Marriage - a gift from our Creator

As I sit here rocking my soon to be one year old little girl I am pondering a lot of different things. One big thing is that tomorrow will be 7 years since Liz became my wife. With every storm that we have weathered our relationship with each other has become so much stronger. The biggest thing though is how marriage strengthens our relationship with Christ, if we will allow it.

The bible compares a believers relationship with Christ to that of a marriage between a man an woman. As I sit here and write this I begin to wonder where would my faith be without my marriage. Non-existent. For me/us God brought us together in the 9th grade because he knew that I needed another strong influence in my life to draw me to himself. Including our dating years we have been a couple for 14 years and of that (as of tomorrow) 7 have been in the covenant of marriage.

When we started dating way back in the 9th grade everyone, including myself, believed I was a Christian. It is apparent to me that God placed her in my life at that early stage because he knew I needed to be made aware of my sinfulness and need for a savior. It was through many great times and many terrible times that I began to fully understand what the grace of Jesus really looked like. As we navigated our way through high school and college I began to make some wrong decisions which ultimately led to a dark place in my life. However, no matter how dark of how many times I treated her wrong she never stopped loving me. She was always the ray of sunshine in my darkness, because she had the creator of all living inside of her.

Through this living, breathing example of grace I came to know the Lord. As we continue down this path of life with careers, kids, and ministry she is still that amazing example of His grace. I write all this not to just build up my wife (or try to earn brownie points :)) but rather point all the glory to our sovereign Lord who has been such a clear master of our story. So many times I think we look at our relationship with Christ and say it should mimic the earthly marriage. While I do think it is a great picture I think our marriage should mimic our relationship with Christ. For me, and I dare to say most people) if our marriage mimic'd our relationship with Christ most would fail.

We tend to put more effort in to our earthly marriage than we do in our relationship with Christ. For you married men out there. How would your marriage be if you only gave your wife praise maybe 3 times a week (Sun morn/sun night/wed)? What if you only spent maybe 30 minutes a day in genuine conversation with her? How about if you never mentioned her to your friends? Not too well. My prayer is that we all would make our relationship with Christ that priority which would cause our marriage to be better than anything we could ever create.

See, she did it again. I did not intend for this blog to take that direction but I love how the Lord uses spouses to draw us to himself.