Ep. 34: Why Christians should Marry Christians

Andrew Marcus:

Hey, this is Andrew Marcus from THE INDOUBT SHOW, we got a wonderful program today. We have Matt Boga, who is a pastor in Stockton, California, and we’re talking all things marriage. The beauty of marriage, the union of marriage, it’s going to be a great program. But before we dive in, I want to remind you of our match campaign. We’ve had a generous donor pledge up to $5,000 for our match campaign. So if you give $10 today, it becomes 20. If you give 20, it becomes 40. And if we can raise $5,000, it becomes $10,000, what an amazing blessing for the ministry. And so double your impact by giving today, we really appreciate your support. We hope you enjoy today’s program. God bless you, enjoy today’s show.

All right, we have Matt Boga all the way from Reality, Stockton. How are you doing today, man?

Matt Boga:

I’m doing well, thank you. How are you doing?

Andrew Marcus:

I’m doing great, man. I’m grateful that you are joining us today from the home office.

Matt Boga:

Home office slash nursery.

Andrew Marcus:

Slash nursery, okay. So we want to know about your family. So tell us a little bit about your church, maybe how long you’ve been there, your role, family life, just to get our listeners and our viewers familiar with you.

Matt Boga:

Yeah, sure. We are a church, our church name is Reality Church of Stockton, located in Stockton, California. I don’t know how familiar everybody is with California geography, but we’re about 40 minutes south of Sacramento, and maybe about an hour and a half east of San Francisco. So we’re right in the northern part, but middle of Central Valley of California. Today, actually, the day that we’re recording this is our 16th birthday as a church, and so 16 years today. And we’re part of a larger kind of… We call ourselves a family, but a network of churches called Reality family of churches mostly up and down the West Coast. But there are churches in London, Boston, Honolulu as well. So fairly far-reaching, but mostly coastlands here in California.

And I’m married, been happily married to my wife for 11 years, and we’ve got three kids. I’m sitting in the home office slash nursery, because we ran out of space with the third one, and we’ve got two boys and a baby girl right now. But yeah, I’m the associate pastor at my church, and so my roles kind vary from small group, life, some pulpit supply, Sunday school classes, and everything in between, Sunday liturgy development, things of that nature. But it’s a whole lot of fun, my background isn’t in ministry, it’s in the field of health. And so coming from that to this was definitely a change of direction that I hadn’t planned, but it’s just been a whole lot of joy creating gray hair quickly, but a lot of joy along the way.

Andrew Marcus:

That’s ministry life, bro, I lost all my hair. I used to do ministry life. So gray is better than loosing it.

Matt Boga:

It’s still there, but it’s just gray.

Andrew Marcus:

Yeah, gray is better than loosing it.

Matt Boga:

That’s what I say.

Andrew Marcus:

Yeah, that’s hilarious, that’s amazing. And so I got to ask you, because we have two kids and we have a third kid on the way, what was the transition like from two to three?

Matt Boga:

You want the honest answer?

Andrew Marcus:

I only want the honest answer.

Matt Boga:

Okay, here we go. The transition was the most difficult of the –

Andrew Marcus:

Oh, really?

Matt Boga:

Yeah. For us, that’s not the case for everybody. But we’ve identified a few factors. The first one is just you’ve never been a parent before, and you bring home a new baby, how do we keep this kid alive kind of thing? The second one is just like, “All right, we did this before, we’ll just do it again.” And then you can play still man-to-man defense.

But then the third one, I don’t know how far apart your kids are spaced, but ours are about two and a half years each. And so when we brought our baby girl home, they were just at the age where they could do some things for themselves, but not really unsupervised. And obviously the infant needs all the attention, can’t do anything for herself, and so it just created chaos. And our older two were boys, and so they’re just loud and chaotic, lovingly so. And so it was the hardest transition. But man, the joy of all three of them, watching them interact together, just parenting in general, the sweet moments far outweigh the challenging ones. But I’ll just be honest with you, it was the hardest transition for sure. But maybe it won’t be for you, maybe everything will just be the easiest go.

Andrew Marcus:

Yeah, I know know. Obviously every family’s different, but the first thing I thought of, like you said, it’s like, “Okay, we have two right now.” So it’s man-to-man, whatever. It’s like, “Oh, we need another parent, we need someone else to join the party. What’s going to happen?” But no, we are very excited. We had a couple who were on the show last season, and they have six boys, and I’m just like, “That is wild.” But it’s interesting because when people have kids, as the kids get older, no one’s ever said, “Oh man, I wish we had one less.” They always say, “I wish we had more because kids are just such a gift.”

Matt Boga:

But I described to folks that… And we’ll get to this in a bit. But God has chosen to hide his covenant love in the institution of marriage. But I think it was J.I. Packer said that the unique way that a Christian relates to God is as father, the most fundamental, unique way. And so there’s something in parenting, that I love my wife, I try with Christ helping me to love her as he loves the church. But she is able to do things on her own. I can go do something else, and she’ll just be fine, and I’ll come back home and we’ll be able to spend time together. My children though, there is a full amount of, I have to literally give up all of my wants, and desires, and dreams, and hopes to see them flourish if I’m going to do this right.

But the other side of that, it can sound like maybe the way some of your friends put it, of like, “Oh man, your life’s over.” It can sound like a big drag. But what you find is that no, there’s so much joy in doing that when you see your children flourishing and you’re investing in them, and just spending time with them. I was talking to my buddy the other day, I’m just substantially more weepy since we’ve had kids, but the tears are not often really sad weepy, but just overjoyed. Sometimes they’re sad, but just overjoyed. It’s just looking at my kids imagining who they’re going to be, and I think all of that is a product of just the fact that now you legit have to lay everything down in order to do this well. And it’s hard, but it’s just so much joy.

Andrew Marcus:

So much joy. Yeah, they coexist, the how hard it is and how much joy it is. That’s amazing. Okay, we talk about kids, we talk about marriage. I want to go kind of all the way back to dating. You had an article on Gospel Coalition, and I read it and I was very blessed by it, and we can let you know where the resources are for that. But many young adults today are wrestling with the question of dating or marrying a non-Christian. I hear this often, we’re a young adult’s ministry, and I used to do a lot of church ministry for years, and I know you’ve heard that a lot too in your role as a pastor. Can you elaborate on why the Bible advises against marrying a non-Christian? Maybe even give some of the scriptures of where it says, “The unevenly yoked.” And why this advice is relevant for young people today.

Matt Boga:

Yeah, and you’re right, it’s a pervasive topic, especially when you’re ministering to young folks because there’s some internal desires that people have. And so it’s relevant, it’s not something that needs to be just wiped away. But what I think is really interesting, is that the way in which I approached the article was really from the question of answering exactly what you just said, the why. Because I think we all have a gut instinct, especially at least within the household of faith, within Christianity, we go, “Okay, yeah, I know I’m supposed to marry a Christian.” And I think we all kind of get that, we’re told that growing up. And even the secular world around us would actually say that that’s a good thing for a marriage. You could Google it and your search bar will just be filled with responses of saying things like, “Hey, if you want to have a healthy and flourishing marriage, you need to align on some things.”

One of them is religion, the other one’s parenting tactics, another one I saw was boundaries with in-laws, things like that. There are a handful of things that even the secular world is going to say, “If you want your marriage to go well, you need to align on these things.” But we’re not the secular world, there’s some common graces and wisdom out there. But there are reasons in the Bible as you alluded to, there are biblical reasons that God gives for why Christians not just it’s wise but ought, there’s an oughtness to it, ought to marry other Christians. And to simplify it, the undergirding reason is God’s glory. Every other thing is going to come off of that, or if you want to vision it as an umbrella, it’s going to be under it. But it’s God’s glory, not only in our lives individually, but in the lives of our marriage and the families that we’re creating, because that’s our chief purpose.

That’s what we were designed for, is to glorify God. And so if that’s our purpose, then every decision that we make, it needs to stem directly from that. And so what I tried to do in the article was kind of just trace the biblical theme through the scriptures, to show that it’s not just a proof text here or there, but this is actually a pattern set in the design of marriage. And so I think that’s another kind of foundational thing. So God’s glory being the umbrella, but then our personal worship. Paul says that our lives are to be living sacrifices of worship to God. And so our personal worship, but also honoring just the design as creatures. We’re creatures created in the image of God, but we’re created with a design and a purpose with constraints for flourishing in the same way that a fish is going to flourish when it’s in the constraints of the water, it’s not going to flourish when it’s on the constraints of the land.

And so we want to find those appropriate ways in which we were designed in order to flourish. But some of the ways in which it kind of follows through scriptures, if you take it all the way back to the beginning of Jesus, often when he’s asked about particularly divorce in the gospels, he says, “Well, let’s think back.” And so that’s what we should do too, let’s think back, let’s look at the beginning. And we’ve got one man, one woman brought together in the covenant of marriage designed by God, and they become one flesh. There’s a oneness, there’s a unity that’s special to that relationship. Then as you move forward, tracing the theme of worship in the design, God as he pulls people out of Egypt sends them into the Promised Land, he says, “Hey, don’t marry foreign nations around you, don’t intermarry.”

You get that in Exodus 34, and Deuteronomy 7, reinstituted in Nehemiah 10, and the purpose again is to not detract them from the worship of the one true God. Then you get further into the New Covenant, and you have Paul reiterating the same message, and so you could be like, “Well, that was Israel, but what about the church?” No, Paul’s reiterating the same thing. He’s like, “When you’re marrying, marry within the Lord, unequal yoking, make sure that you’re marrying people that are aligned with you on this.” And so it’s actually a theme that just has a arc that goes all the way through the narrative of scripture. Which I think is just really important, because oftentimes we’ll be prone to just like, “All right, let me find this verse. And there it is, let me slap it on there.” But obviously we know we’re prone to doing that and taking it out of context. But if you can see it kind of tracing its way through the scriptures, I think it becomes that much more powerful and more convincing.

Andrew Marcus:

Totally, man. And it just solidifies… The whole story points to the same theme. I love how you said you don’t just look for proof passages. It’s like, “No, it’s actually the whole story is intertwined.” When we talk about oneness and one flesh, this union, you gave an amazing analogy. I don’t know if it’s because I’m a car guy and I like doing welding and different kind of work with metal, but walk us through that kind of imagery of the metal and the wood.

Matt Boga:

Sure. Well, I’m glad that you liked it, because on the one hand, I took a lot of shop classes in high school and stuff, never took auto shop, which whenever something breaks in my car I’m sad about. Because I walk up to the mechanic and go, “I literally don’t know what to do.” But also I took more woods than metals, and so whenever I use something in an illustration that’s kind of outside my area of knowledge, I’m always worried. But you said that it works, so I’ll take your word for it.

Andrew Marcus:

It works great. I was like, “That was such a good picture for me.”

Matt Boga:

Beautiful. Yeah, so the illustration is trying to illustrate the oneness, the unity of the one flesh union created in marriage. Which again is what we have back at the beginning in Genesis. Which is something that Jesus, as well as Paul are going to use as kind of foundational when they’re understanding the institution that marriages is built upon it. So we really need to understand what’s taking place in marriage, and I think Genesis helps us with that. But the one flesh union is really important, because what happens at a wedding, two people come up to an altar where they die and they leave as one. There’s something radical happening there. Two people approach, but one person in a sense leaves. And welding is very different than woodworking, woodworking is what I’m more familiar with, it’s what… I’m a hobby, craft, DIY guy at my house, and just very frugal really. And so I’d rather do something myself poorly than pay someone to do it better.

But with woodwork, the first thing you learn is that, all right, if you’re going to put nails or screws even in a joint, put glue on it though, because it’s going to tighten the bond. It’s going to put things together a little bit more securely, which is good, it’s wise. But you have two things that are being held together, either by the nails, and the screws, and the glue, but it’s still two things. Welding though actually changes the composition of the metal to where the two things begin to flow together, and they actually form one new thing at that joint. Where the two things that were there before are now literally one thing, because the materials would begin to flow together.

And that is not unlike Christian marriage. That’s what happens when we get married, the two become one thing that have now flowed together to a certain extent. And so when we’re talking about how does this impact the way in which Christians ought to approach our relationships, when we’re marrying someone or desiring to be married, we’re desiring to weld ourselves permanently becoming one with that person. And therefore what that person does or doesn’t do is going to impact us necessarily. And so you’re a welding guy, you do metal work, so maybe you can… I’m sure this illustration doesn’t work, but we’ll just try to keep the theme. If you welded a piece of steel to a piece of aluminum, I don’t think you can actually do that.

Andrew Marcus:

Yeah, I don’t think you can.

Matt Boga:

But aluminum is like a pretty… No, I don’t think you can. But for the sake of the illustration, let’s pretend.

Andrew Marcus:

Yeah. Well, maybe you can. I’m not a pro welder, I’m a DIY like you, where I kind of screw up and I’d rather do it myself and screw up than pay someone.

Matt Boga:

Yeah, beautiful. But if you weld aluminum to steel, steel’s a pretty tough, durable, hard metal. Aluminum though is pretty malleable. I mean, we make cans out of it and stuff like that, it’s pretty weak. And if you weld those two things together, you now have one thing that’s comprised of those two different types of metal.

And the one thing is actually pretty weak. It’s pretty weakened because part of it is just a metal that’s just very flimsy, so to speak. And so it’s similar, not exactly the same, it doesn’t explain everything, but it’s similar in the sense of when a Christian desires to, or is dating, or is planning to marry, or does marry a non-Christian, your Christian faith is necessarily weakened. And I know it’s kind of anecdotal, but I’ve also never seen it proved false. I’ve never met a Christian who’s entered into a dating relationship or married a non-Christian, and their faith has grown stronger, not one single time. And I don’t expect that I ever will, because I think that the biblical principle requires that to take place, it’s going to happen necessarily.

Andrew Marcus:

It’s just a real eyeopener for people who are listening or watching, because what advice would you give them? I mean, I know even in the article you use King Solomon as a case study of things not to do. And maybe unpack that a little bit, because that kind of just gives us an example of when you’re marrying… Obviously we’re not going to be marrying 900 people. But what happens to his heart and his love for the Lord?

Matt Boga:

Yeah, Solomon’s really interesting. I think it’s similar in my opinion to the way that Ecclesiastes is framed, at least the beginning parts. Because whether or not you think that Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes, whoever wrote it is definitely trying to get you to envision a Solomonic like king. And so whether or not it was him, picture him in your mind as he’s looking through all of these different ventures of the world and coming up and saying, “Hey, this is vanity.”

And I think it’s really important to keep that in mind when we think about this as well, because Solomon he had all of God’s wisdom, he had all of God’s wealth, people literally flocked from the ends of the earth to see this. And by all appearances, he was the guy, he was the immediate fulfillment of the promise made to King David. That this is your son who’s going to embody these things, and he’s going to sit on your throne. And as you read his narrative, it looks like everything’s going well. He asked for the right thing, he asked for wisdom, not wealth, but he got both anyway. He’s got peace around him, he’s got power and everything at his disposal. But he makes this mistake, and it goes to show us even the wisest person to ever live… I’m not wiser than Solomon, you’re not wiser than Solomon, your viewers and listeners are not wiser than Solomon. This guy was able to be pulled away from the true worship of God, because he married people outside of Israel.

And now I think that actually can be… It’s very challenging, because I think our gut instinct is to be like, “No, I’m the exception. I can do it. I got it.” But no, like I just said, I’m not wiser than Solomon, I’m not the exception, he wasn’t even the exception. And so if he can’t do it, then why would I think that I can? But I also think that there’s something, probably our just 21st century Westernized culture that we live in, that makes us rebut at that. The idea of, what do you mean I can’t marry outside… I mean, Israel, there were ethnic lines associated as well. But what do you mean? But I think it’s really important, and I said this in the article, but I just think it’s really important that God’s laws surrounding marriage are not racist, but religious. This is the undergirding… No, he’s literally jealous for our worship, in the same way that a good husband would be jealous for the intimacy of his wife.

And so his principles, his commands around marriage are not racist. This isn’t something where you’re to vilify those outside of the faith, but it is something to say that, “No, God wants our true worship, and he knows. He absolutely knows that if we weld ourselves, if we unify ourselves with someone outside of the faith, it will detract from that.” And so we have to just keep that principle in view at all time. Otherwise, we will follow our desires like Solomon did. And unfortunately, our stories will end like Solomon’s does, where at the end of his narrative it’s just, “And he went after many other gods, and he did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.” And I know that no Christian is going to sit there and go, “I hope that that’s my ending. I hope that that’s where I can go.”

Andrew Marcus:

I really want to end terribly.

Matt Boga:

Yeah, exactly.

Andrew Marcus:

There’s no way. I remember when I was in high school, I was dating a girl who was a non-believer, and I kind of had one foot in the church, one foot out of the church. And I was trying to think I’d be a good example, and I could maybe bring her to the Lord. But obviously my heart gets in the way, and it gets a little bit cloudy.

But I remember the Lord gave me a vision, it was one of the first time kind of seeing this vision from God. And it was two apples together. One of them was this fresh apple, ripe apple. The other one was very, very rotten. And they were sitting together, and as they got closer, that good one started to kind of get rotten on that side. And it was just an eyeopener for me of, “Oh, man, I need to be careful, because here I am thinking, oh, no, I’m going to be on mission.” People think that they can be believers in a dating relationship or married, and they’re like it’s their mission to help convert this person. But it’s like, “No, we don’t do lip to lip discipleship, there’s no flirt to convert.” Some people do that, and I’ve seen the odd success story, but I don’t think that’s the framework for us.

Matt Boga:

Totally. Yeah, and I think you’re kind of landing on it, I feel like. Because one of my tasks in the morning is to make the kids’ lunches for school. I’m a creature of habit, so I put the same thing in their lunch every single day. And when I’m cutting up strawberries, if I find a strawberry… Kind of like your illustration. If I find a strawberry with a big… Looks like it’s wearing a jacket of mold, I’ll pull it out, I’ll throw it away rightly. But I’ll also pull out half of the strawberries in the box that it was in contact…

Andrew Marcus:

Rubbing up against?

Matt Boga:

Yeah, exactly. Because those are now damaged, I got to throw those away too. And honestly, I probably should just toss out the whole carton, and just be like, “You’re not getting strawberries today.” Because you’ve got this big, gross, moldy strawberry in there, you don’t want it to contaminate the other ones.

But you’re right, I think a lot of people approach marriage or dating at least with that kind of missional mindset of, but he or she, they’ve got everything else. They’ve got everything I would hope for, but they’re missing this one thing. It turns out it’s a really fundamental thing, but they’re missing it. And so if I can just get them saved. And I remember about a year, year and a half ago, a young guy had started coming to our church. Not a Christian, but you could see the Lord was working in his heart. And one of our members had shared the gospel with him at the gym, and he’s like, “Tell me more about this.”

And so I’m meeting with him, and after a while he tells me he’s living with his girlfriend, and they’ve been together for a couple years, and this, this and that. And after a while he’s like, “What do you think I should do?” And I was like, “Well, are you asking me as a Christian or are you not a Christian?” I’d give you some advice, but I’m not going to bind your conscience. And he’s like, “I have believed.” And I was like, “Okay, let’s talk about it then.”

And I would say he is the exception to all of these things, I told him, I was like, “Bro, the Bible says that you need to move out. If the purpose of dating is marriage, you guys shouldn’t be dating. And instead you need to take these hard measures to do these things.” And he said, “Okay, I’ll do it.” And I was just amazed. And I was like, “But praise the Lord for it.” And he texted me, he’s like, “I did it.” This, this and that. And I told him, I was like, “But here’s the thing. It’s not a, Hey, I’m a Christian now, my God says we can’t be together, so I’m out of here.” I was like, “Bro, if you believe that this is really good news, then tell her why you have to do this. Why is it?”

And to God alone be the glory. But he did that, and then she got saved because of it, and we baptized them both earlier this year, and they just got married this last month or something like that. And so I’m not saying that the missional thing can’t be true, but what I think is very different in that situation as opposed to many of the ones that we encounter when we’re discipling folks, is that he was willing to cut ties. I told him, I was like, “It’s always the right time to be faithful.” And so he was willing to do that, and then he let God do his thing on the backend. And he was willing to be okay with whatever that was going to mean, whether it meant that she was not going to be in his life anymore, or that she was going to get saved, and praise be to God that she did. But none of this would’ve happened if he didn’t say, “Hey, it’s a hard thing, but this is what my God says is right for me and for his people. And so I’m going to do it.”

But it’s definitely challenging. I mean, as an objective observer in this whole thing, I can just say what the Bible says. But I understand that people that are in it, there’s a lot more tension. I don’t want to make it sound like it’s as clean as this, and, “Yeah, just do the right thing. It’ll work out.” But I think there’s actually some beauty in the objectivity to be able to be like, “No, I can shoot straight with you, because I’m not invested in the way that you are.”

Andrew Marcus:

Praise God, man. Well, thank you so much for your time today. This has been so encouraging, and thank you for writing that article. Keep writing articles, keep resourcing us, we’re very blessed.

Matt Boga:

Yeah. Well, I appreciate it. It’s been a blessing on my end as well.

Andrew Marcus:

Hey, thanks so much for joining us today. For more great content, check out the Indoubt Show on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, or wherever you stream your podcast. We hope you enjoyed it today. Feel free to check out indoubt.ca, we have some great resources available to you. Have an awesome day.

[/wpbb-if]