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Take an inventory of what you’ve put in that empty room at the center. Have you filled that void with other things so that dining intimately with Christ would be awkward or impossible?
Choosing the Lord is not the same as inclining your heart to the Lord. Serving the Lord is not the same as inclining your heart to the Lord. Putting away sin and false worship isn’t the same as inclining your heart to the Lord. Inclining your heart to the Lord means to redirect all your heart’s longings toward Him and only Him.
Picture a plant that leans with every fiber of its being toward the ray of light that comes through the window each morning.
To extend yourself in search of God usually comes down to a few very practical decisions. Does it mean you choose to rise earlier each day to seek Him in His Word? Does it mean you jealously guard the quiet moments of the day to simply listen for the sound of His voice? Does it mean you need to notice what priorities start to incline your heart toward other uses for your time and energy?
I promised you that the answer was yes. But the key to overcoming sin was to understand more about what drives us to sin. We learned that we experience two main urges that drive us to sin: to feel pleasure or to avoid pain. We discovered two breakthrough ways to deal with these urges: 1. We can go to God to find comfort. 2. We can deal positively with the source of our pain. Then we moved deeper. We learned that our hunger for God originates from a spiritual emptiness or void we experience at the core of our being. This void can cause us to sin if we seek false ways to fill it. But we arrived
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It’s true that wholehearted spiritual commitments will affect every single area of your life for the better. But most of us still need to make solid and significant breakthroughs in the critical areas of our day-to-day lives.
A godly—read that, “God-designed”—marriage is actually what every sensible husband wants.
The overarching role of the man in marriage is to be the head. He is to be the head in a similar way that Christ is head of the Church.
Did you notice that the Bible doesn’t say, “For the husband should try to be the head of the wife”? No, it says, “the husband is the head.”
For reasons of His own, God fashioned the man to lead and the woman to respond to his leadership in marriage.
Beyond being in charge in your marriage, as head you must make sure that the people you are responsible for are happy, content, well provided for, protected, and fulfilled. Consider your role model. Jesus gave Himself completely and sacrificially for the needs and interests of His bride, the church.
There it is—Christ’s “role” as head of His bride, the Church, is to bring her to wholeness, holiness, and beauty; in other words, to help her achieve the full measure of what God intends for her life.
You should be able to evaluate your effectiveness in the headship role by noticing its results in your wife.
Notice, for example, that all of Christ’s reasons for loving the church are concerned with what He can do for the church, not with what the church does for Him.
Then, with hardly a pause, she gave the husband an approving look and said, “And you, young man. As her husband, you did that!”
Marriage counselors and wives tend to agree on at least one “headship hindrance”: Too many husbands tip like a sandman in one direction or the other, either too aggressive or too passive.
And unfortunately, aggressors often end up as abusers, hurting the very ones they promised to love and protect.
What is God’s better plan for husbands? I like to describe it as strength in balance.
There’s a well-known secret about husbands who bully: When you fall back on this method of being the head, you’re not leading from either love or strength, but from fear and weakness.
Husbands are to love their wives. The breakthroughs start here.
God’s plan for marriages that are made in heaven and enjoyed on earth requires the husband to realize that the most important responsibility in his whole marriage is for him to love his wife. Can you think of any other need that the wife would have that wouldn’t be met if he truly loved his wife?
The husbands I admire frankly admit that they study their wife—put her under a lens, so to speak, and invest themselves wholeheartedly in learning her natural preferences, her innermost desires, and her deepest needs.
Only when he realized that genuine love is a choice, not an emotion, was he free to truly love his wife.
4. Phileo requires some level of emotional attachment and personal affection to thrive. Agape flourishes in the soil of commitment; any positive emotional experiences only enhance it.
5. Phileo can be a blend of both selfish and self-giving attitudes and actions. Agape, on the other hand, always seeks to benefit the other, often at the expense of self.
When she acted in a way that I liked, then I would give her some love. When she really pleased me, I would give her a big hunk of it. In other words, my love was selfish and conditional.
that the times I loved her when I felt least loving toward her may be the moments in which I loved her the most.
A woman’s rare and beautiful destiny in marriage has come under heavy attack.
In the face of these sobering issues, I first want to affirm for you that God has good news for your marriage. Let me hang way off that cliff, so to speak, and say something full of honest hope: It is the will of God that your marriage be full of joy.
This major distinction is revealed and supported throughout the rest of the Bible: the man’s role from day one of the marriage covenant was to be the head; the woman’s role from day one was to be his helper. Clarity about this is the foundation of a First Chair marriage.
Sovereignly designed … Equally loved … Perfectly suited for the man’s needs … Mercifully provided for the man’s loneliness … Uniquely gifted to make a beautiful life together with him.
I can’t tell you the number of husbands who tell me that their wives have no idea what they’re going through.
• “I love it when Sandy touches me, rubs my back, stands close to me, that kind of stuff. Guys like that—at least I do. I carry a lot of tension in my shoulders and neck. Her touch is my medicine.”
The biblical word for this gift of following and supporting in love is submission. Submission may sound weak, old-fashioned, or even vaguely offensive to you. But for your husband, a wife who chooses submission is his gold-plated invitation to success. After all, without someone who is willing to follow, how will his God-given role—“to lead”—work?
Your tender affection and fierce loyalty gave him an inner strength like he’d never known.
Wrong! The Bible never teaches that the husband is to make his wife submit. Rather, the Bible teaches that the wife voluntarily chooses to obey the Lord and bring herself, as a submitted wife, to her husband.
This is why the Bible doesn’t use a word like obey instead of submit. To submit to someone goes far beyond mere obedience. For example, you can obey another without bringing anything under his or her authority except that single act. Submission focuses on the deeper and more important issues of one’s heart and intentions.
Think how dramatically this approach would change many marriages. Instead of a wife wrestling with whether or not she is going to submit in a specific matter, she would have already chosen to submit herself—even when she strongly disagrees with him (more on this hot potato). When the wife has broken through to true biblical submission as her commitment for a great marriage, then submitting in the range of different circumstances becomes so much easier.
The opportunity for the wife in these situations is to decline to do the wrong act because of her higher allegiance to God—without showing disrespect for the husband who is proposing it.
Misconception #4: A Wife Is Supposed to Submit to Her Husband, but He’s Also Supposed to Submit to Her
On the surface, mutual submission seems logical and fair. After all, no one can be right all the time. Proponents of this approach point to Ephesians 5: “And do not be drunk with wine … but be filled with the Spirit … giving thanks always for all things … submitting to one another in the fear of God” (vv. 18-21). But this passage is the conclusion of nearly five chapters of counsel to the body of Christ at Ephesus, wherein Paul is laying out what it means to be a Christian and how we should relate to each other in the church.
Just because you are the helper of the husband doesn’t mean your husband shouldn’t help you.
You’re reading this book because you want more. You want God’s best. Specifically, you long for a thriving, fulfilling, and God-pleasing marriage. But if you’re conscientiously seeking to obey the Lord by living out a biblical marriage and breakthroughs still aren’t happening in your life, you may be suffering from a blindness similar to mine.
How easy it will be for you to skip over this chapter if you resist the possibility of emotional or physical infidelity of any kind in your relationship. Or if your personal commitments, like mine, seem generally laudable and even noble. But what I want to talk about is a blindness that keeps legions of husbands and wives stuck in the Second Chair year after year, wondering why things don’t change for the better and spiritual breakthroughs don’t happen.
Malachi reveals the mysterious block in Israel’s prayer life. What he says must have taken them by surprise: “Because the LORD has been witness between you and the wife of your youth, with whom you have dealt treacherously; yet she is your companion and your wife by covenant” (v. 14).
One Sunday evening, the reality of this kind of violence struck home for me. I had preached on this passage at a large church in the Southeast. At the end of the service, hundreds of adults flooded to the front. Many were sobbing. I assumed that these were penitent husbands and wives who had divorced and wanted to find healing, but I was entirely mistaken. Without exception, every person pressing forward for prayer and comfort was an adult child of parents who had divorced. The pain in that group was overwhelming. Their injuries, some sustained in family breakups years and even decades before,
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Let me ask you this: What does God want at the heart of your marriage instead of treachery? May I suggest two words? These two words are so powerful in releasing spiritual breakthroughs in Christian husbands and wives that they matter to you right now if neither the thought nor the reality of divorce has ever entered your marriage. The words are absolute loyalty.
Most of what calls out to you offers room just for you, not your spouse. The simple, though at times painful, requirement of every husband and wife is to insist on a no-division policy at every decision point. The two of you have become one, and anything that would try to pry you apart into two again is unacceptable. No person, goal, activity, or endeavor that would create a wedge is allowed!
The two of you have become one, and anything that would try to pry you apart into two again is unacceptable.
I believe a successful marriage is the result of falling in love over and over again—always with the same person!
