A.M.D.E.R.

 

A.M.D.E.R.

Abraham, Moses, David, Exile, Return

God is faithful

 God made an everlasting covenant with Abraham. He also made covenants with Moses and David.  God always keeps his promises. He is faithful. And yet God made these covenants with imperfect, unfaithful humans (now there's an oxymoron). God not only keeps his part of these covenants, but has fulfilled our part as well.  

 Genesis 17: 3-8

³ Abram fell facedown, and God said to him, ⁴ "As for me, this is my covenant with you: You will be the father of many nations. ⁵ No longer will you be called Abram ; your name will be Abraham, for I have made you a father of many nations. ⁶ I will make you very fruitful; I will make nations of you, and kings will come from you. ⁷ I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you. ⁸ The whole


land of

Canaan , where you are now an alien, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you; and I will be their God."

Leviticus 26: 14 - 17

¹⁴ " 'But if you will not listen to me and carry out all these commands, ¹⁵ and if you reject my decrees and abhor my laws and fail to carry out all my commands and so violate my covenant, ¹⁶ then I will do this to you: I will bring upon you sudden terror, wasting diseases and fever that will destroy your sight and drain away your life. You will plant seed in vain, because your enemies will eat it. ¹⁷ I will set my face against you so that you will be defeated by your enemies; those who hate you will rule over you, and you will flee even when no one is pursuing you.

Hebrews 9:15

 ¹⁵For this reason Christ is the mediator of a new covenant, that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance—now that he has died as a ransom to set them free from the sins committed under the first covenant.

 Breaking a covenant with God has consequences, and yet in His mercy, He has rescued and redeemed us.

 In his sermon, Chris mentioned the covenant that Erin and Greg made with one another at their wedding. Society really does have it turned upside down. And so do I. For the longest time, I wanted to get married because I wanted to be in love. I bought into the fairy tale, into society's reasons for getting married. I thought that being a Christian meant that I had a deeper more profound reason for staying married, because we would both being making a promise before God to be together until "death do us part".

 Don't get me wrong, marriage is good for family and society, but as Gary Thomas says in his book "Sacred Marriage", what if God designed marriage to make us holy more than to make us happy?

 Marriage is a covenant between a husband and wife, a reflection of God's covenant with us, an arena in which we intimately live out love, sin, and forgiveness much like how God deals with each of us in our own relationship with Him. That's why the Lord hates divorce so much. If marriage is reflection of His covenant, how dare we walk away and tarnish His image?!  God would never break his promise. And the thing is that God made this promise with us, imperfect and unfaithful us! The reason that we make this covenant of marriage before God is because keeping up our end of it is not conditional on the other person. When we are faithless, He is faithful.

 Ephesians 5:22 & 25

²²Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord.  

²⁵Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.

 The above verse doesn't say "Wives, submit to your husbands as long as he love you" nor "Husbands, love your wives as long as she submits". Rather we are called to do these things as though we are loving and serving the Lord just as he loves and cares for us.

 Non-Christians get married every single day, but they don't enter such a covenant. And perhaps a lot of Christians don't comprehend this covenant either (I'm 25 and I didn't realize this until today!). It's not surprising that 50% of marriages end in divorce. What's surprising is that so many make it.  When I couldn't picture myself standing at the altar yesterday, it was because I'm not "in love", because I couldn't picture myself promising to love somebody forever. And that's because it's impossible. People give you plenty of reasons not to love them, not to be attracted to them, not to be head-over-heals in love.

 And no wonder He tells us not to marry non Christians! If you were going on a mission (and marriage is very much a ministry to the world around us and each other), would you want to bind yourself with someone who doesn't share the same view, the same goal? Of course not!  But that's not what society says. Society says that we can't help who we fall in love with, that we have to follow our heart, that marriage is the ultimate "next level" for such a feeling. I really don't need to hear about what the world has to say on this subject, because they've got it backwards.

 I'm no longer looking to get married because I want to be in love. That's like a buying a house because you like the paint on the walls. I'm asking the Lord to lead me to someone who I can enter this covenant with in order to honor and glorify Him. Like I've said before, I've got a love sick 13 year-old inside of me. Once the Lord makes it mutually clear who I might marry, I've no doubt that she will head over heals.