FamilyLife Today®

Montell Jordan: All this fame, all this exposure, this is how we do it, blowing up. I was interviewing at Hot 97, all of New York and the world is listening to me, this new artist. So, Montell, you're successful, you got all this money, all this fame. Do you have anybody special in your life that you're sharing it with? Yeah, I'm married to my music. We were hiding our marriage and I'm saying to the world, "I'm married to my music." What does that make her?

Kristin Jordan: His mistress.

Dave Wilson: Welcome to FamilyLife Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Dave Wilson.

Ann Wilson: And I'm Ann Wilson. You can find us at familylifetoday.com. This is FamilyLife Today.

Dave Wilson: Today, we get to go on the Love Like You Mean It marriage cruise. We're back on the boat.

Ann Wilson: You mean we're going to listen to a talk from the boat?

Dave Wilson: Yeah, we're going to listen to Montell and Kristin Jordan talk about the priorities of marriage. In case you don't know who Montell is, "This is how you do it, this is how you do it"—that's his song. He sang that.

Ann Wilson: Speaking of which, I know that it seems crazy, but we're going to start talking already about next year's cruise, 2027.

Dave Wilson: The reason we're talking about it is you can get a deal right now through March 31st. You can get a lower price. Let me tell you, we just got off the boat not few weeks ago and it is a phenomenal week for your marriage. It's just awesome. I can't even explain how great it is.

Ann Wilson: I don't think there's anything else quite like it for marriages. We really hope that you'll sign up now because, believe it or not, it sells out quickly. All you have to do is click the banner at familylifetoday.com to learn more about the cruise and all the details on this Cruise Madness sale.

Dave Wilson: And you got to do that before March 31st. I hope we see you on the boat next year. It's February 13th through the 20th, 2027. Okay, let's go and listen to what Montell and Kristin Jordan had to say at last year's 2026 Love Like You Mean It cruise.

Ann Wilson: You mean this year's?

Dave Wilson: I don't know, this is playing in... yeah.

Montell Jordan: Kristin and I, we have both experienced families being filled with divorce and dysfunction. We believe God has given us a blueprint or a template for us to be able to have not only successful marriages but significant marriage. We believe if we follow that blueprint, we can avoid a lot of the pitfalls that we've seen modeled before us.

We get to share that with you today because it's done by something called order.

Kristin Jordan: How many of you know that God is a God of order?

Montell Jordan: He is a God of order. In Exodus, it's this high, this many cubits, this purple robe, this many cows, the lobe of the liver. He's very detailed.

Kristin Jordan: Meticulous, right? He's a God of order. So we're going to give that order we believe the Lord gave to us to share with you today.

Can we hold one finger in the air, please? Group participation. One finger in the air. Our first priority is God. Somebody say "God." That is our first priority. Deuteronomy chapter 6, verse 5, the Message version says, "Love God, your God with your whole heart. Love him with all that's in you. Love him with all that you've got." Love, love, love. Listen, God doesn't stutter, but he does repeat himself.

Kristin Jordan: Yes, he does.

Montell Jordan: When he's saying something over and over again, when he's saying "love, love, love," it's because that's important to him. He's not just saying love with half, but I want you to love with all.

Kristin Jordan: He's giving you a highlighter. When he says something and then he repeats himself, it's a highlighter. It reminds me of when Skylar was a young kid. Skylar is our youngest son and he's actually in college now; he's 22. But when he was a young kid, on the way to school, he'd always give me these really big questions.

This particular morning, he says to me, "Hey, Mommy, who do you love the most?" I was like, what a setup. What am I going to say right here? But the truth is, I knew it was a teaching moment. So I said to him, "Son, the person I love the most is God." He was like, "More than Daddy?" "Yes, more than Daddy. In fact, that's what keeps you and Daddy safe."

Why are y'all laughing? I'm just saying. He said, "You know what, Mommy, I think you're right." He said, "I love God the most and then I love you the next most."

Montell Jordan: He did not say that. Why did you tell that?

Kristin Jordan: He did say that. Don't hate.

Montell Jordan: He's my bestie now. Listen, he is your bestie now, but in that season, I was his favorite. Read that. Read Mark. Can you do that?

Kristin Jordan: Mark 12:30 says it this way: "And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength. This is the first commandment."

Montell Jordan: Remember he's saying "all, all, all." He's repeating himself, therefore this is important. We just came out of a very difficult season, a two-year battle with cancer. From that standpoint, this was one of the anchor scriptures that we held onto in that battle because we needed to be able to know we had to lean into placing God at the center, placing him first because even if I didn't know what I needed, my Dad did.

So one more time, all fingers up in the air. Our first priority is God. Our second priority, hold up a two, our second priority is our spouse. Somebody say "spouse." That's number two priority. Ephesians chapter 5, verse 25 says this: "Husbands, love your wives just as Christ also loved the church and gave himself for her."

Kristin Jordan: Wives, your spouse is God's gift to you. Honor God by honoring the gift that he gave you.

Montell Jordan: To my husbands out there, your wife, our wives are supposed to know what the love of Christ is like by the way we love them. How are we doing with that? I want to give you a quick definition of what a covenant marriage is. A marriage covenant is a relationship between three: one man, one woman, and God.

Listen, a covenant is not about seasons; a covenant is about franchise. If you got any sports fans in here, you understand a season comes and goes, it starts and ends, but a franchise is something that is built and developed over time. That's what a covenant is. Some of us are treating our marriages like contracts instead of like covenants. As humans, we can make contracts, we can make agreements, but contracts and agreements are based on performance. Covenant is not based on performance; it's based on God's promise.

Only God can create a covenant. You enter into a covenant, but we can't create one. I remember one time I tried to create my own covenant. It did not go well. Music business days. I remember Wendy Williams back in the day before she was on television, she used to be a radio host on one of the biggest stations in the nation, Hot 97 in New York City. It was the station to be on.

I was interviewing at Hot 97 and all of New York and the world is listening to me, this new artist. All this fame, all this exposure, this is how we do it, blowing up. Wendy asked me, "So, Montell, you're successful, you got all this money, all this fame. Do you have anybody special in your life that you're sharing it with?"

I'm thinking to myself, because I'd been taught by the label, nobody is going to want to purchase records from an unavailable R&B artist. They have to know you are available, you are single. Guys have to want to be you, women have to want to be with you. You have to have those things to be successful. So we were hiding our marriage. I knew I could be a successful artist; I did not know I could be a successful husband. So I told Wendy, "Yeah, I'm married to my music." That was my answer. Thought it was a cool answer.

If there's life and death in the power of the tongue, and there is, and I'm saying to the world, "I'm married to my music," what does that make her? His mistress. So she now becomes my mistress by my own words. What starts to happen is art imitates life or life imitates art, and now we start to spiral through some tragic things in our marriage because of the words from my very own mouth.

Kristin Jordan: The crazy part is that my parents were married and divorced six times by the time I'm 19. So what we learned is that my mom raised me as a single parent. She taught me, "You'll be self-sufficient, independent, you got this. You're going to be successful at everything you put your hands to." Never once did I hear, "This is how you raise a successful family, this is how you have a successful marriage."

But I was going to be successful as a businesswoman and I knew this because this was her moniker. So here I am coming into this relationship, we're actually married before we get to the label. So when we get to the label and they say, "Well, no one's going to respect you as the manager because you're the wife. If they know that you're the wife, they're not going to respect you."

I was like, "Oh, no, I can be a wonderful businesswoman. I know I'm going to be successful here, but I don't know if I'm going to be a great wife." So we came into agreement with a crazy lie. This is what we learned: I exchanged my rightful position as his wife for a title. This is where it got really dicey.

Montell Jordan: She told me, "Listen, I'm going to make you a million dollars, but I'm not going to make you eggs. Are you good with that?" I'm like, "You can buy a lot of eggs with a million dollars. I'm good with that."

What was happening in this season and this time is that on the most important day of my life, as most of you, we come to the church and I'm here with my daddy and I'm at the back of the church and we walk in and he's standing at the front. The preacher says, "Who gives this woman to be wed?" And my daddy says, "I do."

So what happens is in the spiritual realm, what's supposed to happen is I come out from underneath the covering of my father and I come under the covering of my husband. Now that's my new covenant, right? But when we arrived at the label and they told us that we wouldn't be successful if they knew that we were married, what we decided to and came into agreement with was that I would no longer be under the covering of my husband. I would continue to be Kristin Hudson, not Kristin Jordan. What that meant was that now I'm still under my old covering.

What did that entail? Pornography, infidelity, alcoholism, drug addiction. It was all these wonderful kicks and giggles that we had over here. And what also happened was in the spiritual realm, I rejected my covering as Jordan and so I rejected him. Even though you may not know it in the natural, we can do things and come into agreement in things in the spiritual, and they're just as powerful.

Montell Jordan: So what's going on is that she's my manager, I'm the artist, but because she's not submitted to me, I'm trying to figure out, does the artist tell the manager what to do, or does the manager tell the artist what to do? So we had a very difficult submission problem. She did not submit to me, and the bigger problem was she couldn't submit to me because I wasn't submitted to God.

Somebody missed that right there. It is very difficult for a woman to submit to a man who's not completely submitted to God. If you can't say "amen," say "ouch." Either one works. Don't say anything, just look straight ahead and don't blink and no one will know they're talking about you. It's hard for a woman to submit to a man who is not submitted to God.

But scripture gives us a remedy for this and a truth.

Kristin Jordan: In 1 Peter 3:1, it says it this way: "In the same way, you wives must accept the authority of your husbands. Then, even if some refuse to obey the Good News, your godly lives will speak to them without words. They will be won over by your character." Listen, even if they're not submitted to Christ, it is our job as women to line up with the character of Christ and love them back to Jesus. I have never seen a husband be nagged back to Jesus.

Montell Jordan: I know somebody who's been loved back to Jesus because when I was in my worst state, when I was far from God, this woman prayed and she toiled. It was the prayers and her tears that eventually drew me back closer to the Lord to where I am indebted to you for doing what you did to help me get back in alignment with my Dad. I'm super grateful for that.

Kristin Jordan: I love you.

Montell Jordan: It's the most important relationship on this earth after God. That is your spouse.

Dave Wilson: You're listening to FamilyLife Today and we are listening today to a message that Montell and Kristin Jordan gave on this year's Love Like You Mean It cruise. There's more coming, but let me tell you, we're going to tell you at the end how you can sign up and get a discount to come on next year's Love Like You Mean It cruise. So let's go back to Montell and Kristin.

Montell Jordan: So let's go one more time. Our first priority is God. Our second priority is our spouse. Our third priority is our children. Somebody say "children." Yes, your kids. The Lord says manage your family. He says it this way in Ephesians 6:4: "And you, fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord."

Children, we used to say children don't come with instruction manuals, but they really do. The word of God, the Bible, gives us the example of what a perfect father looks like. I'm going to say this statement and I want you to hear me if you don't hear nothing else I say today, and this is super important: placing your kids or your adult children out of order places them in harm's way. I'm going to say that again because it's worth saying again. Placing your children or your adult kids out of order, it places them in harm's way.

What wife wants to come behind a child? Not one. What husband wants to come after a kid? Not one. I need y'all to hear me today. The kids need to know that Mommy and me come first. Our marriage comes before you. Listen, even if you were here first. Because blended families navigate that a lot of times because you were with your child before you came into the marriage. There's a bond or something that's there. It's the same thing that can happen.

But the reality of it is, God is a God of order and even if something existed before, when you come underneath the covering of God in a marriage, the covenant, God covers the relationship between you and those children because you're providing order and stability.

Kristin Jordan: And if you don't allow your authority in that home to be known, heard, and learned, when they get outside in the real world and they did not learn the authority at home, they will not learn to submit to the authority that they have to work with. They won't keep a job. They won't have the rightful tools that they need in order to learn how to submit in marriage or in life.

Montell Jordan: You got to learn to release your children without losing each other. That's difficult to do because this happens in seasons.

Kristin Jordan: We had a season of small children. We had a season of homeschooling, a season of teenagers. "I hate you." It's okay, I love you back. It's a season. Season of young adults, season of leave and cleave, season of our kids having kids and becoming parents. Seasons shift and change, but their position does not. God and our marriage come before y'all.

Montell Jordan: Hopefully y'all grab ahold to that because that's a big key, even in blended families. God, your spouse comes first, then your kids come after that.

All right, you ready? One finger up. Our first priority is God. Second priority is our spouse. Third priority are our children. And our fourth priority is the church. The church. One priority: the church. Be involved with the local body of believers. We always do better when somebody's watching. Hebrews 10:25 says it this way: "Not forsaking or neglecting to assemble together as believers, as is the habit of some people, but admonishing, warning, urging, and encouraging one another, and all the more faithfully as you see the day approaching."

This is why the church, the community, small groups, Love Like You Mean It, this is why this is so important that you're here this week. You have to stay plugged in. You are always better when someone else is watching.

Kristin Jordan: I need you to get this because as we're talking about the church, the church plays a vital role in what relationships and what marriages look like. When you are single, the church should have your back. When you are married, in a season when you are married, your spouse is supposed to have your back and the church is supposed to have y'all back.

So let me just say this just real quick because we're talking about the church. I know we got a lot of ministry leaders, we got a lot of pastors here, people that are very ingrained in the church and what the church is supposed to do. If we aren't invited back to Love Like You Mean It, it'll be for this reason right here what I'm about to say right now. You can mark this moment. This is the moment where that's why the Jordans ain't coming back.

Here's the reality: the church is God's bride, not yours. Stop treating his wife better than you treat your own.

Montell Jordan: All right now, let's run it. Y'all ready? Our first priority is God. Second priority is our spouse. Third priority are our children. Fourth priority is the church. Our fifth priority are family and friends. Proverbs 18:24 says it this way: "Some friends don't help." Say that again. Some friends don't help. I'm sorry, just... it's a scripture y'all, I can't make this up. Some friends don't help, but a true friend is closer than your own family.

We must know the difference between family and relatives. You cannot choose your relatives, but you can choose your family. Guess what? You can choose the people that you do life with that speak life into your marriage, that speak life into your situation. It's important.

Kristin Jordan: Somebody might say, "Well, why in this order—God, spouse, kids, church, family? Why would you put your family and your friends underneath your church?" It's very simple. Basically, either your family and your friends are going to determine how you see the church, or the church is going to determine how you see your family and friends. One is going to have greater influence over the other.

Montell Jordan: And the way some of your family members act, you need all the Jesus you can get. Amen. True that.

All right, one more time. Our first priority is God. Second priority is our spouse. Third priority are our children. Fourth priority is the church. Fifth priority is family and friends. And our sixth priority—which will probably make you throw up in your mouth just a little bit—is your work or your career, your job. This is the most commonly misplaced priority in God's design for our marriages.

Kristin Jordan: Listen, we understand that there are seasons where work is extremely important. We get that. We did this so incorrectly, that's why we can sit here and unequivocally tell you what this is. When your priorities are out of place, you put this one up higher on the list than it deserves to be put, and you put your job and your family in harm's way. In 2 Thessalonians 3:10, I understand what it says. It says if you don't work, you don't eat. But if you put this position higher than it's supposed to be, you'll be eating by yourself on the Lido deck.

Montell Jordan: That's right. And here's the truth: most people do not get to the end of their lives wishing they had put in more hours in the office. "I wish I had done one more profit and loss. I wish I had just done one more board meeting. Oh, I wish I had done one more thing for my boss."

Listen, when we sit before the Lord and we won't be with anybody else, when we sit before the Lord, he's not going to ask me how many records I sold.

Kristin Jordan: He's not going to ask me how many meetings I took.

Montell Jordan: He's not going to ask you how many awards you got, how many degrees you got. I'll tell you what he's going to ask you: "How did you treat the woman I gave you? How did you treat the man that I gave you? How did you treat the kids I gave you stewardship over? How many people did you tell about me?"

That's what matters. And here's what this means when it comes to your job: we may have opportunities, but God gave us responsibilities. Many of us are exchanging responsibilities for opportunities. Every God thing is a good thing, but not every good thing is a God thing.

We're almost to the end. Our first priority is God. Second priority is our spouse. Third priority are our children. Our fourth priority is the church. Fifth priority is family and friends. Our sixth priority is our career, that's our job. And then the last one is me.

Kristin Jordan: Hobbies, sports, special interest, and really me.

Montell Jordan: Me, right. So golf, you. Wow, that took a really hard left right there.

Kristin Jordan: I mean, fantasy football, though.

Montell Jordan: Shopping. Let's finish with this thought: God desires us to enjoy the life that he's given us. But even when it comes to ourselves, when we place ourselves out of order, we become selfish rather than selfless. Being selfless isn't thinking less of yourself; it's thinking of yourself less.

This is why we place God first because when God is placed first and he's at the center, that's what centers you in who you are in him. That allows your relationship with Jesus to be the thing that creates you to be in his likeness. So if anything in your marriage is dysfunctional, you go back and you can look at this order. You can look at this first things first, and you can say, "God, why are we arguing? Why are we fussing? Why are we at this space?" And it's normally because something is out of alignment.

Ann Wilson: I don't know about you, but that's just a good reminder of how we can keep our priorities straight. I love Montell and Kristin; I love how real they are too.

Dave Wilson: They're great. I don't know if people realize Montell was on Special Forces.

Ann Wilson: Oh, I forgot about that.

Dave Wilson: One of those shows we enjoyed watching. So when I saw him on the boat, I'm like, "I know you," but it wasn't from his music; it was from the show.

But you know what, who cares about that? You need to be on the boat with us next year. February 13th to the 20th, 2027. We'll be back on the boat and you can save big now through March 31st.

Ann Wilson: All you have to do is click the banner at familylifetoday.com to learn more about the cruise and all the details on our Cruise Madness sale. Tomorrow, join us because we're going to start talking about women and men issues. We're going to have a panel of men and women that we had on the cruise. So see you tomorrow.

Dave Wilson: FamilyLife Today is a donor-supported production of FamilyLife, a Cru Ministry. 50 years of helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.