In his sermon titled 'Final Charge,' Scott Brown discusses the journey of marriage, emphasizing that couples have significant time to grow and nurture their relationship. He uses personal anecdotes and biblical references, such as 1 Peter 4:8 and 1 Corinthians 13:4, to underline the importance of patience and love in marriage. Brown advises against constant self-examination and therapy that focuses excessively on problems, suggesting instead that couples should concentrate on positive growth through God's Word. He uses an analogy of farming to illustrate how nurturing the good aspects of a marriage can naturally suppress the negatives. Brown encourages couples to trust in God's plan and timing, highlighting the role of family and church in supporting a healthy marriage. He also promotes his upcoming conference for young families and discusses the resources provided by Church and Family Life to support family-integrated churches.

Okay, so let's see who who has been married the shortest amount of time Shortest yeah, right Jason how long Eleven months anybody below 11 months where where OK, how many months? Nine months. Eight, nine, and 11. That's great. I'm so glad you're here.

That is great. You know what? You know, every year, Debra and I get people and they come up to us and they say, they've been married 20 years and they say, I wish we'd heard this 20 years ago. So I'm so thankful. You know, we have actually done some of these just four younger married couples, you know, under six or seven years.

But it's always really fun. So anyway, that's really good. Okay, so You've been married how many years? 26. 26 years.

Okay, so my mom and dad, they were married for 72 years. Let's just say that, let's just say that each inch, each inch is a year of marriage. So that was my mom and dad's time of being married. So How many years did you say? 26.

You're 26. So you're like right here. You're right here. Al, how many? You said it.

35. That's right here. Got that? Okay. Justin, how long?

Three and a half. Boom. Three and a half inches. Okay. Debra and I have been married for 44 years.

Right here. Okay. Now, I just want you to see the headroom that you have in your marriage. You've got a lot, everybody in this room has a lot of time. Even Deborah and I, the old geezers in the room, you know, we've been married 44 years, and we're not even close to the end, actually.

And some of you have been married 20 years I can hardly even reach that far back okay and what what God has for you is a lot of headroom A lot of headroom to be patient with each other. You know, a lot of headroom to grow together. A lot of headroom to apply the Word of God together. And it's such a blessing. And here's what I want to say.

You don't need to fix everything in your marriage. And frankly, you can't fix everything in your marriage. And that's why I think 1 Peter 4, 8 is important. And above all things, have fervent love for one another, for love will cover a multitude of sins. And that actually applies for your whole life long.

And in a biblical picture of marriage, you find imperfections patiently endured and covered over. And when a when a couple wants to fix their marriage, which is actually you know a good impulse, They tend to just focus on their problems. And frankly, some of their sins are making life hard and they're asking, how can I fix this? Let's identify our sins. Count your many sins, name them one by one.

And they're always kind of in therapy together. And they're always scrutinizing and questioning and they're investigating and they're interrogating their marriage. Here's my advice. Too much of this therapy can be the worst thing you can do because it focuses you on what's wrong and it's suffocating to just live in what's wrong with your marriage and I hope you haven't fallen into that trap Over self-examination is no help when two centers get married. And you can try to get on this improvement path.

We're gonna radically improve our marriage. But that can actually turn into sort of a war path, where you're on the war path, you know, to fix your marriage. But marriages aren't fixed that way typically, they're fixed really over time. And You know, efforts, you know, to constantly try to fix trouble spots, often just vaporized love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and gentleness and self-control and they can vaporize covering over sins, which is really, really important. Nick picking every blemish can do more harm than good.

Now, it's appropriate to deal with sin in your marriage and have difficult conversations to work them through. We've already talked about how you do that, because the Bible is really clear. But you can't make a good marriage by constant analysis and harping, and just continuing to ruminate over your problems. And I'm here to just say, is it possible some of you need to just stop ruminating on your problems and live together in patience and love and covering over sins? Love suffers long and is kind.

That's 1st Corinthians 13 verse 4. God gave that text to the Corinthian church and to your church and my church and our families for really important reasons. And so it's important to bear with one another in love as Ephesians 4 2 says. And it's just very important that couples learn how to cover over the imperfections of one another. Guess what?

It was God that got you married. Maybe you got married with some weird motives and stuff like that, but guess what? It was God. It was that's why you're married. Because God in his sovereign will had you get married.

Yes, you both of you. And this is this is the hope really of your marriage is that God did this and and he can help you walk through it. Let me illustrate something about covering over sin. Maybe some of you know, you know, we raise cattle. We raise milk cows.

And when you're raising cattle, your first focus isn't really the cattle, it's the grass. You become a grass farmer before you become a cattle farmer. And it takes time to cultivate pastures, to be productive. And it involves seeding and cultivating and fertilizing and watering. And it requires sun and it requires heat and because grass needs all those things you know to really thrive.

Now one of our pastures a few years ago was really bad and there was almost there's just very little actual food for cows in that pasture. We had lots of weeds. And so our reaction was to go through and use weed killer to go and round up the whole place and then start all over. And so we talked to people who had spray rigs, you know, who could drive around these pastures and spray those pastures. But then we bumped into this one farmer around here about how to turn it around.

And He said, don't spray these fields. He said, you need to choke out the weeds. You need to choke out the weeds by planting grass. And he said, Don't ruin your pasture by using defoliants. He said, if you do a good job planting seeds and taking care of them, the grass will grow, it will consume the nutrients, and the weeds won't have a chance.

So that's what we did. Instead of resorting, you know, to weed killer, we decided to spend our money on seed. And what do you know? After we planted and watered, We started having better and better grass, you know over the years But the marriage marriage is a little bit like that It's like growing grass and It's really important that you're you're growing grass to choke out the weeds. If you get too focused on the weeds, then you'll just be constantly worried about all of your problems.

But the soil of your marriage, It needs seeds, it needs water, it needs the sun, and it needs nutrients. And in a marriage, it's the Word of God that provides all those things. It cultivates, it breaks up the fallow ground, and it continues to plant good seeds in your marriage. It is the Word of God and the Word of God alone that is worthy to get rid of the weeds. And the most effective way to rid the weeds of your marriage is to choke them out.

To choke them out by focusing on God's ways. Focus on what God has called you to do positively. And God will take care of the sins, you know, in his own time, in his own ways, Galatians 6, 1 through 3, for sure. And I want us all to understand that, you know, he who began a good work in you, he will complete it until the day of Christ Jesus. And most of you have an enormous amount of time for that to happen.

You have sanctification headroom that's actually really, really astonishing. And you may not be married 72 years, but you might be. You're at least going to be married a lot longer than you've been married now. Most of you are going to be married at least twice as long as you've been married already. And some of you who are down here at eight months, I'm so happy for you, you know, you who are at eight-tenths of an inch, you know, and you guys, you know, who are just right out of the gate.

You're at a really thrilling time. And you have a lot of time to just build love into your marriage. And you should be really thrilled to be starting out here. And even If you're at 10 years or 20 or 30, you know, even 40 years, even 44 years. I'm just thankful that we have time.

God has given us time to work through all these things. This is the way God works. He works over long periods of time, nourishing, cherishing, watering, and just doing the normal things of the Christian life. I wanna be an influence in your life tonight by just saying relax. Enjoy the ride.

Everybody has imperfections. But God is able. God is able to take you where he wants to take you in your marriage. Spurgeon said, where love is thin, the faults are always thick. Wherever there's true love in the heart, we make many allowances for the weaknesses and infirmities of our sins, of our friends.

So, I just want to encourage you not to be so obsessed about all the problems in your marriage and rest in the Lord and recognize that he's taking you. He started with you and he's gonna finish with you And God is able to do it. So I hope that encourages you. I hope that sets you at rest and at ease with one another. And maybe you'll have a lot more fun than you've had before because you're really able to trust God, you know, with all the things that happen.

So there you have it. That's what I wanna leave you with here tonight, is that God's not finished with you yet. And you can continue and continue to water continue to do the good things that God has commanded you and he'll take care of you so hey I hope I hope that you all can come to our national conference on manhood and womanhood. May, May 7th through 9th and if you want to hear a lot more about being married and about being men and women this is going to be a great conference with some really, really helpful preaching and lots of experiences. If you're a young family, we designed this for young families, really, who have a bunch of kids, and we really hope you can come.

There's, you know, at this conference, what you find are just lots of young families. And it's thrilling to look out at this conference and see so many young families building a life together, you know, with either a few kids or a growing number of a bunch of kids. And, but yeah, manhood and womanhood, the glory of God in the creation order. And, you know, at Church and Family Life, We do a number of things. We have a network of churches, of several hundred churches.

Some of your churches are in our network and we what we're what we're praying for, what we've been working for, for for about a quarter of a century is really for the sufficiency of Scripture in a church and the sufficiency of Scripture in a family. We think that's the hope of the world. We actually think the hope of the world is a lot simpler than most people think. It really has to do with the very simple things that happen in a home and that happen in a local church. We think that's the most important stuff.

The simple real things that happen between a husband and a wife and their children, the opening of the Word of God in their home, and the work of a local church. We're here to say those are the most important things in the world. You know, the church is the only institution that Jesus Christ established. He established the family, and he established the church right away at the beginning of the Bible. And with all the confusion and all the internet craziness, focus on your family and focus on your local church.

At Church and Family Life, we work pretty hard to produce resources. We produce books. My son David handles all of our publishing and internet and podcasting and video and our conference is everything that we do. And We're getting ready to publish three new books here pretty soon. One of them is really written toward young men by Richard Baxter.

Another one is really about singing, congregational singing and really teaching your children to sing. And another one is a project that I've been working on for a few years. It's really a catechism on the family. It's the doctrine of the family in 200 questions. It's a very simple doctrine of the family.

We think the doctrine of the family needs to be recovered. And we're hoping that you all recover that doctrine and implement it from one generation to the next. You know, There's another book that we're planning to republish that Matthew Henry wrote. I meant to speak of it earlier. Matthew Henry wrote a book called A Gentle and Quiet Spirit.

It's a short book, particularly written to women for the demonstration of this precious quality of a gentle and quiet spirit. It's really a very beautiful book, so we plan to reprint that. And there are others that we plan to republish. We have a weekly podcast. We have various resources that we push out on a weekly basis.

We survive, really, by the donations that people give to us. Our conferences basically break even. And if anybody's ever been in book sales, you don't really make hardly any money on books. The kind of books that rewrite aren't really desired by millions of people. So if we break even on our books, we're pretty happy about that.

But we really thrive with the donations of churches and families that we know about. If you know about family integrated churches that are faithfully focused on the Word of God and if they are in a, if it's a church that's really seeking to reform the family, maybe we don't know about them. We'd like to know about them. We want to draw attention to those churches. We want people to find those churches.

And you know, we really, really do believe that the two most powerful things in the world are when a father and a mother open their Bible in their home and when a family goes into the Church of Jesus Christ, the whole family together and they learn how to worship God together as a generational community. We think those are the most powerful things in the culture and we're trying to win as many people of that proposition as we can. And you know We've been doing this for a long time, particularly Jason. I've been doing this for a quarter of a century. And we've seen the fruit.

And it's really a blessing to see it. So we're Deborah and I are just so thankful that you came. It really is a joy to get to know so many of you. We love this because we get to sit across the table and get to know most of you and that's a that's a real treasure. And We want you to know you're always welcome to come over to our house or anything like that.

And in terms of tomorrow, our church service starts at 10 o'clock. Now, I'd like to sort of get a reading of, you know, who, how many are going to be there. Because we have a fellowship meal. You don't have to bring anything. But it helps to know how many of you are going to come.

So if you're going to come tomorrow and you're not part of our church normally, could you just raise your hand? We'll count them up. Two, four, six, eight. Eight. Looks like we got eight.

And then I think the firmer girls and some others are gonna be here okay Al has taken note of that We'll have plenty of food there, it'll be great. Okay, Mr. Burke, would you lead us in prayer and close this thing out?