{"id":37933,"date":"2025-10-31T22:00:56","date_gmt":"2025-11-01T05:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/?p=37933"},"modified":"2025-10-21T17:29:12","modified_gmt":"2025-10-22T00:29:12","slug":"251101-gift","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/251101-gift\/","title":{"rendered":"A Wedding Gift from God"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"flex_column av_one_full  flex_column_div av-zero-column-padding first  avia-builder-el-0  avia-builder-el-no-sibling  \" style='border-radius:0px; '><section class=\"av_textblock_section \"  itemscope=\"itemscope\" itemtype=\"https:\/\/schema.org\/BlogPosting\" itemprop=\"blogPost\" ><div class='avia_textblock  '   itemprop=\"text\" ><p style=\"text-align: right;\">by Max Lucado<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-37935 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/251101_1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"600\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/251101_1.jpg 600w, https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/251101_1-300x150.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Our quest to manage life by taming thoughts would fail the test of relevancy if we did not discuss lust. To lust is to crave what does not belong to you.\u00a0<em>Lust<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0<em>love<\/em>\u00a0are not synonyms. Romance is healthy. God wired you to connect deeply, enjoyably, and nakedly to a person of the opposite sex under the canopy of marriage.\u00a0 Ever since Adam saw Eve, the power of sexual attraction has been part of life. God gave sex as a gift\u2014a wedding gift.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cEnjoy the wife you married as a young man! Lovely as an angel, beautiful as a rose\u2014don\u2019t ever quit taking delight in her body. Never take her love for granted!\u201d (Proverbs 5:19 MSG). Delight in each other!<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-37832 size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/1-line_1-300x34.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"34\" srcset=\"https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/1-line_1-300x34.jpg 300w, https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/1-line_1.jpg 600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/p>\n<h3>God Made Our Brains. He Can Retrain Our Brains.<\/h3>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-37576 alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/time.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"198\" height=\"300\" \/>Stuck in your head? Hounded by regrets? Weighed down by worry? Change is possible! The thoughts that have characterized your past need not characterize the rest of your life.<\/p>\n<p>In\u00a0<em><strong>Tame Your Thoughts<\/strong><\/em>, Max explores three key thought-management tools and then applies them to the most common thought problems: worry, guilt, anxiety, and other types of mental quicksand that threaten to trap us. God loves us too much to let us lead a life marked by poor thinking. He has not left us alone in this battle of the mind.<\/p>\n<p>shared with permission<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Our quest to manage life by taming thoughts would fail the test of relevancy if we did not discuss lust. To lust is to crave what does not belong to you. Lust and love are not synonyms. Romance is healthy. God wired you to connect deeply, enjoyably, and nakedly to a person of the opposite sex under the canopy of marriage.  Ever since Adam saw Eve, the power of sexual attraction has been part of life. God gave sex as a gift\u2014a wedding gift.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cEnjoy the wife you married as a young man! Lovely as an angel, beautiful as a rose\u2014don\u2019t ever quit taking delight in her body. Never take her love for granted!\u201d (Proverbs 5:19 MSG). Delight in each other!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":37935,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[148],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-upwords"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37933"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37933\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37936,"href":"https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37933\/revisions\/37936"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ocbf.ca\/2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}