Many people get into marriage without even thinking about the purpose why they are getting married. Several years into their marriage, if they are not living and relating to each other according to God’s design, their marriage will end up either in divorce, adulterous relationships, emotional separation, and lack of intimacy and oneness of heart.

God created marriage, first of all, to be a mirror of his glory and his covenant faithfulness to his people. Second, it is meant to be a magnifier of our joy in God as we live according to his good design.

Distortions of his design, like adultery, homosexuality, prostitution, polygamy, and divorce, lead to tragic consequences for the individual, the family, and society.

In the first part of my sermon on marriage (Let Not Man Separate: God’s Beautiful Design for Marriage), I tried to look at Jesus’ words in Matthew 19 and the account of the first marriage in Eden in Genesis 2 to answer several questions:

• Why should we look at most of what is happening in many of today’s Filipino families as distortions of God’s design, even if many people see them as normal and unavoidable?
• Why is having a distorted view of marriage such a big problem?
• Where do we get the pattern for our marriage?
• What is God’s design for husband-wife relationship? Why is it beautiful?
• Why is death the only God-ordained means of dissolving the marriage covenant?
• What do we need to do with the modern trend of one spouse leaving his or her family to work overseas for several years? What is its implication for their marriage and their family?

You can read, download, and listen to the sermon here.