Master Plan for Marriage

By Archie Bost

Master Plan for Marriage is the product of three decades of counseling with thousands of couples who are struggling. Everyone goes into marriage with great intention, but few really know how to be married well. This book shows couples that their way does not work, and it never has worked for them. In Master Plan for Marriage, you will see that only the Master's (Lord's) plan truly works. God's way to be married always works while our way never works. Master Plan for Marriage also shows the four-fold purpose that God has for marriage, to provide companionship, for procreation, to make us holy and to reveal the mystery of how Christ loves his church, therefore being a tool to fulfill the great commission.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781644712429

Book preview

Introduction

I have been providing biblical counseling for individuals and marriages for over three decades. During this time, many of my clients have asked me if I have the material I teach about marriage available in book form. My answer has always been no, I’m not a writer. I have always known that I have the gift of teaching, but writing was a totally different thing.

About twenty years ago, I had a female client that came to see me for individual and marriage counseling and during each session, she took copious notes. She did not seem to be changing, but she always left with hope. About three years after I last saw her, I got a call from a missionary that lived in Africa, thanking me for lessons on marriage that it had changed her marriage and her life. I told her that I have not written anything on marriage, and I asked her where she received my teaching. She said that a lady in Denmark had given it to her, saying that it had changed her life. The lady in Denmark had received it from a lady in Pennsylvania who also said that it changed her life, and the lady in Pennsylvania received it from my client. When counseling from the Word of God, it is 100 percent transferrable.

Requests continued to come, and I continued to tell people that I am not a writer. About eighteen years ago, I knew the Lord had impressed on me to write, and I even shared that with my office staff while at an AACC World Conference in Nashville. However, I continued to make excuses as to why I had not written.

On Wednesday, September 6, 2017, I started having chest pains while in a counseling session. I finished the day and even worked all day Thursday still having chest pains. Thursday evening, the pain was bad but because my symptoms were atypical, I didn’t think that I was having a heart attack. Finally just a little before midnight, I asked my bride, Kay, to take me to the hospital. They determined that I was having a heart attack, and a heart catheterization was done, putting one stent in the widow maker artery. My doctor said it was 100 percent blocked, and it was a miracle that I was still alive. I was released from the hospital on Sunday, September 10, about midday to go home.

After Kay took me home, she went to the pharmacy to get my new meds. While she was gone, I asked the Lord to please reveal to me what he was teaching me and what he wanted of me. His answer was so clear that I was to write this book on marriage, that no excuse I had was good enough. I have never been so sure of anything as I am that I must write. As you read, you might also say that I am not a writer, but I have to get this message out to the public. So I started getting my outline together.

I was able to get a lot of my writing done over the next several months. In early March, six months after the heart attack, I had most of this written when my new laptop computer crashed with my manuscript on it. I was not too worried because had been backing it up to the Cloud. As I looked for my manuscript on the Cloud, I discovered that it was not there. I had lost six months work. Dell could not get my computer to do anything via phone, so I took the laptop to Intrex Computer in Raleigh, and they found that somehow BitLocker Incryption had been activated in addition to the hard drive having over 2,000 bad sectors. My bride Kay found the BitLocker key, and the technician was able to recover this manuscript.

I am totally convinced that the enemy did not want this manuscript to become a book to help the reader grow a better marriage. Knowing the obstacles that were raised up to stop this from getting published, I believe that the Lord will work through this to help marriages become more of what he wants them to be. I pray that each reader will be able to take at least one point to heart, and their marriage will be better.

Chapter 1

The Problem in Marriage

Growing up, I saw my dad and mom hug each other daily. Dad would look down into Mom’s eyes as she looked up at him, and Dad would say, I sure love you.

Mom would smile with a sparkle in her eyes and say, I love you too. As I left home at age eighteen, seeing Mom and Dad hug, kiss, and affirm their love was a daily thing, and it gave me hope for my future marriage. At one point when I was maybe eight years old, I was helping my maternal grandmother wash dinner dishes. As we finished, we started walking down a short hallway back to the den where Mom and Dad were standing, hugging each other. Grandma stopped me with her left arm around my shoulder; she held me close and said, Archie, now I want you to look at that. For in all my born days, I have never seen a man love a woman like your dad loves your mom. Grandma had ten children that lived to adulthood, and mom was her youngest. Grandma was so pleased to see how much Dad loved her baby.

During my childhood years, I never saw my parents argue. I just figured that they argued in private. Eight years ago when Mom was on her deathbed at age seventy-seven, I turned to my dad and said, Dad, I never saw you and Mom argue. Did you argue in private?

Dad leaned back in his chair and said, Well, I suppose you never did see us argue because, well, back in ’49, about the time you were born, we had been arguing a lot, and neither of us liked it and how it made us feel. So one night, I suggested that we talk about anything and everything, express our opinion but not force our opinion on the other person and give each other time to make a decision. Dad went on a little more, telling me about that evening. Then he looked at me and said, By golly, I think it worked. We did not argue much. It was at that point, I told Dad what Grandma said about his love for Mom over sixty years ago. Dad said, She said that? I told him yes, and he said, Well, she was right. I sure do love your Mom. Mom died a few days later.

I tell you this because I was raised in a home that honored marriage and demonstrated love far more than most families. Therefore in 1973 when Kay and I got married, I fully expected to have that kind of experience. It didn’t take long for me to see that our marriage was different. I had no clue as to how to experience what I saw growing up. Kay and I were both committed to be married till death, but we didn’t know how to be married.

Now after more than thirty years doing marriage counseling and seeing more than 9,000 people in my office, I am more convinced than ever that people get married and have no idea as to how to be married well. Part of the trouble is that they don’t know that they don’t know how to be married. Therefore these people press forward as if they know what they are doing. Before long, they start to hit roadblocks or at least detours that cause them to start questioning what they have done. As I have worked with couples who are struggling so hard to make the marriage work, I started looking deeper into why marriage is so hard.

When we ask professionals like sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, new agers, or just average people, they all seem to have different answers about how to make marriage work. For many, the answer is not making it work but getting out and starting over. The divorce rate in America is staggering, and many are saying that we must do something about that. The bottom line is that we don’t know how to be married as God intended.

I would like to take you back to the beginning, back to the Garden of Eden. Dr. Buddy Hinze, my ministry mentor, says that if we get the first four words in Scripture wrong, we will miss out on life as it is meant to be. The first four words, In the beginning, God… Buddy pointed out that everything started with God, and everything proceeds from God. God created everything in this universe with the last of that initial creation was man and woman.

He created man and woman and placed them in the garden. He brought them together as husband and wife, so he created marriage and gave it to us as a gift. They were without sin, living in harmony, focused on God and how he told them to live. They walked with God there in the garden, in the cool of the evening, and they talked with God face to face daily. Their harmony was with God first and with each other second. They were working the garden, and Adam was given dominion over the entire earth and was to care for it. All was great. Marriage was perfect.

They had fellowship with each other and God and their relationship was great. They had complete freedom except eating of one tree in the garden of which they were told not to eat. They were told that they could eat from all the other trees. They were totally secure, accepted, and there was a strong sense of love and peace. There was no shame, guilt, feeling of inadequacy or inferiority. They had no worry, doubt, or fear. Their purpose was set and sealed.

Then, you know the story; Satan shows up in the form of a serpent referred to in Revelation as the dragon. He asked Eve a question which caused her start to question all that she had been taught. Did God tell you that you could not eat from any tree in the garden? She told him that they were not to eat from the tree in the middle of the garden—the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—because if they did, they would surely die. Satan, seeing that she spoke correctly, changed his message and said, Surely you will not die. God knows that if you eat of this tree, you will be like him and have the knowledge of good and evil. Satan, through his questions, suggested that God was holding out on her and that she was not totally free. The fruit on that tree looked good, so she took it and ate it. She turned and gave it to Adam to eat who obviously was being far too passive.

Suddenly they knew they were naked and were ashamed. They were afraid for the first time in their lives. They felt insecurity, worry, doubt, and fear. They had complete trust in God but now that was gone. They lost their purity, and they covered themselves with fig leaves. There was confusion and, I am sure, a sense of panic. Their harmony with God and with each other was gone. The long list of losses they experienced went on and on. Too often, we try to redeem those losses through our spouse, which sets them up for failure.

God came through the garden that evening as he had done daily, this time calling for Adam because he was hiding. Adam told God that he was behind the bushes. When God asked him why he was hiding, he said because they were naked God asked them who told them that they were naked, and the blame game started with Eve blaming the serpent while Adam blamed Eve and ultimately, he blamed God by saying, The woman that you gave me gave it to me. He was suggesting that the woman that God made was flawed and it was all on her, not him. Since that time, we have all been blaming others for our sin. Adam and Eve did not trust God because of a lie they were believing. The question God asked Adam is a very relevant question for us today. Who are we listening to? Who told you?

While in the garden, Adam and Eve had clear purpose with value and significance. That was now gone. They struggled with trust, purity, openness, and being able to give and receive love. They struggled with rejection, lack of peace, guilt, shame, inadequacy, and feelings of inferiority. They totally lost the harmony that they had with each other and with God. All these losses caused them to focus on their needs, both real and perceived. They now had to work to meet their own needs which they were not prepared to do. They started to self-medicate with anything that gave them some relief.

We were all born in Adam and therefore, are born with a sinful nature. As we live life, we start to build our belief systems about God, our self, others, and the world that we live in. The problem is that we build that belief system with data that are true and data that are false. We see ourselves as the core or center of our life, not God. We don’t know the difference at first so as much as our belief system is wrong, our life will be wrong.

As a child is born into this world, that child sees life revolving around him or her. No one needs to teach a child to be selfish. No one must teach a child to insist on its own way. Part of the parents’ responsibility is to teach the child to not be selfish. However, that’s an issue that will follow us all of our life, and that selfishness is the biggest enemy to marriage. As we enter adulthood, we take that selfish lifestyle into marriage. Our vow in marriage might as well be I take thee for me. We look at marriage as a relationship to complete us and when it doesn’t, we are offended and tend to be angry. We want marriage to meet those needs that were lost in the garden, but marriage was never intended to do that.

As we look at the marriages around us, we see other marriages that have flaws in them and often end in divorce. The high divorce rate is so high that many are choosing to live together rather than enter into a marriage relationship. Most people have never sat in a class, teaching them what marriage is to look like. In fact, as I talk with people in my office, I see that most people have never thought deeply about how to be married. Men just know that it is a relationship that they want to have with a woman and that is about it for most men. Women tend to think more detailed about marriage and have very real expectations about marriage.

Think about the marriage license as compared to other licensure. If you want a license as a medical doctor, you are required to go to school through four years of undergraduate and four years of medical school where one reads many books, writes many papers, and takes tests until you really don’t want to take another test. Then you must set for a state board exam to be licensed in each state. Every license that you have requires study, reading, writing, testing to show proficiency in the field of licensure. Even a driver’s license requires one to have a mastery of the knowledge of driving and the laws of the state as well as taking a driving test with an examiner. However, a marriage license requires none of that. Just pay a fee, and you get it. No requirement that you know how to be married.

I believe that one major issue we have as we enter marriage for the first time or whether we have been