I am learning that God designed sex to be amazing, mystical, life affirming and a living, giving gift. It’s the kind of experience men would fight wars for and women would endure high heels for. It is the kind of experience that God, in His infinite creativity and intentional wisdom, would use to compare his love for the church. The 5^th chapter of Ephesians outlines this comparison as Paul inspirationally compares the perfect union of husband and wife to Christ and his bride, the Church. What a love story! What girl wouldn’t (paraphrasing Eph 5:25-32) want a man who would love her, give himself up for her, help make her holy, help make her feel radiant and without fault, present her to the world as his perfect match, and to treat her and care for her like she was intrinsically woven into his essence, his own body – which by the way she is if we recall how Eve got here. Wow! And what man wouldn’t want a wife fully and totally on board with his vision and life in such a way as to be the light of her world? A women who at ever moment would affirm his strength, his abilities and his manliness above all other men’s man stuff.

And it is for this fact, Paul writes, “’…the two will become one flesh. This is a profound mystery…” (Ephesians 5:31-32). In our souls we yearn for this type of union with our spouses or future spouses. It is written on our hearts as if a promise. I would contend that the closer we get to God, the truer the promise of lavish sex becomes in married life. We can even experience these possibilities in our own romance with Him. In essence, the closer we grow to God, the more hopelessly romantic we become. Scott Peck in A Road Less Traveled wrote about being suspicious of a religious convert whose conversion was not also met with an intensified sexuality. He saw sex as a search for meaning; as is our search for God. When the two become one … well, that’s a whole lot of meaning.

I have been told, however, that when approaching scripture, to heed the scripture that may set up the section. I have always noticed that Bible editors love to insert the Husband and Wife header and in doing so draws one’s attention away from the verses the immediately preced this union metaphor. The word “therefore” draws my attention even to Chapter 4 which heeds us “to put off your old selves” (Eph. 4:22) to“be imitators of God as dearly loved children” (Eph. 5:1), to “live a life of love” (Eph. 5:2) and that the “fruitless deeds of darkness” (Eph. 5:11) need to be “exposed”. As we shine the light on our darkness and shame, we ought also to be intentional in making the most out of every opportunity in this journey of our’s and to be filled with the Spirit. Our lavish sex with our earthly spouse is conditional, I would contend, upon our exposing our sins, making the most out of the opportunities to share with others who God is and by drinking in the strength from the living water, Jesus Christ himself.  Lavish sex is worth being an imitator of God for. Lavish sex, for the single, is worth waiting for as we learn to find sufficiency in the arms of our Lord.

If we don’t talk about the ugly stuff, we can never claim the good gift that the Lord has prepared for us in an amazing sexual union with our marriage partner. I am drawn to sex therapy, sexual wholeness and exposing the dark areas of my life in hopes to liberate you and I from shame and prepare us to take hold of what the Lord wants to lavish on us, a great sex life with our spouses.

A friend of mine named Francis works as an advocate for the people of a slum in Delhi and he has married into a poor Muslim family. Yesterday he brought two of his young brothers-in-law to join our program: Shamim and Mohammad. These teenage boys have been working most of their lives. Just last week Shamim ironed jeans in a factory and Mohammad worked as a demolition laborer. They have never been to school or learned to read or write. They kept their eyes downcast as I tried to welcome them and explain to them the housing arrangements.

I asked Francis if they wanted to be here, he insisted that they did. Francis looked at them and told them that they are good, don’t let anyone tell you that you are bad. In other words, do not let anyone look down on you. Then Francis turned to me and said, “You know, Jesus used a small group of uneducated people to change the world once before. It was a miracle; we are just hoping He will do it again. We need a miracle. Let’s see.”

Already this morning they were clapping and laughing with the rest of the group. After we sang and danced a little, I said that our God loves us so much that it makes God happy when we enjoy worship. One of the other students told me that he never knew happiness before he met Jesus and joined this knew family.

According to the United Nations Development Programme Report of 2007/2008, India had a literacy rate of 64.1%. The United States has a 99% literacy rate and Burkina Faso has the lowest literacy rate in the world at 23.6%.

We want to help Shamim and Mohommad learn to read and write—but even more than that we want the love of God to transform them and to use them to change their world for good.

There are a lot of bookshelves in my house (at least nine) and all have “No Vacancies” signs hanging from them. Some shelves have two rows of books taking up residence that are crammed together so tight that I’ve considered leaving a can of WD-40 and a crowbar on the top of the bookshelf in order to pry them out. This population doesn’t account for the stacks of books that I have neatly, and not so neatly, piled in various places around the house—a drawer in the bathroom, the bedside table, throughout my office, and stacked behind the driver’s seat in my truck.

I don’t like to get rid of books. “Leader’s read,” one of my college professors taught me. To emphasize the point he wrote a book on the reading habits of great men including C. S. Lewis, Charles Spurgeon, and Teddy Roosevelt. Well God knows I want to lead. (He does, you know, I’ve told him many times.) So I started reading as much as I could and the books started piling up. I even had a library stamp created so that if my friends borrowed one, every time they opened the cover my book would prominently mention that they belonged back with me.

I started thinning the shelves a couple of weeks ago. Some of this action was due to marital pressure. My wife was going through the house simplifying and I knew that our bookshelves were on her list. If I didn’t have a go at them she would. But another part of my motivation was from freedom. There were volumes on my shelves that no longer had a voice in my life and their silence was taking up important space.

It wasn’t easy going through the titles in one particular corner of the living room. There were a couple shelves dedicated to leadership books, both from secular and Christian authors. My collection was library-worthy and when you read the titles out loud it is almost humorous. Here are a few that I took off the shelves not to return:

• 30 Days to Confident Leadership, by Biehl
• Understanding Leadership, by Marshall
• Excellence in Leadership, by White
• Transforming Leadership, by Ford
• Principled-Centered Leadership, by Covey
• Servant Leadership, by Greenleaf
• Christian Leadership, by Powers
• Perils of Leadership, by Prior
• Leading from the Second Chair, by Bonem
• Who’s in Charge? by Anderson
• Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun, by Roberts

I’ve begun to realize that this clean up is not just about my bookshelves, it’s more about me. What kind of a person collects this many books (and trust me, this is just a subset) on the topic of leadership? An insecure one, I’m afraid. One that desperately wants to be identified as a leader and feels that he isn’t up to par. One that has a degree in church ministry but feels he’d better study a little bit more. One who wants to make the final grade, graduate at the top of the class, and be given the plumb roles at all the best ministries. One that doesn’t want to be caught not knowing. This isn’t an indictment on any of these books, some of them have some really good insights, but when they are all strung together they make for one heavy necklace.

One thick book on the shelf really stood out to me. I remember the day that I bought it. The church where I was on staff was getting ready to send out one of our pastors to plant a new church. The Sr. Pastor asked me to order this certain book by a business guru that we would be giving to him as a farewell gift. Not only did I order the book for the church planter, but I bought one for my shelf as well. It was easy to rationalize having a copy for the resource library which I made available to our church’s leadership teams, but the truth is I wanted in on the secrets too. If this is the book that we give out to the people who have made it, if this is the graduation gift that a church planter needs to be successful, then the Good Lord knows I wants one… I needs one… My precious.

It seems silly now, on this side of that job. Maybe the problem was that I didn’t read all of those books enough. Maybe it was that I didn’t apply all of their principles correctly. Then again, maybe it was because I was focused on me becoming a great, Christian leader. And when I hold that motivation up into the light of the Kingdom, it is nothing but dross. Though it has a ring of piety to it, and I can stand in a pulpit and make it sound brilliant, it really is just another clanging symbol.

There are a lot of thoughts in my heart about leadership issues, maybe enough of them to fill up the pages of a book and be marketed to ambitious, insecure men like me. But what I really want is to have a heart that is secure, one that doesn’t need power, performance, or position in order to find my identity. I want to be able to skip the leadership section at Barnes and Noble, and sometimes—like Jesus did at the last supper—instead of picking up a book, I’d like to pick up a towel.

“Everything happens for a reason.” Perhaps you’ve heard that before. Perhaps you’ve said it. I’d like to suggest that there’s a world of difference between “Everything happens for a reason,” and “God gives reason to everything that happens.” The first is Christian superstition; the second declares the glory of God.

For years my wife was the director of a crisis pregnancy center in our town. She comforted and held women of nearly all ages as they faced unexpected news, or had nowhere to turn when everyone had walked out on them. One of the most memorable moments my wife experienced was when a teenage girl, a Christian, received the news that her pregnancy test was positive. The young girl’s world was undone. She cried in my wife’s arms and asked, “How could God let this happen to me?” There on the couch was not the right moment to chide the girl about the sum of her personal choices. She needed comfort. But during the ensuing months, through Bible studies and parenting classes, the young woman learned that the freedoms given to us by the Creator are also accompanied by the results of our choices. God respects us so much that He allows the choices we make to have meaning.

Finally the months came to term and a beautiful new life entered the world. The teenage mother returned to my wife’s office to show off her trophy of new life, a baby fearfully and wonderfully knit by God. This time the excited young mother declared, “You see, everything happens for a reason!” The beginning of her pregnancy had been met with recriminations against God. The birth of her child was met with a joyful ignorance about the gentle ways of the Father.

The idea that God is somehow pulling the levelers behind the screen of life is what I call Christian fatalism: God is all-powerful. His will cannot be denied. Therefore everything that happens must have been part of his plan from the beginning. He was behind everything all along. Isn’t God great?

It’s true: God does manage to draw wonderful outcomes from the foolishness of men. But that is only a small part of the truth: it is also true that the glory of God’s power and wisdom is frequently on display in human affairs in spite of our choices, not because of them. Part of the glory of God is his ability to accomplish his will in the midst of the complexity of a billion human choices. He does not over-rule our lives. He works within them. He is forgiving, patient, and kind. He knows our weaknesses and chooses to partner with us anyway. What some mean for evil, God turns into good. But he is never the author of that evil.

The twin dangers of Christian fatalism are that believers—who ought to be disciples—first come to believe that their sinful choices have been the will of God all along, and second, believers are tempted to believe that whatever happens in life must be ordained by God.

The first danger strips away responsibility for our choices and undermines the call of God to repentance as a way of life. Repentance is not simply the doorway into life with God; it is the hallway as well. The New Testament word for repentance is metanoia, which means simply to change one’s mind, or even better, to re-think our way of life. This rethinking should be an on-going way of life. The Apostle Paul tells us “be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2). Renewal comes from a continual re-thinking every aspect of life. First God forgives us at the beginning of our relationship, then he teaches us a new way to live.

The second danger of Christian fatalism is that believers accept each event in life as part of God’s foreordained plan. I have watched followers of Jesus embrace tragedy as if it was sent from God. Sickness is a prime example. Many of God’s children embrace sickness as part of God’s dealings in their lives. I have heard some Christians refer to cancer as “my gift from God” because they have learned so much through the ordeal of treatment. The clear revelation of scripture is that God is holy and good. He is the Father of lights, the giver of every good and perfect gift. Testing and failure do not come from him. He is not the source of sickness and disease. It’s true that in our sickness we can experience the grace of God or develop Christian virtues such as long-suffering. But that is something very different from ascribing the source of our illness to the heavenly Father. What earthly parent would infect a child with disease in order to teach character lessons? Why would the perfect heavenly Father do what is unthinkable among us?

Sin and sorrow have been loosed on the earth from the very days of the Garden of Eden. We may at times be subject to them, but our Father has never inflicted them upon us for our good. Christian fatalism lures us into a false expression of God’s sovereignty and separates from his glory. Perhaps we can discover more his greatness by standing with Him against the sin and sorrow of our age.