Preservation of the Traditional American Family — Part 1

I have as a title of our lesson this morning, Preservation of the Traditional American Family. I'm going to give some of you that use the internet a little challenge when you get home: just type in "the traditional American family." I did last night, and I really should have done it sooner — I lost an extra hour of sleep because I typed in "the traditional American." You'll find out, if you believe the internet, there is no such thing as a traditional American family, because everybody on there that had anything to say, in the page that came up on my computer, was trying to tell us that there is no such thing as a traditional American family, and that the things that we're seeing in our family networks today is just usual — that this is it. But I got upset. I told my wife — she was still up at that time — I said, they don't even understand what the definition of traditional is. And so I wrote down the definition of traditional, and it means existing in or as part of a tradition, and of course it's further described as long established. But the American family that we normally see today is not long established. But the traditional American family, the one that I'm talking to you about today, is established and it is traditional. It consisted of a father and a mother and ever how many children God allowed the married couple to have. The basis of this type family unit is certainly biblical, therefore worth preservation.

Now, when I was standing over here just before prayer, I got to thinking I might should have titled this "In Defense Of," and, you know, "Preservation of the Traditional American Family" may seem just a little presumptuous this morning. But if we could save one family from the fall that has gripped American families, it'd be worth being a little presumptuous. We need to preserve that tradition that God ordained for us way back in the beginning and set in the family. You know, the family was the first institution that God ever instituted — before the church, long before the church, He instituted the family. And we have often said it this way: a strong church is made up of strong families, and a strong community is made up of strong families and a strong church. A strong nation is made up of strong communities that are made up of strong families. When our family is weakened and when our family falls apart, when our family traditions are forsaken, our nation becomes weakened. We fall away from God. And there's certain things — you know, there's always that chance and opportunity for us to better ourselves with God, no matter where we stand, no matter what has happened in our past. We can't live and relive our past, but we do well to take from today forward and live a better life than we have in the past.

But this is biblically correct, so let me go to the scripture and show some things there that God has said. In Genesis chapter 1, verse 27 and 28: "So God created man in his own image; in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them."

I don't know just how much some of you pay attention to the news — probably some a lot more than I do, and then there's some probably are disgusted with so much of it that you pay very little attention to it. I'm tired of all the bickering and the battling that's going on in Washington, and some of it I have a tendency to just not read anymore simply because I'm tired of it. You know, they've overplayed it. But then on the other hand, when you stop and think, this nation was not established in a year, in a day, in five years — it has taken us a long time to come this far. This nation was not built upon frivolous things. When you look back at the framers of our Constitution, all of them, every single one of them believed in God. Some folks will tell you they did not believe in God, that they were just — I forgot the word they called them — that they just believed that there was a higher power. What is God? Is He not a higher power? But they invoked God in the writing of our Constitution. Our Supreme Court is supposed to be one that interprets the Constitution, but they've got to where they'd rather rewrite it than interpret it like it was. Things that go before the Supreme Court are supposed to be ruled according to the original intent of the founders of America. But of course, you know as well as I do, for the most part we have liberal Supreme Court rulings that have even — let's look for just a moment. What about abortion? Can you imagine that the framers of our Constitution ever thought for a moment that there'd be a time in America when we would have babies killed even up to the time of their birth? Aren't you glad for the backlash that's sweeping across America right now? I mean, state after state is passing these early bans on abortion. After eight weeks you cannot abort a child, because there is a heartbeat at eight weeks. And then Alabama's got a very strong law that they have just passed — been signed into law — that the doctor that performs an abortion could spend a life in prison. And they're protesting today in Birmingham over that. Naturally they would.

But I'm going to tell you, we never thought in our earlier lifetime — if you're not near the age that I am — Sister Hudson's older than me, Sister Wilbanks is older than me. I'm not going to tell you how old they are, because I don't know, but I'm sure they're not ashamed of their age. And you know, if you get a certain age, you don't care for people knowing how old you are; you're just so glad you lived that long. But for the most part, you're not as old as I am. I asked a couple of young men this morning, I said, "Do y'all remember Brother Frazier?" Neither one of them did, of course. And I wanted to tell them some things that Brother Frazier had said, and I did. But then when you stop and think, most of the younger generation, you mention Ronald Reagan and it's just kind of a name, you know, way back yonder. Let me talk to you just a minute about Ronald Reagan. He was the first president of the United States that had been divorced and remarried. Probably some of you didn't know that. Did you know they wanted a Rockefeller back years ago? And I realize I'm talking a generation ago. They wanted a Rockefeller to be president — the rich family of New York — they wanted one of them to be president, but they didn't have one that was eligible to be, because they'd been divorced and remarried, and they would not put them on the ticket because the American people, they were afraid, would vote it down and that party would lose the election that year. Our ways of living have progressed — or digressed — until we accept a whole lot more than we did a few years ago.

My daughter Anna, when she was in college, she was studying accounting and something about computers — I forgot just what that was. But the man that was over the accounting department got her a job at a bank in Sheffield, and she worked as an intern there in her senior year. Of course, she went into banking and eventually was the internal auditor for a banking company in Tennessee that has somewhere near a hundred banks. And she was the person that they didn't want to see come in the door, because she just locked the doors on the vault and on whichever teller that she was going to audit that day. And they didn't want that. I mean, naturally, she's examining their work, and if everything don't pan out, she writes them up. And if she came in and the vault door was not locked, she wrote that bank up, and the man that was in charge, she wrote him up. And nobody likes to be examined with that much scrutiny. But when she was still working in Sheffield, they had a meeting with the FBI, and the FBI was there to show them exactly how — this was before your markers and before the new money came out — to show them how to effectively detect counterfeit money. And while they were there, the discussion on credit cards and a cashless society came up. Almost everybody uses credit cards now. At that time I didn't have one and didn't think I'd ever have one, but almost every dollar I spend now is on a credit card. But I don't use them for credit — I pay them off at the end of the month. No interest, no charges that way. I use them specifically for record keeping. But however, that's beyond the point. The FBI told them that with every generation we were becoming more acceptable of a cashless society, and that one day there would be no money in circulation, that everything would be done in a cashless society — but that this generation was just not acceptable for those things, and we were not receiving that very well at that time. But now then, you know that we have progressed in that manner too.

All right, what about in our family living? I remember — I'm not trying to pick on anybody — but I remember the first time that I ever heard of a man and a woman getting a divorce. I wondered, how can this be? I mean, you know, I'm a child that's been raised in a stable home, and some of our neighbors had gotten a divorce, and it was so troublesome to me. Now, you can peg my age pretty easily: I remember the first time I ever saw anybody working on Sunday. You can laugh about that if you want to, because everybody works on Sunday nowadays. But we respected — I mean, my daddy didn't go to church, but we could play with a mule on Sunday because the mule didn't make a lot of noise, but we couldn't crank our tractor and play with it on Sunday. We wouldn't have attempted to plow, but Daddy said no — that tractor, we'd want to pull our slide with it — he said, "That tractor makes too much noise. You're not going to crank it on Sunday." And I never saw him in church except at a funeral, but he had respect for the Lord's Day. We've lost that. I mean, our generation has lost a lot of things, a lot of traditions that have made America great. Our generation has lost them little by little until we hardly realized they were leaving us. Amen.

It used to be, in the olden times, when they would send for a teacher to come and teach in a community — our population is not like this in a long time — but in Collinwood, Tennessee, when we first moved there, the population was so much thinner. And of course that's the second largest county in Tennessee, and it was 69th in population, so it was spread out. And there were still some little one-room schools; they were still standing. They were not in use when I moved there, but one of them stood at the foot of a hill near Collinwood, and a man that was my age attended that school, and classes one through eight was all in that one room, and they had one teacher for all eight of those classes. Now, he was my age and he went to that school. But when a community sent for a teacher, the teacher was always unmarried. That was one of the qualifications: they were unmarried — it was a woman, they were unmarried — and if at any time she started courting, she was automatically moved from her teaching position, and if she married, she was not eligible to come back and teach. Well, I'm not saying all that was good, but I'm just telling you, we had strict rules of conduct in almost every aspect of our life. You know, we've got to where we resist any authority, any rules — we think rules are made to be broken.

Some of you are old enough to remember the days of the sixties. Now let's look back at the sixties for just a moment — I have a reason. This is the day when the hippie generation began to catch hold in America, and it was not only the rules of decency that were broken. Anybody ever read anything about Woodstock, the great music festival? Every now and then you'll see pictures of Woodstock. They had another Woodstock just recently that was supposed to be a replica, but it didn't mimic the former Woodstock. But it was a free-love thing. And it turned from there until we had the hippie farm, they called it, at Summertown, Tennessee, which was not too far from us. They had communal marriages there. The electric company man told me — he said, "I went up there to hook the electricity to a building that was their shower room," and he said it was just one big long building of just nothing but showers, no partitions, and you know, the men and the women all came in and showered together. And when they married, they married as high as seven at one time — seven men to seven women. All seven of those women were your wives, and all seven of those men were your husbands, no matter which one you were or where you fit in the seven; you were just one of a bunch. And this was communal marriage. This is the way they lived. And this electricity man told me, said, one of them took him in to show him all of the building, and he said, "Wouldn't you like to live this way?" He said, "Son, I was raised over in a holler in Wayne County. I grew up this way. I spent my life trying to get away from it and better myself." But our nation's rules were broken down, and, you know, promiscuity began to be rampant in the sixties. Now, I don't say that there was never any before that, but in the fifties — I grew up in the fifties and partially the sixties; I was grown by the — I was married by the middle of the sixties — but anyway, I might not have been grown, but I was married anyway. But in the fifties, all of my growing-up years, I never heard of a homosexual. It was never — there was never any — I mean, I didn't even know they existed. And let me tell you something: there was never as many of them — not nearly as many, proportionally — as there are now. I was a grown man before I even knew what the word meant. And yet now it has become so pushed until it's being pushed to where it's normal. That was one of the things that you'll read if you look up "a traditional American family": it said, we had them in the fifties too, we just thought we didn't — they were in the closet. Well, sure, they were all back in the Bible days, but you know what they did? They killed them. God ordered them put to death. They put them away from the church houses. They made a separation out of them. It was an abomination. What is an abomination? It is something that God hates. However, it's stronger than that — it's something contrary to the nature of God. Now, when you change from the Old Testament to the New Testament, they didn't put them to death so much in the New Testament; it was not a law in the New Testament. However, God's nature never changed from the Old Testament to the New Testament, so it's still contrary to the nature of God.

I mentioned I remember the first time that I ever heard of anybody getting a divorce. I mean, 50 percent of the marriages now — 51 or 2 percent — end in divorce. We've come a long way, baby, but we've come the wrong way. When God said, "I hate putting away," it's not something that God has acknowledged as being acceptable and okay. He said, I hate it. I hate putting away. So what I'm saying: the traditional American family was one man, and he was heterosexual; one woman, and she was heterosexual. They never thought of it being any other way. And then they were having the children God would give them. That was the traditional family from biblical times until not long ago. We have come a long way in a short period of time. Amen.

I want to read to you: God created man in His own image; in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them. God blessed them, and God said unto them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." He made Adam the man. Then He, for companionship and help, tenderly made woman from the rib He had taken from Adam's side. Genesis 2 and 22: "And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man." Adam's words at this presentation of his wife indicate that she was part of me, and she is mine. He took possession accordingly. God gave the children and completed the family unit. Thus began the trend that continued into a tradition. When God establishes a thing, of any sort, you can be assured that it's right. Many have broken the order of this God-established family unit to their own hurt. Even some of God's great men tried other ways, but brought heartache, pain, woe to themselves and their family. Here's some examples.

Now we look at Abraham. We're all aware of Abraham and the folly: he went down into Egypt because of a famine. When he came out of Egypt, he came out of there with men servants, maid servants, gold and silver, and all sorts of animals. He became a very rich man. Pharaoh treated him greatly and gave him all of these things, and Abraham left there so wealthy that when he got back to Canaan land, he and Lot had to split up simply because the land was not able to bear them and their many cattle — Lot was with Abraham. There was one thing that Abraham brought back from Egypt that became a snare, not only to him, not only to his family, but it became a snare to the whole entire world. Now, I want you to hear me out on this, and then I want you to remember something: I'm not telling you at all that this is something that's cursed of God, but this is something that God just simply allowed. You know, you always heard, if you give a man enough rope, he'll hang himself. When Abraham had been promised a son and it looked like it was impossible for that son to come — even though Abraham is called the father of the faithful and the father of faith and the friend of God — his faith began to waver, because Sarah said unto him, "You know, I'm going to give you the handmaid Hagar" — that was one of the Egyptians — "I'm going to give her to you as a wife, and then perhaps God will give me seed by Hagar." So he broke the condition that God had set up in the beginning, and Abraham became married to Hagar. She's called his handmaid, she's called his concubine, but essentially they were a married couple. And God did give them seed: there was a child born, and they called his name Ishmael, and his name simply meant this: "he whom God shall hear."

But did you know, when Hagar saw that she was expecting a child, she became obstinate and stubborn, and she resisted? She was a servant in the house; she resisted her mistress, which was Sarah. And Sarah complained to Abraham and said, "Now look what's happened since she's become with child — she's got hard to get along with." Abraham said, "She's your handmaid; you deal with her accordingly." So she made it hard on her to try to make her become a humble servant again, and she left home — she got out and fled. And when she got out there in the wilderness, an angel met her and told her — said, you're with child (she knew that) — but she said, "You're going to have a son, and you're going to call his name Ishmael. And you go home and be subject to your mistress; go back home, be subject to Sarah." And it was told of God to Hagar that this child was going to be a wild man, and that his hand would be against every man, and every man's hand would be against him. In other words, you've got this stubbornness on the inside of you; you have never subjected yourself since you found out that he was within your womb; you haven't subjected yourself to your rulers; and this is passed down into the womb and into the child, and he's going to be against every man, and every man is going to be against him.

You know where our terrorism — 90 percent of our terrorism — is coming from? The seed of Hagar, the seed of Ishmael: the Arab countries. That's the seed of — you know, if you studied any world history, you'll remember something about the Crusades. And that's about as much as I remember about them, but there were Crusades back in the Middle Ages, before the 1500s I think it was, where the Christian world — so-called Christian world — would take the Holy Land, and they would march from Europe all the way over there to the Holy Land, which we call Israel, and they would take it away from the Arabs. Then the Arabs would form a great crusade and come and kill hundreds of the Europeans and take it back, and it swapped back and forth. They even had a children's crusade and sent the children on a march to war to regain the Holy Lands, and of course they slaughtered the children. But this war, from Christianity to — I could just call it paganism, I'm not trying to be mean or ugly — but to the Muslim religion, it's been going on for a long time. And I dare say, even before we heard any of this, I told my wife years ago — I said, "The Pentecostal church preaches so against Catholics; I said, we better set our eyes on the Muslims. They're the ones that are the arch enemy of Christianity." She'll remember me telling her that over and over, years ago, before they ever made the headlines in the news. One third of the world classifies themselves as Muslims. It's not just a religion — it's a hateful religion. When I'm saying that, I don't mean I hate them, but they have hatred toward anything that's not just like them. You say, "Well, I know some peaceful Muslims," but the world itself knows a lot of them that are not peaceful. And it's commanded in their Bible, which is called the Koran, that they ought to behead us — and that's exactly what they're trying and seeking to do. And there are sleeper cells all over America. I'm not trying to scare you; I'm just telling you the facts. There are more than we have ever thought about. They found out lately there are sleeper cells all over America waiting for the opportunity to get just right, and there'll be a call to arms, and they're planning on taking America. Did you know that the mayor of London — one of the largest cities in Europe, one of the most notable cities in the world — the mayor of London was elected like we elect mayors; he was elected, but he is a Muslim. When our president started to go there on a state trip just recently, he said he's not welcome over here as a statesman — "He's not like Obama and he's not like George Bush, so we're not going — we ought not to welcome him as a statesman in this country." Well, of course, he wasn't running the country; he was only running London, but he has quite a bit of sway, him being the mayor of London, as large a town, as influential as it is. And since there is an anti-gun law in London, you can't own a gun. After he became mayor they started just catching them on the street corners and knifing them — you can own a knife; they'd just take a steak knife and just cut a man all to pieces, just one right after another. And they said something to him about it, and he talked like this just went on all over the world — "but it's their way." I'm telling you, their hand is against every man.

Now let's go farther. When we please God — when us as a family please God — we have some protection. We have protection from God. That don't mean that you'll never have anything odd come your way, anything terrible that'll happen to you, because it rains on the just and the unjust, and the sun shines on the good and on the evil. But the scripture even says it this way: if the husband or the wife lives for God, then are the children holy, else they were unclean. Now, that doesn't mean that they're saved because of mother or daddy. What that is telling you is they are sanctified — they are separated. Sanctified — sanctification simply means separated for a holy use. They are separated; their protection is extended into that family. That family has the blessings of God upon it because one of the leaders in that family is a Christian and believes in God and lives for Him. But if neither mother or father live for God, that family is open — the whole headship is open for attacks of the enemy, so much more so than if one of the family members was standing in the gap and making up the hedge and praying intercessively for that family. I'm going to tell you, I'd rather have God on my side than anything else that you could mention. If God be for us, who can be against us? If your children don't have a mother praying for them and don't have a daddy praying for them, there's no telling what's going to attack them. But if you're standing in the gap with God and you're interceding to God for your family, I'm going to tell you, God's going to listen to you; He's going to hear you.

Those children may grow up and choose their way and go another way, and they may go ahead and live ungodly lives and bring judgments upon themselves — while they're under your protection, while they're under your shield of prayer, and even while they're aged and on up in years, you still need to bear them up in prayer. Your children, no matter what age they are — grandchildren — they need somebody standing in the gap between them and God. And if they're living for God, incorporate them in the shield of prayer also. If they're not living for God, encourage them — but you'll do more praying for them than probably — if we only knew the value of our prayers, more of us would be praying. If we knew the value and what happens when we pray, the process that takes place when a mother prays — faith works by love. Who could love your children any more than you do? Who could love them in the way that you do? So your faith will work better when you pray for your children. That's well and good, but you are the main intercessor for those children; that's your responsibility. You brought them into the world, and whether they live good or bad, you need to be interceding to God for them: God protect my children; God bring my children into the fold; God make my children a stronghold; God put Your protection about them. Be in continual prayer for your family, because that brings that family in a relationship with God so much better than anything else that you could do. Oftentimes when you begin to admonish them, they think of it as nagging them. But when you're praying for them, you can pray for them in a way that they're not even aware that you're praying for them, and they don't put up any resistance to it because they don't even know that it's going on. And then unexpectedly God begins to deal in their heart, all because somebody somewhere put them first on their prayer list and had them up before God. We are mothers and we are daddies, and that's our job.

Abraham taking Hagar caused so much trouble in that family until it was terrible, and it caused so much heartache unto him. Even after Ishmael was on up as a teenager and Isaac was born — the promised child, the child of faith, he was born — and Sarah then said, "This son of the bondwoman is not going to be an heir with my son, so you drive him out." Well, that's okay for her, but that's Abraham's flesh and blood; that's his firstborn son. It meant nothing to Sarah, except she saw him mocking the child that God had given her, and she said, "I'm not going to have him in this house. He's not going to sit around here and inherit like my son is. You get rid of him, Abraham." And of course it was grievous to Abraham, and he talked to God, and you know what God said? "Do what your wife said." Now then, as the old saying is, the chickens have come home to roost. He should have never taken Hagar as his wife; he should have left that alone. That was a hardship he brought on his family unnecessarily.

Now another example — and I'm only using the two because of their standing with God and their standing in the scripture — with Jacob, Abraham's grandson. You remember the fusses that went on between his wives? Had he just married one instead of two, and got two handmaids as concubines, he could have lived a good, fruitful life, and God could have given him twelve sons just as easily that way. But instead, in his haste and in his self-will, he went ahead and took Rebecca, and he also took her sister, which he had been deceived into taking, and then took their handmaids as his concubines too. And he raised twelve sons, which became the twelve heads of the tribes of Israel. However, there was never peace in the home — never peace in the home. There was such confusion, there was such bickering and biting, and just — they even hired, paid one another to let him be their husband for a while. It was just utter chaos, all because God's plan was broken. Now, you know, sometimes we hear folks say, "Well, God did this for me, and God did that for me," and when you see that it's completely contrary to the word of God, secretly you know God didn't do that, because God does not go contrary to His word. So He didn't do that. But they have tried to appease themselves by saying, "This is God."

Now let me read to you in the book of Malachi — okay, the last prophet of the Old Testament, 400 years before John the Baptist came preaching in the wilderness of Judea. Malachi chapter 2 and verse 13: "And this have ye done again, covering the altar of the Lord with tears." In other words, you're coming, you're crying before God, with weeping and with crying out, insomuch that He regardeth not the offering anymore, nor receiveth it with good will at your hand. You're crying, you're begging, you're beating your fist on the altar and you're pleading with God, but He doesn't even regard you. Yet you say, "Wherefore?" Why is it, God, that You don't hear me? He said, "Because the Lord hath been witness between thee and the wife of thy youth." Your household is not where it ought to be; you're not treating your wife right — "against whom thou hast dealt treacherously, yet is she thy companion and the wife of thy covenant." Didn't you vow to be one with her? Did you not vow that that was going to be your wife as long as you live, and you've dealt treacherously with her? Didn't you promise to separate yourself from all others and cleave only and ever to her? Was that not the vows that we all made?

I had a young lady several years ago — she said, "Brother Hodum, I want you to marry me." I said, "I'll be glad to." And she said, "I want to have the wedding in your front yard." I said — we had some beautiful flowers there at the time, and they were going to be in bloom the month that she was getting married — I said, "Well, sure, that'd be okay, but what if it rains?" So she agreed we'd move inside if it rained, but other than that, it didn't rain, and we had the wedding in my front yard. But she came back to me in a few days and she said, "Now, I want to write my own wedding vows." I said, "No problem with me, that's fine, but there are certain stipulations: you're going to make the promises that the Bible says in there, and you're going to promise that you're going to love, honor, and obey your husband." She said, "Forget it — that's what I was going to leave out." I said, "Well, I'm not going to read them vows to you then, but I'll read you vows that are biblical." And so she took those vows. Now, whether she ever did all that or not, that's between her and her husband and her God. But anyway, we took these vows — all of us took very similar vows, even though they may have been worded just a little bit different — but according to the biblical principle, the husband is to love and cherish his wife, and he's to keep himself only and ever to her. Is that not what we promised, men? Didn't we promise, "This is going to be the only woman that I have; I'm going to love her all the days of her life"? Come on, this is biblical, folks — this is in our marriage vows. Maybe worded just a little bit different, but that's there.

And God said, "Now, the reason you're crying and beating your fist on the altar and screaming at Me, and I'm not regarding your prayers, is because you've dealt treacherously with the wife of your youth." That's the wife of the covenant that you made. That covenant was before God. It was not just standing here before a preacher or a justice of the peace, but there's a God in heaven that listened to that. Now, He said, you can cry and beat on the altar if you want to, but the reason I'm not regarding you is because you have broken your covenant and are dealing treacherously with your wife. Is it important to God, the way we treat our wives and the way the wives treat their husbands? Sure it's important to God. Amen. So He said, "I'm not hearing you because of this."

Now, is there a way around that? Sure. You say, "Well, I've done that. I've broken those laws. I even divorced my wife; I'm married again." Well, have you ever thought about repenting of that? Did you ever think to come to God and say, "God, I'm sorry. I made You a promise that I didn't keep, and I made my wife a promise that I didn't keep"? You know what God will do? He'll forgive you. "All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men, except blasphemy against the Holy Ghost." And when God forgives you, He frees up the guilt and the pain, and when you come to the altar then, He's going to hear you. You know, some of us — it's so hard for us to admit that we were ever wrong, until we don't repent. It's so hard for us to admit that I did anything wrong. I like what Paul said about it — he said, "I die daily." I don't believe Paul got out and sinned every day. He's the man that wrote, "Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?" I don't believe he went out there and committed sin every day; I don't believe he practiced sin in any way. But he said, every day I bring myself before God in an act of repentance — I die. Repentance is dying out to sin, dying out to yourself and your self-will. Every day, he said, I get before God in that manner. We'd be better off, folks, if we'd learn to repent. We'd be a lot better off if we learned to keep our covenants. It's better not to vow a vow than vow one and break that vow. Amen.

So he said here — "And did not he make one?" Now, this is the next verse, verse 15, after him talking about dealing treacherously with the wife of our youth and the wife of our covenant: "Did not he make one?" How many wives did God make in the beginning? One. "Did not he make one? Yet had he the residue of the Spirit. And wherefore one?" In other words, why did God just make one? He could have breathed in the nostrils of another one and she would have become a living soul too. He had the residue of the Spirit — the word that's translated "spirit" and "breath" is the same word, *pneuma*, the same word. So when God breathed that breath of life into the nostrils of man and woman and they became a living soul, He still had breath left. He could have made two. He could have said, "Adam, I've got you a standby here in case this one fails. Adam, I've got you another one here in case you decide you don't like that one." But wherefore did He make one? "That he might seek a godly seed." Somebody say amen. I'm reading you out of the Bible. "Therefore take heed to your spirit, and let none deal treacherously against the wife of his youth. For the Lord, the God of Israel, saith that he hateth putting away: for one covereth violence with his garment, saith the Lord of hosts: therefore take heed to your spirit, that ye deal not treacherously."

"Ye have wearied the Lord with your words. Yet ye say, Wherein have we wearied him? When ye say, Every one that doeth evil is good in the sight of the Lord, and he delighteth in them; or, Where is the God of judgment?" He said, now then, you're pretending that what you did wrong is not even wrong, and everybody that's following up on it and doing the same thing you did — they're good, and God delights in that. He doesn't delight in that; He hates putting away. Divorce is wrong.

In fact, let me read to you — and I've got to quit, and we'll continue along this traditional family again next week in even a little stronger measure — but I want you to notice something in the book of Mark. I'm just going to read a portion of it: chapter 10 and verse 2. "And the Pharisees came to him, and asked him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife? tempting him. And he answered and said unto them, What did Moses command you? They said, Moses suffered" — meaning he allowed — "to write a bill of divorcement, and to put her away." That was the way it was in the Old Testament: Moses said you can write her a bill of divorcement, give her walking papers, so to speak, and send her away. "And Jesus answered and said unto them, For the hardness of your heart he wrote you this precept" — this rule, or this precept. "But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female. For this cause" — because of the way God made them in the beginning — "shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife." Somebody say "leave." Somebody say "cleave." Turn loose of father and mother and hold on to the wife — leave and cleave. "And they twain shall be one flesh: so then they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder." Amen. It's God's plan, and this is the way God intended it. This is the way the American traditional family was established. Amen.

And our traditional American family is under attack, probably stronger than it's ever been in the history of the world. Amen. Family as a whole is under attack. We're recipients of darts from every direction. If we break down the family unit and it becomes commonplace, then everything else from there on — I should say from there down — because everything else is going to be contaminated because of the lack of obedience to the word of God in the family unit.

We have rampant homosexuality. I detest the word "homophobia" — that indicates that we're afraid of them. You're classified as a homophobe if you don't like it, if you don't agree with it. I'm not afraid of them; I don't hate them. I mean, they're classified in the Bible right along with adultery and fornication; I don't hate adulterers. In fact, if you've divorced and remarried and you've got things right with God, you know, I think you're just — you're sealed, that's it, if you've repented of it. If you've committed fornication in your lifetime and you've got that under the blood, that's okay; it's the same way with this. I'm not homophobic, but I'm going to tell you, as long as I've got breath in my body I'm going to teach against homosexuality because the Bible teaches against it. It's against the law for me to teach against it in Canada, but it's not in America — but it will be in our lifetime, you can bet on that. It's hate speech now. I don't hate them. I wish they could understand — I classify them as sinners. They do understand that, but they don't want to, and they are filled with hatred because of the fact that they're not accepted as they are.

Now let me tell you something: this is coming up, and there's things that I have to be plain with, but I don't want to get too plain. But let me talk to you just a minute: if we don't take a stand against it, the world is filling the youth full of all of this. I had a school teacher tell me several years ago of the evils at school. He said, "We have so many children that think that they're homosexuals. They're really not, but they've been confused by the teaching in the schools." Now listen to this: you would have thought our schools would have stood with us, but they're not going to. You would think that just common decency would be on your side — it is, but it's so far from the other side until they hate common decency. What we need is one guide that tells the truth, and that's the word of God. And I promise you, if I'm going to teach doctrine, I'm going to base it on the word of God and everything that is written there. So be back here next Sunday; let's finish up on the traditional American family. Thank you.