Loveology – Covenant Love

This podcast is presented to you by Pastor Jason Burns and Access Church in Lakeland, Florida.

For more information, visit Access.tv.

Well let's get to work.

Today, I want to talk about love, and specifically, I want to talk about marriage.

And here's the funny thing I know about marriage.

All of us have a different picture of it, of what love really is.

And so just for fun, let's have a fun moment.

I want to ask you a few questions and I want you to vote.

This is an all skate, this is an everyone participate kind of moment.

You can say yes by lifting a thumbs up, or you can say no by giving me a thumbs down.

Let's all practice here in North Lake Limon.

Thumbs up, thumbs up, everybody.

This is an all skate, thumbs up.

Higher than that.

Thumbs up, there you go.

Thumbs down.

Question number one.

Are you ready?

Can watching football together be considered quality time?

Come on, the Super Bowl's coming.

Quality time, lots of yeses, a few nos.

One dude's got two hands up.

All right.

Alright.

Question number two, it's gonna get harder.

If you tell your husband not to get you a gift for your anniversary or Valentine's, can you be mad when he doesn't get you anything?

Yes or no?

Yes or no?

Come up right there.

Come on, yes or no, okay.

We got some issues to work through.

Alright.

Here's the tough one.

You ready?

If your wife or girlfriend loves an outfit that isn't flattering, should you tell her?

Yes or no?

Yes or no.

A lot of cowards in the room, a lot of boys won't do it.

Come on, come on.

Alright.

As you can see, we've got a lot of work to do on the topic of love.

Okay.

To get us started today, um, something you need to know about me is I'm rarely at a loss for words.

Like uh it's my job to talk to people.

So I'm I'm rarely at a loss for words, and I noticed a few years ago that I do something weird when I don't know what to say.

If someone puts me at in like an odd moment, I'll go, huh?

Huh.

Like I don't know what to say, huh?

It just comes out like that.

Some years ago, about 10 years ago, my wife and I, we had uh our two boys, and then we had a little girl named Ella, and she was the cutest thing ever.

I want you to see, because this will make this story make sense.

This was my daughter 10 years ago.

Look at that thing, cute, chubby, rolls on rolls, just the cutest thing ever.

And I loved her so much.

And I would take her with me everywhere.

It was just having a little girl, it melted my heart in my wallet.

Come on, girl dads know that.

And I had this weird thing happen.

Um, whenever I would go out with just Ella, if it was just me and Ella, I would meet so many people.

They would stop and they would talk to her.

Very often and awkwardly, it was girls that would come up and talk to us.

But they, I'll be honest, I know the truth about myself.

They weren't talking to me, they were talking to Ella.

And this happened all the time, and it was super awkward.

But there was one time in particular that to this day makes me feel awkward.

It makes me feel like, huh, like it was just an awkward moment.

We were at the Lakeland Square Mall, risking our lives, everybody.

And we were there.

And pulled into a parking spot, got out, pulled the stroller out, and set the stroller up, and then I go get little Ella.

She's maybe six months old, out of her car seat, and I'm walking with her to put her in the stroller.

And as I'm putting her in the stroller, two elderly ladies, I'm talking like old, old ladies, come walking to me, and one of the ladies says, You want to give me a ride, honey?

And I said, Huh?

I don't know what to say about that.

Huh?

What do you mean, give you a ride?

And I didn't know what to say.

And the only thing that I could think of that came out of my mouth was, oh, you don't mean that.

And then her friend spoke up and said, Honey, you don't know her.

And I said, Huh?

Like, what do you say to this?

It was an awkward moment.

Felt weird.

Now let me tell you what didn't happen in this moment.

I never stopped to think, you know, I've been married for 10 years at this point, got three beautiful kids, and it's been a really good ride, and Liz has been a great wife, but Ethel just won my heart.

I never thought to myself, everything was so good until this moment, but maybe this is the end of my marriage because she came along and said the right words.

It was never a temptation, never a challenge, never a thought.

It was never it was nothing but funny.

But here's the truth.

When you get married, especially if you've been married for a long time, marriage has challenges.

It has moments where you're gonna argue, where you're gonna fight, where you're gonna disagree.

There's some little arguments about where you're gonna eat dinner, and there's big arguments about whether we should move or whether we should have children or what our lives should look like together.

And all of us have these moments, and the truth is, if we're not careful and if we don't deal with them the right way, what has a tendency to happen is those little things become big things.

The thing I know about marriage is marriage is one of the great testimonies that the church has to an increasingly dark world.

And I could spend a lot of time rehearsing all the statistics about marriage and how many marriages fall apart, but you don't need that because all of us have walked through it or know someone who's walked through it.

Many of us had parents that sat us down and said, honey, we love you, but but mommy and daddy are gonna split up or we're gonna live in separate places.

We've all been touched by divorce in some way.

And I just want to say God's way is the best way.

And it is possible that when you say for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and hell till death do us part, it is very possible for your marriage to go till death do you part, and for you to die still in love.

Let me give you a couple quick thoughts on this.

Number one, in this series, we're gonna talk about all different types of relationship stuff.

We're gonna talk about what does it mean to be single and to live in security?

Well, what does it mean to have a godly marriage?

What does it mean to have loving friendships and relationships?

We'll talk about all different types of relationships, but today I want to come out swinging about maybe the most important relationship in your life, which is your marriage.

Let me let me give you two ground rules.

Number one is as I speak today, I don't want you to think about someone else.

I want you to think about you.

Scripture was never intended to be a window that we look through at someone else.

It was meant to be a mirror that we look back at and apply to our own lives.

Second thing is you are not the Holy Spirit.

So don't you dare elbow your spouse and be like, mm-hmm, don't do that, okay?

To get us going today, I want you to think about every childish love story you've ever heard, every fairy tale story.

I want you to think about this.

How do they start once upon a time?

And how do they end?

And they lived happily ever after.

In the book of 1 Corinthians, chapter 13, Paul says this.

1 Corinthians 13 · chapter mention

He says, When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child.

But when I became a man or grown, I put away childish things.

Every childish fairy tale starts with once upon a time and ends with happily ever after.

But maturity knows that in the middle of the story takes a lot of work.

It's gonna cost something.

And if we're gonna be a church full of people that have marriages that go the distance, we're gonna have to have a mature understanding of what is required of us.

So today I want to start with this question that we're gonna wrestle with through this series what does love require of me?

Not of my spouse.

What does it require of me?

As we do this, here's what I'd like to do.

I'd like to take a look at the way that we view marriage.

Because the truth is the world views marriage very differently than God views marriage.

In fact, I want to challenge you.

The next time you go through a grocery store or a store and you see tabloid magazines at the checkout, pay attention to the headlines.

They see say things like, this couple breaking up, this couple splitting up, this couple dividing assets, this one cheated, this affair.

All the language that they use in those stories makes people not feel like people, but it makes them feel like objects.

What it does is it reduces marriage, God's holy and sacred covenant, down from a covenant to what we would call a contract.

Well, what is a contract?

Look at this.

A contract is where we protect our rights and we limit our responsibilities.

I want you to think about this for a moment.

Think about uh your phone contract, okay?

When you signed up with Verizon or ATT or whoever you use, you signed a contract and it protected your rights.

What are your rights?

My phone will work, I'm guaranteed service, I'm guaranteed to be able to call in limited minutes, I'm guaranteed to be able to send as many messages or download a certain amount of data.

This is what you're entitled to.

And then you limit your responsibility.

What is your responsibility?

Pay$59 a month or whatever it is.

And here's the thing: we sign a contract, and in the contract, usually in the fine prints, there's a section called the Dissolution Clause, which says if you ever break the contract, what is the penalty?

For a cell phone contract, it might be that you have to pay the rest of the contract out, or you might have to pay a$299 fee to end the contract.

But when you pay the fee, they rip the contract up and you go your separate ways.

This is how the world views marriage.

As long as my needs are getting met, as long as I'm happy, as long as you're taking care of me and you're doing the stuff you're supposed to do, I'll stick with it.

And I'm only gonna do what I've agreed to do.

And if it's not working for one of us, what we'll do is we'll divide our lives up.

We'll sell the house, divide the assets, figure out where the kids go, and we'll tear up the contract and we go our separate ways.

This is detrimental to the way God intended marriage to be.

Because in God's eyes, marriage isn't a contract, marriage is a covenant.

In a covenant, we give up our rights and we pick up responsibility.

A covenant is a holy, solemn, sacred promise before God.

Covenant, I don't know what you think of when you think of it, but a covenant is so much deeper and it's so much more profound.

In a contract, you're limiting what you're gonna do.

In a covenant, you're saying, what more can I give?

How much more can I serve?

What can I bring to the table to bless you?

And a covenant was always God's idea for marriage.

In fact, the word covenant has this implication of a holy, solemn promise between a husband, a wife, and God.

But the word itself has a really interesting definition.

It's really simply a covenant is cut.

It means to cut something.

So if you read the Bible, specifically the Old Testament, you'll see stories of people having a blood covenant.

That might be two friends who say, We're gonna commit our lives to serving each other, having each other's backs.

And to prove it, they might slit their wrists or slit their hands and touch their blood together.

And what they're symbolizing is my blood is entering you and your blood is entering me, and we cannot unone what we have made one.

We cannot undo what we have done together.

It's a blood covenant.

Blood is always invested in a covenant.

Often in marriage ceremonies in the Bible, what they would do is they would take an animal and they would cut the animal in half, and they'd put one half on one side of the aisle and one half on the other side of the aisle.

And the idea was that they would say, when we make this covenant between us and God, as we walk out fulfilling this covenant with each other, if one of us were to leave, may what happened to the animal happen to us.

I did a wedding just a few weeks ago.

There was no dead animals at all.

It was soups boring, everybody.

But this is what it's supposed to be.

It's a covenant.

And I want you to see that this was always God's idea.

In the book of Genesis, God creates the sun, the moon, the stars.

He speaks the world into existence.

And after God creates all of this, he pushes some dirt together and he breathes into this pile of dirt, the breath of life.

He calls this man Adam.

The word Adam literally means in Hebrew, like reddish, kind of like clay.

It means that he was formed from the dirt.

God puts this man Adam in the ultimate bachelor pad.

He's in the Garden of Eden.

The whole world is his oyster.

He hangs out with animals all day.

He walks around naked and he pees wherever he wants to pee.

Okay.

But God notices something about Adam, is that even though he's living the bachelor's dream, he's alone and he's lonely.

So Genesis chapter 2, verse 21.

Genesis 2:21

So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep.

Pretty easy if you ask me.

And while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs and he closed up the place with flesh.

I want you to notice something.

How does God get it?

Cut.

It's a covenant.

God could have formed woman by pushing some dirt together and breathing breath into her as well.

But this is the first cut.

This is the first covenant in Scripture.

So it goes on.

Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man and he brought her to the man.

And pause here for just a moment.

Try to imagine this with me, okay?

You've got Adam, he's been living the bachelor's dream.

He falls asleep and he wakes up and his rib hurts.

He's like, man, what is going on?

And as he's coming to, he sees walking to him the most beautiful thing he's ever seen.

She's like him, but she's different.

Where he's strong, she is weak.

Where he is where he is cut, she is delicate.

It's just this beautiful thing, and she's walking towards him and she's naked.

And he sees her, and he goes from being a bachelor peeing all over the place to becoming a poet because women, that's what you do to us.

And it says, the man said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh.

She shall be called woman.

For when I saw her, I was like, whoa man.

The joke is so stupid.

For she was taken out of a man.

All the sudden something comes alive in him.

And then God takes the story, now he puts application on it.

It says, the man, or for this reason, the a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.

Pause here for just a moment.

This is a picture of physical intimacy, sexual intimacy in a marriage.

Let me try to explain this to you the best way I possibly can in a PG version.

If you want the R rated version, come to XO conference.

My wife and I will be speaking on the topic of intimacy in marriage, and it's gonna be it's gonna be loose.

How does that sound?

And um, the awkward part for me, if you want to pray for your boy, my parents are registered to come to the conference.

So I'll teach them some stuff.

Alright.

Um this is the reason that God reserves sexual intimacy for the place of marriage.

Because it's a reminder of the covenant.

The two are temporarily united as one.

There's an exchange that happens, and all of a sudden, this reminder of the covenant becomes personal.

This is the reason that sex in marriage is a celebration.

In fact, sex inside of marriage is a gift from God, which is worshiping God.

It's the reason that after this expression of love, you feel so connected.

It's also the reason sex outside of marriage leaves a person feeling so vulnerable and so broken.

It's because after it happens, you look around for who is my covenant partner?

And if there's not the covenant, you feel broken and empty.

So it goes on.

It says, the man, next verse, the man and his wife were both naked and they felt no shame.

I want you to see this.

They were physically naked, but this means something so much bigger.

They were vulnerable, they were fully known and they felt no shame.

This is actually the picture of love.

The first picture of love we have in the Bible is that a person could be fully known, fully exposed, fully vulnerable, and there not be shame in the middle of the story.

All of us live with this fear that, like, if you really knew me, I couldn't possibly love me.

And that's what love is.

It's to be fully known and to be fully loved.

So if a covenant is the place where we we give up some rights and we pick up some responsibility, I want to talk about what that looks like and I want to get very practical.

If we're gonna have a till death do us part kind of love, we're gonna have to give up some stuff.

Let's give up some rights.

The first right we give up is the right of priority.

Can I tell you what this means?

It means for the rest of your life, your spouse, when you get married, they are number one in your life, and they are not competing with anything else.

Some Christians are like, whoa, whoa, whoa.

I thought God was supposed to be number one.

God is.

In fact, I believe God is above number one, God is preeminent.

That means God lives and He reigns and rules above first place.

But the way we honor God on this side of eternity is to make our spouse number one.

It means nothing else competes for your attention.

I love my job.

I love work.

Maybe you love work.

I have had seasons that have been wildly over the top busy.

But work doesn't get priority.

My wife does.

We live in a TikTok.

If you don't like it, scroll quickly kind of culture.

We live in a culture where it's hard to keep focus and attention.

And even our phones, have you ever been in a room talking to someone and they're just like, hold on.

They're looking at my wife gets priority over technology.

Here's a hard one for people.

My wife gets priority even over our kids.

And I love my kids.

In fact, none of you love your kids as much as I do, and I will fight you over it because I love my kids so much.

But can I tell you the reality is that families that center their lives around their kids often experience brokenness the moment the kids grow up and leave.

We're facing this in my home.

My oldest son Joey is 17.

He's about to go to college next year, and our whole world's gonna change.

But we made the decision that we don't center our world around our kids.

We honor each other first and then we love our kids.

Like a lot of families get this backwards, and so a couple gets married to their kids and they kind of love each other.

You were called to be married to your spouse and then to love your children.

This is the reason that in many homes, the age of like the 50s and early 60s is one of the highest divorce age ranges, is because when you center your life around your kids and then your kids grow up and leave, you're kind of stuck saying, like, who are you?

You don't know each other.

Number one is priority.

Second right we give up is the right of ownership.

The right of ownership says that everything we have, we co-own and we co-administer.

This is important for you to understand.

An easy place to start here on the topic of ownership is the area of money.

Now, this is a big deal because a lot of couples fight about money statistically a couple years ago.

Uh, money was named in 20% of American divorces as one of the chief reasons for divorce.

What it means is everything we have, it's ours together.

It means if you're in a marriage where, like, maybe for a season one parent is a stay-at-home parent and one person works, it doesn't matter who earns the money.

Even if both work and one earns more than the other, it doesn't matter because all the money is ours.

I don't make any major financial decisions without my wife because she is my priority, and we co-administer and we co-decide on everything because it's not all mine.

Early in marriage, my wife was a stay-at-home mom to our kids.

Now she works, but she was a stay-at-home mom back then.

And I worked outside of the house, and here's what it meant: it meant that any money that I earned was our money, and I didn't get to decide where it went because I was the one who earned it exclusively.

Can I tell you where this gets messy for couples?

Where it gets really messy for couples is when couples live with separate banking, separate checking, separate credit cards, separate everything.

And this isn't in the Bible, this is just your pastor's opinion, okay?

But what does it say?

Our whole life, God, you've made us one, but we'll just keep our cash separate from each other.

No, no.

Everything is co-owned and co-administered together.

Okay, you ready?

Even your body.

Okay, let me let me start not sexy, then I'll get a little sexy.

How does that sound?

Not sexy.

Guys, if your wife says, honey, I need you to help me with something, it's not like after the game is over.

So you get up and you help her.

It means you serve her, it means you leverage your strength to bless her.

The book of 1 Corinthians, Paul, he kind of makes it sexy.

1 Corinthians chapter 7.

1 Corinthians 7 · chapter mention

He said, the wife's body does not belong to her alone, but also to her husband.

In the same way, the husband's body does not belong to him alone, but also to his wife.

And I'm like, girl, you can have it anytime you want, all yours.

Exo's gonna be wild.

Okay.

Um tell you what this means.

It means that when you get married, your body doesn't belong to you, but you are to use it in a way that blesses your spouse.

A lot of couples will come and they'll be like, we have mismatched drives, and he or she wants it more than I do, and whatever.

Use your body, it's not yours, in a way that honors and blesses your spouse.

Okay?

The rights we give up.

We give up the right of privacy, we give up the right of ownership.

And number three, we give up the right of privacy.

What does it mean?

It means everything in my life my wife has full access to, and vice versa.

She can pick up my phone anytime she wants.

I don't have private passwords.

It means that she knows everything about what I do, she knows about where I am.

There's no secrets.

Why?

Because my hope in my relationship is that there's nothing hidden from her.

Secrets are what drive a wedge in a relationship.

And when it comes to my marriage, I don't want anything between us.

I want it to be full on, vulnerable, full intimacy, fully known, fully loved kind of marriage.

And privacy, if you try to have a separate secret life, is where it dies.

So what does it mean?

It means does she know about your does she know about the websites you like to visit after she's in bed?

Quiet.

Does it mean he knows about the guy at work who probably shows you a little too much attention?

People like to joke that he's the work husband, but that's out.

Does he know?

Secrets kill a marriage.

We give up the right to priority ownership and privacy.

But in a covenant, we're not just giving up rights.

That feels sacrificial.

We're also picking up some stuff.

And let's talk about the responsibilities we pick up.

I want to read you some verses in the Bible.

It's like 10 or 11 verses.

I'm going to skip Ephesians 5.21, which is one of my favorite verses, and I'm going to come back to it in just a moment.

Ephesians 5.22, here's the responsibilities we pick up.

Wives, submit yourselves to your own husband as you do to the Lord.

Nobody claps for that, okay?

This verse has been taken out of context and used in an abusive fashion by men to keep women silent for years.

Let me tell you what this means and what this doesn't mean.

Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands.

Um, what does submit mean?

Let me start with the simple definition, then I'll get a little bit more intricate.

Simple.

Imagine going back to college, you're a college student, and first day of the semester, your professor gives you a syllabus, and he says, the whole class leads to one project.

The project is due on the last day of class.

You show up to the last day of class with your project, what do you do?

Submit it, or you give it.

Wives, give yourselves fully to your own husbands as you do to the Lord.

Then it goes on, for the husband is the head of the wife, and even that feels heavy.

Just as Christ is the head of the church, his body of which he is the Savior.

He goes on, he says, this.

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

Let's pause here for just a moment.

That can feel so heavy, can't it?

But submit means to fully trust, to fully give yourself.

It means to not cut your husband's legs out from underneath him.

It means to be his biggest support, his biggest cheerleader, his biggest fan, because men gravitate towards honor and respect.

Let me talk to some of you ladies for a moment.

It means, women, that you trust your husband with even the dreams that are in the most secret parts of your soul.

You trust him with them, not sacrifice.

Three verses to the women.

You ready, boys?

Eight verses to the men.

Wives, submit.

Oh, it sounds awesome.

Eight verses to the men.

Buckle in, boys.

Husbands, love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy.

Pause.

How did Jesus love the church?

He lot he gave his life for, he died for the church.

He loved the church so much that he was willing to preemptively give his life to meet the needs.

Submission gets fun when each person knows that I'm willing to lay everything down for you.

Wives, be submitted to your husbands.

Husbands, be willing to lay your life down, even to just make the dreams in your wife's heart come to life.

Let me ask who's even more submitted in that.

I would argue it's the husband.

He goes on to say, cleansing her, by the washing with water through the word and to present her to himself as a radiant church without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish and holy and blameless.

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

He who loves his wife loves himself.

After all, no one has ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body just as Christ does the church, for we are all members of his body.

So take care of her the way you take care of you.

For this reason, he goes back and quotes Genesis chapter 2 a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.

Genesis 2 · chapter mention

This is a profound mystery, but I am talking about Christ and the church, and then I want you to see this.

However, each one of you also must love his wife as she loves himself, as he loves himself.

And the wife must respect her husband.

God had this figured out long before modern authors did.

Husbands, how are you doing at loving your wife?

What does loving look like?

It means loving her the way she wants to receive love.

What does that mean?

It means listening.

It means flowers on a Tuesday because it's Tuesday and you love her.

It means being there for her when she's sick and not feeling good and celebrating her best moments.

Love looks like serving her and meeting her needs in ways that blesses her.

Love looks like cuddling with no expectation that it's gonna turn into more than that.

Some years ago I discovered that my wife loves it if I'll do her laundry.

I walked by with a laundry basket.

I was just gonna do mine, and I threw whatever she had in the basket, and she goes, Oh, that might be the sexiest thing you've ever done.

I do the laundry like six times a week now.

Like just show love.

Okay, ready?

And wives, oh go back.

Wives, respect your husband.

What does this look like?

Men gravitate towards places of honor.

What does it mean?

It means you celebrate him.

Thank him for the way he protects and provides for you.

Honor his hard work.

Honor his sacrifice.

Honor the fact that he takes care of things that maybe you don't or can't, but you honor and respect him.

This is what a God-honoring marriage looks like.

So if we're gonna pick up some responsibilities, let me give you three quickly that all of us have to pick up and then we'll be done.

Number one, if we're gonna pick up some responsibilities, we need to learn to love unconditionally.

And I'm gonna be honest with you, this one is impossible because all of our love has strings attached.

All of our love comes with conditions, doesn't it?

But I would like to submit that in a God-honoring covenant marriage, the condition of your love is till death do us part.

So I've done, like I've counted recently, about 150 weddings over the years.

And one of the things I like to do is in my last premarital counseling session, I'll ask a couple, before you get married, let's talk about the conditions of your love.

And I'll make up some wild scenarios.

Husband, will you still love your wife?

If you found out she just made a terrible mistake and one night had an affair.

One night.

We still love her.

Couple looks like a deer in the headlights.

Okay, wife, will you still love him if you found that he his whole life has been in battle in a terrible, nasty porn addiction?

Will you still love him, wife, if he gets in a terrible, tragic car accident and is physically unable to work and provide?

Will you still love her if you get into this marriage and find out something's something's happening in her body and she can't have children?

I make up all kinds of scenarios because all of us have conditions of our love.

Don't we?

We do.

Honor means to value or add worth to.

Where honor lives, love thrives.

I can only speak for the men because as a man I understand this.

Wives, if you feel like your husband would rather be almost anywhere other than home, if you feel like he'd rather be at the golf course or at work or with his buddies, maybe ask the question: does honor flow freely in our household?

These two are so important.

How we feel, how we act, what we say, what we do.

I'll never forget, if you know any of our story, you might know this.

That six months into marriage, I had the world on a string.

Everything was going our way, and my wife one day was doing her makeup, found a lump in her leg, one test lead to the next, and she found out she had stage two, non-Hotchkins lymphoma.

Six months into marriage, all the stuff, all the dreams that were ahead of us came to a screeching halt.

I remember where it was, I remember what time it was, I remember what the sun felt like on my skin when I caught her as I overheard the doctor say she has cancer.

For six months, all of our plans came to a halt.

For six months, all the newlywed fun stuff came to a screeching halt.

Six months in, she started chemo.

She was the model patient, so full of joy.

She brought life to the oncology floor of the hospital.

I called her champ because she was a champ.

But three or four months into it, I came home one night after speaking at a camp 45 minutes away.

And I came home and my wife was asleep on the couch.

Now all of her hair had fallen out, eyebrows, um, eyelashes.

Her skin was like a very gray, didn't have a lot of pink or color to it.

She had fallen asleep on the couch with her arms over her chest like this, and her breathing was so shallow that I walked in and saw her on the couch in our tiny apartment living room, and I literally thought, oh my god, she's dead.

I had an internal panic, but I didn't want to startle her if she wasn't dead.

And so I walked over and I sat next to her and I put my hand on her hands that were on her chest, and I said, Sweetheart.

And I saw her just kind of jar.

I was like, at least she's alive.

Took her by the arm.

I said, Well, let's get you to bed.

And she was so weak from all the rounds of chemo.

And I led her to the room, and as we got close to the room, all of a sudden this rage welled up in here.

I don't know where it came from, but she starts angry, yelling, just leave me.

You don't deserve this.

We've been married six months, just leave, just go, go live your life.

She starts punching me with the limited strength she has.

Let me tell you the truth.

I've messed up a thousand times in marriage.

I got it right this one time.

I grabbed her by her shoulders and we were right next to the wall.

I pushed her against the wall.

I said, You look at me.

I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you.

Just leave.

I said, stop it.

I love you.

I'm not going anywhere.

Love is words, love is action, love is a choice, love is honor.

If you're gonna have a marriage that goes the distance, number three, we learn to submit mutually.

Remember a moment ago I read Ephesians 5 22 through the end of the chapter.

Here's the verse before it says, Wives, submit to your own husbands.

Paul says, submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Okay, because you love Jesus, be submitted to one another.

What does it look like?

In marriage, it looks like the opposite of the world.

The world is all about you.

Meet your needs, make sure you're happy, get your needs met.

Look out for number one.

It's all me-centered, me-centric.

But in a God-honouring marriage, it's not a race to the top to get your needs met.

In a God-honoring marriage, it's a race to the back of the line to see who can outserve each other.

Listen to me.

Selfishness doesn't exist in a covenant.

It can't.

Can't thrive, it can't exist.

Beyond that, here's another step for you to consider.

Not only can selfishness not exist, but here's what I've learned.

After counseling hundreds of couples over the years, I've walked with couples through egregious, difficult divorces, but I have never once walked with a couple through divorce that made the decision to be submitted to each other.

Why?

Because in a God-honoring marriage, it's always you before me, your needs before my needs.

And if you want to have a marriage that goes the distance, you make this decision.

There's no conditions on my love.

I'm gonna pick up that responsibility.

I'm gonna choose to use my words and my actions to honor you.

Ladies, stop cutting his feet out from underneath him.

Use your words to build him up.

Husbands, make this decision to celebrate everything in your wife's life.

And then we're gonna choose to be submitted to one another.

Your needs ahead of my needs, your desires ahead of mine, your hopes ahead of mine, and watch what God does.

Would you bow your head and close your eyes all across this place?

Let's pray.

God, give us the courage to live this out.

For my single friends in the room, give us the courage to reach for the kind of marriage that will live this out.

For my friends who are listening today who are in a marriage, God, give us the courage to go home and adjust what we need to adjust so we can move from a contract kind of marriage to a covenant marriage.

God, we'll be careful to give you all the praise and glory for it.

Jesus, thank you that you modeled all of this for us by laying your life down.

Because you did it, we can do this for each other in marriage.

So, God, I pray that a holy sense of confidence will sweep through our church.

And that we'll be the kind of church who actually lives this out as a testimony to the world around us.

God, we'll give you all the praise and glory for it in Jesus' name.

With your head still bowed and eyes still closed, if you're here and you don't know if you're right with God.

Talks about marriage, but maybe today you came and you're like, I can't love someone else if I haven't received God's love for me first.

If this is you and you need to start or restart a relationship by following Jesus, would you raise your hand right now?

Yeah, thanks, buddy.

Thanks.

Thank you right there.

I see you.

If this is you, I'm gonna ask you to pray this with me.

Look, praying a prayer changes everything when you mean this with your heart.

Would you say, Jesus, today I give you my life?

I make this decision to follow you.

Jesus, I believe that when you came into this world and died on the cross for me, you paid the price for my sins.

Because of that sacrifice and because you rose again.

I believe you have the power to save me, change me, and to forgive me.

So, Jesus, from this day forward, I give you my life.

I choose to follow you all the days of my life.

I love you, and I give all of me to you.

And it's in your name we pray, Jesus.

Amen.

Church fam, we just had people pray to make that decision.

Come on, let's celebrate like it matters.