Marriage Moment – May 18
Marriage Moment
Marriage is not about you! Shocker. No seriously. It is not about you. It is really about the person you are married to. You will not find in this life many people that will give their life up for another person. But that is a part of what marriage is about. Covenant marriage is about you walking out daily the unconditional love for another person and to do that you have to give up all. You can’t be selfish. You just can’t. It won’t work. You must count the cost of the love you say you have for anyone, especially you mate.
I want to give you a devotion from Still Higher for His Highest by Oswald Chambers on May 18, that I feel speaks so clearly to this heart of abandonment for someone else and for unconditional love.
Whenever the call is given for abandon to Jesus Christ, people say it is offensive and out of taste. The counterfeit of abandon is that misleading phrase ‘Christian service’. I will spend myself for God, I will do anything and everything but the one thing He is asking me to do, viz,: give up my right to myself to Him. We say, “but surely Christian service is a right thing.” Immediately we begin to say that, we are off the track. It is the right Person, the Lord Jesus Christ, not the right thing. Don’t stop short of the Lord Himself– For My Sake. The great dominating recognition is that my personal self belongs to Jesus. When I receive the Holy Spirit, I receive not merely a possible oneness with Jesus Christ, but a real intense oneness with Him. The point is, will I surrender my individual life entirely to Him? it will mean giving up not only bad tings, but things which are right and good. If you have to calculate what you are willing to give up for Jesus Christ, never say you love Him. Jesus Christ asks us to give up the best we have got to Him, our right to ourselves. Self-realization must be renounced in order that Jesus Christ may realize Himself in us.
Oswald Chamber is talking here about the love we believers say we have for Jesus. He is talking about total surrender. He is not talking about you say you love Jesus and you keep back part of that love for yourself.
See we live in a culture that you can say you love but you don’t have to show you love. You can say you love in this society and it cost you nothing. My friend…that is not LOVE. Most people say that they can love you but don’t have to give up anything. I say that is simply not true because of the pure nature of love and its origin, God. God is love and love by itself gives. Love doesn’t ever consider itself or a suffered wrong. Period. You can’t argue with that.
To really love Jesus and love your mate, you must give up all. The fact that if the Holy Spirit is in you, He beckons and pulls at you and reveals Jesus to you, you cannot help but love Him with everything in you. The question then is not is this love real but will you abandon yourself to this love. This goes in marriage. Are you abandoned to your spouse or do you hold back. Do you think only of yourself and when it is convenient you give love on a condition?
Staying married, therefore, is not mainly about staying in love. It is about keeping covenant. “til death do us part” or “As long as we both shall live” is a sacred covenant promise–the same kind Jesus made with his bride when He died for her.
When this love is not in place as it should be, divorce can happen. What makes divorce and in most cases remarriage so HORRIFIC in God’s eyes is not merely that it involves covenant-breaking to the spouse but that it involves misrepresenting Christ and His covenant. Christ will NEVER leave his wife. EVER. There may be times of painful distance and tragic backsliding on our part. But Christ keeps his covenant forever.
Marriage is a display of that!!!!If you have the Holy Spirit residing in you, why would you want to display divorce and conditional love. Imagine how grieved He must be.
Marriage puts the GLORY of Christ’s covenant keeping love on display. What are you displaying?
