Keeping Love Alive - Planning - How to Strengthen Your Hope, Part 2

You know, I came across a fascinating statement that changed the course of my marriage years ago.

Here it is. Without a plan, we have no hope. Let me tell you, that truth made all the difference in the world of my marriage as I began to prioritize in our marriage very specific plans.

We're going to learn how to increase the hope in your marriage, and I'm going to give you some very specific tools to help you build the kind of plan that will provide deep hope in your marriage. Stay with me. Thanks for joining us for this Edition of Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram. Living on the Edge features the Bible teaching of Chip Ingram on this international discipleship program.

I'm Dave Drouie. In this program, Chip continues his series, Keeping Love Alive, by sharing the principles, a couple of practical implications, and then specific tools to help you sustain long-term hope in your marriage relationship. Now, after the teaching, Chip's always with us here in studio to share additional thoughts, building on what he shared in the message, so be sure to stay with us for that.

Now, if you have a Bible handy, hop in it now to John chapter 14. Let's join Chip now for part two of his message, Planning How to Strengthen Your Hope. Where's your hope in your marriage? See, is your hope that someday, someway, everything's going to be perfect?

Is your hope someday she's going to be more affectionate? Is your hope someday we can really have a nice house, and when all that happens, everything's going to be wonderful? Is your hope that when we can finally move closer to my parents, so my immediate family will make me feel better? Is your hope that someone will no longer ever have to be deployed, and then somehow life will really be wonderful? Is your hope that when we can have children, then life is really going to happen? Is your hope somehow if I make some career moves, then we'll make more money, and then everything's going to be okay? Do you understand?

Every single one of those is circumstantial. And every single one of those can happen tomorrow, and here's what I can tell you about you and me and our fallen nature. Give you 30 days, and your hope will be on something else.

Just a little bit bigger house. And wishing you didn't have so many kids. And what Jesus is telling us is there's going to be challenges. It's part of living in a fallen world. First, it's this attitude of serving your mate that makes no sense, and you keep doing it when it works. You keep doing it when it doesn't work, and you do it as an act of worship to God. And over time, a transformation happens in you.

You become more and more like Jesus. And all I can tell you is that when someone becomes more and more like Jesus, she's more and more attractive, or he is more and more attractive. My wife's really attractive. She's very kind. She's very loving. She's very other-centered. That was not how she always used to be.

And I spent most of my energy picking apart what I didn't like about her instead of the 90% that I did like about her. And God wants you to know that serving is the first step, but you have to have hope. And the way you have hope is you have to have a plan. I mean, so can I just give you a couple principles, and then I want to get real practical. Here's the principle.

I mean, this is from Jesus. Long-term planning provides hope and perspective to overcome short-term pain and challenges. Now, just tell me.

Am I just reading too much into that? Does he give them a long-term plan or what? Hey, here's the long-term plan. You're going to be with me forever. I got your back.

I'm coming back. No matter what happens, how bad, how hard, I'm coming back, and there's a place for you. Long-term plan gives you perspective and hope to overcome short-term pain and challenges. Second, great plans provides a specific path and create hope for tomorrow and forever. Great plans don't just say, hey, someday, someway, he could have said, okay, guys, I'm going to go to the cross a little bit later. I'm going to go prepare a place for you.

Ready? Break. See you someday, someway, somehow. No, no, a great plan is, yeah, that's the long-term plan, but here's where you are today. There's a specific path. There's specific things we're going to do.

Literally, there's mile markers that we're going to look at that are going to move us forward so we can see we're making progress. Third principle is hope rises and falls with how we keep our promises. The most devastating thing we do to one another, and we all do it, is when we tell our mates something and then we don't follow through.

It breaks trust. What do we know about Jesus? I would encourage you, you know, read John chapter 14, and you can even read 15 and 16, and every time the word, I will, I will, I will, I will, I will, underline it. And you know what he's saying? I will. I keep my promises.

I'm preparing a place, and did you get the why? See, I meet a lot of Christians that believe God loves them. I don't think they really believe he likes them. And, oh, yeah, he loves me, but I need to do this, and I need to do this, and I need to do this, and I know I don't measure up. Do you realize that just you sitting wherever you're at, whatever level of maturity, with all your issues, that if Jesus walked through those doors in his resurrected body and sat down with you, he said, do you want coffee or do you want tea? And he would sit across from you, and he would just be delighted to hang out. And so, do you see the promises that he makes?

And so then the application is practical. Number one, if you, this is from my marine father, so don't look for this in the Bible, but I heard it so much, it's up there in the Bible with me. Chip, if you fail to plan, you... Does every person know that one?

It's true. You plan for career, you plan, hopefully, for finances, you plan for so much. Here's my question, what's your plan for your marriage? What's your plan for your marriage? I mean, if I said, okay, hey, hey, you're the husband, right?

Bridegroom, there's a bride. Okay, guys over here, all you ladies over there, all right, one by one, line up, tell me your plan. What's the game plan? Intimacy plan, future plan, kids plan, intellectual growth plan, spiritual growth plan. Future of your kids, do you want them to go to college?

Do you think they need to go to college? Do you need to plan for that? What's your financial plan?

If you're looking at me like, duh, we got a problem. Because if you don't have a plan, then you don't have a lot of hope. Because planning, you know what the word planning is about? Planning is the presumption that there will be a future and that you're doing some things today and you're looking into the future and saying, these are the important things that we are going to do and they're things that you look forward to.

Planning is sort of a thread that takes hope and the hope pulls you, but it pulls you because there's a plan. I cannot tell you, I mean, my wife and I argued, struggled, you know, we did the roll in bed, faced the other wall, and we made a plan. The plan was we would have a date every single week.

It would be on Friday, be for breakfast, we would eat and we would spend about three hours together, we would take a walk, we would do whatever, but during that three or four hour block, she knew she had me, no phone, no interruptions, and anything and everything that was building up in her heart, she knew I'm only six days away from unloading. And what it gave me was six days of her not unloading a little every day, causing conflict. And it wasn't like it was just conflict resolution. We had a plan. What we knew was we were terrible communicators, we didn't know how to resolve anger, we didn't even know when we were angry. We had to have a counselor teach us, when you're like this, okay, she's passive aggressive and she buries her anger and you verbalize your anger. Oh, so that's why you do this, she does, oh, okay. So we had to learn when we were angry. So right after supper, I mean, just 15 minutes.

We did it three times a week. Okay, honey, this sounds so artificial. How did your day go?

Superficial. Okay, great. How did your day go?

Great. What are you concerned about? Well, this, this, this, and I shut up, you can't fix it, just shut up. What do you wish?

Oh, I wish one of our sons would not be so much this way and I'm concerned about our other sons dating a girl. You know, I wish I felt better, I've got this really situation and what are you willing to do? And in 15 minutes or 20 minutes, I mean, we learned to not just bury stuff, but get all the things that are weighing us down out on the table and then a question that you didn't have to do anything.

What are you willing to do? And what happened is in 15 minutes, every other night at least, I found out this is the burdens and she heard mine. I mean, she would ask me, how did your day go? It's fine. And she wants to talk and well, I mean, well, how did it really go? It's fine.

This church had a lot of meetings, a couple of people came to Christ, it's great. So what's up? I mean, you know, and I can't understand why she thinks we don't communicate, right? I told her. It was fine. That's not what she wanted to hear. How did you feel about it? What was going on inside?

You know, right? So we came up with a plan weekly. We came up with a plan daily.

And then for us, when there's friction, guess what goes out the door? Romance. And now if you have kids, especially small ones, it's hard to even find romance. And so we plan, we scheduled, you know, got other couples, watch our kids, we were super poor. We're going to get away for a couple of nights at least once, try it twice a year. And sometimes you were just holding on by a thread. We only got, you know, 62 more days until we can get away.

But two days away would refresh. Are you starting to get it? Hope. So what is your career and family and ministry and future plan for the next 5, 10, or 15 years? Now I know when I say something like, oh my gosh, I mean, that's sort of a long, big deal. Okay, here's a tool for transformation. I want to get you started. I'm going to give you two tools.

Here's tool number one. This changed the course of my life. 34 or 35, three kids, four. Annie had just been born, was maybe 18 months old.

I've got two 13-, 14-year-olds, about a 7-year-old and about a 1-year-old. And where I went to seminary, they had a thing called LEAD, leadership evaluation and development. And they looked at your whole life, and you went away with your wife for a week, and they had a psychologist talk to you, and someone looked at your preaching, and people filled out all these forms about your life, your character, and they literally had your life. And the goal was to take you through this four or five days and give you an evaluation of where you're at and help you see blind spots so that maybe they could help you skip 10 years of pain because they thought maybe you have some potential to make a difference.

Two big things happened. The man who did our interview was one of my mentors, and he looked at Theresa and said, You haven't told anybody about your past life, have you? No, I hide it.

But she said, I have a problem. What's that? Well, my little boy is like six or seven years old, and we have a picture of Chip and I in our marriage, and Eric and Jason are in the picture. I mean, they were like four and a half, five years old.

You know, dressed up little boys carrying the rings and things. And so our six or seven-year-old says, Mommy, how come Eric and Jason got to be in the wedding picture and I didn't? Well, a little moment of truth.

That's a real tricky one, right? She was ashamed. She was ashamed that she was told where we went to school that God would never use your life. She was told she was a second-class citizen. She lived with guilt. She lived with shame. She married a guy.

She wasn't a Christian. He runs off with another woman. She told me I would have committed suicide if I didn't have those babies. My whole life was in that man. I felt worthless.

And he said, You don't understand. You are a trophy of God's grace. Look at how God has restored you and redeemed you.

Are you ready for this? You know what you do with trophies? You take trophies and you put them up on the mantle, and you put them on the mantle so people can see this is what God did. And we came home from that, and she shared with my seven-year-old boy why he wasn't in the wedding picture. Shortly afterwards, we were called to a church in Santa Cruz.

And my wife is a, I mean, you would not know it now, but I mean was not just an introvert, but super shy and getting in front of people was not her thing. And we're flying on the plane. She said, I want to share my testimony with the church. I said, What? And you know, we went from a fairly small church, and for us it was a pretty good-sized church, 800 or 900 people. And they had a Sunday morning, Sunday night. And I said, Well, my first message is Sunday morning.

You want to do Sunday night? She goes, Yeah. And she got up and told her story.

50 women lined up. If you know anything about Santa Cruz, it's drugs, new age, wacky world, broken people. I mean, just, and God just put us in the perfect place in the world because two very deeply broken people went to a place filled with broken people. And when she shared her story, they finally said, Maybe there's hope for me. And so there's hope. There's not just hope when everything's okay.

There's hope when you share your brokenness. The second thing that happened at that that was critical is I was given an assignment. And I was told to do this. I want you to go home, and I want you to write out, I want you to add 10 years to everyone's age. So, okay, I'll be 44. Oh, wow, Eric and Jason will be 22. Ryan will be 17. Annie will be like 11. And then he says, Now I want you to think about this is where you're at.

I want you to visualize. You now have two kids that I thought, If they're going to go to college, I'm putting like $50 a month away. You know, they're doing really well, but they've got some issues in their life I need to address. My little boy, he's going to be 17.

That's going to make him like a junior or a senior. And while 10 years from now, I will be, this is Theresa and I, we literally, it just grabbed me, and I realized I'm living so much in every single day. I'm not living in a way that is realizing where do I want to be in 10 years? Where does God want me to be in 10 years? Where do I want my marriage to be in 10 years?

It was one of the biggest aha moments of my whole life. I literally, you know what I did? I made a plan. I made a plan for my older boys. What am I going to do between, you know, like 12 and 22? What is it I want them to know? What kind of time?

What kind of experiences? What am I going to do with my son who's 11 or 7 and is going to be 17? And what are the things I learned from my older boys? And where should we be? This is where we're at in our marriage. This was a season where we actually got along. The church was growing.

It was a good season. Wow, what have we done? Where do I want our marriage to be in 10 years? I would tell you it'll change the course of your life if you would write down, add 10 years to every one in your family, and start asking yourself those questions. I will tell you because left to yourself, and then here's the thing. You think you don't have enough time.

The number one addiction in America is technology. You have time to read. You have time to think. You have time to exercise. You have time to build relationships where you can stick your face in this phone, and you can escape, and you can watch movies, and you can play video games, and for some of you secretly log on to porn, and you can waste your life.

Or you can come up with a plan, and you can ask for help, and you can start being a servant. And I will tell you, your life will be so different than everybody else's. And here's the thing that this thing and all that media does. It just keeps telling you you don't measure up, you don't look right, you don't have the right stuff, and if only you had, or if only you could, or if only you were, and so it's all negative messages, and here's the thing.

Some of you are like Type A, highly focused, wired like me, and some of us have gone after some of those things, and here's the thing. If you get them in your hand, you're going to look at it. It's going to be like, remember the rainbow into the pot of gold? And you'll look at it, and you'll go, as one guy told me recently, he said, this is it? I built a company, did $67 million last year, I found the beautiful wife, I have three kids, this is it?

This is as empty, I mean, they promised, I'm in shape, it's a marine. I am, I've got what everyone in the world says will make you happy, and he says, I looked inside of that, and it was a black hole of emptiness. And then he had to be driving in the car and heard a series about heaven and life that happened to be from Living on the Edge. God spoke to him, and he pulled off 101 in California, and cried like a baby and received Christ, and that was the beginning of a completely new life. And what I like about him, he went about it like a marine.

His poor wife. He said it was bait and switch, it really was. He said two years in, he goes, my life, my friends, my habits, he said, I learned God's word is important, I learned prayer was important, a good Bible teaching church is important, I got in a small group with my pastor, another guy and another guy, man, my addictions I addressed, it's just two years, we're having dinner, and she looked at me and she goes, I don't think I even know you anymore. And he said privately, I'm thinking, yes. And yet what she was saying was, I married this person, we partied together and this was our world, who is this guy?

Now, you're a great father and you're treating me in ways I don't really understand, which is fine but weird, you're doing things I've never seen you do. And here's my point, you've got to have a plan. Add ten years and then ask yourself, who do you want that person to be?

What do you want that marriage to look like? The second, this is a real practical thing because it's like, oh, that's a great big picture, structure. Some of us are very spontaneous, some are very detail-oriented. If you don't structure for outcomes, your life will be filled with good intentions where you start and fail, start and fail, start and fail. In planning as a couple, I mean, this week, I'm going to get down to some real basic things. This is just a suggestion. Some of you are great planners, way better than me.

You have way better ways to do this. But for those of you that are sitting here thinking, we don't plan. We just react, we just respond. Oh, kids need shoes. And by the way, if you're like most, the women feel a greater responsibility and they're always feeling like, what are we going to do, what are we going to do?

And they feel like we don't lead well when we don't plan. And so one of the things that helped us, I don't know how it works in your world, but in my world, usually I get a paycheck every two weeks. Some people it's once a month, some people once a week.

I get a paycheck every two weeks and have for whenever. It doesn't have to be blue. We have a blue folder. Every bill that comes in goes into that blue folder, even the ones that we pay online.

We print it out, it goes into that blue folder. Every two weeks, I sit down with my wife. We have a checkbook and she'll take the part that you subtract and I'll take the part where we write the checks.

And a lot of them, of course, we pay online and I'll write on the bill and she'll say, okay, I'll do that online. And we go through every two weeks and we do our finances together. Here's what you need to learn about money. Money is never about money. Money is about values and priorities.

Every two weeks for 35 years, we've had a discussion about what matters. And a lot of times it was, well, we paid our bills and now we have $136 to make it through to the next two weeks. So we're going to put $78 in the grocery envelope, we're going to put $20 in recreation, and we're going to put $16 in for gas when you could buy gas for cheap. And when the money's out of those envelopes, we're done. And we're going to stay in the black.

And then it was like, okay, well, Eric needs shoes and Annie needs this. What should we buy when? And, okay, the habit is more important than the amount, so we're going to save $50 a paycheck. That was our big savings plan.

And it became a habit. The second thing is now we've made those, then we open our calendars and we look at, okay, what's coming up the rest of this month and next month? And we talk about it. Well, we've got a birthday here, I'm supposed to teach here, and we're supposed to do that. Well, this couple asked us to do that. So what are we doing?

We're planning our life together. Do you realize how many of your arguments are about one of you does the checkbook or one of you does it online, you don't know where things are at? Your conversations about money are called arguments.

Your conversations about calendar are called conflict. Well, why did you do that? Why didn't you tell me that? Well, I don't want to do that. Well, you always do that.

You play golf, we can play golf. I just went out with the girls, and I'm sick and tired of you always taking our money. Well, you said we were going to stay on a budget. We make plans and you never stick with them.

Does this sound remotely familiar? Why? Because I lived them all. Structure. Every two weeks, this is how much money we have.

Visibility, transparency. What are we going to do with it? Here's our calendar. At the beginning of every week, and I mean, we've done this so long, it's informal now.

Often it'll be over a cup of coffee. So what do you have coming up this week? And she'll just walk through her week.

Tell me all the major things coming. Oh, Annie's going to come over with the kids in the afternoon. I'm going to do this. And well, I've got to travel Tuesday and Wednesday and I'll be back.

So that kind of messes up with our date night. When do you want to do that? And it can just... Hope for the long term. Hope once a quarter. Hope with your finances because you do it together. I am telling you, you can be proactive in creating a life that you look forward to something this week. You look forward to a great time together away. You look forward to sitting down and having a plan that it may take time, but we can get out of debt.

Final comment. If you are in a situation, I wrote this at the bottom, of crisis of debt or counseling or in-laws or addiction, get outside help. Get outside help. Pay for whatever it takes. I had to. And here's the thing. If this reoccurring problem or conflict in your sex life, in your finances, debt issues, in-laws, resolving conflict, you're smart people.

If you could have solved it on your own, you would have solved it by now, right? You get outside help. Let me encourage you to do that. Chip will be right back with his application. Quickly though, this message, Planning How to Survive Your Hope, is from his series, Keeping Love Alive, four biblical practices great marriages have in common. For each of these four practices, Chip gives you a couple of principles that explain why it's true, practical implications of what those principles look like in the day-to-day, and then very specific tools to get this practice into action.

In classic Chip fashion, he unfolds the roadmap to give you clear directions each step of the way. If you want to hear how to deepen your love, strengthen your hope, multiply your joy, and restore your peace, you owe it to yourself and your spouse to dig into this series and integrate what you'll learn for the long haul. You'll be hard-pressed to find a more practical resource for the health of your marriage.

For a limited time, resources for Keeping Love Alive are discounted, and the MP3s are always free. And to order your copy or to send it to a friend, visit us online at livingontheedge.org or tap Special Offers on the app. For additional information, just give us a call at 888-333-6003. Well, Chip, before you talk about your message, you want to jump in here?

Thanks, Dave. I want to talk to those of you who partner with us financially. Your gifts help us not just stay on the air, but they provide the necessary funding to create curriculum and develop our website and provide resources at extraordinarily reasonable prices. I mean, your giving is making an amazing impact, so thank you very, very much. And for those of you that are enjoying the benefits of Living on the Edge but you haven't yet become a financial partner, would you consider doing that today? Your gifts are going to get invested right back into the ministry to assist us to develop resources, stay on the air, and help Christians live like Christians. I mean, is there ever a day when we need to make a difference?

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Well, now here's Chip with his application. As we close today's program, I want to focus in on one specific thing that I shared. But before I do, I want to go immediately to that group of people that I ended the teaching time with. I said if you're in crisis, if you've lost hope, if you're hurting, if you're contemplating divorce, if you feel like there is no hope, let me encourage you in your crisis get help right now. Go to a trusted godly friend, to a Christian counselor, to your pastor, but don't let it go.

Don't think it's going to get better on its own. When the drift starts to happen, when you feel the anger and the resentment building, let me encourage you, stop, get help. What you're probably experiencing is something very, very normal, but it just feels overwhelming to you. Now, for those that don't feel like you're in crisis but you want a deeper marriage or you feel like there's a little bit of a drift, let me tell you this. Long-term planning provides hope and perspective to overcome the short-term pain and challenges. You know, there's a lot of ups and downs in life, and we're going to have them, right, financially, relationally, with in-laws, in our sex life. I mean, in our marriages, we're going to have all kind of bumps and bruises and barriers. And what I've learned after all these years, when you first get some of these, you think, oh, my, the world's falling apart and what's wrong and this marriage isn't working or I'm a terrible person or am I falling out of love?

And we've been so overwhelmed with media thinking that ooey-gooey feelings and this romantic, you know, hallmark-type relationship is supposed to be every day in every way, that we begin to put our marriages under a microscope. And instead of realizing these are normal things and our long-term hope is we've made a vow before God, and so we need to have a plan. We need to have a plan that says, this is what we're going to do this week. We need to have a plan with our money. We need to have a plan for when we're going to get away as a couple. We need to have a plan for how are we going to raise our children. Now, when I say all that, I don't mean that as some big, overwhelming thing that you get it all done tomorrow.

What I want you to know, though, is you have to pause. You have to meet at least once a week and really talk about what's coming up, what are the concerns that you have, how each of you are going to address them. You've got to be on the same page with common goals and a mutual commitment, because if you aren't, you'll start to go your own separate ways. And then about once a quarter minimum, you know, even if it's an afternoon or just one night away, to get together as a couple and do a little, where are we at, how are things really going, pausing, getting out the calendar. Therese and I do this about once a month, sometime once every six weeks, and say, let's just look at the next six months. And we just line out all the different things that are coming up, and we don't necessarily make a huge bunch of decisions, but all of a sudden it's like, oh, wow, if you're going to do that, I didn't realize you were traveling. Well, what about, you know, one of the kids' birthdays or one of our, you know, grown children have a big anniversary or all of a sudden you're talking about what's going to happen over the next six months, those kind of conversations that provide perspective.

And then for some of you, you just need some hope. You need to know 90 days from now or 40 days from now, you're going to have that special three or four days away or a weekend or something positive. We all need those carrots out in front of us that a good plan says, you know what, we're going to need a break. That's when we're going to get it, and we can make it through this hard season until we get there.

Let me encourage you, planning is how you strengthen your hope. At Living on the Edge, we want you to know about an easy way to listen to our extended teaching podcast. Hear Chip anytime on Amazon's Alexa Echo and Echo Dot. Just say, Alexa, open Living on the Edge, and you'll hear that day's extended teaching anytime you want. Well, for Chip and everyone here, this is Dave Druey saying thanks for joining us for this Edition of Living on the Edge.