We must keep watch over our lives by guarding our heart’s affections. Let us make sure that we do rejoice in our spouse alone, even as we remember our Lord for the goodness of the gift he has given us.

It was the winter of 1986 when I first laid eyes on my future wife. Now, when I first spotted this radiant beauty, great confusion followed. For it was like I was seeing double, because I was seeing double. My wife is an identical twin. A little counsel for any young fella considering dating a twin: make sure you know which twin you want to go out with before asking one of them out. Otherwise, you might end up asking both of them out, as I did. Trust me, your beautiful bride will never let you forget the “mistake” of going out with her twin sister, as long as you both shall live. Well, all that took place in 1987, the same year that lovely girl became my bride, the wife of my youth. Thirty-five years later, I can affirm that a man finds a good thing when he finds a wife and has obtained favor from the Lord. I can likewise affirm the wisdom of Proverbs 5:18-19:
Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely deer, a graceful doe. Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight; be intoxicated always in her love.
Wisdom here instructs men to delight in the wife of their youth. Lest we misunderstand the meaning, the author is not speaking generically about the joys of marriage, but specifically about the delight one finds in marital intimacy. As one honors the marital bed (Heb. 13:4), one discovers the joy and delight of sacred union. So wisdom says to us to delight in the wife of our youth, and in her alone. So the ladies will not feel left out, wisdom declares the same message to you as well. Delight in that man of yours all the days of your life, and in him alone.
Indeed, we must keep utilizing that word “alone,” for vv. 18-19 are set in a broader context, which warns against adultery. The author in vv. 1-14 and 20-23 warns men about the “forbidden woman.” That is the woman willing to engage in an adulterous relationship, a seductress who desires to use her sexuality, not as a gift to delight a husband, but as a tool to trap a victim. The author acknowledges the allurement of her seduction, but also warns against such an illicit relationship:
Why should you be intoxicated, my son, with a forbidden woman and embrace the bosom of an adulteress? For a man’s ways are before the eyes of the LORD, and he ponders all his paths. The iniquities of the wicked ensnare him, and he is held fast in the cords of his sin. He dies for lack of discipline, and because of his great folly he is led astray.(Proverbs 5:20–23). 
So, just as we must rejoice in the spouse of our youth, we must keep watch over our life. We must keep watch even over what we watch. As I suspect all will agree, ours is a society drunk on sexual immorality. Not just adultery, but all sorts of sexual perversions. It is a great challenge to keep watch over our lives because so much in our lives seeks to promote a forbidden life. One need but type a few letters on a computer and one will find a world filled with pornographic images. Actually, one need not even expend that much energy, as a simple drive on a major highway or a walk in a public area will present a variety of seductive images, attempting to allure the heart toward a forbidden life. While nearly impossible to escape all such public images, we nevertheless must keep watch over our lives by guarding our heart’s affections. Let us make sure that we do rejoice in our spouse alone, even as we remember our Lord for the goodness of the gift he has given us.
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The group aims to convince evangelicals of the Christian bona fides of Kamala Harris, but they have to distort orthodox Christianity to do so. The group’s website features a page devoted to “Kamala’s Faith Story,” which is, in fact, a story, although not a Christian one. It includes no mention at all of Jesus Christ or of His death and resurrection for sinners. It does, however, include this claim: “While a deeply committed and faithful Christian, Vice President Harris has great respect for other faith traditions. Her mother Shyamala Gopalan and relatives in India took her to Hindu temples. She joins her husband, Doug Emhoff, in Jewish traditions and celebrations.”

Over the weekend, the group known as Evangelicals for Harris released an announcement about an online confab of Christians who are coming together for a singular purpose: “to help elect Vice President Kamala Harris president of the United States and Gov. Tim Walz vice president.” The organization bills the gathering as an opportunity for Christians to participate in the “community service” of getting the Democratic ticket elected, calling it “a Matthew 25 witness of love of neighbor as our response to the unifying vision of the Harris-Walz ticket. That is what we want Evangelicals for Harris to be known for first.” The group has scheduled an online event, “inviting all Christians and people of good will to please join us for a Zoom call to be encouraged and engaged.”
Who are these Evangelicals for Harris? The founder is the Rev. Jim Ball, who previously presided over an Evangelicals for Biden group. There are 19 speakers set to participate in the upcoming event, some of whom are more well-known than others:

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Written by John G. Grove |
Wednesday, May 10, 2023
Do politicians in pulpits, megachurch campaign rallies, Bible photo-ops, and governors “claiming” their states for Jesus make it more likely that the American public will express “humility and gratitude before God,” as the National Conservatives hope? Or do such public displays merely signal all the more clearly that the religion being practiced is a creation of partisan politics; a human instrument crafted “for the purposes of a moment”; a “state engine” that will be of no efficacy?

During his first few years in England, Edmund Burke compiled essay sketches and fragments in a notebook published only in the mid-twentieth century. One of the entries in that notebook, possibly co-written with his distant cousin William Burke, is entitled “Religion of No Efficacy Considered as a State Engine.” It is fairly straightforward and not particularly developed—it takes up a mere three pages of the published version. The pithy insight it contains, however, is notably lacking in many contemporary calls for more religion in our politics.
The premise is simple: Religion has salutary benefits for social and political life. But once it is seen primarily in a political context—when it becomes merely a “state engine”—it fails to provide those benefits.
If you attempt to make the end of Religion to be its Utility to human Society, to make it only a sort of supplement to the Law, and insist principally upon this topic, as is very common to do, you then change its principle of Operation, which consists on Views beyond this Life, to a consideration of another kind, and of an inferior kind.
Burke certainly had in his sights “enlightened” clergy who were uncomfortable defending the faith on the basis of the old dogmas and so instead stressed its moral dimension and necessity for peaceful civil life. But he may also have had in mind utilitarian and political understandings of pagan religions. And the general reflection on the outward, social effects can be useful in many contexts.
If he meant that one ought never to speak of the social benefits of religion, there would be ample evidence that he abandoned this view later in life, when he had much to say on the subject. But there’s no reason to think that’s what he had in mind. Rather, his comment is about the way religion is publicly presented and understood.
The social benefits of religion come precisely because it is something that transcends the political, and they depend on the manner in which religion is approached by the people. When we come to think that eternal rewards and punishments are aimed primarily at the immediate, political “purposes of a moment,” they become less impressive to us: “We cool immediately, the Springs are seen; we value ourselves on the Discovery; we cast Religion to the Vulgar and lose all restraint.”
In his later life, as a staunch defender of the established church, Burke would identify the social benefit of religion as its ability to overawe all other social calculations and considerations. It reminds us that all we say and do has cosmic significance. Placing all human endeavors next to the sublimity of God, as he noted in his Philosophical Enquiry, has the effect of diminishing our opinion of ourselves and our capabilities: “Whilst we contemplate so vast an object, under the arm, as it were, of almighty power, and invested upon every side with omnipresence, we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in a manner, annihilated before him.”
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