Symphony of Survival in the Key of C, Part 1

Today, from Chuck Swindoll. Becoming one, you learn to become a unit. You hammer away at it. All the sinful struggles and habits notwithstanding, you find a way to get there. And you realize, having slugged it out, through the hard times, you realize in unguarded moments as your head sinks.

You're glad you made it work. You're glad your partner didn't walk out. For the last few decades, the institution of marriage has been under siege. Some of those attacks are very deliberate. Most are nothing more than negligence.

But the result is the same. Husbands and wives feel immense pressure to give up. After all, marriage is too hard. Well, today on Insight for Living, Chuck Swindoll presents an alternative. His convictions are rooted squarely on Scripture and the timeless wisdom of the Bible. Whether you're married, single, divorced, or widowed, there's something for everyone in the message Chuck titled, Symphony of Survival in the Key of Seed. In your worship folder, you will find an outline for this morning's message, Symphony of Survival in the Key of Seed.

As we shall see soon, that seed represents commitment, which, of course, is a secret of a long-lasting marriage. Genesis chapter 2, we have looked at before. Once again, please, chapter 2, verse 24.

We'll glance into a couple of other chapters briefly before our time in prayer and offering this morning. Genesis 2, 24. For this reason, a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

The man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. Verse 1 of chapter 4, please. Now the man had relations with his wife Eve, and she conceived and gave birth to Cain, and she said, I have gotten a manchild with the help of the Lord. Again, she gave birth to his brother Abel. Abel was a keeper of flocks, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.

Then across the page, chapter 5, first few verses. This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day when God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. Please take note of the last phrase. When originally created, man was made in the likeness of God.

Now watch closely. He created them, male and female, and he blessed them and named them man in the day when they were created. When Adam had lived 130 years, he became the father of a son, please note, in his own likeness, according to his image.

Note the difference. Now that sin has come, now the birth is in the image of the parents, and he named him Seth. Then the days of Adam after he became the father of Seth were 800 years. He had other sons and daughters. So all the days that Adam lived were 930 years, and he died.

Well, you thought you were old. In the patriarchal era, they lived long lives, hundreds of years, but as sin took its toll, life was finally decreased to a few score years, and it's passed. Join me in prayer, please. Thank you for your grace, our Father, giving us what we don't deserve and reaching down, stooping to us in our needs.

When you have no needs of your own, you of all things are moved with compassion over us in our pain and sorrow and grief and hurt and feelings of insecurity and lack of trust and fear and on and on the list goes. Forgive us, our Father, for forgetting that you were there. Forgive us as a country for going our own way and ignoring what you have commanded and expected.

Forgive us as a people for mishandling your truths and misrepresenting your son more often than we want to realize. Nevertheless, today, grace brings a new day for us, grace to forgive, grace to go on. Guide us, our Father, even as the psalmist has written, For this shall every one who is godly pray unto you in a time when you may be found. Surely in the floods of great waters they shall not come nigh unto you.

You are our hiding place. You shall preserve us from trouble. You shall compass us about with songs of deliverance.

Then you have responded, I will instruct you and teach you in the way which you should go. I will guide you with my eye upon you. May we be sensitive to the direction you lead us as a church, as a family, as individuals. As people who work in a world that's lost its way, among those who don't know your name, give us authenticity of life and the grace to live honestly and openly before others. Now, Lord, we are facing a challenge before us as we look into this passage of Scripture.

I ask for your help. As it unfolds, may we realize the relevance of your Word. And as we give, may we remember you have first given to us, and because of that, we're able to do this. In the name of the Lord Jesus, we give and we express these needs. And all of his people said, Amen. I'm speaking to a 21st century audience trying hard not to sound like a 19th century preacher.

That's interesting, isn't it? There's a name for guys like me, a preacher who still believes the Bible, who thinks we need to adjust our lives to it rather than force it to adapt to us. Someone told me the other day, you know what they call you when you're not around? I said, no, a dinosaur. I said, really? Yeah, so I went home and checked Webster's and found the definition means out of date, obsolete, impractical, extinct.

But that's better than the first rendering, which is carnivorous oversized reptile. I was telling another group of people this and one of the men walked up and said, Don't feel badly, one of our grandkids calls me a Neanderthal. How times change. There once was a day when a preacher was really determined worthy if he stood on the faithfulness of God's word.

That if you truly believe the Bible was God's word and if you believed in the discipline of hard study and if you faithfully taught it, prepared well and delivered it regardless of the times, that was a compliment. But in our day of great liberality, that's not so. And in fact, how can God's word so ancient ever be considered a relevant message for a world like ours, full of tyranny and terrorism and abuse and the kind of heartbreaking situations in which we find ourselves?

Easy to get sort of lazy about the Bible. The words of G.K. Chesterton come to mind. He writes, What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction, for it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but not doubting about the truth. This has been exactly reversed. We are on the road to reproducing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.

Sometime it's nice to know there are fellow dinosaurs running around. One is Chuck Colson, whose work in Breakpoint often makes us pause and listen closely. In a piece dated September 9, 2004. Depending on your vantage point, you might look back on the summer of 2004 as the summer of Hurricane Charlie, or perhaps just the summer of the Athens Olympics. But Will Haygood of The Washington Post has another name for the summer of 2004. The summer of bad husbands.

If you flipped on the news at all this summer, perhaps you've noticed it too. Mark Hacking's name appeared splashed across headlines in August with the reports that he shot his wife in her sleep and then disposed of his beloved in a Utah landfill. Subsequent investigation found Hacking entangled in a supersized web of deceit, including a phony story about his acceptance into medical school. A story that he had his wife, family and friends all believing. Meanwhile, we've heard odd nauseum about Scott Peterson that trial this summer. The phone conversations with mistress Amber Fry days after pregnant wife Lacey's disappearance, his break for freedom. And we've seen more than enough of the Kobe Bryant saga with his repeated line of defense. Yes, he cheated on his wife.

No, he's not a rapist. And then in less violent, but certainly no less scandalous news, there's been New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey's resignation. While gay activists looked on with pride at the governor's announcement.

I am a gay American. McGreevey's wife stood next to him with the dazed look of a woman twice betrayed. One can only imagine the emotional fallout for his two daughters. While trend spotters can find a trend in just about everything, the Post's assessment of the pattern of events is intriguing. Buried halfway into Haygood's article is a priceless nugget. A quote from David Kahn, former Los Angeles prosecutor famed for prosecuting the notorious Menendez brothers. His take on this summer's events, I quote, I think it's just the loss of family values.

Kahn said, it's the narcissism of our age, of people thinking only of themselves, not even of their family. When you lose those values of morality, you suddenly have no footing. And I think that's when these people think there's no problem with doing evil. Unquote.

Colson adds, exactly. While there are certainly varying degrees of evil, it's the bottom line in every one of these bad husband headlines. And though we hate to be talking about these events at all in this age of relativism and anything goes, it's good to hear somebody call evil from Hacking to McGreevey by its rightful name. Kahn also hits the mark in seeing these trends as a sign of our narcissistic culture. Narcissism is at the heart of the erosion of marriage that we've seen in this country, whether it's the no fault divorce laws or the swelling movement to legalize same sex marriage. The me first mentality bulldozes right over the most vulnerable stakeholders in marriage.

The children. What better reminder of what's up for grabs in weakening views of marriage than the unborn child of Lacey Peterson? Or the devastated children of.

Governor McGreevey. He closes with these words, so maybe this summer, a bad husband should come as a wake up call to America. Marriage in this country needs a biblical makeover. One where husband becomes synonymous with the kind of selfless love of Christ.

Our ultimate model. Good writing. It's an ancient book, ancient, ancient book. This Bible full of full of names that are hard to pronounce and stories that are sometimes difficult to unravel. And theology that has challenged the brightest of minds through the centuries. Originally written in Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek. Put together in a period of hundreds of years by a variety of different people, all of them sinful.

And yet miraculously preserved for any era, any time, any society, any culture. People of any age, in any status, rich or poor, struggling middle class, married, single, divorced, multiple, divorced. Abused, broken, terrorized. Hurting, struggling, fighting for survival. Prosperous, happy, joyful. Guilty.

Dying, grieving. What a book. In all of my years of study, I have never found a principle in it that's irrelevant. Never once. Never once. Never found a truth. Never found a truth in it that turned against me when I needed help or worked against me when I decided to believe it and apply it.

Oh, I failed it many times. It's never failed me. We may tremble on the rock. A rock never trembles under us. So we come to the subject of marriage and husband-wife relationship. Ultimately we'll get into children and the rearing of them and the joys and challenges of going through those rearing and then for them adult and older years. And we'll find over and over how practical and in touch this book is. It is an amazing, amazing body of material. I mean, look at the principles we've already dug out of verses 24 and 25.

Just remarkable how these still touch our times. Leaving father and mother, of course, there has to be a severance. Joining a partner in life, of course, there has to be a bonding. Becoming one.

Absolutely. There must be a cultivation of unity. Notice, become one flesh. You're not automatically one flesh.

Well, you are in God's eyes, but you're not practically speaking after you say, I do. You learn to become a unit. You hammer away at it. All the sinful struggles and habits notwithstanding, you find a way to get there. And you realize, having slugged it out through the hard times, you realize an unguarded moments as your head sinks into the pillow. And you're glad you stayed. You're glad you made it work. You're glad your partner didn't walk out. Now, I'm a realist. I know there are occasions where there are reasons to walk out.

I'll get to that. But let's establish the foundation before we go there. We're so quick to look for ways out that we forget to linger over reasons to stay. In fact, there's not only a severance and and and permanence and unity there. There's even intimacy without shame. Look at that man and his wife were naked and they weren't ashamed. The whole idea of close sexual intimacy and intercourse, all part of God's plan in innocence, in innocence, before there was ever sin. He created the whole idea of it, knowing it would work best between husband and wife.

Knowing that was the place to cultivate such unashamed intimacy. All of this brings up four questions that I think are that they have to be asked. They are crucial questions that any thinking person would ask.

The first is a question of relevance. Are biblical principles still relevant? I mean, does this ancient book still address the complicated issues of our times? A group of small children in kindergarten were asked, Does God understand nuclear science?

Over 80 percent said no. As if God wakes up one day and discovers there's an invention that's caught him by surprise. Romans 15 for says, Whatever was written in earlier times was written for our learning that we through comfort and patience from the scriptures might have hope. How wonderful a promise is that? Whatever is written by Moses, by the psalmists, by the prophets, by historians, by apostles. Was written for our learning that we in whatever era, at whatever time, in whatever culture, whatever the issue might have hope.

Yes, yes, there's a resounding yes. I will guide you with my eye on you, he promises. Psalm 32 8.

How wonderful a promise is that? Second question is a question of harmony. Can two very different people make it work? Can two very different people make it work when a man and a woman come together in a marriage? Immediately, there's a challenge.

Well, not at that moment. There aren't many fights at the altar, but but often people will tell you amazing stories of honeymoons where it all gets going there. You you thought there was perfection and you found there was not.

There was just enormous depravity. Someone someone wrote this. Adam and Eve had an ideal marriage, at least when things started. He didn't have to hear all about the other men she could have married.

And she didn't have to hear about the way his mother cooked it. There's far more teaching we need to hear in this message on marriage. Chuck Swindoll titled his talk, Symphony of Survival in the Key of Sea. To learn more about this ministry, visit us online at insightworld.org. If you're prepared to dig deeper into this topic, I'll remind you Insight for Living provides interactive study notes for every message.

Please take a few moments to review this popular resource. In fact, we were pleased to read a recent comment about searching the scriptures. It said, I absolutely loved the year-long study of Matthew. I was a little behind the daily broadcasts but finally finished it. I cried when it came to an end. The writer continues, I read the commentary on Matthew and did the STS for the entire series. I started and ended each day in the Word.

I was drawn to it like a moth to a flame. Thank you Chuck and the team for these resources. Well, you'll find the entire series, Marriage from Surviving to Thriving, available right now in the Searching the Scriptures section of our website. There's no cause to access these interactive study notes. In fact, you can print them out and share them with friends. Just go to insight.org slash studies. In addition, we're pleased to remind you Insight for Living offers a daily devotional from Chuck Swindoll. It's called Wisdom for the Way. With this devotional, you're able to start or end each day with inspirational writings from Chuck. And the timeless biblical wisdom will guide your steps and your thoughts throughout the entire year. The devotional titled Wisdom for the Way is available when you call us. If you're listening in the US, dial 1-800-772-8888 or go online to insight.org slash offer. We rely on your support to make these daily Bible studies with Chuck possible. To give a donation today, call us. If you're listening in the United States, dial 1-800-772-8888 or give online at insight.org slash donate. Join us when Chuck Swindoll continues to describe the symphony of survival in marriage. Wednesday on Insight for Living. .