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[Lesson For Marrieds]
Ecclesiastes 9:9
Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun--all your meaningless days. For this is your lot in life and in your toilsome labor under the sun.
It's God's will for us to enjoy our life with our spouse. Not everybody attains it, though. Two keys will help us to achieve this
1. Blueprint for a Great Marriage and Family
1 Corinthians 3:10
By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as an expert builder, and someone else is building on it. But each one should be careful how he builds.
This scripture talks about how we build churches, but also applies to building family. When we build a house, we need a blueprint. Don't just go to the site and start throwing it together. When we first got married, most of us were so happy. Sometimes our spouse asks us what kind of family we wanted. We are so confident that we would have a great family and would be happy. But when we are asked for more we become speechless. Some of us didn't have a great family in our childhood days.
We wanted a great family but have no plan of how to achieve this. We need to see in the Bible. We need to have a spiritual family, based on great friendships and full of fun. We need to come up with a blueprint of what we intended to build. We want to encourage each of you to come up with your own blueprint. Talk through all the changes.
When we have a blueprint for our marriage, raising up our child… we may not achieve all of his goals, we would still be successful and joyful in life
Is happy marriage and family your goal? Do we have a clear plan of how to get there? Do we discuss changes to our plan at key points in our life? Do we model our family after great examples in the kingdom?
Somebody made the analogy of family life to a plan flight. You have a flight plan. There are lots of external factors like wind, weather, loading, etc. You have to clearly know your destination, so you can make mid-course adjustments. We always feel safe because when our family knows where we are trying to end up
Even in child-raising, there are lots of external voices trying to tell us what to do. We have to sit down and talk, to make sure we're influenced by the right voices.
Sometimes we are into the habit of looking fine in the job and people think we are ok. We take more responsibilities than we can handle, and then it hurts our family. We have a nesting nature, gathering things around us without really having a plan. When we get more jobs we would end up rushing through our Quiet Times, getting stressed, having zero relationship time. We need to have counseling times with ourselves, to sit down, rethink, re-evaluate and readjust.
2. Never Compromise
Matthew 5:21-26
21 "You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.'
22 But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, 'Raca,' is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, 'You fool!' will be in danger of the fire of hell.
23 "Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you,
24 leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to your brother; then come and offer your gift.
25 "Settle matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to court. Do it while you are still with him on the way, or he may hand you over to the judge, and the judge may hand you over to the officer, and you may be thrown into prison.
26 I tell you the truth, you will not get out until you have paid the last penny.
When we read this scripture as a single, we feel good about ourselves. We didn't get angry with people. We got more angry after we got married. We are surprised how unmerciful we can be towards our wife and our children. We got frustrated a lot of times when they made mistakes.
We may have a blueprint, but we can compromise easily. Initially in our marriage, we'd always resolve conflict After a while, though, we got tired and we'd just let things go. We changed our goal. We went from striving for a perfect marriage, and we settled for a peaceful marriage. Eventually, it can go so bad that we might need major help.
To have a great family, we need to have a blue print and we should never compromise.
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