Mid-week Devotional
Our Jesus Mission in Marriage
John 17:18
Pastor Wes
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This past Sunday, we worked through Jesus’ teaching on joy from John 17:13-19.
Each verse from this passage contains a nugget of truth that will help us obtain the fullness of joy that Jesus wants to give His followers. Right now I want to springboard off of verse 18, it says “As You sent Me into the world, I also have sent them into the world.” This verse tells us that Jesus’ mission is now our mission. I had mentioned some general focus areas that perhaps sum up Jesus’ mission while He was in physical form on this earth- His mission of forgiving, healing, teaching, dying, and resurrecting. I talked about how as His followers, we do the same things- forgiving others, promoting spiritual healing/praying for physical healing, teaching others/kids/grandkids, dying to old habits and wrong desires, and one day joining Jesus as well in His resurrection as we pass from this life into the next.
This coming Sunday we have the opportunity to take part in a wedding ceremony after the morning service, and during the service we will have a time of special focus on the marriage relationship. In preparation for that day, I want us to now briefly look at marriage through the lens of this John 17:18 verse. Could it be that the same principles from this verse that might help us in having joy in the Christian life, might also help us in having joy in our marriage? I think so! For any singles who are tuning in, I encourage you to keep listening/reading- I don’t think I’ll get too deep into marital issues that would make you uncomfortable. I believe what we are looking at today will be beneficial for you as you consider the thought of one day being married.
We as followers of Jesus who have now taken on His mission as our mission, must be about His mission not just in our personal lives, our work lives, or our general family lives, but I believe we have to specifically see and focus on our marriage relationship as an opportunity to be on Jesus’ mission- in that relationship. And if we are able to see it in that light, and apply some Jesus mission strategies specifically in our marriage, I believe we will be able to experience a much greater, richer, fuller joy in our marriage.
I want you to think again about the general areas that could sum up Jesus’ mission, and this time see them through the lens of applying them directly to your marriage. Forgiving, healing, teaching, dying, and resurrecting. I don’t think there is any marital issue that couldn’t be resolved through the application of these Jesus-mission-focuses. You might would want to add “loving” to Jesus’ mission and thus to the mission of your marriage- yes, loving was part of Jesus’ mission and is part of our mission, but His love was expressed through His forgiving, healing, teaching, dying, and resurrecting. I think in marriages, we might do a better job of loving, if we were better able to express our love to one another through the application of forgiving, healing, teaching, dying, and resurrecting. I’ll quickly walk through each of these and explain.
Forgiveness. It’s probably no surprise to you that forgiving is a big part of being in a marriage relationship. But what happens often, is that spouses grow weary in forgiving each other. Our grace with each other thins, our fuses get shorter, and it is very easy to get into a habit of being edgy with each other. How do we get out of this rut, how do we stop this un-forgiveness wedge from tearing apart our marriage? We do like Jesus did, and we forgive. If we’ve gotten out of the habit of forgiving, we awake ourselves to the reality that even in our marriage we are on Jesus’ mission, and we learn to forgive again. Now another critical concept associated with Jesus’ mission of forgiving, is repentance. Repentance is the act of admitting fault, and then doing something about it. It’s turning from an old way of doing things to a new way of doing things. Forgiveness and repentance go together hand in hand with Jesus, and they go hand in hand within a marriage. Now I know what some of you are thinking right now, your picking roles, thinking “I’ll be the forgiver in the relationship, if my spouse starts being the repenter.” Listen, with almost any relationship issue, there is most often room for both spouses to humbly repent of something, and to humbly forgive each other of something. I challenge you to consider ways that you might need to forgive your spouse, and at the same time, consider ways in which you might need to ask your spouse to forgive you.
Healing. I’m sure you can imagine how healing in a relationship could play a great role in experiencing more joy in that relationship. Maybe I’m presuming too much, but I’m pretty confident that each of us have had life experiences that broke parts of us, from which we have been healed, or are still healing, or will need future healing. And a marriage takes two broken people and puts them together, and all of a sudden the possibilities for new brokenness rises exponentially. As followers of Jesus, we need to be on mission in our marriages in being aware of the healing that needs to take place personally, the healing that needs to take place in the life of our spouse, AND the areas of healing that need to occur inter-relationally between us as spouses. Jesus was keenly aware of the brokenness around Him, and was constantly working on healing. He would heal physically so that people could then be healed spiritually. His physical healing always pointed to the greater need of spiritual healing. He addressed the healing that people needed in their minds from misconceptions, past experiences, distorted concepts of God. I challenge you to be on Jesus mission and work on the areas of healing that need to occur in you personally, in your spouse, and in your marriage.
Teaching. We often think of teachers taking a superior position, and the students as being in a subordinate position- and rightly so. But, teaching doesn’t work so great in that manner in a marriage relationship. If you go say to your spouse, “Sit down, I’m going to teach you something” it’s probably not going to go so well. That’s not going to be very beneficial to your marriage. Rather, the teaching that occurs, is perhaps most effective when one spouse is expressing to the other the things that they themselves are learning. Massive walls in a marriage can come down when a spouse takes the time to humbly, and regularly, dialog with the other, and say, “Hey, I want to share with you something I learned today.” Or, “can I tell you about what God has been teaching me in His word?” I challenge both spouses to be learning and growing in your relationship with the Lord, and I encourage you to be on Jesus mission by sharing with each other what you are learning.
Dying. Marriage requires dying to a former self, former habits, a former way of life. The Bible says of marriage that the two become one flesh. They die to just being themselves, and are now something new- a new flesh, a new entity. God will probably end up using you and speaking to you in different ways than He used you and spoke to you when you were single. And even after a couple becomes one flesh, there is still some dying that takes place in the form of letting go of things. Perhaps we could even make a correlation back to what I mentioned about repentance- repentance is dying to wrong actions, thoughts, mindsets. What would our marriages really look like if we were more often able to die to ourselves, and sacrifice, for the betterment of our spouse? I challenge you to lovingly and joyfully (not grudgingly) do something for your spouse that is unselfish and beneficial to them alone. If we as Jesus followers would die to ourselves, then the result of that dying would be: resurrection.
Resurrection. This is what so many marriages are in desperate need of. I think of what many say as someone is baptized, “buried with Christ, raised to walk in newness of life.” If we would not only die to our own personal selfishness, but then also as a couple die to our old habits, die to our short fuses and snappy words, die to ignoring one another, die to holding onto past offenses- if we could bury all that with Christ, then I believe God would raise us up to walk in a newness of life, marriage, and teamwork.
Church, I’m praying for you. Today may you more fully grasp the concept of being on mission with Jesus, specifically in your marriage relationship- as you forgive, heal, teach, die, and resurrect- resulting in His joy more fully filling your heart and marriage.