I thank God for the Los Angeles Bible Training School. It is very encouraging to see men and women serving the Lord in an urban context who are so eager to receive and apply the Word of God to their lives. Last night, I had to privilege of preaching in chapel. Here's the outline of my message and if you want to listen click here for the audio.INTRO:
This summer I experienced one of the greatest joys of my life—I officiated my parents’ golden anniversary.
But all marriages don’t make it to 50 yrs, do they? Today many people never get married at all. The institution of marriage has lost a lot of its luster, even in the church. Marriage has become an endangered species, and that’s dangerous.
This evening we will consider 5 foundational truths that the church must embrace to fight against these trends and to fight for God’s institution of family.
Truth #1 Marriage is a Divine Institution Gen 1:26-29; 2:22-25
The God ordained gender distinctions “male” and “female” have far reaching implications, as the apostle Paul makes plain in Ephesians 5:31-32. God made them male and female so that He could take the two and make them one (Mat 19:5-6). Maleness and Femaleness reflect a complementary differences that enable a husband/male and wife/female to become one flesh (one person, Gen 2:24b).
God designed the husband to be the leader in the marriage union and the wife to be his subordinate helper. Far from these roles being bad, God called this design not “good,” but very good.
Jesus Himself is eternally the Son and in a subordinate role to the Father and is yet equal in the essence with God (Phil 2:6). John 14:31 (misquoted in the message as John 14:1) says “so that the world may know that I love the Father, I do exactly as the Father commanded Me.”
Proverbs 18:22 affirms, “He who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the LORD.”
If we believe that God’s design of marriage is good, then why don’t we get married?
Truth #2 God Wants You to Love Him More Gen 2:16-18
God blessed Adam and Eve with everything. They owned and ruled over all of creation. Like the first man and woman, God blesses people today with many gifts that reveal His goodness, and in turn He wants us to show genuine love for Him by living in obedience for His glory.
God does not want us to let His gifts, including our relationships, to make our relationship with Him secondary. In order to love your loved ones more you need love them less than you love God. Our love for Him must be central.
“What is the one thing you can't live joyfully without? If that one thing is not God, it's an idol,” Tullian Tchividjian.
Lesson #3 The Serpent Seduces Women with a Lie Gen 3:1-5
All sin begins with a lie. The Bible says Satan is the father of lies. He seduces Eve and women in general with the lie that God has wronged them by placing them in subordination to their husbands. Christian women must reject this lie and affirm the wisdom of God’s design and His goodness towards them. Eve believed that God had wronged her and she rejected God in an attempt to gain a freedom the serpent said she would receive by eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Lesson #4 The Serpent Seduces Men with Sex Gen 3:6-11, 17; 2:16-18
The sin God indicted Adam with is that he listened to the voice of his wife (gen 3:17). To be sure, it is no sin to listen to a wife when her counsel is in keeping with the wisdom of God’s Word. But Eve enticed her husband to choose her and her path rather than to submit to and obey God’s. There is an interesting play on words that connects the marriage narrative to the Fall narrative. The words are “naked” arom in Hebrew (2:25; 3:7, 10, 11), and the word “shrewd” arum. The connection reveals that it was the shrewd plan of the serpent to use a naked Eve whom Adam was thrilled with to seduce him to reject God. Click here for further study on "How Nakedness Affected the Fall."
Lesson #5 Our Children Will Imitate Our Sins Gen 4:1-7
Like father, like son. God directly warned Adam (Gen 2:16-17), and he directly disobeyed. God directly warned Cain, and he directly disobeyed. This is a sobering truth. Our children hear what we say but will live what we do. So love God (Deut 6:5) and model the life you are teaching (6:6-9) your children to live.
Lesson # 6 God’s Grace Gives Hope to Hopeless Families Gen 3:15; 4:25-26
The consequences of the sin of the Fall devastated the first family. Although God graciously came to Adam, he refused to repent and instead blamed Eve and even God for his rebellious idolatry (choosing Eve over God). So Adam’s sin led to his spiritual death and the death of all who remain in him. But Eve appears to be a very different woman at the end of Genesis 4. She no longer despises God and longs to be free from Him. Instead, she thanks God for giving her another godly son. Much of the language of Gen 4:25 is very reflective of the promise in Gen 3:15, that through the seed of the woman, God would raise up a victor over the serpent. Thus He and His coming provide hope for otherwise hopeless families living in a fallen world.
CONCLUSION
We all live outside of the garden, in a world marred by sin and filled with death—death of marriages, death of children and worst, eternal death. Our only hope and the hope of the family is that God who is holy is also merciful to repentant guilty sinners. We all have contributed to the demise of the family. The solution is to repent - to yield in faith to God’s institution of family, to seek His grace and mercy to fulfill it, and in faith, to enjoy Him as the Giver of good gifts.
No comments:
Post a Comment