Love, Sex, and Everything in Between: The Picture (Marriage)

Check out this latest episode of RUF Live where our guest preacher, Rev. Russ Whitfield from ATL, dives into God's design for marriage! #LoveGodLoveJSU

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Alright, check it out. This is the social media age, I know. And y'all really grew up with social media all the time. And I know you've seen it. I know you've seen it on social media. You've seen that picture of the perfectly curated couple on their engagement. They have perfect smiles, they have perfect outfits, they have perfect hair, it's perfect lighting, which ultimately leads to the perfect wedding dress on the perfect day with the perfect arrangements and perfect wedding cake. And you may draw the conclusion that marriage is like the pinnacle of life. Like you aren't living unless you are married. But then something else happens. Those people who were so beautiful and so perfectly dressed with their perfect smiles and perfect hair and perfect clothes and all that, you thought that this was going to be something amazing and unbreakable, but pretty soon you start to see these couples break up. You start to see marriages dissolve. You start to see that the people that seem to have a perfectly curated relationship actually were concealing some things underneath the surface, and they wound up crashing and burning in their relationship. And as people have observed these kinds of things happening, maybe some of you have been touched by a broken marriage. Maybe it was your parents or a family member, and that broken relationship did some damage to you or hurt you and made you like, I don't know about marriage. You know, a lot of people today are asking, like, what's the whole purpose of getting married? Like, why would I even get married? If we're in a culture where you can get most of the benefits of marriage without actually making a commitment to someone, many people are starting to think, you know what, I'm not gonna do all that because I'm not trying to wind up in that kind of mess. And I and you can understand that, right? You can understand that thinking. But when it comes to the way that the Christian faith speaks into marriage and what it is and what it's about, it really does begin to give us an entirely new framework for how we approach marriage or what we might see that marriage is about. And so tonight, what I want to do is I want to help to fill out your understanding of marriage from a Christian vantage point. Because regardless of whether you will ultimately get married yourself, the hope that we have for you and R UF as people, we're pastors. Like, this is what we do. We care for people. We're not just talking heads trying to lecture you. Like, we want you to be rooted in the faith. We want you to be stable. We want you to grow up and experience God's joy and to know your faith because it will carry you through hard times, good times, confusing times, all of that. We want to pastor you, and our hope is that you will wind up in the church in community with people who are married. So, regardless of whether or not you wind up getting married or you want to be married, it's helpful for all of God's people to understand what marriage is about, what its purpose is, how we are to think about preparing for it, because it's a really big aspect of our community life together, and ultimately our witness to the world. And so tonight we're gonna get into marriage out of Ephesians 5. And I want to do something tonight, and I want to show you what marriage is all about. How do you think about it? What are some things that, you know, frameworks that you can grab onto that will help you to have a clear head about what it is? And I want to say right up front, if you look at what people in our culture think about marriage, you might you might draw the conclusion that marriage is primarily about your happiness. Or it's primarily about your satisfaction or your enjoyments or any any number of things like this. And marriage does provide some of those things. Um, but that's not ultimately what it's all about. What I want you to see is that marriage is designed to tell the truth about Jesus. Marriage is designed to tell the truth about Jesus. Let me put it a different way. God designed marriage in such a way that when you observe a healthy marriage, you're actually getting an audio visual of what the gospel is all about. If the Christian gospel or the Christian faith or the Christian story is a mystery to you, it just doesn't make sense. It's just not connected for you. You're like, look, I can appreciate y'all about that life, but I'm just not convinced yet. One of the things I would encourage you to see tonight as we work through this text is that a beautiful marriage, a faithful marriage where a husband loves and serves his wife, cares for her, nourishes her, invests in her. And a marriage where a wife shows love and honor and respect to her husband, when you see that dynamic at play, what you're really getting is a little picture of what the gospel is all about. And so we're gonna get into this text, and I want to get into it through three points, alright? Three points. First, we're gonna see true love, we're gonna see true transformation, and we're gonna see a true picture. So let's look at our first point. Marriage shows us true love. In this text, we see that. Take a look at verses 25 to 27. It says, husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. See, what you see right from jump is that in the Christian faith, love is not a generic thing. It's not thrown out there for you to define it like you want. It actually has a specific shape to it. Now, that's important because one of the first things that you have to do when you come to the Bible and you're trying to understand the Bible, and you're trying to understand what difference does it make for your life, one of the things that you have to do is you have to wrestle with what has already formed you. What has already shaped your life? What are you bringing to your reading of the Bible? Because you will bring your own biases and it will make you read in certain ways. But our goal is to let the word of God speak to us on its own terms and to make sure we're not filtering it in the wrong way and missing the message. And I think that when it comes to love, y'all, there's as many definitions of love as there are people defining it, right? What is love? What is love? Baby, it don't hurt.

SPEAKER_01 6:35

That's that's what when I was in high school, that's an old song, right? That's an old song.

SPEAKER_02 6:40

There was this question, like it comes from a real place. Like, what is it? What is love all about? What's it for? How do you find how do you define it? Where how do you know what love is? How many of you talk about love, love, love? Love is what you're really supposed to be about love. Right. We this is a cultural thing. We're people are always talking about love. But if you press people on how they know what love is, many of them would be scratching their heads. Okay? So what I want to do is I want to first begin to name some of the misunderstandings or corruptions of love that are exerting an influence on us from the culture. Okay? So the first thing I want you to see is that we live in what you could call a therapeutic culture. Okay? What's that mean? I have been to therapy. I'm not down on therapy. It has a beautiful, proper place. It just can't do everything, okay? But to say we live in a therapeutic age is to say that most people today they index everything in their life to how it makes them feel. And they determine what is true based upon their feelings. Okay, but let me show you something. You know your feelings can lie to you sometimes, right? Has anyone in here ever felt unlovable? Or you just leave me hanging with my own hand up, right? Okay, is it true that you're not lovable? No. So in that case, your feelings are lying to you, right? Aha. So what happens if everything is indexed to feelings? It doesn't mean your feelings are not important. They just cannot be in the driver's seat. It's cool for them to be in the car. Sometimes they'll they'll fool with the radio station, but they cannot be in the driver's seat, okay? So, what happens when you're living in a therapeutic age where everything is about your feelings and how it makes you feel? And you determine what you will and won't do based upon feelings. You determine what is true and untrue based upon your feelings. It corrupts love in a number of different ways. Let me let me give you some of them. The first thing you see in a therapeutic culture is that love is romanticized, right? This is the Disney effect. This is the like, I'm looking for my my prince. Or I, you know, it's the it's the Cupid effect. Like we're just waiting to be shot with Cupid's arrow, and it's like, ooh, I got all the feels, right? Love is romanticized. We speak of falling in love, right? Like we're just waiting for something to strike. Ooh, I got the I felt it, right? Think about that though. If you can only love when the feeling hits you, you're not gonna be able to love very often. And there are a number of different situations in which you will not have the resources to do the work of love or to live the life of love because your feelings aren't there. Okay? So there's a romanticization of love. Love is romanticized, and then you know what happens when love is romanticized? Love is idolized. The scriptures say that God is love. Our culture says that love is God. Okay? So love is in the driver's seat. It's all about like I must get that marriage relationship. I demand it because I deserve it, right? And there's this sense in which love ends up becoming this, like we redefine love, and then what we do, when we idolize love and we need it so bad from this person, guess what happens? We keep crazy expectations on that person, and we crush them under the weight of our expectations. Because we're trying to get from that person what only God can give. A lot of people get disillusioned in marriage because they're trying to get from a spouse what only God can give. And they're like, why won't you meet this need? Why can't you just do this and be this? And it's like a never-ending list that gets longer and longer, and the spouse gets crushed under the weight of it. That's what happens when love goes from romanticized to idolized, right? And we end up crushing people. But you also see in a therapeutic age, love is individualized. It's what I say it is. What is love? It's whatever I want it to mean. It's how I define it. I'm the one who determines what it is. I determine its contours, I determine how love is expressed. This is just my way of loving, right? We determine, you know, the boundaries of love and we individualize it. Nobody can tell me who to love. No one can tell me how to love. I do it my own way, right? That individualism really shapes our perspectives on love and how we approach the life of love. We also see in our culture that love is commercialized. Love is used to sell things. How many of you have seen the Lexus commercial with the big red bow on the Lexus during Christmas time? Right, right? Think about the messaging. You can use your money and get the love you want. Like just go ahead and get them a Lexus, and it's gonna be all good, right? Okay, you see that? Sex sells. That's why it's in everything, right? All love is commercialized. Love is used in order to make money or the thoughts of love. And corporations attach promises and potential to their products, right? Leading us to believe that we can spend our way into the kind of love our hearts long for. But you can't, y'all. You can't spend your way into it, it's not possible. And you know what? When love is romanticized and idolized and individualized and commercialized, ultimately love is compromised. This is not the kind of love that you want to receive. If it were based upon another person's feelings to love you, what happens when they don't feel like loving you? What happens when you make a mistake or you have some kind of failure that hurts their feelings? You're out in the cold, right? You got no one to love you. It ends up being a performance-based approach to love. You know what it's like? It's like being on a treadmill. You know what a treadmill is? It's the reality of motion with the illusion of progress. You working hard ain't going nowhere. Okay? Like that's that's the idea. When you fool with these these like these false approaches to love or these false definitions of love, it ultimately compromises love. That's why we hear, you know, the modern world gives us the authority to build lives that are completely selfish and about our own interests, right? That's why we'd be like, do you, boo. Do you, boo, boo, right? And we forget doing you is what got you into the trouble in the first place. Doing you is what required the son of God to come to earth, take on human flesh, live, die, rise again. Doing you, me doing me, is what required the son of God to come and rescue me. Okay, so do you ain't really good advice. You see, in the end, the Christian vision of love, y'all, in this text, it's grounded in the person and work of Christ. Do you see in the text, husbands, love your wives as you know what that is grammatically? That is a relative conjunction that is meant to give you the specific definition and contours of love. As Christ loved the church. Now, do you see the difference between this therapeutic approach to love versus the gospel approach to love? The gospel approach to love is very concrete. You know why it's very concrete? Because it shows up in the flesh. Love himself showed up in the flesh. And his name is Jesus, right? And you know what? If you read through the gospels, there's something that you should take away, and it's this. People, religious people, unirreligious people, lost people, found people, all kinds of people. Rich people, poor people, Romans, uh, Jews, all of them stared love in the face and did not recognize him. That's how we know we don't have a clue about love until Jesus, right? That's where you see the full expression of it. That's what Paul is trying to get across. He's trying to get you to stop indexing your ideas of love to your feelings and start indexing your ideas of love to Jesus. If you want to know what love is and what it looks like and how it moves in the world, what does love look like in the context of a relationship between you picket, different people, you know, people from different worlds? What does love look like when it shows up in a marriage? What does love look like between siblings? What does love look like when it comes to our enemies? What does love look like when it comes to the elderly, the young, the rich, the poor? You can look at Jesus and see how love moves. How does love operate? How does love flow? And once you begin to look at Jesus, now you can begin to translate that into our modern world. You can cross the horizon from the first century to our modern day. Jesus is the only one that can help you close the gap and understand what real love is, what it demands, and he doesn't just define it for you and teach you what it is, he empowers you to actually live it out. You see that? It's here in this text. For Christians, love is no longer romanticized, idolized, individualized, or commercialized. For Christians, love is gospalized. Do you see that? That's in this text right here. We're not supposed to passively wait for an emotion to hit us such that we fall in love. No. You know what? Uh, do you know what uh one of the poets of the Harlem Renaissance said? She said to her spouse. She said, and it's a beautiful, beautiful line. She says, of him, I didn't fall in love with you. I rose in love. I rose up in love. And do you understand for us that is the image? We don't fall in love. We've been raised with Christ, the scriptures say. And when we were raised with Christ, we were raised up to love. We rise in love through the resurrection power of Jesus that's unleashed in our lives when we trust in him. When he pours out his spirit, now you have a new power to love. A new strength to love. What's that mean? The strength to love looks like saying no to yourself, so you can say yes to your spouse. That's cross-parent. That's denying yourself and following Jesus, right? Like, like, how does love how does this power strengthen you to love? This power is able to overcome your selfish, sinful heart. Your idolatry that causes you to fail to love people well. Do you see the power of the gospel is what sets you free to love fully and freely without strings attached, right? Not that strings attach love, like if you do this for me, then I'll do this for you, kind of thing, right? No, it's no strings attached. Jesus didn't do like a quid pro quo, this for that kind of thing. He did a sola gratitude, a grace alone kind of thing, right? That's what we see in this text. Oh, that's Jesus saying, just make sure you're paying attention to this thing. Um here's the thing: the true love of God and Jesus Christ is what marriage is all about. It's completely embodied in Jesus, this gospel love. And there's nothing else like it. This is the love that found us and freed us and saved us and adopted us and renewed us and gave us the hope of glory. God has done what therapeutic love could never do. I want you to think about this. If Jesus had taken the therapeutic approach to love, where would we be? If Jesus stopped where he didn't feel it anymore, where would we be? Do you remember when Jesus was in the Garden of Gethsemane? When he prayed? Does anyone remember what he prayed? That's exactly what he said. Like, Lord, if if there's another way to pull this off, I don't want to do this. Do you hear? Jesus is naming the emotional reality. But then what does Jesus do? Does Jesus just submit to his feelings and let his feelings lead him? No, what's he do? He puts his feelings under the leadership of the Father, under the will of the Father. So what you see is even Jesus is not willing to take the therapeutic approach to love, and because he refused the therapeutic approach to love, he was able to redeem us. Because he did something at the cross that did not feel good, it was awful, it was brutal, it was a shame-filled, hung up naked in front of the world as a criminal, even though he was sinless, free of guilt. Do you see the love that God has for you? Do you see the love that is supposed to mark and guide the way we think about marriage? You see it? That's what's going on. One of the most significant theologians of the 20th century was once asked, What is the deepest truth you have ever come across in your theological journeys? This guy wrote homes. I mean, he's written more theological material than I am ever gonna read. Right? You know what the man said? What's the richest, deepest theological truth I've ever come across? Jesus loves me. This I know. For the Bible tells me so. There's nothing deeper than that, y'all. We think we get that, but we don't. Really? We have not really caught it until we're absolutely blown away by it and realize we can't wrap our minds around this. That's how good he is, that's how consistent he is. There ain't no boyfriend, girlfriend, nobody out there, no love out there like this love. Nothing equal to it. And I want you to also see just in this very beginning of the passage that Jesus didn't wait around for the perfect bride. There was no perfect. Bride to be found. He didn't wait for the perfect bride. He chose to become a perfect savior who would bring us into his family and raise us up to glory and beauty. He didn't wait for the perfect bride. He gave himself to make us perfect ultimately. The greatest problem in marriage, y'all, we can see in the text is not incompatibility. It's selfishness. That's the greatest liability in marriage. It's not incompatibility. Me and my wife are incompatible, and this summer we'll celebrate 22 years of being married. We're incompatible. We're like two different. We come from different worlds, y'all. I grew up in the country in Western Pennsylvania. She was a city slicker, grew up in DC. She grew up in an international household, father Haitian, mother Argentinian, speaking all different kinds of languages. I grew up and didn't meet anyone from another country until I went to college in New York City. Right? Like we're we don't. But compatibility is not what has kept us together. Gospel love is what has kept us together. Compatibility can't deal with sin. Even if you're compatible, right? I've seen compatible people sin against each other in their marriage dissolved. Because they had no categories for forgiveness, for grace, for patience, for hope. And so the compatibility was not enough to keep the relationship together. But I have seen and I have experienced marriage relationships where they're not compatible, but gospel love is able to keep them together, nurturing, nourishing their relationship, and they grow that thing to a place where it's really beautiful and healthy. And it flourishes, y'all. The reality is that compatibility is incompatibility is not the greatest problem in marriage. It's selfishness. We primarily want to take all we can get greedily. Jesus primarily wants to give all he can give generously. And that is supposed to exert an influence on the way you think about marriage, the way you think about love, the way you envision what that life will be. Most people, when they envision that life, they don't think about the realities. Okay? When you get married, when you're living in a relationship with someone, you don't know what's coming. My wife and I didn't see chronic illness coming for our kids. And compatibility would not have been enough to help us to stay united and together in trying to love and care for our kids. We went through seasons of difficulty and suffering and life just not going the way we envisioned it going. And if it was really boiled down to any of these other things, we wouldn't have been able to keep it together. But because we had a transcendent love that we could look to that not only inspires and gives shape to the way we think about our life of love together, but because that love has exerted a power, a transformative power on our lives, that's what has kept us together and what has beautified and deepened the joy and connection in our relationship. So this is this brings me to the next point: true transformation. Marriage exposes and transforms us. Okay? Look at verses 26 to 30. It says that he might sanctify her. Now I know Pastor Jermaine has been putting in work with given theological categories, but if, you know, in case you're new here tonight and you haven't had the chance to get passionate by Pastor Jermaine, sanctification is the process by which God transforms us, right? God finds us where we are, right? But he doesn't leave us there. He works with us. Just like I, you know, I'm a father. Four kids, right? I love to develop my kids. I love to help them to become the best that they could be at whatever it is they want to take on. To see them mature, like my investment and commitment to them is not questionable. Like it's it's I love those jokers with everything I got. And it's a delight to be their dad. And if you can just kind of get it into your head that that's the way God feels about you, it will really heal a lot in your life. Because so much of our life is based upon the fact that we do not know that love deeply in our souls. And so we go in search of it in other places and try to get it from places where we could never get it. Where it's not going to come to us like it does in Jesus. But in this text, I want you to see that he might sanctify her, is a way of saying that marriage is about your formation, it's about your transformation. Christ sanctifies the church, and marriage becomes a tool for our growth and grace. Marriage is like it's like an MRI, it's like a CAT scan, it's like an X-ray, right? When you get into marriage, you begin to see things about yourself you didn't realize. And it's shocking because when you have someone else, you live and wait and they're telling you about yourself, you're like, hold up. Really? Well-talking to somebody now. Uh-huh. Marriage does that. I want you to think of it like this. Marriage. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 27:17

Alright. Can I see that? This is a big old water bottle right here. Yeah, no.

SPEAKER_02 27:23

Put the bottle in the water. Okay. Now, if I took the lid off of this thing and I shook it, what's coming out?

SPEAKER_00 27:29

Water.

SPEAKER_02 27:30

Why?

SPEAKER_00 27:31

Because it's open.

SPEAKER_02 27:32

Because water's in it, right? When you get into marriage, when you get in, it was good, though. That's the right answer. That's the right answer.

SPEAKER_00 27:40

That's the right answer.

SPEAKER_02 27:41

Think about it. When you get marriage, when you get into marriage, it shakes you.

SPEAKER_01 27:47

And you know what comes out?

SPEAKER_02 27:49

What was already in you.

SPEAKER_01 27:51

You tend to think, you know what? If she would just act right, all this would be solved. And she's like, if he would just act right, all this would be would be solved.

SPEAKER_02 28:01

But when you get into marriage and it shakes you, what's coming out is what's already in you. It had nothing to do with your spouse. Your spouse just shook you. But what came out of you is all you. Right? And so, but when that comes out, now's an opportunity not for you to hide or pretend like that water didn't come out, like it's not in you, but to be curious and say, Lord, now that I've seen this, I need to seek repentance. I want you to grow me here, right? Like, can you help me here? I didn't see that. The move is not to get defensive towards your spouse. I mean, like, what you mean? What you mean I'm impatient?

SPEAKER_01 28:40

I'm plenty patient, right? Like that's that's how I used to do, right? What you I ain't yelling. Because I grew up in a family where it's like, ah, that's how we get down.

SPEAKER_02 28:49

And she grew up in a very gentle conversation. We don't have conflict like that. My people was like, yo, it's about to be Mike Tyson in you know, 12 rounds up in here, right? So, but marriage just shook what was already in me. And that was a hard pill to swallow, but if you know in advance that that's part of God's design for marriage, is to sanctify you, to transform you, to mature you, to deepen your roots, then you're prepared with the right mentality. So when you are shook and those ugly things come out, you don't get defensive, you don't try to hide it, you take it to Jesus. You run it straight to Jesus, and you're reminded not only of his forgiving power, but of his transforming power. He can help you. He is a tender-hearted high priest, the scriptures say. He loves to get in the mix with you to help you through. He loves that. Marriage reveals what's already in you. It exposes pride, impatience, insecurity, selfishness. Marriage doesn't, this is important, y'all. Some people are under the impression that marriage will cure your issues. Marriage does not cure your issues, it reveals them so that you can deal with them. Okay? And that's a gift. That's one of the gifts of marriage. I am much more like Jesus than I was because of my wife. And her love for me and her willingness to tell me hard things I didn't want to hear for Jesus' sake, and say, hey, this ain't this ain't it. You gotta change up here. Mm-hmm. And I had to swallow that pill. But if it really is all about growth and grace and becoming like Jesus so that we can glorify the Lord by reflecting his light back into the world, then when we're when the water comes out of the bottle, we don't despair, we don't get defensive, we don't have to hide. The gospel is the only message on planet earth that can allow you to see the deep loveliness of your own life and still have confidence that God ain't gonna give up on you, that he's committed to you, that he's for you, that he knew about all of those little hidden corners of your heart before he ever went to the cross to die for you. He knew it all before he went to pay it all, right? That's good news. And you know what? I know Pastor Jermaine and Pastor Richie can testify to this. Anyone who's been married, my wife has seen me in the most raw pos you know, situations. Like she has seen the ugly, she has seen the not airbrushed version, she has seen the not social media curated version of Rust. She's still she's still for me. She still smiles at me, cares for me. That is something of experience of knowing Jesus. Is that a tangible reminder of what we have in the gospel? You see it? That is what marriage is really driving toward our transformation, y'all. Marriage, one way you might think of it is like marriage is like the school of love, right? Now, think about it. Y'all showed up here at Tennessee State. Sorry, Jackson State. I was in Tennessee State last week. Sorry, I'm true. Um, yeah, I've been on tour, y'all. Um here at Jackson State. Some of y'all were very well prepared by your family or your people or your where you come from. Like you hit the ground here at college running, like you blasting, like you knocking out classes, you killing it on your grace. There are others of you that landing here might have felt like, what the heck? Where am I? Like, I was not prepared for this. Why do I bring that up? When it comes to the school of love that we call marriage, we have to take account of where we've come from and the life, like what has shaped us in our lives. Where are your where did your ideas of marriage come from? Most of the time it's from the marriages you experienced, the marriages you grew up around or the marriages you didn't grow up around, right? And you have to account for the ways in which your uh your previous examples are shaping the way that you're interacting now. Right? The school of love, y'all, is about journeying toward growth and grace. You know, you take account of your family of origin, you understand the ways in which love has been corrupted in your mind, or you have been given a picture of marriage that doesn't quite line up with this division from scripture. The school of love is all about taking account of your models from the past and then making a straight line to the model, which is Jesus in the church. Okay. So the question, when it when you realize that one of God's purposes in marriage is your transformation, then you begin to ask different questions. You shift the question. It's not, will this person make me happy, but am I becoming the kind of person who can love like Jesus? That's a more important question to get after when it comes to making that decision on marriage. It's less about finding the right person and more about becoming the right kind of person. You see, that's a that's a much more fruitful thing to consider. Like you actually have the ability to do something about that. You can change your habits, your practices, you can get in community, you can put yourself under pastoral care. You can become the kind of person who more and more starts to love like Jesus. Trying to find the right person is like sometimes feels like a needle in a haystack. The word on the street is kind of rough out there these days. So I just would encourage you, like, do what you can actually responsibly do right now, and that is focus on becoming the kind of person who can love like Jesus. Focus on advancing in the school of love. I want you to also hear this though. When you enter the school, when you think about marriage as the school of love, right? One day some of y'all are gonna enter the school of love. Like some of us have had the opportunity to. And I got into the school of love, and you know what happened? I started getting bad grades. I'm the selfish sum of my gun, right? Like, I'm struggling out here. But you know what I realized through the journey? Jesus loves to take all your F's and give you all his A pluses, right? That's the gospel, y'all. That's real. And that's what changes you. Like over time, what you start to realize is like the only way you will change is if you get a soft heart. And the only thing that can give you a soft heart is the love of God and Jesus Christ in the gospel. And once you get that, now you're primed for transformation. You're ready to hear from the Lord and you're ready to receive and act out of his power, not your own. Let me give you the final point, a true picture, right? Verses 31 through 32 is really where Paul gives you, like, this is what it really is all about. You might have been confused in things I said up to this point. But let me give it to you clear. He says that the mystery is profound. And the mystery of marriage, y'all, is that it really is a living audiovisual illustration of the gospel. It's the picture. Like we don't have many, we don't have many living illustrations in this world that are more gospel dense than marriage. Parenting can be that. It's another living illustration, it's beautiful, it has its own dynamics and gives its own angles on the gospel. But marriage is a unique one and it's focused in this text. In the scriptures, marriage is seen in this way. But let me say this: marriage is not ultimate. It's a sign, it's a picture. Um, think of it like this. I like to go to the mall. Uh, not because I like to shop, but because there's this magical place in the mall called the food court. And uh I love to go into the food court because there are these wonderful people that will stand in the food court with little trays of bourbon chicken and they'll say, Sir, would you like some bourbon chicken? And if you walk by and I say, Why yes. Yes, I would. And then I would eat that bourbon chicken, and I get about three steps away, and I'm like, that got good to me. Right? So, and then I make a lap around the food court, and the next time I come back, you know, because I'm ambiguously brown, I can pass for all kinds of people, I'll be like, hold up, come on, stuff, skate. And I'm like, she just come through here and I'm saying, I'll say, Lady, and then you want to the third time around, I say, I said, I'm a lake. Now, here's the why do those people stand out there with those trays of delicious meat? Here's why. They want you to get a little taste so that you will go and get the real thing. Marriage and our lives of love are meant to be a little taste that is meant to draw people to want the real thing. When we live it outright, when we live it out beautifully, humbly, with faith and repentance, seeking God's grace, praying for his help. When we live into marriage in this beautiful way, it's like a movie trailer of glory. Yeah, you know, you go into the movie theater and they play these little like one and a half to two minute snippets, right? And sometimes you be sitting in a movie and they run all of those trailers, right? And there are a couple in there, they're like, you're like, yo, I'm going to see that, right? It was only a little minute and a half, two-minute thing. But it impacted you in such a way that you want to go and see the whole thing. When we're doing it the way God has it envisioned, our lives actually are witness to our neighbors. And they say, there's something beautiful there. I want to know what that's really all about. What's behind that? And then we have an opportunity to share how he wound up, where we are, and what God did to help us. All right. Your spouse cannot complete you, satisfy you, or save you. Only Jesus can carry the weight. Remember this Jesus plus nothing equals everything. And if you do not have that message locked into your soul, you'll crush your spouse, trying to get from them what only Jesus can give. But if you have Jesus, you have enough. And finally, what this means for you right now, listen, for those of you who want marriage, remember it's less important to ask is this the right person? And it's more important to ask, am I becoming the right kind of person? Remember that the