Hallelujah!  Amen!  The Lord is good, amen?  His mercies endure forever.  We were talking a little bit about divorce—with the runaway divorce mentality in our nation today, we were talking about how the church was not immune.  And, in fact, the evangelical Church’s divorce rate is just about the same as the world.  Shame on us.  Amen?  Shame on us, the church.  And all that is, is an indicator of self‑will, pride (amen?), many times covetousness, all of these things that would come in and lead to a seditious spirit or division in the midst of the church, it’s satanic:  his method is divide and conquer.  “A house divided against itself cannot stand”; amen?  And so, this is something we need to be on guard against today.  And since it’s in vogue, we know that we’re to come out from among it and be separate.  It’s what the world believes, it’s their way of life, and, in fact, we see the marriage rate going down.  People are just living together and no commitment, no covenant.  But the Scripture says it wasn’t that way from the beginning: “a man was to leave his father and his mother and to cleave unto his wife.”  Amen?  And those two, the Scripture said, would become one flesh.

We looked in the Scriptures and saw that the question was asked: can a man divorce his wife for any cause?  And as we looked at a couple of the key passages on divorce, we saw that that was not the spirit or the intention from the beginning.  But the handwriting, or the bill of divorcement, was given because of the hardness of men’s hearts, because of the hardness of men’s hearts.  That’s what causes us to divorce Jesus today and to walk away from Him, the hardness of our hearts (amen?), speaking toward that aspect of just self-indulgence, the pride, and as we see, coming to this last day, the men being lovers of themselves, more than lovers of God.  We see it as it was in the days of Noah, because of a heart propensity toward evil—Jesus said it would be just like it was in the days of Noah prior to the coming of the Son of man.  We believe Jesus is coming at any moment; amen?  Because of that, we look around and we see that men are lovers of themselves; we see men are lovers of pleasure; we see men marrying and giving in marriage—all of these things that the Prophet had spoken of.  So, we then need to begin to approach this hour with sobriety.

Sobriety and that need for temperance in our lives, consistency, is so important.  As we looked at that being the condition of this last day, we want to look at how to protect ourselves from allowing that spirit of seditiousness to enter into our lives.  First of all, the responsibility of allowing no divorce in our midst primarily falls upon the man.  So, we’re going to take time and just look at the role of the husband.  What our job is, men, in this hour, is to raise up a godly seed.  That’s your responsibility, men.  Our job is to see that our children are being raised up in the nurture and the admonition of the Lord.  We’re to be the ones responsible, men, to see that our children are taught the Word of God when they rise up, and when they lie down, and when we walk in the way.  Our job, men, is the spiritual covering for our homes.  To be a spiritual covering for our wives, to see that our wives are constantly being cleansed by the Word of God.  As we go on in the study, we’ll see that doesn’t mean to sit down and have a Bible study or to wake up in the morning and give your wife reproof and instruction through the Word of God for the day.  It means to love them; amen?  You want to wash your wife with the water of the Word of God?  Love her as Jesus has loved you then you’ll have no greater effect of the Word of God, ever, on your wives.