Marriage: Falling in Love | Craig Reynolds | North Campus

this is a hard transition that's a very moving moment and i'm grateful for those that made that possible for us to remember just then but now we're going to shift gears we're going to god's word we're talking about relationships now this is i think week three of relationships and we're focusing on marriage in the beginning we'll be talking about other things as well but it regardless of where you are you could be a student you could be a young single you could be a married person you could be a widow person we need to know what god's word says it's significant it's important particularly in the area of marriage because our culture is so confused about it josie and i my wife and i over the course of our marriage have renovated five houses five renovations five major renovations now i i should rephrase that i should say josie has tolerated me doing five renovations okay she's pretty content with whatever things are it's me that kind of wants to do this kind of stuff and so she's been really gracious about that one of those renovations was in a part of town we lived in that was not inside of a city limits and there were really no building codes there were no there was really no permitting per se and so we we began to do this big edition of a cathedral room and the purpose of it was we would target heisus when i was still playing and we would target high schools to invite them to our house after football games on friday night and we'd send them down the den and i would have a chance to talk to them and and so we started this renovation but we there's no codes required and so we didn't have any real blueprints all we had was a piece of onion paper or onion skin paper with a sketch sketched on it just a little basic sketch and it was nailed on our dining room wall and that's all the contractors had to go by and so you can imagine there were some issues related to the construction and and right away early on i went by there one morning and there was a subcontractor there with a big masonry saw and he was about to saw into a big brick wall that was really to be a focal point of that room and i stopped him in the nick of time and so it didn't happen but you can see when you don't have the right blueprints you're in trouble now to contrast that i want to show you a picture of a house here here's the house this is a house over in bunker hill near our woodway campus this is the only house in houston designed by the famous architect frank lloyd wright he's only designed three houses in you so he's no longer living but he only designed three houses in houston this one of three in texas this one in houston one in dallas and i think the other one i think is in amarillo now you can pick this house up it's on the market today you can have it for a cool three point something million i i've forgotten what it is something like that you can go google this it's on the market right now now frank lloyd wright designed that you can see there's there's another picture i mean keep going let's see guys some more there you go there's the bathroom and that's you can see that's the original one of the original rooms there wasn't a thing in the original design there wasn't a single right angle in the whole house i think there's one more maybe there's a picture from the house looking back today so pretty cool that may not be your cup of tea but that's that's a frank lloyd wright house the most famous architect in u.s history now can you imagine if some idiot like me was able to purchase that house and i went and i got a piece of onion paper and i made some sketches of changes i think i thought out of happen in that house and i stuck it to the on the dining room wall and we started tearing down walls of a frank lloyd wright house to change him to what i wanted how foolish would that be that's exactly what we've done with marriage marriage has the architect the number one architect ever in history who designed marriage and we've taken it and we've scribbled on a piece of onion paper and stuck it on a wall and we think this is how marriage ought to be now let me ask a question how's that working out for our culture i i googled statistics about marriage today and about marriage is lasting and or not by the way i'm not i'm not gonna i'm not trying to knock anybody or pin anybody down today the purpose of the message today is for us to see the design god has given us for marriage to have the right vision of marriage here's some statistics when i google the statistics makes sense when you think about it but the place that had the best statistics i could find about marriage today was a law firm in san diego that just does divorces let me just read you a few of them the divorce rate per 1000 married women is nearly double what it was in 1960. almost 50 percent of marriages in the us and in divorce every 13 seconds there's one divorce in america that's 277 an hour 6 646 a day 46 000 plus a week so think of it in this terms if i were doing a marriage right now of a ceremony up here for someone and the time it would take for the couple to repeat their vows to each other for benign divorces in the united states if you sit down to watch a romantic comedy during the course of that romantic comedy there'd be more than 500 divorces in our country and i say all that just to say clearly we're doing something wrong in our culture who's getting divorced one of the statistics on that page said that the average age of first divorce is 30 years old that 60 of all divorces happened between the ages of 25 and 39 in the culture today so so so picture how young people and so i understand this when i look at our young people and our students and our college students and young young singles when i look at them i think how i understand when they're afraid of marriage i understand why you would be afraid of this when you hear statistics like that all the time and so it's becoming more and more acceptable for couples to live together and let me help you with that one a little bit i might talk about that in the mirror one of the messages in the future i'm not sure yet but for couples that move in and live together before marriage you get marriage they're twice as apt to divorce those that didn't that may surprise you the point is when we go our own way instead of god's way there are consequences to our choices have you talked to anyone that's ever done a marriage series has ever taught a series on marriage i will tell you what if any size audience at all i will tell you one of the things they'll tell you that during the course of that marriage series someone or lots of someone's came up to them and said i wish i would have heard that 10 years ago i wish i would have heard that 20 years ago or 30 years ago or however long ago it was they needed to have heard it because doing it man's way it what have we done we've we've taken god's perfect blueprint we've put it in a shredder we've taken a piece of onion paper and we scribbled on the wall what we think marriage should be as a culture and we've put it up there and the consequences have been disastrous and consequently folks are missing out on the most wonderful institution that i think god has designed and the by the way the first institution that god designed and you're missing out on our cultures missing out on a wonderful wonderful institution by the way there's no perfect marriage that's not my point but i want you to get a vision for marriage god's way because it's the right way he is the real architect of marriage so let me let me set it up and we'll talk about god's design and the first marriage in genesis 1 god creates and over and over again it says and god said that was creation god spoke the world's new zealand and god said let there be light and then once it's created it says and god saw that it was good and then day two god said let there be dry land and seas and god saw that it was good and i'm paraphrasing all this by the way it's more lengthy than this and god said let the earth sprout vegetation and trees and god saw that it was good then god said let there be lights to separate the day from the night and god saw that it was good then god said let the waters team with living creatures and let the birds fly and god saw that it was good god said let the earth bring forth creatures after the land and god saw that it was good then god said let us make man in our image according to our likeness and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every crawling thing that crawls on the earth so god created a man in his own image in the image of god he created him male and female he created them there's a whole sermon right there i'm going to save that for another time and then in verse 31 and god saw all that he had made and behold it was very good so god created and said it is good it is good it is good it is good it is good it is very good and then you get to genesis chapter 2 genesis 1 is an overview and then genesis 2 zeroes in to a much closer look at the creation of man and genesis 2 7 says then the lord god formed man of the dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living being and then in verse 15. lord god took the man and put him in the garden of eden to cultivate it and keep it now get the picture god has created this world there's no sin in the world there's nothing wrong with the world it's a perfect environment he's created adam in his own image adam's made in the very image of god and god puts him in the garden to tend it and care for it and god looks at his creation and he says it's good it's good it's good it's good it's good it is very good but then god says something's not good how could there be something not good in an environment like that everything's perfect adam's in perfect fellowship with god but something's not good and verse 18 says in the lord god said it is not good for the man to be alone i will make him a helper suitable for him out of the ground the lord god formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky and brought them to the man to see what he would call them and whatever the man called the living creature that was its name the man gave names to all the cattle and the birds in the sky and every beast of the field but for adam there was not found a helper suitable for him now i read that text and some of you heard some words in there and your alarm bells went off and you started giving some pushback already hang on okay just don't let the culture affect what you're going to hear today i want us to have god's vision of marriage he's the architect that's the picture so god brings this parade of animals to adam to name from the aardvark all the way to the zebra and there's two of them i mean there's male and female everybody has their counterpart and he names them all by the way adam was no dummy he named all the animals now you think that that's a big deal you can't think of your passwords half the time is that not true he named all the end i can't even make up a password anymore he had to get a name for every one of these and then my problem would have been the next day i would have forgotten them all just saying this adam was sharp god made him sharp so he names them all but there was not found a helper suitable for him in a perfect environment he's somewhat of a genius to be able to do all that he does and in a perfect relationship with god but it still wasn't good now think about that what does that mean what does that tell you about god's creation think about how special this helper suitable for him had to have been when he lived in a perfect environment but he needed her that's how special she was husbands have you ever thought if you're married today have you ever thought about how desperately impoverished you are without your wife because if you're married you are desperately impoverished without her that's the reality in all of chapter one and creation if you read it the name for god used in chapter one is elohim that is the all-powerful god the creator god in chapter two the name for god changes to his name yahweh which is the covenant-keeping god the god of relationship the god that keeps his word and he's the one creating marriage god is creating marriage and he says in verse 18 i will make him a helper suitable for him that's a word that i i'll use this word for lack of a better word i don't even like it but that's a lot that some feminists just go crazy over that word helper well i'm no helper okay remember we're looking at god's way i'm not knocking anybody i'm that's not the point i want you to see hear what god created this word helper is not a weak word it is a strong word it's a military word it's a word used for reinforcements and if you gals if you have a problem with that word it is a word that god used to describe himself in scripture so i don't think it's too weak a word god referred to himself in scripture that way a helper suitable what does that mean what does that word mean the hebrew word means like opposite hymn god created this one like opposite him and you say well which one is it is it like him or is it opposite him and you know the answer to that is yes like him opposite him that's the idea that's the picture here the my favorite way i've heard it explained that helps me understand it is like two pieces of a puzzle if two pieces of puzzle are just a light they don't fit together but just because they're different doesn't mean they fit together either they have to be like opposites to fit together that's the idea they have to be rightly different to fit together god has created man and woman rightly different to fit together in every way is like opposites that's the picture and verse 21 says the lord god caused the deep sleep to fall upon the man and he slept then he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place then the lord god fashioned into a woman the rib which he had taken from the man and brought her to the man best dream ever god puts adam to sleep and he takes his rib and he if you heard the word he fashions a woman it's really interesting look back at verse 7 and when god makes adam it says god formed adam from the god just formed at him from the dust of the ground but he fashioned a woman there should be amen somewhere from that right there yeah there you go yeah there you go i like that but the word can mean built he built a woman and when god built something yeah he he builds it right that's right he builds it right he just fashioned a man or he fashioned a woman he just formed a man chuck swindoll had a great saying on this chuck swindoll said he's really cute he said he said here's the woman's view of creation the woman's view is god made the man and looked at him and said i can do better and he created the woman but he says here's the man's view man's view is god made the beast of the field and then man and then he rested and then he created the woman and neither beast nor man or god has rested ever since adam wakes up from sleeping and god brings the woman to him god brings the woman to him god walked eve down the aisle if you will and when he walked her down the aisle she was not wearing a wedding dress just saying the man said this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh she shall be called woman because she was taken out of man honestly a more accurate description is just like wow this is exactly what i've been looking for and it was exactly what he needed the blueprints for marriage are god's design god designed marriage listen to me and so no man no court no legislative body has any authority to change what the architect designed and we have in our culture and the consequences are devastating because god is the designer you understand you get a picture of that first wedding there were three people it was the man and the wife and it was god and marriage is a covenant commitment between a man and a woman before god that's the picture god is at the center of the relationship it's why scripture says you shouldn't be unequally yoked with someone who's not a believer how can you have a marriage the way god designed it if you have someone that knows jesus christ and someone who doesn't because god isn't at the center of their relationship that's why god says it and if we try to go against it and say oh but i love him or but i love her you're scribbling on the onion paper what you think marriage ought to be instead of listen to what god says verse 24 says for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and they shall become one flesh and the man and his wife are both naked and we're not ashamed we'll talk about that more later in this series for this reason for what reason because god is our creator because he is the architect the designer of marriage and he made us as like opposites because these things are true we're made to fit together because this is true he says first of all a man shall leave his father and his mother that means we're to leave physically we leave home we go establish our own home and we leave psychologically we we gotta guys there's a whole lot of guys i remember howard hendricks used to say this way back when and you hear me quote him all the time but he said there's a whole lot of guys that show up in seminary and they brought their umbilical cord with them still attached to their family still attached to home if you can't break away from your home guys you shouldn't get married you're not emotionally stable enough to get married you have to break away you leave father and mother marriage must become the primary relationship in your life you take on a whole new loyalty for the rest of your life if i ever do it a wedding today of a young couple and they were here before you right now and i did the wedding when i during somewhere in the course of that wedding i would say to them you walked in here and your first priority was to your mom and to your dad but when you say i do in just a minute you take on a whole new loyalty for the rest of your life it is to your husband and to your wife and you when you walk out the door that new loyalty is for the rest of your life to one another and you cut the tie you leave mother and father in every way financially emotionally home and you establish your home that means if the husband builds his life around work or some hobby or something else she's given priority to that thing or a woman could do the same she could build her life around a vocation or around her children around something else and when you hit the empty nest stages if you built your life around something else you're going to be in trouble that's the picture you leave mother and father and then he says be joined to his wife that means you commit to each other one of the old word used there is cleave you stick like glue to each other it's like super glue you're super glued together in fact when jesus quoted this verse when jesus quoted the verse in matthew 19 after he quoted it he said what therefore god has joined together let no man separate so the idea is when marriage when you come together and you cleave to one another it's like two threads being wound together and this two threads become one cloth together that's the picture and you become one just like that inseparable that means here's what that means that means in marriage when you commit to each other as two threads that it means your marriage isn't based on romantic love it's great to have romantic love i'm all for it and we'll talk about it later in the series but that's not what holds a marriage together because if you've been married longer than two weeks you know that romantic love doesn't last forever but the commitment holds you together and so you you're joined to your wife you commit to your wife wives you commit to your husband you are bound together that's the foundation of your marriage is this commitment so marriage is to be viewed as permanent and exclusive an exclusive relationship one man one woman for life that's god's design and the intimacy inside of a marriage must not have any other competition what does that mean guys it means when you get married the guys are no longer the guys they're not the boys anymore not that you can't have friends you can't it's good to have friends but they are not your priority and they do not ever take the place our position of your wife ever it's just the truth it's just it's the way god designed it they're your first priority and the same is true for gals the same is true for gals and the guys shouldn't have any close girls that are his friends the gal shouldn't have any clothes guys that are her friends this relationship is exclusive intimate relationship i want to say something specifically to i can't speak for the women on this one i can speak for the men and when i tell you something's my opinion i tell you it's my opinion everything i've said so far is from god's word what i'm about to say for the next 30 seconds is my opinion but it's right it is it always is no no gals if you have your girlfriends that you like to go confide in you better have some areas about your husband that are off limits that you don't open your mouth to anybody else for it's just between you and your husband i don't know about women's egos i know about men's egos and we can't handle it just telling you there are things in your relationship with your husband you should not go speak to your girlfriends about because if you do you will bruise and damage your relationship that is meant to be a intimate relationship between you and your husband now i'm sure it's the other way around too i just can't speak to that one because i'm not a gal but i can speak to this one and i know i'm right about that be very very careful and they shall become one flesh the like opposites become one flesh that means that we become one physically sexually emotionally spiritually we come together in this permanent commitment and we become one person no longer two but one flesh the two become one is that not cool how god designed this and so the two to come together like those two pieces of thread and you become one now last week we talked about that acrostic them remember and i and i said to have real change it takes these things it takes vision and it takes intent the intent means i'm committed to this thing i see it and i have the intention of my heart i've decided i'm going to make this reality in my life and then the m is for means the ability to do it the tools to help it happen the sermon this morning is the v it is the vision of marriage it's the vision we need to have of this is how god designed marriage and i know the world the listen you could bring in bring in 100 000 people today and 95 000 of them are going to think this is stupid but 95 000 of them are going to be dead wrong look at our culture look at the results of what our culture has done and it's the truth so this is what we're aiming for this kind of marriage this is what god designed us for this kind of relationship and so we're to leave we're to cleave and we'll become one flesh it's like opposites the way god made us now let me share one more verse with you this is from proverbs i just want to build a point here and then we'll close proverbs 24 3 says by wisdom a house is built and by understanding it is established and by knowledge the rooms are filled with all precious and pleasant riches so so look at that first phrase by wisdom a house is built wisdom there means the ability to apply knowledge another way to say it is we can we're able to see what's going on and the relationship with discernment we can see with discernment and and by by having this kind of discernment and seeing this way the house is is built it says here that word for built there you know what word that is it's the same word used for when god fashioned a woman same exact word so so by seeing with discernment having the ability to apply knowledge a home is built it's fashioned and then he says by understanding it's established understanding is the capacity for rational thought by having the capacity for rational thought by responding with insight with this rational thought the home is established the home is built the foundation is built if you will and then the third thing he says in that verse is by knowledge the rooms are filled with precious and pleasant riches and and so by by applying these things by learning with perception the rooms are filled he says with all kinds of riches so what's he saying when we when we take god's blueprint for marriage that we've looked at today and we trust him we trust his word and we build our marriages on what god says in his word and we begin to grow in wisdom and we begin to grow in discernment and in understanding we learn to see life the way god sees life and do things the way god the perfect architect designed them in the first place and he says the result is listened again to what he says and by knowledge the rooms are filled with all precious and pleasant riches he's not talking about valuable things like you know gold pots or you know expensive this or that that's not what he's saying he's saying when we do things the way god laid them out and we begin to practice them in real life and do these things our homes will be built and the fruit of that reward will be the riches the things that really matter the things that a flood can't take away or a fire can't take away or that a storm can't take away but the things that really matter in life the things that when you come to the end of your life and you're looking back at your life you say my life is rich because i did things god's way and god has blessed my life with the things that really really count that's the picture on tuesday of this week josie and i went to a funeral of a of a friend good friend we went to it was at our woodway campus his wife is one of josie's good friends and i may tell you more about the man later because he was a wonderful guy fascinating guy unbelievable life things he did but at his funeral his two sons eulogized their dad and it was unbelievable it was so wonderful it was fun in fact dr young was doing the service and i leaned over to josie and i said man i'd hate to have to follow those two boys like dr young is because how do you follow two boys speaking so wonderfully about their father and dr young said a wonderful thing he said he got up and he said i don't think i have ever done a funeral service and the man's name was ruben he said i don't think i've ever done a funeral service for a man as wealthy as reuben and then he clearly he explained it more he said i'm not talking about wealthy from the world's perspective but wealthy from god's perspective what was he saying exactly what that verse says that we build our lives on what god has put together what the perfect architect has put together our lives and the rooms of our families will be filled with riches that's the picture josie and i were sitting on the back porch yesterday with her brother and sister we see josie has a real big family this is one of her older brothers and he and his wife been married like i think 50 something years and we're just talking it was been a long lazy morning drinking coffee and talking and i was just watching josie just admiring her and and it just hit me how grateful in that moment and this happened by the way i just you know we're not we don't have a perfect marriage i think i told you we had we had a good fight just a couple of weeks ago really good but i feel like i just said this i probably told the first hour but it was a good fight i won like i win all the fights but we had a good fight yeah i won until i shut up and she got to talk um but i just looked at her and i just i was just so grateful that god has given us a good marriage because we built not perfect i just told you we have disagreements there are times she wants to choke me i don't blame her but so grateful that god has blessed us because our heart the intention of our heart that second letter has been to do things god's way we've messed up a lot we've missed a lot of stuff but we our intention all along has been to be obedient to god's word and what how he has laid out marriage and i looked at her we've been married 45 years i looked at her and i just realized how much i love her more than 45 years ago because it's god's way not per we didn't we mess it up but god's a really good architect he's a really good architect and we can trust his way we cannot trust the world's way and so here's my question i'll leave it with this is it possible as you think about marriage young people single guys gals students singles is it possible that you're thinking about marriage but you're really thinking about somebody's taking a piece of onion paper and scribble their ideas of what it should be put it on a wall and you're not looking at it god's way because if you will do marriage god's way when you get to be my age or older you'll be able to look back and you'll see how god has filled your life with riches with things that really matter

Channel: Second Baptist Church, Houston

Views: 76

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: second baptist church houston, north, craig reynolds

Id: 34g8JAIWcsk

Length: 31min 27sec (1887 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 13 2021