Grace Thoughts

Guest (Male): Hello friends. Welcome to Grace Talks, the radio ministry of Grace Connection Church with Pastor Tim Kelly. Grace Talks has been dedicated to preaching a clear gospel of grace for over 20 years. Here is Pastor Kelly.

Tim Kelley: We had a missionary come in and speak one afternoon one one Sunday morning. I guess it was a Sunday morning and we had this open session that we asked and he answered questions and I asked him a question, what are the biggest challenges facing you in his his mission field was Africa in Africa? And in my mind cuz I'm just think like this, I'm thinking well, I know that answer. I was actually trying to do some fundraising for him. The answer is I don't have enough money. Don't have enough money to do this, don't have enough money to do that, don't have enough money to do this.

I figured that'd be his answer, but he was he would that's he didn't say that. He didn't mention money. In fact, he said something that really took me off guard. He said um the biggest challenge we face on the mission field and the missionaries that I know on the mission field is marriages. Woah, okay. He goes most of the missionaries I know, at least a good percentage of them are are battling in their marriage, having difficult time staying on the field, not because they don't have support. They have support. They just can't get along. They can't reconcile the mission field and marriage.

They can't reconcile ministry and marriage. They can't reconcile child rearing and the mission field. It's all the pressure, all the above. It's not working for them. And more people come home because of family disruptions and probably anything else. And Pastor Lewis, you probably attest to that being ahead of IGM. So this morning we we talk a lot about the gospel and and and the impact and the application of the gospel in our life and and I felt sense about a month or two ago to spend a month of April talking about relationships and how the gospel applies to relationships.

Now you say it's all about marriage. Well, it'll be a lot about marriage, but we're not going to talk all about marriage. We're going to talk about relationships, interbody relationships in your workplace. We're going to talk about any anything that's relational, being single. We're going to talk about being single, what it means to be single. A lot of our folks are single. Singleness is a real thing. Loneliness will come up in this series. Won't come up today, but sometimes in the next three weeks will come up after today. So there are many different when I talk about marriage, as you know, my background is in counseling and my trainings in counseling and and we do everything a lot of crisis and grief counseling, especially now.

But more than anything else, we've done marriage and family counseling. Nothing I set out to be. I get asked sometimes in the in the world, what do you do for a living? I say I well, I'm a full-time counselor. I'm a part-time pastor, part-time preacher. And I I do say that cuz I find myself talking with a lot of folks, sometimes in the office, more on the phone than anything else about about families and how to make this marriage work, how to make this gospel work. There really some good tools out there. And I've used them all and will continue to use them.

There's the five love languages. Who's heard of the five love languages? Really good. I I I I would say use it. I I use it to help especially in real crisis situations. I use it when the marriage is just about a nuclear cloud. I'll use the the love languages cuz what the love languages will do will give you a clue and a road map sort of of how your spouse is is wired. This is how this is how they're wired. Good good good program, good Then there's love and respect. Real good one. We use that in marriage university.

We had marriage university for two or three years here and we ended up not having any students or just a handful. I was so blessed but no one came to marriage university cuz I realized all my marriages were perfect in the church at that point. But we had marriage university so people could have an access to some helps in their marriage on a day-to-day basis and and we use love and respect, the basic need of woman is love and the basic need of man is respect. Really good video series. I tell you the people who did it, but I never pronounce their last name.

And and and I they were funny, easy to listen to. I couldn't recommend it better anymore. Then there's another one out there called Preparing for Rich, probably the number one premarital assessment program, but I use it for marital and and premarital. It's a 45 minute or so assessment program that you do online and then it take takes 10 different areas of relationships and charts them out and you can see areas of compatibility and areas of incompatibility. So in premarital session, you can know what areas this isn't an area we need to focus on, but we need to focus on finances, we need to focus on family relations or whatever.

And it's a just it's not really counsel, it's a road map. Good. Well, you have to go I had to go to a whole day seminar just to learn how to do it. I haven't done it myself yet cuz I'm afraid it will tell me. So Preparing for Rich, great. I do a lot of couples with it and it gives us shows us what's working in the marriage, what isn't working in the marriage. Those are all wonderful programs and they all deal with symptoms of a of a bigger problem, not against the using them. But as we'll see here in a in a moment Well, let me just back up a little bit slow myself down.

Use these programs. If you I've been through Love and Rich, I'll be Love and Rich, Preparing for Rich, do it again. I've read the five love languages when? 17 years ago. Read it again. I love love and respect. I went through it seven years ago. Do it again because you always consistently need to be rehearsing these things. I read at least one book on a on marriage every year. I'm waiting for one that I can say finally something blames my wife. It's never happened. And I try to read them with my wife. She just Honey, read this one page.

Don't read this page. That applies to me, but I think this applies to you. You can read that right here. No, I never tried that. I love my life too much. And um so so there is but read this stuff, use these tools, practice it, rehearse it. Don't just do something to say cuz I guarantee what you learned 15 years ago probably isn't impacting you like it still could today. Rehearse these things. Now now I'll get on with the message. Good as these programs are, my friends, they're band-aids. Band-aids are are good. My daughter loves band-aids.

She came home. Dad, will you help me put this band-aid? Last night before she went to bed. She said, sure, honey. If I hit the band-aid, where do you want me to put it? Right here. Get my flashlight. There was a speck there. It might have been ink. And and so I put a band-aid on and she felt so much better when I put the band-aid on cuz band-aids make us feel good. Kids love fixing boo-boos, but again, if I have this open sore on my arm and put a band-aid on it, but the sore is coming from an internal disease, the band-aid's just going to maybe cover up a little bit, but it's not going to take care of the disease, is it?

I think it's much more effective to go to go after what's causing the not the symptoms, but the cause. If you're in the health and nutrition, sometimes medicine will just treat the symptoms and another approach is just to go after the cause. This series we'll we'll talk about some things, symptom and practical things, but especially this morning's message, I'm going after the cause, where these issues come from in the first place. And that is simple enough, my friends, our fallen natures. These need-based, need-filled individual things called people. And we all come into a marriage with our own baggage, our own stuff.

And that's where I think we find our problems. Let's read first New Testament book written to my knowledge anyway, 49 AD. This is the book of James. Now I'll figure this if Jesus was crucified in 33 AD and this was about 49 AD, it's about 15 16 years after the crucifixion. The the church had not been dispelled at this point out of Jerusalem. That didn't happen until 70 AD. So the church is still pretty much centralized in Jerusalem at this point. And here's James. He writes to his local church, just a group of believers like you.

He says, if you are wise and understand God's ways, prove it by living an honorable life, doing good works with humility that comes from wisdom. Now watch this. But if you are bitterly jealous and there is selfish ambition in your heart, don't cover up the truth with boasting and lying. For jealousy jealousy and selfishness is not the kind of wisdom. It's not God's kind of wisdom. Such things are earthly, unspiritual, and demonic. It's pretty strong. For whenever there is jealousy and selfish ambition, you will find disorder and evil of every kind. But the wisdom from above is first of all pure.

Now I think the word wisdom should be worked on a little bit here. That's the word Sophia in the Greek New Testament and and it and it's um it's how to quoting a guy wrote the Hebrew Greek Key Study Bible. He says it how to regulate one's relationship with God. Wisdom is what I get through the Holy Spirit and how to walk with God. So it's wisdom from above, Holy Spirit inspired. So but the wisdom from above is first of all pure. It's also peace-loving, gentle at all times. That wisdom because it gets comes from God is willing to yield to others.

It is full of mercy and good deeds and shows no favoritism and is always sincere. So wisdom from above, God's wisdom This is how I walk with God is I have these things in place. And those who are peacemakers will plant seeds of peace and reap a harvest of righteousness. Now I that's the end of chapter three. I'm going to pick up in chapter four, verses one and two. For what is causing the quarrels and fights among you? Don't they come from evil desires at war within you? That's quite a strong statement to a church.

You want what you don't have, so you scheme and you kill to get it. This is a church. You are jealous of what others have, but you can't get it. So you fight and you wage war to take it away from them. Yet you don't have what you want cuz you don't ask God for it. So we have here in this first century, 15 years after the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we have a church full of um strife, full of manipulation, full of envy, full of covetousness. Now I'm not Let me just take a step back.

I've been pastoring the church for 30 years. It's um You guys are awesome. You really are. I've had 30 years of peace. I've had church issues, but never internal. The people I work with every day are wonderful. You are wonderful. You there's no strife amongst you, not that I'm aware of anyway. And if it is, I just give it to Pastor Go with to deal with. And you guys are great. We've never had fights over hot dogs in the vestibule. We've never had any any any of these major church splits. No one ever fights about the color of this or the color of that.

It's just it's been 30 years of peace and I thank you for that cuz I I read stuff from other pastors. They go through horror stories, horror stories. I talked about the hot dog split that actually happened in the church in in West Palm Beach. Pastor Burns, I was part of it. They sold hot dogs outside and it it offended a bunch of people and and people church split over the hot dog controversy. You guys are great. So none of this is aiming at this. What I 'm trying to show you is that there's a wisdom from above that impacts our horizontal relationships in the body of Christ, in our families, in our marriages.

How do we have relationships that truly please God, godly relationships? First of all, we own our own stuff. It's important. Couple practical things here. In other words, some are not aware of their own motives. They never trace their reaction. They never trace the bitterness um or anger back to its true source. We use the illustration a lot and we spoke on this a year or so ago, I guess. If somebody pushes your button, maybe you said that, that person pushes my buttons. They come in the room and next thing I know my hackles are up.

I get angry and they said something to me and that pushed my buttons. Oh, I wanted to flatten the air in their tires. That's what I wanted to do. I wanted to steal their donut in the coffee shop. I am out for blood. They push my buttons. The question you want to ask yourself is why do you have a button? What's the button connected to?