 We're Jeff and Shaunty. For the past 20 years, we've been married 29 years, and for the past 20 years, we've been engaged in kind of a career of social research, helping people understand one another, particularly men understanding women, women understanding men, and then how that plays out in our marriages and what we can do to practically thrive in those marriages. So today we're going to start with a scripture that some of you, if you're familiar with the Bible, you will have heard this before, but we're going to dive into an interesting sort of application of this today that may be a little bit eye-opening and encouraging for you all about the institution of marriage that God created. Which in our culture at this present moment is not held in as high a regard. It's not slightly skeptically. Let's just say it that way, right? So we're going to start with, if you have your Bible, if you have your app on your phone like I do, turn to Genesis 2 where we look at God inventing this and putting into place this institution of marriage. So we have seen, many of you are familiar with the creation story where God creates light, he creates the animals, he creates night and day, and he looks at all these things and says, it's good, it's good, it's good. And then we come to this curious verse in Genesis 2 verse 18, then the Lord God said, it is not good for man to be alone. It's not good for man to be alone. I'll make a helper who is just right for him. Skip over to verse 21. So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep. While the man slept, the Lord God took out one of the man's ribs and closed up the opening. Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib and he brought her to the man. So you have this image of a good loving father presenting a son with his wife, okay? He brought her to the man. At last the man exclaimed, this one is bone from my bone and flesh from my flesh. Our old pastor used to say that this was Adam going, hubba hubba, okay? This was like, that's kind of what that means. She will be called woman because she was taken from man. This explains why a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife and the two are united into one. So what we see here in that scripture is how much our God values marriage. He created the covenant of marriage. He brought a husband and a wife together so that they would live in oneness together as, as even as the New Testament when we go there, Paul says that that marriage covenant is a reflection of that relationship between Christ and the church. And so we know not everybody in here is married, not everybody watching online, not everybody in the second sanctuary. Is that what you call it? The second sanctuary? Okay. And I look forward to meeting you guys later after the service. But we know not everyone is married right now. Some of you are longing to be married. Some of you aren't sure. Some of you maybe were married before and something happened. There's all sorts of places that everybody is in. But we want to look today at something that we hope will encourage everybody about this institution that God created. So today we are going to be covering three kind of big picture points. And so the first, we're going to be talking about the big picture hope for marriage. Okay. The covenant of marriage. Number two, we're going to talk about the truth about marriages today, the state of marriage today. And third, we're going to dive in just a little bit as much as we can near the end to give some practical tools. How many of you were here at the conference this weekend? And so awesome. Thank you guys for coming and investing. And for those of you who weren't there, we're going to just download a few of those things that we talked about yesterday. Practical tools and ways that God designed our relationship to thrive. So in teasing out this first point, I think it's always helpful. I learned from kind of stories, illustrations. So let me tell you a little story. When our daughter was in middle school, she had a best friend, Meredith. And Meredith was the daughter of a woman. She was a single mom. Her name was Ellen. And Ellen was raising these three kids all on her own. And over the course of time, because our daughters were best friends, Shanti reached out to Ellen and became close with her. And they would share conversations. And over the course of time, Ellen confided in Shanti that she'd met this guy. She met this guy. And he was a great guy. Great Christian guy. And as that relationship progressed, he asked her to get married. And she was excited, thankful, but also. The kids loved him. Yeah. Like everybody loved him. It was a great thing. But she was hesitant. And she talked to Shanti and she said, look, I'm, I'm aware of the high failure rate that second marriages have. I know all of the information that's out there on that. And so as a result, I think I need to protect the kids, protect myself, even as I'm entering into this marriage. And I'm, I'm gonna have kind of a bank account on the side that he doesn't know about. Just so that if he flakes out on me, we've got options. And she said, you know, he's a wonderful guy, but just in case, just because the statistics are what the statistics are, right? Foolish not to do this is sort of the way she put it. Here's the thing when it comes to marriage and really relationships in general, but let's just deal with this covenant of marriage that God created. When it comes to marriage, we take action based on what we believe to be true. We take action based on what we believe to be true. But what if it's not true? We're going to have the wrong action and we're going to go down a road that God says not to go down because we're believing a lie from the enemy. And so here are some of the things that we hear about marriage, about this covenant, this institution that God created. We hear marriages are in trouble. We hear things are falling apart. We hear the divorce rate is rising. We see people writing about a 50% divorce rate for first marriages. Don't even get me started on the divorce rate for remarriages. We hear the rate of divorce is the same in the church. How discouraging is that, right? And we hear that marriage is complicated, that it's just hard to figure out. Marriage is just, it requires a PhD in psychotherapy and a minor in mind reading, right? Like that's kind of what we sort of are presented about this. And so we take certain actions in our marriage or as we're thinking about marriage based on those beliefs that we think are true. And so when we hear, for example, like Ellen, like our friend, she hears about the super high divorce rate for remarriages and she goes, okay, well, then I need to, you know, protect myself, have the little secret bank account on the side. Or maybe you're, you know, a young person you're going into potentially a marriage, but you're thinking, I'm not going to completely open myself up to this, not entirely. I'm not going to be completely all in because we all know that, you know, most marriages fall apart. And when you have the little bank account on the side, or you try to protect yourself and you don't open up in the way that God asks us in oneness, what happens? You're building a wall. And you're creating a lack of trust. And you're causing the problem you're trying to protect yourself from. And it's all because we are operating based on fear. We all know operating based on fear is not what our good God has for us in this good institution, this good covenant that he's created. And it's really tragic that fear is creating these problems and that the enemy is whispering or really more yelling, these things, because here's the reality. So much of what we hear is news. It is not truth. It is news. It is not true. And so there is so much good and wonderful news out there about marriage that you never hear about, but it's real. So we're going to spend the rest of our time here confronting those myths, those things that you have been told by our culture by the news, so that you have the truth and then can take the right action. And we should say, don't don't hear us saying there are no problems, right? Like, don't don't hear us saying that, you know, there aren't challenges. Of course, there are very real challenges. I know some of you who came to the marriage event yesterday were coming because there's a deep need to try to restore and redeem what is going on in your marriage. I'm not minimizing that. But the truth is the big picture truth, God has good things for his children and intends marriage to be one of those good things. And we've been doing this now for about 20 years. And we've done 12 of these nationally representative major research studies on relationships on marriage, and been able to work through and dig out some of these key things that we're going to share with you. One thing though, overarching all of it though, is we've found that you could boil it all down into whether couples thrive or survive in their marriage, or whether they really, really struggle. And that one thing is whether or not they have a sense of hope in their relationship. Because think of it, if you have hope in the future, or in, you know, what you know to be true, then in spite of whatever it is that you are going through that rough season, you go, we're going to make it. But when you lose that hope, when you, it gets replaced with kind of a sense of futility, like, what's the use? Then all of a sudden things begin to spiral down on you. I mean, think about it, right? Like this, if you're, if you start having that sense of futility, here's what often the enemy loves to do with our marriages, right? You start thinking, if the ship is going to sink anyway, why bother spending so much energy trying to bail it out, right? You start listening to the enemy going, it's better if you try to escape the wreck intact. And that sense of futility itself can be what seriously damages or kills a marriage. And the problem is, we have a culture wide feeling of futility about marriage. We have a culture wide feeling of utility about marriage, based on conventional wisdom, all those negative things that I said, that we are going to prove to you are not true. So the bottom line is we're hoping, the two of us are hoping that when you walk out of here today, you'll walk out with a sense of hope. If you're married, hope in your marriage. If you're a parent of kids who are married, that you'll have hope for their marriage and try to instill some of this good information in their lives if they're not here. And we should say, listen, there is, because I can see some of your faces and some of your kind of tents about this. There is no judgment here at all about this topic, no matter what your history is, no matter what you're walking through. And we are certainly not saying, as Jesus did not say, that you have to actually stick with like an abusive marriage, no matter what. No, right? God wants good things for his children. You should, if you are in an abusive situation, go to the pastors of the church, ask for help, ask for help, walking through that. But even then, we have seen in so many cases, our good God can restore even that. Okay. So we want to just say right up front, that as you listen to what we're going to be sharing, if you have gone through a marriage that ended and you're out the other side and you're listening to this, I want you to hear no judgment, because God does not have that for you. So let's do it. Let's start with a big picture, the state of marriage. To sort of debunk the discouraging correct myths. Okay, so this is number two. So this is, yeah, so when Shanti, she just, she used to be a syndicated columnist. And her column was published in 90 some papers across the newspapers, newspapers, those things that used to like read on paper. Yeah. So anyways, she had this, this column and it one of the particular columns that you were writing on was on something about marriage in the divorce rate. And so she being who she is this researcher, she was like, you know what, I need to figure out what is the actual divorce rate? Because, you know, I need to, I want to quote it accurately. Is it, you know, we always hear, you know, it's 50%, but is it 51.253% or 48.79%. So she went and kind of tried to figure that out. And that led in that journey to all that we're going to tell you right now. So it culminated in this particular book right here. It's called The Good News About Marriage, where she debunks a number of these myths that we have all heard have all believed are true, but they're not. And the reason that we want to share it with as many pastors and as many followers of Christ as we possibly can is we want to equip you the next time someone says, well, you know, there's a 50% divorce rate for you to go, actually, that's not true. And to be able to be a part of changing the lie that the enemy has tried to weave in our culture to the truth. So this research, they don't believe me yet. I can tell you guys don't believe me yet. This research was really, really kind of heavy lifting on statistical analysis. So I let her do it. I wasn't necessarily involved. I was the cheerleader there. I'm a lawyer, so I went to law school, so I didn't have to do numbers. So she was the kind of person who loves to dig into numbers. So I'm going to kind of, because it's very complicated, I'm going to let her kind of explain most of it, but I'm going to serve as, so to speak, the tour guide. So I'm going to interview you and ask a few questions. Absolutely. And so hopefully we'll tease out what is needed to be here. Absolutely. And by the way, can I mention, take some notes about this in your phone? If you want to know the real numbers and to be able to whip it out and go like, here's the real, actually the real data, because you're going to forget it. So if you want to, if you want to remember it, put some notes in the phone. So I gave a little of the back story. Yeah. So what prompted it in addition to that? So basically, here's what happened when I was doing that column and trying to figure out what the actual divorce rate was. I went to all the normal places where you try to find vital statistics for the United States. And so I went to the Census Bureau and to the CDC. The CDC has a whole vital statistics bureau, the Bureau of Vital Statistics. So many of these places because and here's why I kept looking is because when I would look at the numbers, they didn't match the narrative at all, like anywhere close. And so I kept looking and I'm like, what, what am I seeing here? And here's where I started to get a little agitated because Jeff and I had been doing this social research for years for all of the books on men and women and happy marriages and parenting and all these things about relationships. And I started to go, hold on a second. If this idea that we have a flip the coin chance of getting divorced when we got married, if that idea is not accurate, that is a really big deal. And so I started like digging into the numbers and then honestly to I'll just be candid with you guys. When I'm talking to a secular audience about this, you know, they look at me funny when I explain why I kept going. But honestly, I felt like the Holy Spirit wouldn't let me stop. Like it was one of those like keep looking, keep looking, keep trying to figure this out. And it took eight years because it is so complicated. And I ended up, I mean, literally like I've been doing statistics and numbers for a long time, but this was hard even for someone who is experienced much less like a pastor who's trying to figure out who has like 20 minutes to try to look into whatever. And I thought this is so crucial. And I felt like the Lord wouldn't let me stop. And so eight years later, I interviewed dozens of demographers, dozens of people at places like the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Vital Statistics and just really spent all the time digging into the data and realized because it was a big deal. So, okay. So that research, again, spun out into this book where we debunk, Shaunty debunks, five of the major myths. Now, we don't have time to cover all five. We're just gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna focus on kind of three initially. Yeah. So why don't we just start with that. And since you've teed it up, what is the actual divorce rate? Okay. No, and here's the reason why this was so complicated. Okay. No one knows exactly what the divorce rate is. There is, there are so many ways that you can describe it as the percentage of marriages that are going to end. Is it the percentage of people in a room who are divorced? Is it like people of a certain age? Do you look at the divorce rates of women versus the divorce rates of men for any of those categories? Because believe it or not, they're different. Like what is, what are you calling the divorce rate? And I'll give you what I think is one of the most easily understood numbers, because I could give you like 20 different versions of this. And we covered quite a few of them in the book. The book is pretty heavy lifting if you guys want some really robust numbers. Well, can I ask a question to the congregation? How many of you, just by a show of hands, have heard that the divorce rate is 50 percent? 50 percent of marriages end in divorce. Seriously, raise your hand. I'm curious. Okay, so it's almost everybody. Yeah. Yeah. Not everybody. Yeah. So, so here's the one of the best numbers that I think is easy to understand. And it's kind of an order of magnitude in the right area when you look at all these other numbers. It's similar. Right now, 71 percent of people are still married to their first spouse. Okay. It gets better. It gets even better than that. Okay. 71. And this, by the way, I said right now, this is actually a few years old, the latest numbers from Census Bureau, which I haven't dug into yet, or even better than this. Okay. But a few years ago, 71 percent of people are still married to their first spouse, which means 29 percent aren't. And guess what? That 29 percent includes all the people who were married for 50 years and their spouse died. That's not the divorce rate. That is death and divorce. Those are just marriages that have ended. Okay. And because we don't keep, there's no way to keep track of every single marriage in the country. That's why we don't know what the actual rate is. But we can get closer. We know it has to be less than 29 percent because that's death and divorce. And so you can kind of look at some other factors, like there's about a 14 percent rate of widowhood. There's some other issues. And so you can kind of squint sideways and say maybe 25 percent of first marriages end and divorce. Now that is still too high. Okay. But it is a universe different from 50. And it means that if you are having trouble in your marriage or you have a friend who is having trouble in their marriage, you can come alongside that person. You can put your arm around them and you can say you are going to make it. Most people do. Okay. I like that. How in the world did we get to believing and hearing that it was 50 percent? Where did that come from? Where did that come from? So here's where that come from. And here is, by the way, I'm going to just tell you right out, there are still issues with people presenting the numbers this way even today. However, most of that comes from in 1972. You guys remember before 1972, 1972 was when no fault divorce was instituted. It used to be before then you had to go before a judge and prove that there was a reason to allow you to get divorced. In 1972, you started to be able to get divorced just because you wanted to with no fault divorce. And so all of a sudden, in 1972, the divorce rate had been going along really steady and then it started going like skyrocketing because people were rushing to get divorced and the demographers of the day started to get alarmed by this and they said, if this keeps up, we're going to hit 50 percent someday. It's a projection. The next time you see university professor so-and-so projects a 47 percent divorce rate, take a big red pen mentally and circle the word projects. We have never hit that number anywhere close to it for society as a whole. Now some high-risk groups have hit that rate. If you get married as a teenager, for example, that's a higher risk divorce rate. For the first few years of marriage, there actually is a very high divorce rate. But that people who get married as a teenager, that's 4.7 percent of the population. That's a tiny percent. That is not the majority. We have never hit that for society as a whole. So just so you guys know, that is a projection that we've never come close to. So remember, Ellen, so you're saying that for those first-time marriages, no, we're close to 50 percent. And can I tell the other reason why we tend? Okay, so there's actually two main reasons why we believe the 50 percent narrative. One is that back in the day, they projected this and some demographers, just being candid, some demographers are still projecting that. Okay, I don't know why. I've talked to a lot of them. And a lot of them are like, well, it's just it's kind of like everybody knows this is roughly what it is. If I say it's lower, I'll lose all credibility. Okay, anyway, just don't get me started. It makes me so mad. Anyway, but the other reason why we think there's all this bad news about marriage. I hate to say it this way, but it's because, unfortunately, our news infrastructure focuses on negative news. If there, if there is a study, I saw this over and over and over. If there is a study, let's just say it's a big research study that finds 10 things about a population that they studied about the divorce rate. And let's just say eight of them are positive and two of them are negative. Guess what makes the headlines? Okay, there was a, I'll give you an example. A number of years ago there was a New York Times huge feature in the New York Times, you know, paper, the paper version, it was above the fold, like it was the main headline for the New York Times that day. And it said the headline was divorce is catching. Okay, that was the headline. Contagious. Contagious. Contagious. Thank you. Divorces contagious. There was this long-term study that started in 1941 in this town in Massachusetts called Framingham Massachusetts. Okay. And this long-term study that has been going on for all these years, the researchers would go back into the town like, you know, every 10 years, 15 years, and do another sort of look at the statistics and what's happened in health and marriages and life issues and education and all these things. And one of the things that they found, which by the way you all might be interested in, because it is true, is that if you have friends who are divorced, you're more likely to think of divorce as an option. If you have friends who not as many of your friends are divorced, you're more likely to think it's not an option. Okay, so there's sort of, that feeling is contagious. And so that's what the article was on. Buried in the article, buried in the article, was the actual divorce rate for Framingham Massachusetts. Because you can do that for like small population groups. Over the course of like 50 years. Over the course of, yeah, 50 years or whatever. Guess what the divorce rate in Framingham, Massachusetts is? 9.5% How come above the fold, how come we didn't see representative American city has a 9.5 divorce rate? So we tend to be fed the news that is the negative and miss the positive buried in the small print. Okay, so sorry. Can you tell I get exercised about this? Now back to Ellen. So that's the first marriages. Yes. That Framingham story, all of that. Yes. What about second marriages? I mean, we've really heard that it's really tough if you get remarried. Who here has heard that second marriages have like a 60% divorce rate? Raise your hand, seriously, I'm curious. 60% divorce rate, 70%, whatever those numbers are. Okay, so my senior researcher and I, her name is Tally Whitehead, and one of the things that we did in this study is we spent three years trying to figure out where those numbers came from. Okay, because we had seen them too. It was really funny because she would call the Census Bureau and the analysts there and she'd say, hey, you might not know me or remember me, but, and they'd say hi, Shanti, and because she called every month or two. Exactly. And so, and so I spent three years with Tally trying to locate that number and the studies that say these super high divorce rates, because I really wanted to see the methodology, right? I wanted to see how it was done. And so for three years, we traced every news report, every website where it's quoted, every book, every magazine article, and they all traced back to one of three sources, none of which actually exist. It is a pure urban legend. I'll give you my favorite example of this. So one of the things that you will see if you are trying to figure out what the remarriage divorce rate is, you will see quoted a Psychology Today article, very, very popular article, very widely quoted and widely cited, that says Dr. Jennifer Baker of the Forest Institute in Missouri found a 50%, 60%, and 72% divorce rates for first, second, and third marriages. Okay. Now Dr. Baker is widely respected, the Forest Institute is widely respected, and so I'm like, okay, so we called Dr. Baker, or actually in this first case, emailed her, and said, can we get ahold of your actual study, because I kind of wanted to see what her methodology was, like where did she get these numbers? She emailed us back, all in capital letters, and it said, that's not me, I never said that, I've been trying to get them to take my name off that website for years. Can you say enemy? Propagating lies? Is that crazy? I called the Census Bureau, because one of the three sources that was cited was this table, it's an actual table in the Census Bureau numbers from like, I want to say 2001 or something, like it's, you know, quite some time ago, but it was an actual table, and so I'm looking at the table, and I'm like, I don't see these numbers there, but now that doesn't always mean anything, like you could be like subtracting and adding and multiplying, and I'm missing it, you know? So I call the Census Bureau, I'm like, Rose, I have another one for you, and I said this table number, and I quoted it, and I said this 60%, you know, remarriage divorce ratio is like, oh yeah, no, we hear that all the time, it didn't come from us, we've never found that. Somebody literally just picked out a random Census Bureau table and put it on a citation as saying that there is this number, and everybody kept quoting it. Pure urban legend. Okay, continuing on our urban legends, how many... Well, can I tell what actually is the good news? Oh, sure, sure, sure, yeah, Ellen wants to know. Ellen wants to know what the good, what the remarriage divorce rate is. Again, nobody knows exactly, but we can get a lot closer. Just like 71% of people are still married to their first spouse, 65% are still married to their second spouse, and so that 35% who aren't, remember, that's not just divorce, that's death, and hey, guess what? People who marry for a second time are often getting married at older ages, and so there is a possibility that actually the divorce rate for remarriages is lower than for first marriages, because a higher percentage of that is probably death rather than divorce. I mean, it's just to think about the difference it makes for somebody like Ellen to say, oh my gosh, like I might cause a problem by having a bank account on the side instead of helping myself. This helps when I think of, you know, talking about the death and divorce. Yes. It helps because I remember Billy Graham's wife, Ruth? Was it Ruth? I think it was Billy Graham's wife. Billy Graham's wife? Okay, they're saying yes. An interviewer asked her about this question about marriage and divorce, you know, about the options, and she said, absolutely not. Divorce, never an option. Murder? Maybe. So, they had a good marriage. Yes. So the next one is we probably also heard here, a lot of us, that it really doesn't matter whether you go to church or not because the divorce rate in the church is the same as it is in the world. Yeah, who here has heard that? That the rate of divorce is the same in the church. Seriously, raise your hand. Sorry, I'm looking at the lights out here. Okay, so probably we have about 10, 20 percent of the people who have heard this. Just, you know, this is a common thing that is very discouraging. That, and people say that George Barna, who is a very well-respected research group, that Barna found that the rate of divorce is the same in the church. And he didn't, because he wasn't studying people in the church. Here's what George Barna was studying, and it has gotten twisted in the reports about it, and pastors have come to believe this as true, and it's not. George Barna was studying belief systems. He wasn't even trying to study people in the church. When you call people on the phone, which is what the Barna researchers would do, and they would ask kind of what's your religious belief structure? You know, are you a Christian? Are you a Muslim? Are you a Jewish? Are you a religious nun? You don't believe in anything. Are you an atheist? Those groups basically all had the same divorce rate. However, he specifically excluded whether they went to church from the analysis, because that wasn't what he was trying to study. And so I partnered with Barna, and I bought that data set, and we re-ran all those numbers. Because they had collected that information. They had collected a bit. They had collected information. It wasn't designed to collect the information, but for example, they had, was the person in church last week. They had some information like that. And so we added that factor back in. Was the person in actually a churchgoer? And here's the thing that is astounding, you guys. According to Barna, and by the way, literally every other study that's ever been done amongst actual church attenders, people who make this a part of their life, the divorce rate plummets. And it turns out it drops anywhere, depending on the study, from 25 to 50 percent or more. The latest study out of Harvard found that amongst churchgoers, the divorce rate dropped 58 percent. And the thing is, us being in church and doing what God says and being under teaching and trying to listen to the Holy Spirit, getting in small groups, being in community, God asks us to do all that, in part not just because the most important thing is our relationship with Him, but because He knows how He created us and it's protective of our marriages. And it does make such an enormous statistical difference, if you actually make your faith a part of your life, especially by being in church. And the thing is, there is, you know how I said the 50 percent divorce rate that demographers today will be all over the map on that and some are still projecting these higher divorce rates, right? Every demographer, every demographer isn't, no demographers are arguing over this one, what I just said. Every single demographer knows that it's true, that if you go to church, your divorce rate plummets, it's just that every pastor and every churchgoer doesn't know that that's true. And so that's the reason that we're trying to encourage our pastors and our church leaders. So in the last minutes that we have, can we kind of narrow this down to the personal? What are some of the things, so that was the big picture, kind of of the state of marriage, the reality. The reality should be knowing is the truth. But how about for an individual, a couple, you know, what are some of the things that matter? Well you need to tell them what your pet peeve is. Oh well, yes. I do have a pet peeve. Because, you know, and maybe I've even said it at times, but oftentimes when you hear people older married couples, or even at a wedding, like a pastor sometimes, you know, when the the pastor or someone of influence says, you know, to the young couple, marriage is hard. I mean, really? I mean, that is not the greatest advertisement for marriage. You know, things, okay, well, I guess I got to do it. You know, it's just not the way that God designed it. Now it can have complications, there can be difficulties. I think what we mean when we say marriage is hard, what we actually mean is marriage can take hard work. Yeah. Right? That marriage can be something you have to work on, but it doesn't mean it's inherently like complicated, or that it's inherently, you know, really, really difficult. So let's share a couple of those thoughts that we did over the course of yesterday. So the simple little things, one of the, I think is what we found, we did a research study on what it was that the happiest couples, the people who rated their marriages exceptionally happy and good. What is it that they did? What were their practices? What were their habits? Those were the kind of people we wanted to learn from and it was a great study, it was a lot of fun to do, and we always talk about that there is one really defining key component which is... And this, by the way, this is an example of this is a simple thing that will make a big difference. It's not super complicated, okay? And it turns out that the happiest couples believe the best of their spouse's intentions towards them, even when they're legitimately hurt. If you can get that, that is a little phrase that if you can walk out of here and just kind of write it down, write it, we had one couple that wrote it on their mirror of their bathroom. Believe the best. Believe the best about my spouse's intentions. Yeah, and just the words believe the best. Because here's what happens. It is natural when your spouse hurts your feelings, it is natural to think, oh, like, oh, they knew how that would make me feel and they said it anyway. You don't realize that what you're believing, the translation of that is he doesn't care about me. That's what that translates to, right? And or she doesn't appreciate me or whatever. And it turns out that the happiest couples, they flip that switch and they go, no, no, I know my spouse cares about me. So they must not have recognized how that would make me feel or they wouldn't have said it. They wouldn't have done it. It is amazing what happens when you, you can still be hurt, but to believe the best of their intentions. And the power that that can have is by just one of the two people practicing that, it can change the relationship and it can change your heart. There was a study that I shared yesterday that we found when we were doing this research. And the study was called The Power of Good Intentions. It was a study that was performed by a professor at the University of Maryland with a bunch of college students. And like I shared yesterday, I love college students because for like 20 bucks, they'll subject themselves to almost anything. And so in this particular study was one of those anythings. He had a student subject that would sit in a chair and was hooked up to all sorts of these biometric measuring devices. You know, it would measure the student's heart rate, his perspiration rate, his respiration rate, blood pressure, all of those things. And then they were also hooked up to a cable that was run across the room and disappeared behind a partition. On the other side of the partition was a little machine with a big red button on it. And when that red button was depressed, it sent an electric shock down that cable to that student sitting there. And then the results would, the machines, the biometric measuring devices would measure what the impact was on that student. Now here was the kicker. The student was told one of three different things about the person who they never saw behind the partition. In one case, they were told that the person yes indeed knew that pushing the button was going to deliver an electric shock, but they had also been told that by pushing that button it would help the student win money. So kind of, you know, a good intention, basically, yeah. In a second instance, they were told that the person pushing the button did it on accident. Didn't mean to do it. And then in a third instance, they were told that yes, the person knows that it's administering a shock and they think it's kind of cool. So in all three instances, the amount of voltage going down the cable, shock stuff, going through the cable was exactly the same. But what they found was that depending on what the student thought about the person behind the partition, if they thought, excuse me, if they thought that the person was pushing it on purpose for no good reason, it hurt a lot. I mean, a lot. And it registered on all of the devices. If they thought the person was doing it, but had done it on accident, it hurt less. And if they thought the person did it because they thought they were helping the student, it hurt considerably less. The shock was the same. The only difference was what that person sitting there believed about the person behind the partition. And that is what happens in our marriages when Shanti, though she never does, but if she were hypothetically to say something that hurt my feelings, if I translate that to she knows that that always stings and she said it anyway, it's going to hurt. If, on the other hand, I choose to believe what is the truth that she loves me, that if she knew how that was going to make me feel, she wouldn't have said it that way. It hurts less and I can move on much quicker. And this, just so you guys know, believing the best of our spouse, this is not wishful thinking. The numbers on, we do these big nationally representative surveys and the numbers are huge. It's something like 99.26, something, something percent of people deeply care about their spouse. By the way, even in very, very difficult relationships, we really care. Now, sadly, it's not 100%, right? There's that tiny percentage where there is sometimes an abusive situation or whatever that you need to get that extra help. But in most cases, when you choose to believe the best of your spouse's motivations, you're believing something that's true. Another little habit that these couples did. A second, the second habit. Yeah. And this one we didn't cover yesterday. No, we didn't. And I love this one because we've all kind of heard in marriage advice, don't keep score. That's a recipe for disaster. If you are keeping score, you're going to be disappointed. And the fact of the matter is, you know what? The happiest couples kept score. They just kept it differently than what I used to do because why don't you explain how they kept it? So the problem, the negative side is you keep score of what you're not getting, what your spouse isn't giving, you know, all of these kind of negative sides. Yes, that will be very destructive. Turns out the happy couples absolutely keep score of what their spouse is giving. And they keep that constantly in mind. And so because they're constantly noticing these things, there becomes this sense of gratitude that's sort of baked in to the relationship. And by the way, when I talk about the happiest couples, this includes people who became very happy, who started out in a really, really desperate place and actually became among the happiest couples. And this was an example of one of the things that they did to get them there. And just in full transparency, we weren't, we wouldn't have put ourselves 20 years ago in that highest, happiest couple quadrant. We became that. And this was one of the things. So let me just kind of tell you a little bit of some of our history. Shanti is the most organized person I've ever met in, on the planet. She carries so much here in her head. She's so handy to have around. I don't need a calendar or anything because she's got everything. She has it all perfectly organized. Mentally. Physical space is less so. And I, maybe OCD, I don't know, but I like things in order, in their place. Like his closet has shirt, shirt, shirt, shirt. Mine is like this. Yeah. So it created a fair bit of tension in our relationship and we had fights over it. And I don't know how it happened, but one day kind of coming home, you know, and it's the Holy Spirit. God did it. I think this was truly just the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit. And when our kids were relatively young and I came home and there's toys everywhere. And there's maybe dishes and mail stacked up on the, all of these sorts of things that would normally make my head want to explode. And somehow when I saw that, I was able to see that those toys everywhere were a result of two little kids that thought I was kind of cool and they were glad I was their dad. And those that mail stacked up everywhere I don't know what to do with mail. was a result of my wife who loves me and thinks I'm okay. And I used to have a perfectly neat ordered home and I was single and I was alone. And it's how you choose to look at some of these things that are occurring in your life. And that was the keeping score. I was able to do it. And it's not just like a super human thing. God just did that in my heart and life. And started, you started to keep score of the good things that I was doing. Exactly. And it honestly, it's scriptural to do this. I mean, think of it. The 103rd Psalm is the scripture there is my favorite scripture in all of the Bible. And 103rd Psalm verse two is praise the Lord, O my soul and forget not all his benefits. It is by remembering God's faithfulness in our lives, seeing how what he has done that gives us courage and hope for the future because of what we've seen in the past. And that's what we can do with our spouse. I guarantee everyone in here who's married, there are things that your spouse does that you appreciate, you enjoy, but you don't necessarily tell them about it. I would just tell you make a list mentally in your mind. Oh, even physically. Physically, yeah, of those things and tell them to yourself. Just the same way that David told the goodness of God to himself. Now we're out of time, but we just want to say, obviously this good news, this has some pretty significant implications, right? Can all of us become ambassadors for the good news of Jesus Christ? Not just that he loves us. He has saved us, but that he has good news for us here in this institution called marriage that is designed for our good and to reflect his glory. So I would just encourage all of us, let's become ambassadors for that good news. Well, and to that point, we all want to be evangelists to this world of the good news of Jesus Christ. There is a world that's looking at us, and if they see us and our relationships in particular in our marriages and in our relationships with our kids as being praiseworthy, of being something that's desirable, that right in and of itself draws people to the creator of the universe. Can we pray for the marriages in this church before we, I know that there's other things that people are going to be doing here in a minute, but I just feel led to do that. Please, start. You want to end? Okay. Lord, can we just come before you, Father, and say thank you? Can we come before you and just sit at your feet and thank you for this institution that you've created called marriage, this covenant that you established because you knew it was not good for us to be alone? Lord, whether our marriages are a source of joy every day or whether there is a stressful situation right now, Lord, we just want to say thank you, and we ask right now for healing and hope from you to be granted to all of the marriages in this church. Lord, I pray that you would send these people out in an explosion of love and joy and delight in their marriages to show a watching world that following you makes a difference. And Father, I pray for everyone who's not in that type of marriage that Shanti was just describing and but wanting to be. I pray that you would speak to those who are, have already made it, who've already come through the deep waters or the desert, that they would link arms and put their arms around these others and say, you know, I don't know what God has for you, but I know that he's good. And I know that if there's anything in me that I can help you with in this journey of relationships, you can count on me. Lord, I pray that we, as the body of Christ, would serve one another and in serving one another would serve the world. In your name we pray all these things, Jesus. Amen.