Sunday 01:30:11

The Beauty of Biblical Marriage Marriage is like a dance. Marriage takes unity – You must be doing the same dance. This starts before marriage – it starts before dating. You must make up your mind to guard your heart Proverbs 4:23 23 Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it. Your heart is easily swayed. You must decide to make your heart vulnerable only to someone that your head knows will work. You must make up your mind to only expose your heart to someone who would be equally yoked 2 Corinthians 6:14-17 14 Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness? 15 What harmony is there between Christ and Belial[b]? Or what does a believer have in common with an unbeliever? 16 What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols? For we are the temple of the living God. As God has said: “I will live with them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people.” 17 Therefore, “Come out from them and be separate, says the Lord. Touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you.” Equally yoked – same direction, same core values, same guiding principles of life, same ideas of what life is about. For a believer that is someone who values Christ like you do. The myth “I can change him/her” – really? Who changed you? God Himself. Do you really think that you can do in the life of someone else what only God could do for you? If you’re already married and finding it hard to be united, we’ll talk about that more next week… Marriage takes commitment– You must stay together. Ruth 1:16 – Where you go I’ll go. Ruth’s husband died. She had no one else in her husband’s family to provide for her. But she committed to stay with Naomi for the rest of her life. Because of Ruth’s commitment to her mother-in-law, Boaz shows her kindness. (Ruth 2:11-12) It all started with Ruth’s commitment for the rest of her life to her mother-in-law. Boaz committed to marry her, buy the property left by his deceased father-in-law, brother-in-law, and Ruth’s first husband – he redeemed all their property and married her to keep it all in their family, tied to Ruth’s first husband’s name. William Doherty is a writer and marriage counselor. He describes two distinct kinds of commitment couples make. One is what he calls “commitment-as-long-as.” It means staying together, “not as long as we both shall live, but as long as things are working out for me.” The other kind is what Doherty calls “commitment-no-matter-what.” He describes it as “the long view of marriage in which you don’t balance the ledgers every month to see if you are getting an adequate return on your investment… You’re here to stay.” Commitment is real only when it perseveres. How can you commit your life to another person – for better or worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and in health? What if they change? What if you change? How can you commit the rest of your life to someone when you don’t know what the future holds? The key topic of the book of Ruth is redemption. Redemption is buying back something or someone who was lost. Like buying back someone who had been sold into slavery. Like buying back land after it had been sold to provide money for a poor family. Boaz is a picture, a fore-shadowing of another, larger hero who would come. He would buy back his people who had become slaves to sin. Just as Boaz gave selflessly and generously to a poor widow, so too, Jesus Christ gave his life for the sake of the poor and downtrodden. Ephesians 1:13-14 13 For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, 14 in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. Christ Jesus bought us back from sin. He rescued and redeemed us. The only way that you can commit – really commit – the rest of your life to someone else… You must know the One who showed that kind of commitment to you.