August 25, 2024

The Profound Mystery of Marriage

Speaker: Pastor James Wychers Series: All Things United in Christ Topic: Marriage Scripture: Ephesians 5:22–23

The Profound Mystery of Marriage_web

SERMON INTRODUCTION:

“We're talking about the profound mystery of marriage. Marriage today in our culture is falling on hard times. I've heard it described more than once that it's just a piece of paper talking about marriage.

Marriage is rarer than it's ever been. It happens later than it's ever happened. In our current culture, men are almost thirty years old on average before they get married.

A third of all people will never get married in the future if things continue. I heard a stat this week that a quarter of fourty-year-olds right now have never been married. It's a stunning thing. And of course, the marriage rates affect the fertility rates.

The fertility rates are falling fast. The fertility rate is the average number of children that a woman has in a society. In 1950, that number was 4.84. In 2021, that number had dropped to 2.23. And by the end of this century, it's estimated that that number will be 1.59.

Almost half of all countries on earth have a fertility rate that's less than the rate of replacement. And you know what that means? That means we're signing our societal death warrant. If we can't replace ourselves, our societies, our civilization will crash. We cannot continue that way.

Marriage has been devalued even in the church. Christians tend to be more concerned with worldly values, with things like financial stability and those kinds of things. In a worldly view of the world, people say, well, who cares? Who really cares? That's something in the future, doesn't really matter. Well, I just want to say this morning that God cares, and that's why we open our Bibles, right? What is God's view? What is a biblical worldview on marriage?

Ephesians has shown us that the transforming power of the gospel changes the way we live. Ephesians 4:1 says, “I urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you've been called.” Walk in a certain manner. Our ability to walk this way rests on the power of Jesus to change us. Rests on the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ. It rests on the power of the filling by the Holy Spirit.

Part of the Spirit-empowered walk is rightly living in human relationships, specifically in the family. That's the part of Ephesians we're in and will be in for a couple more weeks.

Submission, we said last week, is part of walking with Jesus. We are called, if you are a Christian, that means you are a follower of Christ, that Jesus is the leader and you are following Him and doing the things that He does and He calls you to do.

We saw last week that husbands and wives are to live out a certain order in their relationship. Each has a different role given by God. The wife is called to submit to her husband. This posture of yieldedness to Christ, out of love and submission to Christ, the yieldedness to the role of her husband.

And the husband is called to lead his wife in self-sacrificial love and service. Both of these are done in the context of Christ's relationship with the church. We saw there that it's never disconnected to this relationship of Christ in the church.

Today we're going to dig deeper into this reality. And we're going to see that as a one-flesh union, marriage reflects the ultimate relationship of Jesus and his people. The marriage relationship is much more about marriage in the Scriptures. It's the very center of how the Bible talks about the good news of God's love for His people. He talks about it using the institution in the metaphor of marriage. He talks about the gospel through the lens of marriage.

My desire is that we would see the beauty of this biblical value—that our thoughts about marriage would not be conformed to the image of the world, because the world certainly has an image of marriage. So we would not be conformed to the image of the world, but we would be transformed by the renewal of our minds. And that renewal comes through the Word of God, that we might see God and his purposes, and they are good purposes.”

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