Messages on the home Preached 1971 – 2008
By
Bob Marcaurelle
homeorchurchiblestudy.com bob marcaurelle
MESSAGE 1
Annual Sermons Text: Eph. 5:18-21
Vol. 9 No. 19-20 Bob Marcaurelle
SIX STEPS TO A GOOD MARRIAGE
Most husbands feel they already know the steps to a good marriage. They are “Yes, dear! Yes, dear! Yes, dear! . . .etc.” Well, there’s a lot of wisdom in that, but let’s go a little deeper.
And don’t let the word “STEPS” fool you. Don’t think all you have to do is write them down and start doing them. Each one is a battleground where we need to set priorities, destroysome idols to self we have erected, and make daily efforts. It’s like a doctor who tells you to do three things for your health.
1) Lose 25 pounds. 2) Stop smoking. 3) Exercise thirty minutes every day.
Satan is launching an all out attack on your home. The home feeds the church, the government and the culture, so if Satan corrupts the home, he corrupts all society. Here in Ephesians 5 Paul tells us to “be filled with the Spirit” (5:18). Then he applies the Spirit filled life to husbands, wives, parents and children (5:21-6:4). Then in 6:10-18 he tells us to put on the armor, for our war with Satan. Going to battle for your home, first we have. . .
I. SELECTION: MARRY THE RIGHT PERSON (2 Cor. 6:14)
1. The Person (Eph. 5:18).
What is the first step in cooking rabbit stew? TO CATCH A RABBIT! Satan attempts to destroy our homes before we create them by getting us to marry the wrong person. This is the quickest road I know to living hell on earth. I heard a pastor this week say our homes are in trouble today because pastors do not do in-depth premarital counseling.
I disagree. Sure, some premarital counseling where the basics are touched should be and are being done by parents, pastors and friends. But YOU CANNOT CARVE ROTTEN WOOD. If you choose a lazy, selfish, moody, spoiled, inconsiderate, “me first” person, all the premarital counseling and seminars and books in the world will not help one bit. On the other hand, if you choose a hard working, kind, “other’s first” person, you can have a good marriage with no formal counseling. Marriage problems are really PEOPLE problems, and if you marry a bum or a spoiled brat you are headed for heartache.
Paul talks about this in 2 Corinthians 6:14. He tells Christians, “Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common?” I can hear you now. Don’t talk to me about this, he (or she) lights my fire, gives me goose bumps. Well, romantic love and being “in love” have received a bad rap from the church, but those who put it down need to read the Song of Solomon.
Romantic love is a wonderful gift from God and I for one believe God wants this fire to burn all the way to the grave. Your wife or husband should be your lover, your friend, your partner, your very self. But if romance is ALL you have, if you don’t build on it friendship and partnership and equality and sacrifice, it will die. You’ll be like the black man I worked with in high school. When he knew I had a date he would say, “You’d better watch out. When I first met my wife she was so sweet I wanted to eat her up! Now I wish I had.”
The older I get the more I see the wisdom of the Holy Spirit using here, the picture of an UNEQUAL YOKE. It’s like putting a race horse and a poodle together to pull a wagon. They will pull against and fight each other every step of the way. They are anything but a team and the constant frustration makes them sick of the sight of each other. Marry someone with a SIMILAR BACKGROUND and SIMILAR INTERESTS. I’m not talking about being just alike, but I am talking about wanting the same things in life.
Most of all marry someone with SIMILAR SPIRITUAL FOUNDATIONS. And this means far more than being a church member. Paul, in our text, would way marry someone “filled with the Spirit” (Eph. 5:15). And this is not someone who has had some dramatic “second blessing” experience. It is someone who is daily filled with Jesus. It means you marry someone who loves the Lord, who serves the Lord and wants to be and tries to be like the Lord. You can’t carve rotten wood but a new born committed Christian will become more like the Lord through the years. To see what this means look at 1 Corinthians 13. It is a description of love but it’s also a description of Jesus and the person who lives like Him. Love is. . .
PATIENT - Puts up with imperfection.
KIND - Does nice things for you.
NOT ENVY - Does not put others down and be jealous of you.
NOT RUDE - Does not cut you down or off.
NOT SELF SEEKING - Puts you first.
NOT EASILY ANGERED - Is not someone you have to handle with kid gloves.
NOT KEEP A RECORD OF WRONGS.
REJOICES IN THE TRUTH.
ALWAYS PROTECTS.
ALWAYS TRUSTS.
ALWAYS HOPES.
ALWAYS KEEPS TRYING
.Now think about the opposite
- unkind, impatient, jealous, rude, insists on their own way, moody, explosive, remembers every bad thing you do, loves dirty things, holds grudges, says “I told you so!”, is negative and gives up in the face of difficulties.
There, my friends, is A MARRIAGE PROBLEM all the counseling and seminars in the world won’t help. One out of every 2.6 marriages in America ends up in divorce. That’s like playing Russian roulette with three bullets in the chamber. But where husband and wife are both committed to Christ in a local church, the divorce rate is 1 in 24! Why? Because they are becoming the right kind of people.
2. The Perfection?
This does not mean we are looking for the perfect person. That’s someone you wouldn’t want to live with. I saw a cartoon of a woman kneeling by her husband who was asleep in the bed. She said, “Dear God! Please give Mr. Perfect just one little flaw.” Neither does this mean you will be 100 percent sure that the person is the right one. All this leads us to. .
3. The Prayer (Prov. 3:6)
The Bible says, “In all your ways acknowledge Him and He will direct your paths” (Prov. 3:6). I love the Old Testament story of the servant Abraham sent out in search of a bride for Isaac. He came to a well and prayed. And he knew what a good wife was, so he prayed for a girl who would offer to water his camels. Rebekah walked up before he quit praying and did just that (Gen. 24). Now our prayers may not be that dramatic but they can be just that real and effective. God has someone for you and he will guide you to that someone if you will let Him.
A word to those who are married and tempted to say, “It’s too late. I got the wrong one!” My friend, the mate you have is God’s choice for you now. If you can’t change them, change yourself. Commit to becoming like Christ, to giving more than you get, and to praying for your husband or wife to become committed Christians.
Now I’m not saying, like many do, that divorce is never right for a Christian. Sometimes divorce is the lesser of two evils. But I am saying that if you choose to walk away you should do that as an absolute last resort and you should have worked hard at making your marriage work.
II. SUBMISSION: BE WILLING TO GIVE IN (Eph. 5:21)
We hear a lot about the Bible’s call for women to submit to their husbands (Eph. 5:22). But the Bible also teaches that submission is to be done by husbands to wives, by children to parents and by parents to children. To the “Spirit filled” or Christ following family Paul says, “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Eph. 5:21).
If couples go into marriage seeing it as a 50/50 proposition, bent on getting their 50 percent, they are headed for conflict and heartache. One fellow said, “Marriage is a give and take affair. My wife gives the orders and I take them.” Well, that’s not quite right, but we must be humble enough and self confident enough to be willing to give in and walk the second mile. The perfect marriage would be where the husband has the main goal of making his wife happy and making life easier for her and the wife has as her main goal making her husband happy and making life easier for him. Two words of advice.
1) Forget the Small Stuff. The Bible says, “The little foxes spoil the vines? (Song of Sol. 2:15). It’s amazing what teeny, tiny, tacky things people fight over - how you squeeze the toothpaste, how you leave the lights on, how you hang your coat on a doorknob, how you forget to take out the trash. I know of a marriage years ago that could have been saved if a wife could have let her husband take a 30 minute nap when he got home from work. She just couldn’t do it. She said to me with a snarl, “I don’t have time for a nap, why should he?” And with sadness, “I don’t know why, but the sight of him on that couch drives me up a wall.”
2) Be Willing to Give In. Marriage can be pictured with TWO LINES. At the beginning the two are headed straight toward each other like trains for a head-on collision. We come together in marriage from different origins, with different ideas that don’t really come out until we have to live together and make decisions together. As we face the big five - money, in-laws, work, sex and children - our differences come out. We butt heads and pride comes in. We no longer care what is right or best for our marriage, but WHO WINS or who is the BOSS. Through prayer and commitment to the Lord, we need to seek the grace to give in when we know it’s right and best for our marriage.
In my first church out of seminary there was a wonderful Christian couple and they have become lifelong friends of Mary Ann and myself. Knowing I was to preach this sermon, she gave me an illustration from her home. Both were committed to becoming more like Christ and to the local church. In fact, she was at the church many nights a week, working in Sunday School, heading up the WMU, serving on committees and helping minister to the poor.
Like at my home, she made 99 percent of the decisions and her husband, like me, said, “Yes, dear!” One day she told her husband the organist was retiring and she had been asked to do it. Well, choir practice then was on Thursday night and her husband calmly said, “You can’t do it unless they move choir practice to Wednesday.”
That sweet, godly, committed Christian wife said she got as mad as a hornet. “Who is he,” she fumed, “to TELL me what I can and cannot do?” There was trouble in River City! Well, the more she thought and prayed about it, the more she knew he was right. She knew another night out was not best for her family or her marriage. So she got the church to move to Wednesday night. Then with a gleam in her eye she said, “I know he was right. I know he was speaking more out of hurt and anger and need than out of authority, BUT I STILL GET MAD when I think about it.”
That, my friends, is what love is all about. Love goes beyond feelings, beyond pride, beyond “Who’s boss?” to “What is best for my family?” When we do this the two lines that butt heads make an upward turn together and travel side by side as partners.
Part Two
III. CONTENTMENT: DON’T TRY TO KEEP UP WITH THE
JONESES (1 Tim. 6:10; Prov. 30:8-9)
Once a man and woman commit to being the right kind of person and are willing to give in, the devil works even harder to bring them down.
And his number one weapon is MONEY. The Bible says, “The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil, through this craving some have been led astray. . .and pierced themselves with many sorrows” (1 Tim. 6:10). We in America do not love and worship and give top priority to God and to the character of our families, but to material possessions. And the Bible makes it clear that such material possessions are the greatest danger we face in our battle against sin.
Jesus personified money for the god it is and said, “You cannot serve God and Mammon” (Mt. 6:24). The wise author or Proverbs said, “Give me neither poverty or riches but feed me with the food I need, lest I be full and DENY you and say, Who is the Lord?” (Prov. 30:8-9). Materialism drives us from God and from each other. James 4 says,
“What causes strife and fightings among you? Don’t they arise from the desires that war inside you? You covet what others have and when you don’t get it you kill. . .” (Js. 4:1ff).
We don’t literally “kill” but we hate and fight and kill love and kill marriages with greed. Money is a mighty magnet that draws out the selfishness in people. The root sin in human nature is self love or pride and money, with the things it buys, is the primary way we worship before the altar of self. Ask any marriage counselor where you find friction and anger expressed the most and he will immediately say - FINANCES.
Let me give you a sound money principle: WHEN YOUR OUTGO EXCEEDS YOUR INCOME
THEN YOUR UPKEEP BECOMES YOUR DOWNFALL.
Of course, our answer to this is “CHARGE!” We want what we want when we want it, so we pull out the plastic and get it. How stupid can we be? If we cannot afford something this month, what makes us think we can afford it next month with 18 percent tacked on?
To live in mansions, drive new cars, take luxurious vacations, have every entertainment gadget known to man, wear fine clothes and practice hobbies we like, husbands and wives become virtual slaves to a job. They have little quality time for each other and for the children and they wonder why their home deteriorates inside their beautiful houses. It’s easy, money can build a house but it cannot build a home. In fact, it can get in the way of home building.
I’m not talking about poverty. I’m talking about moderation. I’m talking about contentment. I’m talking about doing without some material things so we can have some better things in terms of relationships. The best advice I ever heard was from a layman in our church. He used to say, “Give the Lord 10 percent. Put 10 percent away for retirement. And have family fun with the rest.”
And remember this, there are some words my generation grew up on, but this current generation seems ashamed to admit. You dads may feel like a failure when you say it, but your children need to hear these words. What are they? “WE CANNOT AFFORD IT!” That doesn’t necessarily mean you are a failure. It could well mean you have your priorities right.
IV. CONSIDERATION: KEEP THE LITTLE KINDNESSES ALIVE IN MARRIAGE (1 Cor. 13)
For as long as I can remember I have been giving two books to couples I marry. I give the men LETTERS TO PHILLIP and the women LETTERS TO KAREN, both by Rev. Charlie Shedd. I have dozens of books and tapes and seminar notes on marriage but these two little paperbacks are worth more than all these combined.
Why? Because they move beyond theory to practice. Shedd tells the man what a woman needs and wants and tells the woman what the man needs and wants. This basically is what love is, being kind, meeting needs and being considerate and thoughtful. Paul in 1 Corinthians 13 does not DEFINE love, he DESCRIBES IT as kind, patient, forgetful of wrongs, hopeful, etc. Shedd simply applies all this to marriage. Listen to a few of his practical suggestions:
For the Man:
- Learn to be kind. Find out what your wife wants and needs.
- Aim to be your wife’s best friend.
- Go out together once a week.
- Every Day: Tell your wife you love her. Do some- thing nice. Pay her a compliment.
- Treat her like a person, not a cook, a mother and a house cleaner.
- Give her cards and flowers. You think they are silly but she things they are special.
For the Woman:
Tell him he’s wonderful.
Cut him some slack and let him think he is free.
Learn all you can about his work.
Learn to say, “I’m sorry, honey!” They are words second only to “I love you.”
Don’t nag. Don’t keep telling him something you know he knows.
V. CONFLICT: DON’T GO TO BED MAD (Eph. 4:26)
Perhaps the most destructive emotion we have is anger. When stresses or conflicts arise we often seethe with rage until we blow up, or just blow up to begin with. David and Vera Mace, after 50 years of marriage counseling, said the number one problem in marriage is plain, old fashioned anger.
The root is usually money and selfishness. We don’t get our way or don’t get what we want. The response is anger where we do things we shouldn’t, say things we shouldn’t and make scars that never completely go away. The Bible does not tell us not to get angry because it knows we will. What it says is, “Be angry but do not sin. Don’t let the sun go down on your wrath” (Eph. 4:26). In other words, lovingly and honestly deal with and talk about the issues.
One fellow said, “My wife and I have never had a fight. Sometimes, however, you can hear us explaining things two blocks away.” Another said, “My wife and I have never gone to bed mad. We’ve stayed up all night a bunch of times.” Husbands and wives, as Shedd puts it, need to learn how to FIGHT THE GOOD FIGHT! Here are some ground rules:
1) Never attack each other. Deal only with the issues.
2)Don’t get HISTORICAL and go back and drudge up things in the past you are mad about.
3)If both of you get mad at the same time, declare a truce, and come back and deal with the issue later.
4)Don’t aim at defeating each other but at under- standing each other’s point of view and doing what is best for your family and your relationship.
5)Anger will surface in front of the kids, and that’s OK, because they need to see you are not perfect, but do your quarreling in private.
6)Above all, pray for understanding and the grace to’ give in if you are wrong or if what you want may not be best.
VI. COMMUNICATION: TALK! TALK!
LISTEN! LISTEN!
The final step is perhaps the most important because it enables us to deal with the first five steps. That step is to COMMUNICATE. Talk to each other. Listen to each other. In every home there are three marriages. There is the one the husband sees. There is the one the wife sees. And there is the one that is the real marriage.
Marriage counseling is simply getting a husband and wife together to talk and listen and really see each other’s point of view so stress areas can be relieved. Charlie Shedd wrote LETTERS TO KAREN in 1965. In its latest edition, twenty years later, as an Abingdon Press Classic, he was asked to write an epilog, a closing chapter summing up the book’s influence and his views on marriage. He said in that chapter that the six most important words in marriage are “Talk! Talk! Listen! Listen! Listen!”
To get an insight from someone else he went to a 90 year old neighbor lady who, after a long, happy marriage, had been a widow for the past 17 years. Her husband had been in the military and she and her family had been everywhere and done everything and gone around the world more than once. Shedd, at her 90th birthday party, asked her, “Grandma Mack, what is the happiest memory you have of your 90 years?” She answered immediately, “Oh, that’s easy. It’s all those times Louis and I would sit on the back porch and visit.”
If you received the word that an H-bomb was coming and you had thirty minutes to live, do you know what you would do? You would rush to a telephone and talk to someone you love. You would say all those words you meant to say. You would cry and tell them you love them. You would thank them for loving you. Just this week I saw the reenactment of the terrible tragedy in Texas where children in a flood were clinging to trees.
One little girl was losing her grip and just before she slipped to her death, she didn’t scream in panic. She said to the boy next to her, “Tell my mama and daddy I love them and I’ll see them in heaven.” Her hands released and she was swept away. Oh, listen, it’s not money or power or clothes or fame we need and want. It’s love from other people and love FOR other people. That’s why God gives us moms and dads and children and husbands and wives. Don’t live in a house with someone and never really get to know them and love them and receive their love. If you do, you will miss life’s second greatest treasure, second only to knowing and loving God.
