God's Mandate For Christian Husbands and Wives, Part 4

What Jesus said about marriage and divorce.

Next, on Leading the Way Audio. Marriages are under attack today, and sadly many believers and churches are giving in to defeat, strengthening Satan's grip on culture. But Dr. Michael Yusef will not give up. Today on Leading the Way, Dr. Yusef continues his series called, God's Mandate for Christian Husbands and Wives. And we pray that learning what Jesus said about marriage will change the way you approach all of your relationships.

More on that later. Right now though, join Dr. Michael Yusef for a message he's titled, Crisis in the Family. We know from history that there is no unit more vital to the existence of a meaningful society than the Christian family. God created the family. God dealt with families. God gave instructions for family life. God promised his promises to families. It was Martin Luther, this great German reformer who's called by some as the founder of modern Christian family, this Augustinian monk who made some sort of a revolution by rejecting that clerical celibacy as not of God, and married Catherine Van Buren, who thus liberating her from a nunnery.

He in that act put the family in the center of the universe. Martin Luther said, God established three essential institutions, marriage, the ministry of the word, and the state. And yet this founder of what might be called the modern Christian family stated that both in chronological order and insignificance, the home proceeds both the ministry of the word and the state. Marriage established by God himself and it preceded the other two. The man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife and they become one flesh. This one single verse by virtue of its content and by virtue of its repetition in the scripture teaches us more about family and about marriage in the home than any other single verse.

The necessity of this cleaving, the necessity of this clinging implies that this is to be worked at in daily living, in daily life, in such a way that the outcome will be oneness, not to get into this, oneness. You know, while Solomon is right in many ways in saying that nothing new under the sun, statistics are showing us we are facing two distinct crises and they both threaten the extinction of the family. These two crises are the continuing rise in the divorce rate and the influence of television upon children.

They are at the center of our problem. Before the church, before the state, before anything else that impinged on the glory of Eden, God created the family. The National Family Strength Project found that having a father in the home is essential to the family's strength.

George Ruckus, he's a professor at University of South Carolina School of Medicine said, major child adjustments problem are associated with the father's absence or failure of fathers. But guess what? The Lord Jesus Christ himself addressed this crisis in the Gospel of Matthew chapter 19. Some Pharisees came to Jesus and they said to him, give us the ground of divorce. And instead of giving them the ground for divorce, the Lord Jesus gave them the grounds for marriage.

He said, haven't you heard that from the beginning he made them male and female? And he said, for this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united with his wife and the two will become one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let no man put us under. What is the response of a Bible believing church? The response I believe is for us to trumpet aloud without fear, without hesitation, what Jesus said in Matthew 19. What God the Father said in Genesis 2, that is first of all to say that marriage belongs to God's created order.

It is not up to me to mess around with it. From the beginning, the Creator made them male and female. Before the Bible, before the law of Moses, before Abraham, before the church, before the state, marriage was part of God's created order. And the twice in this passage of Matthew 19, the Lord Jesus emphasized this to the Pharisees who came to question, who came to trip him. Look what he said in verse four. He said from the beginning. Look at verse eight.

It was this way from the beginning. And what our Lord is saying here is this, that just as surely as he created the tide to ebb and flow every 12 hours and 24 minutes and every one of the 66 oceans in the world, he has created marriage and he instituted marriage. You see, generations that have been told that they have been descendant of monkeys can only expect to cohabit like monkeys in the zoo unless we have a word from God.

No amount of federal legislation can change that. Only a word from God, only by the power of God, only by obedient to the laws of God. And until all of us, those of us in the pulpit and those of us in the pews are willing to thunder with a compassionate thunder that marriage belongs to God's created order and that you and I can no more change its ground rules than changing the moon in the orbit. But first, in this statement, our Lord Jesus tells us that marriage is an exclusive union. In the Greek, it literally says God made one male for one female.

That's it. It belongs to God's exclusive union. God engraved this exclusive union into the created order with his own finger.

He put it together. One Adam, one Eve. He didn't make Adam, Eve and Susie. He didn't make Adam, Eve and Steve. He made Adam and Eve. And the Lord made this point very clearly that God created this first family.

They only had one choice. The Hebrew word Adamah, man, Isha, the woman. And God looked at this union between the man and the woman and he said, this is good. And Adam looked at Eve and in some sort of a rough translation, he said, that's real good.

Nothing else in the garden came even close second. God made her out of Adam's own flesh. And Paul stated in first Corinthians chapter seven verse four, he said that the body of the spouse is exclusively the other's body.

And that's why Martin Luther said, and I quote, adultery is worse than any theft for no restitution can be made to an injured spouse since it deals with life and with honor, it takes away what can never be given back. It is an exclusive union, but it is also an effective union. And that's why the Lord Jesus Christ said that there are no longer two, but one flesh.

C.S. Lewis in translating this, he said they become a single organism. But the Lord Jesus Christ said it is exclusive union. He said it is effective union.

And he also said it is a permanent union. The Lord said let no man, let no human being put asunder. The Lord didn't say the minister join people together. I often check when people come, a couple will come and say, will you join us together in marriage?

That's not my responsibility. The church doesn't join two people together, nor does the state. God joined people together. And we must reassert again and again that this is the will of God and anything less than that is not the will of God. Now many of us in the pulpit have been so fearful to offend somebody that we say nothing. And our silence has so lowered God's standards that it is no longer raised in the land of the trumpet.

Now hear me right. It doesn't mean that God does not redeem. It doesn't mean that God does not forgive.

It does not mean that at all. But it does mean that you cannot take God's redemptive for granted, that you cannot make light of God's redemptive love or you can tempt God. As a pastor, I'm compassionate to all those who have known the disruption of marriage. But as a prophet of God who holds up the standard of God, I must say this is the will of God. As a pastor, I am moved to tears often with those who have experienced the pain of divorce.

But as a prophet of God, I must say as the Lord Jesus said, let no human being put asunder. A few years ago, I did some research on the effect of television and I put it together in a manuscript. All the publishers who often call me about, you know, are you working in something new?

We like to, I send it to all of them. Not one of them wanted to publish it. He said, nobody's going to buy it. Nobody wants to tell them that the television has a negative impact on their children. They don't want to hear it.

Therefore, they're not going to buy the book or we're not going to publish it. It was familiar for preachers to thunder against the evils of television. I've seen sermons entitled television or hellavision. Then what happened is that preachers themselves got hooked on television. So somehow settled in a kind of an easy tolerance.

But everything tells me deep in my bones that it is time again to wake up. The average child watches 30 hours a week. That means in a span of 18 years, a child would have watched 18,000 hours of television while spend 12,000 hours in school. A study that was conducted at San Francisco State University showed that beyond a shadow of doubt, that watching television highly alters the brainwave state. Even when people have watched as little as 20 minutes, this state called the alpha state. And the study explains that the alpha occurs when you don't orient yourself. When you just sit back and have the pictures roll in your head, but you're totally passive.

The right word for this alpha state is spaced out. And this means that while we are watching and we are not reacting, just orienting, not focusing, just spaced out. Information goes right into our memory pool. And when you watch television, you are training yourself not to react and not to interact. So later on, you do things in life. Later on, you say things in life. Later on, you act things in life and they come straight out of the memory pool where all that information has been stored.

We better ask ourselves what has been poured into our brain memory pool. If what we are tuned into is what we turn into, then we have severe problems. No wonder we have generations of children who are disrespectful of authority, disrespectful of their parents. No wonder if they're modeling their life and the role of the parents of what they watch on television. I'm not just condemning the media of television.

I believe Christians ought to invade that media, take it over and turn it around. I always believe it's better to light a candle than to attack the dark. But what we need today is absolute discipline in the family or else the crisis is going to be of such magnitude that we will not be able to solve. The reason children are inclined to learn from television is that it is never too busy to talk to them.

Let me tell you something. Those words stung me, as the truth always does. There's a recent study that's been conducted to find what makes families strong, and they found the following principles.

Strong families spend time together. This is not just quality time. That's how I used to use it. I discovered it's a cop-out. Really, that was. It's an excuse for not spending time at all.

It's always been quality time. In fact, I'll tell you, frankly, this whole sermon is a hard word for me, for I'm like many of you men who are overachievers. I set my goals, and I want to achieve them. I wanted to accomplish things in life. So I traveled the world.

I earned degrees, and I wrote books all simultaneously. And to me, they were very important. Oh, yes, I justified it as it is the ministry that often came ahead of my family. Now I may be that I'm not as productive on a global level as I once was, but I know that the quantity of time with my family has been put in its proper place. Secondly, the study showed that strong families discuss their concern together.

They spend time talking and listening. It doesn't mean that they are perfect. There's no such a thing as a perfect Christian family. It's a myth. I'm yet to find one. I love it when somebody comes to me and said, you know, we have been married for 30 years, and we've never had a fight.

Well, I just look. Third, in that study found that strong families always have a sense of being a team, have a sense of a family identity that can form a sharing time, family rituals, family memories. And fourthly, appreciation, appreciation for each other, spending time to help each other and to bolster each other's self-esteem. People who know that they have a family home because they have a heavenly home. And if Time magazine is right when it says that one day the sun will become exploding supernova and the earth will be fried, and then when the sun goes out, this little planet of ours will be nothing but a frozen cube in the solar system.

If Time magazine is right, if the scientists are right, then those of us who have committed our family homes to the heavenly home know that this is not our end, and we prepare for this heavenly home and being in a church home. I want to tell you in this concluding remark something very significant. The Lord Jesus Christ conquered all these problems. The Lord was a single adult, never was married, but he learned for 33 years to live a chaste life. He came from an unusual family, a family of what we call today a merged family. The most unusual merged family there was.

The first born was the son of Mary of the Holy Spirit, and then four brothers and two sisters were children of Mary and Joseph. It was a troubled family. It was a troubled family when there was a whisper of a scandal in the back streets of Nazareth that Jesus was illegitimate. An unusual birth, a family with tension, and these tensions erupted when you read in the scripture that neither were his brothers believed in him. But out of the strangeness, out of the unusualness of this merged family, and out of the tension that was in that particular home of Joseph, the Lord brought it all along in a redemptive way. He brought it in a redemptive way until Mary knelt at the cross and waited in the upper room for the coming of the Holy Spirit.

He brought it in a redemptive way until his half brother James believed in him and was named the Bishop of the Church of Jerusalem and was beheaded for the name of Jesus. And let me tell you together, my brothers and my sisters and my friends, he said, God can take our families with their brokenness. He can take our families with their failures. He can take our families with their unusualness.

And he patched up in a redemptive way. The great thing about our Lord Jesus Christ, the great thing about our faith is that there is a place of beginning again. A place of beginning to those who say Jesus Christ is Lord, not only of heart and mind, but also of home. And this could be a time of new beginning, of redemptive time for you, for your family. You sinned against your family. Repent. The Lord Jesus is ready to forgive you. He's ready to restore you.

He's ready to renew you. Father I pray for every individual who is bowing before you this very moment. Father, our families are being attacked and the pressure is too great for us.

But we know that in the power of the Holy Spirit, we are overcomers. Pray for broken families. I pray for hurting families. I pray for bleeding families.

That with the power of the Holy Spirit, Lord, bring out redeem and strengthen, that out of it will come good families that will stand up for the truth and for the gospel and for the Lord Jesus Christ. Lord, as fathers, and I'm ahead of the pack, we confess to you that we haven't done the best job that we could do. We ask you to forgive us. We ask you to help us to redeem the years of Eden by the locusts.

We know it's never too late with you. We thank you, Father. Thank you for joining Dr. Michael Youssef for Leading the Way. Need to talk with someone about spiritual things? Reach out to the Leading the Way pastors and counselors by filling out a short form at ltw.org slash jesus. Now in the last few moments of today's episode, allow me to share a way that God is using Leading the Way and Dr. Michael Youssef to reach many with the message of the gospel. Dr. Youssef has recorded pointed commercials that are seen on various television networks all across the nation, and they direct people to speak to Leading the Way pastors and counselors about Jesus.

Many people are responding. They're beginning conversations that are leading people to experience new and renewed faith. Expanding these and other outreaches to touch those who don't have a biblical worldview is key to what Leading the Way is all about.

Hi, this is Michael Youssef. You know, healthy fear is a gift from God for our preservation. It helps us avoid real dangers. But sin has perverted fear, trapping us in chains of irrational fear. Today, Jesus can give you faith that conquers your irrational fear. Will you come to him?

Come find one who will never leave you feeling rejected or alone. Visit findingtruepiece.com to find out more. Won't you consider standing with Dr. Youssef and ministry teams impacting lives all around the world? Your generosity reaches globally.

People are turning from darkness to light every day. And you can be a part of what Leading the Way is doing during these turbulent times. Ask about ways to partner with Dr. Youssef when you call 866-626-4356.

Or click over to the website, ltw.org. Hey, and we love getting your postcards and your letters as well. Write to us at Leading the Way, Post Office, Box 20100, Atlanta, Georgia, 30325. That's Post Office, Box 20100, Atlanta, Georgia, 30325. Well, it's time to say goodbye for this episode, but do make plans to join Dr. Michael Youssef right here next time when he shares a moving message from First Peter right here on Leading the Way. See you next time.