"A Match Made in Heaven"
Sermon Transcript for August 8, 2004
By Rev. Dan Sinkhorn
As I said earlier, we’ll spend the next two Sundays talking about marriage. This week, “What Makes a Christian Marriage Great” and next week we’ll talk about how to deal with conflict that leads sometimes to broken marriages and how the church and those who have had broken marriages need to respond, to move on. Now this message it is about marriage is not limited to those who are married. The truths that you will hear are from Scripture and will, I’m sure, be easily applied to many kinds of relationships. Remember that Jesus often referred to Himself as “the bridegroom”, that Jesus used marriage frequently as a way of illustrating the relationship between Himself and the church, and that model that we’ll try to examine thoroughly in the next thirty minutes. I want to give thanks to Keith and Marilyn Hamilton for letting me borrow a lot of the material that I’ve used from their resources that are part of the Marriage Enrichment Workshop that they’ve lead in countries all around the world including this one. And they have received the same truths from God’s Word and been able to encapsulate them in their materials and to teach people to apply them in their workshops. And so I thank you for that, Keith and Marilyn.
We begin by looking at five characteristics of a Christian marriage. We draw heavily on Scripture for this guidance to find these answers.
Spiritual Separation: The first characteristic of a Christian marriage is spiritual separation. We read in the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 19 that Jesus says, “Haven’t you read that at the beginning the Creator made the male and female and said for this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife and the two shall become one flesh so they are no longer two but one? And, therefore, what God has joined together let no man separate.” Do you realize that one of the biggest problems that new couples have in their first year or so of marriage is often learning how to balance relationships with their new husband or wife and the old relationships with their family of origin—their parents. And many times it’s a great difficulty for the parents as well.
This spiritual separation that Jesus talks about is something that He did too. While Jesus wasn’t married, He did nevertheless separate Himself from His family so that He could begin new life and a new identify that was unique and consistent with His calling. In Matthew, Chapter 12 there’s a story we read that says, “While Jesus was still talking to the crowd, His mother and brother stood outside wanting to speak to Him. And someone told Him, ‘Jesus, your mother and brothers are standing outside wanting to speak to you.’ And Jesus replied, ‘Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?’ And pointing to His disciples, Jesus said, ‘Hear are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will, my Father in heaven is my brother and my sister and mother.’” Now at first glance that seems kind of coldhearted and I’m sure some of you are feeling kind of sympathetic towards Jesus’ mom especially. How could He say such a thing? But I suspect like most mothers and fathers and brothers and so forth, there is some wisdom that comes in to play eventually. And we realize that Jesus is simply saying that His life is His own now. He’s no longer His mother’s child as much as He is a servant of God who has been called to a unique identity and a unique ministry. And He is simply broadening His family to include these friends who join with Him in that calling.
That’s exactly what Jesus, I think, is saying to us about the nature of the separation that needs to come between married couples and their families of origin. If you are going to allow your children to grow in their marriage, to grow in to a unique relationship that is their own family, you have to keep a respectful distance. It’s a tricky business, I know. And if this is a fairly new experience for you then you’ll learn through trial and error. And I’d like to give permission to the children in these situations to politely and graciously and respectfully say to their parents, “We need to keep a respectable distance so that we can grow in our own unique family and become our own entity.” Families are an important part of marriage and we should not discount that. But parties on all sides of a new marriage must be willing to pray and seek wisdom in how to be a part of a new married couples lives and for that couple to pray and seek God’s wisdom in how to be a part, appropriately, of their families of origin.
Permanence: The second characteristic of a Christian marriage is permanence. Remember Jesus said, “So they are no longer two but one. And, therefore, what God has joined together let no man separate. Let no one separate.” You know, I think that probably there are too many people who enter in to marriage without a real understanding of the permanence that God desires. You know, as a pastor, especially here at Grace Church with this beautiful sanctuary, I’ve had the opportunity to preside over a lot of wedding ceremonies. And I’ve certainly had my doubts at times about how committed the couple is to the permanence of marriage in God’s eyes. You know, I read a statistic yesterday that in 1957 only one in fifty states offered a no fault divorce, but by 1997 all fifty states offered no fault divorce. You know, the fact is that when go into a marriage these days, you have only to go to the county courthouse, buy a marriage license, find someone to preside over your ceremony who is authorized by the state, obtain their signature and if you like say some words and you are married. It’s really that simple. Some couples I’ve gone so far to say to them, “Do you realize that a police officer has the credibility necessary to do this?” I mean after all, if you want to find our whether your car has been stolen or remanufactured in some way with a different identification numbers, they’d call a police officer and say, “Well, he says it’s okay or she says its okay. It’s okay.” We must realize that marriage is really becoming in this country a legal document and one that is easily escaped.
What the solution is is that we must seek an understanding of the sincere sense of permanence that God applies to a marriage ceremony and to marriage of a couple for life. When I perform wedding ceremonies I often ask the couples to spend some time at the altar surrendering their marriage together to God at the altar and that place of sacrifice. I remind them that they’ve made a legal contract that is good in the courthouse of this county and they have made a statement before me and their witnesses that makes them bound to each other by the promises that they made with their mouths, but now they must do the thing that I hope will put a little fear and trembling in them. They must stand before God and offer this marriage to God. Because while the state will let you off the hook pretty easily and you can sort of pretend to forget the words you said, I hope that you recognize that God is not so easily changed in His mind. Relationships that last a lifetime begin with a sense of permanence--that sort of burning your ships at the shore of a new land mentality. But they must grow in order to be fed and fulfilling through a lifetime. So couples have to accept the fact that romantic love and passion is really kind of short-lived in the beginning of the marriage and becomes something much more mature. The passion is still there, the romance is still there, but it matures into a part of a very complete package. So that after couples have been married for a time, they’ve learned to respect each other as unique individuals. But more importantly, they’ve begun to build their relationship for a lifetime around companionship and mutuality celebrating the friendship that is as big a part of a healthy marriage as the romance—love.
Christian marriages are united by God and maintained by God: That leads us to the next characteristic of a Christian marriage, which is that Christian marriages are united by God and maintained by God. This is a tall order but it goes back to the training that may need to occur in the home and certainly should occur in the pre-marriage process and in the maturing of the minds of the engaged couple that we recognize that this needs to be “of God”. That a marriage needs to be something that God created. Now listen again to the words of Jesus when He says, “They are no longer two but one. And, therefore, what God has joined together, let no one separate.” You see, Jesus is describing a marriage as a creation of God. And perhaps one of the things that we are not thinking about as much as we should these days in this country is that marriage, when it is entered into as a holy covenant, is another creation of God. Believe me, God has created every thing on earth. God created man and woman and God must then also be the creator of a new thing, of the marriage of these couples. And if that is the case, then we have every reason to believe that God is going to maintain what God has created. Yesterday I was watching someone water the flowers that Judy and Joella have planted and nurtured over the years in front of this church. And it occurred to me that the creators expect what they’ve created to be maintained. Otherwise it will grow wild and out of control and maybe even die in a self-destructive way. God is saying the same thing about His creation especially in this context, this creation of our marriages. God must be the center of your marriage. It will need to be your desire to serve God through your marriage.
I’m pretty sure that what Jesus is saying to us is that the things that are united by God will be preserved by God if we’ll simply allow God to do that. And maybe that’s the problem. Maybe we’ve become a little too willful, even in our marriages. In a few moments I’m going to talk about that in greater depth, but for now let me just say that as we look at a creation of God, maintained by God, the worse thing we could do for it is think that we know better than God about how to operate it and maintain it.
Intimate relationship between two unique individuals: So that leads to the next characteristic of a Christian marriage. That it is an intimate relationship between two unique individuals. Now for the purposes of our services this week and next, I’ve put on the altar a very familiar site if you’ve come here for weddings at Grace Church—the unity candle. Now these candles are a reminder to us of this so important principle of Christian marriage that two individuals uniquely gifted by God, uniquely created by God come together to be one. But notice that those outer candles have not been extinguished because the individual has not lost their identity. And this is the answer in many ways to the problem that we talked about in the first characteristic, that spiritual separation. Sometimes parents, I think, are fearful that their child will loose their identify and the essence of their upbringing for the sake of the marriage. And so they are fearful that if that influence is taken away, that the child will lose their individuality and more importantly that the child will lose all the products of a good Christian upbringing. But I would argue that this unity candle illustration makes it very clear that what is really happening is something bigger and better has been created. That the product of one family’s devout Christian upbringing and the product of another family’s devout Christian upbringing has combined to make one beautiful and greater thing. And that becomes the source of even more great Christian upbringing. Jesus said, “For this reason man (and I believe He would say now ‘a woman and a man”) will leave their father and mother and unite with each other and become one flesh.” Not at the cost of their individual identity.
Your marriage is meant to be a powerful testimony to the presence and reality of God: And so that brings us to the fifth characteristic of a Christian marriage--That we recognize that God has created your husband or wife just as surely as God has created you and that your marriage is meant to be a powerful testimony to the presence and reality of God. It dawned on me this week in my own devotions that sometimes God’s answer to my prayers is “It depends. It depends on what so and so does. It depends on what they hear and how they respond.” And so for a healthy marriage we need to recognize that while we are united as one in a unique creation of God, we are also individuals with whom God has an individual relationship. And so in marriage we’ve got to be flexible and willing to recognize that God is at work in each partner. And therefore something beautiful is happening but the answer to my prayer may very well depend on how my spouse is hearing and communicating with God.
A Christ-like marriage is the best testimony that I know of to the world about the very nature of Christ and God’s desire to join wholeheartedly with His creation in an intimate relationship. I’m so convinced of that that this point didn’t come as anything new to me as I penned it for my sermon. I remember vividly when my children started coming along especially that first child the doctor placed in my arms. And I looked in the child’s face and said, “You know, I’m going to love you with everything I have in me.” And then I looked at my beautiful wife and realized that the only way that I could begin to do that right was to love their mother with all my heart. It dawned on me right then and there that the best way to assure that my children would have the proper upbringing in a house with Christ’s love in it, the only way that I could hope to teach them what sort of spouse they should look for when their day came was to model for them the love of Christ for His bride, the church. So I made up my mind, no turning back. There is no getting out of this. In fact, the best thing I can do is surrender to the idea that I love my wife with all my heart in the imitation of Christ. And with God’s help, my children would witness that and know something intuitively about the nature of Christ through the witness of our marriage. Christ Himself will have to be my judge someday as to how well we’ve done that. But I can tell you this; I’m more in love with her today than I have ever been. And I suspect that tomorrow I’ll feel even more strongly about that. And that I confess with great joy!
And I know that that is really the work of marriage that we hear about--a willingness to do what it takes, to do whatever it takes. And that is, after all, exactly what Jesus has done for us, his bride. He has done whatever it takes. Even when it took His own life, Jesus did it. Sometimes we forget there is a very simple lesson to learn about marriage and all relationships in a Christian world, and that is to simply witness what Jesus has done. Jesus has left eternity and left the wealth of His Father’s heavenly kingdom to be among us as an ordinary human being. He came to be born among us in a stable and to live like us, to suffer like us, to do as we do but yet to do it in perfect harmony with God without sin. And then He died for us, rose again, and promises to come back for us. The last words in our Bible say, “Let the bride say come.” We’re the brides pleading with the bridegroom to come.
Do you want to know how to have a great Christian marriage? I can sum these five principles up in one word—Jesus! Read your Bible; see how Jesus responded to His bride, the church, and you will know everything you need to know about a successful marriage. But that leads me to, in my conclusion, a point of contention that has arisen in the last few years and I want to address it. In the letter to the Ephesians we are told that we should submit to one another in reverence to Christ. In the invitation of Christ, I would add. And in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus said “Even the son of man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give His life as a ransom for many.” It’s so important to see that very clear message of surrender and sacrifice. But some of you, I’m sure, have heard this Scripture passage from Ephesians, Chapter 5, “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord for the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, His body, of which He is the savior. And as the church submits to Christ so also wives should submit to their husbands in every thing.”
Anybody’s blood beginning to trickle a little bit harder through the veins? Yes, we’ve all heard this particular passage misused and that’s why I don’t want to miss this opportunity to address it and see if I can’t glean from it a truth that we all need to embrace especially those of us who have the privilege of being husbands. First, recognize that the world, especially the world we live in, sees the word “subject” as a sign of slavery and domination, as a kind of oppression. But in Kingdom terminology that is in the spirit of Christ that Paul spoke of, (if Paul was the writer of these words. There’s still some question about that.) We know that what Paul is referring to is not oppression but mutuality. Paul is talking about something voluntary, something that is built around equality and grace. The world sees the word “head” of the family or the wife or the church as a word that implies a boss or a commander, an overseer. But in Kingdom terminology the writer of Ephesians means something totally different—that the head is the one who provides the love, who surrenders and sacrifices for the sake of the wife or the church. Think about it that way as I read these passages again from Ephesians, Chapter 5 “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord.” That is to say that you should love your husband as completely as you love the Lord or respond to the Lord’s love. “And husbands should be the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church.” And what did Christ, the head of the church, do? —Gave up everything, surrendered everything, died for the church—His bride. This is not a commandment that authorizes men to be oppressive bullies. It is exactly the opposite. It is a command to be like Christ—humble and submissive, to lead with amazing love and grace. It says, “the man is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church. His body of which He is the savior.” Meaning that we men, we husbands need to lead our families with the same kind of willingness to sacrifice as the Savior has demonstrated.
Finally, I want to close with Jesus’ words again from the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 22. Jesus says, “The kings of the Gentiles lorded over them and those who exercise authority over them call themselves benefactors.” I think he’s being a little sarcastic here. “But you are not to be like that. Instead the greatest among you should be like the youngest or the least and the one who rules like the one who serves. For who is greater—the one who is at the table or the one who serves?” Well, according to the world, then it would be the one at the table. But Jesus says, “I am not among you to be served but to serve.” Everything we need to know about a happy and successful Christian marriage and successful Christian relationship is summed up in those words—serve. With all your heart—serve! Marriage is built on trust and I’ve seen the word trust misused too often in terms of marriage. Too often people refer to trust as that sense we know that we don’t have to worry about our spouse cheating on us. But that is so shallow. That is so far beyond the truth of trust in marriage that if that’s the only concern you have, you are already in deep trouble. Because the real trust in marriage is the trust that you can give up making sure all of your needs are met and devote yourself to meeting your marriage partners needs. Your husband or wife can be assured that you are doing that and so willingly devote themselves to meeting your needs. If you are going to love like Christ then you it all up and trust that for your sake in the imitation of Christ your spouse is doing the same. And so you are assured your needs are met and your spouse is assured that their needs are met. It’s really that simple. That’s the trust of a Christian marriage.
I want to leave you with these words, not from Scripture but from a poem. A lot of people don’t know how much I like poetry. But I especially like this, a rather well-known poem from Longfellow called “Hiawatha”. And there is a line in there that describes beautifully to me the real essence of a good Christian marriage. “As unto the bow the cord is, so unto man is the woman. Though she bends him, she obeys him. Though she draws him, yet she follows. Useless each with out the other.” A marriage in the imitation of Christ would be like a bow and arrow wouldn’t it? One is useless without the other and yet they make each other better and together they accomplish God’s aim. Let us pray, “Oh, God, thank you for your word today for us. Now bless us with completing it in our hearts and helping us to live it according to your perfect will. We pray in Jesus’ name, Amen.”
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