God's Plan For Marriage Series

God’s Plan for the Home (Part One)

Text: 1st Corinthians 7:25 – 31

So today, I’m going to start a three part series titled, “God’s Plan for the Home.” And I’m specifically going to focus on marriage… and so if you’re here, and maybe you’re not married yet… or you’re here and you’re widowed… or for whatever reason you’re not married, don’t think this isn’t for you. Because all the things in Scripture are profitable for all who hear it.

So let me start by asking you a question… How long do you think a marriage should last? Well… “till death do us part right? I mean that might be 30 years, that might be 50 or 60 years right?”

Well what would you think if I told you that your marriage isn’t going to last very long? Now let me clarify that by adding something to it. Your marriage isn’t going to last very long when you compare it to how long eternity is. Now have you ever thought about how long eternity is? Or what it even means that people are going to be spending eternity in either heaven or hell? And I know… a lot of people don’t like to hear that there’s a hell. We all like to hear about heaven, and how awesome it’s going to be… but if we’re going to believe the Bible, then we can’t pick and choose to believe in only the parts we like and neglect the parts we don’t like? Heaven is real… but so is hell… and people are going to be spending all of eternity in one or the other. And when you start to look at things… and you realize that this is real… that this is really going to happen… that people really will spend all of eternity in one of those places. It starts to change how you look at things. And it changes how you approach things, and how you view things, and it changes what’s important to you. And you can tell a lot about what a person believes by looking at what’s important in their lives. You know… what they give their time to, and their efforts to. And when you get this perspective… you know… that heaven and hell are real… not just some abstract principles we read about in the Bible… but actual, real places… and that eternity is forever. It even changes how you look at marriage, and the family.

You see; when God blessed me with a wife… and then with children my focus shifted. A lot of you know that right after I got out of the army, a lot of my ministry was focused on street evangelism… some of you have heard my testimony or you’ve heard me talk about it. But once I got married, and then after my girls were born, my focus shifted. The priority of my ministry shifted to my family first and foremost. Because I love my family… and I understood that it would be unloving to my family to not prepare them for the reality of eternity.

Ok, pastor Ken… how do you do that? How do you do “being married” biblically? And how do you raise kids biblically? And how do you build your home biblical?

Well MariJo and I have been married for 17 years, and I love my wife more than ever. And we have a good marriage… and it’s because we learned this key component to marriage early on. We value our marriage… but we also understand it’s proper place in God’s plan.

Turn with me to 1st Corinthians 7:25 – 31 (READ)

Now the Apostle Paul wrote that… he’s also the exact same guy who wrote Ephesians 5… You know Ephesians 5:22 – 28… Let’s read that really quickly (READ).

When you read those two passages, you might think that they contradict one another if you don’t understand what Paul’s saying in them. You know… what’s that mean to live like you’re not married… but at the same time submit to your husband, and husbands love your wife as Christ loves the Church?

You see; most the teaching we hear on the subject of marriage will focus on those verses in Ephesians 5, but when we do that, we’re missing out on the full counsel of God’s Word on the subject of marriage. The Biblical teaching on marriage actually runs all through Scripture… all the way from Genesis to Revelation. And we want to focus in on just these verses in Ephesians.

But hows that working out for the Church? How’s it working out for God’s people… that we’ve focused just on these few verses in Ephesians? I mean within Christianity today families fall apart at an equal rate as non-Christian families… Husbands neglect their wives… wives disrespect their husbands. Kids are disobedient to their parents. We’ve seen the statistics… kids leave the Church at an alarming rate… I mean, Ken Ham lays it out in detail in his book Already Gone.