Re: Sunday School Discussion 3/29/20

Thank you, Robbie!

I understand everything you've said because you've said it well. And I agree with all your summaries. 

In accord with your chapter 17 comments, the third point in today's sermon (which y'all can listen to in the worship recording and there's also a link to the transcript) is that God works through hard times like nowadays to transform our yearnings from yearning for things of this world to yearning for things of God. 

I think chapters 18 and 19 then become applications of that transformation. 

Children can easily observe birds or mayflies or other critters mating all around us. It's an opportunity to speak of sex as a natural part of life ordained and put in proper order by God. We, as adults, just need to make time to take walks with our kids, read books and stories to them that are based on God's truth and not the distortions of the world, and actually make time to listen to our children's wonder of all that is around them and talk with them about it, which is why meals and prayers are so important together. Our true yearning is to see all children, not just our own children by blood, grow up in the Lord and His truth. 

Additionally, it's a simple application to say that the senses and affections in marriage remain strong, even after body parts may no longer cooperate, when we yearn to see in our spouse what God yearns to see in each of us, namely, that we come to love broccoli! Ha! What I mean is that many foods are acquired tastes as we mature. So too, submitting to one another out of reverence for Jesus Christ (Ephesians 5:21) is an acquired taste. No child is born with it. But surrendering in obedience to God's clear word happens when we believe in and then naturally come to be in awe of God's sacrificially loving work in Christ and the persistently patient sanctifying work of Holy Spirit to transform our appetites to be in harmony with Christ. 

In sum, God made us to love both to praise him for who he is and to love also seeing other people and things grow as we pour out our life for them, especially our God-given spouse and children, along with God-given friends who are friends because we love them with Christ-like sacrificial love, and not necessarily because they love us with Christ's love in return. 

When we surrender to God's word in this way, true love abounds and there is ZERO fear of death because that's what Christ's love does all the time, namely, die to self, trusting God's promise that the one who willingly dies to self and unto the Lord will discover again and again a life, the abundant life, eternal life, for which God made us to yearn! 

Hallelujah!