Summary

“This would just be easier if I wasn’t married to spiritual deadweight. Surely God does not want me to be in a home where I get no spiritual support, where he or she is always dragging me down. Think about how much easier this would be if I was with someone who encouraged me and built me up spiritually. So, for spiritual reasons, God probably wants me to get divorced."

Paul says, “No, even if you think it is better for you spiritually to be separated from your spouse, you should stay with them, for two reasons…" First, Marriage is a covenant union that God established, whereby you promise loyalty and union to someone else until death do you part. When Paul in vs. 10 points back to what Jesus taught on divorce in Matthew 19, that was Jesus’ main point. God created it, at the beginning, to be a picture of his love for us and it was to be a permanent union, dissolvable only by death. But the second reason you should stay married in that situation, Paul explains is that God in his sovereignty has put you in your unbelieving spouse’s life for a reason.

Sermon Questions

1. What are you feelings and thoughts about divorce?
2. What does it mean to be in a covenant relationship? How is marriage a covenant before God?
3. God’s main purpose in marriage is not making you happy in a perfect person, his main purpose in marriage is to teach you to become more like him by faithfully loving and forbearing with an annoying sinner like he loves and forebears with you. And he does that by having you marry an imperfect person. How have other's imperfections caused you to look at yourself?
4. In Matthew’s recording of Jesus’ genealogy, Matthew 1, he shows us that a number of the relationships in Jesus’ ancestry were compromised. Sexual sins. Broken marriages. How does that give you hope?
5. In the cross, we find forgiveness for the sins done by us and healing for the ones done to us. Including divorce. React to that statement.