Some couples speak of blissful-filled marriages, where spending time together is wonderful and the constant conversations never end. It’s wonderful, too, to listen to of those ideal, trouble-free unions. Who wouldn’t need to reside in such a carefree, easy type of relationship where husband and wife are one another’s best friends?
For other couples though, it’s a really different story. Staying married is stuffed with challenges, and for a lot of, just attempting to get along, communicate, and co-reside in a house is an ongoing battle.
There’s also numerous chatter in our culture concerning marriage, relationships, and red flags, including opinions and advice from a secular, unbiblical viewpoint that doesn’t align with God’s truth. It’s essential when going through marital challenges that we don’t turn to worldly views because they’re tickling our ears with what we would like to listen to, feel, and do fairly than the reality of God’s Word.
Likewise, we regularly go searching and see couples we predict have all of it together, but even in marriages that look like solid with the right couple, it will possibly be hard. Evangelist Billy Graham’s wife, Ruth, is credited with saying, when asked if she ever considered divorce, “No, but murder, yes.”
Why Fight for a Marriage That’s Hard?
Tragically, marriage is under severe attack. Society is working to have people devalue, avoid, mock, and redesign it. However, God designed marriage to be a sacred union, respected, revered, and held holy before Him.
Our culture has been whittling marriage right down to a legal contract for whoever desires to marry. But marriage is a sacred covenant designed by God. Men’s and ladies’s laws do not need the facility to reinvent it.
Marriage is so vital to God and His plan for His followers since it represents the connection between His Church and Jesus Christ. It’s why the devil is out in full force, attacking and ripping marriages apart, set on destroying and stopping God’s will on earth.
Revelation 19:7 describes Christ and His Church to come back: “Let us rejoice and be glad and provides Him glory! For the marriage of the Lamb has come, and His bride has made herself ready.”
More than most Christians realize, marriage is greater than well worth the fight, identical to the Church of Jesus Christ is price fighting the battle. Believers unwilling to fight for his or her marriages may find it too hard to get up and fight for the Church.
Why Bother to Save a Difficult Marriage?
It is important for believers in Jesus Christ to take their earthly marriage vows with reverence and commitment, understanding that it’s a covenant with God and with one another, not a contract. Ephesians 5:25-33 explains how, through the mystery of earthly marriage designed to form an unbreakable bond between husband, wife, and God, He reveals the mystery of His Bride, the Church.
“Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through word and to present her to Himself as a radiant Church, without stain or wrinkle or every other blemish, but holy and blameless.” Ephesians 5:25-27
God designed marriage because the model for what the Church is to be—the Body of Christ on Earth. Ephesians 5:28-30 goes on to clarify, “In this same way, husbands should love their wives as their very own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, nobody ever hated their very own body, but they feed and look after their body, just as Christ does the Church—for we’re members of His body.”
As Ephesians 5:31 explains, God created marriage as a profound mystery that reveals His everlasting plan for Christ and His Church: “’For this reason a person will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the 2 will develop into one flesh.’ This is a profound mystery—but I’m talking about Christ and the Church.”
Where Do Couples Turn for Help?
For those that struggle of their marriages but need to do whatever they will to remain married, what can they do to maintain going?
What does a wife do if her spouse is distant, unresponsive, uninterested, or uninvolved? Does she sit him down and cross-examine him in hopes of checking out what’s happening? Perhaps for some couples, this plan of action works, but especially for many men, they appear to clam up when being placed on the spot and questioned. But what does God’s Word lead a wife to do?
At times when our marriage is in distress, we are able to turn to Scripture and trust what it tells us to do in difficult situations, especially in relation to marriage. God gives us His Word to encourage, strengthen, and luxury us when marriage is tough.
Where Do a Husband and Wife Begin?
The following are five ways we are able to practice scriptural truths in our marriages in a way that helps us stay married:
1. Pray. First and most significantly, wives can pray for his or her husbands. 1 Timothy 2:1 encourages, “I urge, then, to begin with, that petitions, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for all people.”
If in any respect possible, pray with them. By doing so, we’re letting God work through the words the Holy Spirit is leading us to say to melt his heart. 1 Thessalonians 5:11 urges us to “Therefore encourage each other and construct one another up, just as actually you’re doing.”
2. Follow God’s Word. Jeremiah 17:9 reminds us that “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?”
So what do we are saying to ourselves when our hearts are leading us to depart our marriages and go along with our fun-loving neighbor down the road? Or our co-worker within the office who gets us or the outgoing man on the coffee shop who notices us, pays extra attention, listens to our stories, and makes us feel attractive and wanted?
The world’s advice to “follow our heart” can lead us straight off a steep cliff. We can’t trust our hearts to take us in the fitting direction. Mark 7:21-22 explains, “For it’s from inside, out of an individual’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance, and folly.”
When temptation comes, we are able to turn to God to assist us, and He will. In our weakness, we are able to turn to Him, follow His Word, and He will lead us to safety. “No temptation has overtaken you except what’s common to mankind. And God is faithful; He won’t allow you to be tempted beyond what you possibly can bear. But if you end up tempted, He may also provide a way out so which you could endure it” (1 Corinthians 10:13).
3. Choose Love. Unlike what songs, movies, and poems often profess, love will not be a sense. It’s a choice. Although we may not wish to admit it, feelings are sometimes tied to how our spouse makes us feel, so when feelings diminish or change, which they typically do, we regularly imagine we now not love them.
But what some call love, the sensation that comes and goes with a whim and changes with the breeze, will not be a love that comes from God because His love lasts; it never fails (1 Corinthians 13:8).
True love will not be a fleeting form of love but fairly a selection to like when it’s hard, with the love of God that is robust enough to cover sin. To endure a tough marriage is to let the love of God flow through us to our spouse. 1 Peter 4:8 urges us to “Above all, love one another deeply, because love covers over a mess of sins.”
4. Forgive Each Other. Colossians 3:13 encourages us to “Bear with one another and forgive each other if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive because the Lord forgave you.”
Although many see this as forgiving everyone but their spouse, marriage might be where this godly principle is required probably the most and is given the best opportunity to be practiced. Ruth Bell Graham stated, “A completely happy marriage is the union of two good forgivers.”
5. Submit to One Another. Although some consider it demeaning in practice, even now in some Christian circles, submission is a gorgeous act of sacrifice and worship to God. True submission will not be concerning the other person but has every part to do with our reverence and obedience to Christ. Ephesians 5:21 urges, “Submit to at least one one other out of reverence for Christ.”
We’re called to submit to one another, including our husbands, which stirs up strong reactions from many ladies, who find it easier to do with almost anyone else fairly than to their husbands.
1 Peter 3:1-2 urges, “Wives, in the identical way submit yourselves to your individual husbands in order that, if any of them don’t imagine the word, they could be won over without words by the behavior of their wives, after they see the purity and reverence of your lives.”
Wives, although a tough pill to swallow, we would like to ask ourselves and God if our unwillingness to undergo our own husbands reveals riot in our hearts towards God. The enemy of our souls doesn’t want us to undergo God and convinces us it’s a weakness to accomplish that, which is a lie since it’s quite the other.
Submission causes the devil to flee from us. James 4:7 explains, “Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he’ll flee from you.”
Marriage to Be Honored by All
Hebrews 13:4 calls for marriage to be honored by all, and because of this the devil and his cohorts are ruthlessly at work to destroy and deconstruct God’s sacred design.
So how are couples able to resist the vicious assaults against holy matrimony? God’s Word gives us the reply: by praying, following God’s Word, selecting to like each other, forgiving one another, and submitting one to a different in obedience to Christ.
These are key to reworking a tough marriage into one which reflects Christ and His Church on Earth.
Photo Credit: ©Getty Images/fizkes
Lynette Kittle is married with 4 daughters. She enjoys writing about faith, marriage, parenting, relationships, and life. Her writing has been published by Focus on the Family, Decision, Today’s Christian Woman, kirkcameron.com, Ungrind.org, StartMarriageRight.com, and more. She has a M.A. in Communication from Regent University and serves as associate producer for Soul Check TV.
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