How to Protect & Nature Your Marriage

10/16/23 – 10/20/23

God’s Plan for Marriage and Families

By Michael Youssef, Ph D.  10/16/23

Today we are surrounded by a culture that is constantly attacking God’s plan for marriage and family life. The Lord Jesus Christ addressed this crisis in Matthew 19.

Some Pharisees came to Jesus and said, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?” (v. 3). Instead of giving them the grounds for divorce, Jesus gave them the grounds for marriage:

“Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” (Matthew 19:4-6).

When we consider the crisis in our families and marriages today, what should be the response of a Bible-believing church? I believe our response is to trumpet loudly and without fear or hesitation what Jesus said in Matthew 19 and what God the Father said in Genesis 2: Marriage belongs to God’s created order. From the beginning the Creator made them male and female. It is not up to us to mess around with this holy union.

Prayer: Father, I pray that You would forgive our nation for what we have done to the institution of marriage. Help me to stand up for what You have put in place and to be a powerful picture of what a Christ-centered family should look like. I pray in the name of Jesus. Amen.

“But for Adam no suitable helper was found. . . . Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man” (Genesis 2:20, 22).