Seeing Jesus in Matthew: Called to Good

We did Church in the Park last weekend. I feel like it's been forever since

we've been together, but I was excited to get back to it this morning.

And it's, yeah, it's been a little bit, but we have, we're in our Matthew series

again, seeing Jesus in Matthew.

So we're picking up in Matthew 19. So if you have a Bible, you want to open

it up, open it up to Matthew chapter 19.

Matthew 19 · chapter mention

You can turn there and we'll follow along. I'll also put the,

you know, the references all on the screen here, so help you out.

But what we, in case you're new to this kind of format or what we've been doing

is we've been really, I think it's almost been about two years now.

We've been making our way through the book of Matthew. We've gotten all the way to chapter 19.

We do like a couple weeks at a time and then we stop and then we do something

topical and then we come back to Matthew. So we're coming back to Matthew today.

And I like this approach to Bible teaching, like this kind of just going straight

through a book slowly, also breaking it up a little bit.

But I like it especially because when we're done, we will have collectively,

if you were here for the whole time, we will have read and thought through every word together.

And I think that's really important because I think one of the challenges of

both teaching through the Bible, but also like when you read in your free time

through the Bible devotionally, one of the challenges is that it's really easy

to just pick and choose the stuff that we like.

And so we just kind of eat ice cream all the time.

And that's good. Like we should be encouraged by the word, but there's so much

in the word and in all of it is good for us.

So by going straight through a passage, We don't get to kind of pick and choose.

We just kind of have to deal with what's on the page and talk through it and

think through it, think through it in terms of the gospel.

And this morning, we're doing that with Matthew chapter 19 because Jesus is

Matthew 19 · chapter mention

addressing one of those topics that...

I don't really want to talk about, right? It wasn't like I woke up this morning

and thought, let's talk about divorce because that's what Jesus is talking about

because like, it's not very fun to talk about,

but we're stepping into this section and yeah, it's here we are.

Jesus talks about it. So we're going to talk about it.

But I want to reassure you, I want to reassure everyone in the room,

especially if you've been impacted by divorce in some way, either you've been

divorced yourself or maybe your parents got divorced, that leaves a big mark on people.

We are not here to talk about how bad you are.

Or to shame you in any way. Like, that's not the purpose of reading God's word.

We're actually here to talk about the good news of the gospel.

And as Jesus even brings up serious things, Jesus is always pointing people towards hope.

And that's what we intend to do this morning. So, you know, just kind of,

if you're a little bit nervous, dealing with a topic that's a little bit touchy,

like, just, it'll be okay. That's my point.

So we're going to jump in. We're going to pick up in Matthew chapter 19, verses 1 through 2.

Matthew 19:1–2

Jesus says, well, it says this, Matthew says this. When Jesus had finished saying

these things, he departed from Galilee and he went to the region of Judea across from the Jordan.

Large crowds followed him and he healed them there.

So this chapter picks up and we see Jesus doing what he does best,

what he's been doing throughout the book of Matthew as we've seen.

He's traveling around different parts of Israel. He is teaching along the way.

There are all these people following him, listening to him teach.

And then as those people gather together, they come to him and they ask him

to heal them of their various afflictions, whatever's going on.

And Jesus will pray and heal for people.

And so it's just Jesus doing like his core ministry stuff.

He did that in chapter 18, and now he's continuing to do it in chapter 19.

One of my favorite commentators actually points out that what Matthew is doing

is really interesting because Matthew is thematically arranging Jesus' teaching.

Really according to the order of the Ten Commandments.

So Frederick Dale Bruner points out that in chapter 18, Jesus was dealing with

the sixth commandment, thou shall not murder, right?

And he's actually dealing with that by focusing on the ways that we keep ourselves

from anger and lashing out at people is through love and forgiveness,

right? So chapter 18 was all about forgiveness.

Chapter 19 begins to focus on the seventh commandment, do not commit adultery.

And Jesus here is teaching on adultery and he's talking about divorce and he's

talking about pointing the Pharisees towards the positive things and the true

callings that they have in their marriages.

And then we'll go on from here throughout chapter 19 and we'll talk about the

eighth commandment, which is do not steal. And in order to talk about not stealing,

Jesus focuses on not loving money and not being so attached to money.

So it's interesting how thematically this gets presented to us because we're

walking through the Ten Commandments and Jesus is teaching the things he has

to say to teach the people to be faithful.

See, Jesus deals with each of these commandments and he does so on the edges, right?

He's talking about them on the edges and he's exposing the conditions of the

heart that lead to the breaking of these commandments.

And in so doing, what he's doing is he's exposing those who are listening and talking with him.

He's showing them their great need. And particularly, he's doing that with the

Pharisees. Because as we go along here in Matthew chapter 19, Jesus is teaching.

Matthew 19 · chapter mention

But as we see throughout the Gospels, a group of people is following him around.

They're called the Pharisees. And these were just serious religious people.

They were known to be a group, almost like a party, like a tribe.

Not a tribe. Like an organization, a group of people who they took their job

as being people who studied the law and who taught...

Taught people to keep the law very well. They were serious religious people.

They're following around and they're interested in the law and they have some questions for Jesus.

And so they come to him and they ask him this question. So picking up in verse

three, some Pharisees approached him to test him.

They asked him, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife on any grounds?

Jesus replies, he says, haven't you read that he who created them in the beginning

made them male and female?

And he also said, For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and

be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.

So they are no longer two, but

one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let no one separate.

Why then, they asked him, did Moses command us to give divorce papers and to send her away?

And he told them, Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because of the hardness of your hearts.

But it was not like that from the beginning. I tell you, whoever divorces his

wife except for sexual immorality and marries another commits adultery.

So the Pharisees have come to Jesus. It says they've come to test him.

But many commentators point out that that word really should say trick.

They've come to trick him. They're trying to trip Jesus up.

They're trying to ask him questions that they don't think he'll have a way to answer.

And they ask him a question that was a popular question in Jesus' day.

Rabbis would debate this question. There were a lot of live opinions about it.

And that is, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife on any grounds?

And that any grounds isn't like, is there at least one reason?

And what they're asking is, is it okay for any flimsy reason for us to divorce our wives?

They're asking this question.

And Jesus, so the Pharisees want Jesus to weigh in, but they're probably divided

and there's a lot of opinions.

Some rabbis in Jesus's time would have insisted that there were very few reasons

on which to get divorced, that you had to have a seriously justified reason,

adultery being an example, or some other rabbis would offer different serious reasons.

But a few rabbis basically said, whatever you want.

You wake up in the morning, you don't feel good, divorce.

They would have said, well, there's rules and there's regulations and it's not

very clear why we should do these things and so you can go ahead and get divorced for any reasons.

But as Jesus answered the question, he pushes very hard, obviously, against that attitude.

And he goes back to the beginning and he points out what's happening in marriage

when God first came up with the idea in Genesis 2.

He's quoting Genesis 2, 24, as God creates men and women and he says,

kind of unifies them together.

And Jesus understands that marriage is not as the Pharisees are kind of treating

it. And as frankly, sometimes how we treat it today in our day,

it's not just a kind of a contractual arrangement that can be dissolved for convenience.

What he says is that what marriage is, is the joining together of two people, making them one.

My old pastor in Connecticut, whenever he would do a marriage ceremony,

he was a carpenter and so he would use a lot of carpentry analogies and he would

talk about laminated wood and how, you know, if you have, you know,

laminated wood, it's many layers of wood come together.

But say there's two, that wouldn't be very good plywood. You would send that back.

But say there's two layers, you know, glued together, connected together,

they become one. If you tried to separate those two, you have two pieces of junk.

You don't, you can't separate them. You can't take things apart that have been joined together.

And Jesus' answer is just like that. He says, whatever God has joined together,

no one can separate. No one should separate. Don't let it happen.

His answer is very straightforward.

And the Pharisees do not like that. They do not like that clarity. But Jesus is insistent.

He even goes so far as to say that a man who divorces his wife for any reason

other than adultery, Jesus says, that person is himself committing adultery.

You notice this is all directed at men because that was the way it was in Israel's

day. It's like people who could initiate divorce were men.

That's the culture they lived in. And this was upsetting for the Pharisees because

do not commit adultery. It's like we've talked about.

It's in the Ten Commandments. It's the Seventh Commandment. It's the seventh

most important. At least maybe they wouldn't have ordered them.

But it's on the top ten list of important things that you should not do.

And the fact that Jesus is suggesting to them, because certainly some of them

probably would have been divorced, because it was a common practice in Israel.

That Jesus is suggesting to these people who love not breaking rules,

who've devoted their whole identity and like have literally created a club for

not breaking rules to suggest to them that they've unbeknownst to them broken

a rule is very upsetting.

They've actually come up with so many extra rules to make sure that they don't

come anywhere breaking these big rules.

And so Jesus' suggestion that divorce and remarriage is adultery is very disturbing to them.

And it does not fit in with their understanding of how the law works.

And so they come back and they ask him, they poke, they want to reason with

him. They think he's wrong in his interpretation. They say, why then did Moses

command us to give divorce papers and to send her away?

And their point is, if Moses in Deuteronomy 24, you can go back and look at

Deuteronomy 24, where Moses is giving commandments on divorce.

And in Deuteronomy 24, Moses gives a procedure for divorce.

What needs to happen if that happens?

If he's outlining the rules, telling them what they need to do,

that they need to give their wife a certificate of divorce, then how can Jesus

come along and say the divorce is wrong if they're following those rules that Moses has given?

And, like, I mean, what do you think? It's actually not a terrible point.

It's not as bad as it could be. But let me ask you this. Anyone been on an airplane recently?

Yeah, all you guys have been on airplanes all the time. We fly all the time.

I went to Colorado recently. In case you didn't know, between here and Colorado,

there are no oceans. Not a one.

But you know what the flight attendants told me?

In case of a water landing, yada, yada, yada.

Now, let me ask you something.

Because the flight attendants gave me instructions on what happens in case of

a water landing, does anyone think that planes should land in the water?

It's not like a successful flight if you land in the water. I've never,

I would not think of it that way.

We give instructions for worst case scenarios all the time, but no one is thinking

that a water landing is ideal.

And I think what Jesus understands is that that is exactly what Moses is doing here.

He's actually giving instructions for a worst case scenario situation,

And he's doing it specifically in the context of Deuteronomy 24 to protect vulnerable women.

Because like in this day, like it was a very patriarchal society and a woman

really did not have a lot of means to be able to provide for herself.

She would have to rely on her father or her husband.

And so if a woman is divorced and has no proof of being divorced,

then she can't go and remarry and she can't go have her needs met.

And it ends up being this awful situation. So Jesus is not saying,

hey, this is a great thing. What he's saying is this is a commandment given

for a worst-case scenario situation, and it is not in any way allowing or encouraging.

It does not mean that God loves divorce. And in fact, the Pharisees should have

known this because they would have read the scriptures well,

and they would have known the words of Malachi.

What Malachi says in Malachi 2.15 is, take heed then in your spirit.

Let no one deal treacherously against the wife of your youth for I hate divorce,

says the Lord God of Israel.

That's pretty clear. I hate divorce, says the Lord God of Israel and him who

covers his garment with wrong, says the Lord of hosts.

So take heed in your spirit that you do not deal treacherously.

What Jesus makes super clear is that the very reason that Moses permitted you

to divorce your wives is because of the hardness of your heart.

Like this is not God celebrating divorce. This is not God making it easy for divorces to happen.

God hates divorce and they would have known this.

Moses knew, he's telling them, Moses knew that the thing is you were going to

do it anyway and you were going to deal treacherously with people you're called to love and care for,

and you're going to send them away, and you're going to do this,

and so this is a worst-case scenario provision.

And what Jesus is doing here is he's exposing the Pharisees in a lot of ways.

He is showing them how little they understand about God and what God really

calls them to and what they think the law is.

See, they think as long as they're following the rules, as long as they can

go, you know, buy the book, that they're okay with God.

But they don't understand that God is not giving them rules for the sake of them following rules.

That's not why God has spoken. That's not why God has revealed his will.

That's not why God has sent the law to Moses. That's not what God is doing.

The law is given to restrain sin, to let people know what is completely out

of bounds because people are really bad at knowing good from bad.

Like, I don't have the verse up there, but Isaiah 5, like, woe to you who call

evil good and good evil, but it is a common condition of people that we just

want to call terrible things good things.

We don't know up from down so often. The law, it gives us a very clear example

of what is out of bounds. that we can say that is, I may not know what good

is all the time, but I certainly know what God does not love.

I certainly know what is beyond the bounds. The law gives me that.

The law and the rules don't make anyone righteous. This is like Jesus's big

point. It's Paul's big point.

But the Pharisees are thinking, well, as long as we keep the rules,

like we're winning what we're called to be doing.

But Jesus totally understands that's not true.

Anyone play soccer? Okay. All right. So in soccer, if you get to the end of

the game, do you walk off the field and say, I am so good at soccer because I didn't get a red card?

Do you think that that is winning? Is that you didn't do the most egregious

thing that got you kicked out of the game? That does not make you good at soccer.

But the Pharisees are approaching law that way. They're saying,

oh, we don't want to do these terrible things and that will make God happy with

us. And so they keep the rules in this way, but they're just terrible.

They're not doing the true thing that God has called them to do as a result.

They're deluding themselves. And so often I think we approach God's word in the same way.

We think that the point of God's word and his instruction to us and calling

us just to be faithful and be filled with the Spirit and walking with Jesus

is just so that we don't break the rules.

But that's not the thing.

Carmen Imes, she's an Old Testament scholar. I have a couple of her books.

They're pretty good, pretty easy to read.

She says this about kind of a right way to think about what the law is.

She says, I wonder if sometimes we read the Old Testament law as though God

is that parent giving orders to other neighborhood kids.

He's overstepping his bound. He's being too demanding or negative.

His interactions aren't random, though.

They don't overreach. They are house rules for Yahweh's family.

They ensure peace between family members. They are not the main thing,

but rather the backdrop for the main thing, the loving relationships.

We don't have families so that we can do chores and have rules.

We do chores and have house rules to facilitate life in a family.

And that's the thing. That's what the law does for Israel.

That's why God has given us them commandments and why those commandments are

still totally legitimate and for us to consider.

Because they are the things, they're not the main thing, but they protect the main thing.

And so this commandment against adultery and Jesus speaking about the seriousness

of divorce and how it is not encouraged,

it is about protecting the main thing, protecting the relationships we're called

to, protecting our call and directing us to be people who are growing in love,

the kind of people that Jesus calls you to be.

The rules are not the point. The rules are there to protect the main thing.

You aren't commanded to not commit adultery because God is trying to keep the standards high.

That's not the reason. You are commanded not to commit adultery because God

has made marriage sacred.

And it is a place for goodness and beauty and faithfulness.

It's meant to be a marriage. if you're married, is meant to be a place where

you both, both parties of the marriage, the husband and the wife,

are growing up into faithfulness,

who are sharpening one another and encouraging one another, and where there's

enough security and stability to grow through the challenges that come along

with living together and fighting together,

so that you guys can stay connected and stable through those difficulties and

grow into the people who God is trying to make you, people of love,

people of hope, people of peace.

The rule is there to protect the relationship at the center and both adultery

and divorce destroy the foundations of that relationship.

They turn the gift of God into a place actually of amazing pain.

Anyone who I have ever met, anyone who I've met who has either been divorced

themselves or had parents or someone in a close relationship who got divorced knows this.

Even if there are, you know, it was a biblically allowed kind of divorce.

And Jesus says here, except for cases of adultery, I think we could also list

like abandonment and abuse. Like I think there is an argument to be made that

those are also grounds for divorce.

Even in those things, though, divorce is the most painful thing anyone goes through.

And nobody who's gone through it, even when it was like probably what needed

to happen, even if it was biblically allowed, says five stars.

It was great. It's always a one-star review.

No one loves divorce. And Jesus makes it clear that it is a place of grief and

pain. It is not what God intends.

So what Jesus is doing here, he's not trying to make divorced people feel bad,

or to shame them. That's not what the law is for.

Jesus is trying to get the Pharisees to see that marriage is precious and it's

something that God loves.

God is not trying to come down hard on people who break the rules.

He's not trying to be about the rules. He's actually trying to get people to

wake up to the fact that God is after so much more for us, that he is calling

us to be people who are growing in love.

When we start to approach God's law the way the Pharisees have,

and I think it's easy to kind of get into that spot. You can kind of get on

cruise control with your relationship with God. You stop thinking about how

you're going to grow and you just start thinking about how do I avoid going past the bounds, right?

Have you ever been there? I've been there. Spent years there before.

We become people who are just trying to avoid getting a red card.

That we end up, when we approach God's word that way, we end up just missing the point.

The truth is that we are called to the good.

We're called to be people who are in our marriages, in our relationships,

in our relationship with God, in our relationship with other people,

becoming people of love.

Micah 6.8, another great minor prophet, he says this, and I love this statement.

You've probably heard it before.

Mankind, he's told each of you what is good. He's told you what's bad,

but he's also told you what is good, what is the center that you're aiming for,

and what is it that the Lord requires of you?

To act justly, to love faithfulness, and to walk humbly with your God.

It's good to know that we're called to goodness. It's good to know that we're

not just called to be people who avoid breaking the rules.

We're actually called to be people who are growing in these things in our capacity

to love and faithfulness, to be faithful in our relationships,

to be faithful friends, to be faithful husbands and wives, to be faithful,

I don't know, in all the relationships that we have.

Parents, children, we are called to faithfulness, we're called to humility,

we're called to act justly, to love fairness and what's right and to care about

that, to be advocates for those things in the world.

Like according to God's principles and what he shows us is true and right and good for people.

We are called to be people who are leaning into what is good.

And what Jesus is rebuking very clearly in the Pharisees is that they've forgotten

that they're called to goodness.

And I just want to remind us that that is really our goal. Like that is the

goal of the Christian life.

The goal of the Christian life isn't, okay, well, I got my pass stamped so I

can get to heaven one day.

That's great, wonderful. I'm not saying that's wonderful. Jesus,

pay the price of your sin.

Like there's no condemnation for those who are in Jesus Christ. What great news.

Like even were you to stumble over the bounds of what is wrong,

There's like not, you're not dead in your sins because of that,

because Jesus is now pouring out life in you and he is securing you.

He's giving you that secure, faithful relationship, the same kind of faithfulness

husbands and wives are called to, where you can make mistakes and you can do

things that are clearly not according to good, but there's still faithfulness on his part.

So you come into that kind of relationship, but that kind of relationship is

meant to be the venue in which this new life in the spirit is being drawn out of us.

That's the thing. Like the Christian life is not just, Oh, I'm okay with Jesus.

He's going to be faithful to me, but we don't talk that much.

It's that he's faithful. He's good. He's forgiven me my sins.

And now I can lean into, and I can walk into the fullness of what he calls me to.

Just like, just like we're called more, more to that than that in marriage.

Like we're not just be like, Oh, my wife and I, we're okay. Like,

you know, we don't really do that much or talk that much or care that much about

each other, but we don't commit adultery and we don't get divorced.

So we're okay. That's not a healthy marriage.

We're called to health. We're called to the good.

I'm going to move on to the second part here. I don't like to give advice, but I feel like I have to.

Like, I'm talking about healthy marriage and like,

like that's not, Jesus doesn't go deeply in here, but I'm like,

if I didn't give you some pointers on a healthy marriage, I feel like I'd be

messing up so alright if you're married you want some advice on a healthy marriage,

I'll give you some whether you want it or not,

A guy named Ronald Rollheiser, he writes a lot on spiritual formation.

He describes life's different stages.

And I was thinking about those stages and thinking about a healthy marriage

through the lens of those stages.

And I think this is the best way that I can, in a short time,

give you, I think, what I hope is helpful advice on marriage if you're married.

So he says the first stage of life is this, is that you need to get a life,

which I really, I like because it's a little clever.

And this is it. I mean, this is your early stages. And if you're young here,

I'm not trying to suggest to you that you don't have a life, but also...

You're getting there. You're getting there. You'll find when you turn like 40,

you're like, oh, man, I did not know what my life was about before.

You know, you get older and you kind of realize these early stages are interesting

because what you do is in the early stages of life, you grow into adulthood.

You get launched into the world. Maybe you go to college. Maybe you join the workforce.

You know, you just start to get some experience and you start to figure out.

And this is just speaking to my own experience. you start to figure out from

a place of shocking ignorance who you are.

You know what? I got my first job and I thought I knew who I was.

And I'm like, I am not who I thought I was. And how is it that I was so blind

to my habits and traits and characters and I'm actually kind of the opposite

of the way I perceive myself to be?

And through this stuff that happens at your job and with your boss and you start

to see things about yourself, you start to figure out who you are, how God has made you.

You start to figure out what you're bad at and what you're good at.

So you get this early stage of life. You start to figure out,

what do you actually want in life? Like that is a really hard thing to figure

out what you want in life. Because when you're young, you know what your parents want for you.

And that's about all you know. You don't know what you want.

And you sit out in the world and you start to figure out, what do I want? What makes me tick?

And as you do that, you start to flirt with commitments. That's,

I mean, like middle ages, I've made a bunch of commitments. That's my experience.

I think most people's experience.

So you start to think about, Buying a house, if you're so lucky,

right? You start to think about getting a dog. Don't do it. You'll regret it.

You start to think, oh, I'm going to go to grad school. I'm going to settle

on a career. I'm going to commit to a direction. And I think this is what I

want. I have some confidence about it. So I'm going to do more.

I'm going to lean in more to this.

And most importantly, you start to flirt with another big commitment.

The question of who will I spend my life with?

Probably. You're probably going to ask this question.

And that's a serious thing. I mean, Jesus makes it really clear this is a really

serious decision because he's saying, like, whoever it is that you enter into

a covenant relationship of marriage with, like, that's the one you're supposed to be with.

And, like, God is coming into agreement with you as you come in and you stand

before him and you get married. And he says, that's it. One flesh.

Don't separate these two things. And so it is a serious commitment.

It's so serious that the disciples, we actually just jumped back into Matthew

19 for a second, they have something to say about it.

They say this when Jesus says that whoever are put together,

no one should separate. Whoever God puts together, no one should separate.

They say this, if the relationship of a man and his wife is like this,

it's better not to marry.

And then Jesus responds, not everyone can accept this saying,

but only those whom it has been given. For there are eunuchs, that is.

You can look it up. There are eunuchs who were born that way from their mother's

womb. And there are eunuchs who were made by men.

And there are eunuchs who have made themselves that way because of the kingdom

of heaven. And the one who is able to accept it should accept it.

And so Jesus is taking their comments that maybe we shouldn't even get married.

Like maybe that's like too big of a commitment.

And he doesn't say, oh, no, it'll be fine. Just do it anyway.

He takes their comment pretty seriously.

One commentator, Craig Keener, says this, and I thought it was really good,

particularly in their circumstances. He says this, one could not always know

in advance what one's spouse would turn out to be like.

They didn't really know the people that they were marrying that well.

I'm like, yeah, I actually could see their perspective where they're like,

I don't know. It seems like rolling the dice.

One would not always know what your spouse would turn out to be.

To marry without the possibility of divorce in a painful marriage seemed worse

than not marrying at all.

And responding to this objection, Jesus replied that some would indeed be better off not marrying.

Perhaps because of the intensity of their callings, it would be difficult for

true disciples to find compatible spouses who would share their commitments.

And I think that's really the thing at the end here is people who would share their commitments.

I just, before we kind of keep going here, I do just want to say that like,

if we read the Bible, not everybody's called to be married.

It's okay if you're called to singleness. Like we actually need to do a better

job in the church collectively and in our church of making room for single people.

So Kwame is super coupled, you know, like everybody here is married.

And so that becomes difficult when single people want to come in and connect

in a church because they're looking for meaningful relationships.

And most of our most meaningful relationships are with our spouses because most

people here are married.

I just think that's actually worth reflecting on a little bit for us.

Like how do we be a community that makes room for single people and help single

people develop those kind of meaningful, deep relationships that normally we

just take for granted because we get them in marriage?

How does the church do that for people? I think there's some marriage idolatry

going on. And Jesus says, I mean, Jesus wasn't married.

He had a full and meaningful and beautiful life of deep relationships,

of loving commitment, and he didn't have marriage.

That said, he says some people should accept this, but obviously the implication

is that not everybody's going to accept this.

So we need to, as we step out in this early stage as we're getting life,

we need to consider who it is that we're getting married to and consider this,

if we're going to be able to share commitments with them.

The next phase of life that Ronald Roheiser says is that you give your life away.

And let me just tell you, I think this is when it matters most if you've married

someone who shares your commitments.

I really like this language, giving your life away. I think that is a very good

and an imaginative way to think about what your life could be for.

I've been married 17 years now, which is not that long, I think, relative to the room.

But I've seen, I have seen as a pastor, a lot of successful marriages and a

lot of less successful marriages, a lot of marriages that are struggling.

And I think the marriages that work are the ones where the couple has together,

decided, what are we going to give our life away to?

They've done the work of discerning that and talking through it.

Discerning the individual members of this couple's gifts and callings,

unique abilities, and things that they're good at, and where God has put them,

and how God has gifted them collectively.

And they talk about those things, and they prayerfully and reflectively decide.

To join their lives together in a common purpose, maybe in different workplaces,

totally fine, but in a common community.

And they're just saying like, how do we make the most of blessing other people

with everything that we share together?

How do we, as a pair of collaborative people, each bringing our gifts and our

talents together, how do we give our life away? Because you're gonna give your

life away. Every day you lose it.

Every 24 hours, one more day has passed and so you might as well decide what

is worth living for together and then give your life to that.

What will both of you be willing to sacrifice and spend your life on doing to

the point that after 20, 30, 40 years, you can look back and say, that was worth it.

It was worth giving ourselves away to this purpose. The couples I know who are

doing well are the ones who are coming together as spouses and saying,

what is our shared vision for a life well spent?

And if you're married and you're in that middle stage of life,

I would just encourage you, if it's been a long time or if you've never done

it before, talk about this question.

What will we sacrifice for?

What will we get to the end of our life and say, yeah, that was worth it.

Yeah, raising children together, that's oftentimes where families end up.

That is valuable and that is good. It's helpful.

But there's probably more. There's probably more. And so I would just encourage

you, what can you share together?

And then even no matter where you're at, even if like one of you guys is really

into Jesus and one of you is struggling at this time, you can still come to

an agreement about things that you can share commitments on.

I do think if you're in that early stage of considering who it is you're going

to marry, do consider if they have a common commitment to your faith,

if they share your faith. I think that really does matter.

But if you're already married and that's not the way it's turned out,

you can still figure out what is worth giving your life away to and you can

have that discussion together.

And what I have seen is that if you don't have a shared vision,

you end up with kind of what James says in James 4.

James 4, 1 through 3. What is the source of wars and fights among you?

I never have any fights in my marriage, you know? No, we don't do that.

No, but like we do. And oftentimes it's because we're misaligned here.

What is the source of wars and fights among you?

Don't they come from your passions that wage war within you and your desires,

you desire and you do not have, you murder and covet and you cannot obtain,

you fight and you wage war, but you don't have because you do not ask and.

You ask and you don't receive because you ask with wrong motives so that what

you spend it on may be for your pleasure.

The temptation in any marriage is to just being like, hey, how can we spend

our time and devote our lives to having more of the things we want and more

pleasure and more of the things that the world tells us are really great and valuable and.

Any couple that I know who has devoted that as their why, made that their why,

have more, do more, experience more, gets to the end of it and just says,

oh, that was actually really a waste of time. What are you going to give your life to?

It's a good question to ask.

And then finally, the final stage, the Rolheiser says, and the worship team

can come up here because we are wrapping up.

The final stage, Rolheiser says of life is, and I love this too,

to give your death away, to give your death away,

The healthiest people I know are the ones who know they're not going to live forever.

And the ones who are accepting that this is just the way that everybody ends

up. I'm going to die one day. You're going to die one day.

Thanks for coming to church. Yeah, really, really encouraging.

Really, really, really, really good to know. But no, it is really good to know.

It is freeing to know that one day all of our busyness and all of our work and

all the things that we are devoting ourselves, our time and attention to, it'll all pass away.

And a lot of people go into their 60s, 70s, and then particularly on into their

80s, and they are surprised by how the things that used to sustain their attention

and their energies are suddenly taken from them,

their work, their relationships. They feel sidelined.

And yet there are those. I've seen people who come into those times where their

bodies are failing them, their health is failing them, where they feel like,

less important, less central, and they have great joy in the midst of all of that because they know.

That they've spent their life in a worthwhile place.

They have shot for what is goodness and faithfulness and they have experienced

the joy of walking with Jesus over many years.

They experienced what Paul says in Romans 8.1, if the spirit of him who raised

Jesus from the dead lives in you, then he who raised Christ from the dead will

also bring your mortal bodies to life through his spirit who lives in you.

What an amazing experience. I hope I get this old to have my body be failing

me, but my spirit rejoicing because we have so,

tuned our hearts and our attention and our joy to the things of the Lord,

where he's pouring in life even as our bodies are dying.

Paul talks about that in 2 Corinthians 6, I think, like how an amazing experience

it is that even though we're dying, we're having life poured into us by the

power of Jesus Christ and by the Spirit at work within us.

This is like dying is not something to fight. Dying is something that we should

accept. We should accept because we know that Jesus Christ is going to bring us through.

And see, this is the thing. Like we talked about, you know, law and not law.

And I would hate for you to walk away and just say, oh, so now in my marriage,

I just need to double down and I need to try harder and I need to be better and do more.

Hey, here's the thing. Like the Pharisees didn't get, they thought,

well, we can focus on the rules because we can control that.

We don't know how to become good people, people of love, people of faithfulness, people of joy.

And what Jesus comes into the world, he comes to a bunch of law keepers who

are trying to avoid being bad. And he says, can I just tell you what it is to be good?

And it's not to have a goodness of your own self, but it is to receive from

God the kind of relationship where sin is taken away.

And where by faith you are receiving from God all the resources and power that

you need to have a transformed heart,

and to be a transformed person and to come into a difficult circumstance where

you're fighting and you're angry and like you're dealing with being a normal

human being and you all of a sudden,

you have the spirit within you who God has given you as a gift based off of

faith, based off of his goodness and kindness and he's teaching you what it

is to have a transformed heart.

And he's equipping you and empowering you to be a transformed person.

Like the Pharisees, like they can't move towards what is good because they only

have the resources to avoid the bad.

But Jesus comes to people and he says.

You don't deserve anything. Like you're not righteous. You're not good enough

yourself. And so I'm going to give you the gift of a relationship.

And I'm going to put my spirit within you.

And that spirit over the course of a long lifetime is going to slowly transform

you and hone you and teach you,

to love goodness, righteousness, be people of love, joy, peace,

patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

The gift of the spirit is his resources flowing into us to the point where we

could say even though i die i know i'm going to have life because everything

good in my life has only come as a gift of god and of his gracious supply,

so i can give my death away i can give my life away i can find a life because

everything in my life has become a gift from god every day i wake up I'm not

excited about all the things that I'm going to accomplish.

I can be slowly and realize that actually God is going to meet me in my day.

He's going to partner with me and he loves me. He's going to sustain me and

I can trust myself to him.

We're going to take communion. And what we're doing here as we take communion,

we are just getting our eyes on what Jesus has done.

We're not saying, all right, God, we're going to hype ourselves up and we'll

do better. We're going to receive from God his kindness and his provision.