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That's actually a very concrete way of thinking and I like it Lol. But experience has taught me that you only become one flesh if the pieces fit! 
If the Serial Fornicator is More Forgiven and Accepted than the Divorced Person, Why Bother Risking Marriage?
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Hey brother! Could you elaborate on this more? Do you mean that if the marriage isn't working, then they don't become one flesh? Sorry, I can be a little dense sometimes and I don't get what people are trying to explain a lot of the time.
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Lol... Sure, why not
Forgive my paraphrasing, but I believe the basic rules are this; Husbands do not deny your wives, wives do not forsake your husbands, for in marriage God has made you one flesh and the marriage bed is undefiled. To me this is a great illustration of what intimacy is supposed to be and this obviously doesn't just HAPPEN on your wedding night. It isn't just about sex, it's about knowing, trusting, and respecting your spouse as much as you know, trust, and respect yourself. If I deny my wife then I deny myself, if she forsakes me then she forsakes herself. Likewise, what I do for my wife I do for myself, and her desire is also my desire.... "one flesh". This takes real mutual cooperative commitment. You both have to be ALL IN! It's a goal that's definitely worth striving for, but you both have to be focused on that goal.... I've never experienced that.
On a side note, I believe I posed the question, "Does it matter who files for divorce?" I believe the answer is imphatically YES. It's the one, wife or husband, who initiates the divorce and then remarries who commits adultery.
And then there's 1 Corinthians 7:15 which, in my case, I lean on a lot!
Forgive my paraphrasing, but I believe the basic rules are this; Husbands do not deny your wives, wives do not forsake your husbands, for in marriage God has made you one flesh and the marriage bed is undefiled. To me this is a great illustration of what intimacy is supposed to be and this obviously doesn't just HAPPEN on your wedding night. It isn't just about sex, it's about knowing, trusting, and respecting your spouse as much as you know, trust, and respect yourself. If I deny my wife then I deny myself, if she forsakes me then she forsakes herself. Likewise, what I do for my wife I do for myself, and her desire is also my desire.... "one flesh". This takes real mutual cooperative commitment. You both have to be ALL IN! It's a goal that's definitely worth striving for, but you both have to be focused on that goal.... I've never experienced that.
On a side note, I believe I posed the question, "Does it matter who files for divorce?" I believe the answer is imphatically YES. It's the one, wife or husband, who initiates the divorce and then remarries who commits adultery.
And then there's 1 Corinthians 7:15 which, in my case, I lean on a lot!
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First of all forgiven is forgiven, not more, not less. I think what you mean it accepted, and that’s by the self appointed shamers, not God.
People who think that pleasures of the flesh are there for exploiting and abusing, probably aren’t really on the narrow path anyway. Everyone these days are so damaged and disillusioned, marriage only amplifies brokenness. Society is an experiment gone wrong. It’s so far from what God designed.
The truth is, most people are miserable. Instead of accepting that it is all part of the fall we blame it on our circumstances. Then, if we can change our circumstances we will somehow be happy. It’s all a lie, sorry to say. The single people want to be married. The married people blame their spouses. The greater the expectation, the greater the disappointment.
Here is the secret to happiness.
It is getting slightly more than you think you deserve. Also, for each investment receiving a dividend. That’s it, so simple. In short, lower your expectation and don’t keep spending valuable resources (time, attention, effort, money) on things that give nothing in return.
People who think that pleasures of the flesh are there for exploiting and abusing, probably aren’t really on the narrow path anyway. Everyone these days are so damaged and disillusioned, marriage only amplifies brokenness. Society is an experiment gone wrong. It’s so far from what God designed.
The truth is, most people are miserable. Instead of accepting that it is all part of the fall we blame it on our circumstances. Then, if we can change our circumstances we will somehow be happy. It’s all a lie, sorry to say. The single people want to be married. The married people blame their spouses. The greater the expectation, the greater the disappointment.
Here is the secret to happiness.
It is getting slightly more than you think you deserve. Also, for each investment receiving a dividend. That’s it, so simple. In short, lower your expectation and don’t keep spending valuable resources (time, attention, effort, money) on things that give nothing in return.
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I think that He takes wedding vows seriously. However, if two unbelievers got married, and they cheated or didn't, but it didn't work out, and so they got a divorce and remarried different ppl. Then, they get saved, should they divorce their current spouse and return to their original marriage? I think you already asked this Kim, but I don't know. Does the conditions of marriage apply to heathens, lol, meaning if they entered a union, a covenant, not knowing what that really means. I reckon we don't get to call ignorance. I am released from my marriage according to His word concerning sexual immorality, but still not convinced we are free to remarry. I honestly do not know so I just pray about that one.
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This is still sin and the people that think that's okay have a very skewed view of the bible.
Probably there are much deeper issues than just wanting freedom to "fornicate". This is something that also doesn't just vaporize if you marry.
Many men marry having done those things even though they never had sex with anyone expecting their wife to meet their fantasies. Those things are very damaging to marriage and don't just stop. It alters and corrupts your mind and soul. It changes how you view women-not in a good way.
It's hard work to renew your mind and without Christ and accountability, I don't think it can be done.
Just a little of my experience.
Probably there are much deeper issues than just wanting freedom to "fornicate". This is something that also doesn't just vaporize if you marry.
Many men marry having done those things even though they never had sex with anyone expecting their wife to meet their fantasies. Those things are very damaging to marriage and don't just stop. It alters and corrupts your mind and soul. It changes how you view women-not in a good way.
It's hard work to renew your mind and without Christ and accountability, I don't think it can be done.
Just a little of my experience.
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I disagree with your version of “secret to happiness”.
Did Jesus expect something back from His Father when he died on the cross? No, it was self-less love. It was something that needed to happen in order for the world (us) to get Salvation. This is something absolutely important and that we should be mirroring in all areas of our lives.
When I give time or money to others, I don’t expect for them to return it because rewards of the world don’t matter to me and not that I’m expecting it back. What matters to me is that they are receiving the help and love that God wants them to have. I don’t deserve nothing of this world because I am not of this world.
Romans 12:2 English Standard Version (ESV)
2 Do not be conformed to this world,[a] but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
Did Jesus expect something back from His Father when he died on the cross? No, it was self-less love. It was something that needed to happen in order for the world (us) to get Salvation. This is something absolutely important and that we should be mirroring in all areas of our lives.
When I give time or money to others, I don’t expect for them to return it because rewards of the world don’t matter to me and not that I’m expecting it back. What matters to me is that they are receiving the help and love that God wants them to have. I don’t deserve nothing of this world because I am not of this world.
Romans 12:2 English Standard Version (ESV)
2 Do not be conformed to this world,[a] but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
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Ummm.... Soooo.... Should somebody tell Jesus that the wedding is off?
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My point wasn’t about expecting personal gain for investment. It’s about making a difference, not just in our life but in the world. If I invest in my children so they can be strong and wise, and they become successful, it produced a positive result; happiness. That’s a dividend. I don’t expect them to pay me back. If I sacrifice all of my time and money into my children and they drop out of university to live in my basement and play video games; unhappiness.
God programmed us to enjoy being productive. That means producing something.
God programmed us to enjoy being productive. That means producing something.
If a person gets divorced and it is a Bionically justified divorce then they have not sinned at all...
If it is an un-biblical divorce then it is sin but no more or no less of a sin then fornication when it comes to salvation.. Stealing a cookie from your moms cookie jar will see one cast into the eternal lake of fire if One ends up being unforgiven..
If it is an un-biblical divorce then it is sin but no more or no less of a sin then fornication when it comes to salvation.. Stealing a cookie from your moms cookie jar will see one cast into the eternal lake of fire if One ends up being unforgiven..
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This is a really good topic to chew on and discuss. Here are my thoughts on it, and particularly on questions you asked or things you said, SeoulSearch.
-Do your best not to pay attention to what people on the internet say. 90% of people on the internet are idiots 90% of the time. I would not take spiritual advice from someone online who didn't know me, or really care much for what they have to say, to be completely honest. It really doesn't matter to me that some will say online/emotional affairs don't "count" or that some will say this or that. If we are striving to operate according to what the Bible teaches, then we know we are on the right track.
-I think the way that we look at divorce, marriage, and sex is so often off-base with how it is treated in the Bible. For example, if you look at the way the Bible speaks about marriage and sex throughout, they are nearly synonymous. We were created in such a way that sex was intended to be a sort of seal for the marriage. There is a ceremonious aspect of marriage where commitments are made before God, friends, and family, and then God gives us this means of, privately and intimately, making two into one. So when we develop intimacy with anyone, whether it's physical or emotional, and they are not someone we have covenantally committed to, we are putting ourselves through a divorce experience. It messes with us in a major way. So when we think about divorce, we can't just think about it from a legal standpoint, we have to think about it from a sexual standpoint as well. And just as a clarifying point, that is not to say that if you have had sex, that means you were married because there are other things that make a marriage a marriage, but at the heart level it is as if you were. In a sense you could say you might as well have exchanged rings with the person you slept with and then given them back to each other whenever you decided your relationship with them was over.
-Regardless of the practice of any church, all sin is the same and should be treated as such in the sense that if we confess ourselves to be sinners before God and trust in Jesus Christ for our salvation, we can know that we are forgiven. There are a ton of scenarios that you could think through regarding when it is or isn't right to re-marry, but the bottom line always comes back to the heart--is your goal to honor and serve the Lord or are you just looking to serve your own desires and trying to find loopholes to do that? And along with that, you can only control what you can control. If someone has a spouse who divorces them for an unbiblical reason, that decision isn't on them, it's on the spouse who left. If a church is dogging someone just because they got divorced with no mind for the reason or circumstances behind it, then that is not a church worth being a part of.
-In the end, the Bible isn't about the letter of the law so much as it is about the heart. If a person is having sex over and over again, they are sinning. If they are having sex over and over again presuming that they are already covered by God's grace, I would say the Bible argues that they aren't even a Christian. They can't just ask God's forgiveness any old time they want in that scenario.
-It is true that there can be a scenario where Person A has had sex with a bunch of people and is still biblically eligible to get married while Person B may be divorced and can no longer biblically marry, but there are a couple of caveats to this:
*Person A needs to have repented of their sin, meaning they have not only asked forgiveness but have turned away from that sin in their life.
*It is also worth mentioning that even then, there is a good chance that he/she is going to have to work through the consequences of their past sin as they come up in a future marriage. Sexual sin especially has a way of following us around even a long time after we have repented.
*Person B in this scenario is someone who made a decision to divorce their spouse for an unbiblical reason, knowing that they did so for an unbiblical reason. Even if they were later repentant, to me the only way to honor their repentance would be to remain unmarried (unless they could somehow restore their previous marriage, in which case they could remarry).
-A big problem with what I see in the experiences you described, SeoulSearch, is that there are individual Christians or churches trying to "enforce the rules" without really any mind for the heart or spiritual well-being of the person involved. It should always be about being faithful to what Scripture says, but part of that faithfulness is loving and shepherding a person well in community. That doesn't mean giving the person what they want, which a lot of churches also want to do, but about examining the heart and a person's willingness to honestly examine themselves.
-Being single/unmarried does not have to be synonymous with being alone. We may not be able to develop quite the same type of intimacy with another person as we would in marriage, but that doesn't mean that we have to be alone. I am 29 years old and single, and for a time I really struggled with depression and thoughts that I am alone and no one really cares. I even had passive suicidal thoughts of just really not wanting to be alive and not wanting to fight my demons anymore. It was sort of like...I'm not going to actively hurt myself, but if something happened to me that ended my life, I wouldn't mind that. As I had those thoughts of being alone, I would get this other voice in my head telling me, "What do you think [so-and-so] would think about that if you said that to him?" There was one guy in particular who came to my mind who has been a really great friend to me over the past few years. But there were a few others that came to mind as well. And I shared my passive suicidal thoughts (because I wanted to share them out loud with someone so they weren't just in my head) with another friend/mentor of mine who told me how it would really hurt him if I were gone. I have been blessed with an amazing church family who has really lifted me up as well over the past few years. So regardless of what any single person's status is--never married, widowed, or divorced--and whether or not a future marriage in good conscience is a possibility, being alone is not an inevitability. It is only an inevitability if you decide that it is.
-Do your best not to pay attention to what people on the internet say. 90% of people on the internet are idiots 90% of the time. I would not take spiritual advice from someone online who didn't know me, or really care much for what they have to say, to be completely honest. It really doesn't matter to me that some will say online/emotional affairs don't "count" or that some will say this or that. If we are striving to operate according to what the Bible teaches, then we know we are on the right track.
-I think the way that we look at divorce, marriage, and sex is so often off-base with how it is treated in the Bible. For example, if you look at the way the Bible speaks about marriage and sex throughout, they are nearly synonymous. We were created in such a way that sex was intended to be a sort of seal for the marriage. There is a ceremonious aspect of marriage where commitments are made before God, friends, and family, and then God gives us this means of, privately and intimately, making two into one. So when we develop intimacy with anyone, whether it's physical or emotional, and they are not someone we have covenantally committed to, we are putting ourselves through a divorce experience. It messes with us in a major way. So when we think about divorce, we can't just think about it from a legal standpoint, we have to think about it from a sexual standpoint as well. And just as a clarifying point, that is not to say that if you have had sex, that means you were married because there are other things that make a marriage a marriage, but at the heart level it is as if you were. In a sense you could say you might as well have exchanged rings with the person you slept with and then given them back to each other whenever you decided your relationship with them was over.
-Regardless of the practice of any church, all sin is the same and should be treated as such in the sense that if we confess ourselves to be sinners before God and trust in Jesus Christ for our salvation, we can know that we are forgiven. There are a ton of scenarios that you could think through regarding when it is or isn't right to re-marry, but the bottom line always comes back to the heart--is your goal to honor and serve the Lord or are you just looking to serve your own desires and trying to find loopholes to do that? And along with that, you can only control what you can control. If someone has a spouse who divorces them for an unbiblical reason, that decision isn't on them, it's on the spouse who left. If a church is dogging someone just because they got divorced with no mind for the reason or circumstances behind it, then that is not a church worth being a part of.
-In the end, the Bible isn't about the letter of the law so much as it is about the heart. If a person is having sex over and over again, they are sinning. If they are having sex over and over again presuming that they are already covered by God's grace, I would say the Bible argues that they aren't even a Christian. They can't just ask God's forgiveness any old time they want in that scenario.
-It is true that there can be a scenario where Person A has had sex with a bunch of people and is still biblically eligible to get married while Person B may be divorced and can no longer biblically marry, but there are a couple of caveats to this:
*Person A needs to have repented of their sin, meaning they have not only asked forgiveness but have turned away from that sin in their life.
*It is also worth mentioning that even then, there is a good chance that he/she is going to have to work through the consequences of their past sin as they come up in a future marriage. Sexual sin especially has a way of following us around even a long time after we have repented.
*Person B in this scenario is someone who made a decision to divorce their spouse for an unbiblical reason, knowing that they did so for an unbiblical reason. Even if they were later repentant, to me the only way to honor their repentance would be to remain unmarried (unless they could somehow restore their previous marriage, in which case they could remarry).
-A big problem with what I see in the experiences you described, SeoulSearch, is that there are individual Christians or churches trying to "enforce the rules" without really any mind for the heart or spiritual well-being of the person involved. It should always be about being faithful to what Scripture says, but part of that faithfulness is loving and shepherding a person well in community. That doesn't mean giving the person what they want, which a lot of churches also want to do, but about examining the heart and a person's willingness to honestly examine themselves.
-Being single/unmarried does not have to be synonymous with being alone. We may not be able to develop quite the same type of intimacy with another person as we would in marriage, but that doesn't mean that we have to be alone. I am 29 years old and single, and for a time I really struggled with depression and thoughts that I am alone and no one really cares. I even had passive suicidal thoughts of just really not wanting to be alive and not wanting to fight my demons anymore. It was sort of like...I'm not going to actively hurt myself, but if something happened to me that ended my life, I wouldn't mind that. As I had those thoughts of being alone, I would get this other voice in my head telling me, "What do you think [so-and-so] would think about that if you said that to him?" There was one guy in particular who came to my mind who has been a really great friend to me over the past few years. But there were a few others that came to mind as well. And I shared my passive suicidal thoughts (because I wanted to share them out loud with someone so they weren't just in my head) with another friend/mentor of mine who told me how it would really hurt him if I were gone. I have been blessed with an amazing church family who has really lifted me up as well over the past few years. So regardless of what any single person's status is--never married, widowed, or divorced--and whether or not a future marriage in good conscience is a possibility, being alone is not an inevitability. It is only an inevitability if you decide that it is.
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I had two thoughts when I read this:
1. Thank goodness I only take into account anything I say on the internet about 10% of the time.
2. Where would catfish fall under this, since they are pretending to be 100% someone else, 100% of the time?
1. Thank goodness I only take into account anything I say on the internet about 10% of the time.
2. Where would catfish fall under this, since they are pretending to be 100% someone else, 100% of the time?
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