Communication Failures That Create Conflict

Last month, during the sermon and potluck and Bible study week, I gave a sermon on communication and marriage. And then afterwards, after we ate, we came back together, we had a sort of a little workshop on communication, which was very interesting. I really enjoyed having the men come up with some answers and women come up with some answers, and then walk back and forth and listen to the conversations.

They were totally different conversations on what was going on. It was very interesting. And I gave you this communication model, which if nothing else probably helped you understand that the fact that any two human beings can communicate anything back and forth is so complicated, it proves that there is a God. Because it is so amazingly complicated what goes on in our brains just to communicate almost anything, and especially at the complicated level in which human beings talk. And we went through some basic biblical principles about communication. And in doing so, all the verses that we used and all the scriptures that we read had nothing to do directly with marriage.

They had to do with how Christians should treat each other. Because that's the basis of what marriage is. That's your closest neighbor. Love your neighbor as yourself. So we went through basic concepts of communication and then tied them into marriage. And here's the points that we came up with from tying those into marriage. First, marriage is a God-ordained relationship. It is not just an agreement between two people. And that is a very... it's one of the reasons why marriage in the United States has collapsed into so many divorces and so many times in the church.

And sometimes it's because we don't recognize the fact that marriage is bound by God. Because it's an agreement between God and the two people. So every time we're not communicating correctly, the scripture is where we're supposed to go. We also went through a passage in Ephesians about intercessory prayer. If we're to intercede... you know, every week I send out prayer requests so we can intercede for each other, right? How much more should we be interceding for our husband or wife? How much more should we be praying for them? And then we went through how Proverbs 18 24 talks about if you want to have a friend, you have to learn how to be friend.

Well, if you want to learn how to have a good spouse, learn how to be a good spouse. That's what's so hard, though, and that's why we're going to talk about when our communication breaks down and we have conflict, how we have to deal with that. We also talked about how you can never find happiness in marriage if you're in constant competition. And you will destroy your marriage if you expect your husband or wife to give you complete happiness. You can't do that.

Nobody but God can give you that level of happiness. Another person can bring great joy and happiness into our lives. I mean, in my life, nobody has brought me more happiness than my wife. Nobody! And still does. And, you know, 45 years and she's still, I mean, she walks in a room and I feel like someone turned the lights on, okay? But I also realize if I rely on her to fulfill what only God can fulfill, I just get mean. Because only God can do certain things. You can't expect her to do it.

So we have to understand that. Now, we talked about how most the time when people get married, every couple says we're different. We're not going to do what our parents did. We're going to do what this couple did. And then they have conflict and they think, oh, we're failures, let's divorce. And because if we don't understand the basic problem of corrupt human nature that we're going to look at, whoever we're married, they're always the problem.

Because invariably, disagreements are different. We're just different people. And we're not supposed to be exactly the same in every way. Men and women are designed differently, right? I mean, and we have to understand that. But understand this. Your marital relationship will affect your emotional health. It will affect your spiritual relationship with God. And it will affect your physical health. It can break down our physical health and make us sick. So we're going to talk about dealing, how to deal with the breakdown of communication so that now you have conflict.

Now, we're not talking about certain problems in marriage. We're not talking about alcoholism. That's not a communication problem. We're not talking about drug abuse. We're not talking about violence. We're not talking about adultery. Those aren't communication problems. Those are a much deeper problem. I'd much rather deal with communication problems when two people are willing to learn how to communicate. Because those problems, you can give them the principles and they'll fix it. They'll do it. But there's other things.

There's just certain kinds of abuse that's really not communication. It's a core problem inside us as human beings. So let's look at some ways that we fail in communication that creates conflict. So I don't want to be negative, but we need to look at these things. We need to look at... because as we go through this list, if you don't have at least two, three of these in your marriage, you probably have the perfect marriage or you have no idea what's going on.

One or the other. First of all, is we ignore the issues. You know, it's easy to sort of ignore the issue, especially if you can run away to something else. So if you're both working, you'll run away to work. And at lunch, you get with your friends, she gets with her friends, and you have lunch, and you come home, and you're both tired.

And now you do something else. You watch a movie, you get on the internet, you know, you're doing other things, and you just ignore the problems. And of course, they don't go away, they just get worse. And what happens is when you ignore the problem, ignore the issue, you begin to say in your mind, and it's more an emotion than a thought, I will do something when she does something. I will do something when he does something. So what you've made yourself into is a victim, and the other person's going to always be wrong, and they're the abuser.

Of course, when both people are thinking that, guess what they're doing? They're ignoring each other. Absolutely ignoring each other. Not talking, having talked for three days, except hey, hey, grunts, and hi, and just that's it. Why? Well, we're gonna pretend it's not there, but we know it's not there. When he does something, I'll fix it. When she does something, I'll fix it, right? When the other one finally collapses, I'll come in and save the day.

Well, when we see ourselves as a victim, you can't solve problems when you always see yourself as... Now, sometimes you are a victim. You can be mistreated by your husband or wife. Every person's been a victim to somebody in life, but you can't see life as a victim. It destroys you emotionally. Now, some things can be ignored, right? Fortunately, my wife has learned to ignore numerous things that just don't even bother her. He's goofy. You know, yeah, that's just your dad. You know, she just gets over it. But, you know, there's certain things you can't. You have to eventually deal with. I don't care how small they are. Like, he goes out from...

I'll just pick on those guys on this one, because I'll pick on you ladies later. But the guy goes out, and he comes home from exercising after work, and he just smells terrible. And he sits down and says, what's for dinner? And you haven't tasted your food for weeks. It's time to say something, okay? How you say it is important to say, you stink, go get a shower. Now, some guys say, oh, okay. Some guys say, oh, I'm being insulted.

You know, it just depends on these personalities. But you can't ignore that forever, right? Eventually, you have to say, yeah, you need to take a shower. I'm waiting for that day, because my wife used to say that to me every once in a while. I think you need to take a shower. She was all nice about it, but since COVID, she has no smell. And so, when that comes back, I can't take two days work in my office, exercise, mow the grass, and not take a shower.

Those days will be gone forever when that comes back. The other thing, another thing we do, is we pound away at the problem. It's the exact opposite. We just pound away. We pound away. We won't let go of it. And it's because it's so emotionally stressful to us. We need, we feel a need to pound away. We understand if you, if all these things are sort of normal reactions, depending on your personality, but they're not very, they're not effective, pounding away. Let me give you this, this definition of a word.

Tell me what the word is. To annoy by continual scolding and fault fighting. What's that word? Nagging. Yeah. No, men nag, women nag, right? Depending on the man's personality, a lot of times he's more apt to just shut down and ignore the issue. I'll pretend it's not there. Just like I'm pretending that my clothes, dirty clothes, are laying on the floor. I'll just pretend it's not there and say, how can you not see it? He didn't.

Now he's gonna pretend the problem's out there. Men and women, but I think women sometimes will go into this quicker, will just, you'll just pound away at it. I need you to do something and you're not doing it. And I was pound and pound and pound. And a lot of times, what happens the more you pound? The more he ignores. And vice versa. And so now you have two dysfunctional ways of dealing with things going on at the same time.

Ephesians 5. Now we are going to go to a marriage verse, okay? And this is part, of course, this whole part of this passage. In fact, when I gave this sermon, of course, last week in Nashville, I almost included this entire passage. And I thought, no, actually that's a sermon in itself. Because the whole thing is about using marriage as just an example of us understanding the relationship between Christ and the church. He calls it a mystery. No. So he's giving this example, but it's a summation that I want to come to. Because we know it. It's so simple, but it's not.

Nevertheless, verse 33 of Ephesians 5, nevertheless, let each one of you, in particular, each one of us, love, so love his own wife as himself. So let me stop there. Now we marry our wives for a lot of reasons.

We want to love them. We want them to love us, right? And we love them in how we think she should be loved. It's interesting here. The word is not phileo. I mean, you marry a wife because you want a friend. The Greek word here is eros. You marry a wife because you want romance, right? It's a derivative of agape, agapeo. So love. So it's a verb. You love your wife. The way Christ loves the church, that's the command. As Christians, that's what we agree to when we take this woman into our lives. We agree to that with God.

Now, none of us are perfect at it. Paul doesn't expect us to. He just says, this is our example, guys. We've got to shoot for this one. Okay? We got to work on this one. Our example is to love her the way that Christ loves the church. So that's the command. But we don't know how she wants to be loved. I know I've given this example before, but it's like we were married 10 years. And I'm thinking this is the happiest marriage anybody's ever had.

You know, I'm just just ecstatic. And one day Kim says, I figured something else. She said, there are certain things every once in a while. She's not very often. You'll say things that hurt me. And I thought, why is he doing that? I thought he must be doing it on purpose. And it dawned on me. You're not a woman. I said, well, I hope not. She said, no, you don't understand the effect. I said, I have no idea what you're talking about. She explained it to me.

And I was like, oh, I can do that. I guess if you were a dude, it wouldn't matter. I could say that it wouldn't make any difference. But it was hurting her. And for years, she said, it's not very often. She says, I didn't feel abused or anything. But I think, why is he being mean to me? And then I realized he's not being mean to me. He's just dumb. And of course, we left. I mean, she wasn't putting me down. It would just...

Now, she said, you just don't understand. And she said, now, I think, oh, all I have to do is tell him. It was actually a simple problem to solve.

Yeah, I can do that.

She had to define how she felt loved.

Now, and let the wife see that she respects her husband. That's a command, ladies.

Now, you will find sometimes men and women, if the woman defines love and he finds respect, there's a lot of things that are common in those definitions. But there are differences. I mean, a man has to respect his wife and a woman has to love her husband. But he splits this up on purpose. And when you say, that's just his male ego, I don't have to show him respect, then you're not keeping up your end of the bargain that you made with God.

You're told to respect him. He said, well, I will respect him when he loves me. And he's saying, I will love her when she respects me. How's that working out? How's that work out?

And men, yes, we should lead and try to lead by loving first. But ladies, I'm just going to tell you something. Before God, you're an equal to him. Just because we're told we're the head of the house doesn't mean you're not equal before God. You know what that means? God requires you to respect him, even if he isn't loving you. Now, once again, I'm not talking about abuse, beating you, or I'm not talking about stuff like that. I'm talking about the normal human, this dynamic of marriage. Just like I'm commanded to love my wife, whether she's being nice to me that day or not is irrelevant. That's my command. Your command is to respect him. You know what you have to find out? What does he mean by respect? Just like I had to find out, what does she mean by love?

One of the things that shocked me, took me years to figure out, that I could never quite figure out in the beginning of our marriage, was one of Kim's love languages, her main love language, as active service. So I could praise her, tell her I love her 50 times a day, which I like to do.

I could give her hugs, I could hold her hand, I could take her on dates, but you know what got her the most happiness? Is when I went and cleaned the toilet, and I'm thinking, I don't understand.

I don't understand. I'm doing all this romantic stuff. I go, I clean the toilet. Oh, Gary, the toilet's plugged in. I'll take care of it. I cleaned the toilet and come out, and she's hugging me. And first of all, she says, did you wash your hands? Yes, okay. Now she's hugging me.

And I'm like, I don't get this. And then it dawned on me. Every time I do a simple act of service, I'm a hero. Oh, okay. And then I started watching her, and she was always doing acts of service to me to tell me she loved me. And I didn't know she was telling me she loved me. I just thought, wow, this is the most giving woman. But I didn't realize she's actually expressing love at all these things she's doing all the time. Sometimes, so part of this, we'll do this a little bit in the workshop, is we have to understand what each other means. A third thing is we share criticism with others, what I call mate bashing. Now, there's sometimes there's somebody you have to talk to about an issue you have. Be very careful who you talk to about a marriage issue you have. Be careful who you share that with. And you know how you'll know it's a good friend? When they'll look at you and say, you know, this is partly your fault. That's a friend.

That's a friend. What we can do is we can just gather all our friends around and we can actually make them dislike our husband or wife. Proverbs 17.9. Proverbs 17.9. You know, I actually have seen it a couple times, not for a long time, not for many years, but I remember 20 years ago in some church areas that I was in where literally there was a split happening in the church. I don't mean they were leaving the church. I mean there were two different groups in the church where there were a third group. The third group was the people that had no idea what was going on. And one group was those who supported the wife and one group was the goes who supported the husband because they were fighting with each other and getting all their friends together every Sabbath and telling them about how bad the other one was. That's not Christian.

Proverbs 17.9. He who covers a transgression seeks love, but he who repeats a matter separates friends. If you seek to love each other, you're not going to go around telling the bad things about each other to everybody. You know, I tell those stories about our marriage, but Kim doesn't mind. They're all just normal things that people go through. Although sometimes I'll tell the story and she'll say, you know, Gary, that was 15 years ago and here's what's amazing about our memory. Here's exactly what happened. And she'll have the sentences down. I don't think, well, that's exactly what you said exactly. How do you remember that? I'm sort of like ad-libbing. This is sort of what we said, you know. She remembers those things. She just remembers it. Now she doesn't hold things over me. I'm so glad she doesn't bring up the past. She just doesn't because she remembers everything. That would be scary, right? Well, I mean, she could if she wanted to. She just doesn't.

A fourth thing is you try to get even. You try to get even. Now you can do that in a lot of ways. You can begin to ignore your spouse's needs. You know, I know your back is hurt and I used to give you, you know, rub your shoulders because you have a hurt back, you know, and I did that for years. But you know what? You haven't been nice to me so I'm not going to rub your shoulders anymore.

You neglect family responsibilities. Men tend to do this more than women. They just won't be around. And if there's children involved, it's like, well, there's problems in my marriage, so I just don't go home as much as I used to. I stay after work with my friends. I mean, they're not like out sinning. But what they're doing is they're ignoring their command to love, refusing to cooperate, even in simple ways. Women, you can do this more. Men are ignoring you, so you refuse to cooperate no matter what he says. You know, hey, I didn't get time to take out the garbage this morning. Can you take it out for me because I'm going to be late for work? No, I'm not taking the garbage out. That's your job. Just the simple things of helping each other.

Selfishly and irresponsibly spending money.

Sometimes people will do that. It's like, okay, you, uh, man, let me come out of Pentecostal minister up here. I'm starting to sweat. Is it warm in here? No? Okay.

No? Okay.

Selfishly and irresponsibly spending money. You know, I'll show her. I'll just go out and buy me a new fishing boat. I'll show him this afternoon I'm getting with my friends and I'm all buying a whole new wardrobe. And I've seen people do that. Refusing affection. I'm just not even going to give you any hugs. I'm not going to kiss you. I'm not going to do anything. No affection. Staying away from home. The worst thing is having an affair. Romans 12. Let's go to Romans 12. Romans 12, 17.

Once again, this isn't specifically about marriage. It's about how Christians should treat Christians.

Romans 12 verse 17. Repay no evil for evil. Have regard for good things in the sight of all men.

If it is possible, as much as depends on you, live peaceably with all men.

Now, if he's saying that's how we should live with the world, the pagans, because they're living in a pagan world, how much more should you strive to live peaceably with your husband or wife who is a child of God? How much more should we try to do that? Beloved, do not avenge yourselves, but rather give place to wrath, for it is written, vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord. Therefore, if your enemy is hungry, feed him.

Sometimes you feel like, or you can feel like, well, I'm out of sorts with my husband or my wife, and sometimes people say, well, I just feel like we're enemies right now. Okay, well, what do you do for your enemy in the world? Well, why don't you feed them and serve them and take care of them?

Yeah, but if you knew what a jerk he was, that's not the issue here.

If he's thirsty, give him a drink, and so in doing you will heep colds a fire on his head. In other words, you want your mate to feel guilty? Sometimes just be really nice. Motivate them, I mean, to, okay, I got, yeah, I better do my part too. She's doing her part. I guess I better do my part. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. Think about this and how you relate and treat each other. And then don't collect, this is a term probably most of you don't even know what they are, younger ones, emotional trading stamps. How many of you remember trading stamps? Okay, handful. Trading stamps was my mother had. When I was a little kid, she would go to the store, and the stores would give her stamps every time she bought something, and she would put them in books. And after she had so many books, she would, she got catalogs. She'd send them away, and she would get gifts. I remember one time, I don't know, maybe 10, 11 years old, she gave me all her books of S&H green trading stamps. And I went through the catalog and sent it off, and I'll never forget getting that box in the mail. Her trading stamps. And then there was a, oh, there's a candy bar in the head. If you bought the candy bar, they gave you a little trading card, and you collected enough. And I remember one time collecting enough, because I got all my friends, I'd have them give them to me, and I sent it away and got 10 free candy bars. You know, I mean, this was, this was fun. But we can do the opposite in a very negative way. We have little trading stamp books. And every time we don't like something our husband or wife does, we put a stamp in the book. And we collect our trading stamps. And one day we walk in and say, you know, by this time it's the size of a phone book, an old phone book. Well, people don't know what phone books are anymore, either. And you walk in, and you clam them on, just blast them on the head with the phone book. That's all the trading stamps I have saved up for all the wrong things you've done in our 15 years of marriage. You can't do that. We can't collect. We have to forgive easily. Just forgive. It's not in the context of a lifetime. Those things aren't important.

A fifth thing, and I'll just briefly touch on this because there's children here, and it's not something we should discuss in a mixed crowd. But you can't use the sexual relationship as a means of reward and punishment. You can't do that. You take away everything that's good in that relationship when you do that. It can't be used that way. The sixth thing is we bring in past fallacies about marriage. And if you're newly married in the last couple of years, you may still be living in some of those fallacies, although sometimes people live in fallacies forever.

Once again, I only use examples from years and years ago. A couple came to me. They've been married about a year. She said she was going to leave him. And they seemed so happy together. And I said, why? And she started to cry. She said, we don't make much money. She said, and I know how much it means to him to have meat at every dinner. She said, I haven't bought a dress for a year.

I've taken our budget. She says, I take care of the budget. And I've always made sure he gets meat seven nights a week, even though we can't afford it. And he's never even said thank you. And I've worn myself out. And I have no appreciation. I haven't spent anything on myself.

And he's sitting there with his mouth open, staring at her. And he said, that's your dad that's like that. I don't care what you feed me. And they just looked at each other for a few minutes. She said, I mean, you're not like my dad. She says, no, I don't care. I kept thinking, why we have so much meat? I don't know. And of course, he didn't know what the budget. She was working out the budget. So he didn't need, he just gave the budget to Ernst and work it out the best you can. And she was doing the best she can. And the poor woman had, after a year, said, I don't think our marriage is going to last. And I mean, that was one of the easiest marriage counseling I ever did. They're hugging and crying and kissing each other. And it's like, oh, well, good. I'm glad I fixed that one. Going home now. She was living in a fallacy and the, and she was trying so hard. That's the problem with fallacies. I mean, there's all kinds of fallacies people bring into marriage.

Like, I know I can change him.

Guys, we marry about three or four different women in our lifetime because they go through changes. You know, you marry her, she's your sweetheart, then she's a mother over the children. They go through these changes. Basically, now, in morality and character, we're growing. And we're growing and understanding. We're being better husbands. But there's certain parts of us that if you married him and said, I'm going to change him, he's not going to get up every morning, every Sunday morning at five o'clock and go fishing. Guess what he's doing after 30 years of marriage? Getting up at five o'clock on Sunday mornings and going fishing. There's certain things in him that just is who he is. And if you try to change it, you'll make him somebody else, which you should have married somebody else, then. We live with fallacies. I can change him. Well, you can. My wife's changed me in a lot of good ways because I'm not a barbarian, which is what I'd be if I would have stayed single. I'd live in a cave and cook meat over open fire. Okay? So I understand she's changed me, but there's lots about me she hasn't tried to change. She'll just say, I don't understand, just go do it.

Just go with Mark Smith to the reenactment of the Stones River battle. Just go. No, no, I don't want to go. You know, I got responsibilities and I don't want to leave you. And then it's like an hour beforehand. She says, if you don't leave now, you're going to be late. I resolve. Okay, I will go, you know. Probably, she's not here. So, Evelyn probably did the same thing to him. Get out of here! Go with Gary and go off and do whatever you do. You'll be a better man when you come home.

That understanding of that, I remember my mom always telling my dad, or not always, but once about St. Grover, why don't you go fishing this Sunday? Well, I got so much that no, you need to go fishing. He would. He'd come back a different man. All the stress would be gone. She understood that. And that was him. She hated fishing. I never saw her pick up a fishing rod one time in your entire life, but it didn't matter. Or, no tension or conflict occur in good marriage. Well, then you married a, I don't know, a clone. I don't know. How could you not have some kind of conflict once in a while? Some kind of disagreements? It's how you deal with them, it matters.

Romantic feelings should be present at all times. If that was true, society would collapse, right? We would never leave the house. No, those things are part of a relationship that goes on your entire life.

But there's times, different people, that'll happen sometimes early in marriage. Six months, you know, we're just not hugging and kissing like we used to. Okay.

Well, I tell you what, next month, why don't you take a three-day vacation? They come back and say, we're hugging and kissing again. Yeah. And you'll probably have to do that every once in a while, because, you know, those things, it's not the end of the relationship. Things change. You know, you never had to watch the other one vomit all over the place before either. Okay. There's not a lot of romantic feelings when you're, you know, dragging them off to bed because they just threw up. But you do it because you love them. And the last thing is getting sick. People get sick because of their marriage issues. They get mentally stressed to the point that they're not acting clearly mentally. They're not acting clearly spiritually. And it affects their health in a very negative way. So, what I want to wrap up with then, before we break for lunch here, is how do we begin to deal with conflict? Now, once again, I'm going to take you what you think is a different direction. Okay. He's going to go to some scriptures about marriage from Paul or everything he said on how to deal with conflict. No. I want to talk about where conflict comes from.

It's interesting. We just did the first of the parenting classes Monday night.

Second one's coming up this coming Monday night. And they start in there. It's one thing, the reason I like it, at a place I always seem to start or go back to. God created human beings in His image, and Adam and Eve had no conflict with God. They had no conflict with each other.

They were happy. They got along. There were no arguments. It was easy. Until Satan comes along and chooses them to take of the knowledge of good and evil, and they became then, took upon themselves, we will decide good and evil. At that point, their nature was corrupted.

Every one of us is born with a corrupted human nature. We come from the first Adam, the second Adam, Paul says, comes to save us, because the second Adam is not the first Adam. So we have this corrupted human nature, and we all inherently believe that our corrupted human nature is the truth, the determining factor in all situations. And so we come into marriage and usually, you know, just overwhelmed with the romantic love and finally finding somebody you can spend your life with and somebody that has the kind of character you want and all the all these great things they have about each other. I do find it interesting. Women do tend to say more, I'll change him. Men are like, she's perfect. Which, of course, is just as dysfunctional because she's not, okay? So you have these two extremes coming together. I'll fix him. She doesn't need fixed. We are at our core a problem. And if we're going to solve our issues, whether it's in marriage, in our families, with each other, in the church, we can't always solve the problems in the world, right? They have a different value system. But our value system has to be the same.

If our value system is different, you can't solve the problems.

And there's something you must do regardless... Now, remember, we're talking about communication conflict problems. We're not talking about other issues which are way beyond this.

But we always go back to this, is that we have to remember that you were born in conflict with God.

All conflict comes from that. And that means you and I must seek to repair the conflict we have between us and God. You know what's amazing? Just from my own experience. When I've been in conflict with anybody, not just my wife, I mean, because that's usually not that bad, but except when I took those steroids and walked around the house like a crazy man when they wore off, I just didn't realize what was happening to me. It's like I'm just... I found myself standing there looking out the window yelling outside at something that was going on in my head, you know, I don't know.

I realize this is about as irrational as you can get. And I turn around and she's just sitting there staring at me. And I said, I'm going for a drive. And I went out and drove around a little bit and I came back, got out of the car, and I said, I just came off the steroids. Because I'd had some surgery done. This was, I don't know, a month ago. I'd had some major surgery done because they missed... I think I did I tell you this? They misdiagnosed a tooth problem I have. And so the infection was in the bone. So they had to take out some of my scrapes off, some of my jawbone. So they did me five days of steroids, just a little steroid. I mean, not big ones to keep the swelling down. And, you know, okay, I took them. That Sunday morning, I was about to put my head through the wall.

And I looked at it and I said, it's the steroids, isn't it? She said, yep. I said, okay. And you know, about a couple hours later, I was okay. I had to work through this. I thought, man, I'm glad if you're an addict to those things, I can see why, if you're taking large doses of that, like some of these athletes do, no wonder they go insane.

You know, what do they call it? Royd rage. I just, and it was just coming off of it, a little dose for five days. But, you know, it's funny. She just didn't stare at me like, you're really, this is strange behavior for you. Not even trying to reason with me until I figured it out. Why am I like this? It's like inside, I'm just, oh, it's the steroids. And yeah, by the end of the day, I was fine. I guess that was the steroids. I don't know what else would cause it. Low blood sugar. Something was physically wrong. Okay. It's the other thing I can figure at the time. I get diagnosed myself, but something was physically wrong. It wasn't, it wasn't normal to be this just distressed. I had no reason. I had no, it was, and so I just took, she said, I suggest you take the rest of Sunday off. I said, well, I had planned work today. She says, just take the rest of the day off. And I did. Fell asleep, ate good food, and I was fine. Even our human nature's corrupted physically, you see. And sometimes our problem isn't our mate. It's what's happening to us physically. There are physical issues in marriage.

Romans 5. So we have this physical body to deal with. We have our physical brain to think about.

And the other night, I just laid in bed and listened to Kim talk and talk and talk.

She just spent all day in a trauma ward.

And physically, emotionally, she could not take what she'd just gone through, and she just had to talk about it, talk about it, describe it in detail. On and on and on.

And then I finally thought she went to sleep, so I went to sleep. I wanted to find out later, no, she just thought, I can't talk all night. She's still laid there, didn't she?

See, there's all these things that happen in our marriage that affect our relationship. We learn how to adjust to it. We learn how to adjust to it. We learn sometimes just to listen. We learn how to do different things, because we want to be reconciled to that person, not be in constant battle with that person. Romans 5-6. So you have conflict with your husband or wife. Go read this first. Oh, good, he's going to tell my wife what to do, or he's going to tell my husband what to do.

For when we were still without strength in due time, Christ died for the ungodly.

For scarcely for a righteous man will one die, yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die. But God demonstrated His own love toward us, and that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us while we were sinners. Much more than having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath, that's God's wrath, through Him. For if when we were... Now look at His word. We were enemies. We were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more having been reconciled, shall we be saved by His life. We were reconciled while we were enemies. This is what the part of the gospel that's disappeared in the world that we live in, that God looks on us. As much as He loves humanity, He looks at every human being as an enemy because of our corrupted human nature. And then He says, I sent my Son, and Christ said, I came for you. He gave up His life willingly. He came and died and was resurrected to reconcile us. That's the price paid to have a relationship with us. Either we all had to die, or God had to redefine goodness, which He wasn't going to do that, or He had to pay the penalty for us. That was part of the plan. He was slain from the foundation of the earth. He paid the penalty for us. Why? So that we could have a relationship with God. Every time you're in conflict with your husband or wife, go remember the price that God paid for you to have a relationship with Him. And God paid for your husband or wife to have a relationship with Him. That's where we start. We start with, this is the price paid for me to have a relationship with God. Wow. He's not asking me to go get beat to death.

For my wife, He's just asking me to reconcile, to work it out. That's what He's asking me to do.

Wives, you are spiritually equal. That's what He's asking you to do.

Because you're spiritually equal. To reconcile.

To seek understanding. Now, we may never totally understand each other.

I believe God made women so complex so that we would constantly be surprised by them.

You know, I don't, I have surprised my wife in 20 years, okay?

I'm still surprised by her once in a while.

And it's great. I really like that.

She still surprises me once in a while. I was like, wow, that's amazing.

She'll say, I'll go to say something and she'll say it. And I'll look at her and she'll say, I knew what you were going to say. I'm just sometimes just do something bizarre just to surprise her, okay? Just so she doesn't know what I'm going to do. But she'll probably say, I knew you were going to do that. You had to do it to prove that you can't surprise her. In other words, you'll know what I'm doing.

But we must go here. This is the basis of all reconciliation. It's how God reconciled us to Him. And that person, you know, laying next to you every night in that bed, that person was reconciled through the same process. That's God's son. That's God's daughter you're with.

Changes the way you have to see each other.

Say, once again, we can give you all of the things to do to help a marriage.

You know, sometimes I just hand some books. I hand somebody a book, and they'll come back three weeks later and say, wow, that helped us so much. Because it was just learning what to do. But this is deeper than that. We can learn what to do, but there has to be a change of heart and mind so much as Christians that our marriages become holy. Because that's what it is. God said marriage is holy, just like the Sabbath is holy. It's not as holy as the Sabbath. Yes, it is to God. It is. Our marriages are just as holy to God as the Sabbath.

So we need to understand that. God is the third party in our marriage. Now, we have some things that I want to do in the role-playing. And if you're not married, it's okay because there's some things you can do to help contribute to what we want to do in our workshop after we eat. So don't run off if you're not married because we want your input on some things also in this. And the couples stay around because we're going to have some couple discussions that we're going to do. So I'm glad we could do these two. I've already had somebody say, would you do another one? I say, well, I might wait some time, maybe in the summer or something, but we'll do another marriage sermon. And afterwards, have a little workshop. We'll just keep doing these every once in a while. But I wanted to do these two on communication and conflict to show the greater biblical principles involved. So it's not just, here's some facts, things to do.

We have to understand these principles, and we have to ask God to help us do it because the strain of society on our marriages and families is going to get very great.

It's going to get real great. We're going to have to have God's help to be the people, the holy people, that He wants us to be.