marriage part 1 — Westlake Bible Fellowship

0:00 Introduction and personal reflection

Are we good, brother? Good? Alright. Well, it's great to see you and this is one of my favorite places in The United States to travel, so I'm really happy to be here. Unfortunately, my wife could not be here.

My wife is caring for her father who lives with us. And then we have in the house still a 21 year old, a 17 year old, and a 12 year old. The hardest, most labor intensive work is a 12 year old actually. And so she's talking about, get this, are you ready? Daddy, why am I so moody?

So we got a journey to go. All right. My wife and I have been married for thirty eight years going on thirty nine. And I have one, only one regret. I said that to her one day.

She wanted to pull out the knives, and I said, no, we'll put the knives back into their placeholders. I said, my only regret is that I would have married you when you were younger but it was illegal in that state. And she said, I will allow that. I said, thank you, thank you. Alright, so what we're going to do in this hour is we're going to talk about some of the challenges that you face as you are getting along in age and in marital years usually.

But in order to do that, I'd like to just review a little bit about some of the basics. And so this hour will be stretched you to the limit because we have a bit of material to talk about. If you're wondering, it's exactly 23 slides, okay? Now, in order to do this effectively, I will probably ask you a question or two along the way and you should feel free to answer. And if you don't say anything, I'll just keep talking, okay?

We'll just do it like that. All right? Now if you would pardon me for one more second, I'd like to personally ask the Lord for his blessing. Dear Father, we thank you for our time. We'd like to ask you to bless the discussion that has to center around the invention that is yours and it is marriage.

And we pray that you would refine our thinking and help us in this journey that we would have the mind of God. In Jesus' name, amen. Alright. What I want to do is just take you back here. Are you ready for this one?

Okay. Now how many of know where that quote comes from? Come on, all you young people know. Princess Bride, right. Okay you ready?

I'll do it for you. Okay here we go. Do you remember the scene? Okay. Knowledge is what brings us together today.

How was that? Very good, very good. What's that? I know. Alright, let's go to some key concepts and this is gonna be the review section.

So for you it may be, oh I've heard that before Steve, but just hang in there. Think I it would be good just to go back over some of the things that we all know. Now part of it, I'll read the scriptures. Part of it, I will just explain the scriptures. But if you remember, in Genesis chapter one and two, God created the heavens and the earth and all that is in there.

This is not a course or a class to debate what that actually means. We're just gonna take it at face value because I think that's the appropriate way to take it. But what you need to notice is that when God made everything, he used this word good approximately five times, right? And then he gets to this verse here in chapter two and he says there's one thing that is not good. Now, what you need to know about God in terms of who he is is that it says in the bible that God is good and that he gives good gifts.

So there's a line that many would say, God is good all the time and all the time God is good. And you actually can extract that from the bible. You can see that principle. But this comes out in the way God made everything. But yet when he makes man and...

Or when he makes man, he says, you know, it's not a good idea for man to be alone. Now if you're the creator and you know what's right and wrong and good or bad, and you say this thing is good but this thing is bad, pretty much you have the expert and you don't need to appeal the decision or the assessment. So what he does is he makes a helper, that's the originally translated word in most translations and if you have your bibles, you would see it in Genesis chapter two. And I'll read it to you so you'll see the context here. So Genesis chapter two, then God said, it is not good for man to be alone.

I will make a helper suitable for him. Now if you look in the Hebrew, I've been taking some Hebrew classes and they're kinda fascinating to me and I'm learning a little bit about language and different processes. But this word here has the idea of rescue. Implies one who is lacking needs help. Now that's a very important concept.

When we talk about men and women, we have to understand that there is not, you know, it's not so much that one is superior and one is inferior. It's not that at all. Nor is it that one is inferior or one is superior. It's none of this dynamic there. It's that you need a right hand and a left hand.

You get that? Now think about it. Let's say you had two right hands. How well can you do anything? You can't, can you?

You actually need complementary hands that match opposing digits so that you can actually hold things. Right? If you had two hands, the fingers only bend the same way. You need you need fingers that have been in the opposite direction, don't you? That's what I think is the idea in the Hebrew here is the complementary nature of man and woman.

And God... That was God's solution to a thing that was not good. Now, as we get along in marital life, sometimes we forget that that is a basic principle of the creative mind of God above. And I don't think we should forget that. I think we should remember that.

Instead of letting all the other things that can irritate us along the way drive us apart. Alright, so you see where I'm going with that? Now, it says of comparable quality. That's an interesting word. Think of it this way.

Don't know, are you anybody a dog lover? Maybe a cat lover? Yeah, right there. Dogs? Cats?

There you go. There you go. I like dogs. Alright? I tolerate cats, I'm sorry.

But my cats are great mousers so they have gone up in the food chain, okay. Now, the dogs, I just love dogs, know, and I always have. But I've never had a real conversation with my dog. Have you? Let me tell you something.

If you have a real conversation with your dog, you should definitely see me afterwards. You know what I'm saying? Something's not good there at Denmark. Okay? And so what you need to know is that we can have a lot of substitutes that we can be fond of, that we can sort of care for, and they meet certain needs and yet they're not a human being.

And what you find is that you cannot substitute another part of creation for a human being as companion. You say, well, every time we get together we fight. Well, we can address that but literally there is no one else than the planet that is meant to be of that comparative value to you. You don't say to your dog, sir, think we should have a... Or you think we should go to the store today?

The dog's gonna go... And then you say, what do you think? You wanna watch football? The dog's gonna go... Thing.

How do you know? Right? And so what God said is I'm gonna make woman, man, woman so that they have comparative elements that match like left hand, right hand so that it'll address the issue. So it's really important. You can, what we do when we get older is we substitute things.

We substitute our hobbies. We substitute maybe our work. We'll substitute our things that we enjoy doing. And we treat that as a satisfactory substitute for the companion hip of a spouse. And that happens because, you know, life changes.

But I would like to take you back to the original decision making of the original mastermind who said, you know, that's not what I had in mind. I had in mind that it would be man and woman. Alright, let's move on. I have lots of ground to cover and I don't know what happened. Oh yeah.

I'm supposed to hit this button here. There we go. Alright, turn over. If you got your scriptures there, I'll just read it to you. This is God.

9:17 The principle of leaving and cleaving

Now you need to know a couple things. Number one, you need to understand the word leave. It means that we relinquish, right? So we relinquish something. Now when you're a young married couple, what you have to do is you have to relinquish things both physically, spiritually because you're starting a new spiritual entity that's responsible to God.

But you also have to leave emotionally. And I remember when we were younger and married that neither one of us had left our parents emotionally. We depended upon them for their approval, for a sense of their identity, and we borrowed that and we brought that into the marriage. And what we found out is that that's not going to suffice. We have to develop our own sense of identity.

Our own sense of who we are and what we're going to be about. Our own goals of this is what our family will be. And so it's very important to understand that there is several parts to the human makeup that requires a leaving or relinquishing. But this word cleave is huge. The word cleave is the word that's used to describe so tightly adhered that if you try to separate it, it crumbles in your hands.

That's how tightly it's adhered. Now my favorite illustration is from a piece of furniture and we like furniture and we like real wood but most pieces of furniture have the shelves that are press wood. And press wood means that we take all the sawdust in the world and we collect it and we mix it with glue and then we put it in this press that makes it flat. Then we dry it and then you stick it into the shelves and we charge you a gazillion dollars for that, right? Everybody knows that pain, correct?

Now, if you take that little press wood out and you say, well, I'm gonna like I'm gonna like I'm gonna split it in two. When the moment you start to split that stuff is the moment it crumbles. That's the kind of idea in the Hebrew. It means you're that closely adhered, that tightly bonded so that any separation would mean destruction to the whole thing. Now some of us in our lives have experienced that through of course divorce.

And how it really hurts not just the two people involved, but it also has caused disruption of the family. And if you've been through that, I haven't, but my family has. Everybody is shell shocked and injured and very well destroyed. Right? So if that's the extreme, what we wanna understand that God is saying, I have made this to be permanent and I want you to know that any attempt to sever it would cause disintegration.

Now as we get older, and this is a phenomenon in our American culture, what we're finding is that people are getting divorced after twenty or twenty five years of marriage. Even Christians are doing that and part of it is there is attraction to somewhere else or a sense of loss of what we're about And so when they try to sever the marriage, it just crumbles in their hands and there's really nothing good about it. It's painful for everyone. This is because God designed it not to be that way. Alright, Let's move on.

Now, what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna take you to chapter three, and I'm gonna just talk about some general things, and I'm gonna skip a bunch of slides because we don't have time to do them. But in chapter three of Genesis, we had this incident where this perfect marriage where man had the, we'll say right hand and left hand were matched together. See how that works? It's an object illustration for you. And they're interlocking.

It says actually in that verse I didn't read, they're both naked and not ashamed. At first sight you go, oh naked, yeah, there's that stuff again. But really what he means is they were fully transparent with one another both spiritually, emotionally and physically and there was not a shred of of fear before each other. Wouldn't you like a marriage like that? That there's no fear, right?

There's no hesitation, there's no sort of angst about it. Well, was the first perfect marriage and God presided over the wedding and actually they got along fairly well until Genesis chapter three when we have the foil, the tempter come into the play. And in this drama of what's happening, this person is called Satan. Satan was in the bible, a previous fallen angel named Lucifer tried to take over the throne of God. We'll see that in our third message today, and as a result he was ejected out of heaven and tried to then dominate this planet.

That's the story of the bible. How did he do that? Well, that's Genesis chapter three, and what he does is he first of all lies to Eve about God. Introduces deceit. Now, it plays out like this.

God say if you... Did God really... Eve, God say about eating of the tree that's in the middle of the garden? Did he really say that you'll die if you eat any of the fruit, any of the trees? He expanded God's statement to be more exhaustive than what God really said.

Eve corrected it, but sort of the way that actually it's in the tenses. That what she said was sort of half agreeing with him. And then he gives a bold face line. You won't surely die. Now when you read the Hebrew, that phrase you won't surely die, that's a very strong statement.

It's like a double double negative. He says, God said you really really really will die. Satan says the opposite. You really really really won't die. Same construction just reversed with the word, with the negative.

Right? And so he just bold faced lied. Now listen how he lies about God. God knows in the day you eat of it, will be like God knowing good and evil. Alright?

Now what does that imply to you? It implies that God is holding something out on you, sister Eve. And that God doesn't want you to have everything that he is because he's not good. Hear it? Hear the lie.

That's the lie. It's an impugning of one's character. Now why do I tell you this? Because at that moment, Eve then believes that lie. She then takes of the fruit and eats it, eat of this fruit of this particular tree she wasn't supposed to.

And then it says, and she gives to her husband preposition with in the original Hebrew means with as in I'm this close, like these two, this close. Okay? Not like he was here and then he or she was here and 20 miles away he was over there. Not that kind of with, but with in proximity, immediate presence. Which means that Adam who was responsible to protect the garden and keep it, he was passive and said nothing to correct the error of the moment even though he knew it.

See that was Adam's part. Know, he just became passive. Now, going back to the idea of changing the character, lying about the character. When we entered into that sort of flow of logic and rationale and disobeyed God, what did we introduce into our human race? Sin is correct, but I would suggest to you that we are probably introducing also in line with that this idea of doubt.

Right? Guess really what happened, he said you need to believe God and Adam chose not to believe God. Eve was deceived not to believe God. So what was happening there was doubt, lack of faith or distrust impugned God's character. Now if you notice, there's a lot of that in marriages.

Even when I was young and married, now when I'm older and married, I realize I'm still struggling with this idea of distrust. It comes out this way. Husband thought wife would know this and didn't do that. So I go to my wife and I say, why didn't you do that? She goes, I didn't know.

Does this not resonate with anybody? I didn't know. And at that moment, I have accused her of knowing something that she voluntarily chose not to remember and therefore made my life harder. You see that? See that?

It's all in the bible isn't it? And that's exactly what happens. And we play that drama of distrust mistrust over and over and over. And what happens is if in a marriage if you actually don't recognize that over decades it swells and gets bigger and bigger. And so finally twenty five years later you go, this isn't working.

That's what I hear. It's not working. What's not working? Well you've got a whole barn full of these mistrust distrust issues that you actually never really sorted out and you don't even know where they came from. Well this is where it came from.

That's why I wanna talk about it because when you get into the latter years of marriage you almost have to say, hey, we gotta go back at the beginning and we gotta kinda recognize how we got to where we are and maybe we should start these years where it's just you and I now by reconstructing what we didn't do the first time and that's a big point, right? Alright, let's move on. Okay, so God's, if you have your bibles, if you could read it with me. I quoted to you the phrase God knows verse five, the day you eat of it your eyes will be open, you'll be like God knowing good and evil. Now if I can get you to see this, when it says, I'm trying to find my slide because I'm now going to jump ahead.

Time is against me. So hang on. There it is. Boom. Alright.

19:30 Understanding lust and pride

That was a delight, if I will, to the soul. And then it was self, make one wise. Now you see on how I've listed those here for you. Now I'm doing this because we're gonna talk about body, soul, and spirit in a second as it relates to what we are, what we go through when we're older years in our marriage, but I need you to see that what lust is is taking a normal desire, a normal desire for food. I walked in today and I smelled the prime rib and let me tell you I was immediately hungry and could eat half my arm.

Right? Okay? So what lust is, is taking a normal desire and magnifying it to a level to an extent that God never meant to be satisfied within the boundaries he's created. Okay. Now think about that.

I like dark chocolate. I noticed you have dark chocolate here. I stole one of this from you earlier. I want you to know. I'm not returning it.

Okay. I love it, right? But if all I eat is dark chocolate, what am I doing? I am taking a normal taste and I'm letting it sort of rule me. I'm making it become such a dominant feature of who I am as a human being that it can never be satisfied.

That's the idea of lust. And when that happens, it affects your whole body, soul and spirit. The tripartite makeup of mankind. So you'll notice as you go through years of marriage, there are things that are lustful for a person. Whether it be another person's body or the possessions or the things that are around you.

The things that you can buy like boats and houses or it'll just show up in pride. Right? Now, you know, make one wise. Now we're gonna talk about pride specifically this evening in our last session because I find it to be the great killer of all things. But I need you to see that this stuff is what is embedded in you as a fallen person in the human race.

So if you wonder, well, how come we have trouble getting along? How come we've just tolerated each other for these decades? How come it still is hard? Well, it's because you're you're starting, you, us, we're starting with damaged goods. And the damaged goods that we have, I know that's a hard thing to to say and to receive, but the truth is it's true.

Yet, what God does in his book, is he says, you know all that damage that you've received? You can have it reversed. Did you hear that? It can be changed. Now how can that happen?

Well, that can happen through a series of events which God so orchestrated when it came to the Lord Jesus Christ. And what he did is he had Christ step into humanity. Christ is God, right? But God, it says in the bible, God is spirit. So how do you help your created humanity, a lower order of creation when you're not of the same order?

Well you gotta enter into it. And so that's what Jesus, that's what Christ did as the person Jesus. And he adopted, he took on flesh and bone so that he would identify with the human race. That's kind of brilliant if you ask me. And then, yet as a human being, he didn't have the nature, the rebellious nature that Adam and Eve had because he didn't make them that way and he doesn't have that in him.

It says so in the bible. God is not tempted. But yet he became human like without all that sinful stuff. Why did he do that? Because if you're gonna fix somebody over here who's damaged goods, you can't be damaged yourself.

Right? Do you ever try to make something clean when your hands are filthy from working on the car? Everything that you, all that grease on your fingers goes on that beautiful white table cloth. Right? It doesn't work.

And so, so you have to be perfect in morality, in ethics, in spirituality, in all dimensions in order to help the one that's a damaged goods, the human race. And so it becomes human in that way so that he might do something. Now here's what he did. This is the most amazing thing that the world will ever know. You can't undo what Adam and Eve done and by inheritance what we do.

We can see ourselves blaming, excuse me, blaming each other and accusing each other and mistrust and all. We can see ourselves do that. You can't undo what's been done. But you can pay the penalty for what's been done, Right? Think about it.

Court of law, right? Let me see if I can tell you the story and make the point. There was a seminary student in California who took up a bus route in order to make some money and pay expenses. And out in his route, a gang got on the bus and they didn't pay the fare. And the next stop, the police officer got on the route and he made...

The bus driver told the officer what had happened and the officer made them all pay. And that sounds fantastic until the very next stop the officer got off the bus and the young bus driver woke up in a pool of his own blood about four hours later. Well, they rounded up all the witnesses and all the people and on the day of court there was a bunch of angry young gang members and this young seminary student and it was an open and shut case. They were guilty of assault and battery and even potentially attempted murder. And the judge is up there and he's about ready to sentence him.

And the young seminary student raises his hand and he says, your honor, may I may I address the court? The judge grants him permission and he says, your honor, today the defendants are easily declared guilty. Or excuse me, the accused are easily declared guilty. And you have sentenced them to jail time. I would like to take their place in jail and take all of their time that they would serve and I would serve it myself.

Well, the story is that the judge didn't know whether to spit or wind his watch and he said, this has never been done before. And the seminary student said, actually it has. It was about two thousand years ago this man entered the human race and took a penalty of death that was really ours, all of ours, And he served our time if you will. And when he did that he allowed us to go free. Now that's what Christ did in an effort to change all of the difficulties that we have in marriage because of our sinful condition.

And when Christ did that, he invites each one to put their faith in that work of Jesus Christ and that alone without anything added and not anything subtracted. And God then says, guess what? When you do that, I inoculate you. I immunize you with my spiritual DNA. And when that happens now within your own spiritual dynamic, you actually have the nature of God.

Not God, not... You're not God, but you have the nature of God given to you in your own new spiritual DNA so that now you do not have to live like that condition in Genesis chapters two and three. You don't have to be that way. You don't have to act selfish. You don't have to to accuse Eve of being the problem and blaming God for things which is what Adam did.

You don't have to live according to this doubt mistrust dynamic. You don't have to live under the curse. And you actually can be changed and transformed instantaneously and immediately by recognizing and accepting that Christ took that penalty like that seminary student did for those gang members that day, now two thousand years ago. And when that happens, when that occurs, the bible says you're a new creation. Old things are passed away.

Hear that? Old things are passed away. I don't know about you, but I'm tired of losing my temper, aren't you? I don't know about you, but I'm tired of being so stinking self centered. Aren't you?

I mean these are many of the problems that I've created in my own marriage. My loss of temper, my wrath, my self centeredness, my pride. That awful beast. Well the bible says that the shackles of sin can be broken. So the reason why I have to talk about the basics is because if I don't explain this to you, nothing else will make sense to you.

Nothing else will resonate with you. You've got to know where you come from. You've got to know what God has done. And you've got to know where you can be if any of this is going to benefit you. Otherwise, we're just gonna have a nice little chat.

We'll have really good food and we'll go home. But I'm not after that. I'm after you to see that the transaction that God has put in play for you is a gift. And it is a good gift. You can't bargain for it.

You can't pay for it. You can't do it. You just receive it. That's what you do with a gift. Right?

So if you can understand that, I will be referring back to this fall thing repetitively through our discussion. Alright. Whew. That was a lot for the opening segment, wasn't it? Now, I need you to understand something here, okay?

30:29 The tripartite makeup of mankind

Now if you are of a theological bent, you will say to me, oh Steve, in the bible, these two are kind of combined. Yes. But this one is clear and this one is clear that they are three distinct. Three different Greek words. Now, think about it.

This makes sense. We all can see the body, right? Some of our bodies look better than others. Some of our bodies look worse than we used to be. Some of it look better than we used to be.

But we got a body, okay? And so you can see that there. My kids were saying, dad, we don't wanna get the price look. So you know, I'm kind of arrogant. I go, you mean like this?

They go not like that one. And they showed me a picture of my dad. And that from here to here we both pooched out. And he said, dad, that's what's happening to you. We don't want that.

That's why we work out. Well, really understood the body concept, okay? Alright, now what about the spirit? Well, the spirit in the bible is this element of your, you know, we say spirituality. Sometimes we mean emotion, but spirituality.

What that really is is how God can connect with you because it says God is spirit and so he puts within you a sense of intangible characteristic of that incorporates your personality, but really an aptitude for things that are about God. That's how you define it. And then you say, well what's a soul thing? Well the soul thing, if you read it in the bible, is made up of three things. It's mind, will, and emotions.

Alright? Now I have to go over this because we're gonna talk about these three things in the next segment. Now, the reason why we say mind, will and emotions, but think about it, think about it. You got your intellect, don't you? Some of your intellect, I can tell you.

You got a super duper high q, I'm pretty sure. Right? I'm pretty sure, okay. Now, so we got our minds and we're using them right now. We have our wills, right?

Like I will eat prime rib tonight. Okay, we got our desires and what we want. Then we got this thing called emotions, okay? Now notice on the scale, it's really only a small part of the big equation. But today, all we can talk about is how you feel, Right?

How do you feel about that that your mother just passed? You've never noticed that. You got a reporter, some tragic thing happens, they stick the microphone. How do you feel about that? You know what I wanna do?

I'll take the microphone and kinda put it where it hurts. That's how I feel about it, you know? It's all about feelings. And so what happens is we let our feelings mushroom to be the driving force of all things. But in reality, what God intended was that that which was spiritual, his word to Adam and Eve of not to eat of a specific tree, to actually govern what you do with your body, to control your decision, your intellect of what you understand about God, so that you'll take your will and harness your emotions to obey God.

Now, what's this circle here? This one I had. This is all always baffling. It's called conscience. Now, people ask me, what's conscience Steve?

Is that just something that Freud made up? No, it wasn't Freud's idea. It was actually God's idea. And where do you find that in the bible? Romans chapter two.

And it says there that God wrote in you his law. His his way of behavior. Code of ethics. He wrote it on your conscience. And that's why we can have a two year old here and a two year old there who haven't learned to talk yet.

And one takes the toy from the other and the one who lost the toy is screeching mean bloody murder. Why is that? It's unjust. You took what was mine. That's unjust.

It wasn't just because I'm mad at the kid. It's because there was a breach of something that's wrong. A breach of something that's right called wrong. And that conscience is in part of every person's makeup. And what it does is that God uses it to actually condemn us or approve us as if it's an internal compass, a barometer that allows you to sense the ways of God.

And when we violate those ways, he bothers your conscience to draw you to himself so that you can deal with the sin before a holy God and let Christ's blood cleanse away that which you've done wrong. That's what that conscience is for. Now, all of this is important to us because as we get older, sometimes we'll let the emotional component dominate us or our conscience will dominate us. Sometimes our wills will dominate. I'm not gonna do that.

I want an apology. Those are the kinds of things we say And then, or our mind will go haywire and will start to dream up almost paranoia of my kids hating me or my neighbors hating me and we get out of control. See, what we have to do is we have to recognize the tripartite makeup of mankind and go back to the original design. That which is spiritual was meant to control everything else. To have jurisdiction over everything else.

Okay. Whew. Here we are. What about these latter years of marriage? Now I threw that last diagram up to you so you can see that we're gonna talk about spiritual problems, emotional problems, or soul problems, and body problems.

And I'm gonna try to do it in that order as we spend this last few minutes talking about what do we do, this is very practical, about these things as we get into our sixties. I just turned 60. Don't repeat that. My kids have repeated it enough. Alright.

Now I wanna point out a few things to you from God's word. See this? Genesis twenty two one. And it came to pass after these things that God tested Abraham. Okay, now this is a spiritual thing.

God is spirit. He's testing Abraham. How old was Abraham? He was approximately 120 to 130 years of age. No one else, none of us will hit that.

But he died at our age of 175. So if you do the conversion of what percentage this is, today, in today's life expectancy, he'd been about 60. I'm 60. Okay? Now, what was happening in Genesis chapter 22?

God gave him an instruction which made no sense that he was supposed to make his son sacrifice. God has never been a God about human sacrifice. So it made no sense and there was a lot of promises that Isaac was going to be a huge posterity and so God was testing him. What am I trying to say? Some of your greatest trials spiritually happen in the latter years of life.

That's normal. What we like to think according to our American model is we, well our spiritual life will be like our retirement. We got it all collected and now we're just gonna coast to the end. That is not how things go spiritually. In fact, some of the greatest trials of your life as a Christian happen in your latter years.

38:20 Spiritual midlife crisis

So for example, with women, sometimes as the children are older, they're now young adults, they're making decisions for their lives and they're making decisions which you know would be detrimental. And every fiber in you is screaming, don't do that. Right? But you know what else is screaming in the other ear? You failed.

Look at what your kids are doing. Right? So that haunts you, right? Sometimes this idea, have I contributed now? If my children are making those decisions, what what...

I I failed, what contribution can I make? And those fears are very real and we have to go back to the spiritual nature of things to help reset our reality. Men, alright, men your spiritual midlife crisis is this. As you get older, you get to a point where maybe there's this time in your marriage when the wife says, I kinda had enough. Alright?

And I don't mean like you leave your underwear on the floor. I mean like, I had enough of you always having to have the last word. Alright? Please forgive me. I'm not trying to hurt anybody's feelings, but this is, I live this too you know.

And what you realize is that wow. Maybe, maybe I'm still self centered. Maybe I'm still prideful. And what I've witnessed in life is that guys that have been married, Christian guys married twenty, thirty years, They get in their 50s and 60s or so. And God shows them a mirror.

And they look at that mirror and it goes, wow, that is ugly. Looking at the spiritual mirror. And they look at that and they go, that can't be me. God, you must be wrong. Alright?

No. I think I can not only prove it from scripture with the life of Jacob, but more importantly, I went through that. So I'm cruising along in my spiritual life and I'm raising children. I'm teaching them God's word. I'm teaching them God's ways.

I'm very active in all things spiritual. I'm preaching. I'm teaching. I'm I'm doing stuff and and I'm loving it. I don't hate it at all.

I really enjoy it. And then I come along and I notice that my wife and I, we're having some moments of tension. I don't know if anybody has moments of tension but we were. And I asked God, I said God, what in the world is going on here? I mean, isn't it supposed to be, we're supposed to be like getting better and we're just gonna ride into the sunset on our two little ponies and we're just gonna hold hands to the very end and we'll just be all gushy and mushy.

Well, I did not hear an audible voice. Don't get me wrong. But it is as if the Lord said, well if you're gonna ride into the sunset like that, we gotta look in the mirror. And almost, like over a year, I began to see that everything that I thought was conquered was still there. Lust, pride, self.

It's clear as a day. Clear as a bell right in the mirror. Now what happens to some marriages at that level of existence, twenty, thirty years, they actually will see that that mirror will be in the spouse. They look at their spouse and they go, I don't like that. I don't like that.

I don't like that. And you know what that is? That's your mirror. That's your mirror. And you wanna reject it because you think God's wrong.

And you end up rejecting your spouse. That's the spiritual man's mid life crisis. I called my friend up one day after I was thinking this through for a year or so. His name is John Heller. You should have him come.

He's much better than me. He goes, I said, John? He goes, yes Dave. Do you ever feel like you're starting over? Silence for the space of half an hour.

And he says, welcome to the club. And he told me everything that I was thinking and feeling for the last year. And I said, how did you know? He goes, same song, same verse, different pew. I'm living it too.

Wow. That was amazing to me. Now, what I began to do is I began talk, you know, do marriage counseling and they come and we got this problem. And man, I'm telling you, I came across so many couples at my station of life and they're doing the same thing. So that as you get older, you have to face the fact that God's probably gonna show you a mirror, and that mirror isn't necessarily going to be very pretty.

And you have a decision to make, and the decision you have to make is this, God you are right and I am wrong and I can't change myself. I've tried for the last twenty, twenty five years. I thought I was making progress but I haven't. I'm still as arrogant as I used to be. I'm still as prideful as I used to be.

I'm still as mean as I used to be. And you just have to fix me. And that brokenness, that very brokenness is when God can work. I wanna tell you a story of how God showed me this, okay? I'm working in the ER, okay?

I can't remember if I told you this story or I was working in the ER and I was the head guy. I was president of the company and I was director of the ER. So in terms of medicine, I reached my top. I was at the top of the food chain. Running the ER, 36,000 patient visits per year, and I got a call from a nurse.

And she said, doctor Price, I can't find any place to do my last rotation from a nurse practitioner. Do you remember me? I worked with you ten years ago. Can I come and do a month with you? Now I remembered her.

Okay. She's a nice girl, she had big hair, big voice, big opinions, no filter and I did not want her to go through my ER. And she goes, please Doctor. Price I have nowhere else to go. Okay, I'll see you Monday morning.

So for one month this dear soul follows me around. Now ER work is busy and crazy. I don't know if you all saw that real out there on whatever TikTok or something. The ER doctor, he's just describing his, what happened to you? Well, my little three year old was walking around and I tripped over the coffee.

I don't need a living room diagram. Just tell me what you did. Okay? That's ER. And you cut to the chase, right?

And so I'm in there and I'm cutting to the chase and I was definitely curtain. We walked out of there and this is what she said. Doctor. Price, you haven't changed a bit. And her country twang.

And I felt like everybody, all 55 people could hear that that day. You know that was about eight years ago. That still haunts me today. And I remember that voice and I remember what she said and I remember it because it was true. I hadn't changed a bit.

And I got on my hands and knees and I said, God, you saved me from my sin. But somehow, in this journey of the last two to three decades, you have not actually... I've not actually seen myself be kinder, but be meaner. To be, instead of selfless, to be more selfish. And I wonder God my father, is that really true?

And that's when I broke and I said, I can't fix me. You'll have to fix me. And that's when my second journey started and I'm very happy to be in that journey. Alright, emotionally. Alright?

46:30 Emotional crises in later years

Jacob, if you don't know, he had like 12 sons. And at this point in his life, he had like four wives. I don't recommend having four wives, okay? I don't recommend you having four husbands either, okay? It's a mess, alright?

But this is what he did. Out of all those wives, the last wife was his favorite, alright? And he had two sons by the last wife. That was Joseph and Benjamin. Now, the brothers, the other 10 brothers, they hated Joseph.

They wanted him dead. We call that a dysfunctional family. Okay? And so what happened was was that the brothers faked Joseph's death, the half brothers. And then they took this garment, dipped it in like goat's blood, and took it over to dad Jacob and said, hey dad, don't know what happened here, but we're out there in the countryside and we found this garment.

Does it look like your other sons? Because it was. And it was all dipped in blood. And of course, they don't tell him. They just let him conclude.

Oh no, he was ripped apart by wild animals. And he mourns forever. Okay. So it comes to a point, and excuse me, and this is the part of the story. He mourned for his son many days, refused to become...

That's emotion right there. Later on, several years later, they want to take the remaining brother of that last wife to another country and he says, I'm not going let you take him because if you do that, you'll bring my gray hair with sorrow to my grave. That's emotion. What age was he? The first time he was 65 to 70.

Second time, 70 to 75 given the conversion rate with life expectancy. Guess what? Emotional things happen as crises in the latter years of our marriage. What about this? Well, with women I think there's some emotional midlife crisis.

I alluded to it earlier. But I think insecurity. By the way, my wife can't come but we sat down and went all over this. I got straight from, I don't wanna say horse's mouth because she's really beautiful. Okay.

You don't say that. You say like, swan's mouth, okay. Alright. I got it from her. And she said to me, she said, you know, I got my kids raised and everything and some of them are making bad decisions and I just felt like I was back in high school.

I go, what? You were really cute in high school. She goes, not that. When I walked down the hallway at high school, I looked at the line on the tile floor. That's all I saw for four years.

Because I was so insecure. And now I put all my life into my children and raised a family and everything and I don't even know if I have any worth from that. There's nothing to prove from that, which isn't true, that's how she felt. And she was back to her insecurity that I met when I met her. She was going through what men go through in just a different perspective.

We talked about this last night, in We lost friends. Some of our friends our age, they've died. That scared us. We've had to bury three of our four parents. That frightens us because you know why?

We're next. That's why. Right? My dear friend right now is in the hospital in Florida. He's just a few years older from me, and I think he's having a heart attack.

I started thinking, am I having chest pain? Oh, it's just indigestion. Oh, it could be. Right? So, we have this.

Caring for your loved ones. Now we cared for, we still care for my father-in-law. He's 90, her daddy. But we cared for everyone. And I remember those days of bathing my father because he couldn't make it to the restroom in time.

Right? Those are very real things. And we begin to think, and my wife specifically, as she cared for her dying mother, Well, this happened to me. And so we have these fears, these worries, right? Men, you have some, so sorry.

We have women, some guilt over one's new freedom. Well, can do more. Is that okay? And then losing your spouse, that's a big fear for every one of us. Will I grow older the next twenty years without my partner?

Some might say, well that's a good thing, some it's not so good. And then we have diagnoses in later years. As you, if you graph out healthcare, most of the heart attacks and cancer and fibromyalgia, all that happens after 50. How many of you know a person who had a heart attack at age 20? Let me tell you who has heart attacks at age 20.

Cocaine users. I don't think any of you look like you use cocaine, right? That's really what happens, right? So we have these fears, right? Now men, this is what happened to me.

I'm caring for my dad. I'm taking him all over the country to various venues. And he would get up at night and he would go to the restroom at a guest home. Like if we stayed at the Gonzales' home. He would get up at night and go to the restroom.

He'd go to the wrong door and try to open it and go in and get into bed with whoever was in there. Oh my goodness, I was freaking out. He'd get up two, three times a night. Guess who else was getting up with him at two or three times a night? Me.

Alright? And I'll tell you, I was just like, oh no. How long will this be? I don't think I can do it. And you're right, I couldn't.

Right? And so I began to wonder about my own life. Will I be like this? Is there more to it? Did I miss something?

Am I losing my mind, my body, my sex drive? See that, I know I'm on the risk of being so blunt, but that really worries men. Right? Worsome women too. So those are some pretty big emotional issues.

The fear of being alone, and of course, diagnoses of latter years. Now, I'm pointing these out not for the sake of being obnoxious or anything, but trying to help us get to some conclusions. Number one, what can we do about this? Communication. You know, I think you should communicate with God.

52:40 Therapeutic power of prayer and trust

Why you talk with God? I mean he kinda knows already. Right? And so that's extremely therapeutic. But the Bible tells you to be anxious for nothing but in everything.

Don't know why I put that there. Oh, it's singular. But everything. Oh, that's cool. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything.

And it's in the singular form and it means every single little thing. Every individual thing. Okay? By prayer be made known to God and the peace of God which surpasses all understanding will guard your minds and hearts and not Christ Jesus. Mind and heart.

Those two words were part of the soul picture, right? Yes. And and how about this? Casting all your care upon him for he cares for you. There is a therapeutic benefit by giving all of your burdens over to the Lord.

But how about your spouse? You know, this is a proverb. A brother is born for adversity. Now, it's a principle. A person that is your close friend is there for your adversity.

You have adversity. And you know, my wife and I, we started to share our fears. And guess what? We found out that many of them were the same and that we could cry together and we could take them to God together. The same thing with your spouse in this one here.

There's a friend who sits closer than a brother and you know what I found happening is as I shared my fears of my emotional nature to my wife, we began to become closer. It's an amazing phenomenon. I actually made a commitment. I remember making this commitment. I'm going to reinvest in knowing my wife emotionally.

And learning all over again like I started over. Man, the the kinds of discussions and the things that we talked about are like we used to. And so I suggest these things might be helping, helpful. Sometimes developing a common bond, right? Discipline.

A large part of my life is discipling Christians. Helping them grow. Studying the word. Learning how to think. My wife started doing that.

In fact, we started doing it together. We were on a zoom call for a marriage. It was in another country. And she was sitting right there. Man, she's a smart girl.

Oh boy, she's good. I like to listen to her and write it down, right? And so we began to bond over that. How about your grandkids? One of the things we do now is that we can go to our grandkids school and bring them lunch.

And I get my grandchild grandchild thirty minutes uninterrupted, no one else around. And realize when you come to my house for Thanksgiving, it's 40 people. So I like to have them alone. We did this this week. We went over to see Isaac.

You know, it's really cool. You walk in there with Sonic, McDonald's. I don't care. It can be like peanut butter and jelly. And you set that down there.

Every kid goes, oh man, your grandparents brought you McDonald's. And the little grandson's going. That's right. My grandpa. Right?

Some of we're sitting down. We're having a blast. And I'm not kidding. My grandson Isaac, I couldn't get him to stop talking. He's I said, you're like your grandma.

Right? We left that. Jan and I, we're like high fiving in the parking lot. And she said to me, I so love going on a date with our grandson with you like that. I said, so why.

Alright. Alright, let's try to end this emotionally. There's some obstacles, right? Well, we used to focus on survival mode in the family. Remember that, those days?

Gotta get them up. We gotta get them to church. They all gotta look good. They all have to have the same shoe. They have the same color of socks on, you know.

I guess you don't have to do that today. But anyway, the career, right, and the finances, those are always pressures. Now, go back to the basics and get reacquainted and that's why I went through that stuff at the beginning. And what is that stuff? Well, it says that husbands can love your wives like Christ loved the church.

Let the wife respect her husband, teaching the young women to love their husbands. Listen, listen, you can go back to the basics and reinvest in them, and you will find that the emotional side of you will follow. I like to say this. I like to appreciate her contribution. This comes actually from the passage in first Corinthians 12 about spiritual gifts where we are composed...

We're like a body composed of many parts and God told... Figured out which part should do what, but the ones who have lesser value get greater honor and the ones who seem to have greater value get lesser honor. And so I began to appreciate her and how she thinks and how she goes. She's got the gift of mercy. And you know, before I left town, you know what she was doing last night?

Making cookies. Now I love it when she makes cookies. Because she always has cost overruns. And I have to eat them. There's nothing better than eating hot chocolate chip cookies with pecans right out of the oven.

Why was she doing that? Because there was a lady from our church who was packing today and our kids were gonna go help them and she, in a merciful way, wanted to make that girl something so she would have to express our love and our thanks for being in our church. I love it when she feels like that. I gotta eat all her mistakes. That's fantastic.

But I appreciate that about her. I really appreciate that nature of hers. Okay. Let's do the last one here physically. Alright, you have to say, are your bodies getting older?

How many think your bodies are getting older? Yeah, there you go. There you go. Alright. Hebrews eleven eleven, Sarah received strength to conceive.

She was past age. Alright. Will you agree with me that there are hormonal changes as you age? Need I say the word menopause? Some of you right now going, I'm having hot flash.

My wife was sitting in the chair last night. It's stinking. It's perfect temperature in the house. She's going, Steve turn on the ceiling fan and open it back. It's 32 degrees outside.

Alright. I mean just admit, it's part of it, right? Men, your testosterone levels, I'll get to that in a second. Physical changes of birth, alright, of the body. Ladies, if you've had even one child, you know that things kinda get stretched out and the medical term is in the perineum.

That's such a nicer word than saying, you know, down there. Okay? The perineum. You know what happens down there in the perineum? It gets stretched because this little guy wants to gum through the vaginal canal.

And when that stretching happens, are you ready? You can't hold your urine like you used to. Right? It's called incontinence. Don't you see those commercials?

I mean, I don't like to watch them but I know about it. Everything gets stretched out and so you laugh or you cough and you kinda have a little urine issue, right? I mean, if you didn't know that, you ought to know it now. Okay? So when she says, I gotta go.

You go. I don't care if it's Quik Trip or Phillips. Go. Okay? Alright now, so we got changes.

And there's libido changes, right? I don't know if you know this, but as you get older, sometimes the sexual conquest, well we've done that. And and I'm tired. And you say that to each other and you feel like, oh no, we're gonna die without any sexual joy forever. Now men, they really worry about that, right?

They have hormonal changes. Testosterone, right? So testosterone, so that's, you hear all these commercials. Come get your T level checked and if you need it, we'll give it to you on the spot. Man, you'll be a, you'll be Tarzan.

Also stands for testosterone. And you know what? You may need that, you may not. But face it, it's a fact of life. It happens.

And of course, your physical energy. So people don't understand this, but as you get older, the arteries, the blood vessels that feed your vital organs, they get kinda narrowed with plaque and gunk and stuff like that. It's a medical term, gunk, by the way. And when that happens, you don't get enough blood flow to the end of the organ. Like the heart, you get a heart attack.

Like the brain, you get a stroke. Like your sexual organs and they don't perform like they used to. All right? So it's not unusual to actually experience that. But what are you gonna do about it?

61:27 Addressing sexual drive changes

The principle is this. There are times in which as you get older, the sexual desires of such are there, but you just feel too physically exhausted, right? I mean I literally can put my head on the pillow and be asleep in two point three seconds. My wife hates that about me. I actually enjoy it.

But it also means that our sexual intimacy is probably less, right? So, if we have times where there's this time where you know, there's maybe we're not on the same page sexually, don't moan about it. Take it as an opportunity to seek God about it. And you know what I start to do? I start praying for each of my sons.

Because they can get fouled up by getting into pornography, Getting into to affairs. Getting into platonic relationships. And so I pray for them about, and I use that time in which maybe we, when we were twenty years ago, were way more sexually oriented. Now I'll spend that time. And you know what else I pray about?

I pray that the Lord would move us both to be physically intimate. And I can tell you without a doubt, God has answered those prayers on many occasions. So don't let these physical changes be the death to you. Let them be the stepping stone. Now, of course, if you need a checkup, go get a checkup.

Okay? Maybe you actually are somebody that is tired all the time because you have diabetes. Maybe you're tired all the time because you're hypertensive. Or you're a walking heart attack. Go get a check up.

63:40 Strengthening the body physically

You need supplements? Take some supplements. And most of all, take your meds. I have so many people come in to see me. Oh doctor, I'm not feeling too good.

I think my blood pressure's up. Oh, see you have high blood pressure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when's the last time you took your medicines? Standard answer.

Oh, it was recent. I go, what do you mean by recent? 2021 I think. I said, with all due respect sir, that does not meet the definition of recent. That meets the definition of remote.

Alright? So I wanna end on that note because we're out of time. Oh wow, I'm really out of time. But I wanted to just talk about those three areas with things that affect us all, give some solutions, give some whimsical illustrations, but most of all, say to you this. It's a normal part.

And you two come together and you'd figure it out together. That's really the key. Alright, let's pray and we'll take a break and do whatever we need to do. Father, thank you for our time. We ask for your blessing.

We ask for you to help us in this part of our lives. In Jesus name, amen.

marriage part 1 — Genesis 1-3

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marriage part 1 — Genesis 1-3

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