A Pathway to Healing Marriage – Marriage

“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 build each other up to become all that God had in mind for us to be” (Joyce Meyer).

  

 We’re going to share with you something which Joyce Meyer wrote in her book, “Help Me – I’m Married” (published by Harrison House). It’s a good book that I highly recommend reading. This particular portion of it concerns a God-given pathway to victory she experienced in her marriage with her husband, Dave, which might encourage you. Joyce writes:

“God’s ways are not our ways and we don’t always understand His plans. Almost every couple starts out thinking they must change each other to be compatible, when acceptance is then 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.
“There are many things that I thought Dave should and shouldn’t do. I wanted him to be more outgoing, but he wasn’t outgoing. I wanted him to be a social butterfly. He wasn’t a social butterfly. I wanted Dave to preach. He’s not called to preach, at least not right now.
“I didn’t 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. The 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 had not been born-again and Spirit-filled, I don’t believe he could have ever stood me.
[Earlier in my life] “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. My previous husband had relationships with other women and did things that finally sent him to prison.
“It’s often difficult for people to go forward in new relationships when they’re 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 kinds of things happened to you, you could never get over it. But if you’re willing to let God work with you, He will help you.
“If your partner needs healing, it will come even more quickly if you will help. If you’ll try to put yourself in their place, you’ll see ways to help. Just take an hour and sit down sometime, and in your wildest imagination consider what 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 for one another.”

May God help you to work with each other’s differences to harmonize your talents in partnership with each other. We encourage you to bear with and help each other work through whatever handicaps that keep either one of you emotionally from being all you can be in partnership with Jesus Christ.
Words can’t describe how appreciative I am that my husband Steve partnered with me to work through some very difficult emotional issues, which I unknowingly carried into our marital relationship. It has taken an extraordinary amount of patience and prayerful discernment on his part, as he worked with God to help me. Because of this, our marriage is whole and healthy and stronger than it ever could have been had we not worked through this together, as a “chord of three strands.” It’s our hope that you’ll also selflessly help each other in the ways that are needed.
Consider the following:

“God is seeking a colleague —a dedicated partner and coworker —in the ministry of loving your spouse, and you are the colleague he wants. And when God receives in you the colleague He seeks, you in turn receive the marvelous benefit of being partnered with Him in your marriage. The God who knows your spouse completely is present to share His knowledge of him or her with you” (David Ferguson).

May you give your spouse the loving grace, which Jesus Christ wants us to each experience!