FEB. 1 - Solid Ground: A Word for Couples

For this message we looked at several key Bible passages - you can find them here:

GENESIS 2:18-24 teaches us that God "wired" us for companionship and intimacy.

ECCLESIASTES 4:9-12 speaks of the powerful of the "threefold cord" - an image sometimes used to describe the sacred bond of marriage that includes the power and presence of the Lord.

1 CORINTHIANS 7:8-9 reminds us of the sacred calling of singlehood that in no way makes us less than whole.

EPHESIANS 5:21-33 challenges both husbands and wives to self-giving servanthood and submission to spouse - a real challenge for both men and women in our self-centered culture.

MALACHI 2:14-16 counsels faithfulness in marriage - and reveals God's hatred for divorce and what it does to us. Note that God does not hate divorced persons - and the church is called to repent of being judgmental to those who have experienced the brokenness of divorce.


You can go to this site - "New Marriage and Divorce Statistics" - for more revealing analysis of our culture's trends from researcher George Barna.


As part of the message on Feb. 1, I commended the work of Les & Leslie Parrott. They were also featured on the video in Financial Peace University for session two. Incidentally - I made a spelling error at the 9 a.m. service - their last name is spelled just a bit differently from the bird called "parrot." You can find more about their resources at the REAL RELATIONSHIPS web site.

When I heard the Parrotts speak last year, they shared a simple communication exercise that sounds very valuable - it is called "Sharing Withholds" - referring to information that we tend to keep inside and "withhold" from our spouse. Here Les Parrott comments on this exercise:

This is an exercise we taught literally to thousands of couples around the country and we call it "sharing withhold." It comes from our book Saving Your Marriage Before it Starts. It takes about ten minutes out of a couple's week. They just simply share three things that they haven't talked about that have registered in their mind. We suggest two of them be positive and one of them negative. And the response from your partner is limited to two words, and the two words are just "thank you". In other words, you're not going to ask them questions or grill them on anything or explain anything. You're just going to say "thank you" for sharing that information and leave it in a nutshell.

For the next thirty minutes, we say that the negative information is off limits, we can't talk about that. But every day in every marriage there's information that we bury, that we don't talk about. If it's negative information that we bury, it has a high rate of resurrection. When it pops up to the surface, it's uglier than when we first buried it and we go "where did that come from?" So this exercise is designed to kind of clear the mine fields from your marriage and create a real clean and level playing field.


A final reminder - some of you saw the movie FIREPROOF which was out in theatres recently. The video has been released, and there are also efforts to share the marriage communication strategies highlighted in the movie. You can read more at this site - FIREPROOF MY MARRIAGE.