Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Our text today is a couple verses from the Epistle lesson Romans chapter 7 verses 2 and 3.
St. Paul wrote, For a married woman is bound by law to her husband while he lives.
But if her husband dies, she is released from the law of marriage.
Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive.
But if her husband dies, she is free from that law.
And if she marries another man, she is not an adulteress.
This is our text.
In the name of Jesus, dear Christian friends, June is often a month for weddings.
The traditional wedding vow says, I take you to be my husband or my wife,
to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse,
for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health,
to love and to cherish until we are parted by death.
This is my solemn vow.
The wedding vow emphasizes that a man and a woman are specially united by God for a lifetime,
as long as they both live.
Unfortunately, many marriages don't last a lifetime.
Some people say that one out of every two marriages ends in divorce.
Several years ago, Christian researcher and writer Shanti Feldhahn was working on a newspaper column
and she was planning to use that statistic of 50% divorce rate.
But she thought that she needed to cite the source so that she could make sure that it was accurate.
She couldn't find the source of that statistic.
And so for eight years, she and her researchers studied the question, what is the true divorce rate?
In a book entitled, The Good News About Marriage, she published her findings.
She found out that the actual divorce rate is somewhere between 20% and 25% for first marriages
and around 31% for all marriages.
That divorce is 8% lower for those who attend church regularly
and that about 80% of people said that their marriage is happy
and 93% said they'd marry the same spouse again.
In his letter to the church at Ephesus, St. Paul takes some time in chapter 5
to describe the marriage relationship of Christians.
He wrote,
Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife and the two shall become one flesh.
This mystery is profound and I'm saying that it refers to Christ and the church.
However, let each one of you love his wife as himself and let the wife see that she respects her husband.
He starts out by reminding us of the institution of marriage as he quotes Genesis 2 verse 24.
Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife and the two shall become one flesh.
After God created Eve from Adam's side, he brought them together, united them as husband and wife
and according to our text, that joining together is for a lifetime until one or the other dies.
St. Paul went on in his letter to the Ephesians to give us one of the secrets for a lifelong marriage.
He said, let each of you love his wife as himself and let the wife see that she respects her husband.
What is a wife's most important need?
To be loved by her husband.
What's a husband's most important need?
To be respected by his wife.
It's important that you give your spouse what they need.
Love and respect, they go together, but they're not the same.
That's another whole sermon.
The most important thing, though, that Paul says for us today in Ephesians 5 is this.
This mystery is profound and I'm saying that it refers to Christ and the church.
Paul is using the illustration of marriage to describe our relationship with God.
One of the dominant pictures in the Bible is that God is the husband and the church is the wife.
Or that Jesus is the bridegroom and the church is his bride.
And Paul is doing a very similar thing here in our lesson today.
He's using the illustration of marriage to look at our relationship with God.
The prophet Jeremiah, who wrote our Old Testament lesson, was given a very tough job.
He was to confront Judah with her idolatry.
What's interesting is that he often uses the word adultery in place of idolatry.
Quite simply, the people of Israel were having an affair with false prophets, false gods like Baal and Asherah.
In Jeremiah chapter 3, he wrote,
During the reign of King Josiah, the Lord said to me,
Have you seen what faithless Israel has done?
She has gone up on every high hill and under every spreading tree and has committed adultery there.
I thought that after she had done all this, she would return to me.
But she did not.
And her unfaithful sister Judah saw it.
I gave faithless Israel her certificate of divorce and sent her away because of all of her adulteries.
Yet I saw that her unfaithful sister Judah had no fear.
She went out and committed adultery because of Israel's immorality mattered so little to her.
She defiled the land and committed adultery with stone and wood.
God divorced the northern tribes of Israel in 721 BC when Assyria came in, conquered them and took them off into exile.
Basically, they were lost forever.
The southern tribes of Judah didn't learn from them.
They continued to commit adultery with wood and stone until God sent Babylon to take them into exile in 605 BC, 597 BC and 586 BC.
Later in his prophecy, Jeremiah promised that the Lord would make a new covenant with both Israel and Judah though.
And he said that this new covenant was necessary because, quote,
they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them, declares the Lord, unquote.
God remained faithful to his people, even offering a new covenant in which forgiveness would be given,
even when the people were unfaithful to him.
In his second letter to the Corinthian church, Paul said,
I feel a divine jealousy for you since I betrothed you to one husband to present you as a pure virgin to Christ.
But I'm afraid that the serpent deceived Eve by his coming
and that your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ.
By our own sinful nature, we are often led to love everyone and everything instead of Jesus, our intended husband.
By our sin, we lose our virginity and we commit adultery with all kinds of false gods.
Things like success, possessions, family, social media, likes and friends.
And the biggest of all, me, myself and I.
Our text this morning reads,
For a married woman is bound by law to her husband while he lives,
but if her husband dies, she is released from the law of marriage.
Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive.
But if her husband dies, she is free from that law,
and if she marries another man, she is not an adulteress.
And then Paul continues with the next verse saying,
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.
He implies that at one time we were married to God's law,
but we didn't obey it. In fact, we couldn't obey it.
But through the death and the resurrection of Jesus,
we have died to that law, and it no longer condemns us.
And because of Christ, all of our adulteries have been forgiven.
We started our worship service today with the invocation,
the remembrance of our baptism.
In baptism, God puts his name on us, and he makes us part of his family.
He declares that we are his adopted sons and daughters.
And the name that we now bear is God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.
In the chapter that comes right before our text, Paul wrote,
Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus
were baptized into his death?
We were buried with him, therefore, by baptism into death,
in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father,
we too might walk in newness of life.
For if we have been united with him in a death like his,
we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.
In our baptism, we share in the death and the resurrection of Jesus.
And the forgiveness that he earned there at the cross of Calvary is given to us.
And at the same time, the new life that he brought into our life through his resurrection,
he gives to us in baptism.
Paul went on and he said, Now, if we have died with Christ,
we believe that we will also live with him.
And so as Christians, people who follow Jesus,
we live with Christ and in Christ every single day of our lives here on this earth.
The final piece of the puzzle comes after Jesus returns at the end of time.
Our bodies and our souls are reunited,
and we are invited to be the guests of honor at the marriage feast in heaven.
In Revelation 19, the Apostle John wrote,
From the throne came a voice saying, Praise our God, all you saints,
you who fear him, small and great.
Then I heard what seemed like the voice of a great multitude,
like the roar of many waters and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder crying out,
Alleluia, for the Lord, our God, the Almighty reigns.
Let us rejoice and exalt and give him glory for the marriage of the Lamb has come
and his bride has made herself ready.
It was granted to her to clothe her with fine linen, bright and pure,
for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.
And the angel said to me, Write this.
Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.
And he said to me, These are the true words of God.
Notice the bride didn't go out and buy the pure linen garment that she is wearing.
No, it is given to her.
The linen of holiness and forgiveness is given by Christ himself.
It is a gift of pure grace.
The angel told John to make sure he wrote this down.
Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.
Think about that for a moment.
You are the bride of Christ.
You are the members of the Holy Christian Church on Earth.
And you, you are the honored guests at the marriage feast of the Lamb for all eternity.
In Revelation 21, John said,
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth passed away,
and there was no longer any sea.
I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God,
prepared as a bride, beautifully dressed for her husband.
I've officiated many weddings in my life,
and I have never yet seen a bride come down the aisle at her wedding wearing her everyday grubby clothes.
Usually they are wearing the very best that they have, or the best that they can buy, or the best they can rent.
God promises that he will adorn us, his bride, with the very best that he has.
His love, his peace, his perfection.
John went on and said,
And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,
Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man.
He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.
He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more.
Neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.
Jesus, the perfect bridegroom, and his church, the perfect bride, will live happily ever after.
In her book, The Good News About Marriage, Shanti Feldhahn discovered that those people who said they were unhappy in their marriage,
if they made a few little changes and stuck it out, in five years they rated their marriages as happy.
And the number one factor that they found in the research of what made couples happy, is that they had hope.
Hope.
Peter wrote,
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,
and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil, or fade.
This inheritance is kept in heaven for you.
Because of our hope in Jesus, we wait patiently for him to come back and take us for our wedding with him,
so that we can celebrate the marriage feast of the Lamb for eternity.
In the hymn that is assigned for today, it says,
Rejoice, rejoice, believers, and let your lights appear.
The evening is advancing, the darker night is near.
The bridegroom is arising and soon is drawing nigh.
A prey, watch and wrestle, at midnight comes the cry.
The watchers on the mountain proclaim the bridegroom near.
Go forth as he approaches with hallelujahs clear.
The marriage feast is waiting, the gates wide open stand.
Arise, O heirs of glory.
The bridegroom is at hand.
Amen.
Now may the peace of God, which passes all understanding,
keep your hearts and minds through faith in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Amen.