Cultivating a Healthy Marriage (Part 1)

Welcome to Gospel in Life. You're listening to Cultivating a Healthy Marriage with Tim Keller. This short podcast series features the messages from the most popular sermon series of Dr. Keller's time at Redeemer Presbyterian Church. Preached in 1991, this series was the basis for the best-selling book by Tim and Kathy Keller, the meaning of marriage. With your single, married, widowed or divorced, this series helps you learn how to apply God's wisdom about marriage to your life. Welcome. I'm Glenn Kleinknecht and this is my wife, Carol. And we'd like to. Thank you. We'd like to welcome you to this very unique evening. You know, Redeemer has had over the years married couple retreats or just couple retreats. But never as far as I know, an evening given over to specific teaching on marriage from our leadership. So this makes it kind of a first. You're here to make a little history, in other words. We're glad you're here and of course we'd like to present our speakers, Tim and Kathy Keller, who obviously do not need introductions except for maybe some visitors who may not be aware that Tim is the senior pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church. Tim and Kathy have been married for 30 years. They have three sons and one daughter-in-law. Now Kathy tells us that their main qualification for giving us counsel on marriage tonight is the following. And I'm going to read what Kathy said. She said the whole first year of their marriage, Tim as a pastor got only one day off each week. And they always, every week of the year, used that day to begin a disagreement about something in the morning and continued it in escalating form for the next 12 hours. We especially want to thank one person tonight who had the idea for this evening and who has been the planner and the driving force behind getting it organized. And that's Ellen Wolfe. And she's standing back there. I think we ought to thank Ellen. Okay, and now Tim and Kathy. Let's pray for a couple of seconds. All right, Ms. Prey. Thank you, Father, for giving us the gift of marriage. We really do, we hardly know how to open the package. It's the greatest gift possible. And we just want you to make us good stewards of it and we just want you to help us even know how to receive it. In many cases, I think we've pretty much hardly even taken the ribbon off. There's so much more in it, so much more power in it than we have been able to tap. And we ask that you would make us able to receive joyfully the gift of marriage more skillfully because we spent this time together tonight. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. We want to be practical tonight, more practical than we usually can be in general teaching or sermons as you'll hear. We'll be a lot more practical than we can be in general teaching and sermons. But at the same time, we want to be comprehensive. This is our challenge tonight. We want to drill down quickly into eight areas, all of which are areas that need attention if you're going to cultivate a healthy marriage. The discipline for us is to be practical, to be comprehensive, which means we have to be very pithy and just give you just a few minutes at the most on each one of these areas. And by the way, the first thing out of your mouth to your spouse tonight as you're leaving should not be either of these. I've been trying to tell you this for years. Don't do that. Don't do that. And secondly, it's hopeless. We can't do that. We'll give you application at the end. Now all you have here, by the way, is an overview of an image that we would like to use tonight in order to pull together all the different areas that we think need attention if you're going to build a healthy marriage. And the image is the image of cultivating a garden, cultivating a garden. So for example, in 1 Corinthians 3, Paul talks about the church. Now a church is a complex of relationships. And Paul says, "I planted the seed, a polys watered it, but God made it grow. The one who plants and the one who waters have one purpose in each will be rewarded according to their own labor. For we are God's workers and you are God's field." Now see, a church is likened to a garden. It literally, the Greek word there means a cultivated field. And that's important to see because gardens need a number of skills. A gardener needs a number of skills. You have to plant. You have to break up the ground and put in the seed. You've got a water. You've got to fertilize. You've got a weed. You've got to grow in and eventually you eat the fruit of your labor. But the most important thing to see is gardens take an enormous amount of work. If you've ever run one, they take an not only enormous amount of work but constant attention. You generally can't even go a day without getting out into your garden or it gets away from you. And what this means is we're going to apply this to marriage because by the way, biblically you can do that because the Bible calls the church, the household of God. And in Ephesians 5 we're going to get to this in a minute. The marriage is in a sense is a mini church. The church is a kind of maxi household or family. The family is a mini church. And a marriage is very much a complex relationship just like a garden. And here's my main point, my way of introduction. Your marriage is not like sod that you buy and bring home and roll out, ready to walk on. Your marriage is not like flowers that you buy at the store and then you come home and you put them on your coffee table. Your marriage is not like fresh direct which is delivered to your door and then two minutes in the microwave and there it is. Your marriage is a garden and the difference between the marriage you can and should have, the beautiful marriage you can and should have. The fruitful marriage you can and should have is as far removed from the marriage you start with as an apple tree is removed from the apple seed as a bear garden is removed from a fruitful garden. It's a long way from seed to the apple tree, a long way and you shouldn't get into your marriage expecting to if you've got the right spouse, if you've found just the right person, Bingo, you immediately begin to live this happy and fulfilling life. Instead when you look at the problems you're having, when you look at how much worse your spouse is flawed than you thought he or she was when you got married, when you look at the conflicts that you are sort of stuck in, when you look at how much criticism you're getting from your spouse, the danger is for you to think the problem is this particular person that I'm married to. But actually the problem is marriage. The problem is that marriage is a garden. It takes an enormous amount of skill, it takes an enormous amount of attention. You've got to be in it all the time and you can't be mad because the garden just doesn't produce produce. You can't just plant it and come back in three months and expect it to be there. Now men in particular are like that and that is they just don't expect marriage to be so much work and if they feel like it takes an tremendous amount of work, we always got to be talking about our marriage and working on our marriage. There's something wrong but it's not the way it is with a garden. You can't just plant it and come back in three months and expect there to be something there. And not only that, by the way, gardens take work no matter what the weather. If there's a lot of rain, you've got to be out there weeding all the time or the garden is going to, nothing will come up. If there's no rain or if it's really, really dry, you've got to get out there and do it your own watering. If your life is going well, financially things are going well, your children are doing well, everything's going well. There's all kinds of attention you've got to give to your marriage or it's going to get squeezed out by all of your success. Or if troubles are happening and there's financial troubles and there's children troubles and there's all kinds of troubles, your marriage is going to need an enormous amount of watering and attention or it's going to atrophy. So basically the image is, marriage is like a garden, it's going to take all the work of a garden. Four areas we want to cover. Now in the next 45 minutes. Planning and planting, fertilizing and watering, weeding and pruning, harvesting and enjoying. The first couple of topics are going to pick a little longer than the last ones we want to cover them all. Ready? I get the first one then Kathy and we'll go back and forth. Occasionally, she'll do one back to back as well. Planning and planting. Kathy and I are defining that as. Laying the foundation, which means knowing why you're married. Why did you get married? What's the whole point of marriage? And then, who are you in the marriage? That's the roles thing. So let me start with the purpose. What is the purpose of marriage? Now, ancient culture said the purpose of marriage is to secure, is the security and the status of your family. You married a person who helped the security and status of your family. That's why you got married. The idea of marrying for love is a fairly late idea. It comes into the middle ages. But before the middle ages, you marry someone who helps your family's security and status period. Modern people marry for happiness. In modern culture, we're told that you're marriage. The purpose of marriage is to be happy. I'm marrying somebody who's going to make me happy. Biblically, both of those approaches are naive. They're naive. Because I believe that the Bible says the purpose of marriage, and I wrote it down on this piece of paper here, is gospel reenactment. Why? Well, it says in Ephesians 5, "Husbands, love your wives as Christ love the church and gave Himself up for her in order to make her holy by cleansing her with the washing of water by the Word. So as to present the church to Himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or anything of that kind, ye so that she may be holy and without blemish." Think of the gospel. Jesus sees us in sort of stuck in our human condition. So what He does is He comes into our lives and lays Himself out in sacrificial love. And as a result, now we're on a journey with Him to a future perfection, to a future glory self. See, Jesus saw us not even close to being the persons that we were designed to be by God. He comes in with sacrificial loves and frees us up. So now we're on a journey to our future glory self. That's the purpose of marriage, to reenact the gospel. It says so in Ephesians 5. I mean, put it like this, "The purpose of marriage is to help your spouse become his or her future glory self through sacrificial service. The purpose of marriage is to help your spouse become his or her future glory self through sacrificial service." And therefore, it means basically what love is an action first of feeling second. The most important thing for the success of your marriage is to recognize that you have to develop a servant mindset or a ministry mindset. Put it to you like this. Modern people basically have a consumer attitude toward marriage. The purpose of this marriage is to make me happy. And the basic language of the heart goes like this. I'll be the spouse, I ought to be, if and to the degree that you're the spouse you ought to be. But if you're into gospel reenactment, if you understand the purpose of marriage as helping your spouse to his or her future glory self through sacrificial service, then the language of your heart is, "I will be the spouse, I ought to be, whether you are being the spouse you ought to be or not, because Jesus gave me spousal love like that. He loved me not because I was lovely, but in order to make me lovely. And I'm going to do that for you." That's so fundamental. And you can ask me questions about-- there's clarifications I've got to make. And we will make them. For example, this does not mean that marriage should be one way. This does not mean that it's OK for you to do all the sacrificing and the other person to be completely selfish. And you're just going to serve that person. You know why? That's not ministry mindset. It's so incredibly selfish to let your spouse live a selfish life. It's the worst thing for them. It's the most unleavening thing possible to make it easy for someone to sin against you. A person with a ministry mindset who's really saying, I'm going to bring this person, my spouse. I'm going to bring this person to the full potential that God has given them. I want to participate in what God is trying to do in their lives. If you have a ministry mindset, then you will confront. You will not just say it's OK for them to be selfish. That's the important thing. Last thing on this, because then we're going to turn over to Kathy. What this really means, again, is that love is primarily a action before it's a feeling. I would say most marriages go like this. You start because you fall in love. That's how you get married. And by and large, you love the beauty of the person. There's something about the person's attractive. Then you get married with all this feeling of love. And it won't be long after that that a disillusionment sets in, because you'll find that the greatness that you loved in that person is more embryonic than you thought. It's more undeveloped than you thought. It's going to take more watering and fertilizing and pruning and weeding than you thought. And at that point, you can either go the consumer way, which is to say, OK, this person's not being the spouse he should be, or she should be, then I'm not going to be. I'm going to wait for him. Or you can say, I'm going to lay myself out for you. And I'm going to be the spouse I promise to be, whether you are or not. And here's what happens then. The more you act loving, when you don't feel loving, the more your feelings of love will grow. And the more you act unloving, when you feel unloving, the more you fail to serve in love, when you don't like the person, the more that's going to spiral down. The less you act loving, less you feel loving, the less you feel loving, less you act loving, on and on until it's gone. That's the most important thing for you to know. Now I'm going to turn it over to Kathy, who's going to talk to you about roles and headship and submission. It's making me face not because I had to talk, but because this is a subject that nobody wants to hear about. Tim just mentioned the gospel reenactment is part of the whole purpose of having a marriage. And he also referred to Ephesians 5 versus 25 to 31. Back up a few-- most of you don't have Bibles, so I'll read it to you-- if you back up a few verses and Ephesians 2,22 to 24, you read, and don't anyone throw anything at me while I'm reading, why submit to your husbands as to the Lord? For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the church, his body of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so why should submit to their husbands in everything? Gospel reenactment sounds well, but that means that, as in any play, the players have to take on roles. In marriage, the husband and the wife both take on the role of Jesus. The husband takes the role of Jesus as he's the head of the church. The wife takes on the role of Jesus as they as the sons submissive to the Father for the sake of our salvation. And although the subject of headship and submission has been the cause of a lot of misunderstanding and misuse and abuse, the real teaching of the Bible shows that this is a really enormous privilege and gift that we are in danger of missing in our modern day, because it allows us to enact and reveal the really deep mysteries about God's character through the roles of husband and wife. Now the foundation of these roles is in creation. If you look at Genesis chapter 1, verse 26, we see that male and female are equally share in God's image and are equally given the mandate to care for the world that God has made. I'm going to keep clinking unless I get rid of that. In Genesis 2, however, we see a more detailed and personal account of the creation involving making Adam first than Eve as the helper suitable for him. So the first creation account talks about how God says, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, let them rule over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air." So God created man in his own image, the image of God, he created him male and female. He created him totally quality of male and female. Genesis 2, then, there's this thing like Adam first, then Eve, and she's the helper, like what happened to the equality. This is how-- well, let me do a tangent here before I go on. The word helper in the Bible, Azer-- I'm not sure if you hear who scholars, I'm pronouncing that, right-- it's most frequently used of God. You may have heard this, but in the Bible, the word Azer, the help meat word that's used of Eve in Genesis, is most often used of God. God are help. And a helper can only help out of strength. A helper helps because he or she has qualities that are needed by the person who doesn't have those qualities. So it's a position of strength. It's not like assistant. God's my assistant. My wife is my assistant. It's a helper who helps out of complementary strengths that the husband doesn't have. OK, it's a tangent, but we needed to do it. OK, it's in this way that we reflect the mysteries of God. The classic formulation of the Trinity is that the sun is ontologically equal with the father. That means in his essence, he's equal with the father. But he is economically-- and that means in his function-- subordinate. So the image being made in the image of a triune God, it takes two people to take on those roles of headship and submission. Husbands and wives, like the father and the son, are complete co-equals in dignity, in gifts, in value, in power and strength. But you're different as to roles. New Testament fills out our understanding in this. In Philippians 2, we see that Jesus did not cling to his equality with God, but he emptied himself in order to be our savior, to become a servant and die to save his people. Long ago, when I was struggling with this teaching, and I did struggle with it, I had to ask myself this question, if it's not an assault on the dignity and value and equality of Jesus, the second person in the great I am, the song that calls him that, second in the great I am, but it's not an assault on the dignity and value and equality of Jesus to take the subordinate role to his father in order to accomplish our salvation. How on earth can I be hurt or devalued when asked to play the Jesus role of subordination in my marriage? And the answer is, I can't be. It's not going to hurt me if it's defined by Jesus rather than by a cultural understanding. Of course, you women can retaliate saying, "Well, Jesus was being submissive to a perfect and loving father. I'm being asked to be submissive to a flawed and sinful man." That's why the Bible is so very careful to explain to men that they must also act like Jesus in their marriages, the Jesus who suffered and died out of love for his bride, the church. That means that number one, biblical headship involves servanthood. You don't have Bibles here, so just write down if you're taking notes. First Corinthians 113, and I'll read it real slowly, "The head of every man is Christ. The head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God." First Christ's headship over man is clearly one of authority, and yet his authority expressed itself by his sacrificial death in order to meet our needs. A head's job is to use their authority to please meet needs and serve. A head does not get all the perks, all the privileges, choose control of the remote. All of this, pick the color of the car you buy, et cetera. Your headship is expressed in servanthood primarily. Number two, biblical headship involves voluntary, respectful submission between equals. If there are husbands out there, it's a "yeah, I'm the head, this is good teaching, I like this head stuff." It's respectful submission between equals. Submission is something that a wife gives. It's not something a husband can demand. Christ emptied himself. He didn't grasp equality with God. It was a voluntary submission. Because Christ is a higher order of being than human beings, the Father and the Son are equal in power, greatness, and dignity, and the Son's not inferior to the Father at all. This proves that headship does not imply superiority, nor does submission imply inferiority. What are we supposed to conclude about headship from this Christ to mankind and God to Christ analogies? Headship is something given by one person to another. The giver is equal to the receiver and the receiver has a real and final authority, but uses it only to serve and please and build up the giver. It is not used for yourself because that's not how Christ used his headship. He didn't use his headship to say, "I'm going to sit here and you're going to serve me." He stripped himself and washed his disciples' feet and said, "Look what I've done and I'm the master and I'm giving you an example and get it into your heads. I'm redefining what leadership, what authority means. It means serving." Now in marriage, this means a head may never use authority to please themselves. A head can't may never overrule his spouse simply to get his way or do what he wants. A head sacrifices his wants and his needs to please and build up his partner. Go back to Ephesians 5 if you want a lot more detail about that. There's sometimes involves tie-breaking authority. I would say maybe more than sometimes it's rarely involves tie-breaking authority, but it does. A head only exercises the authority to overrule something that his wife wants or believes is necessary when he thinks that his spouse is doing something destructive to her or to the family. In marriage, you only have two votes. How do you break the stalemate? Can only be broken if one party has the authority to overrule? But there can't be a misuse of that so that I get my way. The only time that a husband can use his authority to overrule is with knowing he has the responsibility and the accountability to God to only be doing it in order to serve and to take care of his wife and his family and that he'll be held accountable for that decision. The wife has to understand that. I have a little more about that later. Why does God direct in his word though? The headship goes to the man. Why not to the woman? Well, if it did, then the men would be sitting here saying, "So how come I'm submissive?" A lot of people struggle at this point. They can't see a practical reason for a commandment of God. They don't see why they have to obey it. The reason that the Bible gives is not the reason that you get in traditional cultures, like men are better, men are stronger, you know, men will stomp on you if you don't let them do it. The reason that the Bible gives is it points us to the Trinity. We're made in the image of the triune God. If you want to put it in perspective, ask this question. Why did Christ have to be the one who came and died? Why not the Father? Why not the Holy Spirit? Why did He have to give away His authority? We don't know. We're not told. But the one thing we are told in Philippians 2 is that it's a mark of His greatness. Having humbled Himself, His name will be exalted above every other name so you could actually make the case that in asking women to be submissive, that they are actually being given a greater calling than the men and will be exalted more highly for it. I'm just saying you could make the case. I'm not making the case. Of course, men are also given the job of following Christ in His role as head of the church rather than in the role of submission to the Father. So men and women, we both get to play Jesus in our marriage. I'll just summarize this way first. Jesus revolutionizes the role of submission, which could be called serving through subordination. He shows us willing submission. It's not begrudging. He brews 10-7. He says, "Here I am. I delight to do your will, O God." Philippians tells us that He will be exalted because He didn't hold on to His status of rule that He became a servant. Second, Jesus revolutionizes the role of headship, which can also be called serving through leadership. Just as He shows us willing and not begrudging submission, He shows us ruling of one equal over another that always has service as its goal. Jesus never abandons His authority over us, but He dies for us. His authority leads to His sacrificial death. He only uses His power, and He always uses His power only for our good and at His own expense. And that's what men are being asked to follow. Third and last, the biblical pattern calls both parties to submit. Many godly couples have come to realize that the biblical pattern is equally difficult for both parties. The woman and the man both have to submit to their roles. Many Christian men would gladly give up their tie-breaking headship authority. It's hard. You're going to be accountable. It's difficult to be nuanced. It's difficult, and a lot of men would be just as happy to back away from it and not assume headship. It's a hard role. It's hard to be a good head in your family. And the man has to submit to his role just as much as a woman has to submit to her role. Now this Trinity-based view of gender roles is not easy to communicate in the modern world today. The concept of in-one self being equal, but in one's vocation and relationship subordinate is difficult to explain, especially to someone fuming over the mere idea of gender-based roles at all. But we can have a separate night on that some other time. I'm sure there are still questions in your minds. But let me just try and pre-empt the most common question so that I don't get 50 or 500 of them all saying the same thing. A woman would probably say, many of you women are probably saying in your minds, "Okay, I get what you're saying, but my husband doesn't." He thinks his authority is a blank check to get his way in every circumstance. He's controlling threatening, maybe even abusive. Am I supposed to submit to all of this? And the answer is no. Your submission to a husband who's singing against God is to oppose him. Remember, you're supposed to be helping serving in your submission. You don't have the motivation of trying to be just as mean to him as he is to you and oppose him so that you can have the upper hand instead of him. I mean, that puts the shoe on the other foot, but it doesn't solve anything. It doesn't change anything. The opposition has to come out of the motivation of 1 Corinthians 13. Love is patient, love is kind, love is long-suffering. If he's abusive, call the police. I mean, if necessary. But with the motive of trying to serve and save him, not punish or dominate or threaten him because then there hasn't been any Jesus role in your action just like there hasn't been any in his. It doesn't save the marriage or save the person. So that's just an attempt to hit that question before you ask it, before you ask it, to answer it before it's asked. But you can still ask another one if you have it. Okay, Tim, back to you. and I will now go more quickly through the next set of topics. And so planning and planting, purpose, what are you there for, roles, who's who, that's the basis. Now actually moving ahead and seeing things grow, we're gonna talk about what we call fertilizing and watering. And under this heading, we're gonna deal with communication and love language and sex. Now first of all, let me give you four basic proverbs I guess about communication marriage, trying to be as pithy as I possibly can. First, you have to, even though, you know, communication is so rapid fire, but you have to learn the discipline of asking yourself, what is my goal of, what's the goal of this message I'm about to send? You have to ask, what is my motive? I'm about to say something to my spouse that's maybe confrontive, okay, or maybe critical. Why? It is crucial to figure that out. If you got a ministry mindset, then if I'm criticizing my spouse, it's because, A, I want the spouse to know the impact of his or her action on me. Or I want our relationship to go better, I want my spouse to grow, or even I want to check out my perception to see whether it's right or wrong. But if you don't have a ministry attitude or motive, the reason why in general, my default reasons for criticizing my wife are, I want to pay her back, I want to prove that I'm right, I want to make her back away from her position, not freely, but sort of through coercion. Criticism that's done with the former set of moments, motives, can actually be a form of watering and fertilizing. Criticism that's done with the other motives, it will just erode and eat away at your love. So first of all, you've got to analyze the goal of your communication. You've got to say, why am I sending this message? Sometimes you have to really ask yourself that question. It's really hard to do, it's really hard to slow your responses down and really ask yourself, why am I sending this message, but it's critical. Number one, number two. The log out of your own eye, that basic biblical idea, before you take the spec out of your spouse's eye, remove the log from your own eye, I can't tell you how important that has been to us over the years. And you know what that illustration means when it says, before you take the spec out of your spouse's eye, take the log out of your own eye, it's an image of course, and what it means is that though there's a spec in her eye, there's a spec in my eye, that objectively, the spec are the same size, but my spec should look like a log to me, 'cause it's in my eye. So my spec should look like a log to me, and that means that whenever you approach a problem, find the part that is your fault, even if only 10% of the conflict is your fault in your estimation. You start with that 10% and you confess that. See, when you've got a problem, you don't come and say, you know, it's mainly your fault, never, never, never. Find the part that's your fault, even if it's a small amount, I'm sure, what you think is your fault is 10%, she probably thinks, you know, it's 50% or 60%, but it doesn't matter, start with a part that is your fault, and admit it without excuses. Start that way, it is absolutely crucial. Even if it's only 5%, never start with, here's what you've done, and then later on I get to what I've done. Here's what I've done, start pointing to yourself, absolutely crucial, start every conversation like that, certainly everyone where you're talking about the difference of opinion, start that way. Remember, that's the second. Third, attack the problem, not the person. This is an incredible discipline. Let's just say, let's just say, I guess I'm sorry, let's just say the wife finds that the husband has forgotten a birthday or an anniversary or some again. Now there's two ways you can go about it. She can say, you're so thoughtless, or she can say, you repeatedly forget something, that you repeatedly forget these special dates, even though you continually tell me you're not going to, what are we gonna do about it? See, the first is attacking the person. You're so thoughtless, the second is saying, we got a problem, what are we gonna do about it? Now you see, there's no backing away from the problem. When she comes and says, we have a problem and it's not getting solved, what are we gonna do about it? But to attack the problem, not the person, means you're gonna make progress. Attack the person and that person's just gonna attack you back. So actually, consider this. The next time you want to, you have a problem with your spouse, consider this template. You might wanna write this down. Start like this. As I see it, you're doing this. It's affecting me like this. I wish you would do this instead, but I need to find out whether I'm missing something. Tell me, do I have this right or not? You've done this, it's affecting me like this. I think it'd be better if you did this, but I'm coming to ask whether or not my understanding is accurate or distorted, could you correct me? Do you see it that way? If you were able to talk like that, ask for those four things when you've got a problem. If you're able to slow your responses enough to put your problem in that shape, then you're attacking the problem not the person and you'll make some progress. Fourth, and I've really needed to learn this. You have to make it safe for your spouse to criticize. You've gotta create a safe environment. Now, surprisingly, there may be some interesting ways that you may use to make it unsafe. Now, we all know that if your spouse comes and criticizes you and you just blow up or you attack back, that's not making it safe for the person to say, "I've got a problem." But in my case, what I do is I apologize really quickly. See, it's very spiritual. So if Kathy comes and tries to say something to me, I really got a problem with you here. I'm so sorry, I'm so wrong. I get, oh, I, oh. Kathy starts to say, forget it. Which is exactly what I want in my heart of hearts. You see, because by being so spiritual, by apologizing so objectively, I've made it impossible for her. It's unsafe for her to say, "I'm really unhappy with you." You see, now it's not legitimate, 'cause the poor guy is a massive smoking wreckage. I mean, I have to back away. There's all sorts of ways, by apologizing too much, explaining too much, attacking back and arguing too much. When your spouse comes to criticize you, the most important thing you can do is to slow your responses down and give your spouse permission to keep on talking. Your first response ought to be, I didn't realize that I didn't understand that, would you please tell me more? So there's the four things. Do this and you will live. Now, you will. Now one more thing about love. I want to have Kathy come and talk about love language. It's more probably important to communicate love than it is to communicate content. And very often, when a person comes to you and says, "I've got a problem," at least this very often happens to you, you start to say, "Well, here's the reason for that." You start to explain, never answer a feeling with a fact. Never answer a feeling with a fact. Answer a feeling with a feeling. And very often, a person comes and is complaining, they really aren't that interested in the content. They're looking for love. And that's where you have to learn how to communicate love and how to weigh the person understands and Kathy's gonna give some ideas on that. Marriage is one of the most profound human relationships, but it's one that at times can be difficult and painful. We'd like to briefly highlight a resource that provides help for anyone who wants to have more loving and stronger relationships. Tim and Kathy Keller draw from biblical wisdom and their own experiences to offer a year of daily meditations for couples in their book, the meaning of marriage, a couple's devotional. The book is a 365 day devotional that includes stories, daily scriptures and prayer prompts that will help couples draw closer to God and to each other throughout the year. If you would like to make a gift to help Gospel and Life share the love of Christ with more people, we'll send you a copy of the meaning of marriage, a couple's devotional, as our thanks. To request your copy, simply visit gospelonlife.com/divo. That's gospelonlife.com/divo. Now, here's the conclusion of this episode of cultivating a healthy marriage. - The most important aspects of communication in marriage is love, language, and I don't know whether you're familiar with that term or not familiar with it. If someone wants to tell me that they love me, if they tell it to me in finish, it's gonna go, 'cause I don't speak finish, I don't understand finish, it's gonna be meaningless to me. If you want to make me feel loved, you'll take the time to find out what my language is so that you can tell me, you love me, in the language that I understand. So what do I mean by love language? A good definition of love language would be the behaviors that when other people do them make you feel loved. For some people, that translates into spend time with me. For other people, that translates into, give me time alone a little bit every day. Defend me from the thought, the children, the chores, the email, just for a brief island of respite in my day. That's the woman talking probably. Love languages are different. They vary from person to person, and it is so hard to put yourself in another person's shoes and realize that though you feel loved one way, that completely is meaningless, or pretty much meaningless to your spouse, they feel loved in a totally different way. It's not easy to remember to use another person's love language. When we were getting married, RC Sprolden, our wedding service, he told a story to illustrate love language. He said that he really likes to get expensive, extravagant gifts on birthdays and anniversaries. And so he was really hoping that Desta would give him a new set of golf clubs. But she's a very practical person, and she likes to get practical gifts herself. And of course, RC was a speaker, so she gave him six new white shirts. Now, Desta being a practical person for her birthday was hoping that she would get a new washing machine. RC thinking in terms of, "Well, what would I like? I'd like something sort of extravagant and luxurious." He gave her a mint coat. You know, they were both trying really hard to express love to each other, but the messages were in different languages. It's one of the most frustrating impasses in a marriage, is when both spouses are truly trying as hard as they can to love each other and to express it. But if you've never learned the other person's love language, the messages don't connect. A husband works long hours to make money to buy you the luxuries that he thinks she really want, and what you really want is more time with him. Or a wife, and this is me, I'm guilty of this one, believing that she's telling her husband how much she loves him by giving him the benefit of her advice, counsel, insight, criticism, and how valuable all that is. Sometimes he'd just like her to stop at the beginning of all of that and say, "Honey, you're doing a wonderful job. This is a wonderful idea." Before she jumps into all of the where the flaws are in the plan. Now, it took me a really long time to figure that out. I won't tell you how many years we've been married, but the Ford Tim actually said that to me, "Honey, before you jump in with a great ideas on how we can make this a better plan, couldn't you just first say something encouraging rather than "It's got a problem here, it's got a problem there." I thought I was being really helpful and loving, showing him where all the bottles were, but he took it as "You're just tearing down every idea I have." I can't emphasize how fundamental this can be in marriage. You may think the problem is a simple disagreement about the vision of labor around the house or budget when what you're really dealing with is something on the level of love language, much of which is learned in your family of origin. I'll give you an illustration too, and I had a terrible problem with this. My family of origin, my mother's love language, was "Help me." She had five kids. She literally did this. She would put laundry, clean laundry, folded laundry on the bottom of the steps that went to the second floor of our house. And as the five of us were running up and down the stairs for various reasons, if we stopped and picked up the pile of laundry and took it upstairs, it showed we were aware that she had done the laundry. She'd washed it, she'd folded it, she'd put it there, and we were helping her. If we just sort of buzzed by with other things on her mind, it was the symbol to her, this huge symbol to her. We didn't give her rip, we expected everything on a platter, we had no idea how hard it was to keep the laundry cleaned in this house, and there'd be this huge blow-up. I didn't realize that I had absorbed. My mother's helped me love language until after the children were born, and then I wanted him to help clean up after meals and change diapers and da da da da da da da. Meanwhile, Tim had grown up in a family where if you offered to help his mother, she got offended, because the message she heard is, "You're not really competent to do this by yourself. You're not doing a good enough job. I need to help you because you're doing a lousy job." You can see where this was lead to, like a really big problem between the two of us. It took us a while to understand what was going on, but then it was like the magic button, you know, "Wala, you understand the person's love language." And then they feel loved. You say love to them in the language they can understand, and it makes everything easier. This works with children, it works with parents, it even works with an employee, employer, relationships. If you want someone to know that you love respect and care for them, speak the language in which they hear love, even if it's not the one that says love to you. Okay, Tim? Now it's sex. So what happened there is when, because of our backgrounds, or different backgrounds, like I remember picking up David when he was my first child, the very very first time I was picking him up and I smelled that he just messed his pants. And I said, "Honey." I think David needs to have his diaper changed. And Kathy says, "Well, you know what? We say around our house." I said, "What's that? Find your keepers." And the reason we had a lot of trouble with, I felt like, wait a minute, that's your job. And we looked at it as a division of labor and we came to realize at a certain point the reason we were having, we were really unhappy with each other, was because I realized that when she did that, I was thinking at a deep level, if you loved me the way my mother loved my father, you wouldn't ask me to do that. And she was thinking, "If you loved me the way my father loved my mother, you would offer." So it was operating at a love language level and that's the reason why we were really budding heads. And we just thought it was just a simple negotiation of division of labor, it wasn't. Important safety tip. Okay, let's talk about sex. Just wanted to say that into a microphone really loud. Okay, Kathy and I are both going to say something about this, so let me give you five. We're going to, tonight we're doing practical. I'm not saying here's the lofty biblical vision of sex. Let's talk practically. Number one, according to the Bible, sex is really good and in marriage needs to be frequent. Proverbs chapter five says a husband should be ravished with his wife's breasts. Right there in the Bible, it says that. First, Grand Thee in seven talks about the fact that sex should be frequent, it should be reciprocal, you should not forbid sex to one another, you mustn't bargain with sex. You mustn't just say, "Sorry, I'm not interested." It's very, very important. That's number one. Number two, the biggest pleasure and the only lasting pleasure is giving pleasure. That is, when you get to the place where giving a rousal is the most arousing thing, you're home free. When we were doing a little bit of research for this tonight, I found some old talks that Kathy and I both did long ago, and when we were probably five, seven years into our marriage, it was interesting to see some of the things that we had learned back then. I had forgotten some of the struggles we had in our early days, and some of our notes reminded us. But in the early days, we started a dread having sex. This is actually Kathy's notes, which made me remember, I'm glad that she thought that because I remember it too, that way, that we both felt like if Kathy didn't experience an orgasm, we both felt like failures. I was irrationally devastated when I would say, "How was that?" and she said, "That hurt." We had a great deal of trouble until we started to see, and this is Kathy's notes from many years ago, speaking somewhere I have no idea who she was talking to, but she spoke this. And he loved my king, he kept listening. And he went, "She could get to listen," she said. She said, "We came to realize that orgasm is great, especially climaxing together, but the awe, the wonder, the safety, and the joy of just being one is stirring and stunning even without that. And we stopped trying to perform and just started trying to simply love one another in sex. We stopped worrying about our performance, and we started to stop worrying about whether we were getting and started to say, "Well, what can we do just to give?" Now Kathy will say something about this because the third principle here is, this solves the frequency problem. And with one person, once it more often than the other, if your main purpose in sex is ministry, if the main purpose in sex is giving pleasure, not getting pleasure, then the person who doesn't have as much of a sex drive physically can give to the other person as a gift. Kathy will have a very funny way of saying that, and she will tell you in a minute. Number four, a big part of sexual adjustments, as surely most of you know, is the male-female differences. And in our case, and I imagine it's true in your case, one of the big problems that we had was, as a man, context means nothing to me. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what else is going on. And I'm ready. (Laughter) And what that meant was, I knew very little about creating context. Context? What is context? What are you talking about? Oh, you mean candles or something? (Laughter) And of course, she didn't mean candles or something. She just meant warmth and things like that. And so, that's the reason why you need to be very, very patient. I would say that it took a lot of time. years and years and years and years for us to be really, really good at sexually satisfying one another. Years be patient. Fifth, very often however, little sex is such a sensitive area that you may find problems showing up in bed that if it wasn't for sex you could probably ignore. Guilt over the past, real fear of having children, for example, or having more children, relational problems that would be fairly under the surface and you probably could move around, you could probably move ahead without in most other relationships, you could move ahead without really having to deal with them. But those little things, unless your relationship is really good, unless your conscience is really good, unless you're doing very spiritually really good really well. Sex doesn't work. In other words, what happens in bed is extremely sensitive to everything else going on in your life physically and socially and spiritually and psychologically. So if you find that your sex life is in trouble, it may be that you need counseling. That is to say you may need to go to a counselor and sit down and say, what is going on? Is there some fear? Is there some problem with the pastor or something else that's making it almost impossible for us to really meet sexually? So consider if all the patients and all the books on sex and marriage you read and all the stuff that you talk to other people about it and still something is not working, it could be there's some deeper problem you need to go to a counselor for. One last thing, pornography. You know it's really seductive about pornography and I guess I have to say it's mainly for men here but what's really seductive about pornography is you get pleasure and you don't have to work. You don't have to do the context stuff. You don't have to do the relational stuff. You get pleasure and you don't have to do all the incredible hard gardening, the work, of having a good relationship. So you sex in the con, sex with your absolutely best friend. There's nothing like it. Just a rousal and orgasm. No, it's not as good but boy it's a whole lot easier and an awful lot of men I think especially when there's other problems going on in the marriage and there's a certain there's a certain coolness in the marriage or you're very very busy. Very often what will happen I think is that that men are going to go to porn as a way of relief and the wives don't know about it and because of that the problems that are happening in the marriage are masked. If the only place you were getting sexual release was in bed and it wasn't working well you'd probably go into a counselor or at least sitting we've got a problem in our marriage. If we've gotten cold we need some kind of kickstart but very often I think what happens is pornography as a secret thing on the side is a way for men to actually hide from themselves and from their wives that their marriage isn't doing very well at all. Wow. I see some of your smoke coming out of your ears as you're thinking about this. Kathy's going to say a couple things about sex for the long run. I was asked as particularly address the issue of sex after children. Is there such a thing? Actually it deserves special mention because that's often when problems arise. Some of you I know some of you well enough that you've heard me pontificate to couples who are expecting their first child that you really don't know how difficult marriage is until after the first child arrives until then you're just on a really long date. The reason it sex changes after children is because everything changes after children. Until we had our first child Tim and I had thought alike about everything we'd met at students attended the same classes worked on the same assignments and suddenly David was born and we had very different responses to the same thing. Sex being one of them. There are a lot of reasons for that. One of them is just plain physical the physical. There's exhaustion. There's no sleep. There's anxiety. They all keep a woman's interest in sex at a very low-ed. Also there's a healing period that goes on where stuff hurts and if she's nursing her hormones are not interested in you. Some couples could be experiencing anger after the child is born because you perceive your spouse isn't fulfilling their end of the responsibilities that you expect. You're thinking like your family of origin again and expecting from your husband or your wife what you saw on your parents. On the husband's part there may be some level of discomfort with your wife as a sexual partner now that you've seen her give birth. Her breasts are meaningful in a totally different way to a totally different person, the baby, than what they were to you and that may be an image that's hard to put out of your mind. Plus if your wife nurses for a year or more the breast remains a functional organ rather than an ornamental play thing and that can be disconcerting for both the husband and the wife. Another thing is my friend Adele, my friend Adele and we're gonna mention actually more about some of these people. Adele and who she is and who some other people are when we get to the accountability part at the end but my friend Adele was one of my friends from seminary and we kept in touch over the last 30 years. When we all had young children one of the things she pointed out was a very subtle but important change she found and when she said this I understood it immediately that her skin hunger was being met with a baby and not with her husband. That means that the need to hug to touch to cuddle is a big motivator for sex but the woman who's tending to have more bodily contact with the child by holding it and bathing it and feeding it etc is full up as far as touch needs and her husband is full-down empty and still is very interested in sexual or any kind of touching with his wife whereas the wife is like you know been there had that unfold with the baby. Another issue for the couple is spontaneity versus planning. You have to plan to have sex after you have children during a nap, during a play date with a child's elsewhere, during school hours you know just times when you're not going to be interrupted or insecure. Even a lock on the door doesn't really help if you know that somebody can be pounding on the other side. Sometimes the solution is to recognize that this is just a temporary season. There's a book out there I forget the title but I remembered this illustration because it was memorable. Talked about three different kinds of sex, appetizer sex which is the quickie kind. Main course sex which is your meat and potatoes kind of regular normal sexual relationship and gourmet sex which is the long romantic evening with all the four play etc. My mother who had five children invented her own category and she made sure that all four of her daughters understood the importance of using it sometimes. She called it the "I'm too tired to participate but I love you so please just go ahead and jump my bones." She told us this she really did. This is a legitimate active love. Tim was telling you I was going to talk about this and here it is. This is a legitimate active love and it shouldn't be denigrated as "Oh no no unless you're going to be all passionate and everything I don't want to do anything." Sometimes you're just too tired but you still love your husband. A fundamental role of marriage is that you must always remember that time marches on or another way to put it in. You don't marry one woman or one man but many. Time, children, illness, age all create changes that demand creative honest responses to rebuild something that might have been effortless at an earlier time and sex after children's one of them. If you don't confront and adapt to these changes they'll seep into your sex life together and lead the coldness anger and disappointment rather than being the commitment glue that hold you together they can become a force to divide you. Conversely, problem and Tim already talked about this I didn't know it was going to but I'll say anyway. Problems elsewhere in the marriage will end up in bed with you. Think for a minute of all the baggage you carry around unresolved as real baggage. Suitcases, trunks, garment bags. Now imagine trying to make love in a bed piled high with all those things. It would be uncomfortable if not impossible. And that takes us to the next thing on the schedule which is conflict resolution and I'll just stay up here for that. Tim is known for saying in wedding sermons he may have said it at your wedding sermon some of you. Marriage brings you into conflict not with your spouse but with your own sinful self. The things you ignored when your mother told you about them when your roommate told you about them when they showed up on your performance review at work will wreak havoc in your marriage and you will have to confront them. This is the part of the evening when to continue the metaphor we talk about weeding and pruning in a garden. Pruning of course was one of the metaphors that Jesus used with his disciples when he talked about what kind of treatment they could expect from God if they wanted to be useful to him. Have you ever driven by a recently pruned vineyard? I was shocked the first time we were out in the Hamptons and had and saw a vineyard that was pruned right down to these little teeny stumps on the ground because I'd only ever seen a vineyard in full leaf and fruit and in the middle of summer. I'd not seen one that had been pruned to these dead looking little stumps that were about six inches high. Pruning the deadwood out of your life and your marriage will feel like a death and it will be. Jesus called us to die to ourselves but nothing less is required if you're going to cultivate a strong healthy productive marriage. Marriages are often made up of two opposite kinds of people and it's really kind of odd how they find each other and marry each other. The conflict avoiders and the conflict confronters. I'm the confrontor, it seems, the avoider. He's the one who says what but I don't hear a noise in the engine. I don't hear a noise in the engine. Or in the marriage. Tim, and maybe it's a majority of men, I'm not sure. We'll do anything for a quiet life. Smooth things over, deny, avoid, pretend things are okay, and then blame the woman when she insists there's something wrong. I once had to get Tim's attention, and I think maybe many of you have already heard this, but I'm going to put it in anyway. Yes, you're already laughing, Stephen. There was a point in our marriage after we had moved here, and Tim was overworking as he was want to do, and I knew he was going to do, starting a new church takes a lot of work. But he had promised me like three years, three and a half, and things will quiet down, and we were in year four and a half, and things were just as bad as they'd always been. And I had nagged for so many years. I mean, Tim was totally deaf to me saying anything about you're working too hard, you're working too long, you're doing too much. You never see you, blah, blah, blah. So in cold blood, I wasn't angry, I wasn't hysterical, I took our wedding china out, some of you were laughing, I took our wedding china out onto the balcony, and started smashing it with a hammer. Tim, hearing all this crashing, came out, saw what I was doing, went totally white, thinking I'd lost to my mind. And I said, "Honey, I just don't know how to get your attention. We have a problem. There is a problem. And you're not hearing me, and I just don't know what else to do to get your attention, and I had gotten his attention." I mean, you can only do that maybe once in the lifetime of your marriage. I call it a godly tantrum, and you have to pick your moment because you don't get to do it like every week. And also, the thing I didn't tell Tim at the time until much later was I was really only smashing the saucers that no longer had cups to match them. [laughter] What can you do with those things? The principle is, if one person has a problem, then there is a problem. It is none of this, so that's her problem. That's his problem. It's not my problem. Paul says, "You're one flesh, and as Paul said, "If the foot hurts, the hand can't say that's not my problem. If you've ever walked around with a pulled muscle or a recent incision, as I have, it's amazing how every single part of your body seems connected to that one spot that hurts. Everything you do seems to move that. All of this is just to convince you that addressing the problems in your marriage is critical, but how do you do it, and especially how do you do it so it doesn't make things worse? Tim and I were masters at this, making things worse as Carol alluded. We'd begin discussing a problem and end, exhausted, hours later, me weeping, Tim shut down emotionally because he had no idea what to do, not discussing the initial problem, but fighting about the way we were fighting. You took such a dismissive tone to me. You obviously would rather not think about this. The original issue was way lost, and everything else was like what had happened in the intervening hours. Rather than focusing the energy on resolving the problem, we used all of our energy on each other wrong. You have to want to solve the problem not to score points. It takes a gospel humility to interrupt yourself in the middle of an argument and say, "Would you please disregard that last statement, "I was really wrong to say that, "or what's even harder, but sometimes more important, "to step off the playing field and be the coach." One of the most valuable things I learned to do with Tim was in the middle of some big interchange. It was to step off as one of the combatants, well you say that word, and say, "Honey, all you really need to do is put your arms around me, "hug me and say it's going to be all right." Really, that's that's all the whole thing. Okay, blow the whistle back in play. Sometimes you need to be the coach. You need to help each other learn how to solve these things, but that takes gospel humility. Some of the conflicts are large. One of you wants to adopt. The other one wants to keep trying the fertility treatments or give up on kids altogether. A great career opportunities come up, but it would mean uprooting the family and moving far away. Each of you has a different career opportunity, but in different cities. There's your smaller conflicts. I hate just table manners. I hate her spending habits. I want to stay in after a long day at work. I want to go out after being cooped up all day. Do you flip a coin? Do you keep records? And who got their way the last time? That's a big no on that one. Record keeping is like the death of relationship. It puts your marriage into the whole realm of competition and who's got the moral high ground rather than into service. You should begin asking a series of questions. To whom does it matter more? How much? One person can't always be the winner and you have to be honest and not manipulative. Sometimes it takes the intervention of a trained counselor to teach you how to approach conflict resolution to fight fair and not say things that leave scars. We're going to be telling you at the end about a one-day seminar that the Redeemer Counseling Center has planned for April 30th. Some people are here with literature and stuff. Do that later. But a big part of that day, I believe, is devoted to learning how to communicate and how to solve problems without hurting each other. Rarely, what it takes is both the husband and the wife to submit to their roles and here I'm back in headship and submission again to both submit to their roles. In fear and trembling, knowing that he has to try and act like Jesus in this situation and she has to try and act like Jesus in this situation and the decision that he makes has to be made for the good of the wife and the family not to satisfy himself. And just as a side note, you'd better be glad that it works that way because otherwise we wouldn't be here because that's how the one and only time in our marriage that Tim had to use, the tie-breaking, ruling authority thing was when I didn't want to come to New York and he did and here we are. So you ought to. And God changed my heart, but he had to take the responsibility of making the decision. I mean, he tried to say, "Well honey, what do you want to do?" And I said, "You're not putting this on me, babe. You've got to make the decision." [laughter] I said, "Well, I'll do. If you don't want to go to New York then we won't go to New York." He said, "Be a man," she said. And I realized that the headship thing was no deal at all because what she said was she said, "Look, we have to make this decision and you do it. It's break the tie." And I said, "Well, then I'll have to take the responsibility for whether this turns out well." And she said, "Yeah." But she said, "If you just wait for me to be ready to come and say, "Well, if you don't want to come, you don't want to do what you've actually done is abdicated. You've put it on me, then I'll have the guilt." She said, "If you. be a man, it's very manly. Take it on yourself." And so I did, it's really the last. We have a lot of trouble coming up. Yeah, we have trouble coming up with any other time in which I ever said, "You want to do this, I want to do this, and as the head of the home, we're going to do this." And we can't really think of any other time. In spite of the fact that we still think headship in some ways, because you settle that thing, it still permeates the relationship in all sorts of ways but they tend to be more informal than formal. Home stretch. Let me talk to you a minute about forgiveness and repentance. Truth without love. People, you're telling the truth, but you don't have the love of forgiveness and the love of repentance. The truth of that love will crack you. Love without truth, you'll just bounce off and you really won't grow over the years. And I'd say most marriages, people. either do the truth of that love thing and the marriage breaks up, or the love without truth thing. We just don't bring these things up and that keeps the marriage together, but there's no growth. The secret of keeping truth and love together so that you're really changing one another is the ability to forgive and repent. That's the grinding compound. Now, what is forgiveness and repentance? I'm looking at my watch and I'm going to be very, very brief on this. Forgiveness is the ability to acknowledge that you've been wronged. And then forgo any desire, you forgive the person. You grant it before you feel it. You just decide because Jesus is not making me pay for what I've done for Him. I'm not going to make my spouse pay for what He or she has done to me. So you make a decision on the inside not to hate the person, not to dwell on the sin, not to try to make them pay, not to take any kind of vengeance out on them in any kind of way, and then you confront them. Okay? Acknowledge the fact that you know denial, acknowledge the sin, forgive deeply, and then talk to them. If you don't forgive before you confront, you're going to confront in a vengeful way and in a destructive way, in a way it's just going to make things worse. If you forgive and don't confront, then that's love without truth. If you confront without forgiving, that's true love. And if you forgive from the heart and then you tell the truth, you're actually going to see over the long period of time, you're going to grow. You're going to grow. You're going to change each other from one degree of glory to the next. One thing about repentance, it's very important, no, just real briefly. Repentance, the way you repent, and this is really important, is not to make excuses when your spouse comes to you and says, "Here's what's wrong." Repentance, okay, 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, center on what you know is wrong, remember the log out of your own eye first. Figure out the 5, 10, 20, 30, whatever is wrong with what you've done. Don't say, "Yeah, but you." Now just talk about yourself, number 1. Make no excuses. What your spouse did to trigger what you did is really the occasion, not the cause of why you did something wrong. The cause of why you do something wrong is your own sinful heart. The occasion may be something your spouse did, but don't blame that on his spouse. Repentance doesn't, it's not real repentance if you say, "Well, yeah, I did it wrong, but you did that." And that's what made me do it. That's not repentance. So focus on your five to ten percent, make no excuses, offer to make a change. It is so critical after you've had a fight after things have calmed down. The repenter needs to, when things are calmed down, say, "Let's debrief. How can we avoid this ever happening again? What can we do so that this doesn't happen again?" When things have calmed down, always say, "Is there anything we can do?" And then very often you sit down and say, "Well, the next time this happens and this happens, don't do that, do this, because that's what set me off. Please debrief. If necessary, write it down someplace. Accumulate your wisdom." And I think that's all I'm going to say on that. I'm Kathy. You're going to talk about something about spiritual life now. This is the part where we talk about your spiritual life together, and I bet you think you're going to get some big guilt-producing lecture about family devotions and praying together regularly and all that stuff. Well, you know, maybe you should get that lecture, but we're not in any position to give it to you because for the first 26 years of our 30 years of marriage, we didn't pray together. We didn't have family devotions. We didn't do anything together spiritually. Oh, if there was a big crisis, one of our kids was like in terrible trouble, we would pray about that. But on a regular basis, it wasn't until four years ago when I first began to get really sick and I was having panic attacks, brought on by medications. I was facing deteriorating health, 9/11 happened, that we finally came to the end of our resources and we finally clung to one another and said, "We're going to have to pray or we're never going to survive." Anything big and ambitious we knew was doomed to failure because we'd tried it before. So we just decided we coveted and we promised that before falling asleep at night, we would hold hands and one or the other sometimes both of us would pray never for more than three, four, five minutes max. And we haven't missed a night in four years and thank God for cell phones because that's sometimes when we're separated, that's where we pray. Now, that's not much of a testimony, but it's something. It was a starting point and I have to tell you, it has made everything else in our spiritual life branch out and grow. All day, I mean, we've had 26 years to do it wrong, it takes a while to erase all of that. But you think about people who talk about God for a living would talk to each other with ease about God in their lives, but it's not true. We found it very difficult, we had different temperaments, we had different spiritual habits and so we're just babes, we're just getting started. So I'm just saying this to encourage you, just start something, no matter how small and lame and weak, just something you share. Maybe it's just reading a verse together in the morning, this is our verse for the day. Maybe it's reading one of those dopey little devotional booklets in the morning at breakfast. Maybe it's just praying at night before you fall asleep, but start something, start something. If you're already there, if you're having a Bible study together and you're praying through stuff like Tim's parents do, then come teach me, but I'm just here to say, to steal a slogan, who am I stealing a slogan for? Re-bok? Am I stealing it from Re-bok? Just do it. Just do something. Just do something. But over and over again, that's the good thing for us. It's really, really brief and just say it's not at all elaborate, but it's regular. Summary. There's other things, obviously, we could say, and maybe you can ask questions and we'll get to it. But gospel re-enactment requires gospel motivation. Now, this sounds like something I always say, fine, I'm just applying it to marriage. If your spouse is the ultimate source of happiness, security, and worth in your life, then you're just going to freak out when the other person is not giving you what you want and you're going to give up on the relationship too quickly. You've got to have a real experience of the spousal love of Jesus Christ, and this sounds very ironic. I mean, paradoxical. Jesus has to push your spouse out of the center of your significance and security if you're going to really have a great marriage. Jesus has to demote your spouse. Your spouse cannot be the main reason why you feel any kind of sense of worth and happiness. Otherwise, when your spouse is having a problem, you'll just pay paralyzed. When your spouse is not giving you what you need, you're just going to freak out and give up. And that's the reason why Paul, I really think, in Ephesians 5, is actually saying to us, not do, you know, be good spouses, but he's saying, you know what Jesus did for you. To the degree you know and experience what Jesus has done for you, you're going to be able to do it for them. You know, you're going to be able to do it for someone else. And that's the reason why ultimately, in the end, service, something to go back to what I said in the very beginning, I am committed long term to my spouse to make her the beautiful person I see God is making her. And if that means I, it means laying myself out for her, even when she's not being to me what she, what I want her to be, so what? That's what Jesus did. And that's, C.S. Lewis has, has, puts it really well like this. He says, "Being in love is a good thing, but it's not the main thing. Love in a, love as distinct from being in love is not merely a feeling. It's a deep unity maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit, reinforced in Christian marriages by the grace of Jesus Christ." Ausman and wife can have this love for each other, even in moments when they do not like each other. It is on this love that the engine of a marriage is run, being in love was the explosion or the ignition that started the engine going. And I think that's all, that's summarized what we were trying to say. Thanks for listening to Cultivating a Healthy Marriage. We trust you were encouraged and that it gives you new insight into how you can apply God's wisdom to your life. If you'd like to find more Gospel-centered resources from Tim Keller, simply visit gospelunlife.com. There, you'll find articles, sermons, devotional and other helpful resources. You can also stay connected with us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter. [BLANK_AUDIO]