Introduction

Does anybody in here have a pet? What is it? Do you love it? Yes, of course we love our wonderful pets! How about a little brother or sister, do you love them? Sometimes! But that’s a different kind of love isn’t it! There are different kinds of loves, aren’t there? And today the Lord shares with us a special love that is the king of all loves! All other loves are wrapped up in this love and that love is called conjugial love. It can only happen between a husband and wife. Let’s read how it started in Genesis chapter 2 verse 15:

Conjugial Love 58.1

That by virtue of its origin and its correspondence this love is celestial, spiritual, holy, pure, and clean, beyond every love from the Lord that exists with the angels of heaven and with the men of the church. (CL 64.4)

Sermon

Sometimes it’s good to reflect for a minute what it is we are actually supposed to be doing here on earth—what is our real purpose here? Even the casual New Churchman recognizes the basics we are supposed to be living by:

(1) That there is one God, in whom is the Divine trinity, and that he is the Lord Jesus Christ.

(2) That saving faith is to believe in him.

(3) That evils must be shunned as sins, because they are of the devil, and from the devil.

(4) That goods must be done, because they are of God, and from God.

(5) That they are to be done by man as of himself; yet that he must believe they are from the Lord with man, and through him.” (CL 82)

Ok, so that’s it in a nutshell! Doing these things will lead us to heaven—they will open up an “inner way” incrementally as your knowledge and intelligence increase. We read

…When we are born, we come first into the earthly level, which gradually develops within us all the way to that summit of intelligence called rationality. The second level called spiritual is opened by a love for being useful that comes from our intelligence, a love for our neighbor. (The) third level called celestial is opened by a heavenly love for being useful, that is a love for the Lord; and love for the Lord is nothing but applying the precepts of the Word to our lives, these precepts being essentially to abstain from evil things because they are hellish and demonic and to do good things because they are heavenly and divine. This is how the three levels are opened in us sequentially. (DP 237)

The more we learn of how Divine Providence operates on the universe the more we understand what is best for us, how we should live and what will ultimately make us happy. There is a lot of trial and error on this pathway. If I were to read a quote from the heavenly doctrines to you, how much could you accept from it?

The state of the man who conjoins himself with..(the Lord), by a life according to His commandments, is more blessed and happy after death than before it in the world; (CL 29.28)

You might be able to easily hear that but do we really understand it? It would be different if you had had the experience of being in the other world for a couple of years, lamenting how much more you should have followed the Lord on earth. Experience is such a great teacher! The Lord wants us to be proactive in our spiritual life right now! We know this from the Lord’s words to Thomas:

because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed. (John 20:29)

If we actually knew all the secrets today, what the Lord has in store for us—could we handle it? That we are only one of an infinite amount of earths with humans on them (Earths in the Universe), that heaven is made up of people from many different religions (DP) and is in the shape of a human! That we must be married in the world to come, to enter fully into heaven. That we must transform the loves we have now for new affections which the Lord provides when we shun those spirits which attack us each day. The truth is fantastic! It frees us from the slavery of living our own man-made truths, trading them in for what actually is so!

So, what’s the problem? We know what to do! The problem is something that we have to get to know so well and be able to recognize so easily that we understand it inside and out! This thing is called the “natural man.” The natural man is all about the love of self and the world but the amazing thing is that we can observe our natural man at work! With practice, we can watch it do its dirty work. When someone says something not in our favor the natural man goes into a frenzy of anger and resentment. Yet it wants to remain as secret as possible for when it gets discovered, it is so obvious that it gets exposed and possibly rejected not only by the outside world but also by the individual who is suffering from it. Nowhere is the “natural man” more prominent than in our marriages, as you all know! When we have not done our spiritual work, the work of shunning evil and lust, the natural man is alive and well in our marriage and is even running the show. If we have done some spiritual work, then a husband and wife have a common point of spiritual connection where the Lord can bond them deeply together. We read

They who…love corporeal natural things, and only from them love things rational, cannot be conjoined with a consort as into one except as to those externals; and when the externals fail, a coldness invades the internals, and dispels the delights of that love, as from the mind so from the body, and afterwards as from the body so from the mind, and this until nothing is left of the remembrance of the earliest state of their marriage, and consequently no cognizance of it. (59.2)

So our marriage is a great place to observe our spiritual life’s progress and to witness the “natural man” at work. Now you would really have to not be paying attention to recognize that women are very different than men. Yet males have a tendency to overlook these amazing differences in their efforts to be right! Sorry men, but its doctrinal! We are told that

The universe was created by the Lord a most perfect work; but nothing more perfect was created therein than woman, beautiful in countenance and charming in manner, to the end that the man may render thanks to the Lord for this bountiful gift, and repay it by the reception of wisdom from him. (CL 56)

As husbands we tend to misjudge these creatures and their love for us! With their God-given perception, perception that we unfortunately don’t have, they are constantly trying to get us back on track and we are doing our best to ignore it! Strange set-up isn’t it?!

That the Lord has taken the beauty and grace of life from the man and transcribed them into the woman; and for this reason the man without reunition with his own beauty and grace in woman is stern, austere, dry, and unlovely; and is not wise unless for himself alone, and such a one is foolish. But when the man is united with his beauty and grace of life in the wife, he becomes agreeable, pleasant, animated, and lovely and thus wise. (CL 56.4)

So why are couples often in constant battle or even in mild disagreements? The “natural man.” It is this natural man that wants to divide, separate and destroy. If we are not paying attention, it will do just that. Yet, if husbands will recognize it, they have been given a secret weapon from the Lord to manage their lust for variety and wandering eye. Each woman is given the perception of the delights of conjugial love and with this perception comes beauty. In fact, their whole body is an organ of perception(CL 56.3) where they are constantly perceiving their husbands changes of state. If a husband can find it in himself to trust his wife and to tell her what he is experiencing, at the time it is happening, from the lusts of the natural man through her perception she can guide him in his journey out of the abyss. That is, as soon as she recovers from finding out just how bad our condition is! This is the secret weapon the Lord has given every husband if he has the courage to use it! To recognize that the lusts of the flesh are not him, but come from hell, and with practice, they both can stand above them and see them for what they are as a team. We read

All good flows in from the Lord, and all evil from hell, Arcana Coelestia 904, 4151. A man at the present day believes that all things are in himself and from himself, when nevertheless they enter by influx, and he knows from a doctrinal of the Church that all good is from heaven, and all evil from hell, Arcana Coelestia 4249, 6193, 6206. But if he would believe as the case really is, he would not appropriate evil to himself: for he would cast it away from himself into hell; neither would he account good to be his own, and thus would not claim any merit from it, Arcana Coelestia 6206, 6324, 6325. How happy the state of a man would then be, because from the interior he would then see from the Lord both good and evil.

Your challenge this week, if your married or single, is to observe the “natural man” at work and to watch him work behind the scenes to create drama, distress and discontent in your life. If you’re a husband, take it one step farther and share your challenges with your wife and watch what happens! Allow her to use her God-Given talents to purify the love you both want!

And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and he slept; and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place. 22 Then the rib which the Lord God had taken from man He [h]made into a woman, and He brought her to the man. Genesis (2;21)

Amen. Let us pray