The Biggest Issue in Your Relationships

So we're going to be in Philippians, chapter 2, today, but I'm going to read it in a little bit. I just wanted you to know that we put God's word in our world here and, I'm going to give you some practical feedback that comes from John and Julie gotman and other marriage and family therapy, at the same time, this all comes from God's word. I just don't want you to forget, while I give you all this practical feedback, that God's word is the, the predicate for all of this information. Can we do that?

Just say Amen am all right, good stuff.

Philippians, chapter 2. We're going to do a sermon today entitled the biggest issue in your relationships. The biggest issue in your relationships. How many of you anyone remember the name of this series?

It's a marriage series.

It's not about marriages only, but marriage is irrelevant to it. It's a relationship series. I just couldn't figure out what to call it. I almost called it the four horsemen, but then people would think we'd be preaching out of Revelation, and then it was just bad marketing.

And then people would show up expecting Revelation and then someone would be like, hey, do you believe in the Rapture?

And I'd be like I'm talking about relationships and it would be confusing. So, anyways, we just called it a marriage series. The first two weeks we covered what I would call the first tier of problematic activities in your relationships. Those first tier are two general habits that we have.

The first would be criticism.

Criticism starts you off into this cycle and can be an early warning sign of a bad relationship or a disconnect or, if you're married, a divorce. Criticism happens when you want to vocalize your need, but it comes out in the form of something that doesn't produce anything positive. I said, it's expressing your need without a nag. Or sorry, expressing your need, without forethought is generally a nag, which is what criticism kind of comes out as, and when you're critical of somebody else, they tend to be anyone.

Remember last week's word defensive, and defensiveness is a propagator of this issue that we have in our relationships.

Defensiveness is you then turning back to them and responding with a posture of defensiveness. You're trying to meet, then, your need rather than addressing their need, and I get it, because when someone vocalizes their need the wrong way, it is my tendency to say: hold on before. We care about what you said. I'm going to make sure you say it the proper way and you do it with your spouse all the time- I know you do.

You're like nuh-, I'm not going to have this conversation.

Go talk to me that way. Well, what you're doing there in your defensiveness, I get why you're do, why you're doing it, but you're actually preventing the conversation from continuing properly, because you can stop this culture that's created by criticism by simply not being as defensive rather than being defensive. Recognize, you don't have to put up barriers against other people. You can actually invite them in and say: hey, I recognize.

Maybe you didn't mean to say it that way, but help me understand your need right, the.

The solution or antidote for defensiveness is to look at the other person and say: how can I meet their need? And again, this is even on both sides. I'm not saying the critical person or the defensive person is wrong. I'm saying when we get into this cycle, it doesn't really matter who's wrong at that point.

What you need to do is get out of that into a place where you can be productive.

Now we come into the second tier. So I'm going to cover one this week and another next week, so you won't want to miss it. But today we're covering a word called contempt. Look at your neighbor and say contempt with a p- contempt, contempt.

It, according to John and Julie gotman, is the number one predictor of divorce.

In your relationships, contempt is not just a starting point, but you're almost there at this place. Well, you're done with the relationship. When contempt happens in a relationship and continues, to Prevail, you are in a bad spot in any of your relationships. Now I want to be very clear.

If you have that toward your partner, if you have that toward other people, you have it toward your brother or your sister or extended family or your employer or your employees or anybody you can interact with.

If you have contempt toward that person, some of it is natural, but if it prevails, you will have problematic or problems continue to arise in your relationships and in my marriage content contempt has risen up, not not not recently, but throughout our marriage. It is, it's reared its ugly head and while I think we have a great marriage, it still comes up and for many people your view toward your partner can be- the word would be contemptuous. It's filled with contempt for reasons that may seem reasonable and for reasons that are inexcusable. Whatever it is, you're in this place where you have contempt toward another person, and that's why it's the biggest issue, because contempt ultimately comes down to your view of yourself in relation to another person.

You're viewing yourself Superior to another.

That's what contempt really is. But I want to give you a couple ways contempt rears its head in relationships. What does contempt look like? Here's a couple.

First one is sarcasm.

Now I'm going to invite you to be honest in this place. I'm going to be honest in this place, so I want to invite you to be honest in this place. How many of you, in your relationships, have a tendency to be sarcastic? Oh, not Rel.

How many of you have been sarcastic at all in your relationship?

Okay, I'm going to work with some people who are apparently unaware of their struggles in relationships and some of you just don't know how to use it. Or you think you're not being sarcastic, you think you're being just. That's the best way to communicate and we're really going to help you today. Sarcasm is- I- sometimes it's early- like sarcasm can have two different ways of expressing itself.

It can be in a real, genuine joke that has some truth to it.

It can also be in Anger. Sarcasm is a big problem in relationships. I'm not saying you can't have jokes in your relationship. I'm saying when there is a tendency to be sarcastic in your relationship, sometimes that stems from contempt, CU, here's what'll happen.

I'll just use me.

But before I use me I want to be clear again. How many of you here last week just raise your hand real quick, cool? You remember when I told you very clearly- and I thought it was eloquent- that when I give you real stuff between me and my wife, that I'm doing it for the purpose of helping you. And sometimes I'll take something that's really small for us and utilize language that makes it look really big, because there are people that are really, really struggling in their relationships and I am trying to help those people.

So I will utilize things vulnerably for my relationship.

It doesn't mean we're in trouble. It doesn't mean we about to get divorced. It doesn't mean I don't date my wife- amen. Right last week I talked about it that that was something I've been growing and someone text me that evening and they did it in the best way possible.

They were like: hey, manto man, you should totally date your wife.

And I was like: I hear you so you can text me if you feel the conviction of the Holy Spirit. But I want to be vulnerable with you today, not to just shade my wife and tell you all the bad things in our relationship, but because it's true in all of our relationships. I'm just trying to be abundantly clear here and I can be sarcastic. I some of you know me well enough to know that I can definitely be sarcastic.

A good version of sarcasm- this is a very small one.

Say I walk home or I don't walk home. Say I get home, I walk into the house and I look down at the edge of the stairs and because we're all upstairs, there's no bedrooms that we use downstairs, and so if there shoes at the bottom of the stairs is because someone wanted to take off their shoes but they didn't want to walk up the stairs and put it where the shoes go, in the shoe cubby or whatever we call that thing. And I look at the shoes and I say, oh man, I love it when I come home and I see shoes. In fact there's dirt on the shoes.

That's cool.

I love using vacuums. It's fun, that's my favorite thing to do and it's light sarcasm, and I don't know that I do it that way, do I, Hannah, maybe sometimes I don't, she just ignore her. I don't necessarily do that, but it's. It's a real thing, and you can think of the areas in your relationships where you might be sarcastic.

We'll be driving and we've driven to this place 10 times, like after the first time.

You should have memorized it right. Some men in the room, women in the room, whoever's good at directions in the room- you don't need Google Maps after the eighth time. And so I'm on the phone and we're driving somewhere. I'm like, hey, can you go to so and so or meet me here, said where's here?

And I'm like, I don't know, we just go here every other day.

It's something we do on the regular. In fact, the first five times I gave you directions it was, you know, I just tired of talking about this. Or when I look at the spreadsheet and I'm like, man, I love not being able to do formulas, cuz you put words and numbers in the same cell in the spreadsheet. See, I'm getting real nuanced here.

Right, that's my sarcasm.

I'll come in there. Ain't nothing wrong with it, it's just a different way of doing it. But what I will do is I will make myself Superior to my spouse by saying that the way that I do things or think about things is more adequate. But I don't say that and I also don't say that I don't express a need that I have.

I say that they're the problem and I do it through sarcasm because it's easier to beat around the bush.

Raise your hand in here. If you came from Alabama this week, There's a team in here. Yeah, look at that. Yeah, you know what I'm talking about.

There's this thing we do.

It's this like light, normal, average, like everyday sarcasm, where someone SS telling a story about how they did something wrong or whatever, and you're just like: oh, bless your heart, bless it, it, it, it. It's just light, but it shows contempt. And so in your relationships, when you use an overabundance of sarcasm, some people just need to take some jokes, but an overabundance of sarcasm it's a problem. And I want to encourage you.

If you have contempt- like if you genuinely believe you are better than somebody else in an activity or you actually believe you're better than them ontologically right, like I- it is a problem to have contempt toward another person.

And when it manifests itself through sarcasm, you think it's not a problem, but I need you to know it's communicating something to your partner, because someone told them when they were growing up- and I wish they hadn't said this, but they said it- that eight, there's 20%, or there's a partial truth to every bit of joking. There's there's a little truth to every sarcastic remark. That's what they told me growing up. So every time someone's sarcastic to me, I'm wise enough, smart enough to hear it and I don't take it as a joke.

I take it as you think.

You're better than me, don't you? The person you're talking to will, 90% of the time, take it that way. So your sarcasm, is a form of contempt. The next one is mocking or mimicking.

Mocking or mimicking.

My wife shows this video every time that she's doing like an art science of love or the four horsemen teaching, cuz she's a Coupes therapist. She shows this video where there's a person that is embodying contempt. So she shows this video because it's- it's kind of it's humorous, but it's true- where there's a husband and a wife sitting there and the husband is like: she's always doing this and she's always doing this. And when I come home she's like: do this, do this, do this, do this.

Hey, will you pick this up?

Will you pick this up. Will you do this? Hey, I know you were at work, but now you got to do this and, I've been at the home with my and they're mocking them right, they're making fun, they're mimicking what they say and I know you do it. You might do it in a very calm way.

You don't use the, the pedantic voice, to frustrate them too much, but you use yep and you just start copying the things that y.

Every time. I want to be intimate. You had a long day. Every time that I want this, you think this and you say this: yep.

I'm guessing we're disconnected again, sweetie, because I've been been busy at work and you don't understand how busy I've been.

The, the version of mocking we tend to see as mocking, is the one that I just showed you. No, you don't have to sound like that to be mocking somebody. No, it's taking what they have said as an expression of need, turning it back on them and making them feel inferior. You're mocking or you're mimicking them.

Another one is name calling.

I know you never do this. You guys are perfect, pure. The spirit of God has fully Sanctified you and never call anyone names anymore. But for those of you who do and are perfectly Sanctified.

I think, name calling actually manifests itself in more than just what you're thinking.

I know you don't walk around to your spouse and say: you're such an idiot, unless you do, in which case you need this sermon, right. I don't walk around and say you, you're so dumb, you're not smart, you're unintelligent, you're not good at anything, you're so lazy. I know you don't say any of that, and again, if you do, listen to what I'm about to say, because it'll be helpful for you. But most of us have learned that if we say that, it's going to cause an argument, and when we have contempt toward another person, we don't feel like having the argument anymore, and so we don't say that kind of stuff.

That's just mean.

Here's what we do. We say we say something about their activity that they take as a hit on their character. You say, man, I wish at some point we could do the dishes, or I wish at some point that we would stop acting like such and such, and you might even compare yourself to somebody else. You might say I, I wish that we were more like this family, or I wish we would do things the way my parents did them.

Look at their relationship.

It's not necessarily calling them a name, but when they receive that, they're saying or they're feeling like you, call them something. This will happen in our relationship, and I don't want to say quite often, but it's happened over the last 12 years. Hey, everybody, I just want to tell you Hannah, Hannah, 12 year anniversary today. Look at you, look at me.

Oh man, we're professionals, we're good at this.

So good at this now for us is divorce wasn't an option, so we got to figure our stuff out. That's that's what we're doing. But in our relationship sometimes she'll say things to me and vice versa, that she'll swear up and down we about an activity, but I heard it as if she thought I'm just a terrible person, and so what I would encourage you to do is, when you're saying things, you may not call him a jerk, you might not call him an idiot, you might not call him stupid, you might not call him lazy. You might not call him a workaholic, you might not call them all of these things that you could list- and chances are, when you were really angry, you probably did- but you are saying something about who they are by constantly talking about their transgressions toward you and it makes them feel stressed out and as if they're with someone who is superior to them.

So stop name calling or stop making them feel like you called them a name.

Another thing we do is we ask the wrong way. Questions can be a real problem if you don't ask them the right way. It's like: why'd you do it like that? Why'd you put words with numbers in the cell of the Excel spreadsheet when you're managing our finances?

Now we have to do a new.

Now we have to do a new sheet every single month because they're in words and we got to change it. Or I've got to add a formula, which means super great. I can use sarcasm. Thanks, baby, for teaching me, letting me Teach myself- how to use Excel, because now I got to do a formula and figure out how to multiply things times each other when there are words in the cell.

I learned a new formula today.

Praise God for you, sweetie. Whatever I'm doing it, I might say: why'd you do it that way? Or or why didn't you do this? And?

And the way that you said it told them everything they needed to feel like they are inferior to you.

Why didn't you pick up the kids? Or why do you never pick up the kids? Why am I always picking up the kids? Why don't you ever be intimate with me?

I've been putting out hints.

Why don't you ever see the hints? I wish you would date me a little bit more. Why don't you ever date me? So and so down the street they go on dates all the time.

I know that they fight and argue and then the only time they're doing well is when they post something on Facebook.

But hey, at least it looks good, sweetie. Why don't you? Why do you? Why would you?

Why wouldn't you?

Why, why, why, why? Why? We ask the wrong way and we wonder why they feel inferior to us, or they're they're, they're just frustrated and you wonder why you feel a certain way toward them. It's because you've been asking the wrong question.

They respond to defensiveness and it propagates this issue of contempt in your relationship.

Oh, because you've been asking the wrong way. Ask a different way. Ask in a way that requires more than 2% of your brain. Ask in such a way that you thought about it for 5 seconds.

Ask in such a way that you're actually trying to meet their need rather than trying to fulfill your own need.

90% of the issue in our relationships comes because I am me centered, not them. Centered says: love the other as you love yourself it. It doesn't say love yourself, like in this super crazy, self-centered way. It says love yourself and your neighbor in the same way.

That's the idea.

And then there are nonverbals. And I put two nonverbals here. You've got I rolling dude. You know the feeling you get when someone rolls their eyes at you.

That's the feeling they get when you roll your eyes at them, right?

I just I want to help you out here a little bit. That nonverbal. When someone does something that you've told them not to do 10 times, or you don't like it when they do it and you've expressed your need for them to stop doing it, and then they do it one more again and you're like: every time that tells them that you giving up, that tells them that you knew they were going to do it in the first place. That tells them nothing good.

When you roll your eyes at them, sometimes you snear at them like there you go again.

They say something critical to you and then you responded defensiveness to them, and then they get defensive and they're like: look at us again in another fight on another day about another issue. We just can't figure our stuff out. That's kind of the sneering that I'm talking about. There's eye rolling, sneering, nonverbals.

I'll give some other points.

They'll be on the screen. Contempt is like criticism on steroids. It's this long simmering negative thought that you have about your partner, about people you're in relationship with, that long simmering negative one. Right, calculating all the wrongs against the other person, while someone who criticizes still thinks a need can be fulfilled.

Right, that's a low level, low, low level, first tier criticism.

Someone with contempt feels that their need can no longer be met by the other person. You can tell how this is problematic and ultimately, contempt says: I'm better than you or you're less than me. I'm better than you or you're less than me. And I know you hear this and you're like, yeah, that makes a lot of sense, but we, we do that.

We have this mindset toward our partner, whether we're flooded or whether we've just defaulted to this, where we have contempt toward them and we feel like we're better.

And something that I didn't list that I think is worth listing. I talked to the first service about this. One thing that happens a lot is the people you spend time with outside of your relationships can have a real positive or A real detrimental impact to your relationships. I'll talk about a group of people in specifics.

Your parents say you're in a marriage.

The Bible's pretty clear. It says, that you leave your father and your mother and you cling to your spouse. That's what God has created: you becoming one in Christ Jesus as you are married to somebody else. But that doesn't mean give up on your entire family.

You still hang out with them, and so one thing I've learned in my relationship is that even good intentions from my family can be harmful, and I'm talking to people in this room who are still hanging out with their dad and their mom at the level they did before they got married.

And what happens is you'll be in a conversation now. I know Hollywood talks about the- the parents hating the- the husband of their kid, you or the wife of their kid. I know that's pretty common. They'll just talk mad.

You shouldn't have gotten with him in the first place.

That's Hollywood and that sometimes happens. I've heard it. It's crazy. Are you parent your kids in a weird way or they're always gone.

Were they ever going to come back home.

My, my father and you- my father and I- are so much better than you guys at this. They, that's Hollywood. But sometimes it happens- for the most part it's more like you talk to your family about something going on in your relationship and then they start giving you advice, but that advice comes to you from people who raised you, they gave birth to you, maybe, and now you're bringing that advice into a different type of Rel relationship and then your husband or your wife is going to feel ganged up on and then you step into a very hard situation, all because you were talking to people who genuinely care about you and that built content in you toward another person: my, my mom. She lives in our next gen suite and we had to be really clear up front.

She never did anything wrong at all, but we had to be really clear up front.

Hey, when Hannah and I are arguing, just make sure you let us handle our stuff right, don't step in on either side. Even if one of us asks you, to pick a side, it's like: doesn't that make sense? Mom, she's wrong, right. And my mom's like: I'm going to my room, I'm, I'm out of here, right, and we, we, we told you that up front on purpose, because we recognize the contempt that can build when you go outside of that relationship and try to get feedback, even if it's good feedback.

The problem we run into in our relationships is that the, the, the desire should not be to fix the other person or even necessarily to fix what's going on.

The desire is to connect. Contempt is the opposite of connection, and so here are a couple antidotes to contempt in your relationship. The first one is: be reflexive. Be be reflexive.

You got to be reflexive.

Reflexive, comes out in two different ways that I've listed here. First, look Inward and assess your needs. How problematic is it when you blame somebody else for not meeting your needs when you're not even aware of what the need that you're asking for for is? I know that sounded confusing.

That's how your, your spouse, feels when you're asking them for it and you haven't even become aware of it.

Right? How many times you blaming somebody else for a problem, that you don't even need know how to solve because you hav't looked inward, you haven't thought about what's going on in you. You're asking them for more connection, but what you need, you actually need, is something radically different. Maybe you need more Bible, but you've been asking your spouse to fix your problems.

Maybe you need more Jesus in your life, but you've been asking your spouse or your friends or your family to fix your problems and you're frustrated at them because they didn't fix the problem that you expressed or they're not meeting the need that you express.

But it can only be fulfilled in Christ Jesus. If you don't look inward, you don't even know. It's like if someone cut you off in traffic and you blow up and you flip them off. No, they shouldn't have cut you off.

They're terrible drivers.

They should have figured it out and they need Jesus to figure out how to drive better. I know, but you flipping them off is not because they did something to you. You flipping them off or cussing them out or at them like they should die, is a problem that you have that you have not looked inward to fix. That's an anger issue, that's a unfulfilled need issue, and if you're not aware of what is causing you to blow up on your spouse or to blow up on those people or to look with resentment on the people that are closest to you, then how are they ever going to fulfill it like if you don't even know what to tell them.

You got to look inward.

One of the biggest issues for me is I. I struggle to look inward sometimes and this is a second one- I, I, I need to question my own assumptions about a scenario. It's easy to come home and then to look at something out of place and think all the worst things. I know you do it, I'm just being honest with you about it.

You look at all the worst things.

Yep, something's out of place. That means someone did not do their job. I've been asking for underwear all week but I don't have any because it's not been washed yet. And I'm just assuming, assuming, assuming- shoes are on the floor.

And then, once I start in that trajectory, I start questioning everything.

So, oh man, things not wiped. It's not even her job, like some of that stuff's my job. But I'm frustrated cuz I came home after a long day. She works full time, she's amazing.

But I came home and something's out of place and I just start blame, blame, blame, blame, blame, content cuz I knew it was going to happen.

But if I question my own assumptions, I get to pause and then I start thinking: oh, what could have happened at home to make this be so. Maybe there's something that I asked my spouse for a long time ago, that they're trying to fulfill or meet my need in that area. But I'm not thinking about that because there's another need that's unmet or an expectation that she didn't fulfill, and I'm frustrated about that all the while she's trying to do something for me that I've asked her for. It's the same in all of our relationships.

You don't know why something happened until you ask am, and so I would encourage you, rather than judging them and making them the problem, be reflexive.

Look inward to assess your need needs. Also, question your own assumptions, which brings me to another antidote. You've got to express your needs, not their problems. I'm going to say that again.

I'm going to be real chill here.

Express your needs, not their problems. Your needs, which means you have to identify your needs, which means if you don't know your needs and you're expressing problems, then you're being problematic. Yeah, you're the problem at that point. Yeah, they got stuff they did to you that was wrong and they shouldn't have done it, but you're the problem at this point.

If you're unaware of your needs, then you cannot adequately Express those needs.

So if you're expressing something out of your mouth. You're probably not expressing your needs, but expressing the fact that they're the problem and they need to meet something that you've never communicated to them. Express your needs, which means you got to become aware of your needs. We talked about this a little bit.

When it came to criticism, you might say something as simple as I feel this way, or I think I feel like this is what's happening.

They might still get frustrated, but it's a little softer than you keep doing this, and this is a problem. Whenever you blame someone, it's not fun. The next step is to build a culture, and I love this. You've got to build a culture of fondness and admiration.

Build a culture of fondness and admiration.

Well, how do you do that? First thing you do is you promote the positive. Promote the positive, cuz what's been happening, the reason you have contempt toward another person, the reason you feel Superior to them- and we all do this- is because you've been counting the wrongs. You've been promoting the negative.

Now, we all do this.

I get it, cuz when you're scrolling Instagram and you look at how much better everyone's lives are than you, then you leave that Instagram moment and then you go into your life and you're frustrated, naturally. So you're looking at all the negative things in your life. I know when you come home from work and things didn't go well, you're looking for things to go negative at your house and your first comment to somebody who asks you for a favor is, yep. Coming home to this again, it's the first thing you do.

Right, it's because we tend to promote the negative.

But not only the ganss, but I think Christ Paul in Philippians, chapter 4, tells us: in our lives and in our relationships, you've got to promote the positive. Here's what Paul says about Christ. He says: think on the things that are true, right, honorable, pure, lovely and of good repute, and when you're thinking on the right things, that's where peace is ushered in your relationships. If you want peace rather than hostility, you've got to promote the positive.

You have to do that.

You, you've got to do this. If you don't, not only you going to be a Debbie Downer at all times- sorry if your name's Debbie, it's just a normal phrase that we utilize in the world. Not only you going to be like that, but you're going to be frustrated with everybody. I struggle with this a lot and I am still learning constantly to promote the positive.

One thing I wrote here is to write a partner puff piece.

You know what a puff piece is. A puff piece is what, a Democrat would write about Biden or a republican were write about Trump. They'll promote all the positive things and they'll kind of ignore. It's not that they don't exist or they're saying they don't exist.

It's that they're just promoting the positive things to the neglect of the negative things.

And you might think, well, Matt, that's not truth. My husband is terrible, my wife is lazy, my husband is a workaholic, just to be even. My wife is always complaining about something. My employer hates me, my employees never work hard enough, my friends don't get me.

I can keep going and going and going.

That's negative. But you can actually promote the positive. You can start writing puff pieces about the people in your relation. You're in relationship with I h.

I have to do it with my wife and I got to tell you this.

I'm not just writing a partner Puff. This is truth, not just Grace, this is truth. My wife is phenomenal and amazing and every time I say anything that could be borderline perceived as a complaint, people look at me and they're like: no, I know you and I know her. She's way better than you.

You must be the problem every single time.

That's what happens. She is that cool. But in a relationship don't matter how cool the other person is to everybody else. You trying to figure each other out.

And so I still have to promote the positive.

There are certain things that she does that bug me and there are certain things that I do. Amen, Hannah, that bug bug you, they bug her. There's certain things I do they bug you, guys. There's certain things that employees will do, or volunteer leaders or volunteers will do that bug me.

And so I have to remind myself to promote the positive, because when we look at Christ Jesus, he could have been hostile to us like we were hostile to him.

He could have counted all the wrongs that were stacked against us. He could have looked at us and said, Woo, it's a terrible piece of creation, let's do away with that one. He could have said: they keep sinning, but. But instead he humbles himself and he dies on the cross.

In fact, here's what Philippians, chapter 2- I said we' be here.

Verse 5 says we'll skip ahead to the verses there- says: in your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he made himself nothing. Taking the very nature of a servant, being made, made in human likeness and being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. So we have a God who, instead of having contempt toward us, desired to connect with us, and the way he connected with us was not by seeing himself as Superior to us and telling us what we should do.

He didn't say: come up here, step up.

He didn't say to the people sitting in the in the pews: hey, come up here, get on my level. In fact, he said N, I don't think they can do it. I don't think this is something I should even like really pursue right now, because they haven't done it the whole time. In fact, what I'm going to do, this is within my grand plan, my will, my foreordained will to do.

I'm going to come off my lofty Throne, I'm going to sympathize with their weaknesses.

I'm going to come close rather than stay distant, filled with contempt. I'm going to connect and, more than that, I'm going to actually humble myself to a level beneath them and I'm going to die on a cross so that, at the name of Jesus, every knee would bow, every heart Proclaim that Jesus is Lord. I'm going to humble myself so that I can get to a better position in my relationships. He didn't have to.

He could have sat up there in heaven and been like, fully justified in his frustration toward us, but he didn't.

Now he humbled himself I. I wrote this as kind of a final point. While superiority can cause contempt, humility will bring connection. Humility will bring connection, and I know what you're thinking.

I shouldn't have to humble myself.

They're the one who did the wrong thing. And so now you're identifying them by their worst sin, just like Satan does to you. You say he's a cheater, she's lazy, she didn't do anything I ask her to do. They're just trying to make me frustrated.

They, they, they, he, he, he, she, she.

And we, we condemn them because of our contempt toward them. Do you realize that's what Satan does to you? He makes you feel guilty about the worst thing you ever did. He tries to separate you from God by the shame that ensues every time you think about the fact that you're unqualified to do the thing that God called you to do.

He tells you when you're about to go to church: you're too wrong to be going to church.

You messed up too bad to be going a church. You are too screwed up to have salvation. That's what Satan does. It's a.

Rather than doing that with the people in your relationships, we should do more of what Christ does.

And what does he do? He says: father, forgive them. They know not what they do. Father forg, he's on a cross, he's dying for forgiveness of sin and he says: father, forgive them.

I know your spouse, I know there are people that wronged you and they filled you with contempt.

They did something wrong they did, and if you don't humble yourself, you're not necessarily wrong. I want to be very clear here. Like get, I, I'm righteously Justified, I'm indignant, I'm contempt toward them because of what they did to me. They may have been wrong and you might be justified, but what I'll tell you is: it's not about right or wrong in these relationships.

When you aren't humble, when you aren't in this place, where you're self-sacrificial, it's not that you're right or wrong, it's that you're not embodying that which Christ showed us.

You're not being, you're not imitating Christ when you mock them. You're not imitating Christ. When you're sarcastic with them, you're not imitating Christ. When you live in contempt toward them, you're not imitating Christ.

When you roll in your eyes, you're not imitating Christ.

I mean, goodness gracious, the disciples couldn't get it together. There's so many times where Jesus is- I mean he, I mean maybe he did roll his eyes a little bit- he's like: how much longer must I deal with this wretched generation like how but when? When it came to what he came to do, he humbled himself to the point of death on a cross. And what you've got to recognize in your relationships is, when there's a canyon between you and the other person of contempt, you're not going to magically get to the other side and you're not going to be able to tell them to come from their side to your side effectively.

So what you have to do is you have to go down into the canyon and, in order to step up eventually on their level, when there's a Chasm of contempt, you've got to bridge the gap, to connect.

This is what Christ has done. This is the example we are to follow, and all that practical advice, the antidotes to contempt that I gave you, are simply a practical expression of what Christ did on the cross. But there are some of you in here who are going to hear the Practical advice and you're going to screw up and screw up and screw up, and you're going to hear the pops ology and be like, oh I love that, that's super cool. Yeah, that's what I need to do.

I need to be reflexive, I need to look inward, I need to stop assuming, I need to create a culture of all these things.

Those are all great things, but without something deeper at the center, you are still going to be filled with contempt when the worst things occur, and what the world will tell you is that when it gets that bad, you have an out. But what Christ would indicate to you is that you should forgive them and forgive them and forgive them. His disciples asked him: how many times should I forgive my neighbor? Seven times, and he says seven times, 70 times, which you could do the math and it would be a lot of times.

But let's be real.

He's utilizing that as a number to implic, or to imply to them, that it's an unlimited number of times. And I'm talking directly to those in marriages right now. But when it comes to your other relationships, the easy out is what screws you up. The self-sacrifice is what will lift.

It will lift your entire relationship up, and the only way you going to get there in the worst moments is with Christ Jesus at the center.

But there are some who won't get there. They'll get the practical, but they won't get the spiritual components of it. They'll never be fully Sanctified and their relationships will be limited because they don't have Christ. So I want to give you an opportunity right now, if you've never accepted Christ Jesus, to accept him.

The Bible says that if we can confess with our mouths that Jesus is Lord and believe in our heart that God raised him from the dead, then we will be saved.

That's the prescription for salvation and that's how you're going to get your relationships ultimately in a better place, where it's not just mediocre, it's not miserable, but it's with Jesus it can be miraculous. The problems you're going to be able to solve- that's what my wife and I see over and over and over. I'll close with with this little story. My wife and I, we had a gridlocked issue for a long time and we still struggle with it from time to time because we're different.

So I- I'm a really ambitious kind of guy and when I was in college you can imagine like I was early 20s, I had my whole life ahead of me.

I'm going to change the world. I'm going to start a business in Bali and we're going to make everyone in Bali Christians. Then we're going to go to Jakarta. Then we're going to do it everywhere in the world.

I'm going be a missionary, that's, above all, missionaries, not because of Pride, but because I wanted to serve Jesus.

I, I was ambitious y'all. And then I was talking to my wife. We had just went ring shopping and it was not good. She looked at all the expensive ones, said: I like that one, I like that one, I like that one, I'm like: how about this one?

And she's like: and it was really bad.

And so we walk out of the Ring shop and we're talking about goals and she says: I said: what are your goals? And she, she said: you, I just want to be a supportive spouse and I'm doing psychology, so I want to be a counselor. I said: but what about your goals? I'm like that's normal.

What about your goals?

How you going to change the world? You'll be like the best psychologist that ever exist- existed. Are you going to find the cure for anxiety in addition to Christ? Give them practical feedback.

And you're going to be the person that did it.

Like, what are you going to do? She's like: I have no desire to do all that and I'm like: what? How dare you? Should we even get married genuinely?

And then we got married.

Obviously, we solved that problem, but we get married and there are times and seasons in our life where I get stuck in the ambition, right, some of it's good, some of it's unhealthy. And then there are times where I'm looking at her I said: don't you want to be the best counselor that exists? And she'll look at me and say: I just want to be the best counselor that I can be for my bosses at our current organization. I'm like: you don't want to start a practice, you want to change the world, you don't want to make the valley do something different in terms of psychology and I'm making fun of myself.

But this is a gridlock thing where I, I like, have big hopes, dreams of ambition and Ambitions and she's like: I'm cool with that, and I'm cool with this.

I'm chill, I'm content, I'm good and I'm like: how dare you be content, not cool. And it was a real problem because I'm sitting here like hey I, I know that that's cool and that's how you were raised and stuff like that, but it comes across to me is apathetic. Don't you want to do something for the kingdom? I know y'all judging me right now and then she's looking at me like man, why you so ambitious?

That's unhealthy.

The comparison, all this stuff that you're doing. It's problematic and that was, that was a gridlock thing because we're so different. But there's one thing I've learned: I'm not going to convince her to be me and she's not going to convince me to be her, but what we can do is convince each other through love and self- sacrifice in the vein of Christ Jesus is we can love one another so that we both become together what God's called us to be. That we haven't imagined yet, and that's just a husband and a wife.

What about all of your relationships?

Seeing the potential in Christ Jesus? That comes from self-sacrifice, not superiority and content, but it takes Christ without. Without Christ, I don't know where we would be. So you need Christ Jesus and I want to give you that opportunity right now.

So if you would bow your heads and close your eyes.

We're going to pray this prayer together, out loud, even if you prayed it before, for the benefit of those who are praying it for the first time. You might say this: God, I believe God. I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. Jesus Christ is the Son of God.

I believe he died on the cross.

I believe he died on the cross and Rose from the grave, Rose from the grave, father, forgive me of my sin, father, forgive me of my, make me a new creation, make me a new creation, redeem my relationships, my relationship, and I will follow you. I follow for the rest of my life, for the rest of my life. Today is the day, today where I put you first. I put you first.

It's in Jesus name that we pray.

Amen. Can we celebrate those who just prayed that for the first time?