God
created a perfect earth on which He intended for mankind to co-exist with Him.
He came to earth to visit with Adam and Eve in the cool of the garden. However,
Satan also came to them, and the first couple listened to His lies and lost
their immortality (Genesis 2:1-24).
Creation
has suffered ever since (Romans 8:22). Mankind has a free will, and our choices
perpetuate this destruction. Each time I see a dead animal along the side of
the road, or a dead tree raising its skeletal remains in praise to God, I
realize that my sin and yours caused that to happen.
Our
marriages also suffer destruction due to our individual, self-centered
decisions. There are God-honoring principles for a successful marriage. The
essence of God's Trinity is a unity of three distinct personalities and
functions.
The
three divine ego states cooperate in unity to bless all of creation, including
our life. God designed marriage to mirror this divine union as an inseparable
blending until death parts us (Matthew 19:3-6). A dissolution of our marital
relationship grieves the Trinity (Mark 10:9-11).
Realizing
that we are partners, rather than competitors in life, enables our intimacy to
grow. We schedule time together in our daily "to-do" list, and guard
that time, regardless of how long or short that time is. We take the time to
love each other in our individual love languages ( http://www.lovelanguagequiz.com/ ).
We
cherish, protect and nurture our marriage as our priority, second only to our
union with God. Everything else - vocation, hobbies, friends, responsibilities,
etc. all take a back seat to our vitally important union with God and our
spouse.
Prayer:
Father
God, help us to understand that we have an inseparable union with our spouse
that You call us to develop, cultivate, and grow in intimacy through
disagreements, sickness, financial upsets, and loss in our individual life.
Remind us to pull together and to support each other rather than taking an
adversarial attitude against each other.
Teach
us what it means to make a covenant with You and with our spouse. Help us to
honor that covenant in our thoughts, words and actions toward each other.
Remind us that our exclusive and everlasting bond with each other has more to
do with our choices than with our feelings.
Thought
for the Day:
As
we schedule time together, even if it is only an hour out of the 24 hours that
God gives us each day, this allows us to dwell together in unity with
understanding and acceptance of each other's foibles and idiosyncrasies, and we
develop compassion for, and companionship with our spouse that will help us to
increase in our intimacy with one another; this enables us to nurture one
another's strengths and to have patience for our individual weaknesses.
