Recap:
👉🏽God won’t choose your partner for you: (Gen 3:12) ” (pro 18:22).
👉🏽 A successful relationship requires a healthy self value
👉🏽 Marriage is not a ticket to heaven or serving God, 1st. Corinth 7:32-36
👉🏽 Avoid unrealistic expectations,
👉🏽 If you cannot tend the garden, you cannot tend a woman.
👉🏽 use both head and heart. Head speak to engaging issues intellectually and heart speaks to emotion
👉🏽 Evaluate you decision: to effectively live with the outcome of the same.
So, It is possible to claim to be in love and not know how to operate in love.
👉🏽 Example, I love gulf court. But I don’t know how to play gulf. I love seeing military jets maneuvering but I don’t know how to fly it. So, it is possible to love something you don’t know how to use. You can love a car and yet you don’t know how to drive it. You can love someone and not know how to pull a successful relationship together. So, the problem is not love, the problem is knowledge. It is knowledge gap problem.
🔸 Therefore, Love does not keep marriage together. Example, do you know that Folks who today are divorced were once in love? So, what happened? Something stronger than came up? Maybe it was infidelity, maybe marital abuse etc. Again, successful marriage is the result of the application of knowledge not the exchange of love. Proverb. 4:7 says…Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding.
8. Exalt her, and she shall promote thee: she shall bring thee to honour, when thou dost embrace her.
👉🏽 You need the knowledge to understand what it means to be female and the uniqueness of a male. You need to understand communication skills, how to manage emotions, the dynamics of disagreements. You need continuous knowledge to protect your home and relationship from perishing. Hosea 4:6 says… my people are destroyed from lack of knowledge. “Because you have rejected knowledge, I also reject you as my priests; because you have ignored the law of your God, I also will ignore your children.
Few things to note in the above passage:
🔹 You cannot reject what was never available. Therefore, your ignorance was a choice.
🔹 Your ignorance will also cause the rejection of your children
🔹 therefore, heaven can’t help you with what you don’t know.
Hence, love is the most misunderstood elements of relationship. Now, there are four major types of love in the bible:
👉🏽 Philos (storge) parental or brotherly love
👉🏽 Eros – erotic love, fleshly or sensual, sexual love
👉🏽 Esterigo – friendly love
👉🏽 agape – God kind of love, a love with no string attached. This love is the zenith of all love. This is the kind of love that even forgives a person who commits adulttary on you. Yes! Agape!
Only agape makes permanent relationships possible. Only agape can help you to use God’s material to get God’s result in a relationship.
🔺Understanding True Love means:
1. Love is not emotion: The reason why love is not emotion is because emotion are product of chemical reaction to what you visualise, heard and touch; which changes every 5seconds. They are not stable, hence you can’t build a solid relationship on emotion. Example, when you look at someone of opposite sex and your body react in a certain way, that is adrenalin reacting. That is not love. This is why most folks commit adultary or fornicate because they confuse adrenalin with love.
2. Love is a choice: true love is a decision you make to stick with the person you have choosing to spend your entire life with. For instance, this is the person I have decided to marry and spend my life with, and so no matter what, we are both together in this marital voyage, nothing will make you change your mind. You have to make that decision. Why? Because there will always be someone who looks beautiful than the person you have married. So, love is a choice generated by understanding marriage sacred vows. It is equally a force fired up by decision. Failure to understand this, leads to the expression “we fall out of love”. And falling out of love is response to change in adrenalin. Example, assuming you had a fight with a colleague in the office, do you resign from job because of fight? No. You will still dress up the followinging day to the office. Why? Because there is a big difference the person and the institution where you work.
3. True love is the response you give to something you value: when a person value something, you’ll place endearment on the same. God’s endearment to man made Christ died on the cross. You can know how much you value a your relationship by the value you are willing to sacrifice for it. So, true love is the value on something you have endearment for. So, lady you know who truly love you by what they are willing to pay to get you. As a guy what value are you willing to give for the lady you want to marry?
4. True Love is an Act of the will: don’t ever live under the illusion that the people that want to marry the woman you eventually married left the planet after she married you. No they didn’t leave leave?
So, Here is what agape love is in its purest essence:
1. True love has no reason
2. True love has no condition
3. The love has no expectation
4. Once there is expectation, it lead to disappointment.
So, true love has no reason, condition or expectations. This is why no where in the bible did God ever tell us the reason for His love for us. No where.
>> Rom. 5:8But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
How to know the kind of man you should marry:
Gen. 2:15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. 16. And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden;17but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”
18. The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.” 19. Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.
🔹1. The man who is in the presence of God: Do not marry a man who is not in the presence of God nor have regards for God. Such person is a potential recipe for a desastrous relationship. Why is this important? It is because The first gift of God to man was not the garden but Himself but his presence. God’s presence (fear of God) in you makes people safe around you. So, before you get so attached, check to see if the person is in God’s presence. Not in bear parlor or clubs but in the presence of God. We were both in His presence when we met. The scripture is so clear about this in 2nd Corinth. 6:14.
>> 14Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?
>> Ps.16:11You make known to me the path of life;
you will fill me with joy in your presence,
with eternal pleasures at your right hand.
🔹2. The man who is working: After God gave him His presence, the first assignment He gave him was “work”. God did not give Adam wife before work. Work in Hebrew is the word “eregon” which means to become. In essence, work is not something you do, it is something you become. It is something you discover that you are suppose to become and start becoming. So, according to God, work is more important to a man than a woman. This is why when a man is not working he is disoriented and frustrated. And said to him “work” Gen. 2:15. Work is this case connote sustainable means. Do you realize that Christ did not only saved us a He also sustains us by providing and meeting our needs.
>> Gen.2:15The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.
>> 1st. Tim. 5:8Anyone who does not provide for their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.
🔹3. The man who has God’s word and could teach same to his family: do you know that Eve wasn’t there when God gave Adam the instruction not to eat the tree of the knowledge òf good and evil? The person who had this instruction was Adam Gen. 2:16-17. So, God gave man His word so the man should be able to teach the wife and children his children same. Never marry a man can’t worship God. As a man, God made you the spiritual leader of your family. An overseer of your family, 1st. Tim. 3:2,
>> 2Now the overseer is to be above reproach, faithful to his wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, 3not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. 4He must manage his own family well and see that his children obey him, and he must do so in a manner worthy of full4 respect.
🔹 4. A man who can cultivate you: is the person you want to marry able to cultivate or tend you? This is one of the key instructions God gave the man before woman was introduced into his life. The word “cultivate” means to bring out the best in everything around you as a male-man. , (Gen. 2:15). God was telling Adam “bring out the best of all things around you”. And this also includes the woman. A true man cultivates and bring out the best in his wife. An ability of helping your wife overcome those areas of weaknesses you noticed in her until she eventually becomes the ideal person in you head. The husband should be so secure in himself and not be timid by his wife’s gifts, that he help her to develop same to impact lives. This is the fourth way of knowing the kind of man to marry. Do not marry a man who can’t cultivate the potential in you, lady!
🔹5. The man who can Protect you with his masculinity and not abuse you with the same. There is reason for your built up as a male-man. Your masculinity is not to turn the woman into a punching bag or abuse your daughter. The safest place for your wife should be the arm of her husband, the safest place for your daughter should be the arm of her father, not to commit insest on her.
In essence a real man provide security for his family with his masculinity, meets the needs of his wife, protect her inlays and outlaws.
Key Foundational Stones for Building a Successful Marriage:
1. Knowledge
2. Trust
3. Patience
4. Truth
5. Respect: how does respect come? Through consistency on doing what is right.
6. Love
7. Commitment, the male man’s commitment to the relationship, activates the female man’s submission to the man.
8. Submission
9. Faithfulness
10. Financial stability
Marriage-ability Traits:
🔹 adaptability
🔹 Empathy
🔹 Ability to go through problem
🔹 Ability to give and receive love
🔹 Emotional stability
🔹 Ability to communicate. A woman communicates by what she feels. A Man communicate by what he thinks, logically.
🔹 Couple leverage similarity
🔹 Family background similarity
