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Agreeing – The Secret To A Happy Marriage
The secret to a happy marriage is for the husband and wife to always reach an agreement on everything. When God said “ … and the two shall become one.” yes he was referring to the act of sex, but also he was referring to a relationship they would develop that would be one of agreement.
Mutual respect for each other is the only way a marriage can be happy and healthy. When you disagree with someone you have a strong temptation to lose respect for him or her because they don’t see eye to eye with you.
Just think about it, who do you have the most respect for? You tend to respect people who agree with your politics, who tend to agree with your religious beliefs, with your idea of right and wrong … People tend to have the highest respect for those in life who agree with them.
When the Bible says that a wife should “submit” to her husband, God is saying she should agree with her husband. God is not saying she should “obey” her husband. Marriage is not a “master”, “slave” relationship. God is not saying she should obey her husband, God is saying she should agree with her husband.
When the Bible teaches that you should not “esteem yourself more highly than your brother”, and that we should “submit one to another”, God is trying to get us to agree with each other.
The Bible says for husbands to “love your wife the way Christ loves the church”. Christ puts up with a lot from the church today. Christ allows the Church to live under grace, not law. And so likewise a husband and wife should be willing to compromise to agree with each other. They should be willing to trust each other and God. One should always be willing to agree with the other. And it shouldn't always be the wife who has to agree with the husband. A good husband will agree with his wife when at all possible. He too should be willing to compromise to keep peace in the family.
In Ephesians 4:26 it says, "In your anger do not sin; Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry; do not give the devil a foothold" This verse shows that the longer you wait to compromise and agree on things the more chance the devil has to use the disagreement to destroy your marriage.
Life is too short to argue all the time. The happiest marriages I have seen are those where the husband and wife have a healthy respect for each other and they always agree, not because they always think alike, but because one or the other is always willing to compromise to accommodate the other. They do end up thinking alike more than you would think, because they are willing to hear each other out and accept each other’s ideas.
The love chapter says, “…Love is patient and is kind; love doesn't envy. Love doesn't brag, is not proud, does not behave itself inappropriately, doesn't seek its own way, is not provoked, takes no account of evil; doesn’t rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”
Notice the “believes all things”. Love agrees with the other person by believing what they say.
To have a happy marriage a husband and wife need to decide to always agree on everything. This will require compromise.
But if they will always agree on everything, they will not lose respect for each other. When a husband and wife lose respect for each other, they become bitter towards each other and resent each other.
The marriage ends up in arguments all the time. Gaining back the respect for each other, is the key to restoring a happy marriage.
To begin to respect each other, the couple first needs to find out what are the things they disagreed on with way back in the past, that caused them to become bitter towards each other.
Once the couple figures out what the issues are that that caused them to lose respect for each other, and become bitter towards each other, the couple can decide to compromise and agree on those issues.
Both the husband and wife should take blame for not agreeing with the other, and for losing respect for the other, and for becoming bitter towards the other. Then the husband and wife should ask each other for forgiveness, and the other person should say they forgive them, and admit they too were wrong, and ask for forgiveness too.
Once the couple has forgiven each other, they need to decide to always agree on everything. They need to tell each other hourly that they respect each other. They need to ask God to forgive them for being selfish and for not being a peacemaker and not loving in the past.
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