Marriage Day (Photo credit: Fikra)

Recently, I have seen so much divisive language being passed around focused on the definition of marriage. It makes me sad that most of the thing I read are bashing another person’s deeply held beliefs instead of respectfully facilittating mutually beneficial discussion. Therefore, I wanted to try to add to the discussion something I have not seen anyone talk about. I hope to do it in a positive way. If the way I say something offends, I hope you can see past my imperfections as a human and can see what I am trying to say. Please share the page if you think it benefits the current discussion, and I’d love to hear your input!

I wanted to start by saying I agree with the Biblical covenant of marriage being between one man and one woman. But I don’t think many Christians are really thinking about what they are doing. I don’t think that they realize once the government decides it will enforce a specific definition of marriage, we are adding the government to the people involved in a marriage. Thus, its not just God + Man + Woman…Government is part of it too. If we accept this, then we have also redefined marriage. Therefore, how are we any different than the people who believe the opposite? I say the government shouldn’t tell anyone what to believe, whether they agree or disagree with me. I just feel uncomfortable with the government legislating morality like this.

If we so ademently want to legislate certain things from the Bible, why do we ignore others? Why aren’t we up in arms trying make it illegal to be drunk? What about sex outside of marriage? Why don’t we take the understanding of what a Christian is from 1 John and make it illegal for a Christian to mess up? Why don’t we legislate the rules for pastors in 1 Timothy chapte 3? Why do we pick and choose what we want to enforce? I agree that redefining marriage is wrong. But people are already doing that no matter if the governement says anything or not. What the U.S. Government says will not change what God says marriage is.Furthermore, I’d think that the excessive amount of divorce in “Christian” circles is hurting many millions of more families than non-christians having different beliefs than us. People in the secular world will always beleive different things than Christians.

As the opening quote from a D.C. Talk song says, “The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips then walk out the door and deny him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.” Why are we expecting people who do not believe what we do to act like we are supposed to but then we do nothing about the fact that we don’t act the way we say others should act?

Our own hypocrisy is more hurtful to Christianity than anything a non-Christian could do or say about is.

We need to begin looking at our own fault and pray that with the power of the Holy Spirit we can live out our lives as people mimicking Christ (Ephesians 5:1-2). We can never be perfect, but I think we are spending way to much time trying to fix other people than allowing ourselves to be changed so that we affect other people for the better in our words and actions.

PS: I have been asked by a few people to clarify the ending of this post. It was mostly a collection of my thoughts on the current debate on marriage. I see so many people questioning the other side that we forget to look at ourselves first. It’s easier to find the speck in someone else’s eye than the plank in our own. The point of this post was simply me trying to get people looking at the bigger picture with this debate. I don’t claim to know everything about marriage (in fact, I can honestly say I don’t!). But, I do want people to be respectful and try to understand others so we can work towards a mutually-beneficial end. This may never come, but respect and striving to understand others can only help and can clear up many issues before they even start.

What are you thoughts?