Christian Anthropology

Transcript

Would you go ahead and stand for the reading of the gospel story this morning? This is Mark, chapter ten. And we're going to pick up here with verse two. Notice these words. This is the word of God.

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Some pharisees came and to test Jesus, they asked, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife? He answered them, what did Moses command you? They said, Moses allowed a man to write a certificate. Dismissal. And to divorce her.

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But Jesus said to them, because of your hardness of heart, he wrote this commandment for you. But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife. And the two shall become one flesh, so they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let no one separate.

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Then in the house, the disciples asked him again about this matter. He said to them, whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery. Now, people were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them. And the disciples spoke sternly to them.

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But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, let the little children come to me. Do not stop them. For it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly, I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it. And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.

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Jesus, thank you for your holy word. Thank you for this difficult, straightforward passage that we have before us. Would you bring clarity to our minds and hearts so that we might have the hope and the vision that you have for humanity, for our lives? In this room, we pray in your name. Amen.

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And you can be seated.

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You know, in all four of the readings today, there's one clear thread, and that is a sort of, if we put it this way, christian anthropology or christian understanding of man, that is, of mankind, of humankind. And with these four texts, one from the beginning. Genesis two. Right, the beginning, where, remember, one has the whole creation. All right, everything.

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And chapter two, another account of the creation, but zoomed in on the man and the woman, Adam and Eve, and of their marriage. And so we then move to the psalm, which also speaks and asks the person pertinent question, what is man? That you should be mindful of him, the son of man, that you should seek him out. What is man? I mean, with all of the vastness of the universe, what is man?

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And brothers and sisters in this room, today, can I tell you that there is no more pressing question upon our cultural sensibilities right now than that very question, what is a human being? That is a fundamental and basic question, because here we sit, able to ask the question, because we are human, and it matters what we say. A human being is a person, man. And the Bible, if you don't know, has a lot to say about a. Yeah.

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Christian anthropology or a study or an understanding of what it means to be man. Over the years, there have been many conceptions, as you know, even just with a cursory view back to history, that we get this question wrong, don't we? What is man? We get it wrong all the time. And we can look back, way back to, for instance, ancient near eastern slavery, where one's status determined one's place in the world so that if you were a slave, you were property and not necessarily human in the way that we understand it.

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Property like a cow as much as an animal, you were. And of course, those conceptions still hang around today, don't they? In other words, if you are of this race or if you are of this kind, you are nothing, to me, subhuman, so to speak. And people have gotten that wrong, maybe even less far back for us. Think about the Nazis and their conception.

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Just because you're a jew, you are a varmint, literally rats. You are a disease, rat filled thing and not a person, or more recently, to call what is in the womb in its embryonic state or fetus state, either one. You can use the medical terminology. That's fine, because fetus just means child. Childhood, literally in the Latin, childhood, okay.

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It's how a child develops. To say, that's not a person, that's not a human is inconclusive. It falls far short of the biblical text. It falls short of what the creed just that came out of our mouth says, do you remember conceived, that we say every week, the apostles creeddehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe conceived by the holy spirit. And what then born of the virgin Mary, conception begins human life.

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And we know this as christians. And look, we don't have to get tangled up in all of the what ifs, all of the questions that surround these things, what we need to catch today. And it may be difficult for us because it's difficult to hear anything anymore. Is this a biblical view, God's view of what a human person is and the purpose, therefore, of humanity? Because let me tell you, we have a purpose.

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And so unlike the Nazis, unlike the ancient near east, unlike those who are racist and all the other conceptions, even to this very day that swirl around us, trying to tell us you can define yourself and so on and so forth. Let's cut through the chase and hear what Jesus clearly states here to us this morning and what his holy word says. Now, in these texts we have in Genesis two marriage, right? I mean, just point blank marriage. Notice the.

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And some people miss this, by the way. I oftentimes when I'm teaching Old Testament stuff to students, I say, I say, you know, the Bible begins with a marriage. And he said, where I don't see that you got a man and a woman and they're sexual together, but there's no marriage. But, dear friend, I think we miss it clearly here when it says, therefore, a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh. And then in chapter three, what happens?

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Eve takes the fruit and gives it to man. No, her husband. It says, you see, the first marriage is Adam and Eve. It is the marriage that from that marriage, the fruit of all around us, every human you ever meet, comes from the fruit of that one marriage, ultimately. And God is the one who presides, by the way, over this marriage.

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And of course, marriage is an institution that is not created by the state. In this way, we can talk all we want about marriage or human life, because both life, marriage and family, which is the result of marriage, the natural result of marriage is family. Another, we can talk about this in apolitical terminology, or maybe this way, pre political terminology, because before you can have a polis, which is a city, right? That's where that term comes from. Before you can have a city of people, guess what?

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You have to tap two that are making one flesh. The two become one flesh. And of course, in our own time, things that are basic, fundamental and natural and should be obvious are anything but today, aren't they? You don't have to say amen. That's okay.

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I'm saying amen. For us, they are. I mean, think about this. To say that marriage is between a man and a woman, natural born man, natural born woman, is like the most obvious thing throughout human history. In other words, if we were just to take a time machine back and go to any point in human history, that is an uncontroversial statement.

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But not today. Not today. We have forgotten what marriage is. We've closed up our ears, we've turned inward to try to find the answer. And it's all because of our human anthropology.

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We don't understand what a human is first and foremost. And we think a human has to do with thinking only, which is a problem. Which is what most people's argument, right? They say, yeah, yeah. A child in the womb can't think.

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They can't. So therefore, they're not a human. Okay, what about the mentally ill? Right? They're not human.

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No, of course they're human. Okay. It falls far short. Now, look, we're not going to sit here. I mean, we can.

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We're not going to sit here and take one by one, because it would take until, you know, I was dead to even get started on something like that. Instead, let's cut through. Keep cutting through. What is a humanity? We have to go back to the beginning.

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The first humans, Adam and Eve, and notice. Notice what we have in the genesis two story is this beautiful, kind of poetic almost way of saying it, and yet literal, because we all come from this one marriage, which is, it is not good that man should be alone. So what can we say about mankind? We were not created to be alone. And isn't that good news?

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Do you know how much loneliness plagues people today, even though we are? I mean, you can literally, I have probably 100 and something friends in India, you know, because I went there twice. And so I've got those friends there I can contact. I can contact people all across the world. And yet we're lonely.

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We feel like we're alone. How is that even possible? Right? And yet. It is.

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It is. But we're not meant to be alone. We're created. Notice from God. Okay?

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So right there, we're not alone because there's also God, but also for others. Notice from God, for others.

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And of course, every one of our relationships and exist, our very existence, is in a web of, isn't it? Of various relationships. And some of them cross over. It's like when you meet somebody and you're like, oh, goodness, I know that person. We're just connected in these web.

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If you just follow the webbing back, it goes back to this first couple, this original marriage, and here we get this interesting thing, and you wonder. You're like, how interesting? God says, all of creation is good, except now he says, this is not good. That man is alone. You see, the first thing we can say is this definitively, man is not made to be just an individual individualism which runs rampant.

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You know, make your own way. Like, it's all about you. Just try to live and squeeze as much out of life as you can. Don't worry about others. Just get as much as you can.

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Squeeze it all out before you die. How absurd. How absurd.

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You came from another. You can't exist without others. And we never were made to, because from the very beginning, God says, it's not good. And guess what? The animals all parade before Adam here, don't they?

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Isn't that interesting? So he says, hey, I'm going to do something about this. God does. It's kind of funny. In the text, God's like, I'm going to do something about this so that man won't be alone.

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So he creates all the animals and they parade before him. And actually, Adam names them all, categorically names them all. Now, what's going on here? We see the Imago Dei, the image of God. That term, image of God.

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We are made in his image, after his likeness. What does God do to create? He creates with his word, doesn't he? What is Adam doing here? Now, he speaks over the animals, and it categorically sticks.

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He defines them, you see? And this is what we do as humans. We look and define. What is that? Right?

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Which is why this is a good question. What is that? Look around the room. There's humans here. What are we?

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Are we just a chair? Are we a roach? Are we a monkey? Are we just a glorified monkey? Is there something absolutely different than us than the other animals?

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Or are we just an animal? Now, psalm eight helps us here, doesn't it? It says we're actually higher than the animals. Because guess what? The animals don't name us.

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We name the animals. That's how it happens. Same thing here today. We're above the animals because of our reason, our rationale. Which is why the typical philosophical definition, anthropologically, for human is just rational animal.

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That's the definition. Rational. But still animal. Above the animals, yes, but yet connected to the earth. Because we guess what came from the earth, didn't we?

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The animals here come from the earth, but there's something unique about us. What is that? He breathes his breath into us and not the animals. We are now a temple of the holy breath of God, the Holy spirit of goddess. Your body is not some appendage.

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Your body is something holy and sacred. We need to start treating them like that. The scripture calls us to this. What we do in our body, we do. We could say it this way.

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You are your body. Now, even legally, if we just want to just legally speak about this, if somebody does something to me that I don't want them to, you know, they take my arm and cut it off, and I didn't want them to do that. Pretty morbid okay, do I then say, oh, well, yeah, that's just, you know, it's just my body. It's not a big deal? No, they did it to me, didn't they?

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It was to me that you did that. This is why sexual sin is so perverse and bad. You're not just doing it to the body of someone. You're doing it to them. And we feel it in our bones, so to speak, in our very soul.

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When it happens to us, when somebody cuts us with words, we feel it. We hear it. Yes, it's just words. What's a big no no? Listen.

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We are an insouled body. You are your body. What you do in your body, you're doing it, and it's done to you. Again, this has been elementary to all of human history, but I think we need the elementary lesson again today. In our own time, we have forgotten, and we need to recognize the truth.

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And it's kind of interesting, that term, recognize, recognize. It's a recognition of what is already there. In other words, this is our participation. When we actually get the truth of humanity, right? We're actually participating in the very mind of God.

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Do you see how this works? In other words, God is the one who thinks us and speaks us and forms us into existence. It was out of his mind so that when his purposes are realized in our mind, oh, the purpose of man is to know and love God. Boom. We recognize that.

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Which is why recognizing truth, even learning things, is almost like finding a familiar friend. It's like, oh, yeah, that feels like home. Plato called it recollection. He thought we actually had the knowledge. We just have to recollect it.

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I think it's more recognizing or maybe cocognizing in the sense that our mind is now participating in the very mind of goddesse. But notice, warning. When we speak falsely about each other and about humanity, and we get it wrong, what are we doing? We're actually mocking God's design. We mock the creator's mind.

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And then, of course, sin. And miss the mark because that's what sin means. Miss the mark of who we are, of who he's created us to be.

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You are your body. You are your soul. You are an insouled body. Maybe that's too philosophical for you. The way the author in the psalm here puts it in poetry, which some of us are more comfortable with poetry, he says, this way, God created us a little lower than Elohim.

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That's the word that's used there. Notice in the scripture text, actually, it said a little lower than God. Some translations will say a little lower than the angels. It's just the term Elohim that's there, which can refer to God or angels or spirit beings. Here's the point.

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We're lower than God, lower than a pure spiritual being such as an angel. But we are higher than just a material animal. We as humans hang in between the divine and the animal. We are animal. We are not divine.

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And yet we were created animal, a rational animal, an animal with a mind that can actually cooperate with God. And we were made by God. Some have put it this way. We were made from dust of divinity, so by God, but from the dust of the ground, we are. But dust went to a funeral yesterday of a student of mine, actually, and he's 43 years old, as old as I am.

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And there he was, laying in the casket. Lying in the casket. Of course, he's not there, but his body is. And his body will return to dust.

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But one day, because of Christ, he's going to raise him up again. Because, you see, our body is not some secondary, unnecessary thing to God. In fact, when God comes to save the world, guess how he does it if you don't know already? Incarnate by the Holy Spirit. We just said it, right?

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What is the incarnation in flesh incarnate in the meat. He takes on human meat and flesh. We don't always think of it like that, but that's exactly what God does to save the world. And then you know what he does? He leaves us a meal, a meal to remember him by, to recognize him in of his body and blood.

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You see, we don't have a purely spiritual faith, brothers and sisters. We have a somatic faith as well, which is to say a bodily faith. Soma means body, which means we're both body and spirit, right? We're back to this point. We're lower than the angels, higher than the animals.

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We're unique. We are made in God's very image, after his likeness. Which is why today we have a candle, we have colors, we have a person that you can audibly hear. If Christianity was purely spiritual, you could do it all at home. You could all do it through aum, which is the sacred sound within Hinduism.

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You could do it all from anywhere, just like the buddha did. That is not true. No, not in Christianity you can't. You must do it in community. You must do it in communion with others, just like we're doing today.

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You see, we're not just a spirit, and we're not just a body. We're both spirit and body. And we are to invite God's holy spirit inside of this temple to dwell here because we were made with his breath for his breath. Okay? And then we come to this text with Jesus and he's talking about marriage.

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And guess what? There's a marriage actually going to be in this building this Saturday. So this week, okay? It's going to be right here. It's actually the first wedding we've ever done.

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Conrad and Darlene right back there are getting married. So we've never had a marriage in this facility. You know, it used to be a gym where people worked out. Now we're working out holiness. Okay?

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That's the kind of thing we do now. And so marriage, in the Bible, it begins with a marriage, Adam and Eve. And it ends with a marriage. Christ and his church, doesn't it? Literally.

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The spirit and the bride, think about this. The spirit and the bride say, come, Lord Jesus. That's the first. Sorry, that's the last verses of the entire Bible. So the whole picture of the Bible shuts down, so to speak, or points up, if we will, with those words.

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The spirit and the bride say, come, Lord Jesus. Who is the Lord Jesus but the bridegroom, he is the husband. We are the wife, the bride.

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The bookends of the Bible are marital, a powerful image. Marriage, in other words, points to the reality of the end. And what is that eschatological end but this very meal and what it points to, which is the marriage supper of the lamb. Think about this marriage supper. We're not just going up there to eat for.

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Yeah, we made it. You know, our team won. No, no, no. It's a marriage. And we'll be finally consummated when we become one with Christ.

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Notice in a glorified body, in the resurrection, where in our body we can see God. We can't see God right now. Nobody can see God right now. Not direct, but in a glorified body, we will see him face to face. That's the consummation of all things.

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And if we don't know him and we don't love him, we are not his bride. If we do not have his holy spirit within us saying, come, Lord Jesus, we are not his bride, we are not his people, we are not his wife. As you already know, the Bible is filled with nuptial conjugal language all over the place. The prophets in particular talk about being wayward, being lost as adultery. You're cheating on God.

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Hosea, in fact, is told to go marry a promiscuous woman and God says, that's how Israel treats me, but that's how I treat Israel. Even though she runs away for other lovers, I never do. I come to redeem her. And he has, because all of us have been wayward brides, wayward spouses, adulterers. In this way, there's really three main metaphors.

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Doctor Dennis Kinlaw says of God in the Bible, king, which has to do with sovereignty, his being regal, regal language, father, which is familial language, family, and then husband, which deals with this nuptial metaphor. This is why when John the Baptist sees Jesus right before he baptized, he says, the bridegroom, you remember this. And it's such an odd thing if you don't understand how important marriage is in the Bible, it just blows right over us. Bride, why is he calling the bridegroom, which would make John the Baptist the best man, right? He is the best man.

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Remember, the best man always has to hang out with the bridegroom, right? Make sure he comes to the wedding and all this. Well, here John the Baptist says, the best man speaks on behalf and identify. There he is. That's the groom right there.

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It's Jesus. It's Jesus. We were made to be married to God. Think about that. Let that sit for just a second.

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Which means marriage points to him, not vice versa. So in other words, the real marriage is God and his people. We are just an image of that that points back. The reality that's being pointed to is Christ and his church, which is why Paul is able to say in his letter, I think it's to the Ephesians. He says, listen, we're talking about marriage here, but what we're really talking about is Christ and his church, the groom and the bride.

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Do you see how you can't reverse that? And it also means we can't change it. In other words, God is always the male in this relationship. Hence the male pronouns in the Bible. These can't be reversed, these can't be equated.

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Male and male, female and female. No, no. God is the one who comes after us from the outside in, and the female receives, and guess what? Gives birth.

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Doesn't that make more sense now, when John in John chapter three says, you must be born again, in other words, the only way to be born again is to have another come inside of us as the Holy Spirit does and bear fruit. You say, pastor, I think you're really, this is a little too much. Dear friends, we completely miss the point if we don't get this. You do know that God created sex, right? Like in my talk with all of my kids.

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That's how we begin, is this is a good thing. God gave you the equipment as male and female. He did. We didn't do it. The state didn't do it.

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God did. And he thinks it's good. And in fact, it mirrors it images and points to him. Which is why, when done wrongly, the results are so bad. Families destroyed, people destroyed, divided, hurt.

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Because it's such a good thing. Because the higher the good, the more room there is to fall. Right? In other words, if I fall off the stage, it's not that. I mean, I might get a bruise.

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If I fall off the empire State building. Not going to be much left of Pastor Marshall anymore. Okay. The concrete and I will be one. You know, not in a good way.

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You see, the higher the good, the worse the fall. Marriage, family, the human person, those are the highest goods in all of the Bible. Think about what God calls all of us who are what, his children. You know, it's funny. I was listening to this guy the other day.

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He said, the Bible never says be an adult Christian, but rather a child of God. Never an adult of God, but a child of God. We're all still growing, aren't we? We're all still learning, and we have so much more to go. Like a kid with their.

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I mean, I love what Lincoln said. No, it was somebody else. I forget who it was. They said, yeah, to grow up big and strong, right? We're all trying to grow up big and strong, but we stymie it when we get it wrong, and we stymie it when we listen to the culture.

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Stop. Let's go back to the Bible. Let's get back down to elementary principles and catch the beautiful vision that God has for the human person. That's you. That's me.

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The beautiful vision that God has for marriage, that God has for family. We all know it's important. And because of the fractured relationships that all of us have been a part of, we also know the hurt that goes along with it. But look, don't focus on the hurt. Focus on the good that is there.

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Don't focus on how far you have to fall, but how high. We are being called up. Do you see? We're being called up. Marriage is being caught up into God himself.

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The family is being caught up into God itself. Yes, it's the most basic principle, the most basic building block of all of life. Like every single decade of human history, has been built on marriage and family. The human person. And we've tried to destroy it.

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We've tried to go to war over it and all of these things. And the human history is just filled with blood and all terrible things. Yet as christians, we are not the state. We don't pick up arms to fight. Instead, we fight with holiness.

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We fight with love. In other words, have a holy marriage. That's how we fight. Have a holy family. That's how we fight.

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Be a holy person filled with God's holy spirit. You say, well, pastor, look, you know we can't have kids. That happens throughout the Bible, right? There's people who can't have kids. Listen, they still take in kids all around them.

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And I know some single people that do just that. Some people are called to celibacy, some to marriage. All right, could I just. This is what I'll be saying. Here we go.

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This is what I'll be saying. Just hear this anew and afresh today. I'm literally gonna proclaim these words this Saturday. But notice, dearly beloved, this kind of sums up all of what we're talking about. We have come together in the presence of God to witness and bless the joining together of this man and this woman in holy matrimony.

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Now, check this out. The bond and covenant of marriage was established by God in creation. Genesis two. Right. And our Lord Jesus Christ, in his earthly ministry, adorned this manner of life by his presence and first miracle at the wedding in Cana of Galilee.

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In other words, he ordained it a good thing, marriage between this man and this woman. Notice it signifies to us the mystery of the union between Christ and his church. And holy scripture commends it to be honored among all people, which means this, even if you're called to celibacy and to never marry. In other words, celibacy is never having sex. You're never gonna have sex in your life.

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Okay? That's a calling. If that's you, you still uphold marriage. That doesn't mean that you uphold it by your purity. You see, you uphold it by sexual purity.

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All of us have a part in this. I don't care if you're married or you're not married. Everybody has a part in upholding marriage as a holy union. Notice the union of husband and wife in heart, body and mind is intended by God for their mutual joy, for the help and comfort given one another in prosperity or diversity, and when it is God's will, for the procreation of children and their nurture in the knowledge and love of the Lord. Therefore, marriage is not to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly, but reverently, deliberately, and in accordance with the purposes for which it was instituted by God.

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Man, almost every bit of that is contrary to our culture right now.

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Now, just as the Nazis, I mean, to us, we look back at the Nazis, which wasn't that long ago, and we say, what a bunch of idiots. Who would ever be able to look at a jewish person in the face and think that they were just some varmint that needed to be eradicated, that they weren't even human? What a bunch of. And we look back at slavery, we say, how could somebody look at a black person and say they are subhumanous? How could somebody do that?

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Do you know that people after us are going to look back on this very cultural moment and judge us in the same way? Brothers and sisters hold on to something that's not passing through our social media or in our stupid politics on both sides, they both have abortion. Wrong, by the way.

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All the stupidness that just goes around and gets in our kid's head. I mean, this is demonic, guys. I mean, I hate to bring it to this point. It's demonic.

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It's not just some sort of political. The church is not in politics. The church is above politics, beyond politics. Pre political, so you say. All right, well, goodness, pastor, you know, sound like you got yourself worked up.

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I'm worked up because my kids deal with this. It's going to be them that has to die for the words that we just read. I don't believe I'll ever see the day where I get put in prison for saying marriage between a man and woman. Okay, so be it if I do, but I don't think so. But their kids, you don't think Nazi Germany kind of stuff can happen again?

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You just got your head in the sand. The demonic is pressing in upon. Do you know that our brothers and sisters in Africa think we're nuts? You know that the center of Christianity has moved right from the Middle east to Europe to great Britain, last stronghold there to America to now, Africa. They think we're insane, that we don't know what a woman is.

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And it is stupid. I mean, look at the term stupid, and I think you would agree.

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So what do we do about it? Just get mad? No, of course not. Listen, we're gonna leave here with hope, and I'm gonna do it in less than five minutes. Here.

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Notice we've gotta catch the vision the Bible has for a human, for what a human person is. The calling is the highest calling of all, and that is to be a saint, be a holy one. Every one of the epistles are written to the holy ones. The saints of God. We don't use that term anymore.

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But we should. How can we be holy, pastor? The Holy Spirit of God in us. That's the only way. It is not by my works.

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It is not by my. No, that's ridiculous. We must be born again. Must be born again. And then.

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And then, just as Jesus says here, we have to have the openness of a child. Did you know? Did you catch what he said? The Pharisees here with that question about divorce? They were trying to test Jesus and trick him, right?

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And Jesus said, look, it's the hardness of heart. That's why. The hardness of the human heart. But you know what? Kids?

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They haven't become hard yet. You know what I mean? They haven't become hard yet. They haven't been betrayed. They haven't stoved up years of bitterness and unforgiveness.

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No, these little guys that mean these precious little guys, right? They don't have that. They don't have what we have. See, the adult is the one who has a hard heart. And Christ calls us to have the heart of a child.

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That means openness, trust.

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He's inviting us into his very life, and he wants to hear this. Hear this. He wants to bring us into his family. You know how he does it? He leaves his father.

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Think about. Notice that language in Jesus. You leave your father and your mother, and you cling to your wife. What does Jesus do? The son of God leaves the father to come get us.

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Hallelujah. He is the husband who comes from heaven to. To rescue us. And he clings to humanity. How?

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Because he has a human body. That's how. It's a glorified human body. He doesn't just leave it here on earth. He takes the human person up to heaven, which is our destination.

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Your destination is not here. Our destination is beyond the here and now and yet still physical. I mean, it is. I mean, this is. I don't know why you're not jumping out of your seat.

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Good news kind of thing. Right here. Right? We're also called into his family. He's our father.

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Did you catch the Hebrews text real quick? It says this, for the one who sanctifies, that's make holy. Right? Sanctify. Holy sanctus.

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The one who sanctifies. And those who are sanctified all have one father. Now, who's the one who sanctifies? Jesus. Who's the one sanctified us?

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We have one father. Which is why Jesus tells Maryland, you remember when she finally recognized, listen, I'm going to my father and your father. He opens up the very divine family to us. We are invited into the Father, Son and Holy Spirit's relationship of love and of forgiveness and of self giving. We are to be made one with Goddesse.

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What an adventure. What a calling. Is anybody on that calling? Is anybody on that venture? He's still working on me to make me what I really ought to be.

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I am. Will you go with me? Let's catch that vision, not be held down by all this other noise. Come on. Let's focus on the good creation, the good institution of marriage, of family and of the human person.

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May it be so. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Amen.

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Well, now we get an opportunity to.