Everyone who gets married wants to stay best friends in marriage. Why do so many fail in this task, so that their marriages become little more than two ships passing in the night? To answer this critical question, we need to understand what friendship is. We also need to understand our need for friendship—particularly marital friendship. We stay best friends in marriage, under God, primarily through sharing. The more we share, the more intimate our marriage will be. 

The National Center for Family Integrated Churches welcomes Joel Beekie with the message Friendship in Marriage. Okay, welcome. I'd like to read two verses. Proverbs 18 verse 24. There is a friend that sticks closer than a brother.

And Song of Solomon 5 verse 16, this is my beloved and this is my friend. Let's pray together. Great God of heaven, we pray that we may be as husbands and wives, each other's intimate and best and personal friends, our first confidant next to thee, and that our relationship with thee may graciously move us to have open and vulnerable and intimate friendship with our spouses. And grant, Lord, to those who are not married that this talk may do a world of good to show them what they need to expect and may expect by thy grace in marriage when genuine friendship is pursued in the Lord Jesus Christ. Bless our time together now we pray in Jesus name.

Amen. Well, next to spiritual life in the Lord Jesus Christ, close, intimate friendship with one's spouse is life's greatest gift. I have the privilege of being involved in a significant number of ministries and tasks and responsibilities, but I treasure my friendship with my wife more than any of them. I really can honestly say to you that my wife is my very best friend by far, and I love her more than I can put into words. And so I hope that what I'm going to bring to you today in this session is a reflection of our own relationship of 22 years of wonderful marriage by the grace of God.

Now, I'm defining friendship as a personal bond of shared life in Jesus Christ. A personal bond of shared life in Jesus Christ. This mutual bond is a bond of faithfulness. And it's the highest form of a covenant bond that we can experience horizontally in this world. Friendship, I say, is a bond of shared life.

Deuteronomy 13 verse six says, thy friend which is as thine own soul. That's an Interesting expression, isn't it? Losing such a friend will be like death to you. It's like you're losing your soul. Your lives are bound together so much that whatever touches your friend touches you.

So friendship is like the force that holds together the nucleus of an atom. It's an intimate bond that holds us together when other forces would push us apart. The stronger friendship is, the closer intimacy is. The closer intimacy is in Christ, the better your marriage. R.C.

Sproul said, in modern usage, the term intimacy suggests merely a sexual relationship, but the word goes much deeper than that. In its broad meaning, intimacy moves beyond the external and the superficial and penetrates the innermost dimensions of our life. So as a bond of shared life, friendship brings our hearts and minds together in harmony. You can work together with someone on a project and actually work fairly closely, but have a very different mindset. But friendship requires kindred spirits.

Your hearts and your minds, we say, are on the same wavelength. So after a while, you don't even have to sometimes even ask what your partner's thinking because, well, you know. You're like two strings on a well-tuned guitar. When one is plucked, the other string vibrates in harmony. Well, in choosing a marriage partner, we ought to look for this kind of harmony, at least to some degree.

It grows in marriage, of course, But we ought to look for commitment and companionship and closeness. We want to be best friends. Now true friendship is as precious as it is rare. The concept of friendship has become very shallow today. My experience as a pastor, I'm pastoring 700 people right now in Grand Rapids, I pastored about 700 in New Jersey.

And there's nothing more tragic than loneliness in marriage. You can live in the same house, have the same joint bank accounts, sleep in the same bed without being true closest friends. And you're far away from that statement I quoted last night of Thomas Gadigar, aren't you? There's no friendship or relationship more near, more entire, more needful, more kindly, more delightful, more comfortable, more constant, more continual than the friendship of man and wife. Now in the library we built up in Grand Rapids in our seminary we have probably 500 to 600 books on marriage And you know I could only find a couple of books, I think two, that have a chapter on friendship and marriage.

It boggles my mind. Friendship is the most underrated commodity of a very good marriage you could possibly imagine. So what I want to do in this hour with you is I want to look at three things. First, the foundation of friendship. Second, how to cultivate friendship.

And third, the temptations that challenge friendship in marriage. So first the foundation, look at the theological foundation here. That will be the only part that might be a little challenging for the children perhaps. But secondly, how to cultivate friendship, that's the practical part. And also the temptations of course will be practical as well.

What we need to realize is that the triune God who said let us make man in our image is a plurality of persons in one essence so that God himself engages in friendship in his own inter-trinitarian relationship. And In establishing a pattern of human relationships, he wants us to image him in that friendship. So it's beyond our comprehension, but by faith we believe that authentic friendship in Christ is rooted in the relationship of the three persons of the Trinity with each other. Now, the Trinity has chosen to display his glory and his friendship and our humanity, our gender differences in our relationships with each other. So Genesis 1 27 says, God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them.

So there's one humanity, but there are two sexes, male and female, distinct from each other and both essential, of course, to human reproduction. So as different as male and female are, they are brought together in marriage on the basis of their common humanity. And the Bible says marriage is honorable in all. But when we marry in the Lord, you see we have this extra connection, this extra dimension that is really foundational to real friendship. We have a threefold core between Christ, husband, and wife that is not easily broken.

There's an earthly tri-dash unity that reflects the Trinity in heaven. So the bond that I feel with my wife by which I experience that we too are one should help me to know God better in his three oneness and to understand just a bit more how there can be three persons in one essence. So the purpose of marriage, you see, is far more than emotional satisfaction or the fulfillment of physical desires. When you're married together and you live together in love as heirs of the grace of God you aim to glorify Him who is Himself a community of interrelationship and of intimate friendship. Now God's intent for this intimate friendship is clarified by the very way he created woman.

He says it's not good for man to be alone. I'll make a help. So Adam looked around. He saw no animal with which he could bond in intimate friendship. God supplied the woman out of Adam's own side.

And so man's well-being depended on having a companion who could come to his aid in time of need and unite with him in doing God's will in the world, a true friend. And you know the remarkable description. God takes the rib out of man, forms the woman, says a man shall leave his father and mother, shall cleave to his wife, they shall be one flesh, and they were both naked and were not ashamed. There's a oneness here. There's a special, unique relationship, a mutual commitment, and total openness pre-fall that was unspeakable.

But sadly, you know the story, of course. Our parents, our first parents, fell into sin, and their corruption had dire effects on their marriage. The first marriage was about ready to split up really. The woman thou gave us to be with me said Adam, she gave me of the tree and I did eat. But God intervened with the promise of the Messiah, Genesis 3.15, I'm sure you know the text well, that the woman and her seed would wage war against Satan and the covenant that man and woman were making with Satan.

God would come to destroy that covenant and would give new life. And Adam believes God's promise. He turns to his wife and he says, your name is not just woman anymore, but your name is Eve. And Eve in Hebrew means living, life, because you would produce seed that would live in the Messiah to come. And so God intervenes wondrously as he did not intervene in the fallen angelic world.

The devils have no possibility of salvation, but he intervenes in the fallen human world and he says I will restore your relationship with me and Jesus Christ and then through me I'll restore your relationship with one another. So Adam and Eve walked out of paradise broken. They had to be excluded from paradise, but they already had the promise of being reunited as best friends through the coming Messiah. Well, that then is the theological foundation of friendship in marriage. We are reunited in the Lord Jesus Christ and called to be best friends as a reflection of the friendship of the triune God.

Even though our friendship here is always imperfect and the and the triune God is perfect, we are to reflect that very much the same way as we've been hearing from Ephesians 5. The husband is to reflect Christ, the perfect Christ, in his love for the church and the bride to reflect the church's love to Christ. Well, let's move then to point two. How do you cultivate friendship in marriage? Cultivation is rooted in farm work.

Seed is sown, tender plants spring up, they cannot flourish if they're not cultivated. Cultivation is rewarding work. It results in an abundant harvest when God gives the increase. But it's also hard work. And so cultivating friendship in marriage is work.

In some marriages it's very hard work. Other marriages tend to just kind of naturally flow together like a happy bubbling stream And I'm blessed, really blessed with one of those marriages. I would say quite freely to you, if I would ever get in an argument with my wife, it would definitely be my fault. She's just really easy, wonderful friend and easy to get along with at the deepest level and that's that's a great blessing but you need to accept however much your partner has in terms of friendship capability and also how much work it takes to really be a close friend with your partner, how much baggage your partner might bring into the relationship, you need to accept that and be willing to put the amount of work into it to cultivate that friendship. So true friendship often relies on lots of cultivation, uprooting bad attitudes, planting daily seeds of love towards one another, pulling out weeds, eliminating pests that threaten to choke the relationship, watering the tender plants with daily prayer, and then taking the time to reap a harvest of love and to enjoy each other's company.

So we need to resist laziness and ingratitude that often creep into marriage if you're going to be a true and best friend of your spouse. Think about it this way. Before you were married, you invested a lot of time in your present spouse. You couldn't wait to be together. You made time for each other.

You sent each other love notes. You talked often on the phone together, you paid each other compliments, you brought each other gifts, you gave each other hugs, you shared each other's daily joys and trials, and you complimented each other constantly. After you marry, when you start giving up these things, you chip away at your friendship. You know, I've been a pastor now for 33, 34 years, and I have yet to have to counsel one couple on anything substantially wrong in their marriage in 34 years. And I've counseled hundreds of couples where both people are still complimenting each other every single day.

Her husband and wife are constantly telling each other how special they are in a variety of ways. Just that attitude of support and love that undergirds friendship has a way of staving off all kinds of problems in marriage. The tender plant of friendship will languish and die away, where friendship does not persist and deepen and grow automatically. I tell my wife often, I love you more than yesterday and less than tomorrow. Because it's a growing relationship, it's a growing friendship.

When you're just married, you think you can't possibly love your wife anymore than you do, and then after the honeymoon you say, this is the apex, but one year later you say, no, it's deeper, and then 10 years later, 20 years later you say, it's far, far deeper. A little bit of the initial ecstasy may not be always at such a high level, but the waters run much deeper, and the appreciation, the friendship is much more profound, and the trust is absolutely stunningly beautiful. So what happens, you see, when married people go the other way and they take each other for granted, what happens is that they become independent rather than more interdependent. And so they wake up six years later one morning they look at their partner and sleep in the same bed and they say I don't even know you anymore who is this person laying beside me in bed we've got three children together she's busy with the children I'm busy with my work We hardly have time for each other and we hardly know each other. Well that's a disaster.

That relationship is going the wrong direction. The Song of Solomon 5 16 the bride says of her husband, this is my beloved and this is my friend. And she describes him in all kinds of glowing terms. And she loses a sense of words. She runs out of words.

She can't explain how wonderful he is, what a great friend he is. So she finally cries out, he is altogether lovely. He is the chief among 10, 000. He is white and ruddy. Of course, that's the bride speaking about the Lord Jesus Christ ultimately, but it's also in a natural relationship of marriage, a wife speaking about her husband, and for that matter, a husband speaking about his wife.

So friendship is very profound. It has many different aspects, but what I'm suggesting to you, when we cultivate friendship, we need to cultivate what the New Testament calls koinonia. Koinonia. It's a Greek word that really stands for fellowship, the fellowship of sharing, The fellowship of communing with each other. And it means to share each other's joys, to share each other's burdens, to share each other's intimate desires, hopes and dreams so that you're truly involved in each other's life.

First John 1-3 says, that which we have seen and heard declare unto you that we may have fellowship, that you may have fellowship with us and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. So as members of the body of Christ, a husband and wife through the Gospel of Reconciliation are brought into love with one another into genuine friendship and fellowship through the Father and through the Son by the indwelling Holy Spirit. So what exactly then do we have to cultivate? Let me give you four or five things. Number one, you cultivate friendship by sharing yourself.

Jesus said in John 15, 15, Henceforth I call you not servants, for the servant knoweth not what his Lord doeth. But I've called you friends, for all things that I've heard of my Father I've made known unto you." You see, Christ's words remind us that sharing ourselves is the heart of friendship. We must love each other as Christ loved us. Walk in love as Christ also have loved us, Ephesians 5 verse 2 says. One time a woman said to me that her husband, after he'd been gone four or five hours, she asked him, where were you?

What have you been doing? And he said, I didn't ask you what you did today, did I? Don't ask me what I did. Well, that is a total disaster for friendship. A man who treats his wife this way has a servant in his house, not a friend.

Jesus said, a friend is Not someone who just gives commands, but someone who shares what's on his mind and what's on his heart. A Puritan, Richard Baxter, said this, "'Tis a mercy to have a faithful friend who loves you entirely and is as true to you as yourself, to whom you may open your mind, communicate your affairs, and it will be ready to strengthen you and divide the cares of your affairs and family with you, and help you to bear your burdens and comfort you in your sorrows, and be the daily companion of your life, and partake of all your joys and sorrows. That is friendship. Now when you marry, you marry in the Lord and you enter into this covenant of companionship. Malachi 2.14, I read last night, says your wife is the wife of your youth, she's your companion, and the wife of your covenant.

You promise to walk together. You commit to these two shall be one in your pilgrimage of life. And So really what you need to do is you need to cultivate what I'm calling the five T's of companionship. Giving each other time, giving each other thought, giving each other talk, giving each other tenderness, and giving each other touch. The five T's of companionship.

You know, there's no time, there's no substitute for spending time together. How great of a Christian could you be if you spent 10 minutes a day in prayer? And that was it. He said, 23 hours and 50 minutes, I'll be talking to other people or talking to myself. In 10 minutes a day, I'll be talking to God.

You know your spiritual life isn't gonna grow. Is your marriage gonna grow? You spend 10 minutes a day talking to your wife? No you've got to have a concern for togetherness. You've got to have time together.

Friendship cannot be warmed up by 30 seconds in the microwave. It's not an instant thing. There's no rush orders in friendship. It costs you yourself, your commitment, your vulnerability. Friendship is baked slowly, gently, continually.

If you want to get the flavor you're looking for. Now one aspect of sharing your minds and hearts is discussing major decisions together and waiting until you have unity before you move ahead. Most women just love it when their husbands sit down and say, well here's a decision we need to make. I just want to talk it over with you. We want to be on the same page.

And you talk about it. It takes a half an hour, it takes two hours, three hours. You talk all the pros and cons and you come to a mutual decision. You know, in real loving headship, 99.9% of the time, You don't have to say to your wife, I am making this decision, even though I realize that you have different feelings about it. Because you've talked it over.

You've come to a mutual decision. And you as head of the home then implement that decision. That's the way it should be. Now once in a while you need to make a decision perhaps that your wife does not agree with. In fact, Most of the time that I have to do that, I must be honest with you, most time I have to do that is because my wife wants me to go the way I think I should go, but I actually make the decision to go the way she thinks we should go.

Because I think her feelings often are more strong than mine in that particular area, and it's a neutral area when it comes to the Bible. So I make the decision to do what she wants to do, rather than what I want to do, even though she says, no, I think we should do what you want to do. You see, when you operate on a friendship in that way, you treasure one another and you value your partner's feelings more than your own. And you actually see your partner, your marital partner, as a gift of God to you that is far more valuable than you being a gift of God to her. In our bathroom, we have a little plaque that we've got hung up just above the sink, and it says, a good marriage is where both partners feel they get the better end of the deal.

And it's half facetious, but there's a lot of truth in that. I mean, I always tell my wife, I married up. And she tells people, I married up. Well, that's a great feeling. I mean, she is far better person than I am.

She thinks I'm a far better person than she is. Well, that kind of love and that kind of respect is good grounding for good friendship. When you really deeply believe in the bottom of your heart, the better my kids, the more my kids turn out like my wife, the better off they are. And she says, the more my kids turn out like my husband, the better off they are. That's a great feeling.

Well, what you need then is you need this listening ability to listen, to talk, to share, to come to decisions together and to Implement them in a loving manner. As Christ loves the church, so ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. You need to be connected to her in conversation and share yourself to love her that way. Number two, cultivating friendship by sharing your faith. Sharing your faith.

You can't be each other's bosom friends, as it were, if you don't share your deepest spiritual fellowship with God, with your wife. Now you need to keep that up in a whole bunch of ways. In our family, we're blessed that way because we've been doing this since, well, for 20 years now. With daily family worship, I often share my deepest personal experiences with my whole family if it's connected with the text we're studying that particular day. Because I believe that what's important is only to exegete the word of God for my children and to instruct them face to face through questions and answers and my comments every single day from the word of God.

I believe that's absolutely critical. That's the most important thing I do in this world. But I also want them to know how this passage impacts a believer and if I've had something personally experienced in my life that's connected to it I want them to know so they can feel from me the reality of Christianity that flows out of this text. And when you can speak with your whole family that way, guess what, you can speak with your whole family about anything, anything. So if you can speak about your deepest spiritual feelings with your wife, and then even by extension with your children, you have a very open relationship in your family.

I remember when I had to first sit down with my son, my firstborn, and explain to him the facts of life. I wasn't nervous but I was just a little uneasy about how it would go. I knew I had a very open relationship with him, okay that's wonderful, but when I actually got into it it was so incredibly easy And he felt it was very easy too. I mean, he just said, okay, that's fine, Dad, thanks a lot. And if I have any more questions, I'll come to you.

And what's Mom having for supper? I mean, no big deal. Because we had shared the most profound, intimate things with each other about each other's soul exercises, sharing the facts about physical dimensions of life seemed rather banal, common, easy. And so it is spiritually, you see, if you can share with your wife your most profound spiritual experiences, your deepest wrestlings, your struggles maybe with private prayer or your, if you talk on a regular basis after each sermon, Say, how did your soul fare today? That's one of my favorite questions to ask my wife after we come out of church.

We're driving home, I'll say, how did your soul prosper under the sermon today? And she'll tell me openly, honestly. And I'll tell her. When My kids will be in the back seat, sometimes they'll listen, sometimes they won't bother to listen. They've heard it so often.

But you see, when you go to bed at night and you get down on your knees together and your wife prays one night and you pray, I hope you do that, I hope you share, I hope you hear your wife pray too, men. They bring a feminine dimension to prayer that's very important. And you pray together. That's a wonderful time too to share your fears, your hopes, your dreams, your joys. Doesn't mean you always feel completely ready to do all that sharing, but it's very important.

There are some frustrations. My wife worries a lot more than I do, actually. I learned early in my marriage, I said, well, you're so good at worrying, I'll just give the whole worry department over to you. But she worries about the children a lot. And so when we get to bed at night, she'll often talk to me about those worries.

Now, honestly, I don't always feel like I wanna hear a bunch of things about worries about children. But that's part of friendship. And so I listen and I respond. And sometimes I understand she doesn't really want answers, she just wants me to listen. And that's the way women are wired.

We men, it's hard for us to understand that. You know, you got problem A, here's the answer to problem A, let's move on. Women aren't that way. In fact, if you give an answer to problem A too quickly, They want to talk more about it, and the answer comes too quickly. So you've got to talk about it.

You've got to understand what makes your wife tick in that way. But sharing your faith, you see, involves that you can share the most intimate things through prayer, through talk, through spiritual conversation. And that then is the foundation for the friendship and the rest of your marriage. You know, John Calvin said that if he had one person that he could pick, that he would desire to travel to eternity and to meet the judge of heaven and earth beside his own self, he would go to eternity wearing the shoes of his wife. He'd go in her shoes, because he had so much respect for her godliness.

That's great if you can say that about the person you live with. But you see, I can look at my wife and say, I profoundly respect her spirituality. And I love that about her. And that bonds me to her like nothing else can do that. I know she doesn't house one secret from me and I don't house one secret from her.

And I love that. That makes you close, that makes you intimate. That's what you want to aim for. Well, maybe you can't reach that in a day or a week, but that's got to be your goal. And that means that when either person wants to pray together, Say it's three o'clock in the afternoon, you happen to be home and maybe your wife raises a problem about the children, she says, can we pray about it, honey?

That means yes, you always pray. You put down your book or your tools or you turn away from the screen and you pray. The same thing vice versa. When your husband comes to you and has some need, pray together, pray together, pray together. In fact, the very first thing to do is to pray together before you even start to talk.

If you know what the problem is, bring it to the Lord. John Bunyan said you can do more than pray after you pray but you can't do more than pray until you prayed. Number three, cultivate friendship by sharing your trust. I plight thee my trough is the old traditional wedding vow, at least part of it. It means I pledge my trustworthiness and fidelity to you.

We need more of that don't we in most marriages. There's a friend that sticks closer than a brother. Cultivate with your spouse a commitment that is more intimate and enduring than blood relations. Superglue your hearts together in an unbreakable bond. Don't be a fair-weather friend.

Before you are married, you lavish gifts and attention on each other. But will you keep your trough when your initial romance wears down? Let your spouse know through consistent faithfulness that you can be relied upon in good times and bad. And that means, wives, don't be resentful of your husband's job if it takes him away from you more than you like. Or, husbands, don't be disappointed if your wife isn't as slim and cheerful as she was before having three children or 10 children.

Don't give way to such resentments. Don't make comparisons or covet other people's mates. Keep your hearts open to each other so that when your spouse talks to you, you don't respond with a deaf ear or a critical spirit. Trustworthiness nurtures more trust. Don't ever even think about flirting with someone else.

Let your marriage be a cozy, loving relationship so that when your husband walks into the home, he feels like he's walking into a warm hearth. This is the best, the most familiar, the most intimate place on earth for him to be. The most wonderful, warm situation he can possibly imagine. You see, a good marriage is like, well, when you see each other's lights slipping into a pair of old shoes, pardon the comparison here, But I don't know about you, but I hate going shoe shopping, buying new shoes, and having to try to fit them out, and they're uncomfortable, and you're walking around, and your feet hurt. It's so much better to just slip into old shoes.

It's all familiar. And a good relationship is like that. It's wonderful, warm, cozy feeling of trust that builds over years and years of marriage. You know your partner would do anything for you. You do anything for her.

When you see each other your heart skips a beat. When she comes around the corner, you love her, you can't wait to have her in your arms. It's just wonderful. I asked my wife actually quite often, do you ever get sick and tired of me telling you how many times I love you? I just, she's special.

And it's that warm feeling of friendship that expresses the friendship, that makes the friendship keep on ticking and keep on getting deeper. But I'll tell you, it's easy to break it. If you're not confidential, if you don't use discretion, if you believe false rumors that others might be saying about your partner, you can break the friendship quickly. He that repeateth the matter, separateeth very friends. A froward man soweth strife, and a whisperer separateeth chief friends.

Don't believe everything everybody says about your spouse. There may be times your spouse may slip. There may be times your spouse needs confrontation. But don't believe everything everyone says. But don't also break your spouse's confidentiality.

I'm a minister of the Gospel, my wife knows everything about me. She could ruin my marriage very easily if she weren't confidential. Of course she could. A woman can make or break a man. A man can make or break a woman.

But when you trust each other fully, that trust needs to abide. That's why Proverbs 31 says the heart of her husband safely trusts in her. She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life. And number four, cultivate friendship by sharing your joy. Friendship is ruined when people have a whining, complaining, and otherwise ventilating negative personality and engage in various forms of murmuring.

The Bible speaks against murmuring seriously. Murmuring cost the Israelites 40 years in the wilderness. A sense of humor, smiles, warmth, optimism, are all important ways to encourage each other's best friends, develop a joyful spirit in the Lord Jesus Christ. Proverbs 17, 22 says, a merry heart doeth good like a medicine, but a broken spirit dries up the bones. In good friendship, you know how to laugh together and cry together and speak together, and you can move from the spiritual to the natural to the humorous back to the spiritual spontaneously, naturally, without any artificiality.

Cultivating joy does not depend on physical circumstances. To be of good cheer is an imperative at all times. Proverbs 15 says, all the days of the afflicted are evil, but he that is of a merry heart has a continual feast. Better is little with the fear of the Lord than great treasure and trouble therewith. If you have each other's love and you fear the Lord, you can feast on inward joys, even if you have nothing but peanut butter sandwiches.

It's all right. You rejoice in each other. You lead your family in giving thanks. We were on vacation once, and we went to a really good restaurant. I thought, I really treat my wife well, and kids.

Oh man, it took, I don't know, two and a half hours, the whole thing. It was a long, drawn out affair, and we were missing some of the sights in the town and it really wasn't that great of an experience. It was a hefty bill and the next day at lunchtime my wife literally had bought a loaf of bread with peanut butter and a knife, and we sat by a beautiful lake and just had peanut butter sandwiches. And it was a much greater meal than the night before because we were together. We were enjoying nature.

We were talking better around peanut butter sandwiches than we were around prime rib. So, when husband and wife take pleasure in each other, said Richard Baxter, it unites them in their duty, It helps them with ease to do their work, to bear their burdens. And this is a major part of the comfort of the married state. And so what you aim to do is you aim to please your spouse in areas where you know what pleases her and you you try to find it out over the years. My wife likes roses more than daisies.

I'd be a fool to go out and get her daisies instead of roses. Common sense. You learn to speak her language of love. There is a legitimacy here to that I believe. Learning what your spouse enjoys and giving that to her, providing, of course, it's not sinful in any way.

When we got married, we actually, it's amazing how similar we were. We talk about it all the time. It's astonishing, similar backgrounds. We actually had very few things to work on where we had differences but one of them was my driving. Now I'm a very careful driver I have always been a very careful driver and I'm convinced I've never driven sloppily But when I got married my wife has a father who I'll tell you if there's a child 150 feet off the road he slows down while he's driving down the road because the child to him is very close to the road.

But to me that child's got to be come within 20 feet before I slow down because, well, the child's way up there. So my wife has an entirely different conception of distance than I do. With regard to tailgating, with regard, No. Because she has this, you see, and because she feels stronger about it than I do, and it's easier for me to change in her direction, of course I've changed. I'm such a much careful driver now.

Well, at least when she's in the car. Because I love her, and I don't want to get her upset, but this is common sense, isn't it? So you adjust in areas to please each other and that helps produce more joy in the relationship as well. So the more your lives overlap, the more areas of commonality you have, the more areas of intimacy you have, particularly if you have intimacy in the Lord Jesus Christ, but the more areas of common intimacy you have beneath that, the closer your friendship will be. And the beautiful thing about growing older together is that you actually start enjoying the same things which you didn't enjoy before because one partner enjoyed it, one partner didn't.

When I married my wife she was she was a great biker. She biked across America from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon. She biked for nine weeks in Europe. I'm good at sports, but somehow I just hate biking. I just don't like biking.

So, for the first years of our marriage, she would bike every morning and I would never join her. Biking to me is like pulling weeds in the garden. It's terrible. But one day I decided, well, she got so much out of biking, you know, I just want to be with her. Maybe I'll try it.

And it pleased her immensely. It pleased her so much that I thought, well, I'll go biking to please her again tomorrow, even though I don't like biking at all. I mean, the seat is very hard when you bike and everything. So the next day, I went biking again with her. Do you know that after about 20 times, I actually came to enjoy biking?

No, I miss it. I'll say to her in the morning, are we going to go biking? And we bike for 20 minutes every morning. So you see, you can actually, with a little effort, you can actually learn to enjoy each other's likes. Well, finally, let me talk a little bit about Temptations of friendship in marriage, temptations of friendship.

I'm just going to lay three before you, there are many more. First of all is the temptation of avoiding correction. Some people just don't want to have any trouble in their marriage, so they don't bother to correct each other about anything. And they end up doing things that irritate the partner for years on end. And they never say anything.

And so their friendship never reaches a very high level, because they're constantly living with these inner frustrations or when they finally do say something the volcano blows. That's not the way to function in a close friendship. In a close friendship if it's something minor yes Don't bother to say anything. It's minor. And ultimately, you're not going to change a person fundamentally, are you?

If you think you marry someone to change him, you're wrong. But in other areas where something really troubles you, you need to be able to constructively criticize each other. Council beautifies us. Proverbs 27 says, ointment and perfume rejoice the heart, so does the sweetness of a man's friend by hearty counsel. Open rebuke is better than secret love.

Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful." Now how do you criticize your wife without her being offended? Well, you do it the same way that Jesus criticized the seven churches of Asia and you do it the same way that Paul criticized all the churches he wrote to. We have models there and those models we can summarize in this simple language. They use what I call the sandwich principle. Jesus and Paul, when they approached these churches, so when you approach your wife or you approach your husband, you should use the same approach, they first complimented.

Paul said to the Corinthians, you're a wonderful church, I thank you so much for all the ways you've ministered to me, I pray for you daily, you're great. Basically is what he's saying. And Jesus said that to many of the churches. Well first he told them all the good things about themselves. Put down a slice of bread.

That's what you do, you say to your wife, I love you very much, you're a very special woman, I'm gonna trade you for all the billions of women in this world. I'd pick you out of the crowd. You're great, you're wonderful, you're special. I can't tell you how much I love you. You're beyond words.

That's how you start. You lay down this slice of bread. Then you put in your meat of criticism. And you say, well, whatever you say. What I'm concerned is, I'm concerned sometimes that you never seem to ask me about how my day went.

Let's say that was a problem. I would really like to share with you how my day went, but I seem to ask you about your day but you don't seem to return the favor. Would you mind? Don't get me wrong. I love you very much.

And you quickly put down the other slice on top of the meat. I love you very much. But could you kindly consider just asking me so I could share my day with you as well? She'll eat the sandwich. Because you see, you didn't threaten her whole personality.

But if you walked in the door and say no, I'm sick and tired of you not asking me about my day She might say well, I'm sick and tired of you baba baba and away you go But by using the sandwich principle you put things in a realistic perspective. You really aren't saying you're a lousy wife. You're saying there is one little particular area. I love you in so many ways. One little particular area I think you could improve on and I'd appreciate if you would.

That's the way to constructively criticize each other. Now, if your wife still blows up at you for preparing a nice sandwich for her, then you Just be patient and respond in love. And don't blow up in kind, as we just heard in the last talk. She blows up and says, what? You don't like my cooking?

Or what? You don't trust me when I'm away at the office? Or what? You expect me to spend more time with my in-laws who hate me and insult me I don't know whatever she says just relax do reflective listening so so you feel you really feel the in-laws really hate you, I'm really sorry to hear that. And then she'll express more, and she'll express more, and she'll express more.

But if you lovingly put your arm around her, or maybe she's not in the mood for that, if you lovingly just sit and give her good eye contact and talk with her, after a while when you're not responding in kind, she'll run out of bad things to say about the in-laws And she's going to then return to you and say, you know, I think I overdid it a bit. I'm really sorry. Thanks for being a good listener. And you can patch things up again. And my life isn't that way, of course.

Number two, the temptation of imbalance in other relationships. You need to be each other's best friend. You need to handle your other relationships well. Let me just say this to you. What that means is you need to put your relationship priority above and beyond, even the relationship with your parents, even the relationship with brothers and sisters.

Treat both families alike, give them about equal time. Both of you should have a little time, the husband should have a little time with some male friends where he goes out and does things and maybe once a week or whatever, work that out together. The woman with her female friends, that's fine. Maybe you don't even need to work out a system, maybe it doesn't happen that often, but What you need to understand is your marriage is your priority friendship and nothing should get in the way of that. So whatever you do with other friends make sure that you don't do anything that makes your marriage suffer.

And then finally the temptation of personal crises. A big part of bearing each other's burdens is to offer spiritual support when someone has fallen. You have married a sinner and they will fail you. Hopefully not in serious, fatal kind of sin, like adultery. That's possible, though.

But even in great disappointments, remember you've married a sinner. Don't expect perfection. Don't expect too much from a friendship. But try to help your spouse in a loving way. Try to deny yourself.

Share her burdens. Be honest with her, but be lovingly honest and steer her in the way of the Lord. A friend loves at all times, says Proverbs 17, verse 17. Be such a friend to your husband, and be such a friend to your wife. Stand with your spouse through thick and thin.

Well, that leads me then to this conclusion that our closest friendship with the Lord should never be trumped by our friendship with our spouse. But our friendship with the Lord should augment our friendship with our spouse. Ultimately we stand alone with God. Neither your wife nor husband nor any other friend can stand with you on the day of judgment. You will be responsible for all things before God.

Every other person, even your wife, is of relatively little importance on the day of judgment compared to God. I want to close with this parable. A man had three friends. He was charged with a serious crime and summoned to court. He went to his first friend for help, but all the friend could offer was a nice set of clothes to wear to his appearance before the judge.

The man went to his second friend, but that friend could only accompany him to the entrance of the courtroom. The third friend not only went with the man all the way into court, but pled his case so well that he was acquitted and set free. Now what does the parable mean? A dying man has three friends. The first friend is his material wealth.

All this friend can offer is a suit to be buried in. The second friend represents dear ones on earth who love him, but they can only accompany him to death's door. The third friend is the Lord Jesus Christ, who's with us through life and through death, and he will plead our case in heaven so that we are counted righteous by God through his own blood. He's the greatest friend that we and our spouses can ever have. Let's pray.

Gracious God we thank you so much for Jesus Christ the friend the ultimate friend that sticks closer than a brother. And we thank thee for friendship with our spouses that flows out of friendship with Jesus Christ. We pray that our marriages may be a reflection that a threefold cord indeed is not easily broken. Help us to strengthen those friendships and to truly treasure our spouses as great and glorious and beautiful gifts of the Most High God. We ask all this in Jesus' name, Amen.

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