FOUNDATIONS BIBLE COLLEGE
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From Chapter Seven

It is my understanding from the Word of God that we are protected if Christ has made us “unspotted” and “pure.” I have confidence in that. Yes, we will have great temptations; all of us will. There is no love, no romance, no conjugal union, no happiness, or marriage that will never have temptation. The desires of a pure, unspotted couple are very active and passionate. But the pure, unspotted heart sees these desires in the light of heaven and home and each other. The duty of vows help to protect it; the pledges of love help to endear it; the gifts of symbols help to remember it; and the joy of conjugal expression, that singular classical joy, thrills it. But temptation remains: that is not because of sin in the marriage but rather sin in the environment and with others. The pure, unspotted heart will turn the temptation back to the home and the joy and the happiness and the romance of that singular gift in a mundane life. I will warn you of the threat and danger of these temptations, but I shall give stentorian word to the triumph of the pure, unspotted heart over these threats and dangers. When fornication, immorality, and sin are seen on every hand, with their respective temptations, the pure unspotted hearts, will return to the romance, the joy, and the glory of true marriages. Although there is a relationship between a man and a woman into which no one has the right to enquire, not even your dear father, yet I set forth with joy in my own heart the splendid beauty of the words of Hebrews.

 Marriage is honorable in all, and the bed undefiled: but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge. (13:4)

Remember that, my sons. Remember that!

I believe, with all of my own heart, that it is right to live above self-accusation in these proprieties. I believe it is to doubt the very Word of God and its protection if we live on the weak precipice of self-accusation concerning our love for our wife and the temptations which would otherwise threaten its destruction through separation and divorce. We must live with jealousy, but we must be very sure that it guards the marriage rather than suspects it. By the way, most often, in the Bible, the word “jealousy” is in an honorable and beautiful context. I am a truly jealous husband over my own wife, your dear mother. I, however, have never suspected her of any degree of infidelity. She has retained fidelity, as I have.

I am forced to this conclusion-that it is this question of all others that is absolutely dependent on the grace of God. We must have the true spirit of Christianity in our kitchens and in our drawing-rooms,-that spirit whose gracious teaching is never ambiguous or difficult to understand; in a word, there is nothing but the Sermon on the Mount which will do us any good. Of human preaching, teaching, writing, setting rules for marriage, etc., we have enough and to spare-it does not appear to go home, or to bear any practical fruit. Most of the modern books on the subject are rotten, yea, sexual. Now the foolishness of preaching and teaching are most necessary, but the “unspotted” and “pure” heart, in the final analysis, is strictly personal, and will only be decided in the inner sanctum of the human heart. Of course, the Ten Commandments guard that inner sanctum and give warning to the breakage of all our Vows, as the Sermon on the Mount beautifies it.

We can only pray that He, whose great heart is open now as it was then to every human need, will help us to realize our responsibility to each other, will give us new lessons in the law of love, and show us that service is the highest form of praise, fidelity to each other is the greatest romance for the preservation of our classical joy, and that nothing is really small or mean or despicable, except sin and the littleness of human aims. It is imperative that I announce in our use of the conjugal “classical joy” that this can only remain a joy, a fun, if experienced in a faithful marriage. The fornicator, the adulterer, only knows a carnal pleasure, knows only an entrance into a “ditch of despair” (Proverbs 23:27).

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