Marriage Matters to Me

Introduction

And invite you to be turning your Bibles to the book of 1 Corinthians. The book of 1 Corinthians in the seventh chapter. We’ll be going to that passage in just a few minutes. It’s kind of an introductory verse or some opening matters anyway about our lesson this morning. We do have many who are visiting with us. We thank you for joining us this day as we come together to worship our great God, to praise his name. And now to go to his word. Because it’s very important that we go to his word so that we can know how to think. We can know how to live. We can know how to act. That we can be pleasing to him in all things. And it’s for that reason I’m going to go off script for just a couple of minutes this morning as we get started, because I think it’d be remiss as so many Christians have come together as we had this morning that we don’t even, if we were not to address, rather, even what’s going on in our own community.

Because what I want to challenge us is with last night. And I don’t know if you were like me, you wound up staying up a little bit later last night than you had originally intended to. And last night was a very grievous night for me. And it may have been for you too. And I’m not even talking about whether or not you think justice was done. I’m talking about our reactions and our perceptions of things. The news channel that I was watching last night was running down at the bottom a scroll, gauging various social media reactions to last night’s ruling. And you had some who said that Trevon Martin got what was coming to him. And you had others who were saying that one day George Zimmerman will get what is coming to him.

Neither reaction is a very biblical one. Well, very reason last night was so grievous to me is because last night was an illustration of just how powerful sin is. And just what sin does to us. My remarks this morning are not even about the trial that ended last night. It’s about us. Because it’s a sin of pride when we think that I know what’s best and what justice should be in a situation, regardless of the fact that there were jurors and that jurors heard the evidence and jurors made a decision. Likewise, it is a problem of sin. When we make assumptions of each other because of the way we look, or a particular demographic in which we fit, whether we’re talking about a young black man, or they’re talking about a middle-aged Hispanic man.

That is a problem of sin when we and I can look at each other and already form conceptions in our head of what that person is and what that person is like. That is a problem of sin. It is a problem of sin when we want vengeance, and we want vengeance now. All this is telling me that we have an awful problem in our world. And it’s a problem of sin all the way around. And one final point that I took away from last night is a reminder of there’s a reason why justice is needed. And it’s because of sin. And now I’m talking about us, and I’m talking about spiritually. The reason why we talk about God and God being a just God, and that one day justice will triumph is because there’s so much sin in this world, yea, there’s so much sin that has been even in my own life.

Our challenge for days like today and nights like last night, as in all days, is to think biblically. To think the way that God would want me to think, to have love and compassion for others, to want righteousness and justice in my land, but knowing that ultimately righteousness and justice will be taken care of by God. And it’s not for me. And it’s not for me to seek vengeance, it is not for me to seek what I think is best. It’s that God will rule and that God one day will ultimately conquer over sin. I hope that we can all trust in Him and lead our lives and following Him in such a way. Well, now going back to what we had planned for this morning.

As we’ve mentioned earlier, that what we’re talking about this month is the theme of that marriage matters. And what prompted this is another thing that’s been going on in the news with the fight for same-sex marriage. And as we began last week, we began talking about that really when we talk about defending marriage, we should have been defending marriage much, much, much sooner than we have been talking about it. That is, marriage has been brought lower and lower in the minds of men and the minds of society. I want to open this morning with a quote, actually, it’s a statistic that was taken in 2010 by the Pew Research Center. That in 1978, 28% of Americans thought marriage was becoming obsolete. That’s high. When you think that more than one and a quarter thought marriage was becoming obsolete in 1978, but now in 19, I’m sorry, 2010, yeah, not 1910, 2010, 40% of people were thinking that marriage had become obsolete.

That tells you that society doesn’t think that marriage matters. And we’re seeing that manifest in various ways. Whether it’s as we were talking about last week and the rise of people who are cohabiting with each other and 13% increase from 2009 to 2010 in that, or whether we just talk about the sky high divorce rate, or whether we just talk about how we treat each other in our marriages. How we treat our spouse. How we treat the one that God gave us. All that we’re seeing within our world and our society is that marriage is mattering less and less to people. But what we focused on last week is that marriage ultimately matters to God. And marriage has always mattered to God. And we focused on two things there.

That marriage matters to God because marriage is where real love can be practiced in society. As we think of real love, and we’ll come back to that even in this morning’s lesson, of this love, this real devotion to one another and caring for someone else and putting their needs before yourself. And that of course feeds into the matter that there’s commitment there. And so when we talk about that marriage matters to God, well, that’s big picture. What I want to talk about this morning is a more personal picture. We’re kind of zooming in now. That marriage matters to me. This is a difficult lesson to prepare because I’m going off of my own life in the nine and a half, not nine and a half, a little over nine years of marriage to Jana.

And I understand that my life’s situation and circumstances are different than everyone else’s in this room. But as I have been thinking about what marriage means to God, and I’ve been thinking and putting time and thought about what marriage means to me as it relates to what marriage means to God, then I hope that what we can do this morning will be beneficial to all of us, whether we are married or not. I hope and pray it’ll have that effect. First of all, disclaimer marriage is not a divine requirement. I understand we talk about marriage a lot. And we do, and justly so. But I also recognize perhaps a failing in my own preaching and my own teaching is that I haven’t spent a whole lot of time talking about the single life.

And certainly we should understand, I just want to get it out there in the front. We’re not saying that marriage is a divine requirement, and you’re a better Christian if you’re married. For that’s not true. I ask you to turn to 1 Corinthians chapter 7, because there Paul states for us. And again, we understand that this is in light of the current distress from verse 26. But the point that Paul makes in 1 Corinthians chapter 7 and beginning in verse 32 is still a valid point, and we’ll actually talk about this more at the end of the lesson today. When Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7 and verse 32, that I want you to be free from concern. One who is unmarried is concerned about the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord.

This I say for your own benefit, not to put a restraint upon you, but to promote what is appropriate and to secure undistracted devotion to the Lord. Throughout this chapter, Paul has been stressing and urging to the Corinthian brethren to remain in the calling in which you were called. And again, there was a distress at that time. We’re not privy to what exactly that was. But the point being, if you’re single, then devote yourself to the Lord, and you can do much for the Lord unmarried. And so we need to understand that and appreciate that. That while marriage is a blessing from God, the one who is single can be a blessing to God and his people, and certainly that is true in the scriptures. Let’s talk about, though, why marriage matters to me.

1. Marriage Is Educating Me

And what I’ve been thinking about and studying about and praying about, even in my own life. Marriage matters to me, first of all, because marriage is educating me. What I mean by that, now I’m already getting laughs. Yes, it’s been a thorough education top-down. I understand that. But I’m talking about the specific points that we talked about last week. We talked about why marriage means to God and that marriage promotes real love and true commitment. You see, I thought I knew about love and commitment before I was married. And I’m not saying that I could not have grown to know and appreciate more about love and commitment had I not married. But I’m just saying that the past nine plus years have educated me in what real love is and what it means to be truly committed to someone.

We think of love, and when someone comes to be married, they love each other. And oftentimes in our minds, what that means is they have these feelings for one another. The other person, that feeling makes them happy, and you’re happy to be in that other person’s presence. Mind you again, I’m not saying I don’t have those feelings for my wife. I certainly do. I am happy to be in my wife’s presence. I love her. I feel strongly for her. What I’m learning every day is that to love her as my own body, as I’m commanded in Ephesians 5 and verse 28, is not just about how I feel about her on a certain day. Or whether or not she has made me happy on that certain day.

The real love, as we talked about last week, is to submit oneself to each other, to care for that person’s needs, to encourage, in my case, my wife’s growth and her spirituality. You see, oftentimes when we think of emotional love, that’s actually a selfish love. A young man and a young woman are in love. And oftentimes in our culture and our dating society, what that means is they’re really happy when they’re in another person’s presence. And you see, I love you because of how you make me feel. That in some ways is selfish. And so that’s the reason why in our culture in particular, in this dating culture, that, okay, this young man and this young woman were together and they were together for a couple weeks, but and it seemed like they were so in love, and then well, no, no longer.

Well, why? The emotions changed. You didn’t make me as happy as you once did. And so we’re not in love. Oh, granted, we ought to be trying to make each other happy. We ought to feel those things toward each other. But real love is not selfish. Real love is selfless. Certainly we understand that when we are looking at the example of love and the example of love being our God and our Savior. We talk about the love of God, how God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. And that while we were still sinners in Romans chapter 5 and verse 8, Christ died for us. Real love in that context is not just about how God felt about us on a certain day.

Because God could have looked at us on any day and said, You’re not making me very happy. You’re not making me feel very good. And yet, because he loved us, he gave his son to die on the cross for your sins and for my sins. You see, I’m learning more and more about that. I’m learning that to love someone, yes, it does involve making her feel happy. It involves her making me feel happy. But it’s so much more than that. It’s about learning to serve her. It’s about learning to put her needs in front of my own. And of course, that has taught me about commitment. When the dominant factor in a relationship is feeling, then it’s little wonder why so many marriages just don’t last.

Because those emotional experiences, what we first think of in love, that emotional love, well, that’s not going to last through the months and the years, at least not on a consistent everyday basis. And maybe there’s a couple here that’s been married 50, 60, 70 years, and you might challenge me on that, say, no, we felt the same way about each other every single day. What a wonderful thing. Wonderful thing. And I’m not saying we ought not to aim for that, to make each other feel that way. But that’s one of the main problems in our culture again. Our culture does not encourage commitment in young men and women. It again, it encourages them to look for someone who makes you happy. And looks the certain way that you want them to look and does the things that you want them to do.

I understand we ought to be discerning. We ought to be looking for godly and spiritual characteristics in a person. But when we see time and time again. Just as in our, whether you want to call it dating, or unfortunately, and I was even reading an article about this last night, how on college campuses not just viewed by the young men, but by young women as a hookup culture. A culture where young men and young women don’t even like each other, but they’ll be involved sexually with each other, just to quote unquote hook up. You see, that doesn’t encourage commitment at all. What God wants of me is God wants me to be committed to my wife. That when he joined us together, we became one flesh.

And we’re to honor that. And I’m to honor her for that reason. The passage on the board of Genesis chapter 24 and verses 64 through 67 is one that we read last Sunday. And I think it’s appropriate. Because it is there that we saw that Rebecca has been brought back by Abraham’s servant to be the wife of Isaac. And there she looks up and she sees Isaac coming towards him, and she asks, Who is this? And that is his master. So she knows this is Isaac. And you read that Isaac took her into his mother’s tent, and they made her his wife, and he loved her. He understood, she understood that they are now in this committed relationship. In their society, there was not going to be any, oh, we woke up the next day and thought, nah, we think we’ve made a mistake.

Let’s go get this an old or let’s go to the courthouse and we’ll get divorced. There was none of that thinking. They understood. We are now husband and wife. We are therefore committed to each other. We are therefore going to love each other. The two go hand in hand. You cannot separate them. This is what I’ve been learning, what I’ve been educating, being educated in, rather, in the last nine years, is I’m to be to committed to my wife. Have I been perfect? Has she been perfect? Of course not. Have we had our bouts of anger, arguments, sulking, etc.? Of course we have. We’re married. Maybe I should say we’re human. That may have gets worse than this, Greg. No.

But we’re committed. And what I’ve been learning for nine years now is that that’s what has to grow. Here’s why that’s even more important to me. I’m a better person because I’ve been learning that. Again, you don’t have to be married to learn those lessons, but marriage has been teaching me those lessons. And so marriage has been helping me in my other relationships. That I can love other people as God would have me to love them, and as God would have you to love them, to love your neighbor as yourself. That I can learn to love other people, and that is not contingent always on the fact of how are they making me feel on this any given day? Have they made me happy? That I can now better serve others because I recognize that this is what love does.

2. Marriage Is Completing Me

And love is going to look for the best and prompt the best in other people. And I can be committed to others. That I don’t have to be looking to bail just because a relationship starts to go sour, that no, I can stay in there and I can help and I can try and repair things and mend things. Marriage has helped in educating me in that matter. Marriage matters to me because marriage is completing me. We understand that that was an attempt from Genesis chapter 2. And when God looked at man and said, It’s not good that man be alone, I’ll make him a helper that is suitable to him. We understand from the end of that chapter. That when woman was formed, and she is brought to man, she is brought to Adam, and they become one flesh.

That is the completion of man. I want to focus on the idea though what it meant to have a helper. And maybe too often the times we look at helper and then we think of passages like Titus chapter 2 and verse 5, where let her be workers at home. Well, that’s the helper that man needed, right? He needed someone who could cook the food and do the dishes and raise the kids. Let me tell you a little bit about myself. I’ve got enough OCD in me that I don’t have to worry about is my house going to be clean. I can take care of that. You don’t go look in my office on any given day. Ask Marion about what I do in my office on a consistent basis.

How many times a year I wind up cleaning and rearranging the shelves in my office? It’s just ridiculous. I don’t need someone necessarily to come in and clean my house. I can do that. I can do all that kind of stuff. I didn’t need a helper for that. I need a helper, though. Let me tell you, I needed a helper big time. Because I needed someone who was going to bring balance in my life. See, because the two big flaws, or two of the biggest flaws I would say, about myself are selfishness and impatience. And the two go hand in hand. I want things my way, and I want things my way now. Ask the elders. Ask them how many times they’ve had me get in there here about how I think something ought to be different.

I’m not saying it’s something to be mimicked and honored in me. I’m saying I recognize in my personality and my life, those are two things that I struggle with. And I’m not saying I don’t continue to struggle with them. Nine years of marriage are helping me bring balance in my life. At least in part.

When you think of passages like 1 Peter chapter 3 and verse 7, that husbands in the same way. You’re to live with your wives in an understanding way as with someone weaker since she is a woman. Show her honor as a fellow heir of the grace of life so that your prayers will not be hindered. That passage is significant in my life. I do not think that passage is denigrating my wife in any way. It’s saying that my wife is different than me. My wife is different than me. She is built physically different than me. She is built emotionally different than me. And so if I’m not careful, and if I allow these things to take control in my life, this impatience and this selfishness, then I can devastate someone who’s very important to me.

And I’ve done it enough times and I don’t like it. Husbands, you know the things that you do to your wife that you feel ashamed when you’ve said something in such a way or you acted in such a way, and just that feeling of guilt that you have hurt someone who’s very important to be married again to understand that, to come to understanding of that, but marriage is helping me see that. Not only that, I’m seeing an example in my life of someone who is patient. And who is more selfless than I am than often times. See that and how she raises our children, how she interacts with them. I don’t know how she, you know, if you’re watching us in services this morning, you want to look what bear wrestling looks like?

Just look at our pew. I was home all day with the boys yesterday, had a great day, and I was so tired last night. But she does that on a daily basis. How do you have that kind of patience and do that much stuff for other people all the time? That’s what I’m learning. Marriage has been very important to me in that. It’s completing me. I needed a helper. This goes back to my education in love. When you look at that definition in 1 Corinthians 13 and verses 4 through 7, I’m just going to pick out a few things of what I said about love there. When it says that love is patient. I understand that better now than I did. And that love is kind.

3. Marriage Is Helping Me Serve

You can’t be kind and always be looking out what’s best or what you think you need or want. Love does not act unbecomingly and does not seek its own. I’m seeing that. I need to see that. And so that’s why, brethren, I would say to you, God knew it was not good for me to be alone. I didn’t need someone to cook my food and clean my dishes. Yes, the meals are better. They’re much better than when I wasn’t married. But I needed someone to help me become a better person. And I thank God that I have that. Marriage is helping me serve. I do not doubt that if I were single, I could do different work for the Lord. We already read the passage on the board from 1 Corinthians chapter 7 and verses 32 and 33 about the one who is unmarried can devote himself to the Lord.

That the woman who is unmarried, she can devote herself to the Lord. I don’t doubt that wouldn’t, that’s not true in my life. If I were not married, perhaps by now I would already be living in a foreign country. Doing some other kind of work, perhaps that, you know, with a with a wife and children, it’s more difficult to do. I don’t know. So there are ways that, okay, yes, I could do different service. And some would even say you could do better and more service to the Lord if you were unmarried. But you see, that’s why you can’t just look at one passage and ignore everything else that’s said in the scriptures. What is said in 1 Corinthians chapter 7 is very true. And that if you are unmarried, you can give wholehearted devotion to the Lord, and you ought to be doing that.

But you see, in my life, while I chose not to follow the path of Paul, I think of people like Aquila and Priscilla. That now together my wife and I can follow in their path. Yeah, the example there in Acts chapter 18, at the conclusion of Saul’s second, I’m sorry, Paul’s second missionary journey. As he has left the city of Ephesus, and he has left Aquila and Priscilla there in the city of Ephesus. Now you read in verse 24, beginning that there was a Jew named Apollos, an Alexandrian by birth, an eloquent man. And he came to Ephesus and mighty in the scriptures. And this man had been instructed in the way of the Lord, and being fervent in spirit, he was speaking and teaching accurately the things concerning Jesus, being acquainted only with the baptism of John.

And he began to speak out boldly in the synagogue. But when Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him aside and explained to him the way of God more accurately. They’re both. And the woman, the wife being mentioned even first in this passage. They take Apollos aside, this mighty man eloquent in the scriptures, and here are Priscilla and Aquila, tent makers, and yet they know the will of God. They’ve been taught the will of God. They’ve been instructed by Paul, and they take him aside and they teach him together. You look at the passage in 1 Corinthians chapter 16 and verse 19 that’s on the board. And where Paul is talking about greeting Aquila and Priscilla and the church that meets in their house.

Encouraging brethren on a weekly basis as they came to their house. Let me tell you.

Of course, I do want to state, and going back to 1 Corinthians chapter 7, that what Paul says here is very important. As the Lord assigned to each one, as God has called each, in this manner, let him walk. And so I direct in all the churches. Paul again is talking about those who are married and those who are unmarried. He’s saying, as you are called, then walk this way. And the idea of the walk is your service and your life given to God. So if you’re married, then use your marriage to the glory and the benefit of God’s kingdom. If you’re unmarried, then use your single stature to the glory and the honor of God’s kingdom. That’s why Paul directed this in every church he went to.

Conclusion

That you see where you are in your life and you give your life wholly devoted to the will of God. If you’re single, that’ll open up avenues and opportunities to you. If you’re married, that opens up other, perhaps different avenues and ways in which you can serve. Brethren, that’s perhaps the most personal sermon you’re ever going to get from me. Because that’s why marriage matters to me. Don’t buy what this world is selling. Don’t denigrate a relationship that God has made holy, and he made holy from the beginning. If you were to be married, then may God bless your marriage. If you’re to be single, then may God bless you in your walk with him. May you grow and do his will. But in all things, let us never belittle what God has given.

Let us think biblically and soundly of the spouses that God gives us, and the way in which we are to conduct ourselves, and the very institution of marriage that God has given. Would you serve the Lord? We have not talked about this morning, but the bride of Christ, his people is the church. And he, as the one who loves his body as his own flesh, gave his life for his people. You can be betrothed to him, as even Paul talks about in 2 Corinthians 11, how he betrothed them to Christ. You can be given to Christ and have him as the one who is looking for you and loving you and thinking of you. But you have to have faith in him. Submit your life and your will to his will.

And so we end this morning with an invitation. That if you believe in Jesus as the Son of God, that you repent of your wrongs, of your sins, you’ll be baptized to have your sins forgiven. You’ll be a part of his body. He belongs to you, and you will belong to him. Can we aid you in some way this morning? Won’t you come as we stand and as we sing?