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Live joyfully with the wife whom you love all the days of your vain life which he has given you under the sun
Ecclesiastes 9:9(NKJV)
Living joyfully together is one tough assignment, especially when it seems that almost everything in life competes for our affection. Too many couples are tired of trying to keep it all together and are pained by love gone bad.
And many of them just throw in the towel and give up on love.
Yet, marriage is close to the heart of God so close that the apostle Paul uses marriage as an analogy of Christ’s love for the church and how he gave himself up for her. It’s that kind of love and commitment God had in mind when he ordained marriage. The most satisfying marriages-the ones best able to fulfill the Ecclesiastes call to joy and love-come about when a husband and wife align themselves with God and his original intent for spiritual and marital intimacy.
Marriage, then, is not just two people in love; it’s three strand cord not easily broken. When God enters the marital equation, a horizontal and temporal contract is transformed into am eternal covenant relationship with vertical and horizontal dimensions. Mundane marital existence is transformed into an adventure of love and joy, lived as a gift from gracious God.
However, thus kind of marriage is not given and doesn’t come without hard work, deep forgiveness, and incredible mutual sacrifice.
LOVE ON THE ROCK
Let’s be fair. Marriage can be difficult. It brings two people together, two people with very different personalities, and desires, and puts them in such close proximity that their faults and weakness will be discovered. as a result, all marriages go through periods of disaffection, times when love feels distant, cold, times when you just seem to have “lost that loving’ feeling.” When conflict and misunderstanding occur, what happens during these times will usually set the course for the rest of the marriage.
Unfortunately, disaffection often wins out, and couples who get to that point never know God’s desire for their marriage. An estimated 50 percent of to day’s couples will see their marriage end in divorce, most of them within the first seven years. And those are just the raw statistics. Many of those who stay in their marriages live unhappily behind closed doors. In the quiet corners of their hearts are profound sorrow and emptiness.
Couples are seeing the marriages of their friends and family ravaged like never before. They see the love that held them together crumbling, its strength and endurance gone. Perhaps you’re seeing that in your own marriage.
Chances are you or someone you love has a marriage in trouble right now. If so, you’ve wondered what went wrong or wondered how a union that started with such promise and with the blessing of God himself could have soured.
Losing at Love
When conflict first hits, every couple has some doubt and also wonders how they might lose at love. After all, neither of them is necessarily a hateful person, neither is particularly selfish, or at least it seemed they didn’t start out that way. How can things go so wrong?
We have found that most couples are unaware or under aware of what happens in these circumstances. When they begin to experience trouble in an effort at self-preservation, they dig in their heels and lay the blame for the problems at the feet of their spouse. This is a losing strategy and is guaranteed to allow the problems to fester and grow.
Believe it or not, there is an answer for why everything goes so wrong, for losing at love is often predictable. It follows a step-by-step process and creates a repeating cycle that if left unchecked can take a couple from love’s first embrace to the point where love is totally destroyed and the marriage will probably end in the pain of divorce.
But there’s hope for the troubled marriage. Because the cycle is predictable, if the steps are understood, the courageous couple can work to stop the cycle, arrest the destructive spiral, and literally save their marriage. Most couples want what it takes to keep their marriage afloat, and by understanding how they got to where they are, they can reverse the process and breathe new life into their marriage.
Everyday Pressures-How Disaffection Gets Started
How does disaffection start? It actually begins with everyday life, with the six pressures we all face daily.
1. Stress
Futurist David Zach refers to our age as the time of hyper-living.” We’re pulled in every direction, busy and going nowhere fast, having to do more with less time. Before long, tempers, stomachs ache, heart break. Hurried decisions become bad decisions.And bad decisions make people hurt.
Marriage becomes a perpetual uphill climb. And our hurt makes us irritable, discouraged, and very difficult to live with. Some have just flat out been overwhelmed by life, wayward kids, financial pressures, health problems, and demanding work schedules.Take an inventory. What stresss have been tearing a your relationship since you married?
2. Evil
Since the time of Adam and Eve, the evil one has sought to destroy this God-ordained intimate bond of marriage. He is the great confuser and the ultimate liar. He magnifies our weakness and fears and uses them as wedges that comes between us.
The apostle Peter described the evil one a a “roaring lion,seeking whom he may devour”( 1 peter 5:8 NKJV).And, he’s out to take as big a bite as he can out of your marriage. If he does, he stands to win a lot, possibly causing fatal blows to you, and your kids.