The Goal Is Holiness, Not Happiness Part 1

Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. There's good evidence in the Bible that marriage is more about developing character than ensuring a lifetime of bliss. When the rough spots come, and they will, what are couples to take from those experiences?

Today, a frank dose of married reality. From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Pastor Lutzer, some people see marriage as a ticket to an endless honeymoon. Tell us why you preached today's message. The goal is holiness, not happiness. Dave, I wish that all of us understood that indeed the goal is holiness and not happiness. The simple fact is, I've heard someone say that we always marry the wrong one. In other words, we look around and we think, should I have married this person?

Because you have two sinners coming together in a commitment that sometimes is strained, but how desperately we need the message that we're going to be turning to in just a moment. Today is the last day that we're offering the book entitled When a Nation Forgets God, the Seven Lessons We Must Learn from Nazi Germany. Some of the lessons have to do with the economy, law, the role of law, that which is legal might also be evil, propaganda. And especially if you're a parent, very important, a chapter on how the state reared children in Nazi Germany and actually cut off the responsibilities and the obligation of parents. Great lessons, lessons that we must learn if we don't want to go in the same direction. The book is entitled When a Nation Forgets God, the Seven Lessons We Must Learn from Nazi Germany.

For a gift of any amount, this book can be yours. Here's what you do. Go to rtwoffer.com.

That's rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. Now let's go to the pulpit of Moody Church where we learn again what marriage is really all about. Well from time to time, I share either letters or comments with you.

And by the way, last week's message did receive, I did receive emails and comments that are very encouraging of couples who are in great need, who are finding hope. But how do you like this? I feel like a thing. Is my conversation so unintelligible that I'm not worth talking to? I could be opposed to the ground for all he bothers to communicate with me. I feel as if I don't know my husband.

He's been hiding from me for years. Some time ago a woman told me, she says, my husband is as oppressive as a guard at Auschwitz. This past week I spent three and a half hours with a friend of mine whose wife left him. I spent time encouraging him, praying with him, and what happened in his side of the story is simply this, that even though he tried to be her servant, he was not able to create for her the perfect world that she really wanted. Furthermore, because of some abuse that she had endured in previous relationships, she not only didn't want to be involved in any conflict, but avoided it emotionally and then physically.

She decided to leave. You see, in a marriage like that, any risk of getting onto something that is touchy or controversial is impossible because you can't take that risk if someone does not want to work through conflict. And today I want to explode the most common myth that there is about marriage. And the most common myth is simply this, that good marriages don't have conflict. If I had married the right one, why indeed we wouldn't be having fights and arguments, we'd be getting along just perfectly. So because I married the wrong one, where is the escape hatch? I'm here to tell you that almost all marriages have conflict. The difference between fulfilling marriages and unfulfilling ones are how they relate to conflict and how they work out their differences.

You can be here today and you can hate your mate. And if you listen carefully, God will teach you how to love and you too can have a fulfilling marriage if you meet certain requirements that we'll get into in just a moment. But you see, we expect too much from marriage.

We have our sights fired to high. There are people who expect marriage to do what only God is able to do. And so here's a scenario. Here's a woman who marries a klutz. It's a good word, I checked it in the dictionary. He's self-absorbed. He can't feel anything for anybody else, but he feels his own hurt very deeply. But he is a Christian, at least he attends church and has a good job, so she marries him. She marries an unhappy, self-centered man and she expects this self-centered man of all things to make her happy. How can an unhappy man make you happy?

He's failing at it, isn't he? Then you have a man who marries a flighty woman. She's the life of the party. Everybody likes her. She is oftentimes the object of attention. And furthermore, she's pretty. And because he can see a lot better than he can think, he decides that he's going to marry her.

But he hadn't counted on something. Because her father left her when she was a teenager, she had a lot of unacknowledged anger that she had never dealt with. And he gets married and now he discovers that she has two Pullman freight cars full of baggage. And he doesn't know how to handle it. And pretty soon the very things that drove him to her, attracted him to her, are the very things now that he just can't stand. She spends too much.

She's not focused. She's everything that he doesn't want. She, quote, isn't the woman he married.

We'll talk about that in just a moment. Well, I'm here today to give you hope. No matter how disappointed you have been in your marriage, no matter how many disappointments and how unsatisfying and mismatched you are, there is hope. When a Britisher was told that there are many divorces in America because of incompatibility, I'm told that he was shocked. He said I thought that incompatibility was the purpose of marriage. I mean, why would anyone want to get married if you were not interested in incompatibility? That's the whole point of marriage is incompatibility. And God is going to use marriage to work through those incompatibilities to do his work.

You stay tuned. But in order for this to happen, I think that there are at least five assumptions that I need to make en route to a fulfilled marriage. Five assumptions, and listen to these very carefully. First of all, it does take two of you.

It does take two of you. You can't work on a marriage too well alone. You can respond in a godly way, but you can't really work on a marriage alone. Some of you say, well, you know, that ends it there right now.

He's not interested in counseling. She can't change. So, you know, we're out of here. We're checking out of this sermon right now.

My dear friend, you understand why that attitude exists, don't you? The man marries a woman who is judgmental. She's judging everything. She's a perfectionist. He can never please her. And so he just shuts down.

He just shuts down because of her judgmentalism. There was a man who was on a plane, a Christian man sitting next to a non-Christian, and the Christian wanted to witness to him and said, now he said, are you ready for judgment day? And the man said, what is it?

When is it? And he said, well, it could be very soon or it could be much later. And the guy said, well, when you find out those dates, you let me know because I'm sure that my wife wants to attend both times. He's not going to open up if he confesses to you a struggle with pornography and you freak out over it. He's not going to open up. He's going to clam up and become what one woman said about her husband, the great stone face. There are some marriages in which there is so much contempt and so much hostility that when he says blue, she says green. When he says red, she says brown. You can predict it.

My dear friend, you are never going to have a fulfilled marriage, the both of you, unless both of you decide right now we are no longer going to be adversaries, we are going to become allies. We're going to be on the same page and we're going to start to work this out. It does take two of you. Second assumption is that you have to go through pain to get there. You have to go through pain to get there.

There may be some exceptions, but almost always you have to go through pain. You know what marriage is? Marriage is looking into a full length mirror that shows you your sin. That's what marriage does.

Takes two sinful, selfish people, puts them together in intimacy and says, get along. And it's not easy. Because of my Canadian background, I love to drink tea. As a matter of fact, I didn't have coffee this morning. I had a cup of tea at home and also a cup of tea here at the church. There's a woman here, by the way, who loves to bring me boxes of tea.

That's her ministry. And I thank God for that because I've always got lots of tea. Well, you know, when I looked at those tea bags this morning, you know, little white fluffy bags with a little string. You really don't know exactly what's in them until you put them in hot water. And when you put them in hot water, you discover the kind of tea that it is. And you've got all this brown stuff swirling around. And there's nothing, by the way, now in the water that wasn't in the tea bag at the beginning, is there? Now, here's the thing.

That little tea bag, that sweet little package, that represents the single life. And nobody really knows what's inside because you've never had an opportunity to demonstrate what is inside. The moment you say, I do, you're in hot water. All right? You're in hot water. And suddenly, everything begins to come out. She makes me so mad, the man says.

Now, wait a moment. Where's all that anger coming from? There's nothing that she can draw out of you that isn't already there. You know the dirty water? That was in that sweet little tea bag that you fooled her with before you were married. But it's all there. You can't get there from here to there without facing yourself and facing pain.

Which leads to a third assumption. We need to have a different perspective on marriage. Some of our staff this week introduced me to the book Sacred Marriage by Gary Thomas. An excellent book, by the way. But Gary Thomas says in his book that the real purpose of marriage isn't happiness.

You thought that you were going to be happy? Well, you know, the real purpose from God's standpoint isn't happiness. It is holiness. And then he quotes someone as saying this, marriage is the merciless revealer. The great white searchlight turned on in the darkest places of human nature. And it is there in the searchlight that our sin is revealed so that God can work on it.

And he's got a lot to work on, doesn't he? So easy for us to see other people's sin. It's somebody else's sin. I heard a priest saying, you know, in the Catholic tradition, they have confession. And the priest said, you know, a woman came to me and she started to just say all the things about what her husband did to her and so forth. And he stopped her and says, whose sins are you here to confess?

So what God is going to do is to work on us. Oh, you say, I knew right from the beginning that this was a bad marriage. I didn't love her right from the beginning.

Couple of comments. First of all, what you're confessing to is that you're not really a Christian because the Bible says you're supposed to love your wife. Secondly, could I be blunt here? You're an idiot to marry somebody you don't marry. And thirdly, it has nothing to do with that.

It has to do with this question. How do you keep your covenant in the presence of a holy God who was there to observe your vows? So with that background, we now go to number three. Number three, yes, a different perspective. Number four, you must open up lines of communication. Men, you have to start to talk.

You great stone faces out there, you're going to have to talk. And wives, you're going to have to accept your husband and not be judgmental against him so that he can talk and feel as if he is heard. And wives should be able to talk and communicate and the husband actually listen. Without communication, you can't have a fulfilled marriage. You can have two people in the same house, under the same roof, and be miles apart emotionally and spiritually.

You're going to have to face the pain. Talking to a man in Christian ministry of all things. This is not some person who's distantly related to the Christian message.

He's a Christian minister. Goes home, takes care of the kids, makes the evening meal. What is your wife doing? She's on the computer from about seven in the evening to 11 at night in a chat room. And that's her life, is the chat room.

My dear friend, if you want to have a fulfilled marriage, you're going to have to say no to the silliness of chat rooms. And you're going to have to begin to wake up and minister and connect with the mate God gave you. A hundred different stories.

And then you think you've heard them all and then suddenly somebody comes up with another one. So what you need to do is to open the lines of communication. Is your marriage a priority or isn't it? If the chat room is more important than your husband, what are you expecting out of marriage? And where do you think that is leading you, by the way?

And man, if you're on the computer watching all kinds of stuff, how is that contributing to nourishing your wife? Are you serious about making a go of it or aren't you? Are you just playing a game? Are you going to counseling so that you can say, well, you know, we tried counseling and it doesn't work. Oh, counseling.

Yeah, we were there. We tried counseling. And now there's an excuse for you to leave. And God says, no. There's a fifth assumption and that is that you have to learn the unfairness, the unfairness of forgiveness. There's something about forgiveness that is just so unfair. And that's what makes us so difficult to be good forgivers. It was so unfair that Jesus was credited with our sin when he was sinless.

That was so unfair. But it had to be done so that you and I are forgiven. And some of you have been treated unfairly. But what you need to do is to realize that there is forgiveness. Now if there's been infidelity, of course. There's a whole process there where trust has to be developed and so forth. And an excellent book on that has been written by someone who counsels in this area. But the point is that we're not giving a simple solution. Well, no matter what he does, just forgive.

No, no, no. There are other things to be said. But forgiveness must be there or your fulfillment will not happen.

Now all that by way of introduction. Now what I'd like to do is to suggest that there are rewards that we miss when we don't work through our differences and find fulfillment in our marriage. There are rewards that we miss. And for this let's take our Bibles and turn to the fifth chapter of the book of Ephesians, a passage that is very unpopular today because we have bought into the world's values and we're so sensitive about what the world says about the role of women. No wonder our marriages are in trouble because we have not looked at God's Word and followed it. And the first lesson that we learn is the lesson of submission, the lesson of submission. And if you're here today and you're new or you're visiting, I just want to explain to you something about Christians. Christians love the word submit. They love it. And they love it because Jesus Christ submitted to the Father.

Where would we be today if Jesus did not submit to the Father? They love it because the Bible says all of us are to submit to Christ. They love it because the Bible says that in the church young men should submit to those who are in leadership, to the older elders. We love the word submit and it lies at the heart of Christian order and Christian faith.

So with that background, we look here at verse 22 of chapter 5. Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body and is himself its savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so wives should submit in everything to their husbands. And there are some wives who are present who are saying, I don't like that. The reason they're saying they don't like that is because of fear of what their husband might do or has done to them.

So I need to clarify. We are not saying here that you should ever disagree with your husband. If you have a wise husband, he's going to consult you about everything.

Rebecca has kept me from so many foolish decisions that I couldn't even enumerate them. But at the same time, it therefore does not mean that a wife agrees with her husband all the time. It doesn't mean that the will of Christ is subservient to the will of her husband. Obedience to Christ trumps obedience to the husband. We understand that. If you're being abused, well then run for help.

Don't walk, get help. But what this means is, is that the disposition of the wife should be to submit to her husband. And unless there are some extenuating circumstances, she should submit and not merely out of duty, but her disposition should be one to submit and to support him. The Bible says in the last part of verse 33, see that she respects her husband. That's a separate sermon. Husbands need respect. Sorry ladies, but it's biblical.

They need respect. All right, story. Here's a woman whose marriage is in trouble.

It's breaking apart. And I said to her, are you submissive to your husband in the matter of spending? Because I had a hunch that she wasn't.

And I remember a friend saying to me, you know, my wife likes to go shopping, but she never looks at the decimal points. Well, you know, uh, do I need to repeat that for some of you? So I said, are you submissive? Oh, she said, why should I be?

He bought a new car for himself and if he buys a new car for himself, well then why can't I buy ABCDEF even if he doesn't like it? And that woman has the audacity to pray to God to help her marriage. I believe that there are so many angels in heaven whose full time job is to take these kinds of prayers and throw them in the wastebasket where they belong. God says to himself, why should I answer her prayer for her marriage when she ought to get on her knees and say, I am a rebellious, disobedient wife. Her husband wasn't being unreasonable. She should have repented of her sin. Then she could begin to say, now God helped my marriage. Well, my friend, this is pastor Lutzer. In the example I gave, of course, I spoke about the wife who I felt should get on her knees, but let me emphasize that oftentimes it is the husband and truth be told, it should be both of them.

It's been my experience that oftentimes marriage problems indeed both sides have responsibility and both sides have guilt. What we need to do is never answer evil with evil. But you know, that also is true for a nation. I've written a book entitled When a Nation Forgets God, Seven Lessons We Must Learn from Nazi Germany, and I need to tell you that this is the last day that this resource is being offered. If I might remind you of some of the chapter titles, It's Always the Economy, then I speak about the role of law, that which is legal might also be evil, how propaganda can change a nation, and parents.

I emphasize that not the state, but parents are responsible for their education and I discuss how Hitler really educated the youth in Germany. For a gift of any amount, this book can be yours. It's entitled When a Nation Forgets God, Seven Lessons We Must Learn from Nazi Germany.

Here's what you do. Go to RTWOffer.com. That's RTWOffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. That's 1-888-218-9337. The last day we are making this resource available.

RTWOffer.com or 1-888-218-9337. You can write to us at Running to Win, 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, Illinois 60614. Running to Win is all about helping you understand God's roadmap for your race of life. Those who think marriage is a magic door to happiness should note that half of all marriages fail today. God intended marriage to develop character and a hard heart can break the bonds between a couple if one will not repent. Next time on Running to Win, a look at the many rewards we can miss if we let our marriages fail. This is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.