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For some reason over the last week or
two or three I have been thinking about marriage. This morning I feel
like the man who was pastoring a church and his congregation got real
concerned because they didn’t think the sermons were that good. So they
asked him, “Pastor when do you prepare for your sermons?” He said, “Oh,
when I get up in the morning and walk from the parsonage across the
field to the church, that’s when I prepare. They promptly bought him a
manse or parsonage five miles further away. Well, I don’t usually do
this, but I’m not going to preach the sermon listed in the bulletin;
I’ve been thinking about marriage, and I guess that’s where my passion
has been. So I am going to talk to you about marriage this morning.
I’ve chosen a couple of scriptures for you that maybe are not readily
apparent as to why they fit together, but they do; and I hope you will
see that in the end.
First from Mark, chapter 10, one of
my favorite stories about James and John when they come and ask Jesus if
they can kind of be the boss or be his right hand or left hand and he
talks to them very sternly about being servants. Once again they prove
they just don’t get it. From verse 35, the word of God:
Then James and John, the sons of
Zebedee, came to him, “Teacher,” they said, “We want you to do for us
whatever we ask.” “What do you want me to do for you?” he asked. They
replied, “Let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left in
your glory.” “You don’t know what you are asking,” Jesus said. “Can
you drink the cup I drink or be baptized with the baptism I am baptized
with?” “We can,” they answered. Jesus said to them, “You will drink
the cup I drink and be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with, but
to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong
to those for whom they have been prepared.” When the ten heard about
this, they were indignant with James and John. Jesus called them
together and said, “You know that those who are regarded as rulers of
the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise
authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become
great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must
be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but
to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
Then from Ephesians, chapter 5, a
passage I often use when counseling people getting ready to be married
or sometimes with couples who come to me for counseling. Beginning in
verse 21:
Submit to one another out of
reverence for Christ. Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord.
For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the
church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits
to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands.Husbands, love
your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her
to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the
word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain
or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same
way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who
loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own
body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church--
for we are members of his body. For this reason a man will leave his
father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one
flesh.” This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and
the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he
loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.
This is the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
Would you pray with me?
Oh Father we come seeking your
presence. Please be with us each as we hear your word preached. May
you have a message for each one of us, what we need to hear. As always
Lord may you be glorified in what is said and thought and what we do in
following. We pray these things in Jesus name. Amen.
God gave marriage as a gift to human
beings. But it seems in our modern era that’s been forgotten or at
least marriage has become disrespected. Every comedian it seems and
every show seems to place marriage in a bad light. If you’re old enough
to remember Henny Youngman, “Take my wife, please!” or, of course,
Rodney Dangerfield, every other joke, how he got no respect from his
wife, or vice versa. I’m reminded of a cute story that a woman named
Sonja Ely tells about her granddaughter, five-years-old, playing in the
yard pretending she’s doing a marriage and first she’s the mother
controlling all the different things happening in the wedding. Then
she’s the various partners in the wedding and she has the bride saying
to the minister, “Read us our rights.” Then quick as that, she becomes
the minister and she says, “You have the right to remain silent.
Anything you say can or will be used against you in a court of law. You
have a right to a lawyer. You may kiss the bride.” Even
five-years-old. Marriage is a gift. It is not good for people to be
alone. Now I realize there are people who have the gift of singleness.
Many people do and for a variety of reasons there are single people.
But God gives marriage for the benefit of mankind. It is the
foundation of society and civilization and we have to remember that. As
I began thinking about marriage, we did a series of sermons during the
summer and I was talking to Buck. “You know there are so many things we
didn’t say.” I won’t say them all today. I want to start with some
things we have to do or not do before marriage.
The first is, I believe the bible
says you should not have sex before marriage. Now I know it is hard to
hear that word “sex” from the pulpit. You know in the church we sort of
don’t do that, do we? We don’t talk about it as much as we should. But
I believe that anything that happens in life we ought to talk about
appropriately. There is a wonderful story about Neil Armstrong, the
first person who walked on the moon. We know his first words were “One
small step for man; one giant leap for mankind”. But he also said
something else which became a great mystery for about 26 years. He
said, “Good luck, Mr. Gorsky.” Now no one knew who Mr. Gorsky was.
They thought, well, “Is he a Russian? Is he talking about the
Russians?” and all that sort of thing. Well finally Mr. Gorsky died and
Mr. Armstrong decided he could explain what he meant. Well it turns out
that when Neil Armstrong was a lad, he was playing baseball with some
friends. His friend hit the baseball right under the Gorsky’s window,
their living room window. He went to pick up the ball and heard Mrs.
Gorsky yelling at her husband, “You want to talk about sex. We’ll talk
about sex when the boy next door walks on the moon!” True story. Well
our society talks about sex all the time in a way very inappropriately.
Every T.V. show, it’s on bulletin boards and everything. In modern life
I’ve noticed that people who lived in a particular time always think
they’re better than people who lived in the past. So, young people tend
to think, “Oh my parents don’t know anything about sex.” Well, I want
to tell you something. “You’re here aren’t you, you guys?” Our
parents, our grandparents, their parents, we tend to think they didn’t
know anything about deviant behavior back in Jesus’ time; they didn’t
know anything about sex or anything like that. They were too holy and
all that kind of stuff. They knew more about it than we do, in many
ways. They just didn’t talk about it quite like we do.
Now the church has made mistakes over
the centuries at times treating sex as some kind of taboo subject and
sometimes treating it like it was something terrible. No, it a gift of
God. But the reason the church says, and the bible teaches, do not have
sex before marriage is not because sex is bad it is because it is so
good. It is holy. Yes, holy. It has become so axiomatic. It happens
all the time that it’s almost understood that if you’re “dating” you’re
having sex, now. There’s no waiting anymore. Every T.V. show, every
movie, it’s the same thing. It’s trivialized. But sex is holy and it’s
holy partly because we procreate children through it. That’s not the
only thing; and some people don’t have children, of course. What an
incredible gift we have to be able to make babies; but it’s more than
that. It’s also one of the central pieces of intimacies between a man
and a woman. Now I now all you guys you’re going, “Yeah, preach it
brother, preach it!” You must not forget all the things, like talking,
that are also major pieces of intimacy; but if we are physically
capable, sex is a big deal. It is holy in God’s sight, as is marriage.
We must not trivialize it, not because sex is bad or anybody is trying
to keep you from anything, but sex outside of marriage on one hand leads
to all kinds of heartache. You all know what I’m talking about.
There’s jealousy; there’s all those things that go with that kind of
thing when it’s done in the wrong way, not to mention disease. God has
sort of rigged it that if we don’t do it appropriately in the wrong
context, we get sick. I was, as you know, I took a trip to Uganda
twenty-five years ago with my seminary group, even then in Uganda there
was a lot of disease running around, maybe the precursor of AIDS; and
they were talking about the problem and one of the seminarians piped up
and said, “Well here’s how we stop it, we teach abstinence.” And
everybody in the room laughed at him. Everybody. Well Uganda is
actually become a place where AIDS is being somewhat stopped and you
want to know why? Because the wife of the president is preaching
abstinence. Whoa.
But it’s also good, to wait. We also
should not live with each other before marriage. I know I’m sitting
here “stomping on toes” because that has also become accepted in society
and in the church. Every movie, every book assumes you live with one
another and the prevailing wisdom is “Well of course we do that. We want
to try it out first. We want to make sure we’re compatible.” Well I
want to share some statistics with you which are true, and I can email
you all the research if you’d like, but people who live together have a
higher divorce rate than people who do not. Do you hear that? Now I
want to say to you that you may have started off on the wrong foot, and
God forgives, and it doesn’t mean that you’re about to go get divorced;
but statistics are true. The prevailing wisdom is wrong. It’s wrong.
It’s better to wait and get married first. There are a lot of reasons.
I think one of the reasons that’s true is because when people live
together they’ve basically said we’re not ready to make the commitment
of vows; but then you begin to doing all kinds of things that require
commitment, like buying a house, or renting, or buying a car together,
getting furniture together, having sex, sometimes having children. Yet
you haven’t made a commitment; and, suddenly, you’re stuck because
relationships are messy. You start getting all kinds of things going
on. You start signing checks together; you do all kinds of different
things. They’re messy. Suddenly you feel stuck and you think, “Well I
might as well get married,” but then you really didn’t want to get
married. You weren’t ready. I think that’s one reason divorce happens
that way. Again it’s not because God is trying to keep you from some
wonderful thing, God’s trying to preserve a wonderful thing, called
marriage. God is not a cosmic killjoy. I sometimes think that we think
that. Young people again, “Oh my parents they don’t know anything about
it, the way it is now.” Oh give me a break! I’m so sick of that. You
know, I know parents are stupid, at least when you’re about twenty. I
think I took a stupid pill when I was eighteen, but that’s another
story. At least I did. We need to hear this; we need to say it again.
The third thing I confess I haven’t
preached on for years, I haven’t talked about it, is we ought not to
marry a non-Christian. You know it is not very popular today to say one
thing is better than another. We want to equal everything out. So we
say we have Christians over here, agnostics over there, and unbelievers
over there and then we have Muslims and Jews and all that. Then we say,
“They’re all the same, no difference”. But there is a difference. It
may sound bigoted but Jesus is better. Jesus is Lord. That’s why we
are trying to get other people to know Jesus. Someone asked me, “Who is
going to hell and who isn’t?” My answer is, “I don’t know who’s going
to hell. That’s God’s business. I just know people need Jesus.” I
just know people need Jesus. If you’ve made a commitment to Jesus and
you are marrying another person who hasn’t, there is a huge gap there, a
huge gap. So many people get married today without any thought.
Christian kids go out and don’t even consider it. Now it’s true there
are some Christians out there who aren’t that good either. But you
stand a better chance if you marry a Christian. The statistics also
prove, yes the divorce rates are high, but if someone goes to church,
you stand a better chance of staying married. It’s just true.
There are lots of things to say about
marriage. One of the positive things we need to do, I think we have to
remember that it is a commitment. We are so wrapped up in the romance
and all the loving feelings things about that sort of thing, and they
are all wonderful, but getting married is a commitment. It is a
commitment. Elizabeth Achtemeier, the late Elizabeth Achtemeier from
Union Seminary, said “When you get married and you make those promises
to your spouse you are saying, whether you get better looking or worse
looking I am going to be there. Whether you get sick or you stay well I
am going to be there. Whether you are successful or not so successful I
am going to be there. It doesn’t matter. I’m going to be there.” So
people today, we seem to have no clue about commitment. A pastor told
me a story about a man he visited in a hospital and his wife was the one
who was sick. Right then and there, pastors run into all kinds of
things during hospital visits, but she started throwing up and the
husband just stood there and the pastor was the one who held her head.
He had no clue how to serve his wife, how to help her. You know what,
that’s a lot of what marriage is about, isn’t it. There are a lot of
times when the kids and the wife and the husband are sick. It takes the
good and the bad. It’s a commitment.
The last thing I want to share with
you the scripture we looked at today. I told you I used this scripture
in marriage counseling and when we get to this verse sometimes the women
turn green and smoke comes out of their ears. “Wives submit to your
husbands as to the Lord.” You lose her right there, sometimes. But I’m
a little playful, and we read that, then we read the next one “Husbands
love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for
her.” And what did he do for her, he died for her. Then I ask the
rhetorical question sometimes and say, “Well who has the harder job?”
Now Paul is often regarded as a male chauvinist pig with a capital P, I,
G for the first verse, but if you imagine the context in which women
were treated a bit like property or at least servants, saying to the
male culture out there, “You got it all wrong, guys.” That’s it! Very
radical deal. That’s it. I think guys have a harder job in some ways
because we are called to be spiritual leaders and you know what, in the
church, it’s often the women in the church who are spiritual leaders, by
default. It’s not that that’s bad, it’s just guys often are out doing
something else and we need to be spiritual leaders. The controlling
verse of this passage is this, “Submit to one another out of reverence
for Christ.” I want you to do something when you look at this verse. I
want you to substitute “serve” for that word “submit”, because that’s
what it is, and remember the passage that I quoted to you from Mark.
When Jesus said “he who is great among you must be your servant… for the
Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life
as a ransom for many.” That’s what its saying, “Serve one another out
of reverence for Christ.” Then he gives two different examples in the
cultural context of the women and the men.
The point is this, that if we want
any relationship, whether it be marriage or anything else, you want it
to be great; you start with the idea of serving first. Part of our sin
nature, part of who we are, is that we are all self-centered, egocentric
as the psychologists call it. It’s all about us. We fight up against
that every day. When we get married often we say, “Well what does this
person have for me? Oh she’s beautiful, she does this….Oh he’s handsome
and he’s going to take care of me.” It’s all about us, and it needs to
be about them. I’ve often again asked that question, “God, why did you
make us so different?” I mean men still don’t understand women. We
think differently, we are differently, we look at the world differently;
and it’s not bad. It’s just different. Sometimes it leads to
heartache. I believe God made it that way because He did so on purpose
because for God it is about serving; and in order to have a happy
marriage or any kind of a relationship, it’s really that we need to meet
the other person’s needs first. So guys for you that means you really
do need to listen and talk to your wives. Meet their needs first.
That’s what that means. Serve one another out of reverence for Christ.
I am going to close with this, one of
the most powerful verses in the scripture. “For this reason a man will
leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will
become one flesh. This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about
Christ and the church.” Paul had this habit of thinking about so many
things at once he would often mix them together and, in this case, he is
talking about marriage but then he is looking up and thinking about
Christ and the church and comparing the body of Christ. All of us
believers, kind of like the marriage relationship between Jesus and us
and the celebration and the party we are going to have. You know I want
to say that I really enjoyed last night. My daughter got married, for
those of you that don’t know, here in the church. It was so much fun to
have it here because you have become family. We also had other family
here: a member of a church from West Virginia where I pastored, their
family; one of Cathy’s friends from Knoxville, I was a pastor there for
five years; and then another friend from Texas, as well. So it was like
the family coming in; family from Cindy’s side and from my side and then
you. It was like gathering together as family, but also as the church,
and celebrating the marriage. It was fun. We enjoyed ourselves, and I
thank you for that. But it’s also what we are going to be in heaven.
This table is so many things to us. It is called the Feast of the
Kingdom of God and for me that means it’s going to be a big party.
Maybe that’s just the way I think. It is going to be a marriage feast.
God has given us marriage for this life and, in some sense, to point to
the next. It is His gift; it’s His wonder; it’s His joy. God has given
us everything including this gift of marriage and sexuality and
relationship. Praise be to God. In the name of the Father, the Son and
the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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