Cultivate Your Relationship With Your Spouse
Number 2: Cultivate your relationship with your mate. Cultivate it. Don’t cultivate the relationship with a third party. That’s where the wheels come off. Man, we start sharing all this intimate stuff with a third party about our marriage about how we feel about stuff. Don’t do that. Keep it on the surface. And when you’re talking to someone else, always bring up your spouse and talk about your spouse in a positive light. The Bible says we should not even have a hint of sexual immorality. Not even a hint. And God is pro-sex. I hope you know that. He wants us to practice sex within the confines of marriage. One man, one woman together. But we’re to cultivate our relationship.
Lisa and I are revising a book that we wrote years ago. It’s already in its fourth printing. It’s called The Creative Marriage. And we simply took some principles from marriage and wrote them down in a book and it really sold like wildfire. So we’ve gone back and we’ve revisited this book and we’ve been writing over the last several weeks and tweaking it.
One of the things we talk about throughout the book is something called the MWE. Do you know what that is in marriage? It’s the marital work ethic – MWE. The marital work ethic. Some people, I think, see Lisa and I and think, “Oh, Ed, you and Lisa have been married for 24 years. I know you’re Christians and you’re leaders at Fellowship Church. I’m sure your marriage just works. It’s just automatic and systematic.”
Well, I’m sorry to rain on all your presuppositions, but no, it doesn’t just work. It’s not a natural thing because I am a self-centered person. I say things I shouldn’t say. I think things I shouldn’t think. I do things I shouldn’t do. So does Lisa. We have to work at our marriage. For 24 years we have worked at our marriage. And many times we don’t feel like working on our marriage, but we do. We’re very, very intentional about it. We’ve gone through dry seasons. We’ve gone through seasons when we were on a roll. We’ve gone through all of that.
© Copyright 2012admin, All rights Reserved. Written For: Ed Young Church
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