Marriage
“Oh no! Absolutely not!”
My sister stopped the stroller mid-stride. In the crush of Christmas mall traffic, I nearly ran over her from behind. Fortunately, the weight of her toddler riding piggyback, balanced me enough to stay upright.
“What’s wrong?” I pulled myself together, checked to make sure Kylie hadn’t fallen off my back, and looked at my sister.
“It’s Cade,” she said. “He just texted me not to look at our bank accounts until after Christmas. He doesn’t want me to spoil a surprise.”
“What’s so bad about that?” I asked innocently. She didn’t know he’d just sent me a picture of the boots he planned to buy for her. He wanted my input. They were perfect for her!
“When Cade tells me not to look at the accounts, I get nervous,” she said. “It usually means he’s going to spend too much.”
Before I could stop her, my sister proceeded to quash her husband’s excitement and texted back an emphatic, “No!”
Karen’s family had moved recently when Cade took a new job after several months of tentative, contract employment. As the “new guy”, he was working a ridiculous number of hours every week, trying to establish a well-deserved reputation as a hard-worker and a reliable supervisor in his field.
In the hubbub of the mall, I let the conversation go, but I could imagine Cade’s disappointment and I felt his hurt. When we finally escaped the commercial madness, my sister and I took her daughters to Chik-fil-a as a reward for their tolerance of our shopping whim. While they tackled the jungle gym, I unburdened my heart to her.
“Kendra,” I began, “It’s none of my business, I know, but I think you need to let Cade go ahead and buy you a special present for Christmas.”
“Why?” she balked. “Honestly, I want to buy him some things for Christmas and we simply can’t afford to do both.”
“I still think you need to let him.”
“Well, I still don’t get it,” she countered.
“Why do you want to give him something?” I tried a new tactic.
“Because I like to make him happy!” Suddenly, a light flickered in her eyes.
“You see,” I said. “This is in fact a beautiful picture of the Gospel. It’s beautiful because God intended marriage to reflect the relationship between Christ and the church. In this case, your husband, your marriage, is making that reflection beautifully.”
I paused to take a sip of lemonade and continued my thoughts.
“It will make Cade more happy to give you something he has chosen for you than to receive anything you could give him. He’s not buying you something because it’s Christmas and he ‘should’, but because pleasing you is his greatest pleasure.
“As we grow in our relationship with God, this is how He wants us to relate to Him. We long to please God and at the same time, we long to be happy, fulfilled and enjoy life. In Genesis 15:1, God told Abraham, ‘I am your exceeding great reward.’
“Psalm 73:25 says, ‘Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.’
“Biblically, our greatest good, our greatest joy in either heaven or earth, the thing that will satisfy us most, is to give God ourselves, our praise, our lives, our worship.”
“I see what you’re saying,” Kendra responded slowly. “The thing that will honor Cade the most and bring him the most joy, is to do something for me. In the same way, the best thing I can possibly do for my own happiness and good is give myself to God, like Paul says, “as a living sacrifice”.
“That’s it!” Excited, I nearly spilled my lemonade.
Later that evening, the kiddos tucked in bed, I sat with Kendra on the couch, absorbing a few moments of silence. She pulled out a Bible.
“I’ve been thinking more,” she said, “and I think I’ve found a passage that sums this up really well.”
She began to read:
“Psalm 92:1-4, ‘It is good to give thanks to the LORD,to sing praises to your name, O Most High; to declare your steadfast love in the morning, and your faithfulness by night, to the music of the lute and the harp, to the melody of the lyre. For you, O LORD, have made me glad by your work; at the works of your hands I sing for joy.’
“And then skip down toward the end and it says, ‘The righteous flourish like the palm tree
and grow like a cedar in Lebanon. They are planted in the house of the LORD;
they flourish in the courts of our God. They still bear fruit in old age; they are ever full of sap and green, to declare that the LORD is upright; he is my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in him.’”
Kendra closed the Bible.
“Wow.” I sat stunned at the way God’s Word always seems to speak to me personally. “The first part reminds us that it is good to praise and thank God, and the second part sums up both the reason for and the result of that praise—God blesses those who give Him their worship, their thanks, their praise, themselves. And He, Himself becomes their rock and fortress.”
God’s economy is so backward from our own. Greed and pride pervade our society and often poison marriages. A close look at how God first loved to us through the sacrifice of His Son for our salvation and His glory, revolutionizes our thinking. To become Christ-like is to employ this kind of sacrificial love in our marriages.
Abby Kelly is the author of, The Predatory Lies of Anorexia: A Survivor's Story. Her second book, a Bible study entitled, Beyond Belief, will be released in June 2015
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