Marriage Counseling | WINTERY KNIGHT

I got this lecture from the Reasonable Faith web site. (H/T straightright)

Dr. William Lane Craig is the top living Christian apologist and debater in the world today, and has 2 Masters degrees and 2 Ph.Ds. He also has scores of academic publications including books from Oxford University Press, etc.

The MP3 file is here. (14.5 Mb, about 41 minutes)

Topics:

the stresses of ministry on marriages
the Christian position on divorce
balancing marriage with academic pursuits
the importance of marrying the right person
Dr. Craig’s politically incorrect advice for choosing a spouse
Advice for men: Marry someone who believes in you and who supports you in your calling
Advice for women: Be the kind of person who can commit to being a helper and supporter
Advice for men: Beware of the career woman who will put their career over supporting you in your calling
Advice for women: Be careful about marrying if you think that your goals are more important than your husband’s goals
Advice: Don’t try to find the right person for you but instead focus on learning about marriage and preparing for marriage
Advice: Flee youthful lusts and pursue righteousness, love and peace
Advice: God intends for sex to be within the bounds of marriage, so you need to guard yourself against unchastity
Advice for men: be careful what images and movies you see with the goal of keeping your chastity
Advice: your highest responsibility after your relationship with God is your spouse, and your studies are third
Advice: it’s better to drop classes or give up your graduate studies entirely rather than destroy your marriage
Advice for women: understand that you have to work at the marriage in order to help your man finish his studies
Advice: set aside a period of the day for communicating and bonding with your spouse
Advice: cultivate the ability to talk with your spouse on a personal level, and maintain eye contact
Advice for men: do not break eye contact with your wife, and also hold her hand when communicating
Advice: do not be embarrassed to seek out a marriage counselor, but make it a good counselor
Advice: don’t just be doing stuff for your mate, but also be vulnerable and transparent with your mate
How your relationship with your wife helps you with your relationship with God
How do you handle the rebellion of children without being overbearing and authoritarian?

There is a period of Q&A at the end. There is another piece of advice that comes out in the Q&A for women: take an interest in your spouse’s work even if you don’t care about it, and ask him about it every day and try to understand it. Go to the man’s workplace and see what he does. Go to his presentations. Get involved in the man’s ministry and help him in practical ways. Another piece of advice is to not paper over the differences – it’s good to argue, because it means that problems are being confronted and worked through. Husbands should have a good male friend to talk to, and wives should have a good female friend to talk to.

I like how Dr. Craig has thought about how to have a successful marriage, how to choose the right woman, and how to love his wife. I like how he calls out men on the chastity thing. I think that chastity is more important for men than for women, because it’s the men who take the lead in choosing and pursuing the right woman for their plan.

Here is my previous post on Craig’s advice for married couples and my previous post on Dr. Craig’s advice for choosing a good spouse, with illustrations from his own marriage.

If you want to hear another Christian husband talk about how his wife supports him, listen to this lecture called “Giants in the Land” with Dr. Walter Bradley. It’s actually my favorite lecture. I also really like his testimony lecture.

From the liberal New York Times.

Excerpt:

“As a senior in high school, I had a strong sense that God wanted me in some kind of ministry,” he told me. “There were only two things I knew in a Christian framework that I could do. One would be the pastor of a church, the other would be a missionary. I didn’t particularly like snakes, so I decided I should probably be a pastor.”

As a young pastor in Winston-Salem, N.C., he began offering classes on marriage and family, and was stunned by the number of couples who asked if they could stop by his office to chat. “I had the personality that listens and empathizes,” he said.

But he also had the personality that sought out patterns of miscommunication. Combing through dozen of years of notes, he identified different ways that individuals express love. As he explained to the audience near Nashville: “Adults all have a love tank. If you feel loved by your spouse, the whole world is right. If the love tank is empty, the whole world can begin to look dark.”

The problem: individuals fill their tanks in different ways.

To illustrate, he told the crowd a story of a couple on the verge of divorce who came to see him. The man was dumbfounded. He cooked dinner every night for his wife; afterward he washed the dishes and took out the trash. “I don’t know what else do to,” the man said. “But she still tells me she doesn’t feel loved.”

The woman agreed. “He does all those things,” she said. Then she burst into tears. “But Dr. Chapman, we never talk. We haven’t talked in 30 years.”

In Dr. Chapman’s analysis, each one spoke a different love language: he liked to perform acts of service for his wife, while she was seeking quality time from him.

“Each of us has a primary love language,” Dr. Chapman said, and often secondary or tertiary ones. To help identify your language, he recommended focusing on the way you most frequently express love. What you give is often what you crave. Challenges in relationships arise because people tend to be attracted to their opposites, he said. “In a marriage, almost never do a husband and wife have the same language. The key is we have to learn to speak the language of the other person.”

He eventually labeled these different ways of expressing love “the five love languages”: words of affirmation; gifts; acts of service; quality time; and physical touch.

He outlined his ideas, along with some homespun wisdom and a sprinkling of homily, in the book, “The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate,” published in 1992 by Moody, a division of the Bible Institute. It sold 8,500 copies the first year, quadrupling the publisher’s expectation. The following year it sold 17,000; two years later, 137,000.

In a feat of endurance that would make New York publishers swoon, every year (except one) for the last 19 years, the book has outsold its haul for the previous year, putting total sales in North America at that 7.2 million figure; the book has also been translated into 40 languages.

Even more striking, those numbers were achieved without Oprah and without an appearance on a broadcast network. (Though in a rare bit of publicity, Elisabeth Hasselbeck held up the book on “The View” earlier this year and credited it with saving her marriage.)

I really recommend Gary Chapman’s book “The Five Love Languages“. My love language is words of affirmation. I like Gary Chapman because he is an evangelical Christian having an influence on the culture by defending marriage. It’s important for people to be thoughtful about marriage, and not to be swept along by emotions. To think about how the other person is and to be ready to treat them as a different person with different needs. It’s good to look at other people and to think “what’s my responsibility to you?”. When you make a commitment to love someone else for life, you have to think about actually achieving that goal, and that means knowing what counts as love to them.