Good evening. We will be continuing through Malachi, so we're going to be in Malachi 2, verses 10 through 16 this evening. And just by way of reminder where we've been, the last couple of sermons, we focused on the priests, we focused on the impure worship, the unclean sacrifices that were being offered, and their display really of empty worship, that they just really don't care about what God has laid out in his covenant stipulations, in his covenant commands. And so last week we looked specifically at the rebuke of the priests and how they've really, the priests have failed to honor God, failed to guard his word. And so this week we're going to look at one of the ways that the worship in Israel during this time is hindered, and it may not exactly be what you think. So let's go ahead and start and read in verse 10. Have we not all one Father? Has not one God created us? Why then are we faithless to one another, profaning the covenant of our fathers? Judah has been faithless, and abomination has been committed in Israel and in Jerusalem. For Judah has profaned the sanctuary of the Lord, which he loves, and has married the daughter of a foreign god. May the Lord cut off from the tents of Jacob any descendant of the man who does this, who brings an offering to the Lord of hosts. And this second thing you do, you cover the Lord's altar with tears, with weeping and groaning because he no longer regards the offering or accepts it with favor from your hand. But you say, why does he not? Because the Lord has witnessed between you and the wife of your youth to whom you have been faithless. Though she is your companion and your wife by covenant, did he not make them one with a portion of the Spirit in their union? And what was the one God seeking? Godly offspring. So guard yourselves in your spirit and let none of you be faithless to the wife of your youth. For the man who does not love his wife but divorces her, says the Lord, the God of Israel, covers his garment with violence, says the Lord of hosts. So guard yourself, guard yourselves in the spirit and do not be faithless. Let's pray. Lord God, we come before you asking that you would help us as we approach your word to approach it humbly. God, that you would encourage us where we need encouragement. to convict us where we need conviction and rebuke us where we need rebuke. And God, we pray now that you would help us in this text to seek holiness and to seek faithfulness to you and to our relationships around us, particularly in our marriages. So God, we pray now that you would use your word to do that amongst us. And we pray this in your name. Amen. So I recently had a poor car rental experience where I prepaid to rent a car, picked it up at 4 p.m., and I show up at 4 p.m., and they looked at me and they said, well, we don't actually have any cars. And I thought to myself, I reserved a car for 4 p.m., I paid for it, here I am at 4 p.m., and there's no cars. That's interesting. I seem to have kept my deal of the agreement, but they have not kept theirs. And it came to mind quickly. I don't know if you've seen this episode of Seinfeld, but there's a Seinfeld episode where a similar situation happens. And this line that he says keeps ringing through my head. She assures him, the car rental lady assures him, well, you know, I know how to keep a reservation. I know how to take a reservation. And he says, I don't think you do know how to take a reservation. You know how to take the reservation, but you do not know how to hold it. And this week as I was preparing, though that's just a silly experience that kind of related to me at the time, I'm reminded of how true this is of Israel and the covenant. They know how to take the covenant. They were circumcised. They don't really know how to hold it. They don't really know how to hold it. And they don't actually have an excuse, because God has told them how to hold it. God has given them the requirements that they are to do. but they are being faithless. They've all received the sign of the circumcision, they've taken the covenant, but in Malachi's time, they're rebelling against this. They're being faithless in their agreement, in their covenant. And the covenant of Israel is often compared with another very common covenant during this time, and even really still today, and that is the covenant of marriage. The entire ministry of Hosea really is to call out Israel for their adultery, how they have turned and they have been unfaithful to God and turned to other gods. And let me just say this up front, that this is why actually Christians really should care about marriage, about the covenant of marriage. Because it's not just an agreement, not just a covenant, but there's something much deeper that is happening in marriage. And we're going to look at that. We're going to look at that this evening. The Bible oftentimes refers to God's relationship with the church in marriage terms. This is really important. And so it may seem weird to jump from talking about priests and worship to marriage, but it's actually very natural to take this next step in the text. This evening, we're going to talk about marriage and divorce. Israel is struggling with this issue of idolatry and rebellion in their marriages, which then is also at large on the altar of their worship. And so remember, this marriage relationship, I mean, even in the common Jewish understanding of Song of Solomon today, it is still understood as the relationship between God and Israel. We would say Christ and the church, right? And so there's something much more going on here. And what we're going to look at in this text is we actually see something. We see that God requires covenant faithfulness in all of our covenant relationships for our worship. In all of our covenant relationships for our worship. Basically what we've looked at in the past has been the vertical kind of relationship, the covenant faithfulness to God, and now we're looking at that horizontal relationship, covenant faithfulness to one another. And God requires both of those for worship. And so what our text shows us today is that the first, it really happens in two movements. First, we're gonna look at God requires faithful marriage parameters. And then we're gonna look at how God requires faithful marriage perseverance. So the first section, God requires faithful marriage parameters in verses 10 through 12. In the first couple of verses, we see this reality in verse 10, starts with this, again, this familial identity of Yahweh as their father, the father of all of Israel. He created each individual. This is true. He created all of us. But this actually is more explicitly referring to Israel. He's the father of Israel. He is the one that created this covenant community. He's the one that called them into covenant relationship, not just with himself, but with one another. And so he is, in this way, their father. And so the question is then, Why have they been faithless? We've already talked about how they've been faithless to God, but now the question is, how have they been faithless to one another? God has been so faithful to them. If you remember how the entire book of Malachi starts, it starts with God's faithful love. God has been faithful to them. He's given them these parameters of the covenant, of what they are to do. And remember from last week that the goal of this covenant, the reason that this was set up, was to bring life and peace. And so in essence, breaking this covenant that God has set up, then doesn't bring life and peace. The priests who were supposed to bring life have brought death. And it's not being faithful to one another, certainly. Because it's not just individual, it actually has an effect on the whole of Israel. And so, more clearly in view here, we are going to talk about how they're not being faithful to one another in marriage. Verse 11 tells us how they were being faithless to the covenant of their fathers, which calls us back to Deuteronomy 4.31, which says that, For the Lord your God is a merciful God. He will not leave you, or destroy you, or forget the covenant with your fathers that he swore to them. And part of this covenant, a few chapters later in Deuteronomy chapter 7, was that they're not to marry foreign gods. They're not to marry foreign wives. So Deuteronomy 7, 3-4 says, You shall not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons, or taking their daughters for your sons. For they would turn away your sons from following me to serve other gods. Then the anger of the Lord would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you quickly. God very clearly, all the way back in Deuteronomy, has given the dangers of marrying these foreign wives. It's very clear in Deuteronomy 7. It's because they will turn you away, they will turn my covenant people away from me to serve other gods. And the anger of the Lord is kindled against Israel, and he would destroy them quickly. This is all the way back in Deuteronomy 7, when the covenant parameters were established. The parameters were to marry an Israelite, to marry somebody who believes the same things that you believe, right? That's really what's happening. And more importantly, who worships the same God. Marriage during this time meant that you needed to align your religious worship. So by marrying foreign women, the sons would then worship these foreign gods. And it happens time and time again in the Old Testament. It's very clear that when they marry foreign women, the foreign gods, they start to worship foreign gods pretty quickly, pretty quickly thereafter. And if we think about this in terms of even the Genesis 3.15 promise, right? To raise up an offspring who will crush the head of the serpent. This is the offspring of the woman who will crush the head of the serpent. They're actually stepping outside of that, right? They're stepping outside of that and marrying the offspring of the serpent. Those who are outside of the covenant community, they're marrying the offspring of the serpent instead of the offspring of the woman that God has said that he will bring this pure seed forth to crush the head of the serpent. So this is really, I mean, it is covenantal rebellion in this sense as well. They're more concerned likely about politics or money. Sure, it might be matters of attraction or whatever, but it's more likely that they're pursuing these foreign women for political advantages or economic advantages. They're more concerned about that than these parameters that God has clearly laid out in Deuteronomy. And so they're still waiting, remember, though, for their Messiah. They're still waiting for that offspring. And yet here they are going over to these foreign women and the foreign gods, expecting God to still work through that line, even though he has said that he would be faithful to his people. So of course we know that God is in control. It's not like the Messiah wouldn't come. God is going to be faithful to his promises even in spite of Israel's unfaithfulness. But the reality for them here is that they're making the Messiah's line unclean, impure, which we looked at about the purity of the sacrifice, right? And so the Messiah's line here is being unclean. And that's really what's happening. And so as a quick kind of application for us, this is still sort of the case for us as Christians. It's not a good idea for Christians to marry a Buddhist, for instance, or a Muslim, or an atheist, or an agnostic. If you're a Christian seeking marriage, you want to make sure that that person that you marry isn't going to lead you to foreign gods. That that person that you marry is worshiping the same God that you worship. It may be easy to ignore this fact maybe at first, like early on in your marriage, but as soon as you have kids, this becomes a chasm. And I've seen this happen. And so our aim as parents should be to raise our children in the way of the Lord, to raise up more Christians, right? And our kids aren't the holy seed, right? But we should desire to raise them up in holiness. And that's incredibly difficult if only one parent is a Christian. That is incredibly difficult if the parents disagree on moral and ethical standards on how to raise their children. So it's not just something that's important for the people during the time of Malachi, it's equally important for us. And the problem today is that it's a little bit maybe less obvious. People aren't, they don't have household gods that they're burning incense to all the time. I mean, maybe some of them. That's not primarily where we see this difference. But they certainly aren't worshipping Yahweh. They certainly aren't worshipping the same God that we are. And we say, well, it's not so bad, at least they're not, you know, actively worshipping idols, but they will still, there will still be conflict, and there will still be idolatry. It may not be the idolatry of the Old Testament, but it will be the idolatry of the world that we live in today, which could look like Raising our children how the world would want us to raise them, right? Affirming LGBTQ, these sort of parenting things that are seen as good in the eyes of the world. And if we don't have any agreement amongst father and mother to have a standard against that, then anything really goes. There is no moral standard. And honestly, what this will lead to is the same thing that it leads to to the people in Malachi's time, and that is idolatry. It is worshiping another god. And this is the result at the time of Malachi. When we read verse 11, we see that they have profaned the sanctuary of the Lord and married the daughter of a foreign god. And the way that this is structured, actually it's structured in a way that it's phrased, it brings emphasis to the fact that it's not just a wife who's foreign, who's not an Israelite, but it's the emphasis on the foreign god that is not Yahweh. And so the concern is not primarily about that it's a foreign woman. It's about her God. And God has set up parameters in the covenant to make sure that they don't fall into this form of idolatry, because he knew that it would come. And so his concern is about their worship here. So you see, it's not altogether unconnected from what we've been talking about. It is still a matter of worship. And marriage and worship are really, really connected in this way. And notice also that it's called an abomination that has been committed in Israel. Abominations are serious breaches of this covenant that require and even expect judgment from God. This was no light thing. It was really important for the covenant and for their worship. And we'll see that as we journey through our text. They're marrying foreign wives. It could be because they were attracted, but it's most likely, again, because they don't really care about what Yahweh has commanded them to do. They really care about themselves and their political advances, their economic gain. And it results in spiritual disaster for Israel. Its results are undeniable. The result in verse 12 is that they are cut off. And again, this is covenant language. This is what circumcision represents, the cutting off that would happen if they were to break the covenant, that those who break the covenant would be cut off. And this can refer to excommunication, and it can also refer to execution. It can also refer to a more extreme, more destructive sort of judgment. The one who does this, who marries the foreign wife and worships foreign gods, is cut off. But they would do this, and then they would still come to the altar of God as if nothing is wrong, as if they are worshipping Yahweh. So they're worshipping other gods, and then they come to, let's say, church, right? And then they're like, yeah, I worshipped other gods throughout the week, but here I am on Sunday worshipping you, and I don't see the problem with that. That's what's happening. They don't understand the severity of what they're doing, and it's because of their marriages. It's because they've abandoned God and worshiped these foreign gods that were, because they've been united to these foreign wives. And so they didn't keep the covenant requirements, the parameters of God for their marriage, and then their worship is actually cut off. So their marriage parameters, they married outside of the covenant, and their worship is cut off. Their offerings were not accepted. So you see again that the marriage and the worship are connected in this way. Their worship is not accepted by God. So it's clear that God requires this faithful commitment to these covenant parameters, both to God here, and what we're gonna see also is to one another. God cares about who they marry. God cares about who you marry. God cares about our marriages. The family is so incredibly important to the marriage, so incredibly important, and the marriage covenant must be founded on principles that will produce faithfulness, not just in the parents, but in the children, and the children's children, and that it's passed down throughout generations. And the second thing that they're doing, however, and this really boils down to one fact, and it's the fact that God requires faithful marriage perseverance, and this is really the last, really the last three verses in verse 13 through 16. So in verse 13, we see that they're covering the Lord's altar with tears. So they're marrying foreign wives, they're worshiping foreign gods, and they're coming to worship God, and they're covering the altar with tears, and they weep, and they groan, and all of this because God no longer accepts their worship, no longer accepts their offering. Their sacrifice has not been accepted, so they start weeping in this way. And so what's actually going on here? Is this true repentance? No, no it is not. This isn't actually repentance. Actually, this is idol worship. What is happening here is not an expression of true repentance, it's an expression of idol worship. And what idol worship looks like in the Old Testament is that people would do certain rituals, certain things that were designed to get to manipulate the gods to do what they wanted them to do. So if you wanted the crops to grow, you would do certain things, and then you would kind of manipulate the god to do that. That's idol worship in the Old Testament. And that's really what's being referred to here in Malachi, that this weeping and moaning at the altar is one of the ways that these foreign gods have influenced the worship of Israel. This is on the altar. This is a foreign wife and a foreign god. This now son of Israel, son of the covenant, is there worshiping like a pagan. This particular practice was an attempt to mourn and to weep, to kind of hurry a god back from the underworld, from the realm of the dead, to bring a new season of fertility. And this is what Israel is doing on the altar. We see this same thing being done in Ezekiel 8, not with Israel, but with the Gentiles. So again, to connect this with our previous passage, when the priests fail, you get pagan worship entering into the temple. When the priests don't guard the word, when the priests are not doing what they have been called to do, then this runs rampant. Then idol worship is abundant in God's house. This idolatry is exactly what the priests were supposed to be guarding against. And let me just make a quick application here, because what Israel is doing here is they're actually making, they're trying to make Yahweh look more attractive to the pagans. You see what's happening? In one sense, doing this at the altar of Yahweh is like, all the pagans around are like, yeah, I mean, I could get on board with that, right? That doesn't look too different from what we do. And so the reality is that we do this in the modern day, right? We also have this same trap that we fall into where pastors, maybe we could say, fall in love with the world or the ways of the world. And then the church and her worship is affected by this worldly idolatry that we have. And it can look in any number of ways. But I think really we can think about a lot of the attraction church sort of movement that's happened. The attempt that pastors are trying to make churches look more like the world so they're more appealing, so that people don't feel as uncomfortable, so that they may want to come in and to worship in this way. I mean, that's really what's happening in Malachi. They're like, well, if we do this pagan worship, maybe the pagans will come. That'll be cool, right? This is sort of emerging between what the world wants and what God wants for worship. And it's really designed to make Jesus look more attractive to the non-Christians in the world. And ultimately, this can lead to the sacrifice of true worship. I mean, there is no true worship. And it leads us even further from God. I mean, that's what's happening in Malachi's time as well. And the scary part is that oftentimes it's justified by calling it evangelistic or missional. But it's actually leading us further away from the worship of God. In a sense, it's kind of what's happening here with the pagan worship in the temple. So of course, God is not going to accept their worship. And here we find that hinge question that, remember, goes all the way through. There's a series of questions. This question comes right here in verse 14. But you say, why does he not accept the worship? Because the Lord was witness between you and the wife of your youth to whom you have been faithless, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant. So why doesn't he accept their worship? Because they have been faithless to the wife of their youth, the covenant that they've made with her. And the reason here in verse 14 really is twofold. We could say at one level, it is the wife of the youth is kind of reference also to God, right? The covenant that they have to Yahweh as their first love, right? To have no other gods before him. But obviously more explicitly here, we're talking about their marriages. The reference that, in fact, during this time, a lot of the Israelites were divorcing their Israelite wives, leaving their Israelite wives for the foreign wives, right? And so this is really what's in view here. The Israelite wives are being left in favor of these foreign wives. So very literally, they're being faithless and they're abandoning the covenant of marriage that they have made with their Israelite wives, not for legitimate reasons, most of them. They were divorcing because they, let's say, fell out of love or thought that it would be more advantageous for them to be in a marriage with this foreign wife over here because of the political gain or the economic gain. And so they just kind of divorce their Israelite wives and they go over here. And more terrifyingly, what we see actually is that it's because the Lord was a witness between them. We typically think of witnesses as like kind of passive, somebody who was there, I just I saw what happened, but actually a witness, especially a witness to a covenant, is not passive, but they are active. They are actually obligated and called upon to enforce the terms of the covenant. Which means, if they are breaking the covenant illegitimately with their Israelite wives, God himself is obligated to enforce the terms of that covenant as witness. Because it's not just a covenant made between the husband and the wife, but it's also a covenant made before God. Their marriage is, yes, it's a legal covenant with God as the witness, and this means there are terms that must be agreed upon, there are obligations that they have to one another, and those are being broken by these husbands. And their marriage is also, we see in this verse, a close and intimate relationship. We see this phrase companion, which is often used in the Old Testament to refer to the marriage partner. It's related to an architectural word for joints and beams that are being joined together, like a seam. And so the idea here is that they are intimately connected to one another. And how? How are they connected? How are they connected in this way? Who is it that takes two and makes them one? Of course, it is God, if we remember Genesis. This takes us to the last couple verses in verse 15-16, which admittedly are some of the very difficult Hebrew, and so I'll try not to nerd out a whole lot on it. But verse 15 tells us this, that their marriage was not just witnessed by God, but that it was actually a spiritual joining together by God as well. God has made them one with the portion of the Spirit. The marriage is spiritual by nature. The marriage is not just a legal contract. That there's something more happening. It is a spiritual union that is happening. That that is done actually by God, who is uniting these two together. This is the work of God in marriage. So what was God seeking in this union? The text tells us. What was the point of the marriage? Godly offspring. Remember Genesis 3.15, we go back to the godly seed being produced by the godly marriages that will ultimately lead to the promised offspring who will crush the head of the serpent. And then there's this command that is going to be repeated actually in verse 16 as well, that to guard yourselves in your spirit, or in modern terms we might say to guard your heart, right? This might be where that comes from. And this phrase is often used, you know, for young girls particularly, who are going, who are single and seeking to be married. But here it's not used for the single, it's used for the married, to guard their spirit. That if you are married, you should continue to guard your spirit in this way, that we must watch our minds and our hearts so that we may remain faithful to our covenant spouse. That's really what's happening here. And verse 16 follows us up with a reminder that the one who does not love his wife but divorces her invites violence upon himself. Now again, this text is tricky. If you have the KJV, for instance, you will notice that it will read something like, God hates divorce. But in the Hebrew, we have two words. We have the word for hate and we have the word for divorce. And that's really all you get. And so there's sort of a variance of ways that modern interpreters have tried to interpret this. But given the fact that there are exceptions that are made in the law for divorce, there are circumstances where divorce is acceptable, say in Deuteronomy 24, Ezra 9 through 10, it can't be just a blanket statement that all divorce is condemned just without equivocation. that wouldn't even go, that wouldn't even fall in line with the Old Testament's view of divorce. However, in Deuteronomy 24, for instance, and other places, the process of divorce is often paired, it's also stated like this, if a man hates his wife and writes her a certificate of divorce, those are the two, the hating and divorcing often go together. when we look at divorce in the Old Testament. So there's a type of person that's being referred to. So those two words are this, they're representative of this type of person. The one who hates his wife and divorces her. That's the person we're talking about. So the subject isn't Yahweh. The subject isn't God who hates divorce, but it is actually that those are the characteristics of the people that would do this. The ones who hate their wives and divorce her. They do this, and this is in an unlawful manner. It's not according to the few exceptions that are even laid out in the law. And so it's the one who does it in a hateful way, they stain their garment, and this makes them unfit to stand before the presence of God. That's what that ending means, that they actually invite this violence upon themselves, that their garment is stained. And again, you see this repeated, guard your spirit and do not be faithless. These verses, they make it clear that marriage really matters. Marriage is a big deal. And it matters not just in a practical sense, but actually in a spiritual sense. That it's not just a legal, covenantal contract, but there's a spiritual union that's happening. And that that spiritual union, if our marriages are a wreck, then our worship will be a wreck as well. That the marriage and our worship is connected together intimately. And let me just ask who in here is a perfect husband? Who's a perfect wife? Who's a perfect child for that matter? We know that we're all sinners who struggle in our marriages. Hosea 1 through 3 really focuses on Israel as the unfaithful and adulterous wife. And in the same way, we are unfaithful to God in our sin. That in our sin, we are the adulterous people. That in our sin, we deserve to be cast aside, to be cut off. Yet God sent us the faithful one in his faithful love, his pursuing love of Jesus Christ. God pursues his wandering bride. And if you don't realize that, that Christ came to save his bride, the church, that he saves his bride, this puts your marriage in a whole new light. When you start to understand why is it that God's relationship with his people is often referred to as a marriage, and then think about your own marriage. See, Jesus is the faithful one. He is the one who fulfills the covenant faithfully, perfectly. He's the foundation of our hope for heaven in that sense. And in the same sense, he's the foundation for our hope with union with God, but also he's the foundation of our hope for union with one another. He doesn't come just to reconcile us with God, which praise God that he does, but he also unites us with one another. And so when it comes to marriage, it's not a coincidence that Christ and the Church is compared to the relationship of a husband and a wife in Ephesians 5, 22 through 33. The marriage of Christ and the Church is the primary means that God has decided to raise up the Holy Seed. that the holy offspring are raised up through the church. Of course this church is made up of individual families who are having children who are raising them up in the Lord, but it's the church's mission, the church's role to raise up this holy seed, this holy offspring. That's how God has designed it to be. This means that we can't do anything outside of Christ. So in our marriages, we must rely on the faithful love of Jesus that meets these perfect requirements of faithfulness. Even in our own marriages, Christ should be the center for this very reason, because without Him, you're not able to do this. Without the power of Christ, you cannot do this. And so what does being faithful actually look like in Ephesians 5? Just briefly, let me sum it up by saying that both husband and wife are submitting to Christ first. That's the first thing we see, is that they're submitting to Christ. Husbands are faithfully loving and serving their wives and children by sacrificing themselves, not by being obsessed with their work and calling that sacrifice, but by investing in their family emotionally, which is hard for some of us. Or more importantly, by investing in their families spiritually, by leading them in the truth, in the word, being that priest of the family, as it were. wives to lovingly submit to their husbands as he loves them like Christ loves the church. She will faithfully encourage her husband, faithfully walk with her husband as he leads her. And when we fail, because we will fail, we have the benefit of Christ's faithfulness to turn to. So we ask for forgiveness, we repent when we mess up, and we seek to faithfully move forward in Christ. Another really important factor, just that the New Testament brings out is this requirement for elders. The requirement for elders and deacons to manage their household well. We see this in 1 Timothy 3. He must be able to manage his household well. If he can't be trusted to manage and lead his household, how could he lead the church in worship? If he can't lead his family in worship, how could he lead the church in worship? You see the connection again to family and worship. Another New Testament passage similar but more general in terms of application is 1 Peter 3, 7, which talks about the seriousness of the husband's role in the way that they deal with their wives. And the implication of this text is really the same of our Malachi text, that if we fail to do this in their prayers, their worship is hindered. 1 Peter 3, 7 says, likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered. You see that connection there as well. Let me also say for singles in the room, if you are single and maybe you want to be married someday, these are things you need to start thinking about now. Don't wait. Maybe you're single and maybe you aren't. You aren't going to be married. But right now, you should spend your time getting to know married couples, encouraging them. Don't think that you don't have a place in the body of Christ because you're not married. Married couples need you. Married couples need you to encourage them in their walk and vice versa. We need one another. So though the primary application here is a lot for married couples, don't think it doesn't mean anything for those of you who aren't married. And let me just close by saying this. If you have been divorced, it's not an unforgivable sin. that there is forgiveness and restoration in Christ. By turning to him, you may find both forgiveness and the power to forgive. There is real brokenness that comes from divorce, and I say this as one who comes from a divorced family. And so, if you're a child of divorce, maybe your parents are divorced, there is healing in Christ, and particularly in the church. I didn't grow up in a Christian home. I had no idea what a Christian marriage was supposed to look like, but because I had great Christian parent models in the church, that I got to see up close friends who I walked with even before I was married, when I was a single guy, seeing how these married couples dealt with discipline, how they dealt with one another, how they encouraged one another in Christ, how they did family worship, was a profound blessing for somebody who didn't grow up in that environment. And so Let me just encourage us that, yeah, God requires covenant faithfulness in all of our covenant relationships. This means faithfulness to God, but it also means faithfulness to one another. And that covenant of marriage is obviously at the core of those horizontal relationships. But even when we struggle and we fail in these ways, God is faithful to restore us in him, not just to him, but to one another as well. and to let us strive to be faithful to God and in so being faithful to one another in our marriages and just in our duties and love for one another as the church. So God, let's pray as we close. God, we pray now that You would help us do this, that you would give us the faithfulness to, by your spirit, have marriages that do produce children, whether they're biological children or those that we disciple as married couples, that they would produce those who love you. kingdom would be advanced, that your name would be recognized and lifted up in our families, in our churches, and in the families of our children and our children's children. God, we pray that you would continue to give us the strength and the power and enable us to do this. And God, we pray now that you would bless us as we come now to the marriage supper. as we celebrate the Lord's Supper, that you would remind us of our great union, of your great faithfulness, and of our great love, that we are greatly loved by you, and that this is a reminder of that. And so God, we pray now that you bless us as we go, and we pray this in your name, amen.