The Bible teaches that God welcomes sinners into the kingdom.
He will welcome in all who call out to him and call on his name. Pastor and author Kevin DeYoung says that has implications for how we live as a family. So here's the question for your marriage. If you believe with all your heart that you are justified by faith alone, why are you insisting that your spouse be justified by works?
Because many of us are. I'm good at the grace thing, God. But that's not going to work with her. Not for him. He's got to prove this. He's got to crawl.
He's got to suffer a little bit. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson.
I'm Bob Lapine. You can find us online at familylifetoday.com. What should grace look like in a marriage relationship? How are we to be dispensers of grace to one another?
Pastor and author Kevin DeYoung talks about that today. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today.
Thanks for joining us. I have to tell you, we've been talking all this week about the Love Like You Mean It marriage cruise. I woke up this morning and just for a minute I thought I was on board. I mean, I just had that moment where it was like... It's because it's sunny here in Little Rock.
If you lived in Michigan, you wouldn't think that. But you can dream in 2022. You can do it. We are going to be back with our Love Like You Mean It marriage cruise next February. We cannot wait. And apparently some of you can't wait either because a lot of you have been calling us this week and saying, OK, we're in. We'll put our deposit down. We want to go on the cruise with you.
Valentine's week of 2022. And it's going to be an amazing cruise. And I hope a lot of our listeners...
I think a lot of us have had cabin fever. So here's our chance to... I mean, I know it's a ways away, but it'll just be special again to be back on board the cruise.
Pull your bathing suits out of those drawers and let's do it. We always have a great lineup of some great speakers. And this week we've been listening to some of those great speakers from the last decade on board the cruise. I remember the year Kevin D. Young joined us on the Love Like You Mean It cruise.
In fact, I was telling you guys a story. I heard a sermon that Kevin was preaching. This was four or five years after he'd been on the cruise. And he was telling his congregation, my wife and I were invited to be on this marriage cruise. And one day we're out on our balcony and we hear this couple nearby and they're arguing with each other. We thought, oh, this sounds bad. And we prayed for them and were worried and thought, I hope they're OK. He said later that night, we're in the ballroom and we hear the same argument happening. It's because it was Jim and Carol Shores, Acts of Renewal, who do the skits for us. They'd been rehearsing out on their balcony.
And now here they were up on the stage and years ago, oh, they were just playing. So they met him later and had a chance to say, we prayed for you guys. But Kevin is a pastor in North Carolina, in the Charlotte area. He's an author.
He's been on Family Life Today a number of times. And the year he was on the Love Like You Mean It marriage cruise, he went to 1 John 4, which is a passage that's all about the fact that God is love. And he said, what can we learn about marriage by meditating on the idea that God is love?
Here's Kevin DeYoung. I want to give you hopefully what our biblical foundations for biblical marriage because we're interested not just in having some good relational techniques, some good communication pointers, but we want to know what does the Bible have to say about marriage? The Bible actually only says a little bit about marriage. It says a lot about God and a lot about what it means to be saved and to serve God. So we want to look at what the Bible says because whether you are here and you know that you're a strong Christian or you're not so sure, there's probably people here who know that they're not Christians.
We're glad that you're here. There will be people here by the end, you thought you were Christians and you get to the end of the week and you realize, I'm not sure I really was a Christian and that's good, but we want more than just what the world can give. The world can give people helpful pointers on how to relate together. The world can do cruises.
Now hopefully this one is unique, but the world can give you fun, can give you entertainment, can give you laughs. What is it that the Bible tells us that makes Christian marriage actually Christian? What is it in Christian marriage that shows forth the love that God has for us? So that's what we want to talk about and I ask you to turn in your Bibles or if you're really cool you can swipe them on and we will be looking at 1 John chapter 4 verses 10 through 12. And I do hope you will have your Bibles open for the different sessions because Dennis and Bob do a great job of vetting the speakers and the people they want to have come in, but you realize the only authority that any of us have to speak about these things is not from our own experience, it's not from our own dent of personality, it's from this book.
And so you want to test everything against this book. 1 John chapter 4, beginning of verse 10. In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
No one has ever seen God. If we love one another, God abides in us and His love is perfected in us. It will come as no surprise that I want to talk to you about love.
You're on a marriage cruise, it is a love like you mean it, which sounds to me sort of like, love like you mean it, sort of cruise. And we want to talk about love. And everyone you meet everywhere is in favor of love.
What is it though? What does love actually look like? Because it's so easy to imbibe our culture's understanding of love.
There are many people who think of love as a feeling that comes over you. To quote that famous theologian, when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's amore. When the world seems to shine like you've had too much wine, that's amore. Bells will ring, ting-a-ling-a-ling, ting-a-ling-a-ling.
Beautiful poetry there. And you'll sing vita bella, hearts will play, tippy tippy tay, tippy tippy tay. When the stars make you drool like a pasta fazool, that's amore. When you dance down the street with the cloud on your feet, you're in love.
When you walk in a dream, but you know you're not dreaming, senor, excuse me, but you see back in old Napoli, that's amore. Okay? Oh, thank you, thank you. I'm here all week. Sometimes we have that idea. Love is just, I'm skipping. There's clouds under my feet and I just see stars and the moon are coming out all for us. Do you remember when you felt like that for a week?
That was a really good week. And you got engaged that week. And then some older couple came along and said, enjoy it while it lasts. Sometimes we think of marriage that way. It's just some bubbly feeling that comes over us.
And it's wonderful when you have it, but then what happens when it's gone? I think it was my first year in pastoral ministry. A young woman walked into my study and she said, Pastor, I'm ready to leave my husband. I said, why? She said, well, he wasn't the one. I married the wrong person. We're not in love anymore. Well, what do you mean you're not in love?
We use that phrase, I'm in love. What happened? I stepped in something.
What was it? That was love. I'm in love. I just fell.
I just tripped. I just happened to be in this thing called love. Well, if that's what it is, then you can fall out of it. But what if it's something more? Some people in our culture think love is unconditional acceptance. If you love me, you will embrace whatever I am, whoever I am, whatever my self-identity claims to be. And if you tell me that there is some other higher authority or some other moral plane that is above my own autonomy, then you don't really love me. This is our culture's understanding of love.
Affirmation. So if you tell me that what I'm doing is something other than what I want to do, then you don't really love me. Now, anyone here who's a parent understands that's not love. You would not be loving to your children if you just said, you know what? This year, you call the shots. That'd be easier for a time.
They'd be out playing in the middle of the streets, they'd be taking bathtubs with toasters, they'd be doing all sorts of dumb stuff. You don't say that to your kids. But somehow we have this idea that if you really love and then you get into a marriage, well, if he really loved me, then he would just let me do whatever I want to do. Or if you love me, why can't I go hunting for 15 weeks out of the year and go fishing?
Why don't you? You love me. It's who I am. That's how God made me.
No. So we have self-esteem issues. My kids apparently don't have self-esteem issues. You may remember that tomorrow is Valentine's Day. Tomorrow is Valentine's Day and all the husbands are saying, look, we're on a cruise already, okay? But it is Valentine's Day and my second grader said before we left, he said, Dad, I hate Valentine's Day. I said, Paul, why do you hate Valentine's Day? This is exactly what he said, straight face. He said, because there's like six girls at school that have a crush on me. I just said, Son, I'm sorry to give you that burden. I mean, I know what it is.
No. We understand love is not just self-affirmation and acceptance. And then you've got people that just think love is just some magic pill. Love just solves everything.
Listen, if you think your marriage problems are going to be solved by a bumper sticker, then you're not in touch with what the real issues are in your marriage. Quote those other theologians, Love, love, love. Love, love, love.
Love, love, love. There's nothing you can do that can't be done. Nothing you can sing that can't be sung.
Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game. It's easy. There's nothing you can make that can't be made. No one you can save that can't be saved.
Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you. In time, it's easy. All you need is love. All you need is love. All you need is love, love. Love is all you need.
Wow, that was just that mixed it up right there. Love, love, love. Love, love, love. Love, love, love, love, love. All you need is love. People get these sort of hallmark moments. Yes, just love, but what is it?
That sounds good for a moment in some after school special and then what does it do for you? We need the Bible to tell us. What does the Bible say?
Each of these cultural definitions have an element of truth but they're far from the whole truth and when you get a half truth masquerading as the whole truth it usually ends up being a lie. So what does the Bible say? I have three points and because I've been to seminary they all start with the letter M. The method, the motivation, and the manifestation of love. Because if God is love, everyone likes that idea, even non-Christians. Oh yes, if there is a God, He is supremely love.
If God is love then it stands to reason that He ought to define what love is and what it looks like. We see here the method, the motivation, and the manifestation. Verse 10, verse, the method. In this is love, John writes, not that we have loved God but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation, we'll come back to that word in a moment, for our sins.
So do you see the method? God's love came about from His will. It was His choice in eternity past to set His affections upon us, to choose us in Christ before the foundations of the world. It was His decision for His glory to love us. So contrary to popular opinion, God does not love us because we were some diamond in the rough, that then the cross shows how special we are, the cross shows how far we were from God in our sin. What does Paul say in Romans, but that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. God did not look out and say, there's some special people, I got a lot of potential in that one, oh wow, she's got a lot going for her, I think I'll send my son for her, her, her, and him.
It was His choice. Now what does this mean for marriage? Now it's not identical because hopefully there are some things that drew you to one another and He's so intelligent and He's handsome and She's so kind and loving that you were attracted to one another, and yet there are many, many times in marriage where to love one another is an act of the will. Love is not what holds the marriage together, it is the commitment of marriage that sustains the love. You made promises to each other.
I love to do weddings and always remind the couple, the groom is standing there and he's looking sort of dopey, that's what grooms look like, but that's okay, I tell them, no one's looking at you, they're all looking at her. And they come and they make their vows and their promises and it is sad as a pastor, and I could tell you stories just right now in our church, in reminding couples, listen, you made promises before God and these witnesses and you said forsaking all others and you said until death parts us. You said these things.
You promised these things. You called upon God himself to witness these vows and we treat them so lightly. Love is an act of the will. When you get married, you turn off, hopefully, that part of your brain that would walk into a room when you were single and sort of think, hmm, maybe, who are you? You turn that off. Now forsaking all others, it is you and her, it is you and him and you make that choice so that you don't wake up and say, today I will feel tingly towards you.
No, if you do that, you're probably sick with something. You say, today I will continue to woo my wife. Men, remember the things we used to do? We wrote poetry that had no business ever being written and those letters are somewhere, they're on the internet somewhere, but you surprised your wife and you thought of her and you wooed her and it seems so long ago, you made those decisions instead of saying, today I will feel sexually attracted to my husband.
No, it may not happen. You say, today I will do what I can in my home so that it will be a welcoming place for my husband. Instead of saying, today I will float on clouds of limitless passion as I consider the boundless perfections of my spouse.
Good luck. You say, today I will forgive, today I will cherish even as I recognize the imperfections of my spouse. So there is an act of the will.
If you expect that your marriage is going to flourish just by the magnetic attraction of your two personalities, that's probably come and gone. You got to make some hard decisions now. You also see the method here is sacrifice. Sacrifice, it says that Jesus' death was a propitiation. Now what does that word mean?
Think of it just the first part of the word pro. When Christ died for our sins, it made God who had every right to be angry toward us as his sinful creatures and God together with the Son and the Holy Spirit now through this act of redemption are propitious toward us. That means God who was against us and had every right to be is now for us.
So pro us. You need good words like that. Listen, you need theology to have a strong marriage. You need theological ballast in your boat. Propitiation.
So God, God had every right to condemn us. Now I don't know what sort of tradition you come from and what sort of church you're a part of. In our church most Sundays at the end I give the benediction. The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you his peace. If you're Baptist it sounds like you're dismissed but if you're Presbyterian that's what we say. Now I love, and it's right from the Bible, it's from Numbers chapter 6 and I love what R.C.
Sproul said many years ago. He said you want to know what it is to be under the curse of God? Take that blessing and flip it. May the Lord curse you. May the Lord turn his face away from you. May he hide his countenance from you. May he turn his smile away and may you see nothing but his frowning countenance. God had every right to be angry with us in our sins and if the gospel has become old boring news to us perhaps it's because we don't know how much we have been saved from.
We've forgotten what it is. You will not be gracious unto your marriage until you know how gracious God has been to you. Sacrifice, he sent his son as an atoning sacrifice that he who had every right to be against us would be now pro us.
When's the last time you've sacrificed something? And I remember hearing, I don't know who it was, some wife say years ago, you know I don't want to know, I don't just want a husband who will die for me. I want a husband who's going to wake up every morning and try to live for me. You know the husband will say, I'll take a bullet for you. Okay, but would you take the child for me? Because that's a more likely scenario.
And those children can drop bullets, you know what I mean. But I think of my wife and she's putting our seven month old who is on the cruise with us to bed and I think of all that she has sacrificed for me just day after day and how little I have sacrificed. My sacrifice is I've watched every Jane Austen movie ever made. We have back in our room on my iPad like 60 hours of costume dramas.
They have British accents and gowns, my wife wants to see it. But that's it. What have you done for your husband, for your wife, some measure of sacrifice, your time, your energy. Marriage is hard for a simple reason. We're selfish people. Some of you are maybe yellers when you get into a fight. My wife and I are silencers.
We just get cold and I'll say, is anything wrong? No. And if the no has a couple of syllables it means yes. And then I'll say, are you mad at me?
Which is my way of saying I have no idea why you're mad at me. And she'll pause and say, no. Which means come back later and we'll get to the bottom of it. But we have these moments of icy tension. And what I find is if I'm willing, and husbands, let's lead the way in this.
If you want to be, as the Bible calls you to be, the leader in your home, the head of your home, then you take the lead in seeking reconciliation in your home. And if you take a little step and if I would just say, honey, I know that didn't come out right. Now what I may be thinking in my head is, okay, it's still 95% your fault, but I took a little step. And my wife is so gracious because if I do that, she'll inevitably say, you're right, that was not right, but I didn't have a very good attitude when you came home.
And it's just a little bit. Some of you may experience a great miracle of God's grace and your marriage is completely changed this weekend, but that's not usually how God works. He works little by little. And if you're here and your marriage is a frozen block of ice and you can leave this week with some melting, that's a good step, just some thawing, some hope. The hope you have is not in any of us or any of our stories. The hope is in Christ. And that's when marriages are at their worst.
If you give me any couple, any couple and whatever their problem, if they say we want to work on this, we have hope, you can do anything, but when you lose hope, say there's nothing, you've never seen it this bad, this will never get better. So you have to believe no one loves your marriage and wants to see your marriage flourish more than God does. Here's our second point. What is our motivation?
The method is sacrifice, the method is choice, an act of the will. What about our motivation? Verse 11 says, Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. Now this is talking about love in the body of Christ, but if that's the case with brothers and sisters, how much more in this covenant of marriage? If God loved us, we also ought to love one another.
Some of us have the, you know, I'll scratch your back, so you scratch my back. I'll try to work on this marriage thing so that you'll come and you'll be a better spouse for me. Many Christians have what amounts to love.
A better spouse for me. Many Christians have what amounts to Pharisee love. Jesus, remember, said you love people so they'll love you back? You do nice things so people will do nice things to you? The Pharisees get that, the scribes get that.
It does not take a work of the Holy Spirit in your heart to get that. Everybody likes that. Everybody likes people to be nice to them.
Maybe if I'm nice, they'll be nice. Maybe if I treat my spouse right, then she'll treat me right. Okay, well, we'd like to see that, but the Bible gives us something much better, much deeper, instead of our human instinct, which says I will love in order to be loved. The Bible says love because you have already been loved.
That's the difference between anyone else trying to help your marriage and the Bible trying to help your marriage. Love because you have already been loved. That God in Christ has forgiven you, forgiven you real sins. That God in Christ will justify you by faith alone.
We need theology for good marriages. This is the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther nailing the 95 theses on the church door at Wittenberg. And all around the world, people will be celebrating the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, and rightly so. And the central doctrine rediscovered in the Reformation is the doctrine of justification by faith alone. That in Christ, we have our sins not only forgiven, but positively we are declared righteous. That he who knew no sins for our sake became sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. Justification by faith alone.
And it was the word alone that was scandalous. Everyone in the 16th century understood. All the Christians knew you were justified by faith. Of course, you have to have faith, but it was faith plus something. It was faith and then enough works to show that you're really a Christian, or it was faith plus the grace working within you, or it was faith plus your own effort. What they rediscovered was this great gospel truth of justification by faith alone.
Alone. So here's the question for your marriage. If you believe with all your heart that you are justified by faith alone, why are you insisting that your spouse be justified by works?
Because many of us are. I'm good at the grace thing, God. But that's not going to work with her. Not for him. He's got to prove this. He's got to crawl.
He's got to suffer a little bit. And you say, but she doesn't deserve another chance. Well, neither do you.
And neither do I. We've been given this magnificent grace. We've been given this castle of grace with servants and fine food and the best clothing, and then it's like we take a stranger in and we put them out in the tool sheds out back.
No. No soup for you. The thing that God may want to work on in this week, you may be here and you know it's about marriage, but it may just be that God wants to take these few days to convince you again or convince you for the first time that in Christ your Heavenly Father really loves you. That when you repent of your sins and you turn to Christ, you know the smile of your Heavenly Father. Some of us only relate to God as a judge. Okay, I know I'm going to heaven, all right, but I don't get too close to the judge. What if he's a father who loves you? Maybe you haven't shown grace to your spouse because you really haven't accepted the grace that God wants to show you.
Maybe you're so critical because you think God is always casting a critical eye on you. You cannot truly love until you know how much you have been loved. So with all the other things you're going to do and you're going to laugh and you're going to eat and you're going to get up with Hans at four in the morning and do all these things, don't miss what Jesus said about Mary. She's chosen the good part to sit at the feet of Jesus and learn from him, to rekindle that first love. Because you know what's more important than this love?
It's the love that maybe you've lost with God. And this is all just going to be, I was going to say rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, but we'll just throw out that analogy for here. It'd all be superficial, cosmetic, if you don't get this vertical relationship right. So I know this cruise is called Love Like You Mean It and that's good. But how about another tagline, Love Like God Meant It. Love Like God Meant It, to love you, to save you in Jesus because of the cross.
That's the motivation. And then finally, the manifestation. You see verse 12, no one has ever seen God. If we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.
Do you see the argument John's making? We have a God, he's invisible. You can't see him. Now how can you see the evidence of this God? He argues his love is perfected in us. So somebody says, I can't believe in your God. I don't even see him. Say, well, let me show you what this God looks like in his love.
Have you met this couple? Now this here is about the body of Christ again. It is, first of all, about the love that people should see in the fellowship of believers. But if this is true, how much more ought to be true in our marriage relationships, that we show forth, as Paul says in Ephesians 5, this great mystery, this mystery that is Christ and the church. Do you know your marriage is supposed to be evangelistic?
Christ and the church. Have you ever noticed in Ephesians 5 that God gives instructions directly to us at our point of fallenness? So he says in Ephesians 5 to the woman, the sort of overarching instruction there is submit to your husband. Respect your husband.
Why? Because the prototypical sin of Eve in the garden was to usurp his authority. And as a result of the curse, there is this conflict and there is this unwillingness to respect her husband, just like at the very beginning when she grabbed the fruit and ignored the command and then gave it to him. And so the command for the woman is respect your husband.
And do you see for the man? And just so you know, the instructions for the man are like three times as long there for the wife. It says love. Now the wife may think, well that's lame because we already have to love.
But notice what it says there. And sacrifice, this is a love as Christ loved the church and laid down his life for her. Man, what are you doing to sacrifice, to love, to protect? I'm not talking about just, you know, some kind of stereotypical, you know, macho, here's what men do and men are, you know, they're hunters and they go out and they kill stuff.
And look, if my family had to depend upon me killing things to eat, we're dead in a week. Unless I hit it with a car, we're dead. I don't know how to do any of that manly stuff. I don't know how to fix my car. I can't change the blinker fluid.
I can't do any of it, okay? I'm really, I go to, I get the oil change and the guy comes over, he's all, you know, grease monkey knows everything. He's like, why don't you pop the hood? And I was looking, I'm like, why don't you do it? Buttons are hard.
So that's what I'm talking about. But to be a man is to be a weighty thing. Act like men, Paul says at the end of 1 Corinthians. To be a man, to know that the woman feels loved, supported, protected. So don't just tell me what you believe, husband, or what you think you're doing. I want to see a wife who feels safe, who feels honored, who is flourishing as a woman, as a daughter of the king.
That's what I want to see. I remember when we were expecting our first and my wife was painting the nursery and I came upstairs, how's it going? And she's crying.
One of those times as a husband, I have no idea why you're crying. And she said, I'm just worried about the paint. I said, the paint looks great. No, no, not looking at it.
Because I don't know if the paint has fumes or I don't know if this is going to cause a defect in the baby and I shouldn't be painting. And so all of these sort of things. And I'm thinking, that's stupid. But trying not to say that because I'm a pastor.
And I, so tell me about that. But I thought, and I said something very husband like, well, let's read the can. Let's see, does it say anything?
Is there any sort of, no, I don't see anything. This is going to be fine. And I didn't understand, why is she crying? Why is she crying?
Why isn't this making it better? And finally she said, I want to know that you'll protect me. I want to know that even if I have that moment of some irrational fear that you want to wrap your arms around me, you want to do whatever you can to make it better, that you're there. There was a time we were having a leaders retreat in our church and we got talking about marriage and I just said to some of the guys, I said, so what would you do if somebody in the park ran up behind your wife and ripped off her purse and kind of shoved her and ran away and we had this discussion with some of their elders and our deacons and men said, you know, I'd call for help or I put my arm around her and I remember one of our deacons, a soft spoken man, he just said with a straight face, I'd rip his head off. And I thought that's probably a happy wife.
Will you be a man, not just to sacrifice and to love and to show forth God's love in these ways, but how about some of the ways that are harder for you? Men, let us be the ones in marriage who often say the word let's. Let's go out for dinner. Let's talk about that.
Let's get a babysitter. Or how about words that are very hard for some of you men? Let's pray. Those are scary words for some men and there are wives here waiting years and years to hear their husband say those two simple words, let's pray. Would you show forth in your relationship what it means to love your wife like Christ loves the church? And wives, will you show your husbands what it means with gracious, graceful, intelligent submission to your husbands? Here's what love looks like.
It's 1 Corinthians 13. You choose to be patient when your husband struggles as a leader. You're kind when your wife is critical. You do not envy what the other one has in terms of gifts or position. You do not boast in your strengths while ignoring your weaknesses. You are not rude to each other, especially in public. I shudder when I see couples that are rude to each other in public and I think what must it be like for you in private? You do not keep a mental journal of faults and hurts.
You know, they're always ready to pull down the file folder, but three weeks ago you said that. You do not delight to hurt each other. You rejoice when you have occasion to see the truth even when you see truth about your own sin. You always protect each other. You always want to find a way to trust each other. You always hope that God can change one another and yourself and you always persevere in God's grace knowing his love for you.
So let me just leave you with one final question and it will sound flippant and I don't mean it to be flippant or funny. I mean it to be deadly earnest because if we are supposed to make the love of God visible and if our marriage is supposed to show forth Christ and the church, then we have to ask ourselves the uncomfortable question, what do people see in our marriage? Do people look at your marriage and think there must be a hell? Or do they think I don't even know who this God is but there must be something to him?
I've heard about this Jesus and I don't like a lot of the Christians and they seem kind of hypocrites and I don't know about the church, but I know these two people in this marriage have got something that is not normal. It's not your goal to be normal. It's your goal to be godly. Worldliness is whatever makes sin look normal and righteousness look strange. And our world is crushing in on us to say here's what normal is and it's in our entertainment, it's in our billboards, it's everywhere, here's normal. That's not what God calls us to.
It's natural. Christ and the church, that someone might be able to look in and say that's a little bit of how God and his people love each other. The secret to a happy marriage is to learn that there is much more to your marriage than being happy. If your marriage is to show forth Christ in the church, it means that ultimately God is the end of your marriage. Don't think that little things are at stake here with your marriage. The glory of God is at stake in your marriage. Your relationship is meant to show forth and redound to his glory, which is why we can't give up and why he will not give up on us. The secret to a happy marriage is to make the marriage about God and not about your happiness. Let's pray. Our Heavenly Father, we know what your word tells us.
Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Teach us this paradox of the Christian faith, that we will be raised up when we get low, we will be found when we are lost, and we will only live when we carry a cross. We thank you for the gift of marriage. We thank you for the glory of Christ, and we pray that one would serve the end of the other. In Jesus' name, Amen. Well, there you go. That's Kevin D. Young. I'm seeing the mic drop, right? Just drop the mic, walk off, and that's right. It is right.
Let that sink into your heart. And Kevin's message from the Love Like You Mean It marriage cruise, this was back a number of years ago. Each year on the cruise, you hear messages like this. Each evening there's a session. There are morning devotions. There are breakout sessions that happen during the day for men and for women, optional sessions.
There's music. There's comedy. I mean, it is a ton of fun, but it's also spiritually enriching. I know couples who have been six, seven, eight times on the cruise. They say it is what we need to get us through the rest of the year.
It's just being intentional about your marriage and pouring into the most important relationship in your life. And the cool thing about it is it can be fun. I mean, you can be playing ping pong or full court basketball or surfing on the top deck of the thing and then go to a session at night.
Who can beat that? I mean, you have joy and refreshment at the same time you're working on your marriage. And if you want to sleep in, you can do that too because it really means to help. Including all the soft serve ice cream you want to eat. Too much. I don't know if that's good or bad yet.
I don't either. We have just opened up registration for the 2022 Love Like You Mean It marriage cruise. And I got to tell you, it's clear to us a lot of you are ready to go with us because we're hearing from a lot of people. We're starting to see the cruise fill up for 2022. If you want answers, call us at 1-800-FL today. If you have questions about the cruise or about what happens if this or that, call 1-800-FL today. We can answer your questions. We can get you registered over the phone.
And right now, there's a special pricing offer that is the lowest price we make available. So if you have any interest in going on the cruise, go to familylifetoday.com for more information or call 1-800-FL today. And we hope you have a great weekend this weekend. Hope you and your family are able to worship together in your local church. And I hope you can join us back on Monday when we're going to talk about what you do as parents if your son-in-law or your daughter-in-law is, I don't know whether to use the word prickly or toxic or somewhere in between those things. Doyle Roth will be here to talk about how we handle in-law relationships that turn out to be hard or unhealthy.
Hope you can tune in for that. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch. Got some extra help this week from our friend Bruce Gough. And of course, our entire broadcast production team was involved. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back Monday 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.
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