Greg and I began our life together with high expectations for what our marriage, sex life and family would be like. We each held onto these ideals strongly. While on the outside we may have appeared to be “the ideal couple”, we quickly realized that somehow at our foundations there was an incompatibility that kept us in stress and conflict. The emotional energy required by these incompatibilities eventually took its toll and we both found ourselves broken before one another and before God. The question we never thought would be ours had become a reality: “Are you going to leave me?”
There is one ideal that Greg and I have always had in common. It is that God is a good God with plans for good for anyone who acknowledges Him their lives. Because of this, in spite of our unhappiness, believing that it was not God’s plan for us to divorce, Greg and I remained committed to our marriage. We each sought God to help us understand and change those things that kept us at odds, and had drained the life out of our relationship. In this Bible study we share the scriptural truths which God used to confront those ideals which kept us from experiencing unity in our marriage, and, as the Lord blessed us with children, in our family.
Eventually we came to a place where we could see that God in fact is not silent on the issue of sexuality. And we saw that the Bible has much more to say about sex and relationships than just the widely established set of rules which religions and church denominations have set out for us to follow.
In this study we examine many familiar passages and a few less familiar passages from the Bible to observe how God designed human sexuality. Our sexuality is the part of us that is not in His image. It is the part of us which mandates that we participate in relationships with others in order to reflect His image more fully.
The application of Biblical truth and its relevance to the sexual relationship and sexuality becomes clearer with each chapter. While this is a study about sex, it is even more a study about finding satisfaction and fulfillment in relationships such as God originally intended for us. It is also a testimony of God’s working through which we hope to demonstrate Godly principles of scripture worked out in our lives.
Though the scriptures we share may not be new, they will undoubtedly challenge your thinking in a new way. We’ve included sections entitled “Our Story” as a means of communicating what life application looked like for us, with the hope that you may consider new ways of applying scripture which has been inadvertently overlooked.
Our story is not your story. As unique as you and I are as individuals, that is how unique our stories will be. There is no way of coming up with a formula as if, “This worked for me, so if you follow these steps, ‘1-2-3,’ your struggles will be over”. God works with each of us individually while at the same time sharpening us as we rub shoulders with others, like us, who are in a process of understanding God and His ways.
No comments:
Post a Comment