For You Gals - 4

If this is your first visit to Overcomer and you are a DBC gal, I'm glad you are here!  If you are a different gal, I'm glad you are here too!  My thoughts from our Titus 2 mentoring study begin a few posts ago.  Just scroll down and you will find the first one with the title..."For You Gals."

In my first post I talked of how we should not treat our husbands based on whether or not they deserve it.  That is the heart of what grace is - treating people better than they deserve.  Our Heavenly Father treated us better than we deserved...way better!  We deserved His wrath.  With marriage being a picture of the relationship Christ has with His church and since that relationship is based on grace, our marriages are to be based on grace.   If you are a believer, Christ bore the wrath that was aimed at you for your sinfulness.  If your husband is a believer, Christ bore the wrath for all of his sins.  There is no room for wrath towards our spouse in marriage, towards anyone for that matter, because the Lord says that is His area - Romans 12:19.  All that is left for us is forgiveness and forbearance, exactly what the Father's grace has provided for us.  The Lord instructs us that we are not to take revenge but we are to overcome evil with good - Romans 12:21.  I'm going to get into the practical aspects of just what that looks like in my next post.  As we've been forgiven by the Lord, we must also forgive our spouses.  As the Lord bears with us, we should bear with our spouses.  Isn't this a great quote by John Piper?  "The distance between what Christ expects of you and what you achieve is infinitely greater than the distance between what you expect of your spouse and what he achieves."  In other words, the chasm between our performance and what Christ expects of us is far, FAR greater than what we expect from our husbands and their performance.  We can even put it this way...Christ always forgives more and endures more than we do.  Way more.  Grace has been lavished upon us, let's bend it toward our husbands!