Steadfast Love Week 4

by charityrattray

Stop thinking of beauty in terms of culture and sexuality; Holy is beautiful.  Let beauty be redefined by holy and then you will see clearly.

Beauty isn’t just the physical appeal of another.  It’s not the way you appraise someone as attractive with your eyes.  Beauty can be seen in her choice to give only one person in the entire human race her body for the rest of her life.

The root word for holy comes from Q-D-SH in the Hebrew.  Some connect it to the Assyrian word denoting purity, clearness, separation of an object from common use.  There is a clarity about steadfast love.  There is a separation from other affections or exchanges.  There is no thirst of lust for self pleasing here.  This holy beauty between you both is unpolluted and pure.  Steadfast love says there is no one else in this life that I will give myself to, it is you.  It will always be you.

Hebrews 13:4a Marriage is honorable in all and the bed undefiled…

It is undefiled when sincere, earnest, and pure in heart.

The respect you give one another tastes better than the attention you sample from someone else even for a moment.  Let your compliments, your physical chemistry, your efforts center on one another, live daily out of and be for one another.  Your marriage is more because God’s eternal love is on display.  It’s a wild gift of beauty to experience and it will challenge you to the core.  It will sift out your human nature and offer you a divine nature, two becoming “one flesh” God-like in perfect love and depth.   The way you are set apart to each other shouts to a world attention hungry, holy is substantially more.  Christ loves the bride to the point of his own blood spilled for her.  This love satisfies.  This love is full of honor.  The world has the feels and then it fades. Holy love is more.

Reflection Reading:

1 Corinthians 13:4-8   

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.”

 Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good. His love endures forever. Psalm 136:1

What makes me love Christ isn’t that all of the sudden I got a view of him and knew how to love God.  We rarely know how to love ourselves let alone how to love God.  What makes us love God is at our lowest point, when we were stumbling and failing our guts out –with love He said, “Her, I want her.”  The Bride of Christ is always “her” the one overlooking herself.  She is standing before Jesus completely known, sins and massive mistakes open for all to see and there in that place against all the ammunition of hell HE steps forward.  Christ falls in our place, takes the death sentence.  The grace he offers us isn’t just life, it’s a new holy way of living all together, it’s abundant life.  It is a gospel of good news that will sanctify us and set us apart to tell of this love for the rest of our days.  We become love.  And this amazing grace -in us compels us -to go to the wedding of the Lamb and say yes to Him.  And this bride knows she is loved, and yet she still choses to put on righteousness because it’s a bride’s wedding clothes.  Christ’s body hung bare so she could be clad in ethereal white.  This love can not be mirrored by any man and yet by grace your marriage can make His love known again.  And this is the weighty gift of God to love and be loved.  It adorns you like pure gold heavy encircling each wrist with bangles, encircling your very neck like the finest jewelry made of pure gold.  Feel the weight of it’s value.  The same gold is worn as a symbol to all through your wedding ring upon your left hand.   Holy beauty stands adorned in righteous love. Glory.  Glory to God His love endures forever.

Application

Listen: what part, concept, or segment stands out?

Understand: How can you set yourself apart to one another?

Do THIS: take action.  Have something you only say to her, you only say to him. John Piper in his closing remarks on marriage quotes two things Christ said, “I am with you … to the end of the age… . I will never leave you nor forsake you” (Matthew 28:20, Hebrews 13:5).

Read his article here https://billygraham.org/decision-magazine/april-2013/the-true-purpose-of-marriage/

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