Rick Warren - Fighting for an Awesome Marriage—Part Three

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. Well, let's get started today

with part three of a message called fighting for an

Awesome Marriage.

It really doesn't matter what other people think about marriage.

It doesn't matter what public opinion says. It doesn't matter

what the opinion polls say, it doesn't matter what's politically

correct or incorrect. What really matters is what God says,

Who invented marriage? And you're going to live in a

culture where this is absolutely counterculture. You now live in

a culture sure that has forgotten why marriage matters.

You live in a culture.

That does not honor it, but actually demeans it, discourages it,

ridicules it, redefines it, dismisses it, and on and on.

And as a result, we can see what's happening in society.

We now have people who go to Las Vegas, get

drunk and in a spontaneous moment, go to a wedding chapel,

get married, and twenty four hours later get divorced because

it's no big deal.

It's just a social contract.

We have celebrities who spend a full year and millions

and millions and millions of dollars on a wedding, and

the preparation for the wedding lasts longer than the marriage.

We have people going from one relationship to the next

to the next in serial marriages, and they don't understand

the meaning and the mystery.

Now, what's amazing about.

All of this is that when we live in a

culture that's forgotten why marriage matters, we still honor and

it still makes big news when a couple makes.

It a long time.

And it's still big news when we hear on the

radio or TV here in a magazine that couple has

been married sixty years, that couple's been married sixty five, seventy,

that couple's been married seventy five years. Why Because in

spite of all the public and political pressure, we instinctively,

as human beings inside know and we recognize the beauty

and the sweetness of one man and one woman committing

themselves to become one flesh and living together in love

for their entire lives.

That is a beautiful thing.

And we know it, and we know it, and we

know that deep down inside of us instinctively, we.

Are wired to want this.

Everybody craves the safety of a relationship where you are

so fully known and known by each other and.

It lasts for life. Everybody wants that.

So I'm gonna ask in just a second, k to

come out and we're gonna talk a little bit about this.

But let me just end with this section with this part.

Twice in the Bible, Jesus says there's gonna be no

marriage in heaven. Huh, Nope, no marriage in heaven. Jesus

said it twice. He knows more about it than you

or me. Why will they be no marriage in heaven?

Because you won't need any of the six reasons. Marriage

exists in a perfect place that you're not gonna need

the multiplication of the human race in a perfect place.

You're not gonna need the protection of children in a

perfect place. You're not gonna need the perfection of your character.

You're not gonna need the construction of society, you're not

gonna need the reflection of christ union.

You don't need a metaphor because you're going to experience

the real thing in heaven.

But here on earth, marriage matters, and the Bible says

we are to honor it.

Whether we're ever.

Married, or we're married or lost a maid or whatever,

we're to honor marriage. So in a society it doesn't

like marriage, how do you fight for your marriage because

there's nothing in society If you're married, nothing in society

is encouraging and to stay marriage married, everything around you

is encouraging you to walk out.

So how do you fight for your marriage?

Well, as I said, Kay and I have been married

thirty nine years, so I thought i'd ask her to

come and help us. Would you give a warm welcome

to my best friend? All right, let's talk about marriage

in the seasons of life, because life is seasonal.

And you go through seasons over and over and over

and over. Let's just start start us off.

Yeah, Well, God balances the world through seasons, the same

with marriages. Marriages, as you said, don't stay still. They're

constantly changing. So we're going to use the metaphor of

the seasons to talk about how to fight for your marriage.

So if spring represents the busy season, you know, when life.

Is just going at a fast paced a lot of growth.

Yep, Summer is going to represent in this conversation when

things are easy, when they're good. Fall is going to

represent when things change, and winter is going to represent

kind of when.

Life falls apart. So let's start with.

Spring and springtime, as I said, is the busy time

when you're like ships passing in the night.

Every marriage goes through these time periods where.

You just feel like you're both you can't get everything done,

there's just too much on your list, and life just

becomes this, Hi, how are you quick.

In the same house, But you don't have time to talk,

you don't have time for sex, you don't have time

for meals.

You know, you're just busy.

I think busyness is the number one destroyer of marriages.

It's that we fall away from each other because of busyness.

Yeah, it's so easy because what starts to be a season.

You know, you go through these time periods where you think, okay, well,

when we get through this, things.

Will calm down. Now things are going to change in

a couple of months. It's not going to always be

like this.

But what we've found is that what can start as

a season, something that is just supposed to last for

a little while, suddenly becomes a pattern, and before you

know it, you're in a habit and a chronic state

of busyness. We have experienced that so many times. We

are experts at this.

You know, we have busy lives.

Yeah, so we really had to fight this because our

lives are so busy. So what we've decided to do

is just to be super intentional, really deliberate about making

time to talk, putting the computer down, you know, turning

the phone off, looking each other in the eye. You know,

even if it's for a brief time, it's that intentionality

of connecting, staying.

Close to each other.

One of the things we have a little phrase in

our house.

We call it divert daily, withdraw weekly, and abandon annually.

Divert daily means find something fun to do every day,

and divert daily withdraw weekly means we take a weekly

day off.

Yeah, we take every Monday. If he's preaking.

Preaching on a weekend, then on Mondays, I mean, you know,

he's typically wiped out. So we have just for years

and years, almost our entire married life taken Mondays as

a day off, and when our kids were small, we'd

farm amount to other people, and then when they were

in school, we'd have that time together and then it

became our family night. But it was a deliberate day

set aside every week to connect in spite of the busyness.

So we divert daily. We withdraw weekly.

By the way, if you're not taking a weekly day off,

you're breaking one of the ten commandments.

It's that important.

It's right up there with don't commit adultery and don't murder.

It says every six days you take a day for

rest and worship. So if you're not doing that, you're

breaking on ten commandments. And you can't build relationships. If

you're so busy you don't have any time for each other.

Then we abandon annually.

Yeah, we've always taken a vacation, so you know, ask yourself,

you know, how long has it been or how regular

are you with taking time off together. And it's amazing

when we talk to folks when they say we haven't

taken a vacation in years, and some of them are actually.

Kind of proud of that. As though that's a badge of.

Honor, it is not a badge of honor to not

take time off and take time away with the people

that you love the most, even if it's a staycation,

you know, even if it's your staying at home and

you're watching movies, but it's your intentionally spending time with

the people.

That you love.

You know, one of the things you got to do

what you did to get married, you got to keep

doing to stay married. You got to date your mate.

You see, men, we're kind of task oriented, and you know,

we have this checklist, like the bucket list, and one

of the things on the checklist is find a good

woman and getting married.

Okay, And so.

Then when you hone in on who that person is,

you're you're a man on a mission, and you do

all crazy things like go to the opera and you know,

talk two hours on the phone, and you know, you

do all these things to loose this woman. And then

once you're married, it's like, okay, mission accomplished. Now I've

got to provide. Now I've got Now I've got to

pay for all of this. And so all your tasks

and energy moved to something else, and the woman goes,

where's the guy I dated?

Yeah, where's that guy who liked to talk, who love

to look in my eyes? And just you know, absolutely

slobber over everything I said.

And it was a lie.

But the here's the other thing people tell me all

the time, and the US do marriage counseling. People would say,

you know, I just don't love him anymore. I just

don't love her anymore, as if it just happened, and

it's totally uncontrollable. No, love is a choice. Love is

a choice. Love is not a feeling. Love creates feelings,

Love creates great feelings. Baby, oh baby, old baby. But

love is not a feeling. Love is a choice that

creates feeling. If love is a feeling, God couldn't command it.

But God commands you to love people. It's like commanding

of feelings. I tell him, little kid, I command you

to be happy.

You can't force a feeling.

And so we even use the language like, well, I

fell in love like it was a ditch, Okay, Like

I just was walking along and boom, I just fell

in love. Had nothing to control over it, and and

so I fell out of love.

It was another ditch. I fell into no. No, it's

a choice. Okay, it's a choice.

And so you can choose to reignite your marriage.

So we have to feel really you have to be intentional.

I mean, you just want to keep honing in on

it in this in this season of busyness, because as

we're talked about, oneness is the goal.

So the scripture that we talked about the goal.

Of marriage is to become one. Flush to become one,

and to become one is something that happened the minute

that you said yes, a minute you said I do.

But then it's the rest of your lifetime to work

that out. So you have to ask yourself, what am

I What choices.

Am I making they're actually working against oneness? If I

say yes to this commitment, will that actually work against

oneness in my marriage?

Well? That actually pulled me away.

And to ask yourself that deliberate question, what is destroying

oneness in our relationship?

And you might be surprised at the answer.

What will create it?

You know, there's a verse in Revelation that says if

you've lost your first love, it says.

You return and do the things that you did before.

Return and do the things you did it first So

if you've lost that first love, what do you do?

You need to start doing the stuff you did before

the dating your mate. It's like that old cliche, if

there was more courting and marriage, there'd be fewer marriages

in court.

Oh come on, you guys laughed at that. You're pretty

saying about three million times.

How many times have you heard that, honey?

Countless?

Yeah, countless.

But it's always good, It's always good.

Okay.

So the next season is that season of summer where

things are good, things are easy.

It's that season in your life where really you're you're cooking.

With gas, every cylinder is working well.

You know, your your marriage is going strong, your kids

are doing well, your careers, you're just kind of you're

just doing really good. We have found that, unfortunately, that

season doesn't always last that long.

Does There's always something that interrupt it.

But summer is the time when there are that you

could just say in this man, things are going well

right now, and so what do you do?

How do you fight for your marriage in that season?

Because you would think what to fight for?

Everything is going great, No, that's the time to bank,

that's the time to invest, that's the time to.

Put roots down deep into the love in your.

Marriage, so that it stores up against the times that.

Are bad, because you can draw on those good memories

when you're in the tough and the bad times.

So it's really easy to get complacent.

Yeah, don't get complacent. That's really important. Don't take your

spouse for granted. When K got cancer and nearly died,

and I watched it thrown up every day with all

that chemo and radiation and all that stuff, and I

just made a vow I am never again taking my

wife for granted, because you don't know what's going to

happen to your spouse tomorrow.

You just don't know.

So part of my homework would be go on a

date this week. If you're married. As your pastor, I'm

commanding you to go on a date this week.

All right, Well, okay, we'll pay for it.

See me after the service.

This is the time in this season it's like to

go for marriage counseling. You can say, why in the

world would I do it now? I mean, the unfortunate

thing is that people wait too long. They do They

wait until the wheels fall.

Off the bus before they decided to get help.

Rick's idea of car maintenance is when the engine falls

out on the freeway, that's the time to get car maintenance.

But sometimes we treat marriage that same way. We act

as though I can put this off, I can put

this off. I know there's some problems, but you know

it's gonna get better, or it's gonna change or or

you know we'll do that next year.

And we wait too long.

You know what Kay is saying, it's so important. I

can't tell you how many men have come to me.

Uh and their wife was begging them to go get

some marriage counsel. And they said no, no, no, no,

And then their wife walked out the door and they go, okay,

now I'm ready.

Sorry, buddy, it's too late. Now, okay, it's a little late.

And this case said you should be getting the counsel

in the good times.

Now.

In our thirty nine years of marriage, anytime we get

a bumpy time, we get some counsel. So we've gone

to council lots of times over thirty nine years.

I remember the very first one when we first.

Got married, and we are so opposite in every area

and we just were butting heads. I mean, we've been

married thirty nine years, thirty seven wonderful years.

I would say thirty five.

The early ones.

We're a little really really rough. Not that we don't

have tough times today, but we do. But I remember

we just said, okay, we got to get some counsel.

I was making eight hundred dollars a month, that was

my salary when we first gotten married, and our counseling

bill was one hundred dollars a week, so half of

my salary was going to counseling. And I wracked up

a fifteen hundred dollars bill on MasterCard counsel I've often

said we should do a commercial for MasterCard sake.

MasterCard saved our marriage. Okay, saved marriage priceless. People say, well.

I can't afford counseling. We really, you can't afford not

to get it?

Yeah, so banks, how much?

Wait minute, how much is your counsel work? How much

does your marriage work?

You got ahead of me on this, sad How.

Much is your happiness worth? I'd pay a million dollars

for what I got today? Okay, really it was worth.

We have worked hard to build a strong marriage. We

have worked hard. That's just it's not an exaggeration.

We have worked hard, and part of the reason we've

had to work so hard is because we are so different.

And that leads me to this season of fall, which

is the season of change.

And we want to talk about it from two aspects.

One, when change happens and it's good, you know you

it's but it's.

Major, it's a major upheaval.

And maybe there's a you relocate, or there's a new job,

or there's something changes pretty.

Drastically in your life.

And change can be kind of scary, can be frightening,

and yet if you're open to it, what may have

seemed like very difficult and unpleasant change can actually be

something that you look back and say, that was one

of the best things that ever happened to us.

So when change happens and it's.

It's huge, but it's good or it could be good,

have the attitude if I'm going to adjust to this,

I'm going to look for the good in this. I'm

going to find the good in this, and you may

be surprised at the change that happens.

It's good.

Let me say a couple of things about the change

that happens to us. First, if your marriage never changes,

boredom is setting it in a major way. And boredom

kills more marriages than almost anything, and so you have

to fight boredom with creativity.

What a great message from Pastor Rick today. There's something

I always take away from his message. Here's Rick to

tell you how you can help support this ministry.

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