Mark Clark [00:00:03]:
To First Corinthians, chapter seven. And what we're gonna do today is a little bit different. I'm going to kind of almost do more of like a teaching style. I pulled a bunch of notes from past things that we've gone through as a church in regard to the topic that Paul's gonna talk about today. And what he talks about as he turns to First Corinthians, chapter 7, verse 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, is he says, because of the temptation to sexual immorality, which we've hit a bunch on, so not gonna talk about too much. Each man should have his own wife. And so he raises this question of marriage and each woman should have her own husband. Now he's gonna go on in the rest of chapter seven to talk about the joy of singleness.
Mark Clark [00:00:46]:
So those of you who are single don't freak out yet and don't say, oh, Paul, you know, doesn't like me or whatever. There's no place in the church for single people. In fact, Paul is gonna make an argument that singleness is really good in regard to the kingdom. And that'll be next week. And so. But this week he talks about this idea of marriage and he talks about the reality of how good it is. And so I did a bit of a survey on social media yesterday and just said, hey, what are your questions? What are your thoughts about marriage? And as I saw these themes come about, I kind of collected some thoughts of series that we've done in the past work that we've gone through as a church in a few of our marriage series, and kind of tried to collect it into eight big ideas that were addressing some of the things that were raised on social media and of course the big things that I see in marriage counseling and so on. And so in the past.
Mark Clark [00:01:35]:
A couple years ago we did a series called Til Death Do Us Part and there was some major. We did a survey, 7,000 people took a survey online at our church to tell us what the major issues in their life were. And some of the issues rose to the top again that we're gonna hit today. We're gonna do our best. Communication, sex, personality differences, conflict. By far the biggest issue was communication. So we're gonna try to hit that. So yeah, if you got your notes out and this would be a good sermon for that.
Mark Clark [00:02:04]:
If you're preparing to be married, this content will hopefully help you. And if you are married right now, it should help you. Unless you're extremely hard hearted and you're just closed off to change. And the Reality of what Jesus wants to say to us in this time. And so here's what we gotta understand a few things about marriage. Marriage is not easy, but cynicism is. And if you're a cynic and you're someone who's given up on the idea of marriage like our culture has, oftentimes marriage is pitched as a really bad idea. It's where people go to kind of die.
Mark Clark [00:02:35]:
It's where their spirit goes to die. You know, Chris Rock talked about that you can either be happy in life or you can be married. All right? That was the dichotomy he created. And because, you know, people say, well, you know, my friend got married and they're not happy, but my other friend, they, you know, they live common law and they're all happy, Everybody's happy, and it's just a piece of paper. And the problem with that is that it's anecdotal evidence. You can create anecdotal evidence. The data does not actually bear out that way. But anecdotally, we all know people who have friends who do this.
Mark Clark [00:03:07]:
And if you draw your life out from one friend that, you know, it's not, you know, I know people who think the, you know, the earth is flat and they have a happy life. So I don't know if anecdotally, we should just say we should believe them. The reality is you have to look at the data across a lot of time of thousands and thousands of couples. And the data bears out of how good a thing marriage is. There's secular studies done called the Case for Marriage by White and Gallagher. Secular thinking around marriage, how sexuality flourishes, how happiness and joy flourishes, how people actually live long, longer when they are married, health wise, they live longer. They do better emotionally. Now some of you are like, man, I just feel like the opposite because I'm married, I'm gonna die quicker.
Mark Clark [00:03:51]:
This lady's killing me. Some of you feel that reality, but it's not actually true. When you have pain that comes into your life, marriage works as a shock absorber. It actually takes. There was actual studies done. Dr. Sue Johnson talks about this in her book Hold Me Tight, where there was electric shock done and the spouse would be shocked. And then they would have the other spouse, the spouse come and hold their hand.
Mark Clark [00:04:15]:
And then when they shocked them, they actually registered less pain when they were holding the hand of their spouse and having their spouse even in the room because of connectedness theory. And so the reality is it's a good thing. It's a beautiful Thing. It's a God thing. Genesis 1, 2, and 3 said, Marriage is a beautiful thing. It shows the world about the gospel.
Mark Clark [00:04:33]:
We.
Mark Clark [00:04:34]:
Paul says, so it's a God thing. It's an us thing. It's a gospel thing. Ephesians 5 says, it's about Christ and the church and showing the world how Christ and the church actually function. And so we gotta understand the beauty of marriage. We love marriage. Marriage can do amazing things, counter and contrary to much of what our culture actually thinks and says. So what I tried to do is pull together some data from past stuff, and I'm just gonna try to throw it at you as a buffet style so you can take notes.
Mark Clark [00:05:01]:
And it's eight points, eight tips about marriage, things that we can look at and say, let's make sure we have these eight things working out. And then we'll actually probably have a chance of flourishing in marriage. So the first one is that marriage is not ultimate, all right? Jesus is ultimate. Marriage is amazing. It's great. It's wonderful. But the reality is it's not the ultimate thing in life. It's not the thing that you are to look to.
Mark Clark [00:05:25]:
You're not supposed to look to your spouse to give you ultimate joy and meaning in life. And we've talked about this many times, that if you look to them, you will actually hurt them, you will kill them, because you will put a weight on them that only God was meant to bear. When a spouse moves from being a good thing to an idol, you will destroy them, and it will dishevel your soul because you keep looking to them to make you happy. And the reality is, is your spouse cannot make you happy because they are an utter disaster as well. You are selfish and narcissistic. You kind of think to yourself all the time about, how does the universe revolve around me? Well, when you got married, you married someone who thinks exactly the same, which is kind of crazy, because then you got thrown into one world and you try to function, as Genesis 2 says, as one flesh, as one person, as one entity. It's a crazy thing. It's a hybrid person that tries to go into the world.
Mark Clark [00:06:11]:
But the reality is our culture has created this thing where you're supposed to derive all your meaning from marriage. Christians even separate the culture have said that in response to the idea that culture doesn't like marriage. Christians have come over here and said, marriage is the ultimate thing. Marriage is the only thing that matters. And the reality is Jesus Christ is the ultimate thing. Jesus is the ultimate treasure. And if you look to marriage. It will utterly disappoint you.
Mark Clark [00:06:36]:
Over and over and over again, Christians have bought into a concept called that psychologists call apocalyptic romance, which basically is, I'm going to try to get all my joy and meaning in life out of my relationship. And one writer has said, we now ask our lovers for the emotional connection and. And sense of belonging that my grandmother could get from her whole village. And it's the idea that every generation actually lived in villages and community where they would get all kinds of different aspects of life. But now we don't. We isolate ourself. We live in our home. We don't connect to community, and we don't try to derive joy or any kind of learning from anybody else outside of our spouse.
Mark Clark [00:07:12]:
So our spouse becomes this thing that we orbit around. And they can never fulfill what the village used to fulfill in traditional societies all throughout time. And so we put that on them. And the Bible would say, it's extremely dangerous. And I've said this before, man, if I woke up in the morning and my wife was looking at me in bed going, give me all the meaning and the purpose of my life, Mark. I'd be like, this woman's freaking me out, all right, I gotta get outta here. All right? Because it would be way too much pressure to me. And that's the reality.
Mark Clark [00:07:40]:
And so marrying my wife, as beautiful as it is, there's so many amazing things. She has changed me, she has grown me. I now understand things as a human being that I never would have before. In the combining, I kind of. This feminine side of me got enhanced. A decisiveness and understanding, a selflessness. Things that I've learned from her that I never would have learned. Before I got married, I was just a guy.
Mark Clark [00:08:05]:
I'd go out till 2 o' clock in the morning, had no responsibilities. I didn't even get my driver's license. She got her driver's license before me. She used to pick me up for dates. What a loser, right? That's the reality we were in. And so the reality is, in marrying her, she's made me a better person. And this is what happens in marriage. It's a beautiful thing, but it's not an ultimate thing.
Mark Clark [00:08:28]:
She doesn't complete me. Like Jerry Maguire says, you complete me. It's like, you can't do that, or the person will destroy you and you will destroy them. So the reality is marriage is not an ultimate thing. It's a beautiful thing. But it's what one writer calls a momentary thing. And it's the Reason. Jesus can put such a high premium on marriage to the point where he only gives two reasons that you would ever get divorced, adultery or abandonment.
Mark Clark [00:08:55]:
You read through the Sermon on the Mount and you think, why didn't he give a bunch of other reasons? Why didn't he give the reasons like, I married you, but you changed after eight years and I don't like your mother in law and so I wanna divorce you now. Why didn't he give those reasons? Because those are what I feel. And the reality is, because he knew marriage, of course. I was talking to a friend doing counseling with him on the phone the other day, and he said, she's just different than when we got married. And I said, yeah, of course she's different than we got married. You made her different, all right. Marriage, the beautiful, enormous thing that it is, when you come together, you become a different person. And so what you have to do, Stanley Hauervest says, is learn to love the stranger that you're married to.
Mark Clark [00:09:33]:
Because marriage, being such a vast thing, actually shifts and changes us in so many ways that of course people are going to be different now. The second point is, is that we are to have real expectations in our life, real expectations in our life, or else we're going to be disappointed over and over and over again, and it will actually destroy our lives and destroy our marriages. Dr. Gary Rosenberg actually talks about the seven steps toward divorce. And he says this. He says, we go from the dream stage of life where we all consider this, this was what we were gonna do with our life, this is what our marriage was gonna be. And then we hit a point right here, which I'll talk about in a second. And then that leads to discouragement, and discouragement leads to distance, distance leads to discord, and discord leads to divorce.
Mark Clark [00:10:21]:
And this missing piece right here is the concept of disappointment. The fact that you had this idea of a dream of what you were going to do. The first step toward divorce in anybody's life, in anybody's situation, is disappointment. I thought it was gonna be like this, and it turns out it's not like that at all. So what I would rather do, and when I work with people who are getting married, especially young people, I work with having real clear expectations, expectations that are grounded, that if you think this person's gonna be this, if you think your sex life's gonna be this, if you think your money's gonna be this, what I need to do is draw a picture for you of what reality is. And so in marriage counseling, I will Just intentionally try to get them to fight about something because they all think they're perfect. And so I want them to fight. And so I'll draw up things about them and I'll try to bring up some ex girlfriend or something.
Mark Clark [00:11:12]:
All right. Just to get them fighting. Because they've gotta start to understand that they're not gonna be perfect. And in seven years, they're gonna see all the cracks and all the problems of their spouse. And so disappointment. I thought it was gonna be like, this is actually the first step toward divorce. One writer says this focusing on what you are not getting out of the relationship and how your partner fails to live up to your expectations can kill your marriage in two to three years. You're starting to look at them and say, this is what I'm not getting out of it.
Mark Clark [00:11:43]:
It's unfulfilled expectations. So what you need to do is actually just have a lower expectation. Expect them to be a thorn in your flesh. That's what you do. You get married and you go, this person's gonna be the person that I fight with the most. They're gonna be the thorn in my flesh. Some days that it's just like, how are you even. How did I marry you? When did we like each other? I don.
Mark Clark [00:12:03]:
If some of you are feeling that right now in your marriage, chill. It's perfectly normal. The thorn in the flesh mentality. Bring your expectations of the dream from here and bring them down here and start to understand. Listen, at my house, we have something called grocery store mark, which is how dysfunctional I am at a grocery store is mind boggling. Like I couldn't describe. I'm a functional human being in every aspect of life. But my wife will give me two or three things to pick up at the grocery store.
Mark Clark [00:12:34]:
She'll ask for an avocado. I'll come back with a lime. I don't know the difference. She's. What is that? I don't understand. I asked for a red pepper. You brought tomatoes. I don't get it.
Mark Clark [00:12:43]:
Don't you know the differences? It's grocery store market now. If she went in thinking the dream was, I'm gonna be the man, I'm gonna understand everything. She's utterly disappointed, and we're on our way to divorce. But if she expects nothing of me at the grocery store, then we're ahead. And so if you see me at the grocery store, you'll see me FaceTiming my wife often. Nine times out of ten. And it's because I know she told me to get that? And I'm pretty convinced that's the right one. But I can't be 100% sure.
Mark Clark [00:13:11]:
So I'll FaceTime her. I'll be like, look, this is the one I'm about to grab. Is this the right one? She's like, no, it's not the right one. That's Almond. I was looking for the light. I'm like, I don't even know what you're talking about right now. So this is why I FaceTime and make 100% sure that's the reality. You gotta bring down your expectations.
Mark Clark [00:13:25]:
You gotta understand who you are. And then you gotta commit. In the midst of the difficulty, in the midst of the failed expectations, in the midst of the fact that you're both sinful, depraved people who are gonna let each other down over and over and over again, then you've gotta understand that you've gotta fight for the flourishing in the midst of the difficulty. Your expectations should be that they will let you down. There's a great song I'm gonna show you by a guy named Zach Bolen. He wrote it and it really captures this idea. And it's the opposite to most songs because most songs is, hey, I'm never gonna let you down. I'm gonna be the best for you.
Mark Clark [00:14:03]:
And we should, you know. And this song is all about I actually will let you down. And in the end he says, but we should fight for it. So I'm gonna show you this song. It's three or.
Mark Clark [00:14:33]:
When we settled down I was still a wide eyed boy Drowning in a dream Stuck inside a distant world so afraid to become the very thing I fear the most Funny how it works there's some things you can't avoid it all no matter what I do I won't ever deserve your love I will let you down I will let you down Still I'm gonna give everything that I have to you Let me show you how Let me show you how when you hold my hand I know that we will be okay Even when the hurt takes a bit of breath away I can feel in my soul Every time your eyes light up Whispers in the wind that this life we have is good enough no matter what I do I know that I still have your love When I let you down When I let you down but still I'm gonna fight hard to give you the best of me it's without a doubt it's without a doub Sam make you small Every bit of pain hits you like a cannonball.
Mark Clark [00:17:31]:
What I.
Mark Clark [00:17:31]:
Can Understand is why you open up your arms, kiss me on the lips tell me that I'm always yours.
Mark Clark [00:17:48]:
No.
Mark Clark [00:17:48]:
Matter what I've done, you have always remain by me Though I've let you down Though I've let you down.
Mark Clark [00:18:04]:
But.
Mark Clark [00:18:04]:
Still I never stop trying to love you the way I should I'm not backing down. I'm not backing down.
Mark Clark [00:18:37]:
So it doesn't sound super romantic. I will let you down is the title of the song. Tends not to be what people dance to at their wedding.
Mark Clark [00:18:46]:
Right.
Mark Clark [00:18:47]:
Okay, everybody, this is the last song. Honey, I picked this one just for you.
Mark Clark [00:18:51]:
I will let you down I won't let you down.
Mark Clark [00:18:57]:
When I make fun of you, you know, but it's powerful because he's saying, I take my words, I slice you down, I destroy you. Like we have done in our lives. Men, you have used your words. Your tongue is vicious, that destroys fires. You have cut your wife down. Wives, as we're gonna talk about, you've done the same to your husbands. You have cut them down and it hits people. And yet we take each other back because of unconditional love, not because of the way we're treated.
Mark Clark [00:19:24]:
That's what the gospel's about. It's about the fact that Jesus was good and it wasn't because we deserved it. And that's the whole picture of marriage. And he's saying, I will let you down. So let's bring down the expectations. Is point number two, the reality of making sure that we understand what we're getting into. Point number three, we gotta keep going, is communication. Communication was one of the top things.
Mark Clark [00:19:44]:
So I'll spend a few minutes on it. When I do premarital counseling with people, there's 12 categories of things that line them up. And communication is two or three of them. And you gotta focus on the fact that there's two kinds of communication. And we talked about this until death do us part. There's logical and emotional communication. And so logical communication is when you're asking, data, is the sky blue? Am I wearing socks? Are we in the house right now? This is all logical communication. But then the problem is there's emotional communication, which is unsaid things.
Mark Clark [00:20:14]:
And emotional communication isn't looking for information. It's looking for affirmation. It's not looking for what's said. It's looking for what someone means by what they're saying. And so in marriage, one of the challenges is to understand the difference. Is the person who's talking to me right now speaking just emotional, are they Talking emotionally or are they talking logically? And so sometimes we will mess this up. I'll go to my wife and I'll call her up. I'll say, where are we gonna go for dinner tonight? And she'll say, what, do you think I'm a bad cook? We gotta go out for dinner? Cause I'm gonna poison the kids.
Mark Clark [00:20:41]:
You don't like my food? What? Who is this? Right. It's like a different person. Because all I'm doing is asking for logical information. Where are we actually going for dinner tonight? But she's reading that from an affirmation grid. From a what does this question mean? Grid. And sometimes can we disagree stuff doesn't mean grid stuff. Right. It just is what it is.
Mark Clark [00:21:06]:
It's just. I'm just asking a question. We don't have to ask about what it means. And so the question is, is this person speaking logically right now, or are they speaking emotionally right now? Am I looking for. Are they looking for information? Are they looking for affirmation? These are the questions of life. If your husband comes to you and says, do you think I work hard and provide for our family? This isn't really a logical question where he's asking. Asking for actual information back to you, where you pull out the budget and you start saying, well, you know, this month we didn't have enough for entertainment. And, you know, I heard, actually, Sarah told me the other day that Joe makes double what you make.
Mark Clark [00:21:42]:
So it wouldn't be bad if you propped it up a little bit. That is going to kill your husband. Cause he's not asking you for information. He's actually asking you for what? For affirmation. Right? Tell me I've been a good man. Tell me that I work hard. Tell me that's what he's actually asking you for. He's drawing it from his high school days when his buddies in the locker room would tell him he did a good job at basketball or whatever.
Mark Clark [00:22:05]:
He still needs that in his life. And so when your wife puts on a beautiful dress and says, hey, look at my beautiful dress. Do I look beautiful in this? That's not time for you to go. Hold on, let me get the measuring tape out. I don't know, you know, maybe you look better a few years.
Mark Clark [00:22:19]:
No.
Mark Clark [00:22:20]:
So she's asking a logical question. She's asking an emotional question that's like, hey, affirm me. Tell me I'm beautiful. Tell me I'm the center of your whole life, in the center of your eye, the center of your mind. If Your spouse looks to you and says, am I the best lover you've ever had? Okay, don't, like, start thinking, all right? Those kinds of questions are traps, right? You don't wanna. And so don't trap your spouse in that. But if they're not asking a logical question, they're asking an emotional question. They're saying, come on, tell me that I am, but where are my car keys? On the flip side, doesn't need an apocalyptic explanation about cars and why we have too many and you drive them, and I don't like them.
Mark Clark [00:23:09]:
No, just wear the car keys. Don't need a whole thing about what cars mean. Just, where are my keys? And this is what messes us up over. And when we're looking for fights, where are my car keys? Becomes a whole existential crisis. And sometimes logical questions are just being asked. And so here's the question you have to ask yourself in regard to conflict and communication when you're in those moments. Are you trying to make a point or are you trying to make a difference? Are you trying to make a point, make a big deal of something? Or do you really wanna just make a difference and go, I wanna do my best to make a difference in this marriage. Because sometimes the goals are different between a husband and a wife.
Mark Clark [00:23:44]:
You know, genders are different. Men are different than women, and goals are. Sometimes psychologists tell us that women have a particular goal in the context of a family, which is unity, love, communication. You're being one, the family's unified. A husband has a different goal in the context of conflict and communication, which is peace. All that he's thinking in his brain is, how can this just go back to being peaceful? How does everything just chill and go back to being nice? Like, I don't want conflict. That's a husband's goal. And we're gonna talk about that in a second.
Mark Clark [00:24:14]:
Why, that's not a bad goal. I'll come back to it. The fourth thing we gotta talk about is conflict and forgiveness. What causes divorce and separation and destruction in marriages is not an increase in conflict, psychologists say, but a decrease in affection. It's not the fact that you fight too much or that you've added fighting to the thing that you used to not fight, and now you fight, and so it must be over. Fighting's not a problem. If fighting was a problem, my marriage would have been over a long time ago. I don't know if you've ever met my wife.
Mark Clark [00:24:41]:
She's the female version of me, which means we just do this, all right? All the time, just like, it's just fireworks. All right? To the point where people have actually watched us fight and then come to us and gone, thank you. I've never actually seen a couple just fight right in front of everybody. And you gave me permission. Because what I do is I bury it as a passive aggressive person. And I never fight with my spouse. They said that was the most healthy because my wife. And then like two minutes later.
Mark Clark [00:25:08]:
And so it's like we get it all out and then we move on with our life. And that's the reality. And so an increase in conflict. Every marriage counselor will tell you that's not what destroys a marriage. It's a decrease in affection that destroys a marriage over time. And so what you gotta understand is how to fight. And you move through stages in our life. You move from.
Mark Clark [00:25:29]:
One psychologist says you move from the romantic love period. And the second major phase of any great relationship is a power struggle. And in the moments of the power struggle, you have fights, you have stress and conflict. Structure versus freedom. You have different ways of dealing with conflict. And in those power struggles, that second phase is usually when a marriage gets destroyed. But the reality is, if you can get past both those pit stops, then you're on your way toward the third and final stage of marriage, which is actual real love, where you get through all of the conflict, you get through all of the power struggles. You get through it, and you get to the place where you actually love each other.
Mark Clark [00:26:05]:
And it's not like wedding love, where you, like, of course you love each other. You've known each other for nine months, and it's so beautiful and perfect. You gotta fast forward 10 years. All the conflict, all the difficulty. So one psychologist, Dr. Hendricks, says this bailing in a marriage during the power struggle stops something beautiful that is struggling to be beautiful into the relationship. You'll be getting rid of your partner, but keeping the problem. It's better to keep the partner and get rid of the problem.
Mark Clark [00:26:33]:
And that's the reality, is all of us have different conflicts. The idea between men and women having the different traits that you both have. Men need to grow out of their Peter Pan syndrome as they get married. That's what I had to do as a young guy. I would be out all the time. Then I got married, and it didn't change in the first year or two. I would still. I got married.
Mark Clark [00:26:52]:
And then all she wanted to do is sit inside and put her little cozy socks on and drink tea and, like, watch the Bachelor on the couch. All right? And I'm like, sitting there on night two, and I start to freak out. I'm like, is this what marriage is? Because I want to go out with my friends and go see like an 11pm movie and then go out and have Burger King or whatever. And it's like, that's what I've done my whole life. And now, day two, I'm snuggled up with tea and socks on, watching the bathroom, freaking out. And so over time, guys gotta grow out of it and grow out of. I'm a young boy for the rest of my life who hangs out with my buddies. Because you start taking responsibility for a woman, you start taking responsibility for finance, you start taking responsibility for a family where you have to be present and you have to be around.
Mark Clark [00:27:33]:
That's what men have to do. That's what a man conflict is all about. And then a woman conflict is different. And a woman conflict is different kinds of things. Because we end up using the Bible constantly when it's trying to address women. It constantly says that you have to be careful about your complaining about being critical about nagging. All right? So men have all kinds of issues that the Bible calls out consistently with women, though. You read the book of Proverbs, and I don't write this stuff.
Mark Clark [00:28:01]:
I just read it to you. So here's the Bible. Proverbs 20:5. It is better to live in a corner of the rooftop than in a house shared with a quarrelsome wife. What? Proverbs 27:15. A quarrelsome wife is like the dripping of a leaky roof in a rainstorm. Proverbs 21. Better to live.
Mark Clark [00:28:23]:
You thought there was like, just half a verse on this. You're like, you can't build a theology on this. That's just one verse. Actually, this is three within, like three chapters. So this guy's really on it.
Mark Clark [00:28:32]:
All right?
Mark Clark [00:28:32]:
I don't know if he had, like, a bad day with his wife or whatever, but he says, better to live in a desert than with a quarrelsome and nagging wife. So this is a theme in the Bible. So here's the thing, ladies, I'm just telling you, you might be a nagger, you might be a complainer, you might be a constant, critical person that just sucks and destroys the spirit out of your husband and the people around you. And I'll tell you what, your family knows it, and they'll never tell it to your face, but they all know it and they talk about it behind your back. So do something. Some self evaluation. Men do some self evaluation about your Peter Pan syndrome, that you gotta grow up and stop spending every weekend with your buddies and take responsibility for your home. And women take responsibility for your nagging and your complaining, because it shrivels the soul of everybody around you.
Mark Clark [00:29:20]:
Welcome to Village Church. Okay, so the reality is, Philippians 2 is one of the best passages for any kind of marriage because it says you need to actually think of other people before you think of yourself. And you need to elevate and think of other people better than yourself. And so if you're looking for a verse to hold on in regard to your marriage, that would probably be one of the best ones. And so the reality is this. When a man desires peace in the context of marriage, here's what we have to understand. That's actually, we tend to go, oh, that's wrong. Because one of the myths of our culture.
Mark Clark [00:29:54]:
And John Gottman did a lot of research on this. And you can read about the John Gottman Institute in Seattle, where he can basically, within 8 to 10 minutes he spends with a couple, he can pick out whether your marriage is gonna survive within a 95% range. And he talks about the myths of marriage, a lot of myths of marriage that what make a good marriage. And one of the myths, he says. Listen to what he says. One of the myths is that we oftentimes talk about conflict and communication, and we put pressure on people to say, you've gotta talk everything out. And if there's a conflict in your marriage, you better get together, you better tell it as it is, you better be assertive, you better tell each other exactly how you're feeling. And you gotta get through this, and you get through it, and you gotta get it all out.
Mark Clark [00:30:31]:
Your actual opinion at any given moment. Be upfront and tell everybody everything that you've done wrong with each other. And Gottman disagrees. And he says, not true. Listen to what he says. He says, plenty of lifelong relationships happily survive, even though the couple tend to shove things under the rug. He says, take Alan and Betty. When Alan gets annoyed at Betty, he turns on espn.
Mark Clark [00:30:53]:
When Betty is upset with Alan, she heads for the mall. Then they regroup and go on as if nothing happened. Never in 40 years of marriage have they sat down to have a dialogue about their relationship. Neither of them could tell you what a validating statement is, yet they will tell you honestly that they're both very satisfied with their marriage and that they love each other deeply and wish for their children as happy a married life as they have shared. He goes on to say that couples simply have different Styles of conflict. Some avoid conflict at all costs. Some fight a lot. And some are able to talk out their differences.
Mark Clark [00:31:27]:
But no one style is necessarily better than the other, as long as the style works for both people. Isn't that freeing? Some of you are afraid, actually, you think, I'm setting you up here. You're like, what? This doesn't sound right. Gottman says that's healthy. Sometimes you just need to bury it and move on and just be like, you know what? We both know what happened. I don't even wanna talk about it. You went shopping. Nice dress.
Mark Clark [00:31:53]:
How was the golf game? Good. Get over here. Right. You never went down into the deepest, darkest realities of what it meant and how it played out 10 years ago. And give me a validating statement. I hear you now. What did I say? Repeat it back to me. Okay.
Mark Clark [00:32:10]:
You said you love. All right. He's saying, maybe that's not for everybody. Some people need that in both couples. But he's saying that's not necessarily how it has to be. Sometimes it's good enough. And so he's saying, every couple's different. And so we've gotta understand, he says, you know what the most important thing about a couple is? You know what the thing that he says, you can tell a couple surviving.
Mark Clark [00:32:30]:
And it's the healthiest reality, aside from all the myths of what you think it is, A good sex life, communication, conflict, money, being in order, all of those things are what's gonna make a great marriage. Gottman disagrees. And he says this. I'll tell you what makes a great marriage. Probably the most widely held misconception about happy marriages, he says, is this is, he says, the determining factor in whether wives feel satisfied in their life and have passion in their marriage. And the determining factor whether husbands feel satisfied in their marriage, both by 70%, is the quality of. Of the couple's friendship. That's the number one issue.
Mark Clark [00:33:08]:
Do you like each other? Are you friends? That I would say in the last five to six years of marriage for Aaron and I has been the thing that has grown the most, that we actually are each other's best friends in the world. We just love being together. We love just doing life together. That friendship is what Gottman says is the most important part of a marriage. Cause you can get through anything if you actually are friends, like deep rooted friends that actually like each other. And he says, but here's four things that kill a marriage. This is what he calls the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Says this criticism is, number one, you always talk about yourself.
Mark Clark [00:33:49]:
You never do what's right for the family. You're so selfish. I can't believe you did that. Criticism, he says, begins to gallop towards separation, defensiveness. If you find defensiveness in your marriage, he says, he can watch a couple and rate these four things and tell you whether they're gonna get divorced. Criticism, defensiveness. The problem isn't me, it's you. Problem isn't me, it's you.
Mark Clark [00:34:10]:
Can you own your piece? No, I don't have a piece. It's you. Third is, he says, is the biggest factor is contempt where you sit. One of you sits at this level of superiority, and you talk down to the other one. You talk down as if you. They're the problem. Contempt is the greatest predictor of divorce and must be eliminated. Gottman says, contempt for your partner.
Mark Clark [00:34:33]:
You are better than them. You are superior to them, and they are there as a second person. In the reality of your family, there is no equality. And last is stonewalling. And stonewalling basically happens when you're in the midst of a conflict, and the person withdraws from the conversation and just stonewalls the. And says, I'm out. Okay. Fifth thing that we need to do in the context of our marriages, and this is a big part of the passage that Paul's talking about, is to have a healthy sex life.
Mark Clark [00:35:01]:
He says, because the temptation is sexual immorality, each should get married. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights. I love that phrase, conjugal rights. This is the one we put up in our. In our fridge. That we have these rights, all right? Over each other and likewise the wife to her husband, all right? The healthy sex life, not only as pleasure, which obviously is something I've talked about a lot, but protection, he's saying, because over time, what's gonna happen is, he says, satan is gonna tempt you to have the wife to not have authority over her own body. But the husband does likewise. The husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does.
Mark Clark [00:35:36]:
I quote the second half of this often to my wife in the mornings. I don't even have authority over in my own body. Just take it. Just take it. It's yours. I don't even. Do not deprive one another, except perhaps for agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer, but then come together so that. Why? So that Satan may not tempt you that the reality of a good sex life is not only about pleasure.
Mark Clark [00:36:00]:
It's not only about procreation, but it's about protection from Satan destroying your marriage. We did a survey as a church, and one of the issues was the question was, if you could tell your spouse one thing to improve your sex life, what would it be? And the women said to the men, up to 62%, we need to connect better emotionally. First. 62% of women responded like that. And then the men said 39% of them, which was the highest, said they were satisfied with quantity but actually had more dissatisfaction with quality, which actually surprised me. So they were saying, quantity is fine the amount of times we do it per week or whatever. So. But it's the quality of it.
Mark Clark [00:36:38]:
It's like, I wanna explore, I wanna kinda, you know, I wanna talk about, you know, and it's kind of this reality of some of you. You don't have the quantity there yet. And the reality is the Bible came along and said, this needs to be a healthy part of your life. Right from Genesis 2, when he makes them naked in the garden and he says, be fruitful and multiply. I made you both naked. Go out, have a bunch of babies, have fun. You're not gonna be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it. If you're having sex once a month, that's not gonna work.
Mark Clark [00:37:05]:
And I can tell you if that's the reality, the husband's certainly not excited. He was made differently. He has testosterone levels for the most part, 99% of the time. And so the reality is you've gotta come together and you gotta go, when am I serving my spouse? When am I doing things for the sake of my spouse, not only necessarily for the sake of me? And sometimes you do that in order to protect. You have a sex life where you've come together. You say, here's some expectations. And I work with couples. I'm like, look, put it on the calendar.
Mark Clark [00:37:35]:
Actually schedule sex out in your calendar. Or you're gonna go by in weeks and not really understand that it didn't happen. And people. Oh, that's unromantic. Listen, sex is not what the movies, you know, you're, like, soaking wet in the rain, and you come in here and you pound, you know, right up against the fridge, and you're like, I can't even handle it. And your clothes get ripped. That's not. Sorry, that might just be me.
Mark Clark [00:38:02]:
But that's not what, like, sex is sometimes. It can be. It's on the calendar. Tuesday at 7. That's just as sexy, baby. You know it's coming. You can prep yourself right like, okay, he's coming home. Get your game face on.
Mark Clark [00:38:19]:
All right, let's do this. And as my wife has said, you know, there's times when it's like, yeah, she's not, like, in the mood, but it's better than being hit by a truck. Meaning, like, there's worse things. So take that as your sex philosophy if you want. I don't know. All right. Better than being hit by a truck. The other day, my kids, I guess, heard about sex in some context where we weren't around and then walked up to my wife and they said, I can't believe you had to do that with dad to have us.
Mark Clark [00:38:58]:
And she's like, you know what? I liked it. And they're like. And they ran out of the room. I was like, what's that? I heard her from four rooms over. What's that? Mm hmm. All right. But here's the thing. It can't be a reward system where you give it to somebody when they're good and you take it away when they're bad.
Mark Clark [00:39:21]:
That will destroy your sex life. And so the reality is we gotta make sure this is a high priority in our life. Number seven. Here's what Dr. Kevin Leeman says about sex, and then I'll move on to number seven. Dr. Kevin Lehman says this. This is really important because often, oftentimes you don't just need a physical connection to actually, you know, to be able to have a good, foundational, flourishing sex life, you need to have the emotional connection as well.
Mark Clark [00:39:49]:
I'm not always saying they happen first. I think a lot of people would say that you have to have the emotional connection first. I'm saying sometimes the emotional connection actually comes out of the physical connection. So it's not what comes first, the chicken or the egg. But Dr. Leeman says this when he works with men and women. He says this. I spend most of my time as a counselor trying to get women more active in the bedroom and trying to get men more active everywhere else in the house.
Mark Clark [00:40:16]:
And I think that's a good balance. Because what he's saying is there is an exhortation for women to understand that, but then there's also an expectation that you can't just, as a man, sit around and expect to have this great sex life and then do nothing in regard to the emotional life, do nothing in regard to the priorities and the needs of the family and the kids and the house and whatever. All of it is gonna feed in together, right? All of it is gonna be playing to those love languages. And making sure you're serving the other person and their needs above your own. Okay, number six, really quick. Union needs to actually be a huge priority in your life. That kind of friendship. I was just down in Palm Springs speaking at a conference.
Mark Clark [00:40:51]:
I just flew in last night. And the reality is, is when I was apart from my wife, even for a day or two, we had been somewhere and we. And we were. We got on, we went to. To the same airport, and she flew home. And I went down there on Friday morning. And even just kind of separating out in the airport, it was kind of like this. Okay, I'll miss you.
Mark Clark [00:41:10]:
And I could see her walking down, and she was like 5, 10 minutes apart from me, and she already got a text. She's like, miss you. I'm like, all right. So it's like this. Like, we really have become this kind of one person. That even when we separate, there's this factor of man. When you're away from your best friend, you actually, I can see like, she pines to be with me. I pine to be with her.
Mark Clark [00:41:33]:
That's out of that union. And that's just the reality of what one flesh actually looks like. Okay, number seven. And then quickly number eight. And I'll pray number seven is the reality of love and respect. The Bible talks about, husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church. And it says, wives, respect your husbands. And I think that's a really big deal.
Mark Clark [00:41:52]:
Men, the way you're supposed to love your wife is to love her as Christ loved church. Selfless. No strippers, no adultery, no cheating, making her the priority over you. That's as Christ did with the church. That's your job as a husband. And you better figure out how to do it. The Bible will exhort you to that. Wives, it says, you better respect your husbands.
Mark Clark [00:42:07]:
Which is hard in our culture. Cause we don't tend to say, I respect you a lot. We say, I love you, I love you, I love you. I don't say respect you. But some of you wives are hacking the reality of respecting your husband. What I see is women going around making of their husbands publicly saying, he doesn't earn enough money. He doesn't do this. He doesn't provide for our family.
Mark Clark [00:42:25]:
He does that wrong. He's a little boy. And you're going around and you use your tongue to destroy and destroy his spirit. And I'm telling you, that is the worst thing you can do for a man. Because a man, even above love, desires respect in life, Respect from his wife, respect from his friends, and the reality is you need to be able to do that. You need to enter into their reality and. And go, man. I'm putting Philippians 2.
Mark Clark [00:42:48]:
I'm putting the object of my affections and needs above mine. When we were dating, Aaron, who's the last person to love anything to do with Lord of the Rings, doesn't even like it. Watched all five movies in the theater five times, and we still couldn't tell you any of the plot. In fact, one day we were driving for nine hours and we were dating. And I was reading Lord of the Rings at the time, and she sat in the passenger seat and read Lord of the Rings to me, all right. And would do voices, all right? She'd be like, I'm Gollum. She'd be like, she did that. She hated every minute of it.
Mark Clark [00:43:14]:
She wouldn't want to read Nicholas Sparks or some nonsense, but she did that for me. That's what you need to do. You need to enter what is your spouse actually. What does that look like? To actually say, I respect them so much that I'm actually going to love them the way that they feel loved versus the way that I feel loved. And if you deprive them of respect, it will kill them. And then the last point is that you have to view your marriage as a covenant. You put Jesus in the center of it, and you understand that this is a covenant. It's not a contract, it's not a commitment, as our culture would have you believe, because those only function on feeling.
Mark Clark [00:43:53]:
But the reality is you enter into marriage. Soren Kierkegaard said the ultimate slavery is the slavery to feelings. And he said, the only way for you to be truly free is to link your feelings to. To an obligation. And the obligation being, I entered into a covenant, and it's not going anywhere. And so passion is beautiful, right? We need passion. We need passion in our marriages. We need to understand that we come together in oneness.
Mark Clark [00:44:18]:
We live for the glory of God, we live for the glory of Christ. We live as a picture of the Gospel, and we enter that into a covenant that transcends what we feel in a given moment. And we say, this is like Christ in the church. And Jesus never walks away from the church. He commits her. He leans into. Of course, there are times in marriages where there are legitimate biblical reasons to separate. Understand that I'm not talking about 99% of the covenant that you enter into.
Mark Clark [00:44:39]:
And you say, this isn't based on feelings, this isn't based on circumstances, and you have an eternal perspective that Says, I'm not in this marriage. When I look at Erin, I wanna disciple her, and she wants to disciple me so that we have a great 80 billion years. I don't want her to just have a good 70 years here and make her into a good person and who has square footage in her house and is safe. I want her to have 75 million years in the presence of Jesus that I helped her have more delight, more pleasure, more of him in the afterlife because of how I helped her get there in this life. That's the eternal perspective that you gotta have as you enter into the covenant of marriage. And that's Paul's concern as he switches to First Corinthians 7. Father, I am grateful for the marriages of our church. I'm grateful that you gave us marriage to show the world a picture of the gospel.
Mark Clark [00:45:24]:
And I pray, even as we reflect on these eight things derived from further study that we've done, that they're good reminders. Every time I talk in marriage counseling, every time I talk to somebody about talking about marriage at church, they always say, man, I'm so glad we did it, because I don't remember those things. I need refreshers on those things. It's constant work in my life to figure these things out. And it's true about me, too. So, Father, I just pray that. That we learn that we have humble hearts and we would actually be changed because of what you teach us in the Scriptures, because of what we understand about our experiences, because of the fact that Jesus as a picture of marriage, came, died, laid down his life for us and rose again to give us the power to actually be able to live marriages like this, where we love and respect each other. To your glory.
Mark Clark [00:46:08]:
Do that among us as a church, and let us be a beacon of hope for the cities we're in. And Jesus, Jesus, great name we pray. Amen.