The Meaning of Marriage

The Meaning of Marriage by Tim Keller!  Read it, everyone.
I actually just finished this book this morning and wanted to reflect on it and think through everything I learned from it.  Now some of you might be asking me why I am reading a book on marriage if I am not married.  Marriage is actually something that God has placed a desire on my heart for.  I like to more think of it as my calling to be a wife and a mother.  I want to be a stay at home mom and raise my children so they know they are loved by their parents and are adored by Jesus.  I want to teach them, too, how to and what freedom and delight it is to adore Jesus themselves.  I want to be a wife to a man who is a follower of Jesus above everything else in life.  I want to marry a man who loves Jesus a lot more than he loves me.  I want people to be able to see my marriage and to see something different and to question it.  I want people to observe the love of Jesus through the way my husband loves me and the way I serve and love my husband.  When I think about the marriage God has for me I think of something so much BETTER than anything that can be depicted in movies.  Now with all of that said, I have been so blessed and am very content in the place God has me right now.  He has been so good to me in teaching me a ton about marriage and what He wants from it.  I am so thankful to be single as He teaches me because I can better understand it in relation to Him in my marriage rather than getting caught up in fantasizing and seeing everything in terms of me and a specific person.  Although I read this book and was unable to practically go home and make changes with a husband, it has given me a much broader picture on what to expect(good and hard) and has given me specific areas to pray regarding a marriage in the future.
This book began with sort of the history of marriage and how we ended up in the place we are at today.  No other time in history have people been entering into marriage looking to be self fulfilled by another person like they do today.  This is something that Keller refers to as the "Me-Marriage."  People are getting married because of the way that person makes them feel.  So you see the selfishness in all of that.  The thing that is so obvious is the fact that when people do this, they are putting expectations on a man/woman to fulfill them in a way that only Jesus Christ can do.  They expect their spouse to do something they simply can not do.  That is why people leave their marriages so often is because their spouse is not fulfilling them the way they expected them to do.
Marriage is a very powerful thing.  It was something that was beautifully created by God BEFORE sin entered into the world.  This means God felt it necessary and needed even when a person was in full union with God.  I love this!
Talking with a friend who has now been married for about a year and her and her husband are absolutely beautiful and honoring God has also helped me put these things I have been learning into a tangible picture.  She openly talked about how much your selfishness is shown to you in marriage.  This is actually a blessing when you think about it!  God has created marriage to sanctify you.  At the end of the day, God wants and will use your spouse to help reveal your sin so you can repent from it.  As a spouse that is what we should be helping, praying through and be open to receive from your own spouse.  There is not a closer, more connected human that you will even be with on earth.  The power of truth in marriage to talk through these sins with one another is so important!  The power of love in a marriage to lift each other up with kind, soft words that direct each other to Jesus and repentance and the power of Grace which was first displayed to us through Jesus to allow each other to forgive.  There is not another relationship on earth that can do the things marriage can do to you.  It is a blessing!  Begin looking at your spouse with eyes to see the things which God is doing in them.  See them as people who are being shaped by God into the people that will one day be complete in the sight of God!
The meaning of marriage is a selfish one but rather a selfless one.  It is to be a partner with your spouse, each having unique roles, to be an instrument in which God will use to sanctify your spouse.  What a blessing to be that person in someone's life!
I don't want this to seem as though I have rose colored glasses on and I think marriage will be a piece of cake.  I Don't!  I actually think that marriage will be the hardest relationship I have been in.  But I also know the power of God and the power of prayer and how much He will also be fighting for my marriage to be the way He wants it.  I know it will be hard but I know it will be beautiful as the Holy Spirit works on me and the spouse God blesses me with.

Let the Redeemed of the Lord Say So!

    "Let the redeemed of the Lord say so" - Psalm 107:2
I had the privilege to go to the Redemption Group celebration at my church last night which was literally a night of worship and people sharing their stories of what God has done and continues to do in their lives.  It was absolutely beautiful.
As I sit in the early morning at my local Starbucks eating breakfast and drinking a soy latte I feel led by the Lord to share my own redemption story.  Please read this story in a way which shows God's work in my life and on my heart and not anything that I have done on my own.  Praise God that I did not and could not do any of this on my own but rather ALL was done by Him.  I hope and pray that speaking truth and sharing my story will only bring you closer to Him.

I was born into a family which was pretty dysfunctional from the very beginning.  This is nothing new for me to know and if you asked anyone in my family they would say the same.  From a very early age I witnessed my dad treat my mom very poorly and as my sister and later I got older he began to treat us in the same way.  Verbal abuse was the norm and in order for our dad to like us, we had to be perfect by his standards.  We had to speak nicely to him even in the midst of his yelling at us and calling us names.  We had to let him do whatever he felt like doing and if we were hurt by anything, it was inappropriate and disrespectful to bring it to his attention.  My heavenly Father was present in my life but my earthly dad was much more important in my eyes.  He was much more important in his eyes as well. My dad never encouraged us in our relationship with Christ.  My mother took us to church but in her quiet nature did not speak biblical truth very often.  This began my quest for perfection.  From as early as I can remember I believed I was not beautiful and sadly, I equated beauty with perfection.  Because I was not perfect, I was not beautiful.  My quest for perfection came out in different ways and when I got into High School I believed that the easiest way to become beautiful was to become skinny.  I made a deliberate choice to stop eating.  I did not see it as a problem but rather something that every girl has to chose at some point in their life.  Not even understanding the sin in this my body and thoughts of food became an idol.  I became sad and angry at the people around me.  It just seemed as though they had it all together when I was putting up a daily fight to be that way.  How do people become so perfect?  Throughout high school I was continually being fed the lies of my father of who I was and who I could never be.  I came to the conclusion that I was not lovable the way I was and I had to continue to try harder.
Then God led me to a college which was a 13 hour drive away from home.  Coming out of such a difficult family environments does not go smoothly.  I came to the conclusion that not eating and being skinny was not what was going to get me love.  So I gave up and quickly realized that food was my friend.  And it became too close of a friend.  I began relying on food for my comfort, my joy, my peace, my healer, my strength and my motivation.  I found freedom in the fact that I could now eat without the burden of imperfection but I was in slavery at the other side of the pendulum.  I would eat to excess and quickly found myself in the bathroom in an attempt to throw up my shame of eating so much.  If anyone would have asked me if I had any sins in my life that were in my face everyday I would have said no and fully believed that I didn't.  A week before going back to Seattle for my second year of college I listened to a beautiful talk by one of the pastor's wives at my church on gluttony.  The Holy Spirit spoke straight to me as she read Philippians 3:19, "Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame.  Their mind is on earthly things."  I was stunned and saddened at the fact that I was blatantly choosing food over the God of the universe.  Although I was convicted of my sin and did not know what to do.  I began searching high and low for things to do in order to stop what I was doing.  I began reading books searching for exactly how to repent of something that had been a part of my daily life for the past seven years.  I had doubts that it was truly possible to repent because I didn't remember a time when I honored God with the things I ate.  To be honest I believed that was something God didn't deal with.  The basic act of eating was way too basic.  That is something we need to fix ourselves.  My binge eating and throwing up continued on for another year and when I got to winter quarter of my junior year of college I joined a Redemption Group at my church.  This was surprisingly something that I thought was a good idea to go through but not completely necessary for me.  My bingeing and purging was definitely something that I knew needed to change and I was reading books on the subject in an effort to find the best method for healing.  I sadly still had the idea in my head that it was way too below God for Him to even consider the idea of healing me from that.  Throughout Redemption Group I think I talked about this once or twice.  It was not the center of my discussions at group.  The center of the subject talked about at group was who God was.  It was revealed to me(by the Holy Spirit) that God is my loving Father who delights in me just the way that I am.  Today, tomorrow and forever will He be joyful to call me His daughter.  After Redemption Group, God absolutely transformed my heart, soul and mind and directed all of my thoughts, passions and desires on Him and bringing glory to His name!  I have never experienced the peace, joy and healing as I have in the past three months.  I no longer turn to food the way I have in the past; taking it away to make me perfect or eating in excess to make me feel loved.  Those things I find in Jesus Christ.
I have had a few people ask me what I did to come to the place that I am at.  I had tried for a couple years to try behavior modifications to escape from this slavery.  Please hear my words when I say I did not do anything but rather God pursued me.  My sin was a huge brick wall that was getting in the way of Him using me to the fullest and praise be to Him that He broke it down.
I could not be more thankful to my God for the healing He has brought to me.  I can truly say, more than I ever have been able to before, that I want and by God's grace I will live my life here on this earth bringing glory to God's name.
And I hope that is what my story does.  Brings glory to God's name and the power that He is more than capable of doing.

Redemption

What a great joy it is to no longer be defined by the world's definition of beauty but rather my righteousness through Christ's death on the cross!! 
Praise God for all of His Redemption stories :)
"I have swept away your offenses like a cloud, your sins like the morning mist. Return to me, for I have redeemed you.(Isaiah 44:22)"


I will post my beautiful redemption story very soon....