Faithful To The Promises Of Marriage

Introduction

Have you ever lost heart? Have you ever lost faith in something or someone? I can remember when my parents initially separated from each other and my prayer was that they would work it out. I held out hope that they would. But it didn’t last long.

I lost heart quickly and it happened as soon as my parents introduced me to the people they were dating. As soon as I met their dates, my heart sank. I knew what this meant - their marriage was ending and my life would never be the same.

Today we are continuing our sermon series on a fruitful marriage, where we are looking at marriage through the lens of various fruits of the Spirit and today’s fruit is faithfulness.

Some 41% of first marriages end in divorce. It goes higher when it comes to second marriages, with 67% ending in divorce and that number climbs even higher for third marriages, as 73% of them end in divorce. In other words, in order to just get married, you have to have hope against hope that you won’t become just another statistic.

Imagine this, you have been waiting your whole life to take a cruise to the Caribbean. You have been scrimping and saving your money. You put some aside with every paycheck and you are studying the boat and the layout of all the amenities. You’ve picked the perfect cabin and you have a countdown ticker on your computer.

Now imagine, that just as you are about to board the boat, the captain of the boat puts you through a mandatory safety meeting and in that meeting they inform you that four in 10 ships never make it to the islands, but instead they sink in the sea. Would you still go through with it? What if they said, if this is your second cruise, the chances of your ship sinking is 2 out of 3! Would you get onboard?

I say this to illustrate a point. Most people get married and they are full of hope, otherwise we wouldn’t do it. We are hoping to beat the odds. Faith is vital to marriage. Not just faith in God, that’s incredibly important, but also faith in one another and faith in the institution itself.

Which leads me to my main point today…

To Be Faithful In Marriage You Have To Maintain Hope In The Promises Of Marriage

If you are going to remain faithful in your marriage, you are going to have to maintain hope in your marriage and in your partner. If you lose hope, you will most certainly lose faith and your marriage will quickly dissolve.

Or, the other side of what we are seeing in society is that people are looking at these statistics and have lost faith in the institution of marriage altogether, so they are deciding to not get married at all. That’s why even though the percentages for divorces have remained somewhat steady over the years, but the number of divorces are going down. People are simply looking at marriage and decided it’s not worth the risk. We will live together instead.

So whether you are married, want to be married, or you are scared of becoming a statistic, Today, I want to look at this subject and point you toward God’s word, which I believe gives us hope for the future and stresses the importance of marriage. So I’m praying this will increase your faith and hope in marriage as we read God’s word together.

Hebrews 11:1–2 NIV

Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for.

Hebrews 11:39–40 NIV

These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised, since God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.

Most of us are familiar with this passage. This passage outlines what some call the heroes of faith. It tells us of Abel, Abraham, Moses, Joshua and so many more.

This passage is the ultimate faith passage in the Bible. If you talk about faith, this is where you go. So when I’m thinking about faithfulness, being full of faith, this is where my mind went.

But, this line in verse 39 is a bit haunting. It says that these people received a good report or were commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised. In other words, to use the example of Abraham, he was promised a multitude of descendants, yet he never saw that. He had one legitimate son, Isaac. He had a promise and he had faith, but he never saw the promise realized in his lifetime.

As I thought through this, it left me with this question…

What Are The Promises Of Marriage?

If faithfulness is a key for marriage, what are the promises of marriage? What are we promised in marriage? When we get married, we offer up many promises. In fact, Keller puts it this way…

The essence of marriage is a promise.

Timothy Keller

As a reminder, here are the traditional wedding vows, though some vary:

I, ______, take you, ______, to be my (husband/wife), to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until death do us part."

I have broken these down into a list of promises we are making to our spouse and from our spouse. These are promises made to each other.

Here’s a list of promises:

To have (to belong to someone else)

To hold (to be physically intimate)

From this day forward (a promise of continuity and endurance)

To love (a promise of affection)

To cherish (a promise to be adored or treasured)

Until death do us part (a promised ending)

Everything else mentioned are the limits of the promise. In other words, it’s an all encompassing promise. It’s a promise for the good times and the bad, for the hard times and the good. It’s for when you are healthy or when you are not. No matter what, this is the promise. Another way to look at this, is the biblical idea of covenant.

Marriage Isn’t a Contract, But a Covenant

When you get married you are making a covenant between you, your spouse and God himself. A covenant is sometimes compared to a contract, but a contract is no where near as strong as a covenant. Contracts are easily broken. As soon as the expectations of the contract are not met, you can break it. And too many times I have treated marriage as a contract.

We have all types of contracts - renting a car, buying a house, pest control. But these are all very easily broken. As soon as our expectations are met, we break the contract and go somewhere else.

For instance, I have a contract with Verizon for cell service. If, at some point, their service in this area were to stop working, guess what? I’m not paying them and the contract is broken.

Here’s another, suppose you have a contract with someone to mow your lawn and you go outside and you are standing knee deep in weeds. That contract is done. You are calling someone else to mow your lawn.

A covenant though, isn’t the same. Covenants were made for life. This is why at the end of our vows, we include the clause, as long as we both shall live or until death does us part. The promises and covenant we are making with our spouse is a lifetime promise and what we are saying is that the only way to get out of this covenant is for one of us to die.

So when we talk about faithfulness in marriage, we are talking about faithfulness to the covenant. When we are faithless or unfaithful in marriage, we are talking about being unfaithful to the covenant or these promises you have made.

So let’s break all of this down a little. We talked about the promises of marriage and how these promises are lifelong and form a covenant. But let’s circle back, Faith is for promises not yet realized or received. In other words, when you get married you are making promises IN FAITH. You don’t have the promises. Your spouse is making promises to you, but they are not fulfilled because they are lifelong promises, faith is believing they will continue to be fulfilled along the way.

You are putting faith in your spouse to keep up their end of the bargain, but you are also putting faith in yourself to keep up your end of the deal as well.

In fact, some of our older vows used to reflect this. Listen to the Presbyterian Church vows from many years ago…

"______, wilt thou have this (woman/man) to be thy (wife/husband), and wilt thou pledge thy faith to (him/her), in all love and honor, in all duty and service, in all faith and tenderness, to live with (her/him), and cherish (her/him), according to the ordinance of God, in the holy bond of marriage?"

You were pledging your faith to your spouse. Essentially you were saying I promise to believe in you, to put confidence in you, even when I cannot see the promises being fulfilled. I am pledging to maintain my vows, to hold up my end, even when you struggle to hold up yours. That’s the essence of a Christian marriage.

So that’s our promises, but what about God? Does God make any promises in marriage? Of course he does! We’ve talked about this before, but it’s worth revisiting in this context.

God Promises That The Two Shall Become One

The promise of God is oneness with one another. Notice that pesky word shall. So many couples get married and assume they have already been made one, but shall means it has not FULLY come to pass. The promise is that we will become one flesh and God is the one who brings this promise to pass.

We cannot will ourselves into being one flesh. This is a process. Through the process of you and your spouse doing life together, God works out the sanctification process in your life and you become one with your spouse and in the process become one with Jesus. To say this even another way, as you married and loving your spouse, putting your faith in the process, you and your spouse begin to look more and more like each other…or, more properly, you begin to look more and more like Jesus. You both reflect Him better.

God is promising that as the two of you maintain your faith in the covenant you made and work toward that end, he will make you into one flesh. You will become one with your spouse.

That’s the goal of marriage and it requires faith. It requires that you entrust yourself to the process of God’s design. God designed marriage to do this. He designed marriage with this intent in mind.

Unfaithfulness Is Rebellion Against God’s Design

This is why unfaithfulness or faithlessness in marriage is such a detrimental sin. If the goal of marriage is that two become one, the problem with unfaithfulness is that it is us rebelling against that process. It halts it.

To look at this practically, this is the same thing that is going on in our relationship with the Lord. We are becoming one with Him, yet when we sin it’s a rebellion against that process.

In marriage, when we stop this process with unfaithfulness, it’s incredibly difficult for a lot of couples to overcome this. It requires confession, forgiveness, time and a lot of care to get past unfaithfulness.

Now one of the problems most of us in this room have is that when I say unfaithfulness, our minds automatically jump to adultery. Yes, that is unfaithfulness. That is incredibly detrimental to the marriage union, but that’s not the full definition of unfaithfulness, its simply one form of it.

When we talk about unfaithfulness, what are we talking about? Unfaithful to what? We are unfaithful to our covenant promises. Remember those? To have? To Hold? From this day forward? To love? To Cherish? Until death? If you break any of those promises, you are unfaithful.

The Bible uses the word unfaithful, but it also uses the word faithless.

Malachi 2:13–14 ESV

And this second thing you do. You cover the Lord’s altar with tears, with weeping and groaning because he no longer regards the offering or accepts it with favor from your hand. But you say, “Why does he not?” Because the Lord was witness between you and the wife of your youth, to whom you have been faithless, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant.

Faithless in this context certainly means they were committing adultery, in fact, many of the men Malachi is speaking to had divorced their wives and married women who worshiped foreign gods. But this word faithless has an interesting meaning.

It means to break faith. When you are faithless, it’s more than just a lack of faith, it means you are breaking faith. You are acting treacherously in your faith. That’s the full meaning of that word. And many of us act treacherously in our marriages by breaking our promises.

We don’t cherish our spouse, in fact we may treat them with contempt. We don’t love or show our spouse affection. We withhold it. These are other ways we are being unfaithful or that we are breaking faith in our marriage. When we don’t make them feel like they belong to us, if we are distant to them or give them the silent treatment, we are breaking faith.

What does it look like to be full of faith or faithful?

Let’s go back to our vows. When we are faithful, we are putting faith in the promises of marriage. We are saying I’m going to be confident in this process of marriage. I’m going to put trust in God that he knows better than me and that he has picked my spouse to better me and He will use them to make me more like Jesus.

With that in mind how do we maintain faith in our marriage? How do we apply this message?

Faithfulness is remaining steadfast.

Faithfulness means being patient.

Faithfulness is staying hopeful.

Faithfulness is remaining steadfast. When it comes to marriage, let me reassure you, there will be storms. Sometimes in life the storms are on the outside of your marriage and typically those storms draw you closer to one another, but often we experience storms in our marriages. We experience hardship, our spouse breaks faith in marriage, they become unfaithful and everything in us shouts for us to run. Faithfulness means that in that moment, you plant your feet. You remain steadfast. You remain strong. You stand firm. You might not make it one step forward, but success is not running away. Success is holding your ground. It’s remaining steadfast.

Faithfulness means being patient. Marriage requires a lot of patience. We talked about this before, but it’s worth repeating. You will go through hard times in your marriage, and patience is putting yourself in a position of waiting. You wait. You realize that great things take time and marriage is a great thing.

Faithfulness is staying hopeful. I have a belief that marriages end because someone loses hope or both people lose hope in the marriage. Once that fire dies, it’s almost impossible to get it rekindled. It’s a miracle when it happens. So one of the biggest things you can do when it comes to maintaining faith in your marriage is remaining hopeful. Don’t let disappointment turn into hopelessness. You will most certainly be disappointed in marriage.

To Be Faithful In Marriage You Have To Maintain Hope In The Promises Of Marriage

Conclusion

Can we have a short time of testimony? You can listen to me talk about faithfulness, but what about this. Would someone be willing to testify to Gods faithfulness in your marriage? After all, our faithfulness is really just a mirror of his faithfulness. He is faithful and true.

Prayer & Journaling Points

Father, in what areas am I struggling with being unfaithful to my promises?

Lord, what actions can I take to encourage hope in my spouse?