God created your marriage covenant all of those decades ago. He was with you when you said, “I do,” and he promises to carry you until death do you part. But he doesn’t just promise to help his people grin and bear it; he is also the God who can bring hope and joy. He loves to bring renewal. He resurrects marriages just as he resurrected Lazarus.

“Do you have a few minutes to talk during my break?” the twenty-something barista asked me as I took my cup of coffee from him in one hand, balancing commentaries and my laptop in the other hand. I could see strain on his face. I had first met him just a few months earlier. We worshiped at different churches in different communities, but he knew I was a pastor and I could see he needed to talk.
Thirty minutes later, he sat across from me in the coffee shop and poured out his broken heart to me: his dad had just announced his unfaithfulness and that he was pursuing a divorce. This hit my new friend hard. He had only been married a couple of years, and he had always looked up to his dad; his parents had led him to the Lord.
A couple of days later, I sat in a church member’s home during our small group. When it came time to share prayer requests, he asked for prayer for his parents. His mom had just announced she had a boyfriend and was pursuing a divorce. This set of parents was in their early sixties. He was shocked and saddened.
What this pair of circumstances days apart showed me yet again is that unfaithfulness—or faithfulness—in marriage affects those around us in profound ways. My friends, both married men who had been out of the home for years, were nonetheless deeply affected by their parents’ marital drift. The majority of my marriage counseling is with empty nester and retired couples, a common trend.
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When Peter denied Jesus, Jesus looked at him. If you sense the Lord looking at you right now, you have two choices. You can try to run from the gaze of Jesus just like Adam and Eve tried to run from the eyes of God. Or you can run to the gaze of Jesus and see that there is forgiveness and acceptance and restoration in his eyes.

To my friends who are no longer friends with Jesus: I want you to know that if I am aware of you walking away from Jesus, I have prayed for you and even cried for you. A couple of years ago I was reading The Last Battle from C.S. Lewis’s “The Chronicles of Narnia” to our kids. I came across a passage that took my breath away and filled my eyes with tears. Tirian, the last king of Narnia, is meeting the former kings and queens of Narnia:
‘Sir,’ said Tirian, when he had greeted all these. ‘If I have read the chronicle aright, there should be another. Has not your Majesty two sisters? Where is Queen Susan?’
‘My sister Susan,’ answered Peter shortly and gravely, ‘is no longer a friend of Narnia.’
‘Yes,’ said Eustace, ‘and whenever you’ve tried to get her to come and talk about Narnia or do anything about Narnia, she says, ‘What wonderful memories you have! Fancy your still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.’
The reason I got a lump in my throat and then looked at my wife Melanie and saw that we were both tearing up is because we were thinking of you, friends. Walking away from Jesus is not child’s play. At the end of The Last Battle, it is revealed that there has been a crash and the kings and queens are in heaven. They are safe, eternally. Susan is not. But there is still time.
It seemed that you used to be friends with Jesus. You sang to him, you read his Word, you prayed to him, you talked about him with me.
Only God, and maybe you, know if that faith was genuine. But I do know this: the Jesus you used to confess with your lips is the same Jesus who can save you today. It doesn’t matter if it has been years or months of walking away from him, Jesus died and rose again not to make it possible for us to earn our way back to God, but to bring us to God. He will still do that for you if you will come to him.
You are not the first disciples of Jesus to deny Jesus. Do you remember Peter, one of Jesus’s closest disciples and friends? He denied Jesus three times, when Jesus most needed someone to come alongside of him and stand up for him.
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The marriage covenant celebration of sex not only points a husband and wife to their one-flesh union, but for the one who has eyes to see it, it also points to the union we enjoy with Christ. Even the bliss we can experience in sex points ahead to the bliss of the marriage supper of the Lamb.

Knowing Jesus really does change everything. Not only does it mean that I know that I have a relationship with God, that my sins are forgiven, and that I will be in Heaven forever after I die–but knowing Jesus changes all of life now.
Knowing Jesus changes how I think about work, finances, friendship, parenting, marriage, and yes–also sex. You might even be able to say, “especially sex.”
For example, knowing Jesus changes how I think about work being for God’s glory, but some of the biblical principles that change how I work are also principles that are often still looked upon highly in society–working hard, for example, or providing for my family.
But the ways that knowing Jesus changes how I think about sex are not something that our culture usually agrees with–or even comes close to understanding. I think as believers, we have to be ok with that to a certain degree. After all, without knowing Jesus we would surely think about sex very differently than we do. Here are three ways that knowing Jesus radically changes how you and I think about sex.
1. Knowing Jesus shows me that sex is for only within biblical marriage.
When I was in High School and heard the “locker room talk” from other guys around me, it was obvious that there was a huge difference in the way that the world generally thought about sex, and the way that followers of Jesus are called to think about sex. But I had no idea then the complexities that the current “sexual revolution” was bringing to the way that people would think about sex just two decades later. In my first week of Spanish class, I learned words like “food” and “homework.” In my son’s first week of Spanish class, he learned the word “bisexual” (yes, it is spelled the same in Spanish and English). Yet all societal changes aside, whether in the 90s or 2020s or the 60s or the time of the Roman Empire, knowing Jesus shows me that sex is for only within biblical marriage.
No matter how much our cultural tides may come and go, God’s design for sex continues to be obeyed only within the committed monogamous covenant relationship of marriage between a man and a woman.
The Apostle Paul saw this understanding of sex as so basic to knowing Jesus, he wrote an entire paragraph about it to the young church in Thessalonica: “…For you know what instructions we gave you through the Lord Jesus. For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality; that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor, not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God; that no one transgress and wrong his brother in this matter, because the Lord is an avenger in all these things, as we told you beforehand and solemnly warned you. For God has not called us for impurity, but in holiness. Therefore whoever disregards this, disregards not man but God, who gives his Holy Spirit to you.” (1 Thessalonians 4:2-8)
God knew what he was doing when he created sex and the parameters that would ultimately bring us joy and human flourishing. He knew that sex is powerful like fire, and that it can bring great destruction like when a house burns down, or great warmth and joy like when a fire stays within a fireplace on a snowy night.
It takes faith to really believe this today. But it doesn’t take a lot of analysis of the consequences of sexual sin to realize that the Creator knew exactly what he was doing when he loved us enough to give us the gift of sex, and loved us enough to give us the parameters for sex.
2. Knowing Jesus shows me that my sexuality is a power to be used for my spouse’s benefit.
Everybody knows that sex is powerful. Advertisers leverage this. Abusers take advantage of this. All sorts of people experiment with this. Christians, however, in obedience to God’s commands, use this power to benefit their spouse (1 Corinthians 7:1-5).
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