This past Sunday school class in
my church was about divorce and the topic was Precious relationships; a
reminder of our relationship with Christ, the most precious of relationships,
upon which our other relationships, including marriage, are built. It occurred
to me that the high divorce rate in the church today may not be unconnected with
the fact that we don’t grasp what Christian relationships should be and what is
required of us to make them work; and we won’t understand it if our relationship
with Christ is faulty. If this is true, our approach to saving Christian
marriages may need some adjusting for it to be more effective because the
problem would then be foundational.
1 Peter 1: 18 - 19
“For you know that God paid a ransom to save you from the empty life you
inherited from your ancestors. And it was not paid with mere gold or silver,
which lose their value. It was the precious blood of Christ, the sinless,
spotless Lamb of God.”
A good Christian marriage cannot
be built on a faulty relationship with Christ. Webster’s dictionary describes
relationship as “the fact or state of having something in common” so that all believers
are in a relationship. If we understand what we have in common, our attitude
toward each other will be much better. We have the same Father and Saviour
whose precious blood flows in our veins making our relationships precious; a
fact we are unaware of because of the faultiness of our relationship with
Christ which said faultiness impacts on the way we treat our spouses. There are
some things you won’t do to your spouse if you understand how precious your
relationship is; your relationship is “blood deep.”
If we don’t understand what is
expected of us in Christian relationships, then we obviously don’t know what is
expected of us in Christian marriages. We have to unlearn all the world taught
us about relationships then learn the new to conduct ourselves in marriage. You
won’t get good results mixing both. Today, believers take all they can in
relationships and give nothing. Even with God, we pay no price and argue that
Christ already paid the required price but God is asking us to die to self
which we won’t do; and all because we are too selfish. We are so selfish, our
relationships are getting ruined.
1 John 4: 11 “Dear
friends, since God loved us that much, we surely ought to love each other.”
At the height of selfishness,
life is only about you and what you want; every other person is “someone else”,
even including your spouse and children. You will treat your family like “others”
no matter how much you profess love for them. They will be tools in your hands
for accomplishing your purpose though you “love them.” You will lose them one
day if you don’t stop before they get fed up. The level of selfishness that
exists in our midst is alarming. Life is about us and our needs even to the detriment
of all others. Every other person becomes a means to achieving our one goal or
the other.
1 John 4: 8 “But
anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love.”
The love we profess is not God yet
the bible says God is love. The truth is what most of us feel and profess is
lust and that is what we build our lives and relationships around. We don’t
know love because we don’t truly know God. We kill ourselves yet we speak
against people who kill believers. You can’t lust after God and claim to love
others; you deceive yourself. If you love Christ, you won’t treat any believer
like thrash particularly not your spouse. Your spouse is first your brother/sister
in Christ; if you understand that, there are certain things you won’t do to
them. We need to return to the basics of our Christianity; Christian marriages
must be built on a relationship with Christ and guided by the rules that guide our
love relationship with Him.
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