Hey everybody, how are you? Are you glad to be in church? I am too, and I'm glad to be in this incredible church. You know, I always like to know a little bit about who I'm speaking to. So, indulge me here for a second. We're going to be talking about relationships, marriage and friendship and other things. But anybody in here happen to be engaged to be married? Stand up if you're engaged to be married. I see some hands going up. Stand up if you're engaged, all over the place and at the other campuses too. All right, that's awesome. Congratulations. I want you to do this on the other campuses as well. How about couples that you're not quite engaged, but you're on the edge of commitment. Nobody brave enough to stand up. I didn't think so. Maybe at some of the other campuses, though, how about anybody that’s single hoping to have a date sometime in the next year? A lot of you relax. You can sit down. That's okay. How about couples that are newlyweds, like you've been married less than a year, 12 months or less, stand up if you're newlyweds. Would you here and at the other campuses? Look at that. A lot of you. That's congrats. Anybody been married less than a month? You have? How's it going? That's great. How about any couples here been married more than a year?

Stand up. It's not a trick question. There we go. And at the other campuses, the singles are clapping, wow, more than a year keep standing. Keep standing.

All right, married more than 10 years, keep standing. Some of you are doing the math. I can tell right now you sat down and sat right back, stood right back up. How about more than 20 years? More than 30 years, by the way, I'm talking about being married to the same person consecutively. How about 40 years of marriage or more? All right, I

You're looking at me like, just keep going, kid. All right, this is a big 150, years of marriage or more. All right.

How about 53 years of marriage or more, we lost you guys. Two couples left, and at other campuses. I know you're standing at other campuses too. How about so how long you guys been married? 53 and how about you guys?

Oh, we got a new Buick for you right out here. That's incredible. 59 years of marriage. Now I don't have a car for you, but I got a book, and I think it's going to change everything for you guys. It's called saving your marriage before it starts. And I think you're going to get a lot out of it. So, you come see me at the book table back there, where I'm sending books after the service, I'll give it to you. So that's incredible. 50. Give them another hand. That's fantastic way to go. And you guys too. Yeah. So, 33 years for Leslie and me, and by the way, we have the same name. This is crazy, but it's true. I'm Leslie and she's Leslie. It's confusing, but that's the way God planned it for us. To make it even more complex, I'm the third. That means my dad's name is Leslie. My grandfather's name is Leslie. I'm Leslie. I'm married to Leslie. So, when we had our first son, we named him John, John Leslie. So, I feel a little bit like half a person without my Leslie with me here tonight, but she's up with our two little guys in Seattle every spring, Leslie and I put on this little event we refer to as SYMBIS, S, Y, M, B, I, S, saving your marriage before it starts. We've been doing this for a long time, and we'll have hundreds of engaged couples come in and for this weekend, and we do what we can to help them launch lifelong love as a result of doing that, year in, year out. We get invited to a lot of weddings. In fact, rarely does a week go by that we don't get invited to a wedding someplace.

Now. If you go to enough weddings, you know that people's personalities come through in these ceremonies. Every ceremony is a little bit different. We have quite a few wedding stories. My favorite happened years ago, and it had to do with this little kid that was maybe four years old. He was a little ring bearer, and they had him dressed in a little tuxedo, white shorts, with a little bow tie and then knee socks. And you know how they teach the little ones to do that wedding walk? And he's doing the wedding walk, and as he's coming down, every few steps, he would turn and he would look to the congregation, and he would go, and he was growling at people on the way down, and people were laughing. What's he doing that for? It's cute, but why? And he came down, he stood at the altar like a perfect little gentleman. He kind of forgot about it because he was so well behaved, until we had the recessional. And then he grabbed people on the way out, and word started spread. He stole the show at the reception afterwards, everybody was abuzz talking about how sweet this was. But why was he doing it? Well, this little guy had the impression that he was supposed to be the ring bearer, right? What's a ring bearer anyway? Right? If you're three or four years old. And by the way, I know some of you are thinking, I made that story up. That's happened at two weddings that I've been to, one I was in and the little guy had a meltdown at the tuxedo shop because he thought he was getting a bear costume. But Leslie and I, we left that first experience and we said, that's a perfect illustration of how our beliefs impact our behavior. Right, whether our beliefs are right or wrong, there's still the fuel for what we do, particularly in our relationships. And that's why I want to look at some of our little crooked thinking about surrounding relationships. We can get kind of messed up on this a little bit. And that's why I love this series. I think it's so fantastic that you've been going through this, and I've watched it online. Oh, incredible. I've learned a ton. And what an honor to get to talk with you tonight. In fact, let's do this just to make sure everybody has the right attitude as we think about spending the next few minutes talking about relationships, why don't you just turn to the person next to you and say these words you really need this. You feel better, don't you? Every there, we all need relationships, right? It's the hub of the wheel.

Some years ago, Leslie and I at Seattle Pacific University, where we teach, we thought, why don't we offer a course in relationships? You ever thought about this? We offer students courses in anything you can almost imagine, but not a single course in relationships. And you know, it doesn't matter what your major is. It can be accounting or nursing or anything else. The hub of the wheel in life is our relationships. It's the number one source of joy and happiness as well as consternation relationships. And so why don't we have courses in how to have healthy relationships? Well, we thought, let's do this. We'll call it Relationships. 101. Now, if you know anything about academic settings, you know you don't just dream up classes and start teaching them. You got to get them approved by the provost and the dean and all that stuff. So, we put a little proposal together. The top of it said Relationships, 101, and we listed out the lectures that we wanted to give. We want to give a lecture on how to fall in love without losing your mind. Okay, how do you improve your love IQ, how do you make smart decisions in the midst of this, you know, kind of brain chemistry stuff going on, you know? And then we thought we should also lecture on breaking up. A lot of dating couples do this. How do you break up and stay in one piece? And we want to talk about, what's the difference between the heartbreaker and the brokenhearted, and how do you approach that? And there's some interesting research on that. We wanted to give that to our students, and we thought we should also lecture on friendship. Can you imagine life without your friends? Yet there's a difference between what we call friends of the heart and friends of the road. You know, there's certain friends that we have. It doesn't matter how far apart we move. We pick up right where we left off. We stay in touch through social media, all the rest. And then there's friends that we go, wonder what ever happened to her, whatever happened to him, and he just kind of lost, that's a friend of the road, right? And we want to talk about, how do you have more friends of the heart? And we thought, you know, just like dating, we should probably talk about, what do you do when your friends fail you? Now, if that hasn't happened yet, put your seatbelt on, because it's coming. It's just a part of life. One of my philosophies of living is that we all have our own private Gethsemane, and we all have our own Judas. And we wake up someone, we go, how could he have done that? I trusted him with my money. I trusted her with my secrets. How could they have done this to me? What do you do when your friends fail?

So, it was all these different realms of relationship, you know, bridging the gender gap, relating to God without feeling phony, all these different realms. We wanted to put this in a course, and so we gave it to the committee. They studied it for a little while, and finally looked up at us and said, Thanks, but no thanks. We said, why not? They said, Well, that doesn't have enough academic rigor. I said, What do you mean by that? They said, Well, just doesn't have, you know, the depth, the rigor that it needs as an academic course. I said, No, no, no, we can. We can change that. We can put some information in it that confuses the students, if you like. And they said, well, there's not even a textbook for a class like this. I said, Well, we'll write our own. They said, Well, other universities don't have classes like this. I said, Well, maybe they should. Maybe they will. They said, well, it's not going to work here. And that was that. So, we left and feeling a little dejected, but we thought, let's not give up on this. And we retooled that proposal a little bit. Came back few months later, again, thanks, but no thanks. We went through this three times that academic year. Finally, on the third round, I think we just kind of wore them down. And they said, Okay, we're going to let you teach this this course, but only under these conditions. And they start to list them off. Number one, the class will need to be pass/fail so it doesn't impact anybody's grade point average. Number two, it needs to be a general elective: it's not a required course for anything. Number three, you don't need to be a class that's taught as an overload. That means, in addition to your full-time teaching responsibilities. Fourthly, they said you'll need to teach it on your own time schedule, meaning, once all the other classes have found a classroom and a time on the calendar and space, if you can find anything else left over, you can teach it and then number five, they said you'll need to teach it without compensation. So with that pat on the back, we set off to teach this class. Relationships, 101, we put the description the course catalog, in there, and just waited to see if any students might sign up for this class. And, and we had a little classroom. It had 12 chairs in it, and we found it was open at six o'clock on Monday evenings. And we had the classroom for two and a half hours on Monday evenings. And, and so we just said, Man, if we can even just get half the chairs filled, at least we'll be on our way. And so we waited see if anybody would sign up for this class.

About 10am when the on the first day of registration, when the registrar called my office and he said, Hey, Doc, he said, we got a problem. I said, What is it you need my classroom space or what is it? And he said, No, no, no. He said, We just realized you didn't cap the course. I said, What are you talking about? He said, in the computer, you filled out all the information on the class, but you didn't limit the number of students that could take the class. I said, What does that have to do with anything? He said, Well, we've only been open for registration for a couple of hours, and 350 students have signed up for your class. And I said, keep talking. And he said, Well, by default, the computer system just moved you into the auditorium and moved the class that was supposed to meet in there into that little classroom that you had. And I say, God bless you! And doesn't that speak volumes about the hunger, the thirst we have for information on healthy relationships? That was over 15 years ago, almost 20 years ago, that that took place, we've been teaching that class on Monday nights, at 6pm not prime time, for an undergraduate class. I've been teaching it at that time, ever since. It's the most popular class on the campus, it's always got a waiting list to get in. We love teaching these students, and on the very first night of this class, we tell these students, it doesn't matter to us if you take a single note the entire semester. It's up to you. It's a pass-fail course. There's no pop quiz, there's no midterm, there's no final. You'll get out of this experience whatever you'd like to get out of it, except tonight, on the very first night, we want you to write down at least one single sentence, and we tell them this sentence that we're about to give you, it has the potential to revolutionize every relationship you ever attempt to build, whether it's on the home front, with mom and dad or with your siblings or with your roommate or your teammates, your potential soulmate and all the rest. If you can allow the truth of this sentence to kind of seep down into the core text of your brain and be lived out through your spirit, it has that kind of transformative experience and they all get poised with their pencils and they're ready to take down the sentence. I want to give it to you tonight because you might find it helpful. Here it is, if you try to build intimacy with another person before you. Done the difficult work of getting whole on your own, all your relationships become an attempt to complete yourself. And we'll leave it on the screen there so you can write that down. If you try to build intimacy, if you try to build a connection, if you try to build a relationship, if you try to get close to another person before you've done the difficult work of getting healthy, getting whole on your own, all your relationships become an attempt to complete yourself, and they'll fall flat, guaranteed. Why? Because nobody was designed to complete you. Sorry to break it to you, but is the truth.

I mean, I know that's a tough pill to swallow for some of us, because, wow, I thought I was going to get there with this person and kind of lean into them. They'd lean into me. They'd make up for the things I'm lacking and they'd complete me. Tough pill to swallow, because we grew up reading the, you know, the fairy tales, and we watched the movies and read the book. In fact, probably the most iconic movie ever. Even has the sentence in there. Remember Jerry Maguire? Remember that movie? Remember one of the most quoted movies in all of cinematic history. Remember the story Tom Cruise character has fallen in love with Renee Zellwegers character, and they've gotten married, and they're having a really tough go of it in their first year of marriage, something Leslie and I can identify with, because we had a tough go of it in our first year. In fact, the very first line of that book, saving your marriage before it starts, says we never had pre marriage counseling, but we spent the first year of our marriage in therapy, and that's the truth. And so, we can identify and he's struggling. He's on the road. He's having this road trip of success with his business, but he's got to repair things on the home front. And so, he comes home early and walks up the little steps up into his bungalow where they're living, he's got his luggage. He's got his overcoat on. He walks in, and he realized he's walked into the middle of this support group with all these women sitting around, and they're all commiserating about how miserable men can be. And he's walked right into the midst of it. You remember the scene? He puts his luggage down, he says, I'm looking for my wife, and then he sees her there. She kind of leans, you know, from behind the lampshade there, and sees her. And he begins this speech. He launches into this amazing speech that surely took three writers a month and a half to craft, you know, and he gets to this speech, and it's just like he says those words you complete now. Now, people that went to this movie, a lot of people were quoting that line, show me the money, but every romantic was quoting this other line, what was it? You complete me. You hear all those women. You complete me, right? You complete me. You had me at hello, right? Remember this scene and he gets to the climax of this speech, and he says that sentence, and he says it with such pathos. He says it with such deep emotion. In fact, any guy in here think they can say it exactly like Tom Cruise said it. Anybody want to stand up where they're seated and take a stab at it right now for us? I didn't think I was going to get a taker on that, so I'm going to do my best job here, and I'm going to say it right into the camera. He's in the midst of this speech. He gets to this sentence, all these women, their jaws have dropped down to the floor. They can't believe the words coming out of his mouth. And he looks at her, and he looks at like she's the only woman in the room, and he looks at her, and he says: You complete me. That's exactly how he says it, and I look like him too, I know, and every romantic that's watching that movie at that point, does what?

Oh, I wish somebody would say that to me. Oh, I'd love to say that to somebody else. I've got to tell you, I'm no psychologist or anything. But actually I am. But if you believe that, if this person can complete you, you're setting yourself up for serious heartache, because nobody was designed to do that. You heard a fantastic message last week about how, when you get this relationship right, these relationships get better, right? Get easier, get healthier. And it's so true, because nobody can complete you. Ultimately, just want to remind you today. Ultimately, your compulsion for completion is met in a relationship with your heavenly Father. Do you guys know the name Neil Clark Warren? You ever heard that name before? You might have heard that name, but if you haven't. Yeah, you may have heard of his company. It's called eHarmony. You ever heard of eHarmony? If you haven't heard of eHarmony, you've got to watch more television. Neil's a wonderful friend. He's been on this platform before, I think, about a year ago to talk here. And years and years ago before eHarmony was ever even a thought in his head, I remember having dinner in Pasadena, and we were there, a late-night dinner, and Neil and Marilyn were there, Leslie and I were there, and we just love those guys. And I remember I asked Neil once. I said, Hey, if you could only give one word of advice to a couple about to be married, what would it be? Well, man, he didn't have to think more than a split second. I mean, he had it right there on the tip of his tongue. He said, get yourself healthy before you get yourself married.

And that's really what we're talking about here, right? Getting healthy. Why? Because your relationships, whether it's marriage or anything else, your relationships can only be as healthy as you are. Therefore, one of the most important things you ever do for your relationships is work on you. I remember that conversation that night with Neil and Marilyn and Leslie around the table. We got energized by that. And how do you get healthy? And it turned into some research. And we did some writing together, and looking at how do you get healthy and in fact, we had this mountain of research on how to get healthy, spiritually, psychologically, emotionally, relationally, and we're thinking, how do you put the cookies on the bottom shelf? We began to realize this, we wrapped our heads around this, that it really comes down to three things. If you want to get healthy, you've got to get a grip. You've got to get a lock on these three things. And we began to write them out. After all this year went on for like a year and a half of all this research, and we began to spell them out. And then one day, and we published this, and some of it's in that book, saving your marriage before it starts, and some things. And one day I was on the airplane, and I was reading my Bible, and I turned to this passage in Ephesians, and I went. And this so often happens in my life as a social scientist. We do some experiments, some study, some research, and then lo and behold, oh, there's that stuff I thought we discovered right there, right? Somehow, the apostle Paul got a hand on this thing before we did, and it's the same thing in the same order that we talk. I'm going to share that with you tonight, because it's so valuable. How do you get healthy, right? How do you do this? How do you know if you're this? First of all, has anybody kind of checked that off their list? Woke up the other day, I'm done, completely healthy, right? Emotionally, psychologically, relationally, not working on that anymore, right? We never finish. It's always a process of becoming, right?

Let me just give you these things that we found. We said the first of all, if you want to get healthy, you've got to get a lock on what we call your profound significance. It's right there in the notes. You can write it right down, profound significance. You've got to understand that God loves you so incredibly, so profoundly. You are so significant in his eyes, he loves you as if you're the only person on the planet, as St Augustine said. Now it's one thing to hear that and sing about it, Jesus loves me and all the rest. And if you've been going to church very long, you've heard that message, right? But it's quite another thing to hear that maybe you've memorized some scripture, Romans 8: there's therefore now no condemnation those that are with Jesus. You can hear that and think it through and all that, but it's quite another thing to experience it deep down in your bones, to experience God's grace, not just at the head cerebral level, but deep down in your spirit. Have you had that experience with God, that He loves you that much? You know, I think that so much hinges on that to get healthy. It's one of those things. And if you're like me, you go, Well, yeah, I don't know. I don't know if I have. Let me do this. Let me challenge you to tune into the single most important conversation you'll ever have. You had it last night and you had it this morning before you came in here, and you're going to have it tomorrow, and in fact, you're going to have it tonight when you fall asleep, because this conversation never turns off. It's 24/7 it's your internal dialog. In fact, what if, before you fell asleep tonight, you could take a little computer chip out of the back of your head, slip it into your laptop, and it would tap and relate your conversation, your internal conversation, for the last 24 hours, and it would categorize it as either positive self-talk or negative self-talk. Which one of those buckets would be most full for you at the end of any given day? It might surprise you to know if you're like most people, on average, you discover that 73% of your self-talk would fall into that negative bucket. We know that from research at UCLA, but not the person who has a lock on their profound significance, not the person that has that experience of feeling God's grace in their life. Do you kind of need to budge open that window that's been painted shut in your life for too long, to allow God's grace to kind of breeze into your relationships a little bit more? Profound significance.

Look at this. This passage that Paul has in Ephesians 3:17. I'm reading this from the message. I love how this is here. He says, I ask him that with both feet planted firmly on love that you'll be able to take in with all followers of Jesus, the extravagant dimensions of Christ's love. I love that the extravagant dimensions of Christ's love. And then he says, reach out and experience the breadth test, the length plumb, the depths rise to the heights. And then listen to this sentence. He says: live full lives, full in the fullness of God. It's as if he said, make sure you don't miss the point here. This is about living a fulfilled life. Live full lives, full in the fullness of God. We're talking about our compulsion for completion. It's not met in another relationship. Sometimes on college campuses where I speak, and certainly my own in Seattle, I'll see students that are kind of walking around, they’re dating, and they're walking around kind of leaning in on each other, not just figuratively, but literally, like they're just walking around like this, right? You ever seen a couple like that just walking around and less than I call them A-Frame relationships, okay? What happens in an A-Frame relationship when one person stumbles? The whole relationship gives away. Why? Because there's no individuation. There's no individual identity, it becomes an enmeshed relationship. That's what we're getting at when we talk about this idea of profound significance. Sure, other people can help us as iron sharpens iron, we can help each other on this pathway to wholeness, but ultimately, that's the work that we have to do on our own with the Holy Spirit in our lives. Profound significance.

Once you get a lock on that, let me have you turn your attention to the second thing that we found in our research, and that is not just profound significance, because that has to do with your relationship with your heavenly Father, but unswerving authenticity. The first one is about relating to God. The second one is about relating to you, relating to yourself. I can't tell you how many times I've had somebody walk into my counseling office struggling with that proverbial disease: To Please. Some of you know exactly what I mean. And they walk around and they go, oh boy, if I could just accomplish this goal over here, I bet people would like me. Oh man, if I could get into that club, that'd be cool. Oh man, if I did this thing, Mom and Dad would finally give me the blessing. And oh, if I did this over here, I bet so and so would smile in my direction. And they lived their life with the disease To Please, but not the person who has a lock on unswerving authenticity. What they know is there's a path that God has called them to follow, and they're not about to step off it, because God has called them to walk down that path in spite of what anybody else says, in spite of what anybody else might say behind their back, in spite of what anybody's attitude is, they know this is it. This is what God has called me to. You know, I've got to tell this story while I'm here at this church, because I was thinking of it as I was flying in from Seattle on my way down here. However many years ago, 15 years ago, however long it's been, 18 years ago, I was in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and I was at my publisher's, Zondervan publishing house, and we had an all-day meeting about some projects we were working on, and the team about, I don't know, 7, 8, 9, 10 of us went out to dinner together, and we're at this Chinese restaurant, and Bruce Rice Camp, the president of the company at the time, was sitting at the head of the table, and we placed our orders, and I leaned over to Bruce, and I said, Hey, Bruce, what's really exciting about the publishing house these days? We've been talking about my projects all day and Leslie here, but what's really exciting for you guys at the publishing house? And just as hush fell over the table, and they were like, tell him. Tell him. And he reached down from some kind of a case that he had down there, and he pulled out a book that was called The Purpose Driven Life. I'd never heard of it. Nobody had ever heard of it before, but they were pretty excited about this book, and I said at the time, I said, Well, I don't know what is inside those covers, but I just got a message right between the eyes, right in the title, right? See that's what we're talking about here. Right purpose. Why on earth am I here? The person that has a grip on unswerving authenticity knows why they're on this planet and they're going to do that because that's what God has called them to do. Look at this next passage. It's just a couple verses after what we just read here in Ephesians, chapter four, now verse one. And Paul says this about unswerving authenticity. He says, I want you to get out there and walk. And then he says, better yet, run on the road God called you to travel. I don't want any of you sitting around on your hands. I don't want anyone strolling off down some path that goes nowhere. Unswerving authenticity. 

Third thing on the path to wholeness, not just profound significance, that's your relationship with God, not just unswerving authenticity, that's your relationship with yourself. But the final one is self-giving love. Self-giving love. This has to do with your relationship with everybody else. You can see the progress here, right? It starts with God, then with you, and now with everybody else, with others. And once you get a grip on this and you begin to transcend your own boundaries and recognize other people's needs that are unique to them. I've got to tell you, friend, you begin to love the life you live. This is when life gets really interesting. How many of you have teenagers at home? How many mom and dads have teenagers? A lot of you, no wonder you're in church. All right, Mom and Dad, what's the number one goal that every adolescent on the planet has? It's to answer a question, and it's a question they never say out loud, but it's all about identity. Who am I? That's the question they're obsessed with. It. Who am I? Right? And that's what they should be obsessed with. That's the developmental period. If they're not asking that question, there's a problem. And they get very self-focused, self-referent, you know, and they get into a social situation, and they're thinking to themselves, how am I doing? What do people think of me? How are my shoes? Are people wearing this kind of shoes? How about my hair? Is my hair good? What about my pants? Are they low enough? I can't tell. Are they low enough or not? It's almost as if they're wearing mirrored sunglasses, but they've taken the lenses out and they flipped them around, they put them back in the frames, and they look out at the world. What do they see? Yeah, reflection of their own neediness, right? And you don't have to be 13 to be stuck there. You can be 30. You don't have to be 14, you can be 40, right? Because it takes some work to transition out of that, to where you can walk into a social setting and no longer be consumed with the question, How am I doing? but instead the question, How are you doing? And really mean it, and really transcend your own boundaries to recognize other people's unique needs and put into practice one of the most important relationship skills ever: empathy, that capacity to put yourself in somebody else's shoes and see the world as they see it. When was the last time somebody did that for you? When was the last time you did that for somebody else? It's a rarity. I've got to tell you, we sympathize, but empathize? That's the difference. Sympathy is standing on the shore throwing out a life ring to somebody that's struggling in the water. Everybody in this room would do that because you are decent human beings. Empathy is much riskier: that's diving into the water, risking your own wellbeing to bring that person back to safety. And not everybody does that. In fact, that's so rare. What do we call that? What do you call those people? Heroes, right? And it's just as heroic when we do that in our relationships, whether it's in friendships or relationships at work or relationships on the home front.

Empathy! Man, I wish we could box it. I wish, before you left, you could get out in the foyer and say, Oh, I'm supposed to pick up a box out here. It has my name on it, and it's a box of empathy. I like to take that home and let it run wild throughout my house tonight. That would change everything, wouldn't it? Empathy, self-giving love. It's a big part of it. If you're wondering to yourself, how do I know if I have a lock on self-giving love? I suggest you look to the greatest sermon ever preached, the greatest relationship lesson ever taught, the greatest lecture ever given. We call it the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus gave it. Oh man, he said some radical things in that message. In fact, this one was driven home for me. And of all places, in Rome, Italy. I had a bunch of airline miles that were going to expire. I'll never forget. As I came into the kitchen, I said to Leslie, I said, we got to use these miles, or they're going to go to waste. She said, that's the last thing I want to do right now, is get an airplane with the kids. She said, Go someplace with your dad. I said, Hey, that's a good idea. I called dad. He's in Phoenix and, and I said, Dad, I said, I got this idea! Yeah, what is it, son? I said, I got this idea that you and I take a trip to Rome, Italy. I said, I've never been. I know you've been before. You can kind of show me around. And he goes, Well, that sounds fun. I said, Well, here's the deal, Dad, if you want to do this, I said, I will pick up the airfare if you want to pay for everything else. And it worked out pretty well for me, and we had a great trip. We really did. And one night we're having dinner in the hotel, and I remember learning about this in seminary, but Dad reminded me of it. And in the days of the Roman Empire, every little kid was required by Roman law to kind of ease the burden of a Roman soldier as they're passing through their village. And so, the little kid would have to kind of carry his backpack, the soldier's backpack, for one Roman mile in either direction from his home, and then put it on, you know, put it after that mile, put it on the ground, and go there. You know, I've done what I'm supposed to do. And because this is such a common practice, kids started to put little stakes in the ground, carve their initials into them, and so they'd know exactly how far they'd have to carry that that satchel, or what have you. And it was such a common practice in all these villages throughout the Roman Empire that Jesus used it as a sermon illustration when he said, Hey, you want to do something radical in your home, you want to do something radical in your marriage. You want to do something radical as a parent. You want to do something radical as a coworker, he said, don't just walk the first mile. Everybody's looking for that. Everybody expects that because you're a good person. You do that to clear your conscience. Walk another mile. They don't that see coming. See what happens. Radical, right? When was the last time somebody did that for you? When was the last time you did that for somebody else? And I know some of you are thinking, oh, man, I don't know. You know, walking the extra mile, that's, that's a big deal. I got to Google that. You know, I got to save my money for that. That's extra.

Hey, let me tell you something. You're going to have the opportunity to walk the extra mile for somebody before this day is done. Because we walk the extra mile in big, extravagant ways, and we do it in in less extravagant ways, in little ways. Tuesday mornings I take the trash out. Signed up for that a long time ago. Anybody do that? How many of you take the trash out in your marriage? All right? I signed up for that a long, long time ago, more than 30 years ago, been taking out the trash on most Tuesdays. You know? Well, I walk the first mile every time I take out the trash, that's the first mile. I walk the extra mile when I take out the trash and I don't say anything about it, you follow me? We have all kinds of opportunities to walk the extra mile for each other. Look at this passage. Look at this next verse. Paul says this: pour yourselves out for each other in acts of love, alert at noticing differences and quick at mending fences. Pour yourselves out for each other in acts of love, self-giving love. You get a lock on that, man, you're going to love the life you live; you will if you try to build intimacy, you try to build a connection with another person, you try to get close to another person before you've done the difficult work of getting whole, getting healthy on your own, all your relationships become an attempt to complete yourself, and they'll fall flat. Do you guys always listen this well? Man, you guys know when to laugh. You know when to listen. I'd like to speak here more often. This is fun. I like you guys. I've got to tell you, as we wrap, I want to have a word of prayer with you in a minute. But let me tell you something. Tell you something I've got. I've got two books out there in a little book bundle, and they're half price and more or less, and one of them I mentioned is saving your marriage before it starts. The other is the good fight. And how many in here have ever had a conflict with somebody that you care about? Keep your hands up. Look around the room. You see the people that don't have their hands up. What do we call them? That's right, and they're in church. You. Yeah, so the little message in the good fight is wrapped up in this idea that conflict can become the price tag for deeper intimacy. If you know how to fight a good fight, you can actually use conflict to bring the two of you closer together. Conflict is inevitable. It's just a part of life, but if you know how to turn that around, you can actually create more intimacy, draw closer to each other through it. So anyway, that's what that little bundle is. And by the way, you can feel good like I said. This is basically sold at half price out there as a bundle.

If there is any profit to be made on this, I want you to feel good about it, because it goes to needy children, and both of them live with me in Seattle and so, and one's going to college soon, so he's very needy. So you guys, what an honor to get to be here with you in this great church. You guys, yeah, thank you. Let me pray for you. You guys go to the one of the greatest churches in the world, Father, we just thank you for a special place like this and for a special time to get together with people that want to be better, with people that want the best relationships possible. And that's why we pray that You would just teach us how to receive your love. Help us to open our arms to your grace, not just to talk about it, but to experience it. Help us to understand the path that you've called us to walk on so we know why on earth we're here help us to take the love that you give us and give it to people around us. Just thank you so much for this privilege to live this life that you've given us. We love you, and it's in your holy name we pray. Amen.



Last modified: Thursday, February 6, 2025, 9:02 AM