Friday 1 July 2011

MARRIAGE

'One does not have to have had much pastoral experience to have met married couples that refuse to have what they can have, because they have set for themselves a false standard of superiority. They have set up a romanticism, either on the romantic side of love or the physical side, and if their marriage does not measure up to their own standards of superiority, they smash everything to the ground. They must have the ideal love affair of the century just because they are who they are! Certainly many of the multiple marriage and divorce situations turn just upon this point. One couple refuses to have less than what they have set as a romantic possibility, forgetting that the Fall is the Fall. Another may want sexual experience beyond what one can have in the midst of the results of the Fall. You suddenly see a marriage smashed - everything gone to bits, people walking away from each other, destroying something really possible and beautiful - simply becasue they have set a proud standard and refuse to have the good marriage they can have.
We wait for the resurrection of the body. We wait for the perfect application of the finished work of Christ for the whole of man. We wait for this, but on this side of the Fall, and before Christ returns, we must not insist on "perfection or nothing," or we will end with nothing.' 
Francis Schaeffer, True Spirituality, p.120.