The Bible's advice for your Marriage

i discovered something in ephesians 5 33 that i hadn't paid attention to ephesians 5 33 ephesians is one of the books of the bible the fifth chapter the 33rd verse is the summary to some say is the greatest treatise in the new testament on marriage and there it says a husband must love his wife and a wife must respect her husband and i realized in a college town academic environment 45 000 students that loving a woman was not a debate issue you know but the idea of respecting a man now that you know women say with dr emerson i have to be honest with you i don't feel respect for him be hypocritical for me to show respect when i don't feel it he's not superior to me it's dictionary definition of respect you show respect your superiors i'm not in fear to him not going to be treated like a doormat and everybody knows you've got to earn respect and he doesn't deserve respect he hasn't loved me in meaningful ways i'm certainly not going to lose a sense of myself and identity i'm not i'm not going to subject myself to emotional abuse i'm not going to return to male patriarchy and fear male dominance which i think is really your agenda but other than these things dr emerson i'm really open to agreeing i'm on page with you so you figured you had a hard sell exactly that is exactly right there are all these landmines out there and yet every man serves and dies for honor and so the disconnect between that yes well men are motivated we honor each other there's this honor code that we live by so i knew as a male and having gone to military school for five years i realized wow i'm motivated by issues of honor and yet women were saying gag me and so i thought there was this disconnect he really wants to be the knight in shining armor he does and so there is this desire to be that knight in shining armor and yet when it comes to this idea of respecting a man there was this fear that women have that i'm going to somehow lose something here and that's understandable i've been around this long enough my own mother and dad had marital conflicts so i always see women as my mom and so mom might have this fear i understand that but as i got into it i also had my phd in family studies and the university of washington studied two thousand couples for 20 years and they discovered that love and respect are the two key ingredients for successful marriage so now you have this best research institute telling us that the bible said it two thousand years ago but my discovery the epiphany i had was when i saw this correlation between love and respect and that was when i had this moment and i called sarah and my wife in to hear what i had just seen when a wife feels unloved she tends to react in a way that feels disrespectful to her husband and when a husband feels disrespected he tends to react in a way that feels unloving to her and one of the two key things each needs they end up stepping on each other's air hose so to speak as i say there's a she has a love tank he has a respect tank but we're pushing each other off our air hoses and we're standing on the others now we all need love and respect equally no question about it she needs r-e-s-p-e-c-t he needs l-o-v-e there is no debate about the fact that we need it equally but the felt need during conflict moira is different and by that i mean when we have these heated fellowship moments there is this tendency for her to filter things through the love grid and him through the respect grid and we wanted to research that out so we've asked seven thousand people this question on our own research when you're in a conflict with your support your spouse do you feel unloved at that moment or disrespected get this 83 percent of the men say they feel disrespected 72 of the women say they feel unloved if you start at zero and go to the extremes this is what we call statistically significant this is as different as night is from day as pink is from blue as male is from female so what happens during the conflict at a certain point she begins to feel unloved he begins to feel disrespected but here's the deal she's not trying to be disrespectful that's not her goal her goal is she's feeling unloved and she's trying to help him understand that he was unloving she just needs re assurance that he loves her and that's where her her mind's at and even if she's feeling disrespected she eventually says how can you say you love me and treat me disrespectfully it still comes back to that deeper issue of love he on the other hand is is he knows she loves him he asks harry hey harriet does your wife love you oh yeah harry yeah does she like you no not today so what happens during conflict he begins to think she's using this topic as another opportunity to send him a message that she doesn't respect him because he fails to be as unloving as she is so now they spin on what i call the crazy cycle without love she reacts without respect without respect he reacts without love without love she reacts without respect without respect and this baby spins and goodwill people not evil will people not ill-willed people good-willed people are spitting out of control and they're confused and our campaign is to help them decode i don't know if you are familiar with the movie the king and i with yule brenner and debra carr and i remember even as a child weeping over this movie how could this strapping handsome virile gilbranner be dying over a wife's demeaning of him a wife dis and a wife the english school teacher she wasn't his wife disrespecting him but what what i saw was my parents and for the first time i understood by that time my dad was gone and i mean it was just filled with this desire to help them because i got it now yes and i just saw you know my my father out of a depression the depression where his dad deserted a wife and six children so love to him was workaholism and a very needy uh victim of all kinds of abuse my mother who needed uh nurturing and affirmation and acceptance and love and they i saw it like this you know they were just missing each other they loved each other the tragic irony is that at one point in their marriage they were dressed for a costume ball i'm going to show you the picture my dad as the king and my mother as anna and they truly lived out that conflict that you see in that classic musical we we tend to deal with conflict differently 85 percent of those who stonewall and withdraw is the male at a certain point in conflict he'll withdraw she couldn't imagine withdrawing but the university of washington in their research on these couples said that's 85 percent and his heartbeats get to 99 beats per minute he's in warrior mode he doesn't look that way she looks like she's out of control emotionally but she knows where she's headed she's not out of control her heartbeats are calm he's setting they're very stoic but his heart beats 99 beats per minute you're ready to throw yourself on a hand grenade and die so what does he have to do he has to calm down he has to withdraw drop it forget it you're picking a fight well she's not trying to pick a fight she's trying to connect she's trying to resolve the issue by moving toward we need to talk but we're so much more verbal well there is this verbalization exactly that's how god has wired you but the university of washington said she criticizes and complains complain they watch it in a laboratory or that's criticism yep complain and after a while what happens men hear criticism and complaint as contempt for who they are and no husband feels fond feelings of love and affection in his heart toward a woman he thinks despises who he is as a human being but in a woman's world when you withdraw she sees that as an act of hostility that's what they said the women are asked how do you feel when your husband's stonewalls act of hostility what do you men feel when she's criticizing and complaining they feel it's contemptuous but here's what's interesting she does this because she cares only to be interpreted as contemptuous he does what he does in his world as a male out of honor we withdraw we de-escalate you're too important to me to fight and this is no big deal let's just drop it forget it and move on make sure she thinks he's not interested in working this hugely so she passes judgment when he's trying to do the honorable thing and she says you hate me so now you have these two goodwill people he she can do the honorable thing he's labeled unloving she's seeking to do the loving thing and she's labeled disrespectful so what we're helping couples realize is that both have good hearts we're not perfect we're all sinful we're all selfish but in the overall marathon of the relationship we jump on that crazy cycle because we're both trying to do the right thing she's moving toward him to do the loving thing but his interpreter is disrespectful he's seeking to do the respectful thing and is interpreted as unloving and the minute we begin to give the benefit of the doubt even though it hurts us they're stepping on our air hose it doesn't feel right to any woman for him to withdraw it doesn't feel right for any man to be criticized and complain against you know on an ongoing basis but what you have to do is come to a point will i trust this person's heart or did i marry hitler's distant cousin do you ever wrestle with god's design male female yes yes well ultimately it's a compliment that he's created because if both of us were the same one of us is unnecessary in that sense but there is this beauty that we have to discover but yes we irritate each other and this is why paul said in first corinthians 7 28 if you marry you have not sinned but you will have trouble and the context there earlier he said the husband does not have authority over his own body but the wife does and the wife does not have authority over her own body but the husband does what's he saying both have equal authority in the sexual area both have equal say so i remember praying i said well lord um on tuesday night for instance does he decide they're going to have sex or does she decide they're not going to have sex yes this inaudible voice said um i said lord um well like like when they're older if he decides they don't want to have sex and she decides that they're gonna who decides yes i said lord have you designed trouble yes and one of the things that we've got to come to is this realization that we're going to have different preferences and that doesn't mean that because my preference is right that you're automatically wrong that mature people come to a point where we can both be right but we differ and this is why we campaign on this slogan not wrong just different and how are we going to do that dance then because we're male and female and we irritate each other and we're upset well god why did you make us take us like this ultimately i have to trust him that there's a purpose for this and that those tensions those troubles are designed for a deeper purpose you

Channel: 100huntley

Views: 37,466

Keywords: 100Huntley, Crossroads, Christians, Jesus, Christian Testimony, Christian Testimonies 2021, emerson eggerichs, love and respect, dr. emerson eggerichs, marriage, christian, marriage counseling, emerson eggerichs pink and blue, emerson eggerichs crazy cycle, relationships, love, eggerichs, divorce, successful marriage and relationship, bible study on marriage, bible marriage, christian marriage, marriage advice, christian marriage advice, relationship advice, best marriage, happy marriage

Id: kBv-yj5lPag

Length: 10min 42sec (642 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 01 2021