Hi everyone. I’m Sean McGuire and I wanna welcome you to the new version, Christian marriage counseling Oklahoma City live podcast, a place where we help you discover what better looks like for you. And then he equipped me with the tools and resources to create it. Well, today I wanted to talk to you about how to stand up and fight. And first I want to say many of us have lived most, if not all of our lives, not realizing that we weren’t a constant battle. You see, when we were born, we were born in between the tension of good and evil, God and Satan out of born in middle earth as Lord of the rings would say, where we have a devil who hates us and a God who loves us. And the greatest story of all time is the gospel where God sent his own son to die for us so that we could live for him eternally in paradise and love.
But then there’s this evil devil who’s out there to take us down. Now what does this have to do with us and the day and era that we live in today, especially in America. That’s a great question because most of us do not live with the constant awareness. Now we’re in a battle that we’re in a fight, that there is a real enemy that wants to take us, our marriages, our families or relationships take us out and nylon us wipe us out. And so if we don’t know that somebody out there to get us there, we’re not going to be prepared. We’re going to live ignorant of the fact that we need to have strategies. We need to realize that when we are under attack, we need to have abilities to take care of that in effective ways so that we’re not falling into the statistics of at least 50 plus people that get married.
We’ll also get divorced. It’s kind of how that works. Or there’s over a half of people cheat when they get married, especially men. And you know, statistics can be massaged to go lower or higher. But that’s a great number that I found to be fairly consistent throughout my 25 plus years of Christian marriage counseling Oklahoma City. And so what I think is helpful is to start with acknowledging, accepting that we are in a battle and that we need to be prepared. We need to be prepared to fight. So a great way to start is to determine where you’re at today. Argue at the place where you don’t know how to fight, where you haven’t lived as if you’re in a battle. Because if you are the now’s the time this podcast is for you. It’s episode number 27 or 26 episode number 26 we’ve been broadcasting out of mostly Edmund in Oklahoma City and you know, that’s where our counseling practices, that’s where I live and we just want to say we want to equip you with the resources to win because so many times when people come to marriage counseling, one of the first things they discover shocking lane is that they have abdicated fighting for their family and they’ve allowed the culture to raise their kids.
They haven’t realized. They really are in a spiritual battle that manifests itself through teenage rebellion, through infidelity, in marriage, through their kids being entitled and they’re just being taken out instead of taking up. So today I want to encourage you that if your highest ideal is to stay comfortable in your life and is to be a spectator, well then there’s not much I can do to help you if that’s your goal and if you’re not willing to change your goal. But if you’re willing to say, Sean, I really do love my wife or my husband. I do love my kids and I do want a better life and keep listening because this podcast is for you. So think about this, the devil a spot since the time you were born, since really the dawn of time, Adam and eve to take background to take background, he hates God and hates his children.
And so what we need to do is realize that when life gets tough, it doesn’t mean we’re doing something wrong necessarily. It mean that we’re, we’re stepping into the space that we’ve given up or the people before us, like our parents have given up that space and we’re taking it back. It’s like any battle, there are battle lines and there are ways to fight that are more effective and there are pivotal positions that we need to take. Like higher ground is always great. The higher we go, the more we can see the landscape of the battlefield, but also the fierce or the battle can come because the devil doesn’t want to give up that ground because he knows the higher we get, the closer we get to God, the more family elevates up, the more successful we’ll be and the more people that we can save in the process.
So we need to realize there are certain areas of her life that we simply can not give up ground. And a lot of times we’ve been acculturated because of the way we’ve been raised to give up ground that we’ve never or never were supposed to give up and we need to take a stand for us. One of the stands we’ve taken is technology. We know that once our kids get cell phones have just constant access to the worldwide web, to social media and then social media and the worldwide web have access to them. It will literally change the way they process information. It will create a measure of stress even if it’s good that they’re looking at, it creates a measure of stress and changes the way their brain is wired and so we’ve chosen to give them very limited access through our phones and it’s a big stand that we’ve taken because in Christian marriage counseling Oklahoma City, the first thing I go for if a kid starts to rebel or if a woman or man has low self esteem is let’s look at what you’re putting in your mind through social media, through TV, through all those avenues and we start to uncover that you’re comparing yourself to others or you have Fomo, fear of missing out, Fomo, fear of missing out because of everything you’re seeing here.
We just give back to an organic natural way of living. That starts with you being enough, the people that you have in your life, bringing the right kind of people in and removing the people that have been toxic to your situation. And so that’s one of the, the lines that we’ve drawn. And also that our home is a place of safety. It’s a place where we choose who comes over. You know, a lot of you have family that comes over and they just create hell. And I’m not using profanity. I’m using a literal sense. They create chaos, drama. And when they come over, you feel kind of out of control. Like they just take over. Look, you don’t have to live that way. You know, God’s made a way that you can create a family that looks like Kim and your time and your generation.
These are your kids, this is your spouse and it really is up to you. It’s, it’s amazing if you realize that you don’t have to create your past again and your future, you can create something better. So recognize you’re in a fight is a big deal in marriage counseling. This is profoundly huge because we draw battle lines. And we’ll call those boundaries. We’ll, we’ll do all these circles of see who the people are closest to you and then we’ll go out to the people that are the most distant and we’ll adjust those people accordingly. You know, marriage counseling, especially in Edmonton, Oklahoma City, I’ve seen so much progress and people just realize they don’t have to live with all these toxic people close to them just because they’ve been raised with them. They had their last name that they have choices that they can mate and I would even extend that to look at the job that you have, the house that you live in, the family, the life.
What do you do when you get to work? What kind of habits do you create? Do you allow yourself to just be around people that are close? Do you give them access just because they’re your supervisor because you’ve worked with him for 10 years. When you come home, what do you do with that time? Do you sit on the couch and watch TV? Check out the social media, you go do a hobby or do you engage with your spouse? Do you engage with your kids? You see, you don’t have to live this way anymore when you learn to fight the right ways. So oftentimes we fight our spouse, we fight our kids when really that’s just the devil getting in. You know, there was an Avengers movie, I forget which one it was, but it was the one where they captured Loki and they’re on this plane and they look, he’s play was to create havoc against the [inaudible] vendors and to disrupt their team from the inside out. And it ended up creating havoc in hope, destroyed the plane or the day, I forget what it’s called, but this huge flying machine and it crashed because he was able to sever the ties and create unrest. And that’s what the devil does cause he to crash your marriage and destroy your family.
So think about these things. The first one I just wanted to just expose is that there is a battle and you are in it. Christian marriage counseling Oklahoma City. Friendship is a great way to start moving the needle of getting on really quickly out of this battle that you’re losing to a battle that you can win. Looking over the landscape of your life, what territory have you given up? What territory do you need to take back? Do you give your kids unrestricted access to social media, to their phones, to the IPAD, to computers, to video games? If so, maybe that’s a start for you and maybe the start is looking up on the Internet of what is acceptable for your family or talking to a friend or maybe you want to move really quickly and you call a Christian marriage counseling Oklahoma City counselor like us and you invite us into your story to begin making rapid changes of taking background to create the family and the marriage that you are excited to be a part of.
Maybe that’s your first move and if it is, you can go to our website. True new. It’s New Vision counseling.live and we’re in Edmond, Oklahoma City area, and we would love to be a partner with you because that New Vision Christian marriage counseling Oklahoma City, we bring Biblical trues married to cutting edge counts and techniques to join you in your story today. We help you discover what’s possible now, what you’ve been through, but where you can go if you remove these limiting beliefs. If you identify these areas that you’ve been taken out in and you start to fight and healthy and right ways, look, you’re either, you’re in a battle no matter what. This is a fight if you’ve lived at all. You know that life is not easy. We just want to equip you with the tools and resources to win when your day, when your month, when your life, and basically that’s connecting you to God and practical steps and walking with you so that you’re not alone. And if you found this helpful, please share this with a friend or somebody that you love or maybe your spouse and listen to it because you can do better. When you go beyond where you’ve been bringing in resources of people, audibles books and things that can help you succeed because that’s God’s best plan for you. And remember, don’t wait for a great day to happen. Make a great day by the decisions you make. God bless and I’ll talk to you again really soon.