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Episode 1. The Three Rules of Marriage
They say there are only three rules to real estate – location, location and location. So – when it comes to marriage – what are the three rules there? Join Berni Dymet – as he looks at an …
There are so many marriages in turmoil, struggling and even falling apart. You have to wonder, is there some way of getting this marriage thing right, are there some basic guidelines to follow, something important that maybe we’re missing? Well let’s find out.
They say that when you’re buying a house there are actually only three rules to wise real estate. Location, location and you guessed it location. When you think about it that makes a lot of sense. When you buy a house you can change the colour, you can change the basic layout, you can change the curtains and the carpet and the lighting, in fact you can change just about everything about the house except its location.
Over the last few weeks on the program we’ve been looking at marriage from a different perspective. Now marriage is much more important than buying a house right? Much. So what would the three rules of marriage be? Location is the one unchanging thing that undergirds a piece of real estate.
So what’s the one unchanging thing that undergirds marriage? Is it communication? Well, communication is very important but that’s something you can develop and change. Is it intimacy? Well that’s really important too but again that’s something you can work on and change.
Now it must be something else, something that’s so important that it should never change. Something as fundamental to love as location is to real estate. A great problem, in fact the great problem of life is our own selfishness.
See we start off in a marriage with a flurry of romance and high hopes but very soon our own selfish desires get in the road and then what happens is we end up missing the whole point of marriage because we think the way to have a fantastic marriage is keeping an eye out for what we can get out of it. We talked a bit about this the other day on the program when we discovered that the whole compromise fifty/fifty approach to marriage simply doesn’t work.
And the reason it doesn’t is that the fifty/fifty approach leads to the attitude of, well what’s in it for me? I better make sure that I get everything I want and I need out of my marriage. And in doing that, in a very real sense, we end up, as the old fairy tale goes, strangling the goose that lays the golden egg.
I want you to imagine that you plan on getting a great harvest of apples out of an apple tree that you’ve just planted. It’s a young tree, it has some growing to do and the reason you planted it is that you wanted to produce nice fresh crisp juicy sweet red apples. Here’s my question, how do you go about getting the harvest that you’re looking for?
Here’s the first approach, do you hassle the tree, do you berate the tree, do you tell it it’s no good because it hasn’t produced any apples yet and when it does produce a few apples and they’re much smaller and not as sweet as you’d hoped for do you tell it what a lousy stupid apple tree it is?
Or let’s try a different approach; do you make sure the tree is planted in good rich soil? That it’s sheltered from strong winds, well watered, well fertilised, free from pests and disease. It’s pretty obvious isn’t it? If you want to have a great harvest of apples it’s the second approach that’s going to work, anybody can see that.
And yet so many people when it comes to their marriages, so many people go with the first approach instead of the second. As though telling their soul mate what a bad job they’re doing at meeting my needs is going to solve the problem.
What’s missing in that is the essential, the three rules of having a fantastic marriage, grace, grace and grace. My dictionary tells me that grace is the free unmerited favour that one person gives to another. Now it’s not that my wife doesn’t merit my favour, she does but the point is that day to day she doesn’t have to earn it.
Any husband, any wife is going to have good days and not so good days and you know even some pretty bad days over a marriage that lasts any length of time, would you agree? We all do and so if I berate my wife for not being a great wife on her not so good or bad days, should I really expect my marriage to bear the fruit of intimacy, emotional and physical, that I really want it to? It’s as plain as the nose on my face, of course not.
On the other hand if on her off days I love her, encourage her, hug her, keep quiet about anything that perhaps has bruised me a little bit. What I’ve discovered is she bounces back soon enough and I know for my part when she does that for me it makes me feel so loved.
I know when I make mistakes in our marriage – perhaps I’m not as quite as attentive or sensitive than I should have been today; hey maybe I had a hard day at the office and I’m grumpy – and when she loves me and supports me through that I know what’s going on and it makes me feel loved and it helps me deal with the pressure and the problems, and I’m loved because I have just received the free unmerited favour of my wife.
That’s love in action and this whole thing is called grace, it’s a deep attitude of the heart. The Bible talks an awful lot about grace, God’s grace towards us. And I have to say my favourite verse on grace is in the New Testament Book of Romans chapter 5, verse 17 where it talks about, wait for this, the abundance of Gods grace.
Heaping grace on your wife or your husband as the case may be, I mean an abundance of grace, it’s like watering and fertilising and protecting that little apple tree. When we water and fertilise and protect that little apple tree you know what? It can’t help itself; it’s going to produce a great crop of apples.
And when we heap an abundance of grace on our marriage partner he or she, by and large, will produce the fruits in our marriage that we were always looking for all along. The fruits that are going to bless us, the fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control.
Each wife, each husband needs to put their roots down into good soil, healthy soil to become the sort of wife or husband that God always planned for them to be; to build the sort of marriage that God always planned for them to have. To engage in the sort of closeness and intimacy that is the great gift of marriage.
Let me say that again, just as there are three rules of real estate, location, location and location so there are three rules of having a fantastic marriage, grace, grace and grace. So in your marriage I encourage you to remember that little apple tree that we talked about today.
And of course a great marriage isn’t just about watering and feeding, the sort a husband does for his wife and a wife does for her husband, it’s also as I said about putting your roots down into good soil and there is simply no way of having a better marriage than putting Jesus, the foundation of grace, right at the centre of it.
Each couple needs to choose, are they going to put God first or not? There’s a great passage in the Old Testament, the Book of Joshua where Israel’s leader, Joshua, challenges the people. Now that they’ve crossed over into the Promised Land this is what he says to them, chapter 24 beginning at verse 14:
“Now therefore revere the Lord and serve him in sincerity and faithfulness. Put away the foreign gods that your ancestor’s served beyond the river and in Egypt and serve the Lord. If you are unwilling to serve the Lord choose this day who you will serve, whether the gods of your ancestors in the region beyond the river or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you’re living but as for me and my household we will serve the Lord.”
What about you and your household? What about you and your marriage? Who is Lord over that? Is it your own selfish whims and desires because they are sure to tear your marriage apart or is it God, the God who is love, the God who sent Jesus to die and pay for our sins, the God who pours His free unmerited favour, His grace out on each man, woman and child who puts their trust in Jesus.
When a husband and wife develop an intimate personal relationship with Jesus what they’re doing is they’re putting their roots down into good soil and that’s how they produce fruit with God’s infusion of grace into their hearts and with their soul mate’s help and encouragement and that’s going to make for a fantastic marriage, just the sort of marriage you were always meant to have.
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