1. Without a clear and defined purpose (which we will from now on refer to as your DREAM) how can you expect your marriage to be all it can be? If you do not know where you are headed together as a couple, or what kind of legacy you want to leave through your children and moments of your marriage, then how can you expect to truly enjoy your marriage. Spending day after day in a bottomless pit of indecision, confusion, and lack of a dream will (or already has) take a huge toll on your marriage happiness and enjoyment.
1. “A man without a vision is a man without a future. A man without a future will always return to his past.” (P.K. Bernard)
2. Praying together about your Dream Statement
1. Prayer is an important element to this study being a successful experience. Prayer is also important on a global level as well for your relationship. Without prayer, your relationship is missing out on God's direction and encouragement. Prayer is our intimate time with God and it WILL draw you...

Tim and Nancy's story should inspire anyone about what it takes to stay committed to each other through "sickness and in health"!

Tim wrote:

Since 1979 I have lived with the consequences of a brain-based mental health challenge called bipolar disorder. Through these years I have experienced episodes of extreme mania, protracted periods of dark depression, as well as eruptions of psychosis.

Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, a leading authority and herself a diagnosed bipolar, clearly expresses the effects of this brain disorder in her book, “Touched with Fire.” She wrote that bipolar illness “encompasses the extremes of human experience. Thinking can range from florid psychosis, or ‘madness,’ to patterns of unusually clear, fast, and creative associations, to retardation [slowing down] so profound that no meaningful activity can occur.”* This very succinctly and accurately describes how I have often experienced bipolar disorder.

Hear their story through...

• Hebrews 10:23-25 “23 Let us hold tightly without wavering to the hope we affirm, for God can be trusted to keep his promise. 24 Let us think of ways to motivate one another to acts of love and good works. 25 And let us not neglect our meeting together, as some people do, but encourage one another, especially now that the day of his return is drawing near.”
• Live your life each day with a purpose, to stir one another to acts of love and good works.
• Why do you wake up each day? If you don’t ask yourself this question, you are purposeless which is like lifelessness.
• Community isn’t a story, it’s an experience and filled with story after story after story. It’s why I came here for my surgery.
  • I knew I would be
    • Loved
    • Not judged
    • Encouraged
    • Filled with hope
• God’s plan for your life is to wake up each day and…
  • Choose hope (v23)
    • Because he is a promise keeper, and there is nothing we need to fear
    • But this isn’t the kind of hope...

1. Relentless Grace
1. No matter how far you run away or how disobedient you are, God still loves you and bathes you with His unending grace
2. Phillip Holmes wrote, “He’s not ignorant of all the ways we’ve sinned against him. He knows everything we’ve ever done and is able to stomach it. His knowledge of who we really are will never hinder his love for us. He’s even aware of the evil behind our righteous deeds. The intimacy by which the Lord knows us but is able to lovingly embrace us as his children is supernatural. God’s grace is mind-blowing. Every time I think of this reality, I’m brought to tears because I serve a God whose love and grace baffle me.” https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/gods-grace-is-mind-blowing
3. I blatantly rejected the voice of the Holy Spirit
1. Heaviest - 138 kilograms
2. I’ve lost 18 kilograms in three weeks
3. No pain, no recovery, no problems of any kind!
4. Joel 2:12-14 'But there’s also this, it’s not...

Today we are talking about sex, possibly one of the greatest gifts outside of eternal life God ever gave humankind! To help us with this conversation, Dave Willis of strongermarriages.com, is going to lend his expertise...and trust me, this guy has millions of readers, likes, and more.

Coming up next we talk about the 4 things every couple needs to know about sex.

About Dave and Ashley Willis (www.strongermarriages.com)

• Almost 1 million likes on their Facebook page!
  • https://www.facebook.com/strongermarriages/
• Millions of readers on their blog
• Pastor at Stevens Creek Church near Augusta, Georgia
• Authors of The 7 Day Marriage Challenge (Husband edition and Wife edition)

4 things every couple needs to know about sex

• Where do you come up with all this great content?
• Who was your inspiration to get into marriage ministry?
• What’s the worst fight you and Ashley have had?

1. Most MEN see sex as a form of stress relief while most WOMEN need stress relief BEFORE they can be in...

1. The health of your emotional relationship

1. If you don’t feel loved, you don’t want to show love

2. The specific things you are doing to kill your sexual intimacy

1. Invalidation

1. How you respond to your spouse matters.

2. Lack of affirmation

3. Negative beliefs

3. Here’s how you eliminate them

1. Invalidation

1. Start to validate each other

2. Empathize

2. Lack of affirmation

1. Make a list of what you appreciate about your spouse (you can do this on our app)

2. Don’t wait till you feel like affirming your spouse, do it because it is the right thing to do. Your spouse isn’t pure evil!

3. Negative beliefs

1. Ask questions

2. Assume the best instead of the worst all the time

Each one of these fixes takes important choices.  Stop acting like a victim and do the right thing regardless of whether your spouse deserves it.

If you want to catch up on the previous episodes of the series, Tonight, then click here: ...

1. Initiate don’t hesitate… “So slide over here; And give me a moment; Your moves are so raw; I've got to let you know; I've got to let you know; You're one of my kind…”

2. “Honestly, do you really even need a list?” so said my 20 yr old daughter!

3. Be open to change and creativity.

4. Build excitement and anticipation.

5. Serve up a five star meal, meat and potatoes or a fast food meal.

6. Enjoy sex with him, because he truly desires your pleasure too!

7. Stop criticizing him for being a man, sex is not just for pleasure, it is also his way to bond with you and connect emotionally.

8. Leave the lights on for a possible change, men tend to be visually stimulated.

9. Be affirming.

10. Plan sex.  That’s right, talk with your husband and discover how many times he’d enjoy having sex in a month and what kinds of things he enjoys.

 If you have missed any of the previous episodes, just click here.

How to survive the drive!

1. Keep it positive
1. Give each other the benefit of the doubt
2. Are you really supposed to blow everything off?
1. No, you can’t really, but before you say anything
1. Ask yourself, “Is this a life or death issue?”
2. “Could I be judged for the same thing?”
3. In the heat of the moment, should you wait, even if it’s just five minutes?
4. What’s my goal in saying anything...Shame? Apology? Correct?
2. In order to survive the drive, chill, take a breath, and keep these questions front and center if anything comes up.

• This is actually not that difficult! It begins and ends with placing high value and honoring your wife.  Make her #1 and sex is an outpouring of how much she feels loved!
• Be a great dad! Sounds sick, but trust us, it does the trick!
• Overwhelm her with affirmation about her life, her looks, and her future.
• It’s old advice, but it is still true today.  Be a listener.  If you are a typical man who loves to solve problems, it doesn’t necessarily work with your wife.  Most times she just wants to be heard and validated.
• Ask her the trillion dollar question…”What are things I could do for you that really help you get in the mood?”  Then do those things out of a desire to server her, not get sex!
• Clean, the Mr. Clean commercial couldn’t be more real (at least for most women). https://youtu.be/GDzMxlw2Fgo
• Be thoughtful. Look for opportunities to do loving things for your wife on a weekly basis (daily ultimately)....

1. What kind of boundaries does the bible give around sex and marriage?
1. Be honoring, kind, serving, patient….loving!
2. That’s it!
3. Leviticus 18:6-23
1. 6 “‘No one is to approach any close relative to have sexual relations. I am the Lord.
2. “‘Do not dishonor your father by having sexual relations with your mother. She is your mother; do not have relations with her. “‘Do not have sexual relations with your father’s wife; that would dishonor your father. 9 “‘Do not have sexual relations with your sister, either your father’s daughter or your mother’s daughter, whether she was born in the same home or elsewhere. 10 “‘Do not have sexual relations with your son’s daughter or your daughter’s daughter; that would dishonor you. 11 “‘Do not have sexual relations with the daughter of your father’s wife, born to your father; she is your sister. 12 “‘Do not have sexual...