MINUTES THAT
MATTER MOST
THE THREE-STRANDED CORD OF MARRIAGE
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A strong marriage does not involve only two people. It may surprise you to learn that it was never meant to.
From the beginning, marriage between man and woman was designed to include a third partner. Bear with me as I explain. In Genesis 2:7 the creation narrative hones in on the details of humanity’s creation. Here we are told that “God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being” NIV. According to Old Testament scholar Dr. Harold Stigers, this was God’s “impartation of the spiritual nature by which he was able to comprehend morality and enabled to enter into fellowship with God.”1 God breathed his own Holy Spirit into the man and his wife.
FROM THE BEGINNING, MARRIAGE BETWEEN MAN AND WOMAN WAS DESIGNED TO INCLUDE A THIRD PARTNER.
In Ecclesiastes 4:12, King Solomon compares marriage to a three-corded rope: “A person standing alone can be attacked and defeated, but two can stand back-to-back and conquer. Three are even better, for a triple-braided cord is not easily broken.” When you twist three fibers to form a cord, you get more strength in a given length of cord because the twist tightens the fibers into coils to increase the amount of fiber per linear inch. A two-corded rope will unravel quicker than a three-corded rope, because it doesn’t have the twisting of the additional cord to increase its strength.
By placing himself in the lives of the man and woman, God completed the rope by becoming the third cord of the marriage. From the beginning marriage was to be a bond of three—man, woman, and God—which made marriage a reflection of the Trinitarian nature of God. God as the third cord gave marriage the strength of three—the strength it needed to withstand the storms that would assail it and to accomplish what God intended man and woman to accomplish.
What were the husband and wife intended to accomplish? This is explained in Genesis 1:28: “God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground’” NIV. Man and woman were to rule the earth and everything in it as God’s deputies. They were to achieve God’s plan for populating the globe by producing children who would also carry his image.
Having God as the third cord of the marriage rope completed the joy of the man and woman. They were intimate with God, close to him, in love with him. They loved him as they loved each other, and they found great joy in him. They took daily walks with God.
We know that from that point the story of marriage took a sad turn. Adam and Eve rebelled against God, deciding to go it alone. They thought the two of them could handle things very well on their own, thank you very much. Therefore they excluded God as the third cord of their marriage.
That is why so many marriages are in trouble today. Their marriage only has two cords—husband and wife. They don’t have God as the third cord in the marriage to give them the power they need to withstand any storm, any temptation, any attack.
The problem is compounded by the fact that the absence of God leaves an empty place in the marriage—a vacuum that craves to be filled. Like a three-legged stool with one leg missing, it must be propped up with some other substitute to keep it from toppling. When husbands and wives face their brokenness, they sense that something is missing from their marriage. That’s when they start seeking something to fill the emptiness—some other third cord that can give them what they are failing to find in their relationship. That is when they often turn to sexual connections outside the marriage, erotic literature, pornography, and various addictive behaviors and substances.
When couples choose one of these progressive problems as the third cord, the trouble intensifies. They go from having a problem to the problem having them. Like a weakened two-cord rope, they become entangled and frayed and too-soon broken. God as the third cord enables them to withstand any attack. But when they turn to something else instead, the thing they turn to becomes the attack itself.
God in his love and mercy is always ready to come back into the marriage and be that third cord as he originally intended. Man and woman once forced him out, so he won’t force himself back in. He dearly wants to come in and restore the love, but he must be invited. The problem is that too many couples don’t realize God is the missing cord. That is why they turn to substitutes such as porn, eating, spending, gambling, working, or even religiosity.
It is imperative that every couple resist and reject our culture’s commonly accepted destructive options that presume to make up that third cord. If any of them have already penetrated your marriage bond, they need to be ripped out before your marriage unravels.
Restoring the Third Cord
When I write of restoring God as the third cord in your marriage, I do not mean just going to church to get your God-card punched, then stuffing your Christianity into your back pocket until the next Sunday. This is the way many Christians live now, but God warned against this through his prophet Isaiah: “These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me” (29:13 NIV).
To strengthen your marriage with God as the third cord, you must reconnect with him the way Adam and Eve connected with him in Eden. You need to walk daily with him in the garden. You must welcome him into your lives as a permanent partner in the marriage. You must get close to him as you do with your husband or wife—and get to know him and his ways so you can begin to see life from his perspective and apply his wisdom to your marriage.
I realize that if you dream of exclusive intimacy between just the two of you, this idea of God as the third party in your marriage may not seem too appealing. Don’t marriage triangles cause divorces?
Not when the third corner of the triangle is God. To get my point, draw an equilateral triangle on a sheet of paper. Put your name at the lower right corner of the triangle and your mate’s name at the lower left. Then put God’s name at the apex—the top of the triangle. Notice that you, your mate, and God are all at the greatest distance from each other. But if you move up your side of the triangle toward God, and your mate moves up the other side of the triangle toward God, you grow closer to each other as you draw closer to God.
Of course, you might think the two of you can just move laterally across the base of the triangle, getting close to each other without having to make the upward ascent. But if you do this you lose your connection with God and fall back to the weakened connection of only two. The only way to get close to each other and yet strengthen your marriage with the power of three is to move up the lines of the triangle toward God.
How to Draw Near to God
How does a couple go about drawing near to God? The way to draw near to your mate is to love him or her. You draw near to God by loving him. Here is where you may encounter a difficulty. Your mate is physically with you, and you can converse, touch, hug, laugh, weep, and do things together. How can you love God as you love your mate when he’s not present in a body you can see and touch and hear?
I hope in this book you have already learned that loving your mate means more than just experiencing his or her presence with your five senses—more than having warm feelings and romantic palpitations. These are fine things, and I encourage them. But truly loving each other means so much more. It means getting to know each other intimately, putting the other first, sacrificing for each other, serving each other, giving to each other, respecting each other, accepting each other, and doing things for each other.
WHEN YOU INVEST YOUR LIFE IN GOD, YOU LOVE HIM ALL THE MORE.
Loving God works in much the same way. It means getting to know him, serving him, respecting him, putting him first, sacrificing for him, giving to him, and doing things for him. When you invest your life in your mate, you love him or her all the more. When you invest your life in God, you love him all the more.
“But,” you may ask, “how can I invest my life in both God and my mate? Aren’t we warned that we cannot serve two masters?” The answer is that in being husband and wife, the two of you have become one flesh. As one flesh, you act as one in investing your life in serving God. You make it a mutual goal of your marriage to act as one in serving him—your one master—together.
Jesus himself tells us how to love God: “If you love me, keep my commands” (John 14:15 NIV). God’s commands are expressions of his love. I know that most people don’t think of his commandments in this way. They see them as restrictions on what they want to do. But the truth is, God’s commands are meant for our happiness. They tell us how to order our lives to achieve the greatest efficiency, health, love, and joy. He knows, because he created humans, and only he understands what makes us work without ruining us.
Have you ever bought a piece of furniture, an appliance, or some device that had to be assembled? The instructions looked so complex that you decided you could save time and trouble by putting the device together without them. How far did you get before you were ready to kick the thing across the room and call down brimstone on the manufacturer? But when you calmed down and came to your senses, you pulled out the instructions and started over, reading them carefully and following them step-by-step.
I’m sure you’re ahead of me and already see the analogy. The only way you can have a satisfying and joyful life is to keep God’s commands, and you cannot keep them unless you learn them. That means spending time in the Bible and diligently applying its principles to your lives so you can build your marriage in the way that God designed marriage to be constructed.
To that end, you as a couple need to read some part of the Bible together every day. Even if it is no more than one or two verses, God’s word and wisdom will flow from each reading and provide you with new perspectives on God and each other, as well as giving guidance and principles for the conflicts and challenges you face. When you follow those principles, the two of you will draw closer to God. You will be weaving the third cord of the rope solidly into your marriage.
A second way to strengthen the third cord with deeper connection to God is through prayer. I strongly urge the two of you as a couple to pray together every day.
Prayer is one of God’s most amazing gifts. Can you imagine being able to pick up the phone and talk to the governor of your state or the president of the United States any time you want? And always with the assurance that whatever he is doing, he will take the call? That is the promise of prayer. We can at any time speak directly, not just to the governor or the president, but to the Creator and Master of the entire universe. And he promises to listen and respond.
You don’t have to worry about preparing your prayer as carefully as you would a call to the governor. No doubt you’ve heard prayers in church composed of eloquent and beautifully intoned phrases. Forget that. Yours does not have to be a big shot–sounding prayer; it does not even have to be original. If you have heard or read a prayer that expresses your feelings, don’t hesitate to use it. You can also use the Lord’s Prayer that Jesus taught to his disciples in Matthew 6.
I have sometimes heard people complain about using “canned” prayers—prayers that people have copied or have a habit of praying over and over. But sometimes these prayers may be highly useful. There will be times when you don’t feel like praying. You are tired. You are down. Your mind is in a whirl, and you don’t feel that you are connecting to God or you can’t find the words you want. When this happens, you need to pray anyway. That’s when a canned prayer can help. It gives you a prayer to pray when you don’t feel anything inside you to pray with.
Don’t worry about whether your weak, confused, or canned prayers are reaching God. They are, because we have supernatural help. The apostle Paul tells us, “the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans” (Romans 8:26 NIV). Just pray the best you can and let the Holy Spirit carry your prayer to the throne of God.
Reading Scripture and praying together can refocus your marriage and build spiritual strength that cannot be achieved in any other way. I strongly recommend that couples spend a minimum of seven minutes together in prayer and Scripture reading every day. I will have more to say about that crucial seven minutes in the next chapter.
Getting into the Word together and being diligent in prayer together are daily essentials to binding that third cord of God into your marriage. Those two actions will draw you nearer to God and increase both your connection to him and your love for him. Having God as the third cord will make your marriage stronger than any external attack Satan can mount against it.
THE MOST IMPORTANT
THING OF ALL
To watch a short video on this subject, go to
7MinuteMarriageSolution.com/16
In this book, you have learned the seven most harmful behaviors to stop and the seven most helpful behaviors to start in your marriage. But in this final chapter I will reveal the most important thing you can do for your marriage. This is the big one. This is the one that clears the path for all the other solutions for a satisfying marriage offered in this book. It will facilitate stopping those negative things that have become so destructive and ease the implementation of the positive things that will transform your marriage and build it up. I have placed this essential part of the 7 + 7 + 7 plan here at the end because I don’t want you to forget it. If you and your spouse commit to this simple, seven-minute solution, the best is yet to come.
Maintain the Garden of Your Marriage
Cleaning out the negative stuff from your marriage is only half the battle. You must then add positive attributes to replace what you have torn out, or everything will revert back to the previous stage and deteriorate even further.
A mutually satisfying, long-term marriage, however, requires this crucial, final step past simply replacing the bad stuff with good. Marriage is like a growing garden. To keep it alive and thriving requires continual maintenance and tender care of the delicate and growing plants you place within it. Stopping the seven things you need to stop is preparing the soil by plowing the hard ground that makes marriages tough. And that ground needs to be plowed over and over again.
Once the hard ground is cleared and plowed, you can set out healthy, flowering plants—the seven things to start doing. But if you clear your land and set out your plants and then walk away, saying, “We’ve done our job; now we’ll just wait for the flowers,” you will never see a bloom. The seven things to stop are like weeds and briars that keep trying to creep back in. Unless you are diligent to prevent them, they will take over like a hopeless tangle of weeds, brush, brambles, insects, and raiding varmints returning to create a worse mess than before your plot was cleaned and plowed.
To maintain the seven positive things you have planted in your marriage, you have to cultivate and fertilize the ground continually—irrigate, hoe out the weeds, poison the insects, and fence out the varmints, because those seven things to start are like delicate, tender plants that need to be nourished and protected if they are to grow. Constant diligence is required, or your marriage garden will never produce beauty.
I have a maintenance problem like this in my home office for writing and broadcasting. I’m very good at getting organized, but I’m terrible at staying organized. When I organize my office, I have a place for everything and everything in its place. I have neatly ordered files, labels, shelves, cubby-holes, and drawers where all my books, papers, manuscripts, writing equipment, research, notes, and correspondence are carefully arranged and stored away. But two months later my office looks like it could qualify for federal disaster aid. My wife won’t enter it without updating her tetanus shot. I can barely see over the chaotic jumble strewn across my desk, piled on the floor, stacked haphazardly against walls, and stuffed randomly in shelves. Sadly I lack ongoing diligence to maintain order.
The same thing can happen to your marriage if you fail in your ongoing diligence to maintain the new good you have created. That is why in the previous chapter I urged you as a couple to engage in daily prayer and Bible reading. Those activities draw God into your marriage, giving it order and protection through the unassailable strength of the third cord. Reading and praying are the primary activities that reconnect your marriage with God and draw him back in as your third partner.
The Most Important Thing You Can Do
You must not look on prayer and Bible reading as merely another item on a list of things to do. They are much, much more than that. Spending daily time with God is the most crucial activity the two of you can engage in together. It maintains your marriage, protecting the positives and keeping out the negatives you ripped away in the first fourteen chapters of this book.
Time with God is so important that the apostle Paul says it can even replace sex at intervals in your marriage: “Do not deprive each other of sexual relations, unless you both agree to refrain from sexual intimacy for a limited time so you can give yourselves more completely to prayer. Afterward, you should come together again so that Satan won’t be able to tempt you because of your lack of self-control” (1 Corinthians 7:5).
THAT THIRD CORD WILL NEVER BE STRONG ENOUGH TO KEEP YOUR MARRIAGE ON TRACK UNLESS YOU BIND YOURSELVES TO GOD DAILY.
That third cord will never be strong enough to keep your marriage on track unless you bind yourselves to God daily. This means spending time together with him every day. Reading to discover the wisdom and insights in God’s Word and praying to connect with him must become a habit in your life—something you do as regularly as eating your daily meals. Just as regular meals are essential to the nourishment of your body, regular time with God is essential to the nourishment of your spirit.
You cannot let this time with God drop by the wayside, because it is your key to maintaining what you have cleaned out and replanted in your marriage. These crucial seven minutes of the day build and strengthen the three-cord rope that binds everything else together. All the work you do in the first fourteen chapters of this book is held together by your relationship as a couple with God.
Developing a Daily Devotional Habit
Because of our natural tendency to let distractions interfere with our resolve, I will give you a few pointers for making these seven minutes as powerful as they can be in your life and in your marriage.
DO IT DAILY
Your daily time with God will not just automatically begin and keep going unless you discipline yourselves to make it happen. You and your spouse may start with good intentions, but other cares will quickly interfere. You may miss your time together one day because a child was sick, the plumbing stopped up, you were unexpectedly called away, or your neighbor locked herself out of her house. One of you may be out of town, working overtime, or ill.
Those are all legitimate reasons for missing your devotional time together that day. Even the strict laws of the Old Testament Sabbath allowed exceptions to the no-work rule. They were expected to tend to emergencies—pulling out an ox that had fallen into a ditch, for example. Things will come up now and then. The problem is that when you miss your time with God once, it’s that much easier to miss it the next time.
Allow for occasional interruptions. But make an ironclad pact with each other to create the devotional habit and keep it going. The bottom-line goal is to do this more often than not. Based on the Center for Biblical Engagement, no fewer than four days a week is required to produce the results of a strong, lasting, intimate marriage.
KEEP IT SHORT
If you begin your time with God together by allowing the sessions to run too long, it will become difficult to maintain the habit in the future. Twenty or thirty minutes may seem great at first before the newness wears off, but as you continue, other duties will press in and you will be tempted to omit the devotional “just for today” because it takes so much time and your schedule is too crowded.
I recommend seven minutes as the minimum. In seven minutes you have time to read a short devotional, discuss it briefly, read two Scripture passages, and pray together. Seven minutes will not take such a chunk out of your day as to create a time problem, which means you will never have to approach it with dread because you have so many other things to do. If, after you have set your devotional habit firmly, you and your spouse get into a discussion and want to go longer, don’t hesitate. Go as long as you like. Or better yet is to continue to discuss your seven minutes together throughout the day. Observe your seven-minute minimum and don’t let your devotionals become a time burden for either of you.
KEEP THINGS RELAXED AND COMFORTABLE
The seven-minute devotionals can be set up at any time and in any place where both of you feel relaxed and comfortable. You must take care to be free of television, books, magazines, kids, pets, or any other interruptions.
When I am home, my wife, Misty, and I meet together almost every night just before bedtime. We look at each other eye to eye, listening, sharing and reconnecting after a tough day. It seems that no matter what we have been through or how hard the day, our meeting time brings us back together to reconnect and strengthen our bond with each other and God. Morning can serve you well to focus your day on what really matters. It can be a reminder to incorporate God into every part of your day. It can be an early connection point before the world tries to pry you apart in every way possible.
CONSIDER READING A DAILY DEVOTIONAL BOOK
Find a good source for some kind of daily devotional thought for your time together. It should address a specific challenge or provide insight into a tough issue relevant to your marriage. Bookstores have shelves loaded with any number of books of short daily devotionals. There are many devotionals on marriage written by well-known and reliable authors. Many couples read a devotional each day from books of this sort and find them helpful in giving examples or insight into issues all couples tend to face.
READ FROM THE BIBLE
Devotionals are optional in your seven minutes with God, but Bible reading is not. In every seven-minute session it is vitally important that you read a short passage of Scripture together. Engaging with the Bible daily produces positive change, builds character, and greatly reduces the temptation toward marriage killers such as pornography, gambling, and sex outside of marriage. As I mentioned, the Center for Biblical Engagement research shows that engaging with God’s Word at least four times a week is the minimal amount of time required to produce change. The change won’t be instant, but I think you will be astounded at the transformation that will occur in you and your spouse as you continue. You will probably notice it first in some little attitude change that doesn’t mean much. Then you will see the change crop up when you say no to some temptation or distraction you would not normally pass up. Eventually you and your mate will see each other in a different and better way. You will be living with the power of God’s Word in your lives.
To keep your Bible reading meaningful, I recommend thematic readings that will help you focus on scriptures relevant to your relationship with God and each other. Unless you are a Bible scholar, I doubt that you will find much inspiration in reading chapter after chapter explaining the intricate details of the Mosaic Law in Leviticus or the many chapters of genealogies in the book of Numbers. To keep your readings relevant, you need some kind of guide to help you locate appropriate scriptures.
One solution is to use thematic study Bibles. There are many that are organized around specific themes drawn from a wide range of subjects, including marriage. You might find one of these to be a helpful guide in your daily readings.
It is very important that you keep these Bible readings on a mutually beneficial level. Both of you should go into the readings as learners. For this and other reasons, neither of you should assume the role of teacher to the other. If either of you had the Bible crammed down your throat in the past, that negative history can cause resentment when one spouse presumes to teach the other. Remember that you are equal partners walking side-by-side on a journey together. Neither of you is on a leash in the hands of the other. Each of you must always approach Scripture gently and humbly.
Not long ago I counseled a wonderful guy whose wife had just left him. Years earlier he discovered that he had biblical grounds for divorcing her, but he chose to hang in there and try to work it out. One thing that complicated their relationship was something you would think should be a great asset to any marriage. In spite of her wayward ways, she was, of all things, a Bible teacher. At least, she thought of herself as such. In an attempt to keep their marriage intact, they tried to read the Bible together.
But every time they opened the Book, she became the “teacher” and used scriptures to make her case against him and justify her infidelity. (No doubt you have already learned that people with impure motives can find a way to prove anything they want by using selective Bible verses, wrenching them out of context, and discarding commonsense meanings.) This couple’s experience is a stark illustration showing the high importance of mutuality in reading God’s Word together.
As one way to encourage mutuality in Bible study, I suggest that both you and your mate participate in the reading. Each of you can read separate passages of Scripture.
PRAY TOGETHER
Of equal importance with Bible reading is prayer. As I said in the previous chapter, your prayer need not be fancy or polished. It need not even be original. But I urge you to make it relevant to you and your mate, and let it come from your heart. Don’t just pray for what you think you ought to pray for.
When you pray, consider holding each other’s hands or making physical contact in some way. It is good for your prayer to involve each other, your relationship, or some desire you share or issue you face. Whatever else you pray for, be sure to ask God to help you to live together with love and grow together in wisdom and character.
When praying, let me suggest that rather than close your eyes, try something that my wife and I find very bonding. Hold each other’s hands and look in each other’s eyes as you pray for each other. This is simple but so powerful that the effect lasts far beyond the seven minutes. And the more you do it, the more you may find that any defensiveness between the two of you is eradicated. You begin to feel that you are truly on each other’s side, pulling for each other to experience the best that God has.
I realize that saying this 7 + 7 + 7 plan will fix your marriage is a grand claim. And for such a claim to be true, you would think it would be something newly discovered or deeply profound. But as I mentioned in the introduction, having a strong marriage is easier than you might think. The truth is, there is no new discovery more profound than the impact of a couple taking a mere seven minutes out of each day to be together with God. The devotional thought expands your perspective. The Word of God, if read at least four times each week, changes behavior and character. Praying together provides a spiritual connection between all three persons in the triple-braid cord.
Before you write off taking these crucial seven minutes of daily couple time with God as too simple to help or too complicated to implement, just try it for thirty days. After a mere month, you will discover significant changes in both of you and new hope for your relationship.
Using the 7 Minute Marriage Solution Devotional Bible
As I stated earlier, you should feel free to use any devotional resources that best fit you and your needs. Because I feel it is so important for couples to spend time together with God, I have headed up a team that put together a devotional Bible for just that purpose: The 7 Minute Marriage Solution Devotional Bible. As you might guess by the title, this devotional Bible was created to be a companion to the book you now hold in your hands.
This Bible contains 260 devotionals placed throughout the biblical text, giving couples a meaningful devotional to share five days per week—Monday through Friday—for an entire year. On weekends I urge you to enjoy biblical teaching, encouragement, and fellowship within your church community.
These devotionals are themed on marriage-related topics such as communication, sexual intimacy, parenting, acceptance, forgiveness, and the like. Alongside each devotional is a poignant quotation relating to some aspect of the devotional and designed to spark discussion. These quotations are gleaned from the writings of respected authors, counselors, and pastors known for their knowledge and wisdom on marriage topics. Two sets of short Scripture passages, one to be read by the husband and one by the wife, accompany each devotional.
In my opinion, among the most valuable elements in these devotionals are the prayer starters at the end of each. These are brief beginning phrases designed to help you continue on with your own words, leading you to pray your own prayers together.
I believe The 7 Minute Marriage Solution Devotional Bible will make your seven minutes easy to implement and powerful beyond your expectations. It is specifically designed to accommodate the elements of a couple’s devotional I have outlined in this chapter. Use it faithfully, and I am confident God will use it in your transformation process.
The Best Seven Minutes of Your Marriage
Allow me to reemphasize the importance of this seven-minute connection. I am convinced that the daily seven minutes you spend getting closer to God and each other will be the most important—even the most crucial—seven minutes in your marriage. Those seven minutes can build cumulative blessings into your relationship for years to come. They can lead you to the ultimate solution to every marriage problem you have. I don’t mean there is anything magical or mystical about the seven minutes or that just going through the ritual of Bible reading and prayer will automatically untie every knot in your marriage. Calling these seven minutes a “solution” to your marriage difficulties does not mean an instant cure.
What it means is this: if you put yourself into these seven minutes and take them seriously as time you are investing in your mate and your God, and if you open your mind as you read the Bible and your heart as you pray, the blessings you receive in return will inspire and enable you to become the kind of selfless, serving, and loving being that makes marriages work. God will give you wisdom from his Word and a connection with him through prayer that will develop in both of you the inner peace and strength needed to accomplish all the other “stops” and “starts” involved in achieving a successful marriage.
Stop the seven most harmful behaviors. Start the seven most helpful ones. Do it all while spending the most important seven minutes of the day together with God, and your marriage will be transformed!
May God bless you as you learn daily to cling to him and to each other.