Pastor Rick's Daily Hope

Guest (Male): Everybody longs for deep lasting love, but strong relationships don't just happen by accident. Today on Pastor Rick's Daily Hope, we're continuing our series called "Finding and Keeping the Love of Your Life." Rick Warren will share practical biblical wisdom for building healthier, stronger, Christ-centered relationships.

Whether you're single, dating, engaged, or married, this series will help you grow in love, communication, and lasting commitment. And now, let's continue with part two of the message called "How to Get a Marriage Makeover."

Rick Warren: The third thing that sinks a marriage: unresolved issues. Things that keep coming up over and over and over and over and over and over, and you don't ever resolve them. Maybe you don't want to talk about them. Maybe it's too personal, maybe it's too touchy. It could be finances, it could be sex, it could be in-laws, it could be kids, it could be communication, but you don't want to talk about it, so it's off-limits and it becomes an unresolved issue. Unresolved issues move a marriage from harmony to hostility and maybe then even to apathy.

The worst unresolved issues aren't the ones that were created in your marriage; they were the ones you brought into your marriage from the things you learned in your family. You see, when you got married, you weren't a blank slate. You grew up in a family that had certain ways of doing things: habits, patterns, ways of doing things that you thought were normal. And your spouse grew up in another family with habits and patterns and ways of doing things that they thought were normal. And so you both come into the marriage thinking that your way is the right way to do it, and then there's unresolved issues.

All of us carry baggage into our marriage. It's like you've got a big garbage sack on your back carrying it into marriage. You carry hurts, you carry habits, you carry hang-ups from your previous family into marriage. And the more pain you had growing up in your family, the more baggage you're carrying into that marriage and the more problems you're going to have to resolve. Would you write this down: Marriage doesn't create problems, it reveals them. It shows the areas of your life that you need to work on.

If you had been a single adult all your life and you had not chosen to get married, you might be able to go all through your life with those habits and hurts and hang-ups, and nobody'd ever bug you about them because nobody's close enough to really see them. If, on the other hand, you chose to get married, then you let somebody into your life who's up-close and personal, and they can see all your hang-ups and all your faults and all your weaknesses. And when they get up-close and personal, they say, "Hmm, I see this. I can help them."

So I will start a little personal improvement program for them; it's called "Let's change you." While you, on the other hand, are saying, "I'm not the one who needs changing." You've got a personal improvement program for your spouse: "Let's change you." And then the sparks begin to fly. You see, you brought far more flaws into your marriage than you realize. In many ways, your family set you up both for success and for failure. Because in your family, you learned some great strengths, but you also learned some great weaknesses.

You bring far more weaknesses into your marriage than strengths. And when they get in there, then you start fighting over that. And some of you are still reacting to things from your past in the present. Maybe your parent or parents, one or both, were overcontrolling. Or maybe they didn't pay attention to you. Or maybe they didn't affirm you enough. But for whatever reason in your past, you have some resentments. You've got some anger, you've got some problems, grudges stored up against your past parents.

Then you come into a marriage, and anytime your spouse even remotely reminds you about that thing you hated so much in a parent—controlling, domineering, wouldn't listen, or whatever it was—it could be a hundred different things, you tend to take all that anger from the past, which you never resolved, and you turn it and you focus it on the person you love the most. Now this may be a little bitty issue, and they're going, "What? How did the volcano come out of this?" Because you're not just reacting to that, you're reacting to how it reminds you of things in the past you never liked. Does that make sense?

You actually start creating—you bring problems of the past into the present. Now if you are doing that, let me just say two things. Number one: it's not fair. It's not fair to your spouse. And number two: if you are doing that, you are killing your marriage. It's the quickest way to kill a marriage. And so those of you who are single adults, I beg you, before you ever consider marriage, deal with the past. Get some closure. Close the door on it. Do not carry guilt into the marriage, do not carry grief into the marriage, and do not carry grudges into the marriage.

If you do, you are setting yourself up to move from harmony to hostility to apathy. You have to deal with unresolved issues, and the more of them you can deal with in advance, the better. That's why in this church, before anybody gets married here, we require premarital counseling. I don't care if you've been married once or twice or never, you have to go through premarital counseling because everybody needs somebody to be honest enough to say, "Have you thought about this? Have you thought about that?"

The best way to prepare for your marriage is to get some closure on the past. Maybe you need to have a frank talk with your parents. Maybe you need to sit down and figure out what out of my family do I need to hold on to and what do I need to let go of? So how about this third area: can you write down one issue that's still unresolved in your marriage? You can probably think of it right now, you just don't want to write it down. It may be sex. It may be finances. It may be the way you raise your children. It may be something else from the past. But those things have to be dealt with if you're going to have a marriage makeover.

The fourth thing that sinks a marriage: unforgiven hurts. The mistakes that we make that aren't dealt with, that aren't forgiven, cause barriers to build up and move us from hostility to apathy. Because we're imperfect, we hurt each other—intentionally sometimes, unintentionally sometimes. We sin, we fail, we are selfish. And the truth is, you're going to be hurt in life. And the person who has the greatest potential to hurt you is the person you love the most. That's why forgiveness must become a daily habit in marriage.

Marriages need massive doses of forgiveness because we are imperfect. If you hold on to your hurts in marriage—you hold on to those mistakes, you don't let it go, you don't forgive—then those wounds fester and they get worse and worse and worse. Now let me ask you this: what is the worst sin in marriage? I know what you think it is, but it's unforgiveness. Unforgiveness is the worst sin in marriage. Why? Because it's the one that holds every other sin captive. It's the one that won't let go.

You have been forgiven by God and God expects you to forgive others. And when you hold on to your hurt, you perpetuate the pain. You don't make it better; you make it worse. If you are holding on to a grudge and if you are using something that happened in the past as leverage and you're holding it over your spouse, you are the one that's destroying your marriage. Now why would anybody do that? Why would anybody hold on to hurt intentionally? Obviously it doesn't feel good. When you're full of resentment, it hurts you more than it does the other person.

So why would I intentionally hold unforgiveness in my heart? I'll tell you why: to soothe my own guilt and to use it as ammunition. You see, in your mind, you've got this scale that what I've done wrong and what you've done wrong. And I don't want to feel guilty, so the way I balance my guilt is by blaming you for stuff. And when they say, "Well you did this," I say, "But you did that." "Well you did this," "But you did that." "Well you did this," "But you did that." And you're trying to justify everything by holding it on as ammunition to get back, and that will sink a marriage.

I beg you: forgive. Let it go. Because nothing can destroy a marriage faster than unforgiveness. Nothing. You hold it on. Can you write down a hurt that you need to let go of? You probably can think of it almost instantly. Can you write down one? You see, if you can't identify these things, you can't work on them. What goes wrong in a marriage? Unrealistic expectations, unaccepted differences, unresolved issues, and unforgiven mistakes. Some of you are saying, "Rick, you just described my marriage. Is there any hope?" Yes, there is.

Look at the verse at the top of your outline. Let's read it together: Romans 4:17. "God raises the dead to life and creates new things." And if God can raise a dead person, he can raise a dead marriage. God specializes in marriage makeovers. He specializes in bringing something dead to life again, in bringing something that's old and stagnant and stale and giving it new life. In a normal makeover, the secret of a normal makeover is knowing what to do with what you've got.

You have a certain facial type, you have certain hair, certain skin color, and a makeover expert is someone who doesn't try to make you somebody totally different but enhances what you've got. And in a marriage makeover, God says, "Let me take what you've got and make something new and fresh and exciting and attractive and relevant and fulfilling and wonderful out of it." And for the rest of this message, we're now going to look at those steps. How do you make the most of what you've got? Well, there are six steps to a marriage makeover: A, B, C, D, E, F.

A: Accept responsibility for my part. These are not easy steps that Tom and I are going to give you, but they are tough and they will work. Accept responsibility for my part. Galatians 6:5 says—let's read it aloud together—"Each person must be responsible for himself." Now you can't control your spouse's actions, you can't control your spouse's attitudes, you can't keep your spouse in love with you. You couldn't force them to fall in love with you; you can't force them to stay in love with you. You don't have control over that.

But you do have control over your response. And the only way you can change somebody else—you can't change somebody else. The only way you can change them is by changing yourself, and that changes the equation. When you're different, they have to relate to you in a new way. So you start on you, not on them. And you accept responsibility for your part. Now what does that mean? Well, number one, it means you stop having a pity party about your marriage.

You stop comparing your spouse to somebody else. That is so destructive; you should never do it. It never solves any problems; it only makes matters worse. You stop comparing your marriage; you stop complaining about your marriage. That's a big waste of energy. You stop resenting your marriage. You do that, all you're doing is wasting energy. You stop blaming your spouse for your unhappiness. Listen, you are as happy as you choose to be. It's nobody else's fault.

Nobody else can make you happy, nobody else can keep you happy, nobody else can make you unhappy; it's your choice how you respond to life. It's like God. You are as close to God as you want to be. And you are as happy as you want to be. You want to be happier? Get closer to God. And that's a choice. Nobody's keeping you away from God. The closer you get to God, the happier you're going to be because that's where real happiness comes from. So you stop blaming your spouse for your unhappiness.

You stop daydreaming, you stop fantasizing about what might have been. You can't improve your marriage if you're always daydreaming and denying and defending. And you can't fix any of the problems if you're always trying to fix the blame. So you start by accepting responsibility for your marriage. Last week we said it, and I want to say it again: the grass is not greener on the other side of the fence. The grass is not greener on this side of the fence. The grass is greener where you water and fertilize it.

If you took as much time watering and fertilizing your own relationship instead of wishing and wanting and complaining, the grass would start getting greener. The biggest barrier to accepting responsibility is what I call the myth of incompatibility. Now we've all heard people say this: "Well, we're just incompatible," as an excuse to divorce. Folks, there's no such word. There is no scientific basis behind the idea of incompatibility. It does not exist. It's just a made-up word.

Let me quote to you from two of the top psychiatrists and marriage experts in the world. Dr. Paul Tournier, the Swiss psychiatrist who wrote *Understanding Each Other*, says, "So-called incompatibility is a myth invented by judges in order to make a plea for divorce. It's likewise a common excuse for people to hide their failings. Misunderstandings and mistakes can be corrected if there is a willingness to do so." What's he saying? There's no such thing as incompatibility. What it really is is immaturity.

You refuse to grow up. I want what I want, you want what you want, I'm stubborn, you're stubborn, I'm selfish, you're selfish, so we can't get along. So let's just quit calling it incompatibility; let's call it what it is: immature, stubborn selfishness. It's not incompatibility. It's immature, stubborn selfishness. I don't want to grow, I don't want to change, I want my way, and you do too. And that's a choice.

Dr. Paul Popenoe, the director of the Institute of Family Relations, who has written dozens of books on marriage, says, "I don't believe in incompatibility. I don't believe it exists. Almost any two people are compatible if they try to be."

Guest (Male): Hey, thanks for listening to Pastor Rick's Daily Hope. Right now, here's Pastor Rick to tell you how you can partner with Daily Hope.

Rick Warren: Hi, everybody. Today I want to ask you to join with Daily Hope as we focus on fulfilling the Great Commission of Jesus Christ. That's where Jesus said, "Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and teach them to do everything I've commanded you, and surely I'm with you to the very end of the age."

Sharing Jesus with others is the most important thing you can do while you're alive because you're helping people determine their destiny. If we join together, we can reach across the whole world with the message of Christ. And that's why I'm asking new friends to partner with Daily Hope. You see, by becoming a partner in hope, we're able to take the good news of Jesus into almost every country of the world, including regions where it's difficult or even dangerous to share the good news of the gospel.

So I want to invite you to join us. Become a partner in hope today. With your first monthly donation, we'll send you a special gift to welcome you as a partner of the hope family. We love you. God bless you.

Guest (Male): To become a partner in hope with convenient automated monthly giving, just go to PastorRick.com or text the word HOPE to 70309. And when you do, we'll send you a very special welcome gift to say thanks. Again, that's PastorRick.com or just text the word HOPE to 70309. And thank you so much for your support. Be sure to join us next time as we look into God's word for our daily hope. This program is sponsored by Pastor Rick's Daily Hope and your generous financial support.