Why did it happen? I want to give you seven redefinitions in the church that led to this whole issue. And I think why speak of these seven redefinitions? Because this didn't happen in a vacuum. If we just think of this as happening in a vacuum, or it's really just about one issue, we won't really understand how to engage it in our own lives, in our own hearts, in our own homes, and things like that. So I'm going to give you seven redefinitions. that took place before this redefinition of marriage. First is that the church redefined love as a sexual preference according to Hollywood. The church redefined love as a sexual preference according to Hollywood. The Hollywood version of love is you follow your preferences wherever they take you. I saw a news piece that was quoting something that happened on Jimmy Kimmel Live. They were interviewing young kids about this issue of same-sex marriage. Jimmy Kimmel. Why would anyone want to get married, kid? Because they love each other and they just feel a connection. That's the Hollywood vision of love. You know, that's the Hollywood princess vision of love. And the Hollywood vision of love is you just follow your feelings. I think it's almost perfectly communicated in the more recent film, Frozen, in the song, Let It Go. Just let it go. That's it. You know, this happened. This happened last week. Because the church bought that vision of love. It's a Hollywood vision of love. And it's so corrupt and so damaging. And Christian families need to recognize where this decision came from. We see a man and a man at a wedding altar. You can draw a straight line to Hollywood and Disney and the Hollywood version of love. Straight line. When you accept the ways of this world, they keep running. They keep running. And this one is going to keep running. Okay. Just, I think it was just two days ago, somebody showed up in a Wyoming civil magistrate trying to get a marriage license for a polygamous wedding. Well, that's just the beginning, but it starts with love is about your feelings. Secondly, the church redefined marriage and romance according to a culture of divorce. We have a culture of divorce. It really started ramping after World War II when men went away and they were immoral and women went into the workforce and they were immoral and they came back and they created a culture of divorce. And it's a little bit more complex than that, but that is partly what happened. So in the church, we've allowed people to divorce. We've allowed loveless marriages to just go on and on and on without dealing with them. We allow a couple to get divorced and then the wife goes off to this church and makes her life in that church and the husband goes off in that church. And we did not bring proper discipline to loveless marriages. We didn't care enough to deal with loveless marriages. And then when they finally exploded, we just let the shrapnel go wherever it would go. And we didn't follow up on them and we didn't do discipline. You know, we're doing a conference on church discipline this week. I got a letter from a man who's a pastor of a church fairly close here. He said, we excommunicated a lesbian a while back and for three years, for three years, She fought it, and then she finally turned to the Lord, came back to the church, repented, got married, and has a baby. So, you know, discipline in the church is right. You know, right now, one of the worst things you can do is to try to encourage a homosexual to change, to turn, you know, to repent. You know, this whole matter of conversion therapy. You know, you can't do conversion therapy because it's not right, it's not possible. Well, it is possible. But there's a lot of conversion therapy in church discipline. So anyway, the church redefined marriage as romance according to a culture of divorce. Number three, the church redefined manhood and womanhood according to feminism. The church redefined manhood and womanhood according to feminism. We blurred gender distinctions. We said women can do whatever they want. We said that There are no gender distinctions. When you blur gender distinctions, you shouldn't be surprised when you see two men in an altar who have absolutely blurred gender distinctions to its logical conclusion. If men and women aren't any different, then what does it matter? And it does have implications in marriage. Number four, the church redefined morality according to relativism. The church redefined morality according to relativism, which states, whatever you feel is right, you set your own boundaries. My generation's mantra was, if it feels good, do it. But God actually sets boundaries. He particularly sets boundaries on sexuality, but He sets boundaries on almost everything. The boundaries started in the Garden of Eden, and then God continued to communicate His boundaries through His laws. He tells Adam and Eve not to eat of the forbidden fruit. He tells Moses, you shall not commit adultery. There are boundaries in the holiness code in Leviticus 18 and 20. Leviticus 18.6 says, none of you shall approach anyone who is near of kin to him to uncover his nakedness. I am the Lord. The nakedness of your father or the nakedness of your mother you shall not uncover. She is your mother. You shall not uncover her nakedness. These are boundaries. But a culture of relativism says there are no boundaries. If you place boundaries, then you're a bigot. God actually says, keep my boundaries. And so we've redefined morality according to relativism. Number five, the church redefined worship. according to humanism. Now, this is number five of seven. I actually think this is the most important one. I think this is the headwaters of it all. When you say that you can worship God any way you want, you have opened the door for any way you want in anything. And the church has been willing to say that God doesn't govern worship. And you can do whatever you want. If you study the kings of Israel, you recognize that God brings destruction on every king for one primary reason. Worship. They have abandoned God's order of worship. So when you have a church that says God doesn't regulate worship, then you have a church that says God doesn't really regulate anything. And if you try to regulate anything, you're a legalist. And that's what has happened in the modern church. Worship is the most defining and the most influential matter of all of life. But if you redefine worship according to your own preference, it has enormous consequences. And when you believe that worship doesn't need to be regulated, then it takes you in a direction. Everything is a direction in life. It shouldn't surprise us that we live in a culture where the church isn't so sure of what to do about this issue because they don't think God should regulate worship. And so the fuzziness and the softness of their thinking about other areas carries forward. Number six, the church redefined salvation according to revivalism. The church has been saying almost comprehensively, you do have movements within the church today that are reversing this whole mentality of revivalism. that all you need to do is pray a prayer, all you have to do is create the right atmosphere and somebody will become a Christian. Their lives don't really need to change, they just need to be able to tell you that they were sincere when they accepted Christ in their heart, which is a category that doesn't exist in the Bible anywhere. The Bible has nothing to say about accepting Christ into your heart. That is a non-biblical and a perversion of many things that the scriptures say about salvation. But what does it do? It leads you to a Christianity where salvation doesn't change your affections. You can just still love everything you always loved and do everything you always did and still call yourself saved. But saved people actually, they think differently, they walk differently. They're regulated by God. Truly saved people want that. But we, the church redefined salvation according to revivalism. Number seven, the church redefined freedom according to tolerance. Tolerance is the new definition of love and freedom in our land. One of the worst things people can say about one another today is that they're intolerant. We've forgotten the God who is intolerant of rape and adultery and murder and theft and Sabbath breaking and immodesty and worldliness and The list can go on. But we've redefined freedom according to tolerance. At the same time, we've kind of become a church that abhors conflict more than almost anything. We live in a church culture where people are pretty much willing to roll over. They want peace. They want to get along. Doctrine divides. It's a fear of turbulence and the rejection that it causes. We had an entire movement in the church that ran for about 30 years in America called the Seeker Sensitive Movement. It's pretty much dying out. It still has its old vestiges hanging on in different versions, but the whole Seeker Sensitive Movement in the church basically said, don't offend anybody. Don't use the Bible words. Those things offend. Tell people how to fix up their life, but don't use the Bible words. The purveyor of this whole movement in the church used to say, don't make them say anything, sing anything, or give anything. There you go. That is a church that just wants to get along. And what you had, you had actually thousands of churches that started in America on this first step. They would send people out into the neighborhoods and ask the people what kind of church they wanted. And then they came back and created that church. Thousands of churches in America were founded on that proposition. And we ended up creating a church in the image of man. But it goes back to this redefining freedom according to tolerance. We're afraid. We're so afraid of rejection. These are some of the roots of it. Here's what I'm trying to say. Whenever the church ignores scripture, it's a redefinition. And we should consider this in every part of our life. What have you redefined? What are you trying to modify according to your own will? A glorious church is an obedient church. The truth of the matter about this issue that happened last week with same-sex marriage, it's just a result of lots of other things that we might call smaller. But we shouldn't be surprised with redefining marriage because in the church we've been redefining everything. And what should we do? We should repent. It's so easy to point fingers at you know, a homosexualized culture, it's really inappropriate in many ways. I think we are obligated to call good, good and evil, evil. At the same time, we shouldn't miss our own responsibility. That we in our own hearts have compromised, we have redefined things according to our own pleasures and our own preferences. And if we're upset with someone's sexual preference, it should cause us to look into our own hearts and consider our own preferences and whether our preferences are running contrary to the Word of God. You know, when Daniel prayed, when Nehemiah prayed, if you read those prayers, you'll find what I think is probably a key to how we should pray. We repent first. We confess our own sins in these matters. It's a lot easier to point fingers than it is to confess. And I think that's what we should do. We should think as a church, what have we tried to redefine? What has the Supreme Court of our hearts been saying these days? You know, everybody has many justices in their hearts. We need to understand the roots. I want to tell you about 10 ways you can defend marriage in your generation. After repenting for our sins and returning to the Lord in faithful devotion, Here are some things that you can do. Number one, depend wholly on scripture for your definition of marriage. Depend wholly on scripture for your definition of marriage. The devil wants you to redefine your marriage according to your own passions. Redefine your own marriage according to scripture. That's a problem, isn't it? Because we grow up with all kinds of ideas about marriage. A lot of them are wrong. We spend the rest of our lives after we get married trying to get the definition right and try to get the picture right. It's so critical. You know, Deborah and I have been doing marriage, small marriage gatherings in our house for a long time. When we talk about a gospel-centered marriage, getting the picture right of a husband who's like Christ and a wife who's like the church, You know, you'd be amazed at how many people say, I never heard that. I've been a Christian for 20 years. I've been married for 30 years. I never really understood that. He said, I knew this intellectually, but it never really occurred to me what this was, what my marriage was really all about. And we've heard that so many times. We decided, and we also heard people say, you should do this for people who've just got married. Do this for people who just got married, they need to hear this. So we're gonna do one for people who just got married in December. You have to be married for seven years and below to come. It'll be free, because those kind of people don't have any money. So depend wholly on scripture for your definition of marriage. Number two, embrace the origin of marriage. In order to bring something back to its proper perspective, its proper shape, you have to go back to its origin, its foundation. And that's true to the whole debate about marriage. I remember my pastor, when I was a young man, if I heard him say it one time, I heard him say it a hundred times, man didn't create marriage. God defines it. Trust it. Number three, reestablish the divine functions of marriage. Re-establish the divine functions of marriage. Marriage is created functionally for a number of things, for companionship, for replenishing the earth, and for taking dominion. The Bible says, be fruitful and multiply. The Bible is very clear about that. Re-establish the divine functions of marriage. Get focused on the things that God commanded for marriage. Number four, recover the biblical language for marriage. Parents, especially now, need to walk their children through the critical passage of scripture about marriage. You know, sometimes I'll have a parent come to me and say, how do I teach my children about marriage? My answer is pretty much always the same. You already are. You're teaching them every day, you know. What are you teaching them? Because you're teaching your children about marriage. And recovering the biblical language of marriage creates a biblical kind of marriage. Number five, cultivate intimacy of marriage. Physical intimacy in marriage that God ordained is a picture of the intimacy of the believer in Christ at salvation. There's this inextricable connection where the two become one in the physical act in marriage. It's an illustration of how God how close God wants you to be to one another and to Him. You go through the busyness of life and there are fences and disconnects and things like that. Intimacy in marriage often dies. If you want to be a blessing in the proper definition of marriage, then cultivate intimacy in your marriage. So you can start right at home. This battle is going to be fought on a lot of different planes. One of the most critical planes is in your marriage. Number six, have a loving marriage. Let love rule and reign in your family. Create a kingdom of love. You know, it's one thing to stand up in front of a microphone and defend marriage and cry out against perversion and all that's taking place in our land and almost be angry or pompous about it or self-righteous. But what about love? What about love in your house? Number seven, fulfill the ultimate reason for marriage and that is to declare the gospel. Number eight, maintain a high view of marriage. The church today has a low view of marriage and while there is an ongoing debate about the permanence view of marriage and the other view, Whatever side you fall in on that debate, there's a Mount Everest high view of marriage in the Bible. And God has made marriage for critical purposes. And that's exactly why the devil is attacking it the way he has. Number nine. know the arguments, know the arguments. This is a time when the church needs to know the arguments, the biblical arguments. It's astonishing to me the absolute lies that are being told by the homosexual community about the Bible. You better know your Bible now because there are people out there that say that it says things that it doesn't say. And you need to know your Bible. At the bottom of this I've got some passages of Scripture that are probably key to understanding what the Bible does say and it's really pretty clear. Number 10. This is the best and the most pivotal. The likeness of Jesus Christ is the greatest weapon in the Bible. Your affection for him, your desire to obey him. your longing to be conformed to his image, your desire for the living water, your hunger for bread from heaven, your happiness in his light, your affection for his kingdom, his beautiful kingdom. This is the most important thing.