Forget your marriage.

Forget working on your checklist for the ideal marriage.

Instead, focus on your spouse.

Trying to achieve a certain kind of marriage can make us crazy. It can be very discouraging. But a lot of that hard work is misdirected energy. We are actually off-target when we focus on the marriage itself.

We have been called to love someone, not to create a particular kind of marriage. We do not take our marriages with us to heaven. We take people with us to heaven.

Focus on loving your spouse, serving according to his or her needs as God directs. As a result, your marriage will be blessed. But turning your eyes away from your spouse to focus on the marriage itself will bring frustration and disappointment.

We thrive when we stop trying to manipulate our marriages, and instead focus on valuing our spouses. They are the real treasures. Your husband is the real treasure. Your wife is the real treasure.

Forget your marriage. Instead, focus on your ministry as a spouse.

When we stand before God, we will not be evaluated by the type of marriages we had. We will be accountable, however, for the way we ministered as wives or as husbands.

We torment ourselves with continually measuring our marriages against our version of the perfect marriage. We can live free from that! Instead of evaluating our marriages, we want to evaluate ourselves as wives or husbands. Let’s pray for insight into the needs of our covenant partners, and then let’s ask God to enable us to minister to those needs according to His wisdom and purposes.

     FORGET THIS:                                              FOCUS ON THIS:

grumbling                                                     gratitude

changing your spouse                                     accepting your spouse

evaluating your marriage                                evaluating yourself as a spouse

controlling your spouse                                   serving your spouse

judging, which is claiming                                examining the motives of your heart
to know someone else’s motives

pursuing your own agenda                               pursuing Christ, the One who fully satisfies

 

(This material is adapted from Radiance: Secrets to Thriving in Marriage.)

Blessings to you,
Tami

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Images courtesy of Ambro at FreeDigitalPhotos.net