# <center> The Christian family</center>
### <center>"That is why man will leave his father and his mother and join his wife and the two will become one flesh." This is a great mystery, I say it about Christ and the Church, in any case, you too, that everyone Love your wife as you love yourself and the woman who respects your husband "Ephesians 5: 31-33.</center>
Marriage is an intimate community of life between a man and a woman, based on responsible love and mutual surrender, in view of the personal good of the spouses and the generation and education of their offspring. Reciprocal love is essential and has characteristics that distinguish it from all other forms of love.
However, we must base this love on our full and active Christian life, otherwise the crisis will appear at any moment when we can not or want to base our life together in the Word of God.
If one of the members of the couple does not follow the Christian teachings with respect to their personal life, less still will reflect them in their marital relationship. Worse still will be if the two members of the couple are living away from God.
Sometimes the couple believes they are in the ways of the Lord but one or both of them are acting in a way that is far from being the correct one, and this affects their common relationship.
In short, we must commit our married life and our love as a couple in the fullness of the Christian life. It must be a life in love, through Christ and through the action of the Holy Spirit. This should be the only acceptable perspective for a happy Christian marriage.
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### <center>CHRISTIAN LOVE</center>
The Holy Spirit is the subsistent love of the Father and the Son. It is essentially a Spirit of love and produces in the Christian the capacity to love. Rather it can be said that it is the Holy Spirit who loves in him: "... because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who has been given to us" (Romans 5: 5). That love that we receive from the Holy Spirit is, above all, an interior principle of the new life that God gives us and that makes us capable of loving and giving ourselves to our brothers and sisters, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us.
That is why the Gospel says that the commandment of love for God and neighbor is the center and synthesis of the moral life of the Christian: "The first is: listen, Israel, the Lord our God is the only Lord, and you will love the Lord your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength, the second is: love your neighbor as yourself, there is no other commandment greater than these "(Mark 12:29). -31). The Christian can be defined as a man who walks in love and on this path finds his fullness and salvation.
In the love of God and neighbor, the whole Gospel and all the commandments are summarized: "In effect, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not kill, you shall not steal, you shall not covet, and all other precepts are summarized in this formula: you shall love your neighbor as yourself "(Romans 13: 9).
This is how the positivity of the Christian life clearly appears. Being a Christian does not mean having to avoid this or that, running away from this or that; but love and commit to build your own personality and humanize yourself and others with the building force of love.
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### <center>THE CRISIS OF MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY</center>
No one can deny the existence of crisis stages within marriage and family life. In the Council Gaudium et spes of 1965, an allusion was made to that crisis with the following words: "The dignity of the institution of marriage does not shine in all parts with the same splendor, since it is obscured by polyandry and polygamy; epidemic of divorce, the so-called free love and other deformations, moreover, marital love is often desecrated by selfishness, hedonism and illicit uses against offspring "(GS 47).
The same finding is found later in Familiaris consortio in
1981: "There is no lack of signs of worrying degradation of some fundamental values: a
wrong theoretical and practical conception of the spouses among themselves, the serious ambiguities about the authority relationship between parents and children, the concrete difficulties that the family frequently experiences in the transmission of values, the increasing number of divorces, the the plague of abortion, the increasingly frequent recourse to sterilization, the establishment of a true and proper contraception mentality "(FC n.6), which is why many young people are losing faith in marriage and justify other temporary types of interpersonal union, without a permanent commitment.
With his attitude towards these actions, it gives the impression that man is again tempting and testing God as in Masá and Meribá in ancient Israel. With their personal way of acting, with their attention to other people of the same or different sex outside of marriage or allowing themselves to be influenced by them, with broken marriages, with families destroyed, children deprived of life from before they were born, with the voice of the permissive legislation and of the customs, it seems that the present man is asking again: "Is Yahweh among us or not?" (Exodus 17: 7)
To find the path again, it is necessary to return to God and the Gospel. The gospel proclaims the truth of the love that must unite man and woman in marriage. Only in the truth of love, husband and wife can worship God in spirit and truth and realize their happiness. It is a demanding affirmation, as is the whole Gospel. But it is the only truth that liberates and that saves the authenticity of love.
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### <center>MARRIAGE IN GOD'S PLAN</center>
"From the rib that Yahweh had taken from the man, he formed a woman and brought her before the man, and then he exclaimed: This time it is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh, it will be called male (female), because of the male it has been taken "(Genesis 2: 22-23).
Marriage is the work of God
Marriage is not a purely human institution. The union between the man and the woman is wanted by God from the beginning when creating both sexually differentiated, but as beings of mutual help that complement each other. Sexual differentiation is a function of reciprocal fulfillment in love and procreation.
The marriage union is even deeper than the bonds of blood and kinship because "for this reason man leaves his father and mother and joins his wife, and the two will become one flesh" (Ephesians 5:31). , that is, there will be only one person, only one being.
The marriage union involves unity and indissolubility. In God's plan, marriage is the deep union of one man with one woman. It is monogamous and excludes polygamy and polyandry. It is also indissoluble: marriage lasts a lifetime and absolutely excludes divorce, since the man and the woman form a single body.
It is precisely in the context of that deep union of stable love, that is, within the monogamous and indissoluble sphere, that it is lawful and in accordance with God's plan for sexual intercourse. All sexual performance before and outside the holy marriage is totally excluded.
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