Single & Married Ladies – More Unshackled!

Hi Ladies,

“He who finds a wife finds a good thing, and obtains favor from the LORD.” – Proverbs 18: 2.   A wife is not only a good thing…she is a God thing! She’s a gift to her husband from the Lord, and the right woman is a prize that men eagerly seek. They are both happy and blessed when they find her. But unfortunately for many couples, a variety of stresses, disappointments and infidelity will lead to the breaking of their marriage vows and the dissolution of their relationship.

Such an outcome to what undoubtedly began as a joyous and hopeful union can be both sad and depressing for any wife, but it can be overcome with the help of Holy Spirit. The key to successfully defeating the trauma of divorce is to remember that marriage is never the Lord’s ultimate goal for your life. There are other more important tasks you’ll be given to accomplish as you follow Him, and as you do so, your priorities and focus will shift to obeying the Will of God, no matter what.

But divorce is rampant in the church world today because many people believe that the vows they exchanged didn’t really matter. That is definitely not the attitude of the Lord.

COVENANT PARTNER:

            No matter the actual verbiage of their marital vows, in God’s sight, by the act of marrying a couple commits themselves to an irrevocable bond. Husband and wife truly “become one flesh.” (Genesis 2: 24; Matthew 19: 4, 5). “Therefore what God has joined together, let no man separate.” (Mark 10: 9).

And the Lord means it. Because Christian marriage vows establish a covenant union between the individuals and Almighty God, it is vital that each person is fully aware of the seriousness of the commitment they are undertaking. Once the covenant is joined, they are bound by our Father to those pledges. A normal “vow” is a promise that an individual can make to the Lord, but in covenant vows God responds with a promise as well, and because of His involvement in it, breaking of covenant is an extremely serious matter.

Numbers 30: 2 – “If a man makes a vow to the Lord, or takes an oath to bind himself with a binding obligation, he shall not violate his word; he shall do according to all that proceeds out of his mouth.”

In Old Testament times, “cutting covenant” was a major undertaking. For most of us today, however, the marriage vow is the only form of covenant that we will ever pledge, and we have trouble honoring just that one. We complain that we didn’t really make any commitments during our wedding ceremony. Or if we did actually mouth the words, we either didn’t truly mean them, or didn’t realize exactly what we were saying. We decide that the words we exchanged, especially if they involved “until death do us part”, or “for better or worse” aren’t really binding. They were just slipped in by sneaky church fathers determined to ruin our lives by thwarting any divorce plans.

But that’s precisely why our Father ordained marriage to be a covenant. It is not a lightly made choice with a ‘rescind’ option when things get uncomfortable. In the sight of the Godhead, the couple is bound together into a single unit, as inseparable as the Holy Trinity itself, male and female halves of a whole. God forms the third cord in this covenantal trinity, and as Ecclesiastes 4: 12 states, “…a cord of three strands is not quickly torn apart.” In His sight, your spouse is the one you have chosen and that decision is eternal. Even divorce is not sufficient to sever the bonds of your pledge.

Testimony:

I got angry when I was convicted of this truth. My unsaved marriage at age twenty was to a man who, despite being a college professor, turned out to be an adulterous heroin addict. And when I took the kids and ran, I was happy to have escaped…until the Lord shook me. Turns out He had plans of His own…

Until next week…Joy and Shalom!