<p>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.</p>

Village SDA Church

Ron Kelly

In the Beginning

Lord, thank you for making us a priority, the priority.

And now, Lord, I pray as we open your word, open our hearts, and please write on them, so that we are like you in the beauty of holiness and its fruits are ours to enjoy and a blessing to the world.

So guide us to that end, I pray now in Jesus' name, amen.

This weekend is a special weekend for the Kellys and the Proctors as 2 families are about to blend and become 1.

My son will be getting married tomorrow, and the journey to that has been 1 of great focus.

This morning I want to reflect with you on the power of these significant events to shape our lives.

You have your Bibles, open them up to the book of Genesis 2.

Now, the narrative and the metaphor of marriage is a big deal.

The Bible starts with the creation story of redemption, of creation.

It morphs into redemption and finally in restoration we find this Amazing symbol.

God has something very special bound up in reflecting on marriage.

It says, So the Lord caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept.

And he took 1 of his ribs, and he closed up the flesh of that place.

The Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which he had taken from man and brought her to the man.

And the man said, This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.

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

For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife and they shall become 1 flesh and the man and his wife are both naked and were not ashamed." This morning as we reflect on the construct of marriage.

I think it's very important for us to understand that God uses this prior to any evil as a consummation of creation In the garden he creates the beauty of 2 lives blended into 1 now Let's go to the last book of the Bible Revelation chapter 13 and let's look at what set this marriage up Revelation chapter 13 we're looking at verse 8 Tucked away in a narrative on the beast is this invitation to make sure our name is written in the book of life.

It says, all who dwell on the earth will worship him, everyone whose name has not been written from the foundation of the world, in the book of the life of the Lamb, slain from the foundation of the world." From the very beginning, we see God places an awful lot of emphasis on this human expression of divine love.

But what I want us to think about at the beginning of the message today is this, is that long before God formed Adam and Eve in the garden, there was a lot of prayer and thought and commitment that went in to the divine expression of human creation.

In heaven, before there was a decision to commit to the human race, there was a recognition that it would cost the life of God.

It was no small thing for the Godhead to make a decision to create man because God was so committed to the freedom to love that He says, this is what it's going to cost me.

Now over the years, I've presided over a number of weddings and sat through many premarital marriage situations, and sometimes difficulties post-marriage as well.

But in the pre-marriage, I always ask the couple, why is this marriage going to work?

You know, society today has come up with a variety of interesting constructs, 1 of which is the starter marriage.

The idea is that you'll meet somebody and you'll try marriage out.

Of course, marriage itself is on the road to extinction if you read the social literature.

But if you do still believe in marriage, I mean, people have more commitment to cell phone packages they share together than they do to the concept of marriage.

But if you still do believe in marriage, then it's very important for us to understand that nothing matters more out in a human realm than marriage itself.

The commitment that leads to a marriage is the key that keeps the marriage going.

Nobody signs up ready to get married that plans on a divorce.

If you bother to believe in marriage at all, then you anticipate a life of love hereafter, which is why Ellen White will say marriage should be the beginning of love, not the end.

Timothy Keller in his book, The Meaning of Marriage, will tell us that people who will stay married 5 years beyond a problem will typically find their marriage better 5 years later than they found it in the moment.

It is not that I feel a certain way towards you that's going to make this marriage work.

And right from the very beginning in the story of redemption where we see marriage as the main metaphor, the main expression of human love, taking out the nature of divine love and giving it away to each other, We see behind the scenes before God commits Himself to the human race, to the experiment of people made in His image that could reject Him and could go against Him, He considers the fact that it's gonna cost Him everything to maintain an environment of love.

This is something of tremendous import for us to really reflect on.

For my kids, this was an important thing for them to know.

The marriage is the structure upon which all of society is built, is between a woman and a man, a man and a woman, and it is the structure of a healthy, not only society, but church and every other social accoutrement that shapes a good society.

It's not a secondary consideration in the most vibrant of all homes, and it is built primarily on commitment.

You can say, you love me all you want, but if your actions Don't match up with your words.

For some reason, the Kellys got a new puppy.

I think it had something to do with 1 of the children.

The second night we own the puppy, the owner of the puppy is not in the home.

Which, for those of you that have adult children and have seen that journey, you kind of understand that this is going to be yours in some respects anyway.

I think we went to bed at 1.20 in the morning.

I'm not even the father of the bride and my schedule is out of control.

I really ought to be holding up the Proctor family here.

At 5 something in the morning, the dog is whimpering.

Love is when you say to your spouse, you lay in bed and rest, I'll get up and take the new puppy out to go to the restroom.

36 years of marriage, some in the first service were approaching 70 years of marriage.

There's an awful lot of things through those years that are directly related to the concept that marriage is a commitment, I'm not going by my feelings, and that we're gonna trust that when we're in the hard times it's gonna get better.

But the children do not come before the marriage.

Certainly nothing else comes before the marriage.

The marriage is the place where 2 people have the chance to know themselves best by knowing themselves through someone else.

And God has chosen marriage as the main metaphor.

Take your Bibles and turn over to Revelation chapter 19.

When we come to the end of the story and it's about time for God's people to go home, which is the time in which we're living, we find ourselves right there again.

It's creation, it's redemption, it's restoration.

And Revelation chapter 19 verse 7, you have to imagine John alone, exiled.

Let us rejoice, verse 7, and be glad and give glory to him, for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his bride has made herself ready.

It was given to her to clothe herself in fine linen, bright and clean, for the fine linen is the righteous acts of the saints.

Then he said to me, Write, blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.

Now this is so overwhelming to John, verse 10 follows, then I fell at his feet to worship him, but he said to me, do not do that.

I'm a fellow servant of yours and your brethren who hold the testimony of Jesus worship God for the testimony of Jesus is the Spirit of prophecy Written in the margin of my Bible outside of these verses are this little phrase The angel in effect is saying to John these 4 words.

We are a family and Being a family is probably the greatest privilege and joy that anybody can know But God finds himself in this moment Declaring the glory of what's coming and John is so overwhelmed by it that he falls down to worship and the angel says don't do that In other words his loneliness is Meated up against the great celebration of togetherness that's coming, and he's so overwhelmed with it that he falls down to worship.

The very first act in heaven is going to be a celebration of what was so committed to before time on planet Earth began, and so highly prized and paid for that the blood of Jesus would flow.

And when it's all said and done and this marriage that was attemptedly derailed by self-centeredness is put back together, All the universe can do is rejoice and Jesus wants me there and he wants you there and he's gonna serve But then we have this unique moment in the gospel turn to John chapter 2 and You could almost think it was an accident.

The verbiage would lead you thinking maybe this wasn't how it was supposed to begin, but I've abandoned that line of thinking.

It's the very beginning of his ministry and he's in this little town of Canaan.

There will be 1 year between this miracle and the miracle of John chapter 4, the 35 recorded miracles of Jesus, this will be the first 1, but there's going to be a year before the next recorded miracle is written down for you and I to peruse.

You almost get a sense that Jesus wasn't out to impress with his ability before everybody had a chance to hear who he was.

And by the way, for all the young people that are listening here, since commitment is the cornerstone of a good marriage, and love is a decision more than a feeling, it's so terribly important, parents, that you're teaching your children how to say no to themselves, which leads up to a relationship and then an engagement, where they can actually say no to themselves until they're married, and they say yes to what the world wants to celebrate at will and whim.

In other words, teaching our children purity to where they can say no to themselves is like preparing them to stay in a committed marriage because there's so many opportunities in a marriage to say yes to the things that will destroy the marriage.

Learning how to say no to ourselves is 1 of the elemental and essential journeys to happiness and we know those who can deny self best achieve and enjoy the most.

On the third day There was a wedding in Cana of Galilee and the mother of Jesus was there Desire of ages tells us it's a relative and both Jesus and his disciples were invited to the wedding, all 5 of them, 6 with Jesus.

When the wine ran out, the mother of Jesus said to him, they have no wine.

And Jesus said to a woman, what does that have to do with us?

Now it's an oriental phrase, it doesn't ring the same in the 21st century.

We're not in the habit of husbands of saying to our wives, woman what does that have to do with me?

But to Jesus and in that culture it was a statement of honor even though Jesus was communicating that this was probably not his problem.

But because it was his mother's problem and because he believed in the fifth commandment, he had written the fifth commandment with his own finger and he was living it with his own life, he was willing to do something about it.

Back to Menu

In the Beginning

Transcript

Sponsor

Recorded

Sound Doctrine