High Calling Magazine
The official publication of The Francis Asbury Society

A School of Love
BY CRICKET ALBERTSON
 

Working as a theological research assistant for the Francis Asbury Society has been one of the greatest blessings of my life.   I would say the greatest blessing – except for the fact that while I have been working with FAS I have also had three babies…Michael, Madeleine and Isaiah. And now, I find myself not only studying theology but living in the midst of a theological whirlwind experiencing every day more of the wonder of God – how he designed human life and how he blesses with his presence any person that will invite him into the center of life.   I want to share with you in this issue of The High Calling dedicated to understanding the family in light of the eternal purpose of a triune God, some of what I am learning from my study with Dr. Kinlaw, all of which has practical implications as I attempt to live it within my own home.

In light of the situation in which American society finds itself today, Christians feel a desperate need to understand the family, not primarily in light of sociology or biology or psychology or even anthropology, but in the light of God’s original purpose for it.   The family points to something outside itself, something that transcends our own created world.   The family reveals to us the nature of God himself and of his purposes for all those persons that he has created in his own image.  The Francis Asbury Society has a booklet entitled The Family: Sacred Pedagogy that deals with the theological foundations for the family based on the triune nature of God.   The family creates an environment in which it can learn about the nature of God – how mercy and justice are related and what self-giving love actually looks like.  Furthermore, it is in the family that we first learn that human persons (just like divine persons) are incomplete without God himself and without other human persons.  The family illustrates how different persons can live together in oneness. The family becomes God’s key pedagogical device to teach us about who he is and about what he wants us to become.   Let me cite the concluding paragraph.

“There are many aspects of God’s Good News that bring comfort to us.  For me, one of the most encouraging is its word about the family.  The census bureau may not be able to define one.  Our own government may be committed to trying to change its essential nature.  I have good news though, and it comes from the highest authority.  The family, as God designed it, is not going to go away.  Its roots are too deep and its purposes too long ranging.  It is the Creator’s best instrument to let us know who he is.  In fact, it is his divine gift to help us, if we will use it for its original purpose, to enable us  l) to think him and 2) to know him personally, for before church or state our Father established the family as his preferred doorway into his holy presence.  Yes, the family is here to stay.  All praise to the Father, the Son, and to the Holy Spirit for his wisdom, his mercy, and his love.  This is enough to make any of us pray a fervent Amen!"

My question in this article is how to implement practically in our own lives and families the theology that we learn from the family.  How can we learn to think Christ Jesus and to know him through the situation in which God has placed us?   If our individual families are the preferred way into the presence of God, then we must consider whether our relationships are drawing our families and ourselves into his presence. 

Sometimes a word captures our imagination and enables us to put ideas into new intellectual categories.   The word opportunity came to my attention in a conversation about surrender.  All human persons have an opportunity built into the fabric of life to give themselves away in self-giving love in the family.   Husbands, wives, children, grandparents, aunts, and uncles find themselves related to other persons – sometimes with no say in the matter at all.  It is here in the family that we find the perfect opportunity to learn the kind of communion that exists between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.  We are not to live in bondage to our families; rather, we have an opportunity to watch, to learn, and to participate in self-giving love.

This giving away of oneself has two different angles.  One aspect of self-giving love is trust and another aspect is action.  If all human persons are incomplete, then completeness can only be found in relationships.  Trust is an essential component for this type of living.  When the Holy Spirit enters a person’s life, he gives a freedom to entrust personal interests and concerns into his faithful and unconditional care.  When one gives oneself away to him, one will certainly find identity and life in Christ.  In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve knew a completeness which came not from themselves, not because they were without sin, but because they were in a perfect relationship with God himself and therefore to each other.   Interestingly, as soon as Eve ate the fruit, not only was her relationship with God splintered, her relationship with her husband was also automatically defiled – her next act implicates him in her sin.   When self-interest turns human persons from the Creator, immediately a brutal rending occurs in all our other relationships.  Only when trust becomes the foundation of the relationship with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit and restores the relationship that was intended between Creator and creature are human persons free to trust each other.   This trust is absolutely essential in the marriage relationship.  Both the husband and wife must commit themselves in trust to each other.  Suspicion, defensiveness, and second-guessing are enemies of intimacy, and they sneak into the closest relationships easily and unobtrusively, wreaking havoc and bringing destruction.  At this point, every Christian man or woman must guard his or her heart against self-protection and self-interest and choose to live in the openness and freedom that the Holy Spirit willingly gives. 

Self-giving love not only requires trust, but it also requires action.   When a person entrusts himself or herself to the Creator, the result of that divine life within a human heart is obedience.  And in an amazing way, as one obeys, one’s love for the Lord Jesus increases.  Obedience to the Creator who gave himself away for the creature produces an exuberant, overflowing joy.   Love and obedience are directly proportional to each other.

Within the family, self-giving love requires action as well. Ephesians 5 outlines what this action is to be, and it also presents the theological significance for the actions.  Understanding both is vitally important.  The Lord Jesus came to lead every person to himself, and in the same way a husband is created to lead his family to Jesus and into his own heart.  A husband is commanded to leave his father and mother, and all other previous attachments, and to be joined to his wife.   And this separation from and giving of oneself to another is the prime example of the relationship that Jesus has with his church.   Jesus left his divine family to be joined forever to humanity.  Once a husband leaves his father and mother, he is to love his wife with a wholehearted and sacrificial devotion, and in doing so the wife will find a freedom to grow and flourish that she will never know unless the husband loves as Christ loves his bride.   Paul does not stop there.  He goes on to say that a husband ought to love his wife as he loves his own body – nourishing and cherishing her.   When this type of love occurs, a marriage becomes a picture of the Body of Christ.  Four times in eight verses, Paul instructs these Christian husbands to love their wives.  Every Christian husband has an opportunity to give himself away in a love that delights in his wife just as Christ Jesus loves the church.

But Paul does not stop with a husband’s love; he instructs the wives to live in submission.  In the same way that a husband has an opportunity to love someone else more than he does himself, so a wife has opportunity to entrust herself to another.   Letting another person lead without criticism or contention is one of the hardest jobs any person ever faces, and yet Paul implies that when a wife respects her husband, then trust flows out of that respect.  Submission is simply the freedom of not having to have one’s own way, a freedom to make room in one’s heart for another. A woman has an opportunity to create a place of beauty for those she loves – a place of laughter, joy, and delight.  A key to this happy home is a wife who is free to yield to another. The wife sets the tone for the family, whether it will be one of joy or contention.  A wife who knows that her husband delights in her is a wife who is free to entrust herself to her husband.  The refusal of either the husband or wife to live actively in self-giving love paralyzes loving communion and spiritual growth.  

When a man leads his home in love and bears his family in his heart, then a wife and children are free to fulfill their own responsibilities.  The husband creates a safety for them in which they can flourish.  When a wife creates a place of beauty and joy, and willingly entrusts herself to her husband, then her husband is free to love as he is required to do.  It is here that one can see the joy of human incompleteness.  Each person was made for another.  By deliberately giving oneself away, one enables others to be who God created them to be and to do the work that they were created to do.

And so opportunity holds a note of obligation.  Obedience to the Lord Jesus creates an opportunity and a freedom for other people to participate in the purposes of God. In his book The Hideous Strength, C.S. Lewis tells the story of a weak husband caught in the throes of an evil force which wants to take over all society and of an insightful yet defensive wife who unwittingly finds herself on the side of good. C.S. Lewis’ portrayal of the marriage relationship is particularly applicable today since the ultimate scourge threatening our society is the disintegration of the very base of society itself – the family.

Jane, the wife, is in an interview with the “Director;” the one who is in charge of the resistance against the evil forces.   They are speaking of her marriage to Mark, who is employed by the forces of evil.   Jane believes she should be able to do whatever she wants regardless of her relatedness to her husband. 

“Is it really necessary?  I don’t think I look on marriage quite as you do.  It seems to me extraordinary that everything should hang on what Mark says…about something he doesn’t understand.”

“Child,” said the Director, “it is not a question of how you or I look on marriage but how my Masters look on it.”

“Someone said they were very old fashioned.  But…”“That was a joke.  They are not old fashioned; but they are very, very old.”

“They would never think of finding out first whether Mark and I believed in their ideas of marriage?” 

“Well – no," said the Director with a curious smile.  “No, Quite definitely they wouldn’t think of doing that.”

I laughed when I read this little dialogue, and yet the more I thought on it, the more I felt the weight of it.   Is it possible that the institution of marriage and the institution of family are realities whether or not one understands them?  Typically, couples enter marriage and begin families believing that those families will be whatever they decide them to be… if they are Christians, with God’s help.   However, if marriage is a sacred institution created by God to teach human persons about Himself and if family is a sacred institution designed to lead creatures into the presence of the Creator, then one finds oneself participating in something much larger, much more grand, and much more marvelous than the imagination can grasp.   Human persons do not have control over what makes a family, but each person has an incredible obligation to participate in the purposes of God through loving trust and faithful action.  An opportunity exists to create a place in one’s home and heart where other people can experience the love of God.  A home can become a “school of love,” as one scholar has phrased it, that enables children to see the love of God lived out day by day.  Self-giving love and trusting submission compose the very character of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.   Husbands and wives have an opportunity to model these day by day through the grace of the Holy Spirit in everyday life.    

Human persons are not created to be alone; they are created for Another.  They are created for fellowship with the Creator of the whole world.  The family was designed to model the communion of the Triune God better than any other medium. Regardless of individual family experience (whether good or bad), an opportunity to live in self-giving love with the ones that God has given exists for every person. 

The love of God poured out into human heart is able to transform self-centered and insecure people into the kind of people who are free to give themselves away in love.  A childlike confidence in the triune God enables human persons to entrust themselves one to another.   He teaches us, through other human persons, how to begin to relate to the divine persons.  He prepares us for himself by giving himself to us and by giving us to each other.  

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