Value Marriage Hebrews 13:4

Last week we looked at the value of love in the church. We reflected on...

love for each other

love for the stranger

love for the hurting

Sometimes we can be winning in all this, but then we miss this one that we should value, honouring marriage. We could say this is the value of love in the home.

Hebrews 13:4 CSB

4 Marriage is to be honored by all and the marriage bed kept undefiled, because God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterers.

The subject of marriage between one man and one woman is frowned up in this world.

It seems prohibiting

It seems old fashioned

“We need to test drive to see whether we ae compatible” people say.

Why would the world frown on it?

Because of our own hearts - we are selfish and successful marriages call for radical unselfishness.

We have poor examples

We don’t want God to tell us what to do

Ruthe Stein, made the point, “Marriage, it has been said, is like a besieged fortress. Everyone inside wants to get out, and everyone outside wants to get in.”

What we are told here is that “Marriage Matters!”

1. Marriage matters

What is it?

“Marriage is a total commitment and a total sharing of the total person with another person until death.” Wayne Mack

“Marriage involves a flawed person, in a comprehensive and interdependent love relationship with another flawed person, in the middle of a fallen world, but with a faithful God.” (Paul Tripp, Broken-Down House, pg. 194)

This matters because the world chooses to define it differently. It defines it as convenience, not covenant.

Biblically we say that those two flawed people are one man and one woman.

1.1. It’s God’s design

It’s meant to result in God’s glory

Celebration of God design in genders - a man and a woman.

Celebration of relationship reflecting that of the Godhead. Man was not meant to be alone. We were made for relationship.

It was meant to be a picture of Christ and His church. So it’s a picture of the Gospel.

It’s meant to be the context for the creation of family

It was God’s design for healthy society

Honour marriage.

1.2. Everyone should care about it

“Marriage is to be honoured by all!” What does it mean to honour? See it as precious, valuable, esteemed. Let’s keep a high view of marriage.

Single? Honour marrage!

Divorced? Honour marriage!

Married? Honour marriage!

We should be holding high the institution of marriage.

Look at the fruit of not doing that. We are living in a world where women are fearful of walking the street because marriage is not being honoured by all. So 9 women dead on the East Rand. The South African government admits that GBV is a national crisis. In a GBV survey that was conducted, it was found that over 33% of the respondents over the age of 18 had suffered physical abuse and mostly through “Intimate partner violence.” Another 10% had faced sexual violence. That’s 50% of the respondents had faced abuse and a high proportion of that happened in the home.

Then there’s the prevalence of pornography. Simply the objectification of women. People think it’s just them and it hurts no one else. If you are in a marriage, it hurts your wife because it affects your thinking about women. And the video online is empowering of movement that includes human traficking, explotiation and the objectifying of women.

One sobering statistic cited by Bill Woolf and Brittany Dunn in the book Eradicating Human Trafficking suggests that as much as 80% of all explicit digital content is produced with some kind of force, fraud, or coercion inherent in its production.

It matters to God and should matter to us.

Gail Dines has said, "It is our job to create a safe environment where young people can flourish rather than being targeted by a predatory multimillion-dollar industry that is almost completely deregulated."

Gail Dines, “We know from 40 years of research that the younger boys get to porn, the more it limits their capacity for intimacy, the more it decreases their empathy for rape victims, the more it increases depression and anxiety, and the more likely they are to engage in risky sexual behavior... now we have a generation of boys desensitized [to violence against women].”

How do we do make this matter to us?

2. Sex matters

“Keep the marriage bed undefiled.” The marriage bed is the context of sex and intimacy in marriage.

2.1. Guard the bedroom

Keep sex in the right place. Sex is a covenant sign of the most intimate expression. It’s a place of celebration. A place of delight. Outside the marriage bed, it produces shame.

Modern culture, “let me see if we are sexually compatible.” You’re not, so learn to be. Self-centered lives rob you of delight.

This is why sex is never used as a weapon against your spouse - that is selfish worldly thinking.

We guard it because we are in covenant. Marriage is a covenantal union designed to enhance and strengthen the capacity of each partner to carry out God’s plan in their lives.

In order to guard the bedroom, we need to guard a few things.

2.2. Guard our hearts

Randy Alcorn, in his book “The purity Principle” wrote, “Purity is always smart; impurity is always stupid.”

1 Thessalonians 4:3–8 CSB

3 For this is God’s will, your sanctification: that you keep away from sexual immorality, 4 that each of you knows how to control his own body in holiness and honor, 5 not with lustful passions, like the Gentiles, who don’t know God. 6 This means one must not transgress against and take advantage of a brother or sister in this manner, because the Lord is an avenger of all these offenses, as we also previously told and warned you. 7 For God has not called us to impurity but to live in holiness. 8 Consequently, anyone who rejects this does not reject man, but God, who gives you his Holy Spirit.

Guard against idolatry. Don’t idolise the experience. Idolatry is when we take something, even something good, and make it an ultimate thing.

Guard against making sex the source of your joy. You will be disappointed. Jesus must be the object of your worship and the source of your joy.

2.3. Guard our mind

What are we allowing to shape our thinking of men and women and our role in marriage.

What are we reading and looking at?

2.4. Guard your feelings

This is vital because feelings are often given the position of lordship - but they should never be.

George MacDonald describes the deceptive nature of feelings in this way: “They had a feeling, or a feeling had them till another feeling came and took its place. When a feeling was there, they felt as if it would never go; when it was gone they felt as though it had never been; when it returned they felt as if it had never gone.”

Feelings will always have persuasive force because of their ability to occupy and dominate the moment

Your feelings are more immediate than thoughts.

Feelings are a gift from God to provide both protection and pleasure. They are indicators that can suggest or offer input, but they have neither authority over you nor power to control you. Certainly feelings have helped bring you together, but they were never designed to drive you anywhere.

Your feelings are neither all-powerful nor all-wise.

Feelings are so fragile and explosive that they must be handled with care.

Guard the marriage. Nothing and no one intrudes. Not your thoughts and definitely not another person.

The one you are married to becomes the one you give yourself to.

3. God matters

There’s a warning here. “God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterers.”

When he says that, he is covering any kind of sexual relation or deviation outside of heterosexual marriage, whether it was fornication, adultery, homosexuality, incest, prostitution, or bestiality.

God cares about this and that’s why there’s a warning about sexual sin. Sex outside of marriage is a perversion of God’s order.

1 Corinthians 6:18 CSB

18 Flee sexual immorality! Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the person who is sexually immoral sins against his own body.

So we are being called to honour God in marriage

Make marriage and act of your worship. They way you treat your wife or husband. Do it all for the glory of God.

4. Moving forward because marriage matters

For everyone

pray for marriages.

support those in marriages. Sometimes a couple may need someone to babysit, offer yourselves to do that because you care about marriage!

We are not living forselves but for Him and that reality needs to be seen. “You are not your own, you were bought with a price.”

Raise our kids to see marriage as precious. Don’t talk badly about your spouse or even marriage.

Go back to your covanant promises. Let marriage be a Gospel presentation - the way your love and forgive, showing grace the way God showed you grace!

Stop the excuses:

I couldn’t help it

it was her or his fault

We fight for our marriages - yours and others. Develop a fresh vision for marriage that honour God.

Glorify God!