His dream
A great job that could pay for all life dreams, a beautiful wife who would equally be on top of her game and would be his best friend, lovely kids; courteous, intelligent, God fearing. A life of service to God!
His Reality
The dream job came and took away the time to serve God. Having devotion became a struggle because there was no time. The job took away time with God and replaced God with unbelieving friends. Then things started cracking with the wife because they spent less time together. Investments cracked and cash did not flow as planned. The job is no longer giving the satisfaction it once used to give.
The home front is not so pleasant any more, the life of service to God he once hoped for looks like a mirage. Is there any way out of this endless cycle?
I share with you again some true, basic Christian faith principle we often forget as life hits us.
Seek ye first the kingdom of God. Matt 6:33
Seek ye first the kingdom of God! God knows there are bills to be paid. He already said, ‘Let your life not be about what to wear, eat or drink, the Father knows you need these things’. Therefore the core of your existence cannot be around a Job but the Kingdom! The very few who get this right and appropriate it never fail! They might not have millions and billions stashed somewhere but they have everything they need!
Very important at this point to mention is that a need is different from want. Take time to examine your life and see if you have been chasing wants or needs!
We are under pressure because of the society’s expectation, what parents, family or friends think. This should not be so; our whole existence must be centred on giving God pleasure!
Depend on God’s Grace
I have a precious song I learnt many years ago that puts what I have to say on this into words.
On Christ the Lord I place my trust
To find my glory in the power of the cross
In every victory let it be said of me
That my source of hope and my source of strength is Christ the Lord!
Depend on God for your every existence, by this I mean become God-dependent in all of your ways.
Jesus said in John 15, ‘Abide in me, when you abide in me you will bear much fruit. You cannot claim to
be a part of the vine and be disconnected from the vine’.
God wants you back right where you belong in Him!
Live by Galatians 2:20 which says “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but
Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God,
who loved me, and gave himself for me. ”
The world does not have the answer!
The world does not have answers to our questions, a lot of families are disintegrated because men and women have gone to the way of the world to find answers to their financial needs. Little wonder so many of us Christians were victims of WONDER BANKS and a lot of other fraudulent schemes.
God is able! There is so much wisdom God would want us to have to unearth the riches of this world if we can just stay at His feet.
God’s grace is not just a phenomenon, it is very practical and it has been made available to us in abundance through prudence and wisdom if only we are a little more conscious of God’s views concerning our life choices. There are lots of trendy things out there today that are not meant for us Children of God but we have put our hands into them because we are not paying attention to our action.
Again let’s do an audit of our lives. The decisions we make, are they motivated by the fear of the unknown or our faith in what God will have us do?
God is a God of Purpose and Process. He has a plan for our lives and He has a route He would want us to take, yet He gives us the power to choose the way we eventually want.
Today I leave a message to all men reading this piece; God wants us to love our wives like Christ loved the church. The Church was not a perfect one but Christ loved it to perfection! Please let’s love our wives first for who they are and show them the way to be the great woman they can be.
Likewise, ye husbands, dwell with them according to knowledge, giving honour unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life; that your prayers be not hindered. I Pet 3:7
This passage is loaded I could go on and on about it, but I will leave it here till next week, may the Lord help us all to reach out to the resources He has made available to us.
Shalom!
-Omolola Ezeifeoma
We want to have a marriage where the relationship is based on friendship, yet he wants to be KING and she wants to be QUEEN.
For a lot of my African readers, you will agree with me that the African culture tells the man he is superior. Some cultures emphasize the man’s Lordship more than ever others.
The man believes the wife should be submissive to him as the Bible demands, and the woman expects to be loved by her man.
What does this mean in practical terms and what price will be paid to attain?
Today we live in a world where man and woman work in partnership to get the home running. In some cases, the woman is as busy as the man or busier, yet the challenge of running the home lies on her. She is under so much pressure to deliver both at home and at work.
Sometime ago I was at a meeting organized for women, all the women in the group had one thing in common; STRESS! She gets up earlier, rushes to prepare the home for the day, gets to work and rushes back home to be there for the children, works till late in the night to prepare for the next day and the cycle continues. So the average woman needs so much make up to cover her stress or spoil herself so much to help her self-esteem and get herself to believe she is getting something for her labour.
The average woman believes she was not just meant to be a mother, so she wants to work and grow as fast as her male counterpart, have multiple streams of income, yet be the mother that holds it together and the wife that makes coming home the high point of the day for her husband.
This is a great dream with a very high PRICE, which is being ready to accept the challenges that come with this choice.
You need to be able to classify every matter as SOLID, LIQUID and GAS. SOLID relates to the essentials, LIQUID important yet not so essential and GAS what you can do without; the vanities of life.
I am like that woman and I know the price is very high. Sometimes the price is your spiritual or physical health, or being misunderstood by people around, even your spouse, or even your purpose for setting out into the this cycle in the first place. Being this hyper active woman might mean not being there for your children all the time, so you want to give quality to every time you spend with them. You want to stamp in them the fact that you love them even while apart, you need to review your VALUE system and say to yourself, what is that one thing I need this children to know even if I do not teach them anything and set out to achieving it.
Above all, to be treated as a Queen, you need to make your husband feel like a king. This is very difficult when you are so stressed all the time or you are not getting the right treatment from your spouse but then you need to realize that this is a SOLID part of the matter. You need to be at peace with your husband to function optimally even within the home. You need to evaluate the price of peaceful co-existence with your spouse and pay it. You may need a loan from the Holy Spirit to do this. Remember: a wise woman builds her home. She is wise because she does things at the right time and when she fails to, she can admit her mistakes and get better.
Finally, as Christian woman whatever takes us away from God is really not worth it. We need Christ at the centre of our being to get things really working. We cannot afford to be too busy for the kingdom.
The scripture remains the same yesterday, today and forever. Seek ye first the Kingdom of God …..Matt 6:33
As we seek him, my prayer is that we find Him and the Peace He promised us.
Have a week full of new discoveries of God’s Love, Peace and Joy!
-OmololaEzeifeoma
For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost,
whether he has sufficient to finish it?
Lest haply, after he hath laid the foundation, and is not able to finish it, all that behold itbegin
to mock him, Saying, This man began to build, and was not able to finish.
Or what king, going to make war against another king, sitteth not down first, and consulteth
whether he be able with ten thousand to meet him that cometh against him with twenty
thousand?
Or else, while the other is yet a great way off, he sendeth an ambassage, and desireth conditions
of peace.
So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple.
Luke 14:28-33
As years pass by and I think more about this life, I come to realize that nothing just happens, we make things happen. Positive and negative things happen because of the choices we make or decide not to make. Our seeming inaction speaks of a choice we have made and they all come with their consequences.
This life principle also applies to our marriage. Dreams of a successful marriage don’t make a successful marriage, rather deliberate actions towards making our dream come to pass, does. After much dreaming should come costing. There is a cost for our dream home, as it applies to other aspects of life, nothing good comes cheap. Our salvation did not come cheap at all, neither does our remaining in faith cost less.
A lot of Christian marriages are in trouble today because of this. We dream big about the ideal home and won’t pay the price.
We start out as couples who want to serve God with all our might but take jobs that keep us too busy to serve God.
We are too busy individually to spend time even as a couple.
We want to have quality time with our children but we are caught up with the rat race to pay bills. We have bought the multiple streams idea and that is keeping us too busy. We are too busy to be our children’s first examples.
We want to build houses that will not remain after the coming of Christ, so much that the sacrifices for this are eternal things.
We have found ourselves in the life’s washing machine, and we keep spinning around.
It’s time to stop to ask ourselves the question,’what really is important’? This is a question I started asking myself after my father passed on. He worked so hard and left so suddenly. And it really got me thinking and revisiting my life principles.
What is important? How important will be my conflicts with my spouse if the final whistle is blown today? How important will be the things that keep me away from home so much? What is the eternal value of the things I invest my time in?
How would I have preferred to live my life? What is the cost of my preferred life pattern?
I will leave you with these thoughts for this week. Next week we will reason more along these lines in details.
God Bless!
-OmololaEzeifeoma
