Gender and Sexuality
Part 5. Finding The Right Spouse
Genesis 24
Pastor Charles Price
Turn to the book of Genesis and Chapter 24. This is a long chapter of 67 verses but it is all about Abraham sending his servant to find a wife for his son Isaac.
Last week I talked about singleness and that provoked a number of questions regarding finding a spouse, how do you know if you are called to remain single and questions about who and where and when and how.
And in thinking about this, I changed what I was going to talk about this morning and want to follow that on with a very practical message on how to find the right spouse.
This is a good thing because in the book of Proverbs it says,
“He who finds a wife finds what is good and receives favor from the Lord.”
And so if you are single and you are interested, listen carefully this morning. If you are single and you are not interested, then just relax but please don’t snore; you will disturb the folks around you. And if you are married, stay and listen and see if you got it right.
The cultural context of this story is very different to the contemporary Canadian cultural context.
Abraham was arranging a wife for his son. Most of us are not interested in our parents doing that, although there are some cultures where that still prevails.
In some cultures we marry the person we love.
In other cultures we love the person we marry. And actually that has a better record of stability because love is not just an emotion; it has to go much, much deeper than that.
And I read just yesterday afternoon this story from the press. It says,
A Saudi man is in hospital after his divorced parents forced him to marry four times in 6 months. The battle began when the father insisted the boy should marry a girl from his side of the family.
The mother retaliated by ordering him to wed a girl from her side of the family as well, records Arab News, quoting Al Watan Daily Newspaper.
But the father wasn’t happy with the balance of power and insisted on a third wife from his side. The mother, not to be outdone, then demanded that her son include another wife from her side of the family.
The son has now been admitted to hospital for psychiatric treatment. He is refusing to see his parents or his four wives.
Well, thankfully, we don’t have that pressure in our culture, though some of you come from cultures where your parents are very involved in your marriage arrangement.
And I want us to read Genesis 24 as we go along. And if you have not got a Bible with you, there are Bibles in the pews.
I want you to follow this because I have ten points I want to bring to you. And you might want to note these down, take them home and think them through in due course.
We have the blue Bibles and the black Bibles, depending where you are sitting. They are both New International Versions but they are actually different translations because the NIV has been updated and we have the updated in the black version, and it may be a little bit different.
But these ten points I want to share with you. So fasten your seat belts and hold on. We will go through them fairly quickly.
The principles are good in any culture I think, but also there are principles here which apply to many issues in our lives as well, so I trust it will have general usefulness to us as well.
Let me then read the first four verses of Genesis 24.
“Abraham was now old and well advanced in years, and the LORD had blessed him in every way.
“He said to the chief servant in his household, the one in charge of all that he had, ‘Put your hand under my thigh.
“ ‘I want you to swear by the LORD, the God of heaven and the God of earth, that you will not get a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I am living, but will go to my country and my own relatives and get a wife for my son Isaac.’”
My first point is you need to decide when it’s time to marry and whether it is right to marry.
Let me give you the background to this story here. God had made a covenant with Abraham, you remember, and that covenant involved his son Isaac. Because in Genesis 15:15 God took Abraham outside and said, “Look up at the heavens and count the stars, if indeed you can count them.”
Then He said, “So shall your offspring be.”
Therefore it was totally logical for Abraham to conclude that it was the will of God for his son Isaac to marry because through that son was going to come future generations and the offspring that was promised to Abraham.
Now it is not a question that we do not have to ask; it is a very important question to ask. “Is it right for me to marry?”
Don’t just assume that it is. We talked about this last week a little bit. It is normal and natural for most of us to marry, but for some it will not be the purposes of God, and it may not be now.
And sometimes we have to wait – maybe you are studying, maybe you are at a certain place in your career and you wait for the time you sense is right.
And I quoted from the Song of Songs last week, which is a beautiful love poem, and three times in that love poem it says, “Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires.”
Don’t awaken love prematurely; you will get yourself into trouble. Wait until the time is right.
So when is the time right?
Well Isaac is 40 years of age – we know that in Chapter 25. His mother Sarah has just died. The promise is hanging over them that from Abraham’s offspring (which was Isaac in particular) will come these following generations.
So the time is right. Now Abraham initiates this (Isaac seems a little slow in the process) and says, “I am going to organize a wife for Isaac because now is the time and he is ready to be out there on his own.”
If that is the first point, deciding when it’s right to marry, the second point is that she or he must be one of God’s own people, because in Verse 3,
“I want you to swear by the LORD, the God of heaven and the God of earth, that you will not get a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I am living, but will go to my country and my relatives and get a wife for my son Isaac.”
There was an important reason for this. It was Abraham’s family who were under the covenant that God had made and in other words, he was to marry from within God’s own people.
That was reiterated a number of times through the Old Testament concerning the children of Israel, that the people they were to marry were to be from among the people of God.
In the New Testament that is reiterated several times. I quoted last week 2 Corinthians 6:14:
“Don’t be yoked together with unbelievers.”
A yoke was a wooden crossbar you put on the shoulders of two oxen to harness them together to enable them to go in the same direction, to share the load together, to balance each other out.
And it is vital that when we marry somebody they share the same fundamental outlook in life, they share the same values, the same sense of purpose. And if one of you knows Christ and one of you doesn’t, you cannot share that fundamental sense of what your life is about.
And so he insists don’t be yoked together with an unbeliever.
1 Corinthians 7:39:
“A woman is free to marry anyone she wishes, but he must belong to the Lord.”
And that means don’t get involved in relationships that cannot lead to marriage with somebody who does not belong to Christ. That is unfair.
And I had the conversation last week with one or two people who said, “You know, there are no Christians that I know that I want to marry so I am either tempted to date unbelievers,” or (in a couple of cases) “I am dating an unbeliever. What should I do about that?”
And my advice was: break it off. If you are serious about God, if He wants you to marry, He will put you with the right person at the right time.
But out of desperation just to have somebody, you are going to jeopardize your relationship with God by acting in disobedience and sharing your life with somebody who cannot share the fundamental thing that makes you tick, which is Christ as Lord operating within your life.
And I want to challenge you to make that decision before God that you will not marry outside of His will.
The third thing is trust God to guide you. In Verse 5, let me read you,
“The servant asked him, ‘What if the woman is unwilling to come back with me to this land? Shall I then take your son back to the country you came from?’
“‘Make sure you do not take my son back there,’ Abraham said. ‘The LORD, the God of heaven, who brought me out of my father’s household and my native land and who spoke to me and promised me on oath, saying, “To your offspring I will give this land” – he will send his angel before you so that you can get a wife for my son from there.’”
Notice that:
“He will send his angel before you.”
Don’t panic. Don’t get desperate. God is going to guide you is what Abraham says to this servant. And that is true for you, for all of us.
He will be preparing you, if you are single, for the person that He is going to bring you to in marriage. And He will be preparing her or him to come to you. And you have got to give God His time in that preparation.
That’s why don’t run ahead. You wait for Him.
Well you say, “Does God have a plan for you in this area? Is it not just enough to marry a Christian? Does God have somebody He wants me to marry?”
My answer to that would be most definitely God has somebody He wants to lead you to if He plans for you to marry because this is one of the most important decisions you will make in your life.
And when Abraham asked his servant, when he did bring a wife back for Isaac, “How did you manage to do this so quickly and so effectively?” the servant answered, “The LORD led me on the journey.”
I love the way the King James puts it:
“I, being in the way, the LORD led me.”
“This was not a random thing. This was not a stroke of luck. God led me in this journey,” the servant says.
“I, being in the way, the LORD led me.”
You make sure you are in the way. That is, you are acknowledging God in all your ways and His promise is He will direct your paths.
The two most important decisions you make in your life is: number one, who is your master? And don’t kid yourself you don’t have a master. To whomsoever you submit, says Paul in the New Testament, you become slaves of the one to whom you submit – either sin or righteousness.
We are mastered by something. All of us have a big “because” in the middle of our lives. “I do what I do ‘because’, and the ‘because’ explains what dominates and masters your life.
The most important question you have to answer is who is going to be your master? The second one: who is going to be your mate?
And if God is not interested in who is your mate, He is not interested in anything in your life. That is a crucial issue, but in its own time.
So don’t present God an agenda that says, “I need to be married by the time I am 22. When I graduate from university, I want to get married that year.”
Just be patient and trust Him.
And if you marry the wrong one out of impatience, then you just have to learn to live with the wrong one.
I had a friend in England and he said this and I wouldn’t dare say this, but I am going to quote him and you can blame him if you don’t like it. He said,
“If you marry a woman and discover she is a pig, learn to enjoy pork.”
I didn’t say that, but I know the point he was making, and the same applies to a guy.
So our first question: should you marry? It’s an important question. When is the right time for such a relationship?
Make sure she is amongst, or he is amongst the people of God.
You trust God to guide you.
And then fourthly there is a time to start looking because Verse 10 says,
“Then the servant took ten of his master’s camels and left, taking with him all kinds of good things from his master.”
Now you need some camels at this stage, and you get hold of your camels and you go – preferably ten.
No, the point is he started looking.
Now don’t go to the other extreme and say, “I am going to trust God to lead me to the person I am going to marry so I won’t even look.”
Marriage doesn’t just happen. You don’t catch marriage like you catch the flu, you know, if you hang around girls long enough, you end up married.
You have to make a decision. You choose to marry and you choose when it’s time to start looking. You might meet somebody – you weren’t looking and you just meet them and that’s the right thing. But don’t start looking prematurely.
But there is a time to open your eyes, mix around, meet folks. There is a time. But you do so in the context the time is right. He or she will be from God’s own people. I am going to trust God to guide me. But then start looking.
And then fifthly, pray about the process because Verse 12 says,
“Then he prayed, ‘O LORD, God of my master Abraham, give me success today.”
That’s a bit urgent – “give me success today”, but nevertheless he is praying.
And we have quite a bit of things that he prayed in this whole chapter, which you can look at some time on your own. This is a vital ingredient, not just praying, “Lord, give me a husband or Lord, give me a wife.”
But pray for the person He is going to give you.
When I was in my early twenties, I remember praying and saying, “Lord, I would like to marry one day, but I have never yet met anybody I want to marry. So I don’t know her name. I don’t know where she lives. I don’t know what she is doing. I don’t know if she is a Christian yet or not. I assume she is alive, otherwise there is going to be a very big age gap and I will have to wait a long time. So somewhere on this planet this girl is walking around somewhere. And You know her and You know everything about her.”
And I began to pray for whoever she was and I asked God to show me how I should pray for her. And I actually remembering sensing she was not yet a Christian and I began to pray that God would save her and that God would protect her and that God would guide her and that God would keep her safe.
And I prayed some specific things that after I had met Hilary (and I didn’t tell her this until our honeymoon) but things that were actually true about her that I was already praying for.
She wasn’t a Christian when I began to pray for her. And I think that’s why the day I met her, I had come back to Capernwray Hall, which is where I was living in England (a conference center and Bible school). And she had come to work there for Christmas break from university. We had some Christmas/New Year conferences.
I came home and I walked down the corridor and she was actually cleaning the corridor and I passed her and just said, “Hello” to her. And I didn’t engage her in conversation or anything.
But I wrote to my friend that night, my closest friend, and I said, “I think I have just met the girl I am going to marry but I don’t know her name yet.”
And the moment I saw her I sensed, “that’s the girl.”
And there is absolutely no explicable reason for that other than the Spirit of God whispered that and that I had been praying for her. And because I had been praying for her, I think that is a reason why I recognized her when I knew her.
I found out her name the next morning and I tried to get to know her as discretely as I could and I discovered she had a boyfriend. So I put his name onto my prayer list and I put a big boot next to it (get him out).
Some time later she went back to university, back up in Scotland and I was going up to Scotland to speak at another university. But I thought while I am Scotland I am going to be going close to where she is staying, I will just kind of casually drop in. I had heard by the grapevine she had broken up with her boyfriend, so I would just casually drop in.
And I was in the office at Capernwray and I said, “When I am up in Scotland I am going to call in to see Hilary Ollertan (that was her maiden name). And there was a guy there, an Australian guy, who said, “Oh, would you take something for me?”
I said, “Yes, I would love to.”
I thought, “I have got an alibi now. I am going to take this thing for him.”
So the next day he gave me a little package and an envelope with it and I contacted Hilary and said, “I am going to call in to just see you – maybe we can have lunch together or a cup of coffee and I have got something I am delivering to you.”
(So that was my alibi, you see.)
And I got there and I gave her this package and this envelope. What I didn’t know was it was a love letter from this Australian student who jumped in ahead of me. And she made me a cup of coffee and read his letter.
And when I left she wrote a reply, which I took back, and they established a relationship.
So there’s me, the kind of piggy in the middle who had kind of helped set it up. So he went on to my prayer list as well. And that went on for about six months and nobody irritated me more at Capernwray than he did during those six months.
Actually I watched her go through three boyfriends. (She is not here this morning; she is speaking at a women’s conference, but she knows I am saying all this.)
But I think I recognized her because I had been praying for her.
I stopped praying, “Lord, lead me to a girl I could marry.” I started praying for whoever this girl is on the assumption she exists and You will be at work in her life.
And it actually took her almost two years to see the light, by which time I had lost interest and I thought to myself, “That was crazy. Why ever did I think of it in the first place?”
And how it came to be that she suddenly fell in love with me when I had now not had the same feelings for her because I had gotten rid of them is a longer story in itself, but it took place in Africa actually.
We were at Victoria Falls together (it’s a long story how we came to be there together) and that’s when she fell in love with me. And I didn’t want her to at that stage. I thought, no, that’s all history now.
Anyway, pray. Pray about the process is what Abraham’s servant did.
And then let me read Verse 13 because then it says – this is what he prays; this is part of his prayer:
“See, I am standing beside this spring, and the daughters of the townspeople are coming out to draw water.”
He is in the right place and these girls are coming out to draw water.
“May it be that when I say to a girl, ‘Please let down your jar that I may have a drink’ and she says, ‘Drink, and I will water your camels too’ – let her be the one you have chosen for your servant Isaac. By this I will know that you have shown kindness to my master.”
My sixth point is look for qualities of character. He set a little trap. As these girls come out, I am going to pick one and I am going to ask, “Would you give me a drink?” And if she says, “Yes, and I am going to water your camels as well”, let her be the one.
So guys, for this one, you have to say, “I am going to take this girl in my car and I am going to pull up at a gas station to fill up. And if she says, ‘I will fill it up for you’ let her be the one.”
So look for qualities of character: kindness, generous.
He didn’t say, “Let her be” and designed his most beautiful image of what a girl would be. He says, “Let her be someone who is generous, who is kind, who goes the second mile etc.”
You know, to marry on the grounds of physical attraction as the primary attraction is a recipe for disaster.
Apparently, those who work these things out, say that the average marriage based on physical attraction is between six months and two and a half years.
Do you think that’s exaggerated? Look at Hollywood. Hollywood is made up of beautiful people and of disastrous marriages. If somebody stays married ten years, twenty years, and if it’s a lifelong marriage, for absolute sure, it will be the defining thing about that person. “Wow, they are still married after 26 years or whatever it might be!”
The person we marry will be physically attractive to us because we will love them as a person, we will love their heart, their soul and we will love their bodies.
But good looks can be a handicap when it comes to looking for a partner. So, you know, a girl might not be a stunning beauty or girls may not fall and swoon at the feet of a guy, but when those people do marry it is more likely to be for good reasons and more likely to become more stable.
I remember going to speak at a church in England that I knew some years ago. And I stayed with one of the elders of the church and he and his wife’s son had married a girl from the church and this marriage had broken up. And it had just happened and it was devastating to the people – everybody was astounded.
And somebody said to me, “We don’t understand – they were just the perfect couple.”
And I went to have lunch at the home of this couple and they had a wedding picture on the piano or something and they were a beautiful couple and people said they were just ideal because they were both very good looking.
But that was paper thin. Physical chemistry is icing on the cake but it’s not the cake.
So he looks for qualities of character.
The seventh thing is he gets to know her as a whole person.
Let me read you Verse 15. It says,
“Before he had finished praying, Rebekah came out with her jar on her shoulder. She was the daughter of Bethuel son of Milcah, who was the wife of Abraham’s brother Nahor.”
So she’s the right person in the sense that she belongs to the family of Abraham, part of the covenant family.
Verse 16:
“The girl was very beautiful,”
(That’s coincidental, but she was.)
“…a virgin; no man had ever lain with her.”
So she was single so she was eligible.
“She went down to the spring, filled her jar and came up again.
“The servant hurried to meet her and said, ‘Please give me a little water from your jar.’
“‘Drink, my lord,’ she said.”
(That was a good start, by the way, “my lord”)
“‘Drink, my lord,’ she said, and quickly lowered the jar in her hands and gave him a drink.”
He probably drank it saying, will she say it, will she say it?
“After she had given him a drink, she said, ‘I’ll draw water for your camels too, until they have finished drinking.’”
You know, camels carry water tanks on their backs, don’t you? That’s a lot of water. They will drink and drink and fill up their humps with water.
“So she quickly emptied her jar into the trough,”
(Notice this.)
“…ran back to the well to draw more water,”
(She is running and doing that for all his camels – this was probably the origin of the term ‘running water’.)
Now notice Verse 21. This is the verse that is key here.
“Without saying a word, the man watched her closely to learn whether or not the LORD had made his journey successful.”
He set this trap and she sprang the trap, was feeding his camels, but he was a wise man. He didn’t say, “You never guess what – I was just praying about looking for a wife for my master’s son and I said if she offers me water and feeds my camels she is the one. You just did that, so you are the one! Look at that!”
That would scare her. She would run home as quickly as she could.
Don’t base anything on one thing. “Well, I prayed this and it happened.”
It’s the testimony of two or three witnesses, two or three things that point you in the right direction that it’s safer to go by. And he watched her closely to learn whether the Lord had made his journey successful or not.
He observed her and got to know her. It is very important that we take time to get to know the person.
Don’t just see them as a prospective wife or a prospective husband. Get to know them as a person. Build friendship. Do things together with others as well as just the two of you together.
And don’t be impatient about that process. Get to know them.
He saw her actions. He saw her reactions. He saw her under the pressure of carrying the water. She ran back to the well to draw more water. And he watched her closely.
I am intrigued – he didn’t lift a finger to help her – he just watched her closely. But he got to know her.
And as he got to know her he began to admire her and respect her.
I told my kids marry somebody that you look up to. Try to marry somebody you would like to be like them because you respect them and you see qualities in them that you want to be in yourself.
And he watches her closely.
And then the eighth thing: get to know her or his family and history. Because Verse 22 says,
“When the camels had finished drinking, the man took out a gold nose ring.”
(You need one of those in your pocket, by the way, and a little tool to put it on with.)
“…took out a gold nose ring weighing a beka and two gold bracelets weighing ten shekels.
“Then he asked, ‘Whose daughter are you? Please tell me, is there room in your father’s house for us to spend the night?’”
(That’s for him and his camels to spend the night there.)
So he found out about her family. Whose daughter are you? She answered in Verse 24,
“I am the daughter of Bethuel, the son that Milcah bore to Nahor.”
(Who happens to be a great uncle of Isaac, and therefore she is a second cousin once removed, to be technically accurate about the relationship. She is within the family.)
It is very important to get to know all about a person who may be the person you are going to marry.
And there are two reasons why it is important to get to know their family. One is, you don’t marry the family – of course you don’t – but you do marry a product of the family. And they will bring a history with them, both good and bad.
They will bring assumptions with them from their family history you need to know and be able to understand.
I came from a stable family. My parents were stable. They loved each other. As kids we never ever doubted that. My father showed love to my mother frequently in front of us as kids. He would tell her she was the most beautiful woman in the world.
We as kids (I was one of six), we would laugh at him when he did that; we would mock him doing it. But he would do it. And it was incredibly secure. The best thing a father can do for his kids is to love their mother well.
And I came from that background.
Hilary came from a broken home. There was tension in her home all the way through. And in her teen years her parents separated. And the rock from which she was hewn was torn apart. That is a devastating experience for a teenager to go through.
They put on the right front of course, but underneath there was a brokenness that comes from that.
After Hilary and I married, for a number of years she would suddenly say to me sometimes, “You won’t leave me, will you?”
I used to say, “Of course I won’t. I know where my bread is buttered.”
I thought, “Why is she asking me?”
I used to go away on trips, on preaching trips, and she would sometimes say to me, “You will come back, won’t you?”
“Yeah, of course I will come back.”
It was only after several years I realized she asked those questions because she needed that reassurance because one day her father had left and didn’t come back. And that was part of her psyche. That was one of the biggest ghosts to haunt her heart. And she needed that reassurance.
I didn’t understand that at first.
And it is very important to go to their home. This man went to her home. It can be a shock to do that, you know.
At Capernwray we had students who had come from all over the world and they would often meet and I used to say to them, “You know, don’t make any promises until you leave here, Capernwray, and until you have been able to go and visit each other in your own homes. Don’t make any promises before then, because you need to know the home context. You need to know the habits, the customs. You need to understand those.”
You know, in Hilary’s home, her dad put the garbage out. In my home, my mom put the garbage out. And so we grew up – I grew up knowing that mothers put the garbage out. It was never discussed. I just knew it. That was what wives did.
Hilary grew up knowing fathers put the garbage out – that’s what husbands do. She had never thought about it; I had never thought about it. We never discussed it.
After a couple years of marriage there was a massive pile of garbage at our house. I said, “Hilary, you are forgetting something.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was wondering about the garbage. Did you forget it or not?”
“I was wondering about the garbage too.”
“Don’t you know the wives put out the garbage?”
“Wives don’t touch the garbage. That’s a man’s job.”
“Not it’s not – it’s a woman’s job.”
That a little thing. And I am exaggerating it just to make the point.
But we need to understand each other. We need to understand the home, the assumptions that govern our home life.
That doesn’t mean you have got to meet the checklist or I will break up with you, but you have to understand because I am going to say in a moment marriage is work. It is not a fairy tale – you need to understand each other’s background.
Second reason why this is important, in this instance she needed to be related to Abraham and therefore to the covenant that God had made with Abraham.
And it is vitally important that you know the spiritual history and experience of the person you are going to marry.
It is absolutely vital that you are compatible in this.
To be honest, I don’t understand the people who have said to me before now, “I thought he was a Christian when we got married, but I discovered afterwards that he isn’t.”
Well, I don’t know how you ever thought he was unless you didn’t spend time on your knees together and didn’t spend time in the Word of God together.
You see, we are spirit, soul and body and the depth of union begins with a united spirit and from that the soul, the mind, the emotions, the will, and from that, the physical union.
Don’t get that the wrong way around. It’s the unity of spirit and soul that holds you together and makes the physical union what it is. And it is vitally important you know that spiritual history of the person that you marry.
And then the ninth thing is wait until you both see the guidance of God. What I mean by this is that in the culture of the day, Abraham’s servant had an interview with Rebekah’s parents. She was not present.
And in Verse 34 he explained to them,
“I am Abraham’s servant. The LORD has blessed my master abundantly, and he has become wealthy. He has given him sheep and cattle,” etc. etc.
And he tells the story how he was sent off to find this woman and “I laid down a certain criteria down” and he just repeats a lot of what he had already said, but he repeats it to her parents whose
names were Laban and Bethuel.
For 15 verses he explains what he was doing, how God had guided him so far, why he was interested in Rebekah.
And then in Verse 50,
“Laban and Bethuel answered, ‘This is from the LORD; we can say nothing to you one way or the other.
“‘Here is Rebekah; take her and go, and let her become the wife of your master’s son, as the LORD has directed.’”
Now Abraham’s servant has said, “The LORD has directed me to you, as I understand it to Rebekah. She has fitted all the criteria and she has sprung the traps I set along the way. And she looks like the right person. What do you think?”
And their answer was, “This is from the LORD. Take Rebekah to your master’s son as the LORD has directed.”
The point is they both independently saw the guidance of God.
Don’t be pushed into making a decision when you do not have a clear sense yourself. Don’t marry someone because your parents say, “We think he is right for you.” You need to know he is right.
Don’t say, “Well, my boyfriend is convinced this is from God; I am not sure but I trust him so I am going to go with it.”
You need to know from God yourself.
I told you when I fell for Hilary she wasn’t even looking in my direction. She went through three boyfriends and never even thought twice about me in that sense. And so by the time she did become interested I had lost interest.
But it was interesting that God showed me and then I let it die because I needed to. And then God showed her and it was already dead in me by them so I had to wake up again.
But the point is we both at different times have evidence that satisfied our own hearts that this was from God.
And so both sides need to know the will of God. It’s not just Abraham’s servant on a journey - he is going to make his decision. They make the same decision equally on the other side.
And my last point, tenthly, is when you commit, commit fully. Because in Verse 57,
“Then they said, ‘Let’s call the girl and ask her about it.’”
That’s a good idea! But in that culture it wasn’t always done.
“So they called Rebekah and asked her, ‘Will you go with this man?’
“‘I will go,’ she said.
“Will you go with this man?”
“Yes,” she said.
At that time you are running a big risk. I have often said we are never 100% in the will of God until we are 90% and step out in faith and the confirmation usually comes after we have made the decision.
And I think probably many of us, when it comes to this point, we say, “Oh boy, is this really true?”
I proposed to Hilary on a Friday afternoon. I was going to speak at a youth event on the Saturday night and I invited her to come with me. And we drove down from the north of England and we took a picnic lunch and we stopped and had a picnic lunch in the field and during our lunch I asked her if she would marry me.
And I said, “But don’t give me an answer until Monday. I don’t want to spoil the weekend. So think about it and we are going to drive home Monday. You can give me the answer then.”
And I tell you that was a tough weekend. I began to think, “what if she says yes? If she says yes, man, this is for life, this is total commitment and do I really want that? Am I totally, totally, totally sure?”
We drove back on Monday morning. It was a five hour drive and we drove back and we never raised the subject. We talked about everything else under the sun.
We got back to her mother’s home where she was staying, pulled up outside the home. And I said, “I asked you a question on Friday. Do you have an answer?”
She said, “Yes.”
I said, “Is that the answer or does that mean you have an answer?”
She said, “I have an answer.”
I said, “What is the answer?”
She said, “Yes.”
And to my eternal shame, I said, “Oh no. That means I am tied and committed now for life.”
It’s the best decision I made. But it was true because, having said yes, there was no turning back.
In Verse 61,
“Then Rebekah and her maids got ready and mounted their camels and went back with the man. So the servant took Rebekah and left.”
And they went back to where Abraham was now living in Canaan, away from his own people and it was going to be a totally new life from which she would not turn back.
I love the realism of the Bible though. This was not a “they lived happily ever after story”.
Sadly, Isaac and Rebekah had a bad marriage. It was not because they needed to. They had married the right person, but when you marry the right person, that’s the beginning. It needs developing, it needs growing, it needs keeping alive, it needs keeping fresh.
I suggest to you the three fundamental ingredients in a good marriage are mutual respect, mutual trust, mutual love.
Like a three-legged stool, you snap one of those; it takes some time to rebuild it. And it takes work to rebuild it.
You break trust and you have got to rebuild that leg of the stool if it is going to be secure.
And Rebekah was barren, you see. The whole point was that Abraham was going to have grandchildren and Rebekah was barren. That was a real problem.
She didn’t conceive for twenty years. I think God was teaching them through that. After twenty years she conceived once and they were twins. They were not identical twins. They were completely un-identical twins - Esau and Jacob.
Esau was a hairy man, it says. He was an outdoor hunter, a hairy man.
Jacob was smooth and pink and he wasn’t an outdoor man. He stayed at home and helped Mommy with the cooking, learned to make lovely stews and things.
And he began to bribe his brother. And his mother taught him to cheat, his mother taught him to lie. His mother taught him to steal.
And the parents sided with the two boys against each other and the boys against each other.
And they had a bad marriage because marriage is work. If you are married, you know that. You have got to deal with some of those basic issues to enable you to grow together in harmony. And it takes time, it takes input, it takes listening, it takes speaking.
I have been happily married for 30 years. I think Hilary has been happily married for about 20. It doesn’t just drift off in fairy tale land and they lived happily ever after.
I don’t know a good marriage in the Bible actually that we have any detail about. You might say, “Ruth and Boaz – looks pretty good” but we only have their wedding. We don’t know what happened after that. Great love story.
But the point is this: I think in this story in Genesis 24 are timeless principles and timeless truths that if you and I take the wisdom of this story and the wisdom of Abraham’s servant, I think we will build in good checks, good balances, good processes that in our own culture and through our own means of finding a spouse, that God will lead us at the right time to the right person and avoid us going to the wrong person out of desperation.
So that’s my message. My time has gone. It’s a practical message. It may be too late for some of you. It may be useless to others. But it might be useful to about six of you, so take it and run with it.
Let’s pray.
Lord, we are grateful that Your Word doesn’t put our head in the clouds. It puts our feet on the ground. It helps us to live well. It helps us to live wisely. It helps us to live with the wisdom that You have promised to give to those who recognize their need of it and are willing to seek it. I pray for those in relationships here this morning, for those who are dating, for those who are engaged, for those who are married, that we might bring these relationships under the scrutiny of Your Word and under the authority of Your Son as our Lord and under the enabling of the Holy Spirit who equips us to live lives that are not only pleasing to You but deeply satisfying to us. We pray it in Jesus' Name, Amen.
Part 5. Finding The Right Spouse
Genesis 24
Pastor Charles Price
Turn to the book of Genesis and Chapter 24. This is a long chapter of 67 verses but it is all about Abraham sending his servant to find a wife for his son Isaac.
Last week I talked about singleness and that provoked a number of questions regarding finding a spouse, how do you know if you are called to remain single and questions about who and where and when and how.
And in thinking about this, I changed what I was going to talk about this morning and want to follow that on with a very practical message on how to find the right spouse.
This is a good thing because in the book of Proverbs it says,
“He who finds a wife finds what is good and receives favor from the Lord.”
And so if you are single and you are interested, listen carefully this morning. If you are single and you are not interested, then just relax but please don’t snore; you will disturb the folks around you. And if you are married, stay and listen and see if you got it right.
The cultural context of this story is very different to the contemporary Canadian cultural context.
Abraham was arranging a wife for his son. Most of us are not interested in our parents doing that, although there are some cultures where that still prevails.
In some cultures we marry the person we love.
In other cultures we love the person we marry. And actually that has a better record of stability because love is not just an emotion; it has to go much, much deeper than that.
And I read just yesterday afternoon this story from the press. It says,
A Saudi man is in hospital after his divorced parents forced him to marry four times in 6 months. The battle began when the father insisted the boy should marry a girl from his side of the family.
The mother retaliated by ordering him to wed a girl from her side of the family as well, records Arab News, quoting Al Watan Daily Newspaper.
But the father wasn’t happy with the balance of power and insisted on a third wife from his side. The mother, not to be outdone, then demanded that her son include another wife from her side of the family.
The son has now been admitted to hospital for psychiatric treatment. He is refusing to see his parents or his four wives.
Well, thankfully, we don’t have that pressure in our culture, though some of you come from cultures where your parents are very involved in your marriage arrangement.
And I want us to read Genesis 24 as we go along. And if you have not got a Bible with you, there are Bibles in the pews.
I want you to follow this because I have ten points I want to bring to you. And you might want to note these down, take them home and think them through in due course.
We have the blue Bibles and the black Bibles, depending where you are sitting. They are both New International Versions but they are actually different translations because the NIV has been updated and we have the updated in the black version, and it may be a little bit different.
But these ten points I want to share with you. So fasten your seat belts and hold on. We will go through them fairly quickly.
The principles are good in any culture I think, but also there are principles here which apply to many issues in our lives as well, so I trust it will have general usefulness to us as well.
Let me then read the first four verses of Genesis 24.
“Abraham was now old and well advanced in years, and the LORD had blessed him in every way.
“He said to the chief servant in his household, the one in charge of all that he had, ‘Put your hand under my thigh.
“ ‘I want you to swear by the LORD, the God of heaven and the God of earth, that you will not get a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I am living, but will go to my country and my own relatives and get a wife for my son Isaac.’”
My first point is you need to decide when it’s time to marry and whether it is right to marry.
Let me give you the background to this story here. God had made a covenant with Abraham, you remember, and that covenant involved his son Isaac. Because in Genesis 15:15 God took Abraham outside and said, “Look up at the heavens and count the stars, if indeed you can count them.”
Then He said, “So shall your offspring be.”
Therefore it was totally logical for Abraham to conclude that it was the will of God for his son Isaac to marry because through that son was going to come future generations and the offspring that was promised to Abraham.
Now it is not a question that we do not have to ask; it is a very important question to ask. “Is it right for me to marry?”
Don’t just assume that it is. We talked about this last week a little bit. It is normal and natural for most of us to marry, but for some it will not be the purposes of God, and it may not be now.
And sometimes we have to wait – maybe you are studying, maybe you are at a certain place in your career and you wait for the time you sense is right.
And I quoted from the Song of Songs last week, which is a beautiful love poem, and three times in that love poem it says, “Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires.”
Don’t awaken love prematurely; you will get yourself into trouble. Wait until the time is right.
So when is the time right?
Well Isaac is 40 years of age – we know that in Chapter 25. His mother Sarah has just died. The promise is hanging over them that from Abraham’s offspring (which was Isaac in particular) will come these following generations.
So the time is right. Now Abraham initiates this (Isaac seems a little slow in the process) and says, “I am going to organize a wife for Isaac because now is the time and he is ready to be out there on his own.”
If that is the first point, deciding when it’s right to marry, the second point is that she or he must be one of God’s own people, because in Verse 3,
“I want you to swear by the LORD, the God of heaven and the God of earth, that you will not get a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I am living, but will go to my country and my relatives and get a wife for my son Isaac.”
There was an important reason for this. It was Abraham’s family who were under the covenant that God had made and in other words, he was to marry from within God’s own people.
That was reiterated a number of times through the Old Testament concerning the children of Israel, that the people they were to marry were to be from among the people of God.
In the New Testament that is reiterated several times. I quoted last week 2 Corinthians 6:14:
“Don’t be yoked together with unbelievers.”
A yoke was a wooden crossbar you put on the shoulders of two oxen to harness them together to enable them to go in the same direction, to share the load together, to balance each other out.
And it is vital that when we marry somebody they share the same fundamental outlook in life, they share the same values, the same sense of purpose. And if one of you knows Christ and one of you doesn’t, you cannot share that fundamental sense of what your life is about.
And so he insists don’t be yoked together with an unbeliever.
1 Corinthians 7:39:
“A woman is free to marry anyone she wishes, but he must belong to the Lord.”
And that means don’t get involved in relationships that cannot lead to marriage with somebody who does not belong to Christ. That is unfair.
And I had the conversation last week with one or two people who said, “You know, there are no Christians that I know that I want to marry so I am either tempted to date unbelievers,” or (in a couple of cases) “I am dating an unbeliever. What should I do about that?”
And my advice was: break it off. If you are serious about God, if He wants you to marry, He will put you with the right person at the right time.
But out of desperation just to have somebody, you are going to jeopardize your relationship with God by acting in disobedience and sharing your life with somebody who cannot share the fundamental thing that makes you tick, which is Christ as Lord operating within your life.
And I want to challenge you to make that decision before God that you will not marry outside of His will.
The third thing is trust God to guide you. In Verse 5, let me read you,
“The servant asked him, ‘What if the woman is unwilling to come back with me to this land? Shall I then take your son back to the country you came from?’
“‘Make sure you do not take my son back there,’ Abraham said. ‘The LORD, the God of heaven, who brought me out of my father’s household and my native land and who spoke to me and promised me on oath, saying, “To your offspring I will give this land” – he will send his angel before you so that you can get a wife for my son from there.’”
Notice that:
“He will send his angel before you.”
Don’t panic. Don’t get desperate. God is going to guide you is what Abraham says to this servant. And that is true for you, for all of us.
He will be preparing you, if you are single, for the person that He is going to bring you to in marriage. And He will be preparing her or him to come to you. And you have got to give God His time in that preparation.
That’s why don’t run ahead. You wait for Him.
Well you say, “Does God have a plan for you in this area? Is it not just enough to marry a Christian? Does God have somebody He wants me to marry?”
My answer to that would be most definitely God has somebody He wants to lead you to if He plans for you to marry because this is one of the most important decisions you will make in your life.
And when Abraham asked his servant, when he did bring a wife back for Isaac, “How did you manage to do this so quickly and so effectively?” the servant answered, “The LORD led me on the journey.”
I love the way the King James puts it:
“I, being in the way, the LORD led me.”
“This was not a random thing. This was not a stroke of luck. God led me in this journey,” the servant says.
“I, being in the way, the LORD led me.”
You make sure you are in the way. That is, you are acknowledging God in all your ways and His promise is He will direct your paths.
The two most important decisions you make in your life is: number one, who is your master? And don’t kid yourself you don’t have a master. To whomsoever you submit, says Paul in the New Testament, you become slaves of the one to whom you submit – either sin or righteousness.
We are mastered by something. All of us have a big “because” in the middle of our lives. “I do what I do ‘because’, and the ‘because’ explains what dominates and masters your life.
The most important question you have to answer is who is going to be your master? The second one: who is going to be your mate?
And if God is not interested in who is your mate, He is not interested in anything in your life. That is a crucial issue, but in its own time.
So don’t present God an agenda that says, “I need to be married by the time I am 22. When I graduate from university, I want to get married that year.”
Just be patient and trust Him.
And if you marry the wrong one out of impatience, then you just have to learn to live with the wrong one.
I had a friend in England and he said this and I wouldn’t dare say this, but I am going to quote him and you can blame him if you don’t like it. He said,
“If you marry a woman and discover she is a pig, learn to enjoy pork.”
I didn’t say that, but I know the point he was making, and the same applies to a guy.
So our first question: should you marry? It’s an important question. When is the right time for such a relationship?
Make sure she is amongst, or he is amongst the people of God.
You trust God to guide you.
And then fourthly there is a time to start looking because Verse 10 says,
“Then the servant took ten of his master’s camels and left, taking with him all kinds of good things from his master.”
Now you need some camels at this stage, and you get hold of your camels and you go – preferably ten.
No, the point is he started looking.
Now don’t go to the other extreme and say, “I am going to trust God to lead me to the person I am going to marry so I won’t even look.”
Marriage doesn’t just happen. You don’t catch marriage like you catch the flu, you know, if you hang around girls long enough, you end up married.
You have to make a decision. You choose to marry and you choose when it’s time to start looking. You might meet somebody – you weren’t looking and you just meet them and that’s the right thing. But don’t start looking prematurely.
But there is a time to open your eyes, mix around, meet folks. There is a time. But you do so in the context the time is right. He or she will be from God’s own people. I am going to trust God to guide me. But then start looking.
And then fifthly, pray about the process because Verse 12 says,
“Then he prayed, ‘O LORD, God of my master Abraham, give me success today.”
That’s a bit urgent – “give me success today”, but nevertheless he is praying.
And we have quite a bit of things that he prayed in this whole chapter, which you can look at some time on your own. This is a vital ingredient, not just praying, “Lord, give me a husband or Lord, give me a wife.”
But pray for the person He is going to give you.
When I was in my early twenties, I remember praying and saying, “Lord, I would like to marry one day, but I have never yet met anybody I want to marry. So I don’t know her name. I don’t know where she lives. I don’t know what she is doing. I don’t know if she is a Christian yet or not. I assume she is alive, otherwise there is going to be a very big age gap and I will have to wait a long time. So somewhere on this planet this girl is walking around somewhere. And You know her and You know everything about her.”
And I began to pray for whoever she was and I asked God to show me how I should pray for her. And I actually remembering sensing she was not yet a Christian and I began to pray that God would save her and that God would protect her and that God would guide her and that God would keep her safe.
And I prayed some specific things that after I had met Hilary (and I didn’t tell her this until our honeymoon) but things that were actually true about her that I was already praying for.
She wasn’t a Christian when I began to pray for her. And I think that’s why the day I met her, I had come back to Capernwray Hall, which is where I was living in England (a conference center and Bible school). And she had come to work there for Christmas break from university. We had some Christmas/New Year conferences.
I came home and I walked down the corridor and she was actually cleaning the corridor and I passed her and just said, “Hello” to her. And I didn’t engage her in conversation or anything.
But I wrote to my friend that night, my closest friend, and I said, “I think I have just met the girl I am going to marry but I don’t know her name yet.”
And the moment I saw her I sensed, “that’s the girl.”
And there is absolutely no explicable reason for that other than the Spirit of God whispered that and that I had been praying for her. And because I had been praying for her, I think that is a reason why I recognized her when I knew her.
I found out her name the next morning and I tried to get to know her as discretely as I could and I discovered she had a boyfriend. So I put his name onto my prayer list and I put a big boot next to it (get him out).
Some time later she went back to university, back up in Scotland and I was going up to Scotland to speak at another university. But I thought while I am Scotland I am going to be going close to where she is staying, I will just kind of casually drop in. I had heard by the grapevine she had broken up with her boyfriend, so I would just casually drop in.
And I was in the office at Capernwray and I said, “When I am up in Scotland I am going to call in to see Hilary Ollertan (that was her maiden name). And there was a guy there, an Australian guy, who said, “Oh, would you take something for me?”
I said, “Yes, I would love to.”
I thought, “I have got an alibi now. I am going to take this thing for him.”
So the next day he gave me a little package and an envelope with it and I contacted Hilary and said, “I am going to call in to just see you – maybe we can have lunch together or a cup of coffee and I have got something I am delivering to you.”
(So that was my alibi, you see.)
And I got there and I gave her this package and this envelope. What I didn’t know was it was a love letter from this Australian student who jumped in ahead of me. And she made me a cup of coffee and read his letter.
And when I left she wrote a reply, which I took back, and they established a relationship.
So there’s me, the kind of piggy in the middle who had kind of helped set it up. So he went on to my prayer list as well. And that went on for about six months and nobody irritated me more at Capernwray than he did during those six months.
Actually I watched her go through three boyfriends. (She is not here this morning; she is speaking at a women’s conference, but she knows I am saying all this.)
But I think I recognized her because I had been praying for her.
I stopped praying, “Lord, lead me to a girl I could marry.” I started praying for whoever this girl is on the assumption she exists and You will be at work in her life.
And it actually took her almost two years to see the light, by which time I had lost interest and I thought to myself, “That was crazy. Why ever did I think of it in the first place?”
And how it came to be that she suddenly fell in love with me when I had now not had the same feelings for her because I had gotten rid of them is a longer story in itself, but it took place in Africa actually.
We were at Victoria Falls together (it’s a long story how we came to be there together) and that’s when she fell in love with me. And I didn’t want her to at that stage. I thought, no, that’s all history now.
Anyway, pray. Pray about the process is what Abraham’s servant did.
And then let me read Verse 13 because then it says – this is what he prays; this is part of his prayer:
“See, I am standing beside this spring, and the daughters of the townspeople are coming out to draw water.”
He is in the right place and these girls are coming out to draw water.
“May it be that when I say to a girl, ‘Please let down your jar that I may have a drink’ and she says, ‘Drink, and I will water your camels too’ – let her be the one you have chosen for your servant Isaac. By this I will know that you have shown kindness to my master.”
My sixth point is look for qualities of character. He set a little trap. As these girls come out, I am going to pick one and I am going to ask, “Would you give me a drink?” And if she says, “Yes, and I am going to water your camels as well”, let her be the one.
So guys, for this one, you have to say, “I am going to take this girl in my car and I am going to pull up at a gas station to fill up. And if she says, ‘I will fill it up for you’ let her be the one.”
So look for qualities of character: kindness, generous.
He didn’t say, “Let her be” and designed his most beautiful image of what a girl would be. He says, “Let her be someone who is generous, who is kind, who goes the second mile etc.”
You know, to marry on the grounds of physical attraction as the primary attraction is a recipe for disaster.
Apparently, those who work these things out, say that the average marriage based on physical attraction is between six months and two and a half years.
Do you think that’s exaggerated? Look at Hollywood. Hollywood is made up of beautiful people and of disastrous marriages. If somebody stays married ten years, twenty years, and if it’s a lifelong marriage, for absolute sure, it will be the defining thing about that person. “Wow, they are still married after 26 years or whatever it might be!”
The person we marry will be physically attractive to us because we will love them as a person, we will love their heart, their soul and we will love their bodies.
But good looks can be a handicap when it comes to looking for a partner. So, you know, a girl might not be a stunning beauty or girls may not fall and swoon at the feet of a guy, but when those people do marry it is more likely to be for good reasons and more likely to become more stable.
I remember going to speak at a church in England that I knew some years ago. And I stayed with one of the elders of the church and he and his wife’s son had married a girl from the church and this marriage had broken up. And it had just happened and it was devastating to the people – everybody was astounded.
And somebody said to me, “We don’t understand – they were just the perfect couple.”
And I went to have lunch at the home of this couple and they had a wedding picture on the piano or something and they were a beautiful couple and people said they were just ideal because they were both very good looking.
But that was paper thin. Physical chemistry is icing on the cake but it’s not the cake.
So he looks for qualities of character.
The seventh thing is he gets to know her as a whole person.
Let me read you Verse 15. It says,
“Before he had finished praying, Rebekah came out with her jar on her shoulder. She was the daughter of Bethuel son of Milcah, who was the wife of Abraham’s brother Nahor.”
So she’s the right person in the sense that she belongs to the family of Abraham, part of the covenant family.
Verse 16:
“The girl was very beautiful,”
(That’s coincidental, but she was.)
“…a virgin; no man had ever lain with her.”
So she was single so she was eligible.
“She went down to the spring, filled her jar and came up again.
“The servant hurried to meet her and said, ‘Please give me a little water from your jar.’
“‘Drink, my lord,’ she said.”
(That was a good start, by the way, “my lord”)
“‘Drink, my lord,’ she said, and quickly lowered the jar in her hands and gave him a drink.”
He probably drank it saying, will she say it, will she say it?
“After she had given him a drink, she said, ‘I’ll draw water for your camels too, until they have finished drinking.’”
You know, camels carry water tanks on their backs, don’t you? That’s a lot of water. They will drink and drink and fill up their humps with water.
“So she quickly emptied her jar into the trough,”
(Notice this.)
“…ran back to the well to draw more water,”
(She is running and doing that for all his camels – this was probably the origin of the term ‘running water’.)
Now notice Verse 21. This is the verse that is key here.
“Without saying a word, the man watched her closely to learn whether or not the LORD had made his journey successful.”
He set this trap and she sprang the trap, was feeding his camels, but he was a wise man. He didn’t say, “You never guess what – I was just praying about looking for a wife for my master’s son and I said if she offers me water and feeds my camels she is the one. You just did that, so you are the one! Look at that!”
That would scare her. She would run home as quickly as she could.
Don’t base anything on one thing. “Well, I prayed this and it happened.”
It’s the testimony of two or three witnesses, two or three things that point you in the right direction that it’s safer to go by. And he watched her closely to learn whether the Lord had made his journey successful or not.
He observed her and got to know her. It is very important that we take time to get to know the person.
Don’t just see them as a prospective wife or a prospective husband. Get to know them as a person. Build friendship. Do things together with others as well as just the two of you together.
And don’t be impatient about that process. Get to know them.
He saw her actions. He saw her reactions. He saw her under the pressure of carrying the water. She ran back to the well to draw more water. And he watched her closely.
I am intrigued – he didn’t lift a finger to help her – he just watched her closely. But he got to know her.
And as he got to know her he began to admire her and respect her.
I told my kids marry somebody that you look up to. Try to marry somebody you would like to be like them because you respect them and you see qualities in them that you want to be in yourself.
And he watches her closely.
And then the eighth thing: get to know her or his family and history. Because Verse 22 says,
“When the camels had finished drinking, the man took out a gold nose ring.”
(You need one of those in your pocket, by the way, and a little tool to put it on with.)
“…took out a gold nose ring weighing a beka and two gold bracelets weighing ten shekels.
“Then he asked, ‘Whose daughter are you? Please tell me, is there room in your father’s house for us to spend the night?’”
(That’s for him and his camels to spend the night there.)
So he found out about her family. Whose daughter are you? She answered in Verse 24,
“I am the daughter of Bethuel, the son that Milcah bore to Nahor.”
(Who happens to be a great uncle of Isaac, and therefore she is a second cousin once removed, to be technically accurate about the relationship. She is within the family.)
It is very important to get to know all about a person who may be the person you are going to marry.
And there are two reasons why it is important to get to know their family. One is, you don’t marry the family – of course you don’t – but you do marry a product of the family. And they will bring a history with them, both good and bad.
They will bring assumptions with them from their family history you need to know and be able to understand.
I came from a stable family. My parents were stable. They loved each other. As kids we never ever doubted that. My father showed love to my mother frequently in front of us as kids. He would tell her she was the most beautiful woman in the world.
We as kids (I was one of six), we would laugh at him when he did that; we would mock him doing it. But he would do it. And it was incredibly secure. The best thing a father can do for his kids is to love their mother well.
And I came from that background.
Hilary came from a broken home. There was tension in her home all the way through. And in her teen years her parents separated. And the rock from which she was hewn was torn apart. That is a devastating experience for a teenager to go through.
They put on the right front of course, but underneath there was a brokenness that comes from that.
After Hilary and I married, for a number of years she would suddenly say to me sometimes, “You won’t leave me, will you?”
I used to say, “Of course I won’t. I know where my bread is buttered.”
I thought, “Why is she asking me?”
I used to go away on trips, on preaching trips, and she would sometimes say to me, “You will come back, won’t you?”
“Yeah, of course I will come back.”
It was only after several years I realized she asked those questions because she needed that reassurance because one day her father had left and didn’t come back. And that was part of her psyche. That was one of the biggest ghosts to haunt her heart. And she needed that reassurance.
I didn’t understand that at first.
And it is very important to go to their home. This man went to her home. It can be a shock to do that, you know.
At Capernwray we had students who had come from all over the world and they would often meet and I used to say to them, “You know, don’t make any promises until you leave here, Capernwray, and until you have been able to go and visit each other in your own homes. Don’t make any promises before then, because you need to know the home context. You need to know the habits, the customs. You need to understand those.”
You know, in Hilary’s home, her dad put the garbage out. In my home, my mom put the garbage out. And so we grew up – I grew up knowing that mothers put the garbage out. It was never discussed. I just knew it. That was what wives did.
Hilary grew up knowing fathers put the garbage out – that’s what husbands do. She had never thought about it; I had never thought about it. We never discussed it.
After a couple years of marriage there was a massive pile of garbage at our house. I said, “Hilary, you are forgetting something.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was wondering about the garbage. Did you forget it or not?”
“I was wondering about the garbage too.”
“Don’t you know the wives put out the garbage?”
“Wives don’t touch the garbage. That’s a man’s job.”
“Not it’s not – it’s a woman’s job.”
That a little thing. And I am exaggerating it just to make the point.
But we need to understand each other. We need to understand the home, the assumptions that govern our home life.
That doesn’t mean you have got to meet the checklist or I will break up with you, but you have to understand because I am going to say in a moment marriage is work. It is not a fairy tale – you need to understand each other’s background.
Second reason why this is important, in this instance she needed to be related to Abraham and therefore to the covenant that God had made with Abraham.
And it is vitally important that you know the spiritual history and experience of the person you are going to marry.
It is absolutely vital that you are compatible in this.
To be honest, I don’t understand the people who have said to me before now, “I thought he was a Christian when we got married, but I discovered afterwards that he isn’t.”
Well, I don’t know how you ever thought he was unless you didn’t spend time on your knees together and didn’t spend time in the Word of God together.
You see, we are spirit, soul and body and the depth of union begins with a united spirit and from that the soul, the mind, the emotions, the will, and from that, the physical union.
Don’t get that the wrong way around. It’s the unity of spirit and soul that holds you together and makes the physical union what it is. And it is vitally important you know that spiritual history of the person that you marry.
And then the ninth thing is wait until you both see the guidance of God. What I mean by this is that in the culture of the day, Abraham’s servant had an interview with Rebekah’s parents. She was not present.
And in Verse 34 he explained to them,
“I am Abraham’s servant. The LORD has blessed my master abundantly, and he has become wealthy. He has given him sheep and cattle,” etc. etc.
And he tells the story how he was sent off to find this woman and “I laid down a certain criteria down” and he just repeats a lot of what he had already said, but he repeats it to her parents whose
names were Laban and Bethuel.
For 15 verses he explains what he was doing, how God had guided him so far, why he was interested in Rebekah.
And then in Verse 50,
“Laban and Bethuel answered, ‘This is from the LORD; we can say nothing to you one way or the other.
“‘Here is Rebekah; take her and go, and let her become the wife of your master’s son, as the LORD has directed.’”
Now Abraham’s servant has said, “The LORD has directed me to you, as I understand it to Rebekah. She has fitted all the criteria and she has sprung the traps I set along the way. And she looks like the right person. What do you think?”
And their answer was, “This is from the LORD. Take Rebekah to your master’s son as the LORD has directed.”
The point is they both independently saw the guidance of God.
Don’t be pushed into making a decision when you do not have a clear sense yourself. Don’t marry someone because your parents say, “We think he is right for you.” You need to know he is right.
Don’t say, “Well, my boyfriend is convinced this is from God; I am not sure but I trust him so I am going to go with it.”
You need to know from God yourself.
I told you when I fell for Hilary she wasn’t even looking in my direction. She went through three boyfriends and never even thought twice about me in that sense. And so by the time she did become interested I had lost interest.
But it was interesting that God showed me and then I let it die because I needed to. And then God showed her and it was already dead in me by them so I had to wake up again.
But the point is we both at different times have evidence that satisfied our own hearts that this was from God.
And so both sides need to know the will of God. It’s not just Abraham’s servant on a journey - he is going to make his decision. They make the same decision equally on the other side.
And my last point, tenthly, is when you commit, commit fully. Because in Verse 57,
“Then they said, ‘Let’s call the girl and ask her about it.’”
That’s a good idea! But in that culture it wasn’t always done.
“So they called Rebekah and asked her, ‘Will you go with this man?’
“‘I will go,’ she said.
“Will you go with this man?”
“Yes,” she said.
At that time you are running a big risk. I have often said we are never 100% in the will of God until we are 90% and step out in faith and the confirmation usually comes after we have made the decision.
And I think probably many of us, when it comes to this point, we say, “Oh boy, is this really true?”
I proposed to Hilary on a Friday afternoon. I was going to speak at a youth event on the Saturday night and I invited her to come with me. And we drove down from the north of England and we took a picnic lunch and we stopped and had a picnic lunch in the field and during our lunch I asked her if she would marry me.
And I said, “But don’t give me an answer until Monday. I don’t want to spoil the weekend. So think about it and we are going to drive home Monday. You can give me the answer then.”
And I tell you that was a tough weekend. I began to think, “what if she says yes? If she says yes, man, this is for life, this is total commitment and do I really want that? Am I totally, totally, totally sure?”
We drove back on Monday morning. It was a five hour drive and we drove back and we never raised the subject. We talked about everything else under the sun.
We got back to her mother’s home where she was staying, pulled up outside the home. And I said, “I asked you a question on Friday. Do you have an answer?”
She said, “Yes.”
I said, “Is that the answer or does that mean you have an answer?”
She said, “I have an answer.”
I said, “What is the answer?”
She said, “Yes.”
And to my eternal shame, I said, “Oh no. That means I am tied and committed now for life.”
It’s the best decision I made. But it was true because, having said yes, there was no turning back.
In Verse 61,
“Then Rebekah and her maids got ready and mounted their camels and went back with the man. So the servant took Rebekah and left.”
And they went back to where Abraham was now living in Canaan, away from his own people and it was going to be a totally new life from which she would not turn back.
I love the realism of the Bible though. This was not a “they lived happily ever after story”.
Sadly, Isaac and Rebekah had a bad marriage. It was not because they needed to. They had married the right person, but when you marry the right person, that’s the beginning. It needs developing, it needs growing, it needs keeping alive, it needs keeping fresh.
I suggest to you the three fundamental ingredients in a good marriage are mutual respect, mutual trust, mutual love.
Like a three-legged stool, you snap one of those; it takes some time to rebuild it. And it takes work to rebuild it.
You break trust and you have got to rebuild that leg of the stool if it is going to be secure.
And Rebekah was barren, you see. The whole point was that Abraham was going to have grandchildren and Rebekah was barren. That was a real problem.
She didn’t conceive for twenty years. I think God was teaching them through that. After twenty years she conceived once and they were twins. They were not identical twins. They were completely un-identical twins - Esau and Jacob.
Esau was a hairy man, it says. He was an outdoor hunter, a hairy man.
Jacob was smooth and pink and he wasn’t an outdoor man. He stayed at home and helped Mommy with the cooking, learned to make lovely stews and things.
And he began to bribe his brother. And his mother taught him to cheat, his mother taught him to lie. His mother taught him to steal.
And the parents sided with the two boys against each other and the boys against each other.
And they had a bad marriage because marriage is work. If you are married, you know that. You have got to deal with some of those basic issues to enable you to grow together in harmony. And it takes time, it takes input, it takes listening, it takes speaking.
I have been happily married for 30 years. I think Hilary has been happily married for about 20. It doesn’t just drift off in fairy tale land and they lived happily ever after.
I don’t know a good marriage in the Bible actually that we have any detail about. You might say, “Ruth and Boaz – looks pretty good” but we only have their wedding. We don’t know what happened after that. Great love story.
But the point is this: I think in this story in Genesis 24 are timeless principles and timeless truths that if you and I take the wisdom of this story and the wisdom of Abraham’s servant, I think we will build in good checks, good balances, good processes that in our own culture and through our own means of finding a spouse, that God will lead us at the right time to the right person and avoid us going to the wrong person out of desperation.
So that’s my message. My time has gone. It’s a practical message. It may be too late for some of you. It may be useless to others. But it might be useful to about six of you, so take it and run with it.
Let’s pray.
Lord, we are grateful that Your Word doesn’t put our head in the clouds. It puts our feet on the ground. It helps us to live well. It helps us to live wisely. It helps us to live with the wisdom that You have promised to give to those who recognize their need of it and are willing to seek it. I pray for those in relationships here this morning, for those who are dating, for those who are engaged, for those who are married, that we might bring these relationships under the scrutiny of Your Word and under the authority of Your Son as our Lord and under the enabling of the Holy Spirit who equips us to live lives that are not only pleasing to You but deeply satisfying to us. We pray it in Jesus' Name, Amen.