I couldn't find the bottled water in the kitchen, so I stole this from the fridge. If it belongs to anyone, I'll have to make it good later. I kind of can seize up sometimes. Oh, too late.
But thank you. Good to see you all here this morning. Let's begin with a word of prayer. Father in heaven, we marvel at your greatness.
We thank you that you have reached down. And through your Son brought salvation to our souls. If there's anyone here who does not know about this salvation, may the revelation of your salvation come through your Spirit to their souls. We thank you for your word.
We pray that we would be instructed in heart and mind this morning, in Jesus' name. Amen. We often, not often, before COVID, we always had evening services. And evening services were sort of traditionally what you might call an opportunity for the speaker to teach the believers on subjects that are essentially for believers to strengthen the believers, what we have not had for a couple of years as evening services.
And as a result, there's been good teaching. I've really enjoyed the ministry of many of the men, all of the men. I just say that because this message is not a gospel message. It's not a gospel message.
But I felt keenly, I prayed about it, and I felt that this is the subject that I should speak on today. And I mentioned the other evening, we have house guests. Welcome to Fred and Veronica from Ottawa and to my sister-in-law, Cindy Minnie and her husband, Anton. Very glad to have them.
They are our house guests. It's great to have a little space, some space in the basement. I just want to say to Fred and Veronica, you can come to my house anytime. You should see them dive into the kitchen.
Like Veronica's at the stove, Fred is pulling out the frying pans. You can come to my house anytime. But they are the opposite of passive house guests, the very opposite. So my subject this morning is marriage and the marriage covenant.
And I would like to begin by thinking for a moment about the origin of the word marriage. The word is etymology, the source of the word. And there's a couple of options there. One is co-ven and venn means calm and co-means together.
So to come together, and so a marriage indeed is two people coming together. And conveneer has to do in life and with fitting together. But if you take those two concepts, come together and fit together and use them both. I think they're very appropriate for marriage, very appropriate indeed.
And in my prologue, I want to talk a little bit about contracts versus covenants. And then there will be a three part message. It is now a quarter to 12. Wow.
And the three parts are the origin or notivity of marriage, the nature of marriage and the needs of marriage. We'll do the best we can. I've been told. In terms of a prologue, we see in the world a greater use of common usage if there is a marriage at all of prenuptial agreements.
And I find that fascinating. I would like to contrast for you between contracts and covenants. Suddenly we hired a plumber. I arranged for the plumber.
I met him here. We looked at where the leak was coming down from. And they sent us a quote as to what it would cost. And it was really cool.
It emailed. Except, click. Okay. Now they're coming.
We replaced the valve. And we paid the bill. And that's what we needed done. And that was what was done in fact, and more.
And now we simply pay the bill. And that contractual relationship is over. And the terms of it were extremely clear. A contractual relationship.
So that's one end of the spectrum of, you might say, relationships, of people coming together in some sense. On the other end of the spectrum, you have biblical covenants. And covenants are very relational. They're very relational.
And they are perhaps shockingly vague. The classic, and here's a classic example, a good example from the Scriptures Ephesians 525. Husbands, love your wives. Well, what exactly does that mean?
That means a world of things. Can you write them all down? No. Can you get the idea?
Well, I hope so. God put it there through the Apostle Paul guided by the Holy Spirit that we should love our wives. Husbands should love their wives. A world of implications.
Deep and broad and profound. And you might say vague. Now that's concerning. I guess that's concerning.
I suppose it should be concerning. But through the guidance of the Holy Spirit, through the guidance of Scripture, through achieving, I would say, a sort of minimal level of Christian maturity, it is possible to begin to understand what the love of Christ means to the church and to us. And what therefore the love of Christ should mean for me toward my wife. I figure that if the criteria for giving a sermon on marriage was that the person giving a sermon has to have a perfect marriage, we would never give a sermon on the subject of marriage.
So I rush in where angels feared a tread, except the Lord Jesus taught us that angels don't get married. The idea of expectations is important. As you know, in many aspects of life, I expected the plumber to do what he said he would do. But in life, whether it's your career or your marriage or friendships, there's many umbrellas under which we could consider these aspects of expectations within a given context.
And if you have misguided or inappropriate expectations entering into a relationship, you are entering into trouble. I think we can agree on that. Having inappropriate expectations generally leads to trouble. And so the idea of a marriage being a covenant as opposed to a contract is an important distinction.
How the world contaminates the scriptural covenant of marriage with prenuptial agreements that try to itemize what this means to get married. That contaminates the covenant and undermines it and in fact is a pointless exercise. You're married one year. A young lady, a bride is married one year and her husband speaks to her with a level of irritation which is above the acceptable threshold of irritation.
Did it say somewhere in the prenuptial agreement, the level of irritation shall be not more than this. Right? There's no end to it. There's no end to it.
This is where lawyers make money and have fun. Is breaking everything which is based on good faith into line items. It's interesting that in the general theological picture the Apostle Paul said the letter kills. There is a sense in which trying to put down every last aspect of proper behavior is in some sense a self-defeating kind of thing.
I should be careful because the Bible is full of instructions as to what is appropriate versus inappropriate behavior. But you think of the law, who was mentioned this morning about grace and the law, when you think of the law then you remember that there's supposed to be something like 616 specific instructions. Here it is. 616 specific instructions.
Jesus gets in conversations with people. We find out as you can also find in Deuteronomy that there are essential principles which actually make the rest of it in some sense unnecessary. Love the Lord, your God with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul. Are you going to steal from somebody if you love God?
God is not pleased with that. You should know that. You know that. You don't tell lies to people.
God living honestly before God and love your neighbor as yourself. You don't lie and steal from your neighbor. If you love him. So these broad and deep and profound principles that we can find in the Word of God that the Lord Jesus himself pointed to in discussions of the law.
Point to the fact that biblical covenants are deep and profound and wide and extensive in their implications. Let's go back to the beginning, what we might call the nativity of marriage. Interesting that marriage was defined at its birth. It's very important when we think about personhood and you will find that the atheist has a lot of trouble with this.
There are in fact philosophers that you can listen to their lectures on things like YouTube that will actually tell you and they firmly believe that your consciousness is an illusion because according to Darwinian evolution you are a collection of chemical compounds. And the sense that you have of what Voltaire said, I think therefore I am. Well that's a profound statement. There are philosophers out there that are backed into the corner of Darwinian evolution because they say well if everything is nothing more than a chemical reaction you are reorganized mud.
And therefore the idea that you have personhood has no basis. This is very, very significant. You should take people to task if they start talking about the invalidity of this idea of person and this personhood. Where does it even come from?
It comes from the ultimate person in the universe that preexisted the universe. That person is God. God is the ultimate person with a capital P. He created man.
He gave man as a special creation. And they have a personhood. And Eve from Adam had personhood and now you have persons. And their personhood is derivative from the creator.
That's where the personhood comes from. That's important to remember. We can read here in Genesis chapter 2 starting at verse 18 and going down to 24. Then the Lord God said, it is not good for the man to be alone.
I will make him a helper suitable for him. Out of the ground the Lord formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called the living creature that was its name, the man gave names to all the cattle and all the birds of the sky, every beast of the field. Before Adam there was not found to help her suitable for him.
So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man and he slept. And he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place. The Lord God fashioned it into a woman, the rib which he had taken from the man and brought her to the man. The man said, this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.
She shall be called woman. Bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. He is now united with her and he is united with her at a very fundamental level in terms of personhood and origin they share the personhood being from God, the ultimate person and they share the same DNA because she was taken out of man. For this reason a man shall leave his father and brother and be joined to his wife or the King James.
I love it. It says cleave to, cleave to the King James and they shall become one flesh and the man and his wife are both naked and not ashamed. So this is going back to the origin. The multiplication part comes later with the children.
And so we have the word cleave. In what sense cleave? Well first of all is a physical union intended by God to produce children. If you listen to the way that the world views, the physical union between a man and a woman, it is portrayed in various false ways and it is portrayed as a recreational activity.
It is portrayed at something in which if children should be implied as a result of the union, that is something that result can be put a stop to, that the unborn child can be done away with because they are inconvenient and it does not, the world does not recognize that this union and that these two people are from God. So first of all, this cleaving is a physical union. Secondly, in its application society, it is a legal union. It says he leaves his father and mother.
I remember the first time I filled out a form after I got married. Before I got married in 1982, next of kin, I would put down my dad, Ben Hanson. After I got married, I almost put down Ben Hanson the first time. No, no, no, no, no.
New next of kin. It is the name of the name of the woman. She adopted the name Phoebe in high school. That is a great name, that is a biblical name, that is in the book of Romans.
This legal union, this change of kinship, has implications for the children. I am told that in the province of Quebec and I believe it is increasingly true in Nova Scotia, that young people now rarely get married. They rarely get married. That is not God's design.
It needs to be a witnessed change of kinship. The third aspect of this cleaving, we might say, is metaphysical. The first one was physical. The third one is metaphysical because the nature of your personhood with your spouse then means that you have a joint personhood.
There is a unified single person that now exists and comes into being in the marriage, a unified metaphysical person. You might say that the souls become linked. The bank account is the same bank account. Sometimes Phoebe and I look at each other and go, your credit card or mine.
What difference does it make? Comes from the same pot. It is financially united. When it comes to the governance of children, ideally when the child says, let me try mom first.
You can. Hopefully, that has the same message anyway because it is a unified parenting, a unified person that is governing the children. We have the fact that the inventor of marriage, God, who also created human personhood, that person has invented a way to unify two persons, a man and a woman in marriage in the institution of marriage. A couple of nights ago we were sitting down at the boondocks restaurant, the six of us, and I mentioned to Fred and Veronica and Anton and Cindy that I was going to be speaking on marriage this morning.
I said, do you have anything that you would like me to add? And Veronica looked at me like, are you dumb? Get married. I said it.
I said it. Veronica. The course, the normal course of things, God's normal plan for things for most people is marriage. I've been married 47 years.
Anton and many are married 45 years. And I'll be married 40 years this July. That adds up to 132 years of marriage experience. And what's the outcome of that?
Get married. So I don't want to be negative about marriage. Marriage is created by God. And yet, the nature of marriage is that God takes this sinner and this sinner and cleaves them together.
Are you going to need some grace? Oh, I dare say, I dare say, there will be the need for grace. Let's think about the nature of marriage. Marriage is to be held in honor.
Timnos means honor. It is the fundamental position of marriage as a union. It is to be honored when two people offer themselves to each other after they are married. It is a positive thing.
It is an honorable thing. And the marriage bed must be kept pure. There's all kinds of things that can make it impure. But the marriage bed in God's eyes is fundamentally honorable.
That's the first point that relates to the idea of the sanctity of marriage. Of course, when you have a holy God inventing something, the fact that it should have sanctity should not be surprising to us at all. The second feature of the nature of marriage is that it's permanent. It is considered indissoluble except by death.
That's why you say, till death do us part. Marriage is in, is until death. Now if I went out on the Spring Garden Road and I said, you know in the marriage ceremony, you get to, you may kiss the bride. Ask somebody on Spring Garden Road.
What's the sentence that comes before that? I doubt that you'd get people out of ten that would answer that. Nowadays, nowadays. It is what you can see there in bold, highlight blue at the bottom.
What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder. Do you think that applies to the two people standing there? They can put asunder but other things, of course not. Of course not.
They came there to be cleaved together legally, not long before physically and metaphysically. That's why they came there. They should not attempt to break that marriage by either party. Neither party should attempt to do that.
I remember when Jim Campbell married Phoebe and I, and he said that sentence, I knew what was coming, what God has joined together, let not man put asunder. I was going for it. He said, you make us the bride. Okay.
The nature of marriage is also that it is before God from the moment of its inception. In engineering, we would say t equals zero with a superscript plus sign. In the moment, the temporal boundary condition at t equals zero plus. In the moment of its inception and for the rest of its life as a marriage, it is before God and it is before these witnesses.
So, when people are married, they are married with God who invented it as the primary witness. The other people in the room seeing that, they can say, we saw that. We saw that you promised yourselves to each other before God. He is the primary witness.
We are witnesses to your covenant promise to each other before God. Then they go out of the church. God is not left behind in the church. Then as soon as you go out the door, the witness of God somehow evaporates, obviously not.
God is there. God has witnessed to every one of your thoughts, every one of your words, every one of your actions. It is a solemn covenant. God is your witness.
It is to be kept and lived out. Thirdly, the needs of marriage. The first thing I want to put up is a cautionary flag. If you are not married, and if you are married, you know what I am going to say is true.
In other words, there is no guarantee that all of your needs will be met in marriage. They may not all be met. Oh, I thought that when I entered marriage, I entered nirvana and that I entered into a utopian paradise and I would never have another difficult hour in my life. That all my possible imaginary and non-imaginary real and imagined needs are going to be met because I got married.
No. There is no guarantee that all of your needs will be met in marriage. Know that when you enter into it. The possibilities here for me to go into the, you might say, positive components of marriage, things that are necessary in terms of the need, the needs for marriage, keeping it together.
Could be two or three sermons, I am sure. You can read Ephesians 5 about the nature of marriage. I will throw out here today this morning things that along with a scripture that I feel that I should bring up this morning. The first one is transparency.
Can you live in transparency and complete transparency? It puts me in mind of the old Christian cliche joke that the Bible teaches that we should all be servants. Just don't treat me like one. Like the idea of being a servant.
You start treating me like I am a servant and I get all bristly. The idea of transparency, I make that comparison. Yeah, be transparent to my wife, transparent to my husband. Then you get caught in a small thing, hopefully a small thing.
What do you do? Do you bristle and get angry? Listen, you signed up for transparency. If you get caught in a small, hopefully small matter of not being transparent, you need to be able to be humble.
That is what you signed up for. To be transparent and to be humble when you fail to be completely transparent. Sometimes it's not necessarily a conscious decision to be less than transparent with your spouse. Sometimes it's a failure to communicate.
Failure to communicate. I put in mind of the fact that we now my wife and I live in an empty nest. The four children are all out in the great big wide world with wives and in three of the four cases with children. We're in this house and it's about the same size house as we lived in when we were raising the four children.
We're going all through this house and we're trying to talk to each other sometimes. What? What? What?
You're talking to me from the other side. So there's a certain amount of that goes on. And you don't always understand, you don't always necessarily understand perfectly what's trying to be communicated. But marriage is of course about communication, communication of a transparent nature at all times.
Marriage is about loyalty. The defense, the United States, if it goes on nuclear alert, goes up to crank up what they call the DEF CON. You want to be on a pretty high DEF CON in marriage to defend your marriage. Not first of all defend the children against the teacher.
No, no, no, no. You want to first of all defend the marriage. And in the context of loyalty, secondly you want to always defend your wife. Thirdly in this hierarchy, you defend the family and the children.
When the children come along in one way, it's great. You have something new to talk about. And sometimes people go, wow, before kids, I don't know what we talked about. There is that aspect of the wonder of children and the joy of children.
And then the focus becomes the children. What happened to the marriage? There is that danger. I'm not immune to it myself.
Now the kids have left the nest. So hopefully I can focus more on my relationship with my wife. I told Phoebe at least weeks ago that I would be speaking on marriage. I spoke on an evening service marriage some years ago.
I don't know how David McDonald and Esther remembered that, but they remembered that. I didn't even look up the notes. I started fresh. And Phoebe said to me, well, okay.
Last time, you mentioned me specifically. Don't do that again, please. Because what happened, and I didn't realize, was that when I mentioned some aspect of our marriage, people looked at Phoebe. She's sitting there.
So we have the need to have that clear hierarchy in our minds that the marriage that God has given us is to be defended. And we are to be loyal to our wives and defend our wives and defend our families and our children as we welcome our children into the family as it grows. The third thing that I want to say is that marriage requires grace. So I mentioned that your needs may not be met after getting married.
And you have two very different people, both of whom are sinners, who have to learn some things about that. And you therefore need grace. And I love this. I'm going to go right there.
It's one of my favorite phrases in the Bible that I have to remind myself of. I'm going to go back to 1 Peter 3, 6, but, heirs together in the grace of life. What a wonderful phrase. What a wonderful, partial sentence there, clause that we jointly as a married couple enjoy the grace of God.
Never forget that you are together enjoying the grace of God and that you need the grace of God in your marriage. Maybe I'm treading on theological thin ice to say that marriage is God's trap in that you need special grace in order to be married. When you get married, then you find out that you need new aspects of grace in your life. Oh, I didn't think I thought everything.
You need grace in order to be married. You need grace in order to be single. But you would find, and married people can tell you, that marriage has its own needs for grace. Well, you are fellow heirs of the grace of life itself.
Your marriage is a marriage life. And you are fellow heirs of the grace of marriage heirs together in 1 Peter 3, 7. Finally backing up, I'm going to read this. Politically incorrect.
So be it. Okay, going back. This is a little bit of a reading. It's only quarter after 12.
In the same way you wives, be submissive to your own husband so that even if any of them are disobedient to the word, they may be one without a word by the behavior of their wives as they observe your chaste and respectful behavior. Your adornment must not be merely external, braiding the hair, wearing gold, jewelry, putting on dresses. Let it be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable quality of a gentle and quiet spirit which is precious in the sight of God. For in this way, in former times, the holy women also, who hoped in God, used to adorn themselves being submissive to their own husbands.
Just as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him Lord, and you have become her children if you do what is right without being frightened by any fear. I had mentioned to you in Ephesians 5, 25, husbands love your wives. Let's just go back to verses. Wives respect your husbands.
It's difficult for love to flourish if there is a basic disrespect in the marriage. It is true that a husband must respect and be loyal and loving to his wife. But a wife needs to be respectful to her husband. What's the old saying, everybody's a critic?
If you want to be critical of me, if you are a fly on the wall in my house and you want to be critical of me, come back next week. You'll have a list this long of things that I need to improve on. Yep. We need grace.
We need to be respectful. But it's interesting that the scriptures do say that an important foundational aspect of a marriage is for the wife, the woman, to show respect for her husband. Now, I don't expect my daughter-in-law, Mary, to say, what would you like, Lord Nicholas, for breakfast? That goes back about 4,000 years and that is a nomadic tribal culture and that was fine.
But what is the principle here? The principle is respect. It's important. It's fundamentally for the wife to be respectful toward her husband.
It gives him greater ease and more freedom just to love her practically and with all his heart. At least that's what the scripture tells me. We just sang that God is smart. Yeah.
God is smart. So why don't you take some advice from the Word of God and say, you know, I'm not actually completely comfortable with all this but I'm going with it because God is smart. God's Word is good and it gives reliable advice if you want to put it in the category of advice. Maybe this morning, what might, in terms of the needs of marriage looking on the negative side, what might contribute to the failure of a marriage?
Selfishness, lack of purpose. I'm glad that my wife and I, you know, you take something pretty simple like ESL that we've been doing from back to Memorial University when I was teaching there. And that's something that we share that we get excited about that we do together and it's very good to have something like that. I remember Boy Nicholson through whom my brother was saved.
I was listening to him in Ottawa years ago and he's talking to the older married people I guess but making the younger ones think as well because what's your end point? Do you want to be doddling around a mall in Florida? Is that your goal? Do you think that's the ultimate?
To be walking around some mall in Florida that that's a good place to say, well that's where we're headed, isn't that great? Oh my goodness. To use the young people's word, that is so lame. That is so lame.
We have higher things to work toward as believers. We have the grace of life as our resource in the context of our marriages. UnChristlike behavior, especially on the part of the head of the house can contribute to marriage and family problems. UnChristlike now, I think it was brought up earlier this morning, Christ was a man.
He was a man. He was the most courageous man in all of history. You will note when you read the Gospels that he never shied away from any confrontation and that he dealt with people who wanted to irritate him, to confront him, to tell him that he's a devil, that he's a fool, that he's everything else. He confronted all of them.
I wish I had been there. I would have loved to see exactly how he dealt with them face to face. He shied away from nothing. If there's one thing that I would say that men have a tendency to do is to say, well that's some kind of a soft emotional issue with the kids or something, or I can't deal with that.
That's the soft stuff. No, the wife has to deal with that. And again, and again, and again. That's actually a form of neglect.
The head of the house needs to take his responsibility and to be the head of the house. The three ways, watch for these three things in yourself men. If there's three things that you want to avoid and because there's nothing Christ like about them in these three kinds of behavior in a marriage. The first one I've already mentioned, wash my hands of it, let the wife deal with it, whether there's some kind of soft emotional problem with the relationship.
I don't want to talk about that. That's a form of abandonment. That's a form of neglect to withdraw. The first negative thing not to do in a marriage and in a family is to be a person who withdraws from problems.
That's not good. Another one that you must put yourself in check is a reflection of immaturity and that is to sulk. If you're not going to go with the way I say things I think should go, then I'm going to be all pouty and angry and all kind of irritable and everything. I'm going to go into my sulk mode.
There is nothing Christ like about that. That is not behaving like a man that's behaving like a child to sulk when things don't go your way. The third one is maybe just as bad and exactly the opposite is to go into a rage, to go into a rage. Nothing Christ like about that at all.
We want to be careful about these things. We want to live within our marriages, with our spouses as fellow heirs of the grace of life before God, to love our wives, and to live in that institution of marriage that God designed as two persons seeking to have a unified marriage life before God. God is our witness, minute by minute, and hour by hour. Shall we pray?
Father, we thank you that your word gives us instruction, that your word guides and directs, and yet Lord we confess that we are all failures, that we often seem to lack the grace when the grace is right there to be had. Help us learn to avail ourselves of the grace that is available to us by your spirit and through your word and through fellowship and through the support of Christian brothers and sisters. We thank you Father for this assembly and for the fellowship we enjoy here, right here. We pray that you would bless us as we part and bring these words, these scriptures that we have read this morning back to our hearts and minds this week regarding the covenant and the promise of marriage.
In Jesus' name we pray, amen.