Restoration 2015:  Do You Mind...??

<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>

Restoration Ministry

Biblical Relationships  (Afternoon meetings)

Chad Kreuzer

Overcoming the Myths of Marriage

Fadia Kreuzer

Preparing to Tie the Knot (Part 1)

Preparing to Tie the Knot (Part 2)

We're going to be talking about the mind, but we're beginning this seminar, at least the morning meetings, we're going to be talking about marriage.

How many of you have ever seen a marriage that you thought, that is a beautiful marriage.

I would love to have a marriage like that someday.

How many of you have seen a marriage where if you thought about it you'd say, I want to make sure I never get married and have a life like that.

What do you think you see more of of the 2?

The second 1 someone said, well, hopefully we can prepare that we can find principles and not just principles because facts only bring us so far, but hopefully we can actually begin to live a life that would prepare us to be people who could live a beautiful marriage.

And before we begin talking about that, I just ask that you bow your heads with me for 1 more word of prayer.

Heavenly Father, we thank you for the time together.

Lord, as we break the physical bread and the spiritual bread, I pray that your Holy Spirit would guide us, that your presence would teach us, and that we would see Jesus.

How many of you have heard, I'm sure most of you, how many of you have heard of Socrates?

And he came up with what we kind of consider the Socratic method, you know, discovering things by asking questions.

He was 1 of the men who helped us discover what we would call epistemology, where you discover why you believe what you believe.

And when you look through history, I believe that you see a lot of times down through history, people had a false conception of what true marriage is all about, even Socrates.

Now Socrates, though, he said something that I think was kind of a half-truth in a way.

There's some truth to it, but he said something very interesting.

He said, if you find a good spouse, you will become happy.

If you find a bad 1, you will become a philosopher.

So maybe this is a little insight into why he became what he became, right?

But his idea, the idea that if you find the right person, it will make you happy, does this bear out in modern life?

They did an actual study in Germany from about 1984 to 1995.

So about an 11 year study of 24, 000 German citizens, both in East and West Germany.

And what they tried to discover was how much happiness do you actually receive from getting married?

So looking at these 24, 000 people, this is a significant amount of people, after looking and after studying and finding out, okay, what was it like before, what was it like after, what they discovered was that if you were happy before you got married, you were happy after you got married.

That in general, marriage didn't really change people's happiness, the levels of happiness.

So Socrates said if you find a good spouse it will make you happy, right?

And it doesn't seem that true happiness is found in another human being.

Now this is what we all kind of hope for, I think in general.

I mean, we see it on the movies, we see it on the television, we read about it.

And in life, our thought process is that, Listen, marriage is actually going to make me happy.

I'm not here to be a downer and, oh no, marriage is terrible and it's not a good thing.

No, actually, marriage can be a real blessing, but the reality of marriage is that in order to have a happy marriage, you want to become a happy person before you get married.

You want to become a person who can actually have happiness in singlehood and also a person that can make another individual happy.

That sounds kind of obvious and you haven't learned very much, but the reality is is that we realize, okay, if we're gonna if we're gonna be somebody who has a happy marriage, if typically when you see 2 unhappy people come together, 2 broken people coming together trying to be fulfilled in the other, we don't actually find what we're looking for.

So we look all the way back to ancient times, you know, to 400 plus years before Christ to Socrates, and we see that he had somewhat of a misconception of marriage.

We come down to even the disciples themselves.

If you have a Bible, I don't expect you to have 1, but I'd encourage you if you do have a Bible to bring 1 with you in the future.

In Matthew chapter 19, Jesus is, He's there with his disciples, but there's also this group of people known as the Pharisees.

Now the Pharisees were an interesting group of people.

They would have, if you would have seen the Pharisees in Jesus' day, you would have thought by looking at them that they were the most spiritual, religious people.

Because they lived lives that were just almost perfect to the outward eye.

They lived a very high religious, you know, at least on an outward perspective, they lived very religious lives.

And so they were not thought of Like we typically, we look at them and we think, man, those people were terrible.

And really, they did have hard hearts, but they looked wonderful on the outside.

And they had a question for Jesus in verse 3 of Matthew chapter 19.

It says, the Pharisees also came unto Him, tempting Him and saying unto him, is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause?

They wanted to know, Jesus, is it okay to let go of your wife for any reason?

And because to them, they lived in a time where, you know, if your wife, I don't know, maybe cooked your, I don't know, they would eat clean food so they wouldn't have sausage in the morning, but you know, cooked your lamb in the morning and it wasn't good enough, okay, I don't want to be with you anymore.

And then Jesus says, no, no, no, you shouldn't just get divorced for any reason.

And so the disciples hear this and they have a very strange response to him.

They see this whole situation, they see this kind of debate going on between the Pharisees and Jesus, and notice what the disciples thought.

Now these are the guys we think of as, you know, Saint Peter, right?

These are the, you know, John, the wonderful, the beloved John.

Notice their response when they heard this situation.

It says down in verse 10, his disciples said to him, if this is the case with the man and his wife, it is better not to get married." They said, if you can't just boot her to the curb for any old reason, maybe we just shouldn't even get married.

Marriage isn't what I thought it should be.

So now we have this ancient idea that marriage is gonna make you happy, the disciples have this funny perspective.

And the early church, you had this situation where the early church began to think that things like sex and marriage were really actually kind of innately evil.

And so they thought at best that, you know, let me see here, I kind of wrote 1 of the, Augustine said, Marital intercourse makes something good out of the evil of lust.

So his perspective was that, okay, you know, marital intercourse makes something good out of the evil of lust.

Now this, once again, is a false conception of marriage.

That actually marriage and being with your wife is actually an evil thing, but God somehow sanctifies the evil.

The Bible actually tells us in the book of Hebrews that the marriage bed is undefiled, that God made marriage to be a blessing, Something that could sustain the happiness of life, not necessarily in general create happiness but that's something that we should already have.

We should already found this experience of joy and peace and happiness before we entered into it but it could enhance those things to some capacity.

So you see that through history there has been a false conception of marriage and then there's obviously the modern Disney kind of idea of what marriage is like and there's a there's a little phrase that's used over and over in modern society, just follow your what?

You can never go wrong if you just follow your heart.

Now there is a little bit of truth to that.

I mean, it's not totally wrong, but in actuality, If we in all things follow our heart, we many times find that we find unhappiness.

We don't find what we were actually looking for.

You know, 1 of my friends, I think of him as a philosopher.

Back to Menu

Series

Biblical Relationships (Afternoon meetings)

Overcoming the Myths of Marriage

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Love and Marriage

1h 4m

Three Essentials for a Strong Marriage

1h 2m

Restoring the Home

03 Biblical Principles for Marriage

1h 4m

Kickstarter Series '15-'16

A Match Made on Earth

39m

Family Communications

2 - Husbands and Wives

27m

The Great Decision: Who Should I Marry?

1h 19m

Relationships and Family Life

My ‘Single’ Desire

1h 24m

Singleness, Dating, and Relationships in the Church

How to Pray for A Godly Spouse

45m

May I Brush Your Hair: Making Your Marriage a Priority

1h 3m

Bible’s Love Stories- Part 1

49m

God's Love Stories (Noon Meetings)

10. Doing Right

43m

Sound Doctrine