Weaponizing Your Marriage

Automated transcript of the sermon audio, generated with OpenAI Whisper (small.en). It has not been checked against the recording and may contain errors, especially in names and Scripture references.

I’m grateful for the talks that have preceded this session, this third session, from Sean and Dave, respectively. And now we arrive at session three, and this message is entitled, weaponizing your marriage. We are actively and currently engaged in a spiritual war, and we are currently witnessing a moral and a sexual revolution in our lifetimes right now. In the preface to his book, We Cannot Be Silent, which I would recommend to you. It’s not on the list, but it is good. It is sort of higher level information about marriage and our current culture. But Doug, I’m sorry, Albert Mohler, who wrote the book, says it well in the opening pages.

We are now witnesses to a revolution that is sweeping away a sexual morality and a definition of marriage that has existed for thousands of years. This is the morality and understanding of marriage that has been central to societies shaped by biblical witnesses and the influence of both Judaism and Christianity. It is also important to note that throughout human history and virtually all civilizations, marriage has been understood to be the union of a man and a woman. That has changed. Those revolutions involve a lot of weapons of all sorts, many of them physical, others ideological. This one is no different. And the faithful Christian who would be an influence for change in this setting has a host of weapons at his disposal.

We have a host of weapons at our disposal that the world cannot wield with the same sort of deadly effectiveness as can the Christian. In Ephesians 6, Paul spelled it out pretty clearly. For the Christians at Ephesus, he said in verses 12 and 13, For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, Against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, Against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore, take up the whole armor of God that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm. It’s true, the whole of the Christian life is a spiritual battle.

But given that ours is not conventional warfare, we don’t try to wage it with conventional weapons. In the verses that follow, Paul does go ahead and catalog what he’s referring to when he mentions the armor of God. And it’s a fantastic list. But I also don’t believe that it’s an exhaustive list. I don’t think that Paul necessarily intended for it to be. Alongside the shield of faith and the gospel of truth and so on, are weapons that we must wield with great care if we would reform our culture. I use that word carefully, and represent Christ well in the world. These weapons have names like Thanksgiving, feasting, corporate worship, liturgy, family, and importantly, marriage.

These are spiritual weapons that are fitting for a spiritual battle. Well, my message is entitled, Weaponizing Your Marriage, and it will involve more declarative statements than it will imperative ones.

can be more realities than strategies. My desire is to help us to correctly view biblical marriage as the weapon that it is and then move on to how to maximize the potency of these weapons. And by the phrase weaponizing your marriage, I mean something tantamount to loading your gun. A gun’s a weapon. Whether you use it or not, whether it’s loaded or not, the firing pin could be removed, but it’s still a weapon. The very existence of the gun, having a gun in your home says something to a would-be burglar who’s aware of that fact. It’s a very real threat to your enemy, but obviously not all guns are as potent as others. And a gun without a bullet in the chamber, it’s rendered ineffective and we will consider, or at least less effective, so as you could use, maybe still use it as a hammer or a bludgeon somebody, but it’s not as effective. And we’ll consider together how to make these weapons as potent and effective as possible. Marriage Marriage is a cultural sine qua non.

It is an essential condition. It’s the basic building block of society. And when it is redefined, we find ourselves doing something closer to building with marbles rather than building with blocks. Traditional marriage, as God has designed it, is a formula for human flourishing. I was thinking about it this afternoon. And for all those who would try to make the case that homosexuality is completely natural, for instance, obviously haven’t looked at animals. And animals realize that it is unnatural for boy cats to try to marry each other, as it were. It is as simple as that, and yet we have labored really hard to redefine these things.

In the end, what natural man wants though, as we are grasping for happiness, this redefining is a formula for real misery, And that’s ironic because what we want in the end is what we think will bring us real happiness, real autonomy, real satisfaction. And what we think as natural men is that the key to that is moral freedom and sexual liberation. Natural men want to follow their desires with impunity, so no consequence to our decisions. We hate the notion of any sort of dependence upon God, so we do our best to remove him from the picture.

When I say awesome talking about natural men in our natural state unless God saves us And though it may be unnecessary in a setting like this one I do find myself needing at least impressed to clarify a few terms Traditional marriage is not the same thing as biblical marriage. I think we’d all agree on that biblical marriage is traditional But not the other way around necessarily so traditional marriage may not be necessarily biblical, like one husband and one wife for life could be abusive and selfish over the course of that term, and we would not identify that as biblical marriage. But by traditional, I simply mean one man and one woman for life, and that is the formula that has been the backbone of most cultures throughout history.

And though there have been certain exceptions along the way, it’s true that narrow definitions like these really, really, really offend many moderns. Our culture tends to view the term marriage as something that is dynamic, as a social construct just like gender, rather than something that is instituted by God. These days, a marriage can be anything from two men together who signed some papers at the courthouse, to a man and a woman who have lived together long enough to enjoy a a practical recognition by the state as husband and wife, or to convenient living arrangements for sake of dual signing of tax returns and the like.

So I’ll use the term biblical marriage to define what we want to have our marriages look like. Two faithful believers who are laboring to reflect Christ and his church and their relationship. So now I’m not saying that, ideally biblical marriage, which I don’t know if you’ve ever seen any in your life. Ideally, a biblical marriage is an accurate reflection of Christ and his bride. And even as Sean pointed out earlier, we cannot necessarily look to many marriages around us to get an accurate picture of what Christ and his bride look like in their relationship. And yet that ought to be our aim. As our marriages, as Christians, ought to be instructive to the world around us.

They ought to show what obedience looks like. They ought to show what sort of fruit, I’m not just talking about procreation either. I’m talking about happiness and joy and prosperity and stability comes forth from simple obedience to what God has said, as well as to nature.

But I do want you to take heart if your marriage is not precisely where you would like for it to be even today because it’s still a weapon. And our aim today is to labor, to maximize that and to be working consciously, self-consciously to represent Christ and his church as well as we can. And our culture, ironically enough, though they may not use the same terms, they seem to recognize that, even better than we do a lot of cases, that marriage is a weapon. Our culture recognizes that it is a weapon that must be eliminated if they are to advance the current sexual revolution.

In this war of ideologies and cultures, we have potent weapons on both sides. On one side we have biblical marriage, biblical marriage, and those who are working toward that happy, robust, stable, completely in line with God’s basic purposes. His design for humanity’s interest for human flourishing. A husband and a wife laboring joyfully, selflessly, to out-serve one another, to love God and to love one another, this marriage is outward facing. is fruitful, often with children, and always a great benefit to its environment. Imagine an entire city full of biblical marriages. What sort of stability and selflessness and harmony would be characteristic of that community. While most Christians would hesitate, in fairness and in honesty, to describe their marriages in these sort of idyllic terms, most of us are at least on this spectrum.

On the other side, we have an arsenal of counter weapons wielded by specialists. For instance, same-sex marriage wielded by homosexuals carrying Bibles and white-out. Adultery wielded by pornographers and scriptwriters and tabloid colonists. The weapon of divorce wielded by attorneys and angry feminists and ear-tickling preachers. The list goes on. A biblical marriage is a weapon in the way that a tank is a weapon. It’s strong. It’s not easily damaged. offensive and defensive capabilities. Similarly, Christian spouses have a strong and immobile defense against a host of satanic weapons that are aimed at even traditional marriage.

To be sure, our culture has no ultimate defense against the weapon that is biblical marriage. If you actually find one, it’s indestructible. A husband and a wife delighting in serving one another, joyfully and accurately reflecting Christ in the church before a watching creation. And then the fruit of that love being manifest in strong, secure, stable family culture, usually resulting in numerical increase, as I mentioned before, in the form of children. There’s no weapon that morally confused and rebellious culture around us can do to combat that directly. So instead, it attempts to just redefine it. it, undermine it, remove from a biblical morality the moral high ground.

You’re a homophobe if you don’t celebrate homosexual culture. And a homophobe is by definition a person who’s either afraid or has a strong aversion to homosexuals. You are a hater if you don’t celebrate what I stand for. I wish the Christian ought to say, says who? So, one of my children will one of these days wise up and say, Dad, you’re a hater when you spank me. If they do, I’ve done a bad job. Or a really good job. No, a bad job. A bad job. Bad job. So, with the time that remains, I wish to make the case together that in order to fully weaponize our marriages, We must love our spouses with faithfulness, with intentionality, and with consistency.

And as I do so, we’ll hang our hats on two independent hooks which are related but independent. Why to weaponize your marriage and ways to weaponize your marriage. And that will serve as our outline. Why to weaponize your marriage and ways to weaponize your marriage. So first, why? Why to weaponize your marriage? And I’ll just key in on two things, although they’re a host of reasons, hopefully even our opening comments have sort of set the grim stage culturally. You must weaponize your marriage because it’s the ideal weapon for the current cultural war in which you are already engaged. So we’ve already talked about the fact that like it or not, we are in a war and weapons are in order and marriage is a potent one, even a versatile one.

So marriage wielded as a weapon can fight on a whole bunch of different fronts. For instance, what sort of weapon can marriage be? It can be a cultural weapon in the war on morality. While others are pushing moral liberation, you can have joy, delight, and blessing in the midst of your moral obedience. So when the world says that the key to happiness is freedom from any sort of strictures or confines, fetters of religion, you can know that it’s actually adherence to those things by God’s design that will bring that about. It can be a sanctifying weapon in the war on sin. I think that Shawn’s and Dave’s talks keyed in on that very, very well. If you have a problem in your marriage, most likely it’s you. And gentlemen, it is possible for you to be responsible for your wife’s sin, even if it’s not your fault. And the sooner that we can accept responsibility for ourselves and be more concerned, as Sean said, for our own holiness than the sin of our spouse.

Well, we’re going to, by faith, we see this, we’re going to reap tremendous fruit in our marriages. It’s a sanctifying weapon. Sin is an instrument for the sanctification of the sinner. A marriage is an instrument for the sanctification of the sinner. And for many of us, marriage is the greatest instrument for our spiritual growth, as we have daily opportunity to serve and share everything with another sinner. Other than that, what could possibly go wrong? A political weapon. So we have a cultural weapon, a sanctifying weapon, a political weapon, and the war on ideologies. Look, just having a happy, stable marriage today is a loud political statement.

Biblical marriage is a stiff poke in the eye with a firebrand to the sexual revolutionaries around us. Enjoying the sweet blessing of God for simply doing what he has said to do will always frustrate those who would insist that sexual freedom means a lack of commitment. Marriage ought to be, then, instructive to the world around us. It is instructive in terms of how to be happy, and of course it’s instructive regarding what Christ’s relationship with the church looks like.

So if we would advance the cause of Christ in this context, where we face resistance on these fronts. We do well to wield our marriages as the weapons that they are. They’re perfect for the situation. Second, you must weaponize your marriage because a failed year to do so renders it vulnerable. The institutions of marriage and family are under full-scale attack in our current day. Everywhere we turn, we see the fruit of a culture that’s grasping for happiness without the strictures of Christianity. Current marriage exp… And Maybe that’s even being too, that’s being too narrow. Any sort of moral restriction whatsoever.

Current marriage experts, we’ll use that term loosely. Maybe I should have put it in quotes in my notes, but current marriage experts and secular counselors teach that personal happiness is paramount. And when a husband stops providing that happiness for her wife, then she owes it to herself to leave. Of course that’s fallacious because the example of Christ and the clear teaching of the New Testament is that selflessness is key to happiness, taking the focus off of self, laboring to serve others, and in this case, a spouse. And all of this works beautifully when it is reciprocated. Marriage has been reduced now to a lifestyle option.

Our culture has sanctioned a host of ways to have a family without the trappings of marriage. In the same book I mentioned earlier, We Cannot Be Silent, Albert Mohler later says, Once human beings were given the ability to have sex without children and children without sex, marriage simply became a lifestyle option. And to this, add to this the change in the Western understanding of marriage from covenant to contract, and you have a sure recipe for social disaster and the subversion of marriage. It’s a frustrating existence to constantly be competing for preeminence, as many in our culture are prone to do in the context of marriage.

And yet it is precisely what many moderns are doing. By God’s design, happiness is found in making others happy. And of course, that deserves clarification, not living to make others happy, but in the process as we serve the Lord, being a blessing to others. But that’s at least two steps removed from the formula for happiness that our culture is grasping after. Even the world does get that from time to time. Americans are very generous, sacred and secular, Christians that I said religious and secular alike, but most people spend their energy on themselves finding ways to be served rather than to serve.

That’s an evidence that the Christian life is actually counterintuitive. It is spiritual, it is not natural. When you enjoy a happy marriage you are engaged in a pitched battle with our revolutionary culture and even if your marriage is not yet what you’d like for it to be, but you’re committed to each other and you’re working to be marked by obedience to God’s instruction, well then your marriage is still a threat to our revolutionary culture and it will be met with resistance, it will be met with opposition. And the marriage is represented in this room are advancing instead a Christian culture that thwarts the destructive plans of the devil and of the sexual revolutionaries around us. When we joyfully serve our spouses and labor to reflect the relationship of Christ and the Church, we demonstrate to a watching world around us that human flourishing is not oppressive to men and it’s not emasculating to men.

It’s not oppressive to women. It doesn’t strip women of their identity, of their femininity. It’s far more fulfilling and satisfying than the promises of promiscuity. It promises a stable haven for the next generation of citizens whose soccer games we attend and whose diapers we change in our own households. Christians by their faithful kingdom-living and biblical marriages wheeled a powerful weapon against a very real enemy. But with the moral and cultural current being what it is right now, if you fail to weaponize your marriage, the odds are increasing that it will be swept away in this current. We must take action if we would preserve what is precious to us for the sake of our joy and God’s glory.

So that’s why. I want to take the time we have left to talk about ways to weaponize your marriage, ways to weaponize your marriage. Your marriage is already a weapon. We’ve established that. That much is unavoidable. But right now, that gun might not even be loaded. The barrel may be rusty. But God has given us lots of instruction to help us to maximize the potency of our marriages. And let’s consider now how to weaponize your marriage. And again, if my wish here is to argue, that in order to fully weaponize our marriages, we must love our spouses with faithfulness, intentionality, and consistency. So I want to take some time to just talk about each of those ways to love our spouses.

First, be faithful. Now, this adjective is loaded. And all of its usages have application here. So first, I would say that we are to be faithful in the sense that we are to love our spouses uniquely. so fidelity in marriage. Faithfully, to love our spouses uniquely and exclusively, not sharing our hearts, not sharing our bodies with another. Many secular moderns adopt a sort of don’t ask, don’t tell policy with regard to fidelity in marriage. They say there’s no harm in looking as long as you don’t sample the goods and all sorts of other crass, justification for giving away your heart, at least in part. Others think that casual looking is fine And as long as you don’t consummate the relationship with somebody other than your spouse, still others think that adultery is fun, but it’s actually deadly.

The Fool in Proverbs chapter 7 verses 22 and 23 follows the adulteress as an ox, as an ox goes to the slaughter. He does not know that it will cost him his life. Not a very pretty picture of the cost of adultery, but faithfulness to his wife and body and heart would have been a very great blessing for that fool. So by faithfulness, we mean fidelity, as in one woman, one man, in body and in heart. And second, we’re to be faithful, as in full of faith in God and what he has said. This means we believe God’s promises and we rehearse them regularly to ourselves. For instance, the husband of faith, the faithful husband in this sense, will have the faith that his wife is his glory.

That’s something we believe by faith. And he is a reflector of the glory that he bestows on her. He’ll have the faith that the Spirit’s work is effectual. That if his wife is a believer, then the Spirit is at work in her to the degree that he does not need to usurp the position of the Holy Spirit. It is not 100% upon him to sanctify his wife. Even if he does have a responsibility, it is the Spirit’s work. He does not need to then needlessly nitpick and criticize because the Spirit is at work. takes faith to not be husbands in the flesh. The faithful husband will have faith that God will use his death to self to bring life to his family because that’s the way that God works. The gospel, that’s a gospel principle. The faithful husband will understand that in any given moment God can be pleased with his faithfulness even if his wife is not. But over time his faithfulness to God is going to bring glory to God and tremendous blessing to his wife. And he will have a wife that will absolutely flourish under his care and leadership.

The wife of faith will find that submission to her husband is actually freeing rather than frustrating. She’ll have faith that if he wants to, God will use her submission to change her husband more effectively than her nagging or her manipulation and with much happier results for everyone. So in each of these bullets, these are sort of counterintuitive things, principles. The natural man doesn’t think like this, but when we believe what God has said in faith, then it transforms. It revolutionizes the way that we go about our interaction with our spouses. And of course, sin on the part of either the husband or the wife can completely frustrate this system.

I know that there are times when Sonya is behaving righteously and I’m being a pill, but almost without fail when that happens and when Sonya responds with patience and grace, when she could have taken offense, almost immediately I tend to find myself snapping into shape. I come around quickly. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. We help each other. But even if we don’t see quick results, our responsibility is the same. Sean B. Labored that point. It was very helpful. My wife’s obedience is Yeah, this her responsibility and my obedience is my responsibility and it is not contingent upon our spouse’s behavior. So my disobedience is not justifiable if I don’t like the way that she’s responding and so on.

But this is the opposite of what our culture says. In our, yeah, we’re watching this revolution unfold before our very eyes and cohabitation is not just allowable. wise because you need to make sure that you’re compatible. And my happiness is paramount. And when this person stops providing that, then we need to be done. No fault divorce. The last type of faithfulness that we see here is that sort of faithfulness that involves just doing the next right thing. What is the spirit telling you to do? Take your wife’s purse upstairs for her because you forgot it. And don’t like make a big deal out of of how put out you were in the process.

Put away the laundry because it needs to be done and it’s a way to bless your family. And like clean up after yourself because you love your husband or more likely clean up after your husband because you love your husband. And by God’s grace over time, over time, not overnight, over time, we should not be shocked when our children start to follow our example. The world just calls this being nice, this sort of doing the next right thing, this kind of faithfulness, but in believing circles, in unbelieving circles, we know that it is chiefly motivated by self-interest in the end. I will do this because it’s good for me.

That is true. It is good for you, but it’s the right thing to do. It brings honor to God. God will bless that, and yeah, that’s what we ought to do. The believer who aims to bring God glory can serve others consistently because whether others appreciate it or not, That’s not what motivates us. So the unbeliever can be righteous for an afternoon, perhaps. But the believing spouse can die to self to bring life to his or her spouse because we are motivated and empowered by the spirit, not in the flesh. So to weaponize your marriage, first, be faithful. Second, I would say, be intentional. Be intentional. Now, we don’t have an option as to whether or not to represent Christ and the church in our marriages or not.

It is a matter of whether we will do it well or whether we will lie to the cosmos. Because when a husband and wife behave selfishly, what they are in effect doing is lying to the world. They are lying to the rest of creation. If the institution of marriage is to reflect Christ in the church, then when we do that poorly, we instruct our children that Christ and his church have a relationship other than what it is. So husbands must consciously labor to follow the example of Christ, and wives must consciously labor to be like the glorified church. I know we already have already read it. I think it bears revisiting.

Ephesians 5 verses 22 through 33. And I wanna see what this looks like. So again, the filter through which we’re looking at Ephesians 5, 22 to 33 is examining what characterizes this relationship that Christ has with the church and then what is transferable, what is communicable to the husband-wife relationship that we enjoy in our homes. Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church, his body and is himself its savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives.

As Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the Word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way, husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself, for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

This mystery is profound, and I’m saying that it refers to Christ and the church. However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband. If Christians would just go about with full awareness that we’re teaching all the time, go about our walk, It would have a profound impact on the culture around us. First in our own homes with our children, with our spouses, but then also with the rest of the watching world around us. It’s trying to make sense of this thing called life. How is it those Christians over there are so happy when they just experienced a death in the family?

Or don’t they realize that the circumstances are really, really bad? Where does that joy come from? It ought to look curious. That marriage is something that I want. I want something like that. That’s called making the unbelieving world around us jealous, Jews or Gentiles, whoever your neighbors happen to be. And it is a good jealousy. Dave talked about that. We need to be intentional about everything that we do. I’m not saying you need to be uptight, but be intentional about your laughter. Why do you laugh? Better yet, why don’t you laugh? If God is good and if He’s in control, circumstances could be cruddy, but we win.

And He is good and He is for us. So when we go about our marriages and we live our lives in service to our spouses, we should do so with full awareness that we’re making statements all over the place. The intentional couple who then takes their cues from this passage will find that their marriages are marked by the following. For instance, this is not exhaustive. Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.” That’s that’s pretty clear. As you would to Christ, ladies, submit to your husbands. Submission to the right authorities is itself an avenue to blessing. You tell your kids this, right? Promise me, it’ll be good for you if you just submit here.

I understand this one. It’ll be marked by responsibility. For the husband is the The head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church. Jesus took responsibility for his bride, ultimately taking punishment for her sin and taking responsibility to ensure her purity. Now, of course, we must take responsibility for ourselves. And we don’t want to wait until our spouses take responsibility for us that we act. We need to take responsibility for ourselves. But men, your job is to take responsibility for your wives and their holiness, and you do what you can to affect that. One sweet side note that always impresses me every time I read this passage, like literally every time I read this passage, is that Christ is taking personally the purity of his bride.

And you know who comprises his bride? Us. And he is personally then invested in your sanctification. That is a sweet and a comforting reality, because man, I screw it up all the time. But it’s OK because Jesus is making sure it happens. So then we take a step back, look at our lives in five-year chunks, and you see a progress upward and to the right. Don’t drill in too close, or you’ll become discouraged. But progressively, Jesus is making sure that he is able to present to himself a pure spotless bride, and he will take seriously your sanctification.

The intentional couple who patterns their marriage, endeavors to pattern their marriage after this passage will also have a marriage that’s marked by sacrifice. Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Husbands loved your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her that he might sanctify her. Yeah, in his love for his bride, Christ set aside his own personal preference to ensure her salvation. It’s marked by service that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of the water with the word. And Jesus worked, and Jesus is still working on behalf of the church to serve her.

It’s marked by sinless self-interest. Sounds like Christian hedonism, doesn’t it? We want our own happiness, and it’s found in glorifying God. It is marked by sinless self-interest. Jesus wanted to present to himself the church in all her splendor without spot or wrinkle or any such thing that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way, husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. Yes, Jesus was motivated by a certain joy, and he ensured that he’d be able to present to himself a pure, spotless bride. Husbands who wish to be happy will serve their wives and look to bring blessing to them, and likewise with wives.

Finally, I would observe that it will be marked by commitment, commitment, devotion. We are, says Paul, members of his body. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. The language here is clearly of permanence. This sort of commitment is only possible if it is, especially with all the temptations that we face in the world today, and of course, even when we just examine our own hearts. It is possible only through the help of the Spirit. A marriage is to reflect Christ in the church, for sure. But if we are to do it well, we cannot just coast and relax and assume that everything will take care of itself.

Rather, we must be deliberate, and we must be intentional about this representation. So we must be faithful. We must be intentional. And for pity’s sakes, we have to be consistent. Once these good attributes characterize your marriage, it’s the key to not only do them faithfully and intentionally, but also consistently. It’s one thing to be an amazing husband for an afternoon. It’s quite a different thing to be an amazing husband for decades. We want for our marriages to be characterized in these ways, to be sure. But this is good for our testimony, and it is a formula for great blessing and happiness. It really is.

And I’m impressed over and over again as I have opportunity to interact with young people parents, the importance of intentionality with consistency. So be aware that what you’re doing has significance. There’s a liturgy behind opening the door for your wife to get in the car first. There’s a liturgy behind staying home on a Sunday morning and watching football instead of corporate worship. There is a liturgy to writing a check first for the Lord and then for your house payments. There’s a liturgy, I’m not trying to institute laws where God has not, I’m saying there is a liturgy to all of these things. There is significance and meaning behind all of these things.

When we do them over time, with consistency, we are changed. We see it happen with corporate worship. You cannot show up corporately, confess sin repeatedly, and orient your face and your attention your heart God-word week by week and come away the same. It can’t happen. It can’t happen. But when we have marriages that are marked by these different things, service, sinless self-interest, commitment and the rest, over time, the world can’t do anything about that. No feigned happiness that is an evidence of God’s abandoning wrath that He would let them be happy in that sin can endure. And when it does, it’s not fruitful. And it’s fruitful of the wrong sorts of things. It may bear a fruit, but it’s a rotten fruit. So we must be consistent. Of course, that is impossible without the Spirit’s help.

Marriage is a mess worth making because if we’re faithful, God promises to bless it. And the institution is under attack. So we should go ahead and do something about it. But as we faithfully, intentionally, and consistently work to represent Christ and the church in our marriages, well, they’ll become increasingly dangerous. It’s good. The formula for marriage provided in Scripture is the recipe for greatest human flourishing. Stability, procreation, and the rest. It’s from the end. It’s from the mind of God, the one who created us in the first place. So it’s little wonder why. It’s the basic and minimal adherence to this formula that has enabled humanity to survive this long and when the people of God are living for each other nothing can destroy their union and that is a formula for very great happiness too.

The biblical marriage provides the core for the family the building blocks for a healthy culture and the data of course bear this out when a father and a mother are both present in the home children are more secure and happier and to boot they at least get a rough idea of what the relationship between between Christ and his church look like. So please be faithful, be intentional, be consistent in your living for each other and wield this weapon of marriage with joy and care by his God’s grace. May the little ones that are even running around downstairs and making noise flourish and come forward and do the same thing.

And in a generation, we can see this culture transformed. Let’s pray. Father, we are humbled at how very short we fall, and yet we’re also excited at the grace that is inherent in this thing called marriage. We do not have it dialed in, but we do have clear direction because you have given it to us. We pray that by your grace, we would be intentional about the things that we do. We’d be aware that we are always teaching either our children or the watching world around us. We pray that you would bless our efforts and give us enough fruit and give us grace to keep going. We ask that you would find us to be teachable and that we would just go forward in faith in all of these things.

And we are even grateful for this particular point in our seminar because we get to eat and you have provided for us in abundance beyond what we deserve. But we pray that we would receive with thankfulness and now wield the weapon of feasting appropriately and of course make the watching world around us very curious and make our enemy who hates our happiness very angry. And we pray this in Christ’s name, amen.