Marriage Prep Slide 3-5

*Presenting Slides 3 through 5*

Slide Three: Nativity

The theology of the body seeks to reconnect the body with the study of God (nativity scene)

It is because God created our bodies and they too were good that we can say that the human person is a body AND a soul, together!

And even more it is because of CHRIST, God come in the flesh, that we can say our bodies are VERY good and that they show us how to love and how to be happy. Christ is our touch point to salvation, to happiness. The meeting place between the spiritual and the physical.  We do not have simply a spiritual God but a God with FLESH.

Slide Four: Doorway        

                                                                   

If Christ is the door of happiness, to Heaven, Flesh is the hinge.

Imagine a doorway to happiness. You want to walk through this door. You know what allows us to Open the doorway to perfect pleasure- our bodies.

It is in and through our bodies that we experience the world and GOD. And this is how God created us. This is how he wants to experience us too! He sent His son, Jesus Christ, to us in OUR humanity, in our flesh, so we can experience Him in the body and He can experience us.

Our flesh, our bodies are not the obstacle, in living a good, healthy, CHRISTIAN, life. The main obstacle to love is our hearts. Christ didn’t come to condemn but to call us to love. In taking on flesh, he calls us as a whole person, body and soul, to live IN his divine life, in happiness forever. Christ did not come to just give us coping techniques for our sin. He came so that we may, body and soul, “share in his divinity” And where do we share in this divinity? In heaven (And on earth we get tastes of it, like in the moments of greatest love or Communion with another person.)

Slide Five: Heaven

 

We tend to think of heaven in the abstract. Like we will be these bodiless spirits floating around. But with Christ’s resurrection, that we are still celebrating now, in this Easter season, we see instead, God’s glorious plan to bring our bodies to perfection! Christ has his body in heaven and at the end of time we will too! (resurrection  image )

We also tend to think of this resurrection as us continually fanning God and feeding Him grapes for all eternity. As if God needed us to fan him. Instead, His plan for us in actually written on our hearts and in our bodies. And His plan is witnessed in Christ. A plan of LOVE. Our whole being, body and soul, in created for the explosion of LOVE.  A love, a happiness that will never end. This happiness is foreshadowed in the union of man and woman.

 Do you know what the most frequently used image for God’s love for us in the Bible is? Marriage!  And The marriage of God with his people is the most used for GOOD reason. It is with that kind of love, that kind of desire and that kind of unity, body and soul that God wants with us. Marriage is the earthly shadow of what we are ultimately created for! (marriage union image)

 

* Stay Tuned for slides 6-12*