Emmanuel Baptist Church of Nipawin Sermons

This morning, as we continue to work through our series on the biggest story ever told, we are going to be speaking about the law.

Most people know that there are laws in the Bible. Many people are familiar with the Ten Commandments, even less of us can name all ten the way we could a generation or two ago.

But let’s face it: for many Christians, the law is a perplexing thing. The word “law” itself sounds kind of negative or at least heavy. Many people who try to read through the Bible get bogged down in the law and never try again.

But on top of this, many Christians struggle with how the law applies to our lives today. We know that we don’t need to sacrifice animals anymore or worship in the temple, but what about those other laws? Are we allowed to work on Sundays? Does God expect Christians to tithe? What is our relationship with the Old Testament law?

Those are the kinds of question we’ll be digging into over these next two weeks as we talk about the law and our relationship with it and how it is that New Covenant Christians are supposed to pursue holiness.

The Law of Moses Belonged to the Covenant

So we want to clarify up front that when we use the phrase “the law,” we are talking about the law of Moses. The law that God gave His people on Mount Sinai after leading them out go Egypt.

God had given instruction to His people before. Adam and Noah and Abraham all receives commands from God. But that all pales in comparison to the chapters and chapters of instruction and commands and regulations that God gave to Israel.

And not surprisingly, when the Bible uses the word “law,” both in the Old and New testaments, it is almost always speaking about the law of Moses.

What we should recognize is that the law of Moses didn’t just fall from the sky. All of the commands and regulations were a part of the covenant that God made with Israel.

And we should remember that God made that covenant, and gave them that law, after He rescued them from Egypt and brought them to Himself. God didn’t give Moses the law the first time they met on Mt. Sinai in the burning bush, so that Moses came into Egypt saying “God wants to set us free, but first, here are the Ten Commandments.”

No—God saved His people and then brought them back to Himself at Mt. Sinai and entered into covenant with them there. And the law came as a part of that covenant.

So the law was never a way to earn God’s grace. The law was how Israel responded to God’s grace. And it did that by showing Israel how they, in their particular setting and place in the story, could best love God and love each other.

So this is our first big point this morning. The law was a part of God’s covenant with Israel. The law belonged to the Old Covenant.

The Law Is About Jesus

The second major point we want to see this morning is that the Law of Moses was actually all about Jesus all along.

This shouldn’t be a surprise to us. On the very first week of this series we read these words of Jesus from Luke 24: “Then he said to them, ‘These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.’ Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, and said to them, ‘Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem’” (Luke 24:44–47).

So according to Jesus, the Law of Moses was always about Him. Jesus is the main character of the Bible, including the first five books. The law is about Jesus.

So how does this work? How does the law point to Jesus? Let’s consider two ways.

1) The Law Shows Us Sin

First, the law points to Jesus by showing us our sin. And the history of Israel bears this out. Even with all of the threats and promises of the Mosaic covenant, nobody was able to perfectly keep the law. The law just showed them how sinful they actually were.

And according to Scripture, this was a part of the point. God gave us the law to highlight our sin. Romans 3:20 tells us this: “For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.” 

And Romans 7:7 shows us how this works: “What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’”

So the law’s commands show us what sin actually is. And that’s why, in 2 Corinthians 3, Paul actually refers to the giving of the law as “the ministry of death” and “the ministry of condemnation” (2 Corinthians 3:7, 9). That’s what the law did: it showed us our sin and condemned us to death.

Without the law, we wouldn’t know how deep our sin was and how much we actually needed a saviour. If you want to know how much you need Jesus to save you, just read the Ten Commandments. That’s actually a great way to help someone else understand how much they need Jesus to save them.

So the law points to Jesus by showing us how much we need Him to save us.

2) The Law Prepares Us for Christ

But more than this, the law shows us what kind of a saviour Jesus will be.  The whole system of priests and animal sacrifices was put in place to teach us about what kind of a saviour Jesus would be, so that when John the Baptist said “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29) we know what he meant.

The law gave us pictures of Jesus so that we would recognize Him when He came.

The book of Hebrews puts it this way: “the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities” (Hebrews 10:1).

Have you ever been in a room, and there’s a light shining from outside of the room, and someone you know begins to walk into the room, and you see their shadow before you actually see them? 

That’s what’s going on in the law. As we read the first five book so the Bible, we are seeing shadows being cast by Jesus before He actually walks into the room.

And so the big idea once again is that the law was given to prepare us for Jesus. 

Paul summed up this idea in Galatians 3:23-24: “Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith.”

That word “guardian” is really important. It comes from a Greek word that can also be translated as “schoolmaster” or “instructor,” and it referred to a specific job that higher-class families would give to one of their trustworthy slaves. His job was to watch over the boys of that household, supervising and teaching them on how they were to live. And he literally followed them around everywhere they went until the day they became men.

And that’s what the law was. All those centuries between Moses and Jesus, God’s people were being tutored by the law that followed them around everywhere they went. They were being shown their sin and taught about their saviour and prepared for the coming of Christ.

The Law Is Fulfilled by Jesus

And then Christ came. And He was everything the law said He would be, and He did everything the law said He would do. Jesus fulfilled the law.

Jesus Himself told us this when He said “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Matthew 5:17).

That word “abolish” comes from the idea of tearing down a building. And Jesus told the people that He hadn’t come to tear down the law as if it didn’t matter. Instead, He came to fulfill the law by completing it and doing all that it promised.

In other words, Jesus didn’t come to shred the check. He came to cash it.

He did that in so many ways. In His life, He kept the law perfectly. He never broke it once. And beyond this, He fulfilled all of the types and shadows of the law. He is the temple, and the high priest, and the One who makes His people holy to the Lord.

And He is the ultimate sacrifice. As He died on Calvary, all of the curse of the law for the sins of His people came to rest on Him. “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree’” (Galatians 3:13).

And so when Jesus walked out of His grave that Sunday morning, He walked out having perfectly satisfied and fulfilled the law in every possible way.

Christians Are Not Under the Law

And so we come to one of the most important points for us to make today, which is this: as members of the New Covenant, who have been saved by the death and resurrection of Jesus, we are no longer under the law of Moses. The law of Moses has been fulfilled by Christ, and so we are no longer a part of that covenant. We are a part of the New Covenant, and we do not live under the law of Moses.

Listen to this full quotation from Galatians 3:23-26: “Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith.”

Now that Christ has come, we are no longer under the guardianship of the law. Just like those Greek and Roman boys, we’ve reached full maturity in Christ, and the guardian is no longer following us around.

And this is the consistent message of the New Testament: we are no longer under the law. Romans 10:4: “For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.” Ephesians 2:14–15: “For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances…”

Colossians 2:13-17 is another important passage which I’ll read for us here: “And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him. Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.”

Questions of food and drink, festivals and new moons and Sabbaths—those are all elements of the law. And Paul says here that because of the triumph of Jesus on the cross, we are no longer to be judged by that standard. Those commands do not apply to us anymore.

And one of the clearest statements of this truth is the passage from Romans 7 which we read together earlier. 

If you turn to Romans 7 or look at it in your bulletin, you’ll see that in the first three verses Paul makes a comparison to marriage. If two people come together in the covenant of marriage, they are bound to that marriage as long as they live. But if one of them dies, the surviving partner is freed from that covenant and able to be married to another.

So verse 4 says, “Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God.”

Do you hear what Paul is saying here? Yes, we’ve broken the law, and yes, we’re condemned to death under the law, but Jesus died our death for us when He died on the cross. And so legally, before the law, it’s as if we’ve already died. And so that means we are released from the Old Covenant. And we are released from the law.

That’s what verse 6 tells us: “But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code.”

Please hear again those wonderful words: we are released from the law. We no longer have these commandments and threats and warnings hanging over our head and following us around wherever we go. We are a part of the New Covenant in Christ and we are no longer under the law.

Can We Do Whatever We Want?

So, there’s a question that some of you might be asking now: if we’re no longer under the law, does that mean we’re free to do what we want? If there’s no law, then what’s stopping us from lying and murdering and cheating and stealing?

The Apostle Paul anticipated that question in Romans 6:15, when he said, “What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace?” And Paul’s answer” “By no means!” (Romans 6:15). May it never be.

We have been freed from the law, but we are not free to sin. We’ve been freed so that we can serve God in righteousness. Just like Romans 7:6 tells us, we’ve been set free “so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code.”

Now what we’re going to do the rest of today and then all of next week is try to answer this question, “How does that work? How do we serve and obey God now that we are not under the law?”

And this is a question that many Christians really struggle with. We get the idea of obeying laws. It’s harder for us to understand how to serve God and please Him apart from the law. It’s tough for us to wrap our heads around this.

And so many Christians default to just going back to the law, or at least a part of the law.

One way people do that is by saying that there are actually three parts to the law of Moses. There’s the ceremonial law, which dealt with all of the temple regulations and sacrifices. And then there was the civil law, which talked about capital punishment and how the legal system of Israel was supposed to work. And then there is the moral law, which talked about the more basic things that all of us should follow, like “do not murder” and “do not steal.” In other words, the Ten Commandments.

And so what people say is that Jesus set us free from the ceremonial law and civil law, but not the moral law. That part is still binding on us. So we Christians don’t need to offer sacrifices, and we don’t deal out the death sentence here at EBC, but we’re still bound by the commands not to lie or steal.

Please understand: splitting the law of Moses up into three parts isn’t biblical. And there’s a whole list of scholars in recent years who have recognized this. According to the Bible itself, there’s just one law. And we’re not under any of it.

But when we read through the New Testament, it’s pretty clear that we’re not supposed to lie and murder and steal. And the New Testament authors, including Paul Himself, will even quote from the law to make their point sometimes. So what’s going on here?

Please follow me closely here—I’m going to do my best to explain this: God is a righteous God. Certain things are contrary to His nature. Lying, murdering, stealing—all of these things go against the righteousness of God. And God Himself does not change, even if the covenants do.

A way to wrap our heads around this is to think of something like murder. Murder goes against the righteousness of God. It was always wrong, even before the Law of Moses. Which is why God punished Cain for murdering Abel, long before the Ten Commandments were around.

And then in God’s covenant with Noah, God gave some basic regulations about murder. And finally in the covenant with Israel, in the law, they had a lot of regulations about murder.

But those laws were simply an expression of the unchanging righteousness of God as it applied to the nation of Israel in their particular spot in history.

And so for us today, we are not under that covenant, that law, but God’s righteousness is still the same. The things which were wrong before the law of Moses are certainly still wrong for us today.

And so there are many things in the law of Moses which point back to this unchanging righteousness of God. And so they are still relevant and important for us today, even though we are not under the law of Moses itself.

With that being said, there are other parts of the law of Moses which were unique to Israel at their specific spot in the story with their specific mission in the world at that time.

For some examples, let’s return to Colossians 2:16-17: “Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.”

Paul here specifically mentions the food and drink laws, the festivals, and the Sabbath. These were things that God did not command before the law of Moses. God told Noah to eat any animal he wanted—there was no clean and unclean food laws in that covenant (Genesis 9:3).

Rather, the food and the drink laws, and the festivals and the Sabbath were a specific part of the covenant with Israel and had a specific role in being a shadowy portrayal of Jesus. But now that we’ve been made holy in Jesus, now that we’ve seen the fulfillment of the festivals and the Sabbath in Christ who gives us rest, these shadows are not needed anymore.

We can still learn from the law on these things. Resting one day in seven is a really good idea. We can still learn so much from the law. But we’re not under it in the same way as they were in the Old Covenant.

Let’s consider one more example of this: tithing. Bringing 10% of your income and crops to the priests and Levites was a part of the Old Covenant law. And we are no longer under that law.

Instead, the New Testament tells us things like this: “Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver” (2 Corinthians 9:7). Now with that being said, many New Covenant christians, including myself, find that 10% makes a really good baseline for giving. We can learn from the law in this way. But that’s different then tithing because we are under that law, which we are not. 

Applying the Law Today

So I hope you’re seeing a pattern emerge here. Even though we are not under the law, the law can continue to help and instruct us and be very valuable to us. As we read the law, we not only learn more about ourselves, and about Jesus, but we also see what it looked like for God’s people to be righteous at that point in the story and with their particular mission. And there’s so much for us to learn from here and now today.

So please, don’t hear me saying this morning “the law is irrelevant. You can just ignore the first five books of the Bible.” That’s not what I’m saying at all.

This past year I’ve spent a lot of time in the first five books of the Bible. I took a seminary class in the fall on these five books, and so had to read hundreds of pages and write dozens of my own about these amazing books. And before that, I spent several months reading through those books slowly in my morning devotional time, using the ESV Study Bible to help me understand what I was reading and how it all fits together. And that was hugely beneficial.

And you might not be able to take the seminary class, but you can pick up an ESV study Bible online or from the NBC bookstore, and use those study notes to guide you through the law of Moses. I guarantee you, things will make so much more sense then struggling away on your own, and you’ll learn so much. And most importantly, you’ll see more of Jesus.

And that, believe it or not, is one of my main points of application in this sermon that has told you that you are not under the law: don’t ignore the law. God gave it to Israel on purpose and there’s so much for us to learn from here and now today.

And, not but, and: rejoice that we are not under the law. Rejoice that Christ fulfilled the law perfectly. Rejoice that we are not under the guardian but enjoy freedom as sons of God.

Galatians 5:1 speaks about the law when it says, “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1). 

Now remember that this morning’s message is “to be continued” in many ways. Next week we’re going to pick up on this idea, and ask the question, what does it look like to “serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code” (Romans 7:6)?

And so you can prepare for that by reading two key passages that we’ll be considering next week. The first is Romans 8:1-13, and the second is Galatians 5:13-24.

And reading those passages will help answer some of your questions and prepare you to dig in with us next week.

But we’re going to end now by singing and celebrating Jesus. Our high priest, our sacrifice, the one who fulfilled the law. The one who lived the perfect life for us and died to set us free from the law and in whom we are free today.

Let’s pray and then praise Him together.

This morning, as we continue to work through our series on the biggest story ever told, we are going to be speaking about the law.

Most people know that there are laws in the Bible. Many people are familiar with the Ten Commandments, even less of us can name all ten the way we could a generation or two ago.

But let’s face it: for many Christians, the law is a perplexing thing. The word “law” itself sounds kind of negative or at least heavy. Many people who try to read through the Bible get bogged down in the law and never try again.

But on top of this, many Christians struggle with how the law applies to our lives today. We know that we don’t need to sacrifice animals anymore or worship in the temple, but what about those other laws? Are we allowed to work on Sundays? Does God expect Christians to tithe? What is our relationship with the Old Testament law?

Those are the kinds of question we’ll be digging into over these next two weeks as we talk about the law and our relationship with it and how it is that New Covenant Christians are supposed to pursue holiness.

The Law of Moses Belonged to the Covenant

So we want to clarify up front that when we use the phrase “the law,” we are talking about the law of Moses. The law that God gave His people on Mount Sinai after leading them out go Egypt.

God had given instruction to His people before. Adam and Noah and Abraham all receives commands from God. But that all pales in comparison to the chapters and chapters of instruction and commands and regulations that God gave to Israel.

And not surprisingly, when the Bible uses the word “law,” both in the Old and New testaments, it is almost always speaking about the law of Moses.

What we should recognize is that the law of Moses didn’t just fall from the sky. All of the commands and regulations were a part of the covenant that God made with Israel.

And we should remember that God made that covenant, and gave them that law, after He rescued them from Egypt and brought them to Himself. God didn’t give Moses the law the first time they met on Mt. Sinai in the burning bush, so that Moses came into Egypt saying “God wants to set us free, but first, here are the Ten Commandments.”

No—God saved His people and then brought them back to Himself at Mt. Sinai and entered into covenant with them there. And the law came as a part of that covenant.

So the law was never a way to earn God’s grace. The law was how Israel responded to God’s grace. And it did that by showing Israel how they, in their particular setting and place in the story, could best love God and love each other.

So this is our first big point this morning. The law was a part of God’s covenant with Israel. The law belonged to the Old Covenant.

The Law Is About Jesus

The second major point we want to see this morning is that the Law of Moses was actually all about Jesus all along.

This shouldn’t be a surprise to us. On the very first week of this series we read these words of Jesus from Luke 24: “Then he said to them, ‘These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.’ Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, and said to them, ‘Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem’” (Luke 24:44–47).

So according to Jesus, the Law of Moses was always about Him. Jesus is the main character of the Bible, including the first five books. The law is about Jesus.

So how does this work? How does the law point to Jesus? Let’s consider two ways.

1) The Law Shows Us Sin

First, the law points to Jesus by showing us our sin. And the history of Israel bears this out. Even with all of the threats and promises of the Mosaic covenant, nobody was able to perfectly keep the law. The law just showed them how sinful they actually were.

And according to Scripture, this was a part of the point. God gave us the law to highlight our sin. Romans 3:20 tells us this: “For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.” 

And Romans 7:7 shows us how this works: “What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’”

So the law’s commands show us what sin actually is. And that’s why, in 2 Corinthians 3, Paul actually refers to the giving of the law as “the ministry of death” and “the ministry of condemnation” (2 Corinthians 3:7, 9). That’s what the law did: it showed us our sin and condemned us to death.

Without the law, we wouldn’t know how deep our sin was and how much we actually needed a saviour. If you want to know how much you need Jesus to save you, just read the Ten Commandments. That’s actually a great way to help someone else understand how much they need Jesus to save them.

So the law points to Jesus by showing us how much we need Him to save us.

2) The Law Prepares Us for Christ

But more than this, the law shows us what kind of a saviour Jesus will be.  The whole system of priests and animal sacrifices was put in place to teach us about what kind of a saviour Jesus would be, so that when John the Baptist said “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29) we know what he meant.

The law gave us pictures of Jesus so that we would recognize Him when He came.

The book of Hebrews puts it this way: “the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities” (Hebrews 10:1).

Have you ever been in a room, and there’s a light shining from outside of the room, and someone you know begins to walk into the room, and you see their shadow before you actually see them? 

That’s what’s going on in the law. As we read the first five book so the Bible, we are seeing shadows being cast by Jesus before He actually walks into the room.

And so the big idea once again is that the law was given to prepare us for Jesus. 

Paul summed up this idea in Galatians 3:23-24: “Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith.”

That word “guardian” is really important. It comes from a Greek word that can also be translated as “schoolmaster” or “instructor,” and it referred to a specific job that higher-class families would give to one of their trustworthy slaves. His job was to watch over the boys of that household, supervising and teaching them on how they were to live. And he literally followed them around everywhere they went until the day they became men.

And that’s what the law was. All those centuries between Moses and Jesus, God’s people were being tutored by the law that followed them around everywhere they went. They were being shown their sin and taught about their saviour and prepared for the coming of Christ.

The Law Is Fulfilled by Jesus

And then Christ came. And He was everything the law said He would be, and He did everything the law said He would do. Jesus fulfilled the law.

Jesus Himself told us this when He said “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Matthew 5:17).

That word “abolish” comes from the idea of tearing down a building. And Jesus told the people that He hadn’t come to tear down the law as if it didn’t matter. Instead, He came to fulfill the law by completing it and doing all that it promised.

In other words, Jesus didn’t come to shred the check. He came to cash it.

He did that in so many ways. In His life, He kept the law perfectly. He never broke it once. And beyond this, He fulfilled all of the types and shadows of the law. He is the temple, and the high priest, and the One who makes His people holy to the Lord.

And He is the ultimate sacrifice. As He died on Calvary, all of the curse of the law for the sins of His people came to rest on Him. “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree’” (Galatians 3:13).

And so when Jesus walked out of His grave that Sunday morning, He walked out having perfectly satisfied and fulfilled the law in every possible way.

Christians Are Not Under the Law

And so we come to one of the most important points for us to make today, which is this: as members of the New Covenant, who have been saved by the death and resurrection of Jesus, we are no longer under the law of Moses. The law of Moses has been fulfilled by Christ, and so we are no longer a part of that covenant. We are a part of the New Covenant, and we do not live under the law of Moses.

Listen to this full quotation from Galatians 3:23-26: “Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith.”

Now that Christ has come, we are no longer under the guardianship of the law. Just like those Greek and Roman boys, we’ve reached full maturity in Christ, and the guardian is no longer following us around.

And this is the consistent message of the New Testament: we are no longer under the law. Romans 10:4: “For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.” Ephesians 2:14–15: “For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances…”

Colossians 2:13-17 is another important passage which I’ll read for us here: “And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him. Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.”

Questions of food and drink, festivals and new moons and Sabbaths—those are all elements of the law. And Paul says here that because of the triumph of Jesus on the cross, we are no longer to be judged by that standard. Those commands do not apply to us anymore.

And one of the clearest statements of this truth is the passage from Romans 7 which we read together earlier. 

If you turn to Romans 7 or look at it in your bulletin, you’ll see that in the first three verses Paul makes a comparison to marriage. If two people come together in the covenant of marriage, they are bound to that marriage as long as they live. But if one of them dies, the surviving partner is freed from that covenant and able to be married to another.

So verse 4 says, “Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God.”

Do you hear what Paul is saying here? Yes, we’ve broken the law, and yes, we’re condemned to death under the law, but Jesus died our death for us when He died on the cross. And so legally, before the law, it’s as if we’ve already died. And so that means we are released from the Old Covenant. And we are released from the law.

That’s what verse 6 tells us: “But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code.”

Please hear again those wonderful words: we are released from the law. We no longer have these commandments and threats and warnings hanging over our head and following us around wherever we go. We are a part of the New Covenant in Christ and we are no longer under the law.

Can We Do Whatever We Want?

So, there’s a question that some of you might be asking now: if we’re no longer under the law, does that mean we’re free to do what we want? If there’s no law, then what’s stopping us from lying and murdering and cheating and stealing?

The Apostle Paul anticipated that question in Romans 6:15, when he said, “What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace?” And Paul’s answer” “By no means!” (Romans 6:15). May it never be.

We have been freed from the law, but we are not free to sin. We’ve been freed so that we can serve God in righteousness. Just like Romans 7:6 tells us, we’ve been set free “so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code.”

Now what we’re going to do the rest of today and then all of next week is try to answer this question, “How does that work? How do we serve and obey God now that we are not under the law?”

And this is a question that many Christians really struggle with. We get the idea of obeying laws. It’s harder for us to understand how to serve God and please Him apart from the law. It’s tough for us to wrap our heads around this.

And so many Christians default to just going back to the law, or at least a part of the law.

One way people do that is by saying that there are actually three parts to the law of Moses. There’s the ceremonial law, which dealt with all of the temple regulations and sacrifices. And then there was the civil law, which talked about capital punishment and how the legal system of Israel was supposed to work. And then there is the moral law, which talked about the more basic things that all of us should follow, like “do not murder” and “do not steal.” In other words, the Ten Commandments.

And so what people say is that Jesus set us free from the ceremonial law and civil law, but not the moral law. That part is still binding on us. So we Christians don’t need to offer sacrifices, and we don’t deal out the death sentence here at EBC, but we’re still bound by the commands not to lie or steal.

Please understand: splitting the law of Moses up into three parts isn’t biblical. And there’s a whole list of scholars in recent years who have recognized this. According to the Bible itself, there’s just one law. And we’re not under any of it.

But when we read through the New Testament, it’s pretty clear that we’re not supposed to lie and murder and steal. And the New Testament authors, including Paul Himself, will even quote from the law to make their point sometimes. So what’s going on here?

Please follow me closely here—I’m going to do my best to explain this: God is a righteous God. Certain things are contrary to His nature. Lying, murdering, stealing—all of these things go against the righteousness of God. And God Himself does not change, even if the covenants do.

A way to wrap our heads around this is to think of something like murder. Murder goes against the righteousness of God. It was always wrong, even before the Law of Moses. Which is why God punished Cain for murdering Abel, long before the Ten Commandments were around.

And then in God’s covenant with Noah, God gave some basic regulations about murder. And finally in the covenant with Israel, in the law, they had a lot of regulations about murder.

But those laws were simply an expression of the unchanging righteousness of God as it applied to the nation of Israel in their particular spot in history.

And so for us today, we are not under that covenant, that law, but God’s righteousness is still the same. The things which were wrong before the law of Moses are certainly still wrong for us today.

And so there are many things in the law of Moses which point back to this unchanging righteousness of God. And so they are still relevant and important for us today, even though we are not under the law of Moses itself.

With that being said, there are other parts of the law of Moses which were unique to Israel at their specific spot in the story with their specific mission in the world at that time.

For some examples, let’s return to Colossians 2:16-17: “Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.”

Paul here specifically mentions the food and drink laws, the festivals, and the Sabbath. These were things that God did not command before the law of Moses. God told Noah to eat any animal he wanted—there was no clean and unclean food laws in that covenant (Genesis 9:3).

Rather, the food and the drink laws, and the festivals and the Sabbath were a specific part of the covenant with Israel and had a specific role in being a shadowy portrayal of Jesus. But now that we’ve been made holy in Jesus, now that we’ve seen the fulfillment of the festivals and the Sabbath in Christ who gives us rest, these shadows are not needed anymore.

We can still learn from the law on these things. Resting one day in seven is a really good idea. We can still learn so much from the law. But we’re not under it in the same way as they were in the Old Covenant.

Let’s consider one more example of this: tithing. Bringing 10% of your income and crops to the priests and Levites was a part of the Old Covenant law. And we are no longer under that law.

Instead, the New Testament tells us things like this: “Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver” (2 Corinthians 9:7). Now with that being said, many New Covenant christians, including myself, find that 10% makes a really good baseline for giving. We can learn from the law in this way. But that’s different then tithing because we are under that law, which we are not. 

Applying the Law Today

So I hope you’re seeing a pattern emerge here. Even though we are not under the law, the law can continue to help and instruct us and be very valuable to us. As we read the law, we not only learn more about ourselves, and about Jesus, but we also see what it looked like for God’s people to be righteous at that point in the story and with their particular mission. And there’s so much for us to learn from here and now today.

So please, don’t hear me saying this morning “the law is irrelevant. You can just ignore the first five books of the Bible.” That’s not what I’m saying at all.

This past year I’ve spent a lot of time in the first five books of the Bible. I took a seminary class in the fall on these five books, and so had to read hundreds of pages and write dozens of my own about these amazing books. And before that, I spent several months reading through those books slowly in my morning devotional time, using the ESV Study Bible to help me understand what I was reading and how it all fits together. And that was hugely beneficial.

And you might not be able to take the seminary class, but you can pick up an ESV study Bible online or from the NBC bookstore, and use those study notes to guide you through the law of Moses. I guarantee you, things will make so much more sense then struggling away on your own, and you’ll learn so much. And most importantly, you’ll see more of Jesus.

And that, believe it or not, is one of my main points of application in this sermon that has told you that you are not under the law: don’t ignore the law. God gave it to Israel on purpose and there’s so much for us to learn from here and now today.

And, not but, and: rejoice that we are not under the law. Rejoice that Christ fulfilled the law perfectly. Rejoice that we are not under the guardian but enjoy freedom as sons of God.

Galatians 5:1 speaks about the law when it says, “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1). 

Now remember that this morning’s message is “to be continued” in many ways. Next week we’re going to pick up on this idea, and ask the question, what does it look like to “serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code” (Romans 7:6)?

And so you can prepare for that by reading two key passages that we’ll be considering next week. The first is Romans 8:1-13, and the second is Galatians 5:13-24.

And reading those passages will help answer some of your questions and prepare you to dig in with us next week.

But we’re going to end now by singing and celebrating Jesus. Our high priest, our sacrifice, the one who fulfilled the law. The one who lived the perfect life for us and died to set us free from the law and in whom we are free today.

Let’s pray and then praise Him together.

Years ago I had some friends who were missionaries in a country where the culture surrounding marriage was very different from Canada. In that country men would often marry women much younger then them, and they viewed their wives as little more than property. And so these missionaries often found themselves teaching seminars to the new believers about the biblical vision for marriage.

So they were doing some of this marriage teaching one weekend, and during a break of the local men came up to ask my friend a question: “Can I beat my wife?” And my friend just wanted to bury his face in his palms, because he’d just been teaching all morning about how husbands needed to cherish and protect and lay their lives down for their wives. And this guy just wasn’t making the connection. So he patiently repeated many of these things to this man, explaining once again how beating your wife has no place in a Christian marriage.

The man stood there, listening thoughtfully. But then when my friend had finished speaking, he asked him one more question: “But what if she needs it?” In other words, “I know everything the Bible says about not beating my wife, but what if she needs it?”

This story has always stuck with me as a perfect example of how our culture conditions us to think a certain way. Our culture trains us to think that certain things are as normal as the air that we breathe. And so when we encounter something in Scripture that is out of step with our culture, it’s very easy for us to just not notice it, or if we do notice it, to not take it very seriously

It takes a lot of work to submit ourselves to Scripture and allow Scripture to reshape the way we think, especially if we’ve been thinking that way our entire life.

In the past several weeks, we’ve been studying how the storyline of the Bible impacts our lives today, and I hope you’ve noticed how many times the truth of Scripture is so very different, so very out of step, with the messages of the Canadian culture that each of us is surrounded by. 

We’ve learned that work is not a necessary evil we need to pay for our weekend hobbies, but instead is the thing we’ve been created for—especially as we think about good works (Ephesians 2:10).

We’ve learned that money and possessions are things we should be very careful with, even suspicious of. Rather than being a sign of God’s blessing, piles of money and stuff will actually pull our hearts away from heaven.

We’ve learned that marriage is not about falling in love and endless romance. Instead, marriage is about work—about the mission. And in the New Covenant, marriage is about putting the gospel on display for others to see.

And last week we heard that just like marriage is a gift, so singleness is also a gift. 1 Corinthians 7 tells us that if someone is able to keep their desire under control, they should seriously consider remaining single and using their singleness for the kingdom of God. In other words, singleness is not a problem to be fixed, but—for many people—it is a privilege to be invested for the Kingdom.

And I know that as we’ve heard these different messages, there’s often something inside of us that says “No, really? That doesn’t feel normal to me.”

But we need to remember that just like that man asking “Can I beat my wife? What if she needs it?”, so also we have each been conditioned to think in certain ways by our culture.

And so when we hear these things from the Bible, it’s tempting to ask “Does this seem right to me? Does this fit with my experiences?” But those are not the kinds of questions we should be asking first. Instead, we should be asking, “Is this in the Bible? Is this clearly what the Bible teaches?” Because if it is what the Bible teaches, then we need to change the way we think, as painful of a process as that can be.

Romans 12:2 describes it this way: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Romans 12:2).

And I hope you know that is an ongoing process. The world is always trying to conform us to itself. And so all of us, no matter what stage of life we’re in, are always in need of further transformation of our minds, further transformation into God’s image. We never get done, this side of heaven.

And so, once again we’re going to turn to God’s word this morning and allow it to renew our minds as we see what the storyline of Scripture has to say about family.

In our Canadian culture today, I think we see two basic kinds of messages about the family. And the first one is that family is everything. I’m sure you’ve heard that phrase before; maybe even seen it hung on someone’s wall. For many Canadians and especially many Canadian Christians, their immediate and extended family relationships are the most important relationships on the planet, and they will do whatever they can to protect and maintain them. Family is everything.

But in the other hand, in much of our culture today, family is under siege. Satan has been hard at work trying to attack God’s design for the family, and we’ve gotten to the point where many people see the traditional family as a negative thing. And so on the one hand we’ve got “family is everything,” and on the other hand we’ve got “family is nothing.”

And in contrast to each of these messages, we need God’s word to speak into our cultural understandings and to shape how you and I think and how we feel.

Family in the Adamic and Abrahamic and Mosaic Covenants

So what does the big storyline of the Bible have to say about family? You might remember that last week we spent a bit of time reviewing how important family was in the covenants God made with Adam and Noah and Israel and David. 

And to understand why, we need to remember that, especially from Abraham onwards, God’s people was an ethnic people group. The literal children of Abraham. The Jewish people.

The way you became a member of God’s people was just to be born into one of those familes. And God had promised to Abraham that He would give Him many, many offspring (Genesis 15:5). 

And that’s why getting married and having babies was so important, because you were participating in the growth of God’s people and the fulfillment of His promises to give Abraham many offspring.

Having babies was further important in the covenant with Israel, because God promised that if they obeyed Him, He would bless the fruit of their womb, and there would be no one barren among them (Deuteronomy 7:14, 28:4). So children were a sign that you had been faithful to the Lord. That’s why Psalm 127:3-5 says “Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one’s youth. Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them!” In that covenant, that was true.

This is also why Samuel’s mother Hannah was so distraught at not being able to bear children (1 Samuel 1:1-20). Here she was, a righteous woman, and yet she was not able to bear children. And it must have seemed like God had just forgotten to keep His promises to her. 

So within the covenants with Abraham and with Israel, when having children was how the people of God grew, and belonging to a family was how you found your place in God’s people, it's safe to say that family pretty much was everything.

Family in the New Covenant

But then Jesus showed up. And there should be no surprise to us by now that Jesus changed things. Jesus challenged the categories and upset the status quo. Jesus announced the arrival of the Kingdom of God, and He established the New Covenant, and within this New Covenant Kingdom, our relationship with family has changed. The very definition of family has changed. And these are the things we’re going to explore this morning.

1. The New Covenant People of God Grows Spiritually, Not Physically

The first truth we’re going to explore is that within the New Covenant, God no longer grows His people primarily through his people having babies. 

This shouldn’t be a surprise to us, because we know that God’s New Covenant people is more than just one single ethnic people group. We Gentiles have been welcomed in (Ephesians 2:11-22), and on the cross Jesus died for people from every tribe, language, people and nation (Revelation 5:9). And so we no longer become a part of the people of God just by being born to the right parents. Instead, people become a part of the people of God as they are born again and are joined to Christ by faith.

We read about this truth together from John 1:11-13: “He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.”

Jesus clarified this truth with Nicodemus in John 3. “Jesus answered him, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God’” (John 3:3). In other words, it’s not good enough to just be born the first time into a particular family. You need to experience the inner, spiritual rebirth through the Holy Spirit. 

Paul speaks about this truth when he writes in Galatians, “…for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith.” (Galatians 3:26). 

This is how God grows His new-covenant people. Now of course, having physical children can still be a very good thing and a very good way to grow God’s kingdom. Not because our kids are automatically a part of God’s New Covenant people, but because we get years with them to teach and instruct them in God’s truth. And very often, God uses this godly parenting as a means of bringing our children to faith. There is no guarantee that our children will be born again and follow the Lord, but it is something God seems to do often enough.

However, God also uses many other ways of bringing people to faith in Christ. How many of you were led to faith in Christ by someone other than your mom or dad? We don’t need to have children of our own to be a part of growing the people of God. And in fact, like we saw last week, not having children of your own might actually free you up to be more fruitful in growing the kingdom of God.

Paul is the classic example of this. He never had a physical child. And yet he was the spiritual father to so many. “For though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers. For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel” (1 Corinthians 4:15).

Men, you don’t need kids to be a dad. And even if you have kids of your own, there’s nothing stopping you from being a spiritual father to more. It comes as we share the gospel and make disciples.

So I hope you see how this first truth has big implications for all of us. It has implications for parents of small children, because it encourages them to build their homes around the gospel and bring up their children “in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:2). But this also has implications for couples who don’t have children, or whose children have already grown. And it has big implications for singles. We all get to play a part in growing the people of God as we share the gospel and make disciples, and those of you without physical children have no disadvantages. 

2. The Church is Our Real Family

Now there’s a second major way that the New Covenant changes our understandings of family. And it’s this: in the New Covenant, this group of people who have been spiritually reborn—in other words, the church—they are our true family.

One significant passage where Jesus teaches this is Mark 3:31-35, which we read together earlier. Jesus’ mother and brothers come for him and are waiting outside for him. Someone tells him this, and they would have assumed that Jesus is going to go be with His family, because in that culture that’s what you would have just done.

But instead, Jesus looks around him and says, “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:31–35). 

Please notice something here: Jesus does not disagree with the principle that He should be with His family. But what He does do is completely redefine who His family is. Who is His true family? It’s not the people standing outside with whom he had at least a partial blood relationship.

No, His family was the people sitting around Him: those who were hearing and doing the will of God. This community of Jesus-followers. That was His true family.

3. We Often Need to Choose Between the Two

We’re going to come back to this idea at the end and discuss some of its implications for us today, but there’s a third truth we need to consider first, which is that very often in this life, we will need to make a choice between our physical family and our true, spiritual family.

Wee see this right in that passage from Mark. The background, which you can read earlier in the chapter, is that Jesus’ family didn’t believe in him at that point. And the reason they have come to see him is to stop him from doing what he’s doing, because they thought he was out of his mind (Mark 3:21).

And so Jesus was in a situation where He had to male a choice between His birth family or His true, spiritual family. And that is a choice which God’s people have had to make over and over again. And it’s a choice which Jesus actually told His disciples they should expect to have to make.

We read this passage together earlier, but it’s important enough for us to hear the words of Matthew 10:34-37 again: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”

Just take that in. Jesus is saying about as clearly as possible that one of the effects of His coming is that families will be divided. When we choose to follow Jesus, that will bring division between us and those members of our family who do not follow Jesus.

And therefore, the only people who are able to follow Jesus are those who love Him more than their father and mother and son and daughter.

Please understand how counter-cultural this would have been to Jesus’ hearers. In the 1st Century, both for the Jewish people and many of the Gentile nations, people tended to make decisions as a family. You didn’t just decide on your own what you wanted to do, you sat down with your family and you all did what your father decided you were going to do.

But here, Jesus turns all of that over. He says that He must be #1. People were not supposed to wait around and only come to Jesus if the rest of their family did it. Instead, people had to choose, right off the bat, that they would love Jesus more than their families. Children had to choose to follow and obey Jesus regardless of what their parents did. Parents had to choose to follow and obey Jesus regardless of what their children did. And strife would ensue. But this was the cost of following Jesus. 

And Jesus was not shy about this. He said it even more directly in Luke 14:25-26: “Now great crowds accompanied him, and he turned and said to them, ‘If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.’”

That’s a hard word, isn’t it? Bible commentators freak out over this word “hate.” Some say it was just a common expression that means “love less.” Others make the point—which I think is very valid—that when we say yes to Jesus, and our families don’t, it will seem to our families that we have suddenly began to hate them, when really, all we are doing is choosing to follow Jesus and they are not.

But we shouldn’t miss, as one commentator said, the “offensiveness of this saying in a society where honor of parents was considered virtually the highest obligation and one’s family was usually one’s greatest joy.”

Jesus says that we must choose to love and obey Him first and foremost, even if that means upsetting and disturbing and dividing and even saying goodbye to our families. And this isn’t  something that only a few Christians might have to deal with: Jesus says that we can’t even begin to follow Him unless we’re willing for this.

Application

Now there’s a lot more we could say here at this point, but for this morning we need to sew this all up and make some application to ourselves.

We’ve already made some application points from the first truth we explored, which is that God grows His people through the gospel, through being born again, instead of just being born the first time.

And I just want to repeat it again lest anyone misunderstand me: this truth does not discourage us from having children. Married couples have many good reasons to consider having children, and God often uses parents to lead their children to faith.

But it’s also important to see that having physical babies is no longer a command for us in the New Covenant. And it’s no longer our number one priority. The church’s number one priority is having spiritual offspring through proclaiming the gospel and making disciples. Here’s one way of putting it: in the New Covenant, our version of “be fruitful and multiply” is “go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19). 

And so the application for us this morning is this: let’s all make sure we’re a part of this work. Kids or no kids, let’s all join together in this great work of evangelism and missions. And we’ll be hearing more about this in the weeks ahead.

Secondly, let’s just soak in the truth that our church family is our true family. I went to a church for a while where we sang “I’m so glad I’m a part of the family of God” every week. But it always felt kind of second-rate. I called my church my family, but really, they came nowhere close to my real family in terms of my priorities and loyalties. 

But according to Jesus, our church family, this community of the redeemed—that’s our real family. We should show just as much love and care and concern for each other as we do with our physical families. There should be no such thing as a lonely Christian. 

So here’s a way to apply this to our lives at the nitty-gritty level. What are your family traditions? What are the things that in your thinking are “just for family”? Are you willing to include your brothers and sisters in Christ into those things, or not?

I grew up in a family where certain celebrations were totally off-limits to anybody else. Birthdays and Christmas were for us, and that was that. But in more recent years, Aimee and I and my two sisters have had so much joy opening up those events to our church family. And why not? That is our real family.

Maybe for you it’s something different. But the question we can all ask ourselves is: “What would it look like if I really believed that my church family was really my family? And what can I do to make my life look like that?”

A third reflection this morning, coming out of our third truth: we should expect that we will need to chose between Jesus and our families. It should not be a surprise when we find ourselves in a situation where we love Jesus and our family doesn’t. I’m not downplaying how painful that experience is, but Jesus told us to expect this.

It’s wonderful when we don’t need to choose between our physical family and our spiritual family. When our physical family does love and follow Jesus. But when our family doesn’t follow Jesus, and when we have to choose between meeting their expectations or obeying Jesus, then there should be no contest. Jesus should win every time.

But isn’t it true that here in North America, Christians very often choose to satisfy our families and do things to make them happy first, and honour Jesus second? And many Christians seem quite content to even disobey the clear commands of God’s word for the sake of their families.

We need to hear this morning that if we are following Jesus, then family is not everything. It can’t be. Jesus needs to be everything.

In a recent article, pastor and author Kevin DeYoung had this to say, and I think it fits in really well with what we’re saying today:

In a world hellbent on redefining marriage and undermining the fundamental importance of the family, Christians would do well to honor and support all those trying to nurture healthy families.

And yet, virtually every pastor in America can tell you stories of churchgoers who have functionally displaced God in favor of the family.

Parents who go missing from church for entire seasons because of Billy’s youth soccer league or Sally’s burgeoning volleyball career.

Committed Christians who would never dare invite a college student or international over for Thanksgiving or Christmas because "the holidays are for family."

Longtime members who can’t be bothered to serve on Sundays or reach out to visitors because the whole family always gathers at grandma’s for lunch…

Churches that implicitly (or explicitly) communicate that marriage is a necessary step of spiritual maturity.

Christians of all kinds who will jettison their theology of marriage or their convictions about church discipline once their children come out of the closet or embrace other kinds of (unrepentant) sin.

The idolatry of the family can be a real problem, either from the church that ignores singles and gears everything toward married couples with children, or from the individual whose practical commitments underscore the unfortunate reality that blood is usually thicker than theology.

Please understand there is so much more that we could say here today. My wife and I just spent an hour this past week at Moms and Tots teaching on parenting, and I wish we could spend a whole other hour up here talking about that kind of stuff.

But we can’t miss that the things we’ve touched on today are things which Jesus and the New Testament authors pointed to and spoke on repeatedly, and they are the important starting place for all of our other New Covenant thinking about family. And so the question we all need to ask again as we end is this: is family everything? Or is Jesus everything? What does it look like for you this week, maybe even this day, to really embrace that truth?

May the Holy Spirit help and guide you into answering that question in a way that honours Jesus as your everything.

Years ago I had some friends who were missionaries in a country where the culture surrounding marriage was very different from Canada. In that country men would often marry women much younger then them, and they viewed their wives as little more than property. And so these missionaries often found themselves teaching seminars to the new believers about the biblical vision for marriage.

So they were doing some of this marriage teaching one weekend, and during a break of the local men came up to ask my friend a question: “Can I beat my wife?” And my friend just wanted to bury his face in his palms, because he’d just been teaching all morning about how husbands needed to cherish and protect and lay their lives down for their wives. And this guy just wasn’t making the connection. So he patiently repeated many of these things to this man, explaining once again how beating your wife has no place in a Christian marriage.

The man stood there, listeninh thoughtfully. But then when my friend had finished speaking, he asked him one more question: “But what if she needs it?” In other words, “I know everything the Bible says about not beating my wife, but what if she needs it?”

This story has always stuck with me as a perfect example of how our culture conditions us to think a certain way. Our culture trains us to think that certain things are as normal as the air that we breathe. And so when we encounter something in Scripture that is out of step with our culture, it’s very easy for us to just not notice it, or if we do notice it, to not take it very seriously

It takes a lot of work to submit ourselves to Scripture and allow Scripture to reshape the way we think, especially if we’ve been thinking that way our entire life.

In the past several weeks, we’ve been studying how the storyline of the Bible impacts our lives today, and I hope you’ve noticed how many times the truth of Scripture is so very different, so very out of step, with the messages of the Canadian culture that each of us is surrounded by. 

We’ve learned that work is not a necessary evil we need to pay for our weekend hobbies, but instead is the thing we’ve been created for—especially as we think about good works (Ephesians 2:10).

We’ve learned that money and possessions are things we should be very careful with, even suspicious of. Rather than being a sign of God’s blessing, piles of money and stuff will actually pull our hearts away from heaven.

We’ve learned that marriage is not about falling in love and endless romance. Instead, marriage is about work—about the mission. And in the New Covenant, marriage is about putting the gospel on display for others to see.

And last week we heard that just like marriage is a gift, so singleness is also a gift. 1 Corinthians 7 tells us that if someone is able to keep their desire under control, they should seriously consider remaining single and using their singleness for the kingdom of God. In other words, singleness is not a problem to be fixed, but—for many people—it is a privilege to be invested for the Kingdom.

And I know that as we’ve heard these different messages, there’s often something inside of us that says “No, really? That doesn’t feel normal to me.”

But we need to remember that just like that man asking “Can I beat my wife? What if she needs it?”, so also we have each been conditioned to think in certain ways by our culture.

And so when we hear these things from the Bible, it’s tempting to ask “Does this seem right to me? Does this fit with my experiences?” But those are not the kinds of questions we should be asking first. Instead, we should be asking, “Is this in the Bible? Is this clearly what the Bible teaches?” Because if it is what the Bible teaches, then we need to change the way we think, as painful of a process as that can be.

Romans 12:2 describes it this way: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Romans 12:2).

And I hope you know that is an ongoing process. The world is always trying to conform us to itself. And so all of us, no matter what stage of life we’re in, are always in need of further transformation of our minds, further transformation into God’s image. We never get done, this side of heaven.

And so, once again we’re going to turn to God’s word this morning and allow it to renew our minds as we see what the storyline of Scripture has to say about family.

In our Canadian culture today, I think we see two basic kinds of messages about the family. And the first one is that family is everything. I’m sure you’ve heard that phrase before; maybe even seen it hung on someone’s wall. For many Canadians and especially many Canadian Christians, their immediate and extended family relationships are the most important relationships on the planet, and they will do whatever they can to protect and maintain them. Family is everything.

But in the other hand, in much of our culture today, family is under siege. Satan has been hard at work trying to attack God’s design for the family, and we’ve gotten to the point where many people see the traditional family as a negative thing. And so on the one hand we’ve got “family is everything,” and on the other hand we’ve got “family is nothing.”

And in contrast to each of these messages, we need God’s word to speak into our cultural understandings and to shape how you and I think and how we feel.

Family in the Adamic and Abrahamic and Mosaic Covenants

So what does the big storyline of the Bible have to say about family? You might remember that last week we spent a bit of time reviewing how important family was in the covenants God made with Adam and Noah and Israel and David. 

And to understand why, we need to remember that, especially from Abraham onwards, God’s people was an ethnic people group. The literal children of Abraham. The Jewish people.

The way you became a member of God’s people was just to be born into one of those familes. And God had promised to Abraham that He would give Him many, many offspring (Genesis 15:5). 

And that’s why getting married and having babies was so important, because you were participating in the growth of God’s people and the fulfillment of His promises to give Abraham many offspring.

Having babies was further important in the covenant with Israel, because God promised that if they obeyed Him, He would bless the fruit of their womb, and there would be no one barren among them (Deuteronomy 7:14, 28:4). So children were a sign that you had been faithful to the Lord. That’s why Psalm 127:3-5 says “Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD, the fruit of the womb a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one’s youth. Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them!” In that covenant, that was true.

This is also why Samuel’s mother Hannah was so distraught at not being able to bear children (1 Samuel 1:1-20). Here she was, a righteous woman, and yet she was not able to bear children. And it must have seemed like God had just forgotten to keep His promises to her. 

So within the covenants with Abraham and with Israel, when having children was how the people of God grew, and belonging to a family was how you found your place in God’s people, it's safe to say that family pretty much was everything.

Family in the New Covenant

But then Jesus showed up. And there should be no surprise to us by now that Jesus changed things. Jesus challenged the categories and upset the status quo. Jesus announced the arrival of the Kingdom of God, and He established the New Covenant, and within this New Covenant Kingdom, our relationship with family has changed. The very definition of family has changed. And these are the things we’re going to explore this morning.

1. The New Covenant People of God Grows Spiritually, Not Physically

The first truth we’re going to explore is that within the New Covenant, God no longer grows His people primarily through his people having babies. 

This shouldn’t be a surprise to us, because we know that God’s New Covenant people is more than just one single ethnic people group. We Gentiles have been welcomed in (Ephesians 2:11-22), and on the cross Jesus died for people from every tribe, language, people and nation (Revelation 5:9). And so we no longer become a part of the people of God just by being born to the right parents. Instead, people become a part of the people of God as they are born again and are joined to Christ by faith.

We read about this truth together from John 1:11-13: “He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.”

Jesus clarified this truth with Nicodemus in John 3. “Jesus answered him, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God’” (John 3:3). In other words, it’s not good enough to just be born the first time into a particular family. You need to experience the inner, spiritual rebirth through the Holy Spirit. 

Paul speaks about this truth when he writes in Galatians, “…for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith.” (Galatians 3:26). 

This is how God grows His new-covenant people. Now of course, having physical children can still be a very good thing and a very good way to grow God’s kingdom. Not because our kids are automatically a part of God’s New Covenant people, but because we get years with them to teach and instruct them in God’s truth. And very often, God uses this godly parenting as a means of bringing our children to faith. There is no guarantee that our children will be born again and follow the Lord, but it is something God seems to do often enough.

However, God also uses many other ways of bringing people to faith in Christ. How many of you were led to faith in Christ by someone other than your mom or dad? We don’t need to have children of our own to be a part of growing the people of God. And in fact, like we saw last week, not having children of your own might actually free you up to be more fruitful in growing the kingdom of God.

Paul is the classic example of this. He never had a physical child. And yet he was the spiritual father to so many. “For though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers. For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel” (1 Corinthians 4:15).

Men, you don’t need kids to be a dad. And even if you have kids of your own, there’s nothing stopping you from being a spiritual father to more. It comes as we share the gospel and make disciples.

So I hope you see how this first truth has big implications for all of us. It has implications for parents of small children, because it encourages them to build their homes around the gospel and bring up their children “in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:2). But this also has implications for couples who don’t have children, or whose children have already grown. And it has big implications for singles. We all get to play a part in growing the people of God as we share the gospel and make disciples, and those of you without physical children have no disadvantages. 

2. The Church is Our Real Family

Now there’s a second major way that the New Covenant changes our understandings of family. And it’s this: in the New Covenant, this group of people who have been spiritually reborn—in other words, the church—they are our true family.

One significant passage where Jesus teaches this is Mark 3:31-35, which we read together earlier. Jesus’ mother and brothers come for him and are waiting outside for him. Someone tells him this, and they would have assumed that Jesus is going to go be with His family, because in that culture that’s what you would have just done.

But instead, Jesus looks around him and says, “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:31–35). 

Please notice something here: Jesus does not disagree with the principle that He should be with His family. But what He does do is completely redefine who His family is. Who is His true family? It’s not the people standing outside with whom he had at least a partial blood relationship.

No, His family was the people sitting around Him: those who were hearing and doing the will of God. This community of Jesus-followers. That was His true family.

3. We Often Need to Choose Between the Two

We’re going to come back to this idea at the end and discuss some of its implications for us today, but there’s a third truth we need to consider first, which is that very often in this life, we will need to make a choice between our physical family and our true, spiritual family.

Wee see this right in that passage from Mark. The background, which you can read earlier in the chapter, is that Jesus’ family didn’t believe in him at that point. And the reason they have come to see him is to stop him from doing what he’s doing, because they thought he was out of his mind (Mark 3:21).

And so Jesus was in a situation where He had to male a choice between His birth family or His true, spiritual family. And that is a choice which God’s people have had to make over and over again. And it’s a choice which Jesus actually told His disciples they should expect to have to make.

We read this passage together earlier, but it’s important enough for us to hear the words of Matthew 10:34-37 again: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”

Just take that in. Jesus is saying about as clearly as possible that one of the effects of His coming is that families will be divided. When we choose to follow Jesus, that will bring division between us and those members of our family who do not follow Jesus.

And therefore, the only people who are able to follow Jesus are those who love Him more than their father and mother and son and daughter.

Please understand how counter-cultural this would have been to Jesus’ hearers. In the 1st Century, both for the Jewish people and many of the Gentile nations, people tended to make decisions as a family. You didn’t just decide on your own what you wanted to do, you sat down with your family and you all did what your father decided you were going to do.

But here, Jesus turns all of that over. He says that He must be #1. People were not supposed to wait around and only come to Jesus if the rest of their family did it. Instead, people had to choose, right off the bat, that they would love Jesus more than their families. Children had to choose to follow and obey Jesus regardless of what their parents did. Parents had to choose to follow and obey Jesus regardless of what their children did. And strife would ensue. But this was the cost of following Jesus. 

And Jesus was not shy about this. He said it even more directly in Luke 14:25-26: “Now great crowds accompanied him, and he turned and said to them, ‘If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.’”

That’s a hard word, isn’t it? Bible commentators freak out over this word “hate.” Some say it was just a common expression that means “love less.” Others make the point—which I think is very valid—that when we say yes to Jesus, and our families don’t, it will seem to our families that we have suddenly began to hate them, when really, all we are doing is choosing to follow Jesus and they are not.

But we shouldn’t miss, as one commentator said, the “offensiveness of this saying in a society where honor of parents was considered virtually the highest obligation and one’s family was usually one’s greatest joy” (Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993], Lk 14:25–26).

Jesus says that we must choose to love and obey Him first and foremost, even if that means upsetting and disturbing and dividing and even saying goodbye to our families. And this isn’t  something that only a few Christians might have to deal with: Jesus says that we can’t even begin to follow Him unless we’re willing for this.

Application

Now there’s a lot more we could say here at this point, but for this morning we need to sew this all up and make some application to ourselves.

We’ve already made some application points from the first truth we explored, which is that God grows His people through the gospel, through being born again, instead of just being born the first time.

And I just want to repeat it again lest anyone misunderstand me: this truth does not discourage us from having children. Married couples have many good reasons to consider having children, and God often uses parents to lead their children to faith.

But it’s also important to see that having physical babies is no longer a command for us in the New Covenant. And it’s no longer our number one priority. The church’s number one priority is having spiritual offspring through proclaiming the gospel and making disciples. Here’s one way of putting it: in the New Covenant, our version of “be fruitful and multiply” is “go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19). 

And so the application for us this morning is this: let’s all make sure we’re a part of this work. Kids or no kids, let’s all join together in this great work of evangelism and missions. And we’ll be hearing more about this in the weeks ahead.

Secondly, let’s just soak in the truth that our church family is our true family. I went to a church for a while where we sang “I’m so glad I’m a part of the family of God” every week. But it always felt kind of second-rate. I called my church my family, but really, they came nowhere close to my real family in terms of my priorities and loyalties. 

But according to Jesus, our church family, this community of the redeemed—that’s our real family. We should show just as much love and care and concern for each other as we do with our physical families. There should be no such thing as a lonely Christian. 

So here’s a way to apply this to our lives at the nitty-gritty level. What are your family traditions? What are the things that in your thinking are “just for family”? Are you willing to include your brothers and sisters in Christ into those things, or not?

I grew up in a family where certain celebrations were totally off-limits to anybody else. Birthdays and Christmas were for us, and that was that. But in more recent years, Aimee and I and my two sisters have had so much joy opening up those events to our church family. And why not? That is our real family.

Maybe for you it’s something different. But the question we can all ask ourselves is: “What would it look like if I really believed that my church family was really my family? And what can I do to make my life look like that?”

A third reflection this morning, coming out of our third truth: we should expect that we will need to chose between Jesus and our families. It should not be a surprise when we find ourselves in a situation where we love Jesus and our family doesn’t. I’m not downplaying how painful that experience is, but Jesus told us to expect this.

It’s wonderful when we don’t need to choose between our physical family and our spiritual family. When our physical family does love and follow Jesus. But when our family doesn’t follow Jesus, and when we have to choose between meeting their expectations or obeying Jesus, then there should be no contest. Jesus should win every time.

But isn’t it true that here in North America, Christians very often choose to satisfy our families and do things to make them happy first, and honour Jesus second? And many Christians seem quite content to even disobey the clear commands of God’s word for the sake of their families.

We need to hear this morning that if we are following Jesus, then family is not everything. It can’t be. Jesus needs to be everything.

In a recent article, pastor and author Kevin DeYoung had this to say, and I think it fits in really well with what we’re saying today:

In a world hellbent on redefining marriage and undermining the fundamental importance of the family, Christians would do well to honor and support all those trying to nurture healthy families.

And yet, virtually every pastor in America can tell you stories of churchgoers who have functionally displaced God in favor of the family.

Parents who go missing from church for entire seasons because of Billy’s youth soccer league or Sally’s burgeoning volleyball career.

Committed Christians who would never dare invite a college student or international over for Thanksgiving or Christmas because "the holidays are for family."

Longtime members who can’t be bothered to serve on Sundays or reach out to visitors because the whole family always gathers at grandma’s for lunch…

Churches that implicitly (or explicitly) communicate that marriage is a necessary step of spiritual maturity.

Christians of all kinds who will jettison their theology of marriage or their convictions about church discipline once their children come out of the closet or embrace other kinds of (unrepentant) sin.

The idolatry of the family can be a real problem, either from the church that ignores singles and gears everything toward married couples with children, or from the individual whose practical commitments underscore the unfortunate reality that blood is usually thicker than theology.

Please understand there is so much more that we could say here today. My wife and I just spent an hour this past week at Moms and Tots teaching on parenting, and I wish we could spend a whole other hour up here talking about that kind of stuff.

But we can’t miss that the things we’ve touched on today are things which Jesus and the New Testament authors pointed to and spoke on repeatedly, and they are the important starting place for all of our other New Covenant thinking about family. And so the question we all need to ask again as we end is this: is family everything? Or is Jesus everything? What does it look like for you this week, maybe even this day, to really embrace that truth?

May the Holy Spirit help and guide you into answering that question in a way that honours Jesus as your everything.

Last Sunday we looked at marriage in the big story of the Bible. And what we saw is that the big story of the Bible, from beginning to end, is really about marriage—or rather, is about one particular marriage, the marriage between Christ and His people. And we saw that human marriage is just a temporary picture of that great reality. When we get to the New Creation, we won’t need human marriage anymore than you need a baseball card at a baseball game. The picture becomes unnecessary when you’re living in the real thing.

Last week we also spoke about some of the implications of this view for us today. We live in this time of already-but-not-yet, when human marriage hasn’t yet been abolished, and when it still can be a good thing. And so those of you who are married were challenged to make your marriage about the mission. And one of the big ways we do that is by obeying Ephesians 5:22-33 so that our marriages reflect the gospel.

We ended last week by reflecting on the fact that, because human marriage is not ultimate or permanent, and we know that it’s on its way out, it makes sense that it should not be the most important thing in our life. We shouldn’t build all of our life, all of our hopes and dreams, on it.

Today we’re really just going to pick up where we left off and see how this big-picture view of marriage applies to those who are not married. Today, we’re talking about singleness.

And in some ways my message this morning is very simple: that passage we just read from 1 Corinthiansis 7 is in your Bible. It’s God’s word. Deal with it!

But of course I need to say more than that. And so we’re going to begin by going back and revisiting some of the big moments in the Bible’s story and and reflect on how singleness fits in to this whole thing.

Singleness Prior to the New Covenant

You’ll remember that the storyline of the Bible is built on the covenants, beginning with Adam and Eve and moving through Noah and Abraham and Israel and David. And as we read the Bible it’s clear that being married was the normal, default position for adults within those covenants. Everyone was supposed to grow up and get married.

But marriage was more than just normal. It was required. God told Adam and Noah to be fruitful and multiply (Genesis 1:28, 9:1). God promised Abraham many offspring (Genesis 17:6), and fertility was one of the blessings He promised to Israel (Deuteronomy 7:13). And in all of this you had the promise of an offspring who would come and crush the serpent and bless the nations and rule the world. And so getting married and having children was absolutely crucial if you were going to be blessed by God and play a part of His redemptive plan.

That’s why there’s that story in Judges about Jephthah’s daughter, who went out and mourned for two months when she realized she’d never be married. And it says that afterwards, the young women would go lament for her for four days every year (Judges 11:37–40). Not being married was a really big deal.

We’re going to pick up on some of these themes next week when we talk about family, but the idea here is that marriage was absolutely necessary in each of these covenants. To be single was essentially to be cursed.

Singleness in the New Covenant

And that’s why Isaiah chapter 56 comes as such a surprise. Let me read these words for you from Isaiah 56:3-5:

“Let not the foreigner who has joined himself to the Lord say, ‘The Lord will surely separate me from his people’; and let not the eunuch say, “Behold, I am a dry tree.’ For thus says the Lord: ‘To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off’” (Isaiah 56:3–5).

A eunuch was a man who had been rendered physically incapable of having children. And that meant he could play no part in fulfilling God’s covenant promises. There’s a law in Deuteronomy that even would have barred him from gathering with God’s people in worship (Deuteronomy 23:1). And he would have had no children to bear his name after him. When he died, no-one would remember him. Talk about a sad life.

But here in Isaiah 56, God is promising something totally new and totally different. He is promising that to the eunuchs who obey Him and are faithful to His covenant, He will give them a monument and a name within His house not just as good as children, but better then children, because it is an everlasting name that will never be cut off.

It shouldn’t surprise us that this passage comes in a larger section of Isaiah that is pointing towards the coming of Jesus and His work in the New Covenant. It comes just three chapters after Isaiah 53, which speaks of the Suffering Servant. And it’s in this context, looking to the New Covenant, that God promises an eternal reward better than children to these men who previously had no hope of anything like that.

Isaiah is pointing us towards a day when being married and bearing children will not be the most important things for us. Isaiah is pointing us towards a day when the unmarried and childless will be able to be just as honoured, and even more honoured, then the married and fruitful.

And these promises came into fulfillment with the coming of Christ. There’s so much I want to say right here about the bearing of children in the New Covenant, but it’s going to have to wait until next week. But what we can say now is that with the coming of Christ, the days in which we need to be married and bear children are behind us. In Christ, being single now stands alongside of being married as a good way to spend our life and be useful to our master.

And we see this in the New Testament in a number of ways. The first one is obvious: Jesus was a single man. I think we often blow past this one too easily. We think, “of course Jesus was single.” But we can’t forget how radical this is.

Do you remember our study in 1 John? Jesus wasn’t just a disembodied spirit. He really came in the flesh—He was really, fully, a man. He “in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). And He was never married.

This makes Christianity very unique among other religions. We worship a single man.

And next to Jesus, arguably the most influential person in the founding of Christianity was the apostle Paul. And guess what? He, too, was single. And we can’t just say, “well of course he was single.” Because other Apostles were married (1 Corinthians 9:5). But the man whom God used in those early decades to plant the most churches and write most of the New Testament was a single man.

Are you beginning to see how affirming of singleness the New Covenant is? And we haven’t even gotten to our main text this morning. 

But let’s do that now. Our passage comes in a chapter in which Paul has been answering some very specific questions about marriage and relationships. In the beginning of the chapter, he actually had to defend marriage against some people in the Corinthian church who thought that everybody should be single. And if you read the first nine verses, you’ll hear Paul saying that marriage is not inherently bad and can be a good thing for some people.

But then he goes on to give the Corinthians some good reasons to consider not marrying and remaining single like he himself was. And that’s what we find in our passage today. So just take that in for a moment. There is a whole section of God’s that suggests reasons for why single people should remain single.

Living a Simpler Life

The first one of these reasons is introduced in verses 25-28. It begins with these words “Now concerning the betrothed.” That word “betrothed” is really interesting, because it literally just means virgins. If you have an ESV Bible, you’ll see a little number beside that word, and at the bottom it will tell you that.

So why does the ESV translate it as “betrothed?” Well, when Paul uses this word down in verses 36-38, it sounds like he’s talking about people who are engaged to be married. But up here, it makes much more sense to understand that he’s just speaking to virgins—in other words, people who have never been married.

And so in verse 26 Paul says to these people that “in view of the present distress it is good for a person to remain as he is.” And yes, that means remaining single. See what he says at the end of verse 27: “Are you free from a wife? Do not seek a wife.” And then he gives the reason for this counsel in the second half of verse 28: “Those who marry will have worldly troubles, and I would spare you that.”

Here’s what Paul is saying: The single life is a simpler life. It’s freer. Marriage is a lot of work and brings “troubles” with it. And so why would you bring that on yourself?

This sounds so counter-intuitive that many people try to explain it away. Some do that by zeroing in on those two words in verse 26—“present distress.” And they say that there was a particular problem at Corinth, like a famine. And so in that particular situation, marriage wasn’t the best idea. But for the rest of us, these words don’t really apply, and we should all aim for marriage just like they did in the Old Testament.

Now there is a little bit of evidence that there may have been some food shortages in Corinth at that point in history. And so perhaps it makes sense that Paul would encourage them to refrain from marriage in the middle of that specific crisis.

But not all scholars are convinced by that line of reasoning. “This present distress” could just be talking about the pressure that all of us Christians face at this stage of redemptive history.

But even if “this present distress” does refer to a specific issue at Corinth, we should still notice that marriage is something they could live without. It’s not the be-all-and-end-all of life. And we should also pay attention to the fact that marriage does bring its own troubles with it. And this becomes especially true if that marriage produces children.

I’ve been at many weddings where someone has said something like “marriage halves your burdens and doubles your joys.” I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but that’s simply not true. This passage advocates the single life as a way to reduce at least some of life’s burdens.

The World is Passing Away

Paul gives us some more reasons to consider singleness in verses 29-31, and we should notice that what he says here has nothing to do with the situation at Corinth. Verse 29: “This is what I mean, brothers: the appointed time has grown very short.” Verse 31: “For the present form of this world is passing away.” Paul is not talking about a local famine here: he’s reminding them that the Age to Come has broken into our age, and so this present age is on its way out and will disappear entirely when Jesus returns. 

And if we know this, then we just can’t keep living life like everybody else. That’s the point of these phrases in verses 29-31, where he says things like “let those who have wives live as though they had none,” “and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it”  (1 Corinthians 7:29–31). We can’t be as invested in all this stuff as everybody else is.

It’s kind of like when you play Monopoly or some other board game. You play hard, and you want to win, but at the same time you recognize that none of it is really real. That money won’t have any value when the game is over. In a few minutes everything goes back in the box and your real life will continue.

And you know what? That’s actually true about what we call our “real life.” The things around us, including our marriages, are so temporary. It’s all just Monopoly money.

If you’re married, this doesn’t give you an excuse to neglect your marriage, but it certainly means you shouldn’t worship your marriage and make it the center of gravity for your heart and life. Your marriage should be a platform for good works instead of a dead-end for your selfishness.

But if you’re not married, and you know that all of this is passing away and you have just a short amount of time to invest in eternity, then should you even consider diverting attention and energy into a temporary relationship like marriage? That is the very good question this passage is pushing us to ask.

A Life of Serving

Finally, Paul introduces us to a third set of reasons for singleness in verse 32: “I want you to be free from anxieties.” And he goes on to say that a married person has divided interests. They want to serve the Lord and serve their spouse, and it’s hard to do both well. Something’s gotta give.

We can look at Paul’s life for proof of this. He was free to fully invest his life in the kingdom because he wasn’t married. He could go anywhere and do anything and had a freedom that someone with a spouse and children simply wouldn’t have had. And Paul is interested in others having that same privilege. Like he says in verse 35, he wants “to promote good order and to secure your undivided devotion to the Lord” (1 Corinthians 7:35).

Making the Choice

So what should we do with all of that? It sounds like there’s some good reasons for singleness, but how do you know if that’s the right thing for you or not?

That question comes into focus in verses 36-40, which speak directly to those in the Corinthian church who apparently were already engaged to be married—betrothed. And these people, knowing what they now know, have a decision to make. What should they choose?

Here’s the advice he gives them. In verse 36 he says that if they are not “behaving properly” with each other, or if their “passions are strong”, and if “it has to be,” then they can go ahead and get married. And he adds, “it is no sin.” That’s for all of you married people in the room. It’s ok, you didn’t sin when you got married.

But then verse 37 is the other side of the fiddle. If those engaged people have determined in their heart to remain single, and if they have their desire under control—which doesn’t mean they don’t have any desire, but simply that it’s under control—then they do well to remain single.

And verse 38 is there to sum the whole thing up and absolutely shatter our North American way of seeing things: “So then he who marries his betrothed does well, and he who refrains from marriage will do even better” (1 Corinthians 7:38). 

Yes, you heard that right. Singleness is to be preferred.

Gift of Singleness

Now some of you might have noticed as I’ve walked through this passage that I’ve said nothing about the “gift of singleness.” Maybe you’ve never heard that phrase before, but it’s a popular idea that comes up when people talk about this topic.

The idea is that there is a spiritual gift that of singleness which gives people the special ability to be single. And if you have that gift, then you should be single, but if you don’t, then forget 1 Corinthians 7 was written and go find a spouse.

I don’t believe that this idea is Biblical. In 1 Corinthians 7:7, marriage and singleness themselves are the gift, not some special ability to do either. I’m going to post more on the blog this week about the “gift of singleness,” so you can read it there if you’re interested, but I hope you can already see that the whole way Paul argues in this chapter points us away from seeing the gift of singleness as some special ability, and instead towards seeing singleness itself as a gift. And it’s a gift because it gives the freedom to invest yourself more fully in the good works for which you have been created (Ephesians 2:10). 

Application

So let’s sum all of this up: 1 Corinthians 7 tells us that the single life is a unique gift from God, and many Christians should thoughtfully embrace singleness as the best way for them to glorify God in this short life we’ve been given.

There is a good chance that this idea is brand new to you. I know how counter-cultural this is. Haven’t we all been taught, either by word or by example, that adulthood equals marriage? That getting married is what all of the normal grown-ups do? That singleness is a problem to be fixed instead of a gift to be invested?

Isn’t it true that in our church culture, if a couple gets married, even if they just use their marriage to settle down and get comfortable in a materialistic North American lifestyle, they will still be celebrated and looked on as if they’ve arrived way more than the single person who is quietly and busily investing their life and time and talents into the kingdom of God?

I want to suggest this morning that most of us have done with marriage what the Prosperity Gospel has done with money. We’ve taken these Old Testament Scriptures about marriage and children and haphazardly applied them to our lives today without stopping to recognize that we are in the New Covenant, and many things have changed. Our relationship with money and possessions has changed, and so has our relationship with marriage.

It doesn’t help that we live in a culture which worships romantic love. Every song, every movie, every story, assumes that a good and happy life includes being in a relationship with another person. Many of us don’t have many role models of normal, healthy, spiritually fruitful singleness.

Except, you know, there’s Jesus. And the Apostle Paul. So maybe we don’t have an excuse. Maybe we’ve let ourselves be conformed to this world instead of being transformed by the renewal of our minds (Romans 12:2).

So what can we do about this? I’m going to end here with some specific encouragements for different groups of people that might be represented among us today.

Parents

First of all, parents. You have a huge role here in shaping your children’s expectations concerning marriage. Let me give you an example. Do you know how many times I’ve prayed with my two boys for their future wives?

Zero times.

Why would I do that? I don’t know if my boys are going to best serve God as married or as single men. So why would I pray with them for someone who might not exist, and train them to expect marriage for themselves, and then to feel let down by God if that doesn’t happen?

I certainly talk to my boys about marriage. But I say things like “If God wants you to get married, here’s the kind of husband you should be and the kind of woman you should marry. But God doesn’t give marriage to everybody. The most important thing is that you use your life for Jesus.”

Parents, be careful about your kids’ media intake. Be careful about the way that even innocent movies and stories can reinforce the stereotype that adulthood equals marriage. Point your kids towards a life of service to God, whether that includes marriage or not.

For the Young People

Next, let me talk to you older children and teenagers and college students. I’d guess that most of you hope to be married someday. Some of you will. Maybe some of you shouldn’t. But regardless, can I please encourage you to make the focus of your life something bigger than just getting married?

For some of you, especially you college students, finding a boyfriend or a girlfriend and eventually a husband or a wife is the number one drive in your life right now.

But I’ve talked to enough people who get to their later 20s and 30s and say “I wish I hadn’t been so focused on a relationship in my younger years.” Because whether you get married or not, by the time you get to your later 20s you start to gain perspective and realize that life is so much bigger than a relationship, even a relationship like marriage.

And if everything you’ve heard these last two weeks is true, then the number one question you should be asking is not, “Who should I marry?" but rather, “What part will I play in the great mission of God? How and where can I best use my life to fulfill my mission of good works for the glory of God?

Focus on that, and only ever marry someone if they will help you do that better than you can on your own.

I was single until I was 26. And you heard me share last week how I pursued Aimee and then married her because I knew that I could serve Jesus in my particular ministry with this particular woman more effectively than I could on my own. 

But that won’t be true of all of you. Or it might not be true for a number of years. And that’s ok. In fact, it might even be better, in Paul’s words. So put the mission first in your life, and put marriage in its proper place, and use your season of singleness, however long it will last, for God’s glory.

For the Married

For those of you who are married, really listening to 1 Corinthians 7 might make you ask, “Should I have gotten married in the first place?” Perhaps you did pursue marriage because you thought you needed to, and you fell in love, and that was that.

Well, you are married now, and like we read in verse 36, you didn’t sin when you got married. So instead of second-guessing your decision, turn instead to Ephesians 5 and focus on making your marriage about the mission. Live out the gospel, and link arms with your married and single brothers and sisters here in the church, and throw your life into the mission of God.

And please, married people, be aware of those who aren’t married here in our church fellowship. Please know that they face certain unique challenges by living in a culture that is oriented around marriages and families. Singleness is a gift, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a lonely gift and even a painful one.

So let’s stop asking people why they’re not married, or when it’s their turn. Let’s remember that holidays and long weekends Sunday afternoons—times that you get to relax with your family—can be really hard and lonely when you don’t have a family to default to. Simple things like vehicle problems become bigger deals when you don’t have a spouse to pick you up from the mechanic’s.

So let’s take care of each other, single and married. We need each other. I think we do a good job of this here at EBC, but let’s keep pressing in to love each other better.

Now I’m going to wrap up here. I know that this is a lot to take in, especially if this is new and challenges some ways that you’ve previously thought.

So we’re going to end together by singing “By Faith.” All of us, married or not, are children of the promise. At this stage in the story, married or not, we walk by faith and not by sight as we trust and obey Christ and invest our lives in the gospel. Let’s determine to do that well together today and always.

Last Sunday we looked at marriage in the big story of the Bible. And what we saw is that the big story of the Bible, from beginning to end, is really about marriage—or rather, is about one particular marriage, the marriage between Christ and His people. And we saw that human marriage is just a temporary picture of that great reality. When we get to the New Creation, we won’t need human marriage anymore than you need a baseball card at a baseball game. The picture becomes unnecessary when you’re living in the real thing.

Last week we also spoke about some of the implications of this view for us today. We live in this time of already-but-not-yet, when human marriage hasn’t yet been abolished, and when it still can be a good thing. And so those of you who are married were challenged to make your marriage about the mission. And one of the big ways we do that is by obeying Ephesians 5:22-33 so that our marriages reflect the gospel.

We ended last week by reflecting on the fact that, because human marriage is not ultimate or permanent, and we know that it’s on its way out, it makes sense that it should not be the most important thing in our life. We shouldn’t build all of our life, all of our hopes and dreams, on it.

Today we’re really just going to pick up where we left off and see how this big-picture view of marriage applies to those who are not married. Today, we’re talking about singleness.

And in some ways my message this morning is very simple: that passage we just read from 1 Corinthiansis 7 is in your Bible. It’s God’s word. Deal with it!

But of course I need to say more than that. And so we’re going to begin by going back and revisiting some of the big moments in the Bible’s story and and reflect on how singleness fits in to this whole thing.

Singleness Prior to the New Covenant

You’ll remember that the storyline of the Bible is built on the covenants, beginning with Adam and Eve and moving through Noah and Abraham and Israel and David. And as we read the Bible it’s clear that being married was the normal, default position for adults within those covenants. Everyone was supposed to grow up and get married.

But marriage was more than just normal. It was required. God told Adam and Noah to be fruitful and multiply (Genesis 1:28, 9:1). God promised Abraham many offspring (Genesis 17:6), and fertility was one of the blessings He promised to Israel (Deuteronomy 7:13). And in all of this you had the promise of an offspring who would come and crush the serpent and bless the nations and rule the world. And so getting married and having children was absolutely crucial if you were going to be blessed by God and play a part of His redemptive plan.

That’s why there’s that story in Judges about Jephthah’s daughter, who went out and mourned for two months when she realized she’d never be married. And it says that afterwards, the young women would go lament for her for four days every year (Judges 11:37–40). Not being married was a really big deal.

We’re going to pick up on some of these themes next week when we talk about family, but the idea here is that marriage was absolutely necessary in each of these covenants. To be single was essentially to be cursed.

Singleness In the New Covenant

And that’s why Isaiah chapter 56 comes as such a surprise. Let me read these words for you from Isaiah 56:3-5:

“Let not the foreigner who has joined himself to the LORD say, ‘The LORD will surely separate me from his people’; and let not the eunuch say, “Behold, I am a dry tree.’ For thus says the LORD: ‘To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off’” (Isaiah 56:3–5).

A eunuch was a man who had been rendered physically incapable of having children. And that meant he could play no part in fulfilling God’s covenant promises. There’s a law in Deuteronomy that even would have barred him from gathering with God’s people in worship (Deuteronomy 23:1). And he would have had no children to bear his name after him. When he died, no-one would remember him. Talk about a sad life.

But here in Isaiah 56, God is promising something totally new and totally different. He is promising that to the eunuchs who obey Him and are faithful to His covenant, He will give them a monument and a name within His house not just as good as children, but better then children, because it is an everlasting name that will never be cut off.

It shouldn’t surprise us that this passage comes in a larger section of Isaiah that is pointing towards the coming of Jesus and His work in the New Covenant. It comes just three chapters after Isaiah 53, which speaks of the Suffering Servant. And it’s in this context, looking to the New Covenant, that God promises an eternal reward better than children to these men who previously had no hope of anything like that.

Isaiah is pointing us towards a day when being married and bearing children will not be the most important things for us. Isaiah is pointing us towards a day when the unmarried and childless will be able to be just as honoured, and even more honoured, then the married and fruitful.

And these promises came into fulfillment with the coming of Christ. There’s so much I want to say right here about the bearing of children in the New Covenant, but it’s going to have to wait until next week. But what we can say now is that with the coming of Christ, the days in which we need to be married and bear children are behind us. In Christ, being single now stands alongside of being married as a good way to spend our life and be useful to our master.

And we see this in the New Testament in a number of ways. The first one is obvious: Jesus was a single man. I think we often blow past this one too easily. We think, “of course Jesus was single.” But we can’t forget how radical this is.

Do you remember our study in 1 John? Jesus wasn’t just a disembodied spirit. He really came in the flesh—He was really, fully, a man. He “in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). And He was never married.

This makes Christianity very unique among other religions. We worship a single man.

And next to Jesus, arguably the most influential person in the founding of Christianity was the apostle Paul. And guess what? He, too, was single. And we can’t just say, “well of course he was single.” Because other Apostles were married (1 Corinthians 9:5). But the man whom God used in those early decades to plant the most churches and write most of the New Testament was a single man.

Are you beginning to see how affirming of singleness the New Covenant is? And we haven’t even gotten to our main text this morning. 

But let’s do that now. Our passage comes in a chapter in which Paul has been answering some very specific questions about marriage and relationships. In the beginning of the chapter, he actually had to defend marriage against some people in the Corinthian church who thought that everybody should be single. And if you read the first nine verses, you’ll hear Paul saying that marriage is not inherently bad and can be a good thing for some people.

But then he goes on to give the Corinthians some good reasons to consider not marrying and remaining single like he himself was. And that’s what we find in our passage today. So just take that in for a moment. There is a whole section of God’s that suggests reasons for why single people should remain single.

Living a Simpler Life

The first one of these reasons is introduced in verses 25-28. It begins with these words “Now concerning the betrothed.” That word “betrothed” is really interesting, because it literally just means virgins. If you have an ESV Bible, you’ll see a little number beside that word, and at the bottom it will tell you that.

So why does the ESV translate it as “betrothed?” Well, when Paul uses this word down in verses 36-38, it sounds like he’s talking about people who are engaged to be married. But up here, it makes much more sense to understand that he’s just speaking to virgins—in other words, people who have never been married.

And so in verse 26 Paul says to these people that “in view of the present distress it is good for a person to remain as he is.” And yes, that means remaining single. See what he says at the end of verse 27: “Are you free from a wife? Do not seek a wife.” And then he gives the reason for this counsel in the second half of verse 28: “Those who marry will have worldly troubles, and I would spare you that.”

Here’s what Paul is saying: The single life is a simpler life. It’s freer. Marriage is a lot of work and brings “troubles” with it. And so why would you bring that on yourself?

This sounds so counter-intuitive that many people try to explain it away. Some do that by zeroing in on those two words in verse 26—“present distress.” And they say that there was a particular problem at Corinth, like a famine. And so in that particular situation, marriage wasn’t the best idea. But for the rest of us, these words don’t really apply, and we should all aim for marriage just like they did in the Old Testament.

Now there is a little bit of evidence that there may have been some food shortages in Corinth at that point in history. And so perhaps it makes sense that Paul would encourage them to refrain from marriage in the middle of that specific crisis.

But not all scholars are convinced by that line of reasoning. “This present distress” could just be talking about the pressure that all of us Christians face at this stage of redemptive history.

But even if “this present distress” does refer to a specific issue at Corinth, we should still notice that marriage is something they could live without. It’s not the be-all-and-end-all of life. And we should also pay attention to the fact that marriage does bring its own troubles with it. And this becomes especially true if that marriage produces children.

I’ve been at many weddings where someone has said something like “marriage halves your burdens and doubles your joys.” I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but that’s simply not true. This passage advocates the single life as a way to reduce at least some of life’s burdens.

The World is Passing Away

Paul gives us some more reasons to consider singleness in verses 29-31, and we should notice that what he says here has nothing to do with the situation at Corinth. Verse 29: “This is what I mean, brothers: the appointed time has grown very short.” Verse 31: “For the present form of this world is passing away.” Paul is not talking about a local famine here: he’s reminding them that the Age to Come has broken into our age, and so this present age is on its way out and will disappear entirely when Jesus returns. 

And if we know this, then we just can’t keep living life like everybody else. That’s the point of these phrases in verses 29-31, where he says things like “let those who have wives live as though they had none,” “and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it”  (1 Corinthians 7:29–31). We can’t be as invested in all this stuff as everybody else is.

It’s kind of like when you play Monopoly or some other board game. You play hard, and you want to win, but at the same time you recognize that none of it is really real. That money won’t have any value when the game is over. In a few minutes everything goes back in the box and your real life will continue.

And you know what? That’s actually true about what we call our “real life.” The things around us, including our marriages, are so temporary. It’s all just Monopoly money.

If you’re married, this doesn’t give you an excuse to neglect your marriage, but it certainly means you shouldn’t worship your marriage and make it the center of gravity for your heart and life. Your marriage should be a platform for good works instead of a dead-end for your selfishness.

But if you’re not married, and you know that all of this is passing away and you have just a short amount of time to invest in eternity, then should you even consider diverting attention and energy into a temporary relationship like marriage? That is the very good question this passage is pushing us to ask.

A Life of Serving

Finally, Paul introduces us to a third set of reasons for singleness in verse 32: “I want you to be free from anxieties.” And he goes on to say that a married person has divided interests. They want to serve the Lord and serve their spouse, and it’s hard to do both well. Something’s gotta give.

We can look at Paul’s life for proof of this. He was free to fully invest his life in the kingdom because he wasn’t married. He could go anywhere and do anything and had a freedom that someone with a spouse and children simply wouldn’t have had. And Paul is interested in others having that same privilege. Like he says in verse 35, he wants “to promote good order and to secure your undivided devotion to the Lord” (1 Corinthians 7:35).

Making the Choice

So what should we do with all of that? It sounds like there’s some good reasons for singleness, but how do you know if that’s the right thing for you or not?

That question comes into focus in verses 36-40, which speak directly to those in the Corinthian church who apparently were already engaged to be married—betrothed. And these people, knowing what they now know, have a decision to make. What should they choose?

Here’s the advice he gives them. In verse 36 he says that if they are not “behaving properly” with each other, or if their “passions are strong”, and if “it has to be,” then they can go ahead and get married. And he adds, “it is no sin.” That’s for all of you married people in the room. It’s ok, you didn’t sin when you got married.

But then verse 37 is the other side of the fiddle. If those engaged people have determined in their heart to remain single, and if they have their desire under control—which doesn’t mean they don’t have any desire, but simply that it’s under control—then they do well to remain single.

And verse 38 is there to sum the whole thing up and absolutely shatter our North American way of seeing things: “So then he who marries his betrothed does well, and he who refrains from marriage will do even better” (1 Corinthians 7:38). 

Yes, you heard that right. Singleness is to be preferred.

Gift of Singleness

Now some of you might have noticed as I’ve walked through this passage that I’ve said nothing about the “gift of singleness.” Maybe you’ve never heard that phrase before, but it’s a popular idea that comes up when people talk about this topic.

The idea is that there is a spiritual gift that of singleness which gives people the special ability to be single. And if you have that gift, then you should be single, but if you don’t, then forget 1 Corinthians 7 was written and go kind a spouse.

I don’t believe that this idea is Biblical. In 1 Corinthians 7 verse 7, marriage and singleness themselves are the gift, not some special ability to do either. I’m going to post more on the blog this week about the “gift of singleness,” so you can read it there if you’re interested, but I hope you can already see that the whole way Paul argues in this chapter points us away from seeing the gift of singleness as some special ability, and instead towards seeing singleness itself as a gift. And it’s a gift because it gives the freedom to invest yourself more fully in the good works for which you have been created (Ephesians 2:10). 

Application

So let’s sum all of this up: 1 Corinthians 7 tells us that the single life is a unique gift from God, and many Christians should thoughtfully embrace singleness as the best way for them to glorify God in this short life we’ve been given.

There is a good chance that this idea is brand new to you. I know how counter-cultural this is. Haven’t we all been taught, either by word or by example, that adulthood equals marriage? That getting married is what all of the normal grown-ups do? That singleness is a problem to be fixed instead of a gift to be invested?

Isn’t it true that in our church culture, if a couple gets married, even if they just use their marriage to settle down and get comfortable in a materialistic North American lifestyle, they will still be celebrated and looked on as if they’ve arrived way more than the single person who is quietly and busily investing their life and time and talents into the kingdom of God?

I want to suggest this morning that most of us have done with marriage what the Prosperity Gospel has done with money. We’ve taken these Old Testament Scriptures about marriage and children and haphazardly applied them to our lives today without stopping to recognize that we are in the New Covenant, and many things have changed. Our relationship with money and possessions has changed, and so has our relationship with marriage.

It doesn’t help that we live in a culture which worships romantic love. Every song, every movie, every story, assumes that a good and happy life includes being in a relationship with another person. Many of us don’t have many role models of normal, healthy, spiritually fruitful singleness.

Except, you know, there’s Jesus. And the Apostle Paul. So maybe we don’t have an excuse. Maybe we’ve let ourselves be conformed to this world instead of being transformed by the renewal of our mind (Romans 12:2).

So what can we do about this? I’m going to end here with some specific encouragements for different groups of people that might be represented among us today.

Parents

First of all, parents. You have a huge role here in shaping your children’s expectations concerning marriage. Let me give you an example. Do you know how many times I’ve prayed with my two boys for their future wives?

Zero times.

Why would I do that? I don’t know if my boys are going to best serve God as married or as single men. So why would I pray with them for someone who might not exist, and train them to expect marriage for themselves, and then to feel let down by God if that doesn’t happen?

I certainly talk to my boys about marriage. But I say things like “If God wants you to get married, here’s the kind of husband you should be and the kind of woman you should marry. But God doesn’t give marriage to everybody. The most important thing is that you use your life for Jesus.”

Parents, be careful about your kids’ media intake. Be careful about the way that even innocent movies and stories can reinforce the stereotype that adulthood equals marriage. Point your kids towards a life of service to God, whether that includes marriage or not.

For the Young People

Next, let me talk to you older children and teenagers and college students. I’d guess that most of you hope to be married someday. Some of you will. Maybe some of you shouldn’t. But regardless, can I please encourage you to make the focus of your life something bigger than just getting married?

For some of you, especially you college students, finding a boyfriend or a girlfriend and eventually a husband or a wife is the number one drive in your life right now.

But I’ve talked to enough people who get to their later 20s and 30s and say “I wish I hadn’t been so focused on a relationship in my younger years.” Because whether you get married or not, by the time you get to your later 20s you start to gain perspective and realize that life is so much bigger than a relationship, even a relationship like marriage.

And if everything you’ve heard these last two weeks is true, then the number one question you should be asking is not, “Who should I marry?" but rather, “What part will I play in the great mission of God? How and where can I best use my life to fulfill my mission of good works for the glory of God?

Focus on that, and only ever marry someone if they will help you do that better than you can on your own.

I was single until I was 26. And you heard me share last week how I pursued Aimee and then married her because I knew that I could serve Jesus in my particular ministry with this particular woman more effectively than I could on my own. 

But that won’t be true of all of you. Or it might not be true for a number of years. And that’s ok. In fact, it might even be better, in Paul’s words. So put the mission first in your life, and put marriage in its proper place, and use your season of singleness, however long it will last, for God’s glory.

For the Married

For those of you who are married, really listening to 1 Corinthians 7 might make you ask, “Should I have gotten married in the first place?” Perhaps you did pursue marriage because you thought you needed to, and you fell in love, and that was that.

Well, you are married now, and like we read in verse 36, you didn’t sin when you got married. So instead of second-guessing your decision, turn instead to Ephesians 5 and focus on making your marriage about the mission. Live out the gospel, and link arms with your married and single brothers and sisters here in the church, and throw your life into the mission of God.

And please, married people, be aware of those who aren’t married here in our church fellowship. Please know that they face certain unique challenges by living in a culture that is oriented around marriages and families. Singleness is a gift, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a lonely gift and even a painful one.

So let’s stop asking people why they’re not married, or when it’s their turn. Let’s remember that holidays and long weekends Sunday afternoons—times that you get to relax with your family—can be really hard and lonely when you don’t have a family to default to. Simple things like vehicle problems become bigger deals when you don’t have a spouse to pick you up from the mechanic’s.

So let’s take care of each other, single and married. We need each other. I think we do a good job of this here at EBC, but let’s keep pressing in to love each other better.

Now I’m going to wrap up here. I know that this is a lot to take in, especially if this is new and challenges some ways that you’ve previously thought.

So we’re going to end together by singing “By Faith.” All of us, married or not, are children of the promise. At this stage in the story, married or not, we walk by faith and not by sight as we trust and obey Christ and invest our lives in the gospel. Let’s determine to do that well together today and always.

Today, as we continue in our journey of seeing how the big story of the Bible impacts our lives, we are talking about marriage. We started two weeks ago with work because that was one of the first things Adam encountered after he was created.

And then last week we jumped ahead in the story and talked about money and possessions, mostly because that is so connected to work for us today. But now we’re going back and loosely following along as these themes appear in the story. And as we’re going to see today, marriage was the very next major life event that Adam and Eve encountered. And so that’s why we’re here today. 

I don’t think I need to say much more than that by way of introduction. We all know that marriage is a big deal. We all know that marriage is important. We also all know that marriage is difficult. It’s hard to do well. And in general, marriages and marriage itself is not doing so well in our world today. And so I hope that nobody here needs to be convinced that it’s a good idea for us this morning to listen in on what God has to say about marriage.

And as we survey marriage in the big story of the Bible, I think that each one of us—whether we’re married, were married, or have not been married—will find something important for us to take home and apply.

Marriage in Creation

So our first stop this morning as we consider what the big story of the Bible has to say about marriage is Genesis chapter 2. We spent time in this chapter two weeks ago, when we heard how the Lord God created Adam, and then “put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15).

Adam was created for a job. He was given a mission. And it’s only after he’s been put to work on that mission that God says, in verse 18: “It is not good that the man should be alone.” And then we hear of God’s solution to this problem: “I will make him a helper fit for him.” 

And so God performs the very first surgery. He knocks Adam out and creates the first woman, not from the dirt like Adam, but from the side of Adam himself. And when he meets her for the first time, he says, “at last” (Genesis 2:23).

Marriage Is About the Mission

There’s a couple of things I want us to notice right away at this point in the story. First thing: did you see how God did not create Adam and Eve as a married couple and then give them work to do? The mission of working and keeping the garden came first. And after that, God created Eve, because Adam wasn’t able to do this job on his own. He needed a helper to be able to fulfill the work God had given him to do.

From the very beginning, marriage was never an end unto itself. Marriage was about the mission.

I highlight this because it’s common for many people, even many Christians, to view marriage as an end unto itself. The life goal of so many people is just to get married, and what comes after that is a whole lot less important. But that’s not the way God designed things. The mission that God gave Adam was the most important thing, and marriage was created to help that happen.

The second thing we should notice here is that romantic love is not the ultimate purpose of marriage. 

Isn’t it true that it’s very common for us to view marriage as the culmination of romantic love between two people? That’s why “fall in love and get married” is a phrase that doesn’t sound strange to us. It’s what happens in all the movies, all the “Christian” romance novels. It’s why so many weddings these days are just big celebrations of romantic love.

But God did not create Eve because Adam needed a little romance in his life. God didn’t say that He would make a lover fit for Adam. He said that He would “make him a helper fit for him” (Genesis 2:18). According to Genesis 2, the main purpose of marriage is not romance, but work.

Marriage is about the mission. And I believe one reason so many marriages today are struggling and failing is that people have forgotten this. Far too many people build their whole lives on the goal of getting married, and when marriage turns out to be less exciting then they were expecting, they just get a divorce and find someone else to fall in love with.

We’re going to say some more about this at the end of the message, so I’ll leave it at that for now. But don’t miss the point that that marriage is about the mission.

One Flesh

Let’s look now at verse 24, which comes after Adam met Eve and named her “Woman.” It says, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24).

This verse is really important, because it tells us that what God did with Adam and Eve wasn’t just a one-off. Instead, He was establishing a pattern for others to follow. He was creating the institution of marriage.

This is why courts and governments and even churches don’t get to redefine marriage. It was never theirs to define in the first place. This was God’s idea.

Now look at verse 24 more carefully. It tells us that when a marriage takes place, there’s two main things that need to happen. First, each person leaves their families.

I always wince when I go to a wedding reception and hear the phrase “welcome to the family.” That’s not biblical. When two people get married, they are not joining each other’s families. They are leaving their families to start a whole new family unit.

The second thing we see in verse 24 is that a husband and wife hold fast to each other. That might sound like a long hug, but “hold fast” a phrase that’s used elsewhere in the Old Testament to talk about being faithful to someone within a covenant (Deuteronomy 10:20). And so this phrase helps us to understand that marriage is a covenant.

When I do remarriage counselling, I ask the couple what the most important part of their wedding day is. And the right answer is the vows. When they pledge, in front of witnesses, to be faithful to each other no matter what until they die. It’s those public covenant vows that actually make them married.

There’s one more thing to notice from verse 24: a man and his wife are united in a  covenant, and then—and only then—do they become one flesh. This helps us understand the Bible’s teaching that physical union is a reenactment and a reminder of covenantal union. And this is why the covenant of marriage must always come before physical intimacy. Physical intimacy outside of this covenant is not just wrong, it’s unthinkable—or at least it should be.

There’s so much more that we could say here, but I trust this gives us a little picture of God’s design for marriage in creation.

Marriage in the Fall

Now let’s move on to the next big event in the storyline of the Bible, which is the fall. We don’t have to look very far to see that the fall of Adam and Eve into sin caused devastation to everything in their lives, including their marriage.

You remember in Genesis 3 how God pronounced words of curse on Adam and Eve for their sin. And a part of what He said to Eve is in verse 16: “Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you” (Genesis 3:16).

Adam having authority over Eve wasn’t a new idea. That was in place before the fall, as seen by the way that he names her, for example. But after the fall, that whole relationship and authority structure will be shot through with tension. Sin causes marriages to become power struggles, war zones of conflicting desires. Sin causes marriages to become tense and painful and loveless. Sin causes couples to break their covenant vows and be faithless to each other. Sin makes marriages end.

Some of us don’t need to look very far to witness the destruction of marriage because of human sin. My parents split up when I was eight and divorced when I was twelve. I know that many of you have seen or experienced varying levels of pain because of difficult marriages. We all know what this is like.

Marriage in Christ

And so, we need Jesus. We need the fresh breeze of the New Creation to transform the way that we understand marriage, think about marriage, and do marriage.

We read Ephesians 5:22–33 together a few minutes ago, and there is so much in this passage that shows us the way that marriages are transformed and redeemed in Christ. But for the sake of our time together this morning, we’re just going to focus in on one key theme.

And it’s this: in Christ, we discover that marriage is about something so much bigger than just two people. Marriage is actually all about Jesus and us.

We see hints of that from verse 22 down to 30, where husbands are called to emulate Christ, and wives are called to emulate the church. There’s a connection here between marriage and Christ’s relationship with the church.

And that connection goes really, really deep—deeper than you might realize. And we discover this when we get to verse 31, where Paul quotes from the main marriage passage in the whole Bible, Genesis 2:24: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” 

And then he says in verse 32, “This mystery is profound.” Now, stop right there. When you hear the word “mystery,” what comes to mind? In English, this word usually means something that’s hard to understand or which nobody knows. But in the New Testament, in the Greek language, this word refers to something which was once hidden, but now has come to light. That’s why Paul often speaks of the “mystery of Christ” (Ephesians 3:4). It doesn’t mean that Jesus is hard to understand, but rather that the truth of Christ was once hidden in the shadows but has now become visible and plain.

And so Paul is saying that Genesis 2:24 is a mystery. These words about a man and a woman holding fast to each other speak of a truth which was once hidden but is now out in plain sight.

So what is that truth? Verse 32: “I am saying that it [—that this mystery, that Genesis 2:24—] refers to Christ and the church.”

Just think about what this means: all the way back in the garden, when God designed marriage, He was already thinking about Christ and the church. And when He inspired these words in Genesis 2:24 about a man leaving his home to come and hold fast to his wife, He was actually talking about Jesus, who would come from heaven to seek and save give Himself up for His bride to and purify her name make her beautiful and who would holding fast to her in covenant faithfulness.

This is telling us that God intentionally created human marriage to be a little picture, a little reflection, of Christ and the church.

Marriage in the New Creation

And so we shouldn’t be surprised to get to the end of the Bible, and see it finish up with a marriage. Revelation 19 speaks about the great marriage of Christ. Revelation 21 tells us about the “new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Revelation 21:2).

And then in Revelation 22, the last chapter in the Bible, Jesus promises to come soon. And in verse 17, the fifth-last verse of the whole Bible, we read, “The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come.’” That’s where the Bible ends. With us, the church, the Bride, saying to our Groom, “come.” 

It’s this big story that helps us understand why human marriage will not exist when we get to the New Creation. See, many people—especially newlyweds—have been deeply saddened when they’ve read Jesus’ words in Matthew 22:30: “in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.”  It sounds like we’ll really be missing out.

But we will not be missing out. We will not need marriage in the New Creation because we will be fully experiencing the reality of which marriage was only a picture.

Can you imagine going to a Major League Baseball game, and you’re sitting front row seats, and it’s the middle of the game, and you look over and the guy beside you is looking through his baseball card collection? You’d want to say, “Put your little pictures away! The real thing is going on in front of you right now!”

Marriage is a baseball card, and we’re not going to miss it when we get to fully experience the real thing.

Marriage Today

So that’s where we are in this biggest story ever told. We are the bride, and we’re waiting for our groom. And we look to the day when human marriage will pass away and be fully replaced by the real thing.

But today, in this season of already-but-not-yet, human marriage hasn’t been done away with yet. Christians still get married. Many of you are married. So what does the big story of the Bible say about our marriages here and now today?

I want to suggest that when we step back and survey everything we’ve seen today, there’s three big ideas that come to bear on each of us today, whether we are married or not.

1) Marriage Is About the Mission

First, we all need to remember that marriage has always been about the mission God gave us to fulfill. And like I said earlier, we need to stress this, because many Christians have been swept up in the way that our culture worships romantic love, and worships marriage as the culmination of that romantic love. I just think about all of those Christian romance novels about two unrealistic people falling head over heels in love with each other and getting married. There are very few novels being written about already married couples staying married through a hard season. That’s the kind of story we need more of.

These cultural blinders impact the way we read the Bible. Think about the story of Ruth for a moment. Almost every single preacher or author I’ve ever heard talk about that story turns it into a romance between Ruth and Boaz. Where they fall in love and have all of this chemistry. But none of that is actually in the Bible.

We really need to recalibrate here.

Now please understand. I’m not against romance. Speaking personally, romance is a wonderful part of my relationship with my wife. I fell in love with her on Christmas Eve 2009, and stayed up late that night writing lame poetry for her. But by that point, I had already begun to realize that she was the kind of person that I could serve Jesus with more effectively than I could on my own.

And even after that point, I didn’t just follow my heart. I remember one specific conversation we had as things were getting more serious. And I asked her, “If we get married, and God calls me to do ministry in a really hard part of the world, would you go with me?” And if she had said “no,” we would have been finished. Because my life was about serving God, and I wasn’t going to sacrifice my life’s mission just because I fell in love with the wrong girl.

I remember a missionary friend once warning me in the most solemn tones not to marry the wrong person. And he told me about how many young men he had seen get all fired up for Jesus, and go off to Bible college so that they could become a missionary, only to fall in love with someone there, and get married, and settle in to a comfortable suburban lifestyle, all the while being cheered on by a church culture that prizes marriage above almost everything else. And I was determined to not let that happen. So while I thoroughly enjoyed falling in love with Aimee, there was a lot of hard work and deliberate conversations with her and with others before I asked her to marry me.

So young people, please listen up: never marry someone just because you’re in love with them. That’s like buying a restaurant just because you like the food there. You need a lot more in place before you make a massive decision like that. Never marry someone unless you know, and the wise and mature people around you know, that you will be able to serve Jesus more effectively with that person than you would without them.

Now a word to those of you who are already married. Just like getting married is not about falling in love, so staying married is not about staying in love. Many couples, when they fall out of love with their spouse, give up on their marriages. Some get a divorce. Others just stop caring and stop working and stop trying.

But please hear this morning: there is so much more to being married than being in love. Not that there’s anything wrong with staying in love or cultivating romance in marriage. Once again, I can testify here. After the better part of a decade, I am still completely bonkers about my wife. She can sometimes just look at me and reduce me to a drooling fool. We really, really like each other. Just the other day she was in the kitchen and I walked up towards her and I’m pretty sure I heard our daughter making kissing noises, because she knew what was coming next.

But we don’t feel those romantic feelings all of the time, and that’s OK. We understand that romance is the gravy. The meat and potatoes of our marriage is our commitment to helping each other serve Jesus and others more effectively. And romance is just the gravy that goes on top if that meal that helps it all taste so much better.

And you know what? You can eat meat and potatoes without gravy. It’s not as fun, but it’s possible. And it’s a lot better than having just gravy and nothing else, or worse, gravy on top of something terrible like rotten meat or roadkill.

So if you’re married today, whether or not you still feel in love, the most important thing you can do for your marriage is to make it about the mission. Use your marriage to serve each other so that you can serve Jesus and others as effectively as possible. And what you’ll probably find is that recalibrating your marriage to make it mission-focused will make it a lot more fun and maybe make you fall in love again.

All of this is our first point of application. Marriage is about the mission.

2) Remember the Gospel

The second thing we all need to remember is that marriage is about Christ and the church. Marriage is about the gospel. If you are married, a major part of your mission is to so love and respect each other that you give the world a living, breathing picture of what Jesus and the church are like. 

And the way we start to do that is by obeying the commands of Ephesians 5:22-33. Husbands, I hope you know you have the bigger responsibility in this department. The buck stops with you, and it’s your job to so love your wife that other people see your marriage and say “If that’s how Jesus loves His church, I want in.” Make your marriage preach the true gospel by loving your wife well.

Your standard of love is Jesus, who—verse 25—gave Himself up for her. I spoke to a man once who was about to leave his wife and was doing nothing but complain about her. And I pointed him to this verse and said, “Until she takes out nails and a hammer and physically crucifies you, you have not loved her to the extent that Christ has loved the church. So press into Jesus, and be strengthened by Him, and live out the gospel by loving your wife.”

Wives, you live out the gospel in your marriage by submitting to your husband, and respecting him. I understand that much of the time, this doesn’t come naturally. Your husband is not always respectable and deserving of your respect.

But that’s the whole point. God tells you to submit to and respect him not because you feel like it or because he thinks he needs it, but because your marriage is not about you: it’s a picture of Christ and the church.

So think about how you talk about your husband in front of your children, or to your friends when he’s not around. Do you complain about him or belittle him or roll your eyes? If you do that, what does it say about the gospel? What sort of picture of Christ and the church are you portraying?

And at this point I just want to add that I know marriages are hard and they take a lot of work. They need a lot of regular maintenance. And often what can really help with that is some input and perspective from others. That can take many forms, but I just want you to know that there is no shame in sending me a note and coming to sit down and talk about your marriage. Even if your marriage is good, and you want to make it better, that would be a great thing to do.

3) Marriage Is Not Ultimate

For all of us in the room today, married or not, the third truth we must remember is that marriage is not ultimate. Marriage is not permanent. Marriage is just one way that some people get to glorify Jesus with this stretch of their life.

But if you know Christ, then if you are married or not, you are a part of the reality to which marriage only points. And that’s a truth we’re going to pick up on more next week when we talk about singleness, which is another way that some people get to glorify Jesus with their life. And what the big story of the Bible has to say about singleness might really surprise you.

But we’re going to end today by singing a wonderful song that celebrates the reality. As the church, we are the bride that Jesus came from heaven to rescue. We are all a part of this wonderful, eternal relationship, where there will be no death to do us part.

Today, as we continue in our journey of seeing how the big story of the Bible impacts our lives, we are talking about marriage. We started two weeks ago with work because that was one of the first things Adam encountered after he was created.

And then last week we jumped ahead in the story and talked about money and possessions, mostly because that is so connected to work for us today. But now we’re going back and loosely following along as these themes appear in the story. And as we’re going to see today, marriage was the very next major life event that Adam and Eve encountered. And so that’s why we’re here today. 

I don’t think I need to say much more than that by way of introduction. We all know that marriage is a big deal. We all know that marriage is important. We also all know that marriage is difficult. It’s hard to do well. And in general, marriages and marriage itself is not doing so well in our world today. And so I hope that nobody here needs to be convinced that it’s a good idea for us this morning to listen in on what God has to say about marriage.

And as we survey marriage in the big story of the Bible, I think that each one of us—whether we’re married, were married, or have not been married—will find something important for us to take home and apply.

Marriage in Creation

So our first stop this morning as we consider what the big story of the Bible has to say about marriage is Genesis chapter 2. We spent time in this chapter two weeks ago, when we heard how the Lord God created Adam, and then “put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15).

Adam was created for a job. He was given a mission. And it’s only after he’s been put to work on that mission that God says, in verse 18: “It is not good that the man should be alone.” And then we hear of God’s solution to this problem: “I will make him a helper fit for him.” 

And so God performs the very first surgery. He knocks Adam out and creates the first woman, not from the dirt like Adam, but from the side of Adam himself. And when he meets her for the first time, he says, “at last” (Genesis 2:23).

Marriage Is About the Mission

There’s a couple of things I want us to notice right away at this point in the story. First thing: did you see how God did not create Adam and Eve as a married couple and then give them work to do? The mission of working and keeping the garden came first. And after that, God created Eve, because Adam wasn’t able to do this job on his own. He needed a helper to be able to fulfill the work God had given him to do.

From the very beginning, marriage was never an end unto itself. Marriage was about the mission.

I highlight this because it’s common for many people, even many Christians, to view marriage as an end unto itself. The life goal of so many people is just to get married, and what comes after that is a whole lot less important. But that’s not the way God designed things. The mission that God gave Adam was the most important thing, and marriage was created to help that happen.

The second thing we should notice here is that romantic love is not the ultimate purpose of marriage. 

Isn’t it true that it’s very common for us to view marriage as the culmination of romantic love between two people? That’s why “fall in love and get married” is a phrase that doesn’t sound strange to us. It’s what happens in all the movies, all the “Christian” romance novels. It’s why so many weddings these days are just big celebrations of romantic love.

But God did not create Eve because Adam needed a little romance in his life. God didn’t say that He would make a lover fit for Adam. He said that He would “make him a helper fit for him” (Genesis 2:18). According to Genesis 2, the main purpose of marriage is not romance, but work.

Marriage is about the mission. And I believe one reason so many marriages today are struggling and failing is that people have forgotten this. Far too many people build their whole lives on the goal of getting married, and when marriage turns out to be less exciting then they were expecting, they just get a divorce and find someone else to fall in love with.

We’re going to say some more about this at the end of the message, so I’ll leave it at that for now. But don’t miss the point that that marriage is about the mission.

One Flesh

Let’s look now at verse 24, which comes after Adam met Eve and named her “Woman.” It says, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24).

This verse is really important, because it tells us that what God did with Adam and Eve wasn’t just a one-off. Instead, He was establishing a pattern for others to follow. He was creating the institution of marriage.

This is why courts and governments and even churches don’t get to redefine marriage. It was never theirs to define in the first place. This was God’s idea.

Now look at verse 24 more carefully. It tells us that when a marriage takes place, there’s two main things that need to happen. First, each person leaves their families.

I always wince when I go to a wedding reception and hear the phrase “welcome to the family.” That’s not biblical. When two people get married, they are not joining each other’s families. They are leaving their families to start a whole new family unit.

The second thing we see in verse 24 is that a husband and wife hold fast to each other. That might sound like a long hug, but “hold fast” a phrase that’s used elsewhere in the Old Testament to talk about being faithful to someone within a covenant (Deuteronomy 10:20). And so this phrase helps us to understand that marriage is a covenant.

When I do remarriage counselling, I ask the couple what the most important part of their wedding day is. And the right answer is the vows. When they pledge, in front of witnesses, to be faithful to each other no matter what until they die. It’s those public covenant vows that actually make them married.

There’s one more thing to notice from verse 24: a man and his wife are united in a  covenant, and then—and only then—do they become one flesh. This helps us understand the Bible’s teaching that physical union is a reenactment and a reminder of covenantal union. And this is why the covenant of marriage must always come before physical intimacy. Physical intimacy outside of this covenant is not just wrong, it’s unthinkable—or at least it should be.

There’s so much more that we could say here, but I trust this gives us a little picture of God’s design for marriage in creation.

Marriage in the fall

Now let’s move on to the next big event in the storyline of the Bible, which is the fall. We don’t have to look very far to see that the fall of Adam and Eve into sin caused devastation to everything in their lives, including their marriage.

You remember in Genesis 3 how God pronounced words of curse on Adam and Eve for their sin. And a part of what He said to Eve is in verse 16: “Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you” (Genesis 3:16).

Adam having authority over Eve wasn’t a new idea. That was in place before the fall, as seen by the way that he names her, for example. But after the fall, that whole relationship and authority structure will be shot through with tension. Sin causes marriages to become power struggles, war zones of conflicting desires. Sin causes marriages to become tense and painful and loveless. Sin causes couples to break their covenant vows and be faithless to each other. Sin makes marriages end.

Some of us don’t need to look very far to witness the destruction of marriage because of human sin. My parents split up when I was eight and divorced when I was twelve. I know that many of you have seen or experienced varying levels of pain because of difficult marriages. We all know what this is like.

Marriage in Christ

And so, we need Jesus. We need the fresh breeze of the New Creation to transform the way that we understand marriage, think about marriage, and do marriage.

We read Ephesians 5:22–33 together a few minutes ago, and there is so much in this passage that shows us the way that marriages are transformed and redeemed in Christ. But for the sake of our time together this morning, we’re just going to focus in on one key theme.

And it’s this: in Christ, we discover that marriage is about something so much bigger than just two people. Marriage is actually all about Jesus and us.

We see hints of that from verse 22 down to 30, where husbands are called to emulate Christ, and wives are called to emulate the church. There’s a connection here between marriage and Christ’s relationship with the church.

And that connection goes really, really deep—deeper than you might realize. And we discover this when we get to verse 31, where Paul quotes from the main marriage passage in the whole Bible, Genesis 2:24: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” 

And then he says in verse 32, “This mystery is profound.” Now, stop right there. When you hear the word “mystery,” what comes to mind? In English, this word usually means something that’s hard to understand or which nobody knows. But in the New Testament, in the Greek language, this word refers to something which was once hidden, but now has come to light. That’s why Paul often speaks of the “mystery of Christ” (Ephesians 3:4). It doesn’t mean that Jesus is hard to understand, but rather that the truth of Christ was once hidden in the shadows but has now become visible and plain.

And so Paul is saying that Genesis 2:24 is a mystery. These words about a man and a woman holding fast to each other speak of a truth which was once hidden but is now out in plain sight.

So what is that truth? Verse 32: “I am saying that it [—that this mystery, that Genesis 2:24—] refers to Christ and the church.”

Just think about what this means: all the way back in the garden, when God designed marriage, He was already thinking about Christ and the church. And when He inspired these words in Genesis 2:24 about a man leaving his home to come and hold fast to his wife, He was actually talking about Jesus, who would come from heaven to seek and save give Himself up for His bride to and purify her name make her beautiful and who would holding fast to her in covenant faithfulness.

This is telling us that God intentionally created human marriage to be a little picture, a little reflection, of Christ and the church.

Marriage in the New Creation

And so we shouldn’t be surprised to get to the end of the Bible, and see it finish up with a marriage. Revelation 19 speaks about the great marriage of Christ. Revelation 21 tells us about the “new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Revelation 21:2).

And then in Revelation 22, the last chapter in the Bible, Jesus promises to come soon. And in verse 17, the fifth-last verse of the whole Bible, we read, “The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come.’” That’s where the Bible ends. With us, the church, the Bride, saying to our Groom, “come.” 

It’s this big story that helps us understand why human marriage will not exist when we get to the New Creation. See, many people—especially newlyweds—have been deeply saddened when they’ve read Jesus’ words in Matthew 22:30: “in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.”  It sounds like we’ll really be missing out.

But we will not be missing out. We will not need marriage in the New Creation because we will be fully experiencing the reality of which marriage was only a picture.

Can you imagine going to a Major League Baseball game, and you’re sitting front row seats, and it’s the middle of the game, and you look over and the guy beside you is looking through his baseball card collection? You’d want to say, “Put your little pictures away! The real thing is going on in front of you right now!”

Marriage is a baseball card, and we’re not going to miss it when we get to fully experience the real thing.

Marriage Today

So that’s where we are in this biggest story ever told. We are the bride, and we’re waiting for our groom. And we look to the day when human marriage will pass away and be fully replaced by the real thing.

But today, in this season of already-but-not-yet, human marriage hasn’t been done away with yet. Christians still get married. Many of you are married. So what does the big story of the Bible say about our marriages here and now today?

I want to suggest that when we step back and survey everything we’ve seen today, there’s three big ideas that come to bear on each of us today, whether we are married or not.

1) Marriage Is About the Mission

First, we all need to remember that marriage has always been about the mission God gave us to fulfill. And like I said earlier, we need to stress this, because many Christians have been swept up in the way that our culture worships romantic love, and worships marriage as the culmination of that romantic love. I just think about all of those Christian romance novels about two unrealistic people falling head over heels in love with each other and getting married. There are very few novels being written about already married couples staying married through a hard season. That’s the kind of story we need more of.

These cultural blinders impact the way we read the Bible. Think about the story of Ruth for a moment. Almost every single preacher or author I’ve ever heard talk about that story turns it into a romance between Ruth and Boaz. Where they fall in love and have all of this chemistry. But none of that is actually in the Bible.

We really need to recalibrate here.

Now please understand. I’m not against romance. Speaking personally, romance is a wonderful part of my relationship with my wife. I fell in love with her on Christmas Eve 2009, and stayed up late that night writing lame poetry for her. But by that point, I had already begun to realize that she was the kind of person that I could serve Jesus with more effectively than I could on my own.

And even after that point, I didn’t just follow my heart. I remember one specific conversation we had as things were getting more serious. And I asked her, “If we get married, and God calls me to do ministry in a really hard part of the world, would you go with me?” And if she had said “no,” we would have been finished. Because my life was about serving God, and I wasn’t going to sacrifice my life’s mission just because I fell in love with the wrong girl.

I remember a missionary friend once warning me in the most solemn tones not to marry the wrong person. And he told me about how many young men he had seen get all fired up for Jesus, and go off to Bible college so that they could become a missionary, only to fall in love with someone there, and get married, and settle in to a comfortable suburban lifestyle, all the while being cheered on by a church culture that prizes marriage above almost everything else. And I was determined to not let that happen. So while I thoroughly enjoyed falling in love with Aimee, there was a lot of hard work and deliberate conversations with her and with others before I asked her to marry me.

So young people, please listen up: never marry someone just because you’re in love with them. That’s like buying a restaurant just because you like the food there. You need a lot more in place before you make a massive decision like that. Never marry someone unless you know, and the wise and mature people around you know, that you will be able to serve Jesus more effectively with that person than you would without them.

Now a word to those of you who are already married. Just like getting married is not about falling in love, so staying married is not about staying in love. Many couples, when they fall out of love with their spouse, give up on their marriages. Some get a divorce. Others just stop caring and stop working and stop trying.

But please hear this morning: there is so much more to being married than being in love. Not that there’s anything wrong with staying in love or cultivating romance in marriage. Once again, I can testify here. After the better part of a decade, I am still completely bonkers about my wife. She can sometimes just look at me and reduce me to a drooling fool. We really, really like each other. Just the other day she was in the kitchen and I walked up towards her and I’m pretty sure I heard our daughter making kissing noises, because she knew what was coming next.

But we don’t feel those romantic feelings all of the time, and that’s OK. We understand that romance is the gravy. The meat and potatoes of our marriage is our commitment to helping each other serve Jesus and others more effectively. And romance is just the gravy that goes on top if that meal that helps it all taste so much better.

And you know what? You can eat meat and potatoes without gravy. It’s not as fun, but it’s possible. And it’s a lot better than having just gravy and nothing else, or worse, gravy on top of something terrible like rotten meat or roadkill.

So if you’re married today, whether or not you still feel in love, the most important thing you can do for your marriage is to make it about the mission. Use your marriage to serve each other so that you can serve Jesus and others as effectively as possible. And what you’ll probably find is that recalibrating your marriage to make it mission-focused will make it a lot more fun and maybe make you fall in love again.

All of this is our first point of application. Marriage is about the mission.

2) Remember the Gospel

The second thing we all need to remember is that marriage is about Christ and the church. Marriage is about the gospel. If you are married, a major part of your mission is to so love and respect each other that you give the world a living, breathing picture of what Jesus and the church are like. 

And the way we start to do that is by obeying the commands of Ephesians 5:22-33. Husbands, I hope you know you have the bigger responsibility in this department. The buck stops with you, and it’s your job to so love your wife that other people see your marriage and say “If that’s how Jesus loves His church, I want in.” Make your marriage preach the true gospel by loving your wife well.

Your standard of love is Jesus, who—verse 25—gave Himself up for her. I spoke to a man once who was about to leave his wife and was doing nothing but complain about her. And I pointed him to this verse and said, “Until she takes out nails and a hammer and physically crucifies you, you have not loved her to the extent that Christ has loved the church. So press into Jesus, and be strengthened by Him, and live out the gospel by loving your wife.”

Wives, you live out the gospel in your marriage by submitting to your husband, and respecting him. I understand that much of the time, this doesn’t come naturally. Your husband is not always respectable and deserving of your respect.

But that’s the whole point. God tells you to submit to and respect him not because you feel like it or because he thinks he needs it, but because your marriage is not about you: it’s a picture of Christ and the church.

So think about how you talk about your husband in front of your children, or to your friends when he’s not around. Do you complain about him or belittle him or roll your eyes? If you do that, what does it say about the gospel? What sort of picture of Christ and the church are you portraying?

And at this point I just want to add that I know marriages are hard and they take a lot of work. They need a lot of regular maintenance. And often what can really help with that is some input and perspective from others. That can take many forms, but I just want you to know that there is no shame in sending me a note and coming to sit down and talk about your marriage. Even if your marriage is good, and you want to make it better, that would be a great thing to do.

3) Marriage Is Not Ultimate

For all of us in the room today, married or not, the third truth we must remember is that marriage is not ultimate. Marriage is not permanent. Marriage is just one way that some people get to glorify Jesus with this stretch of their life.

But if you know Christ, then if you are married or not, you are a part of the reality to which marriage only points. And that’s a truth we’re going to pick up on more next week when we talk about singleness, which is another way that some people get to glorify Jesus with their life. And what the big story of the Bible has to say about singleness might really surprise you.

But we’re going to end today by singing a wonderful song that celebrates the reality. As the church, we are the bride that Jesus came from heaven to rescue. We are all a part of this wonderful, eternal relationship, where there will be no death to do us part.

Picture the most godly person you can imagine. The most morally-upright, squeaky-clean, God-fearing person that ever walked the earth. This could be a real person you know, or you could just imagine someone.

Now let me ask you some questions about that person: what is the balance on their credit card? How much money do they have in savings? Do they even have savings? How much money to they live off of each month? How new is their car? How big is their home? How nice are their clothes? What kind of phone is in their pocket, and how new is it?

There’s at least two kinds of answers that Christians tend to come up with to those questions. On the one hand, some might picture this unrealistically godly person as someone who doesn’t have much money. If they haven’t taken a vow of poverty, they’re close to it. They don’t have a credit card, they wear clothing from the 1940s which miraculously hasn’t worn out yet, and ravens bring them meat every day.

On the other hand, some might imagine this stand-up person as being well-off, prosperous, rich. Maybe even very wealthy. Because wealth and prosperity are obviously the sign of God’s blessing on someone’s life, right?

Now here’s what’s interesting, and why there is often so much confusion on this topic: both of these sets of answers—that Christians should be poor, or that Christians should be rich—have Scriptures which justify their position. There are verses in the Bible which seem to suggest that Christians should reject anything material. After all, when Jesus sent out his disciples, didn’t He tell them not to bring anything with them—not even any money (Luke 9:3)? 

But on the other hand, there are other Scriptures which suggest the opposite is true, and tell us that if we obey God, He will bless us materially, and we will prosper.

So, what do you think is the right answer? How have you made sense of those mixed messages? And most importantly, how do you apply this to yourself? What’s your financial situation? What are your financial goals? How do you feel these reflect on your godliness?

It shouldn’t be a surprise by now that we’re talking about money and possessions this morning. And we’re going to do our best to make sense of these apparently conflicting messages from the Bible. We’re going to see that confusion on this topic comes when we ignore or misunderstand the way that the Bible fits together as a big story. But when we understand the Bible’s storyline and how it fits together, then we’ll be able to more clearly see what God expects of us, today, in terms of our money and possessions. 

Money and Possessions in the Israelite Covenant

So let’s begin by going back to God’s covenant with Israel. You’ll remember how the storyline of the Bible is built on the framework of these big covenants God made with His people. And after delivering Israel from Egypt, God entered into a covenant with them. And in that covenant, God explicitly promised to prosper them materially—to give them lots of resources and possessions—if they obeyed Him.

I’ve mentioned before that Deuteronomy 28 is a very important chapter in terms of understanding that covenant and how it worked. And in that chapter, we read this:

 “And if you faithfully obey the voice of the Lord your God, being careful to do all his commandments that I command you today… Blessed shall be the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your ground and the fruit of your cattle, the increase of your herds and the young of your flock…The Lord will command the blessing on you in your barns [or storehouses] and in all that you undertake…And the Lord will make you abound in prosperity, in the fruit of your womb and in the fruit of your livestock and in the fruit of your ground… And you shall lend to many nations, but you shall not borrow” (Deuteronomy 28:1, 4, 8, 11, 12).

These were the terms of the covenant. Obedience to God resulted in material blessing and wealth and prosperity.

And the flip-side was true: the rest of the chapter goes on to spell out the drought and material ruin that would come upon them if they were unfaithful to the covenant.

And we have to understand these terms of the covenant if we’re going to understand the rest of the Old Testament properly. Because the rest of the Old Testament takes place in the context of this covenant and these terms.

So for example, in Proverbs 3:9-10, we read “Honor the Lord with your wealth and with the firstfruits of all your produce; then your barns [or storehouses] will be filled with plenty, and your vats will be bursting with wine.”

What is this verse saying? It’s basically just repeating Deuteronomy 28. In the Law, God had already commanded them to honour Him with their firstfruits (Deuteronomy 26:2). So that idea wasn’t new: it was one of the many laws they had to obey. And Deuteronomy 28 said that if they obeyed the Law, including this one about honouring God with their firstfruits, then He would bless the fruit of the ground, which would result in full barns and bursting vats.

So this verse is essentially repeating Deuteronomy 28. It’s celebrating that God will keep His promises and be faithful to the terms of the covenant.

We see the same thing in Psalm 37, where David famously wrote, “I have been young, and now am old, yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken or his children begging for bread. He is ever lending generously, and his children become a blessing” (Psalm 37:25–26). Of course the righteous man’s children would not beg bread, because within that covenant, righteous men were rewarded with prosperity. Once again, David is not saying anything new: he is celebrating that God keeps His covenant promises.

One more example is the well-known passage from Malachi 3 about “robbing God.” And in that passage, God challenges the people to bring the full tithe into the storehouse, and He promises that if they do that, He will “open the windows of heaven” and “pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need” (Malachi 3:10).

I hope by now you can see where this is going. Tithing was one of the laws they were given by Moses to obey. And so once again, Malachi 3 is just repeating the covenant promises of Deuteronomy 28: that if they obey, they will be blessed in this way.

There’s a couple of other well-known Old Testament passages I’m going to write about on the blog this week, including the Prayer of Jabez, and they all fit in with this same pattern: prosperity was a specific promise within God’s covenant with Israel. In that covenant, with rare exception, to be godly was to be wealthy.

Money and Possessions in the New Covenant

And so, as we try to understand what this means for us today, it’s very important for us to recognize that we do not live under the terms and conditions of that Old Covenant that God made through Moses. Instead, we are a part of the New Covenant in Christ, which has replaced that Old Covenant.

Hebrews 8:13 says that “In speaking of a new covenant, he makes the first one obsolete. And what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away.” It says it right there: the Old Covenant through Moses is obsolete. And that shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody this morning, right? This is why we don’t sacrifice animals any more. We’re under the New Covenant, bought and paid for by the blood of Christ who died for our sins and rose again as the firstfruits of the New Creation.

And so we seem to remember this when it comes to animal sacrifices or worship at the temple. We get that we’re under a different covenant with different terms and conditions. But many Christians forget all about this when it comes to prosperity and wealth. They read Deuteronomy 28 and think that those things apply to us just like they applied back then.

And this is really where the Prosperity Gospel comes from. If you’re unfamiliar with that phrase, the Prosperity Gospel is a set of teachings which says that if we obey God, or if we have enough faith in Him, or if we use our words in the right way, then He will bless us with financial prosperity.

And this teaching is all over the place. You might be surprised at the popular teachers on the Internet or your TV who believe this. And it shows up in sneaky ways. It’s not just the mega-rich televangelists with private jets. It even shows up in innocent Christian movies like “Facing the Giants.”

Many of you have probably seen that movie. It’s about this guy who is in a tough spot in life, and everything is going wrong for him, and so He finally surrenders everything to God. And guess what happens next? Things start going well for him. His football team starts winning. His job and financial situation improves. He and his wife finally conceive after struggling with infertility. And someone gives him a brand new truck.

This would all be fine and good and biblical, if we still lived under the Old Covenant. But we don’t. We live in the New Covenant, and under this New Covenant, our relationship with money and possessions is not the same as it was back then.

Matthew 6

And nowhere this more clear than when we hear the words of Jesus in Matthew 6:19, which we’ve read already: “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal” (Matthew 6:19). 

Just imagine how these words would have landed on the ears of the people listening to him, especially those who were well versed in the Scripture. They thought that storing up treasures earth was a good thing to do. It was a sign of God’s favour and blessing. God had explicitly promised to fill up their storehouses!

But now Jesus, in a sermon that is drenched with New Covenant truth, is saying not to do that anymore. Don’t stockpile your possessions. Don’t lay up treasure.

See, something big had changed. Do you remember Jesus saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand” (Mark 1:15)? The Kingdom of God has broken in to our age, and this present age is on it’s way out, and in our place in the story—this time of already-but-not-yet—the priorities of the people of God have shifted away from the present moment and towards the eternal future ahead of us. 

Away from storing up treasures here on earth, and towards storing up treasures in Heaven.

Do you notice how Jesus reminds us that in this present age, all of our stuff is so temporary and so vulnerable to being eaten and destroyed and stolen?

I had my bike stolen once, and I was fairly upset about it, until I remembered this verse. Jesus never promised to protect my stuff. He warned me that my stuff is a part of this Old Creation, and it’s affected by the curse, and it’s vulnerable.

And so according to Jesus, the solution to not having your stuff stolen is to keep your stuff in a place where it can’t be stolen. Namely, heaven. Instead of laying up treasures on earth, we should lay up for ourselves treasures in heaven, “where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal” (Matthew 6:20).

So please hear: Jesus is not against us laying up treasure for ourselves. What He is against is us laying up treasures here on this earth. He wants us to lay up treasures in Heaven, where there is no curse and where treasure will last into eternity.

What Are Treasures on Earth?

So that’s the big picture, but we need to ask a few important questions to really dig in to what this passage is teaching us. 

So the first question we’re going to ask is, “What does Jesus mean by ‘treasures on earth’? Is this talking about anything of value whatsoever? Does this mean, for example, we shouldn’t have a savings account? Does it mean we should all take a vow of poverty?”

Now I know it’s easy for us to just say “of course not” to those questions, but we need to check ourselves. What if? What if that was what Jesus was saying? Would you obey?

The way we should answer those questions is to look to the Scripture and notice that Jesus did not ask his disciples to take a permanent vow of poverty. There was one particular journey where He told them not to bring any money with them, but later, when He was preparing to send them out on the great commission, “He said to them, ‘But now let the one who has a moneybag take it, and likewise a knapsack. And let the one who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one’” (Luke 22:36).

So having some supplies for the mission, like some money and a backpack and apparently a weapon for self-defence, was ok.

We know that the early Christians often gathered in each other’s homes for fellowship and hospitality, and so home ownership was not something they needed to reject. 

That’s actually the reason Aimee and I bought the house we did when we moved to town here. Not only was it the cheapest thing on the market that fit our family, but it was a home that we could use as a ministry centre. A place where we could have people in all the time, which has been a real dream come true for us.

We know that even though Paul often faced hunger and need, there were other times he experienced plenty, and he was okay with that (Philippians 4:12). And we know that he had some possessions which were valuable to Him, like a cloak and some books and parchments (2 Timothy 4:13).

And then there’s Paul’s command to the Thessalonians, that we should each earn our own living and be dependent on no-one (1 Thessalonians 4:12, 2 Thessalonians 3:12). In today’s economy, we have vehicles and appliances that break down, and many of us will live for several years after we’ve stopped being able to earn an income. And so obeying this command is very difficult  without at least some measure of savings.

So “treasures on earth” doesn’t refer to the tools that we need to live and fulfill our mission. It doesn’t mean anything of material value, and I hesitate to say that it refers to a moderate amount of savings which we have in place to cover our necessities.

I do think we kind of get that this word “treasure” is talking about things of value that we don’t actually need to live and fulfill our mission. It’s the the luxury items, the things that we keep and collect and stockpile for ourselves that go well beyond our basic necessities.

It’s like the rich man that Jesus spoke of in Luke 12. His land produced plentifully, and “thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’ And he said, ‘I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry”’” (Luke 12:17–19).

Many people today would call that wise financial planning. Freedom 55, right? “But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God” (Luke 12:20–21).

What Are Treasures on Heaven?

So if that’s what treasures on earth are, then the next important question we need to ask is: what are treasures in heaven, and how do we store them up?

If we were to read through the gospel of Matthew in its entirety, we’d see that “treasures in heaven” point to the reward that we will receive from God in the Age to Come. We talked about this idea last week, in the context of good works. God has promised to reward us for the things we do by faith in Him here in this age.

And in Matthew’s gospel, we hear that doing righteous deeds, suffering for Christ’s sake, forgiving one another, and doing good works for one another are all actions that will be rewarded in eternity (Matthew 5:12, 5:30, 46, 6:6, 18, 10:42, 25:40).

So when Jesus tells us to store up treasures in Heaven, He’s telling us to do the kinds of things that will result in heavenly reward. And to actively pursue that. We’re not just allowed to lay up heavenly reward, we’re commanded to. It’s supposed to be a priority for us.

Why Not Both?

And this leads us to our next question. Why not do both? Why not lay up treasures here on earth and in heaven? Why not live the good life here and there?

The answer is that it’s not possible to seek earthly treasure and heavenly treasure. 1 Timothy 6 tells us that “those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs. But as for you, O man of God, flee these things. Pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness. Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called and about which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses” (1 Timothy 6:9–12).

Do you see that? Earthly treasure and eternal life are in opposite directions. We can’t pursue both at the same time. We need to make a choice.

Jesus said the same in Matthew 6, just a few verses down. “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money” (Matthew 6:24). We have to make a choice.

If we are going to store up treasures in heaven, it means that we will be committed to using our time and money to do the kinds of things that Jesus will reward us for. We’ll using our money to give to our church and support missionaries and we’ll be using our time to care for and love others. And if we’re truly committed to those things, we’re not going to have time or money left over to stockpile our own cache of goods.

Interrogate our Possessions

Now I think we should admit that this is a very difficult part of Scripture for us here in North America to rally understand.

Most of us in this room today probably don’t think that we’re wealthy. It’s always the guy who has more than us who is wealthy. But by global standards, virtually every person in this room today is wealthy. Just consider that the poverty line in the United States is $11,000 a year, which works out to roughly $15,000 Canadian. And if you only lived off of that amount per year, you’d still be richer than about 85% of the world’s population.

Most of us are staggeringly rich. And so it’s appropriate for us this morning to be reminded that don’t actually need a lot to live. 1 Timothy 6:8 says that “If we have food and clothing, with these we will be content” (1 Timothy 6:8). 

I want to suggest to you a practice that I’ve tried to do, and continue to try to do regularly, which is interrogate my money and possessions. When we moved here from Regina, I had the chance to ask some questions about every item that we packed up: “Is this a tool for the kingdom? Is this here to help me more effectively fulfill my mission of good works for the sake of Jesus? Or is this just treasure that I’m stockpiling for my own luxury?”

And here in North America where we’re constantly being bombarded with messages about needing more and more and more, we need to ask those questions on a regular basis about our possessions, about how much money we have, about every door crasher sale flier that shows up in our mailbox. “Do I really need this? How much of this do I really need? What am I keeping this for? Is this a tool for this mission, or is it just treasure on earth?”

It’s in this context that we should hear what Paul writes in 1 Timothy 6 regarding those who are rich. He’s already said that desiring to be rich is a deadly mistake, but what about those who are already rich, even if that wasn’t their goal? In verse 17, which is in your bulletin, he says, “As for the rich in this present age, charge them not to be haughty, nor to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly provides us with everything to enjoy. They are to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share, thus storing up treasure for themselves as a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of that which is truly life” (1 Timothy 6:17–19). 

Do you hear that language there about storing up treasure for ourselves for the future? And the way we are to do that is to be “rich in good works, generous and ready to share.”

We don’t hang on to our money and possessions. Instead, we use it for the kingdom. To be generous. To do good works.

Hearts in the Right Place

And please just remember that when we decide to do that—to let go of some treasure, some possession, some amount of money, and give it away to someone else who needs it or here to the church or to a missionary or a ministry—when we do that, we’re not actually sacrificing anything.

All we’re doing is transferring our treasure to a safer location. To heaven. God is going to reward you for your faith-filled generosity.

And that’s where it all comes down to, doesn’t it? Do we really believe that the Kingdom is coming in it’s fullness? Do we really believe that our real life is our eternal life? Do we really trust that God is going to reward us?

It’s hard to believe that sometimes, isn’t it? Especially in our media-saturated world, with all the messaging and advertising tempting us to greed and dissatisfaction.

It’s hard to have our hearts in the right place.

So— one of our last questions this morning—how to we do that? How do we put our hearts in the right place, so that we’ll begin to put our treasure there?

There’s something wrong with that question I just asked. That question assumes that if we can just get our hearts in the right place, our treasure will follow.

But that’s not how it works, according to Jesus. Our treasure doesn’t follow our heart. Instead, Jesus tells us that our heart will follow our treasure. He tells us to just start  storing up treasures in heaven instead of on earth, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21). 

In other words, don’t wait for your heart to feel it before you obey. Just start doing what King Jesus told you to do.

If you have laid up treasure here on earth, you will never feel ready to give it away. Even right at this moment, it is pulling your heart away from God. And so the only solution is to just obey. Just start getting rid of it. Give it away, sell it, and invest the money in things that matter for eternity. And then your heart will follow your treasure.

That sounds radical, but that’s what Jesus said, and I’m not in the mood to argue with Him.

So, last question this morning: what does it look like for you to obey Jesus on this file? Are you already doing that, and this morning just encouraged you to keep doing that? Then praise God. Keep at it.

But is there a chance these Scriptures have challenged you, and you realize that you need to make some changes? Then I think you know what you need to do. Don’t wait. Obey Jesus. And it’s not like we have a choice. He’s our king, isn’t He?

Picture the most godly person you can imagine. The most morally-upright, squeaky-clean, God-fearing person that ever walked the earth. This could be a real person you know, or you could just imagine someone.

Now let me ask you some questions about that person: what is the balance on their credit card? How much money do they have in savings? Do they even have savings? How much money to they live off of each month? How new is their car? How big is their home? How nice are their clothes? What kind of phone is in their pocket, and how new is it?

There’s at least two kinds of answers that Christians tend to come up with to those questions. On the one hand, some might picture this unrealistically godly person as someone who doesn’t have much money. If they haven’t taken a vow of poverty, they’re close to it. They don’t have a credit card, they wear clothing from the 1940s which miraculously hasn’t worn out yet, and ravens bring them meat every day.

On the other hand, some might imagine this stand-up person as being well-off, prosperous, rich. Maybe even very wealthy. Because wealth and prosperity are obviously the sign of God’s blessing on someone’s life, right?

Now here’s what’s interesting, and why there is often so much confusion on this topic: both of these sets of answers—that Christians should be poor, or that Christians should be rich—have Scriptures which justify their position. There are verses in the Bible which seem to suggest that Christians should reject anything material. After all, when Jesus sent out his disciples, didn’t He tell them not to bring anything with them—not even any money (Luke 9:3)? 

But on the other hand, there are other Scriptures which suggest the opposite is true, and tell us that if we obey God, He will bless us materially, and we will prosper.

So, what do you think is the right answer? How have you made sense of those mixed messages? And most importantly, how do you apply this to yourself? What’s your financial situation? What are your financial goals? How do you feel these reflect on your godliness?

It shouldn’t be a surprise by now that we’re talking about money and possessions this morning. And we’re going to do our best to make sense of these apparently conflicting messages from the Bible. We’re going to see that confusion on this topic comes when we ignore or misunderstand the way that the Bible fits together as a big story. But when we understand the Bible’s storyline and how it fits together, then we’ll be able to more clearly see what God expects of us, today, in terms of our money and possessions. 

Money and Possessions in the Israelite Covenant

So let’s begin by going back to God’s covenant with Israel. You’ll remember how the storyline of the Bible is built on the framework of these big covenants God made with His people. And after delivering Israel from Egypt, God entered into a covenant with them. And in that covenant, God explicitly promised to prosper them materially—to give them lots of resources and possessions—if they obeyed Him.

I’ve mentioned before that Deuteronomy 28 is a very important chapter in terms of understanding that covenant and how it worked. And in that chapter, we read this:

 “And if you faithfully obey the voice of the LORD your God, being careful to do all his commandments that I command you today… Blessed shall be the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your ground and the fruit of your cattle, the increase of your herds and the young of your flock…The LORD will command the blessing on you in your barns [or storehouses] and in all that you undertake…And the LORD will make you abound in prosperity, in the fruit of your womb and in the fruit of your livestock and in the fruit of your ground… And you shall lend to many nations, but you shall not borrow” (Deuteronomy 28:1, 4, 8, 11, 12).

These were the terms of the covenant. Obedience to God resulted in material blessing and wealth and prosperity.

And the flip-side was true: the rest of the chapter goes on to spell out the drought and material ruin that would come upon them if they were unfaithful to the covenant.

And we have to understand these terms of the covenant if we’re going to understand the rest of the Old Testament properly. Because the rest of the Old Testament takes place in the context of this covenant and these terms.

So for example, in Proverbs 3:9-10, we read “Honor the LORD with your wealth and with the firstfruits of all your produce; then your barns [or storehouses] will be filled with plenty, and your vats will be bursting with wine.”

What is this verse saying? It’s basically just repeating Deuteronomy 28. In the Law, God had already commanded them to honour Him with their firstfruits (Deuteronomy 26:2). So that idea wasn’t new: it was one of the many laws they had to obey. And Deuteronomy 28 said that if they obeyed the Law, including this one about honouring God with their firstfruits, then He would bless the fruit of the ground, which would result in full barns and bursting vats.

So this verse is essentially repeating Deuteronomy 28. It’s celebrating that God will keep His promises and be faithful to the terms of the covenant.

We see the same thing in Psalm 37, where David famously wrote, “I have been young, and now am old, yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken or his children begging for bread. He is ever lending generously, and his children become a blessing” (Psalm 37:25–26). Of course the righteous man’s children would not beg bread, because within that covenant, righteous men were rewarded with prosperity. Once again, David is not saying anything new: he is celebrating that God keeps His covenant promises.

One more example is the well-known passage from Malachi 3 about “robbing God.” And in that passage, God challenges the people to bring the full tithe into the storehouse, and He promises that if they do that, He will “open the windows of heaven” and “pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need” (Malachi 3:10).

I hope by now you can see where this is going. Tithing was one of the laws they were given by Moses to obey. And so once again, Malachi 3 is just repeating the covenant promises of Deuteronomy 28: that if they obey, they will be blessed in this way.

There’s a couple of other well-known Old Testament passages I’m going to write about on the blog this week, including the Prayer of Jabez, and they all fit in with this same pattern: prosperity was a specific promise within God’s covenant with Israel. In that covenant, with rare exception, to be godly was to be wealthy.

Money and Possessions in the New Covenant

And so, as we try to understand what this means for us today, it’s very important for us to recognize that we do not live under the terms and conditions of that Old Covenant that God made through Moses. Instead, we are a part of the New Covenant in Christ, which has replaced that Old Covenant.

Hebrews 8:13 says that “In speaking of a new covenant, he makes the first one obsolete. And what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away.” It says it right there: the Old Covenant through Moses is obsolete. And that shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody this morning, right? This is why we don’t sacrifice animals any more. We’re under the New Covenant, bought and paid for by the blood of Christ who died for our sins and rose again as the firstfruits of the New Creation.

And so we seem to remember this when it comes to animal sacrifices or worship at the temple. We get that we’re under a different covenant with different terms and conditions. But many Christians forget all about this when it comes to prosperity and wealth. They read Deuteronomy 28 and think that those things apply to us just like they applied back then.

And this is really where the Prosperity Gospel comes from. If you’re unfamiliar with that phrase, the Prosperity Gospel is a set of teachings which says that if we obey God, or if we have enough faith in Him, or if we use our words in the right way, then He will bless us with financial prosperity.

And this teaching is all over the place. You might be surprised at the popular teachers on the Internet or your TV who believe this. And it shows up in sneaky ways. It’s not just the mega-rich televangelists with private jets. It even shows up in innocent Christian movies like “Facing the Giants.”

Many of you have probably seen that movie. It’s about this guy who is in a tough spot in life, and everything is going wrong for him, and so He finally surrenders everything to God. And guess what happens next? Things start going well for him. His football team starts winning. His job and financial situation improves. He and his wife finally conceive after struggling with infertility. And someone gives him a brand new truck.

This would all be fine and good and biblical, if we still lived under the Old Covenant. But we don’t. We live in the New Covenant, and under this New Covenant, our relationship with money and possessions is not the same as it was back then.

Matthew 6

And nowhere this more clear than when we hear the words of Jesus in Matthew 6:19, which we’ve read already: “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal” (Matthew 6:19). 

Just imagine how these words would have landed on the ears of the people listening to him, especially those who were well versed in the Scripture. They thought that storing up treasures earth was a good thing to do. It was a sign of God’s favour and blessing. God had explicitly promised to fill up their storehouses!

But now Jesus, in a sermon that is drenched with New Covenant truth, is saying not to do that anymore. Don’t stockpile your possessions. Don’t lay up treasure.

See, something big had changed. Do you remember Jesus saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand” (Mark 1:15)? The Kingdom of God has broken in to our age, and this present age is on it’s way out, and in our place in the story—this time of already-but-not-yet—the priorities of the people of God have shifted away from the present moment and towards the eternal future ahead of us. 

Away from storing up treasures here on earth, and towards storing up treasures in Heaven.

Do you notice how Jesus reminds us that in this present age, all of our stuff is so temporary and so vulnerable to being eaten and destroyed and stolen?

I had my bike stolen once, and I was fairly upset about it, until I remembered this verse. Jesus never promised to protect my stuff. He warned me that my stuff is a part of this Old Creation, and it’s affected by the curse, and it’s vulnerable.

And so according to Jesus, the solution to not having your stuff stolen is to keep your stuff in a place where it can’t be stolen. Namely, heaven. Instead of laying up treasures on earth, we should lay up for ourselves treasures in heaven, “where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal” (Matthew 6:20).

So please hear: Jesus is not against us laying up treasure for ourselves. What He is against is us laying up treasures here on this earth. He wants us to lay up treasures in Heaven, where there is no curse and where treasure will last into eternity.

What Are Treasures on Earth?

So that’s the big picture, but we need to ask a few important questions to really dig in to what this passage is teaching us. 

So the first question we’re going to ask is, “What does Jesus mean by ‘treasures on earth’? Is this talking about anything of value whatsoever? Does this mean, for example, we shouldn’t have a savings account? Does it mean we should all take a vow of poverty?”

Now I know it’s easy for us to just say “of course not” to those questions, but we need to check ourselves. What if? What if that was what Jesus was saying? Would you obey?

The way we should answer those questions is to look to the Scripture and notice that Jesus did not ask his disciples to take a permanent vow of poverty. There was one particular journey where He told them not to bring any money with them, but later, when He was preparing to send them out on the great commission, “He said to them, ‘But now let the one who has a moneybag take it, and likewise a knapsack. And let the one who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one’” (Luke 22:36).

So having some supplies for the mission, like some money and a backpack and apparently a weapon for self-defence, was ok.

We know that the early Christians often gathered in each other’s homes for fellowship and hospitality, and so home ownership was not something they needed to reject. 

That’s actually the reason Aimee and I bought the house we did when we moved to town here. Not only was it the cheapest thing on the market that fit our family, but it was a home that we could use as a ministry centre. A place where we could have people in all the time, which has been a real dream come true for us.

We know that even though Paul often faced hunger and need, there were other times he experienced plenty, and he was okay with that (Philippians 4:12). And we know that he had some possessions which were valuable to Him, like a cloak and some books and parchments (2 Timothy 4:13).

And then there’s Paul’s command to the Thessalonians, that we should each earn our own living and be dependent on no-one (1 Thessalonians 4:12, 2 Thessalonians 3:12). In today’s economy, we have vehicles and appliances that break down, and many of us will live for several years after we’ve stopped being able to earn an income. And so obeying this command is very difficult  without at least some measure of savings.

So “treasures on earth” doesn’t refer to the tools that we need to live and fulfill our mission. It doesn’t mean anything of material value, and I hesitate to say that it refers to a moderate amount of savings which we have in place to cover our necessities.

I do think we kind of get that this word “treasure” is talking about things of value that we don’t actually need to live and fulfill our mission. It’s the the luxury items, the things that we keep and collect and stockpile for ourselves that go well beyond our basic necessities.

It’s like the rich man that Jesus spoke of in Luke 12. His land produced plentifully, and “thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’ And he said, ‘I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry”’” (Luke 12:17–19).

Many people today would call that wise financial planning. Freedom 55, right? “But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God” (Luke 12:20–21).

What Are Treasures on Heaven?

So if that’s what treasures on earth are, then the next important question we need to ask is: what are treasures in heaven, and how do we store them up?

If we were to read through the gospel of Matthew in its entirety, we’d see that “treasures in heaven” point to the reward that we will receive from God in the Age to Come. We talked about this idea last week, in the context of good works. God has promised to reward us for the things we do by faith in Him here in this age.

And in Matthew’s gospel, we hear that doing righteous deeds, suffering for Christ’s sake, forgiving one another, and doing good works for one another are all actions that will be rewarded in eternity (Matthew 5:12, 5:30, 46, 6:6, 18, 10:42, 25:40).

So when Jesus tells us to store up treasures in Heaven, He’s telling us to do the kinds of things that will result in heavenly reward. And to actively pursue that. We’re not just allowed to lay up heavenly reward, we’re commanded to. It’s supposed to be a priority for us.

Why Not Both?

And this leads us to our next question. Why not do both? Why not lay up treasures here on earth and in heaven? Why not live the good life here and there?

The answer is that it’s not possible to seek earthly treasure and heavenly treasure. 1 Timothy 6 tells us that “those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs. But as for you, O man of God, flee these things. Pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness. Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called and about which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses” (1 Timothy 6:9–12).

Do you see that? Earthly treasure and eternal life are in opposite directions. We can’t pursue both at the same time. We need to make a choice.

Jesus said the same in Matthew 6, just a few verses down. “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money” (Matthew 6:24). We have to make a choice.

If we are going to store up treasures in heaven, it means that we will be committed to using our time and money to do the kinds of things that Jesus will reward us for. We’ll using our money to give to our church and support missionaries and we’ll be using our time to care for and love others. And if we’re truly committed to those things, we’re not going to have time or money left over to stockpile our own cache of goods.

Interrogate our Possessions

Now I think we should admit that this is a very difficult part of Scripture for us here in North America to rally understand.

Most of us in this room today probably don’t think that we’re wealthy. It’s always the guy who has more than us who is wealthy. But by global standards, virtually every person in this room today is wealthy. Just consider that the poverty line in the United States is $11,000 a year, which works out to roughly $15,000 Canadian. And if you only lived off of that amount per year, you’d still be richer than about 85% of the world’s population.

Most of us are staggeringly rich. And so it’s appropriate for us this morning to be reminded that don’t actually need a lot to live. 1 Timothy 6:8 says that “If we have food and clothing, with these we will be content” (1 Timothy 6:8). 

I want to suggest to you a practice that I’ve tried to do, and continue to try to do regularly, which is interrogate my money and possessions. When we moved here from Regina, I had the chance to ask some questions about every item that we packed up: “Is this a tool for the kingdom? Is this here to help me more effectively fulfill my mission of good works for the sake of Jesus? Or is this just treasure that I’m stockpiling for my own luxury?”

And here in North America where we’re constantly being bombarded with messages about needing more and more and more, we need to ask those questions on a regular basis about our possessions, about how much money we have, about every door crasher sale flier that shows up in our mailbox. “Do I really need this? How much of this do I really need? What am I keeping this for? Is this a tool for this mission, or is it just treasure on earth?”

It’s in this context that we should hear what Paul writes in 1 Timothy 6 regarding those who are rich. He’s already said that desiring to be rich is a deadly mistake, but what about those who are already rich, even if that wasn’t their goal? In verse 17, which is in your bulletin, he says, “As for the rich in this present age, charge them not to be haughty, nor to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly provides us with everything to enjoy. They are to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share, thus storing up treasure for themselves as a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of that which is truly life” (1 Timothy 6:17–19). 

Do you hear that language there about storing up treasure for ourselves for the future? And the way we are to do that is to be “rich in good works, generous and ready to share.”

We don’t hang on to our money and possessions. Instead, we use it for the kingdom. To be generous. To do good works.

Hearts in the Right Place

And please just remember that when we decide to do that—to let go of some treasure, some possession, some amount of money, and give it away to someone else who needs it or here to the church or to a missionary or a ministry—when we do that, we’re not actually sacrificing anything.

All we’re doing is transferring our treasure to a safer location. To heaven. God is going to reward you for your faith-filled generosity.

And that’s where it all comes down to, doesn’t it? Do we really believe that the Kingdom is coming in it’s fullness? Do we really believe that our real life is our eternal life? Do we really trust that God is going to reward us?

It’s hard to believe that sometimes, isn’t it? Especially in our media-saturated world, with all the messaging and advertising tempting us to greed and dissatisfaction.

It’s hard to have our hearts in the right place.

So— one of our last questions this morning—how to we do that? How do we put our hearts in the right place, so that we’ll begin to put our treasure there?

There’s something wrong with that question I just asked. That question assumes that if we can just get our hearts in the right place, our treasure will follow.

But that’s not how it works, according to Jesus. Our treasure doesn’t follow our heart. Instead, Jesus tells us that our heart will follow our treasure. He tells us to just start  storing up treasures in heaven instead of on earth, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21). 

In other words, don’t wait for your heart to feel it before you obey. Just start doing what King Jesus told you to do.

If you have laid up treasure here on earth, you will never feel ready to give it away. Even right at this moment, it is pulling your heart away from God. And so the only solution is to just obey. Just start getting rid of it. Give it away, sell it, and invest the money in things that matter for eternity. And then your heart will follow your treasure.

That sounds radical, but that’s what Jesus said, and I’m not in the mood to argue with Him.

So, last question this morning: what does it look like for you to obey Jesus on this file? Are you already doing that, and this morning just encouraged you to keep doing that? Then praise God. Keep at it.

But is there a chance these Scriptures have challenged you, and you realize that you need to make some changes? Then I think you know what you need to do. Don’t wait. Obey Jesus. And it’s not like we have a choice. He’s our king, isn’t He?