Tag: Marriage

Love God First

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Marriage is something that affects all of our lives in one way or another. Most people are going to be married at some point in their lives. And, the various authors of the Scriptures have some things to say about marriage. This all means that as a church, it’s something we need to talk about from time to time. For the next four weeks, that’s exactly what we are going to do in a brand-new series called Back to the Basics. We are going to talk about four adjustments we can make in our marriages at a very fundamental level that will help put us on a track toward the relationships we want most. Let’s get start with today with a conversation about getting our priorities right.

Love God First

We do a lot of building in my house. The exact thing being built varies, but the building itself is consistent. Perhaps the most common building that happens is with Legos. Now, of course, you can build anything you want with Legos if you have the right bricks. The sky really is the limit in terms of the creative potential of that particular medium. Most of the Lego building that goes on in my house, though, is with pre-designed sets. These sets come with all the pieces you need to build whatever it is, packaged neatly in numbered bags, and with a set of instructions that walks you step-by-step through the process of building. Pro-tip, though: Don’t open all the bags at once. That makes the building a lot more tedious. Depending on the complexity of the build, the instructions range from fairly short to book length. But however long they happen to be, the most important thing is that you follow them carefully. If you use the wrong piece or put the right piece in the wrong place, that’s going to cause trouble later on in your building process. I can remember some sets I got mostly built only to discover that I had placed a piece incorrectly dozens of pages before. I had to go back and systematically take things apart in order to get it straightened out the right way. It was not very much fun. 

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Digging in Deeper: Romans 1:26-27

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“For this reason God delivered them over to disgraceful passions. Their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. The men in the same way also left natural relations with women and were inflamed in their lust for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the appropriate penalty of their error.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Hot topics tend to be faddish and cyclical. An issue that is absolutely crucial to have an opinion on in one season doesn’t even register on the radar in another. The issue of the morality of homosexual practice is not the issue in our culture that it once was not all that long ago. This is mostly because as a culture we have decided it’s fine. And as the church has continued losing cultural power and position, most people just don’t care what the church thinks about it anymore. But this doesn’t mean the position of the Scriptures has changed. And it doesn’t mean the culture doesn’t dislike the position any less. These two verses aren’t terribly comfortable to talk about, but here they are, so let’s do it.

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Digging in Deeper: Exodus 24:3-8

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“Moses came and told the people all the commands of the Lord and all the ordinances. Then all the people responded with a single voice, ‘We will do everything that the Lord has commanded.’ And Moses wrote down all the words of the Lord. He rose early the next morning and set up an altar and twelve pillars for the twelve tribes of Israel at the base of the mountain. Then he sent out young Israelite men, and they offered burnt offerings and sacrificed bulls as fellowship offerings to the Lord. Moses took half the blood and set it in basins; the other half of the blood he splattered on the altar. He then took the covenant scroll and read it aloud to the people. They responded, ‘We will do and obey all that the Lord has commanded.’ Moses took the blood, splattered it on the people, and said, ‘This is the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you concerning all these words.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the things I always talk about with couples when doing their premarital counseling is that marriage is supposed to be a covenant, not a contract. We don’t distinguish very well between those two ideas today, and often think about marriage in contract terms rather than covenantal ones much to the detriment of our marriage relationships. In the ancient world, people were more accustomed to the idea of covenants and better understood just how serious they really were. After having heard the basic contours of the covenant God wanted to make with them, the people agreed to His terms and went forward with the covenant. Let’s take a look here at part of how this process unfolded.

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Digging in Deeper: Ephesians 5:25, 6:4

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“Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her…Fathers, don’t stir up anger in your children, but bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Have you ever gotten started off on the wrong foot only to get back on track once things got up and running pretty well? I think about the NCAA Men’s March Madness championship game from a couple of years ago. My Kansas Jayhawks were playing UNC for the title. The game didn’t start very well. At the half we were down 15. We weren’t shooting well. They were. It was a pretty dispiriting beginning. But then things got back on track and the game went entirely more smoothly in the second half…unless of course you happen to be a UNC fan in which case this illustration completely fails. Just focus on the win over Duke in the Final Four and you’ll be fine. Let’s jump to something happier for you. The CBS sitcom Young Sheldon is coming to an end. As it does, one particular storyline is getting up and running really well. It’s become for me the best part of the show. Let’s talk about it this morning and why it’s such a good thing.

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Digging in Deeper: Exodus 21:7-11

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“When a man sells his daughter as a concubine, she is not to leave as the male slaves do. If she is displeasing to her master, who chose her for himself, then he must let her be redeemed. He has no right to sell her to foreigners because he has acted treacherously toward her. Or if he chooses her for his son, he must deal with her according to the customary treatment of daughters. If he takes an additional wife, he must not reduce the food, clothing, or marital rights of the first wife. And if he does not do these three things for her, she may leave free of charge, without any payment.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

There’s a memorable scene from the series, West Wing, when President Bartlett publicly embarrassed one of his critics. Bartlett is a Democrat (being the protagonist of a show developed by Aaron Sorkin, of course he is). The critic is a religious conservative who has a popular call in radio show where she has been critical of the President and his policies and has taken a conservative stance on a handful of social issues including homosexuality. In front of a roomful of reporters and supporters, Bartlett asks the critic what kind of price his daughter would fetch if he sold her into slavery. This is followed by a series of other questions whose purpose is to show that this critic’s traditional understanding of the Old Testament is silly, and thus so are conservatives. Well, this next law starts with the verse Bartlett cities about selling a daughter into slavery. Let’s talk about what this means, what it doesn’t, and why this doesn’t take away from our image of God’s character in the Old Testament.

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