of it and say, “Hhmmm, I wonder what kind of tree this is.” You immediately know it’s an apple tree; but stay with me; you also know that this tree is ‘appleistic’ all the way down to its roots. If it didn’t have ‘appleism’ in its roots, it wouldn’t grow apples as fruit-right? You’ll never plant peach pits and get apples. If you plant peach pits and get apples--run fast; run far; something’s happened to the universe, and it’s probably not good. Now Jesus is saying, (You’ve got to get the concept here.) that in a fruit tree, there’s an unbreakable, organic connection between the fruit of the tree and the roots of the tree. The organic composition of the roots actually causes this kind of fruit to be produced. And in His illustration, the fruit is meant to represent your words and your behavior; and the roots are meant to represent what’s in your heart. Now that illustration that I’ve just given you literally tells you everything you need to know about why marriages go bad and everything you need to know about how marriages get solved in one stunning, eloquent Messiah-given illustration. It’s stunning! You say, “Paul, help me.” Well, let me push the illustration. Pretend with me that in my backyard in Philadelphia, I have an apple tree, and every year it grows hard, dry, pulpy, brown, inedible apples--organic hockey pucks. And it happens year after year, and it’s sort of frustrating because we can’t really eat them, and they end up just falling to the ground and rotting. And pretend that my dear wife, Luella, comes to me, and she says, “Paul, it doesn’t make any sense for us to have an apple tree, and we can never eat the apples. Can’t you do something about our apple tree?” Well, I love this woman; I want to please her; and so I think, and I ponder, and on a Friday night, I say to Luella, “Tomorrow I’m going to fix our tree.” Luella’s a little bit confused, but she’s kind of excited, and she says, “Okay, Paul, that would be great.” Saturday morning, she looks out the window, and she sees me carrying these items, pay careful attention here. I’m carrying a big tall ladder; I’m carrying some branch cutters; I’m carrying a pneumatic nail gun, and three bushels of Red Delicious apples. And I very carefully cut off all those organic hockey pucks; and symmetrically, I nail three bushels of Red Delicious apples on that tree. If you hadn’t seen me do that and you drive by the house, you would see this fruit laden tree, and you’d say, “Oh my goodness, this man must be the horticulturist of the century.” If you’re my wife, what are you thinking? You’re thinking, “This is the big one; the doctor said, ‘He’d be this way if he lived.’” Now think with me; what’s going to happen to those apples? Well, they’re going to rot because they are not actually attached to the life-giving resources of the tree. But, stay with me; even more profoundly, what kind of apple is that tree going to produce the next season? …Hard, dry, pulpy, inedible apples, because if that happens season after season, there’s something systemically wrong with the tree, even to its roots, and if you don’t change that, you’re not going to get a new harvest of fruit. Welcome to your marriage! Now I’m deeply persuaded that most of what couples try to do to change their marriage and most of what is written, even in Christian marriage books, is nothing more or less than apple nailing. And I can give you the three most often used apple-nailing strategies in marriage. Don’t try this at home. Here’s the first one, threat. You say, “Dear, I don’t know how long I can stay in this kind of marriage? I don’t know how long I can deal with your stuff. I think about my escape.” Now, what are you trying to do there? You’re trying to raise a big enough threat, that that threat will alter, in a lasting way, the behavior of another human being. Hear what I’m about to say, “If by your tone of voice, if by the look on your face, if by your pointed finger, if by threatening language, you have any capacity to change your spouse, Jesus would not have had to come.” It doesn’t work. No one in this room, including this man, is the fourth member of the Trinity! It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. It just introduces greater tension and greater disappointment because you’re trying to do something you have no ability to do whatsoever! Husbands and wives, hear me; you have no ability whatsoever to change your spouse; zip, none, nada. Change is always an act of grace. What about manipulation? You try to find something that that other person likes and wants, and you hold it out in front of them, and you say, “If you do this…, I’ll do this...” It’s a nasty bargain because you’re not actually getting love from that person; you’re not actually getting personally motivated service or romance; you’ve bought them.
Transcript: Session 2
WHAT DID YOU EXPECT?
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