Beyond Compatibility: The Pathway to Enduring Love

By Terry Jackson

Beyond Compatibility is a primer for engaged and married couples on the development of genuine love that will last a lifetime. It differs from many marriage books in that it moves past mere compatibility in pursuit of the biblical dynamics of enduring love and three-dimensional intimacy capable of withstanding the changes that life deals us all. Compatibilities, preferences, and opinions change with your maturity and the seasons of your life and marriage, but genuine love never fails. Beyond compatibility shows you how to build a self-perpetuating love that will grow in intimacy and intensity for as long as you both shall live!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9781645593706

Book preview

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Beyond Compatibility

The Pathway to Enduring Love

Terry Jackson

ISBN 978-1-64559-369-0 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64559-370-6 (Digital)

Copyright © 2020 Terry Jackson

All rights reserved

First Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Covenant Books, Inc.

11661 Hwy 707

Murrells Inlet, SC 29576

www.covenantbooks.com

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgment

Introduction

Christian Marriage: Defining the Difference

One Day in Paradise

Then Came the Fall

Here’s Your Bottom Line

The Truth about Love

An Honest Look at Today

Putting It All Together

Here’s Your Bottom Line

Building a Rock-Solid Foundation

The Three Basic Pillars of Biblical Marriage20

The Non-Christian Marriage

The Christian Marriage

How Priorities Create Unity

Here’s Your Bottom Line

The Biblical Basis for Great Communication

Discerning Deep Love Needs

The Downward Plunge

Reversing the Downward Cycle

Loving Your Wife

Respecting Your Husband

Here’s Your Take Home

Resolving Conflict at Its Source

The Danger of Unresolved Anger in Your Marriage

The Impact of Unresolved Anger

Defining Anger

Discerning a Spirit of Anger

Misconceptions about Anger

Characteristics of an Angry Person

Rationalizing Unresolved Anger

Relating the Past to the Present

Discovering the Root Causes of Anger

When Past Events Produce Present Anger

Forgiveness: Breaking the Bondage of Bitterness

Prerequisites to Forgiveness

The Good News

Bringing Forgiveness into Focus

Common Myths about Forgiveness

The Essential Elements of Successful Forgiveness

The Fundamentals of Forgiveness

Developing Intimacy in Your Marriage

Developing Spiritual Intimacy and Power in Your Marriage Part 1: Servant 

Leadership

Part 2: Willing Submission

The Art and Science of Romantic Love

Basic Elements of Romance

Planning Romance in Your Marriage

Here’s Your Bottom Line

Sacred Sex: Taking It to the Next Level

Three-Dimensional Intimacy in Marriage

The Sweet Spot of Marital Intimacy

A Biblical View of Sex

Looking Back

God’s Intended Purpose for Sex

The Blessing of Drinking Water from Your Own Cistern

The Fly in the Ointment

Blessing Your Wife

Ten Ways a Husband Can Love and Pursue His Wife

Fringe Benefits and Blessings

The Self-Perpetuating Cycles of Knowledge and Oneness

A Final Note

For Men Only: Learning to Really Understand and Love Your Wife

Loving Her like Christ Loves His Church

A Sacrificial Love

A Cleansing Love

A Caring Love

Becoming a One-Woman Man

A One-Woman Man Manages the Frailty of His Flesh

A One-Woman Man Ministers to His Marriage

Meeting the Essential Love Needs of Your Wife

For Women Only: Learning to Really Understand and Love Your Husband

How to Really Understand Your Husband

He’s a Man, Not a Woman

He Craves Your Respect

He Wants and Needs Sex, but That Doesn’t Make Him a Sex Feign

Meeting the Essential Love Needs of Your Husband

Appendix

Ten Undeniable Biological Differences in Men and Women

Seven Undeniable Psychological Differences in Men and Women

Who We Are

Notes

About the Author

To my dad, who taught me how to be a man of both steel and velvet.

Preface

Several years into my marriage, I found out that I had no clue how to love my wife. I thought I did. In fact, I was under the impression that I was doing very well. Then, I found it, a page that had fallen out of her journal. I didn’t read it to be nosy. I’d found a piece of paper in a desk we were cleaning and simply looked at it before throwing it away. What it said was as cold as it was desperate with a blade that cut like an axe.

He just tolerates my presence. I’m no good to the ministry. I don’t know how much longer he’s going to let me stay, it said. Heart palpitations and panic ran through my body. Surely, this wasn’t Kaye—not my wife. But it was. The handwriting was unmistakable. I don’t know if it was the shock of what was happening or the fact that this was totally unknown to me that ripped me first, but both realities rocked my world.

I was deeply in love with my wife, yet something had been lost in the translation of that love into words, attitudes, and actions to convey that love to her. Apparently, we were not speaking the same language. By the grace of God, I had enough sense to pick up the phone and call for help. These events then became the beginning of a lifelong journey to the true meaning of genuine love and how it works and flourishes.

Our marriage began like most; we had fallen deeply in love and could not imagine how things could ever be any different. On several occasions, we had been quite offended by people who implied that one day, it probably would. Kaye had never pondered leaving me, but she had obviously concluded that what we had would be all she could expect. Thinking I felt the same, she had existed for some time in fear of being told to leave. It still breaks my heart to think of what it must have been like for her.

With the problem now revealed, you’d think the road to recovery would be apparent. But no—we then faced the problem every couple does at some point in their relationship. Like so many others, we had fallen in love. In other words, we did little to bring about the emotions that had been so intense in the beginning. Consequently, now that things were flatlining, we had no idea what to do to get them back. Some said, Do the things you did in the beginning. And sometimes, that’s helpful for a while. But we had never really stopped doing those things. And anyway, if you just do what you did the first time, doesn’t that mean you’ll just arrive back in the same place at some point in the future? Albert Einstein is credited with saying that the insanity of man is doing the same thing today that you did yesterday and expecting a different result.

We since have learned that in our initial passion for each other, we had captured only one of several dynamics of genuine love. There was so much more for us to learn and so much more for us to experience. There was baggage to be unloaded, issues to be resolved, and wounds to be healed. Ahead of us was freedom to be discovered, liberty to be gained, and intimacy to be experienced that we didn’t even know existed.

Scripture tells us that God is love.¹ Therefore, becoming a skilled lover will always involve capturing a larger vision of God and who He is. Your ability to love is directly proportional to your experience with God and your conformity to the image of Jesus Christ. This is great news because you’ll never learn all there is to know about God, so you’ll never lack for something new to learn about love and loving people, especially your spouse. Conflict in marriage—whether confrontational or just passive suffering—is God, by His grace, drawing us, even driving us, back to Himself and His Word for additional wisdom, understanding, and knowledge.

This book is about the things I wished I had known the first day of our life together. It’s not about compatibility. Love and marriage is not about compatibility. In fact, Chuck and Barb Snyder have labeled incompatibility as one of the vital keys to having a harmonious marriage relationship.² Compatibility on its best day is temporal. It comes, and it goes. Love is forever, for it takes incompatibility and makes it complimentary taking two people with different backgrounds, different aptitudes, interests, talents, and abilities and uniting them into a divinely synchronous union that functions on a plane never possible as individuals.

The greatest love we’ve ever known has come to us through Jesus Christ as He put aside His heavenly garments and adorned Himself with human flesh. He did that to die for you and me and redeem us from a life of sin and hopelessness. Tell me, in what way were we compatible with Him prior to His choosing to love us as He did? Was it not His pure love that reached beyond our incompatibility with all its faults and flaws and has bound us together for eternity? Is it not that very love that binds us to Him yet today rather than some foolish and futile system of religious compatibility?

This is a book about love—the love God has shown us and the love that has the power to bind your marriage in deep intimacy, spirit, soul, and body for a lifetime. It’s just an introduction, but I pray it will challenge you and inspire you to pursue God and your mate for the rest of your life.

Acknowledgment

I must gratefully acknowledge the undying love of my wife, Kaye, whose life has been a constant challenge to pursue God and put forth nothing short of my best effort. Her pure heart and faith unfeigned has been an inspiration that few men will ever know or experience. She has loved me faithfully, believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself, nursed me when I was sick or wounded, refused to allow me to sink in the sea of my failures, and walked beside me as we sought and found these biblical truths and the genuine love that has engulfed us for over forty years.

Introduction

Genuine love is essential to all of life. It enables us to function at our highest levels and reach our full potential in life while providing us with feelings of security and well-being. However, apart from God who is love, a truly intimate marriage is just not possible.

Most couples fall in love and get married because they see in the other person the potential to have their needs met. Certainly, that’s not wrong; we all have needs that were designed to be met by our mates in marriage. In fact, what we call falling in love generally happens because certain needs are being met within the relationship. We will learn a lot more about how that works in the section Truth about Love. For now, we just need to know that this is just one aspect, one dynamic of genuine love, and that left to itself it will grow stale, give rise to frustration, and ultimately seed anger and resentment into the relationship.

Love has many dynamics like spokes in a bicycle wheel. Each dynamic has its own purpose and place, and working together, they will produce a lasting relationship. Failing to identify and develop one or more of these varied dynamics forfeits potential for deep intimacy and years of increasing love. This is a study designed to help you discover the basic dynamics of genuine love and begin implementing them into your relationship.

The good news is that God has a plan that still works and can develop a love for a lifetime. Too many Christians believe that just because they are people of faith, attend church, and maybe even have a devotional time together, their marriage will grow and fulfill all of their dreams. Unfortunately, that’s just not true. We live in a fallen world, and all of us are subject to the innate self-serving pull of fallen flesh. In other words, we are broken people living in a broken world. God’s plan for our marriages embraces His ultimate plan for His people—that we might be conformed to image of Jesus Christ, His Son.

Therefore, our journey together as married couples will require us to work diligently to apprehend God, who is love, thereby becoming skilled lovers in our own life and relationships beginning with our mate. This will happen only if we are willing to pursue God for an intimate knowledge of the Savior that will deliver us from our own sinful ways and fleshly habits. For if we are not being delivered daily from our own sin and self, we will never be able to serve another person like Jesus serves us. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.³ He put aside heavenly garments, took on the flesh of man, and though He lived a sinless life on earth consented to die on a cruel Roman cross that we might be delivered from sin and have everlasting life. Can you do that for your prospective mate? Can you set yourself aside, endure adversity, put away your own pain, and serve another person even if there’s no acknowledgment or appreciation? What if I told you that marriage was designed to perfect that very character in you? What if there were times when God was more concerned with your holiness than He was your happiness in your marriage? Read carefully the words of the Apostle Paul written to his favorite church.

Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made himself of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. (Philippians 5:6–8)

A marriage is an agreement with God to become His agents to cooperate with Him to bring each other into the fullness of Christ. This means that when difficult times come, and they will, you are willing to be a minister of grace, encouragement, and patient love as God exposes and deals with the negative character qualities we all have in our lives. It means extending unconditional love to each other in times when one or the other might not be so loveable. It may mean having to minister tough love or enduring love. But it will always mean that there will develop in you both a joyful love that only two spirit-filled believers can know.

You are about to embark on a journey of adventure, adversity, love, and learning. Although the way may not be easy sometimes, the resulting intimacy, maturity, and growth in the Lord can make for a wonderful life together with a rewarded eternity waiting on the other end. May you both have a wonderful journey as your love grows, as you develop a rewarding three-dimensional intimacy with each other, and as you develop an ever-deepening relationship with the Savior.

Through wisdom is a house built; and by understanding it is established: And by knowledge shall the chambers be filled with all precious and pleasant riches (Proverbs 24:3–4).

Chapter 1

Christian Marriage: Defining the Difference

We begin our study of marriage with a biblical look at the difference in a Christian and non-Christian marriage. This first look also examines why so many Christian marriages never reach their full potential and why many fail even though both partners are active in their faith and church attendance. Christian marriage is so much more than just two Christians who are getting married. Believing in Christ, attending church together, studying the Bible together, and even praying together are wonderful things that every Christian couple should do; yet we all know couples who has done these things and still have serious struggles in their relationships. While these things are great and should be a part of any marriage, there is so much more to building an intimate relationship with God and with each other. So we begin our journey to intimacy by defining what a Christian marriage really is and how it differs from a non-Christian marriage.

No one plans to get a divorce on the day they get married. In fact, we would all be offended to hear someone say that we might. But what guarantees that we won’t be among the many that do end their marriages in divorce?

Most of us count on the fact that we are Christians and have Christ in our lives and marriages to be that guarantee. Yet nearly as many Christians as non-Christians are ending their marriages, some in disillusionment and frustration, not only with their mates but also with God. We are Christians—and that is supposed to make a difference.

As I have traveled this country, it has been interesting to ask married couples what they thought the difference in a Christian marriage and a non-Christian marriage was. In other words, I asked them to define for me Christian marriage. The answers are common core and pretty much the same across the board. Some said that a Christian marriage was one where both partners were Christian. Others said that it’s two people who read the Bible together, pray together, and go to church together. Still, others referred to biblical roles in marriage, leadership, headship, and submission. And even though all these answers describe things that a Christian couple will do, there remains many of them who have done these things, at least at some level; yet they are still unable to maintain a loving, growing relationship.

What, then, is Christian marriage, and what really is different about it to the point that it can survive and continue to grow for a lifetime when other marriages cannot? To answer that question, we will explore some very vital biblical truths that will not only define Christian marriage but also give us a foundation upon which to build a love that will last a lifetime.

One Day in Paradise

All was good in the Garden of Eden. Perfect man and perfect woman were in perfect union with each other and with God. In chapter three of Genesis, we are told that they walked with God in the cool of the evening. Adam and Eve were the perfect couple, seeing each other through the eyes of love, naked and not ashamed, while experiencing each other’s spirit, soul, and body under the direct care and nurture of God. It just doesn’t get any better than this!

We were designed as a trichotomy—spirit, soul (mind, will, and emotions), and body. With our spirit, we communicate with God’s Spirit and with each other. When we are of one spirit, we share the same ultimate goals, passions, and desires. This doesn’t mean that we are all just alike in our wants, needs, ideas, or even opinions. But it does mean that we are both converging on one point, in this case God, and we are moving in a single direction with a single hope and passion—to be like Jesus.

Within our soul, we form thoughts with our minds, choose actions with our will, and experience the emotions that surround those thoughts, choices, and actions. The most powerful part of the soul is not the emotions as some would think. It’s the mind, sometimes referred to as the heart. Proverbs says, As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.⁴ Our emotions cannot be commanded, but they can be channeled and directed by the thoughts of the mind and choices of the will.

Our body, we are told, is the temple of the Holy Spirit. It is the housing in which our spirit and soul live and the Holy Spirit resides. Our body can glorify God and edify others, or it can become an instrument of bondage and destruction. The Spirit of God stimulates and controls the members of the body unto righteousness when the soul is in submission to God.⁵ However, when left to itself, the body can become a housing of evil seeking only to fulfill the desires of the flesh.

We all have different aptitudes, abilities, gifts, and capacities at each level—spirit, soul, and body. The intimate marriage is one that is developing intimacy at all three levels on all three planes as both partners are in pursuit of a common destiny—to know God and be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ.

In the Garden, Adam and Eve walked in unity and intimacy with God, and He called them simply Adam.⁶ Adam means mankind. God saw the man and the woman, not as two entities, but as one divinely synchronous union. I think it may go even further than that. Could it be that it is the man and woman together that make up the full image of God referred to in the creation? When God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our