Tonight we have a wedding rehearsal at our church, which means there is a wedding tomorrow. That also means I just finished some premarital counseling for a young couple that has been in our church for several years. I am excited about where God has them and about the kind of preparation that goes into weddings. I have been excited that there have been several weddings in our church over the past few years, with young people who just want to do it right and head into marriage right. I told the couple in our premarital counseling, “I would rather you have the counseling now, before you are married, than ten, fifteen, or twenty years into your marriage, after you have been doing it wrong and building up all these bad habits. I would rather you get these habits settled on the front end than on the back end.” So we do premarital counseling with all the young couples who are preparing to be married.
Preparing for Marriage God’s Way
When I was engaged to my wife, we went through this book by Wayne Mack, Preparing for Marriage. It still has all of our old handwritten notes in it. We did not do every lesson, but I appreciated going through it with the one who did our premarital counseling. It has since been redone with this new cover, Preparing for Marriage God’s Way. I used it with several of the couples who went through our premarital counseling class and really enjoyed it. Our associate pastor and his wife went through it, along with a couple of others we took through it. Brother Brandon, one of our deacons, went through it with Naomi, his wife.
It is really good on a lot of different topics, with a lot of different Bible studies that get you into the Scriptures in areas that are not directly about marriage. You might think there are only a few particular passages about marriage, but this goes into a lot of different passages on communication, on physical intimacy, on how to stay pure in marriage, and on how to resolve conflict, and the chapters are very, very helpful. I think there are thirteen sessions you are expected to go through: Congratulations, Going Deeper, Real Love, God’s Blueprint for Marriage, Your Most Important Relationship. I did appreciate that there is an entire chapter, chapter 5, on making sure the couple is saved. This book seems to have been broadly marketed to a great variety of couples approaching marriage, and many of the couples I was doing premarital counseling with already had some of these basics secured. Another book I am going to go through has a little more of a Baptist focus. But I did appreciate that this book tries to make sure that both the husband and the wife are secure in their eternity, that they both have a walk with God and a relationship with God, and that chapter really helps establish that.
Chapter 6 is Communicating, and chapter 7 is Communicating, Part Two. So two entire, long chapters are given to how to communicate, how to have time with your wife, and how to share your heart with your husband. There are different charts throughout that cover all kinds of personality quirks you may have red flags about right now; if you just brush them under the rug and do not deal with them, you lose the chance to talk to your spouse about these things. Chapter 8 is on resolving conflicts. Chapters 9 and 10 are very short chapters on becoming a husband and becoming a faithful wife. There is a whole big chapter on family finances, with a lot of different charts mixed in, covering areas you may not think about: “Man, I didn’t even know I was supposed to ask that question,” or, “Oh, we haven’t thought about insurance yet.” It goes through a lot of the nitty-gritty details. Chapter 12 is Sex as God Intended; we always save that for one of the last sessions, right before the wedding. Then chapter 13 is Your Special Day, with several more chapters in part two about preparing for the actual ceremony: what to think of, flowers, photography, video, and all the little checklists you might not otherwise think about.
It is a thick book, a couple hundred pages, maybe 250, with a lot of fill-in-the-blanks for her and fill-in-the-blanks for him. “On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate yourself in this? On a scale of 1 to 5, do you always do this? Do you never do this? Does she sometimes do this? Does she always do this?” When you are forced to put a number to these things, it really changes the gut-level reaction to some of the questions asked about you. So I like the survey questions, and I like how it gets you into topics that you and your potential spouse have never quite talked about yet. When couples go through these, it has been very good. This one is from a little more of an evangelical perspective, and it perhaps included a little too much. We did not always go through all thirteen chapters. Sometimes, if we had extra time, we would stretch it out and do one session per week, but sometimes we would combine and kind of rush through. I would always say, “The point of this is to get you two talking, not necessarily that you have to tell me all of your answers.” So it was a good resource for that.
Premarital Biblical Counseling
What I have since switched to, and what we just finished with the couple getting married tomorrow, is simply called Premarital Biblical Counseling. It is put together by Pastor Robert Sargent, BBC Publications Ministries, up in Washington. It is laid out as a collection of some of his material on marriage and some worksheets he has used over the years. It has fairly simple clip art and some outdated graphics; it is self-produced by the good folks in a good church. But the content is very good, and I like that it is simple. One section tells what to expect as a pastor and what to expect as a counselee, and then come the lessons themselves. There are six lessons overall, and they include a lot of the same things the other book includes: a lesson on communication, a lesson on resolving conflict, a lesson on what marriage is biblically, a lesson on physical intimacy in marriage, and a lesson on finances. It takes those lessons and gives fill-in-the-blanks that have you search the Scriptures and then take Bible principles from them.
That is one section of the book. As you might be able to see, each section is divided off by these pink dividers. In the next section there are some really practical ceremony master-planning worksheets to help you think through your big day, worksheets on how to resolve conflicts, and some one-page handouts that it seems he produced for things like couples retreats and has included in this book. Then in the back, I like these worksheets. The earlier section goes over the notes, and the worksheets in the back are a way for the couple to sit down over a date night in preparation for the counseling session and go through the worksheets together. Similar to the other book, they have forms to fill out: “On a scale of one to five, how would you rate this? How would you rate me? How would you rate yourself?” The worksheets are very, very practical. So this is good for both the biblical studies and the practical side of things, and especially from a Baptist perspective, this one is very, very helpful.
Other Resources: Ironwood Workbooks and Sacred Marriage
In all of my premarital counseling, I also bring in several other resources. I have done a whole other video on books I reference about marriage in particular, and I think I have gone through my entire marriage shelf up here. Yet here are a couple I do not remember whether I have covered before. This one is by Iron Sharpens Iron Publications, from the camp we go to, Ironwood, out near Barstow, California, a couple of hours from here. The camp director put this book together for his teenage daughters in preparation for marriage. Before they even knew their boyfriends, he had his teenage girls prepare what they wanted to look for in a man, what dating should look like, and how to have conversations with a boyfriend: “What if he wants twelve kids and I want three?” and different topics like that. It is a very good little workbook. I may have mentioned it in a previous video. You read a couple of paragraphs in each chapter, and then you work together through some fun questions. This one is a two-part workbook for those who are already married, by the same author, the same camp director, Sam Brock. It is for married couples who have perhaps drifted, or perhaps have not drifted but are looking for a way to freshen up their conversations.
I will reference these kinds of books in my premarital counseling because sometimes conversations can stagnate. Sometimes it can get to the place where you just talk about the same old stuff. I like doing things like this with my wife. If we are on a long car ride, or if it is a special date night or an anniversary trip, we will pull out a book like this and talk about something we have not really talked about before: “Let’s do our vacations chapter and talk about what a dream vacation looks like,” or, “Let’s create a bucket list and dream about what we want to accomplish before we die.” These are fun conversation starters. So I encourage those going through premarital counseling to have an ongoing dating relationship with their spouse.
I think I have also mentioned Sacred Marriage before. This one is fresh on my mind because we used it in the very last session. On the physical relationship, there are other resources I want to bring in beyond just this and beyond just my experience, and I think the best chapter in this book is on the physical relationship in marriage. That is why I had it. The subtitle is also very good: What If God Designed Marriage to Make Us Holy More Than to Make Us Happy? That is the overall goal I want to have with our premarital counseling: to view marriage not as something selfish and me-centered, “I am getting married to fulfill my desires or my dreams,” or, “I have always wanted to be married,” or, “This is about me,” but rather that I am focusing on my spouse, loving my spouse like Christ loved the church and gave himself for it: “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it.” I want to go into marriage with a focus on my spouse, on loving, on giving, on pouring myself into somebody else, and through that loving, giving relationship I get to show Jesus Christ to the world. The way I often say it in wedding ceremonies is that Ephesians 5 shows the picture of marriage is like Christ loving His church eternally. So every time we love our spouse like Christ wants us to, it is like a little slice of heaven on earth. I like thinking that every marriage done right, based on the Bible, is like a slice of heaven on earth. It is the way Christ designed it, the way Christ loves us, and the way He wants us to show His love to the world through our marriage relationship.
Those are a few resources we use in our premarital counseling. If you are interested in marriage, I encourage you to go through premarital counseling with your pastor, or even just get these books for yourself. If you are a pastor, I encourage you to take your young people through books like this to prepare them for marriage. And if you are already married, go ahead and get some resources like this to freshen up your marriage and to keep dating your spouse. Well, God bless you. We will see you in the next video.
