save the legacy

We were driving North from Myrtle Beach on our way back home to Tennessee, entering Florence I took a detour in town toward Rt. 20. My wife said she remembers coming in straight through town on the way in, so that’ll get us to Rt. 20 faster. Then a one hour argument ensued over who was right. Seemed kind of silly to argue about such a trivial thing, but we got so caught up in it that neither of us saw our northern turn off and we ended up in Georgia, and hour east of our north bound turn off point.

What we learned from this escapade was that when you pick the wrong battles in a war you can’t win, you lose ground and cannot advance further without a resolution to the conflict, and the line of thought behind it. There is a simple explanation for this.

We are spiritual beings in a cosmic war for our souls, and we cannot be victorious, happy and at peace fighting a spiritual battle from an earthly position. From that vantage point, the enemy—the devil—who is relentlessly strategic in getting us to focus on a “fleshly” style of warfare, has the higher ground, and the strategic advantage. But we cannot let him gain that advantage.

The key scriptural passage for what’s behind this is in Ephesians 6:12-13: “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.”

The Ephesians passage displays a realistic understanding of what we are up against, and offers a strategic solution that speaks to how we can overcome evil with the resources and power God supplies, so we’re free to do good.

When we fail to acknowledge and submit this truth, things like this happen: I don’t do what I say I will do. My wife then takes on an earthly attack mode recalling past times that I’ve repeated that offense, and proceeds to use the same way of responding which has been a largely ineffective weapon. The same thing can happen with the shoe on the other foot and she does something displease me.

This pattern then becomes the new standard for the way we treat each other. It is at best a stalemate, and if gone unchecked, in the fray of battle without the advantage of a spiritual higher ground, and a commitment to the permanence of marriage, can potentially lead to a lot of stress and unhappiness, or worse, its dissolution, which we see so much of today. We’re not fighting the good fight, we’re fighting each other.

Is there a way to have a productive fight in marriage that yields a solution? — to fight the good fight? Absolutely. To gain significant ground in this fight we must be aware of the devils schemes to weaken our personal character and tear our marriage apart. We need always be aware of God’s promise to be faithful in protecting us and sustaining us as we often grow weary in battle.

The Biblical imperative is a reversal of the going in circles/downward spiral scenario. It begins by dealing with the present situation with a proactive Godly perspective, as opposed to letting ourselves be goaded into finger pointing, or recalling the past which should have been forgiven and forgotten.

This plan involves gaining tactical wisdom to make fighting which is inevitable, productive and not destructive—where selfless love is extended for the good of the other. This is the bridge to reconciliation. So one of us says, “lets stop arguing, because the Word says not to complain or be argumentative.” Then we ask each other, “how did we get off track here, what prompts the same responses that push the wrong buttons, and how can we lose those buttons once and for all?”

This kind of discussion leads to productive solutions, and says we value our relationship enough to work it through to a purposeful peace. We should never forget though, that it is by the power, wisdom and grace of God that we can confidently fight the good fight. A couple that prays together and reads the Word of God—the sword of the Spirit, is like the brigadier general and colonel who know the battle plans, has access to the resources to carry them out, and though they lose a few battles, they know the war is already won.

“Lead me to the rock that is higher than I. For you have been my refuge, a strong tower against the foe.” Psalm 61:2-3

Please enjoy a video called “Fight The Good Fight” a song written by my wife Evy and performed by the two of us: http://youtu.be/oN5TT-eNOaM

My wife and I have many things in common and we have been very tight—we are the best of friends; but without God at the center of our relationship, the strongest trials in our weakest moments may have easily overpowered us.

“Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.” This passage from Ecclesiastes 4:12 in the Old Testament, illustrates the power of having God at the center of your relationships, and especially marriage.

Two people that are bound together in Christ are stronger than the individuals themselves. Christian marriage is about much more than the union of one man and one woman. The Bible teaches us that God performs a miracle in marriage, uniting a husband and wife together in a covenant relationship with Him as one. The Cord of Three Strands is a symbol of enduring strength that secures that sacred union.

This union plays itself out in ways often so subtle that we miss it. Take for instance the times your spouse criticizes you for the same thing again and again on a surfacing character weakness. This is not just a battle of two wills, although two wills can keep the issue locked up for a good while if so inclined. By locked up I mean shutting God out of the equation. Let Him in entirely, and you begin to see yourself as God sees you—through the eyes of your spouse. Even if you were unfairly judged it would at least be a test of character by trial. How do you respond? How do you go about making things right? This is a process of the mind and the heart that requires wisdom from above.

God’s will is not only for us to change, and learn of his way to love, but to find security in both the knowledge and the strength he provides for us as every situation presents itself. As the savior, defender, sustainer and unifier of his people, God has a plan that works. What is often perceived as nagging by your partner, is actually God not letting go of you until you change. When you submit to that plan, God in his infinite wisdom not only changes you, but changes your spouse in ways you could never accomplish through critical retaliation. We just need to have God’s patience to see it through.

Jesus declares in John 15:5 just how important he — the third strand — is in our relationships are: “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.” The result is the difference between nothing and bearing much fruit; there is no middle ground. A marriage that is indifferently coasting or in trouble, is one that has lost touch with devotion to God, and is not remaining in the vine. This is not only the heart of Christian marriage, but the highway to personal growth.

What happens when you can’t see eye to eye, when the other person won’t change, and you can’t see God in the middle of it all? Remember the cord of three strands. If God is in your lives, remain in him, and he will prove to be the third strand for both of you.

Never yield to the temptation of listening to the enemy tell you that it is no use. But seek HIM with all your heart, lay down your sin and pride and know that it isn’t about you. It’s about your devotion to God and one another, and about what God is doing, and able to achieve among you. As you are woven in an unbreakable cord of three strands, nothing in all the world an beyond will be able to separate you and each other from the love of God.

When I was single, being a very distinct solitary individual, I had no concept of what being one with another person meant. When I entered into marriage it wasn’t apparent early on either, other than the fact that I was beginning to share everything with my wife—the first hint. But mystery became revelation quickly—I was no longer my own. I couldn’t think of enjoying a romantic movie or a walk along a daffodil laced stream without her. Still, that deep essence of oneness, often difficult to define, wasn’t fully realized until I understood that it was already there the moment we said, “I DO.”

Why is this so? Marriage makes two people one by virtue of God’s original decree in Genesis 2:24—”The two will become one flesh”. Which means they are already one in spirit, in soul and body. This why something doesn’t feel right when you pursue your own life or continually do your own thing apart from your spouse—it runs contrary to everything oneness stands for. It is because we are ONE as husband and wife that our true identity as individuals emerges into a new identity that includes the person of the one we love. This is not a principle, but a fixed law. Principles apply to the living out of this oneness.

The biggest obstacle to living this out is the insistence that we can maintain a degree of independence and maintain a “private sphere” in marriage. Separation and ultimately divorce are the result of neglecting and violating that oneness, rather than embracing it. In most cases that tends to perpetuate itself in remarriage as well, because the fundamental things that were never realized or experienced in oneness, and the hurt that ensued because of it, become redefined in self-protectionism, further deepening the notion of independence in a new marriage.

The apostle Paul fleshes this out in Ephesians 5 when he said, “love your wife, (or your husband) like you do your own body, no one ever hated their own body, but feeds and cares for it”. It is when you love your spouse you are actually loving yourself, and when you neglect or hurt your spouse, you are literally neglecting and hurting yourself. Unfortunately that hurt, because its roots are usually misunderstood, is often used against the other party deepening open wounds, rather than taken as a warning signal to love your spouse even more, reaching in to heal the wounds and begin again.

Oswald Chambers said, “Love is the overflowing result of one person in true fellowship with another.” This is the ultimate goal of marriage; the transcendent beauty of marriage. God made the marriage bond strong because of his design for its permanence. True oneness is the most intimate state a man and a women can share; one that offers the most protection, and cultivates the greatest happiness as well. So go on that walk, where you think about the heart more than the heart rate, where there’s no difference between each other and the view, and oneness is understood just a little more.

An enigma is a puzzling or inexplicable occurrence or situation; a person of puzzling or contradictory character; a saying, question, picture, etc., containing a hidden meaning; riddle. ‘The meaning of life’ is one such statement that can be read into in as many ways as there are people, without a a definable absolute that is as constant as the north star, and as certain as the sunrise. Yet many miss the meaning because what is favored is an open-ended personal choice over certainty and truth, and the person becomes the enigma, not the meaning of life.

But going down the path of least resistance in favor of pursuits where personal happiness and comfort is the ultimate end, aided by whatever means seem reasonably necessary to attain it, is fair game today. If whether knowingly or unknowingly that is the position taken, rather than a mindset that places an uncompromising commitment to God first, and the happiness and welfare of others second to ourselves, it will in the end prove to be the ultimate betrayal.

But what does this have to do with marriage? Precisely what we are seeing all around us. It may be more understandable though not more right that those who don’t have a viable relationship to God see marriage as a means to their personal ends, rather than a commitment to a person for life, because for them, everything is relative. But for the Christian there isn’t an excuse in the world for not doing far better than that.

The meaning and purpose of marriage originated in the Bible. God ordained it as a covenant for life for the benefit and ultimate happiness of a man and wife, who spiritually speaking are no longer two individuals but one, and for their children too. There is good reason that he commanded man not to break that sacred bond as Jesus spoke of in Matthew 19.

There is also very little justification given in the Bible that would pose an exception—a study worth undertaking. The fact that Christian marriages rival secular ones in their excuse for dissolution speaks bewildering volumes about the spiritual state of the church in our time.

Marriage was designed not to be an enigma but a blessing. It was never about two people looking for a way out because they can’t get along or aren’t in love anymore, it was and still is about two people becoming one for life, living no longer for themselves but for each other under God first, and for their children under God secondly. To look beyond this is to miss the life of the meaning.

It is our 35th anniversary today! And I as I reflect on how thankful I am for my best friend, my wife, I’m also reflecting on what it is that enables us to keep going stronger than ever before, and what it is that makes us know that our love will never die. To take a look around us we see marriages, precious lives, fall like leaves from a tree, not with disdain so much as with tears, and we ask  “Why?” You don’t have to dig very deep to know why.

It is primarily because marriage is no longer held up high as something sacred, something inviolable; and that is because we no longer fear God or love him enough to believe him when he tell us that it is he who created this union to be sacred, and decreed it for life. This is the very heart of the matter, the very center of the storm. It is why there is so much unfaithfulness, so little love, and so much contempt in marriage.

“Therefore what God has joined together let no one separate.” Matthew 19:6.  This doesn’t mean until our feelings for one another die, or until a human judge decides our fate, it means until death parts us.

Evy and I made a pact when we were first married to never use the “D” word. We did this because we decided that first of all, divorce would never be an option – no matter what – because if our love was true, it will transcend anything. In the New Testament, 1 Corinthians 13 says, “Love never fails.” If the Bible is true, then this is true. Do you know what this does? It makes you stick it out; deal with things and work through the tough issues, because you haven’t given yourself any other option.

Scarce is the memory of a time when we for a moment could have let that word roll of our tongues, and followed the course of temptation; but we didn’t because we had an agreement, a covenant with one another and with God.  And if we could break that agreement then something would be forever lost, and something in our very soul would die, something in our character would descend to the lowest place. When something is sacred, it declares by necessity what is forbidden, because of what is honored.

We decided on our wedding night that since God created our union, he would be indispensable to its protection. Instead of going in circles we went to his Word to see what he had to say about our disagreements—what principles there were to guide our thoughts and words. Our feelings usually followed, and so did our desire for a deeper love. Small squabbles took their place below a higher calling where it became harder to go lower than what we attained. And so what was honored endured the test of time—and for that we give God the credit.

That’s the point where love goes down in history, the stuff legacy’s are made of. At the end our lives we’ll look back and say we did it; hand in hand with God my wife and I did it. And through it all we were the best of friends.

Most of us like stories with happy endings. Charles Dickens ‘A Christmas Carol’ is one of those stories. What develops is the haunting portrayal of the base side of our human nature, played out in a chilling tale of what represents the self imposed blindness of the present course we are on in our life. The protagonist Ebenezer Scrooge who had a ‘humbug’ attitude towards the joy of Christmas, and all who did not conform to his self-centered expectations, was given a birds eye view of what his future would be, if he kept going down the path he was taking. In the end he was given another chance to change an otherwise unchangeable future.

The story recorded in the book of Daniel in the Old Testament has quite a different ending however. The famous saying, “The handwriting on the wall” was derived from this historical account in 539 B.C.  King Darius and his court during a drunken feast used sacred vessels stolen from Solomon’s temple, praising ‘the gods of gold and silver, brass, iron, wood, and stone’. Immediately, the king’s face turned pale, as a human hand appeared and wrote on the wall of the royal palace the words, ‘numbered, numbered, weighed, divided’. Daniel interprets their meaning: God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting; your kingdom is divided and given over to your enemies.

What can we learn? It is evident here that God has the authority to pronounce judgment because he is God and he is just. His actions also have a broader focus, warning us of the potential consequences already built into wrong courses of action. The inherent power of this narrative lies in the sheer gravity of God’s jealous desire for our hearts, for if he has our hearts, then he is able to achieve his ultimate desire—mercy triumphing over judgment. If he doesn’t have our hearts, we will either run from him in guilt and shame declaring he doesn’t love us, or display a shameless defiance, ending up with the consequences we deserve.

The handwriting seems to be on the wall again in our day, as we see what is happening in our homes: an absence of the fear of God, undevoted hearts idolatrously fixed on the self-centered gods of personal time and pleasure, careers, and posessions. On top of that we add the lust for and stealing of that which is sacred—our neighbors husband or wife. King Darius’ desecration of the temple has its paralell here, because God calls our bodies temples of the Holy Spirit, if the Spirit lives in us. The result? The days of enjoying all that our families have meant to us are numbered, our courses of action are weighed and found wanting, our homes are divided and given to the enemy.

If we are living with a dark cloud of consequences, our only hope for, and the only means for what could be considered a happy ending has already been accounted for. But what could that be? Reason has failed, endless efforts, even counseling so often fails, the church has not adequately addressed the desperate conditions of our broken marriages, and the courts do not unify, they divide. The only means left is usually the last place we look—the Gospel. It is there we find the reason to forgive as we have been forgiven, it is there that the truth sets us free to love as we have been loved, and it is there that relationships can be reconciled, healed and renewed, as God has done for all who have received him. NT Colossians 1: 21-23

So what about our happy ending? As Ebenezer Scrooge said to the ghost of Christmas future, “why tell me these things if it is too late for me to do anything about them”? It is not too late because what burns behind the hand written indictment on the wall, is the passion of a God who loves us enough to warn us of impending misery, and to point us to a better way. To see this is not to see happiness as an end in itself, but a by-product of that way. God has already unveiled his choice and paved the way to a happy ending for ourselves and our loved ones; the legacy we leave however, will be one of our own choosing.

Every day it hits us in the face, our best friends are getting divorced. What? How can this be? They seemed so perfect for each other, and what about their beautiful little children? Everywhere we turn, it goes on and on — marriage, divorce, remarriage, divorce, broken families. This grim reality is confirmed by the statistics which say: 45 – 50% of all marriages in America end in divorce. Even worse, 60% to 67% of second marriages end in divorce, and 70% to 73% of third marriages end in divorce.

The first statistic is disturbing enough, but the pattern here in the exponential failure rate of remarriage sheds some light on the problem — perhaps divorce is not the answer. I’m going to stick my neck out here and say that of all the cases that end in divorce, there are far less that actually should end that way. But who is asking, “does it have to be this way, or even should it be this way?”

It seems that we humans tend to follow patterns in society because there is at best, a perceived credibility in the acceptance of something by the masses; and at worst, a convenient cover for doing what we wouldn’t otherwise do if everyone else wasn’t doing it. It was only 40 years ago that it was shocking to hear that someone got a divorce. The question is, should what others do be the way we measure what is right? Or is it really about our own way, our own personal pursuits, our own comfort levels, and our own truth? Shouldn’t it be about something bigger than ourselves?

The problem in part lies in the acceptance of this pattern as being normal, or at least non-controversial, because so many others — even trusted institutions like the church have accommodated this pattern by their deafening silence on the issue. The fact remains, that it is a sell-out to say there is nothing wrong with doing what everyone else is doing because it’s expedient or largely accepted.

There is a verse from the Bible speaks directly to this state of mind: Romans 12:2: “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” There is a challenge here not of conformity, but of taking a renewed perspective.

There is desperate need in our world for something more secure and hopeful for this delicate flower called the family. After all, without it what are we left with? And what will our legacy be when our children’s children desperately look for an enduring model to inspire them?

Hopefully this blog will a place where we can share, encourage, help and inspire a higher point of view that helps us help each other to change patterns like this that in so many ways affect us all.

Save The Legacy is a blog style website that is intended to act both as a banner for the cause of the preservation of marriage and the family, a clarion call of awareness, and a hub of resources, articles, testimonies, and answers, for the problem of the broken family.

The Time Is Now!

We are raising the trumpet to our mouths in a desperate plea to wake up and strengthen the things that remain. The time is NOW to do something before what is germane to all we hold sacred is gone, and we all lose. It is our prayer that God helps us, for we’ve already seen what we have done without him!