10 Obstacles Every Successful Marriage Overcomes

if y'all don't know a little bit background about us stephanie and i we have been married for 11 years we actually got married after knowing each other for three months uh i would not necessarily recommend that but when you got somebody like stephanie you just run after it and you do that and you make it happen and so it's been 11 years since then and it's been fantastic as scott mentioned we are the parents of 10 year old twins jason and joelle and having twins any other twin parents in the building any other 20 parents in the building we are praying for you if yours a little man was that rough for the first couple years we'll talk about that a little bit today uh but what we want to talk about today is 10 obstacles every successful marriage overcomes 10 obstacles that every single successful marriage uh overcomes uh also steph give a little bit of your credentials who you are and why you're qualified to talk about this other than being married to me of course yeah um i have a degree in counseling not just any degree a phd just tell him okay that's because he he did help a lot because we had infants at the time yeah couldn't happen really i want you to tell people you have a phd because we're still paying for it and sure you know you like to show off things you're paying for right yeah and uh yep and i teach uh couples therapy uh in a graduate program at jessup and um i'm also a therapist so i work with couples as well yeah so this basically needs to be me interviewing her and letting her share all the knowledge uh if you come to any of our marriage conferences in the past you know that she drops bombs at these things so i'm looking forward to hearing what she has to say but there's an interesting passage of scripture in the book of amos and there's this one little statement and it says this the two people walk together unless they have agreed to do so another version of the scripture says do two walk together unless they have agreed this word agree gives the word picture of two individuals that have joined forces to achieve a common goal that's exactly what marriage is it's two individuals who are joining forces they're bringing the best of who they are in order to achieve some common goal they're joining forces in order to build a family they're joining forces in order to support one another they're joining forces in order to live out their faith and achieve some dream but here's the problem most marriages unfortunately get to a point where the individuals aren't joining in forces trying to accomplish something together but they find themselves as opposing forces amen somebody and what do we do when we find ourselves in this space where we are opposing forces because it is inevitable it will happen but what we discover is and what amos says that if we learn to agree if we join forces we can walk in the same direction to achieve and have the life that god wants us to have i believe and i know that god doesn't just want our marriages to just simply survive he wants them to thrive uh steph tell us what one common myth of marriage is yeah one of the common myths is that successful marriages are with uh two people who can resolve conflicts easily and often and that's just not the case uh in fact successful marriages what they do is they make a decision whether the conflict will come in between them whether it's worth it so they treat conflict kind of like how you would treat you know a bum knee you can expand on that yeah so one of the things that you want to do with conflict is you want to learn how to successfully deal with it it's inevitable it comes in every single marriage uh there's a pastor of scripture where jesus says in john 16 33 in this world you will have trouble and certainly in the world of marriage i can guarantee you that you will have trouble but successful marriages learn how to overcome those obstacles for our newlyweds who are here this morning you certainly are going to run into trouble you're going to run into problems but when you run into them that does not mean that you have to dissolve your marriage or that you aren't meant to be together it just simply means that you have to figure out how to overcome obstacles so in the time that we have the 30 minutes that we have want to give you 10 common obstacles now everybody knows that there are more than 10 obstacles in marriage but we just want to give you 10 common ones that we feel like can come up in every single marriage the first obstacle that you've got to overcome if you want a successful marriage is the obstacle of communication everybody say communication okay you see how half the room said communication the other half didn't we're already having to disconnect with our communication it's already an obstacle for us uh steph tell us about communication in yeah i mean when you think back even in your own marriages the issues and the struggles you may encounter they always come back to some form of miscommunication and when you think about communication there are three elements of it people desire to be seen people desire to be heard and people desire to get their way and oftentimes when there's a breakdown in communication it's one or more of these factors that are not being met yeah yeah definitely when communication uh is not done correctly or when people don't communicate and it's inevitable that problems will happen uh have you ever had this in your marriage where you said one thing but your spouse heard something else y'all ever had that happened is that just me or just us uh it is possible it is one of the things that frequently happens with communication is what you say and what's being heard don't always align or mess up i want to mess up excuse me this actually i think her earring is hitting the microphone is it oh sorry it's all right all right well then we'll go with this should i turn this off okay cool uh what was i saying don't mess up don't line up oh yeah yeah yeah sometimes what you say and what they hear are completely different things especially over text if you want to like really make this problem uh amplified it's over text that that happens so i want to give you guys a tool that you can use in the context of marriage that will help with your communication not just in marriage but with any relationship and it's this it's ask a clarifying question ask a clarifying question and that question is very simple it's do i hear you saying x y and z do i hear you saying x y and z what you're doing is reflecting what the person has said and you're confirming that what you heard is actually what they said i think many of the uh disagreements that happen in marriage often happen because there's been a breakdown in communication and if we learn to ask other clarifying questions it will help us to have better communication the foundation to any relationship thriving is communication i think that any issue you face in marriage can be resolved if you can learn to communicate yeah i think it's flipping your agenda oftentimes when we're trying to communicate with our spouse maybe there's something we want to get done or something we want to convey we our priority is about us being heard about us being understood about us potentially getting our way but if we flip the priority and we prioritize making sure that we understand our spouse first and conveying to our spouse that we understand them what you find is the next thing which is you seeking to be understood will be much easier to much easily achieved after your spouse feels understood by you yeah the passion of scripture that i think best embodies what it means to communicate well is found in james chapter 1 and verse 19. it says my dear brothers and sisters take note of this everyone should be quick to listen slow to speak and slow to become angry that's james 1 19. my dear brothers and sisters take note of this everyone including you should be quick to listen slow to speak and slow to become angry how much better would your relationships be if you modeled this if you made sure that you were quick to listen and slow to speak in other words what james is saying is when you are dealing with your spouse or in any relationship make sure you gain an understanding before you speak so this first obstacle go ahead seth one last quick tip with that is how you start a conversation is going to be a big indicator of how the conversation goes if you start harshly eighty percent of the time this is what research shows that it's going to be hard to recover and turn things around so starting with a cr with a criticism starting with something that's offensive or insulting even if down the line you realize i shouldn't have said that it's going to be hard to recover so be thoughtful and make sure you start gently start with a way that your spouse can at least feel a sense of dignity a sense of respect by you and then they're opened up to hearing whatever challenging thing you have to say next yeah i mean an accusatory tone is always going to cause defensiveness and that's going to affect the uh how that conversation goes so the first officer you got to overcome is the communication obstacle every marriage needs this ongoing learning to communicate the next one is the obstacle of needs the obstacle of needs all of us have needs there are basically two types of needs and relationships the first is fundamental and the second is specific steph talk about fundamental needs so every couple has a fundamental need and every individual have has a fundamental need as couples your fundamental needs are to have relationships outside of your marriage together whether it's have friends or a community another fundamental need of the couple is to feel that you can provide help and support to your spouse a third fundamental need is that your spouse can comfort and be of a support and help to you and finally there's the fundamental need of intimacy so oftentimes the detachment or the stress that you may notice happening in your relationship is tied to an unmet fundamental need and it's good to use a curious mind to examine what need isn't being met in this so that you can communicate that to each other and collectively in a partnership try to figure out how to meet that need as a couple the other fundamental need of individuals can also become an issue in the relationship if your fundamental need as an individual doesn't isn't met and that is for autonomy control and for what's the last one achievement um and i think all of you can kind of think of a time in your life where you felt like you've lost a sense of control and somehow that has manifested itself into your relationship because maybe then you become overly controlling in your relationship because you've lost some sense of control with yourself individually and that's why it's important that when there's also tension a relationship for you to look internally to see is there something off-kilter with me is there something unresolved that i need to work on yeah those are fundamental needs that every relationship needs and every individual needs but then there are specific needs these are needs that are specific to you as an individual whenever i'm doing pre-marital counseling with couples one of the assignments that we do is for them to write down five needs that they have as an individual and share that with the other party and what i found is in the moment most people cannot articulate five specific needs that they have in life now we all have needs but sometimes it's difficult for us to articulate those needs i'll give an example and these needs i know it sounds petty or it sounds little or not like it's a big deal but individual needs are a big deal one of my individual needs is i have a need it is a true need my life is not fulfilled if i'm not able to watch sports it's just a reality all right yes yeah some people tell me you didn't tell me that before we were married like you look i got i have to watch sports it is something that is life given to me it is a very specific need for me so when i talk about your individual needs i'm talking about things as small as that i have a need to watch sports my wife has a need for plants all right uh she is plant lady one thousand uh we got plants all in our house it's a jungle in there however i don't say anything and i don't complain because i know it's something that is life-giving for my wife and your needs evolve over time these plants didn't show up until covet showed up it was like the same time virus disinfected my house no idea how that happened um when our individual our specific needs aren't met it literally affects our quality of life let me give you an example one of the ways that you can know that something is a specific need for you is an area where you find frustration in your life at one time i won't reveal the person's name there was a guy who called me and it was on a sunday evening and he was upset and i asked you know what's going on why are you so upset he was like well today the day didn't go well at all it's like why not he's like i had plans on going to church uh and in my plans to go to church on saturday night i had washed my car got it together was ready to go to church uh and then the next morning when i woke up my wife asked me to take the grandkids to church so i could no longer drive the car that i had cleaned i had to get my daughters dirty nasty minivan and drive it to church and i was so upset and as he's talking i can hear how upset he is i asked him did you ever tell your wife that you need to be able to drive your car that is one of the things that you do that gives you peace throughout the week and my dad said oops i knew you were going to do that this guy said he said no i never communicated that now my parents i guess i'll put it out there because they don't live here yeah they're not watching we're not streaming they've been married over 40 years over 40 years and my mom had no idea that for my dad going to church in this ritual of washing this car on sunday was something that was life given to him she had no idea who was frustrating him so i said dad you got to communicate that need she's not a mind reader and in our marriages you have all of us have specific needs and there might be something that you're frustrated about right now and you're thinking to your spouse that your spouse doesn't care about you you just haven't communicated i think sometimes anybody remember being in school and having that teacher who gave the test and you're like we did not go over this in class how frustrating is that it's like you you think you studied you go in and it's like you didn't give me a proper study guide i didn't know that we were going to be doing this and it was really frustrating it felt like you were being set up to fail and that's kind of what we end up doing to our spouses when we're not specific about what we need and what's important to us and then we get upset when it's not being made because we assume when it's not being met because we assume that our spouse should have known or maybe you're walking around now and you're harboring some expectations and because your spouse isn't meeting that need you're starting to build resentment well don't be that teacher give them the give them the study guide be clear be clear about what it is that you need so that your spouse can have the opportunity to give you that need um clarity is kind yeah to be clear is to be client let me say something about needs the needs that you have should not violate another person's freedoms let me say it again the needs that you have should not violate another person's freedom i could tell my wife hey i need sex every single day well what is that going to do to her how's she going to feel about that we have to make sure that when we communicate our needs that we're reasonable with them it isn't just an excuse to say hey i need to watch sports so you deal with the kids the rest of the day no let's set boundaries around the most important games of the week the atlanta braves the atlanta falcons the georgia bulldogs uh the atlanta hawks and all the other gangs they're all gonna lose they are all gonna lose but i still love them i need you not to call me out anyway uh so need so this is the assignment for everybody in the room over the next week identify five of your own needs and communicate those to one another a week from today identify five of your own needs is not as easy as you think it is identify five of your own needs and communicate those to the other individual all right the next obstacle is the obstacle of children children all right there are three uh kind of phases of this there's the desire of wanting children of trying for children and raising children within the context of marriage this can become an extra a thing that is a huge obstacle for individuals the first is in the desire to have children there are many people who want children but they can't have an agreement on how many they want and that becomes an issue it becomes an obstacle how do you overcome that fertility or yes correct fertility issues do you want to say a little bit about that yeah i mean i want to take some time just to acknowledge people who have unique challenges in their marriage maybe we're going to be talking about and giving tips and you recognize that your issue is perpetual it's it really has rocked the core of your marriage and so for example people who are going through the journey of wanting to have a child and having some unsuccessful attempts and the trauma of that um i just want to take time to recognize that and uh and to say that find a community of people who are in this journey with you to come alongside you because there's nothing that we can say that is really going to i mean we can be helpful but there's nothing like talking to somebody who's actually going through the same journey as you are that's comforting absolutely then there's raising children raising children now raising children can become an obstacle and stephanie and i have one-on-one experience with this uh when we um got married we had our kids pretty quickly and we didn't have any disagreements i thought man this is easy marriage is simple we're not gonna have any problems at all then those twins showed up and wow did i not expect that that was gonna be such a difficult thing and one of the problems that we had was my idea for raising children was different from how stephanie wanted to raise children and because we had only known each other for three months we never had that conversation never crossed our mind to be like you know what how should we raise our kids never thought about that at all we were just smitten and in love and made that happen and never talked about anything else after that so we bring the kids home from the hospital and uh it comes time for them to go to bed and i want to go put them in their cribs and let them cry all night and stephanie is like what are you doing and i'm like we put him down to go to sleep she's like we can't do that and then the children ended up in our room so we had this issue that was there where i was like man if we just put them down they'll stop crying and we can move on with our lives and she as a mother had this nurturing desire where she's like there's no way i'm just gonna put my kids in there and leave them alone now we're not gonna say whose philosophy was right who was wrong we can't get into all of that but how we handled that became an extreme obstacle for us and what i didn't communicate to him is i didn't get to the vulnerable part of what it meant for me i was a working mom so i felt like i spent seven hours a day away from them by the time i got home i only had a couple hours with them it wasn't just about putting them to bed which is what we were focusing on but it was also about this guilt that i felt as a mother how people can relate to mom guilt but just this guilt i felt to be so away from them for so long and then to spend a portion of the few moments i have with them letting them cry themselves to sleep and so i was dealing with my own struggles but i didn't i didn't share that with him instead i just used the battleground of what i wanted the kids to experience at nighttime and you put all my frustration into that and jason might have we still wouldn't necessarily agree but he might have had a better understanding if i would have been honest with him about the other stuff i was struggling with yeah absolutely and my thought from the other perspective was i wanted to be able to have time to spend with my wife quality time with my wife so we both had uh noble things that we were desiring but we never communicated in one another and literally for 18 months we just stood looking at each other in a stalemate upset and we'll talk about stalemates in a minute because i wanted my way she wanted hers our heels were dug in we were not changing anything and so children became a real obstacle for us that we had to figure out how to overcome in your marriages children can certainly become an obstacle but if there's anywhere anywhere in your life where you need to join forces with one another to help raise these people these little people you've got to figure it out as it relates to raising children and go back to what we were talking about with communication it's first of all gain understanding reflect to show that you've heard what the other person is saying and convey empathy empathy is wildly transformational for people it really brings down the walls and then at that time you two are coming together ready to um address whatever the challenge is that's ahead of you yep the next obstacle that we have is the obstacle of falling out of love stephanie as a marriage counselor and therapist of myself as a pastor we meet people all the time where their relationships have broke down and one of the excuses we frequently get is man we're just getting a divorce because we fell out of love oftentimes that happens detachment is really an overarching uh threat to marriage when you look at any issue that causes a marriage to end um a lot of it can go back to something that caused a major detachment in the relationship yeah and and listen i understand that people will say my love isn't for my spouse like it was before i think stephanie and i would both say that when we were dealing with the issue with our twins that our love for each other was not high on our priority list and we didn't feel the love we we honestly thought man perhaps divorce is an option because we felt like our lives could not exist together we had in some ways fell out of love yeah but thankfully our pre-emailed counselor called me one day asked me how things were going he could tell that things weren't going well he said man you need to date your wife again i was like man i don't even want to go on a date with her i don't want to spend any time with her he said you go on a date with her you hold her hand you kiss her and you just keep doing that and over time the feelings of love will show back up listen love is not just simply the feelings it's the action and the feeling will follow the actions over time if you're at a place right now where you feel like man i don't love this person like i used to why don't you go back to doing the things that you were once doing when you initially fell in love with that person and i promise you that the feeling will return yeah when contempt comes into your marriage which is really like a deadly horseman um the antidote for that is fondness and admiration it's going back to the memories of when you guys were enjoying each other when you had a good time when we first were doing that dating it was awkward there was a lot of silence i think both of us wanted it to be over uh very quickly we were just going through the motions of it all but then somehow over time it ended up being something we were looking forward to it ended up being like a part of the week that we were counting down to that was a relaxing part for us and it eventually became a value part of our week but that took time and on the other side of that at the beginning i felt so detached from jason and he felt that for me as well but the fact that we both stuck through the awkward stumbling um time of working towards getting back on track on the other side of them that i had so much of a greater trust in him because what that taught me is that if something comes up again i know that he's going to stick it through with me yeah it's that's a valuable lesson for you to learn that when difficult times come that you're going to do the hard work to get on the other side of those difficult times the next obstacle is the obstacle of stalemates the obstacle of stalemates a stalemate is a situation in which nothing can change or no action can be taken so we gave the example of the stalemate that we had she wanted she wanted to hold on to the kids i wanted to put them down and we were literally at a relational stalemate what do you do in your relationship when you have a stalemate when your value doesn't allow with your spouse's value where one of you wants to move and change jobs and the other one wants to stay put right next to your parents when one of you wants to go out on vacation and leave your kids around and the other one wants to stay when one of you wants to has a desire to do something the other person has a different desire and you have a stalemate it is inevitable that it can happen in every single relationship one of you wants to have another child the other one of you is completely done what do you do in a relational stalemate yeah um first i want to identify and acknowledge that there are two different types of stalemates there's a perpetual problem and that is one that is really it's not resolvable um whether it's the child part somebody wants to have a child someone does it you're talking about a value and it's going to be hard to come to a resolution and then there's the resolvable things our kids eventually started sleeping like it resolved itself um and and so there's but still these tips are going to help whether it's perpetual or resolvable they can be helpful for both and the first thing you want to do is you want to seek clarity by just communicating and identifying what the problem is and asking each other how important is this to you you know is this about a value thing for you is this something that without it you're going to feel like you have made a compromise that has changed something that is truly a part of your belief system yeah don't just seek clarity but also the second step when you when you want to overcome a stalemate is to turn toward each other turn toward each other in other words paul's communicate and have regular conversation about it when stephanie and i were having this issue we turned away from each other and that just killed any intimacy that we wanted to have and i'm not just talking about sexual intimacy any intimacy i wouldn't text her she wouldn't text me we wouldn't talk to each other we turned away from each other but when you have a stalemate make sure that you spend time talking to one another yeah and get through the mess get in the mess together oftentimes we avoid having conversations with one another because we know that this is going to be a problem this person's going to be angry or i don't think it's going to be productive but that's not an excuse not to um engage in that kind of communication and it's almost like you're flexing your muscles you're trying to strengthen your ability and your resilience to kind of get through these rough patches the longer you wait to have a difficult conversation the harder it's going to be for reconciliation the longer you wait to have a difficult conversation the harder it's going to be to have reconciliation also another thing when you're in stalemate you have to be willing to accept influence willing to accept influence don't be so dogmatic in your approach that you can't hear from outside voices including your spouse and then sometimes in order to win a stalemate you just gotta yield you just gotta say you know what i can see this is much more important to you than it is with me i'm going to yield and i'm going to trust you because i want to keep our bond strong colossians 4 6 i think gives some good wisdom on this it says let your conversation always be full of grace season with salt so that you may know how to answer everyone let your conversation always be full of grace and whenever you find yourself in a stalemate that is when your conversations need the most grace season with salt so that you may have an answer to everyone the next obstacle that you got to overcome is the obstacle of wounds this is kind of your expertise yeah so when we move into uh you know a home together and you're first getting married you bring in your boxes and your baggage but you also bring invisible wounds invisible baggage and that means that there are hurts distressing situations sometimes there's trauma from your childhood past relationships things that you have learned how to survive with um but that doesn't mean that they may not come up in the midst of your marriage your spouse could unintentionally be triggering a wound that you did not resolve um that's been around think of it as bruises so there's different layers of bruising i don't know how many athletes or whatever in here but um there's the surface bruising that you know it hurts a little bit and you kind of know all right i know it's there so maybe you've had a hurt or something that happened in your life or you're like okay i'm aware of it and i know what bothers me i know how this is triggering for me then there's a deeper layer of bruising the deepest layer is um the bruising that you experience where i don't know if you've had in your arm it's like you can barely lift up you think maybe i broke it because it hurts so much and all it takes is someone to just graze past that bruise and you jump that's the thing and you could be thinking of it now or maybe you're not even aware of it maybe your mind your brain is incredible it protects you from those really deep hurts because your body doesn't want you to be a puddle of a mess every day and so it'll bury it for your protection and what happens is your body is still storing that and anything that is familiar to that your body will go it's that thing again and you'll react to it when you have a deep deep experience or wound like that it's important for you to attend to that wound and get help and be vulnerable with your spouse i know that in some relationships there's been such broken trust that the vulnerability the willingness to be vulnerable is a very unsafe experience so first of all be somebody who someone who your spouse would want to be vulnerable with to feel safe with so that your spouse can go ahead and willingly do that you'll find that it'll take your intimacy and your relationship to a deeper level yeah that's good the next obstacle is the obstacle of unforgiveness now we know the bible tells us that love keeps no records of wrongdoings but that doesn't just simply mean that you gloss over things and you move forward like nothing happened every marriage is going to have times where there is someone who needs to be forgiven for something these are serious issues like infidelity to just minor things you said something to the other individual in the wrong way if you're going to have a successful marriage one of the obstacles you have to overcome is the temptation to practice unforgiveness talk about unforgiveness and how it needs to be a a healthy exercise in every marriage well unforgiveness is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die you're actually hurting yourself quite a bit with unforgiveness you even produce hormones in your brain cortisol stress hormones that can affect your heart functioning your blood pressure all of those things so it eats your body from the inside out it affects your ability to relate with people um it affects your intimacy with the lord so it is pervasive in every area of your of your life and i almost feel like the lord had a role in that because it's so important you he wants you to understand how important it is for you to forgive because it makes you healthy and it makes your relationship healthy as well yeah also forgiveness uh looks it has a takes on a variety of different looks if you've ever said to your spouse you just need to forgive me you are still in the wrong you are still in the wrong if you looked at them and said why don't you just forgive me you are you probably are still in the wrong uh in order for forgiveness to happen there has to be restoration there has to be communication there has to be uh reconciliation all of these things have to take place also if you have repeated bad behavior don't expect a person to just forgive you and move on as if nothing has happened at all there has to be repair that takes place of course we don't want to hold on to things and just keep a laundry list of every minor infraction that the person has done to us but also there are huge breaches where trust has to be rebuilt so please don't hear me saying that man if you've been if you've experienced infidelity you're just supposed to forgive the person and act like nothing even happened tomorrow no you're going to have to spend some time preparing and building trust and having a plan yeah putting a plan together on figuring out what is it that i can do if you're the person who has broken the trust done something repeatedly asking the question what can i do to get us back on track and if your spouse comes to you with that you being open to say okay i'm gonna think through and together we're going to figure out a plan of what we're going to do to help restore and reconcile our relationship that's right next obstacle is the obstacle of finances finances finances definitely are obstacle or can become an obstacle in any relationship i'm no expert in finances so i don't have a whole lot to say here but i'll share just these these two things uh be careful using money as power against your spouse you should never use money as a form of power against your spouse i commend stephanie for doing this when we met and we got married i was making a whole eighteen thousand dollars a year i mean i was rolling in though she got with me because of my money i had it 18k couldn't even pay rent barely um and she was making much more than me because she was a teacher and we know teachers get paid i mean we have the school counselor all the money no but she was making much more money than me but she never used money as a way to make me feel insecure she never caught me broke she never said do you need to borrow some money she never used it as a form of power you have to be very careful when you use money as a form of power against your spouse because that's going to cause a breach in a relationship you don't want to use money or anything to strip your spouse of their dignity that is going to be a very difficult thing to repair absolutely uh number 10 excuse me number nine the next obstacle that you have to overcome is the obstacle of intimacy now i think mark and aaron did a fantastic job with this uh and i'm coming back to it uh after after ten sorry i want to end with number nine i should have told you that my bad communication is key see how we did that set that up so you can see how i communicate now just kidding uh intimacy mark and aaron did a fantastic job with that uh but the one that we want to end with is the obstacle of submission and sacrifice submission and sacrifice even saying those two words making people get tight up in here i know in ephesians 5 22 this is what we read wives submit to your husbands as you are to the lord now it would be cool if paul stopped there because everybody's like yeah why did you need to submit but then he continues in verse 25 husbands love your wives as christ loved the church and gave himself up for the church how did christ love the church enough to give his life for the church so husbands let's make sure that while we are telling our wives hey you need to submit we can say you need to die exactly [Applause] furthermore in verse number 21 it says that we're submit to submit to one another one of the things that has to happen in the context of marriage is there is a continued and ongoing submission and sacrifice submission and sacrifice think about the last issue that you had with your spouse did you make the sacrifice that was necessary did you submit like you were supposed to it's really two people a picture of two people trying to do outdo one another in submission and sacrifice and i know that is hard that's an obstacle in relationships it's an obstacle in our relationship i don't always want to die that's what christ calls us to because he knows that in order for a relationship to be successful the greatest model for what we are to be to one another is the model that we have in jesus christ who gave his life up for us willingly not because we deserved it not because we earned it but he gave his life for us because he loved us if love is going to be a part of your relationship there has to be submission and sacrifice that happens from both parties and that will help you overcome any obstacle that you face in marriage let's pray father in heaven i'm so grateful just for the time that we've been able to spend and for the investment people have made and given up their time to be here this weekend father i pray for the relationships that are in a hard and difficult place this morning for the couples who are almost ready to give up father i pray that they would give it another shot that if they are a relational stalemate that they both would look towards you and trust you to restore them lord help them to do the hard work to get the help that they need so that their relationship isn't just simply surviving but it's thriving lord i pray that the reconciliation that they experience will be an example of your love and grace and favor on each of us lord for the marriages who are doing well are for the people uh who are are feeling like things are going great i pray that that would continue when they would put these tools into place so that things can continue to get better lord i also want to pray for my brothers and sisters in here this morning that may be dealing with infertility that that may be a real issue for them father that you would give them answers but you would also comfort them and give them a peace that surpasses all understanding lord help us to walk side by side with one another lord help us to join forces to defeat the enemy who wants to do everything he can to tear up every marriage he can as quick as he can lord help us to stand against that and to represent you well in our communities we pray this prayer in jesus name and everybody said amen you

Channel: Bayside Church

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Keywords: Bayside Church, Bible, Hope, Compassion, Love, God, Jason Caine, Stephanie Caine, Marriage, parenting, kids, family, spouse, obstacles, successful marriage

Id: a17xB5JNZtU

Length: 37min 5sec (2225 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 15 2021