Illustrated with Couch Time
Biblical principles and applications are different. Very different. Both are important, but they cannot be confused without risk of harm to the church and its people. Principles are God’s commands as found in scripture. Applications are how Christians live those God given commands. Principles are universal, applications are not. Read on to see a humorous, but real life story, of the consequences of mixing up principles and applications.
Many years ago, the church that Sandy and her husband attended at the time implemented a practice called Couch Time as a way to teach children that their parents’ marriage was a priority.
The Principle: That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh. (Genesis 2:24)
God has designed roles for families. Homes are to be couple centered, not child centered. The husband and wife are one flesh. Their union is a priority in the family. Eventually, children will leave and cleave to their own spouses, and the husband and wife will still be one flesh. So the principle is to make the marriage relationship the priority before children, while raising children, and after the children have grown and left.
The Application(s): In Sandy and her husband’s church, as a way to help couples with young children meet this principle, an activity was created: Couch Time. The goal of Couch Time was to demonstrate to the children that mom and dad are each other’s first priority.
Couch Time worked like this: when the husband got home from work, he and his wife were to sit on the couch and talk for a few minutes and were not to let their children interrupt them. They were to do this for about 15 minutes before going on with the rest of the evening activities. The idea was that this would demonstrate to the children that the wife is the husband’s priority and that the husband is the wife’s priority.
Good so far. This is a good application of this principle, a way to practically apply it to personal life.
But this didn’t work well for Sandy and her husband. Her husband got home from work right when dinner needed to be served, so it did not serve Sandy to stop getting dinner on the table to sit on the couch. It served Sandy most when her husband kept their children occupied so she could get food on the table without distraction. Then, once dinner was finished and cleaned up, the children were put to bed and Sandy and her husband were able to spend uninterrupted time together.
This is a different, but still good way to apply the principle of making one’s spouse the first priority.
The Contortion: During this time, Sandy and her husband had a particular communication struggle in their marriage that they wanted to talk through with some other couples. But when they went to these other couples, the couples asked them about their Couch Time instead of God’s principle.
They asked questions like:
“Have you had Couch Time?”
“How’s your Couch Time going?”
“Why don’t you work on your Couch Time and then see if things change?”
They did not ask: “How are you showing each other that your marriage is your priority?”
This insistence on a particular application made it so that Sandy and her husband could not move forward. It was as if they needed to complete Couch Time in order for the communication struggle to even be discussed. The couples were so focused on Couch Time that they were no longer looking at the original God given principle. Couch Time had risen to the level of a God given principle. Couch Time was not helpful for Sandy’s marriage, though, and attempts to complete this Couch Time had negative instead of positive effects.
Was the lack of Couch Time an indication of sin? No. Couch Time is not in the Bible. Having your spouse as your priority, yes, that is in the Bible. But not Couch Time.
With this lack of Couch Time, were Sandy’s children questioning who was the priority in the family? No. In fact, Bekah very clearly remembers hiking up the stairs to the third floor one day while thinking through the order of Mom’s love. “She loves God first, then Daddy, then us.”
Wait, what? The children understood the correct order of the family without couches? Yes.
Sandy’s husband demonstrated that Sandy was his priority by the way he fought through his pile of children to kiss Sandy hello, by the way he supported her passions, by the way he honored her in the presence of his children. Sandy demonstrated that her husband was her priority by explaining to her kids the order of her priorities, by the way she intentionally looked for ways to bless her husband, by the way she honored him in the presence of her children.
So is Couch Time bad? Not at all. It is a good application. But it is only an application.
Sandy and her husband demonstrated the biblical principle to their children through the way they lived life. They simply had different applications of the biblical principle than other people in their church. The biblical principle was obeyed couch-free.
The Conclusion: Biblical principles and applications are different. Both are important, but they cannot be confused without risk of harm to the church and its people. When the couples in the church refused to help Sandy and her husband’s marriage until they practiced Couch Time, they created a lack of counsel and community that Sandy and her husband needed at that time in their lives. By mixing up principle and application, the church created real hurt. Principles are universal, applications are not.