Difficult Marriages and Divorce | J.D. Greear | November 21, 2021

0:00 Good morning, Summit Church at our different campuses around the Triangle. You know, the last three weeks have been pretty incredible. As we just brought our first and our best in our hearts, your willingness to extend yourself to step forward in faith, giving to God your first and your best. Every single year blows me away, and this year was no exception. Right now, we're in the process of just people turning in these commitments, hearing some incredible stories. One guy who's fairly new to the church and actually connected with us during Summit Online just said, I unmistakably felt God telling me that I was supposed to give my life savings that I had set apart. Not my retirement, but my life savings for some other things. And we're like, well, do you have a job? I just want to make sure that you have a job. He said, yes, I'm very well employed. But this is what it means for God to give my first and my best. And so stories like that multiplied all over our church of people who just say, God, we recognize it is time for us to begin again. And so I want to say thank you to you. For those of you that are still in the process, you got late to the conversation, or you're just, you know, kind of working through it, really anytime this week or next, you can do it online. You can go to our Summit app. There's many different portals for you to be able to do that. So thank you for those of you who have participated. But if you have your Bible this weekend, I want you to open it back to 1 Corinthians chapter 7. 1 Corinthians chapter 7. You see, we are back now in our our series through 1 Corinthians called Cutting Through the Noise. And let me just start this message from 1 Corinthians 7 with a little pastoral confession time, okay? Here it is.

1:36 I came this close, and I'm telling you this close to skipping this passage because it is all about marriage and divorce, which is always relevant, of course. But y'all, we've had quite a run of sermons recently, have we not? I mean, working back over the last six weeks, I was like, we talked about church discipline. We talked about sex. Then we talked about singleness. Then we took a break and we talked about money for three weeks. And now I'm supposed to welcome you back to our study of 1 Corinthians with some smooth talk about divorce. That would be like chapter one in the book, how to drive people away from your church. People are like, man, we are ready for some feel good messages about Christmas, God's promises for dog owners or something like that, right? But my thought was genuinely, listen, genuinely, I thought, let's just, I don't think that many people noticed this passage was in there. I'm sure I could just skip right over it, go to 1 Corinthians 8 and 9, and very few people would be the wiser. They will not notice. One of our pastors said, you cannot do that. In the end, y'all, I just couldn't. God put this in there for a reason.

2:41 Somebody out there needs to hear it. It's like I've told you, I don't choose what the Holy Spirit includes in his scriptures. God stocks the pantry, so to speak. I just prepare the meal. But let's just acknowledge that the last few weeks have been challenging, maybe as challenging as any you've been through in church. And I want to acknowledge that right up front. And it's taken some toughness for you to get through this. But you're still here. Look around. You're still here at all of our campuses. And I appreciate it. Let's pray for that toughness, toughness of spirit here again this morning. You know, a few seasons ago, the Georgia Bulldogs, we're not doing that well. They're actually doing great this season, but they weren't doing that well a few seasons ago. And the story goes that Mark Rick, who was the coach at the time, legendary and colorful coach, who actually, by the way, is going to be leading a parenting seminar for us here tonight. Info is all on the website if you want to check that out. But anyway, Mark Rick got very frustrated with the guys on the team after they'd had a loss, and he gets them all in a room, and man, he just starts to let them have it, just to dress them down. He's like, boys, if you actually, you're great athletes, but if you want to win, you're going to have to get tough, tough. I mean, you got to press through pain and discomfort. You got to play when you're tired. And to make his point in a dramatic, colorful way, as he was often prone to do, he goes over and pulls out this pail from South Georgia, and in the pail, puts it in the middle of the room, reached down and pulls out a little baby alligator out of it. He said, let me show you how tough you're going to have to get. And he unzipped his pants and he lowered his shorts right in the back so that his upper right hip was exposed. And he turned around and he let that alligator just clamp on a big chunk right into his rear end.

4:20 Now, alligator's just hanging off his rear end, just, you know, kind of dangling here. And he takes his hands off it and he just starts walking around the players, just looking at him. He's like, this is how tough you're going to have to get. This tough. Are you ready for that? Are you ready for that. And he goes through the different players. And then he takes his fingers and he pokes the alligator in the eyes. And the alligator lets go, picks up the alligator, holds it up. And he says, all right, who's next? Who's next? Who's ready to be this tough? And some big, you know, kind of slow-witted lineman in the back raised his hand and said, I will coach. But only if it, when it's time to let go, you got to promise not to poke me in the eyes. That was his response. So maybe not that tough. That's not the kind of toughness I'm talking about. But toughness is is what we need. And so I want you to come to this this morning with brokenness. I want you to come with courage, faith, and humility. Y'all, we know this. Divorce has affected a lot of people in this church. Some of you have gone through it. Many of you have watched your parents go through it. Some of you've had to watch your kids go through it. Some of you had a close friend walk through it this year. Some of you are going through it right now. And I want you to know from the beginning that I do not come to you judgmentally today.

5:32 I know that for many of you, the situation was very complex. I know for many of you, divorce was the most painful time of your life. And it is something that if you could have avoided it, you would have. Well, let's just acknowledge right up front, okay? Some Christians talk about divorce like it is the unforgivable sin, as if it is the one thing that you can't ever really come back from. It's the scarlet D, so to speak, that you got to carry with you for the rest of your life that makes you a second-class Christian. But that, listen to me, that is a lie. And I'm going to show you that today. And I also want to acknowledge that while there may be a few of us who haven't had divorce in our immediate families, all of us, all of us have experienced brokenness in our families. For many of us, the worst pain that we've ever experienced came at the hand of somebody in our family. So all that to say is we need to look with humility and courage and gospel, gospel hope with what God has for us today. It's not just about divorce. It's about marriage. It's about conflict. It's about how to care for people, care for people who have been through a divorce. Most of all, it's about the love of Jesus. So can I get you one more time just to bow your heads and let's pray for openness and courage and faith. Father, I pray for toughness. I pray for courage.

6:51 I pray for an open, humble heart. I pray that all the objections, the anger of the flesh, I pray that the bitterness, God, those are tools of Satan, and we say that he has no authority here. May you silence his voice in the heart of every listener that is listening to me in the room I'm in, around the campus, or in their homes. God, silence that voice and replace fear with hope. Replace, God, timidity with courage. we replace confusion with gospel wisdom we pray in Jesus name if you agree with that say amen amen amen first Corinthians 7 verse 10 to the married to the married Paul says I give this charge not I but the Lord now stop there and ask what does that phrase mean not I but the Lord this is not me talking right now this is the Lord talking and you are like but wait Paul didn't you right under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit? Wouldn't that make everything that you said from the Lord? Well, yes, but all that Paul is trying to indicate here is that he is now referring to something, catch this, that Jesus himself had taught. Jesus had taught really clearly on divorce.

8:01 It's recorded in Matthew 19, which we'll actually jump to in a minute. But there in Matthew 19, what Jesus says is, the wife should not separate from her husband. And Paul's referring back to that. He said, I'm the one who taught this. Jesus taught it. He says, you wife should not separate from the husband. And the Greek word that Paul quotes and that Jesus uses is the word chorizo in Greek, which is just the vernacular for divorce. Our Bibles translate it separate, but it's the common word they use for divorce. Verse 11, he says, but if she does get divorce, she should remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband. And the husband also should not divorce his wife. Pretty straightforward, right? Right? Not a whole lot of nuance or ambiguity there. But then, verse 13, Paul throws in a wrinkle. If any woman has a husband who is an unbeliever and he consents to live with her, she should not divorce him. She should not corizo. She should not separate from him. All right, here was the situation. The Corinthian church, you know, was pretty new. Paul had just planted it. And so, it was filled with new converts. And some of the spouses of these converts did not understand their new faith.

9:12 And so their homes felt like spiritual battlegrounds. Their spouses, their unbelieving spouses mocked them and antagonized them. And so not surprisingly, some of these new believers thought, you know, this would just be a lot easier if I wasn't married to some spiritual deadweight. I mean, surely God does not want me to be in a home where I get no spiritual support, not even no spiritual support, but negative spiritual support, where he or she is always dragging me down. Just think about how much easier this would be if I was married to somebody who encouraged me, and we prayed together every night, and we prayed over each other, and we partnered up with a kid. Think about how much easier that would be. So for spiritual reasons, God probably wants me to get divorced. That's not a bad line of reasoning, you got to say. But Paul says, no, no, no. Even if you think, even if you think it's better for you spiritually to be separated from your spouse, you should stay with them for two reasons. First, he says, marriage is a covenant union that God established whereby you promise loyalty and union to somebody else until death do you part. That's from Jesus. When Paul points back to Jesus' words in Matthew 19, when verse 10 in 1 Corinthians 7, he points back to Matthew 19, that was Jesus' main point. God created marriage in the beginning to be a picture of his love for us. And so it was supposed to be a permanent union, dissolvable only by death. We'll look more at that in a moment. But call goes on to a second reason that you should stay married in that situation. He explains in verse 14, he says, God in his sovereignty has put you in your unbelieving spouse's life for a reason. Watch this, 14, verse 14, for the unbelieving husband is made holy because of his wife, and the unbelieving wife is made holy because of her husband. Otherwise, your children would be unclean, but as it is, because you're in the house, they're holy. Now, that can be really confusing. How does being married to an unbeliever make them holy? That's not how holiness works. You know that. It's not

11:22 holiness by osmosis, you know, where I just give you some of mine by meeting in the same room with me. No, Paul is using a Jewish metaphor, so to speak. You see, holy, I've told you this the last few weeks, holy in its purest context means set apart. That's all it means. Paul is saying that the fact that you were in the house as a believer means that your unbelieving spouse and your kids, if you've got them, they have been set apart for a special opportunity to hear the gospel and see it lived out up close. That's an incredible privilege. Your very presence in the home increases their exposure to the gospel, and if you leave, you're going to short circuit what God had appointed. A guy once told me that the only Christian in his family was his grandmother. He He said, none of my grandfathers, none of my aunts, my mom, my dad, my uncles, nobody else.

12:18 She was the only one. And she faithfully stayed in an environment where she was lonely, often ridiculed. She said, but over 20, 30 years of faithfulness, one by one, they all started to get saved. She said, now every single grandchild of that grandmother is now a believer. And he said, sometimes now I look back and realize how difficult it was for her to stay. But because she stayed, we're all saved. The question you need to ask, how many of you who are saved here this morning had a similar situation? Let's just ask, okay? How many of you grew up in a house where not everybody was Christians, but there was one person, one person who followed Jesus. They were the only one, a mom, a grandma, an aunt, a dad, a sibling, somebody. And because of that one person staying there, you are now a Christian. Why don't you raise your hand there? You see this? Think right now about how difficult it was for that person. Maybe that's your role, and maybe it's not really a fulfilling role for you. But God says, you know, I mean, Paul says God has a purpose for you there.

13:18 And I know it's not fulfilling right now, but find your happiness and your fulfillment in doing the will of God and in being a vessel of his purposes. That's how Jesus found it. Jesus found his purpose not by living his, you know, amazing life. He found it by laying down his life. And that's what you're being called to do, even if it's not the greatest situation in marriage. Now watch this, 1 Corinthians 7, 15. But if the unbelieving partner separates, remember, separate, Carizo is a word for divorce. Let it be so. In such case, the brother or the sister, the believer who's left behind, is no longer bound. In that context, the phrase not bound means you're no longer restrained by the marriage covenant, and thus you are free to remarry. So here, watch this, we have an exception to Jesus's don't ever get divorced teaching. And what is Paul's rationale for why this is okay. Well, look at the next phrase because it's really important to understand what's going on here. He says, you can do that because God has called you to peace.

14:21 In an unbeliever, if an unbeliever in the marriage says, I can't take this, and they divorce you, they walk out on you, you don't have to pursue them for the rest of your life, even though you once stood at an altar before God and said, till death do us part. And why is it okay to let the unbeliever leave? Why is it okay there? It's because God has called us to peace. They walked away from the covenant. The covenant is now dead. God did not intend it that way, but that's what it is now, and thus you are no longer bound. So what you see there is that Paul gave an exception to Jesus' never-get-divorce teaching. So here's the next question you should ask if you're reading with your mind on. Are there other exceptions? Or is the only justifiable reason for divorce in the Bible, abandonment by an unbelieving spouse? That's a great question. So glad you asked. Let's take a look. Let's go back to Matthew 19, the passage that Paul bases this teaching on, and let's see what Jesus says. Because what I'm going to argue to you is that Paul felt the freedom to make the exception that he made in 1 Corinthians 7 because of the logic that Jesus used in Matthew 19. So let's look at the logic Jesus used, and then I'll show you how Paul employed it. Verse 3, Verse 3, Matthew 19.

15:38 Pharisees came up to Jesus and they tested him. There's a key word there to understand what's going on. This is not an honest pastoral question. It is a theological trap. They were attempting to set Jesus up with a difficult question so that no matter how he answered, he's going to be in trouble with somebody. Be like me standing up here and saying, hey, Jesus, do you think that love for your neighbor requires a man to get the vaccine? That's the kind of question that would just make somebody mad. And that's what they're asking Jesus, that he will mess up half of his audience. Here's the question they asked him. Jesus, is it lawful? Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for just any cause? Jesus answered, verse 4. He answered, have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female and said, therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but they are one flesh now. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate. So Jesus' answer is hard no. It is not okay for a man to divorce his wife for just any cause. Jesus then quotes from Genesis 2 where God establishes marriage and he points out that marriage was designed by God to be a lifelong covenant, a union lasting until death. No man or woman should ever separate, dare separate themselves from a union that God established. In marriage, He has made you one entity, a new entity, one new body. It is dissolvable only by death. And when it happens before that, it's like amputation. Verse 7, so they said to Him, well then why, why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away. Now they're feeling good.

17:28 They're like, aha, walk right into the trap. Jesus walked right into the trap. God, you see, see, Moses, Moses said in Deuteronomy 24 verse 1, I'll put part of it up here. If a man takes a wife and marries her, and then he finds some indecency in her, goes on to say, then he is free to divorce her. So they're like, well, I mean, Jesus, if you're saying we shouldn't get married or shouldn't get divorced, and Moses says we can get divorced, you're kind of contradicting Moses. So because you're contradicting the Bible, we are forced to conclude that you are a false teacher. For the record, you should never get in a battle of wits with Jesus, particularly over Bible facts. But they are going to have to learn this the hard way. So he says to them, verse 8, because of your hardness of heart, Moses, allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning, it was not so. Jewish scholars had long taught a difference. Follow this. Here's your nerdy moment for the day.

18:26 They'd long taught a difference between a command in the law and a concession in the law. A command was something that God wanted all people everywhere to do. A concession was something that God allowed in the law because of man's fallen, weakened condition. In order to keep peace in a society filled with people at various levels of spiritual maturity. This allowance for divorce, Jesus said, was not a command. It was a concession due to our fallen state and how messed up and weak everybody is around us and they're not all spiritually mature. The Pharisees actually knew that. That was a well-known distinction in the Jewish law, which brings us to the second part of their trap, probably the more deadly part, which concerns, this is what they wanted to get to, what did Moses mean by something indecent? Again, Moses had said, if a man takes a wife and marries her, and he finds some indecency in her, in Hebrew, it's the phrase erwat dabar, kind of rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? Erwat dabar, just something indecent. If you find something indecent in her, then you can divorce her. So the question, the controversy was, what qualifies as erwat dabar?

19:36 That was an ambiguous phrase, and there were at least two dominant schools of thought. there was what we call the school of Rabbi Shammai. And Rabbi Shammai said the only thing that indecent meant, it meant sexual indecency. Meaning that Moses was saying that only if a man discovered that his wife had been sexually unfaithful could he divorce her. This is what we call the conservative position. It was the biblical literalist position. You can only divorce for sexual immorality. On the other side, you had this guy named Rabbi Hillel. Rabbi Hillel Hillel was more, let's just call him progressive, using our terms. He studied at Berkeley. He wore Birkenstocks. He refused to use plastic straws, that kind of guy. Rabbi Hillel said indecent, Urwat Dabar meant anything, anything you didn't like about her. Maybe she has indecent behavior. Maybe she has indecent cooking skills, indecent morning breath. I'm actually not joking about this.

20:32 We have him. There's a record of him saying if she consistently burns the bread, Urwat Dabar, you can divorce her. Hillel said, if you fall out of love with her, that's Erwat Dabar. If anything about her feels indecent to you, Erwat Dabar, you can divorce her. Here's the thing, okay? The majority of the Jewish world in Jesus' day was on the side of Rabbi Hillel, at least the male side of the Jewish world. They were on the side of the progressive one. So the Pharisees are trying to get Jesus on record, taking the hardline position so that he'd fall out a favor with all the people. Plus, and here was the genius of their trap, John the Baptist had just been executed for speaking out against casual divorce and remarriage. Remember, he criticized King Herod for leaving his wife and taking another, and Herod beheaded John the Baptist for that reason. So the Pharisees are probably thinking, look, if we can get Jesus to publicly take the same positions that John the Baptist took, then we can probably get him killed too. And you see how they've done this. So what's Jesus's answer? Verse 9. I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another one, they commit adultery. Jesus comes down pretty decidedly on the side of the conservative position.

21:46 In fact, he strengthens it. Not only is it wrong to divorce someone because you just want to be out of the marriage, he says if you get remarried in that state, God actually considers your new marriage to be adulterous, at least at the beginning, since in his eyes, you were still married to that first person. Jesus bases this on Genesis 2. Genesis 2, marriage, he said, was designed by God to be a relationship in which two lives fuse into one. It's like I've explained recently, in fact, that in marriage, your names become one, your finances become one, your bodies become one flesh in sex. Your futures and your families become one. Marriage is supposed to demonstrate the unconditional love of God for his children. I am binding myself to you no matter how much you disappoint me or let me down. It's why God established marriage. In fact, Paul would later explain that marriage was a unity that was supposed to demonstrate the unity of the Trinity itself.

22:44 The Trinity is, you know, three distinct persons, one essence. That's what marriage is. Two distinct persons, one new essence. That kind of unity, he says, just cannot be walked away from. It's written in theologically into the fabric of the universe. Marriage was never designed by God, Jesus says, to be a contract where you have a buyout option. Marriage is a fusion, a covenant of their life into your life that makes a new single one flesh entity. And so Jesus says, verse 6, Well, therefore, God has joined together. Let no man ever dare separate. No comma, no dash, no asterisk, no fine print, no recommended reading, period. End of sentence. You see that? Jesus had a totally different approach to marriage than most people in their cultures did. And most people in our culture do too. Most people in their culture and ours, especially ours, approach marriage as if it were a consumer relationship.

23:43 A consumer relationship is one where you figure out what you need and who can best meet that need. And listen, there's nothing wrong with consumer relationships. I have a consumer relationship with my grocery store, right? I go because it is convenient to my house. It has fairly good prices. It's got a really, really good sandwich deli and a coffee shop, and they keep the Ghirardelli chocolates right up there at the front so I can just grab them on my way out. And that's everything I need to feel happy in the grocery store, right? But if I find one that is more convenient or cheaper, I'll go there. And that's fine. That's a consumer relationship. I do know people who are still driving 40 minutes across town to go to a grocery store because they feel committed to the people there. And I'm like, that is a misapplication of that kind of loyalty, right? So it's okay to have consumer relationships. But there are other relationships I can't have. I can't have that kind of relationship with my kids, for example. I don't go to one of my kids and say, you know, you know, Adam, this is just not working out for me.

24:40 It's not you, bud. Not you, bud. It's me. It's me. You know, I've changed. I get that. But I've actually been hanging out with the neighbor's kids. And I'm kind of a little bit happier with them now. So I think it's going to be best if we, no parent in here would do that. Because even if the worst stages, your kid annoys you. And you question, did they actually come from me? I mean, you've had that moment where you're like, did you come from me? You know that your relationship with them is not a consumer relationship. That's a covenant relationship. I'm not bound to you because of what you do for me. I'm bound to you because we're family now. So the question is, which kind of relationship is marriage most like? Now, you want to say, you're like, I know, covenant. But if you get divorced because it's just not working or because your desires have changed or because they annoy you or they're just not doing it for you anymore, then I don't care what you say it is. you function like it's a consumer relationship. According to Jesus, marriage is a covenant in effect until death do you part. So if that's the case, is it ever okay to divorce? Now, Jesus says you can do it in the case of adultery. Paul expands that to say abandonment by an unbeliever.

25:50 So let's ask, why would those be exceptions? Y'all, the logic of this is very important. Here's why. Because both adultery and abandonment by the unbeliever, both of those kill the covenant. When your spouse unites themselves to someone else sexually, they have destroyed the one flesh covenant with you, so you are no longer bound in that one flesh covenant, and you are thus free to remarry. You don't have to do that, but it is an option. And if your spouse leaves you and divorces you, well, they've killed the covenant, and that means you're free to remarry. In both cases, God has called you to peace. Now, you ask, you're like, well, what if there's been no adultery technically and technically no divorce by an unbeliever, but one spouse is abusive? Or maybe they're involved in some illegal activity that they refuse to stop that is putting our family at risk.

26:47 Well, first, if that's you, I want you to hear me very clearly, okay? You should definitely get yourself out of that situation immediately. If that is you today, come talk to us today. We will do our best to help. Or if you're not feeling safe even doing that, reach out to the Domestic Violence Support Hotline. Write this number down, just 800-799-SAFE. That would be a great first conversation for you. As far as whether divorce would ever be an option, I would argue that the logic of Paul's and Jesus' exceptions would also allow for divorce when a spouse is doing something that makes them unable to be lived with. putting you or the kids in danger. In the same way that adultery or abandonment killed the covenant, living in an abusive way does also. And so by the logic of 1 Corinthians 7, 15, you are no longer bound. That doesn't mean, by the way, this will be clear, that doesn't mean, yeah, they're unable to be lived with because they are so annoying.

27:42 Or they've changed, or they're just not doing it for me. They listen to the TV too loud. They snore all night long. They don't work hard at their job. I'm not talking about that level of stuff. I'm talking they've killed the covenant by being unsafe to live with. You need to do this, by the way, under the close advisement of a Christian counselor and with the support of the pastors at your campus. Period of separation is probably going to be in order, perhaps even a long one, to give your spouse space to repent. And can I say, just ask this from me, you should bring in those pastors and counselors early. You see, I say this because often a divorcing spouse will spend like a year or more come into a decision largely on their own, and then they want their church to affirm that decision within a single conversation with their pastor. See, that puts us in a dilemma. We want to care for you. We want to understand what you're going through. You spent a year thinking through this.

28:37 We want to honor that, and we want to shepherd you well. It's hard to be pastorally responsible in coming alongside you in a decision as weighty as divorce in a single conversation. so my request is bring us in early on this but the big point that i'm trying to make on this one is this from the beginning god established marriage as a covenant not a consumer relationship to become one divorce therefore is as radical as amputating an arm or a leg listen let's there are times when amputation is necessary but any doctor listening to me right now would know that you would be run out of the practice if you were constantly and quickly and glibly saying, well, let's just amputate it. Hangnail, amputate. Sprained ankle, ugly freckles, varicose veins, just cut it off at the knees. We'll be done with that. Yeah, you could do that, right? You know, but have you considered amputation, you know? Amputation is sometimes required, but it is as radical as you can imagine in a surgery, and it is the last thing that you do after you have tried literally everything else. So using the time that I have left, which is not that long, let me deal with three very practical questions that I get asked on this, okay? Three very practical questions.

29:55 They are, number one, how do I stay in a difficult marriage? Because usually marriages that go to divorce were difficult a long time before they were divorced. Number two, if I am divorced, is it okay to get remarried? Number three, if I am divorced and remarried, how does God see me? let's deal with them one at a time number one how do i stay in a difficult marriage i'm gonna give you a handful of things here okay these should be summit review i should start saying one you should roll your eyes because how many times you heard it okay first of all first thing how you stay in a difficult marriage you need to once and for all thoroughly and angrily reject the right person myth i said this a few weeks ago we were looking at singleness but let me revisit it here because we are just getting into Hallmark movie season, and every Hallmark movie is built on the right person myth, okay? Just telling you like I see it. Lumberjack, you know, meets the rich businesswoman from Jesus' missing piece, okay? That's the right person myth.

30:50 It says that there is a right person out there for you, and a good marriage is determined by finding that person. And if you don't find that person, then you'll never really be truly happy. And that if you're unhappy in your marriage now, it's because you didn't get the right person. At first you thought they were the right person, but now you're a little older, a little wiser. You see your mistake. You realize that just because they had muscles and that really cool mustache that that didn't make them an awesome person. And if you could just get out of this relationship with them and get into the right person, you would at last be happy. That's the right person myth. But the truth, I told you a few weeks ago, is that the right person is not out there and that you always, remember, you always marry the wrong person. And that's a statement of freedom for some of you right now. I'm going to ask you to think about right now, that person you're sitting right next to, that spout, he is or she is the wrong person for you. Just go ahead and acknowledge it. You're wrong for me. Here's why they're wrong. First, they're a sinner.

31:47 A sinner. Sinner so bad, Jesus had to die for them. And that means they're going to disappoint and fail you. Second, I told you, you change over time. So like I said a few weeks ago, counsel say by the time you make it to 70, if you're married to one person from age 25 to 70, you've probably been married to about five different people during that time because they change and you change. That's another reason. If you married the right person at the beginning, probably not the right person now. Finally, you always marry the wrong person, so to speak, because God's purpose in marriage was not restoring the missing part of your soul in another person. The missing piece in you is found not in them, but in him. The arms that you were searching for in romance were actually his arms. So God's main purpose in marriage is not making you happy in an idol and giving you some perfect person. His purpose in marriage is to teach you to become more like him by faithfully loving and forbearing with a deliberately annoying sinner like he loves and forbears with you. And he does that. You're really careful of that amen. I'm just going to tell you. I'm with you. Amen, brother. You say it on behalf of Veronica.

33:01 But he does that by having you marry an imperfect person. The best you can hope for in marriage, one counselor says, is less of a bad match for you. That's your hope. I wouldn't put that on a Hallmark card. I wouldn't send that, you're less of a bad match of all the bad matches. I wouldn't do that. All right, but everybody ends up being a bad match in some way. Now, I'll be very clear. I'm not saying you can't genuinely be in love with your spouse. I so love Veronica, and I will at times even say she is perfect for me because of how God designed her and me, and she is such an incredible gift. I'm not saying that can't exist. I'm saying just don't look to marriage for something it was never designed to give you. Marrying somebody new is not going to fix your emptiness. It's not going to cure your problems. It's like I told you a few weeks ago, lonely, insecure, unhappy single people become lonely, insecure, unhappy married people. In fact, they get worse because problems like loneliness and insecurity aren't cured by other humans. They're cured by the love of God. So you got to reject that myth. Number two, how do you stay in a difficult marriage? You got to do it for Jesus or letter B. Do it for Jesus. The covenant that you made in marriage was first and foremost to him. Even if you weren't a Christian, when you got married, marriage was God's creation. You were participating in his thing. You did it in his name.

34:16 I have a friend who went through a really difficult chapter in his marriage and in one counseling session, his wife told him, I just want you to know, I'm here right now because of Jesus, not because of you. Now, eventually they repaired their relationship and they are wonderfully close, great loving marriage today, exemplary in many ways. But I share that because I want you to know that sometimes it is simply your faith in Jesus that keeps you going. You may not feel, and I will speak from personal experience here, you may not feel in the moment that that person standing in front of you is worthy of your forgiveness or your continued faithfulness. But Jesus always is. So do what Veronica and I do, and that is, in some of our worst moments, we picture Jesus behind the other spouse and respond not so much to them, respond to Him. You see, the reason we usually get divorced is not because we fall out of love with our spouse, it's because we fall out of obedience to Jesus. You may not feel in the moment that that person standing in front of you is worthy of your forgiveness or your continued faithfulness, but Jesus always is. Number letter C, right? You got to soak yourself in God's grace. It is no accident that what precedes Jesus' teaching on marriage in Matthew 19 is his teaching on forgiveness in Matthew 18. And there Jesus tells his favorite forgiveness story. It's also my favorite forgiveness story, which is why you've heard it a hundred times. But he tells a story about a man who'd been forgiven 10,000 talents.

35:44 Talent's basically a month's wage. 10,000 was the highest number they'd write in Greek. So when you wrote 10,000, it was like saying infinity. One guy owed another guy an infinity of money. And the deal was, if you couldn't pay back your debt on the day that it was due, you had to go into slavery, sell yourself into slavery to this other person. And if you couldn't pay off your debt by the time you worked for them throughout your life, then your kids became their slaves. And if they couldn't pay it off, their kids. So you'd have whole family lines, get enslaved to other family lines because of some bad decisions. The day comes for the collection of this infinity of money. Everybody walks, this is a pretty cut and dry moment. You walk in, you say, I don't have the money. You go into debtor's prison and become this guy's slave. God does the unthinkable. He just falls down in front of this guy who loans money. He falls down in front of him and he says, sir, please, I'm so sorry. I don't want to go to prison.

36:36 I want my kids to go to prison. Just give me a little bit more. Give me two more weeks. Two more weeks and I promise I'll pay you back every penny. What he's saying is absurd. You could have 200,000 weeks. You're not gonna get an infinity of money. It's gonna happen. Why would this guy give you more time? It's a debt you can never pay. He's groveling. Everybody starts to get uneasy in the courtroom. It's embarrassing. This guy, you know, debasing himself that way. When all of a sudden this loan, you know, loan shark, what do you call somebody who loans people money? They're mean. You not loan puppies or loan bunnies. You call them loan sharks because they beat you up if you don't pay them their money. So everybody's thinking this is gonna go down badly and all of a sudden this guy is overcome with an emotion that Jesus calls compassion. His lip starts to quiver, his eyes get misty. Maybe this kid reminds him of his grandson or his son and he kind of shakes his head.

37:28 He says, no, no, you do not have two more weeks to pay back the debt because as of right now, that debt does not exist anymore. Stand up, son. You are free and clear of all that, of all that money. Guy stands up and I mean, for the first time, and as long as he can remember, he is not under this crushing weight of millions of dollars. And he walks out of this courtroom as light as air. Nobody can believe it. And as he's walking out in a daze, he sees a friend walking across the street who owes him $1.50, a buck 50. And he borrowed it because they got Mountain Dew together last week. This guy's like, hey, you owe me $1.50 for Mountain Dew. I was like, man, I'm sorry. I don't have any cash. I mean, I'll get you next week, I promise. And this guy says, no, no. If you can't pay me my $1.50 right now, you're going to prison. Grabs him by the throat, Jesus says, and drags him and throws him into prison.

38:23 Now, when Jesus is telling that story, the original audience, they're all listening. Until Jesus gets to that part, then they're rolling their eyes like, that's not a true story. Nobody who'd ever been forgiven a billion dollars is going to turn around and throw somebody else in prison for $1.50. And Jesus said, exactly. Which means that if you're struggling with unforgiveness in your relationships, like your marriage, chances are you probably lost all concept with how much God has forgiven you of. I am the man in that story who owed God $10 billion. And nothing that anybody ever does to me comes close to what I have done to him and what I've been forgiven of. I'm not trying to minimize your pain. I'm not trying to say it's not real. I'm not trying to say that you were not a victim of injustice. I am not.

39:14 I know it was terrible and it was painful. I'm just saying that when we become aware of the greatness of God's grace, even for us, It gives us the resources to be able to deal with those who have disappointed and hurt us. Do you notice in Matthew 19 when Jesus quotes Moses' concession and divorce? Why Moses gave that concession? Remember this? It is because of your hardness of heart that Moses allowed it. From the beginning, it wasn't so. Ultimately, it is our hardened hearts that kill a marriage. It's not the fights. It's not the frustrations. It's not the lack of fulfillment or whatever. It is a hardened heart. And the point is Jesus can soften the heart through the gospel and his Holy Spirit. So lean into that, lean into that.

40:02 Finally, the apostle Paul adds letter D. You might do it for others. You might do it for others. Paul urges that spouse stuck in the unfulfilling marriage to an unbeliever. He says, lift your eyes beyond yourself to the positive effect that remaining in the marriage is gonna have on others, particularly their kids. Y'all, you do not need me to cite the stats about the devastation that divorce has on kids. Children of divorce are four times more likely to have social problems, two times more likely drop out of school, three times more likely to need psychological help later, five times more likely to be unable to keep a job. One secular marriage author I was reading said, absolutely, you should stay married just for your kids. But hear this, these stats don't apply to marriages where there is abuse. Children fare better in safe environments, even if that means divorce. I'm just talking about the disadvantages to the children that happen just because you fall out of love or some other westernized love ideal like that.

40:58 If that has happened, I want you to know the church is amazing and God can raise up and restore and pour out grace on you. He says you should at least consider it. The other thing we have to consider as believers is what a divorce communicates to our kids and to our community about the love of God. When we walk away from a marriage because we're unhappy, we tell the world and our children that God's love is conditional. That when we annoy God or disappoint God or make God unhappy, He leaves us. Our world desperately needs to know the patient, steadfast, never giving up love of God, and our marriages are supposed to be the best demonstration of that. Again, I don't want to make this devastating because the healing power of God's grace is amazing. I know divorced people in this church that are experiencing God's incredible, sustaining, renewing grace after divorce. The gospel is that God can take our mistakes and rewrite them with beauty. Divorce does not mean the best part of your life is over. I'll get to that more at the end. I'm just saying that the fact that God's grace is amazing shouldn't cause us to take lightly the damaging power of sin either. That's all I'm trying to point out.

42:04 Last thing I'll say on this, get some counseling. It's kind of like, I mean, just think of it like of cancer in your marriage, don't wait until you're stage four to go to the doctor. Veronica and I at several points go and we will just talk with somebody that helps us work out and diagnose patterns that aren't healthy, that are developing. Do that. Men, you take the leadership and say, we need to go do that. Not because you're at stage four and everything's about to implode, but because you care not to get to stage four. We offer all kinds of it here. We have a bunch of groups called G4, Divorce Care, Men's Purity Groups, Women's Purity, Support for Betrayal, people that have been betrayed, addiction groups. You got all the counseling options you can find if you go to summitchurch.com slash counseling, okay? I told you there were three questions. That was number one. Number two is, should I get remarried? I'm totally going to skip this section just for sake of time. You can get the transcript. This would be a really good research project for you. Get the transcript, pretty straightforward. Nothing, you know, totally like you need to be a PhD to get through there. So just do that. And let me hit the third and final question, okay?

43:07 And that is this. If I am divorced and I'm remarried, I want to end on how does God see me now? Let me just say what I said at the beginning, okay? Divorce is not the unforgivable sin. In fact, look at Jeremiah chapter 3, verse 8. You don't need to turn it on your Bible. I'll put it on the screen for you. But look at it. Look at it with me. God says, God says, for all her adulteries, I gave faithless Israel a certificate of divorce. God has the audacity to call himself a divorce person. God puts himself in the company of the divorce. If I were to ask all divorced people in this room to stand up and God himself were here, God would stand up in that number. Now, of course, there was no sin on his side of the divorce, and maybe there was sin on yours. You see, the point is, in the cross and resurrection, Jesus puts away the sin done by you. In the resurrection, he overturns the sin done to you.

44:16 You see, at the cross, the cross, Peter says, he bore our sins, our sexual sins, our marriage sins, our anger sins, our abuse sins. He abhorred them in his own body on the cross. And when we believe that Jesus died for us, God transfers our sin to Jesus. If we confess our sins, just confess them. He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. That promise is for you, brothers and sisters. The resurrection is God overturning the curse of death and destruction brought on by our sin and infusing the power of new life into the dead tomb of a broken heart. The empty tomb is the answer for the empty soul that has been ravaged by divorce.

45:05 By the way, I just feel a special word for some people out there, somebody out there going through real marriage trouble right now. I just want to tell you that God is going to do something amazing in your marriage. If you will trust him and you will give him time, he is going to do something amazing in your marriage that's gonna make it far stronger and more beautiful than anything you have ever imagined. Better than when you were newlyweds. I'm not saying that is for everybody, but I'm saying it's for someone. Some of you know I'm talking to you. Maybe you're sitting here right now realizing you've made terrible mistakes in that process. Maybe you've even committed terrible sins. friend you can't change that but the good news of the gospel is that those mistakes don't mean that god is done with you or that he cannot touch even that part of your life with blessing but can i show you something real awesome right here's we close in matthew's recording of jesus's genealogy matthew 1 matthew 1 was jesus's 23 and me deal he shows us that a number of the relationships in Jesus's ancestry were compromised, to say it politely. Sexual sin. Jesus was the product of sexual sin. Broken marriages. One of Jesus's great-grandmother was a former prostitute.

46:30 And all these things, by the way, they were terrible, they were painful, and I'm not trying to make light of them. Yet out of all that mess, all that sin, all that pain, God brought forth Jesus. What is the point of that? I mean, God could have chosen like a perfect, you know, perfect family, perfect family, perfect family, perfect family. This is my perfect Messiah. One of those relationships Matthew points to as part of Jesus' ancestry was David and Bathsheba. Think about the brokenness and the tragedy surrounding that relationship. David sleeps with Bathsheba, then has her husband killed. Y'all, you do not get more severe marital brokenness than that. Yet after David repented, God not only forgave him, God brought forth from David and Bathsheba Solomon, the king that would be the wisest and richest king who would build the temple that Israelites would point back to for years as evidence of God's goodness.

47:23 From Solomon's loins ultimately would come the Messiah himself, Jesus. What's all that mean? I agree with Tim Keller. What does this mean other than that God is trying to say to all of us, I love redeeming the worst situations I love redeeming the hardest cases go ahead try me God can bring beauty and redemption even out of your biggest mistakes if you trusted to him they said well wait jenny wait but my spouse hurt me they hurt me bad they took me from me some things that I'm never going to get back it's not fair it's not fair that they don't have to pay for their sin or that you try to tie all this up with a Bible bow. They seem to have gotten off scot-free. It's hard for me to handle that. Is there no justice? Friend, there is, and I'm not trying to be lighthearted about your pain or the injustice that happened to you. I always think about Uriah in this situation. Uriah, you don't know that name. Uriah was Bathsheba's husband, honorable and loyal, not a negative word said about him, been betrayed by David, whom he trusted.

48:30 and murdered. I want you to imagine after all this has gone down, Uriah's been murdered. He's up in heaven watching things unfold on earth. And he's like, God, no, wait, no, no, no. You're blessing David and Bathsheba? You're blessing them with Solomon? And he gets to be an ancestor of Jesus? David slept with my wife and murdered me. I imagine if that conversation took place I imagine that God may have pulled Uriah over to the side and given him a vision of a mysterious man hanging on a cross one day and he says to Uriah that man on that cross is going to pay not just for David's sin against you he's going to pay for your sin against me and because of that one both of you guys are going to be able to be with me in heaven for eternity and Uriah probably said well who is it on the cross Lord who is it Who is it that's going to pay for sin?

49:24 And God says, that's Jesus that was coming. Not just David's son, he's my son. He's the son who suffers for David's sin and he suffers for yours. And after he dies for that sin, I'm going to bring his dead body back to life to show that I can overturn every cursed thing for good, even this unjust tragedy in your life. You're still writing things down? Write this down. In the cross, we find forgiveness for the sins done by us and healing for the ones done to us. On this part of our lives, in this part of our lives, as with all others, we're gonna be able to say one day, amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved an unfaithful wretch like me. I once was lost, but now I'm found. I was blind, but now I see the Lord. The Lord, even now in the midst of that divorce, in the midst of that injustice, the Lord has promised good to me. His word, my hope secures.

50:17 He will for right now and forever, my shield and portion be as long as life endures. Why don't you bow your heads if you would? honestly friends I don't know how people I don't mean this to be condescending but I don't know how people make it through marriage without the gospel at the center So when you came in, you got a cup, a little hermetically sealed COVID-proof cup.

50:49 That's impossibly hard to open, so go ahead and start working on it. the blood of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus is relevant for anything we ever talk about. Can you feel its relevance right now?

51:10 Two words that I want you to associate with these elements. for the blood, for the juice that represents the blood, I want you to associate the word renewal. It represents the blood of Jesus that can wash away the stain of sin and make all things new. for bread, I want you to use the word hope.

51:34 Jesus' body was broken so that it could be raised from the dead so that he could bring life into your brokenness. I want you to think about renewal. I want you to think about hope. Listen, we always say this. If you're not a believer, this is not for you. I'm not trying to be mean. But this is something God gave to his children who know they are his children. If you're not his child, you can actually become his child right now. All it takes is you receiving Christ. Saying, I surrender to you. I want to be saved. I know I need to be saved. Save me now. Not by taking the bread and the cup. That's nothing about these elements that do it. It's receiving him by faith so that as others around you are taking the bread and the cup. They're doing it because they're in fellowship with Jesus. If you're not in fellowship with Jesus, don't touch it. But while they're doing that, you could be getting your heart right with God. That's what's supposed to be happening right now.