Standing

Marriage 0

What is your assignment from God?  To stand with Him, praying for the one you love to be released from the enemy’s control, coming back to the Lord, and coming back to you.  “It is too hard,” someone will say.  What is too hard?  Praying for and being faithful to the one you promised to love?

Do you realize that every word in the marriage vows… can be carried out while you stand?  They are the promises of one spouse to another, without the demand of anything in return.  For your prodigal spouse, away in the far country for a season, may you always say, “With God as my witness, I take you as my covenant spouse, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until we are parted by death.  This is my solemn vow.”…

How many times a day do you think of your absent mate?  How often does something happen that will instantly remind you of the one you love?  Rest assured that you are coming to your prodigal’s thoughts just as often.  When you were married you became one flesh, a relationship that simply cannot be dissolved at will.  Your absent mate may wish you would drop from their memory, but God will never allow that to happen.

— Robert E. Steinkamp, The Prodigal’s Pen, p. 15-16

Separate People

Forgiveness, Love, Marriage, Relationships 0

It is incredibly important, and critical to any thriving marriage, that spouses see each other as separate persons with unique goals and desires.  This is not easy to do.  In the first thrall of love, people tend to look for and find their similarities with each other and to ignore obvious differences.  It’s normal to see the ways a new partner thinks like us and to focus on the things that bind us together…. 

After a while a new couple realizes that for all their similarities they are still different in significant ways.  For many couples, this is a problematic stage, and it requires a good deal of forgiveness.

— Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Love, p. 151-152

Universalist Theology from Colossians

God, Life 0

Paul knows nothing of a theology in which God does not ultimately achieve his purposes….

It is God’s covenant purpose that his world will one day be reconciled in Christ.  For now, only the Church shares in that privilege, but this is not a position God has granted his people so they can gloat over the world.  On the contrary, the Church must live by gospel standards and proclaim its gospel message so that the world will come to share in the saving work of Christ.

— Gregory MacDonald, The Evangelical Universalist, p. 47, 53

The Gratitude Channel

Forgiveness, Gratitude, Healing, Life 0

I often ask people to pay attention to natural beauty instead of watching reruns of their old grudges….  The world is full of things to appreciate and find beautiful once you teach yourself to look.  The forgiveness and gratitude channels remind us that even though we have been hurt, we do not have to dwell on the hurt.  The one thing no one can take from us is what we pay attention to and focus on.  We may have a habit of watching the grievance channel or the bitterness channel, but we still control the remote.  The good news is that, with practice, any habit can be broken or changed.  The world is full of heroes who have overcome difficulty by tuning in to channels of courage or bravery.  Each of us can become a hero in our own life, to the benefit of our friends and family.

— Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Love, p. 142

Shattered Dreams

God, Life, Trials 0

God goes to work to help us see more clearly.  One way He works is to allow our lower dreams to shatter.  He lets us hurt and doesn’t make it better.  We suffer and He stands by and does nothing to help, at least nothing that we’re aware we want Him to do.

In fact, what He’s doing while we suffer is leading us into the depths of our being, into the center of our soul where we feel our strongest passions.

It’s there that we discover our desire for God.  We begin to feel a desire to know Him that not only survives all our pain, but actually thrives in it until that desire becomes more intense than our desire for all the good things we still want.  Through the pain of shattered lower dreams, we wake up to the realization that we want an encounter with God more than we want the blessings of life.  And that begins a revolution in our lives.

— Larry Crabb, Shattered Dreams, p. 4

Repentance and Rest

God, Life, Prayer 0

The Lord spoke through Isaiah when he said, “In repentance and rest is your salvation” (30:15).  I love how those two words go together — repentance and rest.  When we repent, we can rest in the Lord.  We can’t rest peacefully in God’s presence if we haven’t repented, and so the continual process of repentance is key to staying close to Him in our daily lives….

A. W. Tozer wrote, “Prayer will become effective when we stop using it as a substitute for obedience.”  Ouch!  He saw that we often pray that we will obey — we pray for patience, for compassion, or that we would be free from covetousness — yet we do not take the actions necessary to actually abide by Christ’s teachings in those areas.

— Brooke Boon, Holy Yoga, p. 43-47

Growth

Forgiveness, Marriage, Relationships 0

Acknowledge that you’re going to disappoint your partner sometime; no one can fulfill all of another person’s fantasies.  This may be uncomfortable, but it actually suggests that the relationship is growing, not dying.  The purpose of marriage isn’t to live out your partner’s goals.

— Ellyn Bader, PhD, and Peter T. Pearson, PhD, Tell Me No Lies, p. 95