After Easter I will be doing a six week series on marriage and family. At this point the topics for study aren’t set in stone, but I have some preliminary ideas. This is a much needed topic, but always a difficult one, because God’s ideal and our practical reality don’t always look very tidy and neat. Jesus said that God allowed divorce b/c of the hardness of the people’s hearts. It is our hard hearts and hard heads that make marriage and family difficult in a fallen sinful world. You take two sinners, put them in the same house, sharing all the same “space,” and you have what? Sin. There is a lot of sin and hurt in marriage, but God intends it to be more beautiful than that. It’s a picture of Christ and the Church. We’ll see the beginning of marriage in Genesis. We’ll look at the nature of marriage from the Bible. We’ll see practical commands to husbands and wives, otherwise known as gender roles in marriage. None of this is popular in today’s society. Let’s not kid ourselves and think it somehow used to be popular, though. It’s never been accepted and practiced perfectly. Non-Christian culture thinks we’re extremely weird. Do we take their advice or the Bible’s commands? Christians don’t have a great track record of understanding marriage according to God. We love to denounce homosexuality yet can’t even explain what God’s definition of marriage is and means. I have spoken with countless people since becoming a pastor who have said, “Neither I nor my spouse really understand what marriage is.” Let’s seek to address and correct that together. Marriage and family are the essential units of a Church and should be in a society as well.
March 6, 2008...6:42 pm
Marriage, Men, Women, Family Series
Jump to Comments
1 Comment
March 12, 2008 at 12:51 pm
People are confused about marriage. It seems that the church practices those parts of biblical gender roles that makes them the least weird in the eyes of the world. “Yes, I am a submissive wife” (wink!) “Yes, I lead my family sacrificially” (wink!) Our women have the wrong idea of submission b/c we have let the world define it for us. Our men have no idea what it means to sacrifice for the family b/c they have been raised to take care of #1 first.