So now tonight in Matthew, we are going to come to the 19th chapter. I think, as I mentioned this morning, it is most significant on the heels of a discussion on the nature of Christian forgiveness that the gospel writer records the teaching of Jesus in his discourse on the matter of divorce. And we shall skip over the first two verses. They simply say that Jesus healed again, as was his nature. I have addressed you at least twice in the last year on the healing ministry of Jesus. And so we shall pass over that tonight and come to the third verse of Matthew chapter 19. The Pharisees also came to him, tempting him, always trying to trap him, and saying unto him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause? And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, and said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and the twain shall be one flesh. Wherefore there are no more twain, but one flesh. For therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder. They said unto him, Why did Moses then command to give a writing of divorcement and to put her away? He saith unto them, Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, suffered or allowed you to put away your wives. But from the beginning, it was not so. And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, accepted me for fornication, and shall marry another, and don't get hung up on that word, there is no distinction in this context, it is simply sexual unfaithfulness. And shall marry another, committeth adultery, and whoso marrieth her which is put away, does commit adultery. And that clause refers to the prior one, that is, except under those circumstances. His disciples said unto him, If the case of the man be so with his wife, in other words, if it's this restrictive, then man is better just not even get married at all. But he said unto them, Well, all men cannot receive the same, except those to whom it is given. But there are some eunuchs who are unmarried, which were born so from their mother's womb. And there are some eunuchs which were made eunuchs of men. And there be eunuchs which have made themselves in that state, unmarried state, for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it. Just a few minutes ago, a lady stopped me in the hall and said, What are you preaching on tonight, pastor? I said, Divorce. She chuckled and said, Well, you're about 15 years too late for me. The purpose of my message tonight is a redemptive and conciliatory one. And it's not intended for the person that has been divorced or for the divorced person that has been remarried. Some of the most well -adjusted, beautifully related, and effective Christians that I know who are in places of leadership and responsibility are persons who have had an impossibly difficult marriage, divorced, and remarried, and have made a wonderful go of it. And I want to say that they are loved and wanted and welcomed and honored here. In fact, this church makes an effort to provide a special opportunity for the individual who has never been married or who is single having been divorced to have a special place in some of our single adult ministries to feel that they are very vitally much that which they are a part of the important fellowship of this church. I think Jesus makes it very clear that there are circumstances under which divorce may be allowed. And I think that naturally it follows, and is thusly said, that remarriage, having been divorced, been allowed under those conditions, is now possible. And you say, Well, I am married, divorced, and remarried, but it wasn't under these conditions. Shall I get a divorce and try to patch up the old marriage? The answer is a resounding no. Two wrongs never make a right. Jesus, I find, was never quite as concerned with what happened as is with what is going to happen. I marry divorced people after counsel and under some circumstances. Not all of them, nor do I refuse to do so to all of them. And very frankly, let me say to you that I am far more concerned with the fact that two individuals have profited from a mistake, have objectively and honestly faced the problem, what went wrong, what corrections have been made such that we are not bringing the same components of failure previously into this marriage. In other words, what are we going to do now, I think far supersedes the political football, the theological football of what we have done in the past. If I understand anything about the Christian gospel, it is conciliatory. It is new beginnings. It is a second chance. It's good news about hope for difficult situations. Jesus was confronted with a woman who had had seven husbands. And he never once raised the issue of those seven divorces. But he spoke very meticulously to the matter of the woman's integrity and repentance and sincerity in what she intended to do in the future. Now, for somebody who is conservatively so, theologically so conservative, I confess to you that I am rather liberal at this point. And I think there are a couple of reasons. One is because I never find Jesus condemnatory except to the self -satisfied who judge. And the other is that I find him always more concerned with picking up the fragments of any difficult relationship and starting again and saying, here's good news, here's a second chance, here's a pat on the back, here's another opportunity, do better this time, profit from the past. And then I do find that he makes very clear, in my own opinion, that there is a condition under which divorce and remarriage are permitted. And there are a lot of shades of difficulty in that. There are a lot of problems. What constitutes an adulterous relationship? What about homosexuality? You could go so far as to talk about a man who is so proud and impossible that he's married almost to himself or to his job or to his business. And so if you want to make a theological football out of it, I think, to tell you the honest truth, it's possible to take either side of the issue and prove your point. I think I could take any way you want to argue it and argue it. But after all said and done, Jesus never tried to reduce the Christian gospel to a set of doctrines and precepts and a framework of do's and don'ts. Across the failures and the problems and the interpretations of a thousand laws and rules, He came and stamped one word, love, love. And I say again that the entire tenor of the redemptive, conciliatory nature of the gospel causes me to say to two people that love the Lord and have profited from a mistake and are genuine and sincere in their love for Jesus and have a beautiful chance to start again, God bless you and let me help you. I find some young girl, 25, 26, the victim of an unfortunate marriage. The old boy was worthless. She got pregnant. He left. He hadn't seen her. She hasn't seen him in five years. She's married. She's got a baby. She was faithful. And the old no good is left out and she'll never see him again. Am I going to relegate that woman to a role, a lifestyle of self -incrimination and judgment and causticism the rest of her life when along comes a godly Christian man that loves her and wants to provide a beautiful Christian home, help her pick up the pieces, and have a glorious, beautiful next 40 years of her life. I simply sensed in the tone and tenor and teaching of our Lord Jesus that there is always a good word for those that have had a problem and made a mistake and are genuine in their desire to start again. Now, that'd be treason to make the most of it. Having said that, let me say that I am more concerned tonight, in fact, from here on, and exclusively concerned not to those who are divorced, but to you who are still married, who are thinking about divorce, and who one day might. My wife and I, in 20 years, have never once considered—murder, yes, but not divorce. Divorce. I know you've heard that three times. No, not all of them have. Now, let me say two or three things to you about what Jesus teaches us. The marriage, he said, was never intended to harden people. It is the most softening and intimate and beautiful and personal of two relationships. In fact, he uses it as the illustration of the church. Now, the church simply means the bride of Christ, all of those that love him, the redeemed, the saved, his believers, his own. Look at the relationship. First of all, there's the courtship period, where two people are attracted to each other and begin to fall in love. Then there comes the time that the young man pops the question, and as much as she loves him, she cannot be one with him until she makes a commitment and says, I do. And you can be interested in Jesus, but you don't become a Christian by osmosis. There must come a time where you say, and I do, here and now, and you become his. The actual marriage must take place. And then there's the honeymoon, the beautiful ecstasy of the new acquaintance. And all the Christian goes on a honeymoon, those first few weeks when he is aglow with the joy of his newfound love, and he experiences a relationship between himself and his lover, the Lord Jesus, that is ecstatically unspeakable in its beauty. There are the children that are born, the product of the union of the love of two people. And I think just so there should always be spiritual children being born through the witness and life of the love affair between Jesus and his children. When we love him and are in union with him, children will be born. And if no children are being born, we might need to look up and check up again on the union. And sometimes people say to me, I've been thinking about a divorce. That's bad thinking. That kind of thinking will get you in trouble. Everything in life tends to gravitate toward the realization of those things we think about. You need to be thinking about how to save your marriage, not how to destroy it. I think one of the problems is that we're not serious enough. When I marry people, every wedding has two parts. It has the processional and the ceremony. I never rehearse a wedding. We have young ladies in our church that do that. Some of our staff does that. I don't need to practice. I know what I'm going to do. I mean, how much sense does it take to come from that door, walk up here, and stand still? I mean, I can handle that. But I confess that I wish they would change the music. I feel like a cotton -picking fool. Every time they start that thing, here comes the bride, and I'm the first one to walk in the front and ride up there. They do it every wedding. I think some appropriate wedding music, you know, the fight is on or something like that. They should substitute, but here comes the bride, and boy, in I come. I want Gerald to write a new song called Here Comes the Preacher. Let's get that done, and that'll help. But in the ceremony itself, I never rehearse the ceremony. I say to the couple, I don't want you to be all uptight about remembering your lines. Just listen and I'll ask you and I'll tell you precisely what to do. Why? Because I never plan what I'm going to say. Basically, it's about the same thing. But in the quietness and intimacy, when myself and the bride and the groom are there, I want to say what I feel. I want to say what comes natural. I want them to understand the seriousness of that thing. When I finish a wedding, often people say to me, Preacher, you tire, me not. Well, I tire as mean as I can, as hard as I know how, because I want it to stay. Those vows that you have made are a vow. You have sworn to God that you will do everything humanly possible under God to save that marriage. And it should be, in all seriousness, that kind of a commitment. We were in Ireland in 1959, and I was amazed to find out that the average age of marriage in that country at that time was 28 for women and 30 for men, and they went together 8 to 10 years before they got married. You say, I don't like that. I don't buy that. That's too long. It may be. But would you buy this, that 99 out of 100 marriages stuck? Today, when half of them fail, it is a tragic thing that we have so many young marriages after such short courtships. Like the old Western song says, we got married in a fever. And a lot of people just get married in a fever. They get married on emotion. They get married on romance. They get married on feeling. And that doesn't last. And they wake up one morning to find they really do not know this individual. One of the things I always tell young couples is that you are married to an intricate and beautiful and wonderful but very complex personality, and you need to take time to get acquainted. I think one of the worst things you can do is to make most of your life together, and most of it is, for most of you, being entertained by a third medium. You go to the show. You watch TV four hours a night. You go to ball games, and you sit there like two dummies, side by side, and a third party does all the talking. Turn off that television set, and go in and sit down on the couch and look at each other and talk to each other. I think one of the most wonderful times of the day is those wonderful occasions when my wife and I, the children are in bed, sit in the living room on the couch and talk about our hopes and our frustrations and our needs and our dreams and our plans. And we really know each other. You see, it's in the area where we are different, where we both give, that marriage becomes a beautiful thing. If that person is not different from you in any area, if they don't have something to contribute to you, a strength for your weakness, a liability for your asset, some pluses for your minuses, then you don't need to be married. But you are different, and you can contribute, you can modify, you can both give a little bit, so that actually it is not in the similarities, but in the areas in which two people are different, that they have the opportunity to grow together and find fulfillment in each other, such that by the time you've been married 30 and 40 and 50 and 60 years, two personalities have become such an intricate part of each other that the twain literally are one. You ever know people that have been married 40, 50, 60 years that act alike and talk alike and think alike and even look alike? Sure they do. They are more a whole person than they were when they were married. You don't do this watching gun smoke. You have to have time to know each other. And for heaven's sakes, talk. You'd be surprised how few people talk. The one girl that I said, what do we talk about? Oh, if you're in that far off, you're in sad shape. Just start talking about your old love affairs. That'll heat up the discussion real quick. One psychologist has said, it's a shame that you have to live in Reno, Nevada, six months to buy a hunting license, but you only have to live there six weeks to get a divorce. He said, before you get a divorce, before you succumb to the temptation of a divorce -prone society where you can get it and get out of it easily and quickly, he said, consider these problems for the divorcee. One, there is the problem of loneliness. He said, the divorcee looks forward to his freedom, but far too often it is freedom, the freedom to be alone. He said, secondly, there are the frustrations. It is not simply the guilt that is induced by puritanical society. He said, something happens in the psyche, questions about one's own worth. To be sure, the wounds heal. But he said, the scars remain in the heart of the one that has been divorced. Then he says, there are the problems of remarriage. And statistics show that the second marriage has a three times higher risk of failure than did the first in the case of remarriage. And I say that in nine out of ten cases, the third and fourth divorce will always lead to another with one exception. Only the Christian, the true lover of Christ, has any kind of hope at all. Because when the tend is set, it takes the miraculous to change it. And then there's the problem of envy. What about his new wife or her new husband? And the days with the kids, who gets them? And the relatives and the inter -laws. So many hassles. And then there's the problem of paying the alimony. The young divorcee finds out that it's not as easy to get him to pay as she thought. And a county judge told me recently that if a man really wants to, to get out of it, you can't really make one out of a hundred pay alimony. He said, for every one the police have time to run down. There are four hundred they don't have time to run down. About the only hope you have that he will do what he says are his words. And most of the time, the alimony never happens. Well, I say again, strangely, that when you look at the remedial, conciliatory attitude of Jesus, did you notice when we read it, they asked him, what about divorce? And he didn't even answer their question. Notice again, he told them how important and beautiful and binding was the marriage relationship. They had to force the issue. They had to rephrase the question. They had to ask him the second time before he would even discuss it. And then he said that marriage, that divorce is never directed. It was never intended. It is only tolerated and allowed. But it is never what God would wish. From the beginning, it is not so. Now, I say again, that on the heels of his discussion on forgiveness comes the discussion on divorce. That we must always be willing to stop talking about, well, I am thinking about a divorce. But let all of your powers focus on how can we save the marriage. Now, I want you to turn with me, please, as I close, over to the book of Revelation. And in the second chapter of the last book in the Bible, there is a wonderful sermon on marriage and divorce. You say, I never read it. Well, you have to look close, but it's there. You remember that Jesus himself compares the relationship of a husband and his wife to himself as the husband and those of us that have accepted him as our Savior, as his bride, the church. I was amazed when finally I ran across something in the Bible that dealt with the question, how does a person that has lost their love for their husband or their wife, that is thinking about getting a divorce, get back together in love again? Now, let me say this to you again. What I'm going to share with you, I did about two years ago. And we should refresh our minds on it. There is a three -part prescription for the marriage that is going sour. Why do people want a divorce? Because they don't love each other. Is there a prescription from Jesus on how somebody that has fallen out of love or is falling out of love can fall in love again? Of course there is, and here it is. Jesus is talking to the bride, the church, the believers. He says, Nevertheless, I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love. The church, these believers, had grown cold. They didn't love the bridegroom like they used to. And this is the master's three -point prescription. What does Jesus say to a man that has fallen out of love with his bride or to a bride that is losing her love for her groom? Three things. Number one, remember. Mark that word. Remember, therefore, from whence thou art fallen. Remember, the memory, the mind can destroy you or it can save you. If you start thinking negative thoughts about everything I don't like about her and how I'm going to get rid of her and how it would be without her, what's that out of your mind? You start remembering the estate from whence you are fallen. Look at it. Remember, therefore, from whence thou art fallen. From whence are you fallen, the state from whence you were once in love. Remember how it was. And as you start filling the mind with positive seed thoughts, here's what happens. You admit to yourself, go on, dress up. You can do it. I can love this woman. Remember how it was when I did love her. Remember when you first met her. Remember the courtship. Remember the gorgeous wedding. Never have I walked by the doors of this church and heard them rehearsing for a wedding and playing, oh, perfect love, all human love transcending, that a tear didn't come to my eye. As I remember they played that at our wedding. Oh, perfect love. Remember. Remember the good things. Remember the beautiful things. And as you start thinking positively, your mind starts getting geared into the right kind of a direction to save your marriage. Now, he says something else. And repent. Repent. That's a theological term. We're talking about psychological problems here, emotional problems. Repent. That's pretty harsh, isn't it, Lord Jesus? Wouldn't it be better to deal therapeutically with a man and to try to understand what has happened? Would you rush into a poor, honest man that simply doesn't love his wife and say, Repent? That's something you do when you've committed a sin. Yes, that's what he says. He deals with the problem of falling out of love as a spiritual problem. And here's why. It is not possible to love the Lord Jesus Christ, to be filled with the Holy Spirit and consumed with love because you are filled smack dab in the will of God and fall out of love with your wife, neighbor. You won't do it. It's a symptom of a spiritual problem. Because when you love the Lord God with all your heart, when you're filled with his love, which overflows you, when the Spirit of God consumes you, you love everybody, you're not going to detest the dearest girl in the world, the one to whom you're married. Now, that's hard, but it's a part of the prescription. And at some point, if you're going to save your marriage, you're going to have to get alone and get on your knees and do some repenting and some confessing to God that I have backslidden. I have quit loving you, oh God, like I should. I don't pray as I should. I don't read as I should. I'm not filled with the Spirit as I should be and used to be or else I wouldn't be in this condition. It becomes a symptom of a spiritual problem. And the last thing he says, so underline remember, underline repent, and if you do any of these three, but not all of them, it won't work. This prescription works. I've seen it happen in the lives of only 30 or 40 couples I've counseled with out of several hundred who took it seriously and did it. The other word is do. Underline do. Do the first work. What first work? What you did when you loved this woman. Start treating her like you used to treat her. You say, oh, I'd be playing a game. Play the game. Your marriage is at stake. You mean that I should put on an act? I should act like I am enjoying this man? I should respond to him? Absolutely. Some of you that are suffering from a marriage problem find that your husband or wife, after this sermon, starts to act differently. Man, keep your mouth shut. Don't go home and say, oh, you're just doing that because that... No, give it a chance, man. Everything's at stake. Don't condemn them. Don't accuse. Don't be suspicious. Don't say, well, I don't know if he really meant that or not. Man, just thank God something different's happening. You see, here's what happens. If you will ask God to forgive you, if you'll begin to fill your mind, focusing your thoughts on what it used to be like, and you'll start acting like it was in the beginning, here I think, is the psychology of what happens. I think as you start acting like this, we're the only girl in the world whom you adore with all your heart, like you did when you were trying to get her to marry you, poor thing. If you'll do that, you'll become a new you, and what happens is she starts to respond and becomes a new her in response to the new you, and it's easier for you to love the new her. Nowhere does the Bible equate love with emotion, always with action. Love is something you do. And to you who are married, my sermon is addressed tonight. Oh, it is wonderful to see us married as it has been saved. And if you'll work at it in seriousness and in prayer, you can save your marriage, you can love again, you can save the lawyer's fees, which is only the beginning of heartache that follows. May we pray. Our Father, we are not surprised to find that Jesus refused to discuss the issue of divorce divorce until he was pressed the second time. But when the question was raised, he only talked about the beauty of marriage. And that's where we've got to stay. We've got to think about the good things. We talked about this morning, it's so easy to remember what we want to, oh, and forget what we want. We remember the, we forget the last 20 good things they did because we remember only the one bad thing. And so it's possible, Lord, when you get in our minds and our hearts down in, really inside of us, to change situations and personal relationships. And in this most wonderful and beautiful one, help us to see that to get a divorce, to just tear up the license, is not the way to go. But with God's help and in love and tenderness and effort to start again and make it work, God, give us Christian homes where prayer is said, where thoughtfulness and courtesy is exhibited, where Jesus is Lord and where he is loved. We pray in his name, amen.