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Family Teams Ep 5: Marriage as a Partnership · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  So what can the original Star Wars trilogy and the wife of Pontius Pilate teach us about the unique way that a family team builds a marriage?
• 0:10
  My name is Jeremy Pryor.
• 0:11
  This is episode number five on what is a family team?
• 0:14
  We're really diving into kind of the foundational elements.
• 0:17
  And so I want to talk about the idea of marriage,
• 0:20
  And what is the foundational understanding of marriage from Scripture?
• 0:23
  And if you're trying to transform your family from just a collection of individuals into a team, what does that look like?
• 0:31
  What's unique about a family team kind of marriage that we can find in Scripture and that we can build today?
• 0:39
  One of the things I hear constantly from people in the Christian world that are writing about marriage is they'll say things like, marriage is not there to make you happy.
• 0:48
  It's to make you holy.
• 0:49
  And probably the largest number of books in the last 10 to 20 years on marriage have really had this basic theme that basically marriage is so tough.
• 0:58
  So kind of miserable, so challenging, that maybe God's only reason for creating something that fails this often, creates this much misery, is to make us holy.
• 1:11
  I know that's not exactly the way that they put it, but that's kind of what you get from what a lot of these books are suggesting.
• 1:17
  And you can say that about anything, of course, that your kids are there not to make you happy or holy, or your terrible boss, he exists to make you holy or something.
• 1:26
  But marriage actually exists for a particular reason, and it's not just to make you holy.
• 1:31
  All of life has that feature, but it is there to create a certain kind of partnership so that you and your spouse can together create a certain kind of family.
• 1:43
  That's the purpose of marriage.
• 1:44
  Marriage is incredibly important.
• 1:46
  a beautiful design by God.
• 1:49
  It's highly functional.
• 1:50
  We have done a lot of damage to it, and so a lot of the reactions we're having is really coming from our definitions of marriage and not actually from its original design.
• 2:01
  So let's dive into what is a marriage intended to be originally, and we're going to go back to the book of Genesis and just really understand how the Bible talks about this.
• 2:10
  Now, my favorite phrase for trying to define the way the Bible seems to talk about marriage
• 2:15
  is it is designed to be a romantic partnership.
• 2:20
  In other words, it is about love, but it's about a kind of love that produces something.
• 2:25
  When you come together with your spouse, it's designed to create something, create something incredibly valuable.
• 2:32
  And of course, sex is the ultimate expression and also metaphor for all of marriage.
• 2:38
  You do something because you love the other person, something that you enjoy, and what comes out is the most valuable result you can possibly imagine.
• 2:45
  Of course, in this case, children.
• 2:46
  So that is how God designed marriage, and that's how incredible a design it is.
• 2:51
  It is so well designed.
• 2:54
  But we have done enormous damage to this institution and our culture.
• 2:58
  And so we're trying to figure out, going back to original blueprints in Scripture, what did God design this to be?
• 3:04
  So I think that part of the way that we often have this conversation is, okay, what
• 3:11
  Either God designed men and women to be equal, and this is kind of a modern political lens on marriage, where we're asking the question, assuming that men and women want very different things, how do we negotiate this very difficult dynamic within marriage?
• 3:28
  So one way to negotiate it is—
• 3:30
  to say, well, we're kind of equal and we have to negotiate everything.
• 3:35
  And so you've got that perspective, kind of the egalitarian perspective.
• 3:39
  Then there's what people are referring to as more like the complementary or more of a patriarchal perspective where the male has headship or they have more responsibility in the marriage.
• 3:50
  And so all of this is being seen, it seems like primarily through the lens of looking at the power dynamic in the marriage as if that power dynamic is the main element.
• 3:59
  thing to consider as opposed to what the marriage is actually designed to produce.
• 4:03
  So we don't have these kinds of conversations around other dynamics, right?
• 4:07
  We don't constantly debate whether or not there should be co-coaches or a head coach of a football team.
• 4:12
  We're not constantly debating whether or not there should be co-CEOs or a single CEO.
• 4:16
  We're not constantly debating whether or not we should have multiple presidents or a clear president.
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  What we're primarily trying to figure out is something else, which is how do we win the football game?
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  Like, how do we grow the business?
• 4:27
  How do we govern the country?
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  Like, it's what this leadership structure is designed to produce that actually is the focus.
• 4:35
  The problem, you guys, is that we have completely lost the plot when it comes to family.
• 4:39
  And so now we're focusing almost all of our attention on the power dynamic of the leadership of the family instead of what it's designed to produce.
• 4:47
  And once you shift that perspective back to what it's trying to produce, these kinds of power conversations are far less important.
• 4:55
  What really matters is how did God design this thing, and what is it designed to produce, and how do we as a married team work?
• 5:03
  How do we participate with what God's actually doing?
• 5:05
  And so we're going all the way back to the book of Genesis.
• 5:08
  We looked at Genesis 1.28 about how God created the first family to be fruitful, multiply, philosophy, and rule.
• 5:13
  You should definitely check out our videos on that in episode three and episode four.
• 5:17
  But episode five, we need to get into this thing that happens in Genesis 2, where God looks at Adam and says, it's not good for this guy to be alone.
• 5:25
  And then we get this really loaded phrase, probably one of the most important things you could possibly try to understand or translate to get down to the root of what we're talking about today, which is the purpose of marriage.
• 5:36
  He says, I will make a helper suitable for him.
• 5:40
  Now, whatever you believe, I think a lot of the pressure has not been trying to understand what these words are all about because, again, we're not focused on what the marriage is designed to produce.
• 5:52
  We're primarily focused on the power dynamic within the marriage.
• 5:54
  How can we get our rights?
• 5:56
  How can we get what we want, assuming that we both want very different things?
• 6:00
  Now that happens a lot in marriages today because of the way family is structured.
• 6:03
  But what we're starting from a different premise in this conversation, we're starting from the premise that you and your spouse are trying to build a family team.
• 6:11
  And so this really interesting phrase, a helper suitable, the word that actually is most surprising there is the word for suitable.
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  Kinegno is the Hebrew word.
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  It's a very unusual word.
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  It usually means against in most contexts when it's being translated.
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  But that wouldn't make much sense to translate it that way in this context, in Genesis 2, a helper against him.
• 6:34
  But that's literally what it says.
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  And I think what we're trying to understand is, what's the best way to understand this concept that...
• 6:42
  these words together are trying to get at.
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  A helper opposed to him.
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  Some people have said a helper who's aligned with him, but from a different perspective.
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  That there's something opposite, something against.
• 6:54
  And the deeper you go in trying to understand the fact that every wife is designed to oppose her husband,
• 7:01
  in a really dynamic way, but in a way that helps him.
• 7:05
  In other words, helps them be productive, helps them accomplish the mission of the family that we talked about, to be fruitful, multiply, feel subdued, and rule.
• 7:12
  To do that, guys, you need a wife who is helping you through opposing you.
• 7:18
  That's literally what it says.
• 7:20
  And I think this is a really beautiful thing.
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  If you are committed to that mission together,
• 7:25
  And if she's trying to help you, but she sees things from a different perspective.
• 7:29
  Now this of course gives rise to the reality that when you have two people trying to build the same thing, but they have very different perspectives, you have to have a way of working out that dynamic.
• 7:39
  You have to have a way of making that a positive,
• 7:42
  part of the dynamic of your relationship and not a constant negative.
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  If the husband thinks, in a sense, I'm the leader, I'm in charge, and everything I say goes, and my wife's only job is to just submit to me and not oppose me, not push back,
• 7:58
  then of course you're going to be very confused about why God designed marriage this way, because she's designed to oppose you.
• 8:04
  But if you're a wife listening to this saying, yeah, that's my job.
• 8:06
  I want to oppose him, oppose him, oppose him.
• 8:09
  But you're doing that in a way that doesn't actually help him, doesn't help the family.
• 8:12
  Then you're also violating the basic design of marriage.
• 8:15
  A helper opposed to him, a helper suitable.
• 8:18
  And this is the way in which a wife is uniquely suitable to her husband.
• 8:22
  And so that brings up how to work this out in our context.
• 8:26
  One of my favorite examples of this was the Star Wars films.
• 8:31
  So I'm a huge lover of the Star Wars original trilogy.
• 8:36
  And growing up in the 80s where this was, everybody was just in love, just watching how deeply those original three films impacted my generation.
• 8:48
  But one of the things that I didn't know until later was that
• 8:52
  George Lucas, who was the writer and producer and director of some of the films, he also had other directors, depending on which film it was.
• 9:01
  This was really his, you know, he is the creative father of the whole Star Wars universe, and he was the one who really drove those films into completion.
• 9:13
  However, he happened to be married to a woman who was...
• 9:18
  possibly one of the top, if not the top, editor in all of Hollywood at the time, Marsha Lucas.
• 9:25
  Marsha Lucas edited American Graffiti, which was George Lucas's other major accomplishment before he got to Star Wars.
• 9:33
  That's why he was able to get a studio to sign on to Star Wars.
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  Marsha Lucas was editing for Martin Scorsese.
• 9:40
  She is an extremely talented editor.
• 9:44
  And she was spending so much time cutting Star Wars and working and helping with the Empire Strikes Back.
• 9:51
  And ultimately, they lost their marriage while the Return of the Jedi was coming out.
• 9:56
  And so it's a tragic story.
• 9:57
  But one of the things that's really interesting about the Marsha and George Lucas dynamic was that Marsha Lucas was the one person who was capable of really opposing George Lucas.
• 10:09
  And so a lot of people talked about her incredible skill at editing, how she made these films feel very emotionally human.
• 10:16
  Like she was able to bring a sense of those like relational emotional connections to those original first three films that you just didn't feel existed in the prequels in the same way.
• 10:27
  And a lot of people were asking, well, how did this happen?
• 10:30
  And so you get something like Jar Jar Binks, which just felt very tone deaf.
• 10:35
  And what people were saying about the production of those three films that felt so different was nobody could oppose George.
• 10:43
  Nobody could push back on him properly.
• 10:46
  There wasn't as much a collaborative effort.
• 10:49
  Everyone was sort of in awe of George.
• 10:51
  And so because of that, when he would get excited about something, everybody else got excited about it.
• 10:56
  So it just turned into this very kind of group think fest.
• 10:59
  And...
• 11:00
  Why didn't that happen to the first three films that they produced?
• 11:03
  And it seems like one of the main reasons was he had a wife at the time who was very talented, and she was a helper opposed to him.
• 11:14
  She was able to oppose him and stop him from implementing some of his worst ideas and encourage him to implement many of his best ideas.
• 11:24
  And this is such a beautiful dynamic that they had.
• 11:27
  And it's sad because one of the questions I'm...
• 11:29
  you know, forced to ask is what kinds of films would we have gotten after the original trilogy had they stayed married and continued to work as a team?
• 11:41
  If somebody could oppose George, even those three prequels, what would have happened to those films had Marsha Lucas been involved?
• 11:48
  And a lot of the folks who were involved in that, they've pointed to this very thing,
• 11:53
  And so this is an illustration to say that this is a really important part of marriage that God created.
• 11:58
  And you see this also in Scripture.
• 12:00
  There's a really interesting moment where Jesus is being tried for his supposed crimes of blasphemy that the Pharisees and the Sanhedrin were putting forth to Pilate, the governor over Judea at the time.
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  And Pilate is sitting here and becoming very aware that they are just jealous of Jesus—
• 12:22
  and that he's likely innocent of these charges.
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  And so he's struggling with, how do I get out of this situation?
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  When all of a sudden he gets a note from his wife.
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  And I find this so interesting, this little detail in the Gospels.
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  And she writes to him, have nothing to do with that innocent man.
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  I've been suffering because of a dream because of him.
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  And one of the questions I've often wondered is, why...
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  Why is that in the Bible?
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  And why did God send dreams to Pilate's wife when he was going through this process?
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  Why is she the only one who opposed him?
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  And so if you think about why is anybody who has the power to rule, why are they worthy of that incredible responsibility?
• 13:12
  Yeah.
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  There are so many people that can suffer under their leadership.
• 13:15
  When George Lucas has all of this power to determine exactly how the films go, you've got potentially 100 millions of dollars at stake in this franchise.
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  Somebody needs to oppose that brilliant creative in order for the best to come out.
• 13:32
  Or Pilot, who is a governor, somebody needs to have the ability to oppose him.
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  And even though he has tremendous power, there's one person who could write a note to him saying, have nothing to do with that innocent man.
• 13:42
  This is the incredible gift God gave men and their wives, and the skill that every single wife has to learn is how to oppose her husband in a way that helps him.
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  That is the first and main dynamic that has to be cultivated properly in any functional marriage that's trying to produce all the things we're talking about in family teams.
• 14:04
  Be fruitful, multiply, fill, subdue, and rule requires a two-part team
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  And it requires a husband with a vision, a husband who has got a lot of power, a lot of authority, to craft a house the way that he believes God's calling him to.
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  And how is it safe for children to exist in a house where a man has that much power?
• 14:26
  Is it safe?
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  And the answer is, it's only made safe if he has a wise, loving wife who is on board with the vision—
• 14:36
  She is submitting to the mission.
• 14:38
  She's submissive to that mission.
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  She's under the mission.
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  That's what submissive literally means.
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  However, she's also opposed to him in a way that helps him, helps the vision.
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  So that's the dynamic that God has created.
• 14:52
  And I think that one of the most important things that you can do is create a situation within your marriage where this kind of helpful opposition is something that you invite.
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  So one of the things that businesses do, for example—
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  is they want this kind of really helpful, almost, they really talk about it as constructive conflict to happen within a business.
• 15:16
  And so in order to do that, they create this arena or constructive conflict called a meeting.
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  And a lot of times we don't love meetings in businesses because, oh, like they can be long and they can be difficult.
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  However, if you don't have meetings, you are not getting the collective wisdom of the opposition of all the different groups.
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  stakeholders, and also people with different gifts.
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  It's not just about getting your preferences met.
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  It's not about like representatives trying to negotiate to get what they want.
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  Everyone in a business should be focused on the same goal.
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  We're all trying to do the same thing.
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  The difference is we all have different...
• 15:55
  positions or different opinions or different gifts or different perspectives.
• 15:59
  And so in order to harness all of those perspectives, we create a meeting.
• 16:03
  And this is why we're such a big fan of families having regular meetings, particularly the husband and wife crafting an arena in which you are asking for the opposition.
• 16:14
  Otherwise, your wife sort of feels like it's bottling up, bottling up, and then it sort of explodes when she can't hold it in anymore.
• 16:21
  And a lot of times, husbands need to be aware of that dynamic, that their wife, there's a reason she wants to share this with you.
• 16:29
  It was okay for Pilate's wife to send him this note.
• 16:34
  Like, their marriage needed to exist in a way in which that was a possibility.
• 16:38
  And I think about this as a really good illustration of the,
• 16:43
  the kind of opposition.
• 16:44
  The meeting is one example.
• 16:46
  Another example that I really like is the relationship the president of the United States has with the press.
• 16:53
  So in America, we have the First Amendment, which guarantees the freedom of the press.
• 16:59
  And the idea is, how can you give all of this power to a president
• 17:04
  and have them not constantly abusing that power.
• 17:08
  That's always a risk, and that's always something that we're trying to understand.
• 17:12
  Is that happening?
• 17:12
  How do we fight against that?
• 17:13
  And we have all kinds of checks and balances, but one of the most important checks on the power of the presidency is the press.
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  And if presidents could get rid of the press, many of them would.
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  They would say, like, I hate the media.
• 17:26
  They say negative things.
• 17:27
  They're always opposing me.
• 17:28
  However...
• 17:30
  We have a system that says you have to deal with it.
• 17:32
  You have to allow for the press to be free and criticize you.
• 17:36
  And if it's functioning the way it ought to function, then it's good for the press to share other perspectives that are helpful for the country to consider, for the president to consider, for the president's cabinet to consider.
• 17:51
  And you don't want to crush that.
• 17:54
  If presidents had the choice, many of them would probably destroy the press.
• 17:58
  and say, all right, great.
• 18:00
  Now, people are only ever getting one perspective, my perspective, and that's it.
• 18:05
  And that would not make for a better country in the same way that would not make for a better family.
• 18:10
  Your wife needs to send you regular press releases about how you're doing.
• 18:15
  I get these press releases on an almost daily basis in the form of text messages where April will just text me, hey, this is going on with this kid, or this is happening at the house, or I'm getting a flow of constant feedback on things that I can work on, things that I need to consider.
• 18:33
  She is being very helpful to the vision, but she is a much more sensitive early warning system to a lot of the things that I care about.
• 18:41
  And I could just say, hey, be quiet.
• 18:44
  I just want to hear only encouraging, positive things.
• 18:48
  But I need to hear these challenging things.
• 18:51
  We need to create an arena where she's free to send me these messages, that I respond to them, that she's becoming skilled at making sure that they're helpful.
• 19:01
  Like it's not super helpful if the tone is really attacking and undermining or demeaning.
• 19:05
  That's not helpful.
• 19:06
  That actually hurts my ability to lead the family.
• 19:09
  But there is an incredibly beautiful dynamic that can happen between a husband and a wife where she's being a helpmate suitable or opposed to him so that he can hear these messages and they can be implemented.
• 19:22
  I think Jordan Peterson was the one who once said that if you think about any family...
• 19:28
  A husband and a wife together make one almost sane person.
• 19:33
  And I think that's a really important thing to keep in mind.
• 19:35
  Each one of us has so many blind spots that God loved us, that God loved our children, and that God loved this thing called the family enough to say, it's not good enough for there just to be one of you.
• 19:47
  and for the children of that family to be subjected to the blind spots and to the character flaws of just one person.
• 19:55
  I'm going to make sure that there are two of you, that there is a dynamic and opposing relationship that you have with each other,
• 20:02
  And that together, you can make up for a lot of those blind spots and a lot of those deficiencies.
• 20:07
  And that's God's beautiful design of marriage.
• 20:10
  But again, it's designed to produce something.
• 20:13
  And so we're going to go deeper and deeper into what is the family designed to produce.
• 20:17
  But it's first of all, you've got to create the kind of marriage that is a romantic partnership.
• 20:22
  Yes, you came together because you were attracted to each other, because you love each other.
• 20:26
  You want to build and deepen the romantic love bond between the husband and the wife, but you also want to be a partnership, which means that you need to do productive things.
• 20:36
  You need to accomplish the mission that God has for the family.
• 20:39
  Right.
• 20:40
  Hopefully this is helpful.
• 20:40
  If you guys want to dive deeper into how we think about family at Family Teams and what is this paradigm shift of thinking about family like a team instead of just a collection of individuals, go to familyteams.com slash transform.
• 20:52
  And we have a quick little mini course for you so you can go through the paradigm shifts that we're talking about.
• 20:56
  And you can also just look at this whole series that I'm doing here on YouTube and our podcast where I'm going through all the foundational elements.
• 21:04
  So this was episode five.
• 21:05
  Stay tuned and next for episode six.