The stress of our current world from the COVID 19 lockdown to the racial divide is taking a toll on people. It is also taking a toll on marriages. Here we offer advice on keeping a strong Christian home together when the world seems to be falling apart. 

The stress of our current world from the COVID 19 lockdown to the racial divide is taking a toll on people. It is also taking a toll on marriages. Here we offer advice on keeping a strong Christian home together when the world seems to be falling apart.

Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.

Newington Three Angels Church

Eric Walsh

Broken but Bonded

Our scripture is taken from Ephesians 5, starting at verse 31.

And it says, for this cause shall a man leave his father and mother and shall be joined unto his wife.

This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church.

Our message this week is entitled, Broken but Bonded.

Father God, we thank you for this opportunity to study your word.

I pray Lord now that as we discuss issues of relationships and love, Lord, that your Holy Spirit would speak.

And Lord, once again, I would just be that nail upon the wall and that your portrait would be hung thereupon, that I am not seen.

Lord, have your people hear and see you tonight.

I do these talks from time to time and I've spoken for pure reality many times over the you know last couple 10 or 15 years but this week was interesting because I don't know if it's the lockdown the stress of the coronavirus pandemic or if it's the economic tsunami that has happened because of the pandemic.

Maybe it's all of the racial tension, the stress around just watching the news and social media, but I've had more than 1 of my friends.

Reach out to me in tears because they feel like their marriage is falling apart and.

Wanting some relationship advice and wanting to know how to move forward as Christians in that situation.

Obviously I won't be speaking to their specific situations but instead we'll be giving some generalized advice tonight, biblical advice, not my opinion, but biblical advice and from the spirit of prophecy.

And so to do that, we're going to jump to the book of Genesis chapter 2.

Genesis chapter 2, starting from verse 21 to 25, the Bible says, and the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam.

And he slept and he took 1 of his ribs and closed up the flesh instead thereof.

And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man.

Made he a woman and brought her unto the man.

And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.

She shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man.

Therefore, shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be 1 flesh.

And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.

There's a lot you can unpack from just these few verses of scripture.

If you follow the story of creation, the way that God designs and creates is that his creation becomes more complex as he moves through the process.

And so man, when Adam is formed of the dust of the ground, is the most complex thing he has made up until that point.

And it'd be difficult to argue that the most complex thing God created is not the human woman.

Women have the ability, their mind, the left and right hemispheres of their brain have more connections across the corpus callosum in the brain than a man does, meaning that women, this is how some argue, women have intuition and the ability to multitask.

Women are more complex in that God designed them to be able to carry children, and not just carry children, but to then nurse and feed the child.

So sophisticated is the process of nursing a child that from the saliva of the child, some argue the woman is able to tell what nutrients to add or subtract from the breast milk of that lactating child, in a nursing child.

In the actual milk that a woman produces once she nurses, it's even more profound.

Literally, the Antibodies the woman carries are put into the milk so that her newborn child actually has a specific immunity against certain infections that the mother has already had.

When you think about what God designed in a woman and the idea that unlike all the other animals while the child is in the womb it can listen to the voice, speech, intonation.

The child is affected by the stress levels of the woman when she is pregnant.

So it is a very important and serious thing.

And hence, a woman is not formed from out of the ground.

Taken from his rib because she was not taken from his head because it was not designed by God that a woman should beat up her man or Lord over him.

And she was not taken from his foot because she was not to be trampled upon by a man either.

So she was taken from that part of a man that literally protects him and keeps him alive.

And she is called to help me when Adam sees her and you can only imagine people people say you're wrong to say this but I would have to imagine that Eve was so beautiful.

I would imagine that when when God brought Eve to Adam, his tongue fell out of his mouth like in the cartoons and rolled on the floor.

He had seen all the beauty of creation but when he saw Eve, Adam, Adam didn't know what to do.

I would imagine he couldn't speak probably for a couple of hours.

And then he says, she's bone of my bones.

The scripture says, for this reason, because when a man takes a wife, there'll be 1 flesh, a man must leave his father and his mother and he must cleave to his wife.

And the idea of becoming 1 flesh is where physical intimacy comes in, where sexual relations come in.

And the Bible says that when they were created this way, they were not ashamed.

Even though at that point they still didn't have clothes.

So the question is, why was Eve created in the first place?

If you want to understand the dynamics of a relationship between a husband and a wife, or even in any kind of relationship where someone is courting and so forth, this is an interesting question.

We know that in creation and in nature, there are animals that do not have 2 sexes.

The whip-tail lizards, the stick insects, small-tooth sawfish, are all 1 gender.

They can produce life out of that 1 gender.

In fact, in my opinion, it blows in the face of evolution that you'd make the more complex, more risky method of procreation rather than simply having 1 gender, like an amoeba, break off a piece and create another human being.

E was created because in Genesis 2, 18, the Bible says, And the Lord God said, It is not good that man should be alone.

I will make him and help meet for him." It was not good for man to be alone.

Notice it does not say a help mate with an A, it says a help meet with an E, because a woman is a man's equal.

So even before they could have children, God designed them to be together because God always is looking for love that is given and received.

Ellen White says it like this in her writings, "'In the beginning when the Sabbath law was given, "'the marriage law was also given.

"'It was then that God bestowed on man his 2 great gifts, the Sabbath as a day of rest and woman as a helpmate.

In Christian relationships it says that a man should leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife and they should be 1 flesh.

So if you leave your father and mother and cleave to your wife, where is the third part of that now?

God must be at the center of all relationships, especially the marriage relationship.

What you find is that when the husband and the wife are connected to God, as they move closer to God like a triangle, this goes back to high school geometry, as the 2 of them move closer to God, the distance between the husband and the wife becomes shorter and shorter.

And this is 1 of the reasons many Christian marriages fail.

Either no 1 or only 1 is moving towards God, meaning that the distance between husband and wife can continually drift apart.

If you're going to be happily married, God must be at the center of the marriage and he must be at the apex of this triangle so that as you both study God's word and draw close to him, you draw closer to 1 another.

Because who you marry is going to have great influence on you.

Here's what Ellen White says in Yad Vashem's home page 459 about influence.

Things which influence us and our children.

Every association we form, however limited, exerts some influence upon us.

The extent to which we yield to that influence will be determined by the degree of intimacy, the constancy of the intercourse, and our love and veneration for the 1 with whom we associate.

Now, this is important because I remember reading years ago, probably back when I was in college, where psychologists said that if you just spent 7 or 9 minutes, I don't remember how many it is, how many minutes it was, around someone in conversation, you begin to take on some of the traits of that person you begin to act like that person imagine how much more powerful that influence is when you are romantically inclined and even more so when you are physically intimate.

Hence this is 1 of the reasons why the scripture says that we have to wait until we are married before we are sexually intimate because if not you lend yourself to the deepest form of influence and then you can have that tide broken quickly.

Broken but Bonded

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