Connected – Week 4 – Marriage Matters

Genesis 2:18-24; 1 Corinthians 6:13b-20

[funny proposal story]

I wish I would have been taught more about marriage when I was younger. If you think about it, if you get married, you will spend majority of your life married. Yet, we might prepare for marriage for a month before our wedding, and actually we prepare more for the wedding than we do the marriage. We spend more time practicing divorce than we do preparing for marriage. I’m convinced that that is what most dating is…practice for divorce. “That person doesn’t make me happy…that person is starting to annoy me…” In marriage, that person isn’t always going to make you happy…they are sometimes, and probably often are going to annoy you…and much more!

I’m not an anti-dating person…but I do think that we’ve got it all wrong. I know that many of your future spouses will not be happy about the relationship you’re in right now or the relationship that you have had in the past. If you want a fulfilling rest of your life, you need to do it starting right now. You need to start thinking about your marriage now. If you date, it should be because you actually, truly honestly, not due to your overactive hormones of your need for affection, but actually, truly, want to and can see yourself marrying that person. Some of you may be that way…many of you most likely are dating for selfish and ungodly reasons, ones that will end up hurting that person, hurting you, and hurting both of your possible spouses and even the rest of your lives.

So…marriage…what about it, and what do I need to know right now?…

Purity paves the way to intimacy.

Our most intimate relationship on earth is marriage. See how intimate this relationship is. It goes all the way to the beginning, to the first man and woman. The first married couple.

Genesis 2:18-24

18 Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” 19 Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. 20 The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. 21 So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. 22 And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. 23 Then the man said,

“This at last is bone of my bones    and flesh of my flesh;she shall be called Woman,    because she was taken out of Man.”

24 Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

So, we see that our most intimate relationship on earth is marriage…So, what does that have to do with the other point that purity paves the way to intimacy? Ok, well let’s look at a couple places in the New Testament that refer to this passage we just read in Genesis.

1 Corinthians 6:13b-20

13 …The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. 14 And God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by his power. 15 Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! 16 Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, “The two will become one flesh.” 17 But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. 18 Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. 19 Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, 20 for you were bought with a