1 Thessalonians Chapter 1: Imitation and Example

Note: This material is from the ‘summer style’ gatherings of our campus ministry. Unlike my other talks that are 25-35 minutes long, these have a 7ish minute intro, a 40 minute small group discussion (that I write a leader guide for) and a 12ish minute summary. I cut a lot…so I put most of it back in here as footnotes:

Introduction: The Unsatisfying Allure of Originality

So let me start with a question: Why is ‘Simon Says’ a thing? That game should not be very hard. Why is it? I mean, Why is Simon Says a thing? Lets table that question for a minute and read today’s passage.

Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy, To the church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ: Grace to you and peace.


2 We give thanks to God always for all of you, constantly mentioning you in our prayers, 3remembering before our God and Father your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ. 4For we know, brothers loved by God, that he has chosen you, 5because our gospel came to you not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction. You know what kind of men we proved to be among you for your sake. 6And you became imitators of us and of the Lord, for you received the word in much affliction, with the joy of the Holy Spirit, 7so that you became an example to all the believers in Macedonia and in Achaia.

8For not only has the word of the Lord sounded forth from you in Macedonia and Achaia, but your faith in God has gone forth everywhere, so that we need not say anything. 9For they themselves report concerning us the kind of reception we had among you, and how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, 10and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come.

Well before we answer my original question, let me ask you a question about today’s passage. Was there any part of the passage that bugged you? Anything that maybe just made you a little uncomfortable? Well, if not, let me suggest something:

6"And you became imitators of us,”
Do you feel uncomfortable with that? Well if you do, let me make it worse. You see, it turns out that the Apostle Paul, who wrote this book, says that sort of stuff all the time:

Cor 4:16 I urge you, then, be imitators of me.


2 Thess 3 7 For you yourselves know how you ought to imitate us,


Phil 317 Brothers, join in imitating me

To call someone an ‘imitator’ in our culture is usually not a good thing. Because imitation smacks of unoriginality[1], and in our deconstructing, post-everything , hipster culture where you can things can only be enjoyed ironically, the only real sin is to be unoriginal. We all want to be original. We want to believe we are special little snowflakes…unlike anyone else. And an imitator by definition is unoriginal.

But in response to this, let me ask again…why is Simon Says a thing? Why is this very simple game challenging?

Well there is a biological explanation: because we are not fundamentally auditory or verbal creatures…we are fundamentally imitating creatures. Anthropologists will tell you that we learn primarily by watching how other members or our species solve problems.[2]

We’re all compilations of imitations. Someone who seems totally original is probably either imitating a person or subculture that you are not acquainted with[3] or he or she has cobbled together a life of piecemeil imitation from several sources. And, frankly, originality is a cruel, punishing idol…constantly betraying those who chase her with belated information about the derivative sources of their ‘originality.’

So, we can either cautiously and intentionally select who we are going to imitate, or we can let that happen unconsciously or by accident.[4]

And that is why Paul argues that imitation is a helpful tool in sanctification. And I edited him a little bit when I read those verses. Here are the whole verses:

Phil 3:17 Brothers, join in imitating me, and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us.


1Thess 1:6 And you became imitators of us and of the Lord

We can look to historical Christians, like Paul, we can look to each other, and because Christianity is an incarational faith where God actually showed up, we can look to God himself for examples of how to do this human life thing.

The vocabulary of Faith and Life cannot fundamentally be totally transmitted abstractly.[5] I mean have you ever tried to define faith. How about hope? And don’t even get me started on love? The theological dictionary that Christianity uses to define these things for you isn’t just a text…it’s also a people. You want to know what love is[6]…the Scriptures will give you the boundaries of what the word can mean…but they (point to the people) will show you how to do it. The basic ideas of Christianity are always embodied. And that is why the Christian life is learned by imitation. If you don’t chose who to imitate, you won’t be original…you will just unconsciously and passively unoriginal.

And that is why the Biblical authors talk about ‘doing Christianity well’ with the term ‘discipleship’. The Christian life is an apprenticeship. We are all padawans, so to speak (at least the nerdier of us). And there are at least 4 ways in chapter 1 that Paul suggests that the Thessalonian church has apprenticed well.

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Group Study

At this point the students went to small groups where they used this guide.

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Summary: The Temporal Orientation of the Christian Life

Christianity deals with reality…in its temporal entirety. Faith, hope and love point respectively to the past, future and present, meaning that at its core, the Christian life seeks a temporal balance of meaning and purpose.

If you focus on the past you are a sentimentalist, if you focus on the present you are an existentialist, and if you focus on the future you are an escapist… Putting too much emphasis on either the past, present or future truncates reality.

But at the center of the Christian life are three disciplines that guide healthy and helpful interactions with the past, present and future.

We are people who take the past seriously. We are people who look back to a moment when we took our stand with Jesus and reinterpret the rest of our lives through that event…and the events that it points to. We are people of faith. We are people who care about the commitments and stories of the generations before us…realizing that moderns may not have a monopoly on interpreting reality.

We aren’t stuck in the brokenness of our past mistakes or mired in nostalgia for past joys. And likewise by living out of faith, hope and love, we are not obsessed with the future. We don’t fear it either. Our future is secure…it is hopeful. We have a hope that we can look to when the brokenness of the present gets oppressive (as some of you have experienced in the last couple weeks). But the future does not consume us. Rather, looking back in faith and forward in hope…gives us energy to fill the present with love.

Those for whom the present is everything often find the present to be too valuable to fill with love. But people of faith and hope who understand the past and future rightly and, therefore, do not overvalue the present, have energy to work and labor, steadfastly…in caring for others.

But let me end with the a final thought. One question I pose was ‘What is the difference between hope and optimism?’ What did you say?

Optimism is the delusion that everything will turn out ok…soon. It doesn’t. The world is a beautiful but terrible place. Sometimes things turn out horribly. Sometimes a miracle doesn’t fix things. Hope requires a cosmic temporal scale. Optimism covers our eyes and wishes for the best. Hope deals with reality as it is and perseveres good or bad because of a confidence in the resurrection (one of the themes of the rest of this book). The role of miracles is not to make everything all right. You are going to die. And it is probably going to be horrible. And terrible things will happen to people you love. If you expect miracles to be the answer to that reality, you will be disappointed. If when you say ‘God is good’ you mean ‘he won’t let terrible things happen to me or those who I love, your faith will be deeply tested. But if you recognize the Biblical role of miracles as ‘signs’…indicators that through the pain and brokenness, there is a deeper, realer, real. There is a resurrection that is going to restore and rewrite. Their purpose and the Christian hope comes into focus.

Which leads me to the final verse of the chapter, the transition to the rest of the book:

For they themselves report concerning us the kind of reception we had among you, and how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, 10and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come.

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[1] Actually, there is a second reason these verses make me uncomfortable. They seem like Paul is being an arrogant (fill in pejorative noun of your choice). But this is anachronistic. Imitation was the core of Roman pedagogy. The fact that Paul called them not only to imitate him, but ‘us’ (Timothy and Silas), and ‘each other’ (in the Philippians verse, see below) and the Lord demonstrates that he is not entirely comfortable with the cult of personality that could emerge from that model and is trying to diffuse it…while at the same time recognizing that imitation is helpful pedagogy.

[2] I took a human evolution seminar last quarter which had a fair number of primate specialists in it. I learned a couple of very interesting things about what distinguishes us from the other primates. One professor made the case that chips are actually more rawly intelligent than humans. But humans out perform chimps because they don’t resolve on a final solution to life’s problems. Humans are social animals that watch each other carefully for solutions to life’s problems that could upgrade their current state. Humans did not emerge because we were the most innovative…but because we transmitted innovation through imitation.

[3] Now, those who have heard me speak will recognize some dissonance with the idea that I often teach that ‘creativity’ is the rare human the image of God. Most innovation is an act of integration rather than raw inspiration. I do love innovation and strive for it. But I do not define myself by it and make most of my intellectual, social, professional and moral progress by apprenticeship (careful, critical, teachable, imitation). Innovation happens a the surprising intersection of observations. Actual inspiration is so rare that it seems that if it becomes one of our highest societal goals, the vast majority of us are sentenced to be disappointing or self deceiving. Also, if inspiration is not built out of former materials, where does it come from.? It is either an accident of brain wiring or a gift of God…and neither are meritorious.

[4] We used to learn trades by apprenticeship….a personal relationship of careful imitation. Now we try to teach the professions through class room learning. Now I don’t talk much about my job. I have a ‘one minute rule’. If someone asks about my job, I try not to talk more than one minute before I change the subject, to keep from boring them. Because I understand, I may love sediment transport modeling…but most people find it dull. But here’s the thing I have realized recently…sediment transport modeling may be dull…but its also REALLY hard. There are not a lot of people in the world who can do it really well. So if a young engineer calls me up and says they are going to try it and asks me to teach them about it…I tell them to move into my office for a month. Because anything complicated has to be learned by imitation. Apprenticeship is more effective than instruction.

[5] Fun Quotes: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” - T.S. Eliot (I like this quote because it demonstrates that self-awareness of the derivative nature of the created process – and hence, our fundamental indebtedness – is the maturation process of the artist).


“Imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery - it's the sincerest form of learning.” ― George Bernard Shaw


“We even talked like Hemingway characters, though in travesty, as if to deny our discipleship: That is your bed, and it is a good bed, and you must make it and you must make it well. Or: Today is the day of the meatloaf. The meatloaf is swell. It is swell but when it is gone the not-having meatloaf will be tragic and the meatloaf man will not come anymore.” ― Tobias Wolff, Old School

[6] Love is a word…it is a verbal signifier of an extremely complex reality. So is hope. In fact, so are a lot of our central big ideas in Christianity. They are very abstract…but we also belong to a faith that believes truth is always embodied. And it is transmitted by discipleship, or apprenticeship which is a form of careful imitation.

What Motivates Change?

2 Cor 5:11-17

MP3: here

Tonight I am just going to start with a simple question:

Do people ever really change? And if so, How?

One of the great shared experiences of our humanity is that most of us in this room, at one point in our life, have probably undertaken some long term project of behavior change and…and failed. Either there was a behavior or habit that we want to minimize or discontinue all together: say carbon usage, porn, or procrastination - I mean, how many times have you told yourself, ‘next time, I am going to start writing my paper more than 12 hours before it is due.” Or there is some behavior that we would like to do more than we do (this quarter I am going to exercise more. And as you get older and start making money it will be what portion of your resources will you allocate for the poor and/or the environment instead of spending it on yourself). One thing we all have in common, is that we have all tried to change…and most of us have found it harder than it seems like it should be. It can get discouraging. You start to wonder “do people ever really change?” And if so, how?

Today’s passage seems to answer the first question with an unequivocal, YES. Look with me at verse 17:

2 Cor 5:17 "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!"

Now this is kind of an inspiring verse. Chances are that if you have been hanging around the church for more than say six months, you’re familiar with it. And it takes a definitive position on the first question I posed. Tonight’s passage holds out the brazen claim that Christianity offers the resources to motivate sustained, non-trivial life change. But the verse is a little fuzzy on the second question…how? So how do you motivate long term, sustained change? Well the famous verse 17 starts with a ‘therefore’, which means to find the mechanisms of this change, we simply need to look up. And sure enough, the passage includes not one, but 2 surprising answers to the question: ‘How do we motivate change?’ Look with me at verses 11 and 14

Paul offers two, motivations for substantial and sustained life change: fear and love. Does that strike you as odd? I mean, these hardly seem like compatible motivations. And many people would contend that they are not. In fact one of the great poets of my generation, Ben Gibbard of DCFC, articulated his resistance to this:


Machiavelli famously agreed. He said

He takes it as axiomatic that fear and love are not compatible motivations…a sovereign can only select one to motivate his kingdom…and was better off choosing fear.

Commodus the Roman emperor depicted in the film Gladiator went the other way. Unable to inspire respect, he tried to win allegiance by making the people love them with ‘bread and circuses.’


So what happened here? Did Paul get confused? Are fear and love mutually exclusive?First, we need to ask if we really know what these words mean. Words have what semantic range. The meaning we attribute to them based on our experiences and background was not always the meaning the author intended. Take two examples from the retreat:

When we hear ‘fear’ and ‘love’ in terms of motivation we think ‘reward’ and ‘punishment’. We think God is holding out the cosmic Carrot and stick – what psychologists call extrinsic motivations – trying to coax us into good behavior with pie and spankings. But psychologists who study motivation suggest that punishment/reward motivators can generally only produce short term results. They don’t have the power to generate long term change.[1]

So what is actually going on here? Christian motivation is not based in what God can do for me or to me…but in who he is. It is god centered. And from a God-centered perspective, ‘fear’ and ‘love’ do not refer to ‘punishment’ and ‘reward’, they refer to ‘awe’ and ‘affection’. God motivates change by capturing our imagination and will with awe and affection. But that brings us back to the question: can the same God claim both?

At the bottom of the question of whether we should be motivated by fear or love is a fundamental question of what God is like. There are two basic ways to approach God. The first is to stress transcendence. This is the approach taken, for example, by our Muslim friends. Stressing god’s transcendence stresses distinction. Got is totally other. He is characterized by qualities like omnipotence, and inscrutability and holiness.

The other basic way to approach God is to stress immanence. This is at the heart of the approach taken by our Hindu friends. God is literally everywhere…all around us, in us. God is indistinguishable from the world, and fundamentally is expressed in each one of us. God is fundamentally accessible.

Transcendence stresses distinction, and the appropriate response is awe…and lots of it, so that the appropriate emotional response flirts with fear. Immanence stresses nearness. God is close, accessible. The appropriate response is affection. And so which way does Christianity go? Is the Christian God transcendent or immanent? The answer is ‘yes.’

Christians believe in a Trinitarian God. Who is entirely transcendent but fully immanent. He is holy, totally other, and morally inapproachable in his perfect justice in the person of the Father…but in the person of the Spirit, he is nearer to you than the person sitting next to you, giving you constant and total access. And in Jesus, God become flesh, the cosmic king of the universe soils his swaddle in a cold barn in a backwater town on the edge of the Roman Empire. He is simultaneously totally other and as identifiable as he possibly could be. That which was unapproachable invades our reality and works our salvation. Incidentally, that is what Christmas is about. In the incarnation, Jesus becomes the living embodiment of the transcendent immanent.


You see, some of you have a god like Commodus. You elevate his imminence at the expense of his transcendence. He is so in need of showing and receiving love that he has no moral seriousness. He is trivial. And so you are not inspired to serve him. Others of you have a god like Machiavelli’s prince. You elevate his transcendence at the expense of his immanence. He becomes so hard that you are terrified to cross him. You are scared of him. Eventually, this terror exhausts you, and you give up trying to serve him. But neither of those gods are worth service let alone worship.

So lets revisit the original question with these categories: what is the engine of real life change? What motivates the life transformation that Paul talks about in v 17? Awe and affection. Standing in awe of and cultivating affection for a God who is totally other, unapproachably holy, and perfectly just yet grants us total access and to the point that he is interested in our deepest hurts and our most trifling worries.

And what is the shorthand for Awe+affection in response to a God who is immanent and transcendent… Awe+affection = worship Actual, sustained change is wrought by worship. All sin is fundamentally a worship issue...a deficit of worship. You want to change? The carrot and stick form of religious motivation does not work in the long term. You need to cultivate a bigger awes and deeper affections. That is called worship. Worship (much more than, but including, corporate Christian musical worship) is the engine of transformation. Are you struggling with porn? Then your God is either not big enough or not near enough. Are you indeffeeent to the poor and the environment? Than your God either needs to be more just or more tender.
Sin is fundamentally a worship issue. It is organ failure of our capacity for wonder. If you are stuck in a behavior that diminishes you or are trying to cultivate a behavior that ennobles you, strategies will help, but fundamentally, you need a bigger and nearer God. You need to love the good and the beautiful more intensely. You need to cultivate more awe and better affections. You need to exalt in a fiercely beautiful God …so that our bleak lives of self centeredness looks as pitiful as they actually are. You need to worship.
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[1] See Daniel Pink’s Drive

Three Things That are More Important than Hotness: Selecting and Attracting a Great Life Partner

MP3

What if you were walking on the quad one day and met a wizard. You can picture it however you’d like. Imagine this wizard offered you a ten minute glimpse into your life twenty years from now. What would you want to see? When I was in college, I can tell you what my top two questions would have been:

“Who am I married to? and
“Do we hate each other?”

You see, my parent’s marriage and the cultural narrative I had uncritically adopted had not exactly made me optimistic about marriage. When I was in college, it seemed that the question of how to select that person that we will spend the rest of our lives with seems to occupy a disproportionate fraction of what we thought about and what we talked about. And its’ spending some time on, because there are crazy ideas out there about how this thing is supposed to work.


 I mean, the whole process can just get pretty discouraging:

Lets face it, not all of us the sheer magnetism of our pastor: [1]

You laugh, but no one ever asked me to couples skate.

Even the Scriptures suggest that there is an aspect of this whole process that is just mystifying:

“There are three things that are too amazing for me
four things I do not understand
the way of the eagle in the sky,
the way of a snake on a rock,
the way of a ship on the high seas,
and the way of a man and a maiden.” Prov 30:18-19

Why is this question SO compelling…it is because it is so hard. Essentially, Dan has asked me to tell you how to predict the future. How do you know which person will augment rather than detract from your life and your service of God?

Actually, it turns out to be even more difficult than it seems. Predicting our future happiness turns out to be something humans are pretty bad at. I mean, it sounds hard enough, but brain scientists actually tell us that predicting what will make us happy is something the human brain does especially badly.

In his book Stumbling on Happiness Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert wrote

“we so often mispredict our emotional response to future events…It is difficult to escape the focus of our own attention – difficult to consider what it is we may not be considering – and this is one of the reasons why we so often mispredict our emotional responses to future events.” 103

“When imagination paints a picture of the future, many of the details are necessarily missing, and imagination solves this problem by filling in the gaps with details that it borrows from the present.” 226

He calls this the problem of presentism – we use the emotional furniture of our present to predict what our emotional reaction to a future event will be – and this turns out to be a really bad method of prediction.

“No one can imagine every feature and consequence of a future event, hence we must consider some and fail to consider others. The problem is that the features and consequences we fail to consider are often quite important.” 225
He goes on to conclude, citing a wide range of scientific studies, that our imaginations are poor predictive mechanisms to determine what our emotional response will be to future events.. The problem, Gilbert says is that we overestimate the extent to which we are special. We tend to think that our experience of early love is qualitatively different than everyone else. Like Wesley and Buttercup, our love is a unique precious snowflake will burn and sustain for decades…even though that does not seem to be the experience of most of the mature marriages we observe. Now I don’t want to trivialize the sublime beauty of what I will simply call early love, because it is really one of life’s gifts. Early love is fantastic.

But we can become so intoxicated by the experience of early love that we fail to accept that every crappy marriage that makes us sad and every failed marriage we watch disintegrate before our eyes started out with the same kind of intensely magical 18 months. The great lie is that the intensity of your emotions towards someone right now is an accurate predictor of the quality of your relationship in twenty years. The movies say ‘trust your heart.’ But the bible tells us that our hearts are pathological liars. We suffer from what psychologists call confirmation bias. We really want this person to be the one, and so we over weight the evidence in their favor and under weight the evidence that says, ‘don’t walk…run.’

The scriptures say:
“He who trusts in himself is a fool,
but he who walks in wisdom is kept safe.” Prov 28:26

So, if we can’t trust our emotional connection to someone to be an accurate predictor of the long term quality of the relationship…if accurate prediction of our emotional future is something that our brains do really poorly, how do we go about making such a hugely important choice? Tonight I want to offer you two basic approaches to this decision (and bear with me with the terminology a bit, I will explain):

I. The Empirical Approach: Where is it working well? (And how can I copy that?)
This is what scientists call inductive reasoning – where we move from observation to principal – we observe and listen to as many good marriages as possible, collecting all the data we can about what makes them work. Then we use this data to guide our choice.

II. The Theoretical Approach: How was it engineered to work?
This is what scientists call deductive reasoning. We start with central principles and move to observation and predictions. For Christians, this will be the question, ‘What resouces can we get from the scriptures that will help us predict how this relationship is likely to hold up in the long term.’

So lets start with the empirical approach:

I. The Empirical Approach: Where is it working well?

The empirical approach is not the special property of Christians. It is part of common grace. Gilbert actually recommends it. He calls it ‘surrogation’. He claims that the results of experimental brain science demonstrate that accounts of others that have been through a particular event that we are about to go through are better predictors of our emotional response to that event than our personal imagination of what it will be like. This, incidentally, why arranged marriage works way better than it seems like it should. And so, Dan and I decided that what you really need is just for someone who has been through this to make this decision for you…so we spent 20 hours this weekend matching you all up and are just going to reveal these pairings and give you the rest of the evening to get to know each other…

…so lets start with the winner of the Adam Darbone sweepstakes…

Obviously, I’m being silly…but Gilbert’s idea of ‘surrogation’ is pretty cool…particularly because it is what the Bible taught us thousands of years ago. The scriptures teach both, skepticism of our own hearts and they teach us to seek out the counsel of those who have faced the decisions we face and, it has gone well for them as part of the program for perusing wisdom, the Scriptures recommend surrounding yourself with wisdom…tenaciously seeking out people who have what you want and finding out how they got it. Here is what the Bible says about wisdom:

i. It may be the most valuable commodity you can accumulate
ii. It is difficult to acquire

‘Wisdom is supreme;
therefore get wisdom.
Though it costs all you have,
get understanding.” Prov 4:7
One complication here is that people often mistake cleverness for wisdom.[1.5] And sice married people are perceived as dull, unmarried people get a disproportionate amount of their marriage and dating advice from people who are not married. Spend time with married people and get their feedback on your relationships. This is actually as special feature of college life among the campus ministries – as a church based ministry we have a wealth of married people that you could seek out on this topic. But be sure to pursue the wise and not just the clever.

And let me say this, Dan’s talk included a disclaimer that went something like (‘you might not agree with everything I say, and you don’t have to.) He said that because when we venture from what the Scriptures teach, when we offer advice from our experiences and the experiences of others we need to be cautious of legalism. But I agree with everything he said. While what we are offering you is not all directly from the Scripture, so we have to deliver it cautiously, I would argue that if you want to develop wisdom on this issue in time for it to influence your life choices that you would not dismiss it lightly. So before I move to what the Bible has to say, let me offer you two observations I have made about successful marriages.

First – Choose the parent you want your children to have. I feel like most of us chose our life partners for the relatively brief newly wed stage. Amanda and I protracted that stage longer than anyone I know. We were married for 9.5 years before we had kids. But, we will still have kids in our house for more than twice as long as that. On the whole, couples tend to be married 2 to 4 years before they have kids. But they base their decision of who to marry on what that relatively breif years will be like.[2] They don’t think about it on the right time scale. They are choosing a roommate instead of the parent of their children.

Second – Sexual purity matters. While I was planning this talk I asked several of my married friends, ‘What do you wish you had heard in a talk like this in college?’ The #1 response went something like “I wish someone had gotten in our faces about sexual purity.” I have yet to meet the person who said, ‘you know, we took it too slow physically.’ Keep your cloths on until your are married and don’t do stuff that would really just be much more convenient if you were naked.

“Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.” Proverbs 4:23

II. The Theoretical Approach: How is it meant to work

But, there is a more fundamental way to acquire wisdom. As Christians we believe that the one who made us let us in on some of the inner workings of how he intended the whole thing to work. We call it the doctrine of revelation…the belief that God opened a small window of self disclosure through the Scriptures, that not only let us know who he fundamentally is, but who we fundamentally are.

Now the scriptures can seem a little annoying in this respect. Sometimes it seems like they have very little to say on this topic so many people are so interested in. But it may be because we are looking for the wrong things. We are looking for a formula or an algorithm for choosing a wife or husband…but the scriptures want to lead us in the way of wisdom…the Scriptures want to tell us what kind of person we should be…and by extension, they tell us what kind of person we should be looking for.

So with the remainder of my time I want to look at three criteria from the Scriptures that will help you make this choice…I like to call this part of the talk, three things that are more important than hotness. Now don’t get me wrong. I think physical attraction matters. I’ve been married for 12 years and am still totally into my wife. But the success of marriage is more strongly correlated to character, than hotness. Most of the marriages I respect are based on these three Biblical principles

1. Contentment/Joy
2. Industry/Discipline
3. Forgiveness/Repentance
Why these three things. Well I have a couple of thoughts.

i) These aspects of a peron’s will correlate more strongly with your future happiness (not to mention your effectiveness as an agent of God’s kingdom) than the physical beauty of the person you marry.

ii) They are too fundamental to hide. When you are dating, you tend to be on your best behavior, so it can be difficult to evaluate if someone …but these are three things tend to leak out of a person’s heart through their words and actions. And I am going to offer you several diagnostic tests for each one to help you evaluate a potential love interest.

1. Contentment/Joy

‘Godliness with contentment is great gain.’ 1Tim 6
You do not want to bear the weight of their future happiness. If they are not fundamentally satisfied with their life now, it is unlikely that marriage will fundamentally change that. You will expend all of your energy chasing their happiness when it turns out, they do not need a husband or wife, they need a savior.[3] You will not make him or her happy. Either they are a content person with self generated joy or they are not. It is a function of their character, not of what you can do for them.

Prov 15: 13 A happy heart makes the face cheerful,
but heartache crushes the spirit.
Dan and I were talking about this, and he said ‘Contentment is such an important criteria because discontent is symptomatic of so many spiritual sicknesses.’

If the purpose of the relationiship is investigative, then you need diagnostics. I am offering you three big ideas with respect to how to evaluate a potential partner, but how do these manifest as particular behaviors. In other words, what specific criteria should you use to evaluate these things. Well, I am going to offer you diagnostics on each topic:

Diagnostics: gossip, blame shifting, complaining, joy

21:19 25:24
Better to live in a desert/corner of a roof
than share a house with a quarrelsome and ill-tempered wife

26: 21 As charcoal to embers and wood to fire,
so is a quarlesome man for kindling strife.[4]

10:19 When words are many, sin is not absent,
but he who holds his tongue is wise.

11: 22 Like a gold ring in a pig's snout
is a beautiful woman who shows no discretion.
2. Industry/Discipline

14: 23 hard work brings a profit,
but mere talk leads only to poverty.[5]

25:28 Like a city whose walls are broken down
is a man who lacks self control.

31: 10, 11, 18
“A wife of noble character who can find?
She is worth far more than rubies.
Her husband has full confidence in her
and lacks nothing of value…
She sees that her trading is profitable
and her lamp does not go out at night
This seems about as unsexy as possible. This sounds just plain boaring. But, in the long term, discipline and industry are just about the sexyest things possible. Let me make this case with a digression I will call: 3 reasons discipline is super sexy

i.) Future hotness is a function of discipline. You are probably sexier now than you will ever be again. When you get married, you vow to choose to love the person you marry regardless of what happens to their mind or body….but, in marriages I respect both partners work hard to maintain their physical appearance to make themselves as lovable as possible. Fighting the decline takes discipline. I mean, there is technically more than one way to get a six pack, but the way of discipline is unquestionably superior:

ii.) Discipline makes you more interesting. But being lovable in the long term is not just a function of physical upkeep. It is also an issue of growing spiritually and making generate respect for family contribution. People, on the whole, get uglier. But there is a providiental grace that accompanies that. As people get uglier, they also get more interesting…if they cultivate disciplines that make them interesting.

iii.) Discipline Fundamentally Means More Romance and More Sex: But here is the thing. In most married couples I know about the guy wishes there was more sex and the woman wishes there was more romance. And they are both fundamental to the relationship. Ten years into a marriage sex and romance are things you have to work at. So I am not saying that you should choose discipline and character instead of sex and romance. I would argue that choosing discipline and character is one of the best possible predictors of the quality of your future sex and romance. If you marry someone who is lazy…there will not be much sex…just a lot of late night television.

Also, dicipline is the engine of fidelity. It is the evidence of ordered affections.

Diagnostics - how does she approach her studies, how does he manage his time, amount of time spent playing video games, sexual availability

When I think about the women I considered dating in college, there is a high correlation between women who were conscientious about their studies, and not necessarily good at school, but disciplined and industrious in their vocation as students. Money and sex might be the top two things married couples fight over, but laziness has got to be top three.

In fact, my brother likes to say that the woman who doesn’t have sex with you now is the one who is more likely to have regular sex with you after you’ve been married 20 years. She is the type of woman who does the hard thing now. If she is sexually available now, it is unlikely that she has the discipline to be sexually available in twenty years. And if he is sexually aggressive now, if he cannot do the hard work of self control and respecting your body, he may not have what it takes to do the hard work of romance or, even, faithfulness in the long term. This isn’t a perfect predictor, but it does fit the category of ‘too fundamental to hide.’

Proverbs 20: 6

Many a man claims to have unfailing love,
but a faithful man who can find?
In Joss Wheadon’s latest show, the villan accused one of the heros of being in love with the central character. Listen to the evidence he offered:

“You shared one room for months and you never slept with her, you could have but you didn’t, that’s love…” Alpha

3. Forgiveness/Repentance
‘Love keeps no record of wrongs.’ – 1Cor 13
Forgiveness and repentance are the survival skills of relationship. Christian theology provides a couple insights into humanness that give you an advantage going into marriage. Every marriage is the union of two fundamentally valuable but broken people. Broken people injure those close to them. We can’t help it. It happens. This is why repentance and forgiveness were so central to the teachings of Jesus. In the decades you are married[6] you will do some phenomenally selfish things, and so will your partner. And, selfishness is a feedback mechanism. Often, selfishness of one begets selfishness of the other.[7] There are only two things that actually break this cycle: repentance and forgiveness.

Repentance and forgiveness make up the basic tool kit for marital disagreement. If one or both of you have not developed these skills, you are in for trouble. This is actually related to the discipline point, because the vast majority of arguments Amanda and I have are not resolved as part of the argument, but when one of us sits down alone to spend time with God. Healthy spiritual disciplines are the stop loss of marital friction. It is almost impossible to maintain self righteousness for long if you are regular experiencing of the presence and correction of a Holy God.

Going into marriage without the ability to recognize your own fault and the willingness to let go the fault of your partner is a like going to war without your gun.

Diagnostics: Grudges, broken relationships, roommate relationships, closeness to family,

Post Script (Coda): How to Attract a Great Life Partner

So this talk was supposed to be on how to select and attract a great life partner. And I spent 99% of the time on the choose question how to select a life partner. But we have already done all the work on the attraction question. A person of character, who has the characteristics likely to lead to a successful marriage, is going to be looking for the same things. You want to attract a really great life partner?

1. Cultivate joy and contentment. If you are fundamentally discontent, it doesn’t matter who you marry. You will find him or her wanting. You will begin to focus on their weekensses rather than revel in their strengths.

2. Cultivate industry and discipline. Learn to apply yourself to your vocation…which right now, is your studies. Develop self control and practice it in the context of the physical components of your romantic relationships.

3. Cultivate repentance and forgiveness. Practice on your family and roommates. Develop a regular devotional wife where you examine your actions and motivations (especially in the context of conflicts you are having) and allow the presence of a holy God to unravel the self righteousness that threatens to undo your relationships.

Your character will not only attract someone with character, it will affect your experience of marriage, because how you feel about you husband or wife in twenty years has more to do with

Let me close by quoting my wife: ‘If you want a girl who reads her Bible, prays and goes to the gym…um…guess what she wants?”

[8]

______________
[1] “Many Bothans died to bring us this information” – Admiral Ackbar
[1.5] I think I owe this language to Mark Driscoll...by way of Bronwyn.

[2] I remember that I left most relationship talks I ever listened to, disappointed. I wanted 5 easy steps to …essentially, I wanted an algorithm that would minimize the risk in an inherently risky choice. But you don’t need a flow chart, an algorithm, a 5 step plan or a method…what you need is to become wise…and that is not something we can give you in 90 minutes of relationship talks. Part of the wisdom Dan and I are trying to offer you is that of emphasis from the other side. If you wish we were focusing these talks on other things…maybe the value of these talks is that we just don’t think those are the important things.

[3] “We need to demystify this thing. I could be married to another woman and be thriving…I am crazy about (my wife)…but she is not my savior. She does not complete me.” Matt Chandler
[4] See also Prov 11:16-17, 14:29 and 27:15
[5] See also Prov 10:4, 20:6
[6] though, disproportionately in your early years.
[7] Fortunately, I have found that the opposite is true. Selflessnes begets selflessness. It is a feedback mechanism in both directions.
[8] This image didn’t make it into my talk, but I wanted to include it anyway.

5 Myths About Marriage

(Note: This was not so much a formal 'talk' as a 'campfire chat' that I gave at the college life Men's ministry campout. There is an Mp3 over on the mp3 page.)

So when Cory approached Dan and I about doing one of these talks (in addition to Jarrod) we both kind of got the same look on our faces. I think I said, ‘Wow, I’m totally tapped out.’ But Dan put it best when he followed, ‘Cory, we left it all on the field this year, I’m not sure we have another talk in us.’ I finally said, I won’t be able to teach by then, but I might be able to share a few loosely connected thoughts on some aspect of manhood. I would usually take the opportunity to talk about a theology of work…but I feel like I have talked about that a lot recently. So I am going to talk about something else I am really passionate about…marriage. I’m calling this 5 myths about marriage. Lets start with myth #1.

(Photos by Dave Tan)

1. Marriage Sucks

Let me start with a pretty typical perspective on marriage from a representative of our generation. Bill Simmons (ESPN's sports guy) has started a new feature in his mailbag highlighting an e-mail each month to which he gives the 'Fellas don't get married' award.'

Q: Why can't Hollywood make a movie about a guy who doesn't get married, keeps his friends, loves life, dates hot girls up until they get crazy. But also show his old college roommate married with kids, a nagging wife, a crap job he can't quit because of the kids and mortgage. This should be made and mandatory viewing for any single male by the time he hits 18. At least he would have a fighting chance. If you have a great marriage awesome. But I would tell you that nine of 10 married guys I know are in the old college roommate state of life right now. Good luck all you engaged men. (Suckers.)
-- Gabe B., Waterloo, Iowa

SG: And that wraps up this month's installment for "Fellas, Don't Get Married!" By the way, I'd like to give a special shout-out to my buddy Sully, who's already trained his two young sons to answer the questions "How old will you be before you can think about getting married?" and "Where are you going to college?" with the answers "35" and "South or West." Now that's great parenting. Simmons mailbag

If you watch enough sit coms, movies or hang out with enough married guys, you could start to wonder why anyone would get married if they didn’t believe it was a prerequisite for sex. There are a few lucky ones, who like Wesly and Buttercup, have a magical, once in a life time connection. But most of us will end up divorced or disinterested.

That is not only a myth…it’s a lie. With very few exceptions, guys with crappy marriages are largely responsible for the state of the relationship…or just need to grow up. There is a correlation between guys I respect and quality marriages. (Though part of that is because they attracted women of character). After watching my parents and imbibing the cultural narrative, I was ready for torture on both counts. But both marriage and parenthood are fantastic. They are costly. But they are worth it. I can confidently say that they are God’s gifts, not just theoretically, but empirically. I just want to tell you guys, that marriage and parenthood were both way easier than I had expected. It can be done well. It is God’s plan for most of you.

2. Love is an Emotion

I think that this is the biggest myth of all. There is this sense in our cultural narratives that love is something that happens to you. That is a lie. Chemistry is something that happens to you…love something you do…it’s an act of the will.

I think the term ‘falling in love’ is one of the least helpful semantic constructions in the english language. It suggests that love is something passive, something that happens to you. Something outside your control. But even more destructive, it suggests that love is precarious. If it is so easy to fall into and seemingly random in its object, than surely it is as easily to fall out of or reassign its object.

Love is not a thing in itself…it is the sum of your actions that honor, support and romance your wife. It is not something you can be in. It is something you do.

Even the emotions can be cultivated. I cultivate affection and attraction towards my wife. I keep a list of ‘things I love about my wife’ that includes observations about her skills, gifts, character and physical beauty. New discoveries that I can revel in. I let my thoughts linger on her beauty. You’ll never hire John Cusak to make that movie…but then very few movies are made about marital romance…it doesn’t mean it can’t happen well.

And so if you can’t count on a mystical-gooey-abstract-fated attraction to guide you as you try to choose a wife:

Well first, here is something unhelpful, but hysterical:

One of the things Amanda and I have talked about from time to time is how little our process of choosing a spouse was based on what would actually make a good marriage partner. I am still wrestling with how to articulate this.

Stumbling on Happiness: (p146-7)

But here are some thoughts:

She has to be your best friend. I would never kiss anyone who wasn’t legitimately my closest friend. That’s just my opinion; it’s not in the Bible. But that is the point at which I would start exploring the physical side of things, because that is the point where she is legitimately ‘in play’ for marriage. Until then, she’s just a crush.

Pick someone that you want your kids to be like. For that matter, pick someone that you want to be like not just someone you want to be with. It is a universal axiom, that married people start to act like each other. I once heard Bronwyn say, pick someone who, after you start spending time with her, your friends like you better.

Does she believe in you? Not just in the fog of chemistry, but will she stand by you when you fail. Will she be the voice telling you to try again when you should? Do you respect her enough to hear God say no to you through her? Is she adventurous enough to hear God say yes if he does? When my dream job opened up in Davis, 3000 miles away, I mentioned it casually over dinner. It was Amanda who said “You are applying. We don’t want to wonder ‘What if?’ about that sort of thing.” But recently, I got pretty committed to a plan that I thought God was calling us to…and Amanda said no…and it is pretty clear she was right. That, my friends, is the sort of thing that makes her an amazing wife, that wasn’t even on our radar.

My wife adds (from Proverbs 31:23) “Her husband is respected at the city gate, where he takes his seat among the elders of the land.” Is this what she wants for you?

I’m into a lot of stuff. I work pretty long hours, go to school on the side, teach at college life and spend as much time as possible with my kids. People say stuff to me all the time like ‘I just don’t know how you do all the things you do.’ I respond, ‘Have you met my wife. She’s remarkable.’

And what about you? Do you believe in her enough to make sacrifices for her to achieve her goals (even if they aren’t domestic)? Do you want her to flourish, even at the expense of stuff you want to do?

But attraction does matter. You absolutely need to marry someone you are sexually attracted to. You need to be careful not to over-spiritualize this…to take a Gnostic view of marriage.

And I’ll also say, opposites attract, but psychologists tell us that similarities are the currency of compatibility.

(I've never seen guys 'do hair' on a men's retreat. Leave it to Noah to look into the face of cultural expectations and shrug. Color me impressed.)

3. You Simply Cannot Love One Woman Your Whole Life

I had a friend in college that used to say that evolutionary processes had made it at worst impossible and at best miserable for human males to be monogamous. He planned to marry a starter wife that would help him through med school and have his kids and then move on to an array of younger women in his later years. I have other friends who intentionally put marriage off until their mid-thirties – each time they got close enough to a woman they would get scared that this would be the last woman they would ever get to have sex with and jet. Both these friends fundamentally misunderstood humanness.

But I think this is a big question we have as the children of the big divorce generations. When we saw marriages in our parents generation having a coin flip chance at making it, it seems like a pretty good question. At the retreat one of the girls asked something like ‘Forever is a really long time. How do you know you can go the distance.’ And it is true that you cannot love the same woman for 30 years…because after a few years she will not be the same woman. My wife will often tell people that I am not the man she married. But far from being an excuse about why she cannot stand me any more, she describes the process of learning to love who I have become. All I have to wake up tomorrow and chose love my wife. And in 30 years I will wake up that morning and choose to love my wife …but only because I have done so every day in between, discovering new things to love along the way as she grows and changes.

Here is the punch line, though. Whether or not you love your wife in 20 years will have more to do with your character than with her worthiness. The chemistry will fade. There will be a couple kids running around that will multiply the joys but also the fatigue. The question is, will you take the time to remember why you loved her…and to find new things to delight in. And incidentally, whether or not she loves you will have more to do with her character than your worthiness (though you should give as much attention as possible to being lovable) – so picking a woman of character turns out to be extremely important.

4. Marriage Will Fix My Lust Problem

It just doesn’t. In fact, it can make it harder. As a single guy, there is more ‘looking’ and ‘imagining’ that is fair game. It is not only OK to imagine what your life would be like with various girls, it is imperative. But once you get married, that imaginative life that has been part of your basic apparatus…the constant search for a woman…has to be shut down. Its no longer ok. This search that has dominated your imaginative apparatus for years, suddenly has to be replaced.

And, it is true, when you get to have sex, you are less obsessed with it. But getting married does not automatically guarantee the sex you’ve always imagined. Many couples struggle with it and the majority of guys that I am close enough to, to know about their sex lives are not having as much sex as they’d like. And if you are into the porn thing, when you get married that will destroy your wife…instead of just destroying you. So take care of the business of holiness up front. Don’t drag that crap into a marriage.

5. All Couples Fight

Since I am talking about marriage, I thought I’d wrap up with the best advice I ever got about marriage. Amanda and I were hanging out with a couple we respected that had been married a while and had school age kids. At one point I mentioned that all couples fight, something I thought was axiomatic since my parents fought constantly. The other couple became dead serious and said, ‘That is simply not true. You do not have to fight, and shouldn’t. We don’t.’

I thought ‘Bull Crap.’

They sensed my confusion and unpacked the idea for me. They said, ‘We disagree all the time. And some times the disagreements are deeply held, passionate and emotional. But there is a line we will not cross. It becomes a fight when the things you say have the intent to harm. The minute you let something out of your mouth that has ‘intent to harm’ you are fighting. But you don’t have to.’ This has been a really helpful distinction.

("There are (bleeping) snakes in the (bleeping) camp site".)