Marriage is meant to be HARD!

THE DAVID ALLIANCE

TDAgiantslayer@gmail.com 

 

Intro: As much as I hate Hallmark movies (and that channel is on 24/7 at our house during Xmas) It does teach the world the mindset of marriage.

We all know what happens in a Hallmark movie… one woman, 2 men, one from the past or small town… ultimately has to choose one and someone has to give up some type of dream… but they live happily ever after.

HOLD ON… I don’t mean it taught us what to expect in our lives… what it does do is teach us to build a pattern around what we expect in marriages today… i.e. fall in love, think it will last, hit some hard times and divorce to do it over again. 

 

Marriage is harder than it looks and not as fun as it might seem.

 

Everyone in life has a moment or two when you did not realize the power behind that choice… 

listening to that voice if you will: My mom telling me you cannot go with your best friends dad to go see him graduate at boot camp… and it saved my life.

AND THERE ARE TIMES… you see a choice you did make and you wonder what life would have been like without that choice…

THIS IS MARRIAGE - BUT AGAIN you don’t realize it till years after you got married. 

LIKE ME - AND MOST - you think what would my life have been like…in a good way and in a bad way and in a self reflective way… But everyone who gets married has that thought… wow the change in my life because of that one person.

  -  This is why a covenant is so important to marriage. It holds our feet to the fire until we can see the beauty of the decision to stay with that person even if they are the wrong one. 

 

The best things that ever happened to me were due to the hardest things that ever happened to me. Because I understood a covenant - I learned to understand that in marriage. 

 

Understanding a marriage covenant helps you change your expectation… from This will make me happy (an unrealistic high selfish expectation) to this will make me more like Jesus (a realistic lowly achievable Holy expectation). 

 

Marriage is a covenant We see in Gen. 2: and Mark 10

Mark 10 7 ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, 8 and the two shall become one flesh’; so then they are no longer two, but one flesh. 9 Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate.”

 

Eph. 5:31-33 31“For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” 32This mystery is profound, but I am speaking about Christ and the church. 33Nevertheless, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.…

 

 

God’s intention for marriage is not to be a contract that needs both parties to hold up their end of the deal—as 1 Corinthians 13:1 says, “…love keeps no records of right and wrongs.” God’s purpose for marriage is different from the world’s. 

It’s a covenant—binding and irrevocable because of His love. I Cor. 7 states you can leave, but you can’t divorce… this is covenant talk, not contract talk. 

 

Covenant: A divinely created relational bond. The administration for the paperwork was done up in heaven… it was divinely created. 

 

 

**Have you gone through the FOR BETTER FOR WORSE portion of your marriage… and wondered why the worse seems to come around more than the better? Because we focus on the immediate - a covenant focuses on the eternal.