Change…It’s what October is all about.

Finally a break from the heat and humidity. And a beautiful thing happens in many places when leaves finish their job until next year. But some of us are slow to change. We want our circumstances to change, we want you to change, but not our behavior. We want to keep right on doing what we have always done, yet expect a new outcome … from you. People, that is a lie from Hell! To ask a worn-out question; “So how’s that working for ya?”

Jesus offers all you want; peace, joy, love, mercy, kindness, goodness, understanding, faith, belief, hope, knowing, forgiveness, sharing, caring, freedom; all the beautiful things we covet for our relationships–especially with our spouse. But we keep right on doing it our way and expect you to change, not me. This is not complicated! The solution is here with us when we turn from our sin to Him. We can’t keep doing life our way and expect it to be all we hope for it to be.

Emmerson Eggerichs teaches that most couples do not have marriage problems, they have Jesus problems. They don’t want to do what He said. They simply do not want to “love God with all their heart and with all their soul and with all their mind” nor “love their neighbor as their self” Matthew 22:37-39 (paraphrased).

Instead, we do it our way. “If you … then I … .” Quickly, we put conditions all over our relationships that Jesus never intended. There are many commands in the Bible intended to guide us in all relationships, but in our incredibly small human wisdom, we choose to modify them just a bit. We add qualifiers like “if she will respect me then I will love her”. This is wrong. We need to let the Bible stand as it was written and pray for God to open our hearts and understanding to what it contains.

Please see https://longviewretreat.com/one-another for more on this.

New Morning Mercies: A Daily Gospel Devotional by Paul David Tripp, is the best resource I know of to help you with this. There is more common sense and wisdom in this book than any other single source I know of, other than the Bible. And it’s delivered one day at a time in about 15 minutes. Read this book together with your spouse with the expectation that God will use it to make a difference in your marriage. If you read something you don’t understand, ask others to explain it. This is a great place for the church: the fellowship of believers, the Bride of Christ; to work together, to grow, to become more like Christ. Use this book to help you learn all the Bible teaches about relationships.

Don’t fear change. That kind of fear is paralyzing your relationships. It is the deceit of the enemy being used against you to keep you in bondage to him. Be like a tree, let God take a seemingly dead tree in January, become a source of shade in comfort in July when He puts His leaves all over it, and then in October a thing of beauty when those gifts from God mature. This only happens when the tree is willing to change! If it does not receive those new leaves it will die …, and so will your marriage.