In this sermon titled 'Final Thoughts' by Scott Brown, the speaker emphasizes the importance of not being hard to live with in marriage. He encourages forgiveness, letting go of offenses, and not obsessing over fixing every defect. The speaker highlights the long and slow process of sanctification and the need to trust in God's control over our lives. He offers hope for restoring any lost aspects in a marriage and emphasizes the biblical vision of marriage. The sermon also mentions the Church and Family Life's focus on proclaiming the sufficiency of Scripture and their efforts to support young families through conferences.

Okay, here we go. This is the end of the line, end of the line. There are three brief things that I want to say. And the first thing is this. Don't be hard to live with.

You don't have to be hard to live with. Some people are hard to live with. Some roads are harder on cars than others. They'll tear your car up. You know, some fabrics are, you know, very abrasive, but you know, God has given you everything so that you wouldn't be hard to live with by the work of the Holy Spirit.

And as you're painting this picture, you know, of Christ and the church, you're really painting a picture of the fruits of the Spirit. Everything that is an outflow of the Spirit of God makes a person easy to live with. And I just want to encourage you, don't be hard to live with. Don't obsess about little things. Don't get wrapped up, you know, in offenses.

Forgive. Let people off the hook. You know, life is too short, you know, to live fitfully and unsatisfiable and things like that. Some people are just unsatisfiable. Don't be that kind of a person in your marriage.

You don't have to be that kind of person. And the other thing I want to leave you with is this. You're not going to be able to fix everything in your marriage. You're not going to be able to fix everything in yourself. So don't try to fix everything in your marriage.

You know, some people, they look at the problems, the defects in their marriage, and they're just, they obsess about the defects. And they focus all their attention on what's wrong with their marriage. And I'm here to say, relax. You know, you won't be able to fix all the defects of your personality. You won't be able to fix the defects of your intellect.

You won't be able to fix the defects of all of your relational flaws. It isn't going to happen. But you want to be married to somebody who's okay with that because sanctification is long and it's slow and it's not completed here on the earth it's completed in heaven and and that's really our great hope the great hope isn't that that you fix everything here and of course a real Christian will want to do that, but you can obsess about it and be dissatisfied with where you're at all the time. The Apostle Paul said, by the grace of God I am what I am. And that's true of all of us.

Yeah, I look back in my life. I'm I'm an amalgamation of You know of 70 years of being on this earth You know starting as a boy in Southern, California You know all the influences in my life you know during that time and then and then coming to North Carolina. God was in control. God is sovereign over everything and I don't want to be the kind of person that's obsessing about the weaknesses of my wife or my friends or the people in my church because God actually is in control. He's the one that's ordering your sanctification.

Well, I don't think it's appropriate to ignore the sins in our lives. We should repent of our sins. And if our spouses sin, then there's actually a way to deal with them, and I tried to outline that today. But this may sound scandalous, but don't try to fix everything. A while back, Deborah was manifesting some level of sin, you know, was not an egregious sin, but I was looking at her and I thought you know that's kind of cute you know because God's gonna take care of her.

God loves her. God's gonna see her through you know And I wasn't worried about seeing it. Now, I will have to say, Deborah is not running around sinning against everybody in this house. It's the other people in the house. But I just recognized a manifestation of the fall, like I recognized in myself.

So don't worry too much about those things. And if you do see things, deal with them in a biblical manner with patience and kindness and covering over sin, life will be a lot better that way. So I want to just really encourage you with the hope that there is for restoring anything that's been lost in the years that you've been married. I think I think in this room, Deborah and I, other than my mother, we've been married 42 years. But let's see, mom, was it 70, 70 what?

72 years. So let's just say one year is an inch on this tape measure. That's 72 years right there. 72 years. And you know, how many of you have been married under a year?

Raise your hand. Under a year. Under five years. Five years. Okay.

Five to ten years. Who's five to 10 years? OK. So Debra and I have been married 42 years. Let's see, Carus is how long have you guys been married?

27. Okay, that's a big, that's a high. 35 years. Okay, who else? Anybody above 35 years?

36, right? 37. 37 years. So here you got my mom and dad out here at 72 years. Deborah and I are right down here at 42 years.

I mean, Deborah and I could be just almost halfway through our life together. Like in other words, There's actually a lot that can, there's a lot of improvement that can happen in those years. Amen. Between now and then, even though, even though Debra and I are kind of the old geezer couple in this room. There's still enormous, like let's just say, Let's just say we had blown up major areas of our relationship.

Guess what? We have a long way to go to correct some of those things. What a blessing. But then you've got Ash and Sona 37 years, but almost everybody in this room is you know under 10 or 15 years I mean look at look at how much you've got left I just want to encourage you by saying you may have made some mistakes in the first five, ten, fifteen years, twenty years of your marriage, it's not over. Praise the Lord it's not over.

You know we began this whole thing talking about how Jesus Christ is a Redeemer and Steve you brought that out in one of your talks. But he can redeem the years. And even though you've been married five, 10 years, two years, everybody makes mistakes in their marriage. I'm just here to say there's hope. And God's given you lots of headroom to continue on.

So I'm just so thankful for the mercy of God. He's so kind. And he's given you a tremendous headroom in the years to come. And so go make your marriages a little piece of heaven and be married for the glory of God. Paint the picture of Christ's love for the church.

Stop trying to find yourself. Find Jesus Christ and all of his ways. And husbands become like Christ. Wives, be like a glorious church and also become like Christ as well. This is the biblical vision of marriage.

It's such a wonderful vision and you've got it. So I'm so thankful for that. You know, all of this, of course, happens under the work of Church and Family Life. Church and Family Life has devoted itself to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture. And so we've been trying to do that regarding marriage while we've been here.

And we'd like to try to do that in, you know, every area of church and family life that we can get a hold of. Jason and I are on a podcast every week trying to deal with lots of issues. Our big focus really is the younger generation right now. We, and that's why I'm so delighted that most most of the couples here you know are fairly newly married, well at least compared to my mom and dad. And but I'm just so glad that you came in the earlier part of your marriage.

You know, for years, Deborah and I've done this kind of thing. And over and over again, we heard the same thing. People who are married 20 or 30 years, they would walk out and they would say, I wish we'd heard this 20 years ago. So we thought we'd like to try to catch people 20 years ago when they're just getting going. And so I'm so thankful that so many of you came.

And that's really, frankly, the focus of our whole ministry. We really want to focus on the next generation. And like we have a major conference, our national conference is coming up April 25th through 27th at Ridgecrest. And what we've been doing over the years is trying to design that conference to really be a blessing to young families, young couples. Here's what we want, pray for us.

We want that conference to be the place where young families really want to come because it's so neat, it's so helpful. And so we're doing all kinds of things to try to make it easy for a young family, you know, so that a mother's not stuck in a hotel room while all the other fun is going on. We do it in what is the largest Christian conference center in the world in a gorgeous facility at Ridgecrest. It's just beautiful there. There's lots to do, lots of places to walk and but over the years we've tried to make it really neat for a young family.

You know like we and we've relaxed the schedule even though it's a pretty hard-hitting preaching conference on doctrine. We always try to, you know, really play out, try to play out the doctrine and try to gather an arsenal of doctrinal material for that doctrine that we work at. We do things like the worship of God, you know, the Great Commission, just all kinds of things like that. This year, it's making disciples in the church, in the home, and around the world. So all the speakers are gonna speak about that.

There's not really a conference like it. I don't think around where you have whole families sitting there being instructed together. That's one of the really neat things about it. There's just real life there and vibrancy with children in the room and lots and lots of young adults. Enormous amount of young adults actually grew up, you know, going to this conference.

And now their marriage age, we have a singles pre-conference because of that. And every year I've got, you know, two or three couples come up to me and they show me a ring and they say, we met right here at Ritz-Crest. And I'm so thankful for that. And so we're trying to design this conference for young families and my son David is, we're brought in, you know, We have an ice cream social all afternoon Friday with bounce houses and all kinds of stuff to do for kids. David's wife Monica has designed a mother's fellowship room with all kinds of things that make it really neat for children to be in there.

A place for ladies to have coffee. They can watch the conference on a screen. They can put their children down for a nap. There's a nursing mother's room. And Monica brings in boats and all exercise equipment for kids, just all kinds of.

She had a camping theme last year, where there were tents and kayaks and stuff like that for kids to plan. Anyway, all I'm saying is that we really want to make it a place where if young children are brought, there's just a way for them to blow off steam and things like that. I want to show you a video that we just made, but if you know particularly young families, encourage them to come. We're just praying that this would be the place where young families want to come and and connect with one another. One of the things that's happened over the last 20 years is because of those conferences, so many of us are connected to people all over the country.

And there's actual lots of blessing that come from that. And so I really, I sort of covet that for the next generation. It was true for my generation. Now I'd love to see that replicated in the younger generation.