When is it okay for Christians to Divorce? | Ask Pastor Mark

when it comes to divorce the bible says uh initially god made them male and female to marry and become one flesh and jesus says you know uh similarly that the two become one and so in the covenants of marriage you consummate it to show that physically spiritually financially mentally you're one and then the question is is there ever any uh circumstances by which you can go back to two the bible does give some and christians debate about this all the time the bible talks about adultery and in the old testament if you committed adultery we didn't have to worry so much about a divorce because they would just kill you and so that was a simple way out uh in the new testament divorce becomes grounds uh based upon adultery so adultery can be the breaking of the marriage covenant you don't have to get a marriage divorce but if you have adultery it is a possibility the bible also talks about uh first corinthians seven the unbeliever leaves so let's say let's say you're both non-christians and one of you gets saved and the other says hey you know it's me or jesus pick one and you're like well i i love you but i can't be a non-christian and i'm gonna be faithful to jesus and so then they leave and you let the unbeliever go so that is more in cases of um desertion and then the the thing that i would say as well is uh um jesus says that moses permitted divorce because of quote hardness of heart and most bible teachers probably would criticize me on this point but but ultimately before there's a problem in the marriage there's a problem in the heart and the bible talks about guard your heart it's the wellspring of your life and everything flows from it and so um the problems out here usually start in here and according to jesus it starts in marriage with hardness of heart and what happens in marriage when somebody gets hard-hearted they literally are hard-hearted toward the lord and toward their spouse and we've all had a heart heart at some point some of us it's been a very long season and if you're in it right now you need to ask god to sort of take out that hard heart and give you a soft heart but nonetheless when people get a hardness of heart they they will do horrible terrible cruel even traumatic things to their spouse to force them to do something that would give them grounds for divorce or just to leave and so when it comes to divorce i think it was a westminster confession of faith if memory serves me correct says it when it comes to divorce we need to be careful about saying these are qualifiers and these are not because what happens is if your heart is hard you're going to find a way to get your circumstances to match the qualifications and so i i saw this early on as a pastor um one of the first divorce cases that i was in on at a staff meeting at a church there was a couple that they were christians and she met with a pastor and asked what are the grounds for divorce and the pastor said well you know you can't get divorced unless there's adultery and so what she did she spent the next few years trying to get her husband to commit adultery um and she hired a friend of hers to be the housekeeper she would leave she encouraged the housekeeper to flirt with her husband or she knew that her friend liked her husband and she said she was fine with it and so for years she's got her friend coming over to clean the house and flirt with her husband and she intentionally goes to the grocery store well eventually the husband does what he shouldn't do and he crosses a line with the woman and then the woman goes and tells the wife it finally happened we connected we hooked up so then the woman walks into the church and tells the pastor i can get a divorce now he committed adultery it's like well this is a real sick situation here and the woman had a boyfriend but she hadn't slept with him yet so she hadn't committed adultery but she committed adultery in her heart so the whole thing was just a disaster i remember sitting in that counseling session as a young pastor going man when people want us in they get really creative and if you just give them sort of a paint by numbers kit of what's acceptable and unacceptable they'll oftentimes find a way to get their circumstances to fit the paint by numbers kid and so um and that is what again jesus is talking about with hardness of heart i mean i know married couples that the heart got so hard that they lived in the same house but i know one husband that didn't say a word to his wife for over three years just literally ignored her for three years until she left and then he said i've been deserted i have grounds for divorce i quote okay again the heart is the issue you know i know one um couple some years ago the husband would sit in the living room and watch porn on the family tv and the wife would have to take the kids upstairs and she'd be like why do you do that in the middle of our home and he's like well it's my home and you know i had a long hard day and i can do whatever i want it's it's traumatic i mean you are abusing and traumatizing the whole family but then he would say letter of the law well i'm not committing adultery no but you're committing adultery of the heart and and so again a lot of times people will be wondering how do i get what i want the question is well where is your heart and if your heart is tender toward the lord then even if you do have a divorce you'll have god's heart and it says that god hates divorce and it doesn't say that god hates the divorcee but he hates divorce and anyone who's been divorced they hate it as well they hate all of the implications and complications that come with it so uh what does the bible say about divorce a lot but the thing i would hone in on where's your heart where's your spouse's heart if your heart's in the wrong place it doesn't matter what answer i give you you're going to end up doing a bad thing

Channel: Pastor Mark Driscoll

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Keywords: mark driscoll, driscoll, christian sermon, bible study, theology, bible, christian, pastor, christian pastor, mars hill, jesus, real faith, how to study the bible, what is gods will, christianity, pray, bible verse, faith, gospel, christ, god, church, online church

Id: 9D8g_6hukYU

Length: 5min 45sec (345 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 09 2022