Love Up: Shacking Up with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the MetaCurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaCurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time in your life that God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

Well, want to welcome you in if you're new with us.

My name is Clayton.

I'm the lead pastor here at Meta.

And we are in a series called Love Up, where we are learning a scriptural view of love, sex, relationships, and marriage.

We started in week one by building a framework that all of the rest of our weeks are working out of.

And so if you weren't here, I'm gonna recap that for you, and I'm gonna suggest to get the full impact of today's message that you go back and go to Medichurch.tv slash love up and watch week one.

What we did is we framed up the conversation.

We saw how the pre-Jesus world framed sex and relationship and how Jesus and his movement radically revolutionized that understanding.

In the pre-Jesus world, this is basically all of ancient history before the movement of Jesus that we call church started, and still today, in many places where the good news of Jesus has not yet gone, their framework is selfish.

It's based on convenience, it is purposeless, it serves no purpose outside of them, no eternal purpose, and it is bad.

It is bad for almost everyone.

If you look at ancient history, you see that women had no rights, foreigners had no rights, anyone less than the top 10% of the ethnic majority males, everyone else was in trouble.

It was bad for all people in all places.

Sex and relationships were used to oppress and to dominate.

It was a terrible, terrible place to live.

Jesus, in that context, came in, brought a new ethic for life, including sex relationships and marriage, and his movement began to push that forward as it spread around the world.

This new Jesus framework looked like this.

Instead of selfish, it was selfless.

Instead of based on convenience, it was based on this new idea that we hold dearly today of consent.

Instead of being purposeless, it pointed to the highest purpose.

We believe that God created the world, he created us, he created sex, relationships, and marriage, and he made them good.

It is in our broken world that these things were distorted, and Jesus came back to start a movement to rescue and redeem all things, including our sexual and relational lives.

And because of that framework, the outcomes were good.

It was the movement of Jesus and this new ethic that led to more human flourishing and well-being than anything else on earth.

This is very different than what you will hear from the majority of society.

Our culture views the church, views Jesus and his movement as oppressive and regressive, when in fact it was the very movement of Jesus that made sex something that was good and beautiful, that was guided by the guardrails of consent that led to purposeful relationships and prioritized the dignity of all people.

If you missed week one, I really encourage you to go to metachurch.tv slash love up this week to check it out.

Today, I want to let you know up front, we are moving into what might be the most difficult message in this series.

And if you've been here, we've already had some doozies, okay?

This might be also the most controversial topic because it is going face to face with the prevailing ideas that our culture holds as true.

And so before we get into it, I want to remind you of a few things.

Metachurch is a place for all people.

At MetaCurch, we don't believe that God is a God of guilt, and yet we speak the truth without apology and believe that God uses truth to challenge and convict us.

Guilt says you are bad, you will always be bad.

The harder you try to get out of it, the more you will cycle into worse and worse behaviors.

Conviction says there is a better way to live your life, that you were created by God on purpose and with purpose, and conviction helps move you away from the ways of life that are not working into the framework that God created for your life so that you can actually reach your potential.

All of these things that I am preaching on throughout this series, I have made my fair share of mistakes, and then some.

This is not a place where we are pointing our finger at you.

This is a place where, as a community, we are focusing on pointing all of our lives towards God and the purpose that He has for us.

Are you good with that?

So we can get into today.

Good.

In week one, we looked at framing up.

In week two, we talked about matching up today.

In week three, talking about shacking up.

Shacking up.

And with that, let's pray.

God, we love you.

And uh we ask for wisdom as we guide through uh uh what could be a difficult topic.

God, we want to be like you, we want to follow you, we want to live the best life we can and have the greatest impact during our time on earth, and so we do not shy away from what is real.

We ask that you would guide us today.

We love you, and we pray this in Jesus' name.

And everyone said, Amen.

Today we are talking about cohabitation, cohabitation, shacking up.

And so we're gonna define this very carefully.

Here's how we're gonna define it cohabitation is a non-married, sexually active couple who are living together full or part-time.

Some of you thought you were off the hook until the last line.

Listen, Pastor, technically I still have the lease on my apartment.

There's nothing in there.

I've already moved it all in, but I still have that apartment.

I can't get out of it for another year.

No, you're on the hook too.

And here's why.

Because sociologists talk about what's called the cohabitation slide.

Okay?

You know how, like, the new thing today, we talked a lot about this last week, is uh when someone wants to holler, they will slide into your DMs.

Once you are in relationship, there's a good chance they might just slide into your living room, okay?

It happens slowly, and what they're finding is that most people are not deciding their way into cohabitation, they are sliding their way into it.

And it's based on two things.

One is just uh an increasing level of comfort the longer that you date someone, and the second is that we have a society with no guardrails on these things, and that actively promotes living together before marriage.

And so, you know, you start dating, and after a little while you go over to their house or to their apartment, and you're not comfortable at all, you know.

You don't know where things are, you don't know where to put your bag or your purse, you don't know which chair to sit in.

If you're thirsty, you wouldn't dare go make yourself a drink.

You know, they gotta go get it for you.

You don't know how to turn the television on.

If a couple hours in your stomach kind of starts talking to you, you're just gonna fake a phone call because there is no way on God's green earth you're using their restroom.

You don't know how thin those walls are.

You're just not comfortable yet, you know.

You fast forward six months, if you last that long, you'll walk in without knocking, you'll go to the fridge and make yourself a sandwich, you'll turn on the show that you want.

When that spicy Thai lunch starts talking back, starts threatening to push the exit button, you're like, guess we're going to a new level today, you know?

Raising the relationship.

And so eventually, you know, you watch a movie kind of late and you fall asleep on the couch and you're comfortable, so you stay asleep on the couch.

You wake up the next morning, it's a work day.

You gotta haul across town because there is no way you're showing up to work in what you were wearing yesterday.

You don't need that kind of drama.

You gotta get your teeth brushed.

You do that a couple of times, and it's just gonna be obvious.

You know, maybe I could just leave a couple outfits here, maybe buy a second toothbrush, and all of a sudden, you're on the slide.

It won't be long until it just makes sense.

You know, why are we paying two rents?

Why don't we put our schedules together?

Why don't we make this easy?

I know that there are a lot of us here at MetaCurch who are cohabitating as we have defined it.

A lot of people watching online or checking this out in the archive.

I understand it.

And you're not alone.

Um, it has become the go-to option in society.

In 1960, there were less than 430,000 people who were living together before marriage.

Today, it is more than 17 million.

In 60 years, our ideas about this have changed so dramatically that now there are more people who have cohabitated than there are who have married.

What that means, and this is new, for the first time in our culture, the majority of people's first shared residency experience in a romantic setting will be cohabitation, not marriage.

Nationwide, about 80% of people don't see anything wrong with it, and a majority of that 80% actually promote it as something that is good for you, good for your relationship, and good for your future marriage.

All that to say, even talking about this from a scriptural, counter-cultural position puts me in a tiny, tiny minority of thought in our culture.

I've heard the arguments and I understand the arguments.

You gotta try before you buy.

You wouldn't buy a car without test driving it, you wouldn't buy a house without a thorough inspection.

What if you're not compatible?

What if the sex isn't good?

Why are you wasting so much money?

Why not combine your finances?

Save money.

You know, save up for that big wedding that you guys keep talking about.

I understand that this is gonna be a really easy message for you to tune out or log off or ignore.

I want to tell you why I feel compelled to share it.

Number one, because I've spent my life studying the framework that the world has for how to do life, including sex, relationships, and marriage.

And I have seen the outcomes of that framework when people are not stealing aspects of it from Jesus.

I have also spent my life studying Jesus' framework for our life and am convinced that is what leads to human flourishing and the flourishing of our relationships.

There's a second reason I want to share.

I want to share this today.

I feel compelled to share this today because all of the real world data and research and statistics stands behind Jesus' framework, not the cultures.

So there are a few places that you can go where you will hear the very real outcomes of cohabitation.

But I care about you and I care about your future.

I care about your relationship and your future marriage, and I want to equip you with what is real because culture is trying to blind us to that truth.

And so we're gonna set a scriptural foundation.

So let's talk about it.

What does the scripture specifically say about living together before marriage?

What is the explicit teaching of the Bible about cohabitation, about shacking up?

Now, I know not everyone here has read the Bible cover to cover.

You don't know every single thing inside of it, and so I bet many of you are gonna be pretty surprised to find out that when it comes to cohabitation, the Bible explicitly says nothing.

Alright, that was easy.

I'll see you guys next week.

Thank you for coming.

There is no, thou shalt not live together in the Bible.

There is no the the man and woman dares not shaketh up, saith the Lord.

You won't find it.

There's one time that it is addressed, but it's not addressed explicitly, it's implied by Jesus.

And you may know this story.

Jesus meets a Samaritan woman, she's known as the woman at the well, and Jesus starts kind of digging into her background because he's God in human flesh and he knows all things.

And she says, I'm not married, and he says, Well, you've been married and divorced five times.

And then he says, and you're actually living with a man right now, but you're not married to him.

And if you study that passage, it's very obvious that Jesus is implying that living together outside of marriage is missing the mark on God's design for relationships.

And so we have this really interesting thing because I've been in ministry for a while now, and over the last 15 years, not just with cohabitation, but with all kinds of ways that people are missing the mark on how God outlines how to live our life.

I've heard countless people sit down and tell me, well, you know, I looked into it and I Googled it and I went to Bible.com, and the Bible doesn't actually say anything explicitly about that.

You might be right.

I want to suggest that is not a good enough excuse to not pursue the life that God actually has for you.

There are a lot of current issues that aren't explicitly stated in scripture.

You're not gonna find anything about wire fraud or tax evasion or drinking and driving or selling meth.

You're not gonna find those issues in scripture because those issues didn't exist when scripture was written.

The Bible was written 2,000 plus years ago.

It was written primarily in a Jewish context.

There's no prohibition against drinking and driving because there's no cars.

In the same way, it doesn't talk about cohabitation.

In the Jewish culture, that just didn't happen.

Once you became betrothed or engaged, the custom was the man had to build somewhere for the couple to live.

Usually they would build an attachment, kind of like an apartment, onto the family compound.

And until that man put the last nail in the last wall, they did not live together, they lived separately, they abstained from sex, and once the apartment was done, almost immediately they would have the wedding, and then they would get to consummate that relationship.

Cohabitation was not an issue.

And so, even though there are many issues that scripture doesn't explicitly prescribe in our world today, the overall framework of Scripture and how God wants us to live our life absolutely speaks to everything.

And when you take it in context, there is no other conclusion that you can come to other than cohabitation is not a part of God's framework for love, sex, relationships, and marriage.

In this series, that is the framework we're looking at.

To remind you, it is a framework that is selfless, consensual, and purposeful.

And by the end of our time today, we're gonna revisit that framework, and you're gonna see that when we stop just talking about relationships and start actually talking about marriage, that the framework actually increases in intensity.

This is what Jesus thought about marriage.

In Matthew 19, Jesus said, 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.

And therefore, what God is joined together, let no one separate.

This is God's plan that the two leave behind their separate lives and become one in marriage in every single way, including in a shared residency that happens at marriage and not before in the biblical framework.

And so here's where it gets really interesting, and here's where it becomes a difficult conversation.

There are a lot of topics in culture where scripture and culture intersect each other like this.

Like they're not always saying the exact opposite thing.

You know, you can go to a self-help seminar, and a lot of what you're gonna hear, at least the successful self-help tactics, are things that have been borrowed from the Christian worldview.

Servant leadership, getting enough rest in your life, setting your schedule to where you spend time with your family.

All of those things came out of the Christian ethic, and they've just been removed from their Christian foundation.

However, in our culture, when it comes to sex and relationships, those ideas are not at an intersection, they are moving in complete opposite directions.

Cohabitation is not a part of God's framework for sex and relationships, which means it is not good for your flourishing.

And yet, culture says cohabitation is the way for your relationship to flourish, and it is the thing that's going to help your marriage be successful.

Those two ideas are not at an intersection, they are at a contradiction, they are moving in opposite directions.

And so, how did we get so confused about this?

Well, what I see happening is there are arguments for cohabitation that I'm gonna call myths.

I'm gonna kind of hone them down into three myths about cohabitation.

And what you're gonna see is that the arguments steal from the framework of Christianity, but actually invert those ideas.

And if you are living together, you may recognize some of these in your own thought process or the advice that you got from people who genuinely care about you but just, you know, don't know better, or maybe if you're not, you might see this in some of your friends.

And if you're dating and considering living together, maybe you will see some of this in your own life.

Myth number one borrows from the purposeful part of the Jesus framework.

It goes like this this thing, living together, is preparing us for marriage.

Myth number one is that shacking up, living together, is preparing us for marriage.

What greater purpose could living together have than to prepare you to marry that person?

We know this.

Like every other marriage ends in divorce.

50% of marriages don't make it.

So if there's any way to increase your odds of not getting divorced, why not try it?

I'm gonna get right to the truth on this one.

The truth is that the vast majority of cohabiting couples do not end up getting married.

You may not know this, and this is research from Pew Research, from Gallup, from Barna, from all across the aisle show 60% of cohabiting couples do not end up getting married.

39% of those couples end up breaking up after spending usually years of their lives together.

21% don't break up, they just continue living together without ever getting married.

60% of cohabiting couples do not get married.

Myth number one is living together is gonna prepare us for marriage, when in fact, most of these do not end in marriage.

And the 21% who live together forever and ever and end up in kind of a common law marriage, there is almost always at least one of those partners who is absolutely destroyed, whether they say it or not, that they were never willing to go all the way and make the commitment.

And as we'll see in the other myths, as they continue living their life together, their quality of life will be far, far from what we would desire.

There's other problems because that means 40% of people who cohabit do end up getting married.

And so maybe we see that as a good thing, but not when you actually dig into the statistics.

Adults who polled consistently showed their standard for who they would cohabitate with is far lower than who they would marry.

And so it might go something like this Hey, the person that you're dating, would you marry them?

And they might say, No, or absolutely not, or hell no, have you met them?

You know, like there's a wide variety of answers they could give there.

And then they'll ask, Well, what about living together?

Would you live together with them?

And the majority of people will say, Well, yeah, I mean, we'd live together.

Our standards for who we will cohabitate with are far lower than those who we will marry, even though 40% of those cohabiting relationships end up in marriage.

A lot of times, a marriage that neither party is all that excited about.

This is really startling because for the other 60% who don't make it, you end up taking years off of your life where you could be out dating and finding a better fit in a forever and ever kind of relationship.

Not only that, but what most people do not know, and culture will not tell you this, is that as soon as you begin living together with someone else, you have put yourself in the prime position in society to have something happen that will complicate your relationship more than you can imagine.

Once you are living together, you are now in the situation where almost all unplanned pregnancies occur.

We don't think of it that way.

What we tend to think of historically is that people are dating, they get pregnant, and because they're pregnant, then they move in together.

That is not our society's narrative.

Since 1980, almost all of the increase in non-marital births in the United States has taken place in the context of cohabitation.

Not only that, but what studies have found again and again, and as soon as as soon as you start living together with someone, that this is when couples quit using contraception altogether or start using the least effective forms of contraception.

So now you are living together with someone who's far below the standard of who you would actually marry.

You have very little chance of this actually working out, but you have the highest statistical chance of having an unplanned pregnancy, which will complicate your decisions to no end.

The myth is that living together is preparing us for marriage.

Not only is it not preparing you for marriage, it's not preparing you to thrive in life.

Cohabiting couples report more depression and more alcohol related problems than married couples.

Sociologist Caitlin Thomas says even when controlling for race, age, and gender, cohabiting individuals reported higher levels of depression than married ones.

In another study, cohabiting individuals were three times more likely to report having problems with alcohol consumption than those who were married.

These are the facts.

This isn't thus, saith the Lord.

This is thus, saith the science, that is investigating the Lord's world.

When compared to married couples, cohabiting couples are less successful and less satisfied on virtually every area of life.

When you compare married couples to cohabiting couples, married couples have higher household income, lower mental health issues, less unintended pregnancies, and higher sexual satisfaction.

The myth that shacking up will prepares for marriage is absolutely false.

Not only do 60% of people who are cohabiting never end up married.

If you don't hear anything else, please hear this.

The 40% who do make it to the altar, the ones who do get married after living together, they do not decrease the odd of divorce.

In fact, all studies find that based on your age and place in life, you increase the odds of divorce by somewhere between 33 and 50%.

The myth that living together prepares us for marriage falls apart against the weight of real-world scrutiny.

It does not prepare you for marriage.

If anything, it situates you for an intensely painful path for your life.

Myth number two says living together just makes sense.

This is really kind of borrowing from the idea of consent that came from Jesus and his framework.

Like, look, we're two consenting adults.

You know what I'm saying?

We can make up our mind about this.

We both want to do it.

Why should it be a problem?

The National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia found that nearly half of 20 somethings agreed with this statement.

You would only marry someone if he or she agreed to live with you first, so you could find out whether or not you really got along.

Half of 20 somethings, the prime age for marriage, said, I would not marry someone unless they agreed to live with me.

About two-thirds said they believed that moving in together before marriage was a good way to avoid divorce.

Not only are you being misled by a culture that continues to say that living together is the key to happiness and marital bliss, you are being lied to.

Two-thirds of people under 20 have bought the lie that living together first will decrease your odds of divorce when in fact it will increase it significantly.

This really isn't an argument from consent.

This is an argument from convenience.

It just makes sense to live together.

We have way more buying power if we're like sharing our incomes and we can get a better apartment, a bigger mortgage, you know, we can save more money, put more in retirement.

If we live together, then it will be so much simpler, man.

We can sync up our schedules, you know, we can buy less groceries.

I hear all of the arguments.

Here's what you're missing.

We think living together will make our life simpler, and that's because we don't understand a very, very critical fact of life.

Here it is.

You are an almost infinitely complex person.

The person you're with is an almost infinitely complex person.

If you're someone who's like, I don't know, man, I'm just kind of a simple kind of man.

No, you're not, dude.

You just are unaware of who you actually are.

You are complex.

Men especially are like, I'm just simple, man.

Just feed me and you know, let me watch the game and leave me alone.

It's like, no, you're not.

You are complex.

We all are.

We're the most complex beings in the universe.

And ask any married couple: bringing together two complex people's lives is anything but simple.

It's incredibly difficult.

It'll be so great.

We can just start, you know, sharing a calendar and getting our schedules together.

Do you know what that requires?

It requires y'all wanting to do the same things at the same time, to schedule it the same way, to invite the same friends.

And in the midst of all of that, you're dragging all of your baggage from the complexities of your life into every one of those arguments.

You think, oh man, we'll save so much money.

We'll like, think about it, man.

We don't have to buy double the groceries.

Really?

Then you live together and find out you like different kinds of coffees, and you like butter, and they like, I can't believe it's not butter, and you like Dasani water, and she thinks Dasani water is toilet water, and you drink whole milk like a real man, and she will only drink almond milk, and you put your foot down, I don't even know what they're milking on these almonds.

That will be the least of your problems.

It gets so complex so incredibly quickly.

And the statistics bear this out.

Compared to married couples, cohabiting couples argue more, they have more trouble resolving conflicts, they are more insecure about their partner's feelings.

Of course they are, there hasn't been a commitment made.

They have more problems related to their future goals, they make less in household income, they save less for retirement, and it gets worse.

You know, we move into simplify things, and then six months later, your life and your relationship is more complex than you ever, ever could have imagined.

Your finances become intertwined, your credits become intertwined, they know all of your passwords to everything, they know all about your life.

You share your furniture, you sold all your furniture, now you have no furniture if you were to break up.

You bought an animal together, who gets custody of the animal if y'all break up?

It gets so difficult.

I'm gonna tell you something today you probably have never heard.

It's like the most depressing dating advice ever, and so you're welcome for that.

The most important tool that you have while dating is not your good looks, it's not your charm, it's not your problem-solving skills.

The most important tool you have while dating is the ability to break up.

Breaking up is not a bug in the system, it is a feature.

There are eight billion people on planet Earth, and almost none of them will be relationally compatible to you.

To find the right person to spend forever and ever with, you first have to have the ability and skill set to say no to all of the wrong people.

Breaking up is so, so critical.

And once you begin living together, and now that your credit scores are tied together, and both of your names are on the lease, and one of you sold all of their furniture, and you have a puppy dog that you both love equally, it is so, so difficult to break up that many people will live together forever or even get married against their desires because it's a better option than all of the stress that separating would cause.

We have far lower standards for who we would live with than who we would marry, and yet once we begin living together, we start playing marriage to the point that we can't find a way out of it.

This becomes even exponentially more hard if there are children who are born into the picture, and of course, once you're cohabiting, we've already learned that you are at the highest risk for an unplanned pregnancy.

Now you're not talking about who gets to keep the dog, you're talking about custody of the children.

There's been a lot of work done on this.

Family researcher named Wendy Wong says cohabitation is also associated with greater family instability.

And family instability in turn is strongly linked to poorer child outcomes.

Nevertheless, more and more children today find themselves living in a cohabiting family, at least for a time.

It's a heavy message.

And it's jarring to hear the truth behind the myths that culture has been pushing our way over and over and over again.

And so I want to stop and come up for air and just remind you where you're at.

If you grew up in church and you had a lot of sermons that felt like this, and you and God and He's mad, and I'm mad, and we're all mad at you, this sermon right now could be in danger of starting to bring back those memories.

And we're not pointing fingers at each other, we are attempting to point our life towards God.

And you are a valuable human being, made in the image of God, an image-bearer of the divine.

You were created on purpose and with purpose, and because of that, you deserve for someone to tell you the truth.

I care about you, and I care about your relationships, I care about your marriages and your future marriages.

I want you to thrive and to flourish, and I want you to have all of the facts that you need to make your way towards that thriving life.

Myth number one is that living together is preparing us for marriage.

Myth number two is living together just makes things simpler when in fact it will make things more complicated than you could ever imagine.

Myth number three is that living together is a selfless act.

The selfless part of Jesus' framework is maybe even like the foundation of it.

To go from a selfish society to a selfless society.

It's huge.

And so this is how we talk about moving in together.

You've seen the movie, it's a romantic comedy.

As a matter of fact, it's every romantic comedy.

There's a millionaire playboy, he has tin pack, even though there's only actually six abdominals in your body, you know.

He makes millions of dollars.

He lives in a penthouse.

That's his man cave, that is his domain of masculinity, that is his hideout from the world.

And almost every night he has a different woman in his bed, you know, different models every night of the week.

He makes tons of money, millions of dollars, and he works in the office where he's the boss, and everyone is subservient to him.

And of course, in this office is kind of a quirky, hardworking woman, you know?

And in these movies, they take like Julia Roberts or someone, and we all have to pretend that because she wears glasses and has a messy bun, she's hideous all of a sudden, you know?

You know how the story goes.

One day they run into each other in the hall and her glasses go flying, and her hair comes down, and as she swoops back up and looks at him, he thinks, Sarah?

He knew she was hardworking, she keeps the whole office going for him, you know?

He just never realized how beautiful she was because of those darn prescription glasses.

It's an unlikely pair, but they start dating and falling more and more in love.

And finally, you get to the scene where he brings her up to his place.

After a night of passionate love making, he sits up and looks deep into her eyes and says, Let's do something crazy.

Why don't you he surveys his palace to make sure he means it?

Why don't you move in with me?

What?

She says, How come this is your man, Cain?

You love this place.

Move in here.

You love your house.

Shh.

No.

I love you.

You didn't know your boy's an actor.

It's way.

Y'all were in the movie right now.

Credits.

I just love you so much.

You know, I I feel this relationship is so special.

I want to take it to the next level.

I, I, me, my, I, I think we should move in together.

What?

A selfless act.

But it's not.

And it's only in a highly produced, highly scripted Hollywood movie that you can have a complete pre-Jesus framework and actually get Jesus type of outcomes.

You see, there is something happening inside of cohabiting relationships where people think they are on the same page when in fact, once again, they are moving in polar opposite directions.

According to the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, the underlying reason for the rise in cohabitation is a lack of male commitment to marriage.

This is what they found.

Men experience few social pressures to marry.

They gain many of the benefits of marriage by cohabiting with a romantic partner, and they are ever more reluctant to commit to marriage in the early adult years.

This can be summarized by an old saying.

And let me tell you, it is a very crude saying, but it is an accurate saying.

And it's been around for a long time.

And you need to know this men will not buy the whole cow if they can get the milk for free.

That used to be a saying that applied to a very small percentage of people, and now cohabiting is more frequent than marriage.

It went from a small social problem to an epidemic relational reality.

Studies find that women are almost always hesitant about moving in together, but are often drawn into it by relational insecurities.

Not always, but statistically, in most relationships, the man and woman are thinking diametrically opposite of each other without ever knowing it.

Psychologists call this gender asymmetry.

This is what they say.

Women tend to see cohabitation as a step towards marriage, while most men see it as a way to stall marriage.

In other words, women, you need to know that the man you're living with does not think about this the way you think about it.

Men, you need to know the woman you're living with does not think about this the way you are thinking about it.

Women think if we move in, he will pop the question any day.

While men are thinking if she moves in, it will buy me a few more years of freedom.

Men and women think differently about this stuff, and you can really see that exposed if you compare a bachelor party to a bachelorette party.

A bachelorette party is a celebration of all that is ahead of you.

A bachelor party is a freaking funeral for the life you don't get to have anymore.

At a bachelorette party, they're like, oh my god, you're so lucky, y'all gonna make such beautiful babies together.

A bachelor party, they're like, bro, what is wrong with you?

We made a pact.

Single for life.

It's completely different.

And these are the mindsets that we bring in to living together.

And so, women, how do you get them to marry you?

There is an answer.

You nag them to death.

They're either gonna marry you or murder you.

And this is one of the reasons, of many reasons, why cohabiting individuals end up divorced later, because when push comes to shove, and that man gets so frustrated.

The truth is he didn't choose this, he was pushed into it.

He liked the way things were just fine.

This is not how we set things up for success.

Cohabiting is not selfless, especially when you understand the data.

It is selfish to take away your partner's most important tool of being able to break up without massive collateral damage.

It is selfish to put them in a position where people are statistically poorer, less healthy, unhappy, less likely to get married, less likely to stay married, and more likely to experience abuse and violence.

It really is a paradox because at the same time, shacking up makes it way too hard to break up, and it makes it way too easy to break up.

Compared to a simple dating relationship where you live on your own, it's way too hard.

And so people stay in these relationships for way too long.

But compared to marriage, it's way too easy to break up.

No courts, no lawyers, no divorce, no chance that they're gonna take a percentage of your wealth for the rest of your life.

What tends to happen is that women get caught in the trap of it being way too hard to break up compared to if you were just dating in separate residences.

And men tend to take advantage of the fact that it is way too easy to break up with no strings attached.

Above everything else, it is spiritually selfish.

If we believe in God that He made this world, that He created us, that He made sex, love relationships, and marriage, then anything we do to cause someone else to step outside of His framework is selfish in the highest spiritual sense.

When you make the move from just talking about relationships to actually talking about marriage, the framework, Jesus' framework makes an important change.

It is now not just selfless, consensual, purposeful, and good.

It is now a covenantal relationship.

You move from simply having, you know, consensual relationships to the actual covenant of marriage.

This is what Hebrews says a marriage is to be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept undefiled, because God will judge the sexually immoral and the adulterers.

The word honored there is a Greek word that's used many times throughout the Christian scriptures.

It's often translated precious, and it's often used about the blood of Jesus.

Look at how the Apostle Paul describes marriage.

In Ephesians 5, we're gonna look at this next week.

He says, Husbands, love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her.

Gave his life for her, shed his precious blood for her.

The precious blood of Jesus is what purchased a new spiritual covenant for you and I.

And when you stand at the altar in front of God and friends, and you make that lifelong commitment, you are entering into a covenant.

In the same way that God, that Jesus will never, ever back out of his covenant made in his precious blood.

We are intended to never break the precious covenant of marriage.

From Jesus' perspective, cohabitation is choosing our selfish desires over what our partner deserves.

It's seeking to get the benefits of marriage without the commitment to the person who is giving you those benefits.

It's choosing convenience over covenant, it is trading in the incredible purpose of marriage for what is sold as the simplicity of a living arrangement.

I know that this is a tough message, especially for those who are currently living together or planning to live together in the near future.

I need you to know here at MetaCurch, we are not mad at you, we are not disappointed in you.

I understand how easy it is to slide into cohabitation.

I understand that everything in the culture actually promotes that.

But I care about you enough and the purpose that God has placed inside of you to give you the facts and to come alongside of you and see if we can help make things right.

You need to know.

Last week we talked about sexual promiscuity and how rampant that is and how much it hurts you and your future and your future marriage.

We're talking about the real cold, hard facts of cohabitation and how it could affect your life.

But you also need to know that nothing is beyond redemption if you're willing to give it to God.

Here's what we believe: cohabitation before covenant, before marriage, is a pre-Jesus framework.

And again and again, we see the results of trying to be our own gods and create our own framework outside of his.

And so, what's next?

What decisions need to be made and how do you make them?

This is where we want to come alongside you in a very real way in this very tough series.

On August 20th, you heard earlier, I'm gonna be leading a love up workshop.

This is for people who are married, you want your marriage to go from good to great, or maybe your marriage is on the rocks, you really need some help.

This is for people who are engaged and need some premarital help to set you up for success.

And this is for people who are living together and you need to figure out what your next step is.

The way this workshop is gonna function, it's four hours long.

It's from 9 a.m.

to 1 p.m.

We're gonna do some serious work, and when you sign up and we get both of your emails, you'll be sent an assessment.

It's$35, it's not our cost, it's the company we work with.

We've worked with them for years.

This assessment is so unbelievably powerful, which means I'm hoping for a hundred couples to be at this workshop, 200 people.

But if you take the assessment, that workshop will be custom tailored to you and to your relationship.

It's a powerful, powerful thing.

And I'm hoping that it will help you assess your options.

If you're living together, here's what I see as your options based on what you now know.

Option number one, this is always an option, you can just ignore this.

Ignore this message, ignore the data, ignore the facts, ignore the scriptures.

You can ignore this.

You have that choice every single Sunday.

I don't think it would be wise.

You can't ignore this.

The next two are what I would prescribe as your next steps.

Number two is to separate for success.

This is if you're living together and you know this is not a forever and ever kind of thing.

Or maybe you're confused.

You don't know, you need some help deciphering.

You have some high highs and some really low lows.

Separating for success does not mean that you are breaking up, giving up.

It could, but it doesn't necessarily.

It means that you need space to allow God to work on you, for God to work on them, so there is a chance for the success of this relationship.

Number three is to make plans for matrimony.

For some of you, you're gonna come to the Love Up workshop, you're gonna take an assessment, it's gonna tell you you have incredible marriage momentum.

It's gonna help you see the little warning flags, but that y'all are a great fit.

And so it is time to man up.

It is time to make it official.

It is time to get down to the altar.

And it is time to give the person you're living with what they deserve from you.

We are pro-marriage here, man.

We are pro-family.

We just want marriages that work.

We don't want you to be just another statistic in a study someday.

Meta church, we want to rise above that.

You can ignore this.

Separate for success.

Make plans for matrimony.

If you will sign up, take the assessment, honestly take it, and show up on August 20th.

I think you could lead there with great clarity on your next steps.

And you need to know this is your church.

We are your pastors, and we will help you.

We will help you through the mess and complication of separating out lives that have become so intertwined.

I know it will be complicated, but you also need to know every day you stay in it longer will get even more complicated.

We will help you make plans for marriage.

We'll help you stand before God and some people you love and say, I do.

We'll relieve some of that burden.

We want to come alongside you, and so we invite you to sign up.

They talk about marriage and they call it holy matrimony.

To be holy is to be separate, it is to be set apart.

What breaks my heart so often is people who have lived together and they've lived together and they've lived together and they finally get married.

And you'll ask, so what's it like?

And the answer is usually, I don't know, man, kind of.

Same thing, just got a piece of paper now, you know.

We made it official.

Is that the dream?

Is that God's plan?

Is that separate, special, holy, unique?

I desire that for you.

And to come alongside you with some tools to help you get there.

So here's how we're gonna close.

I know there's heavy hearts.

I know we've been very challenged today.

There's a lot of confusion about how to move forward.

And so we're gonna pray a blessing over you, but I'm gonna do something that I don't know why I've never done it, but in 15 years of ministry, I've never done it.

And I'm gonna invite my dad, Calvin Tiner, to join me on stage.

Katie and I are coming up on 10 years.

My dad and mom just celebrated 40 years.

They've got real skin in the game.

They're humans, so they did not do everything right, but they did a lot of things right.

And I know life has been hard, and I know you've had ups and downs, and life has been hard, and I happen to know for a fact that your kids have been hard a lot of the times.

And you've stuck in there and you've stayed in the adventure.

Y'all have made it to 40 years and you'll make it far beyond.

They're a shining example to Katie and I.

And the reason I'm here with a passion in my heart to help you understand you have a purpose, to discover that purpose and to live it out, is because I had a father who helped me believe that about myself.

And so I've asked him, and he's agreed, to take his 40 years of skin in the game, 40 years of walking, not just with God, but also with my mom, and to pray over you.

And so I want to ask you, right where you are, to bow your head and to close your eyes.

There's nothing magic about closing your eyes, just create some space for yourself to receive this blessing in this moment.

Let's pray.

Lord, thank you for just loving us.

Lord, and giving us all these blessings of relationships that are complex.

And they're even more complex when we ignore the examples that you give us.

Help us give our relationships to you to set them apart, to view them as holy.

Give us the courage to consider our relationships in the light of scripture and what we've learned in this series.

Help those who may have some very difficult decisions to make and the relationships they might currently be in and future relationships.

Give us the wisdom to make the right decisions.

Help us all to have the courage to do the right thing and not just the convenient thing or to take the easy way out.

Help us to show grace to others as you have been gracious to us.

Lord, show us how to have covenant relationships, just like you love us, fully, selflessly, sacrificially.

Thank you for loving us.

Thank you for a church where we can come and struggle with these hard issues honestly, without judgment.

Thank you for our pastor who is willing to preach these hard truths in love.

We love you, Jesus.

Help us, Lord, to love you.

Amen.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

If this was helpful to you and you want to help us get the word out, you can subscribe to this podcast.

You can rate and review or share it with your friends.

If you want to get connected further with what MetaCurch is doing, you can go online to metachurch.tv.

There you can learn how to take next steps.

You can learn where our different venues are at if you ever wanted to visit.

And you can also give financially to help push this movement forward.

Man, I love you guys and I hope you have a great rest of your day.