Phil Howard Marriage Session 2 (Part 1)

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Welcome to No Compromise Radio Ministry. My name is Pat Avendroth. This is The Pactam.

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No, it's not. It's Mike Avendroth. This is No Compromise Radio. I was looking at Facebook the other day for No Compromise Facebook, and I went to American Gospel Television's Facebook site, and there was a picture of me recording the new video series for American Gospel entitled

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Cancer Is Not Your Shepherd. And someone said in the comments, oh, this is going to be good.

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I love The Pactam. If you want to order bulk copies of those books, mikeadnocompromiseradio .com,

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40 % off, good for book study, hand stuff out, et cetera.

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Today is the second marriage seminar held at Bethlehem Bible Church. Pastor teacher,

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Phil Howard, pastor emeritus, pastor retired, Hercules, California. I call him my pastor, dear man, 79 years old.

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He and his wife Carolyn were here for the weekend, extended weekend, stayed at her home. We took them on the

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Boston Duck Tour and out to Brimfield for the antiques and other things. And so today is part two, and I think the title of his session was

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Survival Skills for Marriage. So hope you are encouraged. Pastor Phil Howard, part two, marriage.

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I happen to love your pastor despite what I know about him. He's dear to me.

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Met him in Mount Hermon, California, and the transformation

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I've seen in his life, the growth, it moves me.

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I'm a man given to emotion. I got saved before the devil got a monopoly on enthusiasm.

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I got saved in your whole being. I would ask my father, how was the service?

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He would say it was a two handkerchief service. And my dad was an iron worker.

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He's worked in the 150 feet in the air every day with a rivet gun.

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So he's no Twinkie. But his eyes stood in tears so much because truth moved him.

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I hope it still moves us. Survival Skills for Marriage.

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Divorce continues to escalate in America. I just bought, there's a magazine out,

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I assume it's on the racks here, Time Magazine reprinted a deal called

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The Science of Marriage. And in it, it was talking that the majority of divorces are taking place among those who are 50 years of age or older, which is quite a statistic.

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And the magazine is a little spinny, I think, but it got some very interesting articles.

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But I've been interviewing people since I was going to do this conference and scanning the marriage literature.

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And I was asking this question, if you had to name the top five survival skills of your marriage, what do you think it would be?

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And so I'm going to reflect, just read off to you some of the answers I got. Would that be okay?

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And see what's in your mind. You know what? Wouldn't it be kind of fun?

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Let's just take about five minutes. And why don't you write down on a sheet of paper there, those notes.

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What do you think have been the survival skills that has served you the best in your marriage?

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Whatever those are, be kind of interesting so that when I read this, see if any of your skills are on the list.

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Let's take, we'll just take a few minutes here. Write that down. Yeah, you can talk to your neighbors and borrow the answers.

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Carolyn, I want you to be original. Yeah, you can talk to your wife or your husband.

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What have you survived on? And don't just say love.

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We want skills. What have been some of the skills or things we have practiced that have helped us survive?

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Somebody raise your hand when you've got your five down. We'll know we can. What are your five, your top five skills?

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Okay. We'll go on. I'll read to you what the answers were.

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Okay. I've got about 15, so you'll be in there somewhere.

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Trust. I trust this person. Reliance. I can rely on them when

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I'm sick, when I'm pregnant. Reliance. I know they'll be there. Communication skill was very common.

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I'd say communication skills and conflict resolution are the two biggies, and we'll deal with that.

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Commitment. Sexual harmony and fidelity. Forgiveness.

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Expectations need to agree. Sometimes counselors, when you get married, they'll have the wife write down 10 expectations and the man 10 without revealing it to the other, and it's amazing that what her number one is will be his number 10, and what his number one is might be her five.

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I mean, come in with totally different expectations. Just happens.

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Emotional intimacy more than physical. As the physical may ebb and flow, they want that emotional intimacy.

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I can share my heart with you, and what's the word you used to tell me when

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I tried to? Yeah. She would tell me, and I'd want to fix her.

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Do any of your husbands try to fix you? Raise your hand if you dare. Okay.

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There's a man there. His wife's trying to fix him. Well, Caroline said,

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I don't want you to... Sometimes I wouldn't pay attention to what she shared.

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You are invalidating me. I just want to share. I don't want to be fixed.

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Ooh. So spiritual intimacy. When I was at Dallas, I was staying in the dorm, and we had one older guy, a great guy, graduated from Penn State, pastored up in New Jersey, and he asked all of us guys in the dorm, we'd meet sometime for coffee.

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He said, hey, how many of you guys are praying with your wife? And we're all either doctoral students or doing a master's, pastors.

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Nobody prayed with their wife, including me in those days.

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I was too busy pastoring the church. Didn't have time to be reading the

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Word with my wife. I mean, she's living with a man of God. You know?

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And so Earl Comfort, he said, you're missing one of the treats of life.

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He said, my wife and I read the Word and pray every... He said, you all want to get physically naked.

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He said, why don't you be emotionally transparent and spiritually in tune with one another?

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Men, do you pray with your wife? I'll look down so you could pray.

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Humility, pride. This is amazing. In the Newsweek article at the time, they said the marriages that had compassion and humility were the lasting marriages.

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And for a secular magazine, I was kind of knocked over that humility and compassion was necessary for a marriage.

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I mean, it doesn't sound like anything that Hollywood is putting out.

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I'm compassionate or I'm humble. No, I'm the boss.

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I'm the king. All that kind of language. Interesting. Knowing how to yield or do you have to win always?

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This one couple said sex saved us when other elements were unable.

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Said we agreed on sex, but we couldn't hardly get together about anything else. I said, well, at my age,

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I usually sing thanks for the memories, you know, or the thrill is gone.

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Now, let's see. Not comparing each other to other people.

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You know, success, money. One guy said my ideal of marriage before God has kept me married.

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Even when I wanted to walk, I wanted to honor the covenant. And so, you know, um, the skills,

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I think the first thing you want to be sure of is do you love the person you're with?

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First thing, are you in love? And I think a biblical love, not only a love that will leave in a cleave and become one.

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And of course, in the Old Testament, it included covenant. I was willing to go before others and say spoken for.

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So that the children that are running the streets eventually are spoken for.

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We're in covenant. We're in covenant. The same sex act outside of covenant,

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God said, I will judge. Hebrews 13. But if you're in covenant,

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I could bless the same act, children, the sexual act.

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But you put that outside of covenant, it's sin, and God will judge it. But listen to some of the characteristics of God's kind of love.

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It's patient. God's love is patient. First Corinthians 13. How many of you came into the marriage patient?

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I don't see any hands. You don't raise hands in New England? Are you just all that stubborn?

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No, I, my wife, easy going. I'm trying. I mean, we had to get two cars.

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So I get to church and still be spiritual. But you know, she would be changing a diaper.

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But I want to get there, get there. I'll tell you a true story. Our first daughter, she was, what age was she?

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18 months. I'm going to preach from Sunnyvale, California.

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I was supposed to speak that morning. I'm at a college where I'm teaching. I'm waiting out front.

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Carolyn's taking forever. I'm half carnal by the time she gets to the car.

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Man, where are you? Don't you know I was supposed to be there? She said, well, your daughter had a dirty diaper.

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I said, you teach her to quit messing her pants. You know what? I'm going to preach you better.

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And so here we're going, and this is before seat belts. We're driving along.

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And so I'm repenting. I'm getting right. I've got to look spiritual. I'm going to be up pretty soon.

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And so our daughter is standing up in the front seat with in between.

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And I said, Carolyn, would you, and I was going to do Ephesians 5. I said, turn over to Ephesians 5 and let's just read it.

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I get in the mood, you know. And so she gets it over there, starts to read it.

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My daughter grabs the page, rips it off. I nearly wrecked the car.

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And when I get up to preach that morning, I piece the broken sheet of the

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Bible together. And I was not a happy, happy pastor teaching to be patient when

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I went to box that little 18 -year -old right out through the goalposts of life.

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And patient? No, no. Twice is go, go, go.

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Built that way. God said, I got a lot of assignments for you.

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I'm going to nearly kill you at times, but you're going to learn to lie down in green pastures.

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So you bring this to a marriage. Is your wife slow or fast? Is your husband slow or fast?

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Well, God's love is not envy or boast. It's not rude.

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It's not irritable or resentful. I said, did you love your wife? I'm not irritated by her.

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I don't resent her. Do you resent your wife or your husband?

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God's love would not. Here's one. If you read first Corinthians 13, one translate, it does not keep a ledger of wrong suffered.

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Some of you never know which fight you're in because you've never got rid of the last one because you've got, you got a record of it.

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I went to see a couple that were having marital problems and fussing. I went there and the gal pulls up the mattress.

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I never get it pulled out a green notebook and she had recorded every spat they had, the date and the issue and why he was wrong.

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And he was out of the house when I was there. They're still married by the way. It's been over 40 years, but she kept a ledger, kept dredging that up in every battle because it will kill you, kill you.

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Love does not keep a ledger of faults. How are you doing?

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How many have you erased? Let that go.

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It bears all things, believes all things.

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I think your pastor was outrageous when he told me that he does these weddings and he uses

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Romans 5 while we were ungodly sinners, weak and enemies of God, God decided to love us.

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And if he could do that, could we not do this with our husband or wife when you're at your worst?

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Who loves you at your worst, God? Can you love?

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Can you love your wife at her worst?

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The last spanking I ever got was I was sassy. My mother, being the baby of the family, the other kids were gone because my, my siblings would beat me to a pulp if they heard me talking back.

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I'm just getting sassy. I was resenting the way she's treating my sister with me.

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So just youth, that kind of attitude. And one night at the table, my mother broke down and started crying.

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And my father said, had a different name, Ural, Ural Mountains.

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Said, Ural, what's wrong? And she said, I can't make

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Philip mind me anymore. And this big old iron worker said, well, that's my department.

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I said, oh no, I've done it. I've done it. So we go to the basement.

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We weren't going down there to change spark plugs. We're going down to change me.

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And so he gives me the spanking of my life. And here's a

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Christian man. But, but after he spanked me, he'd never done this before. He, he did pick me up, probably weighed 90 pounds, put me against the wall.

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And he started saying, hear me, son. I've buried two boys with that woman.

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I've watched that woman have a nervous breakdown. She was out of her head for three months because she saw her boy killed in front of her.

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And we went through the depression. We burned tires into an

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Eldorado, Kansas to survive. We lived on cabbage.

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We did. I mean, he starts rehearsing all this history. And his lips are, he said, do you think, do you think

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I will let any child of mine make her life miserable? I'll outlast you, son.

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I'll meet you here every night, but you won't survive. Never again.

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Took me three weeks to heal. When I went to school, had stripped for PE. All my buddies said, what happened?

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I said, oh, I've been playing football, like fun. I've been playing dodgeball. I've been trying to dodge the lasses.

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He made a statement, never another spanking. How much are you willing to go through with that wife or husband?

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That's what sickness does. I don't know what I'd do. I've had surgeries, many surgeries, triple, fusion in my back.

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I can't tell you what it's like for your wife to become your nurse. When you get away from the hospital, you just got a buzzer to get any pain relief versus you get home and she's there.

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There's nothing like it. Nothing like it. Men, we've got a treasure to have a wife.

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She's a helpmate and to have a husband that's there, not for sex, for comfort, to bring me the water and to say, honey,

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I don't care that you're nine months pregnant. I don't care if the stretch marks have come on your body.

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Your value is far beyond the price you pay. The beauty is deeper than just the body.

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Let's move on unless I have a nervous breakdown here. Communication skills.

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How are you communicating? There's four negative patterns that happen in communication in marriage.

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One is we withdraw and we avoid. We just grow apart.

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We can't talk about it. I think that what was my wife, when we first got married, that it was hard for her to articulate her difference.

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One at peace at all costs. Here I'm blabbing plenty talk, but she would close down.

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It was hard for her to stand up to me in the early marriage. How I longed for those days because she learned to stand up and speak for herself.

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In the early days, coming from an alcoholic home that was going into divorce, she wanted peace.

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She didn't know how to stand her ground. Being told as a Christian woman, submit, submit, never knew that that didn't mean be silent.

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Submission doesn't mean silence. Two, you get the escalates.

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By that, usually louder, harsher, maybe anger, so that this issue here, it just keeps growing.

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It starts losing its focus, temper, and maybe bad speech, whatever takes place.

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Here's a tough one. We listen, but we impugn motives. That what they really meant was, be sure we listen.

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Do you know what I said? If you're not sure what I meant, ask me, but don't impugn it.

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We have to do that with people all the time, don't we? We don't have a right to judge their motives.

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We can judge their actions, but not their motive. God would do that, 1

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Corinthians 4, 1 through 5. Then, don't invalidate, dismiss, or minimize their feelings.

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I think maybe as men are more on that side that, oh,

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I've heard this before, you'll be okay, get over it, and she will feel like you haven't heard me, or you were not sympathetic with my view, and she'll feel unheard.

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Here's the real, and we'll get to this in conflict. If you don't hear them in the front room, she won't want to hear you in the bedroom.

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If you don't want to solve conflict in the living room, the issue, or you go in the bedroom, and as men, no matter if it's a thunderstorm or a hurricane, oh, let's make love, she says, oh, no, that's the last thing

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I want to talk about. You never heard me out here. We never stayed at the table long enough to work through the issue.

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Now, you want to pick up the physical, and I'm emotionally checked out. We have to be sure that we don't minimize their feelings.

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Well, that wraps up part one of session two on marriage with Pastor Phil Howard. We will play a second part tomorrow.

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My name is Mike Avendroth. This is No Compromise Radio Ministry. By the way, if you want to get ahold of Phil Howard, you can just email me, mike at nocompromiseradio .com.