Final Exam Flashcards
What is a Christ-centered marriage?
1: God ordained union of two sinners
2: God ordained union of two sinners who admit their sins
3: || who find forgiveness for their sins in Jesus and seek to extend that forgiveness to each other
4: || who have been made new in Christ and who are making progress in overcoming their sins and in being and doing what God wants them to be and do, both in relationship to him and to each other
Ultimate cause of marriage problems:
Not past mistreatments, present mistreatment, situational pressures, sinful influences, diseases, or the devil.
It’s sin.
How to view as a single:
- 1: View God as saving, sovereign, wise, loving, having your best interest at heart; weeps over sin that leads to singleness; Jesus as sympathetic high priest; best friend and loving covenantal partner
- 2: view yourself as complete in Christ, can learn contentment, capable of achieving and making impact, among a multitude
- 3: view opposite gender as not potential spouses, possible spouses of other men and women, need to be led by God if ever to marry you,
- 4: view other marrieds: rejoice for them, they also have hardships, people you can minister to
Singleness Questions:
- Gen. 2:18=> not a remedy to loneliness, talking about Adam and Eve specifically
- Gift of singleness=> spiritual gift/charisma; or God-given providential view=God guides people to live and serve him as a single or married Christian
- Crisis in 1 Cor. 7:26-31=> a) local problem, 2) return of Christ coming, 3) new age inaugurated.
marriage is not the highest good, as it will not continue into the resurrection
Pre-engagement counseling approach and justification
Premarital TRAINING not COUNSELING
Why premarital training?
1. marriage is important to God, it makes sense to take time
2. positive correlation between premarital training and marital success
3. culture, families, and churches fail to provide proper instruction
4. couples are glad they did it
Christian Marriage Commitment Staircase
Step 1: am i saved and following Jesus
2: is the Bible my sole authority
3: what is meaning, purpose, and roles of marriage? Why desire it?
4: biblically problem solve, seek help, or give up? push spouse to pastoral help?
5: promise vows to God when time comes? Swear fidelity, even when things get hard?
Gen. 2:24 being most important for marriage:
It addresses four generations:
1. Written about Adam and Eve
2. Written to Israel about to enter promised land
3. Jesus cited it in Mt. 19 and MK 10 to emphasize permanence
4. 20+ years later Paul cited in 1 Cor. 6:16 and Eph. 5:31
- Before and after fall marriage
- paradise of Eden, desert of Sinai, ancient Palestine, urban Corinth and Ephesus
Lesson 5 Eve’s role in Gen. 2:18:
Suitable: fit for
Helper: not inferior, helps him accomplish mandate
Implications of marriage as a covenant and God’s purpose in marriage
- marriage established by Cov.
- marriage established by cov. within laws and customs of a culture
- est. by cov. not sexual union (though sex expresses it)
- marriage cov. permanent in life except by death or divorce
- marriage cov. can and should hold marriages together, even when nothing else seems to
- marriage cov. calls married people to cultivate marriage as prim. human. relationship
- mar. cov. means God sovereignly ordained and est. YOUR marriage, even if it was unbib. or unwise to enter
Marital Counseling Perspectives and Guidelines
A: Marital counseling is not wise when there’s serious one sided sins
B: Differences between individual and marriage counseling.
- 1. in goals
- 2. in length of sessions or case
- 3. in format
- 4. in counselee expectations
- 5. in how we assess the problem and progress
Twofold Marital Counseling Goal
C: Twofold Marital Counseling Goal
- 1. both grasp the Gospel, please God
- 2. love each other, oneness in marriage
– all problems stem from one or both failing to follow goal
– when one or both partners come in:
- they probably will have a different theory for the problem
- probably will have a fix my spouse justify me agenda
Marital Counseling Task
- expose wrong thinking
- present bib. hope
- secure active commitment to bib. agenda
- teach them bib agenda and help them follow
Husband and wife roles
2: Understand role issues under broader context of equality and mutuality of marriage cov.
3: It’s easier to perform our roles when they do theirs, but their disobedience can’t distract or hinder our obedience
4: it is not our duty to demand that they carry out their role, or hold them accountable
7: the role commands does not imply that they need to receive the blessings
Husband’s Roles
Love your wife with sacrificial love– love that lays down your life for your wife
Love your wife with sensitive love– love that cherishes her and seeks to meet her desires
Wife’s Roles and Mutual Submission
- Jesus calls you to submit to your husband
- from the heart with a submissive attitude
- whether he is obedient or disobedient to God
- in everything except sinful things
- to please Jesus
*mutual submission to one another:
v1: all submit to one another
v2: proper submission relationships
Conflict Step 1
Step 1: Determine to please God
- implications:
1) Failure by you and/or your spouse to please God is the ultimate cause of all marital conflicts
2) This goal keeps your focus on God, not on the conflict issues or on your spouse.
3) In Christ, this goal is always doable, no matter how your spouse behaves
4) This goal will pace your efforts (e.g., timing, energy, risk)
5) If you both please God, reconciliation is guaranteed and your marriage will grow.
6) Even if your spouse does not please God, you can experience God’s favor and comfort
7) You must continue your pleasing God commitment, even if your spouse does not seem to do so, and even if the marital relationship gets worse.
8) When this goal governs you, your spouse’s sins, bad habits, offenses, failures, etc. become opportunities not obstacles to pleasing God and growing as a Christian.
- 2 Cor. 5:9-10; 2 Cor. 5:14-15
Conflict Step 2
Step 2: Repent of your sins
- Heart sins and behavioral sins
- how to confess: Identify offenses, confess to God, confess to spouse
- James 4:1-3; Matt. 7:3-5
Conflict Step 3
Step 3: Love your spouse
- Eph. 4:1-3; Col. 3:12-14
- issue, position, interest– goal of understanding and fulfilling interests
—here’s the issue, tell me your position, i serve your interest
- Luke 6:27-36 game plan:
- - Love - - - - - - - Mercy
- Do good - bless - pray -
Because we’ve been recipients of good, blessed, cared for
Counseling people married to unbeliever
A. Start with compassion for difficult marriage
B. Consider with your counselee 2 passages that address the situation (1 Cor. 7:12-16; 1 Pet. 3:1-6
C. Give biblical counsel to them
- 1. find highest comfort, joy, and strength in Jesus not spouse
- 2. God sovereignly allowed for this, and He wants to use it to make you like Jesus
- 3. Do all that God calls you to do to minister, and remove any improper stumbling blocks for following Him
D. Caution them against spiritual dangers
- 1. daydreaming about life otherwise
- 2. envying others
- 3. letting good desire for salv. become demand
- 4. anger toward God
Problems come from the heart passages
Proverbs 4:23 -24; Matthew 12:33-37; Matthew 15:1-20
Lesson 10 pt. 2: point 2, 2 guidelines, structured listening assignment
Principle: God listens to us, His people
Guideline #1: listen actively and attentively
Guideline #2: caringly and compassionately
Structured listening assignment:
- person a talks uninterrupted for 5-10 minutes
- person b listens
- person b reflects what they heard
- person a says yes or no,
- if no, person a restates it, until they feel understood
Four qualities of godly speech?
Honest, beneficial, timely, and kind
Practical Guidelines for Marital Growth
- engage in spiritual disciplines together
- concentrate on things you appreciate about them
- understand how your spouse experiences life
- express love in “languages” that speak to them
- share relationship building experiences together
Godly sex in marriage
it’s marital, multi-purposed, ministerial; seeking to know and satisfy spouses desires
Leaving father and mother
Gen 2:24
what it means:
1. not under their authority
2. eliminate bad attitudes and reconcile
3. establish adult to adult relationship
4. being careful to speak positively about spouse to them
5. valuing spouse’s ideas, desires, opinions, feelings, practices over theirs
6. resisting and opposing their words or actions that seek to separate spouses
7. don’t change spouse because of parents
8. not comparing yourself or spouse with parents
9. not relying on them
10. united to spouse
Final counsel:
1. apply to all relationships
2. most in law problems are marital problems
3. second marriages double it
4. no relationship should supersede Jesus
Financial problems
Heart issues:
1. worry, fears
2. greed and sinful desires
3. pride, sinful comparisons
4. putting hope in money or things it buys
5. laziness unwilling to work hard to earn, budget shop around
6. slavery to sinful addictions, including patterns of overspending or impulsive buying
7. control prob. seeking to own or carry out financial duities
relational and comm. problems:
1. Failure to disclose and discuss what money means to you and your spouse
2. Failure to understand financial information.
3. Failure to understand and agree on financial policies and procedures
4. failure to handle differing tolerances for financial risks
5. failure to agree on how much money is enough
In cases of adultery: crisis intervention phase
- Understand how the adultery was discovered and the impact it had.
- Give God’s hope that He can restore their marriage if they’re BOTH willing to repent and follow Christ (and make it stronger)
In cases of adultery: Recommitment phase and path for offender
B. Recommitment phase
- secure commitment from both to please God and respond His way
- Path for Offender:
(1) break the adult. relationship immed.
(2) initial confession of sin to spouse elders and counselor
(3) pursue before God both deep heart repentance and action plan for change
(4) thoroughly confess sin to spouse elders and others, seek forgiveness, and commit to game plan
(5) believe the Gospel, grow, carry out plan
In cases of adultery: Path for offended
Offended:
(1) find security and identity in Christ, not spouse or marriage
(2) adopt bib. view of trials and mistreatment
(3) cultivate attitudinal/heart forgiveness (unconditional)
(4) grant transacted/relational forgiveness if spouse repents (conditional)
(5) realize the process nature of it, hand over “this will never happen again” mentality to God
Counseling after crisis incident
- Seek to meet with both spouses individually (structured separation)
- common issues:
2a. for victim
—safety
—fears
—how might God use this sin in your life
—address own sins that could have contributed
2b. for violent
—lead to confess
—anger and selfishness
—substances?
—learn to love like Christ did
—unrepepentent = church discipline - move toward marriage counseling and restoration
- work with pastors and build support system
His view on divorce and remarriage
Divorce and remarriage for adultery or desertion:
- Divorce and remarriage for the innocent party of a spouse’s adultery/sexual immorality, and in the case of an unbelieving spouse’s desertion
Key Passages:
- Matt. 5:31-32; 19:3-12; 1 Cor. 7:10-16
Conclusions:
1. God prohibits divorce
2. Except for 2 reasons:
–1. sexual immorality
–2. abandonment by unbeliever
3. in such cases, divorce is not commanded
4. bib. divorces carry right to remarry since this was the purpose
Phys. Violence grounds for divorce?
- violence handled biblically before considering divorce. Civil and church authorities first
- persistent, unrepentant pys. violence ground for divorce? yes– 1 cor 7:15-16
- Can’t use 1 Peter 3:1-6
- requires wise, compassionate, and bold pastoral care
Viewing Parents biblically
A. A personal saving relationship with God for parents is the first order of importance, permeated and transferred to children, repenting of sin
B. Only parents get to parent children, not children, not institutions, but parents (especially fathers but including mothers) alone– responsible for their parental responsibility before God, not their final outcome.
5 fundamental duties of parents
- provide physical and emotional care
- provide verbal instruction
- provide physical discipline
- model Christlikeness
- pray for and with your children
3 debatable BT issues on birth control
- How to understand be fruitful and multiply?
– Q: command, blessing, promise, some combo?
– A: Blessing or promise - to whom given?
– Q: Timeless, universal OR start up command?
– A: - what is purpose of sexual union?
Prof: defer to conviction of parents and elders; his view is Scripture doesn’t prohibit birth control methods that aren’t non-abortifacient
Couples facing infertility: Intro and 1-9, 11
What are they experiencing? You don’t know.
Lack of preg. after one year of regular intercourse without contraception.
It’s a form of suffering.
1. Infertile or don’t want children
2. Variety of reactions
3. Struggles exasperated at times
4. not alone, many infertile couples
5. God is omnipotent, can open womb, help pray wisely
6. remind of God’s love not being dependent on children; infertility not verdict of their fitness as parents or punishment for sin
7. teach them God is working everything for ultimate good, help learn contentment
8. children not unqualified blessing, consolations to being childless
9. focus on serving God
11. don’t need children to have satisfying life and fulfilled marriage
Preg. loss or early infant death
- Be ready for various reactions: guilt, jealousy, fear, blaming others, depression, anger, etc.
- grasp God’s sovereignty, wisdom, and love
- remember that someone, a person has died
- what about destiny of child?
- don’t forget father, children, parents, in laws
- help address understandable concerns about another pregnancy
- do not need children to have satisfying life and fulfilled marriage
Pre-session prep for teenagers
- decide in advance your guidelines
- Will you counsel children teens at all or solely to parents?
- Will you counsel only with parents’ permission
- Will you counsel only in parents’ presence - in first session…
- a. preteens, parents alone
- b. teens, parents and teens together
- c. divorced, seek all parents
- d. non-divorced, both parents
- e. with kids present, ask why they’re here
Biblical counseling concerning child and teen conversion
- Concerned with child’s relationship to Jesus, fearing false gospel hope and no gospel hope.
- Bible describes believers as followers, and it depicts false conversions– point to present tense faith
- Can be difficult to determine with children due to immaturity and position as minor in home– ultimately one cannot know with certainty until out of parent home
- Gospel-nurture not crisis-decision
- restrain godly natural desire to know salvation
- defer uncertain cases to parents and pastoral leaders
Acting biblically toward difficult teen
know and carry out biblical parenting duties, depending on God’s grace and power.
define and communicate standard conduct required for all family members including consequences
bib. concept of community–
wise-> parent trust-> freed/privileges OR
foolish-> parent mistrust-> restrictions
Gen. 2:24
Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
Mark 10:45
For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
Luke 6:45
The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.
Eph. 6:4
Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.
Col. 3:12
Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience
James 4:1-2
What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask.
