This comes from Alvarina.
And she asks this question:
"If I broke up with my boyfriend
because he stopped being a Christian,
is it ok to wait for him
till he comes back to Christ,
or do I have to move on?"
It sounds kind of high school, right?
"If I broke up with my boyfriend
because he stopped being a Christian
is it ok to wait for him
till he comes back to Christ,
or do I have to move on?"
When I hear a question like that,
my first thing is not yes or no.
My first thought is,
where is this girl going to church?
What kind of pastor is she sitting under?
Is she going to church?
If she is, what is she getting taught?
Who are her parents?
What are her parents allowing her to do?
What are they teaching her?
Those are the first questions that come into my mind.
"If I broke up with my boyfriend
because he stopped being a Christian,
is it ok to wait for him
till he comes back to Christ,
or do I have to move on?"
I mean, in that question,
she kind of sees Christianity as something
you pop in and pop out of.
Well, he's a Christian, and then...
he stopped being a Christian.
And maybe he'll just pop back in
and he'll become a Christian again.
And so, should I wait for him?
You get the picture of what's going on.
But what is it to be a Christian?
I think if this was a young lady
in the church,
and she sat down with me,
she'd just come
or her family had moved here
or however - she came with a friend.
And she asked this question.
You know, the first thing
I would want to ask Alvarina is
do you have a good idea
about what it is to be a Christian?
Because the thing that came to my mind
is being a Christian is miraculous.
It's supernatural.
It's a mighty work of God.
And it's permanent.
I mean, truly being a Christian is permanent.
This "you're in, you're out"
and we know people can make
false professions,
and we know people can come face to face with truth.
And we know people can claim to be a Christian today
and make shipwreck tomorrow.
But one of the things that you see
in Scripture is to once have been
in that light and depart from it
is extremely dangerous.
It's like the seed that comes up
and the persecution comes
and away it goes.
Making shipwreck of the faith.
They were there and they're not there.
Demas never comes back again.
Judas never comes back again.
There's a point of no return
as we see in Hebrews 6.
All these things about this flippant view
of Christian - you're in, you're out, you're exposed to the truth,
you're back and forth,
you claim to be a Christian,
you're not a Christian.
It's kind of missing the supernatural
flavor of what Christianity's all about.
I mean as I'm thinking about it,
a series of texts start coming
through my mind
just about Christianity.
The first thing I think of is that text
right out of Jonah;
salvation is of the Lord,
it's not something men do,
it's not just this decision.
Yes, men make decisions,
but it's not basically, ultimately
at the level of decisions of mankind.
It's at the decision of God.
Salvation is of the Lord.
And you've got, of course, John 1:12-13,
that says that we were born of God,
not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh,
nor of the will of man, but of God.
This is something that God does.
A text very much like it in Romans 9.
He says to Moses,
I will have mercy upon whom I will have mercy;
I will have compassion upon whom I will have compassion.
So that it depends not on human will
or exertion, but on God who has mercy.
I thought of Hebrews 7.
Christ saving to the uttermost.
This picture of Christianity:
Well, we're kind of in, we're kind of out,
we're in, we're out, we're in...
back and forth.
Being saved to the uttermost,
that's complete; that's permanent.
He says eternal life.
I give them eternal life.
He says all that the Father gives Me,
where is that, John 6:39?
All that the Father gives Me,
He says He's not going to lose any of them.
And He says He's going to raise them up
in the last day.
He says He gives them eternal life.
Where is that? John 3:36.
If you believe in the Son,
you have eternal life.
Eternal life is eternal.
It doesn't go away.
Now we know men make shipwreck
of the faith.
We know people take Christianity
in a flippant way,
we know they do that.
But that's what's going on here.
True Christianity is permanent.
True Christianity doesn't go away.
I thought of the text in 2 Corinthians
about being a new creation.
When you're a new creation, you're a new creation,
and you don't get uncreated.
When God creates something,
it's created.
It doesn't stop being created.
It doesn't go into oblivion.
It's not like He created today,
and then you're not created tomorrow,
and then you can come back
and be created again,
and you're just going back and forth
in and out of being this new creation.
None of that.
And so, I was thinking,
if I actually sat down with this young lady,
I'd be saying,
have you even been taught
what true Christianity is?
The radical nature;
the miraculous, the mighty nature,
the permanent nature of what it is
to be a true Christian,
and have you experienced this yourself?
Are you viewing Christianity
the way you are
because perhaps you're not even aware
yourself of what this looks like.
But then I thought, too,
she uses this term,
"broke up with my boyfriend."
"Broke up with my boyfriend."
What do you guys think about that terminology?
What do you think about a girl breaking up with her boyfriend?
You got any thoughts, Abraham?
You start thinking,
think about the relationships
between a man and a woman
in Scripture.
I find three God-condoned,
appropriate relationships
between men and women.
Can you tell me what they are?
Marriage.
You won't find courtship in there.
What do you find?
Betrothal.
Betrothal's in the Bible.
And then what else?
What's the third relationship?
(from the room) Father and daughter?
Tim: I'm just talking about a man and a woman.
Obviously, there's brother/sister,
father/daughter,
there's all those relationships,
but I mean, father/daughter
would fall into this category,
but young men and young women here,
it's appropriate for you to be married,
it's appropriate, perhaps, for you to be in a betrothal
where you're headed to marriage,
and what would be the third that's appropriate?
Yeah, you live together in the same world,
or in the same church or in the same society
and you're pure.
Those are the three God-condoned relationships
between a man and a woman.
And you think about marriage.
Marriage.
When we're talking about intimacy,
there is no other place
where intimacy is condoned in Scripture,
other than marriage.
Proverbs 5:18
Let your fountain be blessed;
rejoice in the wife of your youth;
a lovely deer, a graceful doe,
let her breasts fill you at all times
with delight,
be intoxicated always in her love.
You've got 1 Corinthians 7:2,
because of temptation to sexual immorality,
each man should have his own wife
and each woman her own husband.
You've got Hebrews 13:4,
let marriage be held in honor among all
and let the marriage bed be undefiled,
for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous.
Clearly, the author of Hebrews is saying this:
The marriage bed is the only place
of intimacy condoned by God.
Everything else falls into that category
of being that which is sexually immoral
and adulterous and those that God is going to judge.
Now, we see betrothal in Scripture
which might be akin to engagement
in our time.
Why?
Both of them involve a commitment
and both of them are headed to marriage.
And both of them are to be
radically pure,
because only the marriage bed
is the place where God allows that intimacy.
And God is very serious about that.
We can look at Joseph in the New Testament
acting as a righteous man
and he's ready to put Mary away
because of some perceived infidelity
on his part when they were in
this betrothal period.
But under Moses,
it was very pronounced.
Deuteronomy 22:23
If there is a betrothed virgin
and a man meets her in the city
and lies with her, then you shall bring
them both out to the gate of that city,
and you shall stone them to death
with stones.
The young woman because she did not
cry for help, though she was in the city;
and the man, because he violated
his neighbor's wife.
So you shall purge the evil from your midst.
If in the open country, a man meets
a young woman who is betrothed
and the man seizes her and lies with her
then only the man who lay with her
shall die.
This betrothal period - it even inter-uses
betrothal and marriage,
because it was something that you
actually had to have a divorce to break.
It was that permanent.
Our engagments, although they involve
a token of that pledge
in a ring typically,
and there's a commitment,
and usually when there's an engagement
there's a marriage date set.
But we don't count it as binding
in our society.
But nevertheless, it's a period of commitment.
Marriage is the goal.
And absolute purity is to be maintained.
The other one is where you're just
existing side-by-side.
You're friends.
Or maybe you're not friends.
Maybe it's a father/daughter;
maybe it's a brother/sister; whatever.
Every other relationship is single
and pursuing purity.
I guess one of the parties
or both of the parties could be married,
but we're talking about the specific
relationship between any man
and any woman.
What we're doing is we're answering
the question that this young lady has posed.
And look, she's talking about
"if I broke up with my boyfriend..."
what does breaking up with a boyfriend
even look like?
Well, it's a very worldly terminology.
It's the idea of dating, boyfriends,
going out, casual dating, going steady,
whatever.
There's lots of different ways that it's said today.
But it's this idea that I specifically
have a relationship with this person over here
with no commitment.
It's not headed towards marriage.
We're not married.
We're not getting married.
Why do they do that?
What do they want?
Well, they want something from the other
person without commitment.
That's basically what is wanted.
Typically, in our society today,
it runs into enjoying the fullness
of all the intimacy that is had in marriage
and it's just done without any commitment.
It's done in high school,
it's done in middle school.
And what Scripture says
is you have this spoken to Timothy,
"do not rebuke an older man,"
in 1 Timothy 5:1-2.
"Do not rebuke an older man,
but encourage him as you would a father;
younger men as brothers;
older women as mothers."
And Timothy, this is how you're
supposed to deal -
Timothy is a young man;
this is how you deal with young women.
How?
In all purity.
You want a blanket statement
from the apostle as to how
young men and young women
who are not engaged
and headed towards marriage;
who are not in marriage.
Well, even if you are engaged,
but this is the kind of summary statement.
Purity, purity, purity.
All purity.
1 Timothy 2:22
"So flee youthful passions;
pursue righteousness, faith, love, peace
along with those who call on the Lord
from a pure heart."
Of course, you have 1 Corinthians 6:18
that says, "Flee from sexual immorality."
And so, my point to Alvarina,
listen, it's like she's saying this:
"Well, I thought this guy was a Christian,
and I had to break up with him
because he stopped being a Christian.
Is it ok for me to wait for him
to come back to Christ?"
To do what?
Well, so that she can go out with him again.
Or do I have to move on?
Move on to what?
Some other guy
that professes to be a Christian.
She really needs a pastor,
she needs a father or mother
in her life that's telling her,
look, this isn't even an acceptable
kind of relationship before the Lord.
The Lord wants purity.
What in the world kind of relationship are you getting into
and why are you getting into it? What does it mean?
You go out on dates?
It's totally inappropriate.
It's not specified in Scripture.
There's no such recognized
relationships like this that God gives to us.
The only one where any kind of intimacy
is accepted in Scripture is the marriage bed
and everything else is to be kept
absolutely pure.
Everything else.
And so, there needs to be a fleeing
from youthful passions,
a fleeing from sexual immorality,
and certainly, we know it,
you can be blind and you understand,
that all this casual dating that's going on
in our world,
all this going out and going steady,
and having this girlfriend/boyfriend stuff.
Even down into probably elementary schools now
it's leading to all manner of sexual immorality,
and all sorts of wickedness.
It's done for a reason.
And most of us here were lost
and are first generation Christians.
We were lost when we were in elementary school
and middle school and high school,
and we know exactly what it's all about.
We know.
And I hope we don't have any parents
in this church that would ever condone
that kind of relationship between
young people.
So anyway, that's basically how I would
answer Alvarina if I was able to sit with her
face to face.
God wants a commitment in relationships.
Why?
Because ultimately what this leads to is marriage,
which is what?
It's a foreshadowing of
the relationship between Jesus Christ and the church.
And our Lord has relationship with people
by way of covenant.
He's committed.
He's all out committed to that relationship.
And that's the only kind that is
honoring to God.
Everything else is dishonoring.