daily Broadcast

A Healthy Relationship with Yourself

From the series Keeping Love Alive - Volume 4

Do you love how God made you? Or do you often feel like you never measure up? In this message, Chip continues his series Keeping Love Alive, Volume 4, by explaining that a thriving marriage is built on a healthy view of ourselves. Also, learn why looking to our spouse for security or identity is a recipe for disaster.

This broadcast is currently not available online. It is available to purchase on our store.

Chip Ingram App

Helping you grow closer to God

Download the Chip Ingram App

Get The App

Today’s Offer

Keeping Love Alive, Volume 4 free mp3 download.

DOWNLOAD NOW

Message Transcript

Great marriages are couples that find their identity – who I am and my value as a person – in their relationship with Christ and as a result, don’t expect their husband or their wife to meet all their personal, spiritual, relational, and emotional needs.

Translation: We are commanded by Jesus to love our neighbors as ourselves. If we don’t love ourselves in a healthy, non-narcissistic way, we will continually ask our spouse what they can never deliver. Jesus was asked in Matthew 22, it’s in your notes, “What is the greatest of all the commands?” And He says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all of your strength. And love your neighbor as yourself. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it.”

You have to learn to love yourself. Now, not narcissistic, self-focused. I’m talking about a healthy way to actually say, “This is who God made me. In Christ, this is who I am.” And when your security and your value and your worth and your deepest emotional needs are met by someone that never changes, that never lets you down, that will never wound you, then you have a reservoir to give to your mate. And you’re not asking them every time you are a little bit down, “Love me, make me feel better, oh, I’ve got these needs and those needs. I have been through this.”

So many of our relationships we just suck the life out of the other person saying, “Make my life work out,” and when they don’t, we say silly things like, “I have fallen out of love.” Because the fact of the matter is, some of you don’t like yourself, some of you don’t love yourself. You can’t love someone else if you have not experienced God’s love and have a healthy, non-narcissistic love for yourself.

The principle is an accurate self-perception demands that we know who we are and whose we are.

1 John 3:1 says here in His love, not that we love God, but that He loved us first. And He has lavished His love upon us. I don’t know if you have ever thought about, you know, we sang an interesting song about God has your name written on His heart. Did you see that one in that line? Have you ever thought seriously about the God who created all there is, that your name actually doesn’t come up on a computer screen, but you are actually an individual person that your DNA is different from the almost eight billion people in all the world, and you are uniquely made. And if you are in Christ, God sees you in exactly the same way He sees Jesus: holy, righteous, wanted, valuable, precious. Are you ready?

If you are outside of a relationship with Jesus, and because you have been bold and honest to say, “You know, no, I’m not born again yet.” When God sees you, He says, “You may not be in my family yet, but I care about you not if you clean up your life or if you act this way or that way. I care so much about you, I died in your place while you were yet my enemy to prove to you how much I love you.” That’s how valuable you are. And you know what? If you don’t get that from Him, then you think your value is going to come from your looks. Or what rank you get, or how athletic you are, or how pretty you are, or how much money you have, or what kind of car that you drive, or what kind of logo is on your luggage, or what kind of watch, and are you in and cool? Or what kind of clothes you wear, or how your kids do in school.

And you will try and find your significance and your security in everything and I will just guarantee, no matter what that is, it will never deliver. And so, you are set up for failure. You are set up for failure because if you try really hard and you can’t make it, you fail. And if you try really hard and maybe you’re a little more gifted or a little more beautiful than some of us or you’re a little more smarter than…and you are successful, then you’ll look into sort of the rainbow that was promised and you’ll look into the pot and you’ll realize, I’m very successful. Maybe I’m pretty, maybe I’m smart, maybe I’m rich, and you were supposed to be filled up and you’ll be empty.

Imagine a puzzle. And to realize you’re this precious human puzzle and God wants you to fit with other people. He actually, we’re going to learn in a second, He actually made you where you have some strengths, some real strengths that you bring to the table. Believer or unbeliever, they’re called natural talents.

And then when you come to know Jesus, He will deposit in you some supernatural abilities. But even with those, you’ll also have gaps and weaknesses and vulnerabilities. And He has other people – and the primary person is your mate – to do this. To be one, to complete you.

But so many of us compare ourselves with other people and we see our weaknesses and we try and hide them, because they are unacceptable. And so, we don’t get them filled. And we don’t know our strengths because it feels like we are being proud if we say, “I’m good at this, I’m gifted at this, I do this well.” Or you have never taken the time, you have been so busy trying to be like someone else, you have never looked into the mirror to understand, I have great abilities. I must have been given these great abilities for a very special purpose.

The more your identity is in Christ and you know who you are and whose you are, it creates this security and this confidence where you’re not dependent on your mate and even on other people to make you feel like, “I’m okay.”

So, with that, let’s dig in. Let me give you three very specific ways to get a healthy, non-narcissistic relationship with yourself. Number one, it’s getting a glimpse of your beginning.

Psalm 139, David writes, inspired by the Holy Spirit, speaking of all of us, “You created my innermost being. You knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise You because I am fearfully and wonderfully,” or, “skillfully made. Your works are wonderful.” And he is speaking about God’s creation of your physical body, and his, in this case.

“I know that full well. My frame,” you could translate that, literally, it’s he’s saying, “My skeleton was not hidden from You when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.”

It’s this idea of the darkness of our mother’s womb. “Your eyes saw my unformed substance.” Literally, “My embryo. All the days ordained for me were written in Your book before one of them came to be.”

You are a unique individual on the face of the earth. Your eye color, your hair color, your DNA, your height, your body build, the unchangeable things of your physicality. And it goes beyond that. All those things that happen in your mother’s womb, now that we have all this neuroscience. How you process information, how – whether you are emotionally intelligent or mechanically intelligent. How your StrengthsFinder, if you will, are an achiever, an activator, a futuristic, an emotionally connector.

God wired you uniquely with a set of natural tools different than everyone in all the earth. You are precious and unique and valuable. And we unconsciously compare ourselves with other people and try to look like other people, be like other people, have skills like other people, and become other people. And what we lose, the most attractive person that you will ever be is coming to know who you really are.

And it begins with your physicality. If any of you have done any reading, the skyrocketing anxiety issues of teenage girls and suicides as they post and see these pictures of other people and compare themselves. We live in a world where the pseudo-pictures of what beauty is for a woman crashes into a woman’s mind. The average woman looks in the mirror and doesn’t feel like she is pretty enough, no matter how beautiful. And can I ask you, who created these standards? It’s completely artificial.

Go online and look at art of a hundred years, then two hundred years, then four hundred years, then five hundred years, and a thousand years, and fifteen hundred years and find the pictures of beautiful women. You know what they would say about most of what we consider beauty? What are these skinny little things doing that don’t, they don’t have any hips and they are scrawny little things. I mean...

And what I want to tell you is it’s such a no-win situation. And it used to be primarily with women. But you can’t go to the airport and not look at Men’s Health, right? You know, I’ve got abs of steel. It used to be a six-pack, now it’s an eight-pack and, I look rather thin, but underneath all of this, I am ripped. And I’m lying. Right? You will either live by the opinions of these invisible “they” or you’ll live for an audience of One.

I remember Theresa telling me about – it was in her workplace and in early years. And one of the gals, you know, had a new baby. And she brought the new baby in and she was so excited and the baby had a cleft palate. And the face was a little bit contorted.

And everyone, you know, looked at the baby and you kind of look at the mom and I wonder how she’s feeling and I wonder how she’s taking that. And Theresa said, “It was so amazing.” Her name was Sue, “When you looked at Sue’s eyes, you would have thought that’s the most beautiful baby in all the world, because it was hers.”

And can I tell you that that’s what your kids need to hear from you? Can I tell you, that’s what you need to hear from Jesus for you? That you would, you know, granted, stay in good shape, take care of yourself, but could you, literally, could you come to the point where you could look in the mirror and say, “You know, I mean…”

I was, when I was a freshman in high school, I was five-foot-three. The basketball coach when I was in seventh grade said, “You should go out for wrestling,” and I was too hardheaded. “I want to be a basketball player.”

And it was a junior high of about seven hundred students. And think of it, to this day, talk about things that imprint you. I was only taller than Brad Star and Cindy Christianson. Can you believe I still know their names? Because in my mind, I was this tiny, little, undersized.

And, yeah, I grew some. But what I want to tell you is however, you know, if you’re six-foot, you want to be six-five. If you’re six-six, you’re too tall and wish you were six-two. And if you’ve got blonde hair you wish it was brunette hair and, of course, with ladies you can change it anytime and I think with us men it’s going that way. But my point is, are you ready for a radical application? It’s just a, it’s a mini detox. Turn off all social media for seven days after you leave here. Just turn it off. And if you want to have a real purging, wonderful experience, don’t watch any TV or Netflix for seven days. You’ll be bored and irritable the first two and all that time you don’t have to read the Scripture, walk in nature, go on dates, and spend more personal time with your kids – those who have them – you’ll just find yourself actually bored. You spend an inordinate amount of time on those.

Turn off all your notifications. You basically have been programmed to be a little robot of people who want to keep your attention and every time it buzzes, you look here, here, here, and here. And you can’t stand in line at the grocery store or at the bank or walk in and do anything without your phone. And when you’re bored for a second you pull it out and look at it. The average iPhone user looks or touches their phone two thousand times a day.

And you have been seduced and addicted and you can’t think. And the one thing that has happened in the world now is people are never where they are.

You’re never in the same space looking at the real people here because, literally, I have been in a – it’s all over America but I’ll never forget, I was in China and it was a railway thing. It was like seven football fields long and three or four football fields that direction. Thousands and thousands of people and I bet ninety-seven-point eight percent, everyone was just looking at their phone.

You are fearfully, skillfully, wonderfully made. You are just as smart as you need to be to do everything God wants you to do. You process information, you are emotionally attuned, you have abilities and things that you can develop, but you as you are – and you will either spend most of your life trying to be like someone else or getting something you don’t have or exploring who you are and whose you are and beginning to rejoice in that.

And as you do, it will change your whole world and when it changes your world, it’ll change your marriage. So, getting a getting a glimpse of who you are. The question: Do you see yourself as fearfully and wonderfully made?

You notice that we covered that one. Fearfully, wonderfully.

[The] second way to get a healthy relationship with yourself is doing an honest self-assessment. An honest self-assessment. In other words, to not just your physicality, but to look at your life. Remember Romans? Eleven chapters of grace, then verse 1 of chapter 12 was, “What is it that God really wants?” You, all of you, so He can give you the best.

How do you get the very best from God? Oh, that’s verse 2. “Don’t be conformed to this world, be transformed by the renewing of your mind,” that the God who made all that there is says, “I want you to get what is good. I want you to get what is perfect. I want you to get what is well-pleasing to you.” That’s God’s will. It’s not going to Africa and dodging snakes.

If He calls you to Africa and there are snakes you probably are the kind of person that likes the outdoors and aren’t afraid of snakes. But verse 3 then says how to get an accurate view of yourself. It’s in your notes. “For by the grace of God I say to every one of you, do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment in accordance with the faith that God has distributed to each of you.”

Okay, now, you’ve got your pen out? “Do not,” underline the word “think of yourself more highly than you,” and where the word “ought,” underline “ought.” In the original, they are just trying to make it easy to read. In the original it is, “Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but rather,” underline, “think of yourself with,” underline, “sober.”

So, you should have: think, ought, think, sober judgement. These are all from the same root word. And it’s the – the word sober is the opposite of being drunk. In other words, when you’re drunk you don’t have the right perception.

What he’s saying is: Start renewing your mind so you understand what life is really about, say no to all the bombardment of the world, and then I want you to get an accurate view of you. Don’t think too highly of yourself; don’t think too lowly of yourself. Humility is not thinking lowly of yourself. Humility is thinking accurately. These are my strengths and these are my liabilities or weaknesses where I need other people.

In verses 6 through 8 he’ll say, “These are the primary spiritual gifts. Discover what yours is and really use it.” In fact, open to Romans 12, I want you to see the context here just for a second. This sober thinking is for a purpose. Look at verse 4 of Romans 12. “Have sound judgement as God has allotted to each a measure of faith.” Why? “For just as we have many parts in one body,” physical body, “and all our body parts don’t have the same function, so we who are many in one body, the body of Christ, are individually parts of one another. However, since we have gifts that differ according to,” what? “…the grace given to us so we don’t have to compare, use them properly. If prophecy, in the proportion of your faith. If service, in acts of service. Or one who teaches in the act of teaching. Or one who exhorts with the work of exhortation. The one who gives, with generosity and the one with leadership, with diligence. And he who shows mercy, with cheerfulness.”

Do you see what he’s saying is, “If you discover who you are and whose you are, accurately, then you see where you fit,” first with your mate and then the body of Christ. And then you discover these gifts. And then what happens? You experience this power and this love and you can just see people’s lives change. See, that’s God’s plan.
[The] second way to get a healthy relationship with yourself is doing an honest self-assessment. An honest self-assessment. In other words, to not just your physicality, but to look at your life. Remember Romans? Eleven chapters of grace, then verse 1 of chapter 12 was, “What is it that God really wants?” You, all of you, so He can give you the best.

How do you get the very best from God? Oh, that’s verse 2. “Don’t be conformed to this world, be transformed by the renewing of your mind,” that the God who made all that there is says, “I want you to get what is good. I want you to get what is perfect. I want you to get what is well-pleasing to you.” That’s God’s will.

But verse 3 then says how to get an accurate view of yourself. It’s in your notes. “For by the grace of God I say to every one of you, do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment in accordance with the faith that God has distributed to each of you.”

Okay, now, you’ve got your pen out? “Do not,” underline the word “think of yourself more highly than you,” and where the word “ought,” underline “ought.” In the original, they are just trying to make it easy to read. In the original it is, “Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but rather,” underline, “think of yourself with,” underline, “sober.”

So, you should have: think, ought, think, sober judgement. These are all from the same root word. And it’s the – the word sober is the opposite of being drunk. In other words, when you’re drunk you don’t have the right perception.

What he’s saying is: Start renewing your mind so you understand what life is really about, say no to all the bombardment of the world, and then I want you to get an accurate view of you. Don’t think too highly of yourself; don’t think too lowly of yourself. Humility is not thinking lowly of yourself. Humility is thinking accurately. These are my strengths and these are my liabilities or weaknesses where I need other people.

In verses 6 through 8 he’ll say, “These are the primary spiritual gifts. Discover what yours is and really use it.”

If you discover who you are and whose you are, accurately, then you see where you fit, first with your mate and then the body of Christ. And then you discover these gifts. And then what happens? You know, those of us that have ever played on a team or those of you that are artistic or musical. For some of you it’s a group of women that really get you. And you’re a cohort and you’re going to make it through whatever you’re going to make it through. And you can be honest and real and vulnerable.

See, that’s God’s plan. For some of us it’s being actually a part of a church that functions in a way where you use your gifts and your strengths and other people use theirs and you have this outward focus of helping people. And as you do, you experience this power and this love and you can just see people’s lives change.

And you sit around and drink coffee or Cokes or Diet Cokes or whatever you drink, and you look back and say, “How in the world did we get to be all those marriages were broken and we were a part of healing them. All those kids were orphans and we got them all in foster care. We got to be a team of people and we went to Romania and all those street kids, they’re not on the streets anymore.

And there’s this sense in someone had vision, another had administration, and someone had money, and someone had leadership, and someone had mercy. And you come together and it is glorious. Believe me, it’s better than Netflix. It’s better than how many likes you get on Facebook. It’s better than almost anything.

But you can’t do that…where I have pastored, one of the things I always had people do is I had them get a 3x5 card. And on one side I said, “List your top three strengths.” I mean, what are you really good at? And if they struggled, I’d say, “Get the book StrengthsFinder, you take a test in thirty minutes, it will be very helpful. These are your top strengths.”

And then on the back of the card I said, “Write your top three weaknesses.” Almost always, you know what I got? I got people who listed their top fifteen weaknesses. “Well, I came up with one strength.” So warped.

You need to know what you’re really good at. And you need to know where you have liabilities. These are my strengths: teaching, leading, coaching. I’m an administrative nightmare. I’m a low-tech basket case. The moment anybody talks about, from, “Why should we do something?” to, “How should we do it?” I finally got to just, “Guys, let me know how we’re going to do it, because I have lots of ideas. Mine don’t work.” I’m terrible at it.

After a while I finally learned, this is how this works in my marriage. And I have an amazingly gifted and detail-oriented and mercy-filled – I have a very, very godly wife.

You know, I have learned mercy from her. I mean, mine was all the big picture. And Theresa is saying here’s a woman that lost two babies through an abortion, here’s a woman that was abused by her husband, and I’m looking around and they are eating at our table. And Theresa is saying, “Yes, we are going to give to the Church here, but we are going to pay their rent, we are going to do this, we are going to do that.”

Guess what, forty years of that, God has grown my mercy. And God has grown her vision and leadership. And so, now we don’t just do that around the table, but we do it with orphans in Zimbabwe. And we write checks that we never dreamed we could write because we got a sober self-assessment and we followed God’s plan financially and we were poor most of our life and struggled most of our life and little by little by little, we got to be some of those people who helped others. And I think it was because God first worked in us.

Part of our big marriage problems and I’m biased, but even not being biased, man, I just thought, How did I ever get to marry someone so beautiful? It took me about three months to realize, I mean, she looked in the mirror, she saw someone ugly. I would give her a compliment and she couldn’t receive it, because she didn’t feel worthy to receive it. She grew up in a home with a father and then was abandoned by her first husband, and my wife had a lens that so covered her that said, “You are unlovely, unwanted, unworthy, and absolutely unlovable.”

And when I would compliment and when I would share and when I would want to love her it was like BBs coming off of a tank. And it hurt so bad. And then my response wasn’t good. I got mad, because I didn’t understand. And when we went to counseling he began to ask questions. And you know what happened in our counseling? This guy was a pastor for about twenty years and then became a counselor. And he said, “You know, both of you, you think these are the problems. They’re not. You have a warped view of God. Chip, you feel like no matter what you do, it’s not enough and God’s arms are crossed and get with the program. Are you ready, Chip? Jesus is not your dad. That’s not who God is.

And, Theresa, you know, you have worked hard at being beautiful and you are conscientious and you follow through and you do what everyone says and you never drop any balls because you are so afraid that the other shoe is going to drop and you’re going to get rejected again.

So, here’s where we are going to go with our marriage counseling. First of all, I’m going to help you guys get a revised view of God. And then second, are you ready for this?” Our marriage counseling, he gave us these cards of the lies that we believed. You know, lies like, you know, “If everyone doesn’t like me, my life is not worth living.” “If I don’t do everything perfectly, then why do it at all?” I mean, just lie after lie after lie.

And we would write it, she wrote them on these cards, and it was for her. When I went to this it was like, finally, someone is going to help my wife because she needs it.” And then he told me that, knowing how arrogant I was, that you need to help her. And so, she had these eight or ten cards that were the lies that she believed. And at the bottom it had a big stop sign. And then you would flip over the card and it would say, “I desire to be liked by everyone, but I don’t need everyone’s approval, because I have Christ’s approval.”

And then there would be a verse that talked about, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made in all those aspects of my physical and mental abilities that can’t be changed. Thank you, Lord.” And we had these cards and for two years before I went to work, we sat on the couch and we read the cards out loud. And before we went to bed, we read the cards out loud. If you don’t change your thinking, trying hard doesn’t work. And as we were doing it, I came to this crazy conclusion: I had all the same issues my wife has, maybe deeper, but I parlayed mine into things like workaholic and things that I actually got praised for. And I was as messed up inside or more than her.

And that was, I mean, that was forty years ago. And then we started adding. We realized we, we started adding to the cards. And then she, you know, our team at Living on the Edge created these cards and we just told some people on the broadcast about them, and I think we ordered five thousand and they were gone in three days. So, we ordered some more; they’re gone. Ordered some more; they’re gone.

And then realized, what I realized was people don’t, they just don’t understand who God made them to be. And our marriage changed, not because we learned three skills and we have a date once a week and we sit down and do our finances together so we stay on the same page and this is how we plan out life for our kids.

Did we do those things? Yes, we did. And did we need to? Yes. But that’s not what was the key. The key was a journey of seeing who God really was, then seeing who He made us to be, and then walking through that together.

The “faith” here, this is not your personal faith. This is objective faith. When he says, “According to the faith,” in other words, it’s what’s true. Have a sober – don’t think too high, don’t think too low, but just like you look in the mirror and say, “This is accurately who I am,” this passage is saying, “I want you to look into My Word and from My Spirit, this is how I see you, as My child.”

And that’s your identity. The question is: Do you know your personal strengths, weaknesses, and spiritual gifts? Do you know your personal strengths, weaknesses, and spiritual gifts? And I do think StrengthsFinder is a great way, and we have resources at Living on the Edge, one called Your Divine Design that is on our website that you can either do in groups or personally to help you discover your spiritual gifts.

[The] last way: Believing who God says you are. So, Paul, in Ephesians, is going to take three chapters to tell these people that are in Christ, he uses that word over. In Christ, in Christ, in Christ, in Christ. You have been taken out of the kingdom of darkness. You are now born again. His Spirit now dwells in you. And he says, “Now that you are in Christ, whatever is true of Christ is true of you now.”

I, often, when I teach this I’ll take a big, aquarium. And I’ll take a big bolt that people can see. And I’ll drop it in the water and, Tchoo! It sinks. It’s the nature of steel. And then I take a little block of wood and on the block of wood I paint a cross. And I take the cross and I put it in the water and what happens? [It floats.] Why? It’s its nature. It’s the nature of wood to float.

And then I take the bolt and I take the wood and I take a big, thick rubber band and I tie them around together and then I put it back in the water and guess what happens. It floats. Because whatever is true of the wood is now true of the bolt, and that’s who you are.

And the greatest thing you can ever do is grasp who you are. So, Paul is trying to help us get that. He says, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing. In Christ, rubber band, you’re the bolt, He’s the wood, this is what you have.

And I can only give you an overview. “For He chose us in Him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in His sight. In love He predestined us to adoption and sonship through Jesus Christ in accordance with His pleasures and will to the praise of the glory of His grace, which is freely given us in the one He loves. In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of His grace.”

I’m going to ask you to underline one phrase and circle a bunch of others. Underline “every spiritual blessing Christ.” You got it? Circle the word “chose us.” Circle the word “in love.” Circle the word “adoption.” Circle the word “redemption.” Circle “forgiveness of sins.” Circle the phrase “riches of God’s grace.”

I took Ephesians chapter 1 and I took all these theological concepts and because I’ve been doing those cards for all these years I flipped them around and I put them in everyday speak. Instead of being rejected, you are chosen.

You remember on the playgrounds when someone said, “I want you on my team.” You know what God has said? You know what Jesus said? “I want you. I want you on my team. I want you on my team. You’re valuable. I want you.” Not just chosen, but you’re wanted, you’re valued. Redemption. You know what redemption is? It’s buying something back. Do you know what the cost is for your soul? What was the price tag? It was Jesus’ blood voluntarily spilled for you personally to buy you out of the slave market of sin and the power of the enemy, to set you free.

Here’s what I want for you. I so want you to grasp who you are. And to grasp whose you are. A different person will show up in your marriage, because you are beautiful, you are wanted, you are called.

The question is: Do you see yourself as wanted, valued, precious, secure, empowered, and called by God to fulfill a unique purpose with your life?

The two things you need to believe about God’s character to develop a healthy relationship with ourselves is first is His wisdom.

When Paul talks about the responsibility of man and the sovereignty of God and He says, I mean, how life all works together and how He has done it, “Who has known the mind of God to give God counsel?” Answer: no one. “Who has ever given something to God that God owes him or should repay him? For from Him and through Him and for Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever.”

Why do you have to believe God’s wisdom? Because wisdom is: God brings about the best possible ends by the best possible means for the longest possible time for the most possible people. So, if there was a gentler or kinder way for Him to orchestrate your life, you’d be experiencing that.

So, your eye color and your personality and who you married and the kind of kids that you have, in God’s wisdom and His pathways, His all-knowing, all-loving, omniscient kindness, love, and justice is wrapped into all of that to give you the very best. He’s all-wise. He knows who your supervisors are and what He’s trying to do and develop in your heart. He knows where the financial ups and downs are. He knows the addictions that are in this room. He understands all those things and in His wisdom, He brought you here to get help from one another and from Him.

If you follow His wisdom, if you follow His path – the book of Proverbs is hokhmah. It’s His wisdom. It’s a skill! It’s the way life is supposed to work. And you read the Scripture, it’s like: Here’s how relationships are supposed to work according to God. Here’s how finances work according to God. Here’s how reconciliation works. Here’s how…

And when you follow that path, you experience the good, acceptable, perfect will of God. Now, by the way, the front end is really hard and usually painful and requires much change and you can’t do it alone. But, wow, is it great.

And then you need to believe that He’s gentle. And we looked at this passage before. But what I want you to know is that when these kind of changes, when you look at them, you start probing deep in your heart and usually a lot of shame comes up. And when you feel shame, like you don’t measure up and, yeah, this is probably for everyone else but me, you need to remember. The disposition of God’s heart is mercy. He finds delight to not give you what you deserve. He finds delight in His heart to give you grace. But you have to come.

Conclusion, so often we want our marriage to change by what we think our mates need to do. Guilty as charged. When in reality a healthy, self-love for who we are and whose we are frees us from demanding what our mates can never supply.