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Divorce & Remarriage: Part Two

July 3, 2019 / / 0 Comments

(This is part two of our sermon “Divorce: It’s Going to be OK” from this past Sunday at Central.)

Divorce is sin. And the Church has tried to legislate this sin through law.

Generally speaking — I’m using very broad and very general language in today’s post — the Church has historically taken a phrase or two from Jesus and a sentence or two from Paul and come up with complicated rules and strict laws and serious consequences for legislating divorce and remarriage.

We have said any divorce not based on fornication is an “unscriptural” divorce. In other words, divorce is only allowed by Scripture if one of the parties has had sex with somebody else. We’ve taken the words of Jesus in Matthew, his specific answer to a particular question about a detail in Deuteronomy 24, and we’ve built entire legal structures around it. You can’t divorce your wife except for marital unfaithfulness. We’ve called it the exception clause. Now, I’ll suggest that the reason Jesus’ words about divorce in Mark and Luke don’t contain this exception is because Mark and Luke are written to Gentile Christians who don’t know and don’t care much about the Law of Moses. Matthew is written to Jewish Christians who care a great deal about how Jesus might interpret that murky phrase in Deuteronomy 24. So Matthew puts it in.

Regardless of that, now we’ve got “scriptural” and “unscriptural” divorces based on who did and who didn’t have sex with somebody else and when they did it. So if a couple gets a divorce and there’s no fornication involved, we’ve said there’s no divorce. They’re still married in the eyes of God. It doesn’t matter how many trips they’ve made to the courthouse and how many divorce documents they’ve signed, we’ve said God is still recognizing the marriage. It can’t be undone without sexual infidelity. So if either one of them gets remarried, we’ve said they’ll be living in adultery. They will always be living in sin.

OK. What about a couple who marries and then divorces after three years? No kids. No fornication. No sexual sin. It’s just a bad match — irreconcilable differences — and they divorce. Both of these people wind up marrying again and these two second marriages are doing well. The guy has two kids with his second wife, the woman has three children with her second husband, and both families have re-committed themselves to Christ. And then fifteen years later these two run into each other at the mall. They haven’t seen each other or spoken in fifteen years. So they talk and they show each other pictures of their children and they sit down for coffee together as they’re getting caught up. Next thing you know, the coffee leads to dinner, and the dinner leads to these two having sex together that night in a hotel room. And the angels in heaven rejoice! Praise God! These two are finally obeying the will of the Lord!

We’ve also determined that if there are “scriptural” and “unscriptural” divorces based on fornication, then there must be guilty parties and innocent parties. The guilty party in a divorce can never remarry, but the innocent party can. Which means — follow me on this — we’re saying in God’s eyes the guilty person is still married to the innocent person but the innocent person is no longer married to the guilty person. I think that’s impossible. I don’t know if it’s physics or just math, but that’s impossible.

In a “scriptural” divorce in which somebody had sex outside the marriage, the innocent party can remarry because he or she has been released from the first marriage. But the guilty person is still bound? Is this about marriage or is it about punishment? We’ve made it so that in church you’re better off killing your husband than divorcing him. We’ll forgive you for murder. And then you can remarry.

We’ve made it so that in an “unscriptural” divorce, where nobody’s been unfaithful sexually, both parties are guilty. The man divorces his wife, he doesn’t get remarried, he’s not having sex with anybody else, and we say the wife cannot remarry. She’s waiting on the guy to have sex with somebody else first. She’s waiting on it! And the church is hoping for it! Somehow we’ve said this couple is still married in God’s eyes. On what grounds, I have no idea.

What about the couple that’s “unscripturally” divorced and remarried prior to baptism? Does their Christian conversion allow them to remain married? Some have said, “No, they’re living in adultery. They have to be divorced in order to be saved.” Wait. Do we tell married people to divorce in order to please God? Do we tell them they can live together but they can’t have sex? Is that the biblical model for marriage?

If a husband abandons his wife and leaves no forwarding address, can the wife remarry? Well, is the guy having sex with another woman? And what kind of proof do we need?

Does fornication after an “unscriptural” divorce retroactively make the divorce “scriptural?” In other words, the husband divorces his wife, there’s no fornication, so the divorce is “unscriptural.” If the husband remarries, now he’s committing adultery and the first wife can remarry. So in an “unscriptural” divorce, the first to remarry is a sinner and going to hell while the second to remarry is good and going to heaven.

What if a husband is beating his wife? She’s in danger of injury or maybe even death. Can she divorce? Can she remarry? Well, she can’t divorce him if he’s not cheating on her. So maybe the Church recommends a restraining order or a legal separation. Wait. The Church recommends she be relieved of her marital duties, but not her marriage? She’s not going to submit to her husband, she’s not going to serve her husband, she’s not going to give her body to her husband, she’s not going to live with her husband, but they’re still married? This is not God’s model for marriage. Is she really still his wife? Should she be? We’re setting up false and fictitious marriages for the sake of preserving a doctrine!

Jesus says, I desire mercy, not sacrifice.
Paul says the Gospel is about love, not law.

At best, we’ve developed rules and laws that are unmerciful.
At worst, we’ve punished people and monitored their salvation and sought our own salvation through legalistic works. Through law.

Peace,

Allan

Divorce & Remarriage: Part One

July 2, 2019 / / 3 Comments

Preaching through this current series at Central on our family issues is giving our church a great opportunity to have difficult conversations about serious matters. We made promises a long time ago that Central will be a safe place to have hard conversations. And that continued with this past Sunday’s sermon on divorce and remarriage. We can’t ignore stuff like this. We have to talk about it.

It’s an important topic. If marriage is intended by God to reflect his holy love and faithfulness to the world — and it is — then anything that disrupts it or destroys it is serious. It’s also a relevant topic. Everybody in our church is impacted in some way by divorce. We’ve all been affected. This topic can also be controversial. For a lot of us, our background and our instinct is focused on having the “correct” position and being “doctrinally sound.” In other words, we’ve argued about this stuff. And it’s emotional. It’s hard to have strictly rational, logical, biblical, theological discussions about divorce because it’s so personal. And painful.

Sunday’s sermon at Central went like this: divorce is sin, we’ve tried to legislate that sin through laws, marriage after divorce is not a sin, God forgives sin through the cross. I’ll post the sermon here in this space over the next four days, according to those four main points.

Divorce is Sin – It’s not the unforgivable sin. But it is sin.

In Matthew 19:3, the Pharisees ask Jesus where he stands on Deuteronomy 24: “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?” Deuteronomy 24 begins, “If a man marries a woman who becomes displeasing to him because he finds something indecent about her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce, gives it to her and sends her from his house, and if after she leaves his house she becomes the wife of another man, and her second husband dislikes her and writes her a certificate of divorce…”

We know from ancient rabbinic writings that during Jesus’ day there were two schools of thought on Deuteronomy 24. Two very prominent rabbis at this time disagreed on what “indecent” means. Shammai taught that “indecent” means fornication or sexual unfaithfulness. Hillel taught that “indecent” means anything the husband doesn’t like — she burned the toast, she can’t parallel park, whatever. It’s a tough question. The Law is a bit ambiguous here. Where are you, Jesus? Can you divorce for any and every reason, or just for sexual infidelity?

“Haven’t you read,” Jesus replied, “that at the beginning the Creator made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh?’ Therefore, what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

“Why then,” they asked, “did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?”

Jesus replied, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery.”

Jesus comes down on the conservative interpretation. He sides with Shammai that “indecency” means sexual infidelity. But he also points the Pharisees to the more important principles and foundational purposes of marriage for all time. God joins a married couple together. God unites a husband and wife and the two become one holy person. And it is a sin to tear that divine union apart.

Well, if divorce is a sin, why does God allow it with a divorce certificate? That’s a really good question. And Jesus doesn’t shy away from it. He explains that divorce was never part of God’s plan, marriage has always been intended for life. But God knows that marriages are going to fail. We live in a fallen world, we are all broken people. God anticipates divorce. It’s not approved, but it’s regulated; it’s not ideal, but it’s permitted. Why? “Because your hearts were hard.” The old KJV says because of “the hardness of your hearts.”

Do we still have hard hearts today or has that changed? (Answer that silently. To yourself. About yourself. Not about your spouse.) Jesus isn’t saying hard-heartedness is over and we don’t need the provision for it anymore. He’s simply saying it’s a sin to terminate a marriage and, yes, it happens.

Also, in verse 9, when Jesus says, “commits adultery,” that’s a metaphor for covenant-breaking. Adultery in the Bible isn’t always about sex; it’s an approved figure of speech for not keeping the marriage promises. You find it in the Old Testament and the New Testament. Adultery means covenant breaking.

“But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress.” ~Matthew 5:32

How can the wife be an adulteress when she hasn’t had sex with anybody else or remarried? How can she be guilty of adultery just because her husband divorced her? Don’t overthink that. The only way that’s possible is if Jesus is using “adultery” as a metaphor for covenant breaking. The husband has made it impossible now for the wife to fulfill her marriage vows. She can’t keep her covenant promises because he’s divorced her. When you’re married, you’re not the only one impacted by your choices. The two have become one. He’s breaking the marriage vows and now she’s an adulteress. It doesn’t mean she’s had sex outside the marriage; it means the marriage is over for both of them.

And that’s the sin: ending the marriage covenant, breaking the marriage vows made before God. There could be any of a bunch of reasons for the divorce — sexual misconduct, neglect, abuse, addiction, boredom, whatever. But the net result is that the covenant is broken and that’s the sin of divorce. “What God has joined together let no one separate.” There may be different degrees of guilt on one side or the other, but the sin of divorce is breaking the union that God has commanded us not to break.

“To the married I give this command (not I, but the Lord): A wife must not separate from her husband. But if she does, let her remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband. And a husband must not divorce his wife.” ~1 Corinthians 7:10-11

Notice the Bible uses the terms “separate” and “divorce” interchangeably. “Separate” and “divorce” mean the same thing. Now, in the United States, you can get a separation and still be legally married. You and your spouse don’t have to live together, you can live in different states, you don’t even have to see each other at Christmas, and you’re still legally married in the eyes of the government. In the Bible, in God’s eyes, separation is divorce. You’re not united, you’re not together in body or spirit. The covenant relationship created by God to reflect to the world his matchless glory and his faithful love has been ripped apart. God says through his prophet Malachi that divorce is an act of violence.

Divorce is sin. It’s not an unforgivable sin. But it is sin.

Peace,

Allan

4Amarillo Week 2019

June 26, 2019 / / 0 Comments

What a joy to come together with our Christian brothers and sisters from the other three downtown congregations for four days of outreach programs and service projects. This is our fifth annual “4Amarillo Week” in Amarillo, a collaboration between First Baptist, First Presbyterian, Polk Street United Methodist, and Central Church of Christ. This week we’re running a morning Vacation Bible School at Margaret Wills Elementary and an evening VBS at San Jacinto Elementary. We’re feeding all the kids from those two communities lunch and dinner to go with the Bible stories, the games, the arts and crafts projects, and worship times. We’re also working in the San Jacinto Neighborhood Garden.

 

 

 

All four churches are gathering at San Jacinto tonight for the annual 4Amarillo Ice-Cream Social. For the past five years we’ve hosted this at Central and judged all the homemade ice-cream and gave out trophies in a bunch of fun categories. But this year, we’re taking it to the community. We’re going to make hundreds of ice-cream sundaes for all the kids who are attending these neighborhood VBSes, their families, all the volunteers, and everybody from the four churches.

Praise God for the blessed privilege of joining him in breaking down the walls between his people and his churches and taking the Good News of salvation in his Son Jesus to our neighbors in Amarillo.

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Our Central missionaries in Bogota, Columbia — Byron and Sandra Cana and their two sons, Diego and Derek — arrived in Amarillo late this morning and will be here with us for almost two weeks. I was honored to join them and Steve & Debbie Cearley and Tom & Janice Grant, four members of Central’s foreign missions committee, for a good ol’ Texas lunch at Cracker Barrel. It was great hearing Byron and Sandra’s improved English, it was encouraging to hear about the Lord’s work in Bogota, and it was entertaining listening to Tom try to explain to the Canas what exactly is a Sod Poodle.

Peace,

Allan

I Trust You Now

June 25, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Lord Jesus, I believe that you are able and willing to deliver me from all the care and unrest and bondage of my Christian life. I believe you did die to set me free, not only in the future, but now and here. I believe you are stronger than sin, and that you can keep me, even me, in my extreme of weakness, from falling in its snares or yielding obedience to its commands. And Lord, I am going to trust you to keep me. I have tried keeping myself, and have failed, and failed, most grievously. I am absolutely helpless. So now I will trust you. I give myself to you. I keep back no reserves. Body, soul, and spirit, I present myself to you as a piece of clay, to be fashioned into anything your love and your wisdom shall choose. And now I am yours. I believe you do accept that which I present to you; I believe that this poor, weak, foolish heart has been taken possession of by you, and that you have even at this very moment begun to work in me to will and to do of your good pleasure. I trust you utterly, and I trust you now.

~Hannah Whitall Smith

So, You’ve Ruined Your Kids…

June 24, 2019 / / 1 Comment

(I didn’t get the last part of that sermon posted over the weekend. I tackled my storage shed in the backyard, replacing all the wood on the corners and around the door frame, and re-painting the whole thing. The paint color I carefully selected is “Elephant Gray,” but it looks really blue. I hate painting. Here’s the last part of the “Parenting: So, You’ve Ruined Your Kids…” sermon that concludes all the posts from last week.)

Some of you have kids who are already grown with children of their own. And they did not turn out the way you hoped. They didn’t turn out the way you planned and the way you prayed. They’re not in a good place. Maybe your children are not in a good place with their spouse and their own family, they’re not in a good place with their career or their health, they’re not in a good place with our Lord. And you know you did the very best you could. You tried as hard as you could to raise him right, you did everything possible to raise her right. But the more you look back, the more you see how you could have done things differently. You see where you should have done things differently. You realize your mistakes. You see where you messed some things up. And you have regrets. You feel guilt. And shame. How did she wind up like this? How did he turn out that way? Sometimes you feel like you must have been a terrible parent.

The Lord redeems all that. Our crucified and risen Lord Jesus takes care of all that.

I’m not going to tell you, “No, come on, you were a great father!” because you would rationalize that I don’t know the full situation. And you’d be right. And I’m not going to say, “Your mistakes as a parent didn’t really matter to your kids,” because you wouldn’t believe me. And, frankly, our parenting mistakes do have an impact. No. What I’m really trying to do is point you to the cross. The Lord can redeem your parenting story by joining it to the forgiveness and restoration story of the cross. I don’t want to reassure you about your performance as a parent. I want to offer you something much better: a word of grace.

“Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him?” ~Matthew 7:9-11

God redeems your failures at the cross. Whatever absence, whatever neglect, whatever harshness or abuse, whatever character traits you’ve passed on to your kids, whatever harmful habits or practices they picked up, whatever sins real or imagined — all of that is forgiven and dealt with at the cross. You don’t have to be taken down by guilt or paralyzed by regrets. In all your sins, in all your failures, in all your mistakes, you know what’s best for your kids. How much more does God know what you need and what your children need and how to give it to you in buckets?

Maybe you’ve got a prodigal son or a lost daughter. Maybe your family is intact and everybody loves each other, but you have this one child who hasn’t received the Christian faith. That’s so hard. Or maybe your grown child is outwardly and verbally resentful and hateful to you, maybe he or she is even involved in dangerous or destructive behavior. That’s agony for parents. It’s horrible. How did this happen? What did we do wrong?

Listen, you’re not just dealing with a prodigal child; God is dealing with a prodigal universe! Sin and rebellion against God is universal, it’s in the stream of the human race. Raising children is not the same as raising cattle or programming code into a computer. It’s not always cause and affect like that; it’s not always that black-and-white, input-and-output. People rebel against what they’ve been taught. Humans turn their backs on God and the people who love them. We can’t always know how or why things go foul.

Here’s what we DO know.

Our God is the perfect Father and he knows how you feel. He, too, agonizes over his rebellious children and his children who are not in a great place. He’s not distant from that. He suffers and dies on a cross for us. And with us. Our kids belong to the Lord, not to us. How much more…? There’s mercy in that.

John Stott used to talk about the great temples in Asia where he would see statues of Buddha: placid, remote-looking, arms crossed, eyes closed, softly smiling. In Stott’s mind and heart, he says he would have to turn away from that image and look instead to that “lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through his hands and feet, back lacerated and bleeding, limbs wrenched out of joint, brow pierced with thorns, mouth intolerably dry and thirsty, plunged in God-forsaken darkness.”

That’s our God. He is not distant from your pain. He’s crucified by it. In it. He’s crucified with it. And with you.

And we know that God’s Holy Spirit can convict anyone of sin and bring anyone to a saving faith in Christ, even after years and decades of running. The Spirit blows where he wills and we can’t track him. We can only watch the leaves flutter as he goes by.

God’s got this. Trust him to forgive you by his love and to take care of your child by his grace. Keep loving your grown children as best you can, keep all those connections open, so our prodigals know how to get home and that you’ll meet them on the road and throw a massive celebration feast when they do. God wants them saved and restored more than you do. Whatever mistakes you’ve made along the way are not going to stop God. How much more…? The crucified Christ bears your sins for you, he takes on the curse that we’ve brought on ourselves.

Our children, in our families and in our church, represent newness of life. They are the on-going providence of God. That’s why the powers of hell come after our children so hard, from Pharaoh and Herod to the sex-trafficking and abortion industries. The powers are after our kids. When we embrace children, when we love our kids, we’re sharing in the joy of the future. Children point us to the truth that the world has a future and God’s Church has a future.

Parenting is like the cross; unconditional love, sacrificial service, and pain. And unsurpassed glory. We bless our children by parenting by the cross. We don’t weigh them down with expectations we could never bear ourselves. We keep our promises as best we can. We forgive them, we forgive each other, and we forgive ourselves.

We — all of us together — have a future and a hope, one that is wrapped up in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Our plans may evaporate, our dreams may get crushed. You’re not as consistent with the discipline or as committed to the priorities as you’d like. Sometimes you’re too harsh and sometimes you’re too lenient. Yeah, me, too. But our God’s love and grace for his people never ever stops. God’s mercies never cease and his promises never fail. So we can have babies and parent our children and unflinchingly trust our God.

Peace,

Allan

Big Picture Perspective

June 21, 2019 / / 0 Comments

(This is part five of our recent sermon at Central, “Parenting: So, You’ve Ruined Your Kids…” I’ve been posting this in sections all week. We’ll conclude tomorrow.)

Big Picture Perspective – Your children are not the most important thing in your life. They’re not. Your whole world cannot revolve around your kids. They can’t be the center of your universe. You can’t compromise your commitments to your spouse in time or energy or affection because of your kids. You can’t neglect the commitments you’ve made to the Lord and to his Church because of your kids’ interests or pursuits. Your kids can’t come first. Your life cannot revolve around them and their schedules and what they sign up for and what they want to do. Parents need to operate out of a big picture Kingdom of God perspective. And the children need to understand it, too.

Your children need to see you caring for other people — spiritually, physically, and emotionally. The best thing our children can learn from us is that Carrie-Anne and I are part of God’s Church. Our kids see us singing in worship and serving others with our covenant group and investing our time and money and talents into God’s people and God’s mission. Our lives revolve around our commitments to Christ and to each other.

Kids know when you put other things first. They’re not stupid. They know because we tell them with our actions. They see it.

Church is important in my family, but not as important as my traveling team. Serving others in the name and manner of Jesus is important, but not as important as our school. Or our club. Or this vacation.

The parenting passage in Deuteronomy 6 says, “The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” That’s the big picture perspective or a godly parent. The Lord is first. The kids are not.

Peace,

Allan

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