uh prior to the service that his professional association of geologists when they go to a conference they go to Hawaii and when pastors go to a conference they go to Sexmith Alberta. So I don’t know how that works but that’s how it works. So we’re we’ve been going through the sermon on the mount Matthew chapters 5-7. Uh and the section we’re in is a particular section in the sermon where Jesus opens up six files or six test cases which challenge the superficiality of religion as it was commonly practiced in his day. And in opening those files, all Jesus wants us to do is to realize the deeper heart of God behind some of these uh issues and some of these matters so that he presses us away from just cold black and white technical obedience to God into a warm colorized realm of real relationships with real people. A lot of these test cases uh show us dealing with difficult people. And we all have to deal with difficult people, but that’s how God relates to each one of us is to a difficult person. And Jesus urges us then to imitate the heart of God. So Jesus tells us that when we’re when we nurture an angry, contemptuous attitude toward other people, we’re just fostering the same instincts of a murderer despite the fact that we’re never going to probably act on those instincts. It’s the same thing in God’s eyes. and said uh last time for a man to look lustfully at a woman to entertain just a fantasized sexual longing that doesn’t involve a whole life commitment to her. Jesus says that the fantasy is just an invisible act of adultery. And both the fantasy and the act seek to steal something from another person that we don’t have any right to. So that first file concerning anger was addressed to everyone. Uh Jesus addresses the next two files more specifically to men. And just as Jesus’ comments on lust and adultery placed a restriction on men and bestowed deep value and honor on women, so does this next file uh dealing with marriage and divorce. You know, there’s Proverbs chapter 30. There’s a guy named Agger and he says there are four things that he just can’t figure out. The first three have to do with science, with things like animal behavior and physics. And he poetically builds up to the fourth thing. The thing that amazes him that he just can’t get hold of, he says, is the way of a man with a maiden. It’s guy girl stuff. It’s mysterious to him. And I think if we’re honest, it remains somewhat mysterious to all of us. I know here this morning, we’re a bit of a mly crew. We have some uh who have been widowed. We have some lifelong single people. We have um younger single people, a good match of married couples. There are a lot of relational histories represented among us. some pretty comfortable and pretty pretty delightful, some pretty painful. But despite all of the different uh um restrictions or uh or exceptions, the relational story that most of us gravitate toward is toward marriage. Genesis chapter 2, God said, “It’s not good for man to be alone.” So, he created woman, called the man and woman away from their original families to hold fast to one another and to become one flesh. And God calls that marriage. And for those who are in it, we know that at its best, marriage is utterly amazing. It’s brilliantly fulfilling. It’s great fun. At its worst, it’s excruciating. It’s difficult. It’s painful. And although we might experience both sides of it, uh, and often feel like we’re just kind of muddling our way through, for most of us, marriage continues to feel like it’s the right story for our lives. Now this morning, we’re not making an idol out of marriage. It’s not the thing we worship. It’s not the thing that we want to impose on everyone or or insist that everyone take part in. Yet, by the end of our time together, the goals would be that married people here are encouraged in their relationships. And those who have been longtime single don’t feel left out. Those who’ve experienced the pain of divorce receive some comfort and some healing. And those who are single and would like to get married get some actually some practical advice. And that’s a big job. You can pray for me. I’m going to try to cover it all. We’ll give it a whirl. I don’t know if we’ll succeed or not. But in this section, Jesus begins by talking about people who are making a real mess out of marriage. He says, “It has been said, anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce. But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife except for marital unfaithfulness makes her commit adultery and whoever marries the divorced woman commits adultery. We have to do a little bit of time travel here to see what Jesus is saying because we live in a time in our western world where many of our divorces actually about 70% are initiated by women. That’s not the case at all in the first century world. ancient times, a woman’s place in society largely depended on her relationship to a man, to her father, to her husband, maybe to a son. There’s a great power differential between the husband, who was the land owner, the income earner, and his dependent wife. So, in Israel, in Jesus’ time, everyone assumed that a man could find a reasonable justification to divorce his wife, but it didn’t really work vice versa. wasn’t unheard of, but extremely rare for a wife to divorce her husband. Man had every right to cast his wife aside if he could just find some grounds or justification for it. Much depended on the interpretation of a little piece of regulatory law in the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy 24:1. And two of the leading Jewish rabbis held quite divergent opinions on this verse. And Jesus targets this verse to reveal the true interpretation and the true heart of God behind it. This little regulatory law, if you read it, it reads like a mortgage document. It’s got full of legal ease. It’s full of conditional statements and clauses. And it says this. If a man marries a woman who becomes displeasing to him because he finds something indecent about her and he writes her a certificate of divorce and gives it to her and sends her from his house. And if after she leaves his house, she becomes the wife of another man, the second husband dislikes her and writes her a certificate of divorce, gives it to her and sends her from his house, or if he dies, those are all the conditional clauses. Then her first husband who divorced her is not allowed to marry her again after she’s been defiled. That would be detestable in the eyes of the Lord. So, the rabbis, the only thing they focused in on from that passage was that little clause about uh a woman displeasing her husband because he finds something about her to be indecent. It was a more conservative rabbi named Shamai, and he said, “Oh, for a man to divorce uh his wife, she must have done something very morally shameful.” And by contrast, the lab uh the liberal Rabbi Hell, he was pretty generous concerning grounds for divorce. He said, “A man could dump his wife if she was just incompetent in the kitchen, if she burned his toast, if she said something uh negative about her mother-in-law, if she simply talked to another man in the street, or if her husband after a while decided that she was kind of plain and the other woman looked a little prettier, all were considered justifiable grounds for divorce.” So, it seems that in Jesus’ day, that more liberal view carried substantial weight. So that small clause in Deuteronomy 24:1 stripped from its context was considered a man’s get out of jail free card. But on close inspection, we see there’s actually a clear protection here that the law is offering to the wife, to the woman. Look at the restrictions placed on men. It can’t be a no fault divorce. There have to be some solid grounds for putting an end to the marriage for the wife to survive being tossed out by her husband. It was something of a given that she would have to remarry because land was acquired and passed on to male heirs. So, if she were single, the situation could likely leave her destitute. Maybe she could go back to her father’s house, uh maybe to one of her brothers. But to move forward in life with a family and children of her own to be shielded from poverty, she’d have to remarry. So, Deuteronomy 24 required that the man give the woman a written certificate of divorce in front of two witnesses. Man had to think really seriously about what he was doing. With that certificate, the woman could at least prove that she had been legally divorced. When she remarried, her husband couldn’t try to destroy her new marriage by reclaiming her. When he gave her that certificate, she was effectively done with him. And even if she became divorced a second time or was widowed, uh he had no right to further interfere in her life and try to reclaim her as her own. That law of Moses uh written to ancient Israel should have made a man think twice before divorcing someone he might later realize was really a great gift to him, someone he was really meant to be with for life, someone he would yearn to have back. Maybe he’d think twice before assuming that the grass was greener on the other side of the fence. So that clause, that little regulatory concession for divorce in Deuteronomy only existed, Jesus said in Matthew chapter 19, because of the natural hardness of men’s hearts toward women. And men’s hearts toward women can be pretty hard. 5 years ago in 2017, these five Muslim women in India challenged their divorces in the Indian Supreme Court. One of these women is illiterate. Another has a master’s degree in English. ones working on her MBA. And these five women representing hundreds of others backed by a petition of 50,000 signatures sought to have a tradition outlawed by which Muslim men can obtain an instant divorce. For centuries, Muslim men with the approval of their clergy had been able to instantly divorce their wives by uttering what is known as the triple tac, simply saying the word talac or divorce three consecutive times. That practice is 1400 years old. It’s been given a modern twist. More recently, men have delivered the triple tac by phone, by email, by text, by WhatsApp. They can do it for whatever reason they want or no reason at all. One woman was given the triple tac because she had only been able to give birth to daughters. Another was given the triple tac while she was recovering from a serious car accident. And out of the blue, their marriage was over. And for some that meant they no longer had access to their children. During the court case, the influential all India Muslim personal law board uh opposed the ban. They claimed this practice has been around for 1400 years. And they argued that although it’s sinful, triple tilac is a matter of faith for Muslims. They argued that if men were unable to divorce their wives this way, they might resort to illegal criminal ways of murdering her or burning her alive. And despite that opposition, the court ruled in favor of the women and declared that triple toac unconstitutional. 5 years after that decision, now it really hasn’t made life any easier for those women. Their husbands haven’t taken them back. Upon issuing the triple tac, their husbands remarried, started new families, new children. Women now are left in a legal limbo. They’re unsure whether they’re divorced or not because the Muslim tradition says they are. Civil courts say they aren’t. They don’t receive any support from their husbands. They struggle financially. On top of that, one of the women says, “I’ll always have to live with stigma all my life because in India, the woman’s always considered responsible for divorce. They may try to remarry, but that’ll be a pretty tough go.” And since that triple tack has been declared a criminal offense, cases of men simply abandoning their wives has spiked exponentially. One woman said it’s happening because men don’t want to give any maintenance to women. This is very painful. The law has not helped. See that hardness of heart that men may acrue their casual attitude toward divorce. That’s exactly why Jesus says that little small regulatory law in Deuteronomy was given by God through Moses to the people of Israel. So men shouldn’t view it as their get out of jail free card. They should be ashamed of the need for such a law in the first place. Jesus goes on to say that even if the man does file the paperwork, woman’s released from the marriage, even then the couple’s original covenantal one flesh union marriage has not just disappeared. He says, “I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, makes her commit adultery. Whoever marries the divorced man commits adultery.” Remember from two weeks ago, we were talking about that little section in 1 Corinthians 6 where it says, “If a man even spends one night with a prostitute, it fuses him into a one flesh relationship with her.” Same kind of one flesh relationship that’s meant to be reserved for marriage. You don’t mess around with those one flesh unions because they never simply dissolve no matter how casually we take them. No coupled relationship, either within or outside of marriage, ever just goes away. doesn’t evaporate. And if you ask anyone who’s experienced divorce or who’s had a premarital or extrammarital sexual relationship, they know all too well that there’s no clean breaks in that stuff. Yeah. Marital unfaithfulness spoils the union. Jesus knows that adultery may well be considered something the marriage can’t recover from. Unfaithfulness does smear and it corrupts the relationship, but it doesn’t completely erase it. So for a man to divorce his wife for any lesser reason effectively forces her into a second one flesh relationship on top of the one she already has. So nothing’s being replaced, just being added on to. That’s why those new relationships are referred to as adulteress. So that’s Jesus’ word in the sermon on the mount to men who are messing up this whole idea of marriage. It’s not Jesus’ last word on the subject. He returns to it later in Matthew 19. It’s also recorded in Mark chapter 10. You know, while the men he speaks to are pretty much marriage pessimists, Jesus remains a marriage optimist. He’s not going to get wrapped up into all the technicalities of what constitutes grounds for divorce. He tells his disciples in Matthew 19 and Mark 10, it’s because of the hardness of your heart that Moses allowed you to divorce your wives. But it wasn’t that way from the beginning. And again, he says, “If you divorce your wife except for sexual immorality, you commit adultery.” The disciples, their reaction is amazing because they’re flabbergasted by that. They’re gasping for air. And the disciples, Jesus’ closest men, say, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, oh, it’s just it’s better not to marry.” They’re thinking, “If there’s no possible escape pod from this thing, maybe we’d give the whole idea of marriage a rethink.” And I don’t know how many of them were married. I know Peter was married and I wonder what his wife thought of his reaction to Jesus’ words that day. He may have had to sleep on his boat that night, I think. But Jesus takes them back then to the original plot, the original story of marriage given by God. He says to them, in effect, once upon a time, he says, “From the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother, hold fast to his wife. The two shall become one flesh. They’re no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together. Let not man separate. And Jesus always wants us to return to the good story of marriage, the one back in the garden where it all began. So instead of debating or arbitrating grounds for divorce, Jesus says God had a dream for the relationships of the people that he made for this world. And there’d be this natural complimentary coming together of a man and his wife. And they discover a new kind of oneness. and it would be solid and it’d be permanent because God himself would be the one putting it together. So, it’s like fusing two bones together. It’s not Lego pieces that can be pulled apart and put it put back at will. And so, before we try to inject any of our modern nuances or ideas or objections to the story Jesus is telling, we should just stand back for a moment and look at the original story that God had for a man and woman to come together in marriage. And when we’ve looked at it and marveled at it and accepted it for what it is, then we can talk about the idea of marital failure. Fallout, it’s not fallout caused because God built something that wasn’t structurally sound. God provided us with something good, but it’s fallout just caused by human hearts that get hard toward one another and mess up that original story. And we do distort it and mess it up so much that we we hardly know how to process our attractions and our endurance and our commitments and our promises. Tim Keller talks about this subject by using the illustration of a baby in a car seat. He says we can’t ever explain the need for a car seat to a fussy baby. We strap them in. We tell them we are the parents and they’re the child. says, “When Jesus talks to us about sex and marriage, it’s not a car seat that many in the world want to fit into, but we see relationships crashing around us every day. And we read need to realize that if we’re not secured, if we’re not strapped in, we might go through the windshield at any moment.” See, we have no idea what we’re messing with when we take this area of relationships in our own hands. But Jesus says that surrendering to him and staying in the story is the safest place we’ll ever be. And it can be good be good and it can stay good for a long time. There’s a jazz guitarist named Vic Dalah and on one of his recent albums he included this loping western tinged instrumental. The last song is called simply Ricky loves Lulu. And the inspiration for that song came from seeing those words graffitied on a railroad bridge over the interstate near Eerie, Colorado. And back in the 90s, he’d drive under that bridge every day on his way to college. Says for years, it was a familiar landmark to those who lived north of Denver. One day, Railroad repainted the bridge. Next weekend, in the same handwriting as the original were the words, “Ricky still loves Lulu.” Guys, if you’re looking for that great romantic gesture, that’s pretty good. Take note of that. He Vic Dalah says he thought that deserved a song. And every marriage that stays in the story God has for them uh deserves a song as well. So although marriage has been designed by God to be beautiful and lasting, we know we break marriage covenants all the time. A broken covenant is is uh not something God really understands because it’s so foreign to who he is. Any kind of covenantal unfaithfulness is the antithesis of God’s character. As sinful people, we’re we’re capable of being faithless. 2 Timothy 2:13 says, “Though we can be faithless, God is incapable of being unfaithful to us.” And throughout the Old Testament, many times God compares his relationship with his people to that of a husband to an adulterous wife. Jeremiah 2:1, God fondly remembers his people as his lovely new bride. I remember the devotion of your youth. how as a bride you loved me and you followed me through the desert. By Jeremiah 3:1, God speaks of the subsequent unfaithfulness of his people. They gave into spiritual apathy and idolatry. Says, “You have lived as a prostitute with many lovers. Would you now return to me, declares the Lord.” Book of Hosea, it’s riveting because God commands his servant Hosea to marry a girl who’s going to be proved to be very unfaithful to him. And God compares his relationship with his people to that relationship. And Hosea, he is surreptitiously trying to provide for his wife even as she’s in the arms in the house of another man. And it’s just how God continues to provide for his people who continue to be adulterous and unfaithful. Now, who could blame God for just giving us our divorce papers and sending us permanently away? Instead, in Hosea 2, we just see God’s counterintuitive love for faithless people like us. Says, “Therefore, I am now going to allure her. I will lead her into the desert and speak tenderly to her. There I’ll give her back her vineyards. I’ll make the valley of Acor a door of hope. There she will sing as in the days of her youth, as in the day she came up out of Egypt.” So rather than divorce us, God takes us to a place where we can be undistracted. He can speak tenderly to us, open up a door of hope. We’re all unfaithful sinners. We all chase after idols and we all chase after other lovers that we think provide us with a better time. Whether it’s money or sex or entertainment or career, just general selfishness. God was justifiably angry with us. He created us to be faithful, but we became unfaithful. So, he came up with a way to set aside his anger through Jesus dying on the cross in our place. The anger of God was placed on the shoulders of the son. It was Jesus who cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And that should have been our mournful cry for all of eternity. Because it was our sin that caused the separation. But if you’re a Christian here today, whether you recognize it at particular moment in your life or just naturally and quite graciously it became part of you, at some point you were taken to a place where God spoke tenderly to you. You heard his voice. You repented of as much of your sin as you knew about at the time. You put your faith and trust in what Jesus had done for you. And then your father took you and adopted you into his family. And he placed you within his church that he refers to as his beloved bride and our unfaithfulness, our broken relationships. If there’s tattered threads in our lives of breakups and divorce and lust and adultery and abortion, this can all be covered by Jesus. It’s all forgiven. And he calls all of us to a new beginning. Continues to speak tenderly to us as we lean by faith into his love and forgiveness. Nothing we’ve done in our relational lives has put us out of reach of his grace. Let’s think through just for the last few moments some implications of this because God’s task for us as a church is quite big in this area. It’s to involve ourselves in one another’s relational lives. Marriage isn’t meant just to be a personal thing. Marriage needs friendships. All relationships need friendships. And God calls his church to provide those. The longtime single people, God wants the church to be their families. Psalm 68:6 says that God sets the lonely in families. God also asks his church to exhibit special care and concern for those whose spouses have passed away. For people who’ve been through divorce with or without remarage, we’re to offer grace, not judgment. If God forgives and offers new beginnings, how can we not do that ourselves? We don’t like divorce. No one likes it, especially those who go through it. So, we provide prayer and resources. We try to help couples who are in the process of breaking up. And sometimes, maybe not as often as we’d like, sometimes a church even gets to assist a couple on a path back from divorce toward marital reconciliation. And finally, for those who are single and would like to get married, but they’re unsure and they have questions, our job as a church is just to reaffirm the good story that Jesus says marriage is all about. like to address that last group just for a few moments as we close. 2020 sociology professor University of Texas Mark Ragnarus put out a broadly researched both academic and practical book entitled the future of Christian marriage and his research meth method involved conducting interviews with nearly 200 church-going young adult lay Christians median age of 27. He conducted his interviews at various spots around the world. The United States, Mexico, Spain, Poland, Russia, Lebanon, and Nigeria. And those he interviewed came from Catholic churches, Orthodox churches, many stripes of Protestantism. And the interviews were exploring how today’s Christians find a a mate in a faith that esteems marriage, but a world that that increasingly yawns at it. That book is jammed with a lot. If you’re nerdy like I am, the book’s jammed with lots of statistics and interview segments and correlating insights and but one particular trend just dominates the book. It stands above everything else. It covers it it spans all the local. A major trend with some concerning side effects. That trend as Ragnar as Ragnar describes it is that marriage is now viewed by many as a capstone rather than a foundation. And what he means by that is the capstone is the finishing touch of a structure. It’s something you add on at the end. Foundation is something the building rests on. A capstone can be replaced if necessary, but a foundation is loadbearing for the entire length of the structure. And Regaras finds increasing numbers of young Christian adults not considering marriage as a formative institution, but as an institution they enter once they’re fully formed. First you get your life together. You get your career and your finances in order. You establish your independence. Then you think of marriage. As Ragnarus puts it, marriage is now something individuals aspire to rather than something a couple enters in order to help them fulfill their aspirations. In the contrasting foundational vision, being newly married and poor was difficult, expected, and typically temporary. In the capstone standard, being poor is a sign that there’s something wrong with you, that you’re not marriage material yet. Foundational model would consider marriage as a way to reach the goal of financial stability together. A capstone says that marriage is your prize for having achieved that stability on your own. So, it’s not constructing your adult lives together, but building your own first before you add a second into the mix. Now, as a result of that capstone method, marriage gets delayed, gets pushed back, people get married later, results in an overall marriage recession. Every year that the average age of marriage goes up, fewer marriages actually occur. And that age of marriage has skyrocketed skyrocketed. And with that capstone view, persons getting married might be a little more rigid. They’ve had many more years just to be on their own, less capable and flexible of adjusting to another person. And that’s been the case in the western world where an enormous increase in the numbers of people who just live alone. One of the side effects of that model is that it turns marriage into kind of an upper middle class thing. Regularis writes that the capstone vision has unwittingly turned marriage into an unaffordable luxury good. He says it may sound outlandish but it’s not. Marriage is the social justice issue of our time. He says the working class and the poor, they have to deal with alternate arrangements that fall short of marriage because two advantaged successful people can come together and combine their wealth and income through marriage, disadvantaged people are left without even the help of one another. Says the more that marriage is repackaged and sold in the west as a capstone rather than a foundation, the higher up the social ladder it climbs. And many of the interviewees that he felt uh they felt they had to save up enormous funds just to put on the wedding they wanted. So it delayed the process even further. They had to raise 20 or $30,000. But the alternative really is nothing. If you get married in the sanctuary and have a dinner and dance in the church gym, we can we can do it really cheap for people who want to get married. Another thing Regares discovered is that that capstone model, the only way it can operate really is because it depends on cheap sex. Virtually all of the interviewees, whether they were sexually active or not, agreed that sex was pretty easily accessible. Cheap in the sense that for men to obtain sex from women, they weren’t required to give back much in in terms of time, attention, resources, recognition, or even fidelity. Abstinence felt costly because it was raising the price on sex, hoping that someone would be willing to pay it without pricing yourself out of the market altogether. So those extended years of sexual tension created by later marriages, they’re difficult for people to navigate. Since premarital sex, it’s a big gamble to take on the future of your relationship. It slows down the maturation of the relationship. It diminishes the odds of eventual marriage. When premarital sex is involved, there’s also the risk that the shift from a relationship in which sex plays more of a lead role among two independent adults to one in which sex plays a supporting role in an interdependent union of marital intimacy and commitment, it’s often too much of a jolt for people to overcome. He says, “But trying to renegotiate the sexual terms of a relationship after a couple has already been sexually intimate, it’s difficult. Few relationships survive the withdrawal of sex. One final, I think, concerning side effect of the capstone model is it leads to greater uncertainty when it comes to marriage because the more successful you are personally and the longer marriage is delayed, the choosier you become and the less certain you are when selecting your mate. Tim Keller suggests that people are actually asking for too much in a marriage partner. Often the uncertainty of the capstone model results couples living together or cohabiting prior to marriage. And it seems like a sensible way of getting to know the other person and reducing the risk of marriage. But it actually increases the risk. Cohabiting toward before marriage makes relationships more fragile and less secure. But it’s really hard to convince people of that. University of Denver psychologist, relationships expert Scott Stanley explains how cohabitation increases constraints among people because you start sharing things like rent and pets and debts and furniture, sometimes children, and all of those are mixed together prior to the couple making a greater commitment to one another. As a result, he says, some poorly matched couples marry who otherwise might have broken up because cohabitation constrained them and it made it difficult for them to move on. Uncertainty before marriage, it’s not overcome by experimenting with a temporary trial cohabitation to see whether you’re compatible. The only way to combat uncertainty really is commitment. And that’s the very thing that cohabiting couples are shying away from. Ragner says he’s often asked then, “What then is the best age to get married?” And he answers by saying that waiting until you’re 75 is probably the best way to guarantee that your marriage is going to last the rest of your life. In other words, there’s no way to eliminate the risk and uncertainty, but that can be half the fun of getting married in the first place. Now, Charlene will often tell you, maybe you’ve heard anyone with an earshot, she’ll say this, she’s been doing this for years. She always says she married a banker, not a preacher. And she did. Neither of us suspected when we got married in our mid20s that after a little more than a year of marriage, instead of buying a house and settling in, we’d each quit our jobs and commit to four more grueling years of school and all the costs involved. And we’d do it at a seminary outside Canada and we’d live not knowing exactly how we’d support ourselves and where the money would come from. and would keep having kids at the same time, which is totally irresponsible. And it was, but somehow, and if you ask me to explain exactly how it worked, I’m not sure I could, but it did work. And we couldn’t see the end from the beginning. We were up for the adventure of constructing our adult lives together and building a foundation as a couple. Marriage certainly was not our capstone. And I’m sure our story, it’s it’s not a it’s not a particularly heroic story. is probably the story of a number of people here who viewed their marriage as an opportunity to build their foundation together. So, I’m going to wrap up there. I’m not a matchmaker. Uh we’ve wandered quite far a field from Jesus’ comments on divorce and the sermon on the mount, but I do believe in marriage and I believe in building a foundation together. It’s a durable, reliable story and it is one that most of us gravitate toward. But as Regenerys points out, it either works on its own terms or it recedes. It allows for acceptance or rejection, but it really doesn’t allow for modification. He notes that despite civil laws which allow otherwise, marriage continues to remain largely heteronormative, observing that the rate of marriage uptake by same-sex couples is a fraction of those of opposite sex couples. Marriage is not really very malible or customizable. It’s resistant to change. As Jesus insisted, once begun, it’s hard to get out of. It’s difficult to end. But that’s exactly what we would expect marriage to be if it was an institution given us by our creator God and not something that we just made up somewhere along the evol unguided evolutionary journey. Our church, we’re meant to be a church supports one another in our relationships. We encourage one another. We build up one another. We help those who’ve been wounded relationally. Let’s commit to doing that together as a church. And let’s pray. Father, this is such a difficult area for us and so many histories represented right here in this room relationally. And we know that you you love and care for every individual in this room. That you have uh forgiveness and new beginnings for any of our mistakes that we’ve made relationally. We thank you for this mysterious gift of marriage that we we’re our hearts are drawn to but we often don’t know how to make work. And we just pray for commitment and grace and that as a church we would support one another and encourage one another in reaffirming that good good story that you gave us back in the garden and that Jesus wants to point us toward. And we pray these things in Jesus’ name. Amen. Let’s have our worship team come.