Much of what I’m going to talk about today comes more from experience as a counsellor than directly from Scripture, though I’ve discovered that the Bible talked about these things long before I observed them in the counselling office, and therefore is really an excellent guide for everyday life. I hope to show this to you today.
Let’s begin with an illustration of Love.
Let’s say you had a child who kept getting in trouble, you kept bailing him out as a child, and eventually as he grew up even you couldn’t bail him out anymore, you had to let him go live his life the way he was choosing because nothing you or anyone else did could stop him.
Eventually, after he became an adult, he ended up murdering someone and getting a death sentence. The courts said he must die for what he did, that’s just the Law. The son swore up and down that he was innocent, but the jury convicted him because he did do it, and all the evidence showed he did it.
Now you knew that there were two places people went when they died. One place was for people who had been killed because of crimes they committed, and those people would never see their loved ones again after death. The other place was for those who had not received a death sentence for their crimes, and they would be reunited with their loved ones when they died.
Now this son had an identical twin brother who had never done anything wrong, he was a real good young man who loved his brother and you very deeply. Both sons also knew what you did about where people go when they die, so the good son came to you one day and said “Dad, I bet we could arrange it that during a visit, my brother and I could secretly swap places and the guards would never know.
Then I could die in his place, and because I had not actually committed a crime, maybe there’s a chance I’ll go to the place where I’ll see you again, and if my brother repents and doesn’t commit another crime that requires the death sentence, there might still be a chance that he’s with us when we’re all dead.”
You were stunned, and you loved both sons, but it didn’t seem fair that the good son should die and the other one gets released with no guarantee that he’ll change his ways. But you reluctantly allow this son to change places with the son who committed murder.
The good son was killed for his brother’s crime and the other son came home only to continue in his self-serving criminal lifestyle, showing no gratitude to you or his brother, and leaving you as soon as he had the chance.
He had another 20 years of life to try and change, but he didn’t care if he was with you or his brother after death, he just wanted to pursue his own passions and desires in this life, and eventually killed again, this time being executed for his crime.
You grieved that you had allowed your good son to be killed for nothing, and now had lost both of them, knowing you would never see the criminal son again, and hoping you would see the good son. But because of your love and the love of your son’s brother, you gave the criminal son a chance that unfortunately he never took.
That is the love of God. Giving all people who he created, a chance to be with Him forever by allowing his perfect son Jesus to be sacrificed, knowing that the people may not choose to be with him. He hopes that we’ll say, “wow they did that for me, maybe I do want to spend the rest of eternity with them, maybe I do want to honor them with a new life devoted to them”.
We talk about having faith, how about the faith that the Father and good son showed by taking that huge risk?
Real, authentic, spiritual, or agape love is radical, it’s not of this world, and therefore is rare and noticeable when seen in the world. People will see it as crazy. The reason Jesus is so strong about commanding us to love is because that kind of love is not in our human nature.
Human love is based on our own positive feelings toward someone or something, usually giving us something in return back. It’s self-centered, easy. Real spiritual love like Jesus is talking about is hard, often painful, different, and focuses on the positive feelings we give to others. This kind of love can only come from our spiritual nature. He said “this is love, that you lay down your life for another”.
Love, whether it’s for a child, a spouse, or any other person is always risky, and requires you to sacrifice your own desires and have great faith. But like God, as Christians we are not to love to get something back, we love because God first loved us and He commands us to love like Him, because, as Jesus said in John 13 and 15, this outrageous, unreasonable, sacrificial love is the thing that will truly show that we are devoted followers of Jesus.
Here’s the familiar passage from Paul in 1 Corinthians 13 that we may be good at memorizing but maybe not so great at living out, READ 13:1-8, 13
What a great recipe for marriage, or any relationship for that matter; patience, kindness, humility, politeness, not angry, irritable or resentful, not pointing out our flaws, bearing with one another even when they are hard to bear, enduring all things, not insisting on its own way, and not keeping a record of wrongs. Most of us men can’t believe how good our wives memories are when it comes to our mistakes. And of course we’re pretty good at insisting on our own way.
Love should look like Calvary, like Jesus dying on the cross without a fight, so that we may have life. This kind of love should characterize marriage. We are the bride of Christ and should then be “one flesh” with him, loving him, then loving others as he loved us.
We should be submitting to him and respecting him as a wife is to do with her husband, who is in turn to love her as Christ loved us. We need to trust that this kind of love will ultimately bring more satisfaction than any self-centered love ever can.
This kind of love is vitally important for the next thing we’re going to address:
Communication
Just about every couple that comes for counselling, when asked why they came, answers that they have communication problems. My first response is usually, “Oh yeah, I just heard you speak clearly, and I know you can hear me, so what’s the problem?”
What they are really saying is, “I won’t or don’t communicate normally when...” Usually the when is followed by an emotion, and usually that emotion is fear. For example, a husband or wife might say, “I started yelling because I thought my husband or wife was trying to control me or get their own way.” Another might say, “I shut down and left the room because I was afraid of how my spouse would react if I really said what I feel, or asked for what I really wanted.”
You may think anger is the bad guy, but anger always flares up from fear or hurt, but we seem to be wired to express anger more easily than those two.
To the degree a couple can identify and manage their emotions, put them in a compartment for a time, and pay more attention to what the other person is feeling and needing from them, the more effective communication and problem solving will be. This is true in any kind of human relationship. And remember the Bible says that perfect love casts out fear which is the root of poor communication.
There is a time to tell the other person how you’re feeling, and we shouldn’t necessarily suppress our feelings for long periods, but expressing our feelings is rarely done in a positive or effective way when the emotion is at its peak.
This is especially true of anger and fear, because these feelings activate the biological fight or flight mode in our body, which actually takes blood away from our brain to the muscles and organs. So in essence when we’re feeling powerful anger or fear, we are literally mindless. Many people have little memory of what they did or said during that time.
Without the ability to contain and manage our emotions, we will never have truly effective communication in difficult situations. And the best way to do this is to stay focused on your love for that person and what they are feeling. Dying to self in those moments.
Having said that, there are some basic techniques that will immediately improve how you communicate with each other.
When speaking there are a few things to keep in mind. Speak respectfully, don’t name call, don’t use put downs, don’t use obviously disrespectful tones of voice. Instead use messages that start with “I” instead of “you”, and make requests instead of criticisms.
For instance, a wife could say to her husband, “You are such an inconsiderate jerk, you obviously don’t love me”, and chances are he will live up to the description you just gave of him, and immediately mumble a couple things about you too.
Or you could say, “I was really disappointed, and hurt when you forgot our anniversary. Could you please find a way to remind yourself in the future, it would let me know that you care about my feelings?”
Not only is that way much more respectful, you can’t argue with it (you can’t say, “no I’m not, or yes I do”) and it’s also much more truthful, whether you believe that or not.
We read in Colossians 3 just before Paul talks about rules for Christian households, that we must put all anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from our mouths, then, whatever you do, in word or deed, do it all in the name of Jesus.
Colossians 4:6 says “Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person”. Proverbs 16:9, “Pleasant words are a honeycomb, sweet to the soul and healing to the bones.
Ephesians 5 commands husbands to love their wives, and wives to respect their husbands. Have you ever noticed how in communication, husbands often have a hard time expressing love to their wives, and wives sometimes have an uncanny ability to speak disrespectfully to and about their husbands, especially when there’s stress between them? That is why God commands us to men to love and women to respect, because it’s not our natural way.
Those are areas are where God and Satan know each of us are most sensitive. When a husband doesn’t feel respected and valued by his wife, he feels anything but loving toward her, and when a wife doesn’t feel loved by her husband, she often doesn’t feel like singing his praises. So we start hitting where we innately know it hurts, and get on what some call the “crazy cycle” of hurting each other as we feel they are hurting us. We think it’s intentional.
Now when listening, start by actually listening with the intent to really understand what the other person is saying. Even if you don’t like what you’re hearing.
Ask questions that help you clarify what they’re trying to say and ask them if you got it right. This is a great way to avoid assumption and misunderstanding. James said in his first chapter, “let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry”.
A simple repeating back of what you heard and asking if that is what they meant to say, is very effective. This is important because most of the time, especially if we have an emotional investment in the conversation, we are busy formulating our response or defense while the other person is talking. But when a person feels heard, they have less need to try to ram the point home. Usually though, what we tend to do is go back and forth forcing our own points down the other person’s throat until the loudest one wins.
We need to honor each other by taking the time to really listen and understand, trusting that we will get an opportunity to respond. Otherwise we often speak too soon without having the whole picture or understanding, and our communication gets crazy because we start making our own assumptions about what the person means, and both people get defensive, the emotions rise, and it all falls apart from there.
When we get riled up it’s usually because it feels as if something about our identity is being attacked. This is why the more insecure a person is, the more likely they are to get into arguments easily or be excessively avoidant of them. If I’m secure in who I am, if I don’t carry a bunch of shame, if I’m being honest, in other words if I see myself as a child of God, it’s harder for me to take other people’s words as a personal attack, and therefore easier to stay in a place of compassion and love for them.
So you see that effective communication stems directly from love. Love of self, in terms of security in who we were created to be, and who is caring for us - and loving others by sacrificing the need to get our own needs met in the moment, and rather seeking to meet the emotional needs of the other person.
So what are some of the other Keys to success that I’ve witnessed over the years?
Jesus says in Matthew 19, “man shall leave his family and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh, so they are no longer two but one, so don’t let man separate what God has put together”. This is the big one, and it refers to commitment.
How many couples actually see themselves seriously as one flesh, implying that they really can’t ever be pulled apart without extreme pain and damage? How many in our day and age actually make and keep that kind of commitment to each other? Without a doubt, 100% guaranteed this is the most important factor in whether a relationship survives or not.
Tragically, by the time many couples reach out for help, one or both of them has already left the relationship in their heart, and counselling is like trying to breath life into a corpse. God might be able to do that, but a counsellor can’t.
Obviously the Bible promotes marriage as the ideal relationship between a man and a woman, but I believe this idea of being one flesh occurs the minute a couple begins a physically intimate relationship. So this is not just about traditional marriage, but any physically intimate relationship between a man and a woman. Or same sex couples for that matter.
When this kind of relationship is torn apart, there’s like a cosmic tear in the spiritual fabric of the universe. No matter how pleasant the breakup or divorce, this tearing of one flesh back into two, wounds people at levels they don’t even know about, we leave pieces of ourselves behind, and it affects everyone around them, especially children who are literal representatives of that one flesh, where two people come together.
Not only is this the most important factor, it’s also the most difficult because you have to decide with absolute conviction beforehand, largely by faith, that no matter how you feel, or what happens, you are committed to this person for life, and will never leave for as long as you both shall live.
Now our culture, even apparently many in the church (because the divorce rates are about the same), don’t really take this seriously. We get attracted to someone, act on our feelings and hormones, and begin a physical relationship right away, and then down the road we may decide whether or not we want to actually continue to be with this person long term. We seek to satisfy the flesh first.
But God never intended sexual relationships to be test drives. We need to be very careful, and thoughtful, and patient before we become one flesh with another, because we are putting in motion a God ordained mechanism that has ramifications far beyond our awareness and understanding. Paul calls this a profound mystery in Ephesians 5:32.
Here are some attitudes that can help us make this kind of commitment to another person. First of all, in any love relationship, if it’s really love, we put the other person’s well-being and happiness ahead of our own. That’s what love is, and if you’re not doing that, you’re not really loving in the way God uses the term.
Are you willing to put your own needs and feelings aside at times in order to ensure that your partner’s emotional needs are met? Not just while the relationship is new and exciting, that’s easy, but when the bliss dies down and we come back to earth? This is why it’s so important to get to know someone before making a commitment, becoming one flesh, because the risk here is that if you are willing, but the other person isn’t, then you lose, and it’s hard to keep sacrificing in that kind of one way relationship.
But if everyone has this attitude, everybody wins. So you want to be as sure as you can that this person is willing to make the same commitment you are. In a marriage or any other love relationship between adults, the other person’s happiness and well-being should be our primary goal. I could give you many Bible references to that. And if you are already in a committed relationship you need to make sure you are loving like this.
Another thing that helps greatly in making this kind of commitment is the ability to understand and accept the differences between you. Men and women are very different creatures, with very different needs and emotional makeups, in case you haven’t noticed. Not only that, every man and woman are unique.
Now people may not come out right away and say, “Mr. Counsellor I’m here to get you to change my husband or wife into the model I want”, but that’s often the motivation. Usually I’ll say, “Well then you better trade them in because you can’t change a Volkswagon into a Hyundai” (not that you’d want to).
This is yet another reason that you better know what you’re shopping for before you buy. You might be able to make minor tune ups with the model you have, but don’t expect anymore than that.
If you have already made your purchase, it’s up to you to make the adjustments rather than trying to make the other person change. Have you ever tried to force a 427 Corvette engine into a Ford escort, it ain’t pretty even if you manage to get it in. You bought it as it was and there was a reason you bought it, and you gotta dance with the one you came with. Again this requires sacrifice.
But if you’re spouse really loves you, and you show them real acceptance and love as they are, even though they may be a Ford Escort, they might strive to be a Corvette for you. Change is motivated by a desire to please, as is obedience to the Lord, and if you are nagging and criticizing all the time, you can bet that desire is not going to be there. You catch more flies with honey...
Women need to understand though, that for a man, taking the garbage out can be as loving an act as bringing you flowers in their mind, and more practical, though maybe not in your mind. And men need to understand that their wife nagging them to talk can actually be a sign of respect in a woman’s mind, because they’re expressing their desire to have you there at an emotionally intimate level, though you may not see it that way.
Problems in communication between couples are a sign that one or both people are trying to get a need met by the other person. They want you to be that person because you are the one they chose, and it is terribly disappointing when you don’t come through. Usually it’s just a need for understanding, love, acceptance, or respect, and these are things we’re obligated to give in a loving relationship.
Next week we’re going to cover managing our finances, and did you know that finances are the number one reason for divorce in North America? Almost nothing causes more stress and worry in the lives of families in our culture.
But for today let’s all make more of an effort to really love and respect each other, by putting our needs second to our partner’s, trusting their commitment to us, and making their happiness and well-being our main concern, just like Jesus did when he chose to die for us to forgive our sins and give us new life.
