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LOVE AND MARRIAGE
With Valentine’s Day falling in the heart (pun intended) of February, Paula, our Director of Family Life/Youth, encouraged me to do a sermon series on marriage during this month. I am excited to do so and will begin the series Feb. 1st continuing for the next three Sundays afterward. I am excited to do so for at least two reasons. First, I want to support Paula who has worked hard to build a solid foundation for marriage in her pre-marital and marriage classes. Second, with almost 50% of all marriages, including marriages of Christians, ending in divorce, this subject desperately needs to be addressed. It has been said that “a church is only as strong as the families in her.” I believe that we can extend that to our entire society. God created us in families for a good reason: we need that security, loving acceptance and forgiveness, partnership of responsibilities and duties, and finally, teaching and modeling of responsible behavior that is experienced in a healthy family. I believe that the moral chaos that we are experiencing today, including that of our economy, can be traced to the disintegration of the family. With that said, I believe that the strength of the family rests solidly on the strength of the marriage within the family. The disintegration of the family begins with the disintegration of marriage. The statistics of the damage of divorce runs the gamut of physical, emotional, economical, social/societal, spiritual, and, according to an article that I recently read, even environmental. Add to that the psychological damages to the child caught in a divorce and you have a pandemic of loss and grief. There is no doubt that there are solid single-parent families, and healthy blended families that combine members from second or even third marriages but the challenges of making them work is daunting. So, yes, I am excited to share a series of messages on marriage praying that God will use my words (better to say, give me His Words) to shore up marriage. I will begin by identifying the major source of the disintegration of marriage which, I believe, is not knowing what the purpose of marriage is. I will continue by discussing what is needed to make a marriage work and how the needs of men and women are both different and complementary. Finally, I will discuss how we all can work together to support marriage in general and marriages in particular. Please keep these messages in your prayers.
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