Friday, August 29, 2008

Marriage


image from couple

I bought a book last year entitled "The Mystery of Marriage" by Mike Mason. Funny, it has been with me for a year already but I only started reading it a few months ago. I haven't finished it yet because of my busy schedule. Or am I really busy? hahaha! God revealed to me why I wasn't able to read it last year. I really wasn't feeling the significance of marriage when I tried to read it last year. But then, when I started to read it this year while growing in love with my Cody, it is a marvelous revelation indeed. I've had so many revelations with this book and I even found myself agreeing to every sentence while thinking of my boyfriend. I will share some of the quotes from it that I hope will make married couples continue their quest of loving more and growing deeper with their spouses. For singles to find the love of their lives on how GOD views marriage. One of the most honest books I've read.

Marriage, by the way, is a commitment. A commitment forever til eternity.

"If we truly have the love of GOD, we will find that it spills over to everyone around us."

The love of GOD is contagious. When GOD anoints you with HIS beautiful love, it overflows to other people.

"This is the way GOD planned it, that everything in our lives should perfectly reflect HIS love, so that HIS glory covers the earth. Everything we experience is a door into paradise."

"As the kingdom of darkness advances, the Kingdom of Light advances even more. More than ever before in history, couples who submit wholeheartedly in marriage, both to GOD and to one another, stand on the threshold of paradise, of pure bliss."

These are awesome revelations to me. GOD created us to show HIS glory through each one of us. If there are so many couples who undergo divorce nowadays, there are more couples who grow stronger and deeply in love with their partners who are in the Light. I must say, at this point in my life, I am truly experiencing this bliss but I know there will be more. More of GOD's promises.

"Later I would discover, very gradually, that that is one of the chief characteristics of love: It asks for everything. Not just for a little bit, or a whole lot, but for everything. And unless one is challenged to give everything, one is not really in love."

Just like GOD, HE wants all of you. Because HE wants to give all of HIM, too.

"Marriage, in other words, turns out to be the best of two worlds, satisfying all of the needs relating to separateness and solitude, together with those of companionship."

"No, to be loved as one is being watched is like one thing only: It is like the watchfulness of the LORD GOD HIMSELF, the sense that the believer has of living out his life in the invisible presence of the Living GOD, and of being so loved that it is as if an aura or halo had already been conferred upon him, a spiritual electricity that surrounds and fills all of his words and actions, for suddenly all that he is and does is not only accepted and respected, but marveled at."

I haven't met one person in this world who appreciates and praises me so much like Cody does. I believe GOD does that more that's why HE created me.

"GOD never sends just one sign: HE keeps on confirming HIS course for us with one vision after another. But the reading of HIS signs is essentially a task for faith, a task for people who are willing to persist in seeking out the correspondence between the external and visible realities of their lives, and the interior weather of their souls, striving always to bring the two into line in order that the kingdom of GOD might come."

Whatever signs or revelations we receive from GOD, it should always correspond to HIS perfect will and for HIS glory alone.

"A husband must learn to tolerate his wife's infirmities, because in doing so he either cures her, or makes himself better." ~Jeremy Taylor

This is so true. I have noticed Cody doing this in a loving and gentle way and I see growth in him and helps me grow, too. Of course, the wife should do the same. After all, marriage is a give and take partnership.

"A marriage lives, paradoxically, upon those almost impossible times when it is perfectly clear to the two partners that nothing else but pure sacrificial love can hold them together."

"When the miracle of love erupts before our eyes, we cannot help being swept off our feet, dumbfounded, incapacitated for any other action or response except that of love itself: gazing, marveling, contemplating, loving."

"Marriage is living with glory. It is living with an embodied revelation, with a daily unveiling and unraveling of the mystery of love in such a way that our intense yet shy curiosity about such things is in a constant state of being satisfied, being fed, yet without ever becoming sated. It is living with a mystery that is fully visible, with a flesh-and-blood person who can be touched and held, questioned and probed and examined and even made love to, to our heart's content, but who nevertheless proves to be utterly and impenetrably mysterious, infinitely contemplable."

"Marriage is one of the great steps we can take in the direction of choosing for ourselves what has really already been given to us: It is a choosing of the closeness of GOD, in the form of a close relationship with another person. It is a deliberate choosing of closeness over distance, of companionship over detachment, of relationship over isolation, of love over apathy, of life over death."

"First, however, HE wants us to learn to pay this same undeserved and unqualified compliment to others, the high and magnanimous compliment of regarding others as being every bit as real and important as we are, which is to say, loving them as we love ourselves."

Funny, Cody and I talked about this. How we love each other more than we love ourselves. Which makes sense because that means we're looking out for each other, caring and loving. Being accountable to GOD. Marriage is the closest you can get to another person. You can never be as close to anyone as you are to your partner.

"True religion can begin only with a profound acquiescence to one basic truth: that there is a GOD, and I myself am not HE."

"This is what is difficult about being a human being, about being alive: not life itself, but the sharing of it; not mere existence, but relationship."

I agree. It is our relationships with other people that makes us either love or hate life. People and relationships with them gives us mere emotions. But when you are grounded in a relationship with the Supreme Being, you will attain joy and peace above every trial.

"Marriage is the down-to-earth dimension of romance, the translation of a romantic blueprint into costly reality. It is the practical working out of people's grandest dreams and ideals and promises in the realm of love. It is one of GOD's most powerful secret weapons for the revolutionizing of the human heart. It is a heavy, concentrated barrage upon the place of our greatest weakness, which is our relationship with others. We cannot possibly, it is true, in any practical way maintain a commitment to every other person in the world: That is GOD's business, not ours. But marriage involves us synecdochically in this mystical activity of GOD's by choosing for us just one person, one total stranger out of all the world's billions, with whom to enter into the highest and deepest and farthest reaches of sacrificial, loving relationship."

"The light is brightest where the love is most intense, and the love is most intense where it is most practical, where the experiment in closeness is most intimate and daring."

"What is most unique about the tenacious fidelity of marriage is that it allows for such a really brutal amount of sharpening to take place, yet in the gentlest way imaginable."

"For marriage is a trap. It is a trap of pure love."

"Being engaged is like entering a new stage of childhood, right down to the feeling of strange new chemicals being released into the body."

"The train schedule of love runs on its own sweet time."

"So real love is always fated. It has been arranged from before time. It is most meticulously prepared of coincidences. And fate, of course, is simply the secular term for the will of GOD, and coincidence for HIS grace."

"The essential characteristic of love, in fact, is what might be termed its "deus ex machina" aspect: the sense of something being there, quite suddenly and surprisingly, that was never there before."

"One of the ways we know that love is from GOD, and that it is love, is that it always comes in a form and a manner we never could have anticipated."

"To go forward from love into marriage is to take a step of faith. It is to stake life upon a spiritual experience. There is no entering into the grace of marriage except through the grasping of a whole new understanding of what love itself means."

These are a few of my favorite quotes in the book. I haven't even read half of the book yet. I am looking forward to more revelations. Hope you enjoyed your mini sneak peek. hehehe! I am highly recommending this book to all of you. It is very cheap. You are never wasting money on quality books. It's only 185 pesos. And I advertised. hahaha! Go grab a copy and be blessed. For married couples, read it together. For engaged couples, read it together. For singles, this book will serve as a guide and preparation for you. I believe that if you desire to get married someday with the person GOD has chosen for you, prepare for rain! What I simply mean is to prepare or else you'll be unaware and caught off-guard without knowing what to do. It is always nice to get encouragements and guidance from people who have been there and gone through what you're about to undergo. This book also serves as an encouragement to strengthen relationships. Especially your relationship with GOD.
Luke 14:28-30
"Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Will he not first sit down and estimate the cost to see if he has enough money to complete it? For if he lays the foundation and is not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule him, saying, 'This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.'

I believe that this verse not only appeals to finances. If you look at it in every aspect of life, it means to prepare ahead at all times in every way possible.

I declare prosperity, love, joy, peace, wisdom, discernment and more of GOD in all your relationships!

LOVE with all that you have and all that you are. GOD IS LOVE.




Make an impact. Make a difference. Make a ripple. Tip the scale.

GOD BE WITH YOU!

ALL THE GLORY BELONGS TO GOD ALONE!!!

P.U.S.H.

When you feel GOD's love, OVERFLOW!

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