Protect and Defend Our Marriages - 1 Corinthians 7:10-16, 39-40

Class that I teach at seminary, I'll ask them, what's God done this past week since last time we got together that you can be thankful for, that you're excited about, that you can praise him for? And this last week, as I was meeting, I had my undergraduate class, and I was asking them that question. And 3 of them said they got engaged over this past week between our class in the last class. And I know several people that have weddings coming up, either next month or a few months from now, they were in my class that are here in the church. And it got me thinking about wedding vows and the vows that we take, kind of a traditional Christian wedding vow would go, something like this that says, I, and you would fill in your name, take you, and you fill in the name of the other person, to be my wedded wife or husband to have, and to hold from this day forward for better or for worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death, do us part. According to God's holy ordinance, and thereto, I pledge you my faith. And I imagine you'll probably find yourself at a wedding sometime in 2026, maybe even sometime in 2025, and you'll hear something similar to those vows. And they're fundamentally different than, say, buying a car. Because you'll sign a contract on a car, but what you're going to say is, I'm going to keep this car as long as it's useful, as long as I like it, and when I don't, I'll get rid of it. But we say till death do his part, whether things are good or not. And we ground it in God's holy ordinance. that it's because of who God is, that we extol marriage. It's not just a human invention, that people came up with at some point, socially constructed, that could be changed or modified as we wish. It's grounded and who God is, and everybody here is impacted by marriage, whether you're married or not, whether you're engaged, whether you're single, whether you're divorced, we are all impacted by marriage. And the sacredness that God gives to marriage. We know it's more than just the relationship between a husband and wife, as Willie read earlier, that it's a reflection of Christ and the church, that God gave marriage to humanity, because he was going to say, in marriage, I'm going to reflect God's own love for humanity. And that's why when you read Ephesians 5, when we think that's about a husband and a wife, and it is, but it's also about Christ and his church. And so the sacredness of marriage is grounded in God and who he is in this institution that he's given us. And so in Paul, in 1st Corinthians 7, so it's answering questions for the Corinthians about marriage. He is answering them out of that grounding, out of that basis. It's not just a social contract that humanity had come up with. It was grounded in what God had given us. As you turn to 1st Corinthians 7. The main idea I want you to take away from the sermon today is, as followers of Christ, we must protect and defend our marriages. Again, as followers of Christ, we must protect and defend our marriages. Now, this passage in 1st Corinthians 7 is interesting, because if you just picked it up and read it, you would probably miss some of what I think Paul is wrestling with. When we read the Bible, the Bible comes in a lot of different genres, so we know this poetry, you can go read the book of Psalms. Those narratives, go read the gospels, and you're kind of hearing this story within the gospels, all sorts of different ways that Jesus taught. He taught in parables and other things. First Corinthians is a letter. And as such, it's written by someone, Paul, to a group of people, the Corinthians. And as you read one Corinthians, you can quickly pick up on. They had a lot of questions for Paul. And so Paul's responding, not kind of with a philosophical writing that's made for everybody. He wasn't writing something that says, this is for the general public. everyone's going to read this. He's writing to a specific set of people with very specific questions. And that makes it difficult because if we're not careful, what we'll do is read it and read our own questions into what Paul's saying instead of the questions that the Corinthians had. What we're going to see today as we look at verses 10 to 16. As Paul's going to address, kind of 2 questions the Corinthians had about divorce. Now, behind that, Paul doesn't expand as he does in Ephesians five, the sacredness of marriage, he assumes that already that's built into who he was as a Jewish person who was following God's law, who understood the Old Testament, but he's responding to 2 very specific questions to the Corinthians, that probably aren't questions that impact us directly today. One of the questions was from a group of believers in the church who were married, both spouses were married, and they were thinking of divorcing because they had adopted the false belief that physicality was bad, that the physical body was bad, and hence, we shouldn't indulge the physical body. If you were here last week, if you have your Bibles open to 1st Corinthians 7, the very beginning of this chapter, Paul says, Now concerning the matters about which you wrote, it is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman. That was the question, the statement the Corinthians were saying. They're saying, look, our belief in the how physical nature is bad. Now, we hear that in our philosophically, we don't think that way necessarily. We don't think the way they would have thought in Corinth, which was this. I have a spirit, my spirit's good, but I have a body and the body itself is intrinsically, inherently bad. And so you either go one of two directions with that. You either do whatever you want with your body, because it doesn't matter. Or you really restrict what you do with your body because it's bad and you don't want to indulge it. So you restrict how much you eat. And in this case, in Corinth, there is a group saying, we should probably restrict within marriage or even outside of marriage, but within marriage, sexual relations. And Paul tells them no, don't do that. That's not God's plan. That was last week. What Paul talks about this week with one group of people is they were saying, if the body's bad, and we need to reject sexual relations, then let's just get divorced. Because there's no need to be married anymore. Paul's going to reject that. And the other group is going to be a person who became a believer and their spouse didn't become a believer, and they were worried that if they stayed with an unbelieving spouse, they were somehow being pulled away from God and unholy, and they were invalidating their commitment to Jesus. And so they're saying, do I need to leave my unbelieving spouse in order to be faithful to God in order to be a part of God, since I've changed my commitments in life. Those are 2 questions that affected deeply the Corinthian church probably aren't deeply affecting the modern 21st century church. The issue of marriage does, and the issue of divorce does, but these 2 issues. So what I want to do today is unpack these two issues, interpret them so you know what Paul was addressing, and then give some application for how that applies to us. And this is really important when you read your Bibles, is to know what did it mean in the time it was written to the people it was written to. How can I then apply it faithfully? But we have to know what it meant. So let's start with that. First thing we see in verses 10 and 11 is this. Believers should not divorce each other. So they must have sent a question to Paul, something along the lines of Hey, Paul, it's good that a man not have sexual relations with a woman, and Paul says, hey, if you're married, you should do that. Go back and listen to the last week's sermon on that. And coming off of that, they probably were saying, I think if we're married, 2 believers we should get divorced. Because our views on physicality are such that we shouldn't be coming together and having sexual relations. So let's just divorce, that solves that problem. Here's what Paul says to the married, I give this charge. Last week, if you read, he said, I gave you my recommendation. He said, if someone was single, and we'll talk about this again next week, If someone's single, he said, you should probably stay that way. He said this is my advice to you. He didn't say it's a command. But here he says, To the married, I give this charge, this command. This is an option. He says, not I, but the Lord. When he says, not I, but the Lord. What he's saying is, Paul's not coming up with this, this idea just on his own, he had understood and heard the teaching of Jesus when he was on the earth, when he was confronted about marriage from the Pharisees. And Mark chapter 10, we'll put the verse on the screen. Jesus was on the earth, and some Pharisees came to him to trap him. And they wanted to know, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife? Now, to understand the question, it's not a question given in good faith by the Pharisees. And in fact, in the 1st century, we know there were 2 kind of Pharisaical or Jewish schools that were interpreting the Old Testament and they had 2 different takes on divorce. One of the schools said, you could get divorced for any reason, basically. And only in Jewish culture, only a man could divorce. A woman could leave her spouse, but she couldn't divorce her spouse. And if she didn't have a certificate of divorce, she couldn't remarry. So a man had all the control. And one of the schools said, here's what we get from the Old Testament, you can divorce your wife for any reason whatsoever. If she burns toast, you could divorce her. Anything that displeases you is a valid reason for divorce. It equals to our modern, no fault divorce. The other school was extremely strict. It basically came down to sexual immorality. That's the only basis, and it wasn't even a command then that you had to, but there was an option that you could. And so there are these two schools. And they're debating, and the Pharisees come to Jesus and say, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife? They're trying to give them to pick a side. So they can then use that against him. And he answered them, what did Moses command you? And they said, Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and descend away? So in the Old Testament, there was a line that says you could do this. And Jesus said, then because of your hardness of heart, he wrote you this commandment, but from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the 2 shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together. Let not man separate. So Jesus' view on this was not to take kind of the debate in the 1st century between the 2 Jewish schools of thought on it. His move was to go back to the very beginning of creation before sin entered the world, this hardness of heart that he said, Moses gave a concession to humans because we're messed up. And he said, I'll allow this because the world's so messed up. This is probably the lesser of 2 evils at that point, but Jesus goes all the way back to the beginning to establish the sacredness of marriage. So when Paul says, to the married I give this charge, not I, but the Lord. He's saying, Jesus directly spoke to this. And he said this, the wife should not separate from her husband. But if she does, she should remain unmarried, or else be reconciled to her husband. And the husband should not divorce his wife. Now, Paul uses 2 different words here once separate one's divorce. later, he'll mix those together. And so I think he means the same thing. He's just using two different worlds that are synonyms for that. In Jewish culture and Roman culture. So in the church at Corinth, there were 2 cultures that were coming together. There was a Jewish culture which had its own set of rules and regulations, and there was a Greco-Roman culture. When it came to divorce, they did not have the same procedures. If you were Jewish and you were growing up in Corinth, you would have gone to a Jewish courts, and you would have to get a certificate of divorce. It was a legal proceeding that you went through to get a divorce. In Greco Roman culture, divorce worked exactly like people breaking up today who were just dating. All you had to do was say, I'm done and walk out. There was no courts involved. If there were finances or dowries or things like that, you had to deal with that, but it was extremely easy. You just say, I'm leaving. And husband or wife could do that. And so Paul may be using both words to kind of pick out both cultures. But what he says is really easy to understand. He says, wives, you shouldn't separate from your husband. They must have been asking, can I do this? And he says, no, you cannot. And if you do that, maybe someone already had. You should remain unmarried or else be reconciled to your husband. His argument is, if you do this, you need to stay unmarried so that you can reconcile with your husband, hopefully, that you'll work out these false beliefs that you have. And then he said to the husband, you should not divorce your wife. Now, there are, if you read scripture, there are grounds for divorce in scripture, there's a few. That's not Paul's point here, though. One, he's pointing back to the sacredness of marriage, and he's telling the Corinthians who were thinking of divorcing for grounds that weren't biblical. Can we do this? Is this what we should do? And he says, no, you cannot do this. And so he answers the 1st group with just a resounding no, don't do that. And then he sees in the next passage that believers should not divorce an unbelieving spouse. This was the 2nd question that the Corinthians had for him. He says, to the rest, I say. And when he says the rest, it's obvious the 1st group were 2 married, 2 people who were married, who were Christians. They were both believers because he shifts here, and he says to the rest. And the rest would be the rest of the married people who had these questions. He says this, I, not the Lord. What he means by that is not that what Paul's saying isn't authoritative. He's just saying Jesus never spoke to this issue. When Jesus was on the earth, we read through the gospels. No one came to him and said, hey, Jesus, I have a question. I'm following you now, but my husband or my wife is not. Should I divorce them to follow you? Jesus never had that come up, so he never said anything. So when Paul says to the rest, I say, I, not the Lord. Paul saying, I'm going to tell you what is right, but I don't have a direct statement from Jesus when he was on the earth. He says this, that if any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever, and she consents to live with him, he should not divorce her. If any woman has a husband who is an unbeliever, and he consents to live with her, she should not divorce him. Now, in our culture, we read that and go, who thinks that way anyway? So it's not it's not how we think. In their culture, both Jewish and Greco-Roman, there would have been some pull from the sense of, I've changed my religious allegiance. If they were Jewish, I've accepted Jesus as Messiah. Which the Jewish synagogue in Corinth said no to. They said he's not the Messiah. And so you would have been leaving that group. If you were Greco-Roman, and you accepted Jesus, you were leaving all the Roman gods that you had been worshiping, and everyone, almost everyone in Corinth would have been religious in some way that weren't just secularist, kind of atheists out there. You would have been connected with some sort of deity. that you had been worshiping. And now one of the members of that couple has chosen a different God. And that would be Jewish or Greco-Roman. People in the church would have had this issue. And the thinking is, if I'm still connected to my spouse who's not a believer, am I basically invalidated in my beliefs? Does my unbelieving spouse basically invalidate my belief in Jesus and pull me away from him? Not just in, like, I may do things I don't want to do, or I won't be as commit as I could be, but actually negate that commitment. And so they're asking, should I separate from that unbelieving spouse? And Paul says if your spouse consents to live with you, you should not. If the unbelieving spouse says, I'm okay that you are now a follower of Jesus. I'm not going anywhere. He says, then you would stay there. The believer is not to initiate a divorce. He even gives a reason in the next verses for why he says this. He says this, for the unbelieving husband is made holy because of his wife. And the unbelieving wife is made holy, because of her husband. Otherwise, your children would be unclean. But as it is, they are holy. And we read this and go, what is Paul talking about? What, so, I'm married. I have an unbelieving wife, and she's made holy, and my kids are made holy, and so I shouldn't leave her. When we hear the word holy in our ears, we tend to think saved, like they're saved, because Paul called the Corinthians holy. At the beginning of this letter, he says, I'm writing to all the saints, to the holy ones in Corinth. And this word is often used about those who are believers. The word itself means something that is in proximity to God. And so the closer something is to God, the holier that thing is. And so you could have, like, in the temple in the Old Testament, forks and plates and things that were in the temple area, and they were holy because of their proximity to God. It doesn't mean by default that the person is saved. But what Paul is saying, he says, to the believing spouse, don't leave your unbelieving spouse, because they are in closer proximity to God, than if you left them. that they get to hear the gospel. They get to hear the truth of who Jesus is. They're influenced by that. Your children are influenced by that. In this language, where it says, otherwise your children would be unclean. Again, our modern thinking, when we think unclean, we just think my kid needs a bath. It's like husband, if you take your kid away from your wife, they're going to be unclean. They're not going to get bathed anymore. They're never going to be, you know, it's going to be stinky. That's not what he means. Unclean in scripture has to do with, again, ability to be in proximity to God. And the thought in the 1st century would have been that an unclean thing, a thing that's unholy, contaminates a thing that's clean. We get this not within kind of religious language, but within health language. We're in flu season. I read someone's Facebook post today, one of our members who said, the flu hit me at 3 a.m. I wiped out. I can't even get out of the house. As soon as someone gets the flu. We know how this works, right? If you go in the room and you're healthy and you're wonderful with someone who has the flu, Does your health pour over into the person with the flu, or does the person with the flu sickness pour over into you? We just know you're going to contaminate me. Go in that room, close the door. I don't want to be around you. I'm healthy, you're not. You're going to infect me. I'm not going to infect you. That's how they would have thought of holiness. The unbelieving spouse, distance from God would pull the believing spouse away. Paul says nope, it's the opposite. Your proximity to God as a believer pulls your unbelieving spouse. Not to being saved. We'll see that in a second, but closer to God, and he used this word of holy. And he says, do not divorce them. Don't separate from them. But then he does give this exception. Maybe this was happening in Corinth. Maybe it had happened. But he tells us that a believer is not bound to marriage when an unbelieving spouse separates. He says, but if the unbelieving partner separates, Let it be so. In such cases, the brother or sister is not enslaved. God has called you to peace. For how do you know, wife, whether you will save your husband? Or how do you know husband, whether you will save your wife? There, it's obvious that when Paul said, the unbelieving spouse is made holy, and the kids are made holy, by being in a relationship, it doesn't mean they're saved, because he said, how do you know you're going to save them? How do you know they're going to accept Christ? So if they want to leave, if the unbelieving spouse wants to leave, he says, you can let them leave. You consent to that. He even says, at the end of the chapter, if you look down at verse 39, then we're going to have to go through next week's sermon, but Paul ends this section with this. A wife is bound to her husband as long as he lives. But if her husband dies, she is free to be married to whom she wishes, only in the Lord, that only in the Lord is by saying. Mary a believer, but he uses this word, you're bound, as long as she's alive. Here in this verse, he says that in such cases, the brother sister is not enslaved. When we hear that word, we think Paul may be saying something like, oh, marriage is the old ball and chain. I'm just enslaved. Go read Ephesians 5. Paul has a really high view of marriage. Marriage isn't a bad thing for Paul. His language that we translate enslaved is legal language. And in the 1st century, about half the population, was in legal slavery, to the other half of the population. And when he says to the wife, she's not bound once her husband has passed away. It's legal language about, are you under the relationship and the obligations of that relationship? And here, when he says, they are not enslaved, he's not being derogatory towards marriage in general. He's just saying, if the unbelieving spouse leaves, let them divorce. You're not bound to follow them. You're free now from that relationship and its structure because you don't know if you would save them. The unbeliever can leave. The believer is called not to initiate that separation because they think that somehow the unbelieving spouse is going to make them unholy. Now, these are 2 issues, again, that I think in our day and age, in our culture, maybe some of you are wrestling with. And if you are, I'll give you some quick application. If you're thinking, I want to be an ascetic, which means I just want to have my no physical contact. I'm gonna eat bread and drink a little bit of water every day. That's all I'm gonna do. And I'm gonna have no relations with my wife. Because I think physicality is a bad thing, that the body is inherently a bad thing. If you believe that, you're wrong from scripture, God gave us bodies, Paul tells us explicitly to enjoy the meritory relationships. So if you're thinking, maybe I should divorce my spouse so we can be ascetics. Paul would say, don't do that. If you're married to an unbeliever, and you're hearing you're a believer, and your spouse is an unbeliever, and you think somehow they're making you unholy, they're not. You're bringing them closer to God. And so don't initiate a divorce by thinking, I think my unbelieving spouse is making me unholy. by just being married to them, just the relationship is making me not able to be with God. Not in your own morality, not like, I don't behave well. My spouse is pulling me away to do things I shouldn't. That's not what Paul's talking about. He's talking about like a status that you're in. You are not. You bring your spouse and children closer to God in proximity. But I imagine that's not most of you. You didn't have the same issue that the Corinthians had. We have different issues and they're still pointed at marriage. So what can we do today? As followers of Christ, we must protect and defend our marriages. I think that's what Paul's getting at even in Corinth. And so first, one of the things we can do is honor the holiness of marriage. God created marriage in Genesis 2. He's the one that established it. He's the one that upholds it, Ephesians 5 points that Jesus was saying that marriage reflects his love for the church. Paul points that out for us. Jesus in Mark 10 points all the way back to Genesis 2 to say, from the beginning, this is what God intended marriage to be. Now we live in a broken and a fallen world, but we can so easily diminish the holiness of marriage and just turn into a social contract. that has nothing to do with God in it at all. And the marriage vows just become almost the same as, I'm going to buy this car, and as long as the car works, as long as I like it, I'll keep it, but if not, I'll get rid of it and get a different car. The traditional wedding vows built on scripture are till death do is part, God's holy ordinance. Honor the holiness of marriage. Paul says in Ephesians 5, therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the 2 shall become one flesh. This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. Our marriages are about far more than just husband and wife and kids. They're a reflection of Christ in the church. And our culture is diminishing marriage. And in ways that I don't even think we recognize, and we're not paying attention. I got 2 graphs, I want to show you, that just highlight this a little bit. The 1st one we'll put up there is median age at 1st marriage. So how old were you when you 1st got married? Back in around 1935? It was about 21 for women and 25, a little over 24 for guys. That dropped significantly in the 40s, and then has gone up quite steadily into the 2020s. So that for the average guy, first marriage is after 30, somewhere around 31 years old. For the average girl, the average, the first marriage is around 28 and a half. So that's just average. That's not immoral or sinful? I got married when I was 30, but our culture has pushed merits further and further out for other things to take place. It used to be get out of high school, then it's get out of college, then it's get a master's degree. All the things that we put into our life. And we just see that first, the age of first marriage going up, which makes marriage not as critical. The longer we push it off, the more we're saying, is it that important in a society? Do you have to have it? The second one, I think, is a little more disturbing. This is a survey of 12th graders that they do every year, back in around 1975. Around 74% of 12th graders expected to get married. That went up, peaked around 2008, and then since 2010 has been declining steadily. So that today, a little over 70% of seniors in high school would expect to get married. This isn't just because they all think they're losers and they can't find a lady or a man and all that. It's like, I don't think I'm going to get married. I don't think I want to get married. There's a sharp decline in the younger generation over the idea of marriage, that it's not needed. It's an outdated institution. It's an annoyance. Why would we need to do this? We, as a church, need to uphold and honor the holiness of marriage. The kids in our church need to hear about that. Your kids need to hear about that. Everyone needs to be hearing that marriage is this holy thing that we should be a part of. That points back to the sacredness of it. That leads to, if you're married, invest in your marriage as a holy calling. Last week, Matt spoke about having a good offense and a good defense in marriage. We need to be protecting and defending our marriage. So what are we doing in our marriages, to make them better? continue to pursue your spouse. We do really well. Guys are probably worse at this than girls, but we do really well on the front end, like, to get a wife, then once we have a wife, it's like, okay, good. We're locked in here. We can just settle into, you know, whatever else we do. And both of us, I mean, spouses out that way. You say Mary long enough, they're probably a season in there where you went, we didn't pursue each other as much. Oh, that pursuit looks differently. But what do we do to defend our marriages? We communicate with each other. We go on dates together. We offer here at the church a course called fierce marriage. that it's not, hey, if your marriage is a wreck, come to this course. It can be that, but it can be, hey, here's a great thing to do just to strengthen what's already healthy, what's already good. to meet with other couples. There's just a whole host of ways that you can defend your marriage and strengthen it. If you're married to an unbeliever here, Again, Paul says, don't divorce that person. I don't think that's, again, on the radar from most people who are here who are believers who have an unbelieving spouse, but pray for them and seek their salvation. Peter, in his 1st letter, said it this way in verse chapter 3, verses one and two. He said, likewise, wives be subject to your own husband so that even if some do not obey the word, they may be one without a word by the conduct of the wives, when they see your respectful and pure conduct. So if you're married to someone who's not a believer, you should be saying, how can I strengthen my marriage to draw them closer to God, to let them hear the gospel, the truth of who he is? Invest in your marriage as a holy calling, and then finally, ask for help if your marriage is hurting. We all go through times when our marriages aren't the best they've ever been. And some people go through times where marriage is really, really hard. And there's deep grief involved in it. I'm the type, I'm pretty stubborn when it comes to my physical health. I'll go to the doctor once a year because they give a free physical in my medical plan. And so I go in January, they tell me things are okay, and I go, see you next year, Doc. And if I start feeling bad, I'm not going to the doctor, my wife sees the option. She smarter than me. She starts feeling bad, says, I need to call the doctor and set up an appointment. I said, why would you do that? You don't get worse, and you have to go to the ER, or you get better, and you don't have to go to the doctor. So just wait. Because I would just wait. My advice is not to just wait. There's a reason when we start feeling bad, that we medically go to someone and say, hey, something's wrong, something's out of balance. could you help me with that? Can you help me figure that out? We need to go before it gets so bad that we need to go to the ER. But if you're here and your marriage is such that you need the ER, reach out. Reach out for help. that our marriages are too important to say we can figure this out ourselves. that the sacredness of marriage. And the goodness of marriage is such that we should fight for it, not just individually or as a couple, but as a community. Reach out, you can fill out that connect card and just put, want to talk to a pastor. That's all you have to say. You don't have to write anything about what's going on. You can find any of our pastors say, hey, can I talk? We need some help. Whatever level you're at within that. Or you can go, we don't have anything going wrong. We just want some good ideas of how to strengthen our marriage. But we know that marriage when it's not going well, brings grief and pain and hurt. and that we may be hesitant to reach out, and ask for help, and ask for others from embarrassment, or shame, or fear, that those won't go away, if you check a connect card, it just means I checked it, so I'm going to deal with it. don't want to go to the doctor. I don't want to go to the medical doctor. I don't like them. And so when I go, it's like, I don't have a choice. I'm gonna go. I don't feel good about going, but I'm going. They tend to work. They've worked so far for me. And so I just encourage you, if you're at this part, ask for help if your marriage is hurting, to uphold the sacredness of marriage. to avoid the ramifications that, again, Paul wasn't talking about directly. He's not talking about just marriage in general. He's talking about two very specific situations in the 1st century that Corinth was going through, but the principles can apply further out. That as followers of Christ, We must protect and defend our marriages. Will you join me in prayer? Father, we come to you this morning. And everyone in this room is at a different place, at a different situation in life. Father, we pray that you would help us to see the beauty and the sacredness of marriage, the great gift that you have given up. And Father, we praise you for our marriages. For those that are in a healthy spot, and for those that are struggling. Father, we pray that you would draw us close to you. And for those who are here, who are struggling, that you would give hope through your spirit and wisdom, Father, help us to reflect your love for your church well, and that you would be honored and glorified in our life. Father, we love you. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.