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Conference Session
2023 Marriage Conference

2023 Marriage Conference – Session Two

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February 11, 2023
Steven Lee
Pastor for Preaching & Vision

Suffering & Trials

Marriage

Sanctification & Growth

Transcript

0:04It is so good to see all of you here this morning. For those of you that don't know, my name is Steven. I'm one of the pastors here, and I'm married to Stephanie for 16 years. And we have children who are 5 7, 9 11, and 13. And the Steins mentioned their big Tama tent and I think we ended up inheriting that. And so we've taken some adventures in their tent since then. And I'm excited to have all of you here as we build strong and healthy marriages here at the North Church. I was telling my wife earlier who is here, I said, if you didn't come, I could tell a lot more stories about our marriage, but she's here. And so she told me, don't say anything that you'll regret. So that, that's, that's the aim.

0:58I will try to tell no stories about any of you or any embarrassing ones about us. So would you actually join me as we pray? And I'd love to ask the Lord for help. Father in heaven, we thank you that you are a faithful father. And so help us in these moments now to see how you are at work in our marriages so that we might glorify you in this most sacred of relationship. Do this for your glory and our joy, and for the sake of the next generation. In Christ's name we pray. Amen. Whenever I do a wedding, sometimes I'll lead with this joke, which is an old joke. Some of you that I've married have heard this joke. There's three rings in marriage, the engagement ring, the wedding ring and the suffering.

2:03And usually the young couple that stands before me looks a little bit bewildered and all the other older couples kind of chuckle just like you did. And, and, and we know because there's some half truths with that statement. In marriage, we experience all sorts of suffering and conflict and difficulties. And, and very often when I do some premarital counseling, I'll have this, you know, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed couple who are so excited and you know, they've never had a real argument ever in their life with one another. And I just think, just wait. Because we know that a, as soon as we get past the, that initial delight that we have, then kind of life begins and it's a lot more difficult. So this morning, pastor Brian has assigned me the task of speaking on suffering and sanctification in marriage.

3:04And what I wanna do is look at three questions for us this morning. The first is, what types of suffering do we or will we face in marriage? The second is, what are some sinful ways we respond to suffering? And then the third is, what is God accomplishing in our suffering? So we're gonna just walk through each of these three questions. So what types of suffering do we face in marriage? And I met someone earlier on my way to the bathroom that is engaged. And so, you know, they're not yet married. And so my sense is there is going to be some suffering in marriage. In marriage, we discover that we and our spouse are less sanctified than we originally thought. When you're dating, you put your best foot forward, right? Guys, you don't pass gas when you're dating in front of each other.

4:02But after you're married, it's fair game. We quickly discover that life gets more challenging, both from sin and just from life itself. God says to the woman in Genesis three, I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing, in pain. You shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you. What we discover very early on in the third chapter of the entire Bible is that sin enters into the world and brokenness follows closely behind that slots of our suffering results from the fall. All childbirth is painful, and we have the ever-present challenge that your desires are contrary to your husband.

5:01And the man is given this role of leading God likewise says to the man, cursed is the ground because of you in pain, you shall eat of it all the days of your life. So we can thank Adam for all the backbreaking and burdensome work that we engage in. And so while some of our suffering in marriage can be attributed to sin, a lot of it can just be attributed to living in a fallen world. So these are some of the things I have in mind in our families. We can experience infertility, miscarriage, stillbirth, or the death of a child. We may care for severe special needs children experience difficulty in parenting or have wayward adult children.

5:49Or in our finances we have unemployment and bankruptcy and just not enough. Perhaps our bodies can experience serious illnesses, fear of intimacy, physical trauma, perhaps the inability to have sex As we age, we experience things like dementia and Alzheimer's and cancer and general decline in relationships, just basic relational connection. We, we can be so different from our spouses. My wife loves Hallmark movies and I like movies where people fight and die and, and, and she likes pride and prejudice. And so we don't watch movies a lot together. And when we do, we have to sort of bargain at which ones we're going to watch.

6:38So we just come into marriage with all sorts of different relational baggage, past relationships, various experiences, and just playing differences that make us at times have challenges, trials and conflict. And as we age, as we get older, we get new challenges, don't we? Our children get older and they leave the house, and then we begin to care for aging parents and hopefully marriages grow sweeter and more beautiful and more stable. And yet we know that that is not always the case. And then not only do we experience trials and conflicts and differences, but we can experience different levels of severity in our suffering.

7:25Sometimes it can come quickly and surprisingly like a cancer diagnosis that just rocks you to your core. Or it could be something more long term where you know that you have it and it's just gonna drag out for the rest of your life. Suffering manifests in so many different ways, emotional and relational and physical and mental and spiritual. And then we can experience suffering as a consequence of sin or of God's discipline. Things like addictions and abusing alcohol or drugs or gluttony, sexual sin like pornography, adultery, physical violence, manipulation. It could be related to an unwillingness to live in harmony with one another or unwillingness to provide sacrificial leadership.

8:20So what we discover very quickly in our marriages is that marriage gives us the highest of highs as well as the lowest of lows. You know how to hurt your spouse better than anybody else on the face of this earth. And that's a scary thing. I remember walking with one family in another state where the husband experienced the onset of severe mental illness, where he started hallucinating, paranoia, different visions. And in, in the course of an episode of that where he wasn't sleeping well, he ended up accidentally, well, it was mostly accidentally hurting a, a member of his family with a knife.

9:06And he ended up having to go to jail for several weeks. And, and, and I remember here we had his young wife in our small group at the time with two young children pregnant with her third waiting for her husband to get out of jail. And my guess is when she made her vows, she never expected or wanted such hardship to come in her, in her marriage. And so what are the types of challenges that we face? We, we face a diversity of challenges in trials and suffering in marriage. And maybe just one brief word before we move on to our second question. One of the reasons we're doing a conference like this is to remind us that we're not alone in these trials.

9:55That's one of the lies that Satan will use or has used in your marriage, that you are alone. You are the only one who experiences this. No one else is struggling in this way. You are on an island, no one is as dysfunctional as the two of you. And that's just a lie. We're, we're here together because God is at work in each one of us. And so don't let shame keep you from seeking help or being honest as this day goes on. You don't have to be, and none of us are perfect. Now, let, let me transition to the second question. What are some sinful ways to respond to marital suffering? I remember when we first got married Stephanie and I had such different ways of engaging in conflict.

10:53I did, and she didn't. And so I, I remember once, like we went through premarital counseling and the pastor said, Hey, Steven, you, you need to be more patient. You know, here's some strategies and things you can ask. And so we, we get our first big argument. And, and so I proceed to put all these strategies into effect. And, and I say, you know, do you want to talk about these things? She says, yes. And I said, okay, can you talk about 'em now? And she says, not yet. And I said, okay, do you want me to wait here? She said, yes. And so then I said how long would you like me to wait? And she says, I don't know. And I said, okay, can I do something else? Or would you like me to sit here? She said, I want you to sit here. And so 30 minutes passed right Stephanie you can correct 30 minutes passed. And I say, are you ready to talk now? And she said, not yet.

11:45And so another 30 minutes pass. And in my mind, I'm, my mind is blown. I, you know, I, I can't, I, I, you know, I just like getting conflict out. Let's get it on the table, let's talk about it. And, and I'm just dying inside. You know, we're thinking, who did I marry? Why can't we just, and so I sit there for an hour and and, and I'm wondering why, God, right? Like, I can't believe this is happening. And, and, and she's done nothing wrong. We, we just, we don't even remember what the fight was about, but I just remember it where it's just so different. And, and, and then one of the ways that we were responding to marriage is trying to resolve it. And yet you know, very often we can find ourselves kind of tailspin tail spinning wi with our thoughts. A and so, l let me highlight three main ways we we can respond in marriage.

12:44The first is anger. We respond with anger towards God or towards our spouse, or we're tempted to blame God. We doubt his goodness or wisdom. And, and we begin to resent our spouse. That's what I was doing in that moment where, where just because we had different communication patterns, I I was inferring that mine was better and that hers was deficient. And, and I began to resent God and resent her for just being different. You know, it's like Job's wife, where she says to him, do you still hold fast to your integrity, curse God and die? And so we can be, we, we can respond with anger towards our spouse or, or towards God.

13:26The the second is this idea of avoidance. We can respond with avoidance. That we resign ourselves to disappointment and mediocre relationships for the rest of our life. And so we're tempted to give up or to stop hoping or stop believing or to run away from God. We, we stop praying for our spouse. We withdraw from Christian community cuz we think, well, I I don't wanna share what we're going through with others. The third is arbitration or negotiation, right? We begin to attempt to bargain with God. God, I'll do these things as long as you fix my spouse. I I'll pray more, read more, or do this if you'll fix my spouse or rescue my children or fix this problem. It, it's this work harder mentality.

14:18And yet all three of these are sinful ways of responding because we fundamentally fail to grasp and understand what God is doing in the midst of suffering in our marriages, that God's at work in our marriages by his grace. And so what I wanna do is spend the bulk of our time now answering this third question, what is God accomplishing in our marital suffering? And what I wanna do is look at three key passages that would help us understand what God is doing, what he's working, how he's sanctifying us in marriage. So the first is in second Corinthians chapter one, verse eight and nine. And you can turn there in your Bible, second Corinthians chapter one verses eight and nine. And it says, for we do not want you to be unaware, brothers of the affliction we experienced in Asia for we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we had despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death, but that was to make us rely not on ourselves, but on God who raises the dead.

15:42So that's second Corinthians one versus a and nine. Now Paul isn't writing about marriage there, but he's writing about the suffering and the affliction that he and his coworkers have experienced in that particular moment. They were so utterly burdened beyond their strength that they thought they were going to die. And for some of us, it feels that way perhaps in our marriages at times, that we don't know how to love our spouse after they've betrayed us, or we don't think we have the emotional capacity or the reservoirs of strength to walk through more deep waters in our marriage. We don't know how we'll be able to withstand more heartache or heartbreak. Paul says, it felt like we have received a death sentence.

16:34And for some of us, that's what life feels like or will feel like At some point when you get that diagnosis of cancer or dementia or a child that isn't going to live past a certain age, or you quickly discover that you're never going to have biological children, or that your husband cheated on you or your wife is having an emotional affair, or your teenage son has committed suicide, each of those things would feel like a death sentence. And Paul writes, he says, but that was to make us rely not on ourselves, but on God who raises the dead. Sounds a lot like Second Corinthians four, seven where he says, but we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.

17:30So trials and hardships and suffering are designed by God to push us to rely on him and not on ourselves. We live so much of life functionally self-sufficient rather than God dependent. But every so often we get these glimpses where we realize that we've been depending on ourselves, we get a death sentence, and then we realize I now need to rely on God. That's how suffering functions in our marriages. Now notice what he says about this God. He says, who raises the dead? So this is the God who makes fishermen walk on water and he heals the blind and the lame and the deaf and the dumb, and he turns water into wine.

18:25And this God raises people from the dead, which means for Paul, it felt like we had gotten a death sentence. And even if we die, God has the power and the ability and the love and the grace to raise us from the dead or what feels like a death sentence. And so suffering is designed to push us into the arms of our savior That when your affections have withered and you feel like your marriage is on life support, or your tenderness towards one another is non-existent, and afflictions have worn down and worn away your hope, we're reminded. But God, but God who raises the dead can restore and renew what is broken and beyond hope. And yes, a a a dead body is beyond hope and healing.

19:28A corpse isn't raised by blood transfusions or better medicine or more cpr. It requires resurrection, which is what God can do. And and so this morning I want to remind us that wherever your marriage is at, perhaps you're just enjoying good, glorious fun days, praise God. Or perhaps you are in the other place and say, this is our last gasp. We're we're hanging on by a thread. Or perhaps something comes in the next week or month or year or decade that, that, that feels like a death sentence, remember. But God who raises the dead can restore and renew. It's to push us to look to Jesus.

20:20It pushes us to trust in the Lord, to seek forgiveness for our sins, to learn to love and forgive and for bear. What God is doing in marriage is that he's revealing and teaching us that we must depend on him. Just like Brian talked about, that there's an a dollar tree when we want other things more than we love God. And he's reminding us that we desperately need the gospel of Jesus Christ. In 1990, there was a president of a seminary named Dr. Robertson McQuian, who stepped down from serving as president of Columbia Bible College and Seminary, which is now called Columbia International University.

21:15And he stepped down in order to care for his wife, Muriel, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. And, and a lot of his friends encouraged him to put her in into an institution saying, imagine the impact you can have on the school and on the world, and she doesn't even really recognize you. And, and, but for Robertson, hi, his decision was made. And this was his prayer that he recorded. He said, Lord, I pray that you will do a physical miracle in my wife, but if you choose not to then work a spiritual miracle in me so that I can love her. Well until the end, he understood that this trial was not something from the outside that he had to try to avoid, but that God was using it to work in him greater christlikeness.

22:12His power is great and so is his love and care. So the first thing we want to see is that suffering pushes us to depend on God. It teaches us that God is our God. He is dependable and faithful and true. The second verse I want us to look at is in Romans chapter five, verses three and four, Romans chapter five, verses three and four says, not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings knowing that suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character. And character produces hope. And hope does not put us to shame because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. Now again, notice Paul rejoices in sufferings because he believes that God has a purpose behind it.

23:19He says it produces endurance and then it produces character which produces hope, which does not put us to shame because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. Now, we could spend several hours studying this passage, but let me just point out one thing from this passage that I think ought to give us hope. Suffering attacks our hope, right at its core, very often suffering causes us to doubt that God is in control to doubt God's goodness, his kindness, his wisdom, his plan, right? Even in the smallest of trials, I think why God? And that's a prayer of doubt. Are you truly good? Is this really your plan?

24:12And very often I pray, I'd like to get around this. Can I get to the other side of this rather than to go through it by faith, suffering causes us to doubt that God is doing this for our good. And yet what Paul writes here is that suffering is working in true believers and endurance that produces character, that produces hope. And this confirms through a subjective experience of the love of God that we have received the spirit. Look there hope does not put us to shame because God's love has been poured into our hearts, through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. This means that God is sanctifying us by working in us greater perseverance, a greater ability to endure a more godly character and more hopefulness.

25:12So what this means is that God doesn't just leave us to ourselves. And and that's one of the things that we need to hear. When we're in the midst of suffering, we feel like we're alone. We feel like no one else would understand. We feel like we're dying perhaps. And in the midst of that, we're told that God is building in us hope and pouring his love into our hearts. We receive comfort and joy and confidence through the love of God ministered to us by the Spirit. And so very practically when we're walking through suffering is to pray. God, help me to walk through this trial, this hardship by seeing how you are at work and producing in me greater endurance, greater character, and greater hope. And then help me to feel the truth that you love me. Yes, we can. We, we know it from God's word, we can read it, but sometimes we just need to feel it too, don't we?

26:27That God is for us and that he's behind us and he's goes before us, and that he's upholding us with his love. Second Corinthians four, 16 and 17 says, so we do not lose heart, though our outer self is wasting away our inner self as being renewed day by day for this light, momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison. So suffering, he calls light, momentary affliction is doing something. It's preparing for us an eternal weight of glory. It's preparing us to take hold of what is truly praiseworthy and valuable. It's to loosen our grip on this world and to tighten our grip on Christ and the gospel and all that he is to us.

27:29No Christian will get to the end of their life, get into God's presence and say, you know what? It wasn't worth it. Too much suffering wasn't worth it. Wish I would've picked the other way. It's just not going to be true. No matter whatever suffering you experience, martyrs who lay down their life for Jesus will not get to heaven and say, it wasn't worth it. I wish I would've went another way. They will say, oh, it was a light momentary affliction. It pales in comparison to the splendor and the glories of having Jesus. And so whatever you're walking through in your marriage, God is using it to conform you into the image of Jesus so that you would be more ready, more prepared, enlarging your heart to take hold of Christ both in this life and in the next, no one will say, I paid too steep a price in obedience to Jesus.

28:39Instead, everyone will say it was light and momentary what we experience. It's well worth it. God was upholding us and loving us and helping us in guarding us in each step of the way. The the third verse I wanna draw our attention to is two Corinthians one, verse three to five, second Corinthians one verses three to five. He says, Paul, again, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in our affliction so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God for as we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings. So through Christ, we share abundantly in comfort too.

29:38So not only are we pushed to depend on God more, not only do we receive God's love and his sanctifying work in our lives, but God has a purpose in our suffering so that we might be comforted and then we might comfort others experiencing affliction as well. So this is the beauty of being part of a church body together. My guess is that there is someone here at this church that has experienced something like the suffering that every single one of us is experiencing, where we might say, I'm all alone in this. My guess is that's just not true. Someone else has walked through deep waters, they've gotten to the other side and they've said, I've experienced God's comfort and peace in that.

30:38A and now it's your opportunity to minister that comfort and peace into the lives of others. I I'm thinking of special needs children, wayward adult children, marital strife, impatience, adultery, struggles with pornography. The list goes on and on. And, and each one of us isn't just to get through it and to say, phew, I don't have to deal with it anymore. But we are recipients of God's grace and comfort so that we can now turn around and be conduits of grace into the lives of others. And to speak a word of hope to say, God got us through something a lot like that. And he's gonna get you through what you are experiencing.

31:29We have an opportunity to minister God's grace to one another. God is not done with us yet. He's not done with our marriages, but he's teaching us to trust him and to depend on him and to be increasingly sanctified in and through our marriage so that we would look and live more like Jesus And so that we would be ready and able to minister to others what we have received from God.

32:06And so let me encourage us. I I think in a church like ours, sometimes we have this facade that everyone has it together. You know, they clean up all right on Sunday, they got their little kids with them. If they got kids, they got their sport coat on. And so everyone's, no one has problems. And, and that's just not true. We all have problems. And, and, and that's okay. We, we all have Christ. And, and so one of the things I'd love us to grow in and and I think this is a starting point. I is just in your small group, begin to establish a culture where we can be open about where we struggle. You don't have to be perfect now, use wisdom. Don't air out all of your dirty laundry, especially when your wife or husband says, you know, don't share that particular piece.

33:05Figure out the appropriate times and ways to share some of those things. But, but, but we can pretend to be okay. And, and yet if we're not it, it's counterproductive. Others think they're the only ones, and then we're not getting the help that we need. And so I would just say, let, let, let's be a church that is eager and ready to minister hope and comfort and encouragement to others who are walking through the things that we have already walked through. So, so what we see in suffering is that we're not to resent it. We, we don't look forward to it either. We, we don't relish it, but, but we ought not to resent it because it's meant and designed to push us into the heart of Christ, to push us into the arms of our savior.

34:05I think it's Spurgeon who said, I've learned to kiss or to embrace the wave that cast me upon the rock of ages. It's to teach us to go to Jesus. And, and it's to remind us once again that our spouse has been given to us as God's good gift to us, so that we would become more Christ-like. I I think very often in, in the heat of the moment when you're most angry at your spouse, you think, oh, if I would've married somebody else, it would be different. And it's not true. You'd still be a sinner. And so would they. And, and, and yet God has designed marriage and your particular spouse in order to give you joy and to sanctify you, to make you more holy.

35:02It's to cause us to go to him in greater dependence and to teach us our great need for a savior. And isn't it such kindness of the Lord? God could have designed our sanctification in many different ways, right? He could say he could use a whole number of means, but he uses the most intimate of relationship, the one where we find the most joy, the most delight, in order to use that relationship to sanctify us, to make us more like Jesus, to slowly and gently and gradually teach us that we were designed and destined to be with him and to be more like him. And so one of the things I want us to remember is that you and your spouse, your marriage is God's workmanship.

35:57He is the designer. We are continually being made more and more like Jesus, and he's using your marriage. And so we ought not resent the suffering that comes into our life, but we embrace it knowing that God is using it to make us more like Jesus. This is the goodness and loving kindness of God. He doesn't make any mistakes. He doesn't make any mistakes in our suffering. He doesn't make any mistakes in our children. He doesn't make any mistakes in bringing our spouse to us. God has designed each and every one of those things to sanctify us, to conform us to his image. Not because he wants to put us through a world of pain, but because he really loves us. He loves us so much.

36:56He sent Jesus to die on the cross for us, redeeming us. And now he's conforming us into the image of his son. And so what we ought to see in the suffering in our marriages is that God is loving us through these things. He so delights in his children that he's conforming us to make us more and more beautiful, to make us more and more like his son. And we can just stand back and marvel that God loves us that much, that he's not only gonna draw us in, Thrust us into his arms, but he's gonna sustain us and comfort us and equip us with all that we need to walk through each and every single one of those things.

37:50So God's grace in hardship, in pain and trial is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory. And we'll get to heaven and we'll look back and we'll say, it was all worth it. It was all worth it. He has been so good. Let's pray. Father, I, I don't know the full extent of what trials or challenges are being faced by those here in this room. And for those who are enjoying their marriage, we pray that you would continue to let them bask in that sweetness because of what Christ has done. And for those who are just weighed down by the weight of the burdens of life, of their children, of their health, of the unaddressed baggage and conflict, oh God, we pray that you would renew their strength and cause them to lean wholly on Christ.

39:00Father, I pray that there just wouldn't be divorces at the North Church, far too many Hard hearts brokenness, and yet it's not beyond your power, your reach. And so we just pray, father, be merciful to us. We don't deserve it, but we pray, be merciful to us and to our marriages so that there would be a, a legacy of faithfulness of walking through hardships of forgiveness that Sam's gonna talk about in just a moment that we would belong suffering and that we would portray the beauty and the majesty of Jesus in our marriages to a watching world and then for the good of the next generation, oh, that children would grow up seeing mom and dad loving one another, and grandchildren would see Grandma and grandpa didn't hang it up and go their separate ways after the kids left the house, but that there would be a legacy of faithfulness and a legacy of faith that would honor Christ. In Jesus' name. Amen.

40:15Amen.

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