Rick Warren - Fighting for an Awesome Marriage—Part Four

Hello everyone, and welcome to Pastor Rick's Daily Hope, the

Bible teaching ministry that's here to encourage and inspire you

every day. And today we're continuing our series called Awesome Relationships.

In it, Rick Warren shares practical ways to help you

take your relationships with family, friends, co workers, and even

God from ordinary to extraordinary. And this is a series

you don't want to miss. And now let's go to

Rick for the final part of a message called fighting

for an Awesome Marriage.

We have it in our family what we call the

five second rule, which is called love my idea for

five seconds, because when one of us has an idea

for a change, usually the other one is automatically going

to why why And so rather than immediately moving in

the judgmental mode, we say, Okay, I'm gonna share an

idea for five.

Seconds that has been revolutionary in our relationship.

I'll save your marriage.

Go home.

That's all you need. So the other thing about change

is is it does the antidote to boredom. You've got

to keep your marriage fun and and so you've got

to work at creativity for the opposite of the boredom.

I remember one time k knows that I like hot sauces.

I collect hot sauces. I collect. I have over three

hundred and fifty different bottles of hot sauce from around

the world. I don't just believe in hell, I eat it, okay, and.

Then he burps it, and so what that?

What'd you say? I didn't know what you said. That

was just should have that one under there. I just

that's getting edited before one o'clock. Whatever else. I don't know.

But one time I just creativity Kane, I like hot sauce.

She walks in and flops down a couple of airplane tickets.

I go, what's that? She goes, I'm taking you this

weekend to Albuquerque. I said, what in the world did

an Albuquerque said? The International Hot Sauce Convention. What a woman.

I want to tell you that is a godly woman

right there.

Okay, yeah, okay, I'll tell you later what I said.

In this season of change, then adjust. But then sometimes

change is negative because you look at each other and

you go, you're never gonna change, are you? You know,

you get in those stuck places and you realize you

both you're so different. When Rick has said through these

years that we are different. It's not just to make

this nice little point in a marriage sermon. Now we

are so so if there's a category of so different,

we fall into that so different category. We are over

the top on that. I mean, he is playful, I'm serious.

He's an extrovert. I'm an introvert. He is tig or. Man,

I'm having trouble in this service talking. He's tigger. I'm

e or you hate it. Yeah, He's impulsive and spontaneous.

I'm a planner. He's a big picture. I'm detail. I mean,

you know, I see these all these services. I keep

seeing these little things on the carpet, little threads, and

I'm like, I got to get those threads off the

carpet because I'm so detailed. Right, Yeah, he's like, what

are you talking about it? I don't even see what

you mean. So, and it's funny until you get down

to real life situations where you see things differently, and

you've got to come up with some sort of a

how do you get along when you're stop?

I mean we've been married now a long time.

How many years?

Thirty nine years? I mean just this week we were

looking at something we were changing in our house and

she goes, I think that's too big, and I'm going

I think that's too small. I think that's too well,

look at it from this angle. We walk over here

from the living room, look at it from this angle,

and she goes, well, we just see things differently. I go, well,

that's never happened. And there are things is going to

be constantly changing in your marriage, but there's some stuff

that's not going to change. What's not going to change

is your personality. So you got to decide are you

just going to accept that and love it? Are you

do you have to force them to change before you

love them.

I will confess that I have opted for the force

him to change amen approach many times. It's the honest truth.

I'm being really real with you. I can just give

you an example for years. I mean well, first of all,

he grew up in the country and they never locked doors.

And I grew up in the city.

A better man an outside door and I never even

closed it. Yeah, I'd sleep with open it.

I'm aware of that, yes, so, and that that thought

always bothered in our marriage because we would get into

bed at night and I would say to him, as

we're drifting off to sleep, Did you lock the doors?

And he would say, no, why are you asking me

right now? Why didn't you ask me fifteen minutes ago?

And I'm like, because we weren't in bed fifteen minutes ago.

You're supposed to lock the door before we go to bed.

And so he would sometimes in a very grumpy, very

unhappy way, trudge down the stairs.

You wouldn't wait till my head was on the pillow.

But it wasn't like come on, but it wasn't like

you didn't know.

Women. Here's the word, don't start a conversation when your

husband puts his head down from about the foremost feared

word by any husband when he puts his head down.

There we need to talk.

No, you just need I don't want to talk. I

just wanted to know if you lock the door?

Are you kidding me?

Okay? So how many nights was there the obligation to

lock the door? Well, only three hundred and sixty five,

I mean you know. So we would have this ongoing struggle,

and as you could see, it didn't ever go very well.

So sometimes he would go down and lock the doors

and come back up and be irritated with me, and

I'd be irritated because I had to ask him. And

then sometimes I would say, did you lock the doors?

And he would say yes, and I would think to myself,

I bet he didn't, And so I would go downstairs

and I would find two of the three.

That's pretty good, do you think? Yeah?

Okay, So I can't tell you the years it took

for us to come up with the solution to that problem.

The solution is I locked the doors.

Why didn't we start that earlier? Okay?

Now, because he's not gonna change, and it was silly

for us to continue this habit. But we got locked

into this habit. You are laughing, but you have those

same stuck places in your you are you have those

same stuck places. If I had simply acknowledged the fact

that our backgrounds are different, he was never going to

lock the doors the way I wanted them locked. And

if I just lock the doors, then he goes to

bed happy. I go to bed happy. Everything's great acceptance,

I'm telling you right now, acceptance of the parts of

your mate that are not going to change. Stop fighting

about it and just accept it. You both be happy.

Okay. Let me give you a couple advice from things

we've learned. Number one is stop using incompatibility as an

excuse for selfishness. People say, well, we're just incompatible. I

don't even believe in that term. It's a term made

up by divorce attorneys to justify divorce. The fact is

you're not compatible with anybody. There's nobody who's completely compatible

with you. So no matter who you married in the world,

you're incompatible. Incompatible is not an excuse for divorce because

you're not compatible with anybody. You're all, You're unique. And

there's another word for incompatibility, selfishness. I want what I want,

you want what you want, and then our heads. But

then another thing is I want you to talk about this.

You've got to celebrate the real, not the ideal. Yes,

because this was a big issue.

Yeah, and I Yeah, we made a couple of married

problems right off the bat. First of all, we didn't

know each other when we got married, which is a

whole other story. That was a big problem. Yeah, well

you knew that was all you really needed to know.

So no, so really we didn't we didn't know each other. Stop,

I'm trying to talk. We don't advise not knowing the

other person. That was a mistake. Second, I read too

many romance novels as a teenager, and I decided I

had it in my head of what you know, a

husband was going to be like, and it was completely unrealistic,

and it was I set him up for failure because

I was looking for some you know, dime store novel

character instead of a real person who was and it

got in the way of me loving and accepting the

real person because I had a very stupid set of

things in my head of what cut through here?

She thought she was getting fabio, she got FLABBYO. You

might write this one down. A great marriage is the

union of two great forgivers.

And marriages that are happy are couples who have decided

to be happily incompatible.

Happily incompatible. In fact, every couple has a has a song,

and our song is Huey lewis stuck with you, Happy

to be stuck with you? And and if you know

the words.

That songs and you know we thought about giving up,

you know we always.

But we got the same address. Let's just stay again, James.

Okay, so season spring busy, you know what can you

do to to create oneness and maintain oneness summer, bank

on those good times and invest for the harder times.

When it's fall and there's change, you're going to have

to jest when it's good things and accept when there's

stuff that isn't going to budge. And then it leads

us to winter. And if you stay married long enough,

every couple is going to go through winter. It's that

time when when the bottom falls out. It's when there's

deep loss and deep grief. For us. You know our situation.

I've had cancer twice and then we lost our son,

our son, Matthew. And it's when your marriage takes a

hit that sometimes you think we're not going to be

able to get through this. It could be an affair,

there could be a betrayal, there could be a child

that ends up in jail. There can be mental illness, bankruptcy,

I mean, cancer, any crisis. Most of you are not

going to lose a child the way that we have,

and I'm grateful for you that that's not going to happen.

But you're still going to have to decide how do

we face it when our marriage goes through that winter

time when things are just breaking your heart? How do

you survive and thrive in grief and in loss.

Well a couple things. What we've learned, a crisis cannot

destroy your marriage. What destroys it is your response to

that crisis. Okay, that matter what the crisis is, The

crisis cannot destroy your marriage. What will destroy is the

way you choose to respond to it. And one of

the ways you must choose to respond to it is

this we've learned. Don't judge your mate's feelings or try

to talk them out of their feelings in the crisis.

Why do we do this? You know, when somebody has

a feeling and you don't have it, you immediately start

trying to talk them out of it. That's dumb. Feelings

just a feeling. A feeling is neither right nor wrong.

It's just a feeling. And so instead of me trying

to when somebody's afraid, don't try to talk them out

of their fear. Just sympathize with their fear. When somebody's sad,

don't try to talk about other sadness. Just sympathize with

their sadness. Don't try to talk them out of their feelings. See,

my fears are perfectly rational, Yours are stupid, and my

feelings are always justifiable. Yours make no sense. And one

of the things when Matthew died is I made the

decision and Ky did too, that whatever we were feeling,

we were just going to be there for each other.

And if the feeling was anger, we share that anger.

If the feeling was depression, we share that depression. It

was grief, we share the grief. We don't try to

talk each other out of it. We just feel it.

And even when you don't feel it, well.

Yeah, because sometimes when you're going through a winter season,

when you're experiencing loss, you don't always feel the exact

same time at the same moment. And what Rick saying

is that we just again decided to be intentional in

staying connected. Because Matthew was ill for such a long time,

mentally ill for such a long time, and his mental

illness just kept getting worse. There were periods of time

when I would look ahead to the possibility that he

might take his life and would become very fearful that

if he were to die, that the conflict that he

and I already had over had a parent how to

relate to him, Because I would think we should do this,

He would think we should do this, and we would

have different I just thought that the conflict was so

painful at times that if I you lost that in grief,

we would have that same conflict, and that maybe yeah,

but that we would lose the intimacy, we would lose

the closeness in our relationship. But I can tell you,

really in complete honesty that our relationship is closer than

it's ever been, and it's largely because of the decisions

that we have made of how to face it as

a couple. In staying connected, physical touch is a really

important part when you're going through winter time, because for me,

I tend to withdraw when I am feeling sad or

feeling lost or angry. I tend to withdraw on a

shell and not receive comfort let myself be comforted. Me.

I've had to decide to reach out to Rick, to

hold his hand, to touch his arm, to let him

put his arm around me when I'm feeling really sad,

to not try to walk through it alone, but to

do that together.

You know, one of the things Case said is that

she is wondering, is what's it going to do to

our relationship. It wasn't a fear of divorce because one

of the things you have to do knowing you're going

to have prices in your life. If you're married for

a lifetime, you're going to have a lot of crises

in your life. You're going to have a lot. What

you have to do is what we did when we

got married. We closed the escape patch to our marriage,

like on a submarine, closed it, locked it, double locked it,

and threw the key away. And I can honestly say

in that all the crises, all the changes, divorce has

never been an option. People said, have you ever considered divorce? Okay, no,

because God says I hate divorce.

But I have to say that there have been times

when when it has felt our relationship has felt so

fractured and so irretrievably broken, things that we'd said to

each other, things that we had felt, the ways that

we had treated each other. I'm just being really honest

with you that there have been times that divorce was

attractive in the sense of I'm not sure I want

to even breathe the same air you're breathing right.

Now, especially after garlic now.

After you're hot sauce.

That hurts.

But when we got married, we decided we wanted to

grow old together. That was part of it when we

said yes to each other on June twenty first, nineteen

seventy five. We fully intended to grow old together. It's

what we have intended to do, and so that has

kept us in many of the moments when it truly

would have been easier to just say I am so done,

I am done. I'm not putting up with that another second.

You and I I can't forgive you. We're just done.

And to know that that commitment and that vow has

has kept us. It's been a lot of blood, sweat

and tears. There's a lot of blood on the floor,

a lot of sweat and tears. But it's so worth it.

You could see, you could say, why go through all

that blood, sweat and tears. Why if it's so hard

and it's so challenging, why go through all that blood

in tears? Because it is so worth it too, as

Rick said, to know to be fully known, to know somebody,

and be fully known, to know that we're reflecting God's

love for his people. That is the that's one of

the reasons that it's worth keeping going. And I would

just say the last thing I would say is for

those of you that in your late teens or twenties

or thirties and honestly are a little frightened of marriage.

You've seen your own family, You've seen the trouble in

your own family. You've seen it with friends, with relatives.

Maybe some of your best friends have already gotten married

and their marriage is already over, and you're thinking, I

can't do it. I don't know that I've got what

it takes to survive in a marriage for my whole lifetime.

Please don't be afraid, Please don't be afraid of marriage.

It is so worth it is. It is worth every

bit of energy you can put into it. God will

be your help or God will give you grace. Your

church will stand by you, will pray for you, will

be there offering practical help. You pray for us, We'll

pray for you. You pray for us. Don't be afraid

to get married, you know.

And for those of you maybe you were in a

marriage that didn't last. We feel your pain, We love you,

We want you here. What matters is not so much

what you've been through, but what direction your feet are

headed now and your commitment to the sanctity of marriage.

Whether you ever marry again or not, that you honor

marriage not based on an experience that you had. It

really is worth it, you know. One of the benefits

that Kay and I had as we both were products

of long marriages. Kay's parents were married sixty years before

her daddy died. My parents were married fifty two years

before my mom died. And I'll always be grateful to

my parents that my parents got married during World War Two,

and they got married, they were only together three months,

and my dad was shipped off to the South Pacific

for the next two years and did not see his

bride for two years. And he was involved in Guadalcanal

and in Solomon Islands and in a lot of hand

to hand combat. And he came back from that war

experience a changed man. He was not the same man

that my mom had married. My mom could have said,

you're not the guy I married and walked out and

walked out. If she had made that decision, I wouldn't

be sitting here. You wouldn't be sitting here. There would

be no saddle backed church, there would be no purpose

driven life, there would be no peace plan, there would

be no millions of people touched a lot of times

when we're in pain, all we can think of is

I got to get out of this pain. But you

don't have any idea how that decision is going to

affect other people around you, and you need to just

be very careful about it. Now. Maybe you didn't grow

up in a stable marriage. Okay, you start the new

legacy for your family tree. You make the commitment, We're

gonna break the cycle of divorce. We're gonna break the

cycle of whatever. Okay, you make that decision. Let me stay.

A couple of things will close if you're married. Make

a recommitment to lock the escape patch, throw away the key,

and say we're gonna make this thing work. If it

kills us. It nearly did us several times, but it

is worth it. The joy of a long term relationship,

the comfort of a long the support, the flat out

fun of knowing that this woman knows me completely and

still likes me.

Ha ha.

That gives me an ability to handle enormous amounts of

stress and enormous amounts of pressure. Because the the Bible

says two are better than one. It's one of the

values of marriage. So make a commitment to your marriage

to stay in it and work on it, rather than

people say, well, the grass is greener on the other

side of the fence. The grass is not greener on

the other side of the fence. The grass is not

greener on this side of the fence. The grass is

greener where you water it. That's where you put your energy.

And so and if you have them been married, make

a commitment that if I get married, it's a lifetime commitment.

Why don't we pray for the couples, and why don't

you lead us?

Should we have them stand?

Sure?

No, Okay, so we're gonna ask you stand if you're married,

and even if you came to church mad at each

other today, and it happens we've all got a lover,

and you may even be in that winter season and

it really doesn't feel that great, but great, We're going

to pray for.

You, all right.

Father. I pray for these men and women who are

standing and are we committing, even just in the smallest

way some of them. God, I thank you for those

who are in that spring season and they're busy, and

they have maybe gotten into a pattern and a habit

of busyness. I pray that you would give them good

insight into how they can reconnect with each other and

how they can make time for their relationship. For those

that are in the summer, God, their things are just

going so well. We're grateful for that and thank you

for that. May they be wise enough to invest now

and put down their roots deeply into You and into

the relationship, to store up for the harder times that

inevitably come. And God, for those who are in that

season of change, and there's just been tremendous change, and

maybe some are new here, I pray that they will

be able to adjust to that and see it through

the eyes of wonderful new doors opening for them. For

those God, which is probably every couple in this room,

who encounter those stuck places in their relationship when things

just don't move and they don't change, may we be

wise enough and loving enough and mature enough to accept

without demanding that are mate be perfect or be exactly

the way that we want them to be, but to

offer the grace to them that You have given to us.

For those Lord who are in that winter, that cold place,

there's been lost, there's been grief, there may have been betrayal,

there may have been deep agony, and they are wounded

as they stand here, would you, Holy Spirit, blow the

warm of your love and your fire back into their marriage.

Comfort where there's brokenness, repair what has been torn apart.

You are a good God, and we trust you to

bless the marriages in our church. And I pray this

in the name of Jesus Christ, our Savior. Amen you me.

Thanks so much, Rick, What a great message today. Hey,

if you've been listening to the broadcast for a while,

well you know that Rick is always saying that God

wants your relationships to be more than just fair, average, good,

or even great. He wants your relationships to be awesome,

life giving, filled with joy and purpose. And that's why

he created the Awesome Relationships Bible Study. Through this four

session video based Bible study with workbook, you'll discover the

tools you need to build an awesome marriage and family,

awesome friendships, and most importantly, an awesome relationship with God.

This resource is perfect for individual or group study. Be

sure to request Pastor Rick's Awesome Relationships video based Bible Study.

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