A Sales Job

An evangelical minister in Texas has come up with a twist on the "health and wealth gospel"- believe in God, pray to God, and prosper- of nouveau Christian clergymen.

Reverend Ed Young of the Fellowhip Church in Grapevine on November 23 urged married couples in his congregation to engage in a week of "congregational copulation." The following Sunday the 47-year-old Reverend Young, who has been married for 26 years and has four children, urged the couples to "keep on doing what you've been doing this week. We should try to double up the amount of intimacy we have in marriage. And when I say intimacy, I don't mean holding hands in the park or a back rub."

This advice is strictly biblical, Reverend Young assures us. He quotes "two shall become one flesh," an apparent reference to Genesis 2:4, which has little if anything to do with sexual relations; and "do not deprive each other of sexual relations," the latter apparently a reference to 2Corinthians 7:5, in which Paul writes "stop depriving one another, except by agreement for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer..." Have fun, so God loves you: follow his advice and you'll learn "How to move from whining about the economy to whoopee!”

This sounds a little like the famous Joel Osteen of Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas (Texas again!), who contends

A lot of psychological principles and even medical principles, you see them coming around to what the Bible said hundreds of years ago: a merry heart is good like a medicine. I’ve read many articles on how a positive attitude, laughing every day and being happy, does help people to recover and live longer.

It's really comforting to think that a sovereign God wants nothing more and nothing less than for us to be happy, "laughing every day (with) a merry heart." For a more traditional, more orthodox (and what is known as a "reformed" perspective) Christian view, check out the writings of Michael S. Horton, PhD. of Westminster Seminary in California.