Or, Making Marriage Great Again
Scripture: Genesis 1:28
Date: July 18, 2021
Speaker: Sean Higgins
The Revelation series is finished, and I probably won’t start a new book study until September. There are a few things I desire to preach about until then. Marriage is one of them.
Marriage has been on my mind a lot recently, and the wedding yesterday was certainly a part of that. My upcoming message at the youth retreat is about what the Lord Jesus would have us do in our relationships, and this message is a version of something I spoke to them a couple summers ago. It especially relates to the kind of church, made up of the kind of families, extending into the kind of community, we pray God would make us into.
For young people (like the 27 single gals waiting to catch the bride’s bouquet), for parents raising those young people, and grandparents talking with all of them, we are not raising kids as much as we are raising reinforcements.
Though the song has problems, the chorus of a song called “Daughters,” rightly considered, is convicting:
So fathers be good to your daughters Daughters will love like you do Girls become lovers who turn into mothers So mothers be good to your daughters, too —“Daughters” by John Mayer
So let’s think through this together, starting with two questions.
I don’t mean this exercise to be tricky. The answer to the first question is a no-brainer. Those who have the best fellowship are the three Persons of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Spirit. The result of their fellowship was to create human beings. Their joy and love multiplied, it spilled over, so that even more persons could taste some of the joy and love of divine fellowship. The earth, the heavens, time, Twitter, Tik-Tok, Instagram, What’sApp, old-school water-coolers, and corporate coffee pots, back patios and front porches, tables full with bread and wine, are all a result of God’s fellowship overflowing into the human race. Before social media was social man, and before man was the Trinity.
We can state it more succinctly: God’s blessed fellowship was fruitful.
He did not make us because He was bored; His existence was perfect and glad and happy, He is “the blessed God” (1 Timothy 1:11), “the blessed and only Sovereign” (1 Timothy 6:15). He did not make us so that He would have someone to domineer; His authority draws us up and in. Eternally blessed/happy Persons created a world for the practice of happy people.
Building on that, here are two more questions.
There is also no debate about the answers to these questions in the Bible.
Qualification: I really do need at least one volunteer from every household, and from every Life to Life group, to be sort of a designated discussion helper here. What I am about to say has ‘uge potential to be misunderstood, either accidentally because it’s a new concept or purposefully because you already think you oppose it.
The answer to which human relationship best enjoys Trinitarian fellowship is the first relationship created by God from the overflow of His goodness and joy: the husband and wife. Their fellowship is more intimate than any other in the world, or at least it could be if it is blessed. Among no other friends can it be said that the “two become one,” a physical and metaphysical truth.
The result of that fellowship is not a home mortgage, a Magnolia themed decor with shiplap as far as the eye can see, fancy dinner date-nights without the hassle of finding someone not only to ask out but who will say yes. The result of that fellowship, in its intimacy and love, is children. The result is blessed fruitfulness.
God said, “Let us make man in our image.” (Genesis 1:26) God created man is his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:27) And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion…” (Genesis 1:28)
I used to make a joke about “one28” as the name of our youth ministry, which was named after Colossians 1:28, not Genesis 1:28. It’s a good joke that connects to the importance of purity, but it’s not purely a joke.
This is recognized in the first Psalm we learned to sing corporately: “Blessed the Man that Fears Jehovah.” The LORD says to the LORD-fearing man:
Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house; your children will be like olive shoots around your table. Behold, thus shall the man be blessed who fears the Lord. (verses 3-4)
May you see your children’s children! (verse 6)
To be blessed is to know God’s happiness, which means we can’t be this sort of happy without godliness, without fearing Him, following His will, without imitating Him and reflecting His image.
The fruitfulness is something that is other than you as a result of that happiness. You can have fun, you can have fun together, and you can have fun that sucks others in. But the fruit in Genesis 1 and Psalm 128 include babies, offspring, a family, a household, and even grandkids.
There are some additional qualifications to make, and my designated non-overreactors please take note.
If you are married and cannot have children, temporarily or permanently because of God’s will, continue to fear the LORD and He will bless you in other ways. It obviously is a longing for some that becomes a burden while unfulfilled, and so humbly cast those cares on the Lord (1 Peter 5:7). It does not mean you cannot rejoice with those who rejoice, even as they weep with you who weep.
If you are married and have children, even a lot of them, that doesn’t guarantee you’re blessed. Jacob had twelve sons, and many more headaches.
If you are not married, and some are closer to the possibility than others, I am not saying, because God’s Word does not command, marriage ASAP or children AMAP. If you’re a young single person, (or parenting one), you do not need to get married as soon as possible nor do you need to have as many as possible children.
Kids are not the only fruit that is possible. The cultural mandate in Genesis 1:28 includes other responsibilities. But you can still ask, what do you want with and to come out of your household? How do you view your current household, and any kids that are part of it?
For that matter, without fearing the Lord, children can be an idol. David prayed in Psalm 17 for the LORD’s protection from the wicked,
from men by your hand, O LORD, from men of the world whose portion is in this life. You fill their womb with treasure, they are satisfied with children and they leave their abundance to their infants. (Psalm 17:14)
David contrasted that with beholding God’s face in righteousness and being satisfied with God’s likeness (verse 15).
Ecclesiastes 6:1-6 describes a man who “fathers a hundred children,” a man with wealth, possessions, and honor, “yet God does not give him power to enjoy them…this is vanity; it is a grievous evil.”
But, in this world made by the Triune God, boys/men and girls/women are MFEO: made for each other. They are made, in most cases, for godly blessing and fruitfulness.
A rabbit trail that I hope is fruitful.
It was at a youth retreat, I think six years ago, during a cabin time when the guys were talking about work and goals. It was the first time I really thought about making Marysville a destination. That is not merely a geographical thing, it is a generational thing. As I continue to think about it, we will not Make Marysville Great Again (#MMGA) without Making Marriage Great Again (also #MMGA). The city will not be a destination if our homes are not a destination our own kids want to be.
This includes having opportunities that are interesting/attractive/compelling for our young people to want to stay, learn, work, get married, raise a family, and see their children’s children. This includes moms and dads who love their fruit, who give thanks to God for all their blessings, who make it so that their kids grow up and want what they have rather than to run away from it. It also includes families treating one another with love, and sanctified relationships between the young people.
With the not ASAP/AMAP qualifications in mind, consider:
Don’t practice being married before you promise yourself to someone in marriage. Keep your parts, and your heart, holy.
The way to relate for now is as brother and sister.
Treat younger men like brothers, older women like mothers, younger women like sisters, in all purity (1 Timothy 5:1b-2)
At some point you will add the covenantally legal identity of husband/wife to your covenantally spiritual identity of brother/sister. You will not get to intimate fellowship with someone who is not in Christ. Choose from within the family.
And live with one another, and pursue blessed fruitfulness, in a way that does not mess up the family relations. Remember 1 Thessalonians 4:3-8, the will of God is sanctification, which is holiness, with is honorable, and holy. The warning of that paragraph is that God does not bless those who do not obey Him. The Gentile, the pagan, the unbeliever, lives in “the passion of lust.” He is enslaved by wrong desires and expectations.
Note who this affects: your brother: “that no one transgress(trespass against) and defraud (cheat/wrong) his brother in this matter.”
Again, until you are married, you should not have fellowship like married people. If you go where you don’t belong, you are taking some of his blessed, and pure, fruitfulness.
In our day it’s not new, but certainly ubiquitous, that men and women in usually different ways are attempting to get happy feelings by avoiding fruit and by refusing the work of loving relationship.
Ladies can get attention, and a pretend sort of emotional security, by flattering themselves. They expect no promise/covenant from the guy, and barely make him do any work. It is not for sake of blessed fruitfulness that we can see all of your curves. We should not be able to tell which side of the quarter is facing out from the back pocket of your jeans. You cannot really think that is the fear of the Lord that a godly young man would be attracted to. Raise your expectations and your neckline.
Guys, more than the problem of lust itself, pornography is the ultimate fruitlessness. It is not blessed because it is for self. It is not fellowship but isolating, and it wires your expectations towards self-gratification, not love and intimacy with another person.
Ladies and guys: when you care about you, the fruit is usually resentment, envy, anxiety, and anti-blessing = unhappiness cycles. The devil loves for you to love your self. He loves you loving yourself. He loves miserable hearts and ruined relationships. He loves single whiners and excuse makers. He loves divorce.
We have something better if we fear the Lord.
Sanctified/holy brother-sister fellowship will lead to the blessed fruit of husband-wife fellowship which will lead to your grandkids not hating your friends’ grandkids as Marysville makes people want (or maybe at least wonder about) what we have that’s so different.
It took me too long to realize some things, like how dumb, selfish patterns can be very hard to unlearn and memories don’t easily disappear. The gospel offers forgiveness; God removes our sins as far as the east is from the west. But our minds and consciences are cleansed, not wiped.
Also, it took me too long to realize that my kids are going to have a larger, and longer, effect than all my sermons. My fruit-as-father, blessed by God, will do more for Marysville than all my messages added together. Shepherding is a calling, teaching about and promoting and participating in the fellowship of the church body is fruitful. But my wife and kids, and grandkids, Lord willing, are an entirely next-level of fruitfulness.
Fruit grows by grace. Fruitfulness is glory. Glory has gravity. May He give us the grace to know this sort of blessing.
Tolkien called artists sub-creators, but there is a sense in which this applies not just to artists but to humans. You are made in the image of the Creator, and though you don’t work ex nihilo (out of nothing) like Him, that means you have less excuses. You are not starting from scratch. And as His child, you are not starting without grace. What seed are you called to sow?
May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another, in accord with Christ Jesus, that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. (Romans 15:5–6, ESV)