Making Marriage Work (4 page)

“Becoming one” was not something we were told to do, but was something that God said would happen to us through the process of His plan.

This mystery is very great, but I speak concerning [the relation of] Christ and the church.

Ephesians 5:32

Married couples, who submit themselves to God’s leading, are examples of the love relationship that is available between a believer and Jesus. In other words, unbelievers who can’t see Christ should be able to see His love when they observe the relationship between Christian couples. As believers, we are to put our attention on the Lord. But when we focus on Christ, He always empowers us to achieve or receive our heart’s desire.

Delight yourself also in the Lord, and He will give you the desires and secret petitions of your heart.

Commit your way to the Lord [roll and repose each care of your load on Him]; trust (lean on, rely on, and be confident) also in Him and He will bring it to pass.

Psalm 37:4,5

Likewise, when a wife delights in her husband as unto the Lord, the Lord will in turn attend to the desires and secret petitions of her heart. God has also instructed the husband to nourish and carefully protect his wife as he would his own flesh. God has not called us into bondage but into the mystery of His way that leads to freedom. God’s best will be returned to us if we trust in Him and do His Word.

God said,
the two
shall
become
as one. There is finality to God’s Word that points to the end rather than to the process. He promises that the husband and wife will become one just as Christ is one with the church. God is doing this work in us. It is not something that we make happen; it is something that we let happen as we trust God to do what He promised to do in us.

SOMEONE HAS TO BE FIRST

To let God’s plan work, at least one of the two people involved must start trusting the plan. Either the wife must trust God enough to turn her attention on her husband, or the husband must love his wife and care for her needs as Christ cares for us. What a profound mystery that Christ came as a servant to us, yet we find it hard to serve others. The more we adapt ourselves to His ways, the more His blessings will fill our lives.

God loved us first, and we loved Him back. He reaffirms us concerning His love and we start loving others and eventually, the love becomes so intertwined in us that it no longer matters who was first to love the other. Ephesians 5:1 continues:

Therefore be imitators of God [copy Him and follow His example], as well-beloved children [imitate their father].

The book of Ephesians explains this lesson of love by saying that we are to be useful and helpful and kind to one another, tenderhearted, compassionate, and understanding with the other. In becoming like Christ, we will naturally turn our attention on the needs of others.

Neither the husband nor the wife sets the standard of what the other one should become. Only Christ is the role model to Whom we must adapt. Reaching the goal of becoming one with each other is a daily process just as becoming like Christ is a lifetime study course. It is painful to work at a relationship, but it is more painful to reap failure, dissension, and separation from those we love because we have simply neglected them and sown bad seed.

So, to become “one” with each other, we must first come into agreement with God by drawing near to Christ and becoming like Him. Once we invite Jesus into our relationships, and do what He says to do, we become like Him in our thoughts and deeds, and consequently, we become loving like He is and we develop and maintain good relationships.

There is [now no distinction] neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is not male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Galatians 3:28

LOVE GROWS WHERE IT IS SOWN

When I met Dave, he was well on his way to adapting to the mind of Christ. He was willing to take me as I was, just as God is willing to accept all of us the way we were when we found Him. God loves us, “flaws and all,” and I guess you could say that Dave was overlooking mine. But just as God’s love changes us to be more like Him, His love between two people can cause them to adapt and be at peace with each other as they become more like Christ in each other’s presence.

God’s love between two people can cause them to adapt and be at peace with each other.

If Dave had not been walking with God, our marriage would have suffered longer than it did, or perhaps not survived at all. He was very patient with me during the years when I was struggling so much. The fact that I was born again did help — at least I made some tiny effort to be pleasing to God. I wanted to do what was right, but I either did not know what that was due to a lack of strong biblical teaching, or I was unwilling and often unable to choose the right actions due to all the bondage and strongholds in my personality.

I was horn again when I was nine years old. The night I was saved, I had to sneak out of the house to go to church with some relatives that were visiting us because my dad wouldn’t have permitted us to go if we had asked. I knew that I went to be saved that night, and I don’t even know how I knew that I needed salvation.

The pastor did not have an altar call that evening. I was really scared, but at the end of service I walked to the front of the church, taking two of my cousins with me. I looked at the pastor and said, “Can you save me?”

He was sorry that he hadn’t offered an altar call, but I had a glorious cleansing of my soul that night. I knew I was born again, but the next day I cheated in a game of hide-and-go-seek with my cousins by peeking to see where they were going, and I thought I lost my salvation! I was in my twenties before I realized that Jesus had promised not to abandon me. Hebrews 13:5 confirms this promise, …
For He [God] Himself has said, I will not in any way fail you nor give you up nor leave you without support. [I will] not, [I will] not, [I will] not in any degree leave you helpless nor forsake nor let [you] down (relax My hold on you)! [Assuredly not!]

Looking back I can see that since my conversion experience I was determined to break loose from the situation that I was in and become something more than my father thought of me. I realize now that when I received the Lord. His strength came into me to overcome that situation. Throughout my teenage life, I still prayed and talked to God when I needed help to get out of various situations.

God was with me all those years, and He helped me to endure and to come out of the circumstances that had held me captive. I always hoped that my mother would leave my dad, but she never did and I couldn’t understand why she stayed with him. Once, when seeking for answers, God showed me that parents have an awesome authority over children’s lives and that my father made a lot of bad choices — I was in the bull’s eye of his aim.

When God gives a child to someone, He gives parents the authority to make decisions for them, good or bad. Yet the amazing thing is that God can take a child who was raised by parents who made bad decisions and transform the child’s heart to be as pure as though nothing had happened to him or her. There isn’t anything that God cannot turn around for the good if we love and obey Him. God has taken all the bad in my life and used it to reach many lives with His love and transforming power. I encourage you not to spend your life trying to understand why things happen the way they do, just close the door on the past and let God lead you into a wonderful future.

Hurting people hurt other people. Satan wants the one who was hurt to spend the remainder of his life hating the one who hurt him, but God’s plan is just the opposite. God teaches us to forgive by faith, trust Him to heal our emotions, then get on with life. Life is not always fair, but God is. He is the God of justice and He will bring compensation to those who have been hurt if they place their trust in Him instead of taking matters into their own hands.

Life is not always fair, but God is.

LOVE TURNS THINGS AROUND FOR THE GOOD

God promises that if we love Him, He will turn all things for our good. What a wonderful promise! Look at God’s promise to fulfill our hopes in Romans 8:24-28.

For in [this] hope we were saved. But hope [the object of] which is seen is not hope. For how can one hope for what he already sees?

But if we hope for what is still unseen by us, we wait for it with patience and composure.

So too the [Holy] Spirit comes to our aid and bears us up in our weakness; for we do not know what prayer to offer nor how to offer it worthily as we ought, but the Spirit Himself goes to meet our supplication and pleads in our behalf with unspeakable yearnings and groanings too deep for utterance. And He Who searches the hearts of men knows what is in the mind of the [Holy] Spirit [what His intent is], because the Spirit intercedes and pleads [before God] in behalf of the saints according to and in harmony with God’s will.

We are assured and know that [God being a partner in their labor] all things work together and are [fitting into a plan] for good to and for those who love God and are called according to [His] design and purpose.

Does it help you to realize that the Holy Spirit is praying for you, even when you don’t know what to pray for? (See Romans 8:27.) He is praying that God’s design and plan will bring us into God’s will. This means that our marriage partner can also come into God’s perfect design and purpose as we continue to love God and put our hope in His promises.

When Dave and I were first married, I had many problems, but I didn’t even know I was headed for deep trouble. Dave, on the other hand, was Spirit-filled, which was unheard of in the Protestant church he attended at that time. He was in the fourth grade when he was born again and only eighteen when he received the baptism of the Holy Spirit which I will explain more about in a later chapter. He testifies of a tremendous experience with the Lord when he was a young boy. Then as a teenager he felt as though there was a wall he had to climb in order to know more of God. He wanted more out of life than he was getting, and he sought it for the longest time.

One day, while on break at an engineering company, he went in the bathroom and said to God, “I’m not coming out of here until You give me what I am looking for.” I think it is pretty funny that he was sitting in the stall in the men’s room when God answered Him. This proves that God is willing to meet us where we are.

Dave was very serious about it. He was not leaving until God gave him what he was seeking after, and that’s when it happened. His face shines when he retells the story of how God just filled him up, right there. Prior to this infiltration of God’s Spirit, his eyesight was pretty bad, and God healed his eyes! God began to reveal Himself to Dave and teach him about grace. Instruction from God continued for days on the subject of grace. Then God taught Dave about love, and over the next few years Dave grew into a very strong, mature believer in Jesus Christ.

GOD’S LOVE IS THE BEGINNING OF ROMANCE

I want to tell you more about Dave’s story because I am convinced that marriages work if at least one of two people is seeking God for direction. Someone has to be first — it doesn’t matter if it is the wife or the husband. But one of them needs to know how to hear from God concerning the conflicts and challenges they face and be willing to make the changes that God directs so that love begins to grow in the relationship. In our case, Dave knew how to hear from God.

Be willing to make the changes that God directs so that love begins to grow in the relationship.

Through supernatural events and strange coincidences, God showed Dave how to slow down his life to almost a slow motion pace where it would be synchronized with Him. As Dave understood the process, he intentionally slowed down so he could be in step with God, focusing on listening to God for days and days. Dave said that he functioned almost in a slow-motion pace during that time of renewal, then God speeded up his life up to the normal pace again. But when He did, Dave felt synchronized with God.

Isaiah spoke of a similar experience with God in chapter 50, verse 4:

[The Servant of God says] The Lord God has given Me the tongue of a disciple and of one who is taught, that I should know how to speak a word in season to him who is weary. He wakens Me morning by morning, He wakens My ear to hear as a disciple [as one who is taught].

After that experience, Dave found that in everything he did, he seemed to know what God wanted him to say. It no longer satisfied Dave to have just a good answer; he was now aware that God had a perfect answer for every situation. It was a supernatural revelation that, at the time, Dave didn’t realize how miraculous it was.

By the time he went into the army, Dave had spent years walking intimately with God, but he was already taking God’s supernatural voice for granted because it had been such a natural part of his life. His understanding of God’s will had come to him from close communion with God, rather than through study of the Word. Then when Dave was in the service, he experienced a time that felt as though Gods presence had left him.

GOD’S WORD ESTABLISHES HIS LOVE IN OUR HEARTS

Dave didn’t understand why God didn’t speak to him as He did before. But since we have been married and are both in full-time ministry, Dave can see God’s purpose in letting him experience that time of silence. When he felt all alone, he had to learn how to live all over again because he had depended on God’s voice for everything. When his feelings changed he had to seek security that transcended “feelings.” He had to learn that God’s promises are true regardless of what our five senses experience.

God wanted Dave to establish their relationship on the Word that had been given to him. Dave needed to discover the promises that had been made to him in God’s Word and learn that God is faithful to keep His promises no matter how Dave felt. This time, he had to learn how to come back to the intimate position with God through the Word and faith alone.