Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: If watching pornography is good enough to go to hell, why would it not be good enough to end a divorce? On Earth? Hell is forever. Hell is eternal. Hell is the life to come.
Not this life where this institution we have called marriage is temporal.
This is something I've studied and studied so God couldn't look past my ignorance. I've laid it out. I've studied. I've looked at all the scriptures on divorce and remarriage. I've listed what other people said. I've listened to the Spirit. I've watched God providentially guide me into an incredible story.
I mean, for all these people who think remarriage is completely out of the question, maybe for them it is, but for me it wasn't.
God made it clear to me in scripture.
[00:00:46] Speaker B: For 14 years, Satan relentlessly targeted me, enraged by the freedom I was advocating for those trapped in spiritually lifeless marriages. Thousands merely observing the surface reacted with judgmental screams.
However, after years of confusion among the people reminiscent of the days of BAAL worship during Elijah's time, God responded with a celestial fire, unveiling his extraordinary power and the divine design of time through my testimony and ministry.
[00:01:17] Speaker C: Imagine yourself as an undercover agent in a foreign country and your host country, somehow suspicious of your presence there and has been able to flood you with counterfeit messages from your apparent headquarters. You're suddenly getting all these messages. How do you tell which ones are really from your control and which ones aren't? Well, one of the ways is you would be looking for some attribute that was unique to your source, that wasn't counterfeitable by your host country. Follow what I'm saying.
[00:01:46] Speaker B: When you go through and you see these three columns of my three spouses. First unfaithful spouse, Carrie, Second, unfaithful spouse, Persis, and my third and faithful beautiful wife, Lisa. And you go and you see these correlating events and you see precise timing
[00:02:00] Speaker C: to the day, skillfully fulfilling hundreds of specific specifications in order to accomplish what God was attempting to accomplish.
[00:02:08] Speaker D: Random chance doesn't cut it. Those odds we crunched are practically impossible. I'd lean toward God orchestrating it like he's signing his name in 777 day intervals, maybe to show you or anyone paying attention he's real and active.
[00:02:23] Speaker C: One of the ways that God authenticates His message is to rely on an attribute that is unique to Him. Not even the angels have. He's outside the restrictions of time. That's the uniqueness of his personal imprint.
[00:02:36] Speaker B: Welcome to from the ruins, a divorce sanctuary.
Also, please don't forget to subscribe to this video if you're being blessed by the content. If you hit subscribe, YouTube is very likely to recommend this video to somebody who may be hurting just as much or even more than you.
Hello, Alan Michael Criswell here.
[00:03:01] Speaker A: I received your message and you sent me a link to a video by David Paulson on divorce and remarriage. I'm familiar with him. I've watched a video or two of his in the past. Does a seemingly very eloquent job presenting what he believes. He's right in line with somebody like John Piper.
So you're asking me specifically what do I think to help you, brother? Most important is not what I think, but as it says in Romans 14, each one must be convinced in his own mind. And you cannot have doubts about whatever you believe. And you need to rely upon the Holy Spirit to teach you. And God's will, albeit his principles, are the same. God's will is uniquely different for many people. I see this in scripture. I give examples of this all the time, where Jesus goes around and tells everybody, unless you take up your cross, deny yourself, and follow me, literally follow me, you cannot be my disciple. And yet in Mark 5:19, we see the Garcian man being told, no, you cannot follow me. I want you instead to violate my teaching of follow me. I want you to go back home and I want you to tell everybody all that the Lord has done for
[00:04:07] Speaker B: you and how you've had mercy.
[00:04:08] Speaker A: So there are instances where scripture, many actually scriptures, cannot be blanket applied and approached to every single person's life. That's why the Bible is a living word of God. It's not. If I could help people better understand this one principle, Alan, I think it would change people's lives.
The Word of God is critically important, but the Word of God is not the end. It is a means to an end. And the Word of God is not trapped in paper written with typed letters. Paul teaches the letter kills. If you follow the letter like that, it will kill you. And it doesn't bring life.
But the Spirit is life. The letter kills, but the spirit brings life.
[00:04:55] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:04:56] Speaker A: So the word of God has to be applied by the living, breathing, sovereign spirit of God behind it.
There's a spirit behind all the words. And what happens is with subjects like divorce and salvation, people get so trapped in the words and they. They read the words over and over and over and over and over again, bro, it was never supposed to be like this.
There's a spirit behind it. When you start getting Lost. And you go deeper and deeper and deeper in the Word. You've gone beyond what it means to have childlike, simple faith and trust in God when you cannot explain it to a child. You've lost the spirit of Christ. That's what Jesus said, that the kingdom of God is made up of children. I'm not saying you. I'm speaking in general.
So this is what my huge problem is, is that I understand everybody wants to have light and questions. And there's so much confusion if people would get off of YouTube, which is what I regularly tell people.
I'm only there because that's where the people are at. And I'm trying to tell people, don't even take my word for it. Go back to the Bible. Go. Listen. How do you know at the end of the day who's telling the truth? You can't always, because you don't know the people.
But Jesus was accused of being a friend of sinners. John the Baptist was accused of being a glutton and a drunkard. And Jesus said, wisdom is proved right by her children.
So you look where the fruit is. Not numbers, not number of people in the church or in the parking lot. Lives changed and transformed. Transformed for Christ.
Are you a Pharisee who's pounding the rules, pounding the law, pounding good behavior, pounding external changes and external regulations on people, but an unchanged nature? Or are you a person who God, by the Holy Spirit, is changing and revolutionizing people's souls and spirits because of the word of Christ in you and because of their genuine love and thirst for God? Brother, that's happening in my life, okay? So I'm not here to keep trying to prove to anybody I'm right. I'm right because I'm following God's will for Michael Criswell's life. And I am a person who's begged hundreds of times, hundreds of times. God, please don't let me be deceived like a little boy. Father, please teach me your truth. Please help me to understand that. So when I speak with such conviction, it's not because I just heard a great sermon or because I just. Well, this sounds like it makes sense to me, but because it's been baked.
Through prayer and faith and reading of the Word and waiting upon God and studying how God works in the lives of other people. Okay? So rivers of living water are flowing through me. This is what Jesus said. Jesus said, come unto me, all of you that thirst, and I will give you water. And out of the man who follows him and believes in him, he Teaches us that rivers of living water will flow. Okay, it takes time.
You know, we don't get to this place of spiritual maturity and spiritual abundance without years. There's no such thing as coming to Christ and in one year being a saint, it doesn't happen. I've never heard of it ever happening in all the history of Christianity I've ever read. It takes years. God will set you free from Egypt. He'll set you free from your sins and then he's going to walk you into a wilderness time that may be for years where he tests you and humbles you, causing you to suffer and seeing if you will in the face of opposition, in the face of difficult circumstances, God will begin to test you and see, are you going to obey me when it doesn't make sense to you or anybody around you, when it doesn't make sense to how it feels? And he'll test you. And then eventually, after you believe him, he brings you into a spiritual promised land where there'll be obstacle after obstacle and God will, with his grace, enable you, if you have faith, to keep going. And you'll eventually enter in and possess fullness of Christ, which is a spiritual promised land for the new covenant believers. Okay, I'm in possession of that, brother. I'm not going to apologize for it. And I didn't get to this place by believing something so fundamentally wrong about the Spirit of Christ.
That doesn't happen. Even in says in John 8 we know that God does not answer the prayer of sinners. So if I were wrong about what I'm saying, I'm living in sin and I'm not ignorant of it. This is something I've studied and studied so God couldn't look past my ignorance.
I've laid it out, I've studied. I've looked at all the scriptures on divorce and remarriage. I've listed what other people said. I've listened to the Spirit. I've watched God providentially guide me into an incredible story.
I mean, for all these people who think remarriage is completely out of the question, maybe for them it is, but for me it wasn't.
It was not wrong or evil or a sin for me. God made it clear to me in scripture that when an unbelieving spouse leaves, they are no longer willing to live with the believing spouse. The believing spouse is no longer bound. Brother, if that's not your situation, then you have a different challenge than I do.
My teaching on marriage and divorce is not general Bible based teaching in marriage for people that are getting married or thinking about getting married.
My unique part of the body of Christ is to help those people who are stuck in the condemnation, the shame and the guilt of having gone through divorce. And they don't fully understand why. God indeed may have been pleased and it may have been part of his will to let their divorce happen, okay? And that there might be for them life outside of just divorce. That's what my ministry is for.
But you ask me. Now let me answer the question. What do I believe about divorce and remarriage?
I believe that when Jesus Christ was teaching these teachings, he was teaching them to Jews who did not have the spirit of Christ in them, number one.
Number two reason why this is important to note is because they were divorcing. There was a part of Jewish law that allowed a man to divorce his wife for any reason.
And God is saying that's wrong. In Malachi, chapter two, God says, you're putting away of this wife does damage to the one you're supposed to love. God sees that as evil.
So when we put away a wife, okay? Or a wife puts us away, it's evil in the eyes of God. Unless there's three reasons I see in scripture, okay? Three reasons they're crystal clear, all right?
Three reasons that we can act upon. Number one, a spouse dies. So say you're in a loving relationship with a God fearing spouse. They die. If you choose to marry again, the Bible says you must marry an unbeliever. That principle is clear. Paul teaches it about the widows, okay? So they die. You're free to marry or not to marry. It's up to you.
Number two, there has been an affair. Adultery. And I do not believe that just means a person has only had physical sex with another person, that they've had an adulterous affair. I also believe men that have these pornography habits are adulterous in their relationships with their wife. I mean, ask yourself this question, brother.
If watching pornography is good enough to go to hell, why would it not be good enough to end a divorce on earth? Hell is forever. Hell is eternal. Hell is the life to come.
Not this life where this institution we have called marriage is temporal.
Think about this. There's 7950 some odd verses in the New Covenant. 7950 some odd verses. Okay, there are 10 verses slash passages that speak about divorce. 10, the percentage of that's not even a number. I can calculate that meanings how.
[00:12:49] Speaker B: What percent of 10?
[00:12:52] Speaker A: What percent of 7900 is 10, brother, it doesn't even register. It's like maybe 1, 1000th or something. I don't know. It's just crazy.
And yet, look at the emphasis we place on this in scripture teaching or when we've gone through divorce. This divorce doctrine, the marriage doctrine becomes like everything. I think it's completely perverted. I think man has become idolatrous in the way of marriage. We have placed marriage because of a crisis in marriage in the West. We make it out to be that marriage is the savior of the world. And it's not. Brother, I'm telling you, okay, Mark my words, as somebody who believes fully that I'm saying to you the heart of God speaking to you prophetically what the word and heart of God is on this matter. There will be many, many, many people who prayed and fought their way through counseling or meeting with a pastor or reading a good book who saved their marriage and lost their soul.
Alan, they will save marriages and lose their soul. I'm not saying that every marriage that's saved ends up in a person going to hell. I'm making the point that marriage is not the Savior.
Marriage is not this thing that Jesus Christ taught so much on that it should have the emphasis that we're placing on it today, okay? Either way, to get married, to not get married, to divorce, to not divorce.
God is most interested in the spiritual condition of his children. And if a marriage, earthly institution, which Jesus placed so little importance on that after one of his teachings, his disciples conclude, wow, if this is the case, it's better for a man not to be married. He said, this message is only for those who can hear it. In other words, Jesus was advocating that, you know, it's probably better if you don't marry, okay? So think about this.
Jesus's heart. The point of the divorce teaching is that we do not do harm to the spouse, especially a man, to the weaker vessel, the woman.
That's what divorce is in Malachi 2. It's the man putting away the wife, okay? And it was evil.
Supposing you know, you're making a good living, you're a good provider, and you put away your wife and you did harm to her because you didn't like the way she cooked your hamburger so greasy anymore. Brother, that's absolutely evil.
It's doing wrong to one of God's children.
So if somebody divorces for one of those reasons, for anything less than the three reasons, the death of the spouse, adultery or abandonment being left, that's the third reason that I believe it is a sin. The scripture is clear on that. It's clear on that God will use suffering in a divorce.
I've said so many things about this teaching, so many things about all the mistakes we Christians have made of putting ourselves in alliances not formed by God's spirit. And Isaiah, it says this is evil.
In other words, we've put a marriage together that was not God's will.
Now when we put ourselves in a marriage situation we've chosen, we need to live with those consequences.
Unless we have come into fullness in Christ in the relationship, he becomes the most important thing to us. If we have a spouse who's getting in the way of God's work to bring himself glory through our life, we cannot be surprised if God makes room to end that relationship and uses the relationship as an instrument in his hand to further sharpen the object of his mercy, the believing spouse. I've made it clear that what the Bible says, that when an unbelieving spouse leaves, it's clear to somebody that has wisdom in the spirit of God that the greatest evil in First Corinthians 7:15 is not the leaving of the spouse, it's the leaving of Christ.
Staying married to a spouse will not get you into heaven. Rejecting Christ gets a guaranteed ticket to hell, right? So when you reject a spouse because they have accepted Christ, you are rejecting Christ more than you have rejected your spouse. Rejection of Christ is spiritual death.
And I was able to see with God's help all these scriptures how in the new covenant, God sees death very differently than he does in the old.
In the new covenant, it's spiritual death that matters, not physical death. It's that spiritual death. And, and there's several scriptures I shared. I think there's over two dozen scriptures that talk about people that do not follow Christ, that do not have the spirit of Christ in them are dead. So when a person makes a rejection to leave a relationship because of another spouse's relationship, or they are preventing them from living life to the full in Christ. So if I'm married to somebody and they're preventing me from going to worship times or to do my prayer time, or they're constantly belittling me and persecuting me and acting like a devil in my life, God may use that for a time. But there may come a time when God sees this as a tear. He already knows this is not a wheat tares will never become a wheat tares are planted of the devil. They're children of the devil, and they never an ishmael, never becomes an Isaac.
It doesn't happen.
So there may Come the time when God either decides to move them on or a person says, you know what? Enough is enough.
First Corinthians 7:15 says, if the unbelieving spouse is willing to live, the believing spouse must not divorce. Think about what the crisis was in Corinthian Church.
They had a different situation than we did. They were in a sexual religious crisis.
Historically, we know there was a temple and there was sexual, you know, worship and prostitution going on. Temple, prostitutes. There was a major crisis in this very sinful carnal church called Corinth.
First Corinthians, chapter three. I couldn't even speak to you as spiritual, but as worldly.
They're a worldly baby, sinful church.
And Paul is trying to explain, look, you should stay in the situation you're in. He's trying to contain the mess. He's trying to limit the collateral damage of all the carnality and the shallowness of their faith. He's given them some really hard things on marriage. Brother, those things do not apply in every situation to every person. Throughout all of history, it takes the spirit of God to apply the word. That's why the Bible says, let the peace of Christ rule and reign in your hearts.
You see, not even Paul himself, he says, my conscience is clear, but I don't even judge myself because I might be wrong. God is the judge.
So in every situation, we have to allow the spirit of Christ the opportunity to be judge and jury. What is the father's will in your situation? For example, when somebody comes to me with marriage stuff, I can pretty quickly usually begin to discern, okay, I can see father's heart on this, but sometimes I can't because I don't know what the person's motive was. But guess who does? The Lord.
And then I can only tell you this. There are legitimate situations out there where a person is really hungering and thirsting for God and they have attached themselves through ignorance in marriage to a boat anchor, one of the children of the devil they're sleeping with. A tear, a dead body. And if they continue to do so, they're going to inherit those spiritual diseases.
We get emails from people who say they feel they've lost their salvation because they stayed with a monster of a human being, always believing, well, God is going to save them. God is going to save them. God is never going to change a child of the. Of the devil into a child of God. That's why the tares stay tares and the wheat stays wheat. And that's why Jesus Christ says he knows those who are truly his.
[00:20:49] Speaker B: Michael commentary. So I've just mentioned to him about the false hope that so many believers can be under saying, oh, I just know the Lord will change him. Oh, I just believe that the Lord will hear my prayers to change her. And I want to just say that while that is possible, because with God, all things are possible.
My dear brother and sister in Christ, it is not very likely that you might say, michael, this is an outrageous thing to say, but I'm going to speak to you just the facts. And the facts are that because I have seen thousands and thousands of stories and emails from around the world, I'm able to almost, if you will, bring a pretty strong trustworthy statistic to this to help you to see that globally, these divorce and remarriage situations, these unequally yoked marriage situations, statistically I see that very, very few people ever come out of that darkness and then suddenly the marriage becomes great because of the person's repentance or they finally became a believer and got right with Christ.
I have the stories where that has happened.
There's no doubt about it. But brothers and sisters, I might liken it to how rare it is today to find even a true Christian, regardless of whether or not it's inside of a marriage situation, how often do we find people that are truly walking on with the Lord?
[00:22:22] Speaker A: So supposing you have a marriage situation
[00:22:24] Speaker B: where the partner eventually says, hey, I believe I'm coming to Jesus. I mean, even then, that doesn't mean it's a legitimate, authentic conversion experience. In fact, it's very unlikely that it is if it happens.
[00:22:35] Speaker A: It's very rare, especially in the days that we're in today, which the Bible
[00:22:39] Speaker B: describes as terrible times.
So look at this passage for the freedom of those who are in a bondage situation like this. Again, I am not for divorce if there is hope. But the scripture lays down a principle for us, for those of us who are unequally yoked to an unbeliever or to a hypocrite. Look at what the scripture says. Verse 15, 1 Corinthians 7:15. But if the unbeliever leave, let him do so. A believing man or woman is not bound in such circumstances. You're no longer in bondage to the marriage covenant. People used to want to say to me all the time, michael, you're in covenant with your first marriage. God can never honor the second marriage or now the third marriage. You're a serial adulterer. No, my friend, that covenant was broken between she and I first by Carrie and her infidelity and not to mention the wickedness and the hypocrisy and the unfaithfulness on many levels. Her unwillingness to allow me to obey God's will in my life. That's unfaithfulness. That's horrible. Okay, but that was. That covenant was broken. Her marriage covenant with me was broken. Just like Israel's marriage covenant with God was broken. A covenant does not mean that it can't be broken. It can absolutely be broken. Just like you can break your covenant with Jesus Christ right now. The same thing happened in my second spouse when she leaves through her Eastern mysticism and apostasy. And again, I want to remind you, I could have saved my first marriage and then I could have saved my second marriage. I could have prevented the divorce in both situations. This wasn't where I wasn't given a choice.
All I needed to do, please get this, brothers and sisters. All I needed to do was to compromise just a little and sacrifice doing the Lord's will. Sacrifice what I knew to be my God given responsibility or a biblical truth of what it meant to be a true follower of Christ. If I was just willing to compromise, I could have saved myself and perhaps some of you an awful lot of heartache having to watch this story.
But notice again what this scripture says, that the believing man or woman is not bound. That's why I was able to remarry.
I'm not bound to carry anymore and I'm not bound to persist anymore. They violated the marriage covenant and it wouldn't have mattered if that had happened 10 times.
I'm still not in bondage. If the marriage covenant is ended by a sinful person who does not repent, that's clear. That should be basic understanding. But look at what the main point I'm wanting you to see here is.
Why is Paul saying, if the unbeliever leaves, let him do so?
Why is he saying, you're no longer bound if you're the believer in that circumstance? Because God has called us to live in peace. He's saying this verse 16 because how do you know, wife, whether you will save your husband? Or how do you know, husband, whether you will save your wife?
Brothers and sisters, looking at this passage of scripture that Paul is teaching us about marriage and the unbelieving spouse leaving and letting them do so because we don't know if we can save them. I think of the wisdom of God and the mercy of God to both myself and to Lisa. If Lisa and I both were to stand here right now and look back for me 15 years and actually pretty close to the same period of time time for her at our first spouses.
And if we were to have listened to the good sincere advice of loving people around us, family members, friends and church folk, we would no doubt have done everything we could have to stayed in that marriage.
Lisa would have never filed for divorce against her first husband and I would have simply agreed to Carry's requests. That would have been in contradiction to God's requests of me, but I chose instead to obey the Lord's will. Now just again, just imagine, let's fast forward. We now have 15 to 16 years of time in the future to look
[00:26:51] Speaker A: back and say, were we right to
[00:26:53] Speaker B: get out of those marriage relationships?
[00:26:55] Speaker A: Were we right to ignore the well
[00:26:58] Speaker B: meaning advice of those who would scream
[00:27:00] Speaker A: at us, you're in a covenant relationship
[00:27:02] Speaker B: with them, you must stay.
[00:27:03] Speaker A: You've got to believe, you got to hope God can, can turn this around. They can come into righteousness, they can get right with God and you can restore your marriage. Now, brothers and sisters, can you imagine
[00:27:15] Speaker B: how foolish Lisa and I would look
[00:27:18] Speaker A: all these years later had we not
[00:27:20] Speaker B: believed and had the faith to walk in this clear teaching of Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit into the APostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 7:15. Can you imagine?
[00:27:32] Speaker A: Did either one of our spouses.
[00:27:34] Speaker B: Please don't let this moment pass you. We now have 15 years later to look and say, well, what is the condition of our first marriage partners today?
[00:27:46] Speaker A: Are they getting on with God?
[00:27:47] Speaker B: Did they repent of their wickedness?
[00:27:48] Speaker A: Are they running down the narrow path
[00:27:51] Speaker B: as fast and as furious as we are? Are they living a righteous life that is pleasing and holy to the Lord?
[00:27:57] Speaker A: Did they finally get their lives right
[00:27:59] Speaker B: and come out of the wickedness and out of the hypocrisy and out of the drug addictions and out of the infidelity?
[00:28:04] Speaker A: Did they come out of all of
[00:28:06] Speaker B: that which caused the marriage to fall
[00:28:07] Speaker A: apart to begin with? Brothers and sisters, the answer is no, they did not.
So all of the people that would have convinced us to stay in wait
[00:28:18] Speaker B: would have actually been handing us an extra heavy chain to place around our neck, keeping us in bondage to false dead hope in bondage, either sleeping next to or waiting again to sleep next to someone who is spiritually dead. Do you see how wise the word of God is? Please take this seriously. I am not an advocate for divorce,
[00:28:43] Speaker A: but oh, I want people to see
[00:28:45] Speaker B: that there is oftentimes in these days a good reason for it and a
[00:28:49] Speaker A: Good result from it.
[00:28:50] Speaker B: I can't even imagine if Lisa and I were still waiting when. Now what we have found is the condition of those people that we were in once bondage to through marriage is even worse today than it was then.
When you are corrupted by sin, corruption begets corruption. You don't get better, you get worse.
End of commentary.
[00:29:22] Speaker A: Okay, all of us are sinful, but some of us are rebellious and wicked. And some of us are just ignorant, living according to the flesh.
But we have a good heart. As it says in Luke 8:15, the seed that falls on good soil stands for those with a good heart, a noble and good heart who hear the word, retain it, and by persevering produce a crop. Many people don't have that heart.
And if you find yourself living with an unbeliever who's dragging your head underwater and the rope is going the opposite direction, ask yourself this question. Why would God not want to end that?
Why would God not want to end that relationship if he sees that the devil is using the boat anchor spouse to pull the other one underwater?
Why would God not want to do that?
Because God is saying to himself, oh, wow, no, divorce is so important. It's more important than the condition of the internal soul and spirit of the one believer in this family who will seek me, Brother, this is ignorance. This is what false teaching does. This is what Pharisee legalism does. Now, let me make sure I'm real clear about this.
I am not an advocate of divorce. I think many people will hear some of my messages and they'll justify why they should get out. And God would never have them get out. He's not ready for them to get out. And, and there's people who. And that's not my responsibility. That's their responsibility to hear the word of God, obey the word of God and follow the spirit of God and his will for their life. That's why we pray.
That's why Paul says, look, if you're on some point unclear, ask the Lord and he'll make this clear to you.
God will do this to the Spirit.
So I believe divorce is a sin outside of any of those three reasons. And I believe that many Christians are probably. And when I say many, it's going to be a very tiny, tiny number of people that are eligible for remarriage outside of divorce. Because honestly, most people that are getting divorced today, they're only Christian in name. They're not even real Christians.
You see? Now maybe they come, maybe they become one afterwards. It might be a Situation where two people who, who thought they were Christians like me get divorced and then discover, wow. Jesus says, why do you call me Lord, Lord and not do what I say? Titus 1:16 says, There are those who claim to know God, but by their actions they deny him. Wow. Simon the sorcerer was repented. He believed, he baptized, he followed. And he's still a false believer. Maybe I was a false believer.
And you don't have light on those things of divorce, but yet you got so worked up about the external rules of what the church said and you followed the teachings on divorce and marriage. But you're lost. You don't know the Lord. Do you see how ridiculous this is, brother? Most of the teaching on divorce and remarriage doesn't even apply to the majority of people because the church today is completely apostate. Nobody's believing the truth. All of them have gone astray.
The majority of people today think they know Christ and they do not. But I am trying to only help the small number of people that come to me from all over the world.
The small number of the body of Christ who may have legitimate reasons and blessing of God to remarry one day in a situation where God removed a dead person from their life.
Brother, if you or your wife have left for other reasons and you try to remarry, I think that's wrong. You have to seek God's will and find out what he says to you.
And when God knows. A person really wants to know the truth more than they want to know what they want to hear.
Brother, God will make the truth clear. That's what I wanted. I got tired of hearing from men and I said, God, I want to know the truth. And you know something?
God is faithful to that.
He doesn't teach me everything. There's lots of hidden things I don't know and things that the Lord said, don't go there. Things I don't need to know. They're not part of my ministry. I'm only supposed to execute my little part of the body of Christ's work.
But I can tell you God is faithful. If you want to know the truth, he will. Okay, but there's a lot of people out there say, for example, this Dawson guy, has he ever been through a divorce? Has he ever been left by a spouse? Has his spouse ever had adultery? Why would we listen to the full teaching on divorce from somebody who's never even been through it?
Just ask yourself that question.
What these gigantic big headed preachers. I'm not saying he's one But a lot of these guys forget.
I looked down on all divorced Christians until I became one, and they forget this idea that it takes two people to make a marriage. It only takes one to end it.
And God does not condemn the person who is still left standing there when the one spouse decides to pull the adultery thing or to leave or to abandon the marriage because of the other spouse's faith in Christ. God does not condemn or punish and say, that's it, you can no longer marry because of your spouse's sin.
That's not new covenant faith, you see, brother, so I hope this helps you. By the way, I had another person who asked a question about this today, and so I'm exceptionally fired up about the subject. I realize it causes so much confusion, but it makes me so angry that 10 verses about this one subject out of 7900 verses become the behemoth, as if this is the most important subject. Meanwhile, people are neglecting faithfulness to Christ. What good does it do? Think about this. What good does it do to become an expert in marriage and divorce according to what the Bible says, and still end up going to hell because you went out and did your will, not God's will.
The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever. Matthew 7:20, John 2:17, Matthew 7:21 23 says, not everyone who says to me, lord, Lord will enter the kingdom of heaven, only he who does the will of my Father in heaven. What good would it do to become a doctrinal expert on these subjects and not fully surrender your life and will and heart to Christ and not be filled with the Holy Spirit? To not have a relationship, living and breathing with the word of God, walking with him, talking with him, and executing his plans for your life, but yet you become an expert on this subject called divorce. And brother, I'm telling you, there are going to be thousands of people who knew all the right doctrines, they understood all the right things, and they still end up in hell because they, as Jesus said, they strained out a gnat and swallowed a camel. My friend, if divorce showing up 10 times in the new covenant compared to 7900 other verses, if that's not a gnat and swallowing a camel, I don't know what is. And you know, you might be thinking, okay, why are all these teachers making such a big deal out of this divorce and remarriage topic? And the reason is because it's a crisis. They'll say, divorce is a crisis in the church today. I mean, you can go to almost any church in any congregation. And the statistics of divorce are as bad, if not worse than unbelievers. There would be 50 to 60% of the people in an average church that have divorce. And so that's why someone would argue against me and say, Mike, Yeah, there's only 10 verses. But this is a huge problem facing the church, brother. I'm telling you. This is why church leaders and the church is absolutely blind to this. Okay? The problem that the church is facing, the so called crisis, is not divorce.
The crisis is false counterfeit Christians.
This is the problem. The reason why divorce statistics are almost identical to what they are in the world is because the world is in the church. Christians are so worldly.
So that's why I have so much heat and so much passion and so much indignation towards people making such a huge deal out of this divorce. Because many marriages will be saved and people are going to still end up in hell. Why?
Because this church crisis, so called divorce, is happening because there are not true Christians in the church. That's why the Bible says in these last days they are going to be terrible times. Many are going to depart from the faith. People will no longer put up with sound doctrine because of the increase of wickedness. The love of most will go cold. There will be an apostate church, a great falling away of the faith. When Jesus then says in Luke 1:18 1:8, verse 80 says, when he comes back, will he even find faith on earth?
You know what? If Jesus looked at the quality of people's hearts and looked at their level of spiritual maturity and looked and determined what their if they were truly his or not, which the Bible says he knows those are truly his.
He sees a bunch of people that don't even belong to him. They call themselves by his name. They're professing Christians. He sees everybody getting worked up about one of his teachings on divorce, but they don't know him, nor have they ever known him, brother. That's what you have to see is that's why this teaching on divorce and remarriage is so out of whack from my perspective, is because it's the last thing the church needs to be focusing on. The church is trying to focus on fixing an effect.
The cause is the spirit of Christ has left the building, if it's ever even been there to begin with.
People are not following the teachings of Christ. People are not surrendering their life. They're not giving their will over to God. They're not getting free from sin they're not stopping loving the world. This is what I'm telling you is the truth.
That's why I said most of what I'm teaching about divorce and remarriage. It doesn't even apply to most Christians.
Most professing Christians are not Christians.
2nd Corinthians 13:5. Examine yourselves. Test yourselves to see whether you're in the faith.
Do you not know that the spirit of Christ is in you? Unless, of course, you fail the test. So do you see, brother? The idea, this is what the spirit of Christ is moving on me to teach people is. You are straining out a gnat to swallow a camel.
That's what the problem is, brother. If you want my advice, forget about your marriage and cling to Jesus Christ with everything you have. Obey him like you never thought possible. Seek him like you always wanted to. Become more humble and more childlike and dependent upon him than you ever dreamed. And watch what God will do in your heart.
He'll change you from the inside out. You'll be a beacon of light. You'll be a reservoir of living waters bursting forth from you. And just trust God if he wants to ever have you be remarried or do anything different with your kids. Let God do what he wants to do. But don't get caught up in going down this road of learning. What's the real truth? What's God's real hard on this divorce thing when you're not yet fully mature in Christ? I'm not saying you're not. I'm saying that's my message to the church. Put down the divorce remarriage gun, okay? And start picking up the words in red. Humble yourself. Become like a child. The church is absolutely disgusting today. It's gone completely apostate. It is disconnected from the head and the spirit hasn't been there in a long time. That is the truth, my friend. God bless you.
[00:41:18] Speaker B: If this episode helped you, please don't forget to like and subscribe here on YouTube. But also please consider subscribing on Apple Podcasts or Spotify so you don't miss the next episode.
[00:41:35] Speaker A: Sam.
