Random Marriage Tips

From my sermon on You Shall Not Commit Adultery.

Cultivating a good marriage is part of the antidote to adultery
If you’ve got fillet steak at home, you’re much less likely to go out for a burger!

So here are some random tips on how to affair proof your marriage.
A basic guide to a successful marriage:

Work hard at your marriage
You’re stuck with it, after all.
Its in everyone’s best interests, including your own, that you make your marriage work.
A happy husband is a happy wife, and a happy wife is a happy husband!
How to make your wife treat you like a king: treat her like a queen.

So, married couples, love one another.
Pray for one another and with one another regularly.
Give thanks for your husband or wife.

Don’t make an idol of your husband or wife.
Remember this commandment is given in the context of the 1st commandment, to have no other gods beside the true God.
Don’t have unreasonable expectations of your partner: they’ll make a rubbish God.
Don’t pin all your hopes of happiness on them.

Maintain other friendships.
Intellectual arguments about theology.
Go down the pub with the other curates not bother Mrs Lloyd over breakfast with infralapsarianism.
That’s not her idea of a good time!

A good marriage requires good communication
Spend time together
Talk!
Open up your hearts and minds to one another
Share your joys, sorrows, concerns
Listen, make time
If there’s a problem, discuss it.

Be on one another’s side! You’re a team.
Never criticise or belittle one another in front of anyone else.
Encourage one another.
Sympathise, don’t always criticise or carp.
Lots of little digs can soon burry a marriage.

Remember why you married that person in the first place.
Have fun together.
Go on a date.
Buy her flowers or chocolates or whatever – there doesn’t need to be a special occasion.
Let’s have a little romance in marriage, even though you’ve bagged your wife!
If there were more courtship in marriage, there’d be fewer marriages in court.
Tell her how nice she looks.
Tell one another how much you love one another and why.
When she’s a mother, make sure she remains your lover.

Remember to say sorry, thank you and please.
Don’t let things fester.
Better to let it go or get it out in the open and over with quickly than nurse a grudge.

Don’t take one another for granted.
Show appreciation.
Celebrate what the other person does that you couldn’t do.

Remember that you’ve got your fair share of weaknesses and foibles and sins and failures too.
Be as forgiving and understanding of your husband or wife as you tend to be of yourself – or more so.

Delight in married sexual love
The Bible can be quite direct and graphic about it.
Proverbs 5 well worth reading.
Prov 5:18-20: “Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth, 19 a lovely deer, a graceful doe. Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight; be intoxicated1 always in her love. 20 Why should you be intoxicated, my son, with a forbidden woman and embrace the bosom of an adulteress?”
Did you know that the Bible commands you to delight in your wife’s breasts?
There’s an application for Sunday afternoon!

When a couple have sex they “make love” – that’s a good euphemism for sex.
When a couple make love they celebrate and deepen their love.
Sex is profoundly relational, not just recreational.
Husband and wife are to be treated as persons, not play-things.
Serve one another in the bedroom
Seek to please your husband or wife, not simply to grasp after your own gratification
Don’t have selfish sex
Enjoy one another
There is nothing wrong, or grubby, or shameful or dirty about sex within marriage
God invented sex!
God is for sex and sex is for marriage.
Sex the kind of thing one can talk about in sermons without the slightest unseemliness!
Sex is a good gift from God to be enjoyed within marriage
Sex is a celebration of married love, mutual self-giving, abandonment

Married couples are to make love often.
1 Cor 7:3-5:
“The husband should fulfil his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. 4 The wife's body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband. In the same way, the husband's body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife. 5 Do not deprive each other except by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.”