Hello dear friend,
Greetings to you in Jesus name. I hope you are safe, healthy, and doing well in the grace and mercies of God.
It’s a joy and privilege to have Ps. Robin William from Face2Face Bangalore to write a guest post for us. Please take time to read, comment, and share this with your loved ones.
The paradigm of marriage and relationships have been under attack for thousands of years and it has definitely become more prevalent during the last decade.
So, why are marriages and relationships under attack? The truth is that the devil loves to put seeds of doubt, conflict and division – just because it is something that was designed and ordained by God. Besides God ordaining it, marriage is also a representation of the relationship between Christ and us, which is something that the enemy was completely stripped of.
In most of the instances, the enemy is satisfied by manipulating our understanding of relationships just enough, that we settle for something less than what God intended it to be. If he can cause us to live in a lie, the enemy knows that he can get us to hate it so much that we alone will give up on living out what God intended from its original design.
Probably one of the most read passages during a wedding is Ephesians 5:22-25. It reads like this: Ephesians 5:22-25 [ESV] “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. 25 Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.”
The greatest MISCONCEPTION is to summarize Ephesians 5:22-25 to the following:
1. Husbands LOVE your wife.
2. Wives SUBMIT to your husband.
This is probably why many of us find our marriages and even our relationship with God so challenging. Because we live from a revelation that it is so impossible to live this out.
What if I propose that God does not design something that He is not willing to do in the first place? What if I propose that God has a way of revealing His character in the very things He is asking us to do? So, what does God really want from us as a Husband, as a Wife and as a Bride in our relationship with Him?
Let me challenge you, that the truth in Ephesians 5:22-25 has everything to do with SACRIFICE and Sacrifice alone, because this is what Jesus did for us as a church. John 3:16a [ESV] puts it this way “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son…”
Love without Sacrifice is cheap! Love without it costing you something is cheap. God gave us His everything (as a Sacrifice) to show the depth of His Love. So if we look at Ephesians 5:22-25 again, this is what the word of God is asking of us in our marriages and our relationship with Christ:
1. Husband LOVE your wife like CHRIST [even at the cost of your own DEATH].
2. Wife SUBMIT to your husband like unto CHRIST [because of the COST of the love that He is ready to pay/display for you].
See true marriage and relationship is a fruit of the husband loving sacrificially and the wife submitting out of the place of being loved unconditionally. This revelation causes neither parties to be slaves to each other – its unconditional love from one end and its unconditional submission from the other end, because both are relying on the essence of SACRIFICE.
If we can get a revelation of the SACRIFICE of Jesus, maybe each of us will have less hesitation to willfully Submit to Him. If we can get a revelation of what it COST him on the cross, maybe we will have less hesitation to Obey Him. If we can get a revelation of how much we are already loved unconditionally, maybe we will have less hesitation to believe that His plans are to prosper and not harm us.
So today, realign to the truth that God is LOVE and His Love was displayed through Sacrifice. Today, realign to the truth that Jesus is asking us to do something in our marriages and relationships that He already did for us.
We cannot fully LOVE without it costing us everything (Sacrifice) and we cannot SUBMIT unless we know that we are LOVED!
We pray and declare that today you will receive a brand new revelation of LOVE that is rooted in SACRIFICE.
Blessings.
Robin & Lenu
_web: robinandlenu.com_
_social media: @robinandlenu_
