The Marriage Pyramid with Dr. Danny Purvis

Welcome to the Wrap Report with Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretations and applications.

This is the ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Now I know that many of you who are married have absolutely no problems in your marriage.

So this episode will be for a friend of yours, because you have no problems whatsoever in your marriage.

But if you have a friend who's struggling, this episode may be for them. I'm sure it's not for you, but we have a special guest,

Dr. Danny Purvis with us. He is from Growth Project Radio. We're going to discuss his new book called

The Marriage Pyramid. So welcome, Danny. Hey, thanks, Andrew. It's an honor to be on your show with you.

I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with me here today. Well, first off, it would be proper for me to thank you for your service, and I want to talk about your

Navy career to start. So you were a chaplain in the

Navy for 20 years. Yep, that's exactly right. And so what got you into the

Navy? Why Navy? Yeah, that's a really good question. I try not to make it sound facetious and trying to find a

Weasley way out of it by saying this is where God wants me, but it was completely up to Him.

The Navy chaplaincy, military chaplaincy in general, specifically the Navy, was not on my radar screen at all coming out of seminary.

I went to one of the seminaries I went to, initially went to Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth.

I left there when I graduated, went to work for the, well, then called the Home Mission Board, now called the

North American Mission Board for two years. As that was wrapping up, I was wondering what

I was going to do next, what God was leading me to, and it was really interesting that the

Navy, the military chaplaincy, it just came up in a conversation, and I wasn't even thinking in terms of the

Navy at all because I had, to help, as a lot of people do, to help serve their country and go to school,

I had joined the South Carolina Army National Guard. I had been in the National Guard for six years and had finished my tour there, and so when

I was looking at military chaplaincy, my natural inclination was to go back to a service that I was familiar with, which was the

Army, but it was a completely closed door. Every single time I tried to reach out to somebody to talk to them about it,

I never got phone calls back. I never got emails back. It was beginning to look like just a completely closed door, and then of all people, my mom emailed me at one point and said that she had seen where the

Navy was recruiting military chaplains and that maybe I should take a look at that, and I was thinking, yeah, right, the

Navy. Here I am, Army, guys, no way in the world they're going to get me in the Navy. Well, it wasn't long after I made that initial phone call, and that's exactly what ended up happening.

God was completely in charge of that process from beginning to end. I made one phone call. They initiated contact back with me, walked me through the paperwork, all of the stuff that you have to do to become a—anything having to do with the federal government has a lot of stuff attached to it, and so they had to walk us all the way through that stuff, and then the next thing you know,

I get in, and I'm going to chaplain school, then I'm at my first duty station in 29 Palms, California with the 1st

Marine Division out there, and thinking I'll do my one or two tours, and I'll go on with my life, and this would be kind of a fun chapter to remember, and 20 years later,

I retired from there. So it was—it's been an—it was an interesting journey. It was—God showed me a lot of really neat stuff in there.

I enjoyed a lot of it. There's stuff I didn't enjoy too much about it. You know, it's not a whole lot of fun being separated from your family for months at a time, all the moves every few years, but it was a great opportunity.

See, you started off well in Army, and then you just—you went Navy. Had to go to the dark side, yeah.

I don't know how that worked out, and to this day, it really is interesting to me. I would have never dreamed in a million years

I would have ended up with the Navy. I really didn't. It was not—to say it wasn't on my radar screen would be inaccurate, because it wasn't anywhere close to that.

It just shows you how amazing God is, that he will work these things out, that it was not—it was the last thing I saw coming.

Yeah, well, it is a thing that prepared you, really, for a lot of what we're going to talk about today with your book.

Oh, absolutely. The genesis of it came from my very first duty station. Yeah, well, and you described that in the book.

Let's actually, since that is pertinent to what we're discussing later, but why don't you talk about that now, and then we'll get to the book in another segment.

But how did that first duty station really bring you— Sorry, I didn't mean to jump in there on you, but yeah, it was really interesting.

I was very green, as you can probably imagine. Had never been a military chaplain before.

Had some experience with the military in general, but not as a chaplain, and so I was assigned to an artillery battalion, a

Marine Corps artillery battalion. A lot of people don't know this, but the Marine Corps is actually part of the Department of the Navy, and so they don't have their own—Marine

Corps doesn't have their own chaplains. They use Navy chaplains. And so actually, of my 20 years in the Navy, 10 of it was actually spent with Marine Corps units.

And so my very first duty station was with an artillery battalion out in 29 Palms, California, Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center out there, and the

Navy at that time had adopted a program, a premarital program called

PREP. I don't know if you're familiar with that, if you've ever heard of PREP. But we were actually—they adopted that as the formal premarital program that we would use to help get young Marines and sailors who were getting married integrated into that lifestyle and to make sure they understand—to give them a better chance at success, because it was a force multiplier with the military.

If a soldier or Marine—a sailor or Marine's marriage was doing well, that was a good thing for the

Navy. If it wasn't going so well, it's not a good thing. So it had ramifications beyond just the interpersonal relationship between husbands and females.

So the military had a vested interest in seeing these folks really doing well in their marriage. So we had adopted

PREP. I went through the PREP training at the University of Colorado. They sent me out there for a week and went through the

PREP training. And so it wasn't very long after I got back that I was inserted into the training rotation there to do

PREP—to do sections of PREP. And I had never—I had never engaged with married couples or premarried couples on that level before.

I had never had the opportunity to talk to a large group of people, even though PREP was designed specifically for people who were about to get married.

It was also open to folks who had been married for a while. So we had a mixture of engaged couples and folks who had been married for a while.

And it was really the first time—I guess I would have been about 30 at that point. That was really probably the first time in my life where I started being intentional about thinking about what marriage actually looks like, what a successful marriage actually looks like, and what an unsuccessful marriage looks like, and why are the unsuccessful marriages unsuccessful?

Why are the good ones good? How does this all work? And so they sort of threw me into the deep end of the pool.

And I was looking at the PREP stuff, and I really liked it, but I thought there was some stuff that could have been added in there that I thought could have been even a little more helpful.

And that's where, to be honest with you, that's where the Marriage Pyramid started. It was one of the very first PREP classes

I did. I introduced the Marriage Pyramid—not in the form that it's in now. It has undergone a lot of changes over the last 20 -plus years.

But that was the genesis of it. How in the world am I going to sit out there and look at these couples sitting across from me and communicate to them how important this is, and how people are just not due a good marriage.

They're just not. You have to work at it. There are things, there are landmines all over the place, there are things people don't think about.

And so how was the best way, at least I was thinking at the time, how was the best way that I could communicate to these folks kind of where they are and where they want to be, and what are some of those obstacles out there?

And that was the genesis of the whole thing. Well, the thing that I've noticed with years of counseling and then specifically with military, two big things that I've noticed you end up dealing with with military—suicide and marriage.

Yes. And it really, military life does put a lot of strain on a marriage.

And I think after 20 years of military counseling, you're going to learn, and you're learning it in a secular environment, so you can't always appeal to them and say, this is what the

Bible says, because not all of them care what the Bible says. That's true. And that's a great point you bring up.

And I do want to make sure I clarify something that when, how it works, for lack of a better word with me.

I mean, every chaplain's a little bit different when it comes to these types of things. One of the things that we are actually, we're required to sign, it was a document we were required to sign going into the

Navy, as I was going into the Navy as a chaplain, is that I would not proselytize. Now, here's the interesting thing.

It didn't define what proselytizing was. And so, I left it to my conscience to decide what that actually meant.

And so, if it was a situation where people were forced to be there, a change of command, some sort of military function where they were ordered to be in the audience, then

I would not take advantage of that situation and try to influence them necessarily overtly with the gospel, if that makes any sense.

But the caveat that the moment they voluntarily walk into my office and seek out my counsel, then

I will counsel them from the perspective that my denomination expected me to have and that my faith tradition and conscience expected me to have.

And so, every single person, every single couple that came into my office, they got the

God stuff. Now, they didn't always like it and they didn't always respond to it, but they got it.

And I didn't beat that horse if I got the sense, and you know as well as I do, you've done counseling, you've talked to people, you know when people are receptive to what you're saying and you know when they're not.

So they would get the basics of what a marriage is supposed to look like from a biblical standpoint.

But if their eyes started to glass over and it was clear they were not interested, I gave that to them and then

I would move on to other stuff as well. But I always tried my very, very best to make sure that anybody who voluntarily walked into my office for any type of counseling got that aspect of it, whether they wanted or not.

But like I said, I didn't cram it down their throats. I let the Holy Spirit guide me in those situations. There were people who were oftentimes very open to that, they liked it, they wanted to hear more, and there are others that were completely closed off.

And then I addressed those couples as I needed to. But being in military, there are certain things that are required and therefore there were probably times that you ended up having to counsel someone, not by their choice, not by your choice, but by military's choice, because they needed it and yet they really weren't there to hear the truths of God's Word.

They were there probably because they're forced to. Because they were in trouble, most of them.

Look, the reality is, and this is not hyperbole, I would say of all the people that I counseled, whether they were married couples, whether they were individuals, regardless of the circumstances, of all of the people who walked through my door for 20 years, and we're talking about hundreds upon hundreds of people,

I would say a good 80 % of them plus had no, they didn't want to hear anything about God.

It had nothing to do with God in any way, shape, or form. It was, at times, to be honest with you, it was a little discouraging, but they always got it.

They always got some aspect of it. They always understood where I was coming from in my perspective. I would always tell them there were certain things

I couldn't help them with, because the only way I could help them with it is if it came from a Christian perspective or specifically a biblical perspective, and you don't want to hear that.

So I'll try to help you over here with this, but this is going to be the better answer. So it was always a little bit of a juggling act, but I would say, whoa, easily 80%.

Maybe more, I may be underestimating, but easily 80 % of the people that came in to see me had no, they didn't want to deal with God in any way, shape, or form.

Now the reason I bring that up is because as you work in your book on marriage, you work on this book, it's called

The Marriage Pyramid. It's not a pyramid structure, by the way. Yes. You know, it's funny you should mention that.

That never dawned on me. I was talking to our mutual friend, Colleen Sharp, on Theology Gals, I was on with her

I think a couple of weeks ago, and she had mentioned it to a friend of hers, and she said she had to explain to her it wasn't what her friend thought, and Colleen was just going to let it go.

And I was like, no, you got to tell me, what did she think it was? And it was that, it was that, it never crossed my mind that people think of it as like a hierarchical structure of the marriage relationship.

It never crossed my mind. Well see, now Colleen's, the woman who had issue with the name thought of it differently than what

I thought. Colleen had said to me that there was a lady in her group that had an issue with the name of the book, and I thought marriage pyramid, the pyramid, like so it's a pyramid scheme, like that's where I went, like a

Ponzi type scheme. And where they had an issue was where they had some folks who are from some church backgrounds where the men have complete say in marriage, and the wives have none.

I was counseling a woman this week, her husband controls all the money, he doesn't let her have any friends, she goes to church, but she's not allowed to talk to anybody, he takes vacations on his own, and from that structure where they have the idea that everything is about the male, then yeah,

I could see they have that, but you had a totally different reason for the name that we're going to get into. Drastically different.

Yes, as a matter of fact, I didn't even foresee that. It was amazing. Like I said, when I was talking to Colleen, she had mentioned this lady and then she was just going to let it go, and I said,

I can't let this go, you got to tell me what she thought. And I was flummoxed to be honest with you,

I never crossed my mind that it would be interpreted that way, but it just shows you the filters that we have, which is why

I make the book, and we'll talk about this later as we get more into it, but it's why I made the book as general as I did, because I tried to make it applicable to the filters that we all have in front of us.

Every single one of us speaks through a filter and we hear through a filter, and our filters are not all the same. And so I tried to make it general enough that it would be adaptable to all of these different filters, but also specific enough to be helpful regardless of what the filter is, if that makes any sense.

Yeah, and the thing is, and this is why I want to bring this up for folks is to realize that you were approaching this subject, whether you thought in the beginning, oh, this is what

I'm going to build a lot of my counseling on, but you didn't plan that, but over years of counseling, mostly to people who don't want to hear, they're forced to listen, they do not want to hear the

Bible's perspective on it, and yet using biblical principles to help them in their marriage.

Now, the reason that becomes really helpful for folks is because guess what? There's a lot of Christians who want the

Bible, but they don't always want to actually listen. It's one thing to hear someone say, this is what a biblical marriage looks like, it's another to actually put it into practice.

And you had people who don't even want the biblical perspective, but then are forced to put it into practice.

And I think that's going to be an encouragement to folks who are struggling in a marriage, struggling with thinking that this could never be repaired.

Yes. Andrew, here was the thing that was so demoralizing to me for a long time, for years when

I first started doing this, because people ask, you know, what do military chaplains do? I would say the vast majority of the time, and at least from my perspective and the ones, the guys that I worked with, the folks that I worked with over the last 20 years will tell you probably the same thing.

The vast majority of what I did was counsel people. That was the vast majority of my work was counseling.

And of that counseling, the vast majority of that was probably marriage counseling, relationship counseling.

So I would see these couples, they would come in and we would begin talking and they would be coming in to me, unfortunately, usually

I was the last resort. By the time they had gotten to me, a lot of times, and this was really too bad, by the time they had gotten to me, not only had the bridges been burned, but the ashes been gathered up and burned again.

So it was really difficult to be in that spot to try to help them. But one of the things that used to really bother me, still does because I'm not as involved with it as I used to, but one of the things that used to bother me so much is that I would have these couples come in and I would know from the beginning that they were on the verge of divorce, that this is really kind of a, this is a

Hail Mary. This is the last one that they're going to try to do to make this thing work. And I would just let them talk, try to do what a good counselor does and listen way more than I talk.

And I would just let them go. I would pick one and I'd say, tell me what's going on. And they would go on for a while and then I'd stop them and say, okay, now you tell me what do you think is going on?

And I would listen to the issues and I would sit there and listen for 45 or 50 minutes at times while these, while these folks are telling me this.

And at the end of that, I'm thinking to myself, I haven't heard one thing that should be leading these people to divorce.

Not one. I can't hear one single thing that I would point to and say, that's the thing

I can understand now while they're on the edge of, on the verge of divorce because of this thing that they keep saying, keep bringing up.

I would hear that over and over and over again. And yet there's so many of them would end up divorced when they didn't have to be.

And so I knew then I had to start developing my ideas and how to address these situations in a, in a more unique way because they think that this is, that this thing that they're going through, these things that they're going through are fatal and they're not, but they think they are.

And so how in the world do I, am I going to be able to get them to see that they're not as fatal as they think they are?

And it was a very difficult, difficult thing to do. So when we get back from this break, you went to a school that would be kind of surprising being as conservative as you are.

And I want to talk about that because you went to a school that people don't think of as well conservative from a person who, as you are quite conservative.

So I want to talk about where you went to seminary, where you got your doctorate and why after this. Justification.

This theological term is legal in nature, but to understand it, we must first understand our legal predicament because we have sinned against God, i .e.

broken his law and thought word and deed. We are guilty in his court and must be punished as lawbreakers.

You see, since we have sinned against an infinitely holy God, we deserve an infinite punishment.

Enter justification. This is the one time event when God declares the lawbreaker, us, righteous in his court.

It's been said that to be justified means that God sees me just if I'd never sinned.

This is more appropriately stated, God sees me just if I'd been Jesus. See Jesus lived the life we couldn't live and died the death we should have died and was resurrected on the third day.

In this, Jesus fulfilled the requirements of the law and paid the fine for our lawbreaking.

If we repent and believe in him, God credits his righteousness to our account. Only then are we seen just if I'd been

Jesus. This has been another Growing Moment with Robert Houghton. For more information, visit growthproject .org.

Two, two, two great books in one website. Visit strivingforeternity .org.

There are two books that I would like to recommend you purchase. What They, meaning people who aren't

Christians, other religions believe, and What We Believe, Systematic Theology Made Simple.

Both are great resources, especially if you plan on witnessing to somebody. Strivingforeternity .org.

So Danny, you are a conservative pastor. I know because I've talked with you off air plenty of times.

But you went to, well, one of the most liberal schools in the country.

Yeah, yeah. How cool is that? Right? Let me, let me, it's funny, again, how God works these things out.

It to me is just amazing. Let me take you back a little bit. I was in the

Patuxent River Naval Air Station, which was in southern, is, was, still is, in southern

Maryland. And I had a chapel at that point. That was the only time in my career I was actually assigned to a chapel.

And that was so, as, in a weird kind of way, it was the only time in my 20 -year career in the

Navy where I actually kind of did the stuff a regular pastor does. At a chapel program, we had

Sunday school, we had, you know, anything that a normal, for lack of a better word, regular church would have.

And I was assigned there for three years. I preached regularly, obviously, since I was the, I was the guy there.

And it was interesting. I had always sort of made it a point not to check my email.

I would be in my office before the service started, and it's also my work office, obviously, where at my office at work, the chapel was right across the street.

And I always try to, I always had a very hard and fast rule that I would not look at my email before I went in to preach, because I would see something,

I knew I would see something in the email that would throw me off during the service, and I didn't want to, well, I broke that this one particular time.

I don't know why I did. And I pulled up my email, and had gotten an email from the chief of chaplain's office.

And that says, as a chaplain, that's either usually really good news or really bad news. And so, because I had no reason for them to email me.

And so, I pulled it up, and it said, you know, congratulations, you have been selected for the funded graduate education program.

I had no idea what the funded graduate education program even was. I did not know.

And so, the following Monday, the next day I went into work,

I called the number on there. Anyway, to make a more convoluted story, hopefully a lot less so,

I was selected, I was one of three chaplains in the entire Navy Chaplain Corps that year, that was selected for a program

I didn't sign up for, by the way, you usually have to submit a package, I didn't submit a package. To this day, I don't know how

I got selected, but got selected to attend graduate school for a year to get another master's degree, a master's of theology.

And there were several schools that the Navy had contracts with for this program, and one of them was

Princeton Theological Seminary, and that was the seminary that I chose to go to. And it was quite an experience, it was a good gig, if you can get it right,

I got paid my salary, and I got paid to go to school for a year to get another master's degree. And it was an amazing experience, but you're right, there was a reason why

I picked Princeton. Well, first off, you came to not only a liberal school, but you came to my state, and you can't get much more liberal than Jersey.

California tries. Yes, and I was there too. But yeah, so obviously, you did not get along with your professors,

I'm sure. I actually was going to do my PhD, I was looking at Princeton. Similar reasons as you did for going to Princeton.

I was thinking of doing my doctorate at Princeton because of the fact that, especially me doing a lot of ministry on the streets, when you get these unbelievers who think, oh, you just went to some religious school.

If you say Princeton, it carries some weight to that with the unbelievers. But the big stumbling block that I saw was,

I was going to have to pair up with a professor and really be doing researching of something they're interested in.

And I'm like going, yeah, I want to do, if I'm doing my doctorate, it would be in like something about hypocrisy in Christianity in the

Bible. And I don't see Princeton being a place where they're going to want me to talk about hypocrisy.

Probably not. No, that would be my guess. I will tell you, I had a little bit of an ulterior motive there. One of my absolute favorite theologians in the history of the world,

Cornelius Vantill. I don't know how much you know about Vantill, but Vantill actually went to Princeton Seminary. And so that was, it was when it was a little bit different than it is now.

But yeah, we keep talking about the reason, but neither one of us have quantified that. The reason that I decided that I wanted to go to Princeton Seminary is because when

I went to get my undergraduate degree, I went to a place that believed pretty much like me. When I went and got my

Master of Divinity at Southwestern, I went to a place that pretty much believed like I believe. I got my PhD from Regent University and, you know,

I'm a little, not exactly completely in line with those guys theologically, but for the most part, especially the important things,

I believe pretty much like they do. I wanted to go to a place where I was going to be challenged in my thinking and be surrounded by people who did not think like I thought.

I wanted to be sharpened. I wanted to be constantly bombarded with the thinking that would come from that perspective.

And it was a great experience, Andrew. I loved every second of it. I really did. I had a lot of fun.

I had this one professor in particular, by the way, who we could not have been more different. I mean, we could not have been more different and we actually got to be very good friends.

He encouraged me to start a blog and he said, the stuff you have to say is really important and you need to get that out there.

It was really interesting coming from him since we, like I said, we had absolutely nothing in common theologically, culturally, politically, nowhere did we meet in any way, shape or form, but we had a respect for each other that superseded that and we were able to talk to each other without name calling and without getting into arguments, without doing all that other stuff.

It was an absolutely phenomenal experience. Yeah. And when I went to seminary, I didn't agree completely in the doctrine of soteriology with my seminary and it just forced me to have to write my papers a lot stronger.

And I loved being a Fundamentalist Baptist seminary. I had to do a paper on ecclesiastical separation.

How far do you separate from other churches? And I still remember my professor saying, because I was supposed to be a complete separatist as a

Fundamentalist Baptist, right? I still remember, I got an

A on the class, he gave me a paper where I got an A and his notes said, I really don't like your conclusion, but I cannot argue against any of the points that you made.

Yeah, that, see, that was the part that I found so rewarding in going to Princeton Seminary.

Most of the kids that were there were probably young enough to be my kids, pretty close to being young enough to be my kids.

And so I didn't care so much about their conclusions as much as I cared how they got there. And so I constantly didn't,

I never, almost never challenged them on their conclusions. I always challenged them on their thinking. How did you get there?

Show me, basically, remember when we were kids in math class, show your work, show me how you got there.

Because it sounds like to me, you're just parroting something that somebody else says and you haven't really thought about this on your own.

What about this? Have you thought about that? And you could hear the crickets chirping most of the time, because that's exactly, even though they were really bright kids, they were, they had not been taught to think, they'd just been taught to parrot what their professors, what their favorite writers, whatever the case may be, and said without giving any sort of thought to what they were saying at all.

And so it was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it. You know, I think many of those students were on my

Twitter feed this week when I had posted something and you're right, they're just… Oh, yeah, yeah. I saw that post,

I thought you were a glutton for punishment. Well, I don't know what Twitter has been like a block where I could put something and no one ever reads it.

And all of a sudden, the one post that I put that got a ton of attention was when

I just said, if you go to a church where you have a female pastor, it's not a church and she's not a pastor.

And boy, did that blow up. It did indeed. Yeah, I saw that. And they're all just parroting the same thing and it's like, there's no verse that says that in the

Bible. And I'm just giving the verse. It's like here, 1 Timothy 2, 2 to 14. Just read it.

You're reading into that. No, you're doing eisegesis. All I'm doing is reading the verse.

I'm not adding anything else in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have more access to information than we have ever had in our entire lives.

And we are also stupider than we've ever been in our entire lives because we let other people do our thinking for us.

They will make a statement, some little soundbite, some little clip, something that sounds kind of cool or kind of good.

And then everybody gloms onto that. And then they keep repeating it, they keep parroting it without ever thinking about what

I call, it's not specifically what I call it, but it's one of the unchanging, uncompromising laws of the universe, the law of unintended consequences, second and third order effects.

Nobody ever thinks about that. They just spout this stuff out without ever thinking about the ramifications of what it is to hold that particular worldview because they've never thought about it.

They just heard it. They liked the way it sounded, maybe aesthetically, but there's nothing to it.

It's like when Job was talking to his friends and he says, your proverbs are, what did he call them?

Your platitudes are proverbs of ash or something like that. That's exactly what it is.

They're just ash. There's nothing to it. And so I wanted those kids to think. And so I would challenge them to think about what they were saying and I would tell them,

I don't care. I know you're going to come to a different conclusion than me. I don't care about that. I just care about how you get there. Are you thinking or are you just repeating what somebody else says?

And going to a seminary like Princeton is going to do that. It's going to force you to have to think better. It's going to force you to have to write better, be more articulate.

And that then is going to help when you're, after all these years in the military, having worked with so many military people with marriages, then you bring into that the fact that you have to be more articulate, you have to make stronger arguments.

That leads into what I want to bring up after this commercial is your book. I want to spend some time talking about the book, why you wrote it, and we'll talk about what's in there after this break.

Looking for strategies that will help you engage in meaningful conversations with members of the Mormon Church?

Well, if so, take a look at Sharing the Good News with Mormons, a new book produced by Harvest House Publishers and edited by Mormonism Research Ministries' Eric Johnson and Sean McDowell.

Sharing the Good News with Mormons includes 24 helpful essays from two dozen Christian apologists, scholars, and pastors.

Pick up your copy at the Utah Lighthouse Bookstore or order directly from mrm .org.

And you can also get that book at strivingforeturning .org in our store. I am one of the 20 plus authors.

It was a pleasure to be part of that. So let's talk about your book on marriage,

The Marriage Pyramid. Now one of the things I liked is right from the get -go, you talked about marriage in laying a foundation.

You talked about it as a picture of God with his people. And right off the bat, that grabbed me because so much of the counseling

I do when I counsel people for marriage, I'm going back to that picture of what our marriage represents.

Why is it so important? I had a guy, I felt bad about this because I hadn't met the person.

I was going to be out at his church and speaking at the church where he attends. And you know me,

I like to joke around. We were joking around on Facebook and he made a comment about my wife just in a joking way.

It was putting her down and I guess

I was a little bit too strong, but I just said, I don't joke about my wife. We do not do that.

My wife is not the butt of a joke. And I said, listen, I know we don't really know each other well, but marriage represents the relationship between God and his people.

I would no sooner want to make fun of my wife or have her the butt of a joke than I would want Christ to make me the butt of a joke.

And I guess it came on too strong because when I went to the church before the church that this guy was at, the pastor's wife was like,

I was so glad you put that guy in his place. And I was like, ooh. So I contacted him. I'm like, I'm sorry. I came on too strong.

Forgive me. No, brother, I didn't know that view that you had. And you know what? It really helped me.

But you had that same view and it really was refreshing to see that you start right off with the fact that we have to see that this marriage, whatever marriage it is, no matter how bad it may seem, is still a reflection of God and his church.

Yeah, it's really fascinating. We have, and I mean we as evangelicals, one of the, we've made a lot of mistakes and I've been a part of it.

I'm not, I'm not, I'm not pointing fingers. I was, I was in seminary at Southwestern when the whole church growth movement seekers stuff started out.

And I tell you what, they had me hook, line, and sinker. I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. It was exciting.

It was new. And so I have, I have repented of that and, and, and have moved on.

So I'm not, I'm not saying this from a standpoint of saying I haven't been a part of the problem because I think

I was for a little while. But we have made a lot of mistakes over the last 20 or 30 years.

One of the biggest mistakes that we have made and continue to make as evangelicals is allowing the world to define certain constructs for us.

And one of the things that we have allowed the world to do is to define marriage for us.

We have begun to more assimilate the world's view of marriage as opposed to a biblical view of marriage, which is why unfortunately

I think Christian marriages, at least from my understanding and what little research I've done on this, fail at almost as high rate as secular marriages do.

And so that was the one thing I wanted to make sure up front is that one of the things

I learned in my PhD work, operationalize your constructs, right? You have to know what you're talking about. If I say the word marriage, then this is yet people have to know when

I talk about marriage, this is what I mean. This is what I'm talking about. It was the first institution God ever created.

There's gotta be a reason for that. There's a level of importance to it that we don't ascribe to it today, even unfortunately, even in the evangelical church.

We treat it more as a rite of passage, cultural rite of passage, than we do anything else. Until we actually start seeing it the way

God wants us to see it, it's always going to be disposable to a certain extent. And so that's the thing that I've been trying to fight all of these years and what led up to the writing of the book.

Yeah, and the thing is, is that that foundation is essential because we are having the case where the

Christian church, and I know the stat that says they're failing Christian marriages as much.

There's one thing that I've noticed in those, what you end up seeing is they don't ask the question of when someone was divorced before or after they became a

Christian. Many people become a Christian because of a divorce.

And so when they give those stats, that's one thing I always try to see if they provide the data,

I go back now, there was one research poll that said that marriage, secular marriages and Christian marriages was only off by a small percentage.

It was like 51 % of Christian marriages fail. But when I dug into the data, I realized that they had asked when they were divorced, when they became a

Christian, and it was like 75 to 80 % of the divorces occurred prior to salvation.

That makes a big difference. It's a gigantic difference. And you know, it's really fascinating and all the research that I've been doing on marriages over the last 20 plus years, it is not as easy as you think it is to find out what the divorce rate is in this country.

The number that's tossed around all the time is 50%, right? 50 % of all marriages end up in divorce.

That is almost 100 % not true. It was based on some faulty data back in the 70s.

The real divorce rate in this country has never been 50%, according to the statistics that I've seen, the people who are really crunching the numbers, has never been 50%.

It got close in the 70s, and that was why that projection was if it stayed on that course, it would end up that one out of every two marriages would end in divorce.

The real divorce rate is somewhere, even among everybody, is somewhere around 35 to 40%, which is still too high.

But it's not the 50 % that we hear. It's interesting that we can collate this data about almost anything out there, but this one's a little harder to nail down.

What I began to do, and one of the coolest jobs that I ever had, which is kind of the genesis of the entire book and how it ended up in the form that it's in now, the last year and a half that I was in the

Navy, I was given an amazing job. It was one of those things that was a great way to end a career, as far as I was concerned.

The Navy has this thing called CREDO, it's a retreat program, Chaplains Religious Enrichment Development Operations.

Anyway, it doesn't matter what it stands for. But it's a series of retreats, of which marriage retreats are just one part of them.

They have these things called personal growth retreats, and they have children's retreats, and family retreats, and all these other things.

But by far, by far, the most popular CREDO retreat in the

Navy today is, it was when I started, are the

CREDO retreats. And I had taken part in CREDO marriage retreats earlier in my career and throughout my career, but my last year and a half in the

Navy, almost two years in the Navy, that's all I did. I was the CREDO chaplain at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, which means that's all

I did. Almost every single weekend, I did marriage retreats. And it was a blast.

I had a great time. And so, what I would do is develop the program, which

I did. I didn't use the canned stuff that they were doing. I basically just did it on my own.

I scrapped everything and went back from the beginning and said, okay, what do these folks, based on these years and years of experience with these couples, what do they need to know?

What do they need to hear? What do they need to understand? And so, we talked about, it would be a Friday night.

We'd usually get started around six o 'clock, go to about eight, then we'd get up. We'd go all day Saturday until about 4 .30

or 5 in the afternoon, and then we'd finish up Sunday morning, and everybody would go their way, and I would have young couples in there.

I would have older couples in there. I'd have couples who had just gotten married, couples who had been married for 40 years. It was really a very cool experience.

And the last thing that I would do on Saturday, before I turned them loose for the date night on Saturday night, is

I would do this thing that I ended up calling the marriage pyramid. And that's where this kind of came full circle with the book.

And it is, to this day, by far, that was what I got the most response from.

When I got finished with that subject, people did not want to stop talking about it. People said, you need to write a book about this.

I had other chaplains who would sit in on it, and they would, you know, I would draw these drawings up on the board to try to point out what they were taking pictures of it, and all that.

That was the part that got the biggest response. So let's discuss the pyramid itself, because we've been talking about it, saying what it isn't.

Sure. Let's go through, starting at the bottom, go through each of the points of the pyramid, so that people have an idea of what the structure of this book is going to be, why it's going to be helpful to them.

Well, I think one of the main reasons, and we just talked about what it's not, we're going to add one more thing into what it's not, so that people do not misunderstand.

This is not a four -step process to having a better marriage. Those things do not exist.

There is no such thing as a multi -step program, that all you have to do is implement these steps, and you're going to have a good marriage.

People are too different. Circumstances are too different. Personalities are too different. Backgrounds are too different. There is no, these are not steps, where I've got to do step one, then two, then three, and four, and if I complete these steps, then

I'm going to have the marriage that God wants me to have. That was not my intent in writing this. There are no steps in here.

It's really more of a barometer, the way I look at it, it's more of a barometer than anything else. It kind of shows me, hopefully, where I am in this strata, for lack of a better word, that sort of culminates into the upper goal that we want to, which is at the top of the pyramid.

So I just didn't want people to think this is, okay, I've got to do steps one, two, three, and four, and I'll be good. I'll have the marriage that I want.

It doesn't work that way, and it'll make more sense when people read it, but I just wanted to make sure I gave that little bit of a preamble to it before we move on.

I don't know how much you want me to get into this, the structure of it.

I borrowed from the pyramid standpoint, I borrowed from Abraham Maslow and his hierarchy of needs.

I was always fascinated by his view of human psychosocial development and the idea that you can go up and down on the pyramid.

It's not, okay, I've got this bottom one done, then I go to the next one, then I get that one done, I got those two done. This is something that you can actually move up and down in at any time in your life, depending on what's going on, and it's the same thing with the marriage.

So I looked at what I thought was going to be, what needed to be the foundational issue, and then when that was met, for lack of a better word, not met all the time, but predominantly met, then there would have to be another area that would, the next area up would need to be satisfied, for lack of a better word, in order for the third one to take place, and then in order for the top one to take place, you'd have to have all the other three in place as well.

And so that's sort of the idea I had behind it, because it'll make more sense when you're actually reading the book.

But I actually, it's really funny, I have changed the shape over the years, I have added more layers to it,

I've taken some off, I've switched them around before I finally settled on this, and so what

I decided to do was saying, okay, what is the base thing that we need for a marriage?

The absolute, bare minimum, to have any kind of marriage at all, and of course it made all the sense in the world, that it would be love, and so that began on the pyramid.

But here's the thing, again, the warning that I gave just a few moments ago, about not letting the world define certain constructs for us.

We have more than done that with this idea of love. It has been mind -boggling to me, that as believers, we will speak about love in language that is more closely associated with what the world says about love, than about what

God's word has to say about love. And so even though it's not mind -blowing, earth -shattering news, that the base of the pyramid should be love, it all depends on what you mean when you say that word.

Again, operationalize your construct. What are we talking about when we say love? Are we talking about the world's version of love?

Are we talking about God's version of love? Are we talking about a mixture of the two? Does it depend? But here's the point

I try to make, and again, we don't want to take up too much time here on each one of these, but here's the main point that I was trying to make in that bottom level of the pyramid, is that the love that we're talking about has to be understood in light of what

God says about love, because He didn't create love, He is love. So without tapping into the very source of love, we're never going to understand what that means.

What we have done, in my view, again, of the years that I've been doing this, in my view, what we've done is we have believed the world's lie that love is about 99 .9

% a feeling. And so what happens as a result of that is, we will treat it as a feeling.

It is only as viable as it is how I feel about it at that particular time. Yeah, so we move up from love though, because I want to go through each of these points.

So we move up from love, which, and I do appreciate that for folks to realize that this isn't a step -by -step thing.

Yes, yes. You can't say, okay, I got the love thing down, now I need to move on to the next one. That's not what

I mean. It's having a proper understanding of these things. And like I said, before we move on, I think it's really important that we touch on this before we move on.

This idea about love not being a feeling. Love is expressed in feelings. We have a lot of feelings associated with them.

But the problem is, we talk about love as a feeling, then what happens when we don't feel a feeling? What happens when that feeling, the little warm and fuzzies that we have with love, which are there and they're great and they're wonderful, what happens when they go away?

I've had, you know how many couples I've had in my office, we just fell out of love. I'm not in love with this person anymore.

What that means is, they don't have the little warm and fuzzy. And so therefore, if I don't have the warm and fuzzy, even our language, talking about love gives us an out.

I was an English major in my undergraduate degree. I believe words mean things. And so when somebody says,

I fell in love, it almost sounds like they were walking around minding their own business. And they fell in love, just like they would fall into a hole they didn't see.

And if I fall into love, then I can fall out of love. It's not my fault. No more than it was my fault to fall into love.

And so we give ourselves an out on this. I think this is where, when we look at the way scripture lays it out,

I mean, you had arranged marriages, people didn't fall in love, they chose to love. That's exactly right.

Love is an act of the will. It is a decision to love. When Jesus says, love your enemies and pray for those who would do you harm and hate you,

I guarantee you he was not talking about the warm and fuzzy feeling that comes with love. He was talking about a decision to love somebody who was unlovable.

And to be honest with you, the reality is we're all unlovable. And so that's why that construct has to be defined within the parameters that God has given us in his word, not based on some feeling that happens to be floating around out there.

Because I'll tell you, if I'm really angry with my wife and she's really angry with me, I can tell you something, at that moment,

I ain't feeling the warm and fuzzies. And so if I don't feel that, then we must not be in love anymore.

Because I don't feel like I'm in love anymore. And so we have got to get away from describing love almost exclusively as a feeling and more as a conscious act of the will rooted in God's word.

Okay, so on this pyramid, the foundation is love. What's the next? The next one is safety.

This is the one that really, to me, it was a huge eye opener for me.

And when I would do them in the retreats, this is the one that would garner a lot of attention, because it's not what people normally think it is.

When you hear safety, people almost immediately think physical safety, which is important, and it is included in here.

Obviously, you're not going to grow with somebody in marriage if somebody's being physically harmful to you. But that's not what

I'm necessarily talking about here. I'm talking more emotional safety that is directly linked to the same reactions we would have if somebody threatened our physical safety.

And I'll tell you, Andrew, I'll tell you where this really hit home for me, where this really began to make a lot of sense to me.

And I began to put it into the marriage pyramid and started having a huge reaction from people who had never thought of it this way.

Because before God showed this to me, I had never thought of it this way before. When you decide to love someone, let's go back to that love thing again.

When you decide to love someone, when you choose to love someone, that is an extremely, extremely vulnerable position to be in.

My wife and I, in June, will celebrate our 30th anniversary, okay? But we've known each other since we were six years old.

I've got our first grade class picture. She's standing two people down from me. So I've known my wife since I was six years old.

She's been a part of my life in some way, shape, or form for that long. But we've been married for, we'll be married for 30 years here in June of this year.

I am extremely vulnerable to her. When I choose to love her,

I choose to share everything about myself. When you spend that much time with somebody, even if you choose not to share certain things with you, she's going to see them anyway.

In other words, I am more vulnerable to her than I am to anybody else on the planet. There's nobody that knows me better on this planet than my wife does.

She knows what I'm afraid of. She knows what my failures are. She knows the things that keeps me up at night.

She knows my weaknesses. She knows where the bodies are buried, figuratively, by the way. She knows all of the most horrific things about me that anybody could possibly, she knows what frightens me more than anything else on the planet.

So what began to dawn on me is, isn't there a name for the person that, because the conclusion

I came to with, there's nobody on the planet that can hurt me more than she could if she wanted to.

Not even my kids. Could hurt me as much as my wife could if she wanted to.

And isn't there a name for somebody like that? And the name for that person is, they're the most dangerous person in the world to me.

And my wife, this was, I can't tell you, Andrew, how this opened my mind and my heart that I was married to the person who was potentially the most dangerous person in the world to me.

And what kind of impact to have on a marriage. Does that make any sense? A lot of people don't think about it that way because they don't want to think that their spouse could be dangerous to them.

But the way you lay it out in the book, it's because of the vulnerability. And what I really got out of that chapter was there's, because this is maybe a different word for it, but trust.

Yes. That's it. That's exactly right. What is really at the heart of this is how much trust we're going to put in one another.

That's exactly right. Making yourself vulnerable, how are they going to use it? And you laid that out of how people could abuse that trust.

And then how that when you have that trust, it builds a security. And that's how you laid it out.

That's exactly right. And that's the safe issue. I feel safe with my wife. But what happens if I don't?

See, that's what I would see. Remember when I mentioned earlier that I had all these couples that were in that were on the verge of divorce.

And I could not for the life of me figure out why they were this close to divorce when there was none of what

I call the big three, substance abuse, physical abuse, and adultery. That's the terminology I use for those three.

I call them the big three. I dealt with those, but not nearly as much as you might think. So why in the world were people on the verge of divorce?

And so many times it was because of the safety issue. Because they were placing their trust into someone that all of a sudden was beginning to, and it can happen in such subtle ways, such subtle ways.

The worst thing that my wife could do to me, the absolute worst thing that my wife could do to me right now is to end our relationship.

That would hurt me more than anything else she could possibly do to me. And so as a result, what ends up happening is that if I say something in the course of an argument, or she might say something in the course of an argument that might hint at the fact that this is going to happen, then this weird metamorphosis takes place.

She transfers from being, transforms from being the person who is potentially the most dangerous person in the world to me, to somebody who actually is.

So if she says things like, if she threatens divorce, or if I threaten her to divorce her, or even using more innocuous phrases that we don't think about the power of these words,

I don't know how much longer I can take this. I can't keep going like this. I understand the frustration behind those phrases.

I do. I really, really do. And I've seen it. I've experienced it. I've got it.

I understand that. But people have to understand what they are communicating to their spouse when they make statements like that, because they're threatening, at least implicitly threatening to end the relationship.

I don't know how much longer I can keep going like this means I'm not going to keep going like this much longer. And so we say these things in our frustration.

We say these things in our anger, and it may be justifiable anger or frustration. I got that. Don't, again, don't misunderstand what

I'm saying. But when we say things like that, that spouse who is potentially the most dangerous person in the world actually then becomes the most dangerous person in the world.

And then what do we do as a result of that? Well, we're going to feel safe. That's just what we do.

That's a natural reaction. If I'm on a boat and I can't swim and somebody throws me over the side and I land within just a little bit of arm's length of a flotation device,

I don't sit and have to sit there and think and wonder and bargain with myself about what I should do next.

My natural reaction, whether I can swim or not, is to clamber as best I can to that safety ring, to try to get there as best as I possibly can.

It's the same thing that happens in a marriage relationship. When your spouse then becomes the most dangerous person to you, you are going to feel safe because that's how you are wired.

We are wired to want to feel safe. And if we have to feel safe at the expense of the other person, we will do it.

And the vast majority of the couples that I have dealt with in all the years that I've been doing this, the vast majority of them, safety is the area where they pretty much stay at.

They struggle with that part more than they don't even get close to the other two because they can't get past the safety part.

Because they get mad at each other, they start arguing, and then they let these words fly and somebody throws a fit or walk out or make a statement like that, and all of a sudden that safety is just crushed.

It is crushed and it is really hard to bounce back from that. And this is a thing that I tell, especially to youth, when

I'm in youth groups and things like this, they think, because again, as you said earlier, taking the world's mindset and applying it to these principles, the world says you should date lots of people because it's going to make a better marriage.

You know what you want in marriage. And I always tell youth, the more you date, the more problems you're introducing to your marriage.

Because the more people you date, you date someone, you get hurt, you break up, the next person you date, you're less secure.

You don't want to be vulnerable. What do you do? You cover up. And so one of the things I ask people when I'm counseling them, one of the first questions

I always ask married couples when they come into me is, I ask them, how many people have they dated prior to marriage?

Because that's going to tell me how vulnerable they've been willing to make themselves to their spouse. You get someone that's dated or especially at both couples, both people dated many people.

They usually are so, have so many barriers up. They can't be vulnerable to the person.

That's usually the problem. So let's move up. So the base of the foundation is love.

We move up to safety. What's the third? That's the, obviously you're not going to feel safe with somebody you don't love.

The next one, the third part of the pyramid growth, you're not going to want to grow with somebody you don't feel safe with.

So I kind of hope you're seeing how all of these sort of work together. They are hierarchical in one sense, but they also, as I said before, we can kind of drift up and down depending on the circumstances.

The last two, growth and the idea of becoming one, these are the two that are much more difficult to give examples of because people are so different.

But it's that idea of growing together, of bonding, of that process where,

I'll give you an example and I don't mean to belittle this. Believe me, coming from my standpoint,

I did tourism in Afghanistan with Marines. I'd seen guys, unfortunately, go home with missing limbs and all the things that kind of go along with that stuff.

So I don't mean to belittle this. But when I was, Kimberly was talking to somebody one time,

I can count the time away from my family for the career that I had in the Navy in years. I mean, that's just how much time

I've spent away from them. And Kimberly came to the point where she was trying to explain to people how she felt about when

I wasn't there. And God sustained us through it, not only sustained it, but grew us through it. And all that kind of, we saw a lot of good things come from it, but it was no fun.

Nobody liked it. I hated leaving my family. They hated when I left. It was just part of the job. But Kimberly had gotten to the point where she was telling people it was almost like losing a limb, that not having me here kind of felt like that's what she would think.

Like, again, no disrespect to the people who have actually lost limbs. But the point is this idea that we are growing together.

Let me tell you, if I could, give you an example of what that looked like to show you how innocuous this can look, how simple this can be.

We're not talking about making these big plans. You mentioned earlier about the guy going on vacation by himself.

And I'm not talking about the antithesis of that. But it was something that Kimberly and I sort of discovered a little bit later in life.

We have four kids. Our oldest now has a child of her own. And so I'm a grandpa for the first time, which is a really cool experience.

I highly recommend it. But we grew up with our four kids in the

Navy. They all grew up in the Navy with us. And because we moved around a lot, because we were around people that we really didn't know that well, we were really weird about just handing our – we didn't hire babysitters, for lack of a better word, okay?

We just didn't bring people in to watch our kids while we went out and did things. And so as a result, we missed out on a lot of things.

I would go to Marine Corps Ball. I'd usually go by myself. She'd stay home with the kids. And she would go do something, and I would stay home for the kids.

So we didn't really have things like date nights or anything like that. We were a little creative with that, but we just never really felt comfortable leaving our kids with people that we didn't know who weren't family.

And so I remember when we were in North Carolina right before I retired – this was about three or four years ago – and I got up one

Saturday morning. This is going to sound like a silly story to most people, but it was kind of a big deal for us because it taught me this lesson.

I got up one Saturday morning, and I went to – you know, I went to Kimberly, and I said, you know, why don't we go get some breakfast?

And she said, okay, let me go get the kids up. And I was like, no, no, no. How about just me and you?

And it was like, dare we? You know, I'm thinking like kids like 20, you know. Somebody's going to call the fire department if the house catches on fire.

I think we're okay to go up to Hardee's and get a little breakfast. We went up there and had the time of our life.

We just sat there across from each other, and we just talked about important stuff, about non -important stuff.

And as a result, that became a regular thing for us every Saturday, every

Saturday. And it wasn't because of Hardee's. I'll tell you that much. It had nothing to do with the place. Every Saturday, we ended up going out and getting something.

We were growing, even at that point in our marriage that we had been married for a long time up to that point.

We were growing in a way that we had not grown before because we were being intentional about it.

We took everything else, and we put it to the side, and we focused just on each other. And just like I said, talked about little things, big things, medium things.

It didn't matter. I looked so forward to Saturday mornings just so we could do that and experience that in a way that we never had before.

And let me tell you where it came full circle for me, and it was on my last deployment. I did multiple deployments while I was in the

Navy, but oddly enough, I had never missed a Christmas, which was really weird. It was really weird.

I had spent my entire career in the Navy and been gone a lot, and I'd missed birthdays, anniversaries,

I've missed Thanksgiving, but I had never missed a Christmas until my last deployment. And there are people in the military right now going, 20 years, how is that possible?

Exactly. And I'm one of them. I'm still trying to figure out how that happened. Until my last deployment, it was a non -combat deployment, so that was a good thing.

I went to Sicily. And then when it was announced that we were doing the deployment, I was counting on the calendar because I knew it was going to be a six -month deployment, and I thought, crud,

I'm going to miss Christmas. And so that was the only one. The last one, the very last deployment I did, we were going to miss

Christmas. And the kids were bummed about it, and I was bummed about it. Everybody was bummed about it. But I will tell you,

Andrew, Christmas is one day. It was one day, and I did want to be home for that day.

But I'll tell you, for that six months, do you want to take a guess which day of the week was the absolute hardest day of the week for me?

The entire six months that I was away from home, it was Saturday mornings. I missed that.

I would have given up the next three Christmases to have gotten three of those days during that six months because there was a growing there.

This is not a how -to book. So I can't tell couples, this is how you grow. I can't tell you, do this endeavor, and that's how you're going to grow.

What I do tell people in the book is find that thing or those things where it's just you two so that you can talk about the big things, you can talk about the small things, and you can talk about the medium things, and you can grow during that time period.

It is, we still do it to this day. Now that I'm semi -retired, we do it actually a little more often.

There are times where I can go to lunch now or do some other things. And I love every single second of it.

And it took me a long time to grasp onto that. Yeah, so let's get to the third.

The fourth. Yeah, and that one is even more esoteric.

What does that exactly look like to become one? I wish I could tell you. I don't know what that looks like.

I know how it's defined in Scripture, that idea of no longer being two individual people, but becoming one.

That is the goal that we're looking for. That is the essence of what it is.

I don't know what I would do without my wife. I don't know what

I would do if I were not married to her. Now, that doesn't mean I've given up completely my individuality.

I haven't placed all of that pressure on her, because I can tell you what it's not. It's not her meeting my every need all the time, every time

I want it. That is not what the idea of becoming one is, because she's never going to do that, just like I'm never going to do that for her.

We are not designed so that our spouse will complete us. We're designed that God can complete us, but she complements me in a way that no other human being on the planet, including my kids, can do.

It's not bad or wrong. It's just different. There's no way in the world there's another human being out there like Kimberly for me, and that's that idea and understanding that we are one.

Especially as we go closer to God, as long as our relationship with God individually continues to get stronger, we can't help but to be drawn closer together.

So again, the last two, growth and becoming one, this idea of bonding and becoming one, they're a little more difficult to look at and point and say, here's

A, B, and C, and D, and that's how you know you're one. Here's A, B, C, and D, do these, and this is how you're growing. I give some outlines in the book on what that looks like and the processes of how you get there.

But it's kind of like a thing where it's kind of hard to define, but you know it when you see it. That is very much the case here with this one.

Yeah, and I mean, this is the thing is that we're just touching the surface of this book.

Absolutely. One of the things that I said was that I found this book to be extremely practical, very accessible, lots and lots of good foundations to give the right presuppositions that you need for marriage.

That's the biggest thing that I mean, and you know this because my daughter just got married, and I asked you if I can get a copy for her to make sure that my kids get these principles, the presuppositions that you lay out in your book,

I think are what makes it so invaluable. If people have those right presuppositions about marriage, and having it written in such a practical, accessible way, then it becomes something that I think every marriage will benefit from.

I don't care what stage they are in their marriage. There are some people that think there's no way my marriage could be repaired at this point.

Yes, it can. Yes, it can. Absolutely, it can. It's a change of thinking and you may not want to do that, but that's the reality.

You need to change your thinking to do that and a lot of people don't want to do that.

So, after this break, I want to get to talking briefly about the seminars you have and what's going on over at Growth Project Radio.

In this is love, not that we loved God, but he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins.

1 John 4 .10 The word propitiation, as used in this verse, is one of my personal favorite words in all of the

Bible. John Piper, in his book, 50 Reasons Why Christ Came to Die, defines propitiation as, quote, the removal of God's wrath by providing a substitute.

The substitute is provided by God himself. The substitute, Jesus Christ, does not just cancel the wrath.

He absorbs it and diverts it from us to himself. God's wrath is just and it was spent, not withdrawn, end quote.

This very explanation of propitiation is what God used to open my eyes and heart to the gospel.

Do you know Jesus as your propitiation? This has been another Growing Moment with Robert Houghton.

The good news is, scribing for eternity would love to come to your church to spend two days with your folks, teaching them biblical hermeneutics.

That's right, the art and science of interpreting scripture. The bad news is, somebody attending might be really upset to discover

Jeremiah 29 11 should not be their life verse. To learn more, go to scribingforeternity .org

to host a Bible interpretation made easy seminar in your area. All right, so,

Dr. Burrus, let's talk about these marriage seminars that you do, because that son that really came out from your time in the

Navy and then son you're doing at the church down there. So, let's talk about those. What are you doing with it?

When's the next one? We are working on that now. We had our first one late last year.

If any of your folks want to go to www .growthproject .org, there's some information there under the marriage tab.

That's where we're going to put the information for when we have the next one. But one of the interesting things that we've done there, we actually had some folks who went on camera and did some testimonials about what they thought about the marriage retreat or seminar, whatever terminology people want to use.

Either one's fine with me. And many of these couples, they had been married for a very long time.

One of the things that I was hoping to do when it was over with was that to hear the phrase that I wanted to hear more than anything else was, this isn't what

I thought it was going to be. And that's sometimes not a good thing. And in this particular case, it was. It is a little different, probably.

I think it is a little different than the folks who went to it and said the same thing. You know, I've been to the ones that went to some of these other ones.

And that's not to say the other ones aren't good. They're great. But I just didn't want to do the same thing that other people were doing.

And so we're looking at it more from a foundational standpoint. I introduce personality and how personality plays a role in that.

We don't just do the marriage. The marriage period is actually just one small part of the overall seminar. It's actually the last part on Saturday.

But everything else, we look at it from a biblical standpoint, the biblical basis for conflict in marriage, just a whole number of things.

There's actually a little thing on the webpage there that will show you kind of what we cover, some of the topics and things that we cover.

We are working on setting up the next one. Actually, I'd like to do two this year, if I could.

We are also amenable to taking it on the road. If anybody would be interested in having us come to their area, to their church and put it on, we are certainly amenable to doing something like that.

I really would like to see where we're doing these probably at least four to five times a year. And it covers just about anything you could possibly imagine having to do with marriage, including the marriage pyramid.

We end up on Sunday morning talking about forgiveness and what that, again, we have even a term like forgiveness, which we should have, as believers should have the market cornered on.

We still, when it comes to forgiving other people, have a tendency to think how the world looks at forgiveness as opposed to what

God's word has to say. But it's really a cool weekend and people love it. I knew that when

I got finished with the Navy and I'd done that last year and a half doing nothing but marriage retreats,

I knew I wanted to integrate that into what I was going to do after I got out of the Navy and have been able to do that and want to do more of it.

So we're excited about it and hopefully we'll have one planned here pretty soon. All right.

And then some other stuff, if you've been hearing in the commercials, as I sometimes played, it's probably the first episode where I played both on justification and the one on propitiation, both from Robert Hoden.

He is your co -host over there at the Growth Project Radio. So what's happening with that?

First of all, folks, if you don't subscribe to the podcast, for Growth Project Radio, you should.

I jokingly said they actually have two. They have the longer one and then there's one. It's called, and help me with this, the name of it is 5

Minutes. Roderick 5 Minutes of Truth. Roderick 5 Minutes of Truth. Roderick Yeah, a more accurate title would be

Approximately 5 Minutes. Roderick That's right. I always joke. I always tweet that out or put it on Facebook.

I go, the best eight minutes of 5 Minutes of Truth. Roderick That's exactly right. It usually goes a few minutes beyond 5

Minutes. Roderick I have my report daily and it is always exactly two minutes long,

Monday through Friday. Roderick Oh, man. I wish I had your discipline. I can't do that. Roderick I mean, if I say it's gonna be two minutes,

I want it to be two minutes, but both of those podcasts are available. So check both of them out.

What's going on over at the Growth Project Radio? Roderick Oh, it's really cool. We're having a lot of fun over there. Growth Project Radio is a part of growthproject .org.

It's one of the ways our whole goal when Robert and I first began talking about this a little over a year ago.

I can't believe it's been just a year. It seems like it's just flown by, but a lot of things have happened.

We went from it just being kind of a question and answer video thing for a little Facebook group that we started and then it kind of exploded out from there.

And so we do a podcast that and we will record it. We actually broadcast it live right now.

We're probably going to put an end to that pretty soon and then transfer it into a podcast, but we release that every

Tuesday. And if people are interested in looking live when we do it, we do it from eight o 'clock to nine o 'clock on Facebook Live.

And we cover the whole goal in Growth Project, hence the reason for the name, is that we have a desperate lack of understanding of God's Word among evangelicals of all things.

If there's any group of people that that should not be a problem with, it should be us, but unfortunately it hasn't worked out that way.

And one of my favorite phrases to use from a theological standpoint that we are, for the most part, a mile wide and an inch deep theologically, we mine the

Bible for quotes, but we really don't seek out the depth of its truths. And so Robert and I, we prayed about this.

We talked about it. What can we do virtually? What can we do leveraging technology we have at our fingertips now to try to help as many people grow as possible?

Hence the name of the organization. Almost everything that we do is poured through the filter is how is this going to grow a believer?

How is this going? And I'm not talking about people knowing more about God. Anybody can learn about God. How do we help people know him better?

And so Growth Project Radio is just one part of that. We are right now doing an introduction to the entire

New Testament. We're just, we're hitting the books and we're hitting some highlights from those books. Not in any real depth that I would like to, obviously, because it would take forever.

But we do that. So we'll pick specific books of the Bible. We'll go through that. Sometimes we'll pick topics and go through that for a few weeks.

So it always, it's kind of changed. There is no one thing that we do except trying to get people to grow in him.

That is the first reason we do the marriage retreats and seminars is so that people will grow in him.

So everything is kind of, is kind of poured through that filter. I'm really excited about, we're starting this, another aspect of Growth Project.

And hopefully in the fall is when we're looking for it. We wanted to do it last fall. I had no idea how much involved this was going to be, or I wouldn't have written a check.

My body couldn't cash. Um, last, last year, uh, but by this fall, uh, to actually have some discipleship classes, uh, available, uh, for folks about specific topics, things like that, that we want to have, we're going to record them and have them available, uh, in a, in a, in almost a classroom like, uh, format, uh, complete with, with all the things that you would normally have.

I, I am so tired of, of people who should know better, uh, in positions of leadership and positions of teaching and preaching, dumbing down this stuff.

We've got to stop doing this. Uh, and, uh, you know, the Old Testament says that my people perish for lack of knowledge and ever since my people perish because they have too much knowledge.

So we want to make sure that we're getting as much of that information out there as possible while always making it accessible.

That's the word you hear with us over and over and over again. I've actually heard people, I've actually heard pastors stand up in the pulpit and say, well, you know,

I'm no theologian. I'm thinking what? Yeah, you are. So has every single believer on the planet. If you're a believer, you're a theologian.

The only question is whether you're an effective one or not. And so we have to make sure we understand these things.

Uh, and so we're doing, we're doing whatever small part we can to make that happen. So we've got some stuff on the horizon there.

Uh, another, actually I'm working on a devotional now, kind of a, um, uh, what's the, it's kind of a hybrid, uh, devotional

Bible study based on the five minutes of truth, uh, topics that I've brought up. And hopefully we'll have that published by the end of March at the latest.

So we've got a lot of cool stuff going on. Yeah. You know, growth project radio encouraged me to do some, I've been wanting to do for a while, which is you're doing kind of a survey through the new

Testament. I do always laugh when you guys say you're going to do three books. Yeah, I know. You're not, yeah, that doesn't always work out.

I mean, just for the record, just for the record, I mean, I am going through, I started from the old Testament and I'm going through daily.

So I'm going through that survey just two minutes every day with a book. I still think

I will be done with the entire Bible before you finish the new Testament. Yeah. Yeah. That's probably true. Yeah.

You know, we, we have a tendency to bite off just a little more than we can chew. And, uh, I know in one particular night we were supposed to do three and we got one done.

So it was, uh, yeah, then we, then we just completely ditched the three and now we're trying to keep it at two.

And that's a, that's a little more manageable. Well, granted, I mean, you are, uh, getting into way more depth than I get into in two minutes, but I am doing them five days a week.

So I am knocking them off kind of quicker, but, uh, but it is, it is good to have people have an understanding of the books of the

Bible. And just so you know, here's the context of it, because this is not something that we should be reading the way many people unfortunately read is the way they do with a daily bread.

I'll grab a verse here for today, figure something of what it means to me and feel better about my day.

No, we should be reading it in context. And to do that, we should have an understanding of what the book is about. That's exactly right.

And I think that's why what you're doing, what you're doing is so good. I mean, it's, it's, it's laying out that foundation in the

New Testament. Yeah, we, we have a, we have a, uh, you know, we, we do, we do some basics, um, we do themes and then we pick out a few selected verses or events in that book that that's unique, uh, to that particular book.

And that, that's sort of the format that we follow for each one. And so it gives enough information that I think there are a lot of people who will listen to it, who've even, who are believers and maybe have been believers for a while who will say, oh,

I didn't, I didn't know that was in there. I didn't know it talked about that. Or I didn't, I didn't know that about the, about the circumstances under which it was written or whatever the case may be.

And so I'm hoping it's helpful. Um, I wish, I wish we had the time to go into the depth that, that I would like to, but that's what the classes are in the fall for.

We're going to be more, uh, we're going to be more intentional about that and ended up with a lot more depth as far as that's concerned.

All right. Well, folks go out, I will have a link to purchase the book, The Marriage Pyramid in the show notes, and I will give you,

I'll put some links in for growth project radio. I encourage you to get the book. Even if you're not married, this is an excellent book to get before marriage.

So you enter into marriage on good footings. You want to have that foundation and that mindset right ahead of time.

It will actually help you more if you're not married to get a copy of this book and go through it.

So that is something I'd encourage you to do. And I'd say to this as well, if you are married and you say,

I just, it's over, it's done, it's too late. No, it's not. That can easily be changed.

It's a mindset that you have to have. This book gives that. So I would encourage you to pick up a copy of The Marriage Pyramid and also subscribe to Growth Project Radio and Five Minutes of Truth.

So you can get the different teachings that are going on over there with Growth Project Radio. And Andrew, we are,

I'm going to send you three copies of the book and you dole them out however you see fit, but they will be on their way.

How we're going to do that, that's a good segue. So the way we're going to do that's the same way we've been doing with the other books that were given away.

If you share this episode with hashtag wrap report, that's wrap with two

Ps, R -A -P -P report. If you share this episode, whether it be

Twitter, on Facebook, whatever social media you want, we're going to search through those.

We will choose three winners since there'll be three books and you will get those if you are the winner.

So the more often you share it, by the way, the more chances you have to enter.

So how badly do you want the book for free? And then if you get it for free, my encouragement is for you to go and buy a case of them to give away.

You know, everyone loves gifts, just saying. That sounds like a great idea.

I think it is. So, you know, hey folks, for your church, you can buy a case for your church, talk to whoever, your treasurer, whoever, and say, maybe we make this as a

Christmas gift for the church. And you know, people like to do Christmas in June. Absolutely.

Sure. Why not? Yeah. Well, Danny, it's always great talking with you. Great having you on.

I appreciate it. Any last words you want to share with folks? The honor's all mine, Andrew. I appreciate it.

I have gotten to, in dealing with so many people who are struggling so much at this and looking at how precious marriage is,

I have come to actually not just love being married, of course, but now God has developed such a love for marriage that I don't think

I ever really had before. I knew I had love for my marriage, but just the idea of loving marriage and wanting it so desperately for people to look at it the way we were intended to look at it and in whatever way we can do that.

And to echo what you said before, I have seen the most dire circumstances under which people have gone in their marriages and seen them not only survive, but actually survive and thrive.

It's not over. It's not. It can be helped. I really believe that with every fiber of my being.

All right. So, folks, check these resources out. You'll see them in the show notes until next week.

We didn't have time to do a spiritual transition game. I was going to be curious to see what Danny would give me on that, but we'll have to see next time when we get him on to find that out.

Absolutely. So, folks, I hope that this encourages you in your marriage or future marriage or even in your struggles in marriage that may give you some things to think about.

Until next week, remember to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God. This podcast is part of the

Striving for Eternity ministry. For more content or to request a speaker or seminar to your church go to strivingforeternity .org