Jeremiah 1:5- “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.”
While I was having a conversation with someone I was dating many year ago, I told him that hearing him talk about the women he knew before me; hurt. His response was that I “kinda sounding obsessed.”
It made me start to think, and the Lord opened my understanding of why I felt that way, and the verse above had a lot to do with helping me understand.
You see when God created each of us with his specific plans and purposes for our lives that also included whom he chose for us to marry as well. You had a husband or wife long before each of you ever met. The same way we belong to God before we came into this world.
God created us to love him, to worship and fellowship with him, but when we enter the world. What do we do? We forget him—our first love, the one we were created to love. Our spiritual eyes become dim and we lose the spiritual part of what connects us to God. Instead, we go whoring around with the world. Sorry for using the word whore, but that’s what God calls us many times in the Old Testament when we get into sinful acts with the world through idolatry.
Imagine how God feels watching us doing all that and rejecting him. Is it any wonder when we come back to Him, we have to be washed, cleansed, forgiven, and having God puts our sins far from Him as far as the east is from the west- remembering them no more.
When we meet our spouses and think of all the people they had been with before us- it hurts. The reason is, you had belonged to each other from the very moment God formed you and brought you into the world even if you hadn’t met yet. Put it this way, it’s like someone else getting to use and wear something that is yours before you do, and that many times is where jealousy comes from.
It makes me understand a lot more why God tells us to wait until we marry before we have sex. So whether you believe it or not, God has someone in mind for you and that person might not even be in the same country where you are from. All the love, devotion, and desire to serve and protect our spouses is a reflection of Christ’s relationship and his bride – the church. God is jealous over his church and loves her enough to send his ONLY BEGOTTEN SON to redeem her out of bondage. Where do we get this innate feeling from to sacrifice so much, even our lives if have to, for someone we love dearly? It's the nature of our father.
That special love you feel for your spouse that sometimes makes you wonder how you could feel such love is a reflection of God’s love for us. The devil came to me with a lie- telling me I cared more for my love than God, and that almost scared me. It was God who came to me sometime afterward and made me aware that what I feel is just a reflection of what he put in me to understand what his love is for his people.
One important thing I have discovered that we all need to do when we get married, or even before, but know that the person we are dating is who God sent – is this. Both of you need to ask each other for forgiveness for not waiting—for allowing the world to have a part of you that was only for them.
Your earthly relationship should reflect Christ and his bride. The same way we all had to repent and ask Christ to forgive us to be brought back into his love and become his bride again, should be the same way for us and our spouses. This is so that all the negative things of past relationships will be washed away from our new relationship and not carry over into the one God ordained for you.
It will be now just the two of you-No baggage.
God washed us, made us new before we were joined back to him – doesn’t that say something about us too? Sometimes it’s things we carry from our old relationships into the new one that ends up costing us our marriages, the same way sinful nature in a Christian’s life is what takes them back into sin.
So here are 3 Important Tips or Advice to everyone about to get married or already married.
1. Sit down with your spouse and ask each other for forgiveness for all the people who defiled you before you both came together. Remember your relationship is a reflection of our relationship with the Lord, so be sincere and allow yourself to be set free from all the past attachments or demons of those relationships.
2. Then both of you make a list of every bad trait you have that was passed down to you from ancestors, from your parents, or your own sins. Things you see follow your parents or even siblings and even yourself in other relationships. Those are altars and covenants that will fight against your marriage if you don’t destroy them. If you don’t deal with this it will follow you into your marriage and become the destroyer.
3. Combine your lists and begin to seriously pray to renounce all those negative covenants and associations. That means disassociating and separating yourself from them. Then the most important parts comes next and that is to destroy the altars so they wont fight against you and your marriage. Some of what should be on your lists are things such as anger, barrenness, stagnancy, poverty, prayerlessness, infidelity, backwardness, for women it may be the attitude to dominate your marriage and unwillingness to submit, and for men, it could be the need to control every aspect of the relationship and acting outside God’s will as the head.
Remember if you want a lasting marriage as you do your relationship with Christ, you have to remove all the obstacles of the flesh and sin. So this is crucial. If your spouse isn’t willing to do this then you will have trouble to deal with when married.
In Deuteronomy 7:5 God commands us to destroy all evil altars with fire. “But thus shall ye deal with them; ye shall destroy their altars, and break down their images, and cut down their groves, and burn their graven images with fire.”
So here is an example of how you can pray to tear down these altars.
“We declare that every altar that will or is speaking against our marriage, we tear them down now by fire in Jesus name. Altars of divorce-we tear you down by fire. Altars of barrenness-we tear you down by fire. Altars of infidelity-we tear you down by fire. Altars of short-temper or rage-we tear you down by fire. Altars of masturbation-we tear you down by fire. Altars of poverty- we tear you down by fire. Altars of prayerlessness- we tear you down by fire. Altars of fear to trust your spouse as you should -we tear them down by fire in Jesus’ name. We tear them down by fire, by fire, by fire in Jesus name.”
This prayer is not just a one-time prayer, remember those bad habits you have may be in you for years and may take a while to leave so as many times as you need to, join together and pray while you are courting and if you are already married, do until you start to see change in your relationship.
Be a new creation in your relationship with your spouse as we become a new creation with Christ.
For anyone married:
How do you see your marriage? Is it reflecting what our relationship should be with Christ?
For those yet to marry- I encourage you to follow these tips when you are ready to. Also, what do you take from this post?
If you want to learn more about altars, check out this link and read the posts on this page. I promise you they are very informative and teach you prayers you can pray to break free of curses and other covenants. Evil Altars
I put together this free PDF for you with scriptures, the 3 tips from the posts, along with some spiritual warfare prayers to fight for your marriage.
You can also follow my podcast that teaches everything about spiritual warfare on YouTube called: Spiritual Combat 101. Here's the link, please subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@SpiritualCombat101
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