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.
But this goes both ways. Guys don’t need to talk as much as women do, but men crave recreational companionship. I’ll always remember a conversation I had with a customer at Family Christian Stores one day. We got to talking about video games somehow and I mentioned that Ashley and I would play NBA Live together after we laid the baby down at night. He looked at me with the widest eyes and finally asked, “How did you get your wife to play Playstation with you!?” I explained that one day I just told her, “You’re the most amazing wife in the world, but if you would NBA Live with me, you’d be perfect.” “And that worked!? I’ve got to try that,” he said.
See, men crave companionship. Men need their wives to be our playmates.
Your husband or wife should be your best friend. You should share your hobbies, your secrets, your dreams, your burdens, and your time. You should laugh together, play together, and cry together. That’s the first purpose of marriage.
Secondly, God says, “I will make a helper who is just right for him” (vs. 18).
Marriage gives us a companion who completes us. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this, but men and women are different. Men and women think differently, process emotions differently, make decisions differently, and learn differently. Yet men and women complement one another so beautifully that a healthy relationship makes both partners more complete.
You’ve heard the old cliché, “opposites attract.” That’s exactly the way God intended it. Ashley and I are opposites in a lot ways. For instance, Ashley freezes up at the thought of public speaking but, one-on-one, she’s outgoing and has a gift for gab. I’m exactly the opposite. I’m perfectly at home in front of an audience, but in social setting, I’m introverted and sometimes uncomfortable. Ashley is strong where I’m weak and I’m strong where she’s weak. We fit together and complement each other.
By the way, this one of the reasons God made marriage for one man and one woman. A man, no matter how hard he tries, will never be a good wife. And woman will never be a good husband. Homosexual marriage does not fit with God’s design; rather, marriage gives us a companion of the opposite sex who complements and completes us.
In addition to the purpose of marriage, Genesis also gives a second cornerstone for building your marriage, which is the priority of marriage.
• THE PRIORITY OF MARRIAGE
Your marriage needs to be your most important relationship, second only to God. When the Bible says, “This is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife,” it’s telling us that the husband/wife relationship takes priority over or any other relationship (vs. 24).
That can be a little tough for some parents and newlyweds to accept, especially when you live in a small town like this and mom and dad live just down the street.
I heard a story about a mother and father who gave their precious daughter away in marriage. After the honeymoon, their daughter and her husband moved several states away. A few weeks later, the phone rang, the mother answered, and it was their daughter. She was in tears because she and her husband had just had their first fight. The daughter asked to speak to her dad. He took the phone and went into another room and talked to “his little girl” for about 10 minutes. When he came back out, the mother asked, “What did she say?” The father replied, “She and her husband had a big fight and she wants to come home.” After a moment of silence, the mother asked, “What did you say?” The father answered, “I told her, SHE IS HOME.” That’s good! That father recognized that he needed to let go after his daughter said “I do.”
But this applies to more than just parent/child relationships. Anything that starts to take priority over your marriage is a threat to your relationship—it could be a hobby like hunting or playing video games; it could be a job that requires you to work hours than it’s worth; it could be a friendship, especially a friend of the opposite sex; even your children can sometimes come between you. I’ve always loved what James Dobson once said. He said, “Dads, the best thing you can do for your children is to love your wife.”
When we make our marriages our top priority, we’ll be in a much better position to put up the third cornerstone in building our home, which is the permanence of marriage.
• THE PERMANENCE OF MARRIAGE
There are two little words in verse twenty-four that are very important: “be united.” The Hebrew words translated “be united” actually mean “glued together,” or “cling to,” or “stuck together.”
These two words remind us that God designed marriage to be permanent—to be a lifelong relationship. It’s like ten-year-old Kirsten said, “No person really decides before they grow up who they’re going to marry. God decides it all way before, and you get to find out later who you’re stuck with.” She got the “stuck” part right.
I remember when Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston got divorced. It was all over the tabloids. In one interview, when asked about why their marriage failed, Brad Pitt said, “I don’t think we failed. I think it was a very successful marriage. Who said it had to last forever to be successful.” I don’t know about you, but I don’t think anyone has ever taken their vows and said, “For richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, for seven to ten years.”
No, when you got married you vowed to be together “until death do us part.” And some days it just might come to that. We’re actually going to talk more about the secrets of a successful marriage next week, but for now let me just say that permanence in marriage requires commitment. The Bible says, “The LORD is the witness between you and the wife of your youth… she is your partner, the wife of your marriage covenant” (Malachi 2:14 NIV). When I married Ashley, I made a covenant and a promise to her, to God, to her family and to mine that we would stick together; that I’d be glued to her for the rest of my life and I’m determined to keep that covenant.
So we have three cornerstones in God’s original blueprints for marriage so far—the purpose of marriage, the priority of marriage, and the permanence of marriage. The final cornerstone is the passion of marriage.
• THE PASSION OF MARRIAGE
Take another look at the last couple sentences from Genesis: “And they become one flesh. Both the man and his wife were naked, yet felt no shame” (vs. 24-25).
For some reason, a lot of young people who grow up in the church get the impression that God is down on sex, but nothing could be further from the truth. Sex is a vitally important part of God’s design for marriage. In fact, the very first command God gave Adam and Eve involved having sex. He told them to be fruitful and multiply.
In the New Testament, the Bible tells married couples “Do not deprive each other of sexual relations, unless you both agree to refrain from sexual intimacy for a limited time so you can give yourselves more completely to prayer. Afterward, you should come together again” (1 Corinthians 7:5 NLT).
Like I said last week, sex is precious and God created it to be fully enjoyed and experienced only in the most precious relationship—marriage. There is an emotional, physical, and spiritual bond created by sex that the Bible calls becoming “one flesh.” It leaves lifelong memories and can have lifelong consequences.
When we abuse sex, by removing it from God’s blueprint for marriage, it’s always harmful. Sex outside of marriage can lead to unexpected pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, AIDS, lowered self-respect, and a broken relationship with God. On the other hand, if sex isn’t present within a marriage, it can be very damaging to the relationship. God knew that when he created sex and marriage.
Going back to the book, His Needs/Her Needs, Dr. Harley claims that men’s number one emotional need is sexual fulfillment. He says, “It does wonders for a wife to grasp just how special a man finds sex. He isn’t pawing and grabbing at her because he has turned into a lusting monster. He is pawing and grabbing because he needs something—very badly… He trusts her to be sexually available to him whenever he needs to make love and to meet all of his sexual needs, just as she trusts him to meet her emotional needs.”
God holds sexual intimacy in the highest honor.
He expects us to do the same.
Conclusion:
So here are the four cornerstones of marriage we discover in Genesis: the purpose of marriage, the priority of marriage, the permanence of marriage, and the passion of marriage. If you use these four cornerstones as a guide and line everything up with them, you’ll be in a good position to start building or rebuilding your marriage and your home.
Next week’s message is Extreme Home Makeover: Couples Edition (Part 2), and we’ll talk about the tools you’ll need for remodeling your marriage.
Invitation:
In the meantime, I want to invite the worship team to come lead us in praise and I want to invite you to spend some time this week talking with your spouse about God’s blueprints for marriage. Ask one each other if you think your marriage is fulfilling God’s intended purpose? Is your spouse your most important relationship? Are you still committed to the vows you made one another? Is there still passion in your marriage? If not, what can you do to rekindle that passion? If you need some else to talk to about your marriage, then talk to God. Then come see me. I’d like to help.
