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PASTORS SHAUN & AMY GUSTAFSON
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FROM THE BLOG
Insight and wisdom from High Point Leadership
Staying Power: Part 2
Doing things God’s way isn’t always easy. Anything worth having requires effort! During hard times, remember this great quote from Charles Kettering: “No one would have crossed the ocean if he could have gotten off the ship in the storm.” This is also true with marriage. If we give up when things are the worst, we will never be able to experience God’s best. A rainbow comes after the storm, not before it.
It’s often in the early years that many couples face their biggest challenges. Studies show most divorces take place within the first seven years of a marriage. The wedding is joyous, but then the challenges of life in a crazy world show up and people have to daily make the choice, “…as for me and my house we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15). Many couples happily married over thirty years have told us the toughest years were in the first half, but they are thankful they worked it out. They wouldn’t have had all the joyous years together if they had not persevered and worked through those early challenges!
Studies have shown couples who choose to stay together and work out their problems are more often happier than those who choose divorce. One article stated, “Researchers also found that two-thirds of unhappily married spouses who stayed married reported that their marriages were happy five years later. In addition, the most unhappy marriages reported the most dramatic turnarounds: among those who rated their marriages as very unhappy, almost eight out of 10 who avoided divorce were happily married five years later.” Research also showed “Divorce did not typically reduce symptoms of depression, raise self-esteem, or increase a sense of mastery. This was true even after controlling for race, age, gender, and income. Even unhappy spouses who had divorced and remarried were no happier on average than those who stayed married.”
To achieve success in life and marriage, it’s essential we learn how to ride out the rough waves. Through challenging times, many couples begin to take their frustrations out on family and associate feelings from life’s disappointments with their spouse or kids. They may be disillusioned with their marriage, thinking the relationship is their main problem. However, in reality, marriage was designed by God to be a haven from life’s challenges. If something seems out of sync, it’s wise to look to those with a strong and long-term marriage who can give us some perspective and direction, rather than just jumping to another ship.
When a couple puts God first and builds a spiritual bond with each other, this is the first step in building a strong relationship that will weather the test of time. When hard times come, we will have a strong foundation that isn’t easily shaken.
A couple can be so spiritually out of touch with God and each other that they don’t even know this important bond is missing in their relationship. Then one day something major happens, and they realize they have lost (or never developed) their spiritual foundation. Once a couple chooses to put God first and build or renew their spiritual bond, God is able to move mightily on their behalf. He can and will establish deeper love and joy, as well as reveal His divine plan and purpose for their relationship together.
I pray this encourages you,
Pastor Shaun
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Staying Power
“We really love each other and we know it was God who brought us together. We just don’t understand why we fight so much! On a regular basis one of us gets upset or irritated with the other about something.”
Ben and Shelly verbalized thoughts experienced by many couples. Through further conversation we found they were both raised in broken families. Ben had never met his father nor had any male role model in the home. He was raised in abuse and poverty, struggling to help his sickly and mentally ailing mother. Shelly had some role models, but was raised in a separated family much of her life.
Unfortunately, stories like theirs are very common in the day in which we live. Many people have grown up with either poor examples or no examples of the skills and unconditional love required to make marriage last a lifetime. Within a short time, they begin to follow the behavior patterns they observed in their parents, or they do whatever feels good in an attempt to love based on what makes them feel valued. Many people enter marriage hoping to receive unconditional love, but have little to no idea how to give it!
Ben and Shelly longed for the connection and joy God intended for marriage and asked us if we would impart any secrets we had discovered. They told us they had been viewing us from a distance and they could tell by reading our body language we were happy with each other. We got together with them and visited, sharing the big key to unity God had graciously caused us to stumble upon. He helped us see if we would pray together for a time each day (preferably morning), we would be much more likely to have peace, unity, and single-mindedness in our marriage relationship all day long.
This may be hard to believe if you have a lot of strife right now, but it really does help! We’re not saying couple prayer time will make you see eye to eye on everything, but it will help you be more like-minded, as well as humble, compassionate, and honoring as you work through your differences. Sometimes our likes, desires, and ideas are different than each other. The more we pray, the more we’ll find both of us stepping away from demanding “It’s my way or the highway!” Instead, when we’ve developed a habit of humbling ourself before God in prayer, it yields more humility of listening to and working with each other. Prayer turns our me to we.
In the Bible there’s a story about a group of believers gathered together years ago. It shares the amazing results of their prayer time together.
After they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly. All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had. (Acts 4:31-32 NIV)
Did you notice the three things unified prayer caused with these people? It brought boldness for sharing the love of Jesus, unity, and selflessness. Prayer together resulted in them having one heart and one soul, meaning clarity for direction and motives. This would really help a lot of couples! James 1:8 tells us “A double minded man is unstable in all his ways” (KJV). A marriage with two people trying to go their own direction, rather than God’s unified direction, is also unstable.
When you and your spouse daily pray together, double-mindedness goes out the back window and single-mindedness walks through the front door to help unify the two of you as one heart and one soul. If you’re a skeptic by nature, we realize this may sound a little pie-in-the-sky happy, but it really is profound! We’ll talk more on this in a moment, but don’t just take our word for it. Try it yourself for a month and see what happens! When you two humble yourselves before God and pray together, humbly asking for guidance and help, like-mindedness and unity just start kicking into gear!
The people’s prayer time together resulted in selflessness rather than selfishness. Selfishness is a huge problem in many families today, but this Scripture shows us how to overcome this destructive habit. When we pray together, we are putting Christ at the center of our relationship. Through this humble act, we are inviting God to grow a selfless and serving attitude within both of us. This is the way God intended marriage to be – two people trying to out-serve each other for fun, just like He loves us!
Now back to our story – after we explained all of these benefits to Ben and Shelly, Ben (a skeptic by nature) shared how he really doubted whether prayer time together would help deal with their bickering. “Let’s do this,” we said. “You have disagreements almost every day. Why don’t you try praying together at least fifteen minutes every morning for just one week? Then come back and tell us the results.” We also added, “One more thing, make sure you do your prayer together first thing, before you engage in conversation with each other, otherwise you may get in a disagreement first and end up not praying at all.”
One-week later Ben and Shelly arrived for our meeting. As they strolled through our door, they didn’t even have to say a word. We could tell by their lollypop grins and deer-in-the-headlights gazing at each other that things had improved. Their countenance had brightened to put it mildly. Their body language towards each other was like a graceful combination between a great Fourth of July fireworks display coupled with the tenderness and awe of holding a brand-new puppy.
They excitedly shared with us that in only one week there had been dramatic changes. They both agreed the arguments had diminished by about ninety percent. With a sheepish grin Ben said, “The other ten percent of disagreements happened only when we didn’t start the day with prayer first.”
Ben and Shelly had quickly experienced how God’s Word will work for us when we put it into practice. Just a word of warning here though – prayer time together is something to do daily for the rest of your life – like brushing your teeth. It isn’t something you only do for a couple of months and then stop because you haven’t had any cavities lately!
Isn’t it good to know God didn’t just throw a man and woman together with their opposite strengths, gifts, and abilities and say, “I don’t know how they are ever going to get along with each other?” No, God made marriage to be a work of art, and He gave us a manual to follow on how to have strong relationships. He made man and woman’s opposite characteristics to complement each other and be a powerful force in the earth for His kingdom. Marriage is meant to be a gift, and it can be for you each day! It definitely takes intentional effort, but the lifelong rewards are worth it.
Even if your marriage currently feels like you’re in the 8th inning and down twenty-five to nothing, there is hope. Remember God said, “Love never fails.” (See 1 Corinthians 13:8.) We can take God at His Word and ask Him for help to love our spouse with His kind of love, even if they (or we) are currently a challenge!
In Love,
Pastor Shaun
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Love Always Wins
We know a woman who committed her life to God after she and her husband married. Although her husband wanted nothing to do with God or church, she was always compassionate toward him. Her overwhelming desire was to see him receive God’s free love and forgiveness through Jesus.
We were amazed when we visited with her. She never spoke unkind words about him even though he was sometimes insensitive toward her. She always got tears in her eyes and said, “All I want is to know that one day, when he dies, he will go to heaven and not hell.”
She was grateful for him continually and would never complain about him or their marriage. She also invested time each day praying for other people’s marriages. It wasn’t long before he asked Jesus into his heart and now is close with God himself!
This wife is a great example of how we are able to choose our own thoughts and words; our circumstances don’t have to dictate them. When we make a conscious choice to forget the past and let go of wrongs done to us, we’re then able to focus on receiving God’s love and bringing out the best in others. When we do these two things—meditate on what we have to be thankful for today and declare God’s Word—we are truly able to reach forward to the good things God has in store for us. As the Apostle Paul said,
I focus on this one thing: forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead, I press on to reach the end of the race and receive the heavenly prize for which God, through Christ Jesus, is calling us. (Philippians 3:13b-14 NLT)
You may be asking yourself, “Is it really possible to forget bad things that have happened to me?” According to 2 Timothy 1:7, “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.” When we look at Scripture, we find one key to healing our hearts of wrongs done to us (as well as forgiving ourselves for anything we’ve done) is receiving God’s love.
We receive God’s love by putting our faith in His promises, then we can make the choice to love others by faith, even if we don’t feel it at the moment. The first step of being healed of past hurts is forgiving a person by faith, and God’s love helps us do this. Let’s look again at Ephesians 3:14-19:
For this reason I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that He would grant to you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height – to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Often when people read this passage, they assume the “saints” mentioned above is simply a reference to godly people here on earth, but it isn’t. The Hebrew word for that kind of saint is used in Psalm 116:15 which states, “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints.” The word used here for “saints” means “godly man, good, holy (one), merciful.”[i]
However, in Ephesians 3 the word translated as “saints” specifically refers to “God, an angel, a saint, a sanctuary.”[ii] This means Paul is praying for believers to be grounded in and understand all forms of God’s love just like God, His angels, and the saints who already live with Him in heaven! You may be wondering, what does this have to do with not meditating on wrongs done to me? Everything!
When Shaun was preparing to preach the message for his mother’s memorial service years ago after she moved to heaven, it was clearly put on his heart to tell people they should focus on thinking about the good things they had done for his mom during her life here on earth, rather than thinking of any regrets.
Colossians 3:2 encourages us, “Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth.” Everything in heaven is good and lovely because God is the focus of heaven and He is good and loving. People in heaven think only of the good and loving memories from earth now that they are with Him, therefore we also can choose to be heavenly minded and only look for the good in people. We are able to do this more and more as we “know the love of Christ which passes knowledge” (Ephesians 3:19).
In the presence of God, who is love, there is no desire to meditate on hurts from the past or flaws in a person’s character. Even when Jesus hung on the cross He said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do” (Luke 23:34). When a person truly experiences God’s unconditional love in life, they passionately desire to show God’s love to those around them so others can experience His goodness.
You may have heard the old adage “If you choose to remain in your pain, you will stay the same.” We would like to add to this, “If you choose to meditate on what is right, you will be a pillar of God’s light!” The truth is – anyone can find imperfections in people. Some people look for faults in others like they think they’re going to get rewarded for it, but this brings no reward! It comes with a great price tag! The real talent in relationships is choosing to look past mistakes and focus on the good in others.
In love,
Pastors Shaun & Amy
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