Transcript
Honesty is vital to a marriage. Open-hearted, humble, communicative honesty is very important to marriage, but you've got to hear me say this. You can't confuse negativity with honesty. Isn't it sad that we're better at complaining than being thankful. We're better at finding what's wrong than celebrating what's right. We're better at being judges than encouragers. We're better at the law than we are at grace.
Determine to Count Your Blessings Together
And so, I want to encourage you to do something. I think this is a discipline, a skill, a commitment that would benefit any marriage. Determine that regularly as a couple, you're going to count your blessings. You're going to recount all the reasons you have to be thankful for the other person and thankful for your marriage, all the evidences of God's blessing in your life.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if even in light of the disappointments in marriage, thankfulness would be the lens through which you would look at one another and through which you would look at your marriage? Wouldn't it be wonderful if you woke up in the morning, even in a less than perfect marriage, with your heart filled with a sense of God's blessing, not your heart filled with complaint?
You see, no matter how tough it is for you and your marriage - and for many of you, things are tough right now - you're not a forsaken person because the most important Person in your life would never leave you or would never forsake you. He never sends you without going with you. He never calls you to a task without enabling you to do it.
And so, you have a reason, even in difficulty, to assess that you are blessed and to count those blessings, to celebrate those blessings. And my experience is when I'm filled with a sense of being blessed, I look at the hard things in a very, very different way. I look at them with hope. I look at them with courage and I find in the cracks joy where I didn't think I'd ever find it.
