by Paul David Tripp

This is the first devotional in an 8-part series on Relationships.

Be honest with yourself. In some way, you've been disappointed with every relationship you've ever had. It's the universal experience of everyone this side of eternity. No, it's not that you've met the wrong people or that you lack relational skills. It's that every relationship you've had, you've had in a fallen world.

You never get to hang out with perfect people. You never get to have those perfect relationships in a perfect location and with perfect circumstances surrounding you. No, all of your relationships are with flawed people in a flawed world. And don't forget, you're one of those flawed people as well!

So how can you gain ground? How can your relationships become better than they are right now? Let me suggest four ways:

1. DETERMINE TO BE REALISTIC:

I love how shockingly honest the Bible is. It's a book that really doesn't pull any punches. You see, what damages our relationships is not having a realistic acceptance of our own weaknesses and struggles. What damages our relationships is our delusions of perfection and strength! The first step in any kind of change is admitting that change is needed in the first place.

2. DETERMINE TO BE HONEST:

One of the things that gets in the way of healthy relationships is silence. Maybe our problem is that we simply don't love one another enough to have the hard conversations that are what good relationships are all about. If you are in a relationship with a flawed person, you will be touched by those flaws. Maybe it will come as an unkind word, an act of selfishness, or an outburst of irritation. Quick and loving honesty in those moments can keep a relationship from being distorted by bad habits and subverted by bitterness.

3. DETERMINE TO FOCUS ON YOURSELF:

No, I'm not counseling you to be selfish - I'm encouraging you to be humble. Good relationships are the result of both people being committed to personal change and growth. Self-examination is a key way you demonstrate love for the other person. It's very easy to be all-too-satisfied with yourself, while being irritated and impatient with the weaknesses of another. When you have two people who are committed to heart change, the relationship will change and grow as well.

4. DETERMINE TO LIVE AND GIVE HOPE:

There's a reason you don't have to settle for the relational status quo. There's a reason you don't have to panic. There's a reason you don't have to pack your bags and give up. The cross of Jesus Christ is the epicenter of hope in every relationship. Jesus was willing to face the ultimate in suffering, the rejection of his Father, so that we could experience reconciliation with Him and with one another.

You don't have what it takes to make you and the other person do the right thing, but He does! He is the Prince of Peace and He is able to bring lasting peace to where conflict once reigned. How does He do this? By doing the one thing we can't do for ourselves! He changes our hearts, and the result is radical change in our words and our actions. Look for ways to point the other person to this hope as well.

So be determined. Don't settle for way less than what Jesus suffered and died to give you. Be honest about your relationships and be hopeful about change. You can do both, because in Jesus Christ you really do have everything you need to live in peace with God and the people he has placed in your life.

God bless

Paul David Tripp

Reflection Questions

1 Where have you experienced brokenness in your relationships?

2 How might your expectations of other people (fallen sinners living in a fallen world) be unrealistic and unbiblical?

3 How do you react to relational conflict? Are you silent and sulking, or are you committed to loving honesty?

4 How can you teach and encourage others in the midst of relational conflict?

by Paul Tripp

This is the second devotional in an 8-part series on Relationships.

We all dream of the perfect relationship. You know, the one that’s free of disagreement, conflict, communication difficulties, power battles, anger and control. We can envision what it would be like. The problem is, none of us ever get what we were once able to imagine. When we wake up from our dreams, we’re all greeted by the reality that all of our relationships live in the same location - the fallen world - and all of our relationships are with the same kind of people - imperfect human beings (I’ll remind you again, you're one of those too!).

Now you just have to ask why God would choose to subject us to such difficulty and disappointment. Is there meaning in the mess? Is there mercy in the mess? Maybe right now you’re facing things in one of your relationships you never imagined you’d face. Maybe right now you’re dealing with such deep hurt and disappointment that you simply don't know what to do. Have you wondered what in the world God is doing? Have you been tempted to doubt his goodness and question his love?

Here are some things to remember:

1. God never gets a wrong address:

Acts 17 tells us that God determines the exact place where we’ll live and the exact length of our lives. Your life isn’t out of control. What you’re facing isn’t the result of God forgetting you. God hasn't turned his back on the promises he made to you. I know it's hard to grasp, but what you're facing is the result of God being faithful to his promises to you.

2. God is in the middle of the mess with you:

Psalm 46 tells us that "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble." If you’re God's child, you’ve never been in a location all by yourself. If you’re God's child, you’ve never been in a relationship all by yourself. You’ve never endured difficulty in isolation. Why? Because God is always with you and he’s there so that you would have a place to run ("refuge") and help in your moments of greatest discouragement and weakness ("strength").

3. God is up to something good in the mess:

Here's the mistake we make in the way we attempt to make sense out of lives. We think that the mess is a sure sign that God isn’t working in our lives, because if he were at work, we wouldn't be in such a mess. The Bible tells us something completely different. It tells us that because God loves us so, he’s not satisfied with us as we are. He looks down at us and sees many areas where change and growth are needed. He couldn't love us and be willing to leave us in our immaturity and weakness. So God takes us where we don’t want to go in order to produce in us what we couldn’t achieve on our own - character.

And how does he do this? He uses the difficult experiences of life to expose and change our hearts. One of his main tools is our relationships. These messy relationships expose our hearts, bring us to the end of ourselves and cause us to reach out for the help that only Jesus can give us.

I know it’s hard to face the hurt and disappointment of a relationship gone bad. But there is hope. You’re never alone. The One who’s with you is up to something very good and because he is, there really is mercy to be found right smack dab in the middle of the mess!

Reflection Questions

1. Where are you experiencing relational conflict and difficulty?

2. Are you shifting all responsibility to the other person, or are you humble enough to admit that your flaws are a factor for the mess?

3. Do you wish you lived at a "different address"? How is God using your specific location for your redemption?

4. How can the Person of Jesus Christ - with you in the middle of your relational difficulty - help you in your relationships?

by Paul Tripp

This is the third devotional in an 8-part series on Relationships.

Why are relationship struggles so disappointing? Why do the problems we have with other people affect us so powerfully? Why is relational disappointment one of the hardest disappointments for all of us to face? Let me suggest some reasons.

1. You were created to be a social being:

You and I were never designed to live in isolation. We weren’t wired to be distant from and unaffected by the people around us. In fact, since we were created in God's likeness, desire for and participation in community is a fundamental part of our humanity. The God who made us in his likeness not only does community, he is a community! To deny this aspect of your daily life would literally be to deny your humanity. There would be something dramatically wrong with you if you removed yourself completely from other people. What this means is that the hurts of relationships cut deep. In a real way they touch the essence of who God made you to be, and because of this they’re not to be taken lightly.

2. We all enter our relationships with unrealistic expectations:

Somehow, someway, we’re able to deceive ourselves into thinking that we’ll be able to avoid the difficulties that attend any relationship in this broken world. In the early days of a relationship we work to convince ourselves that we’re more righteous, and the other person more perfect, than they and we actually are. This causes us to be shocked when an unexpected but inevitable difficulty gets in the way of the bliss that we had convinced ourselves we had finally found. Here’s where the Bible is so helpful. It’s very honest about the messiness and disappointment that everyone deals with in every relationship they have.

3. We all seek identity in our relationships.

What does this mean? It means that we tend to look for fundamental personal meaning, purpose and sense of well-being from other people. In doing this, we turn people into our own personal messiahs, seeking to get from them what no other human being is ever able to deliver. That other person is not supposed to be the thing that gets you up in the morning. They’re not to be what makes life worth living for you.

When they’re in this place, you’ve given them too much power and you’re asking of them something that no flawed human being can ever pull off. On the other hand, when you’re getting your foundational sense of well-being from the Lord, you’re then able to step into the inevitable messiness of relationships this side of heaven, and be neither anxious nor self-protective.

4. Our relationships are more about our little kingdoms than the kingdom of God.

Without being aware of it, our relationships are often about what we want out of our lives rather than what God wants for our lives. So we have an "I love you and have a wonderful plan for your life" approach to relationships with other people. Often we're disappointed with a relationship at the very moment when God is producing through this relationship exactly what he wanted to produce. Our problem is that our agenda doesn't agree with God's!

So, there are reasons for our disappointments but there’s grace for them as well. The God who will take us where we didn’t plan to go in order to produce in us what we couldn’t achieve on our own will also give us the grace to hang in there as he uses the messy disappointment of relationships to change and grow us and others.

Reflection Questions

Reflect on two or three significant relationships in your life. Evaluate the spiritual health of these relationships by asking yourself the following three questions:

1. How might you be asking these relationships to fuel your personal identity? Why is this dangerous?

2. How self-serving are you in these relationships? Where you can be more self-sacrificing?

3. How can you make these relationships more about the Kingdom of God?

by Paul David Tripp

We were surprised. We simply didn't see it coming. We thought things were going well. We thought we'd built a good relationship. We thought that we'd been good neighbors. We lived in a twin house, with our landlady living in the attached home with her adult daughter. For reasons we couldn't understand, the daughter began to get mad at us. She would yell and curse at our children. She would play her stereo very loudly late at night, waking our children. She did everything she could to make our lives miserable. We didn't understand what was happening and everything we tried to do to make things better only made things worse.

Things came to a head on the Fourth of July. Months earlier she'd let us borrow a refrigerator that she wasn't using. Luella's parents were up for a visit and we'd gone out and bought more food than we'd normally have in the house. On a hot Friday afternoon we got a call from the landlady's daughter saying that she wanted her refrigerator back. We asked her why she needed it so suddenly and she told us that it was hers and she wanted it back in the garage by five o'clock. I couldn't believe it! What were we going to do with all the extra food that we'd bought? Why would she do this to us?

I was quietly angry all afternoon. I was tired of the tension. I was incensed at her meanness. And I rehearsed to myself over and over again what I'd like to say to her. Luella was making cinnamon rolls and as I walked into the kitchen to check on her progress, she suggested that we send a plate of fresh, hot rolls over to our landlady's daughter. I thought, "Yea, right, that's exactly what I was thinking!" But Luella wasn't finished. She then suggested that I write a note telling our landlady's daughter how much we cared for her and how much we were committed to having a good relationship with her. I think it was the hardest letter I ever had to write.

In about forty-five minutes I found myself at our landlady's front door, praying for a dog (some of you will get that later). I knocked and our landlady came to the door. I gave her the cinnamon rolls and she told me that after the way her daughter had treated us I must be some kind of nut doing such a thing. That afternoon we began to look for ways to do good anyway we could in the face of the evil way we were being treated.

For months we stayed committed to our love offensive, but with all of our noble efforts, nothing seemed to be changing. Then one spring afternoon, there was a knock at our door. The moment I saw our landlady's daughter, I thought to myself, "What now?!" When I got nearer to the door and could see that she was upset, I was even more concerned about what may be coming next. She asked if she could come in and talk to us. Luella and I sat down with her at our dining room table and listened as she said these amazing words to us. "You both know that for months I've been a very angry person. It hasn't been directed just at you. I've been angry with everyone in my life. I've destroyed all of my relationships. I've alienated everyone in my life. The only two people in the world who I'm sure love me are you and Luella. I'm here to ask for your forgiveness and to ask for your help. I want what's enabled you to respond to me as you have."

What's the point of the story? It surely isn't meant to highlight my character! I struggled to do what was right every day of those seemingly unending months. No, what the story points out is that in the messiness of our relationships, there's always something bigger going on. Our relationships are never just about us. They're never just about our plans, our purposes, and our happiness. They're never just about who we want to be around and what we'd like to offer or receive from those relationships. There’s always something bigger going on because there's a God who is sovereign. He puts us right where he wants us and he never gets a wrong address! In our relationships he takes us where we don't want to go in order to produce in us and others what we couldn't achieve on our own.

In those difficult months with our landlady's daughter, God wasn't only working to rescue her; he was working to rearrange me. The tough relationship wasn't the result of God's forgetfulness. It was a clear sign of his love, for us and for our landlady's daughter. So as you live and relate to the people in your life, there's one thing that you need to remember. You'll never fully understand what's happening and you'll never do and say the right thing until you begin to recognize and accept that in every relationship in your life there's always something bigger going on.

God bless

Paul David Tripp

Reflection Questions

1. Have you had, or do you currently have, difficult neighbors? What are some things they do that irritate or anger you?

2. Reflect on your irritation and anger. Are you angry because they violate God's will, or are you more angry because they're irritating your little kingdom?

3. How could this difficult relationship expose sin and idolatry in your heart?

4. How can you lavish your neighbor with Christ-like love, even when they make life miserable for you? Romans 5:6-8 is a great passage for situations like these.

by Paul David Tripp

Have you ever wondered if the people around you deal with the things you do in your relationships? Have you ever wondered if other marriages deal with petty differences, or with the collision of differing agendas? Have you ever wondered if other parents struggle with resistant children and the impatience that greets you when it happens? Have you ever wondered if other people get in trouble with their neighbors or fall out of favor with a friend?

Have you ever wondered if other people experience harmless conversations suddenly turning angry, or misunderstanding getting in the way of an otherwise productive friendship? Have you ever wondered if other people get as exhausted as you do with the mess of relationships? Have you ever wondered if other people say to themselves, "Christians; you can't live with them and you can't live without them?"

Well, you should find comfort as you read Scripture because the mess of relationships that we deal with everyday is on almost every page of the Bible. From Adam blaming Eve for his sin, to Cain murdering his brother out of jealousy. From Abram and Sarai colluding together for Abram to have sexual relations with the servant girl, to Rebekkah plotting with Jacob to deceive his father and get the blessing that his brother rightly deserved. From Saul's murderous jealousy of David, to David's murderous adultery with Bathsheba. From Delilah's seduction of Samson, to Eli's struggle with his wayward sons. From the inability of Solomon's sons to get along, to the grief of Hezekiah over his evil son Manasseh.

From the competitiveness of the disciples for a place of honor in the kingdom, to tension between Mary and Martha as to how to best serve Jesus. From the rejection of Christ on the cross by his own Father, to the divisions that wracked the New Testament churches. The Bible puts before you account after account of people just like you dealing with the same things you do as you live as a sinner, with sinners, in this fallen world.

Why do we have these gritty stories in the Bible? Because God wants you to know that you are not alone in what you experience. And not only are you not alone, God wants you to know that you are not left to your own wisdom and your own strength. The One who is your wisdom and strength subjected himself to the harsh realities of relationships in a broken world so that he would be a sympathetic and understanding Helper in your time of relational need.

But there is more. He was willing to face the ultimate in relational suffering, the rejection of his Father, so that you would not only have the hope of acceptance with God, but also the hope of real reconciled relationship with your neighbor. He purchased our peace with God and in so doing made peace between us possible as well.

What does all of this mean? It means you do not have to give way to discouragement, panic or hopelessness. No matter how frequent or complicated the mess is, there is hope. Not because some day you will discover the key to perfect relationships or meet the perfect person. But because Jesus did what we could not do, so that we would be able to experience what we could never experience if left to our own strength and wisdom.

So, don't passively accept the mess and don't run away when it comes. Determine to be an agent of hope, change, peace, and reconciliation. There is probably not a relationship in your life that could not be better in some way. Jesus makes that change and growth possible.

God bless

Paul David Tripp

Reflection Questions

1. What relational conflict are you going through right now?

2. Do you tend to give way to discouragement, panic, or hopelessness in the midst of conflict? If not, what is your source of hope?

3. What does the Bible have to say about your conflict? Search the Scriptures for verses and/or stories with similar themes, or ask a friend for help.

4. How can you help others find help in the Word of God for their conflict?

by Paul David Tripp

God's Word really does open up to us the mysteries of the universe. It really does make us wiser than we could ever be without it. And yet, having said this, it's sad that we don't take more advantage of this wisdom God has given us.

It's sad that we don't think his thoughts after him. It's sad that we don't require ourselves to look at life through the lens of his revelation. It's sad that we swindle ourselves into thinking that we're wiser than we are. It's sad that we're not irritated by our foolishness. It's sad that we're not motivated to seek his help.

One of the places you see this most clearly is in the struggles we experience in our relationships. I don't know if you remember, but before the Advent season started, we were in the middle of an 8-part series on Relationships. We completed five of those devotionals before December came around- you can review them all here.

Over the next three weeks, we'll wrap up this series by looking at relationships through three perspectives derived from biblical wisdom. These perspectives, or mentalities, are essential to creating and sustaining a healthy relational lifestyle.

1) YOU MUST LIVE IN YOUR RELATIONSHIPS WITH A HARVEST MENTALITY:

The Apostle Paul captures this mentality with these very familiar words: “Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap” (Galatians 6:7). This is an essential mentality if you want to live with habits of reconciliation. You have to buy into the principle of consequences.

What's the principle of consequences? Here it is: there's an organic relationship between the seeds you plant and the fruit you harvest. In the physical world you will never plant peach pits and get apples. In the same way, there will be organic consistency between the seeds of words and actions that you plant in your relationships and the quality of harvest that you will experience later as you live and relate to one another.

Every day you harvest relational plants that have come from the seeds of words and actions that you previously planted. And every day you plant seeds of words and actions that you will later harvest.

Most of the seeds you plant will be small, but one thousand small seeds that grow up into trees will result in an environment-changing forest. Your relationships are continuously planted with little-moment seeds of words and actions which grow into the forest of either love or trouble.

God bless

Paul David Tripp

Reflection Questions

1 Look at your daily schedule. What competes against God's Word?

2 How can you seek help from the Word of God?

3 What relational seeds have you planted over the past week?

4 What relational plants have you recently harvested?

5 How can you share this "harvest mentality" with others?

by Paul David Tripp

We're in the middle of looking at three mentalities that are essential to creating and sustaining a healthy relational lifestyle. Last week we discussed what it meant to live in our relationships with A Harvest Mentality.

Here's the second mentality:

2) You must live in your relationships with an INVESTMENT MENTALITY:

We're all treasure hunters. We all live to gain, maintain, keep, and enjoy things that are valuable to us. Our behavior in any given situation of life is our attempt to get what is valuable to us out of that situation. There are things in your life to which you have assigned importance, and once you have, you are no longer willing to live without them (these principles are laid out in Matthew 6:19–33).

Everyone does it. We live to possess and experience the things on which we’ve set our hearts. We’re always living for some kind of treasure. And every treasure you set your heart on and actively seek will give you some kind of return.

An argumentative moment is an investment in the treasure of being right, and from it you will get some kind of relational return. If you aggressively argue the other person into a corner, it’s not likely that the return on that investment will be his or her appreciation of you, nor will it be the desire to have similar conversations again!

If you invest in the treasure of willing service, you‘ll experience the return of appreciation, respect, and a deeper friendship. If it’s more valuable to have control than it is for your friend or spouse to feel heard, loved and understood, then you’ll live with the return of that in the quality of your relationship.

Investment is inescapable; you do it everyday, and it's hard to get away from the return on the investments you’ve made.

How will you invest in your relationships today?

God bless

Paul David Tripp

Reflection Questions

1 What things - not just physical possessions - are valuable to you right now?

2 Why are those things valuable or desirable for you?

3 Do your values align with what God value?

4 How is the return on those investments shaping your relationships?

by Paul David Tripp

Last week we discussed what it meant to live in our relationships with An Investment Mentality. Here's the third and final mentality:

3) You must live in your relationships with a GRACE MENTALITY:

When I got married, I didn’t understand grace. I had a principle-istic view of Scripture that caused me to bring a law economy into all of my relationships.

The central focus of the Bible is not a set of practical principles for life. No, the central theme of the Bible is a person, Jesus Christ. If all you and I needed was a knowledge and understanding of a certain set of God-revealed principles for living, Jesus wouldn't have needed to come.

I think there are many Christians living in Christ-less relationships. Without knowing what they're doing, they construct law-based rather than grace-based relationships. And because of this, they ask the law to do what only grace can accomplish.

The problem with this is that we're not just people in need of wisdom; we're also people in need of rescue—and the thing that we need to be rescued from is us. Our fundamental problem is not ignorance of what is right. Our problem is selfishness of heart that causes us to care more about what we want than about what we know is right.

The laws, principles, and perspectives of Scripture provide the best standard ever towards which our relationships should strive. They can reveal our wrongs and failures, but they have no capacity whatsoever to deliver us from them. For that we need the daily grace that only Jesus can give us.

We must not simply hold one another to the high relational standards of God’s Word, but we must also daily offer the same grace that we've been given to one another so that we may be tools of grace in the lives of one another. Our confidence is not in the ability we have to keep God’s law but rather in the life-giving and heart-transforming grace of the One who has drawn us to himself and has the power to draw us to one another.

When we live with this confidence, we look at the difficulties of our relationships not so much as hassles to be endured, but as opportunities to enter into an even deeper experience of the rescuing, transforming, forgiving, empowering grace of Jesus, the One who died for us and is always with us.

Three mentalities—each an essential building block for a healthy biblical, relational lifestyle. Each require the honesty of personal humility, and each encourage us to be reconciled to one another and to God again and again and again.

God bless

Paul David Tripp

Reflection Questions

1 What is the difference between LAW and GRACE?

2 What does a LAW-BASED relationship look like?

3 What does a GRACE-BASED relationship look like?

4 Are you better at laying down the law than giving grace? (HINT: no one lays down the law better than the one who thinks they are keeping it themselves)

5 How can you give grace better? (HINT: no one gives grace better than the person who knows they need it most)

by Steven Jay Fogel

It happens when we see politicians repeatedly make the same self-destructive mistakes - think former legislator Anthony Weiner's repeated sexting scandals.

Or we hear friends complain repeatedly about the horrible job they're "stuck" in.

Or, in a rare glimmer of insight, we wonder why we're still hanging on to a "romance" that makes us miserable.

"When people seem mentally healthy and it looks like they could easily make a change that would make them happier, we're absolutely baffled by why they don't," says Steven Jay Fogel (www.StevenJayFogel.com), author of the new book Your Mind Is What Your Brain Does for a Living (March 2014).

When you're the "stuck" person, the why may seem more evident: You're scared, or you think, "If I just keep doing the right things, it will all work out."

Either way, it's likely they - and you - aren't making a conscious choice at all, Fogel says.

"We think we're making decisions based on the present, but we're usually not. We tend to operate on automatic pilot, responding to situations based on the coping strategies and thinking patterns we developed in childhood," he says.

"When those strategies are dysfunctional, we just keep repeating the same behaviors over and over again."

The good news is that we can learn to recognize that "default" thinking and rewire the brain to change it, says Fogel.

The cofounder of Westwood Financial Corp., Fogel draws from decades of neuroscience and mindfulness research to offer solutions.

What can you do to get yourself unstuck? Get started, he suggests, by answering these questions - in writing!

• What is causing your pain? Think about whether you're in a relationship or job that's become less and less satisfying and increasingly painful over a long period. Describe in writing the elements of the relationship or situation that are persistently causing you pain and how long you've been experiencing these problems. Knowing that there are three ways to end your suffering - accept the situation, change it, or remove yourself from it - write down the reasons you're staying even though you're suffering and what is preventing you from choosing Door 1, 2 or 3.

• How are you interpreting your partner's behavior? If you repeatedly fight about the same issues, describe the issues. Think about whether you're unconsciously investing the issue with a meaning based on your "autopilot" thinking. For instance, if you're arguing because your partner's messy and ignores your requests to be neat, are you interpreting that as disrespect toward you? Do you further interpret that disrespect as a lack of love for you? Is it possible that your partner is just not a neat person and that has nothing to do with his feelings for you?

• Do you have impulsive autopilot behaviors that are causing problems? We can often check the impulses that stem from our autopilot brain just by stopping to think before we act. Bursts of anger are one example; suppressed anger that turns into passive-aggressive behavior is another.

• Do you feel shamed or blamed by your partner's critical comments? Write down the comments accurately - as they were spoken. Then think mindfully about whether your partner was really shaming you or if you interpreted the comments in that way because of your own inner critic. If it was the former, have a conversation with the person about how you feel when this happens, and state that you'll be more open to the feedback if the criticism can be expressed objectively.

• Did you bring a myth with you into the relationship? If so, describe the myth. For example, you might have believed that you will cure everything that's wrong with the other person. Or that she will fix all of your problems. Describe how you came to believe that myth and what it would take for you to release it.

About The Author: