What are we really willing to do in our marriages “For our Love”? Very needed and practical steps we can take to prioritize marriage - for our Love?

National Family Retreat 2016: In His Steps

<p>What are we really willing to do in our marriages “For our Love”? Very needed and practical steps we can take to prioritize marriage - for our Love?</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Restoration International

Alane Waters

Tom Waters

For Our Love

What are we as married couples tonight actively doing to build our love, to make 1 another's lives better?

We're gonna talk about that tonight and we wanna greet our live stream audience.

We're glad that you can join us this Sabbath evening.

Think about that, because as we go through the message tonight, we're going to be talking about 4 ways, there are many ways, but 4 ways, that we need to be building, making a better marriage for our love.

I said to my wife, oh it's been probably a little over a week ago, we had just finished doing the Michigan Conference marriage retreat.

And I just have to say this is not a plug for Michigan Conference, although I'm a Michigander by birth and was raised there till I left there to go to my career, But it was such a joy to see what they're doing to build marriages in the Michigan Conference.

We had 68 couples there that wanted to be there, that were excited to be there, and were looking forward to ways to build their marriages.

And I have to tell you, for those of you that have been here for many years, it's great to see people that have been here from the beginning.

For those of you that have been here for years, this won't be a new thought to you, but for those that are new, do you believe that our love can grow better than we've ever imagined that it would grow?

I'm telling you that I said to my wife after this marriage retreat that we had together there in Michigan, I said, I am experiencing a love growth spurt.

You've heard of, you know, our children have growth spurts and, you know, we're done with that as adults.

Our only growth spurts are getting wider or anyway, but I said, I am experiencing a love growth spurt.

I mean, I've said we're falling more and more in love and I don't know how we can love each other more, but we were thinking about this.

That's the exciting thing because it wasn't just the words.

I was already experiencing a deeper level of love from his heart to my heart.

And we're going to share some of those ways that that happens in those 4 areas.

But it's not something that we have to say, guess what, honey, I'm falling more in love with you.

I mean, that's nice, but it should be able to be demonstrated.

Whenever I start feeling like this, even up here, my wife, she either steps on my toe or she's...

We can fall more and more in love and it is an amazing thing.

God's love for all eternity, if we're there by the grace of Jesus Christ, we are going to experience more and more of the love of our God.

And we're going to give more and more and more of our love back to Him.

So why shouldn't that be happening in our marriages?

I'm not really looking, I mean, I'm glad to get the amens, but it would be wonderful if we were just, yes!

Because it is a tremendous blessing to continue falling more and more in love.

And so the reason that my wife, when I said, I'm having a love growth spurt, It was no news to her because we were experiencing a deeper connection.

And just in the privacy of our own conversation, we like to let you in on some of these, In the privacy of our own conversation, we say things like this to each other.

I didn't know I could love you more than I'm loving you.

Neither does our love and response to God happen by accident, okay?

And we're gonna be talking about that tonight.

There's a verse in the Bible, 1 Thessalonians 3.12, and it says it this way, And the Lord make you to increase and abound in love 1 toward another That's inspired God is giving us permission and not even permission but but a mandate of love that it grows and abounds More and more And I'm excited about that.

But wherever we find ourselves tonight, it doesn't have to remain the same as you walked in this room.

You can walk out with a love that is already kindled and growing in your heart for your spouse.

Our relationship with God isn't to plateau.

And our relationships with others isn't to plateau.

It's not just because God wants us to have this great experience in marriage so that we can think more about His love for us and how He wants us to respond to Him.

It's because He wants to channel that love in our hearts and through us to others, first in our home and then to everyone else we come in contact with.

It will be something that flows from us as we are connected with Christ and with 1 another.

And like my husband said, there are more than 4, but we've kind of taken a little bit different approach to examining how we are to fall more in love, what we can do to build and strengthen and secure our love in our marriages.

And so we're gonna be talking about these 4 areas of intimacy, intimacy in our communication, intimacy in the emotional realm of our relationship.

We're gonna be talking about physical intimacy and parents don't panic.

And lastly, we're going to be talking about spiritual intimacy.

And these are all part of what helps us to grow our love 1 for another.

Maybe we understand communication is important but maybe we've never really considered that it's important not just to have communication, but to have an intimate communication that connects more than just the head, but it connects the heart and it connects our souls 1 to another.

So we want to talk about how we can make our communication more intimate, more bonded, more intentional communication where our desire and everything we're talking about parallels being in his steps.

This relationship under the relationship with God is the most significant representation of the union of Jesus to His people.

God wants to make that relationship here on earth the best representation that he can make.

He wants us to know each other at an intimate level.

So we're going to share a little story with you because we want to illustrate what we naturally would have a tendency to do in communication and then why that doesn't work, why we need God working in our thoughts and in our hearts and in our minds and in our words to build the relationship.

This was, this is an experience we have that happened to us on more than 1 occasion, but this 1 is really like forever embedded in particularly in my mind.

This is BC before our children were born.

I cannot tell you what the topic was that we were discussing.

We were having good communication, but something happened and it broke down and somewhere in that discussion when it began to break down not only did our communication break down but our emotions both got stirred up not the positive I love you emotions but the you know what's your problem you know what this kind of you know you know those emotions that come and so in that communication as it broke down we finally just stopped talking and he went in the other room and I had a thought like this, I think I'm just going to go.

We had a you know, a kind of like a basement garage.

I'm gonna get in my car and I'm gonna go to town.

And I'm just gonna give him some time all by himself so he can think about this, right?

And then when I come back, we can work it through.

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For Our Love

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