Tag: Marriage

Bride and groom playfully pull a rope during their wedding ceremony while guests cheer.

Whole and Fair Aren’t the Same

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I’ve got another blast from the past for you today. This one is the next part of the marriage series we pulled back out of the mothballs last week. We live in a culture that highly values equality and fairness. That commitment plays itself out in just about every area of our lives including our marriages. Marriages are supposed to be equal relationships of equal partners, right? Well, it depends on what you mean by equal. In this message we are going to do a deep dive into equality, talk about the kind of equality that does and doesn’t exist in marriage, and set our sights on something entirely higher than that (and far more consistent with the teachings of the apostles) as the goal we should be striving for together. Let’s take a look.

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Smiling couple walking through a busy evening street market

Becoming a Soulmate

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We’re going to go with a throwback post today. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about relationships and what it takes to really get them right. As a pastor, I tend to hear about everybody’s junk at some point. It may not be because they tell me about it directly, but I almost always manage to hear about it anyway. I can think of at least three couples who are at various points of struggling in their relationship without really trying. And, wouldn’t you know it, one of the posts that went live today almost ten years ago was a sermon I preached in a series on marriage. Our culture preaches the gospel of soulmates. According to this gospel, there is a person out there who is your soulmate. All you have to do is find them, and everything will be sunshine and rainbows from that point forward. And yet, what if something happens that leaves you thinking the person you thought was yours…isn’t anymore? Does that mean you were wrong this whole time? Nope, it means you’ve been thinking about it wrong the whole time. Let’s talk a walk down the blog’s memory lane today and have a conversation about relationships and marriage that still feels remarkably fresh almost ten years later.

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Volunteers gardening; sign reads “URBAN ÖLYMPUS COMMUNITY GARDEN – FEEDING OUR NEIGHBORS.”

Faithful Words and Righteous Living

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“Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge, but one who hates correction is stupid. One who is good obtains favor from the Lord, but he condemns a person who schemes. No one can be made secure by wickedness, but the root of the righteous is immovable. A wife of noble character is her husband’s crown, but a wife who causes shame is like rottenness in his bones. The thoughts of the righteous are just, but guidance from the wicked is deceitful. The words of the wicked are a deadly ambush, but the speech of the upright rescues them. The wicked are overthrown and perish, but the house of the righteous will stand.” (Proverbs‬ ‭12‬:‭1‬-‭7‬ ‭CSB‬‬ – Read the chapter)

I was watching a new Batman cartoon the other day. In the episode, a crime boss was being threatened by a man he had ruined publicly and psychologically. The crime boss lived in a huge mansion guarded by more than a dozen well-armed and well-paid men. He scoffed at a warning call he received to take cover because he believed himself to be secure. He wasn’t. If he had listened to Solomon here, he might have been okay. His perceived security was all rooted in his wickedness, yet wickedness provided no real security at all. Let’s talk about this and the other proverbs in this first set from Proverbs 12.

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Two hikers helping each other climb a rocky mountain ledge

Exercising Your Advantages

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“Do nothing out of selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility consider others as more important than yourself. Everyone should look not to his own interests, but rather to the interests of others.” (Philippians 2:3-4 CSB – Read the chapter)

I haven’t watched a whole lot of TV content lately, and as a result, I haven’t been doing the media reviews I normally do on Fridays. Actually, of late, these Friday posts have been a bit of a grabbag. Some days, I’m not sure what I’m going to write until pretty late in the game. Today is no exception. But God is faithful and life manages to keep churning out things worth talking about. In any event, I was having a conversation about marriage last night. We were talking specifically about the roles husbands and wives play and should play in the relationship. One of the statements we were reacting to was this: “I think we will be happier if there is an even balance of power in the relationship.” In a culture that is obsessed with power and who has how much, that’s a pretty significant statement to consider because your reaction is going to have a pretty significant impact to how you pursue your relationship. Let’s talk about it for a few minutes.

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Love Always Looks Up

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For the last few weeks, we have been talking about marriage from the standpoint of the Scriptures. We have talked about the main problem in marriage (sin), what God created it for (to make us more like Him), as well as some practical things we can do to make it better (practice submission and aim for holiness). Today we are finishing up this series by talking about the thing that has been rather noticeably missing in our conversation thus far: love. The Beatles were wrong that love is all you need, but it’s really important all the same. Let’s talk about how we can get that right to the benefit of our marriages and all the other relationships in our life.

Love Always Looks Up

When I do premarital counseling with a couple, one of the things we always talk about toward the end of the journey is where their expectations for the marriage are versus what the reality of marriage will likely be. It’s not necessarily an encouraging conversation (although I try not to make it too much of a bummer), but it is often a helpful one. What we do is that I give them a list of statements describing various aspects of marriage and how they think it will be. The couples are then supposed to mark which of the statements they think are true, and which are false. 

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