A marriage built on a fifty/fifty partnership is doomed from the start. It misleads two selfish half-hearted people to end their marriage when one is not meeting the expectations of the other. A fifty-fifty marriage won’t last long. Your trusting in God is how you are able to give your 100% to your marriage.
Marriage vows have changed because people are not willing to change. Anyone can change for the better; it’s a choice. And what we are weak to do, God will help us do if we humbly go to Him. We need to bring God back into our marriages because God designed marriage for family and the good of all societies.
By the time you marry someone – your love for one another should be somewhat mature because of what should take place in your relationship before you marry. Maturing your love for one another is not about experiencing sexual gratification. You do not need to know a thing in that department before you marry. Sexual pleasure will be heightened if you honor your marriage bed by waiting to have your sexual desires satisfied on your wedding night and thereafter when you both learn more about each other in that way.
Maturing your love is not only about the things you learn to do together. It’s mostly about humility and trust, learning about each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and understanding what it means to commit to one another for the long hard haul.
We have all tried to act better than we really are when we were trying to win the heart of someone. Marriage is not about winning someone; it’s about “two becoming one.” The wedding itself is the legal sanction of a relationship having been tested and approved for marriage and is why the opinion and counsel of levelheaded parents should be honored and welcomed. You need to know whether or not your parents and closest friends approve of the person you’d like to spend the rest of your life with. They see things you might be blinded to.
Believe it or not, it matters greatly that your parents and closest friend like the person you love. With so many other things that will come to break up the two of you – you will need your parents and close friends to encourage you and give you good advice.
Marriage is a very serious commitment, especially to the children who depend on their parents and are greatly affected by the relationship their mother and father have together. Before you marry you should be in agreement as to what you both think about having children and how to raise them. Children absolutely NEED that unity and consistency. I don’t care what you’ve heard; children do not bounce back from a divorce. The children in a divorce are far more hurt and damaged than the two getting a divorce. It shows up later if not immediately. Marriage is not just about you! Marriage is not just about you and your husband! Marriage is about FAMILY!
A solid marriage is formed when both the wife and the husband gives one-hundred percent to the relationship. That kind of marriage will have a harder time ending. We are asking for a ruined marriage from the start – if we refuse to die to ourselves for the sake of our marriage and children. Don’t be an idiot and expect your spouse to do all the changing. Focus on your own attitude and behavior. Make sure you are giving it all you have and then give the rest to the Lord who has the power to work all things out for the good.
“In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will. And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” Romans 8:26-29
Don’t wait to be loved unconditionally before you love unconditionally. When you love – you become loved. God loved us first unconditionally, and that is why we are able to love each other unconditionally. God’s love never fails.
All marriages get shaky. In these shaky times things are revealed in us that need to be revealed so we can change for the better. People who go from one marriage to another have never learned how they need to change, or if they have learned how they need to change they haven’t been willing to do anything about it and so they take their old miserable self into their next marriage for the same thing to happen all over again. What damage this causes!
I am grateful to say that after our years of marriage since 1975, I am not the same person I was and neither is my husband. We have become “one” in all things! And our four children have been guided and blessed by this in their own marriages.
God expects the husband to cover his wife with his protection, provision and praise of her. Besides praying, the wife covers her husband in a different way – like a well-fitted suit that he feels proud to wear. She can be like a cheap inappropriate suit or an expensive custom-fit suit that makes him stand out and be heard. The wife who has a problem with her husband getting all the attention or privileges is like a cheap wrinkled suit on her husband. People will notice it for sure!
A wife has many qualities but if she will not allow herself to be ‘fitted for her husband’ her husband will not benefit like he should and this will affect her, as well as their children.
Women have it backwards when they think they have the right to groom their husband in any way: physically, emotionally, motherly or spiritually. Shamefully, men have let women make them into lesser men and women have let men make them into lesser women. We make fun of “old fashioned” marriages where women take care of their husband and children and stay busy at home, but it was also when men took their responsibility serious as a husband and father. They looked forward to coming home to a loving wife, home-cooked meals, a clean and orderly home, and to children who looked up to their fathers.
The older women are to “train the younger women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind, and to be subject to their husbands, so that no one will malign the word of God?” (Titus 2:4-5)