Scripture: Genesis 2:24-25, Proverbs 5:15-20, Matthew 5:27-30
“The fire of lust’s pleasures must be fought with the fire of God’s pleasures. If we try to fight the fire of lust with prohibitions and threats alone – even the terrible warnings of Jesus – we will fail. We must fight it with a massive promise of superior happiness. We must swallow up the little flicker of lust’s pleasure in the conflagration of holy satisfaction . . . Our aim is not only to avoid something erotic but also to gain something excellent.”
—John Piper
“The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union. The Christian attitude does not mean there is anything wrong about sexual pleasure, any more than about the pleasure of eating. It means you must not isolate that pleasure and try to get it by itself, any more than you ought to try to get the pleasures of tasting without swallowing and digesting, by chewing things and spitting them out again.”
—CS Lewis
Mere Christianity
“We use an unfortunate idiom when we say of a man prowling the streets, that “he wants a woman.” Strictly speaking, a woman is what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be a necessary apparatus… [Real love] makes a man really want, not [even] a woman, but one particular woman. In some mysterious fashion, the lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can give.”
—CS Lewis
The Four Loves
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Bulletin