Matthew-069

Matthew 19:1-12

Today, we continue our study in the teaching of our Lord Jesus at Matthew 19:1-12. And again for those who are new, again I need to explain that what we do in this church is that week by week, we systematically expound the life-giving words of our Lord Jesus and today, we have come to Matthew 19:1-12.

 I have expounded the matter of marriage and divorce in Matthew 5:31-32 a long time ago way back in August 1976, which says exactly the same words, that a man may not divorce his wife except on the grounds of adultery or fornication. And on various wedding occa­sions, we have looked at the matter of marriage in the Lord Jesus’ teaching as telling us something very deep about the relationship of Christ and the church of God. All this has been expounded before, and also in the tapes on baptism.

Why does the Lord Jesus put such emphasis on disallowing divorce?

Today, we want to look at this other aspect of the Lord Jesus’ teach­ing that we have not looked at so far. To do so, we want to ask this question first: Why does the Lord Jesus put such emphasis on disallowing divorce? In Matthew 5:32, Luke 16:18 and in the parallel passage in Mark 10:1-12, he repeats that divorce is not permissible to those who are disciples of Christ. Those who are not God’s people do whatever they like. Having broken every other law, they don’t have to worry about this one either. Why is there this emphasis on the forbidding of divorce? What is spiritual about not divorcing someone?

It seems to be a personal matter between a husband and wife. What has divorcing someone got to do with a person’s spiritual life? For example, that person’s character or conduct may be quite satisfac­tory, but the character is quite incompatible with yours, then what is wrong with getting divorced? It seems better for either party. You live your life and I live mine, and we don’t have to get on each other’s nerves. We have tried this marriage together for many years and it doesn’t work, not because you are bad or I am bad, but because our characters are simply incompatible. So, what is particularly spiritual that we should continue to get on each other’s nerves by this incongruity of character? Why don’t you and I go our own way in peace, and everyone is happy? Perhaps we can serve God better that way? Why should there be such stress on not divorcing? What is spiritual about it?

Not one of the Ten Commandments says, “Thou shalt not divorce,” and it seems suddenly, the Lord Jesus has brought in a new commandment which is not one of the Ten Commandments.

As the Pharisees point out, even though the commandments were given through Moses, he allowed divorce. The Lord Jesus said that divorce was allowed on grounds of their hardness of heart. What does that mean? The Lord Jesus explains that these two people should be so united through marriage that God’s purposes for marriage will be fulfilled in this couple. But because of our hardness of heart, our self-centeredness, our insistence on going our own way, our own disobedience to God, God’s purpose for marriage has time and again been so badly frustrated that the marriage is simply not workable. Therefore, Moses allowed the separation precisely so that they don’t have to get on each other’s nerves and wear each other out.

A marriage that doesn’t work becomes most exhausting. It’s like hell on earth. Marriage is either heaven or hell, but it doesn’t seem to be somewhere in between. You either struggle for a life-time through hell in its earthly form, or else it’s like heaven. But it seems to be difficult for marriage to be somewhere in between, as some sort of “business relationship.” Maybe that can be worked out, but then it’s not really marriage anymore. You just tolerate each other. I’m sure that you know this from the way your parents sort of survive each other’s company; or from the marriage of your friends that you have observed; or maybe from your own marriage which is in all kinds of difficulty. Who said anything is unusual about “flying saucers” in marriages? I have witnessed “flying saucers” in a marriage relation­ship where saucers literally fly around! What is the point of continu­ing in such a relationship? Why not divorce?

Divorce under the law in the Old Testament was ridiculously easy

The question here in verse 3 says, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” Now “any cause” seems to be too wide. The Jews interpreted Moses’ command so loosely that they could quite literal­ly divorce their wives for burning the toast! That was good enough reason to go to the judge and say, “I am fed up with my wife! This is the tenth time she has burnt my toast and I can’t stand this any­more!” And quite seriously, it would be accepted as a ground for divorce. In other words, if you don’t like her for any reason, you can go to the judge and say, “I just don’t like her! Our marriage is finished!” And you divorce her! Divorce “for any cause” is making a divorce in a marriage so easy that it becomes quite ridiculous.

The other reason Moses allowed divorce was because of the hardness of man’s heart, the persistence in sin, even though adultery could not be proven by two or three witnesses. Under the law in the Old Testament, you had to have two or three witnesses to establish any criminal charge, but how easily could you get two witnesses to witness adultery?

Aren’t there also serious grounds on which divorce could be consi­dered? The Lord Jesus’ answer is no. Adultery is the only reason that divorce could be permitted. Why? Because adultery has annulled the marriage covenant ipso facto. It is an annulment of the marriage by action. The covenant which is established in faithfulness has been destroyed through faithlessness.

I suppose under the New Testament, in the Lord Jesus’ teaching, if such evidence that adultery had been committed were available, divorce would be permissible since this is the only ground allowed for divorce. The covenant relationship of marriage had been destroyed through adultery. There was nothing left of the marriage after adultery.

Even allowing the fact that adultery was the sole ground of divorce, I would still persist in the question: Why is divorce not allowed on any other grounds? For example, the wife has an uncontrollable temper, shouldn’t this intolerable conduct be a good ground for divorce? You don’t want to come home from work to have your wife screaming at you every day. It’s very bad for the nervous system as well as for the spiritual life. Why shouldn’t that be regarded as a breach of covenant of marriage? Or put it the other way around, who wants a husband to come home losing his temper and taking it out on the wife or the children? Why shouldn’t a wife be allowed to divorce such a man? The Lord Jesus does not permit this here. How are we to understand it? Unless we set the matter in its context, we are not going to be able to understand this.

Marriage is: A picture of the spiritual relationships within the church of God

As you look at his teaching, and as you look at the New Testament as a whole, one thing begins to emerge. What is it? It is that marriage is meant to serve as the model for the life of the church. Now I put this main theme that the Lord Jesus wants to say at the beginning because it may take you time to absorb this point. We shall look at the evidence and develop it as we go along.

Try for a moment to picture a church in which the relationship of each member to the other is as sweet, as committed, as close to a marriage as God intended that marriage to be. Can you imagine what the church would be like? Try to imagine that your relationship to me, my relationship to you, and your relationship to one another, is as committed, as close, as affectionate, as sweet, as deep as the marriage relationship of two people as God intended it to be – “as God intended it to be” are the crucial words, not as marriages often turn out to be. That is truly something wonderful! That’s how the church is going to be when we come into the kingdom of God. If that were not so, why look forward to be in God’s kingdom?

Would we be happy to have a church as we are now, in the rather lukewarm, rather distant and formal relationships that we have between ourselves? Let’s be honest. Our relationships are not exactly extremely close and warm. We have not arrived at the con­cept of church as taught in the New Testament. We have not arrived at living in the way that God intended us to live as a church, whereby people will know that we are disciples of Christ because of our love for one another. (Jo. 13:35) Frankly, perhaps your relationship to me, my relationship to you is unfortunately rather polite but at arm’s length. We know each other a little bit. You know a little bit about my background, and I have a vague knowledge about yours, and that’s about it. We come to church and say, “How are you today?”

“Good. Nice. How are you today?”

“Nice. Good.”

Everyone is nice and good. We all happily listen to the message, sip a cup of tea, and we say, “Bye-bye, we’ll see you again some time.” We have not even arrived to be the New Testament Church!

So, I put the thesis before you that what the Lord Jesus is telling us, and what the whole New Testament is telling us is that the marriage relationship of husband and wife, or bride and groom is not only meant to be God’s relationship to us, his church, of Christ’s relationship to us, his body, but more than that, it is meant to be a picture of our relationship to one another in all respects except the physical relationship, of course. In other words, marriage is meant to be a picture of the spiritual relationship with one another within the church of God.

Let me go further and say this: Until we, as a church begin to live in this way, we will simply not make an impression on this world. We are only blowing hot air. The world is simply not convinced by our message because they have heard a lot of talk but they have not seen any action in our lives.

Three basic principles of the gospel

Let us put this whole thing in the context of the Lord Jesus’ teaching. The Lord Jesus stated three principles of the Christian life in the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant, which are the three basic princi­ples of the gospel. If you can grasp these three principles which I have put in different ways, but constantly saying the same sub­stance, then you have got a full grasp of the basics of the gospel. In Chinese, we have the saying, “三角鼎立” (san jiao ding li). It means a bronze container which stands on three legs like a tripod is a picture of stability. If you miss any one of these, your doctrine will be imbalanced and cannot stand. This is all the more terrifying because sometimes, in the church today, only one of these doctrines is taught and the other two are omitted to a greater or lesser extent. What are these three principles?

1. The principle of grace

The first principle is the principle of grace. Previously, I have used the theological term “justification,” but today, I would like to speak of it as grace. You will recall that the three principles are past, present and future. Justification is God’s grace to us in the past, whereby he forgave us our sins when we repented of our sins. He forgave us freely and graciously, not on the basis of our works, of our achievements. That is the first principle of the gospel and generally, that is about the only principle taught in the churches. That is a good beginning but that is not the whole gospel. God graciously forgave us our sins not on the basis of our achievements. We could not achieve our own salvation, for if we could, Christ need not have died for us. Grace is the most basic point of the gospel. Therefore, Paul makes this point in Ephesians 2:9, we are saved by grace “not because of works,” so that we don’t have any cause to boast. The next verse, verse 10, the second part is equally important and constantly omitted: We are created in Christ Jesus “for good works.” That is God’s purpose for our salvation.

2. The principle of graciousness

This takes us to the second point of this Chinese tripod: Graciousness. If you are living “for good works” as a result of God’s transforming grace in you, then what would those good works look like in you? You would become gracious through God’s effective grace in your life. Is our conduct gracious, so that when people meet with us they would say, “Isn’t that a gracious person”! John was able to testify of the Lord Jesus: “We lived with him, we fellowshipped with him and we testify of this: he was full of grace and truth” (Jo. 1:14). Could that be the testimony of others concerning us? In what way do we reflect God’s grace in our lives?

We can use a theological word called “sanctification” to speak of this graciousness. Put in another way, graciousness is simply dealing graciously with others as God has dealt graciously with us. Hence, we are gracious in our behavior. It’s so sickening to see Christians who behave so ungraciously, who are rude, nasty, unpleasant, incon­siderate, small-minded, selfish, bigoted, dogmatic, arrogant! We must be gracious if we have received God’s grace. We need to realize that there is nothing optional about being gracious.

This is also what Paul means in Ephesians 5:1 “Be imitators of God” who is revealed in Christ. That is a command. That is not a suggest­ion that it might be good to be imitators of God. We are to be imitators of God, which is to “attain to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13).

What does “imitator of God” mean? It means we deal with others in the same way God has dealt with us in mercy. Indeed, God has forgiven us, and we are to be forgiving to others. It’s not complicated to understand what being an imitator means. This is so heavily emphasized in the Lord Jesus’ teaching in contrast to the other points, that it is remarkable this element has been quite dropped out!

3. The principle of judgment

Since God’s grace in the past has forgiven us our sins, we are to be gracious in the present so that in the future, at the Judgment of God, he will deal with us as we have dealt with others. That is the third principle. The other more theological term is “judgment,” and it will be based upon our works. God will judge us according to our works, for good or for evil, not just for good.

I was reading a book lately, and the author says that the judgment of Christians is simply when God says thank you to us! My question is: What have you ever done that is worth a “thank you” from God? If the judgment is about thank you to us, then judgment will be very short because there will be next to nothing to say. Think of your life, and for what God is going to thank you? Is it for the few dollars that was put in the offering, which was his anyway, and which was far less than the Old Testament’s requirement of a tithe? What do we have that isn’t his? What will God thank us for? Perhaps, if we are exceedingly faithful, He will thank us with the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant!” I wonder how many of us will hear those words?

Let us turn to 2 Corinthians 5:10 regarding judgment, to show you that the judgment of Christians is not just a matter of thank you. It could turn out to be a judgment of severity. Paul knows the Lord Jesus’ teaching too well to come up with this kind of notion that Christians will not be judged or condemned in any way, quite irrespective of how they have behaved. Paul does not make that kind of mistake. He is talking to the Corinthian Christians, not the non-Christians.

We would hope that he might stop “good,” but no, he says, “whether good or evil.” According to your works in the body, so we shall receive good or evil, not just a thank you! The Lord Jesus did say to a servant, “Depart from me, you wicked and slothful servant.” He was a servant, but he was cast out. He received evil for what he did in his body (Mt. 7:21-23, 25:30). The judgment is based on the second principle. It is based on the fact that God will deal with us as we have dealt with others.

Let us sum up these three principles: grace, graciousness and judgment. Firstly, God dealt with us graciously in response to our repentance, irrespective of our works. But now that we have been saved not of works, He expects us to be so created in Christ for good works. Secondly, God expects graciousness to appear in our lives. And graciousness is simply put as: we deal with others as God has dealt with us in mercy. Thirdly, at the Judgment, He will deal with us as we have dealt with others. Think about that. That is the sum total put very basically and simply of the whole teaching of the gospel: grace, graciousness and judgment.

Our relationship to one another in church is as husband-wife commitment

It is in this context that we must return to Matthew Chapter 19, because the Lord Jesus wants to tell us when we are giving our best, what does he really expect us to give? Many times, we want to give our best but we don’t know what the best is, we don’t know what it is we are supposed to give. Hence we live in ignorance.

The Lord Jesus doesn’t want us to be ignorant. He wants to tell us exactly what your relationship must be with the person sitting next to you, what your relationship is meant to be to one another, to me, and my relationship to you. He tells us that in God’s plan this relationship is meant to be spiritually as close as a husband is to his wife. We are to become a group of people in whom God’s grace is so effective in our lives that we truly commit ourselves to one another. We are so open to one another, so undefensive regarding one another, and so genuine and transparent in relation to others. Yet we are so defensive because we are always walking around with a mask so that nobody really knows what is behind that.

You can think of many people in the church who you don’t really know what they think. What is behind the smile? What is inside the person? What does he really think? Perhaps you will look at me say, “I don’t know what he really thinks. Maybe the thing that I see is just a mask. What’s the ‘real him’?” That is the question because we have not really been open to one another. Hence the church becomes simply a kind of social gathering, a formal “congregation” of people who come in and out, having a sort of vague relationship to one another as fellow Christians, and that is it!

That is not the way the Lord Jesus meant us to be. How can the world say, “These are the disciples of Jesus! Look at them! They so love one another! Now we know what disciples are. Just look at them!”? Will anyone coming into the church looking at the way we conduct ourselves in relation to one another really say, “Ah! These are disci­ples of Jesus! Now I have seen the love of God before my eyes!” Why don’t they see this? It’s because we haven’t come to the commitment that the Lord Jesus is speaking about here.

Divorce is forbidden because it is the annulment of commitment

Why is divorce forbidden? It’s because it is the annulment of commitment, and commitment is something deeply spiritual – you give your whole person to the other. And it is precisely here that we dare not give ourselves to the other person for fear that in giving myself, I expose myself to the other person. I might be abused, mishandled, taken advantage of. I dare not give myself, and so we dare not trust each other. We don’t have faith in each other, hence we cannot have love for one another. We must strive towards this goal that the Lord Jesus sets before us: the vision of the church as it was meant to be. We have a long way to go, but that is no reason why we should not see the picture that the Lord puts before us.

Let me substantiate this teaching from the rest of Scripture. Let us turn for a moment to Ephesians 5, this well-known passage on marriage. I think that if you have been to several weddings, you would know this passage by heart because you have read it so many times. Let’s read it one more time to see if we can see something new in it. Ephesians 5:21-27:

Notice that as Paul is talking about the spiritual nature of this commitment in marriage, “as to the Lord”, he is coming in and out of the subject all the time, one moment talking about marriage, the next moment talking about the relationships within the church, moving from one to the other and back to the one. For him, he has long seen that marriage is meant to portray this spiritual reality of what the relation of Christ to the church should be, and what the church should have in its relationship one to another. This is easy to follow because we have just seen that we are to deal with one another in the way that God deals with us, his church in Christ. Hence the one follows the other automatically when you understand these principles.

Let us go on to verses 28-33:

Paul is talking about wives and husbands, which is a very deep mystery. Let me draw three points immediately from here which show you just how our relationship to one another is meant to be modeled on the relationship of husband and wife.

1. Love your neighbor: fellow Christians in your church

First, you are very familiar with the saying, “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18 quoted in Mt. 19:19, 22:39 etc.). I am sure if you have ever thought deeply on Scripture at all, you would have often scratched your head and thought to yourself, “How can I love my neighbor as myself?” How is that possible? No thoughtful person could ever have escaped that question. I have many times pondered it. We are willing to give of the best, but how can we love a neighbor as ourselves? He is a neighbor, he is not me. I can love him to some extent but I cannot love him “as myself” because he is not me. It’s as simple as that.

For the Jew, a neighbor is a fellow-Jew, or a believer of the same God

The first thing to understand is, the word “neighbor” in Scripture does not just mean any X, Y, or Z. The word which is translated as “neighbor” in English translates the Hebrew word rea, which means a friend, a companion. It doesn’t just mean a next-door person necessarily, because the word “neighbor” in the Old Testament referred specifically to someone who was your friend, that is, he stood in some kind of relationship to you even if that relationship was quite distant, in the sense that you were members of the same community of people. For a Jew, “neighbor” did not mean any foreigner, or anyone who happened to sit beside you in a horse carriage or whatever. A neighbor had to be at least a fellow Israelite, or someone who may not be an Israelite but a proselyte, that is, he had the same religion as a Jew, even though he was not a Jew. Now this is important to understand. Even in the Lord Jesus’ teaching, we find that the word “neighbor” does not mean just anyone.

For example, in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, the Jew asked, “Who is my neighbor?” Quite rightly, the Samaritan was his neigh­bor. The Samaritans are very rightly the neighbors of the Jews, not only literally, by being next door to the Jews but also because they believed in the same God and they read the same Bible. In fact, they shared basically the same faith. The Samaritans were very adamant in their devotion particularly to the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament. For them, the words of Moses were absolutely authoritative, far more so than Isaiah, or Jeremiah, or anyone else. Moses was the lawgiver for the Samaritans, so the Jews and Samaritans shared the same lawgiver, and they had faith in the same God. They were indeed neighbors even though the Jews hated them. After all, there is no hate as deep as a religious hatred, as you have long discovered. The hatred between Protestants and Catholics, between even Protestants of one denomination and another is absolutely revolting! And such was the hatred between the Jews and the Samaritans, and vice versa. But whether we like it or not, a person who is a Presbyterian, or a Methodist, or a Roman Catholic or what other denomination he may be, is our neighbor. He has faith in the same God. He reads the same Bible. We may not like his church structure, but that is none of our business. We don’t have the right to exclude him as our neighbor. So in the Bible, “neighbor” in the first instance refers to someone who is related to us in these ways.

“Neighbor”: a fellow-Christian in the same church

When you look in the New Testament, you will find that the word “neighbor” means particularly and specifically a fellow-Christian, a member of the same local church for example, not just a question of different denominations. We can see this especially in Ephesians 4:25 which says,

“Neighbor” is paralleled with “members of one another,” who are members of the church, members of the same body. This is very important because of these words: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

In Ephesians 5:28 and 33, do you see that it says twice to the husband that he should love his wife as himself? I hope you will notice that very carefully. It is most important to take for example the last verse, Ephesians 5:33 – let each one of you love his wife as himself. Why can you love your wife as yourself? He just explained in the previous verse that it’s because you two have become one body, one flesh (v. 31). That is why you can love your neighbor as yourself. If you don’t see your neighbor as being one body with yourself, of course, you wouldn’t love him as yourself. That is the whole point. You cannot give a command like “Love your neighbor as yourself” and leave it hanging in the air without a context. I cannot love my neighbor as myself because I don’t see his relationship to me. I can love my wife as myself because she is united in commitment to me, and I in commitment to her. We have been united in such a way that we have become one flesh, one body. So in loving her, of course I am loving myself because we are one body together. But how can I love my neighbor as myself if I don’t see that he is one body with me?

So you will notice twice in this passage, the relationship we are meant to have with our neighbor parallels the relationship meant to exist between husband and wife. Can you see the parallel? It’s so deeply-rooted in Scripture that it hit me with astonishing force, that I had never considered my neighbor or fellow Christian as spiritually united to me in the same profound manner as my wife is physically united to me!

Look around at the people in church. Is Jason united to me as Helen is united to me? The thought is almost mind-boggling! So I have to love him as myself in the same way as I love Helen as myself. I love him spiritually, because “as myself” is the spiritual model Here it is not a physical connection. Can you look at each one around here and say, “I love that person because I am united to that person”? You don’t feel united to that person! Why? Because you have not com­mitted yourself to that person, and that person has not committed himself or herself to you, so where do you feel commitment? None! Hence because of the lack of commitment to one another, we don’t have the sense of unity, we don’t have the love. This is only possible when we realize that we are one body. So the first point is “as your­self.” We see this as true in the marriage relationship, and as true in the church.

2. Love fellow Christians as husband and wife love each other

The second point is that this is possible only when we observe and accept one another as members of the same body – one body. Again, as you looked at Ephesians 5:31, “as one body” is exactly the whole basis of the marriage relationship. The two are no longer two persons but become one physical unit, one body, one flesh. And yet, in this same passage, in verses 30-31, Paul equates the unity of the church as one body (Christ’s body), to the unity found in marriage as “one flesh.”

In the Old Testament, the word basar which is translated as “flesh” literally means body. The first definition of basar in Brown, Driver & Briggs is body. It can be translated either way you like, as flesh or body. So husband and wife become one body. The Catholic transla­tion of the New Jerusalem Bible, rightly translates Ephesians 5:31, husband and wife become one body. So just as husband and wife are one body, we, the church are also one body. The whole terminology of Paul, time and again, concerning the church is that we are one body (cf. Rom. 12:5; 1 Cor. 12:13).

However, do you feel that we are one body? Probably not. Our Christianity is far too shallow for that. Our commitment to one another is simply a courtesy commitment. There is no depth in it. We don’t realize that being bought by the blood of Christ, we have been baptized by God’s Holy Spirit into one body, so that we are so united and related to one another as indeed a husband and wife would be members of one body. That is striking, isn’t it? By now, you will probably begin to see why I put the thesis out right at the beginning. I told you what the theme of the Lord Jesus’ teaching was, so that you have plenty of time to think about it because it takes getting used to. It took me a lot of getting used to.

3. Be subject to one another, and lay down your life for one another

Let us move on to the third and final aspect of this comparison of the internal relationships of the church to a marriage relationship. The wife is to be subject to the husband, and the husband is to love the wife. Remarkably, this is exactly the kind of relationship which defines the relationship between the members of the church. Notice Ephesians 5:21, “be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ” belongs to the previous passage, which is on the internal re­lationship of Christians, to be subject to one another. This statement is repeated throughout Paul’s epistles that I hardly need to give you an awful lot of references on that. Paul repeatedly tells Christians to regard the other more important than yourself (cf. Phil. 2:3 [NAS]), which means “be subject to” the other one. And “be subject to” in Ephesians 5:21 is exactly the same word in Greek as is used in verse 24 concerning the relation of wife to husband.

In what way should the husband love his wife? He should love her to the extent of being willing to lay down his life for her, “as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her” (Eph. 5:25). That is exactly the same command given to Christians in relation to one another in 1 John 3:16, where it says we are to love one another even to the extent of laying down our lives for one another. In other words, what a husband would do for his wife is precisely what a Christian should do for a fellow-Christian. It is exactly the same command. Isn’t that remarkable? That is truly remarkable!

Now we can see from the whole Scriptural evidence, that in what­ever way you look at it, the marriage relationship portrays the spiritual relationship between the members of the church. This is how we are meant to relate to one another.

Giving your best to God means giving ourselves to one another!

You have sung, “Give of your best to the Master.” What are we supposed to do in giving the best? Well, “giving the best” turns out to be giving ourselves to one another, and that turns out to be not so easy to do because you might look at that fellow in the church and say, “Give myself to that guy? Oh no! I might accept one or two people, and I can give myself to them, but not to the others.” Now if Christ loved us in that way, where would our salvation be? If Christ looked at us and said, “I see some good fellows here, I will die for them, but the others are not worth dying for. Put them on the side.” If we treated each other in this way, God will deal with us at the Judgment in the way that we deal with others. What will happen to us at the Judgment? God will reject us on the same grounds we re­jected others, wouldn’t he? We would be wiped out at the Judgment!

So I hope that you and I can catch the picture of what the church is meant to be. It’s a very exciting picture to me! I think you and I know that we are a long way from it, but at least we now have a goal before us. We know what we must aim for. And when we say that we are going to give our best by God’s grace, what we have to strive for by his grace, that in this generation, the church will become again what it was meant to be. We must start with the church.

God designed marriage to teach us the first step to a community

God meant the marriage relationship to be a kind of beginning in which two people begin to learn to give oneself to the other. For example, if you cannot give yourself to one person, how can you give yourself to the whole church? You start with one person. So marriage was designed to teach us the first step to a community. That is the beauty of God’s plan. When you look at Genesis, that was exactly God’s plan.” What is the reason for marriage? Genesis 2:18 says, “It is not good for man to be alone.” It is not good for you to be alone spiritually. So you have to start by entering into a relationship with someone else. You cannot do this with everyone at the same time, so you start with one person. And this is the model for us to begin in the church. Build a relationship with one other brother or sister, and then build one with another brother or sister. And then another, and another and so the community grows.

“It is not good for man to be alone,” but if two people are in a marriage, they can still be alone in a sense. God goes on to show this in Genesis 1:28, “Be fruitful and multiply.” Marriage was meant to be the beginning of a new community. “Be fruitful and multiply.” Don’t just stay as the two of you, but increase until there is a whole community of you. This is the very intention of marriage. In the same way, we are to begin by building within the church these kinds of commitments beginning with one and then two. The Training Team is learning this committing themselves more and more one to another, starting in a smaller group, and then from there learning what commitment really is about in its full extent.

Unfit to be a Christian if your commitment to a spouse ends in divorce

If you cannot commit yourself to one person, how can you commit yourself to other persons? You cannot do this. Hence, if your relationship even to your wife can end in divorce then what kind of commitment do you have to the one person you are supposed to love? You are not fit to be a Christian, let’s put it as bluntly as that! That is why the Lord Jesus is saying he will not permit divorce.

You must learn commitment to that one other person, with no ifs and buts, with no strings attached. You are utterly committed. You don’t talk about divorce! We will make this commitment work through thick and thin. If you can build your commitment with one other person without talking about opting out, quitting, surrender­ing, but say, “I’m going to make this relationship work by the grace of God,” then you are learning commitment.

Your husband or your wife may be a very difficult person, selfish, ego-centric, and exhibiting various negative traits, but you are determined to make this marriage work. If you win through there, you will win through anywhere! You will be the hope of the church. We need people who don’t quit, who will work hard in the church. As the prophet said, “I will not rest until Zion, God’s church will become again, a thing of beauty. I will not give up. I will work at this commitment until God’s purposes will be fulfilled.” (cf. Isa. 62:1) That is the goal we aim for.

Let us now be quiet before God in prayer.