Marriage Seminar – Part II

I want to pray the prayer that I gave you last night, Jeremy Taylor's. Lord, do thou turn me all into love, and all my love into obedience, and let my obedience be without interruption. My topic yesterday, I'm not even sure I ever gave you one, but it was the glory of sacrifice. and for this morning salted with fire. And in Mark 9, verses 42 to 50, this is what Jesus is telling the disciples. If anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to be thrown into the sea with a large millstone tied around his neck. If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It's better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell, where the fire never goes out. And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. It's better for you to enter life crippled than to have two feet and be thrown into hell. And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell where their worm dies not and the fire is not quenched. Everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can you make it salty again? Have salt in yourselves and be at peace with each other. And frankly, I've never heard any commentator explain that passage. I don't know what it means that everyone will be salted with fire, but it doesn't sound like something that would be very comfortable for any of us. And yet, it is obviously the word of the Lord. Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can you make it salty again? Have salt in yourselves and be at peace with one another. So this morning's talk is Salted with Fire. I remind you that my definition of love is the intention of unity and concern for the good of the other person. Love is the intention of unity and concern for the good of the other person. A woman named Elizabeth Charles, whose dates are 1827 to 96, wrote, To love is to delight in the graces and veil the effects of the person who misunderstood me and opposed my plans yesterday, whose peculiar infirmities great on my most sensitive feelings or whose natural faults are precisely those from which my natural character most revolts. That's a definition of love, which is certainly not easy to swallow. All of us, I suppose, from time to time, are up against someone who is very difficult, a person who misunderstands you or opposes your plans, whose peculiar infirmities grate on your most sensitive feelings and whose natural faults are precisely those from which my natural character most revolts. So we live in a fallen world and we know that every one of us is a fallen individual. And so the Lord has so ordained that we must get together and learn how to love each other. This is how we know what love is, the Bible says. Christ laid down his life for us and we in our turn must lay down our lives for each other. Are you through with that, Lars? I think you might have to come over and mention it again. Of course, it's his job to make sure that the sound is working and we don't want to go through 45 minutes and find out that nothing was on it. So I'm very grateful for the help that he gives me and even if I find it very irritating at times, it has to be done. Okay, now for you note takers, you might like to have a one, two, and I'm not sure whether I'm going to give you a three. Yeah, you'll get a three, one, three, two on this one. One, two, and three. Number one is a surprise package. And I had the privilege of knowing a very wonderful old lady. When I first met her, she was probably just a little younger than I am now, so I thought she was just with one foot in the grave, certainly. And over the years, from the time she was 70 or so till she was 91, she was a mentor to me. Not that she would have ever dreamed of calling herself that. She just considered herself a very ordinary old woman. But I just remember her saying, Betty dear, we're none of us prize packages. Just skip the rest. Look for the essentials and skip the rest. We're none of us prize packages. Look for the essentials and skip the rest. Well, that's a good maxim for us married couples as well, isn't it? You didn't know what you were getting into when you married that individual. You thought you did. This was the most wonderful person in the whole wide world. You couldn't even imagine not loving him or her. But no matter how long you may have known each other in your early courtship days, you're going to find out within 24 hours or so after the wedding that there were some things you didn't know. There were some surprises, and there's nothing unusual about that. None of us prize packages. Look for the essentials and skip the rest. Now, I don't know what your first conflict was after your marriage, but I remember very vividly probably all three of my marriages and what happened almost immediately thereafter. And it wasn't the same. But my second husband, Addison Leach, had married me in New York City. And we were going to spend our honeymoon at the Plaza, very beautiful New York hotel. Some of you have been there, I'm sure. And I think we got there somewhere around 5 o'clock in the afternoon. The wedding had been at 2. and we had just taken a taxi from where we had the wedding to the hotel. And my daughter was then 12 years old and she was at the wedding. She was my only attendant. And then she was going back up to New Hampshire where we lived with a friend of mine who was going to take her back. And so I sat down that evening before supper, before dinner, and began to write a letter to my daughter. I glanced over at Ad and I had the feeling that he was rather upset about something and I didn't have any idea what it was I didn't ask I continued to write and when he decided it was time to go down and have dinner he seemed to be rather stiff and so when we got down to the dinner table he said I said to him is there something wrong It was very obvious that there was something wrong. What have I done? He said, you mean you don't know what you've done? I said, no. What did I do? Well, he said, you sat down and you wrote a letter to your daughter. I said, yes, I did. What's bad about that? We just got married. You're my wife. You sit down, cut me right out of everything, and you sit down at that table and you write a letter to your daughter. Well, to this day, I've never been able to fathom why that bothered him so much. But I'm just giving you a little tiny clue. Maybe you have a very different story to tell, but the chances are we misunderstand each other. Maybe if you've been married 25 years, you still have the occasions when you might misunderstand each other. And I never have sorted that one out completely. But we did have a very wonderful marriage for only four and a half years before he died of cancer. Well, my daughter tells me about her first experience. She and her husband were married and went to one of the islands in the Caribbean. Neither one of them having any idea how expensive those little islands were. And so my daughter was so excited. They had a little cottage, and she was very excited over the fact that that morning they were going to go to the grocery store, and she would then buy all the things that she wanted to have for her husband, beginning with breakfast. and they hadn't gotten into the grocery store for more than five minutes or so before her husband just started taking whatever she had put into the cart out and putting it back on the shelf. And she questioned him about it. He said, did you look at the price of this? Well, of course, down there, the prices are outrageously high and they just didn't have any idea about how high they were. So she said, we ended up, both of us crying. and she said, I don't know what in the world we had for breakfast that morning. It must have been one box of cornflakes or something, but that was just a huge trauma. So we have to be salted with fire in some form or other. You can think about your first conflict after your marriage. Was it groceries? Was it writing a letter? But as with marriage, so with discipleship. The glory of sacrifice is quickly dimmed as we begin to learn its reality And I think of the four B of newlyweds The bathroom the bedroom the breakfast table and the budget. And stop and think about how many conflicts there are because of those four things that you can't avoid. I guess I put it in slightly different order there. The bedroom, the bathroom, the breakfast table, the budget. And you can't get around it. Now, I've been talking about the fact that discipleship and marriage are really very closely linked. And I think of Peter's denial. When it came from push to shove, Peter bugged out and said, I never knew it. I didn't know who the serving maid was. If we're going to be salted with fire and be willing to receive that kind of treatment from our Heavenly Father, we must have the willingness to give up all of our rights. Now, there's nothing natural about that. We all know that we can be very stubborn, very deliberate, and we are never in a position very easily to give up all our rights. it may mean to accept suffering. To go wherever the beloved goes necessitates a daily, costly, continuous revolution. And I said yesterday that I think of marriage as a revolution and a revelation because there are always going to be surprises, things that we could not possibly have predicted. If in premarital counseling some of these sacrifices were delineated, each one could prepare his list to present at the feet of Jesus. Thus, the marriage would begin with sacrifice, an act of faith and trust in God, who will help to fulfill the impossible vows. Now, one must try it in order to know the riches of faith and of discipline and of marriage. To love, someone has said, is to delight in the graces and veil the defects of the person who misunderstood me and opposed my plans yesterday, whose peculiar infirmities grate on my most sensitive feelings or whose natural faults are precisely those from which my natural character most revolts. it's worth repeating that more than once which i have just done we need to be salted with fire in whatever form god chooses to salt us and the lord is gracious and loving and he understands every single one of us he knows all our personalities our difficulties our fears our tremors and he is constantly reminding us that he will help us and one of my life verses is Psalm 16, 5 Lord you have assigned me my portion and my cup and have made my lot secure Lord you have assigned me my portion and my cup and have made my lot secure Certainly when I married Jim Elliot after having waited five and a half years before God gave Jim a red light, a green light, I mean, little could I have imagined that we would have such a short marriage as we did. And when it happened, of course, I felt totally devastated. I was the only missionary on that station then, after Jim died. And I believed that God had called me to be a missionary, first of all. I didn't know whether he wanted me to go to Africa or the South Seas or something, but I certainly never thought he wanted me to go to Ecuador. And so when Jim died, I clung to those words, the Lord God will help me. Of course, I had been trying to do everything that Jim and I had done together, and Jim was a very powerful man, and he could do a whole lot more things than I could ever do, physically and mentally and spiritually and everything else. But since God had put me there on that jungle station, and I certainly never thought of hightailing it back to the States, I clung to that verse. And throughout my life, I continued to cling to that verse. The Lord God will help me. I never forgot going to a conference in Keswick, New Jersey, where there was a missionary by the name of Dr. Virginia Blakeslee. I was probably 15 or 16, and I was sitting on the very front row, just completely mesmerized with this woman's hair-raising stories of her experiences in Africa. And she told about a time when savage people began coming out with torches coming out of the forest in the middle of the night, all of them yelling and screaming with spears and torches and running around her house. And she was alone there, and she just simply dropped to her knees and just asked the Lord to protect her. And suddenly, all the noise stopped, all the flares that these men were carrying went out, and they drifted back into the jungle. And this happened two or three times in two or three nights. Each time they would come out, roaring and screaming and yelling, and then they would suddenly disappear. So one day, in the broad daylight, the leader of this crowd came to her, and he said, I want to see your watchman. and she said, I have no watchman, and he said, you're lying to me, and she said, no, I have no watchman. She said, you may come in the house. You can see if you can find him, and of course he came into the house, looked all over. It was a very tiny little house, but there was no sign of anybody there other than her, and of course immediately she knew that God must have sent an angel in the form of a watchman. As I sat there on that front row seat, listening to these hair-raising stories that she had, I remember the intensity with which she looked across that pulpit, tears pouring down her face, and she repeated this wonderful verse from Psalm 16, 5. Here I am mixing it up with another. The Lord God will, yes. The Lord God will help me. Therefore shall I not be confounded. Therefore have I set my face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be ashamed. I could never forget the intensity with which she spoke those words. And to this day, of course, it is one of the great bulwarks in my own life. The beloved, our Heavenly Father, sees to it that you and I need daily, costly, continuous testings in our lives. In whatever form in which God wants to present those testings to us, we must be prepared to receive whatever he gives us in order that we may become shaped to the image of Christ. And there isn't anything that I want more in this world than just to be shaped to the image of Christ. And God knows that I'm a sinner, and every day I sin in various ways, but he is faithful. In order to know the riches of faith and of discipleship and of marriage, we have to trust him. And what could be a better hymn for us to remember than trust and obey? When we walk with the Lord in the light of his word, What a glory he sheds on our way. When we do his goodwill, he abides with us still and with all who will trust and obey. Now, number two, this was number one, a surprise package. And my friend on Cape Cod said, we're none of a surprise packages. Look for the essentials and skip the rest. So now number two, the splendor of self-offering. G.K. Chesterton said, we would like to have the splendor of self-offering without the sacrifice of self-denial. Chesterton says, we'd love to have the splendor of self-offering without the sacrifice of self-denial. Self quickly rises up with its reasonable and legitimate claims. But let's test these lists now. Self versus love. Me versus you. My thing versus your thing. My way versus your way. My comfort versus your comfort. Which do we think of first? As fallen human beings? Of course we think of ourselves first. I get so many letters from women telling me these horror stories about these miserable bums of husbands that they have. But Elizabeth, he doesn't understand me. I write back and say there's never been a husband in the whole world that has ever been able to understand his wife. So don't give me that line. Do you understand your husband? Well, of course not. God has ordained that we not be able to plumb the depths of our partner But of course as time goes by and as we learn to trust and obey for there no other way we certainly hope that we do see some changes in each other, in ourselves primarily. And I have no doubt that God knew exactly what he was doing in giving me three husbands because they were three very different husbands and I've had to learn many different things from each one of those. I love the hymn, Take My Life and Let It Be, consecrated, Lord, to thee. One of the stanzas says, Take myself and I will be ever only all for thee. A lady wrote to me and she said, but my husband just sits around and I resent that. Well, what can I say back to a letter like that? I just wrote her maybe a postcard. I'm pretty good at writing government postcards. You know, it costs you 20 cents, and I just write a sentence sometimes. I don't remember exactly what I did, but something probably like this. I wrote back and said something like, why don't you make a list of the good things that he does? See how long a list. Maybe you can only get two things that you can think of that he does that are any good. But that's up to you and the Lord, and certainly you can't expect Elizabeth Elliot to sort out your trials with your husband if he just sits around. I was speaking one time in Massachusetts and I was just going to ask Lars, did I tell this story last night? Yeah, I did. Okay, so I don't have to tell that one. The lady who knew that when she walked into the living room her husband would be looking at the tube. That's one of the blessings of, even though I am so old and so forgetful, I have a husband who doesn't forget anything, thank God. And he does help me. So I'm glad he was over there. As soon as I opened my mouth, I thought, that's what I said last night. So we can skip that one. But it certainly was a transformation. And it's wonderfully calming and comforting when out of all the piles of miserable stories that I get, that I hear something like that. we would love to have the splendor of self-offering without the sacrifice of self-denial. And I believe that God tests every one of us in such ways. From the book of Hours, H-O-U-R-S, in 1865, there's this prayer, O God who art love, grant to thy children to bear one another's burdens in perfect goodwill, that thy peace which passeth understanding keep our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord. Now when we go to our knees and ask the Lord to help us to love someone who is difficult to love. We all have people who are difficult to love who are not necessarily our husbands or wives. Probably that miserable woman in the church or the one who always wants the place or a neighbor who has been encroaching on your property. I get all kinds of horror stories asking me, what can I do about this? And I go back to so many of these ancient prayers because, frankly, I don't know how to pray for these people most of the time. I try to give a scripture verse. I try to give a passage of scripture, if I can think of something like that. But it always helps me to fall back on some of these great saints, such as the one who wrote in the book of Hours. O God, who art love, grant to thy children to bear one another's burdens in perfect goodwill, that thy peace, which passes understanding, may keep our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord. Now number three, you who are taking notes, the gold cord of love. Love is like a gold cord, and nothing else can withstand a strain. Those of you who are familiar with Amy Carmichael's work know that she wrote a book called The Gold Cord. And she had a very remarkable work in South India after she had been an itinerant missionary for a number of years before she discovered the hideous traffic of little boys and girls who were being committed to the Hindu temples for purposes of prostitution. these babies, very frequently, new babies, brand new babies, little children up to 10 years old, would be consigned to those horrible, even temples for the purposes of prostitution, for the priests who lived in those temples. And she was so shocked, as a Victorian single lady from Ireland, I really, quite frankly, I doubt that she knew the facts of life. And she had a terrible time believing that this could possibly be going on. And when she found out that indeed it was, it was a centuries-old thing that had been happening, then she began desperately to pray that God would somehow enable her to rescue some of these little children. And God did that, and that miraculous work is still going on. She died way back in the 1950s, having been 52 years without a furlough in Ireland. She left Ireland, went to India, and never went back to Ireland. And she had over 700 children in her beautiful place there in South India, which Lars and I had the privilege of visiting long after her death, of course. But it is such a beautiful work that they did. And so one of her books was called The Gold Chord, and that gold cord of which she was speaking is love. That should be what holds us married people together. Love, not just a good feeling, not love as the world speaks of it, but love as we've seen on the cross. And Jesus said to his disciples, if you love me, do what I say. That's the acid test. if you love me. Now, when we get to some of these real tests in married life, how would you judge your husband or your wife? Is he 80% what you'd like him to do versus 20%? Or is he 20% of what you wish he would do and hoping that he would someday do 80%? because we are married, we have to choose daily this man, this woman, this spouse, who God, in his miraculous mercy and love and perfect insight, has put us together. Someone has said that a second love is a slow transfiguration of early love, and I think that's probably very accurate. We go through some trials and tribulations and some ups and downs, but if we are constantly in touch with God, on our faces before God, trusting him to work in us, to will and to do of his good pleasure, then gradually I would think the percentages should change drastically. Now, God has joined you two together, you and me, Lars and me, you and whoever you are, with, and therefore it is God who, I like to say, invades your life. He has every right to invade your life, but he's out there and he's watching, and every now and then, in his mercy, he invades our lives to point out to us things which we're not doing properly. in the form of this man or this woman. It is God who invades my life. And it is then that I am given the privilege to relinquish the pride of independence. And I have to start taking that other person into consideration. It may not be easy when you're newlyweds to remember to say we instead of I. my house instead of our house. And I made some mistakes along those lines, especially with Addison Leach, because he was a man who had, he was 18 years older than I, and he had been married for over 30 years to his first wife, and he had four children. So there were a good many major changes that I had to make when I married him. He was indeed an absolutely wonderful man, as were all three of my husbands. but I think I learned more from him just because he was a wiser and very much older man than the others and I realized that I had to learn to say we and not I not my but our I think of that Broadway play I've forgotten the name of it now but it has that song in it. Let a woman in your life and your serenity is through She redecorate your home from the cellar to the dome and go on to the enthralling fun overhauling you It was Rex Harrison who sang that song and I saw him on Broadway along with what was her name now I forgotten Judy not Julie Julie Harris And he sang that whole song, I can't give you the whole thing, but that much I do remember, let a woman in your life and your serenity is through. She'll redecorate your home. To the cellar, from the teller to the dome, and then go on to the appalling fun overhauling you. And we do that, don't we, women? Let's face it. We are likely to do something like that. but God has joined us together and it is a great lesson in learning what he wants us to do, not just me. A lifelong yes is a condition of discipleship. You remember that Jesus said, if you want to be my disciple, you must give up your rights yourself. That's the first commandment. That's the first condition. You will not be able to follow the second and the third conditions until you have conquered that first one, which is the most difficult. And it's so obvious that Jesus is not requiring us to follow him unless we want to. He said, if you want to be my disciple, there are a lot of other rabbis around, itinerant rabbis, you can follow any of those. But if you want to be my disciple, he says, you must give up your right to yourself and take up the cross and follow me. Three conditions of discipleship which we should be aware of every single day. Asking ourselves, teach me, Lord, show me, help me, correct me. The taking up of the cross is no great action done once for all, but the continual daily practice of small duties which are distasteful to us. that's what John H. Newman wrote the taking up of the cross is no great action done once for all but the continual daily practice of small duties which are distasteful to us the third condition of course is follow number one take up the cross number one if you want to be my disciple give up your right to yourself and that's got to be the most difficult thing that any of us does. Give up our rights. Then take up the cross. Then you'll be in a position to follow. Now you married this man or this woman and God has put you together. And so what does this entail in terms of spirituality? Do you think to yourself, I wish I had a different set of peculiarities to live with? I wish I could understand my wife I wish I could understand my husband why in the world does he have to do this well the Bible says he that receives you receives me Jesus says he that receives you receives me so God's gift in this wife husband business business is chosen by his magnificently varied grace. And I'm sorry, I can't remember the place in which I found that. It's in the Bible. I'm not making it up. But he has chosen us by his magnificently varied grace. I have a bad habit of not always putting in my sources. He calls himself the father of lights. He gives us every good gift. Every good gift is from above and comes down from the Father of lights in whom there is no turning. And marriage is surely one of his greatest earthly gifts for all of us, for solace, for comfort, for companionship, and for help. But I get all these letters. What if my wife or my husband doesn't do that for me? He isn't meeting my needs. That whine I get over and over again in my letters. My husband is not meeting all my needs. Well, may I see the hands of every husband here who feels that he can do a great job of meeting all his wife's needs. Of course you can't. Where do we get these outrageous ideas? We're fallible, we're human, we're fallen. There isn't anything else to marry. so get with it accept it he that receives you receives me and it says in first corinthians 12 men have different gifts but it is the same lord who accomplishes his purposes through them all isn't that wonderful 1st Corinthians maybe I better read a little bit more from that passage 1st Corinthians 12 he says you are the body of Christ and each one of you is a part of it and in the church God has appointed first of all apostles second prophets third teachers then workers of miracles those having gifts of healing those able to help others. I would hope that all of us can fall into that category. Should be willing to help others. Those with gifts of administration, those speaking in different kinds of tongues, are all apostles, are all prophets, are all teachers, do all work miracles, do all have gifts of healing, do all speak in tongues, do all interpret. but verse 31 says, eagerly desire the greater gifts. And then that wonderful passage follows in the 13th chapter. Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It is not proud. It is not rude. It is not self-seeking. It keeps no record of wrongs. And we are tempted to say, and another thing you did, or another thing that you shouldn't have done, keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. and it was one time very shortly after Jim, after Jim, no, Lars, after Lars and I were first married, we went to bed angry for some reason and I don't know if you've ever done anything like that but I was over on my side of the bed as far as I could get without falling out and he was way over the other side of his bed, on his side and neither one of us speaking a word. He had hurt me in some way which I've long since forgotten, but I was just lying there rigid and stiff and waiting for him to apologize. And you men probably have already guessed what happened. Absolutely happy, falling asleep, not a word, not a thing, paying any attention to his desperate wife who was just waiting for that apology. Well, of course, I just wanted to take my elbow and just jam it into his ribs. But thank God and his wonderful mercy, he reminded me that I better get out of bed and take some thought of this passage that I just read to you from 1 Corinthians 13. So I got out of bed, went into another room, turned on the light, opened my Bible, and read that passage. Love never fails. and I had to try to read those words there. Elizabeth is this and that and the other thing, all the other things that the Bible gives us there. Elizabeth is patient. Elizabeth is kind. She does not envy. She does not boast. She does not proud. She does not rude. She does not self-seeking. Love keeps no record of wrongs. And I wanted to say, and another thing. love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth. And then verse 8 says, love never fails. But it's not the kind of love that you and I can just conjure up. It requires deep repentance and trust in God, that he will enable you and me to be what God has ordained us to be, a husband or a wife. It's a wonderful thing to have an opportunity to speak to a group of just husbands and wives here because I realize that we all have understanding of each other in a certain way, whereas if there are single people here, it's a totally different set of dynamics. But God is merciful and he asks us, will you love me? Will you trust me? Will you praise me? And he will enable us to do all of those things God bless you.