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Genesis 1:31, Proverbs 18:22

Marriage: A God Thing!

Filed Under: Devotions by Chuck
January 7, 2013

Our society does not understand the biblical view of marriage. The best evaluation I can find for it in the mass-media world we live in is that it’s a “meaningful relationship.” It doesn’t even have to be between a man and a woman it just needs to be “meaningful.” But nobody knows that that means. Sometimes it applies to sexual activity, sometimes it applies to emotional bonds, sometimes it simply means compatible personalities, and sometimes it means a profitable (financially) arrangement. With these as the basis of the idea of “meaningful” it’s not uncommon to find that those bonds don’t always hold a couple together. Furthermore, there’s a tendency to promote the single life as the superior life. The fancy free, footloose life of the situation comedies single stars proclaims their own view of marriage. It is not uncommon to see people yearning after their single friend’s lifestyles and feeling trapped themselves.

To understand God’s purposes for marriage, we must understand what the Bible says. We must accept it, embrace it, defend it, and proclaim it. As I studied the Bible in preparation for this series on Home and Family, I recognized seven views of marriage that should control our thinking. The first observation is that marriage is a “gift” from God. No, it’s a “good gift.” In Genesis God proclaimed all his creation “good”, but after the creation of man, “male and female” he pronounced it “very good.” Proverbs 18:22 says, “He who finds a wife, finds a good thing and obtains favor from the Lord.” The word for “favor” is the same word for “gift.” The Contemporary English Version translates this verse, “A man’s greatest treasure is his wife— she is a gift from the LORD.” This truth applies to both sexes. Don’t ever try to remove the totality of humanity from the basic principles in scripture. Although the scriptures sometimes address men separately and women separately, its basic “perspectives” on life and purpose are universal. As a wife is a good gift from God to the man, a husband is a good gift from God to the woman.

Marriage is not a social convenience, a legal fabrication, or a governmental invention. One writer put it this way, “The Bible makes it quite clear in the Genesis account of creation that God instituted the first marriage: a man and a woman united in the will of God for companionship, sexual relations, and the bearing and rearing of children. The Bible says God surveyed all he had created and declared it to be “good” (Genesis 1:31). You see, marriage is a “God” thing and it is a “good thing.”

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Nehemiah 4:14, Jeremiah 22:29

Hear Ye, Year Ye!

Filed Under: Devotions by Chuck
January 4, 2013

When Nehemiah brought the Israelites back to Jerusalem from their captivity in Babylon, his intention was to rebuild the city of Jerusalem. Actually Zerrubabel brought an earlier group back to rebuilt the city, Nehemiah returned to rebuild the walls, and Ezra’s passion was to rebuild the temple and the worship of the true God. The people in the surrounding communities weren’t real happy about it all because it threatened their lifestyle in many ways. The returning Israelites were always being enticed by the Canaanites that were living in the land and often succumbed to their enticements to forget their purpose in life and adopt the Canaanite culture and lifestyle. The enticements, much like today, seemed to surround family values: sex, marriage, family, children’s training.

The more Nehemiah and his group progressed in the rebuilding of the walls the more the nations around them intensified their efforts to stop them. The Israelites lived with a constant threat from their neighbors. Nehemiah finally had to call his people to action. He said, “And I looked and arose and said to the nobles and to the officials and to the rest of the people, do not be afraid of them. Remember the Lord, who is great and awesome, and fight for your brothers, your sons, your daughters, your wives, and your homes” (Nehemiah 4:14). It seems that our culture is constantly at war with the standards for marriage and family that God has established in His Word. But we must be careful about the rallying cry from the political candidates who will call all the leaders and people of the land to support their agenda based on a platform of “family values.” J. M. Boice, said it well: “…in the current political climate an appeal to ‘family values’ without a corresponding acknowledgment of God’s existence, God’s law, and biblical revelation as a basis for all values will always have a hollow ring and sound purely political and manipulative.”

When the nation was crumbling at the hands of the Babylonian Army, 70 years earlier, Jeremiah did his best to get the eye of the Israelites in order to call them back to true Biblical values. The nation found itself in its predicament because it deserted God’s standard. It’s the same way with us. We’ll find that once we reject God’s standards for the establishment and the maintenance of family values, we’ll be in trouble also. We must put God’s word at the center of our value system if we’re to save ourselves and our children and our families as a whole. Jeremiah’s beautiful cry to the wayward people gives me goose bumps when I think that in many ways our nation has drifted from the sound and unshakable convictions regarding God’s revelation to us, The Bible. Jeremiah cries out to the people of his day and to us in our day in Chapter 22, verse 29. He says, “O Land, Land, Land, hear the word of the Lord!”

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John 11:43

The Day The Music Died

Filed Under: Devotions by Chuck
December 31, 2012

Don McLean wrote a song back in 1972 (I think) entitled “American Pie.” There are numerous theories about McLean’s intended meaning, but most seem to agree that it’s his lament over the lack of “danceable” music in the 1970s. The death of Richie Valens, the Big Bopper, and, more importantly, Buddy Holly was the single most significant tragedy in the direction, or lack of, of modern music. McLean seems to be arguing that when Holly died, the future of music died with him. It was a death that brought devastating, culture-changing consequences. But what really happened, in my opinion, was that in the decade of the ’60s, a cultural revolution brought about by rebellion, drugs, and sexual promiscuity destroyed the harmony of the American Family. A more significant kind of death took place with much greater consequences in our culture, and it’s been occurring all around us for over 50 years. The sad part is it doesn’t even arrest our attention anymore.

According to Barbara Dafoe Whitehead (The Divorce Culture [New York: Vintage, 1998]), “For most of the nation’s history, divorce was a rare occurrence and an insignificant feature of family and social relationships.” Divorce did not become commonplace until after 1960, according to Whitehead. She says that divorce “doubled in roughly a decade and continued its upward climb until the early 1980s when it stabilized at the highest level among advanced Western societies. As a consequence of this sharp and sustained rise,” says Whitehead, “divorce moved from the margins to the mainstream of American life in the space of three decades.” The consequent divorce culture means death for the American family. Our last fifty years define “The Day the Music Died.”

Sociologist and historian Carle Zimmerman, in his 1947 book Family and Civilization, recorded his keen observations as he compared the disintegration of various cultures with the parallel decline of family life in those cultures. Eight specific patterns of domestic behavior typified the downward spiral of each culture Zimmerman studied: “Marriage loses its sacredness; … is frequently broken by divorce; the traditional meaning of the marriage ceremony is lost; feminist movements abound; there is increased public disrespect for parents and authority in general; an acceleration of juvenile delinquency, promiscuity and rebellion occur; there is refusal of people with traditional marriages to accept family responsibilities; a growing desire for, and acceptance of, adultery is evident; there is increasing interest in, and spread of, sexual perversions and sex-related crimes.” God is really good at breathing new life into dead entities. Let’s pray that he will do that with the American Family – one family at a time. Maybe as the body of Christ in the world today, we, the church, can speak to the Family with the authority of Christ and shout, “Lazarus, come forth!”

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Luke 2:1f

Christmas Eve

Filed Under: Devotions by Chuck
December 24, 2012

Our Christmas season is well underway now. I think we begin as early as the first part of December when we begin to think much more seriously about the gifts we’re going to give to our kids. The media seems to move the focus on the commercial aspects of Christmas earlier each year. But in centuries past the Christmas season began on Christmas Eve. One commentator suggests that, “Perhaps the practice of celebrating the evening before the big day is an echo from ancient Jewish reckoning. Among earlier Jews, a day began at six in the evening and ran until six the following evening.” He then comments that even the creation account in Genesis records the evenings first,

Christmas is a combination of two words, “Christ” and “Mass.” Dan Graves goes on to suggest, “…the tradition of observing it goes back to at least the fourth century. Under the influence of the church, Christian traditions replaced pagan solstice festivals throughout Europe. Often the more innocent pagan practices (such as bringing in a Yule log, decorating with holly and the like) were carried over into the Christmas observance, transfigured with new meaning. Christmas Eve (the evening before Christmas day) was then celebrated with roaring fires, story-telling, feasting, drinking, dancing, and sometimes clowning.”

Sir Walter Scott described its festive air in a poem:

On Christmas Eve, the bells were rung;
On Christmas Eve, the mass was sung.
…
The damsel donned her kirtle sheen,
the hall was dressed with holly green;
…
All hail’d with uncontroll’d delight,
And general voice the happy night
That to the cottage, as the crown,
Brought tidings of salvation down.

Graves also notes that “Luther is supposed to have cut the first Christmas tree. The story may be apocryphal, but we know that on Christmas Eve, 1538, he was in a jolly mood, singing and talking about the incarnation. Then he sighed, saying, ‘Oh, we poor men, that we should be so cold and indifferent to this great joy which has been given us.’ Despite Luther’s lament, others would make warm memories on Christmas Eve. In his memoirs, Sir John Reresby told how he invited his poor tenants for a feast on Christmas Eve, 1682. During World War I, the famous Christmas Truce began for many troops on Christmas Eve, 1914, demonstrating the power for good that is inherent in the season.

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1 Corinthians 15:55-58

The Sting of Death

Filed Under: Devotions by Chuck
December 20, 2012

Jesus was wrapped in swaddling clothes at his birth according to the prophetic descriptions the angels gave to the Shepherds. They found him that way. The Angels said that would be a sign for them. It may not have meant a lot to others because swaddling was not uncommon. Yet the Shepherds practiced it with their sheep to insure that the new born lambs would remain fit for their deaths as sacrifices for the sins of the people. Jesus was wrapped in the swaddling at his birth to speak to them of his perfection as a fitting sacrifice. Mary wrapped him at birth, and Mary wrapped him in his grave clothes as well.

As the perfect sacrifice for our sin, He was wrapped in swaddling at his birth and again upon his death. But he did not remain in the garments of death! He left them behind in the empty tomb as a sign, not to the shepherds, but to us! The empty grave swaddling, the empty tomb is the sign that the dirge of sin and death have been expunged from mankind. Paul writes to the Corinthians (see 1 Corinthians 15:55-58), through faith in Him, we have victory over death and the grave. Death is robbed of its sting. MacDonald, in the Believer’s Commentary put it this way, “ It is a known fact that when certain insects sting a person, they leave their stinger embedded in the person’s flesh, and being thus robbed of their “sting,” they die. In a very real sense death stung itself to death at the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, and now the King of Terrors is robbed of his terror as far as the believer is concerned.”

Many of us have been struggling over the events at the elementary school in Connecticut last week. Such evil is hard to process in the view of a God who is supposed to love us and care for us all. In our minds death seems so permanent and irrevocable. But that’s simply not true. The “sting” of death has been destroyed. The “victory” that we think has been won by the grave has been reversed! Paul goes on in this passage in 1 Corinthians to exhort us all to be steadfast, immovable, and abounding in the work of the Lord, “knowing that our labor is not in vain.” You see the truth of resurrection changes everything. It provides hope and steadfastness, and enables us to go on in the face of overwhelming and difficult circumstances. There is so much more to come for us, and for the innocent people who lost their lives last week.

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Ezekiel 16:1-5, Luke 2:10

The Swaddling

Filed Under: Devotions by Chuck
December 19, 2012

Ezekiel was the prophet who was called upon by God to bring condemnation to Jerusalem for deserting the God of their fathers. Ezekiel reminded them of their sins. There’s an interesting passage in Chapter 16 regarding the illegitimacy of their birth! As strange as that might sound, Ezekiel calls Jerusalem an illegitimate child. Verses 1-5 record Ezekiel’s condemnation; “Again the word of the LORD came to me: Son of man, make known to Jerusalem her abominations, and say, Thus says the Lord GOD to Jerusalem: Your origin and your birth are of the land of the Canaanites; your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite. And as for your birth, on the day you were born your cord was not cut, nor were you washed with water to cleanse you, nor rubbed with salt, nor wrapped in swaddling clothes. No eye pitied you, to do any of these things to you out of compassion for you, but you were cast out on the open field, for you were abhorred, on the day that you were born.” The wickedness of the people caused God to look at them as illegitimate. They chose to be children of the Canaanites, or children of the world, rather than children of God.

Many scholars argue that the common practice in Israel was that when a child was born the babies were, as one writer put it, “washed with water, rubbed with finely pulverized salt, then rubbed with oil, and lastly swaddled. An illegitimate baby could not be salted or swaddled.” One writer goes on to explain this whole process: “The swaddling was done by first placing the washed baby diagonally on a swaddle cloth. The infant was then rubbed with finely powdered salt and oil. The cloth was then brought up and over the baby’s arms, legs, and torso. Next the end of the swaddle band, made by tying together strips of linen cloth about four or five inches wide and up to six yards long, was held under the baby’s chin, then wrapped up over the forehead and then around and around the infant all the way down to the feet. Swaddling kept the child warm, restricted movement, and it was also thought that it ensured the baby would grow strong without deformity.”

Mary knew something special about her baby boy. Although she had never slept with a man she knew and it seems others knew that this was a legitimate baby. The same commentator goes on to say, “She knew that despite the rumors and hatemongers this child was legitimate and so by swaddling Him she proclaims to the entire world that her baby is God’s legitimate Son.” Thinking of him swaddled in the manger brings to mind a picture of him swaddled for his burial 33 years later. Mary did both! He was born a perfect, legitimate, Son of God, to be the perfect legitimate sacrifice for our sins. This commentator concludes by saying, “He was born to die for us, and by so doing He ‘swaddled’ us, proclaiming us His legitimate children and providing a way to take away our ‘deformity.’ But most important, Jesus Christ has changed our burial linens into the swaddling bands of new birth.”

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Luke 2:8

Shepherds in their Fields

Filed Under: Devotions by Chuck
December 17, 2012

I’ve already heard on TV and from several preachers that Jesus could not have been born in December because no one would keep sheep in the fields in the month of December because of the rainy season. One of my professors at Dallas Seminary, Harold Hoehner, argues persuasively that this is nonsense. I like how Arnold Fruchtenbaum answers that question in the “Messianic Bible Study.” He says, “Anyone who says that has simply never been to the Bethlehem area in the month of December. Having lived in Israel, and having been in Bethlehem on more than one occasion in December, I can attest to the fact that there are sheep and shepherds everywhere. Israel’s rainy season is from mid-October to mid-April. From mid-April to mid-October, no rain falls in the country except on extremely rare occasions. As a result, by the time the first of October arrives, the hills and valleys are burned dry by the sun. Since the rains come in October, by the time December arrives, there is a lush, green carpet throughout the county, even in the Negev Desert. It is a great time for those sheep to be out there!”

Dr. Max Younce also defends the traditional date of Christ’s birth. He too quotes witnesses who were in Israel in December, “On December 25th the group observed sheep feeding in the fields on grass over a foot high. There was grass from Dan to Beersheba, even to Jericho, with cattle and sheep feeding. This is the time of the “greater rains” which ran from October through December. This is when our Lord was born in an empty stable.”

His argument is rather complicated and he bases his case on two Bible passages: 1 Chronicles 24:1-10, and Luke 1:23-27. He says, “In I Chronicles 24:1-10, there were 24 priests with two serving each month. Abijah served during the 8th order, which is the 4th month or July. (The first month in the Jewish calendar, Abib, is our April.) Read Luke 1:5, which is the same course found in I Chronicles 24. “Abijah” (Hebrew) and “Abiah’ (Greek) are the same. Therefore, Zachariah, the father of John the Baptist was serving his term during July. In Luke 1:23-27 we find Elisabeth conceived in either August or September. Her first month was September or October. Notice…in Elizabeth’s 6th month, February or March, the Virgin Mary conceived. Mary’s first month was March or April; therefore, her 9th month would be either November or December. Since the “greater rains” are in December, causing the grass to grow, it is fitting that Luke 2:8 should tell that the shepherds and their sheep were in the fields at the time of Christ’s birth.” Just because someone with a microphone and a camera pointed at them tells you it’s not so, doesn’t make it so! Just because there are a lot of letters after someone’s name, doesn’t guarantee the accuracy of their opinions. There is no compelling evidence to reject the traditional date of Jesus’ birth. Don’t let what you hear dampen your celebration of the birth of our Savior!

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2 Sermons

I’m Glad You Asked: Heaven

Filed Under: Sermons by Chuck
July 8, 2012
This is a selection of sermons from the “I’m Glad You Asked” series answering questions about Heaven.

 

Sermon Videos
Click a link below to watch the video. Click the same link again to close.

1) I’m Glad You Asked: Heaven is For Real

2) I’m Glad You Asked: Rewards in Heaven

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