Marriage 6 of 10 - Encouragement (John Wile)

This series about marriage is dedicated to men and women serving their Lord in a country, a culture, a language that is not their own.  Is that you?  We know that this life creates great stress and your marriage will either contribute to increasing that stress, or your marriage will help you to deal with the stress, will bring you great personal joy, will bring praise to God and will have the added benefit that your ministry will be richer and more powerful. 

Kathy and I have been married for 26 years and we've spent a few more years than that in various forms of pastoral ministry.  During that time, we've learned a lot about marriage.  In this series we're distilling that learning into what we call "The Eight Underpinning Truths".  Today's truth: Marriage is full of joy when it's full of encouragement.  In a landmark study John Gottman and his associates took a microscope to marriages to see what makes them thrive or die.  They gathered two groups of couples. 

One group was made of marriages that were doing ok - making it, thriving. 

The other group was marriages whose prospects were dim, a group in which divorce wouldn't be a surprise. 

The investigators were seeking to uncover any single factor that distinguished these groups. 

After exhaustive work, they came to a conclusion.  They had discovered a dramatic difference in the number of positive moments when compared to the number of negative moments. 

In the marriages that were doing ok, even thriving, they discovered that husbands and wives had five times as many positive moments as negative ones:  Five compliments for every complaint, five words of kindness for every harsh word, five expressions of thanks to every word of selfishness, five encouragements for every single discouragement.  Now this is probably not a surprise.  We would expect a thriving marriage to have a healthy, encouraging conversation and more moments of brightness than gloom. 

What was a surprise to me was in the other group - the comparison of negative moments to positive moments in the marriages that were dying.  What would you guess?  maybe five negatives for every positive?  maybe two negatives for every one positive?  What the researchers discovered in the marriages where the fire was out was that there were an equal number of positive and negative moments:  one compliment for each criticism, one understanding word for each harsh word, one act of service for every selfish action. 

I would have thought that that kind of balance is what you would find in marriages that were just sort of muddling along not doing great, but not falling apart either.  After all a solid 50% of the moments in those marriages were positive.

What we see here is the destructive power of negative words and actions.  Now against that dreary backdrop, listen to Ephesians chapter 4, verse 29:  "Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen."  What would happen if you applied that truth in your marriage, applied it every day, every hour, especially in times of stress and especially when your partner was grumpy, irritable, critical or selfish, or especially when you felt that way?  If you are like me, then it's at those moments that you are least inclined to say anything encouraging, more likely to toss in a criticism of our own or just walk away. 

God, however, has called us to be cycle-breakers to bring the positive word and to bring it at least five times as often as the negative ones.  Actually, did you hear the exact expression?  ‘Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths but only what is helpful for building others up’.

If you want a good model for this, take a look at the life of Jesus.  Crowds surrounded Him wherever He went; partly because of His wisdom and partly because of the way He treated people.  I think of Simon, a bottom-rung-of-the-social-ladder guy, hardly Mr. Righteous.  In fact, when he began to realize who Jesus was he said, "Go away.  I'm a sinful man".  Jesus was a cycle breaker.  ‘Simon, I'm going to teach you how to be a fisherman and catch men for the kingdom of God.  Simon, I'm giving you a new name.  From now on, I'm calling you Peter’.  Of course the name Peter means Rock.  Fascinating, because Peter knew his weakness, his vulnerability to peer pressure, his inability to stay true to his convictions, and here the greatest man he'd ever known said, “I'm going to call you the rock.”  Whether it was His chosen 12, a grieving mother, a vulnerable child, an outcast leper or even a self-righteous Pharisee, Jesus always had a good word.  It was not because these people deserved it, not because you deserve it, but because they needed it and we need it.  His words of encouragement are given as a gift, one gift upon another completely undeserved but joyfully received, given to us as a gift so we might pass it on. 

What's the percentage that you are bringing into your marriage?  Do you want to be a five-to-one?  Keep your eyes on Jesus and He'll make you into one.  Let me suggest that you take a few minutes alone just as soon as you can while all this is fresh in your mind and make a list of ways you can bring good moments into your marriage over the next 24 hours.  Think of compliments, giving thanks, doing a task that's undone, giving a little gift, a surprise hug or maybe even more…going for a walk and sitting down for a chat, saying ‘I'll watch the kids, why don't you go and do whatever you want to do’. ‘I love you’.  ‘I'm delighted we're in this journey for life’.