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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Chad Kreuzer

Fadia Kreuzer

Love and Marriage

Heavenly Father, thank you for this opportunity.

I pray that your Holy Spirit would be here.

We thank you that you care about us and you care about every aspect of our lives, our relationships and future marriages or present marriages.

We need your Holy Spirit to make us into the people you've called us to be.

To begin with, 1 of the things that we mentioned this morning are the 2 institutions that God gave us in Eden.

And we read here in a book called Letters to Young Lovers.

Thus the institution has for its originator the creator of the universe.

It was 1 of the first gifts of God to man, And it is 1 of the 2 institutions that after the fall, Adam, sorry I lost my place, Adam brought with him beyond the gates of paradise.

When the divine principles are recognized and obeyed in this relation, marriage is a blessing.

And it guards the purity and happiness of the race.

It elevates the physical, the intellectual, and the moral nature.

So it's 1 of the 2 things that God gave us.

We talked about the sabbath this morning.

That is 1 of the things that God gave us.

The other thing is marriage that he gave us right in the beginning right in perfection and both of them were meant to be a Blessing but sadly in many cases both of them became a Curse Not because God intended it to be that way, but people became legalistic, and so the Sabbath became a burden, but not that God intended it.

Same thing with marriage, that the marriage was meant to be a blessing.

So we're going to begin with the story of in Genesis chapter 24.

And some of the verses will be on the screen, so we're going to more talk about it and give you a little overview.

Genesis chapter 24 is the story of, who's it about?

And Abraham is getting old and he has a son that needs to get married.

And so he's worried about marrying this boy off, isn't he?

And so many of our parents get worried when we're getting a little old, right?

Well, they don't wanna raise their hands to that 1.

Who feels old and your parents are ragging on you?

Okay, maybe you don't want to admit to the old part, but parents do rag on us sometimes, don't they?

Especially if you come from the eastern part of the world.

They start to, like, hey, so, what's going on, you know?

Well, somebody's probably opened their Bible to Genesis 24.

Anyway, it's good to have fun with each other.

Like every good parent, you're thinking about your child, and you're wanting the best for your child.

He's learned stress doesn't solve your problems, right?

We're dealing with Abraham's choice to this day.

Hagar was the man-made idea of how we're going to fulfill God's promise, right?

And so many times we do that in our lives.

So sometimes parents get a little stressed out and they forget to pray.

But you know what, Abraham had learned his lesson by this time and he starts to pray and he asks his oldest servant to go and find someone for his son.

By this point, Abraham has learned a lot about faith.

And Chad actually does a whole thing on righteousness by faith based on Abraham and Sarah's experience with waiting for this promised child.

And how God promised him, he said, you cannot in and of yourself do this anymore.

It's at our extremity that He comes in and says, I can do this now.

And what is it that God, or it says about Abraham and his body?

It said that Abraham in Romans it says that his body he was as good as dead and he said that he considered not the deadness of Sarah's womb meaning they had no potential to fulfill God's promise to them.

But that's when God, just like in their physical life, he gave them a child, so too in our spiritual life, it may be impossible for us to overcome, but God can give us the victory, and it's by his power.

Could be that way in marriage too, right?

And so in that story, Chad, when he shares it, he's talking about how a lot of times we see promises in the Bible about that we can overcome sin, that we can be righteous in the eyes of God.

And so then a lot of times, what do we do when we see things like that?

We look to self and we say, I can't do it.

Right, and so then we doubt God's promises.

But if God has said it in his word, he will fulfill that promise, right?

And we need to believe it by faith that what God said He will do.

And so Abraham and Sarah finally get to the point where they believe God at His Word and then that child of promise was given to them.

And so if you take that into your own issues with God, right, your own overcoming that you need to do, dealing with sin and all of that, you can come to the place where you realize, you know what, God promised that I would have victory over this.

I need to believe Him and live accordingly.

I can speak to you right now as a woman, and this, in terms of relationships, it's kind of like for me it was like the last frontier.

Not that I've arrived anywhere because there's other frontiers that I'm not even aware of, right?

But at that point, that was like the last frontier for me.

It's like, God, I can do ministry for you.

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Love and Marriage

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