Guarding and Growing Your Marriage

If you’ve read my blog long, you know I am (along with the rest of you) deeply grieved about the rate of divorce among Christians.  It really hits home when you hear of it among your friends and acquaintances.

On a broad scale, marriage is supposed to reflect the picture of Christ and the church; so every divorce among believers is an ugly mark on that picture.

On a personal level, divorce always creates a new set of problems, and rarely “fixes” the old ones.  Hearts are torn, children are permanently affected, extended families are damaged, and the “curse” of divorce reaches into the next generations.

And something we must not forget: none of us are immune to a weakened marriage.   Marriage is commitment, choosing, work and cultivation.  I pray Christians would understand the gravity of cultivating their marriages!

How do we protect ourselves?  How do we grow our marriages?  How do we cultivate them to resemble more and more of Christ and His bride?

Choose. It seems overly simplistic, but I truly believe that commitment in marriage begins with a resolute choosing of love, fidelity and covenant-keeping. As believers, we have to remind ourselves that despite what the culture screams all around us, marriage is for life, and we should never allow our minds to entertain anything different.  Jesus demonstrated the ultimate gift of love and sacrifice “while we were yet sinners”…before we ever showed Him a smidgen of love or devotion, and continues to love us though we don’t deserve it.  Can we commit to love our spouse that way?  Even when he or she doesn’t deserve it?

Cultivate. A garden is a great analogy for a lot of things.  I’ve used it as a picture of raising children, but it’s also great for the picture of marriage.  You CANNOT plant a beautiful garden, no matter how perfect it looks at first, and then walk away and expect it to stay beautiful.  (Believe me, we’ve tried it  Weeds don’t take long to crop up.  At first they’re manageable.  But left for very long, they will overtake the garden and make it almost impossible to salvage.  We have to keep the weeds out as they crop up!

What are the weeds?  An unkind word here, a sarcastic look there.  A kind gesture left undone, a need overlooked, a priority misplaced.  It must be deliberate.  If we let life take so much of us that we don’t have time to cultivate the marital relationship, we simply have to stop something, and regain our priorities.

Protect. It should be no secret that Satan wants to destroy your marriage precisely because of what it does to the picture of the church, and because He loves to see people destroyed.  Knowing that should make us bristle up with vehemence against anything that would threaten  our marriages.

Does anyone speak ill of our spouse?  This often happens within the family.  Don’t stand for it for a minute.

Are we watching or reading things that cause us to compare our spouse unfavorably?  Stop it.  (“If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off.”)

I’ve mentioned before that my husband and I have a few “rules” to help safeguard our fidelity.  Too many couples play with fire in allowing themselves to become too close or friendly with people of the opposite sex.  Don’t underestimate the subtle power of temptation.  No one ever had an affair who started out with that intention.  It always “just happened before they knew it”.

Protect your marriage from the thief of time.  “Not enough time” is probably one of the main culprits of divorce.  Little by little, we let other things choke out our conversations and expressions of love.  If we have to schedule time on the calendar to converse or be together, so be it.

Protect your marriage with you MIND.  Our thoughts are so very powerful.  If we dwell on our spouse’s shortcomings, eventually, we can only see him in a negative light, and his faults will grow until they become bigger than they actually are.  (And our attitude will become more sour, reflecting in our behavior, weakening the bonds of affection.) But if we “take every thought captive”, choosing to think on his positive traits, those traits will grow even stronger, (and our attitude will be sweeter) while the weaker traits diminish.  The battle begins in the mind.

Nourish. Besides pulling the weeds, it takes more to grow a healthy marriage.  It takes deliberate acts of nourishment.  I think the most basic, healthy act between couples is remembering to be courteous.  We all know how difficult that can be when we take each other’s affections for granted, but if we can remind ourselves of this most basic human need, it would make a world of difference.  Courtesy is respect.  “Let each esteem others better than himself”.  That’s it in a nutshell.

What speaks love to your spouse? Find out and do it!  Ask if you don’t know.  “What really makes you feel loved?” Take the time to love your spouse in tangible ways.  It could make all the difference!  How many people have quietly walked away from a marriage because they “didn’t feel loved”?  Don’t assume he knows the depth of your love.

Understand the purpose of marriage. I’ve hardly ever heard someone describe their divorce experience without prefacing it with, “I just wasn’t happy”.Granted, it’s easy for someone who is happy in their marriage to tell someone who is not to “get over it”.  But honestly, happiness is only a by-product of a godly marriage, not the purpose.  Don’t allow yourself to think that your happiness is superior to the command to be faithful to the sacred covenant you made.  (I’m not talking about truly abusive marriages here.)

Once again, when we become one with Christ through salvation, He doesn’t treat that covenant conditionally.  When we are purchased with His blood, He doesn’t leave a “divorce clause” just in case we don’t make Him happy.  His grace extends beyond all our shortcomings and He remains a faithful Groom through it all.

Dear sisters, let’s treasure our marriages.  Let’s choose to love, choose to grow, choose to stay, and choose to do our part to make our marriages a reflection of Christ and His bride.

(Reposted from the archives)