Praying For Keeps

Stable marriages are the bedrock of the family. That's why divorce is so damaging, since in divorce there are no winners.

If your marriage is in trouble, don't touch that dial. Today you'll hear teaching that could bring you back from the brink and help you navigate what may seem to be impossible waters. Stay with us. From Chicago, we welcome you to The Moody Church Hour, a weekly service of worship and teaching under the ministry of Dr. Erwin Lutzer.

On this program, we conclude a ten-part series on fighting for your family. Later in our service, we'll learn about playing for keeps. Pastor Lutzer comes now to open our service. In a moment, we're going to be standing to sing, Come Thou Almighty King. Well, the good news is that the king is already with us.

He has come. But you'll notice the rest of the song says, Help us, Thy praise to sing. We invite the king's presence, even though he is here, because we want to open our lives to him and invite his special blessing upon this time. Would you join me as we pray together, and then we shall stand to sing to the king. Father, we pray now that you might help us to put behind in our minds the concerns, the anxieties, the issues of this morning, the issues of tomorrow, and make this a very transforming experience for us, that we might glorify you better. And even as we sing, Lord, your praises, we invite your spirit to help us to do so for your glory. In Jesus' name, amen.

Would you stand as we worship this morning? Come, Thou Almighty King. Help us, Thy name to sing. Help us to praise. Father, all glorious, for all victorious, come and reign over us ancient of days. Come, all the conquered earth, thy sacred witness fair in this land. Now rule almighty, now rule in every heart, and give us the spirit of God.

To they came on a hymn free, eternal faith is thee. O merciful Lord, thy sovereign majesty, pay we in full mercy, and to eternal love and adore. Great is the Lord. Great is the Lord, he is holy and just, light for each one's delight.

Great is the Lord, he is faithful and true, light for seeking truth's delight. Great is the Lord, and worthy of glory. Great is the Lord, and worthy of praise.

Great is the Lord, now lift up your voice, now lift up your voice. Great is the Lord. Great is the Lord, he is holy and just, light for each one's delight. Great is the Lord, he is faithful and true, light for seeking truth's delight. Great is the Lord, and worthy of glory. Great are you Lord, and worthy of praise. Great are you Lord, I lift up my voice, I lift up my voice. Great are you Lord, great are you Lord.

Amen. I invite you to go along with me in your bulletin as we read together from 1 Chronicles chapter 16. Please read aloud with me on the bold print. This is God's holy word. Sing to the Lord all the earth, proclaim his salvation day after day. Declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous deeds among all peoples. Great is the Lord, and most worthy of praise. He is to be feared above all gods.

For all the gods of the nations are idols, but the Lord made the heavens. Splendor and majesty are before him, strength and joy in his dwelling place. Ascribe to the Lord, oh families of nations. Ascribe to the Lord, glory and strength. Ascribe to the Lord, the glory due his name. Bring an offering and come before him. Worship the Lord in the splendor of his holiness. Tremble before him all the earth.

The world is firmly established, it cannot be moved. Let the heavens rejoice, let the earth be glad. Let them say among the nations, the Lord reigns. Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good. His love endures forever. Amen. Glory to the Lord our God.

God who wanders beyond our galaxy. You are holy, holy. You must let your majesty in.

You are holy, holy. Lord of heaven and earth. Lord of heaven and earth. Early in the morning, I will celebrate the night. Let the night stumble in the darkness.

I will clone the day by night. God who wanders beyond our galaxy. You are holy, holy.

God who wanders beyond our galaxy. You are holy, holy. You must let your majesty in. You are holy, holy. Lord of heaven and earth. We are moment, you are forever.

Lord of the ages, God before time. We are a great world, you are eternal. Love and mercy reign in your time. Holy, holy, Lord God Almighty.

Worthy is the Lamb who was made. highest praise is our glory. Be thou true before me. Be thou true before me. We are broken, you are here. Jesus, redeemer, I need to save.

You are the one song we'll sing forever. Vowing for you, blessing your name. Holy, holy, Lord God Almighty.

Worthy is the Lamb who was made. highest praise is our glory. Be thou true before me. Be thou true before me.

Just remain standing for a moment. Father, we want to thank you today for the strong and powerful name of Jesus. And we exist today with our sins forgiven because of his name. We thank you that there is salvation in no other except in the name of Jesus. We worship him, we love him, we adore him. In his name, amen.

You may be seated. Well, this is number 10 in a series of messages entitled Fighting for Your Family. And for many of you, it may be the most important message of the series. Because of the fact that marriage is so serious and we know that when the fall happened, when man fell in the Garden of Eden, it affected his marriage terribly and everything went wrong.

And the fall still does the very same to us today. And because of the tension that exists in the marriage relationship, it has become a source of much humor. And I thought that before I begin this message, which is a very serious one that I hope will transform your life, maybe we could just relax and enjoy the fact that human nature is very interesting. So here we go. First of all, I want to talk about the insensitivity of men.

Ladies, if you say amen, say it quietly in your heart. There's a story about a woman who said to her husband, you know that I love race cars. I can race them really fast here in Montana. And she knew he had enough money to buy her one. She said, when I wake up on my birthday on the driveway, I want something that I can make go from 0 to 140 in eight seconds. Well, she got up on her birthday, looked on the driveway, and on the driveway was a bathroom scale.

Funeral services for the husband are pending. There was a woman who was looking into the mirror. And she said, I feel so awful about the way in which I look. She said, I've got weight issues. She said, I've got lines on my face.

My teeth are crooked. She said, I just look so awful. She said to her husband, right now I need a compliment from you.

He said, well, dear, your eyesight is near perfect. A man went to his pastor and said, you know, my wife is trying to poison me. He said, oh, no. He said, I know your wife. She's a nice woman.

There's no way she's trying to poison you. He said, pastor, there's another side to her that you don't know. He said, go talk to her. The pastor came back later that afternoon and said to the man, he said, you know, I just spent three and a half hours talking with your wife. He said, I have some advice for you. The man said, what?

The pastor said, take the poison. When you and I get married and we stand at the altar, we bring to that event the seeds of destroying any relationship. Because we bring to that event ourselves the fact that we want to be the center of our own world. We long to be served and not to serve. We are selfish. We may be filled with anger. We may be filled with jealousies and expectations and uncertainties and insecurities. And there we stand and we commit to one another until death do us part. Somebody had said that getting married is taking the ego of a man and the vanity of a woman and putting them together in this intimate relationship.

And it is like having heart surgery without anesthetic. And so God puts them together and says, fight it out and enjoy. It's like somebody said that for my birthday, he said somebody gave me a humidifier and somebody else gave me a dehumidifier and I put them in the same room and just let them fight it out. I do believe that this message is going to be transforming. I've been praying that couples who are on the verge of divorce, couples who are in trouble with their marriage, are going to be changed because of this message.

I really do believe that. Rebecca asked me this morning how the message was coming along and I said, if the Holy Spirit of God comes to open people's minds and hearts as I lay my own heart on the altar, so to speak, as I plead with you regarding your marriage, I believe that God can change your marriage no matter where you are at. And if you're in a good marriage, I believe that this message will help all of us to make our good marriages better. First of all, I'd like to deal with three lies that our culture gladly accepts.

Three lies and lie number one is very clear. My happiness is number one. My happiness is most important. I had a man say to me one time, well, I'm unhappy in this marriage and I can't believe that God would want me to be unhappy. What if Jesus had said that in Gethsemane?

I'm unhappy here in the garden and I don't believe that the Father would want me to be unhappy and going to the cross made me very unhappy. My dear friend, very quickly may I say that it is much more important to be holy than it is happy. And God put you in that marriage to make you holy, guaranteeing not happiness but holiness if you respond to it correctly. Second lie of our culture is this, that if you find the right person, you'll really be fulfilled. What you need to do is to find your soulmate. So a married man at the water cooler meets a woman who just listens to him and just adores him and he's found his soulmate.

Really? I remember a man in this church many, many years ago who said, I found an oasis. I'm living in a desert. I found an oasis. And now you want me to go back to the desert, he said, as many of us tried to convince him not to leave his wife and marry somebody else. But he chose the oasis and discovered that it was terribly poisonous.

It would have been better if he had just stayed right in the desert, actually. When we are in the period of romance, when we romance, when we're in romance, we are the most deceptive, lying people that we ever are in our lives because we put forth our best self. We have this shimmering image that we project. And then after we move in and we get married, we suddenly discover there's a beep, beep and the movers move in and all of the baggage now gets unloaded. And here's a baggage of anger. Here's a baggage of insecurity. Here's a baggage of high expectations. Here's a baggage of laziness.

And after our mate's baggage gets brought into the house, then ours comes and there we are. I tell young people today that it is very important to realize this. Young people, write this down. It is possible for you to be madly in love with someone you should never marry. And that's true of older people, too. You could fall in love with somebody else's wife. The best poster child for recognizing that it's possible to be in love with someone you should not marry is myself.

You can put me up on the fridge and say he's the poster child. Before I met Rebecca, I was madly in love with this young woman. And I thank God today that I didn't marry her. I might not be in ministry if I had married her. God wanted me to wait for Rebecca and how glad I am I did to recognize that feelings itself and thinking that you have found your soul mate can backfire. There's a third lie of our society. If I find my soul mate, I'm justified in breaking my vows.

If I find my soul mate, I'm justified. Like one person said, well, you know, even David got his Bathsheba, he said to me. Yeah. I told him, I said, yeah, David did get his Bathsheba. And you know what else happened? He wrecked his family, lost four sons. But yeah, he did get his Bathsheba, OK. The Bible says in the 15th Psalm, blessed is he who swears to his own hurt and does not change.

Blessed is the man who swears to his own hurt and does not change. You say, I got married and now I have buyer's remorse. I know somebody who bought a vehicle and brought it into the garage.

And the moment they did, they wished they could take it back, buyer's remorse. Maybe you think you didn't marry the right one. Well, it's not as important that you married the right one as it is that you be the right one, that you be a person of character. You know, it is impossible for me to over exaggerate the pain in this world because of divorce. A counselor was telling me how that this couple divorced. This man ran off with his girlfriend.

He's living with his girlfriend. So a divorce ensues. And now they have a little one-year-old girl. And he gets the little one-year-old on weekends. So this mother attends a sporting event where her other son was involved in. And she looks down. And just in the rows ahead of her, there's her ex-husband.

There's his girlfriend playing mom to this little one-year-old. How much grief can a person endure anyway? I was reading somebody who does marriage counseling full time.

He says that many people who divorce regret it later on because they underestimated the amount of pain, disruption, heartache that would come to them if they were to divorce. And this soul mate turns out to be poisonous in the end anyway. There are two things that should never happen prematurely.

One is embalming. And the other is to get a divorce. Now with that introduction, what I'd like to do is to ask us to turn to the Bible for a moment. And thank you for catching on to that, by the way.

I debated whether or not it would float, but evidently it did. The fifth chapter of the book of Ephesians, because this is what we're going to do. I'm going to give you three characteristics of the kind of love that we commit ourselves to when we get married. And then what I want to do is to give you five principles of marriage that I hope are going to help you and keep some of you from divorce and help some of you who are in a loveless marriage to get a reboot and a restart.

Three characteristics very quickly. And you know, as I was looking at this passage yesterday, it would be worthy of several messages. So I'm simply picking out three different characteristics of love and commenting on them. I'm going to begin at verse 25. Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.

I'll stop there. Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church. How did Jesus love us? He loved us, the Bible says, even when we were his enemies. Jesus knew what it was to love us without being loved back. And then he died for us. Most wives say to themselves, I don't expect my husband to die for me.

That's very unlikely. But it would sure be nice if he helped with the vacuuming. I thought I'd throw that in because I do help Rebecca with the vacuuming.

And I wanted to use some illustration that wouldn't convict me too severely. And so that's what the Bible says. Husbands, love your wives as Jesus loved it. And dear wife, you are in a loveless marriage. Just know that you are positioned to be able to experience the kind of love that Jesus had and for God to use your marriage as a laboratory where he is going to teach you about the love of God. You know, I think of Jesus there at the woman at the well. She had had five husbands.

The one that she was living with now was not her husband. And Jesus said to her that if you believe on me, you will find within you a well of water springing up even into everlasting life. If you become a worshiper of God, Jesus said, you'll be number one on God's list even though you've had so many marriage failures and the present man that you are now living with will not encourage you in your walk with God.

So I encourage you ladies, get involved in the church, get involved in the family of God, but don't give up even though life is very, very difficult. And the first thing that we have to do is to recognize here that we have a kind of love that actually enables us to love even in a loveless relationship. And you say, well, you know, that's unrealistic. Yes, it is unrealistic, but what if God poured His grace upon your life? What if God began to do in your own heart things that would be miraculous? The ability of God to work in the human heart should never be underestimated.

This will become clear in a few moments as to the steps that you should take. So first of all, we should be sacrificial in our giving. Secondly, we should be pure in our relationships, pure love. You'll notice that Jesus gave himself up for her that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word so that he might present the church to himself in splendor without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she may be holy and without blemish husbands. This is God's holy word. It's our responsibility to see to it that our wives are spiritually cleansed by the washing of water through the word of God. My opinion, one of the clearest references in the Bible to the fact that husbands have responsibility for spiritual leadership in the home.

And we've talked about that in previous messages. Oh, you say, well, that's an impossible thing. I'm not a Bible scholar. I'm not a Bible teacher. Can you read the word of God? Can you pray with your wife?

Can you encourage her as the spiritual leader? If you want a happy marriage, there has to be a pure kind of love where there are no attachments, sensual attachments to other people. But let me ask you, how can you experience the love of God and the pure love of God if the wife is reading romance novels and if the husband is into pornography?

It's not possible. We'll talk about that in a moment. So secondly, it should be a pure relationship. Third, you should honor your mate. You should honor your mate. Husbands, the Bible says in verse 31, therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.

This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. However, let each one of you love his wife as himself and let the wife see that she respects her husband. You are to leave and to cleave. I've had wives tell me my husband makes no major decision without, first of all, calling his mother. And he may or may not make reference to me, but he has to still be committed to his parents. Do you realize how that devalues your wife? Do you realize how it makes her feel when you have not left emotionally and spiritually your parents? Do you realize how she feels if she is not number one in your life experience and in your relationships, and she is above your family, she is above even your children, and above your vocation? This is what the Bible says in 1 Peter chapter 3, verse 7. It says, husbands, love your wives in an understanding way. And then it says, love her as one who is the weaker vessel, as heirs together of the grace of life that your prayers be not hindered. You say, oh, pastor, long ago I've given up on God and I've given up on prayer. Might it be that you are not dwelling with your wife in an understanding way, giving honor to her?

That's the phrase I missed in a moment, I think. Giving honor to her as an heir together of the grace of life. Is that the way in which you treat your wife? If not, the Bible says that that may be the reason why your prayers are hindered.

They're not answered. Would you honor her? Would you put her in a position where she knows she has your heart and she has your honor because you've let her know that she's number one here on Earth next to God? Well, now what I'd like to do is to give you five principles, five principles. Years ago, I used to do marriage counseling.

I don't anymore because my staff is much better at it than I am. But as I was thinking about this message yesterday afternoon, the Lord laid on my heart some practical principles that I think you should employ, no matter what kind of a marriage you are presently in. Would you open your heart to these principles? Those of you who are planning to be divorced, or you wished you were, or you think to yourself, I've married the wrong one.

Well, let me emphasize again that the one to whom you are married is now the one that God wants for you, and he has you where he wants you. And now the principles. First principle that I wrote down yesterday afternoon is the principle of God's glory, the principle of God's glory. If you are in pain in your marriage, the first question should not be, how do I get out of this pain? The first question should be, how do I glorify God in the midst of this difficult relationship that seems to be going nowhere?

That's question number one. And so you really begin by giving your marriage to God, and you desire his glory above your own happiness, above the own situation. You desire the glory of God first. Now, I always like to emphasize that there's a big difference between committing your marriage to God, giving it over to God, and praying.

I meet people all the time who say, well, you know what? I'm praying for him, or I'm praying for this situation. It's good to pray, and we want you to pray. And God brings us to desperation so that we do pray, but sometimes we can just pray without any faith. I've discovered in my own life that when I commit something to God, sometimes it is so difficult to commit it to him because now I know that I can no longer manipulate the situation. I'm recognizing that it is out of my hands, and it is very difficult to give it to God.

Why? Because I need faith to believe that it is in his hands and not my own. That's what it means to commit your marriage and yourself to God. Now, furthermore, what this means in practical terms is that now you're not going to live in retaliation. One of the great lessons that we have to learn is this, that when we are sinned against, we should not sin in return. I'm using here the illustration of David, who when Saul threw his spear at him, didn't say, oh, you threw that spear at me? Here's one I'm throwing back.

David didn't do that. He didn't retaliate. Don't retaliate.

Why? Vengeance is mine. I will recompense, says the Lord. If you've given your marriage over to God, it is now his responsibility because all that really matters is his glory. The end of the day, nothing else really matters. The principle of God's glory. Secondly, the principle of self-examination.

The principle of self-examination. We live in a culture that is filled with woundedness, woundology. And of course, we live in such a culture because of the brokenness of the home, because of abuse, sexual immorality, molestation.

The list is long. Now, as a result of that woundedness, which I recognize is very serious, people bring to their marriage all kinds of issues, all kinds of baggage that I mentioned before, that they aren't really willing to deal with. And the reason they aren't is because they reason in their mind, considering the way in which I was treated, I have every right to be angry. I have every right to be angry with my husband. I have every right to expect his complete affection. I have every right to be jealous.

And on and on it goes. And so as a result of those wounds, what people are really saying is, I want you to heal my wound. That's why I married you.

I want you to heal my wound, but if you touch it, if you touch it, I will scream and hold her and make this the most miserable marriage you have ever possibly imagined. You know, I know. The reason that I prayed about this message so much and gave it over to God is because I know human nature.

I know my own heart. There are things in our lives that we will never admit to unless God shows us. Until that time, we are fully justified. In fact, some of you for whom this particular point is intended, right now you're missing it because in your mind you're saying, I'm justified to be who I am.

Look at the way in which he acts. Look at the way in which she treats me. I have a right to be angry. I have a right to resentment. Look at the way in which life treated me. And I have entitlement considering what I'm through. Folks, if you don't see that in your life and deeply repent, your marriage is always going to be in difficulty.

There will always be obstacles to harmony. So the second principle is the principle of self-examination. The third is one of individual responsibility. Number three, individual responsibility. Now I spoke earlier about the fact that there are men who, there are wives who've come to me and have said, you know, my husband is into pornography. What do I do?

A couple of comments. First of all, be assured of this, that nobody who does not want to be fixed can be fixed. If your husband doesn't want to be fixed, most assuredly, you can't fix him and you can't even contribute to his fixing, if I can put it that way, because if he doesn't want to be fixed, he won't be. Now, one of the things, and now I'm speaking to the wives, though it could be the other way around, you understand that when I preach this, it could be flipped.

It could be the wife versus the husband, the husband versus the wife. But the simple fact is that everyone who is addicted has one agenda, and that is to this. He wants to continue on in the way in which he is living without interruption and with a minimal amount of problems and hassles. That's his great desire. Now, what you have to do is to help him to own his own stuff, to use an expression, because you can't own his stuff for him, nor should you cover for him. What you have to do is to help him to understand that unless there are positive changes and accountability, not just to you but to others, that you will expose him, that you will not allow this to go on in your home, particularly if it is such an addiction, if it is abuse. You are not going to lie for him. You're not going to cheat for him. Why?

Because you love him too much to contribute to his particular lifestyle. It must be confronted and exposed. And so what we must do as individuals is to realize that it is so important for us to take responsibility. Alcoholics, stop blaming your employer. Stop blaming your wife. Stop blaming your parents. Stop blaming whoever you're blaming, because I know something about the characteristics of such people. Stop blaming and take responsibility and say, I am responsible for my attitude, for my actions, what I am doing.

I resolve to own my stuff. Would you do that, please? Number four, this is critical, the principle of communication, the principle of communication. Years ago when I did marriage counseling, I used to say to the couple that would be in my office, now I want you to write down all of the faults and the problems of your mate. Here's a sheet of paper. Some people would say, one sheet of paper?

I need the whole notepad. Okay, just one pen? It might run out of ink. They would write and write and write. It would come like the pen of a mighty writer. Then I would say, all right, now I want you to do is to write your own faults.

Here's another sheet of paper. Oh, let's see. Well, you know, I guess I did lose my temper one time.

Yeah, it's true, I hit her, but not very hard. My friend, do you see the problem? How we can see other people's faults with 20-20 vision, and we ourselves can be filled with pride and anger and self-serving and all those things, and we are as blind as a brick on the wall to see it.

Communication. I find it incredible to think that there are some parents who think that the way in which they really should raise their families is to be supercritical of everybody. So you have a wife who's supercritical of her husband, a husband who's supercritical of his wife, and they even bring up the children that way constantly. These children are making mistakes they can't obey.

No matter what they do, it's wrong. My friend, do you realize how you're destroying any possibility of a relationship? Do you remember that story that I told you about a counselor, an attorney who said to a man who wanted to divorce his wife, he said, I hate her. He said, in order to make sure that you really hurt her because you want to hurt her, why don't you just for one month always say kind things, encourage her, thank her for whatever she does for you, and just don't say a single negative thing.

Then she's going to think that you really love her and so forth, so you're going to set her up and then you're going to really shove the sword in her heart by handing her divorce papers. He thought, well, you know, since I'm getting rid of her in a month anyway, I guess I can try the experiment. So all that he did was praise her, thank her for everything. In any area in which he wanted her to improve, he would always say, you know, this is really great. Instead of coming home and looking at what was in the frying pan and sarcastically suggesting that it was an unidentified frying object, he now spoke words of love and compassion. Well, you know the rest of the story, of course.

Within a month, they had a second honeymoon. Of course, the words that come out of our mouths. Now, something else that is so critical in the relationship is listening, listening. You must talk to each other and you must listen. I know I have problems with that. I thank all of us as men do to listen. One woman said to me, you know, my husband won't talk to me. He sits there like the great stone face.

Yeah, I understand. I wonder why he doesn't talk to you. I'll bet. Wait a moment, I'm the pastor. I venture to say that he probably talks to his friends. He probably talks to them very freely and tells about everything that's going on in his life and he gets home and he won't talk to his wife.

I have a suspicion as to why he doesn't because he fears being judged. He thinks to himself, she's going to shame me. She's going to blame me. She's going to ask what kind of a person I am to have these kinds of struggles. Wives, would you be able to handle it if your husband ever became so honest with you that he honestly told you the struggles that he's going through with lust and maybe pornography?

Could you handle it or would you just simply say, as one wife did, that I know about what kind of a pervert are you? Well, that really took care of that relationship. That was the last time he would ever talk to his wife about anything that was personal. If your husband begins to talk to you, you need to enter into his world and realize that this talk, no matter how hard it is, is really bringing about healing.

So you have to be at his side. I know a situation in which a wife had to confess to her husband that she was unfaithful to the relationship with another man. The Holy Spirit worked in her heart and she knew that she had to come clean on that, and she did.

And later on, I heard that they talked from evening all the way to 4 o'clock in the morning, and as she spilled out her heart to him, he in turn spilled out his heart to her. And they said later, it was the first time we really connected soul to soul, honesty in the relationship, in the communication. Number five, the principle of forgiveness. The principle of forgiveness, this is a huge topic and I've preached on it before in more detail.

One writer says, Couples don't fall out of love, but they fall out of repentance, the ability to forgive. Now there's a kind of reconciliation that forgiveness sometimes brings about, and then there's a kind of forgiveness where there is no reconciliation. I've spoken about that kind of forgiveness too. Because remember, whatever you don't forgive, you pass on. You're an angry mother, your children grow up angry.

You are a person who is violent in terms of the way in which you deal with issues, you pass that on. So what you need to do is to go through this matter of forgiveness. And now we're really at the heart of the gospel, aren't we? Because the gospel is a message of forgiveness.

The gospel says that Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sins. And if we receive him as savior, we are forgiven. We are accepted by God.

We become God's children, his daughters and his sons. And God now loves us unconditionally. God loves us unconditionally. That unconditional love is not given to everyone. It is given to those who are the sons and the daughters of God. And now we have the privilege of knowing that no matter how badly we mess up, no matter what kind of a past we've had, no matter what kind of mistakes we've made, no matter all of the scars that we bring to the relationship because of the way in which we lived before marriage, regardless of all that, now we have a Heavenly Father who goes on loving us, accepting us, caring for us all the way through. And that gives us the stability to be able to forgive others, to be able to move on in our relationships, and to grow in our love for one another. It is all there in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Which leads me to say that if you've never received Jesus Christ as your Savior, if you're listening to this and God is a stranger to you, He becomes your Father if you believe on Him and believe that the Lord Jesus Christ died for sinners and because of that death we can be saved, forgiven, and welcomed into heaven. There is a story I would like to tell you about a man whose name is John Barger. This is taken from the book Sacred Marriage.

I have no clue who this man is, but he says, My relatives grew up on the streets during the Depression, learning the fury and scorn that characterizes so many people in dire circumstances, drinking, seeing women, etc. He said, As a result, I swaggered through marriage for many years, ruling my wife Susan and my seven children with an iron hand, while citing scripture as justification for my privileges and authority. Years of dominating my wife and children left them habitually resentful, even fearful of me, unwilling to challenge me because of the fury it might provoke. I alienated my wife, my children, and lost their love. Home was not a pleasant place to be, either for me or for them.

Susan would have walked out of the marriage were it not for the fact that we had children. Then he says, A number of dramatic events occurred which wrought a profound change in my moral, psychological, and spiritual life. And this was just trials.

I mean, it was a stillborn baby. It was just one trial after another pounded on this man until he submitted himself to God. He said, In the midst of these many afflictions, I found that the only way I could learn to love and to cease being the cause of pain was to suffer, to endure, to strive every moment to repudiate my anger, resentment, my scorn, my jealousy, my lust, my pride, and dozens of other vices. I started admitting my faults and apologizing for them.

Now men get this. I quit defending myself when I was judged too harshly, for the important thing was not to be right or well thought of, but to love. Took three years of patience, listening, and growing in Susan's trust. Hundreds of hours talking until Susan's anger dissipated. She became loving, trusting, and caring. Well, the rest of the story is Susan had terminal cancer. He cared for her in the last months of her life. And later on, he said that he had the memory that he had experienced something that few couples do. True soul deep companionship.

God brought it about. It can't happen without brokenness. It can't happen unless we give up our right to always be right.

As long as we still have our right to be served and the feeling that our anger is fully justified considering all that has happened to us, you can't have that. Soul deep companionship comes only with honesty, with taking personal responsibility, and saying, with God's grace, this marriage can make it. Do you agree that with God's grace, the marriage can make it? Some of you should go home and have a long, honest talk, accepting each other, connecting your souls, and saying, by God's grace, we don't have to divorce. We don't have to live this way. Loveless relationship. We can have true companionship, which is a love-less relationship. We can have true companionship, which is, after all, exactly what God intended. Would you join me as we pray? Father, however imperfectly this message was preached, we pray today that you might work in the hearts of many couples, some of whom may be in a relationship that is frayed with anger and resentment and mistrust. Come to us, Lord Jesus, and show your glory in the midst of our marriages.

Overcome the bitterness. May there be forgiveness. May there be understanding.

May trust be rebuilt, we pray. And for those who have never accepted Christ as Savior, may they do so today, knowing that they too can know that they are loved, no matter what. And now, before I close this prayer, I'm talking to you, the congregation, and all who are listening. If God has talked to you, would you talk to him right now? Would you tell him what he has spoken to you about? And by his grace, would you agree to be obedient?

You tell him that right now. Help us, O Father. Come to us in our need. Show us our selfishness. May grace be poured out upon our marriages and our families. Abundant, matchless, radical grace. Because we need it. We ask in Jesus' name, amen.

Would you stand as we respond this morning? On today's Moody Church Hour, Dr. Erwin Lutzer spoke about playing for keeps, the last in a ten-part series on fighting for your family. We hope that you found help and encouragement in this wide-ranging look at the battle now raging for each of our families. Our current series can be yours on CD as our thank you for a gift of any amount to The Moody Church Hour. Just call us at 1-800-215-5001. Let us know you'd like to support Dr. Lutzer's ministry.

When you call, mention the series on fighting for your family. Call 1-800-215-5001 or write to us at The Moody Church, 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, Illinois, 60614. Online, go to moodyoffer.com. That's moodyoffer.com. Join us next week for another Moody Church Hour with Dr. Erwin Lutzer and the Congregation of Historic Moody Church in Chicago.