Latest / The Family Teams Podcast / This Biblical Marriage Blueprint Is SHOCKING But TRUE: Adam Lane Smith on Lila Rose [Family Team Series - Pt 3]

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This Biblical Marriage Blueprint Is SHOCKING But TRUE: Adam Lane Smith on Lila Rose [Family Team Series - Pt 3] · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  Adam Lane Smith dropped an absolute bombshell on the Lila Rose podcast. What he said was really shocking about the nature of marriage, something I've actually never heard somebody say out loud before. So we're going to play a couple of clips, but we need to talk about this from a family team's perspective. My name is Jeremy.
• 0:15
  Prior, I'm with an organization called Family Teams, where we are trying to restore the biblical blueprint of family, not as just a group of individuals, but as a multi-generational team on a mission. What people do not understand about marriage is that marriage is about becoming a team. And this has massive implications. I'm working through a series of videos where we're unpacking the foundation of what it means to start a family team. This is part three. If you guys want to go back and look at it.
• 0:38
  part one and part two. I want to go deep in this part. We're only dealing right now with the foundational elements of what it means to be a family team, but there is a way to think about marriage that people have thought about marriage this way for thousands of years. And very recently in the last hundred, 150 years, we've thought about marriage very differently and it is so predictably breaking down. So this could be one of the most important things that you ever hear about the nature of what marriage really was designed to be. Let me play the first part of what Adam Lane Smith says, and then we're going to talk through what this means for a family team.
• 1:06
  What do you think most people think marriage is today in 2026? It is get together, give each other good feelings until one of us dies. That's what most people are doing. It's a friend that you sleep with and pay bills with. That's what most people are thinking marriage is. And that's why marriage is failing so bad today as we have cut it down to such a pointless little thing. That's not what marriage ever has been.
• 1:28
  Biblical marriage and just human marriage in every culture and every civilization for all of human history has always been a business. A business. It will always be a business. It has always been a business and it needs to be a business. It has to. It is a business arrangement. And when we start turning it into an emotional arrangement first, that's where we go wrong. And we did that 100 years ago and it's been devastation ever since.
• 1:50
  All right, now I don't know how you guys react to him saying that marriage is essentially a business. Please do not first react emotionally. Don't just think, okay, do I like this? Do this resonate with me? We have to start this whole conversation with a great deal of humility because whatever we think, whatever resonates with us about the nature of marriage and family,
• 2:10
  We have to deal with the fact that we have an out-of-control divorce rate, one of the worst divorce rates in the world. And the United States, our culture is number one in the world at single-parent homes. Whatever's happening to the family, whatever ideas are destroying the modern Western family, those ideas are most advanced right here in the United States. And so we have to be very humble. When we hear these things, we're like, oh, that sounds weird. Oh, I don't like that.
• 2:35
  Please slow down and really try to listen to what he's saying. Let's let Adam Lane Smith unpack this a little bit more and then I want to dive into the way we think about marriage from this lens here at Family Teams. That's what most people are doing. It's a friend that you sleep with and pay bills with. That's what most people are thinking marriage is. That's why marriage is failing so bad today as we have cut it down to such a pointless little thing. That's not what marriage ever has been.
• 3:02
  Biblical marriage and just human marriage in every culture and every civilization for all of human history has always been a business. A business. It will always be a business. It has always been a business and it needs to be a business. It has to. It is a business arrangement. And when we start turning it into an emotional arrangement first, that's where we go wrong. And we did that 100 years ago and it's been devastation ever since.
• 3:25
  So you're saying it wasn't until maybe 100 years ago, and I'm guessing the Western largely world, especially US, we started to view marriage as an emotional affair and not as a business relationship. Correct. What does that mean? Marriage is the center of every other business you will ever create in your life, whether that's the business of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, if it's starting an actual company together and physically protecting that company, if it's running a household together,
• 3:55
  If it's running a nonprofit, you and your husband have a tremendous amount going on. I know that you do. Your marriage is the business, the core business that everything else is a subsidiary of. So you form a business contract together, agreeing that we will do this forever for the rest of our lives. We'll keep growing our skills. We will unite and be one together, one entity. Yeah.
• 4:16
  This is a company. You've built a company together, and that's why you guys are winning in your marriage. But that's what marriage always has been. Now, it's also supposed to be joining larger family structures and uniting groups, tribes, neighborhoods, everything bonding together. So it's not meant to be two human beings in isolation either. But...
• 4:34
  Putting that aside, even if it is two human beings today, it's a business. And we have to pick a business partner who is savvy, whose skill set matches ours, whose weaknesses are fixed by our strengths, their strengths, their weaknesses, us. All of that has to be bonded together. We have to really look at that. It would be much smarter for people today to read a book about how to pick a co-founder than to pick a romantic partner.
• 4:58
  So I have so many questions about what you just said. And I get that a lot. It's very, there's a lot that's so compelling there. But first of all, what about love? The role of love and attraction. Love is absolutely vital in a marriage. It absolutely is. Feelings of love, not just, and by love, obviously we should define it. It's a choice to will the good of the other, but also the feelings of love and attraction. Feelings of attraction, feelings of commitment, feelings of affection. Those are there. All right. So his frame is look, the business relationship, the partnership is,
• 5:28
  The productive partnership between husband and wife needs to come first. It needs to be at the center of the way we think about marriage. Our way of describing that is marriage is designed to be a romantic partnership. It is a partnership. That's the nature of what it is. It's designed to be very productive, but it is one in which love is the center of what we're doing. And so trying to understand the tension between those things, but what we have spent
• 5:53
  decades, almost centuries now doing is we've been downplaying the element of the partnership in favor of increasing the frame that this is just about kind of a feeling of emotional love. And what we need to do is take a big step back and understand that marriage was always designed to be productive.
• 6:11
  The way that the secular culture oftentimes looks at this is that marriage is made to make you feel good about yourself. Like if you're feeling good about yourself, if you, if this person is really enhancing your life, then you should stay married. If they start to detract, if you start to fall out of love with this person, then you should move on to another partner.
• 6:28
  In a Christian culture, we've really been, in the last 20 years, emphasizing the idea that marriage is meant to make you holy. We've noticed, of course, that in marriage there's a lot of tension, and this tension can really help your discipleship, your growth as a Christian. And so because we no longer really have
• 6:45
  direct contact with the way that God designed marriage and family to be, we've now kind of substituted the practical element that marriage was designed to be a productive partnership with is designed to make you holy. Now, certainly marriage does do that. But when God first created marriage, this was not what he said marriage was about.
• 7:03
  And we're going to dive into the theology of family and understanding how God designed marriage. And this is so difficult for people in our culture to understand because we no longer live in a culture where you are attempting to do all of your life productive activities through and with your family and especially with your spouse. So at Family Teams, we believe that marriage is God's way of ordering the world. It's a team on mission. And the beginning of that team is the husband and wife. And so the team's job is to develop marriage.
• 7:33
  your players, yes, but it is also focused on helping you be productive together, to win the game together. And that's why we like to talk about it as a team. That's the easiest analogy that we've found to the way that God designed family. This was very personal for me. I was very confused about the nature of marriage when I was single. I was terrified at the prospect of a lifelong commitment. When I was 23 years old, I was in Jerusalem. I had gone through different relationships. I was in a kind of a state where I was
• 8:00
  couldn't understand how you could possibly figure out who this person is that you're going to just feel in love with for the rest of your life. Doesn't it just stand to reason that eventually, over time, you're going to sort of tire of this person, or eventually, as the decades go on, you're going to find somebody that you connect with a little bit more, and then you're going to feel regret. It just seemed inevitable when it came to thinking about marriage in this sort of secular, or even the way that Christians today talk about marriage.
• 8:26
  And God really rescued me. It's a much longer story, but God really showed me who he had for me. And when he did that, I realized that this person was a perfect partner to me. Yes, I was attracted to her. Yes, I fell in love with her. But the absolute bedrock of it was I realized God was providing for me somebody who was very different than me.
• 8:46
  in order for me and for us to form a dynamic team together. And she was the perfect teammate for what God was calling me to do in my life. And so the foundation of what we had founded was this dynamic partnership. It wasn't simply based on momentary emotional feelings. It was something far deeper and far more lasting. So part of what...
• 9:07
  this has helped us really understand about the nature of family is that if you're going to have a marriage that lasts, you have to learn to navigate the tension between these three elements, quantity and quality, authority and opposition, the masculine and feminine. I'm going to go over all three of these, but oftentimes what we try to do in the, both the modern Western secular view of family and marriage and in the Christian view of family is resolve this tension and you cannot resolve these tensions because,
• 9:36
  They exist to be managed, not resolved. So I want to talk through each one because if you try to resolve these, you will find your marriage becoming less and less productive. And because the center of marriage is to produce things that God intends for marriage to produce, we need to keep these tensions alive and dynamic. So the first one is quantity and quality. So a few pastors will tell you this, but it's the goal of your marriage to have as many children as you healthily can.
• 10:06
  your goal is to maximize the amount of quantity of children that you can without compromising the basic health of the family. And so this allows you to work together. This is a basic understanding in Genesis 1.28 when God said to the family, be fruitful and multiply each.
• 10:25
  This is the mandate of what it means to be married. And this is the reason why when you get married, outside of using some kind of modern technology, it's inevitable that you're going to have a large number of children if you're family and you're physically very healthy. And so as this happens, that quantity is really, really valuable. Valuable for your marriage, valuable for the family, and valuable for the kingdom of God. God goes on to say at the very end of the Old Testament in Malachi 2.15, didn't the Lord God make you married?
• 10:53
  one with your wife in body and spirit, you are his. And what does he want? What does God want from your marriage? Godly children from your union. That's what it says in Malachi 2.15. The intention of God when he designed family was that you would have children
• 11:11
  and that you would raise them well. This is the mandate of what it means to be a family. This is not something that we should consider to be optional. This is not something that we should put off for as long as possible. This is not something that we should constantly allow to compete with our other selfish desires. This is a basic mandate
• 11:27
  design of what it means to be married. When you get married, you have sex. When you have sex, you have children. When you have children, you are bearing the basic fruit that God designed in the family. Now, this idea of being fruitful and multiplying extends to lots of different areas of our lives. To our business efforts, we want to be as economically productive as we possibly can. To our ministry efforts, we want to be as productive as we healthily can in our efforts to expand and seek the kingdom of God.
• 11:56
  Our desire for our family is to be maximally productive. And so God has given you a partner and allowed you to work together. You're not designed to be doing these things separately. God originally designed Adam and Eve to work together on all of the things that God was instructing them to do. And so we make each other one. And so in every productive area of our lives, we're designed to work together.
• 12:21
  Now, I know a lot of things are designed in our culture to break that down and to cause us to work on separate things. And this has caused us to be really confused about the nature of marriage. This has caused us to think that marriage is just about whatever is left over or these feelings of love or these connections that we have once in a while with our spouse while we're going about our individual lives. And this has been an absolute disaster for the way that marriage.
• 12:44
  Marriage has played out in so many ways in our culture. We need to get away from that, get back to the original design. So we've got to live into this tension. And part of this is just accepting and getting excited about the idea of being as productive as possible. And in a very basic understanding, what that means is have lots of kids and find ways to increase the way that you can do that in a healthy way. If you've got lots of multi-generational support, you've got...
• 13:11
  grandparents who are on board, you've got siblings, you live in kind of a village environment where there are lots of different folks who are helping you from your church, then that can increase the number of children that you can have healthily. And so we want to put our family into those conditions that allow us to be maximally productive in all of these capacities, especially when it comes to having and raising children. This is one of the most basic elements of what it means to be
• 13:36
  married. And this is very much why God created marriage. We see that over and over again in scripture. Part of it, of course, yes, is to be holy. God wants to transform us. But what I've noticed is in the evangelical world, we've really replaced, we're much more comfortable talking about, hey, marriage exists to help you grow closer to Christ-likeness. We are much less comfortable talking about the things that the Bible actually explicitly says is the purpose of marriage, and that is to have and raise children, because that could violate
• 14:03
  somebody's individual desires, somebody's sense of what they personally want, what they selfishly want to pursue that might be different than that. And so we're willing to ignore what the Bible explicitly says about the purpose of marriage. The purpose of your marriage is to be maximally productive.
• 14:19
  And what that means is quantity actually matters. So that's the first one. You never want to feel like you can resolve that distinction between quantity and quality. If you find that if we add more kids, then we're going to really be suffering. There is a dynamic tension and a conversation that happens within a marriage to figure out where that sweet spot is. But we always want to be pushing the line when it comes to quantity. Productivity really matters within marriage. All right. The second dynamic tension we need to look at is authority and opposition. This is one that our culture really, really has a hard time with.
• 14:49
  Oftentimes we say, look, if we're just trying to form a love bond, if marriage is all about just connecting with somebody and falling in love with them and then kind of enjoying our free time together, why in the world would you ever put a hierarchy or any kind of authority into a structure designed to do that? And the answer is you wouldn't. You're asking the wrong question.
• 15:08
  The reality is family and marriage was never designed to be this sort of thing that you do during your recreation time. This is the thing through which you do all the productive work of your life. This is the team through which you are trying to do all the most meaningful elements of your life. And when you're pushing the boundaries as much as you can in the family to be as maximally productive as possible, and you're doing that as a team, then all of a sudden, of course, you would discover that everything else that we do in that way in this world has a hierarchy to it.
• 15:36
  When you're trying to go after really difficult things and try to figure out how to be maximally productive, how to really compete in a world, for example, on a sports team, it makes sense that there's just a lot of clarity when it comes to authority because you're trying to do some very, very difficult things. Now, the Bible talks about...
• 15:55
  the whole idea of authority in so many different places. But I want to really spend some time zeroing in on the role of the wife and the way that the Bible talks about this, because this is what is oftentimes not understood very well. In Genesis 2.18, when God created Eve, it says, The Lord God said, It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for the man.
• 16:18
  Now, this very bizarre Hebrew word, kinegdo, this word for suitable is really interesting. And what it really literally means is to oppose him. I will make a helper opposed to him. And so some people have talked about this as being kind of like a truss. You know, trusses are opposed to each other and they keep the...
• 16:38
  the house up. I like that sort of visual, but the idea here is that she is constantly pushing back, but not in a disrespectful way, but in a way that actually pushes the whole family further. And so how do you create the kind of dynamic as a husband and wife team where your wife is constantly opposing you in a way that is helping you? That's the...
• 16:59
  ultimate question, and that's the dynamic that is always very difficult to create. There are some analogies that have been really helpful to me in this way. One is the dynamic between the president and the press. So part of what you wanna have in a really healthy democracy is you give a lot of authority to the president
• 17:17
  But the press is constantly speaking truth to power, is constantly sending reports on how everyone's really doing. And the president, as much as he would love to silence the press and not let this information get out so that everything sounds perfect about what.
• 17:34
  he's actually attempting to do. This actually does not help the president. The president needs an opposed press that actually has the same goals. We all want to live in a healthy country. We all want to understand what's true. We all want to make sure that we are progressing in a positive direction and not in a negative direction. But in order to do that, the president needs a free press to be constantly in a dynamic tension
• 17:57
  with the things that he's attempting to do on the policy side. The same thing is true within a marriage. My wife is constantly sending me press releases about how I'm doing, how the family's doing, how this child is doing. And this is really, really valuable. This kind of opposition, which I can take as very annoying at times, this is actually a critical part of how she is designed to help me
• 18:18
  I need to find ways to take that information, take it to heart and implement that in ways that my authority, my leadership, my responsibility is being carried out better and better. And she needs to find ways to send me those press releases in ways that really are helpful, are respectful, are helpful.
• 18:34
  are aligned with where our family's going. And so this dynamic is really, really important. Part of what I love about having a wife that opposes me in a really skillful, loving, and humble way is that when we have family meetings, when we host church gatherings, even when I speak, I've invited April onto the stage and says, your job, and I said this to the audience, is your job is to oppose me in real time. So as I'm speaking, if there are things that I'm saying that needs color or that needs correction,
• 19:03
  You have the mic. I need you to oppose me and help everyone that is listening to this hear both sides of what you think and what I think. Even this is why oftentimes I'll have April on a podcast and just say, give color, give nuance, give correction to all the points that I'm making. When God gave so much authority to the husband.
• 19:23
  He protects the rest of the family by giving him a helper opposed to him. And so we've got to find ways to make that work. Now, sometimes we think, well, this would all work so much better if the husband and wife were just simply equal and there was no hierarchy and there was no authority.
• 19:41
  Now imagine this being done in a football team that's really trying to win a championship. Imagine if every single coach of every football team, his wife had equal authority and at any point could change any call he's making. Let's say part of her identity is to constantly get in his way, constantly go in and usurp his authority.
• 20:03
  in ways that could really cause her to feel like I'm equally valuable, I'm an equal partner in this endeavor. Is that really going to help the goals of that team? Would the team go farther? And basically, two things would happen. Number one, they would lose a lot of games.
• 20:20
  And number two, that man would look for some other arena where he could do his job in a way that was not constantly being thwarted by this other person. And that is how the modern family looks today. It looks like a situation where men are looking for other arenas
• 20:39
  where their leadership can be respected and they can actually have a vision and cast a vision without it being constantly pulled back by somebody who has an equal amount of authority. So we need to understand that these roles are distinct. And just like on any team, it's better to have distinct roles where everyone is growing in their skill at doing their job as opposed to competing roles where we're constantly trying to overthrow each other and trying to figure out who in real time should actually have that job.
• 21:09
  That is not productive and that does not help the family. All right, the third dynamic tension that every family has to lean into is male and female. We want to increase the dimensions of the gender binary. We need to love that God created the gender binary and why did he create it? To create a certain kind of family. There's this raging debate that happens right now in our culture that is the male and female gender binary, is this essentially a social construct that we just sort of came up with
• 21:38
  Is this a biological construct that is woven into the way that God designed us? And I do not believe that it's a social construct. I do believe it's biological, but I think it goes beyond that. We see in Genesis 1 that when God created this biological distinction, he created it to create a certain kind of family. And so I think it's most accurate to call the binary between male and female a family construct.
• 22:00
  And so what really makes somebody masculine is they live into that particular role, the role of husband and father, the design of what a husband and father is designed to do. So when you're parenting a five-year-old boy, how does that differ from parenting a five-year-old girl? Well, the big distinction is you want to be really helping that young boy with the kinds of character qualities he's going to need as a future father and husband.
• 22:27
  Because his masculinity that you want to increase is the things that would benefit his future family. Same thing with your daughter. You want to make sure that you are increasing your encouragement, your training around the things that are inside of her that naturally are coming out. They're going to help accentuate your daughter.
• 22:46
  and make her future family healthy as she becomes a future wife and mother. Now, we hate this idea today because we think the family doesn't matter. All that matters is individuals that's going to stomp on people's freedom. Who cares what they're going to, they could choose. They go back and forth between what kind of,
• 23:01
  Gender they may want, they may not want to get married, those things are very much a part of the way that our culture thinks. And this has really caused huge confusion in our culture. And this is destroying the family and destroying individuals and their ability to pair bond in their future families. Because we spend so much time emphasizing their individuality that we don't celebrate marriage.
• 23:21
  the gender dynamic, how beautiful this is, and their purpose behind the gender dynamic, which is for the health of their future families. And so how does this really work? How do you maximize in a marriage the maleness and the femaleness of the husband and the wife? And I think one way to think about this is that men are designed to really be world builders and women are designed to be world fillers.
• 23:45
  Part of what we want to do is a man builds a house, a wife fills it with children. A man builds a business and a wife fills it with values. A man builds a church and a wife fills it with loving relationships. She is really there to craft a certain kind of environment within a world that her husband is constructing and building. And so we want to really be thinking through how do we do that well together as a team? Now, even when a woman really wants to be a world builder or a man wants to be a world filler, well, that can be done.
• 24:14
  In other arenas outside the family, like in the marketplace, inside the family, it's really important to preserve God's original design of gender expression. Margaret Thatcher, who was the prime minister of the UK, she used to talk about this kind of famously, that when she was in the arena of prime minister of the UK, she was in an arena in which she was functioning in a more masculine role. When she was at home, she got to be a wife.
• 24:39
  we have really broken this frame and said, because you're an individual, it's not fair for when you're in the family, why can't you just bring into the family the same kinds of individual desires that you can bring out there? And because the family has a certain design and it's not infinitely malleable,
• 24:57
  Part of what we have learned is we have pushed up against the boundaries of the way God designed family. Family wasn't our idea. Family was God's idea. And because it was God's idea, we need to study the blueprint that he gave us and really understand how it works. And this is how we're going to figure out how to build the kind of healthy families that will last. And so going back to Adam Lane Smith's idea, is family a partnership? Yes, we need to
• 25:22
  Understand that it's a business partnership that every part of the productive way that God's designed our families to be a part of, our families, our marriages were designed to live and accentuate those elements within each family. And so if you guys want to study more about this, particularly when it comes to actual business, we have familyteams.com slash blueprint, a whole email course that is fantastic.
• 25:47
  free and that will walk you guys through how to become the kind of marriage that can build a business. We love coaching marriages that are really trying to figure out how can we help each other and work in integrated ways to build economically productive engines inside of our family. So if you're interested in that, go to familyteams.com slash blueprint. Thank you guys so much for listening this far. If you guys are interested, part four is coming. We're going to talk about the genesis of family. What was in God's heart?
• 26:13
  What was the original blueprint of family? What does the Bible say? We have completely lost this blueprint in the modern Western church. So we're going to talk about what that's all about. So stay tuned for part four.