A Grace Filled Marriage
“The Lord is compassionate and gracious.” Psalm 103:8
Do they deserve my grace?
Grace. You give it to yourself, though some do have a difficulty even accepting and being graceful to themselves. It is much easier to accept ourself and the non-existent person that we thought we were marrying. But they were not really who you believed them to be. They were never the ideal person that you imagined before marriage. Then you got married and quickly the idealism that you had for this person disappeared.
So what to do?
Grace.
Give your spouse the grace that you like others to give to you.
It will change a lot in the relationship. Not everything, it won’t change everything. But it is the only way for freedom and love be felt and enjoyed in the relationship. We can continue to deny our badness and act like we are all good, or at least 99% and just continue a hypocritical treatment of our spouse by talking like they are 99% bad.
What? I have badness? Well, maybe a little, sure, but not like them. They never pick up their clothes. They are a mess!
The truth is, that in this world, we all are afflicted with imperfection and often even considerable flaws. Judgement without mercy is a quick way to make a miserable relationship.
What we all want in our relationships is truth and grace, we just often don’t want to give the same kind of grace that we want and need. We would rather just offer the truth as we see it at the time, without the grace and love that needs to go along with this truth that we believe that we know.
But, If we are going to have a beautiful relationship we must speak the truth in love with grace.
To have a beautiful relationship we must offer forgiveness with grace and love. Lk 7:36-47.We will not be good forgivers until we realize how much God has forgiven us. Even if we don’t accept God’s forgiveness, he has given it.
And we must be able to realize that everyone has good and bad. We should not treat others as though they only have bad and we are much better than them. Those who see only black and white, all good or all bad, are not correct about the real nature of things, and they are not heading in the direction for having a beautiful marriage.
What to do to start offering grace better
You need to realize how you feel when you are offered grace and compare that to how you feel when you are not offered grace.
God gives us grace. He is gracious and compassionate. Where would we be without His grace?
“The grace of God teaches us to say no to unrighteousness.” That is, because God gives us His grace, his unmerited favor, we can begin to feel our great value and so start acting like we have value, which includes offering the same grace to others.
