Fierce Church Sermons
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Fierce Church Sermons
An Overdue Talk About Divorce Part 1 | Applause of Heaven
Does God hate divorce? 🤔 What does Jesus really say about it in Matthew 5? In a world where divorce is common and often encouraged, Jesus calls us to a higher standard—one that values commitment, grace, and love. But what if you’ve already been divorced? Does God still love you? (Hint: YES! 🙌)
📖 Key Points:
✅ Divorce in Context – What Jesus meant in Matthew 5 and how it differs from Old Testament law
✅ Marriage as Sacred – Why God values marriage and calls us to love others as He first loved us ❤️
✅ The Gospel & Divorce – Understanding grace, redemption, and God's mercy—even after divorce
✅ A Higher Standard – Why Jesus challenges us to honor marriage in a way that reflects God’s love
⚡ Call to Action:
If you or someone you know is wrestling with divorce, remember this: God’s love and mercy are bigger than any mistake! 💙 Comment ‘GRACE’ below if this message encouraged you!
Hey, what up? It's Mark Carter. I'm the pastor of Fierce Church. Welcome to our podcast. I'm so pumped that you're able to join us today. I hope this encourages you, inspires you, strengthens you, gives you hope to keep pressing on, and it's my prayer that this sermon gives you a more expansive view of God's love for you. Enjoy the message.
Speaker 1:This is an overdue talk because, honestly, I've been a little bit afraid over the years to get this wrong. That's really what this is about. I have been hesitant because there's a couple of things. One is I know that those who teach are going to be judged more strictly, so I just I want to get it right, man, like I don't want to teach anything. A little bit weird. It's also the people that I love are in this church and I don't want to make anything worse.
Speaker 1:Like I know, it's a delicate topic and there's a lot of pain. Every one of us is touched by the pain of divorce in some way, some more directly than others, but we've all dealt with it. We're all experiencing it and there's things that can be said with like broad, sweeping statements that are maybe even true, but they fail to connect in the flesh and bone of life, because life is just complex and life is hard and life is muddy and life is. It just doesn't always go the way that you hoped. Sometimes it goes seven different ways than you would hope it would have gone. So some of my goals today are I want us to, on one level, see the dignity and beauty of marriage and why it's worth fighting for, according to God. I think that's think that we're gonna see that that's very important to Jesus. I also want to this week and the next week. We're gonna have like a part one and part two this week and next week.
Speaker 1:I want to relieve some guilt from some people that might be carrying around stuff that either wasn't even really their fault or it was their fault, but they're not receiving the grace that is in Jesus Christ Because the gospel. People should be shaped by the gospel more than anything else. For others, especially next week, I want to give some room and I want to talk about some occasional times not the majority, but occasional times when a marriage is so destructive, a marriage is so death bringing, that the Bible itself makes a space for. I do not condemn you to walk in this slavery forever, as we're going to see in the scripture next week. But there are some things and I wouldn't want to encourage anyone to do it, but I do want to protect people that might be in it. There's things like emotional abuse. That is so ridiculous. It's not just claiming that, it's really their long-term non-repentant, it's a prison.
Speaker 1:We'll talk about that next week and talk about the heart of God, the heart of compassion, the heart of the merciful Savior that does not want us to walk in bondage to pain forever and yet he wants us to fight, fight, fight, fight, fight to glorify him through marriage if at all possible. So this week we're talking mostly the rule, we're talking concepts. Next week we're going to talk the exceptions, and the exceptions are going to be maybe much more personal and much more sticky and hopefully our hearts will break in good and positive ways. But I just want to encourage us Guys. It's true always, but it's true right now for this message in particular. Everybody's got a unique situation, everyone's got a very difficult situation and that's why it's really so important to walk in community. It's not just important to know concepts, it's important to have spiritual brothers and sisters. It's important for people to know your life and to try to be able to help bring God's word to bear, and that's what we really need in this topic, more than any other, is we need the word of God and we need the spirit of Jesus and his kindness to show us what to do. So here's some approaches that people take to divorce all the time.
Speaker 1:I'm going to give you several. One is they're very loose with it. They're very loose with it. They're just like, hey, I'm not feeling good about this anymore. I think maybe I made the wrong choice. I think this isn't. You know, I had expectations and I had things I thought were going to happen and it's just, it's not that way. It's kind of like I picked the wrong thing at the store. I need to go back and get a different one. I'm not saying anyone feels quite that loose, but it's treated that loosely. It is, hey, man, look, yeah, it just didn't work out. Just go again.
Speaker 1:And we're going to see that that is one of the versions that Jesus is condemning today in the scriptures. It's very explicit. It's very clear that he is saying you are undervaluing a human being that I love for your own selfish purposes and for your own entitlement, and you're being very unfaithful and you don't even get the damage that you're causing in other lives. Jesus is going to talk about that today in the text, so we're going to see that You're also for those that are that folks that would find themselves in this category. You're also radically relying on your own wisdom rather than the wisdom of God, meaning people take it into their own hands, they harden their heart. This is what happens. They harden their heart and say well, nevertheless, I just want to have what I want to have, and I'm thinking that I'm right and I'm wise and that you are wise for sure. I'm sure there's cases where that's true, but there's also cases, in a walk with Jesus, where your own wisdom is the exact opposite thing that God wants you to do in order to keep growing and keep progressing. So, on one level, folks can be way too loose with it.
Speaker 1:Others you've experienced this and we're all, maybe even a combination of some of these You've been crushed by someone else's choice. You didn't really even get a real choice. You were just. You were thrown out. You were discarded, like some of the people Jesus is talking about today, and your life was forever altered and forever changed. And you still might be picking up the pieces, and it might be. There's some sense that you're picking up the pieces for the rest of your life and you've still got questions. We're going to talk about some of those questions next weekend.
Speaker 1:There's also and this is unique there are unique cases where you are suffering in such a horrific situation, and I don't think the church always knows how to love folks in that situation, and so my ambition for us for the next two weeks is to learn how to love well folks that might be in this boat where they are suffering, and really I think the Bible would use language the innocent are being caused to suffer, and God wants us to have mercy and compassion and he wants us to be able to help with that. Some are not divorced, but you see divorce as this kind of this ultimate law that categorizes somebody forever. That that's just that becomes part of their identity. It's who they are. Weirdly, other sin doesn't become part of their identity, but this one does, and we're going to see that that is law-based thinking. It is the opposite of the gospel, and we're going to do our best to wrap that up and I'm going to challenge some of you guys because I might stretch your brain a little bit here over the next couple of weeks. Okay, I'm doing it on purpose, because I'm going to bring us to God's word and we're just going to make sure that we're still walking in the same gospel that is in the New Testament.
Speaker 1:Make sure that we understand that there's some who you've been divorced and you're walking in regret because you now realize what you didn't realize then, that you really were operating in a lot of for your situation. It was very selfish, but you didn't really know the Lord in the same way, and so you didn't really know the Lord in the same way, and so you didn't have maybe, some of the warnings, you didn't even know to think certain things. But now you get on the other side, now you know Jesus and you're wondering what do I do with that? And then there's others who are presently wrapped up in very difficult situations that are very painful, and we want to talk about how do we help those folks as a church. I want to give you my here's my bottom line sentence. Okay, it's too long to be a bottom line, really, but here's the whole sentence Kingdom people. And kingdom people is we're in the Sermon on the Mount again Kingdom people is everybody who not only wants to walk in the ways of Jesus. But they know they can't walk in the ways of Jesus, and so they're looking to God to give them a heart and steer them into the ways of Jesus and make them more and more like Jesus. That's what we mean by kingdom people. That's the entire backdrop of the Sermon on the Mount. Kingdom people value marriage and should do everything possible to avoid divorce, except in cases of extreme harm where God, in his mercy, allows them to be freed from it. That's the big deal bottom line for us for the next two weeks In Jesus' day.
Speaker 1:You need to know what was going on in the background, in the culture when Jesus was talking about divorce in the Sermon on the Mount, there was two rabbinic schools of thoughts. Okay, there was Halil and Shammai. Halil and Shammai Halil were people. They said you can get divorced for anything. They looked at Deuteronomy 24 and they said you know, this just gives us permission. Anything you want. If your wife does not bring you the right temperature soup, you can divorce her. If you find somebody else that looks prettier that day, you can divorce her. This is what these folks said. Then there's the school of Shammai and they said no, no, no, you can't get divorced for anything other than only sexual immorality. And so Jesus is going to come speak into this. He's going to give us an understanding of the heart behind that and why these folks many of them are misinterpreting. But you need to know Jesus is responding to a specific cultural conversation that was happening right at that moment.
Speaker 1:For us to really understand this, we also need to know Jewish men of this time had all the power, and what that meant is they could just kick out their wife, leave her entirely destitute, but then, if seven months goes by and they change their mind, they can just go find her, grab her and say you're coming with me, no matter how much she's moved on, no matter what else was going on in her life now, no matter, maybe she'd even fallen in love, nope, he's got her, so he's going to take her back. Those are some of the abuses that people were getting away with and could do. Because why? Because they were hardening their hearts and they were selfish and they were entitled. We're all selfish and entitled, but this is the thing that Jesus is confronting in the Sermon on the Mount today. He's confronting that line of thinking. We've all got to recognize. It's within us. We've seen it the past few weeks, past month or so. It's within us to undervalue people.
Speaker 1:Let's pan out now. We're going to talk about the Sermon on the Mount, the actual text. Okay, in this chapter that we're in, matthew the author. He's the inspired author. He was one of the disciples of Jesus. He's writing things in little nuggets and we're going to see up on the screen there's six little nuggets and the reason he would have done this is so it's easy to memorize. But you can also see a pattern in the way he's writing. Let's that on the screen, six little boxes up there.
Speaker 1:We talked about anger several weeks ago and one of the things we said was Jesus was saying when you're angry with somebody, there's even a little seed of murder in your heart and what you're saying is I so undervalue this person. We could just go ahead and get rid of them. I think that might be what we want to do. Let's just get rid of them. Matthew 5, 21, 26, it was.
Speaker 1:Then we went on the next week and we talked about lust and Jesus said I don't just want people to not commit adultery, I want to get deeper in the heart so that even when you lust, you realize you're undervaluing my human. See, when we lust, what we're saying is it doesn't matter about the soul, I just want to devour that. And Jesus says no, no, no, no. That's not what kingdom people do, that's not what citizens of the new heaven do. They're worried about the inside. It's not just external, and that was what was going on at the time. Everyone was just external. And Jesus says no, no, the law wasn't about externals, it's about internals. And so I want to get down to the heart.
Speaker 1:Jesus wants to be deeper than just being legal about anger, or legal about lust, or legal about divorce. There should be a next one in there, jacob. Let's see if we can go to that one. That has kind of a little different slat to it. Yeah, you can see a pattern there, though in the top three anger, lust and divorce.
Speaker 1:Every one of those in this six nugget section of scripture, every one of them, is about undervaluing others. That's a common theme that we can see, and when someone is getting divorced for selfish reasons, for hard-hearted reasons, what they're doing is they're undervaluing their spouse. And God ain't having it. He's like no, I don't want that to happen. Let's start in Matthew 5, 31 and 32. Now, it was said, jesus is speaking to all these folks. It was said whoever sends his wife away, let him give her a certificate of divorce. But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except for reason of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery. And whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery. That's pretty fierce, that's pretty flat, that's pretty black and white.
Speaker 1:There's more to this New Testamentally, but even so, we have to deal with this passage of Scripture right now, today. So I want us to watch two heart surgeries that the Bible gives us, that we need Heart surgeries because our hearts are wrong, our hearts are not adequate to go this deeper route and value people the way that we're always supposed to. So the Spirit of God comes and he says I don't want you to just hear new law. I just didn't come to give new law. I came to transform and renovate the heart. But you got to let me do some heart surgery. And what that means for us today is guys, can we just agree to be open? The best thing we can do is to be open to Jesus at any given moment. God, if you want to do some heart surgery on me, I'm super down. So let's open up our hearts. But I say to you and Jesus is saying right, there again he's saying but I say, I know what you read, but I'm the one who gave the law. Okay, I'm the original law maker, I was the law writer, I was there at the foundation of the world. I wrote the law and it was about the heart, not the exteriors. So what I'm saying to you is it wasn't just about you just having this permission to get a divorce. I've actually got a higher, better thing in mind.
Speaker 1:Why does God oppose divorce? He opposes it because of human selfishness and he loves people and he doesn't want them taking advantage, not to mention the collateral damage that divorce can do. You guys, I don't need to tell anybody this because you've already you've been around it, it's been in your life. You've seen the stories, I've seen the ripple effects of some person. They just harden their heart. They're like forget it, I want to get what I want. I'm tired of not getting exactly what I want. And so they harden their heart and then they move on. But the kids are still getting beat down by these waves, by these earthquakes. These kids are still hiding under the bed when the creditors come because mama ain't got no money, and pops.
Speaker 1:It's like he's oblivious because he's in his new reality now because he just picked something else. He essentially said here's your certificate, go, I want to get on my life Now. Does he care about those kids? Oh, he does, but he's clueless to how this ripples through time and ripples through relationships and really this is exactly what King David did. You remember, king David? I mean, this is really what he, when he gave himself to pursuing Bathsheba and then adultery, he hardened his heart. He says I don't care what God wants, but what did that lead to? Well, it led to adultery, yes, but then it led to murder. It led to deception. It led to cover-ups which ultimately led to the judgment of God, which led to murder. It led to deception. It led to coverups which ultimately led to the judgment of God, which led to Absalom coming in and trying to take over the city, which led to war, which led to death of soldiers that never needed to die. But they did. Why? Because David was entitled, because he was the king and he was on the porch. And he looks down and he sees naked Bathsheba and he's like I'll take that porch. And he looks down and he sees naked Bathsheba and he's like I'll take that. And that one decision ripples through time and causes tremendous damage. Are we seeing this?
Speaker 1:Why does God hate divorce? Hey, malachi 2 tells us Malachi, a prophet writing in a different time. He doesn't just give. Oh okay, here's what God you know. Here's, he's mad because you guys broke the rules. You can hear God's heart bleeding in this.
Speaker 1:Listen to this. This is another thing you do. You drown the Lord's altar with tears, weeping and wailing because he no longer accepts the offerings you bring him. Okay, so, like God, why aren't you answering our prayers? You ask why he no longer accepts them. It is because you've broken your promise to the wife you married when you were. She was your partner, and you have broken your promise to her, although you promised before God that you would be faithful to her. Didn't God make you one body and spirit with her? What was his purpose in this? It was that you should have children who are truly God's people, not children hiding under the bed, but children that are provided for. So make sure none of you breaks his promise to his wife.
Speaker 1:I hate divorce, says the Lord, god of Israel, because I hate it when one of you does such a cruel thing to his wife, make sure that you not break your promise to be faithful to your wife. God was saying I don't hate divorced people. I hate the pain that comes from it. I hate it. I hate it when people are this hurt. I hate it that people don't even know how hurt people are. Now, this is a situation and it might not apply to you. Like your divorce may have been very different. There were very different circumstances. It really wasn't motivated by selfishness. Something else happened there for you. I don't. I don't know. We're going to get to that, okay, but we're. We're taking them one at a time and we're talking about different ones.
Speaker 1:I think you would probably agree Most of us if we were given the choice. Hey, do you want to be able to see everything that happens on planet earth, including all the pain? We would all say no, I can't handle the pain. I have To actually know all the pain that is happening on planet earth. Check it out. God knows all of it. He's experiencing all of it. So he sees not only the pain that's happening right now that's the result of sin, but he sees down through the ages, the pain that continues to ripple through because of unfaithfulness and because of selfishness and because of entitlement. So, yeah, god says oh, you don't even know what you're doing, you don't even know how you're hurting so many when you just harden your heart and get selfish and entitled, except for the reason of sexual morality.
Speaker 1:Sexual morality means adultery is what Jesus is saying here. And what he's saying is you know, there comes a moment that even Jesus endorses that marriage has been so shattered, that trust has been so broken that it's not a sure thing this is ever going to heal, right. And so Jesus says yeah, you can move on. After that, I release you from that. I don't want you to have to live with wondering if that's going to keep on happening. Now we know people in this church you've recovered from that and you've crushed it, and I believe one of the reasons you recovered it is because you loved Jesus more than you Like. You just decided. I'll tell you what Jesus is right and this really hurt and we got in some bad stuff. But how about? We'll just put one foot in front of the other and we're going to follow God today and see what he can heal and see what he can put back together, including not only a relationship, but broken hearts and what might've been broken destinies that are no longer broken destinies because they decided Jesus is my only way out of this.
Speaker 1:Three here's this is actually graphic, jacob three exceptions to do not separate. We're going to see them. Adulteries one this is right here Matthew 5, 32. Abandonment we're talking about this, one next week. And then, in the same exact verse, similarly, similarly, similarly destructive cases, meaning Jesus is making room, the Bible's making room. I believe Paul is making room and I didn't always see this. It was till I studied the original language. I didn't always see this. Other such things like these that are this damaging, that are this deadly, that are this destroying to the relationship God wanted to inhabit. God says I do not condemn you to live in that forever and you can move on and go ahead and move on with your life. Well, okay, well, what about?
Speaker 1:Whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery, because I've had people come to me in this church. Okay, so I want to marry this girl. She's been divorced. If I marry her, am I committing adultery? Like, how does that work? Yeah, let's talk through a case scenario of that.
Speaker 1:So, let's say a couple, we'll start with a gal. A gal gets divorced because of evil things. Like she decides I'm just going to cheat on this dude, and so it's a legit divorce in Jesus' eyes. But it wasn't legit for her because she was the adulteress. Now if she meets another guy and the guy is a Christian, he's like well, you know that marriage is over, I'm just going to marry her and she hasn't repented. She hasn't said that was wrong before God. Then, yeah, bro, she hasn't said that was wrong before God. Then, yeah, bro, you're sharing in that to a degree. In a sense you are, because you're saying, hey, I'm cool with that. Jesus is not cool with that, but I'm cool with that.
Speaker 1:Now let's change the situation. Let's say, the sweet girl. She does commit adultery and she has a little distance, but you know what? Her heart is broken. It says Jesus, even that was a bad situation, but it wasn't right that I did that either. And now time has gone by, there's really no way to fix that. But I want to ask for your forgiveness because I didn't do my part right. I was wrong to do that and I want to ask you to forgive me.
Speaker 1:Now what happens New Testamentally? When she asks for forgiveness, her sin is thrown into the ocean of forgetfulness and he remembers it no more. Guys, in that sense, she's not an adulteress anymore, so he can marry her freely, because she is a sinner, but, like all of us, she's a forgiven sinner. That's how that works. That's a way that that could come together really great.
Speaker 1:Now, of course, you're gonna say, well, what about the folks that fake it? Yeah, if you fake it, if you're like I'm just gonna get divorced and fake sadness, and then it's gonna be fine, well, precious, you're gonna have to deal with Jesus on that. I don't think that, really. I don't think you're paying attention. You're going to make choices that you look back and you're like I think that was the stupidest thing I've ever done in my life and you're going to feel it. You're going to feel that I feel bad still about how dumb that was. That's why there's Jesus. We come to him, we bring him our. He's not counting on any of us getting this whole thing right, okay, so why was it allowed before then?
Speaker 1:Mark 10, verse four this is a different place in scripture. Jesus is talking about the same subject. Okay, just like I talk about the same things a lot, I think Jesus talked about the same things a lot and he gives a little bit more elaboration here. He says Moses was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote this law. Jesus replied so what would happen is this really was? This was not an endorsement, but God wrote this law as a concession.
Speaker 1:See, god is a realist. God knows people are selfish and people harden their hearts and they get entitled and they throw women out. And so what I want to do? I want to make sure that she has a certificate. So if you actually throw her out punk, you can't drag her back seven months later. You can't have it because she got the certificate. No, I moved on. I'm not chained, I'm not enslaved to him anymore. I can move on.
Speaker 1:But at the beginning Jesus says of creation God made them male and female. For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife and the two will become one flesh. So they're no longer two but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let no one separate, okay. So this is what Jesus is saying. Okay, let no one separate. This is what Jesus is saying.
Speaker 1:He's saying I know that you don't do everything right, I don't know. I know that you don't do everything perfect, I know that your marriage is not ideal, but this thing that I'm visioning to you, this thing that I'm showing you, he says love this, love it, love it. Agree with God that this is right and this is good, and this is what you should be aiming for, even if you'll never make it. Aim for it, go for it, because God loves it. And he says I want to shape you according to that. Don't let that out of your sight. Love this.
Speaker 1:You say, carter. Well, that's easy for you to say. Because you got a dope wife. I got an old beater, like I got this old thing. What do I got? Well, you're right about one thing Kenzie is a dope wife, but everybody's got stuff that they've got to work through. And here's the thing Kenzie does not love me because I deserve it. She loves me because it's the way Christ loved her. So she endures my bogus stuff.
Speaker 1:And that's really what he's asking. He's saying don't love them for their sake. Love them for my sake, because that's what Jesus told the disciples right before he died on the cross Even as I have loved you, so you must love one another. That's the how. That's how we do it. So Jesus would say. He would say compassionately, but he would say I don't want you to lose this.
Speaker 1:This really is the standard and it's not going anywhere. Don't judge it by your time, judge it by what Jesus says. This is the standard. If at all possible, I do not want you to get divorced for any other reason other than sexual morality, or we're going to see abandonment or similar such cases next week. But do everything you can to hold on to it. Fight for it with all of your might. Don't allow yourself to just harden your heart and get selfish and get entitled, which we all do. Don't do it. Two necessary heart surgeries. The first one is the standard is higher. God's standard is higher than the world's. The first one is the standard is higher. God's standard is higher than the world's. It always was in the Sermon on the Mount. It always will be. And here's number two the law is fulfilled. Just as true. The law is fulfilled.
Speaker 1:Now, I didn't like making that the point, guys, because that's a really churchy thing to say and no one knows what it means. Half the time and I was trying, I'm racking my brain I was like I can't say the law is fulfilled, like that's true, but what if? What if? There's a guest here? They don't know what that means. They're going to think what? And I racked my brain and the truth is I couldn't come up with anything better that actually encapsulated what is true. And so we're just going to take time, we're here in church, we're going to teach, so we're going to teach what it means.
Speaker 1:It means the law is the deal, the deal that was originally made. Okay. The deal was if you perfectly obey, I'll accept you. That's the law. Obey all the laws. The person who obeys the laws, if they can obey all of them, they will live by them. The problem is nobody can, and so Jesus says I'll tell you what. I'm going to give you a new covenant and I'm going to give you my obedience and I'm going to die for everything. You did wrong and you're totally good. You are 100% accepted because, my friends, if you have been divorced or someone divorced you, jesus took the shame for your divorce on the cross. If you've done wrong things, if you were the selfish person in that interaction, or the more selfish one, jesus took the punishment for that sin on the cross, okay. So it's really not about trying harder. It's about knowing when Jesus died on the cross. It's just like this.
Speaker 1:Do not think I've come to abolish the law and the prophets. I've not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. I'm here to do what none of y'all could do, so y'all could be reunited in new covenant, holy Ghost, filled relationship with the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Now, I know that you might want to do this perfectly. I just want to be perfect. I want to. That's good, that's an admirable thing, but if you think you have to be categorically never divorced to be pleasing to God, you're jacking up the gospel. That is not the gospel. The gospel is not only people that were never divorced are pleasing to me. No, the law is fulfilled, and what this means is not getting a divorce does not save you. Not getting a divorce does not save you. There's one thing that saves you. It is the blood of Jesus Christ spilled on the cross, for you and for me.
Speaker 1:Okay, so Yoda will tell you do or do not. There is no try. He's going to say do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. I like Yoda, and that sounds really deep and spiritual. The problem is you're much better off, you're much more Christian. If you choose instead of do or do not. There is no try I choose, it is finished. There's nothing for me to do. It was all done on the cross of Calvary by Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1:So I will do my best, because I'm a spirit filled person. I'm going to aim at obedience with God, but I'm never going to get it perfect until I shed this body of death and enter into glory, and then this thing isn't such a bother anymore. But in the meantime I'm going to rejoice, I'm going to glory in the fact that the law is fulfilled, that Jesus Christ is my righteousness. I was not righteous because I was doing everything right. I'm only right in Christ, and that means no matter what's happened to me, and I know that you, some of you, know that. But I just want to. Let's review this again through the scriptures, because you can never get enough gospel. So let's just hear it again.
Speaker 1:Jesus tells us again in Matthew 5, 20, unless your righteousness is better than the Pharisees and the teachers of the religious law and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of God. So he's telling them throughout this whole sermon on the mount, he's saying standards high. Y'all can't make it. You'd have to be better than the all-stars. You're not going to do it. And so what? So you're going to need grace, you're going to need a savior to die on the cross for you. But Galatians 3, I love it the way this says it. If you ever, if you, if you struggle with legal, if you will, because it is all about I mean, it is all about Paul's just going nuts about you're a psychopath if you think that your religious works are doing you any good. And this is one of the things he says.
Speaker 1:He says this way of faith is very different from the law. Remember the deal we just talked about, which says it is through obeying the law that a person has life. But Christ has rescued us from the curse pronounced by the law. This is in the New Testament, right Same place that the Sermon on the Mount is. But Christ has rescued us from the curse pronounced by the law. When he was hung on the cross, he took upon himself the curse for our wrongdoing, for it is written in the scriptures curse is everyone who hung on a tree. He took it, man. The law is fulfilled.
Speaker 1:Getting a divorce has nothing to do with your position in Christ. And see, as a pastor. Dude, I don't care. It's not that I don't care what the world does, okay, but think about your family. All right, I've had conversations with my kids. We'll sit down and we're like, okay, we're going over to so-and-so's house and they're going to lose their minds and do ridiculous things that you can never do. Okay, I don't care what they do. I care what you do because you're my house and my friends on a lot of levels.
Speaker 1:I'm not preaching this for anybody else other than you. You're my family and I care what you do. And what I care is that you know the gospel. I care that. Yes, you know you can make mistakes, you can get it wrong. You cannot get it quite right, but there is a God in heaven who sent his son, jesus Christ, to die for your sin, and you are right by grace, through faith, and you don't need to walk around carrying any guilt. Now you do need to know that there's consequences. So let's talk about that before we wrap it up. There are consequences. Just like there were consequences for King David, there were bad consequences.
Speaker 1:What happens when a Christian sins? Well, you're forgiven. Your position in Christ does not change, right? Remember Romans 8.1? There's therefore now no condemnation for those that are in Christ. There isn't any. There's no one to condemn you. There's no gavel coming down. It already came down on Jesus Christ on the cross. So your position doesn't change. But there is a sense where your fellowship is disrupted with God.
Speaker 1:Okay, so he has a bit of fatherly discomfort and displeasure over what you have done, and he doesn't affirm it. He doesn't reject you, though. It doesn't take away relationship. But it's almost like there's a religion gets cloudy a little bit, it gets damaged. He begins to feel more distant and of course part of that is so that you'll run back after him, not hang out there. Go back and get in his presence. But it does damage us.
Speaker 1:The Westminster Confession of Faith says it this way. I'll just read it to you. And it's talking about Christians. Although they never can fall from the state of justification, yet they may, by their sins, fall under God's fatherly displeasure and not have the light of his countenance restored unto them. Until somebody say until Until.
Speaker 1:Here's the secret passage, it's right here. Here it is. It was worth driving out for this or turning on the computer. It was worth it. Here's the shortcut Until they humble themselves and confess their sins and beg pardon and renew their faith and repentance. It is that simple man. Just do, just come back. Just come back to the cross. Okay, you messed up, you got it wrong. You don't even know to the degree to which all you got wrong Doesn't matter. Go to the cross, just get on your knees. He and you will figure it out together. But you won't figure it out out there somewhere, you'll only figure it out in his presence.
Speaker 1:So, yes, our fellowship is maybe damaged, our fruitfulness is damaged. So, in other words, god's willingness to use us to bless other people recoils a little bit. In other words, when you make a major David level mistake, god says well, don't think that I'm just going to like, use your life in incredible ways now and it might take a while for that even to come out. But when it does, god says you need to humble yourselves and get yourself back right with God before I'm going to use you to the degree that you were hoping. And even according to 1 Corinthians 3.12,. It's sad, but when we give ourselves to something like obvious rebellion, god says you're gonna lose some of your heavenly reward. You won't lose heaven, but there's rewards stored up for us that is based on our devotion, based on our faithfulness, based on our taking the actions that God asks us to take. There's rewards stored up and he says you're gonna lose a little bit of that when you decide to go your way instead of my way, but nevertheless, peaches, you can't lose him. He's the reward of heaven. Okay, so I'm just accepting. I've lost some reward. Okay, that's fine. I'm sure it would have been nice, but if I get Jesus, I'm very satisfied. Okay, it was a better deal. Anyway, I want him more than I want the reward, so that's just fine.
Speaker 1:So my question to you, before we wrap up here, land this plane, I want you to like, fear God and think divorce is the thing you got to fight at all costs. And I want you to know that if you get a divorce, baby, if you're in Christ, he's got you. He still loves you. You're not marked in a different way. You're a sinner like all the rest of us, and he loves you and wants to enter into that pain with you. And maybe you've made some. You got some old mistakes that you're still thinking about. Maybe you've made some choices that you know now. You didn't know then, but you know now. Oh, that was really the wrong choice. I wish I wouldn't have done that. Maybe you're still hoping I just need to get to the place where I can forget about this. Maybe it's not about forgetting about it. Maybe it's about reprocessing it in light of the cross. Dude, you can't. In the fact that you're a forgiven sinner and baby, that is awesome.
Speaker 1:I want to get you excited because there's more to this conversation. There's an entire like. But what about the hurt? What about the pain? What about when I'm being abused? What about all the things I'm supposed to figure out after my life kind of like ended? What about when the different family sections go off in different ways and now we can't even talk anymore? What about when all that kind of stuff happens? We're gonna talk about it next weekend.
Speaker 1:In the meantime, I wanna read you this verse because I think it's really important. We have a lot of scripture today, but we need a lot of scripture. This is Hebrews 8, starting verse 8. This is talking about the now. Okay, so this is talking about the new covenant that Jesus established after the Sermon on the Mount. It says the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with Judah and y'all Gentiles. It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt because they did not remain faithful to my covenant and turned away from them, declares the Lord. This is the covenant I will establish with the people of Israel. After that time, declares the Lord, I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts. I will be their God and they will be my people. No longer will they teach their neighbor or say to one another know the Lord, because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, for I will forgive their wickedness and remember their sins. No more I'll remember their sins. No more I'll remember their sins, no more. Are you feeling guilty about anything? Well, he'll remember your sins no more.
Speaker 1:Marriage is sacred and it's important that we fight for its dignity and its importance and how much it stands to protect generations. And it's important that we confront and realize Jesus came to confront selfishness and entitlement. But it's also important that we know Jesus sees our pain and he sees it, man, and he sees the confusedness and he sees the muddiness and he sees how well this was right and that was wrong and this was right and that was wrong, and he understands that he actually can entangle it, untangle it, but the applause of heaven let's end here the applause of heaven it is not I hope we're realizing this by now it is not for the perfect. The applause of heaven is not attained by the perfect. It is attained by the people who realize they need a savior and they turn to Jesus and they trust him that all of his ways are right and the law is fulfilled. Let's pray, father, we just want to thank you so much that we are part of a generation that can know you, not like millennia past, when folks only occasionally were filled with the Holy Spirit. Thank you that we know you personally right now. Thank you that you love us. Thank you that you tell us the truth, thank you that you call us out of compromise with the culture and, at the same time, you call us into the joyous adopted space of a child that you will never leave or forsake, who you yourself take the punishment for everything we've ever done wrong, even when we hurt other people badly. We thank you for that forgiveness, god. As people process this talk this week and in the coming years. Lord, I pray that you'd bring back to mind the trustworthiness of your truth and the trustworthiness of your new covenant of grace In Christ's name. Amen, on passionately knowing Jesus and being his witness in our generation.
Speaker 1:Check out Fierce Church. We'd love for you to join us, either digitally or in person. Also, if you're looking for leadership development-related content, don't forget to check out the Fierce Leadership Podcast, available wherever you get your podcasts from. Special thanks to those of you who give generously to support this ministry. It's because of you that this is possible. You can click on the link in the description to give now or visit fiercechurch for more information. If you enjoyed this podcast, why not subscribe? Share it with your friends, click on the share button, take a screenshot and share it on social media or wherever you would share such things. Whatever challenges you're facing, I know you can make it. Don't give up. Hang on to Jesus. He won't let go of you. Jesus loves you so much and we love you. I hope someday we get to meet in person. Thanks again for listening.