From Alan Adams ...

I’ve recently noted a trend in our culture which I find most disturbing and it reveals a profound lack of understanding about our social relationships and personal interactions as individuals made in the image of God. I understand this condition well because before I knew Christ I was also pulled by this same mindset as a young man. Lost people have either no moral compass or one very distorted (Rom. 1:18 ff). I’ve noted recently a number of You Tube posts of desperate women lamenting being unable to find a husband and all have a list of requirements a prospective husband has to have to “qualify” for consideration. Today divorce is rampant and fidelity rare and little celebrated. The damage to our families and especially our children is sobering. But, Jesus speaks to this problem in the gospel of Matthew (Matt. 19:3-6): 3 And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” 4 He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, 5 and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? 6 So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”1 In this passage it states that we are to “hold fast” to our wife. A study of that word in the original text means to be bonded in such a way that they cannot be separated without causing permeant damage to each. Remember in Genesis 2:18-23, 18 Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” 19 Now out of the ground the LORD God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. 20 The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. 21 So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. 22 And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. 23 Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” 2 Both man and woman are created in the image and likeness of God but each express this “imagehood” in unique ways consistent with the manner in which they were created. The two of them functioning in the way God designed them to function is one of the most powerful images of God that exists. Woman is not “equal” to man but a completing part of the pair. She was made from man (not from the earth like man and animals) to complete man and be the missing part in the man which God said man lacked when he was alone and which God pronounced was “not good.” Woman was the final and crowning act of creation. God has gifted me with a wife who is a living example that has allowed me to experience that same fulfillment and completion that Adam expressed in the quote above. I want to use this piece to express my eternal gratitude for God’s gift to me of my wife Jeanie. She is my encourager, my cheerleader, she believes in me when no one else does; she knows what I will need before I am aware I need it and she sees to it that my need is there ahead of time; she’s my lover and my strength and the most precious and completing gift God has ever given me. I often think of the song “You are the wind beneath my wings” to help explain Jeanie’s place in our marriage. God tells me in Ephesians five that I am to cherish and protect my wife like Christ did the church. Indeed a lofty goal only possible by God’s provision and grace. Ladies, I would ask you to share with those young women under your influence that fulfillment in marriage is not so much about what material riches you get but the precious place you hold by investing your life in the man God gives you and by God’s grace be the “Wind beneath his wings” to complete him where he is in need and by so doing profoundly glorify God.
                                            


The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (2016). Crossway Bibles.