Restoration 2015:  Do You Mind...??

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Restoration Ministry

Biblical Relationships  (Afternoon meetings)

Chad Kreuzer

Overcoming the Myths of Marriage

We're going to be talking about the mind, but we're beginning this seminar, at least the morning meetings, we're going to be talking about marriage.

How many of you have ever seen a marriage that you thought, that is a beautiful marriage.

I would love to have a marriage like that someday.

How many of you have seen a marriage where if you thought about it you'd say, I want to make sure I never get married and have a life like that.

What do you think you see more of of the 2?

The second 1 someone said, well, hopefully we can prepare that we can find principles and not just principles because facts only bring us so far, but hopefully we can actually begin to live a life that would prepare us to be people who could live a beautiful marriage.

And before we begin talking about that, I just ask that you bow your heads with me for 1 more word of prayer.

Heavenly Father, we thank you for the time together.

Lord, as we break the physical bread and the spiritual bread, I pray that your Holy Spirit would guide us, that your presence would teach us, and that we would see Jesus.

How many of you have heard, I'm sure most of you, how many of you have heard of Socrates?

And he came up with what we kind of consider the Socratic method, you know, discovering things by asking questions.

He was 1 of the men who helped us discover what we would call epistemology, where you discover why you believe what you believe.

And when you look through history, I believe that you see a lot of times down through history, people had a false conception of what true marriage is all about, even Socrates.

Now Socrates, though, he said something that I think was kind of a half-truth in a way.

There's some truth to it, but he said something very interesting.

He said, if you find a good spouse, you will become happy.

If you find a bad 1, you will become a philosopher.

So maybe this is a little insight into why he became what he became, right?

But his idea, the idea that if you find the right person, it will make you happy, does this bear out in modern life?

They did an actual study in Germany from about 1984 to 1995.

So about an 11 year study of 24, 000 German citizens, both in East and West Germany.

And what they tried to discover was how much happiness do you actually receive from getting married?

So looking at these 24, 000 people, this is a significant amount of people, after looking and after studying and finding out, okay, what was it like before, what was it like after, what they discovered was that if you were happy before you got married, you were happy after you got married.

That in general, marriage didn't really change people's happiness, the levels of happiness.

So Socrates said if you find a good spouse it will make you happy, right?

And it doesn't seem that true happiness is found in another human being.

Now this is what we all kind of hope for, I think in general.

I mean, we see it on the movies, we see it on the television, we read about it.

And in life, our thought process is that, Listen, marriage is actually going to make me happy.

I'm not here to be a downer and, oh no, marriage is terrible and it's not a good thing.

No, actually, marriage can be a real blessing, but the reality of marriage is that in order to have a happy marriage, you want to become a happy person before you get married.

You want to become a person who can actually have happiness in singlehood and also a person that can make another individual happy.

That sounds kind of obvious and you haven't learned very much, but the reality is is that we realize, okay, if we're gonna if we're gonna be somebody who has a happy marriage, if typically when you see 2 unhappy people come together, 2 broken people coming together trying to be fulfilled in the other, we don't actually find what we're looking for.

So we look all the way back to ancient times, you know, to 400 plus years before Christ to Socrates, and we see that he had somewhat of a misconception of marriage.

We come down to even the disciples themselves.

If you have a Bible, I don't expect you to have 1, but I'd encourage you if you do have a Bible to bring 1 with you in the future.

In Matthew chapter 19, Jesus is, He's there with his disciples, but there's also this group of people known as the Pharisees.

Now the Pharisees were an interesting group of people.

They would have, if you would have seen the Pharisees in Jesus' day, you would have thought by looking at them that they were the most spiritual, religious people.

Because they lived lives that were just almost perfect to the outward eye.

They lived a very high religious, you know, at least on an outward perspective, they lived very religious lives.

And so they were not thought of Like we typically, we look at them and we think, man, those people were terrible.

And really, they did have hard hearts, but they looked wonderful on the outside.

And they had a question for Jesus in verse 3 of Matthew chapter 19.

It says, the Pharisees also came unto Him, tempting Him and saying unto him, is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause?

They wanted to know, Jesus, is it okay to let go of your wife for any reason?

And because to them, they lived in a time where, you know, if your wife, I don't know, maybe cooked your, I don't know, they would eat clean food so they wouldn't have sausage in the morning, but you know, cooked your lamb in the morning and it wasn't good enough, okay, I don't want to be with you anymore.

And then Jesus says, no, no, no, you shouldn't just get divorced for any reason.

And so the disciples hear this and they have a very strange response to him.

They see this whole situation, they see this kind of debate going on between the Pharisees and Jesus, and notice what the disciples thought.

Now these are the guys we think of as, you know, Saint Peter, right?

These are the, you know, John, the wonderful, the beloved John.

Notice their response when they heard this situation.

It says down in verse 10, his disciples said to him, if this is the case with the man and his wife, it is better not to get married." They said, if you can't just boot her to the curb for any old reason, maybe we just shouldn't even get married.

Marriage isn't what I thought it should be.

So now we have this ancient idea that marriage is gonna make you happy, the disciples have this funny perspective.

And the early church, you had this situation where the early church began to think that things like sex and marriage were really actually kind of innately evil.

And so they thought at best that, you know, let me see here, I kind of wrote 1 of the, Augustine said, Marital intercourse makes something good out of the evil of lust.

So his perspective was that, okay, you know, marital intercourse makes something good out of the evil of lust.

Now this, once again, is a false conception of marriage.

That actually marriage and being with your wife is actually an evil thing, but God somehow sanctifies the evil.

The Bible actually tells us in the book of Hebrews that the marriage bed is undefiled, that God made marriage to be a blessing, Something that could sustain the happiness of life, not necessarily in general create happiness but that's something that we should already have.

We should already found this experience of joy and peace and happiness before we entered into it but it could enhance those things to some capacity.

So you see that through history there has been a false conception of marriage and then there's obviously the modern Disney kind of idea of what marriage is like and there's a there's a little phrase that's used over and over in modern society, just follow your what?

You can never go wrong if you just follow your heart.

Now there is a little bit of truth to that.

I mean, it's not totally wrong, but in actuality, If we in all things follow our heart, we many times find that we find unhappiness.

We don't find what we were actually looking for.

You know, 1 of my friends, I think of him as a philosopher.

Fadia Kreuzer

Preparing to Tie the Knot (Part 1)

Heavenly Father, thank you for the time to talk about marriage that was designed to be an amazing blessing, but we also realize that it also can be the ball and chain.

And so Father, we're looking to be prepared for something so that it doesn't become that, that it actually can be the blessing that it was intended to be.

So we pray that your Holy Spirit would guide us and also that Jesus would be uplifted.

Now, I'm gonna start with some good news and some bad news about preparing to tie the knot.

When you look at the stats of those who get divorced by age, what age you are when you get married actually affects, statistically that is, how likely you are to get divorced.

What they discover is that those who are under 20 are some of the most likely people to get divorced.

If you get married before you're 20 years of age, it's very, very likely.

And if I remember correctly, if you go like 17 or under, it's like really bad, you know?

And then under 20 is just plain not good.

And then from 20 to 25 is still quite bad.

Not as bad as before, but it's really really quite bad and After 25 for some reason 25 seems to be like that that Hinging point where things begin to change a little bit things begin to get better after about 25 It's interesting Because right around the age of 25, our frontal lobe or the prefrontal cortex is basically just about done coming to fruition in the human body.

The part of the brain that has to do with spirituality, morality, the will, obviously many other functions But you get the point the point is is that as you get older now look at this chart this chart is fascinating Here you are these are ages They just continues to go down so here you are at 15 to 24 25 to 34 and you go all the way up and at 65 or older, you only have a 5% chance of getting divorced.

All you have to do is wait till you're 65 and it's almost guaranteed you're not going to get divorced.

If that's all you get out of this seminar, you got something great, right?

We talked a bit about what marriage is composed of.

We talked about the fact that it is not statistically, they did a study of 24, 000 Germans in over an 11 year period and they discovered that statistically people were no happier after marriage than they were before marriage.

Initially there's a little bump because you what?

You go on a honeymoon and that's pretty exciting.

I mean if you go to Hawaii for a week, I mean hopefully you know your happiness bumps up a little bit, right?

Basically, finally, ultimately, you come back to basically baseline levels that you had before you were married.

So the reality is we talked about yesterday the need to be happy before marriage.

We're going to talk a little bit more about that right now.

But this is 1 of the things that we need to think about.

We talked a little bit about, actually quite a bit about the Bible last evening.

The Bible is a book that is more than just an ancient manuscript, although it is an ancient manuscript.

The Bible is a book that begins, 1 of the first things it talks about in the Bible is marriage.

That marriage was actually something that God intended to be a blessing.

He gave it to our ancient parents, and he gave it to them in perfection, and it was meant to be a blessing, but obviously, much of marriage is a burden, and we don't want to be negative, but the reality is, is since there is pain and suffering because of marriage, we want to learn how to prepare so that it's not a pain And there's not so much pain and suffering and so in preparing for marriage We want to become the people that we are called to be and if if we if 2 people come together who are whole if 2 whole people come together as they come together they can be whole together especially if they have a connection with God.

So if you have this threefold coming together, it is very, very hard to break 2 whole people that are holding God apart, and then as they come together with God, that can become a unity of 1 that is very, very powerful.

But the reality is, is we're not always whole when we get married, so how can we actually get whole?

You know, the Bible is a book that is transformative.

The Bible is a book that Jesus says in John chapter 15, the whole passage there in the beginning of that chapter talks about abiding.

Jesus says, the chapter begins, Jesus says, I am the true vine and my father is the husbandman.

That means he's the 1 who works in the vineyard.

He's the 1 who is taking care of the plants there.

I am the true vine and my father is the husbandman.

Every branch that abides in me bears fruit.

He says in verse 3, he says, now you are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you.

Now you are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you." Now according to scripture, we actually, that in our lives, it says all of us have sinned and come short of the glory of God in the book of Romans.

So we are sinners and we are corrupted by the world around us and so we have a dirtiness and actually we have shame.

I mean you think about it in your own life.

Are there areas in your own life that you wish nobody would ever find out about?

Like if all of a sudden you had to come up here and just confess to us all your filthy dirty sins, how would you feel?

The reality is we have shame, we have sin that's been a part of our lives, and we have filth and we're dirty in a sense, and God wants to bring us to the point that we are clean, and Jesus told us, now you are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you.

God wants to bring us to a point where we're not ashamed anymore.

The Bible says that when the man and woman came together, they were naked and they were not, they weren't ashamed.

Now they didn't have anything to be ashamed about because they had never seen, but the reality is, is most of us would not want a television monitor on our foreheads that told everybody what we were thinking about, would you?

Imagine how your friends would feel about you if they always saw what you were thinking as you were talking with them.

But you know what I find fascinating about it?

That Jesus reads that monitor All day, every day.

Jesus actually wants to cleanse us so that when we come into our marriage unity, this nuptial bond, that when we come together, that we don't have to carry all the baggage from beforehand.

He wants us to be transformed and the Bible tells us that we are transformed.

Romans chapter 12 verse 2 says, be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.

The Bible says you're transformed in your mind.

He wants to cleanse your mind so that when you enter into this relationship, you don't have all the things that you could have taken into it.

This book, I had 0 interest in the Bible and As I began to read this what I'm gonna share with you more of my testimony later on and how I actually came to read the Bible it was actually because of an atheist that I read the Bible through for the first time and The reality is is as I began to read it, initially, I'll just be fully honest with you, when I initially began to read the Bible, I really didn't really like it.

And the Bible actually tells us that we don't like the Bible.

Romans chapter 7 and chapter 8 gives us this perspective that the natural man, and so does 1 Corinthians chapter 2, that the natural man is enmity against God, for he is not subject to the will or to the law of God, neither indeed can be.

Meaning we naturally are at enmity with the things of God.

And that word enmity means to have antipathy, to have hatred, to have anger, to be opposed to.

And so what we discover is by nature we don't like the Bible.

But then as we actually abide in the word of God, the Bible says that we are changed, we are cleansed, and we actually begin to love that which we once hated.

And we can actually get to the point where we begin to not like the things that we once loved, and we find that The burden is lifted off.

1 of the things in preparation for marriage is to begin to spend time daily in the word of God.

I'm so glad that God changed my mind and my heart through his word before I ever even met the woman who became my wife.

Because if I would have been the man that I was back before I had been growing in the word of God, I mean there's still lots of changing that needs to take place in my life, absolutely.

But I'm surely happy that I'm not the man that I used to be in totality.

This book is true, that there is something transformative about the word of God.

So I wanna challenge you to spend time daily in the book that is the Bible.

And even if you're like me, and as you begin to read it, you don't get anything out of it.

I mean, you were like me initially, that I didn't get anything out of it, I didn't even like it, but there's something about the Word of God, there's power within that book, that it begins to change you, it begins to change your mind, it begins to change your heart, and it begins to change your entire life as a result of it.

My wife's gonna come up now, and she's gonna share with us our next point from Colossians chapter 2 in preparing to tie the knot.

Yesterday, Chad spoke about being complete in Jesus, but let's just look at that.

Colossians chapter 2, verse 8 through 10.

Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.

For in Him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily, and ye are complete in Him, which is the head of all principality and power.

Preparing to Tie the Knot (Part 2)

I'm gonna share with you a little something, a quick little overview.

Yeah, maybe, yeah, just a little overview of what we went over yesterday, some of the things that we talked about.

We began yesterday talking about several things about preparing to tie the knot, preparing to tie the knot.

And the first thing we talked about was the necessity of, the Bible talks about that we are complete in Jesus.

And so if we find that completeness, 2 complete people can come together and they can draw closer to each other and closer to God, and it can be a unity that is very, very, very powerful.

So finding your happiness in Jesus was very important.

What was the second thing right there that we talked about, Fadi?

You can help me remember, I don't even remember.

Yeah, give your life completely to God, what was after that?

Yeah, yeah, know God's will and plan for your life.

So important that life is so much better if you don't just get a job, you know?

I mean, if you just have a job, I mean, that may have been okay for the last generation, but it's just not the same today.

That we would actually like to do something that we enjoy doing, that's fulfilling, that we feel like we're fulfilling a mission in life that is so much better than just having a job.

Now, if all you can do is have a job, okay, but you're, I mean, you're going to college or you're going to university or what have you, you can make a decision to go into something that is actually very powerful, something that is life-changing for you.

Yeah, yeah, and if you don't know, 1 of the things we suggested, if you're like, man, I just totally don't know, rather than just picking something, 1 of the suggestions I have, I'm not telling you what to do, but 1 of the suggestions is go do something like a year of maybe overseas missions or a year of missions and say, God, show me as I put you first in my life, show me what you will have me to do.

And I really believe that most of the time you'll find you'll discover what would be fulfilling to you.

It was an article, if you could click forward just a second.

Why a star football player traded NFL career for a tractor.

Especially when you look at the facts of the story.

This guy had a $34 million career that he was signing for.

But as he's playing NFL football, making millions of dollars, he ends up deciding, you know what, this isn't what's bringing happiness to my life.

And so he decides that he wants to become a farmer.

I mean, trading millions of dollars for farming.

And I don't know if you know, unless you have a mega farm, you don't make millions of dollars.

And so he ends up buying this farm and his name was Jason Brown.

He quit football to be a plain old farmer even though he had never farmed a day in his life.

And they asked, how did you even learn to do this?

He said, you know, how do you learn to farm?

He says, get on the internet, you watch YouTube.

Thanks to YouTube and some good advice from other farmers in Louisburg, North Carolina this week, Jason finished harvesting his first, he has a thousand acres, but he finished his first 5 acre plot of sweet potatoes.

He says, when you see them pop out of the ground, man, it's the most beautiful thing you could see.

He said, he has never felt more successful being a farmer, right?

And then he says, not in man's standards, but in God's eyes, he said.

There are people praying to him in the field all the time.

Yeah, there's a lot of people praying out there, but when I think about a life of greatness, I think about a life of service.

You know, we live in such a weird time, because we live in a time now where this guy, he's riding his tractor, people are like, what do you do for a living?

You know, and people are like, oh, that's cool, bro, a farmer, that's Awesome, right?

I mean, we live in the, when my parents were kids, you know, I come from Michigan, and my parents liked the University of Michigan, and they didn't like Michigan State University, they said, oh, that's a farm school.

People used to make fun of farming, now, like, when someone's like, oh, I'm an organic farmer, people are like, oh, that's awesome, right?

Really what it is is when people find something that's fulfilling to them, I'm not telling you to become farmers.

I'm saying do something that God has called you to do.

It's much better than anything else on the planet.

Even a great job that's high paying that is not fulfilling is absolutely nothing to you.

But find something that is fulfilling for you in your life.

Now we're going to begin with some new information.

The thing that he said, a life of service is that that 5 acres, he calls his farm First Fruits Farm.

And I forget how many, maybe 100, 000 pounds or something like that he donated to a local food pantry.

Series

Biblical Relationships (Afternoon meetings)

Preparing to Tie the Knot (Part 2)

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

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