-by Tom Brennan
Marriage 31
You are an insecure person. That is
not an insult but rather a simple statement of fact. How do I know? Because you
are a human being. Some of us are insecure and hide it behind a false front of
machismo and bravado. Others of us are insecure yet refuse to admit it. Still
others of us are insecure, and let it bleed through into our personality
constantly. We call the latter drama queens. The truth is all of us are drama
queens in one way or another. Some are just more visible than others.
Disappointment often brings that
insecurity to the fore. Our thinking, feelings, and even sometimes our speech
and actions fall victim to it. Our inner man is always weak, yet sometimes it
is weaker than at other times, or perhaps I should say more noticeably weak. We
notice it. Others notice it. Sometimes both. We lose a job and cannot find
another. We are forced into bankruptcy or lose a home to foreclosure. Our
children rebel against us and the Lord. Our besetting sin gets the upper hand
in a way that seems final. Our marriage develops serious stress fractures. Such
examples could be multiplied ad infinitum. The result is an inward (and
sometimes outward) "I'm a loser" type of attitude or feeling.
The real issue will not be found in
the list I just gave. The actual problem is that God never designed us to get
our self-worth and emotional security from that which we personally accomplish.
Nebuchadnezzar looked at the empire he built through the lens of its greatest
city and uttered the infamous line, Is not this great Babylon which I have
built? (Daniel 4.30) No, it was not. It was not great nor had he built it.
It was temporarily impressive because the Lord had designed it to accomplish
something in His purpose. And God had to take it away from him via taking him
away from it in order to reveal that to him.
God did not design us to get our
self-worth from any human accomplishment or relationship; He designed us to get
our self-worth and, thus, our emotional security from what He did and does for
us. He made us in His own image. (Psalm 8) He valued us so highly and
loved us so much He sacrificed His own Son for us. (John 3.16) I am
valuable, I am worth something because I am worth something in His eyes. The
proof is not that something is going right in my life; the proof is the price
the Creator was willing to pay for my soul.
What does this have to do with
marriage and the home? Only everything. I am not a worthless human being if my
marriage dissolves. My life is not a waste if my children rebel. Both of those
will hurt indescribably should they happen to you, but they do not mean that
you are a loser. You were not a winner when your marriage was sweet, and your
children were obedient; you are not a loser if the opposite becomes true. You
are a winner, so to speak, because you are valuable in your Lord’s eyes, made
in His image, redeemed by His blood, purchased for His own purposes.
Emotional security can only come from
one source: Him. Millennia ago, the sweet psalmist of Israel expressed this
truth in the broken shards of Psalm 62. My soul, wait thou only God; For my
expectation is from him. Find your all in all in Him, your meaning and
purpose in life, your emotional security, your expectations and fulfilments. All
my springs are in thee. (Psalm 87.7)
I am not saying the state of your
marriage does not matter; it obviously does. But your self-worth is not defined
by it. It is defined by Him.
Marriage 30
We spent quite a few weeks earlier in
this series looking at each partner’s scriptural responsibilities in marriage.
I do not remember anything in which one partner was to parent the other.
Certainly, the husband is to lead his family spiritually, including his wife,
but that does not mean he is supposed to punish her.
In the mid-16th century,
Richard Taverner issued a new English Bible. It contained minor revisions of an
earlier one, the Matthews Bible. It is mostly remembered for an oddity, a note
in the margin alongside I Peter 3.7. Likewise, ye husbands, dwell with them
according to knowledge, giving honour unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel,
and as being heirs together of the grace of life; that your prayers be not
hindered. Taverner’s marginal note took this verse in a rather unusual
direction. “And if she be not obedient and helpful unto him, endeavoreth to
beat the fear of God into her head, that thereby she may be compelled to learn
her duty and to do it.” For this reason, Taverner’s edition of the Matthews
Bible is known in history as the wife beater’s bible.
Although few married couples conduct
themselves in such a manner, thankfully, what they do instead is only
marginally different in effect. When they do not like what the other person is
doing, they hold something back to get even with them or teach them a lesson.
The (dys) functional idea is, "Well if I don't do ____________, then he
(or she) will realize how it feels when they don't do _____________."
Punishment, in plain language.
At this point, I would like to pose a
most pertinent question. Is this the scripturally mandated manner in which we
are supposed to respond to personal trespass? Then came Peter to him, and
said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Till
seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but,
Until seventy times seven. (Matthew 18.21-22) To which Paul expands
beautifully in I Corinthians 13. Charity suffereth long, and is kind;
charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, Doth not
behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh
no evil; Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; Beareth all
things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. You
can strain that with a cheesecloth, and you will not find any punishment.
I beg you to listen to this next
sentence. It is not your job to fix your partner. Husband, it is your job to
love and to lead and to provide for her. Wife, it is your job to respect and to
follow him. Both of you, it is your job to minister the one to the other. But
it is not your job to fix them. There is nothing in the Bible that would say
such at all.
In addition, not only is it unbiblical
to punish your partner in an effort to change their behavior, but it is not
even practical. How often do sanctions via the United Nations work on a rogue
country? Zilch. More often than not, what develops is an antagonistic
relationship ala the US/Iran/North Korea, rather than an adjustment of their
actions to conform to our desires. Punishing your partner will not make your
marriage heavenly; it will produce another Cold War.
Emerson Eggerichs says it this way in
his book, Love and Respect. “The rule that never changes is: you can’t
get what you need by depriving your partner of what your partner needs.”
You think you can. But it is a
myth.
Marriage 29
Throughout Scripture, there is a
primacy placed on seeking counsel. Thou shalt guide me with thine counsel,
And afterward receive me to glory. (Psalm 73.24) Where no counsel is, the
people fall: But in the multitude of counsellors there is safety. (Proverbs
11.14) I could easily cite dozens more.
Life is a matter of relationships. If
you do not believe me, ask the people in Western North Carolina what matters to
them now. It is not their career, their stuff, or their reputation. What
matters to them is the people they love. It then follows that if life is a
matter of relationships, we should certainly be getting counsel about how to
better maintain and improve those relationships. Foremost amongst these
relationships is marriage. Put plainly, seeking counsel in reference to your
marriage is certainly a scriptural and wise thing.
Why, then, am I criticizing it?
Look again at the wording of this
particular marriage myth: seek counsel when you are unhappy. Assuming this is
the approach, this makes your goal in seeking marital counseling one of
happiness. However, it should not be the counselor's goal to make you happy,
nor should it be your goal.
Why not? First, because this is a
pragmatic approach, and though Scripture does not totally rule out pragmatism,
we certainly should not lead with it philosophically. Second, if happiness is
my overriding goal in my marriage, I have opened the door to ungodly thoughts
and actions. After all, if they make us happy, what right do you have to tell
me to avoid them? Third, many divorces happen for precisely this reason –
happiness is the goal, and it is slowly determined that it cannot take place
within the marriage; ergo, the marriage is dissolved.
Happiness ought never be a goal;
happiness is a byproduct. It is the incidental outcome obtained on the pathway
of obedience to the Lord. Of the 137 times the word "counsel" is
found in the Word of God, it is never connected, in a good sense, with becoming
happy. It is connected with knowing what God wants you to do. It is also connected
with learning how to do what you already know God wants you to do. In other
words, counsel is connected with obedience.
Make no mistake, I am for marital
counseling. But it is not to make you happy; it is to make you obedient. What
does God want you to do in this situation? How exactly do you do that, or how
can you do that better? Seek marital counseling for these things, beloved, and
happiness will come by inevitable default.
Marriage 28
Single people often make two cardinal
mistakes while dating. Each is similarly different than the other. The woman is
not blind to the man's weaknesses, but she has a plan for that. She is going to
fix him. After they get married, she is going to go to work hammer and tongs
and turn him into the man his mother should have. On the other hand, the man
contemplates his future bride with unmitigated delight. She is alluringly
beautiful and sweetly endearing. The wedding will encapsulate her in a
chrysalis of amber. This charming creature of youth and beauty and tenderness
will be his to his dying day.
They are both wrong.
Let us examine each briefly in turn.
My dear fellow, I hate to break it to
you, but the footsteps of time chase all of us down. Solomon tells us to
rejoice with the wife of our youth not with our youthful wife. (Proverbs
5.18) God designed women to be constantly changing, physically and
emotionally. I do not mean He designed them to be unstable. I mean, He created
them to meet the varied needs of the husband and children around them, needs
that shift with the passing of time. As I pen this, I am fifty-one. My children
are twenty-two, twenty, and fifteen. If Mandy was the same woman now as the one
I married in 1999, my children and I would be in a world of hurt. But she is
not. She is the same individual, but the decades of life in between have
wrought some changes. If I fight that or resent that, I will have a constant
erosion at the center of my marriage.
My dear lady, I hate to break it to
you, but first off, if he will not change for you as he seeks to win you, why
would he after he has? Second, as men age, they generally become more resistant
to change. That is why old men wear the pants they bought thirty years ago.
Their life often resembles a canyon worn deep by the river of time, channels
unchanged except for their depth. Third, you cannot change anyone; only the
Holy Spirit can. The king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord, as the rivers
of water: he turneth it whithersoever he will. (Proverbs 21.1) While you
can pray for the Lord to turn your husband, you must also accept it is beyond
your power to do so directly. Fourth, and most importantly, failure to
understand this produces a profoundly flawed marriage, one in which the wife
has either become a battleaxe of a nag that the husband flees from or one in
which the wife has so emasculated the husband he could not lead a horse to water.
What is the moral of the story? Man,
choose carefully, then be flexible as the Lord adjusts your wife for what you
and your family are going to need next. Do not sigh with regret as she grows
with the passing of the years. Woman, choose carefully, and then support your
husband as God goes to work, forming him into the image of the Saviour. Do not
mother him or nag him. Do not attempt to be his Holy Spirit. There is no
vacancy in the Trinity.
“I can change him.”
“She won’t ever change.”
Myths.
Marriage 27
I confess I do not much want to write
today's post. I fear it will be misunderstood. More than that, though, I am
afraid it will hurt people, good people, who will take my words in a judgmental
way I do not intend. Such is the case when you write about divorce. It is the
third rail – electrified and dangerous to touch. But I must if I am to write a
well-rounded series on marriage. More than that, I must if I am to convey to
the never-married and currently married people in my readership what I believe
they need to know. Or, at the least, consider.
In 2024, 673,000 marriages ended. A
small percentage initiate divorce because they want to marry someone else. This
small group will admit that the divorce is mostly their fault, though they will
often fault their partner for being unloving, thus driving them into the arms
of another. However, the typical person who sues for divorce has a long list of
grievances against the other party. Lack of commitment. Infidelity. Domestic
abuse. Incompatibility. Conflict. Financial pressure. Substance abuse. Etc.
That is a rather long list with some
ugly things on it. Put another way round, generally people divorce because they
feel their partner does not do _________, which they should, or that they do
__________, which they should not. Alternatively, it involves not what they do
but what they are, positively or negatively. Put bluntly, most people who
divorce do not think it was their fault the marriage dissolved. Statistically
speaking, 66% of men and 74% of women blame their partner primarily for the divorce. “Yes, I am sure this is partly my fault, but it is mostly their
fault. If they would have/If they wouldn’t have (fill in the blank) we would
probably still be married.”
That viewpoint is a significant
contributing factor to the possibility of divorce itself. If I tend to blame
them while exonerating myself, I am already on the road that may well end in
divorce court.
“That’s not fair, Pastor Brennan. You
don’t know my situation.”
You are right; I do not. Nevertheless,
while this blog post does not apply to every marital situation, it still
applies to most of them. And here is why: in my marriage, Mandy does not cause
me to be the way I am; she reveals the way I am.
Allow me to illustrate what I mean.
Yesterday, I set out to tackle an obscure corner of my patio that has become
overgrown with ground cover in the past few years. I wanted to put a wood rack
there, and it needed to be cleared out. In the process, while using a weed
whacker, I inadvertently sent a tiny particle of sand spinning through the air.
Somehow, it went around my glasses and lodged in my eye. The resulting
irritation was literal, I assure you. Unresolved, eventually, that sand may
well have produced an eye infection and potential blindness. Yet an oyster that
ingests sand solves the resulting irritation by secreting a substance around it
that eventually forms a pearl.
Was the sand the primary cause of the
results in the eye? No. If it were, the results in my eye and in the oyster
would be the same. It is, after all, the same substance. But the external
irritant was not the problem, really. The sand was the agent that revealed the
inner properties of the eye and the oyster.
This problem is as old as marriage
itself. And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave
me of the tree, and I did eat. (Genesis 3.12) Certainly, Eve bears guilt, but Adam bears
guilt also. He cannot simply blame her for the ensuing disaster. His bad
reaction to her wrong was just as much the cause of their crisis as her initial
wrong.
Blame is as automatic as breathing. We
like to blame others because it gets us off the hook. But divorce, though often
justified by blame, is usually at least just as much about my bad reaction as
it is about their bad actions.
Marriage reveals who you are more
clearly than any other human relationship. Many people do not like what they
see. Not in the other party, in themselves. So, to avoid seeing themselves
accurately in an unflattering way, they bail on the marriage, all the while
blaming it on the other person. They cannot handle the revelation of their own
shortcomings in reaction to their partner's flaws. Rather than deal with it
they walk away.
Some of you do not believe me yet. Let
me give you one final illustration. Why do so many people avoid reading the
Bible? James 1 likens the Word of God to a mirror. Those who do not want
to see how bad their actual condition is avoid the mirror rather than working
on the problem. Our flesh does not like to see itself for what it is – lustful,
bitter, lazy, proud, vindictive, jealous, angry, deceitful, weak, petty, and a
thousand other things. So, we avoid the Bible instinctively.
It is that same innate avoidance of
seeing ourselves as we really are that is so often at the heart of divorce. And
if I am right, divorce is not usually about my partner’s flaws as much as it is
about my own. And when I leave, I take my flaws with me, unchecked,
unmitigated, and unmortified. No matter how much I mollify myself by blaming my
partner.
Maybe, just maybe, divorce is not the
answer you think it is.
Marriage
26
Marriage
Myths: The Test Drive
"You would be a fool not to. How
else do you think you will know if you like it? It might not suit you at all.
It's such an important decision that you should gather all the information you
can about it before you make it. Only an idiot doesn't take a test drive."
That paragraph may well represent
wisdom about choosing a car, but it is absolute folly when selecting a husband
or a wife. Yet the idea that living together before marriage results in a
better chance at a lasting marriage is extremely popular. The last data I could
find from the Census Bureau (2016) estimates that 18 million people live
together as partners. That is triple what it was when I graduated from high
school in the early 90s. Furthermore, The Centers for Disease Control estimates
that 50% of all women under 30 will choose this route on the way to marriage.
Jesus said it so well in the Autumn
before His death: Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your
father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the
truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of
his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it. (John 8.44) Of the various
marriage myths we will examine for the next few weeks in this blog series,
surely this has to be the biggest and the most damaging. It is an utter lie.
Living together before marriage
violates God’s Word. Marriage is honorable in all, and the bed undefiled:
but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge. (Hebrews 13.4) The physical
act of marriage is not designed for a test drive. It is designed for the union
of two souls. It is designed to create the intimacy necessary for trust and
love to thrive. It is designed to produce children. It is designed to bring joy
to a couple who have risked everything on a life committed to each other. The
last thing God intended for it to be was a selfish, commitment-free mirage of a
hedonistic joy ride.
Ironically, the very pragmatism that
lies at its core would argue against entering a cohabitation living
arrangement. In a February 2010 report, the Centers for Disease Control found
that married couples ten years in who lived together prior to marriage divorced
at a rate of 40%; married couples ten years in who had not lived together prior
to marriage divorced at a rate of 34%. Apparently, the test drive theory is
faulty. Now, why would that be?
I propose the answer is relatively
simple. The vital element necessary to a successful marriage is commitment.
There is no other way to build a good marriage. At some point, and soon, every
marriage requires it. Living together as man and wife, mingling your past,
present, and future, sharing the same living space, reacting differently to the
same stimuli, experiencing health problems, legal issues, financial
difficulties, parenting pressures, and a thousand other things will push you
apart. In this scenario, when your dreamboat turns out to be a bit of a
shipwreck, commitment becomes the cement that binds you together. The married
couple who initially cohabited, however, bring a decreased sense of commitment
and an elevated sense of "we're trying this" to the relationship. It
does not take a rocket scientist to establish why the latter approach produces
a greater chance of divorce.
There are no better ideas than God's
ideas. Living together before marriage is a bad idea.
Note:
Today, I am answering a time-specific question from my mailbag. The series on
marriage will resume next week.
It is the only time I have seen my Dad
cry. We were standing together on a gravel parking lot in Indiana. We had just
unloaded my stuff, schlepping it up the stairs into my dorm room at
Hyles-Anderson College. It was just him and me. He looked at me, got a weird
choking sound in his throat, and said, “I feel like I’m losing my right arm.” I
had in me a curious mix of trepidation and excitement, with a dash of sorrow
for my parents thrown in. But it was time. Time for me to build my own life.
The world was my oyster. Let’s goooooooo!
There are several before and afters in
my life, events from which all that flowed was different than that which went
before. Leaving for college was one of those. As we speak, all across America,
young men and women are experiencing this precise moment in their lives. Just
this week, someone I care about left home to attend Bible college in another
state. They asked me for advice. Today’s post is my answer.
Here are eight things to keep when you go to college.
Keep Your Mind
Open
I do not know who said it first, but
it was well said: "A mind is like a parachute; it only functions when
open." I am known for being stubborn, for clinging with determination to
positions and ideas. I think there is wisdom in this, generally speaking. But
if you are not willing to listen to an alternate view or weigh the considered
merits of another idea, do not go to college. It will be a waste of time and
money.
If you have chosen your school carefully, then show up with a mind open to the influences you will find there. Obviously, one should never accept any idea or person whole cloth, but the main idea of going to school is learning something new to become something better. So soak it all in.
I am not talking about the truth. Truth, though debatable, is not relative or plural. But so much about life and ministry is. If you have grown up in a stable home and church environment you have been granted a huge blessing. By the same token, you also almost certainly have a rather narrow, parochial view formed by the culture of your home, your community, and your church. One of the great benefits of going away to college is not only exposure to an entirely different culture, but exposure to young people from a wide variety of cultures. College exposed me to a much wider perspective than I would have experienced otherwise. It expanded my vision, but only because I was receptive enough to keep my mind open.
Keep Your Walk
With God
There will never be a time or stage or
age in your life when you do not need the Lord. Your soul will always need to
be fed with the Word of God. Your spirit must needs constantly fly to the Lord
for refuge. And this is true no matter how rich the spiritual environment in
which you live.
You will be busy. Keep your walk with
God anyway. You will be pulled in ten different directions by priorities that
scream at you, demanding time and attention. Keep your walk with God anyway. If
you attend a Bible college, you will spend hours in the Word of God every day
of the week. Keep your walk with God anyway.
No professor or mentor can replace it. No spirit of enthusiasm can replace it. Constant chapel services and church services cannot replace it. Nothing can. The most important thing you will do each day while you are away at school is to carve out a few minutes alone with God somewhere. Open your Bible, open your heart, and let Him minister grace and truth to your soul and spirit.
Keep Your Budget
The typical independent Baptist young
person going to college is largely self-funding. In plain speech, you are
paying your own way. Many people will solemnly tell you what a crime that is. I
am not one of them. It is exceedingly helpful. It will push you, and you must
be pushed if you are going to develop into a helpful tool for the Lord's use. I
paid every dime necessary for the diploma that hangs on the wall in my office.
That process was as important to me as anything else that happened while I was in
school.
None of the above paragraph, though,
is the point. Here is the point: the only way you are ever going to accomplish
that is serious discipline – time management discipline, relationship
discipline, academic discipline, emotional discipline, and financial
discipline. A budget is not complicated. Your income must exceed your outgo.
Make one. Stick to it religiously. If you have to take a semester off to make
money, fine. If you have to eat bad dining hall food, fine. If you have to walk
to work in the rain and snow, fine. If you have to wash your clothes in the
sink, fine. But stay on budget.
I graduated with a Bachelor of
Theology degree four years after I enrolled, and I had zero debt when I walked
across that platform. I drove a beater, wore old clothes, and functioned on
little sleep because I worked so much, but I got that degree without debt. In
today’s world, and tomorrow’s too probably, that is priceless.
Keep your budget.
Keep Your Schedule
At first, college will feel like camp,
only better. Everyone will be excited. All the experiences will be fresh. You
will make new friends every day. The world will be happy with you, and you with
the world.
…for a time. Gradually and inevitably,
however, what was thrilling will become sheer drudgery. Emotion will not keep
you going; character will. Your body will demand more sleep; your character
will haul you out of bed in time (barely) for your first class. Your friends
will beckon to you at the snack shop; your character will send you back to an
empty dorm room to do your reading. Your mind will insist you cannot carry the
workload; character will prevent you from dropping a class. In our world, the
independent Baptist world, you cannot graduate from school without character.
That is awesome, actually.
When it is time for class, go to
class. When you have only twenty minutes to eat lunch, eat lunch in twenty
minutes. When your alarm goes off, get out of bed. Do the next right thing, no
matter what else you want to do at the moment. Live by schedule. Let it be the
boss of your life.
You can thank me later.
Keep Your Purity
I was startled to see him. I was in
California for a pastor's conference. It had been close to twenty years since I
had last seen him. In the intervening time, he had planted a church or two and
been faithful to the Lord. He still is.
He walked up to me, held out his hand,
and said, “Hello, Bro. Brennan, it is good to see you.” Awkwardly but
sincerely, I looked him in the eye, reached for that hand, and said something
similar. We parted a minute or two later, and I have not seen him since that
day.
Why does this matter? Because he
married my girlfriend. She and I dated for most of two years at college, and I
thought we were going to get married. Life went in a different direction. I am
thrilled with the woman God led me to and the family I have. I am sure he feels
the same as I do decades later.
Here is the thing: I looked him in the
eye and shook his hand, and my conscience was clear. I had nothing to be
ashamed of. I had taken nothing from him of what was rightfully his. There are
numerous reasons to cultivate moral purity – your relationship with God, to
keep a clear head, because you agreed to keep the rules, because immorality is
deceitful, etc. – but one that is rarely thought of is your conscience.
Keep your purity. Someday, you may find yourself shaking hands at a meeting two decades later, and your conscience will be mighty grateful to you.
Keep Your Roots
The early months of college are a
whirlwind of experiences, emotions, and relationships. Excellent. Plunge in.
Seriously, soak it all up. Throw open your mind and your heart and let the
world in. The teaching will be world-class. The music will make you shout. The
preaching will be endlessly interesting and convicting. The friendships will be
fast and deep.
…but do not forget the folks back
home. No matter where you go in life or who you become or who you become it
with, to your Mom and Dad, you are the same person. In a similar yet different
way, just as you will never outgrow your need for the Word of God, you will
never outgrow your parents. When you go home for the holidays, spend your first
evening with them. When you pass the hard test, tell them. When that first date
turns into the third or fourth, tell them. When you need prayer, tell them.
When you succeed or when you fail or when you just muddle along, share it with
them. You do not understand this yet, but you are their entire world. Try to
remember that when you are building your own world.
And do not forget the folks at your
home church either. They loved you, ministered to you, were patient with you,
taught you, served with you first. You will hear a thousand preachers better
than your pastor while you are at school, but never let him think that. Your
pastor is better than all of them put together, anyway. He is your shepherd;
they are just preachers rotating in and out of your life for a time. Ask his
counsel and listen to it. Let his lifetime of wisdom infuse your
decision-making and thought process. Let your gratitude remain as continual as
his influence.
They say you can never go home again. They may be right. So when you leave home, do not leave your roots. Keep them. And you will always be able to go home.
Keep Your Cool
Pressure does funny things. Hundreds
of feet underwater, it cracks rivets and sows terror in the hearts of
submariners. In the military, it produces Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and 22
veteran suicides every day. In the ministry, it breaks up marriages and brings
devastation to a family and a church. In the police department, it brings
unjustified shootings and the riots that follow. And hundreds of feet
underground, it slowly turns coal into diamonds.
When – and mark that I said when, not
if – the pressure comes to you, keep your cool. Martyn Lloyd-Jones said, “Faith
is a refusal to panic.” I love that. When you fail a class, keep your cool.
When your car breaks down for the third time in a week, keep your cool. When
you get unjustified demerits, keep your coal. When you think your professor is
heretical, keep your cool. When you have too much month at the end of your
money, keep your cool. When your boyfriend breaks up with you, keep your cool.
When you get laid off, keep your cool. When you fall asleep in church, and
someone accuses you of not loving the Lord, keep your cool. About the only
exercise some people get is jumping to conclusions; let them. But keep your
cool.
Precious little is built well when you build in a frazzled panic, your life included. Keep your cool.
Keep Your Eyes On
Jesus
If you can only remember one of
these, remember this one. Jesus is both the means and aim of our Christian
life. It is His Calvary love which redeemed you and His grace alone that can
sustain you. No goal He does not prize is worth a bucket of warm spit. No
applause other than His matters in the end. No one else is worthy of your
heart’s fire, your arm’s vigor, and your life’s service.
The devil wants you focused anywhere
but Christ. He will troll you, condemn you, deceive you, worry you, anger you,
distract you, tempt you, gaslight you, flatter you, attack you, befriend you,
sympathize with you, buy you off, beat you down, and a dozen other things in an
effort to abort your usefulness to the Lord. He will give you a score of
reasons to quit. Some of them will be genuine; most will not. He will seek to
redirect you ever so slightly away from the mark God is aiming you at.
Ignore them all. You have the Holy
Spirit indwelling you. You have the grace of God available to you. You have a
Book sufficient for your needs. Tell the devil to go back to the hell that
spawned him and look to Christ.
Someday soon, we will kneel before the
Throne. I hope I am near you. I want to see your face when you hear, Well
done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few
things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy
lord. (Matthew 25.21) As the hymnwriter said, “It will be worth it all.”
No matter who does what or says what,
no matter the circumstance that arises, no matter the unbridgable gulf or
unclimbable barrier between you and the will of God, keep your eyes on Jesus.
He is enough.
Marriage 25
Every union of two people will come to
inevitable disagreements over time. Each gender has different strengths, and
each individual has different personalities. Conflict happens, even in the best
of marriages. Last week, we looked at the philosophy of a good fight. In
a marital disagreement, our intent ought to be to understand what the other
person is thinking and feeling so that we may minister grace to them. This
week, I want to give you seven practical ideas to help you do so.
First, choose your fight time wisely.
Do not fight when the discussion must be
hurried by the rush of time or
events.
This will entirely shortcut understanding. Do not fight in public. More than
just bad form, it defeats one of the cardinal purposes of marriage: publicly
representing the love Christ has for His church. Do not fight in the heat of
emotion. As a rule, the more emotion you experience, the less thinking you do.
Logic may lead to emotion, but the reverse rarely happens. As well, do not
fight upon first coming together i.e. waking up in the morning, returning from
work in the evening. Let your (re) unions be peaceful and happy.
Second, do not interrupt each other.
It is natural to want to defend yourself
when you feel you are being misrepresented or even misunderstood. But your
whole approach in this fight is not to make yourself understood; it is to
understand your partner. The more they talk, the more chance you will have of
getting to the root of their real thoughts and feelings. So let them talk.
One particular book I read on marriage
spoke of a couple that had trouble in this precise area. They could not keep
from interrupting each other. So, they devised the spoon rule. When it was time
for a fight, one of them brought a spoon. Whoever was holding the spoon got to
talk. And only one person could hold the spoon at a time. Maybe you should
bring a spoon to your next fight.
Three, use soft words to reveal your
hurt.
Words mean things. The things those
words mean are amplified when they are spoken in emotion by someone for whom
you care deeply. “You are a _________________ son of a ____________ for …”
lands entirely differently than, “I don’t think you meant to come across this
way when you did… but this is how I felt when you did it.” I know grown men and
women who still struggle with something their parents voiced to them decades
ago, voiced in a harsh manner. Words are tools that reveal what we think and
feel, and no tool should be used as a weapon.
Fourth, boomerang their comments.
When it is your turn to speak, you
ought to begin by reiterating what you understood them to say. "What I
heard you say was… Did I get that right?" Often, the one most hurt is the
one not communicating clearly. As such, clarifying statements like this reveal
that lack of communication and allow it to be resolved before the hurt
metastasizes.
Fifth, resist the temptation to bring
up past issues.
In a trial, a judge must rule
carefully on what past events a prosecutor is allowed to bring up for precisely
this reason. Past hurled forward is prejudice. I agree that context is often
helpful in resolving issues; I disagree that context needs to be developed in
granular detail. When you bring up the past, you make the current argument too
big and too complicated to deal with in one conversation. Additionally, your
memory and interpretation of those events are often one-sided, if not downright
unfair. Deal with the problem at hand, not ten years' worth of complaints. If
you keep short accounts with each other, you will find it most helpful here.
Six, make what is important to them
important to you.
At the risk of being too transparent,
let me tell you about the only time Mandy almost left me. We had not been
married more than a year or two when I returned from work to find her suitcase
packed and sitting in the hall. We had had an argument that morning, and in the
course of the argument, I had uttered an entirely forgettable throwaway phrase,
"You're an idiot." It was a phrase I had said a thousand times to a
thousand people in my life. What I did not know was that this phrase was deeply
painful to her and always had been. It was not to me. To me, it was just the
way people talked when they were venting. To her, it was highly offensive,
provoking enough to cause her to pack her bags to go home to Momma for a night
or two.
When I discovered this, I was
flabbergasted. If anything was idiotic, overreacting to being called an idiot
seemed to be a perfect example. But as I processed it, I realized it did not
matter how it felt to me; it mattered how it felt to her. It was important to
her that I not call her an idiot. Since that day, I never have.
Seventh, above all, remember your goal
is to know and understand the other person. If you will pursue that knowledge
and understanding, you will almost always find wisdom arrives with it. In other
words, once you know how and why they did what they did and feel how they feel,
you will know how best to respond. And your response will be edifying.
“Pastor Brennan, you keep talking
about a good fight. I thought fights were never good.”
If you will do these seven things it
will be a good fight. Because good will come out of it.