This Sunday we continue our Grace-Driven Family series by talking about Marriage. Pastor JR unpacks what a Grace-Driven Marriage can look like in the reality of a broken world - two broken people being sanctified and finding joy in their marriage as they move towards Jesus.

Text: Genesis 3:1-22

 Frustration

“…(the) ideal of marriage as a permanent contractual union designed for the sake of mutual love, procreation, and protection is slowly giving way to a new reality of marriage as a ‘terminal sexual contract’ designed for the gratification of the individual parties.” – John Witte, Jr. quoted in The Meaning of Marriage by Tim Keller

When the glamour wears off, or merely works a bit thin, they think they have made a mistake, and that the real soul-mate is still to find. The real soul-mate too often proves to be the next sexually attractive person that comes along. Someone whom they might indeed very profitably have married, if only—. Hence divorce, to provide the “if only.” And of course they are as a rule quite right: they did make a mistake. Only a very wise man at the end of his life could make a sound judgment concerning whom, amongst the total possible chances, he ought most profitably to have married! . . . But the “real soul-mate” is the one you are actually married to.”

- J.R.R Tolkien 

Formation

“Marriage is a duel to the death, which no man of honor should decline.”

- G. K. Chesterton, Manalive

Fulfillment

Ephesians 5:31–32 (ESV) — 31 “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” 32 This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.