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Published: 19 October 2017

For all the books, workshops, seminars and “weekends to remember” that are promoted you’d think that marriage was the most important thing.  Unless you currently have children, then work on your marital relationship can be postponed while you focus on your children.  They are obviously the most important.  Or…not.  I suggest that we can “work on our marriage to a fault.”  What?  With all the breakups, dysfunction and trouble in the home, how could that be?  I say this because changing certain behaviors to make marriage better are good but not ultimate.  Permit an example from another field.  If you were a doctor and someone came to you only wanting relief from symptoms while refusing to deal with their disease, what would you say?  You’d probably give them something for their symptoms AND want to deal with the underlying cause.  This is the real problem with a lot of “marriage work.”  If you are married and your spouse says, “We need to work on our marriage,” it would be a good idea to address the symptoms that raised the subject.  However, the real work of marriage work is the work of personal transformation.  We need to work at becoming the kind of people who can live in harmony with love and respect.  You may have noticed, love and/or respect is very hard “on demand.”  If the underlying issues that have caused selfishness and/or disrespect are unresolved, trying harder with a new set of behaviors will be short-lived.  The message Sunday will be for married and single persons…young and old.  We’ll be looking at the source of our behaviors and consider how to “Become People of Love.”

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Published: 18 October 2017

We need to be very careful with our language.  For example, if you catch someone in a lie, do you say, “That doesn’t seem to be the truth” or “You’re a liar!”  How do you talk to yourself?  For example, if you do not succeed at something you try to do, do you say, “What did I learn from that failure?” or “I am a stinking failure.”  In both cases, one response acknowledges the situation for what it is.  The other response makes the matter an issue of identity.  Calling someone a “liar” is a severe judgment.  Calling yourself a “failure” is overstatement motivated by the enemy—not by our loving and good Father.  I’m bringing this up today in anticipation of the message for Sunday about Saul/Paul’s trip to Jerusalem.  You can read about it in Acts 9.  I’ll just tell you up front, it doesn’t go well for the most part.  He had to leave Damascus because people wanted to kill him and he had to leave Jerusalem for the same reason.  If enough people want to kill you, you might start to ask, “What is wrong with me?  What did I do wrong?  Why am I such a failure?”  These would be rather normal questions for a person in that situation.  But, who really failed in these situations?  Was it Paul or those who were trying to kill him?  What does this study teach us about kingdom life?  What can we learn from Paul’s example?  Is it possible that doing God’s will could make life more complicated?  Lord willing, we’ll see you Sunday.