Embrace: Q & A

Questions by You, Answers by Charlie:

Why did God reserve something as great as sex just to happen within the confines of marriage?

God modeled the marriage relationship after His relationship with His people. God wants us to worship Him alone. He wants to be our only God. It goes back to the first commandment in Exodus 20:3 when God says, “You shall have no other gods before me.” He is to be our only God and in Christ He brings us into union with Himself. Throughout Scripture, God calls for faithfulness from His people over and over again. Ephesians 5:25-33 tells us that God modeled the husband and wife relationship after His relationship with His people. In marriage, two people become one. They are so connected with each other, they are united in a faithful love commitment that lasts for a lifetime. The prophets speak frequently to the Israelites about their unfaithfulness to God (see Ezekiel 16 as one example). In their unfaithfulness, they are likened to a wife who prostitutes herself and has sex with other men. They promised to be faithful to God, their husband, and they broke their promise. God was calling them back to Himself. Because marriage is an intimate union that gives us a glimpse of God’s relationship with His people, God asks us to have the same attitude in our marriages—that of faithfulness (emotionally, spiritually and sexually)--to one person and one person only. Sex is essentially a taste of heaven. It is the most intimate way of connecting with another person. This is what the Bible calls being one flesh (see Genesis 2:24). Our world has lost the meaning of this reality because it sees sex as only an act of the body. But for God, sex is an act of the body, spirit and soul. It bonds us intimately to the person that we are having sex with. This is why God reserves it for the life long commitment of marriage. When we have that kind of multi-faceted intimacy with another human being as God intended it is a foretaste of the kind of intimacy we will have with God in heaven. This doesn’t mean that we will have sex in heaven, it just means that we can look forward to that kind of freedom, safety, oneness and intimacy with God.

Is oral sex, sex?

The answer to that question is yes! In Matthew 5:27-28, Jesus talks about sex not just being an act of the body but also an act of the heart and the mind. In this passage, Jesus tells us that when we hold in our hearts a sexual desire for another, we have already had sex with him or her in our hearts. Jesus calls this kind of sexual desire lust and tells us that we shouldn’t lust after someone who isn’t our spouse. I am a firm believer that oral sex, or even the desire for it, shows that we are struggling with this kind of lust. I’ve found over the years is that people who ask this question are often people who are dating and are looking for a loophole to get out of God’s design for sex. On the other hand, some people often ask, “Is oral sex OK within the confines of marriage?” My answer is that it is up to the Christ-following couple to decide. There are some pastors and scholars who think that last line of Song of Songs 2:3 is referring to oral sex. I’m not completely convinced that this is true. What I do know is that whatever happens within the commitment of a Christian marriage first and foremost has to be done out of a love for Jesus Christ and a love for the other person. In my opinion, there are some couples that can engage in oral sex because it is an expression of love and their consciences are not telling them it is wrong. There are other couples that can’t because it is not an expression of love and their consciences tell them it is wrong. And when I talk about love, I’m talking about a “I would give my life for you” love. This kind of love brings glory to God. All sex within the confines of a God-honoring marriage is done for the purpose of worship and bringing glory to Jesus.

Christ-like Figures at the Box Office

(I give the ending away, so read no further if you wish to be “surprised”.)

I can’t believe I’m actually writing a review of Fantastic Four: The Silver Surfer. But I need to write this down just to let the cosmic dust settle. To begin with, I am not about to herald this movie as “The Next Big Evangelical Movie from Hollywood,” nor will I recommend it to budding Astro-Physicists looking to turn in a half-page extra credit review proving you went out and saw the movie to gain recognition from your teacher/professor.

I’m just trying to unearth the overall theme of this movie, which proves I need to get out more, since digesting and analyzing action hero flicks is about as intellectually shallow as one can get. I mean, once you get past all that eye candy and neoprene suits and billowing smoke, there has to be thematic content scattered among the urban rubble somewhere. They manage to sprinkle plenty of pseudo-scientific jargon throughout the dialogue, strings of words that don’t make sense in any dimension of the Universe, except Hollywood sets; like Rob Lowe’s character says in Thank You for Smoking, “If anyone asks, we’ll just say, you know, thank God we invented the…whatever…device.”

That’s Fantastic Four in a nutshell.

But beyond that, there seems to be an obvious, but not so explicit, picture of Christ at one point. An “alien” enters the Earth’s atmosphere, this perfectly structured, flawless specimen with a powerfully multi-acoustic, echoing voice reminiscent of British Jesus in past Hollywood films. He warns of a Thing so grandiose and all-consuming, it is known “by many names” and is coming quickly, devouring whole galaxies like a roaming bear at a crowded campsite.
The Alien tells Susan he has no choice but to follow his master, that great big thing that systematically eats outer space. But Susan says, and this is the crux of the movie’s theme, “You ALWAYS have a choice.” Then silence, to let the novelty of Free Will sink in to the audience, then an unwelcome interruption.
Superhero movies are like this, and I don’t resent it: Hero-Victim faces life lesson, contemplates momentarily, and then BOOM! the city is on fire again, a temporary diversion from further contemplation. I think life is like this, too, sometimes. You find that quiet moment during the day, when clarity alights upon your tongue like a snowflake and you savor its qualities and then BOOM! you swallow clarity whole and pick through the wreckage of an orderly life.

The difference between this superhero movie and every other superhero movie, is that this isn’t so much a fight between Good and Evil. Sure, you could surmise that the enormous, star swallowing mass is like Satan, but evil is never satisfied. It reaches and takes and consumes and steals and destroys, and is the stuff of Hell. This film seems to step outside Good Vs. Evil momentarily, causing the lines to blur slightly.

Later in the film, after the entire glossary of astronomy terms has been exhausted and new words coined, the incendiary globe a’ la Wrath Of God encroaches on Peaceful Earth, and we get a Space Station’s View for added effect. The Alien realizes that he really does have a choice. He doesn't HAVE to serve this thing anymore, and his new self-sacrificing friends and their planet will be exterminated, so he flies back into the particle cloud just as its fingerlike tendrils of smoke caress Earth’s Ionosphere, and bringing lightning.
Once inside the dark cloud, and here’s where I give the ending away, the alien bows inside of it as though praying “Let this cup pass from me” and then with steely resolve, jackknifes backwards and spreads his arms as if crucified on thin air. The splaying of hands is so fleeting you almost believe you imagined it.
The ominous blackness finds the alien an acceptable sacrifice and recedes back into space, having tasted Planet Earth and decided maybe it’s for another day. Amazingly, the Earth is not knocked off it’s axis, the sun is not extinguished, although our planetary solar system may have suffered minor casualties, such as Saturn. Intergalactic order is restored, phew! The lights flickered momentarily and that was scary. Close call, but nothing the Fantastic Four can’t handle, even though they didn’t handle anything at all, really, once the alien single-handedly saved the world from being vaporized.
The F4 took credit for it.
We are so much like them sometimes.

Embrace: Q & A

Those questions you've been wanting to ask?...get answered here.

(Go ahead, see what Charlie will say!)

Anonymous questions are welcome.

Re-Genesis Website

So I just happened to click on a link to the Genesis homepage, and whoa! What's this? It's a totally different, yet authorized/registered new website for Genesis!
So let me get this straight...Not only will our place of gathering undergo drastic remodeling this summer (see dictionary, under Re-Monschke), but apparently so will our logo and cyber center???

That's cool.

The unveiling of the new website was probably meant to happen this coming Sunday during announcements, but you read and saw it here first!
Ahh, so this it what it feels like to break a story.

Vision Day

This month, the "new" Genesis is officially one year old. It's usually a good idea to reevaluate things after a year goes by, so today we revisited the vision of Genesis: following Jesus and loving people.
There are five words used to describe Genesis.

• family: We want to be one. If you haven't joined a home group, seriously think about doing so. To be a family, we need to know one another and grow in love. This is what leads to crying on one another's shoulders, helping each other out, and occasionally ringing each other's necks- in love.
• authenticity: to be an authentic family, we need to be real with one another. We need to feel comfortable in our own skin and to accept others in their skin. It all comes down to respect and vulnerability.
• worship: Let's face it- not everybody can wail at the microphone or on any specific instrument. But everyone can worship together in different ways. If you're not gifted musically, maybe your service and willing heart expresses worship to God. Or maybe you contribute to Mosaic, or you use a very specific gift as a means to worship in a corporate setting. Genesis is a place where devotion and worship to God is expressed in different ways.
• missional: a relatively new word, this means extending our faith community into the rest of the community. Gathering together a couple times a week is all well and good, but we can't forget that Jesus tells us to "go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit," and teaching them to obey everything He has commanded us. We should serve others and love them, not only through our actions, but with the Truth of the Gospel.
• faith: as Charlie put it, we need to face a daily fight for faith. Pursue righteousness and a passion for Christ. All of the above definitions of Genesis are tied together, and should remain equally valuable for us to maintain a thriving church body.

What to look forward to in the coming weeks:

• Joining the worship band, which consists of Adrian. Talk to Adrian if you are interested... and musically gifted.
• Leading a Genesis Home Group. Email genesis@tlc.org if you are interested.
• Missions Trip- a hurricane relief team will be repairing homes in Port Arthur, TX. The Carltons have all the answers you're looking for: joel2-25@sbcglobal.net.
• The New Series starting next week: Embrace. As in, embracing our sexuality in a healthy, godly way. Rated PG-13 for some mature content.

Thanks to everyone for making Genesis' first year great!