In his sermon, 'Don't Be Hard to Live With', Scott Brown explores the importance of living out sound doctrine in marriage and how God uses marriage to soften us. He reminds us that we are in the time for embracing and that marriage is designed to promote unity, reflecting the relationships between God and His people. Brown discusses the role of the Holy Spirit in a marriage, emphasizing that walking in the Spirit can make spouses easier to live with, fostering love, joy, peace, and patience. He also delves into the qualities that make someone hard to live with, such as narcissism, impatience, and rash words. Brown encourages listeners to be soft, merciful, and kind in their marriages, trusting in God's design and purpose for their lives.

You all are in the time of life. You're in the time for embracing. Solomon said that there's a time for everything under heaven and guess what? You're in the time for embracing for your whole life long. God is so good and He gives us such perfect and beautiful instructions for how to conduct our lives so that we're not just people who have sound doctrine in our heads, but we have the movement of it in our hearts.

And God has given such a beautiful picture for marriage for us. You know marriage doesn't have to be hard. Marriage is hard because we're hard And God uses marriage to soften us. Somebody described it as, it's like sculpture. You're knocking off the unnecessary, the distracting parts of the marble.

And you keep chipping it away until there's a picture that's really beautiful. And that's what God is doing through marriage. He gets us married, And He begins to chip away at us because we are hard. And we need to marry someone who's different than we are, even someone who has sinful patterns and wrong thinking. This is all sanctifying.

This is all helpful to us. But marriage is hard because we're hard. And God gives us His word to soften us, pours out His Spirit to sweeten us. And I'm just so thankful for what God has done in His word for us. I want to do three things in the next few minutes.

I want to go back to some of the basics because you've got to know what you're doing. You've got to know what you're doing when you're married. And secondly, I want to talk about the language of marriage. I'm going to give a flyover of some of the great explicitly marriage-oriented texts in the Bible. And then I want to end up talking about our life, our life together.

And I want to say, don't be hard to live with. Don't be hard. And God tells us how to soften in His Word. And in fact, frankly, I think all of the messages that we give here will have that effect. Jason is going to come and he's going to focus on 1 Corinthians 13.

That will be so helpful. What more do you need than 1 Corinthians 13 to operate your marriage? I pulled this book off of our book table just to sort of promote what Jason's going to talk about. Charity and its Fruits by Jonathan Edwards. This is Edwards' commentary on 1st Corinthians 13.

I highly, Highly recommend it to you. Maybe you've seen this book, Secrets of a Happy Home by J.R. Miller. He says some of the most compelling things in this book. The first home was a garden.

Every home should be a garden spot. You know, God really designed a home to be like a garden, to grow, to grow fruitful vines. And, you know, we need to recognize that the world began in a garden, and it actually ends in a garden. God created Adam and Eve, and He put them in a garden, in a temple, in a mountain, and then at the end of the age he brings Adam, the sons and daughters of Adam, the sons and daughters of God and he puts them in a garden, in a temple, in a mountain where there's rivers of water flowing and there's trees that bear fruit every month. God gives us these things to help us to understand how to live on the earth.

God gives us heaven to teach us about the earth and how to live. That's why Jesus taught his disciples to pray, Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Look at heaven. Keep your eyes fixed on heavenly things and learn how to live on the earth. And, but that's what J.R.

Miller is referring to when he says, our first home was a garden. An important part of our work in this world is garden making. We ought to make our homes as beautiful as we can. They can be very plain, perhaps only two or three rooms, but we should put into them all the lovely things we can gather. The first home in this world was in Eden.

We should try to make our homes Eden's. We should try to make our homes like the Garden of Eden. What a blessing. He continues, he says, he uses another image and another metaphor that comes out of Revelation 21 really all throughout the whole Bible about fountain, the rivers of the fountain of life. The Lord says, I will give of the fountain of the water of life freely to him who thirsts.

Well, here's what J.R. Miller says about the fountain of your home. Fountains are the divinely ordained, homes are the divinely ordained fountains of life. It is not by accident that men live in families rather than solitary. But the family is a garden.

The family is a fountain. The family should operate like a temple. That's why Matthew Henry preached a sermon in 1704 called The Church in the house. He said every family should be like a little church. The family is not the church, but it should be like a church in that sense where the Word of God rules and reigns.

Well, we talked about last night about these marvelous directions God has given us in Scripture to help us to understand what marriage is really all about. That we're living out a picture. We're painting a picture. We're living out a drama. We're dramatizing the love of God in Jesus Christ.

That's what marriage is all about. It's a living drama in the world. In the same way that Jesus Christ was the Word made flesh, so a husband is like the word made flesh so a wife is like the word made flesh in her home creating a garden creating a fountain of life you know that spreads out from one generation to the next this is the most important work in the world And so I wanted us last night to just establish that we're painting a picture. You know, I read in this book, I reread this again this morning, and J.R. Miller quotes an author who speaks of the meaning of the word wife.

What does the word wife mean? He's speaking the use of the word wife in the English tradition, in English dictionaries. He said, the wife is translated as a weaver. A wife is a weaver. I love that.

You know, you're weaving a tapestry of the beauty of the kingdom as a wife in your home. And there's so many pictures of it in the Bible. You know, so these are the basics. These are just the basics of life being married. You know, what's the most important thing in a marriage?

Live like a Christian. Be a Christian. It's a lot simpler than you might think. It's following Jesus Christ. And why is that so important?

I mean, where did marriage come from? Marriage is not of man's creation, but marriage was invented and ordained by God, by the great designer. And why did God create marriage? God created marriage so that man would have a companion. God created marriage so that husband and wife would jointly take dominion over this earth.

God created marriage for the increase of mankind through procreation. God created marriage for the bringing up of children and the training of the admonition of the Lord. God created marriage for the protection of the devastating effects of immorality. God created marriage for the preservation of the seed of the woman for the spread of the gospel to the ends of the earth. God created marriage to be a portrait of Jesus Christ's love for his church.

So all of this to say you're not your own, you're not living out your own story, so stop living your own life, your own story, and live the life of Jesus Christ. That's really the essence of I think everything that we've spoken of here so far. And this breaks down into the duties of a husband, the duties of a wife, which Dr. Beekie was speaking of and will continue to speak of throughout the day. I'm going to give you nine texts of Scripture just very quickly because we have to be calibrated by the Word of God.

Let God lead your life. Let God orient your thinking about how you're to be married. We all grow up with wrong ideas about what it means to be married. And we spend the rest of our lives, after we become Christians, having our minds washed and changed about the way that we think about everything. And that's the beauty of the Christian life because it's a life of beauty.

It's like a fountain. It's like a garden, and that's what God wants to do. But He can't, it doesn't happen unless your minds are washed and changed about what this thing is all about. I'm just going to give you nine texts of Scripture that are explicitly about marriage. Genesis chapter 2, 21 through 25.

The essence of marriage is unity. The two shall become one flesh. God created marriage to create unity between a husband and wife, which would mirror the unity of the Godhead. It's a sacred thing when a husband and wife come together, because they're actually manifesting the unity of the Godhead. Don't mess with God's design in marriage.

That's Genesis 2, 21 to 25. Genesis 3, 7 through 10. This has to do with the fall And the fact that we're fallen creatures and repentance is really the center of our need for everything in life. In Genesis 3, 7 through 10, there's the first awareness of fallenness. And that awareness immediately touched sexuality.

The man and the woman knew that they were naked and they were ashamed. And then Ephesians, chapter 5, 1 through 33, we've already spoken about this. I'm going to use the word power. The essence of marriage is the power of the Holy Spirit. The instruction about marriage comes in a whole context in Ephesians.

The context tightly is called the family life codes. But the family life codes begin with an admonition, with a command. Do not be drunk with wine but be filled with the Holy Spirit and then the Apostle begins to spin out different manifestations of the Holy Spirit and when a wife is filled with the Spirit she submits to her husband she respects him when a husband is filled with the Spirit He loves his wife like Christ loved the church. He nourishes her. He cherishes her.

He gives his life for her. And the two are one flesh. That's how you know when a husband is filled with the Holy Spirit is when He's loving His wife. And that's how you know when a wife completely trusts God and she's actually relinquished control of her life to God and she's able to submit to her husband in peace. She's not fretful.

She knows God's in control. She knows God's bigger than her husband. And so she can submit to Him because she knows that God is God. Here's a reality that I've been aware of for many years. The stateliest women, the most peaceful women I've ever known, understand submission.

Because they don't believe that anything can harm them. They believe that God is God. And they can actually submit to a husband who's not perfect. In the same way that a Christian can submit to a government, a secular government and be at peace in the midst of that. You know, I've spent the last couple of years just encouraging our church not to be fearful.

God is in control of the tyrants. God moves the tyrants. God moves the philosophies that moves the tyrants. You don't need to be afraid. God is in control of them.

They're nothing. The nations are counted as nothing, as less than nothing as Isaiah says. But a wife who trusts God can be at peace, even though her husband isn't operating with perfection. And no husband ever does. Ephesians 5, 1 through 33.

How is that possible? The power of the Holy Spirit. Do not be drunk with wine, but be filled with the Holy Spirit. Don't be controlled by anything. Don't be controlled by anything in this world, but by God and His Spirit.

And that is the essence of the power of marriage. It's the power of love. It's the power of submission and honor and respect. And then I'll use another word to speak of this same passage of Scripture, particularly Ephesians 5, 21-33. This is complementarity.

This has to do with the complementary roles of husband and wife, the gender roles that are different. We have different roles. God has designed a division of labor for marriage and there's a very clear understanding of gender distinctions. The genders are different, you know. Here's my advice to all of us.

Preach the binary. Live the binary. There is the binary. That's reality. The non-binary is not reality.

It's fake. And you have this matter of clear distinctions. 1 Peter 3, 1 through 6, I'll just use the word humility. Humility. Wives, likewise, be submissive to your own husbands, that even if some do not obey the word, they, without a word, may be won by the conduct of their wives.

This is the humility of a gentle and quiet spirit in the life of a wife. And these daughters of Sarah, who are not afraid by any terror. Mighty women. We need mighty women today who actually trust that God is sovereign over all things. And then in Hebrews chapter 13 4 through 6, purity.

Marriage is honorable among all and the bed undefiled, but fornicators and adulterers God will judge." And this passage speaks about coveting someone else's wife. Let your conduct be without covetousness. Be content with what you have. That has to do with marriage. And then the seventh text is 1st Corinthians 7, honor.

Let the husband render to his wife the affection due to her. When you honor someone you render affection to them. And you know this design of God to keep love alive in the world is so beautiful. This matter that we talked about last night, the wife doesn't have authority over her own body, and a husband doesn't have authority over his own body. There has to be a way where a husband and wife can work things out together.

God calls them to work them out. And why are they often hard to work out? Because we're hard. And we want to be independent. And the next passage, number 8, Malachi 2.14, I'll use the word covenant.

Marriage is a covenant. Emotions can't hold a marriage together. A covenant holds a marriage together. There's much to say about covenants in the Bible. And God makes an everlasting covenant to His people.

And that's why marriage is an everlasting covenant as well. The last I would say is the word joy. And I, it would fail me to try to go through all the various passages of Scripture, but one of the tests of the health of a marriage is joy. And I'll go back to Song of Solomon 3.11. Go forth, oh daughters of Zion, and see King Solomon with the crown which his mother crowned him on the day of his wedding, the day of the gladness of His heart.

Marriage was designed to promote gladness. And over and over again, you find this theme in Scripture. So those are the basics. Those are the basics. God created your marriage for a purpose, and it's a beautiful purpose.

And as you manifest the purposes of God, your home becomes a garden. It really does become a fountain of life. That's what God does with his people. This is how God uses his authority. God uses his authority for beauty.

And Of course, he does use his authority for the destruction of the wicked, and that's also for beauty as well, as God is beautifying the world. Well, I want to turn to this matter of being hard to live with. Don't be hard to live with. I'd also like to consider the flip side, and that is to be easy to live with. Because I really do believe the Bible's instructions toward Christians generally and toward husbands and wives explicitly.

It makes them easy to live with. It really does. It sweetens. It softens. It breaks away the hardness that we come into our marriages with.

And I want to turn to Galatians as my central text, which I'll just refer to at the beginning as sort of a representative. Galatians chapter 5, verse 16. Galatians 5, 16. Of course, this is, this text focuses on the work of the Spirit. The work of the Spirit of God is really the central matter for family life.

The aroma of the Spirit of God is God's design for marriage. That's why in the family life codes, it begins with be filled with the Spirit. And so this complimentary passage, Galatians 5 16, I say then, walk in the Spirit and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusts against the Spirit and the Spirit against the flesh, and these are contrary to one another, so that you do not do the things that you wish. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.

Now the works of the flesh are evident, which are adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries, and the like. In other words, this is not a complete list. There are other ways that this happens and the like, of which I tell you beforehand, just as I told you in time past, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. But, verse 22, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law.

And those who are Christ's have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another." Well, here you have a list of what it's like to live with people. What's it like to live with you? What kind of experience are you giving your spouse?

Are you easy to live with? Are you are you hard to live with? When you When you get to your sunset years, when you get to the end of your life, how do you want your spouse to describe you? Was he easy to live with? Was he hard to live with?

Here's my advice. Don't be hard to live with. You don't have to be hard to live with. And if you are hard to live with, it's because you are hard. And the softening work of the Holy Spirit, the waters of life that saturate and bring life to a marriage, are there.

They're readily available to all believers. The work of the Spirit, the filling of the power of the Holy Spirit. Here's another way to say it. Don't cause too much wear and tear on one another. You all know that some roads are harder on cars than others.

They cause more wear and tear on your car. If you live in a place where they put salt on the roads in the winter, Your car is going to suffer wear and tear like, you know, cars in Southern California don't. You know, I bought a car about 17 years ago in Texas. It's been the first four or five years of its life in Texas. And even today, it's pristine.

It's, there's no rust on it. It didn't grow up in a harsh environment. It grew up in an environment that it was cared for. And That's how husbands should treat their wives. That's how wives should treat their husbands.

You shouldn't cause too much wear and tear on your spouse. You know, some of you probably aren't old enough to have gone or even went to high school. But if you're old enough, maybe you went to a high school reunion and you go to your high school reunion and you meet this guy that's your age and you're looking at him and you're thinking, what happened to you? What kind of roads were you riding on, you know? And of course, you're not looking in the mirror either.

That's the problem. But some people are harder on others. And life is especially hard when you're married to someone who's hard to live with. And the Bible actually shows us this in really vivid illustrations Eve was hard to live with she became a temptress Adam was hard to live with he was Mr. Pliable.

He blamed his wife for the problem of the fall He was always pointing his finger at his wife. Is that easy to live with? Job had a wife who was hard to live with. She condemned him and she said curse God and die. She was hard to live with.

Moses' wife was hard to live with. One day she angrily circumcised their son through the foreskin on the ground and said, you're a bridegroom of blood to me. Well at the same time, Moses was hard to live with. God at that moment wanted to kill him, decided to kill him. Moses was misbehaving.

And we don't know exactly what that was all about. Abraham was hard to live with. He did some very foolish things with their family, putting his wife in dangerous situations. And his children had the same problem. They followed in his footsteps.

Gomer was hard to live with. She was an adulterous wife. Perhaps Hannah was hard to live with. She was disappointed in her husband. The Bible gives us illustrations of husbands and wives that were hard to live with.

But you don't have to be that way if you have the Spirit of God, if you desire to walk with God. But think in terms of wear and tear. You know, one of the things that I tried to teach my children was mean time before failure. Are you familiar with that? MBTF?

It's a manufacturing term. Mean time before failure. How many cycles do you have to perform before something breaks? Like how many cycles on the light switch? Well they're designed actually just to survive a certain number of cycles.

The engineers design them that way. When your car breaks, The guys who designed your car knew it would break then because everything is designed according to mean time before failure. And I had a child who was just constantly flipping switches and doing, you know, we're in the car and the window is going up and down, I'm saying, don't you know that it's only going to go up and down so many times? You don't have to do it 50 times during this trip. Meantime before failure.

That happens in marriage. Don't run each other into the ground. Well, I'm going to give you 12 qualities that make you hard to live with. But then I'm going to turn around to the sunny side of the street, Okay. Don't be hard to live with.

These 12 qualities make you hard to live with. Narcissism. Narcissism. You know what narcissism is. Narcissism is an obsession with yourself.

You're always looking at yourself in the mirror. The only thing you care about is how you feel and what's going on with you. You don't really care about the other person. Narcissism. 1 Timothy 3, 1 through 17 is a great place to go for the counteraction and really a disclosure of narcissism.

1 Timothy 3, 1-7. Here's number two. If you want to be hard to live with, be unforgiving. Be unforgiving. Colossians 3, 13, 2 Timothy 3, 3.

If you want these, let me know and I'll email them to you. Be unforgiving. Be hard on your spouse. And forget the fact that you've been forgiven. Number three, impatient.

Be impatient. If you're impatient, you're going to be hard to live with. 1 Corinthians 13 verse 4, love is patient. Number five, unmerciful. You want to be hard to live with?

Be unmerciful. Just always have your finger pointing and forget that you have three fingers pointing back at you. Be unmerciful. Romans 1 31, Matthew 18 21 and 22, that's the parable of the unmerciful servant. Number five, if you want to be hard to live with, use harsh words.

Speak like a dagger. Proverbs 15 1. A gentle answer turns away wrath. A harsh word stirs up anger. Proverbs 18 21 as well.

Number six, here's another way you can be hard to live with. Unkindness. Unkindness, Ephesians 4 29. Here's another way. Rash words.

Just say whatever you want to say whenever you want to say it. You know, one of the most unprofitable, actually stupidest principles of modern psychology is to share your heart. Say everything that's on your heart. The Bible actually commands you not to do that. You don't have to share everything that's in your heart.

You have a wicked heart. Why would you want to spew the sewage all over the world? Don't share everything. If you feel something and you know it's not right, then deal with God and repent. Quick responses, number eight.

Want to be hard to live with? Just give really quick responses. I do that all the time. It's never helpful. Quick responses, James 1, 19.

Let everyone be slow to hear, slow to speak, slow to write. Quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to write. I'm Sorry. Caustic speech. You want to be hard to live with?

Use caustic speech. Use condemning speech. Describe your spouse in an unkind way. Caustic speech, Proverbs 18.21. Unfiltered speech, unfiltered speech number 10, Proverbs 15.28.

Number 11, pride. Pride will get you somewhere, but not where you want to go. Pride, James 4, 6, Psalm 75, 4, 1 John 2, 16. And number 12, if you want to be hard to live with, cultivate evil thoughts. Think the worst.

Mark 7, 21-23, evil thoughts. So, yeah, if you want to be hard to live with, then be a narcissist, be unforgiving, be impatient, be unmerciful, use harsh words, be unkind, use rash words, have quick responses, use caustic speech, use unfiltered speech, be filled up with pride and have evil thoughts. Rather think no evil. So, but to be easy to live with is also very clearly communicated in the Bible. And so I want to take you to three passages of scripture that teach us how to be easy to live with.

And we have already read one of them, and I'll just focus on a portion, Galatians 5, 22 and 23, just two verses and nine marks of love that make you easy to live with. You really want to experience the grace of life, which is marriage. And the Bible tells you how to do that. And so there are nine marks of the Spirit. There are nine marks of love.

They are really, they are affirmed in 1 Corinthians 13. The Bible is a unit and these messages run all over Scripture. But number one, love. Well we've already talked about the chief function of a husband is to love his wife. So this is just a cross-reference to Ephesians 5 and the admonition to the husband.

And then there's joy number two. Joy. Solomon says live joyfully with the wife of your youth. You know, trouble falls on everybody. So what are you going to do?

Give thanks. Give thanks to whatever God gave you. And live joyfully with the wife of your youth. You know, many years ago I was going through a really rough time in business, and one of my dear friends, he opened up Ecclesiastes, and he read this verse to me. Enjoy your life with the wife of your youth.

And of course there's always a way out through problems that you have in this life. There's always a way through it. But so in knowing that, You just might as well live joyfully with the wife of your youth. You know, men come home with the burdens of the world on their shoulders. They shouldn't be doing that.

God is in control. Live joyfully. Make the, well, we talked about that already. Make her happy. Peace, the third, The third mark of the Spirit is peace.

The fourth, long suffering. The fifth, kindness. The sixth, goodness. The seventh, faithfulness. The eighth, gentleness, the ninth, self-control.

Well, All those things make it easy to live with. They're so beautiful, aren't they? Wouldn't you like to live in a world like that? There's no better culture in the world than the culture that God desires to cultivate in a home and in a church. All of the cultures of these superior companies who build these great cultures, they have nothing on God's cultures.

It's a beautiful culture. I'm going to give you 15 qualities from 1 Corinthians 13. I'm just going to run over them really fast, and Jason is going to elaborate on them soon. 15 qualities in just four verses. Love suffers long.

Number one. Number two, love is kind. Number three, love does not envy. Number four, Love does not parade itself. Number five is not puffed up.

Number six does not behave rudely. Number seven does not seek its own. Number eight is not provoked. Nine thinks no evil or thinks the best of one another. Ten, does not rejoice in iniquity but rejoices in the truth.

Number eleven, bears all things. Twelve, believes all things. Thirteen, hopes all things. Fourteen, endures all things. Fifteen, Love never fails.

It always works. It's so good. Here's another list. It's an eight point list from Paul's letter to the Colossian church. So look at Colossians 3 12 and 13.

Again, you have these densely concentrated lists of the ways of the Spirit of God. They're directly connected to the family life codes. Your family should be a picture of this. What kind of culture are you building in your family? Here it is right here.

And husbands and wives are designed to manage that culture, to create that culture. But they have to have it together first or they won't be able to create it in their family among their children. Colossians 3 12 an eight-point list. Put on tender mercies. Put on tender mercies.

You might not have them, put them on. Get clothes from heaven. Put on the robes of righteousness. Put on tender mercies. Number two, put on kindness.

Number three, put on humility. Number four, put on meekness. Number five, put on long suffering. Next, bearing with one another. Next, forgiving one another.

If anyone has a complaint against another, even as Christ forgave you, so you also must do. God has given us everything we need to know to be easy to live with, to be able to manifest the love of God that's in Jesus Christ. I pray that you have the happiest little families, the sweetest gardens, the most beautifully flowing, crystal clear fountains of life in your home. When our kids were growing up and we would read the Bible together, I really had one single objective. I wanted them to see how good God was.

I wanted them to see that He was a fountain of life. He was living bread, that God was good. That was my single objective. I just wanted them to see the glory of the beauty of the kingdom of God. It's the best kingdom.

I wish I had it to do over again, but I would do the same thing, only hopefully better. But love never fails. There are some researchers who have been researching divorce for 40 years. And these researchers have came to, these are secular researchers. The fundamental reason marriages fail is it comes down to one word.

Contempt. Contempt. Letting contempt grow. A disappointment occurs and a little shred of contempt is planted. And then it grows and then it grows.

Watch out for contempt. It will destroy you. But everything that God leads you to is the opposite of contempt, is to love and submission and nourishing and cherishing and patience and kindness and gentleness and all these kinds of things. God has given us everything pertaining to life and godliness. Everything we need is here in his word.

The scripture really is sufficient. That's really pretty much everything the ministry of church and family life is all about. It's just to say scripture is sufficient. You can trust God. You can trust his word.

Rest your whole weight on it. It's a blessing because God's kingdom is a beautiful kingdom. Consider Jonathan and Sarah Edwards. I'll just close with this illustration. There's a popular biography that was written many years ago by Elizabeth Dodds called Marriage to a Difficult Man.

I've always been struck by that title. I thought she should have titled the book differently. But every man is difficult in his own way. Men and women are different, and men have their characteristics. And that can be difficult.

But that's actually God's design. Because God wants to sanctify a woman. And women are different, and God wants to sanctify a man. Really to tenderize him, to slow him down, to help him see things he never saw before through the eyes of a woman. It's really such a good thing.

People make jokes about it, but it really is a wonderful thing. The eyewitnesses to this marriage don't say he was difficult. They don't say that. It was a joyful marriage. It was called a, it's known as an uncommon union.

But even so, even Elizabeth Dodds, who wrote, who titled her book, Marriage to a Difficult Man, she says this, the real Jonathan Edwards, the man, the person, was a tender husband, an effective and affectionate Father, a human being quite unlike the image of Him as a stern preacher of sermons about sin. His happy marriage to Sarah Pierpont was more than a loving link between two people. It was Edwards linked to life, to the practical, to warm fireplaces, to good food, attractive surroundings, to devotion, to the dailiness of the incarnation. What Edwards described as their uncommon union bonded them marvelously to one another and it also bonded them to the living God. So I don't know why Elizabeth Dodd's named her book, Marriage to a Difficult Man, when she would say such a thing like that about Jonathan Edwards.

She writes, Elizabeth Dodd writes about Sarah. She did all as the service of love. And so doing it with the continual, uninterrupted cheerfulness, peace, and joy. There's a young man who stayed with in the Edwards home for months in his early 20s. He lived with Edwards for eight months.

Here's what he writes about this marriage. While she uniformly paid a becoming deference to her husband and treated him with entire respect, she spared no pains in conforming to His inclination and rendering everything in the family agreeable and pleasant, accounting it her greatest glory, and wherein she would best serve God and her generation to be the means of this way of promoting His usefulness and happiness. Samuel Hopkins goes into that home and he sees this woman who's honoring her husband, who's doing everything she can to promote his usefulness. I married a girl like that. I did.

But it's such a blessing. Hopkins was taken by the way that they treated one another as well. He says, no person of discernment could see this family without observing the admiring and perfect harmony and mutual love and esteem that subsisted between them. Hey, I just want to say that what God says in his word is possible. There are actually people who live like this.

And you can too, being filled with the Holy Spirit. A culture of love, a culture like a Garden of Eden, a culture of heaven, Rivers of living water pouring out of husband and wife and caring for the children, sweetening them with every good thing. This is what's so tragic about the entertainment culture that gets poured into our homes. It's not like this. And you calibrate your children with it.

One of their daughters said of Sarah, mother was a violin which responded to the slightest touch mother was a violin that responded to the slightest touch isn't that good You want to be a wife like that, don't you? Don't you want to be a wife like that, who's responsive and helpful and promoting and strengthening? Because that's what happens to a man when he's married to a woman like that. He's humbled by it. Jonathan died before Sarah, and after his death Sarah writes to her daughter Esther.

And by the way, Esther Edwards has a beautiful biography. I loved reading it. I read it to one of my daughters, most of it out loud. It was beautiful, where she just talks about the interactions with other young ladies of faith, her friends in Boston and her experiences and you know living in the Edwards home with lots of traffic with Whitfield there and the great evangelists of the Great Awakening were there and she was there to experience it and she tells of her conversations with some of these people. It's really remarkable.

But Sarah writes to her daughter right after her husband Jonathan Edwards died. And here's what she writes. What shall I say? A holy and good God has covered us with a dark cloud. Oh, that we may kiss the rod and lay our hands on our mouths.

The Lord has done it." And then she breaks into praising God for her husband. She says, He has made me adore his goodness that we had him so long." I think he was 58 when he died. "'Oh, what a legacy my husband and your father has left us. We are all given to God your ever affectionate mother, Sarah. So this couple I think is an example of all the things that we read about what it's like to be easy to live with.

They were a couple they were filled with the Spirit of God. Jonathan was away from his wife when he died. He was at Princeton. He had just assumed the leadership as the president at Princeton and she was at home getting ready to move. They were separated for a few months.

And then he took the smallpox vaccine and he fell ill and he died. And before he died, he whispered to one of his daughters, it seems to me to be the will of God that I must shortly leave you. Therefore, give my... Give my kindest love to my dear wife and tell her that the uncommon union which has so long subsisted between us has been of such a nature as I trust is spiritual and therefore will continue forever. I hope she will be supported under so great a trial.

I submit cheerfully to the will of God. Here's my prayer for you wives and your husbands, that when you reach that point, and you will reach that point, that you will say, My spouse made our marriage so easy, so sweet. He was so kind. She was so full of the graces of God. My spouse put on tender mercies.

My spouse put on kindness and humility and meekness and long-suffering. My spouse created a life where we were bearing with one another and forgiving one another and when my spouse had a complaint she remembered the forgiveness of Jesus Christ. So make it your aim to be easy to live with, to be the best friend that a spouse ever had, it's a mercy to have a faithful friend that loves you entirely and is as true to you as yourself. That's Richard Baxter. Okay.

Three things. The basics. The basics of marriage. We've covered them, not in much detail, but they're there. You know, do a careful study of the roles and responsibilities of a husband and wife.

Secondly, the language of marriage. Get dialed in on the language of marriage. I give you nine passages of Scripture that explicitly speak of marriage. But that's not all the Bible says about marriage. Everything that God says a Christian should be is meant to be in a marriage.

The love, the joy, the peace, the patience, the kindness, the goodness, the faithfulness, the gentleness, the being kind to one another, bearing with one another, forgiving with one another. All those things are meant to be in a Christian marriage. So learn the language of marriage from the Bible. Not your own heart. Forget your own heart.

Don't follow your heart in your marriage. Follow God. It's the only way that the unneeded, unnecessary, unbeautiful pieces of the granite will come off so that God's sculpture will be made manifest in the world. And that sculpture of your marriage as God works away the spots and the wrinkles and he knocks off the hard edges it will be a picture of Jesus Christ and his love for the church so don't be hard to live with you've been told you know what to do it's not that complex let's pray father we thank you you