I am not, by natural inclination, given to letting my emotions rule me. I joke with my cousin that I am “dead inside,” which always elicits a reproving look from her. She feels that such is a self-fulfilling prophecy; if I think of myself as dead inside, then I shall truly be dead inside because I will behave as if I am dead inside, so it won’t make a difference whether or not I truly am dead inside because for all practical intents and purposes, I will be dead inside. Confused? Good. Let’s press on.
I say this as a preface to a recent realization. As with many things that flit about in my mind, it involves God. And Sex. Not that I constantly associate God with Sex; quite the contrary. Usually the things of Sex appear in direct conflict with the things of God. But, in thinking about my relationship with God as a marriage, I was struck by the analogy of Sex as a climactic experience, a visceral rapture, an emotional high that adds an exclamation point to the sentence of marriage.
I enjoy experiences. Should I ever have the chance, I will no doubt enjoy sex a great deal. It is easy to understand why humans pursue sex so ardently, why they place such a premium on the associations with sex: physical beauty, stamina, etc. The easier and more pleasurable sex is to enjoy, the more fruitful and successful one’s life will be deemed to be.
And I think that often times Christians have a similar attitude toward God. We want a transcendent experience of God, a burning in the bosom; the “mountaintop experience” as it has become known in church parlance. We want such an experience because it reasserts our conviction that a) God exists, b) He loves us, and c) we are progressing in our relationship with Him.
This seems awfully similar to sex in the context of a relationship, doesn’t it? The quantity and quality of sex serves as a benchmark for their connection to each other, how much they love each other, and how well their relationship is going.
In this context the skyrocketing divorce rate becomes much more understandable, since part of the allure and pleasure of sex is the exotic discovery of something new, something hitherto unexperienced. And as the newness fades, so too must the conviction on each part of the other’s love and devotion, as well as their assessment of the relationship. “You’ve lost that loving feeling,” the Righteous Brothers crooned, and that becomes the excuse for jumping ship on marriage; the sex isn’t good, thus the relationship is floundering, and "I’ve grown accustomed to her face” (to complete the bizarre cultural references). I keep returning to Lewis’ essay “We Have No Right To Happiness,” but it continues to offer relevant commentary upon not only daily life but spiritual matters as well, and this is one of the main themes he outlines. Familiarity breeds boredom, and this spurs the search for the new experience, unavailable within the confines (a telling designation, is it not?) of the marriage.
Not incidentally, the “divorce” rate of Christians from a transformed, vital, and impacting effect upon the world directly relates to their divorce from a true understanding of their relationship with God. They want the mountaintop, and if they don’t experience it they think their relationship is flawed and needs to be fixed.
Once you experience that mountain top experience, the natural tendency is to reproduce it. But real marriage doesn’t work that way. As we established, sexual attraction fades over time. But in true marriage, it is replaced by a comfortable affection, a deep love and appreciation for the other person, an ever-increasing wonderment and humility as you understand more and more the other person, and as you are revealed more and more to them. That is the heady draught that a truly rich relationship graduates to: love that is patient, kind, long-suffering, faithful, never remembers wrongs, never stops hoping and forgiving, never fails. This draught doesn’t dazzle the taste buds like the first drink of experience did, but it satisfies and endures in ways the other could not.
But if the relationship is built upon the experience of sex, then when the sex disappears, usually one or both go looking for it elsewhere and doom the relationship most of the time. And here’s the kicker, fellow Christians. Get ready.
God doesn’t want to base His relationship with you on spiritual Sex. It’s okay for a towering experience early in the relationship, at the consummation of His Spirit entering your heart, the glory of salvation and redemption being applied to your spirit. It’s good, it’s holy, and it helps you to appreciate the wonders and promise of joy and pleasure that the relationship you enter into brings and will bring. But just as a marriage has to progress beyond sex, so the relationship between God’s heart and yours has to progress beyond that first experience, that anointing of the Spirit, that “mountaintop.”
The term “mountain top experience” refers to the passage in Matthew 17 where Jesus and the 3 closest to him ascend on a mountain and Jesus is transfigured into a glorified being. Peter is astonished and enraptured and wants to prolong the experience, to stay on the mountaintop with a transcendent Jesus and the specters of Moses and Elijah. But Jesus never meant to stay on the mountaintop; if he had, he wouldn’t have fulfilled his mission on earth and brought about salvation.
That first rush, that rapture of new birth seems so foreign and joyful that we want to hold on to it, to prolong it, to preserve it. In the river of life we want to stop the flow, to freeze the experience and dwell in it perpetually. But if you freeze a river, you have a block of ice; you have stasis, not life. Suspended animation.
On the contrary, the successful marriage consists of a daily exploration and deepening of the relationship between the couple as they travel the rest of their lives together. They come to know the other’s habits, faults, strengths, insecurities, arrogances, and desires. They know the best and worst of them, as much as is possible for one person to know the heart and mind of another. But it’s a process, a journey only accomplished by continuous experience, a daily, unspectacular (for a large part) existence. You don’t learn everything about them all at once, and you can’t learn everything about them ultimately. But your covenant with them keeps you together, keeps you coming back and plumbing new depths of self-sacrifice, patience, cooperation, honesty, and humility. But from this comes an intimacy that surpasses anything on earth. When you experience nothing as constantly and as deeply as your spouse, you reach a level of understanding and acceptance that is impossible in any other way. It’s a product of time, given the right circumstances from the beginning.
This is what God desires from His relationship with us. He may include a few spectacular and tremendous experiences, like the occasional sex of a couple in later years, but the relationship has shifted away from experiences that transcend to experiences that unite and create intimacy. As you go through your daily walk and include the Lord in everything, every decision and thought and word, you gain a deeper understanding of who He is as you see His impact upon you and upon the world through you. And as your interactions with your spouse reveal aspects of yourself that you were unaware of, so too does your walk with the Lord allow you to see yourself more clearly, to recognize areas in your life that still must be rendered unto Him, to celebrate victories and new life in areas of spiritual bondage and death. And as the peaceful comfort and deep intimacy of the successful marriage replaces the ecstasy of sex as the pinnacle of the relationship, the benchmark by which you measure the health and progress of the relationship, so to the increasing surrender and understanding of the true meaning of “Christ in you, the hope of glory” in your daily routine becomes the most precious and indicative aspect of your life with God.
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