CHAPTER SIX | HER MARRIAGE
If you want anything to grow in your garden, you have to start with the right soil. Just as you cannot build a house without a foundation, you can’t have a productive, life-giving garden without good, rich soil.
What grows in your garden depends on the seeds you plant, so you need to plant what you want to see come up in the harvest.
Water the seeds, diligently pull out the weeds around the sprouts that appear, and be on the lookout for pests, bad weather, and other conditions that can destroy it.
Then you have to plant the right kind of seeds—the good seeds of love, fidelity, respect, time, and communication.
SEEDS OF LOVE
Seeds of love are some of the easiest seeds to plant, and their growth is so rapid that you can sometimes see results instantaneously.
Weeding is not the fun part of gardening, but it is one of those necessary chores that must be done.
If weeds of hurt, strife, misunderstanding, criticism, selfishness, and anger are allowed to flourish in the marriage garden without being uprooted, they will choke out anything good that is planted.
Sometimes a garden can still look like a garden, but the plants are dead on the inside. They just haven't fallen over yet. Marriages can get that way too.
If you and your wife do not produce enough love to allow each of you to grow into all God created you to be, then your relationship needs to be examined for selfishness, fear, pride, control, or whatever other weed of the flesh is stifling it.
God can work miracles when you pray.
Cling to what is good in your marriage with all sincerity of heart. Despise what the devil is trying to plant there. Pray that God will show you how to plant new seeds of unconditional love.
SEEDS OF FIDELITY
The boundaries of marriage are set up for its protection. If we don't watch over the boundaries, something is sure to be stolen from us.
When we plant seeds of infidelity, we break down the boundaries and invite unwanted creatures of prey to come in.
Everyone gets tempted to sow outside his own garden. The ones who resist, and instead deliberately plant seeds of fidelity, reap a harvest of plenty.
The devil will always look for ways to set a snare for one of you. So your marriage soil is never too good to be beyond the need for enriching prayer.
Pray that God will keep you and your wife from planting anything you will live to regret.
SEEDS OF RESPECT
When we sow seeds of disrespect in a marriage, we are not seeking the other's well-being, and we will reap a crop of bitterness and strife.
Putting our mate's well-being before our own is not only very difficult, it's simply impossible to do on a consistent basis without the Holy Spirit enabling us. That's why we must pray about it.
Your wife does not want to be your mother, nor does she want to be your maid. The former will cause her to lose respect for you; the latter will make her feel that you've lost respect for her. I know there are countless things your wife will do that a mother or maid would do also. But if that expectation becomes a way-of-life attitude on your part, she will begin to think of you as a child or as a boss, and it will adversely affect your relationship. The more your wife feels like your mother or your maid, the less she will feel like your lover.
Ask God to help you see things from your wife's perspective and show you how to plant seeds of respect in your marriage.
SEEDS OF TIME
You can't have a successful garden if you don't spend enough time in it.
In successful marriages the husbands and wives spend time together alone.
If your schedules never allow time for you and your wife to be alone with each other, then you are too busy.
You need that time of togetherness to talk, to work things out, to share interests and dreams, to just be together in silence, and to have intimate times that are not rushed.
Pray that God will help you plant seeds of time together.
SEEDS OF COMMUNICATION
Words are like seeds. They start out small and grow into something big.
One of the biggest problems in many marriages is a lack of communication. Wives say, "My husband doesn't really hear what I'm saying. He doesn't listen." Husbands say, "My wife doesn't understand me. She misinterprets things I say." This comes about because men and women think differently.
In the garden of a marriage relationship, there will always be a harvest time.
If we don't like the crop we're reaping, then it's probably time to plant seeds of a different nature. Seeds are planted through actions, but mostly through words—and when a husband and wife can't communicate well with their words, bad
things start growing.
God can cause a husband and a wife to grow together in a way that makes them more compatible while allowing the two partners to develop their individual gifts and retain their own uniqueness.
When the two people in a marriage partnership relate to one another in the way God wants them to, it brings about a fulfilling of each one's purpose that will not happen otherwise. Through prayer, each one can release the other rather
than control; encourage rather than condemn.
Ask God to help you and your wife appreciate your differences.
The very thing that is designed to be our greatest blessing can often become an irritant because we don't ask God to let us see it from His perspective.
Divorce doesn't happen because people don't want their marriages to work out. It's usually because the husband or wife believes that things will never change.
Through prayer you can invite the light of the Lord to bathe and invigorate the garden of your marriage. Then it will bud, blossom, bloom, and grow into a harvest of joy and fulfillment for both of you.
SHE SAYS
Pray for your marriage that:
1. Love will grow between you and your wife.
2. You and your wife will resist temptation to stray.
3. You will practice mutual respect for one another.
4. The two of you will not live separate lives.
5. You will be friends as well as lovers.
6. You will work together as a team.
7. There will be no divorce in your future.
POWER TOOLS
Ecclesiastes 4:9,10
Matthew 18:19
Mark 10: 11
Malachi 2:15
Romans 12:10
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