Unsettle Your Marriage

Automated transcript of the sermon audio, generated with OpenAI Whisper (small.en). It has not been checked against the recording and may contain errors, especially in names and Scripture references.

Well, this is, like I said, the final speaking session that we’ve got. I think Sean in his opening comments talked about, you know, the advantage to going first is that you can say whatever you want to say, you can steal everybody else’s thunder and you don’t have to worry about it. And I told him after he was done, he says, well, thanks a lot, Sean. You did take about 30% of my thunder. But I’m sure I’ll be saying it in a different way and besides, I like thunder, so repeating the thunder will be okay anyhow.

And I know half of you were probably asleep during that session anyhow and you’re now awake and the other half are asleep And so it’ll all work out okay in the end But and talking to Ryan earlier just as you hear the four of us You will hear overlap and what the principles that we’re sharing. I mean we are reading the same source You know the Bible so hopefully you know so I’m somewhat familiar what we’re saying and but it yet It will come out differently with each of our personalities and our emphases So hopefully they’ll still be beneficial for us all as we go through it So anyhow this you’re wondering what this picture is doing up here on the screen that looks a little strange I don’t know if you can make out the details, but you’ve got a kind of a 1870s sort of settler there in this wagon train and you can sort of make out modern suburbia in the background As a scene that comes out of a recent advertising campaign that Direct TV was running.

If you remember that campaign this past year, each commercial gave a glimpse into the life of a family who was still using cable TV, even though everybody else in the neighborhood had already switched over to Direct TV. And so the family in this series of commercials is compared to settlers living in the 1870s rather than modern-day Americans. And in one spot called Neighbors, Sonny Boy comes up to Pops, that’s Pops, and Sonny Boy asks him why they have to put up with Cables’ lower customer satisfaction while the neighbors get to enjoy direct TV. And Dad, you know, dressed like the settler there, he just cheerfully tells his son, it’s because, son, we’re settlers, and tells his son to go churn some butter and make some clothes.

And then in another ad called satisfaction the wife comes up to her husband of course She’s dressed in the full bonnet in the laundress and all that just little hustle to Prairie And she says she asked why they can’t have direct TV like their neighbors And the husband says it’s because he’s been a cable user all of his life And when she points out that direct TV has higher customer satisfaction ratings he replies to her with a smile He says we find her satisfaction elsewhere the boy has his stick and hoop And you see the boy running down the street with a stick and a hoop the girl has her Rag faceless doll and the girls over there this little doll with no face on it playing He says that you you have your cabbages And he points over to this crate by the corner of the room Full of cabbages that they must have just harvested and then the white just kind of looks at him and she smiles satisfied of the answer And she says and you have your foot stomping and he just starts slapping his knee and doing a hee-haw routine

Well, the ads are humorous and they make the point, well, don’t settle for less. Switch your cable TV service to direct TV. For some time, I have pondered how often people, myself included, act like settlers and settle for less than what could be. This tendency seems to only increase the older we get. Now, I suppose there’s a lot of reasons for that. Among them would be laziness. Let’s just admit it. If we’re happy with the status quo, why change it? Just leave it be. Tiredness. We’re all busy, right? So, why do I want to think about making change when I’m already tired? Lack of vision. Just can’t think of anything better to do.

You’re happy with the status quo. Or perhaps you’ve experienced failures or disappointments so many times in life that You’ve just given up trying to make a change just easier just as subtle for what you got now you might be wondering is Settling always a bad thing Isn’t contentment another word for settling aren’t we supposed to be content? Didn’t Paul say godliness with contentment is great gain and didn’t he say I have learned to be content in all situations Yes But does that mean we should settle for less than the best? And it depends. If we are unsettled, if we’re unsettled because the lust of our flesh craves more, then being unsettled is not good, and Paul’s words on contentment are fitting for us to take to heart.

But even Paul experienced a different type of unsettlement that I call godly discontentment. And let me read you Paul’s words. You’ll know the passage well.

But whatever gain I had I counted as loss for the sake of Christ Indeed, I count everything as lost because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish in order that I may gain Christ and be found In him not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law But that which comes through faith in Christ the righteousness from God that depends on faith that I may know him and the power of his resurrection and may share in his suffering becoming like him in his death that by any means possible I may attain to the resurrection from the dead not that I’ve already obtained this or I’m already perfect but I press on to make it my own because Christ Jesus has made me his own brothers I do not consider that I have made it my own but one thing I do forgetting what lies behind, what lies behind, and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal of the prize of the upward call of God and Christ Jesus.

Let those who are mature think this way, and if anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Only let us hold true to what we have attained.” That’s all Philippians 3, 7-16. What I want you to take away from this passage for the purpose of this talk is the passion that Paul had to know Christ and the power of his resurrection, as well as to share in this Christ’s sufferings. So in that passage, I’m hoping what you hear, what I call this godly discontentment. There’s more to know of God. There’s more to experience. There’s more growth to occur.

And Paul wasn’t content to sit back on his laurels and just be happy with what had already happened in his life, he wanted to press on. For Paul, there was always more of God to know and experience and partake in. In his own words, he had not already obtained this or was already perfect, but he pressed on to make it my own because Christ Jesus has made me his own. This is a drive all believers should possess. He says, let those who are mature think this way. So then, here is a general principle that I’d glean from that passage. And I’m going to take this principle, it’s a general principle, true of all of life for Christians, and then I’m going to make application of it for the marriage in a moment.

But the principle simply says, all maturing believers should be growing in deep love for and knowledge of Christ and increasingly living out the power of the resurrection in their lives. Failure to do this is spiritual stagnation and is settling for less than God wants for us. Now that principle alone could be unpacked into a series of messages, but some of the key ideas there are maturing in the faith and settling for where you are at are incompatible. Maturing in the faith and settling for where you’re at are incompatible. And secondly, the power of the resurrection changes everything about our lives, especially our relationship to others.

And then there’s a second principle from scriptures that specifically applies to marriage. It’s found in Ephesians 5, 31 through 32. We’ve been in that passage several times today. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife. And the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is profound. And I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. Now, usually when people think about marriage, they have two primary purposes in mind. When you ask people, why did you get married? Typically, two reasons come to mind. First is that they’re thinking about companionship. It’s not good for man to be alone.

So they want a companion. And secondly, they think of procreation, be fruitful and multiply. What is often forgotten is a third and immensely unique and important purpose for marriage. It’s to give the world a tangible expression of the relationship between Christ and his church The one flesh nature of marriage is the closest thing humans have that imitates the kind of oneness experienced within the Trinity And have you ever thought about that? We’re all about Trinitarianism here. We talked about the importance of the Trinity What other relationship on earth even comes close to modeling that kind of Trinitarian oneness but marriage?

There is no other human relationship that matches it in this regard. It’s unique among all types of relationships. As such, marriage carries with it the tremendous privilege and responsibility to demonstrate this mystery, as Paul calls it, to the watching world. So restating then what we’ve just said, we can state the second principle this way. The marital relationship stands alone in its ability to picture the love relationship between Christ and His Church and to mimic Trinitarian oneness. Marriage is God’s gift to men and one of His chief means of communicating the gospel to the world. I would maintain it’s probably the primary way that the gospel is communicated to the world in terms of human endeavor.

Its marriage is that big of a deal that it should be the biggest megaphone that we carry around with us to tell people about the gospel. I started off this message talking about the problem of settling for less than what could be. So I’d like to narrow this down then and talk out the problem when we let our marriages settle in the wrong way. You can see the topic of my talk is on settle your marriage. I want to challenge married couples everywhere to on settle your marriage. And so this is going to apply. I made an assumption that of the married couples in this room, you will be married somewhere longer than nine minutes and somewhere less than 90 years.

Is there anybody outside that window?

Okay, if not, then what I’m gonna say applies to you so you can go ahead and pay attention as I see it There are two ways that we fall into a settler mindset in marriage First there are those who have marriages that have not measured up to expectations and years of praying Pleading or feuding have led to a soul and resignation that this is as good as it’s going to get Law and hours of counseling and talking have not resulted in the changes hoped for and while physical divorce is not an option These Christian couples settle into a pseudo divorce and sadly resign themselves to their lot in life When well-meaning friends come along and try to help there’s resistance because the pain or frustration of trying and failing again Is so great that it’s easier to not bother than to keep working on the marriage And sadly, there are not a few Christian marriages in this kind of a settler mindset and while I’m stating sort of the extreme end of that process some marriages perhaps in this room are in the Process of becoming those kinds of marriages. They’re still in the feuding and arguing stage

But they’re not seeing real change take place and they are in the process of becoming settlers where someday they’ll throw in the towel and say It’s never going to change just the way it is and they just they settle into that pattern the second kind of settler mindset I see and one that most quote good marriages fall into is the willingness to live with an Acceptable level of status quo these marriages are not too hot They’re not too cold They’re just Okay Both spouses in these marriages may in fact be happy and feel like their marriage is doing well They largely get along and enjoy each other’s company and from all appearances. There are no significant issues The problem with these marriages is that they have settled into something less than what marriage can and should be I Say that because no marriage ever perfectly models the Christ Church relationship Anybody here want to say that you now perfectly model the love of the love between Christ and his church? Yeah, I don’t think anybody in here would say

that. No one has ever fully lived out the power of the resurrection in their life. Marriage should not stagnate. It should not plateau even on a good level because couples can always do an even better job of modeling before the world. A husband can always do a better job at loving his wife as Christ loved the church. A wife can always do a better job at responding to her husband as the church responds to Christ. Do Christian marriages on a whole, here’s a question to ponder, do Christian marriages on a whole, on whole, stand out from their counterparts in the world today?

or do our marriages generally match the goodness or badness of non-Christian marriages? Is there anything fundamentally about Christian marriages on hold that makes the world say, wow, that’s different. That’s better. That’s something we want to imitate. Are our marriages the weapons that they’re meant to be, like Jonathan was talking about, or do they blend in the sameness with a culture around us. These are hard questions to ponder and I’m not sure we would like the answers if we were honest. Now I’ve been married almost 37 years to a wonderful wife and I would say I have a great marriage but I need to work to make it even better. I don’t pretend to have all the answers but I am convinced that I need to fight the temptation to settle for something less than what God wants to make of my marriage. So in the time remaining I want to revisit these two types of settler mindsets and discuss how each one can get the wheels of the marital carriage out of the rut and back on the trail towards marriages

that are growing and maturing in godliness. Now as I dig in deeper then I want to describe the two types of marriages this way. Those marriages that that lack godly contentment and then those marriages that lack godly discontentment. So that may sound a little funny the way I phrase that, but you’ll see that it makes sense as we move along. Some marriages lack godly contentment and what they need is more contentment. Some marriages lack godly discontentment and they need to become a little more unsettled. So marriages that lack godly contentment, What do I mean by this statement that marriages lack godly contentment?

These are marriages where one or both spouses live in a state of disgruntled with the other and have resigned themselves to it never changing. The best they hope for is to abide the other person and try to keep conflict to a minimum. An uneasy truce is declared where each other tries to stay out of the other person’s way and avoid touchy subjects known to provoke conflict. The home may appear peaceful, but usually it’s just the absence of open hostility. Homes that fall into this trap are pretty tragic. Many, many years ago, Gayle and I, we knew of a home that had fallen into this pattern. They had settled into this.

And they didn’t dare get into anything of substance. Because if they did, they would end up in a war. They had gotten so bad that if they tried to communicate, they would have major day-long fights over how to cut a watermelon, how to rake the leaves in the lawn. The most trivial and stupid of things would set them off on day-long battles because that’s how far the relationship had deteriorated. It’s not possible for a marriage like this to exist and both spouses to be full of godly contentment. You just can’t have both. They can’t honestly say they’re content just because they’re no longer fighting. They may be content to leave things the way they are, but it’s not a godly contentment.

Now, remember, we are talking about marriages where unity is absent and the couples has settled for the situation. There is no longer any real effort to push for improvement towards a more god-honoring home. All marriages struggle from time to time. That’s not the problem. We’re not talking about having homes that are free of conflict. We’re sinners, we’re humans. We’re going to have conflict. So that’s not the problem that conflict arises. The problem exists when bitter resignation sets in over a spouse who’s unwilling to repent of their sin, or a spouse is constantly frustrated by some unmet expectation. So I want to attempt to explain what I believe is usually at the root of this kind of troubled marriage and how either spouse can go about on settling their marriage to make it more honoring to God.

In marriage, where one or both spouses are failing to meet the other’s expectations and the result is increasing bitterness in fighting, where things have settled into hopeless resignation, the root cause, I believe, is often idolatry. you’re thinking, whoa, wait, Jim, you’re just accusing these people of idolatry?

Yeah, I am. That’s a pretty big assertion. But many years of counseling have led me to this conclusion, so let me explain why I believe idolatry is at the root of this problem. In marriage, God’s design is that each spouse should be a means for supplying His grace to the other person. When things are working as they should, we derive from God His goodness. We are filled with His grace. And as the Scripture describes in these vessels, these cracked clay pots, and out of that abundance of our own filling, we then splash out grace on those around us. And this certainly works in the context of marriage. That is a means. My wife is a means of God supplying me grace. She’s not the only means. I also get grace directly from my relationship with God, but through my wife, through kids, through other areas of life, I can receive and be a beneficiary of God’s goodness and God’s grace. When each spouse fulfills their role as onto the Lord, other spouse benefits and is blessed. In a perfect world, each spouse has a growing and vital

relationship with God such that it not only supplies their deepest needs, but they have an abundance of grace to splash over on the other person. That’s how it’s supposed to work. This principle is true in all of human relationships, but it’s especially true in marriage due to the closeness of the relationship. I believe because of of the closeness of the relationship is that the spouse is typically one of the primary means of God supplying that grace. The problem is that sin enters the picture and messes up the flow of God’s grace. The good news is that even when your spouse is being a lousy conduit of God’s grace because of sin, we still have direct access to the giver of grace. We are not dependent on our spouse for the grace which meets our deepest needs.

To expect them to be that is idolatry. As an analogy, think of the sun and the moon. Moonlight is a wonderful thing. I like going out on a full moon night and the light that casts, that’s really pretty. But if the moon should stop shining, that doesn’t mean that the source of the light has gone away. We still have the sunshine, the source of light. Now the problem enters in when we, for whatever reason, fail to orient our deepest affections towards God and we start looking elsewhere. In marriage, that often is our spouse. We begin to expect and or demand that our spouse fill our deepest needs in ways that only God can. If you’re tracking what I’m saying so far is that we all have needs.

Um, and obviously there’s the basic needs, eating and all that good stuff, but there’s, there’s needs down in the deepest inner reaches of your soul that we all have that God intends to fill. And we often fall into the trap then of not looking to God to fill those needs, but we look to people. And again, in marriage, we often look to our spouse. The result is that two people who are no longer splashing God’s grace on each other out of abundance, but rather they’re sucking whatever life they can out of each other because they are spiritually dry. This problem extends to all areas of life, but it’s especially true in marriage.

Now, in case you think I’m making this up, I actually have some verses to back it up. Jeremiah chapter 2 verses 11 through 13 reads, Has a nation changed its gods, even though they are no gods? But my people have changed their glory for that which does not profit. Be appalled, O heaven, at this. Be shocked. Be utterly desolate, declares the Lord. For my people have committed two evils. They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, Broken cisterns that can hold no water. I Love that passage. I have loved that passage for decades now If you would like to really hear a great two great sermons on that passage go out to the Trinity website Sean did one way back I think in 2011 called shock and awe and Then more recently he did another version of the same sermon called the desert of disregard And you can find those sermons on our website where he dives into this passage When God says to be appalled at something, we should sit up and take notice.

It seems to be a huge problem. If God himself is saying, Be appalled, we need to stop and listen. What is the problem described in Jeremiah? Simply put, when God’s people turn their deepest affections from God, the source of living water, to people and things, broken cisterns, God is appalled. Why is he appalled? Because that’s idolatry. Not only is it idolatry, but it’s also crazy.

Why would anyone prefer drinking from dried up holes in the ground when they have a never-ending fountain at their disposal? But that is what we do, and we do it all the time, and we do it in our marriages. We slowly but subtly begin to rely on our spouse to be that which only God is meant to And when they stop doing it for us then we begin to become irate and irritated and provoking and Manipulating and all the things guys have been talking about trying to get that broken cistern to start producing some good water for me We ask our spouse to be the fountain of living water when by comparison they best they can hope to be as a broken cistern How can you tell when it’s happening by how you respond when your broken sister of a spouse fails to get you wet enough.

Anger, frustration, desperation, hopelessness, these are all signs that you are asking your spouse to be something they cannot or should not be to you. This is one reason why the guys of all I think said in various ways that usually in the case of marital strife, usually the problem is you. And I could say that that’s generally a true statement. Now there may in fact be a very real presenting problem coming the other direction at you. That’s a real problem that needs to be addressed. But when that issue results in my anger, my frustration, my despair, my hopelessness. That’s warning signs for me. I’ve learned that’s the idiot light on the dashboard. Warning, warning, broken sister and stay away and I need to learn how to re-approach that situation differently.

It’s probably time for me to start drawing some more grace and splashing more grace instead of asking that broken sister across the table to start pumping out some more water. Now I’m not saying disappointment in our spouse’s shortcomings is always wrong. The key is to identify if your disappointment is mostly about you, your unmet wants, needs your expectations, or is it mostly about what is right in God’s eyes. When your spouse is not functioning well as they should in their biblical role, it should hurt. It should in some cases produce tears. It should trouble you. But when it’s robbing your joy and it’s causing you then to sinfully respond back.

That’s when again, the trouble is, and you are then at that point, I would say guilty of idolatry, your idol is not performing, you’re upset. And that’s where the problem goes. I’m not saying it’s wrong to have wants and needs your expectations. It’s how you respond in your soul when they go unmet that reveals if you’re relying on broken cisterns. Perhaps another example will help make the point. Suppose Jesus suddenly appeared to you in the flesh, just your center mind in your own business and poof, there’s Jesus, and reminds you how much he loves you and that he can’t wait to see you in heaven and then poof, he’s gone. And just after that, just after he disappears, your spouse walks in the room and says something that sets you off and really makes you feel quite unloved at the moment. How would the interaction with your spouse impact you at that moment?

Would the sting of your spouse’s words hit you the same way as if Jesus had not just been with you? I hope I would dare say if you had just had that reassuring visit from Jesus Somehow the words from your spouse while sinful and wrong and perhaps hurtful Would not be as devastating to your soul as they might otherwise be Am I saying that what our spouses say and does do not matter? Of course not What I am saying is that if our spouses failures produce deep-seated bitterness, resentment, despair, or hopelessness, then there’s a very good chance that we’re guilty of what God is describing in Jeremiah. This is how marriages get to the point of settling for an unhappy truce. Over time it just becomes too disappointing to ask a broken cistern to quench your thirst. Better to try and pretend you just aren’t thirsty anymore than to just let it, to then to keep being let down over and over.

Perhaps the biggest tragedy that comes from a marriage that has settled in this way is what it communicates about God. Implied in believing your marriage will never change is that it is beyond the reach of God. When you reach that point in a relationship, you say it’s never gonna change, it’s always gonna be this way. You are in essence saying, this one’s too big for God. Some problems are just too big, even for God. Most people caught in one of these marriages would probably never verbalize such a thought. And I’ve asked people before in counseling, is this what you’re saying? Well, no, I’d never say that. No problem’s too big for God.

But isn’t that what you’re saying when you say, Jim, you don’t understand? We’ve tried everything. It’s just it’s never going to change. It’s just the way it is. So most people caught in one of these marriages would probably never verbalize such a thought, but isn’t that what they’re being communicated when we settle into a life of just existing under the same roof? So what will it take for this type of marriage to become unsettled and to start moving towards something that is more God-honoring? It’s going to take the usual remedies. You may have been waiting for the big reveal. Sorry to disappoint you, but it’s going to come down to these four words.

It’s going to come down to repentance, humility, obedience, and faith. It will take repentance from having idolized your spouse or your marriage and expecting them to be the fulfillment of your deepest needs. It’s gonna take humility to forgive the years of hurt and offense that has built up and to allow God’s mercies towards you and your spouse to be new every morning. It’s tempting to justify our settled mindset by remembering all the ways we’ve been treated wrongly by our spouse. You must let that baggage go if you’re going to unsettle your marriage and have any chance of making it right. I don’t know what it is about us people, but when we’ve been wronged, we like to let everybody know we’ve been wronged and we get into counseling situations and people feel the need, and I understand to a certain degree why they need to do this, but they just want to go through the whole history for years and years and years.

And it’s sort of like, to me as a counselor, I’m like, I’m going, okay, the sink is overflowing on the floor, you know, getting everybody’s feet wet. And you want me to figure out which drip did it. And let’s not spend our time analyzing every drip in the overflowing sink. Let’s get down in there and pull the clog out if we can and find out what the clog is and get the sink to start to drain. It will take obedience to live your biblical role as if, and that’s a key phrase, as if your spouse deserved it. But you say, my spouse doesn’t deserve it. You don’t know what a miserable spouse they are. It doesn’t change the requirement at all.

I say you should respond to your spouse as if they deserve it, because that is what we’re told to do in Ephesians, chapter 5. In verse 22, wives are told to submit to their husbands as to the Lord. We heard that principle earlier today. In verse 25, husbands are told to love their wives as Christ loves the church. And Sean already emphasized the point. There are no qualifications or exception clauses found here. A husband is to love his wife onto greater holiness. And how Sean, how’d you phrase that statement earlier? It’s a similar love bestows love. Yeah. That those, those are golden thoughts. If you think about it, a husband is to love his wife onto greater loveliness.

A wife is to respect her husband on to greater respectability. If Christ is our example, and he is, then when did he love the church? He looked down from heaven. He said, wow, that’s a fine looking woman down there. The church, I think I’ll send my son down there and get her as a daughter-in-law. Right? No. Was it after the church that cleaned herself up and made herself presentable? Of course not. Even while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Consider this. Does Jesus love for the church grow as the church becomes more lovely in his eyes? I mean, did he come down and die for us? I said, okay, I love you enough to come down and die, but you need to clean up your act and as you clean up your act, I’m going to love you more and more and more.

Jesus love for the church has it ever changed is it changing is it increasing in quantity no he loves the church as if it were already as lovely as it can be and then he keeps on loving the church into greater loveliness that is the example we are to follow now some of this room may be wondering what I’ve been smoking at this point, I realize that what I’m saying is not easy. Some here have tried and tried only to be disappointed over and over, which has resulted in them giving up. If you’ve been following, though, what I’m saying, you can hear the problem in that last sentence. They’re saying, I’ve tried and I’ve tried and I’ve tried to the point that I’ve given up. If failure to effect change in your spouse causes you to give up in disappointment, you already hear the problem? If failure to affect change in your spouse causes you to give up in disappointment, then that’s a sure sign that your spouse is a broken cistern to you and your greatest affection is not for God. You need to repent

of that. What you can and should be doing is to obey what you are commanded to do in all faith. Faith is the operative word here. Married persons who put their faith and their spouse changing are always going to be disappointed. Married persons who put their faith in their spouse changing are always going to be disappointed. Do not place your faith, or you can fill in hope there, do not place your hope in your spouse changing. Place your faith, your hope, the God who can change your spouse. There’s a big difference. I can’t guarantee anybody who’s in an unhappy marriage that their spouse will ever change. There’s nobody on earth that can promise that. But I can promise you that there’s a God in heaven who knows and cares and who can change your spouse in the next five minutes. And is your faith in that God and that trust in that God? And some people will grasp that idea and then walk away, you know, full of faith for the next 24 hours, two weeks, a month.

All right, Jim, I tried that trick. It didn’t work. And I’m saying, no, you got to have that attitude, that mindset to the day you go to your grave, believing and having faith in the God who can change your spouse at any point in time, even if that takes 50 years, even if that never happens. That’s where your faith needs to be resting in the process. The only real way to unsettle this This kind of marriage is for someone to begin living their biblical role by faith as unto the Lord and to not expect the other person to be what only God is meant to be, the filler and sustainer of your soul. This doesn’t guarantee that marriage will be restored, but it does guarantee a personal life that is pleasing to the Lord and worthy of His praise.

What’s your highest desire to be able to get to the end of the trail and say, wow, I had an awesome marriage. That would be nice. And God would be pleased with that. But don’t we want to hear God say, well done now, good and faithful servant. Instead of, well, God, the reason I was a lousy spouse for the last 40 years is because you gave me a lousy spouse to begin with. So it’s really your fault.

I want to hear God say, well done now, good and faithful servant. And yes, I know you had a difficult situation and I see how you by faith still lived out what I called you to do and are into your reward. That’s what I want to hear God say. And doing this will also lead to a greater joy even if there are still tears over a dysfunctional marriage. Marriages that have settled this way for decades can be renewed when both spouses work to unsettle their marriage according to these principles. So let’s now talk about then the second kind of marriage. Marriages that lack godly discontentment.

If the kind of marriage we’ve been talking about is the one that lacks godly contentment Then I want to shift my focus and twist a little bit and talk about those that lack godly discontentment And those of you doing Bible searches right now, you’re not going to find that phrasing there anywhere, but you get the idea To some degree all other marriages fall into this category to some degree everybody else that wasn’t in the first group is in this group These are marriages that have settled into some kind of agreeable state, but one that settles for less than what could be. In these marriages, both spouses seem to be content with where things are at.

Now, being content is a good thing, as long as it’s not a contentment that comes from settling for less than what could be. Marriages that are growing are marriages that are changing for the better. Change, however, takes work. Sorry, I haven’t figured out yet how to make change happen without work. I should point out that it is possible to have a marriage that works for both, and I put works in quotes, for both spouses, but in fact they’re guilty of the same kind of idolatry I spoke of earlier. The problem with broken cisterns is that they actually can satisfy your thirst for a little while. There are marriages where each spouse is functioning as an effective idol for the other spouse, As long as both sides play along, everyone’s happy.

Relationships like this are characterized by very strong co-dependence on each other. They are uncomfortable thinking or acting independent of the other person. They may tend to live their life isolated from any other significant relationships. We’ve all seen these kinds of couples. They seem to be very happy. But if you really drill down, what’s going on is they basically have turned each other into an idol. and their idol is functioning, performing well enough to satisfy their deepest needs. And so, you know, it works for them and it looks like a good marriage when in fact, it’s again, guilty of idolatry. Couples that live life nose to nose, rather than side by side, tend to engage the world around them only on an as need basis, rather than as an opportunity to expand their circle of gospel influence.

Marriages that fall into this pattern need to likewise repent of their idolatry. Now this is just one subset of marriages that I would describe themselves, who would describe themselves as content. More common in what I really want to talk about, more common are relationships that are not idolatrous, but fail to evolve and grow into greater examples of love between Christ and His Church. Consider some of the ways Ephesians 5 describes the quality of the love that exists between Christ and the Church. which is to serve as a pattern for marriage. Now just listen real quickly, we’ve already hit them a couple times.

In that passage, Christ gave his life for the church. Christ sanctifies the church. Christ cleanses the church with the Word. Christ works to present the church without spot or blemish. The church lovingly submits to Christ’s leadership. And then speaking specifically to husband and wife, Paul says, husbands should love their wives as their own bodies by nourishing and cherishing her. The husband should leave his mother and father and hold fast to his wife, and the two should become one flesh. The wife should submit to her husband’s headship and show him respect. Now, you can’t escape the fact that the husband’s list is a lot longer than the wife’s.

That fits the pattern of headship. Husbands need to take the lead in discussing how the couple can grow their relationship. In my experience, it is more common for the Christian wife to be eager to grow the relationship while the husband has a if it ain’t broke don’t fix it attitude a Lot of men and guys I’m guilty of this too a lot of men think this way The house isn’t on fire the dog didn’t die the wife’s not upset the kids aren’t fighting dinner’s on time, life is good. Let’s just do all that, go back to bed and do it again the next day. Now that may be an exaggeration, but that’s really not too far off the mark how a lot of us live.

Right about now you might be thinking, well, what are you suggesting we need to do to take our marriage to the next level? Got your pens ready? I’m going to do to you what I used to hate in my calculus textbook. After reading up on a new concept reading about differentials or integrals or whatever the topic may have been They would give you a math problem And then they would say the solution of this problem is left as an exercise for the student And I’d want to pull my hair out whatever used to have air Because I was saying no show me how to do the brome. That’s why I’m reading a stupid book I don’t think there is a one-size-fits-all answer to the question of how do I make my marriage better?

What I want us to have what I want is us to have a healthy godly discontent in our individual marriages Because as great as that might be they can be better But just so I don’t leave you totally empty-handed. I do have eight questions That I came up with that you could use as discussion points with your spouse if you really want to talk about how can we make? Our marriage better. How can we take it to the next level as you meditate on these questions? It will hopefully reveal then some tangible steps you can take to make your marriage an even better one than it already is So question number one How would friends and neighbors?

Describe your marriage Simple enough, you know we might have our own perceptions, but what do other people see and go back to that idea Would they just say it’s nice. It’s okay. You know it’s does it stand out as a different is it just okay? Two, does your marriage stand out from other contented marriages in the culture? What does being in Christ bring to your marriage? What I’m trying to get at there is, again, you might say you have a good marriage, a great marriage, but is it fundamentally different? Is there something about being in Christ? Does it have an extra shine? Is there something about it that makes it stand out?

Or can the world point to as many fine examples as your marriage? If all of your unsaved acquaintances knew about Christ and the church, they’ve never read a Bible, they’ve never gone to church, so all they’re going to glean about the relationship between Christ and church is what they glean by watching your marriage. And then you said, okay, tell me about the love of Christ for the church. Write your essay paper now. What would they write? Would they be able to accurately describe the relationship between Christ and the church of the only data they had was watching your marriage, watching your relationship. Four, how is your marriage making a tangible gospel impact in the culture? Is your marriage making a difference in your neighborhood? Is it making a difference to your neighbors?

Does anybody care? Is it just, oh, yay, the, I can’t say the Smiths, we have Smiths in The Jones, there’s no Jones, the Jones. They lived, they existed, they were nice neighbors. Or was it, wow, they had a marriage that really set the standard. Five, I think. What trait of a husband or wife listed in Ephesians 5 is your weakest? Which trait is your weakest? Which one needs most improvement? I’m assuming none of us would say that we’re perfectly arrived in all those categories. 6. Would you be comfortable telling a newly married couple to copy your marriage? If not, what would need to change? Shouldn’t we be able to say that to people?

Hey, watch our marriage. We’re not perfect, but do a lot of what we’re doing and you’ll do okay. Are we comfortable saying that? 7. Is God truly your greatest affection or are you leaning too heavily on your spouse to meet your deepest needs. Now one takes a lot of honest soul searching. And again, the simple test, how do you respond when your spouse disappoints you? If you’re finding yourself moving in the direction of extreme irritation, frustration, exasperation, I’m tired of trying, I’m going to give up, hopelessness, I’m just throwing lots of words out there.

If these are the kinds of emotions you’re feeling, then I would suggest to you that God not your greatest affection. And then number eight, would your children want their marriage to look like if you have kids? Would your children want their marriage to look like yours? I think Shama’s making the point earlier that in his observation many many kids say well I love mom and dad but I don’t think I want to copy their marriage. And I could probably come up with eight more questions for you to consider but this should be enough to at least make you you wrestle with how you can unsettle your marriage and make it better.

Now, I hope at least one of those questions made everybody in the room wiggle. You know, there’s the, those should be uncomfortable questions. One of the qualifications that we have for leaders in our church is that they must be godly and growing. This isn’t something only for leaders. All maturing Christians need to pass this test and that includes Christian marriages. So wrapping up, there’s an old joke that goes like this. A woman put out an ad looking for a husband. She got a hundred responses back, all from women offering their husbands. Now, as funny as the joke may be, it’s kind of sad that marital jokes are that funny.

They’re humorous because they hit a nerve. I never imagined that I would see a time in my life where the definition of marriage would be as messed up as it is. Part of the reason for this is the natural course of sin in general. But a more tragic reason is that Christians haven’t done a very good job of making marriage as designed by God look all that appealing. We need, by the grace of God, to change that. The world has settled in their minds that Christians have no corner on the truth when it comes to marriage. Their argument when we tell them, you know, boo divorce, boo gay marriage, boo whatever they’re doing, they just throw our marriages back in our face and say, shut up, you got nothing to say.

All married couples in this room, young or old, need to examine your marriage and start looking for ways that you can and unsettle them in order that they more fully become what God had in mind when He first gave the woman to the man in the garden. Let’s pray. Father, as we’ve just covered this material and all of the topics we’ve talked about today, we do thank You, Father, for the gift of marriage. We couldn’t have thought of something as good as that. But Father, we must confess that in so many ways we have messed it up.

gave us something wonderful and we have through sin we have we have messed things up help us father I trust I assume that most of the people here in this room day came because they do care about their marriages they want to make them better and I commend them for that I pray that all of us will have walked away with something that we felt convicted on something that we perhaps re-encouraged on as well but also things that we can grow in and learn and do better father we want marriages that really shine not for our sake not for our glory, but we want the world to see marriage as you designed it to be. We want them to get a clear picture of what the love between Christ and the church looks like.

We want them to come to us and say, help us understand how we can have a relationship like that and that we can then use that as a platform to tell them about Jesus. And so Father, where we need repentance, bring repentance, where we need better understanding, us with that. Father, if we’ve turned our spouses into broken sisters that we’re turning to, help us to repent of that and turn back to you, fill our hearts, fill our minds, fill our souls so that we can be first and foremost better lovers of you and then from that better lovers of our spouses. We just ask and pray this now in Jesus’ name. Amen.