Be Faithful!

We Must Be Faithful!
The Sermon. Matthew 5 : 27-37
Faithfulness is a big deal! God has a desire that we be faithful servants. Another way we could think of being faithful is consistent. God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. We do not have the ability to be unchanging like God, but we strive to develop faithfulness in our lives. Life is at times a roller coaster ride, but though there are ups and downs we strive for an evenness, a consistency…faithfulness. God wants us to live a life of faithfulness! One way we can gauge our faithfulness is to look at what we value and don’t value. We live in a culture that does not value marriage. Our culture is not in love with marriage. Rather, there is some kind of romantic idea out there about marriage. The wedding of Prince Charles and Diana in July 1981 was the wedding of the century. There were about 600,000 people lining the streets of London hoping to catch a glimpse of the Bride and Groom, and about 750 million people watching worldwide on television. One lady from the United States said about the wedding “to me it really looked like the fairytales we read as children”. But unfortunately the headlines tell us of an all to common end to an uncommon beginning. One headline from CNN reads: “Fairy Tale Marriage of Charles and Diana Officially Over”. The story that follows reads, from CNN.com “It was a storybook wedding -- the prince and his princess, united in marriage, surrounded by the trappings of royalty. But the rubber stamp of a clerk in the back room of a London court closed the book Wednesday, and Prince Charles and Diana were no longer married. The fairy tale ended at 10:27 a.m. with the words ‘decree absolute,’ a far cry from the standard ‘they lived happily ever after’”. The story more times than not is that people enter into marriage with a romanticized idea about it then have a rude awakening when reality sets in. The other side of the coin is that there are those who look at marriage as a failed, antiquated, and dilapidated thing of the past with no real relevance for today. I hear so much talk about how marriage is terrible and how you shouldn’t do it and that somehow if you are married you lose out on the fun of life. That is the setting for our culture. We are stuck somewhere in between fairytale and horror story. What is your view of marriage? Has it been working out well for you or have there been some bumps along the way? Do you wonder if you made a mistake? I have talked with several people who have told me that they wonder if they made a mistake in getting married. They wonder if there would have been something better out there. Do you think that it would just be easier to scrap this whole thing and start again, or just scrap the idea of marriage altogether? Read the statistic about marriage and it can be kind of discouraging. Beyond the statistics that we read, which tell us that around 50% of marriages end in divorce, are the people who continue on in a marriage without any sense of satisfaction or happiness. There are many different things that plague marriages and make them difficult. If we study to find out why people get divorced we find a combination, in most cases, of poor communication, financial strain, poor conflict resolution, and sexual problems within the marriage. And our culture produces this rocky and weed infested soil for marriages to grow in. In spite of this common condition of marriage, we are told by God that marriage is good and that he who finds a wife is blessed by God. John Piper has recently done a series on marriage that I listened to entitled “Staying Married Is Not About Staying In Love”. In this series of sermons he spells out that marriage is about showing the commitment that Christ has for the church. I believe that this kind of commitment is another way of being faithful. Marriage is a commitment that should not be taken lightly. Tonight we come to Matthew 5:27-37 and Jesus says: 27"You have heard that it was said, 'Do not commit adultery.' 28But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 29If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. 30And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell. 31"It has been said, 'Anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce. 32But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress, and anyone who marries the divorced woman commits adultery. 33"Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not break your oath, but keep the oaths you have made to the Lord.' 34But I tell you, Do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God's throne; 35or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. 36And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. 37Simply let your 'Yes' be 'Yes,' and your 'No,' 'No'; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.
Jesus in verse 27 brings up the most deadly thing that can happen in the life of a marriage, adultery. Adultery is having sex with someone other than your spouse. Jesus again goes to the 10 commandments. Right after murder, which we talked about last time, is adultery. Again, he goes after more than what is on the surface. He is looking at more than the actual act. He is looking at the heart that desires what is wrong, and confronts it. Here Jesus definitely has a different view than our culture. Finish this sentence about this subject, “you can look,…”. I do not know how many times I have heard that in my life from different people. Jesus is saying if you are not married to them, don’t look or touch. Men are particularly plagued with the desire to look at women. We can go to Job and find a good verse about lust, or the avoidance of it. Job 31:1 says "I made a covenant with my eyes not to look lustfully at a girl.” Job knew there was something wrong and took action in his life to avoid it. Jesus says something also about dealing with this tendency in our lives. He says” 29If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.” That is some pretty strong language. I do not think Jesus is saying that we need to actually poke out our eyes. poking out our eyes would not cure the problem of lust. He is using a hyperbole, to show us sin needs to be dealt with drastically. In verse 31 Jesus is again challenging the handed down tradition of the law, not the law itself, but the interpretation of the law by the rabbis and teachers of the law through history as he talks about divorce. The tradition that had been handed down through the ages had gotten to the point that the teachers of the law had been teaching that divorce was ok if you handle the paperwork correctly. 31"It has been said, 'Anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce.People had gotten to the point where they were getting divorced over anything. Did not like the way dinner was cooked, get a divorce. Did not like how she talked to you, get a divorce. Sound familiar? Jesus wanted them to understand the original understanding of the Law. Jesus says that there is only 1 reason that divorce is permissible, adultery. According to the Old Testament Law adultery was punishable by death. (Leviticus 20) And to put emphasis on the importance of marriage Jesus tells how divorces that are for another reason besides adultery are not recognized. The previous marriage is still intact. This is why the explanation is made that when someone is remarried they commit adultery. We ask about the person who has been cheated on here. Are they able to get remarried? My answer is yes. The reason I give is this, the grace that permits the adulterer to live also allows the correctly divorced person to remarry. The thing that Jesus is saying is don’t get divorced. Faithfulness means staying married.
In verse 31 he begins to talk about oaths, or vows. He talks about vows. Again this can relate directly to marriage or any number of specific applications. In Ecclesiastes 5:4 When you make a vow to God, do not delay in fulfilling it. He has no pleasure in fools; fulfill your vow. We should say what we mean. I read an interesting blog the other day about a guy who wrote why he would not divorce his wife. He gives some good reasons like he does not want to date again, that he has invested a lot of time and money in this relationship, and one of the ones I like the best he says he will not get divorced because he made a vow. Listen to what he said” Twenty-two years ago I stood in front of a packed church of friends and relatives and promised to ‘love, honor, and cherish’ Lois ‘till death do us part.’ This wasn't a ‘cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye’ playground promise. There was no ‘stack of Bibles.’ There wasn't even any ‘collateral.’ This was a once-in-a-life-time promise pledged to my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, grand-parents, future in-laws, former baby-sitters and school teachers, life-long friends, business partners, three members of the clergy, and a church full of well-wishers.” He knows the value of a promise. When we are true to our words we will have credibility. Again if we are consistent or faithful with the things that we say, we will not have to swear. This is what jesus is saying in verse 33"Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not break your oath, but keep the oaths you have made to the Lord.' 34But I tell you, Do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God's throne; 35or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. 36And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. 37Simply let your 'Yes' be 'Yes,' and your 'No,' 'No'; anything beyond this comes from the evil one. When we tell people things and do not abide by them people do not believe us. We have to come up with bigger and bigger things to give validity to our words. We swear by the moon and stars and heaven and earth that what we are saying is true. I might just break into song and start singing that John Michael Montgomery song “I swear by the moon and the stars in the sky, I’ll be there…” or maybe I will do the Boys II Men version of the song. Jesus is telling us that if we are honest we need only to say one thing or the other to have people believe us. Let your yes be yes, and your no, no. Say what you mean, and mean what you say. Be consistent, be faithful!