Is our love in marriage growing so well that it is effervescently bubbling over? It can be and should be. Here are some how to’s.

<p>Is our love in marriage growing so well that it is effervescently bubbling over? It can be and should be. Here are some how to’s.</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

Northwest Family Retreat 2023

Tom Waters

Alane Waters

Identity Crisis

Effervescent Love

Happy Helpers

Living Hope

Tonight's message is a marriage message and we are excited about marriage messages.

That's right, which is why we're excited about sharing tonight.

What do you think of when you hear the word effervescent?

You know, I was thinking as they were sharing tonight especially talking about, oh and by the way, welcome to our live stream audience tonight.

Wherever you are in the world, It's nice to have you with us.

But you know, 1 of the most powerful testimonies that we can have emanates from our marriages.

Do you know that that can be a huge tool for witnessing in this world.

The marriage relationship is the 1 relationship on the earth that represents the union of Christ to who?

What a privilege and what a responsibility that we have.

And when we experience effervescent love, You think anybody notices?

Who might be the most important person to notice it before you ever go anywhere else in the world?

So real witnessing begins right where we live.

You know, it's no problem seeing a young couple in love.

You see the smile on their face, you see the beautiful twinkle in their eye, you see the radiance on their face, and you can quickly identify them, oh they're in love, right?

So is that what we still emanate, Or is that the right word?

That's what we still emanate outside of our, in our relationship, so that others can say, oh, look at them.

We're in love 43 years plus and it's been wonderful.

So we have a little bit assignment for all the couples in the audience tonight.

You can also do this live stream if you're following with us this evening, or if you come back and look at the video later you can do this.

Even if your spouse is not with you here at this event, what we'd like you to do is to close your eyes for 30 seconds and just think of all, whatever comes to your mind spontaneously about your spouse.

Now, this isn't, we're not gonna ask you to get up and share what you saw, but very important reason we asked for this question, ask you to do this little assignment.

We want you to think about whether that 30 seconds was thoughts that were predominantly happy, pleasant, romantic, thankful, jubilant, and peaceful.

Or if your thoughts spontaneously went to negative, irritation, frustration, hurt, bitterness, unthankfulness, negative thoughts.

Because This is very important because as we think so are we.

The Bible says as he thinks in his heart so is as we think in our heart, our mind, so are we.

So it's so important to have those thoughts, especially in this relationship, on the positive side.

This spontaneous thought is often connected to filters or often connected to how life is happening in our marriages And it can either create a resilience, because there's our theme, so that when something goes wrong in the day, or something doesn't just go right in the day, we can have some resilience that is there because our general trend of thinking towards the love of our life is very happy generally, positive generally.

But if that is negative, it will create an automatic filter that makes it difficult when anything doesn't go right, it just begins to feel like everything is going wrong in the marriage.

So we really need to be feeding that in the positive direction because if we aren't, we are naturally inclined to go to the negative direction and that's not a healthy place to go.

Yeah, and those kind of negative thoughts can be related to, well, my husband doesn't really spend that much time with the children or my wife just seems like she has this gloom about her or this attitude about her.

Once we start down that track, like my husband said, everything starts being viewed through those lenses and pretty soon the 1 we love and care for the most becomes the 1 that we have a bit of disdain for because of our thoughts.

That's right so our communication naturally tends in 1 direction or another so if our mind is positive generally positive if they're generally loving interactions, this creates more effervescent love that naturally comes out and the family members, young and old, recognize that or if the mind has a generally negative kind of feeling, the communication will go down that more adverse and unfavorable.

And so tonight, if you found yourself thinking negative thoughts rather than spontaneous positive thoughts, we can do something about that.

We can do something about that because as we think, so are we.

We've counseled with hundreds and hundreds of couples over the last 34 years of ministry, and we have a unique opportunity to really connect with couples because right now, and especially in the last 3 to 5 years, the culture towards marriage is changing very rapidly.

And we've had the opportunity, especially during COVID.

You know, there was a 34% increase in the divorce rate above the 49% prior to COVID.

That's pretty serious divorce rate in the United States.

And it's because people could not, we counseled with many, our counseling sort of went through the roof during that time.

And 1 of the most common themes was, I can't live with this guy.

I'm used to him being gone all day and now he's home and he's driving me nuts.

And it doesn't work just 1 way, it works both ways.

And so that's a pretty sad commentary, but we know that the adversary of our souls is working hard to destroy the marriage, working hard to destroy the 2 institutions that were there in Eden, the Sabbath and marriage.

Because if he can undermine those things, he undermines the whole foundation of Christianity.

The day of worship for God and to spend that time with God and the day and the the identity he created when he created man and woman.

So it is so important that we pay attention to where we are and how we are interacting in our relationship and how we think about 1 another in the quietness of our minds and especially how we think about each other when there may be a bit of a misunderstanding.

When things are going good and you're on vacation everything appears to be going good there's there can be a lot of effervescent love but life doesn't always roll out in vacation mode, right?

There's real life that has real challenges and real difficulties and we do not think the same.

We have a very different way of processing life and how we see things.

In fact, we did this communication exercise at our last marriage retreat.

Yes, so We tried it on ourselves at home and it is simply, there is a little bag of hearts, pink and red hearts that are different sizes, big, little, sparkly, plain, whatever.

And all we were going to do is I was going to give my husband instruction on how to assemble those to create a picture.

And while he has his back to me at the other kitchen counter, I'm giving him instructions as I lay out those heart pieces.

This is a no-brainer because we think we communicate well and we do.

But when we finished the exercise it was interesting to note that my picture and His picture placement of those hearts were very different.

Come on, just be real, what would you do?

Here's the picture, I give the instructions, and his design does not match mine, and I've been very clear on giving the instructions.

So that's basically I said well that's not what I heard.

No, first of all, you said, that's not what you said.

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Series

Northwest Family Retreat 2023

Effervescent Love

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

Parts

Identity Crisis

45m

Effervescent Love

54m

Happy Helpers

38m

Living Hope

30m

Sound Doctrine