Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Thursday, January 8th. Our host is the president of FamilyLife, Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine. Is your relationship with your spouse your primary relationship? Do you understand what the purpose of marriage is in the first place? We're going to talk about that today, stay tuned.
And welcome to FamilyLife Today, thanks for joining us on the Thursday edition. And, right off the bat, we need to remind folks this is Day 4 of our 40-day Love Dare. I know a lot of our listeners saw the movie, "Fireproof," when it was out in theaters back in the fall. In fact, it's coming out on DVD here in the next couple of weeks. And we thought, between now and Valentine's Day, we all ought to take the Love Dare that was featured in the movie. So Day 4 of the Love Dare says this – "Love is thoughtful." Psalm 139, verses 17 and 18 – "How precious also are your thoughts to me, how vast is the sum of them. If I should count them, they would outnumber the sand."
The point is love is thoughtful. For a person to love another person, there is thoughtfulness involved in that. So today's Love Dare is for you to contact your spouse sometime before the end of the business day with no agenda other than to ask your spouse how he or she is doing, and if there is anything you can do for them. All right? That's your assignment for the day, your Love Dare.
And if you are interested in getting a copy of the book, "The Love Dare," you can go to our website, which is FamilyLifeToday.com and we've got today's Love Dare printed out there as well. So you can review it if, for some reason you need to remind yourself of what your assignment for the day is, all right?
Speaking of assignments, we have another assignment for you. We are about five weeks away from kicking off our spring season for our Weekend to Remember Marriage Conferences. Valentine's weekend we're going to open the season with conferences in eight different locations including some pretty nice places like Hershey, Pennsylvania, and Hilton Head, South Carolina; Norfolk, Virginia; in Dallas, Texas at the Gaylord Texan Resort; at a nice resort in Albuquerque, New Mexico; at the Crystal Gateway Marriot in Washington, D.C.; and this week and next week we're giving FamilyLifeToday listeners an opportunity to attend this conference and to invite another couple to join you.
And, in fact, this is maybe the best offer I've ever seen our team put together. If you and your spouse register to attend one of these upcoming conferences, either Valentine's weekend or anytime later on in the spring, and you attend at the regular rate, you will be sent a certificate that allows you to invite another couple to join you for free. So you and your spouse attend at the regular rate, you've got a companion certificate that allows you to invite another couple, and they join you at no cost. And it doesn't mean you have to sit together all weekend. You can go to your part of the ballroom, they'll go to their part of the ballroom, or you can just enjoy the weekend with some friends. It's a nice way to get to go.
But this offer is only good this week and next week, and to take advantage of it, you have to go online at FamilyLife.com and register for the conference. When you get to the keycode box on the registration form, you type in my name – type in "bob" and that will make you eligible for the companion certificate, which we'll send out to you. Again, go to the website, FamilyLifeToday.com, fill out the registration form for the conference, type in my name, "Bob," in the keycode box.
Or just call us at 1-800-FLTODAY, say, "I want to get registered for the conference. I heard Bob talking about it on the radio, and I'd like to get the companion certificate as well. We'll make all of the arrangements and send that out to you, and you and another couple can attend one of the upcoming Weekend to Remember Marriage Conferences and have a great weekend together. And we really hope, Dennis, that many of our listeners will attend one of these conferences this spring.
Dennis: Not "hope" – it's time. You know, when you go through an economic downturn like our country has been through over the past few months, there are certain key relationships in life that you must invest in because they have to endure and be able to come out the other side. And if you haven't been to a Weekend to Remember, I'd like to suggest to you it's time that you go to one.
Come and experience the teaching, the humor, the fun, the entertainment, great speakers who are authentic. Bob, I never get over the fact that thousands of couples come to our conferences, and they hear the speakers being authentic, being real, and sharing from their lives their failures, their disappointments and how they apply the Scripture. And, you know, in a way, couples can leave there feeling like, "You know what? We're not alone in our struggles, and there is a way to handle them, and there is hope."
And I think this is a great time right now to really get away as a couple and spend some time refreshing and refurbishing your marriage and your family and setting your sights on the new year and building into your marriage relationship.
Bob: Let me just give the guys a heads-up here, too – Valentine's Day is on a Saturday this year, and we've got conferences taking place in a lot of cities on that weekend. So just put two and two together here, you know, taking your wife to a Weekend to Remember Valentine's weekend …
Dennis: Homerun.
Bob: It is a homerun.
Dennis: Worth at least 1 point.
Bob: Information about the conferences is on our website at FamilyLifeToday.com and, again, you can take advantage of the special offer as long as we hear from you by next weekend. So go to the website for all the information, or call us at 1-800-FLTODAY. And we thought it would be good for our listeners to hear a sample of what folks hear at the Weekend to Remember.
Dennis: Just one of your average communicators that we have on our speaker team that speaks at the Weekend to Remember Marriage Conferences – Crawford Loritts and his wife, Karen, have been speaking for almost three decades now, and I tell you what, you just talk about a great communicator, and you are about to hear one of the messages we give at the Weekend to Remember, and you can just picture sitting in a room with 600, 700, 800 people who are not being asked to do anything publicly, but they are just being asked to absorb this privately and to interact with their spouse around the truths of this message.
Bob: And this particular message takes a look at what God had in mind when He invented marriage in the first place. Here is Crawford Loritts.
Crawford: [from audiotape.] I love sitting down with couples who have been married 40, 50, 60 years. I love sitting down and just listening to them talk. I love looking in their faces and seeing the beauty of endurance, understanding that they've been through some storms together and the fact that they are still standing – it's not that they've just survived, but they have thrived because they've been through some storms together. They don't make as much as they used to, they've had to downsize and sell the house, the kids sometimes have to send them a little help, but their sweetness is a wealth of experience there, and they've made it. And that's a vision for myself and for Karen.
I look at her sometimes and say, "I just want to be so old with you – pass me the box of Depends."
[laughter]
Ah, you laugh – you're going to get there. Are they showing? No …
[laughter]
All right, I'll hear about that. Oneness grows as we receive our spouse as a gift from God. That's the big idea of this presentation. Circle that – "it grows as we receive our spouse as a gift from God." You might say, "I don't feel like he's a gift from God. I feel like he's a gift from somebody else, I'm not going to mention his name, but I don't feel like he's always a gift from God." Yeah.
God's plan for oneness in marriage involves three responsibilities – you must leave, cleave, and become one flesh. That's God's plan based upon His purposes. Simple – leave, cleave, and become one flesh. Now, we're going to unpack that in this presentation.
First of all, you leave. The first responsibility is to establish independence from your parents. One of the things that disturbs me a little bit, a trend over the last few years in our culture, this is very, very disturbing to me – but adulthood and adult independence is getting later and later and later and later and later and later and later. You know, we are living in a culture in which we are not raising our kids to celebrate and to embrace independence. There is this tacit expectation that we've created in our children that it's okay to keep relying upon Mom and Dad. So we've got to break this whole cycle.
Genesis 2:24 says, "Therefore, a man shall leave" – Hebrew for "leave" means "go," get out – "his father and his mother." I'll never forget, our youngest son told us – my youngest son, when he graduated from college was being interviewed by this large urban church to be the youth pastor there in Chicago. So, you know, he'd gone through the interview process and this kind of thing, and then the final question – he was telling me this – his senior pastor asked him, he said, "Now, Brendan, once again, why do you really want this position? Why do you really – what's on your heart?"
And so he went on and talked about his passion for young people and yadayada and went on. He said, "But there is one other thing I've got to tell you." He said, "What's that?" "My Dad said I can't come home."
[laughter]
And he said that did the deed. So, you see? You laugh, but it's true. Now, leaving must be done in the context of honor to one's parents – honor to them. They have sacrificed for us, and they have carried us, and they have invested in us, but we need to do it in a way that honors our parents.
At the top of page 57 – "It is essential that your spouse is the primary relationship in your life." Your spouse is the primary relationship in your life. Your in-laws must know that on both sides of the equation. Then once you say "I do," those significant relationships change. Your mother is always your mother, but your mother is not your wife. Your father is always your father, but your father is not your husband. The critical primary relationship has to do with you two.
One of the gifts that – and Karen's been really good at this – that we have given our kids – we have huge traditions growing up around the holidays, but when they got married, we said to them, "Your marriage, your relationship, and your traditions are primary, and we don't want you to feel the pressure of having to do what we've always done as a family."
And I think you need to pull some of those expectations off the table very, very practically – that now this is the primary relationship. If you don't do that, you are inviting huge problems in the marriage and in the family.
Be careful not to be financially dependent on your parents. Now in today's economy, certainly, we all need help, certainly we all need help, and for younger couples, let me give you this piece of advice – if your parents give you money, please offer to pay it back, offer to pay it back. Don't continue like you were as a teenager. Let them see you owning the responsibility of your own direction and of your own life. People will treat you the way you let them treat you, and part of the problem with controlling parents is that children do not project enough independence. We revert back to this "Mommy, Daddy help me" mindset, and I'm not talking about being in your face, project the fact that you are willing to take the responsibility for your own life and to stand on your two feet. People will treat you the way you project yourself, and you let them treat you.
Again, I labor this because this is a huge issue. I have met 50-year-old men who get around their mothers and fathers and act like they're 14. Help, yes – dependent, never. Rough spots in our lives, understand that. Letter C, "Beware of over-dependent in other areas – friends, hobbies, and activities." Remember, when you said "I do," you're married, okay? You can't act like a teenager. You can't act like hanging around your boys all the time or hanging around your girlfriends all the time.
Your hobby is not your surrogate mate. And this is the establishment of clarity about this relationship right here. I'm not married simply because I want my want my sexual needs met. I'm not married because I want somebody to clean up after me. I'm not married because when I come home I want my food there. I'm not married because I want some little trophy wife on my arm when I go to the dinner or this kind of thing. Your husband and your wife – they're not manikins, they're not a piece of jewelry, they're not something that makes you look good. That's the primary relationship in your life, and everything else, including how you spend your leisure time, your friends, they are woefully second to that primary relationship – a very, very important concept – leave.
Now let's make it personal. Is your attachment in any of these areas hindering oneness in your marriage? Take a look at these things – what about parents' money? This is a little something that they use to reel you in, overly trying to please your parents because you don't want Mount Vesuvius, you don't want them upset; passed romances – things that you have not cut the tie with; hobbies – more in love with the first T or the fishing boat or whatever; friendships, after-work parties, pre-marriage dreams, siding with parents versus spouses. You go "Ouch, I didn't realize we were going to get this personal," yeah.
The degree to which you leave is the degree to which you can cleave. I mean, that's a huge statement. The degree to which I sever the tie is the degree to which I can cleave to my wife or my husband.
Roman numeral II, the second responsibility is to establish commitment to one another – "Therefore, man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife." Hold fast to his wife. You know, Tim said something, and I wish he could have unpacked this a little bit more – you know, the last 15 years or so, we've gotten scared of the term "co-dependent" and rightly so. Co-dependence is a very unhealthy thing, where you smother one another and you're so personally needy that you end up controlling each other emotionally, and that's not a healthy thing, that's not a healthy thing.
However, the very fact that you are married says that you passionately need the other person. Interdependence is a wonderful thing. God has called us to be healthfully interdependent on one another. You need that person sitting next to you. You desperately need that person sitting next to you. When you said, "I do" you got married, it was a statement of profound neediness. You don't know what you would do without the other person, and that's where this cleaving comes together.
That person that you're married to must never feel as if you are using them; rather, that you profoundly need them. That's the reason why I tell young couples, if one is painfully independent and cannot press into the other, I always tell them, "Hey, back off a little bit until you can get to that point. Don't get married, not just yet." Genesis 2:24 says, "Therefore, shall a man leave his father and mother and hold fast his wife." God created Adam with an unmet need. Adam was alone. And, by the way, this is prior to the fall – obvious observation. So neediness is not a sinful disposition, neediness is not something that came along later on because we were sinfully inclined, and it's a part of the fall.
No, God created – and this is a profound statement – prior to the fall of man, God created in all of us an unmet need. To be needy in this regard is extraordinarily healthy.
Bob: Well, we've been listening to Part 1 of a message from Crawford Loritts from a recent FamilyLife Weekend to Remember Marriage Conference and at least all the married guys said, "amen to that. I'm needy, and I’m glad I have a helpmate to meet my need."
Dennis: And, Bob, some people believe the hardest three words to say in the English language are "I love you." I think some of the most difficult words for some men to say to their wives are "I need you." And the reason is it means we are vulnerable, we are incomplete, and, in reality, all you're doing is admitting what God declared here in Genesis, chapter 2, that we really do complement one another.
And so if you haven't recently said to your wife and haven't, perhaps, held her face in your hands and looked her in the eyes and said, "You know, sweetheart, I want you to know something. I really do need you as a friend, as a companion, as a helpmate, as my wife, as my lover." I think you can get a lot of mileage in your relationship by constantly being aware how much you really do need one another. It's not just for men to admit to their wives.
Bob: Right.
Dennis: Wives can admit this to their husbands as well, and I think it has a bonding impact on a marriage relationship.
Bob: Mm-hm. In fact, I'm always interested when I'm speaking at one of our Weekend to Remember Marriage Conferences to talk to couples after the conference, and it is that personal interaction, the projects that we have couples do during the conference, where they get alone, just the two of them, and they have some time to interact and to go through a series of questions or to work through a project together. I am always interested to hear them say that was the high point of the weekend for us was that time together being directed in these particular projects.
And let me, real quickly, remind our listeners again that this week and next week you have an opportunity to attend one of these upcoming Weekend to Remember Marriage Conferences all spring long. We kick off on Valentine's weekend and go throughout the spring. You make plans to attend with your spouse and register this week or next week, and we're going to send you, at no additional cost, a companion certificate so that another couple can attend the conference either with you or in another city in another location at no cost.
So it's a buy one get one free, and, again, to take advantage of this opportunity, you need to go online and register at FamilyLifeToday.com. Type my name – "Bob" into the keycode box on the registration form. You register at the regular price, we'll send you the certificate so that another couple can attend with you and your spouse at no cost, and you can enjoy a great weekend getaway as a husband and wife at one of our upcoming Weekend to Remember Marriage Conferences.
Again, go online at FamilyLifeToday.com to register and type my name, "Bob," in the keycode box. Or call 1-800-FLTODAY, you can register over the phone. Just make sure you mention that you heard us talking about this on the radio or mention my name. Just tell them, "Bob told me to call," and we'll make sure you get the companion certificate that you can forward on to another couple.
Again, we have to hear from you by next week in order for you to take advantage for this special offer. So give us a call today at 1-800-FLTODAY or go online at FamilyLifeToday.com.
And, with that, we've got to wrap things up for today. We want to encourage you to be back with us tomorrow when we're going to hear Part 2 of Crawford Loritts' message from a recent FamilyLife Weekend to Remember Marriage Conference talking about God's plan for marriage. I hope you can join us for that.
I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, and our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I'm Bob Lepine. We'll see you back next time for another edition of FamilyLife Today.
FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas – help for today; hope for tomorrow.
