Marriage: Four Supernatural Secrets - Part One

Matthew 19
1 When Jesus had finished saying these things, he left Galilee and went into the region of Judea to the other side of the Jordan. 2 Large crowds followed him, and he healed them there. 3 Some Pharisees came to him to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?” 4 “Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ 5 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’ ? 6 So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.” 7 “Why then,” they asked, “did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?” 8 Jesus replied, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. 9 I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery.” 10 The disciples said to him, “If this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry.” 11 Jesus replied, “Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. 12 For some are eunuchs because they were born that way; others were made that way by men; and others have renounced marriage because of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.”


INTRODUCTION

1. Keep Out! (of Marriage) The Spirit of Religion: Right and Wrong
It is generally the spirit of religion that wants to start with what is right and what is wrong. Right and wrong have to do with the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” That kind of knowledge down through the ages has had little to do with a pre-occupation with what gives life and what doesn’t. Its focus is on right and wrong because the desire of a religious spirit (and it doesn’t matter whether it is Christian or not) is to think that you are right . The desire of the religious spirit to think that you are right is not so concerned about righteousness. It is concerned with self righteousness. The religious spirit wants to know what is right because it wants to think that “I am right.” When this is accomplished it is a mere extension of that fact to know who is wrong. The religious spirit finds some enjoyment in the idea that someone else is wrong. Some of the most secular people you will know will be among the most religious by this definition. The idea of being right takes more comfort in the fact that it is “me” that is right and “you” who are wrong than in whether “right” means that it works better for everyone, or produces more life for everyone or whether it blesses everyone. When you put this feeling in the hands of a person who is by nature a sinner, it becomes the tool we use to justify sin and condemn true righteousness. The other aspect of the religious spirit is that it generally focuses on the fact that I have discovered what is right by my own effort and therefore being right is something that represents an accomplishment. This is so different from the righteousness that comes by faith because of what Jesus suffered on my behalf. That righteousness will only ever be a gift. I can’t brag about having been given a gift. I can only brag about the giver. If that gift is available to everyone, I can’t brag about the fact that I am the possessor of this gift, as if it was because of something special about me. If that gift is available for everyone who wants to receive it I can only once again boast about the giver. That’s why religious people don’t like real Christianity. It provides no reason for me to think that I am any better than anyone else. Since it all has to do with gifts that are imparted on the basis of grace from God, then it has little to do with who is right and who is wrong. It has to do with what life is available and how we can connect with it.

2. Teaching about marriage must never become the basis for being judgmental. Teaching about marriage must never be designed to heap guilt on people who already feel it. Teaching on marriage must be directed toward what brings life to marriages. Marriages need life. They need life because that’s the only thing that will make a marriage strong. I want to present some secrets that God has made known about marriage to offer God’s life to present and future marriages, not for the purpose of finding out who should and shouldn’t be condemned.

3. Jesus made a very broad statement about the purpose of his ministry:

i. “I am different from the devil. The devil wants to offer you something but in reality he is only interested in stealing something that you are entitled to have; or to destroy something you already have. The difference between the devil and me is that I have come to give you a shot at life: overflowing life.” John 10:10

It comes back to “one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread.” And when you’re a beggar and there is enough bread for everyone it is not as important to figure out why you are a beggar, or whether I am a better or worse beggar than you. If there’s bread, lets get some.

4. God wants your marriage to achieve a God ordained potential
This is so much the case when it comes to marriage. If we are to represent something that is worthwhile when it comes to marriage it must have to do with the happiness and wholesomeness that belongs to something that is designed to work. By “work” I mean it has to do with who I am as a husband, and who you are as my wife and who we are as a married couple. There are always three elements that make up the foundation of a marriage. The husband, the wife and the marriage relationship. They are like three separate and sacred buckets. No marriage will work if all three aren’t being filled by the journey of the marriage. What works is what fills the husband bucket, the wife bucket and the relationship bucket. When there are children they become extra buckets and a marriage that works must create an environment that sees each of those buckets being filled as well. Whenever the filling of one bucket takes priority over the others it is a sign that the marriage is not working.

5. We need to start with the view that marriage is something God invented.
If I for one minute begin the process of wanting to support, strengthen and build my marriage and the marriages of other people, I don’t want to start with how I feel or how you feel. We need to start with something sovereign and something eternal. We have to start with God’s intention and God’s wisdom. If we do it that way, we will end up with something that is life giving. This is who God is not religious and why God never invented religion. As usual, the devil invented religion as a very well masked counterfeit of what flows from a relationship with God by faith. What I find when I pursue God’s wisdom through the Word is that it kills things that cause death and that I discover things that create life: e.g. forgiveness is an amazing idea. It is totally weird. Forgiveness has nothing to do with justice (illust. “An Unconventional War”). But forgiveness is powerfully life giving to everyone involved.

6. Things that sometimes don’t seem to make sense at first
That’s why if we are to begin with what God says about marriage we are going to find ourselves coming up against things that don’t seem to make sense at first. Like the idea of forgiveness. When you first look at it, it seems foolish. When you look at the message of the cross it looks foolish. When you experience its power it seems astounding. God’s ways are higher than our ways. That’s why we will only ever receive from God by faith. We receive because we are willing to trust God when something that he says seems at first to be foolish or hard or impossible.

7. An impossible arrangement between two imperfect people
I am assuming that Dr. Arch Hart is right when he says that “Marriage is an impossible arrangement between two imperfect people.” The call for all people who are marriage and those who are contemplating marriage is to be willing to embrace what is impossible, not just to achieve the possible. It is to take on board the idea that for a marriage to work it must involve something supernatural in my, in my husband or wife and in our relationship. If all we can draw on is what we of ourselves can produce we will only ever have a shadow of the reality that was conceived in the heart of God when he thought of the idea.

8. Supnatural redemptive plan
I must also assume that when Arch Hart uses the word “impossible arrangement” I could replace those words with “supernatural redemptive plan.” If “impossible” refers to what God wants to do with my marriage and your marriage, then he only ever wants to do redemptive things and what he does is by definition supernatural. We must not look at marriage problems as difficulties. We must look at them as impossibilities. If it is a difficulty the assumption is that with a bit of human wisdom we can make it better. That is probably true. But what is even more critical is that we see problems in a marriage as warning lights on our dashboards telling us that we are in need of divine redemptive intervention. Marriage is a supreme example of redemptive purpose. God doesn’t want you to be married just because he wants you to be happy. He wants you to be marriage because he wants you to be whole and complete. The happiness comes as a by product of completeness.

8. Four phrases that are full of life
I want to take four phrases from the words of Jesus in his most definitive statement on marriage to pinpoint what I think belongs to the core of the Creator’s intention when it comes to marriage. I want to suggest that each of these refers to something that is humanly impossible and therefore needs the transformation invasion of the Spirit of God. You won’t achieve this by effort, only by being willing to let God work on you as an individual and pour grace from heaven into your life. If marriage is God’s idea, then we have to let the inventor speak about what he has in mind. We must be willing to listen to that wisdom regardless of how difficult it may seem or how initially foolish it may seem. When we come as children into the presence of our Father’s Word, we will see the kingdom of God coming.



DIVINE SECRET NUMBER ONE
DISCOVERING WHAT IS REDEMPTIVE OPPORTUNITY

A PURPOSE BUILT RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN A PURPOSE BUILT MAN AND A PURPOSE BUILT WOMAN

Haven’t you read what it says: in the Creator made them male and female, and for this reason….

Genesis 1:27 and 2:23 are exciting verses. It has been re-written a thousand times a thousand almost every day since this day.

GENESIS 1
26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. 28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” 29 Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. 30 And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” And it was so. 31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.


GENESIS 2

20 So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field. But for Adam no suitable helper was found. 21 So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and closed up the place with flesh. 22 Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. 23 The man said, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man.” 24 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. 25 The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.


If we put that information together in summary form we come up with the following:

1. God created both male and female in hi s image.
He didn’t create male in his image and female in the image of man. The later revelation that the female was created out of the male has nothing to do with the idea that somehow woman is some kind of derived image of man. They are unique. God made a male and he made a female and his image was vested in each of them. The fact that males and females are mysteriously different carries the glory of this. The attempt of impoverished women to ascribe the difference in the sexes to cultural conditioning has failed at every point. Unfortunately this discovery had to come at a huge cost to society in terms of the social consequences to women, men and children (it wasn’t the fault of the women it was initiated by males who couldn’t tell the difference between responsibility and power. God gave men a responsibility and they took it to mean power and control. They took submission to mean subjugation and the world experienced centuries of some of the most horrific oppression known to the earth. The feminist movement and its ongoing impact is the judgment of God on the failure of men. That judgment comes in terms of “whatever we sow we shall also reap.”

2. This complementary image of God that we find in males and females needs to be played out on the sacred stage of a marriage.
The measure of this image must never be sublimated. A woman must not be required to become less of a woman because she is married. It must be the goal of every husband to discover and nurture the image of God in his wife and it must likewise be the commitment of a wife to honour and nurture the image of God in her husband. Very often the existence of these very difference expressions of the glory of God don’t seem complementary. They seem competitive. They often seem to challenge each other and the one often seems to make the other feel insecure or inferior. This must not be. We must be the protector of the glory of God in one another. That’s why I hate hearing husbands bagging their wives and wives bagging their husbands. When you simply bag someone because they operate differently to you, you are criticizing something very special that God has created. When you limit the potential of your husband or wife because of your insecurity or because you feel the need to manipulate or control you are cutting off the power of God to bring his redemptive purpose to their lives, your marriage and your family. You need rather to take up the responsibility to discover what God has created in your husband or wife and need to take responsibility to honour what you discover and see that it is fully developed.

3. The idea of complementary purpose takes another dimension when we look at the descriptions from Genesis Chapter 2.

Genesis 2
18 The LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.” 19 Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. 20 So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field.
But for Adam no suitable helper was found. 21 So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and closed up the place with flesh

4. Etymology won’t give us much help
A lot has been made of this from the etymology. Because we are pressed by current political correctness, we are pressured to turn away from anything that would seem to make these words imply hierarchy or order of merit. The truth is that they were never intended to imply that anyway. We must also avoid reading what is here through the eyes of sinful men who hit women over the head with them for centuries. If I were to take a punt at being as objective as I could I would have to say that the picture painted by these words shows someone who is designed to live in the closest possible proximity to the man and whose presence provides something that isn’t there if she isn’t there. A man is not designed to be alone. He can exist alone, but the basic design is not to operate alone. A woman is similarly designed. She is not designed to operate independent of the man either. She can operate independently but she is not designed for independent operation. If they come into the closest circle of relationship they do best what they were designed to do. No rank is necessarily implied at this point (that does get referred to in Chapter 3 following the invasion of sin). The fact that the woman is designed to be a helping presence simply refers to the complementary nature of the design.

Not a lot to do with universal roles and functions It needs to be pointed out that this complementary purpose has nothing to do with certain tasks. We may read tasks into the differences God created when he created male and female, but those are not some short list of tasks so that the men automatically sit talking forever in the gate of the city and while the women do most of the work. In a marriage, tasks have to do with ability and anointing and the discovery of those belongs to the marriage, not to one or another of the individuals. It is not for the husband to pontificate about and it is not for the wife to coerce. They are to discover each other and commit to serving the marriage on the basis of gifts freely given in a spirit of agreement.


Discovery leading to agreed deployment The idea of intelligent design in terms of marriage comes to this. Unless you are a person who for one of the given reasons (see verses Matthew 19:11,12) will not be married, you need to understand that God wants there to be someone who you will be joined to and where that joining will be the supernatural fitting of God’s creative power. He will make someone complementary and redemptive. They will be different. They may challenge your egotistical and self centredness. There may be all kinds of things you need to do in order to discover how they are different from you and why. That whole process of discovery and deployment is the happy task of God’s loving purpose in marriage.

Differences are God ordained But to see differences as God ordained is paramount to the meaning. To see them as testimony to the fact that there has been a mistake will only send you and them on a path that will avoid their redemption rather than serving it. I must read difference as redemptive opportunity. I must read it as the wisdom of the creator. When we assume that some difference or something about our husband or wife is testimony to either a divine or a human mistake is to begin to call good evil and evil good.

CHANON was a masochist ??! Consider the redemptive process that enables a person with little or no finger independence to become a new person…….Chanon devised a set of exercises which could liberate the potential in a person’s fingers to operate independently from one another. Swinging an axe requires very little if any finger independence. “The Flight of the Bumblebee” requires a lot of finger independence. The difference can be found in doing copies amounts of Chanon expercises.

The same is true with marriage. What Chanon does through the commitment and hard work of a faithful piano student, God does by his divine power through the faith and commitment of a husband or wife who finds that they have a severe lack of “finger independence” and when they want to play the “Moonlight Sonata” of marriage they find that they are unable. They find it hard, if not impossible. Only through prayer, Holy Spirit power and God invading their heart will they become an agent of God’s redemptive purpose in whatever challenges them in their marriage.

When you can see these challenges as God’s ordained opportunities for redemptive purpose through marriage you begin to see the mystery of God weaving its way through ordinary human circumstances to accomplish something that is wonderful.

MARRIAGE IS MAKING REDEMPTIVE OPPORTUNITIES OUT OF DIFFERENCES AND CHALLENGES. THE BASIS FOR THESE OPPORTUNITIES COME FROM THE FACT THAT GOD HAS CREATED A HUSBAND FOR A WIFE AND A WIFE FOR A HUSBAND. MARRIAGE IS THE REDEMPTIVE TOOL FOR GOD’S SUPERNATURAL INTERVENTION TO BE REALIZED AND HIS PURPOSES TO BE ESTABLISHED WHERE EVERYONE IN THE MARRIAGE WINS…….




DIVINE SECRET NUMER TWO
DISCOVERING WHAT IS UNIQUE AND ORIGINAL

A man will leave his father and his mother and be united to his wife

In the older language the words were “leave” and “cleave.”


1. Here are the references to places where this word is used in the New Testament:


Mt 19:5 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’ ?
Lk 10:11 ‘Even the dust of your town that sticks to our feet we wipe off against you. Yet be sure of this: The kingdom of God is near.’
Lk 15:15 So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs.
Ac 5:13 No one else dared join them, even though they were highly regarded by the people.
Ac 8:29 The Spirit told Philip, “Go to that chariot and stay near it.”

Ac 10:28 He said to them: “You are well aware that it is against our law for a Jew to associate with a Gentile or visit him. But God has shown me that I should not call any man impure or unclean.
Ro 12:9 Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good.
1Co 6:16 Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said, “The two will become one flesh.” But he who unites himself with the Lord is one with him in spirit.



2. The Greek word comes is translated from the Hebrew word used in Genesis. Here are some of the occasions where the same word is used in the Old Testament:


Ge 2:24 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.
Ge 34:3 His heart was drawn to Dinah daughter of Jacob, and he loved the girl and spoke tenderly to her.
Dt 10:20 Fear the LORD your God and serve him. Hold fast to him and take your oaths in his name.
Dt 28:21 The LORD will plague you with diseases until he has destroyed you from the land you are entering to possess.
Dt 28:60 He will bring upon you all the diseases of Egypt that you dreaded, and they will cling to you.
Ru 1:14 At this they wept again. Then Orpah kissed her mother-in-law good-by, but Ruth clung to her.
2Ki 3:3 Nevertheless he clung to the sins of Jeroboam son of Nebat, which he had caused Israel to commit; he did not turn away from them.
2Ki 5:27 Naaman’s leprosy will cling to you and to your descendants forever.” Then Gehazi went from Elisha’s presence and he was leprous, as white as snow.
1Ch 10:2 The Philistines pressed hard after Saul and his sons, and they killed his sons Jonathan, Abinadab and Malki-Shua.
Job 29:10 the voices of the nobles were hushed,
and their tongues stuck to the roof of their mouths.

Job 38:38 when the dust becomes hard
and the clods of earth stick together?

Ps 22:15 My strength is dried up like a potsherd,
and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth;
you lay me in the dust of death.
Ps 44:25 We are brought down to the dust;
our bodies cling to the ground.
I am reduced to skin and bones.



3. Can We Overtake the T-Model Henry?
How many times do we have to make all the mistakes of past and reap the harvest of those mistakes before we realize that Henry Ford needs to be overtaken: “The thing we learn from history is that we never learn anything from history.” Among those mistakes is this one. It is a mistake to think that we can capture the glory of success by copying it, in the same way that it is a mistake to think that we can avoid the pain of the past by forgetting it. The reality is that we must be encouraged by past success and warned by past failure but we must also assume that every situation carries its own unique responsibility.

How many fathers and mothers have tried to live beyond their own sense of failure by pushing their children to succeed.

How many children have missed their unique calling in life by trying to please the same parents.

How long will it take for us to understand that success can never be inherited.
Why can’t we believe that failure doesn’t need to be inevitably repeated.

The only way we will avoid these unfortunate realities is to do it deliberately. They are default positions far less than they are intentional positions. The myriad of new things that happen around the world are the heralds of hope.

4. Take the time and make the effort to discover your marriage
It is true with marriage. One of the divinely ordained principles of marriage is that there is no marriage like your marriage. That is not a given. It is a discovery you have to make. If you don’t work to discover just how your marriage is unique and different you will have a marriage that is the product of something you have seen or the modeling or the anti-modeling of one or other of the your parents. It also goes for the home you build. The home your marriage produces should be the same journey of discovery. So often people’s households are forged to protect their weaknesses and flaw from being exposed.

5. Street angel and house devil
That’s why we have the term, “street angel and house devil.” A person (usually the man) is all peaches and cream to his fellow employees and to his neighbours, but within the confines of the marriage he is mean and harsh and angry etc. The fact that he displays these baser characteristics at home is precisely why marriage is the redemptive laboratory. If he is angry with his wife he should go to God and say….. “I have a character flaw that needs to be changed. Thank you that it has become apparent so that I can become I whole person. Thank you that I won’t have to abuse everyone else for the rest of my life. Thank you that I have this environment of covenant commitment that enables me to seek these changes where there is unconditional support.”

Think what happens when these things become apparent and the damage of them begins to take effect but we try to hide in within the folds of the very relationship that was designed to give us hope of change. Think what happens when the other person in the marriage fails to see the potential for change and gets on a blame and shame mode instead of a redemptive purpose mode.

6. The Importance of Leaving:
Uniqueness is the result of redemptive process Think of what happens when we fail to recognize that our uniqueness as a couple is on the other side of this redemptive process. We are meant to LEAVE the anger we inherited from our father or our mother. We are meant to leave the manipulation and control of our father or our mother. We are meant to LEAVE the woundings and disappointments created by the flaws of our father and mother’s love. Marriage spells NEW DAY. This is not the same tribe. Our parents may like it to be like that. This has so little to do with actually making a geographical shift from some rooms and a yard that constitute our father’s and our mother’s house. We are to leave our parents TRIBAL CULTURE. We are to leave our parent’s co-dependence. We are to leave our parents weaknesses. Goodness knows, we have enough of our own to deal with. Why not use the break that comes when a man and woman stand in the presence of God to be joined together to break the bondages that come from the former household and determine with our spouse to cling to the unique future that God has ordained only for the two of us and the children born of our commitment.


7. The importance of Clinging:
Uniqueness happens when we come together to defeat every enemy that comes from outside or inside the circle The second definitive word that is associated with this secret is the word, “be united.” If you were to read the verses in the Old and New Testaments that give examples of its use you will see phrases like, “even the dust that sticks to our feet…” (Luke 10). There are many other word pictures. One of them is “joined to a prostitute” (1 Corinthians 6) This is intentional. This is strong and deliberate.

i. Uniqueness is discovered by clinging Here is the principle. The uniqueness will not be discovered by reading a book. It will not be discovered even if you go to the very best course. What will liberate your potential to fulfill the unique destiny that God has for you will be found in a single determination: to take on whatever comes by clinging to my wife or husband.

ii. No matter what it feels like We have to cling no matter what. We have to stick to them. The marriage service spells this out in the phrases that give example to the covenant that love creates: for better for worse, for richer for poorer in sickness and in health.” This secret assumes that there will be times when you won’t feel like doing that. There will be times when you will feel that your marriage partner is your enemy and sticking to them would seem like sleeping with the enemy. There will be times when something deep and important should have been shared in the ‘close encounters of the marriage kind.’ There will be times when someone else will seem more appropriate to uncover your heart. There will be times when that may be a man for a woman or a woman for a man. They will seem so comparatively understanding, so gentle, so kind, so wise. But they are all lies. The word of God says: Cling to your wife, your husband. Whatever else may be foreshadowed, make sure you determine to work it out in each others arms. Do all of your fighting at close range: in a deliberate clinch.

iii. Whatever the soft options and tantalizing alternatives In whatever way you may be tempted to do otherwise, if you make it your primary determination to do as much as you can to take the side with your wife or husband….stand as close as you can….be as loyal as you can….determine not to sacrifice that position no matter what pressure comes on you from your friends, parents or potential lovers, you will discover the grace of God and the grace that operates in that place will determine whether or not you are going to become unique and special as a married couple.

iv. Its choice not chance It isn’t a matter of chance. Its not just that some people are lucky and are compatible. It must never be left to one person to do all the accommodating of the other. Love may cover sins, but it must never cover redemptive purpose. When it does it ceases to be love. It becomes adverse sentimentality.