>>You don't go to church in an "old bathrobe", why would you think it is any different with your spouse if you could afford something more alluring?<<
Because with true love (both for Christ and your spouse) anyting "external" is not needed.
If you need anything outside the realm of what's already been provided, then your efforts are already doomed to failure.
Man, you people are something else.
Yes, people are something else who are transformed by the grace of God into a new creation.
First you drain worship of all the joy of the Lord by making it a dry, boring scholastic exercise
Schola means in Latin "a cessation, leisure, rest from labor, particularly leisure from affairs of the state and manual labor, which may be spent in literary occupations, hence a conversation, lecture, explanation." It also means "a number of men who, by profession or office, belong to each other, and meet together." (Freund's Levrett's Latin Lexicon)
That sounds like an apt explanation of the duty of Christians to come together on Sunday to listen to the Scriptures and their explanation, to worship God, and to refrain from labor by resting. I don't think this dry or boring at all - it is rather an exicting Divine adventure.
In the Catholic Church, the proper name of the choir of singers is the "Schola Cantorum". Perhaps singing the Psalms in praise of God is a "boring scholastic exercise".
Dry to me is singing insipid songs where we speak the voice of the Lord in the first person. But that is just me.
and now you bring your misanthropic attitudes into the bedroom.
That is the first time that I have heard placing the order of affection of God - Family - Self as being misanthropic! So if we are not self-indulgent we are being misanthropic?
Remind yourselves of Isaac fooling around with Rebeccah
I'm ignorant of any knowledge of this "fooling around". Please enlighten me.
Prov.5:18-19
To be delighted by one's own wife and to abhor prostitutes and adulterers (Proverbs 5.15, 17, 20) hardly seems comparable to directing Christians to "spice up your love life" with Victoria's Secret.
Maybe its just me, but if a man is truly delighted with his own wife as encouraged by Solomon, he has no need of fantasy visual aid lingerie.
or the whole Song of Songs
The Song of Songs is an allegory of the love of Christ for His Church - of old the people of Israel by blood, and now the people of Israel by faith in the blood of Christ.
or even that woman hater Paul in 1 Cor. 7:3.
1 Corinthians 7.3 states quite simply that marriage creates an obligation of conjugal union. It has nothing to do with making marriage center around eroticism.
Worship is a joyous occasion and so is marriage. Both have an ecstatic component to them that if missing or ignored render the experience wasted.
Ecstasy - "an emotional or religious frenzy or trance-like state". Yikes! The word is in the Bible! Maybe the Holy Ghost overlooked it while inspiring the sacred writers?
That's why the fastest growing churches
Its easy to grow fast on the gospel of a fat wallet, full belly and empty testes. That is exactly what man wants to hear. "For many walk, of whom I have told you often (and now tell you weeping) that they are enemies of the cross of Christ: Whose end is destruction: whose God is their belly: and whose glory is in their shame: who mind earthly things." (Philipians 3.18-19)
We on the contrary: "But our conversation is in heaven: from whence also we look for the Saviour, our Lord Jesus Christ, Who will reform the body of our lowness, made like to the body of his glory, according to the operation whereby also he is able to subdue all things unto himself. Therefore my dearly beloved brethren and most desired, my joy and my crown: so stand fast in the Lord, my dearly beloved." (Philipians 3.20-4.1)
Last I checked, Victoria's Secret still was not heaven.
also have the largest array of ministries.
How is ministry related to ecstasy? Only when Pastor Bob does some horizontal counseling of the married women of the Parish in his office, is he ministering to their ecstatic "needs", from what I can tell.
They are ministering to the whole person, not just the head.
My Church ministers to God, not man. God ministers to man, not the Church.
If you love your spouse you want to do what pleases them
No, you want to do what is right for and by them. There are many physically and mentally "pleasing" things that are repulsive sins because they stem from concupiscible disorders.
just like if you love the Lord you want to do what pleases Him. You don't go to church in an "old bathrobe", why would you think it is any different with your spouse
So we should have sex only while wearing a nice suit and dress? Or maybe women should go to Church in a nice silk teddy, thong underwear and stockings with garters?
if you could afford something more alluring?
My wife is alluring. If I found clothes alluring, I'd be a clothes fetishist, like panty sniffers and sock sniffers.
It's called basic respect.
So now it is disrespectful to one's spouse to not dress her erotically and support a quasi-pornographic business that objectifies women?
In fact, I have found the most joy in those scholastic exercise. Do you not see how condescending you are to those who find joy in the very thing you do not? Delving deep into the Word, finding how perfectly inspired and inerrant it is, down to the last jot and tittle. I have had moments of deep worship sitting in an anatomy/physiology class as well, looking at the intricacies of the human body.
No, there was no music at those times. The music comes out of me because of a deep knowledge of truth, and pursuit of further truth. It is emotion and behavior which follows truth/belief, and not the other way around. The same can be said for Unity. Unity cannot be achieved without truth. Unity built on sloppy doctrine is an illusion. We may use the same terms and think we agree but in actuality do not because the definitions of our terms are different.
I bet she didn't have Victoria's secret...