Love Up: Settling Up with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the MetaCurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaChurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time in your life that God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

I'm so glad that you guys joined us today.

We love marriage here at MetaCurch.

And yet, uh we are, yes, we love marriage.

But y'all know we're also not that place that's gonna pretend like marriage is easy and it's all gonna work out, and if you just believe it, you will receive it.

Marriage takes some real work and it takes a real deep level of understanding, and understanding that most people in today's world do not have.

So we're gonna talk about it.

We're in this series, if you're joining us for the first time or if you missed week one, week one we called framing up.

And we set the framework that really is guiding us through the entire series.

And what we found is that in the pre-Jesus ancient world, love, sex, and relationships operated very differently than what we are used to today.

And we also saw in week one that we are slowly but definitely in today's culture making our way back to that pre-Jesus framework.

That framework was built on selfishness, convenience, it was purposeless, and it was bad.

If you study the ancient world, it was a brutal, brutal place to live.

If you were a woman, you were property.

If you were a foreigner, you had no worth, no value.

If you were poor, then you were less than.

It was only the very, very top percentage of men in most societies who had any freedom when it came to sex, love, relationships, and marriage.

And in that context, Jesus came and reframed things.

His framework was selfless, it was covenantal, more than a commitment, a lifelong binding promise.

It was purposeful, as a matter of fact, it was pointing humanity back to God's original purpose, design, and intention for his creation and for humanity.

And it was good.

It was this understanding of how relationship works that led to the flourishing of humankind, that led to women, minorities, the poor having equal rights, equal dignity and value, not because it was given to you by law, because it was given to you by God.

This is so counter to what you will hear advertised in the culture.

The culture says that we could finally usher in a sexual and relational utopia.

Everything could be perfect if it wasn't for those darn institutions like the church and Christianity.

They will tell you that Jesus is oppressive and regressive when in fact it was the movement of Jesus and his framework that for the first time in human history led to the flourishing of all people.

It was his framework that guided relationship through the guardrails of consent, and it was his movement and his framework that led to the dignity, worth, and value of all people.

If you missed week one, I really encourage you.

Like everything has come out of that.

You can get caught up really easy at metachurch.tv slash love up.

Week one, we looked at framing up.

Week two, matching up.

Week three, shacking up.

And my message today is settling up.

Settling up.

Would you pray with me?

Father, we love you.

We thank you for a place like Meta for all people on all different walks of their faith journey, a place where we can come and connect with you and connect with each other, a place where we don't put any limits on how you can use us and how you can use things for redemptive purposes.

We love you.

We ask that you would guide us, challenge us, bring clarity to us, give us wisdom.

We would lay down any of our own preconceived ideas or notions and allow you to truly speak to us today.

And we ask it all in Jesus' name.

And everyone said, Amen.

I call today settling up because I believe words matter.

And I don't like the way we're talking about marriage in our culture today.

I had a mentor who said that words create worlds.

And I believe that.

That the words we speak matter, that they create real things in our minds and in our hearts, and we live those out, and it actually can create a part of our reality.

We don't talk about marriage as settling up.

We actually call marriage settling down, right?

I think it's time to settle down.

We talk about it as a digression in fun, a digression in status.

It's time to settle down in all series long we've seen that we are a culture who is pushing adolescence as far into our lives as we can.

And finally we're in our late 30s or our early 40s or our late 40s or our early 50s, and it's like, you know what?

It's time to settle down.

No more fun, no more going out, no doing what I want to do all the time, no more living my best life.

Isn't that what we say when we're single?

I'm not ready to get married yet.

I'm out here living my best life.

That means marriage will be your worst life, right?

So we settle down.

And especially for men, people tell you to settle down because you need to settle down, right?

It's time to settle down.

And so our words continue to just guide us.

And so if you're gonna settle down, then you find the right person, and then you take the plunge, right?

That's great.

It's like walking the plank, you know, it's punishment.

So you're gonna jump off into water that's over your head, you're gonna be in over your head, and you're just gonna have to fight like hell to keep your head above water.

So there's a great picture of marriage for you, but it gets better, right?

Because if you settle down and you take the plunge, then you get this great gift.

The old ball and chain, right?

What a way to describe our spouses.

Oh I mean, I would love to, I'd love to still come out, I'd love to go to the club, I'd love to go in some trouble with you.

The old ball and chain, keeping me at home.

It's like the way that we talk about this is so degrading, and then we're shocked when our marriages are terrible and when half of them aren't working out.

So marriage is hard enough without us going into them, describing them as hell on earth, okay?

We're gonna talk about settling up, and we're not gonna hide the ball.

Marriage is very tough.

You guys know some of the statistics.

50% of marriages end in divorce.

Over 60% of second marriages end in divorce, almost 75% of third marriages end in divorce.

Did you know that if you're a woman in the military, you're twice as likely to end up divorced?

Did you know, like we learned last week, that if you live together before marriage, your odds of divorce increase by anywhere from 33 to 50%?

Did you know, and this represents a lot of us, did you know that if your parents were divorced and their parents were divorced and y'all get married, the odds of divorce go up 200%.

It's really difficult.

It's really difficult.

And that just represents the people who actually go through with the divorce because there are plenty of people who are sticking into the covenant, whether they value it on some kind of spiritual or social level, or whether they're just too stubborn to walk away, and yet they are living every day, every moment in hell on earth, stuck in marriages where there is no end in sight, and where they're more miserable today than they were yesterday.

And maybe, maybe that's even the marriage that you're in today.

And so we've seen a few ways that we can set ourselves up for success in marriage.

All throughout this series, we have confronted the lie that culture tells you, and the lie goes like this how you behave today will have no effect on your future tomorrow.

How you date today will have no effect on your marriage later.

How sexually promiscuous you are today will have no bearing on the quality and longevity of your marriage in the future.

And that is a lie.

And if you don't think it's a lie, talk to some married people who every day are confronting things from their own past and their spouse's past that is seeking to sabotage their current marriage.

But it's not just your behavior.

We've looked at that all series long.

It's also what you believe about marriage that ultimately ends up affecting the quality and longevity of your marriage.

The truth is, as a culture, we do not understand the meaning of marriage.

We do not understand the meaning of marriage, what it actually means, what it is intended for, what role it plays in our life.

It's interesting if you survey the average adult about what they expect out of marriage, you'll hear things like they want to have fulfillment, they want to experience romance, they want companionship, they want sexual satisfaction, they want someone to come in and make their life more fun and more exciting.

And when you ask who they are looking for, like who can you see yourself marrying, they'll say things like, you know, just the right person, the perfect partner, my soulmate.

I'm out here looking for my soulmate.

Here's the problem those are the answers you'll get from the average adult.

Those are also the answers you'll get from the average fifth grader.

I'm looking for someone who will make my life more fun, so you know, someone who where I'm not so lonely, I have someone to do stuff with.

Like fifth graders, 15-year-olds, and 35-year-olds all have the same expectations out of marriage and what its purpose is for.

And what that means is, as a culture, as uncomfortable as it might be to admit, we have a childish view of marriage.

Our ideas of marriage are cemented in and programmed in very young, which means for the average person, more of your view of marriage comes from the Disney channel than from the real world that you're living in today.

Here's one of the things that you see as an expression of our childish view of marriage.

Most people will admit marriage is more about me than it is about we.

It is a selfish endeavor.

And they won't come right out and tell you that, but when you look at their expectations across a broad range of questions, what you will find is that they are looking for someone to come in, accept them exactly as they are with no changes, and that that person needs to make whatever changes are necessary for them to be happy and fulfilled.

And if you just study across the last thousand years of human civilization, what you will find is that the most striking things that has changed is we have lost our sense of community and we have become a collection of individuals.

For almost all of human history, people thought of themselves as a part of a greater whole, which meant when it came to marriage, it was easy to think of marriage as a we first, not anymore.

Now marriage is about me.

I'm the prince or I'm the princess in the fairy tale, which means I deserve a happy, evid happily ever after, without a whole lot of effort on my part.

And when we think this way, that we are perfect just the way we are, and someone needs to come in for our own personal satisfaction and fulfillment.

As soon as marriage brings you anything other than romantic bliss, it is absolutely jarring.

It's hard to think of something that's more difficult than bringing two unbelievably complex lives together in a lifelong commitment.

And yet, we expect that to not just be easy, but we expect it to make all of our wildest dreams come true without any work on our part.

It's about me, not about we.

We don't really understand the meaning of marriage, and even at a more fundamental level, we don't really understand the meaning of love, which is the bedrock of any healthy marriage.

And when you ask people to describe love, what they will usually describe is feelings, you know, it's just the right vibes, it's the butterflies in your stomach, it's just complete fulfillment and contentment.

The apostle Paul, when he details out what love is, he doesn't talk about feelings, he talks about actions.

He doesn't talk about what you get, he talks about what you give.

In 1 Corinthians 13, he describes it this way: Love is patient, love is kind.

Love does not envy, is not boastful, is not arrogant, love is not rude, is not self-seeking, is not irritable, and it does not keep a record of wrongs.

Love finds no joy in unrighteousness, but rejoices in the truth.

It bears all things.

It stands up under the weight of all of the things, all of the suffering and all of the misery that can accompany us in this life.

It bears all things, it believes all things, it hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends.

This is called the love chapter.

And we read this passage at virtually every wedding ceremony ever.

1 Corinthians 13, 4 through 8.

If that was not in your wedding ceremony, you're not actually married.

I hate to tell you.

It's just a part of the deal.

Everyone reads it.

And here's my suggestion we stop a little short.

Three verses later, in verse 11, seemingly out of nowhere, the apostle Paul says, When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.

When I became a man, I put the childish things aside.

We have a childish view of love, we have a childish view of marriage.

And what Paul is getting at here is this detailed list of what love is and what love requires of you for love to be true, it is not for the faint of heart.

That if you have a childish framework of the world around you, of the relationship that you're in, you maybe can conceptualize what love is, but you will not be able to actually live it out.

And because we exist in the broader culture of our world today, most of us are influenced by the culture's framework, which is a pre-Jesus framework.

Let me remind you, that framework is selfish, it is convenient, and it is purposeless.

And we haven't said this explicitly yet in this series, but that framework of how the world viewed sex, relationships, marriage before Jesus, that is the same exact framework that a child has of the world around them.

Children are selfish.

Part of that is they're meant to be.

Babies do not have you in mind.

They just cry.

That's all they've got.

They cry when they want you to feed them, change them, pick them up, burp them, put them down, put them to sleep, wake them up.

Everything they want, they just cry, and that's all we expect out of them.

You don't walk into a crying baby and go, are you gonna add anything to this relationship?

I just give and I give.

Of course you do.

They're selfish.

And it takes a long time for kids to grow out of selfishness.

That's why your teenagers, who you clothe and you shelter, and you feed, and you put phones in their hands, and you drive them all over God's earth so that they can pretend they're gonna go D1 in their sports someday.

And then you feed them a dinner that you bought at inflation prices, and they go, you know, I'm really only eating chicken these days.

Not tonight.

So selfish.

It takes a long time.

Paul's not mad at you, teenagers.

He's like, look, when I was young, I thought I thought like a young person.

I acted like I reasoned like a young person.

Children have no sense of delayed gratitude.

It's all convenience.

I want it and I want it right now.

The majority of young kids, if you give them an endless supply of candy, they will eat that candy until they vomit.

They don't know how to delay gratification.

If you give kids money without guidance, they'll spend all of it immediately.

Kids are largely purposeless.

They're not planning or thinking for the future.

If your household was up to your kids to survive, you would last three days.

That's fine.

Be a kid.

Kids, enjoy it.

It's beautiful.

Someday you have to put the childish things aside.

Selfish, convenient, purposeless.

That's great for a kid.

It will hold you back as an adult.

One of the church fathers about 1600 years ago, he said this a child inevitably views life with a self-centered set of interests.

Chaotic drives address for the child the gratification of the immediate present.

Whereas the adult coherently orders strategies which serve long-term goals.

There is purpose to what they do with self-discipline.

Let's look back at that list of what love is.

This is what Paul says, this is what scripture says love is.

It's patient, kind, does not envy, is not boastful, is not arrogant, is not rude, is not self-seeking, is not irritable, does not keep a record of wrong, finds no joy in unrighteousness, but rejoices in truth, bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Until you understand love, you can't really understand marriage.

And this kind of love, not love from what you get, but love what you give, a selfless kind of love, this is grown folk stuff.

Marriage is grown folk stuff.

It's for men and women, not for boys and girls.

And I'm not talking about age, I'm talking about framework.

If you walk into marriage with a framework that is selfish, that's based on your convenience, and that does not have a purpose outside of your own satisfaction and fulfillment, you are setting yourself up for a disaster of a relationship.

This list is hard.

This list should be convicting.

It's convicting to me.

It is love extrapolated for us just to show us how far we fall short of loving well.

If you had a spouse who did all of these things right all of the time, you would literally have a perfect spouse.

Our culture thinks that marriage is about me way more than it is about we.

And you see this because when you ask them, people in serious dating relationships or people who are engaged or even married couples, what does your partner need to change for y'all's relationship to really thrive?

Oh man, they can pull out a list, boy.

Woo! Let me just walk you through it.

They're selfish, they gossip a lot, they're not good with their finances.

Personal hygiene could use a little bit of an upgrade.

They don't work out as much as they should.

They don't think about the future and they don't really think about the present.

They almost never have my needs in mind.

Like, everyone can do that.

And then you ask that same person, what do you think you need to change in order for your relationship to thrive?

And they're like, look, I don't want to lie to you.

I do bite my nails pretty often.

Sometimes I love too much.

I feel like sometimes I'm too kind to them, you know?

We want this.

This list, the love list.

We want that.

We want a spouse who is patient, and at the same time, we have like no time for any of their nonsense.

We want a spouse who is kind and yet we tear them down with our words publicly and privately.

We would love to have a spouse that isn't quickly irritated and yet everything they do drives us crazy.

It's about me.

And if they're lucky, then there can be a we.

They've got lots of changes to make.

But like my mama told me, I am perfect just the way I am.

And usually both sides of the equation are thinking that same thing.

And they lock themselves into a lifelong covenant.

Their only chance of survival is both of them growing and maturing and becoming more and more of the person that God created them to be.

We must understand scripture's framework and the original intention.

We must understand the meaning of marriage.

I want us to find the meaning of marriage all the way at the beginning, the beginning of Scripture and the beginning of our universe.

The very front of your Bible is the book of Genesis, and Genesis tells the creation narrative and our No God series a few months ago.

We talked about how at the beginning, science has now shown us there was nothing.

There was no space, there was no time, there was nothing, and God created it all.

And everything God created was good.

He made the plants and the trees and the sun and the moon and the stars, and he said all of it was good.

And then in Genesis 1:26, then God said, Let us make man in our image according to our likeness.

Genesis 1:26

They will rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the livestock, the whole earth, and the creatures that crawl on the earth.

Humanity is created, we are given a consciousness and the capacity for creation and for dominion.

We weren't just created by God like the rest of creation.

We were created in his image as divine image bearers.

We were separated out.

The world was literally perfect.

Remember sun, moon, stars, clouds, lizards, birds, all good.

Humanity, very good.

The world actually perfect, perfectly functioning.

And yet, maybe you haven't seen this before, but in this perfect world, there was still one thing that was not good.

In Genesis 2.18, the Lord God said, It is not good.

Wait a second.

How?

Everything's good.

Everything's literally perfect.

It's a perfect world.

They haven't eaten the fruit yet, the world hasn't fallen into chaos.

This should jump off the page and shake us in a perfect world, God said.

It is not good.

And it's not good for the man to be alone.

I feel this verse so strongly.

If there were hidden cameras in my house at like the rare times where Katie goes on vacation and takes the kids, in 35 minutes you could look at those cameras and say, it is not good for Pastor Clayton to be alone.

I am sorry, I'm not a woman, I'm not sure that y'all need men.

I know men need women, okay?

I can imagine God viewing his creation and seeing Adam, poor baby, down there, just wandering aimlessly.

I love how he says it.

It is not good for the man to be alone.

Katie leaves in 35 minutes.

I have lost my mind, and I don't even know it yet.

I'm walking my house, pacing around, chonis only, singing old Motown songs.

I have no idea what I'm doing.

I have no aim in life.

I eat cereal for breakfast, cereal for lunch, cereal for dinner.

It's not good.

And so what does he do?

He he intervenes.

And man, this is very, very instructive.

In the creation narrative, the world is perfect and something's not good.

And this tells us something.

It tells us that we weren't only created for relationship with God, that we were also created for relationship with others.

And specifically, with the rare exception, and I do believe there is a gift of singleness that God gives to people, that's a different topic for a different sermon.

With those rare exceptions that God designed us for marriage.

Here's what he says to finish the verse.

The Lord God said, It's not good for the man to be alone.

I will make a helper corresponding to him.

This isn't everyone's favorite verse.

What does a helper mean?

And I'll tell you why it's not everyone's favorite verse, because for a lot of years, very insecure men did very terrible theological work to make this say that the woman comes in second to the man.

And it's translated helper, and so you gotta kind of some say a help mate, you know, which kind of sounds even worse.

And it kind of makes it sound like, you know, the man's the headliner and the woman's the opening act, you know.

He's the movie star and you're the co-star.

He's the CEO and you're the secretary.

I know we're not supposed to.

And so people have translated it that way.

They take helper to mean like, yes, you need to go helper make me a sandwich.

You know, that's that's not me.

See, everything God does is intentional, and one of the things we talk about a lot here because it's important, is scripture wasn't written in English.

The Old Testament was written in Hebrew.

And in Hebrew, what God actually says is, I will make him, I will make Adam a Etzer conegdo.

It's a tough Hebrew phrase.

It's actually two words.

Conegdo, the second word, just means the opposite of or in opposition to.

It's a powerful word.

It's usually used in the context of military strength.

Etzer means a warrior.

It's even used sometimes to mean a savior.

They often translate etzer connecdo as a helpful adversary.

Now think about the framework that most of us are bringing into marriage.

Selfish, convenient, purposeless.

It's about me way more than it is about we.

You're not looking for an adversary, you're not looking for opposition.

Why would you need active opposition?

Remember, you're already perfect.

You already made it.

A helpful adversary.

Adam understood this.

Adam knew God was not giving him a doormat to walk over.

He knew God was not giving him a genie to fulfill all of his greatest wishes.

He knew he was getting much more than a sexual or social companion.

He was getting an etzer connecto, a helpful adversary.

So how did Adam feel about this?

When God let him know he's, I'm gonna bring you an Etzer connecto.

Did he wander around going, Oh, I guess it's time to freaking settle down, you know?

I mean, I gotta start picking up around the garden, someone to be on my back all the time, someone else to know my schedule.

Here's what Adam said when he saw his helpful adversary.

In verse 23, and the man said, This one.

At last.

At last.

Maybe you felt that way.

You know, the first time you met your spouse.

You've forgotten about it because y'all borderline hate each other now, but when y'all first met, and you thought, at last, someone different, man.

Different than the other girls, different than the other guys, at last.

This is a whole Edda James song right here.

At last.

My love has come along.

My lonely days are over.

At last.

At last.

This one is bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.

This one will be called woman.

He literally took who he was and gave her a part of it because she came from man.

And Adam had just got done.

His first job was to name all of the animals.

And God gave him that because God gave humanity dominion.

God wanted him to know that you are set apart, you are higher and above, you're a co-creator, you can have actual power in this world.

He named all the animals, which means he looked at all of the animals, and in none of those did he see back a reflection of himself.

That image of God located in anything else.

Someone who could come along and actually help him meet his full potential of who God created him to be until he saw Eve.

The very next verse says, this is why a man leaves his father and mother and bonds with his wife, and they become one flesh.

This is the meaning of marriage.

That you were not meant to be alone.

And what you need is not someone to fulfill all of your wildest dreams.

What you do not need is someone to keep the romance at a level 10 every moment of every day.

What you do not need is someone to rubber stamp and affirm you just exactly the way that you are what you need is a helpful adversary.

You need someone who can contend with you.

You need someone who is willing to join into an unbreachable, unbreakable covenant, which is a way of saying, I know this isn't very romantic, but it's a way of saying, I actually know just how jacked up you are, and I am willing to stay through the rest of your life and fight to help both of us get closer to who God created us to be.

You need that.

We need a helpful adversary.

Helpful opposition.

Now, both of those words matter.

We are told to speak the truth in love.

Some of you have no trouble with the truth part.

You'll be an adversary all day.

You're just not that freaking helpful, you know?

But that's the love component.

Some of you have the love down to a science, baby.

You are all love.

But can I tell you a little secret?

You pretending like your spouse's real shortcomings don't exist is about the most unloving thing you can do.

Helpful adversary, helpful opposition, truth, and love.

You need this.

You need this because we're broken people.

Metachurch is not a place for perfect people with perfect marriages.

If that's you, then you can go down the street to the church where everyone gets to lie to each other all the time.

Here, we admit we are broken people, far from our potential, far from who we could be.

And of course you're broken.

The world that you live in is broken.

The world that you were born in is broken.

The family you grew up in, as great as they might have been, is broken.

You experienced real pain in your life.

For some of you, it was people teasing you, it was things not going your way, it was some parts of your physical appearance that you weren't very excited about, you had some insecurities around.

For some of you, you were left and abandoned and abused and used and addicted.

We have the whole spectrum, and you need to know that suffering is scalable.

And just because you don't have a 60 minutes level story doesn't mean that it didn't create real pain inside of you.

And out of that pain, we draw strength.

And those strengths often turn into our worst ways, our coping mechanisms, the way that we shield people off and keep them from seeing the deepest and darkest parts of us.

And yet, what you leave in the darkness will sabotage the significance of the life that God has created for you.

And what you need is someone to love you enough to commit to a covenant that says, no matter what you bring out, no matter who you are, I'm not going anywhere.

It's a powerful thing.

Marriage is the most important relationship you'll ever be in, except for your relationship with Jesus, it's the most important decision you'll ever make, except for the decision to believe in Jesus.

It is an opportunity to come together and to help each other become more and more and more of the people that you were created to be.

And in a world's framework where marriage is about me and it's about my happiness and my fulfillment all of the time and this romantic adventure, this rom-com that I can be on for the rest of my life.

As soon as conflict comes, you run away because you think conflict is evidence that the marriage isn't working.

Can I tell you what I might be most proud of in my marriage?

It's not that we don't fight, it's that we choose with love, usually, to have all the fights.

I'm not the person that Katie married.

Katie isn't the person I married.

Some of that is just time, you change, but some of that is that we have allowed each other in and we have chosen the fights.

And what happens in marriage is you grow in this intimacy, and the more intimate you become, the more you see of that person on both sides of the spectrum, the more you see in great detail what is holding them back from the fullness of who they could be.

And the more you see in detail glimpses of just how great of a creation God made them.

And if you're willing to stay in the fight, to be a helpful adversary, to love each other well, and to point your marriage to something that is purposed greater than you, then marriage is an opportunity to reach your potential in a way that there might not be anything else on earth that can afford you that opportunity.

Here's the meaning of marriage.

Marriage is two broken believers coming under a lifelong covenant to selflessly serve one another for the purpose of helping each other become more like Jesus.

Marriage is two broken believers.

Metachurch is a place for all people on all different walks of their faith journey.

Here is one of the reasons that having a common faith is so essential inside of your marriage because you are no longer fighting against each other.

You are fighting for something that is greater than you, grander than you, outside of you, and that lasts through all eternity to broken believers coming under a lifelong covenant to selflessly serve one another for the purpose of helping each other become more like Jesus.

Marriage is not about you.

Marriage is ultimately about Jesus.

And for us at Meta, the realest reality is that someday every one of us will stand before the throne of Jesus.

The realest reality is that someday every one of us will stand before the throne of Jesus.

Marriage is an opportunity to stand before Jesus someday.

Having lived in a relationship that allowed the world to get glimpses of exactly who God created you to be.

Today we're selling uh a book.

We've done a couple books in this series.

Timothy Keller's The Meaning of Marriage, a book that I give to every couple whose wedding I get invited to or whose wedding I officiate.

Uh, it's a book that I'm so grateful I read before I walked into my marriage.

And here's one passage out of that book describing marriage.

He says, it is to look at another person and get a glimpse of what God is creating and to say, I see who God is making you, and it excites me.

I want to be a part of that.

I want to partner with you and God in this journey you are taking to his throne.

And when we get there, I will look at your magnificence and say, I always knew you could be like this.

I got glimpses of it here on earth and now.

Look at you.

Marriage is an opportunity like nothing else.

And yes, it completes you.

But not in the way you're thinking, not in the way where you get everything you want and they have to change everything for you.

It is an opportunity to make you more and more and more the complete creation that God originally intended for you.

And if you can choose today to have a proper view of the meaning of marriage, then you can begin taking the next steps of what that means for the rest of your life.

Would you pray with me?

Father, we love you and we thank you.

We thank you for marriage.

We thank you for loving us.

We thank you for someone who can come into a relationship with us and find and expose in us the things that are keeping us from the fullness of the life you've given us.

I pray that we would cling tight to a framework that is selfless, that love does not become about what we can get, but what we can give.

I pray, God, that we would find the true purpose of two lives coming together as iron, sharpening iron to become more and more like Jesus, to have a greater and greater impact on our families and on the world around us.

To stand before you someday, knowing that together we helped each other to thrive.

We love you.

And we pray these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

If this was helpful to you and you want to help us get the word out, you can subscribe to this podcast.

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If you want to get connected further with what MetaCurch is doing, you can go online to metachurch.tv.

There you can learn how to take next steps.

You can learn where our different venues are at if you ever wanted to visit, and you can also give financially to help push this movement forward.

Man, I love you guys and I hope you have a great rest of your day.