As we go into today’s teaching, I just want to encourage you that maybe you find yourself in a marriage that you, both of you are Christians. You’re looking for more. You have some mistakes, you have some mess ups. You might even have some struggles that you are pushing into and learning and getting better, but you’re wanting both of you wanting to do better than today. That is how we’re teaching. Those are the parameters for teaching him. So if you find yourself in any other part of that, outside of those parameters, maybe you aren’t. Your spouse doesn’t attend church, they’re not a believer and you are, maybe you are single or maybe you have a severe amount of abuse in your world, in your life right now. I want to encourage you that you can still take nuggets of truth, apply them to your life, and you can learn from today. Do not discount what God’s doing in your heart, in your life and just know God is for you today at this Amarillo Church.
Well, Hey, his church. We’re so glad you’re here today and uh, we’re pumped to talk about marriage. We are a little bit, it’s going to be a fun time. Yeah. We’re going to talk about a marriage moments, like if you’ve been married long at all, everybody knows you have some moments in marriage. How many got good moments? You got bad moments. You just kinda got life moments. Yeah.
Good moments that you are will always remember and bad moments that you can never know.
Forget it. Yeah. So that stuff sticks with you. Right? So we want to take the moments God’s given us. I believe this. I believe that every moment I have to live like, like you look at years. We’ve been married 18 years now and a been made 18 years. It doesn’t feel like 18 years when you go through it. It’s about the moment you’re in right now. Right? I think Kung Fu Panda said this, this is a really good stuff. He said, ah, yesterday is all built around Kung Fu panda. Yesterday’s a mystery. Tomorrow is history, but today is the present. How about that? That’s, that’s great. So really, really, it’s like this. I got to take the moment God’s given us and maximize it. I believe this with all of my heart, that God’s gift to us is the time that he gives us. Yeah. Right. God’s given us a precious gift in time. Now our gift back to God is what we do with our time. And I think that’s massive in marriage.
Absolutely. We’ve had some great times. I mean obviously we have three children. Uh, we still both say we went to a friend’s wedding in Scotland once we say it was even better than the times that we had children. It was one of the best grades are alive. Yeah. Beautiful place. We’ve had great Amarillo Church moments where we feel like we killed it and we have had terrible moments that were just embarrassing. And I just think it helped you if we just share one of ours because you might be going through a life right now and need good moments and you’re just having a string of bad moments. And it’s like all that you can remember that. I want you to know that you can come out on the other side of that with more strength, with a better marriage, with more information maybe. And sometimes with a really good laugh.
We, we had just gotten married, we were in college and we had very little financial, uh, stream coming into our life. So we were in Tulsa and Brian, I remember he got invited to go to this really incredible golf course, which he’s a golfer. I didn’t get it. I get it more now because I’ve lived with them a long time, but he was so pumped to go on this golf trip and I was just a young bride free. It was at a golf course so I could get free golf as true. And, and I didn’t understand it. And honestly, I was just young bride and I gave him, I mean, I really just gave him travel. I was like, I cannot believe you’re going to go and do this. And he said, fine. He’s like, we’ll collect everything. We’ll gather up all the extra money that we can find right now and I’ll take you with me.
We’ll stay in a hotel, I’ll go golfing, you can go to the mall. And so I remember he gave me $150. Like that was a, that was like a year’s worth of fun for us at that time. And he said, you go to the mall, you do whatever you want today, babe, just have a great time. And I was so pumped. I mean, I was like shaking. I was so excited. Do you remember this? And he dropped me off at the mall and he, uh, went onto the golf course and I was going to stay at this huge mall in Dallas forever. And I was just so excited and I was all by myself. And I watched myself as I went in. The first place I went was in a department store and they had these really incredible makeup counters and I’ve always been a sucker for a product.
I just, I like products. And so I walked up in, this lady just started telling me now, given I’m 19, it wasn’t going to take much to make me look young, right? So, uh, she’s given me all these creams and all of these things and all of this makeup and I fell for it. She was an incredible salesman and I swear they had like the best lights that a human could possibly have. And I looked at myself in the mirror and I thought, I cannot live without this makeup, like I have to have this makeup. So I remember buying it all and I did not realize it, but when she handed me my bag and she asked me for my money, it was like $149 and 97 cents. And being young I now, today I would just be like, ah, no thank you. I need to, I need to get that back. But at the time it was so embarrassed that I didn’t have all the money. So I just said, okay. And I gave her my money and I sat in the mall and I cried all day and I didn’t even have enough money to eat lunch.
So I thought, well, the best part about this, it’s been a terrible day. I’ve had no more fun after that. But I’m going to go and Brian’s gonna think that I look incredible. So I’ve got in the car after he came to get me and I said, Babe, how do you think I look? And he said, what are you talking about? And I said, what do you think about my makeup? This lady in the mall did it. And he said, you look the same as you’ve always look. And I lost it. I was so torn up. And he said, you, I don’t know why you would do that. I said, I spent all my money on this. I don’t look at, he says, you don’t look any different. She’s like, can we eat? I’m like, didn’t you eat at the mall? We’d all, she’s like, I really have money eat. I’m like, are you kidding
me? You spent all your money at the first place you went? And we started fighting. He started fighting. A fight ensued. Marriage moments like track heads on cops. We started fighting. So we’re driving down in Dallas traffic, right? And uh, we start screaming at each other. I know that never happens in your family, but they were 19 and 22. We’ve never raised our voice since then. Right now I’m lying. But what we start finding, I’m like, why did you do this? And she’s embarrassed. So she’s saying, I’m just going to take it back. And I’m like, no, you’re not going to take it back. You’re going to live with what you’ve done now. You know how people do in your marriage. So they were in the traffic and she threatens to get out of the car, opened my door in the Dallas and we’re like, we’re like stopped.
I’m like, what are you doing? She’s like, I’m getting out. I’m like, you’re not getting out of the car. Get back in and talk to the mall when we get back in. And we don’t talk for like, I dunno, we don’t ever not talk for more than like four minutes. Four minutes is like an eternity for us to shut up. Cause we’re communicators, right? Yeah. And so we, we get over it, but it was like one of those marriage moments. You look back ever and we’ve all had them. Everybody in the room can relate. Anybody’s been married more than 20 minutes has had something like that in life. And so what can we do that that’s a, that’s a bad one. Embarrassing. Embarrassing one. But a funny one because your kids, and I can tell some other ones that I would never tell the public setting.
Right? So, so you have those as well. So what do we do to minimize the embarrassing moments and maximize the good moments in marriage? There’s other great marriage, marriage moments we had come on. We got kids that we didn’t think we were going to be able to get. Right? Miracle Kids by the wordle board. We’ve, we’ve seen success. We’ve seen, God bless what we’re, what we’ve done. What do you think one of the best moments for us has been married? I think one of the, one of the best moments that, that we’ve had in marriage is, um, early on and we’ll get to learning what we’re talking about today. Learning to communicate with one another. It’s about communication always. I mean communication and it’s always include those things like just the story we just told you. What does that have to do with communication and money?
Those are huge things that happen every single day to, to people in their house. Yeah. Marriage is like, it’s communication. Yeah. Money and it’s sex. A lot of what, what makes a marriage work or not work. But, uh, I think back early on, we planted the church about 15 years ago in Owensboro. And so we were Gung Ho. I mean, we’re all, when we get in, we get all that right. It’s like this is going to work. If it kills us all, it kills the neighbors. We’re, we’re, we’re doing this right. So, so we’re working around the clock and we’re working together, uh, for a while she sold furniture when we planted the church, but then, then the church was going, going well and I needed the help. And so she came on part time, um, at the church work fulltime, got paid part time there and we weren’t making much money, but we’re working around the clock and I didn’t know how to turn it off.
I still don’t know how to turn work off. It’s part of my, um, fallen nature on bit of a workaholic. And so, so I would work and, and really I thought because we were together working, that was enough. We were together. Can I get an amen from all the girls that that is actually not the case. Right, right. Being together is not always being together. Right. You can be together doing something, but that’s not together building a relationship. We’re building a church, not a relationship at the time. And so Jesse would come to me and say, Brian, I feel empty. It’s like you’re not, you’re not working on us. And she wasn’t even being hard about it. She was just, it was the reality of our situation that we weren’t. So when in up us, yeah,
I just knew we were headed in the wrong direction. It wasn’t like a fight. We weren’t having angry bouts. It was just this moment where I thought he’s my friend and I felt like if someone was my friend, they would inform me that we’re about to have problems in a few months and I could just feel that they’re just, that we weren’t right, that we weren’t connected, that we weren’t where we were supposed to be. And some of you are like, man, that seems so small. If you knew the problems in my marriage, but the deal is that big problems come because little problems are ignored. And the communication, just say that again. Big problems come because the small things are ignored because you think if this is or are you just go ahead and just make a little thing into something that’s so much bigger than it is.
Instead of just looking at someone and believing, just really genuinely believing that they want the best. Like they want to win with you and if you can give them a clue as to how we’re going to win next, right, then they can have an option on how they handle that. So it wasn’t like a fighter. I wasn’t nagging him. I was just simply saying, hey look, we have no connection. We’re working. We see each other all day, but you don’t see me. You see everything and everybody. But she, you don’t seem Jesse and I can tell that you’re not looking at me because we’re not having any kind of real communication about our family and our life. And I think that was one of the best ones because you literally took that and like at first he was like, oh, we’re fine. We’re together all the time. You know,
typical male response would a female tells them what they need? Like, like, and I know this is stereotypical, so throw tomatoes at me if you must, but, but typical, different, typical personality be different. But a lot of times, let’s say 70% of the time all a female will respond with hurt, right? And a male will respond with some form of anger. It’s both hurt, but the manifestation looks a little different. And I’m not saying that’s true with everyone but it, but it seems to be that way a lot of the cases. And so she would say, I need this. And for me it’s like, well, what are you saying? I’m a bad husband. Right? And that’s a bit of a defense mechanism and an unhealthy thing to do. And so finally it’s like I was listening, she said it enough, I started listening and I’m like, how do I fix that? And to fix problems like that, we’re not communicating. It takes us, it takes, this sounds crazy and not romantic, but it takes a system and our system became every Thursday night at a certain time we would go on a date and we would set it up where somebody we didn’t, I don’t know if we had, we had Briley probably then a where somebody had Briley and where we’re going out and if we didn’t have a lot of money it’s like we’re going to the fast food joint for a cheap burger, but we’re spending some together.
There were times we didn’t even have enough money for a babysitter so we would swap out with a friend will watch your kids this week if you’ll watch our kids next week. Yeah. And that’s a beautiful thing cause it any way you work at, even if your data’s I, our kids go to bed at seven 30 because they’re really tiny and we go and we watch a movie and he brought a bottled coke home cause that’s my favorite thing and we sit on the back porch and we’d drink that coke. It is, but it works because all I think that was a win for me because Brian came to me and he said, babe, I don’t know how you feel about this, but this is my calendar and this is where I’m putting our day and I am telling you there is never been a more romantic moment in our entire marital history. Then that moment, it doesn’t sound romantic, but he, he penciled me in. Everybody else got a date, everybody else got a slot. The whole world had an Amarillo Church appointment except me until that day. And I feel like it was one of the biggest marriage winds that we’ve ever had. Right.
I think at that point in our life, our marriage got stronger than it ever been. And I think that, that, that system, for lack of a better term, that we developed to invest in each other, set us up to, to not fall apart and to be strong. And some of the toughest trials of our life, it made us who we are. Like we’re not Brian and Jesse anymore. We’re Brian and Jesse. Yeah. And, uh, we kind of share a brain and it’s awkward and it’s weird, right? If we really are, we really are like that. And I think that made us that way, uh, back in the day. But
set up a time for us to communicate. And that’s one of the things that we want to hit on today is communication is so vital and people usually lean on one side or the other. They either lean to being over communicators and that is asked. We’re going to admit our problem we have. We are over communicators by name or it can lend it the, you can lend yourself to being an under communicator. Either one of those are going to require a time that you focus on proper communication and it’s going to, it’s going to require discipline from you to not just communicate but to communicate properly with the one that you love so that you can build your marriage and make it strong.
It’s massive. Oh, the Bible talks about communication again and again and how we communicate. And here’s a scripture that I think you can apply it to any area of life in communication. And it’s a Feagins four verses 26 through 32 all right. Ephesians four 26 through 32 it reads like this. It says,
write it down on a note and you need this one.
This is a Tex Kinda, we all, I think it’s worthy of memorizing portions of this text. It says this, be angry. This is the old King James and sin not let not the sun go down upon your wrath. Neither give place to the devil. Let him that stole still no more, but rather let him labor working with his hands. The thing which is good that he may have to give to him that needeth let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers and grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby you’re sealed until the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and got that going on right. Bitterness, wrath. It’s like that was breakfast this morning. Anger was lunch clamor. Hey, you’re in the right place. If that’s you, right?
Oh and evil speaking be put away from you with all malice and be ye kind one to another. My mother quoted this a thousand times to me and my brothers growing up. It’s like every day, be kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another. Even as God, for Christ’s sake has forgiven you. It’s all about communication. Be Angry and sin not. Yes. Okay. When you’re communicating, there’s going to be things in marriage. There’s going to be moments where we’re going to be angry at each other and you’re not, you’re not bad for getting angry. Uh, some people will set it up and make it sound like if you ever say anything or ever get heated in marriage that you’re a terrible person. Come on. You’re a human. You’re walking around in a body of flesh. I do not. And this relationship,
sorry, you’re married to another human that isn’t exactly like you. And so they think different and they act different and they communicate different. And that is a huge part of why God places you together. Because that can either be a force that makes it strong or it can be something that holds you back.
Absolutely. He says, he says this, be angry and sin not so you can get angry. You can communicate your anger and you can not get into sin. I believe that. And it goes on and talks about don’t be raffle. Don’t blow your tops. Really what he’s saying don’t go, uh, you know, crack head crazy. You don’t have to do that anymore, right? You have the spirit of God on the inside of you. And he says this, that we are sealed by the Holy Spirit. So the spirit of God’s here, when we’re communicating the spirit of God’s here in the midst of us, we are the temple of the Holy Spirit. So he tells us how to communicate. And then he says, be very careful that you don’t grieve the spirit of God. I think of the Times that I’ve grieved. I mean, I’ve grieved. I’ve been walking with Jesus since 1998 and there’s a lot of times now that I’ve grieved the spirit of God, my communication. You
know what though? I don’t know that there are as I think that we have grieved the holy spirit and more in our communication with each other. Absolutely. Any other thing in our life, and I don’t want to, I don’t want to do that and we’ve learned and we’ve grown, but if I’m honest, the marriage is one of the places that you have to be the most guarded and this will, this scripture pertains to every relationship that you have in your life, but if you live with someone on an everyday basis and you’re working out kids and work and finances and love and sex and all of these things, man, it can be one of the most intense situations that you live in. Therefore, you have to learn more self control with each other. I tell people this all the time. If you think you got off work at five o’clock you are misinformed.
The minute you got off work at five o’clock your job began because now you’re going home to your family, to your marriage. It’s the most important work that you will do all day long. When you get in that car, you take five minutes, you stop and you say, Holy Spirit, help me to do what I should do at my house. Helped me to love him like you. Love Him. Helped me to raise those kids like he would raise those kids. Help me God too. To not grieve you tonight. Whenever I go home. What would happen if every single marriage in our church started that way when they left work? I mean, we would have revival in our church. Paul, can you start that tomorrow?
Oh, it really is like this. And then you see people that are great everywhere they go. Yeah. Right. People love him at work. They’re the good old boys. Love them. Their friends love them. All the, they’re lovable people. And then they’ll go home and because of the familiar at parity, we’re family. Then they’ll treat their people that the familiarity I’ve working on English got, excuse me, I’m from Western Kentucky. But yes, that is your family. Right? And if you’re not careful, you let your gloves down and you’ll say things to the people you love the most. You wouldn’t say to anybody else because you know, they love you enough to give you a pass. And so you gotta be careful. You don’t let that pass become a trap where you grieve the Holy Spirit and you’re hurt each other. So communication, you have to be very, very careful.
Uh, we were just talking about how some people over communicate, right? They’re saying too much all the time. And uh, this is Jesse. So, so I’m just saying, and it really is me, like if we’re feeling it, the other person’s gonna know. Yeah. Because we’re kind of wired that way. You know, we’re not afraid of confrontation either. One of us, we don’t have flight. We only have fight. There’s something wrong with us genetically. Most people have fight or flight. We have fight and uh, so we can communicate and we know that, that we probably, especially me, I need to dial it back right. At times at all.
Yeah. And I feel that too, even in other relationships. But there are times that Brian wants the headline and I want to give him all the details of why he’s hurting me and why I’m mad and why I need him to fix it and why he needs to change and all these things. And I’ve had to learn over the years that in order to not grieve the Holy Spirit, sometimes that communication style, even though very informative, it’s not always helpful because he’s not listening anymore. So I’ve thrown so many words, thousands of words at him and he’s only caught 10. So if I can think through what I want to say and dial that communication back, we can have communication that is quick and concise and, and he’s more receptive to that than he is the thousands of words that I’ve come up with about his personality and why it’s bothering me. Right? So, um, sometimes when you’re an over communicator, you just have to remember, yeah, you’re not done communicating yet, but they were done 15 minutes ago and they just can’t handle any more, any more words. And they’re flying past them. And it’s just anger and anger and anger and anger. And now it’s becoming impossible for them to be angry and sin not, and you’re actually provoking your spouse to wrath, which we’re not even supposed to do that with our children. The Bible says, and I think it’s vital that we remember that in our marriages,
if it, if, if communication is, if he’s over communicated and the thing starts trekking in a negative manner, that’s true. All, all the stats show, you know, some people are like, we’ve got to stay here and fight this out. We’re going to get this done. Don’t do it. I’m not like that. I leave. I’m like, I’ll come back when you can act like you’re not crazy. Right. I’m out and I’ll be, I’ll be back to normal human geography and I’ll be back honey. And so I’ll walk. When she used to get so mad and I had no proof that I was right, I just knew I was about that. And now the science of relationship says once a thing is, is going toxic and negative, the best thing you can do is, is come apart for one of the things toxic and negative for a period of time and come back whenever a cooler, cooler minds cooler heads can prevail. So, so there’s over communicators in the room, there’s probably some under a lot more under communicators, people that don’t communicate enough in the room. And so those people, spouses, if you don’t communicate enough, most of the time you’re expecting your spouse to fulfill a need in your life that they don’t know exists. Right. You’re placing an expectation on a person that you haven’t communicated. So you’re looking for something.
Yeah. God knows your heart. Your spouse doesn’t. Yes, that’s right. And so you come in and you’re like, I’m done. Maybe you have a job that you have to talk a lot or you’re just not communicate, you know, a communicator by nature. And so you just pull back and you’re like, well, they should figure it out. And they’re like, what have I done to you? And you’re like, if you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you. If you have said those words in the last week, you are definitely an under communicator because God has called you to actually share with your spouse. Like give them an opportunity to win. We have to want our families to win more than we want. Our own way. You have to give them a chance to win. And it may be that you have to discipline yourself to come in, take a rest, and then say, this is our 15 minutes of communication. I would love it if you’d tell me everything that you need to tell me from today. And I would like to comment back with two words. I don’t know.
No one. You have to schedule it your way to communicate. The people that don’t communicate, a lot of times they don’t talk, don’t talk, don’t talk, don’t talk. And then they go crazy, right? And it’s like this is toxic. So, so a better system is, is you need a system of communication.
People think, well, that person that talks too much needs more discipline in their life, but it takes just as much if not more disciplined for an under communicator to come into the room, to schedule a time and to actually show up, present, look their spouse in the eye and say, I’m going to communicate for the next 15 minutes. I’m not going to communicate on minute 16 but I’m going to communicate for the next 15 minutes and anything that we need to talk about, and there may be days you have to do more. Obviously we recommend and every seven day date day, our date, night, whatever that looks like for you, a time that you set aside those moments or moments that you have communication. It helps people that are under communicators to schedule that in and to put that discipline in their life. I’m telling you, it will help you if you can get it in, in, in your calendar.
The main thing, and we’re running out of time. I want to, I want to kind of close with, with a couple of thoughts, but, but if you allow the devil to steal your communication one from another, or you’ve allowed the devil to win. And I was, I was eating with will Mitchell just the other night from here at his Amarillo church. Amarillo love, we’ll Jesse grew up with will and will wrote a book about divorce and kind of the effect on families. Pretty cool. That wills written a book, man, I hats off to you will, I’m coming after you. I’m writing a book right now and I’m, I’m to, I’m going to get in the club but, but one of the things he said is that the first thing when two countries go to war, when they’re getting ready to war, the first thing they do is they cut off all communications.
They come away from the negotiation table, right? They come away from talking to each other. Uh, their, their, their ambassadors, their leaders. Stop talking, communications cut. And after communications cut, the next thing that happens is the bomb start dropping. Yeah. So I want to encourage you, if you’ve allowed the devil, I believe in a Christian marriage, right? To cut the communication, uh, you better open those lines of communication back up before the bomb stopped dropping. God doesn’t want the bombs to drop on your marriage or, or your or on your family what God’s put together. Let no man put us under the scripture says so. So what we want is we want you to communicate and here’s just a couple of action items. You could talk to your spouse. Those of you that aren’t married yet, um, man, y’all to write this stuff down and think about it the future, but you need to schedule a time.
You’re communicating and you need to come up with a spirit led way. You’re going to communicate if you’re going hot, you need to bring it down. If you’re not saying what you should be saying, you need to step up and learn to communicate. And then both of us, we need to learn if we’re going to dish it out, right? They’re going to tell us what they need. We have to receive it. If you can pitch, you also have to be kept catching. So the way we say it, so it’s a powerful way and so I think we ought to take a moment, Jesse, and we ought to pray for their Amarillo Church communication. Would you? Would you pray for them today? I’m going to
pray that you’ll have quick and that you’ll have honest communication, that God will give you a peace that passes all human understanding. It’s going to guard your hearts and your minds through Christ Jesus. As you walk out this thing that is the best thing that God ever gave to the earth outside of the Church of the living God. We’re believing with you today. Are you ready? If your spouse’s by you, go ahead and grab their hand. If you’re single, I want you to push into this prayer because you’re already pushing into your future in what you want in your life. If you’re single and you don’t want to spouse, just keep your eyes open and let you go. Anyone else’s hand, pray for you today. Father. I thank you for these sweet people. Yes God that have come today with a heart to learn and hunger. Father for your word, for help from heaven for their homes.
God, I pray that you would intervene, that you would give them wisdom voices that come in and are a part of their life right now. I pray that the angels of the Lord would visit their household, that even as they sleep, that they would prepare the atmosphere. Father, that there worship would go up, that their heart would be seen by you, that as they pray, but father that you would open up the lines of communication. We pray this week for super natural open lines of communication between the two of them. I pray that every single marriage that’s on the rocks right now, God that your, that you’re bringing help from heaven. Father, I pray right now for those that are strong that they’re getting stronger. Father, today we ask you to do what only you can do as we apply the wisdom principles from the word of God, we believe you for it. Yes, thank you for it, and we agree together today. In Jesus’ mighty name, we pray. Amen. Amen.