Save Marriages

Do you value your own wedding vows enough to help others value theirs?

Does the institution of marriage mean enough to you that you would be willing to do something? Something to help? Anything? Pray? Counsel? Something more than just say you are pro-family? Would you put your words into action and make a difference?

I know you know divorce rates are high. You may see countless children growing up in broken homes. Years ago, when I lived in Pleasanton, California, I saw one family after another in our neighborhood fall to divorce. The lady across the street was left by her husband and raised her son mostly alone. Two doors to the right, a family moved out and a young couple with small children moved in. Shortly after, they divorced and sold the house. Across the street and to the left one house, a couple about my age had a teenage daughter and three younger children, and they divorced, and a real estate lady moved in who was a divorced Christian living with a boyfriend, and they became convicted of sin and he moved out while she remained. Two doors to our left, another couple with children split up. And then one day at work, I logged into my computer to see my wife having a conversation with a man about an affair. That was confronted and forgiven, but it would be only a few months before she would divorce me for another man.

So, there is the pattern. It happens to other people all around you, and then it happens to you. Or your son. Or your daughter. Or your parents.

The time to do something to save marriages is always now. Yesterday is never enough. Tomorrow is too late.

The person to do what it takes is always “me”. It is never “him” or “her” or “you” or “someone else”. Say the three words out loud — It—Is—Me. If you don’t do it, someone else won’t do it for you. When was the last time you did anything to help save marriages? Today? Awesome! Your own marriage counts. Your children’s marriage counts. It is not selfish to do something to shore up any marriage.

There is work to be done in the legal community. There is work to be done in the church. There is work to be done in the schools. My goodness! Did you know the homosexuals and the pedophiles probably do a million times more to break down marriages than Christians do to help save marriages? We better pray!!!

I don’t say that to rip into Christians or condemn Christians, but we need to stop trying to be more sincere and learn to be sincere at all. I mean it. Is that unfair?

Little children are growing up in broken homes because more of us would rather spend our time watching the TV and we would rather spend our money on sinful pursuits than on saving marriages and families. Few of us have ever led one person to salvation through Jesus Christ and most Christians don’t even know how to obey this basic commandment of Jesus Christ to take the Good News to all the earth. We need to be revived ourselves before we can hope to bring revival to others.

Wedding Vows

Is the value of your wedding vows so great that your spouse can expect you to stand by them?

Do you have the courage and integrity to back up your wedding vows with accountability and legal assurance your family will not be deprived of their right to live together full time and enjoy the shared family home and possessions by anything you do?

If so, you may be ready for a Sincerity Marriage.

What is a Sincerity Marriage? 

A sincerity marriage is what every marriage should be.  It is a marriage where the people are telling the truth when they declare that the marriage is binding.  It is a marriage for the honest, for the true, for the loving, for the sincere, for the courageous.  The insincere will not find this concept pleasant.

The Sincerity Marriage is the expectation of marriage written into the hearts of every human by the hand of God, and it is why people naturally become angry when the sanctity of marriage is violated.

It is a commitment for life.  Nobody has a right to make wedding vows and then rip the marriage to shreds at everyone else’s expense, and no honorable government would ever rush to protect the unfaithful from responsibility for their bad choices.

A Sincerity Marriage Plan

A plan for a “sincerity marriage” would contain the following assurances of success in marriage:

• Premarital counseling consisting of homework with questions to help the couple get an assessment of differences, expectations, and plans for resolving potential conflicts in a healthy way.
• Determination of whether there are any moral or legal obligations tied to any previous marriages that would prohibit a legitimate marriage from taking place.
• Confirmation of the understanding, sincerity, and depth of the commitment to a lifetime of supporting and benefitting this marriage for the sake of the family.
• Prenuptial agreements drawn up to protect the family from suffering robbery of the right to live together and enjoy the shared family resources because of the unfaithfulness or abuse of one spouse, to oversome some of the adverse affects common to unilateral no-fault divorce laws.  These are loving prenuptials to provide security and assurance of one’s faithfulness and willingness to accept responsibility for any unfaithfulness.
• Prenuptial agreements should contain an identification of common problems in marriage and an agreement regarding the remedy for those problems in advance.
• Followup assessments and review of things learned in premarital counseling after marriage.

 
This vision of a Sincerity Marriage is still in the infancy state of development. However, awhile back I purchased the domain “sincerity-marriage.org” in hopes of building up a website for this purpose.

It is very difficult for me to run these web sites without support and encouragement and prayer, and I have to accept the reality that people don’t support saving marriages at this time very much. People get hurt and look for help urgently for a little while, but then it all goes into a period of grief and loss and recovery, and after that point, helping others avoid trouble in marriage brings back painful memories, so most people would rather accept having others go through it over and over again with a fatalistic attitude that it could not be prevented and that a person who would try would find themselves living a life of pain and futility.

And that is pretty much what it has felt like for me. I see others take a different approach. They go out and get a gun or a bomb, and they kill someone or a few people and often they kill themselves. In fact, one of the highest correlations in statistics is that between suicide and divorce. Here in America, people do it all the time, and many people wonder how it was even possible that such a kind, gentle, sincere, loving person would snap and do something so unexpected.

Truth is, abandonment, adultery, divorce, followed by a heavy dose of robbery, extortion and injustice in the courts will do crazy things to people, and if we don’t want to see those things happening in the news now and then, we have to make some changes.

But, for the