Jesus Christ. Amen. Our text today is the first couple verses in Romans chapter 7 verses 2 and 3.
St. Paul wrote,
This is our text. In the name of Jesus, dear Christian friend, June is often a month for weddings and the traditional wedding vows say,
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 vow that comes with marriage emphasizes that a man and a woman have a very special bond, that they have been united by God for as long as they live.
For God created marriage for a lifetime.
Unfortunately, many marriages don't last a lifetime.
Some people say that one out of two marriages will end in divorce.
Several years ago, a Christian researcher and writer by the name of Shanti Feldhahn was writing a column for a newspaper
and she was going to quote that statistic of 50% marriages end in divorce.
But she decided that she really needed to have some statistical data, the source for that statistic, in order to really be accurate.
And she couldn't find it anywhere.
And so she spent eight years researching what is the true divorce rate.
She published her findings in a book called The Good News About Marriage
and she found that the actual divorce rate is somewhere between 20 and 25% for first marriages
and 31% for all marriages.
The divorce is about 8% lower for those people who attend church regularly.
That about 80% of people say that their marriage is happy.
And that 93% said they'd marry the same spouse again.
In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul takes some time in chapter 5 to describe Christian marriage.
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 with the institution of marriage by quoting Genesis chapter 2, 24.
Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be united to his wife and the two will become one flesh.
After God had created Eve from Adam's side, he united them together as husband and wife.
And according to our text, the joining together was to last until either the husband or the wife dies.
Paul went on in his letter to the Ephesians to give us one secret for a lasting marriage.
He wrote, let each one 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 is 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 go together but they're not the same.
But that's another whole sermon.
The most important thing though for us today is that Paul said in Ephesians 5,
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.
That Jesus is the bridegroom and that we are the bride.
Paul is doing a very similar thing in our epistle 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.
But what's interesting is that he often used the word adultery instead of the word idolatry.
Quite simply the people of Israel were having an affair with some false gods like Baal and Asherah.
In Jeremiah 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 every spreading tree and has committed adultery there.
I thought that after she had done 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 her adulteries.
Yet I saw that her unfaithful sister Judah had no fear.
She also went out and committed adultery.
Because Israel's immorality mattered so little to her,
she defiled the land and committed adultery with stone and wood.
God divorced those northern tribes of Israel in 721 BC
when Assyria conquered them and took them off into exile,
really to be lost forever.
The southern tribes of Judah didn't learn.
They continued to commit adultery with wood and stone
until God sent Babylon to take them into exile in 605 BC,
597 BC, and again in 586 BC.
Later in his prophecy, Jeremiah promised that the Lord would make a new covenant
with his people, with Israel and Judah, one in which he forgives their iniquities.
But he said that the 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 when they were unfaithful to him.
In the second letter to the Corinthian church, Paul said,
I write or 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 as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning,
your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ.
By our sinful nature, we are often led to love everyone and everything
rather than 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 her husband 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 Paul then continues in 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 that condemns us.
And because of Christ, all of our adulteries are forgiven.
Our worship service began with the invocation, the remembrance of our baptism.
It is in baptism that God puts his name on us and he makes us his children,
his sons and daughters, part of his family.
And so we now wear the name of 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 therefore buried with him 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 the newness of life.
For if we have been united with him in a death like his,
we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.
In baptism, we share in the death and the resurrection of Jesus.
And the forgiveness of sins that he earned there at the cross of Calvary is now given to us.
And likewise, the new life that he earned through his resurrection is given to us through that empty tomb.
Paul went on and said, if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.
As Christians, we live with Christ.
We live for Christ each and every day of our lives on this earth.
The final piece of this puzzle comes after Christ returns at the end of time.
Our bodies and our souls will be reunited and we will be invited to be guests.
The guests of honor at a wedding feast in heaven.
In Revelation 19, the apostle John wrote,
From the throne came a voice saying,
Praise our God, all you his servants, 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 the glory for the marriage of the Lamb has come
and his bride has made herself ready.
It was granted her to clothe herself 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 that the bride did not go out and buy the pure linen garment for this feast.
No, the pure linen garment of holiness and righteousness and forgiveness
was given to her by Christ himself.
It is a gift of pure grace.
The angel told John, 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, members of his holy Christian church,
and you are the honored guests at the eternal marriage feast in heaven.
In Revelation 21, John says,
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had 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 have officiated many weddings,
and yet I have never seen a bride walk down the aisle at her wedding
wearing her everyday grubby clothes.
They are always wearing the very best that they have or could borrow or could rent.
That's what God promises us.
He promises to adorn us, his bride, with the very best that he has.
His peace, his love, his perfection.
John went on and he said,
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 bride,
will live happily ever after.
In her book, The Good News About Marriage, Santee Feldhahn
discovered that the people that were unhappy in their marriages,
that if they stuck it out and they made some small changes,
that five years later, they rated their marriages as happy.
And the number one factor that they found out to make for being a happy marriage
is that those couples 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 the hope that we have in Jesus Christ,
we wait patiently for Jesus to come and to take us to our wedding with him.
In the hymn of the day that we just sang,
we read the first two verses said,
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.
Please rise.