Unity: God’s Plan for Marriage

God’s plan for our marriage is for us to become one in every area of our lives. The hardest part for my marriage to become one is the area of expectations and finances.

“That’s why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh”.

Genesis 2:24

Expectations

All of us bring expectations into our marriage. Some are talked about and some go undiscussed and are never thought through. Expectations on how many children we want, adoption or no adoption, vacations, what holidays we go with what family, who does all the cooking, who stays at home if we have children, etc. When we don’t talk through our expectations and deal with them, it leads to arguing, hurt feelings and ultimately bitterness.

“How good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity!”

Psalm 133:1

When we had our son, my husband and I assumed that we had the same beliefs in how we were to raise and discipline him but we never discussed what we really thought and wanted. We quickly found out that we were not unified especially when it came to disciplining our son. Instead of being open and resolving our differences, we became bitter and critical towards each other. Our son would see through our disunity and use it to manipulate us emotionally to get his way.

God showed us that that our un-openness, our lack of trust in each other and lack of unity was affecting not only our marriage but our son. He was becoming shy and insecure because he did not have boundaries provided by us to make him feel secure. We decided to repent as a couple and it’s amazing how our repentance has helped our son to have emotional stability and feel secure by having boundaries in his life. This is one area of our lives that we struggle in and continue to work on.

What about you? What areas in your life do you have unspoken expectations?

Finances

A lot of us tolerate not being “one” in our marriage and are disunified when it comes to finances. The reason is that we don’t want to deal with the sins and emotions that get exposed when we talk about them.

“This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.”

John 3:19-20

I do the budget and manage the finances in our household. It is easy to feel unified with my husband when we can talk about the main goals we have as a family in terms of our financial future. However it’s the day to day spending and the unexpected expenses that come our way that exposes our disunity. One of my challenges that I can have in managing our finances is not communicating to my husband on a weekly basis on where we are at financially and getting help from him on how to make our budget work when we get unexpected bills. In my pride, I try to figure things out alone which makes me feel overwhelmed, worried, anxious, etc. I can also get deceitful as I can charge expenses on our credit card without telling him or just telling him “partial truth”.

I recently had to tell him that I overspent in buying our Christmas decorations and I did not want to do it. I feared his reaction, I also felt guilty because as the finance person, I think I should manage our finances better. It also exposed, as I was talking to my husband, that there is a part of me that likes to be in control. I like to spend what I want to spend without considering what is best for us as a family. It was humbling to see how deceitful, selfish and prideful I can be. I am repenting by working together with my husband and realizing that only together as a couple can we accomplish our goals. It feels good to know that I am not alone but that I have my husband who wants to be involved and help.

Questions/Application

• Do you talk as a couple about your expectations in every area of your life?
• What sins is God exposing as you talk through these expectations?
• Are there any sins that you need to confess: credit cards charges your spouse does not know about, what about bitterness, criticalness, etc?
• What are you going to do as a couple to repent together?

Additional Reading (Optional)

• Do a bible study in unity and being “one”.
• Read the book of Philippians
• Read a marriage book together