say something else?” I want to say, “No, no, please don’t.” “Daddy, what I mean is--what does the Bible say about it?” I went into my bedroom, and these two thoughts hit me. First, my pride reared up; I want to be a hero to my son, and it was embarrassing that he saw through that moment and felt the tension that Luella felt. But hear what I’m about to say. That didn’t last very long. I immediately then thought, “How could it possibly be that God would love me this much that he’d give one twit of care about that little minor moment in the Tripp bathroom?” That just wasn’t a Paul moment, or a Luella moment, or a Darney moment; God was in that moment. Now think about this, this is one moment, in one room, on one morning, in one house, on one street, in one neighborhood, in one city, in one state, in one nation, on one continent, in one hemisphere, and one globe in the universe, and God is in that moment. That is love of such magnificence; I can’t wrap my brain around it. Now why is that important? Oh, hear what I’m about to say--because you don’t live in big moments. Most of us won’t be written up in history books; you only make three or four big decisions your entire life. Several decades after we die, the people we leave behind will struggle to remember the details of our lives. If God doesn’t rule your mundane, He doesn’t rule you because that’s where you live. The character of a marriage isn’t set in three or four big moments; the character of a marriage is set in ten- thousand little moments. I would ask you, right now, be honest; “What’s happening in the little moments your marriage?” What wouId I see if I watched the video of the last six weeks of the little moments of your marriage? The little moments of your marriage are profoundly important precisely because they are the little moments, because it happens to be the address where your marriage lives. Now I think that’s where we get in trouble. A husband will say something nasty to his wife in a little moment, but will walk down the hallway and say, “She knows I love her; it was just a little moment.” A wife will lash out in bitterness in a little moment that she’s carried for a while, but she’ll later say to herself, “It was just a little moment; he knows I love him.” Yes, it is true that those little moments are significant and important because that happens to be the place where your marriage lives. I have little interest in the time that we have together to talk about the big moments of your marriage because that’s not where you live. But I have lots of interest in shining the searching light of Scripture on the little moments of your marriage. Now I want to say something before we jump in about the Bible that will be our guide. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this or not, but your Bible isn’t arranged by topic. That frustrates some of you. You wish it was arranged by topic with little tabs at the end of the page so you can go to your topic of interest. The Bible isn’t arranged by topic because of divine editorial error; the Bible is arranged the way it is because of divine intention; the Bible is essentially a grand redemptive story. Maybe the best way to say it is that the Bible is a theologically annotated story. It’s a story with God’s essential notes. Now here’s what this means. If all you do is go to the marriage passages to learn about marriage, you’ll miss the vast majority of the information that the Bible has for you on this profoundly important relationship because that’s not the way the Bible is arranged. To the degree that every passage tells me things about God, and things about myself, and things about life in a fallen world, and things about the disaster of sin, and things about the operation of grace--to that degree, every passage tells me something about every dimension of my life. That’s the way the Bible works. And so I want to take you on a bit of a journey through passages I think are so wise and so essential that I am persuaded that you can’t really understand why marriage is a struggle and how marriage difficulties get solved without these passages. We’re really only going to exam three things, three very important things, that maybe they’re things that you didn’t ask yourself, and you haven’t thought to consider. Here’s the first one. A marriage of unity, understanding, and love is not rooted in romance--but worship. A marriage of unity, and understanding, and love is not rooted in romance--but in worship. Now, if you’re a woman in the room, and you know who you are, don’t think this is another Christian speaker whose disrespecting romance. I love romance! I’m a very romantic man. In fact, when I was doing my doctoral
Transcript: Session 1
WHAT DID YOU EXPECT?
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