God's Design For Marriage

Marriage is a parable for our relationship with God. Your earthly spouse is to symbolize your relationship with your heavenly spouse – Jesus. When we enter into a marriage and make promises to love, honor and obey our spouse, we are also making these promises to God. God designed marriage a very specific way and it must follow His design in order to keep love alive.

In preparation for this marriage, God's design is that you wait and keep (or make) yourselves pure. This purity is not just your sexual purity, but your sexual purity is to symbolize purity of our mind, body and spirit.

This is where folks get a bit messed up. Father's teach their children to stay virgins, because they recall their own sexual promiscuity and they are mortified by the thought that a boy might do to their child what they did to girls when they were young. But this is the wrong foundation to use. When we focus on our own sins and use them as the teaching motivation, from the beginning of this teaching we are using a lens that is blurred and unclear due to sin. This creates lessons which are not clear to our children either. When fathers teach using this foundation, children will learn that keeping their virginity makes them better than other girls their age and their hearts get messed up. When this happens it creates children who may keep themselves sexually pure, but in doing so will look down at girls who are struggling with their identity, feeling unloved and making up for it by giving pieces of themselves away little by little to every boy who shows them attention.

We must use the parable of Christ as our bride to teach our children, instead our own foundation and sin. If we do this, we are preparing them properly by using the foundation of who they are in Christ and how He designed marriage.

The first two years of marriage will be the most difficult, because this is a time when the couple will experience what is called “breaking the backbone of selfishness”. During this time, God will teach the wife to let the husband be the leader and to trust God to sort it out when the husband's leadership is not Godly. A woman's natural tendency is to fix or take care of her family. This can get in the way of the husband being the leader in the family. What the wife needs to understand is that once she objects and gives her very logical argument, she must then let her husband make the decision for the family. This is what the Bible is teaching the wife when God tells the woman to submit to the leadership of her husband. Rest assured wives, when your husband makes a choice that is not Godly, God will deal with him. You role, however, is to lift up your husband and make him feel like a king by serving him in a very Godly way.

Husbands, God teaches that you are to honor your wife and to love her like Jesus loved the Church. Dishonoring your wife is the same thing as dishonoring God. If there is something in your live that is causing you to dishonor your wife, you should follow that like it is smoke from a fire. When you dishonor your wife, your prayers will not be heard (1 Peter 3:7), because as you dishonor your wife you also dishonor God. You must listen to her and care about her concerns. God created her differently from how her created you. She is more intuitive and more emotional, so she sees things differently. The best decisions will be made together as husband and wife. If you are not able to come to an agreement, it is your responsibility as the leader to make the decision for the family. You must rely on God to help you make these decisions. You must pray about them with your wife. Trust God to lead you, not each other. As the leader of the family it is your role to be the spiritual leader as well. You must be seeking understanding of God and His will for your lives. You must be doing this through the study of His Word.

When disagreements arise, you must never go to bed angry. Together you must look to God to fix your hearts and remove the anger and replace it with renewed love for each other. Work hard to serve each other. Men require respect and women require love. Do your best to fulfill the needs of your spouse on a daily basis.

I love making my husband feel like a king. One thing I do, which creates this uplifting feeling for him, is to rub his feet when he comes home from work in the evenings. I also make sure he understands daily that I am his servant. That does not mean that I am not his equal, because that is clear in 1 Peter 3:7. We should all practice serving each other, because that is what we are called to do by our Father in Heaven.