God wants us to show honor to each other. Yet, this boundary is being crossed so often that our nation is reaping fatal consequences. For all of our efforts and expense over the last 30 years to give sensitivity training to our children, to get everybody behaving better, to instill good values in our schools and communities, we have allowed our young people to feed on popular storylines in the media that regularly cross God’s boundaries – thus nullifying so many of our other efforts. And one of the consequences that we are experiencing now is the increasing number of young women being brutalized and young men becoming brutes. If you don’t think it is happening, you need to read the statistics.

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There are boundaries that allow love to flourish. When those boundaries are broken, relationships turn into a swamp.

Another current hot issue deals with the boundary of marriage which is being threatened. There are many seeking to make same-sex marriage legal in our nation. What is God’s plan? We know that every person is precious to Christ, so any jokes or hard-hearted criticism we make about anyone dealing with difficult personal issues is an offense to Christ. You will never meet a person that God does not believe is worth the death of His Son.

Having said that, the United Methodist Church is opposed to same-sex marriage. We know and we care that people deal with difficult relationship situations. In all of those relationships you are precious to God, but this is an area where God has a boundary. Marriage is to be between a man and a woman. Jesus was asked directly about marriage in Mark 10:6-8. He quoted from Genesis. It is a very simple statement: “From the beginning, God made them male and female. For this reason, a man shall leave his father and his mother to cling to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”

What happens if that boundary is broken? In the first place, it institutionalizes and legalizes a behavior that God says hurts the human soul. That is what sin is. Sin is anything that separates us from God and hurts us, even if we cannot see how it is hurting us at the time. In addition, if the biblical standard is jettisoned, it opens the door to every other kind of marriage humans can invent -- and you know that we can be pretty inventive: bigamy, polygamy, group marriage, and so on. If the biblical standard is gone, then there is no standard. When you get right down to it, what happens to society if the biblical standard is jettisoned?

Holy marriage is not just a commitment between a man, a woman, and God; it is also an ordering of community, a social contract between the child and the parents, impacting the future. God’s design is for every child to grow up being influenced by and loved through the unique gifts of both genders of the human family. God wanted children to grow up seeing loving men and women in gracious complementarity, with each child influenced by and learning to appreciate the God given attributes of both halves of the human race.