Making Marriage Work (21 page)

The main thing that a man wants out of a marriage relationship is significance. He wants to feel important, and this basic desire is influenced by God. It is not wrong for a man to want significance in his life.

Let’s read 1 Peter 3:1:

In like manner, you married women, be submissive to your own husbands [subordinate yourselves as being secondary to and dependent on them, and adapt yourselves to them], so that even if any do not obey the Word [of God], they may be won over not by discussion but by the [godly] lives of their wives.

I used to work at trying to win over Dave with my words. As I realized through the Word that a lot of discussions would not change Dave, I learned to pay more attention to trying to make my own behavior more godly. Instead of changing Dave, I was to reinforce his sense of significance.

That’s exactly what the Word says, that a woman should respect and reverence her husband. In other words, everything that a woman does should make her husband feel as though he is the most important thing in her whole life. That need is built into the heart and godly ego of men. If a wife can make her husband feel his importance in her life, it seems to supercharge him to want to find ways to take care of her needs.

Satan does not want couples to reinforce each other in a marriage. He whispers deception into the hearts of wives, “Don’t submit; you deserve to have things your own way. Don’t give in or adapt to him. Look at your husband who is doing his own thing all the time. He doesn’t even know what ‘cleave’ means. He married you, threw you in a house with a couple of kids and then took off, He’s gone all the time doing his own thing.”

When a woman listens to the devil, she has been set up for a fight as soon as her husband comes home. She fights all evening, goes to sleep mad, and sometimes the fight continues for years. As she remains open to the devil’s lies, she finds it more difficult to talk to her husband and misses out on the relationship that God intended her to have.

God wants to help couples with marriage problems and work with those who have good marriages to make them even better. How married couples treat each other is important to God. Men are to love their wives and treat them with respect. He is to be considerate of her needs and to think about what she needs and what she might want. Wives are to make their husbands feel significant. They are to make their husbands feel important and treat them the way they in turn want to be treated.

Do we want our marriages to be triumphs or tragedies? If you want to be the queen in your home, treat your husband like the king. If men want to be the king in their homes, they should treat their wives like queens. Obviously, Satan’s desire is that they all become tragedies. But I believe we can prevent tragedy and find healing for the differences that work to destroy us.

Most people get married without knowing what God expects them to do for their spouses. Many individuals have never read what God’s Word has to say about filling the needs of each other in marriage. Their marriage may have been inspired by some physical or emotional attraction to the other person, then they “tie the knot” and Satan quickly begins to use their ignorance of God’s intentions against them.

We usually follow the examples that have been placed in front of us prior to our own marriage and, in many cases, that example has been a bad one. If a young man has never witnessed his father giving affection to his mother, chances are he won’t know how to give it to his wife. If she, on the other hand, grew up in a family in which the father gave a lot of affection to her mother, she will naturally expect the same. She will be quite devastated when she does not get it.

As I already mentioned, my father always got his own way through becoming angry and staying that way until everyone submitted to him. Because the way my father acted was the only way I had seen people get what they wanted, I followed that example until I learned to pray and trust God to bring into my life what He knew was right for me.

We can only do what we know to do. The Bible says that people perish for a lack of knowledge. (Hosea 4:6.) Many marriages are perishing because people are not educated in how to gain and maintain good, godly relationships.

With all the information available today anyone can get educated in any subject. All they need to do is apply themselves to studying in the particular area needed. We can’t blame anyone else for our failures if we lazily refuse to do our part. Whatever your particular problem is, turn it into a college course. Study, ponder, pray, reflect, think, read, search until you have all the answers you need for victory. Don’t sit by idly while Satan destroys your marriage. Stand your ground and fight for what is yours.

Many marriages are perishing because people are not educated in how to gain and maintain good, godly relationships.

Often people marry hoping that the other person can make them happy. But marriage must be looked at from the viewpoint of giving, not getting. When each partner fully gives themselves over to thinking about what they can do for their partner, then in that process of giving, they will get everything that they want in return and more besides.

The Bible says, …
It is more blessed to give than to receive
(Acts 20:35
KJV
). It takes most of our lifetime to get around to believing that. We stay busy trying to get somebody to do something for us, don’t we?

You may have noticed that I keep saying the same thing in different parts of the book about having a mindset to do for others instead of always expecting them to do for you. I am saying it over and over in various ways because it is probably the single most important principle that contributes to making any relationship work. It takes us right back to what we have called the “golden rule” in God’s Word —
Do to others as you would have them do to you
(Luke 6:31
NIV
).

The world does to others whatever they want to do to them, and obviously the world’s ways are not working. Give away what you would want, and you will always be amply supplied.

Hebrews 13, verse 4, says, Let marriage be held in honor (esteemed worthy, precious, of great price, and especially dear) in all things. … Many couples in the world aren’t even getting married anymore; they just live together thinking that if it doesn’t work out, they won’t have to spend the money to get a divorce.

There are actually generations of people who have never heard that God said it was wrong for unmarried men and women to live together. They have never even heard that marriage in God’s eyes is an honorable institution where He can bless them and make something of eternal benefit happen between them. I hear people talking openly about living together with no shame or embarrassment about it at all. They have convinced themselves that it makes more sense to try living together first to see if they like it before making a real commitment. That theory may make sense to the human mind, but God does not approve of it, and anything He does not approve of ultimately will not work.

To God, marriage is a covenant — a covenant relationship. And in God’s eyes, covenants are not ever to be broken. Coming into a covenant relationship with somebody literally means that everything you have available becomes theirs and everything they have becomes yours.

As believers in Christ, we have a covenant relationship with God, and we need what He has! I didn’t have much to offer God, but God gave me enough of His strength to make up for all of my weaknesses. Likewise, the marriage is to visibly reflect the benefits of our invisible covenant with God. So, the first blessing of a good marriage begins with honoring the marriage relationship and being willing to give what we have to our spouse.

Born again and Spirit-filled people are getting divorced after many years of marriage. After I learned of at least twenty of these situations happening within a year’s time, I asked the Lord, “What is going on? These are people who know the Word! They know that divorce is not Your will for them! And yet they’re just doing it anyway! What is going on, God?”

I heard the Lord speak to me in my heart, and I don’t think I have ever heard Him sound like this. His voice was sad, and He said, “Joyce, My people are not using wisdom.” The Lord preached a whole message to me in that one sentence.

Honor is missing in our society today. Even thirty years ago, men put high regard in honor. If something wasn’t honorable, you just didn’t do it. Godly principles are being stripped from society. There are generations of people who have never been taught the importance of keeping their word. But those of us who have the privilege of being in a relationship with Jesus Christ and have understood the Word of God, can learn and do what is right. We can have wonderful, strong, and powerful marriages. But we must use wisdom.

Satan always begins tempting somebody by lying to them. He begins through little suggestions — a little temptation here and a little temptation there. But if the temptations are entertained, they will progress into real sins. I remember a young girl who worked for us in the very early days of our ministry. She had problems with insecurity and, though we didn’t know it at the time, she had occasionally become inappropriately involved with men. She started bringing donuts to one of the married men who worked for us. Every morning she continued to give him this special attention.

It didn’t take me very long before I said, “Hold it! If that man needs a donut, his wife can send him to work with donuts. He doesn’t need you carrying him donuts. If you are going to bring donuts, you bring them for everybody at the office and not just for one man!”

The man, of course, liked the attention she was giving him. Evil spirits work on people through little flirtations. They say, “I’m going to make you feel good about yourself.” But we are called to use wisdom! Don’t think that you can play with fire and not get burned! If we need to be built up, we should go to our spouse for reinforcement and resist security and significance from other sources.

If your spouse will not or does not know how to reinforce and encourage you, then get what you need from God or your mother or another friend, but under no circumstances should anyone allow themselves to be drawn into Satan’s trap of adultery. We all know countless people who have been caught up in an adulterous affair who always say, “I never meant for this to happen.” If they never meant for it to happen, then why did it? It happened because one thing led to another and, before they knew what was happening, it was too late. Their emotions were in control instead of the wisdom of God.

When we follow wisdom, our lives are blessed, and when we don’t, they are destroyed. That is the bottom line, and I am a bottom-line person. I have found living that way is much better than living with my head in the clouds somewhere, not facing the reality that will eventually chase me down and force me into a confrontation anyway.

When we follow wisdom, our lives are blessed, and when we don’t, they are destroyed.

Some people may not even know that the devil is real! Twenty-five years ago I didn’t understand the reality of the devil as my enemy. I didn’t know about demon principalities and powers. I didn’t know that there were spirits that would get on people and try to lure other people into sinful relationships.

We must use wisdom against the enemy. Nothing will change without wisdom. We use wisdom in our ministry that some people say is a little strict, but we do not let one of our male and female employees get in the car and go somewhere together. If they have to go somewhere on business, we will spend the money to take somebody else off their job and put them in the car with them, rather than let the two of them go together.

When I’m out preaching in different places, Dave will not let another man pick me up at the hotel unless a woman is with him. It’s not because Dave doesn’t trust me. We just don’t feel that traveling alone is wisdom, even if it is simply to avoid the appearance of evil to someone who may see us and wonder why we were together.

There are countless ways we can avoid evil simply by using wisdom. I recall one time when a male friend of Dave’s started telling me how pretty he thought I was and how he wished his wife looked like me. I immediately sensed trouble! So instead of hiding it from my husband and secretly enjoying this man’s compliments thinking they wouldn’t hurt anything, I went to Dave and told him what was said and that I did not feel comfortable with it. We decided to pray and then if it ever happened again, Dave would talk to him. The prayer worked, and we never had another incident. Obviously Satan knew from my reaction it was not going to work, so he aborted his plan. We need to be smart enough to abort Satan’s plan, rather than allowing him to abort God’s plan for our life by drawing us into sinful relationships that can only end in disaster.

We need to be smart enough to abort Satan’s plan, rather than allowing him to abort God’s plan for our life.

Let me emphasize one more time: You cannot play with fire and not get burned.

GIVE YOUR SPOUSE SECURITY

If, for example, you and your spouse are in relationship with another couple and your personality and the other man’s personality match up well, you may just like to talk when you get together as a foursome. But if you find yourself not wanting to spend a lot of time with the others and prefer to sit apart by yourselves to talk, you may be headed for trouble. Be careful! I’m not saying that you can’t talk to anybody — just don’t get out of balance.

A good marriage does not just happen. I don’t care how wildly in love you were when you got married, if you don’t continue to work at your marriage, by paying attention to the needs of your spouse on a regular basis, your marriage will get in trouble. Your relationship will get stagnant. You’ll get tired of each other. You will lose the excitement in your marriage, blaming your spouse when all along you were neglecting him.

Marriages decay and fall apart, but it doesn’t happen overnight. It’s almost always a result of people just not using wisdom. You won’t have a good marriage if you don’t spend time together. If you don’t learn how to respect one another and care for each other’s basic needs, you will definitely have serious problems.