Christian Marriage #11 Building A Strong Marriage

So this morning, after a little more than three months off and on, we're going to be finishing our sermon series on Christian marriage. This will be our 11th week and final week. We've covered a lot of ground over the last couple of months, and I'm hopeful that our time studying what God says about marriage will bear fruit in the years to come. I recognize that a lot of what was said, a lot of things I've said are not entirely unfamiliar to us, but I also realize that they're seeds planted and that they take time to grow. And I told you at the beginning of the sermon series, the reason I wanted to preach this sermon series to our congregation is because there's many of us who are young and newly married. And what I want is for you to learn from Scripture, from the beginning of your marriages, what God requires of you, what he expects of you, and what he commands you to do, so that you don't fall into the snares of the world and of the devil. And so my hope is that in the years to come, we'll grow as we strive to become better husbands and wives.

The title of our sermon this morning is Building a Strong Marriage. Now, if you were to search on Google, 10 tips for building a strong marriage. How do I strengthen my marriage? There'd be no lack of answers, right? You wouldn't even have to get halfway through the question you're asking before Google would know that that was the question you were asking. And they'd say, here's 10 tips. And you can go and you can read on it. Some of the advice is helpful. Things like humility and forgiveness. and listening and intimacy come up, even from unbelievers. My goal this morning in addressing this topic is not to give you a top ten list of things to do to strengthen your marriage. The Bible doesn't break it down for us like that. It doesn't say, when you get married, be sure to do these five things. And the reason that's the case is because we need a lot more than simply a list of things to do. Many of us are quite capable of doing the things we're supposed to do while our hearts don't have any interest in

loving those things. Those of you who have children, have you ever had children go and do the things they're supposed to do with a grumbling heart? And as a parent, are you satisfied with it? You go, no. You want their hearts. The same is true of our God. He wants our hearts. And so when we think of building a strong marriage, we have to consider our hearts and what we want. Not what we say, but what we do and also importantly, why we do it. And so my goal is to get each of us this morning those who are married or preparing for marriage, to consider our own contributions to our marriage and to see if our contributions are actually in the direction of pursuing a stronger godly marriage or if they're just enough to get by. Whether or not we're paying lip service to wanting to build a strong marriage but really giving ourselves to the things we really want to see grow. That's our purpose this morning.

Our text is 2 Corinthians 9, verse 6. Would you please stand as we read the word of the Lord? This is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. He who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and he who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. Now you might be thinking to yourself, that's not a sermon text, or a marriage text anyway. And I say, well, a couple of times through this sermon series, There have been truths that are applicable to our marriages that are not exclusively applicable to our marriages. And this is one of those passages. This is a very simple truth, a universal truth that God has written into this world from creation. The principle of sowing and reaping. The creation mandate, when God spoke to Adam and Eve and told them what they would need to do, having been made and placed in a garden, teaches us this principle of sowing and reaping.

In Genesis 1, where God was debating about the sixth day, creating man, he says, we need to create man because there's no one to cultivate the ground. Now, what does it mean to cultivate the ground? Well, it means that you need to cultivate the ground. You need to plant, you need to sow, so that you have food to eat. After creating Adam and Eve, God speaks to them directly, and he says, be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it. Sow in your wife, as we've talked about previously. In your marriage, sow seed that bears fruit, children, so that you can sow more seed in the world, rule over it, and subdue it. And so from the beginning, God's intention has been for us, his people, to reap what we sow. Adam was supposed to cultivate the land so that he would have food to eat. This is how it's always been. Now it is true that in Scripture there are times when we reap what we don't sow.

Can you think of times like that? Perhaps when the Israelites were in the wilderness and they had no food and they grumbled and they complained and what was God's answer? Was it go plant? No, his answer wasn't go plant. His answer was, I'll provide manna and go out and get enough each day. Or maybe when Elijah was in hiding in the cave and how did he get his food? The crows brought it to him. Now could you imagine birds bringing you meat? and wanting to eat it, but this was Elijah, and this was Lord's provision to him. Or, in the New Testament, Jesus feeding the crowds. The disciples thought, sowing and reaping, right? Jesus, it's late, and the people are tired and they're hungry. Send them into the villages so that they can, what, spend their money to buy their food. Jesus says, no, you feed them. And so there are times in Scripture, and many other than the ones I just mentioned, where we do reap.

Things we don't sow. And yet the principle remains that we ought to expect to get out of our lives or our marriages what we put into them. This idea of sowing and reaping, Paul teaches again in 2 Thessalonians 3, verse 10. He says, For even when we were with you, we used to give you this order. If anyone is not willing to work, then he is not to eat either. Those of you who are parents, this is good instruction. This is a tool you have in your basket. If you have a child who's like, I'm not going to do my work, they can have bread, they can have water, but they're not entitled to have food like the rest of the family if they're not willing to work for it. You teach them a good lesson if you teach them that there is a direct correlation between the amount of effort they put into their work in the day and the reward of good food at the end of it. In other words, Scripture teaches us, if you will not sow,

If you will not do the work of sowing, you may not reap. You may not take from other people what they've worked for. What does Paul in another place say to the thief? The thief who steals shall steal no more, but rather work with his hands so that he has food to eat and what else? Something to share. And so we as Christians should take this principle of sowing and reaping and understand that our job is to live. and to provide for our own needs. Now, am I saying that God doesn't use us to provide for our needs? No. He makes us able to work. He gives us work to do. And those are the means by which we're supposed to be provided for. Our ambition as Christians, as people created in God's image, men and women, is not to live off of the work of other people, but to provide for ourselves. And not only to provide for ourselves, but as Christians, To reflect some part of the character of God who not only provides for himself, but for those who haven't got the things they need enough to share. And so in Thessalonica, where Paul says, we used to give you this order, if anyone is not willing to work, then he's not to eat either. Paul was dealing with a bunch of busybodies, a bunch of people who were talking about work, looking like work, but not actually producing work. And so I want to draw a distinction for you here, and this is all going to come to bear in our marriages later.

it's not enough for you to talk about the work you need to do, or that you want to do, or that you intend to do. Whose is that? Oh, it was so loud I thought it was up here. That's Jairo, everybody. It's Jairo's phone, actually. He doesn't make that sound. So, if you let your phone ring, I will embarrass you. So talking about working, how we intend to work, what we plan to do, is not at all the same thing as getting to work. I've often said about hard work of men, I said the man that won't work and the man who can't work, there's no difference between them. Because in the end, they'll both have the same amount of fruit, which is none. If you're capable of working and you refuse to work, if you can sow but you don't, you won't have anything to show for it. And you're no different than the man who can't work. And so Paul instructs us not to talk about working, but to work, to sow. If we want food, we should work for it. If we won't,

can't or don't, then it'll be evident on our dinner plates. This is sowing and reaping as the scripture describes it to us and teaches us. We could also describe this as being very basic economics. This is like an economics lesson, right? If you want something, what do you have to do? You have to work for it. When I was in economics in high school, they taught us this acronym, TINSTAFL. Now you guys probably know what it means. What's it mean? There's no such thing. as a free lunch. Now, maybe they didn't teach you tinstaff. Well, it's kind of a crummy acronym after all, but it helped me. There's no such thing as a free lunch. What was that meant to teach us? Well, it's meant to teach us this sowing and reaping principle. Anything that you receive had to be produced. It doesn't come out of nowhere. The only one who can create out of nothing is God. If we want something, we have to work for it. If we give up or we grumble when our work is hard or seemingly fruitless,

then our reward for our work will be commensurate with the work that we put in. This is the reality of our lives. Work hard, and you'll enjoy abundance. If you do just enough work to squeak by, then you'll struggle to make ends meet. What I want to say to you is, you may be sitting here thinking, that's not how it works in our society. And I go, that's a shame. Because this is how it should be. We should love this principle of sowing and reaping. It should motivate us to get up in the morning and go out and do something to produce a profit, to make a return, to not bury our talent in the ground as the unfaithful servant did. You remember when the master came to that unfaithful servant, what did he tell him? He said, you could have done this minimal amount of sowing. You could have put my money in the bank, and I at least would have received interest.

But the slave's answer was, you were a cruel and harsh master, reaping where you didn't sow. And so I'm just here to give you back what's yours. And while the other disciples, who multiplied their talents, received more talents, that man, even what he had, was taken away from him. He was cast out because he didn't sow. And so when reaping time came, there was nothing for him. It is true that our society is running away from this principle just about as fast as we can. It's very easy to see. It's very easy to despise. But we need to be careful. Instead of simply despising the foolishness and the wickedness of those making these decisions, we need to guard ourselves that we don't follow in their footsteps. Because this isn't simply an economic lesson. And before we were doing this economically in our society, we were doing it morally. Sexual debauchery of every kind has overtaken our society, and it's not something that's happened in the last 10 years or the last 15 years. Sexual immorality

overtook our society and became acceptable decades ago, before many of us in this room were even born. And today, we are reaping the fruit of what was sown. Think of it today. When you hear someone talk about being divorced, are you shocked by the news? Is there any visceral response left in you to the news that someone's marriage has fallen apart when you hear about it? No. What is your response when... A young couple that's not married is living together and fornicating. I think many of us have followed the wicked in our land and saying, that's just what people do. And because we've done that, in turn, it's become what we do in the church. Here we are, Christians, and say, do we have a response, any sort of disgust, any sort of, oh no, when you hear of divorce? Like, well, that's...

I want that to be what happens to me. I'm sorry. It's too bad for you. You'll make it. It'll be okay. When it comes to sexual promiscuity, we go, that's just what, I mean, that's just the world we live in. That's just what happens. I mean, Christians struggle, you know. Brothers and sisters, it's not always been this way. We're reaping what's been sown, and at the same time, we're sowing, and we will reap the fruit of the things we sow in our marriages, not just financially, but spiritually and sexually. Where we look at divorce and go, man, that's too bad. The scripture tells us that God hates it. He hates it. Do we hate it? Maybe for ourselves we hate it. But when it comes to other people, well, I mean, what can I do? You can hate it. You can run and flee from it. I was talking to John before the service and I was telling him about this. And I said, you know,

If you want to test this and see if I'm right, the next time someone tells you they're divorced, just somebody at work or at the park or wherever you go, look at them when they say they're divorced and say, I am so sorry. That must have destroyed your life. And see how they respond. And see how scared you are to say anything about it that's like, that wasn't a good thing that happened. They'll brush it off and say, no, no, it's no big deal. We're better off that way. We're still friends. But we don't learn these things from Scripture. This is not how the Bible speaks of divorce.

And so before we're quick to judge those who've gone before us making foolish decisions in the things they've sown, whether that's financially or morally, we need to guard ourselves that we don't simply follow in their footsteps, becoming inoculated against this principle of sowing and reaping. If you want to have a strong and godly marriage, you can't fill your eyes and your hearts and your minds with all kinds of lusts and desires that sole purpose is to erode away your commitment to your spouse. You may not do it and expect to get something good. You can't get figs, Jesus says, off of a thorn tree. And so if you plant and cultivate a thorn tree of lusts in your heart, you will not have a strong, godly marriage. Why? Because you haven't sown the seeds of a godly, strong marriage. The work was hard. It was unpopular. If you don't do it, you will reap what you sow, for better or for worse.

And so when we consider what God calls us to as husbands and wives and our desire to build a strong marriage and we put that together and marry it with this principle of sowing and reaping, what should be produced is a strong desire to sow bountifully in our homes and in our marriages. That's what it should produce. That's what our children should see. That's what our spouses should enjoy and what we should enjoy from them. We do this primarily for the Lord, not just so we can have a happy marriage. But as we seek the Lord in this way, doing what he's designed us to do, sowing in the gardens he's given us to sow in, we will reap. In our text, Paul gives us two different ways of sowing, sparingly or bountifully. So not only is the principle of sowing and reaping something that the scripture teaches us, it also teaches us that the way we sow matters. If we sow sparingly, Or if we sow bountifully, we will reap what we get. It's not enough for us to content ourselves and say, yeah, yeah, I'm working on having a godly marriage. I'm not looking at pornography, and I come home for dinner, or I take care of the kids, and I'm doing what's required, and I'm doing what I have to. That's not sowing bountifully. That's sowing sparingly. And you will get the fruit of it. And those of you who are young, there's lots of excess time and energy and life in you.

If you squander it, there will come a time in your life when you're older. And I don't mean old like 60 or 70. I mean old like 35 or 40. Like you've been married for 10 years and you're like, man, this is hard. This is tough. Don't decide to sow later. Sow now. Sow bountifully now. We need to give attention to how much and how well we sow in our marriages. You could think of square foot gardening. Are any of you guys familiar with square foot gardening? When I started gardening, I got into square foot gardening. It's the hipster way of gardening, so you know. It's for people who don't have a big area to plow up and to plant and have nice rows to walk down between with grass and all that. It's when it's like, I've got a six foot by ten foot plot of dirt, and that's all the space I've got to grow. But I don't want to just grow like six plants.

And so the whole premise of square foot gardening, the question it seeks to answer is, how many tomato plants can you plant in one square foot of dirt? And those of you who are gardeners might say, well, you're not supposed to plant a tomato plant every 12 inches because when they grow up, they get to be these really big things, right? They need room. But square foot gardening says, we know that, and we know that the plants will be stressed because they don't have the room to spread out the way they normally would. But if you have three plants that take up all of this room and are very healthy and produce they're fruit, that's good. But if you take that same amount of space and you plant three times as many plants there, there will be more plants, you'll have more work to do, and at the end of it, you'll have what? More tomatoes. You said less. No. I did it. What? Apparently. I'm a hipster. Thanks. You can tell by my nice long beard and my craft beer, right? I'm a reformed hipster. No, yeah, that would mean... Thank you.

Glad you guys are so up on those cultures. My experience, and the aim of Square Foot Gardening, apparently I'm better at it than Abram, is that you end up with more fruit on the whole, even though you end up with less per plant. And the goal, after all, of having a garden, I mean, what's the point of having a garden if it doesn't produce fruit? I mean, it's just a lot of work then. For what purpose? The point of having a garden is so that you have tomatoes in the fall or squash or cucumbers or zucchini or peppers or whatever it is you like. You want as much of it as you can have. We understand this in our gardens. This whole idea of square foot gardening says get as much as you can if you have a limited space. Sow bountifully. When you plant your carrots, just take the bag and spread them out and the whole ground will be covered with your little carrot sprouts.

And they can't all grow there, so what do you do? You come in and you pluck them out when they get about this big, and you put them on your salad, and you do that for like a week or two until they're thinned out sufficiently that the carrots can all grow. You don't plant just enough seeds to produce what you want. You plant way more. This is what it means to sow bountifully. The goal of bounty is not just a couple of tomatoes or a healthy tomato plant. I'll tell you, whether you have a beautiful, big, lush tomato plant or whether you have one that's struggling to get by, it's going to die when the first frost comes and it's not going to give you any more fruit. So get as much as you can out of it before the frost comes. We need to be honest with ourselves about how we're sowing, how much we're sowing. And the reason I say we have to be honest is because we have to make this determination based not on what we say we want,

or what we say we're going to do, but on actually what's been done, what we've actually produced. If a big fat guy was to tell you how to lose weight, you probably wouldn't be as inclined to listen to him as someone who's in shape, right? Now is it possible that the big fat guy who never works out knows as much as the skinny guy who actually does the work? Perhaps. But what's the difference? One of them actually does it. The other one doesn't. So who are you more inclined to trust? I'm inclined to trust the one who actually does it because they're going to be able to speak to the difficulty of the work in a way that the big sloppy guy is not going to be able to because he doesn't do it. Oh, you want to lose weight? You need to eat like this. You need to do like this. You need to exercise like that. And he hasn't been motivated by all the stuff he's told you to do it. So he's not going to be able to tell you what to do when you don't want to get up at 6 a.m. or go for a run or not eat your ice cream or whatever it is.

We don't need to measure what our intentions are or what our desires are. We need to measure and evaluate what sowing we've actually done. Why would we lie to ourselves? Why don't our actions match our intentions? Why do we say we want to sow bountifully but end up sowing sparingly? Well, simply because it's hard. It's straight up hard work. Going out and sowing sparingly doesn't require nearly as much sacrifice, time, effort as sowing bountifully. And that's why we do it. For those of you who are married, let me ask you a question. I want you to be honest to yourselves about the answer to it. When are you most likely to sow in your marriage? When are you most likely, you husbands, to love your wives? You wives, when are you most likely to be respectful to your husbands? You'd like to say all the time. That's what it should be, right? But it's not what it is. When are you most likely to invest in your marriage? Here's a couple of answers.

First, when you want something. Second, when there's a conflict and you want it to go away. Third, when you have time and energy, when it's easy. These are the times we invest in our marriages, but we have busy seasons and we have hard seasons. And those are true. And yet if we were to map out when we put the most effort into our marriages, I'm convinced the truth would be in line with the answers I've given. When we want something, when there's a problem, or when it's easy. So is that sowing bountifully or sparingly? I'd submit to you that's sowing sparingly. When it comes to your desires, you want something, it's a lot of work to get it from your spouse. Maybe easier somewhere else. Go find it there. When there's conflict, you want it to go away. Where do you go? What do you do? You patch up the problem with your spouse. Just enough.

So you can go back and do whatever it is you want to do until the next conflict comes up, you know, until the next wheel falls off. You have to deal with it. Or you romanticize with yourself and perhaps get your spouse to believe that you really intend to do it, but you're just busy right now. You're just tired right now. You will. You want to. You're going to. Later. This is sowing sparingly. And we will get out of our marriages. We will reap what we sow. And if we sow in the way I've just described, we won't have a bountiful harvest. If we're just trying to keep it calm, keep it together, get through the day, make sure all of the responsibilities are fulfilled, we aren't sowing bountifully. And I haven't even begun to speak about the effect of children on marriages and how much they complicate this work. In one sense, I think couples, you get married and they have kids and they think, kids are going to strengthen our marriage. And that's not necessarily true.

Kids will make you and your spouse work together, logistically at least, because you're busy. There's not enough of that excess time and energy like I was talking about earlier with newlyweds. All of a sudden, the schedules and the demands and the sleepless nights and more food gets consumed and they broke that thing and they got to get to school and what about sports and they got to need to get to the doctor and all that starts, you know, it makes a husband and wife at some point, depends. It's different for different couples how many kids they have to have, but at some point, if you have children, they will force you to have some communication with your spouse. You will just have to talk about who's doing what because there's too much for you to get done without talking about it. Kids can take up a lot of time and a lot of energy, and they do require you to work with your spouse, but this is not the work of sowing that I'm talking about. Yes, all that needs to be done, but don't mistake that work, those necessities of life,

For being the things that will build a strong marriage. They're not. Think of it this way. The goal of having children is to raise them up such that they can leave your house. What marital fruit will there be to harvest when they're gone? Or are you afraid of that day? Of becoming empty nesters? This question is a good indicator of how we've sown. When the kids are gone, will it be a season of new hobbies? Or will it be a season of harvest? That's the question that's set before us. I know many men who've worked hard all the years of their lives taking care and providing for their children, and now their kids are gone. They go visit their grandkids and stuff, but now they've got all this free time on their hands. And it's like they're free of their wife now. They're free of having to interact with her. They've cultivated over decades of raising children a garden that only deals with logistics. And once the pressures of the children are gone, it's like they're single.

I know the idea of being an empty nester is foreign to most everyone in this room because precious few of you have any kids out of the house yet, let alone all of them. But that day will come for all of us who are married and who have kids. At least it should. Your kids shouldn't live with you forever. You should want them to grow up and become adults and move out and start their own families and give you grandchildren. But will the state of your marriage be then? The principles that work financially with regard to retirement work the same with marriage. If you want to have an enjoyable financial peace, rest, life when the kids are gone, you can't wait till then to start investing and saving for that day. It's too late. When do you have to save for the future? Very simply, Andy says right now, and I say yes, and the way I describe it is when you don't have the money to. That's when you have to invest. When you don't have the excess income, you don't feel like you can yet. That's when you have to do it.

That's when you have to sow so that you can reap later. Same is true in our marriages. Kids make you busy. Work makes you busy. You're trying to figure out how to be married. You're trying to figure out how to take care of a house. You're trying to figure out how to get stable into your career or what your career should be. These are real questions that we all face in our lives. Don't neglect your marriage because of them. Work out both, all of those questions and work at sowing in your marriage or there won't be a harvest when you want there to be. There'll be barrenness and anger and disappointment and bitterness. And I don't desire and God doesn't desire and hasn't taught you that that's what you should expect, want, or pursue. And so in conclusion, we should expect the strength and the godliness of our marriages over the long haul to be a direct outworking of the work that we put into them. How do you build a strong marriage? Very simply, work at it. Don't put it off.

Don't work at it just when it's convenient or fun. Sow seed every day. Now, what in the world does that mean? You could all go away and say, the pastor told me I'm supposed to work on my marriage, but he didn't tell me what to do, and I'm not sure where to go. And while I said I'm not going to give you a list, and I don't intend to, I have exactly one application. And it's not because I think there's only one application. It's because I think it's probably, for the most of us, the most important one. What does it mean to sow bountifully in your marriage? What I simply want to say to you is time. You have to spend time working at it. Get off of your phones. Get off of the internet. Spend time with your spouse. Listen and get to know one another. It's very easy for a man and woman not long after they're married to realize that they don't speak the same language.

She cares about relationships and emotions, and the man cares about truth and efficiency. And what do we have to talk about? Everything under the sun. Because you guys are nothing alike. The problem is you don't know how to talk about it. How do you learn to talk about it? Well, the same way you learn how to do everything else in life, you practice. This is the only way. Well, it's hard. Well, we get in fights when we talk. Welcome to the club. Do it anyway. Listen and get to know one another. Enjoy each other's company. Some husbands and wives have a lot in common and some don't. As I look out at you, I think some of you guys are similar and some of you are very different. My wife and I fall in the category of being very different. We still got to work it out. We still try to. We still misunderstand each other and argue and get frustrated and have to apologize and ask for forgiveness. We're both inclined. It's easier for either one of us to just be like, yeah, I won't worry about that right now.

Learn to enjoy each other's company and the benefits of marriage. Those things you were looking forward to and anticipating with great earnestness while you were single, you're married, enjoy it. Spend time planning and doing things together. There's so much more to your marriage than simply work and logistics. I have a few friends, two of them are sitting right here, two of my best friends, and the things I've learned from them is that they waited and they worked really hard and then they waited until too late in their lives to go on vacations. I think that's what they would tell me, spend time with their family.

I'm younger than them, and I'm just like them. I don't have any time to go and do anything fun. I've got to go work. I've got to work. That's what I may do, and that's what I enjoy doing, and it's what I'm good at. And I feel useless when I don't have work to do. But I've learned from these men, who I think learned early in life, to invest in their marriages and to love their wives and spend time with them, to go do things with them, even if it causes fights in the planning process. Go on dates. Plan out and do projects together in the home. You can talk logistically about how to get the kids to school and how to get the groceries bought and who's going to clean the bathroom. But you should talk about what the bathroom remodel is going to look like or what the deck that we're going to build looks like or what you want to plant in the garden this year. Then the fights begin. Sinner. In our society, we spend so much time interacting with people who aren't right in front of us through our phones.

And we feel as though we have to be connected constantly to everyone else except the people that are closest to us and actually deserve the majority of our attention. We're quick to sit on our phones and pay attention to people we probably have never met or have no relationship with and have not spoken a real in-time word to them instead of our spouse. Why? Because it's easier. It's more comfortable. You get your dopamine hit. That's sowing sparingly. Spend the time to learn how to communicate with your spouse. Spend the time getting in arguments and working out the reconciliation. Don't just talk about the logistics, but talk about what's on your heart. Talk about your joys and your sorrows, your burdens and your hopes. These are the things that will build a strong marriage, and they don't happen overnight. Like many things, you'll work, and you'll sow, and you'll build, and it'll take time for it to bear fruit. And this is exactly what Scripture tells us.

It says that the farmer sows in hope of what? Of a great harvest. Months, months after he sows and he tends and he cultivates in hope of a harvest in the future. Don't take away what I'm saying and say, oh, well, he said if we talked, we'd have a better marriage. Yeah, you'll feel like it's getting worse for a while. Just ignore that feeling. Trust me and the older men that have gone before us and scripture and do the work. Don't settle for a barren marriage. I was going to say something else, but I'm not going to, so let's pray.