Rules for Covenant Breaking

Today's verse is 1 Corinthians chapter 7, 10 through 16.

To the married, I give this charge, not I, but the Lord. The wife should not separate from her husband, but if she does, she should remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband.

And the husband should not divorce his wife. To the rest, I say, I, not the

Lord, that if any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever, and she consents to live with him, he should not divorce her.

If any woman has a husband who is an unbeliever, and he consents to live with her, she should not divorce him.

For the unbelieving husband is made holy because of his wife, and the unbelieving wife is made holy because of her husband.

Otherwise, your children should be unclean, but as it is, they are holy. But if the unbelieving partner separates, let it be so.

In such cases, the brother or sister is not enslaved. God has called you to peace, for how do you know, wife, whether you will save your husband?

Or how do you know, husband, whether you will save your wife? I think as you hear that read, you should realize a couple of things.

One of them is that there are some curiosities in this passage, but the other part of this is this passage is pretty simple to understand the main point of.

And it should shake us that culturally, we have gotten this so wrong.

And many of the problems that we have in the nation today are from this very fundamental thing, is that what

God has put together, man should not separate. Marriage is a vow before God, and even for the godless, marriage is a vow before the state and before friends that you have dedicated and given your life to this person.

To tear that apart is to cause devastation, death, disorder, broken dreams, broken hearts.

And when it gets downstream like we are today, marriage is a very dangerous proposition indeed.

Because with easy out comes a lot of distrust and trouble.

And I hear it over and over. In fact, many of the conversations I have with older men in this church are working through the consequences of what we've done for decades now.

And we have young, we have boys and girls who are getting to marriage age, and it's just extraordinarily difficult out there.

And the reason it's extraordinarily difficult is because we have broken this beyond repair, it seems like.

And it can feel overwhelming. I can tell you from this spot, the hardest decisions, the hardest counseling that ever comes across my plate is always about marriage, it always is.

It's difficult, it gets broken, there's lots of factors going in, and what is simple, we'll find, is what we do is we hear something very simple and we recoil from it, we don't like it.

We look for excuses, and we're not alone. The very people that the Lord taught look for excuses right away.

Even when Moses was given the law, the people in their hardness of heart were granted a certificate of divorce to provide some measure of peace in the society.

And in Jesus' day, even the Jews themselves were putting their wives out often.

It was rampant, divorce was rampant. And Jesus speaks to a monoculture of Jews, and here

Paul writes to a church in the middle of a dark, pagan city where the

Gentiles have come in and there's all kinds of madness. And remember this letter, this letter is about division in the church, it's about being of one accord, it's about how the gifts are given to different members of the body for their own purposes, for them to come together and accomplish the mission that God has given.

And what we'll see in the thesis statement of this book, in this letter, is this, that marriages start to fall apart when

Christians forget who they are, what the resurrection has actually done, which has made what was dead alive, and it has given us allegiance, and we are now slaves of Christ.

And when we are slaves of Christ, that changes the way we have to operate. These are fundamentals. And what

Paul does here is he gives us a thesis statement that's not floating in the air. Remember, how do you guard against sexual immorality?

You get married, so you don't burn in passion. When you're married, you allow the outlet for the passion.

You stay together, you come together. If you're not coming together, that requires a conversation where you agree for a time to pray together.

Remember, not praying for Nigerian refugees, you're praying for the issue in your marriage that is keeping you from coming together.

And then you walk together. And if you start to go wrong there, if you have the blinking red light, which

I talked about last week, then we come to today, and today is death. I've labored long this week.

I try not to make it about me. But I can tell you, I've experienced death. And I want to give you some warning from a pastoral heart about what happens when this goes wrong.

We should be very afraid of this. And I look out in my congregation, and I think that I see the marriage, and I was trying to recount, who's had divorce?

Who's that been? And it's very few of you, very few. To God's glory, that is so amazing.

But everybody's been touched by it, by a friend, by a parent. It gets in your life, and it is very, very terrible.

When we go along haphazardly in our marriages, and we're not paying attention to what's going on, and we don't come together, and we start to become roommates, and maybe husband is not leading, and so the wife puts the pants on, and she starts dictating where the family is going, don't be fooled.

You are sowing the seeds for what's about to happen. And what's about to happen is the worst thing you can imagine.

If I could take away one thing in my life, it would be this devastation. What men meant for evil,

God meant for good. And I can tell you with full clarity that I would not be standing here today, I would not have the family I have,

I would not be the person I am if I had not gone through this devastation. But I should have been much more afraid of it as a man in my 20s than I was.

I thought it was impossible. I thought I'd tell the truth, I'm a godly man, it's all gonna be fine, and it was not fine.

It wasn't fine, and there were warning signs. So we'll get one of that, I won't leave you hanging, it's not to be a mystery.

I wanna frame this a certain way. This is a big deal. First, we have to understand that if you are a

Christian, your marriage is permanent, period. There is no way out unless you are a covenant breaker.

And if you're a covenant breaker, what other covenants would you break? Because if the one that is visible before you, remember, to break your marriage vow means that you are a carnal person, and you have decided that what you see in front of you is worth nothing, so what is your covenant with God worth?

The answer writes itself, nothing. Such were some of you. Divorce is a thing that should not happen in the church.

And when it does happen, it's because there is someone who is an unbeliever and a covenant breaker in this deal.

It's not okay, it's not okay at all. To the married I give instructions, not I, but the

Lord. Paul is using a quote here, and what he's going to do is he is going to extend, not in a different way, the teachings of Jesus, but what he's quoting here, the hardest thing that Paul is doing in this passage is repeating what

Jesus Christ said. Understand, verses 10 and 11 are the hard parts of this teaching.

Verses 12 through 16 are the exceptions, or the way when someone does something horribly wrong, what do you do about it?

But here is the standard. Not I, but the Lord, that the wife should not leave her husband, but if she does leave, she must remain unmarried, or else be reconciled to her husband, and that the husband should not divorce his wife.

Understand that in this entire passage, the instructions to men and women are interchangeable all the way through this, okay?

This is not like in Ephesians, because we are talking about legality in this passage. We are talking about judicial stuff.

Equal before the law, that is a thing that we rightly believe in in America, or we did, right?

Equality before the law. Equality not everywhere, but before the law. So the

Lord delivered this teaching in every one of the Gospels. In every one of them, Jesus says, I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife except for the reason of pornea makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

Matthew 19, six, this is the grounding for Jesus' teachings. They are no longer two, but one flesh.

What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate. Every person that is together in marriage,

God has joined together. Whether you believe in him or not makes no difference in the legality and the judicial side of marriage.

There is a covenant entered into that is a blessing of God to people so that people would be able to reproduce, multiply, take dominion over the earth.

Whether you give credit to God or not, you're a vessel of wrath or you're a vessel of mercy. Either way, you are doing

God's purpose and your marriage is a bonding, a one flesh union. See, our response to this teaching has been similar to the disciples.

Here's what the disciples said after Jesus said that. The two are no longer two, they are one.

Here's what the disciples said. If the relationship of the man with his wife is like this, it is better not to marry.

Boom. That is the Christless red pill movement in a sentence right there. Is it not?

She'll just divorce me and take all my stuff anyway, I'd rather not marry. And that is the logical outflow of this teaching that you are wholly connected with this person and there is no way out except for the one and we'll talk about that.

But what does Jesus say to them? This is crucial for us this morning. He says in verse 11, not all men can accept this statement, but only those to whom it has been given.

Now we went through Mark and there was a theme in Mark, right? That Jesus is saying words and some of the people don't understand a thing he's saying, some of the people understand part of what he's saying, that's the disciples, and then every once in a while in those stories, someone understands exactly what he's saying and that is the person that God has made sight.

They have spiritual sight. So in this case, if you can accept this statement, let me tell you, if you claim the name of Christ in this place this morning, you can accept this statement because God has illuminated you to his law, he has given you the meaning and the

Holy Spirit to regenerate your heart to where you agree with every jot and tittle of the law that will never pass away and that in your heart is this, there will be no way for you to divorce except for a covenant breaker who brings egregious, unrepentant pornea into the marriage, who defiles the marriage bed.

But if that doesn't happen, you are married and that is it and for you to try to escape that is to reject

God's plan, to stick your thumb and your finger up toward the heavens and say,

I don't care what you say, God, I want to be happy. This person annoys me.

This person's getting in the way of what I want to do and the answer is this, you come in and we allow it.

You come in, you've divorced your wife or you've divorced your husband, you bebop up to this table and you take a little communion and that's where the verses in Malachi make direct, direct application to what we do today.

The Lord will say, your religious activity is disgusting to me. You cloak yourself in robes of unrighteousness, you deal treacherously and you come into my house and offer sacrifices.

I want nothing to do with you. Stop divorcing your wife. It's serious because of the outflow because what

God has joined together, if you try to take it apart, there is no way. It's not like cutting the tag off of your shirt, okay?

You can do that cleanly. Divorce is like trying to split a rock apart.

It just shatters. It goes everywhere. So there's a message that Paul is giving and it's the hardest part of the teaching this morning that you are, when you get married and many of you are married this morning.

Those of you who are married, you need to hear this. You have a lifelong vow that only death ends.

Your witnesses have to hold you to this. Most church discipline that gets to the congregational level is about this topic.

It's about covenant breakers who forsake their marriage vows and go do what they want to do.

Are they Christians? The church doesn't recognize it. At least the church operating correctly unless they repent.

And this is the difficult part of the teaching, right? We always look for an escape, just like the disciples.

We look for escape clauses. What if he's real mean? What if he's kind of abusive?

What if he's a drunk? What if she always has a headache and won't talk to me?

What if she just won't listen to me? What if she nags me all the time? What if he's schizophrenic and has delusions?

What if she's depressed and won't get out of bed? Do we see that exception anywhere in this text?

There is not. And that's because what we do is when we look for these things, we are elevating our own personal happiness above what

God has called us to do. Right? And what Paul is going to illustrate to us is that marriage itself is a sanctification machine.

It makes you holy. Not in the soteriological way. It doesn't save you, but it does sanctify you.

And all of you who are married can say amen to that. You know this. You do not get to do whatever you wanna do when you're married.

You don't. And that's a good thing. That's a very good thing. This vow has teeth.

Understand it. That we don't go looking around at our spouse and we're waiting for them to trip so we can go, aha!

Sexual immorality, I'm out. We don't use it that way. The sexual immorality that Jesus is talking about that would end a marriage is the kind of hard -hearted sexual immorality that would result in someone being brought up here on charges, defending themselves against witnesses who have spoken to them, talked to them over and over to kick the sin, and they refuse to kick it.

That's the person who has brought sexual immorality in that can dissolve the marriage. Adultery is a category that by itself, adultery, when you have a one -flesh union with another woman or another man, you have broken the covenant for sure.

And if you want to repent of that, then I do not place the burden. I'm not going to sear the conscience for the aggrieved party to take you back, but I will say that it would be better if they do.

It would be better if they do. Because God is a God of grace, and I think oftentimes we handle this so wrongly.

We give grace to the wrong people who are not repentant, and then we don't give grace to people that are repentant.

Because what Paul uses, notice that word. I want you to see it. He says, if she does leave, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband.

Now, that's a very interesting word indeed, that word reconciled, because only Paul uses it in the New Testament.

He is the only one who says that word. And that word, every single time he uses it except here, is about us being reconciled to God through Jesus Christ.

Do you think marriage is important? So what he's saying is, wife, husband, if you screw up really bad and you dissolve your marriage and you become a

Christian, what you should do is not ever get married so that there's a possibility of the hostility that existed between the two of you being repented of completely by you coming back together.

That's the only way. If you get divorced outside of someone dissolving the covenant with sexual immorality, you may never get married again.

If you do, you're an adulterer. Such were some of you. Don't we treat this so lightly?

Don't we just, like the disciples, look at this and we hear the story, oh, it was such a bad marriage.

They were so mean to me. They wouldn't do any, they were just so emotionally abusive all the time.

So I couldn't take it anymore and I got divorced. But now I've met this guy and he's the love of my life.

And what the Bible says is you are an adulteress. And what we do is go, wow, man, that's really harsh to say you can never get married again.

No, what we do consistently is we look at marriage and we despise it. And then we wonder why we get what we get.

The Bible is so incredibly clear about this. Now, if you are in a grieved party who you have a covenant breaker, who brought porneia, sexual immorality of the grievous, hard -hearted, unrepentant kind, or who committed adultery, and that divorce happens, you are free to remarry.

And the reason why is because the covenant was destroyed by someone that's not you.

It's so serious. It's so serious. So what if you were sinfully divorced and you got remarried?

Here's what you do. You repent of it. You do not divorce again.

Two wrongs don't make a right. But listen, you are a guide mark and a post that that is a sin that you will have the effects of for your entire life.

And you should do your Christian duty to warn other people about the effects because you have made a royal mess of everything.

You're not qualified to be in the pulpit anywhere. You're not qualified to be a church officer because you will never be a one -woman man if you've done that.

And you should tell people the story. Here's what we understand.

And this, we get to the exceptions and how we deal with things in the real world. In short, there is zero avenue for two believers to end a marriage and remarry.

To allow this is to allow the leaven to infect the entire loaf of the church. Divorce is contagious.

Because what we do is when divorce happens, which we know by the statistics, 70 % of divorces in America are initiated by the woman.

So when she declares her sovereignty, divorces the man, what's gonna happen is she gets her woo -woo girls and they go have margaritas together.

And she talks about how awful he was. And they go, yeah, that's right, girl. You look for your own happiness.

And then they start to be microcritical of their husband and it spreads like a virus. And that's how we have it, even in the church.

Is there really a way? When you have someone in your life who is talking about divorce, you should warn them so soberly.

Guys, if you've not been through it, look, I see the tears out there, all right? If you've been through it, you know exactly what

I'm talking about. You can't imagine how horrible it is. You cannot imagine.

It destroys everything inside of you. It turns you into a different person. It makes you cynical.

It makes you distrusting. It makes you hate other people's family. It destroys your friendships.

It destroys all the bonds that you had with that extended family, gone. And when we don't have church discipline in the church, it destroys the church for you too.

And a beloved church that I was in failed in this area with church discipline. When I had a wife in my youth, not

Kelsey, let me be very clear about that. When I had a wife in my youth, she committed adultery.

She was unrepentant about it. She continually did it. I pleaded for her to come back. She did not come back.

And the church said nothing. And what happened is that church was dead to me then. I didn't even know it when it happened, but it destroyed me.

It destroyed me. And people that I loved, I was so disappointed in. And so it becomes a mission that what was evil has to become good, and that is this, is that we as elders cannot let that stand.

It has to be a place that hates this. We cannot tolerate what

God hates. We saw it right there in the call to worship, did you not? Could it have been more clear? God hates divorce.

He doesn't kind of like crinkle up his nose at it. It is an offense to him.

It is unnatural. You know this. Remember your wedding night. To tear that apart is unnatural.

It's disgusting. And we don't see it that way because we are so seared to it.

We are around it so much. And many of you guys, you don't even see the breakage that happens with children.

I was very fortunate that I did not have children with this woman. But when you have children with them, it wrecks their lives too.

And the generational sin goes on and on. Are they likely to get divorced too? Why, yes, they are.

They will have distrust for the opposite sex because they saw it go to hell in a handbasket.

And they don't understand because the most foundational force in any child's life is the stability of their parents.

We do everything based off of our parents being safe, right? No matter what happens, my mom and dad are gonna love me.

No matter what I do, like the prodigal son, right? Could you have done worse than the prodigal son?

He takes his father's inheritance. I wish you were dead, dad. I'm gonna take everything you got and I'm gonna spend it on whores.

And yet what we see is the picture of God's mercy is that the father does not tap his foot. He's watching, waiting for his son to come back.

And our kids watch us. They watch our marriage. They are seeing and they're understanding of their own identity, their own sexuality, their own loyalty, their own ability to be faithful, their own ability to be honest is being written and constructed by you.

That's what it means, these mysterious texts, when it says that this makes you holy. Can you feel the passion?

I have it. This is so foundational to the church doing what she needs to do.

And when we wanna look around and say, why is the church so powerless in the country? This is why. This is why.

Because we do not have young men who are courageous because they have no base of operation to be courageous from because their parents ruined them.

We can't accept it. Unequal yoking. You better be careful, young people.

If you marry someone who's not a believer, you have no protection at all. Paul doesn't even try.

Do you understand this here? Paul understands, and this is where he says, I, not the Lord. This doesn't mean that Paul is taking his apostle hat off and speaking non -authoritatively.

No, that's not what he means. What he means here is I'm about to give teeth to this law and I'm about to tell you,

Corinthians, how you're gonna be unified and you need to do what I say. Jesus did not go this far in the teaching because he was talking to a different culture for a different reason.

The church is established now and Paul is going to talk about what happens when things are bound that are unequal.

And the thing that happens is lots of strain, lots of stress, and potentially breakage.

Do not be unequally yoked. It is a sin to soft pedal someone's fake

Christianity when you're dating them because you think they're attractive. That is very, very stupid, young people.

Don't do it. I can speak from experience. So unwise, so foolish.

I stay awake at night thinking about it. That's what my week was like this week.

I reminisced about this. It was painful. It was very painful to remember how stupid

I was. And I've read these passages and I understand them, but I didn't apply them.

You have to apply. They're no good if you don't use them, if you don't put them in practice.

If my brother, if any brother, this is a believer, right? If a brother, a delfo, a brother has a wife who is an unbeliever and she consents to live with him, he must not divorce her.

And a woman who has an unbelieving husband and he consents to live with her, she must not divorce her husband.

For the unbelieving husband is sanctified through his wife and the unbelieving wife is sanctified through her believing husband.

For otherwise your children are unclean, but now they are holy. Yet if the unbelieving one leaves, let him leave.

The brother or the sister is not enslaved in such cases, but God has called us to peace.

For how do you know, oh wife, whether you will save your husband? Or how do you know, oh husband, whether you will save your life, your wife?

Here's what Paul is doing. Don't disconnect from context, it's very important. He has just taught them that your bodies are members of Christ.

Shall I then take away the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? May it never be. So the people of Corinth obviously take that teaching and they go, whoa,

I got married and now this person I'm married to is a blasphemer. They hate God. What fellowship does light have with darkness?

If I am fulfilling my marriage vows, am I not joining the members of Christ to a prostitute, to a rank unbeliever?

That's the question that's being answered. And then we get the specific natural law, spiritual application of marriage and what marriage is.

See the sinfulness of a person does not negate the vow and the covenant.

And marriage is a great covenant. It's the earliest covenant that was given to man. Was it not?

It was because the dominion mandate and the covenant that Adam's given to be fruitful and multiply only applied after he had marriage.

Marriage was the first institution for man and it is for our good and it is written into the hearts of most men and women.

You desire it, you want it and so you better handle it rightly. So am

I now joined to a prostitute in a defiled marriage since I'm now a Christian? No, no.

Is it good for a man not to touch a woman? Remember, that's how this starts.

No, it's not good. When you're married, you should touch and it is not a prostitution relationship because you have made vows before God and before the magistrate and you should not tear that apart.

But it's going to be difficult, isn't it? And the situation is as Corinth blows up here, as they become a church and they are starting to grow and they are turning the world upside down, this church is doing things, okay?

And while this church is doing things, people are converting to Christianity who were pagans before and they were in marriages now where there's a pagan and there's a

Christian in the marriage. It's real life. Friends, I want to see this again.

Not because of the unwisdom of it, but because I want to see lost people come to Christ and when they do, there's going to be stress that happens.

Is that not what happened in the New Testament as families were being saved? As men would come to Christ and they would go home to their household and they would tell their household and through the patriarchy, their house would be saved.

Right? Because we know even today that when a man comes to Christ, 90 % of the time his whole family does because men naturally lead.

Paul answers. His answer is astounding and you got to be careful with the wording. Do we believe that people that the unbelieving husband who has no faith in Jesus Christ actually becomes a

Christian through his wife? Being married to her makes him okay with God. No, that's not what Paul is saying.

What Paul is saying is that he has been uniquely put in a sanctification factory.

Marriage is a covenant that is righteously upheld. So if you are in it, then you have entered the machine.

Now, for the believer in this situation, and I hope this is none of you, and I hope this is none of our kids, right?

But it's gonna happen. As people come to the church, people get saved. They become a new person and they are married to someone who is not yet.

And here's what goes on. You enter into this arena and here is the machine. For the believer, here's how you're being sanctified.

You are being made holy through your patience, through your prayer, through your dependence on God and for your hope.

Hope is a thing that we have to understand because hope is what faith is towards, right?

We have faith in the promises of God that are unseen. We also know from our marriages that salvation is held only in the hand of God.

You cannot save someone. It is given by God. And so we hope that he will do it.

And we have faith that we will do it. And the way that's activated is that we pray that he will do it.

That's for the believer. Do you pray enough believer? Do you think that you would be more holy if you prayed more often?

Do you think you would be more holy if you desperately wanted something that you have no power to make happen?

That is the Christian life. That is it. But this is a near in your face sanctification machine because your spouse is an unbeliever and you get all of the trouble that goes with that.

And that is going to grind you down and you will be dependent on God. And we know this, friends.

We know this from the sadness of my story where I was in the shower not knowing what to do, sitting on my knees, crying out to God, crying and saying,

God, what do I do? What do I do? And in that moment, the peace that passed all understanding and I went to my grandpa's house.

I didn't even know why. And he gave me sage, godly counsel. And I'll never forget him for that.

He was so kind. And what I understood was this thing is broken. There's no coming back.

I wish it wasn't that way. You know, back in the day, I wish it wasn't that way. I'm very happy for the rewards that have come from being faithful since then.

But understand that being in a situation where you're being ground to a nub is where holiness happens. You don't get more holy when you're really comfortable eating a bunch of fatted meats at the table.

You get holy when you are dependent on God and you start to see with your visible eyes that things are not going well here and you start to trust him and then the invisible becomes more real.

Can you hear the voice of God when you don't even listen? The answer is no. Do you want to hear the voice of God?

Get dependent. Pray like Daniel did that the vision would come because if it doesn't come, you're dead.

Do you think he was serious that night? I do. I think Joseph was serious when he needed a word from the

Lord. Why do we act differently? Now for the unbeliever, because who knows? Who knows whether the believer is going to save the unbeliever?

Here's what happens. You get an intimate window, an intimate window, a one flesh union window into the goodness, righteousness and character of the

Christian life. That's what the believing spouse should be exemplifying. Unbelievable patience that is a gift of the

Holy Spirit. Peter 3, in the same way you wives be subject to your own husbands so that even if any of them are disobedient to the word, they may be won without a word by the conduct of their wives as they observe your pure conduct with fear.

See, Christianity makes atheism, paganism, ungodliness. It makes it feel uncomfortable.

That's what light does to darkness. It chases it off. You want to start making unrighteous people uncomfortable, you start living righteously and explaining the reason for your righteousness, which is not you.

It's the Holy Spirit's work in you to follow the book. And when you do that, it starts to make people upset.

Saying you love Jesus makes no one upset. Saying that you cannot get remarried because you'll be an adulterer according to God's law, that's gonna make somebody upset.

It's always applying God's law that makes people upset and that's why Christians must do it.

Are we gonna have evangelism by inviting everybody to a tea party together that's a big God loves you fest?

God loves your sin, man. He loves everything about you. No, he does not. He hates your sin.

He hates it so much and he loves his people so much that he poured out his bitter hatred of sin on his own son.

That is the gospel. You have hope, husbands and wives, if you're in this situation, that there is a sanctification.

And we shortchange all of this hope if we break our vows for our own well -being due to the other person being not a very savory character.

Make sense? How do you know whether you will save your husband? Understand this.

You are the primary means of the delivery of the word to your spouse. Your marriage is not about you.

It's a critical thing to understand. Our marriage is not about, it's not about myself. It's not about you.

It's actually about imaging Christ's relationship to the church so that that would be a testimony to all those around.

And even those who don't believe in Christ, it is about the natural good of having civilizations that are based on stable marriages with children who are not terrified.

Why are they on social media so much? It's because their parents pay no attention to them. They want you more than the screen,

I promise you. I promise you they do. See, this verse also, as I inevitably run out of time, there's breakage in Christian families when we mess this up.

Now, I do not want, I never go out of my way to get into the great baptism debates, so I'm not going to here, okay?

But there is a piece of this, right? I want you to look at it in context. Otherwise, so if the marriage is unclean, then that means the children are unclean too, right?

Understand what Paul's doing. He's saying your marriage is not defiled, therefore your kids are holy.

In what context? In the same context as the unbelieving spouse or is holy also.

It doesn't mean that they're Christians. What it does mean is that they are in the sanctification machine, and they're going to benefit tremendously, believer, from you staying with your spouse.

Whether their other parent is lost or not, they will tremendously benefit from you staying with your spouse and honoring your commitments and honoring your vows.

See, far from being defiled, far from being defiled, this marriage blesses children, and it blesses both spouses.

I know of several marriages like this, right, where there is an unbelieving husband or an unbelieving wife, and it is a very, very difficult situation.

And there's one that comes to mind immediately, and I pray for her. I don't pray enough.

I know it's a tough row to hoe. I know it is. But she has been so good in her conduct that he has asked questions, right?

And the reason he asked questions is because her conduct makes no sense at all, as she follows her great mother,

Sarah, and not fearing intimidation, but fearing God, and raising her kids the way that she should raise them and deferring to her husband who does not believe in Jesus whatsoever.

It's a beautiful thing when you see it, and if you know someone like that, you should encourage them. You should encourage them often, and tell them that you're praying for them, and then actually do it.

Pray for them. Think about them. Help them. Bless them. I end here. This whole situation, there's going to be breakage when this happens, right?

Because there is a necessity for church discipline. Because there's really two types of unbelievers in practice, right?

Two types. One type, these are easy. The ones who deny Christ explicitly. They have no story.

They have no regard for God. These guys are easy to understand, and guess what? They're not in here, right?

And very rarely does Tyler even talk to them on campus. It happens, but most of the time, we have the second type, okay?

These people who have some kind of confession, but they have no regard for God whatsoever or his laws.

They're not truly saved. They are unbelievers who sprinkle a little religiosity over their unbelief, and then they start to confuse us, right?

They confuse us. And so what we have to do as a church with people like that who are in the midst is we have to discipline them.

And if they are not repentant, they have to be given over to Satan after church discipline so that they don't confuse us and live in the loaf.

These are unbelievers, and they have to be marked as unbelievers so that we can judicially handle marriage cases.

When church discipline is forsaken, this gets very murky and very emotional. Because how do you let an unbeliever go if he's coming here every week taking communion?

When there's no church discipline, he's not an unbeliever. You understand? So we have to discipline.

When there is trouble in the marriage, you have to have a witness. You have to start building this case.

If he's an unbeliever that's going to abandon you, or she is an unbeliever that's going to abandon you, you don't get to just declare them an unbeliever.

That is an ecclesiological function. You don't get to decide, he left because he's an unbeliever.

Well, who said he's an unbeliever? Me. You are not a law unto yourself. And church discipline is here because God cares about justice.

And justice is established on the testimony of witnesses and evidence. You don't get to just say, well,

I let him go because he's an unbeliever. Like, well, I saw him taking communion three weeks ago, and he's an unbeliever.

It was fake Christianity. Sorry, you don't get to do that. And you see how messed up this gets? Because what we do as churches, outside of our partnerships, we do not have cooperation.

And so what happens is, even if you get church discipline in a faithful church, you're just going to bebop down the street and they'll take you in.

And this is not kind. It's not kind and loving to people because you need to deal with the consequences of your sin.

It should be a fearful thing to divorce because when you do it, you are being told by a group of believers that you are in hard -hearted sin and are giving over to Satan.

Do you think we'd have less divorce if people knew that was going to happen? I assure you we would.

We have laid down and not done it because we're afraid of causing division when failing to do church discipline ensures division because that person's going to get their faction.

They're going to get their Woo Girls, and they're going to build a faction, and they're going to take their clique with them.

So I want to sum it all up. Can remarriage happen? It can in one situation.

In the case of hard -hearted sexual immorality, the covenant is broken and it is like death. This is the only way that a believer can initiate and pursue a divorce.

That's the only way. Now, the victim of a covenant breaker can remarry.

They are not enslaved and will not commit adultery unless they marry one who has immorally ended a marriage.

You do not get to marry someone who has immorally ended a marriage. You can remarry if you've gone through the steps and it is an unbeliever who has abandoned you.

You are not enslaved. But there's a process. You don't get to just declare it like bankruptcy.

Let's sum it all up this way. God hates divorce because it makes a mockery of the image that it points towards.

So therefore, believers must not divorce. An unbelieving spouse can abandon, but there are conditions on this one for those who falsely claim

Christ. Understand that. And I know I'm repeating, but it's important we don't get here very often. This is like a one of one in scripture, okay?

So I wanna make sure you know. Do not use the exception clause of sexual immorality or unbeliever abandonment to be normative.

This should be very rare. Do not intend or connive to find a way out of marriage. Your commitment should always be to honor your vows, regardless of the other party.

See, telling the truth doesn't depend on the other person. Telling the truth depends on you. Holding your vows depends on you.

Not conditional. There is not spiritually even supposed to be another party.

Do you understand what the one flesh union means? There's not even supposed to be another party. You are one legal entity.

And when you become two legal entities, something bad has gone on. Strong marriages, strong families, and strong intergenerational church, the nation will result from our attention to this.

Don't let it happen. If you have warning signs in your marriage right now, treat it like the crisis it is.

Don't let it go another day. I know the alarm bells can be going off.

Men, I urge you, I urge you to do your job. Look at your wife, get with her today, and say, look,

I think things are out of repair here. I want to start working on it.

I want to pray through it. I want to get counseling. I want to figure this out.

Start praying that God will repair your marriage. Start praying that God will protect you from this disaster.

And understand what it is. It's not a way out, it's death. It's a terrible thing.

So treat it like what it is, and treat your marriage like the holy thing that it is. And church, I pray that as we are faithful in this area that we will have children who operate out of holiness, out of the situation where they are out of stability and they do see their parents walking with the

Lord and discipling them. And that is where this starts. It can be overwhelming thinking about all the problems out there, but what we're called to do is to be faithful in what

God has laid out for us. And that starts with fundamentals and very basic things. And if we have bad marriages, this place is doomed.

It's really that simple. We might as well pack it up and quit if we have bad marriages here, because it's not gonna work, okay?

So let's pray, let's be active. Let's get on this. Let's be serious about it.

Let's pray. Father, protect us, we will make a mess of it as we have done time and time again.

Lord, I pray that you would bring conviction of the Holy Spirit this morning to those who see warning signs in their marriage.

I pray that they would see the enemy, that they would see what they're looking at, that they would see the disaster that awaits from allowing the disrepair to continue.

Lord, I pray that you would bless our families, that we would have husbands and wives who love each other, who respect each other, who come in union often.

Lord, that they would have clear consciences at this table as they are having the building blocks of a stable marriage that results in stable children.

Lord, I pray that you would protect our church from the contagious scourge and leaven of divorce and sexual immorality.

Lord, would you purge it from our midst as far as we can see it and anywhere we come in contact with it. Lord, would you help us to have the words and the courage to treat it like the enemy that it is.

To not coddle it, to not tolerate it, to not accept it, but Lord, instead to rebuke and to walk alongside so that this can be thrown aside.

And Lord, through that, that men, women, boys and girls would be saved by the power of the gospel from the witness that comes from your people's mouths.

Lord, I pray that we would walk out the word so that we would speak it. And that as we get examined, that people would see the righteousness that you have given us.

It is not mere trifles and words that you've said that you have given us your very righteousness,

Lord. That means you have given us hearts that love your law. May we walk that way. Or may we understand, may we seek, and may we practice not to be hearers, but doers also.

Lord, we're dependent and we will pray these things and we will give you glory when we see them happen. We know that you are the power and you are the authority.