Jesus Refutes The Profanation of Marriage

If you would turn with me, please, to the 19th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 19.

Before we look to the Word of God, let us once again ask His blessing upon our time. Our gracious Heavenly Father, we do ask that you would be with us now by your

Spirit, that during this time we would truly hear from your Word, that your

Spirit would minister to us, speak to us clearly, Lord, that we would be prepared to be servants of yours in this evil and perverse generation.

We pray these things in Christ's name. Amen. It has, once again, been one of those weeks.

If you were here on Wednesday evening, I noted a number of developments that had taken place in our culture, developments of an ungodly nature.

And since then, yet another development took place. I was, in preparation for this morning, taking a few moments to read through a 40 -some -odd -page decision rendered, ironically, by a federal court judge by the last name of White.

No relationship that I am familiar with. Certainly not a worldview relationship that I would be familiar with with this particular man.

And you may be aware that certain elements of the Defense of Marriage Act, which was passed in the 1990s by the

United States Congress, were struck down. And in the reasoning of this striking down of these provisions, which in essence allowed a state to, the law prohibited the state, and people sued in regards to this, prohibited the state from allowing a lesbian couple, a, the,

I don't even know, how do you describe these things? The wife? Which one's which? You just, you can't,

I mean, honestly, you can't even, you can't even speak about these things in a meaningful fashion.

But one of the two wanted to apply for the federal benefits.

They had been married in one of the states, quote -unquote, that now engages in what we simply have to honestly call the abomination of marriage.

And in giving his decision, the judge in essence said that what has been done in the past, the standards of the past, cannot be used as guidance for the future.

In other words, the consistent testimony of human experience, and certainly the consistent viewpoint of every single man who is involved in the writing of the

Constitution of the United States, is irrelevant to how we should read this document in the future.

A revolution is taking place in our country today. It's a revelation to us of just how far man will go to seek to eradicate every bit of example of God's law and God's rulership in human society.

It's a revolution, and it's a revelation to us. For we've all been saying, well, it's coming, it's coming, but in our heart of hearts, we put it far enough down the road that, well, it was, it was still a good bit in the future.

It's not in the future. It's here. I was reading an article last evening. The provincial government of Alberta, Canada.

You say, well, those are the Canadians. The provincial government of Alberta, Canada had just informed

Christian schools and homeschoolers that they had to include in their curriculum, in teaching in the home, diversity training.

Now, in case you have been asleep, you live under a rock or in a lead mine.

Diversity is the new word, which means anything that is opposed to Christian morals and ethics and godliness.

That's what diversity is. Whatever it is, you're supposed to embrace it.

And it's very clear to me that whatever it is, it's the opposite of what I believe. And they don't have to embrace that for some odd reason.

I have to embrace their viewpoints. It's not even a rational way of thought and thinking. And here you have a government telling parents in the home that while you can give religious instruction at another time of your views on homosexuality, while you're doing homeschooling, you need to teach what we tell you to teach in regards to homosexuality and gay marriage.

Now, as we think about these things this morning, I want to speak especially to the young people.

And I hope that every comment that I make will be relevant to all of the people of God.

I don't want any of you to feel like you can tune out now because you no longer consider yourself to be young.

But especially those of you, I would say, between 12 and 25 years of age, right around there.

The world wants your heart. This world wants your heart and your mind.

And they're going to do everything they can to convince you that what you are taught in this place should be marginalized in your thinking.

It's only your religious upbringing. You should not allow it to have anything to do with how you actually live your life.

You are probably already aware of the fact that our society is saying to you that if you want to be relevant, if you want to be with it, if you want to be accepted, that you need to abandon any ideas that there is any transcendent meaning to life.

You are but the chance result of a random process of natural selection and mutation.

When you die, you will cease to exist. There is nothing after death. There is no spiritual nature that is yours.

Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you die. That is the world's view.

That is how you are supposed to view yourself and others. And when it comes to institutions amongst men, what you've been taught is that if it's always been done that way, it must be wrong.

We are the most intelligent generation. We are the ones with iPhones and iPads and we have the

Internet and we have Wikipedia. How could anyone have ever really made moral decisions or thought through anything clearly until we came along?

That's what you have been taught. That is the pressure that's placed upon you to think in that way.

And when it comes to the issue of marriage, what is being said today is that the profanation, the degradation, the blasphemous redefinition of marriage, that is already in existence in seven of the states, in the

United States, is absolutely inevitable. It's going to happen from the top down.

And why? Because of you. Because of you. The young generation right now.

You accept it. According to some polls, 70 % of your generation says,

Oh, that's fine. It's a civil rights issue. We need to treat everyone fairly. 70 % of your generation has given in to the thinking that marriage is something that is defined by, well, what we feel about it.

It's not a divine institution. And the government can regulate it and tell all of us what we should think about it.

And so my question for you today, young people, is what is your ultimate authority?

What is your ultimate authority? Is it the pressures placed upon you? Is it the way of thinking of the world?

Or is there a divine revelation that tells us what God's intention for our life is?

I hope you realize the cost of not having a

Christian worldview in your generation. Is there anything for the younger generation that's worth dying for?

Seriously. I ask this of all of us. Is there anything worth dying for?

I mean, if this life is all there is, and you are just lucky enough to come into existence, and you don't have any transcendent meaning, and you don't really have to worry about the generations after you, because you're going to be dead and gone, and there's no spiritual aspect to you, and there's no community between us that's relevant, the most important thing is your happiness, your fulfillment, then you don't need to have kids, you don't need to worry about the next generation after you worry about any of those things.

If that's true, is there anything worth dying for? Obviously, every generation before us thought there was.

But I don't know about today. Because if I'm all that there is, and when

I'm gone, that's it, then how am I any different than my dog or my cat? I've often noted that my cats hold that worldview.

Everything came into existence when they did. And everything will go out of existence when they cease to exist.

And everything that exists, exists for them, including myself.

The first thing I must do when I get up in the morning is I must serve them. And I must step over them, whether they are between my feet or not in the dark.

It does not matter, I am supposed to somehow see them. And I am supposed to serve them and give them the food that they like in the morning.

And how are we any different than them? If there is no spiritual nature to us, if there is no purpose, if we are not creatures of God, called to walk as those made in His image, with responsibilities toward Him and toward those around us and those

He puts us in relationship to and to the generations to come, how am

I not like a cat or a dog? And why should I not behave like them? When it comes to the issue of marriage, why do we believe that it's between one man and one woman?

Isn't that just one view? And aren't all views equal?

That's what we're told. We don't live that way, by the way. Nobody in this room lives thinking that all views are equal.

And it's absolutely idiotic, it's foolish, it's stupid to think that all views are equal on all things.

You do not live that way. I don't live that way. A year ago, a year and a month ago or so,

I had cardiac ablation surgery. You know what? I did not ask

Brick to do it for me. Now, Brick's a wonderful man. And if I wanted to have my lat pull -down machine fixed at my house,

I'd ask Warren or Brick or George. They'd do fine. I would not ask the man who got paid,

I don't know, $200 ,000 to do that procedure. I would not ask him to fix my lat pull -down machine.

Because I recognize not all opinions are equal. And Brick's opinion about how to do my heart surgery, not quite the same level as the cardiologist that I trusted to do it.

No, we all live that way. And yet, when it comes to this matter, our society has dumbed us down so much that every opinion is equal.

Every opinion's equal. And yours is just one opinion. You think it's one man and one woman.

And yeah, a lot of people believe that. But you know that we have to give the same amount of respect to those who say it's two women or two men or, well, what else?

Because, you see, if you think about it, logically, rationally, why stop there? There are people who want to marry their dogs.

They do. They love them that much. In fact, some of them found their dogs even more faithful than the people they were married to.

So they love their dogs more. Why not let them marry? And we know that there's a lot of people, there's a lot of guys that like to marry to 10 women.

Especially up in Utah, they already got that started. And maybe the other way around.

And why not brothers and sisters and moms and dads and kids and grandparents? Let's just make marriage whatever we all feel like it should be.

Then we can all be very inclusive and feel warm and fuzzy. Is that how we define things?

Well, for a lot of people today, is it just one opinion amongst many?

It can't be for a Christian. It can't be. Matthew chapter 19, beginning at verse 1, we read these words.

When Jesus had finished these words, he departed from Galilee and came into the region of Judea beyond the Jordan, and large crowds followed him, and he healed them there.

So the Pharisees came to Jesus, testing him, they were tempting him, and asking, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all?

And he answered and said, Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said,

For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh?

So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man.

Now, what the Pharisees are doing is they're trying to get Jesus into the middle of a current theological battle of his day.

There were two primary rabbinic schools at that day, that headed by Shammai and the other by Hillel.

And they had different views as to the nature of divorce and the reasons for divorce. And so the question, which was a temptation, it was a testing, was specifically designed to get him embroiled in the inter -rabbinical school debates of the day.

Get him wrapped up in that. And maybe if we can get him to side with one side or the other, then he'll stop skewering all of us.

And Jesus' answer avoided getting into any of the battle at all, because he went back to what we would call the creation ordinance.

That is, the intention of God in the creation itself. Notice what he says.

He answered and said, Have you not read? Let's stop right there.

Have you not read? I was probably insulting to these men, because many of them had memorized major portions of the scripture.

It would be like us. If we had to rebuke someone, have you not read

John 3 .16? Well, we all know everybody in this room has read John 3 .16. Well, okay, there's some babies in the back.

We'll have a few exceptions, but we've all read John 3 .16. And so when you say, have you not read, you're calling to memory something that should be the first thing in your mind.

You should recognize this. And immediately we recognize where the problem lies in our society.

Oh, it's not just an ignorance of the Bible. There's no reason for ignorance of the Bible in our day.

It's never been more available. I have more translations and scholarly material on this piece of equipment on the pulpit than existed in most libraries a hundred years ago.

There's no reason for the ignorance. The fact is, our society as a whole has adopted this attitude toward the revelation of God.

I don't hear anything. God hasn't spoken. It's a fundamental shift of attitude in our society.

God has not spoken. But the same society has not yet gotten to the point in large portions of our society where they're willing to say, and Jesus was wrong.

In fact, for some reason, even the homosexuals run around going, well, Jews never said anything about homosexuality, which is one of the most absurd things anyone's said.

But they like to say it. Why? Because you like to invoke the name of Jesus. There aren't too many folks.

There are some, but there aren't too many folks who would openly skewer his name.

They'll skewer his law. They'll skewer his gospel. They'll skewer his people. But they don't want to be caught doing that in regards to Jesus directly.

Our society doesn't care that when Jesus was asked about marriage, he answered by doing what most of us aren't allowed to do on a radio call -in talk show anymore.

You start quoting the Bible, you might get five words out before you're going to be cut off. Jesus said a little bit more than that.

In fact, Jesus quoted from the very text of the Bible so many today would simply identify as a myth.

He quotes from Genesis 1 and 2. And if you end up in seminary somewhere today, you'll be taught those are two different creation myths that have been rather clumsily sewn together by a later redactor.

That's not how Jesus viewed it. Which has always made me wonder why these professors who claim to follow

Jesus think they're so much wiser than him in regards to the Scriptures. But that's for another day. Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female?

Literally, have you not read that the creator, the one engaging in creation from the beginning, male and female, made them?

In other words, Jesus' first corrective to their errant question, which was just jump into our little debate, was to say you've all missed the point of the debate to begin with.

Jesus goes directly back to the creator and the fact that the creator has an intention in how he creates.

That is one of the gravest dangers, my friends, and especially, again, young people, that our society faces today.

Not only do we not believe that, but we have actually decided that we will use our technology to change the creation.

To change the creation. What would I be referring to? Well, you know cloning is coming.

You know that we are playing with the very essence of life. And you may know that now our society has become so perverted in its evil that there are clinics opening up where parents can take their children, 5, 6, 7 years of age, to receive hormone replacement therapy to change their sex, their gender assignment.

And the idea that God has a purpose in maleness and femaleness.

We think we can change that. You know, we're starting to learn enough about this incredibly complex thing called life.

Well, of course, we don't look up high enough to see that, well, it must have come from, if it's designed, then there had to have been a designer.

No, we won't see that. We just suppress that knowledge. But we're starting to learn enough. We can start tinkering with things.

What will be the result? I don't know. But it will be disastrous, whatever it is.

The Creator created male and female. And they're good things.

They're necessary things. He made us the way we are.

And immediately people say, oh, but you've just got to understand, in this world, there are some fathers that are just such terrible fathers that they warp the next generation.

Well, sin does that. There are some mothers, they're just terrible mothers, and they warp the next generation.

Sin does that. But the profaning of a good gift does not mean the gift itself is not good.

And we have to get over the attitude that is fostered amongst many in our society that if you had bad stuff happen to you, well, that excuses any type of behavior you choose to have as a result.

I've never understood that. I don't know how my parents communicated it to me. But somehow, when

I was knee -high to a grasshopper, they communicated to me the truth that I'm responsible for how

I live my life. I can't blame somebody else. I can't blame their failures.

I'm responsible for my own happiness. There are some people that choose to be happy and some that just choose not to be.

I don't know how they got that through to me, but they did. And I recognize that God has a purpose in maleness and femaleness.

That is a part of His created decree. What that means is, if we are the creatures of God, then when we change

His ordinance, we can only do so to our destruction, never to our betterment.

Never to our betterment. My wife and I both ride bikes.

And we both have these gadgets that we put on our bikes. And we've got this thing in the back that can tell you how fast your wheel is spinning, hence how fast you're going.

It also can tell you how fast you're pedaling, how many revolutions per minute. And it wirelessly transmits that to a device up front.

It's amazing what these things will do these days. For some reason, she has issues with her cadence meter.

And so yesterday I said, ah, it's not working again. And I tried to rematch it.

It's just not working again. And so what do we do? Well, I don't use hers. I could, on mine, it would be pretty easy because I know which buttons to push and all the rest of this stuff.

But I had to go online. I had to download a document that would tell me how to work her particular unit.

And what we eventually found out was that was a waste of time. And the battery was dead in the doornail. So, you know, we should have gone for the easy fix first.

But I just didn't think it would have happened that fast. But, you know, we got it working.

The point was I had to look at the instructions, even once I got the new battery in, how to work her particular unit to get it to work right.

There was a set of instructions. It never crossed my mind to get mad at the folks that made that.

There was a group called Garmin. Garmin wants me to have to follow their instructions to make this work.

What about my freedom? Why can't I assign certain buttons to where I want the buttons to be?

Never crossed my mind. That unit was designed to work in a particular way.

And if I want it to do what it's designed to do, I had to get the instructions. And I had to follow the instructions.

How many modern human beings stand on their two feet and look up to heaven and say, how dare you tell me how

I should function? Yeah, you made me. Yeah, you designed me. Yeah, you know how

I'm supposed to have the greatest happiness and joy in this world. But I want the freedom to do it my way.

Is it any less foolish than if I had gotten mad, picked up the phone and called

Garmin and said, why did you put that button on that side? I want it on the other side. Why did you make this red?

I want it green. What foolishness. And yet, is that not exactly what we do to God?

Is that not exactly how this generation is thinking? Oh, yes, we recognize that this is how, you know, if you want a society to continue, you've got to have children.

You all know that unless the average child -bearing woman has 2 .1 children, I'm not sure what the .1

looks like, but the 2 .1 children, that the society will begin to decline and disappear.

You've got to have that many kids or the society is not going to survive. There are some countries that have figured this out.

I have a Muslim friend in Australia. Just found out his wife's expecting. She gets,

I think, she gets 28 weeks off. He gets, I think, six, all paid.

And a $5 ,000 bonus for having the kid.

You know why? Because there's only about 30 million Australians. And it's a big country.

They need more Australians. And so it's good for the government to go, have kids.

We will reward you for it. So it's not a financial strain on someone to have kids.

There in Australia. Isn't that interesting? You see, they recognize there's something good about having kids.

In case you haven't noticed, two men together cannot have kids. Two women together cannot have kids.

Oh, yes, they can. They can have artificial insemination and all the rest of the stuff. You still got to borrow from the people that are doing it the old -fashioned way.

You can't do it. You can't create life. It's not possible. God didn't design it that way.

He created them from the beginning. He made them male and female from the beginning, from the very purpose of God.

But our society says, oh, no, no, no. We're not worried about what God's creative purpose is because fundamentally they're saying there is no creative purpose.

That's just all myth and mythology. In fact, the term that is being used, and we have some legal minds amongst us.

They can confirm this. The term that's being used in the initial, when the homosexual judge in San Francisco, that was fair, wasn't it?

Yeah, right. In a very unbiased fashion, initially struck down Proposition 8 in California, the term that he used was animus.

See, I don't know what it is, but lawyers like Latin. I think it's because you can charge more when your documents are filled with Latin.

Well, I don't know what that means, but once you find out what Latin means, it really doesn't actually mean anything other than what we just say in English, but you still get to charge more for it.

Sorry to any lawyers in the room. Animus.

What they're saying, and this came out again when the Ninth Circuit did the same thing just a couple weeks ago.

There's an animus against homosexuality. Oh, well, we don't want animus, right?

I have animus toward homosexuality. You know why? It destroys life. It destroys life.

It destroys the life of those who engage in it, and it destroys the life of those who would otherwise have been born had the male not decided to chase after men or the female after women.

It's destroying the societies in which it becomes predominant. I have an animus against it as I have an animus against murderers and thieves and drug abusers because it destroys life.

Any human being must have animus against that which is evil. So you see,

Jesus starts off taking us back to God's intention in creation.

And when we mess with that, when we think that maleness is just something that, well, you know, once you get a little older, maybe 10, 11 years old, we'll introduce the idea of, maybe you want to try being a different gender.

In other words, we'll make you God. So, He who created made them male and female.

That's from Genesis 1. And said... Some people say this is just Jesus saying this.

I think this is Jesus saying God said this. And He said, for this reason, for this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, God has joined together.

Let no man separate. May I say something to you, young people? You have more opportunities to impact the thinking of this society than many of us who are older have.

Because these are topics of conversation amongst you and your peers right now.

And I know the looks of disapproval that will come your direction if you stand for what is right and what is true and what is honest.

I understand that. What I'm saying to you is, if you believe that this is true and honest and just, you don't have any choice.

You need to be a servant of Christ. And you need to be a light in this society. And when you have an opportunity, what you need to be able to say to someone is, marriage is a divine institution.

What? Therefore, God has joined together. Let no man separate.

Now you might say, but wait a minute. The government regulates marriage. We didn't have any arguments about this 50 years ago.

Look, my friends, the only business government has in promoting marriage is getting citizens.

It's the only business it has. The only reason that advantages have been given to married people is the government wanted to have citizens.

You've got to keep the population growing. I mean, think of how many...

We've forgotten. We haven't been... You know, we've been in some protracted wars recently, but they haven't been massive casualty wars.

It's not like World War II. It's not when you would drive down the road and you would see those stars in the windows.

Most of us aren't old enough to remember that. I'm hearing this from preceding generations. But everybody knew someone who had died, had given their life, and there wasn't much talk about not having big families back then.

No, no. The only reason government regulates marriage is because that's where you get new citizens.

Marriage is a divine institution. And the nation that refuses to recognize the origin and shape, form, and function of marriage as coming from God's hand is the nation that is standing before God and saying, give me your best shot.

And that's a nation that will not long be upon the face of this earth. That's a nation that ends up in the history books as a result of its fall.

Marriage is a divine institution. And you know what? I understand in your generation, young people,

I know in your generation, what they want to hear is something positive. Well, you have something positive to say.

You have something positive to present. You can say, you know what? Real Christian marriage is a

God -ordained covenant. It's God -ordained. Let's say you're a young person and you're married.

We've had some marriages recently. And you're married. You can look at the people of this world and say, you know what?

I've experienced a divine act. I've experienced a divine act.

God has blessed me so that I have been able to enter into an institution that He Himself ordained and He has blessed my union with my husband and my wife.

Because, you see, we're obedient to Him. And it's one man and one woman. We've come together.

Jesus taught that this was the way it was from the beginning. The man shall leave his father and mother.

Not his father and father. Not his mother and mother. Not his father and mother's.

Or his mother and father's. The perpetuation of this institution is seen in the founding of the family.

And a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife. That is only something

God can do. You want to see God active in this world? Look at what

He's done. When He joins people together and those two become one.

And in all the trials and difficulties of life, they don't become two again.

They become even more one. What a testimony it is to our world when they see

Christian couples united together and they stay together for 30, 40, 50 years.

What a testimony it is. What a beautiful thing it is. But, my friends, hear what

I'm saying. Hear what the world is saying.

They had a picture in one of those articles of the two women that had brought the suit that I had mentioned at the beginning that resulted in a part of DOMA being struck down.

And here are these two women. And I looked at that and I said, those people aren't married.

God did not join those two. Oh, you terrible whore! That's hate speech!

No, what you're doing is hate speech toward my God. What you are saying is hate speech toward Jesus, the

Messiah. What God has joined together, what has

He joined together? Does He join two women? No! Does He join two men? No! If it's going to be a divine union, if it's going to have that blessing, if it's going to be marriage, a man leaves his father and mother, he's joined to his wife, and only those two can become one flesh.

The great horror of the profanation of marriage in our land and in our societies today is very simple.

You cannot love a mirror. You cannot love a mirror.

And that's what a man and a man and a woman and a woman is. It's a mirror image. Homosexual profanation of marriage is the ultimate act of rebellion against God out of pure selfishness.

Selfish! That's a mirror image of me. Every married person in this room knows, truly married,

I don't think we have anybody who's profaned marriage in here in that sense. Every one of you in here knows that it is the differentness of that husband, the differentness of that wife that God uses to change you.

Do you want to see a young man grow up? Let him get married. Oh yeah.

Oh yeah, changes everything, doesn't it? And the other way around. But especially the impact of that woman, that young man.

Talk about, oh yeah, changing his way of viewing the world.

And himself and his time and his money and his activities and his clothing and his all sorts of things.

Maybe his personal grooming habits. I mean, all sorts of things. I don't think there's a man in this room that would not testify,

I thank God that my wife has made me a better man. But it wasn't her manly aspects that did it.

You cannot love, in the marital sense, a mirror. And that is the great, devastatingly horrible thing about this profaning of a divine institution is it involves a mirror image and that union is never a union.

It is selfish in its core. It is selfish and a rejection of God's purposes and that's why it never creates life.

It never creates life. It cannot create life. They have to take our children and how sad it is.

How sad it is that there are women in this valley today in those types of relationships who have gotten themselves pregnant artificially.

They're going to have a kid. They're going to have a child. May I suggest to you there's almost no better definition of child abuse than that?

Think about it. We weep when we think about, right now, we think about servicemen lost on battlefields and when you read the obituary or you read the article, two young children and our hearts go out to them and we give money for their college educations and their medical expenses because they've been deprived of their dad or maybe their mom.

And we recognize that's a terrible thing and yet in these institutions we do it purposefully.

Purposefully deprive them of the balanced example, father and mother, that Jesus talked about right here.

We purposefully deprive them. It's an abuse of children.

And doesn't it make sense that if we live in a society that is turning its back so purposefully upon God's purposes and God's right to say this is right and this is wrong, doesn't it make sense that as we look at our society, how many unborn children do we murder?

How many now are we condemning to abuse in that type of situation? Even to the point of introducing foreign chemicals in their bodies to change their bodies into something other than what

God created them to be. And those parents are looked at as being enlightened on the cutting edge of societal evolution.

It's perversity. It's self -destructive perversity and if somebody knew something about the history of this world, it's not the first time this stuff has happened.

But history will tell us every nation that engaged in it destroyed itself.

So young people, remember I'm speaking to you. You have opportunity to speak to your peers about these things.

Do you understand now why we say what we say? Most Christians, well, homosexual marriage is wrong because homosexuality is wrong.

That's true as far as it goes. But there's something much more positive. True Christian marriage following Jesus Christ as Lord in your home.

Women subjecting yourselves to your husband even though the world says you're not supposed to do that. Trusting Christ.

Men loving your wife as Christ has loved the church in a self -sacrificial way.

That's not how the world says to do it. But under the Lordship of Christ, that's what we do. That's a good and positive thing to present to people.

When people say, it doesn't hurt you if I engage in homosexual marriage. Yes, it does.

We do not live on an island. You are taking an institution that my

Lord blessed and my Lord defined and you are perverting it.

It's supposed to give us life and you're making it the very source of death.

All out of rebellion and selfishness. You might say to me, okay,

I agree. It is a beautiful thing. And I agree that when a beautiful thing is profaned, we should speak out.

But do you really think it's going to change anything? Look, unless God grants repentance to this nation and this culture as a whole and I include

Europe, I include Australia, what we call Western culture.

Unless God grants repentance, we have already sown the seeds of our destruction and great will be the fall thereof.

But you see, we do not do what is right in God's eyes based upon a pragmatic analysis of well,

I think we're past the tipping point so I guess we might as well shut up now. That's not why we do what we do.

We are called to be light. Christians have existed in every nature and culture that has disappeared since the time of the cross.

And what did they do? As that culture was marching into oblivion, as that culture was destroying itself, as so often it was associated with homosexuality, because Paul says that's the ultimate example of what it means to twist

God's good creation. What were Christians doing? They continued to be a light.

They continued to point the way to Christ. They continued to point the way to life.

That is all we can do. That's what we've been called to do. And yes, that often resulted in their suffering.

Yes, that often results in their having to count the cost. What will we do?

What will we do? That is the question before us this day. Let us pray together.

Our sovereign, just, and holy King, we affirm the goodness of your law that represents your purposes in creation.

We recognize that we are creatures made by your hand. And Lord, we recognize we live in a land where there are many who are openly choosing to reject your ways, knowing what your ways are.

Lord, we pray that you would make us to be instruments in your hand, lights that you would use to bring about repentance, to save your lost sheep.

Lord, use us. May we be clear in our understanding. May we ourselves fully understand what your word says so that we might communicate it to others and be used to your honor and glory.

Lord, protect marriages in this place. Protect the families.

May our marriages be testimonies to the world. And Lord, for the young people in this congregation,

God, help them to love you and not this world.

May they love you. May they find in following your purpose for their life, in being used as servants of yours, their greatest calling and joy.

May they be zealous in the proclamation of your King.