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How to Stay Married

by Jerry Ousley  
2/26/2016 / Church Life

Last time we talked about the buzzer found in all of us, but especially in men. Today we are going to assume that the buzzer has sounded, the dating phase has ended, the wedding and honeymoon is over, and we're settling in for the long haul. The two of you are so in love that you think you'll always understand each other and you'll never fight. But unless you are out of the ordinary don't fool yourself (and there are some; I've talked to a few couples who claim they never fight, but let's face it, that isn't the norm for most of us). Before you know it the habits each of you have that you hadn't discussed before the wedding will begin to crop up. Oh, they don't have to be enormous things; just the little things like how you squeeze the toothpaste from the tube, whether you change the toilet paper roll when you've used it up, and what's that awful smelling stuff you're putting on your face?

It's time for some honesty here, okay? I'm going to be honest with you and then I expect you to be honest with yourself. Here it goes; the truth of the matter is that Deb and I were at each other's throats the second week after the honeymoon, and (remember we're being honest here) it was mostly my fault. It was me who had the largest number of annoying habits. Deb was never one to keep things in and so she let me know, boy did she ever!

Then the children came along and we didn't have as much time between working and raising them, to continue correcting each other's annoying traits. But after the last one had left the nest it began all over.

Now don't get me wrong because I don't mean to give you the impression here that fighting is all Deb and I do. We've had some wonderful experiences together and after thirty-nine years as of this writing, we are still happily married. We still have disagreements from time to time but by this time we've either changed our annoying habits or gotten so used to them that they aren't as annoying any more. But does that mean that we're out of the woods on this thing? To answer your question I heard just this week of a couple who has been married for fifty-one years who has split up! And these were church-going folks too! You'd think after fifty-one years they'd be too old to have the energy to split up!

The fact is that until the "death-do-us-part" clause is put into affect (in other words, one of the partners pass on) the marriage takes work and hard work! Especially in the day in which we live when divorce is such an easy thing to accomplish, staying married is tough. In days gone by you just couldn't get unhitched that easy. There had to be good reason. Most of our flimsy excuses today would never fly then. The "I don't love him or her anymore" would have been met with "That's tough buddy! You should have thought about that before you said 'I do.' So be a man (or a woman) and make the best of it." That might seem harsh but it was good because it forced people to learn to love each other again.

So what does the Bible say about this? It says a lot and there's no way I can cover it all in a single article. So I'm going to concentrate on the passage of scripture as found in Ephesians 5:21-25. It says, "Submitting to one another in the fear of God. Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is head of the wife, as also Christ is head of the church; and He is the Savior of the body. Therefore, just as the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives bee to their own husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her." The first sentence when taken in the correct context is actually a part of the verses above it and is talking about Christians in general. We are to submit to each other as believers. But if both the husband and wife are believers then that means they've got to submit to each other. We could argue for days over wives submitting to husbands and so forth but in a nutshell if the husband will work on loving his wife as much as Christ loved the church and gave Himself for her, then I'd say the submitting part of the wife wouldn't be all that difficult.

So how do we stay married? Determine that we're going to stay together no matter what, take the advice of Paul and put it into action. When we do we'll be so busy we won't have time to think about not loving him or her, and how much better we'd be off to just up and leave and we just might learn to actually love each other in the process. Simple, huh?

Jerry D. Ousley is the author of ?Soul Challenge?, ?Soul Journey?, ?Ordeal?, ?The Spirit Bread Daily Devotional and his first novel ?The Shoe Tree.? Visit our website at spiritbread.com to download these and more completely free of charge.

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