Steven Furtick - The Secret to Stronger Relationships
This is an excerpt from: Fix Your Focus and The Prison of Offense
Happiness isn't finding the right person; happiness is being the right person. If you find the right person and you are not the right person, what do you think you're going to do to that poor right person? Please. I'm not suggesting that if you're not married or something like that it's because you're not ready yet. All we have to do to disprove that stupid theory is to look at some of the people who are married. Married doesn't equal ready. I could offer you many examples of that, starting with myself.
What I am saying is that it is important to God that you have the right people in your life, but the only way you're going to have the right people in your life is if you will be the right person in your heart. That's the only way you're even going to attract them to begin with and that's the only thing you can control. I can't always control whether this person comes into my life, but I can control the kind of person I am. You know how you have little memories from your childhood that are so random you wonder how they're still up there from all these years and you kind of wish you could delete them because, honestly, you need that space for more important things, like your children's names and stuff that you forget sometimes.
I have memory… I don't know why. I remember in sixth grade they gave us the Berkeley County writing test. I remember the prompt of the Berkeley County writing test when I was in the sixth grade almost word for word. "Pretend that you are on an adventure or journey with your friends, and on this adventure or journey you come across a valuable unusual object. Describe the object". A couple of weeks later, the teacher walked in with all of our writing tests and made an announcement. She said, "I've never had this happen before in however many years of teaching, but every single one of you failed the Berkeley County writing test". We laughed. She said, "It's not a joke".
She said, "You wrote beautiful essays. You went into great detail elaborating on the journey with your friends, but that was not the writing prompt. The writing prompt was not to describe the journey. The writing prompt was to describe the object. All of you wrote essays about walking through the woods with your friends. Some of you traveled across the seas with your friends. Some of you flew through space with your friends. It was highly entertaining, but none of you described the object".
The object of relationship, the object of love is not that somebody else would complete you. I'm sorry, Renee Zellweger, but you got it wrong. Your line was touching; it just wasn't true. Jerry didn't complete you. Touch your neighbor and say, "You can't complete me". We teach this stuff. No wonder single people have their fists up ready to fight me when I want to preach about marriage. The way we preach it and teach it… We teach it like until you get married your life hasn't started. I only have one question to ask you. If that's true, how can you worship Jesus? We worship a guy who stayed single till they killed him. I'm not saying you have to stay single and be like Jesus. I'd be a hypocrite to say that. I'm saying if Paul would have waited to fulfill his purpose until he had somebody to complete him, we wouldn't have 23 percent of the New Testament. We teach it wrong. I've taught it wrong.
In the book of Genesis God is describing marriage. He's talking about Adam and Eve and he says, "The man shall leave his father and mother and go be with his wife," and it says, "The two will become one". Let me tell you what it doesn't say. It doesn't say, "The halves will become whole". Yet we teach it and we treat it and we expect it like the halves are going to become whole. I found out if you go into a marriage half, the two halves are going to make hell, not whole.
Let me show you what the Devil wants to do in your relationship. God said the two shall become one. This is exactly what the Enemy wants. Every battle you're going to fight, every argument about the dishes… The Enemy's agenda is destruction. His strategy is division. I don't know if you believe in the Devil or not, but the Enemy is not going to be happy until he sees you like this. What I just showed you… The Bible says marriage is even a picture of Christ and the church. What he wants to do to them he wants to do to this whole church. What he wants to do to them he wants to do to you and your teenager. His agenda is destruction. He comes to kill, steal, and destroy. His strategy is division, and here's his tactic. This is the part I want to preach about. His tactic is offense. Satan has an offensive strategy. If the Devil were not subtle, Dan wouldn't stand for his schemes, but the Enemy is very strategic.
Jesus is giving us in Matthew, chapter 5, kind of a playbook of how the Enemy wants to work in your relationship. I know Dan is not going to let him, but he's going to try. He won't make an announcement. "Hey, I'm coming to kill and steal and destroy". Right now you just spent all that money on the flowers and the dresses and all the groomsmen and all that stuff. I know it has been a couple of years, and that's good, because what you see in those first couple of years is that the Enemy will usually start in a small way. If he announced, "I've come to divide," Dan the man wouldn't stand for that. Come on, stick your chest out, Dan. What the Enemy will do is just use the littlest offense. What Jesus is doing in Matthew, chapter 5, is showing us how to deal with the offense so we can keep the Devil on defense. How many want to keep the Devil on defense in your life and in your family?
Come on, church! Last week when I was preaching, I ended talking about you have this plank in your eye and you're so concerned about the little speck in my eye. Meanwhile, you're walking around with your big old plank, just whacking them on the head, causing distraction, division, and all this stuff. It's the contrast between the small things and the big things. There are times that a big offense… There's not a week that goes by that somebody doesn't call me for counsel who's going through a marriage situation, like a divorce or a separation. There's not a week that goes by there won't be another pastor or maybe a situation in the church. I get to talking to them about what happened, and if you can go back far enough you find that every plank is made up of a lot of specks. To me, that's the heart of Jesus' teaching. I didn't read you the whole passage, because I want to break it down and show you how it happens. He said it could be something as small as a word.
The closer the relationship, the greater the opportunity. That goes both ways. The closer the relationship, the greater the opportunity for intimacy. However, the closer the relationship, the greater the opportunity for offense. That's why nobody can make you really mad like somebody you really love. Nobody can hurt you like somebody you've given your heart to. I've asked the question a lot of times of people and really in my own mind… I've seen people who were so loyal to each other and if you would have asked me 10 years ago, "Who is most likely to ever have an enemy relationship"? or "Who's most likely to have a divorce"? or "Who's most likely to not be speaking to each other…"? Some of those very same people… Just in the last year of my life, even, I've watched some things happen that surprised me. Every time you see it, you ask the question, "How did we get here"?
Did you see how big Dan was smiling over Stephanie? They're going to have a great marriage and all of that and it's going to be awesome, but you ask the question, "How could somebody who had that same hope, that same smile, barely stand to be in the room with somebody two kids later"? It happens and there are all kinds of ways it happens. I know there's compatibility and I know it's not always something you can fix. It takes one to forgive, but it takes two to be reconciled. I guess I want you to know that my goal today isn't so much to do an autopsy of anybody's mistakes but just to show you something that happens. It always happens one offense at a time.
Usually when I see something in someone else that makes me angry or offended it's because it represents something that's in me. I told you there were two tools (and there are) when it comes to the relationships that matter the most and when it comes to the things that offend us in other people, because everybody has issues and most of us have a subscription. Do you know what a great dating conversation would be? "What kind of crazy are you? I can't tell from this distance, but if I get close to you…" All these issues… You have to decide, "Am I going to focus on theirs or mine"?
I think the key to this thing of loving the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind, and with all our strength, and loving our neighbor as ourselves… Sometimes you have to put down this and pick up this and just ask God, "So, Lord, what is it that you're trying to teach me or what is it that I can change? I tried changing Charlie and Charlie won't change. So here I am, Lord". In the words of the King of Pop, if you want to make the world a better place, where are you going to start?
Sometimes you have to start with your own self. God says you can't even help the people you love when you're infected with the very issue you're trying to solve. It's "Love the Lord your God". That's one half, but it's also, "Love your neighbor as yourself". That's the other half. You can't have this half right and not have this half right. You can't treat people like garbage and worship God at the same time. You can't get this right, though, until you get this right. You can't treat people well if you don't know God loves you, and you can't love God until you have received his love freely.
God has given us another way to deal with offense. If only we could find an example of somebody who had every right to be offended, of somebody who had every right to hold it against us, of somebody who had every right to stand at a distance but opened his arms and said… This is the way of relationship. The Lord gave me a real specific word for somebody who needs reconciliation in your relationship. It's very simple what they have to do if they're going to stay like they started.
If we're going to get back to where we were, we're going to have to learn… This is very profound. This is deep. You're going to miss it. This is what you're going to have to learn. You have to learn to drop it. I don't mean suppress it. I don't mean you don't deal with things after they happen, but after you've had the conversation, "Dan, I like pancakes on my birthday," then drop it.
The moment the offense… You can't always control what's handed to you, but you can control what you do with it. So what are you going to do with the offense? You can't choose anybody else's actions. The Enemy wants you to drive it down deep. He wants you to think about it and miss all the reasons the person has worked their way into your life and miss all the things they've done for you, but God says, "Drop it". I believe there are some things we need to drop tonight.
In fact, Jesus said this is so important that if you are in church at the altar offering a gift and a sacrifice but the primary relationships in your life are dysfunctional and need reconciliation, you can't even properly connect with God unless you drop it. What are you going to do when they don't acknowledge you, when they don't notice you? What are you going to do when they are too busy to show you the love and affection but you know they're trying as hard as they can? You have to drop it. I'm telling you, being married, being in a close relationship, is about not how quickly you can get offended but how quickly you can get over it.