Hebrews 13:4 “Marriage is to be honored by all and the marriage bed kept undefiled, because God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterers.”

With each passing year, our world seems to get a little more confused on this topic. All my years growing up there was a movement that tried to claim marriage was not very important. “Free love” they called it. Marriage was just an outdated institution, a worthless piece of paper, even a way of oppressing women. People should be free to set up house keeping and sleep with whomever they chose, for as long they chose. Books and music, movies and television, were all used to push this view.

Then a few years ago marriage became so important that we had to stretch and redefine it to include combinations of people that practically no one else in all of recorded history had ever considered part of the institution. Both of these things dishonor marriage.

Brotherly love is not the same thing as the romantic love we usually associate with marriage. But it does have something to say about honoring it. The world is going to do what it wants. But the members of Jesus’ family realize that sex and marriage are not our play things. These are not a kind of hobby or recreation we can shape and change to suit our own happiness or pleasure.

Like all God’s gifts, they are tools for loving our neighbor, and not just in the sense of providing physical pleasure. They serve others. They serve God’s purpose. They create a stable home where husbands and wives can develop the deepest of loving bonds, and children can live and grow in security. They create the children themselves. A peaceful society, a successful civilization, depends on these things. This is no place for human beings to tinker.

So we honor marriage by approaching it God’s way and keeping the marriage bed undefiled. Only one man and one woman publicly committed to each other for life belong there. Sexual activity before, outside of, or after marriage dishonors God’s purpose.

Where we Christians have failed–and let’s be honest, my old professor was right when he said, “No one I know has a spiritual track record free of sexual stumbling”– we turn to Jesus for forgiveness and restoration. And then we honor him by honoring marriage in the way asks us to do so.