“Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” (Genesis 2:24)
In June1971, I asked a beautiful young lady named Miriam to be my wife, and she surprisingly said: Yes! We set our wedding date for March 4th 1972 in Caracas, Venezuela, after I had finished nine months of Army training. We would then move to our first home in Berlin, Germany where I was to be stationed. I didn’t know when I got on that plane for Caracas that last week in February,1972, but I also had to get married at a civil ceremony on February 26th and that my father-in-law to be, had scheduled two services on March 4th, one Catholic and one Protestant! Miriam’s family was nominally Catholic and I had been raised a Methodist. (His logic was that Miriam could decide at a later date if she wanted to continue as a Catholic or become a Protestant like her husband.)
So we got married 3 times in one week so, we always have said: “we are so married there is no chance for a divorce ever!” There were never any doubts that we would live up to our vows of “till death do us part” just as my grandparents and parents had. We learned little by little in the coming years the need to always consider the others feelings, desires, and wishes and to work hard at learning to agree to every big or small decision and to especially work hard to raise our children properly.
After both of us became born again believers in Christ, we started to become aware of how important it was to have God involved in all our decisions and actions. Of course, we didn’t always do it right. We had been married 25 years when I first understood and began working hard to “love my wife the way Christ loves the Church.”
We have been married 50 years now and we are just now reading the best book we have ever read about Marriage, appropriately titled: Marriage, by Paul David Tripp (My new favorite author!) The following is a small example of the priceless gems Mr. Tripp shares in this book and I hope it will encourage you in your marriage:
“Humbly admit your ongoing struggle. The good news of the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ is that you have all the help you will ever need to face whatever is written into your life by the one who is writing your story. But you must humbly face the fact that until you are in his final kingdom, where sin, suffering, and death are no more, you will need his rescue, forgiveness, empowerment, and deliverance moment by moment every day. You will never become a grace graduate! This means there will never be a point in your marriage where you can just lay back, chill out, and coast. As long as sin still lives inside you, with its self-focused, antisocial instincts, you need to live with open eyes, listening ears, and an approachable heart.”
“None of us is yet all that grace is able to cause us to be. None of our marriages is all that God has designed each of them to be. No one reading this can say, ‘Our marriage is perfect without need of growth in any way.’ We all must confess that every day we struggle with sin. Every day we say and do what is wrong. Every day we desire things we should not have and think things we should not think.. Every day we fall once again into living for ourselves rather than for God and others. We don’t celebrate who God has made our husbands and wives to be in the way that we should…..We want things done our way rather than having to consider another way or being required to admit that there is a way that may be better than ours. We don’t want to admit that there are ways in which our husbands or wives are stronger or more mature than we are…. We don’t like having to live with differences.”
“Your King and Savior is at work, even when you have given up. He loves you even when you don’t have sense enough to love one another or to love him in return. He is working outside you to produce in you a sense of need, and working inside you to give you what you need. You never face a disappointment, temptation, responsibility, obligation, opportunity, or calling without the resources of his grace. When you are weak and exhausted, his strength gives you reason to go on. When you are confused and don’t know what to do, his wisdom gives you direction. In moments when you feel wounded and alone, he comforts you with his loving and healing hands. When you have lost the way, he seeks you and finds you and brings you back.”
“Your hope of a long-term, loving marriage is found in one place—God’s love for you. Admit that you need it and then give yourself to celebrating that this God of love has brought you and your spouse together for his glory and your good. And remember, he will not call you to a task without giving you, in his grace, what you need to do it. (Marriage by Paul David Tripp, pp. 258-259)
PRAY
Lord, we beseech you to help everyone of us who is married to remember that our spouse has been chosen by You to be our loving partner for life and that we have been chosen by You to be their loving partner also.
Help us to love each other just the way You love us by constantly being patient with our sinfulness, our unfaithfulness, our rebelliousness, and our stubbornness.
Fill us with Your Spirit everyday, and draw close to us to help us through every trial, obstacle, and challenge that we face in this fallen world.
