Well, let's begin in prayer. Father, we thank you that you indeed have provided us everything we need for life and godliness through the knowledge of you. And we were reminded of that so powerfully this morning. We pray for your blessing and our time together now in your name, amen. Okay, we need some more chairs in here. Well, Patty and I are really excited about being with you here during these first several sessions. And how many of you were not in the Parenting Foundations class earlier? OK, several of you. All right. Those are now up on Sermon Audio and the church's website, or the church's They're up on Sermon Audio, so if you want to watch those up there, I really would encourage you to do that because I'm going to assume that you've had that information, although I'm going to just do a quick review here. I mentioned in the last two sessions we had in July that our journey began in this parenting thing in 1976. This is a picture of Kirsten, me holding her in the hospital and asking myself, first of all, holding her and thinking, What have we done? Maybe that's a dad thing. The moms have been thinking about this for nine months, and now that she's here, it really hit me. And I began asking myself, what do I want this precious girl to be like in 21 years, and how is that going to happen? And it's not going to happen by default. Children don't come out of the womb quoting John 3.16 and asking for some help in their daily devotions. You know, this doesn't happen. They come out little unsaved pagan sinners. And our first job is to evangelize. We'll keep them alive long enough to bring them to this point of salvation. When you first have a child, you're just thankful for every day that baby stays alive under your care. On your first one, not sure what to be doing. And I won't go into all the details. I spent a lot of time in this in the last couple of sessions we had. Of trying to figure out what should be my direction as a dad and just to summarize I landed on Deuteronomy 6 where Moses talks about if you're going into this promised land and you you dads need to love God with all of your heart and with all of your soul, with all of your might. And these words which I command thee shall be in thy heart, and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children. Speak of them when thou walkest in the way, when thou risest up, when thou liest down. Lest your children, excuse me, forget the Lord their God. So I wrote down that weekend, while Patty and Kirsten slept most of the weekend, my job is to saturate her experiences and her environment with the ways and the words of the living God. That was the primary goal. And therefore, I must become the most God-loving, word-filled, ministry-minded disciple-maker this little girl knows. And all of those themes coming out of of Deuteronomy 6. And I mentioned this and I want to review this. The mission of a discipling parent, we must become spouses who are like-minded with God. I used to speak to the freshman orientation class, and I would tell them, right now, as freshmen in college, you are determining how your teens turn out. And they would look a little confused, and I said, if you are a mediocre believer, you're gonna be attracted to a mediocre believer. no godly woman is going to want a mediocre or less guy. But if two mediocres come together, then you have a pretty low level of Christianity. And that's going to impact your children. And I cannot tell you how many times when a student was in trouble and a dad would come into my office, I remember one leaning forward on my desk and putting his arm down on my desk and say, I would give my right arm to have my son back. And men and women, it will take your right arm. Spiritually, if you want to raise a godly seed, you can't just float into this. I love this morning. Oh, I don't mean to get all slides here. This is a morning slide show. That's too far. Sorry about that. Here's what I want. The special number that was sung this morning, fully surrendered. Listen to these words, men and women. This has got to be your heart cry. And if this doesn't resonate with you, you're already toast. I'm serious about that. With a contrite heart for a faith that's sure, with a thirst for righteousness and a love that's pure, We, with all our hearts, seek thy perfect will. Emptied of our own desire, break us, Lord, and with thy spirit fill. A heart that's pure, a conscience clear, a soul that thirsts for holiness. In godly fear, be this my prayer, mine all upon an altar, still fully surrender to thy will. You have to begin your marriage that way, and you have to foster that the rest of your marriage. And that's why I say, you must as spouses, whatever your spouse now, you're in this now, and both of you must be growing to likeness to Jesus, and a thirst for this kind of heart for God. You have to have a wholehearted commitment to becoming Christ-like and wise. And that will allow you to have a like-minded marriage, where you have a wholehearted commitment to God's design for marriage and for the Christian home. Now, I think we all have to admit that most marriages, ours included, and yours probably, most of our marriages started like a tick and a dog relationship. And it wasn't too long before we find out there are two ticks and no dog. Both of us get married for the thing the other person can do for us or for how the other person makes us feel. And it's not too long when we, and I remember when we discussed this early in our marriage, I mean, the first few weeks. I would get aggravated when she did something, there was something sinful. Now, you know, she's not swearing or anything, but impatient about something. And she is disturbed that I did something. We're trying to mesh these two lives together. And it came to a realization for both of us. We married sinners. And sinners are going to sin. And we need to help each other when we do sin. And it has to stay on that level that we must be helping one another grow in likeness to Jesus. Jesus said that the disciple will be like his master. our children will be like us in more ways than you know. And I'll say more about that as we go along. Now, I know this is a little heavy way to start, but if we are not committed that the most important thing is that I be like Jesus, and the most important thing for her is that she be like Jesus, and if we're not helping one another do that, we have nothing to offer the next generation of kids. And what we're looking for in our children is wholehearted commitment to what they have been taught and have seen modeled in our home. Now, I've got that footnote I called attention to a couple of weeks ago, Isaiah 1-2. There are families where mom and dad lived godly lives. And none of them would say we did everything right. But they lived godly lives. But one of their kids turned away. I'm not I'm not throwing rocks at that because God says in Isaiah 1 2 I have reared up children and They have forsaken me God didn't make any parenting mistakes But his whole the children of Israel in mass Turned away from him So I'm not throwing rocks at that, but I'm saying Jesus does say that the disciple is going to be like his master and and we've gotta be the right kind of masters. And the whole goal of that is that we raise God-loving, word-filled, ministry-minded children who will be committed to becoming like Christ and wise and will find a like-minded spouse who's committed to that and just repeat this generation after generation after generation. And I'm saying, men and women, that when we first, many of you have your first or second or third child, and some of you do not yet. And I mentioned last time, there's a reason why God gives us 13 years before we have a teenager. It takes that long for us to grow up spiritually and get mature in a lot of areas before we can enter this stage where we're helping this young adult now really think rightly about everything that's in his world, which isn't the same world you and I are living in right now. And this is our goal. But all of this is destroyed by self-centeredness. Our individual self-centeredness, our pride. And that is exposed mostly by how we communicate with one another during conflicts. And as I said, I know this is getting a little heavy at the beginning. I just want us to say, folks, if we're not getting this thing about Christlikeness and wisdom, we're not gonna get a lot of things right. And I want to show you what goes wrong when you don't have that right. Here's what James says. From whence come the wars and the fighting among you? Come they not hence even of your lusts, your strong desires? Where we get into conflict with one another is that we have mutually exclusive desires. She wants it this way and I want it this way. She wants to go here and I want to go here. Now, And those have to be resolved. And the only way that's gonna happen well is with godly spirit-filled people doing it well who have a mission to become like Jesus. Patty and I right now are in an absolutely overwhelmed state of our lives. I mean overwhelmed. We almost cry about it. And we were in the kitchen yesterday talking about it. And I said, well, I guess we're not complete and entire wanting nothing yet because we have some trials. They're not trials between us, but they're just a lot of things. And we must, and we've got to have that all the way through our marriage. that we have trouble with this young person and his illness, this child and his illness, or we have trouble with finances or whatever. Why are those there? Because we're not like Jesus yet. And they will be, we will fuss at all those times unless we do really want to be like Jesus. And therefore we do count this all joy. Because this is growing us up. And that's what we want. That's got to be our hard cry. This is just Christianity 101. We gotta live it ourselves, we gotta live it with our spouse, we gotta live it with our children. James says, whence come the wars and the fighting among you? Come they not hence even of your lust, your own strong desires at war and your members? You lust and you want and you have not. You kill and desire to have. and you cannot obtain. You fight and war, yet you have not because you ask not, you ask and receive not because you ask from us that you may consume it upon your lust." So, whereas James said the problem is coming, the problem is coming because you want something, and your spouse wants something, and God wants something, and men and women, God's gotta win. I think I shared with you maybe in the earlier thing, early in our marriage, we had something we couldn't agree upon and I don't recall what it was. We had some discussions, not yelling or fighting, but some discussions and it occurred to us that we were, she was trying to get me to think the way she wanted and I was getting her to try to get her to think the way I wanted to think and both of us needed to start thinking the way God thinks. And what God wants more than the bedtime of the kids that we can fight over, or more important than whether we spend $10 here or $10 there, is that we preserve the unity that God intends for us to have. And we need each other's perspective. One of the most diabolically destructive forces in marriage is a husband who won't allow himself to be influenced by his wife. I can show you study after study after study that shows that if a guy won't take input from his wife, that marriage is headed for the rocks. I need that woman's perspective about everything. It's like having two eyeballs. I can see that building over there, and two eyeballs are looking at it from a little different angle, but looking at the same thing. And I need that angle for depth perception, as long as these two eyeballs are talking to one another. And I need her perspective, and she needs mine, and then these two eyeballs have to be talking with one another to get God's perspective about what we're looking at, and then we go do that. So let me talk to you about stages of conflict. And for that, I need to get off my nose. And this is just all from observation, secular observation, and I think it's correct. But there's a tension development that comes up. She, you know, she's already had a rough day at work, and now she, or with the kids, and she comes home, or it's time, she starts supper, and he comes home saying, oh man, what a day at work, I can't believe this or that, and he goes and vegetates on the couch watching the news. As if she hasn't worked all day long. And so she's thinking, what is going on here? Or when it's time to get ready, time to go someplace, he's never ready or she's never ready. Caleb, you want to close that door? Or she, when they discuss about where they're going for holidays, his parents or her parents, she's always insisting it be her parents. So whatever the issue is, And I know that none of you as couples have tensions, but you know people who do out there. And so you know what this looks like. Well, then the next tension, if it's not handled well, is a role dilemma, where we start thinking, well, if he's going to do that, where does that leave me? Who was his slave last year? He used to call me his princess. Now he calls me an idiot. There is this role dilemma where we're asking inside, where do I stand? I thought he loved. I thought he cared. I thought she understood. Do you see the role dilemma there? Where am I in this whole scheme of things? And if that's not resolved, then it goes to injustice collecting because we know a confrontation is coming at some point. This has got to come out. We've got to deal with this. But we don't go to war without ammunition, right? So we start collecting and tagging, indexing all of the phrases we're going to use when this thing blows up because we're not going to go to war without some ammo. He doesn't pick up his clothes and he doesn't help me clean up after supper. Okay, we tag that and put that back here because we're going to use that. He doesn't lead the family spiritually. We're going to use that one when the confrontation comes. She's always complaining that we don't have enough money. and I can't help it when I get paid, and she wants me home more. So when he gets ready to say something, he's got to have that in the bunker, because he's got to remind her, you're so unreasonable in this way. Or she criticizes everything I do. And what you really want to do is index and tag the ammo where they're using never and always. You always do this, and you never do that. I mean those are really good to pull out when you need to, when you're going to have a battle. At the beginning, right here in the role dilemma stage is the onset of bitterness if we don't deal with that before God and deal with that with our spouse. We'll talk about how to ways to do that. And it gets more and more bitter the more this goes on. So injustice collecting and finally there is that confrontation. There's a final fuse and the whole thing blows up and man have we got the ammo. and both of them come out with both guns blazing and there is a confrontation. And it may come out like this, we need to talk. Well, right away, just even that tone does not set up for a good peace conference. Right? That's like putting a gun to somebody's head and saying, sit down, we are going to talk. Well, probably the outcome of that is not going to be good. That is what's called in marriage counseling literature, a hard start. It's already being derailed just by that almost violent push that this is going to happen and it's going to happen now. Or I'm sick and tired of you just thinking about yourself. You act as if you don't have a wife and kids. You aren't single anymore. We got to talk. So this is the confrontation that comes out. Now, none of us do this, but there are people that have conflicts who are a lot more, they have a lot more finesse about it. And so they can be really kind as they stab that dagger in the back. And then after that confrontation, however that comes out, there are some adjustments that are made. So he says, or she says, well, I guess we don't talk about finances. Or I realize, again, talking about her mother is off limits, so we make this adjustment, we say, all right, I realize this, I'm not going to do this anymore, but it's not solving any problems, it's just putting them in a gunny sack. You can call it gunny sacking, we just stuff it in there. And it doesn't resolve anything. That's how, you can recognize these stages of conflict in the people you know out there, right? It's pretty common things that happen. And I will tell you that, oh, and then we go back to the normal way we have been living, but now facing some more, the next tension comes up, we go through the cycle all again. And I can tell you, men and women, this can be diffused at any stage through spirit-filled humility. And we're gonna talk about that next week. If you won't be humble, you can't be wise. Humility is a prerequisite for wisdom. And we'll talk about how Jesus said that. When I was taking a doctoral course on advanced biblical counseling of marriage and family counseling about some years ago, I did a lot of reading, some reading even in the secular world just to let me know what is going on in the secular world as I did my own research. And by the way, one statistic George Barna said, I don't know, I have any current ones, but George Barna said in 2000, that between 2000 and 2009, there were 85,000 books on parenting published. That was up to 2009. Now with print on demand and everybody can be his own publisher, we're probably at 250,000 books on parenting. And that's why there's a handout up here of resources we recommend, and we'll be updating that before the class is over. Because one of the things Patty has been doing, we haven't parented for what, 30 years? Yeah, probably. Our kids are in their 40s. Yeah, and we have grandkids, of course, that they want help and talk about. But most of the books that we read are not even the best books now. So Patty had, I can't tell you how many books we purchased for this class where she's been reading and I've been following up and trying to bring us up to date with resources for you. They're really not telling us anything we haven't known for the most part, but we need resources that we can hardly recommend to you. But one of the authors I read, and I'm not saying you need to read this at all, I'm saying it's not going to be helpful to you, but John Gottman is a clinical researcher on marriage. He has a clinic out in the West Coast. And I just want to share with you some statistics here. Dr. Gottman is able to predict with 90% accuracy which couples will divorce and which will stay together. And it all resolves around how they solve problems. 69% of conflict in relationship is about unresolved perpetual problems. We never take this out of the gunny sack and get help with dealing with it or deal with it biblically. It's just perpetual. Every time a holiday comes up, we have this fight again about where we're going. Every time there's an overdraft in the checkbook, we have this big fight about who's doing what. and they're perpetual, they're never resolved, they just are always there and they're never fixed. 69% of conflict in relationship is about unsolvable, unresolvable, excuse me, perpetual problems. 16% of these perpetual issues involved gridlock, couple, conflict. They just, neither one of them will budge on this matter. So here's kind of a problem-solving test. How a spouse introduces a concern, let's say the wife, you want to bring something up to your husband or vice versa, how you introduce that concern with godly wisdom or with a fleshly approach and how the other spouse responds to the concern becomes a key difference between happily and unhappily married couples. how you bring up a conflict, how you bring up an issue to one another and how the other one responds to that. Now, if you're spirit filled and you're walking with God and you are allowing God to produce in you love and joy and peace and gentleness and goodness and meanness and temperance, you're gonna do all right. But if you have bitter ending and strife in your hearts and James says, don't lie against the truth, that is wicked. We're either walking in the flesh or walking in the spirit. James says, who is a wise man and endued with knowledge among you? Let him show by his good conduct his works with meekness of wisdom. Wisdom doesn't come out with guns blazing. But if you have bitter envying and strife in your hearts, glory not and lie not against the truth. Don't kid yourself, this wisdom descended not from above. but it's earthly, unspiritual, demonic. For where envying and strife is, there is disorder, chaos, and every evil work. But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, easy to be entreated or reasonable, easy to be reasoned with, full of mercy and good fruits. without partiality and without hypocrisy, and the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace of them that make peace. Righteousness flourishes, that last verse, if I could put it in a different way, righteousness flourishes in the garden of the peacemaker, or the unity builder. I'm not saying peace at all costs, we're just, okay, okay, you can do it, you can do it, I just have to have peace. I'm not talking, that's not peacemaking, that's gunny-sacking. Peacemaking is where we both see what God wants done and we decide how we're gonna do that together in a way that pleases God. A whole harvest of righteousness grows out of that garden. John Gottman talks about his four horsemen. You're familiar with the horsemen of the apocalypse in Revelation 6. and the judgment that God is bringing on the world. He says there are four horsemen. And the first one is criticism. Criticism here, his definition is, criticism is any statement that implies there is something globally wrong with one's partner, something that is probably a lasting aspect of the person's character. So a wife might come to her husband with a concern. Honey, Johnny's discouraged because you didn't make it to his ballgame. And she's just reporting a concern. If she is coming as a critic, she might say, you really don't care about the kids, do you? You wouldn't have forgotten to come home if the Braves were playing on SPN. He might have. You're so lost in your own world. That is moving from a concern to an attack on the person and his character. Now, it may be true that he's not thinking about anybody else in the family, but her saying that in that form is not helping this. She can express a concern. I would tell the students, if you have to make an appeal to an authority in your life, your mom and dad, your boss at work. Understand there are three things a doctor does. A doctor hears your symptoms and then he diagnoses a problem and he prescribes a cure. And here's what, now with the internet, here's what a lot of people come in. They say, Doc, I got this pain and this is happening and I feel this way and this way and I watched this advertisement or read this article and my problem is this and I need you to write this prescription. This person doesn't need a doctor except to do some handwriting. So when you're solving a problem, just bring the problem. The concern is Johnny is discouraged because you missed his ballgame. That's just reporting a symptom. An attack says, and if you would do this and this and this, you're a bum, you're doing this, and if you would just straighten up over here, what that is doing is diagnosing the problem and prescribing the cure. And that's probably not going to be helpful in this initial encounter. Just report the system. I remember when we first got married, we were so poor, we couldn't pay attention. I mean, we couldn't pay anything. We just didn't have any money. And she had all kinds of dreams about how to take this one bedroom apartment that we're renting and kind of make it look like a home kind of thing, just bringing all this nesting instinct into this thing. And I'm not thinking about that anything. We didn't have anything on the wall in the dorms. I'm not thinking about that kind of stuff. And by the way, one of the things that we did, the Greenville Library used to check out paintings. I mean, they were reproductions. And you could have them for two months, I think, or something. We would go out and we would look through their gallery, pick out some paintings, come and hang them on the wall. And every two months we had new artwork. And it cost us nothing. I don't know if they do anything like that anymore, but we were poor. And the checking account would, and I don't even think we had a credit card. I think credit cards have been invented, but we certainly didn't have one, most people didn't. So you're paying on, you're paid as you go with your checking account. And it would, you know, I would be thinking, I've got this paycheck coming in, she's got the, and we're down to $5. and that would make her nervous. And so she would say, honey, I get nervous when that checking count is down to $5. And then I would look at the, oh yeah, I bought this for the car. That really wasn't crucial. So we would have a discussion about, and then I'd say, I'm not going to do that anymore. We'll talk about it. And when I think we need to spend something, let's figure out how much we got left. So, but she's reporting the symptom. I get really nervous when we only have $5. Now $5 did go further than $5 does today. $5 would buy a pound of hamburger, $1 would buy a pound of hamburger, I think, and we bought one pound of hamburger a month and stretched it in all kinds of ways. She's remarkable at stretching things. But, so you have all these kinds of pressures and problems. You better be spirit-filled when you're trying to solve those or right now you're destroying your marriage. It's going downhill. In criticism, the shift has gone from the problem to a personal attack. The problem with you is, now we're not talking about the concern about Johnny's ballgame, Johnny's feelings, we're talking about the problem with you is, and if you would just, that's an attack. This is not solving any problems. But then the next one is a defensiveness. One or the other, whoever the charge is against, comes back in a defensive. It's an attempt to defend yourself from a personal attack. And you can take the innocent posture thing. Oh, with sarcasm, of course. I'm sorry I'm not perfect. I think that thing about, well, nobody's perfect, I think that's about the dumbest thing anybody can say. Whoever said, you are perfect, nobody says that about anybody. And then people say, well, my defense is nobody's perfect. Well, of course, everybody assumes everybody's imperfect. What needs to take place is whether or not, when we don't handle it well, that we know how to do it. We need to go back and solve it. But defensiveness can be that innocent thing, that victim mentality. All you can think about are my failures. You never compliment me for going to work every day and doing all of this. You're just reminding me about my failures all the time. That's playing a victim with your thumb in your mouth. I tell husbands, one of the most important things you can do in life in problem solving is keep this out of your mouth. Don't suck your thumb because stuff is bad for you right now. It better be bad for you. You're supposed to be the shock absorber for this family. Be the shock absorber so she doesn't feel all the bumps and the kids don't feel all the bumps. You take it all. And don't suck your thumb about it. Don't whine, and don't complain, and don't pity yourself. If you've got a problem, I would tell, we've always been really busy, but when we were raising the girls, I had a little five by seven office that was a storied room in our house, and we turned it into an office, and I would have to close the door, but I would tell the girls, if there's anything, and Patty, if there's anything we need to talk about, you are free to come any time. and knock on that door. And I would tell them, if there's a problem that has my name on it, put it on my desk. I don't care how busy I am. If God brings another problem with my name on it, I need it on my desk so God and I can figure out what to do with this. I would tell my staff that. At 53 and student life, and I'd say, if there's a problem that you're dealing with that's got my name on it, you put it on my desk. I'll figure out a way to do it with God. And men, that's the posture we have to take. The buck does stop. The responsibility is there. And if it seems overwhelming, then you and God need to have some really long conversations of surrender and trust and obedience. And we don't complain that we have to do all the hard stuff in life. That's what God has given us to do. A third horseman is contempt. It's any statement or nonverbal behavior, nonverbal or facial things like, oh, that's a nonverbal contemptuous thing. I can't believe what an idiot. You're just saying that with your face. It's any kind of a statement or nonverbal behavior that puts oneself on a higher plane than a partner. I get this, why don't you get this? It's as plain as a nose on your face. For crying out loud, why don't you get this? How many times do we have to talk about this? That's mockery. That's content. I don't understand why you can't get your act together and have supper ready when I come home. Or can't you ever lift your finger to help a little bit around the house? Or open your eyes, are you blind? Why are you the only one around here that can't see what you're doing to this family? Now all of those things may be legitimate problems that need to be addressed, but not with content. This is like sulfuric, contempt is like sulfuric acid to love in a relationship. It just corrodes it immensely. And the last one is stonewalling. And by the way, the seriousness grows from left to right. Stonewalling occurs when the listener withdraws from the interaction. That's where you're talking to your husband, you're talking to your wife, and it's like they're not even listening to you. They've got their attention somewhere else, and you're going on and on, and they're doing this, and maybe once in a while they connect with... some kind of nonverbal contemptuous kind of thing. Stonewallers act like a stonewall, no feedback, except maybe some angry facial expressions, or they walk away or they say, that's all we're going to talk about this, I'm done. We're done talking about this, we're not going to talk about it again. You can call it gunnysacking, but it's stonewalling. It's saying there are problems we're not going to discuss. That is the most diabolical thing that can happen in a marriage, is where you say, we're not going to talk about this. But that means that both of you have to be safe people, where you are safe to talk to each other about it. And statistics show that husbands are more likely to stonewall than women. And when women stonewall, it's quite predictive of divorce. when she won't talk about it anymore, then the end is nigh. Now this is from a secular standpoint. By the way, you may say, oh man, we're already into this, we've got children, it's already affecting our kids. And in the addiction world, kind of the common saying is that you can't help a person till he hits bottom. Did you know that's not true? What happens when a person hits bottom? He loses everything. And I just talked with a guy at last Friday night who just got out of 20 years of prison. He's been in prison since COVID. Now, I mean, 20 years before COVID. He's been COVID in prison. I am mathematically challenged. She is not, and it's wonderful. So he, Friday night he said, I don't know how to do anything. I don't, when you think about it, if you've been in prison 20 years, you don't know how to use a computer to fill out an application, and all applications are online. He's going to need some help. And same thing for renting, and everything is online, and that's not his world. I can't remember how I was, what I was saying there. I was on the horseman here. Yeah, oh yeah, thank you, thank you, about hitting bottom. My old gray matter ain't what she used to be. So what happens when he hits bottom, he's humble, he says, help me, I am ready to learn. Did you know that you don't have to hit bottom to have humility? Wherever you are, you can humble yourself and begin the process of rebuilding and growing and changing. You don't have to wait until there's a divorce court before you say, we really need some help. In fact, I'll show you a couple other statistics here. So, I'll talk about this next week, but problem-solving stalls, when the husband and wife are not dealing with the problem, they're attacking each other. Now, how do you turn that around? We'll talk about this diagram next week. So here's some other things from John Gottman. The four horsemen, criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling predict early divorcing five point years after the wedding. If that's the common way of solving problems, it's not gonna last long. The average couple waits six years before seeking help for marital problems. Six years. Don't wait six years. If there's struggles, go to older folks in the church who know God well and say, I just need some feedback here, I need some help. Emotional withdrawal, the absence of positive affect, that means that even when you're talking with one another, you're not encouraging, there's no empathy, there's no let's talk this through, it's negative affect, it's just attacking the other affect. The absence of positive affect during conflict discussion, that's shared humor. This morning we were talking about one of these overwhelming things and I made a comment about it and Patty said, I don't know whether to cry or laugh. and I hugged her while she did both. That's positive affect, okay? That's encouraging kinds of things even when something troubling is happening. Where you're using shared humor, affection, and empathy. Without those, they predict later divorcing 16.2 years after the wedding. Half of all marriages that end do so in the first seven years. Eighty-five percent of stonewallers in heterosexual relationships are men. Eighty-seven percent. Guys, don't just walk away. I'm not going to talk about that. Now, we may do that because we don't know what to say. But that's when you humble yourself and say, honey, I don't know what to say about that. Let's make an appointment with the pastor. Let's go talk to so-and-so. I'm gonna find a book that will help us with that. But you humble yourself. If you don't know what to do, don't stonewall it. I remember Patty, our first year of marriage, she said, honey, you don't do everything right. But it is so encouraging to me that you're always reading about how to do this better. And you say, well, I'm not a reader. Well, there are a lot of audiobooks today. Audiobooks weren't invented back when we were going. You had to read words for yourself. Nobody read them for you. Sometimes people ask me, who are your mentors? I would have a student come in the office and say, who is your mentor? I need a mentor. Who is your mentor? I point to my bookcase and I say, those are my mentors. And most of them are dead. The nice part about that is that they're not going to mess up after they wrote good stuff. Men, we gotta read. I never have been married before, I've never raised children before when we did this. You can't go based on what you, you may say, well my parents did this, I'm always gonna do it this way instead, or I'm gonna always do this like my parents. I can't tell you how messed up that will make you unless they were walking in the spirit and teaching you how to walk in the spirit. Top right, Dr. Gottman reports that stable marriages have a five to one ratio of positivity to negativity during conflict. Where there's encouragement, although we have to talk about a negative thing, there's encouragement, there's bringing God into this picture. That's what a spiritual leader does. A spiritual leader, as you're talking with whoever, your children, whatever, you're kind of pulling a screen down out of the ceiling and projecting God up here and saying, here's what God said he will do. Here's how God's gonna help us with this. You're bringing, that's spiritual leadership, by the way. It's bringing God into this picture. And you can do that, that's bringing positivity into this picture. Whereas unstable marriages, the ratio is 0.8 to one. Far less positive things being said than negative things being said. Dr. Gutman, the middle banner on the bottom, Dr. Gutman has completed 12 longitudinal studies with over 3,000 couples. The longest couples were followed for 20 years. 60%. So these are not just guesses. His clinic is amazing from a research basis. I'm not saying his answers are at all. helpful to us, but he does resurrect a lot. He does point out a lot of problems. 60%, 67% of new parents experience a participant's drop in couple satisfaction in the first three years of the baby's life. Because now you're sharing your lives with somebody else who's demanding attention, and help, and nurturing, and food, and changing. And I used to think that we were in charge of our house until we started having children. Then they determine when you're going to go to bed. And if you sleep once you go to bed, and when you're going to wake up. And I used to say, we don't go anywhere fast anymore. And sometimes it's so bad, we just don't go anywhere. We don't even make it. This is a rough time of life. And knowing that, you know what this is, men and women? This is a trial. And if you're walking with God and you want to be like Jesus, you say, Lord, I guess there's another, some more growing and changing you need to make in me. I remember holding Kirsten, kind of the unspoken thing in our house was that Patty would get up with the girls at night when they were nursing. And when they finished nursing, then I started getting up at night and I got that teething span. I remember one night, and I'm so tired. And I'm rocking Kirsten at night. She's whimpering, and then she let out a shriek. And I had put numzit and all the medicine that was legal to give a child. To try to make it through this thing. And I remember crying out to God, I'd say, God, I know this trial can't be about her. She doesn't have this pain because she needs to grow in Christ. So I must be the one you're talking to. Would you please show me what I need to learn so I can go to bed? And I am serious about you've got to see God in everything. Even rocking children while you teethe, God's got something he's doing. and he wants you to grow. If that's not on your radar, growing is not on your radar, everything is an irritation to you that doesn't go your way. And that is so destructive in your parenting and it's destructive in your marriage. And it's destructive in your relationship with Jesus. So imagine here is a couple trying to solve a problem and they're using criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling. Will the presence of these ways of solving problems affect their parenting? You bet. They're going to be critical and sarcastic with their kids. I grew up on a farm with three boys and a Norwegian background in that whole area. There's not a lot of affection. I may have told this. It's like, did you hear the joke about Jan? He loved his wife so much, he almost told her. I mean, there's not a lot of affection going on. A lot of sarcasm. And men, anyway, try to, and this certainly was true of the men in my family, it was men kind of have a vending machine mentality about relationships. You put in your quarter and pull the lever, and if you don't get what you want, you kick the machine. And so that's what you do with other people, you don't give what you want, your kid doesn't give you what you want, then you do some kind of a quick, a sarcastic, you know. I have never been sincerely motivated to do right by sarcasm. Sarcasm is from the Greek word sarx, it means to tear flesh. And that's what sarcasm is, it's cutting, it's saying, well our family does that, it's just the way we do it. Yeah, and a lot of people are hurt in the process. Much truth is spoken in jest. And I had to eliminate sarcasm out of my communication methods because it was not helping my wife or my children. So again, the mission of that discipling parent, and I just wanna show you something that grew out of what God was doing in our heart. When the girls got into early high school age, I felt like it's really time to help them focus even more on their own spiritual growth and their ministry to other people. And so we sat down after supper. We would often have our Bible time after supper. Maybe I can talk about this some other time, but I gave them an assignment. I said, now if you needed correction at school, they were in junior high and two in high school. So if you need a correction at school, maybe your slip was showing or there was an attitude issue or a bad habit or some kind of a sin issue, who do you want talking to you about that? And they said, well, you and mom. And I said, no, no, outside of mom, who do you want? and they said, Rand Hummel, they knew him really well at the Wilds, or Ken Collier, he was Uncle Ken, we kind of grew up together, Mr. Tompkins, who was a principal or vice principal of the academy and their Bible teacher at that time, and Jane Smith, who was a guidance counselor there. So I said, good, okay, I want you to write those names down on this sheet of paper, and tomorrow we're going to take it to step two, and that is, what is it about those people that makes you feel like you can take criticism from them? So they came back with, they won't think I'm dumb, they're kind, they will help me from the Bible, they won't tell others about me. That made them safe. Assignment three is, since God wants us to be people who can influence others as a family to be salt and light, what kind of things need to be going on in our home for us as a home and individuals to be better influencers for God? And we came up with this mission statement after several iterations of it, and the girls were very engaged in this process. And it framed it, it was in the hallway of our house. It was, and this is on the opening foreword, or preface, and change into its image, so don't try to write it down. Instead, buy the book. So, to passionately know our God and love and please Him. Men and women, that's got to be your heart cry. I want that to be the heart cry of my kids, that they love God and they know Him and they want to please Him. You don't drive your kids to God. You entice them to God by the way you live. They see something in you that they want. They don't see it in other parents. They don't see it in their friends at school. But they may not like everything that you do. Well, they won't like everything that you do in doing that. But they will respect what's going on because they know God's in it. And so there are four phrases we put together as we hammer it out. Living together in harmony. We solve problems. Serving each other with humility. We look out for other people. Growing together in godliness and helping others with cheerfulness. That last one is mostly about me. This is back when telephones had cords for cell phones. And I'd get calls all the time. And it's hard to be cheerful when you already feel like your boat is overloaded. And so that was, if we're going to help others, it needs to be with cheerfulness. So this is what we want our home to be. We want our home to be epitomized by harmony and humility and godliness and cheerfulness. Did you notice none of that had to do with winning or getting a 4.0 or first chair or most valuable player? None of that is here because that's not the most important thing. Those are venues out of which we can teach these things, but they aren't our goals. In fact, some of the most important discipling things take place when they fail something. And if your goal is to make them a success and make you proud and make sure that that ball goes through that net every time they kick it, all this kind of thing, and you're kind of reliving your life, you're in deep trouble. This godliness has to be the goal of your kids. And thereby as a family, as a family to provide a living advertisement of Christlikeness for others in our generation and for our children in generations to come. So let me just give you three real quick commitments. We'll talk about more. Your home, number one commitment to spiritual growth. You must individually and as a couple be committed to spiritual growth. Your home must become a spiritual greenhouse to grow Christ-likeness in yourself, your spouse, and your children. That means that, and you keep, if you're a greenhouse keeper, you keep out of it anything that's, all the pests and stuff that's gonna destroy that. You provide the right kind of nurturing that those plants need, the right kind of pruning, the right kind of atmosphere and temperature and water and all of that, and you keep out things that are gonna be damaging. You gotta do that with your home. Commitment to communicate biblically. Parents must model life-giving words. I think it's Proverbs 18, 12 says, there is a speech that speaks like the piercings of a sword. But the tongue of the wise brings health. There are life-giving words and there are death-giving words. And wisdom chooses life-giving words. The verse that convicted me about the sarcasm was Ephesians 4, let no corrupt or destructive communication proceed out of your mouth. No, none, zilch, nada. No communication proceed out of your mouth. that it may minister grace to the hearers. How you handle problems is important. And God got us started early on our own Christian walk and God helped us in this problem-solving thing before we even started having children. And I'll tell you this, to God's grace, we made a commitment when we were engaged that we would never, ever tear each other down in public or in private. And I can tell you with God's help in 53 years, 51 married, we haven't ever done that. It's not that there haven't been temptations to say things, but if you really are trying to walk in the spirit and please God, you do restrain your tongue. Our second daughter, her fiancee said one time, tell us, how do your mom and dad fight? And she said, they don't. She said, no, no, no, everybody fights. How do your mom and dad fight? And Angie said, I have never seen them fight. There are things that they have different opinions about, but if it's really important, they go back in the bedroom and they talk about it and they come out and tell us what is gonna happen. They don't fight. Men and women, you don't have to fight. And I'm not redefining fight. I'm not redefining argument. We don't have arguments. We do solve problems God's way. We bring to the table our perspectives, we see what God has to say about it, and then we pick God's side on it and do it. Now, we do that better sometimes than others, but we don't fight about it. You don't have to fight. Only by pride comes contention, the proverb says. And if you're trying to walk in humility, and I say that to God's credit, not ours, and a commitment to seeking wisdom, parents must model biblical problem solving for the hurts and the hardships of life. So much of rearing children, particularly when they get into elementary school, a few of the neurons start connecting, is helping them solve problems. We'll talk about that more later. I'm trying to lay a foundation. You gotta be committed to loving God with all of your heart, loving each other with all of your heart, and you're gonna grow in that likeness to Christ, and that's a commitment every one of you has to make individually. And then you have to talk about that in marriage and decide how that's gonna be happening in your marriage. The most important thing going on in your home is people growing to be like Jesus. That is the most important thing in your home. And if you'll do that well, parenting is a joy. It really is. And every stage is better than the last. I loved having teenage girls. They can talk for hours. and trying to solve their problems. I really miss that. Anyway, I gotta close here. Let's pray. Lord, thank you that your word is a light to our feet and a lamp to our path. I pray for these men and women. Thank you for their eagerness to know how to walk and please you and serve you and raise their children in godliness. Lord, help us to be a help to them. And we thank you for this opportunity you've given all of us to meet together. We love you, Jesus. We want to be more like you. Help us, I pray in your name. Amen.