What is the Perfect Vision?
What would you consider the perfect vision of a Christian marriage? Would it be a husband and wife that communicate with the tongues of angels? Would it include an ecstatic romantic interlude that lasts for about a month? How about a financial windfall that not only covers all of your debts, but also launches you out onto a three-month worldwide vacation? Maybe your perfect vision of a Christian marriage embraces a new and perfect set of in-laws. You can probably fill in the rest, can't you?
Many of us really believe that a perfect Christian marriage is the direct result of a new marriage seminar or neat set of marital principles that will finally transform our marriage-of course, by transforming our mates. Maybe it's the latest book or set of tapes on "How to Have A Successful Marriage."
Don't get me wrong. We at Christian Family Life have spent the last thirty-two years working on and trying to perfect the best principles on Christian marriage that we can find in the Bible. We are totally committed to God's basic principles for marriage and family. But that does not mean that we believe that if you perfectly apply all of our CFL materials to your marriage, then you will have the perfect marriage. That would be like saying that if you applied all of the basic surgical skills in open-heart surgery, every heart patient would successfully survive the operation. But a successful marriage, like a successful open-heart surgery, requires a vision that is larger than itself, a vision that transcends its earthly limitations, confusion, and setbacks.
One Who Captured The Perfect Vision
Maybe C. S. Lewis, in his book Mere Christianity, got it right after all when he said:
The Christian says, "Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly treasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same."
