Podcasts about betrothal

This is the first of a two-part episode in which we explore Saint Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle Fifth Mansions Chapter 4. In part 1, Saint Teresa explains the difference between spiritual betrothal and the Christian covenant of matrimony. As the soul goes deeper in its relationship with God, it will encounter severe trials and warfare from the devil.Timeline:00:00:00 Show Opener - Interior Castle Fifth Mansions Chapter 200:00:33 Introduction - Welcome00:02:07 Introduction to the Fifth Mansions (Fourth Water)00:08:56 Fifth Mansions Chapter 400:09:18 Paragraph 1. The Spiritual Espousals.00:12:25 Paragraph 2. The Prayer of Union Resembles a Betrothal.00:17:46 Paragraph 3. Before the Spiritual Nuptials Temptations are Dangerous. 00:21:43 Paragraph 4. The Great Good Done by Souls Faithful to These Graces.00:30:29 Paragraph 5. Religious Subject to the Devil's Deceptions. 00:38:22 Paragraph 6. satan's Strata-gems.00:45:03 Spiritual Exercises - Contemplation00:51:28 Conclusion

Recorded live at New Destiny Marysville 122 North Court Street, Marysville, Ohio 43040 We'd love to have you join us in person! Please go to NewDestinyMarysville.com for service details.

In today's podcast we look at the 10 commandments through the lens of a loving God seeking a covenant relationship with His people. Israel's wilderness season is one of complete dependence on God. So it is for us as we journey through the wilderness of this world and come out leaning on our “beloved”. We also discuss how the public display of the 10 commandments has been under attack for decades. It is ironic that the same Supreme Court that has Moses pictured holding the ten commandments on its outside wall has ruled against those commandments being posted in public. This weeks portion is: Jethro TORAH EXODUS 18:1-20:23 PROPHETS ISAIAH 6:1-7:6, 9:5-6 GOSPEL MATTHEW 19:16-26 Want to learn more about our ministry? Visit www.LoveAndPurity.com Intro and outro song: Faith for Salvation (1 Peter 1:3-5) by Brayden & Tali Waller All music rights belong to Love & Purity Ministry

The Song of Songs has been interpreted in many different ways. I believe it is clearly about Solomon and his bride, but I also believe that the Bible clearly teaches that marriage is a mystery concerning Christ and the church. So what are His kisses? And why are they better than wine? The applications point to a rich, deep love relationship between us and our Savior.

Fr. Daniel Alloy, FSSP has served as Parochial Vicar at Regina Caeli Parish in Houston, Texas since July of 2022. He was ordained in June of 2020.   In Today's Show   Visit the show page at thestationofthecross.com/askapriest to listen live, check out the weekly lineup, listen to podcasts of past episodes, watch live video, find show resources, sign up for our mailing list of upcoming shows, and submit your question for Father!

Sermon Text: Luke 1:26-38 Sermon Date: 9/22/2024 Speaker: Brian Crawford . Check us out at: https://citylightvicksburg.org/ Or check us out here: https://www.facebook.com/citylightvicksburg . Sermon Notes - Sept 22 Mary is one of the most fiercely debated characters in the Bible. So, who is Mary and what is her story? This is the second conception story in Luke. The first is John the Baptist. So, we can see the importance of Mary by comparing both Johns birth, and Jesus' birth. We will analyze them through Comparison, Condition and Calling. Comparison - Elizabeth and Zachariah are old and without children. Mary and Joseph are young. Elizabeth and Zachariah lived in the city, Mary and Joseph live in the middle of nowhere. Yet, both are visited by Gabriel. In the face of the impossible, they will both conceive. One child will prepare the way for the savior, the other is the savior! Our backgrounds are not a prerequisite for our use by God. We often think - Do I have the minimum prerequisite to be used by God? The only requisite is God Himself. Conditions - Mary is a virgin (betrothed to Joseph), Elizabeth is barren. Betrothal in this time is very different than what we expect. It was legally binding, and any sexual conduct would be considered cheating. And for all intents and purposes they are considered husband and wife. The accusations of adultly could bring extreme problems in Mary's life. But God provides the protection for her. We also see the trinity in this work! God the father, and the Holy Spirit bringing about the Son in Mary. “Greetings oh favored one” is a statement of grace from Gabriel to Mary. Mary is the recipient of God’s unexpected and overwhelming grace. Mary’s not the mother of Grace, but the Daughter of Grace. Not because she is perfect, but because God is! When angels show up, they often elicit a response of fear - but take notice of her response. It’s not Gabriel’s presence that troubles Mary. But Gabriel’s words. What’s so special about me? But, she is favored - not because she’s great, but because God is! Calling - the angel gives Elizabeth and Zachariah a name for their son, and Gabriel gives Mary and Joseph a name as well. These names mean things. In Jesus' name, we hear his eternal purpose. “Yahweh saves.” God sent his Son, so that we would have access to adoption by the Father for all eternity. The angel also declares his future - “he will be great… and he will reign forever… and of his kingdom there will be no end!" The mentioning of David is important in this text, because He is fulfilling promises made during David’s time. God raised up David’s line, and birthed a kingdom that lasts forever. And all of that is wrapped up in Gabriel’s promise to Mary. Fear not, in Christ, there is being established a forever kingdom. In Christ, we will know eternal joy, eternal peace, eternal gladness, and eternal presence, with the Lord. A kingdom with no end. And why are these two wombs are sprouting forth life when they ought not to - because nothing is impossible with God. Barren wombs and virgin wombs will give birth, and those who were abandoned and left for dead, will be adopted into our family: because nothing is impossible for God! How should we respond? Like Mary. This is what set her apart and makes her special - “Behold, I am the servant to the Lord.” Her Obedience as a Daughter of Grace.

Sermon Text: Luke 1:26-38 Sermon Date: 9/22/2024 Speaker: Brian Crawford . Check us out at: https://citylightvicksburg.org/ Or check us out here: https://www.facebook.com/citylightvicksburg . Sermon Notes - Sept 22 Mary is one of the most fiercely debated characters in the Bible. So, who is Mary and what is her story? This is the second conception story in Luke. The first is John the Baptist. So, we can see the importance of Mary by comparing both Johns birth, and Jesus' birth. We will analyze them through Comparison, Condition and Calling. Comparison - Elizabeth and Zachariah are old and without children. Mary and Joseph are young. Elizabeth and Zachariah lived in the city, Mary and Joseph live in the middle of nowhere. Yet, both are visited by Gabriel. In the face of the impossible, they will both conceive. One child will prepare the way for the savior, the other is the savior! Our backgrounds are not a prerequisite for our use by God. We often think - Do I have the minimum prerequisite to be used by God? The only requisite is God Himself. Conditions - Mary is a virgin (betrothed to Joseph), Elizabeth is barren. Betrothal in this time is very different than what we expect. It was legally binding, and any sexual conduct would be considered cheating. And for all intents and purposes they are considered husband and wife. The accusations of adultly could bring extreme problems in Mary's life. But God provides the protection for her. We also see the trinity in this work! God the father, and the Holy Spirit bringing about the Son in Mary. “Greetings oh favored one” is a statement of grace from Gabriel to Mary. Mary is the recipient of God’s unexpected and overwhelming grace. Mary’s not the mother of Grace, but the Daughter of Grace. Not because she is perfect, but because God is! When angels show up, they often elicit a response of fear - but take notice of her response. It’s not Gabriel’s presence that troubles Mary. But Gabriel’s words. What’s so special about me? But, she is favored - not because she’s great, but because God is! Calling - the angel gives Elizabeth and Zachariah a name for their son, and Gabriel gives Mary and Joseph a name as well. These names mean things. In Jesus' name, we hear his eternal purpose. “Yahweh saves.” God sent his Son, so that we would have access to adoption by the Father for all eternity. The angel also declares his future - “he will be great… and he will reign forever… and of his kingdom there will be no end!" The mentioning of David is important in this text, because He is fulfilling promises made during David’s time. God raised up David’s line, and birthed a kingdom that lasts forever. And all of that is wrapped up in Gabriel’s promise to Mary. Fear not, in Christ, there is being established a forever kingdom. In Christ, we will know eternal joy, eternal peace, eternal gladness, and eternal presence, with the Lord. A kingdom with no end. And why are these two wombs are sprouting forth life when they ought not to - because nothing is impossible with God. Barren wombs and virgin wombs will give birth, and those who were abandoned and left for dead, will be adopted into our family: because nothing is impossible for God! How should we respond? Like Mary. This is what set her apart and makes her special - “Behold, I am the servant to the Lord.” Her Obedience as a Daughter of Grace.

Sarah's Journey: From Trauma to Triumph | Conversations of Hope In this emotionally resonant episode of Conversations of Hope, hosts Faith Ingraham and Michelle Viscuse welcome Sarah Carr, a certified financial planner and therapist, to share her inspiring story. As a survivor of religious and spiritual abuse, Sarah recounts her experiences growing up in a small evangelical community, undergoing a coerced betrothal to a youth pastor at a young age, and eventually finding the courage to confront her abuser and seek justice. With a powerful narrative of resilience and healing, Sarah sheds light on the importance of breaking the silence around abuse and offers insights for creating safer, more supportive communities. Visit conversationsofhopepodcast.org for resources and more information. 00:00 Introduction to Conversations of Hope 01:06 Introducing Sarah Carr: A Journey of Resilience 02:34 Sarah's Early Life and Family Background 03:27 The Charismatic Movement and Relocation 05:00 The Youth Pastor's Influence and Grooming 07:25 Betrothal and Isolation 16:00 The Wedding That Never Happened 20:44 Realization and Reporting the Abuse 24:05 Legal Proceedings and Seeking Justice 25:02 Reflections and Support 27:20 Biblical Misinterpretations and Abuse 28:15 Lack of Accountability and Support 29:00 Seeking Answers and Understanding 29:31 The Role of Authority and Validation 31:34 Creating Safer Environments 35:08 The Importance of Asking Questions 39:30 The Church's Response to Victims 46:16 Raising Awareness and Taking Action 49:11 Final Thoughts and Gratitude

Guest: Denise WeimerBook: A Cherished Betrothal (part of a series, Scouts of the Georgia Frontier)Interview location: Blue Lake Christian Writers Conference 2024Website: deniseweimerbooks.com 

Guest: Denise WeimerBook: A Cherished Betrothal (part of a series, Scouts of the Georgia Frontier)Interview location: Blue Lake Christian Writers Conference 2024Website: deniseweimerbooks.com 

Pastor Michael Torres - Song of Solomon 2:8-3:5. Wednesday, Jun, 2024Click To View Slideshttps://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1xhWG84RBqCsW_I6MRCGXAQ-g8XGxgBwa/edit?usp=drive_link&ouid=109643752056010674706&rtpof=true&sd=trueWebsite: https://calvaryitl.orgOur Location : https://goo.gl/maps/2tAhVnZGbEavLP2C9Give: https://calvaryitl.org/giveYou can also donate via your phone directly by texting “itlGive" to 888-364-4483Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1U1Y6LJUioUoayFRwmzgfyFollow on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/calvary-chapel-into-the-light-podcast/id1374484093 Follow on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CalvaryITLFollow on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/CalvaryITLFollow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/calvarychapel_itl/ 

One of the best parts of being a rabbi is sitting down with a young couple that has just become engaged and is now beginning the exciting journey of planning their wedding day. That initial conversation always involves the sharing of the proposal story. Almost always there is an element of surprise. One partner does not know it's coming or coming then. There is usually a photographer hiding in a bush taking pictures or a videographer hiding in a bush capturing the whole thing on video. There is often a room somewhere strewn with roses or flower petals and bottles of champaign. It is not uncommon for the person planning the proposal to have arranged for both sets of parents and siblings to be at a cool restaurant to celebrate. Betrothal energy is unique, and uniquely beautiful. It happens once, and the couple remembers it forever. What do we make then of the end of the Haftarah from Hosea: I will betroth you forever; I will betroth you with righteousness and justice, And with goodness and mercy, And I will betroth you with faithfulness; Then you shall be devoted to the Lord. (2: 21-22) These lines of betrothal are part of our daily morning prayer practice. We say them as we wrap tefillin every Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Rinse and repeat for our whole lives. What does it mean that betrothal energy, engagement energy, flower and champagne energy, photographers hiding out in the bushes energy to capture a once in a lifetime moment, is recited every single week day? For our last class, we focus on three life lessons that flow from turning a once in a lifetime deal to an everyday deal.

The Divine Betrothal : Hosea : Pastor Raef Chenery : 06-02-24 by Park Community Church

Send us a Text Message.Thanks to author Leah Brunner for joining me to talk about her latest release in the DC Eagles series, Betrothal or Breakaway. Order your copy of Betrothal or BreakawayLeah's websiteJoin Leah's Facebook groupFollow Leah on InstagramFor links to the books discussed in this episode, click the link here to take you to the Google Doc to view the list. For episode feedback, future reading and author recommendations, you can text the podcast by clicking the "Send us a message button" above. For more, follow along on Instagram @whereileftoffpod.

8 INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT MARY THE MOTHER OF JESUS Fact #1: Mary comes from the Old Testament name Miriam which carries a meaning of bitterness, sorrow and trouble. Mary was from the tribe of Judah and the lineage of David. This was a. fulfillment of the prophecy (Isaiah 11:1, Jeremiah 23:5-6) Fact #3: Mary was poor and was raised in a small, remote village called Nazareth.  Fact #4: Mary was uneducated according to the standard of the world but knew God for herself. Fact #5: Mary was in the first stage of marriage. In Jewish practices, marriages had 3 stages. In the first step was the signing of the contract called a ketubbah. The couple was married but were not permitted to have sex. That why the Bible says she was betrothed. A betrothal could only be broken by death or divorce. Which is why although they had not yet engaged in sex, Joseph was going to divorce her. Fact #6: How old was Mary when she gave birth to Jesus? Betrothal usually happened right after puberty so Mary was likely in her early teens when she became pregnant and gave birth to Jesus.  Fact #7: Due to her pregnancy Mary did not enter the second stage of marriage until after Jesus was born. In this stage, the marriage was consummated. And in the final stage, a celebratory feast was held. Fact #8: Jesus was Mary's firstborn. She had other children afterwards (Luke 2:7.) She had four sons and an undisclosed number of daughters (Mark 6:3; Matt 13:55,56)   Kenn.blanchard@gmail.com    Song at the end was from Sarah (A listener like you) 

Many people are only familiar with the idea of betrothal from the Bible (or certain kinds of romance novels). Today, in Western cultures, serious relationships begin with dating, followed by engagement, and then eventually, maybe marriage. But from a Christian perspective, betrothal is an extremely important aspect of marriage, to the point where it is central to the gospel itself. In this episode, we want to try to explain why betrothal was built into ancient marriage practices, what it accomplished, and how it is demonstrated in Christ's marriage to his church. We also want to discuss the different parts of betrothal that differentiate it from engagement, such as the covenant, the bride price, the commitment to the upcoming marriage, and the transfer of authority between the time of betrothal and the wedding ceremony itself. When these are misunderstood, we begin to think of the nature and purpose of marriage differently than it truly is. We should not be deceived: marriage has been under attack for a very long time and the church needs to labor to bring it back in line with the word of God. Please join us as we discuss this very important topic.. Production of Reformation Baptist Church of Youngsville, NCHosts - Dan Horn, Jonathan Sides, Charles Churchill and Joshua HornTechnical Director - Timothy KaiserTheme Music - Gabriel Hudelson

Many people are only familiar with the idea of betrothal from the Bible -or certain kinds of romance novels-. Today, in Western cultures, serious relationships begin with dating, followed by engagement, and then eventually, maybe marriage. But from a Christian perspective, betrothal is an extremely important aspect of marriage, to the point where it is central to the gospel itself.-In this episode, we want to try to explain why betrothal was built into ancient marriage practices, what it accomplished, and how it is demonstrated in Christ's marriage to his church. We also want to discuss the different parts of betrothal that differentiate it from engagement, such as the covenant, the bride price, the commitment to the upcoming marriage, and the transfer of authority between the time of betrothal and the wedding ceremony itself. When these are misunderstood, we begin to think of the nature and purpose of marriage differently than it truly is.-We should not be deceived- marriage has been under attack for a very long time and the church needs to labor to bring it back in line with the word of God. Please join us as we discuss this very important topic.. Production of Reformation Baptist Church of Youngsville, NCHosts - Dan Horn, Jonathan Sides, Charles Churchill and Joshua HornTechnical Director - Timothy KaiserTheme Music - Gabriel Hudelson

Many people are only familiar with the idea of betrothal from the Bible (or certain kinds of romance novels). Today, in Western cultures, serious relationships begin with dating, followed by engagement, and then eventually, maybe marriage. But from a Christian perspective, betrothal is an extremely important aspect of marriage, to the point where it is central to the gospel itself.In this episode, we want to try to explain why betrothal was built into ancient marriage practices, what it accomplished, and how it is demonstrated in Christ's marriage to his church. We also want to discuss the different parts of betrothal that differentiate it from engagement, such as the covenant, the bride price, the commitment to the upcoming marriage, and the transfer of authority between the time of betrothal and the wedding ceremony itself. When these are misunderstood, we begin to think of the nature and purpose of marriage differently than it truly is.We should not be deceived: marriage has been under attack for a very long time and the church needs to labor to bring it back in line with the word of God. Please join us as we discuss this very important topic.. Production of Reformation Baptist Church of Youngsville, NCHosts - Dan Horn, Jonathan Sides, Charles Churchill and Joshua HornTechnical Director - Timothy KaiserTheme Music - Gabriel Hudelson

Many people are only familiar with the idea of betrothal from the Bible -or certain kinds of romance novels-. Today, in Western cultures, serious relationships begin with dating, followed by engagement, and then eventually, maybe marriage. But from a Christian perspective, betrothal is an extremely important aspect of marriage, to the point where it is central to the gospel itself.-In this episode, we want to try to explain why betrothal was built into ancient marriage practices, what it accomplished, and how it is demonstrated in Christ's marriage to his church. We also want to discuss the different parts of betrothal that differentiate it from engagement, such as the covenant, the bride price, the commitment to the upcoming marriage, and the transfer of authority between the time of betrothal and the wedding ceremony itself. When these are misunderstood, we begin to think of the nature and purpose of marriage differently than it truly is.-We should not be deceived- marriage has been under attack for a very long time and the church needs to labor to bring it back in line with the word of God. Please join us as we discuss this very important topic.. Production of Reformation Baptist Church of Youngsville, NCHosts - Dan Horn, Jonathan Sides, Charles Churchill and Joshua HornTechnical Director - Timothy KaiserTheme Music - Gabriel Hudelson

2:31 - Should Christians promote false teachers? / 15:18 - What can I do for my nictoine addiction? / 18:06 - What's the Biblical difference between Marriage and Betrothal? / 32:08 - In John 2, why are there 6 pots? / 40:10 - What are the seven spirits of God? / 43:50 - What are the Urim and Thummin? / 48:18 - What does it mean to be about our father's business? / 53:01 - Why did Jesus need to be Sacrificed?

We examine the complexities of betrothal gifts in China, shedding light on the impact of recent court rules and challenges faced by rural bachelors in finding a spouse. Gift money vs. the Law: Will court regulations curb the financial strains of betrothal gifts in China? On the show: Heyang, Xingyu & Josh Cotterill

One quick announcement. We are in the middle of a building campaign and we're trying to raise $5 million for space that the Lord has sent to us. We've signed a purchase and sale agreement on half of it, and we're trying to raise funds for the rest. So I say that because we need prayer. The church of God, if we ask you to pray for the Lord to send us a miracle, it's a miracle that we got here. We're praying for the second iteration of the miracle is like the blind man. If you remember, he got the first touch from Jesus and Jesus says, "Do you see?" And he says, "I see people walking like trees." And he needed a second miracle.So that's what we need. Our first miracle is the space is located, we know where it is. Down Kent Street, you take a left on Longwood, three towers, it's right there. So pray. And then also if the Lord brings anyone to mind, perhaps a rich uncle or something like that, and then connect us with them. With that said, would you please pray with us for the preaching of God's Holy word.Heavenly Father, we come to your word with fear and trepidation, knowing that you are holy and your commandments are holy. And we recognize that we are sinful, we are commandment breakers, we are covenant breakers, unfaithful. Lord, but we thank you for Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior who out of his great love for you and out of his great love for us went to a cross to shed blood for the covenant. The covenant that welcomes us in for whoever would repent of sin, of transgression, everyone can be forgiven, purified, sanctified, and filled with the spirit to live lives of obedience. Lord, as we consider the topics before us in the text on marriage and divorce and children, someone of the most intimate spheres of life, Lord, we ask that you send us the Holy Spirit that you minister to us, to our hearts. If there's hardness of heart, remove it. If there's brokenness, mend it and heal it. If there's a lack of zeal for your word, I pray, Lord, fire up our hearts and bless us in the Holy Word in our time together, amen.We are continuing our sermon series through the Gospel of Mark called Kingdom Come. And the idea is that Jesus has come, the king has inaugurated His kingdom, but then He teaches us to pray. Our Father who in heaven hallowed be your name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. So the more God's will is done in our lives, the more of His kingdom we usher into the world. The title of the sermon today is Covenantal Love. I will never leave you nor forsake you. These are some of the most powerful words that you can hear and they're some of the most powerful words that you can speak. These are words of eternal love, a love that will never end.And who's the only one who can make that promise and we can completely trust Him to keep it always? Well, that's God of course, because God alone is eternal. God alone is perfectly faithful. And this love, this faithful love is a costly love. And that's why the conversation about marriage happens right after Jesus informed his disciples that there's a cost to following him. There's a cost to loving like Jesus loved. There's a cost to faithful love and that's denying self daily, dying to self daily, taking up the cross daily. The way of Christ is the way of love and that's how most of people in the world view Christ and God. God is love and we all know that. It's love for God and love for neighbor. But if you look at the way of Christ, how Christ lived, the way of Christ is the way of the cross, the way of self-sacrifice and service.Therefore, the way to love and the way of love is self-sacrifice. All of me for all of you. And that's what covenantal love is. You say, "I love you so much that I will die to self to serve you." And how was the greatest covenant ratified? The greatest promise of love? Well, with the blood of Jesus Christ. Jesus tells us, "Drink of it all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins." What was Jesus saying on the cross? On the cross, He opened up his arms and He said, "I love you this much and I love you so much that I am willing to bleed for you." That's what covenantal love costs. And receiving God's covenantal love, well, it's transformative. It changes your very essence. It melts your heart, it melts the hardness and his love fills your heart with a supernatural love to love the way He loved you with blood, sweat, and tears.And when you realize that He loved you with that kind of love and promises to love you like that for all of eternity, despite your sin, despite your unfaithfulness, despite your idolatry, despite your adultery, it stretches your heart expanding it and then your heart's filled with his love, ready to fill the hearts of the closest people in your life, your closest neighbors, your family, your wife, your husband, your children. Today we're in Mark 10:1-16, would you look at the text with me? And He left there and went to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan and crowds gathered to Him again. Again as was His custom he taught them.And Pharisees came up and in order to test Him asked, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?" He answered them. "What did Moses command you?" They said, "Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away." Jesus said to them, "Because of your hardness of heart He wrote you this commandment. But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast his wife and the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate."And in the house the disciples asked Him again about this matter and He said to them, "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another, commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery." And they were bringing children to him that He might touch them and the disciples rebuked them. And when Jesus saw it, He was indignant and said to them, "Let the children come to me. Do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it." And He took them in His arms and blessed them, laying His hands on them.This is the reading of God's holy, inherent, and fallible authoritative word. May He write these eternal truths upon our hearts. Three points to frame up our time. First marriage is being joined together by God. Second, adultery is breaching of the marital covenant. And third, God loves humanity, therefore Jesus loves children. First of all, marriage is being joined together by God. Before Jesus Christ embarks on His journey to Jerusalem, embarks on the way of the cross, the Via Dolorosa, He tells us and the disciples how to follow Him in some of the most important areas of life. The next part of the chapter is about money and wealth and how do we interact with how Jesus wants us to be faithful with finances? And later He'll talk about a relationship to work and faithfulness there.But here He says, "I'm going to teach you how to follow me in the relationship between a husband and a wife and the relationship between parents and children." Jesus wants to follow Him needs to impact every single area of life, specifically the most important areas of our lives. He's Lord of all. And today Jesus concentrates His teaching of what it means to be a disciple in the most fundamental areas of life, one's marriage, one's children. In verse one of chapter 10, it says, "He left there and went to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan and crowds gathered to Him again. And again as was His custom, He taught them." So Jesus has finished the private discourse with the 12 disciples and what it means to follow Him. And probably that took place in Peter's house in Capernaum.Now Jesus is leaving everything familiar and He's beginning His fateful journey toward Jerusalem. And one of the fascinating things is Jesus here in His final journey toward Jerusalem, passes directly through the same area where John the Baptist conducted his work in preparing the way for the one who is to come after him. So the crowds gather and the Pharisees seeing another opportunity to test Jesus Christ. And the phrase here for test Jesus, shows that the inquiry is hostile. They're seeking to trap Him, therefore they ask a question about divorce. They come to Him in verse two and they say, "Pharisees came up in order to test Him and asked, 'Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?'" They try to trip Jesus up with a loaded question designed to expose Jesus Christ as a lawbreaker. They had heard Jesus teaching on family, on marriage, on children.And Jesus has been emphasizing the fact that it's one man, one woman, one covenant, one lifetime, and there wasn't any talk about divorce. And they believe virtually everyone in the first century, Palestine, was in agreement that you could get a divorce. Husbands could be granted divorces for trivial things if the wife didn't please them, since the law of Moses allowed for divorce. If Jesus here says, "Moses allowed for it, but I go against Moses," then Jesus can be charged with being a lawbreaker. So that's the trick behind what they're doing. And Matthew 9:3, it's more explicit, the parallel passage, "The Pharisees came up to Him and they tested Him by asking, 'Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?'" So they saw that Moses allowed for divorce and we'll get into that text in just a little bit, but then they reinterpreted in their schools of thought as for any cause.And the question is about marriage. So we're not dealing with a ceremonial ordinance, but with the moral law. And Jesus already warned not to think that He had come to destroy the law or nullify it. He has come to teach it and fulfill it. Verse three, "He answered them, 'What did Moses command you?'" They ask a question, Jesus answers with a counter question. And some early Christian commentators interpret this question as Jesus way of playing Moses commandments off against God's. Moses commanded this, but God did not. And that's clearly an unsustainable path exegesis, because in Mark 7, Jesus clearly identifies the 10 commandments as God's law. He's going to do the same with the conversation about the rich young ruler. And Jesus affirmed the binding character of the 10 commandments, the decalogue, as the central part of the mosaic teaching. If you remember, He revealed himself on the Mount of Transfiguration.He went up there with Peter, James, and John and He met with Elijah and Moses. And one of the reasons why He met with Moses was because the law was given by Moses. Therefore, Jesus is affirming the law that was given by Moses. And Elijah was given the job to then go tell the people of Israel that they need to repent and turn back to the 10 commandments. Moses wrote the whole Pentateuch concluding the Genesis narrative that Jesus will quote. So verse four, "They said, 'Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away.'" And some exegesis have found a key to the passage in the contrast between Jesus' question, which asked about what Moses commanded and the Pharisees that reply, which only talks about what he allowed, as if in Jesus' opinion God permits divorce as a concession, but He never commanded it.And again, this exegesis is unsustainable and the Pharisees here are merely using common terminology of what may or may not be done. And this question in reference to divorce comes from Deuteronomy 24. If you know about Jesus and the way He quotes scripture, go back and see how often He quotes the book of Deuteronomy. When He meets with Satan, when Satan comes to tempt Jesus in the wilderness, when He's fasting for 40 days, three times Jesus' response to Satan and all three times they're verses from Deuteronomy.Deuteronomy 24:1, "When a man takes a wife and marries her, if then she finds no favor in his eyes, because he has found some indecency in her and he writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of the house and she departs out of his house, and if she goes and becomes another man's wife and the latter man hates her and writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, or if the latter man dies who took her to be his wife, then her former husband who sent her away may not take her again to be his wife after she has been defiled. For that is an abomination before the Lord and you shall not bring sin upon the land that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance."So Deuteronomy 24 is a classic example of the Torah's casuistic or case law. The case law that interpreted the 10 commandments and occasions that would arise in real life. Here in this text there's no denunciation of the divorce. In fact, it's not the divorce that's being denunciation by taking a divorce wife back after she has subsequently married and divorced another man. In verse one it says, "If he finds some kind of indecency in her," another translation says, "Nakedness." Leviticus 18 uses this phrase 18 to 20 times. It has to do with illicit sexual activity. So when Deuteronomy 4:4 says that the woman has been defiled by her second marriage, it's because there was still the option of reconciliation before she actually had sexual relations with her second husband.On the one hand, the divorce of the wife was legitimate though not mandatory. On the other hand, her second marriage is categorized as defilement, which in this case must of necessity refer to adultery. And the second marriage is simultaneously categorized as both permissible and adultery at the same time. And you say how? Well the explanation is that the second marriage permanently and irrevocably severs the first one flesh marital union with her first husband, there can be no more reconciliation.It is in this sense an aspect of the second marriage constitutes adultery. And though this constitutes adultery and though the woman is set to be defiled, her defilement is in regard to her first husband. It's not defilement in regard to the second husband. It says he is to write her a certificate of divorce and send her away to make it official. So they quote Moses, Moses permitted, Moses allowed. In verse five it says, "Because of your hardness of heart," Jesus says, "Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment." In the parallel passage in Matthew 19:8, "He said to them, 'Because of your hardness of heart, Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.'" And some people look at this text and they say, "Well, because God foresaw hardness of heart or sinfulness, He wrote into the law a concession to sin."And this of course cannot be the right interpretation, because God never writes into the law concession to sin, though He does write into the law consequences of sin. So the divorce writing in Deuteronomy 24 is not a concession to sin, but it's consequences of sin. If adultery is to happen in a marriage, there are consequences that can be taken. Consequence number one for adultery in marriage was execution. But the husband sometimes, because of grace toward his wife, didn't pursue the execution. Like Joseph, if you remember Joseph, when his wife Mary was found to be with child, Joseph didn't hear from the Holy Spirit yet, he didn't hear from the angel yet, and he quietly wanted to divorce her and then the Lord stopped that. So divorce sometimes was a lesser consequence that was pursued instead of execution.So what then does Jesus mean, "From the beginning it was not." What does he mean, "Because of your hardness of heart?" Well, quite simply that from the beginning when there was no sin, there was no provision for divorce, but man fell into sin and subsequently hardhearted men and women commit adultery. Divorce comes in on the heels of sin, because it is necessary to punish sin, which is what divorce is. It's a punishment or a sanction for sin. So divorce legislation is authorized or permitted in order to deal with this hard heartedness. Divorce is not presented as an inherent or absolute right, but as a remedy for sin and a right only ensuing upon sin.Verse six, "But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female." He goes to the very beginning. So in a sense, in the Garden of Eden, the Garden of Eden was ruled under God's will perfectly. And in a sense Jesus Christ comes in order to save us from our sins and He points to the 10 commandments, this is how we are to govern ourselves if we are to live a life that creates a semblance, a taste, a foretaste of heaven on earth. So He goes from the beginning, He goes to the very beginning and He says, "God made them male and female." The first service I almost passed out. I know what was happening. 15 years I've been doing this long enough and I know there are topics where you are just over the target. You put yourself over the target and in the spiritual realm there is war. And whoever was in the first service, you know exactly what was happening. My wife almost called 911. She said, "I had my phone ready," because I know where we're standing.We're standing in the demonic epicenter of ideologies, demonic ideologies that seek to pervert the design of God from the very beginning. We stand, this synagogue celebrated the fact that they had one of the first same sex marriages ever officiated in this country right here, right here in a place where the 10 commandments are right there. So people standing right with the 10 commandments, the law of God over them as they make a mockery of it. I also understand this moment in time that we're in. We are in a synagogue with the 10 commandments in back of me and the latest iteration of the pride flag outside, that's not our flag. And what is that flag? The new iteration is confusion on gender. Alistair Begg recently, he was a faithful expository for years, but he was asked recently, "Hey, my grandchild is having a same sex wedding, can I go to the wedding?" And his response was, "Not only should you go, but you should bring a present. In effect with your presence you're celebrating or you're partaking in the ceremony of the covenant that's being made."And I was blown away by that, because those are conversations that we were having a decade ago here. The conversations we're having now aren't about that. The conversations we're having now with people here, real people, we're asking can my child be friends with a trans child? Our kids go to school with parents that dress boys in girls clothing. That's where we are in this moment in time. So even to get up and say, "No, there's two genders, male and female, He created them. And He designed sexuality for the flourishing of humanity." Why is this topic so important to God? Because this is the topic that explains how we got here. We're talking about the act of creation itself.And what does Satan want to do above all else? He wants to murky the waters of the design of God so people say, "Is there a designer? Look at us." So Jesus goes and He says, "From the beginning of creation, God made them male and female." And the emphasis here is on the complimentary sexual equipment of the first couple designed for each other whose result in sexual union is part of an indelible marital bond created by God. The presupposition of this argument seems to be that sexual union creates a permanent ontological fusion of the individuals involved. That on a spiritual level something is happening that you can't even explain, a unifying experience. When one body enters or is entered by another, a transaction of eternal significance has taken place. One that in its merging of opposites and resolutions of contradictions. And in a culture in which sex is often trivialized and used merely as just fun, private gratification, we have to heed the words of Christ.Verse seven, "Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. So they have no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate." Jesus doesn't use the word marriage here. He uses it later in the private discussion with the disciples, but clearly that's the subject at hand. And what is marriage? Marriage is a man and a woman becoming one in recognition that God has joined them together for life, therefore they vow not to separate. I remember as a young pastor freshly ordained out of seminary, I was really excited to move to Boston, plant a church 15 years ago. And I remember being asked to do my first wedding and people always say, "Pastor Jan, will you marry us?" And I always say, "No, I'm already married. Thank you."And what they mean is, "Will you officiate our ceremony?" And I remember sitting down and saying, "I just spent three years in seminary, which is like law school and not once was there not even one class on how to lead a wedding ceremony." I had to write some pastors, "What do you do?" And they're like, "Well, I cobbled this together from some other pastors. And you go back into history." And so you put in some kind of formula that looks like it works. You greet everybody, the bride comes down the aisle and you say, "Who gives this bride to marry this groom?" And the father says, "Her mother and I do." And then you get up and you say, "Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today in the sight of God, in the face of this matrimony," you do that whole spiel.And we got that from the book of Common Prayer from England. I don't know why we use that. Then you read a little homily. And I realized that with a lot of weddings, you ask people, "How's the wedding?" And if they say it was good, it's only for two reasons. They're like, "Yeah, the wedding was great. Number one, the bride looked great. And then number two, the food. Oh, the food, the food was..." And what I tell people in the ceremony, I was like, "That's all good and well, that's not the most important part of the ceremony. The most important part of the ceremony is that this couple, this man, this woman are making a covenant, speaking with their eyes, with their mouth, sorry." And in the same way that Jesus Christ says, "You need to confess with your mouth that Jesus Christ is Lord and believe in your heart that He rose from the dead."The speaking in some sense makes it a reality. And where do we get that idea, is because God spoke and His word has creative effect. So when the groom and the bride, they say I do, they make the vows. What are they doing? They're not just confessing past love and they're not professing current love, they're promising future love. That's the covenant. That's the most important part. But regarding engagements and wedding ceremonies, there's very little detail in the Bible. There are no prescriptive commands in the Bible whatsoever concerning ceremonial procedures, rituals, civil and ecclesiastical requirements, public oaths. And you say why? Why is the Bible silent on this issue? Oaths and vows and rituals and ceremonies are numerous in the Bible, but marriage oaths and ceremonies are conspicuous by their absence. Well, why?Because what is Jesus saying marriage is? He's saying the man shall leave his father and mother, leaving a household. I'm going to start my own family. And then you hold fast to your wife and two shall become one. So in a sense, sexual union is marriage properly defined. Betrothal or spousal is actually an agreement or covenant pertaining to the marriage, not marriage itself. Such agreements, however, are presented in the Bible in covenantal terms. So the sexual union to becoming one is the consummation of the covenant made with God and one another, what God has joined together. You're recognizing we are under the eyes of God. God before the foundation of the world has predestined us to come together. We're recognizing, we're making a covenant to God and we're making a covenant with one another before the eyes of God. The reason why we hold marriage ceremony in the church is for the church to come alongside of the couple and hold them accountable to the covenant made.Because why make the covenant? Because you are anticipating moments where you will be tempted to break the covenant, that's why you make it. And you need the church to come alongside you and say, "We were there, we were witnesses, we heard the vows. You are one and you are one for life." In Genesis 1:26-28, we find God creating man and woman and blessing them with the words, be fruitful and multiply. And this was in essence the betrothal of Adam and Eve by their father. And there was no question here of any ceremony or ritual to solemnized or authorize their union, only the authoritative command of God that you have been joined together. Moreover, the Apostle Paul in the New Testament explicitly interprets the phrase one flesh as sexual relations. And while many have rightly pointed out that the phrase is not restricted to sexual relations, but includes the whole personal relationship of man and wife, it's a very great error not to see that this is its core meaning and central focus.Look at 1 Corinthians 6:16, "Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, 'The two will become one flesh.'" So Paul uses Genesis 2:24 to argue for the permanence of the union created by sexual intercourse even with prostitutes. So meaning the commencement of sexual relations begins a marriage, because sex is a covenant making ceremony and covenant making and covenant renewal. And we live in a day and age where people just want to make the covenant, just act out the covenant and then never... I mean, not for the beginning. Think about what are we agreeing to? One regarding the building that we are purchasing, there's going to be a building plug in every sermon from now on until we raise $5 million or move into the building, and/or.I get the purchase and sale agreement from our lawyer and Adobe DocuSign, very tremendous. I get on my phone, I was actually at the gym getting into my truck right after working out and I was like, "Oh sweet, I get to sign a contract." I open it up, not reading a thing, not a thing. I mean, I kind of knew what was... The small letters I was not reading. And then it says, "Okay, there was a blue arrow, initial here, click and then you write the JV. And then sign here, I did the thing. And then you just go through a whole document and that part was so fun, it's so gratifying, so incredible. I'm just signing stuff. What am I signing? What am I signing? What am I agreeing to? There's a cost, obviously. I signed a contract. There's terms, there's an agreement, I know exactly the cost involved in this... And that's a contract. A contract is so much less important than a covenant. A covenant is before the watchful eyes of God.So when people are just going around doing it, what are you doing? What are you promising to the other person? And there is something happening on a spiritual level that you can't even make sense of. So if you are going to consummate the covenant, you just got to be really, really clear on what it is. So therefore sex is sacred and should be not treated as profane. And if we have not made a covenant with God that He has joined us together, then we must not join together.And in biblical scripture this is how they viewed marriage. If you think about Jacob and Leah, the story of Jacob and Leah. He married Rachel, worked a long time for her and then goes to sleep. And then there's that fateful verse and he wakes up in the morning and it wasn't Rachel, it was Leah. And does he go to Laban and say, "No, we didn't have a ceremony, therefore we're not married. You tricked me." No, he realized what happened. We're married, I'm married to her. And this is how scripture presents a marriage. A marriage is a covenant. Virtually every reference in the Bible to covenant shows them to be a weighty matter and that the evidence is overwhelming.In Genesis 2:24, "Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast his wife and they shall become one flesh." So this verse imputes a legal covenantal significance to their coming together physically. And this is actually how scripture talks about God's relationship with His people. Ezekiel 16:8, for example, God says, "When I pass by you again and saw you, behold, you were at the age for love and I spread the corner of my garment over you and covered your nakedness. I made my vow to you and entered into covenant with you, declares the Lord God and you became mine." So man shall leave his father and mother, he's leaving one family to start his own. And then with the wife, they're joined together and he says, "What therefore God joined together, let no man separate."For the idea that God brings man and wife together, it's an idea. The phrase here is yoke me. That God in a sense yokes mates together, puts a yoke on them and says, "You together now are going in this direction." And it displays the idea of mates predestined for each other from the beginning of the world. Someone recently asked me, "Do you believe that God predestined people to get married?" I say, "Yeah, of course, of course." If God predestined people to salvation before the foundation of the world, then he certainly predestines how they are created and by whom and through what means.When I met my wife, I met her in Philadelphia at church and I tell everyone was love at first sight. And that's the romantic way to look at it. The theological way is I knew she's the one that I was predestined to marry before the foundation of the world. How did I know? I knew. And so that's part of choosing a mate. You pray and you say, "God, whom have you predestined for me?" And what God has joined together we are not to separate. And so Christ is refuting divorce on demand. He's also refuting making covenants on demand without thinking about it.Point two, and this brings us to adultery. Adultery is breaching of the marital covenant. In the house, the disciples ask for clarification in verse 10, in the house of the disciples asked him again about this matter, meaning they were puzzled like the teaching of Jesus was so radical, it's almost like they've never heard it before. It's like how did you not hear this clear teaching of scripture? Because the teaching was presented by Pharisees who wanted the loophole of divorce on demand. So the teachings of scripture, which are normative, this is how things should be, weren't normal. They weren't normal at that time. And this was the pattern in all of Israel. When people would move away from the law, they moved away from what's normative. And then what was normal was just sin and consequences of a debased mind.So verse 11, "And he said to them, 'Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her.'" And what word best describes the violation of the marital bond than adultery? And that's why Jesus uses the word for adultery to explain the breaking of that covenant. And Matthew 5, Jesus gives us more comments on this. Verse 31, "It was also said, 'Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.' But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery." Note what Jesus asserts, that such a man causes his wife to commit adultery. If he divorces her for non-biblical grounds for anything other than adultery, he causes her to commit adultery.Now note first what Jesus simply presupposes. He presupposes that the woman in question will remarry. Else there would be no adultery to speak of. And secondly, Jesus clearly places the guilt of the adultery upon the man who divorces his wife without valid grounds. And though the woman and her new husband commit the act, the guilt of the adultery, the violation of the one flesh bond is imputed to the divorcing husband. He, the divorcing husband, is declared to be the cause of adultery. And the wife who remarries in such a situation and the man who marries her are not imputed with the guilt of adultery. And the law of God always distinguishes between a perpetrator of sin and a victim of sin. A wife who is unjustly divorced by an unrepentant husband is a victim and would be permanently victimized and consigned to a life of singleness if she were required to remain unmarried. So Jesus clearly imputes to the divorcing husband as the causative agent of the adultery guilt thereof.In Matthew 19:9, in the parallel passage it says, "And I say to, whoever divorces his wife except for sexual immorality and marries another commits adultery." And the word for sexual immorality in the Greek is pornea. And what's happening here is this exception, this clause, sexual immorality, is the parallel to the indecency language in Deuteronomy 24. That for adultery, if a married woman commits adultery, that act of adultery, that word is used to describe the severing of the one covenant with her first husband.Adultery is the transgression of the seventh commandment and it is punishable by death. But sometimes divorce was the chosen path. If you remember like with Joseph, and this is how God speaks of his relationship with even Israel. That Israel deserved execution, capital punishment. God should have wiped them off the face of the earth, but God had mercy on them. So instead of execution for their spiritual adultery, idolatry, he gave Israel a certificate of divorce in Isaiah 50, "Thus says the Lord, 'Where is your mother's certificate of divorce, with which I sent her away? Or which of my creditors is it to whom I have sold you? Behold for your iniquities, you were sold and for your transgression your mother was sent away.'" And the conquest and exile of the northern kingdom of Israel by Assyria is allegorically characterized by God as a bill of divorcement. For what? For adultery.In Jeremiah 3:8 he makes that explicit, "She saw that for all the adulteries of that faithless one, Israel, I had sent her away with a decree of divorce. Yet her treacherous sister Judah did not fear, but she went and played the whore." So divorce in God's law is not just permitted, but sometimes it is a manifestation of God's holiness and wrath against sin. And since divorce is a manifestation of God's holiness and God calls his people to be holy for I am holy, it follows by good and necessary consequence from this that God's example of divorcing his wife for the cause of adultery was normative and the lawful basis and redress on a human level. And that was His grace. It was His grace. They deserved execution, He didn't give them that. Execution was not the only lawful means of dealing with adultery.So adultery is a breach of the marriage covenant and divorce is confirmation of that breach. It was allowed for God by God not as a concession but as a consequence for sin. Verse 12, "And she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery." In Exodus it says that the failure to provide for the wife on the part of the man constitutes a breach of the one flesh covenant as well and by implication that includes extreme offenses such as physical abuse. But groundless divorce itself constitutes adultery, because adultery is the breaking of the covenant."Pastor Jan, we are seeking a divorce. What do you think?" I had this conversation recently. I said, "Why? What are the biblical grounds?" "Well, I think God wants us to be happy and we'll be happier apart from each other." God's primary will is not your happiness. It's not my happiness. God's primary will for you is your obedience and your obedience of faith. And with that obedience, God gives us the power of the Holy Spirit to be obedient and fills your heart with joy. Now the fact that we made the covenant husband and wife, made the covenant, your covenant together that no matter the season, no matter what happened, we're going to stay together, because it's God's will. This is God's will. We confirmed it's God's will and we made that vow.And then point three is, God loves humanity, therefore Jesus loves children. So marriage and heterosexual sex are inextricably linked with the divine gift of children. And indeed in Genesis 1:28, God's first blessing on humanity after he created the male and female is be fruitful and multiply. And it's no accident that our passage in which Jesus traces the institution of marriage back to the beginning of creation is immediately followed by His blessing of children. So having proclaimed the permanence of marriage, Jesus now turns to the related theme of children on natural progression.And this is partially why God has designed marriage the way He has and sex the way He has so that there's never any question on who's the father. One of the greatest epidemics in our culture and in the world in general is the epidemic of fatherlessness. Where children growing up not knowing who their father is or not having a father in the house. The reason why God designed it is so that children would not be brought up that way with so much pain. And Mark 10:13, "And they were bringing children to him that he might touch them and the disciples rebuked them. But when Jesus saw it, he was indignant and said to them, 'Let the children come to me. Do not hinder them for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God, like a child shall not enter it.'"The main Old Testament background to the saying of entering the dominion of God is the image of the Israelites as they were poised on the brink of entering the Promised Land, but they didn't believe God. And then God tells them, "Your children who today do not know right from wrong, they shall enter there." And Jesus makes it an emphasis that the only way to enter the kingdom of God is to receive it. And in scripture, people frequently enter into action that was prepared for them by another. Others have labored and you have entered into their kingdom. So when He says enter the dominion of God, he's saying enter into the work of God. He's prepared the kingdom. And little children are the model of how people enter the kingdom.That God bestows the kingdom upon the low, upon the helpless, upon those who can do nothing to gain entrance. And entrance into the kingdom of God is not something which can be earned or gained, because of the basis of human merit. As one commentator aptly put it, to receive the kingdom is to allow oneself to be given it. We see Jesus revealing his heart. And that's the heart of a father, because he knows God the Father, he knows God the Father's heart. He welcomes the children, He takes them in His arms, He blesses them, He hugs them, and He loves them. In Malachi 2:13-16, all these themes are summarized by the following and the Lord God says, "And this second thing you do, you cover the Lord's altar with tears, with weeping and groaning because He no longer regards the offering or accepts it with favor from your hand.""But you say, 'Why does he not?' Because the Lord was witnessed between you and the wife of your youth to whom you have been faithless. Though she is your companion and your wife by covenant. Did He not make them one with a portion of the Spirit in their union? And what was the one God seeking? Godly offspring. So guard yourselves in your spirit and let none of you be faithless to the wife of your youth. 'For the man who does not love his wife, but divorces her,' says the Lord God of Israel, 'covers his garment with violence,' says the Lord of hosts. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and do not be faithless." The Lord Jesus Christ knew what his teaching was doing as He was explicating the commandments of God. He knows exactly what was happening. That the straight edge of the sword of God's commandments was piercing the hearts of the listeners.And that's exactly what regeneration is. Regeneration is when you hear the word of God, when you hear the law of God and you feel in your heart how much you have transgressed the holy, pure law of God. It's like the commandment goes down into your heart, pierces it, and that's exactly what it's supposed to do. The more precise, the sharper the edge of the sword, the more clean the incision. And then what does God do? He gives us a heart transplant. He takes the hard heart of stone and He removes it and replaces it with a heart that's tender toward God, tender toward the people He calls us to love.Ezekiel 11:19, "And I will give them one heart and a new spirit I will put within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh that they may walk in my statutes and keep my rules and obey them and they shall be my people and I will be their God. But as for those whose heart goes after their detestable things and their abominations, I will bring their deeds upon their own heads, declares the Lord God." So today, however you're feeling about this message or the subject matter, if you are feeling condemnation or shame or guilt, or if you are feeling the stirring of the Holy Spirit, calling you to repentance, calling you to ever greater levels of holiness, just know that's the Lord working in you.Here I want to read 1 Corinthians 6, and as Paul deals with this subject matter, I want to put the emphasis on the fact that he's speaking to Christians. He's speaking to people who were saved out of this worldly idea of what it means to be a man, a woman, sexuality, et cetera. And he says, "Such were some of you," were. Such were some of you.So 1 Corinthians 6:9, "Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived, neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the spirit of our God. All things are lawful for me, but not all things are helpful. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be dominated by anything. Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food, and God will destroy both one and the other.""The body is not meant for sexual immorality but for the Lord and the Lord for the body. And God raised the Lord and will raise us up by His power. Do you not know that your are bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never. Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For as it is written, the two will become one flesh. But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body."As believers in the Lord Jesus Christ we're part of the church, the bride of Christ. That's why the new building is a ballroom. And I like that idea, because we're the bride of Christ and Jesus is going to... We're going to dance with Jesus following His lead. He's going to lead us. How did Jesus choose His bride? Did He choose His bride for her beauty? Did He choose us because of our purity and holiness? Did He choose us because we were lovely? Did He choose us for our godliness? No. God chose His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. And we, the bride of Christ, we've all been unfaithful to the Lord.Therefore, in the covenant we make with Christ, it's now we who spill the blood of virginity, it's He who spills the blood to redeem us. And Jesus Christ loved the church, not because she was lovely, but because He is loving and He gave himself up for her to save her and to make her lovely. He forgives us and redeems us and makes a covenant with us. And then what does He do? He begins to sanctify the church.And in Ephesians 5 says that He does so by cleansing the church, cleansing His bride by the washing of water with the word. I love that picture. That's how I view my job. I view my job as I am here to wash you with the water of the word. And some texts feel like I've got a power washer. Have you ever seen those videos on power washing? They're very satisfying. I can watch those things for a long time. Power washing videos, all the mildew coming off the house. And I used to do that as a kid. I used to paint with my dad, he's got a painting business, and my job was the power washing, because it takes a lot of work. And I remember as a 13-year-old kid, I'm on the 40-foot ladder at the very top trying to hold the power wash. But it's so strong that it's blowing you off.That's what we need sometimes. That there's sin, that there's cobwebs, that there's mildew of sin in us. And the Lord has given us His word and He cleanses us by the washing of water with the word. Why? So that he might present the church to himself in splendor without spot or wrinkle or any such thing that she might be holy and without blemish.So today, if you have felt the sharp edge of the commandment of God coming down upon you, because of commandment number seven or whatever commandment, and we've broken commandment seven, because we broke commandment number one. What's commandment number one? Thou shall have no other gods before me. If we have other gods before God, either ourselves or someone else, well of course we're going to shirk the other commandments. So if you felt the commandments of God coming down on you, revealing sin, revealing that we're all transgressors today, look to the cross of Christ.Look and see the covenantal love of Christ as His blood is pouring down in order to redeem us and save us. And as you repent of your sin, receive the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. Believe that you have been forgiven, purified, sanctified, as pure as snow. And then receive this promise from the Lord Jesus Christ that He is speaking to you. And this promise will satisfy your soul with a love that you will never experience from another human being. Receive this promise. I will never leave you nor forsake you. He proved it on the cross. That's true. He's faithful. Then He calls us to follow him.Let us pray. Lord God, we thank you for this word and we thank you for this time together. We thank you Holy Spirit, that you are with us and you are ministering to us. Lord, if our hearts are broken, mend them. If our hearts are hardened, soften them. If our hearts have grown tepid toward you and toward your word today, Lord, set our hearts on fire so that we will be people of God seeking holiness in absolutely every area of life, including the most intimate ones. We pray all this in the beautiful name of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. Amen.

One quick announcement. We are in the middle of a building campaign and we're trying to raise $5 million for space that the Lord has sent to us. We've signed a purchase and sale agreement on half of it, and we're trying to raise funds for the rest. So I say that because we need prayer. The church of God, if we ask you to pray for the Lord to send us a miracle, it's a miracle that we got here. We're praying for the second iteration of the miracle is like the blind man. If you remember, he got the first touch from Jesus and Jesus says, "Do you see?" And he says, "I see people walking like trees." And he needed a second miracle.So that's what we need. Our first miracle is the space is located, we know where it is. Down Kent Street, you take a left on Longwood, three towers, it's right there. So pray. And then also if the Lord brings anyone to mind, perhaps a rich uncle or something like that, and then connect us with them. With that said, would you please pray with us for the preaching of God's Holy word.Heavenly Father, we come to your word with fear and trepidation, knowing that you are holy and your commandments are holy. And we recognize that we are sinful, we are commandment breakers, we are covenant breakers, unfaithful. Lord, but we thank you for Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior who out of his great love for you and out of his great love for us went to a cross to shed blood for the covenant. The covenant that welcomes us in for whoever would repent of sin, of transgression, everyone can be forgiven, purified, sanctified, and filled with the spirit to live lives of obedience. Lord, as we consider the topics before us in the text on marriage and divorce and children, someone of the most intimate spheres of life, Lord, we ask that you send us the Holy Spirit that you minister to us, to our hearts. If there's hardness of heart, remove it. If there's brokenness, mend it and heal it. If there's a lack of zeal for your word, I pray, Lord, fire up our hearts and bless us in the Holy Word in our time together, amen.We are continuing our sermon series through the Gospel of Mark called Kingdom Come. And the idea is that Jesus has come, the king has inaugurated His kingdom, but then He teaches us to pray. Our Father who in heaven hallowed be your name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. So the more God's will is done in our lives, the more of His kingdom we usher into the world. The title of the sermon today is Covenantal Love. I will never leave you nor forsake you. These are some of the most powerful words that you can hear and they're some of the most powerful words that you can speak. These are words of eternal love, a love that will never end.And who's the only one who can make that promise and we can completely trust Him to keep it always? Well, that's God of course, because God alone is eternal. God alone is perfectly faithful. And this love, this faithful love is a costly love. And that's why the conversation about marriage happens right after Jesus informed his disciples that there's a cost to following him. There's a cost to loving like Jesus loved. There's a cost to faithful love and that's denying self daily, dying to self daily, taking up the cross daily. The way of Christ is the way of love and that's how most of people in the world view Christ and God. God is love and we all know that. It's love for God and love for neighbor. But if you look at the way of Christ, how Christ lived, the way of Christ is the way of the cross, the way of self-sacrifice and service.Therefore, the way to love and the way of love is self-sacrifice. All of me for all of you. And that's what covenantal love is. You say, "I love you so much that I will die to self to serve you." And how was the greatest covenant ratified? The greatest promise of love? Well, with the blood of Jesus Christ. Jesus tells us, "Drink of it all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins." What was Jesus saying on the cross? On the cross, He opened up his arms and He said, "I love you this much and I love you so much that I am willing to bleed for you." That's what covenantal love costs. And receiving God's covenantal love, well, it's transformative. It changes your very essence. It melts your heart, it melts the hardness and his love fills your heart with a supernatural love to love the way He loved you with blood, sweat, and tears.And when you realize that He loved you with that kind of love and promises to love you like that for all of eternity, despite your sin, despite your unfaithfulness, despite your idolatry, despite your adultery, it stretches your heart expanding it and then your heart's filled with his love, ready to fill the hearts of the closest people in your life, your closest neighbors, your family, your wife, your husband, your children. Today we're in Mark 10:1-16, would you look at the text with me? And He left there and went to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan and crowds gathered to Him again. Again as was His custom he taught them.And Pharisees came up and in order to test Him asked, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?" He answered them. "What did Moses command you?" They said, "Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away." Jesus said to them, "Because of your hardness of heart He wrote you this commandment. But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast his wife and the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate."And in the house the disciples asked Him again about this matter and He said to them, "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another, commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery." And they were bringing children to him that He might touch them and the disciples rebuked them. And when Jesus saw it, He was indignant and said to them, "Let the children come to me. Do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it." And He took them in His arms and blessed them, laying His hands on them.This is the reading of God's holy, inherent, and fallible authoritative word. May He write these eternal truths upon our hearts. Three points to frame up our time. First marriage is being joined together by God. Second, adultery is breaching of the marital covenant. And third, God loves humanity, therefore Jesus loves children. First of all, marriage is being joined together by God. Before Jesus Christ embarks on His journey to Jerusalem, embarks on the way of the cross, the Via Dolorosa, He tells us and the disciples how to follow Him in some of the most important areas of life. The next part of the chapter is about money and wealth and how do we interact with how Jesus wants us to be faithful with finances? And later He'll talk about a relationship to work and faithfulness there.But here He says, "I'm going to teach you how to follow me in the relationship between a husband and a wife and the relationship between parents and children." Jesus wants to follow Him needs to impact every single area of life, specifically the most important areas of our lives. He's Lord of all. And today Jesus concentrates His teaching of what it means to be a disciple in the most fundamental areas of life, one's marriage, one's children. In verse one of chapter 10, it says, "He left there and went to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan and crowds gathered to Him again. And again as was His custom, He taught them." So Jesus has finished the private discourse with the 12 disciples and what it means to follow Him. And probably that took place in Peter's house in Capernaum.Now Jesus is leaving everything familiar and He's beginning His fateful journey toward Jerusalem. And one of the fascinating things is Jesus here in His final journey toward Jerusalem, passes directly through the same area where John the Baptist conducted his work in preparing the way for the one who is to come after him. So the crowds gather and the Pharisees seeing another opportunity to test Jesus Christ. And the phrase here for test Jesus, shows that the inquiry is hostile. They're seeking to trap Him, therefore they ask a question about divorce. They come to Him in verse two and they say, "Pharisees came up in order to test Him and asked, 'Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?'" They try to trip Jesus up with a loaded question designed to expose Jesus Christ as a lawbreaker. They had heard Jesus teaching on family, on marriage, on children.And Jesus has been emphasizing the fact that it's one man, one woman, one covenant, one lifetime, and there wasn't any talk about divorce. And they believe virtually everyone in the first century, Palestine, was in agreement that you could get a divorce. Husbands could be granted divorces for trivial things if the wife didn't please them, since the law of Moses allowed for divorce. If Jesus here says, "Moses allowed for it, but I go against Moses," then Jesus can be charged with being a lawbreaker. So that's the trick behind what they're doing. And Matthew 9:3, it's more explicit, the parallel passage, "The Pharisees came up to Him and they tested Him by asking, 'Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?'" So they saw that Moses allowed for divorce and we'll get into that text in just a little bit, but then they reinterpreted in their schools of thought as for any cause.And the question is about marriage. So we're not dealing with a ceremonial ordinance, but with the moral law. And Jesus already warned not to think that He had come to destroy the law or nullify it. He has come to teach it and fulfill it. Verse three, "He answered them, 'What did Moses command you?'" They ask a question, Jesus answers with a counter question. And some early Christian commentators interpret this question as Jesus way of playing Moses commandments off against God's. Moses commanded this, but God did not. And that's clearly an unsustainable path exegesis, because in Mark 7, Jesus clearly identifies the 10 commandments as God's law. He's going to do the same with the conversation about the rich young ruler. And Jesus affirmed the binding character of the 10 commandments, the decalogue, as the central part of the mosaic teaching. If you remember, He revealed himself on the Mount of Transfiguration.He went up there with Peter, James, and John and He met with Elijah and Moses. And one of the reasons why He met with Moses was because the law was given by Moses. Therefore, Jesus is affirming the law that was given by Moses. And Elijah was given the job to then go tell the people of Israel that they need to repent and turn back to the 10 commandments. Moses wrote the whole Pentateuch concluding the Genesis narrative that Jesus will quote. So verse four, "They said, 'Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away.'" And some exegesis have found a key to the passage in the contrast between Jesus' question, which asked about what Moses commanded and the Pharisees that reply, which only talks about what he allowed, as if in Jesus' opinion God permits divorce as a concession, but He never commanded it.And again, this exegesis is unsustainable and the Pharisees here are merely using common terminology of what may or may not be done. And this question in reference to divorce comes from Deuteronomy 24. If you know about Jesus and the way He quotes scripture, go back and see how often He quotes the book of Deuteronomy. When He meets with Satan, when Satan comes to tempt Jesus in the wilderness, when He's fasting for 40 days, three times Jesus' response to Satan and all three times they're verses from Deuteronomy.Deuteronomy 24:1, "When a man takes a wife and marries her, if then she finds no favor in his eyes, because he has found some indecency in her and he writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of the house and she departs out of his house, and if she goes and becomes another man's wife and the latter man hates her and writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, or if the latter man dies who took her to be his wife, then her former husband who sent her away may not take her again to be his wife after she has been defiled. For that is an abomination before the Lord and you shall not bring sin upon the land that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance."So Deuteronomy 24 is a classic example of the Torah's casuistic or case law. The case law that interpreted the 10 commandments and occasions that would arise in real life. Here in this text there's no denunciation of the divorce. In fact, it's not the divorce that's being denunciation by taking a divorce wife back after she has subsequently married and divorced another man. In verse one it says, "If he finds some kind of indecency in her," another translation says, "Nakedness." Leviticus 18 uses this phrase 18 to 20 times. It has to do with illicit sexual activity. So when Deuteronomy 4:4 says that the woman has been defiled by her second marriage, it's because there was still the option of reconciliation before she actually had sexual relations with her second husband.On the one hand, the divorce of the wife was legitimate though not mandatory. On the other hand, her second marriage is categorized as defilement, which in this case must of necessity refer to adultery. And the second marriage is simultaneously categorized as both permissible and adultery at the same time. And you say how? Well the explanation is that the second marriage permanently and irrevocably severs the first one flesh marital union with her first husband, there can be no more reconciliation.It is in this sense an aspect of the second marriage constitutes adultery. And though this constitutes adultery and though the woman is set to be defiled, her defilement is in regard to her first husband. It's not defilement in regard to the second husband. It says he is to write her a certificate of divorce and send her away to make it official. So they quote Moses, Moses permitted, Moses allowed. In verse five it says, "Because of your hardness of heart," Jesus says, "Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment." In the parallel passage in Matthew 19:8, "He said to them, 'Because of your hardness of heart, Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.'" And some people look at this text and they say, "Well, because God foresaw hardness of heart or sinfulness, He wrote into the law a concession to sin."And this of course cannot be the right interpretation, because God never writes into the law concession to sin, though He does write into the law consequences of sin. So the divorce writing in Deuteronomy 24 is not a concession to sin, but it's consequences of sin. If adultery is to happen in a marriage, there are consequences that can be taken. Consequence number one for adultery in marriage was execution. But the husband sometimes, because of grace toward his wife, didn't pursue the execution. Like Joseph, if you remember Joseph, when his wife Mary was found to be with child, Joseph didn't hear from the Holy Spirit yet, he didn't hear from the angel yet, and he quietly wanted to divorce her and then the Lord stopped that. So divorce sometimes was a lesser consequence that was pursued instead of execution.So what then does Jesus mean, "From the beginning it was not." What does he mean, "Because of your hardness of heart?" Well, quite simply that from the beginning when there was no sin, there was no provision for divorce, but man fell into sin and subsequently hardhearted men and women commit adultery. Divorce comes in on the heels of sin, because it is necessary to punish sin, which is what divorce is. It's a punishment or a sanction for sin. So divorce legislation is authorized or permitted in order to deal with this hard heartedness. Divorce is not presented as an inherent or absolute right, but as a remedy for sin and a right only ensuing upon sin.Verse six, "But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female." He goes to the very beginning. So in a sense, in the Garden of Eden, the Garden of Eden was ruled under God's will perfectly. And in a sense Jesus Christ comes in order to save us from our sins and He points to the 10 commandments, this is how we are to govern ourselves if we are to live a life that creates a semblance, a taste, a foretaste of heaven on earth. So He goes from the beginning, He goes to the very beginning and He says, "God made them male and female." The first service I almost passed out. I know what was happening. 15 years I've been doing this long enough and I know there are topics where you are just over the target. You put yourself over the target and in the spiritual realm there is war. And whoever was in the first service, you know exactly what was happening. My wife almost called 911. She said, "I had my phone ready," because I know where we're standing.We're standing in the demonic epicenter of ideologies, demonic ideologies that seek to pervert the design of God from the very beginning. We stand, this synagogue celebrated the fact that they had one of the first same sex marriages ever officiated in this country right here, right here in a place where the 10 commandments are right there. So people standing right with the 10 commandments, the law of God over them as they make a mockery of it. I also understand this moment in time that we're in. We are in a synagogue with the 10 commandments in back of me and the latest iteration of the pride flag outside, that's not our flag. And what is that flag? The new iteration is confusion on gender. Alistair Begg recently, he was a faithful expository for years, but he was asked recently, "Hey, my grandchild is having a same sex wedding, can I go to the wedding?" And his response was, "Not only should you go, but you should bring a present. In effect with your presence you're celebrating or you're partaking in the ceremony of the covenant that's being made."And I was blown away by that, because those are conversations that we were having a decade ago here. The conversations we're having now aren't about that. The conversations we're having now with people here, real people, we're asking can my child be friends with a trans child? Our kids go to school with parents that dress boys in girls clothing. That's where we are in this moment in time. So even to get up and say, "No, there's two genders, male and female, He created them. And He designed sexuality for the flourishing of humanity." Why is this topic so important to God? Because this is the topic that explains how we got here. We're talking about the act of creation itself.And what does Satan want to do above all else? He wants to murky the waters of the design of God so people say, "Is there a designer? Look at us." So Jesus goes and He says, "From the beginning of creation, God made them male and female." And the emphasis here is on the complimentary sexual equipment of the first couple designed for each other whose result in sexual union is part of an indelible marital bond created by God. The presupposition of this argument seems to be that sexual union creates a permanent ontological fusion of the individuals involved. That on a spiritual level something is happening that you can't even explain, a unifying experience. When one body enters or is entered by another, a transaction of eternal significance has taken place. One that in its merging of opposites and resolutions of contradictions. And in a culture in which sex is often trivialized and used merely as just fun, private gratification, we have to heed the words of Christ.Verse seven, "Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. So they have no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate." Jesus doesn't use the word marriage here. He uses it later in the private discussion with the disciples, but clearly that's the subject at hand. And what is marriage? Marriage is a man and a woman becoming one in recognition that God has joined them together for life, therefore they vow not to separate. I remember as a young pastor freshly ordained out of seminary, I was really excited to move to Boston, plant a church 15 years ago. And I remember being asked to do my first wedding and people always say, "Pastor Jan, will you marry us?" And I always say, "No, I'm already married. Thank you."And what they mean is, "Will you officiate our ceremony?" And I remember sitting down and saying, "I just spent three years in seminary, which is like law school and not once was there not even one class on how to lead a wedding ceremony." I had to write some pastors, "What do you do?" And they're like, "Well, I cobbled this together from some other pastors. And you go back into history." And so you put in some kind of formula that looks like it works. You greet everybody, the bride comes down the aisle and you say, "Who gives this bride to marry this groom?" And the father says, "Her mother and I do." And then you get up and you say, "Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today in the sight of God, in the face of this matrimony," you do that whole spiel.And we got that from the book of Common Prayer from England. I don't know why we use that. Then you read a little homily. And I realized that with a lot of weddings, you ask people, "How's the wedding?" And if they say it was good, it's only for two reasons. They're like, "Yeah, the wedding was great. Number one, the bride looked great. And then number two, the food. Oh, the food, the food was..." And what I tell people in the ceremony, I was like, "That's all good and well, that's not the most important part of the ceremony. The most important part of the ceremony is that this couple, this man, this woman are making a covenant, speaking with their eyes, with their mouth, sorry." And in the same way that Jesus Christ says, "You need to confess with your mouth that Jesus Christ is Lord and believe in your heart that He rose from the dead."The speaking in some sense makes it a reality. And where do we get that idea, is because God spoke and His word has creative effect. So when the groom and the bride, they say I do, they make the vows. What are they doing? They're not just confessing past love and they're not professing current love, they're promising future love. That's the covenant. That's the most important part. But regarding engagements and wedding ceremonies, there's very little detail in the Bible. There are no prescriptive commands in the Bible whatsoever concerning ceremonial procedures, rituals, civil and ecclesiastical requirements, public oaths. And you say why? Why is the Bible silent on this issue? Oaths and vows and rituals and ceremonies are numerous in the Bible, but marriage oaths and ceremonies are conspicuous by their absence. Well, why?Because what is Jesus saying marriage is? He's saying the man shall leave his father and mother, leaving a household. I'm going to start my own family. And then you hold fast to your wife and two shall become one. So in a sense, sexual union is marriage properly defined. Betrothal or spousal is actually an agreement or covenant pertaining to the marriage, not marriage itself. Such agreements, however, are presented in the Bible in covenantal terms. So the sexual union to becoming one is the consummation of the covenant made with God and one another, what God has joined together. You're recognizing we are under the eyes of God. God before the foundation of the world has predestined us to come together. We're recognizing, we're making a covenant to God and we're making a covenant with one another before the eyes of God. The reason why we hold marriage ceremony in the church is for the church to come alongside of the couple and hold them accountable to the covenant made.Because why make the covenant? Because you are anticipating moments where you will be tempted to break the covenant, that's why you make it. And you need the church to come alongside you and say, "We were there, we were witnesses, we heard the vows. You are one and you are one for life." In Genesis 1:26-28, we find God creating man and woman and blessing them with the words, be fruitful and multiply. And this was in essence the betrothal of Adam and Eve by their father. And there was no question here of any ceremony or ritual to solemnized or authorize their union, only the authoritative command of God that you have been joined together. Moreover, the Apostle Paul in the New Testament explicitly interprets the phrase one flesh as sexual relations. And while many have rightly pointed out that the phrase is not restricted to sexual relations, but includes the whole personal relationship of man and wife, it's a very great error not to see that this is its core meaning and central focus.Look at 1 Corinthians 6:16, "Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, 'The two will become one flesh.'" So Paul uses Genesis 2:24 to argue for the permanence of the union created by sexual intercourse even with prostitutes. So meaning the commencement of sexual relations begins a marriage, because sex is a covenant making ceremony and covenant making and covenant renewal. And we live in a day and age where people just want to make the covenant, just act out the covenant and then never... I mean, not for the beginning. Think about what are we agreeing to? One regarding the building that we are purchasing, there's going to be a building plug in every sermon from now on until we raise $5 million or move into the building, and/or.I get the purchase and sale agreement from our lawyer and Adobe DocuSign, very tremendous. I get on my phone, I was actually at the gym getting into my truck right after working out and I was like, "Oh sweet, I get to sign a contract." I open it up, not reading a thing, not a thing. I mean, I kind of knew what was... The small letters I was not reading. And then it says, "Okay, there was a blue arrow, initial here, click and then you write the JV. And then sign here, I did the thing. And then you just go through a whole document and that part was so fun, it's so gratifying, so incredible. I'm just signing stuff. What am I signing? What am I signing? What am I agreeing to? There's a cost, obviously. I signed a contract. There's terms, there's an agreement, I know exactly the cost involved in this... And that's a contract. A contract is so much less important than a covenant. A covenant is before the watchful eyes of God.So when people are just going around doing it, what are you doing? What are you promising to the other person? And there is something happening on a spiritual level that you can't even make sense of. So if you are going to consummate the covenant, you just got to be really, really clear on what it is. So therefore sex is sacred and should be not treated as profane. And if we have not made a covenant with God that He has joined us together, then we must not join together.And in biblical scripture this is how they viewed marriage. If you think about Jacob and Leah, the story of Jacob and Leah. He married Rachel, worked a long time for her and then goes to sleep. And then there's that fateful verse and he wakes up in the morning and it wasn't Rachel, it was Leah. And does he go to Laban and say, "No, we didn't have a ceremony, therefore we're not married. You tricked me." No, he realized what happened. We're married, I'm married to her. And this is how scripture presents a marriage. A marriage is a covenant. Virtually every reference in the Bible to covenant shows them to be a weighty matter and that the evidence is overwhelming.In Genesis 2:24, "Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast his wife and they shall become one flesh." So this verse imputes a legal covenantal significance to their coming together physically. And this is actually how scripture talks about God's relationship with His people. Ezekiel 16:8, for example, God says, "When I pass by you again and saw you, behold, you were at the age for love and I spread the corner of my garment over you and covered your nakedness. I made my vow to you and entered into covenant with you, declares the Lord God and you became mine." So man shall leave his father and mother, he's leaving one family to start his own. And then with the wife, they're joined together and he says, "What therefore God joined together, let no man separate."For the idea that God brings man and wife together, it's an idea. The phrase here is yoke me. That God in a sense yokes mates together, puts a yoke on them and says, "You together now are going in this direction." And it displays the idea of mates predestined for each other from the beginning of the world. Someone recently asked me, "Do you believe that God predestined people to get married?" I say, "Yeah, of course, of course." If God predestined people to salvation before the foundation of the world, then he certainly predestines how they are created and by whom and through what means.When I met my wife, I met her in Philadelphia at church and I tell everyone was love at first sight. And that's the romantic way to look at it. The theological way is I knew she's the one that I was predestined to marry before the foundation of the world. How did I know? I knew. And so that's part of choosing a mate. You pray and you say, "God, whom have you predestined for me?" And what God has joined together we are not to separate. And so Christ is refuting divorce on demand. He's also refuting making covenants on demand without thinking about it.Point two, and this brings us to adultery. Adultery is breaching of the marital covenant. In the house, the disciples ask for clarification in verse 10, in the house of the disciples asked him again about this matter, meaning they were puzzled like the teaching of Jesus was so radical, it's almost like they've never heard it before. It's like how did you not hear this clear teaching of scripture? Because the teaching was presented by Pharisees who wanted the loophole of divorce on demand. So the teachings of scripture, which are normative, this is how things should be, weren't normal. They weren't normal at that time. And this was the pattern in all of Israel. When people would move away from the law, they moved away from what's normative. And then what was normal was just sin and consequences of a debased mind.So verse 11, "And he said to them, 'Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her.'" And what word best describes the violation of the marital bond than adultery? And that's why Jesus uses the word for adultery to explain the breaking of that covenant. And Matthew 5, Jesus gives us more comments on this. Verse 31, "It was also said, 'Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.' But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery." Note what Jesus asserts, that such a man causes his wife to commit adultery. If he divorces her for non-biblical grounds for anything other than adultery, he causes her to commit adultery.Now note first what Jesus simply presupposes. He presupposes that the woman in question will remarry. Else there would be no adultery to speak of. And secondly, Jesus clearly places the guilt of the adultery upon the man who divorces his wife without valid grounds. And though the woman and her new husband commit the act, the guilt of the adultery, the violation of the one flesh bond is imputed to the divorcing husband. He, the divorcing husband, is declared to be the cause of adultery. And the wife who remarries in such a situation and the man who marries her are not imputed with the guilt of adultery. And the law of God always distinguishes between a perpetrator of sin and a victim of sin. A wife who is unjustly divorced by an unrepentant husband is a victim and would be permanently victimized and consigned to a life of singleness if she were required to remain unmarried. So Jesus clearly imputes to the divorcing husband as the causative agent of the adultery guilt thereof.In Matthew 19:9, in the parallel passage it says, "And I say to, whoever divorces his wife except for sexual immorality and marries another commits adultery." And the word for sexual immorality in the Greek is pornea. And what's happening here is this exception, this clause, sexual immorality, is the parallel to the indecency language in Deuteronomy 24. That for adultery, if a married woman commits adultery, that act of adultery, that word is used to describe the severing of the one covenant with her first husband.Adultery is the transgression of the seventh commandment and it is punishable by death. But sometimes divorce was the chosen path. If you remember like with Joseph, and this is how God speaks of his relationship with even Israel. That Israel deserved execution, capital punishment. God should have wiped them off the face of the earth, but God had mercy on them. So instead of execution for their spiritual adultery, idolatry, he gave Israel a certificate of divorce in Isaiah 50, "Thus says the Lord, 'Where is your mother's certificate of divorce, with which I sent her away? Or which of my creditors is it to whom I have sold you? Behold for your iniquities, you were sold and for your transgression your mother was sent away.'" And the conquest and exile of the northern kingdom of Israel by Assyria is allegorically characterized by God as a bill of divorcement. For what? For adultery.In Jeremiah 3:8 he makes that explicit, "She saw that for all the adulteries of that faithless one, Israel, I had sent her away with a decree of divorce. Yet her treacherous sister Judah did not fear, but she went and played the whore." So divorce in God's law is not just permitted, but sometimes it is a manifestation of God's holiness and wrath against sin. And since divorce is a manifestation of God's holiness and God calls his people to be holy for I am holy, it follows by good and necessary consequence from this that God's example of divorcing his wife for the cause of adultery was normative and the lawful basis and redress on a human level. And that was His grace. It was His grace. They deserved execution, He didn't give them that. Execution was not the only lawful means of dealing with adultery.So adultery is a breach of the marriage covenant and divorce is confirmation of that breach. It was allowed for God by God not as a concession but as a consequence for sin. Verse 12, "And she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery." In Exodus it says that the failure to provide for the wife on the part of the man constitutes a breach of the one flesh covenant as well and by implication that includes extreme offenses such as physical abuse. But groundless divorce itself constitutes adultery, because adultery is the breaking of the covenant."Pastor Jan, we are seeking a divorce. What do you think?" I had this conversation recently. I said, "Why? What are the biblical grounds?" "Well, I think God wants us to be happy and we'll be happier apart from each other." God's primary will is not your happiness. It's not my happiness. God's primary will for you is your obedience and your obedience of faith. And with that obedience, God gives us the power of the Holy Spirit to be obedient and fills your heart with joy. Now the fact that we made the covenant husband and wife, made the covenant, your covenant together that no matter the season, no matter what happened, we're going to stay together, because it's God's will. This is God's will. We confirmed it's God's will and we made that vow.And then point three is, God loves humanity, therefore Jesus loves children. So marriage and heterosexual sex are inextricably linked with the divine gift of children. And indeed in Genesis 1:28, God's first blessing on humanity after he created the male and female is be fruitful and multiply. And it's no accident that our passage in which Jesus traces the institution of marriage back to the beginning of creation is immediately followed by His blessing of children. So having proclaimed the permanence of marriage, Jesus now turns to the related theme of children on natural progression.And this is partially why God has designed marriage the way He has and sex the way He has so that there's never any question on who's the father. One of the greatest epidemics in our culture and in the world in general is the epidemic of fatherlessness. Where children growing up not knowing who their father is or not having a father in the house. The reason why God designed it is so that children would not be brought up that way with so much pain. And Mark 10:13, "And they were bringing children to him that he might touch them and the disciples rebuked them. But when Jesus saw it, he was indignant and said to them, 'Let the children come to me. Do not hinder them for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God, like a child shall not enter it.'"The main Old Testament background to the saying of entering the dominion of God is the image of the Israelites as they were poised on the brink of entering the Promised Land, but they didn't believe God. And then God tells them, "Your children who today do not know right from wrong, they shall enter there." And Jesus makes it an emphasis that the only way to enter the kingdom of God is to receive it. And in scripture, people frequently enter into action that was prepared for them by another. Others have labored and you have entered into their kingdom. So when He says enter the dominion of God, he's saying enter into the work of God. He's prepared the kingdom. And little children are the model of how people enter the kingdom.That God bestows the kingdom upon the low, upon the helpless, upon those who can do nothing to gain entrance. And entrance into the kingdom of God is not something which can be earned or gained, because of the basis of human merit. As one commentator aptly put it, to receive the kingdom is to allow oneself to be given it. We see Jesus revealing his heart. And that's the heart of a father, because he knows God the Father, he knows God the Father's heart. He welcomes the children, He takes them in His arms, He blesses them, He hugs them, and He loves them. In Malachi 2:13-16, all these themes are summarized by the following and the Lord God says, "And this second thing you do, you cover the Lord's altar with tears, with weeping and groaning because He no longer regards the offering or accepts it with favor from your hand.""But you say, 'Why does he not?' Because the Lord was witnessed between you and the wife of your youth to whom you have been faithless. Though she is your companion and your wife by covenant. Did He not make them one with a portion of the Spirit in their union? And what was the one God seeking? Godly offspring. So guard yourselves in your spirit and let none of you be faithless to the wife of your youth. 'For the man who does not love his wife, but divorces her,' says the Lord God of Israel, 'covers his garment with violence,' says the Lord of hosts. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and do not be faithless." The Lord Jesus Christ knew what his teaching was doing as He was explicating the commandments of God. He knows exactly what was happening. That the straight edge of the sword of God's commandments was piercing the hearts of the listeners.And that's exactly what regeneration is. Regeneration is when you hear the word of God, when you hear the law of God and you feel in your heart how much you have transgressed the holy, pure law of God. It's like the commandment goes down into your heart, pierces it, and that's exactly what it's supposed to do. The more precise, the sharper the edge of the sword, the more clean the incision. And then what does God do? He gives us a heart transplant. He takes the hard heart of stone and He removes it and replaces it with a heart that's tender toward God, tender toward the people He calls us to love.Ezekiel 11:19, "And I will give them one heart and a new spirit I will put within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh that they may walk in my statutes and keep my rules and obey them and they shall be my people and I will be their God. But as for those whose heart goes after their detestable things and their abominations, I will bring their deeds upon their own heads, declares the Lord God." So today, however you're feeling about this message or the subject matter, if you are feeling condemnation or shame or guilt, or if you are feeling the stirring of the Holy Spirit, calling you to repentance, calling you to ever greater levels of holiness, just know that's the Lord working in you.Here I want to read 1 Corinthians 6, and as Paul deals with this subject matter, I want to put the emphasis on the fact that he's speaking to Christians. He's speaking to people who were saved out of this worldly idea of what it means to be a man, a woman, sexuality, et cetera. And he says, "Such were some of you," were. Such were some of you.So 1 Corinthians 6:9, "Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived, neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the spirit of our God. All things are lawful for me, but not all things are helpful. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be dominated by anything. Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food, and God will destroy both one and the other.""The body is not meant for sexual immorality but for the Lord and the Lord for the body. And God raised the Lord and will raise us up by His power. Do you not know that your are bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never. Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For as it is written, the two will become one flesh. But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body."As believers in the Lord Jesus Christ we're part of the church, the bride of Christ. That's why the new building is a ballroom. And I like that idea, because we're the bride of Christ and Jesus is going to... We're going to dance with Jesus following His lead. He's going to lead us. How did Jesus choose His bride? Did He choose His bride for her beauty? Did He choose us because of our purity and holiness? Did He choose us because we were lovely? Did He choose us for our godliness? No. God chose His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. And we, the bride of Christ, we've all been unfaithful to the Lord.Therefore, in the covenant we make with Christ, it's now we who spill the blood of virginity, it's He who spills the blood to redeem us. And Jesus Christ loved the church, not because she was lovely, but because He is loving and He gave himself up for her to save her and to make her lovely. He forgives us and redeems us and makes a covenant with us. And then what does He do? He begins to sanctify the church.And in Ephesians 5 says that He does so by cleansing the church, cleansing His bride by the washing of water with the word. I love that picture. That's how I view my job. I view my job as I am here to wash you with the water of the word. And some texts feel like I've got a power washer. Have you ever seen those videos on power washing? They're very satisfying. I can watch those things for a long time. Power washing videos, all the mildew coming off the house. And I used to do that as a kid. I used to paint with my dad, he's got a painting business, and my job was the power washing, because it takes a lot of work. And I remember as a 13-year-old kid, I'm on the 40-foot ladder at the very top trying to hold the power wash. But it's so strong that it's blowing you off.That's what we need sometimes. That there's sin, that there's cobwebs, that there's mildew of sin in us. And the Lord has given us His word and He cleanses us by the washing of water with the word. Why? So that he might present the church to himself in splendor without spot or wrinkle or any such thing that she might be holy and without blemish.So today, if you have felt the sharp edge of the commandment of God coming down upon you, because of commandment number seven or whatever commandment, and we've broken commandment seven, because we broke commandment number one. What's commandment number one? Thou shall have no other gods before me. If we have other gods before God, either ourselves or someone else, well of course we're going to shirk the other commandments. So if you felt the commandments of God coming down on you, revealing sin, revealing that we're all transgressors today, look to the cross of Christ.Look and see the covenantal love of Christ as His blood is pouring down in order to redeem us and save us. And as you repent of your sin, receive the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. Believe that you have been forgiven, purified, sanctified, as pure as snow. And then receive this promise from the Lord Jesus Christ that He is speaking to you. And this promise will satisfy your soul with a love that you will never experience from another human being. Receive this promise. I will never leave you nor forsake you. He proved it on the cross. That's true. He's faithful. Then He calls us to follow him.Let us pray. Lord God, we thank you for this word and we thank you for this time together. We thank you Holy Spirit, that you are with us and you are ministering to us. Lord, if our hearts are broken, mend them. If our hearts are hardened, soften them. If our hearts have grown tepid toward you and toward your word today, Lord, set our hearts on fire so that we will be people of God seeking holiness in absolutely every area of life, including the most intimate ones. We pray all this in the beautiful name of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. Amen.

This devotional video explores the monumental role of Joseph as told in the New Testament of the Bible. It particularly focuses on Joseph's lineage, his profession as a carpenter, his righteousness, and his response to Mary's miraculous pregnancy. The speaker highlights the Hebrew marriage system and Joseph's righteousness in handling the unexpected news of Mary's pregnancy. The devotion concludes with a heartfelt prayer centering on the spirit of the Christmas season - the birth of Christ. 00:00 Introduction and Welcome 00:20 The Christmas Season and the Birth of Jesus 01:01 The Revelation of the Messiah's Birth 01:21 Introduction to Joseph, the Father of Jesus 01:59 Joseph's Lineage and Profession 03:03 Joseph's Righteousness and Character 03:41 The Betrothal and Marriage Customs of the Time 06:30 Joseph's Pain and Dilemma 07:46 Joseph's Love for Mary and His Decision 08:10 Closing Prayer and Blessing --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/gnbc/message

Pastor John Bornschein takes us through the history of the Jewish Wedding traditions that serve as a backdrop to the Lord's instructions to the church in the New Testament era.Support the showProduced by Calvary Fellowship Fountain Valley church. Learn more at www.CalvaryFountain.com

Alecia Simmonds with tales from a time in Australia's legal history when the jilted and broken-hearted could sue for redress in the courts 

A new chapter, and a new mishnah - when a man appoints an agent to betroth a woman on his behalf, and instead the agent betrothed her to himself. With examples and commentary, and some confusion.

A long beraita that is brought into the discussion of when betrothal with a portion of some sanctified or dedicated portion works, or doesn't. Plus, how this parallel text to our Gemara is relevant to understand the differences of opinion. Also, more analysis of the cases of the mishnah - specifically, using the second tithe (maaser sheni) for betrothal. In contrast to other gifts to God/kohanim, which are effective for betrothal.

A dispute between Abaye and Rava, whether a betrothal works if there's no consummation with sexual intercourse. Plus, how is this impacted by an attempt betrothal of two woman who can't be "co-wives" to begin with. Also, explaining the rationale of both Abaye and Rava, including complicated cases of betrothal to support the rational of each.

In this sermon, Pastor Chris talks about the significance of Jesus being called the bridegroom in the Bible. He begins by explaining the role of the friend of the bridegroom in ancient Jewish marriage customs. The friend of the bridegroom was a trusted friend who worked closely with the groom and his family to make all the wedding preparations. He also helped to protect the bride's purity during the engagement period. Pastor Chris then points out that John the Baptist refers to himself as the friend of the bridegroom. This is a significant statement because it shows that John understood his role was to point people to Jesus, the true bridegroom. Pastor Chris then goes on to explain how the image of the bridegroom is used throughout the Bible to describe God's relationship with His people. In the Old Testament, God is identified as the bridegroom of Israel. This relationship is meant to be a sacred, intimate, and exclusive covenant of love. However, the people of Israel often broke this covenant by turning to other gods. Despite their faithlessness, God promised to restore the covenant one day. Pastor Chris then explains how Jesus is the fulfillment of these Old Testament promises. Jesus is the bridegroom who has come to renew the covenant with His people. He is the one who loves us unconditionally and who will never leave us or forsake us. Pastor Chris concludes by talking about the implications of knowing that Jesus is our bridegroom. He says that this image uniquely conveys how much God desires to be in a committed, deeply personal relationship with us. He also says that Jesus has made vows to us, and that we can trust Him to keep these promises.

God continues to draw the soul closer to Him through the purification of the soul as well as mystical favors that may occur.  In this episode, we talk about ecstasies, raptures, flights of the spirit, spiritual betrothal, gift of tears, and the prayer of jubilation.  These are all communications from God to the individual soul to draw the soul closer to Himself.  St. Teresa always helps us know the effects of such favors and how to discern if they are truly from God.  Although some souls may never experience these favors, just knowing about them helps us to praise God all the more for his Majesty, Power, Wisdom and Love.   RESOURCES:  “Interior Castle, Study Guide, 2nd Edition” by St. Teresa of Avila; Translated and Prepared by Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD; ICS Publications. “The Interior Journey Toward God: Reflections from Saint Teresa of Avila” by John Paul Thomas; My Catholic Life. “Journey into Divine Intimacy with St. Teresa of Avila:  a Retreat, Spiritual Direction Guide, and Study Resource” by Sr. Leslie Lund, OCDH (Hermit of the Order of Discalced Carmelites); Carmelite Sisters of Mary Publishers, 2019. “The Ordinary Path to Holiness” by R. Thomas Richard, PhD; St. Pauls, 2003. “The Spiritual Life” by Adollphe Tanquerey, SS. DD; Tan Books, 2000. “Visions and Revelations” by Fr. Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalen; Sophia Institute Press; 2022. “Private Revelation: Discerning with the Church” by Mark Miravalle; Seat of Wisdom Publications; 2007. “Revelations and Visions” by Augustin Poulain, SJ; St. Paul's, 1998.  

Betrothal with money has to be with something that has a clearly defined value. With a parallel to pidyon haben - redemption which also needs to be of a certain value. Also, what happens if the woman takes the money a man offers her for kiddushin and she destroys the money? Is that rejection of kiddushin, or is it too late? Or does she owe him the funds? [NOTE: If the second part of today's daf sounds familiar from yesterday's daf, you are not wrong. It was a good we will share (maybe) at the siyum for Kiddushin. In the meantime, check Daf 7 soon for a renewed second half.]

Can each of these three ways of betrothal imply the others? Or can any two imply the third? Or do we need all three of them stated explicitly? Also, what about chuppah? Shouldn't it work to bring about a betrothal? The Gemara works out why not. Plus, the actual process of betrothal via "money."

Honing in on the language, specifically with regard to a girl's coming to physical majority. Plus, the question of superfluous words - with regard to letting a slave (or maidservant) go free. Also, investigating the source of betrothal taking place with money - is it logic or is it a verse?

Scripturally, a young man is not allowed to marry a young woman if the girl's Yah-fearing father refuses. This lesson speaks to (1) the bride-price, (2) parenting carefully, and (3) the weightier matters of Torah. 

I cover three key words: entice, virgin, and betrothal. We being looking at and unpacking the intricacies of this law concerning seduction.

I cover some preliminary thoughts I've had while studying Exodus 22:16-17, namely that a good marriage is key, a woman is a gift to man, daughters are to be given not taken, and intimacy is designed for covenant relationship. I also read and hit some highlights in Genesis 24, ending with a warning to both men and women in the Torah community.

Le Comte de Monte-Cristo is an adventure novel and that deals with themes of hope, justice, vengeance, mercy and forgiveness. Alexandre Dumas' celebrated classic continues with Part 9- The Evening of the Betrothal! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

TRIGGER WARNING!  This episode contains discussions and descriptions of arranged teen marriage, spiritual abuse, sexual abuse, sexual assault, and more.  Listener discretion advised - and please take care of yourselves. Tracey and Sharon talk with Abigail Witthauer, a courageous survivor of the cult "IBLP" (Institute for Basic Life Principles), led by Bill Gothard, and featured in the new documentary "Shiny Happy People."  Shiny Happy People also told the "real" story of celebrities "The Duggar Family." This episode is the second of a multi-part interview with Abigail.  Part 1  is here:https://www.buzzsprout.com/2078827/13030650 You can  listen to our general discussion of "Shiny Happy People" in episode 009, here:https://www.buzzsprout.com/2078827/13032097Link to the documentary  "Shiny Happy People"https://www.amazon.com/Shiny-Happy-People-Duggar-Secrets/dp/B0B8TR2QV5FANTASTIC-DO-NOT-MISS-THIS satire video on purity culture by the great folks at Mega-the-Podcast  is here: https://www.instagram.com/reel/CreKutxI0e6/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==Abigail's TikTok (with lots of juicy cult stuff!)https://www.tiktok.com/@unicornhabitat?_t=8d8e9yzzuNH&_r=1Abigail's wonderful non-profit work with therapy dogs can be found here:https://www.theroverchasefoundation.org/"Feet of Clay - Confessions of the Cult Sisters" is a new podcast hosted by  Sharon Madere (Bennett)  and Tracey Phalen (Reed), who both worked alongside Keith and Melody Green at Last Days Ministries (LDM).  As one-time key leaders in the organization, they go on record about the spiritually traumatic and often damaging influences of the Greens and the multitude of materials (many of which are still available today) published through LDM, including 'The Last Days Newsletter'.  Sharon and Tracey each joined LDM as teenagers, where they met and married their respective spouses during those cult-commune years.  Both couples independently left LDM in 1987 and moved hundreds of miles apart.  They continued in their hard-held beliefs for over ten additional years, yet ultimately divorced in the early 2000s.  In this podcast Tracey and Sharon  come together to talk about their parallel journeys out of the cult mindset, the long process of unpacking indoctrination and spiritual trauma, and their separate but often co-mingled road to healing and  humor.   Come join them on the journey!https://www.instagram.com/feetofclay.cultsistershttps://feetofclayconfessionsofthecultsisters.buzzsprout.comWe love acronyms -- and we aren't afraid to use them! Here are some common ones that we might forget to explain:LDM - Last Days Ministries (organization) ICT - Intensive Christian Training School (at LDM)YWAM - Youth With A Mission (organization) CCM - Contemporary Christian Music

Some in Christianity have taken a position of total, complete pacifism. Based upon this text in Exodus (and a few others) I believe they are incorrect. At the same time we must consider the balance found in religious persecution. Listen to learn about some intricate details in the book of instruction and how they apply to our modern lives.

What would Mary do? This month we are learning about faith.  This week we are learning about the faith of Mary, mother of Jesus. 8 INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT MARY THE MOTHER OF JESUS Fact #1: Mary comes from the Old Testament name Miriam which carries a meaning of bitterness, sorrow and trouble. Mary was from the tribe of Judah and the lineage of David. This was a. fulfillment of the prophecy (Isaiah 11:1, Jeremiah 23:5-6) Fact #3: Mary was poor and was raised in a small, remote village called Nazareth.  Fact #4: Mary was uneducated according to the standard of the world but knew God for herself. Fact #5: Mary was in the first stage of marriage. In Jewish practices, marriages had 3 stages. In the first step was the signing of the contract called a ketubbah. The couple was married but were not permitted to have sex. That why the Bible says she was betrothed. A betrothal could only be broken by death or divorce. Which is why although they had not yet engaged in sex, Joseph was going to divorce her. Fact #6: How old was Mary when she gave birth to Jesus? Betrothal usually happened right after puberty so Mary was likely in her early teens when she became pregnant and gave birth to Jesus.  Fact #7: Due to her pregnancy Mary did not enter the second stage of marriage until after Jesus was born. In this stage, the marriage was consummated. And in the final stage, a celebratory feast was held. Fact #8: Jesus was Mary's firstborn. She had other children afterwards (Luke 2:7.) She had four sons and an undisclosed number of daughters (Mark 6:3; Matt 13:55,56)   Thank you for listening, downloading and supporting the Speak Life Church and this podcast.    https://giv.li/p2nj61 Zelle  - pastor@SpeakLifeChurch.net https://www.patreon.com/speaklifechurchpodcast You can support the ministry by check or money order by sending it to Speak Life Church, 14713 Kent Drive, Upper Marlboro, MD 20772   love you, Rev. Kenn Blanchard  Kenn.blanchard@gmail.com pastor@speaklifechurch.net  240-200-0713  

In this episode of Bible Talk, Alex Duke chats with Jim Hamilton and Sam Emadi about Judges 13–14. They discuss Samson, Israel's surprising, set-apart, and sinful savior.

Joel Richardson teaches Session 9 of THE RETURN OF JESUS series of the MARANATHA GLOBAL BIBLE STUDY from FAI STUDIOS

Joel Richardson teaches Session 9 of THE RETURN OF JESUS series of the MARANATHA GLOBAL BIBLE STUDY from FAI STUDIOS

Bride-dowry and betrothal gifts have risen from a token amount to exorbitant levels, becoming an obstacle for many young men in China over the years, especially in rural areas. Now the government is vowing to launch a special campaign against this problem. What are the highlights of this campaign (01:47)? / Grads from famous university saved only 5,000 yuan 5 years after graduation (26:00). / Schools will hire professional coaches to teach sports (44:47). On the show: Huang Shan, Li Yi & Ding Heng

Wrapping up their story, Boaz and Rebekah share the highlights of their betrothal and wedding.  As a bridegroom rejoices over his bride so shall your God rejoice over you!  As the Sundquist share may you be blessed to hear the heartbeat of the King who is overcome with love for you!   

We've Always had the Christmas Story Wrong. Dr. Jeffery Chadwick. Joseph and Mary moved to Bethlehem to build a house and live there to fulfill ancient prophecy. They were not ‘Taxed” but were enrolled or registered as residents of Bethlehem. Jesus was born in a cave or grotto. Joseph carved the stone trough or manger. Joseph and Jesus were skilled construction workers, Stone Masons, Craftsmen and/or Builders. Not wood workers. And more…   Part 1–Introduction of Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick, Census, taxes, or prophecy?, Tekton or carpenter, Betrothal, Joseph builds a home in Bethlehem, Herod's temple as place of revelation, Jesus's name is prescribed and is the Son of God, Joseph marries Mary, Taxes or enrolled and registered, Where did Joseph and Mary live in Bethlehem?, Guest room or cave?, Manger in stone. Part II– Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick. The Wise Men, The faithful examples of Joseph and Mary, Stone Manger: The Untold Story of the First Christmas, Joseph was a tekton and the name Cephas, “His name shall be called Wonderful”, A spiritual and political Messiah, Philip and the Ethiopian Jew, Jesus as Deliverer and will bring salvation, Christmas joy and gathering.   Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick explores the possibilities of census, housing, and manger traditions in the ancient Levant. Note- this selection is a condensed version of the podcast. To watch the entire, visit the links listed.   Christmas Part 1 • Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick • Dec. 19 - Dec 25 • Come Follow Me https://youtu.be/MfyRLvSyax4 Follow Him Podcast with Dr. Hank Smith and Co-host John Bytheway 59.9K subscribers 49,621 views. Premiered Dec 14, 2022.  Old Testament Are there parallels between Jesus's birth in a cave, resting in a stone manger, his burial in a tomb, and his resting place on a stone? Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick explores the possibilities of census, housing, and manger traditions in the ancient Levant. Please rate and review the podcast! Show Notes (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese): https://followhim.co/old-testament/ Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/followhimpod... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/followhimpo... Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/15G9TTz... Part 1–Introduction of Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick, Census, taxes, or prophecy?, Tekton or carpenter, Betrothal, Joseph builds a home in Bethlehem, Herod's temple as place of revelation, Jesus's name is prescribed and is the Son of God, Joseph marries Mary, Taxes or enrolled and registered, Where did Joseph and Mary live in Bethlehem?,Guest room or cave?,Manger in stone. End of Part 1–   Christmas Part 2 • Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick • Dec. 19 - Dec 25 • Come Follow Me https://youtu.be/ACgc80QfLyI Follow Him Podcast 59.9K subscribers 27,850 views. Premiered Dec 14, 2022. Old Testament Dr. Chadwick continues to explore the historical significance of archaeological and historical findings and the spiritual significance of the life and birth of Jesus Christ. Please rate and review the podcast! Show Notes (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese): https://followhim.co/old-testament/ Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/followhimpod... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/followhimpo... Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/15G9TTz... Part II– Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick. The Wise Men, The faithful examples of Joseph and Mary, Stone Manger: The Untold Story of the First Christmas, Joseph was a tekton and the name Cephas, “His name shall be called Wonderful”, A spiritual and political Messiah, Philip and the Ethiopian Jew, Jesus as Deliverer and will bring salvation, Christmas joy and gathering, End of Part II–Dr. Jeffrey Chadwick   Free New Testament online study guide for 2023- Come, Follow Me—For Individuals and Families: New Testament 2023 https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/come-follow-me-for-individuals-and-families-new-testament-2023?lang=eng