Purified By the Word

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Living Hope SDA Church

Love Connection: Separating Facts from Fiction in Relationships

Chris Holland

Separating Facts from Fiction in Relationships 2

So I left off with this kind of this bold statement of if we're not at a place where we are no longer dependent on sustenance, then we're not at a place to really explore the dating and courtship experience.

I thought dating was about getting to know each other and things like that.

And while that is certainly an aspect of dating and courtship, dating and courtship is with the marriage being the end goal, because that's what we're exploring, right?

We're not just exploring having a fun time.

We're exploring, what are the possibilities of marriage?

And so when we're exploring that, this is what this means.

Now this does not mean the complete abandonment of our parents.

In some cultures, and I have a deep appreciation for example, in India there is the taking care of parents when they get of an older age.

And unfortunately in the American culture we've kind of lost that.

That doesn't mean that we're not caring for what that means and that doesn't mean that at some point in our future marriage if a parent would become sick and we brought them into our home, that's not what we're talking about.

And so, and listen, You know, as I told you, I'm 49 years old.

But my mom, you know, when my mom will introduce me, she says, this is my boy.

And even though I haven't lived with my mom for 31 years, I'm still her little boy.

My mom doesn't send me a monthly allowance.

So for those of you not familiar with the word allowance, when I was growing up, I had a set of chores.

And if I did all my chores, I would get an allowance.

And back in my time, a couple dollars, maybe $5, which was more valuable than $5 is today.

So My mom doesn't send me a monthly allowance because I work and Debbie works and we have our family circle that we are no longer dependent upon the family circle of my mom and my stepdad.

Does that mean that we abandon, does that mean that we abandon the counsel of our parents?

We still look to our parents and I'll talk more about that tomorrow.

By the way it's very interesting in that passage that was that was read in Proverbs 28 13, it talks about the whole idea of repentance, okay, in the context of forsaken.

Why does repentance and forsaking come at the same time?

The word repentance in the original Greek is a word that comes from 2 Greek words.

And some of you are saying, Pastor Holland, it's in the afternoon, this is too much.

Repentance is not just changing behavior, it's changing the mind.

Now if I get into trouble, the first person I go to is not my mom.

Who's The first person I go to is not my mom.

Who's the first person I go to if I'm in trouble?

And by the way, this is another piece of the counsel.

I have an argument with my spouse and if I go talk to my mom, we're not following the biblical counsel.

Now, let me be very, very clear because we live in a very broken world.

Things like abuse and things like that, you need to involve somebody else.

But if I have a disagreement with my wife over, I don't know, how towels are folded or something.

If every time that happens I call up my mom and I say, Mom, this is what happened.

How do you think that relationship will be with my mom and my wife?

See we deal with things with the family circle.

In fact I preached a sermon 1 time called Alien Invaders.

Anything that comes into the family circle, other than the husband and wife, and eventually there will be children, possibly, but anything that comes in the family circle other than the husband and wife is an alien invader.

It's a foreign entity that will disrupt normal operation.

And just to illustrate this, a number of years ago there was a television program called My 600-lb Life.

And what the television program, some of you have seen this, what it traces is these individuals that weigh 600 pounds or more and kind of their journey in life of how to come out of that.

And I know for some of us, we think about that, and we say, how is that even possible?

And then once you stop moving and you still eat, you gain weight very, very rapidly.

But in the show, 1 of the interesting things, and at first I didn't understand why, I was like, it doesn't make sense, these people need help.

They would go see a surgeon down in Houston, Texas, and he did bariatric surgery.

So that's where they open you up and they take your stomach out and they remove a significant portion of your stomach and your stomach now only holds about 3 tablespoons worth of food.

And some of you are saying, why in the world would you do that?

It drastically reduces the amount of food that you can eat and so naturally you're going to lose weight.

But 1 of the things that's interesting that they do is that when they would go to visit the doctor, the doctor would say, I need you to go and lose some weight and then I can do the surgery.

And I used to say to myself, this is ridiculous, what These people need help.

Because the problem is, is if I take your stomach and I resize your stomach to only fit 2 or 3 tablespoons, I've not done something that's very, very important.

You're going to go home from your surgery, and you'll adhere to what you're supposed to eat for a little while.

But then you'll start eating more and more.

And what happens the first day when you put 4 tablespoons in instead of 3 tablespoons?

And then tomorrow you put in 5 tablespoons rather than the 3.

And these people can re-stretch their stomach back to a size which they can consume too many calories.

So why would this doctor send them home to lose weight?

He would send them home to lose weight to change their mind and how they eat and how they think and then he would do the bariatric surgery.

Now some people would say, well, I mean, if this person goes home and they lose 50 pounds, why don't they just keep going?

Well, because many of them are in a very significant health challenge, and they need to lose weight very rapidly.

And when you shrink somebody's stomach down to only fit 2 or 3 tablespoons, they start losing 50, 60 pounds very, very rapidly.

Separating Facts from Fiction in Relationships 3

And what we're going to do today is so we're going to transition.

Yesterday, we laid this framework of, and we talked about reverse engineering.

If you want to grow potatoes, then you're not going to plant carrots.

And so when we talk about dating and relationships and courtship, that's where we begin.

We began with marriage because when we understand dating and courtship in the context of this is exploring the possibility of the possibility of marriage, well then we need to start with that in mind so that way when we back up, then we're following the same path rather than, you know, hey I want to grow corn and you just throw some random seeds and if you happen to get corn, great, but you might have a field full of alfalfa and that's just not what you're hoping for.

So let's go ahead and have a word of prayer.

Heavenly Father, as we explore this whole topic of relationships, it can be quite sensitive, Lord.

We have preconceived ideas, we've had different experiences, And so I pray that You would help us to really understand the biblical model and in understanding the biblical model, that You would help us to formulate in our minds how we can be dedicated to you and stay true to your principles.

All right, so as we as we talk today there's a couple of things that we are going to look at.

We're gonna get as far as we can go today.

As I said, I may have to skim over some things.

But when we talk about, and yesterday, kind of the conclusion of yesterday, which I could have spent hours and hours on what we were doing, but I want to give you some practical steps.

When we understand marriage, marriage is defined by the following.

And in the 21st century, some people say, well, of course.

But in the 21st century, that is not the accepted norm.

But it is between 1 man and 1 woman, which means it is exclusive.

And we talked about the family circle yesterday.

When 1 man, 1 woman come together, there is now an exclusive circle that no 1 else can intrude upon.

And so I will just tell you 1 of the principles I follow in my own marriage.

I do not, I will not, and I do not spend time alone with other women.

Even in my role as a pastor, if I need to give counsel, that counsel will happen with a door open and making sure that someone else is here in the building.

And that is both to protect me and the other person, but this is an exclusive relationship.

The challenge is when we start becoming emotionally dependent upon others, rather than, because remember, we talked about the whole concept of leave, we're leaving the emotional, financial, sustaining influence that our parents have in our life and now we become emotionally, remember the word, they shall cleave unto 1 another.

Some of you probably work with soldering.

When you solder something together, the whole attempt is not to have a weak joint, but something that is uniform.

If you've ever done grafting, grafting is that graft union, actually, after a couple of years will become stronger than the rest of the tree.

Now, by the way, and you have to be careful how far you take analogies, but when you graft an apple tree, you have to make sure that that graft stays above the soil.

Because if the graft union goes into the soil, then that scion wood, the desired, will sprout roots and now no longer will the rootstock control the size of the tree and now it'll grow into a gigantic 40 foot tall apple tree.

That is that that graft union needs to be upheld so 1 doesn't become greater or stronger than the other.

And so marriage is exclusive and marriage is loving.

And I'm going to spend some time defining what that word love means because we live in a society that has defined love in a lot of different words, and it is honoring.

And we talked about this from the very concept of the book of Genesis where God made male and female.

We could do a whole seminar on this, but this is why God says it is not good for man to be alone.

Now let us be very clear though, okay, while God's ideal for us is that someday we would be married, then the Apostle Paul kind of throws in his counsel in 1st Corinthians 7 where he says, I wish more of you were like me.

I'm kind of giving you the Chris Holland paraphrase and Paul of course was single.

Now does that mean, does that mean that there is a biblical principle or biblical precedent for singlehood?

Well, we have to understand, Paul was writing to the Corinthian church, and the church there in Corinth actually had the opportunity to visit the ancient site of Corinth, but Corinth was known for its being an extraordinarily promiscuous society and it was leaking into the church and the church was having real problems with that and basically what Paul was saying is I would rather have more of you to be sexually pure and single rather than getting yourself involved in all this stuff.

I'm simply saying that you can be a whole person without being married or in a relationship.

And this is typically more of a challenge with women than it is with men.

But often, because of our broken society, and I don't want to be stereotypical, but I'm going to be slightly stereotypical, and that is for a number of women, they are, they do not have a strong father figure in their life, And so they, and people ask the question why.

I'm not a psychologist, so I'm a preacher, but it is kind of natural that then there is this seeking after a relationship with a male figure that has that leadership quality that you missed when you were a child or a young woman.

And the challenge with that is that it often leads to very poor decisions because of a perception of what it is believed that your acceptance is based upon physical intimacy.

And it leads down a road that is a road full of heartbreak.

And so I will give you a line that most young ladies don't like to hear, but it is a line that is very very true and that is we and it doesn't work as well for men, but it works much better for women, and that is we need to become a one-man woman.

And we need to be satisfied in Jesus, and as we are satisfied in Jesus, God will open up the doors for you as to what He would like in your life.

I don't know if that makes sense and there's more that I could say about that.

For men the analogy is not as strong, but for men it is the same thing.

Sometimes at men we do not have a good relationship with our mother for whatever reason and so we go looking for that motherly influence in our life through relationships and again that can lead to some very unhealthy relationships and by the way hopefully you're both listening.

The guys are listening to the counsel that I just gave to the women and the women are not listening to the counsel that I'm giving to the men.

Because if you see in somebody that you're potentially thinking about entering into a relationship with, and you're kind of functioning like a mother in their life, this is a warning sign, and I will call them red flags of relationships.

And this is an indication that you probably ought to be thinking long and hard about really what kind of future you have with that person, because that's a very unhealthy dynamic.

And for the men, that is also an unhealthy dynamic if you're seemingly in this more fatherly role rather than in a mutually honoring relationship.

So I'm going to give you 1 as we now kind of go into this whole idea of relationships and dating and remember from yesterday I'm using those words interchangeably.

Relationship, dating, courtship, Sometimes we get caught up in terminology and I will generally define all of those as entering into a relationship with someone, exploring the possibility of a future marriage.

Whether you call it courtship, whether you call it dating, whether you call it going out, whether you call it seeing each other, whatever that may be, that's what I'm generally speaking about.

So I'm going to give you 1 guiding principle for any and all relationships.

This goes outside of even the possibility of a romantic relationship.

And that is, and I was going to give this to you later, but I want to give it to you now.

You need to just read the first part of that.

If somebody has that, you can go ahead and read that.

Number 1 question I get asked by young people is this.

Doesn't matter what part of the world I'm in.

The number 1 question for people under the age of 30, and it's becoming more under the age of 35 or under the age of 40 is this.

What's God's will in my life for relationships?

When I was pastoring in Hagerstown, Maryland, I taught at the Academy.

I taught 11th graders and then I taught 12th graders.

And on Friday, it was what I called Ask the Pastor Day.

We would set aside the textbook and ask any question you want to ask.

And I can tell you, over the course of 2 years, the most dominant question is about relationships.

1 Thessalonians 4, verse 3 tells us what God's will is in our life.

Separating Facts from Fiction in Relationships 4

Let's let's have a word of prayer as we go into this last session.

Heavenly Father, we are grateful for the opportunity to be here.

And now, Lord, as we continue to talk about relationships, I pray, Lord, that you would give us wisdom.

Alright, so where I left off is talking about what is love.

It's a grand question and there's many songs that have been written, you know, asking the question what is love And I want you to notice what 1 John 3.16 did not say.

It did not say love is personal happiness.

It didn't say love was all these other things.

And it is a foundational guiding principle.

And, by the way, sometimes when I'm saying these things, we're like, OK, well, that tells me who my partner shouldn't be.

There's another piece of this that's a very important analysis.

If you're a selfish person, we need to be praying and ask God to help us to be selfless.

But now We're going to go to further define the word love to the classic place in the Bible to define it.

1 Corinthians 13, it's read at almost every wedding, every Christian wedding that you go to.

And what I'm going to do is I'm gonna have us just kind of go around reading.

So go ahead and read out of the version that you have and We'll start there.

And I'm gonna have you go ahead and start with 1 Corinthians 13.

We'll go ahead and begin right in verse 1.

By the way, this is 1 Corinthians, I've already told you about Corinth.

Corinth was a place, so if you go visit ancient Corinth, the temple to Apollo is there.

You have up on the hillside, there was the, oh and I just lost it, the temple where all these temple prostitutes would be during the day and at night they would come down into Corinth.

And Paul is talking about love and he's going to define it in just a moment, but if we define it by the 1 word selfless, Paul's talking about all these things, like the gift of prophecy.

How would you think about having the gift of prophecy if God came to you in a vision and told you what was going to happen?

Heavy burden, but it would still be pretty amazing.

If you receive the gift of prophecy, but you don't have love, Elijah, what does it say?

And we began with, what did he say in verse 1?

Without love, you're a clanging cymbal or sounding brass?

What does a cymbal sound like when you bang it together?

How many of you would have, gentlemen, this morning if I would have come to your hotel and I somehow got a ticket or a little card to your room and I opened your room and I was really quiet and nobody knew I came in and I had a pair of cymbals, and I just started going, bang, bang, bang.

Would you have deeply appreciated that this morning?

Without love, without love, we're actually kind of an Annoyance.

Okay, so now we're getting really interesting.

You do all kinds of service, but if you're not selfless in your service, It's nothing.

So we switch from the word love to the word charity.

And I know many of you have heard a lot of sermons, that word love there, anybody know what the Greek word for love is there?

It is, so you can say it with a exclamation point rather than a question mark at the end.

Now, I know that may be surprising to some of us because typically when we talk about agape, people will talk about agape is God's love toward man.

The challenge is, is that word agape, the Greek word for agape, is actually used more to describe love between humans than it is between God's love to man.

Agape is defined by God's love toward humanity.

And in that definition, what is God's love defined by?

And Enos, I'm going to ask you because you read the passage.

And so, help me with your name 1 more time.

And then I think there was 1 more in the passage you read, right?

Before not being puffed up, what does it say?

So the new King James, I'm going to use a different word there.

It says it does not parade itself and then the last 1 is it it's not puffed up let's look at those for right now because we're defining this word love because if we're going to talk about relationships This is ultimately the question we're trying to answer.

Because too often in our society, and this is the challenge, we use the word love far too often in English.

While I don't speak another language, English is a very shallow language, right?

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Love Connection: Separating Facts from Fiction in Relationships

Separating Facts from Fiction in Relationships 4

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