Manna for Marriage

Category: Here’s Hope

  • An Open Letter to a Hurting Husband

    An Open Letter to a Hurting Husband

    I know that you are hurting in your marriage. And I realize that it might seem easier to just walk away.

    But you haven’t.

    I commend you for that because God doesn’t walk away from His covenant partner, either.

    Take hope!

    Although there has been pain in your marriage, you can have immense hope in the unfailing goodness of God. As you seek to honor God in your marriage, you can be confident that God will enable you to do that. The Scriptures give this encouragement to you:

    Do not be discouraged, and do not be dismayed, for the LORD your God fights for you.¹

    God’s heart is for you. He is for healing. God has obligated Himself to act on behalf of those who are in covenant with Him.

    Author and pastor Dave Harvey says,

    God is completely, totally, enthusiastically supportive of your every effort to build a strong, God-glorifying marriage.

    You can succeed.

    You are able to succeed powerfully as a husband. God has created your spirit for strength and for greatness. Regardless of your wife’s actions, you can excel as a husband through your commitment and devotion to her.

    This success as a husband is rooted in your commitment to God. It is not based on your wife’s reaction or behavior.

    Marriage is not something you wrestle out with your wife. Instead, marriage is something you wrestle out with God, just as Jacob did at the Jabbok River. Wrestle until you are able to submit to the blessing.

    You succeed as a husband as you remember your pledge before God in the presence of witnesses to love this woman and to be faithful to her “till death do you part.” Remember that you made a sacred vow; and by the enabling of the Spirit of God Himself, stand with strength to fulfill that pledge.

    You commit to fulfill your solemn oath with honor and with integrity, regardless of the cost, because mighty men of God choose to act as God Himself acts. As bearers of His image, godly men uphold covenant promises as God does: with steadfast faithfulness, unintimidated by the threat of loss and undeterred by the pain of sacrifice.

    You succeed as a man of strength and greatness when you say to your wife:

    I am completely committed to you.

    I devote myself to you and to you alone. There are no “back-up” plans.

    Even if you reject me, I will continue to be committed to your good as long as there is breath in me. To whatever extent that you will permit me, and as is appropriate, I will strive to bless you and to serve you.

    I will lay down my life in order to minister to you. I will lay down my self-interests and self-focus.

    None of this is contingent upon anything you do. This is my unconditional pledge to you, offered in obedience to God.

    Even if you should want me out of your life, I will continue to commit to you alone and will serve you by my fervent prayers.

    You are able to do this as you recognize that the great need of your life is for God Himself. Know that He has promised personally to be your great Reward. Like the apostle Paul, resolve to make knowing Christ the determined purpose of your life.²

    You can be satisfied.

    God desires to satisfy every longing of your heart, and He is able to satisfy you fully. He does not satisfy those who are looking elsewhere for satisfaction, but He does satisfy abundantly those who are passionate and hungry and desperate for Him. For those who commit themselves to belonging to Him exclusively, He satisfies supremely.

    With Christ as your sustainer and as the satisfier of your life, you are able to stand with strength as a man and with success as a husband.

    In the beginning, the earth was formless, empty, and dark. By the work of the Spirit, God created new life—things of beauty and things of excellence. Your marriage may seem shattered, empty, and dark right now. As you yield to the Spirit of God, invite Him to hover over your life and marriage, creating and restoring all that is “very good.”

    Even if your wife should reject this miracle of renewal in your relationship, it can be a wonderful reality in your own spirit and life.

    In general, when a husband creates a solid foundation of relational security for his wife, she will meet him there and will work with him to build the relationship upon that foundation of commitment. It is that commitment to one another’s good and to the relationship itself that gives strength to a marriage.

    Many past hurts and frustrations are resolved
    not by rehearsing the hurts or by reviewing the resentments
    but by renewing a firm commitment to the relationship.

    “Love covers over a multitude of sins,” and it is a man’s “glory to overlook an offense.”³ Resolve that nothing will thwart your commitment to your relationship with your bride.

    You can gain honor.

    Your wife may reject your offer of relationship and may limit your expressions of service to her, but absolutely no one can deter your commitment to her. It is that commitment which glorifies you and which God honors. As the husband, you bear on your shoulders accountability for the relationship. The wife is responsible for her own choices, but you are uniquely accountable for the relationship. When you provide a solid foundation of commitment, you are encouraging and enabling your wife to commit on her part and to join in successful marriage-building. But if the man’s offer of commitment is conditional, then the woman perceives this as thin ice rather than as firm footing which she can trust.

    The husband has the God-given ability to meet the woman’s core need for relational security. The wife looks to the man to provide this first. It is his glory to do so, and it is his greatest success to continue to do so.

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    ¹ Deuteronomy 31:6, 8; Isaiah 41:10; Joshua 1:9, 23:10
    ² Genesis 15:1: Philippians 3:8
    ³ 1 Peter 4:8; Proverbs 19:11

  • Hope for a Hurting Husband

    Hope for a Hurting Husband

    “Some of you will rebuild the deserted ruins of your cities. Then you will be known as a rebuilder of walls and a restorer of homes.” (Amos 9:11, NLT)

    I know that you are asking God to fulfill these words in your marriage, and I earnestly join you in that prayer, believing that God’s heart is strong for healing and reconciliation. But I also know that at this moment, you sense only cold silence and closed doors. 

    I want to encourage you that you are not alone in your pain, God is not discouraged, and His plan for your life is not in tatters. 

    “We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.” (2 Corinthians 4:8-9, NIV)

    God is not limited by your emotions. You can feel low and yet have strong faith. As you set your will to follow God, He works powerfully through your yielded spirit. 

    “Therefore, since we do hold and engage in this ministry by the mercy of God …, we do not get discouraged (spiritless and despondent with fear) or become faint with weariness and exhaustion.” (1 Corinthians 4:1, AMPC)

    I pray that the following five truths will strengthen you today.

    1. God’s mighty purposes for your life and your marriage are not thwarted. 

    “I know that You can do anything and no plan of Yours can be thwarted.”
    (Job 42:2, HCSB)

    God is still using your marriage to draw you closer to Him. The Spirit is still using you to show those around you what God looks like. You have the opportunity to reveal God as a forgiving God, full of generous grace, unfailing commitment, and unconditional love. In fact, it is when our marriages are difficult that we are most able to demonstrate these awesome attributes of God.

    And when our marriages are difficult, we are often able to see our own hearts better. When a spouse is warm and supportive, we may believe that we are more loving than we really are. “You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours” is usually a  pleasant transaction, not a self-denying sacrifice. But when we serve a spouse without receiving appreciation or even acknowledgment, then our inner responses reveal our true motivation. 

    As others have pointed out, when we are treated like servants, we quickly learn whether we have servant’s hearts or not! When we are not receiving positive feedback, we have the privilege to serve purely for the sake of love.

    2. Your calling to cherish and to care for your covenant partner has not changed.

    How you carry out that task has changed, but you can still love her well.

    Always, you can provide a covering of earnest prayer for your wife. Praying faithfully is one of the most significant and most powerful things you will ever do. The greatest accomplishment of your life may be your perseverance in prayer for your wife and children, sharing God’s burdened heart for them.

    “Your prayers are God’s way of accomplishing the victory of Jesus Christ over this world.” (John Piper, desiringgod.com)

    You can always fight on your knees!

    “Don’t be afraid of the enemy! Remember the Lord, who is great and glorious, and fight for your brothers, your sons, your daughters, your wives, and your homes!” (Nehemiah 4:14, NLT)

    3. God allows you to wrestle honestly with Him. 

    Many times, we understand that our spouses’ resistance toward our marriages may actually be resistance to God. But it can be much harder to recognize our own inner struggles as wrestling matches with God.

    As we churn with turmoil and darkness in our spirits, we usually focus on our spouses and the conflict between us. But we may need to recognize that we are actually struggling with God. 

    Deep down, we may feel that He should not have allowed this pain in our lives or that He is not being a good God to us. We may believe that He has failed us or is negligent in keeping His promises. We may wonder if he is a God worth following even through intense suffering. Is He truly sufficient to satisfy the longings of our hearts?

    Simply recognizing that we are struggling with God can be very helpful because then we can verbalize our troubling thoughts and begin to deal effectively with these core issues.

    In the Old Testament, we learn that the patriarch Jacob wrestled with God at the Jabbok River (Genesis 32:22-31). In my life, I wrestled with God in fear and confusion, but eventually, I learned that God wanted only to bless me.

    4. This is your opportunity to come against the enemy like never before. 

    It is good to worship God in the light, but it is powerful to worship Him in the darkness. Prison bars are broken and chains are snapped when God’s people worship in the darkness of their pain.

    Long before Jacob wrestled with God, he encountered God on another difficult night. Jacob was running for his life when he stopped to sleep on the hard ground, using an even harder stone as his pillow. In the middle of the night, God met Jacob in the middle of his crisis, and there God gave Jacob strong promises. The next day, Jacob took the stone, set it up, and poured oil over it, turning it into an altar of worship before the Lord. 

    You, too, can meet with God in the dark and hard places of your life. You can take the stone of suffering in your life and set it up as an altar to God. As you surrender to the goodness of God, an outpouring of the Spirit of God will be like oil flowing over your spirit. Your worship on hard ground will create a sacred place to encounter the Living God and to experience His promises and His presence.

    I do not take your pain lightly. The rejection of a spouse can be more devastating than the death of a spouse, and it can be difficult to know how to process the grief in healthy ways. Give yourself much grace, pour your heart out to God, and soak in His love. Meditate on His fervent love for you personally, and be aware of His Presence with you. He is attentive to you. He is careful and tender, mindful of every detail in your life. He will love you well.

    God has a high purpose, lasting significance, and a true honor for you. The enemy cannot thwart the purposes of God for you. There is no darkness that is darkness to God. There is no confusion, wavering, or bewilderment with God. Even in our darkness, He is light (Micah 7:8).

    This is an immense opportunity for you! You are being invited to invade enemy territory—to plant the flag of Christ in victory, proclaiming that the love of God is stronger than the rejection of people. The love of God is our healing, our thriving, our comfort, and our joy.

    5. God has called you to this, and He will make you successful—successful as a man who trusts his God and who faithfully fights the good fight. 

    You have not been tossed aside by God. You have been called to join in the suffering of Christ with joy for the sake of eternal victories and for the richer savoring of Jesus Christ (Colossians 1:24).

    Tune your ear to hear the voice of God. Refuse to listen to the lies of your enemy, Satan. He is the relentless accuser of your soul, and he comes only to steal and to destroy (John 10:10).

    Resist him! Stand firm in your faith, as your brothers throughout the world, are also doing (1 Peter 5:9-10). Draw strength from their example, and add strength to the Body through your example.

    Please do not shrink back (Hebrews 10:39). Please do not despise your calling. The Body of Christ needs you to be faithful where God has assigned you.

    Set your face and faith like flint, determined to do God’s will (Isaiah 50:7). You will not be shamed, and you will not be disappointed when you see what God has been doing through your yieldedness to Him (Romans 5:5). 

    “Your right hand, O LORD, is glorious in power. Your right hand, O LORD, smashes the enemy.” (Exodus 15:6, NLT)

    God is not defeated in your life. He is fighting, and He intends to show Himself glorious.

    “Be strong and courageous. … The LORD himself goes before you and will be with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged.” (Deuteronomy 31:7, NIV)

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    Other articles to encourage you:

    An Open Letter to a Hurting Husband
    Thank You!

  • 6 Reasons for Not Giving Up on Your Marriage

    6 Reasons for Not Giving Up on Your Marriage

    Are you ready to give up on your marriage?

    Perhaps you have reasons such as these: You are the only one trying to making it work. It takes too much effort. Nothing ever gets better. It is too painful.

    What if you discovered that God’s gift of hope is greater than your pit of despair?  What if you learned six powerful reasons for not giving up?

    1. Just one person can make a huge difference in a marriage. Just one person—you!—can make enough difference in a marriage to change the entire dynamic of the relationship.

    We tend to think that it takes two people working together to build a marriage. But is that true?

    Imagine this: think of two people standing back-to-back in conflict. If both people are willing to turn around, then the couple will be face-to-face in good relationship again. However, what happens when one person in that back-to-back situation remains motionless while the other person walks around to face the one who did not move? The two people become face-to-face again, even though only one person moved.

    If both people in a marriage will make changes, that is great. However, it takes only one spouse to make a dramatic difference. You can be the one!

    2. We easily give away our worthless junk, but we guard our treasures. If we don’t realize that what we have is valuable, we may allow ourselves to be robbed of great riches. Your marriage is a treasure because your marriage contains two priceless people! Your spouse is worth loving, and your marriage is worth fighting for.

    Your spiritual enemy knows that your marriage is extremely valuable, so he is relentless in trying to steal it from you. Don’t let him! He will urge you to let go of your marriage; he will tell you that your marriage is not worth all the effort that you are making. He is lying.

    He is lying because he wants your marriage! He knows its great value. When Satan destroys a marriage, not only does he harm the husband and the wife, but he also devastates their children, damages other marriages, weakens society, and discredits the gospel.

    Conversely, when you fight for your marriage, not only do you and your spouse benefit, but your children are powerfully blessed, the marriages around you are encouraged, society is strengthened, and the Kingdom of God advances. That is a lot to keep fighting for!

    3. Sometimes we think that if our marriages aren’t perfect, or if our spouses are not honoring God, then we are not able to glorify God through our marriages. That is not true! Regardless of what your marriage looks like or what your spouse is doing, you are able to reveal God through your choices in your marriage.

    When you keep your promises, even though others are not, you are a powerful reflection of God. When you are faithful to your covenant partner, you glorify God as the loyal Covenant Partner of His people. When you daily make the choice to love your spouse, you display the unfailing love of God.

    Your spouse’s failures do not lessen your ability to glorify God. There is never a time in our marriages where we cannot reveal the unshakeable commitment of God to His covenant people.

    If “we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot disown himself.” (2 Timothy 2:13, NIV)

    4. We often fear that other people are ruining our lives, but we know that as believers in Christ, this simply cannot happen. God says that His plans for us are good; unless we ourselves reject or resist the work of God in our lives, those good plans cannot thwarted.

    “For I know the plans I have for you,” says the LORD. “They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.” (Jeremiah 29:11, NLT)

    “I know that You can do anything and no plan of Yours can be thwarted.” (Job 42:2, HSCB)

    When we are walking in yieldedness to the Spirit of God, then we have the amazing confidence that God is working through our suffering for our good and for His glory. Our God-ordained suffering actually shapes us for greater joy.

    Instead of being afraid that we will be inwardly deformed by our difficulties, we find that our God-ordained suffering actually heals us and advances us. When we trust the goodness of God, instead of being controlled by fear, we rest in His perfect love for us. We allow God to build a core of strength and peace within us that we had never known before.

    The reason we don’t give up on our difficult marriages is because we are convinced that God knows how to redeem our pain, how to make our spirits thrive, and how to create a glory that far outweighs our troubles.

    “For our momentary light affliction is producing for us an absolutely incomparable eternal weight of glory.” (2 Corinthians 4:17, HCSB)

    5. It is very hard to keep working at a marriage when we don’t see anything happening. But God is working! The roots of our obedience must often grow deep and sturdy before we can see the plant and long before we can taste sweet fruit. Our sincere attempts to please God are always seen by Him, valued by Him, and rewarded by Him: He honors those who honor Him (1 Samuel 2:30).

    Everything that we offer to Christ has spiritual force; it is used by God to advance His purposes. God uses our obedience like spiritual scaffolding in our marriages. Our willingness to cooperate with God in our marriages becomes the platform upon which God works.

    We “dare not despise the day of small things” because God sees every act of obedience, however small, and pours His mighty power into it (Zechariah 4:10, NIV).

    6. You will not regret trusting God. You will not regret obeying Him.

    We struggle; we fret; we rack our brains trying to figure things out. But the reason we wrestle with God is that we do not know what He knows. We would do well to remember this: God knows something that we do not know. We can trust Him.

    God keeps His promises; He is absolutely trustworthy. He loves us much more and far better than we love ourselves, and He has the power to pull it all off. His mighty arm has the strength to fulfill all that His wise mind plans for us and all that His loving heart desires for us.

    Don’t give up! You can make a difference.
    Don’t give up! Your marriage is worth fighting for.
    Don’t give up! You honor God as you honor your marriage.
    Don’t give up! Your God-ordained suffering will enrich you.
    Don’t give up! God is working through your obedience.
    Don’t give up! You will not regret trusting and obeying God.

  • To the Husband who Seeks Reconciliation

    To the Husband who Seeks Reconciliation

    I salute you!

    Your heart for reconciliation reveals the very heart of God, and your faithfulness to covenant reflects the faithfulness of God, which “reaches to the skies.” We will break our loyalty to our covenant partners the day God breaks His loyalty to us, His covenant partners.

    I commend you for your commitment, even though it means battling upstream against the culture and against spiritual forces. Instead of harming you, this struggle will instead strengthen you into the greatness for which you were created.

    reconciliation

    When a man makes a covenant vow to a woman, he is bound before God to that commitment until death breaks the bond. Even if his covenant partner loses heart, he can remain committed to her, regardless of what she does, and remain committed to peace. Without pushing, pulling, or demanding, he can stand with his feet planted in unshakable, unmovable commitment to the partner. Her reactions do not change his commitment. The covenant-keeping husband, even when divorced, can be a rock of commitment to his covenant partner. He is willing to suffer for her good. His goal—his unchanging goal—is to love well.

    God will fully satisfy and delight you. He may use your covenant partner to do that, or He may not. It does not matter how He does it; He will do it. He will do it so that you know that He is the great Treasure; anything else would be deception and disappointment. He knows how to love you, and He knows how to love you well.

    “But you, O LORD, are a shield about me, my glory, and the lifter of my head.” Ps. 3:3, ESV

    “For the LORD God is our sun and our shield. He gives us grace and glory. The LORD will withhold no good thing from those who do what is right.” Ps. 84:11, NIV

    Cheering for you,
    Tami

     

     

     

     

    Image courtesy of dan at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

    Image courtesy of Sura Nualpradid at FreeDigitalPhotos.net