

# Unbox the Marriage

### by James D. Jones Jr.

Copyright © 2018, James D. Jones Jr.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the express, written consent of the author for any purpose, other than the inclusion of brief quotations in review.

Unless otherwise noted all scriptural references are

from the New King James Version of the bible.

Smashwords Edition

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Chapter One

This Thing Called Marriage

Who is this book for? Everyone. For the couple embarking on the journey of journeys called marriage, this is a map of the ground ahead and some simple rules for navigating what could be treacherous waters if they sail obliviously into them. For the couple whose marriage is already underway and seemingly working well, this is an opportunity to understand why what they are doing is working and maybe discover new areas of exploration and adventure to add that extra spark to their life. For the two who seem to be having difficulty bringing their separate lives into the transition that allows them to become one in marriage, it is a life line thrown to them by those who have sailed the rough waters and discovered the way to make the dream come true. Whether just starting out, seeking a tune up or needing extensive repairs, everyone benefits from going back to the roots of what makes something work.

Marriage is the union, or coming together, of two people for the purpose of sharing their individual strengths and creating one stronger, inseparable couple. Marriage is a design of God and thus, in many ways, inconceivable to the human mind. It is more than just two people sharing a life together. Roommates can do that. Two guys can do that. Or two women for that matter. But when a man and a women come together to share their lives on a level that allows them to intermingle their lives so completely as to obliterate the individuals they once were and become identifiable as "them", something must take place on a level of consciousness and in a spiritual fashion outside of the realm of ordinary life. It is not an ordinary thing for a man or a woman to give up who they are to become one. It is an extraordinary thing. Two people becoming one.

Marriage is a complicated endeavor even for the best of us. Two people, coming together to share one life, carrying all the elements of their separate lives and wanting to build something that is both simple and yet diverse enough to make both happy. Something that is so inconceivably complicated that it has to be accepted instead of being understood many times. To the human mind it is an impossible process. How can two separate individuals learn to become one living and thriving couple? How can they move from positions of autonomy into mutually beneficial oneness? Our minds have trouble grasping these marriage descriptions. Is it any wonder, when we try to make it a reality in our lives, that we have trouble pulling it off?

Why?

Shouldn't it be easy? Others do it and have done it for years. Why can't we just say we are going to do it and then make it happen? No one said you can not do it. This book is not about some process or steps a couple can take to make a happy marriage a reality in their lives. Instead it is a true resource in a world of many false resources to help couples achieve whatever they have planned to achieve.

When I got married I believed that love was all I needed. The rest would work itself out. Like so many things in our lives I believed that if I wanted it bad enough I could work at it and keep trying things until I got it right. And, if we are very focused, that does work. Like climbing a high sand dune, if you keep trying you may slip backwards a few times but you can eventually get to the top. The problem is that we all have enough stress in our lives already and moving through a stressful transition such as becoming one in marriage does not have to be a back breaker or as in many cases, a deal breaker. There are little things we can do that make the job of growing closer and learning about each other easier. Or we can fight to carve out new ground and suffer the effects of our efforts.

We do not have to reinvent the wheel. God has already built it. He has already given it to us in a package that makes it easy to incorporate into our lives. Marriage is not new. It belongs to God. Marriage without God is an infringement of the designer's authority over His design. We would never tell the inventor of something he or she is not allowed to profit from their invention because that thought would be inherently wrong to us. It would also inhibit us from asking the inventor about how they envisioned the invention working. In many ways we have done this with marriage. God invented marriage. He designed it for a particular reason. When we ignore the designer we also ignore the reason.

In Genesis 2:18, God announces His intention. And the Lord God said, "It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him." It is God's desire that a man should not be alone. Why? Because a man is not complete without his wife. Adam saw the other animals and saw that they all had mates. Males and females of each species came together to reproduce and live in the harmonies of their kind. Adam thought it was strange that there was no mate for him. God saw this. And God did something wonderful about it.

It is important to note that God created all other creatures of the dust of the earth to be whatever species they were. But man he created in His own image, meaning with God's own heart for living. God is spirit, so we are not created in His spirit image. We have physical bodies. But God has a heart and we have been given His heart to live life to its fullest.

But woman was not created of the dust of the earth. She was taken from the rib, the protective covering of the physical heart of the man. You can not take something out of something without lessening the original. God had made Adam perfect, complete. In order to give Adam a mate, God had to take some of what made Adam complete from him and fashion it into the new thing that would now make Adam complete. A woman.

In verse 23 of Genesis , chapter 2, Adam says "This is now bone of my bones And flesh of my flesh; She shall be called Woman, Because she was taken out of Man."

Adam recognized what God had done. The woman was taken out of Adam. She was not another creation, but somehow a part of him was taken out and she was that part that used to make him complete.

When God caused a deep sleep to fall over him and he removed the rib of which Eve was formed, Adam became less than perfect. At that moment in history man became incomplete without woman. And life has been a process of two becoming one ever since.

Adam was a totally complete person when God formed him of the dust of the earth. He was perfect, nothing lacking. God did recognize that man needed a companion, though. Someone to share life with. Being complete is good, but sharing that completion with someone else is essential. Someone who understands always enhances any experience.

Only God can exist in perfect completion. Man can not deal with the loneliness. The physical part of man cries out for a physical relationship to mirror the spiritual one we have with God. Because we were designed to love God we share that ability to love with others. Without others around, our physical man struggles to hold on to the spiritual part and the emotional part withers.

Unlike the Godhead, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, man does not exist as multiple beings in one. Only God can do that. But in the marriage relationship God lets us peek into the mystery of the Godhead. A man and a woman existing as one. A small part of the power of the Godhead unleashed in the marriage picture.

This is the most fantastic concept in all of life. One man, Adam, being complete and then being made incomplete and then being made complete again. How? Marriage.

If Adam had remained single he would have remained incomplete. Eve would have remained an incomplete part of the image of God that was once complete in Adam. But together they become the complete image of God once more.

Of this process God says in Genesis 1:27 He, created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.

In God's image. In completion. But not in ability to be multiple persons in one. Then He created the one in two when He pulled Eve from Adam. He did not recreate them. He merely finished the creation. A multiple being in one. Male and female.

Two males can not complete the package. Two females can not create the package. They can love as deeply as any other but despite every effort, they will never perfectly complete each other. When a man and a woman come together to create the marriage union, then, and only then, is the image of God reflected. God created man complete in His own image. Then He broke that image up into two parts, male and female.

Marriage is the union of one man and one woman in a bond as old as creation itself. In that bond is the image of God. What the perfect marriage is trying to become is the image of God. No wonder so many people have a hard time organizing the perfect marriage. If they don't want to look like God, to be fashioned in His image, they are fighting the very purpose of the invention. And the inventor.

The problem of marriage is easy to identify. The image of what we are trying to become (two people as one) has to match the Creator's image. Too many people either have no image of what they are trying to become or they have a faulty image. If we can not see the target, how are we going to hit it?

Get the image right in the beginning or change the image to match the original purpose and the marriage becomes what it was intended to be. The completion of two people in the image of God.

What can be said to those who refuse to acknowledge God as the Creator and the inventor of marriage? Good luck. (and I don't believe in luck) I am not trying to be hard here or unsympathetic. The fact is simple. Try to put a swing set together in any manner other than what the designer intended and it will not look the same and probably won't function as well or as safely. And there are always parts left over that get tossed out. Parts the designer had a plan and a use for.

We do not need to become fanatics on a crusade to save the world in order to acknowledge God as the Creator of everything. What we need is to be logical. This world screams of intelligent design. God is the designer. The only reason to fight the assertion that God is the designer is that we want to have another reason to do whatever we want with our lives. Because, if God is real, and He really designed marriage, then all that other stuff He says about morals and ethics suddenly applies, too.

Marriage without God is like a man buying a chain saw to cut down trees and then using the heavy, cumbersome chain saw without ever starting it up. It's designed to make the job easier, even pleasurable, but if we don't use it according to the designed purpose, (starting it up) then we sweat and toil to make our version somehow useful.

Instead of a picture of a noisy saw gliding easily through the trunk of a tree we get the fatalistic, frustrating picture of a man pushing and pulling a heavy piece of equipment back and forth (almost funny) until either the tree falls or he does. For some, this is an apt description of their marriage to date. For others, we know people whose marriages resemble this picture. A tree can be cut down with a chain saw that has not been started up. That is true. It can be done. But how satisfying is that experience? How jealous are we of those who start their chainsaws up and cut down entire forests, build a home and life, while we toil over one tree? (How many of us come to believe it must be the tree's fault, so we keep changing trees in hopes that somehow our way will work?)

God must be acknowledged in marriage or the picture we have of what we are creating and growing towards is wrong. Man was created in God's image. God created that image in two parts, man and woman. It is not complete until a man and a woman make it complete.

A good place to begin is with a personal look at the picture we have of marriage. Whether we are planning to get married in the near future or already married, we need to begin with wherever we are. What does marriage look like to us?

Sound simple? The question is. The answer is anything but.

In marriage there are six people involved right off the bat. That is before we involve in-laws and friends and other assorted relatives.

There is the guy he thinks he is. The guy she thinks he is. And the guy he really is.

There is the girl she thinks she is. The girl he thinks she is. And the girl she really is.

Those six people all have a different picture of marriage. Their pictures of that marriage must be forced into a common picture or nothing but bedlam will ensue. Yes, forced. Each part of us develops according to our experiences in life and how we react to those experiences. Life does not just happen to us. We are a part of it no matter how much we believe we were not in control of some parts. A person can hit me, but they can not make me hit them back or respond in any other way than what I choose. Forcing is another way of saying make a choice.

Why is choosing to force ourselves to come to terms with our separate views of marriage important? What are the dangers?

Every time an issue arises, he can choose to approach it from three different angles and so can she. This is the comfortable stance of most people who try to maintain a semblance of personal dignity in today's world. They hold onto these different platforms of their life from which to respond so that however they choose to respond has some historical base from which to operate in their lives. They hold onto a part of who they are as a defense against who the marriage is forcing them to become. Kind of holding a way out for every action they take. (Shamelessly noncommittal)

If there is only one mutually agreed upon picture of marriage allowed, though, then only one avenue will allow them to mutually seek the completion of that picture. We're not talking about some picture given to them by the church, their parents or some other authority. We're talking about a picture they create together for themselves, their life.

A mutually shared picture is important because the real issue is not the argument that may come from it but the separate feelings that may arise because of it. If he is allowed to go down one road while she goes down another every time they have an issue, then they are not really traveling on the same journey. They are roommates maybe, but not married. They may have a piece of paper, but they do not have the image of marriage. The image is a oneness that makes them complete in the image of God.

As long as they continue to operate on separate paths they will continue to be only half the image of God at best. Even if they are both devout Christians going to church every time the doors are open, they will still be lacking the very thing that makes them the complete image of God, a marriage reflecting the multidimensional personhood of God.

Marriage is not an institution or situation. Marriage is the ability to become one couple in the image of God. It is the term that names the process and the disposition of two people who have chosen – chosen – the be one person in the image of God. Anything – Anything – that hinders us from maintaining our relationship as two in one is a hindrance to the marriage.

Christians are well aware that their enemy, the devil, or Satan or the evil one is going about as a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. He has come to kill, steal and destroy. Sermons are preached about recognizing this fact throughout the year. Testimonies are given weekly about overcoming the designs the enemy has on our lives. Somehow, though, Christians fail to apply the enemy's attack designs to their own marriage defenses.

A husband and wife may recognize that the enemy is attacking them (as individuals) but they too often fail to see the attack as an attack against the oneness they share. This failure causes them to respond as individuals instead of as the image of God. There is a definite disparity in the amount of spiritual power they can access because of this oversight.

The enemy sees married people as one. He attacks them as a single entity. They need to experience it as a single entity attack and respond as a single entity. Attack his wife and you have attacked him. Compliment her and you have complimented him. Love him and you love her.

The enemy of God is also the enemy of marriage. Like his desire to tear down any ministry that is spreading the gospel of Christ, the enemy desires to tear down the marriage so that God's plan for sharing His completeness and multidimensional image is thwarted.

Why? Because the marriage union between a man and a woman completes the image of God on earth. The enemy does not want God's image to prosper on earth. The enemy hates everything about God. So, consequently, the image of God, and those who would try to complete it, are hated also. The devil hates marriage and, by extension, those who would embrace it.

Few people ever realize there is an active force working against their marriage. Because they try to do it all themselves (they see themselves as individuals still) they also take the blame for when it does not work. Or they blame the other one as an individual who caused the failure. They say, it wasn't meant to be or we gave it a shot or any of a hundred other sayings designed to alleviate some of the pain.

What would have changed about their approach if they had realized that a person they knew was actually doing things to make their marriage fail? Would they not have been motivated to try harder and to keep the intruder out of it? Of course they would.

A woman who realizes she has a competitor for her husband's attention makes adjustments to block the competitor and to increase her hold on her husband's attention. A man who realizes another man is moving in on his territory takes action and makes moves to stop the advances of the other man while increasing his own ability to capture and hold his wife's attention.

That is precisely what many marriages need today. A healthy dose of trying harder and getting the intruder out of it. Not fighting and screaming. Not drama. But real life action designed to save what we have built. Our marriage picture.

The intruder is an unseen enemy that whispers in our ear about the shortcomings of our intended partner in this venture of marriage. The intruder places stumbling blocks in the road trying to get us to quit.

What if we had a clear picture of that marriage and our partner's part in it? Then no whisper in the world could shake us and tear us apart. No stumbling block ever designed could make us give up. We would have a better destination in mind.

The only place where the whisper can get to us is in the areas where we are unsure of ours or our partner's commitment. The only way stumbling blocks can make us sit down and quit is if we do not believe the end result justifies the effort needed to get there. A marriage based on our separate ideas of happiness is not as binding as a oneness based on the image of God.

Couples need to try harder to make sure their picture of the marriage is as solid and complete as possible. Couples need to keep the places where the "whisperers" can get in closed.

Why? We argue about the things we hear whispered in our ear by the enemy. Even people who do not go to church hear the whispers from the enemy. Then they argue about what they hear. They use words like, "I think" and "I feel" but what they really are displaying during the argument is what they have heard "whispered" in their heads. And those arguments cause separation. That separation keeps two people from achieving the image of God. The enemy wins the battle.

The enemy does not care as much about churches as we give him credit for. He is worried about ministries that change the community. He is worried about married couples taking on the image of God. Any married couple.

Why? Because the church is the bride of Christ. If the marriage of a man and woman shows off the image of God (and the power) then the church that understands its place in the marriage with God will show off much more of the corporate power of the image of God. Entire communities could be taken back from the hand of a lying enemy if the church ever gets the idea of the full image of God contained in the marriage picture.

The enemy's job is simple. Stop the marriage. Change it so it doesn't represent God. Take God out of it. Anything, as long as the image of God (and the power He gives to His image) is not released.

In church or out of church. When the image of God is displayed the enemy must flee. He is resisted. He is not given a foothold, not given a place to set up shop. The darkness is replaced by the light.

The devil or Satan or the enemy can not abide being pushed aside. He wants to exalt his throne above God's throne. And he does this by tearing down what God has designed.

The marriage relationship is a battlefield. Where it is a comfort and a completion by God's design, it is also an affront to the enemy. A bold statement that he is being shut out. A declaration of war against the goals of the enemy. A challenge to become the image of God on earth.

In John 15:18 Jesus says, If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you. This is a realization of the marriage theme. When a Christian comes to God and repents of their sins and accepts Jesus into their heart, meaning they turn from their sinful paths and seek the path that brings them into the image of God, then they become what the bible calls the bride of Christ. The church – the people, not the buildings – is the bride of Christ.

They enter into the same battle that the Lord faces. If the enemy is against God then he is also against those who would side with God. And taking on the image of God, as in the marriage relationship, is siding with God.

Marriage must be defined. A clear picture of marriage must be achieved. The marriage itself must be protected from the enemy who would seek to destroy it. God must be allowed into the marriage in order to get the picture right. Everyone must realize that the enemy is actively seeking to tear marriages apart.

Sound ominous? Sound challenging? Is it necessary? Is it real? Can we do this?

Philippians 4:13 says, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. It is real or we would not need to know we can do it. It is ominous because we were created in the image of God. That is who we are. The enemy is trying to deny who we are for his own purposes. The challenge is to make the choice. The choice is to whether or not we are going to make marriage a priority.

We have this promise of assurance as we enter the field of battle. Greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world. The enemy knows this. He can not defeat us by a frontal attack. He must trick us into giving up. We must quit on the very thing that makes us greater than he is. We must give up the image of God and take up the image of something else for our lives. We must give up God's design for marriage and allow some other design to take its place.

Maybe you are a strong Christian. Maybe you are a new Christian. Maybe you are not a believer in God at all. The truth is that the reality is still the same. Marriage makes you a target for the enemy. You have something at stake. Your relationship with your spouse or intended spouse. The enemy wants to make that relationship so miserable that you both go your separate ways.

Divorce is the enemy's goal. Separation. No marriage. No image of God. The enemy wins.

If marriage is your plan then God's design is your plan. Just because you may not believe in the designer does not make the reality go away. Even if we leave parts out of our swing set as we put it together, it is still a swing set, no matter how it functions.

The enemy's hatred of the designer is your reality. To choose not to recognize the enemy is to face the attacks with fleshly weapons that have limited value. To understand the spiritual role of marriage is to empower God to work in our lives and guide us to a victory. The true victory is attaining the image of God in our marriage.

We were never designed to approach this marriage thing without God. God wants to be part of our lives. He wants to be with His bride. Us. As a married couple, the image of God as two in one, and married to God through the acceptance of being the bride of Christ, Christians can unleash a power on earth that can change things and improve life.

God says His ways are higher than our ways and His thoughts are higher than our thoughts. He is not putting us down. He loves us, so He is not putting us down. He is explaining that he has not left this thing called life up to us. He has made Himself an integral part of it and He wants to do His part. He wants us to join in the marriage relationship wholeheartedly and with purpose. His purpose. And He wants to be there every step of the way.

Chapter Two

The Picture of Marriage

The most important place to start is with a picture of what marriage is supposed to look like. There is no way anyone can tell another person what marriage looks like for them. Every person is different and those diversities make the actual picture of the bond of marriage as unique for each couple as the fingerprint is for each person. His strengths and weaknesses combined with her strengths and weaknesses will always – always – look different than their parent's marriages or anyone else they will ever meet. There are just too many variables to use a cookie cutter model as a viable approach.

Instead, we must understand the purpose of the marriage and seek to make our picture of that marriage look like that purpose. As with the individual personalities of him and her the picture each carries of what they see marriage as is different. Their first goal is to combine their separate pictures into a single vision of what they are embarking upon.

Whether they are just seeking pre-marriage counseling or been married for years, if they have never combined their personal views of marriage before, now is the time. There is no point going any further down this road of marriage if they are planning on traveling separate roads.

There may be many ways to get some place but, if they decide to go together, it is imperative that they also decide what path they will take. Including how they will handle obstacles.

Two people can hold hands and walk down a street together. But when they come to a lamp post they must decide which way to go around it. One can not go left while the other goes right and still hold hands. Neither can they stop and argue about it. Arguing implies no more forward motion. They've stopped traveling altogether.

There are many things to consider when combining individual pictures of marriage. An individual's background is important. Their family situation is important. If they come from divorced parents there is a broken marriage picture in their mind. Even if they come from a happy, two parent home they may have learned wrong ways to relate to their spouse. There may be fears assigned or assurances needed to move forward. There may be more questions in the beginning than there are answers. Either he or she may even be uncertain about what they think marriage should look like. There must be time to explore the ideas and the concerns of the two involved.

What is certain is that no one – no one – can decide what marriage looks like for someone else. They have to work it out for themselves, by themselves and with each other. Sure, they can seek advice and even watch how others are doing it. Nothing wrong with getting ideas from lots of places, especially successful marriages.

In the end, though, they must sit down with just themselves and decide what they want it to look like. It has to be their plan. If it is someone else's plan then they can walk away from it easily. If they built it, if they gave birth to it, then walking away is much harder.

The marriage picture should be comprised of their goals and how they picture the successes they are planning. Simple things like, how many children, where to live and work, where to go to church and other necessities of the marriage situation should be answered. More complicated things like, how he pictures her support of him and how she pictures his support of her should be addressed. That way they are both picturing and working toward the same thing. Common goals. Real marriage.

Any goal not pictured in a common or together way is subject to misinterpretation by either side. Whether they can work out the misinterpretation or not they begin thinking like separate sides again. To counter this there needs to be a process for how they deal with the things not thought about yet. That way, when a disagreement or an issue that they believe different things about rises up, they already have a plan of how to deal with it together.

All goals should be emphasizing what they are achieving together. Even if one of the goals is for one of them to achieve a degree in college it is never considered an individual accomplishment. He or she is doing it for some part of a plan that increases or promotes the rest of their marriage picture. That way when they look at it it is not he or she going to school while the other stays home. It is them working on the marriage picture that includes one of them earning that degree. She is just as much a part of his degree or vice versa.

It may sound Utopian to say and aim at such a picture but we must remember that the marriage relationship was created to cause us to shine with the perfect image of God. It is the things of our fleshly nature that taint the image of God in us. Not the plan itself. The Garden of Eden was Utopian. It was the sin of man that caused that Utopian setting to be taken away. The image of God is perfect, even if the setting within which we are trying to attain it is not.

There is only one goal in every marriage picture that should be the same. All other goals will have some similarities to those around us but because of our differences ours will look different. The one thing that should always be the same is that we are trying to achieve the image of God in our marriage. Having said that, it is also relevant to admit that each couple has to create their own picture of what God in their marriage looks like.

To a fifty year old woman, remarrying after her first husband has passed on, God may look like a stern, elderly gentleman sitting on a white throne and ordering the universe about. To a teenage boy God may look like the very picture of young love itself, always caring about his wife and showing it through an excess of polite interchanges and constant attention.

Now, without advocating such a union, or dismissing it, it is very easy to see how the older woman and the younger teen boy would have to discuss their differences before they got married, if they ever hoped to be going in the same direction. There is also no problem imagining all the other things that they would have to work out before such a union could stand. And most people would have no doubt that if they did not work out those issues before hand then down the road divorce would be in the cards.

The same is true of every marriage. There are no perfect matches. Only individuals desiring to become perfectly matched. Both participants need to hold the same picture. Maybe the differences in most marriages are not as extreme as the example of the older woman and the teenage boy, but they are still there. They still need to be worked on. They are still a danger to the cohesiveness of the picture if they are not worked out before hand.

What if a couple chooses not to believe in the God that designed marriage? Does that mean it can not work? Welcome to the real world. God did not design this world to function only for Christians. What he created worked regardless of a person's beliefs. Why? Because God believes in choice. If it only works for Christians, then it becomes a circumstance that forces people to accept God. That's not choice, that's coercion. God does not use coercion.

What must be considered is that the principles can not be violated no matter what. The couple must still prepare a picture of what marriage looks like and settle the issues over all the goals of their picture. They must still work at it like any Christian couple. The difference will be that Christian couples have an advocate against the enemy's attacks in their picture and the non-Christian does not.

Another consideration is that any couple who operates in the bond of marriage and works toward their common goals will be showing off the image of God no matter what they call it. As they work to bring their picture to life it will take on the image of God more and more. That is what marriage is designed to do, look like God.

If someone puts together a model airplane and follows the instructions in the box, then what they will have when they are done will be that airplane the designer created. If they choose to call it a sky flyer instead of an airplane it will still look the same. A rose by any other name will still smell just as sweet. It can not help it. The designer made it that way.

A third consideration is for those who deliberately seek to change the marriage image into something other than God. Not just changing the name, but actually trying to pervert its existence and form it into something other than the two halves of God's heart melded together in perfect union.

This could be a deliberate, violent and abusive marriage relationship where one partner dominates over the other and demands the other see the picture they create. Or it could be two people of the same sex coming together to prove God wrong. Whatever the situation, the same rules apply.

The marriage union is designed to be the coming together of two halves of God's heart in perfect union to show off His perfect image. It's like baking a chocolate cake. Change any of the ingredients and you do not get the cake to taste the same. Two people of the same sex do not have both halves of God's heart to put into the mix. A person perverting either half of God's heart to force their own way does not allow the other half to shine.

It's like putting bad ingredients or weak ingredients into the mix. Whatever is changed in the ingredients changes the flavor of the result. Maybe a chocolate cake was what was wanted, but if the right ingredients do not get added a chocolate cake is not the result. It may still be a cake but it is not the chocolate cake it was supposed to be. And if the wrong ingredients are changed it may not even be a cake when finished.

A bad marriage shows off what is wrong with the relationship. A good marriage shows off what is right with the relationship. God gets the glory for a good marriage because it shows off the image He placed in man and woman from the beginning. An image that can only be seen when they are doing it right.

A bad marriage does not reflect on God. It reflects on the way the two people in the marriage are picturing the marriage. It reflects on their mistakes. Like all of Christianity, when it is being done right, God is displayed. When it is being done wrong, the flesh of the individuals is displayed.

Mistakes can be corrected. Remember, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. A bad marriage can be fixed. And a good marriage can be ruined. Neither of them is a monument to stand forever. What they are is a picture of the dynamic lives of the people involved in them.

When those people are doing it right it is a good marriage. When they are doing it wrong it is a bad marriage. God is never to blame. He set up the process but He does not force or coerce our participation in it. Like the chocolate cake, we can choose to put all the best ingredients into it or we can choose to cut corners and do it our own way until it is no longer a chocolate cake or worse, it is something inedible.

Some may take exception to the fact God gets the glory if marriage turns out great but accepts no blame if it turns out badly. If we build a house according to a master set of blueprints and it turns our great, does not the designer and architect get credit for a great design? And if we cut corners or do it wrong do we expect the designer and architect to take the blame for our choices? God has given us the blueprints. What we build depends on us.

Where the picture comes from is as important as the picture itself. If God gives the picture it is pure and holy. If the picture comes from a source that denies God and wars against Him, chances are the picture is going to be considerably different from what was originally called marriage.

If God creates a chocolate cake using the best pure chocolate He knows of, so He can show off His chocolate, how can the enemy create a better chocolate cake? If he adds strawberries to it it is no longer a chocolate cake. It is a strawberry-chocolate cake. Still a cake but not a chocolate cake. If he leaves out the chocolate and uses vanilla, it is still a cake but not a chocolate cake. No matter what changes the enemy makes the cake is different, if it remains a cake at all.

Marriage is the same way. God decided what marriage was to be. He designed it. He determined what ingredients he wanted in this thing called marriage. He made it to be the union of two hearts, a man and a woman's heart, in the bonds of matrimony and for the purpose of showing off the completed image of God.

God made marriage with very specific ingredients. Change the ingredients and, like the chocolate cake, there is no longer a marriage. It may still be a union. It may still be two people living together. But it is not a marriage because a marriage, has as its purpose the goal of showing off the image of God. If what is put together does not show off the image of God then it is not a marriage. Call it whatever you want but it is not a marriage.

The picture must be right or the shot is going to miss the mark. Like a marksman told to shoot at a target beside a big red barn, if the barn is not in the picture then it is not the right target. The union may be two people but if the target is not to look like God and show off His image then marriage is not the goal. The picture is wrong.

Those who would try to tell people that marriage is anything people decide to call it are mistaken. People did not invent marriage. Therefore people can not reinvent it. When they do, it is a whole new thing. A true marriage is never abusive. No one abuses themselves. A true marriage does not try to combine two like sexes because they do not hold both sides of God's heart and can not, therefore, achieve the goal of showing off the completed image of God.

Those who would advocate such unions are well within their right to do so but equating them to what God invented is ludicrous. Man does not create holiness and purity. Only God does. What man does is tainted by his flesh, at best, and sinful at worst.

It must be determined where the picture a couple uses comes from. If it comes from God's design then it is correct. All other designs are imitations at best. Even if the couple does not believe in God they have a better chance at success if they are using the proper design.

A person may not know anything about building a radio. But if they go to an electronics store and buy a radio building kit they have a good chance of actually ending up with a radio when they are done. Why? Because they started with the right parts and put them together for the right purpose.

Two people may speak about their picture of marriage in the same terms. But it is quite possible, and almost a sure bet, that the picture their individual words conjures up for each of them is different. Anyone who has ever played the rumor game, where one person tells a story to another person, who tells it to another person, who tells it to another person and so on to the end of the line, knows that the story at the end of the line is different than the one told to begin with. Why? Because we picture the words we use differently based on our personal values, experiences and how we see things.

That is why a discussion of each others picture is necessary to get the real picture. It will not happen by accident. They must discuss what it looks like, not just say the words. It will not happen on its own during the course of the relationship. It has to be planned and worked at to make it a reality. To make it clear for both sides they have to come to an understanding of what their words mean.

He may say he wants a business venture of his to be successful for their marriage picture to be complete. She may even agree that she wants it to be successful, too and say she will support him in accomplishing that. The problem is her idea of success may be different than his.

He may believe success is a certain dollar amount in the bank or a particular level of operation. She, on the other hand, may believe that success is more about the time the two of them can spend together.

While he is reaching for that dollar amount he may ignore her pleas for time together thinking he is painting their picture for them. She may be arranging things to make the most of their time together and then growing resentful or bitter because he regularly ignores the things she thought they agreed to.

If they do not work it out ahead of time they are going to come to a place where the goal of the one differs from the goal of the other. An argument could erupt. A discussion will definitely be needed to clarify the difference of opinion. If the situation gets far enough out of hand they may have to bring in a third party to help them refocus and redefine their picture so both of them are headed toward the same thing. (Sometimes a cooler, outside voice can refocus those who want to be refocused.)

It is important to agree on what the real picture looks like. This applies to every area of their lives. Everything. What is red to one may be pink to the other. Clarification may be needed. Don't wait until it cause an argument. Clarify it as soon as it is noticed.

The picture a couple creates is important for many reasons. First, it gives them something to work towards. A common goal. They are going nowhere without it.

Second, it gives them a line of defense. That's right! A line of defense. When the couple create a picture they are both happy with and living in, they are showing off the image of God in that area of their life. Two hearts, joined as one, and living for a common good that invites the blessing of God upon them. Because of their agreement and common focus they are living ordered lives and exercising authority over their lives. God is present in both things.

The footsteps of a righteous man are ordered by God or arranged by God according to Psalm 37:23. It also says, God delights in his way, meaning that God expresses his joy in the path the good man has chosen. He actually does things in the life of the man who pleases Him by doing the right things. That translates as a couple who shows off the image of God within their marriage causes God to delight in them and to do things that make their lives even better somehow, to make their marriage show off more of Him somehow.

One of the intangibles of marriage is the thing God does to enhance and grow the marriage. How can two people grow closer together and learn more about each other, good and bad, and still love each other? What makes them draw nearer together rather than run from each other. This thing called love. What is it exactly?

It is not just emotion. It is stronger than a feeling. At times it makes more sense than anything else and at other times it makes absolutely no sense but it must be obeyed for some incomprehensible reason.

Love is not a rule because no one can isolate how it works. Why does a beautiful woman fall in love with an ugly man? Or vice versa. And is it really falling in love or is a conscious decision made somewhere? Is it an unconscious decision? How is an unconscious decision made? How does love grow? What does it feed on?

The bible tells us God is love. Love is the intangible in marriage and God is it. That is why God can not be taken out of the marriage. Without love the marriage is not necessary. Because of love the marriage is necessary. Without God the marriage is not necessary. Because of God the the marriage is necessary.

This is simple algebra. The unknown quantity is love. When the answer for love is provided, God, then we can plug the answer into all our relationship equations and achieve correct results.

God paints the love into a couple's picture. He provides the enhancement for their decision to come together. He makes it necessary. He makes it desirable. He makes it what seems at times unbearable to live without.

When she is hanging on every word out of his mouth it is because God has drawn a deep batch of love, Himself, into the situation and drizzled it all over the place. He is not that interesting. Her friends do not see what she sees in him. But God has given her eyes of love to see him through, which opens up a picture that includes both of them conquering the world.

The same goes for him. He's telling everyone he has married the most beautiful girl in the world. She's not the most beautiful girl in the world. She laughs with a squeaky voice and she has one ear that hangs lower than the other. But because God had filled him with Himself, love, he sees her as perfect. Her squeaky laugh draws him into her mystery and her one lower ear is a priceless treasure that only she can offer to him.

Together they live in a world of love that they chose and God helped them paint. They sat and worked out their picture of what marriage was supposed to look like. They got close enough for God to delight in their ways and throw in His two cents. Love flows and no one knows where it came from.

Some may claim to be in love even before marriage. Is this possible? Sure. Marriage does not start at some ceremony or licensing agency. Marriage starts at the time when two people start to imagine their lives together. They may be teenagers betrothed to each other and waiting until after college to start their life together. They may be a couple who met through a dating service two months ago and their discussions have been all about painting this picture of their life together from that day forward.

The circumstances do not determine the marriage. The marriage creates the circumstances. The couple draw the picture and God adds His flavoring to it. Why does He add His flavoring to it? Because the marriage is designed to show off His image. His enhancement of a couple's love not only makes the marriage better but it also draws the attention of others to question the couple about how they do it.

Love can touch a person at any time anywhere. That is why so many poems have been written about love. A major theme in our movies and books is love. It is the overriding focus of our lives.

People may try to ignore that true love comes from God. That does not change the fact that God is love. The one place where love can not be dismissed is in the marriage relationship.

The relationship exists because of love. It has no purpose except for it being an outlet for our love. It can not be explained but somehow the element of love in our marriage relationship makes it better, stronger, more satisfying. It just is.

That is the God factor. He is far above us in the area of making things wonderful. He created the Garden of Eden in all its purity and pleasure. This may sound crude but think about it. God created a perfect world where a man and a woman existed in nature without the need for any clothes. The perfect existence and no clothes.

How far could a marriage progress under those circumstances? Everything they needed was there for them. No labor. No toil. Nothing to argue about. Just natural abundance supplied by God. All they had to work on was their relationship, the joining of the two hearts of God in one picture of their lives. A place designed to allow the marriage to succeed.

One thing most people can not answer is why one marriage works and another one fails. Maybe they fell out of love. If God is love that means they stopped looking like God's image. That may be the best determination of a failed marriage yet. Yet the reasons they fell out of love – stopped looking like the image of God – may be as diverse and varied as the sands of the sea.

Chapter Three

This Marriage as His Life

Marriage for a man is different than marriage for a woman. Every woman who reads this is going to say something like, "NO KIDDING!" It sounds like a simple statement but it must be said. It must be realized. Two people are about to get married or else they are already married and the fact must be addressed. Guys do not have the same picture of marriage and life in general as women do. Let's look beyond the obviousness of the statement and see the impact of its reality.

While it may not be a revelation for many people, the fact that it needs to be said speaks volumes. Why? Because most people approach marriage as the coupling or union of two people.

It is not the union of two "people". It is the union of a man and a woman, who both view life differently. What they want out of life is different. Whoever said opposites attract probably had marriage in mind. The strengths of the man combine with the strengths of the woman and produce a strong, unified marriage.

They do not get married because they have the same interests. There may be similar interests involved but the reasons they are attracted to each other are quite diverse from each other. They could both live in the same town their whole lives and work at the same place and like the same foods. But what will attract him to her are things that have nothing to do with the similarities of their lives. His heart is seeking out the heart of the one who makes him complete. (We will deal with hers in the next chapter.)

Guys see things differently. They process what they see differently. What they process comes out different than if a woman processes the same information. As a single man, his life is his own and it is the primary source of his satisfaction. It is not just about ego. Although, if allowed to develop without limits, a man's ego can become a stumbling block to his own development as well as future relationships. But it is specifically that ego that emanates from his heart and drives him to show off the heart of God.

A man with no ego is a rare and pitiful thing. Let's make sure we are talking about the same thing. A man's ego, when in control and operating properly, does not boast or make wild claims of fantastic proportions. But it does seek approval and challenges of self worth. The stronger the heart of the man, or more correctly, the more of his heart he allows others to see, the more apt we are to see his ego challenging others and seeking approval of his own manhood. God designed the man to love the idea of being a man. A man must embrace being a man or die a little bit inside every day.

The heart of God that beats in him is a different drum than the one that beats in the woman. It is imperative that everyone understand that the man does not just have a drum with a different beat, but his drum is a wholly different drum than hers. On his best day and being as sensitive as any sensitivity training could help him become, he can never make his drum sound like hers. Even if he wanted to, which he does not.

The reason he does not is because his heart demands attention. He is sensitive but to a different wavelength of emotion. He is not as sensitive to the effect he has on others as much as he is driven to have an effect on others. He is built to elicit a response. Every day is another opportunity to test himself. The man lives to test his manhood. He lives to show it off. While some see only his ego or pridefulness, others will see his worth. Those are the ones he is seeking.

How many times has a group of girls watched a young man display his manhood in some fashion and then talked about his actions. Some say he is cute. Others say he is a lot of wind with not much substance. But he is looking for the one who recognized something in him that moved her heart to want to respond. She saw something the others didn't. She felt a connection that they could not. Somewhere, at the heart level, he touched her in a way other guys do not. Her heart recognizes his heart as a match.

She may call it a funny feeling. It may be a quirk of his personality. It may be an irresistible draw towards his company or at least his outward displays. But that is what he is fishing for, a response. His heart is hunting before he enters the marriage. It is hunting for the other half of the image of God that makes it complete. The part that was removed in the Garden of Eden the day God gave Eve to Adam.

While he is playing around and acting out of his ego, searching and testing himself, he is always aware of the responses he receives. He is looking for that one response that says, "Here I am. Your other half." He knows her when he sees her. He'll keep searching until he finds her.

He wants approval. He needs it. He seeks it. He wants the leading male in his life to validate him as a real man. He wants male peers to recognize his manhood. He wants to know that women of all ages see him as a man. It is more important than just feeding his ego. It is a measuring tool he uses to grow by. If he is surrounded by the wrong answers it will negatively affect his growth. It could possibly even kill his manhood before it begins.

If there is no leading male in his life, or the one present is a weak fake of the image of God's manhood, then part of his picture, which he brings to the marriage, is wounded and possibly warped. If the male peers in his life have not recognized his manhood or the women have somehow demeaned his manhood, then he brings a lot of things to prove to himself and to the world into the marriage picture he wants to paint.

That is why it is so important to discuss what that picture looks like to him before hand. If he is wounded or his picture is skewed to some kind of wrong proof of manhood, he will undoubtedly bring that into his marriage picture. He will have expectations drastically different from the woman's marriage picture. That is a recipe for disaster. Not that it can not be dealt with, but that it must be identified.

The real man's heart, the picture he has of his life, is the side of God that goes to war and lives an adventure and wins the heart of the beauty (his other half) to himself. It may sound quite romantic and even a little melodramatic. Some would probably still claim that it sounds way too egotistical. But it is assuredly the picture of life a man brings to his relationships. The trick is fitting this swashbuckling, romantic adventurer into the marriage relationship. Not taming him but harnessing all that power for the good of the relationship.

To do this the man must first understand who he is. He must first come to grips with the person God made him to be. Too often marriages are composed of individuals who are still trying to "find themselves." How can he help his spouse paint the picture of their marriage if he has no idea who he is and where he fits into the scheme of things? Obviously he can not do it.

Similarly, if he has a wrong idea of who he is in God's scheme of things he is operating with faulty information. Like a man reading a map upside down he could end up going the wrong way very easily.

So, a little heart to heart is in order for the man before he shares his heart with his sweetheart. It will make him more sure of himself and a stronger partner in the long run. It will bring together in his mind the two elements of his life that society has told him can not exist together, a loving heart and his wild side.

A man does not mind testing himself but when it is a test of his heart he generally gets antsy and anxious. Society has tried to turn matters of the heart into a sensitivity thing and he will revolt against the idea without reviewing it. Because his heart is strong and wants to fight and does not mind the adventure of going it alone, he will resist against any attempt to harness him or tame him. His resistance to conform to things his heart sees as restraint may be seen as a rebellion or a commitment issue or worse.

Society has forgotten that it takes a lot of heart to stare down a racing chariot as it approaches, knowing the warrior in it is planning to kill you. It takes a lot of heart for a man to stand with his fellow soldiers as whooping bands of Indians race down upon them slinging arrows from everywhere. It takes a lot of heart for a man to board an old wooden ship and search the oceans for whales the size of his ship and then fight and kill them to harvest their oil and meat. It takes a lot of heart for a man to go off to war and fight against an enemy who wants to kill him. It takes a lot of heart to be a real man. It takes a man's heart. The very thing she is searching for.

A woman wants a definite choice in life. Every woman would like to know and be married to a man who is sure of who he is and where he is going. She would like to know that her man has proved himself and is ready to paint their marriage picture together. That information gives her the chance to make her choices and plan her life. It gives her a sense of expectation. It gives her a sense of security.

A man is a warrior. Leave two eight year old boys alone for ten minutes and they will invent a game that looks very much like war in some sense. Maybe it's Cowboys and Indians with each one arguing who gets to be the Indian next time. Maybe it's an artillery barrage of flying rocks into a pond to upset a frog sitting quietly on a lily pad. It might even take a more civilized form such as a competition like basketball, or baseball. Somehow, someway, they will invent a way to play which feeds their desire to show off their manhood.

Little girls don't do that. Little girls don't pick up sticks and imagine they are holding AK-47's. They don't choose up sides for their pick up games with the intention of annihilating the other team. They don't run up to older males and hit them, challenging them to wrestle. Little boys do. It's in their heart to want to fight the good fight.

There is no shame in that statement. We should not back up to find a more politically correct way of phrasing it. A man desires a battle to fight. A challenge to meet and overcome. Not in the sense of a wild night of drinking and bullying. But a life of meeting challenges that count for something. Not shying away from the tough decisions. He wants to accomplish things despite the odds against him. A man's man, standing up to be counted and worthy of the respect of other men and the love of a good woman. He doesn't want to have to stop and ask directions. He wants to be the hero.

A man may go to work and punch a time clock or he may own his own business. He may climb mountains on weekends or he may coach his son's soccer team. He may take his wife dancing until she wants him to take her home or he may be the one who accomplishes every task on her "honey-do" list. Being a real man has nothing to do with the life he has chosen to lead. It is a matter of how he chooses to carry it out. How he meets the challenges life presents.

His battle may be keeping a job in a poor economy. Or it may be some new competition to his company's way of marketing itself. His battle may be against nature as he paddles down a raging river or against the clock in some game show on television. His battle may be something as simple as keeping his family together against the temptations of this world or as complicated as trying to conquer the demons of his own past. But he is willing to take on the fight and he is confident that he is going to win. Why? Because he is a warrior. And warriors fight. Warriors also expect to win. They have trained themselves to be warriors. They have trained themselves to win. It is the way of a man.

It is that confidence to overcome that will attract the woman holding the other half of his heart. It is precisely that warrior stance that will be the completion of her own heart. The stronger they are in their hearts before they marry the stronger the marriage will be initially.

Some will scoff at the idea of men as warriors. They will ridicule the idea as old fashioned or out of date. Some will see it as a macho thing designed by men for men to exclude women. They will be sorely mistaken if they hold to such a view.

A man's heart was designed by God to attract women. Those who try to tell a man that civilized men do not fight are on a mission to tear down what a man was designed to be and replace it with something they can control.

The bible tells us that God is a man of war. Exodus 15:3 says, The Lord is a man of war; The Lord is His name.

If God calls Himself a warrior then there is no shame in claiming that part of Him that He has deposited in a man as a warrior too. A real man is a man of war. As much as a man desires a battle to fight to test himself, he needs to be a man of war. A warrior. One trained to fight the good fight. God consistently calls the men of his nation to war but never calls the women to war. The man has a capacity for fighting that God did not place in a woman. This does not mean she can not fight. She can. But her heart is designed to seek other ways of winning. It is not a matter of her body design or even her size as much as God's plan on how she would seek to show off His heart to others.

For those who would still maintain that God wants gentle, civilized men rather than warriors one need only to look at the writings of King David in Psalm 144:1. Blessed be the Lord my Rock, Who trains my hands for war, And my fingers for battle. Why would God train them to fight unless He wanted them to fight?

God has designed the man for a purpose. It is not a wild, uncontrolled rampage but a precision directed push through to the main objectives. A man, according to God is designed to accomplish the goal despite the attack or the obstacles raised by the enemy. This is an essential quality for marriage.

A woman who marries a man who knows he is a warrior links herself with someone who is willing, ready and capable of doing whatever needs to be done to make their picture of marriage a reality. He is someone who can see the goal and make it happen. She comes to value him for what he can do and how he takes the initiative in bringing their picture of marriage to life. She has evidence of his commitment to the picture and she has worth in his sight because he has done it for them.

If she gets a man who does not know he is a warrior or does not want to be a warrior (the word wimp comes to mind) then what she gets is a man who runs from the adversities the enemy poses and hides from the obstacles in his way by choosing to seek comfortable avenues or easy exits. He makes excuses and pushes time lines and deadlines back again and again.

They do not achieve the goals of their picture of marriage and together they are defeated. She comes to question his commitment to the picture, which eventually translates into questioning his commitment to her.

A true man, showing off God's heart, also understands that there is a spiritual element to his picture of life. 2 Corinthians 10:3 says, For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh. That's God's battle plan for man. The enemy is not conquered by our own might. Because the enemy attacks us from the spiritual level a man must be ready to fight on the spiritual level. That requires the man to be a spiritual warrior as well as maintaining a physical readiness to defend the marriage picture for he and his bride. He must know the tools of spiritual warfare. He must know the God who gives him power to overcome the attacks of the enemy. When his heart is combined with her heart they have a complete picture of the image of God and a new power in their lives that wasn't there when they were individuals.

The man with God's heart is also a man who desires the adventure that makes him come alive. He is less than whole if he ignores his inner calling to seek out the adventures around him. Psalm 84:5 says, Blessed is the man whose strength is in You, Whose heart is set on pilgrimage. Adventures do not come to a man. He must go out and seek them. They are not just anywhere or everywhere. A real adventure, one worthy of his attention, is out there. But it has to be found. It has to be uncovered and realized.

That's why a real man's life looks like a pilgrimage to discover new things, new ways, new places. He's feels a rambling spirit and needs to recognize it for what it is. It is not a desire to roam. It is not a fear of settling down. It is a hunt. His heart is looking for something, its other half. Until he finds it the desire to roam and adventure out beyond the ordinary will eat at him, egging him on.

The adventure is not an option in the man's life. It is a necessity. Without it a part of him is missing. He needs the adventure to make his life worth while. In the marriage picture he makes the marriage itself, the relationship with her, a part of the adventure. The goals of their picture together become an integral part of his adventure. What makes the marriage worthwhile also makes his adventure worthwhile. And, while his heart seeks her heart and vice versa, after the marriage both their hearts will still seek a greater union with God, who is love, their love.

The adventure is part of his test of self. She may not understand why he needs to test himself. But she will be best served by allowing him to live his adventure. The more he lives it the more his desire to keep going. Why is that important? Because the marriage picture is a dynamic, constantly changing scenario of where the couple is heading. If either of them stop moving and working the picture the picture gets stale and possibly dies. His love of the adventure and constant searching for a new path keeps the picture alive for both of them. God designed him that way. She needs him to be that way.

Women love adventure too. Just not for the same reason. She wants to share the adventure with her husband. His energy and need of the adventure excites her womanly heart. She senses his commitment to their picture in his excitement over the adventure. This motivates her to join him in their picture. She is drawn to his commitment because she desires to be part of something real. A real man can show her real commitment. She needs him to be the man God designed him to be.

Put two little boys in a field next to a house and they will soon be found as far away from the house as possible. The urge to wander and explore ranks high on their list of things to do. It might only be a rotted log to an adult but it is a place to explore and discover new, possibly dangerous things in their mind. It feeds the need to live the adventure. It will do until something better comes along.

Unfortunately for some men, they never learn to respect how God designed a real man to operate. They have accepted fake lives and false adventures and do not have any idea that there is something better out there. They have compromised with society's watered down, gentle, sensitive demands. Their heart is crushed inside manly bodies and unable to even remember the dreams they once had. They falsely go through the motions of a "civilized" life and wonder why they never feel like they have measured up. Fake men can only give a woman a fake marriage.

Even in today's computer games generation, a boy will lay down his games for a hike through a muddy, dangerous, snake infested wilderness. Why? Because the games only allow him to indulge in a fake sense of manhood and adventure. A real adventure will win out every time. And although she will scream and say, "o-o-o-o!" when he holds out a snake for her when they are young, that same adventurous spirit will be a welcome presence when she has real serpents and problems in her life later.

The heart that God placed inside a man also wants to win the heart of the beauty. The purpose of his warrior mentality and his desire of living the adventure is to give him the necessary drive to search out the beauty that holds the other half of his heart. The two halves of the heart are seeking each other. His and hers. The way they are designed by God they are programmed to look for one another. And he searches for her with the same energy and gusto that he trains to be a warrior or lives out the adventure.

She will not have to guess if he is interested in her. He is programmed in his heart to seek her and do whatever is necessary to win her. Whatever signal she sends him will encourage him to go in that direction in order to win her. If she knows her heart and he knows his heart then the signals she sends will be answered properly and the hearts will begin knitting themselves together in preparation for that final fusion in the marriage.

His single life adventures peak in the winning of the bride who shares the picture of marriage with him. She completes his picture. She completes him. Like a quest to be whole he pursues her toward that end. It is not obsession but can look very much like it at times. Especially if he is carrying a wounded heart, as so many men are. That is why a man and a woman should know their heart as God designed it before entering into marriage. If one or both hearts in the marriage are wounded then the marriage is wounded also.

Marriage does not fix the wounds. She can not fix what is broken in his heart and he can not fix what is broken in her heart. Those things have to be dealt with before the marriage or outside the confines of the marriage structure. It is essential that his heart be whole as a man before he enters into the marriage or carries it forward.

When he senses that heart that will match the other half of his heart, his life purpose now has purpose. What he lives for is to sweep her up and carry her forward on the adventure that is their picture. That is what he is geared to do. Playing up to her and acting out for her are all part of the male display to win her heart.

Her response to his desire is important. If she backs away then he has two choices. Push harder or admit he made a wrong advance. In a man whose heart is in good manly working order he can readily make such a decision and do the right thing for all involved. But in a wounded man his response will be generated based on the severity and nature of the wound his heart has taken. A wrong response, such as stalking her or retaliating against a perceived slight, is the result of her actions being filtered through a wounded heart.

When she is captivated and drawn into the adventure, the fire that is her love burns hotter and stronger. When he hears her say he has won her heart, when he sees her join him in the adventure they will share, when her passion is painted on their marriage canvas he is finally complete. Then and only then. He has no idea how it happens. He has no idea when it happens. All of a sudden, every question he has ever had about himself and his manhood is answered. The funny thing is that she is not the one who answered it for him. She is merely a filter that gives him the confidence to look at his life clearly.

Truly. The test of being a warrior is his and his alone. She gives him the space and the confidence to answer it. The search for the adventure is something she joins him in and even suggests direction of, but still she does not answer his question of whether he has what it takes. When she tells him he has captured her heart she has completed him but she has not answered any question about whether he is a real man or not.

True, she is a strong clue as to what the answer is or could be. But weak, fake men have wives too. So gaining a wife is not the event that answers his questions. It is something deeper. Something that takes place on a level he is driven to seek while he asks the question.

Am I a real man?

He is a warrior. He lives for the adventure of life. He has won the beauty his heart desired. When he has it all he still has the question. Am I a real man?

The answer is not in the events or the circumstances. It is in the connection between two hearts, his and hers. When her passion and love ignites, it draws on his passions and he chooses to respond with his love. Their hearts come together and the once separate halves of the image of God are fused together and a complete image of God lights up their picture. In their completeness they complete the image of God and his presence enhances everything.

Questions have answers. All of his questions are answered. His big question is answered. With the realization of the full image of God to compare himself to he knows that he has become what God designed him to be. A man. A complete man. A man capable of complimenting the woman's half of the image. If he was not all he was supposed to be then they would not have a complete picture. The reality of their marriage picture is his answer. It takes a real man to carry the presence and the image of God. Only a real man can come together with a real woman and complete the image of God.

(If the image of God in their marriage is weak, broken or somehow without authority, then they have some things to deal with.)

He has his warrior status. He has his adventure. He has his bride. He has his answer. God has their marriage and a couple who bear his image.

When she accepts him as her man, a real man, not a fake or a substitute, she does so because he has excited her on a level that moves her heart to want to come together with his heart. It is more than sex. It is more than relationship. It is a joining together at the soul level. Two individuals give up who they were to become who they want to be. She wants to be a complete woman. He wants to be a complete man. They might even have felt a measure of completeness before but somehow, when they came together she realized he was her other half and he realized she was his other half. Maybe they didn't even know it was missing before. But once it is discovered they have to have it. They have found the one who makes them complete and they are willing to sell all in order to have what they have found.

Then God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth." The desire to come together more fully than any other relationship is commanded by God. Being fruitful is not talking about making a cherry pie. God said fill all the earth with your offspring. That takes passion and a plan. That has to be kindled and ignited. And once ignited it has to be maintained. He has to keep being the man God made him to be and she has to keep being the woman God made her to be.

If he is not the man God wants him to be or she is not the woman God made her to be or if both of them are lacking the heart of God in action, then what results is an emotional togetherness without the fire of the love of God to ignite a true passion. Instead of a fire that burns at a level that combines the hearts of the couple, they get a fire that burns at the level that excites their emotions only. A strong fire to say the least but a fire that can be quenched by other emotions.

They can have sex. They can speak of love. But somehow it never is enough. They still feel incomplete. They still desire more. They may still be searching. They sense that there is something else. They may not know what it is that is missing. But they do not make love. They play at it. Like their hearts play at being real men and women.

Real love is made between the two when the image of God is produced from their image. It can not be real love if God is not in it. Remember? God is love. It can only be real love if both of them are purposefully living their half of the image of God when they come together. God's love, God Himself, is painted into their picture and it overshadows all their goals and accomplishments.

Of course, the whole deal can be faked. It can be blocked and it can be polluted. A man can be stopped from achieving his rightful manhood with God by being waylaid en route by well meaning people or outright enemies of marriage.

Those who do not understand what the marriage stands for, what is produced from it and how God designed it to function, reduce it to a ceremony and an admirable institution. They put the idea of marriage up on a pedestal but never allow its true significance to be learned. People are warned to honor marriage and even to keep it holy. But they are never told how it works, what makes it so important.

A man can grow up with lots of wrong ideas. The world is full of them and they are taught everywhere. Some of them are even taught in the church.

Churches don't want warriors. Warriors are hard to control and they are not civilized. Many churches do not even have a true picture of what a warrior is. How can they then help a couple learn about creating a picture of the true marriage? The guy who wants to be God's man is a warrior and his lifestyle reflects the honor of fighting the battle and conquering. But he doesn't fit in any of the church's boxes.

Churches don't want guys who are on adventures either. They want men who are docile and happy with being kept in a box. The church's idea of adventure is usually related to a bible study or a prayer meeting. Maybe an outing to a men's breakfast. All docile, gentle experiences designed to teach a man how to keep his adventurous side in the background.

Guys need to stretch their adventure muscles and flex them for the beauties in the crowd. (even if the beauty is already his wife) They need to exercise their desires in public and thereby learn what is acceptable and unacceptable to God. What they don't need is to be told constantly to shut up and sit down and be quiet. Where is the adventure in that?

Any guy who goes after the beauty of his heart runs the risk of being chastised by the church for looking. God does indeed bring the woman he needs by but he still has to be the one who wins her heart. It's like the scientist who helps the bird get out of the egg and watches the bird die after all the help. The bird needs the experience of pushing and struggling out of the shell to strengthen it and to prepare it for the life ahead. Without that exercise of its survival muscles the bird dies. The same with the man. If he is not allowed to stretch the man muscles in his heart then it dies. What is left is a poor excuse for a man because his heart is dead.

Usually he is so intimidated by the protocol of the church social atmosphere that he never chases her and she never knows he is interested in her. And if they do, they feel guilty about having to go outside the church to exercise their interest. This is a sad comment on churches. The one place where God's heart should feel the most comfortable being unleashed is the last place a man feels allowed to unleash it.

The church is supposed to represent the bride of Christ yet it knows little to nothing of the marriage picture God is drawing up. It is a drawing of God's warrior attitude and His adventurous almost playful personality and of course, his passionate desire to be chosen by His bride as her husband.

If it is good enough for God to be that way, the church should allow its men to be the same. And churches that refuse to allow their men to be real men of God run the risk of filling up their seats with poor excuses for men who play at being men and never challenge the enemy and never win any victories for God. (Sound familiar?)

Real men were created by God. They were given a heart that desires to fight for some good purpose. Each man should seek out that purpose for his own life. Each church should unleash that purpose in the lives of the men they oversee. Each woman should settle for nothing less than a man who knows where the real fight is, against the enemy of God. Against the enemy of the church. Against the enemy of the marriage. The devil, Satan or just the enemy. Whatever he is called. That is where a man's fight belongs. Against the evils of this world.

Think about it. What would happen if tomorrow every man in the world woke up and decided that they would fight against evil from now on? How long would evil reign around us? That is why the heart plays such an important role in the plan of the enemy. The enemy wants to keep men from discovering their true calling, the true nature of their heart. And too often his plan is working.

Chapter Four

This Marriage as Her life

Marriage for a woman is different than marriage for a man. Every man who reads this is going to say something like, "I knew that!" Now, when she said "No Kidding!" in chapter three, she was expressing her frustration at trying to understand a man's ways. When he says "I knew that!" he is trying to make everyone believes he pays attention to things like that. All he knows is that it takes a lot of work to date a woman or marry her. A lot of work that most of the time he feels inadequate for the task. The male-female relationship is a mystery for the man. He just knows he likes it.

The truth is his capacity for thinking about how she feels is severely limited. Because of the way a man is wired by God in his heart, he is uncomfortable with relationships unless he has been shown who he is and discovered what his purpose is by the time he meets her. A man who has not figured himself out sufficiently to have something to share with the woman enters the relationship with much to hide. He tries to hide what he does not know about. Ever ride in a car with a man when he gets lost. Does he ask for direction? No! That would be revealing something he does not know. He wants to have all the answers for her.

Instead of making sound decisions based on where the two of them want to go in the relationship, he may sabotage the relationship because he does not know what she wants out of it. His ignorance of himself and incapacity for unveiling and discovering her desires is frustrating and possibly relationship ending for the woman.

It may sound simple but it must be said. It must be realized. Two people are about to get married or else they are already married and the fact needs immediate addressing. Women do not have the same picture of marriage and life in general as men do. In many ways they have a more complicated and maybe more completed vision of the marriage. At least their side of it. A man could get a sighting of his own possible direction from understanding that she actually has one herself.

Women see things differently. They process what they see differently. What they process comes out different than if a man processes the same information. And it is very important that she understands the marriage image from her man's standpoint if she is going to overcome the obstacles that may be in her way to reach the marriage plateau.

In making the marriage become a reality she must lead the way in certain things before he can see marriage as part of his reality. How many women get frustrated because the man simply does not respond the way she thought he should, or sometimes, even at all.

He processes everything with his brain power. He thinks the process through and it has no real avenue for diversion away from any thought or picture previously placed in his mind. That is a big key. What has been placed in his mind prior to meeting her?

Call it baggage. Call it experiences. Whatever. It is there. If he has been surrounded by good marriages then he may have some good pictures in his head. If he was surrounded by bad marriages then he probably has some bad images of marriage in his head. The point is he does not try to imagine marriage for himself. He only knows what he has seen. He is not dreaming of marriage or of some perfect picture. It is whatever he has learned it to be. A fact. An experience. An empirical study at best.

He may dream of something better than the bad marriages he has been around. But the way he views events and situations always brings him back to the only sure thing he knows. The bad marriage. That will color his decisions and how he sees what happens to himself.

As a single woman her life is her own and it is a primary tool in the satisfaction she seeks. Where his single life was a satisfaction unto itself for him, hers is only a part of the satisfaction she seeks. Men do not ask each other to go to the men's room. It fulfills no need. Women do ask each other to go because they have a need to share things. They have a satisfaction level in things they share. Not that men are stingy or self serving but they are designed to be okay when they are alone. Women prefer groups of friends. Usually a man has one or two. A woman fills up her contacts list on the computer or her phone with friends and some business relationships. A man fills up his list with business contacts and throws in a few friends or acquaintances for convenience. His convenience.

The heart of God that beats in her is a different drum than the one that beats in her future husband or a current one. His drum is okay with beating for just him. Hers likes to be shared though. She likes others to hear it and to be drawn to it and to let her unveil it for them. She desires her drum to be special and looks for those who will tell her it is.

This is a big key for a man. When he wants people to hear his drum, he beats it loud enough to draw attention to what he has accomplished. The louder, the more attention. A simple equation.

When she beats her drum, however, it may be a soft, delicate beat almost impossible to hear. She still wants just as badly to draw attention to herself. But she does not want him to hear what she has accomplished. She does not want him to see anything but her. She wants a man to hear who she is. To see her. The real her. To see enough in what she reveals that he begs her to play some more so that he can see some more.

It is imperative that everyone understand that the woman does not just have a drum with a different beat but her drum is a wholly different drum than his. On her best day and being as ready to fight and as ready to explore the world as she can be, she can never make her drum sound like his. Even if she wanted to.

She is not built to do it. She may be tough on the outside and hardened on the inside but she still has the heart of God inside her that draws her toward a different set of goals and into a different picture. It may be hidden or repressed or even locked away due to life's experiences and circumstances. But her heart is there and desiring to emerge. It only takes the right man with the right amount of knowledge and patience to draw it out and see the beauty that God has placed in her like a flower opening up and drinking of the rain.

A quarter has two sides, a heads and a tails. Both represent the quarter but neither one can ever be the other. No matter how a person squints or holds their mouth, the president's head can never be made to look like the eagle and vice versa. But if someone hands over a quarter with one or the other side missing they are immediately found out as fakes. It's not a whole quarter unless both sides are intact.

Have you ever been given a quarter where one side was worn practically away? Did you have thoughts about that quarter not being as good as a quarter whose sides were clearly visible? Did you get rid of it as soon as possible? The same with marriage. Both sides need full representation.

Both sides are necessary but neither one can be the other. It is also interesting to note that a quarter with two heads or two tails is a cheat's coin. Not the real deal, but a fake used to cheat someone out of real things. The government has never minted a coin with two sides identical. In some recess of our mind we know it takes to different sides to make a whole. Always has. Always will.

A woman's heart desires to be fought for. Not fought over. Not like a couple of guys fighting over her in a bar. But like a gallant knight, fighting through battles and dragons and natural obstacles to get to her. It is not a matter of some romantic wish or some stroking of her ego. It is a perfect picture of what is necessary in the marriage picture. His efforts validate her own belief – and in some cases, give her that belief – that she is worthy of his attentions.

Remember, she is searching out the other half of her heart. She is comparing the one who comes to her with the heart of God that she is looking for. Even if she was abused prior to meeting him, some part of her knows what she is searching for. Jesus died for his bride, the church, the bible says. So she is looking for a man who has such a heart, too. If her father was such a man, he set a high standard for some other man to come along later in her life with the right stuff. If her father fell short of the mark, she will carry doubts and wrong experiences into the new relationship, which must be dealt with.

Her heart knows what she is searching for because it is written into her. Like the man can see her beauty when he searches for it, she can feel his heart. Feelings can lie to a man because he does not thrive on them and use them often. He thinks his way through things. But a woman can feel something and know its truth by her feelings. God has made her that way.

It could be that her feelings have been violated by wrong experiences and she needs an opportunity to soothe them and repair any damage. Like the man must learn who he is and know deep down in his heart that he is a real man, she must feel deep down in her heart that she is a worthy woman.

In the marriage picture she must rely on his thinking processes because he is better attuned to that way of processing situations. But equally, he must rely on her feeling processes because she can sense things not readily seen. Together they make an awesome defense system for their life. Both operating best in the way they were designed.

One of the hardest things for a man and woman to develop is a dependence upon each other. When she depends on his ability to process his thoughts, she plays to his strength. When he depends on her ability to feel what is happening even beyond what can be seen, he gives himself a whole new avenue from which to investigate the world. Problems arise when she wants her thoughts to mean as much as his and he wants his feelings to be given as high an account as hers.

Wait! Wait! Wait! Wait! Wait!

Don't get all riled up and turn it off now.

Her thoughts ARE as valuable as his. It is her ability to process those thoughts which are secondary to his. Now, his processing ability may be impaired by some life experiences or it may be totally intact. But for him, thinking is how he processes the world. It's how he perceives all life. He not only is more attuned to thinking his way out of things but he needs it. He needs to think. He needs to hear new thoughts and get alone with all the thoughts he is thinking and bring them before God so God can help him make a decision based on those thoughts. She needs to help him think. Not force her thoughts upon him but help him think things through.

His feelings ARE as valuable as hers. But his ability to process life through his feelings is almost negligible. What he may not understand is that he has feelings for a reason. They speak to him and call to him. If he ignores them he can make wrong decisions which result in wrong turns in life. Life with her can help him learn to some extent to process his feelings better. A smart man learns to depend on the feelings of his wife. She will sense when things are wrong long before he thinks they are. He is far less likely to try and force his feelings upon her (unless he has been severely damaged) than she is likely to try and force her thoughts upon him. But he must be careful to not try and dampen her feelings or give them too little authority in his thought processes.

Thinking or feeling? Neither is perfect without the other. Like two heads of the same coin, different but necessary to the whole. To go through marriage ignoring one or the other is like playing a game of heads or tails and always calling out heads or always calling out tails. The best percentage you will ever achieve is fifty percent. Only half. But take a chance and call out both sides every once in a while – use both in your thought process or feeling process – and the percentage goes up or down markedly. Now, in a game of heads and tails it may be undesirable to make the wrong call. But in marriage it is undesirable to make the same call every time.

She is also looking for the man who does not always take the easy way out of things. A knight in shining armor is only a male on a horse unless he has fought through the dragon's territory to reach her. Again, there is a spiritual principle in what she desires.

In 2 Samuel 24:24 King David announces, I will surely buy it from you for a price; nor will I offer burnt offerings to the Lord my God with that which costs me nothing. He is talking about purchasing a plot of land from a man where he can offer sacrifices to his God. This is an important decision as well as an important purpose. It is highly significant that the King, a man who can take anything he wants and is actually offered this land for nothing, makes the bold declaration that he refuses to enter into anything as important as sacrificing to his God without it costing him something.

He chooses the hard way. He chooses the high road. He chooses to pay for everything he gets. He wants it to hurt so he can prove his worth to himself and to the beauty he desires. He has made the decision. He is willing to enter into the relationship and knows that it is going to cost him something. If he does not, then why would he be willing to enter into marriage, which costs him everything?

Consequently, in a woman's heart is the feeling that the man had better be able to make the hard decisions. Not just wrong and right, but also how to please her. He has to fight through things he dislikes, like shopping at the mall or meeting her parents, in order to please her. When he does this out of his own desire to fight for what is right, she is not only pleased but attracted. It is an attribute she is looking for. A man who avoids the unpleasant things of life is following his feelings, not his thoughts. He is playing to his weakness, not his strength. And she will sense it.

It also does not hurt if the man shows her that he is willing not only to pay his way to make her understand his commitment, but also willing to give it all. Like the scripture says in Matthew 13:46, When he had found one pearl of great price, (he) went and sold all that he had and bought it. She is looking for a man who values her so highly that he will give all to have her in his marriage picture. After all, her Lord died for her. Her heart is looking for the other half of that perfect image of God. The half that would die for his bride. Total commitment. 'Til death do us part.

A woman's heart is very steadfast and firm about what attracts it. She has very definite ideas about what she is looking for. And she will know it when she sees it. Or, more correctly, she will know him when she feels him. Why? Because from the moment God chases Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden she has been endued with an automatic search engine that desires to find him.

Genesis 3:16 says, Your desire shall be for your husband, And he shall rule over you. She desires to be with him. Her heart yearns for that moment when they make contact. When a young girl sits in her bedroom (by herself or with a friend) and dreams about her husband of the future, she is not being silly. She is actually letting her heart out. She is unleashing the woman inside her to be God's woman. And God's woman is looking for her other half so she can complete the image of God in her life.

Little girls play House. It is a dream world where they conjure up the images of marriage they will seek later in life. Little boys play Army or Cowboys and Indians or Knights and Kings. While the little boys dream of the adventure that makes their life complete the little girls dream of the man that will make their life complete. The little boy has no clue that his greatest adventure will be her and she has no idea that the him she is dreaming about comes with a wild side she should never try to tame. Happy marriages consist of grown up girls who make their game of House a reality and grown up boys who live their adventure every day. Together.

Now, proper rule in the bible is that the husband would love his wife as he loves himself. So, a real woman is not anxious about the "he shall rule over you" part. In her heart she knows the real rule of a real man means she will have protection and love and all the things her heart dreamed of back when she was playing house as a little girl. Not anger and violence and abuse as some people picture ruling over others. It is an important distinction. Rule in the bible means proper rule, not abusive rule.

The bible never commands a woman to love her husband. She is already built for that. It is built into her response system when she encounters a man's heart and opens herself up to it. That is why she must guard who she opens herself up to. Once she has opened herself up, her heart attaches itself and she loves.

It can not be overstated how important it is that a young woman – or any woman seeking her man – not open herself up to love until she is sure (feels it in her heart) that he is the man for her. Any doubts she feels about him must not be ignored. If she thinks to herself that she must accept whatever is presented because no man is perfect, then she is at risk of a faulty decision because she had over-thought her feelings. To THINK she must settle for second best or good enough is to play to her weakness. She must follow her heart and her heart FEELS its way along. If it feels wrong then it is. The right man will FEEL right.

It is the man who is commanded to love his wife in the bible. And he is given an example of how to carry it out. Like Christ loved the church and died for it. He has to be told to love his wife. That should come as a revelation to women. That man does not love you because he saw you or adored you or because you captured his heart. He only loves because he chooses to love. It is not a feeling. It is a process of his thoughts. A choice. A decision.

This is a revelation to many women. Men choose to love. They DO NOT fall in love. Weak men claim that they have no control over their choices. Real men take responsibility and choose wisely.

It is not that he is incapable of loving her, but he has to be told it is the way. He has to be given permission to love. Why? Because his is not primarily a relational heart. His heart is set on searching and fighting through to get to her. When he has found her then he is reminded that loving her is the kindling that ignites the fire that causes the real union and exposes the full image of God.

A woman needs to be aware that a man does not fall in love. He responds to her expressions of love by choosing to be in love. If he had a loving upbringing he may choose to be in love more readily than if he had an unloved past. Either way, a woman does herself and the relationship an injustice if she expects him to fall in love with her beauty or her ways or anything else. He is more like a shark trolling the waters for prey than a puppy dog waging his tail, waiting to be petted. He chooses when and who to love as surely as he chooses when and what battles he will fight. The warrior in him must be given permission to love and be loved. Only she can do that. Only she can send that message, or withhold it.

In John 15:5 scripture tells us Jesus says, I am the vine you are the branches. Without me you can do nothing. He explains the principle of connection. If the bride, the church, needs to be connected to the groom, the Lord, in order to accomplish anything, then the same principle holds true for the marriage relationship. Without him, she can do nothing. Without her, he is not fulfilled.

Another characteristic of a woman's heart is her desire to share an adventure. He desires to live one. But her adventurous side desires to share one. True to her relational method of feeling her way through life, she likes adventure, but she likes it for its ability to bring two people closer together. Consequently, she can make an adventure out of going to the ladies room. For her the adventure is not so much the risk and the new territory as it is the company and the new, shared experiences.

Her desire to share is a biblical necessity. Without her being drawn to being two, being together with the man, he would never truly experience the full power of the scripture that says, If two of you agree on earth concerning anything that they ask, it will be done for them.

Christians are not alone. God is with them. He never leaves them or forsakes them. They are always on His mind. He is always watching over them. They are no longer one when they accept a relationship with Him. He becomes their Father and they His children. And, at the end of this world's time, they will be wedded to the Son of God, Jesus.

Basic tenets in a God given life. But still as viable today as they were when handed down from God by God to His people. And they are woven into the woman's half of the marriage heart.

Somewhere deep inside her heart she knows that her power in life resides in becoming whole. Just as the man knows that his wholeness will complete his adventure and proclaim his worthiness to be a man, she knows that her wholeness will unveil to the world that she is truly a woman to be loved.

It is wholeness she seeks. Sharing brings wholeness. Sharing her feelings opens up opportunity to discover the one who will complete her. She desires the adventure to prove he is the one for her. As he proves to himself that he is a MAN, she tests him for proof that he is THE man. Same adventure. Different agendas.

Sarai went with her husband Abram to the land of Canaan when he asked her to. Mary went to visit her cousin Elizabeth when she heard that she was with child. Jesus sent his disciples out two by two to minister in the country side.

Wherever the adventure lies a woman will find a way to share it. It's not about the adventure. It's about the opportunity to share. The adventure does not open up a chance to feel his heart and discover if he is THE man. Sharing opens up the chance.

Ruth says it best in the book of Ruth. Entreat me not to leave you, Or to turn back from following after you; For wherever you go, I will go; And wherever you lodge, I will lodge; Your people shall be my people, And your God, my God. Let me share your journey. Let me see who you really are. Let me inside your world where I can feel myself being alive.

When a woman shares the experience she gets a good feel for what is really happening. Her strength is sensing the reality of something. When she shares with someone she truly senses that person's reality.

Dating is a problem. For a short period of time a guy can be whoever he desires to be. He can share whatever he believes suits his purpose. He can, in effect, fool her ability to feel him truly. Now, this may or may not be intentional. Depending on where a man is in his own development, he could be truthful or deceitful. The problem is not him. It is her.

Over time, his defenses will break down and he will reveal who he is. Her goal then, if dating is her option, is to spend as much time with him as possible to get a good feel for who he is all the time, not just when he is with her. She has to be careful and take her time. Not because he might be the wrong guy, but because he might be the right guy.

A guy changes when he meets a woman. Ask his friends. He talks differently. He goes different places. He does different things. He dresses differently. Everything in his life changes when he meets her. He changes himself to meet the challenge of winning her. Like a fighter going into training, he will ignore all other aspects of life to concentrate on his newest conquest.

Knowing this she must cut through the drama and false front to seek out the real man beneath the surface. Her job is not to validate him or give him any sense of self worth. She will do those things in part naturally by being a part of his world. Her job is to discern his heart.

Is he the ONE for her? Is he ready to give his heart to her? Is he a complete man himself?

He may tell her that she is the ONE for him. He may tell her that he wants to get married and be the only man for her. He may even act like the perfect model of manly expression. He may be the best athlete and good looking and know all the right people with a great job. But all of that might be a front for greater insecurities than she could ever dream.

He may need her to fill a hole his father or the absence of his father left in him. She can never fill that hole. Only a true male role model can do that, or the love of Jesus. He may want to get married for any number of reasons from a desire to have what his parents had, to having something better than what his parents had or even just to validate himself as a man because real men get married and have families.

His motives may sound silly and childish but a lot of weight should be given to the childhood years of the man. Marriage may be an end to his journey instead of a beginning to their journey. It may be his chance to stop play acting for the ladies and settle down to become the image of a man he has accepted in his mind. That image could be dangerous unless she has rooted it out and discovered it before hand. (and gotten his consent to deal with it)

The fact remains, she needs time to discover who he is. He can make a choice to commit or play at commitment in seconds. She needs time. She needs to share the experiences and feel for a decision. To not give herself what she needs plays into his control. Thinking is a black and white, yes and no, off and on switch with him. Her feelings contain more gray areas and many maybes and she does not turn it on. It goes on all by itself when the right power (love) is close.

A woman needs to ask herself some questions about the relationship and get the answers before she moves too far into it. What is he? A real man? How does she know? Does he act it out or has he made her feel it? Has she seen it or felt it? She needs to be able to trust her feelings.

What does he want out of the relationship? Sex? Marriage? Family? A bond? Roots? Validation? Her? She has to be sure why he is pursuing her. He can get sex anywhere and he will before, during and after the marriage. She must know – KNOW – his picture of marriage. Where does he get his picture from? Is it a real place? Does he really believe it or is he just holding onto something because it looks or sounds nice?

When he talks about family, his hers and a future one for them, does he feel genuine or just wishful. Is there anger in his past family relationships? Why? Where does it come from? Has he dealt with it?

What bond is he seeking. Can she still be her within the confines of his bond? Is it a bond or bondage he seeks? Can they be a new creation, the two of them together, in his idea of the bond or will she become just another assimilation in his world of conquest and domination?

What are his roots? While they are not a harbinger of where he is going they are a messenger of the past he is carrying with him. It does not matter that he has them under control. What matters is that he has dealt with them and moved on. She can not move on unless he moves on. He can drag her back into his roots and get her as entangled as he is if she does not use wisdom.

If she is his validation for being a man he is in trouble. A real man has a beauty on his arm. What happens as she gets old? If he does not see her true beauty, the woman God created and made just for him, he will begin looking around for another beauty. A younger one. A sexier one. One that captures his heart anew. She must be certain that he thinks of himself as a man without her before he can be the man with her.

She is a tough yet delicate creature. Her heart is tender as well as strong. Hers is an ability to know when toughness is called for and when tenderness gets the job done. He lives the adventure with a readiness and toughness set to do battle all the time. She has the ability to do battle when necessary and to touch tenderly when necessary. Because she can share she has the ability to open herself up to being viewed or shut herself down and wall away all her beauty from prying eyes.

She is strength wrapped up in a package of soft, delicate beauty. It is a beauty of flesh to be sure but also a beauty of heart, unveiled and offered up as her part of the relationship. He can search for it but only she can give it. He can want it but he can never take it. She is not the adventurer, but she makes the adventure better.

God's entire plan is to unveil Himself to His creation. In Psalm 98:2 it says, The Lord has made known His salvation; His righteousness He has revealed in the sight of the nations. The part of a woman that desires to unveil herself to a man is that part of God that wants those He loves to know everything they can about Him and to still choose to be with Him. Her heart is designed to like being revealed and discovered. She wants to do things that reveal her true self. Just like the God that designed her.

To men this is a great mystery. For women this is the very mystery that captures a man's imagination and gives him an adventure in their relationship. To both it is a necessity. It sets the tone for how they relate to one another. A Christian soberly admits they will never totally uncover all the depths of their God. It is the same for a man. The adventure for marriage is that he will never totally uncover all there is to know about her. He will always be learning new things. And as he learns they will grow closer and more happy with each others ways.

People are not one dimensional. For her there is her physical beauty, something that catches his eye. And to that there are several layers. Then there is her emotional beauty. Her ability to express her emotions in a manner that draws his heart out of him without him even knowing she has done so. There is also her spiritual beauty. An unseen element of her person that somehow registers with men in a way only understood from a spiritual paradigm. He senses her contentment and position with the Lord. The beauty that is the Lord God of heaven, Jesus, radiates from her as she draws closer to Him.

Each of these elements of her beauty have a mysterious side he desires to uncover. Each of these has an element she can learn to use for her advantage. She can also learn to use it against him, as a trap for his very soul.

The man is designed to take up the adventure that will search out her entire realm of beauty. Unfortunately, along the way several things can happen. He can be untrained in what to look for. Like an untrained discoverer of a new land, he will miss much of the wonders offered by his new discovery. Like a barbarian warrior, he can conquer and pillage the land for its readily viewable assets. But he will miss the real treasures because he does not know what to look for.

Instead of luring the man for purposes of marriage and a life together with God as their leader, she can use her beauty in all its layers, to entice and draw the man for her other purposes. King Solomon's words to his son in Proverbs is filled with warnings to avoid the "forward" woman. He challenges his son to seek the wisdom of the Lord, found in His presence and His ways. He explains that the path to the wicked woman's door is treacherous and deadly. He tells his son that wisdom and following God's intended path will deliver him to God's future for His children. To deliver you from the immoral woman, From the seductress who flatters with her words, Who forsakes the companion of her youth, And forgets the covenant of her God. For her house leads down to death, And her paths to the dead.

It must be understood that a woman using her beauty, in all its dimensions, is not wrong or sinful. Too many church people today – church people does not necessarily include all Christians – claim that all sexuality and beauty is evil. Even if they don't say it out loud they exercise its intentions will deadly accuracy on any pretty young girl or woman that happens into their midst. This is an atrocity in many churches today. The very essence of a woman's being, the very thing she has been designed to use to draw out a real man, has been cut off and forbidden by those who already have their man.

The purpose may be of good intention but the effect is having devastating repercussions throughout the world. Untrained women – those who have not been made aware of the purpose of her beauty – are operating with it like a child with a loaded handgun. They know about it and can even pull the trigger. But they have no real idea of the end results they are setting in motion. And because they are frustrated by those who claim to be in control, they are rebelling by exercising their right to pull the trigger whenever and on whomever they want.

The result of the church's lack of training in this area has caused a lot of untrained girl-women to hit the streets looking for a man without understanding the tools and weapons she carries or even what a real man looks like. It would be akin to giving a 12 gauge shotgun, loaded with buckshot, to a twelve year old and telling him to bring home a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. He knows a turkey is a big bird. He's seen one on the table before, without all its feathers and without its head. So he looks through the woods and finds the biggest bird he can and blows it away.

What he brings home is a bird, true enough. But shooting and blasting to pieces a protected bald eagle is not the same as bringing home the coveted turkey. Using a 12 gauge shotgun loaded with buckshot probably renders the carcass of the bird indistinguishable from other big birds. The feathers tell what kind of bird it used to be. But it is so damaged that it could not be eaten even if they were so inclined.

The result is that the eagle is ruined. The little boy has had an unpleasant, unsuccessful experience with hunting. The family does not get their meal. And something that was once beautiful is now dead and mangled lying in the sink in their kitchen. They have a mess to clean up.

Untrained women – and men – out hunting each other with deadly weapons and an ability to ruin each others lives should be a call to action for the church and its leaders. Parents need to understand better what they are sending their children to do. Dating is not a game or even a harmless past time. It is hard core life. Sure it can be fun. But even a drive in the country on a beautiful day can turn deadly if the driver is distracted and takes their eyes off the road.

Men are easily distracted. Much has been made of a man's inclination to follow his eyes and that is a true assessment of primary focus. He goes after what he sees. The adventure is in discovering something new. Uncovering that which is hidden. Half the battle for him is to see if he can. The challenge.

Women are also easily distracted. Though the process for distracting them takes longer to set up. A woman who has not been trained to use her beauty properly, or told what it is for, can easily be distracted to use her beauty for wrong purposes in order to attain the right feelings for herself. This can take some time because she must adopt feelings and desires consistent with her new direction. Because she processes information with her feelings, she will do what feels right to her most of the time and what feels like it should be right the rest of the time. Without proper training or understanding of her beauty at all levels, she will use it to make the right feelings come about. Now, instead of hunting for a man with whom she can make her marriage picture and share her adventure, she hunts for a man who makes her feel good about herself right now.

Her distraction is immediate fulfillment of her sense of beauty right now. His distraction is an immediate adventure with good chances of unveiling the hidden prize at the soonest opportunity. When these untrained individuals meet and are distracted by each other, coupled with the certain knowledge that sexual intercourse brings great sensual pleasure, too, nothing, but nothing, can stop an inevitable, full speed crash of what the church politely calls sinful pleasure.

Then comes the day after syndrome. She wonders. He wonders. Neither knows because neither has been trained to know. Although they may be sincere in their efforts to make meaning of it all and even make it a permanent relationship, they are ill equipped to finish the course they set. Their expectations, will be full of holes and extra baggage and all the things that are causing problems in marriages today. Trained wrong. Started wrong. Lived wrong. Too many wrong reasons. It has a very slim chance of survival in today's "I want it perfect, now" world.

A woman's desire is to be the woman that the man hungers for and fights his way through to be beside. If she is not trained to seek the long term goal of the marriage picture and explained all that it means in relation to her growth as a person with her husband and God, she will seek a feeling that makes her the sought after beauty immediately. And if she has also not been trained in what to look for in a real man, a man after God's own heart, she will settle for one of those conquest hungry Romeos who knows no more about what they are doing than she does.

Like taking your Porsche to a backyard mechanic with a small box of tools, it will be an unsatisfying experience. Sure you will pay less up front. And it might even run when you drive it away. But to maintain a finely tuned automobile requires sophisticated, computerized methods beyond the abilities of the basic backyard mechanic. So it is with the man and woman relationship.

He needs a real woman before he will experience real satisfaction. She needs a real man. If neither fits the bill they will eventually resume their search. Unfortunately, now they both are carrying the baggage from the broken relationship they are leaving. Leaving the relationship makes it worse, not better.

God's desire for one man and one woman to marry for life is not based on any sin that occurs when a man or woman divorce as much as He knows that wrong reasons for coming together, added to wrong reasons for breaking up only create a more wrong life as they seek out other partners later. God's ways are higher than our ways. He is trying to protects us always. Not keep us from enjoying sex. He created sex. He made it fun and sensual and all the pleasurable things we know it to be. God is not against sex. He is against sex that hurts his creation and draws them further away from what he designed them to be. Close to Him.

A divorced or separated couple are further away from becoming real men and women because they were not real men and women before they began. She is hurting because her feelings have been violated. He is hurting because what he thought was perfect has blown up in his face. They are separate but each still holds a part of the other – whatever part they shared. Now they are hurt, untrained, carrying baggage and still searching for Mr. or Mrs. Right. Chances of that happening are dwindling.

Why? Because no one told her what to do with her beauty. Her daddy never made her feel beautiful. Her momma never explained how she used her beauty to draw her dad in. She never saw how other women of good reputation and standing used their beauty. Even worse, she may have been around those who made her feel like being beautiful was a curse.

What about the older, already married woman? Abraham was a very successful business man with many servants and relatives around him. That meant he supported a lot of people with his business enterprise. And when God told him to move everything to Canaan he had a lot of work to do to get it all ready. But he had another problem, too.

He had a beautiful wife. It says of Sarah, in Genesis, Indeed I know that you are a woman of beautiful countenance. And Sarah was not a young woman. But the bible declares that she was so beautiful that Abraham feared that as he traveled through foreign lands, the rulers of those lands might kill him to take her as a prize for themselves. Now, we are not talking about a young, sweet virgin here. We are talking about an older woman who is drop dead gorgeous and someone that other men would kill for to have her on their arm. Her beauty went beyond her age. She held it. It had not faded. She maintained it and it was obviously a joy to her husband. One he wanted to keep, as well as his own life.

Now, I hear men say all the time that when they get to heaven they want to ask Paul this or Peter that, but I want to see Sarah. What man would deny wanting to view a woman so beautiful that she would cause others to kill for her? I'm a man. I am also honest. Something many men feel afraid to be.

Because we have attached a nasty sinful stigma to a man enjoying the beauty of a woman – and it may be rightly deserved – we have also done away with a man's ability to be truthful about his internal wiring that makes him think about discovering new lands. Personally, I believe a woman is better off with a man who still has an adventurous mind and personality but has learned to curb his desire to conquer and restrain himself within the marriage picture. The alternative is a man whose greatest adventure now is to read the paper or watch the news.

Obviously, as men, we are not tuned into only the beauty. I use that as only a tool to point out how devastating the attack on the normal male stimulus has been for our society. I'm probably going to seek out King David and ask about battling a giant before I seek out Paul and ask about enduring a prison sentence. But women must remember that men seek a battle, desire an adventure and want to win the heart of the beauty. Those things can not be denied.

As a society there must be a return to the true beauty of a woman. Physical, yes, but also emotional and spiritual. A complete package, not just a dressed up shell for an empty life.

A woman's beauty is a key to the sins of this world. How come the church does not recognize it is also a key to turning things around. Not by repressing and hiding beauty. That's like creating a law to keep all birds out of a city because they keep leaving their droppings on cars. There is no way to enforce that law without killing all the birds. Similarly, one would have to kill all the beautiful women to stop men from looking at them. In a scary way this is exactly the course some churches seem to suggest. Hide the beauty. Not as an attractive lure but as a sinful circumstance. Beauty is not sinful. Misuse and misunderstanding of beauty cause sin.

Jesus is beautiful. Revelation 1:16 says, His countenance was like the sun shining in its strength. And he wore the best clothing, otherwise the soldiers would not have gambled to own his cloak while he was dying on the cross. Nice clothes, beautiful countenance. Jesus believed in showing off the outer man. How come the church has so much of a problem with it? Could it be the church has no idea what beauty is for or how to train people to use it properly?

It is this beauty of Jesus that births her desire to be seen as beautiful. He was so she is. It also transcends the physical because, as she grows in spiritual matters she takes on more and more of the attributes of her savior. Her spirit becomes clean and fresh and beautiful. A man can sense this if he is looking for it. He is smart to demand it in a wife. He is wrong to ignore it if she sends signals of disrepute. A man can not change who a woman sees herself as. He might be able to influence her in a way that causes her to change who she sees herself as. But he can not overlook the matter of her spiritual beauty without consequence.

Similarly, a woman who does not develop her spiritual beauty or dismisses it, can never hope to hold the attention of a man who is looking for it. Once again, if both know what they are supposed to be looking for then both help the other become just what they are looking for. Iron sharpens iron the good book says.

A man also searches for a woman who he can trust. That means that emotionally she is stable and grounded and capable of making good decisions. She makes him proud to be her husband because other men desire her but she is all his. (to the victor go the spoils) She is good at the things she does and her life's pursuits add much to the marriage picture. Who can find a virtuous wife? For her worth is far above rubies. The heart of her husband safely trusts her; So he will have no lack of gain. It says in Proverbs 31:10-11.

He can watch her in a crowd of men, holding court as it may be, and not worry about who she loves, or whether some other man will pull her away from him. He knows her and he knows she knows him. They are attuned to each others needs and mutually respect each others abilities, both strengths and weaknesses. She is his beauty and he is her knight in shining armor. They work at their marriage picture daily and it is a beautiful thing. She is a real woman radiant in all her beauty and he is a real man who does not back down from challenges and chases her every day to remind her that he once caught her.

They live an adventure that has become their life and it probably does not look like an ordinary marriage to most people. They are not trouble free but they take on all obstacles and expect that they will win every time. They have come to believe that together they are unstoppable. They have come to depend on each other and can not imagine life without the other. He would be less than whole without her and vice versa.

They are the perfect marriage. She is a real woman fulfilled when she found her other half of the heart. The half that allowed her to unveil the fullness of Jesus in her marriage life.

Chapter Five

Painting The Perfect Marriage Picture

The picture of the perfect marriage begins and ends with God. As unwelcome as this revelation will be to some people, it should be a welcome acknowledgment to Christians in general and married Christians in particular. God invented and gave us marriage as more than a relationship, more than an institution. He intended from the beginning for the marriage picture to paint the perfect view of a true relationship with God.

Now, does someone have to be a Christian to have a good marriage? Certainly not. As a matter of fact. Anyone adopting God's principles of relationship can see great improvement and growth in their common development and togetherness value. God's insistence that He knows best for us is not based on His ego as much as it is on God's knowledge that we are created to live and respond to life and each other in certain ways. God knows best because he created us. He is the designer. His purpose is built into us.

Like a sports car created to go fast, it runs best and operates to its fullest when it is going fast. Now, whether it is raced on a racetrack or a side street does not matter. It was created to go fast. It just wants to go fast. We have all seen the race car put together by some sports enthusiast as it passes by us in traffic. Wide back tires, a sporty paint job and a motor that seems like it is laboring to go slowly in normal traffic. What about the guy who goes out and buys the fancy sports car at the dealership and takes it out on the local dirt track on Saturday night? His fancy sports car doesn't seem to have the muscle necessary for the track just as the race car idling in traffic while driving the local streets seems out of place too. The vehicles were designed for different purposes yet still designed to go fast.

Marriage is similar. A good marriage between two good people outside of the church domain is not impossible. Whether it is a supercharged marriage with so much emotional and physical power holding it together or whether it is a loving, coming together of two beautiful people, the same thing occurs. Others see it and envy what those two have found.

A man can accept the challenge of being a real man without accepting the saving knowledge and grace of Jesus as their living Lord. The same with a woman. The right morals and ethics and standards of right and wrong can be adopted by anyone or any society. True Christians know that living right is more than accepting Jesus as Lord. That is only a beginning. The real relationship is learning of His ways and changing our lives to be like Him. Therefore it is entirely possible to live in a wonderful marriage picture without ever entering a church.

But why strive to have the perfect relationship exposing the true heart of God if there is no desire to see God? Why build a race car if not to test it out on the track? Why buy a fancy sports car if not to cruise around town showing it off? Why accept the designer's design if not to express the designer's purpose?

No one buys a good meal just to get a whiff of its enticing aroma. They buy it to eat it. Why go to all the trouble of having a marriage if not to have the perfect marriage. Perfect the way God – the Designer – designed it.

My father was a carpenter. He always told me to use the right tool for a job and the job will go smoother. The same with marriage. To paint the right picture we need to use the right brushes. A wide, six inch brush is best for painting a house, not a delicate portrait.

A picture is best painted according to the vision in the head of the painter, or in this case, painters. As the two come together to paint their marriage picture they must reconcile their differences and adopt proven ways to move forward. Where they get their marriage vision from will have a lot to do with their individually combined marriage pictures. Even as they seek to paint a singular picture they must be keenly aware that no two people agree on everything. Their marriage pictures will still have some differences.

Ephesians 5:25-29 gives us a description of how God views the marriage picture that many marriages never try to emulate. It says, Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her, that He might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word, that He might present her to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish. So husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies; he who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as the Lord does the church.

Christians talk about it. Preachers preach about it. All Christians say they believe it. But what is it they really believe? Is it perfect?

Sometimes it comes across as, husbands, love your wife like Jesus loved the the church. When men put themselves into Jesus' sandals, their love for the church comes up woefully short. Therefore their love for their wife is less than perfect, too. They are barely maintaining either, let alone dying for them.

How many husbands truly love their wives as themselves? Not as her. Not as the beauty. But as themselves. Do husbands put as much effort into taking care and pleasing their wife or the church as they do themselves? It's a viable question. Its a serious issue.

Think about it. Jesus washes her – his bride – and makes her spotless for himself. She is the beauty. She is His desire. But He washes her. He takes her to himself. He loves her as Himself. What He does makes her perfect for Him. He loves her as His own body. Like His own flesh he nourishes her and cherishes her.

What woman walks away from that man? What woman wouldn't want to be swept away by that man? Most women just want to know where to go to meet this guy.

He is the man they marry.

Right here there will be a lot of disbelief and joking going on about the man they believe they got instead. Men will read this and know in their heart of hearts they are not this man either. The question is why? Why did this man not show up in the marriage? Women want the perfect marriage, right? Men want to be the perfect man, right? So where is he?

He wasn't painted into the picture.

Because she could not see the man she married as this man, they did not paint this man into their picture. Because he did not see himself as this man, he did nothing to adopt this man's characteristics. They can only paint what they can envision.

Marriage counseling is not about compatibility. It is about developing a plan to paint the perfect marriage picture together. The two people getting married should have already discovered who each one was before deciding to get married. What they need now is to decide who they want and what they want in their marriage.

If they do not decide to have the man who looks and acts like Jesus in their marriage before hand, He will not magically show up. God gives them the canvas on which to paint but He never – NEVER – demands what gets painted on it.

So, how does this man get into the marriage? Simple. SHE chooses to let him in. Some will ask, don't you mean, HE chooses to be that man? No. It is her choice.

That's right. Christians choose to let Jesus into their lives. The Bride of Christ chooses to let the Groom be the Groom. The woman in a marriage must also choose to let the character of Christ into her marriage through her choice to be the bride. As the man must act like Christ in all things the woman must act like the church or the Bride of Christ in all things.

Ah! Some are beginning to see the light. A big click was just heard round the world and it wasn't the refrigerator door closing.

Two things happen in a perfect marriage. He begins to take on the character of Christ in how he expresses his love of his wife. For him it is only a matter of transferring his thought processes for how he deals with himself to her.

She, however, takes on the character of the church in how she loves her husband without question. She transfers her authority over her life to him. She makes him understand that he now holds both their lives as one.

He slips her into his life and she folds him around hers. His choice is easy. Keep doing what he has been doing only expand it to encompass two lives and then a family. She must stop being herself and change into the bride. The bride – the church – gives up her life that she might have eternal life everlasting.

See the problem? If he does not want to give up his ways for the ways of Jesus then he will fall short of her desire. Chances are, he will take his cues for how he needs to adapt from her. Therefore her choices will draw out his.

Men hate to be viewed as that simple but the fact is that a warrior operates on a simple set of rules that bring honor and value to his life. Because a thing is simple does not make it less than some complicated thing. It is what it is. And the warrior uses it for his success.

Equally, if she does not want to give up her ways for the ways of the church then she will fall short of his desire. His desire is to have her totally absorbed into his life. Her insistence that she is still an individual will draw an individual response from him.

She must fully accept the idea of her life being gone and their new life beginning or he never will. If she refuses to bend to what she sees as archaic rules for women, she will miss God's design and the ultimate power her marriage could have. Just as his pride will keep him from asking for directions, hers can keep the marriage from being what it could be, also. Neither he nor she has a corner on the pride market, just different ways to show it off.

Her pride at keeping her life is a slap in the face to the man who won her heart. Women love to express how they would love a man who would love them like Jesus. But how many of them love their man like Jesus demands his bride to love him? Unconditionally and without question.

Right here all the women's liberation group turns around and goes home and continues their fictional struggle to be the equal of men. Or else they admit that the truth is what it is. There is no struggle. He can not be what she is and she can not be what he is.

Her pride is misplaced in herself as his equal. She does not become HIM. She becomes THEM. Her ability to love and teach love on God's spiritual plain draws him to learn and enjoy that love. Sure he knows love from God on his own. But he has never experienced it physically. Until the marriage love was only a mental picture he had.

How she plays her hand decides how he responds. If she wants to compete with him on his level he will do that and he will never learn of the love that she desires to share with him. But if she instead draws him over to her level with God's love manifested, he will respond by learning of it and coming to depend on it daily.

He is all about the battles. She is all about the relationships. Who is going to lead the relationship in the marriage picture? Well, it's not going to be him.

Each of them needs to play a part in deciding what the life together looks like. Then they need to make it happen. It will not happen because they want it to. It only happens because they work at it and sacrifice things to make it happen.

She will give up her life as she knew it. He will also give up his life as he knew it. Together they will live a new life. A together life. A life for one. THEM.

The key is that what they want to happen must be idyllic. Not just natural goals like buying a house, getting a job, having a career. It must have more body, more punch. Things like having a perfect house on a perfect lake. A perfect career with the perfect family vacations and the perfect amount of time off to go to the kid's games. It must include her desires for his attention and his desires for her attention.

This is what the marriage picture must be able to express. Their desires. Not just what is. If they don't aim for the idyllic all they will hit is the natural. And that is boring. Everybody gets that.

Reality in a marriage picture is like letting a five year old draw the Mona Lisa with crayons. It may have form and even function as artwork. But it will lack the mystery and the flavor of the original.

A marriage picture needs vision. It needs dreams. It needs two people reaching for that which is beyond them but what also brings them together. It's n o longer her dream and his dream. It's THEIR dream.

If she wants him to love her like Christ loves the church then she has to worship and give herself to him like God says the church must do with Jesus. Not worship like we worship Jesus. The husband is not a god. But he is God's representation in the marriage picture. If he is painted in at the lowest point of respect or hidden behind some other agenda in the picture, then so is God in the marriage and, consequently, the character of Jesus she says she wants.

Her submission – a word women have come to hate – is required to release his character. When a Christian does not give an area of their lives to Christ then He can not work in it. It is held back from Him. Jesus never forces Himself or His ways on His people. The same is true in the marriage picture. If she can not envision herself giving herself so completely to her husband that she allows him to do whatever he desires, then she is holding something back. She is not trusting him. She is not committing to him. He does not have what he needs to make her perfect for himself. He can not fully love what is not fully himself.

By now most people can see why a lot of baggage coming into a marriage is so detrimental. The he and she involved have enough work ahead of them just committing to the marriage painting they are going to create without also having to deal with all the wrong things that clutter up our minds and emotions.

One Psalm says, With my whole heart I have sought You; Oh, let me not wander from Your commandments! The woman who can envision herself saying these words to her husband has a correct view of the marriage picture. A woman who has bowed up like a cat under attack and refuses to ever give such authority to a man should stay single. Her marriage picture will never be all that she desires it to be. Why? Because a person can not deny the design of something. A race car that never gets to race will soon load up and even cease to run. It needs to run like it was designed. Similarly, a marriage that tries to operate in some fashion other than the way it was designed will not be as satisfying to the two involved.

A woman must trust her husband to make the right choices. This does not mean he always will. Remember, he is learning to be like Christ. He is learning to live for both of them.

Of course, he should also be aware that it also does not mean she will always be as trusting as he would like. She is also learning.

They must both be in character more than they are out of the character of Jesus and the church. A church that does not trust itself to Jesus is just another club. But a church that trusts in their Lord is a thriving relationship that can grow in ways no one can imagine and accomplish things no one would have guessed.

A woman that trusts in her husband and a husband who takes her trust seriously is a couple that no wind can trouble and no storm can chase away. They have the first ingredient in God's marriage picture. Trust. When she trusts him he will trust himself to show off the character of Jesus. If she doesn't trust him he will be forced to continue to try to show off in ways that he has taught himself will earn her trust.

It's a two-edged sword. She's caught between a rock and a hard place. Her desire to protect herself has to be overridden to allow her husband to become the protector. He has to see her unveil herself to this level before he truly senses all that could be. Why? Because Jesus responds to His people when they submit themselves totally to Him. When she submits totally to him the Jesus in him rises up and comes into the foreground. He starts to feel the presence of Jesus as he watches her unveil herself to him in a way that can only say, "I love you this much."

What man – real man – can look upon his beauty as she unveils herself, making herself totally dependent upon him, and not want to be her everything? His desire now becomes to see to her every desire. His job will match her heart for him. His hobbies will now match her desire for him. His entire life will adjust and turn to become their life.

Her trust is the first stroke in the marriage picture. How and where she places it will determine his first stroke. His first stroke is how much he will value her as he values his own self. Like an investor, if he knows he has all of her invested in this, then he will invest all of himself. Or else he must admit he is a selfish person.

The second stroke of the marriage picture for each of them is how the two of them are going to view Jesus. That's right. Not being able to view Jesus is an obstacle. How can they paint what they can not see. Maybe he paints the vision of a good man. Maybe she envisions a similar man. But what is it based on? His father? Her father? A man they both knew? How can they have the same vision unless the person is someone they both know?

Even then, the vision they have of that man is probably different. He sees the tough, manly side. She sees the softer, gentler, kinder side. So they need a reference point to come together over. Why? Because she will lose trust in him if he deviates from her vision of the picture of the husband she desires. And that removal of trust will cause him to stop seeking to change into the picture of the husband he has. If he can not be her protector then he will become his own protector.

That is why the vision of Jesus as the husband is so critical. His character is found in the pages of the bible and there for all to view. She can still see the kinder, gentler version, but she must also acknowledge the tough, adventurer husband. He can view the risk-it-all-winner-of-the-world's-greatest-cosmic-battle-between-good-and-evil, but he must also recognize the softer, more sensitive man that Jesus was. Together they can paint a balance that suits them.

Here is where it gets interesting. Will she trust him when he displays the tough side of Jesus? It's easy to trust him when he displays the sensitive, gentle side. But how will she paint her vision of the picture when he claims a right to move them somewhere away from her marriage picture?

Most women have a picture of their house and the street it will be on in marriage a long time before they have come to terms with the request of a husband to move that picture. She paints her conveniences and wishes into her side of the picture a long time before she starts considering he might want to have a say in it. How rigid she is in her pre-marriage picture will determine a lot of what needs to be discussed before he asks her to marry him. If he accepts a woman who does not want to change her picture for him then he will be severely hampered in his efforts to become the figure of Jesus in their marriage. Jesus can not operate in any area the bride does not give Him permission to.

Why? Because it's just like the church telling God how they are going to do church. We are going to have it on Thursday, not Sunday. We are going to only sing for the service. We do not want God interrupting what we have planned. We will tell Him when we want Him to do something.

How well does anyone think this church will do with God? The same with a marriage. If the one who is designed to submit forces her designs upon the picture then the true picture of Christ will never materialize.

Not because the husband has some maniacal need to be in control. Remember, his desire is to make her perfect for himself. That is to make her the best her she can be. Not perfect the way a man would design a Barbie Doll. But perfect the way God would desire His church to be. Holy and devoted and lovingly protected. It's not a matter of control as much as a tool to draw out the presence of God and thereby tap into the power of God in the marriage.

How he develops in the marriage picture will show off a lot of God and what God wants to do with them. It is constantly amazing to see women who claim to be so sensitive yet they do not see the way God is moving their man right in front of them. It's not so amazing when guy doesn't see it. He misses a lot of the subtle things. What he does not miss is how she grows deeper and deeper in love with him. His competitive spirit wants to match her love.

The third step is tapping into the power of God. This is very difficult without wanting to see the image of God revealed. Needless to say, marriages outside the church never progress into this level. Sure the woman can learn to submit and draw out the man she desires him to be. After all, not every woman fears the word submission. Some know the power of submitting to proper authority. Sure the man can take on the attributes of Christ. After all, Jesus was a good man. But to admit they need the power of God in their marriage is a step most non-Christians are not prepared to take.

Unless the husband is given the authority to act like Jesus in the marriage, the full image of Jesus will probably be overshadowed by a circling of the wagons kind of effect. Either he or she will focus on what THEY need. What they need to do. What they need to have. What they need to still get. What THEY need will become the focus of the marriage. Any guesses what happens when THEY can not get it?

Truth is Jesus explained the power of the marriage relationship very succinctly. He said in Mark 12:30-31, And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind,: and with all your strength.' This is the first commandment. And the second, like it, is this: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these.

Hear what Jesus said. There must be a commitment to God, wholly and without reservation. Secondly, and just as important, there must be a desire to see others succeed. Within the marriage, it is him and her loving God and loving each other as they both travel closer to His image. Outside the marriage it is the two of them helping others to see the image of God they reveal with their marriage.

Their power from the marriage is to show off the image of God to others. This may be in ministry. This may be in helping out a neighbor. It may be them using any resource they have to help or helping others to find needed resources for themselves.

What it is not is the two of them secluded away inside their marriage bunker taking on the world. The power of their marriage comes from God's desire to be revealed. They reveal Him. They tap into the power of God for their marriage by presenting Him to everyone they meet. Even people who do not know Jesus know something about a Jesus focused marriage is different.

Here's a question. Does a marriage have to be Jesus focused in order to show off the Jesus character? Not specifically. Meaning that if a couple both espouse the character of the church and Jesus then the marriage will show off the very character they live within. They do not have to call their model after Jesus and the church.

The difference will be when people ask them about where they get their inspiration from or how they keep the marriage so alive. A non-Christian's answers will differ from a Christians. A Christian will point others to the image of Christ as their model. Non Christians will point to other things. Things probably harder for others to model themselves after, or maybe not as effective with others because we all have different pictures of things. Jesus is universal. Because God designed us to accept Him, He is universal with all people. Good, righteous, kind, manly, worthy, focused, sacrificial, etc.

While many women can not believe it is imperative for them, so important, to take up the role of the trusting, submissive wife, even fewer men really believe their decision to stand in a leadership role makes any difference. Maybe her submission triggers his decision making role. Maybe his decisions trigger her submission. Possibly both play a part in the development of each other.

The fact is men need to stand up and assume the role as leaders. Not because men are superior. Hopefully we are beyond that argument by now. God has specific roles for the two halves of His heart to play. The wife is the representation of the church in the marriage and the husband is the representation of Christ in the marriage. Together they bring a perfect view of God and His people to the world.

The man who stands up and takes his place as the leader in any circumstance draws the admiration of the women around him. They respect the position a man assumes in order to be in charge. This does not lessen their power but increases it. The more in charge the man is the more power the woman has who is standing with him.

Many churches today operate from a a spiritual deficit. So few men are standing up in their roles as leaders that the women are having to fill those posts. The argument is that it is necessary because the men refuse. The reality is that God does not honor a church full of women as leaders.

Let me say that again. God does not honor a church full of women. He can not. They are only one half of the equation. Why the church can not see this simple fact is an amazing riddle. The church advocates marriage as the union between one man and one woman, yet ignores the imbalance of having a church run by mostly women. Just as God sees the marriage of two same sex individuals as sin, He also sees the imbalance of a poorly run church as sin.

Church people continually try to force God to accept whatever they bring to Him. Has the church not learned the first lesson of the bible taught from Cain and Able? God has a particular way He wants things done. It is according to His design. A man or a woman is not lessened by assuming the roles they were designed to take. They are blessed and prospered in those roles. To try and make God accept anything less is sin.

A man who will not lead his family in all matters is ignoring his role as given by God. How can God bless what we ignore? A woman who steps beyond her role as trusting wife steps out from under God's guiding hand of protection as well as her husband's hand. A church that has an imbalance of women running the show is ignoring God's design. How can anyone expect God to jump in and make things happen if they are refusing to do it His way?

Church people like to invoke the promises of God that say IF we do what God says, THEN He will bless the situation in a particular way. The truth is, IF men and women will take their rightful roles, THEN God is glorified and He will turn their situation into victory. But if they continue to do it their own way, He is under no obligation to recognize their efforts any more than He is obligated to bless the marriage union of two men.

Men are the problem with today's church. They have relegated the operation of the church to the women and stood back in a supervisory role. Whether its counselors or deacons or elders or whatever, many churches suffer from men who want to supervise rather than lead.

Men as supervisors are all taking the role of pastor. Ever hear the old adage too many chiefs and not enough Indians? That aptly describes too many of our churches today. Men watching and waiting for something to happen. Women desperately working to keep it all together out of love. But their love is not being blessed the way God intended it to be. The men have waylaid the blessings.

The man draws the beauty and the unveiled love from the woman when he assumes the role of leader. He becomes protector, provider, and prophet in the life of the women he marries. He never becomes boss. Boss implies that he can have whatever he wants whenever he wants it. That's a slave to master relationship term. Not a wife to husband term. He is more like a CEO – Chief Executive Officer – and she is his vice-president and board all rolled into one. He can not make a move without her and she does not want to move without him.

It may be worth noting here that for someone to "steal" a husband or wife out of a marriage is just as easy as answering the needs that exist within the marriage. A man needs only become what the woman wants in a real husband and a woman only needs become what a man wants in a real wife in order to peak their interest. A subtle acceptance of the wifely role entices the man to be drawn to her revealed beauty, desire to share his adventure or even be allowed to capture her. An overt playing of the husband's role wins the beauty who is searching for someone to fill her heart with the romance of the true marriage relationship. He wants to be a warrior and she wants a fighter, a winner to share herself with. He wants to be an adventurer and she wants to share an adventure. He is seeking to unveil a beauty and win her and she desires to be both unveiled and won.

Broken marriages don't just happen. They are planned. Those outside the marriage are planning how to get inside and those inside the marriage are planning how to get outside. Marriages do not dissolve. People do not fall out of love. Love is unconditional. How can we fall out of a choice? What condition makes us forget unconditional love?

Men and women are designed with key receptors for intimate relationship. Their hearts, like God's heart, seek out the stimuli that set off their receptors. As long as the needs are being met they gravitate toward the one meeting them. When the needs are not being met, they begin the search anew.

Is the church meeting God's needs for love and devotion? His love is endless. He does not need to seek out other suitors and leave anyone behind in order to draw our love. But He will respond to what other suitors are doing. He will fulfill the depths of His promises in the lives of those who are doing it in the proper order.

In the marriage the man and woman need to be committed. Not just "in love" but totally, one hundred percent, never to back out, in it to win it, 'til death do us part committed. Why? Commitment invokes the promise. When we give all, God gives all.

Men are the key to a church's success. Women are the key to a marriage's success. But God is the key to success in everything. Not just asking God into the relationship, but modeling the relationship on what God designed it to be. Someone said the greatest flattery in the world is to copy someone worthy of emulation. God is worthy.

If there is a fourth step it is perfecting the picture of Jesus in the marriage. Always retuning and readjusting the picture ensures that the marriage stays dynamic and never grows stale or old. This ensures outsiders stay outside and insiders – the husband and wife – stay inside.

As Christians we never fully attain the character of Christ. Sin is always present and a temptation to give in to. Only Christ was sinless. So, every day is a new challenge for the married couple. Every day is another challenge to become the image of God and show off the image of God.

Her trust triggers the marriage explosion that reveals God in His fullness as the husband does his part to take on the character of Jesus for the marriage picture. Then the two of them come into agreement on the Jesus that will live in their picture of marriage. Jesus will enhance the best parts of their hearts as they are being joined together.

The God in their hearts that once was separate will now become whole and wholly visible as one person, the married couple. Then they will take their show on the road, so to speak.

What they have inside the marriage must be let out. Like Jesus in their hearts, they must let Him out by living Him large-and-in-charge before everyone. And every day they must adjust and perfect the image they show everyone. Like adjusting a projected image until it is focused, they must continually adjust their marriage picture until it shows off Jesus in the best light, the clearest view.

This does not mean they begin a street corner ministry. It means they learn to act out the character of Christ that they have allowed to blossom within their marriage picture. They do not become loud, boring crusaders for Christ everywhere they go. Instead they become the attractive couple that has a marriage that seems to work the way every other couple wishes theirs would. It means they example the character of Christ and draw others to themselves for answers in how to handle life and all its circumstances.

People are looking for answers. Too many are looking in wrong places. Don't ask the mechanic, who always has to work on his car to keep it running, how to fix your car. Ask the mechanic who is taking his wife out for a Sunday drive. Don't ask the divorced marriage counselor for advice on marriage. Ask the couple next door who have been married for thirty years and still love to got to church together every Sunday.

People need to look for answers in good places. Trouble is, there are not too many good places to look.

Chapter Six

Assault on the Marriage

The greatest attack on Christianity today is against marriage. The greatest attack on marriage is to redefine it. Why? Marriage, in its truest form, shows off the image of God in all His power and splendor. If a person hates God they are against marriage as God designed it. If a person hates marriage they are against the designer, God. In all its many and varied forms of substance, every attack on marriage is, at its roots, an attack on God.

It is not just a desire by certain individuals to redefine marriage to suit their needs. Marriage represents the relationship between Jesus and His bride, the church. It also represents the right and wrong ways to deal with the foundation of all family relationships, the husband and wife. A proper foundation stands against the storms but a sloppy, ill-advised foundation will wash away easily. Prudence says, build your house on the rock, which is Jesus Christ. A solid foundation. (Luke 6:48)

Also, if there is division within the house it can not stand. In Mark 3:25 Jesus says, If a house is divided against itself that house can not stand. The last thing the enemies of God want is for people to understand the power they unleash by doing marriage right. Hence, the fantastic lengths which unchurched people go to in order to keep men and women on opposite sides of the marriage fence.

God gave us the marriage relationship because He cares for us. God saw that Adam was lonely and needed a mate. Although He had created Adam in perfection, needing nothing, God realized that like Himself, man desired companionship. He provided one that would be the perfect match for his heart and complete the man. The woman, Eve, was even taken directly from the man – a rib – to signify how much he needed her to complete him. Marriage is more than just a relationship. It is the embodiment of the presence of God. No other relationship in life can make that claim.

There are no groups fighting against other kinds of relationships. No one is trying to stop mothers loving their babies or dad's teaching their boys to play ball. Why? Those other relationships do not have the ability to focus people on God the way the marriage relationship can. No individual group cares what kind of friends a person has. They do not care much about how the cousins and other relatives relate to one another. Why? Those relationships do not show off God in all His glory.

God gave us marriage because He cares for us. Others want to take it away, not because they are looking out for us, but because they are looking out for themselves. They want to redefine marriage to their view because God's way is against their way. Every person trying to redefine marriage as something other than one man and one woman in a holy relationship is trying to take God out of the picture so they can push on with their own personal agenda. And they will attack anyone who defends God's marriage picture as well.

In John 15:20 Jesus says, Remember the word that I said to you, 'A servant is not greater than his master.' If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you. If they kept My word, they will keep yours also. It is true. Because the marriage looks like Jesus the world can not abide it. Those who would deny Jesus must also deny everything that looks like Him. His preachers and teachers. His church. His bible. His marriage. Everything.

Every assault of the marriage is first and foremost an attack against God. To remember that is to allow every Christian to fix whatever is out of focus in their marriage picture. The attackers would like Christians to forget the purpose of marriage and to focus on themselves. The real focus of the marriage picture is whatever shows off the image of Christ, through the couple inside the marriage. All marriage difficulties can be fixed if both agree to concentrate of making it conform to the image of Christ rather than the feelings or desires of the couple.

Marriage counseling is not hard. Getting two people to agree on where they are going is what makes it hard. As long as he and she hold different views of what the marriage should look like, especially views based on his thoughts and experiences against her feelings and experiences, then a stalemate will occur. That's why an attack on marriage is important to the enemies of God. If they can get couples arguing about what the marriage is supposed to look like, instead of accepting what God designed, then the battle is over.

The best attack of the enemy is to get him or her or both of them concentrating on what they want. Why? Nothing – BUT NOTHING – can be fixed in a marriage that is supposed to be a joint picture as long as the two can not agree what the picture is supposed to look like.

How can two people arrive at a single destination – and travel together – if they both want to ride in different cars and go in a different direction? In Amos 3:3 it says, Can two walk together, unless they are agreed? And again in Matthew 6:24 Jesus says, No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. In order for two people to travel together it is imperative they agree on where they are going and who they are representing. Either their marriage represents the designer, God, or it does not. They must decide.

The attack is simple for the enemy of marriage. Make one or the other of the two feel they are getting short changed by the relationship. Then let them argue about who should get what, who should do what, who should be what. Eventually they choose up sides, him against her. The battle is on and the battle field is their marriage picture.

In all marriage arguments the questions are simple. Anyone can ask them. But only the bride and groom can answer them.

First, are they real people? Is he trying to be a real man or some weak copy? Is she trying to be a real woman or some shallow image of the beauty? Fake men make lousy husbands and fake beauty makes for a shallow woman. This is a bad foundation for something as important as the rest of their lives.

Second, does their marriage picture include an image of Christ with His bride, the church? Without such an image his view of how he is supposed to carry out his side of the marriage may be different than her view of what he is supposed to be and do. And vice versa.

What is the common view they will both hold and strive to achieve? Is this view solid like a rock or more like the shifting sands by the side of the ocean? It's very hard to set a foundation at the beach. Most storms destroy whatever sits on that foundation. A good marriage picture is important.

When the answer to either of these questions is no, a big problem exist. Why is he or she not conforming to or at least trying to conform to the real image of a man and woman as God intended them to be? Why is Christ and the church not their picture? What substitutes are they using? The problem may well exist in the substitutes.

Our heroes on TV and in the movies may be swashbuckling adventurers and do good deeds, but unless their lives reveal the power and majesty of God, they are still weak copies of what a real man can be. Those beauties we see in the media may have all the right curves and pretty smiles, but without the perfect love of Christ dwelling within them they lack something necessary to make them the perfect wife. What's his idea of a real man and a relationship with God? Hers? What's her idea of a real woman and her relationship to God? His?

From a few simple questions it can be deduced what the couple are trying to form, a real marriage or a substitute marriage. Real macaroni and cheese uses real cheese, no substitutes. Even children can tell the difference between the real and fake. The same way with a marriage. Shine the light of the true marriage up against the fake one and everyone can see the difference. (Some folks are embarrassed to come to church because they can see the difference in their lives when they get close to real believers in God.)

If the couple does not want a real marriage, just something they can live with, perhaps they only want the outward "show" of a marriage. Logic would dictate then that they should also want only the "show" inside the marriage. Why should they get the benefits of a real marriage with only the efforts of a fake marriage being given? There are no answers for fake marriages because fake marriages have interchangeable rules. Real marriages have steadfast rules and a real image to maintain. It is founded upon the rock that is God.

For the purposes of this discussion real marriages are marriages that seek to attain God's desired design. Fake marriages are those that seek the bliss of the relationship without the effort of the real work of the relationship. Real marriages are eternal. Fake marriages are temporary.

In Malachi 3:6 it tells us, For I am the Lord, I do not change. God does not change the rules of marriage because marriage represents Him and He does not change. The image is always the same. Like a designer dress, it may look a little different as different people wear it but to those with a trained eye it always has the look like the designer who made it wanted it to have.

Like a fake designer dress does not stand up to critical review, so a fake marriage does not stand up to an outside attack. The attack may be real or imagined. It may be generated by the enemy of our souls, a jealous outsider or a well meaning insider we count as a friend. It can also be generated by the very couple painting their marriage portrait.

As they become stale in their quest to take on the image of Jesus for each other, they may start searching for other images to replace their lost vision in the marriage picture. Either together or separately, they can change the direction and the ultimate image shown. If it is not Jesus then it is flawed. Any flaw that a marriage is built upon will eventually become a stumbling point.

Certainly temptation is a big problem in marriages. He is tempted constantly. She is tempted constantly. Much time could be spent explaining the various ways he and she are tempted. Truth be known, every reader has probably already experienced them more often and in greater detail than any written word here can do justice to.

Instead of dissecting the various temptations effort is better spent on resisting them altogether. Temptations exist. They are not all the same and what tempts one person may not tempt another. What tempts them today may be different than what tempted them yesterday. The focus is not the temptation but what the temptation is trying to accomplish.

Like an animal trainer trying different methods to get a desired behavior out of an animal, there are forces working against married couples to get them to accept the temptations and act out in a manner that destroys the marriage relationship. This fact alone should make married men and women angry and cause them to set their hearts not to be manipulated.

All temptation has one goal, to replace the real with the fake. All temptations are fake alternatives to the real thing. That's why they are temptations. Otherwise they would be called the real thing. But a person can make a temptation a reality by giving in to it. The temptation to seek alternatives to the real marriage relationship – for example, he has an affair – is only a temptation to replace the real marriage relationship with a fake marriage relationship. Even if marriage is not the goal of the affair, it is still a partial replacement option. It is still a real act in the middle of a fake package. It is a filler to something perceived as missing in the real marriage picture. Or, worse yet, an add on.

Question! Was the affair designed into the marriage picture in the beginning? No! Why not? Because it did not show off the true image of Jesus and His love for His bride, the church?

Is showing off the image of Jesus and His love for the church part of the marriage design? If the answer is yes, then he can easily be redirected back to the right path. She can be content with knowing the true direction of their marriage picture and secure in the knowledge there are real answers.

If the answer is "No, an image of God was not their marriage picture," then it means only that they both demanded total monogamy with each other – a normal request. Then there is room to argue. What if he changes his view? Or her? What if monogamy takes on a different meaning itself? They decided what it would be based on their own desires so they can also change what they want it to be based on their own desires. And because there is no solid image of what it is supposed to look like, as with the marriage between Jesus and His church, then there is no solid expectations.

His view of her claim to monogamy may change if things within the marriage change. That is the danger with movable standards. It is too easy to challenge and call into question anything based on how something is perceived today by the couple. Tomorrow they may feel differently about it. Something may change in their views or how they perceive each other and their roles. The marriage picture must be painted upon a canvass of true standards or else the shifting sands of time and circumstance will cause the couple's picture to fade and become hard to recognize as a real marriage. It may even become difficult to see as a real relationship after a while.

Marriage is an agreement between two people to live their lives together forever. As with any agreement there must be something that makes them come together and want to stay together. Something that binds them voluntarily. For Christians love is the answer and love is defined by God as being God. It seems at times to be too simple an answer and yet it is the right answer.

For others love may be the answer but what their love is based on is anyone's guess. That is not a slight or an attack on non-Christian love. It is a fact. Love that is not based on God as God is a varied subject. The context within which a non-Christian's love can fall is so widely arrayed that even secular marriage counselors have trouble defining it. Non-Christian love is a mystery and therefore, very complicated.

Everything within the agreement must be built on a solid immoveable foundation, something each person wants to do. It must be measurable or quantifiable. They must be able to see the change in each other. There must be acknowledgment of each other as individuals before acceptance as a couple. It must be repeatable. Something they want to continue and watch it grow. And, believe it or not there is a time element, too. The time to enter into the marriage agreement must be calculated. They must both be ready to become one.

S-M-A-R-T. That's what marriage is supposed to be. Solid foundation (Christians depend on God and emulate His character). Measurable change in their lives (Everyone says they have changed). Acknowledgment of the individuals forming the couple (They continue to learn about each other). Repeatable actions garnering repeatable and dynamic results (They're growing and loving the journey). Timely coming together of all the proper elements and a realization of that timeliness by both parties (It was the right time for both of them to move into this next phase of their lives).

Jesus and His church is the immovable foundation for real marriages. Whether people acknowledge Jesus or not, He must be the steadfast image that burns in their hearts or they will face adversity with movable standards that shift and cause friction between them. A solid model gives them someone to focus on who helps them maintain and go through the hardship. Like a mentor.

Marriage is not easy. There are many potholes on the road to marital bliss. It is essential that the couple know ahead of time how they are going to handle the problems that arise.

Any time a person does not want to do something they will find a way to not do it. That is a fact. Both people in the marriage must want the same image in their lives. They are going to become one in marriage. They must be happy with that singular image or else one of them will run from it eventually.

More people leave a marriage saying they no longer want to be the person that marriage picture demanded of them than anyone can imagine. They both blame the other because there is a strong level of guilt any time a person backs out on an agreement. The truth still remains. At least one of them no longer wanted to see themselves in the marriage picture they had created.

It is not an indictment when friends mention that a couple have changed since they met each other. It is confirmation that they have finally found a relationship worth changing their routine for. Or maybe they have finally found a reason to change some behavior that never really was them to begin with. Whatever the reason, the change is a yardstick by which to measure the depth of their commitment. Little change. Little commitment. Big change. Big commitment.

Change may come hard to some people. True enough. But it comes when they are convinced that something they want is worth more than what they have. If he or she is not willing or ready to change their life for the marriage picture, then it is too early for marriage yet, or he or she is the wrong person.

Without acknowledgment of the individuals a couple loses sight of who they are. His best qualities and her best qualities are what drive the marriage picture. If they do not celebrate who they are and enjoy it with each other, then they will bog down the marriage engines with boredom and unnecessary strife.

He chose to be married. He wants to be an adventurous, purpose driven warrior. She chose to be married. She wants to be an adventure sharing, mysterious beauty. They can not afford to just become man and wife.

If they get married and forget all about who they were, then the reason for getting married gets lost. She married him for who he was, an adventurous, fighting man of God. He married her for who she was, an adventure seeking partner with a mysterious quality of Godly love and beauty he could barely understand. If either of them does not come along into the marriage, then why would the other stay.

Every circumstance of the marriage must be repeatable. That's why learning about each other takes time. Situations need to be repeated and common results achieved. Why? Marriage is a mundane existence if a person is expecting excitement every day.

Courtship is a quest for existence and carries a certain amount of daily excitement. The couple must become comfortable with each other in the silly, everyday experiences. Is having a cup of coffee together after a movie as rewarding to them as taking a trip on a cruise liner? If not then they still have to work on their combined picture.

How many cruises can they afford? Who wants a relationship that can only be happy when the fantastic is happening? Repeatable means that they have discovered the methods and areas where they relate to one another at a level where they excite each other even in the mundane things of life.

Happy is the marriage couple who can excite each other at the birthday party of a friend's, cousin's, little boy. Not just because they are thinking of what may happen later. But because they are excited to be with each other anywhere and everywhere. Because he feels whole when she is around and she feels whole when she is around.

Timeliness in marriage is as simple as understanding that both he and she are not only willing to get married, but also ready. Many marriages end not because the couple were incompatible but because they rushed things. If they had waited until both of them were ready then the marriage picture would have had a better chance of being colored properly. Too often one side rushes the other before they are ready. Or one side jumps in before they are really ready because they are afraid to lose the person of their dreams.

Preparation takes time. Time is a valuable asset. It is sold more often than any other commodity in the world. A couple needs to treat time as a tool and use it wisely. They need time to assess each others commitment. They need time to grow together. They need time to discover each other. They need time to meet the right person.

No, I did not list those backward. They need to be committed to the fact that they are not going to get married until they are sure of the commitment of their intended before they even start looking. They need to be committed to the fact that they are going to take time to grow into the relationship. They need to be committed to the fact they are going to use their time to learn about the other partner. They need to be committed to waiting until the right person comes along.

A proper marriage preparation includes planning to take the time to do it right. He plans to do it right. She plans to do it right. They meet someone with similar plans and it begins a relationship. Then they take the time to see if it will grow and become one.

Because the marriage picture depends upon two people coming into agreement it must always be remembered that those two people are different. They may come to act the same or similar in many things as they grow, but they are still two different people coming together as one.

Remember, he is still a man at heart and adventure never is quieted within him. Risk is part of his nature. He will risk everything to find what his heart begs for.

If his heart is being fed by his fleshly desires to soothe his flesh then he may respond to his flesh more than his heart's desire to represent the character of Jesus. If Jesus is not their standard together, then changes she makes may give him the perceived right to demand some changes of his own. Whoever changes first, changes will occur as people grow. It is inevitable.

On her behalf, she may decide to change her view in whole or in part as the marriage progresses. With or without consulting him, she can change the marriage picture, sometimes even without realizing she has. Maybe they are communicating less. Maybe she is too tired from hectic schedules to really sense where he is in the picture. Maybe she is bored or frustrated herself and she can not accurately judge where she is in the picture. Whatever happens, wherever they find themselves. Little changes can cause major adjustment on the part of one or the other.

Keep Jesus as the standard and no one has the right to demand changes. Jesus is the standard that does not change. When the standard is common to both of them then they both can have a common picture as their goal. It is only when they both have different standards they can have different pictures of the marriage they are creating.

Keep Jesus as the image of the marriage and focus on His miraculous love for His bride and His insistence that the bride live well and enjoy life. Jesus says in John 10:10, I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.

He is not into boring or mundane. Jesus is into exciting and fulfilling. With Jesus as the image of the marriage both he and she have a living legend to live up to. The image of God, living life to its fullest, taking on all obstacles and defeating them, enjoying His creation and all the pleasures of life.

The picture has a better chance to stay clear if both seek God together. Together is the key. If they seek separately they may end up going in separate directions. The written word of God they consume together settles in their spirit and joins them in a common bond of direction for their marriage picture. The word they hear preached at church adds to their common knowledge of the picture of Jesus they both share. The other people they are around who show off the image of God also add to their marriage picture. It is the picture of Christ they share that allows them to maintain the common view of where their marriage is headed. Just because they learn about God and His character does not mean they learn the same things. Learning together is a key. Together.

Temptation is designed to separate the couple. It draws one or the other away from the idea of together and creates a separate he and she again. It also allows one or the other of the couple to change the picture. For whatever reason they make the change a change is made that pulls them away from the cohesive, Jesus centered image of their marriage picture.

Because they are in control of the image they project they have to want to change the picture. That is why temptation is so important to enemies of marriage. The marriage picture can not be changed without their permission. Because they operate as one in the marriage either one has the authority to change the marriage picture. It is only necessary to tempt one of them and draw them away from the real marriage picture in order to change it.

Temptation is a planned attack on the marriage image, changing it so it can be viewed as something other than the vision God planned. God wants to reveal Himself through the marriage picture. Any attack on the marriage will be designed to reveal something other than God through the marriage. No matter what else replaces the image of God in a marriage picture, it is a flimsy substitute and a weak fake of the real thing God intended it to be.

One assault on the marriage picture is designed to redefine love. The Christian bible says, God is love. Any definition that states anyone else or anything else is the picture of love is faulty. A person is not as steadfast as God. Anything on earth is not as long lasting as God. Nothing is as unchangeable, immovable and as permanent as God. Therefore, any definition of love that does not include the fullness of God is also falling short of the true depth of what love is.

The bible says, Now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love. A person chooses to have faith. They choose to hold onto hope. They also choose to love. It is not an emotion they can not control. It is a response they give to a situation. They meet someone and they decide whether to love that person or not. A choice. It does not just happen just like no one becomes a famous singer overnight. There is a long period of work that goes into the process before the BIG CHANCE occurs.

The same with love. A person prepares themselves, or allows their environment to shape their views of love before the opportunity ever occurs. When it occurs it is usually pretty easy to see. Their choice could have probably been predicted – and maybe was – by those closest to them.

That is why dating services can match individuals. Lots of people think they know what they would love in a marriage partner. Outward appearance. Inner security. A job. A career. A dream that is similar. The same taste in food. The same taste in excitement levels.

Good starts but woefully short of God's intended design. The best dating service can never purposely match someone with God's intended partner, with the other half of their heart. There is an intrinsic, inward part of the heart search that only a heart can identify. It takes God to somehow bring that person near enough to be discovered by that searching heart.

God's design brings together two different people and makes them one. Dating services match up two similar people and hope they will learn to coexist. Two different agendas. Real men and women are not looking for a roommate they can get along with forever. They are looking for the person who holds the other half of their heart. They are looking for the one who completes them and makes them whole.

Who a person chooses to love is a major step yet children are taught from grade school that love can be given and taken back at will. Boyfriends and girlfriends join up and separate seemingly daily in our schools today.

What impression does that leave on a young mind? That love is theirs to give and theirs to take at will? If things are good they give it. When things turn bad they take it back and move on. (Kind of like parents that show their child how disappointed they are when they are bad.)

Any wonder that divorce rates are skyrocketing? Any wonder why kids feel responsible when parents separate? All their lives they see love withdrawn when others are bad or situations get ugly. To have a parent leave means they must have been bad. That why love leaves.

Words mean nothing when actions speak so loudly. And they practice it daily. We call it drama today. But it is really the immature heart acting out what they see expressed in the adult world around them. We are not growing real men and women in our society today. We are fostering immaturity at an unprecedented rate.

Those grade schoolers are now our married couples. Unfortunately, they are still playing grade school games with their love. Giving and taking at will.

They say they fall in love as though it was unavoidable and out of their control. Yet, when things get tough and bumps occur in their marriage road, they suddenly believe that it is their choice to take back their love. Their original emotion of love was not real. It was as fake as their marriage. A temporary convenience of the times. Founded on emotion and situation, they play along until either the emotion changes or the situation does.

Too many people today use marriage as an excuse to say they know what loves truly is. Truth is, most people do not have a clue what love is. Worse yet, most people are afraid to discover all that love represents because it asks more of them than any other choice in life. Real love takes everything we have and involves us on a level that we can never get back from without significant change to our hearts.

Love is the greatest risk in the world. That is why men are designed to take risks and women are designed to love men who do. His heart wants to risk love. Her heart wants to share the love connection. Both can be perverted and turned into other things but neither can deny that the roots of their hearts are risking love and sharing love.

When a man enters into a relationship with a woman he loves, he has put all of himself into the decision. A real man knows that to love her he can hold nothing back. He understands that what he is risking is himself. Who he is. What he is. It all belongs to her now. And he gives it freely and without reservation. That is his risk. To become no one to become one.

When a woman enters into a relationship with a man she loves, she aches to be totally consumed of the love she feels for him. For her it is not complete until she feels totally enveloped by his love for her. She understands that she is totally his and she desires nothing else but to feel as though he has and wants all of her. She never considers holding back a part of herself because she wants total involvement. It is not complete until she has it. She desires to empty herself for him and to become one with him.

A man's ideas of love are closely tied to his ideas of risk taking. If the man learns, through experiential exposure, that risk taking is all about temporary exaltation and elevated levels of excitement then he comes to the relationship with the same expectations. His idea of love is colored by his past experiences of risk and reward.

The couple's relationship, designed to be a completion of his heart, becomes a continuation of his game playing. As long as he is winning the game and things are happy, he continues to play. But when the reward is no longer worth his effort he backs away and quits. His goal is to experience the reward of risk. Not to win. He becomes an excitement junkie. When the excitement runs out he runs out. For the fake man, untrained and immature, his goal becomes bigger and more rewarding risks.

A real man learns that risk is not a game to be played but an inevitable result of living life. He does not back down from it, but it is not his goal. He doesn't look for it. He uses it to get to the other side of his real goals. He faces risk and conquers it but he does not challenge risk unless there is a real reward worth having in the result. His desire for living the adventure and fighting the battle and chasing his beauty culminate in his choice of who he loves. He brings all his experience of fighting and living and chasing the beauty to her and offers them up as proof that he is worthy of her love. When she offers her love he can honestly choose to give her his.

If his experiences are based on long term adventures she can rest assured that he is in it for the long haul. If his life experiences consist of short term adventures and risky highs of life then she should similarly expect his idea of love to be similarly as temporary. Anything more is not warranted. If she wants a real man she must demand real man experiences in her choice of husband.

She can not make him into a real man later. She does not have that kind of authority or ability. That doesn't mean a man can not grow into the position. But it is a certainty that she can not drive him or in any way make him do it. Motherly instincts raise up a boy and release him at the proper time to become a man. But it takes a man to teach a boy how to be a man.

He must accept the challenge to become a real man and choose to make the hard decisions. He needs to practice making the long term decisions for real rewards and forgo the short term elevated levels of excitement that are only temporary. They are entertainment at best. Temptations at worst.

She needs to be aware that what he brings to the marriage relationship is important. It will become the basis of her life as well as his own. If she wants a permanent life with him she needs to look for his permanent characteristics. Settling for his temporary adventures will set her up for more of the same and an unhappy life where the only permanent thing in it is his desire to seek greater and greater risks for the highs they bring. Eventually one of those risks will involve a woman other than herself.

In marriage, the greatest risky adventure is getting away with an affair. Add to that the element of chasing another beauty and the man with the temporary set of life values has found the ultimate adventure. Eventually he comes to regard his life in terms of his next risk. Not his marriage.

It is a personal choice to be a real man. And that choice requires a lot of choices to be made daily. Hard choices. Choices that change the boy into a real man step by step, experience by experience, hard thing by hard thing.

Becoming a real man does not happen overnight. His growth, as all personal growth, is a series of lessons learned by facing situations and moving past them. How the man gets through each situation tells a lot about him. Does he seek temporary answers, like avoiding the fight and seeking quick pleasures or does he finish the job and make sure the situation is handled permanently, no matter how hard he had to work at it?

Real men are not born, they are grown. Grown by the experiences he has conquered. Nurtured by the situations he chooses to confront and conquer. What a man allows and becomes used to in his youth is what he will allow to be part of his adulthood.

She must grow into being a real woman, also. While his lessons help him learn to choose the path of a real man, her lessons help her decide on what kind of woman she wants to be. His growth is a path and hers is a destination.

As with him, her growth is not immediate either. She learns every day what she will accept in her life, who she will be. Her strength is in choosing to stand for the depths of her heart and become the real woman God designed her to be.

There are many easy alternatives for her. Easy in that they are sometimes the quicker road to pleasure than the Godly choice. Society allows a woman to be a victim of her circumstances and even helps her make up excuses for why she is not as virtuous or as steadfast in her choice of role models. But the woman's heart desires to be thought of as virtuous. She wants to be seen as holding on to a higher ideal of womanhood.

Her choices are just as important as his for their future marriage picture. If she has chosen quick and easy pleasures in her single life then she will still believe that quick and easy pleasures are the way to go in her married life. When quick and easy is no longer happening with her husband she may seek her pleasures elsewhere.

She may learn in her youth to accept outward or physical examples of love but her heart will desire more depth and more commitment. How she deals with her heart at a young age sets a standard for how she will respond to love in her adulthood.

While his motive for having an affair is the risk and adventure of the deal, hers is an opportunity to share life and the adventure with someone new. Quick and easy for her is a new relationship that fulfills her need for sharing herself fresh and new again. Maybe not in depth, but shared nonetheless. She feels alive as the new man unveils her beauty and chases her with his adventurous passions.

The hard choice is finding her pleasures in the existing marriage and sharing the adventure, such as it is, with her husband. If she has depended on the man to always bring her a new adventure to share while she was single she will continue to desire new adventures when she is married. But if she has built her adventures from the things she loves, like a hobby or a passion for sharing things, then she understands how to build her life within the confines of the marriage picture.

Her lessons of life must revolve around building relationships in order to fulfill her need for the ultimate relationship, marriage. If she has spent her youth moving from one relationship to another – whether with males or females – she will have a certain incomplete knowledge of how to build her own life within the relationships. He should be aware of this.

Unlike the man, however, a woman can learn her marriage building skills from within the marriage picture. Because she feels a necessity to enter into it completely, no matter what her background, she is also committed to making it work for the most part. With the proper focus after marriage she can train herself and be taught the characteristics of a real woman.

God told his profit Hosea to take to himself a wife of disreputable character. Though they had children she still cheated on him and ran around with other men. Still Hosea was ordered to follow her and bring her home time and time again. To pay the price for converting her to the role of a virtuous woman. Why? Because a woman's heart has the desire to be covered with unconditional love. It may take time but she can be won over by his show of love. His perseverance can be a key to her changes.

This does not mean a woman has no control over her choices. They are her choices. It is just that God designed her heart to be happiest when it functions and responds a certain way. Experiences of life may turn her heart against certain responses in order to avoid painful situations again. These experiences need to be overcome and dealt with before the marriage picture can be completed. A woman needs to come to an understanding of the way God designed her heart to work and be comfortable with it. Too many women today are uncomfortable with what their heart tells them they should be and what the world says they should be.

This also does not mean a man can not change within the marriage picture. But for him change is a far more involved process. Why? Society. Society and its preconceived perceptions of the man's role in marriage.

If he is a fake man entering the marriage it will be a hard process for him to change into a real man inside the marriage picture. For one, the fake man does not give his entire self into the marriage. He holds back a part for himself, or for his protection, maybe in order to exit the marriage in case of failure.

To become a real man he must give all of himself, nothing withheld. He must empty himself into the marriage for her. Not for himself. Not for anyone else. But for her. It is the price he pays for becoming a real man in marriage.

Also, a fake man has to deal with his past inside the marriage picture. For the woman giving up temporary relationships and moving on to a permanent relationship with her husband is not such a hardship. It fulfills her in a way that she gladly leaves her old life behind once she realizes how the permanent relationship completes her. He, on the other hand, has learned to derive his pleasure from temporary risks and adventures. Maybe he even gets his pleasures from chasing a new beauty. He now has to replace his old system of rewards with the real man's system of reward, looking like Jesus as he loved the church.

This is a hard thing for a man to do inside the marriage. It is a confining, restrictive training that most men will rebel against because they can see neither results nor rewards from it. His flesh battles with his heart for control inside the marriage picture. Because he is more attuned to answering to his flesh than his heart, he is more likely to desire his old life back rather than pushing through to the inconceivable goal of being one with his wife.

It may be easier for a real man to hook up with a fake woman and bring her along into the marriage as a virtuous and Godly woman than it is for a real woman to draw a real man out of his fake shell, but neither is a desired situation in any marriage picture. Both should be aware of the character of the other and understand what marriage picture they are looking at together.

The picture they create together is never perfect. Communication and personalities may never allow them to be perfect. That is part of the adventure and the risk. Becoming one in marriage is a goal not to be taken lightly. It is going to take work. The bad news is that the work never ends. The good news is that after a while the work becomes part of the adventure – they realize that forces are at work to defeat their oneness – and eventually being one is a reward that neither would give up for anything in the world.

Marriage is first and foremost a picture of the image of God portrayed in the everyday life of two individuals as they grow closer to one another and become one. He matures into an elder of the marriage and she matures into the Godly woman who can pass on her knowledge and experiences to younger women. He leads and she she leads. Both of them leading the younger men and women around them.

It is, secondly, the result of the choices of two individuals to combine their separate lives into one life for the purpose of achieving a power of unity that no other relationship can offer. The marriage picture, while beautiful, is also one of the most powerful forces on earth.

Nothing – NOTHING – can defeat a strong marriage. No outside force can break it or damage it. It is indestructible. That is why a woman can still love her man after he has done something wrong. That is why a man can forgive his wife for any transgression she may make. They have made a choice to be indestructible together. He and she.

Chapter Seven

God's Delight in Marriage

Marriage is not just something God allows or something God thinks is a good idea, so people should do it. Like many things God does, marriage has more than one side to it and all sides operate together at the same time. It is also a major part of the completion of His creation.

Unlike other animals, created male and female, God created woman from man as a missing part of him. A part that is necessary to complete him. Consequently, a woman needs a man to complete her. She was never created to be a stand alone entity. She was created to be a helpmeet (the other half) of the man.

Those individuals who say they are perfectly alright without a partner are correct in that they can live and function without a partner (especially if they have a personal relationship with God). They are also denying that they are missing something (unless God has called them specifically to Himself). To understand marriage a person must understand what God planned for the happy union to be. Anything less is to miss the point of the whole thing, and to miss God.

The heart of a person desires a connection. Ultimately the connection it desires is with God. In practice it desires a connection with its mate, the one who makes them complete. What many do not understand is that the one who completes us is not so much the one God set aside and designed specifically for us, as the one who God works through to awaken us.

Confused? Poets have written epic dramas about the love of one person for another. They have cataloged the emotion for entertainment value. A large part of the romanticized view of love is that a person goes through life looking for that one other person that completes them. And many seemingly never find that perfect other. Are the poets wrong? Are some people fated to never know that romantic, heart throbbing kind of love? Is there not someone for everyone out there?

Good questions. Probably every young woman in the world asks herself these questions. Even some of the young men. But, are they the right questions?

Instead of the poet's view of love, the one that seems to leave so many less than satisfied, lets look at God's view of love, the one that satisfies. Some people get married. Some people do not. That does not mean God did not plan for them to marry. In the USA marriage is an expected course of life. In other countries marriage is a luxury for those who can afford it. Every culture in the world has a marriage equivalent whether they say they believe in God or not. The desire of the heart of men and women to come together and create a family is inborn and an undeniable part of the human make up. So, it is a choice to marry or not to marry.

Some people find love. Some people do not. Since God is love, He plans for everyone to find Him. Love does not only exist in marriage. People love their family members, their friends, their God. Somehow people are going to express their love to someone. It is in us and desires to be free. People are created to love and they will find someone or something to love.

In the poet's view love is something that wings its way through the atmosphere and finds the lovers. In God's reality, love is a choice people make. They decide if they will love, who they will love and when they will love.

As a child many are told it is wrong to love money and then are also told they can not love sports or fishing or other hobbies. The fact is a person can love anything they want. Love is a choice. Love is the thing that a person devotes their life to. It is the thing that they feel brings out the best in them. And every person on earth seeks this thing that makes them the best they can be.

Advertisers try to sell people the newest, "best" thing to make them everything they want to be. The newest hair product. The next stage in clothing. The best skin care product. The fastest working pill for dieting. The newest rage in exercising. Whatever the product, the hook is making it something that will complete the person. Advertisers don't sell products. They sell dreams. And the greatest dream is to become a complete person.

Why? Because completion is what the human heart desires. His heart desires completion. Her heart desires completion. They are looking for it. They are willing to pay for it. Unfortunately, too many are looking in the wrong place.

What completes a person is the very thing that awakens that person's dreams and desires fully. Advertisers have discovered that many things can be sold as substitutes. But they must keep coming up with new things. Why? Because they are only offering substitutes. They do not have the real thing to offer. So when it does not complete a person something new must be available.

Someone said, let's just live on love. A romantic notion to be sure. But also not far from wrong.

Who can say who is happier? A millionaire with his fancy cars and houses and vacations and business worries or the man who has a forty hour a week job and comes home to a loving wife and family everyday? Money does not complete people. Things do not complete people.

Happiness is not found among experiences either or people would not keep seeking new experiences. Happiness, that elusive condition of completeness, is found only when one person finds the other half of their heart.

When a man and woman are together and complete they can weather any situation and overcome any obstacle to life. Wherever they find themselves they are happy. They are in love. They are completed. They are powerful. More correctly, they are enabled. Their choice to love has enabled them to overcome. Why? Love conquers all.

In 2 Peter 2:19 it says, By whom a person is overcome, by him also he is brought into bondage. Think about it. When a person "falls in love" who are they overcome by? God Himself. Love overshadows their life. God overshadows their life. Maybe they do not acknowledge Him. But He is still there. He is love. Love can not exist without Him. When a person "falls in love" their life is overcome by the one who they gave their life up to. Not the person they love, but the God who is love. When they chose to "be in love" they also chose to let He who is love "be" in their life.

In John 5:4 it says, Whatever is born of God overcomes the world. Love overcomes the problems of life. God enables or empowers those in love to overcome. While it may be impossible to strictly live on love only, there is some truth to the power that love releases in a couple's life.

Choosing to really love someone is a simple decision. There may be far reaching and complicated issues involved, but the decision is simple. One person decides to love another. Simple.

That decision calls upon the greatest power in the universe to get involved. Without God there is no love. He is love. This is not merely a Christian thing or a religious thing. This is a fact.

Without God love becomes an emotion that is totally at the whim of our feelings. Our feelings change daily depending on circumstances. The emotional love has no staying power. It quits when the feeling goes bad. That's not real love. That's lust or like or temporary joy. Not love.

How can a person love someone that does something that makes them feel bad? Yet a mother loves her children no matter what they do. She may not like what they have done but she still loves them. Why? Because she chooses to do so.

Some would try to convince people that mothers love instinctively and can not help it. But everyone knows a mother who has abandoned her children and made the choice not to love them any more. She may still desire the relationship but love asks more of her than she is willing to give. Love is a choice. She may have loved those children once, but something caused her to make a choice one day to walk away from loving them. Not the mother with problems and issues who can not love her children properly. But the mother who just up and leaves to start another life. She loves herself or her pursuits more than her children.

Granted, in mothers it is rare to find one who really has stopped loving her children. But they exist. What about fathers? Fathers walk away from families all the time any more. About fifty percent of all marriages end in divorce. That's a choice. Many of those fathers slip away and have nothing more to do with their children. At least nothing significant.

Love demands to be a significant part of a person's life. Just as God demands to be a part of our lives, love also makes demands. If a person wants to experience love there are certain rules they must abide by. Like leasing an apartment, the landlord does not hand over the keys until terms have been met. And during the term of the lease the landlord expects certain criteria to be met, certain standards to be maintained. Violate them and the lease is broken. Violate love's agreements and love is over. Hearts get broken. God is pushed away.

God delights in marriage because it is the ultimate expression of the love two people share. Marriage tells everyone two people are in love. People can see their love. People can share their love in a small way as they gather with the couple to celebrate their relationship. God gets shown off in the marriage celebration. Love is put up on a pedestal. God is put up on a pedestal.

Whether the couple acknowledges God or not He gets shown off at the wedding celebration. Everyone sees the love (or lack of it) as they watch the happy couple. They become the vision of God and all his love for everyone to see. If there is a lack of love in their relationship people see that too and lament its absence. Though they may not talk of God that day, they are surely talking about him when they discuss matters of love.

Real love is God's realm. Fake love, substitute love, is the choice of too many.

The enemies of God would try and sway world opinion to envelope and accept substitutes for God. Even in the love they peddle. Love a job. Love a sport. Love a car. Love a make up. Love a hair care product. Love anything except God.

True love includes God. He is love. So the enemies of God also have to redefine what love is. It can not be a choice. To them it must happen spontaneously. They feel this allows them to be in control of their lives. That's the attraction. Don't let God be in control, or those people at that church. Do whatever comes to mind. Be spontaneous. Don't be controlled.

Here's a question. If love is spontaneous then who controls it. No one. It just erupts. But if love is a choice, as God intended it to be, then who controls it? The person who chooses. True love empowers the person making the choice and reveals the God who gives such power. Spontaneous love, like the theory of spontaneous human life crawling out of the sea millions of years ago, has too many holes in it and not enough verifiable data. Spontaneous love has spawned more divorces than God's path of chosen love.

Why? Because a person who "feels" in love can also get to a point where they do not "feel" it any more. They can tell themselves that the "feeling" is gone. They can say they lost that "loving feeling". The failure of the marriage becomes someone else's fault or no one's fault at all.

However, a choice is something that they make and decide to complete. It's not based on a feeling as much as a plan. Sure, a person can choose to not love someone any more. But that violates the plan. It is not as easy making a personal decision to stop loving another as it is to blame some emotion or feeling.

People try very hard to make good choices in everything they do. The car they buy. The suit they wear. The house they live in. The neighborhood where their kids will go to school. Good choices are part of the plan. And however they envision their lives, they will seek to make choices that support their plan.

Love is no different. It is a plan designed to further the vision two people have for their lives. Now, love is certainly more complicated because of the emotions and the involvement of God and family and all the entanglements of making two lives into one. But, essentially, love is a choice that enhances the life plans of the two individuals.

Mothers have got to stop telling their daughters that they can not help who they love. That is untrue. Love is a choice.

Fathers have got to stop making excuses for sons who "date around". The search for love is not a game. The emotional highs of sexual conquest should never be a goal among real men. Love is a serious choice to be made.

It is true that a person can not help who they are attracted to. Men are designed to be attracted to visual things and women are designed to be attracted to secure things. But who they love is still a choice. We can view a lot of items while we are out shopping but that does not mean we have to buy everything or even sample it all.

A man can see a beautiful woman and even comment that she is beautiful and still not hunger for her affections. He can stay true to his wife and even control his reaction so as not to upset her if he chooses. It's a choice. Otherwise, every man in the world would be at the mercy of the next beauty that walked by. If it's a choice he can control himself. If it's just chemistry, as some would suggest, then he is a fool to hurt himself by not chasing her. And if he is a fool to not chase her then what is the woman who married him?

It's a choice who we love. It's a choice how we react to the stimulus around us. Two people can stand at the bus stop on a freezing winter morning. One can complain about the cold. The other can just endure it. Two people. Same circumstance of stimulus. Two different responses. Why? Choice.

To discount choice in love is to relegate love to a happenstance of life. Some will find it. Some will not. That is untrue and a lie from the enemies of God. Love is a choice. All can find it. But it must be submitted to.

Love can not be controlled. The famous poem that says, if you love something set it free, is quite correct. Love can not be boxed up. Like a wild rabbit it will die. It requires freedom to be what it is.

God can not be controlled. He can not be boxed up. He simply will not stay anywhere that does not allow Him to be God and in charge. He requires His people to submit to Him before He will enter their lives.

Love is the same way. Remember, God is love. A couple must commit to the love they feel and choose to submit to it. This choice begins their journey. God loves the journey in love because it is a journey to Him. He takes pleasure in enhancing the experience for the couple in love so they may know the pleasures of His company, if only in a small part of the human experience.

Love controlled is actually hate. Many couples live in hate. God's enemies hate Him and thereby hate His love. They try to change His love into hate. Love is very easy to chase away. Just try and control it. Like God, it will not stay where it is being controlled.

Matthew 12:31-32 has been argued over for centuries. What does it mean? What exactly is the unpardonable sin? Let's look at it and read what is really there. Therefore I say to you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven men. Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man, it will be forgiven him; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it will not be forgiven him, either in this age or in the age to come.

It must be noted that all sin is forgivable. Jesus said so. In Mark 3:28-29 it goes like this, Assuredly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the sons of men, and whatever blasphemies they may utter; but he who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is subject to eternal condemnation. Notice Jesus says all sins will be forgiven. All. All means ALL to God. He did not misspeak. But, and it's a big point to understand, something against the Holy Spirit is unforgivable. The scripture says the person who does it "never has forgiveness".

What makes the Holy Spirit of God different? What makes anything against Him unforgivable? It's love. Love is the Holy Spirit's life. It is the power of the Godhead.

The God head is a triune being. Three persons in one. God the Father. God the Son. And God the Holy Spirit. Three persons in one. All acting for one purpose in one accord. Each with a separate personality expressed in the bible. God the Father is the ruler. The exacter of tribute and controller of destinies. God the Son is the Savior. Healer of Hearts and bodies and the One who died for the sins of mankind to give them the opportunity to reconcile with their Creator. God the Holy Spirit is the power of God. His love. Pure and simple.

When the Holy Spirit shows up, people are always worshiping and reaching out to God. He comes in response to their love expressed for the Father. His shower of love on God's people, His people, is an expression of His love. His love is the power of God. It changes things. It backs up time. It stops natural processes. It stalls imminent dangers and reverses diseases. The love of God, His Holy Spirit, is the most powerful force anywhere. Nothing can overcome love. Nothing can control love.

But He – the Holy Spirit – can be chased away. That is the unforgivable sin. Chasing away God's love. Replacing God's love with other things. Saying that God's love is not necessary and going on with cheap substitutes. The unpardonable sin talked about in so many circles is nothing more than denying God's love and the fact that He is love. Simple yet unpardonable. Denying God's love is such a devastating act that it separates the person from God.

It is not unpardonable because God is adamant that whoever does this is condemned to Hell for eternity. It is unpardonable because the power of God to work and exist in a person's life can not be experienced if they have chased the Holy Spirit away. It is not unpardonable on God's behalf. It is unpardonable on behalf of the person who has chosen a wrong path.

We can not have what we choose to not accept. Like placing a filter on our network browser. If it is set it too high we can not get any pages to come up at all. The same with the power of God. If His love is denied then He will not come in either.

When that person allows real love back into their life then they are no longer sinning against the Holy Spirit. Real love comes in and the Holy Spirit, God's Holy Spirit, is the embodiment of that love. The person provides their own pardon. God receives them back into His love. It is not a pardon from God. He did not institute the unpardonable situation to begin with. It is an action of the choice of the person.

Love is what connects us to God. The absence of love is the only thing that can disconnect us from God. Jesus said, if we loved Him we would keep His commandments. In other words, we would not sin because we love God. Sin is an act of not loving God. We choose to not sin. We choose to love God.

Now, just because love comes into the person's life there is not salvation. Not salvation in the way a Christian understands salvation. Having love – the presence of the Holy Spirit – in a person's life is only a matter of not denying love. Having Jesus Christ living in a person's heart is a whole other matter. It requires another choice to be made. But one who submits to having love in control of their life has little difficulty submitting further to letting Jesus be their Savior and Master.

Because man is born in sin, he is at odds with His Maker. The original sin is Adam's denial of God's rules in the garden. Adam and Eve were thrown out of the garden for all time. This is significant because it is the condition of all people born after that event. All people are separated from God because of this sin.

God has provided a way for men and women and children to come back to Him through the sacrifice of His Son, Jesus. Love is just the beginning of the path that leads people to reconciliation with God. The Holy Spirit calls to people with His love. If they respond then they are called to submit to the rule and reign of Jesus as their Savior. Submission is the key. Submission to the One who knows them better than they know themselves and loves them more than they know. The same submission necessary in salvation works also in love. Or vice versa.

Jesus' desire to express His love for His people is the thrust of the entire New Testament. But, His ministry does not begin until the Holy Spirit comes to Him and He is empowered to do all that God has sent Him to do. From then on His life becomes a study in love. The entire book of John tells of the love of the Savior for His people. He tells us, God is love. He tells us that people are the branches and Jesus is the vine they are attached to. (John 15) Jesus is the attachment and the Holy Spirit is the power to be attached.

Like the submission to God, submission to love is necessary. Because God is love, because the Holy Spirit embodies that love, every person who desires to live in real love must also commit to that love. The Holy Spirit does not play games. Either he will stay, or He will go. Either the couple will love by the rules or they will not.

Some people have power to overcome anything in their relationship. Why? Because the power of God, the Holy Spirit, is present. He is love. He will not let love die as long as the couple seeks that love and abides by its rules. They will overcome because He will empower them to overcome with whatever strength or miracle they need. God does not let love die. People have to choose to walk away.

People choose to love and they choose not to love. That is the facts. God is involved in all real love, whether people want to acknowledge Him or not. That is the truth. Real love can not be manufactured by man. That is a certainty. Substitute love can never fulfill a man or a woman like real love can. That is the situation.

Choice. People make it. God honors it.

Why? Because God honors the choice He gave us. If He did not want us to choose then He would have made us like the animals, programmed to live out life according to certain rules without any direct contact with the Creator.

Instead He gave us choice and a desire for contact with our Creator. A hole inside us that only His love can fill. A hole that is one half of an equation, one half of a fulfilled heart. A hole that puts us in contact with His Holy Spirit and draws us onward to a complete understanding of who God is and what He means to us.

At this point it is probably not a hard thing to imagine that many readers have been stretched by the things written here. Enough scripture and logic has been displayed to keep them interested if not totally involved. From here on the rides gets wild. From here on the conventions of church life are tested and revealed for the substitute relationships they have become due to worldly influences.

For those who want to know the entire plan of God pertaining to His love for the bride, His church, there are answers coming. For those who want to control the love in their church and keep it dignified, there is only denial ahead. Theirs. The caution is that what they are denying is the love of God, the Holy Spirit. Whether they believe it or not, to deny the Holy Spirit and His power of love is the unforgivable sin.

Marriage. That's where people can come to contact the Holy Spirit most readily. On the altar of marriage is given the lives of two people to God and He gives them back as one completed life. Only God can accomplish this. Nothing else in life has the power or the authority to take two people and make them one person. Only God can do this. Only love can draw them to such a point. Only Jesus can provide the substitute for their sin on the cross and only the Holy Spirit can reveal to them the wholeness of God so completely that their lives are overshadowed because of it.

Marriage.

Not surprisingly, the very thing the enemy fights against is the very tool God uses to reveal Himself and empower His people. It is God's delight to show up in a marriage. Why? The people become totally fulfilled when He is in the picture. They are designed to function at their peak when God is there.

Also, God loves to be displayed. Marriage displays the love of God better than anything else in life. Birth is happy. Death is somber. Never does a couple or the people around them celebrate life with any more energy and love than when they are celebrating marriage.

There is a restraint shown with the birth of a child. There is a depression of solitude and remembrances following a death. Marriage is an all out celebration. A full fledged, no holds barred, party of titanic proportions designed to make the most of the new beginning and yell its existence from every housetop.

Now, it is recognized that people can also be married to God. He says He will become the father of the fatherless and husband to the widows. Psalm 68:5 tells us God is, A father of the fatherless, a defender of widows. He can and will provide what is missing in a person's life if they ask. If there is no man to be their father, God will fill the vacancy. If no husband can be found for a woman she can call on God to keep her safe and to tell her how much she is loved.

This is all very true. But in the normal scheme of God's plan, He has designed the man and woman to search out each other and make a choice to love. (Only dire circumstances create a situation where another part of a person's heart can not be found.) That love choice ignites the passion and ministry of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, in turn, spends His time telling us about God through expression of God's love.

Jesus said when He left the earth that He would never leave His people or forsake them. He said He would send a comforter, the Holy Spirit. God the Father sits on the throne in heaven. Jesus sits at His right hand. The Holy Spirit is the one answering the call of the people on earth today. And the call is a call of love. If God's people want power then it must begin in love.

Football teams know that whatever they attack on the other team has to have an impact on their ability to fight, so they always try to impact the things they feel will make the most difference. They target the best runners and the best passers with a plan. They key on every move the quarterback makes. Someone watching a game can tell who a team feels is the most dangerous weapon on the other team by how they attack them. The same way with love.

Watch how the enemies of God attack love. Those are what the enemy feels are the dangerous parts of God's love. They attack the idea of marriage between a man and a woman because that power is dangerous to them. The marriage relationship releases the image of God into the community. The image of God draws others to Him.

The enemy has no power to defeat those grounded in the Lord. Therefore, they depend on keeping new converts from discovering God's power and try to dissuade the older ones by putting forth false doctrines. If God's power is love, the enemy's power is lies.

There is no power between a man and a man. There is no power between a woman and a woman. The enemy pushes these agendas and others in order to weaken the power of God's love inside the church.

The enemy attacks a man's visual attraction centers with nudity and pornography. An uncontrolled man or a fake man can not resist the attack and succumbs to accepting substitutes for the real thing. They attack a man's values of manhood and try to get him to accept fake values like a false sensitivity and emotional dependence. He may come to accept other men as substitutes for the women he can not relate to or he may chase women who do not run so fast or hide so much.

The enemy attacks a woman's submission issues and her desire to seek that special relationship of love until she holds herself above men, thus denying love and her own fulfillment on God's level. Or she succumbs to a substitute woman's version of sexuality that makes her a puppet for men and a plaything for the debased.

Whether the enemy does this through experiences, advertisement or just plain outright wrong teaching, does not matter. The idea is to get people to deny the love of God and thus chase away the power of God to work in their life. The who, what, where, when and how do not matter to the enemy. The enemy only desires to keep the person from discovering the power of God's love.

Some women earn their hatred of men rightfully through bad experiences. More about that will be said in another chapter. The truth is that fake men can ruin a good woman.

However, if she knows who she is with God and who He designed her to be and how He designed her heart to work, she can better push away from a wrong relationship or avoid one altogether. She can choose to love properly know matter what was done to her or what she faces. But if she lets bitterness turn her against love it is a hard process to bring her back to the table of love.

The same with a man. Once bitten, twice shy, goes the saying. A man who denies his heart to chase one night stands is not only hurting others but he he is also denying real love can exist. Soon he will deny love is even a reality.

When he chases love away, the Holy Spirit of God, then he has a difficult time ahead of him. The Holy Spirit will not force Himself into anyone's life. He has to be invited.

Just as easy as a person can say they don't want love around, they can also stop and admit that they need love in their life. They can ask for love to come back into their life. Maybe they do it as a cry in the night for someone to share their life with. Maybe they do it at an altar of prayer in some church where they recognize something is missing and they cry out for Jesus to come into their lives.

Sure the one who cries out for someone to share their life with only gets the Holy Spirit back into their life. And the one who cries out for Jesus gets an answer that brings reconciliation with God. But both get love back in their lives and anything is possible with love.

When someone admits that love is possible, God can make Himself known to them in many ways and maybe they will also come to know God personally as a result of the call for love. One thing is sure. They will never know God as long as they refuse to let love in. That is unpardonable. They will have imprisoned themselves.

God always takes whatever we will give Him. He wants all our lives to be given into His hand. He will take whatever we give Him and keep drawing us on until we trust Him completely.

The same with love. He will allow His Holy Spirit to example and enhance real love in their life as long as they will allow Him to stay. His goal is to draw on the couple with His love exampled and expressed through their shared love. If they will stay close enough to love long enough the Holy Spirit will get the chance to tell them about the love of God.

2 Corinthians 2:10-11 says, God has revealed them to us through His Spirit. For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God. For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God. The Holy Spirit is the key to love in our human existence. He is also the key to God's existence in our love.

Churches spend lots of money on programs that are designed to draw people to their doors and lead them to the saving knowledge of Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. What they miss many times is the fact that love teaches all things. Love covers all things. Love is better than sacrifice.

Scripture says obedience is better than sacrifice. (2 Samuel 15:22) There is no other human experience that demands obedience more firmly than marriage. Marriage is the one thing a couple does that calls for both of them to enter into a solid agreement and then hold fast to that agreement. They must be obedient to their combined dreams and desires and to the common picture of their life they have painted together. Other areas of life may demand obedience but no other area of life asks the participants to agree to be as obedient to each others lives as marriage does.

God delights in marriage because it is a picture of worship, power, obedience, choice and all the other things God desires to be prevalent in the lives of His successful people. Marriage is the event that caps off the call for love by two people. Caps it off in a way that they no longer grow as two people but as one. Caps it off in a way that does not stifle their growth but protects it. Caps it off in such a way as to make others wish they could see inside.

Part of the mystery of God is His desire to be seen and then only showing His people the hinder parts. Part of a woman's mystery is her beauty and the parts she never shows to any but her husband. Part of a man's mystery is his deepest dreams and desires to accomplish things which he only shares with his most trusted and accepted wife.

God delights in marriage because it is the unveiling of a mystery as much as it is the beginning of a mystery for the new couple.

Chapter Eight

The Church View on Marriage

Churches view marriage as a celebration of dreams at best and as an arrangement of legal proportions at worst. It is a revenue enhancement in some cases because the couple donate generously to the church for its facilities and/or to the pastor for his/her services. It is a field of family honor as some families have seen all their children married at the same altar. The institution of marriage inside church walls has become a formality legalizing sex while signifying the beginning of a new family.

This less than spiritual view of church weddings does not make the celebration any less fantastic or less significant. The beginning of a new life for two people is taken seriously by the church. Unfortunately, most church people do not understand what has really happened. Too often church people think in terms of, "the marriage bed being undefiled", as they launch their new married couples into life together. It's now legal to start a family, as though God does not allow anyone to start a family until they come to Him for permission.

As joyous as a church wedding can be even people outside the church community get married, start new lives together and begin the plans for a family. So what makes a marriage inside the church different? There should be a definitive answer. The one most church people give is that the one inside the church is done in the sight of God. Well, if God is everywhere – as church people love to claim – then anywhere a wedding is held is in the sight of God. Not a very convincing argument for church wedding or marriage exclusivity.

Churches – and church people – tend to think of marriages as joyous occasions that validate their existence more than they do as a drawing points for God. Because church people think of what the authority of God means to themselves more than to God they tend to demand validation even when they have not earned it. Example? Demanding that people outside the church treat church weddings as more valuable than other types. Why? Because they did it before God.

Church people need to get real. They need a dose of what God really wants shot into their veins and coursing through their blood. Instead of righteous indignation at those who do not get married in a church or at least using a minister of God, church people should show off their marriages and treat the world to a better view of the power and majesty of God they have access to. Problem is, they do not know what to show off and they are embarrassed about the parts of marriage that really make them excited and energized. The passionate parts.

Marriage is more than a marriage bed undefiled. It is more than an arrangement that makes having sex legal to church people. As vulgar as that sounds it is what most church people think of, if they would admit it. Church people have fought the battle of marriage for the sake of the church – not God – to the point that they are now missing the point. They hold the standard of God upright and wave it valiantly, but they have forgotten why they do so, if they ever knew. For some it has become a matter of doing to others what was done to them.

Marriage is supposed to be a love bond witnessed by others before God and the beginning of a beautiful picture the united two will paint. It is a blossoming of the power of the Holy Spirit in the lives of two people as they become one. Like a giant star winking out of existence to be replaced by vacuuming blackness, the two people will cease to exist until they once again burn with brightness as one couple, one person. To those paying attention they cease to be two and become one.

Churches are caught up in practical things. It is easy to get church people to rally for the written word, the Bible. They will defend its authenticity to the death. But from a practical standpoint, they too often do not know what it says. This creates an army of vigilantes. They do not defend the laws of their God. Instead they defend the traditions they have come to regard on the same level with God's laws. (Easier to learn what we do every week than to learn what God wants us to do each day.)

So many churches use the word to defend marriage. And rightly so. But marriage should not be defended by the offended and angry. Nothing should. People who do not know what they are really fighting for just fight and try to bring down the enemy – any enemy.

Unfortunately, when one does not know who the real enemy is then it is desirous to find one – any one – and defeat them. This is the picture of the church today, lashing out in all directions trying to sustain a place in the community without defining their own role or goals. They are fighting useless battles and struggling against imaginary foes.

Without knowing who they are or what they are really fighting for, church people have become mean, junkyard dogs, defending the old, broken down remnants of what once was. The problem is that no one – No One – invites a junkyard dog into their home to play with the family. As the older echelon of church members dies off, the younger generations can not remember what the fight started out as. The picture of the image of God is not being passed on. That means it is not being held up as important.

Churches and their people need to rediscover what it is they are fighting for. They need to renew their spirits in the fashion of their God who gave the Holy Spirit to them in the first place. It is time the church world realign themselves with God and become the picture of His love they were designed to be from the beginning.

If there is a real goal, then fighting has purpose and the only battles that matter will be the ones that reach the goal. Marriage has purpose – to show off the image of God. The image of God most people see when the church feels under attack is angry and militant, almost desperate or else defeated and needy and begging for help. Neither of those images is the image of God true marriage wants to portray.

The word of God is powerful. More powerful than a two edged sword the scripture says. It cuts coming and going. Wherever it is swung. However, in churches it is often swung like a pole or shovel in a Three Stooges movie. Often it hits everyone and everything, causing great carnage and laughter.

Because the churches miss the real purpose of the enemies who attack marriage, those enemies are laughing. Why? Because the church is arguing its point without knowing why. The winner of a debate or political race is not the one who was right but the one who made their point with the most passionate plea and reached the hearts ODF the people judging the contest.

The church seeks to maintain God as the answer to all things. That's great. Inside the church. However, the argument is outside the church. The enemies of God are not going to come inside the church and make their arguments. They argue from outside the church. Yet the church fights its fight of faith from inside the church walls. They are defeated because they think their words are the fight. Godly marriage is being defeated because not enough people are taking Godly marriages to the outside of the church and showing them off. Simply put, there is more passion and excitement being displayed for a worldly marriage than a Godly one.

When the only competition is other substitutes then any substitute can win on any given day. Two ice cream sundaes topped with different artificial chocolate syrups can compete against each other. But make either one of them compete with the real thing, a true chocolate syrup, and there is no contest.

If those substitute relationships had to stand up against a God-powered relationship, then the results would be different. Remember, God is a warrior. He seeks the adventure as surely as a man seeks adventure. Who fights against God and wins? Why is the church afraid to place the real God of the church in front of people? Could it be that church people have made their vision of God so unfriendly that they are now afraid that He would scare most people away? (Why do we need seeker friendly churches? Is there any other kind?)

The enemies of God are only winning their battles to change how marriage is perceived because real men and women are not standing up to show the world an alternative. Real men and women of the church are the answer but they are also the problem. They are hiding in their churches and thereby hiding the very persona of God existing in their marriages from those who need to see it most.

The greatest single threat to marriage in the United States today is churches.

Better let that sink in. That's a lot for Christians to admit to. But they must admit that they are part of the problem before they can get out of their own way and become part of the solution. Churches have the answer. They just don't know it.

The answer is love. God is the answer. God is love.

Churches need to show the world outside the real love of God. Not just how they can love the unfortunate by serving food in a shelter. That does not attract most people. The church needs to show people how they can love and enjoy love in the marriage relationship.

What has become forbidden in church is the very thing God has used since the beginning to draw people to Himself, real passionate love. Some will claim that real love is not forbidden in church. The truth is that by refusing to allow the real marriage relationship to be taught the church has effectively forbidden the real image of God to be shown. In the interest of some misbegotten desire to protect the membership from the idea of sex and passion in the marriage, the church has become the obstacle to Him revealing Himself.

Funny, huh? The very organization of God's invention, the church, designed to share His word with the outside world, hides the revelation God wants to make. Not so funny. Who wants to stand before God on judgment day and admit that they were the reason someone did not learn about the love of God? No one in their right mind wants that. The issue is that church people can not tell anyone about God unless they can get people to listen to them.

There's the root of the problem. Too many church people say what they want to say in their own way and if others do not adhere to it and change their ways then they say, too bad. They console themselves with phrases like, "not everyone will hear the word", and "I told them but I can not make them listen".

Someone said that people do not care how much you know until they know how much you care. Sound logic, there. Again, too many church people take that statement to mean they must give something to people to get their attention. Rubbish! Read it again. People want to know how much "you" care. There's the key to that statement.

If church people want others to listen to them, to ask them about their life, then they must have a life worth asking about. Unfortunately, most church people have lives that other people would run from. To borrow a phrase, most church people are broken, busted, bored and disgusted. No one wants to hear how much they know. It doesn't seem to be working for them. Most people avoid them.

Then there are those church people who are moderately successful. Again, many avoid them because they seem to be the exception to the rule. Somehow they seem wrong in the midst of all that other church suffering. People outside the church wonder if they are really serving God – some inside the church, too – because they are successful even after listening to the same messages that don't seem to help the others. The wonderful unity the church talks about is just that, all talk. Easier to pull down a few successes than to build up those struggling.

This may seem a hard line against churches for some. Maybe not hard enough for others. While churches are doing good work and helping many people, it is not enough. Church numbers are dwindling because church people are not showing off the power of God. They have become content with the image of a Godly institution but have denied the actual presence of God and all His glorious power.

Churches need to sit down and ask themselves the really hard questions. Not, how do they reach more people? But, how come we are not reaching more right now? The answer is the same for everyone. God is not being lifted up. His image is being watered down, hidden and talked over. Instead of the true image of God being revealed, church people are showing off an old picture they have kept in their wallets for a long time. And it is old, faded and wrinkled. Not very attractive at all. Almost pathetic.

Many church people talk about a fresh anointing of God. True, it comes daily. Scripture says it is refreshed every morning, meaning that each time a person starts again God is right there to start with them. If yesterday was a bad day today's fresh anointing will be an overcoming anointing. Fresh means new and vital and very dynamic in God's view.

Too many church people expect the fresh anointing they seek to feel and look just like the last one they had – even if the last anointing of God they felt was twenty years ago. Truth be told, too many of God's people can not remember how the anointing felt or what it accomplished in their life. A dead church is not a church where God is absent (He is everywhere) as much as it is a church where God is ignored and avoided.

Churches avoid the marriage relationship for the most part. Preachers talk about it in terms of the bride and groom but the happy couple always seem like a distant dream in most sermons. Love the wife as Christ loved the church and gave Himself for her. Message: Be devoted even to the point of giving a life. Pretty severe. Very preachy. Not much relationship there.

What is there to get excited about? Why should I be prepared to die? What's in it for me? Everyone says Jesus died for me. So what is it I get for His sacrifice? Why did Jesus love the church? How did Jesus love the church? Is dying for someone the only way to show love? What does the love of Jesus look like? Is it as boring as the church would make others believe? Does Jesus ever get excited? About what? Dinner on the grounds? Just church things?

It is easy to see how people outside the church lose interest in what church people try to tell them. Church people create more questions with their lives than they answer for those outside the church. The simple truth is that most church people do not show off the image of God for those outside the church.

Inside the church is a different story. Inside the church those church people will let God use them and speak through them and minister to others through them. But the idea of God ministering through his people has been altered. Its an image of men and women calling on the power of God to do a miracle in the lives of others. A partial image. Not a full image. The warrior part of God's heart, to vanquish the foes coming against His people. But not the full image of God. Where is the love and the passion for that love to come into relationship. Where is that shown off? What part of the service is dedicated to showing off God's love? Very few Christians today represent the full image of God as God wants to be revealed. Why? They are ashamed of God's passion.

God is love. Love is the image He desires more than anything for people to see when others look inside His church and watch His people. Love is the image He desires people to see when His people are seen outside of church. Real love. Not fake love. Not partial love. Not one sided love. True love.

Real love is the domain of the church and God's people. God designed it that way. The church needs to operate according to God's design if it is going to be successful by God's measurement. The church needs to be showing off the image of God in all His glorious power of love. That is just the way it is.

Marriage is the place where the church went wrong. By trying to regulate people's thoughts and keep uncomfortable questions out of the pulpit, the church has relegated love, real love, to a back room at best. Because the question of sex enters into the real love description of marriage, churches shy away from teaching real love with any passion that a person outside the church would recognize.

Why? Who decided sex was dirty? Who decided that a passionate embrace and a longing look was wrong? Who threw God's greatest gifting for power in the lives of His people out of the church? Who decided what God designed was bad? Who wants to be the person who explains that to God when it's time to stand before Him?

Because churches ignore the loving passion God meant for people to enjoy, people look elsewhere for it. Love outside of God can become very dirty. It can become sinful. If that was the church's worry then they made it come true by their silence and hidden agendas.

Church people feel like they must take their passion for love outside the church. People who are already outside the church feel like they must justify themselves against the rigid doctrines of the church, which seem to be against being passionate and loving. That's right. The church is viewed as the enemy against passion and love by most people. Did they earn it? Mostly.

True. Many of the enemies of God would use every opportunity – no matter what – to bring down the church and its authority. What has happened is that the church has opened up the attack themselves by not being what God designed them to be. By not representing the whole image of God the church has adopted a view of God's love that looks like His mercy but does not have any of His passion in it. They operate like a warrior without a passion.

Here's a stunning revelation for most people. The church operates like they are the warriors of God, ready to fight the battles for righteousness and justice. This is the man's half of the heart. Good enough. But, in most churches, who's driving most of the programs? Men or women? See the problem. Churches act like the warrior side of the heart equation, which is the man's heart, but they are driven by the women of the church from inside and behind the scenes. See the issue here? No wonder churches seem conflicted. The loving, woman held side of God's heart is being subdued and hidden while the warrior side is being presented. The passion is being held back and the world knows it. We need to let men be men and women be women and show the world how God intended things to be.

Maybe it is derived from the Catholic Church position of having unmarried men as their priests. Men theoretically married to God. Now God is able to do anything He desires. But if he has already designed a way for His image to be fully revealed in the marriage bond, then it seems silly for men to decide to make God produce it in another way.

The Catholic church is not to blame for this. Those men who take the vows of a priest have a hard choice ahead of them as they live out God's call on their lives. The blame lies with those who would deny the Catholic church is a viable entity of God for past transgressions.

Somehow, the Christian churches of America have accepted marriage as a call of God but have left God out of the equation. Which is more ungodly? A man living his life married to his Savior or a man and woman marrying each other and leaving God only for the church service? The point is, God wants to be an integral part of the entire life of His people.

No matter how it came about, the church has allowed itself to become the protector of an image that God says is only half the story. That's the problem. Half the image of God is unworthy of God's real glory. It's like telling a joke and forgetting the punch line. It's like dropping a piece of bread spread with peanut butter, peanut butter side down. Frustrating.

Churches frustrate people. The average non Christian comes in looking for real life, real love, real adventure and real passion because that is what was designed into their hearts from the beginning. Whether they know it or admit it, they are hunting it. They find substitutes at best and a denial that those things are necessary to life at worst.

Real, exciting life, lived to its fullest everyday with new and fresh mercies is important. Real love with all its attached emotions and sticky questions is still vital. Real passion shows a side of God that makes Him real to people as they imagine His power and understand His reasons. Real adventure is required for relationships to blossom and grow. Churches need to be the place where the world comes to find these things.

People should not be told these things do not matter. Most certainly they do not need to be told that those things are sinful or made to feel like they are sinful if they desire them in their life. Churches have got to start teaching marriage and the wholeness of God's image. It is time for the church to take back marriage and show it off as something the world can not do without.

Churches have got to return to a desire to be in the center of God's will. His will is more than altars of prayer, more than formalities or customs. God's will is that every aspect of the human condition show off His image. Especially the marriage relationship. Churches have got to return to teaching marriage from God's point of view rather than some stodgy, ill-tempered, old, widow woman who no longer has need of passionate, adventurous love in her life.

Movie theaters fill up when there is the invitation to watch adventure and passion and romantic challenges. Churches would too. God designed people to respond to those things. So, who decided they didn't belong in church? God made His people respond to certain stimuli and some stuffy preacher or group of women or old men decided God did not know what He really meant? Preposterous. Yet, there it is.

The very things that stimulate men to act like real men and women to act like real women are prohibited in the church. Is it any wonder that our churches are filling up with fake men and fake women who can only model a few characteristics of Christ, instead of really revealing God? Church people act out the role of Jesus as a Christian. (Many are bad actors, too.) God designed us to live the role of real men and real women. Live the roll. Alive.

Here this! God never told His people to act like Christ. Never. Never. Never. This is important to understand.

God never told His people to act like Christ. Paul said, Follow me as I follow Christ. Jesus said He had come that they (His people) might have life and have it more abundantly. He said have life. Jesus told His people to have life. God says that living life fully is His way.

Life is not the quality of not being dead. Abundant life is the measurement of a life lived to its fullest extent. Jesus expects us to enjoy life in all its aspects to their fullest measure. Jesus came that His people might push the envelope of living to its farthest point.

Yet churches only preach sacrifice in its fullest measure. Living happens in between the sacrifices, in between the suffering. No wonder no one is coming. Where's the life?

Joy is found in God. Yet joy is not preached. Church people are told they should be joyous and then warned of the dangers of really living it out. They are told to be happy, positive examples and then burdened down with the cares of the needy and oppressed as more important than themselves. They are challenged to find Jesus in everyday things and then warned not to enjoy it too much in case it becomes sinful.

God's greatest joy is when someone finds Him. It is said that the angels sing and have a party every time someone accepts Jesus as their Lord and Savior. How much more would God enjoy His people exampling His relationship to the church and unveiling His beauty in the marriage relationship? Who could deny God His joy when all He wants is our joy to be full?

A full, happy, Godly marriage would not only show off the full power and majesty of God but also draw others to see the Holy Spirit working in the couple's life. Those others would ask about the Holy Spirit of God and be drawn to His presence until they could experience it the same way.

It is joy and love that draws people. Not hell fire preaching and warnings of damnation. Those things have their place. But the focus of the church should be unveiling the true heart of God, His love, by revealing the heart of the man and the heart of the woman joined in marriage. They are the image of God that can be seen.

The enemies of God have directed the church focus away from the truth of the marriage experience by getting the church to focus on small issues. The church needs to be man and woman enough to return to God's design and teach others the joy of God's love.

If that means the church must become the primary teacher of sex and passion in the community, then so be it. Who better? The secular schools? The peer groups? The television or cable company? How about popular music?

Someone said that the best way to fix something is from the inside. It's true. And the church has got to realize it is outside of the mainstream of thought. Not meaning that the church should adopt mainstream thought, but that the church should get itself positioned to affect mainstream thought. Otherwise the church is just another complaining voice in the night.

Chapter Nine

The World's View on Marriage

This is an interesting chapter. If the scriptural view of the marriage relationship has stretched anyone, then this section will give them a chance to take a deep breath. Why? Because even the most pious of Christians will find they have much in common with the way the enemies of God view marriage.

Shocking? Not really. As is often the case the more people hear something the more they tend to agree with it. Even wrong things sound right after a long period of time with no alternative view offered. Such is the state of marriage, love and the relationship between men and women. People are inundated with the world's view of marriage and love and sex and relationships every day. Who is broadcasting all these messages? It ain't the church! The church complains that everyone else is wrong but then offers no real answers.

The church says, get married. The church talks about God's love but not about the love of a man for a woman or vice versa. The church never talks about sex except to denounce fornication and demand a marriage bed. The church says a man should love his wife like Jesus loves the church but never sets the example or explains it further.

The church views relationships as good but does not teach people how to relate other than to always – always – act like Jesus would. That is no help. Jesus had a full range of emotions. Church people seem limited in how they share their emotions with each other, let alone outsiders. They put on the church face and get very serious. Can anyone seriously expect that church people take that pious, church face into their bedrooms? No. If they are hiding that, what else are they hiding? And how is that subterfuge affecting their relationships and religion?

Consequently, most people outside or inside the church are not hearing about marriage, love, relationships or sex from the church. This means that the view being accepted is one absent of God's wholeness and full image. People outside the church and inside the church are being fed a daily ration of non-Godly marriage views and learning to accept them without any alternatives offered. There is no alternative coming from the church. What else can they do?

Many church people will argue this point. That is understandable. They feel attacked by this baring of the church soul. Their frustration at being unable to affect things around them has made them eager to find a place to do battle and win. So they will argue that the word of God says they are the authority. No proof, no examples, no real evidence of their effectiveness. Just fake authority thrown about like a child's plastic police badge.

Church people believe they have the perfect view of God's marriage intentions. There is no need to argue. If they have the perfect view of God's marriage intentions why do they not show off the perfect revelation of God in all His glory and power and majesty? Simple. Something is missing from their view. Church people need to stop looking to win an argument and start helping others find the true image of God in their lives.

Churches are not bad. They are just missing something. The full image of God as expressed through the marriage relationship. Then and only then can the full love of God be released upon the church. If we deny the Holy Spirit He will not force His way into our lives. By denying the fullness of the love found in the marriage relationship, the full expression of it, we deny the full expression of the Holy Spirit.

The church denounces husbands who rule over their wives with an iron fist and control every aspect of their day. Yet, in many respects, that is exactly how the church responds to its people, especially concerning any mention of passion or physical displays of love or sex. Abuse is more than a beating. More often than not it is a measure to control someone. Churches need to stop trying to control people and unleash God.

The people outside the church are content to express their joy with the marriage relationship in and out of the legal definition of it. Simply put, if maybe a little plain spoken, the world likes to talk about sex and passion and love and relationships. It is an obsession with them. It pervades every aspect of the human existence in their view.

Does that make it wrong because the people outside the church like it? The people outside the church like making money and church people still do that. The people outside the church like nice houses and church people still buy them. The people outside the church like cable TV and church people still get cable. The church has got to own up. They have abandoned an aspect of the God-to-man relationship and do not know how to bring it to people any more.

The fullness of God's power is expressed in the marriage relationship between two people. One real man and one real woman. As their real hearts join, the two halves that represent the different sides of God join to complete the picture of the image of God. During this process the Holy Spirit is enhancing and guiding the love between the two. The more they submit to real love – the love God designed – the more they are empowered to reveal the true image of God.

In a marriage between two non-believers in God, the Holy Spirit is still present. He is the love of God. If they have real love and not just an emotional lust, then the Holy Spirit of God is present. Without the Holy Spirit there is no real love. There is only fake or substitute love. It's lust or companionship or maybe just a good agreement of liking one another or what one another stands for. But not love.

Many Christians would like to believe they have an exclusive hold on the comings and goings of the Holy Spirit. Like maybe His power is subject to their presence or something. They would like to believe that because they would never outwardly sanction a marriage between two non-Christians that God would not either.

This is untrue. God is everywhere and in all things. He is working just as hard in the life of the one who is trying to deny Him as He is in the life of the one who listens to His every word. God loves His creation. That is what is so hard for many church people to grasp. God loves even those who deny Him. He listens at their door always, waiting for that moment when they call on Him. He is ready in season and out of season to answer them. Why? Because He is love. Pure, uncompromising, ceaseless love.

Children in non-Christian homes are conceived in love. That means the Holy Spirit was there. To deny this is to believe that most people are born out of hatred. Sure, conception can take place in a rape case or even in a drunken stupor. Who's to say that some warped view of a person's love did not call upon the perfect love of God at the moment of conception? Who's to say that what Christians believe is perfect love in their own marriage beds is even anything close to what God considers perfect love? Truthfully, no one can actually say what true love will or will not do. Only God can set those limits and He has called it limitless. There are perversions and there are hatreds being camouflaged as true love but God knows the difference.

The issues of love and when love is real are too deep for human comprehension. That is why God sent the Holy Spirit to communicate with us concerning God's love. He is the comforter. He is the present tense love of God dealing with each person daily. To really love one another requires that love be present. The Holy Spirit.

People outside the church have as much right to lay claim to love and marriage as people inside the church. What they do not claim is the whole image of God. Why? Because they are not fully real men and real women until they acknowledge God's real existence. They are only partially in the grips of love. Never fully enveloped.

Remember, love must be submitted to. It has rules. One rule is total commitment. To each other and to God. Though the people outside the church may achieve total commitment to each other they are still lacking the final ingredient, commitment to God. There is still an element of love missing, the third member present in the marriage picture, God. (Wow! Does anyone think this same condition exists inside the church too?)

That does not mean God withholds His joy and love for the part they do commit to. God does not withhold Himself from His people inside the church just because they do not get everything in life right. True, He does not give them everything He has for them until they have met all the guidelines of commitment. But He does not withhold good from them because they miss something.

People outside the church can enjoy love the way it was meant to be enjoyed even without calling on God to show Himself. That's right. Love, God's love, His Holy Spirit is not for church people only. He comes into every life that will invite Him in. Love is the key. If they want it He will supply it. His hope is that they will want it all and continue to seek the depths of love available until they actually meet the One who is love, God Himself.

Because the church views God's Holy Spirit as holy and pious they also believe that He will not go anywhere near a sinner's home or life. How do they think God called them. Was it an anonymous phone call?

God can not look upon sin and agree with it. As when His Son took the sin of the world upon His shoulders on the cross, God could not watch any more. He had to turn away as the sacrifice was offered. His Son became sin for all mankind. Yet He was there and He did raise His Son from the dead and complete the process that now offers us the love of God. No one has more sin in their life than Jesus took upon Himself that day. If God could still work in the life of His Son, covered by the sins of the world, past and future, then He can work in the household of the current day sinners, too.

Through Jesus people are offered salvation. It is not for everyone. Surprised? It can be but it is not. Salvation – the admission that Jesus is the Son of God and died for the sin of mankind on the cross and rose from the grave and is now seated at the right hand of the Father in heaven – is available to everyone, but offered only to those who accept love, God's love.

Proof? The proof is that God the Father and God the Son are both seated in heaven while God the Holy Spirit is ministering to the people on earth. The righteous God of heaven is seated there. The redeemer of our souls is seated there. The love of God, the power of God is present with us on earth today. However, He can be forced to stay away and that is what keeps people from receiving salvation. Those who do not accept love as real are at risk of offending the Holy Spirit. He who is love is sensitive to being loved.

The Holy Spirit loves unconditionally. A word Christians have a hard time with. They love the word when it applies to God's love for them. But when it applies to their love for others there are always catches. They feel justified in protecting themselves from others and therefore withhold love in the name of self preservation. That is conditional love, not unconditional love. Unconditional love requires God's protection around the one doing the loving.

So the people outside the church love and are passionate and enjoy sex and enjoy each other. Why? Because they choose to do so. They choose to involve themselves in love on a level they are comfortable with. They deny God and try to change the origin of love but a rose, if given any other name is still a rose.

Their choice is to enjoy what they feel is in their heart. Granted, some people outside the church have perverted God's vision for love and passion and sex. Policing these perversions has become the full time job of the church. Too bad God never asked them to be in charge of it. He said condemn it in the society they controlled. In other words, use their influence to warn people away from bad behaviors.

Not only does the church not have any influence over most sectors of society, they do not have any idea what will fill up the void they seek to create. The church seeks to create a void in wrong sex but has no idea how it should be filled up. (Hey, maybe wrong sex should be replaced with good sex. Just a thought.)

God will not help church people make the situation worse. God does not seem to help them with this issue many times because the church people are violating something God has designed for His people's welfare.

A major tenet of spiritual life is filling up whatever bad thing a person takes out of their life with good things. Scripture says, When an unclean spirit goes out of a man, he goes through dry places, seeking rest, and finds none. Then he says, 'I will return to my house from which I came.' And when he comes, he finds it empty, swept, and put in order. Then he goes and takes with him seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter and dwell there; and the last state of that man is worse than the first.

When it concerns sex or passion the church preaches taking bad things out but never preaches what to put back in its place. If a person takes a wrong physical thing out of their life they must replace it with a good physical thing. They can not replace it with a spiritual thing or an emotional thing. It must be of like kind. Physical to physical, emotional to emotional, and spiritual to spiritual. A round hole can not be filled with a square block.

Such is the condition of learning surrounding the marriage relationship. With all the pressures and stigma surrounding marriage, it's a wonder anyone gets married at all. Then again, the Holy Spirit is a wonder Himself.

The world tries to claim love in its own version of the up tight Christian love they think they know about. The view of love from outside the church of what Christians think love is, is very sketchy at best. Some look at the church and wonder if church people really ever love anyone or if it only applies to the needy or destitute. Before church people get mad or indignant they should find out why others have such a view. Maybe the view they give of love and the things that accompany love are confusing.

Church people talk about the love of God. They example the love of God by helping others and doing good works around the community and across the seas and continents. Church people actively work out their idea of God's love by making things better for others. In this the people outside the church are grateful and knowledgeable about how churches express God's love.

But people outside the church don't see it as loving others as much as they do just being nice to folks. Can we blame a non-church going person when they believe they are as holy as the church goer because they help others out, too? They are comparing apples to apples.

The church helps people. The non-church people help people. Is either one a better act of love because the church was involved or not involved? Who's to say? Church people say they love their wives and families. Non-church people say the same thing. Does allowing God into their lives make church people somehow automatically better? If it does, why are church people getting divorced at the same rate that non-church people are getting divorced? Why are church children growing up without fathers and mothers in the picture?

It is time church people admit that their version of marriage is still lacking something. Their marriages are basically no different than the marriages outside the church. Obviously, there are some great marriages inside the church as well as some great marriages outside the church. Sad to say, these are the exception, not the rule.

Non-church people say they love their spouse. So do church people. Non-church people say they like passion and romance in their relationships. So do church people. Non-church people admit to liking sex with their spouse. So do church people. Non-church people, for the most part, agree that marriage is between a woman and a man. So do church people. Non-church people, again for the most part, agree that marriage is a monogamous relationship. So do church people. What's the difference? Does anyone see any difference? So, what are they arguing about then?

The argument is more about who's right than it is about who is doing right. The church people want to claim that God is right so therefore, they are right. The non-church people want to claim there is no God so, therefore, church people must be wrong.

This is not what God asked His church to do – argue. God said, Go into all the world, even to the ends of the earth, and tell people about the good news. God designed marriage to be so great that people outside the church would ask church people why their marriages were so great. God also designed His power and image into the marriage picture so it would be easy for His people to tell others about Him. Instead of doing what God designed us to do, love and get married and create the perfect image of God in our lives, church people would rather argue.

The best love should be inside the Christian marriage. The best enjoyment of a simple touch should be between two married Christians. The best sex should be between two married Christians. The perfect image of God should be shown off by two married Christians. The best explanation of what makes their lives so great should come from two married Christians. How many churches have a couple like that?

Television tries to model the happy lives of satisfied people. They always seem to have plenty of money, or at least enough to pay the bills, a family that loves them and a spouse who makes their life complete. Of course, the television reality is created by actors and actresses who do not really know what happiness is in relation to the spouse given to them by the script. But people know what it should look like. That is what is important.

Television creates an evil version of love too. Too much love for money. Too much love for family. Too much love for a spouse or significant other. They use too much sex and passion and wrong motives and results. Many times the plot involves someone getting hurt so someone else can enjoy life. Seemingly the audience recognizes the wrong things and roots for the good guys to succeed. The point is, even when selling tickets, or commercial time, television and media seem to know a good marriage picture from a bad marriage picture. They seem to understand good relationships between men and women and bad ones.

Who can say the Holy Spirit has not done His job? Does anyone think the conscience of a television producer is so good that he or she thought those scenarios up all on their own or assigned good and bad images to either one without some spiritual insight? The Holy Spirit is God's love present with people on earth today. He offers the fullness of God's image with every loving touch or longing glance. There are few takers. True. Especially in the outside world.

Sadly, there are few takers inside the church as well. Not for lack of desire or even for a few who are trying. Because the righteous church hides its promotion of the sexual and passionate side of the marriage picture, the message is that those things are evil and perverted. Wrong messages are sent to the Holy Spirit as well as to the outside world they hope to affect.

A mother can not love her son and hate his wife without there being something missing in their relationship. The same holds true with the Holy Spirit. Christian people can not love a part of God's love and deny the other part and expect to have the whole image of God.

God created love to span the elements and the levels of life He created. God is love. He is everywhere. Love is everywhere. God can go everywhere. Love can go everywhere.

There is a spiritual element to love. It is the two halves of God's image contained in the heart of the couple that comes together and creates one whole image. A spiritual union that no man or women can tear apart.

There is an emotional element of the marriage picture that is the knitting together of separate likes and dislikes in life until the couple become one person in the picture. Loving each other because no one has yet hated his own self.

There is the physical element of the marriage picture which encompasses every touch, glance, whisper, word, dance, playful moment, laughter, tears, and yes, even sex. A full scale physical assault on the senses that draws the two closer to each other than to any other human beings in their relationships.

They share spiritual, emotional and physical things with each other on such an intimate scale that they know the depths of each other in spirit, mind and even in body. Their love is seemingly a force of its own.

The non-church people claim that they made and control the power that infuses their love. Church people do not know what to claim regarding the power they feel when they are so deeply in love that it hurts to think of it as gone. Mostly they are ashamed to admit to such a love except where it can be made to conform to the picked over, rigid love of the church.

Outside the church a man looks for a wife by searching. He passes among pretty women of all types with a certain type of womanly figure in his mind. A woman allows a man to search and also makes her own investigations. She knows he is a visible hunter so she adorns herself with visible aids. He knows she looks for security and a future so he shops among the women, proudly displaying his credentials to be a good provider. Both acknowledge they are looking at the opportunities offered by those of the opposite sex.

Inside the church small voices say, God will bring me the right person eventually, while secretly looking and wishing, almost afraid to approach God with a request for such a thing, other than to say, Lord, bring me the one You have for me. No wonder so many church marriages end in divorce. Neither of them hunted. They let God choose, or happenstance or chance. Later they can claim that they had no part in the process. They did not commit to it so it is not theirs. That's right. Many a marriage starts with the couple claiming God brought them together and then split apart because they think God must have messed up.

Outside the church a man and a woman may play at sex and the games of sex under the banner of trying out the compatibility of the other. They chance doing it for play rather than love. The Holy Spirit is in it for love. When love is the motive, the Holy Spirit attaches a deeper meaning to the act of sex. He draws on the couple to complete the image of God.

The act of sex is not the completion of the love act. Contrary to popular opinion inside the church and outside the church, God is not in the entertainment business. The act of sex holds a deeper and often misunderstood meaning. Submission. The couple must submit to each other in order for both to achieve enjoyment from the act of sex. The act of submission is the completion of the love act.

When two non-church people go their separate ways after having had sex they are refusing the submission of the love act. First to each other and then to God. Maybe they submitted to each other for a while. Things were going well. They were happy with the arrangement. Then something happened. They got unhappy. They became unsubmitted. They changed their minds.

God did not change His mind. He still wants them to submit to love. To Him. To righteousness. First to each other and then to Him. The Holy Spirit makes them think of each other often and consistently. They long to return to the good and happy times. Their inabilities to submit can keep them apart.

Many relationships with non-church people, married and unmarried, are ruled over by a forceful opposition to submission of any kind. They want to be viewed as tough, independent, emotionally whole people. Yet what they show off is their weaknesses. They are scared of intimacy. Emotional, physical and spiritual intimacy. They fight to maintain their separate lives and never experience the fullness of truly loving and being loved by another human being.

Church people make the same mistake, too. They want to hold out options. Options to how they minister to the poor and needy. Options to how they let the congregation use the facilities. Oh, they use words like stewardship and proper usage, but what they mean to do is protect themselves from others. Real love submits.

Real love submits and holds nothing back. People sign pre-nuptual agreements. Why? Because there is something they feel obligated or justified to hold back. That is not real love. That is just what it looks like, a contract for marriage. Real love gives away everything and receives everything. There is nothing left out in everything. Everything means every thing. All.

Most people enter marriage with a love agreement. He will love and cherish her. She will love and honor him. The Holy Spirit attaches Himself to their love and draws them into deeper and more full love as time goes on. If they will listen and follow His leading they will come to know the fullness of the image of God in their marriage and consequently their lives.

If they choose to take back their promised submission to one another then the Holy Spirit is asked to withdraw from them by their refusal to accept the terms of love's presence. He may choose to cheat on his wife, which is a blatant situation where he has decided she does not get all of him. She may choose to manipulate him and others for her purposes, which is a wrong way of relating and says she wants to control things, not submit to love. Either way, both of them are asking the Holy Spirit to leave because they no longer want to accept the part that requires they submit to one another.

How can a man love God, who he has not seen, if he can not love his brother, who he has seen? A common enough scripture with a very uncommon idea embedded in it. How can a couple submit to God, who they can not see, if they will not commit to each other, who they look at every morning?

Do church people carry on much differently? Probably not. Because so much of their lives is influenced by television and media sources, they act much like their non-church counterparts when it comes to the marriage picture. They regularly unsubmit to their spouses, denying their promises to each other and their God in the moment.

Church people can ask forgiveness and return to loving in a submitted state. Non-church people, for the most part, do not believe in forgiveness and thereby injure themselves after the act of loving by trying to love again and again. Statistics show that non-church people who get remarried are very likely to divorce again. Why? Because the second time there was no Holy Spirit in their relationship. They may have had the chance the first time, vowing love and even meaning to fulfill their promises. But after breaking their vows and divorcing they have asked the Holy Spirit to go away so they can unsubmit from their earlier love. Unfortunately, He does not come back until He is asked. They must ask forgiveness of love in order to have love in their life again. That's hard thing for people who do not believe in the need for forgiveness.

Church people regularly ask for forgiveness. It's part of their lives, or it should be. Non-church people do not have that habit. They do not believe in God so asking for forgiveness would be on the order of asking the one they left to forgive them. That is distasteful and probably not going to happen easily. Therefore, they enter the next relationship without the Holy Spirit's influence at all.

They are flying alone. Maybe they have met a partner who is not flying alone and can draw them to an act of submission and asking forgiveness. But it is not automatic. The love meter does not just automatically reset itself. The Holy Spirit is a person and He must have his terms met if He is going to be in the relationship with anyone.

Let's apply this to a young, teenage couple. It does not matter whether they are in or out of the church. They share sex without being married in the interest of practicing their love for one another.

They say they love one another. The Holy Spirit shows up. He hears the young man say he wants to be with her and he hears the young woman say she wants to be with him. Then they go their separate ways. Excuses come and feelings are displayed. What started as an experiment in love ends up as a catastrophe in life.

In love they were joined. Hearts joined. Minds joined. Bodies joined. A part of her is left with him. A part of him is left with her. She is never whole again without God. He is never whole again without God. The half of her heart that was them has been corrupted by the event as has his. When they part she takes part of his and he takes part of hers. It is inevitable. Now, he is searching for his future other half with a corrupted heart, as is she.

On top of this, they may be searching without the Holy Spirit's help. If they do not ask forgiveness after unsubmitting then they are broken and damaged hearts looking for healing and wholeness all by themselves. If they continue to practice love by having sex without marriage and never truly submitting or asking forgiveness from God then they become more and more fragmented as time goes on. Less and less whole. More and more needy.

They may look happy and successful outside, but partners with uncontrolled and varied sexual alliances are a time bomb in a marriage picture. He will always be reminiscing in his mind with all the memories of the good times her had before her. She will always be focusing on the men who did and gave her the things she wanted and comparing her new husband to them. Their experiences, without the influence of the Holy Spirit to clean them up and make them new again, can very well lead them to a divorce.

Outside the church sex, passion and love are not holy things. Inside the church they are holy things but too often they are holy for the wrong reason. Without submission neither will work. Without God neither will last.

Chapter Ten

Sex Inside Marriage

Some will undoubtedly skip this chapter or quit reading because it has reached the point of no return. Non-church people are not interested in what goes on in a church couple's bedroom. They think it will be boring, like the Christian fascination with long winded sermons. The Christian, on the other hand, will probably skip this section because someone may catch them reading about sex.

Christians are responsible for making sex a dirty thing.

That's a strong statement. It does not say Christians are responsible for making sex dirty. It says Christians are responsible for making sex a dirty THING.

People made sex dirty. They did so by taking sex out of its original context and robbing it of its original purpose. The church vilified such people and made the idea of sex a dirty thing. Instead of attacking the people who did wrong, which might hurt the church's income, the church attacked sex, making it shameful to discuss and desire, thereby trying to control love in the marriage relationship.

Over the years sex has been relegated to a dark back room in the picture of good society. Marriages take place in good society. Sex does not. Therefore, marriages were viewed as being sexless. Remember the Leave it to Beaver show? Ward and June slept in separate beds. They had two children but society could not condone the admission that men and women even slept together.

Is it any wonder that the generations of the sixties and seventies espoused free love? They sang about love and shared it openly and profusely throughout their limited areas of authority. Does anyone remember that the free love movement started with a generation seeking God? Their songs included Jesus and God as much as they did love and drugs.

Where did those hippies and hippie wannabes go? They grew up and took their free love platform with them into businesses and all the other areas of life. They learned to control their love and give it over to more normal avenues of expression, like marriage. They learned that drugs were harmful and that God should be in charge of this messed up world.

The church never capitalized on the Jesus movement. It shunned most of them and tried to change those it did accept. It hardened its stance against drugs and sex and added music because the Jesus movement got started with music. In short, the church said everything the hippie generation stood for was wrong and evil and alienated half of the United States. (at least)

It may have been wrong. No argument there. But the church was wrong too. To have a friend the bible says a man must be a friend. There were few friends inside the church. Jesus sat with those consuming wine and called them to accept the kingdom of heaven as theirs. The church shunned the druggies and free love participants and demanded they change their ways or end up in hell. Where are the WWJD (What Would Jesus Do) people now?

One group of a young generation was searching for God and no one came around to show Him to them. (Well, very few came around.) Most church people took the stance of the staunch, rock steady, immovable guardians of the church. Instead of looking for opportunity to share God they circled the wagons and protected God from those wayward souls outside.

Standing off at a distance was the rest of the world watching the show and wondering what any of it was about. It's still much the same way. A few reaching out. More holding the church like a fort in the wilderness. The outside world looking on and smiling at the absurdity of it all.

The church attacked anything and everything that younger generation embraced just on principle. If they were for it the church was against it. The younger generation returned the action in suit and challenged everything the church had believed in for years. A war was generated because someone didn't like the way someone else was searching for Jesus. The two sectors of society looking for the true meaning of life battled each other rather than actually looking for answers.

The answers became anything that made the other side look bad. Young people ridiculed church people and church organizations. Church people and church organizations came out against the younger generation as rebellious and wicked.

The young people sought bigger and better ways to become wicked for real when the focus came to making the church uncomfortable. That rebellious cloud still hangs over the younger generation in today's society. Always looking for darker and darker ways to express themselves. New ways to lash out at the establishment.

The church people sought bigger walls between them and a degrading society. The focus became one of showing how much they were not like the people outside the church more than about showing off the image of God. Many churches have still not recovered from this wrong thinking. Their claim to godliness is based on how sinful others are rather than how much of God they show off. Their ministries are held up by the efforts of people. Their dwindling presence examples the lack of God's powerful love exploding into the community.

Through it all church people have gotten married and sex has been a major player in the picture they paint. To be sure, it is not the dominant theme or even a conspicuous part of the picture. Sex for church people has been a back bedroom thing. (Where are most bedrooms in a house placed? In the back.) A done in the dark thing. A secluded, special thing that is only shared in secret and when absolutely no one else could possibly realize what they are doing.

With work schedules getting mixed up and running around the clock, many couples have opted for much less time together and consequently less time in bed together. This surely has some bearing on why couples stray into the beds of other people. Opportunity and desire. The human desire for sex once opened up will find an outlet eventually. If a couple denies that fact they run the risk of creating a need to stray from the marriage bed into other beds.

That is why everything that concerns the marriage picture must be discussed and worked through. If a need exists for separate schedules they can not allow that to create separate lives. Separate lives soon separate physically, finding no common ground upon which to stay together. There must be a place for the sexual element to be satisfied within the marriage picture or one or both of the couple will seek it outside the marriage picture.

Also, within the marriage the couple must decide what sex looks like. Sounds funny to some people. Not so funny to others. It is a serious problem that many now divorced people never solved.

Sex has many variations and combinations involved. There is no way to seriously explain them all so a quick definition of sex is required. The act of sex is any and all pleasurable excitements of the male and female genitalia. That is to say, sex occurs whenever a man and woman come together for the expressed purpose of satisfying one another with mutual or singular excitement of the senses and genitals as to cause orgasm and/or ejaculation.

This may sound crude to church people. It probably sounds silly to non-church people. So much beating around the bush, so to speak.

A serious discussion in church circles would include whether or not oral sex is real sex or just some perversion of the real act. As with those outside the church there would be proponents and opponents on either side, probably depending on their personal likes and dislikes.

The bible calls the marriage bed a holy union between a man and a woman. Many are the examples of who a man should not "lie with", the biblical term for having sex. Never does the bible attempt to describe what sex is allowed or not allowed between the man and the woman in their marriage bed.

Some church people would claim that the bible made an oversight and they have the answers. Others would claim it means that God is only concerned with who a man has sex with, not how. Both would be wrong.

The bible does explain itself very well. God is concerned with who a man has sex with and how he has sex. First, a man must be married to a woman. Second, he must be submitted to his wife and to his God. Third, he must do it in love. That means she is as satisfied with the sexual act as he is. It is a mutual pleasure society. If either one of them is uncomfortable with what the other wants to do or is doing, it is an area they need to discuss to uncover how they are going to paint it in their marriage picture. Mutual sexual fulfillment means agreement.

Church people like to talk about the fact that marriage is one woman and one man. God says so. In Genesis 1:27 it says, So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. He created male and female as one. He created them. Them. THEM. Not he and she. Them. He created them. If the scripture intends to separate what God did then only man was created in God's image. This is not so. Man was created but then woman was taken out of him. Man is incomplete without woman. God created THEM in His image. God is not incomplete. So the scripture is talking about both of them as the creation. One. The perfect union. He and she in the image of God.

This fact is very important to church people. Some need it to back their argument that God made the marriage union for them. Others need to be able to tell sinners that God has a better way. Truthfully, God wants the marriage to be about showing off His full image. That requires a man and a woman. Two women or two men can not complete the image of God. Whatever else Christians and church people may be wrong about, they are right about one thing. Marriage can only be recognized as a union between a man and a woman.

Church people are immovable when it comes to who a man can have sex with. They cite Old Testament scriptures like they were written in stone yesterday just for them. There is some credibility to the scriptures they use but the spirit of the rules is somewhat lost on church people. They have become so enamored of the rules they like to enforce on others as signs of their superiority that they have attributed that same position to God's warnings in the bible. Moses gave the children of Israel stern laws to govern their sex lives by. Each of them has a reasoning that transcends the mere monogamy of the marriage relationship.

Church people would take away a couple's choice in sexual matters if they had their way. Easier to deal with. Not as messy. Literally.

God is a God of choices. He gives laws for guidance and understanding. To misunderstand the reasoning is to follow a law that becomes mundane and never gets a person to the place where God wants them, His holiness.

Be holy even as God is holy, the scriptures say in 1 Peter 1:16. To understand God's laws is to understand what makes him holy. That understanding flavors the scriptures so that God's picture is both exciting and holy.

In the book of Leviticus, chapter 18, Moses declares God's law concerning "uncovering the nakedness of others" to God's people. To understand them is to understand how God structured society. He declared how society would be best served by sexual relationships. As important as church people hold the "do not" clauses to be, it is interesting that there are a lot of relationships not covered in the laws. Those are as telling about God's intentions and choices as the others are about God's demands.

It begins with a series of explanations about not uncovering the nakedness of close relations. (To better understand the term uncovering the nakedness of others, it must be noted that a man uncovers the nakedness of a woman for the purpose of having sexual relations with her.) Science tells us this is dangerous because the blood lines get weak when this happens. However, God mentions jealousy more than any other reason in this section. A person's mother is his father's nakedness. She is part of him. An aunt is his uncles nakedness. She is part of him. A sister is your mother's nakedness. She is part of your mother or your father by birth. The nakedness of grandchildren is the nakedness of the person themselves. The nakedness of your father's sister or your mother's sister should not be uncovered because they are near of kin to them. Uncovering the nakedness of your daughter in law is your son's nakedness. Of your brother's wife, it is your brother's nakedness. The sister of your wife shall not be taken as a rival to her while she is alive or your wife's mother.

Over and over the law against uncovering the nakedness of close kin is riddled with the idea that it only creates bad feelings for each other. Jealousy will erupt and ruin relationships. Marriage and the sexual relationship are all about good feelings and creating the perfect relationship to honor God.

Then the laws take a turn. Moses tells the people that a man shall not uncover the nakedness of a woman who is having her period. Blood is sacred to God so this one is easy. Dietary laws restrict the eating of blood and sexual laws restrict the touching of blood for pleasure. It also creates a mandatory fasting time in the relationship for the couple to grow in other areas.

Then the law states that a man will not lie carnally with his neighbor's wife. This is not the next door neighbor but any person they may know. The law calls it a defiling of the man who worships God to lie with his neighbor's wife. This implies a man sneaking over and uncovering his neighbor's nakedness.

It is the deceitfulness that is wrong. Sex is sex. It is an experience. It enhances relationships, even empowers the Godly relationship. But the real sin is stealing sex. Taking sexual experiences that do not belong to you. Deceiving someone and cheating on others. Relationships can not survive such deceit.

Forgiveness can be asked for if sex were the only issue. God can heal bad decisions. But a bad relationship can last a long time, especially if the deceived party does not grant forgiveness. Jealousy can grow into bitterness. Bitterness grows in their heart and that one act of stolen sex can alter that man's life, his wife's life and ultimately their life together.

One of God's principles is to always ask for forgiveness. God forgives easily. Forgiveness is not cheap or easy for God. It cost Him the life of His Son on a cruel cross. It is the way He has chosen to deal with transgressions.

But people sometimes have a difficult time forgiving. Both the one asking for forgiveness and the one who will not grant forgiveness are affected by the deception, by the jealousy it created. It is a dangerous place to be. Love requires forgiveness. Extra effort must be made to be forgiven in such matters. Even if the deceiver seeks forgiveness and receives it, their actions may make it too hard for the one who was deceived to ask for forgiveness, or they may not realize they need to forgive in order to be forgiven.

Mark 11:25 reminds us, whenever you stand praying, if you have anything against anyone, forgive him, that your Father in heaven may also forgive you. For a man to deceive another man and uncover his nakedness and then leave him in a state of unforgiveness is a bad situation spiritually. God seeks to help us avoid such a disastrous mistake by warning us to stay away from it.

The laws Moses gave to God's people go on to say it is wrong to make a man's children pass through the fires of Molech. Molech was a deity worshiped by the enemies of God. The ceremonial worship required children to be placed in the fire (killed) and given as sacrifice to this god. Obviously God did not want the fruit of a man's love with his wife – his children – to be wasted on empty promises by an empty deity.

The laws go on to say that no man should lie with another man. God calls it an abomination. Not just a sin and wrong, but an actual attack on the holiness of God. An abomination. To change the use of the man in a sexual act is an abomination. God designed them for another holy act, a man with a woman. To change the act is to make it unholy and an abomination. The same is true for a woman lying with a woman.

Finally, the laws state that no man or woman should mate with an animal. Notice it is not lie with, uncover the nakedness of or any other act implying love. It is animal mating. Husbandry like at the zoo. God says it is a perversion for a man or woman to mate with an animal.

The people of God are cautioned not to perform any of the wrong sexual customs of the people who owned the land before them. God took the land from them because of their abominations, unholy acts against the Lord, and He promises that He will do the same with any who defy the laws Moses gave them that day.

Church people like the scripture found in Hebrews 13:4. It says that Marriage is honorable among all, and the bed undefiled; but fornicators and adulterers God will judge. Much is made of the fact that God blesses the marriage bed and holds it as honorable and undefiled. Church people like to think of their sex lives being pure and holy. But they do not understand holy sex or pure sex. Those terms mean different things to different people. (Talk about different marriage pictures...)

Church people also believe that anyone not married under God's idea and authority for marriage is a fornicator or at least an adulterer. But this belief defies the true meaning of either word. A fornicator is an unmarried person who has sexual relations without the covering of any marriage picture. An adulterer is a person who has sexual relations outside of their own marriage picture.

Church people believe marriage is honorable among all as long as all means only those who worship God. Given that when this scripture was written it was common for non believers to live among the believers, the writer would have stipulated believers and non believers as separate groups if he had wanted them to be separated. By saying all, he was including people not normally addressed by his letter. Since he was writing to believers he was including non believers in his statement.

The first few verses of chapter 13 in the book of Hebrews are a list of godly actions and holy ways of living. Let brotherly love continue. Take care of strangers. Remember prisoners. Know that a commitment to love as in the marriage agreement is honorable but things outside the marriage agreement are not honorable. Do not be covetous. Be content with what you have. It reads like a list of how a person should conduct themselves in order to live a satisfying an productive life. Good advice whether in the church or outside of the church.

God says, through His writer in Hebrews, that sex within the context of the couple's marriage picture is honorable. No one is deceived and they enjoy each other in a way God designed for men and women to enjoy each others company. Within the marriage picture the couple decides what their sexual relations will look like.

No where does God tell them what to do or how to do it. He warns them about keeping it holy and keeping jealousy out of the picture but He never tells them how to conduct themselves within the marriage picture. There is no scripture anywhere in the word of God that tells a couple what their marriage bed picture will look like. It is left up to them. Their union and coming together in the full image of God makes their marriage bed holy.

This is important. If God leaves the picture they create up to them, who has the authority to intervene in what they decide and rewrite the rules or redraw the picture? God knows people are different. There is no picture that covers everyone and every marriage. Like salvation itself, the Christian couple must work it out with fear and trembling. The healthy fear of the Lord and the exciting trembling of new discovery.

Too often church people are willing to accept that sex must be boring in order to be holy. This defies the exciting God they serve. Would a God who created so many colors create and eye that could only see a few of them? Of course not. Creation is to be enjoyed. Jesus said He came that people might have life and have it more abundantly. That means it is for their enjoyment. Would a God like that create a thing like sex and then allow His creation to only partially enjoy it? The logical answer is no.

Sex needs to be reclaimed by the church people and taught again as part of the process that shows off God. God is love. Sex is the ultimate expression of love. Of submission to Love. Submission to the God who is love. Maybe then the people who look at the church would see the image of God shining brightly again.

Chapter Eleven

Sex Outside Marriage

Church people will believe this entire chapter is about sin. Sex outside of marriage is sin. There is no other answer for church people. Their myopic view of life, like looking at others through the wrong end of a telescope, actually allows them to hide within their views and smother out every other idea that comes by. Comparing their personal views – which they count as doctrine – with scripture, for true authority, never seems to occur to them. Ignorance is better than sin seemingly.

If church people skip this chapter it will be no different than what they do in real life. They refuse to even try to understand the views of the people they are supposedly wanting to help. If they do not know where others are, is it any wonder they can not get to them to help them. Combine this insulting refusal to acknowledge others with a slanted view of marriage inside the church and church people are in no position to help anyone anyway.

The confusing claim by the church to have a corner on the marriage market is a devastating untruth. If marriage outside the church is not really a marriage because God was not given His due credit, then all marriages outside the church are essentially sinful and not real. Many church people have a problem stating it like this but then they follow doctrinal commitments that make such claims because they do not understand God's commitment to love His people and love through them and be loved by them.

Many times in the bible God could not find any of His people to do as He asked so, He brought in people from the outside who did His bidding. God got it done, His way. Still, church people do not understand that God's love will not be smothered out or kept in a church box as they would like. God will find people to express His love and if they are silenced or refuse Him, He will raise up more. God's love may not be like an offensive weapon to be displayed and feared, but it is also not a force that can be covered up in hopes it will go away.

Sex, as portrayed by a misled, unchurched society as an offshoot of the love they want to express, is a picture of God's design being shown through a thick glass and distorted for personal purposes. The fact that non-church people use sex to express their love is not an evil plot to pervert God's plan for mankind. It is a natural progression of the love they feel but do not know how to express it properly or within practical limits.

Non-church people need answers. What answers can church people offer them? Is condemnation and threats of eternity in hell the only answer? Obviously not. If those were good answers then people would be flocking to the church to learn about God and His ways. The church answer is not working. Why? Because God is not in condemnation.

Romans 8:1-2 explains that very clearly. There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death. If there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ, believers, how could a true believer feel that condemnation is God's way of reaching others? There is a big difference in a warning word to the wise and condemnation designed to create fear and drive the other person to God.

Many church leaders do not know the difference between leading and driving. Consequently neither do the people in their congregations. Leaders stand in front of the people, do what is right and call for the people to follow them. Like Paul asked of the people in 1 Corinthians 11:1, Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ. Leaders ask others to follow them. They do not drive them with words of fear and condemnation.

Hirelings drive the sheep from behind and hit them with their staff while yelling and cursing at the flock in order to achieve obedience. Shepherds lead their sheep from in front, guiding them through obstacles and toward desirable pasture and water. Hirelings are in it for the money. It is their career. Shepherds do it for the satisfaction of having lead the sheep to a better place. It is their calling. Church people must be careful to keep their flesh out of the ministry endeavors they put their hands to.

The flesh wants to be right and demands others acknowledge how right they are. Sound like a familiar pattern of existence to anyone? Those walking according to the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, are focused on exampling God's love. Is it any surprise that the same people who have a hard time expressing God's love in His marriage picture would have trouble expressing love in any other area of their life? In order to express God's love His church people must first fall in love with Him.

Every young person in love understands this. When a person is in love the whole world is beautiful. Most people can remember a time when they looked at the world through rose colored glasses. They were fresh and newly in love and everything seemed sweeter, brighter, prettier, more colorful. When love operates inside a person their methods of expressing themselves can not help but to example the love that is oozing out of every pore of their being. Emotionally, physically and even spiritually.

Somehow, church people conveniently overlook this simple analogy. If they were really in love with God then they would be operating out of love for Him in everything they did. They would see the beauty around them and not concentrate on the negative things.

For the most part, this can not be seen in most church events. They tend to look more like family gatherings at the best and club clicks at the worst. And church conversations sound more like gossip sessions and complaining championships than anything else. So, where's the love? Where's the in-love feelings?

The divorce rate inside the church is the same as the divorce rate outside the church. Some would say this means church people are becoming too much like the outside world. Maybe. But why then is the divorce rate outside the church not growing in similar fashion? What if there is another reason?

Divorce rates inside the church have not always been so high. So what has changed? Society. What about society has changed? Society today deals more and more with issues of sexual fulfillment. Divorce is a viable option for seeking fulfillment elsewhere. The questions and seemingly endless and varied answers keep coming.

Everyone is dealing with the sexual issues but those inside the church are faring worse and worse because of it. Things outside the church are not changing nearly as much. Why? Because outside the church sex is viewed as a normal part of life. They are dealing with it best they know how. Inside the church sex is still a dirty little secret confined to dark hallways and back bedrooms. No one is dealing with it. Ignored sexual fulfillment creates a tension and bitterness that ends in divorce.

Many say the stress of financial tension is the root of most divorces. That's funny because how many people started out having to live on love? Why was living on love okay in the beginning but now they need money to stay together? Are people really that shallow? Or are they deflecting the real reason for their divorce?

Could it be that church people, shamed by years of hidden sexual agendas and handcuffed by a glaring lack of education are succumbing to the pressures of an unfulfilled life by blaming financial pressures? No? Look again.

People who are in love weather every storm thrown at them. They find a way to make it work. Why? Because they are invested, committed and submitted to the love they share. Finances are just another storm. Finances have no special power to break a marriage down. It's a smoke screen to blame the economy. Something they feel they have little or no control over. It's not our fault we are unfulfilled in the marriage. It's the economy's fault.

Time for the church to get real and maybe take a lesson or two from the outside world. At least glean the impact of applying an attempt to deal with the increases in divorce.

Here's a thought. Maybe the causes of divorce for church people are different than the causes of divorce for non-church people. They both have to deal with issues but maybe they need to deal with different issues. But to say that finances are the basic problem is a lie.

Poor and penniless people get married all the time. Why do some stay together and others fall apart? That is the issue to look at. The church needs to start looking for the answer and stop blaming the question.

Finances is a convenient excuse. Blaming finances has not produced any answers to the divorce problem yet. That is proof that finances is not the problem.

As with all things relational, the answer is contained in what fulfills us. The question is not why do people divorce? It is why do people, under the same pressures, stay together? Something fulfills them and they stay in the relationship despite the things that come against it. Something bigger than all their circumstances draws them and holds them. Love.

Non-church people often have a healthier love life than church people. Fewer hang ups about love and less stress over it. They talk about love and relationships and sex like it means something important to them. They acknowledge their desires and offer each other comfort in times of sorrow and a raucous cheer in times of celebration. Non-church people seem to be more comfortable than church people when it comes to dealing with love and sex and similar relationship areas that God designed for His people.

Why is that? Non-church people are not better at helping the poor. They are not better at building shelters and feeding the hungry and lending a hand during a disaster relief operation. Non-church people are not better at knowing the difference between right and wrong. Why should there be an important, God related area of life at which the non-church people excel above the church people?

Truth to be told, there should not be. Everyone knows that. Even the people outside the church know that. If God is so great then why is His church so mediocre? The question cuts the Christian to the bone.

That said, non-church people have a decided edge when issues arise concerning love and sex and intimate relationships. They do not always deal with them properly or in a right manner. But they do not run from them either. They embrace the issues and do their best, with what information they agree is acceptable. This sometimes locks out God and the ministry of the Holy Spirit on earth. That is an unfortunate result of their denial of God's existence or right to rule in their life.

The fact that non-church people are not afraid of intimate relationship issues, in fact they seem to like them, tells a lot about how church people have denied a basic call in their lives and allowed the wrong thinking of a few individuals to influence the church's ability to impact the community. The church could learn something about love and sex and other issues of intimacy from the non-church world.

First, sex is not dirty. Sex is natural and a part of the love relationship between a healthy man and woman. Non-church people like sex. They crave it. They go after it. This sometimes obsession with sex has become a dividing line between church people and non-church people. Non-church people see sex and intimacy as a pleasure, a joy, even a game. Church people see it as a holy thing to be hidden in a secret place and locked away from the prying eyes of others. (If they saw it as the fulfilling of the image of God would they still hide it?)

Now, sex certainly does not need to be public. No question. But the love of people happy with their sex life should be a drawing point for churches. Happy, fulfilled people should be in church. Or rather, church people should be happy and fulfilled. Church people should be happy with every area of their life. If a church person sees hungry people they desire to feed them. Why, when a church person sees people interested in love, do they not desire to teach them about God's love? Could it be that church people do not see sex as an integral part of love?

About now a self righteous church person somewhere is going to invoke the old line, sin has its pleasures for a season. And so it may. But to call sex a sin is a gross misunderstanding and an attack on God who created sex.

To call other people's sexual practices a sin is an outright shame upon the church people who hold such a view. Sex accomplished in love is no more sinful outside the church than it is inside the church. The measurement of how much a person enjoys it does not make it holy or sinful. Without meaning to, the church seems to be intimating that those who enjoy sex inside the love relationship of the marriage picture are bordering on the sinful and need to be careful.

Perhaps that is why so many Christian couples are having troubles in the bedroom lately. They are ashamed to enjoy what God has given them. They are conflicted. Their lives are not matching up with the church view. They are divided. They want to enjoy sex but they also do not want to contradict the church. But their lives do just that. How can it be?

Who comes up with this stuff? Sex in the marriage bed is undefiled. That means holy. Sex is holy within the confines of the couple's marriage picture. The church does not make marriage holy. God does. The presence of the Holy Spirit, to be exact. Within the confines of the couple's marriage picture, sex is holy for the church and non-church couple.

Why? Because the Holy Spirit is called upon when love is the focus. As long as the couple has not pushed the Holy Spirit away, He comes into them as they cry out with their every action trying to understand the depths of a love that seems always just out of reach. He is the comforter and the teacher of all who want to know the depths of God. God is love. No one can seek to understand the depths of love without also seeking to know the fullness of God. They may try, but it can not be fully realized until they admit that God is love. Until they submit to all that love is.

There is no reason to fear sex or be ashamed of it. God ordained it. He didn't just create sex and tell us to go ahead and use it. He ordained it as a full expression of the love of two people and the common unity they share.

It is not merely an element of the procreation mechanism of humans. It is a desire built into a man and a woman that drives them to love more deeply and more fully than they ever thought they could before. That is why so many describe the feeling as "falling" in love. It just overwhelms them, taking control of their every idea and dream. Like the infilling of the Holy Spirit, who allows love to well up and overflow the person who invites Him into their life, the overflow of love between a man and a woman during the act of sex and the climax is overwhelming, to say the least.

God created the perfect element of the marriage picture to excite and energize His people for love. They can not ignore it. It drives them at times. It consumes their thoughts at other times. It is the perfect stimulus to help them understand the strength of God's love and power in their life. People in love can conquer anything.

Love is not meant to stay hidden. Like God's love for His people is to be shared, the love between the couple is supposed to generate a whole new field of love for them to share with others. What they share is a pure love that sees beauty everywhere and loves freely and without judgment. Their love is generated in a pure picture of the marriage and expressed in the pure motives of one who wants to share what they had discovered. It is exciting and new and fresh every day as they grow with their marriage partner and with God. It is also the closest earthly relationship to help people understand the depth to which God loves His creation.

In the world outside the church doors and beyond the church person's bedroom, there is a host of immoralities and wrong motives associated with much of the love, intimacy and sex that can be found. I Corinthians 6:18-20 says, Flee sexual immorality. Every sin that a man does is outside the body, but he who commits sexual immorality sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? For you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God's.

Sexual immorality is a problem. No one says it is not. It chases away the Holy Spirit and God's love. It creates a wrong atmosphere for drawing people to the love of God. It is a direct attack against God's creation and a direct provocation against Him. So, suffice it to say that sexual immorality is wrong.

A man cheating on his wife or vice versa is wrong. A woman who sleeps around for pleasure or money is wrong. A man who makes women his item of conquest is wrong. Couples who divorce because they are tired of each other are wrong. Men who abuse their wives in the name of sex are wrong. Women who use sex as a tool to gain power are wrong. All those who pervert the intended use of God's love and methods of intimacy for personal gain or to deny God are wrong.

That said, much of what the church deems as questionable is nothing more than non-church people expressing themselves. The discomfort church people feel with the intimacy that love brings is a personal issue created by wrong motives and objectives within the church. Church people, the ones who claim to be the bride of the Savior, seem to have no idea how a bride acts.

A bride getting ready to be married is swooning. She is in love and adoring every action her beloved takes. She accepts his gifts and gives gifts of her own. She talks with him constantly. She desires to be with him more than anything else. She watches for him when he is gone and hovers close to him when he is around. She is not jealous of his attention to others. She embraces his love as big enough for her and even more. He is endlessly fantastic in all ways in her opinion. She wants his every attention but she is not clingy. She loves how he adores her and she is ready to give herself up to him whenever he asks. She is waiting on pins and needles for him to ask. She can not await the moment when they are at last alone and can consummate the marriage. For her, he is everything. Her whole world revolves around him. He makes her believe that his world revolves around her, also.

Does that sound like the church people down the street? Not really? Why? Maybe because the church has a problem seeing itself as the bride of Christ. There is an intimacy related to being the bride that the church is uncomfortable with. They do not adore their God like He wants to be adored. They are standoffish and reserved in His presence. They are cool and dignified.

Brides are not dignified. They cry at their own wedding. They stress our about perfect arrangements and getting things just right for their special day of celebration. They get mad if they are delayed any longer than necessary and worry when they can not see the groom at all times prior to the ceremony. Why? Because they can not wait. They have planned and painted their picture for this moment. They will not be denied.

All it takes for a church person to be denied is to see a new face in the crowd. They lose their desire to love God unconditionally and replace it with a desire to love God as long as He does not ask too much of them and make them look foolish. They are more concerned with how they look than how God looks to others through them. Church people treat their relationship with their loving God more like a long distance friendship, or pen pal, than a lover.

Non-church people do not have that problem. Oh, they have image issues, but because they do not see themselves as showing off God they spread the love they feel in their heart with everyone they meet. The fellowship among a group of men meeting in a barroom surpasses most church men's groups. It is probably safe to say that a stranger would find more acceptance on a bar stool than in a pew.

A woman in love glows because of the relationship that has sparked her love. She shares that glow with the people she meets during her day. She does not try to impress them with some view of a deity in her life. She just lives out the feeling of goodwill and good fortune in her heart.

She wants everyone to know the feeling of love that has taken over her life. She may not feel worthy of it but she will enjoy it all the same. She may feel inadequate to explain it to others so she shares what she feels instead.

The love is overflowing in her life and she does not even try to contain it. Her mother knows and asks about the new man in her life. Friends want to know when they can meet this mystery man. Coworkers get tired of hearing about her new love but still gather around her to feed off the love she exudes with every breath. Her love breathes hope for them.

How effective could the church be if that were their relationship with their God? The non-church people are better at enjoying the love they find than the church people are. Why? Because non-church people are not on a crusade to gather people to themselves to support some industry of religion. They only want to share what the love of their life means to them personally. Church people could take a lesson from such expressions of intimacy from their non-church neighbors.

God does not like the spreading of immorality. That is a true statement. He hates sin. But God also does not want His people to hide their relationship with Him. Many church people act as though they are embarrassed to share what God means to them. Some probably feel like they are recruiters for the religious industry. Some probably feel less than qualified to speak the deep things of God to strangers. Still others are probably too lazy to share any good news with people. Whatever the reason, not sharing the good news about God, His Son and His most Holy Spirit is a wrong.

There are lots of surface reasons church people do not share God with those they meet. The root of it is that they are not totally in love with Him. If they were, others could not help but see the love overflowing in their life. It would be in plain sight all the time. Not like a recruiting poster but more like a love song always repeating itself over and over until it is stuck in everyone's head.

Though crude at times and even a little immoral, non-church people set a better example of showing off their love than church people. That does not negate the beautiful way they show it off. To them love is a part of their life that makes them complete. They want others to know they are in love. Women tell their friends and guys tell everyone who will listen. Sometimes it is a one night stand and sometimes it is a long term relationship that has turned a corner and the two are starting to think permanent structure. But it is a revelation of their belief system.

Church people will get stuck on the legitimacy of the act and miss the point. Proverbs 14:11 says, There is a way that seems right to a man, But its end is the way of death. When a man, or a woman starts making their own decisions about what's right and wrong, they are headed for a fall. This is true enough. For just a moment, though, consider the matter from a lover's standpoint.

Does a lover care about rules and regulations and right and wrong of the thing? Certainly not. Those things are important. But what matters most is the love they share.

Listen. Two people married to other spouses meet and share what's missing in their homes. They fulfill each other. The love they create in that obviously wrong endeavor is strong and binding and almost has a life of its own. They will give up everything it seems to capture it and make it their own even though they know it will destroy what they have with their original spouse. Ever wonder why? Or is it just easier to think there is something wrong with those people?

Some will say that Satan has his own version of love. A counterfeit love. A fake love designed to draw people away from God. Think about that a minute. God is love. How can Satan manufacture God? God is too grand, too majestic, and certainly too big for anything that Satan can make men and women believe he controls.

Instead of manufacturing a counterfeit love for people to enjoy in place of God, which would be a real problem when the Holy Spirit shows up, the enemy of God creates a counterfeit feeling of being in love. People have been duped into believing that the sexual act of love is the pinnacle, the top, the ultimate feeling in the emotion of love. In the concert of love it is the crescendo.

The enemy of God knows if he tries to put a fake love up against God's real love, the real love will outshine the fake love every time. People are not stupid. They would see the choice and make the choice for real love every time. People are designed to want the real love, to need it, to be completed by it. It would fill a void in their lives and be recognized as what they were searching for.

Satan is not that foolish. His plan is to get the people to accept something that keeps them short of God's full realization. If they stop short of the goal then they fall short of the mark. Instead of achieving real love, they accept physical satisfaction and then wonder why it does not fulfill all the need they had expected it to. When it falls short of their expectations they search on.

Men and women all over the earth are chasing love daily. Industries grow up to enhance a person's ability to make love and enjoy love. People everywhere buy into it and never realize the joy that is just a few steps away if they would put down the search for physical satisfaction and pick up the search for real love. The real love, consequently, would not only fill the hole they feel inside themselves and make them complete, but it would also provide an outlet for the physical satisfaction they believe is so important, and also make that physical satisfaction a permanent part of the love they express.

Wrong love or right love, the world chases it and has a faulty view of what it will look like when they find it. Like watching a soap opera, many people begin to believe people really live like that somewhere. So it is with any kind of love that believes sex is the end or consummation of the relationship. It is a faulty view.

Real love does not end nor is it consummated with the sexual act. It is embraced and joined in the act, but not as an ending, rather as a beginning.

For real love, sex is not the end of the chase, but the beginning. Two people are not finishing a relationship but actually starting one. Two people becoming one.

In this many non-church people are closer to reality than many church people. They believe that once they have sex and make love they are bound together and things should grow from there. For church people, it is more an ending to the wedding service that is never talked about in polite company and is always – always – kept behind closed doors.

Church people make it seems as though the courting days are over once marriage is entered into. Just the opposite is true for non-church people. For them the wedding celebration is for the guests. The honeymoon is for the bride and groom. They plan it. They look forward to it. They can't wait to get to it.

Non-church people read articles on how to keep the marriage fresh and the excitement alive. They take pills and buy enhancement products and exercise and do whatever is necessary to keep the interest of their partner and spouse. Most married church couples act more like they regret that they got married because the courting is over.

When was the last time anyone preached about keeping the marriage exciting from the pulpit? Most church people would really have to think about that one. It's not a hot topic to be sure. And if it is brought up, it is riddled with disclaimers and warnings to be careful.

When was the last time a commercial aired on the TV or an ad appeared in a magazine or an e-mail was sent anonymously advertising some sexual enhancement, marriage enhancing, intimacy enhancing product? Easy one to answer there. The world is hard at work selling the benefits of sex and intimacy to the public. And people are buying. Why? Because it is a necessary part of their fulfillment. They may be wrong about how to go about it. But they are not wrong about the desire to achieve it.

Church people are not excited about their love for God because they are not excited about their marriage within the church. That is not to say they are not excited by and about their partner. But their opportunity to share that love with other church people is absent. If church people can not practice sharing their love with each other, how are they going to share love with the strangers outside the church? If they can not share the love they can see, the one with their spouse, how can they share the love they can not see, the one with their God?

1 John 4:20 says, He who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen? The principle is simple. No one – NO ONE – can example anything to anyone that they are not living out. A person can not give someone something they do not possess. Church people must possess a real love in order to give away a real love. They must possess a desire to share that love in order to share it.

Non-church people may be better at showing off the love they believe is real, but they are not correct in what they believe. They may feel a little love. They may even believe that there is more to love than sex. But without putting the revelation of the love of God – God Himself – into their marriage picture, they are still leaving something out. And that something is the spice that makes the marriage picture light up like a Thomas Kincade painting.

Church people have the right idea and even the right goal in many instances. They definitely have the right God. However, they are held back and stunted in their love growth by a fear of their natural inclination to love excitedly and even wildly and passionately.

Whatever a person becomes famous for is usually something they have endeavored at with a good deal of passion and most likely something that excites them to excel at. How appealing it would be to go to a church that is passionate about its relationship with Jesus. How fantastic it would be to meet church people who are so passionately in love with their spouse that their ability to convince others of their love for God is unquestionable and excitingly on fire.

Chapter Twelve

When Marriages Get Broken

Many factors contribute to a broken marriage. Whether it is broken and ended in divorce or it is broken and being suffered through and endured like a prison sentence, the factors leading up to its current situation tell a lot about the people involved. Like a bad photograph, it takes a lot of things contributing to the end result.

No one just comes along and throws random factors into a marriage picture to ruin it. Someone has to let those factors in. That is important to remember. People ruin marriages. People can fix them.

The simple answer is to remove the factors that cause a broken marriage and fix it. The reality is that the factors did not just show up one day. They had to be explored and accepted and then introduced into the marriage picture before they became part of the backdrop.

All marriages can be exciting, happy marriages, full of passion, wildly intoxicating and intimately satisfying. All the ingredients people believe smiling couples must enjoy. There is no economic reason or physical reason for success. Fulfillment inside a marriage is merely a matter of meeting the expectations of the marriage picture.

Sounds simple. In practice it takes a lifetime of work by both the husband and the wife. When one quits working, the marriage fails. Why? It takes both of them working at painting their ultimate picture.

Divorce is not an answer. Only an extenuation of the problem. A brief respite in the relationship struggle. Divorce is a lane change in heavy traffic. Still the same car. Still the same driver. Still the same direction. Just a different path with different surroundings. Like the driver changing lanes during rush hour, no real progress is ever made with divorce.

All broken marriages can be fixed. All. No marriage has to end in divorce. This can be asserted with perfect assurance. Divorce signals the end of love. God is love and love has no ending.

Why? Forgiveness.

Forgiveness is the ingredient marriage counselors seldom sell. They may offer it. But they do not push it. It's the one thing no one likes to talk about when a marriage goes wrong. Broken marriages make angry people and angry people want revenge, not to forgive. It is very hard for someone to tell a mad woman or even a man that the first thing they need to do is forgive the other one. But that is where all fixes begin.

What has separated them has to be allowed to drop away and they have to forgive and forget in order to draw the other one back into the picture with them. Otherwise they begin painting two different pictures until none of their picture scenarios overlap and divorce is the only conceivable and believable option left.

In the beginning, before marriage, counselors, whether they be friends, licensed counselors or just religious leaders, like to help the couple start off right. A right start assumes up front that all parties, he and she, are going to make the other happy, if they can, and do nothing to make them unhappy, if they can help it.

Who thinks up these fairy tales?

Seriously! Who in the world believes this myth? People are people and they are going to seek pleasure and varied interests throughout life. Believing that anything people can do will somehow make a couple so compatible, to the point of liking all the same things, is ridiculous. If it is ridiculous, then the myth of the perfect marriage is ridiculous under any man or woman's ability to envision such things.

No person on the face of the earth has ever been able to make everyone happy. Jesus could not please everyone. Some people hated Him because He did good.

Think about it. Real marriage counseling, if such a thing existed, would have to include a healthy dose of reality check ability. He would have to practice what he was going to do when she made him mad or disappointed him. She would have to practice what she was going to do when he looked at another woman wrong or asked his buddies over to watch the game when she rented a movie for them to watch. Reality of relationship.

People are not perfect. Things get broken when they have imperfections in them. Because people are painted into their own marriage picture, their marriage picture is imperfect. They need God in the picture to hold the imperfect together.

Matthew 19:4-6 says, Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning made them male and female, and said, For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh? So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate.

What holds a marriage together is not some kind of special, magical emotional glue. What holds a marriage together is a decision. That decision is the commitment the couple makes to one another. They give their word and what their word is worth is what holds that marriage together. Everything can be worked through if they do it together. Almost nothing can be worked through if only one is trying.

If their word is their bond, then the marriage will have two committed people trying to make it work at all times. If their word is a weak, emotional agreement that lasts only until the first big challenge rears its ugly head, then their marriage will suffer the consequences of a bad decision. They are what holds it together or pushes it apart.

Only people who are sure of themselves and each other need to get married. In the church or out of the church, problems will arise. People can be sure of that. Every marriage has them. A good marriage is not a marriage that has no problems. It is a marriage where the couple has learned how to work through the problems. Their goal is staying married, not feeling good or being right or any of a number of other sabotage techniques so many couples employ.

People make mistakes and hurt each other at times. What should they do? Forgive. Certainly they need to fix the thing causing the hurt so the hurt stops being given. But then, forgive, so the hurt can be given to God.

Psalm 147:3 says of God, He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. Without God in the picture, many marriages are forced to live with the hurt. She is in pain. He is in pain. They are hurting each other or hiding the hurt or sometimes both. Without God they have no where to dump the hurt.

Jesus says, lay your load on me. He wants people to bring their hurts and worries to Him. Why? Because He can take care of them. He can help the one who is hurt. He can make forgiveness bind them together again. He can make the marriage stronger than it was before and give them the satisfaction of knowing they have worked through the pain and won a battle.

It is not a simple process. That is why God is needed. No one can understand how God can take away a hurt that seems to be ripping the heart out of someone. Only God knows how it works. He wants us to call on Him because He knows we are going to need His help.

Keeping God out of marriage is the chief reason so many marriages end in divorce. People have always had hurts pop up in marriages. People did not just begin hurting each other. But more and more there is no help forgiving each other and that means that they can not go on together any longer. No forgiveness. No God. No supernatural healing power. Not magic power. God's power. Love.

God's forgiveness is not just a word. It means forgetting the hurt. Maybe not forgetting that it happened, but forgetting how much pain it caused and how destructive that pain felt. God's forgiveness allows a couple to move on and build on what they have experienced. She is stronger and he is stronger. Together they are growing invincible. Like the God they example in their marriage.

The struggle to paint the marriage picture in a way big enough for both of them is part of the process to create the stronger, larger image of God. Their separate lives were not big enough to create a vision of the whole power of God. Together they are not as smooth and convincing as a single entity until they have suffered through some things and discovered each other in all their good and bad areas. Then and only then are they ready to display the full image of the God their union represents.

God is three in one. That's hard for people to understand. How can anyone be three persons in one person? Mind boggling. But God is God. God the Father. God the Son. And God the Holy Spirit. Three persons in one holy union.

Marriage is a small picture of God. Three persons in one union. The heart of the man. The heart of the woman. And God the Holy Spirit. To understand marriage is to understand a little bit about the identity of God.

Leaving God out of the picture means it is only the heart of the man trying to join with the heart of the woman. They both share different experiences. They both have different dreams. They both have so many areas of their lives where they are two totally different people. How can they ever imagine being joined so completely that they want and desire the same things? What could possibly drive them to such a dream? On what point of life can they ever hope to agree so completely that they would willingly give up who they are to become one in the picture?

Emotions are all well and good for bringing people together. But emotions change at a whim and they are not good foundations upon which to build. Changing emotions also mean changing goals and desires. Marriage pictures need solid points of agreement upon which to build. Emotions do not create such solid foundations.

Love is the foundation of all good marriages. Love, the reality, the decision, not the emotion. God is love. The Holy Spirit joins the marriage picture and gives the couple a foundation upon which to build. And while they build He draws them closer together and closer to the image of God. Upon the foundation of love, God Himself, the marriage can flourish and accomplish anything that piques the interest of the couple.

Broken marriages are a result of one or the other of the couple changing their foundation. God does not change. He is always the same. So, any change in the marriage picture belongs to the couple. Either he or she or possibly both of them must change after the wedding or not come into full agreement to become one despite the wedding vows. However it happens, the fact remains. Wrong visions are introduced into the marriage picture and separation occurs.

A broken marriage always – ALWAYS – includes a measure of wrong thinking. Wrong thinking is more than just having a wrong idea about something. Wrong thinking is a belief in something that denies or defies the truth. Not simply an idea but a belief that causes a person to take action based upon that belief.

A man may believe he can find greater happiness with another woman or alone. A woman may believe her husband is bad for any number of reasons. They do not have to be based upon truth for someone to believe them. Only a good dose of whatever makes them feel better about a situation.

Maybe he needs to relieve his conscience for a wrong decision he made one night when he felt a little lonely or was seeking a little extra excitement. Maybe she needs a reason to soothe her conscience or explain some action she noticed in his life. Whatever the purpose, each of them creates a new picture within their marriage picture that takes away from the plan and destroys the foundation that the original picture was based upon.

It's that simple. They add something untrue to the marriage picture and destroy the truth that it is based upon. If they began with God in the picture then slowly they must push God further and further out of the picture, or pervert the image of God to support their new position.

Truth can not abide with the lies they tell themselves. Whenever truth enters into the picture with the lies they have created, a sharp chasm opens up between them. The light of God's truth can not stand beside the darkness of the lies they tell themselves without showing the lies for what they are. Weak excuses designed to let them do the things they want to do. The truth of God becomes unbearable. It shows up their weaknesses and reinforces their desire to be right.

Whatever prompted the wrong thinking, it becomes necessary for the person using it to hide and protect the untruthful beliefs. If the wrong thinking is exposed they will suffer the indignity of being wrong themselves. Broken marriages are based upon two people protecting wrong thinking. Maybe it was only one of them at first. But the anger factor draws them both into a protective war of words to prove who is the injured party and who is the bad guy.

Left unhealed these wounds they inflict against each other can fester and become open sores of disagreement. These disagreements can tear a marriage picture apart. Like a cancer in the body the untruths eat away at all the good parts until no truth remains. No God remains. The untruth does not actually do the destroying. It is only given a chance to grow because the person allows it to grow. They nurture it and adjust their life to accommodate it.

Some will call it pride to quantify it and make it manageable. The truth is that it goes much deeper than a simple element of pride. It is existence. His warrior instincts kick in and he begins fighting against her. Her relationships instincts kick in and she begins lining up relationships against him.

Ever notice how the woman usually maintains most of the friends they both had after a divorce? At least the married ones? Ever notice how the guy comes out looking like the aggressor? The bad guy? He's a fighter and she's a relationship expert. Under the stress of tearing their lives apart, they revert back to their original heart functions.

Contrary to popular belief, divorce is not like splitting everything down the middle and going their separate ways. Broken marriages are a dissolution of the marriage picture they once sought to create. It's a slow, painful process of watching all they once believed in become hated and ugly.

The lives of two married people are never separate again once they have been joined. They are joined for life. The marriage vow, 'Til death do us part, is appropriate. They are joined together in a powerful picture of the full image of God. God can not be torn apart. He can only be denied. For them to go separate ways will only rip a new hole in them.

She will be part herself and part him and part God all living in a confused, uncertain state of mind. She is now part her and part him. Her former self does not exist. It is not just the new experiences she has participated in. It's more. Much more. She has a new insight into life. She has seen life through the male half of God's heart. This ability colors her decisions from then on.

If she is hurting very badly she may crawl inside herself and become the little girl who needs someone to come along and help her. Or she may become the strong woman who challenges the entire world to prove she can't take it. She may become militant without really having all the mental faculties practiced in the art of warfare. She may become more masculine in an attempt to dissuade others from thinking she has been damaged by the man somehow.

There are many variations on how she may deal with the separation. The fact is, separation only occurs physically and emotionally. Spiritually, she is now three people living in one. Herself, him and what is left of the Holy Spirit clinging to her and drawing her into the solace of God's waiting arms. Unless she has pushed God away.

If she denies God and ignores Him in her pain, she runs the risk of chasing love away from her life. God will not force Himself into a life that does not want Him around. He will call from the sidelines and deep into the dark times, but He will never demand to be allowed in. How many militant, hurting, demanding and bossy divorcees are there in this world? One is too many. One is more than there should be. But who is willing to admit that she is damaged? Who is willing to tell her?

Friends try to help her deal by covering up the hurt and moving on. They mean well, but they do not understand the logistics of separation from the marriage picture. Because they do not understand they can not help. Her hurt is not due to separation as much as it is to death.

That's right. When marriages dissolve and people go their separate ways, there is a death taking place. Inside her she must kill the picture that once was. She must kill all of him that she took upon herself. His thoughts and ideas and ways. His likes and dislikes. She keeps the experiences. Uses them to define her own existence. But she must kill the desire to join with him again and share the experiences.

Simple to say. Hard to do. It can be done. She can become baggage free. More importantly, she needs to understand that she is damaged until she can kill off her desire to be with him again. Why? Because he is a part of her as surely as Jesus is a part of the Godhead. As long as she lets him live inside her she has to deal with his presence. It is real and tangible.

She must kill any and every idea that links the two of them together. They might share a town or even custody of the children. But she has to cut herself off from ever thinking about them as together. They can be joint managers at best.

The memories are fine in their place. They are a part of who she is. They can never be allowed to take center stage though. Otherwise they will color every relationship she ever has. She has to come to terms with never being the person she was when they were married. Her key to fixing the damage and moving on is becoming who God wants her to be. And that requires a new life, now that her ex-husband is out of her picture. She must reinvent herself in God's image as best she can.

The question is, if she can fix her own damaged self why could she not fix her marriage to begin with? Truthfully, she probably can not. Or will not, to be more exact.

In most instances she moves on trying to put the bad experience behind her and not understanding why she still desires him. She hates him, yet he is there in her every thought. He has ruined everything she loved and she has every right to despise him. Yet, in her quiet moments she has kind thoughts and longings for the good times they shared. A part of her wants to know why it didn't work. She can not forget because she does not want to forget.

She tells her friends she is over him and moving on. But each new guy she dates can not measure up. They are shallow replicas of the real thing. She hates him and yet he is more than any other guy she meets. How can this be?

Unfortunately, he is part of her and she knows him better than any guy in the world. No matter how many guys she meets, she will always know him better. And the part she knows is the good guy. The one who won her heart. That's the problem. She gave him her heart.

He may have dragged it in the dirt and stomped on it, but she gave it willingly. His abuse and bad usage of her love for him did not erase the fact she had given him her heart. A part of her is gone.

Can she live with that? She gave away a part of herself. It may seem metaphorical or even just overly dramatic. She gave away her heart. The very thing that made her who she was all those years. She gave herself away.

Healing is a matter of getting it back. Unfortunately, God created the heart of the woman and she can not recreate another one for herself. Without God she is destined to search for herself in everything. In every relationship. The best she can hope for is to reclaim parts of her life and with the absence of that man in her life she might be able to pick up some pieces and move on.

At worst she can move around and shift from man to man trying to alleviate her pain by creating new good feelings. They don't last because she doesn't have the same tools to work with that she had in the marriage. He took some of her away with him, namely, her heart.

After divorce he will be part himself and part her and part God all rolled up in a big bundle of male dominated activity, namely proving he was right about something, reclaiming the male image. His heart, unlike hers was probably not given away to the same depth unless they were married a very long time.

They joined and she took on much of his life as her own. But he probably never gave his heart away. He invested it and offered up glimpses of it. However, men do not usually give their hearts away until they are fully committed. That takes time and assurances.

Where her heart is more like sand, hard to take back after it has been mixed with his warrior heart, his heart is more like a rock, easy to find jumbled up among her relational heart. Where she has trouble finding herself in the mix after it ends, he easily picks up where he left off and rejoins his idea of his previous life.

Proof. The divorce. A man who has invested his heart in something fights for that thing until he dies or wins. His desire is for victory. If his idea of victory is divorce then he has nothing invested which he does not mind to lose. If divorce occurs and he did not want it to then he will die inside. It will require extensive retraining and counseling to revive that man. She has absconded with his heart and he can not survive without it. He has to retrieve it.

In scripture men are commanded to love their wives. Why? Because they do not generally give their heart away. Women have no such commandment. They give their heart away when they find the man their heart is searching for. When they sense the other half of their heart in him they give away their half in order to make the whole. It is part of their design. Men have no such design.

Because men think through things more than they feel their way, they do not give their heart away. They invest it but hold it in reserve. Women feel their way through more than they think their way so giving their heart is a natural result of loving their man. To use a poker term, women are all in, while a man keeps a reserve pot available risking it all only when he believes it is a sure thing.

Neither side is stronger or more complete because of this difference. He is always at a disadvantage in situations of emotion and feeling and she is always at a disadvantage when pure logic will achieve better results. That's why they need each other to be complete. Their hearts and therefore their minds are not sufficient in themselves. Together they are a complete package. Separately they are only half the equation.

He can move on easier than she can. That is to say he can affect the posture of moving on easier than she can. He is still broken and not whole after the divorce but his inability to ponder and focus on the relationship without her creates an avenue of passage that allows him to move away from the relationship.

While she revels in the memories they created, he seeks to create a new memory for every one they used to have. Sounds cold and cruel but it is the way men are designed to cope with emotional issues. She copes by burrowing into the relationship and he copes by distancing himself from it. That's why so many fathers disappear after a divorce. It is not a lack of love for the children but a safety mechanism to distance themselves from the hurt they feel. Same pain. Different reaction than hers.

If a warrior got bogged down with emotional things every time they presented he would become useless in the battle. Therefore, his warrior instincts serve him as a buffer against the pain of the divorce and consequent separation. He replaces her with something. He is not whole. He is not better. He is probably not even okay. He is just coping.

His emotional bonds are related more to spatial relationships than memories. A new woman in his life can help him erase the memories of a bad relationship. Why? Because he takes more of his heart away at the separation. The new relationship asks him to receive her heart into his life. He has a new focus, a new battle, a new conquest, new victory. She can give him a new purpose. Gone is much of what has caused his pain from the old relationship.

If it sounds like the man was shallow and uncommitted to the first relationship he was not. Remember, the man is a warrior. He fought to win her affection. She never fought to win his. He chased her for the prize of her heart. She never made any such demand on him.

Their goals in coming together were separate. He, to win the beauty. She, to reveal herself. In divorce, he simply chases another beauty. She has to deal with waiting for a new suitor.

Not shallow. Different. Shallow would imply the relationship meant nothing to him. That's a wrong interpretation. He just has a different way of coping with the end of that relationship.

In the first few years of a marriage a woman puts more of herself into a marriage picture than a man does. There is groundwork to be laid and the man is not equipped to lay it. She empties herself to become the wife. He models himself after her and teaches himself to be the husband. She becomes what is needed for the relationship. He tries to fit the relationship into his life.

When they separate after only a few years, he has invested less of himself than she has and given away less. His ability to refocus and walk away is helped along by his inability to fully give his heart away without God's help. Because the man has the warrior side of God's heart in him his life is more a matter of rambling and hunting and seeking excitement. While she pines away for the love she feels she has lost, he begins a new search and seemingly starts a new life without her.

Now, as simple as those explanations sound, none of it is easy. Both are being ripped apart at the very core of their being, especially if God was involved. A part of their life is dying. A part of what makes them whole is dying. They sense the death and may even mourn it. It is not uncommon for them to have thoughts of their life being all over now that the divorce is final. Imagining life without the other in their life is unbearable, especially if one wanted to leave and one didn't. No matter how they attempt to move on, a part of their heart dies in the separation.

For her its a big part and maybe even the whole thing. For him it is a smaller part but still a part of him is dying to be sure. Together they were one. But separately they are not a half. It doesn't work like that.

During the marriage they had love. Love made up a big part of them that others saw and were drawn to. It was what drew them together in the first place, the love they could see in each other. A love they both felt would make them complete. Now, separated, the love is gone. They not only do not have each other any more, but the love is gone too. Two thirds of their life has been dissolved along with the marriage.

He is a shell of his former self. She is an emotional copy of what she once had been. God is no longer there to draw others to see their marriage and His glory shining through them.

God may still be working to heal them and console them and comfort them. But he can not show off His glorious image in broken marriages. A broken marriage is the opposite of His love and power. He is still God, but the separation kills the opportunity to show off the image of God. He is still strong and He is still there to help them through the dark hours of their separation. But He can no longer shine through them because they have thrown love away.

Whether they meant to throw love away or it just happened in the fray of their personal battle does not matter. God can not shine and show off in a separated marriage. He backs off and calls to them to stay with Him. God becomes their love focus if they will call on Him. They have no love focus if they ignore God.

It is not as desperate as it sounds. Though some may feel desperate about such turmoil, the old adage holds true. It is never as bad as it seems. They can heal the marriage, or, at the least, be healed themselves. It's not about what he did or what she did. It's not about any changes in their lives or any new things they have discovered. It is about their hearts.

Wholeness is both their hearts together as one under God. Forgiveness can get them there. Learning to deal with the obstacles and deciding to go through rather than quit is the issue. They can stand up and be counted as real men and women and fight for the love they have, or they can lay down and give up and let the enemy of their souls take away the happiness that once was theirs.

Here's a truth few dare to express. It does not matter what has happened in a marriage. Love conquers all. If they love hard enough and long enough they can overcome everything. EVERYTHING.

Proverbs 10:12 says, Hatred stirs up strife, But love covers all sins. Love does not seek to bring out the truth as much as it seeks to love. People are fallible. They make mistakes. Love recognizes this and determines to love them anyway. No matter what.

True love is unconditional. He does not love her as long as... She does not love him if he only... They love as one. He chooses to love. She chooses to love. The choice to not love is a sign of a condition being set.

Some will undoubtedly say, okay but what if the mistake is to great to forgive? How does anyone quantify something like that? Is every person's tolerance level different? Must forgiveness be given? When must it be forgiven?

There are no easy answers here. Every couple determines their level of love together. He makes up his mind and she makes up hers. God draws on them and He calls them to complete love, like the love He has for His creation. Ultimately, though, it is up to each person to decide how much love they will let into their lives.

Love forgives. God is love and He forgives. Why? Because what they did was not so bad? No. Remember, God thinks all sin deserves death. So there is no degree of what to forgive. Forgiveness is the tool God uses to reconcile us to Himself. It is the tool He teaches us to reconcile all our relationships to ourselves with. The more like God we become the more forgiveness we will be capable of sharing with others.

Still, the reason is simple to God. He wants the relationship more than He wants retaliation. Why? Because He can show off the fullness of His power in the relationship. He can not do that unless there is a relationship in the first place.

A woman wants to be whole in her marriage picture. A man wants to be fulfilled in His marriage picture. Love makes them seek this together. Love takes them higher in their quest than they ever imagined. Love shows them parts of themselves and each other that have been hidden. Nothing ever is as good for them as it is when they discover love. Consequently, losing that love brings about a corresponding sense that nothing is ever as bad either.

In the battles of separation they talk a lot and say things like, they deserve happiness and want satisfaction. If they do not realize that all they seek is contained in the marriage picture it is because they never really uncovered all that the marriage picture held for them. To throw it away is to throw away their best opportunity to be whole and complete. Love desires that for them.

Jeremiah 29:11 says, I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope. Not only are God's thoughts and ways higher than a man or woman's personal thoughts or ways, but He thinks about them in ways that prosper them always. Can any couple say that about each other? Can they say that when they are mad and angry?

Forgiveness is not just overlooking a problem. It is dealing with it. Solving it. Then moving on, stronger and more decided than ever before. Love seeks forgiveness as a way to get stronger. The stronger a couple the stronger their image of God is going to be. Problems must necessarily come and go. Having a problem is not the issue. Making mistakes is not the point. Going through is the main purpose of love.

Hate is easy. Hate does not seek togetherness. The main drive of hate is separation. Hate separates husbands and wives and breaks up families. Hate destroys easily if given a chance.

Love is difficult. Love seeks to join together two people who are so completely different that it seems impossible that they can even occupy the same space, let alone the same heart. Love combines so completely that what was once two distinct individuals becomes one cohesive unit of impenetrable strength and steadfastness.

Hate deals with the same problems that love deals with. Hate takes the easy way out and love chooses the hard way. There is no right or wrong in hate. Only blame. There is no right or wrong in love. Only togetherness.

Marriages that are broken can be fixed. Two people must want it. Two people must work at it. Two people must call on God to heal the hurts and rejoin the couple. No one will say it is easy. Broken love hurts. But love is also beautiful. If beauty drives the couple they can repaint their marriage picture. He can understand what she needs and what she brings to the picture. She can understand him. They can both depend on God for making it work.

People need to decide before they get married how they are going to deal with the problems that will arise. It is easy to say that they will forgive and forget and move on. It is better to have a plan of what they are seeking and how it takes priority over what they are feeling or thinking. Keeping the goal of togetherness in mind keeps both partners on track. Staying on track lessens the mistakes and hurts.

Planning on not letting the hurts derail their train of relationship is a goal worthy to make. But both of them need to determine in their heart what they can accept. No one else makes that decision for them. If his acceptance is higher than hers or vice versa then one will become a martyr for the marriage and the other will take advantage and become an abuser.

It may seem strange building in a plan of allowance for wrong doing. That's not really the case. Wrong is still wrong. But deciding ahead of time how much a person can take is a good way to face the possibility of a hurt that could damage and possibly kill the marriage. Sharing what they can take from each other is a good way to get to know an area of each others heart that may take years and a big problem before it surfaces.

Couples routinely decide ahead of time things like whether or not she will allow him to have women friends in his life or whether he will allow her to remain friends with old boyfriends. That is a form of deciding ahead of time how much each can take. If she gets jealous when he talks to another woman then they have to decide how outside relationships will look in their marriage picture. If he does not trust her old boyfriends coming around then again, they will have to decide what that will look like.

If they take this to the idea of deciding how he will deal with her unfaithfulness and how she will deal with his reliance on a relationship with other women they can have a meaningful discussion that reveals to each how committed the other is to this marriage. If she is going to kill him and walk away after an affair they need to review why they are getting married. Is it just because she wants exclusive rights to him? Or do they both share a desire to be complete in each other and whole before God?

All marriage discussions should point to motive. Motive is why a person gets married. Loneliness, jealousy, to be like mom and dad, to be better than mom and dad, to grab on to the perfect American dream. Good reasons to get married? Probably not. Bad motives lead to bad results usually.

A perfect couple usually has perfect motives. They may not be the best match or the best visual at first. Why? Because those things are not the perfect measurements of what will work. Motive is. If he is pure in his motive to become complete in her and she is pure in her desire to become whole in him, then they have a chance. Marriage is still difficult. It is still two people becoming one person. The right motive gives them an edge many others don't have. Compatibility.

That's right. A compatible motive is worth more than going to the same school and growing up in the same neighborhood and sharing the same likes and dislikes. Very compatible people with incompatible motives divorce all the time. Everyone laments the separation but few ever recognize that they were after two different things from the start.

What's the motive for creating the marriage picture? How much will either one of them take in keeping it together? What untruthful elements does either allow into the picture and how do they get them out? Can forgiveness be offered with a clear conscience? Does the other one accept being forgiven or do they want to be held as right all along? Is there enough of a desire to be together left in either of them? Some call it the spark of love. What it is can best be described as the idea that they can make it. When the idea is dead, so is the marriage.

In no way can all the factors relating to divorce be covered here. That would take a book in itself. Maybe a volume of books. Instead the idea here was to impart the knowledge that divorce is not an answer, only a way out.

Marriages will have many opportunities for failure. It is a part of life. The people involved determine the outcome. God is invested in all marriages. He invests His love. He invests Himself. It takes a person to deny God. It takes a person to deny love.

Fixing a broken marriage is not easy. It takes understanding and hard work and plenty of forgiveness. But God reminds us that we can accomplish all things through Jesus. And Jesus said He would send the comforter, the Holy Spirit, when He went away. Love lives among us. Call on Him and reclaim what the enemy would steal and kill and destroy.

Chapter Thirteen

Marriage After Divorce

There is life after divorce. A good wholesome and complete life can be had. It must be rebuilt out of the ashes of the previous marriage picture, but it can be done. God does not curse a person who is divorced. He loves them. God is love.

Many people inside the church try to make a big deal out of being divorced. They treat divorce as though something is permanently wrong with the person and sin has somehow attached itself to them. That is not the case. Divorce is a part of life. A nasty, negative part of life, but still, only a part of life. God desires that it be avoided, but he never condemns the divorced person.

In the warnings given to the priests, concerning whom they may marry, divorced women are listed among those to be avoided. The scriptures says, A widow or a divorced woman or a defiled woman or a harlot—these he shall not marry; but he shall take a virgin of his own people as wife. Look at what is being said. Widows, divorced women, defiled women, and harlots are called out as undesirable wives for God's priests. Has a widow sinned? Has a defiled woman sinned? Not necessarily. They both could be upstanding pillars of the church. They just met with circumstances that made one a woman without her husband because of death and the other a woman sexually abused by a sinful man. They are not the ones who sinned. So the list is not about priests avoiding sinful women.

The list is about women who have a lot of baggage. God is warning His priests to avoid women with baggage. Why? Because God wants to show Himself off in the lives of His priests. Because it is very hard for God to show off His image in a marriage picture where one or both of them is carrying a lot of problems from previous situations.

God wants to show Himself off mightily in His priests. He wants them to have the best opportunity to grow together with their spouse in their marriages and share their hearts and complete the image of God. He especially wants this for His priests. Who should be better able to show off the image of God than the priests of God?

Widows have baggage because of the loss of their loved one. They are mourning and getting over having a big hole cut out of them when that loved one dies. They carrying many issues with them as they seek to find themselves and rebuild their lives. Even inside the church this is a hard task.

Divorced women, for all intensive purposes have a similar need. They have lost a loved one. Not dead but still lost. The hole is being ripped out of them as surely as it is a widow's heart. They are mourning over their loss as completely as the widow. And on top of that, because the person who has damaged them is still alive they have to deal with issues of forgiveness and anger and perhaps bitterness if they are not careful.

A defiled woman may not have asked for her abuse and she certainly wasn't looking to attach herself to the attacker in any way. But if they shared intercourse she was drawn into a warped version of love that scars the heart and creates a hole when the attacker leaves. Not a hole of longing, certainly. But a hole all the same.

She desires revenge. Maybe an apology. Perhaps the knowledge that the man suffered over it like she has in some way. Whatever form her hole takes it is still there. She must deal with it before she is complete again or else she runs the risk of bringing her baggage into the marriage picture.

The harlot is a wanton, lustful woman who sells her body for pleasure and profit. Her every thought is to make pleasure work for her and to have a living of great ease. But it is not her sin that the scripture warns the man away from. It is her baggage. Because of all her sexual liaisons she carries a huge pile of baggage around with her. Her heart, though she believes she owns it, has been given away over and over until it is nothing but the shell of a woman's heart with little to offer.

She will consistently seek the easy way out. Ease and pleasure. That is her style. Her problem is that she believes she is in control of her pleasure and ease. She has very little to offer and it will take a lot of work for her to regain her womanly heart before she will be ready for marriage.

It is important to remember that the scripture for the priest's warning is located in the Old Testament. It was given to men who were to be priests before the Holy Spirit was given to men and women on earth.

Why is this important? When the Holy Spirit was given to men love was given to men. Love that conquers all. Love that heals all. The Holy Spirit makes healing a broken heart possible.

In the Old Testament there was no solution for healing the broken heart. The damaged heart stayed damaged. Kind David tells us in Psalms, The Lord is near to those who have a broken heart. It says He, the Lord, saves those with a crushed spirit. God does it. They are damaged at a level they can not fix. So being near to God is the answer in the Old Testament.

God places the man's heart in him and gives the woman her heart. Each is a half of an important whole that shines with the power and majesty of the complete image of God when combined. Only God can fix what He has created.

When Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to men on earth, God opened a new door that allowed every illness and every wrong in life to be fixed. Jesus said, Nevertheless I tell you the truth. It is to your advantage that I go away; for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you; but if I depart, I will send Him to you. The Helper is the Holy Spirit. When Jesus fulfilled the sacrifice and returned to the Father in heaven, the Holy Spirit was sent to begin His ministry on earth. A ministry of healing and showing off the image of God.

His love seeks to bring the fullness of God to light. This can only be accomplished in the people God calls to Himself. His people. Within His people there is a very special relationship that God has endowed with the ability to show off the full image of God to others. The marriage. Both halves of the heart of God, a man's and a woman's, join in a full picture of God's glory and might.

Jesus said He came so that people might have life and have it more abundantly. Without the sacrifice of Jesus, reconciling the sinful creation with the holy God, there is no access for the Holy Spirit in the earth. Now, with the sacrifice completed, once and for all, the Holy Spirit is given to men to empower them to live righteous and holy lives before their just God. Further, the marriage of a man and a woman, once only the shadow of the relationship God desires, is now endued with this power from the Holy Spirit to show off the fullness of the image of God for all to see.

She was taken from the man in the garden and she is rejoined with him in the marriage. Man, made in God's image, filled with the Holy Spirit is once again able to show off the full image of God in the marriage picture. Only in the marriage picture is the woman rejoined with the man she came out of. Only then is the full image of God completed. Only then can God really show Himself off.

Divorce ruins the marriage picture. This is a truth that can not be avoided. Divorce is to be avoided if at all possible. But when it occurs, God is there to heal and repair and rebuild the damaged heart. It can be fixed. The Holy Spirit is the key. Wholeness is the focus. God's full image is the reason.

Those three things must not be forgotten or overlooked. Without the Holy Spirit a heart can not be fixed. The only purpose for the heart is to seek wholeness. If there is any other reason than showing off the full image of God, The Holy Spirit is not interested.

Knowing what is damaged in a divorce is a good place to start. Understanding that only God can fix it is a better place to end up. Put both together and the divorced person has a chance to rebuild and become a viable partner in a new marriage and retake their former position for showing off the full image of God.

The heart is damaged in the divorce. Divorce is separation. Separation occurs when the couple goes their individual ways. Whether by agreement or not the separation is damaging. There is no such thing as an amicable divorce. No matter how friendly the couple stays, someone is saying to the other one that they are unlovable now. That hurts. That damages. That scars.

He is being told that he can no longer win her heart and she is being told she is no longer worthy of his attention. He is being told he is no longer strong enough or protective enough for her. She is being told that her beauty is no longer desirable and that her companionship is no longer enjoyable. All that her heart once beat for has been thrown aside and trampled in the dirt. All that he once counted as a success has just crumbled to dust.

A person may believe they have become unlovable. They may act out in unlovable ways to prove their unworthiness. Or they may do just the opposite and act out in ways they believe will prove to everyone they are still lovable. Whatever the result, they are acting out to prove something to themselves and others. They are not living out the desires of their heart.

He is not seeking adventure or battles or a beauty any longer. He is hiding in his hurt and suffering the loss of his own manhood. Manhood is not a sexual thing or an impotence thing. Man tries to call it that and turn the hurt into some kind of macho exercise in regaining their dominance. That is wrong.

Manhood is the heart of the man beating strong and driving him onward to fulfill the destiny of his heart. A man is not whole in his own heart until he is doing three things for himself. Seeking an adventure to live, battling forward instead of hiding, and seeking a beauty to share his heart with.

The key is for him to rebuild himself. To access the plan for his heart and renew that plan in full. A man must return to what he knows about himself and retrace the training steps that got him there.

He can not go back to the old places. He can not regain the old life. Instead, he must remember the call on his life and refocus his energies on walking that trail. And he must first relearn to walk that trail alone.

Until he knows who he is again it is out of the question that he find a new female love for his life. In the divorce he pushed love away. He needs to relearn how to draw love back to himself. He must let God back into his life and learn to enjoy that love first.

When he is whole again and ready to move on with his life he must begin seeking a new beauty carefully. He must be more aware of the enemy's traps than before. He has fallen once. He must seek to overcome the second time around.

Having friends set him up with dates is not seeking a beauty. At best it is fishing with someone else's bait. At worst it is waiting for someone to throw a fish into your boat. He needs a sense of accomplishment to drive him. He needs to discover a new object of his affection and love after he has rediscovered his own trail again.

Climbing a mountain may be adventure but he must seek out his own adventure. Something that makes him feel alive when he does it. It might be singing a song or playing an instrument or learning something new.

Whatever it is it will take him new places. Adventures do not take place in the same old places people have always gone. He needs to develop a new lifestyle after the divorce. The old things are what was shared with her. That is gone now. He will not find himself in the old things. As much as he may desire to hold onto the old things, whether for normalcy, or balance or even to show her he has won, he must let it go and move on. It is important that he embrace the adventure of moving on.

Fighting in a bar might be a battle but it is not the kind of battle that moves him forward. He needs a fight that moves him to excel and compete and find something bigger or better inside of himself than he previously showed.

The divorce erased all his previous conquests. Like wiping the hard drive clean he now has nothing. He may still have his job and career but they are made less by the divorce because she shared them. He needs a new battle. One that forces him to test the waters of his calling and advance his growth toward what God would have him to be.

If a man can do those things, find a new battle for his life, embrace a new adventure and realign his life to being successful alone again, he is ready to seek out a new beauty and try to win her heart. It will be a daily battle to remind himself who he is. After a divorce the who he is part becomes muddy and unclear. He is not ready for any relationship until he has answered that question in his life.

In divorce, for her, she is no longer as appreciative of the process to show off her beauty. Her idea of sharing an adventure is to go shopping with a girlfriend. She is revolted by the very idea that any woman would want a man to fight for her attention. She becomes self sufficient to shut men out. Even if she dates, she will do it her way and keep the man at a distance even in her most intimate moments.

Good men will sense her brokenness and go away. Broken men and fake men will prey on her hurts and seek to get inside her life where they will likely damage her even more before they are through. She will accept it as part of what has happened to her.

She will despair of ever meeting Mr. Right again. She may doubt her ability to choose him out of a crowd. She may even come to believe he doesn't exist. He's a myth. That way she removes the burden of waiting for him. It does not have to be that way.

Divorce has caused her sense of adventure to withdraw because the relationship which made adventure fun is now destroyed. Her sense of beauty is defiled because she feels she has already unveiled all she has. Her sense of desire to be worthy of a man's attention disgusts her because she feels that it sells her out. Unless she can reclaim these things she is doomed to repeat her relationship failures as often as she enters into them.

Her womanhood is covered up and thrown away at this point. She might still be mindful of it and even protective of it, but a part of her knows it has been damaged. It is no longer what it once was. She no longer takes great pride in being a woman.

It is interesting to note that no man has ever said his life would be better if he was a woman. But women, especially damaged women, say that things would be different if they were a man. It is because the damage they receive is to their womanhood and makes them wish they didn't have to be a woman. Her husband's attention validated her womanhood. Divorce took that away.

A woman instinctively knows a man is different. She knows he does not lose his manhood in a failed relationship. She sorrows over her own lost womanhood and may even come to believe men have it better than women. Men receive their true validation of manhood from another man, a mentor, not their wife. So divorce does not destroy his manhood, only his considerable ego.

She blames the man because she gave everything. Even if she initiated the divorce, she blames him. She knows she was all in. If it failed it had to be his fault, somehow. She makes excuses for the things she does and seeks out those who will let her live in her excuses. Even if she really was the victim, she will live in the excuses as an answer for why she does not move on with life.

She needs to be retrained to think of herself as a real woman again. Real womanhood is not afraid to be a real woman. She loves being beautiful and will go to great lengths to show off her beauty. She knows deep down inside that men will appreciate her work and appreciate her beauty. She needs to recapture the strength to go it alone, to be a desirable beauty again. To shake off the stigma of failure and live fully again. Beautiful again.

Her greatest desire is to share an adventure, preferably with the man of her dreams. It is not the adventure that gets her blood boiling but the relationship that comes out of the adventure. The deeper the relationship the better the adventure for her. To regain this perspective will require igniting a fire that hasn't burned since the divorce. Her fear will be that she is unworthy of such an adventure. But a real woman's heart wants what it wants and will not be denied. She has to unveil it and give it free rein.

If she finds a man who is willing to chase her and fight for her attention, she will play him along until she is sure he is the one and has what it takes to go the distance. Divorce will make her extra cautious. That's okay as long as it does not become her crutch. She can not spend her whole life finding things wrong with every guy she meets.

A real woman learns from past experience what to expect and what to inspect. She will be doubly hard to win the second time around. Not so easy a prize to be won but far more worthy because of her experiences. She will also be better at culling out the losers and going straight for the good stuff.

Because she was all in during the marriage, after the divorce she has no idea who she is. Redefining herself and reinventing herself after the likeness of who God called her to be will take time.

The key for her is to become a real woman again. She was a real woman during her marriage but divorce stole that from her. Her womanhood was torn up into little pieces with the divorce. She needs to find those pieces and reassemble them into a new life. Her life. Not a copy of someone else's life. Not a remake of her previous life. But a whole new life complete with new goals and desires. Her and God walking the road to her destiny once again.

If she can become a whole and refreshed, real woman once again, she can then contemplate letting a man back into her life and seeking her ultimate goal of sharing an adventure in marriage once again. What was probably inconceivable immediately after the divorce will become conceivable once she has reasserted her desire to be all the woman she can be.

The goal is not to get married again. The goal is to become a woman again. A real woman by God's definition. By definition a real woman will desire the things of a real woman and she will then be able to move on with a successful life according as God has planned it to be.

When the heart is damaged people sense it and protect it with different activities and ways of acting. They cover up for the deficiencies they now perceive in themselves. He covers up the fact that he no longer feels like acting invincible. She covers up her desire to be seen as beautiful. They accept the damage and try to move on dragging it behind them.

How do they fix themselves. They don't really. They admit what is out of whack, but they need God to put the old heart back together. They need the master builder to put the broken and torn pieces back together.

He may have retained his assertion of his manhood but everything else he had come to know in his life has been destroyed. He knows he is a man but that is all he knows. And unless he starts acting like a man, with a man's heart leading him, he may soon come to doubt his own manhood. Because he does not do well with defining his feelings he is confused and frustrated at everything. He does not know how to deal with all of the emotional turmoil he is now surrounded by.

A false man will run. A real man will stand and fight. Even if he can not identify the attacker, he knows that fighting to be a real man again is all that counts.

He needs to pray for a heart that seeks adventure. He needs a heart that takes pleasure in chasing the beauty. He needs a battle worth getting up every morning for. When he can get those things back he can once again seek out his beauty and try and win her to himself.

She may be better equipped to deal with all the emotions flying around but she has lost her sense of true womanhood. It is gone. Destroyed in the divorce. Her system of logic will try to kick in but her dependence upon her feelings will push logic further and further away. As a woman she knows that feelings are her strongest asset. Unfortunately, without a little pure logic thrown in she will come to depend on feelings that are based on other feelings and getting further and further from the truth all the time.

A fake woman will hide. She will build a life that is insulated from the hard truths she has come to despise. She will isolate herself by any means possible to keep all men and maybe even most women at arms length. She will only allow people around her who agree with her assessments of a horrible life ahead. She may have relationships and even engage in sex again. But it will be under her terms and for her enjoyment only. She probably will become self destructive if friends do not intervene. Such is the despair when her sense of true womanhood is gone.

A real woman will stand up, clean up and seek to unveil the real beauty once again. She will deny any feelings that do not move her back to a feeling of being a real woman again. She will seek out logic and counsel that will help her rediscover the real woman in herself again. She will necessarily back away from any new relationships for a time but only to gather herself back together and regroup for her new life.

She needs to get back that old desire to be beautiful in the eyes of those she admires. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It is not skin deep and it does not have a certain size waist either. Beauty is a confidence that they have something to offer and that there is a man out there who wants it. Her joy is in putting it on display, not shopping it around. She displays it and waits for someone to come along and tell her how much they like it.

Then she wants him to fight for it. She will not make it easy to get. She is not easy. He has to pass the test. The state of her test tells a lot about the state of her heart. Damaged women have practically no test, or a test so hard that superman could not pass it. When the fight she wants him to undertake represents the man she wants to have then her heart is in working order again. Until then she will not desire a real relationship anyway. And that is her goal, a real adventurous relationship with the man of her dreams. She will dream about Mr. Right again. She will embrace her dreams again. She will dare to dream again.

Then she will feel comfortable unveiling herself once again. She will have to get past the fear of being all in once again. She will have to overcome the anger that men do not share such an all in investment in the relationship. She will have to gather all that says she is a woman and unveil it for her new man before she can breathe easy and say that she has come all the way back. The overcomer is the real woman.

The best description for a divorced person getting married again before they have reclaimed their heart is a ghost. They are a ghost of their former selves. There is a ghost of someone else following them around. Unless they have dealt with the rebuilding of their heart, the ghost description will fit every time.

Why? Because separation after marriage does not tear the couple apart at the two points where they joined. It is not that simple. When two people get married it's not like setting a bone that is broken. It's more like reattaching a spinal cord that has been ripped out.

Marriage is a complex fusing of two distinct and separate entities into one everlasting unified couple. It is not just joining two people. It is joining two people with thousands of idiosyncrasies, likes, dislikes, quirks, preferences, life experiences and even relatives.

Doctors will admit they can not reattach a spinal cord that has been ripped out of a human being. There are millions of nerves, dozens of muscles, too many to count blood vessels and other things to be dealt with. The damage done by ripping it out is staggering at a medical level. It is too intricate a procedure for a human doctor to perform. The technology is not there yet.

Why? When a spinal cord is ripped out of a human being it tears in so many places and becomes unattached in so many ways that the intricacy of what has been done is beyond human comprehension.

Because a marriage is a union of two people at such an intricate depth a similar analogy can be made. When the marriage is ripped apart each part of the torn couple are now helplessly separated and left in a damaged condition. All the places where their lives had been fused are now ripped and torn and scattered like so much flesh at a bad accident.

Hence, the ghost description after divorce. He may look like the old him on the outside but inside he is only a shadow of what he once was. Most of the damage can not be seen. Until he acts.

When he was single he had learned to operate as a complete entity and make his way through the world seeking his purpose and fulfilling his destiny. After the wedding that purpose and destiny were wrapped up in his marriage picture.

When the marriage picture is ripped apart his destiny and purpose take a huge hit. He may try to fall back and regroup. He may try to rethink his life. But the fact remains, wherever he goes, whatever he does, she is still there and part of him is missing and residing with her. No matter how much he wants to reclaim it he can not. It is gone.

The same goes for her. No matter how she tries, no matter how many friends she has, no matter how many ways she tries to get over him, it will not happen just because she wants it to. She has made him a part of her life when she joined her life to his. Just because they separate does not mean she gets herself back. Just because they separate doesn't mean he will go away. He still has the part of her she gave away. She still holds the part of him he gave away. And both parts are now damaged. Because what they both have are damaged parts of the same heart.

Think of it like two circles. His is blue and hers is red. When they join the colors blend and they become one purple circle. When they separate he takes part of a purple circle away and she takes part of a purple circle away. There is no way to retrieve the red and blue circles after they have been joined.

What they have are two parts of a purple circle. And its not a clean cut that will fit into some other divorced person's life either. It is a jagged, ragged, sometimes see-through, portion of a heart that is red in places, blue in places and purple in places. A real mess.

Like all experiences of life the way to live to the fullest is to go through the experience. Add the good things to the list of things to repeat and add the bad to the list of things to avoid. Going through is a healing process.

For the divorced heart it is imperative that the individual understand that there is no way back. Only forward. Only going through. They can not turn back the clock. They can never retrieve whatever they may think they have lost. All they can do is admit that they have been there, had the experience and then move on toward success.

There may be a time of mourning the loss. After all, a dream has been killed. In all seriousness, their old life is dead. It may be appropriate to mourn it for a season. To admit it is gone forever. Unless there is a reason to hope for reconciliation both people should move forward with their lives and retrain their separate hearts.

Retraining is the only way the separated couple can regain full use of their hearts again. They can not replace their hearts. They can never make them like they were pre-marriage. The answer is in taking what they have and making it stronger. Much like an athlete's leg after if has healed up from a broken bone. It must be exercised and retrained to be athletically useful again. they can rebuild the muscle and strength it once had but it will take lots of work.

Both the man and the woman need a period of time to just sit and absorb what has happened. They may need to cry. They may need to think. Whatever their personal preferences, the point is that when they fall off the marriage bike neither of them needs to get back on right away. Many people will want to surround their friends with company and energy and all the trappings of life. What the separated people need is a little solitude.

Solitude is not all bad. Both people were used to being together. Solitude will bring the reality of what has happened into a proper focus. Too often divorced people try to jump straight back into dating life only to experience failed relationship after failed relationship. They try to convince themselves that they were not the problem. The other person was the problem. Their solution is to prove to everyone that they are capable of having a good relationship. Unfortunately, they have a damaged heart to work with and a wrong goal as their purpose.

The sitting period after the separation is crucial. For some it may need to be longer than others. The desired result of the time spent alone is a realization that everything has changed and they are now an individual again. Not just a person alone. Not just a person without a mate. They are a fully capable, ideally suited, individual with a reason to live. They have a Godly purpose still to carry out.

Divorced people need to realize they are real. Their marriage was real. The pain they feel is real. The separation is real. The fact they are now alone is real. Too many divorced people are wandering around in a fog of fictitious creation surrounding their circumstances.

Well meaning friends help soothe painful memories by describing a life that does not include the reality of their broken relationship. Family members try to create an atmosphere for moving on by ignoring the reality of the broken marriage with family happenings and involving the person in a maze of events.

They all mean well. The truth is that the only way to get past the pain is to go through. Rebuilding can not take place until the person admits they have some damages that need to be fixed. Like repairing a damaged roof on the house, a person has to inspect the damage in order to ascertain what is needed to rebuild. The time alone is necessary for them to take inventory of who they now are and what they need to do to move on. They need to have a plan and a direction before moving again.

The heart of a man needs a challenge to rebuild around. The heart of a woman needs to be rebuilt around her beauty. It may sound shallow and trite but it is still true. He excels at being a man when he focuses on competing. She excels at being a woman when she feels beautiful. They need that motivation for the long road of rebuilding that lies ahead. If the journey is not fun or provides no excitement, who will want to take it?

His major need is to rebuild a purpose for his life that will once again focus him on what is important. It must have an element of fighting through and an adventure to make life interesting. He has to believe that it is a worthy fight and that he is man enough for the challenge.

Her major need is to rebuild her image of herself. This is important on all levels for her because it is her image that drives her in the marriage to desire to show off God's image. A woman without a desire to show herself off is unnatural, unhealthy. She needs to recapture that desire in her life and that takes time and a chance to inventory what she has to offer. From there she can rebuild her relationships and allow a man to seek her attentions again. Adventure and personal success will not mean a thing to her until she feels that it can somehow help her become all the woman she can be. And what she wants to be is a wife and mother.

This may sound patronizing and male dominant to some but a real woman acknowledges her heart in all things. She wants to love and be loved. The perfect relationship for the ultimate love and be loved scenario is marriage. When the marriage is good she is complete and everything else falls into line.

When he realizes what is needed he can start working on putting back the elements God intended to drive his life. She will never be happy with her life without rebuilding her heart the way God meant it to be. No matter how many great things they add back into their life after the divorce, nothing – NOTHING – will make them feel totally alive until their hearts are back in working order. Working order according to God's design.

God is an important part of the healing process. As the individual rests from the situational turmoil and reflects upon the experience and its effect and regathers the pieces of their heart by regaining their focus, the Holy Spirit brings a dimension of love back into the person's life. This is important. How important this process is can not be overstated.

No one can tell exactly what is lost in a divorce process for either him or her. Only God knows the level of destruction they have endured. But one thing is sure. They both feel the loss of love in a most acute sense. His logical processes of dealing are overwhelmed because his feelings are raging. Her ability to think with her feelings are sidelined because of the hurt, anger and outrage often associated with such dealings. They may not even realize that the thing they are grieving is the loss of love they feel.

They are born in love. For the most part people – even non church people – do not disavow God, so they live their lives with the Holy Spirit, God's love, in their lives. Divorce may be the first time in their lives that they can sense that love is gone or at least far away. It's a hole that only God can fill. Lets make this part very clear. For many people divorce is probably the first time in their life they have experienced a monumental loss of love that has left them with a huge hole inside.

Maybe they had a loved one pass away previously. But there were other relationships to fall back on, especially for her. Suddenly, they both find themselves torn apart and losing another loved one. Who does a person turn to? On what relationship does a person fall back on when the loved one they are grieving for is themselves? He lost her and she lost him. But they really lost themselves. He was part of her and she part of him. It was them that died. The greatest, most loving relationship in the world has just been killed. Not only did they lose themselves and watch themselves pass away, but they did it to themselves. Pain, anger, hurt, outrage and especially guilt cloud their every thought.

They need love to come back into their lives in order to move on. The same love they just killed. They just pushed it away in order to achieve some other goal for their lives. Even the worst marriage leaves traumatic traces of these feelings on both of them. On top of needing love they now feel unworthy of it because they also know they killed it. They chose to end its life when they chose to separate themselves.

It may seem a little thing. It may seem an obvious thing. But getting love back into their lives is not as simple as finding another relationship. God is love. God is what is missing after divorce. They pushed god away when they pushed love away. The only way to get God back into their lives is by way of asking forgiveness. The only way to allow love to come back to them is to ask forgiveness for pushing love away in the first place.

This concept escapes most people and they fight the feeling of lost for the rest of their lives. Sometimes they meet someone who helps them regain the love they have lost by helping them come to terms with the feelings they are felling. One of them is guilt and guilt leads them to recognize they have offended God. Sometimes they fall into the word of God and discover a fresh, new relationship with their Lord that renews their spirit and brings the love back into their lives. Sometimes they just flounder around and move from relationship to relationship searching for love. Unfortunately the answer is simple and closer to hand than many would admit possible. Ask forgiveness of love. Ask forgiveness of God.

He was pulled apart and she was pulled apart. What gets forgotten is that the third member of the marriage picture was God. God the Holy Spirit was told that He was dead to them. He had no say in the process once they decided to separate. He was pushed away by both of them as they denied love existed between them. They denied He existed in the relationship. As much as it hurts them it hurts God more. Maybe they both are at fault for the end of the marriage (that's usually the case) but God did not do anything wrong. He was all in from the beginning. He did everything they would allow Him to do to keep it together. In the end they decided against God. They decided against love. Essentially, for a marriage to end, both he and she have to admit they did not do what God wanted them to do.

That is what has to be forgiven. Both he and she have to admit they killed the love that once they shared. Then they have to ask forgiveness for driving love away from themselves. No one else did it. He did not steal her love and she did not steal his love. They pushed it away together. Now, separately, they must ask forgiveness and seek to draw love back into their life.

The good news is that the Holy Spirit is waiting to return to them. He will not force Himself back into their lives. That is a fact. But He will come flooding back into them at the simplest cry of forgiveness. God is love. He can not exist without loving. He lives to love and shower His love upon His people. He is most certainly waiting for them to invite Him back.

What about the non-church divorce? What about the person that does not believe in God? Are they destined to live without love forever? Nonsense. God loves all His creation. A church person may specifically ask forgiveness of God during a crisis time like this in their lives and a non-church person may not. But most of them recognize and take some responsibility for what happened. That is a key for non-church people.

When they admit that they caused the divorce they take responsibility. When they sorrow over the love they have ended they reflect upon the condition of their own soul. When they cry out for that love and mourn its passing they tug on the heart strings of the very God they deny. When they lament their loss of love and cry out in their alone times for someone to love them again, the Holy Spirit moves in as close as they will allow Him to and brings love back into their life. Even if they will not let Him love them face to face, so to speak, God will find other ways to share His love with His creation every day. As long as they want love in their life there is hope that they will one day love Him.

A person must know that love is possible in order for hope to fill them. Any person without the chance of love in their lives admits to a lack of hope. Love breeds hope. Divorced people need love as well as hope. Without love or hope they do not pursue life with the commitment necessary to succeed. Their efforts are lackadaisical at best no matter how they look on the outside. Unless they think there is a reason for the effort why would they put much into it?

Both men and women can have healthy, normal hearts after divorce. It requires knowing what happens when separation occurs and dealing with the rebuilding process in a mature, responsible manner. The marriage experience has to be incorporated into the growth process for the divorced person like any other experience they go through. It can not be ignored or glossed over. It must be dealt with in the truth of its reality. It happened. It has changed them. They can be whole again but it will be a different whole than they knew before.

Divorced people can be viable parts of a perfect marriage picture again if they have rebuilt their hearts properly and fully to line up again with what God designed them to be. He must return to being a real man again and she to being a real woman. Then they can move on.

Marriage is God's plan and it must be carried out according to His design. This includes the hearts of the man and woman that God created, working in the way God designed them to work. Healing is always God area of expertise. He created the human beings we are. As the Creator He is also the Great Physician. He knows best what to do about what ails us.

Chapter Fourteen

Homosexuality and Lesbianism

In recent times no other issue has so rocked the church world as the issue of homosexual and lesbian marriages. A man marrying a man and a woman marrying a woman. The very thought raises looks of disgust from most dignified church people. (And quite a few non-church people, too.)

You shall not lie with a male as with a woman. It is an abomination. Leviticus 18:22 is often sited and spoken as though that is the end of the discussion. Final. Finished. Church people spout it like it solves everything. They speak the truth but do not understand it. They shout the scripture but do not live it. Sure they live the letter. But what do they know of the intent?

Church people can not use one scripture and ignore all the others as fits their comfort zones. They shout the part about it being an abomination like they have declared their own personal righteousness by separating themselves from the abomination. Church people use separation as their ministry technique too often.

Jesus sat with the sinners and tried to talk with them and teach them. Too often churches today speak at people but do not talk to them. The homosexual/lesbian community is fairly small in numbers. But the number of sympathizers is growing daily. Why? Primarily because the church has shown a decided lack of sensitivity to an issue that tears at the fabric of healthy society.

Churches are the number one reason homosexuality and lesbianism are growing in popularity. That is not to say that personal choice is not to blame. People always do whatever people want to do. But churches have laid the ground work to creating an atmosphere conducive to going the wrong way. There are three reasons for this.

One, everyone likes to go against what the church says, seeing as how the church has no authority in most communities anyway. Churches are an easy target for groups or individuals to attack. And a hot button with the church is homosexuality. It is also an area most churches are unprepared to deal with. Which makes them uncomfortably silent after they issue their edict.

Two, churches do not teach what a real man is or a real woman, so they are very much to blame for the fake men and women who are turning to alternative relationships. It is too easy to stand on the sidelines and second guess those in the game. The church wants the glory of the win but does not get off the bench and into the game. People do not respect those who demand the glory but do not actually play the game. Churches are disconnected from society. They have no influence in their communities. They are not in the game. They are unruly fans yelling out their desires from the stands.

Three, let's not forget the sin issue. Sin invites the attack of the enemy of God into the very home of the individual or individuals who are opposing God. When a family, living under the same roof, acts out its intent to deny God, it is understandable how they would soon stray into sinful and perverted territories. Pornography, drugs, alcohol, over indulgences, bisexuality or even homosexuality. What the world sees as addictions are simply demonic influences being played out in the person's life.

Everyone feels the attack. It's called temptation. No one is immune to it. Even Jesus was tempted. But He never sinned. Meaning, he never gave into the temptations. Sin is not inherited or designed into us. But those around us do influence how we feel and react to different things.

Who else should know more about what God designed real men and women to be? No one. The church has dropped the ball and now they want to blow the referee's whistle to stop the game. Either the church needs to get in the game or admit they are not in the game. Either way, they are not the referee. God is the referee.

Vengeance is Mine, I will repay, says the Lord, in Romans 12:19. The church was not called together to be a referee or a police unit. The church is a newspaper. The church is the system for telegraphing the good news of the salvation offered to mankind all over the world. The church is to be the example of what God wants in His creation.

So how come the church spends more time condemning people than teaching them? Not all churches do this. But to say that this is not the overall theme most people see coming out of the churches they know would be a lie. The church must deal with the reality of the situation. They are not the respected pillars of society they once were. Churches must fix the damaged view the community has of them. Then they must become the teaching influence God called them to be.

Like most media today, the church has taken to putting its spin on the news rather than just reporting it. The same way the world news organizations tend to downplay and criticize all things God, the church has taken to criticizing and downplaying all things world. But everyone acknowledges that news organizations are not supposed to be doing that. Fair and impartial reporting requires detachment from the subject to some extent. Too much opinion makes the story about who is reporting more than what they are reporting.

It's time churches go back to reporting the good news rather than trying to enforce it. The world spins every story for its own agenda. That is because the world acknowledges so many agendas and they all compete. God does not compete. He simply says there are options. Option one, you go to heaven. Option two, you go to hell. Give people those two options and there is no reason to spin anything. Clear choices. The spin is only good if there are no clear choices. The spin seeks influence by playing on feelings.

It is true, homosexuality is a sin. It is an abomination under the eyes of God. Man was not created to have sex with other men. God never designed it to be that way and there is nothing that supports any claim that men are made any differently now than at any time in the past.

No evidence has ever been found linking homosexuality with any physiological difference in one man or another. Homosexuality is a choice. Pure and simple. There is no gene that got messed up. There is no chemical imbalance. There is nothing but the choice of a man.

The question is not whether the choice is legal or sinful or anything else. The question is why a man would make such a choice. Why would a man leave the normal search for the beauty of a woman, as designed by God, and seek the love of another man?

Heterosexual males everywhere cringe at the thought of such a relationship. Maybe that is why churches deal so poorly and helplessly with the issue. (Most are lead by heterosexual men.) Maybe its something deeper. Maybe churches just don't know what to do.

What has to go wrong for a man to seek out the intimate company of another man? There must be some catalyst or precipitating event in the man's life that makes it okay in his mind to switch goals. Something, maybe a lot of somethings, have to cause the man to make a decision to be different. He is not born different. He chooses different.

First his battles have to become perverted. What would normally allow him to fight for a woman's love would have to be transferred over to a male model. Second, he would have to desire an adventure that brings out his masculinity in a way that attracts other men. Thirdly, he would have to believe that winning that man of his dreams adds to his life in some way.

Now since two men are involved they both have to be doing this same thing. During the process one of them will have to take dominion and the other become submissive. Unlike a woman who gives her love freely, two men will enter into a shallow relationship based on getting what they want, whether that be sexual release or domination or submission. They will call it love but neither has much practice at real love and without a woman involved what they can best hope for is infatuation or a deep sense of respect, since that is what a man has to give.

Because it is two men neither can draw love out of the other. It is an impossibility. They can have a deep respect for one another, but love is of God and there is no God relationship in two men. Remember? It is an abomination to God. He can not look on it. He can not bless it with His presence. He will still call out to them and urge them back to the right path. But He can not bless their sin.

Whatever it is called it is not love they feel. Fake love, maybe. But not love. Not real love. Real love wants to show off the image of God. The real image of God is the heart of the man joining with the heart of the woman and becoming one. Two men do not become one. They are two existing together but each has a separate agenda. There is no mutual point of bonding for them. They must play two different roles.

The lack of true love in the arrangement is an important factor in helping a man understand his wrong choice. Something made him feel that way. Something drove his heart that way. Something in his life forced him to turn away from his designed purpose to become a real man under God's guidelines.

For whatever reason he changed his purpose and defied God's plan. But it is choice, not destiny or some mutation in his body. Claiming a medical reason or physiological or anthropological reason is silly and defeats the honest intention. The fact still remains. Bad choices were made. Good choices can turn things back around.

That's a key. It is not a single choice to be gay. The choice is not gay or straight. It is a series of choices made over a long period of time as the damaged person seeks solace in the things they can find for themselves.

Truthfully, homosexuality is more an answer to the pain than a choice to rebel. The homosexual male is at home with the perverted or wrong thinking because he has learned to live with it. Like a prisoner of war, a person can get used to anything and even accept what was considered outrageous before. Such is the progression of homosexuality. It is a learned behavior reinforced with pleasurable consequences along the way until it is accepted as a lifestyle.

Whether dominant or submissive the man must accept a role. That role must fulfill a need he has or believes he has. It does not have to be real, only perceived to be important. Wrong thinking does not have to be based on a lie. It can start out with truth and gradually mutate into the lie.

A young boy can be terrible at sports and weak and small. The taunts of his peers can drive him to seek answers and solace in other things. If those other things lead him to a homosexual release he will still seek reward and acceptance there. Those are the things missing in the other part of his life. If he finds acceptance there he will return to it again and again until he learns to live within the boundaries of his new found acceptance. Stepping away from that acceptance would be unpleasant so he chooses to imbed himself deeper and deeper within the lifestyle protecting himself from being yanked out of the very thing that makes him feel accepted. Eventually he comes to identify with the lifestyle as the thing that saved him. Then he allows the thing that saved him to give him his identity. He becomes homosexual. (Much like the Christian experience in reverse.)

Not all scenarios are this simple. Certainly there are far more complicated evils accosting our young men each day than simple peer pressures. But peer pressure should not be ignored nor should the simple process of indoctrination that the homosexual lifestyle uses be dismissed.

Homosexuals train up new homosexuals into accepting what they are. This is the lie. People are not born homosexuals. They choose to become homosexuals.

No one has to tell a man what to do with a beautiful woman when he gets her alone. He knows deep down in his heart what is supposed to happen. The couple may learn new things with each other, but there is no period of indoctrination while they come to grips with accepting themselves and understanding why they feel the things they feel. Somewhere a man must learn the putting away of his desires for a woman and placing them on the man. The reverse for a woman.

An old saying says misery loves company. Well, if homosexuals could be said to be miserable then they are doing a bang up job of training up more miserable people. In truth, they are not miserable. They are hurting. Something has hurt them. Something has devastated their decision making process and turned them against God and His ways. Something has made them hurt so bad they want to inflict this hurt on God Himself, if they could. Hence, the need to turn others to their cause. Away from God. Like they have won something from God in the process.

A man has to be indoctrinated into becoming intimate with another man the way he would naturally just become intimate with a woman if left alone. It is not a matter of teaching methods or process. It is a matter of overcoming the mind's natural thought pattern that something is wrong. The lie is that there is something wrong in the homosexual. There is nothing wrong with him. He is fine. He is just making bad choices based on bad information.

No man has ever just stopped kissing a beautiful woman and thought to himself that he really hated that so he would try men now. It doesn't happen like that. Trauma causes a rethinking of social norms and physical desires. Something away from the natural relationship with a woman causes him to rethink his goals. Choices made under the pressure of this trauma causes the man to go in wrong directions. His wrong thinking and wrong direction combine to create a wrong path. Far enough down that path and he will have to justify the existence of his deviant path to someone, even if just to himself. It can be anything from physical or emotional pain to an out of control desire to experience every pleasure imaginable. But still a choice is made.

Justification is dangerous. Anything can be justified if enough untruth is applied. A man that has been taken advantage of enough can justify killing the next person that takes advantage of him if he wants to. It's that easy. Things done by justification are never sound or proper.

Something that is right does not need to be justified. If a law is broken a police officer does not justify stopping the lawbreaker. If a principle is ignored the result does not have to be justified by anything. It will be shown to have deviated from the proper course of the event under analysis. If a man jumps out a window, now matter what the justification, he will fall downward. Gravity demands it.

Homosexuality, like other deviant choices, can be justified and even understood. But it can still never be called right or healthy. People who accept unhealthy things in their life and things that can be proved wrong, are damaged people. No one eats rotten meat or poisoned vegetables without a damaged decision making process. They have to get to the place in their mind where other choices are not good for them.

Real men of God are undamaged men. Homosexuals are damaged men. They were taught to be who they were. Real men are taught and accept the challenge of being what God designed them to be. Homosexuals can retrain themselves and seek retraining to become all that God designed them to be. Just as a husband of fifteen years can one day decide to divorce his wife and move in with a man the decision can work in the reverse. The notion that somehow the guy woke up to who he was and can now never go back on his real identity is a lie. A demonic lie.

It must be understood that homosexual men are not just perverts or deviant miscreants that society should not have to suffer with. They are human beings, created in the image of their God and sidelined by circumstances and choices. They are good people many times with a desire to contribute as much to society as anyone else. In fact their desire to be part of society is partly to blame for the choices they have made. They made those choices thinking this was their best option for happiness and fulfillment.

The choices are simple choices and seemingly inane actions. A small giving in to a forbidden subject. A chance investigation of it. A trial just to test the waters. All of these choices seem easy enough to back out of at any time.

The problem is not with the choices. Investigating something is not a problem. Testing something out is not a problem. The problem is what a person uses as their guide and standards. The problem is in how they measure success. Real men measure success by God's standards. Fake men measure success by a path of least resistance. Real men fight to be recognized as real men. Fake men do not fight for that. They fight to be accepted for whatever they choose to be.

Before a full investigation of the homosexual lifestyle can be made, a man has to set aside the normal agenda of a man. He has to deny his integral design. He has to put aside what truly drives him and accept false drivers for his life.

A real man wants a battle to fight. Something with purpose and a real opportunity to make a difference. Something that proves he's a real man. He takes up the fight he has been trained to look for. He ignores the fights not worthy of his attentions.

A false man will accept a fight over anything, especially personal differences of opinion. The homosexual will believe his fight to be accepted is a real battle. Fake men do not have to be homosexuals. But homosexuals do have to be fake men. Whether they use violence as their measurement, or refinement of surroundings, or an over exaggerated sensitivity to feelings, homosexuals are damaged men trying to fake being real men in the only ways they no how.

Unfortunately a real battle for a man has a purpose that lifts up and adds to the community he lives in. A homosexual lifestyle does not lift up the real community. It detracts from its growth process. Fake men have to build fake communities. They can not compete in the normal, natural community so they create a place they can prosper within and then draw others in to help them create the impression of normalcy.

Like the American who mistakenly believes that freedom is free and does not need to be maintained with a military presence, the homosexual community believes it does not need the heterosexual community. Both beliefs stem from a discontented feeling with society's values and resulting actions. But just as it would be devastating to the health of the United States to do away with its armed forces it is similarly unhealthy to do away with the natural, heterosexual relationship of the man and the woman.

The normal, natural heterosexual community is designed to recreate itself from nothing, just two people sharing a life together. The homosexual agenda is to change that view, but it can only create itself from that which comes out of the heterosexual community. Homosexuals can not procreate. Their lifestyle is a dead lifestyle. It can not create. It can not create a oneness. It can not create progeny. It can only steal from those who do create. It steals the idea of love. It steals the reality of marriage. It steals the offspring of the healthy community. A man would not suffer a thief to come into his house so why would anyone expect a community to suffer a thief in their midst?

A man must accept a lie to turn against his natural inclination to do something important for others and fight instead to make others do something important for him. That is what a homosexual agenda is all about, forcing or coercing society to accept an alternative lifestyle whether it adds to that society or not.

Is this important? Think about it. The main reason men do not take responsibility is that they have been tricked into believing a real man is something different than what God designed them to be. Consequently, they do not take their rightful places in families, do not act like the men God designed them to be. The enemy does not care what men believe they are supposed to be, as long as they do not believe they are supposed to be what God wants them to be. A homosexual agenda accomplishes that task. It draws the man and the woman away from becoming what God truly designed them to be. As an added bonus to the enemy, it also denies God's right to be Creator and Designer of the universe. It perverts His design. It hijacks His creation.

A real man wants to live an adventure. He thrives on the release of the chemicals that flow through his system when he is active. The adventure has to be something that takes him into new places and allow him new experiences. A man of God, a real man, uses scripture and biblical doctrine to set his boundaries for what he will and will not allow in his adventures. A homosexual man denies God's scriptures because they are contrary to his choices and is generally open to almost anything happening in his adventures. Accepting the lie that scripture is wrong and not for them the homosexual uses his freedom from scripture as an excuse to try anything and everything his mind or someone else's can think up for pleasure.

A real man wants a beauty to win. He does not want her throwing herself at him. He wants to work a little for her attention. It is part of his adventurous side and part of his warrior mentality. He wants to prove he is worthy of her before he acknowledges that he believes she is worthy of him. A homosexual man denies that women are beautiful. That is the first lie. Then they accept that their only choice for beauty lies in the men around them. That is the second lie. Finally they must tell themselves that the sexual perversion of their choices is somehow natural for them. That is the third lie. A fourth lie exists for a man when he admits that he will let another man win him over. Men are not won over. They do the fighting and the winning. Competition is built into their hearts. To accept that they can be won or fought for is contrary to the man's heart. He must tell himself that at least a part of him is a woman. This fourth lie concludes that God must have messed up, must have made a mistake, that God is not perfect.

How a homosexual balances this idea that at least a part of him is a woman and the fact that he finds women repulsive, is confusing. It requires much justification and probably a good deal of denial and maybe a pain ordinary men do not know. Some homosexuals do not find women repulsive in a visual sense. But they all must find women repulsive in a sexual sense or they are not homosexuals, men drawn to other men.

Discovering where the choices were made in a man's life may point to the answers which will allow him to challenge life once again and retake his manhood under God's design. It must be noted that the fake man must realize and admit that his life is not what God intended it to be. Without this realization there can be no hope for the fake man. His chosen lifestyle is an affront to God.

A man can not complain about the movies playing on his home DVD player. It is up to him to change what he is watching. Similarly, it is up to him to change how he views God. Either God is God or He is not. There is no in between. There is no gray area. God meant to do just what He did when He designed men. He meant for men to be just what He said they should be. If a man does not believe that, he is fighting against God from the beginning.

Where did he begin fighting the wrong battles? What factors were pressing in on his life during this period? What has changed since then? How can better changes be made now? How can a better fight be chosen?

Where did he begin using alternative limits to his life? What authority allowed those wrong limitations into his life? What was happening during this period of time when he was adjusting his life to line up with these wrong thinking standards? Were there any factors outside of his life pressing in? Were there other people or other events?

When did he begin to turn away from women? What turned him off? Was there a single event or was it a grouping of events? Why did he choose to turn toward men when he found women were not attractive to him? What made him think this new attraction was right for him?

A homosexual can be helped if he wants help. Many do not want help. Unfortunately a man would rather fight than switch. Even when wrong a man will put up a front and demand to be seen as correct. (Ever ask a man to stop for directions?) He will fight to maintain his right to be wrong as certainly as he would fight to right a wrong. A homosexual man does not want to be told that all he is living for is wrong any more than any other man. That part of the man isn't fake. Just misdirected.

Only a homosexual man who is asking questions is reachable by other people. To attack them and call them names or threaten them with eternal damnation is counter productive. Understanding them can place church people in the right place at the right time to maybe answer their questions and certainly to pray for God to open their eyes to the lies they have accepted. (That is perhaps the best prayer that can be prayed for them.)

Why is defeating homosexuality important? Consequently, why is homosexuality important to the enemies of God? Why does the world want to stand against the church on this issue?

Simple. Homosexuality defies the marriage relationship God designed. Without the marriage picture being painted as God planned it to be, mankind would never see the full image of God on display. Instead, if homosexuality has its way and fulfills its agenda, they would deny God and replace His plan with a plan that shows off man. On top of that, man's plan requires that no more babies be born. Men can not have babies. Two men in an intimate relationship will never be fathers. It is a biological impossibility. Again, a homosexual must lie to themselves in order to think there is something natural about two men living together as a married couple.

Marriage is a picture with a man and a woman in it. Both of them live their lives according to the design God placed within the heart of each and then come together to join those hearts as one.

Two men can not paint this picture. Two men are not drawn together. They choose each other based on the elements of their personal lusts, personal desires. They can not join hearts because a man's heart seeks the other half of the equation, the woman's heart. (He must kill his heart's desire so as to enact his fleshly desire.)

Two men are destined to live in a shallow relationship. No matter how intimate they become, the wall that is their hearts must be denied daily. The effort to hide their hearts from each other will require constant supervision and will stress the relationship, keeping them from attaining true intimacy. There will always be something they can not share.

A man also needs to learn how to love deeper than the battles and adventures and the seeking of experiences of his life. This is impossible when the one he has combined with has the same need. Who will help them go further? It won't be the Holy Spirit. God does not bless arrangements that seek to deny Him. They are left to discover the depths of true love without the One who is love Himself. Can a man find a five star meal in a garbage can? Not likely.

Here's an important statement to witness.

There is no argument that can stand up under scrutiny for a homosexual life style. No matter the information shared or how vehemently it is discussed, the argument boils down to the fact that there must be no God, or that God is a weak character whose ideas have come and gone. Impossible. God is God. He created everything. To deny Him is to deny the existence of everything. Ludicrous.

There should be no argument. Church people lend credence to the homosexual lifestyle when they pretend it is worth arguing about. They should stop arguing and start showing people there is a better choice. No argument. If someone wants to argue then he or she is decidedly against God to begin with. The argument then is not about homosexuality, but God. Settle the God issue and there is no homosexuality issue. No argument.

Choices were made. New choices are possible. Good choices can turn things around. Does anyone believe that any person would choose something bad for themselves. Of course not. What they have chosen is what they have perceived as good for them. The answer is to show everyone that God has something better. People always choose the better. They don't argue about it. They just do it.

A popular game show from the seventies had it right. Monty Hall's Let's Make a Deal offered contestants a chance to trade up every night. Given something they wanted, maybe a hundred dollar bill, they were also given a chance to trade up to what was behind curtain number one or door number three. Most people went for the door or the curtain. Some won larger prizes. Some got stuck with a goat or a years supply of oatmeal. The point was that most went for the deal, hopeful of advancing their position. The attraction to the audience was a chance to see people tricked into choosing wrong. (Sound familiar?)

People will make choices for the better if they can see a hope for it being better. And who better to show the world what the better choice is than a church member? A married church member showing off the full image of God in all His glory and love. The church should stop arguing and start showing. It's put up or shut up time.

A chapter on lesbian relationships is not going to enhance any picture of marriage that people would like to embrace. If man with man is wrong because it defies God and the marriage picture He has planned for His creation, then women with women is as bad a choice. The discussion would be similar.

But a woman does not have to deny her heart to seek out another woman for her intimate partner. Not fully anyway. Both women will want to be fought for. Not fought over but for. Another woman would understand this better than some musclebound guy who thinks fighting over her is the same thing. Between two women the fight for her attention and her heart could be any test that either one of them uses to qualify others for inclusion in their intimate circle. Maybe bringing her flowers when she is not expecting them, or buying her a dinner out. Maybe it is a persistent phone call to check on her daily. Something as simple as being interested in her can constitute fighting for her attention. And she is designed to give it to those who would seek it.

She wants to share an adventure in order for her life to have meaning and again, another woman can come along with an adventure they both can live out together. Women practice this all the time. They go shopping together. They have lunches together. They take road trips together. They even go to the bathroom together. Their lives are packed full of sharing adventure. They practice it daily with female friends around them.

A woman's heart also desires to unveil a beauty and be recognized for her beauty. Women are always complimenting each other on the things they wear, what they do to their hair and how they are groomed. It is a natural practice of their daily lives. It is part of their sharing lifestyle.

What a woman has to deny is that she is designed to have children. That may sound sexist but it is a fact. Her heart seeks out a male because he is the other half of the equation that allows her to be whole. Part of that wholeness is undeniably the desire to have children. He is designed to be the other half of her heart as well as the other half of her biological ability to produce offspring. Two women, in an intimate relationship, can not have babies. It is a biological impossibility. She must tell herself that she does not need babies in order to fulfill her life. She may lie to herself and say that adoption is the best idea.

Well, if her lifestyle is the best option then soon all women should be joining her and there would be no more babies. Or, she must accept that her lifestyle is expected to be against the natural woman's lifestyle forever. What mind could conceive of a species where the female of that species has two roles? Literally, what part of a species does not believe that it must recreate itself? Would not the part that does not recreate itself die out? Is that not what natural selection teaches? The strong survives. The weak dies out.

Would not then the lesbian lifestyle be construed as the weak part of the species? Who promotes weakness as a good thing? Only the hurting or the damaged. Only those who are trying to overturn the natural ways of things.

Given the atmosphere of our times and the dangers associated with raising children today, a woman deciding not to bring children into the world, though it is denying her heart in one respect, can also tell herself she is saving a child from pain. The compassion with which a woman considers such things is as viable and strong a part of her as her heart. So, her reasoning may not be as faulty as church people would like to think. The places where it falls into suspicion is those places that deny what God intended marriage to be. There she will have to justify, create new alternatives or just plain outright lie.

The final argument is that both men and women have to deny God and exchange their normal heart drives for unnatural heart drives. Maybe a women comes closer to using her heart in a lesbian relationship than a man does in his homosexual endeavor, but both are forgetting that their heart is searching for its other half. And God designed the other half to be of the opposite sex. The have to tell each other they have found the love of their life when they enter into an intimate alternative lifestyle. They have to convince themselves that somehow they are different and that this is what is meant for them.

However they do it they must do it. Somehow they must accept the love they feel toward one another as the deep love God intended for his people's hearts. Intense emotion may pass for God's love for a time, but it requires a lot of lies after the emotion wears off. And emotions always wear off.

God does not like it but He will allow it. They are hurting themselves and God knows it. His love is all about freedom, though, and He will not force Himself into their lives even if it means they are destined for eternal damnation because of their wrong choices.

Romans 1:22-29 says it like this. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man — and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things. (They made their own God's out of things they could control – like their lifestyle or the places they gather.) Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves, who exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. For this reason God gave them up to vile passions. For even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature. Likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due. And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a debased mind, to do those things which are not fitting; being filled with all unrighteousness, sexual immorality, wickedness. God let them seek their vile pleasures because He will not force Himself into their lives.

They believe they are in control of their lives because they have forced society to accept their alternative lifestyle. However, it is sin that is in control of them. Their desire to override God's plan has made them subject to the laws of sin. The only payment for sin is death. Eternal death and damnation in the afterlife or an acceptance of the death Jesus offered on the cross. One way or the other sin will have its death.

Jesus asks us to seek forgiveness in Him and He will offer His sacrifice for our sin. It has been offered once for all mankind. Everyone has access to Jesus and His sacrifice. All that is required is asking for forgiveness. And that only requires admitting that something is sinful.

A woman may be able to play at the love game better in a lesbian relationship than a man can because much of her life has been built around loving and relationships and seeking the love of her life. There is no doubt. Women are better with intimacy than men are. At least at first in the marriage picture. But the fact remains. Two women in an intimate relationship can not deny that their choices got them where they are.

Like the men they are products of the environment, their experiences and the rewards offered to them for the choices they made growing up. She was not born a lesbian. A man and a woman did not come together and seek to have a child that would not be like them. Species are not designed to create offspring that will deny their true form and purpose. That requires free will and choice. A deadly choice.

God set his creation in order so that like things would beget like things. A horse gives birth to another horse. A fish lays eggs that produce other fish. Each of these offspring grow up and reproduce again and continue the species. For two women to decide that somehow things got messed up and they have been born to stop the cycle is the ultimate selfishness. If they are the last of the species then the whole world is about them.

In Genesis 1:25 it says, And God made the beast of the earth according to its kind, cattle according to its kind, and everything that creeps on the earth according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.

It was good that God created everything according to its kind. Men and women were also created according to their kind. God warns His people not to become intimate with animals. They must stick with their kind.

Lesbian relationships need to be understood and the women need to be talked to and embraced and drawn back into the plans God has for them. Prayer helps. Being there if they have a question helps. But living a fantastic and powerful married life before them will do more to peek their interest than anything. It must be noted that for a women to forsake the natural male-female relationship, she must be really turned off to the male part of the species. It will take a real man and a real women showing off the image of God to peak her interest and give her something else to think about besides her own experiences.

Curiosity and circumstance drew them into the lesbian lifestyle. Use curiosity and circumstance to draw them back into the true usage of their heart. Church people have a great tool for evangelism at their disposal and most do not even know it. The marriage picture, when fulfilled by real men and women of God, has the power and ability to draw others to look and ask and desire more.

What better can a church person ask for?

Chapter Fifteen

Marriage and the Children

When children are introduced to the marriage picture, it gets far more complicated. Every parent knows the joy of having children and the tremendous amount of work required to raise them. Children are expensive. They are not quiet. They break things and explore in ways that some never would think to do. Children are little people with hearts and minds of their own. Painting children into the marriage picture is not as easy as just giving birth to them.

A married couple become parents when children are introduced into the picture. Parents are overworked, underpaid people who seldom get the respect or credit they deserve. It is imperative that a man be a real man before he try to raise a real little man or a real little woman. A woman who has not dealt with her fake woman issues will only pass those issues on to her children in the marriage picture.

It is important that a couple not throw out the marriage picture when the children are born and begin painting the family picture. God does not say to do this. In the bible the man's wife comes before his children. She is more important. This fact is expressed in the inheritance laws. A wife inherits her husband's estate before the children do.

God created the marriage picture to show off Himself. There is no reason to throw it out when children come along. Children change a lot of things but they are not a reason to throw out what the couple has worked so hard on. Instead, they should add the children to the marriage picture. God loves to show off His power. His power includes children.

Psalm 127:4-5 says it like this. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior, So are the children of one's youth. Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them; They shall not be ashamed, But shall speak with their enemies in the gate. Raised up, guided and aimed properly children are like an extension of the father. They finish what he has begun or at least they add to it.

Parents should be happy that God has trusted them with the tiny hearts of their children. It is in this trust that they can understand God's plan a little better. God gives people the information, lets them practice a little, corrects them when they get off line and blesses them as they grow and succeed at each endeavor. Is that not a good model for parents to use?

Children are a chance for the couple to grow even closer together. It is also a chance for each one to learn a deeper love than they ever thought imaginable. It is easy for a parent to think of their children as part of themselves. They know that they had a part in creating that life. So loving what is part of a person is easy. But as the father watches the mother's love being shared with the children and the mother watches the father's love being shared with the children, each one goes through a realization that the other is really a part of them.

Children have the effect of causing the couple to reevaluate themselves. A husband becomes a father and a wife becomes a mother. Her part may seem easier to digest because she is physically attached to the birthing process and actually labors through it. But as a man becomes a father he is forced to look at his marriage picture in a different way than ever before.

Where he used to see his part and her part in their marriage picture before, he now starts to see their part in creating a child. Instead of being part of a picture like before, he now sees himself as a creator of that picture. As a creator he understands that he needs The Creator, God, in his life like never before.

Why? Men understand that God is in control. Men understand authority. Some send and some call and some go and some come. Authority. They may not like that there is a God or that He is in charge. But a real man, a man of God, will seek God at the birth of a child like never before for one reason. He knows he can not raise a child.

Children do not come with instruction manuals. Not that a man would read it anyway. So real men do what they understand works. They give the child to God. That's what He wants. That's what they do.

Now, if a father gives his child to God and begins painting a family picture, then the picture he paints is going to be him waiting for God to add everything. This is a hard situation for a man.

A man needs to understand that the children are just an add on to the Marriage picture. He and his wife have already laid the background and now there are children in the foreground. God is already in the marriage picture of the Godly man and woman so He is ready to begin unifying the family under His image in a totally comfortable way. The children are drawn into the picture the parents have already created. It already has all the love and experiences painted into it. It is already real and alive. It already has the heart of the couple painted into it.

The adjustment is not so much for something new as for something added to the old. Like buying new furniture. A couple do not go out and buy a new house to put the furniture in. They put it in the old house and arrange things around to make the best display of all they have.

The marriage picture undergoes a similar rearrangement when children come along. The husband and wife now have a hat that says mom and dad. He has already painted a work hat and a career hat and a hobby hat and a husband hat and a lover hat into his part of the picture. Now he has to add a dad hat. Mom undergoes the same adjustment.

The key word is adjustment. Nothing should be destroyed or left out of the couple's original picture because children have come along. It should merely be a matter of adjusting for the children and making allowances for being parents now.

Everything in their lives is changing but, everything is also just the same as it ever was. Circumstances and situations may be changing. Life may seem to be turned upside down. But how they deal with it was already established in the marriage picture they created together before the child was born. It all revolves around the image of God their picture shows off.

It does not have to be easy but it most certainly does not have to be difficult either. It should be a joy to share the marriage picture with the children. How else will the children know what to do when they get married to the other half of their heart unless they have learned it from their parents? (See the problem in a society that is not teaching such things to our children?)

Times will be adjusted. Plans will be adjusted. Dad's will take on new roles as high sheriff and protector of the realm and moms will share themselves unceasingly.

A real man is not jealous of the love the mom wants to shower on the children now. He is satisfied with his trust in her and her trust in him. Watching her mother the children with a love he has never felt the depth of before, is a draining experience for him. Literally. A man can be emotionally worn out by just watching his wife sharing herself constantly with the children. He has never been as close to erupting with emotion as he is now. But still remember, he is a real man, an adventurer, not one who sits around and thinks about things like love. This kind of love being released draws from him such a fountain of emotion that he may not be able to deal with it. Again, remember that he has no former experiences with that depth of love to relate to this experience.

When a father realizes for the first time how much he loves his children he is way, way, WAY out of his element. A good man quietly absorbs what he can and hopes to grow into the rest. A selfish man withdraws and seals himself off from what is almost a painful experience, dealing with something way beyond his comfort zone. A good wife recognizes both and draws him into her love and reminds him of their marriage picture as a focus and a familiar base for him.

Anyone who believes a man should always lead in the marriage relationship is wrong. A general knows when to send his scouts up ahead and when to position his troops in front of him. A good Husband also knows when to let his wife lead the way.

When it comes to matters of the heart she is usually more practiced and because of her physical attachment with the children she is definitely closer to the action. He should not feel inadequate because she can express her love easier or receive from the child easier. He should take her lead and follow after his heart to receive all the things he desires from the relationship.

A mother's love for her children is a perfect love that arises from deep within her heart and bubbles up without her being able to control it. No matter what a child does, that mother still loves that child with all her heart. She would do anything to help that child. Her love knows no limits. It is given without conditions of any kind.

A mother's love mirrors the love that God has for His children. Her unconditional love of her children is as close to God's unconditional love as a human being can get. She does not see the wrongs or rights of their lives. All she sees is that they are her children.

A Godly mother has the ability to bring God's love full force into the marriage picture. She gives her heart when she marries the man and she asks for nothing but his attention in return. She loves her children unconditionally and asks only that they love her back. She wants to guide them and help them make good decisions, but she does not make her help or guidance a part of the love she gives to them. Her love is for free. It is her gift to them. They do nothing to earn it and they can do nothing to make her stop loving them.

When a husband sees this love enter into his marriage picture he gets to view the full image of God's love for the first time up close and personal. Prior to this love show that moms put on for their children, a husband only knows the depth of his wife's love for him, given freely and fully. If he was stunned by the love she was capable of showing for him, he will be fall down, staggering amazed at the ability to love unconditionally.

Children bring out a lot of the heart of God in a woman. The husband sees it. The children grow up and see it. It becomes a very important center piece of their family relationships.

Nowhere in society is unconditional love showcased more than in the love of a mother for her child. Everyone else has reasons and the seeming ability to step away from hurts and withdraw their love at will. Mothers do not have such an ability. Real mothers love. It is their finest feature.

Of course, where love shows up in the marriage picture, the Holy Spirit shows up, too. God is present when mom loves her child. A mother's prayers for her children are always heard. She does everything for them in love. Her prayers to God are no different. Because she prays to God in love, she is actually praying to God with God, through God. A mother's prayers are very powerful.

While the mom is showing off the love of God and astounding her husband with a new depth of love he could only imagine prior to the children, dads are painting their part of the marriage picture, also. As important as the mom's heart is in showing off the full image of God, the dad's heart is just as important even if in a different way. While neither heart, the wife's or the husband's, is operating in a separate manner any more, they still have a particular ministry within the marriage structure and especially within the family.

If mothers are the source of the love of God then fathers are the source for the authority of God within the family. Neither operates separately though. This point can not be made strongly enough. That is why the marriage picture is so important. Starting a family does not mean starting a new painting for the family.

The husband and wife came together as one in the marriage picture. A family picture might be a temptation for the husband and wife to separate a little for the purpose of raising the family. Many parents do this when the children come along. They back off from the intimacy because of the stress of raising children. They view it as an efficient usage of their resources. It is neither necessary or a good idea.

Just as the husband and wife created a blended, unified marriage picture to begin their marital life, they need to continue it when children arrive. Children should be an addition not a complete change. As the husband and wife learned to coexist and paint their marriage picture for both of them they now need to add the children in for all of them.

The husband, on the other hand, does not just give his love. The wife learns to draw it out of him and guide him in how to use it even more deeply than his life before her allowed. He does love, but at a different level. He loves from his heart and it is freely given. But along with what he gives comes an expectation of reciprocation. He learned it by receiving it. Part of his experience says that love is love because it is returned.

A mother does not expect anything but love in return. A father expects obedience. Just as God expects obedience, and much of His promises are based on obedience, a human father expects along similar lines.

The father, because of his ability to stand back from the emotional side of the love relationship and see the truth of all actions, has a God appointed position as leader of the family. His leadership stems from the love he has for his family and is seasoned with a good deal of his desire to receive obedience from his wife and his children. A good leader shows his love by guiding and accepting true and righteous actions within the family. He deals with transgressions and wrong doing by seeking what will correct it. He moves and functions based on his love. A love that is constantly monitored by his wife and children. He must be tuned into what they believe about his love for them.

The two parts of God's heart given to the man and woman are joined in unity by the marriage picture. Together they create an awesome image of God's ability to draw two people together and join them in a unity so complete as to erase their previous lives and give them one new existence. Only God can take what was separate and strong and make it unified and stronger. That is what the marriage picture is all about, two people becoming stronger because of their union in God's love.

Whether they married in the church or out of it, their love draws the Holy Spirit into their lives whether they accept Him or not. He is trying to help them paint the picture of God in their lives as long as they continue to love one another. It is His ministry of love that helps marriages last.

When children enter the marriage picture, the Holy Spirit does not leave. He is given a greater influence in the family. It's not just a numbers thing. It is a love thing. When the mother's greater, unconditional love is put into action, the love of God, through the Holy Spirit, jumps to a new level.

The marriage picture grows when a child comes into it. Love grows, too. God does not get any bigger. God is always the same. He is constant. But the level of love He unleashes in the family setting is greater than the love unleashed in the normal marriage.

Here is a good place to bring out the point that some marriage pictures can progress forward with God's unconditional love without children. Maybe they shower this love on orphans or the homeless or any number of others who a good couple would commit their lives to helping. The focus is the commitment to share their love. A commitment to share love, to share God, is a call to the Holy Spirit to turn up the level of love. Whether it is a child or a relative in hospice or a friend in need or a neighbor going through a difficult time, love is the key to unleashing the power of God in a person's life.

It is not only the love, as seen through the mother, that is increased in the marriage picture when children arrive. The father's authority also increases. Not just because he now has children to order around and guide and raise. His authority increases on the same levels as the mother's love, emotionally, physically and spiritually.

As a couple the husband and wife become priests of God and as such carry the authority to share the love of God and His gospel, or good news. Their unity and presence are infused with the power and authority of God to be His representative at a higher level. This in no way places them in some special place above single people. The marriage union is just a way to draw on the Holy Spirit in a deeper manner and for a higher purpose. Sharing God's love with children, which is a usual progression for most marriages, is a higher call. It's God's natural way to show Himself off.

When children enter the picture the couple moves into another level of drawing on the Holy Spirit. It is a responsibility issue. Before they were responsible for each other. Actually, as one in the marriage picture, they were still responsible for just themselves. But when children come along, or a ministry opportunity to others presents itself, the couple is no longer responsible for just themselves. They are now responsible for others.

The responsibility does not extend to a legal or even a moral responsibility to the people. The responsibility is a responsibility to God. The Holy Spirit unleashes a greater power for authority in the life of the father – and thereby into the life of the mother as his other half – to be responsible to God for whatever He wants them to do in the lives of those the father has taken in.

It is a big responsibility for the man to accept God's desire for his heart. As a warrior the man had little trouble taking on the big fights. As an adventurer he traveled and tried out things as wide as the world he lived in. As a seeker of beauty he won the heart of his wife and became a champion for her love and adoration. Now, as a father, he becomes a leader of lives, his children.

God never means for His men to be sedated, sleepy eyed dreamers. He designed the heart of a man to live a life that builds and increases the kingdom of God. A real man of God is a man of action. He gets things done. There are many skills and many levels of those skills that God uses and requires in His efforts to build the kingdom of God. But one thing is always constant in the men who answer the call of God on their lives. They are found doing something that builds.

A father builds a part of God's kingdom within the marriage picture. His family becomes a micro model of God's people. A leader, a lover and the followers. Mom and dad lead and love together and the children follow by learning to love and be people of action themselves.

Dad's grow better at loving within the family setting and mom's grow better at leading as they embrace the ministry of each other and support each other with family issues. The children learn about loving and leading and making things happen. They in turn become valuable men and women of God as they grow up and they advance the kingdom of God further when they begin painting their own pictures. They continue what their mom and dad began in them.

Proverbs 22:6 says it like this, Train up a child in the way he should go, And when he is old he will not depart from it. The father's job and jointly the job of the mother, is to train up a child in the way they should go. Math teachers teach math. English teachers teach English. Moms teach love and dads teach leadership.

This is the way God designed the hearts of His men and women. Those who would destroy what God has designed only add to their obvious motives when they claim to be a new dimension of society. God is building. Those who would tear down what God wants to do are not builders. They are destroyers.

The perfect place to steal the plan from God is within the family. Men and women are affected. Children are left without proper guidance and leadership if the enemy can accomplish his theft. By redirecting the focus of the family God can be left out of the picture and God's plan can be stolen right out of the family setting.

Proverbs 28:24 says, Whoever robs his father or his mother, And says, "It is no transgression," The same is companion to a destroyer. Robbing from mom and dad is as simple as taking away what they have. Beyond their possessions there is the authority that God has placed within them. When a child rebels and does not respect the authority placed in the parents, those parents are robbed of what God wants to do with them.

A child who claims the right to live their life as they see fit runs the risk of being listed as a thief among the recorders in heaven. Any child going a different road than their parents had better be sure that God has called them into such a path. Maybe the parents have strayed from God. Maybe a child needs to make individual decisions to keep their life on track with the Lord. But a child had better be certain that what they are doing is from God or their life will hold a curse for rebellion until they repent.

There are warnings for fathers, too. Ephesians 6:4 records this warning, And you, fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord. Clearly God takes the role of leadership within the family seriously. Why? Because the Holy Spirit has given an extra level of authority to the words spoken by the father. They have a power to provoke the child to anger or to love. A dad who does not learn to love from the mom runs the risk of being too much the authoritarian and not enough the lover as God intended them to be.

Like an education that is too one sided a dad has to be less of his own heart at times and more of his wife's heart. They have to be in sync and in unity for this to occur and for him to know what is called for. Who wants an education where all that is learned is one way? People like variety. It is the spice of life. It is also the spark of God. A natural balance. He and She.

God can be all things to all people at the same time. He has that ability. People do not have that ability without the power of God evident in their life. Dad's need to be able to draw upon the power of God to love deeply when they need to and guide strongly when they have to. Mom's are just the opposite and need God for the same reason. Moms need to be able to draw upon the power of God to guide strongly when they need to and to love deeply when they have to. Both operate in the others heart gifting because they have been unified and joined as one. Yet mom will always love easier and probably better while dad will always lead easier and probably better.

Women get offended when the suggestion that men are somehow better at leadership is raised. They never get offended when someone suggests that men are not as good at loving, though. It is a pride thing and it is not very attractive when it rises up.

God designed men and women to be different. A woman claiming that she can do everything as well as a man or that she does not need him because he is inferior, defies the very fact that God designed them differently. It may be that the woman has been surrounded by fake men who took their leadership roles too casually and did bad jobs of leading. That does not negate the fact that God designed men to be the leaders of the family and women to be the lovers.

Both roles carry a power that makes the image of God full and mighty. Women need to understand that as long as they will do all the work, a lazy man will let them. If a woman likes the role of being the leader she has to ask herself, why? Does she believe her husband should be any less involved than she is? What role does she believe God has for him if she is the leader?

This next statement is not made lightly. Real women of God will not be offended by it. Women need to get back in their role as the lovers of God and the teachers of love in the families. Families are disintegrating because of a lack of love. Society lacks a discipline of love.

Women need to put down their usurped roles as leaders of the families and the churches and everything else and become the lovers of their men and families that God intended. Yes, they still need to take up roles of leadership, but only under the authority of the men God has placed in their lives.

If they have chosen well and are surrounded by real men, this will not be a problem. If they have chosen badly and the men around them are fakes, then the only thing that will draw out the real man is an education by the church and a real show of love by the women. Women in usurped roles of authority will never make things right. The situation is upside down. Even if they are real women, handcuffed by a bad marriage to a fake man, they can never hope to fix things with only half the equation working.

And no – NO – it is not better to have half the equation working than none of it. Like Elijah sitting under the tree and lamenting about being the only one left to worship God properly, women have got to trust God enough to realize He will do what needs to be done and He has the necessary people to do it. But as long as they usurp the positions of authority under whatever reasoning, then they also usurp God's ability to place the right people where they need to be. Women getting back into their roles as the lovers of God is a key to fixing society inside the church and outside the church.

However, this can not happen as long as men refuse to take up the fight and become the real men that God intended them to be. Any man who will let his wife carry the burden of leading and loving the family while he rests and watches is in jeopardy of standing before God and giving an account of his missed opportunities. How can God trust a man to build the kingdom of God if he will not lift a finger to build his own family?

Women can be leaders. That is not the point of God's two halves of the heart joined in the marriage picture. Women have and always will make good leaders. But they can only show off the full image of God if their husband is a good leader. She is not a whole leader until her husband is a true leader as a man. She will take her cue from her husband and her God as she grows into leadership positions.

There is no category or classification that is more or less appropriate for a woman's leadership abilities. There may be areas where she is more effective than others, just as a man would be more effective in some areas than others. But no one should make the mistake of assigning male and female properties to leadership.

A father should train up his children, male or female to handle all leadership opportunities. A mother should train up her children to handle love the way God intended them to. Together they prepare their children for whatever opportunity God opens up for them.

The point of God's two halves of a heart drawn together in the marriage picture is the need to work together to achieve unity and then show off the power of God. If the woman had all the tools or the man had all the tools neither would need the other. Instead of individualism, God designed his creation to need each other and by extension, to need Him.

Real men and women of God should be able to put down the race issues, the gender issues the economic issues and all the rest, in order to seek unity. The marriage picture is the ultimate example of unity. It grows even greater in example and responsibility when children are added to it.

God made no mistakes when he created Eve from Adam's rib. She was part of him at the beginning and in the marriage picture she becomes part of him again. Together they take dominion over the world they inhabit and train up their children to do the same.

Parents get the credit for good children. God should get the glory. He created the marriage that created the children that showed off a mighty God. No one else can do anything even close to that in the lives of men and women. Two hearts, drawn together by the love that God gave them, infused by that love and empowered by that love to reach greater and greater heights of love than ever before. Even those who would deny God's authority in their life should have the decency to admit that God knew what he was doing when he gave the perfect women to the perfect man. Together they make the perfect couple.

May all couples who read this, whether they be young or old, newly married, old hands at marriage or just thinking about marriage, find something that helps them understand their heart and all that God wants to do in their lives. May God bless them and keep them is the greatest prayer that can be prayed for them.

