Treasured Truth

As we look forward to celebrating Christmas, Pastor Ford describes what should be our real focus during this season. We may not fully understand the mystery of Christ’s birth, but we’re still supposed to share it with others and remind them about the true meaning of Christmas.

The foundation of a Christian marriage is being “equally yoked”—where both people have a genuine faith in Jesus Christ. That’s where you start. That doesn’t finish it. It should be established at the beginning. And so once we find a person who professes faith in Christ, who we want to pursue a relationship with, then we should find out if their faith is genuine or generic before committing to them in marriage.

According to Pastor Ford, here’s what we need—in the beginning of our relationship and especially in our marriage—we need someone who will not give up on us, but who will give up for us. We need to seek someone who understands that sacrifice is part of a relationship. And we need to be willing to become sacrificial ourselves as we take part in the relationship.

The thing that separates a good marriage from all other marriages, is the ability of the couple to deal with conflict. If you don’t deal with conflict biblically, then conflict will deal with you.

Today, Pastor Ford will remind us that if we will give God our marriage relationship, then God will make sure that we have the quality relationship that He wants us to have. But we don’t start the process of surrendering our relationship to God when we get married. We should start it before we get married.

When we look at the commitment of a person, we need to try to see what they do in a crisis. Why? Because it’s easy to keep a commitment when there’s no drama. But what does a person do when there’s drama? We need to know that the person will stick around during a crisis and that they made the decision to commit to a relationship based on counting the cost.

Pastor Ford reminds us that a temptation is an opportunity to do a good thing in a bad way. Satan’s tactic is to pervert good. He always wants us to step outside the boundaries.

A lot of people are in relationships with people who are “photo-shopped.” They’re not really as they appear to be. What they have on is a whole lot of make-up. And unfortunately, you can’t see them for who they really are until after you marry them. So, once again, we’ll be encouraged today to dig deep and find out who the person really is before committing to them in marriage.

God has designed for marriage to be a union of two forgivers. And whatever we have to forgive to fulfill the vow that we made—until death do us part—that’s the kind of commitment that we’re supposed to have in our marriage.

Pastor Ford explains that many of us dated to marry, instead of married to date. And we fail to realize, that we have to put as much or more effort into keeping our spouse as we did into getting our spouse.