Stay The Course

Believe me, I know... staying the course in your marriage is not always easy. 

During most of the first half of the three decades my wife and I have been together, we felt like giving up more times than I can recall. In fact, we both did give up, several times.  But Someone kept bringing us back together—helping us to love and forgive one another. 

As my wife and I enjoyed our coffee together this morning, we reflected on how we have been through so many difficult trials, and endured times of hopelessness.  But what is truly overwhelming is that if we had not chosen to stay the course and surrendered our hearts to Christ and then allowed God to bring us back together and forgive each other, we would have missed out on the healing of our marriage and on so many wonderful things that He has done in our marriage since those very dark days.

We will be forever grateful!

So our encouragement to you today is to stay the course in your marriage, and call upon the only One who is truly able to save.  We tried for years to fix our marriage and we only made it worse.  We couldn't fix our marriage because we couldn't fix ourselves. 

There is a story in the gospels of Jesus meeting a Samaritan woman at a well.  Like our lives had been, this Samaritan woman's life had been a series of failed relationships.  But Jesus' purpose in their conversation was to get to the heart of the matter—which was to bring her into a spiritual relationship with Him. She spoke of water drawn from the well that can only quench one's thirst temporarily.  But Jesus spoke of a completely different kind of water:

^"Jesus answered, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life." (John 4:13-14)

Our marriage was failing miserably and dying, and we desperately needed this Living Water to flow into it and give us life.  But we had to choose to drink of it. And ever since we did, we have never thirsted again.  Sure, we still have struggles from time to time.  But we can never forget what God has done in our hearts and in our marriage.  It is tangible, it is real and we have experienced it first-hand.   No one can ever take that away from us.

Sometimes a marriage can dry up because of selfishness, when we stop loving loving our spouse and become totally self-absorbed.  When this happens one must cry out for the ever-present Living Water that Christ offers and drink deeply from Him as our source. 

Even if your marriage seems dead to you, at the scent of His Living Water, it will bud and flourish again.

"For there is hope for a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout again, and its tender shoots will not cease.  Though its root may grow old in the earth, and it's stump may die in the ground, yet, at the scent of water it will bud and bring forth branches like a plant."  (Job 14:7-9)

Drink deeply of His Living Water and experience the new life in your marriage that only Christ can bring. There is hope in Him.

—God is Love and Love Never Fails.