A great marriage doesn’t happen by accident.
You can love someone deeply, have good intentions, and genuinely want your relationship to succeed—but without the right structure, life’s pressures can slowly determine the direction of your marriage for you.
That’s why one of the most important questions you can ask isn’t simply, “Did I marry the right person?”
A better question is: “Who am I choosing to become in this marriage?”
In this message from the Home Run series, Pastor Keith Craft continues teaching you how to build the structure necessary to run the race God has given you. This week, the focus turns toward one of the most significant races you’ll ever run: your relationships and marriage.
The goal isn’t simply to stay married. The goal is to build a relationship that reflects God’s purpose, continues growing, and helps both people become who God created them to be.
You Have a Race to Run
Ecclesiastes 9:11 says the fastest runner doesn’t always win the race and the strongest warrior doesn’t always win the battle. Instead, opportunity and timing play an important role.
That means you have a chance.
There are opportunities God has uniquely positioned you to see because of the purpose He has placed on your life. When you learn to see opportunities, seize opportunities, and eventually create opportunities, you begin approaching your life differently.
But seeing an opportunity isn’t enough.
First Corinthians 9 challenges you to run to win.
That applies to every area of your life. Don’t simply go to work. Run your career race to win. Don’t simply try to survive financially. Build financial structure that prepares you to win. And don’t simply stay married.
Build a marriage that can win.
Your Life Needs Structure
Structure is the arrangement of different parts designed to support, strengthen, and accomplish an intended purpose.
If you want a strong marriage, you need more than feelings. You need a structure that supports the relationship you’re trying to build.
The same principle applies throughout your life.
In the Home Run series, six major races are identified: personal growth and leadership development, marriage, family, calling and career, finances, and health.
These areas aren’t isolated from one another.
How you grow personally affects how you show up in your marriage. Your marriage affects your family. Your family can influence your calling. Your financial decisions affect your relationships. Your health influences your ability to fulfill your purpose.
That’s why growth has to start with you.
Instead of waiting for your circumstances or the people around you to change, start asking:
What structure do I need to build in myself to become the person who can win the race God has given me?
First Base: Decide What Matters Most
Think about a baseball player hitting a home run.
Even though the ball leaves the park, the runner still has to touch every base. You don’t get to hit the ball, celebrate, and walk directly back to the dugout.
You have to run the bases.
The same principle applies to your marriage.
First base is deciding what matters most.
You need to determine your values before the pressures of life determine them for you.
What kind of marriage do you want?
What role will God have in your relationship?
What values are non-negotiable?
What do you want your home to represent?
What matters most to your spouse?
Keith shares how this principle began in his relationship with Sheila when they were teenagers. He drew a triangle with God at the top and each of them on opposite sides. The idea was simple: if both of them committed to becoming their best for God, they would ultimately grow closer together.
Decades later, the principle remains.
Matthew 6:33 teaches you to seek first God’s Kingdom and His righteousness—His way of doing things.
When you decide what matters most, you give yourself the opportunity to build a life that most matters.
Your Spouse Doesn’t Have to Value Everything Exactly Like You Do
One of the easiest ways to become frustrated in marriage is to expect your spouse to think exactly like you.
They won’t.
You may naturally notice something they don’t notice. Something incredibly meaningful to you may not carry the same emotional weight for them.
The problem begins when you take your awareness and turn it into an expectation.
You think, “If this matters to me, it should automatically matter to you in exactly the same way.”
That’s a recipe for frustration.
A healthier approach is learning what matters to your spouse and deciding that because it matters to them, it matters to you.
You don’t need two identical people to build a strong marriage.
You need two people who understand what matters most and intentionally choose to honor one another.
Second Base: Select Who You Will Be
Second base may be one of the most challenging principles in the entire message:
Select who you will be in your marriage.
Marriage involves selection, but not simply the selection you made when you chose your spouse.
Every day, you’re selecting which version of yourself you’re bringing into your relationship.
Will you bring the offended version of you?
The exhausted you?
The selfish you?
The critical you?
Or will you bring the lover?
The encourager?
The giver?
The passionate you?
The growing you?
The best version of you?
You cannot control who your spouse chooses to become, but you have tremendous influence over who you choose to become.
That’s why one of the most practical challenges from this message is simple:
Stop trying to select a better spouse and start selecting a better you.
Work on Yourself Before You Work on Your Spouse
It’s easy to identify what your spouse needs to change.
It’s much harder to look inward.
But a healthy marriage requires humility.
There may be moments when your spouse sees something in you that you cannot see yourself. Your instinct may be to defend yourself, become angry, withdraw, or explain why they’re wrong.
Instead, what would happen if you became curious?
What if you asked:
“What are you seeing that I’m not seeing?”
“What could I do differently?”
“How could I love you better?”
“What kind of person do you need me to become?”
Keith shares that there was a turning point in his own marriage when he stopped simply reacting to Sheila’s concerns and instead asked her to tell him what she saw, asked for mercy, and invited her to pray for him. That posture helped him recognize that his marriage could actually help him become a better version of himself.
Your spouse may reveal things about you that nobody else gets close enough to see.
That doesn’t have to be a threat.
It can become an opportunity to grow.
Third Base: Establish Rules for Your Marriage
Every relationship already has rules.
Some are spoken.
Others are unspoken.
Some are healthy.
Others may be quietly hurting the relationship.
Third base is intentionally establishing rules for your marriage.
First Corinthians 14:1 says to let love be your highest goal. So ask yourself what rules, rhythms, habits, and commitments would help love become the highest goal in your relationship.
One practical exercise is to honestly rate your marriage on a scale from 1–10.
Don’t use the number to attack each other.
Use it to create awareness.
Then ask a much better question:
“What can I do to help us move up one number?”
If your marriage feels like a five, don’t obsess over getting to ten overnight.
What would make it a six?
Maybe it’s cleaning up after yourself.
Maybe it’s communicating more consistently.
Maybe it’s having a regular date night.
Maybe it’s praying together.
Maybe it’s improving your financial habits.
Maybe it’s putting your phone down and becoming more present.
Maybe it’s learning how to disagree without attacking each other.
Healthy rules create healthy structure, and healthy structure gives your marriage room to grow.
Your Marriage Is an Assignment
Marriage isn’t merely about finding someone who makes you happy.
From a biblical perspective, marriage has purpose.
In Genesis, Adam was given an assignment before Eve entered the picture. Then God brought them together, blessed them together, and gave them a shared calling to be fruitful, multiply, and exercise stewardship.
That means your marriage can become more than two people sharing a house.
It can become a shared assignment.
You can ask:
Why did God bring us together?
What can we accomplish together that we couldn’t accomplish separately?
What kind of family are we building?
What will our children and grandchildren receive because of the decisions we’re making today?
How can our relationship reflect God to the people around us?
When your marriage has purpose, you’re no longer simply trying to avoid divorce.
You’re building something.
Run Your Marriage Race to Win
You don’t need a perfect marriage to begin building a better one.
Maybe your relationship is strong.
Maybe you’re struggling.
Maybe you’ve experienced divorce and you’re trying to understand what comes next.
Wherever you are, you can learn.
You can grow.
You can become better.
Your past doesn’t have to dictate your future.
The challenge is to stop focusing exclusively on what someone else did or didn’t do and begin asking what God wants to develop in you.
Your growth matters because every relationship in your life is affected by the person you’re becoming. Keith closes by connecting marriage back to the larger Home Run principle: when you remain structured the same way you’ve always been, you tend to continue producing the same results.
So build differently.
Grow intentionally.
Decide what matters most.
Select who you’re going to be.
Establish healthy rules.
Put God first.
And don’t simply run your marriage race.
Run it to win.
If you’re looking for a church in Frisco, TX where you can grow spiritually, strengthen your relationships, and discover God’s purpose for every area of your life, we’d love to welcome you to Elevate Life Church.
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