Here we go, guys. We are in a message series called Foundations. We kicked it off last week. If you missed last week, want to highly encourage you to go check out that message because it kind of sets up the foundation for the whole kind of series.

But I'll brief you a little bit on what the series is about. It is about building on a strong foundation in your relationships and in your faith. So often we can have storms of life come, bad days come, which they do, right. And if we build our lives on firm foundations, then it will be built to last. And that is a good thing, right.

Destination. And so we want things that are built to last. Not just relationships, not just faith, but gosh, would I like appliances to be built to last. , let me just rant here for a second.

Okay, I I am on my fourthish appliance that I'm having to buy for my house. Okay, moved in in 2019. Everything was brand new. And I my newest fix is the washing machine.

Now I need to replace the washing m machine because it sounds like a spaceship that's taking off in my laundry room. And I was like really mad about this because I don't know about you, but I remember my house growing up and we didn't replace anything. It's been like the same fridge for 30 years. And I I was so like kind of disappointed in how much I've been spending on these that I went and I researched this. Do you know with each generation appliance lifespan has gone down.

So, you boomers, y'all are lucky because your life expectancy for I've never heard somebody woo boomer before. Okay, your life expectancy for an appliance, you know what it was. 20 to 30 years.

Okay, Gen X, you get to rock about 10 to 15 years. You know what us millennials get. >> Five to 10. And I would say 10 if you're lucky.

Cuz the technology on your screen of your fridge is going to go out and all of a sudden you just have to buy a brand new fridge. This can be transferred to so many different things. Do you guys remember the big Nokia phones that you could just drop off of a building and they still work nowadays.

You look at your phone screen and it cracks like that. Nothing is built like it used to be. Nothing is really built to last.

And the trouble is is that kind of goes into our relationships and our faith as well. , you know, a couple of years ago, the divorce rate was about at 60%. Now, I'm celebrating because as I researched for this message this week, I found out that that's down, that we are down to about 50 to 40% on divorce rates.

But Pew Research also just released this little statistic that 40% 40% of Americans believe that marriage is completely obsolete, that it doesn't matter anymore. And so what my hope and prayer is for you today is that we would be able to together look at God's word and work on relationships and marriage and build a marriage that is built to last. So to do that, I don't want you to hear from me first. I want you to hear from God first.

So we're going to open up God's word to Matthew chapter 19. It's on page 845. , by the way, if you don't have a Bible, you can take this one home with you.

, this is our gift to you, and I just pray that you would open the word of God this or just throughout the week. , also, don't think I have many kids in here, but this this message might get a little PG12, PG-13ish. So, I mean, if you get as red-faced as me during singing of Happy Birthday, just forewarning, okay.

And just one other thing too before we get started. Today we are just scratching the surface of marriage. I I want you to hear me when I say this.

I could make and we will will make an entire message series out of marriage and relationships in our church history. But for today, we're just going to get the big kind of picture of marriage. So, think of it like a web page. We're going to click into a couple of things, but most things we're just kind of scrolling through.

, and so if you need further resources, I want to put this page up. This is , by the way, don't worry about this if you don't have time to scan it now. At the end of my message, we're going to put this up.

I've been working on this all week. I've actually been adding to it, but this is a whole bunch of marriage resources for you. , I'm very very passionate about the subject wherever you're at because I've walked through the dating stage. I have walked through the divorce stage and I have walked through the marriage stage and I get the pleasure of of doing a lot of premarital, a lot of counseling like that. And so I'm really just passionate about things like this.

So go dive into some of those if you want further resources. So, all of that to say, wherever you're at this morning, wherever you're at this morning, this message is for you. So, if you're single, this is going to give you a great foundation for your next relationship.

If you're divorced, I'm telling you, there is hope and there is healing. And if you are married today and you got some things that maybe you've been ignoring or trying to work out, I'm just going to tell you, we're probably going to poke at him a little bit today. The goal is that you're not elbowing your spouse the entire time and having an awkward car ride home.

I'm not praying for that. I am praying for your marriage to improve this week. So, let's get to God's word. Matthew 19, we're going to start in verse three.

So, if you follow those numbers down to verse three. , now don't get scared away by the header. I know it says divorce.

We're not getting there. We're just reading what Jesus says about marriage. And he says this.

Some Pharisees came to test him, that is Jesus. And they asked him, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any any and every reason. Haven't you read.

" Jesus replied that at the beginning the creator made them male and female and said 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 are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together let no one separate.

So, that's what we're going to look at. Just this short little bit of scripture. And what's happening here in context is that Jesus is with some people called the Pharisees.

We learned about them in our last message series that we were going through. And Pharisees were a group of people that kept trying to trap Jesus and and kind of prove to all of the people that he was guilty and that he wasn't who he said he was. And so they're trying to trap him to get him to have an opinion about Old Testament stuff about Old Testament law around marriage and divorce.

And what Jesus does here is he quotes the book of Genesis which is at the very beginning. And then he says this is what is happening through marriage and the two are becoming one and let no one separate this. And so what he is really saying here is he's he's giving us a definition of what marriage is and then he's he's stressing the importance about holding that marriage together.

So that's what we're going to look at. Let's look at what marriage is. Now, if your pastor, if you're married in here and your pastor did a good job explaining to you what marriage is, you know, the what all of these things that we do during a wedding ceremony are. There's three things, okay. And each of those things kind of represent what marriage is.

The first one is this. Marriage is a covenant, not a contract. Marriage is a covenant, not a contract. Did you do vows in your wedding.

Did you do vows where you were either reading them that were already pre-wrote or maybe you wrote some yourself. , this is a covenant. And it is a covenant that God holds in the highest regard. You see, a contract is something that is just signed on a piece of paper, but a covenant is a physical, spiritual, emotional agreement.

And so there is a really big difference. But the problem is is that we've taken a word like marriage and kind of almost redefined it. And so we treat marriage almost like a contract. You agree to terms and if the terms are not meant then that means oh well I can just walk away and find somebody else because a contract says I'll stay as long as you do your part but that might work in business but it doesn't work in marriage because marriage is covenantal marriage says I'm here because I made a promise even when times are hard.

Even when it's difficult, I made this promise to be in this with you. Now, what you need to know is that this is really important that the covenant is a bigger deal than the contract. The covenant is a bigger deal than the contract. Now what happened historically in America is that the government took this word marriage and they started to give it their own definition but it is a biblicalbased word.

And so we're not going to get into it today but we could get into all of the politics of how the word marriage has been taken from this biblical word and redefined to what we know it as today. And we can look at a verse that talks about marriage being between male and female. And all of a sudden it's a a debate because we've redefined what marriage is.

But here is the truth. Scripture defines marriage different than our government defines marriage. It is a different deal. Because marriage is covenantal. Marriage is defined by this book, not just by our culture, not by our government.

But we have to talk about the opposite side of this. Because while we talk about the marriage term getting stretched and redefined, what can happen sometimes, especially in Christian circles, is we ignore the contract portion of it. We say, "Okay, there can be some kind of separation of church and state here, right. Like we can live together or we can do things together and act like we're married because we know that we're in a covenant together and we can kind of ignore the contract.

I didn't say that contract and covenant covenant are equal. I said that the covenant is the bigger deal. Which means that the contract should not scare us off because when we go into a covenantal marriage, that is us saying, "I'm allin.

You can have it all. We are all for each other. The two are becoming one. " And this is a hard process.

Not going to pretend like it's it's easy, but I want you to remember this that contracts are built on conditions and covenants are built on unconditional love. Unconditional love means you love somebody without condition. It means that no matter what, I am going to choose to love you.

And that is a really difficult choice some days. It's a really easy choice other days. And so that brings us to our next thing that marriage is a choice that you choose daily.

Did you have this little like ring ceremony during your marriage. Do you remember this where you'd like awkwardly put the ring on your husband or wife's like sweaty hands cuz it was your wedding day, right. And this ring, contrary to popular belief, says way more than I'm taken.

This actually the idea of a ring came when somebody was talking about unconditional love. They said like the circular shape of the ring the unconditional love has no end. And that's where the idea of the wedding ring came from.

Now let me ask you do you always feel the unconditional love or feel like giving the unconditional love for your spouse. The honest answer is no. Okay, there are some days where choosing to love is a hard choice, but there are some days like the wedding day where it was an easy choice.

But it's very important that we not base our marriages off of how we're feeling, but how we're choosing. Let me ask it like this. Do you think Jesus was feeling good about going to his death on the cross. Probably not.

And so Jesus chose love when he went to the cross. In the same way you and I choose love as we choose each other. And like I said, some days it's a hard day, some days it's a hard choice, and some days it is an easy choice.

But when you make that choice, you start to become one, which is the last thing. Marriage is two becoming one. This is that unity moment.

Okay, let's do a a quick poll for our married couples. If you did a unity moment, raise your hand if you did the candles where it's like two candles, they come together, join on the flame. Raise your hand if you did the the braided cord. The braided cord.

Anybody on that one. How about sand. Anyone do sand.

All right, my people. I'm with you. We had like that that beach kind of vibe for our wedding.

Even though it wasn't on a beach. So anyways, this whole idea of unity comes from Genesis and then is reiterated by Jesus. It is a visual representation of two things under the headship of God becoming one. And so as sand is poured together, as two candles are joined on one, as three strands are tied together, so is it that you and your wife, your husband are tied together, that two are becoming one. Now listen, this does not mean agreement.

This means alignment. It means alignment. You will not Can I get an amen.

You will not always agree with your spouse, right. You won't always agree with me. There is no one that you will always 100% of the time agree with. But agreement is different than alignment. Alignment says we are for each other, not against each other.

And we are built on Jesus and we are built for Jesus. And so we take this unity under Christ very seriously. But now here's the tension. As we define what marriage is and what all of these things mean, we need to ask the tough questions.

What happens if we don't agree and we're not aligned. What happens if the marriage feels more like a contract and not a covenant. What happens if we're basing our relationship more on a feeling and not on a choice.

Or maybe the worst, what happens if it does feel like we're living two different lives and two have not became one. And these are really tough questions. Now, I want to say at this point in the message, every single person in this room has a different situation. I'm not going to pretend like I know and can speak to every single individual in this room, okay. I just I can't do it.

We'd be here forever. , but what I can do is I can show you a couple of things that help to change the narrative. I've gotten the the joy of sitting with couples on the brink of divorce.

I've gotten the opportunity to do premarital for some people that are in this room even. And I've gone through myself my own divorce and now I am remarried and very very happily married and so I even have my own story up here. But let me tell you, no matter where you're at in your relationship status, there is hope. And so what Jesus says here is he gives us that glimmer of hope. He says, "Therefore, what God has joined together, let no one separate.

" So God's intention is for once we are joined together to do things that would not put us in a position that would allow us to separate. And so I just want to take the remainder of our time together to talk about four ways. These are not just the bottom line four ways. These are just four ways that if you feel like, man, we're really screwing up what marriage is, then I want to talk to you about this one is how is how are we joined together. Here's the first one.

Grow together. You need to grow together. Not just to be happy, but to be holy. You see, marriage is not just to make you happy.

It is meant to make you holy. Your marriage should grow you in your relationship with Christ. And so the order should be that as you are growing in Christ, as you are growing in your faith, that is pouring into your relationship. And so God becomes the first thing.

And here's the hard news. This one's going to be fun. Did you know that God will use your spouse in order to get your attention. Okay, God will use your spouse to become your mirror.

And some people don't take kindly to that. But let me tell you, God can get your attention through that person because they are the person that you love and listen to whether you like it or not the most. And so God will use your spouse to become your mirror, which is a good thing. And we need to stop looking at this as if it is a bad thing.

As if as if it is is nagging or it is whatever it is that you can be for each other in a way that builds one another up. Okay, let me give you an example. It's the only time I'm going to use my wife as an example.

You're not allowed to look at her. Okay, that's it. I I'm kidding.

I'm kidding. We were talking about it this week and we were talking about how when when we tell the story it feels like everybody's looking at us like judging us. Anyways, I've really been trying to work on my personal health lately.

I really want to get like you know back on doing good dieting and get back into shape and start working out. And my wife does a great job encouraging me in that. And it's not it's something that I've set for myself.

It's not something that she has been hinting at or anything like that, okay. But she helps me she helps me plan out my exercise plan, my diet plan, and she helps me see how each milestone that I hit can bring me closer to my goal. That's how we grow together. That's how we complement one another. But this has to be established in some type of friendship, which is the second thing.

You are meant to with your spouse or your future spouse be soulmates and not roommates. You didn't get married just to split bills and share a calendar. You got married because you like each other. Otherwise, we got a whole different conversation we got to have.

But if all you're talking about is kids and schedules and grandkids and logistics, you're missing the love part. You're you're missing the fun part. There is a fun part to this.

And so singles, if you're in here today, establish this first. Establish the good friendship. And if you're in here today and it's like, man, we're we feel like we're we're not on the same page friendship-wise, it's time to find some stuff to do together. If you're like, what.

Okay, Pastor Josh got some suggestions for you. , here's some things you can do together. Serve together. Okay, I'm not going to name them by name, but there is a couple in this room who got so excited to join Destination because the two of them could serve together as husband and wife.

And I love that. I love that example. Pray together, guys.

It's not awkward unless you make it awkward. Ladies, it's not awkward unless you make it awkward. Pray together. Do things at home.

Find something fun. A show, a game, a puzzle, a shared interest. Whatever it is, do something fun. Laugh together. Enjoy each other.

Do a new adventure. Go somewhere. Just not on Sundays, okay.

I want you here. But other than that, go somewhere. Have a new adventure together. , psychologist John Gottman says this.

You ready for this one. The determining factor for both husbands and wives in how satisfied they are with sex, romance, and passion in their marriage is by 70% the quality of the couple's friendship. It starts with friendship.

And speaking of sex, let's talk about it. So, , you thought I got I I'm going to get less red for this than I did for my happy birthday song there, but here's the thing. All of your Netflix shows talk about it. So, why can't your pastor and Jesus do it.

Okay, I hate how we make this such an awkward thing in churches. Okay, so here's the third thing. You need to be known, not just touched.

Intimacy is bigger than just the physical. This means being fully known. Because you can share a bed, but you can still feel miles apart.

And what this means is being able to connect on different levels, not just physically, but emotionally and spiritually. Because some of you might say, "Yeah, we're intimate enough. We're physical.

" But how are you doing on the emotional connection, the spiritual connection. Because some of some couples haven't had a real conversation about how they're doing or where they're at in years. And this should be a priority to be able to check in on all of these different levels and to do it frequently and to not neglect the physical side of things. Now, the Bible does speak to this.

So, let me let the Bible speak more than me on this one. 1 Corinthians chapter 7, Paul says this. He says, "The husband should fulfill his wife's sexual needs, and the wife should fulfill her husband's needs. The wife gives authority over her body to her husband, and the husband gives authority over his body to his wife. Do not deprive each other of sexual relations unless you both agree to refrain from sexual intimacy for a limited time.

So you can give yourselves more completely to prayer. Do you notice that when he says taking a break from physical intimacy, it should be for spiritual connection together. By the way, have you ever prayed for your intimacy before. If you're struggling with it, just just a thought.

Then Paul says this, "Afterward, you should come together again so that Satan won't be able to tempt you because of your lack of self-control. " You hear how quiet it got in here, by the way, because this is a this is a tough word from Paul. But what I want you to see in this in this passage is how many times he said don't neglect.

He said don't neglect, don't deprive, do this frequently because this frequent connection of both spiritually, emotionally, physically builds this bond between the two of you that is so vitally important. And look at what he says at the very end. If you're not doing this frequently, it's going to give Satan an opportunity to tempt you. And so that should remind us of how important this connection is. But for a lot of marriages, unfortunately, intimacy in this way becomes transactional because we live in a transactional world.

And so intimacy becomes a reward or something that we're not really giving to each other out of love but out of obligation. And so that brings me to the fourth and final one that in order to build a very strong marriage you need service and sacrifice. Meaning that you are willing to give more than you get.

You see, marriages fall apart when both people are asking, "What am I getting out of this. What am I getting out of this. " And it's almost like we're starting to keep score.

Well, I did this, so you should do that. And you did that, so I should get to do this. And this is what happens in our marriages where it becomes transactional. And that is a very dangerous place to get to because what that takes out of it is the serving part of marriage which is to serve one another as husband and wife and that is for each other and it takes out the sacrifice in marriage as well. One book that I will plug that is my personal favorite on the topic of marriage is Gary Chapman's five love languages.

, if you haven't read it before, , Gary kind of talks about how there are five primary ways that somebody feels loved or somebody likes to give love. He says touch, which is beyond just sexual intimacy, but it's holding hands, having hugs, whatever it is. There's touch.

There is words, building each other up. There is there's service, being able to do something nice or special for one another. There's gifts. That one's pretty self-explanatory, getting a gift, right.

And then there is quality time, which is really hard when you have kids. And so all of these things are really important things that build up our marriages. I want to kind of illustrate this like this.

I want you to picture that when you got married or when you get married, God says, "Here's this blessing of marriage that I have for you. This is your treasure of blessing for your relationship, for your marriage. Here it is full to the brim.

" And what's really cool about this is as we live out those things like love languages, pretend these are gold coins by the way. As we live out those things like the love languages, each time I am living those out in my relationship, I am putting a deposit in the treasure box that God has put in our marriage. So each time my wife builds me up with words, it is a deposit. Each time we are spending quality time together, each time we are connecting emotionally, spiritually, whatever it is, right.

We are building into the treasure that God has for us. Now, a lot of you would say, "Hey, my marriage is good. " And you would say that it's it's it's there.

Yes, you have the treasure box, but what's it full with. What's inside of it. Because here's what Paul is saying here at the end, going back to that verse, at the end of it, is that Satan loves to come into relationships.

He loves to destroy marriages. And do you think what he does is takes the whole box. He just takes a little bit out at a time. It's the fight that you had that's unresolved.

It's the thing that you looked at on your phone that you haven't talked about before. It is the emotional thing that happened years ago, right. And you and Satan just little by little comes to steal and kill and destroy. And so I want you to think about this for a second because let's go back to the original where this verse came from.

What Jesus is saying it came from Genesis. Do you know what happens in the book of Genesis. In the very beginning, God creates the heavens and the earth.

He creates all things. Then he creates Adam and Eve. And Genesis chapter 2 ends with what. The first wedding. It is the two becoming one flesh.

What happens in Genesis chapter 3. >> Yeah, it's all messed up. Thank you, Wes. It's almost like we've been talking about that.

It's all messed up because temptation enters the world. And so here's what happens. After the wedding comes the war. That is when Satan enters the picture. It isn't during creation.

It is after the wedding because he takes the blessing and he wants to scatter it all over the place. He wants to scatter it all over and steal and kill and destroy the marriage. Steal and kill and destroy the relationship. But what Jesus comes to do is he comes and he picks up the pieces.

He sees the brokenness. He sees your heart. He sees your longing for your husband or your wife or to be married and he picks up the pieces and he says, "There's grace to be restored.

To be restored. " That's what I want for your marriage. I don't want to see your marriage in pieces all over.

I want to see the treasure restored. So in this moment, would you just bow your head and close your eyes so you can just have a moment to to reflect on this. And would you do something. If you are married and you are sitting next to your spouse, would you just grab their hand.

Don't squeeze it too tight like you're mad at them. But if you're here today and maybe there's some things that man just didn't really feel too great, I want to remind you that there is hope for you. That there is hope for your marriage.

That there is hope for you if you are single. There is hope for you if you are divorced. But don't neglect these things.

Don't neglect the foundation that God wants to build on. For some of you, it just starts with saying yes to Jesus. That you need to put the first thing as the first thing. And that is to put Jesus above the marriage so that Jesus can fill into the marriage.

For some of you, it's just fixing a couple of these little things. And I want to remind you that as you do, Jesus is with you. So, I want to pray over you. With my wife up here together. And let me let me just pray over you.

God, we thank you so much for just all of the the couples that you brought here together, the examples of marriage. And God, I pray for whoever's single, maybe recently divorced. I pray just in their waiting, in their longing, God, that you would shape them in this biblical foundation of marriage.

God, I pray for the marriages in this room. I pray for healing in Jesus name. Wherever the husband is at, wherever the wife is at in this room right now, that you would take this very precious relationship and you would be at the center of it, bringing it hope and healing. And God, I pray for anyone in this room who has put their spouse above you.

That God, we would make moves today to put you first so that we can grow in your name. We pray this all this all this in Jesus name. And everybody said, "Amen.