Marriage Truths from Malachi two

00:01 Well, we do want to give glory to God this morning. Let the church say Amen. 00:05 Amen. 00:05 Amen. We greet you in the name of Jesus and wish you peace and wholeness in the Lord Jesus Christ. What a wonderful Lord we have and we serve. Invite you this morning to turn in your copies of the Scriptures to Malachi chapter 2. And we'll be continuing in our series through the book of Malachi. 00:27 I plan to preach this morning on the marriage truths from Malachi 2. Marriage truths from Malachi 2. 00:38 And next Sunday morning I've asked permission from the other brothers or asked counsel anyway, I guess was more like it, to continue this message tomorrow or next Sunday morning on the subject of marriage, divorce, and remarriage. 00:54 And we want to lay some of those marriage foundations this morning and then next week look at some of the objections that people bring up supposedly from Scripture. 01:04 Objections to covenant marriage and binding marriages and use Scripture to identify those arguments and come against those arguments with the truth of God's Word. And so that God's Word might be our focus and might be our standard and might be our authority... 01:24 for it is the authority over the life of the believer as it has been spoken from the heart of God, from the mouth of God. It is the Word of God. So let's read from Malachi chapter 2, verses 10 through 17 this morning. Have we not all one Father? 01:44 Has not one God created us? Why do we deal treacherously with one another? By profaning the covenant of the fathers. Judah has dealt treacherously and an abomination has been committed in Israel and in Jerusalem. For Judah has profaned the Lord's holy institution which he loves. 02:04 He has married the daughter of a foreign God. May the Lord cut off from the tents of Jacob the man who does this being awake and aware. Yet who brings an offering to the Lord of hosts? This is the second thing you do. You cover the altar of the Lord with tears, with weeping and crying. 02:23 So he does not regard the offering anymore nor receive it with goodwill from your hands. Yet you say, "For what reason?" Because the Lord has been witness between you and the wife of your youth with whom you have dealt treacherously. Yet she is your companion and your wife by covenant. 02:44 But did not he make them one having a remnant of the Spirit? And why one? He seeks a godly offspring. Therefore take heed to your spirit and let none deal treacherously with the wife of his youth. For the Lord God of Israel says that he hates divorce. For it covers one's garment with violence says the Lord of hosts. 03:05 Therefore take heed to your spirit that you do not deal treacherously. You have wearied the Lord with your words. Yet you say, "In what way have we wearied him?" In that you say, "Everyone who does evil is good in the sight of the Lord and he delights in them." Or where is the God of justice? 03:25 In this passage of Scripture this morning there are two sins that are being committed by the Israelite people, by the Hebrew people at this time and place. They dovetail rather uniquely with the book of Ezra chapter 9 and chapter 10 and Nehemiah chapter 13. The first sin being the sin of marrying pagan women. 03:47 If you look at the first three verses, verse 10, 11, and 12, he refers to this fact of dealing treacherously. The word treacherously or dealing treacherously means to be to deal unfaithfully or to break faith with one another. 04:03 And he says, "You have broken faith with God our Father and you have broken faith with one another by taking to you these foreign wives and then putting away the wife of your youth and remarrying these foreign wives." These two sins are what Malachi chapter 2 is speaking about. 04:23 The putting away of their wife of their youth and the marrying of foreign gods, of foreign wives. And so we have the sin of marrying pagan women in verses 10 through 11 or 10 through 12 and the sin of divorce and remarriage in the rest of the chapter, 04:43 verses 13 through 16 and into 17. 04:48 When he talks here about having profaned the covenant of the fathers, dealing treacherously, committing an abomination in Israel and in Jerusalem, Judah has profaned, verse 11, or desecrated the Lord's holy institution or holy sanctuary which he loves. 05:07 And this comes on the heels of what we've been talking about about the profaning of the sanctuary by the priests. And he has married the daughter of a foreign god or pagan wives. Now this goes back and you may want to turn to this to get some context to Deuteronomy chapter 7. Deuteronomy chapter 7, 05:26 God was telling them what to expect when they entered into the land of Canaan. And he said, "I'm going to bring this land to you. You're going to go in and possess it, the land of the Canaanites, the Hivites, the Jebusites, the Gergasites, the Amorites, the Hittites. 05:42 And when the Lord your God delivers them over to you, you shall conquer them and utterly destroy them." So this was a nuclear option. This was the nuclear option. And you go in and you utterly destroy the land and its peoples so that they not draw you away and entice you. 05:59 And do you know by studying Jewish history that they did not do this and they were drawn away and enticed? And it was at the hand of these pagan wives and pagan women that some of that took place. And so look at the end of verse 2, "You shall make no covenant with them nor show mercy to them. 06:19 Nor shall you make marriages with them. You shall not give your daughter to their son nor take their daughter for your son. For they will turn your sons away from following me to serve other gods so the anger of the Lord will be aroused against you and destroy you suddenly. But thus you shall deal with them. 06:37 You shall destroy their altars and break down their sacred pillars and cut down their wooden images and burn their carved images with fire. For you are a holy people of the Lord your God." Now we would expect that the unbeliever... we would expect that the pagan would not be holy and would be covenant breakers. But we would expect something different from the believer. 06:59 We would expect them to be holy unto the Lord. 07:03 Verse 6, "The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for himself, a special treasure above all the peoples on the face of the earth." And then if you go down to verse 9, "Therefore know the Lord your God... 07:22 he is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and mercy for a thousand generations with those who love him and keep his commandments." So the reason that they were to do this in relation to the gods of the pagans to destroy them completely... 07:41 the reason for that was because God is a covenant keeping God and he wants them to be a covenant keeping people. And when it comes to the subject of marriage, whether that be marrying unbelievers... believers marrying unbelievers as is the case in verses 10 through 12... or whether it be in the subject of marriage, divorce, and remarriage... 08:01 it's all about covenant. It's all about covenant. And we'll dig into that a little bit more in these two messages. So this had been disregarded. It was disregarded by Solomon. And Solomon... his downfall was that he amassed many wives. Was it 700 wives and 300 concubines? 08:21 Something to that effect. And it was political alliances to politically maneuver so that he would be at peace with the nations around him because he was married to their wives or to their daughters. And it was a political arrangement. But it was ungodly. It was contrary to what God had said. 08:42 And it pulled his heart away from God. And you see this happening in Ezra chapter 10 and Nehemiah chapter 13 where Ezra came along and in the great revival in Ezra chapter 10, the men came to him and said, "We must repent of marrying our foreign wives, our pagan women, our pagan wives. 09:03 And we're willing to put them away." And you can read about that throughout the chapter in Ezra 10. And in Nehemiah chapter 13, Nehemiah confronted this as well and said... he saw... went out into the camp one day and he saw half... I don't like the term half breeds... but nevertheless that's what they were. 09:23 They spoke half of the language of Ashdod and half of them spoke the language of Israel. And they were a mixed multitude. And these women that they had married were drawing their hearts away from God and away from the covenant that they had made with God. And so this is one of the reasons that God has an issue with these people. 09:44 And of course Nehemiah, Ezra, Malachi being somewhat contemporaries and referring back to Nehemiah and some of the things that he did there to correct that problem and that situation. And so may the Lord... verse 12... cut off from the tents of Jacob the man who does this being awake and aware. 10:04 In other words, he's fully aware of what he's doing and yet he doesn't anyway. He marries outside of the covenant community, outside of the community of faith. In our day it would be similar to marrying an unbeliever, being unequally yoked in marriage as per 2 Corinthians chapter 7 I believe it is. 10:26 And so he says, "Yet the man who does this being awake and aware yet who brings an offering to the Lord of hosts." And the problem here was they were continuing to go on with their worship of God. And so... but the worship of God was not being effective. God was not listening to them. 10:46 God was not hearing them. God was not responding to them. God's favor was not upon them because of the second thing that they did... verse 13... you cover the altar of the Lord with tears, with weeping and crying and he's not listening to you anymore. He's not listening to you anymore. Why? Because you have broken faith. 11:05 You have been unfaithful. You have dealt treacherously with the wife of your youth. And this is the second sin... the divorce and remarriage... marring the vision of the covenant keeping God who by dealing treacherously, breaking faith, and being unfaithful to your marriage partner. 11:25 Now in verse 13 through 17... I want to give you this morning 10 marriage principles from this passage of Scripture. And if we have time after those 10 marriage principles I'll elaborate on them more. 11:39 So the first thing that we notice in this passage of Scripture is that God is the creator of marriage and by virtue of being the creator of all the sons of Adam. He says in this verse 10, "Have we not all one Father? 11:56 And has not one God created us?" When this whole thing comes to the surface here about covenant marriage, it's based on the fact that God is the creator and of not only marriage but of all the sons of Adam. And we all come from one Father, one God and whether Jew or Gentile. 12:17 Now this should have something to say to us about what God thinks about the marriages of unbelievers. Does God recognize the marriage of unbelievers? Yes, he does because of what we would call the universal marriage law which is not rooted in the law of Moses. It's rooted in creation. 12:38 It's rooted in the law of creation when God performed the first wedding ceremony and joined that first couple together... Adam and Eve... our physical forebearers. And they were united together by God and made one flesh by God. 12:56 And that came upon us as the way to do family and marriage and sexuality down through the ages. Has it been perverted? Yes. Has it been distorted? Yes. So we have to go back to the original which is in fact what Jesus did when in Matthew chapter 5 when he says, 13:17 "You have heard that it was said but I say unto you, you have heard that it was said that you could divorce and put away your marriage partner. But I say unto you, in the beginning it was not so." And he took us back to the beginning as the standard for the New Testament age. 13:34 So God is the creator of all marriage and of all the sons of Adam. We'll flesh that out a little bit more in detail. The second thing we notice in this passage of Scripture is that God recognizes first marriages. God recognizes first marriages. Verse 14 he says, 13:54 "Because the Lord hath been witness between thee and the wife of thy youth." Now you may say, "Well, but he put her away. He married a foreign wife." Doesn't matter. God says, "Yet she is thy wife and thy companion, 14:13 the wife of thy youth." Which one does God recognize? God recognizes the wife of thy youth in verse 14. She is your companion and your wife by covenant. 14:27 The third principle we see here in this passage of Scripture is that God not man joins them together in one flesh. God not man puts them together in one flesh. Has not the Lord made them one? In flesh and spirit they are his. 14:47 It's a rhetorical question. Of course, you go back to that original marriage, universal marriage law that God put them together. 14:56 "Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother and be joined unto his wife and they too shall be one flesh and what God has joined together let not man put asunder." And so that's the instruction way back at the beginning. It is the foundation for covenant marriage. It is the foundation for marriage. 15:16 It is why we stand opposed to divorce and remarriage. It is why we stand opposed to homosexual marriages is because it was not made by God that way. God designed it one man, one woman joined together by him for a lifetime separable only by death. 15:35 And so when God joins them together they are joined together. Now I want you to think about this. How does it work when God joins someone together and then you go to the justice of the peace or to the law and ask them to unjoin you? 15:57 How does that work? How does it work when you come to God and in the presence of God and these witnesses you are joined together as husband and wife and then you go somewhere else and ask that to be separated? Doesn't work. Doesn't work. The laws of logic... 16:15 spiritual logic would say that if God did the joining only God can do the unjoining. If God did the joining only God can do the unjoining. So you cannot go and have God join you and then go to the law, to a lawyer or to a judge and say, "Now unjoin us." By the way, it's not the church that joins us either. 16:36 Otherwise you could go to the church and say, "Unjoin us." And the Catholic Church has done that through what was called an annulment. The Catholic Church joins you and so then the Catholic Church can unjoin you and annul this marriage. Wrong. God joins us as husband and wife. Number four... 16:57 marriage is a covenant, a verbalized public vow sealed in blood. It is a blood covenant. Verse 14... yet is she your companion and your wife by covenant. 17:14 You may try to put her away a hundred times but she is your wife by covenant. And the covenant is the important thing that we emphasize in marriage. You see the difference between a contract and a covenant. A contract is written in such a way... and don't ever say that marriage is a contract. 17:33 That's not biblical. Because a contract is written in such a way that you have two parties making an agreement, entering into a contract and if one party violates the contract the other party is released from the contract. That's not true with a covenant. 17:51 A covenant is mutually binding until the terms of the covenant have been fulfilled. And that is in the case of marriage, death. And so a covenant is if you not break the covenant because a covenant cannot be broken. But if you violate the covenant the other party is still bound by the covenant. 18:13 That's the way it is with God's covenant with us. That's the way it is with God's covenant with us. There's what is called in Scripture assault covenant... assault covenant. Now I find it interesting that that in marriages oftentimes in weddings they do a sand covenant. Well, I guess that's kind of easier to get colored sand than it is to get colored salt. 18:35 But so they have... he has one colored sand... she has another colored sand and you pour them together as a symbol of the covenant. 18:45 And what you're really saying is if it were possible for you to minutely take all those grains of sand and get them back into his container and back into her container then you could negate the covenant. Be very difficult to do, wouldn't it? But you could do it if you had colored sand. 19:06 So let's have a covenant ceremony where you have white salt and his white salt goes into the package and her white salt goes into the package. Now try to separate those. It's impossible. It's not only just difficult but it's impossible. 19:26 You cannot undo this covenant. That's what that is signifying... the blood covenant. And if you want more definition of how this is a blood covenant I won't go into it in a mixed setting here with children. 19:40 But there is very clear in Jewish tradition and Jewish tradition and in biblical history that blood is involved in the covenant of marriage. In fact, let me just say this... 19:57 that in historical record when a couple got married and entered in that wedding night into the marriage tent that the rabbi waited outside the tent and the whole community and the parents and family until they 20:15 could produce the evidence of her purity and her virginity. That's all I'll say. If you want to talk about more about that afterwards I'll be happy to talk to you and more about that. But it is a covenant, not a contract. Number five... 20:35 the purpose of marriage in verse 15 is intimacy... and let me go back here. I missed something. Verse number three... one flesh also includes the spiritual dimension. And so did he not make them one flesh... 20:55 one in flesh and spirit they are his. It is not just a physical union... it is a spiritual union. Now getting back here to the purpose of marriage... intimacy and to raise up a godly generation. And wherefore one... why did he make them one? That he might seek a godly seed... verse 15. But did he not make them one having a remnant of the spirit... 21:16 and why one? He seeks godly offspring... godly offspring. You cannot improve upon the way God did it for the raising of children and families... the rearing of families... bringing children into the world. 21:33 And as much as the world has tried to disregard the standard of God it's still the best way to raise a family in a covenant marriage... one man, one woman for a lifetime... raising godly children... instilling within them the values of the covenant keeping God. 21:55 Number six... adultery. We define adultery as the sin of a married person and fornication... the sin of an unmarried person begins in the heart. Where does adultery begin? Where does it take place? In verse 15 he says, 22:16 "Therefore take heed to your spirit... take heed to your spirit." Jesus was very clear about it in the Gospels when he said, "Whoever looks on a woman... 22:28 any man looks on a woman to lust after her he has committed adultery with her in his heart." And by the way what's good for the goose is good for the gander as well. 22:40 In other words when it talks about a man lusting in his heart for a woman it can just as easily say a woman lusting in her heart for a man even though that lust looks differently. It is not necessarily always a sexual kind of lust as much as it is a romantic and an emotional kind of attachment. 23:00 So he says, "Guard your spirit... take heed to your spirit because that's where it all starts." It's where it all starts. Number seven... adultery does not break the marriage vow... in verse 14 we already touched on this... yet she is your companion. 23:22 You've put her away... legally you may not be married to her anymore but in God's sight she is still your companion. That's the word of God... yet she is your companion and the wife of thy covenant. Here's something we need to know is that adultery does not break the covenant... 23:43 adultery violates the covenant... adultery violates the covenant. That's a very important distinction. Number eight... 23:54 this should be known by everybody... self-evident. But this is what God thinks about divorce... I hate divorce... I hate it... I despise it... I detest it... I hate putting away... 24:15 verse 16... for the Lord God of Israel says that he hates divorce. Now be careful with some of your modern translations because I've noticed that in the modern translations there's at least two of them that I find rather trustworthy but they do a disservice to this and they talk about that the man hates his wife in putting it away... 24:35 but if you look in the footnotes you'll see the alternate rendering and the alternate rendering is clear in the NIV... the New American Standard version... the King James and the New King James where it says, "I hate divorce." How much more clear can it be? 24:56 Number nine... their sin... adultery causes God to reject their worship and withhold blessing. And this have you done... verse 13... covering the altar of the Lord with tears... with weeping... with crying out insomuch that he begardeth not any offering anymore... 25:18 the offering anymore receiveth it with goodwill at your hand. I remember back in 1995 I think it was... 95 or 6... as Dallas was just born and was a baby... that's kind of how you measure some things in the past of when your children were... what stage your children were in. 25:39 But I remember there was a group of us... quite a number of us from Northern Indiana went to Washington, DC for the Covenant Keepers Million Man March... million man march. Anybody remember that? How many of you were there? Okay... just about three or four of us... okay... 25:56 we were not together as a church at that time and so I went with the church where we were attending at the time. And that Million Man March was interesting. It was supposed to be a confession time... of promise keepers... men who were... this was all men... men who were committed to God... 26:15 committed to the truth... committed to the word... committed to holiness... committed to their wives... committed to their families. And I remember very very specifically listening to all of the things that we confessed throughout the day... we were to confess the sins of the nation... 26:37 and we confessed the sin of racism... we confessed sins against the Native Americans... we confessed the sins against African Americans in slavery... we confessed the sins of apathy... and I don't remember what all we confessed... we confessed... it was pretty comprehensive but there was one sin that was absent... 26:57 and it was the sin of divorce and remarriage. I think we even confessed the sin of divorce. 27:06 And sometimes shortly thereafter the Lord spoke to my heart and said, "There will be no revival until this sin gets repented of." So what the Bible says... you cover the altar with tears... 27:26 with weeping... with crying... why is not God listening? There's a reason because we've broken covenant on the subject before us this morning. God isn't listening... and they were so concerned that God wasn't blessing... 27:45 they were more concerned that God wasn't blessing than they were concerned about the severity of their sin. And not until we get concerned about the severity of sin more than the absence of blessing will God send revival... I believe that with all my heart. Number 10... 28:07 divorce is an act of violence... divorce is an act of violence... ask any child... it destroys. Verse 16... 28:26 he hates divorce for it covers one's garment with violence. And the reason it's violence is because it is the ripping apart of the one flesh relationship. You know I describe marriage like this... it's like two pieces of plywood glued together. 28:48 So you have a piece of plywood that's made up of many layers... many layers... many layers... another group piece of plywood that's made up of many layers... and that symbolizes our lives. We are multi-layered people... we are people with a layer upon layer upon layer of feelings and emotions and truths and and knowledge and and and experiences and hurts and healings and so on. 29:10 We're people of multi-layers and you glue those together. Now those of you that work with plywood when you glue them together you make it one flesh and you try to separate it... what does it do? It doesn't destroy the bond... it destroys the plywood... 29:31 it rips it apart... it doesn't just come neatly apart from where you glued it. That's not what divorce does... divorce does not just neatly separate... well here's your part... here's your part... here's his part... here's her part... here's the children part... this is what we're going to do with the children on the weekends... this is what we're going to do with the children during the week... 29:50 on Father's Day... Mother's Day... no... it's not a nice clean splice... split... it is a ripping apart of the fabric of people's lives and personalities. I've dealt with many who have been the children and the product of divorce... 30:10 and others who have been the product of having a death... a parent separated from them by death... and I can say this rather confidently that I would many times over rather lose a parent to death than to lose a parent to divorce. 30:32 It rips lives apart. Some marriage basics... number one... it is instituted by God... we've already covered some of this... it is not man's idea... therefore it cannot be tampered with... it cannot be improved upon... 30:51 it cannot be negated... it cannot be bypassed... it cannot be substituted... and God is the one who makes one flesh... the making of one flesh is an act of God... it is a spiritual act that is evidenced in a physical oneness. 31:09 But even without the physical oneness there is still an emotional and spiritual oneness that God puts together. On October 14th, 1983 at the Mount Joy Church that happened with my wife and I where we said, "I do... 31:27 I receive you and I promise myself to be faithful to you..." and those of you that are married have your own time and place... if something happens there that is unseen... it is not observable... and that is the making of one spirit... one flesh... 31:48 oh the act of being one flesh... the sex act could be observed but not the one spirit... the oneness of spirit... the oneness of soul... there's an act of God... not an act of the church... not an act of government. Therefore... Mark 10:9... 32:10 no man may separate what God has joined together. How do you expect to give an answer before God when you have been responsible for separating what God put together? How do you explain that to God? 32:32 That I was the one who was responsible for separating what he put together. 32:41 Marriage is a joining of two persons into one and God views them as one flesh. 32:51 First Corinthians chapter 7 makes this very clear... the wife hath no power... hath not power of her own body but the husband... and the likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body but the wife. You see there's something else that happens in a biblical marriage... even in an unbiblical marriage it happens... 33:12 in a pagan marriage it happens... where there is the transfer of ownership... where he has been fully responsible for himself and under his own direction... 33:29 and she has been fully responsible for herself and under her own direction because she holds the title of her life and he holds the title of his life... and then when they come together in marriage the title gets transferred... so that his title is now held by her... 33:50 and her title is now held by him... that's what that passage is saying... she doesn't have power over her own body... her husband does... and he doesn't have power over his own body... his wife does. And so you have the transfer of titles... 34:08 now what gives a person authority then to take the title of his life which he does no longer possess and give it to another person? It's not his to give... it's not his to give... 34:27 it's not hers to give. 34:32 Marriage is a covenant... we've talked about that quite a bit this morning... based on a vow... based on a vow... you say what about Adam and Eve... where do you find them being married... and who performed the ceremony? Well God performed the ceremony... who were the witnesses? Well God and the angels and the Trinity was the was the witnesses. 34:54 At what point were they married? You see a vow being made... you see a verbal public acceptance of one another... when Adam said this... and it says... Adam said... this is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh... 35:15 now today we say that should be done with witnesses in the congregation of community and so on... there were no other human beings there to witness this... but we have all witnessed it now in the pages of Scripture for thousands of years... it stands as historical record... 35:37 it was at the point when Adam said she is mine and I am hers... 35:44 and he verbalized that to God... Adam said... it was not a thought... it was not a written agreement... it was a verbal vow... 36:02 now here's another thing before we close this morning... sex does not constitute a marriage... it wasn't until after Adam and Eve were already married... God joined them together as one flesh... 36:19 and then Adam knew his wife and she bore him sons... 36:27 they were married before they had sexual relationships. 36:33 You may ask the question what if a marriage was never had that aspect... was never consummated... we use that term... I challenge you to find that term in the Scripture... because it's based on a vow... it's based on the verbal spoken vow... not by the sex act... 36:53 because if it were based on the sexual expression in marriage then the violation of the sexual expression could negate the vow or could negate the marriage... if that was what... is that what it was made up of... you could violate that and have an unmade... but that's not the case... it's the vow that makes a marriage. 37:15 Mary 37:17 and Joseph are a perfect example of that... and this will go into our message next week... so I'm not going to hit it this morning... but Mary and Joseph... she was his wife at least nine months... who knows how long before they had sexual relations... she was his wife. 37:38 Bathsheba and Uriah... 37:41 she became his wife after her husband was dead... but you know the story... their sexual experience before marriage was adultery... not marriage... 37:58 so marriage is a covenant... I want to challenge you this morning with an illustration... what we're talking about here... why this is so serious is because this is about covenant... this is about covenant... 38:17 and it's about our relationship with God... and the picture... the picture that we have of a covenant keeping God by covenant keeping people... 38:31 early in our ministry I had a conviction about the subject... was raised that way but also studied that way and it became my conviction... but I was a young pastor and didn't have much... 38:53 well any experience... pastoral experience... I was just in the experience learning stage... we had a family that started attending our church... and they came through our Christian school... they liked our school and their children started attending... 39:09 and they heard what we were preaching and how we were preaching the Bible and teaching the Bible and trying to live the Bible... they were attracted to that... began to come to the church... but there was a problem and that was the fact that they had both been married before... 39:27 and had remarried and had a child between them... now they were coming to church and we wanted to be a place where community people could come and be discipled and so on as every church does... most churches do... 39:41 so I told them right up front that our position on divorce and remarriage would be such that they would never be able to become members. 39:51 They became very supportive attenders and very supportive of my ministry and of the church and so on... and yet there was this elephant in the room that would never go away... well it came time for communion and they had been attending for about six months... 40:13 and I really had not worked through... 40:15 and we had not worked through as a leadership what to do with communion with these folks... they claimed to be Christians... 40:27 well long story short... I had to be the one... I got to be the one... to go to them one evening and inform them that they could not take communion with the church... at first he got angry and said... why didn't you tell me this six months ago... 40:46 I pled ignorance... I said I didn't know how to respond to that six months ago... but I did tell you you couldn't become members. And after his... and then I reminded him... he had handed me a blessing and that was... if you ever see us doing anything in the church that would be offensive let me know and we won't do it and we'll back away from it... 41:07 and I said... you remember Don when you told me that... I said if you were to come to communion that would be offensive... and he immediately backed away because he remembered his own words... be that as it may... he began to tell me his story... he said Todd... 41:27 he came to the place where he said... Todd I know that you are right... he said... when I got saved I was divorced... he said... the Lord revealed himself to me in a miraculous way and called me and saved me... and the Lord laid on my heart... the Lord spoke to me and told me I should not remarry... he said... 41:49 for five years I would spend hours and hours and hours studying the Scriptures... he said... I was hungry for the Word of God... I had an incredible peace and knowing God... it just was all over me... he said... 42:06 this peace was so real... he took a business trip to California... while he was in California he met a woman who was also divorced... she was not a Christian... he met her... I don't remember how they met... but he invited her to go to church with him the next morning... and in the morning service she got gloriously saved... 42:29 I mean the Lord came upon her and and and she was born again in that service... well he looked at that and said... ah well this means I can get remarried... I'm saying... I'm saying that doesn't mean you can get remarried... all it means is that God wanted to save her... 42:48 but he took it as a license and liberty to go ahead and get married... so they pursued a relationship... ended up... and now we're five, six, seven, eight years later when they've come into our lives... and I admire this man to this day... even though he's been gone for many years... 43:09 in a moment of honesty he said this... he said... Todd I know you're right... because in those five years when I was unmarried... he said... I had an incredible peace with God and God had made it very clear to me that I should not remarry... he said... within two weeks after marrying Linda... I lost that peace and I haven't had it back since. 43:30 We're talking about covenant... we're talking about weeping... we're talking about crying over unanswered prayers... I've never forgot that conversation... to me it was a moment of honesty where a man shared his heart and then went about... 43:49 him and his wife Linda went about trying to remedy the situation to the best of their ability... let's pray... Lord we thank you that you have given us this beautiful picture of marriage... 44:07 Jesus Christ and the church... inseparably linked and joined as one flesh... one spirit... one soul... Lord don't let us do anything that would mar that... even in our marriages... even though we would never divorce... 44:26 sometimes we live emotionally distant lives... we live emotionally separated... we live in some cases emotionally divorced... Lord help us to see that as sin as well... 44:39 and Lord I pray that as we try to stand true to your Word as the authority in our lives... that we will give heed to its counsel, to its rebukes, to its blessings, 45:00 and to its path to blessing... 45:06 and never waver... in Jesus' name... amen...