My dad was famous for telling lots of other men and me, "Hug Your Honey." What did he mean? Why did he say it? And, why you should do the same as a husband or a wife.

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Church and Family Life exists to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture. It's such a delight to extol the goodness of God in His Word. Today we're here to talk about marriage and so Jason this is this is pretty neat, huh? I thought we were here to talk about your dad.

Well we are, yeah. So my dad, my dad pretty regularly would stop me in the hall or wherever and he would say, son, hug your honey. I don't know how many times he said that to me. I mean, I hate to break it to you, and I'm sure you were very special to him, Scott, but he did say that to everyone. I know.

Isn't that amazing? I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't say that to me 100 times. Oh my, wow. I know him a long time. Yeah, you did know him a long time.

But not as long as you. Yeah. So he died about a year ago, and our family had a wonderful time in his graveside just reminiscing and things like that, singing some of his favorite songs. It was such a sweet thing. If you ask the people who knew him well, give me five Bill Brown-isms, number two or number three would probably be Hug Your Honey.

That's great. My dad loved me and he wanted me to love my wife. He wanted me to be very tender and very present with Deborah. And I think there were times he thought maybe I was a little bit too involved in everything else. And so he would say, hug your honey.

Yeah, here's what I wrote down in my prep notes. Hug your honey equals make sure to take time to lavish attention on Janet. So he knew Janet as well as he knew me. I'm married to Janet. And he wanted to exhort me to take time to make sure I was taking time to lavish attention on Janet and not bypassing that.

Yeah, he wasn't saying go give the girl a hug. Yeah. It wasn't like that here go hug her. No. Well, probably included that, but he meant, hey, spend a lot of time with that girl.

He meant, don't be so busy. He meant... Oh, here's another thing he would say often, right on the heels of that, smell the roses. 00.00 You were special on that one. I didn't get a lot of smell the roses out of Bill Brown.

00.00 Yeah. I mean, he wanted me to just have lots of just casual time with her. I think it was the Bill Brown exposition on Ephesians 5, 28 and 29. Let me read that. Ephesians 5, 28 and 29.

So husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it just as the Lord does the church. So I think Hug Your Honey was an exposition on husbands nourishing and cherishing their wives. Making time for that, doing it proactively, making sure that it didn't get lost in the busyness of life.

Hug your honey. Hug your honey. Now, also, I would just like to make the point that when I hear the term hug your honey, I think it goes both ways. I think husbands and wives need to have that same mentality that my dad was talking about. Of course, he was talking to men, he was talking to husbands about that.

And he, as you say, was speaking of Ephesians 5, there's no question about it, and the other passages of Scripture that speak about husbands and wives. Now, my dad and my mom, they really had a wonderful marriage. They were together all the time. They did everything together. Even when they moved into our house, you know, 17 years before my dad died, they had a little living room in our house.

And whenever I'd walk by it, they would be... My dad would be reading to her or she would be reading to him, or they would be listening to an audio Bible, or they'd be listening to a radio broadcast, always having to do something with the kingdom of God, or Christian living. And that's what they did. They were always reading to each other. It was really neat to walk by and just see that.

A few years ago, our church had a married couples night. It was just married couples. We had a nice meal together. And then I gave a few remarks. It probably wasn't 15 minutes long, but I titled the remarks Dome Incorporated.

So I'm a dome, that's our last name, and I wanted to talk about the business side of marriage. Any young couples that don't think there's a business side of marriage. I haven't been married very long, don't have very many children, haven't had sort of the obligations pile up over the decades. But if God has given you children and God has given you more obligations, then you do have a business side of your marriage, and it's not bad, it's actually necessary. It brings order to life and allows you to function.

But you better have more than Dome Incorporated. You better have more than Brown Incorporated. And I think Hug Your Honey maybe encapsulated the essence of that is, hey, maybe make sure that there's more happening under your roof than just the trains running on time. You know, marriage is about more than just having a well-oiled machine that functions properly. There needs to be friendship and laughter, compatibility, love, passion.

All of that, I think, is wrapped up in Hug Your Honey. You know, when our last child was married, I determined that I was going to spend a lot more time with Debra, just running errands, going to the store, stuff like that. So that's what I've been doing. I've spent more time with her just driving around on something she's doing really than any time in our lives. It's been really fun.

The other day we were driving around and I said, Deb, it's really fun wasting time with you. Of course, since she hit me, but she knew what I meant. It was just nice to sit together and drive or sit together and not be so driven. See, you were obeying your father. I was obeying my father.

You know, Solomon said that there's a time to embrace, and there's a time to refrain from embracing. And if you're married, it's not the time to refrain from embracing. Right. It's the time to embrace. You're not in the time of your life to refrain.

Now, couples often fall out of embracing, either physically or in their hearts. Or both. Or both. So I think we're here to say, y'all embrace. This is a time for embracing.

That's the time in your life. God gives you seasons in your life, and when you're married, it's the time for embracing. Mm-hmm. When you think about Ephesians 5 and the truth that Paul is pressing on us there, that marriage is a picture of the gospel, It really is the preaching of a false gospel to have the dome marriage be nothing more than dome incorporated. Shame for shame.

And there have been seasons where it's been a lot of dome incorporated, and I would say to myself, for shame. That's not the right preaching of the gospel. You know, it's interesting if you look at the way the family life codes are framed. Like you brought us to Ephesians 5. Well, this is in the section of Ephesians, which are called the family life codes.

It begins with wives and then to husbands and then to children and then to servants, okay? And those are the family life codes. But at the beginning of the family life codes is the magic of it, is the engine of it, is the sweetness of it. Because in Ephesians 5 18, the apostle exhorts, you know, do not be drunk with wine, but be filled with the Holy Spirit. And then in the church you start speaking to one another, in the family you have a wife who's submissive and you have a husband who loves his wife, you have children who obey their parents, you have fathers that don't exasperate their children.

But it all hinges on the filling of the Holy Spirit, be filled with the Holy Spirit. It's the Holy Spirit that creates the sweetness. Like you said, it's not just the business, it's the Spirit. It's the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of love and joy and peace and patience and kindness. Everything in the family hinges on the work of the Spirit.

Isn't that amazing? Yeah, love is the centerpiece of the household codes, but the problem is you can actually do the peripheral things without the love and somehow feel like you're compliant with the household codes. Wait, no, love was the centerpiece of these things. You know, Paul says in Ephesians 4, 31 and 32, and do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you with all malice, and be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as Christ forgave you." Now, that passage addresses the things that drive you apart, that keep you from embracing, because it's the time for embracing, and the devil does not want you embracing like that.

And it's interesting that in what I just read in Ephesians, he really frames this in the way that it works out in a sequence. He starts with bitterness. That starts in the heart. And then it escalates to wrath, and then it escalates to anger, then it escalates to clamor, and then it escalates to evil speaking. It starts from the inside and it works its way out in really dramatic ways.

But rather, then he says, but rather be kind, say things that are kind, and be tender-hearted. In other words, feel that other person's pain. And then thirdly, be forgiving. So he talks about the things that well up beginning in your heart and you start to do them. And then he says, no, but then do these things.

You know, it's a time for embracing. And, you know, I don't know who's listening to this, but my guess is that there may be some people who fall into bitterness, and it's escalating. And so he says, no, no, be kind, be tenderhearted, be forgiving. Pete Slauson whenever I'm sizing up a man, I really want one of the key things, maybe the key thing I wanna do is to observe his wife. So Scott, I mean, your mom has been sort of a flourishing woman.

That's how I would describe her. She's flourishing. She's always been flourishing. And to me, that reflected so well on your dad. I wanted marriage counsel from your dad.

Hug your honey hit like a ton of bricks because it came from a man whose wife was flourishing. It was clear he was hugging his honey with all that meant. 11 And by the way, that deposit that my dad made and my mom lives on, like she hasn't fallen off the edge of the earth now that he's gone, because her strength was in the Lord. It was the Lord that always sustained her, but she did have a husband that really cared a lot about her and spent so much time with her. And maybe in somebody's calculations would say he was wasting time with her.

Never. Never. So here's one thing this means. Don't let sexual intimacy die in your marriage. The Bible actually commands couples not to let sexual intimacy die.

1 Corinthians 7 makes that really clear. Verse three, let the husband render to his wife the affection do her, and likewise also the wife to her husband. And then he says, do not deprive one another. God desires husbands and wives to be close, like skin close. And that dies away often in marriages and sexual intimacy dies.

And it never dies by itself. It's attached to a lot of other things. So people who think they can drop that element out of their marriage, either wives who think they can or husbands or both, you'll not just lose that in isolation. You'll lose laughter, you'll invite tension. There's a lot of tentacles to that beast.

Yeah. And the sexual relationship is a picture of Christ's intimacy with His Church. Ephesians 5 makes that so clear. When you get to the end, He says, this is a mystery, and he's talking about sexual intimacy and his love for the church. The two become one flesh.

The two become one flesh, they're totally connected. So don't let sex die in your marriage. We have a duty before God to hug our honeys. And that means that we're paying attention to them. We are kind and tender-hearted toward them.

So... Nourishing, cherishing. Nourishing and cherishing. I think that's it. I think that's what my dad meant when he said, hug your honey.

I'm so glad he said that. And I was aware that he said it to a lot of guys, but I wasn't aware that he might have said it to you a hundred times. You know, for people who are watching the podcast, it wasn't a trite phrase. It might sound like that on a podcast, but coming from Bill Brown and knowing him, knowing his marriage and knowing what he meant by that, it was no trite phrase. Oh, he was looking you in the eyeballs.

Yeah, yeah. When he said that, son, hug your honey. It was a command from a Texan. That's exactly right. Wow.

Well, it's been a joy to talk about this. It has. Jason, I've really, really been thankful for the conversation. Brings up some good memories. Yeah, it sure does.

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