By Pastor Kunle Osunkunle
God created the heaven and the earth and everything in it. He made everything comfortable for man before He created him. One of the things you need to know is that God is concerned about you. God is more eager to bless you than you are eager to receive from him. He is giving you all things that pertains to life and godliness and He is giving you all things to richly enjoy.
If the first thing God created was man, man would have to be swimming first of all. So many things would happen, after swimming, there wouldn’t be food for him to eat. So God made everything comfortable for man.
After creating man, one of the things he did was to give him a job to do, to keep and tend the garden. Man was obviously doing what he was told to do, God saw him faithful than to blessed him with a helper.
God knew that man would get to a point where he would need a helper, he had always known that he would create an helper for Adam, this was portrayed in Gen 1:27; ‘…male and female he created them…..’ A woman is not an afterthought, it was always in the master plan.
Man did not even realize the kind of help he needed, all he knew was that he needed a help. When the animals were brought to him to name, He could have called lion wife but because he had God’s spirit inside of him, he wouldn’t call the lion wife. God created the person compatible for him.
Marriage is not human created but God created. It is a concept out of the mind of God. Therefore, for man to get the best out of marriage, he must go back to God. God has put together a manual for is to understand marriage and for us to have a great marriage, it must be modelled after God’s way.
Deuteronomy 30:15; ‘See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction’. Man was created with a choice, God gave him between the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Why did God give the first man choice? He did this because if there’s no choice there won’t be an opportunity for reward.
Since God created marriage, it has not evolved, the principles to have a good marriage remains the same.it is man that is changing, but for believers, the more of God that is discovered, the better marriage we can have. Paul described marriage in Ephesians 5 as a mystery. Mysteries are concealed.
The bible says ‘ it is the glory of God to conceal a matter and the honor of kings to search it out”. You are a king and because you are, you can search it out. The mysteries of God are not hidden from us but are hidden for us. Know this things about marriage.
- Marriage is Holy….
A godly marriage is one of the greatest weapons a believer has. A marriage combines and magnifies the spirit of the two spouses in a relationship, which signifies the relationship between the church and Christ. Marriage is a holy covenant, initiated by God, conditioned on an irrevocable promise, oneness with an imperfect person of the opposite sex for a lifetime to glorify God.
It is called holy matrimony. Just as God is holy, marriage must be holy. Holy is sacred. The challenge is that you do not treat marriage as holy anymore. If you treat marriage as holy, you will not defile the marriage bed, you wouldn’t commit fornication or adultery. Marriage involves a man, a woman and God. We are having challenges of gay because as the bible says, ‘because they did not involve God in their reasoning, he gave them up to reprobate mind’.
A lot of marriages have excluded God. Excluding God in marriages happens very subtly by not praying together anymore, not communicating anymore and before you know it, the holy matrimony has turned to just ‘matrimony’. When God is relegated to the background, you get the results.
- Marriage Is A Covenant…
Covenant is more than an agreement. It is a walk into death, when you enter it, there is no going back. You need to ask yourself if you are ready for the commitment involved in marriage, that is why it is a matter of ’till death do us part’. The Hebrew word for marriage and Holiness are the same!
Every other issue in marriage are structures on the foundation of COVENANT. Things like feeding yourself on your wedding day is a covenant, many don’t know that. Then you exchange things like rings, names are also exchanged. Remember that it was after God had a covenant with Abram that he changed his name to Abraham. After all this, the couple exchanges blood in sex and that seals the covenant. No covenant is complete without the blood. The bible says the life of the flesh is in the blood.
- Marriage Is An Irrevocable Promise…
Marriage is irrevocable, you can’t change your mind when you enter. That is why you have to be sure and start with God.
There are revocable promises as well as irrevocably promises and marriage is the latter. Before you say ‘I Do’, check it out, so that you wouldn’t end up saying ‘What did I do?’ You should understand what love mean before you use the word. The Bible says in John 3:16 that ‘ for God so loves the world that he gave his only begotten son…’ That is deep.
You can’t meet a person on one month and say you love the person. It is when the rubber meets the road and commitment is tested that you can say for a fact that you really love a person.
- Marriage Is Oneness With An Imperfect Person….
No one is perfect and you can’t change anyone only the Holy Spirit can. We have the tendency to expect the other person to be a finished product and be perfect, while giving ourselves the opportunity to evolve.
Your partner is not perfect, get uses to it. You need to help them instead to overcome the imperfections and ask for grace to do so. Understanding that the other person is not perfect is why it is called Grace. But you too must not stay there under the pretense of ‘I am not perfect’ and refuse to do the right thing.
- Marriage Is Of The Opposite Sex….
Gay and homosexuality is not allowed. This is stated clearly in the Bible. It was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. Also the Bible says the man and his ‘wife’ they two shall become one flesh’. There’s no room for polygamy.
- Marriage Is Leaving…
In marriage your priorities change. You are leaving, there should be no question of who you choose between your parents and your spouse.
When God says ‘leave’ though he knew it was going to be difficult to leave because that is where the source of your life came from. God didn’t tell you to leave as a baby, but as a man. If you do not leave, there are going to be challenges. Look at the baby in the mother’s womb, imagine it refusing to leave after 9 months because the place is cozy.
Where you are coming from is comfort zone, but like the baby that must leave his mother’s womb at the appointed time unless he wants to inconvenient both his mother and himself, when you refuse to leave when it’s time, you inconvenient people.
Leaving requires some level of maturity. Growth doesn’t happen until there’s a detachment, same with marriage. You must leave financially, emotionally, spiritually. You need to know how to leave, every marriage is a different culture. You don’t compare your marriage with your parent’s or any other.
There is a difference between LEAVING and ABANDONING. You still give them the respect they require. Sometimes you want to leave but they don’t want you to, the responsibility is for you to free yourself. Don’t let anyone manipulate you.
Leaving must happen before cleaving. Cleaving cannot be done properly until you have left.
- Marriage Is Cleaving….
Cleaving means to be joined together, to become inseparable. If you have two pieces of wood and glue them together, you can’t pull them apart without them tearing one into the other. That is what happens in cases of divorce, it is difficult to leave whole. This is because you have become one spirit.
It is important that your soul, intellect and your body in sex are joined together. It’s a concept of synergy when one plus one equals one. ‘…One shall chase a thousand two ten thousand…’ Spiritual strength is multiplied by a thousand. Every time you agree you strengthen the bond, you disagree and you weaken the bond.
Cleaving also mean ‘ to pursue closely and relentlessly’. The challenge with many marriages is that they pursue until the wedding day, some pursued until they have sex. Cleaving means continuous pursuit. The things you did in courtship, continue to do. Keep diving into their person more and more.
Don’t be a party to those that say ‘ my chasing stopped when I caught you’. It isn’t right, there are still more things to know. Catching is the beginning of your pursuit. Your relationship only grows the more you pursue each other.
If you cleave to your spouse you won’t be unfaithful to him or her. I’d you are focused on your spouse, you won’t have time for another. Division means ‘dual vision’. Cleaving requires focus. It is important that on a daily basis you are pursuing, you are talking, questioning and getting to know the other person better. Focus requires a lot of commitment and focus
To be in love is not difficult, it’s staying in love that is the issue. It requires effort and as a Christian it involves the help of the Holy Spirit. Cleaving requires good communication, forgiveness, it requires you to show grace. Remember you are from different backgrounds. Despite the frictions and communication gaps, you still work through it. It requires good sexual relations, romance and service to one another.
- Marriage Is ONE FLESH…..
After leaving and cleaving, the objective is to become one flesh.
The minute you get married God sees you as one flesh, however, experientially, you have to work it out to be one flesh. One flesh means one functioning unit. Each being equally interested in all things that concerns the marriage. The oneness is in all ways, emotionally, financially, spiritual….
INTIMACY means INTO ME SEE. You begin to see the intimacy in everything you do. You are one unit. Intimacy sometimes makes a couple look like each other. When people become one their thought process gels. You need to make sure your spouse is at the same rate of development as you are.
The man and his wife were NAKED AND NOT ASHAMED. When you are hiding from your spouse, you are hiding from yourself. There should be openness, transparency and oneness in everything the spouses do. It is being vulnerable and trusting that the other person will not hurt you. Trust is what happens in marriage.
Teaching on how to maximize singlehood and build a marriage that is heaven on earth... 