Scotty Smith at Redeemer: Gospel and Marriage (Part 1)

Well, good afternoon.

It's a joy to be with you, and uh very, very briefly, I'll give you just a little bit more uh insight into who I am and why I am here.

I want to start by saying I love your pastor, Russ.

As he mentioned, we're walking in a friendship in this season as mentor and coach and friend, and I think I'm learning as much from Russ as he is from me.

But we enjoy this journey of groaning and growing in grace, which really shapes the two things Russ has asked me to do this weekend.

Uh, this afternoon, just to think out loud for the next hour or so about the implications of God's grace, in particular for marriage.

And then tomorrow morning we'll just consider this broader way of thinking about the implications of God's grace for all of our relationships.

Very much look forward tomorrow morning to walking through one foundational text of Scripture, Philippians chapter 2, 1-11, which is just a core understanding of the greatness of the riches of God's grace and how it's meant to comprehensively redefine how we think of ourselves relationally.

Philippians 2 · chapter mention

Well, what I'm gonna do now is what you have in your hands is something that's gonna be very frustrating to you, because this is really pretty much an outline that my wife and I use over the course of a whole weekend.

We do a couple's encouragement weekend, Darlene and I.

We just had our 46th anniversary, and usually when we do our retreat, we are very comfortable in saying probably no two people were more ill-prepared for marriage than we were.

And we love to share out of our weakness and brokenness how clueless we were about's grace, about our own hearts, and about what it really meant to show up in another person's heart, namely your spouse.

So this represents a lot of material.

I'm not gonna run through anything.

I'm probably just gonna focus on one or two things at a slow enough pace that you'll be able to hopefully be richly encouraged, but also maybe to begin thinking about the mourness of where you go from here.

Good place for us to start would be I want to read one portion of one psalm, and then I'm gonna probably highlight just two points from this syllabus, and then give you some very practical ways of thinking about how can the grace of God go more deeply into your individual heart and then into your coupleship.

So allow me just to turn briefly to one of my favorite Psalms that in many ways captures the heartbeat of God's grace.

It's written by a very broken man just like me, King David.

In Psalm 63, not going to read the whole Psalm, but Psalm 63, beginning at verse 1, is just a great on-ramp for this conversation about what is the grace of God and how is it meant to free our hearts, heal our hearts, and really redefine how we think about every relationship.

Marriage, parenting, friendship, life in the body of Christ.

Listen to King David's words, and remember with me, he wrote this psalm after committing adultery.

This is a psalm that would have been indicative of where his life went after tragically failing in his own marriage.

And after God met him in that very place of extreme brokenness, David knew our heavenly father, this good, good father we sang about in a radically different way.

And thus he wrote these words for us.

Oh God, you are my God.

This is Psalm 63, 1.

Oh God, you are my God.

Earnestly I seek you.

My soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you in a dry and weary land where there is no water.

I have seen you in the sanctuary and beheld your power and your glory.

Because your love is better than life, my lips will glorify you.

I will praise you as long as I live, and in your name I will lift up my hands.

My soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods.

With singing lips, my mouth will praise you.

Now let me pray for us for a moment in light of these words.

Heavenly Father, thank you that you are a good, good father.

And that really is what we in this room this afternoon in the conversation about your grace in marriage, is what we need to believe more than anything else.

Lord, we thank you for King David.

We thank you that really the only hero in the entire Bible is Jesus Himself.

Thank you that you have usen, you have used very broken men and women to tell your story, to show and tell that from Genesis through Revelation, everything that you're communicating through the Bible points us towards Jesus and frees us to really embrace those words that Russ spoke over us.

We are in greater need than we really even understand.

And yet your love is truly better than life.

Lord, what we need more than a different spouse, what we need more than formulas and pragmatic how-to's for our marriage is to know in the depth of our being in fresh ways and new ways.

Lord, even in old ways that we've known before, that this ache, this longing, this craving we have to be loved and to share love and to give love, Lord, really it's it's primarily about your relationship with us and our coming alive to that love.

Lord, thank you that marriage shaped by the gospel is the privilege of two thirsty, hungry people saying to one another, come let us drink together of the living water of life that is freely ours in Jesus.

Father, help us this afternoon to understand that a little bit better.

And truly, Lord, we ask you that in these next several moments, you would cram as much hope and encouragement as possible into our hearts for your glory.

Come, Lord, now by your Spirit.

Speak to us by your word.

Lord, let us really believe that nobody in this room, no couple in this room is beyond the reach of God's grace, and no couple is beyond the need of God's grace.

To this end we pray with great thanksgiving in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Well, I mentioned to you, we just had our 46th anniversary, and part of the rhythm that Darlene and I are learning to live in now is at a different season of life than most of you.

My next birthday will be number 69.

We're slowing down just a little bit, but we are seeking to do some fun stuff together.

I say that to say I just flew in, we just flew in from Zurich, Switzerland, uh less than, well, I guess 30 hours ago.

So I'm in a different time zone than you right now.

So I am trusting in a five-hour energy ale to make me very present with you as I'm craving a bed.

Not quite, it's not quite that bad.

I'm readjusting some, but we just got back from this incredible time celebrating Darlene's birthday in a little village called Isel Vault on the Lake of Brienne's outside of Interloch.

And uh I think of that because we just, Darlene and I just were really giving God praise for a lot of the things that we're gonna talk about now.

And those things I'm gonna focus on, if you do have your little syllabus, let me turn you to the first of several numbers.

Really, we're just gonna look at two numbers, and then I will be sensitive to the time frame that I have, and we're gonna finish right on time.

I think legally we have you till 5.30, is that right?

I pride myself for nursery workers and others getting out on time.

So I may even finish up at 5.28 just to show you I have that much control over the pace of wordage that will come at you.

Well, let me call your attention to this language at the top of the page.

And really, what you see here is uh uh this overall roadmap that Darlene and I in these 46 years have come to see as opportunities for growing in the grace of God.

Now, let me briefly remind you when we speak the word grace, what we mean by that.

First and foremost, I would suggest that when you hear the word grace, don't think of a something but a someone.

In the Bible, God's grace is always a personification or another way of speaking about the person and the work of Jesus Christ.

It's the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Again, grace is not a something, it's more a someone.

It's not a commodity, it's a person.

It's the second member of the Trinity, Jesus Himself, who came into this world to do something for us we could never do for ourselves.

And in response to his perfect work and his ongoing presence in our lives by God's Spirit, we come alive to the riches of God's grace.

In fact, probably all of you at one time or another have heard the word grace described in this fashion.

It's just a wonderful acrostic.

Take the word grace, G-R-A-C-E, and use each letter and put beside it these words: God's riches at Christ's expense.

It's just a great functional way to think about every time you hear your pastor Russ or whatever church you might be from, when you hear the word grace spoken, think of, okay, here's that's shorthand for incredible riches, God's riches, from the storehouse, the treasury of the God that made everything, God's riches at Christ's expense.

Someone has picked up the tab.

Maybe some of you, like me, have had that experience of being in a great restaurant, and uh and you you chose from the menu some very expensive items, but then across the room someone pointed at you and said to the waiter, that one's on me.

And it blows you away when someone treats you so generously to give you something you did not deserve or expect.

Well, let me tell you, a free meal has nothing in comparison with what God's grace is for us.

God intends every one of us to know him in such a way that we don't look to any human relationship to give us what God alone can give us.

That's something that Darlene and I only discovered several years into our marriage.

In fact, let me just say this relative to whatever stereotypes you might have or where you are in your own journey, whether it's a season of being narrowly married or miserably married.

Darlene and I have done our most important growth in our marriage 25 years in.

It was only after I had a burnout at age 50 as a pastor in downtown Franklin, Tennessee.

We've lived in the Nashville area now for almost 40 years.

Came into Nashville from Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

I had been ordained at first Perez in Winston-Salem.

I was the youth pastor at first Perez in Nashville, then senior pastor there, and myself were called to plant Christ Presbyterian Church in 1981.

Then in 86, I was sent into Franklin with friends, a group of friends, to plant Christ Community Church, which I did for 26 years.

For these last six years, I now am serving as teacher in residence on the staff of one of our daughter churches, West End Community Church.

But the point is this when we planted this church in Franklin, God gave me an incredible gift.

It was a burnout.

He gave Jonah a large fish to swallow him, that he Jonah might come to some degree of sanity.

He gave me a burnout.

And I had no clue how I would become in my marriage and my parenting as a pastor, I had become a great Jackson Brown song.

Some of you would know that name, kind of date myself.

In fact, the only artist I've seen in six different decades is James Taylor, beginning at my freshman year at the University of North Carolina when his dad was the dean of the med school at UNC.

So I mean he was 19 years old.

He just recorded Carolina My Mind.

I'm sorry, that's where my ADD takes me right now.

I will chase many rabbits.

We have an hour, let's stay on task here.

But uh Jackson Brown wrote this great song, Running on Empty.

Maybe some of you can get that melody in your brain immediately.

And it's a song about really just doing life, and then all of a sudden you realize your emptiness, your bankruptcy.

You're running on empty, you're running wild.

Two often go hand in hand.

When you begin to hit a wall, when you begin to look in the wrong places for bread or for drink, you begin reaching, you begin demanding, you begin putting things in the place alone reserved for God Himself.

Sometimes He can be your spouse.

It's one of the things that Darlene and I realized as we began to move in to becoming a healthier couple that in many ways our marriage for the surf for several years had been kind of like a tick on a dog relationship, only two ticks and no dog.

Not a very delicate image, right?

Hopefully none of you have had to pick a tick off of a dog recently, but you've got that image, right?

What does a tick do?

A tick is parasitic, it just attaches itself to another life that it might just suck life.

A tick cannot exist apart from a dog.

Best definition of a band marriage I know is two ticks and no dog.

Can you imagine?

A man and a woman coming together saying, I'm basically going to plug my umbilical cord into you and you be life for me.

And uh, and in some ways that marked our marriage as believers.

As a pastor, married to a pastor's wife.

By the way, I should tell you this part of our story.

It's fun when Darlene tells the story.

When we got married, uh, I promised her I'd never be a pastor.

The last thing I would have ever wanted to be was a pastor.

Can I get an amen, Russ?

Don't answer.

It's for us later.

I mean, who would want to be a pastor?

I mean, I was a child of the 60s.

I had to leave the church I grew up in even to hear about God's grace.

I had to leave the church.

Darlene did as well.

We, I'm from a little town called Graham, North Carolina.

Darlene's from Greensboro.

And we both left the church we grew up in because all we heard was religion.

We never heard that God was a father that loves deeply.

We heard rules, we heard get your act together, we heard if you do it right, maybe you go to heaven when you die.

We had a lot of misinformation about really what it meant to know God.

And so in our journey and story, uh, when the Lord really began to make clear our calling would be to grow in grace and to share God's grace, you know, we had a lot of catch-up to do.

And a lot of times that catch up is going to go in God's timing through seasons, chapters, and stories of your brokenness.

Once again, don't have time, but I just want to identify with you at some level to let you know this is a safe place, and we're not gonna burden you with how you have failed at marriage.

Do more try harder.

I want you to hear today and tomorrow morning, God's grace, God's Son Jesus will meet you where you are, whatever the story, and he will give mercy, and he will give grace, and he will give you what you need individually and what you need as a couple.

For Darlene and I, that that meant after my burnout, again, I'm 50 years old when I have this burnout, we've been married 25 years.

It began the journey for me of some important counseling.

Darlene had already been involved in some important counseling when we left Winston-Salem to go to Nashville, Tennessee.

That was not a popular move to her.

She loved Winston, she loved North Carolina.

But it was clear to both of us that God had indeed called us to be youth pastor and wife at this uh new city.

And uh, but when she, when this often happens when God begins to disrupt your life through a transition, when we moved to Nashville's when Darlene began to feel there's some stuff in my heart I don't understand.

And I need to make margin to begin to ponder who am I?

Who really is this God that I know that I love, but at times I feel disconnected from.

What for us in this new city, as I'm just trying to find my way around vocationally in this new city, and uh, she begins for the first time to get some counseling for herself.

I found a marvelous woman of God, not many years older than her, a native of Nashville that had studied with uh Dan Alender and Larry Crab back when they taught together and worked together.

And uh it's one of the important first moments in our marriage of beginning to discover God's grace.

Darlene and our coupleship became the courageous one who made the first movement to get healthy.

She, I should give you a little background here, and this will further help you probably feel good about you.

I asked Darlene to marry me on our second date.

We were married three months later, we had 30 minutes of premarital counseling.

Can anyone top that one?

Don't raise your hand.

Uh we used to call that part of our story supernatural, now we call it stupid.

Who would do that?

But we were children of the 60s, and you didn't plan stuff, you simply showed up in the moment and go with instinct, right?

And that's who we were.

But that's that's who we were, and you have been and are somewhere too, and that's where the Lord's gonna meet you.

Well, we moved to Nashville, and she begins to feel a real sense of something's wrong.

There's just, you know, kind of parts of my heart and life that don't find rest.

And in counseling, she began for the first time to process her own story.

Part of her story was she'd grown up in a family of alcoholism and divorce.

Uh her father was a very delightful man, charming man, caring man, until he began drinking.

And her parents divorced when she was, I think, five years old.

She was the youngest of three sisters, each year, each sister eight years apart.

One sister 16 years older, next sister eight years older, then there's little Darlene coming in last.

And uh, when when we became Christians, when we became followers of Jesus apart from one another, we thought that really any part of your story had no meaning.

That if you are a Christian, all things have passed away.

Any part of your heart, life, and story, it has no significance.

You're brand new, and anything that ever happened to you has no bearing.

Folks, that's not a biblical way of thinking at all.

That's that's la la land.

You see, Jesus has come not just to prepare us for heaven, but to heal us and to free us.

And really to bring grace to bear through parts of our wounds and hearts and longings that we in many ways try to heal too lightly or deny.

For Darlene, that meant as we were in Nashville, she began to have the privilege of pondering what did it mean to be a child in a family system that greatly impacted how she thought about herself, uh, implications of her father's alcoholism, the divorce, as a very young child, and to grow up in a family system where she was expected to be the hero, the caregiver for everybody else in the family.

Well, she begins to do some good counseling, and then she also, by God's grace, comes to understand and articulate that part of her story called sexual abuse.

How, as a very young woman, she unfolds.

Unfortunately, it was harmed very deeply by a family member.

And that was denied, and that was just rewritten as another story than it actually was.

And God's grace began to enter more substantively into our marriage.

As my wife, 17 years before I would begin my own journey of becoming healthier, she, darling, began to really process the implications of a God that loves so much, He gives us the permission and the freedom to begin to explore the riches of His grace for us and to walk through the healing journey that we're called to be on, as those known by Him and loved by Him.

Begin to watch, as I'm getting busy with ministry, many years before my burnout, begin to watch my wife grow.

Begin to hear things, and I remember three important things that Darlene said in our marriage over a course of 15 years that hopefully will give you some encouragement.

Again, do you hear the years as I say this?

I don't want to discourage you, but I want you to know you know, God is building for eternity, not next Thursday.

I would just hope that a little vignette of my story would give some of you hope that have begun to believe the lie that nothing can ever change for you.

You know, we take on this cultural nonsense of you can't teach an old dog new tricks.

You're not dogs, you're image-bearers of God.

And because of your being in Christ, one day you will be as lovely as and as loving as Jesus.

And so the journey of being willing to risk individually and as couples, it's worth your investment.

Three things over the course of 15 years, Darlene said to me, as she's beginning to become a healthy woman.

First thing I remember is she's doing good work, and this work involved discovering this grace of God, coming alive more fully to the fact that there is only one love better than life.

I could never love her to match the longings God put in her heart for him.

She began to realize that.

And first thing she said to me was as she was doing good work.

She said, I remember she sat up in bed one night, she said, Scotty, I don't think I really know who you are.

And that seemed so odd to me.

We had been married seven years, and so my response was, Well, of course you know who I am.

You know I love Carolina basketball, Pittsburgh style stakes, you know I love, you know, she wasn't talking about, give me some data here.

Tell me your favorite 60s band, right?

She, as she was beginning to come alive to her humanity, her dignity, she began to believe that she was worth being known and loved.

She knew that God created our relationship for more than simply good sex and going to heaven when we die.

So when she said, I don't think I know you, it was an invitation.

Surely God wants more for our relationship than simply us serving Jesus, you know, loving in that season students into a saving knowledge of Jesus.

You know, she began to understand this longing, these aches in my heart, this chapter called Sexual Abuse, there is a God who will meet me there.

Several years later, she said to me, and this was when we, after we had planted the church in downtown Franklin, we planted in 1986, and uh it was just incredible to be a part of that young church plant.

Uh, we can take no credit for how that church grew.

That church grew from five couples to 4,000 people in eight years.

Nobody takes credit for that.

It was simply a phenomenon of God deciding to drop a gospel bomb on Franklin, Tennessee, and we got to be the collateral damage.

Well, as that church was growing, I remember coming home one Sunday, and by this time we were up to four services a Sunday.

And here's what she says to me after a well-prepared lunch.

She said, Honey, um, why do you suppose you're more alive in the pulpit than you are at home?

Well, there's a delightful underhand pitch.

Well, what can I say, sweetheart?

It just must be the Spirit of God.

I don't know.

He just comes upon me, and it isn't pretty awesome to watch me preach.

No, she wasn't talking about.

You're a rock star in the pulpit.

She was saying, I see that you have a heart as you teach the Bible, but why can't you pursue my heart and our children's hearts when you're at home?

Boom.

Now she wasn't putting her finger in my face, didn't have a rolling pin in her hand.

There was no ultimatum attached to that.

There was longing.

Again, I want to underscore the fact that, see, sometimes in a coupleship, one of you will begin to wake up before the other.

Don't you go hitching your health based upon anything in your spouse.

We did that too long.

That was back to the tick on the dog thing, two ticks and no dog.

She was beginning to really process, discovering, I had this incredible theology of grace.

I love to defend grace, preach grace, but I did not realize that through those years I had in many ways become, as a man, as a dad, as a pastor, uh, The Wizard of Oz.

I love that movie, not because I think it's great cinematography.

You go back and you look at it, you realize, you know, what would a reshoot of the Wizard of Oz look like?

I don't want that to happen, by the way, but my favorite scene in the movie that I connect with in my story is that story when Dorothy and her delightfully broken friends, remember that band of brokenness?

What does the lion need?

What does Tin Man need?

What does straw man need?

What does Dorothy need?

Kansas.

Now I don't know why anybody wants Kansas, but anyway.

I drove four years through Kansas one afternoon.

So many granaries one after the other.

Again, digression, forgive me.

But you remember that scene in the in the Emerald City, they they get there and they hear there's an Oz, there's a great figure that has the power to get them what they need.

And they're there, and Toto is there as well.

Delightful Toto.

And they're all hopeful that whoever Oz the Great is, he might give them what they need.

But then you remember the scene in that movie?

There's big green stuff going on, there's loud pills of thunder, it's kind of an awe-producing scene until Toto leaves Dorothy and goes in between these two curtains.

And remember, behind the curtains, there's a very ordinary man pushing buttons.

And so Dorothy goes looking for Toto, and what does she find out?

Oz isn't so great after all.

He's pretty ordinary, he's balding, and he's just kind of pudgy, and she's not, it's not that she's deeply disappointed, it's almost like, well, come out and join the rest of us.

We'll figure this out together.

I give that illustration to say my wife was married to a man more comfortable behind the curtains of ministry than coming out and seeing and owning my brokenness.

She was right.

I would preach grace to a lot of people, and a lot of people were finding their heart and their home in God's grace, but I was in such heart shutdown.

My heart was so closed.

I was so fearful.

There were just so many things in my life that basically demonstrated that I had a better theory of grace for myself than experience of God's grace.

Well, at that 25-year mark, the third thing Darlene said that really began to be a vehicle of us moving into a few of the things we'll talk about here until our 25, 28 minutes after the hour turn into pumpkin moment.

Third thing she said was this, along with, I don't know who you are, Scotty.

The second thing, why do you suppose you're more alive in the pulpit than yard home?

The third thing she said was, Scotty, I want to get healthy with you, but I will get healthy without you.

And that's just her way of saying, I cannot imagine anything I would want more than to finish life with you, Scotty, with us being healthy, with us really coming alive to God's love, with us giving each other permission to own our brokenness, to own our weakness, to encourage each other.

I want to get healthy with you, but I'm not going to wait on you forever.

She was not threatening divorce.

She was a vehicle of the God's Spirit for me, basically, that God used through that burnout to begin to move me towards a place of health.

These last 17 years plus have been our journey of getting the care that we have needed as a couple.

Including for me, finally, 17 years even after my wife owned and began to embrace and become a healthy woman in the area of the violation of her sexuality, I had my own moment.

At age 54, four years into becoming, you know, after that burnout, uh a little bit more intact human being, I had, you know, uh that season where I had the privilege, had the honor, as hard as it was, I say privilege because of where the Lord's taken me, to acknowledge my own sexual abuse.

And few things in my pushing 69 years of life had a more of a defining reality in my life than to say that I, too, as an eight-year-old little guy, had been violated by someone I should have been able to trust.

Three years after that, my mom was killed in a head-on car crash, in response to which my father went into such a depression, he hardly did not speak for two years and did not mention her name until 39 years later.

The juxtaposition of these two incredible heart wounds in my life, sexual abuse at age eight, the death of my mom, and the aftermath of a family system that completely shut down.

I needed to have the freedom to begin to say, Lord, where were you when?

What does this mean?

And that's the journey we've been on.

Now, it's a journey that now uh put your gaze back onto this outline to make some connectors to help you understand.

Let's just read, look at point one, as I've given you some narrative and background, but let's look at this.

An untapped gospel, this has been an avenue for us, an untapped gospel.

What do we mean by that?

When we got married, Darlene and I loved Jesus, but we were pretty clueless about the degree to which Jesus loved us.

We suffered from gospel light.

The riches of the gospel were far greater than we realized.

We lived more like spiritual orphans than a beloved son and daughter of Abba Father.

Unwittingly, we began to look to each other to give us what Jesus alone can give us.

And I gave you some of our story to let you know, you know, when you have deep heart wounds, and also when you have God-given longings, you're going to do something with both of those.

Let me say that again.

Let's start with the longings.

Every one of us are made with good deep longings for connection, for intimacy, for love, for partnership, for creativity, for presence, for life, but predominantly to find those longings met in relationship with God.

If you are limited to horizontal provision for eternal longings in time, you are gonna both be a mess and miserable and do great harm.

I mean, it's a little extreme to put it this way, but I'll use it.

I think for Darlene and I, we were at some degree in our brokenness and longing, hoping we were married to the fourth member of the Trinity.

Unrealistic expectations.

So, what does this relationship actually look like, holding on to those images?

Well, what what is the essence and heartbeat of a gospel shaped marriage?