 How's everybody doing? Okay, show of hands at both campuses. How many of you think the LA Rams are gonna pull it off tonight? Raise your hands. How many of you think it's inevitable that Tom Brady wins another Super Bowl? How many of you are just not caring? I got that, yeah, that's right. I thought after hell Michigan froze over a couple days ago, I thought, well, this is the year for the Lions. So, so 2019-20 might be fun, but sorry. Hey, if you have your Bibles, open them with me to Malachi chapter two. And before we go there, you can turn there and hold your place there. I just wanna update you on a couple of family things and we're all family, so we're a big family, but we really do, Jane and I really do view you guys as our family and we have a couple of announcements. One that a lot of you probably already know, if you follow us on social media and I'll get to that one last. The first announcement we want you to know is maybe a year ago or a little while, even longer than that. We just let everybody know that Jane has for the last several years been battling against a, I don't know, it's a disorder, it's a neurological disorder called cervical dystonia. And it's a motion disorder that's connected and kinda related to Parkinson's a little bit and she's struggled with this for about 25 years. At first, we really didn't know what it was and then as it kinda continued to progress and we got some additional information out, that's what it is. Cervical is referring to the neck and dystonia is a, it's like a tremor and a pulling disorder. If you're unfamiliar with what that is, your brain sends signals to your muscles when to contract and when to let go. Her brain is telling her neck muscles to contract all the time and never letting go. So it's like a pulling of the neck and what she's done to compensate really, really well is the other side of her neck pulls against this to keep her head straight. And she also has a tremor associated with that and it's, the worst part of it is the pain that she's in and all the time. And every husband in this room knows that your wife already has a higher threshold for pain than you do, we're babies. Jane is tough and gone through this for 25 years and we've looked at just about every type of option remedy for it. So we believe in the power of prayer. We believe that Jesus is still a healer. God still does signs and wonders and miracles and so we have prayed fervently for that and we have also tried holistic and massage and all kinds of things. And a couple of years ago, we connected with a fantastic neurologist in Grand Rapids and we're very grateful for the medical community as well. And this doctor has just been a godsend and she's been getting treatments with Botox in her neck where they shoot about 20 different shots with needles this long, all in different places of her neck and it lasts for about three months and gives her a little bit of relief. Every three months we have to go back. And maybe six months or so ago, her neurologist brought up a surgery that they have, it's relatively new and it's changing all the time. It's incredible technology. It's called DBS, Deep Brain Stimulation. And what they do in essence is they drill down through your skull into the cortex of your brain, the part of the brain that controls that movement and they put electrodes down in there. It's very small and it gives off a signal. They run that under the skin connected to a battery pack that they place here, it's a small battery and it sends out an electrical impulse that they can manipulate to short circuit the brain's message to the muscle to contract. And so in Parkinson's, it's just amazing the difference that it makes in Parkinson's patients who couldn't function and now can. And in cervical dystonia, it has also a very, very good rate of change and transformation there. It's on a spectrum a little bit, but they can dial it in and take several different months. So when the doctor told us about this, he was telling us about this, I'm thinking to myself, that makes me nervous because I don't like needles. I don't know if anybody else is like that, but I am not a scalpel needles type of guy. And but I am the risk taker in their family. Jane is a little bit more, let's take our time into things. And so when we got out to the car, I said to her, well, we've got a lot to pray about. And Jane looked at me and said, I don't have to pray about this, I'm doing it. If there's anything that can fix this or help me with this. And so what is gonna happen at the end of the month? There's gonna be a couple of different surgeries. Jane is gonna be going in for deep brain stimulation surgery. They're gonna shave her head completely. They're gonna drill through the skull into her brain and they're gonna do that, it's gonna be a long surgery. There's gonna be a couple on either side of the main surgery that are connected to that. And so we just wanted you to know that for two reasons. Number one, so that when you see Jane in the next several weeks and she has her head shaved, it's not because she has cancer. It's not what's going on. This is a very hopeful thing. We're very encouraged by it. We believe it's a gift from God and we're grateful for the medical community and that God uses doctors to heal. And so that's why her head is gonna be shaved. I offered to shave my head in solidarity with her and she said, oh, dear Lord, please don't do that. So I am not gonna be shaving my head. But Jane is. Second reason we're telling you this is so that you'll pray with us. It'll be like somewhere between the 18th and the first week of March where they will have this succession of three surgeries. And so we'll kind of be out of the pocket. I will probably be preaching on the weekends, but I'm gonna be mostly with her. And we just thank you all for your prayers, for your concern, words of encouragement. We've gotten so much already from those of you who know. So we wanted you to be aware of that. That's first announcement. Second is that on Friday evening at 6.33 p.m., Jane and I became grandparents. And we have, this is our grandson, Owen Lee Dillon. I almost said Owen Lee Cummings, but last name is Dylan. So Pastor Zach and our daughter Ashley, beautiful little baby boy, seven pounds, 10 ounces, 22 inches long, little world changer, wasn't he the cutest? Look at that little face. In fact, after church, we're going right there and we are gonna see him. Cause when our kids were growing up, we determined we are not spoiling our kids. But now that we got grandparents, let the spoiling begin. So I had somebody tell me, you should not spoil your grandchildren. And I said, get the behind me, Satan. Cause I am spoiling rotten. So be praying for Pastor Zach and Ashley and Owen and Jane and I are ready. It's gonna be a lot of fun. It's hard to believe we're grandparents, but we're gonna embrace it. It's gonna be awesome. Malachi chapter two, you guys there? Looking at your Bibles. Malachi chapter two, the title of this installment of our series, First Love is entitled Marriage Matters. Marriage and Family Matters. And just by way of recap, you'll remember that the entire book of Malachi, which means messenger, is a prophet that God raised up to speak to the people of Israel 400 years before the time of Jesus, at a time when the people of Israel had grown cold in their love for God. They were still going through the motions, the religious obligations of, in our language we would say it like this, they were going to church, they were reading their Pible, they were praying prayers, they were giving their tithes. They were doing all the external things, but their heart had grown cold, their passion for Jesus had dwindled and internally they were more like the world than they were like the God they were worshiping. And so God raised up a prophet by the name of Malachi to go to them and to remind them who they are and to share some things with them that matter to him that if they would address these issues and repent from their way of thinking and see it the way God sees it, that their heart can be changed and they can return back to their first love. And so we talked about honor that honor matters and God wants to be honored in our lives, he wants to be honored as our father. We talked about worship that worship matters. What we think maybe it doesn't really matter does God really see I can worship the way I want to? No, God says actually the way you worship changes you and it blesses me worship matters. Last week we talked about God's word that God's word matters, that God's word is not God's ideas or suggestions, it's God's mandates and decrees, it's true. That when we honor God's word, we actually honor him. And today we're gonna talk about marriage and it's interesting that God speaks to the people of Israel, he speaks to his people when he's talking about their first love, he talks to them about their relationship in marriage. And it's interesting to me that one of the areas that God addresses, and he only addresses about five or six issues in the entire book and says these things matter to me, that he actually addresses marriage because you would think well, if we're talking about our relationship with God, obviously honor as an attitude matters, worship that's spiritual, the word it matters, that's spiritual, but relationships, marriage, I mean God, you really care about horizontal relationships? And God says yes, because what you don't realize is your horizontal relationships are a reflection of and affect your vertical relationship with me. So look with me here at verse number 13, Malachi chapter two, and this is the word of the Lord, he said, in this second thing you do, you cover the Lord's altar with tears, with weeping and with groaning because he no longer regards the offering or accepts it with favor from your hand. But you say, why doesn't he? Because the Lord was the 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, did he not make them one, he's talking about a couple or husband and wife, did he not make them one with a portion of the spirit in their union? And what was the one God seeking? Answer, godly offspring. So guard yourself in your spirit and let none of you be faithless to the wife of your youth. For the man who does not love his wife but divorces her, says the Lord. The God of Israel covers his garments with violence, says the Lord of hosts. So guard yourself in your spirit and do not be faithless. It's interesting what God has to say about marriage. Now, here's the danger that we have presented before us this morning. The danger is that if you're not married today, you could tune this out and say, well, that doesn't apply to me. But it does apply to you in a couple of different ways. Number one, because most of you who aren't married will one day be married. And don't wait until you're married to settle issues about how you view marriage ahead of time. The second thing that we stand in danger of is if you are married to just choose to say, well, I've already this deep into marriage and this is the way I see it and this is the way we do it, so I can't really change. The worst possible thing that we can do is to say that I'm married but not deal with our hardheartedness because much of what God is going to say to us out of Malachi here about marriage really has to deal with the issue of our heart. That's why he addresses it because what he's saying to Israel in essence is that marriage matters and I'll tell you why marriage matters because it's impossible for you or me to have hardened hearts towards marriage itself and yet have a soft and tender heart towards the Lord. You say, well, prove that to me. Okay, first John chapter four says this. It's impossible for you to say that you love God whom you've never seen when you hate your brother or your sister whom you do see. What's the moral? The moral is this, that the relationships we have with each other are both a mirror and a reflection back to us and a thermostat or starting point or tipping point of our relationship with God. They're in, they're inextricably connected. You can't say, well, I love God but I hate the person I'm married to because if you truly do get into the place of being hardhearted in your marriage that same heart heart is the same heart you're trying to love God with. That's why God is addressing this issue with the people of Israel because they had gotten into a place where they had abandoned their families, they had abandoned marriage, they had become just like the world around them. There were very permissive ideas around in the culture around Israel at the time of Malachi just as they were in the time of Jesus just as they are in our day that were affecting the people of God who were called to be different from the world around them. So they were being affected by that and they were abandoning their marriage vows, they were divorcing left and right, they were having affairs, they were marrying women, in this particular case these were men that he was dealing with because men were the only one who had the ability legally to actually file for divorce. They were divorcing their wives putting away their families and they were marrying pagan women that God had told them not to intermarry with and they were doing it. But here was the bigger issue. They were doing it all and could not figure out why God was upset about it. They were saying to God, God, we're still going to church, we're still going to the temple, we're still offering you sacrifices, we still sing the songs of worship that you like and we still pray prayers, we're tithing, we're giving our 10%, we're doing all those things externally so why does it matter what we do over here in the realm of our relationships? What they were doing was they were compartmentalizing their lives. They were saying, my spiritual side of my life over here and then I got my relational side of my life over here. Do you know that as human beings, that's one of the biggest lies that we believe and all of us believe it at one time or another and it's this, that we have different rooms in the house of our life and that God's happy if we just give him the front room. But we can keep private rooms in the back hallway of our life that is our secret sin, our relationships, our career, our money, all of these different things. Those are rooms that it's like, God, you're invited into a living room, sit on the couch, have the TV, I'll bring you some food, maybe we've invited him into the kitchen but do you know that God is not just concerned about that when he comes into your life and he comes into your house, he wants to come in the living room, he wants to sit and talk to you, he wants to go in the kitchen and commune with you but he also wants to be invited into the bedroom, he also wants to be invited into your office, he wants to be invited into the basement, he wants to go through every one of the boxes of your old junk, he wants access to the attic because he's either Lord of all or he's not Lord at all. And Israel was compartmentalizing their life and saying, God, you can have this part of our life, we're gonna worship you, we're gonna do all that kind of stuff but what we're not gonna do is we're not gonna allow you to have access to our heart and heart and that's exactly where God wanted to go because they were missing the significance of marriage, they were diminishing it and it reminds me a lot of a couple of months ago I was on a road trip, I was preaching at a conference and kind of my rhythm when I travel is I'll fly in as early as I can, get a rental car, drive to a hotel, get settled in, kind of rest pray, get ready and so I was driving down I-80, I was in Nebraska, I think it was Nebraska and as I was going along the highway there was a huge billboard on the side of the expressway. I mean huge and it said something along the lines of need a fresh start, easy divorce with no fuss, call and then it was the name of a divorce attorney and the phone number and as I looked at that I just thought how many millions of people saw this billboard and is there such thing as easy and fuss free divorce? Now we live in the state of Michigan that is a no fault divorce state which means you can divorce for any reason at any time no matter what you want. Do you know that what's interesting is that in Jesus' time even though it was a Jewish community the rabbis had so misinterpreted the scriptures for the sake of men, it was a very misogynistic culture that men could actually divorce for any reason. That's why Jesus and Matthew 19 that we'll get to in a minute actually says it was because of the hardness of your heart that Moses actually allowed you to divorce but it was not always so from the beginning. In other words, God didn't intend this. So in Jesus' time if a man came home and looked at his wife and didn't like the way she looked that day, he could divorce her for that. If he didn't like how she cooked he could divorce her for that. If she got old he could divorce her for that. If he asked her to do something and she didn't do it he could divorce her for that. You could just go down to your local rabbi and ask that she doesn't please me anymore. And here was the problem. Women had absolutely no rights, legal rights. So if you had invested your whole life into building a marriage and then your husband came home and he decided that you're 40 years old and he wants to trade you in on 220s then he comes home and he tells you you had to pack your stuff, leave the house, you left your kids behind, you had no legal rights, you had no wealth and now you have no place to live and nobody to take you in. A lot of scholars believe that's why the Samaritan woman at the well had been married and divorced so many times and why she's living with a guy now because she just needed a place to live. Men had all the power, women didn't. Now our situation is a little bit different because now we've kind of evolved culturally and we realize women and men are equal which is a good thing and have equal rights which is a good thing but the problem is now we have seemingly doubled down and made it just as easy for any reason at any time to get a divorce. And what's happened is the church in the middle of a culture that views marriage through the lens more often than not of the world instead of through the lens of the kingdom of God is doing all the things that Israel did. We say to God, I'm going to church, I read my Bible, I pay my tithes but God what does it have to do with this room of my life? What does it have to do with my marriage? What does it have to do with my relationships? What does it have to do with my sexuality? And God says it has everything to do with that because it has a connection to your heart and I want all of you. So this morning what I want to do is I want to zero in on three things from God's perspective of how he sees marriage that are found in this text because how many believe that just like in most things God sees marriage differently than the world sees it. Raise your hand if you believe that. I believe that. I think there's most things that God sees things differently. God sees money differently. God sees family differently. God sees destiny differently. God sees, it's flipped upside down. We live in a world that sees divorce as we actually view marriage more like the boyfriend, girlfriend scenarios that we had in high school level commitment than the covenant that God speaks about them. And so let me zero in on three things from this text this morning that will help us understand how God views marriage and why it's significant important. Number one is this, marriage is primarily a spiritual issue. Marriage is a spiritual issue. You are a being that God created in three parts. You are body, soul, and spirit. First Thessalonians Paul says part of his prayer for the Thessalonian Christians was this, I pray above all things that the God that we serve would sanctify you or set you apart, body, soul, and spirit until the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. Your body, soul, and spirit. You have a body, you have a spirit. When you're born again and you're saved, it's your spirit that comes alive. It's your spirit that was created in the image of God. It's made perfect and it will live forever. The spirit is the place where you relate to God but you also have a soul and your soul is your mind, your will, and your emotions. It's kind of the bridge between your body and your soul and your spirit. So when we talk about marriage being primarily a spiritual issue, that's in contrast to how the world views it because from the world's standpoint, marriage has everything to do with physical and has everything to do with emotional. But even though it involves all three parts of us, marriage is about body, soul, and spirit. It's primarily a spiritual issue first. So think about this when you read this text in verse number 15, here's what God says. Did he, talking about God, not make them one with a portion of the spirit in their union? And then twice after that, he says guard your spirit. Guard your spirit. Why? Why would God say guard your spirit? He doesn't say guard your heart, he says guard your spirit. Why? Because marriage primarily is a spiritual issue. When two people get married, they become one. Genesis chapter one, God says let's create man in our image. And according to our likeness, let us make them. And so God made them, it says and let them be fruitful and multiply and have dominion over the earth, the birds, the fish, all that kind of stuff. And then it says, and so he created them in his image, male and female, he created them. And then later on in chapter two, we get the full picture of how God created man and woman. It says first he created man, Adam. And he said that everything else in creation was good. It is good, it is good, it is good. Until he got the man and he said it is not good, man is alone. So he made a companion, a helper, that was perfectly fit for Adam. And he made it from Adam, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, took from Adam's side, the Hebrew word for rib means from his side. He put Adam to sleep, knocked him out, like a Sunday afternoon nap, took him out, took a rib out and he fashioned woman, Eve. When Adam comes to, here comes God the Father performing the very first wedding ceremony. He's got Eve on his arm and God the Father is walking her down the aisle between the trees and the Garden of Eden. And that's where she got her name from, woman. Because when Adam saw her, he goes, whoa, man. And she's been called woman ever since. It's grandpa jokes, I'm telling you. And the two became one. And here's what was said right at the beginning. God said this, a man shall leave his father and his mother and cling only to his wife and the two shall become one. It's not just talking about physically, it's talking about physically, emotionally, but it starts spiritually. Because when two people get married, it's a spiritual uniting of two people in one. And then it becomes a physical uniting of two people in the one. Sex was always meant to be a bonding agent in the covenantal bonds of marriage. And you know what, in our culture, we treat sex like a game of Naked Twister. It's recreational. It's a hookup culture, it ain't no big deal. It's just our bodies, it's my body, I can do what I want to. And by the way, right now, if you're getting nervous because I'm talking about sex in church, you need to get over it because everybody else is talking about sex and the only person that's been silent about sex is the church. And part of the reason why we have such dysfunction about sex in our culture is because we blush in church, but we don't out there. And God's not afraid of sex. Can I let you in on a little secret? Sex was God's idea. He came up with it. He didn't like bring Adam and Eve together and then they met and a few hours later, he's looking at him going, oh my, look. Did you see that coming? Whoa. I didn't know they could do that with, hmm. It's like he hardwired even our physical bodies and our souls and our spirits so that when we came together in covenant, there would actually be a uniting and a oneness. Do you know what Paul writes about this in First Corinthians when he says, a man when he unites himself physically with a prostitute actually becomes one spirit with them? Because I'll just tell you this, one of the biggest issues, one of the biggest causes of emotional, psychological and spiritual hardness in our culture is directly correlated to the sexual promiscuity of our culture. Because when you sleep with somebody, you just don't get their body, you get their soul and you get their spiritual. There are a lot of people walking around not just with sexually transmitted diseases, but there are people walking around with sexually transmitted diseases or spiritual transmitted diseases. And so marriage is spiritual. We come together and the two become one. But our culture says, ah, no, marriage is emotional. It's an emotional issue. What I mean by that is when we fall in love, what's the thing that we wanna do? We wanna get married. And we fall into love, but when in our culture do people, most of the time, divorce. It's when we don't feel in love anymore. So our culture has made marriage about physical and emotional first. And yet God says it's spiritual first. We treat marriage kind of the way we did when I was in elementary school, we called it going together. Anybody remember that? I remember fifth grade, I got a note pass to me on my desk and it was about a girl named Nicole Stengel. And it said, do you like Nicole? Yes, no, maybe. So I checked maybe, gave it back, friend who gave it to her. And then I got another note. The next day it says, do you wanna go with Nicole? I'm like, where are we going? She's like, no, go steady. And I'm like, yes, we never talked. I never talked to her. Fifth grade, never said a word to her, I was scared to death. Saw her on the bus, I'm like, hi. Two months later I got another note. It says, Nicole wants to break up with you. I'm like, I'm good with that, check the box. So we had a two month relationship and I've never spoken two words to her. But it's based on feelings, fickleness. If we base the foundations of marriage on emotions, we'll be very fickle. And love will be something that you fall into and anything that you fall into, you can also fall out of. But love is not emotional primarily. Love is spiritual because God is love and God is spirit. So love has spiritual foundations long before it has emotional implications. And then obviously it has physical things. The reason why God designed us to be virgins until the time that we're married is because there's actually a physical bonding thing that happens between a man and a woman when they have sex together. When you have sex together, there's actually a hormone that is released in the brain that bonds you emotionally to the person you just had relationships with. And here's what's damaging in our culture. I know it's graphic, but just we need to hear this. What's graphic is that in our culture, there's a huge increase in pornography, both in men and in women. And here's what scientists and neuroscientists have figured out that different hormones are released when we view pornography than when we have sexual relations with another person. One bonds you, the other is the same as cocaine. So what we've created is a culture of independent sexual beings that are actually addicted to the same high as cocaine instead of being bonded to a person for life in the safety and the security of a covenant. And that's why we have so much insecurity. That's why we have so many identity issues. That's why we have so much dysfunction. You might right now be thinking, oh, such an old fashioned idea to think that one person's only gonna have sex with one other person. Listen, I know that we all have sexual background sin issues that we had to deal with, but it can be under the blood. It's what you do now from this point forward that really matters. And it may be old fashioned, but I'm gonna tell you, there's some old fashioned things that we could do really well to go back to that will actually heal the wounds that we have in our modern sophisticated society. And God would call us back to that purity. Why? Because marriage primarily is spiritual issue. Number two, marriage is a covenant issue. And that's different than the way the world views marriage. Our world views marriage as a contract. And here's the difference between a covenant and a contract. A contract says, I don't trust you, so I want an agreement. And in the agreement, I want it to be legally binding and it's all about me preserving my self-interest and rights. That's different from a covenant. Because what a covenant says is, instead of it being built like a contract on mistrust, a covenant is built on trust. And it says this, I will not preserve my self-interest. I'm actually going to lay myself down for you, regardless of what you do. And I'm actually not gonna seal it in ink, I'm gonna seal it in blood. And God is not a contract, God. Nowhere in this Bible will you ever see God presenting a contract to anyone. How many of you know that when you come to Jesus, you come to Jesus in terms of a covenant? A covenant that was established in His blood. God so loved you that according to Romans 5, before you had any strength or you were able to do anything for God, He died for you when you were still ungodly. Blood is a covenant, it's called the new covenant. When we take communion, we're remembering a covenant that He cut for us and with us that is binding even to the point of His death. And here's what I know, when we follow Jesus, Jesus doesn't call us into a contractual relationship with Him. There's no prenuptial agreement in following Jesus. He doesn't present to you a contract and says, if I don't bless you the way that you think is appropriate and if you ever don't feel as passionate about following me, if life ever gets hard and you're persecuted, I'll tell you what, then you can leave and I won't hold you responsible. There's no such thing as a no-fault savior. We have a contract and the reason why we're willing to lay down our lives for Jesus is because He laid down His life for us and it's sealed and it's signed in His blood. Now why that's different is we live in a contract culture that views marriage as a contract. It's an agreement, we can have prenuptial agreements, we can have all this kind of stuff. Look at verse number 14. It says that 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. Now in our culture, we can divorce anyway that we want to and divorce is rampant. Do you know that even though God looks at divorce and hates divorce, He actually realizes that there are certain circumstances in which divorce is now impermissible but actually necessary. And the Bible gives four, I think, it definitely gives three and I think a case can be made for four reasons for divorce. Number one is when there's been sexual immorality or adultery that's taken place because that bond of covenant has been broken. It doesn't mean that you have to divorce, it just means that if you as a follower of Jesus are bonded together to someone and they've been faithless to you, unfaithful to you, that you have the right to say trust has been broken and I no longer can stay in this household because you violated terms of our covenant. So that's number one. Number two, it's called the Pauline exception in 1 Corinthians, Paul says if you're a believer and you're married to an unbeliever and the unbeliever packs their stuff up and leaves you and abandoned you and says I don't wanna be married to you anymore, it says that if you're the believing innocent party you have a right to be free. Once they've left, probably after you've exhausted everything you can to try and get them to stay, then you're free to remarry, but if you remarry, marry a Christian, don't marry an unbeliever, don't be unequally young. Third way that a marriage is dissolved is through death. When your marriage partner dies, you're free from that and you can remarry and I think a case can be made for four and the fourth is when a person is in a marriage relationship that is extremely emotionally and ultimately physically abusive and damaging and there is no repentance and no help that is to be had at some point a partner with the help of their pastor, spiritual leader and the Lord can come to a place where they say I just have to because in that position that person has become like an unbeliever, hard hearted and will not lay their life down and embrace the covenant. But those are the four reasons, do you know that in our culture today you can get divorced for any reason and we actually celebrate unfaithfulness. We celebrate it. We have whole websites and apps for people who are married and want to be unfaithful, need a little spice things up or you need to hit a reset and start over again. God says that doesn't just affect your marriage, that actually affects your relationship with me and we need to be aware of that because marriage is a covenant. Marriage isn't just about sentiment. In our culture we spend so much of our time, our money and energy on the wedding day but yet we don't spend as much time or investment and resources into the marriage after the fact. Average wedding in America is over $30,000 but the average married couple that is in critical condition on the verge of divorce according to recent ads will spend less than $1,000 investing in resources or counseling to get their marriage better. So we spend $30,000 on a day and we won't invest $1,000 of our life over the course of a period of time of giving interest, getting counsel, doing whatever we can to triage and get our marriage back because we believe the lie that marriage is emotional and so if I don't feel it anymore if I've lost that loving feeling then there must be somebody out there who's my soulmate. I still love technology but not as much as you you see always and forever. La Fonda's my soulmate, Napoleon. We've got this mindset that says that there's one magic soulmate out there. No, listen, instead of focusing on finding the right person how about we focus on being the right person? How about we focus on Jesus, change me, shape me? How can I lay down my life because this is a covenant that I've entered into. When I said for better or for worse and sickness and health till death do us part those weren't just cute poetic words they were covenantal vows that I made. When Jane and I were 20 and 21 years old I was 21, she was 20 years old and we stood in the front of Elger Park Christian Reform Church front of God, our friends and our family we weren't just saying checking boxes on a note in fifth grade saying I love you, we don't wanna go with me I was saying I'm married to you for life and I wanna tell you something Jane would testify to this if she liked being on stage. 26 going on 27 years there have been moments I know it's hard to believe this where she has not liked me there's been times where she irritated me seasons even periods of time where it's just like, ooh and you know what we've done we've gotten help we've asked for counsel counselors and mentors we've thought through it we've had conversations that were painful we've forgiven one another and we just didn't quit there were times where it's like you ain't gettin' out of this this easy I said till death do us part and she's like well that might be tomorrow but today I can say this our marriage is stronger than it's ever been before and it's not because we never hit skin it's because we did and we didn't quit it's because when we tore down the muscle of our emotions like you do in the weight room we were willing to feed it what it needed to rebuild and now it is rebuilt stronger so many people quit so many people give up because it's easier and because it's celebrated and they never get to the place where they actually experience what they're really looking for in the first place you see my grandparents have been married 68 years and if you were to ask them like you would ask any other legacy couple they would tell you it's not because they never hit skin in the road it's not because they hit the lottery and found the one person that they're always going to like and never disagree with it's because they just honored their covenant they remain faithful in a world that is faithless third thing that God would say to us and he's saying to Israel here in Malachi is marriage it's a family issue look at what he says in verse 15 what was the one God seeking? Godly offspring translation children right from the beginning God's whole purpose of marriage was for companionship yes but also for the multiplication of his image through his image bearers in the earth he said it let them be fruitful and multiply let's create them in our likeness according to our image mankind your ultimate purpose as a human being was created to reflect the image of a good God back to its world and God says now Malachi I want godly godly offspring why godly offspring? because the more offspring the more kids that we raise in the security of covenantal marriage and train them up and pass on our faith there is a generational blessing and acceleration and intensification of the righteousness and the blessing of God from generation to generation it's like compounded interest think about this he reveals himself in the Old Testament as the God of Abraham Isaac and who? three generations it's compounded interest of blessing what we don't realize is that there's blessing and cursing and what we are experiencing right now ladies and gentlemen in our culture is we're not seeing the compounded blessing of God through secure nuclear families of one man and one woman in the sight of God married in covenant fighting for it what we're seeing is the destruction of the nuclear family the redefinition of family the destruction of the importance of family and we have dysfunctional kids self-centered homes in a culture that is not experiencing compounded blessing but compounded dysfunction if blessing goes from the first, second and third generation before God releases the promise then what we're seeing is the third, fourth, fifth generation that God says I will visit the iniquities of the fathers to the third and the fourth generation we're a generation right now that is seeing the full fruit of our abandonment of God's ideas and it's destroying our culture when God built the Garden of Eden he didn't build a church or a government building before he built a marriage it's because he understood that marriage is the foundation through which blessing is handed down my dad was married and divorced three times lived with another woman for eight years and by the way, if you're single and you're living with somebody it does not equal marriage marriage is when you enter into a covenant and you say until death do us part and if you're living with somebody and you're not married to them and you're sexually engaged don't tell me your heart is right with God because you are living in fornication and sin and you will stand before God and give an account for your life you might say well that's old fashioned you tell that to God when you stand before him if you're married and you're having a relationship with somebody you're not married to you might think you're living a BBC fantasy but you're just setting yourself up for judgment and we need to have a longer term view of the actions we take church because what I'm interested in is I don't want to pass onto my kids the curse of promiscuity divorce that my dad handed to me I wanna hand a legacy to the third and the fourth generation where my great great great grandchildren someday say our great great grandparents Lee and Jane Cummings were married for 90 years loved Jesus stayed faithful to one another impacted the world for the kingdom of God and that's our legacy you see we gotta have a long term view of what we wanna hand off let me tell you this in closing if you are single today maybe you're single because you just haven't gotten married yet or maybe you're single by choice because God's called you singleness we honor that and I want you to know this as a single person you can bear the image of God faithfully to the world you don't need anybody to complete you you are a child of God and you can reflect the glory of God to the world around you if you are married today doesn't matter what condition your marriage is in you have the potential of reflecting the image of God back to the world around you and if you are divorced today and it was not your will and you didn't want that and things happen and ramifications happened we understand listen you still have the opportunity to change your heart and reflect the glory of God to the world around us and we desperately need us all to do this but listen to me if we name the name of Jesus and we disregard his word and we treat marriage the way the world treats it we should not be shocked when they reject what they see in us because they're not seeing the image of a faithful God they're seeing a mere reflection of a broken world we're acting just like them and I know statistics have been out there that said you know divorce rate in the church is the same as it is in the world that's true except for one thing when a married couple go to church regularly together that number of 50% one of every two marriages actually drops down to 20% why? It's because we choose to put God first just because you name the name of Jesus and you pay your tithes, go to temple offer your sacrifices and your offerings doesn't mean your heart's right but when Christians boy I wanna preach like a whole nother message how dare we say that we have the God who created the universe living on the inside of us two people who've been redeemed from our sins looking at each other and we say that we're at an impasse I thought we serve a God in whom there is nothing impossible for it I thought he's the God who can call dead things back to life well we need to take a great big spoonful of grow up and we need to act like Jesus so that we can pass a blessing down to the third and the fourth and the fifth and the thousands generation because we got a lost and dying world that needs to look at the church and say we've made a mess of marriage we've made a mess of sex but you guys seem to have your act together because they don't even know it but the way we're living is the way God designed us and we're flourishing and we say come on in there's room for one more and we bring healing and blessing to broken marriages and we restore hope to the earth the world's not gonna do that it's gonna be you and I and I'll tell you what I got a little grandson and someday after I spoil him rotten I wanna hand off the baton and I never want him to have to deal with the pain I dealt with as a kid who experienced divorce and abandonment I want him to know that he grew up in an environment with his mom, with his dad and his grandfather and people who loved him and a grandmother and the word of God deeply entrenched in his heart so that he passes it down to his kids and so on and so on and so on and I want everybody to stand up with me so I don't preach anymore and here's what I wanna say to everybody because I know that there's some people right now you would probably if you felt anonymous enough would say you know what, I had an affair and I wish I hadn't or I'd lived sexually impure before I was married and I wish I could go back and redo that I think there's probably some young people that I'm looking at right now all across the room who right now you're living sexually impure and you're just like I wish I could change I think there's some people you divorced a spouse when you know you didn't have biblical grounds and there's some people who are watching listening right now and say I was divorced and it was never what I wanted but I feel stigmatized how can I ever be whole again? I want you to hear me wherever sin abounds grace does much more abound there's hope, it's right here you don't earn it there's no penance to be paid what's God looking for? That's what he was looking for here for them to turn their first love back to him to repent so God I'm sorry God I've got a hard heart right now I'm married to somebody and I'm not investing any time into it we're just kind of living in the same house and I don't know how long it's gonna last I don't wanna feel like that God changed my heart God I made a mess of things and I don't think I can go back and restore it or fix it they've already moved on but God would you forgive me would you soften my heart once again so I don't have to carry that into my future God I know I'm living wrong right now I repent I say that it's my way it's not your way and I'm sorry and I repent and I'm stopping it right now because I wanna be like Jesus I don't wanna be like the world and here's what I know soon as you turn your heart towards him grace meets you grace is not just the eraser that forgives your sins grace is the divine empower that allows you to live righteously he wants you to be your first love again would you buy your heads with me Heavenly Father would you right now pour out the oil and the wine soften our hearts Lord we confess before you that we're human beings and we're prone to wander we're prone to sin we're prone to see things the way we wanna see them we're easily deceived and our heart so vulnerable to becoming hardened but none of that surprises you none of that catches you off guard you know each and every one of us in this room you know each and every one of us at both campuses and even those that are watching online you know us intimately you not only know where we're at you know the dreams and the desires where you wanna take us we need soft hearts to get there when no one looking around please this is a sacred holy moment it doesn't matter what it is specifically but you just know that today you need to repent of something might just be hardness of heart in your marriage towards God it might be sexual sin I'm gonna leave it very very general so that there's no shame associated with this but I do want you to make a response if you're saying God apply the oil to my hard heart give me grace to forgive me and to change me so that I can live righteously I want you to be my first love that's you I just want you to lift your hand God meet us meet us in this holy moment free us set us free forgive us stir us change us I wanna invite the prayer team make their way here and over at Portage down to the front in just a moment I'm gonna pray and dismiss us and here's what I'm gonna invite you to do you may just by responding to that that's all you need to now you've repented and now repentance means turning going a different direction maybe that's all you needed today but some of us might need we might need prayer we might need somebody to pray with us and our spouse or just us over something we need to maybe confess something we need to ask somebody to help us maybe you need to sign up on your way out today in a community group, a marriage group a purity group doesn't matter what it is but I want you to take some action today and when I pray and we dismiss if you want prayer I just feel like there's some hard hardened hearts and marriages where you just need to take the hand of your spouse and walk and say come on let's walk down to the front and come together and let God meet you here and soften your hearts Lord we love you and as we leave this place we always want to be able to say you are our first love meet us as we pray down here today in Jesus' name, amen