Roommates, Bad Dates, and Soul Mates

“Roommates, Bad Dates and Soul Mates”—3
www.newperceptions.tv

» Ecclesiastes 4:9-12

• #1—“Two are better than one” because you have someone to share the . (Financial benefit)

- “Research has shown the financial benefits of marriage. Long-term marriage offers a 77% better rate of return than staying single and total wealth of married persons increases 16% year over year. In other words, the  you are married, the more money you make. . . . [I]f this was the reported returns on a stock growth fund, we’d all be jumping in.” (www.moneyunder30.com/financial-benefits-of-marriage)

• #2—“Two are better than one” because you have someone to help you . (Emotional benefit)

• #3—“Two are better than one” because you have someone to keep you .  (Physical benefit)

• #4—“Two are better than one” because you have someone to help you . (Security benefit)

» A great love story most have never heard . . .

- C. S. Lewis: “We feasted on love; every mode of it, solemn and merry, romantic and realistic, sometimes as dramatic as a thunderstorm, sometimes comfortable and unemphatic as putting on your soft slippers. She was my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign, my trusty comrade, friend, shipmate, fellow-soldier. My mistress, but at the same time all that any man friend has ever been to me.” (Quoted in Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts 142)

- Les and Leslie Parrott: “If there is a lesson to be gained from this amazing love story, it must be that partners without a spiritual depth of oneness can never compete with the fullness of love that enjoy. Marriage, when it is healthy, has a mystical way of revealing God; a way of  bringing a smiling peace to our restless hearts.” (142)

» The third strand

• Jeremiah 9:24—“Let the one who boasts boast about this: that they have the understanding to know [yada] me, that I am the LORD.”

• Genesis 4:1—“Adam made love [yada] to his wife Eve, and she became pregnant.”

• God takes the same word for “making love” [yada] and declares “That’s what I want in a relationship with you—the between a husband and a wife—I want you to know me like Adam knew Eve.”

• Alan McGinnis: “There can be no intimacy without .” (The Friendship Factor 105)

• Alice Fryling: “[Sex] is an expression of intimacy, not the  to intimacy. True intimacy springs from verbal and emotional communion. True intimacy is built on a commitment to honesty, love and freedom. True intimacy is not primarily a sexual encounter. Intimacy, in fact, has almost nothing to do with our organs. A prostitute may expose her body, but her relationships are hardly intimate.” (www.focusonthefamily.com/faith/three-lies-about-premarital-sex/)

• Don’t miss Adventist Engaged Encounter with Jeff/Twyla Smith (Nov 1-3).

• Ecclesiastes 4:12—“A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.”

- The Third Strand—Proverbs 18:24/John 15:13-14

- #1 Felt Need—How to grow a relationship with God

- Jennifer Schwirzer calls it “going .”

- “A New Way to Pray” (www.newperceptions.tv/newwaytopray)

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“Jesus, What a Friend for Sinners!”