God Doesn’t Need our Help!
Praise the Lord, God DOESN’T need our help; He CAN AND WILL accomplish HIS will and purpose without a bit of help from us! And it’s EXTREMELY important for every man and woman standing for marriage restoration to understand and believe that, because it’s the ONLY way to ever Be Still And KNOW That He IS God; the topic of an earlier Seeds Of Faith post.
We often see a recurring theme in the FAM Fellowship, and it’s pretty obvious that the theme this week has been “Be still and wait.” Or as God said in Psalm 46:10, “Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.”
Unfortunately, the problem for many men and women standing for marriage restoration is that they don’t REALLY believe or understand that, and when they finally realize and accept that their marital situations are totally out of their control and that there isn’t ANYTHING they can do to save them, they give in to despair and hopelessness. And that’s such a shame, because it means that they obviously don’t believe Jesus, because HE said “With man this is impossible, but with God ALL things ARE possible!” ( Matthew 19:26)
That’s why we have to remember that it is GOD who will uphold and honor the covenant of our marriages as long as we remain faithful to the covenant we made before Him. And contrary to what many might otherwise believe; that also includes genuinely repentant (and forgiven by God!) unfaithful spouses, because we’ve seen MANY marriages restored after prodigals turned from their wicked ways and became standers. But we must know and understand that God absolutely has the power to change our spouses’ hearts from stony hearts to hearts of flesh. And there are a multitude of scriptures that make it undeniably clear that we don’t plan and determine our own steps, because it is God who directs our paths. One of my favorites is Proverbs 16:1, which says To man belong the plans of the heart, but from the LORD comes the reply of the tongue. And we all know that what God says goes!
But the work God does is done SUPERNATURALLY and no matter how far our spouses run to get away, they can’t EVER get beyond the reach and power of our great and mighty God! So we can’t afford to buy into the devil’s lies that WE have to DO or SAY something; like “How can anything change when I never even see or talk to my spouse?” Or a big one I’ve heard lately is “We don’t have any children and that’s what keeps other couples in touch with each other.” And then there’s “We haven’t been married that long.” Well, just read the testimony of the first FAM Fellowship member to remarry after divorce (Sowing in Tears and Reaping with Songs of Joy!), which took place less than a week ago and see if she did ANYTHING to “help” God! Quite the contrary; she did just about all she could to sabotage what He was trying to do for most of the two and a half years they were apart…BUT GOD DID WHAT GOD WAS ALWAYS GOING TO DO ANYWAY!!! But He had to do quite a work in both of their hearts first, and that’s what He will do for all of us; all He expects of us is that we love Him and trust and obey Him. And HE will do the rest!
So as yesterday’s Seeds Of Faith post, Restored by the Power of the Holy Spirit, reminds all of us, we have to put our trust and reliance in the power of the Holy Spirit to do what we can’t do and what looks impossible in the natural, because with God ALL things truly are possible and He will do WHATEVER IT TAKES to uphold the covenant of our marriages! And He REALLY doesn’t need our help, because as Isaiah 46:10-11 declares;I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come. I say: My purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please. From the east I summon a bird of prey; from a far-off land, a man to fulfill my purpose. What I have said, that will I bring about; what I have planned, that will I do. So all we need to know is that God hates divorce and that HE will uphold the covenant of our marriages, which He does in part by not accepting the offerings or honoring the worship or hearing the prayers of those who have wrongly abandoned and divorced their faithful spouses (Malachi 2 and 1 Peter 3:7). That’s why we can rest assured that God will do what we can’t do and why it’s so important for us to use this time to learn how to be the husbands and wives God calls and created us to be, and the husbands and wives our spouses want us to be.
So as we stand on the power and promise of God’s Word for the full and complete restoration of our marriages, we need to accept Jesus’ powerful and liberating invitation in Matthew 11:28-29, where He promised “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. And when we do that, we will indeed be blessed because of God’s awesome promise to lift us up in due time when we HUMBLE ourselves under His mighty hand 1 Peter 5:5-6)! And we sure have seen plenty of testimonies proving that in the past week!