I guess I should have begun with the question of what a good marriage looks like to you?  Is a good marriage one that allows you to do things how you want them done?  Is a good marriage one that has your spouse serving you like your second-class citizen in your house?  Is a good marriage one that makes you wake up in the morning singing like a Disney movie?  Is there no such thing as a good marriage?

What I want to argue first is that we must get our idea of a good marriage from the Bible.  Not just from the Bible in an instructional sense (i.e. Paul says that husbands should love their wives therefore husbands should love their wives) but in an exemplary sense as well (i.e. Jesus’ love for his bride is how we should love our spouse).  We do not simply take the steps, but we fully take on the character.

In Ephesians 5, Paul is not using Jesus and the Church as an analogy for marriage.  Instead, he is showing that marriage between a man and a woman is the analogy for Jesus and the Church.  Having this understanding is as fundamental as putting a horse at the front of the cart.  Jesus and the Church is the reality and your marriage is the image, the reflection.

Knowing Jesus is the reality and we are the image makes the instructions much easier for me to handle.  When we make the mistake in thinking that the relationship between Jesus and the Church and the relationship between a husband and a wife are equal we try to qualify the tough sayings.  This is not good.

To begin to understand the relationship between Jesus and The Church you must be a part of that relationship.  A man will have no clue how to love his wife if he has not first been loved as the bride of his Savior.  A woman will have no understanding of respecting her husband until she has grown to respect her Savior who nourishes and cherishes her.

Again, let me reiterate what I said Sunday:  I am just a newborn when it comes to marriage (and therefore probably shouldn’t even be speaking about it), so I have barely scratched the surface of what it will look like for me to love my wife as Christ has loved his bride.  But, if I am to answer my own question (what does a good marriage look like?), I would have say it looks like my wife growing in grace and beauty because of the love and nourishment that I have given her.  It is my wife finding joy and ease in her respect for me because Jesus has enabled me to give up myself for her.

Well, with that as my goal I better stop typing and start praying…

Because of Jesus,

Michael

In his sermon entitled “The Marriage Supper of the Lamb,” his ninth on this passage, Dr. Timothy Keller concludes by looking at two things: what we find in marriage that teaches us about Jesus and then what we find in Jesus that teaches us about marriage.  The former is repentance and forgiveness.  Genuine marriage is built on repenting and forgiving.  Every day there is a cycle of constantly recognizing hurt and moving gently to the other person.  Marriage is, by design, two different kinds of human beings learning to share each others perspectives, concerns, emotions… in truth their whole being.  You cannot separate Mary Lu’s thinking from me.  Foreign though it may be, it is mine.  And I will never be the same because of what I have learned of me in her thought, her life, and her emotion.

It is perfectly fair to say, her weaknesses were tailor made for my needs.  Our marriage is a blessing, not “in spite of” how differently we see the world.  Rather, God’s design for my blessing is through our differences, and some of those are blatantly sinful either way!  God uses evil to bring about His will.  I have the gospel, in a way that I would have never known, because of our mutual brokenness.  To be sure, that process requires the development of a real expertise in forgiving and repenting.

The practice of forgiving and repenting at the level that marriage affords requires the kind of forgiveness and repentance we find in our walk with Christ.  Marriage teaches us about our relationship with Him.  He leads us to a thirst for real, deep, and abiding forgiveness in relationship.  In that thirst, there comes a union that surpasses all other relationships.  That is how marriage trains us for our relationship to Christ.

Greater, even than that, is the intimacy required to bear fruit.  That is where I got… um became, um “poorly stated?”

In Romans chapter seven Paul offers, through the Holy Spirit, that we died to the law.  We died to the law, he says specifically, so to be freed from our obligations and to marry another.  Marriage is bound by this life.  The woman who was married is no longer bound when her husband passes, but she is free to love another.  This passage, rightly understood, is genuinely a picture of the intimacy necessary to bear fruit.  It is a passage about the deepest intimacy.  Jesus desires that you be released from your bondage to the tyrant law.  He wants his bride to freely love him.  He desires in that new marriage to bear fruit.  We are His bride and he longs to see the fruit of our relationship born from the intimacy of the union of our being, “in Christ.”

The truth is, my inability with words bespeaks my ignorance!  I need to hear for myself that Jesus is not a proposition.  He is not a philosophical syllogism.  He is not an article, nor an object to be academically debated.  He is a lover who desires to move to heal at the depths of our wounds.  Scars that were left so deeply can only find their healing in the intimacy of His deeper embrace.  The most profound marriage wouldn’t begin to scratch at the surface of that kind of intimacy.

Jesus longs to bear fruit in your life.  That kind of fruit bearing comes from an intimacy that holds no bounds of access or exposure.  People and dogs and rabbits and guppies can consummate a relationship, but only Jesus, as the glorious bridegroom, can move to you with the intimacy of affection that cleanses your deepest stain.

One friend said, “You know, I got one good thing out of your sermon…” he went on but not without noting, even in the tone of his own voice, how enthusiastic and successful he considered it to get ONE thing… like the other weeks he got, … um, maybe nothing?

Well, thank you to my friends who allow me to struggle.  I am grateful for your forgiveness and I trust that the few short paragraphs above give maybe even two things that came to me through this series.  Marriage teaches us about forgiveness and repentance and we find that in our relationship with him.  Secondly, the intimacy I find required for Christ to bear fruit in my life teaches me about that which was designed for my wife and I to share.  I am so grateful for her today.  She couldn’t be better fit for me.

I trust you have found the same.  Your spouse’s strengths, and weaknesses alike, were created in them just for you!  Will you join me in rejoicing over both and His deep love for you?

I remain,
Ted

There is nothing more frustrating than coming to a Sunday and leaving spiritual food lying on the table. When Steve and I met early last week, in anticipation of the upcoming service, we had great plans. We set about constructing the following order:

The theme for this past week was “The depth of our relationship in Christ, through the call and regeneration of the Holy Spirit.”

We asked,

What does it mean when we say a person is lost?

What is the effect of Sin and the Fall on people?
How has sin affected God’s image bearers?
What is the work of the Holy Spirit in regeneration?
What does it mean when we use the term Sin?
What does the Holy Spirit do in making us alive?
What does it mean that we were dead?

Then this week would have been: “How does the Holy Spirit use the sacrament of communion to picture and press to us our communion in the body?”

What does communion mean to you?
Communion of the forgiveness of Sin?
Communion of the Holy Spirit?
Communion of the Lord’s Supper?

Now, doesn’t that sound orderly?

I hope the sermon spoke to you Sunday. Several commented that it did. I just couldn’t get to the beauty and wonder of an author describing the real strength of Sin.

Sin is the force which Paul says, through the inspired words of the Holy Spirit, we were all at one time under. By “under,” he means that we were controlled by our cravings and without hope against them. We all as objects of wrath were trained to feed our nature. We do it just as surely as a good animal is trained to fetch.

I take Knox’s dog out at night and throw an orange ball across the front yard in the dark.  At first, it was just to see what he could do.  Finding it is no problem him. He roots around, back and forth: he hasn’t missed it yet. Apart from the work of the Holy Spirit applying grace to me, that is what my nature does. It roots around in the dark cloak of hiddeness and it finds sin out. It doesn’t merely stumble into sin. It hunts it down back and forth, whatever it takes.

Because we have washed our cultural vocabulary of the language of Sin, we are all the more susceptible to its presence. Because we have placated ourselves with a more palatable language we have forgotten to be aware of its ugliness.

Now, I’m writing to our folks so they’ll know I’m no ranting fool pretending that the outward sins of youth are the most deadly. No, by far the sins of hidden slavery are the more deceitful. The festering cultural idolatries that keep a person socially acceptable while not accomplishing the work of the kingdom are far more deadly. They just drag their pain out.

The work of the Holy Spirit applies the redemption, the forgiveness of sins, to me. The blood of Jesus is a deep cleanser that seeps into every crack and crevice. Every single place that Sin has touched me, God now has made whole.

The work of the Spirit is regeneration, making something that was dead now alive again. In that birth, I received a faith that was not mine. Receiving that faith, I believed. Having believed, I became a living receptacle for the promised Holy Spirit. The Lord is the Spirit and where the Spirit is there is freedom. The natural man cannot comprehend the things of God because they are spiritual, but the one who has been made alive has the Spirit of God in Him. That Spirit reminds us of the power and presence of our High King to overcome Sin and death. Even more, it not only reminds us, the Holy Spirit renews us in every place that sin had broken and separated us.

Looking at the full impact of Sin in the created order and in me, I begin to remember how much God did for me to make me fresh and new before Him

Walk by the Spirit today and do not gratify the desires of your sinful flesh for you have been bought with the immortal, imperishable saving blood of our Savior. That blood is effectual for you so that no power of Sin and death may keep you from the very presence of the throne of God.

Hear again, this summary of Sin’s treachery.  Relish today that you have been washed and made entirely clean. Every place that Sin persists is a reminder to you that you have the Holy Spirit and you are made wholly new.

Cornelius Plantinga Jr. writes in Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be : A Breviary of Sin.

My goal, then, is to renew the knowledge of a persistent reality that used to evoke in us fear, hatred, and grief. Many of us have lost this knowledge, and we ought to regret the loss. For slippage in our consciousness of sin, like most fashionable follies, may be pleasant, but is is also devastating. Self-deception about our sin is a narcotic, a tranquilizing and disorienting suppression of our spiritual central nervous system. What’s devastating about it is that when we lack an ear for wrong notes in our lives, we cannot play right ones or even recognize them in the performances of others. Eventually we make ourselves religiously so unmusical that we miss both the exposition and the capitulation of the main themes God plays in human life. The music of creation and the still greater music of grace whistle right through our skulls, causing no catch of breath and leaving no residue. Moral beauty begins to bore us. The idea that the human race needs a Savior sounds quiet.

In the celebration of the living who were once dead, your brother, and fellow washed by the blood of Christ cleansed and made whole again,

Ted

We began a new series this last week.  Over the next several weeks we will be looking at the work of the Holy Spirit in the communion of the church.  In order to appreciate the work of the Spirit in our communion we must consider the reality of the person outside of Christ, or as Paul will say, “what we all once were.”

Have you ever really known your need?

When I was in high School my family traveled to Minnesota to my grandparents lake house.  A couple of years we pulled a ski boat, all the way from Florida!  To be brief, there was an accident.  My cousin’s best friend fell overboard and was run over by the motor.  Her aspirations of being an Olympic down hill racer were ended when the keel and blade nearly severed her arm.  I’ve always had a sense of being responsible.  I wasn’t in the boat, but when my Aunt screamed that they were in trouble, though I didn’t know what had happened, I jumped into a fishing boat on shore and tried to leave the beach to go and help.

I had the motor started and pulling against the rope when my father calmly said, “Let me get the anchor up.”  Sheepishly, I recognized how foolish I looked, but still I was going to save whatever or whoever needed my help.

As we came around the peninsula and could see them for the first time, I felt something was more wrong than I had thought.  When we came nearer the accident and I saw my cousin hanging over the side of the back of the ski boat, his strength gone, barely able to keep Julie out of the water, I knew I was done.  The blood spread across the water seemingly as far as the eye could see.  I said to my dad, “I don’t know what to do.  Tell me what I should do.”  I knew that I was beyond any sense of being able to save that had formerly been my vainglory.

My dad saved Julie’s life.

The Lord was amazingly gracious and provided a world class surgeon in a little walk in clinic.  I never have lost the sense of being way beyond my capacity to make something live.

The Bible says that we were dead in our trespasses and Sin.  When it says this it doesn’t mean we were mostly dead.  It means D-E-A-D, dead.  Now, in this case dead things walk and move, but spiritually they are unresponsive.

Think of a dead body.  It contrasts a living body in at least a couple of ways.  A dead body has no sensation.  It does not interact or respond to stimuli.  Not only that, but a dead body has no strength.  It doesn’t respond to stimuli and it has no power.  It can’t move.

Wow!  Sunday I was horribly disrespectful to my brother’s paralysis in a way that really only belongs to family.  He is the greatest brother.  We played whiffle ball in the side yard for eons… and he bought the ball and bat, just so he could play with me.  I miss him in those memories.  His inability does however picture the lack of life apart from the Spirit.

We can move, marry, create new life and still be dead.

It is what all of us came from.  If you are in Christ today then you have been made alive.  Every person in Christ was dead.  We were lifeless until, God chose to set His love upon us and make us alive again.

We are not sinners because we sin.  We sin because we were born in Sin.  In sin did my mother conceive me.  In Adam, Romans 5 says, we all sinned.  It means our spiritual death came before our first wrongful act and our only hope is the life of the life giving Spirit.

This is good news.  When you feel undeserving… when you have done your worst… when you hear your own voice in the mocking of the Savior who hangs on a cross for you… then you need to know that He chose to love you when you had nothing but death to offer Him.  He loved you when you were lifeless.  There is nothing you can do to make Him love you less.  You may expect yourself to perform better.  He knows you better… and He loves you.  You haven’t let Him down.  He knew your need when you were dead.

Now some folks think they are protecting God’s fairness by leaving conversion to an individual’s decision.  But they aren’t thinking of those who never hear.  If you aren’t capable of hearing, how is it fair to expect you to choose Him.

No, my friend, all who are His, He chose.  And those He chose come to Him.  And everyone of them was just as dead and lifeless as the next.  A fifty year old man is no more able to save himself than a baby can keep himself from being aborted.

In fact, Paul says, “then He made Himself known to me, as one untimely born.”  It means as a baby born unto death, with no hope outside of the work of someone else.

God loves you.  The Spirit lives in you if you are in Christ.  If you are in Christ it is because He chose to set His love on you before the foundation of the world.

He loves you even more than Miss Barbie or even Mr. Jay.  He loves you without beginning or end.  He can’t wait to hear you sing your praise to Him for making you who were dead live again.  Cry out this week and let someone know you were dead.  Scream it loud that even you, who were once dead, have been made alive again.  How could anything be any better than that?

In the celebration of the living who were once dead, your brother, and fellow carcass made living,

Ted

The world is a fallen place.  While we are grateful for the generous daily mercies of our heavenly Father, any person doing business in the world today knows that there is a lot of man-eating-man going on out there.  In fact, the whole enterprise of business is eating people alive today, right in the streets of Marion County!  How do we respond to that?  How do we process the world’s treatment of us, particularly when we don’t get what we want?  How do we face the circumstances of our lives being turned upside down?

We’d like to answer that differently than the outward reality many of us experience; i.e. I hurt the people around me when I don’t get what I want!  I kick, or scream, or guzzle Diet Cokes… or any other such response of a habit of self protection.  We’d like to respond a little more wisely.

Let’s look at ourselves and the inscribed memory of hurt.

We respond to our life experiences based on the assumptions of our memory.  Memory works to define our self perception by giving us a sense of our identity, our community, our future, and even our God.  We sing, because raising our voices invites us to affirm, in the community, in which we belong, the truth that our heart believes.  When you sing, you raise your heart.  When you don’t sing, you don’t affirm or engage your belief… It has nothing to do with hitting the right note!
When you beat me, I will fall, and then I’ll hear a mental tune, “My faith has found a resting place, not in device nor creed.  I trust the ever living One; His wounds for me doth plead.   I need no other argument; I need no other plea.  It is enough that Jesus died and that He died for me.”

“Remembering” means that we must be careful to challenge the honesty of our memory.  How have I shaded the very mental pictures and emotions of what has formed my basis for living?  Remembering redemptively means that I wash the memory of my assumptions in the stories of the High King to whom I belong.  Remembering that Jesus died for me includes remembering that I stand guilty before him.  In Romans 5, Paul speaks of the reconciliation that has been purchased in Christ.  Not only am I welcome there, but my enemies are welcome there.  Not merely enemies who won’t give me insurance coverage for the TV that belongs in my truck, but enemies that formed my childhood.

Maybe your childhood was splendid.  Maybe you don’t have a specific “hurt.”  God has allowed the world to bring stress in your life.  It has formed you and you are fooling yourself if you deny it.

God is willing to use the circumstances of your life to bring you to the end of your assumptions.  He is kind enough to be at times radically unkind!
Exodus 13 tells the story of the people grumbling as they followed Moses into the wilderness.  They had no food.  They grumble by saying, “We had food in Egypt – all we wanted!” They didn’t.  “You have led us into the desert to die.”  He didn’t.

When you grumble against your circumstance – you grumble against God.  Moses responds, “Who are we?”  He clearly tells the people and us, when you complain against the circumstance of your life you are forgetting God has formed your days from before you were born!

God knitted you in your mother’s womb and he knows your days from beginning to end.  Every day He knows right where you are.  When you grumble, you grumble against Him.

When you are not honest in your remembering, you forget that He desires good for your enemies.

If you don’t forgive you cannot be forgiven.  Forgiveness in America means I didn’t hit them back.  Forgiveness at the foot of the cross means I love my enemies, even in my memory, like my King loves them… I desire good to come to them!

WOW!

I pray God’s peace for you today, as you walk with me in the field of your hurtful memories.  Some of you need to start by saying in all humility… “God, I hate my mother…  God, I hate my Father…”  Some need to say, “God I hate this economy.”  I’d love to hear how this comes to life in your existence.

In Christ,

Ted