Amelia Church of Christ - Christian Church in Amelia, OH near Cincinnati in Clermont County

This is the third message in our Maze of Marriage series. In this series, we’re talking about four areas where a lot of couples make some costly wrong turns in the marriage maze.

We started out talking about sex. If we follow God’s principles for sexuality, then we’ll experience the sexual fulfillment and joy in our marriage that God intended for us.

Then last week we talked about money. There is tension in money that can lead to tension in marriage. So we chased after a godly perspective on our money and our stuff.

Today in message #3, we’re talking about kids. It might sound harsh, but it’s true: when it comes to kids, there are a lot of potential wrong turns in the marriage maze. And so today, we’re going to unmask a few of those wrong turns so we can get our families back on the right track, or even better, so we can avoid the wrong turns altogether.

This is going to be a little different in that the focus of this message isn’t on parenting as much as it is on your marriage. This is a marriage series. We’ll do a parenting series later on, but the focus of this series is your marriage relationship. That relationship goes through some drastic changes when kids are introduced into the equation. How do you keep your marriage thriving and growing and healthy when you are a husband and a father, a wife and a mother? How do husband and wife coexist with father and mother? That’s what we want to focus on today. Let’s jump into it.

A first wrong turn a lot of couples take when they have kids is racing through each day.

A lot of us are living life at an insane pace, dragging our kids along for the ride. Every night, we’re running to this practice, or that game, or this concert, or that production. One parent is chauffeuring little Johnny here while the other parent is driving little Janey there. We’re living our lives at breakneck speed, and then we’re surprised when our family’s neck gets broken.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the average American family spends more than $2,000 per year on dinners away from home, and that 10 percent of those dinners come from McDonald’s. We don’t have time for a casserole at home, so it’s a Happy Meal on the go. It’s why our country is leading the world in overweight, overstressed, overanxious, overextended kids. There is study after study that will back that up.

Our culture has gone mad, and we’re simply continuing the cycle by teaching this madness to our children.

God’s Word tells us to, “Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life…so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders…” (1 Thessalonians 4:11a, 12a, NIV)

Our culture has engrained us to crank up the volume, to increase the intensity, to add the RPMs in our lives.

But God is calling us to a different way of living. A lifestyle that is counterculture. Make it your ambition, your goal, your objective, your mission to lead your family in a quiet life.

God knows this is an unusual lifestyle in our world. That’s why he told us that living in a quiet, unhurried fashion will “win the respect of outsiders,” those who have yet to come to Christ.

We talk a lot about how we, as God’s people, are called to live by a different standard. But that’s easy to misunderstand or misinterpret. It’s not just about sin avoidance. It’s not about living by some set of legalistic rules that we use to keep score of how we’re doing spiritually. It’s about living a life that is permeated by God. It’s about finding the freedom in Christ to live, to really live.

In Luke 4, Jesus said, “The Spirit of the Lord is on me…He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners…” (Luke 4:18, NIV)

Jesus came to free the prisoners, regardless of where or how they are imprisoned. For those of us who are slaves to our schedule, understand that Jesus came to set us free from that bondage.

If you are constantly on the go, constantly running, dragging your family around here and there and everywhere, can I ask you a simple question…do you like that? Does that make you happy? Is your family fulfilled by following a hectic schedule? I doubt it. But our culture is telling us to go, go, go, and we simply nod our head and say, “This is the way it is.”

Finding freedom in Christ means that you don’t have to be a slave to our culture. He came to set you free from that. You are free to live differently.

When God tells us to make it our ambition to lead a quiet life, he is trying to set us free from the hectic, harried, hurried life of our culture. It is a freedom that we need to pass on to our kids. It is a freedom that we have to find in our family if our marriage is going to continue to grow. If you’re constantly on the move, constantly on the go driving the kids here and there, if you rarely have unhurried family time and uninterrupted time with your spouse, you’re heading down a dangerous road.

Mark Batterson noted, “According to recent studies, the average married couple spends twenty-seven minutes a week in meaningful conversation. That doesn’t cut it.

Here’s how Scott and Jill Bolinder describe it. “Every day we change as individuals based on our experience that day. In order to build a growing relationship as a couple, then, we must make time to ‘daily reintroduce’ ourselves to each other. We share the mundane and profound.”

It’s old, it’s cliché, but it’s true. Love really is spelled T-I-M-E. Time with your kids. Time with each other as husband and wife.

God has set you free to lead a quiet life with your family, but it’s a freedom you’ll have to fight for. It will mean that you’ve got to learn to say “no” to some things. It may mean allowing your kids to play 2 sports, but not 3 or 4. It may mean that, as a parent, you have to take a stand against an unrealistic practice schedule. It may mean that you personally have to say “no” to some night meetings at work.

I’ve had to learn this myself. When your job revolves around people, as mine does, there is a great temptation to be a people pleaser. And I succumbed to that temptation for a lot of years. If someone wanted my time, I gave it to them. Didn’t matter when or where. I dropped everything to give them my time. And what I started to figure out is that I was robbing my family because I didn’t have any time left for them.

I don’t pretend to be perfect at this, but I do have a system in place. As a general rule, I won’t be out of the house more than two nights a week. Obviously if there is an emergency, I’ll deal with that regardless of the time. But as a general rule, I’m not out more than two nights a week. When I’m home, I try to be home instead of bringing work home with me. The catch is that it is inevitable that I will upset somebody when I say “no” to something in ministry. But my family is my primary responsibility and I’ve seen the results of more family time.

This is how it looks for me. I don’t know exactly how this looks for you, but here are the things I do know. God has given you your family to manage. Remember last week we talked about ownership vs. stewardship. God owns your family, you are the steward or manager of your family. God has given you your family to manage. God has set you free to live a quiet life so you can manage your family well. And you’ll have to fight for that freedom.

Now let’s move on to a second wrong turn a lot of couples make when they have kids. It’s the wrong turn of role confusion.

We’re going to tread on some politically incorrect turf here, but God designed the family and he set up the family structure in a certain way. No matter which way the political winds are blowing, the family structure remains constant because it is God’s design.

The reason that the addition of children can throw some marriages into upheaval is because the couple has allowed our gender-bending culture to influence their decisions instead of looking to God’s family design.

In God’s design, the father is the primary disciplinarian and the mother is the primary nurturer. This doesn’t mean that fathers don’t love their children and it doesn’t mean that mothers don’t have any authority of their children. What it means is that, primarily, mom provides nurturing, dad provides discipline.

The Bible says, “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.” (Ephesians 6:4, ESV)

Notice that this is addressed to dads. The consistent biblical pattern, Old and New Testament, is that the father is in charge of discipline. This is an area that is ripe with wrong turns.

I’ve known fathers who were drill sergeants. They were on their kids constantly, no matter what their children did or didn’t do. But the Bible says, “do not provoke your children to anger.” Another translation says, “don’t exasperate your children.” In other words, balance your discipline. Your kids need to know that you’re in charge, but they also need to know that you love them.

I’ve got to watch that I don’t fall into this camp. I’m hard on Ryan. I have a high expectation of his behavior. Sometimes too high. And I’ve got to be careful not to overdo it. It’s not that I’m afraid that it will rise to the level of abuse. Not at all. But I know that there are times when I’ve got to pull back a little bit.

The reason I lean this way is because I’ve seen too many other fathers lean the other way. I know of one dad who has unequivocally said that he will not discipline his son. His father abused him as a child, and so he is now overreacting and will not discipline his son. And his son shows all the hallmarks of an undisciplined child.

Both of these, the drill sergeant and the powder puff, are wrong turns when it comes to discipline. God’s call on us as fathers is to bring a right and balanced discipline to our children.

Remember, God has given you your family to manage. And if you’re not offering your children biblical, balanced discipline, then you are not managing your family well.

Proverbs 13 says, “He who spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is careful to discipline him.” (Proverbs 13:24, NIV)

Notice the stark contrast there. Hate vs. love. Love means discipline. Love means a stern word. Love means sitting in time out. Love means grounding you kids. Love means spanking your kids. I know that we are supposed to be more enlightened now, so we would never spank our children. When our children need to be spanked and we don’t do it, dads, we are living in opposition to this Biblical command.

In chapter 23, Proverbs says, “Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you punish him with the rod, he will not die. Punish him with the rod and save his soul from death.” (Proverbs 23:13-14, NIV)

Dads, a spanking isn’t going to kill your child. Obviously we’re not advocating child abuse here. But contrary to our enlightened culture, spanking and discipline will not kill your child. It won’t crush his spirit. It won’t scar her for life. Instead, it will save your child’s “soul from death” because that discipline will be remembered. It will give your child the tools that they need to make better decisions, to make godly decisions.

One more verse from Proverbs. “Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child; The rod of discipline will remove it far from him.” (Proverbs 22:15, NASB)

The end goal of discipline is wisdom. We are correcting and disciplining our children to steer them away from what is foolish and toward what is wise. We are training them to make wise decisions.

When I was a kid, I was out riding my bike in our driveway one day. I wasn’t paying attention to where I was and I rode my bike right out into the road…and right in front of an oncoming dump truck. The truck driver laid on his horn, and I steered my bike into a ditch as he drove past. My dad saw this whole thing unfold, scaring him to death. He yelled my name, I came to him, and he warmed my backside with the hardest spanking I think I ever received. And you know what? I never rode my bike into the road without looking again. Because the end goal of discipline is wisdom. That spanking taught me to make a wise decision and it was a lesson that I never forgot.

Discipline teaches wisdom. If that’s true, then the opposite is also true. If we withhold discipline, then we are training our children to be fools and to make foolish choices.

Now, as we said, God has laid this responsibility to discipline squarely on the shoulders of dads. Here comes a wrong turn. For whatever reason, the roles in a particular family may have gotten convoluted. The roles have been confused.

Maybe dad is lazy. He’s a wimp. He doesn’t put forth the effort to discipline his kids.

Maybe mom is overbearing. Instead of allowing dad to be the disciplinarian, she usurps that authority. In an effort to be an empowered woman, she takes on a role in the family that isn’t hers.

Whatever the reason, the family doesn’t operate well when we deviate from God’s original design. It is harmful to our children and it’s harmful to our marriages.

Think about it. On the one hand, a wife resents her husband because he won’t do anything with the kids. She’s trying to play all the roles as best she can, but the discipline is supposed to be his department. She and the kids don’t respect him because he doesn’t command respect.

On the other hand, a husband resents his wife because she’s on a power play. She’s trying to usurp his authority as leader of the family and the primary disciplinarian of the kids. He has a difficult time loving her as a wife because she disrespects him as a husband.

See how this role confusion doesn’t just have an adverse effect on our children? It’s also a destructive force in our marriages. And it all started when we took our cues from our culture instead of from God’s Word and we allowed the roles in our families to get all mixed up. It’s a wrong turn that will cost us in our parenting and it will cost us in our marriages.

Now, as an aside, in our culture we obviously have a lot of single parent families. I do believe that God can still bless those families, but you will have to work hard to make sure that your kids still have a positive male or female role model in their lives. But ultimately we’re speaking to issues of marriage in this series.

Now let’s move on to a third wrong turn couples can take when they have children. It’s the wrong turn of putting romance on the back burner.

Dr. Dorothy Tennov did a long-range study of the “in love” phenomenon and she found that the average life span of a romantic obsession is two years. Two years! Nicki and I dated for three years, so by the time we got married, the romantic obsession was already in overtime!

I don’t know how you quantify this exactly, but it really does have the ring of truth to it. In the first two years of a relationship, romance has a way of finding you. It just happens. Everything is romantic. You look at the world through romantically rose-colored glasses. If you happen to be in that stage right now, please enjoy it, because it’s short lived.

What about the rest of us? It sounds unromantic, but romance is hard work. Romance doesn’t just happen. You have to make it happen.

One writer said, “One of the greatest dangers facing every marriage is a process called familiarization. The Nobel Laureate, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, was once asked about his marriage to his wife Mercedes. His response is fascinating. He said, “I know her so well now that I have not the slightest idea who she really is.”

Here’s how John O’Donohue describes the process. “Relationships suffer immense numbing through the mechanism of familiarization. We reduce the wildness and mystery of a person to the external, familiar image.”

Familiarization is a death blow to romance, which is why we have to constantly battle against it. The longer you’re married, the more you have to plan, prepare, and work to make romance happen. That that is even more true when children are introduced into the equation.

There’s nothing like kids to squash the romance, is there? I asked Nicki’s permission to share this story. One night this past week, we were in a romantic mood. Ryan was asleep. We were in our bedroom and everything was, um, going well. And then Ryan decided to wake up. He was sleeping quietly, but now all of a sudden he’s singing and talking and very much interrupting his daddy’s plans. Kids work better than a cold shower, don’t they guys?

Let’s pull in some Bible teaching here. The Bible says, “The husband should fulfill his wife’s sexual needs, and the wife should fulfill her husband’s needs. The wife gives authority over her body to her husband, and the husband gives authority over his body to his wife.

Do not deprive each other of sexual relations, unless you both agree to refrain from sexual intimacy for a limited time so you can give yourselves more completely to prayer. Afterward, you should come together again so that Satan won’t be able to tempt you because of your lack of self-control.” (1 Corinthians 7:3-5, NLT)

These need to be the theme verses of our marriages when it comes to sex, and when it comes to the larger issue of romance. God gives us one reason to abstain from sex in our marriages. So we can devote ourselves to prayer. In other words, you and your spouse consent to go on a sexual fast for a time so you can seek God individually and collectively. Fasting is giving something up to focus on something else, and that’s the idea in these verses. But this is only to be for a short time.

This is the only reason God gives for acceptable abstinence in your marriage. Abstinence is for prayer and fasting, but it’s not for kids! Having children is not an acceptable reason to not have sex. In a broader context, it’s not an acceptable reason to not have romance in your relationship. Romance is an expected part of a godly marriage. You just have to make it a priority and work hard to put it into action.

When was the last time your kids went to a babysitter so you and your husband or your wife could go on a date? I know some parents who don’t like to ever have a babysitter watch their kids? Honestly, it won’t kill your children to have a babysitter, but not having babysitter just might kill your marriage.

Here’s where a lot of couples make their wrong turn in the marriage maze. If your kids are young, it might not seem like they will ever leave the house, but one day they will. One day they will grow up, move out, and then it happens. It’s just you and your spouse. For years it’s been you, your spouse, and the kids. But literally overnight, you go from that scenario to just the two of you. I don’t mean to undermine the difficulty of this transition. It is hard. But if you and your husband or wife have been romancing each other for years, you will still know this person that you’re married to. But if you’ve poured everything into your kids, if your world has completely revolved around your kids, if the kids have been the center of your universe, if your kids have completely defined who you are, then this transition is going to be incredibly difficult because your marriage will have gotten lost.

Romance isn’t an option. If your marriage is going to make it for the long-haul, from newlyweds to empty nesters, romance is critically important. Change your routine. Plan a romantic getaway. At the very least, plan a romantic evening. Book your babysitter without apology and keep those romantic fires burning.

All these wrong turns we’ve talked about today are intertwined. And they all add up to a mountain of a problem in our marriages. If you’re always on the go with the kids, always racing through your day, you won’t have any romantic time with your spouse. If the roles in your family are confused, there will be a loss of respect and a resentment that will supersede any romantic thoughts or feelings.

Kids are a gift from the Lord and they are a challenge to your marriage…all at the same time. That’s why God has given us some clear direction in His Word about how we can navigate this particular turn in the marriage maze...He’s shown us how to raise godly children and still have a marriage left after the kids are grown and gone.

Mike Edmisten

Tags: children, kids, marriage, parenting, romance