We come into our wedding day full of hopes and wishes and dreams and desires. And then something on the way back down the aisle happens that transfers those desires and hopes and dreams (which are good and fine) into expectations.
And expectations kill a marriage. We begin to enter into a debt-debtor relationship. He owes me, she owes me, all of this stuff that we put on one another and it robs us of genuine relating, intimacy and real community.
And so, argues Andy Stanley in his sermon series iMarriage, we have to learn three crucial things:
1. Your spouse owes you zip, nada, nothing. As long as expectation drives our marriage, it will destroy intimacy and genuine community.
2. The Scriptures call us to submit to one another not because he or she is so great, but out of reverence for Christ. Because of what Jesus has done for us, we submit to one another.
3. The solution to our desires turned expectations is not to pretend that we don't have desires. It's to keep those desires in the "desires category" and not allow them to turn into expectations...or to return them to the desires category once we realize that we've made the unfortunate transfer.
Stanley sometimes drives me crazy with his inexact-ness, particularly theologically. He's sometimes more of a life-coach than a teacher from the Scriptures.
But this series has some serious wisdom for anyone who's married or on the road to marriage or who thinks that they might get married some day. It's available for free on Itunes.
If you're old you might not know that you can download the Itunes player for free and listen on your computer sans Ipod. Once you've downloaded the Itunes player, go to the Itunes store and search North Point Ministries and you can download the 3-part series called "iMarriage." It's all free. Enjoy!
2 comments:
quoted you from this one in a recent post about lies from Walt Disney... thanks for the insight! :)
thanks, kristen! always good to have stuff i steal from other people get further stolen somewhere else..
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