Happy Marriages
Randall Caselman
7/16/97
Happy Marriages
We have allowed Satan to methodically remove God from our halls of government, the market place, the courthouse and from our schools. Satans next goal is to remove God from our homes. And at this point in time, he is doing a fantastic job. Sociologists are already predicting that one day marriage, as we know it will be obsolete.
Let me give you some facts:
Our nation recently reached a milestone, in a single month more divorces were granted than marriage licenses issued.
Every third marriage in America ends in divorce.
More marriages are held together by children and counselors than by love or religious conviction.
Homosexual and lesbian behavior is being taught in our schools as an alternative life-style.
The living together arrangement between heterosexual partners is viewed by an ever increasing segment of society as being both a reasonable and proper substitute for marriage.
Consider these statistics, not from New York, Los Angles, or Los Vegas, but from Benton and Washington counties. Last year, wedding bells rang for 4,118 couples in Benton and Washington counties. Unfortunately, 2,512 couples decided to end their marriage in divorce. This means for every 100 weddings there were 61 divorces granted in the two counties. Thats 10% higher than the national average. Arkansas has the second highest rate of divorce in the United States! Oklahoma is third. Forty percent of all children experience a divorce before they are 8 years old, and half of them go through a second divorce by age 18.
George Gallup Jr. contends,
if a disease were to afflict the majority of our people, we would be frantically searching for reasons and solutions. Yet divorce has become so endemic... This scourge is a root problem in our country and is the cause of any number of other social ills.
What can we do?
Before Marriage:
Understand God has a pattern. Jesus teaches that marriage is exclusive, one man one woman. Marriage is
permanent. Divorce is not an option!! What God has joined together, let no man separate.
Matthew 19.1-9
Marry one of like faith. Be not unequally yoked together with unbelievers.
1 Corinthians 6.1
Don't get in a hurry. The decision of whom to marry is the most important decision you'll ever make outside of committing your life to Christ. Be prayerful. Be careful.
After Marriage:
Determine to love. We do not fall in love; we grow in love and love grows in us. When the infatuation is gone and familiarity sets in, determine to love anyway.
Stop trying to fix you spouse. Peter tells us our mate will be changed by our godly behavior not our eternal nagging and complaining.
Learn to forgive and forget. Dragging up thirty year old garbage is spoiling many potentially happy marriages.
No, we can't force husbands to love their wives, and wives to love their husbands, but we can change our hearts and say no to Satan.
Randall Caselman
