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My Marriage Tis of Me
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My Marriage, Tis of Me

Pastor Tom Mitchell
 
I’m going to spend a few weeks specifically on Marriage, but many of the ideas we are going to talk about can also be applied to any relationship. I was reading an article in the Atlantic Journal and the title to an article caught my eye: “My Country, Tis of Me” I thought with a little change that would be a good title to today’s message: “My Marriage, Tis of Me.” It reminds me of a cartoon about marriage that read: “I was looking for the ideal, then it became an ordeal and now I want a new deal.”
 
Let me give you a Biblical view of marriage. Here it is: It’s a flawed and sinful person like my wife Dori, married to a flawed and sinful person like me, in a flawed and sinful world but with a faithful God.
 
And what happens when two flawed sinful people, who have trusted Jesus alone for their salvation, enter into marriage with different family backgrounds, different friends, different spiritual beliefs, different sex drives, different tastes in music, different ideas about finances, different ideas about parenting, different thoughts about housecleaning, different beliefs about how decisions are made, different ideas on how power will be shared, different and on and on?
 
I’ll tell you what happens. It gets messy! It gets difficult! It takes work! It takes prayer! It takes asking others for help!
 
The Bible assumes that any marriage (or any relationship) this side of heaven will be messy and require a lot of work. The best marriage no matter whom it’s with is messy. Think about the following questions:
-Have you ever felt misunderstood?
-Have you ever been hurt by what the other person said?
-Have you ever felt like you haven’t been heard?
-Have you ever had to work through a misunderstanding?
-Have you ever been let down?
-Have you ever struggled to resolve a conflict?
-Have you ever doubted the other person’s love?
-Have you ever disagreed on a decision?
-Have you ever felt used?
-Have you ever thought, If I had only known?
 
I have been married for more than forty years to a woman I love and greatly respect. Even so both Dori and I could answer, “yes” to the questions I just shared. These questions reveal underlying struggles EVERY marriage and relationship faces.
 
God assumes we will have messy marriages. That’s why He included so many commands that deal with messy relationships in the Bible. Positive commands like: love one another, be patient with one another, be kind to one another, honor one another, be quick to listen and slow to speak, be forgiving, understanding, compassionate, encouraging and gentle to another. Negative commands like: “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths”, “Get rid of all bitterness, rage, and anger”, “In your anger do not sin”, “Do not be deceived”, “Do not conform to the world”, “Do not be conceited”, “Do not repay anyone evil for evil” etc…
 
So, here’s a question: Do your messy relationship issues come from inside you or outside you? James 4 gives us some insight. It asks a question and gives an answer.
 
Question -“What causes fights and quarrels among you?” (Jam 4:1) Notice both “fights and quarrels”. This is not a one-time thing, it’s a pattern. “What causes fights and quarrels among you?”
 
Answer - “Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you?”
The real problem isn’t my wife. The real problem isn’t that the devil made me do it. The real problem isn’t my past. The real problem isn’t stress from my job. The real problem isn’t our poor communications skills. The real problem is in me! 
 
James 4 teaches this: “cravings underlie conflicts”.(say it with me)   Cravings underlie conflicts! (Dr. David Powlison)
Where there are fights and quarrelsyou will find unfulfilled cravings, such as: affection, power, attention, love, vindication, security, need for approval or respect, etc.  You fight because you didn’t get what you wanted or needed. So you need to ask yourself this question: What’s going on inside of me that I’m willing to fight to try and get it?
 
Over the years, I’ve done a lot of marriage and relationship counseling. Many times I ask this question or a form of it:
What percent of the marriage problem is yours? Then I explain, if I had a pie, how big a piece of the pie is yours and how big is hers? Guess what the answer usually is? 50 – 50.
 
Next question I ask is: Ok, if 50% of the problems is yours, then what are you doing to work on your part? You know what the person then says? Well, as soon as she/he takes care of their 50% (the underlying implications is their 50% is worse than my 50%) then I’ll start working on mine.
 
The apostle Paul was very honest with us and about how the source of his struggles was inside him: Romans 7:21-25: “So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. 22 For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; 23 but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. 24 What a wretched man I am! Who will rescueme from this body of death? 25 Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.”  
 
Look at four words Paul uses to describe his experience: 
 
1st word “law”. This word law explains an inescapable principle at work in his life. That principle is like gravity: you can’t just choose to be free from its influence. Until you are finally delivered from the power and presence of sin, you will never escape your own sin in relationships.
 
2nd word “war” illustrates the ever-present struggle going on in Paul. This inner conflict, between a desire to do what is right and the power of sin, is still at work.
 
3rd word “prisoner” describes the experience of the born again Christian. Have you ever wanted to do the right thing, but instead were pulled into sin? This is what it feels like to be a prisoner. A prisoner has lost his freedom.
 
4th word is “rescue”. When you need rescue, it means you are hopeless without outside help. You are hopeless without outside help. You cannot rescue yourself no matter how hard you try.
 
I remember the picture of a Haiti earthquake rescue of a little boy named Kiki. The image of Kiki being plucked free after spending eight days beneath the rubble in Haiti brought a moment of joy amid all the death and despair. It had taken four hours of painstaking digging, cutting and probing to reach through five layers of crushed concrete to the buried cocoon where two small children had huddled together with the corpses of their siblings for eight unimaginably gruelling days. Kiki could never have saved himself. He needed a savior and in this case it was a number of people who worked together to rescue him.
 
These four words suggest that our biggest problem is our sinful nature inside us. This sinful naturecontinues to affect us, even after we have become born again Christians, in 3 specific ways:  
 
1. Self-centeredness: When you reject God or God’s way of doing life, you create a void that cannot remain empty. Sin will lead you to fill it with yourself. When things get messy we go to our natural default setting: “What is best for me, myself and I?” rather than listening and following our new Spiritual nature which says: “How does God want me to respond to her needs?” Doing marriage or relationships God’s way is other-centered, but when you do things the self-centered way conflict will be the end result.
 
2. Self-Rule: When you replace God’s loving rule with self-rule other people become your subjects. They are expected to do what you want, in the way you want, and when you want. When self-rule is in operation you try to control the other person. Some try to dominate the other with criticism and demands. Others try to control with isolation and silence.
In extreme cases some use force, which we call abuse. But Christian marriages are supposed to be between two people who are equally submitted to God’s rule – not to self-rule. The pursuit of self-rule will always cause a mess of any marriage or relationship.
 
3. Self-righteousness: When God’s rule is NOT your personal standard for what is good, true, and right, you will always set YOURSELF up as the standard. In these marriages each person thinks they are more right than the other. And neither person is looking at his or her own heart. This approach invariably leads to an inflated view of yourself and a critical view of the other. You end up maximizing their sin and minimizing your sin!
 
In all marital conflicts you will find two flawed sinful people. Both are to acknowledge that their sin is their sin and that no one else can make them sin. Both, according to Matthew 7:3-5 (…the speck and the plank), must deal with their own sin before they attempt to point out the others sin. Any other approach will, guaranteed, bring increasing conflict to the marital relationship.
 
Hear this: Sin turns us all inward. When something or someone other than Jesus rules your heart there will be a messy marriage? There is no way to get around the profound statement in James 4:1 “What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? “
 
All of us have some work to do. All of us need to come before the Father and admit our neediness. We need to confess our sin. We need to ask the Father to help us identify and deal with our “cravings.” We may have to go to our mate and ask for forgiveness for how “our cravings” which underline our conflicts have hurt the other person!”
 
Some of you may be discouraged by the difficulties in your relationship, whether it’s a marriage, a family, a school, a church, or a work relationship. I like to encourage you with what Dr Paul Tripp said: We make a mistake when we measure our potential to deal with difficulty by the size and duration of the problem. We should be measuring our potential according to the size of God’s provision and God’s promise to go with us.
We are never alone. Our messy relationships have everything to do with sin and our potential has everything to do with Jesus.
 
The theme song of a God honoring marriage is NOT, “My Marriage Tis of Me”. The theme song of a God honoring marriage is “Our Marriage Tis of THEE”.