Making Marriage Work (27 page)

God is working amazing financial miracles for us so that we can operate the world ministry that we now have. But even in the earlier years of our life, when we went through hard times financially, we still sowed the tithe. We just had enough to pay our bills and then we had to believe God for everything else that came in. When I look back, some of those leaner times hold my best memories and were the most fun times for us.

I had a little prayer book that I kept and one time I wrote down, “Dear Father, I need twelve new dishtowels and I don’t have the money to buy them. Please provide those dishtowels.”

One day, a friend of mine rang the doorbell and said, “I hope you don’t think I am totally insane, but I believe God told me to bring you a dozen dishtowels.”

The excitement of God hit me and I almost knocked her over as I screamed with delight and shouted, “That’s God!” Who gets that excited over dishtowels these days? But excitement comes into your life when you begin to live God’s way.

If you need financial miracles, don’t be afraid to obey God concerning your finances. Begin proving God’s power to bless you by tithing, then beyond that develops a giving lifestyle. As a couple, Dave and I are both trying to live a lifestyle of giving and we enjoy giving away more every year. As we obey God and give when He leads us to do so, somebody always gives back to us and keeps us in that realm of exciting miracles. We actually search for ways to give. We don’t wait for some great feeling to come over us; we give on purpose and with purpose. As a result, our joy and prosperity is always increasing.

14

PASS THE BAND-AIDS®, PLEASE

We who are strong [in our convictions and of robust faith] ought to bear with the failings and the frailties and the tender scruples of the weak; [we ought to help carry the doubts and qualms of others] and not to please ourselves. Let each one of us make it a practice to please (make happy) his neighbor for his good and for his true welfare, to edify him [to strengthen him and build him up spiritually].

Romans 15:1,2

When you read the Word of God, and it says to make your neighbor happy, to edify him and build him up spiritually, do your thoughts lead you to the people next door? Did it even occur to you that this word might be in regard to how you should treat your spouse? The word “neighbor” in Greek, according to
Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance
implies one who is “near,” or “close by.”
¹
Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate® Dictionary
explains a neighbor as “one living or located near another.”
²

For some reason, it seems easier to obey the Word if it doesn’t mean our immediate family, but nearly every home has someone within it who needs healing over a past hurt. In these last few chapters, we have looked at our opportunities to either build up or tear down our partners in various areas of our marriage relationship. Another choice we can make is whether or not we are willing to bring healing to past hurts with which our mate may be dealing.

Of course, God leads us to choose life by following the example of Christ Who did not choose to please Himself and gave no thought to His own interests, but took on Himself the reproaches and abuses of those who reproached and abused us so that we might be healed. Those of us who are free are now called upon to bear up others who are weak in faith.

Men and women are very different, but it helps to understand that God made us different on purpose. Don’t confuse weaknesses with differences. We are to help build up frailties but we are not called to change our differences. It certainly is not God’s plan for us to try to make our partners be like us. But we are in each other’s lives to help build each other up to become all that God had in mind for us to be.

Dave and I suffered many, many heartaches from trying to change our differences instead of trying to build each other up in what we were to become in the Lord. God will almost always put you with somebody who is different from you, but that is part of His plan so that together we complement each other with our strengths and learn to depend on each other for areas in which we are weaker.

God’s ways are not our ways and we don’t always understand His plans. Almost every couple starts out thinking that they must change each other to become compatible, when acceptance is the key to harmony in marriage. If the Lord received us with unconditional love, how much more should we embrace each other with the same patience? But instead we easily fall back into our prideful thinking that we alone are right and everyone should do as we do.

God’s ways are not our ways and we don’t always understand His plans.

There were many things that I thought Dave should and shouldn’t do. I wanted him to he more outgoing, but he was not outgoing. I wanted him to be a social butterfly. He was not a social butterfly I wanted Dave to preach. He’s not called to preach, at least not right now. I did not want him to watch as much football as he watched. I didn’t want him to like sports. I didn’t want him to play golf. I wanted him to sit down every night and just look at me and talk and talk and talk. There were many things that I wanted him to want.

Dave liked his job and was a great provider. He went to work every day, always came home with the money, and took real good care of us, but he had no great ambitions to advance on his job. They offered him promotions, but he knew that it would require him being out of town a lot and he didn’t want that. He just wanted to be happy and have us all live a happy life.

Many times I tried to push him to be something more saying he ought to have more goals. Then when we started actively serving God together, I began to appreciate his differences and how much his approach to life had done to bring God’s healing for my past hurts. If Dave had not been born again and Spirit-filled, I don’t believe he could ever have stood me. As I said before, by the time Dave found me, I had so many wounds and hurts from both my childhood and earlier marriage that I was in a really serious condition. As I already stated, my previous husband had relationships with other women and did things that finally sent him to prison.

It is often difficult for people to go forward in new relationships when they are loaded up with deep wounds and hurts from past situations and abuses. Whether they suffered emotional abuse, physical abuse, or verbal abuse, they need healing to overcome their trained suspicions and defenses. If a person was repeatedly talked down to as a child by his parents or teachers, that person is going to have problems with insecurity. He will need more tender loving care than somebody who was lovingly reinforced as a child.

We need to know about each other and care about what kind of background our spouses came from. Understanding the past may help you to understand some of the things that are happening now. Many people admit to some thing in their past that they know is still crippling them emotionally. They need godly understanding to be able to go on past these things before they can properly relate to people.

Jesus is in the healing business — we don’t have to live all our lives in bondage to our past. I used to think, I would never change. I believed that once those kind of things happened to you, you could never get over it. But if you are willing to let God work with you, He will help you.

Jesus is in the healing business — we don’t have to live all our lives in bondage to our past.

HEALING OLD WOUNDS

If your partner needs healing, it will come even more quickly if you will help. If you will try to put yourself in their place, you will see ways to help. Just take an hour and sit down sometime, and in your wildest imagination consider what it would be like to go through what your spouse has tried to share with you that they went through.

Romans 15:5,6 gives instruction on how we can help:

Now may the God Who gives the power of patient endurance (steadfastness) and Who supplies encouragement, grant you to live in such mutual harmony and such full sympathy with one another, in accord with Christ Jesus,

That together you may [unanimously] with united hearts and one voice, praise and glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ (the Messiah).

God will give us the power of patient endurance and supply us with encouragement so that we can live in harmony and in sympathy with one another. Dave’s father died from drinking, but Dave had a godly mother and it saved him a lot of the problems that he could have had. But Dave went through many years of being passive to avoid conflict with his father. Now, he is not like that any more, but he didn’t deal with certain responsibilities for a time. As I mentioned previously, Dave went to work and he did his job, and he took care of all that, but beyond that, getting him to move was difficult. If he had a golf match, he could remember to call everybody in town, could come home and tell me every ball that he hit, even every ball that everyone else hit, his score, and their score, but he couldn’t remember to hang the picture or mail the bills. That kind of stuff used to easily anger me.

I thought Dave just didn’t want to do the things I wanted him to do. He is healed from passivity now, but God has shown me that Dave got into that behavior pattern by looking at his role models. Children learn from what they see their parents doing and Dave saw his passive father sitting on the sidelines and basically doing nothing. Even though Dave never had a temptation to drink, he still followed his father’s example and dismissed most all of his responsibilities around the home.

When Dave made the decision to change that type of behavior, it took him a long time to make new habits. But I respect him for the work that he has let God do in his life. The devil had us in a trap because I wanted to control everything anyway, and Dave’s passive nature just fed my controlling spirit. Dave and I both needed healing from situations of our past, and while God was working on our deliverance, the devil used our weaknesses against each other.

The Bible tells us to bear one another up in our weaknesses. To build each other up requires godly sympathy and understanding. What you don’t understand about each other or even about yourselves, get busy and find out. Why do certain behavior patterns develop in people’s lives? We need to care enough about each other to get involved and find out how to help our partner.

Dave and I enjoy reading books by author Gary Smalley, who has many helpful titles available on interpersonal relationships. In one of his lessons, Gary uses the example of a plant which he called “Ivy.” He said if he married Ivy and she had a lot of brown leaves it might not be his fault that she had the brown leaves. She might be browning out from things that happened to her long before he met her. But, he continued, now that he was married to Ivy her brown leaves were his responsibility and he must find a way to give her the nutrients she needs to become vibrant and healthy again.

Even though we may not have caused poor behavior patterns in our mate, God has put us in their life to be a help to them. God already determined that there are things we can’t do alone. God repeatedly calls us to love each other and bear one another’s griefs and burdens. Galatians 6:2 says,

Bear (endure, carry) one another’s burdens and troublesome moral faults, and in this way fulfill and observe perfectly the law of Christ the (Messiah) and complete what is lacking [in your obedience to it].

Dave and I struggled for a long time because we didn’t understand this important role we were to play in each other’s life. God has brought you to this page and place in time to give you knowledge and understanding so that your marriage might become a picture of his plan for the world. We are a privileged people to know the things that God has revealed.

Doctors’ offices are filled with people wanting to know how to relate to their spouses and how to be healed from those things that bind them. God’s Word gives clear instruction, and God anoints His Word with the power to be fruitful if we will simply do as He says to do.

Dave used to ask me, “Why do you act like that?”

I didn’t know why I behaved the way I did. Then I would ask him, “Well, why do you act like that? If you wouldn’t do that, I wouldn’t do this.”

And he replied, “Well, if you’d do this, I wouldn’t do that! If you would quit griping all the time, I wouldn’t stay on the golf course.”

I would say, “Well, if you would stay home, I would quit griping.”

How often have you had a similar conversation? I am trying to illustrate and impart understanding of how hurting people hurt people. If you are hurting each other in your relationship, it is probably because there is a hurt inside of you that hasn’t been healed. Some way, somehow, you have been hurt yourself somewhere, and you need to get with God and let Him bring you the healing that you need in order to go forward.

Dave brought healing to me by showing me unconditional love for years and years and years. I had never lived around this kind of love before. All the love that I ever received in my whole life was conditional. If I did what someone wanted then I could get what I needed.

Conditional love fills you with rejection if you don’t perform exactly right all the time. Many people have trouble in their relationships because it is the only kind of love they know about. Even if you didn’t come out of an abusive situation and saw only conditional love from your parents, it has the same effect. How many of us were raised to believe that Mom and Dad would only be happy with us if we got all A’s on our report cards and other things like that which placed conditions on love given?

Destructive behavior problems result from a feeling of insecurity and insignificance, but God is in the healing business. If you recognize these problems in your marriage, then ask God to help. You can’t keep sweeping these things under the rug, hoping they will go away on their own. You have to deal with these issues in your life.

Determine in your heart that whatever help your spouse needs, you will give it to them. If there is anything hurting you, try to explain what it is and ask for help. Rededicate your love to each other by learning how to cherish and nurture each other. Once you understand what needs to be changed, ask for and grant patience when it is needed. Honesty is the turning point of recovery. Admit when you are not real sure how to do something, but let your mate know that you are going to try to either help them or make changes yourself.