Now let me ask you, if you’re married who or what are you putting ahead of your husband or your wife? Come on, what is it that’s crept in to supplant them from being your Number-1 person on the planet. Because I bet you anything, that there’s something. And when we each deal with that something, what we can rediscover is the passion in our marriage.

Priority Comes Before Passion

Anyone who’s married will remember those first few weeks, months, even the first year or two after their wedding. You couldn’t keep your eyes off one another, you left little love notes around the place, you’d call each other during the day whenever it was possible. You know what that was called? It’s called passion and in 100% of marriages at some point passion evaporates.

That’s what marriage counsellor of twenty-something years, Dr David Clarke writes in his fantastic book, ‘Kiss Me Like You Mean It’. And one of the major reasons that he cites for this, based on all the clinical counselling experience that he has, is that somewhere along the line we each manage to put something or someone ahead of our spouse.

In those early days of passion nothing comes ahead of our new marriage partner, absolutely nothing! But little by little, well you know … One of the most confronting chapters of Clarke’s book is Chapter 3, it’s called, ‘Even The Dog Is More Important Than I Am’, good title and there are six big issues that he sets out in that chapter, the main things that we end up putting ahead of our spouses. Let’s see if you recognise any of these in your life.

Number one is our children. Now parents know that bringing up children is a gruelling marathon that goes on for years. Naturally our kids soak up our time and our energy but you and I both know there’s a line we step over where, let me say especially mothers, (not always but mostly) displace the deep emotional connection they should have with their spouse by attaching themselves to their children. Now all of a sudden your former Number-1 is coming a poor second, third or even fourth and by the way he knows it and it hurts.

Number two is our job. This is one mostly for us guys. We rationalise that we’re trying to establish our careers, working to build a future, creating wealth for a happy retirement and yet we’re working so hard there’s nothing left there at the end of the day for our wives. That was my biggie and I’m still a reforming workaholic. See I duped myself into believing that my work was more important than my wife.

Number three is our home. For some people how their home looks and feels is way more important than their spouse.

Number four our hobbies. Hey, it’s great to have a hobby or two, something you can do just for yourself because it sparks your creativity, it burns some energy, it relaxes you, I’m all for it but at some point our hobbies can rob a marriage of the intimate time that it needs to survive and to thrive.

Number five is our pets. Yeah, for some people their pet has become more important than their former number one person. David Clarke in his book recounts the comments of one disgruntled husband during a counselling session and this man observed that his wife had more kind words, cuddles and attention for their dog. Buddy than she did for him.

Number six are our friends and our family. A husband that continues to hang out with old single friends at their houses. A wife who spends on average an hour and a half each night on the phone to family and friends.

Now I’d be really surprised if you don’t recognise just one or two of those as things that might be supplanting your spouse as the number one person for you on this planet and you know the hardest thing about dealing with that, it’s admitting that you’ve let it happen.

You see it’s hard for a man to admit he’s putting his career before his wife. It’s hard for a woman to admit that she’s putting the emotional attachments with her children ahead of this man of hers who promised so much to start out with but well, look at him now.

The single most important insight that hit me between the eyes in reading David Clarke’s book, ‘Kiss Me Like You Mean It’, is this. If anything or anyone is more important than your spouse your marriage cannot be deeply intimate and passionate. Let me say that again:

If anyone or anything is more important than your spouse then your marriage cannot be deeply intimate and passionate.

Husbands its not good killing yourself in your job, coming home and complaining that your love life with your wife isn’t what it used to be. Of course it’s not. Your work is more important than she is. And wives it’s no good pouring yourself out on the kids or perhaps your pet cat or dog, come on, and then complaining he never talks to me anymore. Well of course he doesn’t. You are demonstrating to him that he’s not important to you anymore, at least not as important as the children or the dog.

You want passion in your marriage then first get your priorities right. Right priorities come ahead of passion. Do you want to hear what your wife and husband has to say ahead of what anyone else has to say? Do you want to spend time with your spouse before your work, your children, your pets, your family, your friends, your football game? It’s about priority.

Let’s see what Solomon’s priorities are. ‘The Song of Songs’ is a beautiful Book in the Old Testament that’s about the passionate love between a man and a woman, between Solomon and a woman and the Song of Songs talks about priorities. This is what she says:

The voice of my beloved, look he comes leaping upon the mountains and bounding over the hills.

She wants to hear his voice, she longs for his voice. That’s Song of Songs chapter 2, verse 8. And he says in verses 13 and 14:

Arise my love, my fair one and come away. O my darling in the clefts of the rock, in the covert of the cliff, let me see your face, let me hear your voice.

What’s the Lord our God saying to you and me about the passion that should exist between husband and wife? He’s saying that priority comes first. Priority precedes passion and Gods heart is to see you put your wife or your husband before all other things on planet earth.

Yes He should be the very first and foremost thing in your life but putting God first inevitably means loving your God given soul mate above all the other things on this planet because that sort of love comes directly out of the very nature of God. God is love.

Let me put it as bluntly and directly as this. Until your spouse goes back to being number one in your priorities there will be no passion but within days and weeks of changing and living out a new set of priorities, putting him or her first this is what’s going to happen. Your former number one, your soul mate will notice, absolutely, and not just notice they’ll respond.

How to Love Your Wife

Now it’s a pretty obvious mistake to make. We each have certain needs in love, there are certain boxes we have to have ticked for us to feel loved and so we assume that that’s what our spouse needs, we men are incredibly good at this. We figure that if our wives don’t agree with us, if they don’t see the world the same way that we do, well they’re obviously wrong and they need to be reformed. They need changing because obviously they just have it wrong; it’s a plain as the nose on our face, yeah right.

We all want to love our spouses in a way that makes for a passionate, fantastic marriage. Of course we do. Is there any married man or woman on the planet who doesn’t wish for and hope for and long for a passionate marriage? The problem is that, well most of the time we just don’t know how to get there. Most of the time we men don’t know what a woman needs in order for her to feel loved and most of the time, come on you women don’t know what we men need to feel loved and valued.

Just imagine for a moment a marriage where both wife and husband know what the other needs to feel loved. Imagine a marriage where both wife and husband not only know what the other needs but learn to give their loved one the love they need most of the time. Do you think that would make for a good marriage? Hey, that would make for a fantastic marriage. That would make precisely the sort of marriage that each one of us is looking for.

So right now, men let’s discover what it is your wives really need and after the break we’ll be doing the same thing to help wives discover what their husbands really need.

I’m going to go back at this point to David Clarke’s book about having a passionate marriage. It’s called “Kiss Me Like You Mean It” because he’s been in the marriage counselling game for over twenty years. This is what he writes:

Nearly every wife would list unconditional love, protection and security and emotional connection in her list of top five needs.

In other words husbands she needs to know that she is your number one no matter what she does. She needs to know you would crawl over broken glass to save her and protect her and she needs to communicate with you and be connected with you at a deeply emotional level.

If you’re a husband let me ask you, how do you score on those three criteria? When her hormones are playing havoc with her emotions what does she get from you? Reassurance, encouragement, a hug or anger followed by a prolonged silence?

Do you behave in a way that demonstrates to her that you are in the business of protecting her? I mean when someone a bit odd or menacing walks towards you both on the street do you make sure that you put yourself between her and that person?

And when you come home from work do you listen to how she feels? Do you tell her not the executive dot point summary of what happened in your day but also how you felt about it, what you enjoyed, what you didn’t enjoy, what you found hard, what made you angry, what made you laugh? Because those are the very things that are going to make her feel loved. If you start doing those things, develop the habits to do them, pretty quickly she’s going to notice the change and pretty quickly she’s going to start feeling very, very loved.

One of David Clarkes practical tips for making that happen is make sure that your wife is the person who gets your day’s news first. Remember the things that matter and make sure that you treat her as your very best friend, the person you want to connect with by telling her the news first. Isn’t that great?

If you can, give her a quick call during the day to tell her a bit of your news. Isn’t that great? I mean it’s so practical. She wants to hear your news. She wants to hear how you feel about this and that in your day and when you tell her first words cannot describe how loved that’s going to make her feel.

She needs you to tell her in detail over and over again why it is that you love her, what it is that you love about her, what makes you delight in her. Women need that reassurance; they need your unconditional love. She needs you to ask her what she needs today. “Sweetheart how can I help you today?” “Well you know it would be really good, can you stop by the supermarket on the way home and grab some lettuce and some rice and some yoghurt.”

Men, that’s loving your wife, that’s how she needs to be loved and you know something it’s not that hard, it’s about developing the habits. The more you give her what she needs the more she will give you what you need.

I guess the one thing that is particularly tough as a husband is the fact that your wife’s emotions are so prone to the hormonal onslaught that goes on in her body. On a monthly basis with PMT and I remember in one of the classes I was taking a few years back in Bible College, one of the older men shared a pain that he’d gone through during his wife’s menopause where she would lash out at him for no reason.

And choked up and as teary as he was he said to us, “the one Scripture verse that let me love her unconditionally through all that is Ephesians chapter 5, verse 25.” And it’s a verse, I have to tell you, that I have memorised since then. It says:

Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the Church and gave himself for her.

Hmm, last time I checked Jesus was nailed to a cross, hands and feet and suffered there as He choked and died for me. Last time I checked He gave His all for me and that’s how He’s calling me to love my wife through those difficult times. That’s how He’s calling you men to love your wife through the tough times. That’s how He’s calling us to give ourselves for our wives in the tough times. God’s wisdom is so awesome.

Remember her top three needs are unconditional love, safety and security and a deep emotional connection. Husbands start with those things, do them, say them, live them, breathe them and that passion you were longing for, trust me, it will be back real soon.

How to Love Your Husband

Most wives are intrigued by their husband’s odd behaviours and responses. Well maybe intrigued is a bit of a understatement, how about perplexed, frustrated, driven crazy, hurt, disappointed. Whatever happened to that romantic knight in his shining armour who rode along on his white steed and swept you off your feet? Now he just sits there in front of the television and watches sport. I mean seriously he’s impossible. What happened? What went wrong? Why is he broken? Why is he like this?

After the first few years it’s like you’re married to a Martian and that’s exactly the point that Dr David Clarke makes in his book of rediscovering the passion in your marriage. His book’s called “Kiss Me Like You Mean It” and it’s fantastic. Have a listen to what he says, he writes:

After two decades of intense marital research I have discovered a shocking truth about passion. Here are my findings. Something completely unexpected and terrible happens between two and fourteen years into your marriage. The person who you fell passionately in love with is replaced by an alien. I’m not kidding. The alien looks exactly like the wonderful person you married but its behaviour is bizarre, unbelievably annoying and obviously designed to drive you insane.

There is many a wife who looks at the podgy slob sitting on the sofa, remote control in hand, surfing through the sporting channels, whose real life experience 100% confirms Dr Clarke’s research findings. What went wrong? What are you going to do with him?

Girls the first thing you need to know about your man is that his love needs are profoundly different to yours. Loving him the way that you like to be loved doesn’t work, it didn’t work yesterday, it doesn’t work today, it’s not going to work tomorrow and what’s more it’s never, ever, ever going to work. Have you got it?

Before the break we saw what women need in order to feel loved. So now, what do men need because their needs are entirely different to women’s, totally? Here they are from David Clarke’s book. Respect, honour and sexual intimacy are three of nearly every husband’s most important needs. Let’s do it again, respect, honour and sexual intimacy are three of nearly every husband’s most important needs.

As a husband let me tell you he has absolutely hit the nail on the head. Not only in the three things that he’s put on the list but also in their sequence. Respect and honour come first. Interestingly there’s nothing new in this. 2,000 years ago this is what the Apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the Ephesians. Ephesians chapter 5, verses 22 to 24:

Wives be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord for the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the Church the body of which he is the saviour. Just as the Church is subject to Christ so also wives ought to be subject in everything to their husbands.

That causes a lot of contention that one little Scripture in a lot of societies and cultures but wherever you are and whatever your cultural context or background might be what this is talking about is the fact that the husband is wired to be a leader and his deepest need is to be respected and honoured by his wife.

Now I could spend an hour or two sharing with you my understanding of how that Scripture, about obeying and all that sort of stuff, plays itself out in western culture and how it works in my marriage with my beautiful wife Jacqui but that’s not where we’re going today.

My point is simply this, when a wife sneers at her husband, when she pulls him down in front of the children or in front of other people, when she dishonours him, when she hen pecks him which by the way never, never works and it only has the effect of having him pull up the drawbridge and locking himself away inside his castle.

When she does those things she robs him of his two most important love needs. Of course he’s going to get things wrong, of course he’s going to make mistakes but in the same way that a wife needs to experience her husband’s unconditional love when she’s making a hash of things, he needs to experience her respect and honour when he’s not having one of his best days. You rob him of that and I’ve got to tell you the guy will close down.

Start respecting and honouring him in practical ways and he will open up. Add to that physical intimacy which I have to tell you is almost as much as a physical need for him as oxygen, water and food and you’ll have a new man.

Wives you are the only person on this planet that can legitimately meet this uniquely deep need of your husband. You rob him of that, make it difficult for him and he feels like the most unloved person on planet earth.

Before the break I implored men to develop the habits and behaviours that will make their wives feel loved. Right now I’m imploring you wives to do exactly the same for your husbands. He’s different to you, that much you already know; now you know how his love needs are different to yours.

Respect, honour and physical intimacy. Give him those things over and over and over again and the alien on your sofa will pretty quickly start behaving a whole bunch more like the man who swept you off your feet. Just imagine both of you giving the other what they need to make them feel loved, now there’s a recipe for a passionate marriage.

We’ve all heard the saying ‘the husband may well be the head of the house but the wife is the neck that turns the head’, there’s a lot of truth in that. Wives I don’t think that most of you even begin to realise the awesome influence that you have in your husband’s heart with your physical beauty and your ability to enjoy intimacy with him.

I know what many of you are thinking to yourselves, oh well you know I’m not that beautiful, I’ve put on a few pounds, gravity has taken over all my body parts. Let me tell you something, your man thinks that you are beautiful. Absolutely he does.

How often do you hear someone in my position talking about the importance of physical intimacy in marriage? Not that often right? But Jesus talked about it because it is vitally important especially for your husband. Wives when you get that husbands feel instantly loved. A wife’s realisation of the importance of this one thing in the way that he’s wired will literally transform her man before her very eyes. Trust me.

This is what Jesus said quoting the Book of Genesis:

For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined, be cleaved to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. So there’s no longer two but one flesh. (Matthew chapter 19:5-6).

You know what I love about God; He’s so honest, so direct and so practical in His Word. He deals with everything including marriage and intimacy and in fact if you’re married let me just pray for you right now.

Father God
I pray for each man and woman who is listening today who is married and who’s struggling to love their spouse they way they need to be loved. Lord, You’ve shared some things with us today, Lord it’s in your Word there, we’ve discovered it, teach us how to love our wives the way we should and teach wives how to love their husbands the way they should. Lord, We know that you want to bless marriages; we know that you want to pour your love and your grace out; we know that your plan is for us to have a passionate marriage. Lord, We invite you into our marriages today. Be the Lord of our lives, the Lord of our marriages and give us the wisdom and the insight through what we’ve heard today, to love our loved ones the way they need to be loved. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.

Anyone who’s been married for any length of time will tell you that the differences in their married partner that they once found endearing and funny at some point became incredibly annoying. Why is that? And if you relate to that, what can we do about it?

When The Differences Become Annoying

When I first married my beautiful wife Jacqui, I immediately discovered an annoying habit. She squeezes the toothpaste tube from the top whereas I’ve always squeezed it from the bottom and it wasn’t long before it started driving me nuts. It’s the little things that can tear our marriages apart; it’s the little foxes that ruin the vine.

Now fortunately I had some great wisdom (God-given I believe) to solve this terrible problem. Within a few weeks of our marriage a second tube of toothpaste was inserted into our bathroom, one for Jacqui one for me, problem solved! I would never have to pick up a deformed and mangled tube of toothpaste again in my life, phew! Marriage saved, crisis averted!

When we head off onto the marriage journey together as wife and husband, we can laugh about those funny little differences, Jacqui for instance is completely spatially impaired, I mean really. She’s been known on more than one occasion to become totally lost in a department store. I, on the other hand, somehow always know which way is north no matter where I am, and I can genuinely follow my nose to get myself to where I want to go.

Although these days the satellite navigation in my car does rather help, but Berni here, I struggle, incredibly sometimes, to remember people’s names! Part of that is a function that I guess that I meet a lot of people, but I can be introduced to someone, knowing my problem concentrating on their name being totally determined this is Suzan and that’s Craig and this one is Jeff and that one is Maria only to completely forget their names within twenty seconds on being introduced. Jacqui always chuckles as I lean over to her and I whisper, “what’s his name again?”

Now we all start off finding those differences endearing and funny but as I said at the top of the program at some point those things turn sour on us, if you were able to join me last week on the program you’ll know that we’re smack bang in the middle of the series of messages on re discovering the passion in our marriages. The series that I’ve called, ‘Kiss Me Like You Mean It’ inspired by the brilliant book of the same name by Dr. David Clarke. And there is nothing that kills passion more than when we let the little things that once made us smile become evidence that we hurl in our marriage partner’s face as something to prove that they’re just no good.

Any of that sound just a bit familiar? We have the capacity to turn molehills into mountains, to magnify little faults in our dearly beloved. And there is a reason for that, because when after several years of marriage you’ve put up with that same fault, that same weakness, that same annoying habit for the 10,000 time, well it’s like Chinese water tauter where they drip water onto your forehead for days – drip, drip, drip, drip, drip – and after a while it feels like their dropping a brick on your forehead.

And it’s the same in our marriage partner’s weaknesses. Have a listen to this statement of wisdom from a book of the Old Testament from the bible, ‘The Song of Songs’ which rather amazingly is the story of the passionate love between a man King Solomon of Israel around 950 BC and a Shylammite woman. Just have a listen to this. The Song of Songs, Chapter 2 and Verse 15:

Catch us the foxes the little foxes that ruin the vineyards, for our vineyards are in blossom.

If you have just a half an hour, do yourself a favour and read this book ‘The Song of Songs’ in the Old Testament and it will amaze you. Take these two King Solomon and the Shulammite woman are madly in love. Their head over heels in love with one another and pretty early on in the story comes this statement of wisdom that it’s the little foxes that ruin the vineyard.

So someone please catch them because our vineyard is in full bloom! Its about to bear fruit, our love for one another is so wonderful that we need to catch these little fellas, these little so-and-so’s that want to ruin our passionate love for one another as husband and wife and we have to get them out of our marriage, out of our vineyard because we want to see the fruit.

So, you in your marriage do you want to see the fruit of a deep passionate head over heels relationship with your wife or with your husband as the case may be? Do you? Then get to and catch those little foxes, what are they? What is it that drives you absolutely crazy about the one that you’re supposed to love more than anyone else with the elusions of anyone else?

She bought another pair of shoes! She doesn’t need any more shoes! Why does she keep buying all those shoes!?” “He, can you believe this, he is watching sport on television again! I mean how much sport do you have to watch until enough is enough? And you know he always leaves his socks by the bed.

Do you know what those things are? I mean come on, lets be honest they are molehills they’re not mountains. It’s not the action itself that’s terribly wrong, its our reaction to it. Its not going to kill us to let them pass, you want some passion back in your marriage then go and catch those little foxes! Kick them out of the vineyard and then watch the vineyard of your marriage blossom and bear fruit, bear fruit of joy and passion and intimacy.

Now I know what you’re thinking. Okay, maybe I can forgive the socks on the floor or that new pair of shoes that she bought just this one more time. All right I’ll do what Berni said, I’ll get over it but how long can it go on? How many more times do I have to forgive him or her? It’s a fair question, and Jesus has the answer for you. Praise God! Mathew chapter 18, beginning at verse 21:

See the apostle Peter came to him and said ‘Lord if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As much as seven times?’

Which must have seemed an awful lot of times to forgive, but Jesus said to him:

No not seven times, but I tell you seventy seven times!

That figure of speech there that Jesus is using there is called hyperbole, in other words its an exaggeration to make his point. I mean forgiving someone seven times that’s a lot of times to forgive someone for doing the same thing. Forgiving someone seventy seven times for doing the same thing over and over and over again that is water torture. But that’s what Jesus is calling us to do.

And that speaks right into my marriage and if you’re married, into your marriage. Because when we forgive – listen to this it’s really powerful – when we forgive completely and utterly over and over again what we’re doing is we’re eliminating our bad reaction, which is what turns the molehill into the mountain in the first place. Of course there is some things some big issues in marriage that have to be dealt with but you know what, the socks on the floor and the extra pair of shoes don’t number amongst those.

There are some really deep important issues in marriage that we have to confront them, sure! But the toothpaste, and the socks and those little things come on … they’re not in that category are they? So here it is again, Song of Songs Chapter 2 verse 15:

Catch us the foxes catch them right, the little foxes that ruin the vineyards, for our vineyards are in blossom.

What are your vineyards doing?

The Most Wonderful Person In The World

The more I observe people, including myself, the more I come to the conclusion that many of us are just kidding ourselves most of the time. Many of us believe our own propaganda about how wonderful we are how perfect we are, the rest of the world may well be getting things wrong all the time, but not me! It’s you. You’re the problem! I’m certainly not!

Do you know why my beautiful wife Jacqui married me? Because I am the most wonderful man on the planet! That might sound like a boast but it’s not! In her heart in her eyes, this young knight in shinning armour who swept her off her feet was and is the most wonderful man on the planet and just quietly, in my eyes in my heart she was and is the single most wonderful beautiful woman on this planet. Second to none!

But back to me for a moment, Mr. Wonderful here. Now I know this is going to shock you but Mr. Wonderful hasn’t’ always lived up to that title! Surprised? Yeah thought so. Because I, like you am not Mr. or Mrs. Perfect. I have flaws and weaknesses and annoying habits just like you do. But there is one flaw that each one of us has in common and this is the one that I want to talk to you about right at the moment. It’s the sheer ignorance and arrogance that we carry around when we just believe our own propaganda that we aren’t flawed or if we are, you know it really doesn’t matter. You’ve done it, I’ve done it, we’ve all done it.

If you’re married the chances are very, very high indeed that you have some character traits, some habit something that completely drives your marriage partner around the twist or worst still there are just two or things that you do that hurts them incredibly deeply.

The chances are that if you’re a man, you give your wife the perception your work comes before she does and then when you do come home from work, and she asks you about your day she gets a bit of a grunt, nothing important and that’s about it. What you’re really doing is in her eyes telling her that you don’t love her because something else comes first and you’re not prepared to talk about it.

And the chances are, that if you’re a woman that you nag your husband. You’re always onto him about something he never helps around the house, he’s always watching television. Just once he should stack the dishwasher, none of which is unreasonable, but by nagging him you’re just reinforcing in his mind why it’s so important to withdraw into his shell to get away from you and the incessant nagging.

I want to talk to you today about the concept of honour. Honouring the most wonderful person in the world that you fell in love with. So what does it mean to honour someone? Note here I’m not talking about ‘honour’ the noun the ‘thing’ – His Honour, Her Honour, I’m talking about ‘honour’ the verb. The ‘doing word’, honouring someone. What does it mean to do that?

Well my dictionary tells me that it means to regard someone with respect, to pay public respect to someone, to fulfill an obligation or keep an agreement. When you married your most wonderful person in the world no doubt that you made a vow to them a typical wedding vow that went something like this:

I take you to be my lawfully wedded husband or wife, my constant friend, my faithful partner, my love from this day forward. In the presence of God our family and friends I offer you my solemn vow to be your faithful partner in sickness and in health, in good times and in bad, and in joy as well as in sorrow until death us do part. I promise to love you unconditionally, to support you in your goals, to honour and respect you, to laugh with you and cry with you and to cherish you for as long as we both shall live.

Do you know the single most practical way that you can fulfill your marriage vow to your partner? By tackling that one weakness, that one character trait that one thing that you do that hurts your wife or your husband the most. Tackling it head on, by admitting your faults, by sitting down with your most wonderful person in the world to talk about how you can go about changing what you say and do to take away the pain an the distress and the confusion and the isolation and the loneliness that your behaviour is causing. And do you know what that is? It’s honouring your wife or your husband.

None of us ever made a conditional marriage vow, we never said, “I’ll do this if you do that”. In fact, go back to the vow that I just read and you’ll note that it says that I will promise to love my wife unconditionally. So please don’t give me this line, “Well why should I do that? He still hurts me”. Or “She still has plenty of faults too buddy!” I’m not talking about the other half here, I’m talking about me. I’m talking about you. Come on, do you plan on honouring your most wonderful person in the world or not?

So your marriage isn’t going along as well as you hoped for right? Here’s the place you can begin, but deciding right now to live up to your title, your status as Mr. or Mrs. Most-Wonderful-Person-in-the-World to your husband or your wife. Now this isn’t just me banging on here about honour, God is heavily into honouring the marriage vow. He says in Malachi chapter 2 verse 14:

You cry out, ‘Lord why have you abandoned us?’ I’ll tell you why, because your Lord witnessed the vow that you and your wife made to each other on your wedding day when you were young but you’ve been disloyal to her though she remained faithful to you, the wife of your marriage vow.

See God takes marriage very seriously, it’s meant to be a joy and a delight, this whole marriage thing. It’s meant to be fun and its meant to be supportive and rich as husband and wife carry one another through the tough times, its meant to be the single most unbelievably fantastic relationship between any two human beings. And when we dishonour our marriage partner, the one that we promised to love and the honour unconditionally until death do us part, that’s something that God takes really seriously. And if God takes it seriously then maybe, just maybe, you and I should take it seriously too.

There’s another world that believing your own propaganda and that word is ‘pride’. And pride does not make for a good marriage, humility on the other hand tells your Mr. or Mrs. Most-Wonderful-Person-in-the-World that you truly, truly do love them. That you’re prepared to do whatever it takes to say, “I love you”.

We’re Just Not Having Fun Anymore

Pretty scary question that for many a married couple anyone who’s married remembers how much fun there was in those early days of their relationship. You couldn’t’ wait to get together; you couldn’t wait to go out on a date together; you couldn’t’ wait to get married so that you could live your lives together, set up a home together, share everything together. Ah they were the good old days! But it’s not like that today is it?

Somewhere along the line something happened, the spark went out of your marriage. That’s the point that Dr. David Clark makes on having a passionate marriage it’s called, ‘Kiss Me Like You Mean It’. If you were able to join me last week you’ll have heard me read out the second sentence in the first paragraph of the first chapter of that book, this is what he writes:

Why is it, in one hundred percent of all marriages that the passion disappears just a handful of years after the wedding?

See at some point we stop wanting to have fun together, the net result of which is that we indeed stop having fun together. So what is fun?

Dictionary definition: enjoyment, amusement, light-hearted pleasure, playfulness and good humour; a behaviour or an activity that is intended purely for amusement.

So husbands and wives when was the last time you engaged in some serious fun? When was the last time you engaged in a behaviour or activity that was intended purely for enjoyment? Some can’t remember the last time they had some serious fun with their spouse. Sure, when the children where young we maybe used to go out and do some fun things as a family. But that’s not so much what I’m talking about, I’m talking about husband and wife going out and doing something just for each other to have fun with one another elusively with no one else invited.

Some couples go out on dates and you see them sitting there in the restaurant bored to tears not knowing what to talk to one another about. And it’s so sad, so I’m not just talking about going out on a date together; I’m talking about having fun together. Fun is something that I have to be deliberate about. See, normally in a marriage one of you isn’t a bubbly fun kind of person and that’s me. Its not in your DNA to just go and have fun and also normally in a marriage one of you isn’t typically very good at having ideas about how to go out and have fun. In my marriage that’s my beautiful wife.

With our kids grown up we have Saturdays completely to ourselves, so this is the conversation we’ve had about a million times, “What do you want to do today darling?” and she says, “Hmmm I don’t know.” And I say “Well surely you have some ideas”, and she says, “Hmmm no not really” a billion times.

Do you see how easy it would be for the two of us to just never go out and have fun together? Jackie has the most outrageous wacky sense of humour; her laughter is infectious. When she laughs I can’t tell you how much it lifts my spirits. I as things turn out, I’m not bad at having ideas of things that we can do together and go and have fun. So if we put the effort in, we can end up having a whole bunch of fun together the key is the effort.

See we both work hard so it’s easy to say, “Oh look I’m just too tired to go for a walk together around the neighbourhood tonight holding hands.” The easiest thing in the world would be to bore each other to death and that’s sadly what a lot of couples do.

The Old Testament book of the Bible ‘The Song of Songs’ is all about the passionate love between a man and a woman. Let me read to you something from that book about having some serious fun together as husband and wife, this is what Solomon says to the Shulammite woman:

Arise my love my fair one, come with me come away for now the winter has passed the rains over and gone the flowers are appearing on the earth the time of singing has come and the voice of the turtle dove can be heard across the land. The fig trees putting forth its figs, the vines are blossoming they give forth their fragrance.

Ok, it’s really poetic language, but do you get the gist of what he’s saying? It’s about getting out and having fun together, it’s about romance and delight, it’s about making the most of this new season of spring! He starts off with “Arise my love, my fair one and come away with me’, not ‘oh gee I wonder if there is anymore sport on TV today?”

If the two of you want to see some passion in your marriage, if the two of you want a spark back again, if you want to live the marriage that God always planned for you to live then it’s time to go and have some fun together, come on FUN! Be deliberate in it, make the effort and you’ll be surprised at the power of fun in you life and in your marriage, really!

Now if you’ve ever read the Old Testament, ‘The Song of Songs’, what you’ll know is that it’s a book full of passion. He talks very explicitly about the sexual intimacy between wife and husband the desire they have for one another the enjoyment of one another. Almost every time I read this book of the Old Testament it completely rocks my socks off that God puts a whole book in the Bible about passionate, intimate love. You know what that tells me? The Lord my God ain’t a prude! I mean, when you think about it, he invented marriage, he invented sexuality, he invented intimacy.

It’s His plan, it’s a good plan. It’s a fantastic plan! The man and wife to enjoy each other, obviously given this program goes to air in lots of different cultures around the world on lots of different stations at lots of different times of the day, I’m a little bit limited in the detail that I can go into so here is the thing: Are you married? Are you missing out on the fun and the spark in your marriage? Well the remedy to that as it is with the remedy to everything that we lack and everything that ails us, the remedy can be found in the living breathing Word of God.

God loves you, and not just everyone, of course he loves everyone, but very personally, very specifically, very intimately, God loves you! And if he’s given you a wife or a husband then he means you to totally, totally enjoy one another to have fun together to be head over heals in love with one another and my friend if you don’t believe me, okay that’s fine. You don’t have to believe everything that Berni tells you.

Instead go and read this book in the Old Testament, ‘The Song of Songs’ yourself. It’ll take you a half-an-hour at the most, read it, drink it in, and hear from God himself the sweet enjoyment, the passion, the fun that he wants you and your marriage partner to have. And then once you’ve read it you know what? Just go and live it, go and do it.

Men, have you ever noticed how your wife wants to describe her day in minute detail? And women, have you ever noticed how men talk in dot points and executive summaries? Let’s see how that one profound difference can be a blessing, and not a curse.

The Lesson of Attentiveness

My daughter Melissa works as a beauty therapist. Each night when she comes home, she shares with Jacqui (my wife) the blow-by-blow description of her day – this client and that situation, and we ran out of this product and we had to improvise over there, and that made me feel like this and I was so happy when this happened, and I was really disappointed when that happened … It’s about a 45-minute debrief, routinely, and me as a typical male would rather have the executive summary.

It’s so important for women to be able to pour out everything in detail when they get home. It’s like taking out the garbage. By talking about it all, it somehow gets the stress of the day out of their system; it helps them to de-stress, and when they share a problem, the last thing they want us men to do is to fix their problem. You see, we men love to fix things. If it’s broken, then obviously the best thing to do is to fix it, but that’s the last thing she wants.

She doesn’t want her man imposing his masculine interpretation on the whole thing, and breaking her process of unwinding. She wants – wait for this – she just wants his focused attention. She wants him to listen, to look her in the eyes, to travel through the detail with her, and then, when she asks him: “So, what do you think about that?” Let’s say it’s some disagreement she had with someone at the office. She doesn’t want a solution; she just wants engaged empathy. She wants understanding. She wants to know how her man feels about the situation, and that’s the bit that so often we as men don’t get.

We’re talking this week again about having a fantastic marriage: the wisdom, the insight we need to really have the marriage we were meant to have. And if you’ve been able to join me over the past few weeks, you’ll know that we’ve been looking at some of the wisdom and insights that Doctor David Clark shares in his fantastic book, ‘Kiss me Like you Mean It’ about having a passionate, madly in-love kind of marriage.

And getting this balance right between a woman’s natural need and desire to talk about the detail in her life, to talk about how she feels about things in detail, versus a man’s need (and we’ll be talking about that more after the break) to talk about big-picture and keep things short, is a really important thing if a man and a woman are going to have the sort of marriage they were always meant to have.

This is how Doctor Clark rather humorously describes this phenomenon in his book:

She wants you to know absolutely everything that happens to her every day. No event is too small to share, and you will hear not only what happened, though she’ll cover that in incredible minute detail, you’ll also have to hear her feelings; her thoughts; the thoughts of other people who were there; the feelings and thoughts of people who weren’t there, but whom she’s talked to, and found out their feelings and thoughts; past events in her life that this current situation has triggered, and what the event means about her, you, and your relationship.

But that’s not all! She also wants your feedback, and she’s going to ask for it repeatedly. She’ll pepper you with all kinds of questions. She wants to know your thoughts, responses, reactions, feelings … It’s like living with a private investigator who’s always probing you for information. She wants to know how her experience of this event impacts you and resonates with you and your relationship with her. And all you can say is: ‘I wasn’t even there! I don’t know! Who cares?’

It’s true isn’t it? Any man who’s married will recognise that scenario. She’s so heavily into the detail and the emotional consequences, and he’s not. Well, to all the men who are listening out there, here’s my bit of advice for you today. If you want to have a deeply intimate, passionate relationship with your wife, then you are going to have to spend some time to focus intently, exclusively on her each and every day, and listen to her, and engage with her emotionally. Did you get that bit? Engage emotionally with her; because when you do, you’re telling her that you love her on her own terms.

Now, speaking as a man, that’s not something that I’ve always found that easy to do. Actually, I have to discipline myself. Stop playing with my iPad or my mobile phone. Turn the television off. Get rid of all the distractions and focus just on my beautiful wife, Jackie. Now she loves the detail. She needs to process the detail, in order to let go of her day. That’s what most women need to do, and when we start doing that, here’s what we discover. Sure; at first the detail takes some getting used to, but when we tell her what we feel about this or that instead of grunting occasionally, and imposing a male solution on someone who’s not looking for a solution, all of a sudden, husband and wife feel much, much more emotionally connected.

If we men could learn to honour our wives in just this one way – just this, nothing else – so many marriages on planet earth today would become instantly more exciting and intimate. So to all you men out there, take a tip from me. Give it a try. Make it a daily habit. Okay, it’s going to take some learning; it’s going to take some getting used to, but when you do this one thing, you will watch your marriage blossom.

And not only does she want you to hear about her day in detail, she wants you to tell her how and why you love her over and over again, in detail. Guys, we need to learn about emotional detail, and this isn’t just something that psychologists and marriage counsellors will tell you; it’s something that the Bible shows us in practice, in that beautiful book about passionate love – the Song of Songs in the Old Testament. Have a listen to how Solomon talks about his woman – the Shulammite woman. Listen to the detail. Song of Songs 4:1:

How beautiful you are, my love, how very beautiful! Your eyes are doves behind your veil; your hair is like a flock of goats moving down the slopes of Gilead. Your teeth are like a flock of shorn ewes that have come up from the washing, all of which bear twins, and not one among them is bereaved. Your lips are like a crimson thread; your mouth is so lovely. Your cheeks are like halves of a pomegranate behind your veil. Your neck is like the tower of David, built in courses, and on it hang a thousand bucklers, all of them shields of warriors …

And so, he goes on. When we husbands engage emotionally with our wives, first and foremost as listeners, but then also as lovers and speakers, it brings our wives to life. I guarantee you, if you’re a typical male who’s prone to just grunt and not engage, I absolutely guarantee you that if you begin to listen and engage at an emotional level, if you begin to enjoy the detail of your wife’s emotional world, your marriage will just rocket on from strength to strength, and get this: It’s all in the Bible; the Song of Songs; read it. You’ll be glad you did.

Understanding the Male Ego

I want to chat right now about the male ego. You’ve probably heard that it’s an incredibly fragile thing. Speaking as a man, I can tell you that absolutely it is. For some men, it’s an overdeveloped ego, and that’s a whole different kettle of fish. We’re not going there today. I just want to deal with your ordinary, everyday, adult male, and how it is that he gets his sense of worth and value.

Now, I’m a pretty secure kind of guy. I’m not that concerned about what other people think about me, and yet there’s one person on this planet whose opinion matters greatly to me. There is one person on this planet whose approval I need, and that is my wife Jacqui. I don’t think that most women really understand the power they have to support and encourage their husbands, or alternatively, to criticise them and undermine them and pull them apart.

If you’re a wife, as a man, I’m asking you to recognise the huge power that you have in your hands for either good or evil when it comes to your husband, who I’m hoping is the single-most important human being in your life – your number one; before your children, before your work, before anything else.

Now of course, with all my heart, I believe that God should come first in everyone’s life, but what I find when I put God first, what I find when I’m following Jesus, is that my wife becomes even more important in my list of priorities than anything in the rest of the world. That’s natural. That’s the way it works, and that’s the way it’s meant to be.

In the early part of a man’s life, as a young boy, he derives most of his sense of worth and self-esteem through his mother. That’s what psychologists tell us, and then through those teen-years, his dad becomes incredibly important. Interestingly though, once he’s established himself as a man and finds himself a wife, it’s his wife to whom he looks for guidance, for approval, and for validation.

We all know, that how parents treat their children in those formative years has a huge impact on their perceptions of themselves. Loving parents, with the right mix of discipline and reassurance, tend to produce well-balanced, well-adjusted children, who carry that forward into their adulthood. And in the same way, wives, you have the power to reassure your husband – to be an emotional rock for him; to love him through his mistakes; to encourage him when he’s struggling. Women have a depth of emotional strength and endurance that’s often underestimated, and you can use that strength to help your husband be all that he can possibly be.

Let me tell you this: I basically need my wife to approve of me, and to support me, and to show her love to me even when I get things wrong – in fact especially then. And if you’re a woman with a husband, he needs you, are you ready, exactly in the same way. He’s wired inside as a man to care about providing for you and protecting his family … He wants to succeed at that. That’s why, as I’ve often said on this programme, you can’t by and large hen-peck a man into submission.

That’s why when you criticise him openly in front of others or attack him, or withhold your support, he’ll either lash out or withdraw. This is why that stuff doesn’t work with him. Have a listen to this piece of wisdom from the Bible about how precious to a man a great wife is, and how she ought to behave. Proverbs 31:10-12:

A capable wife, who can find? She is far more precious than jewels. The heart of her husband trusts in her, and he will have no lack of gain. She does him good and not harm all the days of her life.

You know what every husband is looking for? A capable wife, and such a wife is a woman who is more precious than anything else – a woman he can trust in his heart; a woman that will always do him good and not harm. It always staggers me to know that the latest psychology and knowledge, as all these brilliant men and women figure this stuff out, it was already written down in the Bible almost three thousand years ago. There’s nothing new here under the sun.

You go on and read the rest of Proverbs 31 in the Old Testament, and sure; it’s written in the context of the culture of the time, but what it talks about is a woman who’s emotional, stable and strong, and supportive of her husband. A husband’s world is made so much the richer when he knows his wife won’t criticise him when he makes a mistake, but instead she’ll help him to get it right. And when he knows he has a wife like that, he naturally opens up his heart and learns from her.

There’s my perspective on the male ego. It’s not so much about an ego; it’s about a deep need for him to be who he was created to be, with the help of his wife. Much is made by people these days about the apparent male dominance over women in the Bible. People somehow think that equality means that men and women should be the same. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but they’re not. They’re equal, but different – very different.

And what we’ve been doing over these past few weeks on the programme is trying to get some of God’s wisdom to help those differences become a source of rich intimacy in our marriages, rather than covert or overt conflict. And the people who would make much of the Bible’s apparent disconnect with the so-called modern-day use of equality somehow always conveniently miss the bits where God talks about men and women as being equal, albeit different and often with different roles in a relationship.

For instance, in the New Testament, Ephesians 5:21, we’re told that husbands and wives should submit to one another out of reverence for God. Wives, one of the ways you can do that is to understand how your husband is different to you, and love him in the way that he needs to be loved. He’s wired to protect you and to provide for you, even though social standards and economic contexts may have changed over time, and that’s why he doesn’t like to fail, or to be pulled down.

Of course the more mature he becomes emotionally, the less of an issue ego becomes – the less touchy he becomes, but still, wives, your husband needs your approval. He needs your support. He needs your steady hand in his life, and that sort of a wife is more precious than any jewel that you can find. He needs you more than anyone else on this planet. Are you there for him?

Dealing with Conflict

Now the other day, I had coffee with a man who was just recently married. He was, not surprisingly, a very happy man; so when I told him that the initial passion he’s feeling right now fades and disappears in 100% of marriages, he was shocked and dismayed. That’s when I shared with him God’s plan for maintaining a lifelong passion and intimacy in his marriage.

You know, he was pretty deflated I have to tell you. “What do you mean, the passion that I feel for my wife and that she feels for me in these early months of our marriage are going to fade?” That’s not me saying that. It’s something that Doctor David Clark – a man who’s counselled hundreds, thousands of married couples over the last twenty-something years – says in the first paragraph of his book, ‘Kiss me Like you Mean It’. This is what he says:

Why, in 100% of marriages, does passion disappear just a handful of years after the wedding? Part of the answer to that is that most people don’t know how to deal well with conflict.

The outcomes of conflict can be either constructive or destructive. For most people, sadly, it’s the latter, and that’s because most of us don’t know how to handle conflict well. That’s the key – ‘well’. Put two or more people in the same place for long enough, and there is going to be conflict, because we live in a world full of selfish people – you and me included – a world where some people step over boundaries that should never have been stepped over; where people see things from different perspectives, which is often the place where conflict begins.

I want to share with you today a three-part plan for dealing effectively with the conflict that arises in marriages, often out of the differences we’ve just been talking about today. We can all remember three simple things, right? Until the next time we’re angry. Well, I’m here to encourage you to remember these three steps for the next time you’re angry and you can feel conflict brewing in your marriage; because the difference between doing them and not doing them is the difference between a rich, intimate marriage and a boring, dull, lifeless marriage. So, are you ready?

All right, step one: Speak the truth in love. That comes straight out of the Bible which, as it turns out, is an incredibly practical guide to how to live a great life, and this one comes out of something the apostle Paul wrote in the New Testament – Ephesians 4:15, if you want to go and check it out for yourself. Now he writes it in somewhat of a different context but, since marriage is about love, it applies equally in our marriages. If something your wife or husband is doing or not doing is hurting you deeply, there are a few different ways you can approach it.

Well, you can yell at them; accuse them; vent your anger at them, or you can remember first that you really do love this person and then find a gentle way, a powerful way, of speaking the truth with them in love – in a way that doesn’t accuse them or condemn them; in a way that tells them even in the middle of this difficult issue, I still love you. Now which one of those two approaches do you think is going to work better, huh? Speaking the truth in love is a great way to start in handling conflict.

The second step is about anger, as is the third step, which we’ll talk about in a moment. Just a few verses down in that same letter, Ephesians 4:26, the apostle Paul writes this:

Be angry, but do not sin.

Now that’s interesting. You’d think that anger would be sin, but not according to God. He’s a realist. We get angry sometimes – hey; sometimes He gets angry. That word ‘sin’ literally means to miss the mark or to miss the point, so what God’s saying here is, ‘sure some days you’re going to get angry, but when you do, don’t miss the point’. And when it comes to your wife or your husband, the point is that you love them. You married them to spend the rest of your lives together. That’s the point.

It’s so easy to say incredibly hurtful things when we’re angry – things that’ll damage your relationship; things you can never take back. ‘I wish I’d never married you!’ or worse still, threatening divorce. That sort of anger completely misses the point; that sort of anger is sin, ‘cos the point deep-down is that despite what your spouse has done to cause you to be angry, you still love them deeply. We can express displeasure, frustration, anger, without missing the mark, especially when we take a short time before we open our mouths to remember the point, which is that we love them.

And thirdly (this bit comes from the same verse):

Do not let the sun go down on your anger.

In other words, don’t go to sleep angry. Don’t go to bed with the issue unresolved. Don’t let anger fester into the next day and the next and the next, because then, it’ll become just another brick in the wall that divides you and the person you love most. And when that happens, first passion and then love ultimately die.

Speak the truth in love; be angry, but do not sin; be angry without sinning – without missing the point, and don’t let the sun set on your anger. Or to look at it another way, forgive quickly. In fact, the more quickly and completely we forgive, the more passionate and loving our marriage is going to be.

None of that is particularly complicated, and you and I both know those three steps make a lot of sense. If you want to have an intimate marriage, then both of you need to learn those three steps for dealing with conflict. Speak the truth in love; be angry but do not sin, and do not let the sun go down on your anger.

You may remember last week I shared with you a great bit of wisdom from the Bible. Song of Songs 2:15:

Catch the foxes, the little foxes, that ruin the vineyards, for our vineyards are in blossom.

The operative part of that verse is that because these rotten little foxes gnaw away at the base of the vine and ruin the vineyard, we need to catch the little blighters and keep them out. So one of the things that I’m always on-guard for, always on the look-out for (I wish I did it perfectly, but alas), is whether this thing that I’m finding annoying is really worth getting angry over – whether anger is indeed the correct response.

I was talking with a man recently whose wife is a terrible snorer, and he was losing a lot of sleep. He was getting really angry and frustrated with her, and I asked him: “So do you think she’s snoring on purpose? Do you think that this is something she has any control over?” Surprised, he said: “Well, no.” So I asked him: “Well, why are you getting angry with her?” His anger was the wrong response. His anger was getting in the way of speaking the truth in love, and getting out there and looking for some solutions to getting a better night’s sleep.

Friend, anger is not always the best response, or indeed the right response to conflict. So remember: Watch out for those little foxes, and treat them for what they are.

They say that marriage is all about give and take – you know, 50-50. That’s the prevailing wisdom, but … well, what if it’s wrong? What if 50-50 doesn’t work? What if 50-50 gets us a 50-50 result, then what? Well it turns out that God has a much, much better plan.

Why 50-50 Doesn’t Work

One of the most common things that people do in life is to get married. Not everyone, but most people. It’s just the way we’re wired, and this whole marriage gig can be anything from an outrageous blessing to an unmitigated disaster. I wonder, if you’re married, where along that scale you’d put your marriage at the moment. One of the biggest factors that influences our position on that scale of satisfaction in marriage is what we ourselves put into the relationship.

As I said earlier, I’ve often heard it said (maybe you have too) that marriage is all about 50-50. You know, it’s give and take. You have to compromise along the way, and yet these days, in western so-called first-world countries at least, almost 50% of all marriages are ending in divorce. It seems that this 50-50 approach is giving us, at best, a 50-50 result. So what if God has another plan that you and I can live out in our marriages to radically up the level of satisfaction?

In marriage, a 50-50 arrangement looks something like this: “Well, you know, he’s watched football on TV all afternoon, so tomorrow, I get to go out shoe-shopping”. Or “She’s spent money having lunch with her friend, so I’m going to get that new cell phone”. Or “He should’ve cared that I was feeling down. It’s not fair that he didn’t notice; he owes me”.

Now on the surface those responses kind of sound reasonable I guess; they’re based on the 50-50 principle. If I get something, the other one must also get something. If the other one gets something, then I have to get something too! It’s about trade-offs all the time. But underneath this, there’s this deep destructive thing called the 50-50 mentality. Her 50 becomes conditional on his 50. His 50 becomes conditional on her 50. This is a relationship based on conditional trade-offs. It’s a relationship based, let’s be blunt about it, on what I get out of it. 50-50 is about saying: “I’m entitled to my cut of this relationship; I’m entitled to my 50%”. Get it? It’s subtle, but it’s so important.

If you’re someone who’s married, I’d love you to step back in time with me to what it was that you said to your husband or your wife on that day that you were married. What was the vow like? Most marriage vows go something like this: The minister or the marriage celebrant says, “Fred, would you take Jan to be your wife? Will you love her, comfort her, honour her and protect her, and forsaking all others, be faithful to her as long as you both shall live?” And he says, “Yeah”, and then the wife is asked the same question and she says yes.

And then he says, “I take you to be my wife, to have and to hold from this day forth, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish till death us do part, according to God’s holy plan. In the presence of God, I make this vow.” Doesn’t that sound vaguely familiar? And then she does the same (I won’t do the squeaky-voice impersonation).

Now let me ask you something. We were talking about 50-50 before. Tell me, how much 50-50 is there in these marriage vows? I mean, how many conditional statements are there? How much is there of? “Well, if I give you your 50%, you have to give me my 50%”. Answer? None! In fact, it’s exactly the opposite. It very specifically says that my vow to my wife, your vow to your marriage-partner, is totally unconditional – for better or for worse.

That means whether you’re having a bad-hair day or it’s ugly, I’ll still do this. For richer or poorer, you know, even when you spend all my money on shoes or gadgets or whatever and we’re struggling financially. In sickness and in health, when I’m not feeling up to it or maybe when you’re not feeling up to it, or when we’re tired or when we’re sick or when we’re not well, I will still love you and cherish you and hold you and protect you and honour you and be faithful to you, forsaking all others, as long as I live, even when it’s tough.

Now, this is where the rubber hits the road, people, because the moment we live our marriage-relationship (and let me say something: Most people do it this way), the moment we live our marriage-relationship as a series of points that we score, then what we’re doing is we’re saying that my marriage is about what I get out of it.

But the promise we made at our wedding had nothing whatsoever to do with what I get out of it or what you get out of it. The promises only speak of what we will give to this person whom we love, who we’re marrying for the rest of our lives. Is that a sobering thought or what? Love doesn’t keep tabs. Love doesn’t keep a score. Love forgets wrongs. Love bears all things. Here’s a radical thought. How different would your marriage be if you accepted your wife or your husband just for who they are?

When we were first married, Jackie discovered that I loved cricket. Now you may think that it’s an outrageous concept that any game could last for 5 whole days. Personally, I think it’s wonderful. My darling wife, she thinks it’s outrageous! See, I find cricket absorbing and relaxing. I can have a nap in front of the cricket; I can be excited by the cricket; I just enjoy this sport.

Jackie, on the other hand – her passion, as you might have heard me say before, well she just loves shoes. Now when we were first married, I used to resent her spending some of my hard-earned cash on shoes, and she used to resent it when I would spend the afternoon watching cricket. You see, this resentment comes out of this 50-50 mentality. It’s what I get out of it. “He’s watched cricket all afternoon yesterday; that’s not fair, he should only have watched cricket for one hour.”

You know, we have these scoring things in our head. We may never share them with our husband or our wife, but they’re there. We score what we think is reasonable, and I used to think, “What’s the matter with this woman? Why does she have to walk into yet another shoe shop?” We were each focusing on our own needs, not on the other’s.

And then we said, “This is dumb. We can’t do this anymore”, and Jackie’s now at the point where she says, “You know something? My husband works really, really hard, and he just loves to watch the cricket, and if he wants to spend an afternoon watching the cricket and that blesses him, I want him to be blessed.”

And I took that same step with the shoes. We actually organised our budget so that if from time to time Jackie wants to go and buy a pair of shoes that I don’t think she needs, providing that it fits within the budget, well, that’s her choice. She can go and do that. And I think: Well, if that’s what her gig is, God bless her; I just love her; I hope she enjoys the shoes.

And all of a sudden, there’s peace. The resentment’s gone. The strife is gone. Berni can watch the cricket, Jackie can have a nice pair of shoes, and what we’re doing is we’re living unconditional love because we’re focusing on the other’s blessing, not on our own. You know the crazy thing that happens when we do that? Our marriage-partner responds, and they want us to be blessed too. It’s a totally radical shift – this unconditional love. This is about sacrificial giving. It’s not 50-50. This is the love that changes people, and that builds marriages.

Husbands Love Your Wives

Men and women are so different, aren’t they? For one thing, men are physically much stronger, and women by and large seem to have a richer and more sensitive emotional makeup than we men. Sadly, the law of the jungle has prevailed far too long, and far too often, and it goes something like this: The strongest one wins. Just take a look around at the world today. Women are being oppressed and abused and so often still being treated like chattels.

One of the greatest criticisms actually of Christianity today is that it seems to reflect that sort of out-dated view of womanhood, where the man is the head of the household and the woman should obey her husband. Come on! How can we come to grips with God’s view of the man/woman relationship when the Bible was written thousands of years ago in a vastly different culture from today? Should a person’s sex really determine their role in a family’s leadership structure?

It’s a tough one, isn’t it? God has some great wisdom on the marriage-relationship. I mean, after all, He made us. He made us in His image, male and female. He created us, but God’s take on manhood and womanhood and marriage is kind of clouded by a whole bunch of cultural baggage, and what I would like to do (as we talk about marriage today) is to separate what God actually says from the cultural baggage that we sometimes ascribe to what we think Christianity’s all about.

What does it mean to be a husband here early in the twenty-first century? I was born in 1959 in Australia, my father was born in 1923 in Romania, and his dad was born in 1889. So he came from a different age and a different culture, and I guess we all learn so much from just living with our parents – the unspoken things. We take on their behaviours and their attitudes, and I guess we men take on the model of being a husband from what we observe from our fathers, which is what they observed from their fathers. That model may be imprinted on our brains somehow, but is it still relevant today?

We’ve had the whole women’s liberation thing, and today many women go to work, and so we men have a confusing transition in coming to grips with our role as husbands today. So where do we men begin? Well, the apostle Paul has a great starting-point. If you have a Bible, you can look it up. Ephesians 5:25:

Husbands, love your wives the way Christ loved the church and gave Himself for her.

This is an interesting, beautiful parallel that we have here between what Jesus did for us, and what God is calling us men to do for our wives. Jesus’ model of leadership was servant-hood. The Son of God stepped right out of heaven; He became a man; He was humiliated; He was beaten; crucified; He suffered on the cross for us. God’s model of leadership, men, is servant-hood.

God stepped down from the supreme role in the universe to serve you and me on that cross, through pain and through suffering, and He said to His disciples (who were arguing, “Which one of the twelve of us is going to be at the top of the heap?”) and Jesus said, “Don’t you get it? The one of you who wants to be the first needs to be the servant of all.”

Let’s look at that model and apply it to our marriage for a moment. Why is that? Why does God adopt the servant-model of leadership? You know what happens when we genuinely serve other people? When you serve me, when you go out of your way, when you sacrifice for me? You will get my respect, and my honour, and my love, and my trust. When I meet you, I don’t know you from a bar of soap, but we develop a relationship and I discover that you’re someone who delivers value; who cares about me; who’s prepared to serve me. That builds trust; that builds relationship; that builds influence … It’s true in every relationship, and this bridge of influence is what happens when we serve other people.

You can’t lead someone unless you’ve open the door to their hearts to allow your influence to flow in. We can’t lead someone unless they allow themselves to be swayed by who we are, but generally people won’t do that until they’ve developed enormous trust; until they know that we have their interests at heart; until they see us as servants, as good leaders, and good leaders are servants. That’s God’s model of husbands’ leadership in the marriage.

I believe that has been perverted. I believe through culture over many years that this has been turned into something crass and horrible, where it’s not about servant-hood, but it’s about domination. You can’t lead people by domination. That’s why dictatorships will ultimately fall, so this whole model where even in Christendom, you know people have said: ‘Well, the husband’s head of the household, and that means he’s the boss and that means he dominates it’? That’s been rejected by society, and rightly so.

I’m not talking about that perverted, man-made model where the husband is the lord of the manor, served on hand and foot by a dutiful wife. Men have strength and a sense of protection over their loved ones, and a desire to provide – that’s who they are. When we take that and we humble ourselves, and when we do what the Bible says (Ephesians 5:25):

Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and died for her.

When I describe that sort of a man, that sort of a husband, how many women would give their right hands to have a husband like that? Come on. Leaders don’t rely on position; they don’t rely on rank; they influence people’s hearts. Husbands, love your wives the way Christ loved us and gave Himself for us, and let me tell you something, blokes, that is not always going to be convenient.

It was not convenient for Jesus to die on the cross. It was painful; it was horrible; it was sad; He was under pressure, and yet He did it anyway. That is what your love for your wife should look like. That is what your leadership in your family should look like, and that’s so powerful. Let me ask you a question, men, today, tomorrow, how can you adopt a servant-leadership role in your marriage?

Wives Love Your Husbands

Well, ok then, what about the girls? What’s God’s wisdom for them? Right now we’re going to look at what, on the surface, might appear to be an out-dated discussion of a wife’s role. But as we unpack that, as we look at that, as we see God’s heart and intent, I think we’ll discover in there somewhere, buried below our cultural misconceptions, a blessing from God that might well surprise us all. Before the break, we were talking about the role of husbands as leaders in a marriage, and we saw how God’s plan is not for the husband to be the lord of the manor, served on hand and foot by his dutiful wife. That’s not what it says. It says (Ephesians 5:25):

Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave Himself for her.

That is so contrary to the template that so many of us have in our heads about what God says on the husband-wife relationship thing, but what does God say to the woman? Because, to me, this is culturally the toughest of all. In the very same passage where it talks about men loving their wives the way Christ loved the church and gave Himself for her, it says this about women. Ephesians 5:21-24:

Be subject to one another, out of reverence for Christ. Wives, to your husbands as you are to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife, just as Christ is the Head of the church. In everything, be subject to your husband.

And immediately, it then goes on to say in verse 25:

Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave Himself for her.

Now we load this passage with cultural baggage, and maybe we want to run a million miles from the notion that the husband is the head of the wife. Maybe you want to throw rocks at that and say, “You have got to be kidding me! That’s two thousand years old; that’s not relevant today; just go away.”

I have to tell you: I used to run a million miles from this passage too because I thought that it was so yesteryear – so anachronistic; because I too loaded it with this cultural baggage that says, “Well if that’s the case, then the husband gets to be the lord of the manor; he gets to ride roughshod over his wife; he gets to do all sorts of horrible things because he’s the boss.”

I don’t believe that’s what it says, so let’s unpack that today and see what the reality is of what God is actually saying. This passage that we just read starts off this way. It says, “Be subject to one another”. Can I tell you something? Even though I am the head of our household, I am also subject to my wife because the Bible tells me that I am. We make decisions jointly as equals.

Some years ago we sold our house, and an offer came in with a signed contract with a 10% deposit. It was a good offer; it wasn’t exactly what we wanted it to be … It’s often the way, isn’t it, when you sell your house; you don’t get all that you want? But it came to the point where Jackie and I had to sit down and have the discussion: Do we accept the offer, or don’t we accept the offer? And it’s interesting how men and women, certainly Jackie and I, look at things from quite different perspectives.

Jackie as a woman looks at it from more of an emotional perspective. For her it’s all linked together. It’s an emotional decision for her to let go of our house, which had been our home. We’d been so blessed there in that home over the previous five or six years. We’d put a lot of effort into making it look nice and feel comfortable, and so … well … ‘Is this a fair price? I’m emotionally attached to this house. I know we’re moving, but’ – that’s the way she looked at it.

Berni, on the other hand, is a man. I look at it totally dispassionately. I look at it logically. I go, “Well, you know, irrespective of what we think it might’ve been worth, this is a pretty good offer and we haven’t had any others. The difference between what we would’ve liked and what we’ve been offered isn’t that much, and in the scheme of things, it doesn’t matter to us. We’ve bought the other house anyway, so the move is on. This, in the context of all of that, is a pretty good deal.”

Two very different perspectives: typical male/female roles of emotional and logical. And do you know something? I think you need both of those in a marriage-relationship to make the whole thing work. So how did we make the decision? Well, we worked through; we talked through; I guess I brought some leadership to the discussion through my logic; she saw it this way, I saw it that way … Then we jointly made the decision. We jointly decided yes, we would accept the offer.

But what if we hadn’t agreed? What if Jackie had said no, and I had said yes? How would we have handled it then? The answer is Biblically. This is how our relationship works. This is how we live out this passage in Ephesians 5 about submitting to one another, and yet the husband being the leader by being the servant. If we hadn’t agreed, then Jackie would have left the decision to me.

Now you may not agree with that, but that’s what we would have done. So, how would I have decided? Well, I would have weighed up these two things: The risks and benefits of selling or not selling on the one hand, and the impact of going against my wife’s will on the other. And to tell you the truth, if Jackie had said no, I do not think we should sell for this price, I would have said that we’re not selling; because I really believe that she needed to be happy with the decision, and it was more important that we were both of the one mind than necessarily me getting it right the way I saw it.

That’s my role as the leader, and that’s what I would have done. In exercising that role, God’s Word tells me that I am subject to my wife. I have to take her into account. I have to love her, so that we do things jointly and ultimately if (as the leader) I have a decision to make, I still have to take her into account in making the right decision. It’s up to each husband and wife to figure out how this works in their marriage. For us, we jointly take the decisions. We’re involved; we discuss; and you know, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, we agree, but every now and then we don’t. I decide, and Jackie accepts the decision. It’s resolved; we forget about it; we move on …

We just have to figure out how to apply God’s wisdom here and now in our marriages. It may be you’re afraid to do it God’s way, but can I encourage you to ditch this cultural baggage, this nonsense about male domination that we read into these words, because men have been doing that to women for centuries and millennia. Just ditch it! That’s not what God is talking about. And then pick up the Bible (Ephesians 5:22-25), and start trying to figure out: How do we do this God’s way? How do we put God first in our marriages? After all, God is the God who made us. God is the God who invented marriage. He knows how it works … and do you know something? His way always works.