Marriage Rekindling
Taking the covenantal stance in a marriage sets the stage for a rekindling, if it is needed. Rekindling (reigniting of sorts) is the agreement to fight for your relationship. This step is really one of obedient action, not only a duty. What it amounts to is relational restoration.
Couples who have grown weary of “trying harder” and need to rediscover the why behind their covenant. Let’s reimagine obedience not as obligation, but as a pathway to intimacy, healing, and trust. Let us go a step further. How about a return trip to the garden, to the table, to the embrace of the closeness we once knew?
I like metaphors, so does the Bible. I am going to use a few right now.
Your Marriage can be as a winding path through a garden. It done intentionally, it can always lead both of you back to a gate marked “Delight” (Eden in Hebrew means delight, or pleasure).
Living a love of obedience is not going to place you and I in an exiled state. Obedience is the way back to relational delight. ALL though Scripture, disobedience led the perpetrator to hide and blame. In Yeshua, obedience leads to walking together in the cool of the day again.
Couples (individual reader), you must see obedience not as “rule-keeping,” but as rejoining the walk—hand in hand, heart to heart.
We have too many married people working diligently to destroy their marriage (Eden), with selfishness, immaturity and lack of compassionate care. Not loving your relationship (marriage) the way the Father requires, will say all of these things about you. That alone is the definition of DISobedience.
Husband, where have you been hiding? What would it look like to walk together again in trust?
Wife, where have you been hiding? What would it look like to walk together again in trust?
I encourage you both to find the ancient path that you once walked on with not only one another, but the LORD.
I’ve heard songs that have lyrics in them like, “candles burning in the wind.” Let’s use that one for now. If you two are two candles lighting a third[candle], would that not be a real cool symbolic reference for shared obedience? Even the phrase of, “igniting covenant love” would be a smooth talker’s dream phrase.
Striving as one to listen and respond (shema) would be an obedience response of warm love, not cold passivity.
Much the same as the priest tending the flames in the tabernacle. That Commanded task requires attention, humility, intentional understanding a willing submission.
Yeshua’s obedience was fueled by love: “I do only what I see the Father doing.” In marriage, we mirror that by attuning to one another.
Father, teach us to listen with love, to respond with kindness and mercy in the effort to rekindle what You began.”
What about the restoration, or the hope of it? Whatever you and I have planted, we expect it to grow. Correct? Good. We agree. Marital obedience must be approached as if we planted it. It is filled with seeds of (love, hope, selflessness, service and passion) nourishment. Every living organism (plants here) required pruning and nourishment. Take care of the soil of your marriage, and watch it mature into what the name of the seed on the package says it is. Don’t starve the plant. …as some will do and have done.
Obedience is not starvation, it’s nourishment. It’s choosing to feed one another with words, presence, and dare I say again, kindness and mercy.
Jesus’ obedience led to the cross, but also to the table, where He said, “This is My body, given for you.”
In marriage, obedience looks like mutual surrender—not control. It is designed to be a sweet picture of a unified relationship and closeness.