My wife, Sharlene, and I will host a marriage retreat June 20 thru 22 at our property just outside Wilmington. We have space for only five married couple besides us, so please register soon. Love is such a complex subject, and we’ll guide our guests through five sessions to gain greater wisdom and understanding of marital love. In other words, it’ll be all about love. A retreat is a time to get away and recharge, but you can’t recharge if your days are stuffed with sessions. So we build in time for romantic walks, hanging out in the room or whatever you choose to do.
And yet, our sessions will be so enjoyable and edifying that we’ll wish we had more time for them, too. It starts Friday at 5:00pm and ends by 3:00pm on Sunday. Each couple gives a fully deductible gift of $350, which covers all six meals and helps Raise and Release Ministries take marriage ministry to other countries, like Mexico and Ecuador.
The small number of people – six couples – is perfect for growing deeper in understanding love through a small group discussion format along with hearing, through streaming, some of the world’s top speakers on various marriage subjects, like communication, conflict, finances, spouse roles and sex & romance. Some of the great benefits we’ve seen in this style of retreat are the friendships we build with our fellow couples and the memories we make together. Please consider joining us. You won’t regret it. Use the link below to register.
And I mean uncommon in a very good way. But more on that later.
In this uncommon-in-a-good-way marriage that I’ll get into later on, you’ll see five traits.
Their priorities are to love Jesus first and spouse second. The list of loves goes on, but those are unwaveringly the top two, and in that order.
2. They love unconditionally, as best friends, as Christian brother-sister, and as sexual lovers. All four are important, but the uncommon marriage keeps them in that order.
3. They have a missional mentality. The dream for their marriage is to use their unique gifts and relationship to bear fruit together for God’s kingdom. Everything they do aligns somehow with their vision. They’re very purpose minded.
4. They have a deep connection that fosters natural, heart to heart communication. They delight in giving out and receiving the contents of each other’s heart. Their one-flesh-ness is evidenced by the way they communicate. They love it when they get one another and it happens normally.
5. Contentment and generosity best describe their financial life. They have unity because of their mutual contentment, and their generosity proves useful for building God’s kingdom.
Now, let’s get to the matter of what it means to be uncommon.
In my parents’ generation, children who spoke something crudely might hear their parents say “Don’t be common.” I never heard my mother say “fart,” “poot,” “toot” or even “pass gas;” her phrase was “break wind,” and she only said that with a whisper. Her parents were among those who thought their daughter should be uncommon in her conduct.
But what I mean by uncommon is holy. Holy is what God is, meaning He’s unique in the highest, best way. He has no rival, no equal, no peer. He alone created the universe, and He sits on Heaven’s throne alone. None loves like He does, none has the power He has and no other has the knowledge or awareness that He does.
It’s God who created marriage and He purposed it to be holy – uncommon – not the way humankind has made marriage to be, made up of self-centered, God-neglecting, inter-oppositional spouses lacking unity and purpose and trying to amass as much wealth as possible so they can squander it their own pleasures.
No, God’s plan for marriage is very different. It’s holy. Uncommon.
The scientific definition of vacuum is a space devoid of matter. It’s close kin to the word vacant.
Jesus described a spiritual vacuum. He said that when an evil spirit is forced out of someone, creating a vacancy – a vacuum – in the person’s heart, the spirit may come back to find it still vacant. If so, Jesus said, the spirit will re-enter, except this time he’ll bring seven of his evil spirit-buddies with him. The resulting condition of that person will be far worse than their starting one.
The problem, Jesus taught, was that the person remained empty; their final condition could’ve been much better – ideal, even – had they allowed God to fill them.
Most of us have seen the famous William Holman Hunt painting, The Light of the World or Jesus at Heart’s Door. It shows Jesus standing outside a closed door in what seems a garden patio holding a lantern. The door has no handle on the outside; it must be opened from the inside. It’s depicts Revelation 3:20, Jesus’ words, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If you hear My voice and open the door, I will come in, and we will share a meal together as friends.”
Jesus is offering to fill the void in our hearts. If we open up and invite Him in, He will fill us with the highest quality contents. If we don’t, a vacuum remains that can be filled by our enemy, and He doesn’t knock and wait, like our gentle God does; no, he tries to enter by either force, deception or both.
As the heart of a person can be filled by either God or the enemy, so can the heart of a marriage. A marriage is more complex than an individual person, because two wills are involved, instead of one.
Here are three pointers to keeping your marriage filled with Godliness:
Agree. Husband wife and wife are stronger together than they are individually, but only if they agree. If they walk divided by disagreement, they’re actually weaker as a couple than as individuals. The Amos 3:3 Scripture comes to mind: How can two walk together unless they agree?
Both Be Filled. When two people are involved, like in a marriage, not only is there potential for far more strength, but also twice the opportunity for the enemy to gain a stronghold. Both spouses must stay close to God. It’s been said that a marriage is only as strong as its weakest spouse. That can be true in this sense. If one opens their heart to temptation, both spouses can know the resulting destruction.
Abundant Wise and Loving Communication. One thing the devil hates is a marriage with lots of communication between spouses, lifting each other up with words of love and encouragement.
Behold, Jesus stands waiting, hoping we’ll open the doors to our marriages and allow Him in. What do you say we let Him in to fill up our vacuum?
Perversion is sometimes like the proverbial frog in the pot on the stove. Being cold-blooded, he sits in the water, oblivious to its rising temperature. Until, finally, he’s being boiled to death.
We have some cold-blooded marriages, too. They don’t realize the trouble they’re in until the boiling waters of apathy turn to despisal, hatred, unfaithfulness, separation, and divorce.
We can’t bear the thought of being perverted. That’s the word we use for people who commit sex crimes.
But that may be our problem. We think perversion applies only to the extremely sinful. And I guess it does, but we “normal” people can be there before we know it.
Pervert means to turn completely away from what is good. (per: through, or thorough; vert: to turn)
Now since all good things come from God and God is good (not just as an adjective, but as a noun, good being part of the character of God), a person or a marriage can become perverted just by slowly turning more and more away from God.
Here are 5 ways marriage can travel down the path to becoming perverted:
Spouses stop praying together.
Married couples break fellowship with believers who can build up their marriage with encouragement, intercession and Godly modeling.
Spouses stop communicating, allowing a void in their thought life that the enemy fills with lies about each other.
Couples neglect the romance and sex that help keep their passion for one another burning (date nights, snuggling, affection and intimacy become a thing of the past).
Spouses prioritize their things or other people ahead of their spouse.
Do a self-assessment of your marriage. One of the five above is bad enough. But if there are more than one, that means it’s all the more urgent to turn things around.
Speaking of turning things around, here’s an interesting word fact. The opposite of, and therefore solution for, perversion is repentance.
Repent means the same thing pervert does, with one gigantic difference. Pervert is to turn completely away from God; repent is turn back to God completely (re: back to; pent turn).
Here are the ways to repent in correlation to the five steps toward perversion listed above:
Spouses begin praying together in addition to spending individual time seeking God in prayer.
The married couple find Christian marriage community that will support their marriage, not work to tear it down.
Spouses become intentional about communicating lovingly and abundantly.
The married couple work to reignite their passion for one another by having romantic and intimate time together.
The married couple re-establish each other as top priority above all others.
The key to all this is getting God into the center of the marriage relationship. Once there, He’ll lead you in moving forward in keeping with repentance. And away from perversion.
May God bless us all as we diligently work to keep ourselves turned toward God!
31% of people in the world don’t have access to safe water. That’s according to water.org. That non-profit’s founder is Matt Damon. Since he’s one of my favorite actors, it got my attention when I saw an ad he did to get people behind the project of digging wells in impoverished communities around the world.
Could digging wells be the most important thing in the world for people’s physical health? Maybe so. Excited, I posed that question to my pastor, Ron B, a veteran of mission trips to the countries of southern Africa.
“It certainly would be immensely helpful for all people who can’t get water to gain access to it,” Ron told me, “but it isn’t quite as simple as digging wells.”
It turns out that many third world countries have wells in close proximity to their people, but the wells have been taken over by armed bullies who disallow access by the people for whom the wells were dug. In some places, wells are even poisoned by thugs just to keep the community’s residents weak and vulnerable.
For many people, the most important thing is to guard their community’s existing well.
Proverbs 4:23 states: Above all else, guard your heart, for out of it springs all the issues of your life.
Like many people in the world, we all have a well, one that produces everything we say and do. It makes sense that Solomon would advise us to make guarding it our top priority.
Applied to marriage, everything we say to our spouse, every kind of treatment they get from us, comes from our heart. So our marriages depend, in part, on how well we guard our hearts.
Here’s a simple tool for guarding our heart. It’s called the O.A.T.H. It works like this. Raise your right hand and repeat after me:
OFFENSE. I vow to guard my heart against every offense. I will not take offense to my spouse.
ATTRACTION. I vow to guard my heart against any ungodly attraction. I will not allow anyone or anything to steal the attraction that belongs to my spouse.
TEARING DOWN. I vow to guard my heart against any attack designed to tear down my marriage. I will not entertain the idea of my marriage being defeated.
HAUGHTINESS. I vow to guard my own heart against being puffed up. I choose, instead to be humble, taking a lower position than my spouse.
Congratulations! You’ve taken the OATH to guard your heart to protect your marriage.
Now, keeping your vow will prove to be, of all the things you could do, perhaps Most Important.
As Christians – recipients of grace – we sometimes give works a bad rap. We rightfully emphasize, as does the Bible, that we are saved by grace, not of works.
So, we cannot work to earn eternal life and right standing with God. That was done for us by Jesus; our part is to believe in and trust Jesus and His life’s sacrifice that He did all the work necessary for our salvation.
But just because works can’t win our salvation doesn’t mean works are futile. Good works still serve a wonderful purpose.
In 1 Corinthians 15, we find an important statement from Paul, a principle we can apply to marriage and most every other part of life. Verse 10 reveals Paul’s assertion that he has worked harder than any of the other apostles.
Now lest we think him arrogant or boasting, Paul offers two more ideas, one before and one after, that show his heart of humility. In verse 9 Paul states that he’s the least, not even worthy of being called an apostle, because he had persecuted Christians before He came to know Jesus, himself. In the latter part of verse 10 Paul clarifies that it’s actually God’s grace working through him, rather than Paul’s white-knuckling efforts.
So, when we consider our works, we must include the fact that even our works are actually God’s works.
I once heard Pastor Craig Groeschel preach a message based on Romans 15:10 as he spoke to church planters. He charged the group to never let someone out-work them. Craig emphasized the importance of leading by working hard; once your team sees your second-to-none work ethic, they’ll gladly follow your leadership.
We can apply this to marriage, as well, regardless of whether you’re the husband or the wife. We can take the competitive approach: don’t let your spouse out-work you. Or we can approach it by percentage, endeavoring to give 100% of what we have.
The point is to work extremely hard on our marriage, making it the best it can possibly be. Some of the most important work to be done for marriage are in these areas:
Characterbuilding. As we apply Scripture to ourselves, we see qualities like quickness to forgive, patience with spouses, not giving up on them, and kindness in the way we think and act toward our spouse.
Communicationskills. Communication has been called the lifeblood of marriage. That’s a pretty good way to look at it. So much is determined by our communication or lack there of, so it’s wise to invest in both sending and receiving skills.
Spousology. This is a made-up word meaning the studying of one’s spouse. Studying our spouse to best understand them is worthwhile work. It helps us know how to love them and relate to them.
Marriage is something Paul didn’t have. But since we do, let’s apply his hard work principle to our all important relationship with our spouse. Because work has power.
For I am the least of the apostles, who am not worthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me was not in vain; but I labored more abundantly than they all, yet not I, but the grace of God which was in me.
Money issues present one of the four biggest challenges in marriage, the other three having to do with communication, goals/values and intimacy. And financial stress can take a toll on the couple’s communication, test their commitment to their agreed upon values and even zap their emotion and physical energy, leaving them lacking in or frustrated with their sex life. So, it’s very important for a couple to keep financial stress at bay.
Joseph provides us with a very helpful example of financial wisdom. This is the Joseph the patriarch, son of Jacob, great-grandson of Abraham, of the Old Testament, not the husband of Mary, mother of Jesus. We find his story in the last fifteen chapters of the book of Genesis.
God had gifted Joseph with, in addition to wisdom in leadership and keen administrative skill, the ability to interpret dreams. He found himself, at the end of a long string of mistreatments, in an Egyptian prison. That’s when the Pharoah, king of Egypt, called him into his court to interpret two bothersome dreams he’d had.
Interpreting the dreams served as a segue to Joseph’s revealing his wisdom in financial management to Pharoah. As a result, Pharoah appointed Joseph to the highest position in the most powerful nation in the world at that time. Only Pharoah, himself had more authority than Joseph, and he delegated to Joseph all decision-making power over the nation’s commerce, agriculture, real estate and public service personnel.
As a result of Joseph’s performance in his newly appointed role, Egypt’s net wealth, as well as it’s gross national income (GNI), its ability to bring in income for itself, skyrocketed. Under Joseph’s leadership, the nation obtained virtually all the grain, livestock, land and servants of that part of the world. During Joseph’s tenure, Egypt increased its value probably 200% to 300%.
All those great accomplishments occurred through the practice of this principle: A vital building block for financial prosperity is one’s positioning for opportunity. Positioning essentially means having the resources to invest when opportunity comes along.
Joseph positioned Egypt for opportunity with one critical number. He chose the number 20, instead of the number 14. The dreams he had interpreted predicted what would happen over the ensuing fourteen years. There would be seven years of plenty followed by seven years of lack. To prepare for the seven years of lack, Joseph set aside 20% of what each of the first seven years of plenty produced. If I had been in Joseph’s position, not being nearly the giant of financial wisdom he was, I would’ve set aside 14%. 14% would’ve provided just enough to survive.
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But Joseph saw the situation as one to not merely survive, but as an opportunity to grow in prosperity. Instead of having a store of 100% of resources needed to provide for the nation of Egypt for seven years, Joseph stored 140% of what was needed to survive. He had an additional 40% with which to advance Egypt’s wealth, and he used those resources to purchase additional property for Egypt as people and people groups who weren’t positioned to thrive had to surrender their resources to Joseph for food to survive.
Now, some four hundred years later, the Jews left Egypt with all that wealth, wealth that, in my mind, was rightfully theirs since their ancestor Joseph had amassed it to begin with.
The point here, though, is to see a financial principle that makes the difference between the struggling and the wealthy. Following this principle often determines whether one will be prosperous or poor.
And for a husband and wife, it can either contribute to or detract from their marriage. I pray God gives us all the wisdom to live by the principle of positioning ourselves for opportunity.
If we go all the way back to the very first married couple, all the way back, just after the creation of marriage, immediately following the fall of mankind, the birth of sin and the ensuing pronouncements of judgement, we find the tap-root of marriage’s tree of challenge. Right there in the Garden of Eden, home of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life, sprouted the Tree of Marital Challenge.
The serpent would crawl on its belly amid the dust of the earth. He would bruise mankind’s heel, and mankind would bruise his head. The man would find the earth cursed and his work extremely difficult. The woman would have, in addition to intensified pain in childbirth, the desire to control her husband, but would instead be controlled by him.
Consequently, marriage has three serious challenges.
They have an enemy for the ages working to undermine them.
The husband finds his work daunting.
The wife finds in her heart the desire to supplant her husband’s role as head of the marriage relationship.
With such a towering tree of challenge, what’s a poor married couple to do? Well, that tree has to come down. But how?
When God made these pronouncements of judgments, he knew exactly what their solutions were. In fact, He used the whole unfortunate fall of mankind as a stage on which to bring His Son. And therein lies the solution. Once again we find a problem whose answer is Jesus.
Christ established the New Covenant, expressed in the New Testament, which provides the solution for the husband’s insurmountable work challenge. Love your wife, husband, as Christ loved the church and gave His life for her.
The husband’s challenge has to do with how difficult his work is. There appear to be two tendencies for husbands, and most incline to one or the other. He either works too hard, overcompensating in an effort to succeed, or he’s intimidated by the difficulty and shies away from working to provide. Thus, many are workaholics, while many others are seen as lazy.
But how does loving his wife address his work challenge? Follow this logic: If he loves his wife, he’ll resist the urge to fall into either extreme; he’ll find the work-life-balance that allows him to succeed in providing while reserving a healthy amount of time for his family.
The wife’s challenge, the desire to take the reins from her husband, is overcome by accepting her New Testament solution of submitting to her husband.
Ladies, please put down your stones. I know you want to hurl them at me but think about this. You aren’t the only spouse in your marriage that God is asking to submit. Try loving as Christ loved without submitting. It can’t be done, and that’s the calling your husband has.
What does submission have to do with solving the wife’s problem? Here’s the logic for her: the decision to submit completely replaces the desire to rule over her husband. The dreaded idea of submitting to the husband is the very thing that relieves the pain of the ancient curse.
What about the enemy? The biggest thing is to not repeat the mistake the inaugural couple made. Do what God said and don’t listen to the deceiver.
If we do these three things – love, submit and don’t listen to the enemy – we’ll find that we’ve felled the Tree of Marital Challenge.
First, understand what freedom is. Freedom is the absence of limitation, confinement or restraint.
Also, there are varying degrees of freedom. The greatest freedom is the freedom Jesus has obtained for us. He said that if the Son sets you free, you’re free indeed. I take this indeed to mean the greatest possible freedom there is.
That begs the question, free from what? Jesus offers freedom from sin and its consequences. That means guilt, condemnation and control. But how do we get this freedom? Answer: move into God’s presence. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is,” Paul wrote (2 Corinthians 3:17), “there is freedom.”
Jesus came to free us from sin and reconcile us to the Father, which means we get to move into the presence of God where the Spirit and real freedom are.
So how does this apply to marriage? Remember that Jesus and His bride, the body of Christ (the church) serve as the perfect model for marriage. So, how did and does Jesus bring freedom to His spouse (us believers)?
Jesus went to great lengths to bring freedom. We mere humans have an eternal future, but not an eternal past; our existence began when our parents conceived us. God the Son, however, has both an eternal past and eternal future. He was in the beginning (See John 1:1). My point is that Jesus left a perfect eternity to enter a sinful world to bring us freedom. To what lengths can we go to help our spouse live free.
A man is filled with joy as Jesus breaks his chains.
Jesus sacrificed all of Himself to gain our freedom. He gave up His rights, any claim to what He deserved and all comfort and privilege to bring us freedom. How many of our rights, our merits and our comforts can we forego for our spouse’s freedom?
Jesus gave up His voice, His breath, His body, His blood – His life to afford our freedom. What sacrifices can we make for the freedom of our spouse?
Jesus offers forgiveness to free us from our sins. For what can we forgive our spouse to set them free from guilt and condemnation?
These are just four things we can see that our Bridegroom did as both a gift and an example.
Now lest we have the idea that freedom’s purpose is something other than itself, consider Galatians 5:1, which states, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.” Obviously, God wants us free, not constrained by something destructive. And that goes for spouses, too.
What if we get into the habit of waking up daily with the goal of helping our spouse live free?
There’s a leadership vacuum. That’s what I’ve heard for years, but I never believed it. Leadership isn’t complicated, I thought. But I’ve been in several work situations over the past few years that have shown me there is, indeed, a deficit in the way many leaders lead others.
I’m always looking for ways to apply principles to marriage, since I’m in a season of focusing my writing, counseling and teaching efforts on marriage. So, these leadership principles I hope to share in a way that will help married couples.
Leadership is influence, so both husband and wife need it, both needing to have a Godly influence on their spouse.
If marriage seems hard, a real struggle, then maybe VIE will help as you struggle – or vie to have a good marriage. VIE is an acrostic for Value, Intrinsic & Exemplary
Value-oriented. Effective leadership begins with valuing the people you’re leading. The more you value them, the more you’ll want to invest in them.
IntrinsicMotivation. Good leadership is understanding that people are best motivated from within, rather than by external rewards, like money, gifts and the threat of consequences. There’s a time for extrinsic motivation (to reinforce intrinsic), but intrinsic is more respectful and ultimately recognizes the person’s power to make their own choices.
Example. Leading by example is as basic as leadership gets. If a leader lacks the self-discipline, work ethic or willingness to sacrifice that they’re asking of others, they soon won’t have any followers.
For married couples,
Value your spouse very highly.
Help them build motivation intrinsically (in their heart). Never use coercion or ultimatums.
Set the Godly example they can follow (rather than modeling something that conflicts with God’s vision for them).
A Godly marriage is spouses influencing each other toward Godliness. Vie for your marriage.
