YOUR MARRIAGE IN TRYING TIMES
(Mark 10:9 KJV ) What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.
(Gen 2:24 NIV) For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.
There are three aspects to a marriage in this passage. Leave, cleave, become one flesh.
(Mal 2:16 NIV) "I hate divorce," says the LORD God of Israel
(Mark 10:9 KJV ) What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.
a. Turn your Adversity to your advantage.
(2 Cor 1:3-4 NIV) Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, {4} who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.
(2 Cor 1:9-10 NIV) Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead. {10} He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us,
William Shakespeare says: “Sweet are the uses of Adversity”.
b. Turn troubles to Triumph.
Dr. James Kennedy says “ Life is shaped…by what it does with the troubles it experiences”.
c. Be an optimist not a pessimist.
(Prov 13:12 NIV) Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.
d. Don’t be choked or strangled by worry. Matthew 6:25-26
(Mat 6:25-26 NIV) "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? {26} Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?
The word worry and anxiety are derived from the Latin and Anglo saxon forms of a root word which means to choke or to strangle.
e. Don’t call it a quit.
(Mat 24:13 NIV) but he who stands firm to the end will be saved.
(Gal 6:9 NIV) Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.
f. Surmount the insurmountable. Joshua 3:13
(Josh 3:13 NIV) And as soon as the priests who carry the ark of the LORD--the Lord of all the earth--set foot in the Jordan, its waters flowing downstream will be cut off and stand up in a heap."
