Why Does A Strong Marriage Start By Letting Go Of The Past

Your marriage doesn’t drift into strength. It gets built, and it gets protected. We continue our Home Security series by going back to Genesis 2 and asking a question that cuts through every cultural slogan: what did God actually intend marriage to be? From the first wedding in Scripture, we see a pattern that still holds up under modern pressure, disappointment, and distraction. 

We walk through the hard but freeing “leave” that must happen for a healthy marriage. That means more than moving out. It means breaking unhealthy dependence on parents, refusing to let extended family outrank your spouse, and ending the quiet competition that makes husbands feel inadequate and wives feel insecure. We also talk about leaving what’s behind you: former relationships, old comparisons, and even the places and seasons you keep reliving. If we keep romanticizing the past, we starve the relationship right in front of us. 

Then we get practical about the baggage that follows people into marriage: grudges, grief, and guilt. Resentment eats a home from the inside. Unresolved sorrow can turn destructive. Secret guilt blocks trust and intimacy. The turning point is forgiveness, and we point clearly to the gospel of Jesus Christ as the only real cleansing for sin and shame. From there, we move to “cleave” as committed, glue-like faithfulness that creates security, making one-flesh intimacy possible and lasting. 

If this encouraged you, subscribe so you don’t miss the rest of the series, share this with a friend who needs hope, and leave a review so more families can find biblical teaching that strengthens marriages.

Transcript

Mission And Series Introduction

SPEAKER_01 0:00

You're listening to Foundations of Truth, the radio and podcast ministry of Firm Foundation. Our mission is to help you build your life on the unshakable foundation of God's Word, rooted in Scripture, anchored in the grace of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Today we continue our series, Home Security. God's protection plan for the family. We're asking a foundational question. What did God actually intend marriage to be? Not what culture says, not what experience has turned it into, but what God originally designed. Here now is Dr. Timothy Mann.

Leave Parents To Build Unity

Release Old Relationships And Comparisons

Stop Living In Past Places

Let Go Of Grudges Grief Guilt

SPEAKER_00 0:33

And so Genesis chapter 2, verses 15, and we're going to read all the way down through verse 25. We are beginning a new sermon series. It is home security, God's protection plan for the family. I'll be referencing that along the way. The Bible says, Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat. For the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die. And the Lord God said, It is not good that man should be alone. I will make a helper comparable to him. Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, every bird of the air, and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them. And whatever Adam called each living creature, that was its name. And so Adam gave names to all the cattle, to the birds of the air, to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper comparable to him. And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and he slept. And he, meaning God, took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh in its place. Then the rib which the Lord God had taken from man he made into a woman, and he brought her to the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man. And therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife. And they shall become one flesh. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed. We'll stop there. This is God's word. Now let me give you some thoughts here. Some things we must let go of as we think about God's design for the family, for marriage, God's original design. Some things we have to let go of. Number one, first of all, you must give up. You must leave. You must give up, let go of parents. Now that's obvious. Because it says, for this reason a man will leave his father and mother. So there's a leaving that is to be done. Now it's true for ladies, too. That's just the generic word here. It's true. You need to leave your parents. And he's not just talking about geography. Specifically, he's talking about leaving psychologically, leaving relationally. The word here, leaving, literally means to break your dependence. To break your dependence. That's what it means. It means to cut the emotional umbilical cord. Your relationship to your parents changes the moment you're married, no doubt about it. God says it. Just like a brand new baby cannot live if the cord is not cut from the mother. A marriage cannot make it if you don't psychologically leave your parents. You can live next door to your parents and see them every day and be psychologically independent, relationally independent. You absolutely can. Or they can live 3,000 miles away on the other side of the country and you can still be dependent on them. I've seen this problem over and over. As a senior pastor, folks who come to me for marriage counseling, I hear about spouses who'll never make a decision without first calling up mommy and daddy. And that's even, they're already in their 40s and 50s. Or every single time, every time they have a day off, they spend it at their parents' house. Or every time they have a holiday, they always go home. And they don't build any traditions themselves in their own marriage, in their own family. Or anytime they have a problem, they call their parents. What is it that God is saying here in this verse? He's saying that your spouse, listen to me, he's saying that your spouse should not have to compete with your parents. It's unrealistic. It's not God's way. It puts all kinds of pressure on a marriage. And it makes wives feel insecure. It makes husbands feel inadequate. So let go of parents. Let go of parents. You know what? Adam and Eve really had an ideal marriage because they didn't have any relatives to interfere. When your obligations, when your obligations to your extended family take priority over your own marriage, you're in trouble. And let me flip this a little bit. If you are parents of adult kids who are married, don't pressure them to be dependent on you. Cut the kids loose. Don't force them to come to your house every holiday. Don't force them to come to your house every vacation. They need to leave you. Now, I'm adding some other leaving here. Because I've seen it, it's principles all throughout the Bible, and I've seen it so much in marriage counseling over these last 27 years. So, number one, you've got to let go of parents. Number two, you're going to have to let go of other people in the past. You're going to have to let go of other people in the past. Let go of other people, other relationships, other friends, brothers and sisters, other people you've held on to. Maybe a former boyfriend or girlfriend, maybe a former spouse. You not only let go of parents, but you let go of other people in your past. Listen, contrary to, and I'm going to show my age a little bit here, contrary to Willie Nelson and Julio Oglesius, you've got to forget all the girls you've loved before. They've got to be in the past. You've got to do that. You've got to let them go. Forget them. They're gone. It's all out of the way. Focus on your relationship with your spouse. And look, if you don't let go of other people, you're going to fall into the trap of comparison. Old relationships start looking better. When things start going wrong in your marriage, when you begin to have some difficulties, some challenges, and you will, when the new wears off a little bit and that happens, a couple cycles through over the years. When things start going wrong in your marriage, you start thinking, well, if he or she was only like whoever. Well, if I hadn't broken off that relationship. Or maybe I should have married that person. Isn't it interesting how we have selective forgetting? And we tend to forget the problems that we had in those relationships and why we ended them in the first place. Let go of those people. This is the grass is greener myth. You know what I'm talking about? When you're over here, the grass is greener over there. When you're over there, the grass is greener over here. Frank Fried said one time, the grass is not greener on that side of the fence, and the grass is not greener on that side of the fence, the grass is greener where you water it. The grass is greener where you water it. And what you need to do is stop comparing and start cultivating. Stop comparing your mate to everybody else. Oh, if he or she were more like whatever. You need to stop comparing and start cultivating. You water your relationship and you watch it grow, you watch it develop, you watch it expand and become all that God wants it to be. God is saying that the first thing you have to do is leave. You have to let go. Marriage is an exclusive relationship, it takes priority over everything else except your relationship to God through Jesus Christ. Everything else. It's the most important thing in your life next to your relationship to God if you're married. It's even more important than your relationship to your children. Your marriage is the most important relationship. Men, not your career, not your hobby, not anything else. Some of us still need to quit chasing the Almighty Dollar. There are some men that was a lot more concerned about their career than they were with their relationship with their wife or their children, and now you're paying the price for it. You lost them. Listen, they need a spiritual leader at home. And the most precious commodity you have is time. You can always make more money, but you can't make more time. Because you only have so many days allotted to you, and once you've wasted one, it's gone. All other relationships must take second place, especially the ones in the past. Especially the ones in the past. It's kind of like, oh, I hate to even say this joke. It's so corny. But it's funny, though. It's kind of like the lady who went through four marriages. First, she married a millionaire, then she married a film producer, then she married a butler, and then she married a funeral director. Someone asked her why. She said, I married one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready, and four to go. Yeah, I know that's corny, wasn't it? But you've got to let go. That's the idea. You let go of parents. Cut the umbilical cord. Let go of other people in your past. And number three, you've got to let go of other places. You've got to let go of other places. Sometimes I hear, oh, my husband or my wife lives in the past. All he or she wants to talk about was what happened in high school or what happened in college, what home was like back then. How many of you know we have a tendency to idealize our hometowns? We make them larger than life. Larger than life. Let's face the facts. The good old days are over and they weren't really all that good in the first place. Not really. There were a lot of problems in the good old days. We just don't tend to remember them. And if you tend to hold on to places in your past and your spouse was not born in your hometown or didn't go to your college or whatever. Listen, it's amazing to me the number of adult people, in my age even, in my 50s, who need to get over high school, who need to get over college. Listen, it's over. Some of it, listen, you're not the prom queen anymore. Look in the mirror. Buddy, you're not the captain of the football team anymore. You know how I know that? Because you're just like me. Your belt line has to keep getting lower. You're not the captain of the football team anymore. And you're you're always, when you're doing that with your wife or your husband, it's like you're saying, This is a part of my life that you'll never be able to experience. You wouldn't understand it. You had to be there. You have to live in the present. You have to live in the present. God is saying, wherever the two of you are right now, that's home. That's home. Your home is where you and your spouse are right now. You have to make that your home, not some icon way back there in the past. Let go of parents, let go of other people, let go of places in the past, and then let go of problems. Let go of problems. I'm gonna just have to hit some highlights here. But listen, you have to let go of problems from your past. Your marriage is going to have enough problems on its own today. You don't need to drag in old ones from the past to help it out.

SPEAKER_01 12:08

If this teaching is helping you see God's truth about marriage more clearly, we want you to know foundations of truth is made possible by listeners like you. When you give, you help us continue bringing clear biblical teaching into homes across the country. You can give securely at firm-foundations.org. Now back to more of today's message on God's original design for marriage.

Cleave Through Commitment And Security

Following Jesus Changes The Odds

Two Commitments And Closing Prayer

SPEAKER_00 12:30

And let me quickly list three problems specifically that I'm thinking of problems you need to let go of. It's excess baggage. Number one, you need to let go of grudges. That's a problem. Grudges. And that's important to any relationship. But you need to let go of grudges. That's a past problem. And there are a few things that will destroy a relationship or a marriage quicker than resentment. Resentment. It eats you alive. It causes us to react to our past. And when you say, Oh, I would never be like that person who did that to me, what are you doing? Well, you're focusing on them. And when you say, I could never forgive that person, what are you doing? You're allowing them to bother you today. Some of you are still allowing people to hurt you in your past that hurt you in your past, you're allowing people that hurt you in your past to hurt you today. And that's not helpful. I know from personal experience. Your past is over. It's finished. And your past cannot hurt you unless you choose to allow it to hurt you. If you keep on resenting and you keep on grudging, you're carrying on, on your own accord, you're carrying on hurt into the present. Let it go. It's bad for your marriage. It's bad for relationships. Number two, you've got to let go of grief. Grief. Everybody experiences sorrow. Everybody experiences loss. We all do. It's natural, it's normal to sorrow. But what is unnatural is when mourning turns into moaning and self-pity. That's unnatural. Grief is normal, but if you hold on to it, it becomes destructive and it starts to eat you away. And you start saying things like, Oh, I'll never be happy again. No matter what my husband does, I'm unpleasable. No matter what my wife does, she can never make me happy again because I will grieve over this for the rest of my life. Listen, you will destroy your entire family because you refuse to let go of your grief. This is a hard fact of life, but it's a fact we would all do well to learn. You have to accept what cannot be changed. You have to accept what cannot be changed. No matter how much you grieve, you cannot change the past. So you have to accept what cannot be changed. And there are some of you who need to focus on what's left, not what's been lost. Your family needs you to. Your husband needs you to. Your wife needs you to. Your children and grandchildren need you to focus on what's left, not what's been lost. So give up your grudges. Leave your grudges. Give up your grief, give up your guilt. Give up your guilt. That's number three of the problems. Many marriages die from secret guilt. If my spouse ever found out, I would just die. So as a result, I prevent my mate from ever getting to know me intimately because of this. They might find out this secret skeleton in the closet. So I never let them get close. Guilt destroys marriages, it ruins openness, it damages trust, it kills intimacy. Guilt does all kinds of terrible things. I've met people all the time who are torturing themselves and their marriages for things that happened even before they were married. And that's not fair to your spouse. There's only one solution: the gospel. The good news of Jesus Christ. Confession to the Lord Jesus Christ and forgiveness. We ask God for forgiveness. And we accept forgiveness from God. And then we offer forgiveness to others. Thank God for 1 John 1 9 that says if we confess our sins, He is faithful and He is just. And you know what can happen when that when you do that, all of a sudden I can feel clean again and I can enjoy the relationship. I don't have to feel dirty. I can enjoy today. I don't have to let the past manipulate the present. Thank God for forgiveness. Thank God for the forgiveness of Jesus Christ that was purchased and paid for on the cross of Calvary. Some of you listening today need to experience that forgiveness, that forgiveness of sin. And no good marriages, I'll tell you, no good marriages happen without forgiveness. It is one of the essentials to a good marriage. I mean, just ask Patty. I have to forgive her all the time. No, I mean, she has to forgive me all of the time. She has to constantly be forgiving toward me. Why? Well, because sometimes I intentionally hurt her. Sometimes I unintentionally hurt her. And you do the same. And forgiveness is the way you let go. So you let go of parents, you let go of people, you let go of places, and you let go of problems in the past. That's the letting go part. There's the hanging on part. I'm about done. Here's the hanging on part. A man will leave his father and mother and be joined. Old King James will cleave. Cleave to his wife. Cleave in the Hebrew, it literally means to glue together. To paste together. To adhere. It means to stick. It means like superglue. That's what it's about. That's what it means. Superglue. A man is super glued to his wife. And with the super glue, the bond becomes stronger than the two pieces you glued together. Does that make sense? That's what marriage is meant to be. That's what it's supposed to be about. If I were to take a piece of red paper and take a piece of blue paper and I were to put some glue on it, and I were to smash those pieces together and I allowed them to bond, it would be an illustration of what the Bible calls cleaving. It means glued together, a blending. And then, then, if I were to try to separate those two, some of the red would come off on the blue side, and some of the blue side would come up on the red side. And that's what happens in a separation. That's what happens in a divorce. That's why it's so painful. When you live with somebody, and then you separate, it literally says to both people, you leave a little bit of yourself behind. Sometimes a lot of yourself behind. And that's what happens. And then what do we do? Well, you go out to the singles bar and you try to show the good side, right? The unglued side. Then the other person who's been through a separation, they show the good side and they think each other's just wonderful. The problem is that they don't realize that there's scars on the back that hasn't been dealt with. To cleave. Listen to me, to cleave is an act of commitment. It means to say I do. The problem with marriages is that so many people who say I do don't. Instead of marrying for better or worse, we ought to marry for good. What's God saying? God is saying that good marriages are a result of choice, not chance. They don't just happen. They're a result of choices that you make. Good marriages are a result of commitments, not convenience. Some of you are already divorced. I'm not talking about your past. Your past is over. I'm talking about you're in a relationship right now. If you ever plan to be in a relationship, forget the past. The past is over. I'm talking about right now, make a commitment. If I ever marry again, or if I'm married right now, I will not divorce. Make that commitment. The only way a marriage will stay together is if you will it to stay together. It's an act of volition. You will it, you choose to make the marriage work, both of you. And it will work by the grace of God, with God's help, if you'll do what the word of God says, it'll work. It'll work. Whatever it takes, it's a matter of choice. Love is a choice. As we get into this series, we're going to be talking about some other things, about communication, about parenting. But the foundation, the foundation for the sake of your marriage, listen, lock the escape hatch and throw away the key. Throw away the key. Intimacy is built on security. Security. You can never be one flesh, intimately, totally with your spouse, if there's always the possibility in the background that there's an option of divorce. When the problems come, it's just too easy to walk out rather than face the problems, even though divorce is painful. So you leave and you cleave. Leaving and cleaving are the process, and the results are one flesh. A man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they'll become one flesh. He's talking about the blending of two lives. He's talking about much more than just physical union, although that's a very important and happy part of it. He's talking about total intimacy here. And it doesn't happen overnight, it's a process. You know, right now in the United States, one out of every two marriages ends in divorce. That's not very good odds. One guy said that he got married by the justice of the peace, and he's had neither since justice or peace. But now listen to me. Listen to me as I close. Seriously. In marriages, when they're married or saved and they're in the church, they attend every Sunday, they're involved in ministry together. The divorce rate, listen to me. The divorce rate is one out of every 1,100. That's a big difference. For people who are followers of Jesus Christ, not nominal Christians, not casual Christians who show up once every six weeks for an hour. Those who are involved, who are committed to Jesus, who are following, who are immersed in the life of the church. The divorce rate is one out of every 1100. That's the difference Jesus Christ makes. That's the difference following the Word of God makes. So what do you need to let go of? Do you need to let go of your parents? Parents, do you need to let go of your children, your adult married children who have kids? Do you need to let go of other people? Some of you are hanging on to a secret relationship. Do you need to let go of some past memories that you've been comparing your spouse to? Are you still allowing somebody in your past to hurt you now? Don't do it. Don't do it. Close it, shut it down. It's over. What do you need to forgive? Are you holding on to grief? Refusing to get on with your life. Marriage begins and ends with commitment, and it continues with commitment. And I want to challenge you to make two commitments today. First of all, you need to surrender your life to Jesus Christ if you've never done that. That's the most important reality. Not just for the sake of the now, but for the sake of your eternity. It's most important. Your eternal soul is in danger without Jesus Christ. Salvation and forgiveness only comes through Him. It doesn't matter what your background is. I'm not talking this morning about a religion. I'm talking about a genuine relationship, a real followship with Jesus Christ. You need Jesus today. He's the only one who can save your soul. He's the only one who can save your life. He's the only one that can take your marriage and save your family. He's the only one. And you make a commitment to Jesus Christ, you commit your life to Him. Number two, second commitment is cleave. Cleave. Commit to your spouse. Would you determine in your heart right now to cleave? Would you say right now, I eliminate the possibility of divorce? Some of you need to do that if you've never done that. If I'm married now, if I marry in the future, I will not marry with the option of divorce. Some of you are in your marriage now and you're under tension and you're under stress, and you need to say, I'll do whatever it takes. I'll pay whatever the cost. I think if you'll make those kind of commitments, you'll be well on your way to having the kind of family, the kind of home that the Lord wants you to have as revealed in his word. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for your word, that it's practical, that it applies to every area of our lives. It helps us when we're hurting. Thank you for teaching us through your word. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

SPEAKER_01 25:41

Thank you for joining us today for Foundations of Truth. Join us again tomorrow as we continue our series Home Security, God's Protection Plan for the Family. If you'd like to find out more about our ministry, you can find us online at firm foundations.org.