Today we continue the series, “Making Courtship Count” which started last week with an introductory charge. If you haven’t read it please do now before you join us for today: https://lovestraighttalks.com/making-courtship-count/
Now you see in law, there is something we popularly call locus classicus; a Latin word which literally means a classical place. In daily legal practise it refers to the first and most authoritative case where a legal principle is established and from which every subsequent case of similar subject or fact MUST take their bearing.
The locus classicus of the marriage institution is the one established by His Royal Highness, Oba Arugboojo I-am-that-I-am, the Olorun of Orun between those young charming couples whose name you are well familiar with. The historian Moses Amran recorded the event of their marriage in a book popularly called Genesis. Now please note that every marriage that will be enjoyed must take its instruction from this locus classicus. You can’t ignore the manual of an electrical appliance and hope to make the most of it.
Two things are profound from the story of their beautiful union. One is that God conceived the idea of marriage primarily for a selfish reason. Wait, before you fight me- yes for a selfish reason. He had a work to be done. It is His work by the way. So he made man and recruited man to do it for him. Of course not without pay. I see you feel better now. The point however is that man’s productivity was low as long as he was alone. God wouldn’t have that being the most sophisticated businessman in existence. Simple logic, get him someone to join him so that heaven can get higher productivity and profit from his life.
Even if all this “helper” does is warming him when he’s cold and lifting him up when he’s down, that would be seriously positively consequential as far as the productivity of the man who has been recruited into God’s labour is concerned.
For indeed two are better than one because they have a good reward (productivity) for their labour. Two can accomplish more than twice as much as one, for the results can be much better. If one falls, the other pulls him up; but if a man falls when he’s alone, he’s in trouble. Also, on a cold night, two under the same blanket gain warmth from each other, but how can one be warm alone? And one standing alone can be attacked and defeated, but two can stand back to back and conquer…” Eccl 4:9 (LB)
May I shock you to say that all the warmth of sex and other fringe benefits that seems to come to you from marriage is all so that your productivity in the assignment given to you can be unhindered. In all, the companionship, the good sex, the warmth of fellowship and all of the fringe benefits that come from marriage is not God’s end. They are mere means to an end. His real end is economic in nature: increased productivity.
Put differently and rather bluntly, God wants you to marry not for your sake but for His sake. So marriage was instituted primarily for the ‘more effective’ carrying out of a task conceived by God for you.
The second thing that I’ll like to draw your attention to is that God gave the two of them one assignment. Not two. I mean they had a shared mandate.
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, AND GOD SAID UNTO THEM, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
Genesis 1:27-28 KJV
From the forgoing you’ll realise therefore that the first and most important task for a courtship to pursue is the discovery of the purpose of God for bringing the two of them together. For if there is no divine assignment for the marriage to carry out for God, God will have no business being the author of it.
If they have unfortunately not hitherto received a revelation of their divine life mandate (assignment) in their many decades of Christianity, as the courtship commences, this is their first, most important and most urgent task. It is this mandate that… Click To Tweet
If they however be couples who already individually have a clear sense of their life mission and vision, their first and most important task in courtship is to synchronise (merge) these tasks.
What an excitement of monumental proportion it always is for couples whom God have authored their coupling to find out that the assignment God had individually communicated to each of them is the same or at least strikingly similar. If what God had communicated to them individually be dialectically opposed to each other, the marriage cannot be a success. God is likely not the author of it. For can two work together except they be agreed?
It is the synchrony of the individual mission of the couple into one mission that gives the union it’s most solid foundation. It provides the marriage with a daily focus. It is the purposelessness of the marriages of so many couples that allows them so much time to concentrate on petty useless quarrels.
A marriage that is founded primarily and daily focused on the accomplishment of the urgent shared mandate of the couple has no time for pettiness.
This synchronized life mission becomes an invisible child born by the union that constantly compels the couple to come together for nurturing. Just like most couples are unable to separate because of the cohesion of their shared heritage in their children at least, the need to constantly nurture this invisible child of their shared life mandate becomes a center that compels the couple to always bridge whatever gap may already be creeping up between them at any given time.
A marriage without a shared mandate is a lose canon. It will be like a reed that is blown around by the wind. The parties will at best be roommates who only share physical space and not life. Everyone is pursuing his own goals. So his success is not her success really. Why she could even loathe him for succeeding. Hate him for it. Her failure doesn’t bother him. You can’t find them crying into each other’s arms. In the truest sense, they are not yet one but two!
Can there any thing be that could bind a couple inseparable more than a revelation of a single mandate from God that carries their compound name “Penibiye Akintujoye”. You suddenly realise that you are going nowhere without your partner. Your destiny is intertwined with hers. She’s the only one that is called primarily to fulfil the mandate with you. There is that sense of her uniqueness in your life that this breeds. That sense of “no one else can fit my life”. You then have no choice than to cling to her. Nothing can be too much to forgive. It’s foolish to hate her. If you hate her you hate yourself. You’re practically going nowhere without her. Your call is one, your journey is one, your life is one, your mandate is one.
If the fulfillment of this joint mandate requires that we kneel to pray together every morning then together we must, notwithstanding the pending quarrel of yesterday. And nothing is more impossible than joining hands to pray with someone and remaining in malice with them.
If the life work of the marriage that came into the shared mandate through my wife (i.e her original personal vision) has become my personal shared divine mandate, then joining her to do it is not trying to help her. I will be flogged at the Judgement Seat of Christ on the last day if I do not. So we must come together daily if for nothing else, for the sake of a shared mandate that must be done.
This is now the secret; what more can breed a ceaseless flow of affection towards your partner than seeing them totally given to the vision which was originally your own personal life’s task. Which offense can stand the wild fire of the deep love and affection precipitated by this losing of one’s self into another?
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you perhaps the greatest secret of remaining inseparable – A shared mandate that sits immovably in the heart of the couple. Your courtship ought to lay a solid foundation of this shared mandate. You must see to it that the vision God has communicated to you is burned into the heart of your partner reasonably even in your courtship.
Unless you have discovered the vision in your husband’s spirit, you will only wonder why he behaves as he does, and why he is so tenacious to a thing you would have considered insignificant.
Now this is where the work is.
As a man you must take time to share repeatedly the vision of your heart with your fiancée (wife). It takes time and God at work for another to catch a vision that is deeply embedded in your spirit. It takes a revelation and an impartation to imprint your vision on your fiancee’s (wife’s) spirit. Of course vice versa. Once they catch the vision, the arguments will end, their reluctance to follow you will melt immediately.
Maybe you now see why courtship (or even marriage) is serious business unsuitable for lazy prayerless people.
If you want to make a huge success of marriage like me, your prayer from now on will be the prayer I’m raising up to God even at this moment; “Lord, imprint my vision on her spirit indelibly.” Only you can do these things. Amen.
We’ll continue the series next week.
Please help us share this message with your friends.
Your Brother,
Peniela Akintujoye.
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