Tag: Sermons

Happiness Isn’t the Goal

Leave a comment

Every marriage story our culture tells is always in pursuit of living happily ever after. The trouble is that when you actually get into a marriage, there are seasons when happiness seems pretty fleeting. Complicating this is that we live in a culture that prizes personal happiness above just about everything else. You can perhaps see how this might create some unique challenges for the development of a strong and healthy marriage culture in our nation. The apostle Paul spoke into this challenge almost 2,000 years ago with some counsel that is hard to receive, but if we will receive it with open hands, it has some truly transformational power. As we continue our series, The Journey of a Lifetime, let’s talk about what the real goal of marriage is and why understanding that matters so much.

Happiness Isn’t the Goal

Before 1969 divorce in the United States was hard to come by. That year, the Republican governor of California, Ronald Reagan, signed into a law a bill that allowed for the first time in the nation something called no-fault divorce. Prior to that, if a husband and wife wanted to get out of their marriage, they had to be able to demonstrate enough of some kind of justifiable harm such as abuse, infidelity, abandonment, or something else sufficiently severe along those lines to convince a judge to grant their request. No-fault divorce laws, on the other hand, allowed for couples to simply cite “irreconcilable differences” without having to furnish any kind of proof to back up their claims. In what ought to go down as the least surprising outcome of a public policy ever, within about ten years, the divorce rate in the country more than doubled, bringing with it all of the various social problems associated with divorce. 

Read the rest…

Dirty Words

Leave a comment

One of the most offensive ideas the church has introduced to the world (at least as far as our culture reckons things) is that wives should submit to their husbands in the marriage relationship. Submission is just a dirty word. It’s so demeaning. It’s depressing. It’s dehumanizing even. And yet we are called to just such a thing in the Scriptures again and again. Paul is explicit about it being a part of the marriage journey. In this third part of our series, The Journey of a Lifetime, we are going to dive into Paul’s command to see if we can better understand why he gave it, what he meant, and why it is perhaps not nearly as bad of a thing as we have been led to believe. Let’s get started.

Dirty Words

Have you ever said a dirty word? Maybe don’t raise your hand on that one. How about this: Have you ever wondered what exactly makes a word a “bad word”? Culture certainly plays a big role, but I don’t think that’s the only factor involved. There is a common theme running through all of these words we aren’t supposed to say in polite company. Generally speaking, a word that gets classified as a “bad word” is a coarse or vulgar way to refer to marital relations, bodily functions, or religious condemnation. There are, of course, more polite or sophisticated ways to refer to all of these things, but in a moment of anger or irritation or even simply because we don’t know a better word, we go with the more common versions…and get our mouths washed out with soap. 

Read the rest…

More Like Him

Leave a comment

It is necessary and often good to talk about the challenges facing a marriage. Until we properly understand the nature of the problem, we don’t know what it is we are trying to solve. However, unless we have a positive vision and understanding of what marriage was designed for in the first place, we’re not going to be able to point things in a direction that can help prevent future challenges. Last time, as we started our new teaching series, The Journey of a Lifetime, looking at what the Scriptures have to say about marriage, we identified the problem: sin. This week we are going to look at what marriage was designed for in the beginning so that we can walk away from the problem in the right direction.

More Like Him

I’m going to show you an image of something, and I want to see if you know what it is? For some of you, this is probably going to be really easy, but a few of you might not have any idea. In fact, I’m going to show you a couple of different images for us to talk about. Let’s start with that first image. What is the thing sticking up out of the container here? Be honest with me now: How many of you knew this was a potato masher without being told or without cheating by reading the answer in your copy of my manuscript before the service even started? How many of you genuinely didn’t know what this thing was and wouldn’t have known without being told? Everyone else apparently is just confused. 

Read the rest…

Identifying the Problem

Leave a comment

Marriage is one of the single greatest journeys any of us will ever take. It is capable of taking us to places of emotional and relational and physical and spiritual fulfillment that are hard to reach by any other means. That doesn’t mean people not so called are stuck incomplete. God calls and cares for them in special ways that go beyond what marriage can offer. But for those called to it, it can be absolutely incredible. At the same time, marriage is hard. It is hard enough that most marriages don’t make it for the lifetime the man and woman promised to each other at the altar. Everyone needs a little help and encouragement along the way. For the next few weeks, we are going to be doing just that in a new teaching series called, The Journey of a Lifetime. In this first part, we are going to identify the primary problem besetting our relationships. Let’s talk about it!

Identifying the Problem

Most of the stories we heard growing up ended with “happily ever after.” And, if the story involved a prince or princess in any way, what was it that likely preceded that famous tag line? A wedding. The characters fell in love, they got married, and they lived—say it with me—“happily ever after.” But did they? I mean, what happened after the credits rolled and the happy couple started to discover that one of them snores and one of them hogs all the covers. One prefers to sleep right in the middle of the bed surrounded by 8,000 pillows, while the other wants just a sheet and a pillow that’s only a step above putting a piece of paper under your head. One showers in the morning and the other at night. One is a morning person, and the other doesn’t honestly function until after the second pot—not cup—of coffee has been consumed. One is content with a bit of chaos, while the other likes to have everything neatly in order. One is always right and the other is never wrong. In other words, they start to find out that marriage is hard. Sometimes it’s really hard. And somewhere along the way, they are tempted to just throw up their hands and walk away because something created by God for our good and His glory couldn’t possibly be intended to be this hard. 

Read the rest…

Doing Makes All the Difference

Leave a comment

This week we are finally wrapping up our journey through Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. For the last two and a half months we have been working our way through the incredible vision of God’s kingdom Jesus gave us in these words. Here at the end Jesus doesn’t add any new teaching to the pile. Rather, He offers us a warning and an encouragement. Both are focused on making the same point: If we don’t put all of these things into practice, they won’t do us any good both now and when all things finally come to an end. Let’s dive into these words together as we are reminded that doing really does make all the difference.

Doing Makes All the Difference

I spent three years in seminary. While I was there, I took classes on all sorts of things you might expect a preacher to learn. We studied Greek and Hebrew. We learned various approaches to interpreting the Scriptures. We took classes on theology and church history. We learned how to defend the faith and to make strong, rational arguments in its favor. There were preaching classes, of course. Toward the end, there were even a couple of practical ministry classes and leadership classes. It was a robust program in which I learned a ton. Or at least, I felt like I did. But it’s hard to know how much you have really learned until you have the opportunity to actually put it into practice. 

Read the rest…