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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

The God-Arranged and Blessed Marriage

Dan Augsburger

The God-Arranged Match

Let Her Be the One

Principles of the God-Blessed Marriage

I have to be honest with you, I didn't expect to ever come here.

You know, this is a place well known and doing a ministry all over the world and for which we are very grateful.

And I don't think I would be here unless the Lord wanted me to be here.

For some reason someone put it on someone's heart and I think the Lord was behind that.

And so I want to kneel and offer a word of prayer that everything I say will be what God wants me to say.

But we truly need the Lord, otherwise we will have wasted a lot of time this morning.

Father in heaven, this weekend we've been asked to, we opted to speak on relationships.

We could have spoken on other things, but Lord, you know that from the hour of marriage, Mrs.

White says that for many it is the beginning of their either success or their failure in life.

And it's such a serious, serious decision that we won't want to choose.

Father, this morning it is my task to try and look at this subject from the Bible.

But without the presence and the help of the Holy Spirit, they won't gain what you want them to gain.

And so please forgive us, Lord, of everything that might hinder the presence of the Holy Spirit.

Take over our minds, take over my tongue.

Might I be your representative and your spokesman nothing more nothing less nothing else for Jesus sake and thank you Lord in advance in Jesus name I pray amen I'm here this morning because God did an amazing work in my life in the area of marriage.

You know what I'm referring to Been married twice the first time Came to an end sadly It's a life-changing experience as some of you know It can destroy you or it can help you.

In my case, the Lord, this is honestly true, the Lord brought a healing in my life that I would have never expected.

Now I can tell you that part of what Rose did not talk about last evening is how both of us experienced a profound healing that most people would say you never recover from.

In a moment, we walked away from our past.

And we shared a little bit with another person and she said be sure and mention that so we'll talk about that more later this afternoon in appropriate ways.

But God is still in the business of doing miracles.

And back in 1998 both Rose and I came back to Andrews.

My dad taught at Andrews over the course of 60 years, literally from 1942 to 2002.

And a brother here who speaks the language of heaven, le français, on doit le parler, j'espère qu'on va l'employer au ciel un jour.

I just told him in our language that someday we may speak French up in heaven, we should all learn now to be able to speak it there.

But anyway, in 1998, we both came back to Andrews.

And within 2 years, Rose had the very distinct impression, literally, I'm going to marry you someday.

But we did marry, And as you heard last night, God was working a way that you could not make up.

Okay, this was something that was truly of God and I would urge you to listen to the story if you weren't here last night.

And it's interesting when they tested our compatibility, you know, the Preparing in Religion, some of you know that instrument, It looks at your differences and your and your similarities.

We'd only spent 7 hours in person when we really got serious, you know, to the point of talking marriage.

And her mom, Green, when they did that test we answered 83 to 86 percent of the questions identically and they said you know we've never seen scores so high it's because truly I believe it was a God arranged marriage but God also wants to have a God bless marriage and and Just as 90% of overcoming temptation is avoiding temptation, did you hear me?

90% of overcoming temptation is avoiding temptation.

Much of what makes a good marriage is choosing the right person, and we talked about last night, looking for God's needle in God's haystack.

And I suggested that we don't know what that needle looks like.

And then eventually I realized that God was doing something profound.

And in the mercy to me, God allowed me to be naive and ignorant of what was going on during those many years.

But anyway, we finally did get married and we've enjoyed really a wonderful, wonderful marriage.

I can tell you that there's something better than being single and something worse than single, and that's being married.

If it's with the right person, nothing can compare to it, because you're with your best friend all day and all night.

You don't have to go on a date, you don't have to go to a restaurant, you have a date every day and all the day if you want, And it should be that way.

Why not have a marriage that you look forward to coming home?

Frankly, if you could, you'd stay home all day.

I call her, you know, you speak of My better half, that's sometimes a pejorative term.

Men sometimes speak and say, there's my better half at home.

No, I call her my better equal because she is my equal in every sense of the word.

And she knows that I love her and I believe with all my heart that what comes out of our mouth affects what's in our hearts.

And so we need to, you know, if you have a garden and you want plants, what do you do?

You cover it up with black plastic, right?

And you sneak pesticide underneath all the time, right?

No, you open it to the sunshine, you weed it, you give it good nutrients, and if you want a good marriage, you praise your wife, you love your wife, you do things with your wife, you do stuff for your husband.

And that's where a good marriage comes from, not by criticizing and trying to remake their lives.

Because we've all been made with an individuality, an identity that is ours and belongs to God.

And no 1 has a right to try and change that.

And so the great challenge in marriage, which is what we'll talk about this afternoon, is how do you blend 2 different individuals?

And that's called the work of a lifetime.

When you get married, you enter into a school that you never really get out of, right?

But it becomes wonderful to see how God can bring you together.

You know, when you've prepared and then suddenly someone comes along and says, well, actually I'm going to change all of that, and you kind of take a deep breath and say, well, I guess she's the woman, she has the right to do that.

And eventually you come to so respect that sure, sure.

And so we'd like to suggest this afternoon that marriage is amazing.

I know that there's some people who are not convinced that they want marriage because there's so many examples of bad marriages or poor marriages or less than ideal marriages.

But I want to tell you that I believe good marriages, happy marriages, productive marriages should be the rule, not the exception, because Ellen White also says that the strongest witness, bar none, stronger than anything your pastor might say is a happy family.

And so it's not something you're going to experience by running to this church or that church, and I just need to find a nice person.

I can't find in my own church, so I'll go to the Baptist church down the road.

No, it's where you look for God's needle in God's haystack.

You don't know what the needle looks like, and you don't know where the haystack is, but God knows both.

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Series

The God-Arranged and Blessed Marriage

Let Her Be the One

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

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