Category Archives: marriage

Church Discipline, Discipleship, Divorce, family law, Lost culture, Marriage Restoration, morality, Prayer, Spiritual Warfare

Help – I Want to Get Out of My Adulterous Remarriage, But Can’t

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by Standerinfamilycourt

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.  – 1 John 4:1

The moment a blogger attempts to rescue perishing souls and dares to connect the cultural soul-poison of remarriage adultery with its biblical eternal outcome (“do not be deceived, no adulterer has any inheritance in the kingdom of God” – 1 Cor. 6:9), it amounts to nothing less than kicking satan’s hornet nest in mid-summer.  Trust us, satan fights hard to control and manipulate those souls – often doing so by fear of doom!

Once hardened to the straightforward protests because the focus is unwaveringly on souls, the evil one will regroup to bring on challenges that also attempt to challenge our compassion here at
“7 Times Around the Jericho Wall.”    A couple of those potent challenges can be seen in the comments to one blog post from about a year ago:
“HOW DO I KNOW WHETHER GOD JOINED MY FIRST MARRIAGE?”

Typically, the person bringing the challenge truly does have circumstances where there are enormous, and even dire barriers to ceasing to cohabit with a faux spouse as a necessary element of true repentance.    In other situations, the person is merely impersonating such a person in a truly sick attempt to discredit God’s word, and to discredit any such ministry by challenging the compassion of both.  From where this blogger sits, discerning between these types of encounters doesn’t always come easy – and we’ve been at this for almost seven years now.

In this post, some of the common characteristics of this kind of challenge will first be explored, for discernment purposes.
Then, a few generic, practical suggestions for this sort of impossible situation will be at least offered – which may or may not “land”  well, depending upon one’s true heart condition.    We shall then finish off by connecting the advice in this post with the new geopolitical reality that landed on January 20, 2021 in the United States.

Characteristics of a typical “compassion” challenger (in no particular order):

(1) they insist they have no options to physically exit an illicit living arrangement  (no money, no health, no friends, no relations, can’t afford a lawyer,  noncovenant dependent children, etc.)

(2) they are persistent if they don’t get the answer from this blog site that they hoped for, making repetitive arguments numerous times.

(3) their inquiry typically makes apparent that they haven’t read the blog post they are challenging, or its related links very thoroughly.

(4) they insist they have been praying about their situation for quite some time, and God has been silent, so they need an urgent answer from us.  They openly assert that they expect us to peer into their heart and speak for God, or the consequences will be dire for them.

(5) they often assert that they are living celibate in their faux marriage in a distant part of the adulterous home.    (What could be the harm in that?)

The more of these elements that are present in an inquiry, especially a redundant (“but you don’t understand my circumstances”) inquiry, the greater the suspicion that we’re really dealing with an impersonator – one of the demonic individuals bent on countering the movement who is quite deft in taking on various personas, and has many years practice at it.    Within reason, we always seek to be open in the blog comments to earnest questions, but the days do grow short, our extensive  blogsite is keyword-searchable, and any expectation that we will be such bad time stewards as to regurgitate a previous blog post in response to an individual inquiry comment is (frankly) badly misplaced.

Practical Suggestions for Exiting Immoral Cohabitation When  Resources Are Limited

When it comes to adulterous remarriages, unilateral, “no-fault” divorce, while profoundly unconstitutional, can be a good thing.  Unless one happens to live in the state of Mississippi, nobody living in the U.S. can legitimately argue that they “can’t” get a relatively cheap civil divorce because their faux spouse refuses to cooperate.   One could even reasonably argue that as of the date this past week when SCOTUS formally declined to hear the last of the many election fraud / foreign election interference cases, we now have to live as Christ-followers in a barbaric society that no longer has a functioning U.S. Constitution because of six  or so current justices who appear to be badly compromised – but more about that near the end of this post.

I am reminded of a top-ten ditty back in the 1970’s here, called “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”…

But I’ll repeat myself at the risk of being crude
There must be fifty ways to leave your lover
Fifty ways to leave your lover

You just slip out the back, Jack
Make a new plan, Stan
You don’t need to be coy, Roy
Just get yourself free
Hop on the bus, Gus
You don’t need to discuss much
Just drop off the key, Lee
And get yourself free

While the context here is obviously a paperless immoral cohabitation, are these not actually the same in God’s eyes as the papered-over situation where God’s  word tells us He doesn’t recognize the paper?    Some godly, high-integrity marriage permanence pastors,  who are well-deserving of any Christ-follower’s deep respect will insist that God expects obtaining a civil divorce out of an adulterous remarriage, for “true” repentance to be complete.   I respectfully disagree, both based on the lack of such a requirement in scripture, and the logic that Jesus taught that “divorce” is strictly a tradition of men (Matthew 19:8).   In other words, there is nothing to “dissolve” in the case of adulterous remarriage, nor is it a “sin” to live reconciled with the covenant spouse of one’s youth without a second ceremony, because man’s paper did not “dissolve” that original state of holy matrimony.
This biblical fact has long been an important consideration in the event that unilateral no-fault divorce laws were ever to be appropriately judged unconstitutional and individual state laws changed to require mutual consent to “divorce”.     

Obviously in most cases, a legal dissolution and reconsecrating of covenant marriage vows in reconciliation cases is desirable, but the point is that not doing them, reconciled or unreconciled, will never keep a repenting, regenerated person out of heaven, according to scripture.    Ditto for Catholic “annulments”.
For the unreconciled, God alone sees into every heart to gauge how open a repenting person truly is to God bringing back their estranged true spouse into the holy matrimony home, which is precisely why demands or pleas that “standerinfamilycourt” give assurances of heaven based on so-called  “heart repentance” are badly misplaced.   Only God, through the indwelling Holy Spirit can ever give that kind of assurance, and only those who are regenerated (“born again”) have the Holy Spirit indwelling them, according to scripture.

To circle back around to the main point, the only biblically-based requirements for exiting an adulterous “remarriage” as a regenerated person, and being fully reconciled with God are:
(1) leave the illicit home permanently
(2) sincerely desire to be reconciled to your true spouse whether or not that appears possible, and whether or not godless society persecutes you for it.    (They probably will, and you won’t ever fool God on this one.)

Whom does scripture say should be providing for an indigent / disabled believer who believes they literally have nowhere to go if they exit their immoral cohabitation?

A big clue can be found in 1 Timothy 5:

Honor widows who are actually widows; but if any widow has children or grandchildren, they must first learn to show proper respect for their own family and to give back compensation to their parents; for this is acceptable in the sight of God.  Now she who is actually a widow and has been left alone has set her hope on God, and she continues in requests and prayers night and day. But she who indulges herself in luxury is dead, even while she lives.  Give these instructions as well, so that they may be above reproach. But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.

Obviously, back in the 1st century church, “divorcees” were nearly non-existent because the church of Jesus Christ never recognized man’s “divorce” nor “annulment”,  and God has always spelled “divorce” as follows:  D-E-A-T-H.     However, in context of today’s immorality inside and outside the church, we have a lot of figurative “widows” and “widowers” for whom the only remarriage that is legitimate is back to their covenant spouse.    It seems not unreasonable that arrangements should be made first with extended family, and failing that, with the church – including the body of other covenant marriage standers, many of whom could benefit from having a roommate while they await the repentance of their own covenant spouse.   Many of these standers will themselves have come out of an adulterous “remarriage” and have skills and space to take care of a disabled repenter.   Most disabled people in the U.S. at least qualify for some level of sustaining state and Federal benefits, including Social Security, that could help ease the financial burden on the care-giving family member or fellow stander.    Many covenant marriage standers’ groups can be found on Facebook or online web pages these days where connections can be made with solid Christian stander communities, and a few of those links will be listed at the end of this post.

As for continuing to live celibate in one’s adulterous household, this notion is quite common, in particular, with Catholic-background people where that church officially condoned this practice as part of its broader contemporary compromise of true biblical marriage indissolubility.    These folks will often say they can’t get an “annulment”,  so this is their “solution”.    There are several kingdom of God problems with this kind of “solution”.    I personally like the response a commenter recently made to this issue on the blog post linked above, though this (characteristically) didn’t satisfy the inquirer:

“We are here as witnesses to the unsaved and the world watches us – we are told in 1 Thess 5:22 to ‘abstain from all appearances of evil’ – Why would a sister be living with another sister’s husband? the ‘appearance’ still exists.

“Would you ask a sister – to live with another woman’s husband? Is that seen to the world as ‘chaste and separate’?

“God who designed marriage – also provides all the tools needed for reconciliation – ‘disabled, isolated and no income or the ability to obtain income’ – are no obstacles to God – providing you have a genuine heart to reconcile – he can and will do what you can’t – if you do what you can….”

(Amen!)

The Big Picture is Drastically Changing – For the Worse:

To close out, “standerinfamilycourt” believes strongly that the relatively-affluent and the poor alike, in this nation of the United States have a high risk of losing all or almost all of our creature comforts in the not-too-distant future, as usurped Marxist  rule makes further inroads to eliminating our national path back to a constitutional republic.     In the U.S., the extreme dysfunction and compromised state of all three branches of the Federal government (plus the military) has been exposed since the November 3, 2020 election, such that constitutional separation-of-powers are rendered almost completely inoperative, hence checks and balances on outright crime and treason in office are rendered effectively “moot”.   This sadly occurred with  the acquiescence of at least six of our nine SCOTUS justices, who likewise proved themselves unwilling to sacrifice personal comforts in order to do what’s right for the nation at a critical time.    The result is that, as one immorally-living set of top leaders replaces the next in the White House, our nation is left under illegitimate rule by those who came into office by what could justifiably be called sedition and Communist China Party purchased collusion (i.e. unprosecuted treason).    These illicit leaders have taken deliberate, unilateral actions in the first few weeks of their White House occupation to seriously break down the national defenses of our nation against these colluding foreign enemies, and we face many serious risks ranging from the “global reset” and collapsed financial currency to a widespread  attack on our electrical grid that could reportedly kill up to 90% of our population over a year’s time.

What a shame, on top of all these losses, to lose one’s soul as well, for the sake of shaky, disappearing material comforts!    Marxist regimes confiscate property at-will, and they wipe out livelihoods with the literal stroke of a pen.   They unleash bioweapons on their own people, and get rid of “the least of these” without a pang of conscience.   They deliberately go after true citizens of the kingdom of God for the way they live and for their convictions.    When God continues to allow this to happen without intervening after the normal channels fail to stop it, it’s a strong sign that His judgment on the nation is fully landing.  He is removing His hand of supernatural protection for the nation’s pervasive sexual immorality and, in particular, church leadership condoning the breakdown of the biblical family over decades of concurrent and consecutive polygamy, divorce and remarriage.  We’ve been “given over” to our own desires, and at that point, the only reversal of this sequence of events is for church leadership to reverse its course on the same.    We know this from following Israel’s history, and we can only hope that it’s not too late already!

“We have been unfaithful to our God and have married foreign women from the peoples of the land; yet now there is hope for Israel in spite of this.   So now let’s make a covenant with our God to send away all the wives and their children, following the counsel of my lord and of those who fear the commandment of our God; and let it be done according to the Law.   Arise! For this matter is your responsibility, but we will be with you; be courageous and act.”

Then Ezra stood and made the leading priests, the Levites, and all Israel take an oath that they would do according to this proposal; so they took the oath.   Then Ezra rose from before the house of God and went into the chamber of Jehohanan the son of Eliashib. Although he went there, he did not eat bread nor drink water, because he was mourning over the unfaithfulness of the exiles.   So they made a proclamation throughout Judah and Jerusalem to all the exiles, that they were to assemble at Jerusalem,  and that whoever did not come within three days, in accordance with the counsel of the leaders and the elders, all his property would be forfeited, and he himself would be excluded from the assembly of the exiles.”  – from the Book of Ezra, chapter 10.

For this very reason our founding fathers repeatedly warned (I believe, through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit) that we can only retain our constitutional republic through biblical morality.

www.standerinfamilycourt.com
7 Times Around the Jericho Wall |  Let’s Repeal No-Fault Divorce!

 

Links to a few helpful covenant marriage standers sites where chaste connections can be made with other standers:

Covenant Marriage Standers (Facebook)

MADR (Facebook) 

Testimonies of Repentance from Adulterous Marriages  (Facebook)

Restoration of Christian Marriage (MarriageDivorce.com)

 

Discipleship, Lost culture, marriage, morality, Spiritual Warfare

How Do I Know Whether God Joined My First Marriage?

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by Standerinfamilycourt

Adam and Eve…Ahab and Jezebel….Joseph and Asenath…Moses and Zipporah….Herod and the daughter of the King of Petra….Herodias and Philip….Timothy’s mother, Lois and his pagan father…Potiphar and Mrs. P….Pontius Pilate and Mrs. Pilate…Felix and Drusilla  

What do all of these biblical married couples have in common?    Obviously, they stand as the scriptural rebuke to contemporary evangelical fantasies (usually arrived at in retrospect) that, “God didn’t join my first marriage.”

It isn’t usually that the evangelical church leadership pushes this nonsense.   No, Protestant leadership seems to prefer the equally immoral falsehood that some human act (X) “breaks” the covenant, and “marrying” another person constitutes a new covenant as binding as the first.     The only church that officially promotes the myth that God “doesn’t join” some original marriages, where there is a believer and an unbeliever making vows, seems to be the Roman Catholic Church, which presumes to issue “annulment” papers in that instance, but only upon the request of one of the spouses.

When the Pharisees (presumably all unbelievers, with possibly one or two exceptions) challenged Jesus’ first declaration from the sermon on the mount that God-joined holy matrimony was dissoluble only by physical death, He took these leaders on a history tour back to the Garden of Eden and recreated for them the first-ever wedding performed by the hand of God.   He described how Eve was taken out of Adam, who declared his wife to be “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh”.     The Apostle Paul later echoes this in Ephesians 5:

“So husbands ought also to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself; for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church, because we are members of His body. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and shall be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”

But, I digress….forthwith, back to that wedding scene in Genesis 2.    Moses tells us of the Father’s presence as officiant.   He tells us that the generations coming from Adam and Eve will be never-married, leaving their father and mother to be made one-flesh (sarx mia, in the Greek) with the spouse of their youth.   We see consent, and we see two witnesses, Jesus and the serpent.    What we do not see is any religious test applied by God or anyone else.    History tells us that religious tests which retroactively “nullify” a marriage didn’t arrive until the 13th century.

Jesus had every opportunity to tell the religious-but-apostate philandering Pharisees that God couldn’t possibly have joined their original marriages, but instead He told them this:

 “So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no [hu]man separate [put distance between]….Because of your hardness of heart Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not been this way.”

“Whoever divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her;  and if she herself divorces her husband and marries another man, she is committing adultery.”

The only fact that can reasonably be supported by scripture is that God joins all marriages between a never-married or widowed man and a never-married or widowed woman, of every tribe, tongue and nation where there is consent and intent to form a home together.   No exceptions.    The direct corollary is that God does not join civil-only legalized unions where there is an estranged prior spouse still living, regardless of the individual circumstances.   For a deeper understanding of this, please read “GOD’S CHARACTER AND HIS COVENANTS”.   

God actually didn’t join your first marriage if you tried to wed someone who was legally estranged from a living spouse.    Otherwise, nothing they did, or you feel changes the fact that He was  there and was the real officiant.

Marriage is to be held in honor among all, and the marriage bed is to be undefiled; for fornicators and adulterers God will judge.
– Hebrews 13:4

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal “No-Fault” Divorce!

Church Discipline, Divorce, Lost culture, marriage, Marriage Restoration, morality, Prayer

We Respectfully Disagree With Rev. Wells’ Wrap-up to “Does Divorce Dissolve Marriage?” Here’s Why

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by Standerinfamilycourt

And did not he make one? Yet had he the residue of the spirit. And wherefore one? That he might seek a godly seed. Therefore take heed to your spirit, and let none deal treacherously against the wife of his youth.
– Malachi 2:15

We periodically rerun the book series by the late Assemblies of God pastor and bible college president Milton T. Wells on our Facebook page, because until the mid-2000’s no book came closer to the undiluted truth of God concerning man’s “divorce” and adulterous remarriage.     John Piper’s books are roughly equivalent to Wells’ book, but they don’t teach (nor does Dr. Piper actually practice) disciplined hermeneutics necessary to overcome all the damage that’s been done to our contemporary English language bible translations.     Rev. Wells’ deeper concern for a better hermeneutical grasp is probably due to the fact that he was an Arminian who believed that the “born again” (those sealed with the indwelling Holy Spirit) can still walk away from the faith and wind up in hell, rather than a Calvinist who believes all eternal losses for the born-again Christian are limited to “loss of rewards”.

Yet the fact remains that both Wells and Piper came to the same unsupported conclusion, that despite “remarriage” being adultery by the rigorous case they each made,  and despite Paul’s multiple warnings that unrepented adulterers have no inheritance in the kingdom of heaven, both concluded the “remarried” must not leave their continuously-adulterous civil-only union to put their covenant family back together, or (failing that) to obey Paul in remaining celibate until that true spouse has passed away.   Both men presented impeccable, or near-impeccable cases for why these subsequent unions are not actual marriages in God’s eyes, yet neither shepherd managed to follow the case they made to its unavoidable conclusion concerning true repentance and restitution.   More than one previous post has dissected Piper’s faulty (and sometimes spuriously dishonest) assumptions about this, so we won’t repeat what was said earlier.    We will focus here on what Rev. Wells had to say (with the denomination’s General Superintendent literally looking directly over the author’s shoulder as the latter wrote the Foreword to Wells’ book).

From pages 48 through 51 (Chapter VII) of the original text….

“Many a spouse of an unscriptural union is in deep distress when he (or she) learns through the reading of the Scripture that he (or she) is party to an unscrip­tural union. A letter written to C. Morse Ward, speaker on Revivaltime, a gospel broadcast of the Assemblies of God, is typical. It follows, in part, as it ap­peared in The Gospel Gleaners:

Dear Brother Ward,

I have lived in sin and rebellion against God, but now I want to live wholly for Christ no matter what the cost. I have three living husbands, and a voice keeps telling me I should leave the husband to whom I am now married. He says that he does not know what he would do were I to leave him. Am I re­sponsible for this man’s soul?   I am restless and constantly haunted that I am living in adultery. I have four married children and I want to be a better tes­timony to them. My present husband has given me a beautiful home, and we have all the money we need, but how can I enjoy it?

Mrs.____. 

 

A portion of C. Morse Ward’s answer follows: At the well of Samaria Jesus met a woman who had a similar problem. It is interesting to read that story in the Gospel of John, chapter 4. She had had five husbands and Jesus said of her present companion, ”He whom thou now hast is not thy husband.” There is no direct statement that Jesus sent her back to any one of the five.

( SIFC:  We dealt hermeneutically with the above popular heresy of C. Morse Ward in this post, “What About That Samaritan Woman?”)

“Sin tangles our lives to such an extent that although forgiveness can be obtained, certain things can never be straightened out. Paul could never bring back to life the Christians he had slain as Saul, the persecutor. Much of the havoc he wrought in his rage against Christ (Acts 8:3) he could never undo. He simply lived by this rule: “This one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.” Philip­pians 3:13,14.  It seems to me that there are certain things that you are powerless to undo. “

( SIFC:   Since living on, unrepentant, in a state of ongoing sin necessarily takes a person in the opposite direction of sanctification needed to reach the marriage supper of the Lamb, we have valid cause to question how one can reasonably expect to “press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus”, while continuing to covet and retain the purloined spouse of another living person with whom God did not make you sarx mia, but instead, you made yourself hen soma.    The idea that we “can’t undo” a human fiction is (well) fictional.   David righteously recovered his God-joined covenant wife Michal from Paltiel, though he also had non-covenant wives (some of them widows) with whom he was only hen soma.    John the Baptizer told Herod in no uncertain terms “it is not lawful for you to have YOUR BROTHER’s wife” after there was no question from historical accounts that he had “married” her under Jewish law.  Comparing the sinful past ACTS of taking the life of the saints, with the ongoing sin of continuing on with driving a stolen car, or spending from a stolen wallet, or continuing to sleep with the God-joined spouse of another living person is comparing apples to oranges, and is dishonest at best. )

It is true that you have your present husband to consider. Do you want to leave him a divorced man? Would he then be clear to marry again?

(   SIFC:  Here’s where building on a right, hermeneutical foundation as laid out by Jesus in Matthew 19:6,8 is crucial to getting the answers to these questions right.   The foremost consideration with both our covenant and any non-covenant “spouse” is whether they would or could die in a continuous state of sin that will keep them out of heaven, according to what clear scripture says — ignored by “Brother Ward” here, if we don’t take the right action to fully repent.  How can we legitimately say we “love” someone or anyone if we don’t care about where they will spend their eternity?    Will this guy be left “a divorced man”?    Not likely, unless he already was one civilly before entering the “marriage”.
Yes, he’ll be civilly divorced as a result of the required act of repentance, but we have to look at what Jesus said about the validity of the union to begin with, and we have to look at where Jesus said “divorce” comes from…and doesn’t come from.    “Brother Ward” is once again conveniently ignoring crystal-clear scriptures:  “He said to them, ‘Because of your hardness of heart Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not [ever] been this way. ‘”    If this “husband” has a living, estranged wife, exiting the false “marriage” frees him to redeem the generational sin of what he’s done and put his covenant family back together with the one he never actually ceased to be married to.   Can this released “husband” remarry?   That obviously depends on whether he, too, has a living, estranged true spouse of his youth.  He may remarry her, or if there is no “her” he may marry for the FIRST time.)

You won’t solve one question by creating a dozen new ones. Entering a sort of Protestant clois­ter is not the answer to your problem. The answer to your problem is in the words of Jesus to another woman, ”Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.” 27

( SIFC:   An essential part, we would respectfully submit, to “go and sin no more” is this: “Flee immorality. Every other sin that a man commits is outside the body, but the immoral man sins against his own body.Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own?For you have been bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body.”   – 1 Corinthians 6;18-20.    In light of what Christ said about becoming a eunuch for the sake of the kingdom of God in identical circumstances (Matthew 19:12), it’s hard to square “Brother Ward’s” out-of-context advice with the bulk of in-context scripture.

(C. M. Ward: “Letter Column,” Gospel Gleaners, September 2, 1956, Spring­field, Missouri, Gospel Publishing House.)

“Some conservative teachers of the doctrine of divorce find in I Cor.7:10,11,17 and 20 permission by the Apostle Paul for converted spouses of adulterous un­ions, contracted before they were regenerated, to remain together. They base their conviction on the Scriptures and reasons which follow. The Apostle said. “And unto the married I command . . . Let not the wife depart from her hus­band” (I Cor. 7: 10). These teachers reason that this statement has reference to both valid and adulterous marriages, since it is assumed that there must have been many converts in the Corinthian Church who had been married the second time before they were both born of the Spirit, and whose first mates were still living when they entered the Church.

( SIFC:  Such “conservative teachers of the doctrine of divorce” to whom Rev. Wells refers, still are not applying principled hermeneutics,  but he fails to blow the “h”-whistle on them here, whereas some contemporary pastors have done so in recent years.   We previously dealt with this popular 1 Corinthians 7 faux pas in this blog post, and again in this one.   Following through on what Jesus repeatedly said about the invalidity of subsequent “marriages” while our original spouse still lives, and what Paul repeatedly said about the only thing that “dissolves” our original marriage, it is a stretch to envision anyone who is not either widowed or never-married being “called” while in anything  but our original God-joined union, plus a possible tacked-on, papered-over immoral relationship.)

Was not Corinth a city notorious for its licentiousness? It is believed by these teachers that the Apostle was referring to Christian spouses of adulterous unions in I Cor. 7: 17, and 20. “Only, let each member go on living in the same condition which the Lord originally allotted to him, and in which he was when he heard God’s call” (I Cor. 7: 17, A. S. Way’s translation). “In whatever condition of life each one heard God’s call, in that let him remain” (I Cor.7:20, A. S. Way).

(   SIFC:   Remember when we spoke earlier of the General Superintendent literally looking over author Wells’ shoulder?   Watch below for how our intrepid author — whom you can almost see holding his nose as he types away, navigates the “pickle” he has pulled out of the canning jar… On the “plus” side, this isn’t a dedicated chapter, but is mercifully buried in the Appendix.  How ironic that a hermeneutically-meticulous shepherd is forced to relax the disciplined hermeneutics which his denominational superiors felt free to ignore with their bone-headed, politically correct insertions!)

Ralph M. Riggs, the General Superintendent of the Assemblies of God (1956) presents the status of those described thus: When the Passover blood was applied to the door posts and lintels of the Jewish home in Egypt. Jehovah said, “This month shall be unto you the beginning of months: it shall be the first month of the year to you” (Exodus 12:2). A new life begins at Calvary. Jesus’ cleanses the past and accepts us as we are when we come to Him. “Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called. Art thou bound unto a wife? Seek not to be loosed. Art thou loosed from a wife? Seek not a wife” (I Corinthians7, 20, 27), “This is good for the present distress,” Paul said concerning their problems then. The same can be said of our similar problem now. Art thou bound to a wife? Seek not to be loosed. Let the status quo prevail. The past is under the Blood. Start life anew as a new creature in Christ Jesus. To this agree the experiences of many forgiven Blood-bought souls and the witness of the blessed Holy Spirit…

( SIFC:  Above is the last thing the author said – through others – of what the individual Christian should do who, for whatever reason, is in an adulterous “remarriage” to someone else’s God-joined spouse — and not even Wells’ own words or thoughts, but quoting the words and thoughts of those who outranked him in the denomination, before he himself moves on to tackle the “safer” subject of adulterously remarried church leaders and their role in the church…. until Wells finally says this to wrap up, in his own words:)

“God indeed genuinely saves the souls of men and women of unions disapproved by Christ who sin in ignorance during their unregenerate state, but when Christian professors continue deliberately to walk in darkness, they cannot claim I John 1:7. “But if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin. ”

( SIFC: Rev. Wells would have surely been aghast, had he lived long enough to witness the development of homosexual “marriage” in civilly-legal form.  Might he have taken a bit different position than the above, had the Lord had a chance to make His own LGBT counterpoint to this spurious argument before Rev. Wells graduated to heaven?    We dealt more fully with this popular “last resort” heresy, after all the other “exceptions” and human excuses fail rigorous scriptural examination,  in our earlier post, “But Mr. (or Mrs.) New Creation Hasn’t Passed Away”.)

The pas­sages discussed above (I Cor.7:10, 17, 20, and I Tim.3:2) may give evidence that God tolerates the continuation of an unscriptural marital relationship entered into before conversion, but they do not indicate that, by them, God validates such a union as acceptable and approved by Himself any more than He approved of Israel’s having a king, although He tolerated it. See a fuller treatment of
I Cor.7:10,17,20 in the Appendix on pages  108 through 112 and I Tim 3:2 on page162. The texts will there be viewed in the light of their context.”

( SIFC:  Rev. Wells suggests above, apparently without a lot of personal conviction that marked all that he had to say in the body of his book, that the last-mentioned scriptures “may” provide evidence that God “tolerates” departures from Christ’s commandment to allow living on in a union God did not join, and then he gratuitously splits hairs between God’s “acceptance” and His “tolerance”.    This, of course, flies completely in the face of Jesus’ message in the sermon on the mount, where Jesus declared  such days to be over, and kingdom of God standards to be in full effect henceforth.    There is no objective biblical evidence that Paul recognized man’s divorce as dissolving holy matrimony in anything he said in 1 Corinthians 7, or that he ever addressed “divorced” people anywhere in that chapter. )

In conclusion, even if such “toleration” were true in the 1st century church, how could such possibly still be valid, 18 centuries later, especially after history tells us the saints of the first four centuries of the church had eradicated divorce and remarriage so completely that, as Rev. Wells himself quotes historian Kenneth E. Kirk in documenting, that this New Testament morality controlled the church and general culture for 15 of those centuries, despite the fact that the concept was completely new to the world up to that point?

“What is more astounding than the mere fact that the early Church taught and practiced the complete indissolubility of marriage for so long, is the fact that the Church chose to take its stand against the strong contemporary lax social and legal attitudes toward divorce which prevailed so universally all about them. The Church, today, feels that it is on the horns of a dilemma, because so many divorcees are coming to her for help and encouragement. Shall she accommodate the Scriptures to the apparent need of the unfortunate divorcees, or shall she uphold the Biblical standard of the indissolubility of marriage for any cause while faithfully discharging her duty to such distressed individuals?  Every church of today which considers the lowering of its divorce standards should remember that the early Church stood true to the Biblical doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage in a world that was pagan and strongly opposed to the moral and marriage standards of the New Testament. Not only did the Church maintain her stand on the indissolubility in the early centuries, she changed the attitude and standards of the whole world toward it. Even today the whole Church of Christ and the entire western world is still reaping the rich benefits of that heritage.   Shall the Christian Church of today be less courageous and faithful than the Church of the early centuries of the Christian era? Does she not under God have the same spiritual resources?

“There were other grievous social evils in the early Christian centuries. Slavery enveloped the Roman Empire of that age, yet the Christians did not set themselves to change the thinking of the masses against it, but they did set themselves to change the thinking of the masses toward marriage and divorce. Why did they not attack slavery with the same vehemence? The reason was that the Apostles had not received a “thus saith the Lord” from Christ respecting it. They had, however, received such in the doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage. No sect or school of philosophy is known to have influenced the early Church in this teaching. From whence, then, did she get the teaching? Certainly she received it from the teaching of the Gospels and from the teaching of the Apostles, who had earlier conveyed the same orally (as well as in writing) to the leaders of the early Church who succeeded them.”

No, such accommodation is strictly carnal man’s idea, and indulging it inevitably leads precisely to a place  Rev. Wells also did not live long enough to witness:  pollster George Barna famously documenting in 2000 that a full 90% of the evangelical respondents he surveyed admitting two things, as a matter of fact:

(1) their last “remarriage” occurred after, not before, they considered themselves “born again”

(2) at least one divorce had also taken place at their own initiation or mutual consent since their salvation experience.

If indissolubility was in reality a part-time, circumstantial “ideal”, without heaven or hell consequences for living in willful disobedience, it would hardly have been worth Rev. Wells’ studious efforts to write this book in the first place!   The concept of indissolubility (as contrasted with the ideal of “permanence”) demands its unavoidable conclusion with regard to what repentance from an unlawful union entails, especially in light of what Jesus said in Matthew 5:30-31, and said again in Luke 16:18-31.

The fear of man bringeth a snare: but whoso putteth his trust in the LORD shall be safe.   –  Proverbs 29:25

What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase?  May it never be! How shall we who died to sin still live in it?  Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death?  Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.   –   Romans 6:1-4

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7 Times Around the Jericho Wall |  Let’s Repeal “No-Fault” Divorce!

Connection of Unilateral Divorce to SSM, Divorce, family law, Lost culture, morality, Spiritual Warfare

Sorry, But Forming A Committee To Flout God’s Sexual Ethics Started Long Ago…With Heterosexuals

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by Standerinfamilycourt

That which has been is that which will be, And that which has been done is that which will be done. So there is nothing new under the sun.
 –  Ecclesiastes 1:9

The American Psychological Association achieved the political coup of the century in 1973 when homosexuality was removed as a disorder from the  Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.    Homosexualist political activism had gained steam after the 1969 Stonewall bar raid and riot, and had established an extremely loud voice with the APA by 1971, coercing a questionable reliance on the since-discredited Kinsey Reports, and grossly downplaying the public health and self-destructive effects of sodomy in defining what constitutes a diagnosable emotional disorder.

In the wake of the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City [], gay and lesbian activists, believing psychiatric theories to be a major contributor to anti-homosexual social stigma, disrupted the 1970 and 1971 annual meetings of the APA….There was also an emerging generational changing of the guard within APA comprised of younger leaders urging the organization to greater social consciousness [2]. A very few psychoanalysts like Judd Marmor [5,52] were also taking issue with psychoanalytic orthodoxy regarding homosexuality. However, the most significant catalyst for diagnostic change was gay activism.

The opponents of the activist influence on the APA board’s 1973 recommendation forced a referendum vote of the membership:

“Psychiatrists from the psychoanalytic community, however, objected to the decision. They petitioned APA to hold a referendum asking the entire membership to vote either in support of or against the BOT decision. The decision to remove was upheld by a 58% majority of 10,000 voting members.

“It should be noted that psychiatrists did not vote, as is often reported in the popular press, on whether homosexuality should remain a diagnosis. What APA members voted on was to either “favor” or “oppose” the APA Board of Trustees decision and, by extension, the scientific process they had set up to make the determination.”

This travesty, as we all now know, laid the groundwork for much false “science” to develop that later conferred “born that way” (contrived) immutability to said emotional disorder,  which in turn led to the societally-devastating ability to elevate a destructive behavior choice to a civil rights issue in many states and localities through SOGI (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity) laws, and finally, a second layer of  redefinition of what remained of God’s definition (per Matthew 19:4-6) of marriage, by judicial legislation that culminated in June, 2015 in the Obergefell SCOTUS decision.    SOGI’s create a super-protected class of special rights that trump the fundamental constitutional protections of all other U.S. citizens.   And, if only, the APA’s authoritarian, virtue-signaling quest had ceased with its efforts to normalize sodomy….

But, alas, the APA has continued to “evolve”, as more homosexual activists actually started to infiltrate its ranks to ensure that the faulty DSM removal decision is never reversed but instead, continuously enforced and reinforced.   Per an article yesterday by Illinois Family Institute’s Laurie Higgins,

“Division 44 is also called “The Society for the Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity (SPSOGD).” Division 44 was founded “in 1985 by a group of pioneering LGB psychologists and their allies,” and one of its primary purposes is to “promote the development and delivery of affirmative psychological services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender and gender nonconforming and queer people.” In the service of this purpose, last year Division 44

‘formed a task force on consensual non-monogamy (CNM), in recognition of relationship diversity, which intersects with sexual/gender identities in interesting ways. ‘

‘Consensual non-monogamy’ is a euphemism for adultery, sexual infidelity, or polyamory.”

It should be pointed out this idea was hardly new to the APA!   Following shortly after the natural passing of the 16th century Reformers, (who also were notoriously discontented with biblical sexual ethics, specifically with God’s definition of marriage as regards lifelong indissolubility), were a group of 17th century clerics and Members of Parliament in England who where determined to gain a durable edict doing something about the “legalism” of Divinely-compelled monogamy, so in 1643 they convened the Westminster Assembly.

While it would be misleading to paint the assembly as not being concerned with an array of issues relating to the rule of King Charles I, a Catholic, there was also much humanistic animus against the indissolubility of holy matrimony, seen as a “Catholic” teaching, instead of more properly as Christ’s teaching.    So what do you do when a government is in charge that won’t cooperate on liberalizing the sexual ethics of the day, but insists on biblical sexual ethics?   Why, you form a committee of pseudo-experts (of only one persuasion), and you challenge that authority based on “social science” and “enlightment”, of course!    After all, the house of the adulterous monarch founding the more “reasonable” Church of England had been put down, and royal descendants of his discarded covenant wife had been given the upper hand, promising to reverse all that Reformation “progress” after barely a century.    In the name of nonconsensual serial monogamy, something had to be done!

Parliament finally passed an ordinance to hold the assembly on its own authority without Charles’s assent on 12 June 1643.[20] It named as many as 121 ministers[a] and thirty non-voting parliamentary observers: twenty from the Commons, and ten from the House of Lords.[22] The Assembly was almost entirely English; Parliament appointed Englishmen for the counties of Wales, but the French stranger churches (churches of Protestant refugees from Catholic France) sent two ministers in place of any from the Channel Islands.[14] Many of the divines were internationally recognized scholars of the Bible, ancient languages, patristics, and scholastic theology. Many were also famous preachers.[23] Most of these theologians had retained their positions in the Church during the tenure of William Laud. Some had been ejected from their churches or cited by ecclesiastical courts for their views. Some had fled to the Continent, and one to the American colonies.[24] Nonetheless, they all considered themselves members of the Church of England and had received episcopal ordination. Most were conformists, meaning they agreed to follow the Act of Uniformity 1558 and the Book of Common Prayer.[25]

The Assembly was strictly under the control of Parliament, and was only to debate topics which Parliament directed. Assembly members were not permitted to state their disagreements with majority opinions or share any information about the proceedings, except in writing to Parliament.

The result, four years later was a Calvinist triumph that became the staple for the harlot church, reinforcing its gross immorality in the 20th and 21st centuries, as if Jesus Himself handed it down.     One of the most harmful doctrines in the Westminster Confession is found in Chapter 24, which abused numerous scriptures to fabricate “biblical grounds” for man’s divorce and ecclesiastical permission to defy Christ and marry again while our God-joined spouse is still living:

“V.  Adultery or fornication committed after a contract, being detected before marriage, giveth just occasion to the innocent party to dissolve that contract.l   In the case of adultery after marriage, it is lawful for the innocent party to sue out a divorce,m and, after the divorce, to marry another, as if the offending party were dead.n

l Matt. 1:18-20.
m Matt. 5:31,32.
n Matt. 19:9; Rom. 7:2,3.

VI.  Although the corruption of man be such as is apt to study arguments, unduly to put asunder those whom God hath joined together in marriage; yet nothing but adultery, or such wilful desertion as can no way be remedied by the church or civil magistrate, is cause sufficient of dissolving the bond of marriage:o wherein, a publick and orderly course of proceeding is to be observed, and the persons concerned in it not left to their own wills and discretion in their own case.p

o Matt. 19:8,9; 1 Cor. 7:15; Matt. 19:6.
p Deut. 24:1-4.”

Because of this landmark Reformation document, we now speak of “orthodoxy” instead of obedience to scripture,  and bow down low to what the majority think, rather than what Christ commanded.
This, of course, set a powerful example for future corrupt church leadership in the 20th century, (ironically, in 1973, the same year as the APA official redefinition-by-committee of long-established moral truth), and ultimately, this power lesson, walked out by the church wolves, was not lost on the sexually lawless pagans.   Sustaining  such “reforms” over time, however, requires that its advocates remain temporally “large and in charge.”

Social conservatives are fond of asking these days,  “if you change the definition of marriage not to require a man-woman union (of whatever sort  or duration, in circumstances short of incest), why is there any logical reason to limit it to ‘two’  or to ‘persons’? “

SIFC believes this is a valid question, but a deliberately myopic one.  The more revealing question is,  “if you change the definition of marriage from lifelong indissolubility (also a creational non-negotiable, according to Jesus) between a man and a woman,   how can you expect any other creational non-negotiable to apply?”    
It is this question that finds us at the true foot of the “slippery slope”.  One cannot only “partially” reject the teachings of Christ, consequentially or otherwise.

The Christian social conservatives complaining about the “slippery slope” and saying “we told you so!”  aren’t wrong in their sentiments. But they are loath to acknowledge where the slippery slope accurately began, because they rather hope to preserve part of that slope…the part that imposes biblical morality on others, but not on them.     It is a core mission of this blog to keep pointing out why that kind of a “strategy” will never work — namely, because God Himself will never allow it!    Church leadership is going to be required by the Most High to officially renounce the harlotrous doctrine of  WCOF Chapter 24, to excommunicate people in adulterous “marriages” with someone else’s discarded spouse who refuse to forsake those unlawful unions, and to cease creating new ones by undertaking vain “wedding” ceremonies in which God is no party at all.

Commentator Laurie Higgins correctly observes (while not necessarily considering #LukeSixteenEighteen violations “adultery”):

” ‘Consensual non-monogamy’  is a euphemism for adultery, sexual infidelity, or polyamory. Leftists must paint sexual immorality with a glossy finish if they’re going to deceive people and advance their socially destructive ideology.”   

From God’s perspective,  it doesn’t matter whether polygamy is concurrent or consecutive, nor does He consider polyamory any more immoral or abominable than either form of polygamy, even though a good 60% of  His “church” is these days engaged in one of them.  Furthermore, if the next stronghold does indeed prove to be civilly legalized or decriminalized pedophilia, and this in itself doesn’t trigger his final judgment on our land,  the legalized sexual abuse of children will simply be an escalating form of judgment where several prior escalations have fallen on deaf ears, despite the loud (and also unheard) outcry of that harlot church doing the complaining.

A worthless person, a wicked man,
Is the one who walks with a perverse mouth,
 Who winks with his eyes, who signals with his feet,
Who points with his fingers;
Who with perversity in his heart continually devises evil,
Who spreads strife.
Therefore his calamity will come suddenly;
Instantly he will be broken and there will be no healing.
– Proverbs 6:12-15

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7 Times Around the Jericho Wall |  Let’s Repeal “No-Fault” Divorce!

Church Discipline, Discipleship, Divorce, family law, Lost culture, marriage, Marriage Restoration, morality, Spiritual Warfare

Do Not Be Deceived, God Is Not Mocked – Deuteronomy 24 Revisited

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by Standerinfamilycourt

For both prophet and priest are polluted;
Even in My house I have found their wickedness,” declares the Lord.
…Moreover, among the prophets of Samaria I saw an offensive thing:
They prophesied by Baal and led My people Israel astray.
 “Also among the prophets of Jerusalem I have seen a horrible thing:
The committing of adultery and walking in falsehood;
And they strengthen the hands of evildoers,
So that no one has turned back from his wickedness.
All of them have become to Me like Sodom,
And her inhabitants like Gomorrah.

– Jeremiah 23: 11, 13-14

“standerinfamilycourt” should have been absolutely elated and jumping for joy when a leading Christian activist for repeal of unilateral, “no-fault” divorce in Texas recently posted these two YouTube videos of marriage permanence sermons delivered in the past few days in a large Dallas-area megachurch.    Not only did this pastor muster the courage to deliver the “u-haul sermon”  without the usual fawning apologies for stepping on congregational toes, but he….

– delivered this in a very engaging, winsome way….
– based it on the sermon on the mount, with mostly correct, accurate insights in at least the first video about the purpose and effects of TSOM…
– effectively set aside all the usual cultural excuses (except one) for Christians living contrary to what Christ clearly taught…
– acknowledged, albeit a bit hollowly,  that the one-flesh entity is created only by God’s hand….
– actually vocalized the term “serial monogamy” in a denouncing tone…
– admitted that denominations, pastors and churches had sold out due to cowardice on this topic, both politically and in church…and
– admitted that God’s laws cannot be escaped simply by ignoring them.

It was clear that some combination of marriage permanence authors, covenant marriage standers, and our friend, the activist were having a meaningful influence on this pastor, and perhaps on others like him.    But… since SIFC’s focus is on the souls involved, and then on legal reforms needed to redeem our nation (in that order), no rejoicing was actually possible.    The activist is in a second “marriage” while the wife of his youth, who divorced him and “remarried” first, still lives.    His second “wife” is actually another man’s estranged one-flesh wife.    Both shepherd and sheep here labor under the delusion of a “safe harbor” presumed to be found in Deuteronomy 24:1-4, and the (hireling) shepherd made another video in 2015 stating that the only conditions under which he will officiate a wedding over someone with a living, estranged spouse is when said spouse has “remarried” first under the immoral civil laws of men.    Says he (applaudably), he’s motivated and convicted by the need to steer clear of hindering family reconciliation, but (shamefully), when man’s paper has covered over an immoral relationship, reconciliation is thereafter and forevermore deemed “impossible”, apparently finding at long last something too hard for God.

It’s obvious, of course, why such a pastor’s position would be immensely attractive to somebody who now is in the “remarried” position our activist friend finds himself in, and who may have arrived there 95% innocently (5% was the Holy Spirit putting a check in his spirit that went unheeded), and who might conceivably make a very different decision today based on what he’s learned since.    Such teaching is also irresistible to a Christian who has an unadmitted and unconfronted forgiveness problem because the treatment they got in the divorce process was so ugly, and the ongoing damages so deep.   Boy, if we can find a basis to believe that God made an exception for us and replicated that one-flesh entity between #2 and us, because by “remarriage”, #1 severed the prior supernatural one-flesh entity, what a relief!

Tellingly, there is no early church writing that shows those leaders interpreting Deuteronomy 24 as preventing covenant family wholeness after a spouse has returned from taking up legal residence in the “Far Country”.     Those true shepherds didn’t preach “permanence”, instead they preached indissolubility.    “Permanence” has the potential to cement in an immoral legalized relationship and keep us out of heaven.   Indissolubility cements in holiness and automatically invalidates that subsequent relationship in every case.

Deuteronomy 24 seems to make man’s divorce “real”, notwithstanding what Jesus said directly to the contrary in  Matthew 19:8, and seems to forbid our ever reconciling, all in one!    Or does it?     What does the bible actually say about that?

There is a strong reason SIFC led off the early 2016 “debunk” series with Deuteronomy 24 as the second blog in the series, immediately after hermeneutically laying the scriptural foundation found in Matthew 19:6 for the no-excuses life-long indissolubility of holy matrimony.    The “marital unfaithfulness”  exception clause arguments that had, for 100 years or so, manipulated Christ’s teaching in Matthew 5:32 and 19:9 were wearing thin and were causing a portrayal of Christ as contradicting Himself – which is to be expected when there’s pre-1800’s concordance evidence still lying around showing that the Greek word “porneia” never has accurately translated into a post-marital sin.   Arguments from 1 Corinthians 7 around abandonment or “abuse” even more rapidly wear thin when Paul is portrayed within the very same bible chapter as contradicting himself.    The sheer genius of satan in elevating the Deuteronomy 24 argument as the new “go-to” strawman argument is, that this one is far more challenging to de-bunk.    Attempts to do so are subject to criticism that if Moses said it, how can it not be God-breathed?    How could Christ contradict Moses (though He very clearly did!) if He came to “fulfill the law” ?   Successfully debunking Deuteronomy 24 marriage heresies also requires a firm reliance on two doctrines (the true nature of one-flesh, and the true nature of the holy matrimony covenant),  that Christ preached, but no pastor today (well, no more than 7 or 8 pastors today) dare preach!   Our 2016 post covered all that, and more.

Upon further reflection since writing that original post, a few additional hermeneutic problems with Deuteronomy 24 have come to light that weren’t addressed in the earlier post, and SIFC has conferred with a couple of other gifted, Spirit-led scholars who contributed some good further insights.    An update at this time seems quite warranted to bring these new items forward, though every word of the old post remains just as valid as when they were penned three years ago.

Pastor Todd Wagner of Watermark Church treats Deuteronomy 24 as creating an all-time prohibition against returning to a covenant marriage after one of the spouses (evidently, without regard to which one) has remarried.   He justifies this by citing the desirability of “outlawing serial monogamy”, parroting  as he does all the conventional liberal commentators.   The implication in this sermon is of the wife remarrying, but “standerinfamilycourt” is willing to bet the farm that he actually applies it on a unisex basis in determining which subsequent weddings he’s willing to officiate over people whose true spouse is still living.    Is this valid, based on the face content and context of the Torah scripture?    Is it valid to extrapolate a Mosaic regulation which Christ actually abrogated in Matthew 5, to New Covenant practice?    If we must extrapolate and extend this Mosaic regulation, why then is eating shellfish OK today, along with not stoning our disobedient children to death?

Deuteronomy 24:1-4 is isolated from the rest of the marriage regulatory commandments Moses delivered in Deuteronomy 22, in a chapter that deals the rest of the time with non-marriage topics.    This fact alone should be treated with a certain level of care and deference in attempting to apply it broadly.   While the regulation in Deuteronomy 22 was fairly comprehensive and was broadly applicable, the instruction in Deuteronomy 24 is a conditional set of nested “if” statements aimed at narrowly regulating an evil practice.  That means, “if” the first condition (“when…”) is not met, there is no need to apply the second “if” condition, nor the subsequent ones.   Ditto for the third condition, if the 2nd one is not met, and so on.    With each iteration, the hermeneutically-responsible scope of application becomes narrower and narrower.    Unfortunately for our “remarried” activist friend, this means his situation will fall out of the logic at some point, and in fact, it does so in an early round.     Unfortunately for this pastor he admires, it should be obvious that Deuteronomy 24 cannot be applied on a unisex basis.   It is gender-specific for a purposeful reason, and that reason is not, as he suggests, prohibiting all covenant reconciliations, for all time.    It behooves us to look into what that purposeful reason for the regulation actually was, and keep investigating until the results square with all that Jesus (and His Apostle) clearly said to the contrary later on.

“standerinfamilycourt” commented on the facebook post:

When pastors “truth engineer”, it’s called EISEGESIS.   In the first 7 or 8 minutes of this — which are excellent to a point, we start seeing the eisegesis creep in when this pastor substitutes “intention” for “commandment” and when he focuses on this life going well, instead of eternal consequences of dying in a sinful relationship. If his theory were correct, there would have been no reason for Malachi, chapter 2, nor Ezra, chapters 9 and 10.   Furthermore, if this man’s theory were correct, the U.S. church and nation would not be under such harsh, advanced judgment from the Lord, whereby the salt (Matt. 5:13) has lost its savor (and we’re on the brink of losing our Bill of Rights and national sovereignty) — no longer good for anything except being trampled under foot.  The last several minutes of this video are a sophisticated, full-throated abuse of Deut. 24:1-4 which has several issues hermeneutically.

We know that Matt. 19:6 and 8 were not mere “intentions” because the imperative mood was consistently used, and because Jesus had just gone into the metaphysical reason (Greek: sarx mia, sunezeuxen) why there is no paper “divorce” even possible, hence no release from the ongoing adultery Christ repeatedly spoke of that always results [“EVERYONE who marries one who has been put away enters into a state of ongoing adultery” – Matt. 5:32b; 19:9b; Luke 16:18-31].   As a result, people are still being deceived (even if the standards are a bit tighter these days in a few churches), and God IS still being mocked.  One can never walk by the Spirit while coveting and retaining some other living person’s God-joined spouse, and while forever rejecting one’s own God-joined spouse, and while bearing false witness about who our God-joined spouse is.   Genesis 15:8-17 illustrates the true nature of this unconditional covenant of holy matrimony, because it shows that the inferior (human) party can only violate that covenant, but can never break or dissolve it by any act short of physical death.

Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life.

There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.

Until pastors realize that divorce causes people to die in legalized adultery and permanent irreconciliation with their God-joined spouse, and that dying this way always sends them to hell, churches will never be adequately onboard with the repeal of unilateral divorce laws sufficiently to prevail in repealing them in all 50 U.S. states.

I wish this pastor, who clearly means well, could meet Pastor Ray McMahon, or Pastor Stephen Wilcox, or Pastor Casey Whitaker, or Pastor Gino Jennings, or Pastor Phil Schlamp, or Dr. Joseph Webb.

Final thought: so long as pastors still continue to tickle ears by framing their messages humanistically, they are going to continue to miss the mark. Humanism has always been 100% incompatible with authentic discipleship — which is why we’re hearing about the evils of “divorce” far more than we’re hearing about the evils of “remarriage” and why dying in this sin is not being connected (unconscionably) with its eternal consequences the way Jesus connected them, and the way Paul connected them. Such things can only be preached theistically.

Some of the “truth engineering” going on with pastors who have run clean out of other arguments (directly due to increased awareness of lay disciples around sound principles of hermeneutics) for not urging people out of their covetous, legalized immoral relationships is the anti-Christ myth that once there’s paper around an immoral relationship, it is “sinful” to restore the covenant family. This saves a lot of embarrassment and public admission of wrongdoing when a hireling shepherd has defied Christ and performed an adulterous wedding. God still knows whom He has and HASN’T joined into the sarx mia entity, and with whom He is the superior party in an unconditional covenant (see Gen. 15:8-17). This popular heresy is the evangelical counterpart to the RCC’s God-mocking vehicle of “annulment”.

Further comments left on the YouTube videos (6/21/2019):

He’s on the right track (sort of) by appealing to the sermon on the mount… Piper is 98% truth, 2% heresy. This guy might be 99% truth, 1% heresy, but the standard in the kingdom of God is 0% heresy, because we’ve been given the indwelling Holy Spirit so that we would not mock God without internal misery from doing so.

The last several minutes are a sophisticated, full-throated abuse of Deut. 24:1-4 which has several issues hermeneutically: its conditionality (nested if’s), its murky scope, clearer NT scriptures from the mouth of Jesus that directly contradict, its gender application, the extrapolation of the “land” from Israel (for a specific, temporary OT purpose) to the U.S.A. — to name just a few of the hermeneutical issues.

If Jesus wanted Deut. 24 to be His standard for marriage “permanence” under the Messianic Covenant, He would never have bypassed that scripture and headed straight for Genesis 2:21 when He discussed it in Matt. 19.

 To this pastor’s credit, he alludes to the commandment nature @~2:30 when he says “…tariff engineering might allow you to escape the government’s ire, but truth engineering does not allow you to escape the Lord’s ‘intent’..”   He purports to tell us why, without ever getting to the true reason why: the consequences are eternal, Jesus tells us twice in no uncertain terms, not just temporal.   An “inescapable intent” is by its very nature a commandment , with an eternal consequence for disobeying and never truly repenting.

“The best way to interpret scripture is with scripture” is true enough, but this can and does still lead to error and humanistic bias, if all of the other hermeneutic principles (content, culture, context, and consultation) are ignored. Accuracy in this hermeneutical endeavor requires an accurate starting point to which all other scripture must be compared. Obviously this must begin with the words of Jesus, and it should provide the “why” not just a “what”. Then, after that, it must be 100% in line with everything else Jesus said (He was never schizophrenic – if He said something, there was a serious, eternal reason for it) not only on the topic, but on related heaven-or-hell topics like unforgiveness, irreconciliation, returning evil for evil, the externally-imposed requirement for a disciple to live as a eunuch, etc. In my opinion, the only thing Jesus said about the permanence of marriage that meets ALL of these conditions is… Matthew 19:6, 8

“So they are no longer [ never again , by the verb tense] two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no [hu]man separate [literally, put distance between]…Because of your hardness of heart MOSES permitted you to divorce [send away] your wives; but from the beginning it has not [ ever – by the verb tense] been this way.”

This is in the imperative voice and is therefore a commandment, not merely an “ideal” or “intention”.   It was on this basis that John the Baptizer told Herod “it is not lawful for your to have your brother’s wife.” Had he said, “God is really disappointed with you that you divorced your wife and married your brother’s ‘ex’, so try to stay faithful to her, OK?” he most likely would not have lost his head.

This, of course, is profoundly unpopular in Christendom because it significantly raises the moral standard from “permanence” (which makes all civilly-legal heterosexual marriages theoretically interchangeable morally – “love the one you’re with” ) …to absolute, no-excuses indissolubility . Further, it paints figures like Luther and Calvin as the moral heretics they actually were. It shines an intense light on the immoral living arrangements of many pastors, not to even mention the current POTUS and VPOTUS.

This pastor has said in a previous video that he officiates “weddings” over the legally-estranged-already-married.   He rationalizes (presumably based on gross eisegesis around Deuteronomy 24:1-4) that reconciliation is “impossible” in those cases.   Not only does this fallacy contradict Christ on several of those closely-related heaven-or-hell topics, empirical cases of believers putting their covenant families back together after a series of adulterous remarriages, even where the faux, paper “spouses” are still alive
( #somuch4irreconcilabledifferences on Facebook)… show that God engineers these reconciliations quite miraculously.   Why? Because He is not willing that any should perish, but everyone come to the knowledge of the truth!  Why?  Because He Himself is the superior party in the unconditional holy matrimony covenant — and out of 267 unconditional covenants mentioned in the bible from Genesis to Revelation, no theologian has ever been able to show a single instance where God failed to uphold the covenant or where He entered into a competing one.

That’s precisely what Malachi, chapter 2 is about. When that OT “pastor” divorced his wife and “married” another woman, it clearly broke fellowship with God until renouncement and repentance took place, but it did not break the original covenant itself:

“…I stand as a witness between you and the wife of your youth … she IS (not “was”) the companion of your marriage covenant…”

Make no mistake, pastors who defy God by performing weddings over the already-married-for-life, and who refuse to apologize for misusing the Lord’s name to perform a vain act , and who refuse to counsel these people to sever these papered-over immoral relationships so that they can recover their inheritance in the kingdom of God, will share in the coming judgment because they acted as a hireling (John 10:12-13; Ezekiel 34; Jeremiah 23: 11-14) instead of His faithful shepherd.

“Thou dost not take up the name of Jehovah thy God for a vain thing, for Jehovah acquitteth not him who taketh up His name for a vain thing.”    – Exodus 20:7, Young’s Literal Translation

99% truth, 1% heresy results in all heresy, in its eternal effect.

To close out the gender / unisex application issues with Deuteronomy 24, let’s go ahead and apply it to the immorally-abandoned activist who gave up on his own wife after a brief time, and “married” another man’s abandoned wife, justifying it by the same passage:

CONDITION 1:
“When a man hath taken a wife, and married her,

CONDITION 2:
and it come to pass that she find no favour in his eyes, because he hath found some uncleanness in her: then let him write her a bill of divorcement*, and give it in her hand, and send her out of his house.“

(* Houston pastor, Timothy Sparks has written a paper disputing the translation accuracy of the purported commandment, “let him write” in several translations, showing instead that the manuscript reflects more accurately as “and he writes” – a simple condition or observation by Moses only.)

Nevertheless, “standerinfamilycourt’s” understanding of the facts is that this gentleman did NONE of these things.  His one-flesh covenant wife, in fact, did all of them.  Hence, the next set of “ifs” in this narrow regulation does not apply.    He cannot, therefore, use Deuteronomy 24 to justify remaining in a “marriage” to another living man’s estranged wife which Jesus repeatedly called adulterous.     In fact, neither could he have used Deuteronomy 24 to justify entering the “remarriage” in the first place, because this conditional Mosaic regulation clearly does not discuss “remarriage” by the innocent male party.    What Jesus actually said in Matthew 19:6 and 12 is objectively more relevant to this man’s situation, where he was legally but immorally abandoned, than anything Moses said beyond Genesis 2:21-24.

So, under these circumstances, assuming a Mosaic regulation can be extrapolated to non-Hebrew disciples in 21st century U.S.A., is our activist prohibited from reconciling with his repenting, wayward covenant wife?    David didn’t think so when he recovered the wife of his youth,  Michal from Paltiel, to whom she was subsequently given, after David did not put her out of his house – no “defilement” there.   Hermes of Philopoulos , the 1st century author of the Shepherd of Hermas also didn’t think so (2nd book, Fourth Commandment on Putting One’s Wife Away For Adultery), even when the innocent husband “put away” the guilty wife.    The previous blog went into detail about how Christ’s delivery of the sermon on the mount abrogated and cancelled those various and sundry Mosaic regulations, to leave us with only the 10 Commandments, condensed down into just two.    But there’s a more obvious set of questions to ask when applying Deuteronomy 24 today:

“What ‘land’ was being defiled if a put-away wife was reconciled to her original husband after taking another husband?”

“What did the ‘defilement’ specifically consist of, and why was it considered ‘defilement’ in the first place?”

Scripture is quite specific about which land is within the scope of this narrow Mosaic regulation:   “thou shalt not cause the land to sin, which the Lord thy God giveth thee for an inheritance.”

Was the land of the United States of America, or the United Kingdom, or Canada, or Australia or Slovenia given to its citizens or their forebears by God, as an inheritance?     No!   There may have been God’s assistance in settling or conquering it,  and there may have further been an Israel-related purpose, in turn, for that, but nobody could argue that there was anything like the Abrahamic Covenant involved!     No, this instruction was specific to Israel!

So how about what the “defilement” was?    That actually circles back to why Deuteronomy 24 applied specifically to the genders as specified, and all of that points back to fulfillment of the prophecies and geneology around Jesus’ birth.     Of course, a man could not be involuntarily put out of his family or his house under the Hebrew legal system.    Women were routinely put out, though Jesus unequivocally declares that from the beginning this was never lawful in the kingdom of God.    Women only had two professions available for their survival, if they had no grown sons to support them:  wife or prostitute.    The law of stoning made the bill of divorcement a survival necessity, as evidence she wasn’t committing adultery in the legal sense, even if she was still committing adultery in both professions in the moral sense.    Her parents typically didn’t live that long, and even if they did, returning to their house would have involved return of the bride price that was paid.    If she became another man’s wife then returned to her original husband, there was potential for the tribal blood lines to get crossed as children were born.   None of this necessarily means that the one-flesh entity created at her first wedding was actually severed, nor does it mean that God created a new one-flesh entity with the second husband, who for that matter, could have been a concurrent polygamist under the culture of the times.

This would have impacted Christ’s blood lines, potentially.     There were longstanding prophecies about that, which further necessitated this Mosaic concession to the pre-Christ depravity of men that their rabbinic tradition wrongly allowed and facilitated (sounds familiar, doesn’t it?).     Christ then arrived on the scene incarnate,  the risk of “defilement” ended thereby, and the Mosaic Covenant was officially replaced with the Messianic Covenant (as also laid down in prophecy).    It was now okay for Him to abrogate this Mosaic regulation along with all of the others, to clear the way for the higher moral standards of the Messianic Covenant which would now apply to both Jews and Gentiles.    As He said in Matthew 5:17,  He was thereby fulfilling the law, not prematurely setting it aside, nor “overriding Moses”,  as many of the remarriage apologists love to incorrectly argue.

So, is this pastor’s practice of officiating the weddings of divorced people whose spouses are still living, just because they’ve “married” others already, ever defensible biblically?  Is it ever not misusing the Lord’s name to perform a vain act?   Again, the answer must be:   no!     The nested “if’s” cannot be applied to the benefit of our activist’s guilty covenant wife, nor can they be applied to his #2, the innocent wife who was involuntarily put away, to prevent her from reconciling with the repenting husband or her youth….

The claim that adulterous intervening “remarriage” precludes and overrides the commandment to forgive and reconcile fails on all counts.   

Pastors who sincerely want to bring about a church culture of reformation and repentance must unlearn their politically safe and “aesthetically-pleasing” concept of “permanence” (which they also seek to apply to legalized unions that Jesus clearly, repeatedly and consistently called ongoing adultery while making no exceptions)…and learn the morally-stricter concept of indissolubility which Christ actually taught in that sermon on the mount.   It will be exceedingly messy, and look horrible as the repentance process is taking place (so did the God-commanded sending away of almost 150 unlawful wives of priests with their children, in Ezra’s time), but it is only at this point that the Bridegroom will stop being openly mocked by His bride, the church.  It is only at this point that His bride will cease being deceived, and at the same time, persecuted for standing up (without personal moral authority to do so) for “biblical morals” in others outside the church.   It is only at this point that God’s protective hand will return, and the days of His escalating chastisement will be at an end.   Perhaps it will be at this point, if it comes soon enough, that God’s hand will suddenly peel back and overthrow the immoral civil laws that have heavily yoked us for 50 years in the United States.

I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot; I wish that you were cold or hot.   So because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of My mouth…..He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.    – Revelation 3:15, 22

www.standerinfamilycourt

7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal “No-Fault” Divorce!

Connection of Unilateral Divorce to SSM, Equal Protection, family law, Fundamental Rights, Lost culture, morality, Religious freedom, Spiritual Warfare, Substantive Due Process

The “Equality Act” Is Unconstitutional For All The Same Reasons “No-Fault” Divorce Is: So Why Is Nobody SHOUTING The “U”-Word?

2 Comments

by Standerinfamilycourt

Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me.  Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in heaven is great; for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
– Matthew 5:11-12

From the start of the first century church, intense persecution has always proven to be a powerful purifier of the true church, and an accelerator of the kingdom of God.     That’s the good news.    The rest of this post will be about the bad news that lies ahead as a direct consequence of those who should have, failing to stand up for the religious freedom of embattled innocent spouses when their 1st and 14th Amendment protections began to be trounced 50 years ago in the “family courts” across the land.

Since all persons in the jurisdiction of the United States of America are (theoretically) entitled to the God-given inalienable rights to free religious exercise and right-of-conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of association, the right to seek redress of grievances by the state, life, liberty and property, equal protection under the law, due process under the law, both procedural and substantive, there is no way of lawfully enacting a Federal statute that curtails these founding liberties but only if they interfere with the sexual autonomy of homosexuals, abortion-seekers and the like.    Doing so unavoidably creates a super-class of citizens with superior rights to everyone else.   Unless it’s done by the constitutional process for constitutional amendment, it is decidedly unconstitutional.   It is only being attempted because our national leadership is smugly satisfied that the rule of law derived from built-in separation-of-powers has been rendered sufficiently inoperable to overturning it.   Today, as a result, we have a great many enacted unconstitutional laws wreaking tyranny over the lives of the politically-disfavored, due to the decades-old disconnection of the separation-of-powers mechanism through collusion among power-holders, in favor of special interests.    In fact, the enactment in the 1970’s of unilateral divorce laws was probably the most impactful of these.

Moreover, “family court” provided the perfect incubator to prove that totalitarianism could go effectively unchallenged, regardless of the human rights violations regularly honed in “family courts” across the nation.    Who knew that despite even more strongly-worded protections in many state constitutions, the family law lobby and the feminist groups could cause both courts and legislatures in 49 of the 50 states to march in lockstep for five decades?     This also proved without any doubt that a state or Federal Constitution could contain all sorts of vestigial protective language that the judiciary could decide ideologically (and unilaterally) whether or not it would ever be enforced, depending on the clout of the political class involved and varying with the prevailing, changeable social morality.

Up to now, this erosion in constitutional protections in the name of the Sexual Revolution primarily impacted about a million or so “Respondents” to unilateral forced divorce petitions each year in the U.S.    Following enactment of the so-called “Equality Act”, all non-homosexual citizens, and especially practicing Christians, will join these divorce “Respondents” in being stripped of their fundamental rights if they in any way interfere with someone’s sexual autonomy.    Back when the sexual autonomy involved was primarily (but not exclusively) heterosexual, the majority didn’t mind this, and didn’t see it as the threat to our constitutional republic that it actually represents.    No Christian legal defense ministry would touch divorce challenges…by policy (and would routinely deny there was a religious free exercise threat involved in them).    Neither would most other types of large ministries or state family policy councils that purportedly stood against all challenges to religious freedom and the biblical family in their mission statements.   A small few FPC’s would occasionally undertake very quiet activities on this front, but not enough to be effective in the time frame before the present threat emerged, and certainly none that entailed significant resources or any publicity.

Just recently, Texas Values (an arm of the marriage-permanence-lukewarm Dobson political organization) plastered the blogosphere with “Save Chick-fil-A” (from franchise exclusion at Texas airports), but published not a word about HB922, a bill that would have repealed non-consensual “no-fault” grounds for divorce.  This FPC sent a very inexperienced and poorly-prepared junior analyst solo to the May 1 committee hearing for that important bill, while the family law lobby sent its most senior person.    In 2017,  Texas Values’ director testified very effectively, but committed no media support that year or 2019.     The semi-annual Texas legislative session has now adjourned.  Chick-fil-A was saved.  Texas families weren’t so fortunate this time.

Now that this is being done for the special benefit of transgender homosexuals, instead of just for the special benefit of heterosexual adulterers and abandoners, the majority of society still might not mind, so long as the only losers are Christ-followers.     But there’s strong evidence that this time, the tyrannical impact is going to be much, much broader, impacting female athletes, racial minorities, women in the workplace and more.    Arguably, it could lead to civil war, and probably should lead to civil war if enacted.   Otherwise, the 240-year American experiment has died an ugly death by sexual appetites and the emotional disorders they spin off.    It probably goes without saying that if the (In)Equality Act is enacted and signed into law, the unilateral divorce reform movement will face substantially longer odds of ever succeeding, before the nation folds into a grotesque version of Orwell’s  “Animal Farm”.

“…all animals are created equal, but some animals are more equal than others…”

Other than religious freedom complaints, why aren’t others declaring the “Equality Act”  unconstitutional before it passes?   Enacted legislation, despite its obvious unconstitutionality, is exceptionally hard to reverse, as the unilateral, forced divorce quagmire has unquestionably demonstrated.

If U.S. citizens ever started to demonstrate that they can and do read the Constitution for themselves when bills are in progress, perhaps fewer unconstitutional laws would be cynically passed by rogue legislatures.   Just maybe the oath of office mouthed by the people we’ve elected to various offices, to …“protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America (and the individual states) from all enemies domestic and foreign” might start to mean something again.   Sadly, however we are becoming a society virtually illiterate in such things, and one which is increasingly willing to elect representatives to high office who are equally illiterate in them.

Judicial Watch is a very effective organization that has also been all over exposure of this malicious legislation, with attorneys who argue before the Supreme Court.    “standerinfamilycourt” left this comment with regard to their May 24 post:

This proposed law is unconstitutional for all the same multiple reasons that the unilateral “no-fault” divorce laws of 49 out of the 50 states are unconstitutional, and that’s far from a coincidence! The Left has been methodically honing their skills removing the fundamental rights of parents and Christ-followers in the “family courts” of the land for 50 years, come September.

What they’ve learned over this long trial is that our own hypocrisy and fondness for sexual autonomy has shut everyone up who would otherwise defend embattled parents and innocent spouses. They’ve also learned that powerful special interest groups can make our appeals courts inaccessible to ordinary citizens who have no access to Christian legal defense ministries nor to so much as the media resources of state family policy councils for the purpose of sustaining a complaint of unconstitutionality, even if a law is blatantly so on numerous counts.

Knowing how hard it’s become to get even the most blatant unconstitutional law related to the Sexual Revolution overturned in court, can’t the constitutional attorneys in this battle (at the very least) start calling a spade a spade, and use the “U”-word instead of merely complaining about the law’s too-obvious intent? Couldn’t they encourage everyone else to? After all, every member of Congress casting a vote, as well as our POTUS have taken an oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution from all enemies, domestic and foreign. That means that nearly 200 Congressfolk (so far) have violated their oath of office – and that ought to be a BIG DEAL to all of us! Our POTUS recently stopped short of committing to veto the “Equality” Act. In other words, Trump’s still considering whether he must keep his oath of office.

Just some thoughts,

“standerinfamilycourt”

 

We can count on President Trump never to sign such a bill, right?   We all better hope so!   “standerinfamilycourt” would like to suggest, however, that we not take such an assumption for granted.    Nor should we take for granted that any reprieve afforded in 2019 by a presidential veto will necessarily be permanent, even if Trump is re-elected.  Trump did take a positive step last week to curb the religious freedom fangs of homosexualism, just as the “Equality Act” was sailing through the House of Representatives on its way to the Senate.    Yet, reprieve-wise, we remain an unrepentant nation under God’s advanced judgment, where church leadership has not moved an inch on reversing the desecration of His full definition of holy matrimony, and where escalating chastisement appears to still be necessary from His hand if there is to be any national repentance that will redeem our constitutional republic.

Two unrepentant years have elapsed since the election of Donald Trump, while the disappointments described above have continued in the Christian community throughout that particular reprieve.    
Not one single pastor with a congregation in all of Texas was among the witnesses May 1 in Austin supporting HB922 (or its companion HB926 which would have extended the waiting period for “no-fault” divorce to six months).     Yet, the next week, a Dallas pastor performed a mass wedding for cohabiting couples in his church willing to go through 90 days of premarital counseling, many of whom likely were already married in God’s eyes to someone else.

At the end of May, Trump came out with a tweet pledging to use foreign policy to pressure other countries to “decriminalize” homosexuality.   Fine, if that means refraining from executing people for their same-sex attraction.    But the reality is that both sodomy and adultery ought to be restored to their well-founded illegality in this country, based on the fraudulent judicial manufacture of the so-called “right to privacy” for which the Constitution has not been duly-amended by its citizens to ratify this piece of 1970’s legislation-from-the-bench.  Same-sex attraction, for that matter, needs to be reclassified as an emotional disorder, reversing the heinous political action that occurred in 1973 to remove it from the diagnostic manuals of mental health professionals.

Why should we be shouting the “U-word” preemptively here, and holding our elected representatives responsible for doing so as well?  Because every elected Federal official in the process has sworn an oath of office to “defend and protect the Constitution of the United States of America.”    If we defer to the ideological black-robes, as if they were the only ones qualified to detect violations of fundamental rights such as these being enshrined in the Federal statute, we lose the opportunity to hold our elected policymakers responsible for carrying out their oath of office to defend our Constitution from its domestic enemies.    Enactment will prove way too late to do that!   Go tell your Senator and this POTUS that you expect them to honor their sacred oath to uphold the Constitution and vote against / veto the so-called “Equality Act”!

When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn.  – Proverbs 29:2

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

7  Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal “No-Fault” Divorce!

Discipleship, Divorce, Lost culture, marriage, Marriage Restoration, morality, Prayer, Spiritual Warfare

Remain Chaste or Be Reconciled: Two Co-Equal “Options” Per The Apostle?

2 Comments

by Standerinfamilycourt

“And I will put enmity
Between you and the woman,
And between your seed and her seed;
He shall bruise you on the head,
And you shall bruise him on the heel.”

To the woman He said,
“I will greatly multiply
Your pain in childbirth,
In pain you will bring forth children;
Yet your desire will be for your husband,
And he will rule over you.”
– Genesis 3:15-16

But to the married I give instructions, not I, but the Lord, that the wife should not leave her husband (but if she does leave, she must remain unmarried, or else be reconciled to her husband), and that the husband should not divorce his wife.
– 1 Corinthians 7:10-11

Jack and Jill were joined in inseverable holy matrimony many years ago.   Upon valid, witnessed vows, God’s hand created a one-flesh new entity, with which He then unconditionally covenanted as the superior party.   Jack and Jill had no children in the brief time before their estrangement, and after a time, Jill began to feel emotionally-abused by Jack.    Jill reasoned that this was because she must have married Jack “outside God’s will” and satan, more than happy to oblige, whispered to her: “if you stay, this is going to turn physical”.
(The Evil One’s very name, it should be noted, literally means “accuser of men”.)    She availed herself of man’s unilateral no-fault divorce laws, after the fashion of the majority of women in our culture.    Not long thereafter, she “married” Jim, thinking she could now have a Christ-centered marriage.    The hireling pastor involved was no obstacle to the second wedding.   Domestically, Jim was better able to manage Jill’s emotions than Jack, and children were born into this adulterous union.   Several more years passed.

One day Jill encountered serious covenant marriage standers online who pointed out the mountain of truth in God’s word that “remarriage” to another while her original husband lives is adultery, not just on the wedding night, but every night thereafter.   At first, Jill quite naturally resisted, but nevertheless she took some time to study the word of God for herself with an open heart to obey, to do whatever was necessary to follow Christ completely, and eventually the Holy Spirit persuades her to get out of this adulterous-but-happy second marriage.  She was able to eventually persuade Jim, which enabled a mutual consent petition and voluntary shared parenting arrangements.

Meanwhile, Jack has come to a very different place spiritually than when his bride was last willing to live with him.    He, too, has been absorbing God’s word, is relieved that Jill is no longer living in papered-over adultery, and it appears he hopes for reconciliation.      He is gentle in his efforts to woo Jill back, and hopefully, much is happening in prayer that the rest of us don’t see except in his manner.     If Jack became entangled during the years of estrangement, he too has become disentangled.  We don’t really know yet, and only God knows, whether Jack is ready spiritually to resume and sustain their union, non-covenant children in tow, under the same roof, but his heart appears open to growing his own discipleship.   He has publicly apologized to Jill and expressed regret for the emotional pain he caused her in their marriage.    All of this puts Jack and Jill light years ahead of most estranged Christian couples on the path to the kingdom of God, and is truly a cause for rejoicing even though reconciliation doesn’t appear to be on the horizon.

Enter the blind guide:  Joe means well, but like all of us shepherdless sheep, is no less vulnerable to being controlled by emotions and scars.   Joe runs a local “house church” and a very large standers’ ministry.   Joe has been legally estranged from his covenant wife for a couple of decades, and would probably prefer not to be reconciled, for a variety of reasons.    He frankly wouldn’t have time for her if she did get out of her adulterous “remarriage”, and he routinely refers to her as his “ex”, neither cringing  nor voicing objections when countless other professing “Christians” do the same.   Brother Joe has undergone the further pain of being emotionally alienated by the actions of his wayward wife from his (now-grown) children and sadly hasn’t seen any of them, much less his grandchildren, in many years.    Joe now leads a vibrant “single” life which includes freedom, travel, financial autonomy, mission trips and several ministries.   He reasons that this is in keeping with much of the rest of what the Apostle Paul advocated in the 7th chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians about kingdom of God fruitfulness from forsaking marriage altogether, if one is “not bound” to a wife.     He considers himself “single” rather than part of an unsevered one-flesh entity.    Joe devoted a recorded group teaching delivered to the rest of the large stander community about this issue, saying that verse 11,  gives estranged covenant spouses two “options”.   Says Joe, they are not required by scripture to reconcile.    It says right there in that verse, they can “remain unmarried”  – or -they can reconcile.

Is Joe right?   Or is he really just a Christ-robed “MGTOW*” ?
(*rightly-disgruntled “men going their own way”)

We’ll get the technical part of this discussion over with early, so that we can return to a robust discussion of submitted discipleship as a true follower of Christ.   One more thing needs to be said first:  every disciple needs a certain amount of judgment-free space to “work out their own salvation with fear and trembling” once they do have the accurate scriptural facts–and unless there’s some strong indication that the brother or sister is acting in willful hypocrisy while knowing and rejecting the truth, they are entitled to the presumption of good faith in pursuit of God’s will and His truth.    Jill and Joe have much in common in many ways, and one of those ways is they are both in this particular good-faith “boat”.     Satan’s “no-fault” attack on marriage, and its horrible consequences in the church  has been a “doozie” from which it’s not been easy to recover, most of us would agree.

It should by now be no surprise to regular followers of “7 Times Around the Jericho Wall” blog to hear “standerinfamilycourt” remind that the answer to rightly dividing scriptures like 1 Corinthians 7:11 boils down to not taking any shortcuts in applying the 5 basic principles of sound hermeneutics:  Content, Context, Culture, Comparison, and Consultation.    We have gone into great depth in previous blogs about applying the study technique, so this post will be a “cliff notes” revisit.   Despite anyone’s praying, fasting and seeking the Lord for their personal answer, after which they will “feel lead to…”,  SIFC is going to posit that someone who takes 1 Corinthians 7:11 as “two co-equal options” (remain chaste, be reconciled) has stopped superficially at Content, and didn’t really dig very deeply into that one.


(scripture4all.org  Greek Interlinear Text Tool.  Please click to enlarge.)

A couple of quick point-outs about the content of this scripture:

(1) it speaks of involuntary estrangement (choresthetai – literally, to “put distance between”, as the literal furrows in a plowed field), and is not a recognition of any validity for legal “dissolution” of the marriage.   Neither does it validate the reciprocation of that estrangement, which would be incompatible with Christ’s concept of one-flesh (sarx mia), and would excuse both spouses from their 1 Cor. 11:3 roles in the kingdom of God, with which the involuntary estrangement is interfering.    Most importantly, it prescribes a disciple’s gracious response to a circumstance that remains beyond their control.

(2) we must not overlook the importance of Paul beginning this instruction with utter clarity about Whose instruction (commandment) this is: “But to the married I give instructions, not I, but the Lord, that the wife not leave her husband“.   (Some translations insert “should” here, but neither the text nor the parsing gives them any support for implying such permissiveness.)

(3) Nowhere in all of 1 Corinthians 7 does Paul ever address “divorced” people, or ever recognize man’s divorce as having any validity whatsoever.   He speaks of illicit legal proceedings in 1 Corinthian 6, but ceases to speak of it there.    Elsewhere, Paul tells us in no uncertain terms that God’s “divorce” is always spelled “D-E-A-T-H”.    If that were not so, Paul would be speaking out of both sides of his mouth.

(With points 2 and 3 above, we have segued into the Context principle, which SIFC could take much further, but instead refers our readers to prior blogs.)   We simply say that the advocates of co-equal “options” in 1 Corinthians 7 really can’t go here, and don’t dare go here without corrupting or conflating who Paul was addressing in each section of this epistle.    When he speaks of the “unmarried” “being free of concern for a spouse” hindering them from the kingdom of God, he is not speaking of “dedetai”  but of “dedoulotai”.
Scripture consistency demands the understanding that the estranged covenant spouse is nevertheless “married”, in Paul’s parlance (and Christ’s).

We must remember that Paul got his instructions for marriage from spending three years of direct time with the resurrected Jesus, as he tell us in Galatians 1:

“But when God, who had set me apart even from my mother’s womb and called me through His grace, was pleased to reveal His Son in me so that I might preach Him among the Gentiles, I did not immediately consult with flesh and blood, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me; but I went away to Arabia, and returned once more to Damascus.  Then three years later I went up to Jerusalem to become acquainted with Cephas (Peter)…”

When Paul says, “not I but the Lord”, this is a much stronger statement than if he’d merely been taught by the rest of the Apostles after his conversion, both by the amount of instruction time involved (equal to time spent by Christ with His disciples) and by the force with which he says it.    Any woman who leaves her husband permanently is in sin.   If she leaves him even temporarily for any reason short of physical safety, she is in sin.  She is actually rebelling against God’s sentence in Genesis 3:16, and its NT echo in 1 Corinthians 11:3.   This is as true of Jill as it is of Joe’s wife.    It is true even after she gets out of a faux “marriage” that, for however many years, has been masquerading as her true marriage.   Will this particular state of sin keep her out of heaven, or just reduce her rewards?  SIFC humbly submits that this depends on her heart being of the same hardness as the “unmerciful servant” of Matthew 18:23-35, and would strongly recommend gambling on the eternally safe side of that gamble (more about that below).

But who else is in sin?   Early church father Hermes tells us in a writing called “The Shepherd of Hermas”, of which there is documentary evidence that the Apostle’s disciples attributed the weight of scripture (in other words, conviction of Holy Spirit inspiration):

Mandate 4
1[29]:1 “I charge thee, “saith he, “to keep purity, and let not a thought enter into thy heart concerning another’s wife, or concerning fornication, or concerning any such like evil deeds; for in so doing thou commitest a great sin. But remember thine own wife always, and thou shalt never go wrong.
1[29]:2 For should this desire enter into thine heart, thou wilt go wrong, and should any other as evil as this, thou commitest sin. For this desire in a servant of God is a great sin; and if any man doeth this evil deed, he worketh out death for himself.
1[29]:3 Look to it therefore. Abstain from this desire; for, where holiness dwelleth, there lawlessness ought not to enter into the heart of a righteous man.”
1[29]:4 I say to him, “Sir, permit me to ask thee a few more questions” “Say on,” saith he. “Sir,” say I, “if a man who has a wife that is faithful in the Lord detect her in adultery, doth the husband sin in living with her?”
1[29]:5 “So long as he is ignorant,” saith he, “he sinneth not; but if the husband know of her sin, and the wife repent not, but continue in her fornication, and her husband live with her, he makes himself responsible for her sin and an accomplice in her adultery.”
1[29]:6 “What then, Sir,” say I, “shall the husband do, if the wife continue in this case?” “Let him divorce(*) her,” saith he, “and let the husband abide alone: but if after divorcing (*) his wife he shall marry another, he likewise committeth adultery.”
1[29]:7 “If then, Sir,” say I, “after the wife is divorced (*), she repent and desire to return to her own husband, shall she not be received?”
1[29]:8 “Certainly,” saith he, “if the husband receiveth her not, he sinneth and bringeth great sin upon himself; nay, one who hath sinned and repented must be received, yet not often; for there is but one repentance for the servants of God. For the sake of her repentance therefore the husband ought not to marry. This is the manner of acting enjoined on husband and wife.
1[29]:9 Not only,” saith he, “is it adultery, if a man pollute his flesh, but whosoever doeth things like unto the heathen committeth adultery. If therefore in such deeds as these likewise a man continue and repent not, keep away from him, and live not with him. Otherwise, thou also art a partaker of his sin.
1[29]:10 For this cause ye were enjoined to remain single, whether husband or wife; for in such cases repentance is possible.

[   SIFC:  (*) This translation of The Shepherd uses the words “put away” (or, send away) instead of “divorce”, and here is the original Greek text –

where the word “apoluo” was used (literally meaning: “from-loose”) which most of the early church fathers considered a separation only from “bed and board”- not necessarily a legal dissolution, though Hermes’ writing indeed indicates that Roman law, similar to today’s “condonation” provisions in some U.S. states, may have immorally required this in order to legally exonerate the husband from presumptions of “complicity”.]    This distinction is important because it helps establish that the disciples’ disciples such as Hermes only recognized legal divorce as a man-made contrivance, and (like Jesus) didn’t really hold that it dissolved the actual union.   

 Note, however, that Hermes specifically charged one-flesh spouses with the duty of care over each other’s souls, and so portrays the Holy Spirit as commanding reconciliation consistent with no-excuses indissolubility, so far as it depends upon us.      This would be consistent with the sharp warning Jesus gave in Matthew 18:23-35, also with 2 Corinthians 5:18 and Romans 12:17-19, as well as with 1 Corinthians 7:2-3.    Some who can’t presently bring themselves to obey in this area will try to call this idea that reconciliation is mandatory, “legalism”.   “standerinfamilycourt” appreciates Leonard Ravenhill’s take on legalism, and would suggest taking great care before obedience to an apparent heaven-or-hell commandment is dismissed by a Christ-follower as “legalism”, even though many contemporary “Christians” do so almost reflexively.

“standerinfamilycourt”  personally admits accepting this commandment reluctantly, since a returned spouse in this instance means one who is likely to come back to a financially and emotionally stable household with shattered health and finances, not to even mention a mountain of debt trailing behind as one more evidence of God’s merciful attempt to change their “free will”.    (The Prodigal Son came back home with the stench of hog manure on him and still was draped with his father’s best robe before finding a bathtub.)  Cherished activities and ministries may have to be given up with little or no notice to others.   Oh that Paul had left us with two equally moral options, of which we could “opt” to fulfill the easier of the two!  But a repenting spouse who dies in his or her sins because we refused to lay down our lives the way Jesus did, is infinitely and eternally worse for us, as the prodigal’s “other half”.    Let such a thing as allowing a prodigal to die in their sin be God’s decision, never SIFC’s!

With this last bit of discussion, we’ve just applied three more principles of sound hermeneutics to 1 Corinthians 7:11 – remain chaste or be reconciled:  Culture, Comparison and Consultation.

As readers might imagine, there is a real Jill and a real Jack in the online marriage permanence community.   One of them appears to be earnestly seeking to reconcile and the other has been making some powerful YouTube videos that have raised some of these questions about reconciliation.    The reconciliation-seeker goes so far as to comment about their intentions on their one-flesh’s YouTube posts, apologizing for what happened.   May God protect this pair from satan’s interference until His full will is done.    Both spouses may be “newbies” when it comes to all the implications of the indissolubility of holy matrimony.   At least one of the spouses makes clear that they need additional time and space to process all that repentance entails, and SIFC would agree they deserve it, so long as their true heart is to obey.    The reluctant spouse is also considering the feelings of the children born into the noncovenant “marriage”, perhaps very wisely, though obedience to Christ usually resolves such matters in due time.   Certainly it is prudent for the reluctant spouse to not act in a way that would mislead the children to believe that getting out of the noncovenant union with their other parent was being done for reasons the world (and worldly church) would regard as “adulterous”.      That spouse has asserted the voice of the Holy Spirit in “not being told to reconcile”.    It is not wrong to aspire to be Spirit-led, but we should remember that the person of the Holy Spirit never leads in contradiction to scripture, even where scripture’s application has been obscured by contemporary culture.    (To round out the discussion, SIFC also notes the previous posts addressing some Anabaptist sects who (for other reasons) falsely teach that reconciliation with the spouse of our youth after repenting of an adulterous noncovenant “marriage” is actually “sinful”.)

In Dr. Eggerson’s classic Christian book,  “Love and Respect”, he echoes the marriage instructions of Peter and Paul  in commanding the husband to love his wife, but commanding the wife to respect her husband.    A husband who effectively “writes off” the soul of his prodigal wife (and sometimes their children) after “remarriage”, by treating the instructions to remain chaste or be reconciled as “either / or” options at his own choosing,  does not love her the way Hosea loved Gomer, nor the way Paul describes in Ephesians 5.     As a result, he is directly contributing to her disrespect and continued prodigal state, and probably her perception of him as a “hypocrite”, since he’s wearing Christ as a large badge, but not modeling Christ toward her very well.    The wife who refuses a repenting husband his God-assigned role of her “head”, does not respect him, and by extension, does not respect Christ in him or over him.   In time, her one-flesh husband will revert to a lack of sacrificial love.

About the gamble, mentioned above, between “loss of rewards” and loss of eternal soul.    Will street ministry, group teaching calls, YouTube videos on marriage permanence make up for letting our one-flesh spouse’s soul go uncared for as a result of exercising this “option”?

 According to the grace of God which was given to me, like a wise master builder I laid a foundation, and another is building on it. But each man must be careful how he builds on it.For no man can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if any man builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, each man’s work will become evident; for the day will show it because it is to be revealed with fire, and the fire itself will test the quality of each man’s work. If any man’s work which he has built on it remains, he will receive a reward. If any man’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss; but he himself will be saved, yet so as through fire.
– 1 Corinthians 3:10-16

We can’t take our ministry materials through this fire and expect them to survive, obviously.    We can only take the souls we influenced correctly by those materials through the fire.    SIFC would suggest that if we guess wrong here, by virtue of having produced those materials, there won’t be any souls to present.   If Christ’s warnings elsewhere concerning heaven-or-hell issues, like authentic forgiveness, and discipleship through imitating Him by laying down our lives are true without exceptions, there won’t even be a pass at that fire that tests our works.

Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter.  Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’  And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness.’

For these strong reasons, it is wrong, selfish and rebellious against the kingdom of God to treat 1 Corinthians 7:11 as presenting two equally-acceptable “stand-alone” options, rather than as dependent commandments (“A”, if not “B”).   It should be clear from all of Paul’s other instructions that he wrote this instruction with a preference for “both / and” (not “either / or”).    After all, reversing the logic and supposing that Jill had left Jack for the “abuse” of having come to Christ, and Jack had remarried, would simply reconciling with Jill absolve Jack from the need to confess his adulterous, noncovenant union as sin and forsake it forever?    Of course not!

Wherefore I urge you to reaffirm your love for him. For to this end also I wrote, so that I might put you to the test, whether you are obedient in all things. But one whom you forgive anything, I forgive also; for indeed what I have forgiven, if I have forgiven anything, I did it for your sakes in the presence of Christ, so that no advantage would be taken of us by Satan, for we are not ignorant of his schemes.
– 2 Corinthians 2:8-11

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

7 Times Around the Jericho Wall | Let’s Repeal “No-Fault” Divorce!

 

Divorce, Equal Protection, family law, Fundamental Rights, Lost culture, morality, Religious freedom, Spiritual Warfare

The Other Side of the “No-Fault” Appeals Coin: Activist Family Court Judge in Mississippi (2017) Shot Down

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by Standerinfamilycourt

You shall do no injustice in judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor nor defer to the great, but you are to judge your neighbor fairly.
– Leviticus 19:15

Earlier this year,  “standerinfamilycourt” shared a detailed analysis which showed that the State of Mississippi was the only state in the nation that substantially respected the 1st and14th Amendment fundamental rights of Respondents ( religious free exercise and conscience, parental and property rights, equal protection and substantive due process rights )  as well as the separation of powers between the legislative and judicial branches of state government.

Little did we know at that time that a case had been filed in 2017 with amici by domestic violence activists asking the state Supreme Court to affirm a family court ruling that Mississippi’s mutual consent-restricted statutory “no-fault” grounds for divorce (Code Section 93-5-1) was “unconstitutional”.      Though the outcome of this case (which, according to news reports, and the resulting opinion, was not a case alleging any sort of abuse).    The record shows that the wife who backed out of a mutual consent petition before it was finalized was serially adulterous, including in prior marriages.   This case, triggered by, Judge Jennifer Schloegel, an activist “family court” judge from Harrison County, and appealed by the innocent, rejected husband,  was ultimately unsuccessful in its claim of “unconstitutionality”.

Per the Clarion (October, 2017):

“The Harrison County case does not include allegations of domestic violence, but anti-domestic violence advocates and others have said Mississippi’s antiquated divorce laws make it difficult for an abused spouse to escape a marriage and help prolong dangerous family situations.”  (Translation:  this is as good a vehicle as we’re going to get for our ideological straw-man, so we’d better run with it.)

Under the Mississippi court system, such appeals go directly to the state Supreme Court.

Little did we know as well, that by the time our February, 2019 piece was posted, the Mississippi state legislature was heading for adjournment in March of their annual legislative session, while the only divorce “reform” bill that had been on the agenda was defeated in committee in early February.   Rather than seek repeal of the mutual consent provision of the statutory “no-fault” grounds, SB 2529 sought to add non-cohabitation grounds that even the abandoner could trigger after a period of time.    This Senate defeat constitutes two pieces of good news in one development.      The legislative measure would hardly have been a “reform”, and would have added a decidedly unconstitutional provision to the statute, one that had no available due process defense, beyond perhaps a token right to produce evidence that the charge of non-cohabitation was false in some regard.

Certainly, as borne out in this very case, there would be many more innocent Respondents upon whom this non-cohabitation was imposed against their will than abusive Respondents from whom a battered spouse was fleeing.    It would have been a decidedly anti-family measure, and redundant of the existing provisions for a battered spouse to bring objective evidence of abuse under fault-based grounds, or pursue a criminal remedy that didn’t seek to “dissolve” the marriage.  No abandoner of a marriage should ever be preemptively and automatically rewarded for the abandoning act.   Fault-based abandonment remedies, where they exist, should be exclusively available to the abandoned party.   We are grateful that the 2019 legislature did the right thing by the state’s families, after the high court also did.

Several studies of the causes of divorce have discredited the “abuse” and domestic violence lore, consistently showing that adultery or the desire to adulterously remarry is by far the most common driver, and placing abusive marriages far down the list.    Yet the unjust expectation of the media and Leftist activists is that this one assumed cause should control family law policy as if it were dominant.  Some ascribe “emotional abuse” to all the other traditional “legitimate” grounds, in order to justify this.


(Please click to enlarge)

This case also showcases the biased obnoxiousness of the liberal press around this “issue”, as media outlets from Thailand to Seattle, Detroit, Memphis (and back), including the Associated Press,  all parroted verbatim the original  Clarion article, which crowed its approval of the rogue, overreaching family court ruling , but went dead silent about both the Supreme Court outcome and abortive result of the ensuing legislative effort they had so confidently hyped.  Why?   It doesn’t exactly fit the “abuse” narrative when it turns out the truly “abused” person is actually the cuckolded Respondent, does it?

But just how obnoxious was the media over this case when it broke?  Here’s a 2017 sample:

“Lawmakers are expected again to debate divorce law reform and other measures to reduce domestic violence and related issues.

“Last year after much debate, lawmakers passed a measure that allows judges to grant a divorce for “spousal domestic abuse” based on testimony of the victim spouse.

“But Mississippi and South Dakota remain the only two states without a unilateral no-fault divorce ground. An investigative report by The Clarion-Ledger last year showed how Mississippi divorce laws, little changed over 100 years, trap spouses and children in abusive situations and financial limbo. One spouse who does not want a divorce or wants it only on his or her terms can hold up finalizing one for years — in some cases a decade or more.

“State Sen. Sally Doty, R-Brookhaven, the Mississippi Coalition Against Domestic Violence and others are vowing to continue to push this year for divorce law and other reforms to combat domestic violence.”

(  SIFC:  Anybody care to hazard a guess who the unnamed “others” are who vowed to fight on for divorce law “reform” in this news story?)

This case would have been even more satisfying to read if it had been the case of a God-fearing husband and father forgiving his “wife” (she had been previously divorced and this was an adulterous remarriage in itself, by biblical standards).    But true to the way of the culture, it was a case of retaliatory adultery also within the marriage, with no clear evidence of who started it or who retaliated. The Gertzes were in the process of finalizing a mutual petition under the existing (supposedly “unconstitutional”) law when she decided to withdraw her consent to the terms of the previously-agreed property settlement and child custody arrangements, leading both to charge each other with adultery.   The media clucked about how the case had “unconscionably dragged on” as if the husband had been responsible for that.

The actual facts per the high court:

“In January of 2015, Michael informed Joesie that reconciliation was impossible and that he wanted her to sign and finalize the divorce papers.  Joesie, upon the advice of her attorney, surreptitiousy told Michael that she also was ready to complete the irreconcilable differences divorce.  Based on the advice of her counsel, Joesie waited until her summer [2015] visitation had begun pursuant to the [2013 property settlement agreement] until her son was physically in Mississippi before withdrawing her consent to an irreconcilable differences divorce…”

It gets crazier from there, with the account of Judge Schloegel’s arbitrary actions, with which neither the husband nor the wife agreed:

“After a temporary hearing on July 13, 2015, the chancellor granted physical custody to Joesie. The trial began in December 2015 and concluded May 2016. Six months later, in November 2016, the chancellor entered a final judgment and decreed that a divorce should be granted, but that neither party was entitled to a fault-based divorce. She found that Joesie had failed to establish adultery. She found that Michael had proved adultery because Joesie had admitted it, but that Michael had condoned Joesie’s adulterous conduct. Then the chancellor sua sponte declared the statutory scheme under Mississippi Code Section 93-5-2 (Rev. 2013) unconstitutional and granted an irreconcilable-differences divorce. Joesie was granted custody of their child…. After the chancellor’s November 15, 2016, final judgment was entered,
Michael and Joesie, along with the State of Mississippi,

(  SIFC:  Well, yeah, the state AG is supposed to be given advance notice – 30 days in most states – when a constitutional challenge is being brought against an enacted statute – why would a family court judge not also be held to this same standard which common citizens and their attorneys are required to observe?)

…asked the chancellor to reconsider her judgment, because no party had asked for, pleaded, argued, or offered proof on the unconstitutionality of the statute….The State appealed the chancellor’s sua sponte adjudication of Section 93-5-2 as unconstitutional. Michael also appealed, arguing that the trial court erred by (1) declaring Section 93-5-2 unconstitutional, (2) failing to award Michael a divorce on the ground of
adultery, (3) reducing Michael’s summer visitation, (4) awarding Joesie a portion of Michael’s retirement benefits, and (5) awarding custody to Joesie. We affirm the chancellor’s finding regarding custody and child support, but we reverse the remaining judgment and remand the case for proceedings consistent with this opinion.”

It would have been nice to wave this ruling under the nose of the Texas Family Law Foundation’s chief lobbying Stephen Bresnan when he got away with making the opportunistic claim before the Texas Juvenile Justice and Family Issues Committee last week, that “no court in any U.S. state had ever declared [unilateral] ‘no-fault’ divorce unconstitutional” (even though most honest constitutional attorneys say that it certainly is on numerous counts – the real issue is fair access to the appeals courts and applying the correct standard of review due to political fallout for elected judges.)   It would have been nice to follow up with a witness who said, “maybe not, in 2018, the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled that state’s mutual consent-only ‘no-fault’ grounds, which has stood since 1972, to be constitutional.   They can’t both be constitutional.”

But, alas, this was only a technical ruling, and can’t really be considered a ruling on merits due to the lack of substantive arguments or evidence either way.    The ruling was only that the Mississippi statute was not proven to be unconstitutional, by the trial judge or anyone else who was party to the case.

So what was the Judge Schloegel’s basis for determining on her own that mutual consent-restricted “no-fault” grounds was unconstitutional?    Only her own subjective opinion, apparently:
“the chancellor sua sponte declared that “the present Mississippi statutory fault-based divorce scheme . . . unconstitutionally restricts and, in some cases, denies [a host of] fundamental rights and freedoms. . . . although “the parties did not execute a formal consent for the
Court to adjudicate contested matters on this basis . . . , [t]he parties are constitutionally entitled to a divorce without the mutual consent of the other.”    

Au contraire, said the Mississippi Supreme Court.

This appeal was also important due to the high court remanding the case back and requiring the trial judge to consider marital fault (attributed by the high court to the wife who failed to prove her husband committed either adultery or cruelty and inhuman treatment), also failed to prove–in light of her repeated lying and deception about her own adultery, that  her husband had condoned her illicit relationship while he attempted reconciliation, and had admitted her own adultery, she was not entitled to all of the alimony the trial judge attempted to award her.   The high court also determined that Judge Schloegel could not arbitrarily set aside the couple’s previous mutual custody agreement in order to reduce the husband’s time with their son for no just cause.

Perhaps it’s not so much that the mutual consent statute is actually “unconstitutional” but more accurately, the feminist judge (chancellor) had a problem ideologically with assigning legal fault to an adulteress, somebody merely exercising their sexual autonomy when she would have been perfectly free to do so with minimal legal and financial consequences in several other surrounding states.   If a surrounding state legalized (or, in fact, incentivized) murder or infanticide, does it really follow that this would automatically make Mississippi’s law penalizing those acts “unconstitutional” because its law…”restricts and, in some cases, denies [a host of] fundamental rights and freedoms” ?   That’s not really too far-fetched a question these days, given recent successful infanticide legislation.

As for the bid by the domestic violence activists to hitch their opportunistic wagon to this case, the high court tossed their amicus brief to the side, saying:  “The amicus called for affirming the chancellor, because the statute deprived domestic-abuse victims of constitutional rights. However, no domestic violence was pleaded or proved in this matter.”     Given the ideological outrageousness of Schloegel’s ruling, who knows but that connections might run a bit deeper with this MCADV organization than meets the eye?   SIFC struggles a bit with the feminist fantasy of a “constitutional right” not to have to prove allegations with evidence just because one is an alleged domestic violence victim, but after both the Brett Kavanaugh and Roy Moore episodes (“believe the woman”) this virulent, unconstitutional ideology had obviously taken hold in a lot of places.

Lastly, it’s not hard to see this case as the flip-side of the debate that has been going on in Texas about emulating Mississippi’s law, which appears to have operated fairly well in this particular case in levelling the playing field between an offending wife and a her offended husband.    It’s refreshing to see a veteran get fair treatment for once, and for the militant feminists to lose for change.

Because the sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil. Though a sinner does evil a hundred times, and his days are prolonged, yet I surely know that it will be well with those who fear God, who fear before Him. But it will not be well with the wicked; nor will he prolong his days, which are as a shadow, because he does not fear before God.
– Ecclesiastes 8:11-13

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

7 Times Around the Jericho Wall |  Let’s Repeal No-Fault Divorce!

 

 

 

Divorce, Equal Protection, Equal Protection, family law, Fundamental Rights, Lost culture, Substantive Due Process

What Happened When a Covenant Marriage Stander Wrote His State Legislators About Forced Divorce

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by  Guest Blogger, Billy Miller of Louisiana

In 2013 I sent the following email to every Louisiana legislator, and some statewide leaders. I did not get one reply.

Ladies and Gentlemen:

While you are at work your wife could file for divorce, get a Protective Order based on her word that she is afraid of you, and you couldn’t get into your own house…not even get some clothes, shave kit, etc., and you would have to sleep somewhere else tonight.

That is divorce according to current law. Staying apart for just 6 months would guarantee her a divorce, and that is when you would start paying for something you didn’t even want…the divorce.

You wouldn’t hear any charges against you and proof of guilt, no defense because there aren’t any charges, and no way to appeal the judge saying “Divorce granted”…because there is no Case to appeal.

Now you see why I am an Advocate for Divorce Reform…fighting our ILLEGAL laws…that make you “like it or lump it” in divorce.

The lawyers in 1969 in California who came up with the current No-Fault divorce laws were told by an Associate Justice of the California Supreme Court was present and told them that what they were doing was illegal, and they did it anyway.

Louisiana has had these illegal laws on the books for 40 years, destroying marriages and families…ILLEGALLY. These same laws are in effect in all 50 states.

I hope that concerns you IMMENSELY, and that you will initiate actions to put a stop to these ILLEGAL laws.

(  SIFC:   Billy Miller is a Baptist pastor, family patriarch, covenant marriage stander and family law reform activist who lives in Louisiana.)

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

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citizenship, Connection of Unilateral Divorce to SSM, Divorce, Equal Protection, Equal Protection, family law, Fundamental Rights, Lost culture, Religious freedom, Spiritual Warfare, Substantive Due Process

Legislative Learning Curve: The Fate of Texas HB 922 To Scrap “Insupportability” Grounds

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by Standerinfamilycourt

This will be a good news / bad news account of the third consecutive unsuccessful try in Texas to restore fundamental constitutional protections to “Respondents” sued by their own spouses in “family court”.     Re-introduced into the 86th Legislative Session by Rep. Matt Krause, HB 922 would have limited the “no-fault” grounds for divorce to cases of mutual consent and have required cases where the spouses do not mutually agree to the divorce to submit proof of existing fault-based grounds, while HB 926 would extend the waiting period for “no-fault” divorce to 180 days.   Testimony for these bills occurred at a very late evening hour on May 1, 2019 with just 2 business days’ notice of scheduling.    More about that unfortunate circumstance follows below.

The latter bill extending the waiting periods made it out of committee on Thursday, May 2 and still has a remote chance of being scheduled for a floor vote in the House in time to go to the Senate before the 2-year adjournment.   During the 85th legislature, this bill made it out of committee unanimously (versus 5-3 this time), but was killed by adverse lobbying of someone in the Calendars committee.   HB 922 was killed by the Democrat-dominated JJFI committee, and will need to be re-introduced in the 87th session in 2021.    It also passed out of this committee in the 85th session but met the same special-interest lobbying fate before it could come up for a floor vote or proceed to the Senate.

This blog post will be something of a post-mortem:  what went well, and not so well, and will shine some light on some long-festering process issues in the Texas legislature that has, over time, made legislative reform of family laws a bit of an uphill battle structurally.    Family structure activists are not deterred, even though the demographic trend in Texas points to an even more liberal-dominated legislature in 2021 when it next convenes.

Is a Constitutional Amendment Needed to Allow the Texas Legislature to Convene Annually?
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL),  46 state legislatures meet annually today.  The remaining four states—Montana, Nevada, North Dakota and Texas—hold session every other year, each in the odd year.   Illinois convenes annually but holds approved, pending bills open for two years, rather than require them to be reintroduced each session, which seems to be a cost efficiency to the taxpayers, not to mention, a bit of a safeguard against the effects of voter fraud and rapid demographic change (such as via unchecked illegal immigration) in elections, and possibly curbs the sort of Calendar Committee chicanery the Texas House is bloody infamous for.  In each span between legislative sessions, committee membership changes along with the makeup of the House, with a definite recent “bluing” trend in this (once) deep-red state, as people move into Texas from economically-failing liberal states losing several large employers each year.

The frequency of legislative sessions is set by the Texas Constitution, which reads as follows:

Sec. 5.  MEETINGS; ORDER OF BUSINESS.  (a) The Legislature shall meet every two years at such time as may be provided by law and at other times when convened by the Governor.

Hence, any change would require passage of a measure to put a statewide referendum on the ballot to change Article 3, Section 5.   This actually brings up one key example of the effect of biennial legislative sessions in Texas:  we are coming up next month on 4 years elapsing since the capricious Obergefell decision legislated a “right” to gay “marriage” from the Federal bench, and nullified all of the DOMA (defense of marriage) amendments passed by citizen referenda  a decade or so before, in numerous states.   Although a bill, HJR 64 was debated to put the DOMA repeal measure the ballot in the fall, astonishingly it still sits in committee, with only three weeks remaining in the session.   It appears that both the Texas marriage statute and the Texas constitution will continue to officially define marriage as being only between one man and one woman well into 2021, the 6th anniversary of Obergefell, since the constitution must be amended before the statute can be changed.

As the moral fabric of society has continued to fray, at least in part due to the societal destructiveness of divorce-on-demand, so has the legislation load perceived by citizens and their state leaders as necessary to manage all of the ever-worsening symptoms from this disease, now in its 3rd and 4th generations since enactment (boomers, gen-X, millennials, nextgen).    The NCSL article cited earlier makes this interesting observation:

“In the early 1960s, only 19 state legislatures met annually.  The remaining 31 held biennial regular sessions.  All but three (Kentucky, Mississippi and Virginia) held their biennial session in the odd-numbered year.  By the mid-1970s, the number of states meeting annually grew tremendously—up from 19 to 41.”

Gun rights activist Rachel Malone provided  her Facebook followers this statistical breakdown of Texas bill activity as of May 1 or so:

722 bills passed by the House (693 are HB’s)
640 bills passed by the Senate (632 are SB’s)
37 bills passed by BOTH chambers (but some still in process / conference)
16 bills sent to Governor

In the past 6 sessions, an average of . . .
– 6,363 bills were filed
– 1,382 bills were passed by both chambers (trending downward to the 1200’s)
– 1,342 bills were signed by the Governor / went into effect
– 389 bills died in Calendars (about 25% of the bills sent there)
– 258 bills passed the Senate but died somewhere in the House
– 368 bills passed the House but died somewhere in the Senate
– 11 bills died on the House floor
– 0 bills died on the Senate floor

How does this compare with other populous states that meet annually, such as Florida and California?  A good topic for study!
In the meantime, anyone can see that there’s basically only a 5% chance per biennial session that any bill in Texas would make it to the governor’s desk, including (apparently) a SCOTUS-dictated matter from 4 years ago– and plan their activist activities accordingly.

The power of life and death is literally in the hands of the Committee Chairman’s scheduling choices
Attorney Harold Dutton has been the Chair of the Juvenile Justice and Family Issues committee for the past several legislative sessions.   He is a man with a very checkered family life of his own, and has apparently treated this standing appointment as a personal fiefdom, according to a 2007 article in the Houston Chronicle.  The Chair of each House committee controls the hearing calendar for that committee, a fact which is absolutely key to the difference in what occurred this year with HB’s 922 and 926.

Not that Rep. Dutton had all that much to fear in terms of a repeat of the 4-3 party line committee approval that occurred in 2017 for HB 93, the predecessor bill to HB 922, since the Democrat majority on that committee was now 5-4, with 100% turnover in the rank-and-file members.    But just to be on the safe side, a bill filed in January was not scheduled for a hearing until May 1.    Two business days’ notice of the scheduling was given after business hours on the Friday before.    The hearing was scheduled on a day when there was a very heavy agenda on the House floor, typical for this point in the year when the session’s calendar days are dwindling, so the hearing scheduled for 10:30 a.m. didn’t actually start until after 7 p.m.   That was tough enough, but these bills were heard alongside a litany of bills whose numbers indicated they were filed substantially later on, including an albatross of a bill opposed by an army of LGBT activists: HB2109 which sought conscience-based protections from liability for wedding officiants to recuse themselves from certain weddings.    This testimony was, of course, prioritized to lead off (and, cynically, it set the political tone for) the entire evening.   

SIFC expects that Chairman D was giving himself high-5’s for preventing the parade of constitutional law attorneys who testified in 2017 before his committee that Texas’ divorce law is profoundly unconstitutional, and replacing that with a literal Gay Pride parade twice as large.    Despite the bills being introduced for the 3rd time by a practicing constitutional attorney, and despite ever-faithful veteran constitutional attorney Shelby Sharpe reprising an abbreviated portion of his 2017 testimony (given only 2 minutes this time instead of 3 minutes), and despite another family law attorney echoing the unconstitutionality with handouts to the committee,  what wound up resounding from the testimony was the technically-true but woefully-incomplete declaration of Texas Family Law Foundation head lobbyist Stephen Bresnan that “no court in the United States has ever found  no-fault divorce to be unconstitutional.”

The final injury came in the departure from the room of most of the GOP members shortly after the gay rights debate, which ended around 8:30 p.m.   After powerful reprise testimonies by Kristi Davis and Jeff Morgan and a few other excellent witnesses, none of them got any questions from the committee members, mostly because there were few or no Republican committee members present any longer to give them a hand.   Ditto for when Texas Values Sr. Policy Analyst Nicole Hudgens was peppered by feminist committee members with repetitive ideological “questions” she couldn’t quite handle to everyone’s satisfaction (partly due to coming off as being a bit unprepared).     Last time, executive director Jonathan Saenz testified in favor of the predecessor bill.    Whereas the victim witnesses got no questions, Ms. Hudgens’ 2-minute debut testimony evoked 6 contentious minutes of questions from the remaining committee members.

Another pivotally-damaging moment in the testimony questioning….

Rep. Callani to Ms. Hudgens:   “Why do people get divorced?” (@1:57)

Texas Values’  Nicole Hudgens:  “There are a number of reasons you can get divorced, but you have ‘insupportability’ which is no-fault divorce but this is not talking about…in the case of abuse or in the case of neglect..others, this is simply talking about ‘no-fault’ divorce…”

Rep. Callani:  “Right, but what do you think the reason for that is?”

Hudgens: (pause) “It can be a number of reasons.”

Callani:   “Just one of them”….(after longer Hudgens pause)…”Like a reason that people would get divorced…other than abuse?”

Hudgens: “Other than abuse?”  [Way to affirm Callani’s pet ideology there, Ms. Hudgens!]

Callani:  “So in your work for the Texas Family Law Foundation….”

Hudgens:  “That’s Texas Values”

Callani:  “OK, Family Texas Values…and you’re against divorces…so when…what types of divorces have you seen being…that were insupportable…what was their reason for wanting to get divorced?”

( SIFC:   Noooo, Nicole, please don’t assent to her rhetoric again!!   Proper response:  “there can’t be any ‘insupportable’ marriages in the legal sense because the term has not even been objectively defined in the statute.”   Legislator lecture coming in….4, 3, 2, 1… )

Hudgens: “There could be a number of reasons.  We’re for government promoting a policy that keeps families intact as much as possible, so…it could be a number of reasons…right now you can just get divorced for pretty much any reason.”

Callani: “All I want you to do is just give me one reason why people would get divorced.”

Hudgens:  “A lot of people would say ‘it’s complicated’…”

( SIFC: Callani could easily have gone in for the kill right here, but she was having herself a ball playing like a cat with her helpless prey….)

Callani:  “But what do you think is complicated about it?”

Hudgens:  “One person says they don’t want to be in the relationship anymore….”

Callani:  “So if that’s reason, if this bill were to pass, it defeats the whole purpose.”   (She didn’t say of what, but it’s clear that she believes in the “force people to stay married” dogma.)

( SIFC:  While every question couldn’t have been anticipated, less than two minutes invested in a Google search would have produced this fairly accurate study information, courtesy of AARP, which places “abuse” far down the list, and would have put up a far better fight against Callani’s media-driven assumptions…the fact is that the vast bulk of divorce is driven by adultery, and in a lot of cases, deliberate spouse-poaching in older, more affluent couples with older kids, and often grandkids….creating massive retirement problems, and rewarding the offenders while severely penalizing the non-offenders.   If this kind of informed content had filled those 6 minutes, they would at least have had something substantial to chew on, and it would have raised the opportunity to educate the committee on at least two important points that almost never get talked about!)

(Please click to enlarge)

Perhaps the most harmful moment that carried the evening, as a result of the GOP lawmakers all leaving the room, is the patently false statement by TFLF lobbyist Bresnan which went shamefully unchallenged because nobody remained present who was both entitled and motivated to debunk it at that point:

Bresnan: “And the third thing I’d like you to consider is leverage.  If I’m in a relationship with someone and they can’t leave without my permission,
I have extraordinary leverage over them.  I want the kids, I want the car, I want the house, I want the business.   I want everything.   If you want out bad enough, that’s what you’ll give me.  Right now, people are on an equal basis and they can dissolve their marriage, and in no way should you allow the law to..uh..change the leverage in a relationship.”

But suppose GOP Rep. Faithful had been in the room, wide awake and on the ball — despite it being 9 p.m. by then (since the liberals somehow managed not to take a dinner break, no doubt because of the wherewithal for campaign contributions that were on the line here)….

Rep. Faithful:  “that’s certainly an interesting point of view, Mr. Bresnan.  Let’s probe that a bit further, if you don’t mind.   Do you think it’s really necessary, in the best interest of the family as a whole, for the idea of “leverage” to be a zero-sum game, where the petitioner has 100% of the leverage and the respondent has zero percent?   How do you see this as being an ‘equal basis?’  The AARP has rightfully been growing concerned because the most recent studies show that due to the effect of no-fault divorce laws on younger adults opting not to marry at all, the only growing category of no-fault divorce is what is commonly called “gray divorce”, often where a couple has been successfully married for decades.  Often these divorces leave an innocent spouse, who wanted to save their marriage, with half or less of their retirement savings, 401K’s, IRA’s and pensions.  So, AARP published a 2004 study report showing that the chief driver for these gray divorces is adultery and / or the selfish desire to marry someone else, and the divorce petition filer is typically the adulterer.   Let me ask you:  should the adulterer have 100% the leverage over an innocent spouse who has done nothing substantial to harm the marriage?   Should they get the house, the business, the kids?   Could you tell us how that is good for society, Mr. Bresnan?

Of course, back in December, following the disastrous 2018 mid-term election results which reflected the changing demographics in Texas, Rep. Krause tried to warn us (privately) that there “would be little appetite for” family law reform in the 86th session.    He was a little reluctant to re-introduce the bills, but thankfully was persuaded (late).    The video feeds showed him  looking a bit disengaged, overtaxed and disinterested throughout the May 1 committee proceedings, and he apparently did little to encourage his conservative peers to stay in the room when their pushback against commercial / special interest testimony was absolutely crucial.  

Taking the picture as a whole, SIFC believes it was still right to keep re-introducing the bills despite the formidable obstacles to enactment rehearsed above.    William Wilberforce did this before Parliament for more than 20 years, across the entire spectrum of political circumstances, in order to engage the uphill battle to abolish the slave trade.  The activist community can do a much better job of supporting Rep. Krause’s political courage by taking all of the following steps:

(1) praying for Dutton’s defeat in 2020.  He’s been over the JJFI committee for far too long, and was morally ill-qualified for that pivotal Chair to begin with

(2)  making a lot of off-session visits to allies for educational purposes, especially Texas Values, but also sympathetic family law attorneys like Cecilia Wood (who seems as well-informed as anyone).    Ideally, we’d be visiting those same committee members with educational materials, but historically each session typically sees new faces under Dutton on that committee, so perhaps the only solution is to see all incumbent Reps in the off-session season, and from Nov. – Jan. 2020 visit the newly-elected (who are likely to wind up on the committee).   This means Jeff Morgan, who has purposed to focus on enlisting the support of the state’s churches in the off-season, will need a lot more hands.

(3) re-courting the constitutional attorneys who testified in 2017

(4) entreating Rep. Krause to file his bills on Day 1 of filing rather than in January, so that testimony in both chambers can occur by March

(5) prioritize the courting of Senate concurrent sponsorship

(6) recruiting the testimony of once-divorced couples who remarried each other (#somuch4irreconcilabledifferences)

(7) solidify ties now with the Constitution Party of Texas who might be able to help Jeff Morgan with some of the ground work over the next two years

(8) write Rep. Krause a heartfelt thank-you now, hoping for his re-election, and advising him how we will be doing our part to better support his efforts next session

For just one example of potentially effective connections, HB 2109, the wedding officiant recusal bill, which had six co-sponsors (Reps. Flynn, Bonnen, Dean, Schaefer, Springer and White) has already died on the vine this session, which really need not become a tragedy that leads to a similarly ill-considered Alabama-style reaction.  Would these gentlemen not be great candidates for some timely education on why the successful repeal of unilateral forced divorce would make their issue go away altogether — by quickly killing the demand for gay “marriage”?    This is before even mentioning the budgetary heroes and rock stars they would become over the next few years!   According to a 2008 study, unchecked unilateral divorce was costing Texas taxpayers almost $3 billion each and every year.   This might be a great conversation to have with these gentlemen even before this session adjourns at the end of the month, if their attention can be had during crunch-time.

The debate on HB 2109 was (in reality) about compelled moral approval for sodomy-as-marriage, and by extension, the morality of sodomy in general.   May 1, 2019 needn’t have become Gay Day in Austin, and it needn’t have been a Democratic committee member pointing out how this bill reflected a “fire, ready, aim” mentality
(Flynn testimony: “I thunk it up mahself”) behind it.   Passage of HB 922 (accompanied by the future repeal of Sec. 6.006 – forced divorce with a 3-year delay in redundancy of Sec. 6.005) would have made that whole debate moot and unnecessary.   Hence, there seems little reason why all six should not have been co-sponsors on Rep. Krause’s bills during the 86th session, and why they shouldn’t be courted by our team to become co-sponsors during the 87th session.

“standerinfamilycourt” is retired from corporate life, and lives several states away, but would have loved to spend part of 2018-19  in Texas for the reasons mentioned above.   Steps are being taken to find a way to monetize Unilateral Divorce is Unconstitutional so that the finances to do so, and to start working other states, become available in 2019-2020.    Prayers are appreciated for success and God’s direction in this fundraising vision.    We have a formidable adversary, but a mightier Lord, so it all boils down to: who’s hungrier to win?

Therefore, do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward.  For you have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what was promised.
– Hebrews 10:35

www.standerinfamilycourt.com

7 Times Around the Jericho Wall |  Let’s Repeal “No-Fault” Divorce!