Pursuing a Thriving Marriage - Bayside Marriage & Parenting Conference 2021

uh guys so good to be down here at bayside this is our home away from home we love you guys uh yeah uh we we got asked to do this uh because they were really looking for somebody who's figured everything out and they said who's whose marriage is perfect let's go get the clarks down here yeah we've been married 18 years and it didn't take long before we realized we were in trouble we were probably three months in and it was the first time i left the house in a huff and said i want a divorce um it's still actually tender for me to talk about but it was a sunday afternoon this is 18 years ago sunday afternoon and i had made a roast beef dinner for two fancy afternoon i went did all the fixings and then mark came along and he decided he'd be helpful and played it for us sounds good with no respect for boundaries my potatoes were touching my corn the meat was touching the potatoes the gravy covered all who puts gravy on corn not me clearly there was some underlining issues there with no joke i was out i was like i've made a mistake we dated for five years and i didn't know until now the disrespect that you would have for me you clearly don't love me yeah and that's how we started all right so there you go so that's how mental we are that's how crazy we are so glad you're part of this thing uh listen let me let me give you one big big idea here so uh a couple years ago we were going through this really difficult moment on staff we had a bunch of stuff we had to deal with and we had kids that were sick and all this kind of craziness going on and i was in a hospital and one moment air and i were there and i kind of just freaked out on a nurse i just kind of lost it was right you know i just had all this pressure and aaron as we walked out of course radiant and perfect christ-centered person looked at me and quoted a sermon that i had given the week before and she said what are you trying to do in the world are you trying to make a point or are you trying to make a difference and i was like shut up all right just like what why do you talk to me in this way regurgitating my own stuff back to me but the point is is as you guys are here today through this series through this conference yesterday and today we were over at uh blue oaks on friday night last night and this morning doing some content for them and what uh what a just dirty campus over there because we did this q a we did this q a and it was you know i was like wow these people are anyway so so we're glad to be with you anyways you fine people uh and uh but anyway so one of the big things we got to talk about is how do you actually make a difference in your marriage versus just making a point because oftentimes we're driven by just making a point i'm right you're wrong whatever so here's one of the big ideas that we want to talk about it's being active versus passive in the context of your marriage you got to be active versus passive you got to be american versus canadian right in your right like in like in canada we're super passive people like we're just sitting like during kobe to sit in our homes we're like please government you know tell us when we can come out and we'll obey you and you guys are like screw the government it's our freedom baby so you guys just pass cove it around to each other well chokovin watch what uh and so and so that's the image my canadian part of me is shrinking right now please don't say this stuff yeah it's like this sounds really so we don't talk controversial things so we want you guys to actually be super uh american and active when you're dealing with the issues of your marriage you can't just sit back listen we don't drift towards success in flourishing in life you drift toward destruction what it takes is actual super intentionality to make something flourish and just the fact that you're here right now tells me you want to be intentional you want to grab this thing by the way i don't want to just survive in my marriage i want to actually thrive and flourish because what we tend to do is like you know those moments like at a conference or something they'll go these people were married for 50 years what do we tend to just naturally do right we just clap why is anyone asking a follow-up question like is it any good like you survived it's awesome you hate each other you think up ways how to murder each other every other day but you've been married for 50 years because it's easier that's not something to celebrate y'all yes we need to be intentional both in marriage and in our parenting six months after we got married we made the cross-country move from toronto to vancouver which most people don't know canadian provinces or cities but it's basically new york to california so we make the full drive it would have been crazy for us to just hop in the car we knew our destination but it would have been crazy to hop in without a plan like how are we actually getting from point a to point b especially at that point i still thought every time you turned right it was north somebody would be like okay just go north and i'm like so you want me to turn right no no just go natural y'all it's natural i wear it well yeah it would have been it would have been not bonkers but yet for some reason so we went in we didn't have smartphones so we went into like caa back then and had to sit down with somebody to teach us how to get from point a to point b with our triptychs of course there's still roadblocks along the way we still had to figure out okay for some reason there's always water mains that have burst all over so always construction is like okay we got to make a detour here and we go back to the map to figure out how to get there why is it that in the trivial things of life like driving across country planning a trip we put in so much effort to the details we're not just looking to the destination you're not just showing up in mexico and going well we'll just see how it goes no you have a probably don't show up in mexico right now at all it's probably probably the better you have a plan so we need a plan in life we need our own road map and so i highly recommend to everybody we've done this in our house is to have a vision for your family sit down together and this is like minor things and big things is where do you see yourself 10 years from now 20 years from now what are the character traits that you want to see built into your kids do you want one of ours is i want to be friends with my kids 20 years from now i want my kids to come home drop their stuff and be like ah i like this place like i feel safe here so how are we creating that environment i can't just assume they're gonna come home if it's not a fun joyful place to be and so we need to put in the hours at the beginning of time to figure out okay we've got our vision now what are the steps in order to get there yeah so we got to take control of the situation control your marriage don't just be a victim of circumstance don't just blame your spouse and your kids and the way you were raised and your parents and your family and your kindergarten teacher if your marriage isn't very good you got to go how do we actually flourish in this which means sometimes you might have to go to counseling aaron and i go to counseling we tell our church this it's like we we need help in the context of our marriage huh sometimes she misunderstands why we're like literally the first time we went to counseling it was like two hours of unpacking our stuff and on the way to the car she goes man i won i was like it's not not i did however win that round how counseling works anyway so but you got to be intentional you got to work on it um our friend who's a divorce lawyer uh uh she wrote a book a little bit ago she's a christian divorce lawyer and here's what she said she said 95 of the couples that have sat in front of me have said um if i knew how difficult and time and money all the things that were going to be spent on this i just would have put that into my marriage i just would have taken the time the energy the money and put it on my marriage versus this situation now because this is a disaster and so that's what being intentional is that's what being active is you got to be saying if something's broken we got to actually figure it out so we have a couple big ideas for you one of the big ones is a flourishing marriage is not going to happen by little tricks that you learn at conferences it's going to learn by one big idea attachment now there's been a big a lot of talk in the psychology world dr sue johnson's done a lot of work on this on attachment theory and it's the idea that when you get attached to someone you're going to do everything you can to fight for that relationship well but if there's detachment from that relationship then it's not actually going to work all that well and so you think of the idea of a kid for instance like uh when you have a baby you create those attachment moments right off the bat and then if other people do it kind of weirds us out like my buddy uh his mom back in the 80s there was a church service and they had everybody in the church service and they couldn't get in touch with the moms and there was these little kids and so she had a baby and the baby was crying and they couldn't get the mom out of the church service so this guy i was talking to his mom just started breastfeeding a random kid it's like this guy's rude i was like no right now that doesn't even sit in our brains it's like what what do you talk it's like you know the hand that rocks the cradle it's like oh my gosh i don't want my but why does that sit weird in our brains because we don't want our kid to attach to somebody else that's what attachment is that's the power of it and what we got to try to figure out is in the context of marriage don't now get the breastfeeding out of your mind all right i like this guy he's got great ideas honey all right so it's attachment attachment to each other in three big ways okay this is what we want to talk about so here's the three big ways you can write them down they're all based in the book of genesis genesis 1 2 and 3. god lays out this couple adam and eve and there's three big ways that they're supposed to have attachment in close relationship first spiritually you have to have spiritual connection to god of course god puts them he says i want to walk with you in the cool of the day and then you've got to spiritually actually connect to each other you got to share that love for jesus we're going after jesus you know we and sometimes what happens is like the wife will go hard after jesus and be like hey i want to actually and then the husband's kind of lagging behind and she'll get a stack of books and she'll put it on his bedside table about how to have a better marriage and how to walk with christ better here's the thing what's going to happen to those books they're just going to grow dust and he's never going to touch him right because it's not your job to play the role of the holy spirit in your spouse's life you got to be leaning into jesus and going i need my husband i need my spouse to actually have a spiritual relationship that's the same as mine so you're actually walking this thing out together your job this is very important my job with aaron is to not just make sure she has a good 80 years on this planet i'll give her a good house i'll make sure we have good kids we'll get out of it's to make sure she has a good 80 million years with jesus when she passes away and then the 80 million after that and the 80 million after that so i want to see her actually develop spiritually so that she treasures these things so she has greater delight for 80 billion years not just making sure you know we cocoon have this great life for the 80 years in front of that's the spiritual component of life yeah and when we think spiritually often we think tools we think moments of sitting together doing devotions together we often get asked as a pastor's family what devotionals do you do with your kids what devotionals do you do together and i'm like hmm you mean like daily because that's that's not our thing like and i don't mean that we're not in the word together i don't mean that we're praying together but we don't do it in a way that might work for your family well we tried once we did this bible app yeah we were reading we said one year bible app we'll do it together and then you you know how you click off like you're done that chapter oh i got a little behind and i went and over on her ipad and i saw that she so i just kind of clicked backwards so that she didn't know that she's like why do i keep reading genesis 18. i don't know that's a true story so we're both eights on the enneagram and so it always was a competition if we try to come together and do a devotional i'd be like why are you preaching at me i know i grew up in the church i've read my bible longer than you like don't think you know more it just didn't work well but devos don't go well for us but when we're on when we're in the word and we're spending time we're having these great conversations about god about what he wants for our lives we're challenging each other spiritually and it's the same with our kids we don't i sit i'm a homeschool mom so i'm teaching them in this way we do bible classes and that but what i find is their spiritual growth our spiritual growth together it's coming in those everyday moments it's coming in the conversations of how are we weaving god in and out of these moments in time that we already find ourselves in one of our missions as a family so if we go back to the vision that we have is to be vocationally on the same page i want our family to know how to serve and love those both within our community and abroad and so we spend our our money where we spend our time is in that way and serving others with our kids and we always go back to this when we stick to this vision what happens is we can parent and we can do this out of love and not fear because we can go back to our blueprint we can see like okay does this fit does this align with what we want for our family and those little decisions of should our kids be in rep soccer five days a week well does that align with everything else we have this saying that i got from my friend julie and it's the chatter doesn't matter the vision makes the decision and every time we're in a situation where we're like does this align right we go back and we go the chatter doesn't matter the vision makes the decision and so when the world feels like it's exploding and it's out of control we're able to come back and be grounded in okay our vision the umbrella of our vision is god and him wanting us to serve him follow him so if we're safe within that then we can we can move forward so when kovit hit and being in canada you probably saw the new we were on complete lockdown no one was allowed to come in of your your houses pretty much no one was allowed to go out of your houses we're not even allowed down here right now we're just just don't tell the government we're here we're allowed we're allowed um but it was we're still it's it's interesting world out there but right when it happened it was march everything was completely locked down we've got kids that struggle with um tourette's ticks so two of them when this hit i don't know where they got that they can tell they see it um we my girls and i were coming back from a missions trip in uganda we spent time there with our friends there and we had to go through paris which had been shut down and and my kids had all these facial tics that they would do and of course people a good-hearted would call our parents would call and be like well it's it's okay you'll be fine to get home just don't touch your face my kids are like yeah don't tell someone with tourette's not to do something i'm like why are you doing this so they were already at this all-time high our home became like this bubble for them they loved the rules they loved that we couldn't go in they couldn't go out because they were concerned we were working through all that and then all of a sudden we get this knock at the door and this woman shows up my door just weeping and she's like i didn't know where to go but my husband just hit our daughter we've just left the hospital and the police station i need your help and i'm standing there calculating going i know this is a big deal but a hospital you just left a police station you just left now you okay you need my help she's like my kids are in the car can we come in i'm like oh gosh i've got kids that are struggling with anxiety i had to stop and go what is our vision it is to serve and love the people in our community i couldn't turn her away i couldn't look at my kids and go sorry we're not helping so we invited her in i took her out back my kids sat with their kids while their kids shared their day and what had happened in their lives by the time they left my kids were just a mess they're like why would you do that we're not allowed to do that their dad hit them and i could have looked at them and go i will never do that to you again i will never do that i know we didn't follow the rules no i looked at them and i said guys god has called us to love our neighbor yeah even more than ourselves even when it hurts us even when it feels yeah even when it's messy and we were able to have these amazing conversations and this is what i mean by this spiritual side is we're able to have these conversations about god and what god calls of us and how wow like your dad wouldn't do that to you just like our heavenly and we are able to pull these in so having those every day stay on your vision and when you start growing spiritually together closer to jesus what flows from that and this is a big issue probably in this room at some level is forgiveness once you start understanding how much god has forgiven you and you really kind of gospel yourself day in and day out then how can you hold something against your spouse and i guarantee in this room there's people holding stuff against one another right now right uh almost every wedding i do someone gets up and reads first corinthians 13 right it's like you know it's usually graham up there with the king james or something and thou hitherest love it you know what everyone's like what uh but uh but it's like love keeps no record of wrong and it's like there's someone needing some forgiveness today out there it's like there you should never be heard saying last year you did this to me last month you said this to me it's like every day the slate gets cleaned and you say this is a new day to move forward right i was reading some guy the other day he said the only thing you get by looking back is a strained neck you gotta move forward because yes of course you're married to a complete narcissist you're married to a gong show they are sinful narcissistic depraved turned in on themselves all they think about is themselves what did you think you were marrying that's what marriage is it's the pr it's basically you saying out of the seven billion crazy people on the planet i choose to forgive you the most when i was pregnant with our third daughter i had uh health issues leading into kids and so i had to have c-sections and i remember this is my third so if you're a woman in the room who's given birth you know you kind of know what's happening and mark was at a lunch meeting about half hour away and i called him i'm like mark i'm going into labor and when i go into labor i'd need to get in because they have to do a c-section and we couldn't let it get to a certain point he's like i don't think you are i i'm like no no no no no no i am i am he's like no no you'll be fine you'll be good and i'm like mark i am telling you right now i am going into labor i need you and he goes yeah i'm in the middle of a lunch meeting is there any way you could just meet me at the hospital i'm like you know what click i'll figure this out on my own man but hold on so oh hold on just clearly uh it's kind of a black and white situation we just no gray area here we had just planted a church okay now usually when you plant a church like we're one year in so when you start a church from scratch okay in canada don't compare it to giving birth to a baby no i wouldn't do that but let me mansplain for a second all right so so now i've planted this church all right and i'm like when you plant a church like the only people interested are 19 years old they live with their mom they don't have a job and unless you let them play guitar you know they get mad at you and leave and start a blog about you three weeks later about how you're so authoritarian and me so here was a guy with a job and he looked functional and competent and i finally got a lunch with him so i'm sitting there at lunch and i'm like i'm about to keep a functional human being in my church right now with a family and money and then this one calls saying well there's a baby coming why no not now so so i hung up and i was like he's and so the guy hung up the guy and the guy says i'll have my baby myself the guy says so what was that i go i my wife thinks she's having the baby now but let's finish our lunch and this is and this is why you should hang out with older people because he goes dude you need to get the bill and get out of here this is going to pay dividends in the end if you just leave so i called you back like half hour later he said okay i'm still laying on the floor okay we can do it now anyways i had a point thanks for telling that story i was truthful forgiveness forgiveness forgiveness we still like each other all right that's the big point okay so spiritually there needs to be an attachment and a connection and a depth to your relationship secondly emotionally there needs to be a depth and an attachment to your relationship so god says in that story with adam and eve i want you to leave and cleave right i want you to leave your mother and father remember that sermon where he's marrying adam and eve leave your mother and father and be united to your wife and the two will become one flesh so and that's interestingly specifically said to men leave your mother and father which is fascinating right because the women in the room are like yeah exactly like i don't need your eyeballs telling me you don't make spaghetti like my mom makes it you know whatever it's like shut up you have left your mother i am not your mom and so there's like a specific he's checking right now he's like no way he's got to be addressing both of them no that is just the man that's interesting so there's a leaf and a cleave and that leave and cleave listen is an emotional attachment that has to happen and i know that when you say that of course you're going to hear that and america's going and a lot of men and women depending on how your wire going oh i don't like that's not my thing like i don't want to just emotionally attach and they have visions and ideas about what that is and you talk to me about yeah that's not really what i'm looking for i don't need you coming home and sitting you know yes yes for 45 minutes saying how was your day how do you feel like that's how it's like i've never talked to a group of people here like i want to work you know eight hour nine hour days and come home and then sit and debrief for an hour with someone about how they feel about life like no yeah just like spiritually we have these conceptions of what it should look like and emotionally it's often that where we shy away and not just men i i don't want that either i don't want to come home and have to sit face to face with you i got things to do i got totally yeah but it's the idea of it's more than that it's more of sitting down and having your half-hour hour talk it's how are you having fun together like how are you actually emotionally connecting how are you enjoying your time together we laugh together we have fun we like joke about each other but it's it's fun we enjoy just being together and i'm gonna go on a ledge and going back to the mother-in-law thing for a minute that everybody in this room has had issues at some point with a mother-in-law and i often sit with women and it could be on both sides but i often sit with women because that would be weird if i'm just sitting down with men having conversations when does that happen so i'm sitting down with i'm sitting down with these women and the issues that they have with their mother-in-laws i resonate with so well because it's not necessarily an issue between you and your mother-in-law it's an issue between you and your spouse it's an issue of am i the person that you love and cherish the most like are we on the same team here and early on in our marriage i remember oh i would like literally hear her voice coming through his mouth and i'd be like that was clearly your mom fed you that to tell me i'm not doing this right like this isn't you and all of a sudden something switched where one day he took my side and he went to bat he had the conversations and no longer did i have to battle it out because he took ownership he had that relationship those hard conversations he took on with his own parent and so this works on both sides you need to take ownership for your own parents and have those hard conversations to save your spouse from and that changed our relationship yeah the big idea here guys is and i think this is pretty it sounds really cliche but the point is the goal of your marriage is actually friendship you know there was a study done years ago out of like corporations and businesses and why people stay at their workplace and the number two reason why people stay at their job is they found a friend which is really strange because you'd think it'd be salary and money and they feel whatever it's like i made a friend now imagine that could happen with your spouse like you woke up every day and it wasn't like oh this person i'm kind of grinding to me it's like i actually like not love but like this person that's the goal and i remember a couple years ago we were uh in dallas we were walking around and uh the kids were at home and we were kind of hanging out we were kind of hand in hand walking through celina like shopping and aaron just says you know what when the kids are gone i think we're gonna be good because we actually like each other right and it's like how many couples just kind of grind it out during the kids years the kids move on and you don't even know or like the person that you're sitting in this house with because you never became friends you never actually related to each other in a friendship and the same is true about parenting we're trying to kind of weave both marriage and parenting uh principles in here but it's the same with one of the worst pieces of advice people can say is don't become friends with your kids guys become friends with your kids that's a beautiful thing of course you still have the the three but that relationship that attachment needs to happen relationally um now i aaron actually taught me this in our marriage about our kids because i have three daughters okay so you can pray for me i got 15 13 and 10. and i think like an 80s dad right so i'm just like like i you know everything they do and say i picture them as a 30 year old doing and saying it so then i just try to cut it then so it's like she's 10 she's oh that's not gonna work in the workplace don't say that never say you know whatever so i'm constantly just like consequences is the way to teach children stuff right so they do something bad throw them up in the room for a week because that's how i was raised i was a latch latchkey kid in the 80s it was like go to your and there was no fun to sit in my bedroom and stare at my mirror and listen to counting crows and think about stuff for a week and that's like how i became a human being so then that's how i try to parent my kids my three daughters and erin taught me bro you can't you can't like so well you do have a tone issue we all they hear you talking see this is what she always says it's the approach it's the approach suppose you have like a tone problem right when i talk to them like and i'm like no that's not what i m see they're all like what did he mean what did he mean but i didn't say that it's just what i guess my tone so so aaron is away with her girlfriends and i'm at home with the kids three daughters about to get in the car this is like a few months ago they said can we do hot chocolates when we get in the car right that sounds fun i was like that just sounds like an utter disaster all right so my answer was no you can't do hot chocolates you're gonna spill it it's going to go on the day no daddy come here so i'm like fine whatever that's a good parenting tip the kids complain enough just do that so i was like okay fine so we they fill up their hot chocolates we're not even at the front door and the ten-year-old boom on the carpet hot chocolate all over the place so i went into 80s dad mode there's consequence what the heck what's going on see i told you i told you i told you i'm the man i know what's right the other two start texting aaron right this is what dad's saying there may have been video recordings since i didn't know that look at his tone uh and i'm doing and then she texts me back i didn't i didn't know the kids had texted her so it was kind of like she texts me out of the blue i'm like oh my goodness the holy spirit must be talking right now meanwhile i got two morons in the next room going i ain't saying this but she texts me this line that kind of forever changed my philosophy on parenting at least daughters she said remember and sons it fits with sons it's always relationship over rules and that changed my whole philosophy on this because when your kids are 30 yeah of course there's discipline but the relationship you built with that kid that's why they love on you when they're 30 and they come back around that's why they're your friends when they grow up it's not because you create a bunch of rules in their life some of those things can be figured out as they go but one of the big principles me man don't treat a 10 year old and project them to a 30 year old and think that you're actually raising them well it's all about that attachment that's right and the relationship adds currency so when you have to have the hard conversations yeah it's not without discipline obviously there's rules there's discipline but the relationship takes precedence so this tone that we're talking about hypothetically this hypothetical tone and we don't always get it right we none of us we all have room to start fresh to start over let's talk about what are you working on but it's all about the relationship builds the currency which builds the trust so that you're able to parent in a way it always goes to that grace and truth grace and truth john chapter one full of grace full of truth and one of the things that's been really cool over the last bunch of years i've started to see that friendship build with my kids where it's like these girls it's like we're watching movies together we're exeggs like it's stuff that they've come into my world a bit i've leaned into their world and i've opened up and allowed them to watch certain movies because they're with dad yeah well you're like just when he says a movie title please well it's like when aaron's growing up it's like all these hallmark movies that the girls are watching it's like oh you know big business woman from new york goes back to her small town and learns a great lesson from the lumberjack it's like yeah whatever and if you've seen one you have seen them all right and it's like just on repeat i'm like i think we've seen this one it's like no this is brand new brand-new cutting edge candice cameron's in all of them but so my daughters have now moved into like mom can i go watch like inception with dad again like we're exegeting the dark knight together and interstellar and how time works and it's like my kids are now trading her out for me and it's legit right so it's like now i'm winning it's pretty good yeah pretty good because i'm teaching you how to win yeah so it all it all works out and with our even with our currency with mark and i it wasn't always that way early on i always questioned whether i was the backup plan we dated for five years and then we got married and i would just be at home when he'd be out with his buddies constantly the night we got home from our honeymoon our place wasn't ready yet and so i got to move back into mark's childhood bedroom kate winslet above us yeah the single bed and we get back in the there that's kind of we're obsessed with titanic oh yeah brother yeah sequel to titanic as well side note fun fact wrote a sequel to titanic don't do this and we were dating and he's like oh i'll print you off a copy i wrote this sequel and well i'm standing behind the man he erases it says written and inspired by my one true love and he erases his ex's name and types mine in well i'm standing there that's how this guy rolled back then wow and so in front of all these nice people so they're gonna throw me under the bus so we get back from our honeymoon and i'm like okay this is cool my parents live 10 minutes down the road but i'll move back into your childhood bedroom um but at least you're here with me so that's cool and he's like yeah just so you know uh lord of the rings came out tonight so i'm i'm heading to the theater with my friends should i just go home then to my bedroom that's how we rolled and then we moved out to bc six months later and i thought okay this is good like not that i want to like control them and have them all to myself i want some space too but this is going to change his allegiance he's not going to be all about his friends he's going to connect with me more and i am not joking we were two days in bc did not know one person and he left me two days in to go play poker with some random guys he met through our landlord and i'm like okay so this is my life this is my life and then i had to start thinking okay i guess i need to like entertain for him to stay home with me so i couldn't just no no no like like when we were first married it's like like i'm used to going out every night we get married first time at home it's like she's got a little blanket around her toes and she's got a cup of tea and i'm like what are we doing tonight she's like this i'm like what do you mean this i gotta go like i gotta get out sort of wigging out i'm like but what are we gonna are we gonna like no it's this this is the rest of your life and i'm like oh my gosh and so what actually took the time and the beautiful part about it is now i would choose that that's the attachment piece that's the emotional connection that's happened where she's literally as cheesy as it sounds my best friend and so that is whatever he says the besties we should get like necklaces no we should i find uh okay so we have one final point to tell you which we only have two minutes for and it's about sex so we've kind of you know i guess we should just wrap it up yeah yeah that's pretty cool thank you thank you for having us appreciate it i hope we felt your heartfelt needs so good really quickly physically is the third component of your attachment and connection of course god makes them naked in the garden that says be fruitful and multiply so there's this point about sexuality uh we have a lot of stuff to say in it we don't have time but point is uh we do a lot of marriage counseling with couples and one of the big things that you've got to look at is unmet expectations when it comes to sexuality you got to be talking this stuff out in premarital counseling i remember sitting with couples literally one guy i'm like okay how many times do you think you're gonna have sex per week and the guy no joke he goes 13 twice okay right twice every day and once on sunday that was literally the answer because it's the sabbath right and we're all laughing because most of you that's not actually happening i know some of you think it is maybe i know it's not so it's just like this unmet expectation of one of the huge things is you guys have all these expectations you got to be able to talk about the expectations because there's things being unspoken in this room right now about sexuality that you're starting to resent each other about that you have you have unmet expectations about certain things one of the great challenges and action points that i'll tell you is sexually you got to go home and talk about this stuff i i read about one couple they were at a marriage conference like this and one of the challenges was you got to go home and talk to your spouse about kind of that that one sexual thing that you wanted to talk about a fantasy a thing that you've always kind of wanted to do you got to be able to have that open conversation with them and uh the lady was like alright so the husband sat down he told his and then he's like okay what's yours she was like the 60 year old lady she's like i can't tell you after all these years of marriage he's like come on come on she's like okay fine i'd love you to suck my toes in bed might be your thing sorry sorry for the face it might be yours yeah if it's yours it's cool but but it's like and he was like oh my goodness like this is so crazy let's try it and he liked it and she liked it and it's like you got to be able to have those open conversations because i feel like in the church we're just doing a really bad job about talking about sexuality openly and we need to do it like guys this is just part of life we need to talk about it so in the last um the last uh blue oaks they asked a question it was a bunch of q a we had time for q a and they're like hey can we use vibrators and sex toys in our marriages and so we did a 10-minute piece on vibrators and sex toys you have to get the audio from over there go ahead thank you thank you but on that note i find especially in women men they talk on the golf course together about this generally they talk a little bit more open about it and generally it works in a different way women can spend years and years without ever having a conversation with somebody if it's not working you need to figure out how to make it work or of course if you've never had an orgasm it's not going to be fun like it'd be like what was the point of that it's not just about the other person god made us so that both both of us can have pleasure together and that is the the combining of one another so we need to figure out how to have these conversations and i talk openly about this because it is such an important conversation to be having and to know that you're not abnormal you need to be seeking counsel talk to somebody who is comfortable in this area i just had a conversation recently there was a couple women and they know that i'm open in this area and life had changed for them i had a hysterectomy many years ago and so i know how our bodies change as we go through pre parryman all this stuff as you evolve it changes and these women said you know what it just doesn't work for me anymore and i just cause there's a high percentage of women who don't have orgasms they never organize they think that's just part of life and they don't realize there are actually ways to have orgasm you've got to study it and teach your husband and so that's right and so this woman said it's just it's just not working and i i don't know what to do and i gave her a couple recommendations and i said have you tried this and she's like no i i don't i'm just you know what she got uncomfortable and she's like you know what i'm just gonna wait and see if my husband introduces that if we like figure that out and i was like but you're the one you're the one that has the issue in this area he's never gonna figure it out because i guarantee he's definitely all the guys like i guarantee you definitely won't figure it out doesn't even know that this is a concern for you so stop faking it and figure out how to make it work have these conversations because when we are physically connected or when we're spiritually connected and emotionally connected these conversations should be happening yeah because you're safe you're with this partner that you're safe with so we need to start having these conversations with one another and one of the things we do with because it's about it's not just about quantity but about quality so we did it we did a survey of seven thousand people at our church and uh and it was like eighty percent of them said it's not just about quantity what i actually want is quality you could be having sex three four or five times a week whatever but if it's just you're just mailing it in who's all that excited about that that's right it's like great it's like check a box great it was it happened but it wasn't like fun it just kind of happened it's like quality is actually a hugely important part of sexuality and if you're at a season in life often this is when our kids are young and you're just trying to pull it together if you're having zero and people hate when i say put it on the calendar have a day of the week where it's scheduled people are like you don't schedule that that's so clinical it's like no if you're having zero a schedule is better at least it's something to look forward and be forward focusing on we need to make this a priority in our relationships i think people have this vision of sex that we get from movies where it's like it's got to be like raining and you come on you rip your shirt off like and it's like in the kitchen and it's so just like in the moment i couldn't help it it's like no tuesday at 8 00 p.m is just it's just as sexy man because then you know like like if you're like mentally you got to be like okay i don't feel like it but remember he's coming home he's coming home i gotta get in the game let's go let's go let's happening it's happening it's happening and then the guy's at work and he's kind of getting jacked up because he knows what's going on like it's kind of a thing scheduling sex is not a bad thing and uh aaron and i work with so many couples around this stuff it's all these unspoken stuff about all these kind of things it's like we actually have a passion for people to flourish in this area in so many ways it's like a stool too where yeah all three work together you can't have a two-legged stool and expect to stay up all of these work in sync both for connection and also for protection because there will be seasons where one of these areas you'll be emotionally spent maybe you've lost a loved one or lost a job whatever it might be and that will be out of sync and the other two can help carry it there was a season early in our marriage um i had some health problems and had many surgeries and we weren't sure if me and my baby would make it and from that on we had a season in time where it didn't work we weren't able to have sex and it was like if that was all we had then what would have happened then if all our eggs were in that basket but no we had the emotional side we had the friendship by that point because early on i would have not felt like i was enough if that was the only thing but we had built that connection we had built that connectivity in order to be able to still flourish and move forward so let me give you uh one bible passage that sums all this up and it's what francis chan calls the most important bible passage in regard to marriage in the entire bible it's philippians 2 and it has everything to do with the physical sexual peace the emotional and the spiritual attachment philippians 2 verse 3 to 4. do nothing out of selfish ambition rather value others above yourselves not looking to your own interests but to the interests of the others so think about that in regard to sexuality think about that in regard to your emotional connection think about that in regard to your spiritual connection how do you look at the other person and say what they're saying is more important than what i'm saying i'm going to love and serve them the way they want to be loved and served not necessarily the way i want to be loved and served it doesn't always have to mean you love someone according because this that might not be their love language the love and respect thing you got to respect not just love all those pieces come together and then that starts to build trust in the relationship because if you lack you know stephen covey he was this business writer years ago wrote a book called the speed of trust you want to wonder why things bog down in your marriage sometimes it's a trust issue trust has been broken trust lacks i had a i had a couple in my office we were doing marriage counseling and i was trying to hit all their issues and she was like a person who didn't believe in vaccines and she's like we could never get it and she's getting all these notices and and never get it and it's gonna hurt your body awesome go in and then they're fighting and finally he just goes i already got it a month ago and she's like no and like she starts to ball and like runs out of the office pulls herself together for 15 minutes comes back and he's like it's the same thing i did with our vasectomy i'm like what do you mean he's like well i just went and got one of those too i mean she was nagging on about it and i just went and got it i'm like okay don't do that all right so what that does is destroys trust and when you've destroyed trust it's very hard to win it back and so even when you're trying to build trust and you're trying to flourish and try to build intimacy philippians 2 keep coming back to it i got to keep thinking of them more than i'm thinking of me that's the fight with your natural self that only the spirit of god can do he changes not what you do but what you want to do he changes the way that you can love and serve someone so that they flourish not so all the time that you're flourishing that's the way you're gonna actually flourish in your marriage so lord we're so thankful that you've given us this thing called marriage and parenting that we get to actually do you've entrusted us and i pray that this room stewards it well i pray that there's so much grace and forgiveness in this room that we expect and hope that you give us all this grace all this forgiveness in our life i pray that that is able to actually then stream out horizontally toward our spouse and our kids and that this room from being here this weekend would actually have marriages that just show the picture of the gospel to the world which is what ephesians 5 says marriage is it's a picture of christ in the church and that the world would look in at the marriages that are flourishing in this room and go i want to know jesus because of this that that's the work you would do that you would heal brokenness and pain and unforgiveness in this room so that we would leave here deeper better far more intentional and active toward pursuing flourishing versus just surviving in jesus great name we pray amen you

Channel: Bayside Church

Views: 2,627

Rating: 4.9506173 out of 5

Keywords: Bayside Church, Bible, Hope, Compassion, Love, God, Marriage, love, thriving, relationships, parenting, spouse, kids, biblical marriage, Mark Clark, Erin Clark

Id: 7sXbZZdOgdE

Length: 50min 39sec (3039 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 11 2021