I first started pastoring when I was in my twenties. Looking back, what was I thinking? Most of the people in the church had been serving in the church long before I was even born. Nevertheless, I remember when a couple in their forties came to me for marriage counseling. To be honest, I was a little nervous.

Not sure what to do, I simply quoted scriptures and relayed bible-based principles. Oddly enough, the husband came into my office the next day thanking me and telling me that he would be forever grateful for the advice I had given his wife. Believe you me, no one was more surprised than I was.

After a few years, however, I started to gain more and more confidence in my pastoral care counseling in that I started to see many similar stories as the one mentioned above. Though I would be the first to say that I made a good amount of mistakes during that time, I was gaining a confidence in the fact that the heart of the matter is the heart and when you mix scriptural principles with hearts that are willing to bend to those principles, you are often able to see great results in the matter of mending relationships.

During those early days of helping couples from a pastoral care perspective, I would often bash the idea of using steps and formulas to fix marital issues. Little did I know that after more formal training, study, lots of writing, experience dealing with troubled marriages, time developing material for various speaking engagements and marriage conferences, and three and a half years of gathering material for a local television broadcast on marriage and family issues, I would actually make it a major part of my agenda to propagate what I now call a 2-Step Process to fixing marital problems.

Though I basically slammed the idea of steps and formulas for a number of years, I started to see that couples are often desperately looking for "handlebars" to grab a hold of when they are at their deepest point of need, and the steps that we promote are often an anchor for their hearts and minds when their emotions are wanting to take them all over the place.

Also, I like to tell people that these steps are not just random ideas that I picked out of the blue. In fact, when I first started to work with couples in need, I would often spend a good amount of time dealing with many of the things that they should not be doing. Consequently, I felt that some couples were leaving my pastoral care counseling sessions more frustrated than when they initially came in the door. Finally, I found a better, faster, and more efficient way of dealing with marital woes.

You see, instead of trying to straighten every individual branch of the tree, I found that it is more important to deal with the base or the trunk tree first, and, in straightening the base or the trunk of the tree, many of the branches that were previously pointing in the wrong direction tend to start pointing in the right direction.

In the scriptures, it is interesting to see that Christ took all of the "thou shalt nots" of the Old Testament and summed them up into two positive commands. In fact, in Matthew 22:37-40, Jesus specifically states that if a Christian will love God and his neighbor, by virtue of doing the two commands that Christ taught, he or she will not be doing the many things that God previously outlawed in the Old Testament.

In like manner, we have applied this principle in part to solving marriage problems in that if couples will concentrate on the two positive commands that we promote, they will often stop doing the thousands of things that they often do to "get on each other's nerves". I love it!

To Order our Audio Cd Series that gives our 2-Step Process to fixing your marriage problems, Click Here.

Watch the Following Video to See if Your Marriage May be Caught in the Cycle of Resentment and Anger

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