If you’re someone who’s married – what sort of an impact are you having on your soul mate. A good impact or … something else? Because your wife or husband should be the most important person on this planet to you.

Who’s the most important person in your life? If you’re a husband may I ask you, is your wife the single most important person to you on this planet? And if you’re a wife, is your husband the single most important person to you on this planet? Come on, really? And if not, why not?

Marriage is one of the most sublime and wondrous of all human institutions. Well it’s not entirely human, it goes a whole bunch higher than just us but I’ll get to that a bit later. The coming together of a man and a woman in a life long union, an emotional, spiritual, physical is just the most fantastic thing. Well at least it’s meant to be.

Sadly for all too many people, way too many people, the whole marriage thing ends up going horribly wrong. 99% of couples, when they’re standing there at the altar, or wherever, exchanging their wedding vows, pledging their lives to one another, well they don’t ever expect it all the head off the rails. They don’t ever imagine that divorce could happen to them; that domestic violence could happen to them; that infidelity and adultery could happen to them.

They can’t begin to comprehend a relationship that’s anything but romance, sweetness and light. And yet many of them will end up, if not separated physically through divorce then certainly separated and isolated from one another emotionally and spiritually.

What begins with a flurry of passion, for far too many, all too soon begins to fade into something’s that’s a little less satisfying. It goes from inexorably fantastic to good to something a little less than good to poor to terrible. And you look back on that and you think, hang on what happened? What went wrong? At what point did this thing head off the rails?

Over this last little while on the program we’ve been chatting our way through a series of messages that I’ve called, ‘The Art Of Living’. Just I guess having a bit of a poke around in your life and mine looking at the things that really matter. You and I have only one life to live here on this earth and I don’t know about you but me, I want to live the best life, the most fruitful life, the life that in a sense I was made to live the best way I can possibly do it.

Most people end up getting married, not all of course but the vast majority. The relationship between a man and a woman as husband and wife is meant to be the most special, the most important human relationship that we can have and yet so many things get in between that, so many things conspire in this world to tear the two apart that have been joined together.

I’m not someone who subscribes to the idea of a disposable marriage. I do not believe for one instant that separation or divorce is a valid lifestyle choice. Of course sometimes it’s inevitable. A woman married to a man who is a serial adulterer, I mean at the end of the day if he won’t mend his ways what choice is there? Or in the case of domestic violence and abuse but these days all too many people treat their marriage like a disposable lighter, the flames gone out, time to throw it away and get a new one.

So why does the flame go out? Well that’s easy because we each start putting something or someone else ahead of our wives or our husbands. Men are pretty good at putting work before their wives, absolutely we are and women are pretty good at putting their children before their husbands.

Now please there is no way that I’m saying our children and our jobs and a whole bunch of other things, friends, hobbies, all those other things of course are important, absolutely they are but the moment we put them ahead of our wife or our husband, the moment work becomes more important than my beautiful wife, that’s the moment that things start to head off the rails.

My beautiful wife was made to be my number one; I was made to be her number one. There’s a fabulous Book in the Old Testament of the Bible called the Song of Songs or sometimes it’s called the Song of Solomon written by a wise old king called Solomon.

It’s a love story, it’s a story about passion, the passion between a man and a woman, it’s quite steamy in parts and certainly not the sort of Book that I’d expect to find in, well you know, in the Bible but there it is in all it’s glory and because it’s there I can only surmise that the passionate love between one man and one woman is incredibly important to God and in fact He invented the idea and that’s why the Book is there.

And the secret to that passion is priority. Let me say it again, the secret to the passion is priority. Have a listen to this. This is what Solomon says about his beloved:

Like a lily among the thorns so is my beloved amongst the maidens. (Song of Songs 2:2)

And in the very next verse this is what she says about him:

As an apple tree among the trees of the wood so is my beloved among young men.

In other words even amongst the competition she is number one to him and he is number one to her. Not just by a little way but by a massive margin. It’s like the difference between a lily and a bunch of thorns.

Another time at some point in the future we’re going to talk a whole lot more about the love between a husband and a wife but at some point we all have to get real, at some point we have to be honest with ourselves about who or what we’re putting ahead of that one person who’s supposed to be our number one, our wife or our husband.

At some point I had to be honest with myself and tell myself that I was indeed putting my work ahead of my wife and once I had admitted that to myself I had to start making choices and decisions that reflected right priorities.

Our wedding anniversary is coming up soon and a very large Church asked me to speak at an important event, yep you guessed it on the night of our anniversary. Now it was a great opportunity for the ministry and it was the start of something new and I could come up with every reason under the sun why I should go and speak on that night and push our usual anniversary night, a romantic dinner out for two, to the following night.

But either my wife is my absolute number one or she isn’t. Come on, this is where the rubber hits the road, husbands is your wife your number one and wives is your husband your number one and if not why not? Because this is the single most important human relationship God will ever give you. What’s the matter with us?

When the religious leaders of His day challenged Jesus about divorce, which seemed to be sanctioned by God’s own law and what we now call the Old Testament, this is what Jesus said:

Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning made them male and female and said, ‘for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh so they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together let no one separate.

Sure He was talking about divorce but what we do when we put other things and other people before our once and for all soul mate is we are kicking off that process of separation. Isn’t that how it happens? And Jesus is telling us here “don’t do that, just don’t.”

I want to encourage you today to be honest with yourself about your priorities. Men if you’ve isolated yourself from your wife by immersing yourself in your work admit it to yourself, admit it to her, seek her forgiveness and live a new set of priorities that honour your beautiful wife as your number one.

And women if you’ve been putting your children before him, as admirable as that may seem, if you’ve been replacing the emotional bond that should be there between your man and you with a bond between you and your children, be honest. You’ll be a better mother if your husband is your best and closest friend than you can ever be without him being emotionally by your side.

If you and I have to live one life here on this earth and if we have a marriage partner given to us by God then making that a great friendship second only to our relationship with God is the best way I know how to live an utterly fantastic life. Do you think?