The Christmas story, lovely as it is, is a hiding place where many life lessons can be found. Here are four of them as they apply to marriage.
- God makes and fulfills outlandish promises. Telling an obscure engaged virgin girl that the Holy Spirit would come upon her, causing her to conceive and bear the Son who would be the King sitting on the eternal throne of David can certainly be placed in the category of outlandish.
God also made the promise during the very first week of His creation that a man and woman coming together in matrimony would no longer be two, but one. That, too, is outlandish. And just as the coming of the Messiah would require deeply intimate divine intervention, so does oneness of flesh in marriage; it’s made possible only by God, thus Jesus’ statement, …what God joins together…. Remembering that the Spirit that sowed the Messianic seed in Mary’s womb is the same Spirit that joins together a husband and wife should cause all us married folk to view with trembling the marriage relationships that join us with our spouses. Let’s allow God’s Spirit to draw us most closely together this Christmas.
- God often uses the humblest in His loftiest works. A peasant girl. A carpenter. A group of shepherds. A manger. These are the players God conscripted into His story of the Savior’s birth. Not a princess, a prince, a group of noblemen or a brass crib with goose down bedding and a midwife. No, God chose the lowly, the meek, the things deemed foolish to the world.
The choice ingredients of a Godly marriage are those things which bring us to a humble position. I’m sorry. I was wrong. Sacrifices. These are the things God uses in a marriage. They require us to take a position lower than our spouse’s. Let’s give our spouse the gift of humility this Christmas.
- The loftiest enemies of God’s plan will ultimately come to frustration. Herod never got his murderous hands on the Christ child. The wise men subverted his plan by not reporting back to him. And Joseph heeded the voice of God and took his family of three to Egypt until Herod had died.
The enemy of our marriages is the same spirit that incited Herod to seek to kill little Jesus. That evil spirit wants to spoil God’s plan, which is to have us spouses enjoy each other and dwell in homes of kindness and peace. This Christmas let’s have peace in our marriages and goodwill toward our spouses.
- God has factored “detours” into His plan. Living in the country God had told His people to never live in again must’ve seemed almost wrong to Joseph and Mary. But God has His reasons for making His exceptions, and preserving the life of the Messiah was a perfect one.
Life can hit our marriages with circumstances seemingly designed for our destruction. But these are just detours. Unemployment. Parenting challenges. Health hurdles. If we can just remember that these difficulties haven’t caught God by surprise, that He’ll work them all for our good and that we can be stronger by going through them, maybe we can keep a Godly attitude through them all and have stronger marriages on the other side of them. If you’re on a detour this Christmas, may God comfort you, strengthen you and give you wisdom, you and your spouse.
Merry Christmas!!
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