Marriage and Beyond

This entry is a part of the message series we are doing in our church. I hope that readers who love their families and who are serious about making their families better and happier will consider the principles that will be shared. A small note: the principles being shared here are not from me. They are from the Bible and anything written here may be or may not be agreeable to some readers. Let me just give proper information to readers that my bias is for God and the Bible.

As Psalm 127:1a says, ”Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it.”

1) God’s design is that a family is to be a shelter in storms.

We all have storms in life because life is tough. Things don’t always go as planned. We need a place of protection, stability, security.

Proverbs 14:26 “In the fear of the Lord there is strong confidence, and His children will have refuge.”

In the verse above, God’s children find refuge in Him as their Heavenly Father. God’s relationship with His children, those who have accepted Christ as their personal Savior and Lord, is the perfect example for this. And God created the family to be a shelter (a refuge) in storms.

Some types of storms families face are financial, physical, emotional, intellectual, moral. But in general they can be summed up in three types.

a) Change is a storm. We go through changes in life. We have illnesses, we have deaths, we have graduations, we change jobs, we move, and we adjust in these situations. There needs to be a place that, no matter where the house is, there is a family in it and that we know we can count on.

b) Failure is a storm. We’re not always the winner in life. Sometimes we lose. We get turned down at work for promotion, students get an “F” at school, children don’t make the team, their team has a losing season, or the family may go bankrupt. Things just don’t always go as planned. You can handle a lot of failure in life if you come home to hugs, where there’s a shelter in this kind of storm.

Ecclesiaistes 4:9-10 says, “Two are better than one because they have a good return for their labor. 10 For if either of them falls, the one will lift up his companion. But woe to the one who falls when there is not another to lift him up.”

It is a sad thing to see when husbands, wives, or when children who have experienced som form of failure outside of their home and then they come home and instead of being sheltered, they are nagged at, put down, ridiculed and even punished for what they’ve experienced.

c) Rejection is a storm. This is probably the most difficult storm to handle of all. We hate to be rejected, put down, ridiculed, criticized. Some of the most difficult rejection we may have had was growing up on the playground. Kids are cruel. If we don’t believe in sin nature (that man is born a sinner), just become a teacher. Kids are ruthless. Many of us even today can remember points of pain when we were young or embarrassing situations. We still remember them vividly, when we were embarrassed or put down as a kid. Somebody said something about us and it hurt. If we didn’t have anybody to go home to, to reinforce the positive in our lives, that can have a long lasting, lifetime, emotional wound. We need a storm protector when people put us down.

HOW DO WE APPLY THIS PRINCIPLE AT HOME?

Simply DEMONSTRATE LOVE AT HOME. Through hugs, a long embrace, a simple pat on the back, a kiss. Try it when your husband, your wife or your child gets home, especially during the storms and see what improvement it can make.

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