THE PURSUIT OF PASSION Jimmy Evans When God creates anything, He creates it for success. He builds it upon the laws of His kingdom and His Word. God created marriage and then said a husband shall leave his father and mother and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be one flesh. (Genesis 2:24-25) Those are the laws He gave for marriage. In that passage, the word cleave means to pursue with all your energy. According to Gods plan, marriages take energy. You have to work at it. When I first dated Karen, I pursued her with all my heart. But once we were together, my pursuit stopped. I began to take her for granted. Thats human nature. Thats why many marriages encounter trouble: because we stop working at them. A marriage can be great as long as the husband and wife are pouring their energy into it. But we dont want to work at love—we want to believe that true love is easy—and so many of us enter marriage with misconceptions. The first is that, if we marry the right person, loving emotions will occur effortlessly throughout our marriage. But soul mates are not born—theyre made. The best marriages are built when two people roll up their sleeves and endure hard times while working through their incompatibilities together. They end up best friends. When the emotions arent there, they realize emotions come and go, but the best love in the world is agape love—a love by choice, regardless of feelings. Its Gods type of love. A second misconception is related to love and romance. We feel that positive events and experiences should sustain our emotions long-term. So a trip to Hawaii or great Valentines Day will fuel our marriage for awhile, as if were earning points. Thats not true. Just like the children of Israel received manna each day but couldnt store it, a marriage needs to be fed on a daily basis. Love is a perishable commodity. You cant bank good feelings. Relationships are built on the day-to-day. Another misconception is that, once weve fallen out of love, we cant get it back. In Revelation 2, God told the church at Ephesus it had fallen out of love with Him, and told them to repent and do the things they did at first. What did you do in at first in your relationship? You pursued each other with passion. You were polite. You were selfless. You were romantic and thoughtful. You put energy into your relationship. You can do those things again. Early in our marriage, Karen and I fell out of love. We stopped liking each other. We had no positive feelings and thought wed made a mistake in getting married. It scared us. I told her I was sorry and I hung up my golf clubs. We began to spend more time together. We worked at our relationship. We began to treat each other the way wed treated each other when we were dating. After several weeks of hard work, we fell more in love with each other than ever before. Passion replaced our negative emotions. Energetic pursuit is one of Gods laws for marriage. When you ignore it, your marriage will suffer. Embrace it and pursue one another, every single day. Work at your marriage. Take action and show each other romance. Youll be amazed at how God restores your relationship.
Posted on: Sun, 31 Aug 2014 05:16:30 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015