THANKSGIVING FOR UNANSWERED PRAYER!

One of the worst times in my life was when I felt that God had let me down by not answering one of my prayers. From as far back as I can remember I had always wanted to be a writer and I finally completed my first book when I was 43 years old. I believed the promise God made to us in Psalm 37 “Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord, trust in Him and He will do this”.

One of the main desires of my heart is to write and to share with others what a mighty God we serve.

Someone had prophesied over my life that God would give me the desire of my heart and the verse given to me in confirmation of this prophesy is found in Jeremiah 30:2 “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘Write in a book all the words I have spoken to you’”.

I had covered all the bases – I had prayed about the book, someone had confirmed it with a prophesy which was then followed up by a scripture verse and the book itself is very scripturally based. In fact a friend of mine who read the manuscript before I submitted it for publication had this to say “Actually, Noel, it would be a very good book if only it didn’t have so many scripture verses in it!”

I truly believed and had absolute faith that the book would be accepted for publication. I posted it off to three publishers – two of them never bothered to reply and the third one sent me a politely worded rejection letter. To say I was devastated is an understatement.

I was totally shattered and my faith and trust in God’s faithfulness was shaken. I had believed so strongly that this book would be accepted for publication and my faith had been unwavering! I spent days crying and weeks asking God why my book had been rejected.

After a period of time I started working on the manuscript again. I rewrote quite a few things and added some other things. I also spent a lot of time in prayer and reading the Bible.

Six years later I submitted the book to a partner publisher in America and they accepted it for publication.

I know now that if my book had been accepted first time round it would have been one of the worst things that could have happened to me and my family. I would have taken all the credit and become insufferably proud. I would not have been able to cope with the public speaking that goes hand in hand with having to promote a book. There was still a lot more healing that had to take place in my life and issues from my past that needed to be dealt with before my story was made public. I needed those years to grow in Him, to learn to rely solely on Him and to trust Him in all things. I needed that time to realize that God’s timing is always perfect and that He will not allow anything to happen to us – whether good or bad – until the time is right and He has equipped us to deal with the situation.

I thank God with every fiber of my being that He did not answer that prayer of mine at that time.

John 7:18 says: “He who speaks on his own does so to gain honour for himself, but he who works for the honour of the one who sent him is a man of truth; there is nothing false about him”

If God had answered my original prayer and the book had been published when I first submitted it - I would have spoken in my own strength and failed miserably.

In Ezekiel 36 it states “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you”

I needed those years of unanswered prayer to recognize and acknowledge God’s spirit in me and to grow into the new heart that God had given me.

The minister and writer Theodore Cuyler said “I do not believe there is such a thing in the history of God’s eternal kingdom as a right prayer, offered in the right spirit, that remains forever unanswered.”

It took six years for my prayer to be answered and what a blessing that it did take so long.

THE MOST POWERFUL TOOL IN MARRIAGE

The most difficult and challenging thing I have ever done in my life is to stay married.  The second most difficult and challenging thing I have ever done is to have children.

Both of these life events have also been filled with extreme joy, peace and happiness as well as horrific sadness, many, many tears and the sure knowledge that if I did not have Jesus Christ in my life I would not have survived either!

In his book Letters and Papers from Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes one of the most incredible statements about marriage I have ever read:

Marriage and not just your love for each other makes you husband and wife in the sight of God and man. It is not your love which sustains the marriage, but from now on the marriage that sustains your love. God makes your marriage indissoluble.  He protects it from every danger from within and without. God is joining you together; it is His act, not yours.”1

For me, it was an incredible revelation to realize that on the day my husband and I took our vows before God, we were in fact declaring that our marriage now belonged to God.

In that very moment, God, Himself, sanctified our marriage.

Sanctification is brought about through the redemptive work of Christ and the work of the indwelling Holy Spirit. Redemption means deliverance from the enslavement of sin and release to a new freedom.

In other words, God was releasing us from our pasts as individuals and joining us together in Him.

For those of us who worry that our past behaviors, mistakes, sins will follow us into our marriages and that we will repeat the same mistakes in our marriages that we have repeated in our past relationships, take note of the following!

If we believe in Christ and have confessed any wrong behavior/attitudes to our prospective spouse and to God, and have asked forgiveness for our sins then the following words erases our negative behavior of the past and we need not fear the future.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!  All this is from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that God was reconciling the world to Himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them.” —2 Corinthians 5:17-19

A husband and wife can start their married lives together with their pasts wiped clean, and they can look forward to a future not marred by the past.

Always bear in mind that it is not your love which sustains the marriage, but “the marriage that sustains your love.”

Love is an emotion and like any emotion—joy, anger, sorrow—it tends to fluctuate.

There will be times when you will be disappointed in your spouse, when you will be angry and hurt, when you will think to yourself “Why did I marry him/her?”

Sometimes, the struggles and conflicts within a marriage, can continue for weeks and it is at these times that you need to remember that your marriage has been sanctified by God and that you need to continue to pray and trust that God will equip you to deal with whatever issues may arise.

Oswald Chambers said the following:

To say that ‘prayer changes things’ is not as close to the truth as saying ‘prayer changes me and then I change things.’ God has established things so that prayer, on the basis of redemption, changes the way a person looks at things. Prayer is not a matter of changing things externally, but one of working miracles in a person‘s inner nature”.2

Every Christian marriage, where, a couple are committed to each other, enjoy each other’s company and are content within that marriage has its roots in prayer.

Prayer can make your marriage a happy one. Prayer can heal marriages. Prayer can restore marriages.

Prayer in a marriage is a very powerful tool.

1.Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison.
2.Chambers, Oswald. My Utmost for His Highest; Selections for Every Day.

Originally posted on http://www.startmarriageright.com/2014/11/the-most-powerful-tool-in-marriage/

DON'T JUDGE A BOOK BY ITS COVER (A SECOND REMINDER!)

Yesterday I was walking down the street and I passed a couple who had various body piercings and tattoos. My first reaction was to scowl at them, because to me, it just does not look right and I feel that they are 'defacing' the beautiful bodies God has given them. That is my personal opinion. My reaction reminded me of a few years ago when God taught me a major lesson about how easily we judge things and people by their outside appearances. I had just climbed off a plane in Birmingham, England, and was waiting, along with a 100 other people, for my luggage to appear on the carousel belt. I was on the opposite side of the carousel from where the luggage first appeared. The 4th item of luggage to appear was a big black suitcase that was ripped at the sides and held together by ugly brown sticky masking tape. As I watched its progress along the carousel the following thoughts were going through my mind:

“I wonder how someone who can’t even afford a decent suitcase can afford to fly?”

“I would be so embarrassed to acknowledge that as my suitcase!”

“I wonder how the person who owns that suitcase is dressed?”

As it drew closer to me I saw that it had exactly the same stickers that I had on my suitcase and then I saw my name on the identity tag and purely out of instinct I reached out and lifted it off the carousel belt. To compound my embarrassment I didn't even have a trolley so I couldn't put the suitcase on a trolley and cover it with my hand luggage! I had to pull this broken, wonky suitcase that was held together by ugly brown tape all the way through the airport. People stopped to stare at me as the wheel mechanism was also broken and it was making an awful racket as I pulled it along. I was mortified as I could just imagine what people were thinking!

In Matthew there are two very challenging verses “Do not judge or you too will be judged. For in the same way as you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you” (Matthew 7:1,2) and John 7:24 says “Stop judging by outside appearances…”

My suitcase was filled with beautifully wrapped presents, chocolates and decent clothes.
Judging by the appearance of my suitcase you would have thought it was filled with rags.
Often things happen that are beyond our control – I had put a big, black suitcase in good condition onto the airplane in South Africa and had received a damaged and torn suitcase, covered in tape in England. Somewhere in transit the suitcase was badly damaged and yet the contents were unharmed and, thank God, nothing was stolen.

The friends I was visiting have a son whose body is covered in tattoos and he has various piercings on his face and body. Judging by his appearance you would think he was a delinquent who took drugs and was on the dole because he had never completed his education. In fact the truth is, he has never taken drugs, has a steady job,earns a good income and is one of the kindest, politest and honest people that I have ever met. I love him dearly and yet if I didn't know him and saw him walking towards me on the street I would cross over to the other side…………..!

My oldest daughter who is now working has also had a few piercings done. I struggle with it because it is something I would never do but she thinks they are beautiful. These piercings have not changed her at all. She is still the beautiful, compassionate, caring and humorous person she has always been. These piercings may affect how she looks on the outside to a small degree but they have certainly not changed what she is like on the inside.

The couple smiled and greeted me in a friendly way as we passed each other in the street and I was reminded again of that old adage "Don't judge a book by its cover".

I was also reminded of the words that Jesus spoke when the woman caught in adultery was brought to Him (John 8). The punishment for adultery was for her to be stoned to death. Jesus said to the crowd:

"If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her."

"WHO'S THE BOSS?"

In the early days of our marriage my husband would jokingly quote the following portion of  scripture to me “wives submit to your husbands”.

I would just smile quietly and tell him to go and read the rest of that scripture!!

“wives submit to your husbands as to the Lord”.

Contrary to popular belief, the Biblical meaning of submit does not mean ‘to obey, give in to, have to serve’.  The true meaning of the word submit “describes the Christian grace of voluntarily yielding one’s preferences to another” it does not mean to obey.

“The Greek word for “obey/obedience’ is hupakoe, which means to listen to or to harken to.  Submission (hupotasso) means to get under and lift up, or to put in order.  It does not mean obedience.”1

Our duty as wives is to encourage our husbands, to love them, to support them and lift them up.

The Biblical duty for husbands entails far more. When husbands finally read further after the ‘wives submit yourself to your husband’ part, this is what it says:

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her… in the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies.  He who loves his wife loves himself.  After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church…”  (Ephesians 5)

A husband needs to treat his wife exactly the same way he treats himself.  He needs to feed and care for his wife, he needs to love his wife as Christ loves His people.

Jesus embodies the word love.  Love is patient, love is kind, love is not rude, love is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered and keeps no record of wrongs.  Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes and always perseveres.

 A husband is commanded to love his wife in exactly that manner!  I am not sure how marriages, where partners do not know the Lord, survive.  Surely, it is only with God’s grace and His love flowing through a husband’s life, that a man is able to love his wife as Christ has commanded.

I am so thankful that I was born a woman!

It states in the same passage that “the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church”.

In any organization or business there has to be someone who is ultimately in charge of the business, someone who can take command and lead and make a decision after consulting the relevant people in the business.

This is exactly the role of the husband – if you disagree on a course of action in your marriage, or both have strong, opposing feelings about a decision that needs to be made – it is the husband, who after consulting, discussing and praying the matter over with his wife, then has to make the final decision about the situation.

If you are living and loving each other in your marriage as Christ has commanded you must,  it will not happen often that you will reach a point in your marriage when the husband has to make the final decision.  You will generally be ‘giving in/compromising’ with the one who is the most passionate about something.

My husband and I have been married for over twenty-two years now and in all these years there has only been two times that we have really disagreed over something and not been able to compromise on it and he has had to make the final decision.

Writing this has brought to mind an incident that happened when our middle child was about six years old.  I was hosting a tea party for a group of moms and we were gathered around the kitchen table and at one point the topic of conversation turned to “who wears the pants in the house – the wife or the husband”.  There was a vigorous discussion around this point and our Amy just happened to be walking through the kitchen at the time.  One of the moms turned to her and asked “So, Amy, who is the boss in your house?”

She stopped in her tracks and answered “God!” and kept going.

I thank God that her father and I have been able to be a witness to her that neither the wife nor the husband ‘lords it over the other’ but that the ultimate authority in a Christian marriage is God.

1.  godswordtowomen.org/submission.htm