How To Understand Your Lover and Spouse. I often wondered which planet my spouse came from after my wedding! Interestingly, there is this thing that tells you before the wedding that you know your loved one through and through! Ha Ha Ha! I laugh in the Holy Ghost. Wait till you are married! Don’t believe that thing o!
I will attempt to address both single and married. The subject of understanding one’s spouse is so key in any relationship or marriage!
Why do you even need to understand one another? It’s simple, you are so different from one another. Opinions, perspectives, leanings, and preferences will be so diverse you will often wonder how your significant other is thinking!
How To Understand Your Lover and Spouse
When God wanted to stop the progress of super brilliant humans while building the Tower of Babel, of which God Himself testified that they will achieve their goal, He went for their “understanding!”
Gen 11:7 (KJV) Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not UNDERSTAND one another’s speech.
When the devil wants to tinker with your relationship or marriage, he tries to touch your “understanding!”
You must make effort to understand one another!
You need to understand that your lover or spouse wants to be understood. There is a need for everybody to be understood.
Oh yeah, most women don’t even understand themselves, and yet they want their husbands to understand them, is that not unfair?
Well, you need to know that all your wife wants is to feel that you are willing to understand her.
How To Understand Your Lover and Spouse
In other to understand one another, you must have a listening ear! You must be able to put yourself in the shoes of your spouse!
Stop saying you already know what they want to say! Are you the Holy Spirit? Let them talk! And Listen!
Listen with eyeball-to-eyeball contact. Put your phones aside. Show that you care!
After your lover has spoken, regurgitate the words back to show you really got the message!
Make sure you reply with sentences explaining what you thought they have just said.
Don’t just say ok!
Ok? Lol…
God bless you today!
Use REVIVE prayers below to pray on Understanding your lover or spouse!
Assignment For How To Understand Your Lover and Spouse
Ask your spouse to list three ways they feel you don’t understand them or three ways they feel you need to understand them more.
How To Be Honest With Your Spouse. Honesty! It is one of the secrets of a successful relationship and marriage! Are you aware that most relationships broke, and most marriages are terminated because one or both spouses were not honest? Oh yes!
Why is this so crucial? I will tell you! It is because honesty strengthens marriages by strengthening trust!
Trust is so pivotal to any successful marriage, that you can’t trifle with it! What makes trust real is honesty!
We have been looking at ten qualities that all singles and couples will need in their relationship or marriage
Trust
Communication
Respect
Love
Affection
Honesty
Understanding
Cooperation
Commitment
Fun
Today we continue with the next which is Honesty! How To Be Honest With Your Spouse
For singles, the greatest blessing you can have is to be in love with someone who is honest! It will eliminate unnecessary hassles and heartache. If you have not met anybody yet, you can begin to pray for this quality! God answers prayers!
You won’t have to discover shocking things after the wedding because your lover would have opened up to you before then.
It can be frustrating to keep discovering some new funny things every other day in marriage.
For couples, be honest in every area! Take a look at this scripture.
Eze 45:10 (MSG) Use honest scales—honest weights and honest measures.
A scale is a system used to measure. The weight is what you measure. The measures are the units that express weight!
God said everything must be honest! What this portends is that there should be total honesty in every area of your life.
There shouldn’t be honesty in certain areas while other areas are shrouded in mystery.
The problem with that is that one day, every secret will be discovered and at that point, hearts are broken, trust is shattered, and these are not good experiences for any relationship or marriage.
Php 4:8 (KJV) Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest…
Let this scripture regulate your relationship and marriage and you will have less heartache!
If trust is broken already and there are crises, take time to start building trust back by being honest!
Each lie told after a broken trust is like an arrow being thrown into a festering wound!
Decide to be truthful, particularly when you think about the spiritual implication!
Pro 6:16-17 (KJV) These six things doth the LORD hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him: [17] A proud look, A LYING TONGUE…
Joh 8:44 (KJV) Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.
Notice the connection between lust and lies here!
Say with me, I am of God, and God is my father! I speak the truth at all times and I have a honest heart!
This is How to Be Honest With Your Spouse. Have a great day and may your week be blessed!
REVIVE is now 6.00am daily! Ensure you join to pray for your relationship and marriage daily!
We have a great time yesterday on the Singles’ hub and Couples’ hub! The compilation will be available soon!
The Hidden Benefits of Affection. The word “affection” naturally comes across as something tender, desirable, and with an air of fondness. I remember back then in high school when you use the word “affectionate” for a girl, you really love that girl.
You can’t be in love with someone without being affectionate, but you can be affectionate without being in love!
We have been looking at ten qualities that all singles and couples will need in their relationship or marriage!
Trust
Communication
Respect
Love
Affection
Honesty
Understanding
Cooperation
Commitment
Fun
Today we are looking at the next one which is “Affection!” The Hidden Benefits of Affection
Before I go on, a quick announcement. Today is that exciting weekly meeting for singles and married on WhatsApp!
Below are details of the meeting, kindly help us send fliers and community links to as many as you can so we can reach more people! Last week, was such a blessing from the feedback we got! And guess what? I will personally be taking both singles and couples’ sessions respectively. Below the page, you will see a youtube link to last week’s edition.
Find details and materials below:
SINGLES HUB
Topic: Let’s Talk About Sex Venue: WhatsApp Singles Hub Time: 7.00pm Community link:http://bit.ly/3VSuXpY Right Click on the Image to download and spread the word.
COUPLES HUB
Topic: Sex in Marriage: Learning from the Prostitutes Venue: WhatsApp Couples’ Hub Time: 9.00pm Community link:http://bit.ly/3VSuXpY Right Click on the Image to download and spread the word.
Back to our devotional. The Hidden Benefits of Affection
We looked at love yesterday. Is there a difference? Yes, there is. Love is very deep and it’s a commitment. Love is at the very foundation of any successful relationship and marriage.
However, affection can be described as love displayed. Affection is the resulting feeling arising from love.
For example, you should not fall in love with a same-sex, as you fall in love with your spouse, but it is possible to have affection towards the same sex. You can also have affection for siblings and parents. See an example
2Pe 1:7 (AMPC) And in [exercising] godliness [develop] brotherly affection, and in [exercising] brotherly affection [develop] Christian love.
Now bringing this into our relationship and marriage, we are supposed to have affection for our fiancé or spouse!
Affection will help you demonstrate your love to your loved one.
Affection is a gentle feeling of fondness and likeness, caring and kindness towards your spouse.
So, notice here that affection is a behavioral display.
For example, a parent disciplining his child is showing love, even though the child can’t see any love because he doesn’t understand. It is called tough love. However, in other, for this discipline or reprimand to be effective, affection must be displayed in the midst of that tough love.
This is what couples have to understand.
I learned this too. There must be a melange of affection and tough love before correction can be effective.
Start showing affection by fondness, playing, gisting, talking, touching, hugging at every opportunity, smiling, and whatever you can do!
Affection is needed to keep the fire burning! These are some of The Hidden Benefits of Affection
Start today by asking your loved one to list five ways they want affection shown to them. Use REVIVE prayers below to pray Affection into your marriage.
Am I In Love Or Not? Love is so powerful in its attributes, sacrifice, indescribable kindness, and benevolence that God adopted it as His nomenclature.
There are different kinds of love, Eros, Philos, and Agape. Agape is the unconditional love upon which marriage is based. Only this unconditional love can guarantee a marriage that will last. In another way, you can also say there is lust, passion, and commitment.
Why is agape or unconditional love the ultimate? It is so simple, the frailty of man will ensure that your partner will often offend you or step on your toes, sometimes deliberately, sometimes ignorantly and sometimes to prove a point. It takes Agape to keep forgiving.
We started looking at ten qualities that should be in every relationship some days back.
1. Trust 2. Communication 3. Respect 4. Love 5. Affection 6. Honesty 7. Understanding 8. Cooperation 9. Commitment 10. Fun
Today, we continue with the next which is Love
Am I In Love Or Not? How do you even love?
I will attempt, in an inexhaustive way to highlight some qualities that show love and that do not show love. This will go for singles and married except in a few cases, which will be noted.
Am I In Love Or Not?
Pray for each other
Do you pray for that loved one? Do you pray rather than condemn? Your deep-seated love will often be expressed in committing that loved one regularly to God. You become each other’s intercessor and genuinely watch out for one another. When you forget to pray or you don’t even pray for your loved one, that love needs “servicing!”
Am I In Love Or Not?
Pay for each other
Love gives! The one you love is really the one you want to spend for, sometimes at your expense! Love is so much interested in making the other person comfortable. Do you say you love that person and you never bought anything for them? Your love is in doubt nine, not cloud nine!
Am I In Love Or Not?
Play with each other
Love wants to stay in fun with that loved one. Love wants to talk, gist, play, laugh together and spend time with each other. When you detest communication, when you hardly laugh, when you claim loneliness right in the midst of your loved one, that love is contaminated, that love has been compromised and that love has been negotiated.
When last did you laugh together? That is one of the expressions of deep-seated love. That childish, innocent, hard belly laugh, till some drop of tear come out of the corner of your eye! That is love.
1Co 13:4-8 (MSG) [4] Love never gives up. Love cares more for others than for self. Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have. Love doesn’t strut, Doesn’t have a swelled head, [5] Doesn’t force itself on others, Isn’t always “me first,” Doesn’t fly off the handle, Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others, [6] Doesn’t revel when others grovel, Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth, [7] Puts up with anything, Trusts God always, Always looks for the best, Never looks back, But keeps going to the end. [8] Love never dies.
Signs there is no more love
Am I In Love Or Not?
The butterflies are no longer found
When the wings of the butterflies have been broken, their jokes that used to make you reel in laughter now irritate you. The once-creative jokes are now dumb and stupid. Love has flown away to a far far land!
Am I In Love Or Not?
When the bedroom fire dies
For couples, sex used to be explosive and satisfying, but now you could be reading a novel while at it. The love is evaporated.
For singles, when it is all about sex, with some sprinkles of manipulation that “there is nothing wrong, everybody is doing it” then you know that it is not based on love, but on sex and such relationships will not last.
3. When love is based on money
This love can’t endure. What happens when he or she goes broke? Love evaporates.
Heb 13:5 (CEV) Don’t fall in love with money. Be satisfied with what you have. The Lord has promised that he will not leave us or desert us.
There are more but I will stop here this morning! Use REVIVE prayers below to intercede true love back into your relationship and marriage.
Respect Can Turn Your Marriage Around. Relationships and marriages thrive because those involved are deliberate. Nothing just happens, as Bishop T.D. Jakes would always say. There is always cause and effect A dating and courtship situation doesn’t just morph into marriage like in a painting with strokes of the brush. A good marriage is not automatic.
We started looking at ten qualities that should be in every relationship
1. Trust 2. Communication 3. Respect 4. Love 5. Affection 6. Honesty 7. Understanding 8. Cooperation 9. Commitment 10. Fun
Yesterday we looked at the first two. Today, we continue with the next!
3. Respect
Respect Can Turn Your Marriage Around. Mutual respect is key in every marriage! I usually tell singles, that man that they can’t respect is the man they should never marry!
Respect should be both ways in marriage, but respect is more of an issue for the man!
Do you know when you respect your spouse, you won’t dabble in emotional affairs, not to talk of full-blown affairs?
It is disrespect to your spouse and the marriage covenant, and ultimately to God when you harbour, nurse, and pursue feelings, leading to affairs with anybody aside from your spouse!
Heb 13:4 (CEV) Have respect for marriage. Always be faithful to your partner, because God will punish anyone who is immoral or unfaithful in marriage.
Some ladies have perennial issues in marriage because they simply don’t understand what respect is in marriage.
They were never taught growing up. All they watched growing up is parents fighting and mum talking down at dad every time.
The modeling they saw growing up becomes tattooed in their brain and they unwittingly treat their husband even worse. They come into the marriage with attitudes, always defensive and unable to cooperate in marriage. Within, they struggle and feel that cooperating, adapting, and submitting to one’s is servitude or stupidity.
Conversely, some husbands are also unable to respect their wives. All they observed growing up is dad ordering mum around like a slave. All they saw was dad barking out instructions and sometimes “decking” mum with fatherly blows!
They come into marriage, with that notion. God help them if they marry a wife who is equally stubborn and recalcitrant! That marriage will not last!
The only hope then is a renewal of mind from the scriptures! Respect Can Turn Your Marriage Around
Both parties have to follow the word. They have to die to themselves! They have to be “stupid” for things to work sometimes.
It is not every statement that must be replied to. It is not every angry word you match fire for fire. That is why the Scripture says
Pro 15:1 (MSG) A gentle response defuses anger, but a sharp tongue kindles a temper-fire.
It is not every utterance you must meditate on and expand till it explodes your relationship and marriage!
Let me stop here this morning! I will continue tomorrow. Use REVIVE video below to pray on what you’ve just read! Good morning!
