Reconciling Love in Marriage

You hurt your spouse deeply by (________________) fill in the blank or you hurt each other. Is this the end of the marriage or is there hope? Yes, there is hope because God can fix it if you are humble enough and honest enough. The first step is to stop the behavior. The next step is to face reality and honestly admit to yourself and to God your part in whatever hurting thing that took place. After this breakthrough you will need to have strong faith because now you must forgive your spouse's part in whatever happened between you.  

You must say the words, "I forgive you!" Then begin treating him or her as if they had never sinned against you. I’m not talking about being in denial nor about simply forgetting what happened. I’m talking about what I call active forgiveness. The making of a firm decision to treat your spouse as innocent of wrongdoing, the granting of a full pardon to your spouse. Keep repeating this active form of forgiveness every day until the hurt you feel is gone from your hearts. This could take awhile, but don’t quit  just minutes before this miracle happens for you.

Part of the healing process you’ll experience is the softening of your hearts which allows the stirrings of love to begin again or should I say to begin anew. This will be a beautiful and a divine thing. Then you will experience and understand what God means in  
1 Peter 4:8  where he says, “Love covers over a multitude of sins." 

Finally, learn to love God’s way as in 1 Corinthians 13:1-8. In this passage God gives us an amazing blueprint for how to love your spouse. Own this passage of the bible. Substitute your name in all of the place where the words, 'love' and 'it' appear then imitate those actions. 

It is my hope and my prayer that God will bless your marriage with the incredible reconciliation that he has blessed mine with. God went a step further than to just restore our relationship. He gave us an even better relationship and a greater love than we had before. For these gifts, we will forever be grateful. 

Training Yourself (To Be A Godly Man)

I was asked to do a short talk sharing with some men in our church on a scripture pertaining to training yourself to be godly.  In 1^st Timothy 4:7-8 the bible states, “For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.”

I had to ponder for several minutes about what to say to them. Obviously going to church, listening carefully to the message, taking notes and reading the bible are all training but I wanted to share what really helped to train me. To prepare for sharing, I started off with reading the scripture quoted above then I started to read other scriptures that mention the word godliness. As I was reading I began to feel stuck so I did something I should have done in the first place which was to pray. After looking up from my prayer my eyes fell upon my journals sitting on my bookshelf.   I picked one up to see if I had previously written anything down about training myself to be godly when suddenly it hit me.  For me the very act of writing in my journals was how I trained myself to be godly.  I have filed up three journals and I am currently working on my fourth. In my journals I write down my personal thoughts about things that are troubling me or inspiring me and I write down inspiring scriptures.   In my journals, I also admit to myself and to God what my part was in starting a conflict, and then I go ahead and forgive the other person’s role in the conflict. I also write down what emotions I am feeling and then write down some conclusions about why I feel those emotions.  It gets better; next I will write down exactly what I need to do to repent and how I’m going to make amends for my own wrong behavior. In conclusion when I speak to the men tonight; I plan to share with them that journaling was how I trained myself to be a godly man and that I still write in my journal today.