Kingdom Marriages

 What is a Kingdom Marriage anyway?

We are often asked by other couples, what is a kingdom marriage? It is one thing to be married, but an entirely different thing to be in a kingdom marriage. 

Here is a picture of myself and my beautiful wife.  We have only been married for five years, but it seemed like so much longer.  It has not been bad, but the road of living and being in a kingdom marriage is full of potholes and fast lanes. We have four children, but we are a blended family. See I was a single man for most of my life before I decided to marry this lady that was recently divorced and had three children from her previous husband.  It was really funny because I always told myself that I would never get married to a woman who already had kids, especially more than two.  But, like God would have it, he didn't subscribe by the same predestined thoughts that I had created. 

So now after being together for almost eight years and married for almost six years, we have four children. Two of which are adults, and two that are 11 and four years old.  But back to the kingdom marriage thing, this is where we are, and what has continued to keep us from totally falling apart. Like most marriages, you have ups and downs, and all the in-between. Marriage is the ultimate mirror of self-reflection and discovering what you are really made of. I for one have learned and discovered a great deal about myself. That reflection is painful, and it comes with a whole lot of sacrifice and humility. 

Kingdom marriage is about putting the other person first, your spouse before yourself, and knowing when to say, "I'm sorry". Knowing that you're not perfect, but I know the perfect one that has all the right answers and I'm going to follow him, but I don't have a clue without him. And might that person that I'm talking about? Well if you haven't heard, his name is Jesus Christ. Christ Jesus is the reason; he is the beginning and the end of our life.  We can do nothing without him, even though we may think that we don't need him, he is there guiding and directing our lives. There is order in a kingdom marriage, the order is very simple, Christ is the head, the man is in-line with Christ, and the wife is in-line with the husband. Both wife and husband are one and they share the same love for the father, our heavenly father, who is God. Jesus Christ is the son of God, but at the same time is God. We also have a helper, and that helper is the Holy Spirit which lives and dwells within those that accept Christ as Lord and Savior. 

The great thing about being in a kingdom marriage is that we, the husband and the wife don't have to do it alone. We have a team that is so supportive of the covenant which God ordained at the beginning of the world. God created man, which was called Adam, and God didn't see it as good for man to be alone, so he took the man that he created and caused him to fall into a deep sleep. Doing that moment of sleep, God took a rib from the man's side and formed what is called a woman. God was intentional with seeing that Adam wasn't alone, but that he had a helper, and she would be the reason for the earth to flourish and multiple.  I guess you could say that God understood that man wasn't capable of doing anything but work, and that wasn't going to be pleasing to a God that loved relationship. 

So here we are, thousands of years later, still trying to figure out what this marriage thing is all about. Why do we struggle to understand the pure reason why we exist? God said it, and he wanted us to do one simple thing. To be fruitful and multiple the earth. Being fruitful was the hard part, we could get the multiple parts right, but the fruitful part would prove too much for the man and his wife to handle. Why did we take the fruit from the tree that God specifically instructed us not to? Those were again, very simple instructions, not too complicated, but a simple command. I would have to say that temptation was as strong then as it is today. Don't we see the fruit of another and try to take it when we have a whole bunch of fruit that is our own. But wait, that is my fruit too, right? Well, it isn't yours because you were not the one that created the fruit in the first place. And what give you the right to eat something that isn't yours? God knew the devastation that it would cause if we decided to get knowledge of all the things that he had. God wants the best for us, so why did we plant that tree and leave us with the daunting task of being curious about something that we could touch or have? It was bound to happen; we couldn't just let that tree sit over there all by itself. We knew that it was something more than just living in a beautiful garden, and what harm would it do to us anyway? Next time we will tackle the simple thought about sin, what is sin, and how does it affect our marriage and our relationship with God? 

The prize, and price that is Sin