Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Hebrews 13:1-4

to speak to enemies in the gate because they are here. They are most assuredly here. Sermon text today is Hebrews 13. I’m going to be speaking on the first half of verse 4, but we’ll read the first four verses for context. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. Hebrews 13:1-4.

Let brotherly love continue. Do not forget to entertain strangers. For by so doing, some have unwittingly entertained angels. Remember the prisoners as if chained with them, those who are mistreated, since you yourselves are in the body also.

Marriage is honorable among all and the bed undefiled. But fornicators and adulterers God will judge.

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for this text. Help us, Father, to be those mighty warriors of the Lord Jesus Christ who see it as our obligation to protect, to defend, and promote marriage in the context of not just our lives, not just this church, but this culture. In Jesus name we ask it. Amen. Please be seated.

The last second of the two opening songs of praise as well as the last song we’ll sing today are songs that may normally be sung at weddings, but I chose them deliberately as kind of an illustration of the responsibilities that the text places before us on all of us to defend, promote, and honor marriage. And so, as we leave the worship service today, the last song will be like the one we sang earlier, a song really aimed at each of us supporting with our song and committing to support those who are married in the context of our church with our actions, our prayers, our money, our time, etc.

That is thrust of the verse before us today.

Now, we’ve been looking at these very simple set of imperative instructions here for us. You know, it’s pretty interesting that Hebrews has some long involved theological stuff that we worked our way through for many months. And now we’re at the section where we’re living like Jesus, son of God, son of man, living in heavenly community on earth. How does that happen?

How does what we pray for every Lord’s day—thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven—what we have here are some very simple points of application related to the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. He has come. We celebrate him for what Hebrews has taught us that he is in the context of worship. And this prepares us for a mission that’s really quite simple and pointed: living in heavenly community on earth.

And you know the delight is in the details. Old word phrase—the devil’s in the details—but the delight’s the details of these phrases, it helps us to understand, you know, specifically what these individual phrases mean. They’re simple, but it’s easy to get a little confused on them.

So, for instance, instead of spending a sermon talking about the importance of prison ministry today, that’s not what this text about visiting prisoners is all about. It’s about persecution. It’s about visiting brothers and strangers. Not complete strangers, but strangers in the sense of maybe not part of your local congregation. Maybe folks that you don’t know that well—visiting those folks who are in prison because of their faith.

So direct application: remembering and praying as we do on a regular basis at least once a year here for the persecuted church across the world. But more directly, it’s you know understanding that frequently in the history of the Christian church this is going to be a very important verse for us. He didn’t just put this in here because of their individual situation having no relevance to us today.

You know there’s a very important conference coming up on March 3rd and 4th—Restoring Northwest America conference put on by David Crow, a friend of mine. He’s been doing voter registration for many years here in our area. And you know some of the old names that were important to our church way back when we got started: Marshall Foster, first guy along with Rushdoony—I ever heard to get us into the theology that I’m into today. Gary DeMar, who we’ve had preach in this church before and did a conference for us. Herb Titus, who while we never had here influenced a lot of our thinking in terms of law and constitution and other speakers will be here on March 3rd and 4th.

So it’s a big push and I’ve xeroxed off one sheet information you can pick up in the literature rack. I’d encourage you to do that. We’ll try to get an email out to everyone if we not sure if we’ve done that or not yet. I think we might have. But it’s kind of a big conference and there probably won’t be a whole lot that you don’t know if you’ve been here for very long at RCC. But it is significant.

This week among other various mailings, I got this card advertising this Restoring Northwest America Conference. It’s going to be held up here at Rolling Hills Church, not too far away. And this mailer they put out says, “Will speaking the truth put your pastor behind bars?”

You know, it’s maybe a little over the top, but maybe not because the specific issue we’re talking about today, if going to defend marriage—if the elders of your church are going to defend it from the pulpit and going to say that it must be protected, for instance, against homosexual marriage—that may well end up being an illegal activity defined by the state of Oregon. So, prison ministry is something that I would encourage you to think about in case I ever get thrown in jail. I’d love to have some see me.

Well, the delight’s in the details and the text before us is frequently misunderstood as the ones we’ve just talked about have been misunderstood somewhat. The details are important to us. And you know, I want to say too before we get into this that these things are not that he’s calling this Hebrew church to do this for the first time. They’re supposed to keep doing this. And the same thing’s true of us.

Like them, we’re in an urban environment. We’ve been around for a while. Started off strong on some of these distinctives. And we just need to be told, keep it up.

So, we’re good at brotherly love. I think we need to be reminded that it’s got to continue to grow and increase in this church. I think we’re pretty good at showing hospitality to people visiting out of town. I’ve never heard of people wanting to stay in our area that’s had to stay in a Motel 6 or something because you opened up your homes. We’re pretty good about showing hospitality to one another. We can be encouraged to be better. And I think some of the things we’ve said over the last couple of weeks, at least to a few people that have talked to me, have been encouragements that way.

And I’d say that we’re really good, too, at honoring and respecting marriage and the fruits of marriage. Like, you know, the baptism here and, you know, we honor and respect childbearing and we are real happy when people have kids. We’re not like “Oh, how you got to pay for that mouth” or “Oh, gee, how you going to take care of another?” No, you know, we—these are blessings from God and we are delighted in this church to have a community of people that does this sort of celebration over large families.

So I’m not telling you anything new today that you don’t know, but I would just encourage you. This text helped me this week at a meeting that I attended, and I’ll talk about that a little bit later in the outline, but maybe some of these points that we’re going to talk about will be good for you and sort of help you to see the details of what’s going on here.

Now, specifically, the New King James says, “Marriage is honorable among all.” And you know, the particular Greek phrase can be seen that way or it can be seen as an imperative. Marriage must be honored. And I’m convinced it’s the latter of the two—that this is really not a good translation in front of us. A better translation would say marriage must be respected, okay? By all, by everybody, must be honored.

Now, the reason why I think that’s important, or not why it’s important, but why it’s true, and I’ve got this on your outline: marriage—it doesn’t say marriage is respected. I mean, after all, marriage isn’t always respected. It wasn’t respected by everyone at the time of the writing of the epistle. So, that on its face of it probably is not the way we should go if we’ve got good grammatical evidence to go a different way.

And we do. So, you see what I’m saying? I’ll just slow down a bit. If could be saying legitimately based on the Greek text: “marriage is respected by all.” Or it could be saying “marriage should be respected, must be respected by all.” I’m convinced it’s the latter because it’s not always respected by all. And we live in a time and a culture when marriage is under attack. There’s absolutely no doubt about it from many different ways. We’ll talk about that in the context of the notes.

Secondly, this is not just—this is like what’s happened up to now. There’s a string of imperative statements made here. Brotherly love must continue, right? Don’t forget to show hospitality. It’s a series of injunctions at the end of this epistle telling us what our community should look like. It’s a series of, you know, command statements to us.

And so that’s another reason to take this as another command statement. And the Greek can go either way. So, it is a command statement, I believe, because it’s in the midst of a series of imperatives. And then finally, at the end of verse four, it says that God will judge. And actually, the word God is at the end of this phrase: “judge will God.” And so there’s a penalty if we don’t do something. So, that’s another good reason to say, well, it isn’t just assuming that marriage should be respected.

So, I think the right translation is respected—must marriage be. Yoda talk, right? Respected marriage must be, you know, well, the Greek—if you studied your Bibles, and you should, I mean, we’re people of the book, you should be knowing the Bible. You shouldn’t just be casually reading it occasionally. And you’ll know if you’ve studied it much that in the Greek, certain words are put forward in the sentence. The flow doesn’t have to be translated that way, but the first word in this is “respected.” So, it emphasizes the idea of respect or honor.

So, respected marriage must be, and we’ll see next week that God is at the end. “Judge will God,” you see, so God is emphasized at the end—that the judgment if we don’t respect marriage will come from God. So it’s an imperative with a strong statement of punishment from God if we don’t do it. Okay?

And then I’ve listed a few synonyms here: Honor marriage, respect it, held in reputation. We’ll see in just a minute one of the verses where the same word honor is translated “a man was held in reputation”—added reputation by people, had a good reputation. So, we’re supposed to work to the end that marriage has a good reputation. It doesn’t, does it? I mean, in point of fact, in our culture today, outside of the Christian church, it doesn’t. And even within the Christian church, it’s becoming less and less true. And I’ll talk about that a little more next week as well.

Held in reputation. Dear, precious. The word for honor here is the same word as in Timothy. Timothy is a precious thing given by God. Fee—at the end, theos, valued by God. A gift given by God. Honor is value. Respect is holding something dear. In other words, marriage should be held dear by us. You know it’s really important to us. Valued properly weighted, weighed right. It’s a proper evaluation. A high valuation given to it.

Precious. You know a couple verses says precious stones in the book of Revelation—same word. Honorable stones. Marriage should be seen as precious to us. Worth tremendous worth. Excellence. All these things are synonyms for what this verse—this command by God—is telling us what to do now.

In John 5:23, Jesus says that people should honor the Son just as they honor the Father, so another object of our honor is the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, just as we honor the Father. And so, you know, if we’re looking at things that the Bible says should be honored, the Son is the primary one. But here we’ve got a corollary to it that marriage should in like way be honored. You see, in other words, it’s a statement of verse that in parallelism to the one we have here shows us that marriage has a very high value to it.

In Acts 5:34, we read about Gamaliel, a teacher of the law, held in respect by all the people—held, had in respect, held in respect. So marriage should be held in respect by all people. We want to place a very high value on marriage. We want to give marriage its due. That’s what the command of this verse is. We want to honor it.

And so I got 10 ways here that I would encourage us to honor marriage. How shall we honor marriage?

First, we honor marriage by seeing it tremendous significance and blessedness. So, you know, here we could put in the importance for the dominion mandate that God gives to all the created order in Genesis. Man is supposed to exercise dominion, improve the world. It’s why we’re here. Man is here to make the world more beautiful, to add value to it. And to accomplish that task, Adam was given marriage. He was given a specific wife. But marriage is an institution, a relationship that’s given to assist Adam in exercising dominion.

So you see, it’s not just something that’s optional in the world. It’s critical. It’s very important in terms of the exercise of dominion that God calls us to marriage.

In 1 Corinthians 3:12 and Revelation 17:4, we have these references to precious stones, right? Preciousness—marriage should be seen as exceedingly valuable. Precious stones are like, you know, really do rubies, diamonds, emeralds. You know diamonds are given at the beginning of most marriages and that’s a great way—not just the person—you see to value your wife with diamond—gift of a diamond ring. But a diamond reminds us when we see diamond rings or shiny metals on our on the fingers of married people. It’s a reminder to us of the preciousness of the relationship itself, the institution of marriage. Okay, precious stones are honorable stones. Marriage is to be honored, seen as precious, seen as diamond-like. Okay, so marriage is like diamonds.

We know that vocation is the way dominion is exercised. Ultimately, the world isn’t changed through physical warfare, deeds of love and kindness, but primarily the way the world is transformed is through simple acts of work. You know, we’re talking about simple things in this in this Hebrews text as a way to accomplish a godly heaven-like community and it’s the simple act of dominion work that transforms the world, that changes it, right?

So vocation is, as I said earlier, of the essence of exercising dominion in the world and marriage is given to man that his vocation and thus his dominion might be exercised in a better way.

We sang about—Jesus’s first miracle at a marriage celebration, right? Well, why? Because it’s a picture of the new creation. Water to wine, new world, everything’s changed. A marriage is a new thing coming into being. And so marriage should be seen—the institution of marriage is as occupying a very large place, a very important place in the context of the new creation.

Now again, talking about our old days, there was a article in one of the Journal of Christian Reconstruction many years ago by George Gilder. He wrote a wonderful book called Men in Marriage. And this article was a little synopsis of it. And Gilder 20 years ago documented all these statistics about how horrible single men are—that men really do need to be married to fulfill their vocation and to keep out of trouble. And his conclusions based on the statistical evidence is that the average single man struggles with an inherent irresponsibility that only marriage can cure.

Single men are 30% more likely than single women, for instance, to be unemployed. If they get a job, the single man will make very little more than his single girlfriend. In striking contrast to the substantial earning power of married men, married men take home 70% more income than single men. Single college graduates will normally earn about the same as married graduates of high school. Okay?

So, statistically, you graduate from college and you stay single, you’re going to make about as much as if you’re a single guy who just graduated from high school. Your college degree doesn’t do you a whole lot of good if you stay single statistically.

That is—Gilder suggested based on this that it could well be more important for an ambitious young man to get married than to go to college. Now that’s a little cross-grain and we want to be careful with those kind of statements. We think that college is very important. But you see Gilder is saying if you look at the statistics, you’re going to make more money by getting married and working than you would by going to college alone and coming out single. You see—marriage is that important. Do you think of it that way as a young man? Do you see it as part of your vocational path? Well, it is.

And this didn’t surprise us because that’s exactly what God told us in the garden—that the married state increases the man’s ability to properly and in a blessed way exercise vocation.

Apart from divorced people, the single men are the most disturbed group in the United States. Between the ages of 25 and 65, single men is 30% more likely than a single woman to be depressed. He’s 30% more likely to exhibit a tendency toward phobias and passivity. The unmarried man is three times more likely to experience a nervous breakdown and 22 times more likely to be committed to an institution because of mental disease.

Single men are the bane of our culture is what these statistics show us. If you’re a single guy here, I’m sorry, but that’s that’s what the statistics show. Marriage is important.

I could go on, I won’t, but Gilder made a big impact on those of us who started this church in that article in the JCOR—the importance of marriage buttressing with statistical data what the scriptures tell us is true in the garden. Gilder has based on that and for many years has tried to advocate what’s called a “family wage.” Nothing wrong with women working but Gilder has tried to get uh the culture to think about the fact that married men trying to support a wife at home and a family should get more money because they’re married. We should move toward a family wage and instead of equality in terms of wages.

And I think that if you’re a businessman, this is something excellent to think about: giving men family wages. And you know, it’s really for the well-being of the business because you want a guy to be married and to have a wife who helps him primarily by taking care of the house, picking up their children in it, etc. You’ll have a better employer if you if you hire somebody who’s married and support him enough to where he can stay married. The wife doesn’t have to work if she doesn’t want to.

So, so properly valuing it: we should respect marriage, honor it. It’s really important. The scriptures clearly tell us that.

Secondly, we honor marriage by holding and teaching good incarnational theology. It’s pretty interesting that this particular verse is left out. It’s not in some of the early manuscripts of the Bible and the Patristic writings, the early church fathers, right? Many of their commentaries, they leave out the verse two. Why? Because they were in the throes of a Greek philosophy that didn’t like marriage.

If you’re the Roman Catholic Church, you got a big problem with this verse. Marriage is to be honored among all. Okay? Now, guys can, you know, there are the idea of being a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven. That’s certainly true. And God calls people to be single. But in general, the married state is to be honored. It is not honored when clergy are demanded to be kept single. All of them. That is not honoring to marriage. What it produces is this kind of dual mentality where marriage is not a good thing and the best state is unmarried.

Now, you know, the response would be, well, our priests are sacrificing, and I understand that, but still, there’s a modeling that goes on in the context of the Roman Catholic Church that’s horrific in terms of not obeying this principle. And it goes way back, you know, to this omission, this removal from the text of this verse because the Greeks didn’t like sex, they didn’t like bodies, they didn’t like marriage because of it.

And we we fail—you know, what this book has told us so far is bodies are good. Now, we know that already. God in Genesis creates a physical world, creates physical people, and it’s all good, right? But somehow we’re in the throes of our Greek philosophy still thinking that physical stuff is bad and what’s really good are ideas and the abstract and all that stuff. It’s just wrong. You know, it’s just wrong.

We’re liable to fall into the two Greek ditches. You know, one Greek ditch was you just don’t want to have anything to do with marital relationships, true holiness and spirituality is asceticism, not being in the married state. The other idea was well sex is bad, but let’s get rid of it by indulging it everywhere we can.

The Bible says a biblically mediated, you know, moderated, you know, through legal statutes from God view of marriage is what is great and positive for how the world works.

In Hebrews, you know, Jesus took on a body. Hebrews 2:14 says, “If as much then as the children partaken of flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared in the same through death he might destroy him who had the power of death.” So Jesus doesn’t assure the physical state, he embraces it—coming in as incarnated God to die for us.

And then later in chapter 10:5 when he came into the world he said “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire but a body you have prepared for me.” Verse 10: “By that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once and for all.”

God places a high value on bodies, physical state and we should do the same. We honor marriage by understanding that God doesn’t think the flesh is bad and and physical delights are not bad things. An incarnational theology. We honor marriage when we promote that in our church.

Third, we honor marriage by celebrating it. The word here for marriage is gamos—like you know gamos—is two marriages, polygamy is two is multiple marriages. Gamos is the Greek word here and the same word is used for instance in Matthew 22. Jesus answered and spoke to them again by parables and said “The kingdom of heaven is like a certain king who arranged a marriage for his son.” Now he arranges a marriage and in some translations New American Standard says “arranged a marriage feast for his son,” okay?

And he’s going to invite him to a marriage feast. Well, most of the time the word feast isn’t there. It’s implied from the word gamos. The point is that this word for marriage implies that it is a celebration. It refers to the wedding festivities, not just the legal state of being married. See, again, it’s not an abstract concept. It’s a rejoicing time of celebration. And we should be those kind of people that honor marriage by celebrating it.

And I felt bad here. When I thought about this, you know, we should celebrate its origins and its continuance. And we do that by and large in this church. What I mean is you get an invitation to a wedding, right? To a marriage, to a rejoicing festivity. You should go. You shouldn’t think, “Well, maybe I should go, maybe I shouldn’t go.” You should go. It’s a way to honor marriage by joining into these festivities.

Now, I understand the parables talking about the relationship of Christ and all that, but there’s, you know, the point is there’s got to be truth in the analogy for the analogy to work. And the point is, if you get a wedding invitation, unless you got something big preventing you from going, you ought to go. If you want to stay home and cut the lawn that Saturday, you shouldn’t do it. From my perspective, you have an opportunity to honor marriage by swelling the ranks of those people who come together to observe the exchange of vows. Okay?

I’ve not always seen it this way. I’ve often thought, “Well, I don’t know what’s the big deal. You know, I love them and if I’m not there, they won’t miss me, you know. a lot of people there.” That’s the wrong way to think. I thought wrong about that because see, this text says that we have a command to honor and respect this institution and this celebration called marriage. And we can honor it. It’s an opportunity to obey this verse every time you get a wedding invitation in the mail. It’s a way to go and honor it.

And you should honor it by celebrating people’s anniversaries. I’m glad we do that at this church after the announcement, right? We celebrate anniversaries. We don’t want to just, you know, celebrate and encourage marriage at its origins. We want to continue to encourage it in its continuance as well. We want to encourage people and say, “Good deal. You’re still married. It’s tough in this world.” Right?

So, we can honor marriage, keep it going in this community by going to weddings and by celebrating anniversaries. Now, if you can’t hang around for the announcements, well, you ought to try to call some body up during the week who’s had an anniversary at this church and encourage them. That’s a practical way.

See, we need to build a culture in which this these distinctives of who we are are very much in place because the culture on around us is moving the other way and we can impact this culture with our culture. You know, how are they going to know?

Well, we could put a lot of money into outreach programs, evangelism, etc. But these texts all tell us that this is really an extension of brotherly love. And Jesus says that it’s the love of the brethren that will convince the world of the reality of your Christian faith. The world wants to see community. And the world will respond to the sort of love that honors marriage and honors those members of the community entering into it. That’s evangelism. It’s outreach. Indirect, but you know, in Hebrews, there’s not a whole lot of outreach. There’s no evangelism text for the most part. But what it does tell you is how to build, how to live a heavenly community here on earth. And that’s enough. That’s enough.

You shouldn’t feel guilty about not knocking on all your neighbors doors and presenting with the poor spiritual laws. But you should feel guilty if you’re not maturing in your love of the brethren. If you’re not prone or given to hospitality and if you don’t go out of your way to honor the institution of marriage, then I do want you to feel guilty.

See, so we honor marriage by rejoicing in its celebratory nature at its beginning in its continuance. That’s why I wore this tie today. You look at the tie. To me, it always reminds me of New Year’s Eve, you know, like I don’t know, streamers and stuff. It looks party-like. I don’t see them there, but champagne bottles popping. I don’t know why I think, but I do. So, to me, this tie’s like celebration, and we should join in and celebrate marriage. Rejoice in these things at their beginning and in their continuance.

For we honor marriage by preparing for it. Luke 14 says, “Which of you intending to build a tower does not sit down first and count the cost whether he has enough to finish it?”

If we don’t think marriage is a big deal, then who cares about preparing for it? But if we place the kind of significance and value, respect, preciousness, reputation in it, then we are going to do our best as a community to help young people prepare for it, aren’t we? It’s not some small thing they’re doing. It’s some important thing they’re doing that we want to celebrate its beginning and celebrate it for 50 years into the future.

And if that’s the way we think of marriage, we will honor marriage by insisting that we help people prepare for it. Right. I think so.

So, we honor marriage by preparing for marriage.

Five, we honor marriage by nurturing it with our time. James 5:7 says, “Be patient, brethren, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, waiting patiently for it until it receives the early and latter rain.”

Precious here is the same word for honor. So, there’s this precious fruit that the farmer is waiting for. But, of course, the farmer didn’t just wait. No, the farmer plowed the field. He planted it. He’s going to harvest it. He worked at it, right? So, if we’re going to honor marriage, if we’re going to see marriage as this precious fruit that ultimately the Lord God has to give us, right? Unless the Lord builds the house, it doesn’t mean that we’re not going to work hard for it. In fact, it means the reverse according to this illustration.

We’re supposed to be farmers of marriage, nurturing it, cultivating it with our time. Now, praise God. Again, it’s not as if we don’t do this in this church. For many years, the young people of this church have obeyed this verse without knowing they’re obeying this verse. They put together a Valentine’s Day dinner. This Tuesday night, same thing. Abigail L. is leading up some young people at our church. Praise God for them. Maybe they—I don’t know what their motivations were, what they were thinking. But they’re obeying today’s verse. They’re taking their time and nurturing your marriage here.

If you’re a married couple here, they’re giving you an opportunity to come together and gaze at each other’s eyes instead of gazing at your kids or gazing someplace else. They’re giving an opportunity to come together and focus on one another and rejoice in your marriage. Who’s watching the kids?

Again, in the providence of God, we were able—I didn’t set it up. My wife did. But we took care of Mike and Lana’s kids last night and you know it was a direct—I I understood it in terms of this verse. We were helping honor their marriage.

You know, we like to do marriage counseling and all this stuff. And you know, I wonder how much marriage counseling is needed in churches where the young people and the older people are all doing their best to give the married couples time to get off together and stare at each other’s eyes. See, I think it would take care of a lot of counseling problems.

So, we have an obligation as a community to nurture marriage with our time. There was this idea floated. I don’t know if it ever happened. I heard this idea, you know, from some of the young people here about providing a babysitting service. Man, go for it. If you can get young people—I know you’re busy, too—college, careers, all that stuff, but, you know, if you could somehow, you know, let people know if you want a babysitter to get out for a, you know, for a time together, husband and wife will do it. Now, my wife and I were able to actually, you know, keep Levi and Charlotte in our house all night and it was fun. It made us younger again and hopefully it helped their marriage as well.

See, this is what we’re supposed to do. We encourage and nurture marriage by providing, you know, babysitting so couples can get out together and focus on not family but marriage. Marriage is what’s supposed to be respected and honored here. Who are the kids watching? You see? Well, our kids are watching us and nurturing us this Tuesday night by encouraging us to come together and build our marriages just through a romantic evening together so that the spouses can watch each other instead of their kids or other people.

So you know we honor marriage by putting work into it as a community. You see—this is one of our objectives to honor marriage and the way we can get there is through things like Valentine’s Day dinners through babysitting services. That’s what the church can do as a community. But then in terms of our families, we should be thinking of ways, you know, to build marriages.

Six, we honor marriage with our speech. Matthew 15:8, “These people draw near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.”

Well, at least they did it with their lips, even though hypocritically we at least need to do this too with our tongues and words honor marriage. Not hypocritically, sincerely.

You know, I was thinking there are some young people here who like to write songs. One of the most marked differences in songs over the last 20 years is people used to sing about marriage. “Going to the chapel, going to get married,” Beach Boys, “We could be married.” Where is the marriage word in modern day lyrics? It’s gone.

And I’m telling you, you know, if you’re young people here and you’re writing song lyrics and you’re writing about romantic relationships all the time that could just as easily apply to cohabitation as well as to marriage. I don’t like it. It is time to speak positively about marriage in this culture. And it’s time, as I’ve got on your outline, to dis cohabitation.

We don’t want to be so accepting and loving of everything that people think we think it’s okay when people live together out of wedlock, out of Christian marriage. It’s not good. It’s horrible. It rips the culture apart. Cohabitation is bad, evil, it is a lie from the pit of hell that it is just as good as marriage. It is not. And we should tell people that regularly.

We should build a community at which people are fearful of cohabiting together because they know they’re going to get, you know, bad words from us. We should encourage our culture in Christian marriage. It is under attack. This is why I say your children will speak with your enemies in the gate. Well, this has come home. This is being attacked in the last 20, 30 years in our country. I was with, you know, the generation of love in the late 60s, early ’70s, and they’ve just ripped this thing to shreds. Marriage is the butt of jokes.

Let’s make some cohabitation jokes. Let’s ridicule people living together outside of marriage. I’m serious. We ought to be doing it. We ought to be with our words dissing cohabitation. And we should be affirming marriage in our speech. And we should be telling people outside of the church in our community, this is what they ought to do.

My wife uses her words to honor marriage. She goes to the store and they call her Mrs., you know, they always have your card and you know, they run your plastic or your Safeway card, whatever it is, and they say they know your name. They call you Christine. And you know, I mean, I remember years ago a fella from Europe, boy, he was really offended when people would call him by his first name. “What is that? They don’t know me and they really don’t.”

But if they’re going to do that, what they typically do today if you’re a woman is they’ll call you “Ms. [Name].” My wife says, “I’m Mrs. [Name].” Okay, we ought to be doing that. I think we’ve accepted far too passively the redefinition of the terms of what men and women are called. “Mr.” and “Mrs.” are terms that we should want to get back into the vernacular. I’d encourage you to do that. It’s one way to obey this work, this verse.

This week, you go to the store and they call you “Ms. [So-and-so]” and you’re a married woman. You tell them, “I’m Mrs. [So-and-so]. I’m married. It’s a good thing.”

We should honor marriage with our lips, with our tongues, with all of our prayers. You know, we’re going to have prayer meeting today. You know, everybody—this text is not a text directed to married people. It’s directed to everybody. It says marriage is to be honored by everyone. By young people, people that aren’t married, old people that aren’t married, whatever it is, everybody supposed to be honoring marriage. Everybody in our community has an obligation to do this. And we can do this with our words of prayer, right?

We get in our prayer meetings. We can honor the married people there. Praise God for marriage and use our prayers as well to support people. Pray for people that are married. Marriage is under attack and specific marriages are under attack in the context of our culture. So our prayers—I’ve got Karen Menace down there. I’m going to talk in a little bit about political action.

But you know, the fact is marriage is under attack through civil unions through homosexual marriage. This is a direct attack on the thing that we’re supposed to be defending. And there’s one woman in the providence of God who saved us the last legislative session. And as I’ve told you before, and I know this is the truth, it is the deal this year to maintain Republican control of the House here in Oregon and to get Karen reelected in her district. That is the goal and it is probably the only thing apart from, you know, some providential miracle from God that will keep us will allow us to defend marriage by preventing this homosexual frontal attack.

Governor Kulongowski announced the task force last Thursday. I’m not going to be on it. You know, the conservatives won’t be on it. Basic Rights of Oregon were at the press conference. They’ll be on it. They’re the ones who espouse homosexual marriage. He is preparing legislation stronger than last time around. and they’re going to come right at it. And unless we maintain control of the Republican House, and unless we keep a solid conservative as speaker, we’ll lose.

And believe me, that will be a huge strike on marriage in the context of our culture. We should pray for Karen specifically. You know, Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Party, actually has spoken about how important Karen Menace is as an individual. “She’s in the way of our agenda,” her as an individual. I pray for her physical safety, friends. I’m not trying to be alarmist. She’s important and everybody knows she’s important. So pray for her as well.

We honor marriage with our words. Think about it. Think what you say. Are you in this fight or are you not in this fight?

Seven, we honor marriage with our money. I went to this meeting last Thursday and got our political goals set from the Oregon Family Council for this coming year. And as I said, one of the huge ones is Karen. Another big one is Supreme Court judges. There’ll be a uh—we have a vow of the homosexual man on the Supreme Court. Now there’s a lesbian woman who is running again. we have a good candidate running against her. That’ll be a focal point.

And after the meeting, you know, you get tired. I do. It’s like the old job I had at our old place about cutting blackberries down. And they come right back and you just think, “What is the point of this? We’ve been doing this for two years. We spent $3 million passing that constitutional amendment a year and a half ago. $3 million. And I thought, boy, that could pay for a lot of other neat stuff we could do. Was it worth it?” I thought to myself.

And then I came home and thought about this verse and I said, yeah, it really is worth the time and money and effort. It is our obligation. I thought to my shame, you know, last year when we put out some of this promotional literature for Measure 36, you know, and there was defend marriage, they said, you know, “Why are we going to defend marriage? It’s something that God gives us.”

Well, this text says defend it. This text says keep it honorable. Defend it. Put work into it. Protect it. It’s important. And right now in our country particularly, it is very important because it is under full frontal attack. Now, it’s been that way, you know, since the cultural revolution of the late 60s—culture’s been under attack and now it’s under legal attack. Okay? And so we should with our money support efforts like you did two years ago, the Defense of Marriage Coalition—defending uh marriage from the attack by homosexual marriage.

Now in your outline, I’ve got Acts 28:10 and 1 Timothy 5:17. The word honor means in its first sense money. “So an elder who rules well and teaches is worthy of double honor.” Double pay is what that means. Acts 28—Paul says they send us on our way with lots of honors. He means money. And so money properly honoring marriage means putting our money where our mouth is. Good to speak in defense of marriage, but also good to use some of our income to support marriage when it’s under attack legally in the context of our culture.

James Dobson, famous quote that’s going around these days, said this: “I think it’s a disgrace that half the Christians in America aren’t even registered to vote. And of those who are, only half go to the polls. When we withhold our influence and participation, we yield by default to those who promote immoral and destructive policies.” And that is true in spades in terms of marriage.

If we do not go to the polls trying to defend Christian marriage and keep out homosexual ual marriage, you know, we have we have blinked at a crucial time in the context of our culture. It looks like they’re going to beat us in the short term and maybe they will. I don’t know. But I know this verse tells me that it is proper for me to put the long hours I do going to these political meetings, for us to spend $3 million, to us to spend maybe another million bucks next year and trying to get people elected and defeat homosexual civil union legislation in the in the Oregon legislature.

Yeah, it is worth it. It’s what we’re supposed to do. We are supposed to protect marriage. We are supposed to do that. It’s what we’re called to do according to this text. We’re to honor it. And part of that honor means with our money protecting it from those that would assault it.

Eight, we protect or honor Christian marriage rather by submitting to it. Matthew 15:4, “God commanded saying, ‘Honor your mom and your dad.’”

Bob Dylan has this song and in one of his songs he says, “I was born here and I’ll die here against my will.” I think that’s a pretty good line. We are, aren’t we? We don’t come out willingly from the womb typically and we don’t go willingly into the grave. We’re born here and die here against our will. We don’t choose the fathers and mothers that we’re supposed to honor. And marriage—once you’ve entered into Christian marriage, now you know I want to be careful here.

There are good godly reasons for divorce and it’s not honoring marriage to maintain marriage with the guy for instance who’s committing adultery all the time. That is not honoring marriage. The marriage has been adulterated by the man. He should be executed and the marriage should be over. So there’s a proper role, you know, for divorce.

We should hate men by the way who don’t honor marriage and who cast eyes at married women and we should hate women that cast eyes at married man. We should hate him. That’s part of honoring marriage. It’s not some little sin that people fall into and “Oh gosh, isn’t that too bad? Okay, we’ll just move on past that now.” No, it strikes at the very foundation of vocation and dominion Christian culture. According to the Bible, adultery is a capital crime. That is what we should want—adulterers punished.

That’s number nine on the outline. But the point here is that, you know, we want to make sure that we understand that our marriages—what I saw a thing in Parade magazine bought the Sunday paper yesterday to avoid buying it on Sunday and my wife bought it for me and Parade magazine—you got Brooks saying he loved Trisha Yearwood all along, you know, you know he divorced his wife and then married Trisha Yearwood and it’s kind of like that, you know, Johnny Cash thing with his wife. I don’t know Garth Brooks and I don’t know his wife and I don’t know how they got divorced.

But I know that this culture will use every kind of opportunity to convince you that maybe the person you’re married to is the wrong person to get you not to submit to Christian marriage. Marriage is a delightful thing, but marriage is a ton of work. It’s like that farmer doing the work. Well, God says that you honor marriage by hanging in there. I mean, unless there’s actual divorce stuff going on, you honor marriage by understanding that like your life and your death and your parents, you know, ultimately maybe you didn’t choose the person you married.

You know that you sort of did it and “We got married in a fever hotter than a pepper sprout. Been talking about Jackson ever since the fire went out.” Well, maybe it was a fire that you don’t understand that got you married, but you’re married now. That’s who God chose. You might have been married against your will even. But God says now love that person that you’re married to.

There was a song back in the 80s—”Love the one you’re with.” The 70s, David Crosby, “love the one you’re with.” It’s free love. You know the late 60s. Yeah, we just love everybody and love the one you’re with and you can’t be around your wife. “Well, I love the other girl you’re with,” you know, sexually. That’s horrible. That is, you know, it seems so nice and flowery. It’s an attack from the pit of hell against what we’re supposed to be honoring and protecting.

Instead, I say play the hand you’re dealt. Again, Bob Dylan—fascinated by a lot of his lyrics. I really am. He in “A Series of Dreams,” I was listening to some songs yesterday as I was relaxing at the house and “Silver Wings” by Merle Haggard came up and I thought about the technological difficulties of married life. You know, airplane taking his wife away from him for a while. Well, you know, we have all kinds of technological challenges to marriage.

Then the next song that came up was “That’s the Way Love Goes,” the simplicity of marital life. A wonderful song by Merle. And then “Gimme Shelter” came up on the playlist next and I thought—that’s marriage. If we don’t give marriage shelter, it’s going to fade away. God doesn’t say honor it, protect it, guard it if there’s not a good reason to doing that. And we should give marriage shelter by our actions.

And then came on “A Series of Dreams.” And that’s the Dylan song that has this line in it. He says, “Dreams where the umbrella is folded and into the path you’re hurled. And the cards are no good that you’re holding unless they’re from another world.” The cards are no good you’re holding unless they’re from another world.

We have to remind ourselves of that over and over again. We have difficult situations sometimes in a marriage. It’s just our ordinary life. We think, “Why are we in the midst of this? I can’t play this hand. This is ridiculous. I want to just fold.” But those cards are from another world. They’re from God. They’re from heaven in terms of your marriage. You see, I mean, again, I understand there’s reasons for actual divorce, and that is respecting and honoring marriage. Divorce people that attack marriage. I understand that.

But most of us aren’t in that position. Most of us honor marriage by submitting to it, by playing the cards, the hand we’re dealt, because we know that like our parents, like our birth and death, they came to us from God. They came to us from God. And so, it’s our obligation to submit to them.

Nine, we honor marriage by punishing attacks upon it. You know, no-fault divorce, which happened in my lifetime, was a tremendous assault upon marriage. We should want to roll it back through legislation and we don’t probably have a prayer of doing that in the next decade or two. Probably don’t. But that shouldn’t stop us from wanting to get bills introduced to roll it back. We’re never going to get it done if we don’t speak into our arena, our political arena, our cultural arena.

That no-fault divorce, I believe, is another one of those things from the pit of hell that said just divorce one another and there’s no fault. The Bible says there’s fault in divorce and the guy who’s at fault, he’s got to let the wife walk away with that whole dowy if he’s at fault.

Now, we can’t do that in the courts of Oregon, but we can write up and we have written up in this church marriage contracts in which people bind themselves in marriage to church courts who will say, “We’re going to determine fault.” And to the party that’s at fault, we’re going to say, “You walk away with nothing. Maybe be the shirt on your back.” That’s what we want.

And we look weird, you know, and people see these things we draw up and they say, “What is wrong with you? You guys are nuts. Let the courts handle it.” No, we’re not nuts. We’re trying to honor marriage by holding people at fault.

Now, if we don’t have a marriage contract that’s been entered into and submitted to the court the way they should be, if we have people in our church who end up with divorce, there ought to be somebody—there ought to be a clear determination of who is the one that’s causing the divorce. And that person ought to be encouraged in the strongest terms to hand everything over to the non-offending party. The riches of the unrighteous are saved up for the righteous.

We don’t want to think that way. The culture forms us and when we hear about no-fault divorce and all this stuff, we tend to kind of think that way. And that’s a direct attack on marriage.

You know this verse—punishing. In Acts 22:5, I didn’t, you know, just think this up. I just looked at all the verses talked about honoring and one said to punish people. Says this in verse 5: “The high priest bears me witness and all the council of the elders from whom I also received letters to the brethren went to Damascus to bring in chains even those who were there to Jerusalem to be punished.”

Now he’s using a word that’s related etymologically to this word honor. And now he was doing it in a bad sense but this same Greek word means to be a guardian or avenger of honor. To be a guardian or avenger of honor. And that’s what we’re called to be—guardians and avengers of honor. And in church courts, hopefully eventually in civil courts and in our personal relationships, we should behave ourselves in such a way as to be guardians and avengers of honor.

And when people treat marriage dishonorably, we should dislike them and let our dislike be known. We should defend marriage by seeking to punish attacks upon it.

You know, we should seek the death penalty for adultery. The Bible says that’s what’s supposed to happen. It is striking at the core of a civil—uh at the core of foundation because marriage, as Gilder’s statistics buttress the argument from Genesis, marriage is absolutely critical to a Christian culture. It’s not some optional deal. Can’t have one without it. And you can’t have the sort of successful blessed vocational dominion calling apart from it.

And when people strike out at through adultery, they ought to be executed. I firmly believe that biblical law maintains today and we ought to have laws enforcing it today. And you know, we may not be able to do it civilly, but we ought to be looking that way.

I heard this morning there’s an initiative petition filed that people that rape little children mandatory 25 years in prison. Well, they ought to be executed. That’s what the Bible says, I think. And we can defend Christian marriage by seeking the civil penalty of death to those who attack it. And that includes adulterers and that includes the church taking an active role in the context of divorces to determine fault.

And then finally, we honor marriage through sexual meekness. The last half of verse four connects up with the first half of verse four. We honor marriage through sexual meekness. Next week I’ll talk about high fidelity in terms of marital sexual relationships. But that is a sermon for another week.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for the wonderful gift of marriage and forgive us, Father for taking these things for granted. Forgive me, Lord God. Forgive me for not seeing this positive obligation we have to honor and defend marriage. Thank you, Lord God, that the church across this country seems to be awakening to this in terms of the homosexual attack upon marriage.

Help us, Father, to use this opportunity not just to talk about that attack but these others that have already been existed in the context of our culture as well. Help us Lord God today to honor those that are married. Help the young people here speak with the enemy in the gate by taking up this charge to defend Christian marriage to encourage their parents and other parents here who are married.

Thank you Lord God for this Tuesday night. Bless us each and Valentine’s Day and in the next couple of days as we move toward it by recommitting ourselves afresh to honor marriage and those who are married and to celebrate with them and to pray for its continuance. Help us Lord God to apply these many points of application as we seek to honor you by honoring this institution you’ve given us. In Jesus name we ask it. Amen. Amen.