Grace Based Relationships Part 1 October 6, 2002
Relationships When Grace Is Not In Place
Genesis 3 (16)
Over the next few weeks I will be speaking through a series called Grace Based Relationships. The series is taken from a book by Jeff Van Vonderen called “Families Where Grace is in Place.” While Jeff’s book concentrates on relationships within the family, I believe that the biblical principles that he teaches can be applied to all our relationships, especially the primary ones
He begins his book with a story of a father and daughter (pages 13-16)
A man asked his twelve-year-old daughter one day, "Chrissy, can you do something for me?"
"Sure, Dad," Chrissy answered. "What would you like me to do?"
"Right now I need to run an errand. But later on I have to do some work with that fence over there," he said, pointing to the high old fence that stood guard over the back of their property. "Would you please clean up the debris that’s all along the edge of it? You can put it in these bags, and when I get back I’ll carry them away."
"Okay, Dad," she replied.
The dad left, and Chrissy started on her task. In less than an hour she was finished with the entire job. Her dad wasn’t home yet, so she tried to think of something else to do to help. Looking at the old fence, she thought, 1’11 bet dad is going to paint this old fence. I’ll give him a head start. He’ll sure be surprised when he gets home.
The sun was hot, the brush was stiff, and the fence was high. After about an hour Chrissy was tired, sweaty, and discouraged. She looked at what she’d accomplished so far. What a bogus job. 1 give up. I’m a terrible helper:
Just then Chrissy’s dad pulled up. But he didn’t get out. He just sat there looking at the fence. The streaky brush marks spoke of an old paintbrush in inexperienced hands. He could picture his sweet Chrissy perched on the tips of her toes, working hard.
When he got out of the car there was Chrissy. She was covered with so much dirt and paint that it was hard to see her skin. As he got a closer look, he could see the trails of sweat and tears through the grime on her face.
Chrissy ran to him. "Daddy, I wanted to help so much," she cried.
Chrissy’s dad led her to a nearby lawn chair. Sitting down with her on his lap he said, "Sweetie, I’ve got some bad news, some worse news, and some good news.
"The bad news is that I have new brushes and a step stool in the trunk of my car. I ran the errand to pick up those things at the hardware store. That brush you were using belonged to your grandpa. It isn’t useful for much more than a keepsake."
"Well, that’s bad news," said Chrissy. "What’s the worse news?" "The worse news is that I’m going to tear down the fence." "What? After all that work! Why?"
"Because it’s served its purpose, it can’t be repaired, and I have the stuff right over there by the garage to build a brand-new one. Ready for the good news?" Dad asked anxiously.
"I suppose." Chrissy sniffed.
Chrissy’s dad took her face in his hands, looked full into her eyes and, with tears in his own, said, "Chrissy, I really love you. And I am so proud that you gave that old fence a try. Why don’t you get in the car and I’ll take you out for some ice cream."
"After I wasted all that time and made a terrible mess?"
"Well, you know," her father countered, "with the lousy tools you had you didn’t stand a very good chance. And besides that, it wasn’t even your job. So let’s have some ice cream. After that, if you’re still game, we can build the new fence together. This one will be much prettier. And it’s specially designed to let the sun shine in and let the breeze blow through our yard. ..."
The story of Chrissy and her dad is very much like that of so many Christians in relationships. We want to do the right thing. We try like crazy to have a Christian marriage and to raise Christian kids to have Christian friendships.
Too often, though, the work we try to do as Christian spouses and parents, family members, and friends is not the right job at all. We focus on "unspiritual" or wrong behavior, then we set out to apply pressure, control behavior, and do everything in our power to change our spouse or children or others we have primary relationships with. In numerous Christian couples and families, this is the primary cause of exhaustion, depression, and the hopeless sense of wanting to bailout of it all. When people spend their lives trying to transform their spouse and their kids, the natural result is tiredness and discouragement and the desire to quit. Therefore, this series is more about learning the right job, and less about learning new techniques.
This first step is easy- if we will do it: We must learn the simple difference between God’s job and ours. God knows you have done the best you could, using the tools you’ve had. But God may be like Chrissy’s father, saying to you, "I can see that you’ve worked really hard to help me and to please me. But you have been burning yourself out doing a job I never meant for you to do. You’re trying to paint over something that’s bound to break down in the end, and no amount of white paint can cover the mess. Let me show you how to build something that’s brand new.”
I am talking about learning how to be continually empowered by God’s grace and therefore able to empower your spouse and children and others to learn and to grow, And to do that, we have to make the frightening step of giving up our fear of people and our drive to conform outwardly to what other Christians expect of us, or seem to.
God’s job is to fix and to change. Our job is to depend, serve, and equip. This is the work of grace.
THE PROBLEM
Trying to Control – Genesis 3:16
It is not too surprising that the difficulties that we have start right in the garden with Adam and Eve. When Adam and Eve disobeyed God in the Garden, we most often recognize the result of separation from God – they are expelled from the garden were they had perfect communion with God, but there is also a separation that happens in their own relationship.
In the Genesis story of the creation, God creates Humanity by creating the first pair, and they live in paradise – the garden of eden where they enjoy the company of God and each other’s company. They can eat anything in the garden, except the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The devil comes in the form of a serpent and tempts them by telling Eve that if they do eat this fruit, they will be just like God, knowing good and evil. The teptation was not eating something that they were told not to – like the cookies that are supposed to be saved for company. No, the temptation is to be like God.
They eat the fruit together, and immediately their eyes are opened, they are ashamed of themselves and their nakedness, and they try to cover themselves.
Gen 3:8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the LORD God called to the man, "Where are you?"
10 He answered, "I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid."
11 And he said, "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?"
12 The man said, "The woman you put here with me-she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it."
13 Then the LORD God said to the woman, "What is this you have done?"
The woman said, "The serpent deceived me, and I ate."
You see the breakdown in their relationship immediately – they begin to blame each other for their sin
Nicky Gumbel says: “The man blamed the woman, the woman blamed the serpent, and the serpent didn’t have a leg to stand on.”
I understand that the blaming continued, since Adam was walking with his sons a few years later and they came upon the garden, and Adam said “This is where your mother ate us out of house and home!”
In verses 14-19 God lets them understand the result of their sin.
14 So the LORD God said to the serpent, "Because you have done this,
"Cursed are you above all the livestock
and all the wild animals!
You will crawl on your belly
and you will eat dust
all the days of your life.
15 And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring [1] and hers;
he will crush [2] your head,
and you will strike his heel."
16 To the woman he said,
"I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing;
with pain you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband,
and he will rule over you."
17 To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ’You must not eat of it,’
"Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat of it
all the days of your life.
18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
19 By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return."
There is much to be said about this curse, but I want to concentrate on verse 16: Your desire will be for your husband,
and he will rule over you."
The way that the Bible uses “desire” for how the woman desires the man is best understood by seeing how the word is used just a few verses later in 4:6-7 when God talks to Cain about his unacceptable sacrifice.
“Then the Lord said to Cain, “why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it.”
The New Living Translation has a footnote for 3:16 that says that an alternate translation is “And though you may desire to control your husband”
This is a great description for the breakdown in relationship that has occurred, between men and women, but I would say that it affects every other relationship as well.
The woman tries to draw life and nurturing from a man who is not capable of filling these deep needs – never was and never will be. And the man is forever trying to rule over the woman, either aggressively or passively trying to keep her quiet about his inadequacy to fill her needs. Each demands love, respect, nurturing from the other. And as the generations of children pass, men and women forget that they were never supposed to draw their life from each other.
You can see this if you talk to people who are in a relationship that is breaking down. If you ask them “How would things have to be made different in order for you to become a happy person?” Invariably, we come up with a list of how the other person needs to change their behavior in order to please us.
Often times the difficulties in the relationship result from each of the people trying to control the other into being the person that they want them to be. This trying usually comes along with allsorts of manipulations, tricks, shaming, and blaming.
I think it is really well illustrated in a story that Jeff tells in Chapt. 2 of his book.
"My husband, Rick, doesn’t seem to care about spiritual things. He’s never read the Bible, and it’s getting harder and harder to get him to go to church. What bothers me most is that he’s setting a bad example for the kids." So began my session with Danine several years ago.
"How can I help you?" I began-meaning, "How can I help you with you?"
It was immediately apparent that she thought it was her job to control Rick’s behavior. So what she heard me ask was, "How can I help you get your husband to act more spiritual?" This was evident by her answer: "For starters, I’ve been getting him up and out the door for church for ten years now and I’m running out of tricks. I was hoping you could help me think of some new ways to motivate him."
Whose responsibility is Rick’s spirituality? It is Rick’s. Whose had it become? Danine’s. She had taken on the task of trying to control Rick’s church attendance, Scripture reading, and the ex- ample he was for the kids. No wonder she was getting tired.
The original Curse resulted when Adam and Eve took their eyes off God, who is our primary source. Today, the Curse is played out in relationships as a result of the very same mistake: In a curse-full marriage, one partner makes demands on the other as if he/she were the source rather than a resource. Danine was trying to get her needs met from Rick’s spiritual activity. And when Rick did not perform, Danine wrongly assumed it was her job to see that his spiritual needs were met.
Page 23:
“I cannot make this point strongly enough: It is not our job as Christians to carry out the Curse. God has given us a new plan. That plan, which is meant to set us free, is not powered by “more spiritualized” means of dominating: That is only splashing white paint over an old and deadly spirit of legalism. God’s plan is powered by grace - that is, He has made available to us the power to be transformed from the inside out, and the power to guide others in our own families as they discover the path of inner transformation, too.
It is not our job to perform the Curse more nicely, or in a more spiritual way than the rest of the world does. It is our wonderful freedom to grow in relationships that carry out God’s plan.”
We believe that God is the Potter, and we are the clay – he is the one who shapes us and molds us, it is not we who do the shaping and molding of our family and friends. We are not God – he is God.
There’s a fine line to be found here because, particularly husbands are called to “Love their wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.” We are to love each other in such a way as to enable them to be the best they can be.
But we do this not by playing God and trying to do the shaping ourself, we do it by giving the people that we love the freedom to have God work in their lives.
Idolatry in Relationships
The reason that we try to shape and control the people around us is not usually so that they will be happier – it is so we will feel happier and more fulfilled.
“I will be happy and look good to everyone if I have a wife who is successful in all that she does - I will be happy and look good to everyone if I have children who are well behaved and highly intelligent…”
Conversely if my wife is not always at the top of her game and my children are not behaving as they should I come of looking bad and feeling bad.
Let me put this in theological language.
We believe that we are born with a Holy Spirit sized hole in our heart – our core being. This hole makes us feel empty and needy, so we try to fill it with exteriors that make us look full and fulfilled. These things could be positive behaviors like success in business, sports academics or physical beauty, or they could be negative behaviors that try to fill the void through substance abuse, sexual promiscuity, bullying, and other dangerous behaviors.
This is why there are so many people who look completely together on the outside, but on the inside, they feel empty. Others might think you look fulfilled, but the feeling of emptiness doesn’t go away.
So, along comes another empty person who looks full on the outside, we see their “fullness” and hope that it will fill us too! The problem is that it can’t – at their core, they are as empty as we are. After a while we realize that they will not fill our emptiness, so we go about shaping them into the type of person who will fill us up.
Then these two empty people have a child, and they see someone new who can fill them up, so they go about trying to shape the child into the type of person who will fill their emptiness.
This is so destructive, and it is idolatrous.
We are guilty of idolatry anytime we expect someone or something that is not God to do for us what only God can do. If your peace and happiness depends on your spouse (child, or friend), then that person has become a false god to you.
“Your glass is half full, and you are expecting your spouse, child, friend to fill it up – you need to come into the relationship with a full glass, filled by God”
The Solution – “Let God be God” – what is needed in the people around us is not a change in behavior, but a change in heart – we cannot do that, but God can.
Find your self worth in Christ.
If I am filled with the Holy Spirit, I don’t need you to behave in order for me to feel fulfilled – I love you, and my hope is that you would behave in ways that we healthy and honoring to God, but my self worth does not depend on it.
