The author of the Bible Study Guide was wise to include a week listening to Solomon’s Proverbs regarding a happy family. He would have been even wiser to focus on the book of Proverbs for the full thirteen weeks.

It would be difficult to find any biblical book that speaks more directly, more frankly, to the health of families. Families today, perhaps more than any time in memory, are in deep trouble. Statistics coldly indicate that family troubles and divorce are as common in Christian homes as in non-Christian homes. Worse, the statistics are about the same for Seventh-day Adventists!

So much of the analysis of why this is happening waltzes all around what most experts list as the core problems: finances, in-laws, poor role models, and so the list goes. But I can point to many homes that struggle with finances, in-law problems, and poor role models while growing up—but the wife and husband grow together, leaning on each other for strength. Their children see all this and adore their parents.

Solomon goes to the heart of the matter. He talks about the wandering husband who "listens to the lips of an immoral woman [that] drip honey…but in the end she is bitter as wormwood" (5:3, 4) and the wife "who forsakes the companion of her youth" (2:17). All this chasing after forbidden fruit, the "fatal attraction," is underneath most of the friction that saps the joy of married life today. This wandering and forsaking may not even be known to the other spouse—but the chaffing and hostility goes on burning, year after year.

Any pastor or counselor knows exactly what we are talking about, and for professional reasons our mouths are shut. That is, until the masquerade is over and caring concern is needed for the hurt party.

Facts are not hard to come by. Unfortunately, besides the age-old illicit connections at work and travel, many Christian leaders have had their homes wrecked by the lure of TV or the secret sanctum of their computer. Wives as well as husbands are sucked into the world of pornography and nothing again will ever be the same. Lies become habits. Fake intimacies become routine.

What is going on here—even in the homes of professed Christians? Fidelity is almost a forgotten word, especially since the 1960s, when responsibility suddenly was trumped by the siren call for self-fulfillment. And by the amazing shift in Adventist thought in buying into a gospel that promises forgiveness but not transformation. Solomon saw it in his day: "I have peace offerings with me; Today I have paid my vows.…Let us delight ourselves with love, For my husband is not at home." Bad theology has bad consequences.

Is there a disconnect here? Is Solomon saying that the illicit sexual entanglement, whether in the solitude of one’s mind or in the "one night stand," is the only way to find pleasure with our sex drives? Is self-fulfillment the highest form of life’s choices?

Hardly! After all, God created the sexual drive with all its gratifications. God did not expect his people to be prudes. And he surely is not pleased with frigid wives and brutish husbands. Solomon, before his own sense of responsibility slipped into a fantastic life of self-fulfillment, urged young men to "rejoice with the wife of your youth.…Let her breasts satisfy you at all times; And always be enraptured [ravaged] with her love" (5:18, 19).

But God also knew that the best things in life could be counterfeited. Divine drives can be morphed into uncontrolled passions that we call lusts—whether it be the love of money, of power, of personal beauty, or a sexual orgasm.

His Word has much to offer a man or woman who chooses to turn from these uncontrolled passions. "Each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Then, when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, brings forth death" (James 1:14, 15).

James and Solomon run up the storm flags in our world of sexually charged images, both in TV commercials and in regular programs, on highway billboards, in provocative attire in the work place, and video games aimed at the young especially. The slippery slope begins when we linger at these not-so-subtle appeals to wander like Eve. It takes more than "sheer will"; we must deliberately distance ourselves from these "fatal attractions" by cutting off access into our minds. Only the Holy Spirit can give us the power to make these changes so that our habits of lingering become habits of fidelity to everyone who expects the best from us.

Be practical: we think and do what we fill our minds with. To conquer lust of any kind we must have a mind that dwells on faithfulness to our greatest Lover so that we can be faithful to our spouses and our children.

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