The Life Giving Home: Part 2 Seasons of Home (excerpts)

 January 
Creating a Framework For Home: Rhythms, Routines and Rituals 

Planning daily rhythms - meals, devotions, cleanup, bedtime routines - should take into consideration the abilities and personalities of everyone who lives in the home. 

Am I doing something now that doesn't need to be done? How can I simplify my work to provide more time to do what I value most? I want to avoid "mile-wide and inch-deep" commitments and commit to a few activities that are central to my values. 

What daily and weekly rituals will bring pleasure and mark important areas in which I can invest my moments?

Whatever your household or season of life, make your plans according to your needs, circumstances, life stage, and personality so that your home can thrive in sync with your own preferences. You will only find your plans sustainable if they fit you as well as those who live in your home. 

Decluttering the Soul: I also try to identify ways I have missed my goals and ways I want to strengthen my commitments in the major areas of my life - physical (diet and exercise), emotional (my relationship with Clay, the kids, my friends, and our a quite time, what I will study or read in the Bible, ways I want to grow) . I choose one or two areas I will concentrate on during the following year and find a pertinent Bible verse to memorize as a support.   

The Life Giving Home: Part 1 Thinking about Home (excerpt)

By: Sally and Sarah Clarkson

The very richness of this room brings life to my soul, and that is what this book is all about - how to create a home that nourishes, nurtures, and sustains life and beauty. It is all about how to order your living space and what happens there to embody the joy and beauty of God's own spirit. 

If we look at the lovely world that God has designed for us, we can see a pattern for what He has always intended for us - a home environment filled with color and creativity and order, a welcoming provider of laughter and refuge, a space where memories are made and shared. Instead of creating us to live in a house of weariness and colorlessness, God has made us to live in a home full of soul-beautiful elements. 

Give foundations of strength and inspiration to these precious ones, but give them wings as well. Prepare them to take risks, to live by faith, so that they can take the messages and cherished values they learned at home and share them with a hurting world. And so our home becoming a launching pad, a place of blessing, as we sent our beloved children on their way - hopefully strong, whole, and secure in the ideals, faith and values that truly matter. 

Part1: Thinking about Home 

1. A Lifegiving Legacy 

As I toured Biltmore, my imagination and vision were once again piqued by the idea of intentionally making my home a holding place for all that is beautiful, good, holy, and foundational to life - a place where those I love always feel like they belong, a place of freedom and grace that launches them into the persons they were made to be, a place of becoming. In the midst of demanding, constantly pressured lives, we all need refresher courses from time to time about what we are building and why we must be intentional about doing it. 

"All people need a place where their roots can grow deep and they always feel like they belong and have a loving refuge. And all people need a place that gives wings to their dreams, nurturing possibilities of who they might become."

Family was God's original organization scheme for society, and home was the laboratory where human beings could learn to glorify God through the work, relationships, and purposes of their lives. Home would be the place where love for God and commitment to His purposes would be passed down from one generation to another.

Homemaking - not in the sense of housekeeping, but in the broader sense of cultivating the life of a home - has to be done on purpose. 

The essence of home, you see, is not necessarily a structure. What makes a home is the life shared there, wherever they may be. And cultivating the life of home requires intentionality, planning, and design. There must be someone (or several someones) to craft the life, the beauty, the love, and the inspiration that overflows from that place. 

Because of our missionary, job-oriented lives, Clay and I knew from the beginning that we would probably not have a static homestead where we could congregate over our life as a family. So we focused on creating home out of less tangible materials - traditions, habits, rhythms, experiences, and values. 

Creating a lifegiving home, then, is a long process taken one step, one season at a time. 

The intentionality of seeking to build my home piece by piece, day by day, as moved me and my family toward the goal of creating a great legacy of healthy people who live and grow within its walls. 

Home should be the very best place ever to be. 

2. Made for Home 

We don't have to have a perfect family, a healthy background. We don't have to have lived in one place. We don't have to own a mansion or even a house. Nothing required for the making of home except a heart that loves God, an imagination fired by His Spirit, and hands ready to create. And, well, a bit of courage, spaces and fill them. But when we do, the Kingdom comes in the homes we make as the love of God becomes flesh in our lives once more. 

I'm still holding out for a cottage with a garden someday, but until then, I know that each new little student room is my space of possible creation. 

As I order and hope, fill and form, the Holy Spirit is renewing one more corner of the world. Here, in my room, the fallen stuff of the broken earth is being formed back into love, into home. There's no place like it. 

3. A Symphony of Grace 

- The Music of Welcome: We always try to write the name of those we know will be entering our home. 

We want all who enter our little kingdom - family, friends, and guests - to know that they are welcome and cherished in this sacred place we call home. 

- The Music of Safety: I try to ensure that wisdom, truth and the reality of God's grace are kept within and that my home is a haven from the destructive voices of the outside world. 

In order to protect ourselves and others from finding menacing influences, as much as possible, we must purpose ways to keep our homes as havens of all that is good, pure, innocent, and excellent. If the Lord guards our own coming and going, so we should be guards over what is allowed into our homes. 

- The Music of Knowledge and Wisdom: As a young woman, I began to picture my children's hearts as treasure chests of a different sort, and I vowed to fill them with intrinsic treasures: the best stories, memorized Scripture, priceless images of classical art, excellent books, memories from great feasts enjoyed together and special days celebrated, great Bible stories and wisdom passages, plus heart photographs of love given, holiday cherished, lesson learned. 

- The Music of Beauty: We honor Him when we make beauty a priority in our homes. 

- The Music of Relationship: Relationships are the core focus of celebrating life together in a place. Consequently, the desire to create spaces for friendship, companionship, and fellowship, influenced many of our home choices - even the furniture we bought, where we placed it, and how we used it. 

- The Music of Nourishment: I believe every meal should be a celebration of life itself as we break bread and enter fellowship together. And the way those meals are planned, prepared, and served enhances the connection and the celebration. Every meal, in other words, should be a feast for the senses and the spirit. 

- The Music of Rest: - a personalized space for each occupant (in a bedroom) 

Having home that tells a great story happens over time as we mature, refine, create, and love. 

I hope you will have that experience as well. Whatever your taste, preferences, and style, you have the freedom to create your own home art and make your dwelling a place that is distinctively yours - a place of comfort, safety, and delight for you and everyone who steps inside your door. 

4. The Rhythms of Incarnation 

A Renewed Awareness 
If we want to embody the life of God in our homes, we need to understand what God intended human life to be, and we also need to be aware of what distracts us from that intention or diminishes it in our lives. 

A Scrambled Consciousness
The rhythms of earth and body require me to sleep. The limitations of my physical senses mean I can only hear so  many voices, so many words at one time. But the online world is unresting. 

We can only create what we have imagined. We can only embody the life of God if we have internally known and tasted His goodness. 

If the precious, limited hours of my day are used bit by bit in scanning information. I will have less and less time for the attentive, slow, good work of creativity, conversation, and connection that real people and real homes require. 
If my awareness of space is concentrated on a screen, my home will reflect the absence of my attention, my creativity, and ultimately, my love. 

We cannot change the world if we cannot incarnate God's live in our own most ordinary spaces and hours. Homemaking must be understood as a potent Kingdom endeavor, not merely a domestic task. Homemaking requires a willed creativity, a conscious diligence, because we are called to create new life and challenged to do it in the midst of a world that actively resists us in this endeavor. 

Atomic Habits (excerpt)

 Introduction 

Changes that seems small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results if you're willing to stick with them for years. We all deal with setbacks but in the long run, the quality of our lives often depends on the quality of our lives often depends on the quality of our habits. With the same habits, you'll end up with the same results. But with better habits, anything is possible. 

1. The Surprising Power of Atomic Habits 

That said, it doesn't matter how successful or unsuccessful you are right now. What matters is whether your habits are putting you on the path toward success. You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results. 

Time magnifies the margin between success and failure. It will multiply whatever you feed it. Good habits make time your ally. Bad habits make time your enemy. 

Mastery require patience. The San Antonio Spurs, one of the most successful teams in NBA history, have a quote from social reformer Jacob Riis hanging in their locker room: "When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it - but all that had gone before." 

All big things come from small beginnings. The seed of every habit is a single, tiny decision. But as that decision is repeated, a habit sprouts and grows stronger. Roots entrench themselves and branches grow. 

Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results. 

Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress. A handful of problems arise when you spend too much time thinking about your goals and not enough time designing your systems. 

2. How Your Habits Shape Your Identity (and Vice Versa) 

Habits like exercise, meditation, journaling and cooking are reasonable for a day or two and then become a hassle. 

However, once your habits are established, they seem to stick around forever - especially the unwanted ones. Despite our best intentions, unhealthy habits like eating junk food, watching too much television, procrastinating, and smoking can feel impossible to break.  

Changing our habits is challenging for two reasons: (1) we try to change the wrong thing and (2) we try to change our habits in the wrong way. 

Many people begin the process of changing their habits by focusing on what they want to achieve. This leads us to outcome-based habits. The alternative is to build identity-based habits. With this approach, we start by focusing on who we wish to become. 

It's hard to change your habits if you never change the underlying beliefs that led to your past behavior. You have a new goal and a new plan, but you haven't changed who you are. 

True behavior change is identity change. You might start a habit because of motivation, but the only reason you'll stick with the one is that it becomes part of your identity. 

The effect of one-off experiences tends to face away while the effect of habits gets reinforced with time, which means your habits contribute most of the evidence that shapes your identity. In this way, the process of building habits is actually the process of becoming yourself. 

This is a gradual evolution. We do not change by snapping our fingers and deciding to be someone entirely new. We change bit by bit, day by day, habit by habit. We are continually undergoing microevolutions of the self. 

Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. .... This is one reason why meaningful change does not require radical change. 

The most practical way to change who you are is to change what you do. 

It is a simple two-step process: 1. Decide the type of person you want to be. 2. Prove it to yourself with small wins. 

Building better habits isn't about littering your day with life hacks. ... Habits can help you achieve all of these things, but fundamentally they are not about having something. They are about becoming someone. 

Ultimately, your habits matter because they help you become the type of person you wish to be. They are the channel through which you develop your deepest beliefs about yourself. Quite literally, you become your habits. 

3. How to Build Better Habits in 4 Simple Steps 

Habits reduce cognitive load and free up mental capacity, so you can allocate your attention to other tasks. 

Habits do not restrict freedom. If you're always being forced to make decisions about simple tasks , then you have less time for freedom. It's only by making the fundamentals of life easier that you can create the mental space needed for free thinking and creativity. 

The ultimate purpose of habits is to solve the problems of life with as little energy and effort of possible. 

Any habit can be broken down into a feedback loop that involves four steps: cue, craving, response, and reward. 

The Four Laws of Behavior Change are a simple set of rules we can use to build better habits.
They are:
(1) make it obvious -> cue
(2) make it attractive -> craving 
(3) make it easy -> make it easy
(4) make it satisfiying 

THE 1ST LAW = Make It Obvious 

4. The Man Who Didn't Look Right 

One of our greatest challenges in changing habits in maintaining awareness of what we are actually doing. This helps explain why the consequences of bad habits can sneak up on us. We need a "point -and-call" (raising level of awareness from a nonconscious habit to a more conscious level) system for our personal lives. That's the origin of the the Habits Scorecard, which is a simple exercise you can use to become more aware of your behavior. 

To create your own, make a list of your daily habits. 
Once you have a full list, look at each behavior, and ask yourself, "Is this a good habit, a bad habit, or neutral habit?"

As you create your Habits Scorecard, there is no need to change anything at first. The goal is to simply notice what is actually going on. Observe your thoughts and actions without judgement or internal criticism. 

The process of behavior change always starts with awareness. 

5. The Best Way to Start a New Habit 

Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity. It is not always obvious when and where to take action. Some people spend their entire lives waiting for the time to be right to make an improvement. 

Give your habits a time and a space to live in the world. The goal is to make the time and location so obvious that, with enough repetition, you get an urge to do the right thing at the right time, even if you can't say why. 

The implementation intention formula is: I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].

When it comes to building new habits, you can use the connectedness of behavior to your advantage. One of the best ways to build a new habit is to identify a current habit you already do each day and then stack your new behavior on top. This is called habit stacking. (It is a strategy you can use to pair a new habit with a current habit). 

The habit stacking formula is 
"After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT]." 

The key is to tie your desired behavior into something you already do each day. Once you have mastered this basic structure, you can begin to create larger stacks by chaining small habit together.

Habit stacking works best when the cue is highly specific and immediately actionable.

The 1st Law of Behavior Change is to make it obvious. Strategies like implementation intentions and habit stacking are among the most practical ways to create obvious cues for your habits and design a clear plan for when and where to take action.  

6. Motivation is Overrated; Environment Often Matters More 

People often choose products not because of what they are, but because of where they are. 

The most powerful of all human sensory abilities, however, is vision. 

Every habit is initiated by a cue, and we are more likely to notice cues that stand out. 

If you want to make a habit a big part of your life, make the cue a big part of your environment. The most persistent behaviors usually have multiple cues. 

Habits can be easier to change in a new environment.

When you can't manage to get to an entirely new environment, redefine or rearrange your current one. Create a separate space for work, study, exercise, entertainment and cooking. "One space, one use"

Every habit should have a home.

A stable environment where everything has a place and a purpose is an environment where habits can easily form. 

- Small changes in context can lead to large changes in behavior over time.

- Every habit is initiated by a cue. We are more likely to notice cues that stand out. 

-  Make the cues of good habits obvious in your environment. 

- Gradually, your habits become associated not with a single trigger but with the entire context surrounding the behavior. The context becomes the cue. 

- It is easier to build new habits in a new environment because you are not fighting against old cues. 

Sacred Marriage

"How is your wedding prep?" -- yup, people ask me all the time! haha~ 

and... reading this book is actually one of my wedding, ah, marriage preps :D :D 

Sacred marriage by Gary Thomas. 

I loooovvveee it so much!!!! really2 recommended! 

The big question = What if God designed marriage to make us holy more than to make us happy? 

Find out here, and really!!!! - this book is worth your precious time :) 

If we view the marriage relationship as an opportunity to excel in love, it doesn’t matter how difficult the person is whom we are called to love; it doesn’t matter even whether love is ever returned. We can still excel at love. We can still say, “Like it or not, I’m going to love you like nobody ever has.” - Gary Thomas - 

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“The state of marriage is one that requires more virtue and constancy than any other. It is perpetual exercise of mortification.. from this thyme plant, in spite of the bitter nature of its juice, you may be able to draw the honey of a holy life.” Francis de Sales 

If you want to be free to serve Jesus, there’s no question – stay single. Marriage takes a lot of time. But if you want to become more like Jesus, I can’t imagine any better thing to do than to get married. Being married forces you to face some character issues you’d never have to face otherwise. 

Since there is so much immorality within us – not just lust, but selfishness, anger, control-mongering, and even hatred – we should enter into a close relationship with one other person so we can work on those issues in the light of what our marriage relationship will reveal to us about our behavior and our attitudes. 

The key was that I had to change my view of marriage. If the purpose of marriage was simply to enjoy an infatuation and make me “happy”, then I’d have to get a “new” marriage every two or three years. But if I really wanted to see God transform me from the inside out, I’d need to concentrate on changing myself rather than on changing my spouse. 

For the Christian, marriage is a penultimate rather than an ultimate reality. Because of this, both of us can find even more meaning by pursuing God together and by recognizing that he is the one who alone can fill the spiritual ache in our souls. We can work at making our home life more pleasant and peaceable; we can explore ways to keep sex fresh and fun; we can make superficial changes that will preserve at least the appearance of respect and politeness. But what both of us crave more than anything else is to be intimately close to the God who made us. If that relationship is right, we won’t make such severe demands on our marriage, asking each other, expecting each other, to compensate for spiritual emptiness. 

Some of us ask too much of marriage. We want to get the largest portion of our life’s fulfillment from our relationship with our spouse. That’s asking too much. Yes, without a doubt there should be moments of happiness, meaning, and a general sense of fulfillment. But my wife can’t be God, and I was created with a spirit that craves God. Anything less than God, and I’ll feel an ache. 

Will we approach marriage from a God-centered view or a man-centered view? In a man-centered view, we will maintain our marriage as long as our earthly comforts, desires and expectations are met. In a God-centered view, we preserve our marriage because it brings glory to God and points a sinful world to a reconciling Creator. 

The first purpose in marriage –beyond happiness, sexual expression, the bearing of children, companionship, mutual care and provision or anything else – is to please God. The challenge, of course, is that it is utterly selfless living; rather than asking, “What will make me happy?” we are told that we must ask, “What will make God happy?” 

Strong Christian marriages will still be struck by lightning – sexual temptation, communication problems, frustrations, unrealized expectations – but if the marriages are heavily watered with an unwavering commitment to please God above everything else, the conditions won’t be ripe for a devastating fire to follow the lightning strike. 

If I’m married only for happiness, and my happiness wanes for whatever reason, one little spark will burn the entire forest of my relationship. But if my aim is to proclaim and model God’s ministry of reconciliation, my endurance will be fireproof. 

Marriage requires a radical commitment to love our spouses as they are, while longing for them to become what they are not yet. Every marriage moves either toward enhancing one another’s glory or toward degrading each other. –Dan Allender and Tremper Longman III 

If you treat a man as he is, he will stay as he is. but if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become bigger and better man. –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 

We can never love somebody “too much”. Our problem is that typically we love God too little. The answer is not to dim our love for any human in particular; it’s to expand our heart’s response to our Divine Joy. 

Allow your marriage relationship to stretch your love and to enlarge your capacity for love – to teach you to be a Christian. Use marriage as a practice court, where you learn to accept another person and serve him or her. 

She wanted him to listen, to understand, and to sympathize. She wanted him to let her know that despite her problems, her exhaustion, her dishevelment, he loved her – to let her know that it caused him sorrow that she was suffering and that if it were possible, he would change it for her. 

Women are capable of and sometimes commit magnificent acts that manifest incredible power and awaken in us men as profound awe, if not fear and trembling. Yet when they love, they love quietly; they speaks, as it were, in whispers, and we have to listen carefully, attentively, to hear their words of love and to know them. 

Many of the marital problems we face are not problem between individual couples. They are the problems that arise because we are either too lazy or too selfish to get to know our spouse well enough to understand how different from us they really are. 

I had to learn to better understand my wife before I could truly respect her, and I had to respect her before I could fully love her. This is a tremendously spiritually therapeutic process, an emptying of my self so I can grow more in my love for others. 

“Honor isn’t passive, it’s active. We honor our wives by demonstrating our esteem and respect; complimenting them in public; affirming their gifts, abilities, and accomplishments; and declaring our appreciation for all they do. Honor not expressed is not honor.” Betsy and Gary Ricucci 

Contempt is conceived with expectations. Respect is conceived with expressions of gratitude. We can choose which one we will obsess over – expectations, or thanksgivings. That choice will result in a birth – and the child will be named either contempt, or respect. 

“Our souls are wired for what we will never enjoy until Eden is restored in the new heaven and earth. We are built with a distant memory of Eden.” 

This calls me to extend gentleness and tolerance toward my wife. I want her to become all that Jesus calls her to become, and I hope with all my heart that I will be a positive factor in her pursuit of that aim (and vice versa). But she will never fully get there this side of heaven, so I must love and accept her in the reality of our lives in a sin-stained world. 

Husbands, you are married to a fallen women in a broken world. Wives, you are married to a sinful man in a sinful world. It is guaranteed that your spouse will sin against you, disappoint you, and have physical limitations that will frustrate and sadden you. He may come home with the best of intentions and still love his temper. She may have all the desire but none of the energy. 

This is a fallen world. Let me repeat this: you will never find a spouse who is not affected in some way by the reality of the Fall. If you can’t respect this spouse because she is prone to certain weaknesses, you will never be able to respect any spouse. 

She was being hard on herself and easy on me; and that made me want to be hard on myself and easy on her.

“A magnificent marriage begins not with knowing one another but with knowing God. “Betsy and Gary Ricucci

“Prayer is a work to which we  must commit ourselves if we are to make sense of our lives in the light of eternity.” Terry Glaspey 

Without prayer, we live as temporal people with temporal values. Prayer pushes eternity back into our lives, moving God ever more relevant to the way we live our lives. 

Peter tells us that we should improve our marriages so that we can improve our prayers lives. Instead of prayer being the “tool” that will refine my marriage, Peter tells me that marriage is the tool that will refine my prayers. 

Making someone else feel smaller so that we can fell larger is antithetical to the Christian faith, a complete rejection of the Christian virtues of humility, sacrifice, and service. 

Godliness is selflessness, and when a man and woman marry, they are pledging to stop viewing themselves as individuals and start viewing themselves as a unit, as a couple. In marriage, I am no longer free to pursue whatever I want; I am no longer a single man. I am part of a team, and my ambitions, dreams and energies need to take that into account. 

If, for instance, a man views his wife solely as someone to cook for him, provide him with sexual satisfaction, and keep a quite home while he alone serves God, he will also browbeat others to “fall in line” regardless of whether that specific role is suited for them. If a woman essentially abandons her family to ambitiously “serve” God, she will likely display the same lack of compassion and empathy for others as she does for her own family who feel her absence keenly. 

If you want to grow toward God, you must build a stronger prayer life. If you’re married, to attain a stronger prayer life you must learn to respect your spouse and be considerate. 

Sleeping with your spouse can leave your heart, mind, and soul free, for a time, to vigorously pursue God in prayer without distraction. 

Paul is a practical pastor. He recognizes that the sex drive is a biological reality. By engaging in sexual relations within a permanent lifelong relationship, a major temptation and distraction is removed and our souls are placed at rest. This is especially important for contemplative prayer, a type of prayer in which the mind must be unusually free of distractions. 

Many marital disputes result precisely from this: “You want something but don’t get it.” James says we don’t get it because we’re looking in the wrong place (James 4:1-2). Instead of placing demands on your spouse, look to God to have your needs met. That way you can approach your spouse in a spirit of servanthood. 

Marriage can cause us to reevaluate our dependency on other humans for our spiritual nourishment, and direct us to nurture our relationship with God instead. No human being can love us the way we long to be loved; it is just not possible for another human to reach and alleviate the spiritual ache that God has placed in all of us. 

Marriage does us a very great favor in exposing this truth, but it presents a corresponding danger – getting entangled in dissension. For the sake of prayer, it is essential that we live in unity. For the sake of unity, our passions and desires must be God-directed. 

Struggle makes us stronger; it builds us up and deepens our faith. But this result is achieved only when we face the struggle head-on, not when we run from it.

Christian love is an aggressive movement and an active commitment. In reality we choose where to place our affections.

Intimate relationships, as opposed to intimate experiences, are the result of planning. They are built. The sense of union that comes with genuine spiritual closeness will not just happen. If it is present, it is because of definite intent and follow-through on your part. You choose to invest, and do. It's not left to mere chance. "Donald Harvey"
The opposite of biblical love isn't hate, it's apathy. To stop moving forward our spouse is to stop loving him or her. It's holding back from the very purpose of marriage.

First, men tend to be less communicative, perhaps not realizing the message of disinterest this sends. It's one thing to think warm thoughts about your spouse; it's quite another to express them. Many men don't realize the damage they do simply by remaining silent.
Secondly, men tend to view independece as a sign of strength, maturity, and "manhood". Interdependence is more than a long word- for men it is often a bitter pill to swallow, a sign, even of weakness.

Even in the moments of anger, betrayal, exasperation, and hurt, we are called to pursue this person, to embrace them, and to grow toward them, to let our love redefine our feelings of disinterest, frustration, and even hate.

This call to "fall forward" puts the focus on initiating intimacy. We cheapen marriage if we reduce it to nothing more than a negative "I agree to never have sex with anyone else." Marriage points to a gift of self that goes well beyond sexual fidelity. Mary Anne Oliver calls it an "interpenetration of being."
Getting married is agreeing to grow together, into each other, to virtually commingle our souls so that we share a unique and rare bond. When we stop doing that, we have committed fraud against our partner; we made a commitment that we're not willing to live up to.

Communications is thus the blood of marriage that carries vital oxygen into the heart of our romance.

P155-161- #The Male Masquerade# sorry - i felt like writing the whole part, so read it by yourself yaaa.. ;) 

Learning not to run from conflict, learning how to compromise, and learning to accept others.

Unless you truly enjoy hanging around a sycophant, the absence of conflict demonstrates that either the relationship isn't important enough to fight over or that both individuals are too insecure to risk disagreement.

Sometimes that's what marriage is like: our spouse has confessed sins and weaknesses to us, and we've kept every confession in a mental file cabinet, ready to be taken out and used in our defense or in an attack. But true forgiveness is a process, not an event. It is rarely the case that we are able to forgive "one time" and the matter is settled. Far more often, we must relinquish our bitterness a dozen times or more, continually choosing to release the offender from our judgement.

What homemaker hasn't found herself asking, after the fiftieth load of laundry in a week or when facing yet another sink full of dirty dishes, "is there anything significant about what I'm doing here?" Yet in God' eyes, nothing is more significant than servanthood. The path to genuine greatness lies in serving.
Grasping for power or recognition is natural. Servanthood is supernatural. So many women are missing out on the supernatural today because they are caught up in the "search for significance". Ironically, the more they search for it, the less satisfied they feel. Why? Significance is found in giving your life away, not in selfishly trying to find personal happiness.

God is always worthy of being obeyed, and God calls me to serve my spouse - so regardless of how she treats me at any particular moment, I am called to respond as a servant.

Strong personalities are tempted to assume one-sidedly the whole responsibility for their marriage. Rather than ask the partner to perform certain services they want to do everything themselves.... While it looks like sacrificial love, this in fact a passion to dominate the other person.
"Service" includes allowing your spouse to give - if, of course, they are willing to give. In other words, service isn't just washing somebody else's feet; at times it's letting your own feet be washed.

Quarrels over money and time usually reflect a demand to "own" our life rather than to serve the other with our wealth and existence. The typical fight over who ought to pick up the kids usually is about whose time is more valuable, who works the hardest, and who is least appreciated. It is not wrong to alternate chores or divvy up responsibilities, but the hurtful interactions usually reflect drawing battle lines over more petty matters.

How do a husband and wife use money and time to serve instead of dominate or manipulate? By appreciating your spouse, by seeking first to understand him or her, by emptying yourself and not immediately assuming that your task, your time, your perceived need is the most important.

How can I spend my money in a spirit of service? By remembering that I will be most fulfilled as a Christian when I use everything I have - including my money and time - as a way to serve others, with my spouse getting first priority (after God). This commitment absolutely undercuts petty power games. If I humiliate my wife by pointing out how much more important I am to the family's financial well-being, or if she points out how utterly helpless I am in doing certain domestic chores, we don't just cheapen each other; we cheapen ourselves. We destroy the entire notion of Christian fellowship by denying that every part has its place in the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:14-31)

A godly marriage shapes our view of beauty to focus on internal qualities. The Holy Letter argues that when a man chooses a woman for her physical beauty alone, "the union is not for the sake of heaven." Beauty is wonderful, but it is not the only or even the highest value when we seek Christian marriage.

A single woman is likely to face strong temptations to become the type of woman a man would want to marry - and that might very well compete with the type of woman who lives a responsible life before God. But single women know that men are attracted to a certain physical shape and so might be inclined to put more effort into changing physically than changing internally by growing in godliness. Marriage can set women free from this vain pursuit; once they are married, they can focus more intensely on the internal beauty that God finds so attractive.
This is not to suggest that either men or women should shun the care of their physical bodies and become unfit. Keeping in good shape is a gift we can give to our spouse. But so is the grace of acceptance - particularly on the part of husbands - in recognition that age and (in the case of women) childbearing eventually reshape every individual body. Marriage helps to move men from an obsession over bodies "that do not exist" into a reconsideration of priorities and values.

Marriage calls us to redirect our desires to be focused on one woman or one man in particular rather than on society's view of attractive women or men in general. We men are married to women whose bodies we know intimately. And out of these bodies, our own children have been born. God gives us each other's bodies as gifts in which to delight. But in receiving our gift, we must not covet another's.

I knew from proverbs 5:18-20 that I was to take delight in my wife, not in women in general.

Married sexuality helps from us spiritually by shaping the priorities of what we value and hold in high esteem. Many of us don't realize how truly shallow this world and its values really are.

Marriage teaches us to give what we have. God has given us one body. He has commanded our spouse to delight in that one body - and that body alone. If we withhold from our spouse our body, it becomes an absolute denial. We may not think it is a perfect body but it is the only body we have to give.

The family that will enjoy Jesus' presence as a customary part of their union is a family that is joined precisely because husband and wife want to invite Jesus into deeper parts of their marriage. They are not coming together in order to escape loneliness, more favorably pool their financial resources, or merely gain an outlet for sexual desire. Above all these other reasons, they have joined themselves to each other as a way to live out and deepen their faith in God.
Even if you didn't enter marriage for this reason, you can make a decision to maintain your marriage on this basis. The day you do this, you will find that marriage can be a favorable funnel to direct God's presence into your daily life. Marriage invokes the presence of God through prodding us to communicate, reminding us of our transcendent ache, helping us to behold the image of God, and allowing us to participate in creation.

In marriage, it is our duty to communicate. To be sure, every marriage needs time of silence and meditation. But in our relationship with our spouse, communication is a discipline of love.
God loves us with words, rather than physical arms with which to embrace us. We can love our spouses with those same words and grow more like Christ in the process.

There comes a time when silence is healing, but there is also a malicious silence. You know your heart. You know whether you are being silent in order to promote healing or whether you are being self-centered, cowardly, or malicious. When I refuse to speak out of cowardice, selfishness, or weariness, I am taking a step back as a Christian.

Let your relationship with your spouse point you to what you really need most of all: God's love and active presence in your life. Above all, don't blame your spouse for lack of fulfillment; blame yourself for not pursuing a fulfilling relationship with God.

We are reminded of the transcendent ache in our soul that even this one very special person can't relieve entirely on his or her own. As odd as this may sound, I have discovered in my own life that my satisfaction or dissatisfaction with my marriage has far more to do with my relationship to God that it does with my relationship to my wife. When my heart grows cold toward God, my other relationships suffer, so if I senses a burgeoning alienation from, or lack of affection toward, my wife, the first place I look is how I'm doing with the Lord. My wife, is quite literally, my God-thermometer.

Part of this springs from my theological belief that as people created in the image of God, we have a responsibility to create. Whether a business, a house, a family, a book, a life (through education or medicine), or whatever else we choose to build, we shouldn’t waste our lives but spend them productively. 

If we don’t nurture a godly sense of creativity, we will experience an emptiness that we may perversely and wrongly blame on our marriage. The emptiness comes not from our marriage, however, but from the fact that we’re not engaged in our marriage. We’re not using this powerful relationship in order to create something. 

You were made by God to create. If you don’t create in a thoughtful and worshipful manner – whether preparing meals, decorating a home, achieving a vocational dream - responsibly raising children - you will feel less than human because you are in fact acting in a sub-human mode.

But a man and woman dedicated to seeing each other grow in their maturity in Christ; who raise children who know and honor the Lord; who engage in business that supports God's work on earth and is carried out in the context of relationships and good stewardship of both time and money - these Christians are participating in the creativity that gives a spiritually healthy soul immeasurable joy, purpose and fulfillment.

"Let us be what we are, and let us be it well".
In other words, if we are married, we are married, and we must not try to live as if we were otherwise. Francis noted that by living with this attitude, we "do honor to the Master whose work we are."

Christian men in particular might be tempted above all others to let ambition erode their marital devotion, even to the point of using religious language to justify shortchanging their spouse, but de Sales warned that even spiritual devotion can be taken "out of bounds". When we get married, we make a certain promise to our spouse that we will devote a considerable amount of energy, initiative, and time into building and nurturing the relationship. It is spiritual fraud to enter marriage and the to live like a single man or woman.

The means of gaining perfection are various according to the variety of vocations: religious, widows, and married persons must all seek after this perfection, but not all by the same means." He encouraged the woman by suggesting several spiritual exercises, but then he warned, "in all this take particular care that your husband, your servants, and your parents do not suffer by your too long stayings in church, your too great retirement (for prayer), or by your failing to care for your household.... You must not only by devout, and love devotion, but you must make it lovable to everyone"

When marriage becomes our primary pursuit our delight in the relationship will be crippled by fear, possessiveness, and self-centeredness. We were made to admire, respect and love someone who has a purpose bigger than ourselves, a purpose centered on God’s untiring work of calling his people home to his heart of love. 

We allow marriage to point beyond itself when we accept two central missions: becoming the people God created us to be, and doing the work God has given us to do. If we embrace – not just accept, but actively embrace – these two missions, we will have a full life, a rich life, a meaningful life, and a successful life. 

If we view the marriage relationship as an opportunity to excel in love, it doesn’t matter how difficult the person is whom we are called to love; it doesn’t matter even whether love is ever returned. We can still excel at love. We can still say, “Like it or not, I’m going to love you like nobody ever has.” 

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Not Even a Hint

If you are a fan of Joshua Harris' books "I Kissed Dating Goodbye" -- "Boy Meets Girl" - Here's his another book! "Not Even a Hint" -- this book talks about LUST ~! the thing that not only men struggle, but we, women, do too!

"Oh, I keep my bed pure" -- or "Oh, I never have sex before marriage" -- we might say that~! But, we know what we have in our minds, when we try to be beautiful (in a wrong way) to get attention from guys -- or how we try so hard to have a bootylicious body like girls on magazine covers ('coz men like them!!) -- or how we fantasize after watching several movies or reading novels!! and we know God knows!

Bible says -- there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or any kind of impurity!

So, hey girls (and guys) -- let's not give ourselves a chance - and play with it - not even a hint!!

God be with us ~

the good news is "The temptation in our lives are no different from what other experience. And God is faithful. He will not allow the temptation to be more than we can stand. When we are tempted, He will show us a way out so that we can endure"

You are not alone, and there is a way out!!!!!!!!

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“Every day of our Christian experience should be a day relating to God on the basis of His grace alone. Your worst days are never so bad that you are beyond the reach of God’s grace. And your best days are never so good that you are beyond the need of God’s grace.” Jerry Bridges

Lust: craving sexually what God has forbidden.

In our losing battle against lust we’re often misguided in three key areas. We’ve had..

• • The wrong standard for holiness
• • The wrong source of power to change
• • And the wrong motive for fighting our sin

God’s standard when it comes to lust = not even a hint. God wants us to be freed from; He wants us to eliminate any kind of impurity in our thoughts and actions. He wants us to dig down into our hearts and uproot sexual greediness, which is always seeking a new sensual thrill.

God’s standard of not even a hint quickly brings me to the end of my own ability and effort. It reminds me that God’s standard is so much higher than the standards I place for myself that only the victory of Christ’s death and resurrection can provide the right power and the right motive needed to change me.

Lust is our enemy and has hijacked sexuality. We need to keep reminding ourselves that our goal is to rescue our sexuality from lust so we can experience it the way God intended.

It feels as though destroying our lust will destroy us. But it doesn’t. and when we destroy our lustful desire, we come not to the end of desire, but to the beginning of pure desire – God-centered desire, which was created to carry us into the everlasting morning of God’s purposes.

If you ever expect to find victory over lust, you must believe with your whole heart that God is against your lust not because He is opposed to pleasure, but because He is so committed to it.

It’s so critical to understand that our sexual drive isn’t the same as lust. For example:

• - it’s not lust to be attracted to someone or notice that he or she is good-looking.
• - It’s not lust to have a strong desire to have sex.
• - It’s not lust to anticipate and be excited about having sex within marriage.
• - It’s not lust when a man or woman becomes turned-on without any conscious decision to do so.
• - It’s not lust to experience sexual temptation.

The crucial issue in each of these examples is how we respond to the urges and desires of our sexual desire.

To rightly embrace our sexuality we must bring it under the dominion of the One who created it. When we do so, we’re not fighting for it. We’re rescuing our sexuality from being ruined by lust. We’re exalting our God-given identity as sexual creatures by refusing to be trapped in the never ending dissatisfaction of lust.

Each of us is unique in how we’re tempted to lust. This shouldn’t be a surprise – we all have different backgrounds, different weaknesses, and different sinful tendencies. All these combine to make us particularly vulnerable to lust in certain situations.

My bigger outbreaks of sin are usually triggered by smaller sins that I wasn’t diligent in guarding against. I’m talking about the daily, even hourly decisions of what to watch, read, listen to, and allow my mind to think about and my eyes to rest upon.

“Keep as far as you can from those temptations that feed and strengthen the sins which you would overcome. Lay siege to your sins and starve them out, by keeping away the food and fuel which is their maintenance and life.” Richard Baxter

1. List your own top three lust triggers. (time of day, tempting locations, television, newspapers and magazines, music, books, internet, the mailbox, in public). How can you avoid them?

2. What time of day or week are you most tempted by lust? What can you do to prepare for those times?

3. Which locations are the most tempting for you? How can you limit your time in those places?

4. What five little battles do you need to be fighting more faithfully? Describe in detail what it looks like for you to fight – and – to win - this battles.

It’s not enough to merely feel bad about or dislike the consequences of lust. True repentance is a change of direction. It involves turning away from sin and toward God – replacing sinful actions with righteous ones. Genuine repentance springs from heartfelt sorrow over sin because it is against God and then leads to real change in the way a person thinks and lives.

When it comes to lust, the greatest misconception about women is that they only deal with lust on an emotional level. But many women struggle with lust in what you might call traditionally male ways – the temptation to view pornography, to masturbate, to focus on intense physical desire for sex. These women are often hindered in their fight against lust because they’re consumed with shame over the particular ways they struggle.

Women, it doesn’t matter if your sex drive is as strong as a guy’s or how it compares to other girls you know. What matters is whether or not you’re looking to God for strength to control the desires you have. What matters is whether or not you’re fleeing temptation and pursuing holiness because you love Him.

The truth is that men’s lust is more obvious, but not necessarily more sinful. Guys are typically more visually oriented, and as a result their lust is more visible. And because God made me to initiate and pursue women, their expressions of lust are often more aggressive and blatant.

• - A man’s sexual desire is often more physical, while a woman’s desire is more often rooted in emotional longings.
• - A man is generally wired to be the sexual initiator and is stimulated visually; a woman is generally wired to be the sexual responder and is stimulated by touch.
• - A man is created to pursue and finds even the pursuit stimulating; a woman is made to want to be pursued and finds even being pursued stimulating.

Lust blurs and bends true masculinity and femininity in harmful ways. It makes a man’s good desire to pursue all about “capturing” and “using” and a woman’s good desire to be beautiful all about “seduction” and “manipulation”. In general it seems that men and women are tempted by lust in two unique ways; men are tempted by the pleasure lust offers, while women are tempted by the power lust promises.

A man’s lust leads him to detach a woman’s body from her soul, mind, and person and use her for the sake of his selfish pleasure. Isn’t this why most pornography is directed toward men and depicts women presenting themselves solely for a man’s pleasure? Pornography reinforces the lie that women are sexual playthings for men’s enjoyment – that women want to be used, not loved and cherished. Some men prefer to masturbate to pornography over engaging in a real relationship with a woman because it allows to them to live in the fantasy that their own physical pleasure is all that matters.

When a woman sees a seductive ad featuring a man, she might be tempted to fantasize about sex with him, but the odds are that this temptation will be rotted in fantasy about a relationship with him, with physical pleasure being a subset of her craving for passionate attention and emotional intimacy.

Lust offers men the pleasure of sex devoid of the hard work of intimacy. Lust offers women the power to get what they want relationally if they use their sexuality to seduce.

Recognize that lust is the greatest enemy of a healthy, godly relationship. If you love God and each other, determine to hate lust. Don’t feed lust in your relationship. It won’t stop wanting till your relationship is ruined.

Lust seeks to use what we know about the weaknesses of the opposite sex to manipulate them. Our membership in God’s family must transform our view of the opposite sex. We’re not trying to get something from each other: we’re called to give, to love, and to care for one another.

The reason this very private act (masturbation) matters to God is not because it involves our genitals, but because it involves our heart. And God is passionately committed to our hearts belonging completely to Him (see Deut. 6:5). Masturbation isn’t a filthy habit that makes people dirty. It only reveals the dirt that’s already in our hearts. It’s an indicator that we’re feeding the wrong desires. That’s why problems with lustful actions are symptoms of deeper heart problems.

Masturbation is built on a self-centered view of sex. This wrong attitude says that sex is solely about you and your pleasure. Your body. Your genitals. Your orgasm. This is the natural tendency of sin. It isolates us from others and makes pleasure self-focused. When our lustful desires are given free rein, sex is pushed into a corner and made completely self-centered, isolated experience that reinforces a self-centered view of life.

Marriage and sex are inseparable in God’s design. You can’t have one without the other.

God is telling us that before we can view sex accurately, we have to take marriage seriously. We have to understand that in God’s sight, when a man and woman marry and join their bodies together sexually, something spiritual occurs – they really do become “one”.

CS Lewis compares having sex outside of marriage to a person who enjoys he sensation of chewing and tasting food, but doesn’t want so swallow the food and digest it.

If you cultivate a habit of masturbation, don’t assume it will end once you’re married. I know my married people who continue to be tempted. Sometimes “solo sex” seems easier, even more pleasurable, than the work involved with maintaining intimacy with your spouse and unselfishly seeking to give him or her pleasure. But a husband or a wife who turns to masturbation in marriage becomes a rival to his or her own spouse. The act of masturbation draws them away from each other.

The world has abandoned marriage and commitment for a lifestyle for empty “hookups”. Don’t follow the world’s pattern. Pursue God’s gifts of marriage. God has given marriage to us for our good. The world is increasingly delaying and avoiding marriage – we should do the opposite. No one should be ashamed to want to marry young and enjoy the wife (or husband) of their youth. Marriage is great. Sex in marriage is terrific! We’re not just called to guard the marriage bed; I think more Christian singles should be running toward it.

When it comes to our entertainment choices – a lot of Christians are more concerned with what others might think that with what God thinks.

God has begun to show me just how much my unhealthy media diet has fed my lust and negatively affected my spiritual life. When I’ve come to see us that no matter how much I study the Bible, pray, and ask God to help me conquer lust, I’ll never move forward in holiness if I’m filling my mind with lustful images and ungodly themes through entertainment.

Television and film stir up feelings and emotions that bypass our minds and go straight for our affections. The incredible power of media is that it can make something evil look good or exciting without appearing to make any argument at all.

If we’re to honor God with our entertainment choices, we must be willing to carefully evaluate how what we watch affects our love for God. We must be willing to wrestle with our standards and often refuse to watch what other think is permissible.

A Confident Heart

Here's my first ebook, read on my kindle ~ "A Confident Heart", by Renee Swope

This book really speaks a lot about what most women struggle with ~ insecurities, self doubt, comparison, guilt... etc etc... *you know what I am talking about~*

Though - I know, people hardly believe when I say "I have no confidence". I don't know either sometimes how to explain my "no confidence" - 'coz seriously, you won't see it >.< and this book helped me to see the root of the problems that I never realized have been there for a long time~!

So, girls - I am gonna stop talking now, you just read the excerpt!

"The only way we’ll have a confident heart as if we move beyond knowing about God to knowing and relying on Him - to depending on His Word with our whole heart, mind and soul." - Renee Swope -

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Self-doubt blocks the promise of God’s power and truth to change us from the inside out so that we can live with a confident heart.

Doubt keeps us from believing things can get better. Doubt convinces us that it’s not worth the effort.

It is a rare soul indeed who has been sought after for who she is—not because of what she can do, or what others can gain from her, but simply for herself . . . so what are we to conclude? Often we conclude that there is nothing in our hearts worth knowing. Whoever and whatever this mystery called I must be, it cannot be much. John Eldredge and Brent Curtis[1]

It can be hard to let people know how we’re really doing. We don’t want to be high maintenance, right? We surely don’t want people to see the peeling paint of our imperfections or the rotting attitudes in the wood boards of our minds. It’s embarrassing for people to see our flaws and failures, so we work hard to look like we’re doing fine from a distance.

Sometimes I think we tell people we’re fine even when we’re not, because we want to be fine. Or we hope that by saying we are fine, eventually we will be. Other times we act like we’re fine because others expect us to be.

Being honest about who we are and how we are doing is especially risky when it comes to our insecurities. We fear that if people know we doubt ourselves, they’ll start doubting us too.

Pretending leads to hiding and isolation. What we need is someone who will pursue us and accept us even though we’re flawed. Yet most of us doubt anyone would ever stick with us if we let them get too close. So we put up walls and hide our struggles, even from God, hoping we’ll convince Him and everyone else that we’re fine. Eventually, though, we find ourselves in the shadows of doubt, convinced that we aren’t worth knowing or pursuing. Slowly we begin to believe we have to be perfect to be loved and accepted.

Oh how I longed for someone to see past the exterior façade and look into the secret places of my heart. I wanted to be known and loved for who I was. Yet if I let my guard down, I was afraid someone would say I was too sensitive or too serious…. Even though I was surrounded by people, my insecurities convinced me I was all alone.

Jesus met Sam in one of the loneliest parts of her day. In the same way, He is there waiting for us in the midst of our imperfect lives, when our pain and failures confirm our self-doubts. He is there waiting for us when we’re going through the motions, aware of what needs to be done but unaware of how we’re going to do it. He is there on those mornings when we can’t stop criticizing ourselves for blowing it the day before; when we go to work and wonder why we’re even there.

You don’t have to pretend things are fine when they aren’t. He knows what is going on in your thoughts. Nothing could keep Him from wanting to be with you. He invites you to come to Him to receive the perfect love He offers—love that casts out fear, love that is patient and kind, love that keeps no record of wrongs.

But if we only live on the surface with God, we’ll never experience the intimacy we long for or the acceptance and security He offers. Instead of just making our lives easier, God wants us to come up close and experience Him and all that He has for us. He knows that our problems won’t be solved and our confidence won’t be found through simply getting more stuff done. Instead, He invites us to slow down and talk to Him about our day and the desires of our hearts, asking Him to show us the reasons for our doubts and insecurities. He wants us to go below the surface by asking Him to show us why we want what we want. Then we can ask Him if what we want is really what we need.

In the same way, Jesus wants to help you see what is going on in your heart and what you are struggling with that is eroding your security and confidence. If you were sitting with Jesus today, what do you think He’d want to talk about? Perhaps your heart needs to be set free from pretending and perfectionism. Are you longing for others’ approval and wonder why you can never get enough?

Jesus is the only one who can meet our deepest needs to be accepted and delighted in simply because of who we are. We can offer nothing but our presence, and he will desire us just the same.

A personal relationship with God sets us free to be all we were created to be. As children of God we were designed to find our identity, our significance, and our confidence in Him.

The only way we’ll have a confident heart as if we move beyond knowing about God to knowing and relying on Him - to depending on His Word with our whole heart, mind and soul.

When I feel insecure, insignificant, or unloved, remind me of Your perfect love that has the power to cast out my fear.

Our plans (me and my ex boyfriend) of a future together crumbled under the pressure of me expecting him to be all that I needed, and him wanting freedom to be who he wanted. I had been crazy about him – a little too crazy.

You’ve been trying to earn your value in everything you’ve done. But you will never ding the love you for in anyone or anything but ME. I AM the unconditional love you are looking for.

Until our hearts find complete security and significance in God’s unconditional love, we will never be satisfied.

Those of us who struggles with insecurity and find ourselves in the shadow of doubt often get there because we are seeking our validation in people’s opinions, our worth in accomplishments, and our identity in excessive commitments. It can only go on for so long before something breaks. We either get tired and quit trying, or we push ourselves to the point of burnout because we don’t know how to set boundaries.

God put a longing for unfailing love in our hearts because He knew it would lead us back to Him. Only God’s unfailing love will fill and fulfill the desires of our hearts. It is the deepest thirst of our souls. Until God’s love is enough, nothing else will be.

For instance, if we focus on our job (or our marriage) al the time, thinking about how we are doing at work (or home) and what our boss (or husband) thinks about us, we start to find our worth in our performance, and our job (or marriage) can become something we worship. If we are doing well, we feel fulfilled. If we are not doing well, we feel empty and like we have less worth.

Salvation is one-time decision, but finding satisfaction in Christ and living in the security of His promises is a daily process.

Jesus wants us to invite Him to look into the well of our hearts each day and show us what, who and where we are looking to be filled and fulfilled. As we allow Jesus to fill and fulfill us instead, the Holy Spirit quenches our spiritual thirst. We find our satisfaction in Him and begin to live with a sense of contentment and confidence based on the unchanging promise of who we are and what we have in Christ.

We become secure as we know and rely on His love more and more. It is a moment by moment, day by day experience where we process our thoughts, emotions, and decisions with God, positioning our hearts to let His perspective redefine ours.

A confident heart is found in a woman who knows beyond the shadow of a doubt that she is loved no matter what. Lasting security comes when we bring the empty well of our hearts to Jesus and ask Him to fill and fulfill us with the security of His unfailing love.

"Faith looks back and draws courage; hope looks ahead and keeps desire alive." -John Eldredge and Brent Curtis-

Many of us have been completely knocked off our feet and wondered if we would ever have the strength to get back up again.

Yet getting back up again is often where we find our strength.

God also showed me I needed to find my security and hope in Him alone by letting Him be the Father I longed for. I needed to grieve some of the things I wanted that I would never have. I also needed to invite God into those hurting places so He could bind up my broken heart and set me free from captivity to my fear that I would never have a happy ending.

His power is perfected in the broken places we consider to be our greatest weaknesses – our most vulnerable emotions we don’t want anyone to know about. In those hiding places, God calls us out of captivity. When we’re willing to let Him, He brings hope for our future despite the pain of our past.

God’s plans for us are found when we surrender ours and seek His each day. God’s plans unfold each time we come to Him, talk to Him, and really believe He’s listening. Learning to live in the security of God’s promises is a daily journey of dependence.

We find ourselves in the shadow of doubt many times because our thoughts are mostly about ourselves; how we’re performing and what others are thinking about us.

When we focus our attention on ourselves, we turn our attention away from God. We leave no room in our thoughts to listen to what He is thinking about us, because we have given that place away to be occupied by other people’s opinions.

“You can’t put your hope in a man, you can only put your hope in God. A man’s love will always disappoint you.”

Paul warns us that those who “measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves” are not wise (2 Cor 10:12). Our struggle with comparison will always leave us feeling like we’re lacking something. We try to do more and be more, but it’s never enough. We still feel insecure and wonder what’s wrong with us.

What I need to change is the way I talk to myself. Because every time I say, “What’s wrong with me?” I plant a seed of doubt and convince myself more and more that something is wrong with me.

That is not what God wants me to say to myself, and it’s not what He wants you to say to yourself either. However, we have an enemy who loves to cast the shadow of self-doubt over us and get us to focus on all that is wrong with us (real or perceived), instead anything that is right with us.

“The more you reaffirm who you are in Christ, the more your behavior will begin to reflect your true identity.” Dr. Neil T. Anderson

Trying to get our “good enough” outside of God’s promises and provision will always create insecurity and obstruct our relationship with Him and with other people.

The truth is, we are all “wrecked up”, but we are loved with reckless abandon by the King of Glory. We may be rejected by man, but we are accepted and adored by our Maker. We may be betrayed and cast aside, but we are chosen and redeemed by our Heavenly Father.

We also have an enemy who is completely against us. He is jealous of God’s glory in us and threatened by the beauty that lies within the heart of a woman whose identity is secure. That is why he attacks our confidence. He knows if he can paralyze us with self-doubt and insecurity we will never live up to the full potential of who we are and what we have in Christ.

Now, we don’t need to be afraid of our enemy. The One who is in us is greater than the one who is against us. However, we do need to be aware of his schemes and ready to stand against them.

Although people’s preferences will change, God’s desire for us won’t. Others might not think we’re good enough, but God always will. And even if someone decides they don’t desire us anymore, God most certainly does! The truth is, when we belong to Jesus we are loved and accepted forever. We are covered in His goodness, and it’s His goodliness that makes us good enough!

Comparison leaves us insecure, confused, and discontent. My friend Genia summed it up well when she told me, “Every time I compare myself with someone else, I can never measure up because I am comparing my insides with their outsides.” She is so right. We compare how we feel inadequate on the inside with someone who looks like they have it all together on the outside. Then we try to polish our outsides, hoping that will make us feel better on the inside, but it never does.

Comparison causes us to compete with each other, but no one wins. God never intended for us to compete with each other; He wants us to complete one another, celebrating and encouraging each other’s strengths while discovering who He created us to be.

God deliberately gave you the personality He wanted you to have so He could impact certain people through your life.

We all have strengths, and when surrendered to Christ, we become more like Him as we become more like our true selves.

When we are faithful with the little things, God entrusts us with more and we get to share in the joy of fulfilling His purposes. We are stewards responsible for all God has entrusted to us, no matter how significant or insignificant our gifts seem.

I surrender my personality, heart’s desires, abilities, spiritual gifts, and experiences to Your purposes. I delight myself in You, Lord, trusting You to shape desires of my heart to match Yours.

Grace is the security of knowing God’s love is guaranteed for us because we trust in Christ.

When I say, “I feel so weak.” God says, “I’ll give you power.”

My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. (2 Cor 12:9)

When I say, “I feel so alone.” God says, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”

The Lord your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you. (Deut 31:6)

When Sinners Say "I Do"

I just finished reading a very wonderful book, "When Sinners Say 'I Do'" - Discovering the Power of the Gospel for Marriage, by Dave Harvey.

This book gave me a preview of how a marriage is - that "I love you - you love me" only surely ain't enough, no matter how compatible and crazily in love to each other we are. For our love is corrupted by sins.

Yet, this book didn't leave me on all the paranoid about marriage. There is a hope!!! A BIG H-O-P-E! to have a wonderful marriage that He designed for us from the beginning.

What does make a marriage works..?? God, the source of love! The unconditional Love that purify our "corrupted" love each day. With Him, as the center, the marriage will work. Through Him as the source of mercy, we will be able to forgive. By His grace, we will go forth to be more like Him (yes, both of us) and do the good works in our marriages!

Have a blessed and blessing marriage!! OH, I pray!!!!

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It's a wonderful, freeing thing to realize that durability and quality of your marriage is not ultimately based on the strength of your commitment to your marriage. Rather, it's based on something completely apart from your marriage: God's truth, truth we find plain and clear on pages of Scripture.

God created the marriage "program", wrote the "operating manual", and is faithful to explain it. He is the one and only reliable and trustworthy authority on the subject of marriage. As its "inventor" (see the first two chapters of Genesis), he knows how it works and how to make it last. Lord over marriage, he has given all we need for life and godliness - and marriage - in his Word.

The Bible is the foundation for a thriving marriage.

Marriage was not invented by God, it belongs to God. He has a unique claim over its design, purpose, and goals. It actually exists for him more than it exists for you and me and our spouses.

Marriage is not first about me or my spouse. Obviously, the man and woman are essential, but they are also secondary. God is the most important person in a marriage. Marriage is for our good, but it is first for God's glory.

Christians are rapidly losing sight of sin as the root of all human woes. And many Christians are explicitly denying that their own sin can be the cause of their personal anguish. More and more are attempting to explain the human dilemma in wholly unbiblical terms: temparement, addiction, dysfunctional families, the child within, codependency, and a host of other irresponsible escape mechanism promoted by secular psychology.

The potential impact of such a drift is frightening. Remove the reality of sin, and you take away the possibility of repentance. Abolish the doctrine of human depravity and you void the divine plan of salvation. Erase the notion of personal guilt and you eliminate the need for a Savior.

Once I find 1 Timothy 1:15-16 trustworthy - once I can embrace it with full acceptance - once I know that I am indeed the worst of sinners, then my spouse is no longer my biggest problem: I am. And when I find myself walking in the shoes of the worst of sinners, I will make every effort to grant my spouse the same lavish grave that God has granted me.

When we are first tempted to sin - for example, tempted to become angry with a spouse - the battle is within, and we must go on the offensive: our goal is to defeat the sin, to not let it break out. Should we fail at this, and sin breaks out of our hearts into the larger battlefield of our marriages, we are called to be peacemakers: our goal is to end the fighting.

Wisdoms for our marriages then, is not found in “how to” books, or in formulas for success. It is found in putting our beliefs into gear and heading down the road of wisdom with God behind the wheel.

To be suspicious of my own heart is to acknowledge two things: that my heart has a central role in my behavior, and that my heart has a permanent tendency to oppose God and his ways.

Many marriage problems could move toward resolution if husband and wife actually lived as if they were “sinners” who said, “I do”. Sinners who are humble are growing more knowledgeable about their hearts.

We all have a common tendency: we often want to fix our marriage problems by “fixing” our spouses. … Scripture does not give me permission to make the sins of my spouse my first priority. I need to slow down, exercise the humility of self-suspicion, and inspect my own heart.

Matthew 7:3-5 Jesus is not concerned here with which of you is more at fault in a particular instance. His emphasis is your focus, what you find to be the most obvious fact to you whenever sin is in view. He’s calling for the inspection to begin with me. In light of who we are compared to God, and because of the reality of remaining sin, it is nothing more than basic integrity to consider our sin before we consider the sin of our spouse. To do otherwise lacks integrity. It’s hypocritical.

Wisdom connects integrity to humility in a pretty simple way. If you suspect yourself (humility), you are more likely to inspect yourself first (integrity). This road feels narrow to us, because we are constantly looking for an off-ramp to focus on the sins of someone else. But if we stay on it, we can be confident that it will take us where Jesus wants us to go.

Okay, maybe you think you are able to be more objective than your spouse. But even if that’s true, your objectivity is itself tainted by sin. You must bring to these conversations an awareness of your own sinful drives and desires that is more tangible and more vivid than your awareness of your spouse’s in. This will lower your irritation and soften your tone of voice.

Also, avoid the off-ramp of self-righteousness. Integrity calls you to suspect and inspect your motives. Are you really doing this to bless, encourage, and help your spouse? Or do you actually have a strong interest in chalking up a few points for the home team? Do you hope to be proven right? To be vindicated? To emerge as spiritually superior? Who are you intending to serve – your spouse or yourself?

There is a lot of talk these days about the need for honesty in marriage. Unfortunately, what’s being advocated looks more like a license to verbally unload on our spouse whatever we’re “feeling” for the sake of “emotional” honesty. Sadly, this approach in practice typically produces great hurt and offense. Though honesty is essential in marriage, we must be able to build trust and resolve offense. The problem is not with the honesty itself, but in the intent of a person’s honest words.

Blame-shifting is what I do when I basically know I’m guilty and am just trying to convince myself or someone else that maybe I’m not.

Why didn’t Jesus get irritated or bitter or hostile? The simple but astounding answer is that when his engine was heated by circumstances, what was in his heart came out: love, mercy, compassion, kindness. Christ didn’t respond sinfully to the circumstances in his life – even an undeserved, humiliating, torturous death – because the engine of his heart was pure. What was in his heart spilled over. It was love!

Your spouse was a strategic choice made by a wise and loving God. Selected by him, for you, from the beginning of the world, your spouse is an essential part of God’s rescue mission for your life. Often a spouse plays his or her part by raising the engine temperature and heating the oil. But if we’re wisely honest we will realize that God is behind it all, revealing the familiar sin so that it might be overcome by amazing grace.

According to Scripture, the source of angry words, unforgiving looks and cold shoulders is not unmet needs. It’s unsatisfied desires.

Is it wrong to desire the gentle caress of a husband’s hand or the kind words from a wife’s tongue? Absolutely not. But even things that are good for a marriage can be corrupted if they are defined as needs. The problem is not that we desire-desire is completely natural; it’s that our desires become juiced with steroids. Calvin called our desires “inordinate”.

It’s not wrong to desire appropriate things like respect or affection from our spouses. But it is very tempting to justify demands by thinking of them as needs and then to punish one another if those needs are not satisfied. A needs- based marriage does not testify to God’s glory; it is focused on personal demands competing for supremacy. Two people, preoccupied with manipulating each other to meet needs, can drive their marriage down the path of “irreconcilable differences”. This is cultural language that simply acknowledges that a marriage can no longer carry the weight of demands understood as needs.

Without mercy, differences become divisive, sometimes even “irreconcilable”. But deep, profound differences are the reality of every marriage. It’s not the presence of differences but the absence of mercy that makes them irreconcilable.

Mercy doesn’t change the need to speak truth. It transforms our motivation from a desire to win battles to desire to represent Christ. It takes me out of the center and puts Christ in the center. This requires mercy.

Mercy is given to be shared. And what it touches, it ultimately sweetens. We are to pass along what we have received from God-steadfast love, inexplicable kindness, overflowing compassion. We sinned against God and he responded with mercy. We are called to go and do the same.

Here are some practical ways we can show mercy when under attack:

1. Remind yourself that your greatest enemy is “the enemy within” - your own sin.

2. When you’re not in a conflict, ask each other the question, “What behavior of mine expresses anger or a lack of love for you?” Take your spouse’s answer and attempt to do the opposite when you feel sinned against.

3. Learn to love in the style of 1 Corinthians 13 by being “patient, kind, and not resentful”. Resist being a defense attorney in your mind. Fire the “prosecuting attorney” within – it’s nothing but an expression of the sin of arrogance.

4. Memorize and apply this wise advice from James, “let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness that God requires” (James 1:19-20). Applying this one verse in the heat of conflict can have an amazing effect on where the conflict goes.

5. Where patterns of sin are causing persistent problems, draw in the outside counsel of friends, pastors, etc. who can help you spot where chronic problems are occurring and provide accountability for responses of love.

Ideas like this will not eliminate conflict. But they are biblically sound strategies for responding to the heat of our spouse’s sin in a way that doesn’t just increase the temperature or complicate the process of resolution one thing I’ve learned, if I can avert a two-hour argument with two minutes of mercy, that’s a win for everybody involved.

Maybe you didn’t know this, but the Bible gives you a specific privilege in dealing with sin committed against you. It’s called forbearance. It means that you can bring love into play in such a way that you can cut someone free from their sin against you – without them even knowing or acknowledging what they’ve done! Forbearance is an expression of mercy that can cover both the big sins of marital strife and the small sins of marital tension. And let’s face it, small sins are the fuel for most marital blazes.

Let’s be careful here. Forbearance doesn’t mean we tuck sin away for another time. It’s not a variation on patience, nor is it some Christianized, external “niceness” where you pretend nothing bothers you. It’s not even a kind of ignoring the sin, in the sense of refusing to acknowledge it.

In forbearance, we know (or at least suspect) we have been sinned against, but we actually make a choice to overlook the offense and wipe the state clean, extending a heart attitude of forgiveness and treating the (apparent) sin as if it never happened. Proverbs 19:11 tells us it is a “glory to overlook an offense.” Forbearance is preemptive forgiveness, freely and genuinely bestowed.

Of course, righteousness often demands that we address the sin of another, even if that may create some unpleasant results. It’s not forbearance to suppress an offense you can’t readily release, or to prefer the pain of being sinned against to what you imagine would be the greater pain of discussing it, or to let a pattern of sin in your spouse to go completely unaddressed.

Forbearance applies to specific instances of sin. It involves a clear-eyed realization that we may have been sinned against and then bold-hearted, gospel-inspired decision to cover that sin with love. Peter gives us the key to forbearance. “Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins.” (1 Peter 4:8).

Self-righteousness doesn’t just who up when people sin against us. I also expresses itself what to draw too fine a line between sins and weaknesses. I don’t’ want to draw too fine a line between sins and weaknesses, because sin in fact has a weakening effect on our character. But the Bible understands weakness- areas of vulnerability or susceptibility to temptation that are different from person to person. We’re not all strong in all areas. Some are more susceptible to discouragement than others, or anger, or anxiety. Some struggle with physical weakness more than others. We all have some weakness in some areas, or else there would be no need for the power of God to operate in our lives. (Romans 8:26)

Weaknesses in our spouse can tempt us-they’re inconvenient and frustrating to what we want from our marriage. How do I respond when that particular weakness in my spouse arises again? Do I just keep insisting (aloud or silently), “I don’t see how that can possibly be a problem for you!” this is a particularly sad expression of self-righteousness. Rather than sympathizing with the weaknesses or limitations of others, we act in condescending and demanding ways. We are finely attuned to the weaknesses of others but slow to see our own.

When I grasp the mercy of God expressed to me, it opens my eyes to the bankruptcy of my own righteousness and sends me to the cross for the righteousness of Christ. I can then sympathize with my spouse weaknesses and rejoice in my own, for they reveal Gods strength (2 Corinthians 12:9)

Forgiveness and repentance is the powerful tool that repairs the damage done to sin-torn marriage relationships. And where forgiveness is employed, and repentance is lived out, it transforms. Forgiveness humbly sought, and humbly given, profoundly expresses the glory of God. Why? Because forgiveness is at the heart of the gospel-the true demonstration of God’s love for those who deserved his wrath. As John Newton said so well, “The unchangeableness of the Lord’s love, and the riches of his mercy, are likewise more illustrated by the multiplied pardons he bestows upon his people, than if they needed no forgiveness at all.”

We have been forgiven the greatest debt. Let’s learn how to forgive the debtor we married. It’s the way forward when sinners say “I do.”

When someone close to you is running from the truth, love demands that you speak. Sometimes love must risk peace for the sake of the truth.

It’s evitable. In navigating through a fallen world with a sinful heart, from time to time your spouse will experience a pattern of sin that extinguishes joy and saps the soul, revealing dangerous corrosion in one’s character or relationship with God.

We are called to be merciful and withhold judgment. But we are also called to challenge one another- to correct, exhort, and speak truth to the one we love (Hebrews 3:12-13). This can seem like a paradox, even an apparent contradiction in our call. But it’s not. On the contrary, God has set us in our marriage, at this time, with this person so that we can perform an extraordinary task of ministry. We can fulfill the call of reconciliation – turning a wandering believer back to God who saves. We can love by bringing truth in gracious ways; applying grace through speaking the truth.

It needs wisdom, courage and meekness.

According to Paul, feelings of sorrow alone aren’t necessarily conviction. We can be sorrowful for many reasons, including selfish ones. We can be sorry for the bad consequences of our sin, sorry we lost someone’s respect. This kind of worldly grief can’t begin to address the true offense of sin, and it can’t begin to change us. Only godly grief brings repentance. And only repentance testifies to the surgical effect of God’s truth applied to our sinful hearts.

In marriage, to be meek is not to be weak or vulnerable, but to be so committed to your spouse that you will sacrifice for his or her good. A meek person sees the futility of responding to sin with sin.

Sanctifying grace is good news. It’s the news that God gives persistent grace to run the race.

Grace is constantly at work in us, gradually and incrementally, so that we can patiently but diligently run the race set out for us. And a significant part of the race we will run is our marriage.

God promises persistent grace to help you run away from that sin and finish well. “Human sin is stubborn,” says Cornelius Plantinga, “ but not as stubborn as the grace of God and not half so persistent, not half so ready to suffer to win its way.” Stubborn, persistent, unrelenting grace that changes us. Now that’s good news indeed.

Grace: the Power to Renounce the Old

Here God reminds us that the biggest challenge in our marriage is that we tend to live more like the old man (or woman) that we once were, than the new man or woman we have become in Christ. But have no fear: God has made provision for change! Grace meets us right where we are, to take us to where God wants us to be. Grace in salvation gave us new desires to please God and live for his glory. Grace in sanctification works to overcome the remaining opposition of sin and move us toward the goal that saving grace has set in our hearts.

Grace: the Power to Live

There are two aspects to sanctifying grace: a renouncing and an embracing – a turning from what is wrong and a turning toward what is right.

Grace: the Power to Wait

We cooperate with God’s persistent sanctifying grace to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives. We understand that some sin, challenges, difficulties, and weaknesses may never be totally overcome, and that all change takes time. But because grace is so powerful, thorough, and comprehensive, even this waiting is for our good.

Grace interacts with time and eternity. Sanctifying grace settles our souls so that here in this waiting room we can both work and wait, trusting that God is exercising his perfect will, even in those areas where we wait and wait, and wait.

Grace: the Power to Want

Grace transforms us from within. Maybe things have drifted to a place where even the smallest kindness seems like the biggest step. Don’t despair, God has sent grace – persistent, sanctifying grace! It can work powerfully in you, not simply to call forth dutiful obedience but to make you “zealous for good works” in marriage.

Here are four things to keep in mind when encouraging your spouse in the grace of God.

1. Your spouse is inclined to drift from grace to self-effort.

I just need to do more, work harder, give it more effort.

- Preach the gospel to your spouse.

- Encourage meditation upon the riches of the gospel.

- Encourage resting in God even as the battle rages.

2. Your spouse may tend to become discouraged.

- Remind your spouse that God works beneath the surface well before change becomes visible.

- Celebrate what you can see, even if it is not directly to the area of desired change.

- Review the game plan for change. ~ sometimes grace comes through a simple willingness to take action. When it does, act decisively.

3. Your spouse can lose sight of the ultimate goal.

~ there is no one more fit to remind us of the ultimate goal of life than the person who is walking toward that goal with us in the bond of marriage.

4. Your spouse must be pointed not to grace, but to the one from whom all grace flows.

God intends for our greatest joy in marriage to come from being a primary source of joy to our spouse. John Piper says, “The reason there is so much misery in marriage is not that husbands and wives seek their own pleasure, but that they do not seek in the pleasure of their spouses.”

When it comes to your marriage, think of creativity as simply faith-inspired work, a natural outgrowth of your belief that God cares about your marriage and wants to help you improve it. The important thing is not how naturally creative or imaginative you may be, but whether you truly are walking in dependence on God in improving your marriage. As Gary and Betsy Ricucci have written, “There’s no such thing as a romance expert or passion professional. Romance must be continually practiced, like an art.”