Extreme Home Makeover: Couples Edition Series

EXTREME HOME MAKEOVER: COUPLES EDITION

Scott Bayles, pastor

Blooming Grove Christian Church: 5/27/2012

One of the things that always amazed me about shows like Extreme Makeover: Home Edition is how this team of designers and carpenters can come in and totally remodel a house from the ground up in a week or sometimes a weekend.

Real life never seems to be that easy. I’ve never built or remodeled a house before, but if you have you’ve probably discovered these four principles to be true:

1. It will take more time than you planned

2. It will cost much more than you figured.

3. It will be messier than you anticipated.

4. It will require more patience than you thought possible.

I think those same four principles hold true for building or remodeling a home. Let me share our anchor verse with you. The Bible says, “Unless the Lord builds a house, the work of the builders is wasted” (Psalm 127:1 NLT). In other words, God wants to be intimately involved in the building of your family. No sensible person would think about building or remodeling a house without a well-thought-out plan or blueprint from an architect. And yet, so many couples try to build not just their house, but their home without consulting God’s divine design for marriage and family.

This morning’s message is called Extreme Home Makeover: Couples Edition because we’re going to go back and look at God’s original intended design for marriage. Genesis 2 provides us with God’s blueprints for marriage and the plans we need to build or remodel our own marriages. Here’s what the Bible has to say:

Then the Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper who is just right for him.”… So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep. While the man slept, the Lord God took out one of the man’s ribs and closed up the opening. Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib, and he brought her to the man.

“At last!” the man exclaimed. “This one is bone from my bone, and flesh from my flesh! She will be called woman, because she was taken from man.” This explains why a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are united into one. Now the man and his wife were both naked, but they felt no shame. (Genesis 2:18-25 NLT)

Now I can’t find this in the Bible, but I think somewhere between verse 18 and 19, God said, ‘‘Adam, I know you’re lonely, so let me tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to make you a woman, I mean a perfect 10, and she is going to meet your every need. She’s going to get up at 5:00 a.m. every morning, lay out your clothes, have breakfast and the newspaper on the table when you get ready. She’ll kiss you passionately when you leave for work, put love notes in your briefcase, and call you to find out what you want for dinner and tell you how much she loves you and can’t wait for you to get home. She’s going to meet you at the door every evening wearing something exciting. She’ll massage your feet and rub your shoulders, then usher you to the table for an extravagant feast. And, Adam, after you have dessert, you get to have her.’’

And Adam was excited so he said, ‘‘God, that’s great! But that’s too good to be true, what’s the catch? What will it cost me?’’

And God said, ‘‘It will cost you an arm and a leg.’’

Adam thought about it for a minute and said, ‘‘What can I get for a rib?’’

Seriously, though, this passage gives us four cornerstones that establish a framework for building or rebuilding any marriage.

The first cornerstone is the purpose of marriage.

• THE PURPOSE OF MARRIAGE

God’s words here in Genesis 2 reveal a two-fold purpose for marriage. First, he says, “It is not good for the man to be alone” (vs. 18).

Marriage fulfills our need for companionship.

God created you and me for relationships. God loves us and he wants us to have a relationship with him, but he also designed us for relationships with each other. Human beings are hard-wired with an innate desire for companionship.

In his bestselling book, His Needs/Her Needs, Dr. Willard Harley claims that one of a woman’s most important emotional needs is having someone to talk to—she wants to be able to share her thoughts, her feelings, her experiences, and know that the person she’s talking to cares deeply about her. Husbands, one of the best things you can do for your marriage is just listen to your wife. Be her companion. Let her open up to you and she’ll love you for it.