Tag: Getting marriage right

More Like Him

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It is necessary and often good to talk about the challenges facing a marriage. Until we properly understand the nature of the problem, we don’t know what it is we are trying to solve. However, unless we have a positive vision and understanding of what marriage was designed for in the first place, we’re not going to be able to point things in a direction that can help prevent future challenges. Last time, as we started our new teaching series, The Journey of a Lifetime, looking at what the Scriptures have to say about marriage, we identified the problem: sin. This week we are going to look at what marriage was designed for in the beginning so that we can walk away from the problem in the right direction.

More Like Him

I’m going to show you an image of something, and I want to see if you know what it is? For some of you, this is probably going to be really easy, but a few of you might not have any idea. In fact, I’m going to show you a couple of different images for us to talk about. Let’s start with that first image. What is the thing sticking up out of the container here? Be honest with me now: How many of you knew this was a potato masher without being told or without cheating by reading the answer in your copy of my manuscript before the service even started? How many of you genuinely didn’t know what this thing was and wouldn’t have known without being told? Everyone else apparently is just confused. 

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Identifying the Problem

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Marriage is one of the single greatest journeys any of us will ever take. It is capable of taking us to places of emotional and relational and physical and spiritual fulfillment that are hard to reach by any other means. That doesn’t mean people not so called are stuck incomplete. God calls and cares for them in special ways that go beyond what marriage can offer. But for those called to it, it can be absolutely incredible. At the same time, marriage is hard. It is hard enough that most marriages don’t make it for the lifetime the man and woman promised to each other at the altar. Everyone needs a little help and encouragement along the way. For the next few weeks, we are going to be doing just that in a new teaching series called, The Journey of a Lifetime. In this first part, we are going to identify the primary problem besetting our relationships. Let’s talk about it!

Identifying the Problem

Most of the stories we heard growing up ended with “happily ever after.” And, if the story involved a prince or princess in any way, what was it that likely preceded that famous tag line? A wedding. The characters fell in love, they got married, and they lived—say it with me—“happily ever after.” But did they? I mean, what happened after the credits rolled and the happy couple started to discover that one of them snores and one of them hogs all the covers. One prefers to sleep right in the middle of the bed surrounded by 8,000 pillows, while the other wants just a sheet and a pillow that’s only a step above putting a piece of paper under your head. One showers in the morning and the other at night. One is a morning person, and the other doesn’t honestly function until after the second pot—not cup—of coffee has been consumed. One is content with a bit of chaos, while the other likes to have everything neatly in order. One is always right and the other is never wrong. In other words, they start to find out that marriage is hard. Sometimes it’s really hard. And somewhere along the way, they are tempted to just throw up their hands and walk away because something created by God for our good and His glory couldn’t possibly be intended to be this hard. 

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Couple walking hand in hand on a coastal trail at sunset with ocean and hills in background

Delighting in the Goodness of Marriage

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“Drink water from your own cistern, water flowing from your own well. Should your springs flow in the streets, streams in the public squares? They should be for you alone and not for you to share with strangers. Let your fountain be blessed, and take pleasure in the wife of your youth. A loving deer, a graceful doe—let her breasts always satisfy you; be lost in her love forever.” (Proverbs‬ ‭5‬:‭15‬-‭19‬ ‭CSB‬‬ – Read the chapter)

After God made the first woman, He brought her to the first man to be his partner, his wife. And the first man, seeing her for the first time, was so excited that he broke into song. God designed marriage to be a good thing. He created it to be good for us and glorifying for Him. Today, though, it is often treated as something less than that. Yet when we get it right, it is a still a blessing. Let’s talk about some of Solomon’s wisdom for doing that.

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How to Talk Right

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A whole lot of our relationships are tied up in communication. This is especially true for our marriages. If we want to have the kind of marriage we desire, communicating well is going to be an essential part of the process of getting there. And, if we have put in place negative communication patterns along the way, getting this right is going to require us to get back to the basics in order to fix our foundation before building properly moving forward. In this next part of our teaching series, Back to the Basics, we are talking about how to communicate well in marriage. Let’s dive in.

How to Talk Right

The largest cruise ship in the world right now is the Icon of the Seas from Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines. It’s big on a scale that’s hard to imagine. For starters, it’s as long as four football fields back-to-back-to-back. It weighs approximately 250,000 tons. It’s 20 decks high—that is, it’s as tall as a 20-story building. It can hold up to more than 10,000 people between passengers and crew. You could take the entirety of Oakboro on a cruise…times three…and still have room to spare. It’s so big that if you were to completely hollow it out, you could fit the Titanic inside of it with enough room to still play a football game at one end. In short: It’s enormous. Exceedingly enormous. So big, that you really can’t grasp it until and unless you’re standing in front of it looking up. Even then, it’s still hard to grasp. By comparison, though, the mechanism for steering it—the rudder—is remarkably small. Sure, the rudders of ships scale up with the size of the ship, but by comparison to the whole thing, it seems incredible that such a small thing can successfully steer something so large. 

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Love God First

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Marriage is something that affects all of our lives in one way or another. Most people are going to be married at some point in their lives. And, the various authors of the Scriptures have some things to say about marriage. This all means that as a church, it’s something we need to talk about from time to time. For the next four weeks, that’s exactly what we are going to do in a brand-new series called Back to the Basics. We are going to talk about four adjustments we can make in our marriages at a very fundamental level that will help put us on a track toward the relationships we want most. Let’s get start with today with a conversation about getting our priorities right.

Love God First

We do a lot of building in my house. The exact thing being built varies, but the building itself is consistent. Perhaps the most common building that happens is with Legos. Now, of course, you can build anything you want with Legos if you have the right bricks. The sky really is the limit in terms of the creative potential of that particular medium. Most of the Lego building that goes on in my house, though, is with pre-designed sets. These sets come with all the pieces you need to build whatever it is, packaged neatly in numbered bags, and with a set of instructions that walks you step-by-step through the process of building. Pro-tip, though: Don’t open all the bags at once. That makes the building a lot more tedious. Depending on the complexity of the build, the instructions range from fairly short to book length. But however long they happen to be, the most important thing is that you follow them carefully. If you use the wrong piece or put the right piece in the wrong place, that’s going to cause trouble later on in your building process. I can remember some sets I got mostly built only to discover that I had placed a piece incorrectly dozens of pages before. I had to go back and systematically take things apart in order to get it straightened out the right way. It was not very much fun. 

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