MARRIAGE CAN BE A PIECE OF CAKE - PART 7

Happy new year. congratulations on coming into another fresh season.

Thank you for joining us again today. It is always beautiful to learn together at God’s feet. Thanks be to God, our Father for His love. May we continually walk in the consciousness of this love. We open our hearts to learn from You, the All-Knowing God in Jesus’ unfailing name (Amen).

In our last post, we talked about the purpose of marriage. We considered ‘Wholeness’ ‘mirroring the relationship between Christ and the church’ and ‘raising godly kids’. Today, we will wrap it up.

Genesis 5:1-2 talks about wholeness. There is something about the unity in marriage: most of the relationships we have on earth is based on adding value, the only relationship legitimately based on covenant is marriage. The employer-employee relationship is based on how much value is delivered by both parties, once there is dissatisfaction in the value being added the employer can lay off the employee or the employee can decide to leave. Friendship relationships are based on value too. The only relationship that is based on covenant is marriage.

Have you ever been asked why you love your partner? You will probably say things like "he's intelligent", "she is caring", "he is loving", but there have been times (not once, not twice, not thrice) that they haven't demonstrated those attributes, yet we still love them. Why? It's a covenant we both made in the presence of God.

If we have a picture of how God accepts us it will help us to understand how marriage works as well. He gave us His righteousness [For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. 2 Cor 5:21] and that is all He sees. Can we base our relationship with our partner on the covenant of God's Word? Our lead facilitator, Ibidun Olude, often use the analogy of a movie script to explain how each individual in marriage needs to view and fulfill their marital role without waiting for their spouse to act as they have presumed because God is the judge of a man/woman and not his/her Spouse.

One of the expressions of a person's Faith/belief in God is a man loving his wife, whether she loves back or not and a woman submitting to her husband whether he does her good or not. “Believing is casting the weight of our lives into a place of trust and abandonment in who God is” - Bill Johnson. We believe that this template of affectionate, unconditional love and submission is an expression of trust in God's plan and strategy.

Asides raising godly children, it is also important to get married because of what we can give and not what we can get. We must strive to give. So, we marry because we have received so much love from God and we are ready to be committed to lavishing it on someone else. Such questions as "what is it you have identified in your life that you need me to help you with?" should be a familiar discussion during courtship and even after marriage i.e after the wedding ceremony. Our motto ought to be "I am on a mission in my marriage".

Back to our 3 requirements for baking a great cake;

#1. Training:

Some people believe "you can't be trained for marriage, it just depends on the ‘grace' of God". "Can someone be trained to love?" We must remember that the purpose of God's grace is to teach us (Titus 2:11). Training is something many people rebel against. Many young people wish for families other than the one they were born into, not realizing that the peculiarity of their families was meant to prepare them. The negative experiences we had in our families growing up, were meant to incline us to receiving godly instructions for such areas of life.

A story was once told of two brothers raised by an alcoholic father, one of the brothers grew up to be irresponsible like their dad and probably ended up in jail. The other brother grew up so responsible. When they were both asked how they grew up differently, the well behaved brother said, their father's lifestyle taught him how not to live while the miscreant took the father's lifestyle as a way to live. Whether our circumstances make us better or bitter, depends on how we react to it.

Now to the concept of SEX and MARRIAGE

Should we be involved in pre-marital sex as a way of getting trained for marriage?

If you grew up in the church, you would have heard such expressions as "it is better to get married, so you can have sex legally". Even though this may be true to an extent, it is important to note that sex in marriage is much deeper than this.

We cannot afford to get married just for the sake of sex. Sex is like the icing on a cake. You and I both know that we can’t take an icing (sugar) as a meal. If one does so, it will upset the digestive system and ultimately, the person's health. In the same way, we can't afford to get married for the sake of sex alone.

Sex is beyond being pressed down, shaken together and ran over. Sex is a language beyond words. Sex in marriage is not the goal but an activity that helps us to achieve the goal. The goal is oneness. Sex is the physical demonstration of the union that occurs in marriage. Just like every believer is baptized in water as a demonstration of the inward experience we had of, being buried and raised with Christ, so is sex in marriage.

When couples know this, no matter how old they get, their sexual life is meaningful because it is a source of renewal and refreshment.

For the unmarried, seeing sex as an icing on the cake will help to see sex in the right perspective. Now, a cake should taste good on its own even without an icing. Same way, an unmarried union should stand solidly without sex. If there is pressure from your boy/girlfriend, fiancé/fiancée on sex and how it will make you closer, you should remember that the intimacy that comes with pre-marital sex is a mirage because disobedience to God does not produce blessedness.

We will take this discuss on sex further in subsequent sessions, however, take time out to study and meditate on the above.

The #2 need for baking a great cake is to add ingredients in the right proportions. The recipe includes (a) the ability to love (b) the ability to submit. It is important that men learn to love like Christ loves the Church that He gave Himself for her and women love to submit to their own husband as Christ submits to God. It is important to understand this correctly and not in error. Submission is not a weakness, it was by submission that Jesus obtained a name that is above every other name (Phil 2:5-9), Submission is what makes the Trinity one; when One had to come to the earth, there was no argument.

There was submission to the plan of redemption. Jesus said, "I only do what I see my father do”, the Bible says that the Holy Spirit will not speak of Himself but will only speak what He hears the Father say. Submission is key though it is not a sign of weakness. I do ask if the head is more important than the heart. Being the head does not mean the body is not needed. Submission is a powerful blessedness and so is love. Some men feel that if they love their wife to unconditionally, they will be perceived as weak. Culture has demonstrated that strong men don't demonstrate affectionate love, but we, who have been translated into the Kingdom of God's dear Son, are not led by culture, we are led by the Spirit of God's Word, the Truth.

But God demonstrated his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. (Rom 5:8).

This sums it up: Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it; (Eph 5:24-26)