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Series:  Family For Dummies
1.  Marriage:  Our responsibility for oneness
Dennis Mullen  February 4, 2007                                                                               

            This past week, Ben Hackett celebrated his 90th birthday party.  His wife Louise turned 90 last year, and they will have their 69th anniversary in April.  Just a couple of miles down the country roads where I grew up lived Bill and Myrtle Mullet who when I was a kid celebrated their 75^th wedding anniversary!  Not many couples stay together for 69 or 75 years, and we don’t have to appeal to the high divorce rate to figure out why.  50, 60 or 75 years together - these are remarkable achievements and well worth celebrating.

        That’s why I want to talk about barriers to intimacy (or oneness).  If you’re not married or don’t plan to be, remember that building strong marriages takes the whole church family working together, and we all need to be pulling in the same direction. Our theme:  No One Left Behind.  With regard to marriage and family, this means “No one left behind to fight alone against the enemies of marriage and family.”  MHCC needs to be a place where you have friends who will reliably give you the help you need from God’s Word for your family – be it prayers, encouragement, counsel, or maybe a kick in the seat…

            (Very similar message last year; credit to Todd Wagner from Watermark Community Church in Dallas for the major points).

            Series:  Family for dummies; many know more about family than I do, but NO ONE knows more about being dumb. 

            Getting to oneness in marriage or other relationships means getting past barriers to oneness.  We need to understand what our culture and our sinful nature and the evil one throws in our path if we want to overcome those obstacles.  So let’s talk about barriers to oneness.

            1.  Changing culture.  There is very little in our culture today that encourages two people to make the difficult adjustments that will make oneness possible.  Todd Wagner makes the observation that there is more social pressure to go through with an engagement to get married than there is to stay married.  Once the date has been set and you’ve mailed those invitations and rented the tuxedos, and once someone has bought those horrendous bridesmaid dresses and Aunt Nelly has bought her non-refundable ticket from Idaho, and once you’ve been through a bridal shower or two and you’ve got all those gifts - then there is significant pressure to go through with it and get married.  There will be more of a scandal, more gossip about “What happened?” if you break your engagement to get into a covenant relationship that you shouldn’t get in than there will be if you break the covenant later. 

            It isn’t just social pressure and shifting attitudes about divorce that threaten marriage.  Other factors are much more important.  Comparison, for example.  If you lived on a farm in 1870 (as 80% of the U. S. population did), it’s likely that you met no more than a couple hundred people in a lifetime.  Now you see that many every day and (very importantly) you interact with thousands of attractive people in fantasy settings during your lifetime through television and movies.  It would be incredible if those interactions didn’t shape our expectations about the ideal man or woman or what I have a right to expect out of a normal relationship.

            Some other cultural shifts I’ll mention: In 1870 or 1930 or 1955 a great many people agreed on the roles that a husband and wife would play in the family.  I’m not saying they all had it right, just that there was a consensus in the culture.  The husband was responsible for providing a living and the wife for managing the home.  That has changed a great deal in our lifetime.  And think of the diversity of values and opinions and religious beliefs in our culture.  A boy and a girl can grow up right next door to each other but because of exposure to a huge expanse of perspectives via TV and the web and school may have totally different outlooks on life and family and God.   

            I’m not saying “let’s get back to the good-old-days.”  We can’t do that.  I’m saying “let’s understand the forces acting upon us and be better prepared to live for God and be a witness in THIS culture.”           

            2.  Contrasting backgrounds.  It was hard enough for Ma and Pa Ingalls to learn to live together in their little house…, and they had in their favor a shared background.  And if a couple marries today and they have the big things in common - agreement about God and what he expects, agreement about how to raise children and where to live, etc. - there are still some tough adjustments.  Let’s take a seemingly trivial example - how to do Christmas.

            How many of you open your gifts on Christmas Eve?  (That’s wrong!)

            Christmas Day?

            How many of you have everybody just tear in and open them all at once?  

            How many of you do it one at a time, and everybody oohs and ahhs and takes a picture and tries it on and the giver gives the history of the shopping experience? 

            Very likely, you never discussed those differences in pre-marital counseling and then when your first Christmas together approached you assumed that you would just do Christmas the “right” way, meaning the way you did it as a kid!  And that’s true with more serious holiday issues like where to spend them and who to visit and when.  It is said that you date the adult but you marry the child, meaning that even though your wife or husband may be mature in many ways, he or she is a product of the home of origin and has strong expectations about life and family and raising children and whether spaghetti sauce comes from a jar and whether you really have to wash the dishes every day.

            Much more significant are differing ideas about religion.  It is with good reason that God says in 2 Corinthians 6:14 - “Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?”  A yoke ties two animals together to pull a plow, but if they disagree about what direction to go, there is a lot of heartache.  I talk to people all the time who have had great difficulty finding a church they and their spouse agreed upon, and many of them when they got married considered themselves Christians (both of them) and it didn’t seem to matter much because neither was serious about their faith, but when they started getting serious they began to realize that each of them assumed that the right kind of church was exactly like the church they attended as a kid.  You date the adult but marry the child.

            3.  Superficial reasons for getting married.  Why do you suppose most people get married?  I always ask in pre-marital counseling, “Why do you think you should marry this person, and why now?”  The answer is always “Because I love him...”  Then I follow up with: “What do you mean by that?  How do you know?”  And usually the answer has something to do with feelings.  “I have never felt like this before.  She makes me feel wonderful.”  The problem is that if feelings are your reason for getting married, then feelings may well be your reason for getting divorced.  “I’ve never felt this way before and I never want to feel it again, so I’m getting out!”  Add in there that you’ve found someone else who makes you feel wonderful and the end of the story is inevitable. 

            Contrast a love based on feelings with 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 - “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.  Love never fails.”  There is nothing in there about feeling and everything about commitment.  The person who says “I love you because you make me feel wonderful” is really saying “I love myself, and you are useful to me because you make me feel wonderful.”  But when the feelings change or fade, so does the basis for love. 

            One other reason people get married is sex.  Now I say that knowing that Scripture teaches that sexual relations are for marriage, and yet I know that the majority of the world and a significant percentage of the church doesn’t believe or practice that.  The problem with sex before marriage even when you say that you’re going to get married someday is that you fast-forward through some important relationship building and you create an intimate bond with someone that you don’t know very well, and sooner or later you find yourself saying: “I had no idea you believed this, and that these are your values.”

            Single women, I want to say to you:  If you want to win a guy on your looks, you’ll lose him for the same reason.  There will be someone someday who is better looking or just new, and if you’re all about your appearance and snagging a guy that way, you’ll snag guys who don’t know how to be faithful and stick with you.

            4.  The Worldly Pattern.  It would be bad enough if we simply lacked knowledge of the Biblical pattern for marriage, but it is worse than that because there is a competing pattern that is offered to us constantly.  It’s the worldly pattern that says that marriage is a 50/50 performance relationship.  In this pattern, we accept each other based on performance.  I’ll do my part and she’ll do hers and everything will be great.  But meeting halfway fails because we’re terrible at judging distance.  When I’m in a bad mood, I tend to think that she hasn’t really done her part.  She hasn’t expressed love to me in the way according to my particular love language.  She hasn’t come through with the unspoken expectations of my heart.  Hey, isn’t the fact that I’m unhappy evidence enough for saying that she is falling short? 

            And then what happens?  Well if she isn’t doing her part, I’m sure not going to keep doing mine.  I’m going to punish her, get her attention by holding back and failing to do the things she expects of me until she comes back in line.

            After that happens, you see one of two things.  One: A marriage where one partner, out of fear of being abandoned, gives more and more and more while one learns to take and take and take.  Or two, a marriage where both people give less and less and both feel wronged and war begins.

             In contrast, Paul says:  Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her...  (Ephesians 5:25).  How does Christ love the church?  While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8)  There isn’t anything 50/50 about it.  When we get married, we promise to love each other through financial problems and through grief and through depression and through failure at work and through anger and through times of apathy and through dryness and through boredom and through disagreements both minor and major.  When two people are willing to do that, you have a Christian marriage.

            5.  Our tendency to be selfish and destructive in relationships.  All of us, when we live according to our sinful nature, are selfish.  And yet it surprises us when other people are selfish.  We hire someone and we go through a honeymoon period when we get along so well and they work hard and don’t ask for much, and then they start looking out for themselves or putting themselves above the business, and the relationship can start to deteriorate.  Kids are born and everyone delights in them because even though they are self-centered and dependent as infants, they aren’t really selfish, but they soon reach an age where self-will begins to assert itself and they start to disobey or make selfish demands or compete with their brothers and sisters, and parents who don’t understand this are shocked and disappointed and the relationship begins to deteriorate.  And we fall in love and get married and we go through a time of total devotion to each other, but then selfishness begins to appear on both sides and we start to ask: “What have I done?”  We live in a culture that encourages selfishness, one that teaches us that our highest aim ought to be to seek our own happiness and fulfillment.  We bring that into marriage, but it cannot be allowed to stay and make itself at home. 

            6.  Extramarital affairs - an attempt to escape reality and find fulfillment outside the marriage.  When you check out of the marriage emotionally and say to yourself, “I’ll endure it and make the best of it, but I’ll put my heart somewhere else”...that is a lack of faithfulness to your spouse. 

            Extramarital affairs take many shapes.  The activities affair, in which you overbook your life and deal with the disappointment in one another by living constantly on the run.  Or the materialism affair where you look for life in what money can buy and it becomes a way to numb the pain of a non-existent intimacy.  There is the work affair where you put every emotion you have into what happens at work in order to distract yourself from a failing relationship at home.  If we put the same effort into our work that we put into our marriages, we’d be fired.  There is the family affair where you stay attached to Mom or Dad and give them the primary place.  And then there is the love affair where you find someone else who will listen to you and affirm you and give you all the things you used to get from the person you married, and you begin to share with that person your deepest self.  And even if that never leads to physical intimacy, it is an affair.

            Look at the chart The Path to Rejection.  Every relationship has the potential to follow these steps downward, and I’m not talking only about marriages.  You see it at work, in politics, in the community, and you see it in a lot of unhealthy, dysfunctional churches too, because people who don’t work on relationships at home don’t work on them anywhere else.  There’s a romantic phase where things are great, and then a transition where people began to make adjustments based on human sinfulness, and then reality sets in, which we tolerate for awhile, and then comes retaliation where we began to lash out and talk past one another, and then finally rejection where we break off the marriage or end the friendship or leave the church, and we go start all over again.

            We have looked at six barriers to intimacy in relationships – Our changing culture, the contrasting backgrounds from which two people come, superficial and inadequate reasons people get married, the worldly pattern that is ever around us, our own selfishness, and extra-marital affairs which might involve giving our deepest heart to something or someone other than God and our spouse.  We could name others – a lack of problem-solving skills, or communication skills, etc. 

            But of all of these, I think that only ONE is primary.  It isn’t the culture.  We do live in a society that works against marriage, but people among us have great marriages and we are all called to pursue oneness in a way that testifies to the culture no matter what culture we find ourselves in.  People come from contrasting backgrounds to get married, but by God’s power they develop oneness.  As for superficial reasons, maybe we all look back on our reasons for getting married and see some superficial ones we’d hate to admit to our kids.

            I think the primary problem in marriages and all human relationships is #5, our own selfishness that we bring with us.  Self-centered pride, the desire to protect ourselves above all else is the original sin and maybe the sin behind every sin.  Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit after Satan appealed to their pride – “You will be like God.”  That’s the primary barrier to oneness, and the other problems grow out of it.

            That means that the way past the barriers is as simple as it is profound – to turn yourself completely over to the Lordship of Jesus Christ.  Love is the fruit of His Spirit, which produces joy, peace, patience…  When your life is completely submitted to him, here’s what you have:

            A love that will never let you down – which removes desperation and the need for self-protection in your relationships with others. 

            Complete acceptance by your heavenly Father – which gives you a security in life that you don’t have to try to draw out of others.  Even when people fail you or turn on you, God accepts you.

            Power within to live selflessly – we probably don’t take seriously enough the power of God within us, the Holy Spirit, His deposit upon us, his mark of ownership.  In our Thursday Home Bible Fellowship, we read about that power in Ephesians 1:18-20 where Paul says:  18 I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, 19 and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is like the working of his mighty strength, 20 which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms…

            The power that raised Christ from the dead is the power to live differently, the power to be better, the power to lay your selfishness aside and quit destroying the relationships you care about most.  It’s his power available to you today.

            Prayer

            Today he calls you to accept Jesus Christ as your Savior and Lord.  If you are ready to let go of your selfishness and make Him your ruler, come today and do it.

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