Marriage Is Not All About The Will Of God (1)

Marriage is a lifetime journey that should not be taken for granted and because of its uniqueness and importance, God’s help and leading in the choice of a life partner cannot be over emphasized.

However, I am of the opinion that knowing the will of God is not the ultimate thing but just a fragment of the whole process that ensures a successful marriage. People have been brainwashed into the illusion that things would automatically fall in place with the choice of the will of God. Nevertheless, I write to challenge that unbalanced truth today, make bold to say that a number of things still matter, and need to be considered apart from waiting on God to hear or see whom He wants us to marry. This could be nothing but mere deceit and a crass way of thinking! I wish that all Christians across the world would take God seriously and never make Him a liar any longer.

Don’t get me wrong please, the will of God is important in marriage but the point is, it is not enough for you to know the will of God, but you need to know what to do appropriately with the will of God. This is one reason why Paul said in one of his letters to the Ephesians that we should understand what the will of God is. For example, you could have actually seen someone as the perfect man God has chosen for you but that is not enough. You need to go beyond that level and understand that one needs to do some background checks and consider some salient but important things which I will mention in the course of this write-up. If not, there is every possibility that you are likely going to make a mess of your marriage!

Let us look at one of the salient areas in which God manifested His dynamic nature on this. When He created Adam, he gave him the authority over the works of His hands by putting him in a position whereby he could use his brain and that was why Adam single handedly named all the animals without making any recourse to God! Bible says whatsoever Adam named the animals came to be. Adam did that successfully with all the animals and after Eve was created, God only presented her to Adam which he immediately recognized as someone different from other animals he had been relating with. He did not have to pray to know there was a bonding between the two of them and that made him christen her “woman”. This shows that it will be mere laziness and insult on God’s personality to throw all the responsibilities of choosing a life partner on God and keep wishing that things would fall in place automatically just because we are not ready to shoulder responsibilities incase anything goes wrong.

Let it be known to everybody that the choice of a life partner has God’s responsibility as well as everyone’s; a two-way thing. God’s responsibility is to create (make available) for you to see but the onus lies on you to make a choice using the resources God gave you as Adam did. God created Eve and allowed her husband to make his choice. Excuse me, don’t you think either Adam or Eve could have rejected each other and decided to be with the animals? If that had happened, I can bet it that God wouldn’t have forced anyone of them on the other.

Let us stop the confusion; one of the most crucial things about the will of God in marriage is for an individual to tighten up all loose ends. However, the challenge is, “do we even understand or recognize what we are supposed to do on our own part?” God has created a lot of opposite sex partners and left us with choices to make. What efforts are we making on our side to make the right choice? And when we make the right choice, what do we do to nurture and keep the right choice? Prayers to get God’s will is good but for some reasons, many people think that because “God has spoken or has revealed” (which could still be questionable anyway for some obvious reasons), the marriage will automatically continue to grow without working it out. This is tantamount to saying, "my power generating set has full tank of fuel today, so it should be fine to keep working without doing anything else to it". It’s really not the best when we keep servicing our power generating set at regular intervals, maintain our cars, our houses, etc more than we do our relationships. What do we do to maintain the will of God we once claimed to have?

It is also not all about finding the will of God in marriage but understanding how to manage and nurture the will of God. I love what my friend, Mathew Eseoghene Edafe said sometime ago on facebook. He said that even if he had made a mistake marrying the wrong person, he was determined to make the marriage work to the extent that when God sees his determination and effort, He would not have any choice but to rise up and help him right all the wrongs in the marriage. That is the spirit; God couldn’t have been more moved at any other thing than this determination. A determination to make it work before getting into it has generated an atmosphere for success already.

Next week Monday, 13th August, 2012, we shall continue on some of the things you need to consider besides getting the will of God.

                                                                                                                 (C) rwnomoreloss 2012