For an update on Betty, please visit Praises-Answers.

Reading my Journey just now  — way late in doing so; this was yesterday’s offering — I read the story of a young woman planning her wedding and she was pretty much turning into Bridezilla. Then a friend said something that all we who are married or want to be married would do well to hear: “Your marriage points to Him [Jesus], not to you.”

Does it?

Truthfully, I am hesitant to offer this Scripture. It is not intended by me and I think not by the HOLY SPIRIT to be a blanket to smother those wives who are married to godless men who are without kindness to them. However, to troubled homes wherein neither spouse is violent but clearly JESUS and His Bride is not pictured in the home, I urge you to come together with this Word and begin now to practice it.  To others I am a firm believer in CHRISTIAN Marriage Counseling and in some cases — court ordered protection!  The intricate workings of marriage is far too senstive and complex for blanket advice — individual counsel is a must.  So when our marriages are not pointing to JESUS — GET HELP!

Ephesians 5:15-33 NIV 2011 ¹⁵ Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, ¹⁶ making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. ¹⁷ Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is. ¹⁸ Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit, ¹⁹ speaking to one another with psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit. Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord, ²⁰ always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.  ²¹ Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.  ²² Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. ²³ For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. ²⁴ Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. ²⁵ Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her ²⁶ to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, ²⁷ and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. ²⁸ In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. ²⁹ After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church— ³⁰ for we are members of his body. ³¹ “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” ³² This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. ³³ However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.

 Praying for These

ABBA, this is not easy to post. I am mindful how sensitive it is; how complex and tender and sore the lives of wives and even some husbands can be out there. I do not want to add pain or even cause inappropriate guilt to be heaped upon dear ones. I desire for Christian marriages to be about YOU, reflecting to the world what You intend – JESUS and His Bride — and if our marriages are not doing that, then to encourage us to get with the Program and allow You to make it so in us. And for those marriages out there that are more like our enemy than anything else I pray for help and relief and repentance and correction and safety and protection for children and spouses alike. Certainly LORD it is my heart for marriages to be saved yet LORD I am so aware that it takes THREE to make a Christian marriage – You, the wife and the husband in love with You and each other. That is what I pray, what I desire for our IDOKs and I pray it be so in JESUS Name. Amen and amen.  

I placed your names (those who sent me a comment) in a cup, my beloved gave me a (verbal) drum roll and he ‘blindly’ drew a name. And it was SUE!  Sue I will be contacting you for your address to get your book to you. I’d so enjoy a brief review of what you think of the book when you have opportunity to read it.   

Sweet blessings, my Friends!

As I sit to write for our Wednesday time it has been a sweet Tuesday.

I’ve been catching up on my homework for my online class with Leah Adams and one of the Scriptural Addresses I visited today was 2 Timothy 3.  Allow me to share a word or two with you.  

2 Timothy 3 (New American Standard Bible) 1But realize this, that in the last days difficult times will come.   2For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy,   3unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good,   4treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God,   5holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power; Avoid such men as these.   6For among them are those who enter into households and captivate weak women weighed down with sins, led on by various impulses,   7always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.   8Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so these men also oppose the truth, men of depraved mind, rejected in regard to the faith.   9But they will not make further progress; for their folly will be obvious to all, just as Jannes’s and Jambres’s folly was also.

Difficult times will come. How well we know that is true! And who among this group of believers does not believe we are in the last days? What an accurate description of 2011 is recorded for us here in this passage of Scripture! Look again at those descriptive words just before the words ‘without self-control’.

Lovers of self.   Lovers of money.   Boastful.  Arrogant.  Revilers.  Disobedient to parents.  Ungrateful.   Unholy.  Unloving.  Irreconcilable.  Malicious gossips. 

How far do you have to look to see all this?  Then we read ‘without self-control’ and I am wondering if Father’s placement of these words in His Text is significant? Look what follows ‘without self-control’:

Brutal.  Haters of good.   Treacherous.   Reckless.   Conceited.    Lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.

Does a lifestyle of refusing to exercise self-control lead to brutality? An abhorrence for goodness? And on down the list?

I don’t know. But this I do know if it’s even a possibility, I’m ready to yield to the HOLY SPIRIT rather than my own fallen nature. How about you?

This reminds me a bit of Made To Crave.  If I lack self-control as to what I put in my mouth that nets me increased poundage. A lack of self-control as to what comes out of my mouth just might lead to me brutalizing the soul of another.   God forbid! May it never be!

And in the context of Scripture, it does go without saying that ‘self-control’ for the Christian is in fact actually ‘yielding’ to the HOLY SPIRIT in the given moment — right? I think so too.

I want to thank You, Father, for another day that You have loved on me and watched over me oh so carefully, and not just me but every son and every daughter that You have adopted by the Blood of JESUS. Thank You for showers of blessings, both literal and figuratively. And as our IDOKs settle in for this evening even before this devotion goes to post, I pray for peace, rest, ad refreshing.  We pray too for our IDOK Troops, thank You for their willingness to serve, and ask that You reward them richly and bring them home safe and sound. And I ask You, HOLY SPIRIT, to have mercy upon us and send us a moving of Yourself among us with conviction and power to repent all across this Land. And in particular, at this moment I am mindful of little ones who are sick and I ask You to heal them. And comfort the Mamas too as they tend them. Amen and amen in JESUS’ Name.

 Until Then + + +,
Kathie