Hey friends, welcome to week one of the Heartwork for Couples.
When I say I'm so excited about this, I've been wanting to do this course for a really
long time.
And so if you're new to me, welcome to me.
I'm Jackie Dorman, and I'm so honored that you're here with me.
Over the next four weeks, we're going to let God do what only he can do.
He's going to heal your hearts, he's going to strengthen your unity, he's going to deepen
your connection with each other and restore the places in your marriage that have been
tired, tender, or maybe just tested, maybe just been through a lot since you got married.
Now this isn't counseling and it definitely isn't just self-help, but it is going to be
transformational.
This is where you and your spouse get to step into a new rhythm of love and agreement.
And today, we're going to start with one of my favorite things, expectancy.
Expectancy has to be the foundation of your marriage.
And so ask yourself, what do you expect from love?
What do you expect from each other?
And possibly, maybe you should ask, what do you expect from God in the area of relationship?
Because here's the truth.
Every couple begins with hope.
That's what brought us together.
We're hopeful about each other.
But sometimes our hope has scar tissue because we've been through a lot.
We want to believe the best, but we've lived through the worst, all kinds of disappointment.
And because of that, we're already preparing for things to go wrong.
So let's talk about that today in our teaching.
Many of us learn to expect disappointment long before we ever met each other.
We learned it from childhood, possibly unsafe parents, past relationships.
Maybe you've been married before, or maybe you've just had your heart broken before by
a romance or maybe a friendship, a betrayal, abandonment, rejection.
I always say that relationships are for reasons and seasons and treasons, but that's caused
our emotions to shut down, to shut off a lot of times.
And we start carrying that disappointment into our marriage instead of expectancy.
But expectancy is not just an emotion.
I want you to know it's spiritual, it's prophetic, it's powerful.
Because faith and fear both require belief.
Think about it for a second.
They're both futures that we're agreeing with.
We're what if-ing on both fear and faith.
And so our imagination is what's coming into play, and we need to release our imagination
to God, because fear rehearses pain, but faith will rehearse your promises.
And here's the simple truth that will shift everything if you let it.
Your partner is not your past, but if you're not careful, your past can become the lens
that you're seeing your partner through.
And some of us are still making these people that we love, our partners, our spouses, pay
for old debts.
We're still making them prove to us that they love us because we expect rejection.
And when we expect to be hurt, we start interpreting everything that they do through that lens.
Maybe a look from across the room, either not even looking at us or looking through
us, right?
But we think that they gave us the stink eye.
We think that their tone of voice suddenly is evidence that they hate us now, when really
it's just human imperfection.
Everyone gets irritated.
Everyone gets annoyed.
It doesn't mean they hate you.
In chapter one of the book, we're talking about expecting not the worst, but expecting
the best of each other.
Because if you expect disappointment, you're going to find it.
I promise you, you're going to find whatever you're looking for.
But if you expect connection, what you will do is you'll begin to cultivate it.
If you expect irritation, you're going to find it because we're all going to be irritated
by marriage.
Marriage is hard, especially when your heart is hard and you cannot build intimacy with
a braced heart.
You can stay married, sure, but you can only function.
You're not going to flourish.
Not with a hard embraced heart, a heart that's bracing for disappointment.
It can survive, but it cannot thrive.
But God wants to change your posture from bracing for the other shoe to drop to believing
from suspicion to peace and from fear to expectancy.
Now let's talk about our marriage is getting a new lens.
That's what this first part of the heart work is all about because our marriages need to
have a clear and clean lens.
Every married person has a heart lens.
Every one of us does.
Unmarried people have them and they're full of memories and assumptions, probably beliefs
that are wrong and some that are right, past pain, old patterns, defense mechanisms, unhealed
childhood wounds, childhood imprints.
Without renewal, we're not going to see our spouse correctly.
We're going to see them through the fear and the rejection, the suspicion, insecurity,
the disappointment that is already all over our dirty heart lens.
And our partner becomes the screen that we're projecting our past onto, if that makes sense.
This is why Proverbs tells us above all else, everything that you do, make sure that you
guard your heart because everything flows from it.
Because the heart is not just an emotional center, it's an interpretive center.
It's a life giving center.
And what we decide in our heart is what we're going to have.
We decide with our heart, what things are going to turn into.
If your heart expects rejection,
then you're going to feel rejected even when your spouse is just simply maybe
tired that day. If your heart expects to be misunderstood,
you will interpret every single moment,
even if it's a neutral moment as an attack. And if your heart expects conflict,
you might not just find conflict.
You actually might create it even in calm seasons of your marriage.
And this is why God wants to renew your heart.
Because until that lens changes, love cannot be fully received by you.
And so we go on in these first three chapters to talk about shared surrender.
Chapter three is going to really take you there.
And I want to go deeper here in this teaching about shared surrender because
surrender and marriage is not about giving up.
It's about giving God permission to lead, not just one of you,
but both of you.
Because when both people surrender their hearts and surrender control,
surrender the fear of being vulnerable, possibly your assumptions,
something is going to shift. Shared surrender will say,
we don't have to know everything. We don't have to fix everything.
We just have to be in agreement with God and with each other.
And I know that sounds like a small thing, but agreement is powerful.
The Bible says if two of you agree and touch anything, it will be done.
Agreement is not just sameness. We're not alike all the time,
but it is alignment and alignment creates peace and peace will create safety
and safety is going to create more and more intimacy.
And this is why this first week is so foundational.
We cannot go further until you build this connection and connection cannot be
built on suspicion or fear.
It cannot be built on a braced heart for disaster.
It has to be braced on unity and God wants you to have unity.
And that's why this first week is about expectancy, hope,
faith and shared surrender.
I used to coach a couple who had been married for quite a bit.
I think they'd been married around 12 years and they thought their biggest
problem was communication. They were terrible communicators with each other.
But as I listened to a lot of their stories,
I realized it wasn't just communication. It was actually expectation.
He expected always to be criticized by her and she expected always to be
disappointed by him.
And that's why they weren't communicating well because they were responding to
the echoes of their past through each other, right?
He couldn't stand to be criticized.
He had a critical mom and she couldn't stand to be disappointed.
She had a disappointing dad. And because of those things,
I call it poking each other's orphan.
They came together and they were constantly not hitting on all cylinders.
They were constantly on different pages.
And so they were able to come together with that revelation and they were able
to truly communicate, not from a place of fear, but of true vulnerability.
So I want to activate you in this right now,
go ahead and close your eyes and take a moment.
Think about what you've been expecting in your marriage lately.
What do you expect your spouse to say before they even open their mouth?
And I want you to ask yourself, what am I afraid I'm going to repeat?
What am I afraid I am going to have happen again in my life that's happened
before?
What good thing can I expect from my spouse this week?
Take a couple minutes.
What do I need to release so that I can receive again?
Let's go ahead and pray. God, we need you to heal our heartlands.
We need your help to see each other through your eyes, Lord.
Replace suspicion with faith and fear with expectancy and teach us to believe
again. Believe in each other. Believe in marriage.
Believe in legacy and lineage.
Believe that goodness and mercy and love are pursuing us,
not just by you in the land of the living for other areas of our life,
but pursuing us in this relationship.
In Jesus name. Amen.
So this week I want you to make sure that you read all of part one chapters one
through three,
and then highlight every sentence that stirs something in you.
It's going to be those areas where God is inviting you to hope again.
Make sure that you complete your week one worksheet and don't forget to write
your hope declaration together. That's very important.
So set aside one night this week for a vision talk where you're going to dream
out loud,
talk about what your marriage means and what you still want to do and build
together. And then next week we're going to dive into what we call the heart
mirror.
That's where we're going to see what's really happening beneath the surface of
our hearts and letting God clean out fully the places that maybe we've been
ignoring.
All those troubled places in our marriage or maybe just in our relationships in
general with other people, friends, community.
Those are all
rooted. Those problems are not really the problem, those are symptoms of the
problem and so they're rooted somewhere. So next week we're gonna go deeper. It's
gonna be deep, it's gonna be freeing though and you're gonna feel so much
lighter afterwards. So I'll see you in week two. Ciao for now.