1996 SINGLE SERMONS
INGREDIENTS FOR A HEALTHY MARRIAGE
DR. JIM DIXON
JUNE 30, 1996
EPHESIANS 5:21-33
According to Marriage and Divorce Magazine, the United States has approximately 5% of the world’s population but, incredibly, 50% of the world’s divorces. I find that statistic impossible to believe, but I think we would all agree that marriage is struggling here in America. Half of the marriages in this nation end in divorce and the divorce rate today is 16 times higher than it was 100 years ago.
Now, God grieves as He sees marriages crumbling in our world because marriage has been instituted by God and is regulated by His commandments and it has been blessed by our Lord Jesus Christ. God wants to see our marriages blessed. This morning, I would offer a three-fold prescription from God’s Word for our marriages. I would offer three ingredients that God would use to make our marriages strong.
The first ingredient is a servant’s heart. If we would have strong marriages, if our marriages would be blessed, then as husbands and wives we all must have servants’ hearts. Now, there’s an old story of a guy who was feeling sick. In fact, he had been sick for a couple of months. He was going to the doctor for a series of tests. He was kind of nervous, so his wife went with him. After the medical tests, the doctor asked to speak to the wife alone. So, the wife went into the doctor’s office and the doctor said to her, “Your husband has a very serious condition. He has a neurological disorder that could be fatal. This is a matter of life and death. This disease, this disorder, this neurological problem, is augmented by stress. We need to create for your husband a stress-free environment.
“I’m going to ask you to make a sacrifice as his wife. I know that you’re a career woman, but I want to ask you to quit your job and I want to ask you to help create a stress-free environment for your husband. I want you to get up every morning a half hour before your husband and clean up, put on a cheerful dress, an outfit, and greet your husband with a smile. I want you to prepare a nutritious breakfast, preferably with fruits and grains. I want you to send your husband off to work with a hug and a kiss and a smile. After your husband leaves, I would like you to change clothes and get into some grubby clothes and begin to scrub the floors and clean the house. I want you to create a stress-free environment, physically, with no allergens. There can be no pathogens in the house, no viral or bacteriological sources of infection. I want you to make the house spotless, that there would be no physiological stress in the house.
“I want your husband to come home for lunch every day so that we can control his environment. I would like you to clean up again before lunch and dress up. When your husband comes home, be there with a smile, and prepare a very healthy lunch, high in protein, and send him out again with another hug and a kiss. Then as the afternoon begins, just relax a little bit, take some time to yourself. But then about mid-afternoon, I would like you to prepare yourself for your husband’s homecoming that night. Ready yourself again and make yourself beautiful. When your husband comes to the door, I would like you to greet him with a smile and put him in his favorite chair, hopefully a recliner. Give him his newspaper and give him the TV remote control and let him just relax there.
“Then go and prepare a wonderful meal for him. For dinner, just give him all the things he loves to eat. After dinner, have him sit down somewhere and rest while you tidy up the kitchen. Then, if you would, lay out his pajamas and draw his bath and be attentive that night. And of course, be as romantic as possible. And remember, you know, this is really critical because this disease could be fatal. It’s a matter of life and death!”
The wife nodded that she understood. She left the doctor’s office, met her husband in the hall, and they walked out to the car together. They got into the car. Her husband turned to her and said, “Well, what did the doctor say?” She was silent for a moment and then she turned to him and said, “The doctor said you’re going to die.”
I think most of us have a servant’s hearts to some degree and I think most husbands and most wives have a servant’s hearts towards each other in some measure, but most of us have a limit. We have a limit with regard to the service that we’re willing to render.
Jesus Christ has the greatest servant’s heart of all and there’s no limit to His willingness to serve. In Matthew, chapter 20, our Lord Jesus Christ tells us that He has come into the world not to be served but rather, He said, “to serve and to give My life as a ransom for many.” If you’re a Christian, if you believe in Jesus Christ as your Lord and as your Savior, as you enter your marriage you need to enter your marriage with that attitude. You need the attitude that you come not to be served but you come rather to serve and to give your life. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a husband or a wife.
You know, our passage of scripture for today, Ephesians, chapter 5, is a somewhat controversial passage. At least, in our time it has become controversial because wives are exhorted to respect their husband’s authority. But it’s often ignored that in this passage it’s the husband that God instructs to serve his wife through the laying down of his life. It’s the husband that God instructs to die daily for his wife. I think this admonition, in a sense, is given to all of us as Christians: that as husbands and wives we would lay down our lives for each other, that we would come not to be served but we would come rather to serve. This attitude is essential if we’re going to have marriages that are blessed.
Barb and I just came back last night, flew in last night at about 9:30, from Seattle. We were in Seattle to do my nephew’s wedding, and I would say to you what I said to him and to his bride. We all need to have a servant’s heart. A marriage just doesn’t work without a servant’s heart.
Well, the second ingredient in a blessed marriage is a civil tongue. If our marriages would be blessed, we need not only to have a servant’s heart but a civil tongue. Certainly there is a lack of civility in society in general today. This lack of civility has invaded the American home. Sometimes we don’t speak lovingly to each other as husbands and wives or as parents to children or as children to parents. We need civil tongues.
It’s the Apostle James who, in the little book of James, speaks of the dangers of the tongue. James writes, “Let not many of you become teachers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. For we all make many mistakes. If anyone makes no mistakes in what they say, then they are a perfect person, able to bridle the whole body as well. If we put bits in the mouths of horses that we might control them, we guide their whole bodies. Look also at the ships. Though they are so great and driven by strong winds, they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs.
“The tongue also is a little member which boasts of great things. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire, and the tongue is a fire, an unrighteous world amongst our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the cycle of nature, and set on fire by hell. For every kind of beast and bird and reptile and sea creature can be tamed and has been tamed by humankind, but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless our God and Father and with it we curse mankind, made in the image and likeness of God. Brothers and sisters, it ought not to be so. Can a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh water and brackish? Can a fig tree, brothers and sisters, yield olives, or a grapevine figs? No more can fresh water yield salt. Who is wise and understanding among you? By your good works, let him show forth his life and the meekness of wisdom.”
The abuse of the tongue is a very dangerous thing anywhere in society. It’s dangerous at work. It’s dangerous in our friendships. It’s most dangerous, perhaps, in marriage. How many marriages have been destroyed because, in moments of stress, in moments of anger, a husband or a wife has said things that they would not normally have said and would not normally feel, things not easily forgiven, things not easily forgotten? The tongue is a gift, but a dangerous one.
Last week Barb and I were in California for her parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. Her parents have weathered a lot of valleys and mountaintops together. Barb’s mom has had three different types of cancer. She’s had 40 years of rheumatoid arthritis. Barb’s father has been paralyzed over half of his body for 19 years, and yet God has blessed them and they have had these 50 years together. It was great to be there with Barb’s parents and with all the members of the extended family.
It was a pretty busy time, and it really wasn’t until the last day that we felt like we had free time. And yet there wasn’t enough time to squeeze in everything that Barb and I and the kids wanted to do. We needed, of course, to fly back to Denver that day. We were trying to decide what to do with the portion of the day we had. Drew and Heather wanted to go shopping. They said that you can buy clothes in California you just can’t get in Colorado. I wanted to take a walk on the beach. We wound up finding a mall with Nordstrom’s and going shopping for an hour and a half and (actually beyond an hour and a half). We were really running a little short of time. We knew we had to go back to Encinitas to see Barb’s parents—we wanted to see them before we flew back to Denver—and then drive down to the airport, so we rushed up to her parents’ house to say goodbye. Then we got back in the car and we started driving south towards the San Diego Airport.
Along the way we planned to stop and get some food because we were hungry, and Barb knew of a restaurant. She suggested that we go there, but it was a little out of the way and I decided just to plow right on. This frustrated Barb, I think, a little. Then we went to the first off ramp. I was thinking that on the way to the airport we could get something to eat then. There was no restaurant. There were a couple of restaurants, but a fair was going on and they were all overly crowded. So, we went down to another off ramp. But there was no restaurant.
I was just pressing on from one exit to another. There was a lot of traffic and it was all taking time. We had to get to the airport to catch our plane. We were all hungry and kind of irritable. The more I pulled off and there were no places to eat, everyone began to get frustrated in the car. Barb began to say, “If you had only stopped at that first restaurant that I wanted you to go to…” Heather and Drew were kind of like, “Come on, Dad. We need to find someplace to eat…” We pulled off at this other off ramp and there was a hamburger place there, but they just had hamburgers and Heather didn’t really want hamburgers. She wanted a salad or something like that. Drew was happy to eat extra hamburgers. It was just a kind of a real tense time in the car.
Have you ever had moments like that as a family where it’s just tense? Isn’t it in moments like that that you begin to get cross with each other and you begin to say things to each other you wouldn’t normally say, and you don’t really even feel except in that moment?
You know, psychologists today speak a lot about the inner child. They talk about your need to find your inner child and get in touch with your inner child. I don’t have any trouble in moments like that finding my inner child. It’s my inner adult that I have a hard time finding. I think those are just situations where it’s a test. It’s a test of our commitment to each other as a family.
So, we have this exhortation from God that we are to have servants’ hearts and we are to have civil tongues and use our tongues to build each other up and not tear each other down and not to say things that are not easily forgiven. Of course, that leads us to the third and last ingredient in a blessed marriage, and that’s a forgiving spirit. We need a forgiving spirit because we don’t always have servants’ hearts and we don’t always have civil tongues.
So, a marriage blessed by God needs not only to have servants’ hearts and civil tongues, but also forgiving spirits where people are ready and willing to forgive each other.
Years ago, right here in Denver in the summertime, a husband and wife got into a little argument. It began that morning in the bedroom. The wife said a few cross words to her husband. She was kind of irritated and hurried and she said a few cross words to her husband. That bothered him and he felt hurt. A moment later, she was putting her dress on because she needed to go to work. She needed the back of the dress zipped up and she asked for her husband’s help.
Well, because he was kind of irritated by what she had said to him, he went over to her, and he took the zipper on the back of her dress. Instead of zipping it up, he took it up and down, up and down, up and down, and left it down. He was just kind of in a bad mood.
She was frustrated by that. She managed somehow to get the zipper up and she went off to work. During the day she mellowed out and she began to feel like, “What a stupid thing to get mad at my husband about,” and she was kind of ready to patch things up. She came home. She came into the driveway and saw her husband working under the car with his feet sticking out. She went up to him there and she thought (just as a joke) to bend down and take the zipper on his pants and go up and down with the zipper on his pants a few times, thinking he would laugh. She got no response. She thought, “Boy, he really is in a mood.”
She heads into the house and is stunned to see her husband coming out of the kitchen with a couple of Cokes. She says, “What are you doing’?” He says, “Well, I’m taking a Coke out to Bill. He’s working on the car.” She runs out of the house and Bill is unconscious under the car. He was so stunned when he felt his zipper going up and down that he jumped up and knocked himself out against the bottom of the car.
The whole thing made the local newspaper. Think about it. It begins with the misuse of the tongue and then the lack of a servant’s heart. I mean, it’s all right there. How important it is to forgive sooner rather than later. One thing leads to another. It’s kind of neat that she came home willing to forgive, even though things didn’t work out. But how important it is that we be willing to forgive every day. The Bible says, “Don’t let the sun go down on your anger.” We need to be willing and ready to forgive every single day if our marriage is to be blessed by God. We need to realize and remember that He’s forgiven us.
Simon Peter said to Jesus in Matthew, chapter 18, “How many times has my brother or sister sinned against me and I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus said, “I do not say to you seven times but 70 times seven.” There is no limit to the forgiveness we should render each other.
Of course, where do we really have a chance to learn forgiveness like that? 70 times seven? You don’t really need to forgive your neighbors that often, and maybe not even people at work. But at home is where we learn forgiveness like that, through the months and the years as we learn to forgive each other for Christ’s sake and for the sake of our marriages and for the sake of our families. So, we have this call from God.
You know, in 1 Corinthians 13, there’s that beautiful chapter called “The Love Chapter,” and in there love is defined. We’re told that “Love thinks no evil.” The word for “think” there is the Greek word logizomai. It’s the word from which we get the word “logic,” but the word logizomai was a special word which referred to “forming a list” or “keeping a record.”
So, what God is saying, what the Spirit of God is saying to us, is that love doesn’t keep a record of wrongs. Love doesn’t make a list. It doesn’t remember the wrongs done. How important that is in marriage, that we be willing to forgive. So, we need a servant’s heart, a civil tongue, and a forgiving spirit. As we come to the Lord’s table, as we come to this communion table, God would remind us that we are married to His Son, Jesus Christ. The church of Jesus Christ in the Bible is called the Bride of Christ and God would remind us that as the Bride of Christ we have found forgiveness beyond comprehension, that our Lord has a servant’s heart and a forgiving Spirit and He would use His tongue, His speech, His Word, to bless us.
So, as we come to the table this morning, He would remind us of these things so that we come grateful for His body broken. We come grateful for His bloodshed, grateful for His mercy, and grateful for His grace. We commit ourselves anew to Him and to our marriages and to our families. Let’s look to the Lord with a word of prayer.