Supporting Married Couples

Background to passage: Continuing our summer series on the church and the family; having address motherhood, children, youthfulness, and singleness, today we take up marriage and the church. This series has been less instructive toward the groups of people, and more toward the church ministering to and with these groups.

Matthew 19:1–10 ESV

Now when Jesus had finished these sayings, he went away from Galilee and entered the region of Judea beyond the Jordan. And large crowds followed him, and he healed them there. And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?” He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.” The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.”

Opening illustration: Roman Catholic Church and marriage and annulment

Main thought:

1) Protect Marriage Theologically (v. 4-6)

Matthew 19:4–6 ESV

He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

1) Protect Marriage Theologically (v. 4-6)

Explanation: Marriage is under attack from a lot of different angles in our culture. We must clearly state as biblical position and hold to it without flinching. As Jesus said here. Marriage is between a man and a woman, intended for life. The culture wants to redefine marriage and call what is not marriage marriage. Of course now, we have to take a step back further and define what is a man and what is a woman. Jesus, these Jewish leaders, society as a whole was not confused in the least. It would have been laughable that biology could be overruled emotion or law.

Argumentation:

Illustration: Slippery slope in American mainline denominations

Application: Gender and marriage is grounded in creation and God defines what it is and what are the terms. We, nor the government, nor the courts, nor the LGBTQ revolutionaries have the right to change God’s definition of an institution that he created. Our final arbiter of truth is the bible, and we submit to it regardless of what we want or think or the culture demands.

God created two genders, male and female; and to think otherwise is not only to deny scripture, but to deny biology and genetics. Gay “marriage” is not marriage. We need to clarify that marriage is a covenant not a contract. We need to hold fast to the truth that the deepest meaning of marriage is to put on display the relationship of Christ with his church. The Groom who is prepared and coming to unite with his bride. In all our doctrinal statements, policies, ministries, and all other areas these truths about marriage will be supported.

We are not haters.

2) Protect Marriage Educationally (v. 3-5)

Matthew 19:3–5 ESV

And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?

2) Protect Marriage Educationally (v. 3-5)

Explanation: We must systematically teach the truths we believe, including marriage. Sermons, curricula, music, casual conversation. We must provide resources to help people understand the truths about marriage.

Argumentation:

Illustration: A recent LifeWay study found that only 32 percent of Americans who “attend a Protestant church regularly say they read the Bible personally every day.” Evangelical Protestants faired a little better (36 percent), but not much. As Albert Mohler put it, “The scandal of biblical illiteracy [is] our problem.” For the last four years, the Bible and theology department at Wheaton College in Illinois has studied the biblical and theological literacy of incoming freshmen ... When asked to complete a test in which a series of biblical events must be placed in order, our students returned surprising results. One-third of the Margaret Killingray, Encouraging Biblical Literacy, Grove Books, Cambridge 1997, p 5. 100 Causes of decline ANVIL Volume 19 No 2 2002 freshmen could not put the following in order: Abraham, the OT prophets, the death of Christ, and Pentecost. Half could not sequence: Moses in Egypt, Isaac's birth, Saul's death, and Judah's exile. One-third could not identify Matthew as an apostle from a list of NT names. When asked to locate the biblical book supplying a given story, one-third could not find Paul's travels in Acts, half did not know that the Christmas story was in Matthew or that the Passover story was in Exodus. In the most recent survey, only half were able to identify which biblical book begins with the line, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Barely more than half knew where to turn in the Bible to read about the first Passover. Most revealing in my mind is the fact that my students are generally unable to sequence major stories and events from the biblical metanarrative. Only 23 percent were able to order four key events from Israel’s history (Israelites enter the promised land; David is made king; Israel is divided in two; and the people of Judah go into exile), and only 32 percent were able to sequence four similarly important events from the New Testament (Jesus was baptized; Peter denies Jesus; the Spirit descends at Pentecost; and John has a vision on the island of Patmos). These students may know isolated Bible trivia (84 percent knew, for instance, that Jesus was born in Bethlehem), but their struggle to locate key stories, and their general inability to place those stories in the Bible’s larger plot-line.

Application: Knowing the bible gives you the tools for marriage—communication, conflict resolution, money management, sex, parenting, support in difficult seasons, love, commitment, responsibilities, anger management, moral guidelines, religious conviction and practice, determining the will of God for you life, teamwork, oneness and unity, priorities, dealing with intense suffering, reliance on God, faith, sickness, and a hundred other things.

I don’t say that so that you will think, “o wow, if I would just read the bible, I will get all the things I want/need.” I say this because we don’t realize the richness of knowing God, knowing his Word, and therefore we suffer for it.

As a church we must teach by example and by intentional focus upon marriage. We teach not to produce simply informed readers, but transformed followers. As Jesus said in the Great Commission, “teaching them to observe (to do, to practice) all the things I commanded you.”

3) Protect Marriage Emotionally (v. 10)

Matthew 19:10 ESV

The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.”

3) Protect Marriage Emotionally (v. 10)

Explanation: The disciples understood that this teaching was a higher bar that either of the two rabbinic schools of thought that he was being asked to put himself into. In fact, we read that they thought, it’s better not even to marry. Pretty extreme. Let’s think about this. Why would they say that? They understood Jesus to say that divorce was only granted because of the sinfulness of people, and the provision for it was regulatory to protect women and to stop serial divorce and remarriage.

Argumentation:

Illustration: I had a man in the church we were members of in Tifton while I was an Assocational Missionary tell me that he and his wife of 25+ years never fight.

Application: So, why do I bring this up? Couple of reasons. The disciples carried with their assessment of Jesus’s teaching an attitude of arrogance or condemnation for those that may experience divorce. They thought, it’s better to not get married if we can’t get divorced, because divorce is going to happen and then God is going to be mad. They were creating this picture of a big angry God who sits on high awaiting for us to mess up so he can punish us. If that picture stands, we carry around a continual sense of guilt, that may turn to bitterness; not to mention the fact that we usually live under a “do better” mentality.

So, all that to say, we must take care of marriages emotionally. I mean that we know what the disciples knew. Marriage is hard! It brings people to the breaking point. Most couples go through times that they wonder if divorce is the only option. We must work diligently to make the church a safe place to talk about troubled marriages. What I mean is that we feel like we can be open enough to have people pray with us about struggles that we have in marriage. We need to have a church like that. You need to love people in marriages that are in trouble. Men, you need to be able to come alongside men who need to be carried along sometimes and confronted sometimes. Likewise, ladies during those hard times, you must be willing to carry other wives’s burdens or confront certain behaviors.

All these things must be done out of and through love. We must welcome openness, honestly, vulnerability, because there is help in the community of believers. It protects marriages when we can bring the darkness in our marriages to the light, rather than suffer in silence because of embarrassment from judgmental attitudes.

Closing illustration: I have a book, When Sinners Say “I Do”. Don’t have time to go through the content, but the title says so much. Those of us who are married or have been married understand that marriage doesn’t reduce sin, it compounds it. It takes that sinfulness of a single person by themselves, and makes them live together with a sinner equal to them. Marriage exposes so much selfishness that you cannot stay selfish and stay married.

If this is true, how much is the church needed to support this magnified brokenness? With any other symptom of brokenness, any manifestation that hurts our lives and hurts others, the question is obvious, the church should act and help. How much more those in our midst that don’t need condemnation, but grace and love to live married well. You don’t do it alone.

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