Sermon Transcript

0:00:14.0

Well, good morning, everyone.  Over the years I have learned that some people have very strange ideas about marriage.  I heard the story about a lady who felt that she needed to be married to four different men over the course of her lifetime.  Now, thankfully, it was one man at a time, but she felt that four men were needed over the course of her lifetime to meet her very unique needs.  First of all, she needed to be married to a banker, and then a movie star, then a preacher, if you can imagine that.  And fourthly, in the final stage of her life she wanted to be married to an undertaker.  Now, her friend thought that was very strange and ask her why.  And the lady says, “Well, that’s very simple.  One for the money, two for the show, three to get ready, and four to go.”  Strange, strange ideas about marriage.  I learned about a dad who was very serious about teaching his three boys what it meant to be a man and the unique roles a man plays in life- husband and father.  And so he was very serious about modeling this to his kids and speaking this into the lives of his boys whenever he had the opportunity.  So you can imagine how shocked he was when his oldest son came to him and said, “Dad, I’m gonna have 16 wives when I get older.”  His dad said, “Son, where did you come up with a crazy idea like that.  I never taught you that.”  He says, “Dad, the preacher told us that.  You know, at the wedding last week he told the groom, ‘Four better and four worse, four richer and four poorer.’”  Strange, strange ideas about marriage.  Socrates once told his students, “Men, by all means marry.  And if you find yourself a good wife, consider yourself twice blessed.  If you find yourself a bad wife, you too will become a philosopher.”  Just strange, strange ideas about marriage.

0:02:08.6

There are some in culture today who want to redefine marriage, as strange as that seems.  For thousands of years civilized people have understood marriage to be the union of one man and one woman.  And now a small but vocal minority want us to expand the definition of marriage to include, strange as it may seem, men marring men and women marrying women.  Strange views about marriage.  And this small but vocal minority want us to believe that it’s their right, maybe even their constitutional right to marry someone of the same sex.  That we shouldn’t have laws on the books that protect marriage in that way.  Well, let’s think about that a minute.  We have plenty of laws on the book that protect the sanctity of marriage and the definition of marriage.  For instance, you can’t marry a child.  That’s against the law.  You can’t marry a group of people.  That’s against the law.  You can’t marry another married person.  The law won’t let you do that.  You can’t marry a close blood relative.  It’s against the law to do that.  You can’t marry an animal.  Now, I know you love Fido and Fifi, but no matter how much you love your dog or cat, the state is not gonna give you a marriage license.  And it is against the law to marry somebody of the same sex, at least for now.  And I believe that should be protected, that the sanctity of marriage, that marriage as we have understood it in civilized places for thousands of years ought to be between one man and one woman for lifetime.  Now, we love homosexuals, and we love lesbians.  And they are welcome to attend Immanuel Bible Church and sit next to all the rest of us sinners, okay.  But we also love you enough to…yeah, you can applaud to that.  That’s okay.  But we also love people enough to tell them the truth.  Jesus said if you know the truth, the truth will set you free.  And that’s true in a lot of areas of our life, including some of the strange, strange ideas that we have about marriage.

0:04:44.7

Marriage is God’s idea, and it was for His glory.  The apostle Paul talked about marriage in Ephesians 5.  And he said it was a mystery.  Now, some of you have been saying, “I’ve been wanting to say to my spouse for a number of years, ‘You are a mystery to me,’” okay.  You can do that right now if you want or save it for a little bit later.  But that’s not exactly the mystery Paul was talking about.  Paul was talking about the mystery of Christ and His Church.  You see, marriage from the beginning was meant to be a picture.  It was meant to illustrate something, this mysterious relationship between Christ and His Church.  In other words, your marriage is not about you.  My marriage is not about me.  It’s about God.  And we have lost the biblical vision for marriage in our culture today, and it’s something we need to recapture.

0:05:35.3

John Piper says it this way.  “The greatness and glory of marriage is beyond our ability to think or feel without divine revelation and without the illumining and awakening of the Holy Spirit.  The world cannot know what marriage is without learning it from God.  The natural man does not have the capacity to see or receive or feel the wonder of what God has designed marriage to be.”  And with that loss of vision, without a clear understanding and revelation from God about what marriage was designed to be, we have drifted off into so many different directions- promiscuity, cohabitation, no-fault divorce, drive-through marriages, wedding rings for rent—I actually read of a place this week that had wedding rings for rent—and same-sex marriage proposals.  We have drifted so far away from God’s original design and purpose for marriage.  No wonder the institution of marriage is in crisis today.

0:06:41.9

So there is no better time to go back to book of Genesis.  If you have your Bibles, turn with me there, Genesis 2.  And to go back to the book of beginnings, back to our origins to rediscover marriage and to rediscover why marriage still works the way God intended it to work.  And as you’re turning there, let me just give you a definition of marriage, a biblical definition of marriage that will get us started this morning.  Marriage is a covenant relationship between one man and one woman who become one flesh in the sight of God for one lifetime.  Let me say that again.  Marriage is a covenant relationship between one man and one woman who become one flesh in the sight of God for one lifetime.

0:07:31.8

Now, with that in mind let’s go to Genesis 2, and let’s begin in verse 18, where it says, “Then the LORD God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him.’  Out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name.  The man gave names to all the cattle, and to the birds of the sky, and to every beast of the field, but for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him.”  Now, if you’ve been studyi8ng along with us in these early chapters of the book of Genesis, you remember in the creation story that God affirmed His creation at the end of every day by saying it was good.  He created on day 1, and the refrain at the end, “God saw that it was good.”  Day 2, “And God saw that it was good.”  And throughout the creation story.  On day 6 He created man, male and female, in His own image.  And He took it up a notch and said it was “very good.”  So if you're a careful student of the scriptures and as you read through the text and you see the repetition of those phrases, you come to chapter 2 and verse 18 and you see the words “not good.”  And you say, “What’s that all about?”  How could something in paradise not be good?  But that was now God assessed it.  He is slowing down in chapter 2 the creation story here and going back to day 6 and giving us some further details.  Eve has not come along yet.  And God looks at the man and sees that He is alone.  And He says, “That’s not good.  That’s not the way it’s meant to be.”

0:09:23.1

Loneliness is one of the great ills in our culture today.  I think it was the Beatles who sang, “All the lonely people, where do they all come from?  All the lonely people, where do they all belong?”  Because written into the software of our being is this need for connected relationships.  It’s a need to belong.  Because as human beings we have this God-given need for connected relationships.  We were created for relationships.  That’s why marriage still works today.  Adam was created for relationships.  You and I are still created for relationships.  Adam was lonely.  We do experience loneliness today in our culture.  Now, we’re experiencing it after the fall.  And in a fallen world like the one we live in today, the alienating effects of the fall make it even more difficult to experience authentic biblical connected relationships.  It even makes it more difficult to experience a successful marriage, okay.  But Adam experienced this loneliness before chapter 3 and before the fall.  It’s because we were created for relationships, and something was missing in his life.  And so God, who is this relational being…and He is a relational being.  You know that, don’t you?  You see it in the intimate relationships of the godhead- the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  They all appear in the creation story.  They all participate in the creation story.  You find those plural pronouns, “us” and so forth.  God is a relational being.  And so part of what it means to be created in His image is we were created for relationships.  We were made for this thing called marriage.

0:11:09.8

Now, let me be quick to say that God didn’t intend for everyone to be married.  He didn’t intend for it to be a requirement that we are married.  Otherwise Jesus wouldn’t talk about a group of people He referred to as eunuchs.  These are people who chose to be single for a purpose, okay.  Paul would not have afford the single lifestyle in 1 Corinthians 7, and actually said in some circumstances—especially the circumstances of persecution that they were under—that that might be the preferred lifestyle.  He wouldn’t have affirmed it if it was God’s intention for everybody to be married. Now, that’s not what a single adult likes to hear.  I was single until I was 31 years old.  I didn’t like to hear that, okay.  I really believed that God wanted me to be married.  There was something in the core of my being, and ultimately we would get there.  But if you're a single adult today or single again, accept where you are today and trust where God might be taking you.  I used to say to my single friends, one of which was my wife Cathryn…we were friends, single adult and just friends for three years before we ever got married.  And I know that even as a single adult, you can experience connected relationships, reserving the sexual relationship for marriage.  But you can still experience connected, intimate relationships with same gender, even opposite gender, as a single adult and have that need fulfilled.  But I used to say to my single friends, to myself and even as a single adult pastor, I used to say to single this.  There is something worse than being single and wanted to be married.  It’s being married and wanting to be single.  So be very careful, very careful who you marry.  And even though that decade of singleness that I experienced during my 20s was oftentimes painful and lonely, I’m so glad that God gave me the patience to wait for my wife Cathryn.  So it’s not God’s intention for everyone to be married, but it is His intention for all of us to experience connected relationships.  Authentic community.  And we are moving toward that in a most radical way as we can here at Immanuel Bible Church without community life initiative.  And I hope you’re getting prepared for that.

0:13:39.3

Now, God knew that Adam was alone and that there was something missing in his life.  But I’m not sure that Adam had clued in yet, okay.  He didn’t feel a need, let alone even know his real need.  And so God gave him a task.  He gave him something to do that was designed to bring that real need to a felt need level so that he experienced his own aloneness and pain.  God gave him the task of naming the animals.  You ever wonder what that was all about in Genesis 2?  He talked about the man being alone, and then he goes off into the animal kingdom and starts naming all of the animals.  This was the task God had given to him.  And if you allow a little sanctified imagination, I imagine it going something like that.  Adam has the animals brought to him as the scripture says God did.  And he looks over here, and he sees this giant beast with kind of a gray, leathery skin and this big ol’ thing that goes like this.  He said, “Hey, we’ll call that an elephant,” okay.  Then he looks over here and he sees another creature or two, tall with long necks, kind of spotted brown furry coat.  And he says, “Ah, let’s call that a giraffe.”  Then he looks up into the trees, and he sees these creature kind of running along the branches and swinging from vine to vine, having a lot of fun.  And he says, “Oh, chimpanzees.”  And then along the way as he’s making these observations in the animal kingdom, he notices coming else.  He sees the elephant pairing up over here.  He sees a boy giraffe—ready for this—necking with a girl giraffe.  I worked hard on that one this week, all right.  I appreciate the feedback.  He might have even observed the chimpanzees holding hands.  And suddenly he clues in.  I’m alone.  There’s nobody like me.  There’s nobody comparable to me.  There is nobody for me to pair up with.  And that’s why God said, “I will make a helper suitable for him.”  The idea of connected relationships and the idea of marriage was God’s idea.  But God had to take Adam through this experience, this exercise, for him to really understand his need so that he could receive Eve as a special gift from God.

0:16:18.4

And it was God who decided to make the woman for the man.  She was made for him.  The Lord says—the Lord is doing this—“I will make a helper suitable for him.”  Now, what does that mean, that phrase “suitable helper?”  What is a suitable helper?  Now, some people have read into that this idea of inferiority; that the woman must be inferior to the man because she’s just a helper, a little assistant that comes alongside him to do this for him and do that for him.  Come one.  That’s not even close to the meaning here.  In fact, the word “helper” is the Hebrew word ezer.  And it’s the same word used the Old Testament to describe God, who is our helper in time of need.  And there is nothing about God that is inferior to anything or anybody in the cosmos.  So to be called a helper, ladies, is a high and holy kind of assignment and a name that is given to you.  You are your husband’s ezer, his helper.  You provide what is lacking in the man.  I was expecting a few ladies to shout amen there, all right.  I have learned in being married to my wife, there is a whole lot lacking in me that she completes.  For instance, this week we were awakened at about, I don’t know, 2:00, 3:00 in the morning by this loud sound in our house.  I mean, it was like an alarm going off.  And my wife springs out of bed.  And I decided about a minute later that I should probably get up too.  And she goes down the hall, and she quickly diagnoses that it was the furnace downstairs.  Now, we’ve been trying to nurse this furnace along for quite some time.  You know, it’s on its last leg.  I don’t know how many years old it is.  And we had, you know, the heater guy out, and he’s given us his multi-thousand dollar bid.  And I’m just, you know, trying to hold this thing off, you know, Band-Aid this thing, duct tape as best as, you know, we can.  But it sounded like it was going to explode.  We went down the first flight of stairs and then down into the basement.  It kept getting louder and louder.  And I’m thinking, this thing is going to go “kaboom.” And so I got in front of my wife, you know, the protective guy that I am.  I said, “Honey, we shouldn’t go into that room, the little furnace room.”  She kind of gently pushes me aside, opens up the door, goes into the furnace room, and in a matter of seconds it was turned off.  And I said, “What happened?”  She said, “Well, there’s a little switch on the side here that just, you know (0:19:00.0)…I mean, you just turn it off.”  I said, “Oh, I didn’t know that.  Way to go, honey.  Way to go.  Kids, we’re safe now.”  She completes what is lacking in me in so many different ways.  And it’s not just because I’m mechanically challenged, but emotionally and physically and in so many multi-dimensional ways, she is my ezer.  She is my completer.

0:19:36.6

Now, ladies, to be your husband’s helper does not mean that you merely act like his helper when the mood arises.  Let me just take a little risk here.  Let me get out on the edge a little bit.  Helper or ezer defines the essence of who you are.  It defines the purpose for which you were (0:20:00.1) created.  She was made for him.  It sums up the very definition of your existence.  Now, that’s hard for us to hear with 21^st century ears.  Because our understanding of male/female relationships and the gender roles and all that has been so blurred and so obscured in our culture today.  But, ladies, you need to understand something.  This role as helper, as ezer, is a high and holy and lofty calling as you come alongside your husband and you complete what is lacking in him.  God said, “I will make for him a helper that is suitable for him.”

0:20:42.7

Now, in what ways was the woman suitable?  We can think of a number of ways.  Suitable for companionship.  Adam was alone.  He was lonely.  He began to experience that loneliness as he named all of the animals.  And certainly companionship is part of it.  The same sex marriage folks, that’s where they start and stop their definition of marriage.  It’s all about companionship, okay.  But it’s much deeper than that.  She’s suitable for companionship.  She’s also suitable, from God’s perspective, for procreation, which was commanded when God made us in His image, okay.  “Be fruitful and multiply.”  She’s suitable now for procreation and to partner with Adam in the domestication of the earth.  This procreation idea is why this same sex marriage is entirely unsuitable in God’s eyes, okay.  God never intended men with men and women with women.  Thirdly, she is suitable as a partner in ruling the earth.  This is something that was given to us at the moment of creation, to take dominion of the earth, to rule the earth.  And men and women partner in that, okay.  Adam didn’t have a partner to do that before Eve came along.  And then she’s suitable for being that “fellow heir in the grace of life.”  And I’m borrowing a phrase from Peter in 1 Peter 3:8 where he’s talking about the marriage relationship.  And he says to husbands to love and cherish your wife and to receive her as a “fellow heir”—I love this phrase—“fellow heir of the grace of life.”  No inequality there.  Different roles, different responsibilities, absolutely.  But that doesn't negate the equality, the sharing of the image of God and being a fellow heir and a partner in the grace of life as you live life and carry out God’s purpose for your life and for your marriage.  She was made for him.  It defines the essence of who you are, and it’s a high and holy calling, ladies, to fulfill that role.

0:22:48.2

Secondly, though, she was made from him.  Let’s read on in the text a little bit beginning in verse 21.  It says, “So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place.  The LORD God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man.”  It’s an incredible scene here.  God created Adam out of the dust of the earth, and we talked about being dust and dignity with a divine destiny.  Now when He chooses to create woman, He doesn’t go back to the dust of the earth.  He goes to the man’s ribcage.  And He pulls a rib.  This was the first surgery ever performed.  He puts the man to sleep, a little heavenly anesthesia there.  Makes a little cut in his side, takes the rib out, and out of the rib our miraculous creator God fashions and forms the woman.  She in every sense of the phrase is prime rib.  Come on, come on, come on, we’re having fun this morning.  We’re having fun.  My father-in-law’s favorite place to eat in Dallas, Texas was Lawry’s Prime Rib.  And every time he took my mother-in-law, Cathryn’s mother, there, he always had this big smile on his face.  He loved to share a prime rib meal with his bride of, I don’t know, 40, 50 years.  And I wonder if it was a little flashback to Eden for him, you know, prime rib.

0:24:32.6

Matthew Henry was the first to make this observation.  He said, “A woman was not made out of man’s head to top him, nor out of his feet to be trampled on by him, but out of his side to be equal to him, under his arm to be protected, and near his heart to be loved.”  That’s the picture here.  And the scripture says that God formed the woman and brought her to the man.  Here is the picture of God in the wedding ceremony bringing the first bride down the aisle.  Guys, do you remember when you stood here at the altar and those doors opened up?  And there was your bride, and there was your bride’s father bringing your wife to you.  I remember that moment.  I was so excited.  I was so excited when Cathryn received and said yes to my marriage proposal.  And then we had an eight-month engagement, and we got, you know, prepared.  And when those doors opened up, she looked beautiful.  And I remember her on her daddy’s arm coming down that aisle.  I was so excited.  She told me later I looked a little pasty, but that’s beside the point.  If you look at our wedding photos, she’s probably right, you know.  I needed a good tan or something.  But I was so excited to receive her.  And what was happening inside of me was not unlike what Adam expresses here.  Verse 23, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.”  By the way, this is why Paul says in his letter to the Ephesians that a man should cherish his wife and love her and care for her like he cares for his own body.  Because she was made from him.  “She shall be called woman,” he says,—he completes the naming exercise—“because she was taken out of man.”

0:26:37.0

She was made for him.  She was made from him.  The Hebrew word for man is ish.  Say that with me ish.  The Hebrew word for woman is ishshah.  Say that with me, ishshah.  Somebody once said that when Adam first caught a glimpse of himself in a pool of water, he went “eesh!”  But when he first caught glimpse of Eve, he said, “Eesh, ahh!”  He finally found what he never found in the animal kingdom, a helper that was suitable to him.

0:27:20.5

And now we come to verse 24 and 25.  And these are familiar verses.  You might have even heard them at the altar when you married, I don’t know, last month, last week, or 30, 40, 50 years ago.  Let’s read them together, verse 24.  “For this cause a man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.  And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.”  Here we learn how marriage still works for us today.  Four key principles here I want you to write down.  The first in a single word is the principle of severance.  Severance.  “For this cause a man shall leave his father and his mother.”  Have you ever receive a severance package from your employer? It’s when your employer says, “Leave.”  Or maybe you have given one to an employee that you’ve wanted to say, “Leave.”  Severance package.  The first step in forming a new marriage relationship is for the man to leave that protected relationship that he had with his mother and his father.  By the way, moms and dads, that means you’ve got to let them leave, okay.  You’ve got to let them leave.  That’s one of the hardest things for parents.  Now, I’m gonna say something here that in about, I don’t know, another 10, 15 years when my kids are hopefully getting married, you can come back and say, “Okay, Pastor.  You said this.”  But, parents, one of the best things you can do for your kids is to stay out of the middle of their marriage.  Let them leave, as painful as that is.  The empty next, all of that.  That relationship between you and your son, you and your daughter changes.  It matures.  It gets better.  They're adults not taking on adult responsibilities.  You’ve got to let them leave.  Give them a severance package.

0:29:28.0

Number two is the word permanence.  You leave and then you cleave.  You can’t cleave very well if you don’t leave.  So they kind of go hand in hand there.  And it’s the idea of permanence.  You remember the definition of marriage?  One man with one woman who become one flesh for one lifetime.  Here is marriage math- 1+1=1. Permanence.  We’re living in a culture where there is no-fault divorce, drive-through weddings, wedding rings for rent, all that kind of stuff.  Disposable relationships.  And if all the studies are true, we’re not doing any better job inside the church than the culture is outside the church.  Some of the studies by Barna and Gallup and others are saying that the divorce rate is as high inside the church as it is outside the church.  I don’t know about all of that.  I just know that in every church that I’ve served in, there’s been a lot of pain in the pews with regard to marriage.  Remember, we have this great need for connected relationships and we were made for marriage.  But we’re living in a fallen world, and the alienating effects of a fallen world make it more and more difficult to experience connected relationships and to have a successful marriage.  And if you’ve not succeeded in that area, I just want you know this is a safe place to fail, okay.  We’re all sinners.  Some of us saved by grace and some of us needing to learn that we need to be saved by grace, okay.  But the church, of all places, should be a safe place for broken relationships to where somebody can say, “Hey, it wasn’t as permanent as I thought it was.  Didn’t sign up for this, and I’m hurting on the inside.”  And we don’t go around shooting our wounded.  And we hold high the standard and the sanctity of marriage.  But we know we live in a fallen world and we’re all sinners, and sometimes it doesn’t work out.  But we need to come around folks and love them and do what we can to rescue a failing marriage.  And we’ve got great stories about that throughout marriage mentoring program here at Immanuel.  I was just talking to one of our leaders after the first service.  And he says, “You wouldn’t believe some of the stories of God’s saving grace.”  One man with one woman for one lifetime.  That’s what we’re teaching, and that’s what we need to model.  And that’s what we need to minister toward.

0:31:50.4

The third is intimacy.  Verse 24, “And they shall become one flesh.”  Now, that’s not just about sex.  It is about the physical, but there is a multi-dimensional aspect to this one flesh relationship.  And you need to know something.  Everything in our culture works against a husband and a wife experiencing oneness.  It’s multi-dimensional.  It’s physical.  It’s emotional.  It’s spiritual.  It’s intellectual.  Cathryn and I even like to say it’s financial.  In our “Becoming Financial Soul Mates” conference we talk about how a couple can become one flesh and one financially at the same time.  I’ll tell you what, it ain’t easy, okay.  We work on the marriage relationship first and set that up for the financial aspect of the relationship.  But intimacy, we’re made for this.  We’re created for this.  And the longer I am married, the deeper the intimacy goes.  Not just physically, but other ways as well.  I’m learning things about my wife I didn’t know in the first week of our marriage.  It’s like an adventure.  It’s a joyful adventure to keep discovering new levels of intimacy with her.

0:33:10.7

And then fourthly, unconditional love.  Verse 25, the man and his wife were both naked and unashamed.  Yeah, they didn’t have a stitch of clothing on.  By the way, they had perfect bodies at that time, all right.  Nothing to be ashamed of.  When I was at the Creation Museum in Kentucky about a month ago, we did some filming there for this series.  And they had Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.  I want you to know something.  Adam was buffed, okay.  Eve was a babe.  Perfect bodies.  Nothing to be ashamed of.  But God wrote these verses clearly with something after Genesis 3 in mind.  It’s not just about being physically naked before your spouse and there is no shame, no judgment there.  But what about emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, financially?  It’s speaking of a transparency in the relationship with at least one other person in this life who will love you unconditionally, who knows all of your faults, who knows all of the things you don’t want to have out there on YouTube, okay, who knows your deepest insecurities and vulnerabilities and weaknesses, but who loves you unconditionally.  Naked and unashamed.  The worst thing that a man can do to his wife is make a negative comment about her naked body, or some emotional or spiritual or intellectual nakedness.  It needs to be a safe place where there is no shame, where there is unconditional love and acceptance.

0:34:44.9

By the way, this is the way God loves us, doesn’t He?  He loves us unconditionally.  Some of you think that when you come to the Lord, you know, you’ve got to put your life in the dishwasher and get yourself all cleaned up.  Put up on the shelf real nice and neat and come to church in your nice church clothes and all that before God will accept you.  And that’s so opposite of what the scripture teaches.  He loves you just the way you are.  Now, He loves you too much to leave you that way, to leave me this way.  That’s why Christ died for us on the cross.  He died for our sins.  He died for all of our shame.  He took our shame upon Himself, and in doing so, stretched out His arms and said, “I love you this much.  But I love you so much I’ve got a greater vision for your life and for your marriage than what you’ve ever dreamed of.  Come unto Me, all you who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.”  You come out of a broken marriage or a broken home or your marriage is on the skids, you need to come to Christ.  You need to come to the cross.  We need to be a church that allows for brokenness to come to the surface without there being shame and finger-pointing and judgmentalness and all of that.  Because we‘re all broken in some way.  Saved by grace and being restored to the image of God by the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

0:36:16.0

This is why marriage still works today when we get back to God’s design for it.  We were created for it.  She was made for him and from him.  And when we get back to the beginning and to the way God intended it, maybe we’ll get off this drifting thing going on in our culture right now.  And we come back to the sanctity and the holiness of marriage the way God intended it.  Let’s pray together.

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Father, thank You so much for Your Word.  And thank You for giving us a vision for marriage and a vision for relationships.  Thank You for making us with a deep hunger inside of us to connect relationally the way You do in the godhead- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in perfect fellowship.  Father, I pray for my friends here today.  For marriages and relationships and may be struggling.  I pray that You would bring your healing grace to that situation.  Maybe there is a marriage here today that is already thinking about drawing up the papers, and this is exactly the intervention they needed today was a message like this.  Thank You that You give us do-overs, try again.  That’s what grace is all about.  Thank You for the cross of Jesus Christ and His love that flows from there.  For anyone here, Father, who needs to come to the cross for the first time to receive Christ as Savior and as Lord.  Maybe it’s the felt need of a broken relationship that brings them there.  But whatever it is, Father, whatever experience, whatever task, whatever exercise we’re going through right now that brings us to the cross, thank You for that.  And I pray for that person that needs salvation today, who just cries out even as the thief on the cross did and said, “Jesus, remember me.  Help.  Save me from myself and from my sin.”  We thank You, Father, that every time a genuine, heartfelt sinner cries out that there is a listening ear in heaven and enough grace to cover a multitude of sins.  We pray this in Jesus’s name, amen.

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