NRB Chronicles- THE COVENANT OF MARRIAGE STUDY GUIDE

Well, it's hard to believe it's 2021 and they actually had an NRB and it's in June this year, and so we're live on the convention floor. And as always, God is like a kid in the candy store for kingdom pursuits. How does God take your passion and use it to build a kingdom? And I actually have an old friend with us today, Dr. Mark Johnson, MD kind of doctor. There's a lot of different doctors floating around here at the NRB. But Dr. Johnson, you might recall, has got this wonderful understanding of covenant.

And so he's written a number of books along those lines. But what we want to talk about today is sort of in conjunction with his book, The Covenant of Marriage, we now have the Covenant of Marriage Study Guide, which is critical, really. And like for all of us who are married, I guess this is a huge deal. But for those people who have heard you for the first time, Mark, can you kind of take them into what that means, a covenant of marriage? OK, first, in our culture, we have little understanding of the historical understanding of what a covenant actually is. When somebody 2,000 years ago asked Jesus a question about marriage, he did an interesting thing instead of just answering the question. He said in the beginning, he went back to the original nature, structure and function of the marriage relationship.

And the implication of what he said was, if you really understood what this relationship is, and if you built this relationship accordingly, you wouldn't be asking me about divorce because you wouldn't want one. So God has a plan. And interestingly, covenant is not just a tie that binds two together, perhaps miserably.

A covenant is actually God's plan for our growth and development. We understand what this thing really is. We understand that it's a growth and transformation process for both of the people in the relationship so that they can actually learn to love consistently and well and really build a love for a lifetime relationship.

God's intent is that anybody can do that. The reality is that a lot of times we don't. And the reason we don't is because we think we already understand this thing. We think we know how to live. We think we understand ourselves. We think we understand how love works. Let me go find the right person in true love and all else will be fine in life. Meaning I'm going to dump all my stuff on this person and expect them to not only tolerate me, but celebrate me for being who I am, yet they're usually unwilling at the same time to be dumped upon by the other person's stuff. So if you get into a relationship where you're just trying to express yourself and expect everything to work out, well, just heads up, that's really not God's plan. It's supposed to be a refining and development process. It's like walking into a football field in 9th grade in practice and you're deciding you're fine right now and you'll just keep doing what you're doing and keep playing video games. You get on the field and you get your head beat in because you have no idea what you're doing. You're not developed.

You're not strong. You have no idea what's going on around you. And that's the way a lot of people do marriage and it kind of shows up in the results. So in a generation particularly now that seems to have lost more and more of the understanding of traditional marriage, and keeping in mind traditional marriage only drew from part of what a covenant actually is, let's go back to the real thing, take a look at what it's supposed to be, take a look at God's plan. When I first became a Christian in 1977, I went to a great church and every week this guy is telling this beautiful glowing picture of what the mature Christian life is supposed to look like in one aspect after another after another. And for about the first three or four months I'm really excited. I'm pumped because this is going to be my life.

But in a few months that began to become frustrating and then it actually got to be painful to walk in there every week. Because I'm watching what could and should have been. This is what I'm supposed to be. Okay, that's over there.

I'm over here. My life had changed some. I knew it had changed enough to assure me that I was actually a Christian, but it hadn't changed much. And I got a long, long way to go.

I have no idea how to get from here to there. Nothing about anything I'd heard gave me any understanding of how that change in me is supposed to take place. So God let me simmer in this really painful place for long enough to build a lifetime of motivation to grow and change and to help other people do exactly that. And one way to do that is through mentoring. Somebody came alongside me and helped me begin growing actually and changing and transforming my life. And a lot of that has to do with God. A lot of that has to do with our personal choices. So somebody helped me make those choices and see how this thing is supposed to work.

For the last 40 years I've been doing the same thing with other people. So with this study guide, you can see what it's supposed to look like. But the step-by-step part of that, the actual doable part of that, often we can't possibly see how that could happen. So we have to find somebody who does know how this happens. You take a person that wants to play football, you want to find a good football coach, and most good football coaches actually played football.

They know what that development process feels like from the inside and what they had to deal with and what they had to face up to and how they had to man up or woman up or whatever it is you're doing and whatever sport you're doing. The way we put that in the car business, because I've trained car salesmen for 40 years actually, was that conversation without demonstration is... no, yeah, conversation, excuse me, information without demonstration is mere conversation is how that actually would go. The point being that you can tell somebody all you want about how cool a Wrangler is with the top down and the doors off.

But if you go take the top off the car and the doors off and then go take them for a ride on a dirt road, they're going to feel like they've been in a Jeep. So similarly, if you want to get into a covenant marriage, how does this covenant actually feel when you try it on? That's the deal, right? You keep on a couple of things there.

One is you want to see a marriage in operation that you want to have your marriage look like. That's a part of it. The other part of that is there's so many voices in our culture saying that everything that God said is nuts.

And it feels that way. We've bought into so many ideas, we hear what God says to do, and we're like, no, that doesn't make any sense, or I don't want to do that, or that's not me, and so I'm not going to do that. I'm going to do something else. Well, that something else consistently won't work as well as what God says. The reason I can say that is after 40 years of experience of not only my own life and marriage, but also watching other people, kids, we have seven children, they're in their 30s, we've seen all kinds of outcomes. Not everybody does this very well. And what I have really been impressed by is when people aren't doing it well and it's falling apart, if you watch what they're doing, they are not following God's plan in significant ways. On the other hand, even people who don't really understand the plan or even know there is a plan, if they're really pretty much following what God says to do, because of tradition or family pictures they've seen or the way their parents, people do this stuff, it actually works. So what would be an example or maybe a story of, here's one of those principles that you saw a couple and this is kind of what happens. Okay, well I'll tell you, how about me?

I'll give you that one for sure. And I've seen a lot of couples, but this one I can tell you from the inside and the outside. Early in marriage, understand what a covenant is. A covenant is not two people walking beside each other. A covenant involves an exchange of identity between two people. In marriage it happens through sexual intercourse. We become what is called one flesh.

In churches we hear the term thrown around and have no idea what it means. What it does mean is you've got a part of what makes me, me going into my wife. My identity literally goes into her and remains when we enter covenant. On the wedding night, ideally, that's God's design. The wedding isn't the wedding. The wedding is having intercourse after the wedding.

Actually, that's where the covenant is actually transacted. Some of her goes into me, some of me goes into her. So, we actually become joined by a bond of shared identity. When she comes into me in that way, my net identity actually shifts. The married guy is not the same as the single guy. Okay, so if I look across the breakfast table and I see the other person, I think this is a contract.

It's just about behavioral. A contract is about getting more of something you want and giving up a little less of what you don't think you need as much. A covenant is about winning, basically. A covenant is about realizing that there's no more yours and mine. There's only ours. It's just us. There's no more you and me.

We're in this thing totally together. So, if you look at people in a contractual kind of mindset, they're going to be undercutting each other. They're going to be banging away at each other. They're going to be trying to neuter each other to a degree.

Why do they do that? I mean, you see couples all around us trying to really pick at each other and undermine each other. The reason is because they're trying to weaken each other because, in their minds, the game's about winning, about getting your way. If that's what you think, you're going to be beating your marriage up and beating your marriage partner up in a way that is totally non-constructive.

On the other hand, if you realize that her interests literally are your interests, then vice versa. My wife and I, we are very strong-willed and very opinionated. We get into a knock-down, drag-out fight.

What it looks like is a corporate board meeting. We're sitting there. We're laying out what we think. We're perhaps passionately explaining why we think it should go this way. Then we're talking through it. We're looking for deeper reasons. We're looking at the bigger picture. Pretty soon, very commonly, we'll switch sides. I'll understand what she's saying.

It's like, yeah, that's a good idea. So, it's not about being right. It's about getting it right.

It's not about getting my way. It's about finding the best course that takes both of our interests into full account. What we'll almost always end up with, Robby, is something that either one of us walked in with. But going through that process, we come up with a plan that's better than either one of us would have laid on the table. That synthesis is exactly what covenant's all about. It's about two people coming together and being greater than the sum of their parts. It's also about us watching the things in us that resist loving each other and resist being faithful to covenant. When we see those things in ourselves, we can either say, hey, that's just me, or we can realize that's not supposed to be me.

Those things all come about by beliefs we've bought into from our world that try to drag us away from God's plan. If we see that, and we realize that it's on us to change this thing, and we begin looking for God's truth about whatever the situation is, any conflict we're in, if we really take an honest look at ourselves, look at what we're trying to get or trying to do, and then match that with what God says, if we then go through the process of weeding out of ourselves those beliefs that are wrong, that are hurting us, that are hurting our wives, hurting our marriage, and latch onto God's truth and buy into that and start acting like that's true, an amazing thing happens. I've been in this thing for decades. In a marriage just like that, I have a marriage so good, I'm trying to write books to explain to people how this thing works.

Go ahead, go ahead. I'm tracking with you more than you know. Okay, so how we view the other person sitting across the breakfast table really is the key element. If we understand covenant, now covenant's got four parts. The first part of the covenant is the exchange of nature and identity and the new identity that we have. The second part of covenant is if we're joined together in that way, then logically every part of life is shared completely between us. Our families are shared.

I'm going to jump in right here because I've been dying to jump in for a while because it's interesting. I was studying this this morning and the reason why is I could see Dr. Johnson looking at me like, Why are you looking at your phone? And I'm not usually that rude person that's looking at my phone.

The reason I was looking at my phone is like, Oh my gosh! He's like taking Romans chapter 6 and delineating it for me as the way I studied this. If you listen to this verse and you think, Oh my goodness, it says, essentially here's King James, so it's just the one I look at. Know ye not that to whom you yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants are whom you obey, whether under sin or under death.

It must have moved from where it was. I'm sorry. Neither yield your members as instruments of unrighteousness under sin, but yield yourselves unto God as those that are alive from the dead. And your members are instruments of righteousness unto God, for sin shall have dominion over you.

Now why did I not get to where I want to? I'll cut all that out because there's the verse where I want to. Look at the, the, the cotton picking thing is moving while I'm trying to talk. Lord, we just pray right now for any force that is trying to wreak havoc, will you send it away and block its effect in your most precious name? Well, here's the verse, maybe I can map things out in my notes, but I didn't give the chapter. See, I speak after the manner of men because of the infirmity of your flesh. For you have yielded your members to uncleanness and inequity and inequity. Even so now yield your members servants to righteousness unto holiness. That last little part right there, where it says, yield your members servants to righteousness unto holiness. So to go back to what you were saying a minute ago, was that if I can get right with my wife, and right meaning right with God, right vertically, right?

We're in a right place. Then that takes us to a joint place of holiness. Yes. That is, yes. You are now standing, you're creating the holy ground, you're standing on by obedience. Right.

And that holiness, just by virtue of the Hebrew understanding of holiness, is literally a fire that is oxidizing, right? Yes. Of God in a reflection back to him of how holy he is.

Absolutely. And so as we get right with our wives together, to get back to what you were saying, then we're living out this chapter in Romans, which I know is in chapter six, so you're going to have to go look it up yourself. You're going to have to read chapter six, it's in there. And oh my goodness, you will get to this place of holiness.

And my experience with this in my own marriage, because I'm tracking with you completely, because I've been married for 34 years, and I understand what it's like to be in the wrong place. Right. Not righteousness. We all understand that. I know what it's like to be in wrongness.

We all understand. It leads to unholiness, okay? But when you're going to get into a right place with your wife, and that will lead to a place that burns. Yeah. I mean, that holiness is a fire.

Don't miss that. And to play on that imagery, God speaks of himself as a refining fire. And if you envision molten gold or silver in one of those crucibles that is glowing hot, and on top of that usually is some dark stuff floating around.

Oh yeah. And what those are are impurities, and the fire of God, and the crucible of an intimate relationship. We can play games with ourselves, and we think we're a lot better than we are until we're mixing it up nose to nose with somebody, and stuff comes out that you didn't know was in there. Okay, but those are the very things that are holding us back. That's not just me.

That's not something she's supposed to put up with. That's something I'm supposed to come before God with. And that step-by-step, day-by-day process of taking the little spoon, and getting rid of the junk, and leaving the more and more and more pure silver or gold, that's what God wants to see on a daily basis. Now, what that does in the long term is it makes us more and more and more loving, more and more and more wise, more and more and more mature. We now become capable of many other things. Now, what I've also seen in my life is God refining me through marriage, and equipping me now to do other things in life, and assume other responsibilities, and be faithful in other ways.

It's just like He's building me into the man I'm supposed to be to fulfill the many roles in family, church, society that I'm supposed to fulfill. There you go. Wow. As usual, we've run way out of time before we ran out of show, so that's a good problem to have. So we're going to have Dr. Johnson back on our live show coming up on King's Pursuit someday soon. As always, doctor, it's a pleasure. I mean, I just love what you're doing, and keep up the great work, sir. I love what you're doing. This is so much fun just to sit here and spend time with you, man. Always. God bless.