Archives for March 2015

Our desire for love can drive us to rationalize just about any behavior. God made us to experience love. So when we don’t experience it, we know something is deeply wrong. Something is deeply wrong — our suffering is genuine. We do need to keep crying out for love, otherwise we will won’t be able to receive it. As intolerable as being unloved is, if we lose sight of where love comes from, we will ultimately destroy our relationships.

We can submit and surrender ourselves to anything, treating it as a source. Some sources are life-giving and some are life-stealing. Most of our sources will fail us in one way or another. They may be excellent sources with natural limits, or they may be horrible substitutes for fullness of life. God is the only true and trustworthy source that will never run out or fail us.

If you are struggling in your marriage, could you be expecting your partner to be your source instead of God? Are you trying to be sufficient apart from abiding in Jesus?

Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden.
Genesis 3:7-8 ESV

I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.
Genesis 3:16-17 ESV
God told Adam, “You will die when you eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:17). Then God created Eve. God or Adam must have told Eve because she knew at least a distorted version of God’s command (Genesis 3:3). Adam and Eve lost paradise when they chose to trust in themselves over dependence upon God. When they disobeyed Him, they died spiritually and lost their secure connection with Him. Encountering fear and shame for the first time must have been brutal. Preoccupied with grief, they were unaware of the depth of the problem. Little did they realize they were powerless to undo the mess they had gotten into.