Let’s Never Stop Pursuing Your Spouse

Jun 28

Love-is-the-fuel-for-our-one-flesh-marriage

We all Long for Purpose! Some people live in pursuit of power or love or money or popularity. At the core of these things is purpose — they are looking for something that will fulfill them.

In Jesus, we find an eternal purpose. When you live for Jesus Christ, you’ll always have a reason to get up the next day.

Why? Because your purpose is not tied to yourself. It’s not tied to something that can be lost like money. It’s not tied to something as fleeting as popularity. It’s tied to eternity and the Kingdom of God. In psychology, the principle of transference describes when a person redirects feelings and desires from one object to another.

When we try to find acceptance, identity, security and purpose from our spouse rather than from God, that’s transference. It will always result in disappointment.

Transference ruins marriages because people fail.

Today, I challenge you to take action because God’s love never fails. Only He can meet your deepest needs, and when you find your needs met in Him—when your personal spiritual health improves—your marriage will improve, too.

Today, read Jeremiah 29:11 over yourself. Take some time over the weekend to memorize this verse. Yes, the Lord knew His plans for me, and He does indeed want us to prosper—but in His timing and for His glory, with or without a spouse. My fundamental joy, contentment, and satisfaction in life reside in doing God’s will. I thank God for my husband, but he cannot bring me the ultimate sense of transcendent wellbeing that submitting to God does. I want to say with Paul that I am content in all circumstances and trust that He always has plans to prosper us—and not to harm us—to give us a hope and a future.

Love is what will fuel this hope filled journey and keep Willie and I as one-flesh-together way into the future. Without love, none of us are anything but hollow sounding gongs and noisily clanging, cymbals. Without love we are able to gain absolutely nothing. What’s this love like? It’s actually not the romantic kind of love that Willie and I have fallen into and which brought us together in the first place. The love to which Paul refers in the reading from 1 Corinthians is the kind that will keep us together. It’s patient, kind, rejoices with the truth, always protects, trusts, hopes and perseveres. It’s that kind of Love that never fails. The love that has people celebrating their 25th and 50th wedding anniversaries.

Finally, a fourth word which puts these three in context. A name. The Name above all Names. The one to whom all knees will one day bow, willingly or unwillingly. Jesus, Son of God, Saviour, Light of the world. When God created men and women in his image, He did it through Jesus. When God makes Willie and I one flesh over a decade ago, He did it through Jesus, within His Body and Bride, the Church.

Praise God our marriage is the result of faith, hope, and love in Jesus.

“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor 13.13). And Jesus is the One in whom and through whom they are all most perfectly received, enjoyed and expressed.

Are you up for the challenge? God has a plan for you. Seek it and let nothing stand in your way to achieve it. Ask not. What have I got to lose? Rather ask, What have I got to gain?

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