Am I What You’re Looking For?

Posted on by Ekko Church

Every loving and godly couple wants to submit to, love and respect one another. But the problem is: often we haven’t developed godly characteristics that would make it easy for our spouse to submit, love and respect us.

We need to better prepare ourselves for marriage.

So how do we prepare to be someone who is easy to submit to, love and respect? We need to cultivate three characteristics in ourselves for our future spouse.

First thing we need: Humility

Humility means becoming a person who is not impressed with themselves and their accomplishments but interested and invested in God and Others, so that they can be worthy of respect, safe to submit to, and easier to love.

In Ephesians 4:2, Paul says to “be completely humble.”

We need to practice and position ourselves as a student: to cultivate the heart of a student that will bless our future spouse.

Here are some tangible markers of a humble person:

  • Not easily offended when corrected. 
  • Has accounts (stories) of being corrected and adjusting actions and attitudes due to corrections. (or are you a, “No one corrects me” kind of person?)
  • Teachable and correctable. 
  • Quiet-life. (works hard, listens well) 
  • Celebrates others. 
  • Is not overly critical. 
  • Usually satisfied in life due to constant gratitude. 
  • Patient. 
  • Can ask for help. 

“… Don’t be arrogant… Don’t think that you are smarter than you really are.” 

— Romans 12:16 (GWT)

The second thing you need: Honesty

Honesty is becoming a person who is full of integrity and character, loving God from the inside out, so that they can be worthy of respect, safe to submit to, and easier to love.

“Since, then, we do not have the excuse of ignorance, everything—and I do mean everything—connected with that old way of life has to go. It’s rotten through and through. Get rid of it! And then take on an entirely new way of life – a God-fashioned life, a life renewed from the inside and working itself into your conduct as God accurately reproduces his character in you. What this adds up to, then, is this: no more lies, no more pretense. Tell your neighbor the truth. In Christ’s body, we’re all connected to each other, after all. When you lie to others, you end up lying to yourself.” (Ephesians 4:22-25 MSG)

In Korea, construction for the Grand Olympic Bridge began in 1985 and it was meant to be finished for the Seoul Olympic Games in 1988. But the bridge was not completed until 1990, because the bridge collapsed. When they investigated the cause, many of the crucial elements of construction had been rushed through or skirted, in order to try and meet the deadline.

The appearance and the presence of the bridge were more important than the integrity of the structure.

Marriage is like this.

You can’t fool your spouse.

The weight of marriage and its demands will eventually expose the lack of integrity in the foundations of your life.

Don’t cheat yourself during these years of singlehood, don’t take short cuts, instead build godly habits, a life of inner devotion to Christ.

Honesty means being authentic. It is not “confessing” in order to pout and give up. Nor does it mean: “I will confess that I am living a lie and be true to myself, that I simply do not really believe and it’s hard to follow God.”

That’s not truth-telling, it’s a cop-out.  

“…we do not have the excuse of ignorance, everything – and I do mean everything – connected with that old way of life has to go. It’s rotten through and through. Get rid of it!” – v22

Honesty means to get rid of everything that makes you a liar. 

Honesty is the fruit of constant repentance and realignment to God’s Ways.

Questions to Ask of Yourself: (adapted from Quaker Queries)

  • Am I fully submitted to Christ?
  • Is my heart for God increasing or decreasing?
  • What is keeping me from becoming an honest follower of Christ?

Marriage is also like surviving a mission to Mars.

Image from National Geographic

Behavior scientists researching dynamics of groups isolated for long periods of time, found in the Human Exploration Research study, that every good group needs a leader, a social secretary, a storyteller, and an equal amount of introverts and extroverts.

But the most important role each group needed for their survival was the clown.

So the third characteristic is humor.

“Intriguingly, by far the most important role seems to be that of the clown… the clown is not only funny, he is also smart and knows each member of the group well enough to defuse most of the tensions…”

— The Economist, “The Problems of Flying to Mars”

Edwin Friedman in his book, Generation to Generation, writes about how humor is needed to quell anxiety.

“Seriousness is more than an attitude; it is a total orientation, a way of thinking embedded in constant, chronic anxiety. It is characterized by lack of flexibility in response, a narrow repertoire of approaches, persistent efforts to try harder, an inability to change direction, and a loss of perspective… 

Families (or couples) that evidence such seriousness are as if surrounded by volatile fumes of anxiety, and any small incident can cause a flareup. They will always assume that it was the incident that created the problem, but it is the way they relate and think that gives any incident its inflammatory power. 

The antidote to seriousness is the capacity to be playful, which is not to be equated with making jokes… What gives to any playful response its remedial power is its relational affect and not its cleverness. This notion of playfulness has less to do with ‘one-liners’ than with the concept of flexible distance; it has less to do with good ‘come-backs’ than with the ability to distinguish process from content.”

  • Humor helps create enough distance to see the ecosystem that is causing the problem.
  • Humor helps defuse the emotional bombs that will create new problems further distracting those involved from the ecosystem that created the problem in the first place. The godly spouse absorbs anxiety and churns out an atmosphere of hope.
  • Humor helps drown out negative and fearful imaginations and creates a space for new ideas and innovation and an openness to hear new perspectives. 
  • Humor helps disengage with the tense situation at hand through the spirit of playfulness long enough for the body to calm itself down and recalibrate itself for better, smarter, more creative ideas to flow. 
  • The humorous spouse is the spouse who has been deeply dependent on God and has developed through a life of prayer a mellow heart and hopeful outlook on life. 

Let’s pray:

Lord, you can start with me. 

Teach in me, humility. 

Construct in me, honesty. 

Cultivate in me, humor. 

That I may be more like You. 

That I may love like You.

You can listen to the sermon Am I What You’re Looking For? from the Ephesians series that inspired this post here.

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