Miles Apart In The Same House Part 2

Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. Many marriages begin happily but quickly descend into conflict as husband and wife display the latent rebellion that has marked every human since Adam and Eve. Today, how we can apply God's solution to man's deepest problem and heal broken relationships. 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, families are in trouble when mom and dad don't get along. In today's message, you'll be telling us that relationship problems began a long time ago. You know, Dave, you're absolutely right, of course. Adam and Eve had no idea that when God gave them that son called Cain, that he would become a murderer.

Brokenness, murder, envy, that's the history of the human race. But yet at the same time, God leads his dear children. You know, my father was in a church in Canada many years ago, of course, and he saw my mother. He asked if he could walk her home. She worked about a half mile from the church on a farm. First date, he asks whether or not she would marry him. She said she'd have to think about it, but within three weeks, they were married.

They lived together for 77 years. Now, I tell that story because recently I gave an interview to Philip Miller entitled The Past, The Present, and The Future. I talked about my past because I wanted people to understand that there's really no connection between my upbringing and all the opportunities God has given me, and I do so, and I tell the story for his glory.

But I also talked about the present and what's going on in the future. For a gift of any amount, this interview can be yours. Here's what you do. Go to rtwoffer.com.

That's rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. Ask for the interview, the past, the present, and the future. And now let us listen once again to what happened to the first family. I took a book from someone else's shelf that he willingly gave me, and I read it, and I read about five or six different ways that you and I will not reveal who we really are.

All of the defense mechanisms. Because nobody is to really understand who we are. The image must always be better than the reality. And one of the ways that people do it is they blame others for what they've done. In fact, if you're an addict, you'll actually get to the point where you will not accept any responsibility for what you do.

It will be automatic. It is your employer's fault. It is your wife's fault. It's the kid's fault. It's the cat's fault. It's somebody else's fault. Because you have made yourself immune from blame. The very same can be said by those who have destroyed their conscience.

Sociopaths take no blame and no responsibility and see the evil that is in their own heart as belonging to someone else. It is not theirs. Well, we can already see this here. God comes to Adam and said, have you eaten of the tree? Where have I commanded you not to eat? Adam should have said, Lord, I did. I'm guilty.

That's not what he said. He said, well, the woman, the woman, Lord, the woman whom you gave me. Watch my hands now. Lord, it's this weak willed woman whom you gave me. She took of the tree and then, well, what's a man supposed to do when his wife misbehaves? He has to do it with her. I want you to know that the man blamed his wife even though there wasn't a chance in the world that he had married the wrong one.

Which is a reminder that you can even marry the right one and still have problems. So he says, it is the woman whom you gave me. So God says, oh, it's the woman? Fine, I'll go talk to the woman.

So he talks to the woman and what does she say? It's the serpent. It's the serpent, Lord, the serpent.

So the man blamed the woman, the woman blamed the serpent and the serpent didn't have a leg to stand on. And that's the story of the human race up until now. We refuse responsibility. We are very anxious to protect ourselves. We tweak everything. We are basically dishonest and what we want to do is to make sure that we look better than we are.

All of us do that. But when we hide from our mates and when we hide within those walls, we can neither love nor be loved by someone else. Now what does God say in the midst of this? The Lord already begins to give a solution. He says in verse 15, I will put enmity, he's speaking to the serpent, I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring. He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel. This is the earliest, the earliest promise of the gospel, that there would be the seed of the woman, namely Jesus. And Satan would try to destroy Jesus and he would, the best that he could do is to nip Jesus Christ's heel. It would not be a mortal wound, it would be a very temporal wound. But Jesus in turn, the scripture says, is going to crush the head of the serpent.

You've heard me describe this before, but just imagine taking a very sharp heel and you come across a serpent and you take his head and you grind it like this into the pavement. That's what Jesus is going to do to the serpent. And Jesus is going to win a victory over the devil. Praise God. Isn't that wonderful? Now you say, well that's wonderful, but that took thousands of years to be fulfilled.

Meanwhile, what are they going to do? Are Adam and Eve just going to have to wait? No, God says I have something for you right now that is going to help you.

I have something for you in anticipation of the fact that Christ is coming. You'll notice it says in verse 21, and the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skin and clothed them. God says no longer do you need to wear fig leaves because fig leaves don't cover enough.

What you need is clothes to put on so that your shame is hidden and it's covered. And that's what Jesus Christ does for us. He takes the shame that you and I experience and he covers that shame. He takes the messy trails of our life and he brings a snowfall to cover the trails and the ugly ruts that show the times that we have fallen into the ditch.

He cleanses it and covers it. When Jesus died on the cross, the scripture says that he despised shame. In other words, what he said is I'm going to shame shame.

And I love what Rodney Clapp has written. Does shame bind us? Jesus was bound. Does shame destroy our reputation? He is despised and rejected of men. Does shame reduce us to silence? He is led as a lamb to the slaughter and as a sheep before his shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth. Does shame expose our apparent weakness?

Well, they said of him, he saved others, but himself he cannot save. Does shame lead to abandonment? He said, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Does shame diminish us? He was crucified naked and exposed for gawkers to see. Jesus comes and rectifies our relationship with God and he covers the shame. The animals of the skins of the animals that Jesus, that God used in the Old Testament clearly, clearly he must have killed animals to cover Adam and Eve and those animals by their death, by the blood that was shed and by the death that they died prefigured the coming of Jesus who would cover our sin so we could be free from shame. One day I was riding in a car with a friend of mine who had a series of adulterous relationships, ruined his family.

Tragic story because he was so gifted, so gifted and in many ways so blessed. But I remember as we were riding along, he put it on the stereo of his car, the song Calvary Covers It All. My sin with its guilt and shame, my guilt and despair, Jesus took on him there.

Calvary covers it all. You say, well what does this do though in our relationships? I mean that's fine for our relationship with God to be restored, but what about my relationship with my wife? Like one man says, if she knew who I really was she'd leave me. I'd like to suggest that it is the forgiveness of God that enables us now, that gives us the strength and the enablement to create an environment, to create an environment where sharing, honest sharing can take place.

Rodney Clapp again says the cross creates a community of people who are no longer afraid of being defined and destroyed by shame and can admit their failures and allow their neediness. The names are Tim and Anne, the names are fictitious, but the story isn't. Both of them raised in Christian homes, married one another, every indication of a happy marriage, but Anne became bored with a housework and was spending a lot of time watching television, watching the soaps on TV. She began to think to herself, you know there's a whole world out there that I've never experienced and so in order to experience it and to get rid of the boredom she had an affair. Now suddenly she was faced with a tremendous difficulty of what do you do now? How do you live the lie?

How do you position yourself in such a way that your mate will not find out? How do you go in to church on Sunday and sing the songs of Zion? How do you pray with your children all the while knowing that you have betrayed your husband as her conscience began to trouble her? Her husband knew that something was wrong obviously but he didn't know what it was. They attended a meeting where people were coming forward in prayer to pray and to commit and to and to seek God together as couples and they went home and they got on their knees and before they prayed Tim said to Anne, Anne I know that there is something and I want you to know that I have forgiven you in advance no matter what it is.

That's grace. There you have the cross of Jesus Christ applied to a human relationship that no matter what you share I choose to forgive you even before you tell me what's there. Well Tim began to share his problems as well and they talked all night. Six years later I wrote up their story and they said that Jesus is the best marriage counselor because in his presence we can be honest, we can be open, and we can share. All of the secrets can be revealed and love can finally flow.

And then another story more recent. I spent an hour some time ago with a couple where the man was a bisexual and he was involved in other kinds of relationships with other men. I can't even begin to tell you the pain of trying to put a marriage like that together and you know of course that it's one thing to forgive it's another thing to be reconciled. And yet I saw in that relationship the love and the forgiveness of Christ and the and the genuine desire to say whatever it takes whatever it takes God's grace will help us. If he can forgive the shame we can forgive one another and marriages can be restored. I believe that the restoration of a failed marriage is as great a miracle as the raising of the dead causing the stone deaf to be able to hear and causing the blind to be able to see because the human heart is so filled with determination and self-will and self-protection and self-justification who can possibly overcome all that in our sinful hearts except God by his word and by the spirit.

There are some of you couples who ought to go home you ought to get on your knees in the presence of God and talk talk to God and talk to one another. Remember that book that was popular a number of years ago I think it was by Robert Fulcrum entitled all that I ever needed to know I learned in kindergarten. He says that when they were kids they used to play in the leaves and there were huge piles of leaves and he says there was one kid who always hid in such a way that nobody could ever find him and he said we explained to him there's something about hiding there's something about being found you're not supposed to hide in such a way that nobody will ever find you. He said now as an adult he was looking out of the window one October and noticed these huge piles of leaves and there was one kid who always hid in such a way that nobody could ever find him.

So he says since the pile of leaves was close to the window he leaned out and shouted kid get found and the kid ran out of the leaves started to cry and ran all the way home. Now you and I are together one on one nobody else is here except God who knows who the real you is and I'm asking you telling you get found get found. Let's pray. Father we pray for those relationships that are frayed some of them between husband and wife some of them between parents and children and the parents have to humble themselves and go to their child and ask forgiveness. We think father of how shame binds us how fear binds us how self-protection binds us. God we are just such deceptive sinners come to us today Lord come to the men who have been listening to the husbands to the fathers come to the wives and to the mothers and we pray today that these walls that have been so carefully dug that they might be demolished in your blessed and holy presence. Now you talk to God if God has talked to you you talk to him right now. Father we're asking that the dead be raised that the blind see and the deaf hear we're asking for the change and transformation of the human heart something over which we have absolutely no control.

You have just pushed us to a place of utter total dependence upon what you can do and not what we can do. Do in us God that which is well pleasing in your sight we pray in Jesus name amen amen. Well my friend this is Pastor Lutzer and of course God sees us behind our pile of leaves he sees the way in which we want to hide from others and even hide from ourselves and yes there is healing when we come to him and get found. I'm so glad that my parents came to saving faith in Jesus Christ my father was converted already when he was in Russia actually the Ukraine I should say my mother came to saving faith in a small church in Canada. Recently I gave my testimony but also talked about the present the changes that I have seen in society in the last 50 years.

I've talked about the future in an interview by Pastor Philip Miller entitled the past the present and the future. I think that you will find this interview encouraging. I gave the interview to give glory to God for all that he has accomplished in my life because of the prayers of my parents and because of the prayers of my wife and others. Here's what you do for a gift of any amount you can go to RTWOffer.com that's RTWOffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. My parents experienced a great deal of suffering in their past but they were able to put that behind them they prayed regularly and it's a story actually that should inspire all parents.

Ask for the interview the past the present and the future either on CD or DVD. I think it will be a tremendous blessing in your own walk with God and for your own family. It's time again for you to ask Pastor Lutzer a question about the Bible or the Christian life. I think many listeners will identify with the concern of Kelly who has a family problem. She writes my mother-in-law and sister-in-law are highly narcissistic. My husband and I have struggled to love them while also making them accountable so as to not condone their actions.

This has been difficult on our marriage and I recognize we both need help forgiving them. I sympathize with them to some degree since I was a victim of verbal abuse within my family and sometimes exhibit some of the same narcissistic characteristics. I'm seeking a Christian perspective on this topic.

I'd appreciate any information you could provide. Kelly I want you to know that I found your question very very interesting. It's intriguing because it deals with human nature first of all narcissism. Let me simply say that narcissistic people basically receive all information and they want answers to two questions. Number one how does this make me look and how does this make me feel? They are very self-centered, very self-focused, self-absorbed.

Everything has to do with them. So narcissistic people are very difficult to live with and I can understand that when your mother-in-law and the sister-in-law are narcissistic and they want to control your marriage which narcissistic people want to do because remember they always have to be the center of the attention and control is one of their means to get it. I'm glad that you and your husband have set down some boundaries and I hope that you stick to those because in-laws can destroy good marriages. Secondly I'm interested in the fact that you yourself admit to narcissism. That's a tremendous step forward. Most narcissistic people are so defensive that if you point out their narcissism they've got a hundred reasons why they don't have a problem but other people do. So I hope that you make progress and that progress can be made as you begin to be less self-defensive, more willing to admit that you are wrong, to confess what you see in your heart, and to give your husband the privilege of helping you along.

And by the way he may struggle with his problems too so both of you need to help each other. I'm optimistic that you are making progress Kelly. Thanks for letting us know your question and God bless you. Thanks for listening. For Dr. Erwin Lutzer, this is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.