Marriage Conflicts

There's been asked, I've been asked to give a sermon on who was Melchizedek, so I'm still working on that one. It just seems like every time I get ready to do it, something else comes along. This sermon is because I've had numerous people in both congregations talk to me about how we all bring into our families the dysfunction of the families we came from. We all do that. We're all broken people. We have to understand how broken we really are. But we all bring our own dysfunction into whatever marriage, whatever children, you know, the relationship we have inside a family. So I wanted to talk about our brokenness and the brokenness we bring into our families. But before I do that, I thought I need to start with a premise, you know, sort of a broad concept that we can move into over in the next sermon. And that is the understanding of what is the purpose for marriage and family that God has set. Okay, so this is broad concepts. Next time we'll talk about broken people because everybody's broken just in different ways. And we bring that into every relationship we have. And how do we deal with that in the relationship and how we deal with a relationship with God? First premise, marriage, Christian marriage, is holy.

It is established by God. You know, we talk about the Holy Sabbath day. We talk about the Holy Days. We talk about how the Passover is a holy meeting and how important that is. We talk about the, you know, we use these holy to refer to all kinds of things God is doing and refer to God Himself. He is holy. Well, when you, when we add all those things up, marriage fits right in that same category. Marriage is holy, created, designed by God. It's just as holy as the Ten Commandments. It's just as holy as the Sabbath. And that has to be a premise and understanding we bring into our understanding of marriage. Because that means, is that we will struggle as broken people, everybody will struggle in their marriage at some point to make it holy.

To make it what God wants it to be.

There is no marriage, the two people get married, and it's perfect from day one on. Even if, you know, it's just, it's not possible for human beings, but it's also the realization that this has to do with holiness.

That God ordained it, God has ground work for it, He has a framework for it, and we have to understand that. And that means, we start dealing with marriage, with prayer, and study with what the Scripture says about marriage. Oh no, I was hoping I'd get, so I could tell my wife how bad she is. No, we're not going to do that today.

What we're going to talk about is this premise, these premises, and then we're going to talk about the dysfunction. I want to get into, here's the dysfunction that happens in marriages, because we're broken. The second thing we need to know, the premise, is we come into marriage expecting a certain healing to take place. And it is true that in marriage we can find stability, we find love, we find joy, we find companionship. But, because we all bring our brokenness in, marriage can't fix everything in your life. And it can't fix every emotional problem you have, it can't fix, there's a lot of things marriage can't fix. And if we try to have ourselves healed and repaired through marriage, you just undermine your own marriage. I mean, there's things that we do in marriage that do help. It creates a joy, a bond that makes life better. And, you know, I'm a better person because of who I married. A much better person because of who I married. And she stabilized me. But she could not, she could not simply change certain aspects of me that only God can change. And sometimes we expect our husband or wife to actually produce a change in us that they cannot do. And so we do our marriage to become sort of this emotional warfare that's going on all the time because you're expecting something from the other person they can't give you. And they're expecting from you something that you can't give them. So if marriage is holy, it's established by God. Healthy marriages come because people are becoming spiritually and emotionally healthy themselves. Not because, oh, you are the wife, you heal me. No, you're the husband, you heal me. No, we help each other. We bring some real connection and stability into our lives in a good marriage. But at the core of who we are, those changes happen from God. So if we set those two premises, now let's talk about why marriage gets hard and things we do that damage our marriage, our marriages. They keep us from growing in our marriages. And these are all dysfunctional. And we bring, everybody here brings a couple of these dysfunctions into your relationship. And your mate brings their own set of dysfunctions. And you bring these dysfunctions together and say, fix me.

No, you bring your dysfunctions. He or she brings their dysfunction. And the result is, you're trying to do something that your marriage cannot do. And you're actually hurting your marriage. There's going to be conflict in any marriage. Even the most perfect marriage has points of conflict. You're two different people. Two different experiences in life. Two different genetic makeup. You know, I remember my wife saying that her mother told her, here's the problem you and Gary are going to have in your marriage.

She says it's almost like you grew up together. She says you're almost like brother and sister. And boy, are you going to get into it sometimes. And she was right. But we understood. Yeah, we're both firstborns. And it is. It's really weird. It's like I've sort of known her my whole life. It's like, because our families were so similar.

So you think, oh, well, that that one's going to be no conflict. No, there's going to be conflict. There's going to be conflict because there's so many similarities, for one thing. So, it's how you deal with it. And remember, your marriage is as much an extension of your emotional health and your spiritual health as anything else. So, you know, my marriage is an extension that we love each other. Yes, but you're part of it. And your emotional health and your spiritual health is the determinant as well as the mate of how this marriage works. Remember how difficult that is if you already come in thinking that marriage is here to heal everything about me, to heal all of my loneliness, to heal all of my emotional issues, to make me happy all the time.

No relationship can do that. You're putting such a stress on it that it's going to fail. So let's look at some of these dysfunctional behaviors we bring in and end up really hurting our marriages. Then we'll talk about next time, we'll talk about how broken we are. These behaviors come from a brokenness that we have.

Oh, by the way, just if your marriage involves alcoholism, drug addiction, or violence, what I'm telling you won't solve that. You have to stop those things first. You have to deal with your drug addiction. You have to deal with your alcoholism. And you have to deal with the violence before anything else can happen. Oh well, if my mate just treats me right, I'll stop drinking.

No, you're doomed. You deal with the alcoholism first. So understand there's some things that all the marriage principles, all the marriage counseling in the world will not solve until other things are solved first. And those three, specifically, alcoholism, drug addiction, and violence, has to be healed first.

And then, that has to stop. Then you can work on the marriage. Okay, so here's the broken behaviors. Okay, here's the broken behaviors that we bring. One is ignoring the issues. We ignore the issues. We pretend that they're not there. I will do this when she does this. I will do this when he does this. And here's what happens. When you approach this only as, I am only responding to exactly what I want my mate to do first, you are defining yourself as a victim.

And you will create a victim mentality. When you have a victim mentality, there's two people in this relationship. The victim and the perpetrator. The good person and the criminal. You see what I mean? Once you're the victim and everything, the other person is bad. Now, it may be that that person needs to change things, and it's hurting you. But when you say, I'm not going to deal with anything, we're never going to heal anything, we're never going to work through anything, you now see that person as the perpetrator.

You stop seeing what you need to do, and only see what the other person needs to do. Now, there's always issues you have to decide to ignore or not, right? The problem is, sometimes we let little things pile up and pile up until it's just an entire attitude towards the person.

I just make up something here. A guy comes home from work, he works hard, and she works hard, you know, she only works half a day, and she comes in, and she makes a nice meal for him every single day. And he walks in, and he goes in, and he's always dirty, he watches his hands, he comes in and he sits down, he's so excited because she has this wonderful meal. But she's thinking, boy does he smell bad.

But I've mentioned it to him, and he sort of got offended by it. Why? I work hard all day, and I'm hungry. So she ignores it. And then after a while he comes home, and there's a bowl of corn flakes, right? Well, what happened? I don't want to prepare a meal for you anymore because you stink. Now they're both mad. That may get an enormous issue to deal with. And probably other things have piled up. So now it's like, well you, yeah I may stink, but you know, you wear too much makeup. I mean now you've got a real problem because they've never discussed things. Now there are some things you just say they're not important enough to discuss. I can live with them. All of us have to live with things, right? All of us have to live with things. My wife has to live with certain things with me. I have to live with certain things with her that are okay. They're okay. They're just not, you know, I would like, I mean, I go to bed late. She gets up real early, usually. It'd be nice if we both went to bed and got up at the same time. But we don't, and that's not going to change. That's something that we've, it's been like that for, I don't know, 30 years. Probably longer. It's okay. That's not worth having an issue over. We just, we adapt to each other. There are certain things that's hard to adapt, and you keep building these things up so that you're never really dealing with any issues. Okay, that's a dysfunctional way of doing things, and that comes from a lot of dysfunction in you, a brokenness in you. So we'll talk about brokenness another time. The other thing we do, and there's, we have a whole list here, is we keep pounding at the problem, right? We pound at the problem. Men, we do this by just never stopping. I need time to think, no, we need to work this out. No, I need time to, I just, I just need, no, we need to work this out. We can pound at a problem until we've created a whole new problem, where she can't process. She can't deal with her emotions, because you're pounding and pounding. I fix things. So when I do a work, I fix things, right? I work on cars, I fix them. As if she's a person to fix.

And what we do is we actually pound and pound and pound until the other person either explodes or shuts up. Now women, you do this too. You do it sometimes a little more subtly. Proverbs 21 verse 9. It's funny, men and women do all these things, and it's because we're all broken. Now some of these you don't do, and you're married, you don't do some of these things. We're all broken in different ways. Proverbs 21 verse 9 says, better to dwell in a corner of a household than a house shared with a contentious woman. You know, it's interesting. Nagging. We always think of nagging as something women do. Men do it too. But nagging literally means that you use annoying words and habits by continually scolding and fault fighting. You just find fault all the time. Why don't you do this? Why don't you do that? I think sometimes, ladies, you were designed by God to be our helpers, but in your desire to be our helpers, you become our correctors. And that's not exactly what's good in a relationship. For one just to be the corrector of the other person. And of course, men, we do that too. We correct, we correct, we correct, we pound, we pound. So pounding away at a problem usually just creates more and more resentment and less and less ability to actually deal with it. And that's because we're broken people. We have to fix. We have to control. Having to control everything is not... it actually is an issue of faith. At some point, we give things to God. We have things we have to do, but there's a point where you say, okay, God, you're going to have to control this, not me.

Because you try to control everything in life, you will fail.

Because the universe doesn't give itself to our will, right? Everything you do. The stoplights don't change at your will. Everything. We have so little control. We do have control over a lot of things or some things. Well, we usually have control over ourselves, and that's about it, right?

A third thing is that we don't apply the biblical instructions on how to make our marriages holy. We keep wanting to go back. Marriage is holy. It is established by God, ordained by God. And you know, when we do a service in the church, we say that this is a covenant made between God and these two people, and it is bound in heaven. It is a covenant in which God is involved in. So understanding the holiness of that, you know, we talk about the new covenant that God made through Jesus Christ. It's a holy covenant, right? The covenant God made with ancient Israel was a holy covenant. The covenant God made with Abraham was a holy covenant. The covenant made between two Christians and God in marriage is just as holy as those covenants, because it's ordained by God. Let that sink in a little bit. I say, wow, why is that so hard? Because we're broken. We come in broken. That's why. And marriage is a way that we can learn with God's help to actually help each other, but it's through His help. Let's go to 1 Peter 3. It's like, oh, okay, we've read these so many times that what happens is usually in a sermon, this is starting to be read and everybody just sort of shuts down. 1 Peter 3 verse 1. Wives, okay, we're going to pick on the women. Likewise, be submissive to your own husbands, that even if some do not obey the word, they without a word may be won by the conduct of their wives when they observe your chase conduct accompanied by fear. Now, the context here, he's talking to women who have an unconverted husband. And he said, look, just because, and remember, unconverted here, would be a Jew, although a Jew married to a Christian at this point probably was much more acceptable, but they're actually married to a pagan. They came into the church without a, and their husband did not come into the church. And so this is an issue you find. The early church had a lot of women coming in more than men. You can see that in a number of cases. And so it's like, okay, your husband didn't come into the church with you. He's a pagan. So it's easy to say, I don't have to do what you say, you pagan. I worship the God of the Bible. And he said, no, in the, no, you don't submit to them what is against God. He says that. So I mean, we all know that. We don't have to go there. But in the non-God issues, you show him respect and you give him some deference. This is the value statement. Women today, for the most part, receive much more respect than may have been in those marriages. And that's good. But you have to understand that the nature of the world he's talking to here. He's not saying, okay, he's a great husband. Just go ahead and he's going to be pagan. He lets you worship God. He says, no, you have to work hard at this. And the whole point he makes here is, okay, don't be so centered on dressing up and how you look. Although he doesn't say it's wrong. Women have a natural desire to look nice. Thank you. We're glad of that. Because men don't, right?

Yeah, my wife's all the time. You're not going to wear that, are you? Yeah. I wanted to be a clown today. What do you say? You're not going to wear that. Oh. No, I just fallen around. You know, I didn't... Or did you comb your hair? Yeah. You look in the mirror and it's like, oh, wow. She's always really nice about it, but they are, for the most part, women are centered on, I want to look nice. You're designed that way. There's nothing wrong with it. What he says is, that can't be the center of your life, though. Every time I walk out of the house, I don't want people to see me. Especially if you want men to look at you. That's not why you walk out in the public, so that men will look at you. That's a wrong motivation. So what he says here is that, okay, that shouldn't be the center part of your life where you're just how you appear. He says, instead, in verse 4, rather let it be the hidden person of the heart with the incorruptible beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit which is very precious in the sight of God. He says, you want to be precious in the sight of God, then you have a gentle and quiet spirit, which is the fruit, some of the fruits of God's Holy Spirit, and your relationship, who you're pleasing all the time is God, because you're in a holy marriage, even with an unholy person. He didn't say, leave your husband if he's a pagan. He said, who knows, you may win him over, because you're going to be different than other wives. The point he makes here, and through the rest of this is, because he said, Sarah called Abraham Lord, no ladies, you're not required to call your husband Lord, okay? And guys, don't even ask, okay? I don't want to have to take that call that says, we have marriage problems. The point he's making is, is that women are required in their relationship with God, because it's a holy marriage. They are required to pay respect and work with their husbands, to pay respect and work with their husbands, instead of trying to control everything that goes on in the marriage.

He says, this is glorious, or precious, in the sight of God. This is when God says, now that's a precious child of mine right there. Look at her. She knows what she's doing, because she works in her marriage to be respectful.

Verse seven, husbands likewise dwell with them with understanding, giving honor to the wife as to the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together the gracious grace of life, that your prayers be not hindered. The point, once again, is very simple. Give them understanding. This is what holy husbands do. We try to understand, we try to understand the spiritual things that we are supposed to bring to this, this relationship, just as they are trying to understand the spiritual things they bring. They're the weaker vessel, not because they're, not because they're mentally weaker. It just, in most cases, most men are physically stronger. You physically abuse your wife. You hit her, you push her around. Until that stops, you can't fix anything. Until violence stops, you can't fix anything. And as a man to do that will break their ability to, not only respect you, to trust you. It will destroy it. So that has to stop. And that's the point he's making. He says, as being heirs together the grace of life, remember we come before God equal in the grace of life. We might have different roles in marriage, but we come to God absolutely equal. And then he says that your prayers may not be hindered. He says, gentlemen, I put you in charge. You mess this up, don't come talk to me. Doesn't this scare you a little bit? That verse bothers me. I put you in charge. You mistreat her, and don't come talk to me.

Is there much dysfunction we can bring in? Oh, I don't have to submit to my husband. No, you have to respect him. This is precious in the sight of God. And no, I don't have to understand her. You can't understand a woman. No. No, you have to try to understand her, and you can't see her as spiritually inferior. You can't, because your co-heirs together. Oh, it's holy. It's a holy relationship. We come in with such dysfunction that sometimes we miss that entirely. And one of the most important things, what I was going to do with the Bible study today, and I did it in Nashville, I actually had the men anonymously. I said, anybody wants to write it down? And they wrote it down, gave it to me. I didn't know who it was. It was a huge stack. Men saying, this is how I feel respected, and women saying, this is how I feel loved. And some of them were the same. And some of them weren't the same at all.

We have to define that. Men have to tell, because women will say, well, that's not respect, that's just giving into his male ego. Well, there is a point where a proper male pride, not improper pride, is enforced by you in how you treat him. And men, there's times when you love your wife, because how she defines it, not how you define it. How many have read the five love languages? The rest of you read it. Okay, there's your assignment. Read it. Number three, sharing criticism or mate bashing with other people. When you begin to criticize your husband or wife in front of others, you've done damage that may take a long time to heal. If you do it behind their back and they find out. I saw a congregation once where the husband or wife were having a battle, and they kept telling their friends until, you know, part of the congregation was on his side, part of the congregation was her side. It was like, well, let's just put the husband or wife out of the church. They're causing division. They had literally created a controversy inside the congregation. Now, we didn't put them out. Would you see what I'm saying?

We can't go around to others sharing everything. We can't go around to my wife or my husband and say bad things about them. Don't ask me anything bad about my wife. My relationship with her is too important, and I won't tell you a thing.

I just won't.

And I know she won't either. Oh, she'll say little things like, oh, the man has no idea how to match ties to suits, and that's okay.

But you know what I mean? She's not going to tell you. I know that. She's not going to tell you any great fault I have. And there's a lot. But the relationship's too important. Proverbs 17, 9.

We're just scratching the surface here. But I guarantee you, as we go through these, everyone here is going to find at least one of these that they've done.

Or you are a remarkable person. Proverbs 17, 9.

He who covers a transgression seeks love, but he repeats a matter, separates friends. You know, your best friend, as far as of the opposite sex, has to be your husband or wife. As a man, I can have other men as best friends. There's only one female that can be my best friend. Only one. Nobody else can. So it should be. Guys, you know, she doesn't even want to know. What are you guys talking? No, she doesn't even ask me. What are you guys talking about? It's like, I don't want to know. Now, what sometimes she'll ask, what are you guys talking about? And I'll say, oh, we're talking about this, that, the other. And sometimes she'll say, I like male congregations. And sometimes I'll see her, if I'm standing with a group of men talking, and she'll be off to the side listening to you, finding a letter of step. Oh, come up, because I'd love to hear what she's going to say.

We do not. If we seek love, we cannot share. Now, I will say this. You may have a very, very close friend that sometimes you share some things with. Okay? That's, that's understandable. But remember this. If they're a close friend, they just won't say to you all the time, well, he's just a beast. Or, well, she's, you know, she's just rotten. You should leave her. If they're a good friend, they're going to listen. And you know, a lot of times they're going to say, well, here's something you should do. If you want someone just to listen to you and, you know, feed back what you're feeling, you got to be real careful about that. So if you have a close friend that you share some things with, if you're the best friend, be careful not just to just keep feeding them the negativity back. You know what I mean? You become this, oh, she did this. So that was rotten. Oh, she did this. Oh, that was bad. And now the guy goes, yeah, he's reinforced everything I've said. So I'm not even going to... tomorrow's our anniversary and I'm not even going to ask her out. There, I'll teach her. You're feeding the fire. Be very careful what you feed in somebody else's marriage. Very careful.

Getting even is number four. You neglect the other spouse's needs. I'll show you. I just won't wash your clothes. Now, I... my dad and mom, I remember them telling me this. I was a teenager and they both laughed. They said when they were first married, dad would just take off his clothes and throw them in the middle of the floor. And she kept saying, please put them in the hamper so I'll know what needs to be washed. And he wouldn't do it. So one day dad said, so I looked out, it's pouring down rain and the entire backyard is just a giant mound of all my clothes. And he said, what are you doing? She said, well, they're going to be washed. They're getting washed and you'll have to dry them yourself. And he said, no, I won't. He said, my clothes laid out there for like three days and he just wore the same dirty clothes over and over again. And they both laughed and said, we learned how to deal with problems better than that pretty quickly. You know, they hadn't been married very long. And they just laughed about it years later. You know, I'm thinking, man, you talk about stubborn people. I'm glad I didn't get that trait. Neglecting family responsibilities. This can happen. We just pull away from the family. So other people, the children or mom and, you know, the grandparents, other people are being hurt because we pull away from family obligations because there's a problem between husband and wife. We start to refuse to cooperate even in the simplest ways.

We begin to spend money the way we want to without discussion. You know, in every marriage, both people needs to have their own money to spend. But you know, you bring this rent, you know, all the utilities, all this money has to be spent certain way. You have to have a budget so everybody knows, okay, this is yours and this is mine. The rest of it has to go to this. Children's shoes, right? There's things you have. What Kim and I have this extensive budget.

With her being German and me, you know, wanting tight with money, we're like perfect. It's amazing, you know. Actually, sometimes we don't spend money when we should, but spending money. I'll show her. I'll go buy this. I'll show him. I'm going to go buy a bunch of new clothes even though it's not in the budget. This is all very dysfunctional. I'm getting even, refusing affection, staying away from a home. Yeah, so after work, you go out with the buddies, skip dinner. That's why we had an argument yesterday, so I'm just not going home tonight till 10 o'clock. This is all dysfunctional. It's just getting even. What does Romans 12 say? Let's go to Romans 12. Now this has nothing to do with marriage, but it has everything to do with marriage. If you really apply this now to the concepts of what we're talking about now, about getting even.

I hope some of you are starting to say, you know, I do that. I hope so. I hope so.

You might do two or three of them, right? Romans 12, 17. Repay no one evil for evil. Yeah, but you don't know my husband. Well, wait a minute. Repay no one 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. How much more is that to apply to the person you made a covenant with God to spend the rest of your life with in this three-way covenant? Beloved, do not avenge yourselves, but rather give place to wrath. For as written vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord. In other words, God's going to judge this, but don't.

Don't stay at war as much as it's possible with God's help. Live at peace. That means you have to do something even if the other person is not. Well, we sort of have trading war stamps. When I was a little kid, my mom had S&H green stamps. How many of you are old enough to know what S&H is? Okay. S&H green stamps. When you would buy things, they would give you S&H green stamps, and you would get a little book, and you would put the green stamps in. And when you had a thousand number of whatever it was, they had a catalog, and you could trade it in for stuff. And my mom saved S&H green stamps. They haven't done that in 50 years, but I can remember them doing it. Now, that's what we can do. We have a little book, and it's like, ah, she did this. Ah, she did that way. Until we have a full book of stamps of what you did wrong, and then we're going to get even. It's a holy marriage. So Romans, there fits. The fifth thing, using sex as a weapon. I want to be careful when I say here, I know there's children here, but the sexual relationship inside of marriage is holy.

You know, if I was to just ask people, in the congregation, even outside, what is the minimal standard, the absolute minimal standard, biblically, for a person, two people to have a sexual relationship? Someone says, well, you have to be male and female. Well, that's the minimal standard. They have to love each other. Malachi, chapter 2. God was very upset with Judah. They'd come out of Babylonian captivity, and Malachi is an amazing book. I haven't covered it in quite a while. I should cover it, because it's set up like a play. It's almost like a courtroom scene. Accusations, defense, and then the case made. So we're in the middle of this, and in verse 13, Hamalachi 2, it says, and this is the second thing you do. So this is God answering, and they're going to answer back. You cover the altar of the Lord with tears, with weeping and crying, so he does not regard the offering anymore. You'll receive it with goodwill from your hands, so God isn't listening to your prayers anymore. Your worship isn't acceptable to him anymore. Why? Yet you say, for what reason? Okay, so this is the question that is asked. You can see sort of like the priesthood not literally doing this, but like I said, it's set up like a play. Because the Lord has been witness between you and the wife of your youth, whom you have dealt with treacherously, yet she is your companion and your wife by covenant. This applies to men and women. Remember, your covenant is with not only your spouse, but with God. But did he not make them one, having a remnant of the Spirit? And why one? Why did God say at the very beginning that man and wife should come together, which excludes homosexual marriage? Okay. Okay, should come together and they would become one. Why did he do this?

Because he seeks godly offspring, therefore take heed to your Spirit, and let none deal treacherously with the wife of his youth.

The only reason that God says a sexual relationship is holy is inside of marriage.

Two people can get married and not love each other, but they can have a sexual relationship. It's not, you know, it's a destructive way to live and it's not going to work. But, hopefully when you get married, you love each other.

But the only holy sexual relationship is in marriage, so that he can produce children. Now, a sexual relationship goes way beyond producing children because of, well not way beyond, but I mean it's more than that, because it binds these two people together in something very special. It's a very special thing. But God said, I want children. Now, I want you to think about the genius of God here. God says, I'm going to create billions of children. They're His. Every child that's born is His. Now, He could have done it like, I remember that my kids had a children's book someone gave them. I remember little that, where do babies come from? And the adult in the story was saying, well we find them in the cabbage patch. That's where they got the cabbage patch dolls, right? The babies were, you go out and you look under the leaf. Oh, there's a baby. That's where babies come from. I forget what the, I think the story was showing that wasn't true. I don't remember, but it was a book that someone gave our kids and we had explained. No, that's not, okay. We're just going to tell you that's not where they come from. That's it. But later we'll tell you more. So, he says I'm going to create them. And you know what? I'm going to create you male and female. So you can learn to have a totally unique relationship that's different than any other relationship in your life. And you can create children for me. They'll be yours. And you can raise them, and you can love them, and you can learn a little bit like what I feel about you, because you're going to have little ones, because I set it up for you to have them in this holy relationship. That's amazing. When I try to think through the way God does certain things, I just think that's, nobody could come up with that but God. It's genius. Of course, we all know Satan corrupted everything, and that's why our marriages don't work sometimes, because we all corrupted by Satan. But originally, it's very simple. And, Reneve, I've united you in holy marriage. You have a relationship, and you're going to produce children. They're mine, but they're yours too. And that's how I'm going to have all kinds of children. You get to participate and meet creating children. And you get to be creating children. He could have just created them, right? Adam and Eve could have been created, then he created a hundred, then a thousand, then a million, and he could be creating people today. We could just go out to the swamps every once in a while and see a person come up out of the ground and say, oh, there's another person God made. No, he makes them through us.

That's amazing. And what is the context and what that's supposed to take place? In marriage, in this holy union, so that these people take care of those children, and they love those children, and they teach those children.

That's why there's a dangerous thing in ever using sex as a weapon against the other person. It hurts both of you emotionally so much. It'll take away from the specialness of what God wants. In fact, we won't go there, but in 1 Corinthians 7, 3 through 5, Paul actually has to tell the church, you people have so many sexual problems. He says, by the way, you need to have a sexual relationship in your marriage. He actually commands them to try to build us...there were sexual problems in Corinth. They didn't even know how to have a sexual relationship in a marriage that was healthy because of their past experiences. And he tells them, no, this is part of what you're supposed to actually have. We use that as a weapon.

We do a lot of damage. The sixth thing is we live with past fallacies about marriage. We all bring fallacies about marriage. I thought that my wife would always be looking at me every day for 50 years and saying, you're a fine figure of a man.

It didn't work out that way.

Give me a little time and I'll change him. Oh, man, that is said by more young women. Just give me a little time. No, you won't. Not probably in a good way. If you have a good marriage, you'll change. If he's a man of God, you'll change. But you changing him, I'm going to mold him into what I want him to be. Oh, man, if you do work that out, you'll be very unhappy by what he becomes.

And you're going to find that probably he's going to really say, no, you're not changing me. Oh, I'll get him to stop going hunting once I marry him. No, you may find he hunts more.

Because he's going to be running away. There'll be no tensions or conflicts in our marriage. Because good marriages don't have that and we're getting married and we have a, we'll have a good marriage. No, life is working out conflicts and tensions. Life is working out problems. Many of the problems of marriage don't happen because the two of you, they come from outside in, right? You lose a job, you get sick, you have problems. They're not even yours, but you now own them. They come in and the stress on that relationship is from an outside source. That's going to happen all the time. And you have to be ready for that. You have to accept that. Romantic feelings will be present at all times. That's not true because you would never go to work. You would starve to death, okay?

Those are just like everything else. They're part of a relationship and there's a time and place.

Once the spark is gone, it can't be rekindled. Well, that means the first time he gets sick and throws up all over the place and the spark's gone, that's it. I'm out of here, right? The spark comes and goes and you work at making the spark come and go. You work at it because it's worth it.

And then one last thing. Don't try to psychoanalyze your mate.

One thing it's not going to work is, well, you know, I just read a book and this doctor said, looking at it, you're a narcissist fringing on being a psychotic, okay? That's not going to help your marriage at all. Especially when he or she goes and looks up narcissism and being a psychotic, okay?

I mean, you can do it, but it's not good to say it. I mean, sometimes there are marriages that fail because one of the people just won't make it work because they won't be a Christian.

But you don't sit down with them and psychoanalyze them. That won't be good. You know, because they're just going to say, let me see that book. Okay, let me look up this doctor. Oh, this doctor is a counselor for LGBTQ. Yeah, you could throw that book away and I'm going to listen to anything you say. I mean, you just got to be real careful what you do here. Try to help each other. And sometimes there are other major problems. I'm not diluting that in any way. I'm just saying it is not a way for the two of you to fix your problem, to solve your problems by doing those kinds of things.

So we're all broken people. We bring all these broken people together. And we, when our children leave our homes, they're partly broken from us too. From Satan and from us. Even the most perfect marriages leave the children not totally functional. And even if it did, the influence of other people and the influence of Satan leaves them broken when they leave. Right? Everybody's broken. Everybody is struggling. Everybody wants to be healed. And the easiest thing to do is, I can be healed if I find the right girl. I can be healed if I find the right guy. And there's a little truth in that. Because marriage does heal part of us. But the greater parts of marriage, but the greater parts take... those have to be healed and worked with for the marriage to work. We have to work within ourselves to make a marriage work.

And so next time we're going to talk about our brokenness that we bring into marriage. And we bring in the families. There's another thing too, by the way. Your children, you give them a genetic makeup. You ever look at a child and think, oh man, that's just like grandpa was. You give them genetics that sometimes aren't very good. It's not your fault. It's just... they're genetically... they're different. Right? You too are very calm. You like to work things out. And you give birth to a baby that at 16 years old, all she does is scream and yell and stomp her feet and tell you how evil and bad you are. And you say, she's just like my sister.

I mean, she even uses the same words my sister did. And she has never even hardly known my sister. Where's that? That's genetics. There are genetics things we pass on to them. Sometimes you ever... you know, sometimes kids, you want to go talk to your parents about some trait you have. You just say, hey, I'm sorry, but you're the one who gave it to me. Right? Because it's a genetic trait. So they have those issues, and we have to work them through that. We have to sometimes say, boy, that's a family issue. That trait you have is in all kinds of members of our family. And they'll probably say, I see it, but it makes me mad. Okay. But you have some of that same trait. And we can help you work through it. So there's even genetic issues that we give to them, and they go on through life with them, and they have to deal with them in their lives. But we had to deal with the genetic issues given to us. Right? We had to deal with the genetic issues given to us, through our parents and our grandparents and their parents and their parents. And some of this goes back 15, 20 generations.

I mean, there's even physical traits that skip generations.

That, you know, I come from a whole family of short men, except my grandfather. The rest of us, the genes, skipped through. And before him, somewhere a gene got in there that made him six feet something tall. The rest of us, you know, if we each, if we each five, ten, we're like amazing. We're a big man in our family. It's just genetic traits. So next time we're going to talk about our brokenness that all of us have. It shows itself in different ways. But that brokenness is healed only through us and God. There's a brokenness, and so there's a conflict we have with God, and that conflict is many times played out in our marriages and families. We actually play that out in our marriages and families. So that was going to be the sermon, but I decided to give this sermon as the introduction to that sermon. So we can all face the fact, yeah, sometimes we're good at family and sometimes we're not. That's reality. Let's lay it out on the table, and then let's look at the brokenness we bring, and so that we can maybe help that the next generation doesn't have some of the same brokenness that we have in our relationships as adults.