Wisdom for Relationship

I want to invite you to take out the message notes that are there right inside your bulletin with this logo on the top. The art of living well. This is a series that we've been doing for several weeks, in the book of Proverbs. And today we're gonna wrap up the series, and I'm so sad to be leaving the book of Proverbs because I've just become almost obsessed with it. There's—we could do another 10 weeks in this book. It's fantastic. It's so multi-layered. But what we're going to do today is take a look at the big picture of what Proverbs has to say about relationships.

And as you're getting those notes out, quick show of hands—anybody see the movie The Croods earlier this year? Anybody see The Croods? Literally like three people. This explains why we probably will not be seeing a Croods 2. But anyway, I thought they actually did a pretty good job of showing classic family dynamics. But in a caveman family, watch the screen. Just think: our whole family packed together on a long, slow trip across country. We'll tell stories, we'll laugh. Haha! We'll become closer as a family. You want me to turn this family around, do you? Because I will turn this family around! Dad, I gotta go. Come on, you can hold it. I don't think so. When we get there, don't do that! That's not food. He's a pet! My pet! What's a pet? An animal you don't eat! We call those children.

Anybody relate to that, especially this summer, right? With family road trips? Well, there can be a lot of tension in families. So let's talk about wisdom for family relationships today. Now, we represent in this room a lot of different kinds of families, right? Some of you are married, some of you are not married, some of you have kids at home, some of you are kids at home, some of you, the kids have gone. And what that means is there is going to be something for everyone in this message here this morning. But it could be very easy for you to kind of tune out the points that don't apply specifically to you. Oh, this point's about parents and kids. I don't have kids, and so I'm gonna play Scrabble on my iPhone. But listen carefully, because the themes of how to have healthy relationships that run through all these verses are really universal. There really is something for everybody in each point.

So let's take a look at what Proverbs has to say first about spouse-to-spouse relationships—husbands to wives and wives to husbands. And this one I'm gonna hit very quickly because my main concentration is gonna be on points two and three, and I don't have time to get into some of the more controversial things about sex and marriage today. But I did cover a lot of that two weeks ago in the message on sex, which you can download on our church website. So today let's look at the four keys to a dynamic, growing, and flourishing marriage.

I have to tell one of my favorite stories that some of you have heard me tell at weddings about marriage. It's the one about the very elderly couple in bed at night, and he could tell that she's a little bit upset. And the wife says, "Well, dear, you know, you never put your arm around me in bed at night like you used to." And so with a lot of creaking of bones and groaning, he puts his arm around her, but she's still not satisfied. She says, "You know, you never rub my back the way you used to at night." And so he mumbles something and begins to kind of rub her back like this. And then she says, "And you know, you never nibble on my ear the way you used to." And at that, he throws back his covers and stomps away. And she says, "Dear, where are you going?" And he says, "To get my teeth!" You know, as somebody said, "Who wants to nibble on an ear when that ear is young and the air is scented with something or another? Do something or another is one thing, but to be nibbling on that same ear when it contains a hearing aid and the air is scented with Ben Gay is something else entirely." But that is what we want—that kind of lifelong love.

So how do we get there? Four keys. There's a description early on in the book of Proverbs about somebody who, quote, "has left the partner of her youth and ignored the covenant she made before God," there in Proverbs 2:17. This implies that marriage is first a relationship based on covenant. Marriage is a relationship based on covenant. What does that mean? Covenant means a binding agreement where you say, "This is a contract I am signing on the dotted line. I am promising I will not leave you. I will be faithful." Now some of you are going, "What, are you saying that I need a piece of paper just to tell somebody that I love them?" No, of course not! Go ahead and tell somebody you love them. But a marriage covenant is not a declaration of present love; it's a promise of future behavior. It's not a declaration of present love; it's a promise of behavior for the future before God. And there is huge power in covenant.

Interesting, a Harvard University study showed that marriages where the wedding is in a church service, the divorce rate drops to one out of 50 marriages, far lower than the divorce rate in the population at large. But in marriages where people are married in a Christian ceremony and they go to church every week, read the Bible, and pray together, the divorce rate is one out of 1,105 marriages. Just an amazingly low ratio. It's spectacular, really. Why is this? I think it's at least partly because there's a real emphasis in these relationships on a covenant—a promise, a binding agreement before God.

Now a couple of things on this. First, even the mere mention of covenant and breaking a marriage covenant evokes a couple of reactions probably from us. Some of you feel shame and guilt and pain when you hear this. But the purpose of this message is not to resurrect your past. Perhaps the covenant has been broken. Perhaps you broke the covenant. But listen, if you have confessed a sin to God, God has forgiven it and forgotten it, and you can too. What this is about is about moving forward. Don't dwell on the past.

But there's another emotion that this can evoke, and that's this: some people in our individualistic Western world, when they hear all this talk about marriage being a contract, a covenant, they feel like the walls are closing in on me. This is not right. Well, keep listening because the next point is that not only is marriage based on a covenant, it's a relationship based on friendship. Friendship, because that very same verse talks about the partner of her youth. The word partner there is a Hebrew word, which means your most intimate and best friend—your most intimate and best friend.

Now, how do you make your spouse into a friend? Well, the best way is by having a common mission. C.S. Lewis once said something interesting. He said, "It's impossible to have fellow travelers if you're going nowhere." Think about that. Isn't that great? It's impossible to have fellow travelers if you're going nowhere. And he said this in an essay on friendship, and he was saying don't just go out looking for friends desperate for friends because that's just not very appealing, and you'll never end up getting the friends that you're looking for. Have a mission in life. Be going somewhere, and then you're gonna find fellow travelers. And man, when you have that in a marriage relationship, that's spectacular. Have a shared mission in life, and you'll have that friendship.

But the Bible says it's about more than friendship, more than a covenant. It's also a relationship based on passion—based on passion. Now we saw the next verse a couple of weeks ago, Proverbs 5:19. It's talking about somebody's wife: "A loving doe, a graceful deer, may her breasts satisfy you always. May you ever be captivated by her love." And that we saw that the word for captivated there literally means intoxicated. May you be drunk on her physical affection. This verse is talking about torrid romance, about the ingredient of sexual love in marriage. Now this can be both the easiest or the most difficult ingredient in marriage.

I heard about one middle-aged couple who go to a restaurant, and in the booth right next to theirs is a honeymooning couple. And this couple is all over each other. They are kissing, they're hugging, and the wife of the first booth says to her husband, "I wish you'd do that." And he says, "I don't even know that woman!" You know, it's gonna be very difficult. But passion is part of it.

Now again, I did a whole talk on this two weeks ago. If you missed it, I encourage you to download that from our website, TLC.org. It's called Being Wise About Sex. Now look at these first three points from a historical standpoint. This is remarkable because for most of human history, you married for economic reasons, you married for security, you married for status, you married for children. Marriage was arranged, and historians agree romantic love didn't start as a reason for marriage until much later in human history. Yet here in something written three thousand years ago, the book of Proverbs, it says don't just base it on a covenant; have passion in your marriage. And not just passion—make your wife, and they're talking to a world where women were not given equal status to men, and it says your wife should be your most intimate and best friend. This is, from a historical standpoint, this advice is completely an outlier—like 1500-2000 years ahead of its time. Where did this come from? Well, it came from God. This is a divine format, recipe, ideal for marriage.

And that's why it goes even further than this. Proverbs says it's a relationship based on a ministry mindset. You don't have a consumer mindset; you have a ministry mindset. You want to bless them. There's a wonderful passage in the New Testament that explains this. It says, "Husbands, love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her." Why? "To sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that he might present to himself the church—that's you and me—in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she would be holy and blameless." What is that talking about? It means that when Jesus Christ looks at you and me, he sees us not just for what we are, but for our potential. He means that Jesus Christ has a commitment to your future glory. And so he entered our world not just to save us from our sins, but to journey with us on the road to becoming what God wants us to be.

And that means that in a Christian marriage, we treat our spouse like Jesus, and we say it's not just about my love for who you are now; it's about my commitment to serving you so that you become the person that God made you to be. I want to minister to you. And so this is the engine that makes marriage last and work. When you combine a promise, a covenant, you combine that with an intimate friendship based on shared purpose and with eroticism and passion and with a ministry mindset, man, you've got a powerful—almost a chemical concoction—that is going to be very powerful.

Now there's tons more to say on this, and I really want to encourage you to grab a copy of Tim Keller's excellent book, The Meaning of Marriage. I got a lot of my ideas for this right from Tim Keller, and we always have copies of those in the lobby at our book cart that we just make available at cost. But at TLC, we're committed to enriching your marriage. And so you might want to check out the Tim Keller book.

But second, what does Proverbs say about parent-to-child relationships? Listen, in traditional conservative cultures, they would often say the main goal of child-rearing is control. And in liberal modern Western cultures, we would often say the main goal of child-rearing is affirmation and love. But Proverbs is actually more nuanced than either one of those positions. It says the main purpose of parenting is to make your children wise. Is to make your children wise—not just to control them, not just to affirm them, but to make them wise.

Now why is wisdom the most important thing to teach your kids? Because kids are fools, right? Kids just do dumb stuff. And I want to have a little bit of fun with this because we could all share stories from our own childhood or our own kids, but I'll share just a few stories with you. One time, when our oldest son Jonathan was very young, his grandpa made him a beautiful lemonade stand. And we helped him set it up one weekend. He sets up this lemonade stand, and he makes seven or eight bucks selling neighborhood kids his lemonade. He's very excited, and apparently this was very motivating. Because the next Saturday morning, Lori and I wake up late, the sun is shining, and after a while, we go, "Where's Jonathan?" But we go outside, we find him on the front sidewalk surrounded by a crowd of neighborhood kids, and we're thinking they're pretty enthused; that must be great lemonade he's making. And as we get closer, we saw that he has put up his stand, and he's put up a new sign on his stand which says, "Tools for rent." And he has laid out all of our power tools on our driveway, and he is renting them out by the hour to the neighborhood kids. Kids are walking away with drills, circular saws in wagons, and they all thought it was awesome. Thank God we gathered them all up, but Jonathan thought it was a great idea. We had to teach him wisdom that day, right?

Another time we were camping, and the kids get up early to go outside to play. And about 7 a.m., they wake us up. They've already been up an hour. You know, you cannot get them up when they're at home, but when they're camping, they just pop right out of bed at like 5. So 7 a.m., we hear them at the front of the tent going, "Mom! Dad! Dad!" "What? What is it?" "We just want one thing! One thing! Just let us leave!" "Well, we just want one thing! One little thing! One thing! One thing!" "And then we'll let you sleep." "What? What is it? One thing? What is it? A match?" And we look outside, and the kids have put together dozens of what they called pinecone bombs—pinecones with pine needles sticking out like fuses—and their morning activity plan was to light them all and lob them into the forest. We had to teach them wisdom that day, right?

I'll give you just one more. My friend Bobby, one time, he's six years old, and his mom leaves him alone at home when she goes out grocery shopping—first time he'd ever been home alone. And he decides what would be hilarious, obviously, is when mom comes home to jump out and surprise her, disguised as the jolly green giant. Obviously, that would be hilarious! So he goes into the basement, gets greenhouse paint, takes off all of his clothes, paints himself green from head to toe, goes back upstairs, and hides under his bed. Problem: he falls fast asleep. And he wakes up much later to the sounds of policemen that his mother had called frantically when she couldn't find Bobby at home. And so Bobby thinks, "I better jump out now and say, 'Ho ho ho! Jolly green giant!'" And he tries, but he's stuck to the carpet because the paint dried. And so now he's crying, and the cops go, "Wait, wait! We hear crying!" And his mom's now really freaking out. "What has happened to Bobby?" And they go into his room; it's coming from under the bed, and they shove the bed aside to see the scene I just described. Bobby told me, "How do you even begin to describe the thought process that got you there?" And he looked up at them and said, "It seemed like a good idea at the time." And he said they all just collapsed laughing, right? These are all examples of what the Bible says: folly is bound up in the heart of a child, isn't that true? Kids will just do these ridiculous things.

All right, one more—just one more. I just was speaking for two weeks at Mount Hermon, and it reminds me of a story that Chuck McDall told one time when he spoke up there. This happened in Felton. He said he asked a mom there, "How's camp been?" And she said, "Well, eventful." She told him the day before—again, this is right up there in Felton, so you guys will know what I'm talking about—her kids and some other kids that they had met at camp were all standing in a circle on the redwood path up there looking down at something. And so this mom wanders over, "What are you looking at, kids?" They're looking down at a mother skunk and her babies. And the mom yells, "Kids, run!" And so each kid picked up a skunk and ran! You know, the folly is bound up in the heart of a child.

But the rod of discipline will drive it far away. Now the rod of discipline—I better say something about this quick. The word discipline is a very common word in Proverbs, which actually means coaching. This is a combination of instruction and discipline, which really the modern word we would use would be coaching. Because kids do not come pre-programmed with discipline and wisdom. What's interesting is that what the studies are all now suggesting is this: most of us get a lot of the specifics about what our parents taught us, right? But what makes you capable of living a disciplined life? What makes it possible for you to live according to a value system is that your parents had a value system, and they disciplined you in accordance with that system. In other words, if your parents had a consistent value system of what's right, what's wrong, and they coached you according to that, then you are going to be much more apt to have the ability to have a firm set of your own standards—not necessarily their standards, but what they taught you by their example is what it looks like to live with principles. And that's so important, and this just makes me relax so much as a parent because that means it's not so much that you get every little detail right. What's the exact right curfew time? You know, it's about the overarching idea of living a disciplined life. You're teaching them the overarching big picture of what it looks like to live according to principles. You're coaching them that way.

Now the word rod means authority, and a rod was a symbol of authority. It's symbolic. It means to take authority. You are the authority in that relationship. But one of the dangers of reading the book of Proverbs, if you don't understand the poetry of it, is that every time you see the word rod, you think it means spank. Now certainly in ancient times, back when this was written, this idea included corporal punishment. But you're making a huge mistake if every time you see the word rod in Proverbs, you think it means punishment. And here's why: you know that famous verse, Proverbs 22:6, that says, "Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he's old, he will not depart from it." Many commentators think that what this really means is make sure your discipline fits the nature of your child. A lot of kids don't need corporal punishment; they just need a look, and they melt down, right? Other kids need more than a look. But if you think that corporal punishment is to be used universally or extensively, you're not really understanding the book of Proverbs. You're bringing to it a more traditional understanding of control. Being the goal, the goal is to teach them wisdom. This means make sure the discipline fits the child, and there has to not just be discipline; there also has to be delight. Proverbs 3:11 says, "My son, do not despise the Lord's discipline; do not resent his rebuke, because the Lord disciplines those he loves, as a father the son he delights in." Your child needs to know you delight in them, no matter what.

And so that's parent-to-child, spouse-to-spouse. But what does the book of Proverbs have to say about number three—child-to-parent relationships? And at this point, it hits all of us, right? Because we all had parents. I think that's pretty safe to say. But in the book of Proverbs and all through the Bible, there is one key concept that comes up over and over again. In a verse there in Proverbs, it says, "Listen to your father who gave you life; do not despise your mother when she is old," Proverbs 23:22. Now do not despise—the opposite of despise is honor. Honor, and that is all through the Bible. It's one of the Ten Commandments: honor your father and mother. Notice it doesn't say admire your father and mother. It doesn't say enjoy your father and mother. It doesn't even say trust your father and mother. It says honor them. I think what's so important in this command is not just what is contained in it, but what's not in it. It doesn't say you have to think your father and mother are the greatest people on the planet. It doesn't say you have to admire them or even enjoy them. It says to honor them. Why? Well, for one thing, I was thinking about this this week: statistically, one half of all parents are below average. If you think about it, it's impossible to argue with that statistic, right? And so that means that some of us in this room had poor parents, and some of us had evil parents. I mean, I'm so thankful that I have had a phenomenal experience with parents and step-parents, but some of you, it has not been phenomenal. And that's why the Bible says it's so wise, you know, to fulfill this one condition. The Bible, it's just so true to life because you can't always admire, you can't always enjoy, but you can always honor them.

So what does this look like? Five ways to honor your parents from Keller. Number one: find appropriate symbols to show honor in your family's culture. Your family may have ways it shows honor that means something to your parents—giving them a place of honor at the table, inviting them up with you when you go to the lake on family vacations, not leaving them out, letting them speak first and finish talking, even if they take a long time to get to the point before you interrupt. You know, honor them. Now on this point, I want to say for many parents, as they grow older, the less honor they get because all of their affirming friends start to die off. And this is why it's so important for children to honor them. And I'm preaching this sermon to myself now, and you're welcome to listen in. But one of the ways you show honor to your parents is by phone calls or letters or emails. You fill them in on the details of your life because every single time you send a letter, you make a phone call, you send an email, you're obeying this command. You're honoring your father and mother.

And also, as time passes, your roles in life reverse, where at one time your parents took care of you and bathed you and fed you. As time goes on, those roles reverse, and you end up taking care of them and feeding them and even bathing them. But that's a part of life, and I know many of you are already facing this issue. But the Bible says this is part of a Christian's responsibility. In fact, it's interesting to me that Jesus Christ, one of the seven last phrases he said on the cross—he's on the cross in immense pain, dying for the sins of mankind, and he says from the cross, he sees his aged mother Mary, and he sees the one guy who did not abandon him, the apostle John, and he says to John, "Take care of my mother." While he's dying for our sins, he's remembering to keep this command to honor his mother.

All right, number two: don't underestimate their need to see themselves reproduced in you. Your parents have a great need—a desperate need—to feel, to know that they made some kind of positive contribution to your life. They need affirmation as parents. Is there any place that you can say, "You know what, Mom? You know what, Dad? I got this from you. You know this thing I do? I got that from you, and it's a really good thing." They need that kind of encouragement.

Number three: let them change. Don't stereotype them into irrelevance. People can change. Your parents, your grandparents can change. Don't go, "Oh, well, they're always like that, Gramps, Mom, Dad. They're always like that." That's not honoring. Let them be a dynamic human being and not just a piece of cardboard.

Number four: forgive them. Forgive them because none of us is perfect. There's only one perfect parent, and that's God. We all need forgiveness. Now for some of us, this is like, "Yeah, I need to forgive my mom, Dad, for whatever," some relatively minor, you know, mistakes. But for some of you, this is a very painful point because, again, some of you had parents who hurt you deeply. And so what does God expect you to do here? God is—listen, God is not asking you to gloss over anything. He's not asking you to deny the pain. He's not asking you to repress it. God doesn't want you to fake it; he wants you to face it. Because the chances are that you are venting anger that's really because of your parents and something that hasn't been dealt with. You're venting it on your wife or your husband or your kids or your friends because you've never resolved it with your parents. And so what some of us in this room need to do is to prayerfully attempt some kind of a reconciliation with our parents. That can be so rich and rewarding. But if you can't talk to your parents, maybe they've already passed on, or maybe they wouldn't listen, or maybe their faculties are going, share your pain with a friend or with a counselor. And let God bring good even out of that pain because, listen, if you don't forgive your parents, if you're holding on to this anger against them, you're still a child because you're still letting them control you.

And then maybe the most important way to honor your parents, number five, is to be liberated from them. That is the most important way to honor them. You see, if you had really good parents, the temptation is going to be for the rest of your life to want to earn their approval because they're so important to you. And you're always going to be thinking, "What do Mom and Dad think? I really want them to approve." And if you had really bad parents, the temptation is to spend the rest of your life resenting the fact that they don't show approval. But either way, you haven't grown up. It's such a great transition when you get to the point where your parents just become your friends, where there's liberation, and this honors your parents because that's really the goal of parenting—that you get up and leave the nest.

And so that's the big picture. I mean, we did the main, like, 5,000-mile high flyover here of what the Bible in Proverbs says about relationships, and I think everybody got touched by at least a part of this, right? But you might look at this list and go, "Okay, how do I do this? Is this just one of those try harder messages?" No, of course not! The answer is to go to Jesus. As we've been doing at the end of the Proverbs messages every single week in this series, let's walk our way through this in application as we close.

First, how do you love your spouse in all the ways that we just talked about? Well, remember the Bible says, "Husbands, love your wives just as Christ loved the church." That's you and me. If you see that Jesus gives you the ultimate spousal love—that the creator of the universe loves you more than the most amazing husband or wife ever could—then you're free, really free, to love your spouse. Because listen, here's the dynamic: if getting your spouse's love is sort of your main goal, the center of your universe, you're going to be obsessed with it, and you're going to be disappointed at times because they're not perfect. And so you're going to be clingy, and you're going to be worried, and you're going to be nagging, and you're going to be controlling, and you're going to drive them further away. But if your deepest need for love is met by God himself, if you know that Jesus loves you as a groom loves his bride, the more you own that, the more you let it move you, the more you build your life on that foundation, then you are free to love your spouse because you're not obsessed with gaining their love. And so you're relaxed, and you're confident, and counterintuitively, more appealing.

Now there's a lot of people who want to be married, and they're not. And you go to weddings, and you think, "I can't stand this! I cannot stand it! Because when am I going to be married?" And sometimes you think, "I don't think I can be happy until I am married." And that's a common feeling and understandable. But the Bible says that when you know that you have really the ultimate spouse in life—that Jesus already loves you as a groom loves his bride—that the one person in the universe who matters more than anybody else loves you, that according to Revelation 22, your wedding is going to happen no matter what. That no matter what, your groom, Jesus, is going to embrace you. That heals you. That heals you.

And then finally, how can you be free enough to not resent your parents or your kids and really honor them? Well, you know that verse we saw: "The Lord disciplines those he loves, as a father the son he delights in." God the Father delights in you. You have the ultimate love, the ultimate delight of the ultimate Father. Most of us don't get that. In a seminar once, I asked people to show one another pictures of their kids or grandkids for five minutes, and then people got out their wallet pictures and their iPhones, and it was hard to get everybody's attention. Five minutes later, you couldn't stop them. There was so much laughter, so much joy in the room. But finally, I said, "Okay, stop now. Take out your wallet again and show each other pictures of your own driver's license." And people just moaned because nobody wants to show anybody else pictures of their driver's license photo. We all hate pictures of ourselves anyway, and the DMV camera somehow brings out all the flaws. There's nothing worse. And my point is we tend to see ourselves like that DMV picture, with all of our flaws magnified, and we think God sees us like that. But God sees you like you see that first set of pictures. God delights in you as a father loves his son or daughter. You are the beloved child of God, and when you realize that, you are free to love your own parents, whether they tell you they love you or not, because you have that kind of confidence.

So in this message on relationships, what I'm saying is come home. Come home to the ultimate spousal love, to the ultimate parental love. Come home to the Lord because then you're free to love, whether your spouse is being loving or not, whether your kids go off the rails or not, whether your parents respect you or not, because no matter what, you're always home.

Let's pray together. Would you bow your heads with me?

Heavenly Father, thank you that because of your work for us through Christ, you're no longer some remote king, but you're our heavenly Father. Help us to take what we've learned and apply it to our family relationships. Help us to be wise through Jesus. Help us to love others as we are loved. And if there's anybody here today who's saying, "Man, that sounds good. I just want to come home," I pray that they'd say something like this in their hearts: "God, I don't understand all of this, but I want to be at home in your love." And so I receive the love of Christ now, bought by his death, burial, and resurrection. Thank you, God. In Jesus' name, Amen.