Making Your Marriage Work Part 2 - 100 Days Of Discipleship - Day 90 by Apostle Emmanuel Iren: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

The IKEA Effect: Investment Deepens Value

There is a fascinating psychological phenomenon that psychologists call the IKEA effect. IKEA furniture is functional but not exceptional. If an outside observer were shown a piece and asked to rate it, they might give it a seven out of ten. Yet Harvard research has demonstrated that if the owner of that same furniture is asked to rate it, they will give it a nine out of ten. The reason is straightforward: IKEA furniture comes in pieces that the buyer must assemble themselves. The one to two hours of effort required to put it together creates a genuine emotional attachment. People become personally invested in what they had a hand in building.

A second and even more striking example involves a product called Insta Cakes — a cake mix that required only water and a microwave to produce a finished cake. It was a brilliant innovation, yet sales suffered because bakers felt no personal stake in the outcome. Then the company removed two ingredients — the egg and the milk — and let the buyer add them. The result? Sales improved significantly. People felt they had contributed to the process and so valued the product more.

Investment Transforms Relationship

This psychological principle carries a powerful application for marriage. There is a proven cognitive bias in all of us: we value something more when we are more invested in it.

If a marriage has the right person — a genuinely good person — but there are difficulties, those very difficulties are an opportunity. Using the Michelangelo analogy, the vision is to see diamond in the rough and walk through it together. What comes out on the other side is something stronger and more valuable precisely because of the work that went into it.

Ephesians 5:25-27 speaks directly to this. Husbands are called to love their wives just as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her — sanctifying and cleansing her with the washing of water by the word, so that he might present her to himself as a glorious church. The work is done, and what emerges is glorious. Both men and women carry responsibilities in this dynamic.

Consider a woman who stands by her husband during his early, struggling years — encouraging him as his life begins to change, as prosperity comes, as children are born. After all of that shared history, it takes far more to destroy that home. Challenges, as unpleasant as they are, present an opportunity to grow a deeper relationship than would otherwise exist.

Depth Is Forged Through Shared History

The temptation in difficulty is to give up or give in. The counsel of wisdom is the opposite: sit down, come up with a strategy, read, study the word of God, pray, and come out of that challenge together. What waits on the other side is a new depth in that relationship — something that was never there before.

If gold is what is desired, gold must be dug for, and dug for deeply.

This depth has a very visible quality. When two people have been close for a long time, those on the outside of that relationship are often unable to keep up with them. They have shared language — phrases, references, even a look between them — tied to deep moments in their history. Communication becomes almost effortless. Experience takes a relationship deeper and deeper, producing an intimacy that cannot be manufactured by anything other than walking through life together.

Don't give up. Don't give in. Keep seeing the diamond in the rough. Keep walking — and one day you will be glad you obeyed God through and through.