Gary L. Thomas's Blog, page 58

Making Your Spouse’s Dreams Come True

Family life often calls us to deny ourselves, to put others’ needs above our own.

If we cherish our spouse, however, we’ll work hard to make the denial a season instead of a lifelong sacrifice.

When Donnie and Jaclyn lived in Nashville, they had so little money they depended on food stamps. Jaclyn was pursuing a career in photography, which can take a long time to launch, and she started to feel guilty about not contributing more to the family budget. In fact, it was negative revenue—photographic equipment is expensive.

One of her good friends worked as a waitress at a restaurant, and Jaclyn thought maybe she should start doing that as well.

“No, you’re not doing that,” Donnie said, with uncharacteristic force. “Keep pursuing your photography. One day, it’s going to become lucrative. I just know it.”

Donnie explains his thinking: “I grew up hearing women talk about how they gave up their dreams once they got married, and that’s not what I wanted to have happen with Jaclyn. I didn’t care what her dream was, to be honest. If she wanted to be a stay-at-home mom, if she wanted to get a master’s degree, or if she wanted to pursue a career in photography, I was determined to help make it happen.”

This commitment came at great cost to Donnie. He had to work two jobs to make up for the lack of Jaclyn’s income. He did his regular job during the day, ate dinner with the family, then started his second job in the evening.

When Jaclyn finally got her first “bite” at a commercial photography job, she didn’t have the right equipment and was planning to pass it up, but Donnie went out and spent $2,000 on a camera lens so Jaclyn would have the tools she needed.

“And this was when we really didn’t have $20 to buy groceries.”

Today, Jaclyn does have a lucrative photography business. Billboards all over Houston feature some of her work. In fact, she has a lot of other photographers working for her now. “I pay them to do most of the shooting and I do a lot of the editing now.”

Even more than what this sacrificial attitude did for Donnie and Jaclyn’s bank account, however, is what it did for their marriage. Jaclyn feels cherished. She even told me, “Sometimes I feel guilty that we have it so good.” She feels she will be forever in Donnie’s debt for his commitment to make her dream come true.

But what if, unlike Donnie, you didn’t make such a sacrifice on behalf of your spouse, or such a sacrifice wasn’t possible? What if, looking back, your spouse gave up a favored dream to serve your family? Maybe the husband stayed in a job he hated; maybe the wife took partial instead of full employment or passed up a promotion that required travel.

Here’s where the empty nest (or the kids getting older) gives you another chance. When my friends Dennis and Barbara Rainey had a private marriage retreat shortly after they became empty nesters, they planned to spend time discussing what this season of life meant for Barbara and what it meant for Dennis. They never got to Dennis but instead spent three days planning out the implications for Barbara’s new ministry opportunities.

Dennis is a busy man, the “top shepherd” at Family Life Today, a ministry with a budget in the tens of millions. But this man showed his integrity by agreeing to focus all their time on what his wife could do, discussing the support she would need in this new season of life. Dennis doesn’t just talk about marriage and family; he lives it.

What if the two of you took a similar retreat and you focused on the one who “swallowed” their dreams? In some cases, it could be the husband; in others, perhaps it was the wife. Do your new circumstances give you a little more flexibility to revisit that dream, or perhaps to create a new one?

Would you be willing to sacrifice something now—more time off, a little financial security so close to retirement, an easier schedule—to give your spouse a second chance?

In my book Sacred Marriage, I quote a pastor who offers a very practical application of Ephesians 5:25: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her…” This pastor suggests that in order for us to comply with Ephesians 5, we should be able to point to something we have sacrificed on behalf of our wives: a hobby has suffered, our bank account has suffered, or maybe a promotion was delayed. We have to ask ourselves, “Am I loving my wife in such a way that it’s costing me something?”

If the answer is “No,” then we’re not loving our wives as Christ loved the church.

What does it mean, men, at this point in our lives, to sacrifice for our wives? Maybe it means retiring a little sooner so we can travel with them. Maybe it means postponing retirement so that our wives can pursue a different career, with more energy, more resources, and a freer schedule.

And wives, what might you be able to sacrifice for your husband? What hobby or avocation or job did he pass over to serve your family? Is there some way you can give him a second chance?

A cherishing marriage is built on honoring our spouse, and that includes honoring their passions, dreams, and goals. Family life sometimes insists that those dreams and goals get delayed, but is it possible now is the time to pick them back up, dust them off, and see if they can be realized?

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Married for Adversity

“A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.”  (Prov. 17:17)

You’d be miserable indeed if you trained to become a fireman and resented it every time there was a fire. Not that you want there to be a fire, but putting out fires is what you’re trained to do. It’s what you signed up for. You don’t run from the fire—you move toward it.

In the same way, when we get married, we sign up to be there in times of adversity. If it is true that a brother is “born for adversity,” it is doubly true that a husband or wife is “married for adversity” for when I marry my wife, I become her closest friend in addition to being her brother in Christ. We’re thus signing up to be there during our spouses’ worst moments, most trying seasons, and even most irritating personal challenges.

What if we took Proverbs 17:17 seriously and thus considered ourselves “married for adversity?” Rather than resenting adversity, or feeling sorry for ourselves (instead of empathy for our spouse) that we have to deal with adversity, we would see adversity as a call to action, to closeness, to encouragement and support.

Imagine wives facing down social embarrassment with their husbands, but working with him instead of laughing at him: “This is one of the reasons I married him, to help him through this.” Imagine wives suffering a husband’s long bout of unemployment, thinking, “We got married so I could keep supplying the confidence and hope he needs.” Imagine the same attitude if he’s fighting an addiction, depression, or discouragement—a strong woman of faith realizing how dire things are but saying to herself, “I was born for this! I can love my man in the midst of this!”

Imagine husbands married to women who are gravely ill, doubling down on their affection and assurance: “I was born to help my wife get well (or even, sadly, to help her face her death).” What if a man discovers he married a sexually wounded wife who needs special care and understanding and he becomes more concerned about his wife’s healing and health than his own satisfaction? Imagine a husband who is married to a gifted woman who wants to start a business, but whose dad always told her she’d never amount to much. That husband provides the support, encouragement, and confidence she needs to become who God created her to be: “I was born to help my wife achieve her full glory!” Whatever the challenge, imagine Christian husbands taking up this biblical truth and instead of feeling sorry for themselves that they have to deal with adversity, loudly proclaim, “I can do this! With God’s empowering Spirit, I can love this woman! I was born to do this!”

Instead of seeing a weakness or limitation as a point of frustration, Proverbs 17:17 calls us to let adversity define our commitment, call out the best in us, and depend on God’s love working through us.

We live in a broken world where broken realities break our hearts. Knowing this to be so, God created marriage to confront this reality, not to be crushed by it. Marriage doesn’t remove us from the brokenness of the world but it does help us confront it together, and even to overcome it. Proverbs 17:17 is a rallying cry to let marriage be a castle against confusion. Rather than allow the brokenness of this world to cause us to question our marriage, Proverbs 17:17 says brokenness should remind us of why we got married.

The truth is, most of us marry for selfish reasons, but the Bible describes love as being showcased most clearly when we’re called to serve in the face of difficulty. A biblical friend doesn’t love only in wealth, health, social success, and sunny days. A biblical friend loves at all times. So, instead of feeling sorry for ourselves when our spouse hits a dry spell, or when he or she is going through a difficult time, let’s lace up our shoes a little tighter and remind ourselves, “I was born for this, to love my spouse at all times, especially in adversity.”

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Your Boyfriend’s Brain

 

Single women, your boyfriend’s brain is very different than yours. If you try to evaluate him like you’d evaluate a girlfriend or sister, you’re going to fail. You’ll miss cues. The male brain and the female brain diverge immediately upon conception. So, if you want to make a wise marital match, spend a little time getting to understand a bit about the male brain.

Dr. Louann Brizendine studied at UC Berkeley, Yale, and Harvard and is now on the faculty of UCSF Medical Center. She states, “The vast new body of brain science together with the work I’ve done with my male patients has convinced me that through every phase of life, the unique brain structures and hormones of boys and men create a male reality that is fundamentally different from the female one and all too frequently oversimplified and misunderstood.”

Her book, The Male Brain, can help young (or middle-aged) women understand what’s going on in a suitor’s brain.

Let’s look at some highlights to help single women while they are dating. There are also many applications for within marriage.

Some men’s brains are more neurologically inclined toward monogamous behavior than others.

A study of lizards provides a “three types of men” analogy. There are “orange throat” lizards who basically guard a harem of females and mate with all of them. The males with yellow throats are called “sneakers” because they hang around the orange throat’s harem and mate with any of the willing females when the orange throat lizard isn’t looking. The “blue throat” lizards mate with one lizard for life and guard her 24/7.

This activity is partly guided by the vasopression receptor in the male’s brain, which is true in the human brain as well as the lizard’s brain. The longer the receptor, the more likely he is to be a “mate with one for life” kind of guy (the “blue throat”). As Dr. Brizendine puts it, “When it comes to fidelity, the joke among female scientists is that ‘longer is better,’ at least when it comes to the length of the vasopression receptor gene.”

If you’re not a scientist this isn’t something you can observe, but you can observe behavior. If your boyfriend has cheated on others before, it’s more likely he’ll cheat on you. If he left his former girlfriend to cheat with you, the time will almost certainly come when he will leave you to cheat with someone else. You’ve got to let his actions demonstrate the way his brain is wired. If you forgive him once for cheating on you, it’s far more likely you’ll have to become a “serial forgiver” if you want to stay with him. Some guys are just more wired for monogamy than others.

This isn’t to say biology is destiny. When you date a man surrendering to the work of the Holy Work and submitting to the truth of Scripture, he won’t be a powerless victim to his natural urges. But it will be more difficult for an orange throat to act like a blue throat. If you want a faithful mate, look for a “blue throat.”

Sex takes up a bigger part of the male brain and guys are more comfortable than are women lying to get sex.

Dr. Brizendine’s research has found that “Men have two and a half times the brain space devoted to sexual drive in their hypothalamus. Sexual thoughts flicker in the background of a man’s visual cortex all day and night, making him always at the ready for seizing sexual opportunity.”

The ongoing level of interest in sex between a male brain and female brain are widely different. Dr. Brizendine explains, “Women are surprised that the penis can operate on autopilot and even more surprised that men don’t always know when they’re getting an erection. The autopilot penis is part of a man’s daily reality for most of his life, though it happens less as he gets older.”

Further complicating this increased interest, and making it more dangerous, is that deception can be a big part of a guy’s mating strategy. Dr. Brizendine says, “Researchers found that three out of four men said they were willing to lie or ‘modify the truth’ to persuade women to have sex with them…Men exaggerate their wealth, status, and business and social connections.”

I heard a man once speak about the trick of collecting ATM receipts at the bank, which are often left lying around. He said to find one that had a balance of over $20,000 on it. When a young woman asks for your phone number you casually take out the receipt from your wallet, acting as if it’s yours, and write your phone number on it.  You can bet she’ll turn it over. “When it comes to verbal deception, researchers have found that men are biologically more comfortable with it than women.”

Since women tend (not always, but tend) to be looking for a relationship, they may not understand why a guy would blatantly lie to get sex when he’ll inevitably be found out. The reason he’ll lie is because he may want a one-time sexual encounter more than he cares about a long-term relationship, so he’ll jeopardize the long-term for the short term.

If you’re looking for something long-term, be faithful to save sex for marriage. And don’t believe everything you hear. As they say in journalism school, if a guy says his mother loves him, look for a second source.

Distinguish between a guy who is interested in you and a guy who is interested in having sex with you.

One thing that was universal about men and women was that in the first flush of infatuation followed by sexual activity, the relationship becomes literally intoxicating—but because men generally have lower levels of oxytocin, it can hit a male brain with more force. “In one study, men and women said they spent up to 85 percent of their waking moments daydreaming about their lover.”

As soon as the relationship becomes physical, you unleash neurological ingredients that are almost impossible to control. If the release comes during a honeymoon, you’re serving a lifelong love. If it comes before that, you risk becoming obsessed with someone who could make you very miserable as a spouse. You simply cannot properly evaluate someone you are infatuated with and sleeping with at the same time.

Women, this is so important: during this phase you may mistakenly think that he wants you, that he’s enthralled with you and intoxicated by you. In fact, it’s the sexual pursuit and the chemicals that come from such frequent sexual activity (which is also affecting your brain, by the way) that makes him seem so devoted. The frequency of sex will die down—it always does. And when it does, the chemicals making this man interested in you will evaporate because they are largely based on the sexual activity. In a very real sense, a boyfriend will “put up” with the romantic stuff to get to the sex. Once the sex goes, so goes the romance. Put this together with the male propensity to lie and the fact is that he is primed to promise you a lifetime just to buy another hour in bed.

According to Dr. Brizendine, “Researchers have reported that men want an average of fourteen sexual partners in their lifetime, while the women said they wanted an average of one or two.” This discrepancy alone tells you that when women and men are considering “dating” each other, they may have two wildly different agendas.

Men are actually neurologically wired to misbehave more than women.

I am not calling sinful misbehavior a biological necessity; the only perfect person in the history of the world (Jesus) lived with a male brain. The apostle Paul, who also lived with a male brain, claimed to be “flawless” in terms of human righteousness and keeping the law. Maleness thus cannot be an excuse for sin.

But men are biologically less in tune with the consequences of bad behavior. The anterior cingulate cortex is “the “fear-of-punishment” area of the brain and is smaller in men than in women. Furthermore, “testosterone decreases worries about punishment.” The prefrontal cortex, which Dr. Brizendine calls the “CEO” of the brain, focuses on good judgments and “works as an inhibiting system to put the brakes on impulses” and is “larger in women and matures faster in females than in males.”

Put all this together and you are dating a person whose biological ability to process negative consequences arising from bad decisions is less than yours; whose fear of being punished is less than yours; whose processing area of the brain devoted to making good judgements is more limited than yours; and whose inhibitions are naturally less than yours.

Men are always accountable for not controlling their urges.  But an analogy may be helpful here. Your boyfriend is more likely to be able to bench-press 250 pounds than you are, but girlfriends are more likely to make better decisions based on consequences, punishments, and reasonable inhibitions. Now, a woman can lift a lot of weight and end up pressing much more weight than many men ever could. And in the same way, a man can surrender to the work of the Holy Spirit and fill his mind with Scripture and learn to walk with wisdom and discretion. But biologically, a case can be made that it actually is easier for women to “behave.” While dating, be prepared to be the one who wants to think through the possible negative consequences of becoming physical right away, getting married right away, or doing something romantic but foolish.

Older men become more like women neurologically

Because older male brains produce less testosterone and vasopressin, the ratio of estrogen to testosterone increases in the male brain, which means “hormonally the mature male brain is becoming more like the mature female brain.”

A man is gradually growing into a person who will likely be more in tune with your emotions, more capable of making sound judgments, and more relational overall. If you divorce a man in his forties, you’ve likely lived with him through his most difficult relational years and may miss his most in-tuned empathetic years.

This isn’t a promise—again, biology isn’t destiny, and stereotypes tend to be true but aren’t absolutely true.

This explains in part, but of course doesn’t excuse, why older men are often able to date much younger women. It’s not just the money. A younger woman may well be tired of a twenty or thirty-something male brain with its hyper-competitive, territorial, and sexually predatory nature and find it refreshing to have an older man who is more relationally aware. God’s ideal plan is that this man’s new awareness should be a gift to his wife who has been with him for three or four decades. When a man leaves his wife at this stage it’s a double-hit: she suffered while putting up with him in his more insensitive years and then she misses out on what could be his most relational years.

The younger woman’s devotion may be confusing to the original wife. The ex-wife may remember what this man was and thus not understand the new wife’s affection, while the new wife appreciates what he is and not understand the ex-wife’s rejection. This is terribly sad and goes against God’s creational design.

For the married women still reading this, if you value relational connectedness and understand the slow evolution of the male brain, it really is true that things are “getting better all the time.” A gentler, kinder, more relationally aware husband may be on the way.

Christians can become uncomfortable focusing too much on biology, as if it undercuts moral responsibility. I think most of you know I would never do that. Understanding a little science, however, can help single women be more aware of the issues they need to watch out for while dating. Every one of these issues are best addressed by living life the way God calls us to. In this case, modern neuroscience simply proves what we’ve known all along: God’s way is always best.

If you’re new to this blog and want more insight on making a wise marital choice, check The Sacred Search: What if It’s Not About Who You Marry, but Why? Link….

 

 

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Good People

By God’s grace, I’ve been fortunate to meet many of the people who often make news; because some of them happen to be conservative Christians who occasionally take politically unpopular stands, the news isn’t always so kind. Then you meet them face to face and are overwhelmed by the quality of faith and kindness and generosity, not to mention competence and hard work that marks their lives.

One such day I want to remember was February 8 at the Hobby Lobby corporate offices in Oklahoma City. Hobby Lobby is a $4.3 billion business that started with David Green and his young family making wooden frames. It has grown to over 700 stores across the United States, and they are aggressively adding about 60 stores a year.

David Green is a man of deep faith. His father was a pastor and all his siblings became or were married to pastors. David, alone, went into business—and what a business. It was overwhelming to get a personal tour of the campus and see all that is involved in running such a huge enterprise. The warehouse operation comprises over nine million square feet. The conveyor belt system that carries merchandise to trucks going out to the stores fascinated me. Thousands of boxes fly by at about five miles an hour to fill up the trucks. It looks like a science fiction movie to see the mechanized efficiency and speed of that conveyor belt system.

The Greens give huge sums of money away, focusing on five major charities. Rather than giving a little to everyone who asks, they want to make a big difference—and they have. David lives by the example of his mother who, though very poor when David was a child, would figure out the value of a dress given to her by someone and tithe on that value. There’s a sculpture in the hallway given by a Christian institution that likely wouldn’t exist if the Greens hadn’t offered both financial and business advice during a particularly tight time in that ministry’s history.

Hobby Lobby gives every full-time employee a minimum wage of over $15 an hour—whether the employee sweeps the floor or packages frames. They also have an area designed to provide jobs for people with developmental disabilities. And there’s a medical clinic on campus for employees that includes free MRIs. This company is doing so much good, though they have been chastised simply for not wanting to offer abortifacients to their employees as mandated by the Affordable Care Act (they have no issue with birth control, just with abortifacients).

I began the day by speaking to the executive team at Hobby Lobby—a couple hundred people, I’d guess—on Cherish. David Green, the founder, then spent 30 minutes showcasing and cherishing his wife in front of everyone in honor of their 56th anniversary, something he has never done in a business meeting. He didn’t know what I’d be speaking on (my invitation was arranged by someone else). The way he spoke of his wife’s character and faith moved all. It was so lovely to see a couple married over 55 years so in love with each other. Many people marveled at how well my talk on Cherish set up his presentation, something that wasn’t planned by either of us but ended up being very special. It was one of those “God things.”

Steve Green, David’s son, then gave me a tour of the Museum of the Bible holdings, financed by the Green Family and Hobby Lobby. The actual museum will open in Washington, D.C. this November. I got to see original letters from John Wesley, an annotated sermon by Charles Spurgeon, antiquities dating back to the time of Abraham, hundreds of scrolls of the Torah, the Revolution Bible, and so much else. Steve has a dream to show how well the biblical manuscripts have been preserved and to tell the true story of the Bible.

It was fascinating to see Steve hold a copy of the “Bible of the American Revolution,” one of the most scarce Bibles in the world.  After the colonies declared their independence, England wouldn’t allow Bibles to be imported. So the early U.S. Congress voted to spend $10,000 to get Bibles from Holland or Scotland or anywhere they could find them.  This modern notion that the founding fathers who would agree to authorize taxpayer money (because of war expenses the money was never actually spent) to get more Bibles into the country would somehow find governmental celebration or mention of the Bible, including the Ten Commandments, as “unconstitutional,” shows us how little we know our history. The Bible of the American Revolution was printed here in the U.S. to get around the English importation ban.

The museum is going to be phenomenal—a must stop for any believer who finds herself or himself in the nation’s capital.

Hobby Lobby now carries some select Christian books—thus my visit. Steve Green calls Sacred Marriage one of his favorites and, thank God, chose it as one of the books to offer. Christian bookstores are facing difficult times—Hobby Lobby takes books to people who would never go into a Christian bookstore, or to communities that can’t support a Christian bookstore. The day after I visited, I was given the wonderful news that they’d also be carrying Cherish. So if you haven’t gotten a copy yet and there’s a Hobby Lobby nearby, I’d consider it a personal favor if you stopped off to buy a copy there.

Overall, I was struck by the goodness of this company, the amount of philanthropy, the number of families employed by one man’s vision that started out making wooden frames. They provide livable wages and a supportive work environment. It was such an inspiring day.  And the children and grandchildren are amazing young adults of faith with an admirable work ethic. David’s extended family is an even stronger testimony to his legacy than the size of his business.  Since my son is now getting an MBA (a foreign world to me), I gained a new appreciation and perspective for how much good and how much influence a Christ-based, God-honoring business can unleash. That might be part of the reason I was so overwhelmed.

Spending time with the Greens reminded me of spending time with Bubba Cathy, son of the Chick-Fil-A founder and his wife a couple years ago. Bubba’s wife Cindy told me Bubba is the finest Christian man she has ever known—and her face was glowing as she said it. Touring the campus of a ministry Chick-Fil-A has built, I noticed many houses that are given for free to single mothers and foster families. Chick-Fil-A also has a vital marriage ministry. But because they have taken a stand for traditional Christian values as to how marriage should be defined—one man and one woman—they get attacked in spite of all the good they do.

When you meet these people, you see genuine love, caring and generosity surrounded by a hard-work ethic and an abiding faith. Don’t let slanted news reports that focus on one issue let you believe, for a second, that these people are motivated by a sliver of hate. They spread more love, support and charity than every protestor in this country combined.

It is a blessing that I have gotten to meet some of them face to face, and past the time that I take whatever platform I have to tell the truth about the amazing things that happen when people of faith work hard, provide jobs and do good works in the name of Jesus. We need so many businesses in this country—and thank God that some of them are run by people who fear God and love others. It’s so marvelous to see it in action.

As a pastor, I have looked into the wearied and tired faces of the unemployed. I have not thanked business owners nearly enough for what they provide to marriages and families. We salute you and celebrate you. And thank you, Steve Green, for giving me such a fabulously inspiring day that I will long remember.

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Real Repentance

“Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death. 11 See what this godly sorrow has produced in you: what earnestness, what eagerness to clear yourselves, what indignation, what alarm, what longing, what concern, what readiness to see justice done.” 2 Corinthians 7:10-11

If a spouse has been unfaithful; if a spouse is “messing around” with meth and “sort of” promising to never touch it again, what is a faithful spouse supposed to do? How can a husband or wife know if their spouse has entered into real, biblical repentance?

It’s an important question. Counselors tell us that at crisis points in marriage, a spouse may make a few small changes in the right direction only until the sense of crisis passes. Then he/she goes right back to the offending behavior.

This is flat-out abusive. When you know that what you’re doing is frustrating your spouse or even making him/her miserable and you do just enough to keep the platform of living together alive so that you can ultimately continue to make him/her miserable, that’s spiritually sick. It’s malicious. “I’m not going to let you go but I’m also not going to change.” I can’t say this strongly enough: it is a spiritual disorder to treat anyone, much less your spouse, this way. This is about you and God before it is about you and your spouse. If this is you, it is a state of rebellion against God and He is simply using your spouse to help you see what you’ve become.

This is a high call for biblical counselors who must be sophisticated enough to bring an end to the evil (change needs to happen) rather than unwittingly offer a platform for the evil to continue (just try to do a little bit better so your spouse isn’t quite so angry and won’t separate from you).

If I resent my spouse for calling me to become more like Christ then ultimately who I really resent is Christ; it means in my heart of hearts I actually wish He were different, or that He didn’t call me to become like Him.  This attitude needs to be confronted, not coddled.

If a marriage is going to be rebuilt after trust has been repeatedly broken, it has to be rebuilt on real repentance. The offending spouse has to demonstrate their horror at what they’ve done by going full speed in the opposite direction, not by taking a three-degree turn simply to show a tiny bit of “progress.”

This is true for major and minor issues, to a different degree. If my issue is being chronically late and I’m truly repentant, I start showing up early. If the issue is saying hurtful things, it’s not “repentance” to say hurtful things a little less often. Real repentance is stopping abusive language completely and intentionally saying kind, encouraging and praiseworthy things. If the issue is a lack of employment, I don’t settle for a part-time job. I work the part-time job and then spend just as many hours looking for a full-time job.

Real repentance reveals a real heart transformation; our spouse can see the change not just hear us say we intend to change.  

Real repentance continues with the offending spouse owning his/her faults. It’s common for me to see a spouse who has acted deplorably start to resent having the spotlight put on him or her and thus respond by saying, “You know, he/she isn’t perfect either.”

The sarcastic part of me wants to say, “Really? I thought they were sinless. Well, this changes everything. We’ll forget about your deplorable wickedness until we get this person you’re married to to be a little more patient when you mess up.”

If I make a sinless spouse the requirement of repenting then I’m never going to have to repent and the marriage is going to stay miserable. Avoiding changing a grave failing because your spouse has a minor one is an arrogant spiritual trick that some spouses use to avoid having to change. It is a great offense against love.

A third mark of real repentance is that a spouse will welcome, without resentment, increased accountability. If you say you’re not looking at porn or contacting a previous flirtation (or worse), then you shouldn’t have any problem letting your spouse pick up your phone or IPad and scrolling through the messages or history. There is no good reason I would care if my wife looks at every app on my phone. If she finds out I ordered her a surprise birthday present, that’s on her. There is no good reason I should be afraid if she checks out where I’ve been on Amazon or Netflix or surfing the web. Why would I care unless there was something I didn’t want her to see? And why wouldn’t I want her to see it unless I shouldn’t have been doing it to begin with?

Secrecy is hiding and by definition the opposite of intimacy. Some people think they can have their “sin on the side” and their spouse’s intimate affections, but that’s a lie. Repentance is, at root, a choice: “Choose you this day whom you will serve.” You’re calling your spouse to make up his or her mind: do they want to be married, or not? You’re not interested in a quasi-marriage where they are half single and half spouse. You will be all-in with them, responding with grace, forgiveness and generosity, but they have to accept the main course of marriage before they get to enjoy the desserts.

One husband sinned greatly with several extramarital affairs. The wife had full biblical “permission” to leave him; no pastor I know would have objected. But she thought she saw a real change for the first time so they went to a place that specializes in sexual addiction. The counselor set out the conditions: “Your wife is going to write down thirty questions that she has always wanted to ask you. You’re going to be hooked up to a lie detector and a detective is going to monitor every answer. She’s finally going to get all her answers, and you’ll submit to this lie detector test every four months for the next two years. And by the way—one more act of unfaithfulness and she is going to divorce you.”

The husband agreed and through much counseling and confession their marriage was restored. At the end of two years the marriage had become so sweet that the wife told her husband, “You don’t have to take the lie detector tests anymore” but the husband said, “Yes, I do.”

You see, that’s real repentance. That’s a man who realizes the harm he has done and the harm he is capable of doing again so he welcomes accountability. His desire to stop hurting his wife is greater than his desire to “enjoy” the sin that wounds her. He knows the latter desire is not yet nonexistent so he takes concrete steps to guard himself and ultimately protect his wife from further pain.

Contrast this with a husband who had “dabbled” in meth. He and his wife have two small children. When his wife said it wasn’t safe for her and the children to share the same house with a meth addict, but she was willing to work with him if he would enter recovery, he said he was done with meth, recovery wasn’t necessary, and he refused to consider any drug tests. That’s not repentance. Lying and addiction are virtual synonyms. A repentant addict knows this and admits it and sees the tests as necessary steps for healing.

One husband who got it had displayed controlling behavior over his wife until a separation woke him up. I told him he had to be more concerned for his wife’s welfare than he was over her return. “If you truly love her, you shouldn’t want her to return until you know she won’t be hurt by this behavior anymore.” He later told me that sentence hit him like a sledgehammer and he kept repeating it to himself until it was true. He really didn’t want his wife to agree to live together anymore until he was certain there had been a heart change sufficient enough to protect her from his former behavior. Today they are back together and enjoying the best season of their marriage to date. Why? Real repentance ushered in grace, mercy, and healing.

If you are the offending spouse and your spouse is willing to hang with you, you owe him/her real repentance. Not a minor change that keeps them silent for a few more months, but an admission of guilt, a major overhaul of behavior, concrete accountability to maintain the change and a heart transformation so complete that you don’t even want to get back together until you are relatively certain that, under the grace of God, your behavior won’t make your spouse miserable any more. Anything less is not real repentance.

If your spouse is on the treadmill of saying-I’m-sorry-but-never-changing you can say, with some integrity, “Being sorry isn’t about what you say or even about how you feel. Biblically, it’s ultimately about what you do.”

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How to Know if You are Cherishing Your Spouse

There’s a simple definition of cherishing that doesn’t fully encompass the word, but it’s an essential slice of it.

If you cherish someone, you seek to enhance their life.

If you cherish a diamond, you set it in gold and regularly shine it. If you cherish a car, it gets washes and waxes and you think about where to park it.

If you cherish a spouse, you think regularly about how you can enhance your spouse’s life.

It’s the little things. Lisa likes to read the local paper so I try to make sure she never has to go outside to retrieve it. She hates filling up the gas tank so I try to remember before trips to fill it up. She’s not a big fan of driving in general, so if there’s a shopping trip I can take her to on the weekend, I’ll do my best.

Lisa excels at this much more than I do. When I’m tired and my schedule is overwhelming me, Lisa’s service goes on overdrive. She won’t let me do anything. I off-handedly mention I should eat sometime soon and suddenly a meal is in front of me. I reach to pick up the plate afterwards and she’s already there, scooping it away. “I’ll let you get back to work,” she says.

As we’ve pursued a cherishing marriage, we both are more mindful of this. My wife takes a supplement right upon waking up so she needs a bottle of water nearby.  She asked me to bring a bottle up the night before and I knew upon waking she can be a little groggy so I broke the seal, making the bottle easy to open. Later the next morning Lisa came up and hugged me and told me about waking up and finding the bottle already opened. “I live with a very nice man,” she said. It took me all of one and a half seconds but it meant so much to her.

It just becomes fun trying to do this, asking yourself in little ways, “How can I enhance my spouse’s life?” It sets you thinking about them instead of yourself, and it almost becomes a contest as you seek to “outdo one another in showing honor” (Romans 12:10).

This blog post is 99.9% about application, as the idea is so simple and needs little explanation: will you wake up in the morning and ask yourself, “How can I enhance my husband’s/wife’s life today?” If nothing comes to mind, ask your spouse for some ideas.

We’ve promised to cherish our spouse and this is one of the most practical ways to do it—regularly seeking to enhance their life.

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A Cherishing Marriage Isn’t Easy

It has been so exciting for Lisa and me to watch the enthusiastic reception of Cherish. We’re so glad this message is taking root and re-energizing marriages and re-adjusting goals.

One caveat is in order, however: the central message of Sacred Marriage is still true: marriages aren’t easy, but God can use the difficulties and challenges of marriage to shape us and grow us.

If I had my way, people would read Sacred Marriage before they read Cherish, for this reason: a cherishing marriage still isn’t easy. Having a new goal for your marriage and a new determination won’t erase your spouse’s sin (James 3:2—we all stumble in many ways).It won’t solve the inevitable “incompatibility” that must exist, by nature, between any two people. It won’t remove “bad days” that come about from attitudes, lack of sleep, lack of finances, conflicting goals, desires, and needs; stress from child-rearing, home managing, employment, friend and family issues and conflict, or physical disability.

In a Sacred Marriage seminar I once asked an audience of 500 couples (and thus 1,000 people) how many of their marriages had proven to be “easier” than they thought it would be. Just five couples (one percent!) raised their hands, and one of those couples later admitted to me that they had been married just ten days. So the real rate was less than one percent. Which means, almost everyone finds out that marriage is a lot harder than they ever thought it would be. If that’s you, it doesn’t mean you made a poor marital choice. It just means you’re normal. Marriage isn’t a cure for difficulty or even for loneliness; sometimes it increases both.

This isn’t to bring you down, but rather to prepare you so that your pursuit of a cherishing marriage has legs.

When I tell people that since I’ve pursued a cherishing heart toward my wife I feel my heart leap just hearing Lisa wake up, that isn’t what I always felt in the first two decades of our marriage. We have worked long and hard for over thirty years to be at this place. And there are still moments of utter incompatibility that try our patience and resolve. No two people are perfectly matched.

Please don’t become infatuated with a new goal, ride the wave of enthusiasm for a few weeks, and then collapse back into your old patterns because it proved harder to cherish your spouse than you thought.

God still uses the difficulty of marriage to shape us, grow us, and increase our faith. Marriage is still one of the best schools of “spiritual formation” and character formation ever invented. It offers so many opportunities to turn loving our spouse—sacrificially and humbly—into vigorous acts of worship (our spouse may not be thankful but God always notices).

I still believe that God designed marriage to make us holy even more than to make us happy, but I just as earnestly believe that holiness is the key to true happiness. Sin makes me miserable and always brings regret. Holiness ushers in peace, joy, contentment and, best of all, that special sense of intimate communion with God.

A cherishing marriage is the best kind of marriage, but even a cherishing marriage isn’t an easy marriage. If you think it should be, you’ll eventually give up and collapse into old patterns, old attitudes, and old frustrations. Go back and read a few chapters from Sacred Marriage, just as a reminder. Marriage is a rich and marvelous journey, but it isn’t an easy one. It never has been, and never will be.

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Do You Find it Difficult to Let Your Spouse Cherish You?

While writing Cherish, a good friend of mine who does a lot of counseling warned me that many spouses—up to 30%, in fact—actively resist being cherished by their spouse. They sabotage their own happiness because they don’t see themselves as “cherishable” and thus resist any efforts their spouse might make to cherish them.

If you struggle with this, you’ll find plenty of help in Cherish (thanks to my friend), especially as it relates to the spiritual side of letting yourself be cherished.

But since many of you have already read the book, I want to share a related testimony from a woman who found that letting herself be cherished by her husband was one of the most difficult things she had ever done—but also one of the most beneficial, spiritually speaking. She blogs under “The Baby Mama” moniker (https://babymamasblog.wordpress.com/). These are her words:

Letting Yourself be Cherished

It is very, very hard for me to accept anything from my husband.  Whenever he wants to give me anything, or do something for me, I am suspicious, fearful and the walls go up.  I often wonder why anyone would want to give me anything or do anything for me; I feel so unworthy, undeserving.  To be honest, I feel embarrassed whenever someone wants to cherish me in any way.

There are a myriad of reasons as to why I feel this way and it has taken me almost 44 years to understand some of these reasons. I am still busy peeling back the layers, but I am starting to see, to understand.  Besides having parents who loved me (I have no doubt about that), but were relationally dysfunctional, I was also shy, fearful and didn’t like any attention on me.  I preferred to hide away.  It’s not that I didn’t want the attention, or to be cherished – I did.  I just didn’t know what to do with it.  I didn’t know how to respond.  It was much easier to hide away and just pretend it didn’t matter.

The problem is that when you start nurturing a mindset of not being worthy, you believe it and you become it.  It has taken some time to break down the walls that I have been hiding behind my entire life. Slowly but surely God is showing me that He does love me.  Not just in a “I’ve saved you for Heaven” kind of way, but in a “I know who you truly are and I really do love you” way.

Just before I started reading Cherish, I started to realize that God loves people through people.  He needs hands and feet in this world to go out there and love.  And the easiest way for God to love me is through my husband.  I know this is dangerous thinking because my husband is not God and he is fallible and can so easily make mistakes, but I have begun to realize that if me loving my husband can show him a touch of God’s love, then surely my husband loving and cherishing me is God showing His love to me through my husband?

I have been deeply hurt by my family and my background, and my husband’s constant presence in my life has brought such comfort to me.  No matter what anxiety I am facing, or what hurts I am dealing with, he is always there.  He is the constant presence that brings comfort to me all the time.  I can accept that and feel grateful (and even humbled) that God would send me a man whose presence brings me such comfort.

More importantly, though, is realizing that I am worthy to be loved and cherished.  Not from anything I have done, but for who I am in Christ.  Because Jesus loved me enough to die for me, I can accept love from my husband – I have no idea if that makes sense.  But, I can learn to accept God’s little blessings in my life – because very often they come through the hands and feet of my husband.  I can let myself be loved and cherished because I am a person of worth and value.

I am turning 44 this year and I have been a Christian since the age of 13 and this is the first time I am learning what the gospel message is truly about.  God loves me.  All of me – and He cherishes me and blesses me in ways I cannot yet see or understand.  In fact, He doesn’t just bless me – He wants to bless me; He desires to bless me.  It is a struggle for me, because I have always thought to struggle is more spiritual, to battle in life more pious.  I am learning, however, to allow myself to be loved and cherished by my husband (and people in general) – because of God’s love for me.

If this resembles your story, I ache for the pain you’ve gone through, and I urge you to allow your spouse to cherish you as an act of healing and a gift from God. In Cherish I tell the story of Megan who, through her husband’s cherishing care, also found herself opening up to God’s care.

It’s so powerful to think that we can cherish our spouse in such a way that they can begin to receive (some of them for the very first time) the cherishing touch and affirmation of God. You can’t give anyone a better gift.

Cherishing our spouse isn’t just about having a happier marriage; it’s so much bigger than that. It’s about modeling the love of God to the love of our life.

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Singles: Make Your Mantra “Worthy and Fit”

Singles seeking to marry well can learn so much from a man who got married four hundred years ago. He made a supremely wise choice for all the right reasons and benefitted immensely because of it.

Don’t be freaked out that he was a Puritan.

Richard Baxter (1615-1691) lived half his life as a single man because he believed a zealous clergyman was “married to his congregation” and didn’t have time for a wife. When his church fired him and he was forced to make his living as a writer (he became the most popular writer of his day, sort of a Max Lucado and Tim Keller rolled into one person), he thought having a wife would be a very good thing indeed, and he soon entered into a very happy and fulfilling marriage to a young woman named Margaret.

They had an incredible marriage.

In making his choice, Richard was already a wise man who, as a pastor, had seen the folly so many others had fallen into to. Thus he was determined to “avoid the foolish passion which the world calls love.”

He didn’t eschew love, but sought a higher love: “I know you must have love for those [you marry],” he wrote, but he was insistent that it be a “rational” love that discerns “worth and fitness” in the loved, not “blind…lust or fancy.”

Richard had seen how “blind lust and fancy” (sex appeal and romantic infatuation) could make seemingly wise people curiously blind to a person’s poor worth and low character so he determined early on that he would not be guided by those things.

Instead, he was determined to find a “worthy” spouse, and a “fit” spouse.

If you find yourself crazy with infatuation, and your highest desperate desire is to hear that they feel the same way about you, force yourself to ask two rational questions: “Is this a worthy person? Are they fit for marriage?”

Let’s look at each in turn.

First, are they worthy of you having such interest in them? Force yourself to look at them objectively. If you didn’t have such strong feelings for them, would you still like them, admire them, and respect them? If you can’t answer “yes” to all three questions you’re falling prey to “blind fancy.”

If you’re at all embarrassed by them, or constantly finding yourself having to explain away and excuse the faults and character flaws that everyone else sees and points out to you, you’re in the midst of “blind fancy.” They’re not truly worthy of you; you shouldn’t be afraid that they don’t feel the same way about you; you should be afraid of why you’re feeling that way about them.

Next, ask yourself, “Are they fit?” That is, do they have the necessary relational, emotional, and spiritual skills to be a superlative spouse? Can they handle conflict? Are they humble and gentle and patient? Are they a giver or a taker? Is God the center of their life? Do they pray and do they seek to grow in righteousness? Would they be a good parent and a true friend? Can you trust them in every way?

If the answer is no, they’re not “fit” for marriage.

Feelings are loud and strong, and they come and go. Asking questions about “worthiness” and “fitness” will help you to be objective and make a wise choice.

Dr. J.I. Packer summarizes the best of Puritan thought on making a wise marital choice by stressing that Christians were urged not to look for someone one does love romantically but rather for one whom one can love “with steady affection on a permanent basis.”

Because marriage is all about the future and feelings are only about the present, it makes the most sense to choose someone you can love in the future because they are worthy of your love and fit for marriage. Those things usually last; feelings never do.

Among the most stupid things said on a stupid reality television program is when the Bachelor or the Bachelorette keep saying, “I’ve just got to explore my feelings; I don’t know if I feel the right way about him/her.”

No, you don’t. That’s a stupid way to evaluate a relationship. It’s being guided by “blind lust or fancy” (and explains why that show has such a pathetic “success” rate for couples who get together).

Find out first if the person you are interested in is worthy and fit. Then ask yourself, “Is this someone I’d enjoy spending time with? Is this someone I’m attracted to physically enough so that I’d desire to be with them sexually?”

Sexual desire and “fancy” aren’t enemies—they can be delightful “spices” in life. If you make them the main course, however, you’ll end up relationally hungry, as they can’t satisfy on their own. I sprinkle cinnamon in my chai tea every morning, but I don’t take a spoonful as a substitute for breakfast. That’s what you’re trying to do when you let “blind lust and fancy” be the main factors in determining who to date and, ultimately, who to marry.

Worthy and fit.

That’s what you want to look for. That’s what you should evaluate.

I’m taking these quotes from J.I. Packer’s A Grief Sanctified, pg. 25.

 

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Are you Settling for Something that God Never Meant for You to Settle for?

Readers,

When I was writing Cherish, I’d ask wives how they wanted to be cherished. If you poured a cup of coffee right away, it would be room temperature by the time most of them stopped talking. When I’d ask men how they like to be cherished, the most common answer was, “Do you want the PG version or the real answer?”

The reality is that many husbands won’t feel cherished if they are not sexually pursued. Sometimes, the husband needs to change a few things so the wife can safely pursue him—but sometimes, wives can address ways to build their own libidos. No man feels cherished with mere “duty sex.” He wants to see in his wife’s eyes and even sexual hunger, “He is altogether desirable. This is my beloved and this is my friend.” Song of Songs 5:16

My friend Sheila Wray Gregoire writes a marvelous blog primarily directed toward women, though I have steered many a husband her way. I’m delighted that she has released an online video course that will help wives who want practical advice for boosting their libido. Sheila has been talking and writing about this for years, and her husband is a doctor. She mixes the medical with the practical in a fun and inspiring way. Talks are already underway about Sheila and I touring together, speaking about sexual intimacy in marriage—that’s the confidence I have in her, her marriage, and the content of her message.

Here’s Sheila’s story, and what she’s offering:

Are you Settling for Something that God Never Meant for You to Settle for?

Sheila Gregoire

Every night when I was a little girl, I would drift off to sleep dreaming of one day being married to a man who would make me feel safe. An only child of an amazing single mother, I still desperately needed to know that I was loved and that my life wouldn’t be uprooted again.

I wanted stability. I wanted, in Gary’s words, to be cherished.

I’ve been married for twenty-five years now, and I can attest with every fiber of my being that I am, indeed, very safe.

But I’ve also learned that safe isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The reason that I’m happy with my husband today is not because I’m safe; the reason I’m happy with my husband is that together, we’re living an adventure.

Sometimes in our quest for safe we forget to live. We’re trying so hard to avoid anything bad that we forget to let the good in, too.

We know there’s such a thing as holy contentment–the sentiment that the Apostle Paul conveyed in Philippians 4:12:

I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.

I believe, though, that there’s also a thing called holy discontentment, even in our marriage. It doesn’t mean that we’re unhappy with our mate. It’s that we feel that we’re missing something important that God had for us. We know that He created us for more, and we’ve been settling. And we have a thirst for God’s passion to be more real in our lives, so that we stop playing it safe and start really living.

Nowhere do I see this as much in women’s experiences as in the area of sexual intimacy. Many of us are content to put sex on the back burner, every now and then consenting in order to give our husbands a break, but not truly experiencing passion ourselves. Maybe we figure we weren’t made for it. Maybe we figure it will never feel that good anyway. Maybe we figure we have too many other things on our minds and it’s too much work to make sex feel awesome.

Now, I know many of you are throwing yourselves into anything but sex because you’re the one with the higher sex drive. In 30% of marriages, it is the woman who wants sex more, not the husband, and your biggest question is why doesn’t your husband want to make love? Others have been so wounded because of your husband’s pornography use that sex has become ugly. For you, I am sincerely sorry, and I pray that you will be able to get others around you to hold him accountable and to help you both restore what has been broken.

But for those of us who have just given up, let me ask this Valentine’s season–are you settling for something that God never meant for you to settle for? Are you giving up too easily, and losing out on the life that God meant for you?

Before I got married I dreamt about sex. A LOT. I pictured us spending Saturday mornings in bed every week, just enjoying each other. But then we got married and I realized that sex was work. It didn’t always feel that great. I was often so tired. And for me to be able to enjoy it, I had to be able to concentrate (no one ever tells us women that!). If I had a headache, or was worried about something, or had too much on my to do list, then sex flew out the window.

Somewhere along the line, though, passion did, too. Our lives became work and housework and shuttling the kids to music lessons and to church clubs and to sitting down at night to watch Netflix and to knit my eighth pair of socks this year. Not that there’s anything wrong with knitting socks, mind you. But life became a routine.

The more content we get with normal, the less we yearn to be part of the big passion story that God is writing in our world. God is a passionate God. He’s creative to the extreme. He’s jealous. He gets angry, but also rejoices over us with singing. He is the furthest thing from mediocre or boring. As C.S. Lewis said, “He’s not a tame Lion, you know.”

When we settle for tame in our marriage we often tame God, too. Our sexuality and our spirituality are linked, because they get to the core of who we are. We have been created to know so intimately and to be known so intensely. God chose to use sex as the metaphor and vehicle by which we would partly understand His passion for us. The sexual imagery in the Bible is awfully blatant.

During those years in my marriage when I put sex on the backburner, then, it’s hardly surprising that I often ended up putting God there, too. When I couldn’t be carried away and a little out of control with Keith, it was hard to let God take control and to be overcome with His goodness, too.

Passion is of God. And passion is expressed in so many ways–in worship; in our heart for the world; in our love for our kids. But also, most definitely, in the bedroom. And when we let passion die in one area, it often dies in all.

Perhaps this Valentine’s Day it’s time to awaken passion. I’ve created a “Boost Your Libido” course for women like me who have been living very safe lives, and want more.  Maybe God isn’t just calling you to more passion with Him, but also to more passion with your husband. That part of you can be reawakened, and when it is, it’s amazing to see what God can do with the rest of our lives, too!

Boost Your Libido is a super practical 10-module online course (with video!) that will help women understand what libido is, the roles our brains and bodies play in libido, and how to escape from a boring sexual rut in our marriages. The modules build on each other step-by-step, so you can start seeing immediate results! We don’t need to settle for safe .

Sheila Wray Gregoire has been married for 25 years and happily married for 20. The author of nine books, including The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex, she blogs almost everyday at To Love, Honor and Vacuum !

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