Tag: Marriage

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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Naked

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While playing hide-and-seek is a fun game for kids, in the context of our lives, we want to be found. This is especially true in marriage. We want our marriages to be loving and intimate. We want to know and be known by our spouses. Intimacy, though, is tough. In this second part of our teaching series, Back to the Basics, we are talking about some of the things that can interrupt intimacy in our relationships and what we can do to get it restored. Thanks for reading and sharing.

Naked

I love playing hide-and-seek. I think I always have. I don’t play it as much anymore as I used to—my kids have mostly grown out of it—but it’s still a lot of fun. I remember one time playing with the boys at my folks’ house years ago. They have a loft area overlooking the living room. There’s a linen closet up there that’s really big. I got in there behind the blankets that were on the bottom, and they couldn’t find me. I had to finally start texting clues as to my location to Lisa so she could give them some hints. It was an awesome hiding place. But, the best part of the experience was being found, and the laughter that echoed through the house in that moment. When playing hide-and-seek, it’s always fun to find a killer spot. But if you stay hidden forever, eventually it gets boring. The real excitement of hide-and-seek is in being found. Deep down, we all really want to be found. 

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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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Digging in Deeper: Romans 1:26-27

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“For this reason God delivered them over to disgraceful passions. Their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. The men in the same way also left natural relations with women and were inflamed in their lust for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the appropriate penalty of their error.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Hot topics tend to be faddish and cyclical. An issue that is absolutely crucial to have an opinion on in one season doesn’t even register on the radar in another. The issue of the morality of homosexual practice is not the issue in our culture that it once was not all that long ago. This is mostly because as a culture we have decided it’s fine. And as the church has continued losing cultural power and position, most people just don’t care what the church thinks about it anymore. But this doesn’t mean the position of the Scriptures has changed. And it doesn’t mean the culture doesn’t dislike the position any less. These two verses aren’t terribly comfortable to talk about, but here they are, so let’s do it.

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Digging in Deeper: Exodus 24:3-8

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“Moses came and told the people all the commands of the Lord and all the ordinances. Then all the people responded with a single voice, ‘We will do everything that the Lord has commanded.’ And Moses wrote down all the words of the Lord. He rose early the next morning and set up an altar and twelve pillars for the twelve tribes of Israel at the base of the mountain. Then he sent out young Israelite men, and they offered burnt offerings and sacrificed bulls as fellowship offerings to the Lord. Moses took half the blood and set it in basins; the other half of the blood he splattered on the altar. He then took the covenant scroll and read it aloud to the people. They responded, ‘We will do and obey all that the Lord has commanded.’ Moses took the blood, splattered it on the people, and said, ‘This is the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you concerning all these words.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the things I always talk about with couples when doing their premarital counseling is that marriage is supposed to be a covenant, not a contract. We don’t distinguish very well between those two ideas today, and often think about marriage in contract terms rather than covenantal ones much to the detriment of our marriage relationships. In the ancient world, people were more accustomed to the idea of covenants and better understood just how serious they really were. After having heard the basic contours of the covenant God wanted to make with them, the people agreed to His terms and went forward with the covenant. Let’s take a look here at part of how this process unfolded.

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