For a marriage to really thrive, couples have to learn how to be transparent, how to be open and honest with one another.
Here's author Gary Thomas. What do you want out of your marriage? Do you want to just coexist? Do you want to just get by and maybe reduce the level of conflict? But do you really want to be connected as a couple?
It really comes down to what do you want? What do you want out of your marriage? And so often it's just a fraud that we get married to be known and accepted and then we hide and we pull back from each other. But the best marriages are the marriages where each partner says to the other, you know what?
I am yours. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson.
I'm Bob Lapine. You can find us online at familylifetoday.com. We're going to hear from Gary Thomas today about things we can do to deepen the intimacy in our marriage. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today.
Thanks for joining us. I've had people over the years who have asked me because I've been on all 10 of Family Life's Love Like You Mean It marriage cruises. And so they've said, what's your favorite part of the cruise?
And I mean, that's hard to pick because you go to some great ports. You're on a great ship. You've got soft serve ice cream. Whenever you want it, you can go get pizza whenever you want it.
The middle of the night at three in the morning, you want a pizza, you can go get pizza. That's all pretty great. But the speakers that we've had on the cruise over the years, the chance to hear from the best of the best when it comes to the marriage relationship, that's what 10 years later still sticks with you.
Well, the soft serve is still sticking with me too. But those speakers, I mean, we've just had such a great lineup. We're talking about this because we have just opened registration for the 2022 Love Like You Mean It marriage cruise. February next year, we will be back on the boat in the water, headed to some great ports. There's information about the upcoming cruise on our website. If you are interested in going and who's not after this past year, you can go and register today. Best opportunity to pick the cabin you want to be in.
And you save $400 per couple by registering this week. But I remember we've had so many great speakers. Gary Thomas, who wrote the book Sacred Marriage, has been on the cruise with us a couple of times. He did a message back in 2016 about the elements that go into building intimacy in your marriage. And he's talking not just about physical intimacy, he's talking about oneness, which is what we're all about.
It was just such a great message on the four keys to becoming a more intimate couple in your marriage. Some years ago, I was just about to go to sleep. You know that twilight when you're just about there, and I heard one of the worst sounds in the world. It was this beep, smoke alarm. Have you ever wondered why they don't go off at 10 a.m. or at 2 p.m.? They always go off at the worst times. We had these high ceilings at the time where we lived, and I'd have to go down to the garage, get a ladder, and get the 9-volt batteries.
It's just not worth the hassle. I'm just going to will myself to sleep. And so I'm, beep, and I've got that.
So after two or three times, I realized it's not going to work. So I go downstairs, I get the ladder, I get some 9-volt batteries, rip off the smoke alarm, put the battery in, get back in bed, beep, it's the wrong one. And so I go out in the hallway, all right? I had a bunch of batteries, I put the ladder into the hallway, I take that one out, I get it in, get back in my bed, beep. It was in my daughter's bedroom. I mean, six linear feet away.
I didn't even know my daughter's bedroom had one right next to the hallway. So I do that, I take it out, I get it in. My adrenaline is just pumping right now. I know because I got in bed and Lisa was catapulted about two feet up in the air. And she goes, did you get it? I go, I didn't just get it, I conquered it.
I am lord and master of this house. And you know what happened next, beep. Lisa had been married to me long enough to know something was going on. She goes, Gary, whatever you're thinking of doing, please don't. I gave her my favorite line from Rocky II, honey, I never asked you to stop being a woman, please don't ask me to stop being a man. I got out my ladder, I ripped off every smoke alarm upstairs, threw them all in a box, took them downstairs.
Lisa is appalled. She's like, what if there's a fire? I said, as long as the fire takes the smoke alarms, God's will be done, all right? I want to get some sleep. So I threw them all in and you can guess a couple minutes later, beep. So I just put up with it for another couple of beeps and then it was about midnight by this time.
My son was in high school, he had a midnight curfew, so he came in and he had to check in and tell us he was in. So he's talking to us and while he's talking to us, the beep goes off and he goes, huh? And he walks over to my dresser where I had this brand new thing called the flip phone. Hey dad, did you know you missed a call?
I wanted to toss that thing across the street, but I just signed up for a two year plan, so I wasn't able to do that. But I had spent a furious hour of my life trying to treat the symptoms without dealing with the underlying cause. And so often that's what we do with marriage. We treat the symptoms and we don't go for the underlying cause.
And when I talk about the underlying cause, I'm talking this morning about the heart. How do we shape our hearts to become a more intimate couple? Now the four things I want to share are difficult, they're scary, but they work. They really can change your marriage. If we will let our heart move in these directions, we can have radically different marriages if we'll just embrace them.
The reason I like it is because often we talk about the physical things we can do, date night which is good, scheduling sex which is fine. All of these things, love languages, those are wonderful things to learn about. But how do we shape our heart?
Because ultimately if we want to become one, if we want to be reconnected as a couple, how do we get in there and shape our heart? And these are four spiritual practices I found that really can do that. And so if you're taking notes, I encourage you to take it down because these are great discussions how you can grow in this first area.
So the first one I want to talk about is simple. It's honesty. It's honesty. If you want to increase the level of intimacy in your marriage, increase the level of honesty.
Jeremiah 8-5 warns of those who quote, cling to deceit. And it's always amazing to me as a pastor that we get married so that we can share our lives together and then we spend most of our lives hiding from each other. Well that creates a great frustration because we can't be intimate with somebody we're lying to.
Intimacy by definition is being fully known and fully accepted and if we're not fully known, we can't be fully accepted. Now I know to men in particular, this is terrifying to us. Just a little window to the wives. A lot of us guys are just astonished that we got a woman to marry us, right? I mean we were cut from sports teams by coaches, we were ridiculed by our siblings, we never feel like we measured up. And somehow we got this woman to marry us and we're afraid if she gets to know us as we really are, she'll be like the coach who wants to cut us or the siblings who said or friends that said we didn't quite measure up. But men, when we give in to that fear, we miss one of the most healing aspects of marriage. My wife married a very insecure man who still deals with a lot of insecurity. I'm three or four kids.
I had two older brothers that were, you know, you can't compete with them. I had the younger sister who was the little princess when you got three boys and you got the princess. And so one of the most healing things for me of all is Lisa knows me literally better than anyone else and she still likes me. She still respects me and I can't believe it and I can't tell you the healing that that brings into my life. In fact, a couple years ago, we were with a couple and I had been away at work all day and we were meeting a couple at the restaurant.
Lisa was the last one to arrive. She'd been at our home. So she came in.
It was November. She kind of just scooches in and gets close to me. And the other woman says to her, well, are you cold?
She goes, no, I've been away from him all day. I really miss him. And I felt like a king. Here we'd been married almost 30 years at a time. I'd just been apart for one work day and Lisa was eager to see me.
I can't tell you what that did for my soul. But here's the thing. If I know I'm lying to her, instead of that moment making me feel great, it's going to terrify me because I'm going to like how it feels. But I'm going to be afraid. Well, she likes me because she doesn't know about X or Y. She respects me because she hasn't found out about Y or Z. So what am I going to do because I don't want to lose that? I'm going to double down on the deceit.
I'm going to build a wall. I'm not going to let her get to know me. And men, if I could just tell you, most wives will tell me when their greatest frustrations in marriage is they feel like their husband just won't let them in. They feel like I never really get to know them.
I feel like there's always something up. I talked, this was a tragic situation with a rather young couple married less than five years. And she knew something wasn't right in her husband's life. She didn't know all of his past. He hadn't been completely honest about it before they got married.
And he hadn't dealt with it even though he was in the ministry and things weren't going well. And she sat him down and she looked him in the eyes and said, look, I am the kind of woman who will work through anything. And I mean anything. But you just got to be honest with me.
I need to know what's going on in your life. And he knew he was kind of on the spotlight. So he confessed to one of the weakest sins he could think of, leaving a lot of dark still in the dark. And when it finally came out, as it will, she was done. And their marriage is over. She was calling for him to be honest.
And he refused. And one of the things that I understand about what she's saying is you can't be intimate with the woman you were lying to. Deception becomes a part of that relationship.
And it's terrifying. But when we have a God of grace, when we know forgiveness, when we know, as we talked about last night, James 3, too, that we all stumble in many ways, we have the context to be honest with each other, to accept each other and to grow. Justin Davis was a pastor who also had a really tough background, but this has a much happier ending. He got involved in a lot of things. Some pornography ended up having an affair with his wife's best friend.
It came out and it took weeks and months for them to really be restored. But coming out of it, and this is the thing I would say to the guys, he realized, deception has ruined my whole life. It's ruined my relationship with God. It's ruined my relationship with myself. I'm disconnected from myself. I'm disconnected with my wife. I can't believe I did that to my friend, cheating with his wife.
I mean, all that he did, he lost his ministry, everything. And so here are the four questions that he now regularly asks himself because he's so committed to the truth. Is the fear of the consequences of the truth greater than my commitment to tell the truth? Isn't that what makes us lie? We're afraid of the consequences more than we're afraid of being dishonest. He said, am I telling myself the truth?
We can lie to ourselves. Is there a truth I've distorted or am distorting right now? And finally, is there something I've withheld or am currently withholding from my spouse? Get before the Lord this week.
You got a great time. You got some opportunities and say, Lord, how honest am I being with my spouse? And understand that whatever is most painful to share with our spouse is something that God probably wants to work on.
I'll be very honest. I would be much less of a man if I wasn't worried about my wife finding out about certain things. And the danger of giving in to that fear and living in deception before your wife is that what Satan says is, you know what, Gary, there's a way you can have this action or this sin or this attitude and still have your wife and still have her esteem and that's lying about it.
But Jesus said Satan is the father of lies. Lies never serves a marriage because Jesus says, I am the way, the truth and the life. To bring Jesus into our marriage is to bring the truth into our marriage.
So if you want to increase the level of intimacy in your marriage, increase the level of honesty. It's tough to get there. It's scary to get there, but it helps bind us together. The second thing that will really help us is the blessing mentality. The blessing mentality.
There are really two different dimensions that we can live in. And this is a cognitive change and it's a heart change. And it sounds not that profound, but when it's practiced, it changes marriage enormously. It comes from Genesis 12 to when God is saying to Abraham, I'm blessing you.
Why? To be a blessing. And that's the way it works. 1 John 4 19, we love because he first loved us. The biblical model is that God pours himself out for us so that we pour ourselves out for others. We're to be a blessing to others. And so every day of marriage, I live with one of two questions.
These are two dimensions. How can I get my needs met or how can I bless you? It's that simple. Every time we're in a disagreement, I have a thing. Do I want to win this argument or do I want to bless my wife? Only one of those two motivations will prevail. James 4 one through two says this, what causes fights and quarrels among you?
You want something, but don't get it. I believe most divorces could be stopped if every couple would wake up every day and their first thought is, how do I bless my spouse today? It just puts everything into focus.
It changes the color of the day. It is just our selfish desire. How do I get my needs met today? How do I get my husband to finally do this?
How do I finally get my wife to do this? But if we wake up and say, how do I be a blessing to my spouse? That involves going to God first, getting the blessing from him. We need his affirmation. We need his encouragement. We need his empowerment. But when we do that, it's just natural then or I could say supernatural that we want to bless others.
The more we receive from God, we are just compelled to pass it on. So that's the second thing that we do. The third one we're going to talk about is what I call killing spiders, killing spiders. I don't have a problem with spiders, but my wife really does. If I see a spider in the house, it's dead.
I kill it. There are good things about spiders. They actually kill other insects that can be good, but it freaks Lisa out. If she sees a spider unexpectedly, she wants me to kill it. Because I'm married to Lisa, because I want to love her and bless her, there are certain spiders I have to kill.
Let me put this in the relationship metaphor. If Lisa's dad had been an alcoholic, he surely wasn't, but if he had, I think I would just kill alcohol use. Theologically, I don't believe there's an absolute prohibition against alcohol, but if I knew that she had grown up with that in her childhood, every time she smelled it on my breath, every time maybe I had just a little bit too much to drink, she couldn't help it.
She's a real person with a real past. All those feelings are going to come up from her childhood and to protect her. I don't want her to have to face that.
I don't want her to have to overcome that. So I can choose either this on the side, drinking, or I can choose, do I want to be close to my wife? Now, so many times when I work with couples, they say, but I enjoy that. Why do I want to give it up? Because a connected marriage is so much more fulfilling than a disconnected marriage with hobbies.
It really is. That's what we want. We want a life of intimacy, and to grow closer together, there are certain things we have to kill that might not be morally problematic, but they keep pushing our spouse away, and we have to choose. Do I want to maintain my independence and live in a rather disconnected marriage, or am I willing to kill just about anything to have a life of true intimacy and oneness? And I think if you could experience intimacy and oneness, you would choose that. If Lisa and I were on our second marriage, we're not, surely this is our first one, our only one, but if her first husband had basically wrecked their marriage with video game playing too much, I think that's a spider I can kill, because I think every time I pick up that controller, all of that's going to come back from her past, oh no, here we go again, I lost my first husband to that, and maybe I get a little too into the game and a little too excited, and I forget that maybe two or three hours has passed, I just say, you know what, I chose her, I want to be close to her, this is a spider I need to kill, and I'm going to kill it. And the thing is about this, this is something that goes on throughout our life, because different spiders crop up when we're in different stages of marriage.
Lisa and I are rather recent empty nesters, and so now we're traveling together a whole lot more than we used to when the kids were young and at home. It's amazing to me because when we come out of the hotel elevator or when we go out in the parking garage, Lisa would always turn the wrong way, right? If the hotel room was right, she would go left. If the rental car is north in the parking lot, she would go south. I kept thinking, you'd think she would guess right half of the time, all right, but she's the extrovert, she had all these great conversations, and she wants to recount them to me, and she's got the energy going and just talking, and she doesn't have to worry about it because she knows I paid attention, so it just doesn't even kick into her, but I'm letting her out of the elevator first so she's always the one ahead, and I was just kind of laughing about it because we'd been in this hotel for several days, and she went the wrong way again.
I thought, really? That wasn't the best way to make her feel close to me, men, all right? I wouldn't recommend that response. Okay, well, that didn't work out, so the next day, she did it again, and so I just stopped where I was, and she went 20 to 25 yards away. She looks, and she saw what I was doing.
That didn't go so well either, all right? And so, you know, typical guy, I say, well, what am I supposed to do? If I say something, you say it makes you feel stupid. If I don't say anything, you think it's an act of disrespect. I can't win, right?
That's the guy perspective. She goes, it's easy. Just say, this way, hon, with exactly that tone. This way, hon.
All right. Next day, I get to try it out. She goes, right? I go, this way, hon.
She turns around, gives me a gorgeous smile. We laugh, we have a good moment, and we go off down the way, right? And so, men and women, it's just this. If there's this life situation that's pulling the two of you apart, how about if you just say, then tell me what spider I need to kill. I don't want you to feel disrespected. I don't want you to feel stupid. I honestly don't know what to do, though. I think I'm at an impasse.
So, show me how to kill the spider, and then kill that spider, because now, whenever that happens, it draws us closer together, rather than pushes us away, because we want to be closer together. My youngest daughter, Kelsey, has been in three automobile accidents on the freeway, and none of them were her fault, but a couple of them were pretty serious. One, her car was completely totaled, and she was shaken forever. And it's not her fault, and when you've been in car accidents, and they weren't your fault, it's not like you can take, I mean, what are you going to do differently if it's not your fault?
It just happened. And so, when she is driving with me, particularly she's in the front seat, I'm Grandpa Gary. You know, there's 100 yards between me and the front car. I'm not driving aggressively. I'm not coming right up on somebody, because she's a real person with a real past, and to honor her, and to protect her, and to love her, I'm going to kill that spider of aggressive driving, because she can't help it.
It's who she is. What I'm saying is, your spouse has a real past with real hurts and real fears. It doesn't matter whether you think they're silly or illegitimate, or you should just think your way through them. If they motivate your spouse, and you want to be close to your spouse, you've got to kill those spiders. You've got to kill those spiders that irritate your spouse, because it's better to be connected than to hold on to those spiders and be disconnected in marriage.
Now, the fourth one is this. It comes from Proverbs 17, 17, and I could label it as this. I was born for this.
I was born for this. Proverbs 17, 17 says this. A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity. Now, if that's true for a brother, you could say a spouse is married for adversity, because here's a challenge.
We get married because we love this person. They're beautiful. They're full of energy.
They're full of life. We have a good time together, and then they get sick, or they get discouraged, or they get depressed, or they get addicted, or they have a problem, and it's so easy spiritually to say, boy, this isn't very good. I have to put up with it. I didn't get married for this.
Why do I do this? But if we believe that we were born for our spouse's adversity, whenever they face a challenge, I was born for this. This is where we rise to it. Rather than collapsing into resentment and self-pity and feeling sorry for ourselves, we feel empathy for ourselves.
I was born for this. We have to have the attitude of a fireman, right? A fireman doesn't resent it when there's a fire, does he?
He says, oh, man, I wanted to finish my meal, or I was playing Scrabble. He goes out because that's what he was trained to do. That's why he's given a paycheck. That's why he's there to put out the fires. But, see, in marriage, we think, no, we're there for the good times.
We don't want to have to put out the fires. But if we have the attitude of Proverbs 17, then we're saying, whenever it arises, I was born for this. And that's what creates great connectedness with a couple because when you meet your spouse in their weakness and need and hurt, they're just naturally drawn to you. A friend of mine was a pastor up in Canada, really young man, just one of the most gifted communicators I've ever known. Things were going so well, but he was in just one of those really awful church fights that ended up in a church split and he was out of a job. It's one of those nasty ones where there's a lot of gossip and slander and people have to be blamed and people were saying awful things about him and he's a good man with a good heart, but his reputation was just kind of wrecked. So he found himself in a job crawling under houses for $8 an hour. He had this great vision that God was going to use him and bless his ministry and it's just humiliating that he can barely eke out a living. His wife is having to budget a third of what they were living for before and she could have gotten down on him, but she said, honey, I believe in you.
I know God has a plan for you. This is a momentary reprieve. She never lost her faith in him, and ugly things about him, she was there for him the entire time. And one time Grant came home and he was so discouraged, he was dirty and smelly and filthy and made, you know what, I don't know, 70 bucks that day. And he walks in the house and his wife hadn't heard him walk in, but he hears his wife talking on the phone and he overhears her telling one of the elders in the church, no, you can't talk to my husband.
I'm his wife and I just want you to know, if you want to get to him, you have to go through me and if you find a way to get around me, you're going to have to deal with me because he's my husband and you're not going to abuse him anymore. And Grant felt so humbled that when she could have piled on, she could have maybe even said, you know, maybe what they're saying is true, but she was there for him. She said, I was born to get you through this and they grew together and he grew as a believer and God put him in a church in the United States. He was in Bellingham, Washington, and today his church is the largest church of a city that size in the United States. It is just blossom and God has blessed his ministry and I was talking to one of his elders a decade ago and they were telling me, you know, we know we're going to lose him. He's too gifted. He could be paid three times what we pay him.
He would be in a city that's larger where people could grow. It's hard to grow a church when you kind of push and I know, I thought, why Grant hadn't taken up any of those offers because he was getting regular contacts and so I called him just a year or two ago when I was working on A Lifelong Love. I said, hey, Grant, just between you and me. I won't tell anybody.
I just need to know between you and me. You see, Grant's wife, Laurel, the one who protected him, has been going steadily blind till now. She is almost completely blind and they're in a small community of Linden, Washington where she knows their house. She knows the community. She is set up for her.
I said, I'm guessing that the primary reason you're still in Bellingham is it's really the best place for Laurel to live. Grant was silent for a long while and he said, I can't deny that. And I love it where she said when he was down, I was born for this. His wife is down, he says, I was born for this. Before I was born to be some big shot pastor, I was born to be my wife's husband. I'm not going to resent it that I'm stuck here in this town and he doesn't look at it that way. I'm not going to resent it that I can't follow these opportunities because the best opportunity in my life is to be connected to my wife, to be a husband. A lot of men with big churches live with empty souls because they have distant marriages. And Grant said, I think it's better to have a pretty large church and a connected marriage and to be honoring her.
But if you write them down and if you apply them, they work, they draw us together. They take a lot of courage but you've got to ask yourself, what do you want? What do you want out of your marriage?
Do you want to just coexist? Do you want to just get by and maybe reduce the level of conflict but do you really want to be connected as a couple? It really comes down to what do you want? What do you want out of your marriage? And so often it's just a fraud that we get married to be known and accepted and then we hide and spiritually we become resentful and we pull back from each other. But the best marriages, the best marriages are the marriages where each partner says to the other, you know what, I am yours.
Before I'm my kid's mom or dad, before I'm my boss's employee, before I'm my company's boss, before I'm my parent's child, before I'm my hobby's addict, I belong to you and I'm going to make those choices to stay connected to you. I'm not going to put anything above you because if you're frustrated in a disconnected marriage, the solution isn't to kill your marriage. See, that's what Satan likes to do. See how frustrated you are?
See how distant you are? Here's what you do. You kill your marriage.
You destroy your family. What does Jesus say Satan comes to do in John 10? Satan the thief comes to steal, to kill and to destroy. Whenever that's the solution to your problem, you know who you're listening to. Jesus told us that's his motive. That's his operation.
That's his solution. But Jesus says I have come that you might have life and you might have it abundantly. God wants us to have life-giving marriages and abundant marriages and his word, he's given us these four things all out of scripture where we can reconnect, we can direct our hearts to have a more connected marriage and when we do, it becomes so powerful. I want to end with the story of a couple that did this later in life. How many of you have heard of Robertson McQuoken?
A good number of you have, but if you had heard me talking about this before you know, it would be like this. How many of you have heard of James Dobson? He and his wife Mary were the power couple. They were going to conferences. He was president of a seminary.
Both were successful authors. They would speak all of those things and as they were just entering their 40th year of marriage, not that old, his wife Mary was diagnosed and because they were so well known, they had a lot of people offering different suggestions. You got to take out all your feelings or you got to quit eating this or that and finally, he knew there was good intentions. Robertson said this, please stop and he offered this prayer. I pray the Lord will do a physical miracle for my wife, but if he chooses not to, then I pray he'll work a spiritual miracle in me for a Christian husband who says, for my wife's sake, I want her to be healed physically, but if she can't be healed physically or if God chooses not to, Lord, do a spiritual miracle in me so that I can say to her, I was born for this. This is a challenging time of your life and I was born for this and so he wants to live with the blessing mentality, not how can I get my needs met, why do I have to put up with it, to go to London's Tate Galleries, where a lot of her favorite masterpieces, the originals, were kept at and it broke his heart because the day they got there, it was already advanced enough where she had good days and bad days and this was not a good day and she raced past some of these masterpieces like she was going through a Hallmark store and it broke his heart that part of his wife was already gone and there were the embarrassing moments to get there during the flight. So he got off of his long flight and used the restroom and Robertson thought to himself, man, if she gets in there and she's able to lock the door, she might not be able to unlock it and she's gonna panic. So he gets up behind her and he follows her in and he said, look, I saw the smirks of the passengers around us and even the flight attendant and I knew what they were thinking, you guys look a little old and he cared about his wife's welfare. He cared about his wife's safety. He wanted to serve his wife and so he said, let everybody laugh. I'm gonna be connected to my wife and so he took care of her and then when they were flying back to the States, he found that Muriel could get restless at an airport and the best thing to do was just let her go around. If he tried to get her to stay seated, she could just get kind of fidgety and so he's a rather slight man and she kept sitting right across from this business woman who just screamed power and influence. I mean, she had incredible clothes, all the tech gadget and just that expression that said she's used to giving orders and she's used to having them obeyed and Muriel kept sitting across from her so like the third time, she just plops down right in front of her and finally, Robertson hears the business woman say something and he says, excuse me? I'm getting embarrassed and she said, nothing, well, I just wondered if I'll ever have a man love me like you obviously love her. Now, does your wife want a connected marriage? Here's a woman who has everything that women are supposed to aspire to, the dress, the authority, the power, the influence and she is literally envious of an Alzheimer's patient.
So I've achieved so much but what would it be like to have a man love me like this man loves his wife and why does he love her? That's the power of a connected message but it wasn't just Muriel that loved Robertson and Robertson loved Muriel. Everything changed in his life when one day Muriel started to panic. Robertson was president of a seminary and his house was on the campus there and his office was also at a different building and Muriel only felt safe at a certain point when Robertson was near and she couldn't find him so she ran out of the house and she's running up and down the sidewalks trying to find her husband until somebody saw her, knew who she was, she directed her into Robertson's office and she showed up in his office with bloody feet. She'd been running on concrete, she forgot to put on her shoes, she just wanted to find her husband and Robertson looked at those bloody feet and he knew what it meant. He knew his time as president of that seminary was done and he put in his resignation and here's what he said in that.
The decision to come to Columbia was the most difficult I've ever had to make. The decision to leave 22 years later though painful is one of the easiest. That decision was made in a way 42 years ago and he promised to care for Muriel in sickness and in health till death do us part. I mean you talk about killing a spider when your spider is your job and you get the intellectual stimulation and the leadership stimulation but he says you know what it's more important right now that I be Muriel's husband because that's what I pledged to do first and so he has a different life instead of reading textbooks he's reading the newspaper and instead of trying to help people understand the mysteries of the gospel he's helping his wife clean up after bathroom accidents. Literally one time he's listening to a famous preacher and the preacher's coming on the air and says men are you at home I mean really at home?
Robertson said he laughed literally with feces on his hand saying yeah Chuck I'm at home trust me. It gave such a strong testimony to the physician who cared for Muriel and Robertson saying you know what's so difficult is that 70% of the women who have this situation are abandoned by their husbands. They say I didn't sign up for this and they leave them. They just put them in a home or just let them go and Robertson said 70% maybe they're having a love affair with themselves and that's the key of a disconnected marriage. We can't have a love affair with our spouse if we have a love affair with ourselves. If we're gonna say I'm not gonna be honest because I wanna do what I wanna do and not lose his or her approval or I don't wanna bless you I wanna get my needs met that's a love affair with ourself or I don't wanna kill this spider I enjoy this why should I give it up or I wanna resent this and say I was born for that. That's a love affair with ourselves and we can't have a love affair with our spouse when we serve ourself first when we're honest when we bless our spouse when we kill the spiders when we say I was born for this we create the witness that I was talking about last night John chapter 13 because that's what happened with Robertson and his wife when she was still able to walk he would take her out for these walks he liked her to get the sun and they lived on a busy street and I'm sure it was kind of funny when he got off by a car and so he kept doing this and the way facing him was this homeless man obviously dealing with some dementia and he saw this couple walking forward and just his guys would be like that staring at her you know no tact no sense of propriety just staring and gawking and then when Robertson and Muriel came up this man said that's good that's real good I likes that even a man who's literally losing his mind knows love when he sees it that's the power of a connected marriage you don't have to destroy your marriage if you feel disconnected you might love being married if you can get reconnected and I believe these things will help you do that Well we've been listening to a message from Gary Thomas the author of the book Sacred Marriage he's written so many great books and he's a great communicator and what Gary's talking about here is what I think couples want but don't know they want if you say to a couple do you want oneness in your marriage I think they go I do but I'm not exactly sure what that means or what it looks like we know we want it we're just not sure how to pursue it what are the elements that go into that and Gary maps it out for us here Well how about when he said the adversity of your spouse is your calling some of us are thinking what what does that mean yeah but he explains it he does so again you can check out the 2022 Love Like You Mean It Marriage Cruise February of 2022 come with us we will be back on board for a great getaway I mean everybody who has felt cooped up this year oh yeah I mean we're all counting on the fact that it's going to be you know masks off and a clean boat and I'll tell you it it's starting to fill up we are hearing from people who are so so ready to reserve a stateroom for the 2022 Love Like You Mean It Marriage Cruise right now between now and March 22 the best opportunity all year for you to reserve a stateroom on the cruise because we we make a special offer to Family Life Today listeners in March we call it cruise madness and so it's your opportunity to save some money and reserve your spot for the Love Like You Mean It Marriage Cruise in February of 2022 if you have any questions about you know what happens if there's a another wave of the virus or you know call us and we can talk through all of that with you okay 1-800-FL today is the number if you want to check out more information online go to familylifetoday.com there's a link there that will give you everything you need to know about the Love Like You Mean It Marriage Cruise for February of 2022 now tomorrow we're going to hear a powerful message about the biblical priority of forgiveness it's not an option for forgiven people to forgive other people it's a biblical requirement and Bodhi Bakkum has a message for us on that that we'll hear tomorrow and tune in for that I want to thank our engineer today Keith Lynch along with our entire broadcast production team got some extra help from Bruce Goff today on behalf of our hosts Dave and Ann Wilson I'm Bob Lapine we will see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas a crew ministry help for today hope for tomorrow
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-12-17 02:08:36 / 2023-12-17 02:26:17 / 18