Wholesome Relationships V, Fruit of Faithfulness

And I want to thank David, and let's just thank the Lord for his gifts today. Thank you, David, I appreciate it. Turn your Bibles this morning. We're going to continue on in our series now of Health, Food for Wholesome Relationships. And I'd like you to turn to Matthew chapter 5. This is the fifth in a series on what makes relationships work. By the way, if you were not here last Sunday, many people have commented on the importance of the message of last week and understanding where North Way is going in the future. So we made some extra copies that you can pick up, just free. Just pick one up at the tape table. Just ask for last week's tape in Gathering Sunday. It's Mark, and it'll be out there at the tape table in the foyer. We're talking about faithfulness today, and let's see what Jesus had to say about the importance of faithfulness in marriage. Matthew 5, verse 31. It has been said, anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce. But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress. And anyone who marries the divorced woman commits adultery. Pretty heavy. Despite all of its problems, marriage is still a very popular idea in America today. Did you know that 96% of all Americans will marry at least once? And if that doesn't include you, that doesn't in any way mean that you're inferior in some way. But everyone who does marry, does so not expecting failure. Rather, they expect a wonderful life. They don't expect disappointment and pain. They expect fulfillment and joy. They don't expect regret. They're filled with hope. But it takes a whole lot more than hope to make a marriage last, doesn't it? It takes commitment. And faithfulness in marriage requires good old-fashioned commitment. How many of you find it's easier to get married than to stay married? Isn't that true? I mean, through a whole lot of weddings that seem to just fall together, it's the marriages that seem to get into trouble. Even if you're in a wonderful marriage, I doubt there's even one person here today that hasn't somehow been impacted by divorce. I thought about this. Most every one of us have a relative, a friend, a co-worker that's been personally affected by unfaithfulness, separation and divorce. So it's important that we as believers in Christ have a grasp on what the Word of God says about this. It's a major issue in our culture. The statistics seem to vary. Where you listen seems to change things. But somewhere between 33% and 50% of all marriages will end in divorce. That's an amazing number. And 75% of those will be affected by adultery. But in every case, it's painful. Divorce is always one of the most painful things that people face. Now, it's not my intent today. I want to set some people at ease. I'm not going to dredge up past hurts. We're not going to be looking backwards and heaping guilt and condemnation on people. I had someone come up to me after the service last night and thank me. Because she's been divorced twice, she said. And for the first time, she realized that maybe there's hope for her life. But I do want to encourage you to take notes today. And even if you're in wedded bliss, I don't know if we have any newlyweds here. You're going to find someone. No, there's no implication there. You may have been married 50 years and be in wedding bliss, as you'll hear me say. But take notes today. And I know that the blanks are kind of small, but you can squeeze it all in there. My orientation is forward-looking in this. Because, number one, I believe that the God that we serve is a God of hope. My orientation is forward-looking because it's the God that we serve whose idea was to have marriage in the first place and who created sex. And any God who understands those things is a pretty good God, wouldn't you say? And also, my orientation is forward-looking because He's forgiving and forgetting. And dear ones, can I say, some of us just need to be freed from guilt. I mean, we've asked God to forgive us, but somehow we can't forgive ourselves. And you need to let that happen today. So, I'm going to talk about this in broad strokes, three areas. I'm going to talk about God's intention in marriage. Then His accommodation to human weakness and divorce. And then finally, His orientation toward remarriage. Under what circumstances, if any, is it appropriate? Alright, are you ready? First of all, what was God's intention? I mean, what did He have in mind? Well, from the beginning, He said in Genesis, it is not good for man to be alone. He never said it was wrong for man to be alone. He just said it wasn't good. He said, I've created you to be a sort of community creature, to long for intimacy, to want to touch somebody else in soul and body. Dear ones, we are created with a desire to be known. God says, I created you with this desire to find a mate whom you could be connected and experience what I call oneness. Donald Joy writes in his book, Bonding, he said, the basic thesis of his book is, God's relationship with humans is one of intimate bonding, and that all human intimacies are rehearsals for the ultimate reunion of humans with their Creator. In other words, what you experience in marriage is to prefigure what God had intended you to experience with Him. Now when I say that, that can go right over many of your heads, which it just did. And how many of you know God would not want what you experienced in marriage to be your experience with Him? But that's what He intended. He wanted marriage to kind of look like, this is what it's going to be like to know me. In fact, in Ephesians 5, the Bible talks about God wanting us to be the bride of Christ. And so God says, my intention is for you to go out and find Mr. Right, or Miss Right, whatever the case may be. He says, go for it. I've given you the whole planet. You can go anywhere in the world. If you don't find someone in Pittsburgh, hey, you don't have to stay here. Go to Ohio. It gets better as you go west. Go out to California. I mean, if you really want to be different, and if you don't find anyone there, keep on going. Stop in Hawaii. Go on over to Japan. On into Asia. Go back all the way to Europe. Whatever it takes, you search and hunt. I've given you about a billion options. Find someone. Make your own checklist of size and style, interest, looks. And if spiritual values are important to you, make sure they have the same focal point of spiritual values. If it's Jesus Christ, it should be the same for you. And really search. In fact, in Genesis 24, there's a whole chapter written about God prompting Abraham to send his servant out to find or to search for a wife or his son. What was the wife's name that they eventually found? Bible scholars? Isaac and Rebecca. But God says, I've given you liberty to go out and do it. In fact, we have an overhead on this. A marriage license is a hunting license for one deer only. I had to do that today because I know what some of you are already daydreaming. You're already out there thinking, man, I just saw one go across the road. I want you to know that we're aware that some of you need healed, but that's okay. You just keep on going. God says, once you find that deer one, marry them. Don't shack up with them. Don't elongate the relationship and make it weird. Marry them. Leave your father and mother and cleave to your wife. Love them with all your heart. Love them till you explode and then love them a little bit more. And you'll experience what I have called in my word, oneness. Did you know that the word for sexual intimacy is the word to know someone? To know them? The word for sexual union, it's the word to know. That's a whole sermon. God says, I will bless that union with my spirit and my promises. I'll protect and I'll honor them. I'll support that union in the church and I'll cheer for those unions to last till the grave. He says, I hope not one of them ever fails because God says in Malachi 2.16, I hate divorce. I hate divorce. Now He doesn't say, I hate divorced people. He says, I hate divorce. He says, I hate it when loving relationships turn ugly and lifelong covenants are broken just like that. God says, I hate it when people get betrayed and violated and hurt and used and then discarded. I hate it when children are left fatherless and I hate it when children are left motherless. I hate it when once tender and loving people, people who are sharing my nature together, start acting treacherously toward one another and filled with bitterness. I hate the heartbreak and the anguish of divorce, God says. I hate it. That's a very strong word. But God says, I figure it's going to happen because I know what people are like. Did you know all the way back in the Pentateuch, the fifth book of the Bible, Deuteronomy, God is already making allowance for divorce? He already describes what the conditions might be so that innocent parties might be protected from people who would abuse them. I mean, God knew it was going to happen. He knew that early on we'd struggle in our sinfulness, that we'd have breakdowns and divorces would occur. So, how did God accommodate? This is the second point. How did He accommodate our human weaknesses? Well, let me first of all tell you what some of those weaknesses are. Number one, some reasons why divorce happens. Number one, because some people go about it incorrectly. They have a poor search process. Some people really don't hear what God says to take your time and search the whole world for the right person. They hear that, but they don't do it. In fact, they rush right out and get infatuated or because of desperate loneliness or raging hormones or that temporary insanity called romance. They make some kind of ill-advised choice and get hooked up with someone. Or they have a great wedding, but a lousy marriage. I had a young girl tell me, maybe about a year ago now, she said, all of my college friends were engaged in their senior year. And I couldn't deal with the fact that maybe I was missing my golden opportunity. So, I got engaged to a guy that I liked. And after we got married, I realized I'd just gotten caught up in the rush of it all. He really wasn't the right person for me. Some people experience what is now being called by psychologists the pathological pool. What is that? Well, that's a deep unmet need in me for affirmation or acceptance or esteem reaches out and touches a deep unmet need in you. And we have two unmet needs kind of going after each other and filling a void. And it looks like love. And it smells and it tastes like love. But it's not love. And as soon as that need gets sort of satiated, other things begin to happen. Relationships fall apart. Some people succumb to parental pressure. Some succumb to the fear of just being alone. And they botch or bypass the selection process. And then they're filled with heartache and agony. And then they realize, man, I've got a major problem here. Mistakes happen that lead to divorce. God knew it would be that way. He understood it. Another reason why divorce takes place is because God knew that some marriages would encounter unexpected tragedy that would strike and complicate the marriage. I think of about 12 years ago, a couple that I knew very well, whose marriage seemed very strong and normal in every respect, whose young 12-year-old son contracted leukemia. And I walked through that horrible experience with them for over a year. And the son eventually died. And it wasn't more than a year or 18 months later that their marriage, because of the shatteredness of their soul, could no longer survive. I didn't understand it, but I do. I think of another couple that I've talked to recently who'd been struggling financially for years and just seemed to be climbing out of it. And because of the financial struggle, constant strains and stress in the marriage, and just recently another major financial setback, caused the husband to reel downward once again in his own sense of value and worth. And I don't know if their marriage is going to make it through this one. Sometimes success is the enemy. It's not a tragedy, it's success. One woman said to me, I've got everything I could ever want in life except my husband. Sicknesses come. And marriages don't endure the sicknesses sometimes. The third reason why divorce happens is because of good old-fashioned sin. You know, God knew a lot about sin. He knew some couples would look into one another's eyes at the marriage altar and make vows that they intended to keep for a lifetime, and then two or three years later they'd look into someone else's eyes and forget that vow and do something that they would later regret. God knew that along the way that those two persistent enemies that stalk every part of our life, pride and fear, would attach themselves to individuals and leave them with anger and bitterness and criticalness and negativity. That that would distance spouses and leave wounds and that people would then just kind of stay in that cesspool of hurt and anger and bitterness, never contributing to their spouse or trying to make the marriage work. God knew that sin would cause some others to be self-centered, and even controlling. He knew that sin would cause others to be boring and lazy and totally disinteresting so that nothing was really there in the marriage anyhow. And God knew that sin would cause a number of people to fall into drug and alcohol abuse. And dear ones, when that happens, it makes it very difficult to save a marriage. Drug and alcohol abuse is a much easier alternative to facing the real hard issues of life and people choose them all the time. God knew it would happen. He knew it from the beginning. He knew that though His intention and theirs was we're going to be together for a lifetime. He knew that people would, for one of those three reasons and many others, end up wanting to be divorced. But He says, He says, wait a minute. When those things happen, when you realize that maybe you kind of got hooked up prematurely, or when disaster strikes your relationship, or when good old-fashioned sin rears its ugly head, God says, before you just stand up and walk out, before you just pull out a certificate of divorce and kind of end the whole thing, God says, wait a minute. The marriage union is worth a whole lot more than that. You see, in Jesus' day, what He was addressing here in Matthew 5 was the practice that many people had. A man could divorce a woman simply because she looked at someone wrong. He'd pull out what was called a certificate. He'd just sign it, hand it over to the priest and say, I don't want her anymore. And this became a plague. You see, God would say, wait a minute. Marriage is far more precious than that. Very often I've discovered God is at work in those pressure points of our marriage. He's at work trying to create something in my character. How many of you have discovered that the graduate school of character formation is very often your marriage? You're looking too holy right now. Nod at me, okay? Yeah. God would say, face yourselves and your sin, your immaturities, and learn to trust Me through those times, even through those tragedies. God says, don't just go running away from all these things. Face them. Walk through them together and deal with it. In fact, dear ones, God would say, when you sense these stress cracks coming in your marriage, learn to deal with them very quickly. Because if you don't, stress cracks can begin to grow in the foundation of love. And then you begin to drift and then you stop communicating and then you begin to lead separate lives and then you can fall into what the Bible described as the most dreaded position for any relationship. It's called hardness of heart. It's when stress cracks appear, but you don't pay attention to them. It's when you drift in your affections, but you don't attend to it. It's when hostility begins to form, but you don't process it. And you get farther apart and less loving and less tender and forgiving. And dear ones, hardness of heart is almost always terminal. It's when you say to your spouse, you know, I don't give a rip about what you think. I don't care what you're feeling. In fact, as far as I'm concerned, I'd like to help you find a bridge somewhere. And some of us just drift into that condition. We do it in relationships, not just in marriage, but even with our brothers and sisters in Christ. Kind of like the frog in the kettle, you know. Things just slowly heat up. Instead of jumping out of the water, we just kind of slowly get numb. And isolation and pain and hurt and sadness and guilt become so intense that something's got to give. And you know what usually gives in a situation like that? Your fidelity. My experience is that most affairs aren't just some momentary spark of electricity between two strangers who meet somehow, you know, one night in a bar. My experience in talking with people about adultery is that it's sort of the end of a couple of weeks or months or years of isolation and separation and unresolved hostility. And one day they just give in and say, Hey, it's over. And the Bible says that adultery in Matthew 5, 31, 32 and desertion in 1 Corinthians 7, 15, when those two things, either one of them take place, in God's eyes, this wonderful union that He purposed to last forever is over. Now you can rebuild it, but it becomes a terrific challenge. God says there's a much better way, a way to fix the stress cracks before the marriage drifts into this hardness of heart. You know, in studying the story of the Titanic, more recently historians have told us that when the boat hit the iceberg, that the captain delayed something like 45 minutes before he sent the SOS. Because he had been told that the ship was unsinkable. And his crew said, We'll get it under control. So for 45 minutes they just stayed there. And then they realized that they were losing it. So then is when he sent off the SOS. And I forget the name of the ship that was close enough, but it got there about 20 minutes late. If that captain had sent up the signal flare, and if he had sent off the SOS earlier, how many hundreds of lives might have been saved? Dear ones, I believe that most marriages could be saved if someone would just send the SOS early on. Too often, you know, we just don't do it. A very common problem in churches like North Way is this. Because we have a spiritual environment here, we tend to turn the other way. And kind of think that, you know, hey, so and so is in a home group, or they're reading their Bible, or they're going to worship service. They couldn't have marriage problems, could they? And the people with marriage problems tend to think, you know, how can I go to that church? I feel like such a hypocrite. I lift my hands to God, but I know inside I have hate toward my husband or my wife. And so they drift along. I remember recently asking our pastoral staff about a couple I hadn't seen in a while. And they said to me, oh yeah, they just got a divorce. I said, a divorce? I didn't even know they had marriage problems. And they had followed the predictable pattern. Problems developed. They didn't find help. They didn't ask for help. They started to not show up here on the weekend, and pretty soon weeks turned into months. Next thing I know, I hear about them. They're divorced. Jesus would say, look, you made a covenant together. You intended to be faithful to the grave, but you got into it and realized, wait a minute, I've got some problems. I've got some sin. I've got some hangups. Whatever. Pressure's building. Jesus would say, hey, send the SOS. Get the flare up there quickly so that someone can see that we need help. Call the church. Talk to a pastor. Go to a couple whose marriage seems to be strong and say to them, we need some help. Sit in their door and knock and say, I don't want to bother you, but could you talk to us? If you come to us, we'll help you find a list of counselors. We'll sit down with you. We've got a ministry in this church called Home Builders that will help you to restore some of the foundational things of your marriage. And dear ones, I want you to know there's some wonderful stories. God has rescued some marriages in this church that were already underwater. But what if it doesn't work? What happens? Well, number three, what is God's orientation toward remarriage? Well, you could... percent or 90%, I don't know, but you contributed. It's never just the other person. How many of you know that's true? You'd like to think it is, but it's never just them. So you've got to own it and face it and confess it and you've got to grieve over it and you've got to repent. The second thing is a little more difficult. You've got to reconcile. 2 Corinthians 5.18 says that God has given us, we believers, this ministry of reconciliation. The point is this, it's impossible for you to get on with your life, to live in total freedom with God and your family and your extended family and the body of Christ. It's impossible. If you are carrying around these toxins of hostility toward your spouse everywhere you go. I meet people all the time who've been through a divorce and once you peel back a couple of layers, what you find in there is a deep, angry root of bitterness that hasn't been settled. Some, when the divorce is over, they just say, well, I've got to get on with my life and they go out and they start on the hunt all over again. And it's not too long before they take back into that next marriage the very same hostilities that created the first divorce. And guess what happens? It goes down again. And I hear it in kids who, when visitation rights are extended, the dad tells them, you know that lousy mom of yours? Do you know what she did to ruin our family? And then they go to the mom and she says, never trust that father of yours. He's a conniving, deceiving. On and on she goes. And then the kids look at each other and they say, why do mom and dad hate each other like this? Is it our fault? Did we do it? Dear ones, it's the friends, the kids, the new spouse, the body of Christ that get the residue of a lot of unreconciled relationships. What does that mean? Well, it means that to whatever degree you must, you go to that former spouse and you say to them, listen, I don't know what it means to you, but I know to me I've repented before God and I need to let you know that I'm going to let go of this. I'm going to lay down my anger and my bitterness. I want to put it down. And they may not have any, they may laugh in your face, they may never want to be a friend again, you may have to put boundaries around how you do it, but dear ones, in the Spirit then you can walk away with peace in your heart. And it's very important. Someone came up to me after last night and said, you know, I've never been able to do it, but I know I've got to. Because those toxins will destroy you. The third R stands for remaining single long enough to bring an equilibrium back to your life. One of the things I've discovered is people going through divorce, many times their whole life is seen through the glasses of that divorce. Everything about them revolves around the pain of that divorce and all the complications of, you know, assigning material goods and all that kind of stuff. And you know what happens if you don't remain single long enough? You get into what's called a rebound marriage. And I've rarely, if ever, seen rebound marriages work. They don't work. Because people end up just bringing the same stuff back into it. You need time to reestablish your priorities, to get an objective view of yourself and God once again, to see things the way God sees them. And listen, to hear God's voice about something other than your divorce. It takes time to do that. But if you do those things, I believe, I'm not the final authority, but I believe remarriage is okay. I believe God would give you a second chance. But if you bypass them, if you don't repent, if you don't reconcile and if you don't remain single very long at all, I want you to know it's very likely that you're just going to step right into another relationship and repeat the same problem and I believe you're violating the scriptures. Jesus would say, you're kind of doing what they did back in his day which is, well, I don't like this one anymore, give me another one. I don't like that one anymore, give me this one. And they were literally passing spouses around. Jesus would say, stop that. It's not what I created marriage to be. But if you've repented and reconciled and remain single, I believe God would graciously allow you a second chance. Let me conclude with these comments. Let me talk to us as a church for just a second. A couple things need to change in our church, especially as we grow and open our doors to more and more people who have marriage problems. I want to just issue an appeal to the many among us sitting right now somewhat smugly. Married 25 years, 32 years, 19 years, thinking, well, you know, this is one just for someone else. I rejoice with you in your marital faithfulness. I mean, I really do. I'm glad for you. For whatever reason, my observation is that some people have very easy relationships. I mean, I don't know whether they were experts back when it all started and they just followed the process perfectly. I don't know why it is, but they seem to be just as in love, more in love than they were when they stood at the altar. I mean, do you know people like that? It's wonderful. I mean, it's like they started in fantasy land and they just stayed there. But these people tend to be a little judgmental of the rest of us. And in fact, when they hear about someone going through a struggle, I mean, what clicks in their mind is, well, we've never had those problems. I wonder what's kind of going on with them. Come on, you know, work out your problems. We have. And they're a little prideful and a little pompous in how they face people going through these struggles. And dear ones, I want to say very clearly, please resist the temptation to judge someone else's marriage problem. Because you've never walked in their shoes and you've never slept in that person's bed and you don't know what goes on behind their closed doors. You don't know what they might be going through. And because you have a wonderful easy relationship, don't judge someone who maybe is struggling just a bit. Or maybe struggling a whole lot. I heard of a Christian leader recently, many of you would know his name, who's going through a difficult time and it came out that it looked like divorce was going to happen and so on. And I remember thinking to myself, come on, you know, you're a leader in the body of Christ. You can do better than that. What's up? Why is it that you're just kind of caving in? And then I found out that his wife was an alcoholic for years, that she'd had a number of adulterous affairs, and she basically shattered this man. And he couldn't take it anymore and he said basically, even if it means my whole ministry goes down, I've got to do something about this. I don't know what that would be like. I hope I never have to find out. But I found that I had to repent of my attitude which was kind of like, come on. Carol and I have been married, it'll be 23 years. Why can't you do it? Don't judge other marriages. Number two, make this a place where we help people to craft strong marriages from the beginning and then to strengthen existing ones and then finally to stand by those who are in trouble. You see, here at North Way, if you come to us to get married, it's a process. We have an extensive process of counseling and testing and meeting with you because we believe it's not just the wedding that we're doing. That's easy. It's the marriage that matters. And then you know, every year I do at least one series of messages to strengthen marriages. We have the family life conference and different speakers and so, people like that who are marriage and family experts because we want to strengthen marriages. But it is so important that we understand that number three, we've got to stand beside those who are struggling and make this a safe place where it's legal to ask for help. I was talking with John Sides about this. Folks, we need to take this stigma off our helping ministries. In fact, the church needs to be a place where if you need help, it's the natural place to go where you're welcomed and people don't look at you like, well, gee, it's too bad about your problems. You must not be very spiritual. I mean, we need to be here to extend the kind of support and love and cheer each other back into health. Dear ones, this needs to be a haven for healthy relationships because I believe it's going to get tougher as we go on as society increases its pressure on marriages. This needs to be a place where we reach out to people and say to them, come here and find help and get healed. Where it's legal to send the SOS before the ship goes under. A while back, I was at a big table for dinner with a well-known Christian leader and his wife was saying how great it was. She said, we've been married 46 years and I've enjoyed every day of every week of every month of every year of it. There was sort of this chuckle and so on. One person said, what's the secret? Another person said, denial. But then the leader said, no. He said, we waited. We waited until we were really sure that it was the right person that we were marrying. And then we made our marriage a priority and we nurtured it and we got away now and then and we found help when we needed it. And then he said this, he said, we put Jesus and His kingdom first. We didn't always just have a vision for our own little family and a picket fence and security and happiness and our own little corner of the world. We sought first the Lord and His kingdom. And that made life exciting and made us givers. And givers are always receivers from God. I want to say to you today, as I look over your eyes, some of you are downcast because your marriage isn't what you want it to be yet. Maybe you're in the midst of a battle and you say, but boy, you don't know the pain. And I don't. Only you do. But I want you to know that the Holy Spirit knows too. And we want to give help today if we can. We want to be there for you. I'd like you to bow your heads, please. I've asked Joanne Hoover to come and sing a very tender song about what the church is to be. If you'll bow your head and just listen, this is what we're to be to each other. We're to be a friend that's there to help one another through these times so that marriages can exist and be strengthened.