Marriage

I was talking to a young lady recently about her plans for when she gets married and what skill set she thinks she needs to be a good wife and a great mother along with being a great person in her career. After some minutes into that conversation, I was shocked when she said she has never had the opportunity of seeing things as I painted them in that conversation and has never been taught anything about marriage as I did. Far too many people enter into marriage Ill-prepared or totally unprepared.

We make too many assumptions about what we think people know in life. There are many people who know nothing and claim to know and sometimes those who truly know are either being honorably quiet or simply lock the knowledge in books and long writings. (Well, we should never be too lazy to read).

Marriage is under attack. A person can be a very successful minister and a great business man or woman and still have a failed marriage experience. Many people who have handled thousands of staff and dealt with major crisis in major corporations successfully have failed woefully in managing this union of two. We understand why. The difference is that marriage is the institution God created to perpetuate His counsel on earth. So, the giant corporation may thrive but not this union of great eternal significance.

Marriage is under attack because of the seed/offspring. Satan was there when God proclaimed victory through the seed of the woman over the seeds of the serpent. Now the enemy knows that marriage has that potential to produce the seed that will become a potential battle axe in the hand of God. Therefore to fight God’s purpose, he must fight the process.

The attack against marriage has come over the years from the world, pushing the agenda of homosexuality, an agenda that fits properly into the enemy’s program against the seed of the woman. Then there’s abortion, delayed marriages, infertilities, poor parenting etc.
There is also the push for feminism with an intention to equate men and women but a resultant effect of putting husband, against wife. Men and women are created equal in persons but not in purpose. The fight for equity of the genders has become a fight for equality of husband and wife. The two must be separate. The woman in the institution of marriage is the “help meet”, which is by no means a subservient purpose but a vital and honorable one. The help, without which the man, again, in the institution of marriage, is incomplete.

In the wake of women taking up jobs outside of the home and having an ever increasing roles in the home is taking a big mental, physical and emotional toll on wives who have to deal with jobs responsibilities and still deal with children, home and husband’s needs with little to no help. You can’t eat your cake and have it.

No one is greater than the other in their different purposes. Everyone is important in their assignment, when that assignment is known and appreciated.

The more concerning is the attack of the marriage institution coming from within the church and among believers.
The agenda to put asunder what God has joined together comes from within the church when the real purpose of marriage is unknown and personal experiences are used to override biblical principles. Our personal experiences should never become our standards for faith and practice. My mentor will say, “Don’t let your tragedy become your theology“. Charles Ndifon.

Another subtle one is the growing dissatisfaction of women with the idea of a man’s headship in marriage. This comes from the misunderstanding of what that headship truly means. Most men have a boss idea of that term rather than a shepherd or a servant leader idea of it.

The woman is like a garden to be cultivated, nurtured and seeded. What you put in, is what you get, and even much more. An uncultivated garden will soon become a bush of wild and unwanted plants. All it takes for a garden to be run over by weeds is to be abandoned and left uncultivated. My concern is that the weed has grown so much, many are embracing the weed as the rightful plants in the beautiful garden designed for great fruits.
Many people also have a negative idea of the word submission as the Bible teaches of the wife. The submission of a biblical wife is her power and her place of strength, not to exert her wishes but to exert God’s purpose for the marriage in which is her and her household’s happiness.

Submission of the wife and the love of the husband are mutually exclusive. Each must love and submit as instructed with without the other fulfilling their part necessarily. But because each is both so instructed, it is expected that the man will love his wife as Christ loved the church sacrificially. This is the weak point of the man in marriage. Most men do not have the natural ability to go the extra miles for their loved ones including their children. But the woman will naturally do that. The woman naturally has issues with submission just as the man has with loving sacrificially and selflessly. It’s easier for the man to be quiet in argument or apologize for the sake of peace in the home than it is for the wives. Submission for men won’t be an issue if it is necessary for peace. But loving unconditionally with no strings attached? Not so quick. So God is out with these instructions, not to harm us but to help us with the templates that work for this institution he created. We can rebel and argue with the templates but the result will be loss of unions that could produce great results for God’s kingdom.

Just like in the church as in the home, the best leadership structure is servant-leadership patterned after the leadership of our Lord Jesus Christ. Anything outside of that is worldly, and will never contribute to the fulfillment of God’s ultimate agenda.

If couples will be as creative, innovative and goal oriented as they are in their businesses and workplaces, the love we want, the attention and affection we desire and the atmosphere we love, we will create. We just need to deploy the same energy and commitment we have in other areas of successes to the marital union.

Many husbands and wives are individually thriving but their union is not. Each knows how to take care of themselves but not their union. Any slight pain in the body, we fix swiftly, but slight pains in the union are left uncared for until it becomes life threatening injuries that will send the union into a state of needing life support. It needn’t get to that to start with, if we care for the union like we care for ourselves and our businesses.