Go Get It
Monday Morning Commentary
It’s one thing to get married. It’s another to stay married and yet another to have an enduring happy and healthy marriage. Yesterday, Pastor Chad preached the second sermon in our Show me Love series, Go Get It. He encouraged married couples to get the wisdom needed to sustain a healthy God-honoring marriage.
Scripture instructs us in Proverbs 4:7 that wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom and in all your getting, get understanding. One of the paradoxes of any success is that the skills it takes to get the success are seldom the skills needed to sustain it. The more responsibility piled onto a marriage, any relationship or pursuit the more likely one is to experience feeling trapped. The more something grows we question our values, expectations, purpose, and have unresolved issues emerge.
How do we guard our marriages against becoming overwhelmed and trapped? We gain God’s vision through the wisdom provided in scripture.
God’s vision for marriage includes:
* Leaving mother and father to become one flesh
* Intimacy where both people are completely unashamed to be themselves
* Staying married to the spouse of one’s youth
* Husbands loving their wives as themselves and wives respecting their husbands
Wisdom is not only having a vision. Wisdom is knowing the way God designed for us to get there.
The way to grab hold of the vision God has for marriage is:
* Get God’s wisdom through his word
* Seek first Jesus and his kingdom
Without these two things, there may be a lot of gain in marriage, but it will not be the gain God has for the marriage.
Lastly, Pastor Chad broke down our sermon series title “Show Me, Love". It is first important that in love there is a “Show” or display of the love we have for one another. We all have ways we naturally show love which can be easily defined when we look the love languages: physical touch, words of affirmation, acts of service, gifts, and quality time. Relationships can break down when one expects their partner to speak the same language as them instinctually.
Secondly, the “Me” part of show me love can be problematic when one or both individuals elevate “me” above “we”. It’s easy to show love when we feel loved but what do we do when the feelings aren’t there? The good news is there is a secret place in God where we can go to fill loved. Only by being continually filled with the love of God can we continue to love our spouse and others when they fail to meet all of our needs.
Finally, the “Love” part of marriage can be difficult when we expect our spouse to meet all of our relational needs. We need a variety of different relationships in our lives so that we can be connected, built up, and open-minded. No person can be everything. Expanding our outside relationships can help us value what our spouse does give and what only they can give. The job of a spouse is to give affection, intimate conversation, relational companionship, and sexual fulfillment.
This week, let’s continue gaining God’s wisdom for marriage and relationships. An easy place to start is to communicate Google's most translated phrases: How are you, Thank you, and I love you. Try using these three phrases more in your relationships and see what happens!