Humanity of Marriage

Welcome to Gateway Churches Podcast.

Wherever you're tuning in from, we hope you're encouraged by today's message.

Um so we have been in a series right now called O the Humanity, and uh I've enjoyed being able to go through this series.

Um, and as as you you may not realize, um, when I'm going through a series, uh it is I'm going through it with you.

Um I I have in my study and preparing time, I have felt convicted over different areas of my life in every single week as we've gone through this, and God is molding me and changing me.

And I have caught myself uh even this past week uh uh starting to say something and thinking, uh I should not say that.

Um, you know, that whole thing about practice, what you preach, that thing, you know, you know, that thing.

And uh some work in progress.

And uh so this week we're gonna talk about the humanity of marriage, and uh and and the same thing has happened this week.

Um, it has been very uh exciting for me to go through, but also very, very convicting.

And uh, and so I'm I'm I'm gonna talk about marriage, and uh I know that not everyone here is married, and so I'll I'll tell you why I think this is still important for us to talk about.

But uh when my daughter was maybe five or six, uh she told us that she didn't want to be married ever.

And uh I was fine with that, but Hannah was like, no, let's talk about this more.

Uh and so uh she recorded a video of it, and I just think it's really cute, so I'd like to show it to you now.

Take a look at this video.

I don't want to get married.

How come?

Because I won't get to you much.

Do you want to move in with me?

Uh-huh.

After you get married?

No, I'm not getting married.

But what if you get married and you move in with me?

Then you can see me all the time?

Uh no, I'm not getting married.

Will you always give me lots of kisses?

Uh-huh.

I'm not getting married.

Are you sure?

I'm sure.

I'm pretty sure.

Uh I show it to her every three months, just a reminder.

Uh no, marriage is good.

It's designed by God.

And so I've really struggled going into this week because as we're going to discuss marriage, I'm thinking of the people in my life and in the church who aren't married.

Uh, I was thinking of my my grandparents who are here.

So I still have in my life my my grandfather on my dad's side and my grandmother on my mom's side.

Um, but they each have lost their spouses.

And uh, and I just saw Sandy up here.

She recently lost her husband, Bill, and and I was thinking about those people.

I was thinking about people who um are not married yet in in their life, and and how difficult it may be to talk about this subject.

And that's it's always in my heart to think about those things.

It's always in my heart to remember uh that there may be people who are are or may disassociate or not be able to find themselves in in this passage, but I believe that you will be able to see it because uh if you say even that you're not married, I would like to propose to you that you you are married.

Um and you'll be like, I don't think so.

Uh there's no one living in my house, and but you are married because uh the Bible calls us the bride of Christ.

And God set up marriage in a particular way to teach us a lesson about his relationship with us, and he uses marriage as this symbol for what his relationship with us looks like.

He uses it in a way that that that points it to the way that he's going to be in relationship with us.

And so if you can learn about marriage today, you will also learn about the unending and inexhaustible love of God.

And so what we can learn from these biblical principles is laid out and also is applicable in marriage, but it is applicable in our relationship with God.

Marriage is one of the hardest things that we could ever do in life, right there, along with parenting.

These things are very difficult, they're very hard on us, and uh, but they are also equally rewarding.

And so, in that, uh, these things are hard to step into, but they give lots back to us, especially if we make our uh relationships and marriages point to God.

N.T.

Wright has a great book called Broken Signposts, and he describes these elements about being human, and part of our being human is that we're supposed to stand as a signpost.

A sign points to the direction that you want to go.

We're supposed to stand as a sign point post that points to God.

And oftentimes our sign begins to point towards pride or lust or greed or uh anger or all of these other things that we can allow to enter into our lives.

And the word repent means to turn around.

It literally means to turn from those things and put your direction or your attention back towards God.

That's what we're called to do is be a signpost towards these things.

And so the purpose of talking this about this is not to condemn each other, but instead to inspire us to live a life in the spirit and to always be growing to be a better signpost for Christ.

So, in the same way that uh we would say that we aren't perfect in being human, in bearing the image of God, as we've been talking about in this series, in the same way that the community that we're in is flawed, the church that we're in is flawed, the people around us are flawed, in that same way, our marriages will be the same way.

We will have flaws in our marriage.

And so as we talk about this, uh, I want to tell you for anyone who has been through divorce, uh, for anyone who has chosen to not be married uh for whatever reason, for anyone who is uh maybe uh getting older in your age and has not been able to find the person that they want to be married to, you should not in any way hear any condemnation in this message.

What you should hear is the overwhelming love of Christ for you.

And and and there are many people, many examples in the Bible.

Uh Paul and even Jesus himself are examples of people who did not get married.

So as we look at marriage, look at the principles of how it applies to each and every one of our lives and how it relates to our relationship to God.

And I'm gonna show you, I'm gonna try to go through this part as quickly as possible so that we can uh talk about some practical things about marriage.

But none of us navigate bearing the image of God perfectly, and we don't do that in marriage either.

So if you hear these words today and uh and and the voice comes up in your head and it is anything other than loving, now this the spirit convicts, the spirit might cause conviction on us to say, I need to make a change in my life, I need to repent or turn from my ways, that's fine.

But if the voice in your head is not loving in any way, it is not from God.

So as we go through this, remember that God always, even when he in the even when the woman was caught in adultery, the voice that he gave to her was loving, and then he called her to a higher standard.

So if at any time you hear a voice that is uh not loving, that voice is not from God.

So when Hannah and I got married, we were we were really young.

She was 19, I was 20, 21 or 22, and 22, thank you.

Um and uh she helps me so much.

Uh and uh so she had lived in Amarillo for her whole life.

She's 19 years old.

Uh, we say that our parents were insane.

We have no idea what they were thinking.

They were like, yes, we we think yes, you should get married.

Um, but it has always gone fairly well for us.

Getting married young did not didn't didn't cause any extreme issues for us.

People said, Oh, your first year of marriage will be so difficult.

Our first year of marriage was wonderful.

And so uh, but we got married very young.

And um we we we got married and we were, I was living in Amarillo, we got married and immediately moved here to Dallas, and I started working at Gateway right after we got married.

And so in that move, she not only left her parents, she left her hometown, she left everything that she had ever known.

Um, and then she cried every day for the first three months of our marriage, and I was like, uh-oh, this is not going very good.

Um, and uh like I remember one day I was like trying to cheer her up, and we went out to eat sandwiches somewhere, and I just thought, like, like this will be great.

We'll go on a little date and we're eating our sandwiches, and I'm just enjoying my sandwich.

I'm like, this is really good.

And I look up and she hasn't touched her food, and she's like trying to hide that she's sobbing in the restaurant.

And I was like, let's go, let's get out of here.

We just pushed our food away and we left there.

And and so she left, and it was a difficult time for us, but uh, we work through all of those things together.

We partnered with each other as we went through those things, and that's what marriage is all about is that you enter into something and and you you settle into those things and you go through them together.

So God designed marriage and he designed it from the very beginning of time.

So in every message, we started at Genesis chapter 1, verse 27, and we'll do that again today.

Genesis 1:27

It says, So God created man, this is mankind, in his own image.

In the image of God, he created him.

A lot of translations say them because it's talking about mankind.

It says, male and female, he created them.

We were created in God's image, and we we complement each other.

Male and female are different, they're alike in a lot of ways and different in some very distinct ways, and we complement each other in that way.

And so um, we're even supposed to complement God through bearing his image.

In Genesis 1, there's several things listed that are different, but yet they're complementary to each other: the land and the sea, the plants and the animals, the heavens and the earth, and finally male and female.

Different but complementary.

So the first commandment ever was about sex.

It was about uh be fruitful and multiply.

That was the first commandment ever given to mankind.

And so no wonder the enemy would attack that area of our lives so strongly.

It's the first thing that God asked us to do.

So we only have to get to Genesis 2 to see marriage revealed in a greater light.

It says in Genesis chapter 2, verse 24 Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

Genesis 2:24

And this is the joining together, and as male and female join in a holy unity of marriage, they help each other better reflect the image of God.

So, uh at the very beginning of the Bible, it paints this picture of marriage, and then this is used as even it talk as it talks about the body of Christ, that we are his bride, and you get to the second to last chapter of the Bible, and the idea of marriage is summed up in this.

It's Revelation chapter 21, starting in verse 1.

Revelation 21 · chapter mention

It says, Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth.

For the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more, and I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

Heaven and earth were meant to be together.

And it was at the fall that they were split apart, and through Jesus' death and resurrection, they're drawn closer together, and we, through Jesus Christ, have access now to heaven because of that.

At the same time, male and female were designed to be together, and at the fall were separated, and now through Jesus we can have a restored marriage, not a perfect marriage, but a restored marriage, and that's what we want to talk about today.

So Ephesians 5 is the passage where Paul speaks of marriage.

It's uh probably quoted at every every wedding that you've ever been to.

And it isn't really simply instructions for marriage, it's the ideal way that marriage can reflect the story of Christ and the church.

That's what Paul is doing in this.

So watch how everything is about Christ and how our marriage can reflect the relationship between Christ and the church.

It's not about rules, it's not about any of those things, it's about our marriages reflecting his love.

So I'm gonna start in Ephesians 5.

I'm gonna start with verse 21.

A lot of people start at verse 22, and you'll recognize it.

Um, but verse 21 says, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Now, this is important because uh the next verse talks about wives submit to your husbands, and a lot of people start there.

But if we just go back one verse, it is that male and female, husband and wife, should submit to each other.

There's an equal and mutual submission.

And when Paul talks about the husband being the head of the church, he's referring to or the husband being the head of the marriage, he's referring to Christ being the head of the church.

And I'll tell you more about that in just a moment.

But now let's go to verse 22.

Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its savior.

Now, as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.

Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.

All of this is about the church.

In the same way, husbands should love their wives as their own bodies.

He who loves his wife loves himself, for no one has ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body.

Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother, this goes back to Genesis two, and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.

However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.

So Paul in Ephesians is talking about Christ, how everything, all of the heavens and the earth are summed up and brought to fruition in Christ.

That's what Paul's talking about.

In chapter one, that's all he talks about, is how heaven and earth is all summed up in Christ, the man himself.

In Ephesians 2, then he goes into talking about how all of this can be reflected by the joining together of the Jew and the Gentile, that they complement each other in their differences, and that they can be brought together through the power of Christ.

In chapter three, that's where he begins to talk about the church and how the church can find unity because of Christ.

And he expands on that in chapter four.

And when he gets to chapter five, he talks about marriage and says, this is how man and woman can come together and mirror or reflect the image of Christ.

And so that's what he's talking about.

It is it is about marriage, but it is also about Christ and the church.

So even if you're not married, understanding these principles takes us back to how God connects with us, how we are to live out this way.

So this has been used inappropriately many times for people to say when it says wives submit to your husbands, that's been used in inappropriate ways many times.

And so I want to point out to you that his entire comparison is about Jesus.

So what this really does is places even more responsibility on the man.

Because if the man is supposed to represent Christ and lead his family, he doesn't do it through authoritarian dictatorship, he does it through serving.

Let me just show you what Christ did in Matthew chapter 20, verse 28.

Matthew 20:28

It says, even as the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life as ransom for many.

So if it's ever used to say, well, the husband has authority over the wife, and that is used in inappropriate ways, that is the wrong idea of what Paul is saying.

What he's really saying is, men, hold that place of being the image of Christ to your wife and to your family.

And how will you do that?

It's that you'll lay down your life.

Not that you'll ask your wife to sacrifice to meet all of your needs, but instead that you will be first in laying down your life to serve your wife and to serve your family.

That is the correct image of what marriage ought to look like.

And in response, the wife does the same thing.

So this is the idea of what Paul is talking about here.

And what he's saying here is deep.

He's asking us to really think of it.

He calls it a mystery, even at the end of that passage.

So I'm going to get into a couple things that we're going to talk about.

The first thing is that marriage is intimate.

Marriage is intimate.

Christ is close to us.

He is near to us.

He is right here with us.

He is present with us.

He is called Emmanuel in the Bible, which means God with us.

And marriage involves this type of intimacy where you share everything and you become one, as the scripture says.

Ephesians chapter 2, verse 13 says, But now in Christ Jesus, you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.

Ephesians 2:13

He is near to us, and marriage involves that type of intimacy.

When Hannah and I moved to Austin several years ago, four years ago or so, we we left this system and structure that was around us.

We left our families, our church community, all of these things, and we went out there and all of a sudden we felt alone and we had to rely on each other and on God more than we ever have before.

And in that time we grew closer than we've ever been before.

We started to share an intimacy that said, uh, I'm I'm with you through this difficult time, and that means sharing things with you.

That means talking to you, it means uh opening up to you, it means not hiding things from you, it means uh building an intimacy there that we have with each other.

And so we started being able to go through the difficult time together and share everything that we had.

We never uh should hold back anything from God, and we should mirror that in our in our marriage as well.

Now, what you shouldn't do is uh go home and unload every dark thought that you've ever had on your spouse and be like, well, he said to be honest with you, okay?

Uh it is a relationship that grows in intimacy.

As we went along, we had to start being able to learn to support each other, to recognize our humanity, to recognize our brokenness, to be able to hear that without pride or ego, to hear what each other was struggling with, and not only hear it through the lens of, well, that must be a fault of mine, or or to hear it on how it affects us, but instead to have empathy and compassion for each other, to understand what that person is going through.

And being in married intensifies the image of ourselves because we become more and more aware of who we are because we see it through the way our spouses see us.

We see that the darkness of us.

Our spouse will always discover our weaknesses and the destructiveness of our behavior.

And so oftentimes we try to manage and control the one that we love so we don't lose that person.

That starts with a little a lot of little half-truths.

It starts with a lot of uh uh controlling the image of the way that your spouse sees you.

It's done out of the desire for intimacy, but it says that if you really knew me, then you wouldn't love me and you would leave me.

And oftentimes, because we may have that relationship in our marriage, we carry that over into our relationship with Christ.

God, if you really knew who I was, you would know I'm not worthy of your grace.

We're scared of rejection, we're scared of going to that place with our spouse, we're scared of being in that that vulnerable spot where we share the the deepest and and and most intimate thoughts, desires, uh difficulties, struggles, and all of these things, we start to try to manage our reputation with our spouse.

We become afraid to speak the truth, not because we're a liar, but because the love for our spouse is so intense that the fear of losing them becomes so great.

And so, because of that, we begin to hold back certain parts of our lives.

We say, if I lose my spouse, I fear that I will lose myself, that I won't know who I am, that I won't know how to exist within this.

And God's love doesn't work that way.

It never leaves you, no matter how flawed you are.

This is why you're able to uh offer it to someone else.

And that isn't very easy to uh to even say.

To to offer someone unconditional love is not even very easy to say, but even more difficult to actually do.

There there's there's a lot of conditions placed on that.

Now, hear me, I'm not talking about in cases of abuse or things like that.

There are times when for the protection of yourself, obviously, and that's covered in scripture.

So I'm I'm not talking about that, but there is an unconditional love that goes along with marriage that God has designed and destined for us to work to try to replicate within our marriages.

Not that we'll be able to do it every time, but to work to try to replicate those things, and that's how we stand in the image of God.

And so what we started doing, that I learned through counseling, was we started to say, what do you need?

We say that all the time to each other.

What do you need?

We ask, what are your needs?

We we try to learn to be present for each other, to be intimate in the way of knowing that our spouse has needs and we need to meet those needs.

So one of the things that I learned in uh in counseling is that uh what would happen all the time is that Hannah would tell me something that was going on in her life, and I would try to be a fixer.

So I would say, Well, did you do this or should you do this?

Or can you change this?

And I would try to tell her all these things.

And uh typically, when someone is telling you something that's going on in their life, they need one of three things.

There's kind of three different categories that they might need.

They might need encouragement, they might need input, they might want you to tell them this is what I think you should do in this situation.

They might need encouragement, they might need input, or they might need what's called attunement.

An attunement is where you have a deep empathy for what the person is going through and you sit in it with them.

And so I started to learn that when she was going through something difficult and she does the same in return for me, that sometimes it's fine to just sit with them and go, I know this is really hard.

I know it's really tough and I'm here with you.

I just want you to know.

I don't know what to do about it, I don't know how I can fix it, but I'm right here with you.

It's to place your arm around them and go, I'm here.

If you want to sit here and be sad and go through these feelings and process these emotions, I'll be right here and I'll go through it with you.

That's what Jesus did in becoming human himself, is that he said, I see your suffering and I'll come down and I'll sit in your suffering with you.

And when we can offer that to our spouses, we help bear the image of God for each other.

So don't focus on the negative.

Reward the positive things that you see in your marriage.

Uh, all the time we see spouses berating each other, even sometimes in front of their friends.

It's always difficult to watch sometimes.

You just think, oh, that would be so hard to deal with.

Encourage each other in your marriage.

These are the things that show that we have a love.

And and also have grace for your spouse.

Think about how hard it is for you to change the patterns in your own life and have empathy for them whenever you see patterns in their life.

Make space for your marriage.

Take date times.

Uh you you did dates before you were married, so do them after you're married.

Make a plan or a schedule for those things.

Uh cultivate that relationship.

Count up how many days you have left in your marriage and ask yourself how you want to spend them.

So far, Hannah and I have been through about 6,500 days of marriage, almost 18 years.

And so what do we maybe have?

Maybe 10, 15,000 days more?

Do you want to spend them not having intimacy in your marriage?

If you look at it that way and you as almost as if it was dollars to spin, you will start to begin to say, we're gonna spend this intentionally because it's the right thing to do.

The second thing that we need to learn about marriage is that marriage is sacrificial.

Christ sacrifices all for us.

And so Paul teaches us to lay down our life for our spouse just as Christ laid down his life for us.

In Ephesians 5, verse 25, it says, Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.

Ephesians 5:25

What this means in our lives is not that you need to uh uh be the brave guy that jumps in front of a bullet, you know, and takes one, you know, for your wife or whatever.

It means that you need to die to daily selfish desires.

What this means is that you die to all the things that you say, this is this is the things that I hold on so tightly to that it may impact or affect our marriage.

And if we die to those things and we begin to serve our spouse, it will change our weddings.

I love to do weddings, especially with really young couples, because um, they're so happy and they should be.

It's thrilling, it's exciting.

I can't, I like I can't express how like radiant we were to get married.

Um, but everyone who is married, uh, you kind of just look at them and you go, you have no idea what's ahead of you.

You have no idea.

Because it's hard.

It's wonderful and it's beautiful, but it's really hard.

Uh when we got married, um, we we really had never had like a real fight or an argument at all.

And and so we got married, and then we went on our honeymoon and uh we decided to do this excursion where we were gonna kayak uh through this river to this place.

And we got in the biggest fight ever over who was steering the kayak, you know?

And uh like the biggest fight, we were like arguing, and everybody was a mile ahead of us and we couldn't get through the waves.

We were like, no, go left, no, go right, and we were just arguing with each other.

And we learned really quickly that this is gonna be a struggle, that that that we're often in our marriage gonna be uh uh saying different things about different directions that we should be going, and that only if we paddled together would we make it to our destination.

Only if we learned to work together would we make it to the place where we wanted to be.

And so, in that uh idea, it is sacrifice.

It is sometimes to give up your desires and to lay that down.

It's sacrificial and it lays down your own desires to pick up your spouse's desires.

I don't like it when we argue, but I always pray, God make us love each other enough to keep arguing when we have to.

Because the opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.

And as soon as we stop caring, enough to really work through the issues, and if you think about it, sometimes it feels easier to stuff them away, to tuck them under the bed and not to see them, but they will come back out.

There will be a time that you will have to address those.

And who wants to address all those things at one time?

And so we we we often don't like to have conflict with each other, but if we love each other enough, we will work through the things that we need to work through in order to find unity and to keep moving forward.

This is one of those ways that we mirror the image of God.

In unity, it gets messy in our community, it gets messy, and oftentimes we want to avoid those things or push those people out of our lives or spew hatred towards them.

And if we just work on them, they won't stack up and we won't eventually have to deal with them all at one time.

You won't get away with them.

You'll you won't get to a time where you never had to deal with those things.

So why would you want to deal with them all at one time?

Each time we care enough about each other to go through momentary difficulty, we become closer and closer.

The third thing I want to tell you about marriage is that marriage is a covenant.

Marriage is a covenant, it's a vow.

It says that no matter what you do, I will stay with you.

Living together doesn't even compare to the love that you show someone when you get married.

You say when you get married, I'll be here, or you say when you live together, I'll be here for you unless something better comes along, or unless this gets really difficult.

But in marriage, you say, I'll be with you no matter what, till death do its part.

Um, let me tell you the most encouraging thing I can tell you about marriage.

When you get married, you shackle yourself to your spouse.

Doesn't that sound awesome?

You take uh you take handcuffs and you put them around your wrist and around your spouse's wrist, and you go, that's it.

We're one.

We're together.

No matter what, that's it.

We're together.

That might sound awful to a lot of people, and maybe especially if you're not married.

It's the best thing you could ever give to someone.

It's the best gift you could ever give to someone.

Because what you say is, you, in your humanity, in your flawed nature, I want to be with you, and now we're one, and I connect myself to you, and I say, My goal in life is to show you the unending, inexhaustible love of Christ.

My goal in life is to be with you, to understand that you are flawed just like I am, and you shackle yourselves together and you say, That's it, we're together.

In marriage, you you tell your spouse, I'm not gonna leave just because things get hard.

I'm not gonna bolt on you just because I discover who you really are.

And that is the greatest gift that you can give to someone.

We've been through uh so many difficult things in our our lives, and again, uh this permanence of shackling yourself to people doesn't apply to things like abuse or things like that.

There are times when when it's gonna harm you to such a degree, and again, we live in a broken world.

If not each, if each spouse does not agree to offer that same love to each other, then it can change the scenario.

But the very best image of marriage is that we would shackle ourselves to each other and we would say, I'm with you to walk through these things with you, no matter how hard it gets.

It is permanent.

And if you can't run away from your spouse, then that means you have to solve your problems.

If you can run away every time it gets tough, you have no more problems to solve.

You grow when you're in marriage because you work with each other to see the weaknesses in each other and to begin to move towards health.

It is permanent.

It is being uh uh committed to someone to such a level that you enter into a covenant with them and you say, My love for you is not conditional.

It does not depend on who you are or how you act.

It is unconditional.

That I understand that that can't be held out in every marriage.

I understand that there are extenuating circumstances.

I wanted to go into it, just we don't have time.

Jesus talked about some of those things, but I understand that that can't be, but I'm I'm I'm not trying to bring judgment on any area of marriage or anyone who has gone through divorce or difficulties or anything like that.

What I'm saying is that God designed it so that we would see what his ultimate love looks like.

And everyone who is married has the opportunity to strive every day to give that type of love to their spouse.

It's a covenant that we enter into with each other.

A contract means that if you don't hold up your end of the bargain, then I don't have to hold up my end of the bargain.

And the reason that marriage is a covenant is because it represents the covenant that God made with us.

I don't know if you know this or not, but as the bride of Christ, each and every one of us has been unfaithful to our husband.

Each and every one of us has been unfaithful.

And God, because of his covenant with us, has said, I will not break my end of the agreement.

And so when we're in relationship with our our spouse, we shackle ourselves together and we say, I want to know the real you.

I won't let it impact my ego or my pride.

Instead, I'll be shackled to you and I'll help as each one of us works through our humanity and works to be a better signpost that points to Christ.

That is the greatest love that you could ever give to anyone.

When Hannah and I uh moved to Austin, we planted a church.

We've been going for uh about um a year whenever COVID hit, and it shut down the church.

And uh it was it was a dream of mine.

Um it was something that uh that God told us to do, and I feel like the the growth that we experienced during that time is uh is what God was leading us into.

And uh and it was a it was a an impactful time for us, but it was really, really difficult whenever it ended.

And uh I mentioned in one of the messages before that uh I took my son to Colorado uh for his birthday shortly after we had we had ended and moved away from Austin.

And I would tell him, hey, you're 13 now.

Uh it's time for you to to go in uh into the restaurant.

And it was during COVID, so you could only go in and pick up your food or or and pay there or whatever.

And we were in Colorado, and I would tell him, it's time for you to do that.

And the reason that I was asking him to do it is not entirely because he was 13 and I was putting more responsibility on him, it's because I I literally could not look people in the face.

It's because uh a depression set on me that no matter how good life was, or how much I remembered, how bright life was or how wonderful things were, it didn't matter what thoughts I tried to put in my head, it rested on me in such a heavy way that I could not lift myself up.

And I tried so hard and I became the worst person to be married to that you could ever imagine.

I was sad all the time.

I wasn't present for my wife or for my kids.

I was in the darkest place that I've ever been in my life, and one day I told my wife, if you leave me, I'll totally understand.

But I don't know how to get myself out of this place.

She signed me up for a counseling group.

And I'll just tell you that she knew that if if if she told me first, I would have said no, and not just because it was counseling, but because it was so expensive.

And this group and what God has done in me has literally saved my life.

So when she informed me that I would be going to counseling, she sat in it with me and she said, I love you.

I'm not gonna go anywhere.

I'll be right here.

We're gonna go through it together.

And that's when I truly understood the love of Christ.

I experienced it through Hannah.

And in marriage, we have that opportunity to genuinely show someone what it looks like to love them unconditionally.

And I'm sorry this was a heavy message, and then I'm such a mess, but as I started thinking about it this week.

All I can think about is how it's the greatest gift I've ever been given.

Not just our wedding day, not the height, not the not the joyous times.

It's the time where she just sat in it with me.

She said, We're gonna get through it.

And that's what Jesus does for every single one of us.

When he became a human, he said, I see your pain, I see your suffering, your anxiety, your depression, your thoughts that eat at you.

I see all of those things.

And in fact, I'll become a human and be tempted in every way that you are.

I'll experience pain and suffering that you will never even know or understand how to compare to what I've experienced.

Because my love for you is unending and inexhaustible.

Would you bow your heads and close your eyes with me?

We're gonna go into a prayer time at every campus.

And I've embarrassed myself in front of all of you.

And uh, I'd like for you to think about maybe embarrassing yourself in front of everybody today.

I'd like to ask you to think about coming forward for prayer, and especially if you've never done it before.

You could need prayer for anything at all that's going on in your life, but especially if you found yourself hiding or pulling back or holding back those things, telling God half-truths and not being intimate with Him.

Especially if you need to rekindle that relationship and rediscover an intimacy with Christ.

And then there's a specific group that I want to challenge today.

Men, as we talked about, it is your job to lead in serving your spouse, your wife, and your family.

And so when it's time for prayer, I want you to grab the hand of your wife and say, Let's go pray.

If you don't have anything specific to pray about, you come forward and you say, We want to pray that God will continue to keep and hold our marriage.

But man, I want to ask you to start leading today, not just in your relationship with Christ, but in your relationship with your wife.

So, Lord, today we remember that your grace is sufficient, that your love is inexhaustible.

And God, that we're in our when we're in our lowest, darkest times, you're right there, and you sit in it with us.

We're never alone because you're always with us.

So, Lord, I pray that you would draw every single person that needs prayer.

Lord, don't let anything stop us today from receiving your love and being married to you once again.

We pray all these things in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Thanks for joining us today.

If you'd like to connect with us, text Connect to 71010 or visit gatewaypeople.com.

We hope you have a great week.