Home Improvements V, How To Survive A Spiritual Mismatch

Word we're going to focus on. Someone asked me, why don't you preach about something in Israel? Well, my purpose in the coming weeks, beginning next week, June 4th, is to talk about building our faith. I'm going to begin a new series called Developing a Daring Faith. You know, faith is like a muscle. If you don't use it, what happens? You lose it. If you don't use your faith, if you don't exercise it, if you don't grow it, it begins to atrophy just like a muscle. And folks, there are a lot of us who are ready to build some serious faith muscles, if you will. We're going to start that next week. We're going to look at how God does it. Why is it something that every person here today would benefit from doing? And may I just say, this is going to be a series that wherever people are in their journey, they can plug in and go on. And I want you to know, I think it's going to be challenging for those of you who are more mature, but also will make sense to people who are just discovering faith. And I think it's very important. I'm going to weave in some of the things that I experienced on this trip as I see Israel as a tremendous, tremendous illustration of how faith operated in the people of God. So that's coming, beginning next week. But I wanted to finish this series, and I'm going to talk today about how to survive a spiritual mismatch. Now, interesting, I talked to some folks after the first service. How many people here today may find this message a little uncomfortable? Because it sounds like I'm reading a page from your diary. Others may say, hey, not me. But I really believe the Lord wants to use this today to help encourage and strengthen the church. So let's pray. Father, as we look at your word, open it to our hearts. How I pray, Lord, for those that I know are here who are desperately searching for a word that will carry them through. Help us, Lord, to hear and to listen. In the name of Jesus, amen. Our text is going to be in 1 Peter chapter 3. You already turned there. You got it? Okay. I'll be reading from different portions there as we go through. Many times the conversations in my office begin something like this. My husband doesn't seem to care a bit about spiritual things. He never reads the Bible. It's getting harder and harder to get him to go to church. He says he's a Christian, but I just don't see it. And I worry about his example to the kids. Or I'll hear this. My wife just doesn't know when to quit. She's out four or five nights a week to study groups and prayer meetings and church. And when she is at home, she's on the phone talking to someone about God told me to do this and the Lord showed me that. And I just want a little attention, the husband will say. Or a single person will come in and say, I know the Bible says that it's not right for Christians to get serious about non-Christians, let alone marry them. But Jay, do you know how difficult it is to find an eligible believer out there? It's not fair. I've really had a heart for this message for a long time because I have encountered so many people through the last years who are dealing with this area of a spiritual mismatch in their hearts. Husbands and wives who are not connecting spiritually, whose personal lives are increasingly frustrating. And a complex web of misunderstandings and conflicts about God and the role of spiritual truth and what the church is supposed to be. And folks, it can be very ugly. Left unaddressed, these situations have a way of degenerating into tolerance of one another at best and all out war at worst. And I have discovered that people are likely to take some spiritual mismatching and sit on it for a long, long time. When asked, when did you first sense that you weren't connecting spiritually in your marriage? The average answer is about six months into it, I realized we weren't connecting. And that answer will come from people who have been married for six months or six years or 25 years. And I can point you to, I wouldn't do this of course, people in this church who have been in situations of spiritual mismatching for decades. And their lives are tolerable but nowhere near where God wants them to be. The kind of spiritual problems that I'm describing are not uncommon. In fact, Paul wrote about them all the way back in 2 Corinthians. And I've jotted those three scriptures down. He warns against them happening in the first place, 2 Corinthians 6, when he says, Don't be yoked with unbelievers. For what does righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness? What harmony is there between Christ and Belial? What does a believer have in common with an unbeliever? And then Peter, trying to encourage women whose husbands were not believers, says this. I won't read the whole passage but jot it down, 1 Peter 3, 1-7. Wives, in the same way, be submissive to your husbands so that if any of them do not believe the word, they may be won over without words by the behavior of their wives. We're going to talk about that a little bit today. And even Jesus was confronted with this question. Great passage, Matthew 19. Some Pharisees came to him to test him. They said, Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason? Back then the Jews, if a Jewish husband came home and his wife burned the stew, he could say, You know, I'm tired of you. Here's a certificate of divorce. Out she went. Literally the case. Jesus said, Haven't you read that at the beginning the Creator made them male and female and said, For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh? So they are no longer two but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate. Why then the Pharisees said, Did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away? And Jesus, I just wish I could have seen his eyes, replied, Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. There's no easy way out of these situations. Now if this happens to not be your situation, if you're in the glorious position today of being matched with someone who's on the same spiritual frequency, may I entreat you with all my heart to not sit there smugly and look up at me and say, I just did such a great job. I'm so wonderful. I picked the right person. Look at me. May I just rather say you ought to, when the service is over, fall on your knees and say, God, thank you for your grace and your mercy. You have been so good to me. And you may want to say, God, give me compassion for the many, and I will put a number on it today, the 50 to 65 percent in this congregation who don't share your experience. And so this message is very relevant to a large portion of our church, and far beyond that in the community at large, I believe it's very relevant. And I want to say that if you're in a great situation right now, don't take it for granted. I do know situations where wives were feeling frustrated because their husbands weren't coming along. And you know what? Marriages, they're dynamic. They're not static. Those situations, some of them have reversed. Promise Keepers has done a great deal to ignite fire in men. And now I know wives were saying, why can't we do some of the stuff our husbands have been doing and so on and so on. So be thankful for that. And I just want to, again, address three groups. Couples where one spouse is a believer and the other isn't. Couples where one is, where both are believers, but one is far beyond the other one, or at least not on the same frequency. And third, singles who struggle with obedience in this area of being equally yoked, because it seems to be such a difficult command in some respects. And though I don't want to oversimplify this, and I pray that you don't sense anything but really deep concern about this, I do believe that there are two dominating emotions in a relationship like this that prevail. And if not addressed, the situation can go on indefinitely through either denial or pointing the finger at the spouse, or in some cases, people I know, point the finger at themselves and say for 30 years, I'm the problem. And their self-esteem goes right down the tubes and their sense of purpose in God is washed away because they can't figure out why they can't change their spouse. But those two emotions, two simple emotions are, first of all, frustration and the second is simply fear. Frustration and fear. Those are the two dominant emotions in a spiritual mismatch. And if you don't deal with them, folks, I want to tell you, they can spiral down into conflict and they can spiral down into depression and ultimately, I've even known people who've walked away from God over it all. Let me just talk about frustration for a moment. This isn't on your outline, but this is the kind of thing that I encounter. Frustration, like I experienced in a man who came with me with his wife, a man in his mid-thirties, a businessman, and his wife came in from marital counseling. He began by saying to me, you know, things were fine until my wife came to this church and found Jesus Christ, or his word was religion, okay? And he said, I really don't understand all of this religious stuff my wife's gotten into. I'm not against it, you understand, I just don't need it in my life right now. But it's becoming upsetting to me, he said. I feel we've started out one way in our relationship. I mean, I was a Catholic, she was a Methodist, and now she's changed the rules, kind of like bait and switch. Is that legal? She wants something from me now I just can't give her. Some spiritual leadership she talks about. I'm not able to do the things she wants. In fact, I think she's looking to other people now more than me, and that really bothers me. And the music that she listens to and the meetings she goes to, I don't want to have anything to do with those things. And I asked him, it sounds to me like you're feeling like perhaps you're less of a successful husband than you once were. And he said, that's it, I do. I feel I'm losing something that I once was, and I don't like it. And he said, what if my wife starts raising our kids as Christians? I mean, we never talked about that a few years ago. I don't want them to pity poor old dad, you know, the pagan on the road to hell. Dad, feeling sorry for me all the time. He said, I don't want that. I want my kids to love me. I'm frustrated, he said. We've even been fighting about things that never used to matter. I mean, she really wanted to go to church a few weeks back, and so she asked me, please come. He said, all right, I'll come. And he said, and I've got to admit, I really didn't want to come, so I dragged my feet and took my time and slowly, and I guess I made everyone late, and they were met, and we fought in the car, and by the time we got there she was so upset, she cried and wouldn't go in, and the whole day was shot. He said, we never used to fight like that. And he said, now you used to run the budget of my family, and the family budget was something, my wife was in agreement with it, everything was fine, and now she comes and she wants to give money to the church. The church, can you imagine that? Might as well flush it down the toilet, he said. Felt pretty strongly. And on her side, you see, she was feeling frustrated about the absence of being able to share what was the most fulfilling and exciting dimension of her life with the person that she cared about the most. And she was finding herself going back again and again and again, weeping about the fact that nothing was getting through to her husband. She was terribly frustrated. But then there was the fear part. He said to me, you know, I'm really afraid that she's going to get on this thing and just keep on going, and it's going to get really weird. She's going to become a fundamentalist or something like that. And she's going to start judging people that are different than her, or that, you know, she's going to become sexually repressed and no more fun at home, you know. Or she's going to stand up in some restaurant somewhere and say a prayer and embarrass me. I don't know what's going to happen next. And for her, you see, it was the fear of escalating conflict. She said to me, I don't know if I can keep facing the conflicts over and over and over again. Fighting about the kids. Fighting about the money. Fighting about the weekends. She said, I don't want to fight, but that's all we ever seem to do. I don't know how long I can keep doing it. I feel locked in a revolving door of circumstances. And folks, can I say, even though this conversation was between a believer and a non-believer, the same kinds of things happen when it's two Christians who are just really on a different wavelength. And they're back and forth and back and forth. The only difference is they add to those feelings guilt. Because they don't believe as Christians they really should be acting this way. But they know they are. It's a very serious situation. And yet you put on a happy face and you come to church and here's Bill, it's so great to be at church with Bill. Praise the God, he's so glad to be here. And Bill's like, I can't wait till this is over. I just want to go home. Dear ones, just because you put a label on a relationship and call it a Christian marriage does not mean that what's going on there is truly pleasing to God. It doesn't mean that there's spiritual intimacy or mutual submission or the will of God being worked out or growth happening or communication and wholeness. In fact, many marriages are Christian in name only. Couples are living a spiritual mismatch and don't have any idea what to do with it. Some of them here today. I can think of one person, one couple, not going to this church right now, that I married years ago. At the time that they first met, she was a Christian, he wasn't. And they got along and she knew that it wasn't God's plan. And she said, well, I'm just going to believe God and he's going to come to Christ. And after maybe a year of dating, he did. Nine months later, she said, we're ready to be married. And I agreed to marry. But it wasn't six months after that marriage that he started to be sporadic in church attendance and fellowship and so on. And it wasn't six months after that, that he was just flat gone. It was as if someone, you know, needed to achieve a certain requirement for marriage. And so he did it. And but as soon as it was sort of acceptable, he was gone. And there she is now in a relationship, totally mismatched and totally frustrated. Not knowing what to do next. So what can we do about this? What can we do about a spiritual mismatch? Well, let me say this, and I'm going to ask you to write it down. Right underneath those three scriptures. What you don't want to do is control and manipulate your spouse into trying to behave the way you want them to. The number one problem I see in a spiritual mismatch is when a wife tries to get a husband to act a certain way, or a husband, a wife, by setting them up in certain behaviors which become acceptable performance. You know, you do this for me. You go to church with me, and I'll go to the party with you. You provide this for me, and I'll provide that for you. And you get into this sort of agreement about performance. And folks, I want you to know, if you start trying to change your spouse, if you take the responsibility to bring about a heart change in your spouse, good luck. Because only God can change a heart. If you begin to seek this kind of, you know, well, I'm going to make it happen. I'm going to try really hard. This controlling performance thing. You know, if it just took hard work to make good marriages, how many of you would be in the Good Marriage Hall of Fame? It takes more than that. It takes the grace of God. And that's what I want to focus on. The key is learning to allow Jesus to do the work that only He can do, and that is to change hearts. And the way that happens is by you getting the obstacles out of the way in the relationship. The problem I sense in most relationships is there's so much conflict, there's so much at odds, that the grace of God that could flow in, that I'm going to talk about here now, in the closing outline, that just doesn't ever get in there. And so we try for years to change our spouse. How many of you know what I'm talking about? You try for years to change him or her. I'll change him. I'll change him if it kills me. It's killing me. You know, an interesting little geographical analogy to this whole thing of just simply opening a channel to the grace of God. In the Jordan River Valley, which was for many years just a very narrow band where the Jordan River flowed from north to south through Israel, the dividing line between Jordan and Israel, it was just a riverbed. But in the 1920s and 30s, as the Jews just began to filter back, and then particularly in the last two decades, they've discovered how to tap into that river and to open it up into the valley below, and it's become an agricultural almost utopia. I mean, just stuff is growing because it's real warm and sunny, and then you put the water in through irrigation, and now they're producing so much extra food and agricultural products that they're exporting it throughout the world. And the whole reason was not because they labored to carry in all these buckets, they simply figured out a way to take what was already flowing and just divert it where it needed to be. And that's what I'm talking about. Let the grace of God work. How are you going to do that? Let me just give you the one word that I think is at the key. It's in 1 Peter 3 and verse 15. Nancy, if you can find that overhead, please, I'd appreciate it. 1 Peter 3 and verse 15. Let's read it out loud as Nancy puts it up. But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord, and always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have, but do this with gentleness and respect. Everyone say respect. The key word in surviving a spiritual mismatch is respect. It's not coercion, it's not force, it's not control, it's not manipulation, it's not spiritual seminar swapping, it's respect. Respect of the sovereignty of God in a relationship and respect for that human being that you've been connected to. Can I just touch on it with you please? The first thing are, reaffirm your love. You know, one of the strangest contradictions in spiritual life is that we often lose sight of the very basic things the Lord tells us to do. And Peter says in 1 Peter 3, 1 through 7, Hey, wives, live a life of love. Live a life of love before your spouse. That will change him by God's grace far more than any lecture, any little trick, any little thing you try to do. Live a life of love. Jesus said, love your enemies. Let me ask you a question, spouses. Is that husband or wife an enemy? God forbid, it's the person you're married to, it's someone you love. You're saying, you don't know how hard it is to love him when he's like he is or she is. You're right, I really don't know, but I know this. Jesus said, love your enemies. So even if you have an animosity between you, love him. Reaffirm your love. One man who was very successful in seeing, I'm sorry, let me say it this way, whose wife was very successful in seeing him come to Christ. You may have heard of Clint Murchison. He used to own the Dallas Cowboys. And his wife Ann Murchison wrote a wonderful book in praise and worship and another book for new Christians called Milk for Babes. But in one of those books, Clint Murchison says, my wife became a Christian before I did, but she loved me into a relationship with Christ. He writes in the book that she gave me the one thing that I needed most amidst all the changes I could see in her life, her priorities, her values, her commitments. She told me she loved me and said that would never change. And it gave me what I needed most, which was security in the midst of a changing relationship. Very important. Reaffirm your love. If you're in a spiritual mismatch, tell that person you're committed to them. You love them. Let them know that. Many men criticize their wives who might be ahead of them in the Lord or Christians when they're not, because they're afraid of something they don't understand. They feel off balance. A man is taught, you know, be in control, be prepared, be ready for anything. And when a wife comes in in a spiritual time of revelation, the husband doesn't understand, he gets defensive. So he starts being critical. Be prepared for that. Affirm your love. Number two, letter E, exercise restraint. Please listen carefully to this. You know, we're not called to compromise our faith or water down our conviction. We are called to be sensitive to the turmoil that these commitments can cause in our homes. Notice that Peter says that we're to share our faith, our love. How? With gentleness and respect. And nothing shows respect more than the willingness to exercise some restraint. We need to respect our spouses enough to give them some space, even though you may want to take them by the lapels and shake them and say, come on, don't you get it? Don't you see what God's doing? Don't you want to get in on it? Folks, can I tell you that is not the way to see God's grace in a relationship. Avoid those things. Show the power of restraint. I mean, I hear some weird things that people start doing. You know, wives, they'll get some Christian books going, and they'll be reading, oh, if he would only read this, what would he read? So they open the book up and leave a marker in it and put it by the bathroom, you know, right by the commode. And he sits down and he'll read this. Husbands come and tell me, well, I see all these books, my wife, I don't know why she starts all these books and never reads them all. They don't get it. Don't put those little stick-em post-ems, you know, and put little post-its every place like, you know, on the bathroom mirror, or, oh, repent in the name of the Lord, or just get, you know, get. Those kinds of weird things. You know, every time the husband gets in his car, she's changed the radio station over to W-O-R-D, you know. Well, maybe he'll turn it on and just hear. And when he travels, they'll pull out little tracks that'll come out of his travel bag or in his pillow. Those kind of things do not soften. It just puts up a defensiveness. And use wisdom, men and women, in your level of involvement in kingdom things. One thing we tend to want to do is just jump way into it. And the spouse looks back and says, well, you know, four or five nights a week, do you have to be over there or out of this study or that prayer group? And, you know, if you do that, you're heading into trouble. You're getting to a place where that balance is gone and it just sends up walls of defensiveness and will create conflict rather than solve it. And the third thing I would say, exercise restraint by not nitpicking your spouse. Every time he or she does things that you don't approve of, you know. I mean, if he has a drink, don't just, you know, don't nail him to the wall. You know, you send her. If in a heated moment of temper, he uses language that you don't approve of. Now, see that? That just shows, you know, where you're coming from. Those kinds of things just alienate and divide. Be careful what you make into a spiritual issue. Hold your ground on the important issues, dear ones, but please don't make a big federal issue, a spiritual giant monument out of every single thing. I know this isn't easy, but you know what? The principle is the same in the physical realm. Before a muscle will grow, it has to be relaxed and stretched. And before faith will grow in the heart, the person has to be relaxed and ready. Very important. Number four, seek spiritual support. Ecclesiastes 4, 9 and 10. Very clear scripture there. It says, two are better than one, because they have a good return for their work. If one falls down, his friend can help him up. But pity the person who falls and has no one to help him up. Make a recommendation here. Find a person who is spiritually mature to become a confidant for you. A person maybe who's been there. A person who's worked through this. A person that you can learn from as a friend. And listen to them and receive their encouragement. Someone that's discerning enough not to allow you to fall into a prolonged pity party about your circumstance. And to promote negative and judgmental behavior. Listen to what that loser I married said now. And then the person says, yeah, he said. And you start building this negative synergy about what a lousy guy you're married to. Well, that doesn't work. That won't release the grace of God. Your companion needs to help you avoid the mentality, it's you and me and God against him. Folks, I want you to know that happens. Get two or three people talking about how bad this guy is and pretty soon, it's not the grace of God any longer. It's like a fortress mentality. Don't block the possibility of God's grace coming that way. And please don't think if he became a Christian that everything in the marriage would be great. If he became a Christian, he'd mow the lawn without any hassle. If he became a Christian, he'd help with the dishes. No. If he became a Christian, he would work fewer hours. No, not necessarily. How many of you know Christian marriages have their own set of struggles? Amen. It doesn't solve all your problems. So don't blame everything in the relationship on the fact that he or she may not be where you are. A true friend will help you keep, this is important, the focus on God who's the solution and not on the problem that you see with your relationship. And that's what a friend really will do to help you. No. 4. So obvious, but I want to say it. Pray. Pray. But this one qualifier. Pray for yourself first. Pray for God to give you the grace to show respect. Pray for you to have the courage to stand when you need to. To deal with the hurt and the disappointment. You know what? When you get hurt, and you will, when your spouse disappoints you or doesn't come through or doesn't understand you, if you don't have a heart that's been softened in prayer, you know what you're going to do with that hurt? You're going to spew it right back at them and you're going to get into a battle. Or you're going to push it down in and just let it boil into depression into your life. You need to learn to pray. Ask the Lord for wisdom and strength and restraint and grace to forgive. How many have discovered that simple little phrase, please forgive me, I was wrong. Changes in marriage just like that. How many have found that's true? Please forgive me, I was wrong. If you can get those words out, it just turns the whole thing around. Pray for that grace. And pray then for your spouse. Pray for his or her eyes to be opened to the gospel. 2 Corinthians 4.4. Write that down. 2 Corinthians 4.4 says that the devil has blinded their eyes. Folks, that spouse may have no idea because their eyes, just like the Jews' eyes, are blinded. And you need to pray that the blinders would come off. Pray 1 Peter 5.8 that the devil who's roaming around like a roaring lion doesn't have access to his or her heart. A lot of good books to recommend on this matter of interceding for a loved one. Check out the resource center there. There's some good books on that. Next, E. This is important and I've never seen this before. I want to share it with you. Experience daily fullness. Turn to Ephesians 5. If you have your Bible, real quickly just back over a few chapters. Got it? Can you hear the pages? Ephesians 5. I'll wait. Ephesians 5. I want you to see this in the text. Are you there? When I normally do a wedding for two believers, I will read Ephesians 5 beginning in about verse 22 right on through to verse 32. Critical passage in the New Testament about Christian marriage. But you want to know why a lot of Christian marriages get into a mismatch? Because husbands and wives are not able to live what this is teaching because they haven't experienced something that comes just before that in the Scriptures. Look up at verse 18 of Ephesians 5. Do not get drunk on wine. Instead, be filled with the Spirit. What? What does that have to do with a Christian marriage? Speak to one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord. Always giving thanks to God the Father for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus. And submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Can I say this to you, Church? This could be a whole message. I really believe that the key to growing in spiritual unity is learning to be filled with the Spirit of God on a daily basis. Be being filled. It's in the passage, a perfect tense. Be being filled with the Spirit. That gives you the power to live a life that then you can share with that spouse. And the reason why so many marriages get into conflict is because one partner looks to the other one to be their source of fullness. One looks to the husband or the husband looks to the wife to be the one that meets all their needs. How many of you have read a book that said, Here are the needs that I see I need to have filled and here are the needs my wife needs. Have you seen books like that? Yeah. There's a lot of them out there. You meet these needs and I'll be fine and I'll meet those needs and you'll be fine. How many know what I'm talking about? Okay. The only problem with that is sure there's some ways that we provide for one another but in the basic area of spiritual life our spouse is not our source. Hear what I'm saying? Our spouse is the Lord God Almighty. The Holy Spirit is our source. Not that spouse. And wives, you will forever be frustrated if you're looking to your husband to be the source of your spiritual life. And husbands, you will be frustrated if you're looking to the wife to fill that need in your life. In fact, may I say this? And I've not seen this before. I believe that kind of a relationship where you're looking to that spouse is really evidence of the curse on Adam and Eve. Nancy, get up to Scripture, please. Genesis 3, 16. When Adam and Eve fell away by disobeying God God looked down on them and here's what He said. To the woman He said, I will greatly increase your pains and childbearing. With pain you will give birth to children. Was that part fulfilled? A lot of men said yes. A lot of men must have been in the old labor room there. But the second part of the verse is what I want you to see. Your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you. Do you see that God is saying that an effect of the fall is a realignment of affections? Do you see that? That's not God's best plan. God's best plan is for our desire to be for Him. For Him to be our source and for us to live in a mutually submitted relationship. And it's only possible out of living a life that's experiencing daily fullness in the Spirit. I could go on. That's such a powerful truth that deserves further elaboration. Let me recommend a book right now on this. It's called Families Where Grace Is In Place. You might want to write that down. Families Where Grace Is In Place. Written by Jeff Van Vonderen. V-A-N-V-O-N-D-E-R-E-N And he talks about this. And it's a powerful book about letting the grace of God in a relationship bring about the change we want to see. The source of love is Christ alone. Letter C then. Crack your code. Few things are more frustrating in a marriage relationship than the inability to understand what the other person is doing. And I know lots of people who use spiritual code language to keep their spouses unsettled. And they start using spiritual buzzwords about things like, well, the Spirit was moving this way and we experienced this particular thing. And it isn't tongues we're talking about here. It's just an absence of communication. For both Christians and mixed couples, the vocabulary of respect is very important. Imagine what goes through the mind of a non-believer who hears for the first time from his newly converted wife, the Lord told me to do that. What is he thinking? What do you mean He told you? Do you have voices now? Watch your language. Watch the mystery kind of stuff. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 2, 4 and 5, Hey, I didn't come to you with words of spiritual mystery. I came to you with just simple power and life. When