Chapter 1_ God's Thoughts on Marriage and Divorce

God's Thoughts on Marriage and Divorce

It is God's desire that you have a happy marriage and a blessed family. To this end, He has provided a well laid out prescription for its structure and practice in His Word. Adhering to His guidelines of leaving and cleaving, one man one wife, selfless love and Christ-like submission will guarantee a blissful union that adequately typifies the original purpose and plan of God for the marriage institution.

From time to time, you need to take retrospective look at your marriage and compare it with how the Word of God says it should operate. If you find any difference between the state of your marriage and what God stipulates in His Word, then you need to make the necessary changes.

Man always has the tendency to follow the dictates of his own heart; do his own thing in his own way to his own detriment. His perverted will and hardened heart tend to abandon the perfect will of God and settle for the permissive. The results of this are the dysfunctional marriages and broken homes we see in the society today. It is hardness of heart that makes a person hold on to a grudge, bitterness or unforgiveness against his or her spouse for so long until it fosters selfishness, thoughtlessness and cruelty against each other, eventually leading to at breakup with a devastating impact on the children and those. connected to the family.

Marriage is a permanent engagement. Whether you got married before you got saved or not, it is until death do you part (Romans thi 7:2-3). God has unequivocally stated in Malachi 2:16 "that he hateth putting away." In Mark 10, Jesus was asked if it was lawful to put away one's wife, and He answered their question with a question that took them back to the beginning: "What did Moses command you? And they said, Moses suffered to write a bill of divorcement, and to put her away" (Mark 10:3-4). You will notice that they didn't say "Moses commanded us", meaning that they were merely given permission to get a bill of divorcement; it wasn't a commandment. "And Jesus answered and said unto them, For the hardness of your heart he wrote you this precept" (Mark 10:5). It was the hardness of their heart that led to the permissive will.

You see, you need to understand that in any area of your life when you keep insisting on doing things your way instead of God's way, God will leave you to yourself. When a hardened heart leads anyone to adamantly seek his own will, such individual will reap the devastating harvest of his or her choices. The fact that God allowed you to settle for His permissive does not mean that He will give you His blessings. Instead, you will be left to bear the !consequences of your willfulness alone.

While it is true that marriage can be sometimes tough, it is truer that there can be no rose without thorns, and life generally comes with all manner of challenges. You have to take it all in stride with the determination to make your marriage work. When problems arise in your marriage, you might be tempted to make comparisons and think your friends and all those good-looking couples out there are having it so good. You might feel that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence but have you asked how they manage to have it all together? If they will tell you the truth, you will discover that there is no sunshine without heat; every good thing comes with its own baggage of challenges. These people you admire also experience challenges but have decided that whatever happens they will forgive, forget and continue to forge ahead together in the spirit of love.

The thought of getting a divorce got saved might actually lead to a second, is until third or fourth marriage or other more traumatizing consequences. If you insist on ignoring God's injunction, the Lord will leave you alone but untold suffering may accompany that permissive will of you part 7:1 yours. 2 Thessalonians 2:10-12 speaks of those who reject the commandment of God to please their own depraved minds: "And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness."