Marriage Material: It's Foundational | Part 1

Welcome to the Awakening Church podcast.

We pray this message encourages you and provides the hope and light of Jesus Christ.

Thanks for tuning in.

Surf City, Florida.

Surf City, Florida.

It's a little city outside of Miami.

Originally designed to be an oasis for the rich and the famous.

People like Frank Signatra, Elizabeth Taylor.

They went to this space to get away from the Miami, you know, hustle and bustle.

It's high-end, it's nice.

And today it still is the same.

As you can see, it's just got beautiful beaches, gorgeous warm water.

Wouldn't it be nice to have warm water?

This incredible downtown, but it's famous now for something a little bit different.

In 2021, in the middle of the night, a condominium collapsed.

89 people tragically lost their lives in this.

As you can imagine, this sent shockwaves uh through all the institutions, lending, uh, banking, uh, insurance.

In fact, uh, we are impacted.

If you want to buy a house here on the West Coast, 3,000 miles away, because of uh Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and their response to this, it has impacted how we get mortgages here today.

In fact, um, you can see now today it's just simply an empty lot.

Uh now here's what's interesting: the National Institute of Standards and Technology spent$30 million to investigate what happened.

With$30 million, they came away with four key findings.

The first was simply this: that it was a fundamentally a foundation issue.

The collapse at this core was a failure of the foundation.

The condominium was built with a pool deck on the ground floor and parking garage underneath the complex.

Because of design falls, investigators say water from the deck constantly seeped into the garage area under the pool, helping corrode reinforcing steel in the support columns.

The second thing was that we had foundation issues, then the quality of materials.

Though it passed building inspections, shortcuts were taken using lower quality materials, and the columns supporting it were weaker than required by building codes after they went back and tested all the material after the collapse.

The third observation and finding was there is added stress to the structure.

In addition, because of added weight from planters added to the pool area years later, the deck and columns were subject to more stress than they were originally designed for.

And the final fourth observation, key finding, was deferred maintenance.

Two years before the collapse, the HOA commissioned a report and approved$15 million in critical repairs.

However, they did not seem to be in any urgency to get it done.

Now you may be asking, what in the world does this have to do with marriage and relationships?

And I believe everything.

Because the core idea, the big idea for this series, is that a strong, vibrant marriage doesn't just happen, it's built.

It doesn't just happen, you just don't fall into it.

You don't just hope into it.

It's not just something that automatically takes place once you get married.

It's just like it's just up to luck, up to chance.

It's built.

In fact, Proverbs 24, 3 says this by wisdom a house is built.

And through understanding, it's established through knowledge.

Its rooms are filled with rare and beautiful treasures by wisdom.

And wisdom here in the Hebrew understanding is a skill.

Wisdom is fundamentally a skill.

It's the skill of navigating life will.

It's the skill of developing and building a strong relationship, a strong marriage.

And so here's the question: where do you find the wisdom to build a strong and vibrant marriage?

Now we're in church.

You go, like, okay, I think I know the answer to that, Ryan.

Thank you very much.

Um, but let me ask you this where are you currently finding the wisdom to build your marriage, or if you're single, your most significant relationships?

Whose voice is loudest in your life?

As we go through this series, we're actually gonna use uh the National Institute of Standards and Technologies, their findings to be the really framework for our series.

And so, week one, we're just gonna talk about its foundational.

Next week, we're gonna look at the building materials, the quality of building materials we build our relationships with.

Week three is added stress to the structure.

Anybody ever experience added stress to your?

Okay.

Um that's Father's Day, by the way.

Um week four is deferred maintenance.

The things we know we need to do, but because they're not urgent and important, we don't do them and often suffer as a result.

And so today, would you go ahead and say to your neighbor, it's foundational.

All right.

And before I dive in and we dive in together, something that's fun, and it's talking on marriage, especially, it's like you don't want to just hear from me, you want to hear from uh my wife, who's got way more wisdom and insight than I do.

So I would just want to take a moment and I did a little interview with her.

I'm gonna show it here on the screen, and then we'll get back in and dive in to um our sermon and our series.

All right, take a look.

So we got married when we were in our early 20s, and now we almost have a 20-year-old.

Um so in reality, we would talk about it.

We really grew up together in so many ways and learned together just how to do life.

Uh looking back, like what would you say has been most foundational over the last 21 years of marriage for us?

Yeah, I do.

I think about uh actually regularly about how young we were and got married.

You were 21, almost 22, and I was 23.

And you were still in college in Chicago.

I had just lived overseas in Sweden for a year.

And we just knew we wanted to be married, and we I mean we had our bumps leading up to it, but really what we did find was we did have um obviously we loved each other, but we also really had like similar values of what we wanted in life, and the two things were we really wanted our foundation to be on God or whatever it was that we were doing.

We wanted God to be really at the forefront of that, and then also we really wanted to have a great family, and we got pregnant faster than we thought.

Um so I had Ella at 25, but yeah, so in some ways I just I feel like we kind of grew up quick with that.

We kind of had to, yeah.

Um, but we had those our North stars were were aligned, like they weren't things that came up for us as problems.

Yeah, I think that's so like something we didn't realize how important it was at the time.

And you know, kind of looking back, we'd tell people, hey, these things need to be foundational.

Um it almost was like we just knew we loved each other and we loved Jesus and we wanted him uh to be the foundation.

I think I I just was thinking about this.

You did some things actually in college that were very foundational to your faith.

Uh I was just thinking about you would do kind of these date nights with Jesus as a college student.

Um so your love and passion for Jesus was foundational before we ever started dating or ever got married.

What were some of those things?

Yeah, well, I actually didn't want to get married.

That's right.

Um I had gotten to a place of I had seen so much in marriage that to me was not something that made me want to be married.

And then I really got to know Jesus in college and decided to take a year of just being single and just focus on God and really just be sure I was in a good place.

So then you were kind of a wild card a little bit because I was like, oh yeah, you know, that's great, that's cute, and he loves God and all that, but I was very much like not looking for a relationship.

But it worked out if we could go back and do some things over again, maybe invest differently.

What are a few of those maybe habits or things that we wish we built in from the very you know start of our marriage?

I think probably being learners of love and what that actually means and looks like.

I I think that we assume we love somebody and it's just easy and natural, but um it's something that we actually grow in, I think, our entire lives.

I hope our entire lives, like we never actually nail it, like we're always growing in it, and um you know, like at first Corinthians, the very first thing is love is patient.

We think of love as just like it's so easy, yay, we but like it takes uh patience and it takes uh kindness and it takes uh not being easily angered, and it takes uh not keeping records wrong.

And it's like these things where you realize love is not just the happy feelings, there's the happy feelings too, but as we lean into our own development of love, I think that the marriage grows stronger rather than why aren't they doing XYZ?

But as we actually grow in how to love out of you know Christ's power and that supernatural love, then it's really a beautiful thing.

Yeah, so much of it being rooted in Christ's love for us and that being the thing that is enabling us to love each other, not just because the other person is lovable at the time.

Yeah.

Because there's plenty of days I'm not lovable.

Yeah, we are, yeah, yeah, and but then the beauty of the promise at the end of that is love never fails.

Like you just keep doing whether you're getting it back or you're seeing you know exactly why you're doing it, like it's actually a practice and a self-discipline and something that the Lord helps enabled you to do.

I just didn't realize that I was actually gonna need to grow in loving you in ways that didn't feel natural.

And I think that's also when you learn how selfish you are, yeah, because you want everything to feel good.

Yeah, that's like the very first lesson I think we both learned in marriage was just how very selfish we are.

And then once having kids, that it's still there, that there's even more of that than like um you know, I've heard it said that marriage exposes what's inside of you and it reveals some of those things that God wants to work on and deal with to help you grow and help me grow.

Isn't she great?

Yeah, no.

Thank you for doing that, by the way.

Um if you got your Bibles, would you open up to Matthew chapter 7, verse 24?

Matthew 7:24

Matthew 7, verse 24, as we're talking about it's foundational.

Matthew 7:24

Uh, I want to take you to what Jesus has to say about foundations.

He concludes the most famous, influential sermon in human history, and he talks about our foundations.

Matthew 7, verse 24, he says this.

Matthew 7:24

Therefore, everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock.

The rain came down, the stream rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock.

But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on the sand, the rains came down, the streams rose, the wind blew, and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.

Here's what I want you to see.

Jesus is talking about a universal principle for us, and we're gonna specifically apply it to our marriage and our relationships.

And so, whether you're single or a teenager, this applies to us.

But if you're married, let's lean in to how this specifically applies to you.

How do you build a strong, vibrant marriage?

First thing I want you to notice that Jesus says here is every marriage experiences storms of adversity.

Every single one of them.

The rains came, the winds blew, the stream rose.

Whether you were wise or foolish, you both experienced the storms of adversity.

You experienced the storms of loss.

You experience the storms of conflict, you experience the storms of financial pressure and change and the storms of disagreement.

You experience, and we all have these storms, and here's why this is so important.

Because there's a marriage myth that undermines and threatens to sabotage so many relationships in our day, and it goes something like this.

If you marry the right person, then everything else will work out right.

If I marry the right person, sure I might have a day where there's some drizzle, some maybe fog or something like that, but I'm not gonna have a storm that's gonna shake us to our core.

If I marry the right person, then everything will work out right.

Which, if you reverse engineer that, if everything's not working out right, then what?

You've married the wrong person.

And by the way, if you're not married or if you're newly married, I got a little bit of a this is insight, I guess.

Every single married couple at some point thinks they married the wrong person.

Did?

Oh my goodness, what did I do?

We all do.

Because you wake up and you're like, wow, this is a lot harder.

This is different.

And the bigness of the decision.

And underneath this uh marriage myth is there's a few ideas and thoughts behind that.

One is that this idea that love is easy.

Jenny was just talking about that.

We'll spend more time talking about that next week.

But love should be easy.

Love is love, it should be easy, right?

Let me ask you, why should love be easy?

We ever think about that?

You know what's easy?

Lust is easy, selfishness is easy.

Love is beautiful, but love is hard.

The other thought underneath that is your happiness is most important.

Right?

We we kind of buy into this that the purpose of marriage today is personal fulfillment.

The purpose of marriage today is my personal happiness.

And so I'm getting into this so that I can be happy, and you are the you're the one who is gonna make me happy, or this relationship, or one day maybe the kids are gonna make me happy.

And by the way, this is really important.

Happiness is a wonderful byproduct in life, it's a terrible destination.

And when we run after happiness, we miss it all.

And then let me ask you maybe another question.

Why is your personal happiness more important than someone else's personal happiness?

We ever think about that?

And the impact that it has when we make those decisions, because when we're making those decisions, they're self-oriented, me-centered.

Well, and underneath that is this idea that your spouse will complete you.

Right?

You know what was what's the movie?

You complete me, right?

Yeah.

You whispered it out loud.

Good.

Right?

We just had this idea that that person is going to complete me.

They're my better half.

What I mean, that's an incredible amount of pressure to put on somebody, by the way.

You're gonna complete me.

I don't know if I want to do that anymore, you know?

I'm not so sure about this.

No human can complete you.

Compliment you?

Absolutely.

Complete you?

Absolutely not.

In fact, Dr.

Less and Leslie Perrott, they're uh clinical psychologists, they write, they teach on this all the time.

They they say that as humans, we have this compulsion for completion.

And they said there's this one sentence that is transformative for relationships.

If you really understand, and it's simply this they begin every lecture on marriage and relationships this way.

They say, if you try to find intimacy with another person before achieving a sense of wholeness on your own, all your relationships become an attempt to complete yourself.

And here's the reason why this is so very important.

Your relationships can only be as healthy as you are.

And as long as I'm looking to that other person, and I'm only hoping you got to completely, and I'm not dealing with me, and addressing the things inside of me, is gonna bring great harm and pain into that relationship or marriage.

So the marriage myth find the right person, everything works out right.

Marriage Truth said it in the video.

Marriage will expose what's inside of you.

Marriage exposes what's already inside of you.

What a gift, by the way.

Like, really?

Yeah.

Because if it exposes what's already inside of you, God wants to help shape you and form you into the man and woman you were created and intended to be.

And he uses things in our lives to help expose the areas in our lives so that we can become more of who he's already made us to be.

Like we were saying in the video.

The very first thing you kind of recognize when you're married, the very first lesson is how selfish you are.

And then you recognize how selfish they are.

And then you conclude their selfishness is worse than your selfishness.

Right?

Like, well, if they only change, if they only had this.

I remember, I remember having this realization that my love actually wasn't love.

Because I loved to get.

I loved with strings attached.

I remember someone telling me this.

I don't know who said this, but like the sexiest thing a husband can do is do the dishes.

And so here's what I tried this for like a week.

It didn't try very long.

I tried it for a week.

Um, and I thought, like, if I do the dishes, Jenny's gonna notice.

She's gone, oh, hey, you know, because what I want is affection from her.

I want her attention, I want intimacy, and so here's what I'm doing.

I'm doing something that she would think is good so that she would actually give me what I really want.

And that is not love at all.

And that's what marriage begins to expose inside of us.

See, I think one of the big questions we have to ask is who is meeting your deepest needs?

Who's meeting your deepest needs?

Our deepest need for acceptance, to be known, to be fully known, and to be loved.

Our deepest need is for identity.

That you have, you know, intrinsic value and worth for security, for provision and protection, for purpose, for meaning and significance.

Your spouse was never intended to meet your deepest needs.

And when we put that on them, it almost always brings about incredible pain.

It's a weight they are not able or designed to carry.

Only Jesus can meet your deepest needs.

Only Jesus will finally and fully satisfy the cravings, the longing, the emptiness, the hurts, the hoping, the hungering in your life.

And when we get that out of order, all of a sudden our spouse becomes our savior than they're never designed to be.

And when they fall flat, maybe then our kids become our savior.

Or then maybe our work.

And we're caught in this cycle.

Every first thing I want you to notice every every marriage experiences the storms of adversity.

That's just reality.

So if you're in a storm, what a gift, by the way.

What a gift.

Because here's the other thing.

Every marriage is just as only as strong as its foundation.

Storms don't determine the strength of your foundation, they just reveal it.

And if you're in a storm right now and you're feeling like our foundation's being shaken a little bit, can I just flip the script a little bit on you and just go, what a gift.

What a gift.

Because now you're realizing, you know what we need to do is I put my foundation on something other than Jesus, and I need to do some foundation work.

Or we need to do some foundation work.

We need to get to some of these root issues.

Jesus would say it this way, you take take his words for it, not mine, right?

He said, Everyone who hears these words of mine and what puts them into practice is like a wise man who builds his house upon the rock.

Jesus would say, a wise marriage builds on a foundation of Jesus.

A wise marriage builds on a foundation of Jesus.

Now here's something that we miss in this because I think many of us would go, yeah, absolutely.

And we'll unpack more of how to do that through the weeks, but here's something that is so important.

This is true for every single person, whether you're a teen or you're like 80.

You cannot build a foundation on Jesus without obeying the teachings of Jesus.

There should have been like a mmm on that one.

There wasn't.

So let me let me say it again.

You cannot build a foundation on Jesus without obeying the teachings of Jesus.

Oh, I love it.

I love it.

You just made my day, by the way.

That was so good.

Let me just take you to the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus is teaching.

And did you ever think of applying this to your marriage?

He begins with the Beatitudes.

Blessed are the poor in spirit.

Like there is a there is a recognization that you have spiritually bankrupt and you're in need of your heavenly Father.

Blessed are those who mourn.

Like there's a conviction of your own sin that you are actually convicted by it.

Blessed are those who are meek.

That's like strength under control.

Like you don't leverage your strength to Lord over, you leverage it for the good of others.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness.

Like you're your driving passion is for the good of all humanity, the flourishing of society, because that's God's heart.

Blessed are the merciful and the pure in heart.

Now, by the way, wouldn't you want to be married to someone like that?

And don't we want to be that kind of person?

And imagine how that would impact your marriage.

We just go, okay, I'm going to begin to obey.

Blessed are, you know, it goes on to salt and light, you know, in the same way, let your light so shine before others that they may see your good deeds and glorify your father in heaven.

Maybe if I just change the word, in the same way, let your light shine before your spouse.

Let your light shine before your kids that they may see your good deeds and glorify your father in heaven.

That gospel living begins in your home, begins in your marriage.

Murder.

Yeah, that's good.

Let's not do that.

Um, that's that's important.

No murder.

That's that's important.

But he says this that to not harbor anger, which means not allow a root of bitterness to spring up and take hold of you.

Instead, keep a short account, settle matters quickly.

Adultery, yeah, that's another good one.

Let's not do that.

But then he talks about lust and taking it seriously, like the sacredness of all of humanity, that I'm not gonna degrade another human, but I'm also gonna honor my spouse.

Divorce.

You know, in our marriage, something that we have never said, never will say, we don't even joke about.

We sometimes have called it the D-word, divorce.

Like we're not even gonna just joke about this.

Sometimes couples just joke about divorce.

Like, no, like it's a big deal.

Are there places and reasons why?

This is yes, absolutely.

The scripture's queer in that, but he also says marriage is so sacred, or o's, like your yes be yes, or eye for eye.

I'm not gonna retaliate or pay back or love for enemy.

Ooh.

Because there's sometimes in the course of marriage that your enemy is your spouse, they're unlovable.

And Jesus says, when they're unlovable, you are called to love them and pray for them.

One of the areas that I was so convicted on was when I don't feel loving towards Jenny, which is rare because she's amazing.

It happens though.

And you know what I do sometimes?

I have a journal and I'm writing down my complaints and my stuff, and like, if we just change this, and I just got this conviction, pray for your wife.

And God changes your heart.

So you can't build a foundation on Jesus without obeying the teachings of Jesus.

And Jesus actually taught about marriage, like the foundation of what marriage actually is.

He says, Haven't you read, he replied, that at the beginning the creator made the male and female, that there's this distinction that one, you're made in the Imago day.

And then for this reason, a man will leave his father and mother, be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.

So they're no longer two but one.

Therefore, what God is joined, let no one separate.

Here's what Jesus thinks about marriage, by the way.

Jesus thinks God is the architect of marriage.

Which means God designed marriage, so it works best by his design.

How did he design it?

We said marriage is to be a lifelong commitment between one man, one woman, before God.

It's called a covenant.

You leave and start a brand new family unit.

That's that maturity stage.

The old English or King James of united is cleave.

In the Hebrew, that word in Genesis 2, it has that picture of being glued together, inseparable.

It is the word of covenant.

We don't think about covenant very often anymore.

We marry sometimes out of convenience, don't we?

We marry, you know, and it's like it's almost consumeristic.

It's like, I'm gonna marry as long as this is a good transaction for me.

Covenant.

We say it in our vows.

We say, till death do us part.

And sickness and in health.

Through the good times and the bad times, through whatever storms come our way.

Amen.

The sturdiness and the foundation that a marriage needs needs a covenant commitment for when the storms come, you say, Christ, you're the center, and because you are the center, we have made a covenant commitment, and so we're not getting out.

There isn't a backdoor.

There's not an escape hatch, so we better figure it out.

And it says, one flesh, that there's this sexual intimacy, physical intimacy, that sex is actually designed within the context of marriage, and it's actually harmful outside that context.

It's this beautiful expression of the covenant commitment.

See, marriage is built into the very fabric of creation, it is not a fabrication of culture.

God is the architect.

Your marriage upon.

And I know we know probably most of us the right answer.

But what's the real answer?

You know, we're in this different season.

Um we're in that sending season, launching season.

Our oldest just finished her first year of college.

Our middle is now starting senior year, next year of high school.

I remember Jenny saying this the other, like, as we're kind of entering the season maybe a year ago, she was like, oh, it's only losing and dying from here on out.

And it's kind of true, you know, because like you at the beginning, you like you graduate college, you get married, you have a new job, you have kids, and this birthing, and then it is like this sending.

And there was a season where we really needed just new and fresh vision.

Now, here's the interesting thing.

What foundation are you building your marriage on?

Here's what I would say over the last 21 years of marriage, and I'm just being honest, so you be as honest as you can with yourself.

I'll just tell you where I'm at, but you figure out where you're at.

As I began to look back for me, we started with the foundation of Jesus.

I would say there's some foundational slips, some foundational shifts.

Two.

One was kids became more the foundation in ministry.

It makes sense, it's easy to do.

Man, kids, it takes, I mean, the last 19 years has been full focus spread.

And ministry, not a bad thing, but it certainly isn't meant to replace Jesus.

In the ancient day, when they would build a foundation, they had what was known as a cornerstone.

Cornerstone is the first stone set to construct a masonry foundation.

All other stones are set in reference to this stone.

Thus, it determines the position of the entire structure.

Symbolically, it means something of great importance that everything else depends on.

And the reality, the question is, what is your cornerstone?

Singles.

What is your cornerstone?

Married.

Maybe it's happiness.

It sets the entire direction, and yes, Jesus is a part of it, but the cornerstone, the founding place is somehow Jesus, maybe he was a cornerstone, but something has shifted along the way, and it's about happiness, or maybe it's personal fulfillment or self-actualization where maybe it's like you, like me, it's become identifying as my kids.

What's the foundation that you're building your marriage upon?

What's the foundation that you're building your life upon?

What's the cornerstone that everything else is set up from?

I want to invite you today afresh to Jesus.

It sounds so simplistic, but it's incredibly true.

One of the greatest ways to strengthen your marriage is to deepen your relationship with Jesus.

One of the greatest ways to strengthen your marriage is to deepen your relationship with Jesus.

And 20 years of ministry and pastoral counseling, I can't tell you how often I've sat with a couple in crisis.

And humanly speaking, you look at it and go, I don't know how this is gonna work.

There's been betrayal, there's been all sorts of stuff, there's been so much water under the bridge.

And if you can get both couples to prioritize Jesus as the cornerstone, it's incredible.

But the reality is you only need one often.

And I've sat with so many couples that I don't know how the story ends.

I don't know if the marriage lasts, but here's what I do know: left to our human tendency, we try to do two things.

We try to control and we try to fix.

And when we do that, it almost always ends up in disaster.

But if you lean in, if you lean in, if you lean into Jesus, you will never regret it, regardless of how the story ends.

And I can tell you, I've just seen marriages restored, healing and wholeness of friendships and relationships and families, like only God can do.

And often it took the desperation of the brokenness and the storm to get you to the point to finally go, just Jesus.

Just Jesus.

I'm gonna invite the band up.

We're gonna sing Christ is my cornerstone.

And as we do that, I would like for you today to fresh.

What is the cornerstone and the foundation of your life?

Be honest.

I was honest.

And I'm a pastor, it should be Jesus.

And would you go, Jesus, today?

I want to have you the one upon which every other thing is set from.

I invite you to be the very cornerstone of my life.

And so what that means is I'm just going to begin to take you at your word and do it.

And would you show me areas to take the next step?

And so, Jesus, I ask for my friends, would you give them the wisdom to know what to do with what they just heard and the courage to do it, no matter how hard it may be.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

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