"Back to the Owner's Manual"

Dear Friends in Christ,         

   Times are a changing, aren’t they?  And you don’t need to look very far for evidence of that.  All you have to do is turn on your television to the TV Land channel where at 7:00 and 7:30 any week day morning you can see one of my favorite shows of all time, “Leave It to Beaver.”  There you’ll get to know the Cleaver family: husband, Ward; wife, June; and 2 sons, Wally and Theodore, though Theodore was known best as the Beaver.  On that show the family was stable, the brothers got along with one another for the most part, and they showed respect to their parents and anyone else who was over them in authority.  Contrast that show, however, with this one, “The Simpson’s,” and oh what a difference we see.  The 2 best known characters on The Simpson’s are Father Homer and son Bart.  Here’s what the official web site has to say about Homer: A devoted husband, Homer leaves his wife with few complaints.  When pressed, however, Marge did acknowledge to a marriage counselor that Homer “forgets birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays (both religious and secular), chews with his mouth open, hangs out at a seedy bar with bums and lowlifes, blows his nose in towels and puts them back, and scratches himself with his keys.”  Kind of a far cry from Ward Cleaver, wouldn’t you agree?  And what about his son Bart?  Well, the Simpson’s official web site describes him this way: Bart is the most misunderstood Simpson.  He is constantly frustrated by the narrow-minded people of Springfield who judge him merely by his thoughts and actions.  At heart, he’s just a good kid with a few bad ideas, a couple of really bad ideas, and one or two that are still being reviewed by the Springfield district attorney.”  Again, a far cry from Beaver Cleaver, right?  But this is how society’s view of the family has shifted and changed over the years. 

   And that’s why this morning I’m beginning a brand new sermon series that will find us each week taking a look at a different slice of the family pie.  Having just completed a series of messages in November on heaven, I decided to call this series “A Little Bit of Heaven in Our Homes.”  We’ll be talking about the family in general, marriage, parenting, choosing a future mate, finances, and much, much more.  And we’ll be looking at these important areas of our life from God’s perspective, or, from what we call a biblical worldview.  It’s no secret that our highly secularized and sexualized culture has pretty well dropped the ball when it comes to the family.  So as Christians, we need to know how we can pick that ball up again so that our families can not only survive, but thrive as God wants them to.

   And the 1^st question we want to consider today is: Why are families not working well these days?  What has happened to cause the downfall of this institution that God intended to serve as the cornerstone of society?  Well, there are no doubt many answers we could give to those questions – things like stress, materialism, debt, over-extending ourselves with our schedules, outside influences like TV, movies, and the music of today are just a few of the factors contributing to the family’s demise.  But more than anything, I believe the bottom line reason has to do with the fact that many people today are trying to run their families in a different style than God designed.  They’re not paying attention to the instructions that he’s given us.

   Kind of like the man I recently heard about who was riding his bike as he did every morning when he came across a sign on his regular route that said “Do not enter.”  Well, he didn’t think that applied to bicycles, so he ignored the sign and soon found himself plummeting over an embankment because the bridge was out.  He banged up his bike and his body pretty badly and received his share of bumps and scrapes and bruises.  When he got home he started complaining to his wife about what had happened.  But she wasn’t in a very sympathetic mood.  Instead she said, “But Sweetheart, what part of the words ‘Do not enter’ do you not understand?”

   Well, God has some directional signs that he’s put up for us to follow when it comes to our marriages and our families.  In fact, we might say that he’s written the owner’s manual for those things.  You know what an owner’s manual is, don’t you?  It’s that little book that most men finally pick up and start reading only after all their efforts to figure it out on their own have failed.

   Well, the failure to read and pay heed to God’s owner’s manual, the Bible, has resulted in a lot of bruised marriages and broken dreams and scarred hearts.  The statistics are very alarming.  45-50% of all first-time marriages performed today will predictably end in divorce.  And if you think it gets better the 2^nd and 3^rd times around, I’m afraid you’re wrong as 60-67% of all 2^nd marriages and 70-73% of all 3^rd marriages will suffer the same fate.  We’re so accustomed to divorce that I imagine if I were to ask you to raise your hand if you personally or someone in your immediate family has been touched by divorce, we would see almost every hand go up. 

   But you know, it hasn’t always been like this.  Do you know what the divorce rate was in our country in 1952?  .4%.  What did I say it was today?  45-50%.  Let me state that a different way.  Whereas today 1 out of about every 2 marriages will end in divorce, in 1952 it was 1 out of every 250 marriages.  Do you realize that the United States of America has the highest divorce rate of any other nation in the world?  We have more divorces per capita than France, more divorces than Germany, more divorces than non-Christian nations like China, Japan, and Korea. 

   Why is that?  Or perhaps a better question to ask is, why do we tolerate it?  I mean, if a home builder had every other home he put up collapse after just a few years, would we tolerate that?  Absolutely not!  Don't you think somebody in authority would look into it and see what that builder was doing wrong so that further collapses could be prevented?  And yet for far too long now we have tolerated the collapse of nearly one-half of all marriages that are performed each year.  We’ve become callused and desensitized to the tragic demise of this sacred institution and all the negative consequences that divorce invariably brings with it.  And that’s sad.  But the good news is there is hope and there is help for every single family out there.  And it all begins with going back to the owner’s manual and agreeing on a few basic things that that manual reveals to us.

   For example, we need to understand that God is the originator and designer of marriage and the family.  He came up with the idea of marriage, he wrote the book on it, so obviously he knows what’s best.  He knows how to make marriage work.  Unfortunately, we’re surrounded by a lot of people and entities today, including many government officials, who think they know better than God.  Just tune in to any television program, especially any modern sit-com, and almost without exception you’re going to see people displaying and promoting and advocating something different than God had in mind for marriage.  For example, God calls for one man and one woman in marriage rather than one man and several women as can be seen on a popular television program called “Sister Wives.”  And since God says marriage is to be only for one man and one woman he does not intend for it to be between one man and one man or one woman and one woman which sadly is not just a TV fantasy anymore but has actually become the law in certain states in our country now.  God calls for sex after marriage rather than sex before marriage, something you’re not going to see very often on the television or movie screen these days.  God calls for mutual submission between husband and wife in the marriage relationship rather than me demanding my rights over those of my spouse.  God calls for parents to put their children ahead of their career rather than their career ahead of their children.  He calls for marriage to be a binding lifelong covenant between a man and a woman rather than a contract that can be easily gotten out of.  But rarely do we see God’s plan for marriage being played out on the television or movie screen these days.  And that's sad because listen to what our text for today says: “I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “they are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.” 

   So God has a plan.  And his plan is for our good.  That’s where we’ve got to start.  The problem though is that man so often ignores or resists the plan.  Of course that’s nothing new.  It’s been that way ever since Adam and Eve were told by God that they could eat of any tree in the garden except one.  So what did they do?  They ate of the forbidden one.  And that sin nature that had its beginning in the garden, that proclivity to rebel, that tendency and desire to do the opposite of what God wants us to do is something that has been passed on from generation to generation all the way down to you and me.  We’re like the bicycle rider we heard about before.  God puts up a sign that says, “Do not enter” and what do we do?  We ignore the sign and we enter. 

   And I would suggest to you this morning, my friends, that the same Satan who whispered in Adam and Eve’s ear in the garden is hanging around your family these days.  And over the next few weeks of this sermon series when God calls you to be forgiving and faithful to your spouse, to be morally pure, to be parentally and financially responsible, you’re going to hear the old evil foe whispering in your ear and saying, “Don’t listen to that old gray-bearded fellow up there.  He has no idea what he’s talking about.  He’s so out of touch with our modern times.  He’s so old-fashioned.”  And you know what?  If all I was going to offer you in this sermon series on the family were my thoughts and my opinions, I would have to agree with Satan.  I wouldn’t suggest you listen to me either.  But that’s not what I’m going to offer.  Rather we’re going back to the owner’s manual to see what the originator of marriage and the family has to say.

   For example, in Ephesians 5 the Apostle Paul, writing under the inspiration and authority of the Holy Spirit, gives us what I like to call God’s blueprint for a successful marriage when he says in v.21: “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.”  And then he goes on to describe how this idea of mutual submission should work its way out in a marriage relationship.  He first of all deals with the wives and says that they are to submit to their husbands in the same way that the Church submits to Christ.  Now a lot of women don’t like that passage because they feel that Paul is being a male chauvinist there, that he’s saying women are inferior to men and wives are to serve as their husband’s doormat.  But that’s not what he is saying at all.  Rather, when he says that wives are to submit to their husbands in the same way the Church submits to Christ, we need to ask ourselves, How does the Church show its submission to Christ?  And the best answer I’ve been able to come up with there is that the Church shows its submission to Christ by striving to please Christ in all that it does.  Is that asking too much of a wife to do for her husband?  I don’t think so provided the husband submits to her the way Paul goes on to describe. 

   He says that husbands are to love their wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.  So the husband is to have such a self-giving, self-sacrificing kind of love for his wife that he always places her needs and her desires ahead of himself and his needs and his desires.  If a man will love his wife like that then I can pretty well guarantee you that she will have no problem striving to please him in all that she does.  In fact, this will become a beautiful cycle that keeps repeating itself over and over again throughout the marriage.  The more he loves her sacrificially, the more she wants to please him.  And the more she pleases him, the more he wants to sacrifice for her, and so on. 

   That’s the plan of the master designer.  That’s his blueprint for marriage.  And well-blessed is the couple that takes it to heart and tries to outdo one another in this area of mutual submission.

   Let me close then with a true story about a fellow named Stefan who was in charge of the family forest in Germany.  This forest had been in his family for several generations.  It was his job to harvest and sell the trees that his father and grandfather had planted.  But then it was also his responsibility to replace those trees, to plant the seeds and saplings of trees that his children and grandchildren would one day harvest and sell. 

   You see the connection there?  You see the linkage between the generations?  One entirely dependent upon the other.  I would suggest that the same is true with our families.  Some of you inherited a phenomenal forest – great parents, wonderful grandparents, stable home life.  That’s something to be thankful for, isn’t it?  I know I am, especially today which is the 1^st anniversary of my dad’s death.  Had he lived 6 more months and 1 day he and my mom would have been married for 65 years.  That’s the legacy, that’s the forest that they passed on to my brother and sister and me.  And yes, I am very thankful for it.  But then there are some of you here today who weren’t so fortunate, who didn’t inherit much of a forest.  Yours was barren and dry with lots of decay and disease in the family tree.  But you know what?  It doesn’t have to continue that way.  You don’t have to pass that same legacy, that same forest on to your kids.  The cycle can stop with you.  Starting today you can plant seeds that will bear fruit for years, decades, and generations to come.  And that’s really my primary goal in this sermon series that I’m starting today, all in the hopes that every one of you will experience a little bit more of heaven in your homes.  Let’s pray:

Father, you have established the family as the centerpiece and cornerstone of society.  And yet, as we’ve heard here today, so many families, including many within our own congregation, are floundering and failing.  We need your help, Lord.  We need your direction.  Speak to our hearts throughout the course of this sermon series that we’ve begun today as we study the owner’s manual and hear what you have to say about our homes, our families, our marriages.  Let your Holy Spirit have his way with us that we might experience to the fullest your gracious blessing and presence in all our homes.  In Jesus’ name.

Amen