February 18
God's Blueprints for Marriage (Part One) Psalm 127:1
Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it.
I was traveling in Southern California not long ago and stopped for a red light at an intersection around 6:30 A.M. There was an old restaurant at that corner and a crew was already at work, renovating and restoring it. Like little ants, the carpenters and other construction workers were moving about the building and almost every one of them had the same thing in his hand or under his arm: blueprints. It seemed that everywhere I looked somebody was referring to blueprints, holding them up and looking at what was going there and what would be going over here.
The light changed and I drove on, but that brief scene stuck in my mind. It teaches a simple truth. You don't start building or renovating without blueprints.
Many marriages today certainly need renovation. And to do it right, we need to go back to the original blueprints-the divine blueprints.
Earlier in this devotional we looked at God's purposes for marriage. Now I want to look at God's plan to accomplish these purposes.
I often meet Christian couples who have problems because they make a common mistake: As sincere Christians they believe they are automatically living their lives according to the correct plan. The trouble with that naive reasoning is that many different blueprints compete for their commitment.
Unfortunately, many Christian couples never stop to evaluate the blueprints they're working from. Many give into the temptation to just increase the speed at which they build. They rush through life getting married, rearing children and constructing what they believe are perfect buildings. But they find at the end that the plans they were building from were flawed. They had worked with a counterfeit instead of the real thing.
Prayer: That God would use the next few devotions to give you insight about His blueprints for marriage.
Discuss: If someone asked you "What plan do you have for making your marriage work?" how would you answer? Are you both building your marriage and family from the same set of blueprints?
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