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[Music] Is marriage outmoded? A message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. [Music] First, a personal word to our tape listeners.

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Before our morning worship services begin, I'd like to have a personal word with you. This is a day in which many new thoughts are being thought concerning the institution of marriage. We are prone, too quickly I believe, to think these thoughts ridiculous and not apropos. I would submit that some of the things being said about marriage today demand the most serious consideration on the part of Christians.

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It is some of these aspects of marriage that I want to consider in this message. I hope that you will open your heart and open your mind as well. The thoughts will be new, but that does not mean they are wrong and it does not mean they are right. It is for you to judge under the guidance of the Spirit.

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May God bless you in your thinking and in your searching, my friend. The Scripture reading of the morning is taken from the book of Genesis, the 29th chapter, beginning the reading at the verse numbered 1, and then from the book of Hebrews, the 13th chapter, reading only the first portion of the 4th verse.

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Will you please be upstanding for the reading of the word of God? "Then Jacob went on his journey and came to the land of the people of the east. As he looked, he saw a well in the field, and lo, three flocks of sheep lying beside it, for out of that well the flocks were watered.

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The stone on the well's mouth was large, and when all the flocks were gathered there, the shepherds would roll the stone from the mouth of the well and water the sheep, and put the stone back in its place upon the mouth of the well. Jacob said to them, 'My brothers, where do you come from?'

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They said, 'We are from Haran.' He said to them, 'Do you know Laban, the son of Nahor?' They said, 'We know him.' He said to them, 'Is it well with him?'

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They said, 'It is well, and see, Rachel, his daughter, is coming with the sheep.' He said, 'Behold, it is still high day; it is not time for the animals to be gathered together. Water the sheep, and go, pasture them.'

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But they said, 'We cannot, until all the flocks are gathered together, and the stone is rolled from the mouth of the well; then we water the sheep.' While he was still speaking with them, Rachel came with her father's sheep, for she kept them.

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Now when Jacob saw Rachel, the daughter of Laban, his mother's brother, and the sheep of Laban, his mother's brother, Jacob went up and rolled the stone from the well's mouth, and watered the flock of Laban, his mother's brother.

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Then Jacob kissed Rachel and wept aloud. And Jacob told Rachel that he was her father's kinsman, and that he was Rebekah's son. And she ran and told her father.

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When Laban heard the tidings of Jacob, his sister's son, he ran to meet him, and embraced him, and kissed him, and brought him to his house. Jacob told Laban all these things, and Laban said to him,

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'Surely you are my bone and my flesh.' And he stayed with him a month. Then Laban said to Jacob, 'Because you are my kinsman, should you therefore serve me for nothing?

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Tell me, what shall your wages be?'" Now Laban had two daughters. The name of the older was Leah, and the name of the younger was Rachel. Leah's eyes were weak, but Rachel was beautiful and lovely.

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Jacob loved Rachel. And he said, "I will serve you seven years for your younger daughter Rachel." Laban said, "It is better that I give her to you than that I should give her to any other man.

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Stay with me." So Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her. And then reading from the book of Hebrews in the 13th chapter at the 4th verse,

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"Let marriage be held in honor among all." And may God bless to us and to our understanding these readings from his word. Please be seated.

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Let us pray. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

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Very quickly, permit me to flash three word photographs upon the screen of your imagination. And after we have seen the three pictures, we will talk about them. The first picture is of a mother who goes to visit her daughter

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on a surprise visit in a distant city, only to discover when she gets there that her daughter is living with a man and that they have not been legally married. When she asks them about this,

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the daughter and the man with whom she is living respond, "We are married in God, and we don't need a piece of paper, a marriage license, to prove it." Picture number two, a couple who have been members

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of the Glendale Presbyterian Church for over 25 years, husband and wife, at least everyone thought so, come to my office and advise me that in point of fact they have been living in a common law relationship for over 25 years,

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and they wish now to be married. It is clear that they feel married in every way, and that in fact they know themselves to be married, but they are going through the legal formalities now

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because there are certain questions with regard to medical insurance and social security which require legal documents. Accordingly, will I perform the ceremony. Picture number three, I'm visiting on a campus,

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and I go for dinner to the home of the young couple who are in charge of the preaching mission in which I am engaged. They're outstanding Christian young people, vigorously engaged in preaching Christ on the campus of which they are a part.

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During the course of the dinner conversation, I say to them, "How long have you been married?" And they respond without batting an eye, "Well, according to the establishment, we are not married at all,

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but in point of fact, we took our vows in privacy before God three years ago. After all, don't you agree, marriage as our society understands it, is outmoded." All right, those are the three pictures, and I would like to ask you this morning what you would do

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were you confronted with these situations. Suppose you were the mother going to the distant city and met your daughter living with this man. Or suppose you were the minister of the church

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and were confronted with the couple that came to confront me. Or suppose you were visiting on the campus and found yourself in the situation that I found myself in. What would you say?

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Do you think that marriage is outmoded? Well, I would hope that in your response to these individuals that you would not tell them that they, in fact, were not married. I hope you would not accuse them of living in a relationship

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which was nothing other than fornication and sin. I hope you would not try to accuse them of that kind of iniquity because, you see, you'd have a very difficult time proving it. I'm sure that there are some couples who get together in this way

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without benefit of clergy, purely because it's some kind of sexual adventure or because it saves on the rent or for some other kind of convenience or another.

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And I suppose that you could address these individuals by pointing out to them that they were, in fact, living in an improper and indecent relationship and that they were not married.

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But please notice that the couples I describe to you in this photograph, all of them, claim to be Christian. Every one of the individuals involved has given himself or herself to Jesus Christ, and the fruits of their discipleship are evidenced in their lives.

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We're not talking about pagans here. We're not talking about people who deny the reality of God or of his Son, but of people who understand their marriage to be a matter between them and him

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and to have been blessed by him. And you're going to have a very difficult time if you're going to attempt to go to Scripture and to find anywhere from the book of Genesis to the book of Revelation

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any verse which says that you have to have a marriage license or that you have to have blood tests or that you have to have a public ceremony or that you have to be married by a minister

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or that you have to wear a gown and have a cake and a reception and photographs and floral pieces and all the rest of it. In point of fact, Scripture says nothing whatever about how we are to be married.

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It focuses its attention on what marriage is, and it affirms not once but many times that marriage is that moment when two individuals give themselves totally to one another

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without losing their individuality. They offer their identities, their separate identities to each other in an act of love, and they offer their act of love in turn

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to the God who made them both. Marriage is two people loving each other and two people together loving God and being blessed by God.

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And when that couple came to me who had been living as husband and wife for over a quarter of a century, it was very obvious that they were in love with each other. And it was very obvious and has been for over two decades

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that they had offered their love to God and that he had blessed it. And when I was sitting at table with that young couple who had never gotten a license or been married by a minister or anything of that kind,

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I would have had to have been, it seems to me, utterly callous and avoiding the truth to have said to them that they were not in truth in love with each other and had not in their love been blessed by God.

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I would hope when you encounter this kind of person that you would not say to them, "What you are doing is sin and evil," because that's very unwise and possibly very untrue and definitely very unloving.

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At the same time, I would hope also that you would not try to unload on them a lot of arguments against what they are doing, although there are a lot of very good arguments which you could use.

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You could, for example, choose to point out to them that contrary to much thinking of our time, this is not the most sophisticated, sexually speaking, generation in human history. Young people, I think, have a special tendency to believe

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that no generation really understood anything at all about marriage and sex and romance until their generation came along. Everyone before them was ignorant and stupid and prejudiced and bigoted and narrow. Only today have we discovered what marriage and romance really are.

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It's the doctrine of evolutionary enlightenment, and suddenly the missing link has been discovered and they are ready to teach everybody who's lived before what marriage is all about. Well, in actual fact, there is absolutely nothing being taught or demonstrated in marriage today

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which has not been known in other societies and perhaps in our own for generations upon generations. Insofar as marriage and romance are concerned, there is nothing new under the sun. And you could point out to individuals who claim special knowledge that if they think their generation is so special,

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they better not be too contemptuous of all those who have gone in the past because there are future generations coming, and if they follow the same tack, then they will be contemptuous of marriage as it's understood in our time.

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It's true the past is not infallible, but it's also true that just about everything we do today has been done for a long, long time. Now, you could lay that argument upon them and perhaps with some effect, but I would suggest that that argument is basically a put-down

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and therefore that it ought to be avoided. Or you could come at them by suggesting that while what they are doing may be all right for them, when other people who are not Christians see what they're doing, they might be led to stumble and fall,

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and if you lead someone else to stumble and fall, that sin is as great as if you yourself were to be the one who has fallen. And there certainly is a certain amount of truth in that argument. We all understand that marriage as an institution is under severe attack in the United States today,

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perhaps under greater attack here than anywhere else on the face of the earth. When a young couple go off and start living together without any regard for the culture, the morals of the time, they are, to a certain degree, even though they themselves might feel pure in the relationship,

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liable to be tempting others who have not made the same loving commitments which they have made into, well, into nothing else than an illegal form of sex. There is a time, you know, for sex, and there is a time when it is not appropriate. In our time, it seems to me that sex is being made into what is virtually a drug,

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and as we see it oft times in television and on the motion picture screen, it becomes nothing less than an act of violence. Well, in a climate where sex is so seen, you can be in a pure relationship yourself, but others observing it from the outside can see in that relationship

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that which leads them to do what's wrong. And so we should not cause our neighbor to stumble, and therefore you ought to be legally married, not married as you ought. That's a pretty effective argument, but I submit that what you are doing

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is you are making a person feel guilty by proxy, and that really doesn't persuade a heart or a mind. And then you might come at these couples by saying to them that, as a Christian, you are responsible for obeying the law of the land,

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and by living in the way in which you are living, you are being contemptuous of that law, and therefore this is wrong. And you've got a great deal to stand on when you take this argument, because there's no question but that the Scriptures teach

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that a Christian is to be a good citizen and to uphold the law of the land as long as that law is not contradictory to the law of God. Two people who are living alone on a deserted island can become husband and wife without benefit of clergy,

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but when you are living in the midst of a society, you are not by yourself, you are in interrelationship with a great number of other people. Whatever you do affects those other people,

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so that if you become contemptuous of the law of the land, then you are undermining that law, and it will affect the total society in a very negative way. We have social security procedures, we have credit loans,

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we have mortgages, we have procedures for widows and orphans, we have a whole host of benefits within our society that are all predicated on marriages that are duly and properly entered into. And if you enter into what you call a married relationship

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without obedience to these laws, you suddenly throw all of these things off center and that affects the whole society. And as a Christian, you are to be concerned for everyone

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and therefore for the whole society, having reverence and responsibility to those placed in authority over you. So you ought not to break the law. It's a good argument, and I'm sure you could advance it with some effect.

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But when you're dealing with young people today, most of them being decidedly anti-establishment in their thinking, you really are putting two strikes against yourself if you're going to come out in defense of establishment procedures.

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In other words, I'm suggesting that it's rather foolhardy to try to argue young people today into obedience to the establishment for the sake of the establishment. They'll turn you off, wrongly, but they'll turn you off,

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and won't hear what you're trying to say. See, all of these arguments that you might be tempted to unload on someone in these circumstances tend to reach the head when what we're trying to reach in this kind of a discussion is the heart.

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Remember, in meeting a person on an issue such as this and many related issues, you're not so much out to win the point as you are to win the person. So I would submit that our approach to individuals in situations of the kind we're noting this morning

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should be predicated on helping them see the beautiful thing which Christian marriage is, and to present the picture of Christian marriage so beautifully that they will want very much to be a part of it. Now, permit me a few minutes to spell that out.

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Most people who don't go for licenses and blood tests and all of the other things that are required by society refuse to do this because they have seen what society has done to marriage. If you look at the institution of marriage in our American culture today,

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it has been horribly abused, crippled, and disfigured by the rules and the regulations which our society has placed upon it. They see this, and seeing this, they don't want any part of that kind of marriage. Now, what am I speaking of specifically?

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Well, let's look at some of the characteristics of marriage in our society. And I want to emphasize when I say "our society," I'm talking only about the United States of America. We have changed the institution of marriage from what God would have it be

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perhaps more than any other civilized society in the world today. That might be one of the reasons why we have the highest divorce rate on the face of the earth today. But look at marriage in our time.

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One characteristic of it might be described as possession. A husband and a wife are to belong to each other. Notice I didn't say they were to belong with each other. I said they were to belong to each other.

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That means that neither one can do anything without gaining the approval of the other. And that enters into a kind of a bartering and a training procedure in which, you know, "I'll do this," "Well, then I'll do this," "And if you're going to do that, then I'm going to be able to do this."

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Suddenly we own our partner. That denies the individuality of the partner and forces the partner into a kind of bartering or trade relationship which is very far from the love which a marriage is supposed to know.

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Or take another aspect of marriage, very typical in our day, the denial of the self. The words you come across all the time in marriage counseling books and you hear referred to in marriage counseling sessions

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is compromise. Both the man and the woman must be willing to compromise. You know, he wants to go to see a Western, she wants to go to see a romance, so they end up going to see a comedy.

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Now, that's not just a silly, indifferent matter. The point of the fact is, in some way, that man may need that Western and in some way, that woman may need that romance. And when they go to the comedy, neither of them are getting what they need.

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To a certain degree, they are giving up part of what they need. They are giving up part of their identity, their individuality. The statement which I hear most frequently across my desk in marriage counseling is this, "He's not the man I married."

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Why, of course he's not. He's been giving away his desires in compromise for the last ten years, the same way she has, until neither of them are the people they were when they were married. They're about half of what they were when they were married.

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Is it any wonder, under such circumstance, that the love which was at the center of the marriage has died? They're different people. They're not the individuals they were. Or take another aspect of marriage in our time.

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We might call this the couple front. Everything in marriage is to be done by couples. Married people are virtually like Siamese twins. Wherever you find one, you are, in our society at least, expected automatically to find the other.

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She had some friends, girlfriends, who contributed to her education, who stimulated her and encouraged her in many beautiful ways. He had some friends, male friends, who were part of his identity and individuality. They helped to make him the man that he was.

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Now they're married. And suddenly he's not supposed to be spending time with the boys anymore. And she's not supposed to be spending time with the girls anymore. Instead of that, we pick out couples to build friendships with,

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and we only pick out couples where both the husband and the wife are equally acceptable, which suddenly means that relationships which have existed for a long time and which were important in the formation of our identity are laid aside. And you can't do that to people without seriously and significantly changing those people,

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making them less than they were in the first place. But we do that in marriage every day. Role rigidity is very typical in our society today. We talk about man and wife.

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We don't ever talk about woman and husband. I mean by that we measure the man in terms of his sex and the woman in terms of her function. [bell rings] Please turn your cassette to the other side.

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Here's a fellow who's been cooking his own breakfast for years. Then he's married. First day after the honeymoon, does he head for the kitchen to fix his own breakfast? Not on your life.

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It's his wife's job to fix the breakfast. That's understood from the very outset. He may be able to make scrambled eggs a lot better than she can, but it's the wife's job to fix the breakfast.

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Well, you see, there are a lot of people who look at the rigidities associated with role in marriage and say, "Thanks, but no thanks. I don't want any part of that. I don't want any part of society's idea of marriage."

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Or take the area of fidelity. How do we measure fidelity in today's culture? We measure it in terms of sexual fidelity. We say that you must not be unfaithful insofar as your sexual relationships are concerned.

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And if you are unfaithful, we have various laws, coercive forces to bring to bear upon you to make sure that you don't do it again or that you pay the price of what you have done.

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But at the same time that we limit fidelity to such a narrow area, we are willing to permit unfaithfulness in every other area of the married relationship. We are quite willing, for example, to have a husband in life live in totally different worlds where he is growing and expanding in the world of business

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and she is growing and expanding in the world of the washer and the dryer and things of that kind. And as they grow farther and farther apart, they are still faithful as long as, though they're in separate worlds, they're still in the same bed. Unfortunately, separate worlds almost invariably lead to separate beds.

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And there is a kind of exclusivity in marriage which is characteristic of our time. And by that I mean this. She feels she has the right to assume that at every moment in his life there is nobody he would rather be with than her.

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And he feels he has the right to assume that in every moment of his life there is nobody that she would rather be with than him. And that's a plain denial of a very plain and obvious fact. There are times when our needs as individuals don't require this particular individual

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but that particular individual. But in our society, that's not supposed to be. And the one you should want to be with all the time is your wife or your husband. Now a lot of young people today look at that

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and they see all those aspects of marriage as we observe it and they say, "I want no part of that. I'm not going to sign any paper. I'm not going to enlist in that kind of an understanding of marriage.

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I know as soon as I enter in to the legal formalities of marriage that all of this baggage is going to descend on me and I'm not willing to carry that baggage. I don't want to be manipulated in my marriage.

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I want to marry an equal. I don't want to marry a dictator or a caretaker. I don't want to be one half of a couple. I want to be a complete individual in myself.

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I want to be me ten years from now as I am today and I want to be loved as I am now and I want to be the same way then so that I will be loved the same way then." We joke about marriage.

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We talk about it being the ball and chain or we say she hooked him or we say they got hitched. A lot of young people today don't think that's funny.

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They don't think it's funny to be talking about chains or hitching or hooking when it comes to marriage. They see the expectations of society. They know that expectations lead to demands,

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that demands lead to manipulation, that manipulation leads to frustration, that frustration leads to despair, that despair leads to marriage counseling,

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that marriage counseling leads to divorce and that divorce leads to crippled living. And seeing that, they say, "We'll have no part of it." Now, to that kind of person,

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we have to come holding up the picture of what Christian marriage is. For Christian marriage is not like the kind of marriage that our society has made basic to the way we live. Christian marriage is not a 50/50 proposition.

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It's a 100/100 proposition. It's not an instance in which 1+1=1. It's an instance in which 1+1=3. It's not two trees growing so that one leans on the other

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or that they lean on each other, but two trees growing straight and tall and tangling their branches. That's what Christian marriage is. It's not a matter of trading and bartering.

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It's not a matter of giving up. It's not a matter of being one half a person. Christian love and Christian marriage is accepting another person as that other person is,

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not requiring them to change here, to change there, to cease this, to start to do that, not molding them after our image, but loving them as they are

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and rejoicing in the fact that someone can love us just the way we are. And being willing to help that person not become what we want them to become,

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but to become what God in his fullness is enabling them to be. And being able to open ourselves so that they can come into our lives and help us to become not what they want us to become,

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but what God in his fullness wants us to be. Christian marriage is a relationship in which you take and in which you permit yourself to be taken, but all of this is for the strengthening

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and the blessing of the other. Christian marriage is friendship raised to its ultimate intimacy, and basic to friendship must always be freedom.

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Now, there's a risk in this. It's a dangerous thing to enter into an intimacy with someone in which that someone has the right to be and do whatever they are inclined to be and do.

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That's risky. But out of that risk comes the thrill, the soul-satisfying, lifting thrill that makes romance the exciting thing

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that God intends it to be. This is what makes Eden in marriage, and that's what Christian marriage is to be, Eden, where you can be naked and unashamed.

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Naked physically, naked emotionally, naked spiritually, naked mentally. All the defense is gone, and at the same time letting the other be the other.

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Not the defense is gone because you've stripped the other person of all of their weapons of attack so you can feel free to be defenseless. Not at all. Far riskier than that.

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It's letting the other person be all the other person wants to be and still being defenseless before them. That's what love is. This is what the Bible means when it says repeatedly

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that the marriage relationship is when two people know one another. That's the word Scripture uses repeatedly. They knew one another. That does not mean they adjusted one another.

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That does not mean that they altered one another, that they compromised one another. It does not mean that they cut the other to fit their pattern. It means they knew the other person as the other person was

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and loved them just like that. Of course, the model for the kind of love which is to be true to a Christian marriage is the very love of God.

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How does God love? God never hesitates to say to us how much he loves us, how much he needs us. See Jesus weeping over Jerusalem.

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The tears of God. This is how much I want you to come. But at the very moment he holds up his hands, he does not say, "Now, in order to come,

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you must do this and this and this and this." Not at all. There are no strings. God never asks us to violate our freedom.

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God says, "Come to me in such a way that your freedom is fulfilled." God never asks any soul to become less than everything that soul can be.

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And no husband and no wife should ever ask their mate to become anything less than that husband or wife can be in all the rich fullness which God has given them. Christians are the only ones who can make marriage

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what marriage is supposed to be. The non-Christian wonders about the universe. If I give myself, am I flying in the face of a universe which says that if you want to get along in life,

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you don't give, you take. The Christian doesn't have to ask that question. He knows that at the center of the universe is God and that God is love

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and that God is the kind of love which perseveres even to a cross. Nothing, nothing frustrates or stops that love. So when the Christian gives himself with that kind of love, gives himself fully, not altering himself, not changing himself,

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but entering into relationship with everything that he has to offer, when he does that, he knows he is moving in accord with the very center guiding principle of everything that is the love of God.

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So he moves or she moves into this ultimate intimacy, giving space to the other to become what the other wants to be, giving time to the other so that the other can be what the other needs to be. Separate vacations become a viable option.

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The goals of the husband and wife don't have to be exactly the same in every instance. Their friends don't have to all be off the same list. They can communicate, fulfill themselves, and they fulfill themselves in order that they might have more to give to the other.

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But you see, and this is the point toward which I've been driving in all of this discussion, in order to have this kind of relationship, you've got to make a commitment. In order to enter in to the kind of intimacy where you accept a person as they are no matter what and open yourself so that they accept you as you are no matter what,

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in order to be able to have that kind of union, you've got to be willing to make real investment. You want to make real investment. This isn't the kind of thing you do in some back room.

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This is the kind of thing where you stand up in front of the world and you say, "I am offering myself in the terms of everything I am to her." And she stands up and says, "I am offering myself and everything I am and God's will can be to him." And you as husband and wife want it to be known that you're offering yourself in just such a way.

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When God came to us with his all-consuming love, there were no escape clauses. He said, "You can be what you want to be even if it means nailing me to a cross." And he repeated those same words from that very cross. He didn't refuse to sign on the dotted line so that if things got tight,

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he could slip out and avoid Calvary. Not at all. He came in fully committed. He put all of the money on the number before the wheel was spun. And that's the reason that Christians should stand up, fulfill all the rules of society,

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sign on whatever lines have to be signed, and announce to everyone who will see and hear and repeat it if they will, "These people have given themselves to each other in fullness." Hugh Hefner in his filthy little magazine tells us that the essence of romantic love is to give whatever you have to give in order to get whatever you want to get.

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That kind of thinking tears away at the very heart of love and rips away at the very center of our way of life. It is iniquity, pure and simple. We stand in opposition to that. And we say, "Love is that moment when you say, 'Here I am.

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God has made me as I am, calls me to become more than I am. Will you take me as I am? Will you help me to be what God wants me to be? And will you believe me when I say that I will take you as you are

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and will help you to be everything, not that I want you to be, but that God wants you to be?" And in pledge of my faithfulness, I'll say what I've just said to you before all the world. I'll cut off every avenue of retreat so that you will know that I mean it with all my heart and soul.

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I love you. That's what Jacob did for Rachel. Lots of good love stories in the Bible. My favorite is that one about Jacob and Rachel.

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He ended up working 14 years for her. Now that's quite an investment, quite a commitment. 14 years before they could become husband and wife. But the scripture says that the time that he worked for Rachel

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seemed to him to be but a few days because of the love he had for her. So when someone says to me, "Is marriage outmoded?" I'll say, and I've said, "Marriage as our society understands it is outmoded. Those kinds of marriages are collapsing about us every day.

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But that marriage which is built upon the love of God, upon his very essence, stands and will always stand because he stands and will always stand. That marriage which is built upon freedom,

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encouraging the other to be all the other that can. That marriage which is based not upon secret agreements but upon open rejoicing in one another. That kind of marriage will never die.

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It'll hurt sometimes, but the hurt will be as nothing because of the love such a husband and such a wife have for one another. Let us pray. Oh God, bless our homes.

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Bless every husband and every wife. By the inspiration of thy spirit, let the freedom which is of the essence of love dwell in every one of our homes. And in that freedom may we grow as individuals.

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And as individuals may we strengthen each other, uplift each other, encourage each other, love each other. We pray this in the name of that one who loved us and set us free. Even Jesus Christ.

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Amen.