<TITLE>09. Par 39-43</TITLE>L-39 And then, after the decision is made that you are, then comes the engagement. That... You find that at the altar. You've got to make an engagement before this union can be. And that's the way it is with Christ's church. It has to be an engagement with Christ, a--a pledge, an engagement, a love affair.
And then the next thing is, is promises made. There has to be promises made to one another, like that you make promise, "Sweetheart, if you'll marry me, I promise that I'll be loyal and true. I will look upon no other woman."
Or, "I'll look upon no other man. And I'll do all that as a duty as a wife. If we have children, it'll do all as a duty as a--as a mother. I--I'll be a housekeeper." All these promises has got to be made, or should be, in a correct wedding.

L-40 And that's the same thing when you come to Christ. "Lord, if You will receive me into Your Kingdom, I promise..." There you are. "I'll love You. I'll be true to You. I'll serve You day and night." It's too bad we forget that. "I'll serve You day and night. I'll fast; I'll pray; I'll be loyal to You. I'll bring my tithings into the storehouse. I--I'll--I'll pray many times a day. I'll--I'll do anything. And I'll pledge all my love to You." That's what you should do. That's exactly right, where you promise that, and it should come from your heart.
If you promise your husband that, and not from your heart you mean it, you are absolutely not living correctly with him. It's kind of a crystallized affair.

L-41 Look here. If--if you haven't got teeth, and you use false teeth... Now, that's all right. It's substituting for the teeth that you once had. But actually, those teeth are not connected with you. It's not part of you. If you had an arm amputated, and you put a false arm on, well, that arm is actually not connected with you. It's just stuck on you. See, it's not connected with you.
And when we take our pledge to Christ, if we don't become part of Him, like a woman ought to become part of a man and a man part of the woman, then we're artificial Christians. We're not really... You're really not married to that woman. You might be loyal. If you don't love your husband, and him sixty or seventy years old, and you don't love him as good as you did at the beginning, then you're really just raising his children.

L-42 And that's the way the churches are, too many today. We're just taking the name of the Christian church, pretending to be the bride, when it's artificially; we're not connected with Christ in any way. We're like an artificial tooth, artificial arm, artificial eye. See, it's something that's artificial if we're just putting it on. Well, you can't put on Christianity. You've got to be connected with it.
And then a church that's just artificial called the church of Christ... Well, them children then, are not in there that's born of that same organization is only... They're not Christ's children; they are denominational children, and not children of Christ.

L-43 If a woman isn't connected with the man in trueness, then it isn't her husband. It's just a man she's taken a vow to live with, and she took a wrong vow. She pledged to love him, and she said she loved him; and she didn't do it. All the time the man is deceived. But there's one thing sure, friends; we're not going to deceive Christ. He knows His own.


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