Fresh Manna 2021

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Strong Tower Radio

Marriage as a Covenant

Ariel Roldan

01 Marriage as a Covenant

Fresh manna fell to the ground as a gift from God while the Israelites were in the wilderness.

It was Fresh from the ovens of heaven, baked by the master baker himself.

How the Israelites must have anticipated the taste and the smell of each morning's delivery.

Just like the Israelites, you too can now enjoy the taste and smell of fresh manna.

Today you will be listening to Ariel Roldan, pastor of the Cadillac and Lake City Seventh-day Adventist Churches in the Michigan Conference.

This morning, we're gonna start a brand new series on marriage covenant as I began to pray and plan and Elder Snamen and Lori Snamen agreed to come and do this weekend's workshop last Sabbath.

I realized it would be great to segue that with a couple more of meditations, instructions from the Word of God in regards to marriage.

Most of the material, of course, comes from the Bible.

There's another book that if you're able to find it, I would encourage you to get it.

You may be familiar with an Adventist professor named Samuel Bakyoki.

He's most known for his work on the Sabbath, but he's actually written a book called The Marriage Covenant.

And much of this sermon series is based upon his book.

There's another pastor, he's a Presbyterian pastor, Timothy Keller.

He wrote another book called The Meaning of Marriage.

Very well written, very biblically sound.

And of course Advent is Home, Patriarchs and Prophets, Steps to Christ, Desire of Ages.

Many of those books have also been sources for this sermon series.

So I want to pray that before we engage it, God will open our hearts to receive the blessing He wants to give us this morning.

Father, I'm already blessed by fellowshipping and opening Your Word with our brothers and sisters in Belgium.

As we were looking at Your Law this morning, it was encouraging for me to know that there's a body of believers faithfully meeting, Faithfully, Lord, in spite of the language barriers, cultural barriers, COVID barriers, you are showing them a way to still be a church, to still be connected.

Thank you for the opportunities and blessings we have in our country.

Give us of your spirit that we can maximize these opportunities you give us.

And Father, this morning we need your spirit to speak to our hearts.

Open our understanding, Father, that these truths from your word will become real and applicable to each of our lives.

Thank you for blessing us with your word.

We ask that your spirit be the 1 explaining and teaching us this morning.

These are the sermon series, Marriage as a Covenant, this morning, Living the Marriage Covenant, The Law of the Marriage Covenant, Covenant Marriage and Sex, How to Face the Tax on the Marriage Covenant, Marriage Covenant and Divorce, Marriage Covenant and Mission.

I remember growing up in the church and hearing sermons with that word covenant in Spanish, pacto.

And immediately in my mind I would think, boring.

And I can understand because a lot of the concepts and words in the Bible are foreign to us.

And there's 1 that really stands out and that is covenant.

It gets flung around in Christian circles.

It means this to this church group, this to that group.

And yet for us, we're sometimes left wondering what is covenant.

And this morning I'm happy that we will be studying it in the context of marriage.

I think sometimes we get those 2 confused.

Contracts engage the services of people, whereas covenants engage what church?

You make a contract with a plumber, you make a contract with a chef, you make a contract with a photographer, but you do not make a contract with your spouse.

Contracts are made for a stipulated period of time, whereas covenants are forever.

Contracts can be broken with material loss to the contracting parties, whereas covenants cannot be broken, but if violated, they result in personal loss and broken hearts.

But this is the most precious part of a covenant, at least from the scriptures.

Contracts are witnessed by people with the state as guarantors.

It means that 13 years ago, when I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in front of Darlene and my precious bride, glorious and glowing and beautiful as she does today, even after a girl's been sick and her hair is not as done as it was that day, she's still precious and beautiful.

We stood before each other and there was a part in the wedding ceremony that if you've been married, you've partaken of, where we say our vows.

Some people like to write their own, some people like to have the standard in sickness and in health, poverty, etc.

But what I've come to understand from the scriptural teaching of covenant is that that day I made a covenant with the lean in God's presence, but the 1 that makes himself responsible for the success of those vows to be fulfilled is God.

No matter what promises I made to Dallin that day, there's a book called Steps to Christ that says that our promises are as ropes of sand.

But when I enter into a marriage covenant with another human being, the 1 that guarantees the success of that marriage is not either of the human parties.

Who is the guarantor of that covenant relationship?

Because I tell you, I tried to make it work for the first couple of years and they were not the nicest.

And when humans try to fulfill something that belongs to God, we are not very good at fulfilling that.

So this idea of marriage covenant is not really about us trying harder to be nicer husbands, nicer wives, but opening up ourselves to the grace of God and allowing Him to be the guarantor of our marriages.

We're going to look at 3 covenantal phases.

As we are starting this first sermon we're going to set the foundation as to what a covenant is, what it looks like, what it does for the marriage couples and in the upcoming series we'll develop this theme further.

Michelle read for us the verse that opens to our understanding the 3 covenantal phases.

Genesis 2 24 says, Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and they shall become 1 flesh.

In this 1 verse, God defines and describes the process by which each human being can experience the covenant, the marriage covenant.

Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and they shall become 1 flesh.

This language gets repeated throughout the entire Bible, but not primarily in marriage context.

These 3 words, that sequence gets repeated over and over as God engages humanity to save humanity.

The experience of marriage post-sin, the way God has created the marriage covenant to be experienced is to be a life lesson, an experiential life lesson for the couple, for the husband and the wife, in the process of what it feels like to be saved and loved by God.

The way I experience my marriage with God in it becomes my personal lesson book as to what God has done to save me.

It becomes a salvational experience for me.

Can we say that out loud so that it gets ingrained in our brain?

These are the 3 covenantal phases and we will see this repeated throughout the Old Testament and the New Testament.

In Genesis 2.24, Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and they shall become 1 flesh.

We will look at this first part of this covenantal phase, the leaving part.

In Genesis 12.1, God is about to make a covenant with Abram and the first thing he tells Abram to do is found in Genesis 12.1, the Lord had said to Abraham and what are his first words?

Leave your native country, your relatives, and your father's family and go to the land which I will show you.

In the same way that God says a married couple begins this covenantal phase, is the exact same way He begins the covenant of salvation with Abraham by telling Abraham to do what with his family?

In Jesus in the New Testament in Luke 5, 10-11 tells us, Then Jesus said to Simon, Don't be afraid, from now on you will fish for people like Bruce.

So they pulled their boats up shore and did what with everything they had?

Left everything and not just their boats they also left their wives, they left their families, Peter's mother-in-law was sick which means he was a married man.

02 Living the Marriage Covenant

It was fresh from the ovens of heaven, baked by the master baker himself.

This series of sermons started about 5 years ago while I was still pastoring at the Oakwood Church.

And they've been a great source of instructions, encouragement for me.

I want to continue developing this idea of what it means to be in a covenant.

Last sermon, we talked about, or try to help us understand better, how we may be thinking of a marriage versus how God wants us to think about a marriage.

And we talked about how marriages sometimes are often seen as a contract.

And contracts are not the same as a covenant.

A covenant is something that extends beyond focusing on me getting what I want.

When I enter into a contract with a dentist, I want him to take care of my teeth.

And if he takes a wrong tooth out, I'll get a new dentist.

If I want a plumber to fix my plumbing in my house, and my house gets flooded, I'll get a lawyer.

Because it's a contract-based relationship.

But when marriages are approached with that same mindset of a contract.

We are setting ourselves up for failure because it's a guarantee that whatever you expect from that human being is a matter of time before that human being somehow fails at something.

Sandy asked a very important question during the children's story, 1 that didn't really show whether we get angry or not, but whether we are honest.

He said, raise your hand if you've ever lost your temper.

So if you are marrying someone, you are marrying someone that may lose their temper or will lose their temper.

And so if you enter into this relationship expecting a contract to be fulfilled, you are in essence setting yourself up for disappointment.

And eventually because many people think of marriage as a contract, they feel that well, you failed at meeting your end of the deal, therefore this contract is made void.

Whereas a covenant is a completely different dynamic.

And this morning we're going to go into part 2 of the marriage covenant, entitled Living the Marriage Covenant, If you would allow me to award prayer as we begin.

Precious Father, this is a sacred subject and spiritual things are spiritually discerned.

I am not able, Lord, to express fully and eloquently and clearly the beautiful truth you have for us this morning.

So I'm asking for your spirit, Father, to condescend to our great need.

Father, even if we're single, We are still experiencing covenant relationships with our parents.

And all of us, Father, are invited to have a covenant relationship with you.

So whether we are married, widowed, divorced, single, whatever our condition is this morning, Us understanding what a covenant is, Father, is crucial for our happiness and for our fulfillment.

Like I mentioned earlier, we have a struggle in our society more than ever because we have media through all its forms, be it the newspapers, education, university.

Brother Keith and I had a wonderful conversation this morning as we were driving to church, and faith, how our culture seems to put, you know, either you're a faith person or you're a science person, but you can't be both.

And so if you love science like I do, you love medicine like I do, but I love Jesus and I have faith in his power to heal, somehow the 2 cannot live together.

And in academia, if you express faith, then you're ridiculed as gullible or childlike.

There are 4 forces that are very much present today, especially in our culture in the western part of the world.

Secularism is a loss of a sense of what is sacred in life.

Humanism, marriage does not have its origin with God, but with a human-devised social structure.

Selfism, this is where the contract mindset comes from.

This worldview emphasizes our right to pursue self-fulfillment, self-sufficiency, and self-development.

Do you want to marry someone that is selfish?

But yet society keeps telling you, you got to watch out for number 1.

If you're not watching out for number 1, who is?

And if this relationship is not fulfilling your needs then you've got to leave it, you've got to walk away.

And there are situations, but they're usually the extreme situations where you have humongously dysfunctional behaviors that yes, you should be protecting yourself or putting yourself in safety.

But for the majority of us, the idea of my needs and my wants and what I expected, the focus on self, frustrates our desire for companionship, for lasting, loving relationships.

The last 1, relativism, this social lens makes moral issues subjective and therefore personal, not universal.

I used to tell people, well, your path is Buddhism, your path is Islam, your path is atheism.

And I can respect and I can see, well, when you go that route, then who has the final say as to what is right and wrong?

Ultimately, all of these actually just put the human mind above the mind of God.

How many of you have struggled telling your child they are sleepy, therefore they're having a tantrum?

Now, the challenge is that your child thinks they know more than you.

And the challenge is that you as a parent know them.

It is not until they are adults that they begin to reflect back and say things like, you know what, Dad was right after all.

If you're blessed with good parents, I mean, not perfect parents, because we're not perfect either, right?

But if you have good parents that love you and care for you, their advice will 1 day make sense to you.

And that is the challenge that we have today when it comes to marriage and relationships.

We as humans have a very narrow, limited view of reality.

And the Word of God opens to us a mind bigger than ours and we chafe, we resist the idea that someone knows better than me and is telling me something contrary to what I want.

We are careful with what we tell our girls not to do.

Because sometimes they were not even thinking about not doing it until you told them.

But now that you've told them not to do something, they're struggling with doing it.

We have been very careful not to tell them too many details as to why we put these plastic lids on the plugs in our house.

Because we don't know how curious they might be.

The Word of God is 1 of the most tender revelations of a heart of a God that loves you.

And you need to know this before we even engage in anything that we're going to talk about this morning.

If there's anyone in this universe that wants to see you happy and fulfilled, It is God, your Heavenly Father.

And this morning you may be challenged just like my 4 year old is challenged when she is on the floor.

They've made snowmen, they've sled, they've done all these things and I know that she's tired.

She needs to lay down for a good 45 minutes to an hour.

You know I'm hoping she'll agree with me.

I just hope that my love for her will convince her, I want the best for you, honey.

03 The Law of the Marriage Covenant

Fresh Nana fell to the ground as a gift from God while the Israelites were in the wilderness.

I'm excited to continue with a series that, last time I shared this in the previous church district that I was in, it did bring a personal revival to my own home, my own marriage, myself as a Christian, and I've been eager to be able to share these things with you.

Some people may think, oh, no, I should have gone to somewhere else, because they're going to talk about marriage, and I'm single, I'm a widow, I'm a divorcee, or whatever.

Marriage is just another form of a relationship.

And the marriage covenant is actually teaching us the core principles of how friendships, relationships work.

And So the idea of friendship and understanding what that means and how it works, this will apply.

And if you're married, I hope you will get a blessing.

Some of you may be looking at me saying you're a whippersnapper still, you're still 13 years, you know, still wet behind the ears, wait till you're getting your 40 years of marriage, yada, yada.

I know this much, you may be 40 years married but you ain't no expert at it.

So I'm praying that all of us will approach the Word of God with humble hearts and a willing spirit to be taught by the Word of God this morning.

So let's bow our heads and let's have God speak to each of our hearts, to our friendships and our marriages, precious Father.

Father, when you were done with creation, you blessed humanity with a relationship called marriage.

And throughout all these millennia of sin, if there's 1 area, Father, where the adversary, the world, under the control of the enemy, has sought to continually destroy, continually attack and dismantle, has been the family.

And there's only 1 way to get to the family, Lord, and that is to get to the husband and the wife.

So Father, I pray that we will not just learn, but be convicted, be revived, transformed by the preaching of your holy word.

I pray that your spirit would speak to each of our hearts with power, power to revive, power, Lord, to anchor our marriages on that rock, the only rock, your son, Jesus.

In the title of the sermon, I thought about changing it many times because I thought it sounds already a bit on the dry side, the law of the marriage covenant.

So if I were to be asked on the day that I married Dallin, my pastor Mark Swytheswood, Dallin, Ayel, do you guys want your marriage to be under the law of God or under the grace of God?

So the title with the Law of the Marriage Covenant already kind of sets us like, I don't know if I'm going to like this 1.

This 1 sounds like 1 of those sermons that you got to try harder or you're going to feel really guilty about yourself.

The challenge is that all of us have, Christianity has struggled from the onset of sin, we've struggled with the role of the law of God and the grace of God.

And as I've said, and we talked about last Sabbath, to a great degree, the enemy has been successful at pitting against each other things that are not enemies like faith and science.

The secular world tells us that if you are a man or woman of faith you cannot be a true woman or man of science.

Newton was a man of faith, a great man of faith, and a great man of science.

There's been others as well, even to this day.

And for many Christians, the idea that the law of God is against the grace of God is also a misconception.

And so this morning we want to kind of wrestle with this and of course we do want our marriages to be under God's grace but what does it mean to be under the grace of God?

So I'm going to give you a bit of an illustration as we begin.

What would it mean for a wife clicking on their bank account online to discover something she had not noticed before, a separate bank account that she discovers accidentally, that her husband has had for several years, and he's been funneling money into that bank account without letting her know about it.

And it's not just his money that he's been funneling into the secret bank account, her money as well has been going into this secret bank account that he's never told her about.

How should she relate to her marriage then?

If we want our marriage to be under the canopy of grace, what does that look like at those moments when we discover secrets?

What about the husband who unexpectedly comes home to find his wife embracing another man?

How would Grace relate to this situation?

How would Grace relate to the husband with the secret bank account or the wife with the secret relationship.

Would Grace say, this is option A, would Grace say, they have done nothing wrong really, who hasn't made a mistake before?

Didn't Jesus say to cast no stones at anyone?

1 more step and you'll be in currents that will drag you down into death.

Because we struggle with the father yelling at the child, stop!

The law has been the means by which grace gets placed into our hearts.

So grace would say this is sin, this brings death, you husband with the secret bank account, you wife with the secret relationship, you need Jesus' forgiveness and cleansing and healing.

These attitudes, these values, these priorities, these behaviors, they need to go out of this marriage.

So, innately, we understand experientially that grace is not against the law.

But unfortunately for many Christians, because of the way that the gospel has been presented to them, they have come to see the law as something that they need to stay as far away from as possible.

And to a great degree, listen carefully, Our theology doesn't just stay in the church.

It affects how we live our everyday life.

And if inside of me, I have a hard time reconciling grace and law, and if in my mind, in my convictions, because I want to be under the grace, I need to stay as far away from the law, I will have a very dysfunctional religion, very dysfunctional non-working faith.

And when I try to apply that to my everyday life, I will not know what a marriage looks like under the grace of God.

I will either become an abuser or a facilitator of abuse, a codependent.

God wants to bless our friendships, our relationships.

My favorite book in the Bible Romans 3 31 says, Do we then make void the law through faith?

On the contrary, what do we do through faith?

Series

Marriage as a Covenant

05 Conflict in the Marriage Covenant

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

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Marriage as a Covenant

03 The Law of the Marriage Covenant

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Faithful Remnant

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06 Marriage Covenant Sclerocardia

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Whole Marriages in a Broken World Part 2

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