WHAT IS BEST FOR US

Michael Ryan

What God wants for us is always what is best for us. God’s will is what we would pray for if we knew what God knows. Near the beginning of his book, Married for God, Christopher Ash says the following, which is applicable to any aspect of our lives, but especially the relationships that matter the most to us, our closest relationships with parents, siblings, friends, and certainly in any sort of dating relationship as well as marriage:

So, when we ask what God wants, we are asking what is best for us. What is best for us is not what we want, but what He wants. When I ask what God wants for marriage, I am saying that I want my marriage to cut with the grain of the universe.

Starting Sunday, between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, we will focus not just on marriage, but on how to apply the Bible to the closest of our relationships. We will ask what God wants about parenting, singleness, how we handle money, and roles within marriage.  We will also explore why God made us male and female, and why the Bible says what it does about how we manage the sexual attraction that God Himself designed and placed within us. You can relax! It’s impossible for me to forget that my nine year old daughter will be in the room.

Each message will be a call to repentance. We each, in varying degrees, need to turn to God from our own cultural ideas and from our own sinful desires. We need to ask what God wants about all of these things, because it’s what honors Him and it’s what’s best for us.

Tim Keller says in the beginning of his book, “The Meaning of Marriage”

There’s nothing in the Bible about how schools should be run, even though they are crucial to a flourishing society. There’s nothing there about business corporations or museums or hospitals. In fact, there are all sorts of great institutions and human enterprises that the Bible doesn’t address or regulate. And so we are free to invent them and operate them in line with the general principles for human life that the Bible gives us.

However, the Bible provides plenty of wisdom about singleness, parenting, marriage, and other relationships. We can’t just make stuff up about how these work. Our view of the authority of the Bible determines whether we give weight to what the Bible says. Putting more weight on the human side of the Bible, simply seeing it as the writings of men trying to figure God out, causes the solutions of the Bible to seem out of touch and unrealistic. We are more apt to think the Bible is irrelevant to today’s issues. If, however, you truly believe all scripture is God breathed and useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness you will see God’s word as applicable and authoritative.

Sunday, we will begin talking about why God made us as he did and how that relates to these types of relationships. The text is Genesis 1:26-31 and 2:15-25. I can’t wait to open God’s word with you this Sunday.

-Gene Cornett