“Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will
be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be
like him, for we shall see him as he is. Everyone who has this hope in him
purifies himself, just as he is pure” (1 John 3:2-3).

“After that, we who are still alive and are left will be
caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so
we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage each other with these
words” (1 Thessalonians 4:17-18).

“He who testifies to these things says, ‘Yes, I am coming
soon.’ Amen. Come, Lord Jesus” (Revelation 22:20).

You may have wondered what my eschatology is. I do not often
speak about it. These few words from the text summarize my anticipation:

Hope

Purifies

Encourage

“Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.”

This keeps me from differing with the saints on the order of
events at the end time.

This post coordinates with today’s reading in the To
the Word! Bible Reading Challenge. If you are not in a daily reading plan,
please join us at TotheWord.com. We would love to have you reading with us.

Here
are some suggestions for how to go about either reestablishing relationships
with your parents or making them better.

First,
write two letters home. Do not write, “Dear Mom and Dad.” If you write that,
who answers the letter? Mom. Dads are illiterate when it comes to answering
letters. In many cases, the father thinks that any communication is between mom
and the kids. He doesn’t think he ever gets a letter, even if it is
addressed to both Mom and Dad. So, write a letter to your father and a separate
one to your mother. Make them very clearly separate. Put on the outside “Dad
Only,” “Mom Only.” (Yes, I am suggesting sending actual letters in the mail. It
will mean more than an email.)

When
you write to your father, include at least five things.[1] I
recommend covering one element per paragraph as follows:

1.
Tell your father how much you respect him. If you do not respect him, do
not write the letter until you do respect him. You must not be hypocritical.
But not respecting your father is not one of your options. How can you do it?

First, confess
this disrespect for your father to God. Your father is to be honored because he
is your father. God has commanded you to honor him. It is not optional. If you
do not honor him, then you have sinned. The same is true with your mother. Sin
is forgivable, and repentance is required.

Now
with freedom and sincerity, write to your father how much you respect him. If
he is not respectable, make sure you are not being dishonest. It would be a lie
if you said, “I respect you for divorcing Mom, for being a drunk, for…” No.
Don’t respect him for anything other than being your father. “I respect you as
my father.”

2.
Tell him how much you love him. 

If you do not love him, that has to be corrected first. You
might object that you would have loved him if he had loved you first, but he
didn’t. I’m sure that is true, and he should have loved you first. As a father,
he should have loved you so that your natural response would have been a loving
one. But we cannot go back to childhood and start over. Even if we could, that
does not guarantee that your father would do it any different the second time.
We address the problem from where we are, not from where we should be.

One
of the reasons your father didn’t love you may be because he had never
been loved. You are turning that around.

If
you had to answer for your father, would he say that his father loved him? I
have asked many college students this over the years. The answer I usually get
is, “No, his dad didn’t love him. He’s told me all the fights they had.”

Next,
would he say that his wife loves him? No, mom doesn’t love him. Would he say
that his children love him? No, he doesn’t think his kids love him. Would he
say that God loves him? He doesn’t know God; he’s not a Christian.

Do
you meant to tell me that your father doesn’t think God loves him, his father
loved him, his wife loves him, or his children love him? And you wonder why he
drinks too much! He sees that everyone who should be close to him does not love
him.

“His
perception is wrong. We do love him, and God loves him.”

That’s
not what I asked. Does he think that you all love him? No.[2]

So
here we have a person who couldn’t love you first because he has never
been loved. He doesn’t know how to love.

I
used to ask this question when speaking to a crowd: “How many of you know that
your parents love you?” Ninety-five percent would raise their hand.

Then
I would ask, “How many of you think they expressed it to you adequately?” Only
half of those hands would stay up.

“Of
those who think it was expressed adequately, how many could have used more
love?” Everybody’s hands stayed up. Nobody gets enough love at home,
even when love is there.

You
are now an adult, and as a Christian you have unlimited access to love and
forgiveness—a love that your family does not have if they are not Christians.
If you are waiting for them to love you first, you’ve got it all backwards. You
are now the source of love for your family. You are the vehicle to love your
parents. Straighten out your unlove for them with God. As a Christian, confess
this lack of love to Him. Is it sin? Yes, it is sin. It is disobedience to the
command of God. We have been commanded to love our neighbors, love the
brothers, and love our enemies. Your father fits into one of those categories.
Confess this lack of love and forsake it. After you have confessed and have
been forgiven, choose to love your father.[3]
This love requires expression, so tell him in this paragraph.

3.
Tell your father how grateful you are to him. You may be grateful for a lot
of things. Enumerate them. Or you might have to go back to preschool days to
think of something. Think of it and thank him. Go back to some nostalgia; tell
him how much you appreciated sitting on his lap when you were three, or the
fishing trip you had that one time. If you are not grateful, then as with
respect and love, it is your problem, not his. The procedure is the same.
Confess your unthankfulness to God. When you are forgiven, express your
thankfulness to your father.

After
I had been teaching this for years, I wrote a letter to my mother. (My father
had already passed away.) Most of it was just news, but I put one last sentence
in of gratefulness and praise to her, and she called on the telephone to talk
to me about it. Nobody gets enough! Start expressing respect, love, and
thankfulness.

These
elements are necessary and required. The next two are suggestions for further
ways to convey respect.

4.
Ask your father for his autobiography. He probably won’t write one, but he
will be glad that you want to know about him. If you live near your parents,
you can ask your dad for this in person. One young woman told me she couldn’t
write home because her parents lived in the same town. I told her to just ask
him. So she asked her father for his autobiography, and this man who is
normally extremely quiet talked for four hours. She asked, and he was so glad
to be asked.

5.
Ask your father for advice, in general and on specific matters. This is
part of honor. Has he given you advice before, and you didn’t like it?
Unsolicited advice is generally much rougher than requested advice. It is
rougher on you because you didn’t want it, and it is given rougher
because you didn’t want it. But when you request advice, the person is usually much
more considerate, much more thoughtful, and the advice will be better.

Ask
for counsel, and be open to it. You might be really surprised at the advice you
get. There are very few parents who are not concerned about the direction their
children go and what they do. When you ask, you might find that they were just
waiting to be asked, and they will be considerate.

If
you are still single, this is especially true regarding anyone you are dating.
Ask your father what he thinks of this guy/girl. You may hear things you don’t
want to hear. When you do, you had better listen. Even if your father is not a
Christian, he’s been around a while. His answers may be sheer prejudice, but likely
they are not. He knows you, and he knows people, so pay attention. If he
dislikes the person you are going with, go slow. Even if this man or woman is
absolutely right for you and you both know it, it is not right until your
parents also know it. It is wise to go slow even if you are right and
they are wrong.

Some
parents will say it doesn’t make any difference to them what you do, and you
should just do what you want. Don’t believe them! They think that is the proper
thing to say because you are an adult. Ask them, “If you were going to
give me advice, what would you want me to do?” If they still don’t give you
advice, but you know your parents well enough to figure out what they think,
pay attention to that, even if they are not willing to tell you outright.

Your
father may not answer the letter you have written him, but he will almost
certainly read it more than once, and he will not throw it away. If you have
Christian siblings, tell them what you are doing and encourage them to do the
same thing.

Next,
write the same kind of letter to your mother, but with one change. The first
paragraph should express your love to her, and the second para­graph should
communicate your respect. Both sexes of the human race need love and re­spect
from both sexes. But of the two, women need love more than they need respect,
and men need respect more than they need love. Tell your mother how much you
love her; then tell her how much you respect her. The rest of the letter can
follow the same pattern as the letter to your father.

Honor your father
and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is
giving you. (Exod. 20:12)

Our
country is full of broken families. Whether you are a Christian or not, from a broken
family or a whole one, God calls you to honor your parents. The apostle Paul
tells us this “is the first commandment with a promise—‘so that it may go well
with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth’” (Gal. 6:2-3).

Your
relationship with your parents affects your relationships with your spouse and
children. If you are not yet married, a good way to prepare for those future
relationships is to reestablish a good relationship with your parents.

The
Ten Commandments give us two statements that relate to this. The first is the
Exodus quote above. Here is the second:

You shall not make
for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth
beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them;
for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin
of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but
showing love to thousands who love me and keep my commandments. (Deut. 5:8–10)

God
says that He will punish children for the sins of the fathers to the third and
fourth generation. This has stumbled and troubled people for a long time. How
can a just God punish you for someone else’s sin? The answer is that He does
not.

Yet you ask, “Why
does the son not share the guilt of his father?” Since the son has done what is
just and right and has been careful to keep all my decrees, he will surely
live. The soul who sins is the one who will die. The son will not share the
guilt of the father, nor will the father share the guilt of the son. The
righteousness of the righteous man will be credited to him, and the wickedness
of the wicked will be charged against him. (Ezek. 18:19–20)

God
does not hold great-grandchildren responsible for what great-grandfather did.
Ezekiel says very clearly, “The soul that sins shall die” (v. 20). The person
who is in sin is the one who will be held accountable.

What
the Deuteronomy passage is saying is that sin flows downhill—and it does
so for three and four generations. Look at your parents and grandparents. Can
you see how you are affected by the things your parents did, and how they were
affected by your grandparents? The sinful influence of our ancestors affects
us. This is generational bad news.

However,
the sentence in Deuteronomy does not end with verse 9—it continues with
something more wonderful. “But showing love to thousands who love me and keep
my commandments” (Deut. 5:10). God punishes the children for three and four
generations, but He shows love to thousands—not just thousands of
people, but thousands of generations. “Know therefore
that the Lord your God is God; he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of
love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his
commandments” (Deut. 7:9). Sin and hatred of God cause downward movement
to three or four generations, and obedience and love of God cause upward
movement to a thousand generations.

How do we turn our lives from three and
four generations going downhill to a thousand generations going uphill? If you
are part of a broken family, the solution seems obvious: get converted, leave
home, and marry a Christian. That should turn it around, because you are not
going to do life the way your parents did, right? You are going to love God and
keep His commandments.

Certainly, a major part of the solution
is to become a Christian, keep God’s commandments, and marry a Christian who also
keeps His commandments. You must do those things. Without them,
you can expect more bad generations.

However, although these actions are a very important part of
the generational turnaround, they alone bring no automatic guarantee of halting
the curse. We still have the descending promise of three and
four generations, and leaving to establish a new home does not change that.
Even if you have no contact with your parents, you carry those relationships
and the effects of them with you into your marriage. I have heard this
many times: “I decided I was not going to be the kind of father (or mother) who
raised me. I would become a Christian, marry a Christian, and do it right. I
became a Christian, married a Christian, and I am doing it wrong, just like my
parents.”

Leaving your parents is not the answer. What
you need to do is to reestablish relationships with your parents. When
you get married, you will have children, and those children are going to need
grandparents. If you are estranged from your parents, your children will be
deprived of a very important part of their growth. They need grandparents; they
need aunts and uncles; they need cousins. The entire family is important. In
fact, the family is more important than the church. God created the
family first. Of course, the best family is a Christian family, but your own
extended family is what God speaks of and gives examples of in the Scripture.

My family holds regular reunions. The
year my mother was eighty-four, her six sons, their wives, their children, and
their grandchildren all met for a reunion in Moscow, Idaho. To see how all the
children and grandchildren got along with each other was great. It was a
wonderful time, and it was very important. Every family needs this.

If
you are in the second or third bad-news generation, you do not have to wait through
more bad generations. Tt is possible to turn the descent around now. But unless
you change your relationship with your parents and grandparents, you will have
to wait two more generations. (And preaching the gospel to your parents does
not change the relationship. It needs to be repaired first.)

About
400 years before Christ, the prophet Malachi gave a negative conditional
prophecy: “See, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and
dreadful day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of the fathers to their
children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers; or else I will come
and strike the land with a curse” (Mal. 4:5-6).

The
angel Gabriel alludes to this prophecy in Luke 1:17: “And he [John] will go on
before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the
fathers to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous,
to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.”

Notice that to stop the curse from
happening, hearts must be turned both ways.[1] Unless
you do this, you are asking for another generation of bad news. You cannot
expect to be a good husband or a good father, a good wife or a good mother, if
you have not turned your heart to your own father and mother.

Because
we have not obeyed God’s command to honor our parents, we may be in the third-
and fourth-generation promise, and we will not live long on the earth (cf. Eph.
6:1). The land is in danger of being smitten with a curse. The Malachi text is
a call to repentance, a turnaround of the heart.

We can turn our family around by obeying
what the Ten Commandments tell us: Honor your father and your mother (Exod.
20:12). We are promised that a thousand generations of blessing come from
keeping God’s commandments, and this is one of them. If you want to turn the
flow around, this is primary.

How
do you honor parents who are not honorable? You may have parents who are
divorced. You may have a father who left home before you were born, and you
don’t even know him. You try to get in touch with him, and he does not want to
know you. How do you honor someone you don’t know? How do you honor someone who
is an alcoholic, mistreats his wife, or mistreats his children?

The
Scripture says to honor your father and mother because they are your father and
mother, not because they are honorable. When God tells us to love our
enemies, does He mean that our enemy is lovely? Does he have to deserve
love? No. Love is based upon the person who does the loving. Likewise, honor
has to do with the person doing the honoring, not the person being honored.

Do
you know any children who have been mistreated at home? How do they act in
school? Poorly. On the other hand, if children are treated with respect at
home, how do they act in school? Generally, they do well. If you want to make
someone unrespectable, treat them with no respect. The opposite is true
as well. Just as love makes people lovely, respect causes them to be
respectable. As Christians, we do not honor, love, and respect people because
they deserve it; we do it because they need it. Fathers and mothers need
it. “No, they’ve got to earn my respect first.” No, they don’t. If you want to
turn your family around, then you obey God’s command: honor your father
and your mother. If you have not honored them, confess that as sin first and then
choose to honor them.

Based upon the Word of God, if you are in a homosexual
relationship, you are either a very disobedient Christian, or you are not a
Christian.

Things that would indicate that you are not a Christian are the
complete absence of a sense of guilt and your current manner of life.

The points for being a Christian are your conversion, if you
have had one, and any previous record of Christian living.

Galatians 5:19-23 gives us two lists: the works of the flesh
and the fruit of the Spirit.

“The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality,
impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy,
fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness,
orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like
this will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love,
joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and
self-control. Against such things there is no law.”

Which list describes you? The first list is descriptive of
things a man does, and the second is description of things a man has
or is. The second list is not a personality description. It is the fruit
of the Spirit. Regardless of your temperament or personality, these things will
be evident in your life.

Concerning the physical sexual relationship, God made man
and woman. In the beginning, He made one of each, and He has been making 50% of
each ever since. That comes out to one apiece. God made reproductive organs
which are pleasant means to express love and reproduce. Because God made
the sensation pleasant, man has made the pleasantness an end and
has prostituted it outside of God’s moral law. He has done this in many ways:
adultery, fornication, multiple wives, concubines, prostitutes, male
prostitutes, bestiality, homosexuality, etc. All of these are outside of God’s
moral law. Some of them are outside God’s moral law but still within His
natural law. For instance, divorce and remarriage is outside of God’s
moral law but still within natural law.

Homosexuality is outside of both God’s moral law and His
natural law.

Concerning emotional friendship with another man, that is
biblically alright. Jesus and John, David and Jonathan are two biblical
examples of close friendships. When these close friendships become exclusive,
become sexual, or replace a wife, then they have gone beyond the legitimacy of
man-to-man friendship.

Adult magazines and online content get used for vicarious
sexual satisfaction. You might justify this as innocent release. When you do
this, the enemy sets you up for a fall. Sex outside of God’s moral and
natural laws and outside of vows to a spouse cannot be called a deep
friendship. If you keep doing this, the result will be your “conscience being
seared as with a hot iron” (1 Tim. 4:2). The nerve endings of your conscience will
not work anymore. They do not conform to the teachings in the Scripture. You
are allowing your conscience to determine right and wrong, and it does not work.

Read the first nine chapters of Proverbs. Although they
speak of a woman (adulterous) instead of a man, the truth is the same.

If you are married, your vows to your wife are sacred.

“Drink water from your own cistern,
    running water from your own well.
Should your springs overflow in the streets,
    your streams of water in the public squares?
Let them be yours alone,
    never to be shared with strangers.
May your fountain be blessed,
    and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth.
A loving doe, a graceful deer—
    may her breasts satisfy you always,
    may you ever be intoxicated with her love.
Why, my son, be intoxicated with another man’s wife?
    Why embrace the bosom of a wayward woman?

For your ways are in full view of the Lord,
    and he examines all your paths.”

(Proverbs 5:15-21)

“Another thing you do: You flood the Lord’s altar with
tears. You weep and wail because he no longer looks with favor on your
offerings or accepts them with pleasure from your hands. You ask, ‘Why?’ It is
because the Lord is the witness between you and the wife of your youth. You
have been unfaithful to her, though she is your partner, the wife of your
marriage covenant. Has not the one God made you? You belong to him in body and
spirit. And what does the one God seek? Godly offspring. So be on your guard, and
do not be unfaithful to the wife of your youth. ‘The man who hates and divorces
his wife,’ says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘does violence to the one he
should protect,’ says the Lord Almighty. So be on your guard, and do not be
unfaithful. You have wearied the Lord with your words. ‘How have we wearied
him?’ you ask. By saying, ‘All who do evil are good in the eyes of the Lord,
and he is pleased with them’ or ‘Where is the God of justice?’” (Malachi
2:13-17).

Read these paragraphs over and over until you think God’s
thoughts after Him.

1 Corinthians 7:3-5 says, “The husband should fulfill his
marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. The wife’s body
does not belong to her alone but also to her husband. In the same way, the
husband’s body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife. Do not deprive
each other except by mutual consent and for a time so that you may devote
yourselves to prayer.” Your body belongs to your wife, and you are
depriving her.

If you have children, you cannot fulfill your responsibility
to them as their father. For children to grow up secure, they must see the
closeness of their father and mother. Also, if they respect you and know
what you are doing, they may wish to follow suit. And to be consistent, you
should be able to endorse their homosexuality, which you cannot do. If they
know you are a Christian and are immoral and do not honor your marriage vows,
they could well reject Jesus Christ. And it is more likely that because they
will not be getting enough affection and attention from their father
they will seek other male affection. The result will be that they will be taken
sexually in junior or senior high school.

You cannot go only on feelings. You must go on God’s
absolute standard of right and wrong. Choose to turn away from
homosexuality based upon truth, not on subjective feelings nor on cultural
standards. Guilt is not about how you feel. Repentance is an act of the will
based upon turning from real guilt.

Leaving your homosexual partner is a must in the
repentance. Do not buy the lie that he will be hurt, as if that were primary.
That was not important to you in leaving your wife and children.

Hedonism, a life of selfish pleasure, is where you are and
where you are headed. You must turn around.

1 Corinthians 5 requires that you be removed from the body
of Christ and turned over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the
spirit may be saved. This is not to be done if you are repentant.

If you are a Christian, that means accepting the Word of God
as your authority. Do not accept an interpretation of the Word from someone who
is violating the Word. Do not accept a justification for murder from someone
who has committed murder, nor on divorce from someone divorced, nor on
homosexuality from someone who is practicing homosexuality.

An attraction to the same sex is no basis to practice
homosexual acts any more than an attraction to the opposite sex is a legitimate
reason to practice heterosexual acts.

You know that God loves you, and that Christians in your
life love you. Accepting or endorsing your sin would not be love for you.

by Bessie Wilson

Victorious
Christian living means walking in obedience to God in all areas of our life.
Obedience is something not many Christians are interested in. We dismiss the
commands of Scripture with spiritual words and nuanced arguments of why we
don’t need to obey a command that seems difficult, instead of simply asking,
“How do I do this?” If we want to live a victorious life, we must be committed
to obeying God with everything we are: physically, mentally, morally, socially,
and spiritually.

Physically.
Physical obedience means recognizing God’s ownership of your body. This relates
to your marriage as well. Are you withholding physically from your husband?

What
if it’s hard? You don’t love him anymore, or you’re tired, or you’re just not
in the mood. “I can’t; not tonight.” I come up with the same excuses, and the
Lord used a verse about the man with the withered hand to show me the way. One
Sabbath, Jesus went into the synagogue, and there was a man with a withered
hand there. Jesus told him, “Stretch forth your hand” (Mark 3:5).

What
could the man have said? “I can’t—it’s withered!” That’s what we women
sometimes say. “My emotions are withered—I can’t!” The Lord says, “Stretch
forth your hand.” What did that man do? “He stretched it out,
and his hand was completely restored” (v. 5). God’s commands are His
enablings. If He tells you to stretch out your hand in love to your
husband, He will enable you to do it.

Don’t
give in to your feelings when it comes to the spiritual life. We should say,
“God commands me to respect; I will respect. If He commands me to love
physically, I will love physically.”

Mentally.
Christians should be alert and thoughtful and should use their brains. Have you
ever been bored by a fellow Christian woman, so bored you felt like going to
sleep? Single women, don’t denigrate your brains. The right man will appreciate
them.

What
if people don’t have much mental equipment? God saves the entire body, and He
can make you think. Help me to think, Lord. You don’t need to be constantly
running to counselors if you just use your noggin. Let me encourage you to use
your brain and be creative, in your homes, at work, or at school, wherever God
has put you. Be creative. Before you go to bed tonight, ask the Lord to make
you creative in your mental processes. He can do it.

Morally.
If you are living with a non-Christian or a defeated Christian, your moral
standards have probably gone down. That’s just a fact. There’s
no such thing as a plateau in the Christian life. You are either going up, or
you are going down. So, be very scrupulous with your morality. Your husband
should be able to trust you. Proverbs 31 says, “The heart of her husband doth
safely trust in her” (v. 11 KJV). I’m amazed at the number of jealous Christian
husbands I’ve known. They couldn’t trust their wives out of sight! If you have
been living with a non-Christian man, you may have allowed things to be slipped
under the rug. Take a stand on moral issues. I don’t mean become a raving
moralist. But it is refreshing to meet someone who quietly speaks up for morality.
Let me encourage you to do this.

Men
want to marry Christian women. Even non-Christian men want to. When they
decide they’re ready to settle down, they want a clean, good woman. That’s why
it is so dangerous for girls to be impressed with a man because he is nice or
loves classical music and so on. He may be a non-Christian man looking for a
good woman.

Socially.
Are you a social creature, or are you naturally shy? When Jim was still in the
Navy, he told me one time that we had to go to the captain’s cocktail party,
oh! it was stressful for me. A former missionary, going to a cocktail party? I
was heavily pregnant with Doug, and you’re not at your best at classy social
occasions when you’re heavily pregnant. I had to look on it as a social
witnessing opportunity.

We
got to the marine club in San Diego and met the gorgeous captain’s wife, and
she was so gracious and sweet. Then I was introduced to some of the other
women. I stood beside one woman, and she immediately said, “I don’t really want
this drink; I just drink it for the olive in the bottom.” My fame had gone
before me—they knew I had been a missionary! I was an embarrassment to some of
them. Jim had said, “We don’t have to stay very long. After a while, they’ll be
so tubed out that you can’t say anything to them, anyway.” So it was. We left
early, and the next day the captain’s wife made her way to my place. She told
me how those fellows had gotten drunk and wrecked the club, and the captain had
to pay for all the damages.

Socially,
a Christian should walk into any situation with their head high, and say, “I’m
a child of God.” The best person who ever did this was Helen Palm. Her husband
was a colonel in the army in Washington, D.C., when Jim and I first came to the
States from Japan. What a couple! He conducted Bible studies in the chapel, and
Helen did her best evangelism at cocktail parties. She could point to woman
after woman that she had led to the Lord. “I just get them to the side, and I
take their wrist, and I talk to them.” One woman was so impressed with this
method that she gave Helen a thick silver bracelet, “Because you held me so
often by my wrist and talked to me of the Lord.” What a gracious,
socially-alert woman she was! She wasn’t embarrassed about being a Christian.
She went everywhere bubbling over with the joy of the Lord.

The
Palms would also give Bible story books to new parents they knew. The parents
would read to the children, the children would ask questions, and the parents
would go to Col. Palm’s Bible class to find the answers. Together they led
scores of people to the Lord.

I
met some of the ladies that Helen led to the Lord, and they were sophisticated
women. I had been timid about approaching high-society women when we were in
Japan. In chapel there one day, Jim had pointed out a woman sitting a couple
rows ahead of us. “That’s the couple that might come to our Bible study.” I
looked at her, just from the rear, and I thought, “Whoo! What a cool cookie!”
Everything about her was immaculate—every hair was in place, her earrings were
perfectly straight. I was intimidated.

Her
husband came to the first Bible study alone. He went home and said, “Arlene,
you have to come, too, because Mrs. Wilson was there.” She had said it was only
for men. So they came together the following week, and it was just the four of
us. Jim and I did what was very embarrassing to us, a Bible study back and
forth to each other, because those two didn’t say anything! We were on 1 John 1
that night, so Jim and I studied it together in their presence. I was so
embarrassed. Then they went home.

Later,
Arlene drove me along the bluff in Yokohama. She put her head down on the
steering wheel (when the car was stopped!), and she said, “Bessie, that night
after the Bible study, nine years of bitterness was poured out before the
Lord.”

She
was a backslidden Christian. Her first husband had died in the Air Force. They
hadn’t been married long enough for him to change his insurance over to her.
His mother got everything, and Arlene didn’t get anything. She had gone through
nine years of bitterness over it.

Then
she married Dick. He was not a Christian, but he was willing to be led in
spiritual things. She knew the truth, and she wanted him under the sound of the
gospel, but didn’t want him to take it seriously. Then after coming to our
Bible study she repented and poured her bitterness out to the Lord.

Dick
told us later, “If I ever invited anyone home for dinner, the banging that went
on in the kitchen!” She knocked pans around and put up a fuss. Arlene had to
have two weeks’ notice if anyone was coming over. Then everything changed.
“After that night when she confessed her bitterness to the Lord, I had a
different wife.” She became the woman would collect strays after church and
take them home. She might have a dozen or more people home to eat every Sunday.
She lost the cool, poised look and became a warm, friendly person. God
transformed her socially. But it was the confession of sin that started it.

Spiritually.
This is the last aspect of victorious Christian living. Of course, the aspects
are all connected. What you are doing physically is going to affect you
spiritually, and if your mind is all screwed up, you’re not going to be
spiritually alert, either. The main thing to keep yourself in good spiritual
shape is to keep close to the Lord. Be in the Word and in prayer every day.

I
would like to end this chapter with a prayer of Amy Carmichael’s. It is a
simple prayer. “All I need, all I want, is Your ungrieved presence with me,
Lord.” That is profound. All I need and all I want is Your
ungrieved presence with me, Lord. Can you pray that today?

At
the time of this writing, I have been a Christian for fifty-four years. It gets
sweeter all along the way. I identify with the Psalmist who said, “Whom have I
in heaven but Thee? There is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee. My
flesh and my heart faileth, but God is the strength of my life and my portion
forever” (Psalm 73:25-26). All I need, all I want, is Your ungrieved presence.

If
you are not unequally yoked, but you know women who are, there is much you can
do to help them. But don’t get too sympathetic with them. If they have married
out of the will of God, say so. And say, “Confess this, be forgiven, and
let’s get on with the solutions.” Do not get sucked into a never-ending
“counseling” where you hear the same old story over and over again and never
get anywhere. Give them positive reinforcement for living an obedient life.
“You did a good job with that one! Now let’s go on to another one, and see how
you do on that.”

I
pray that the single women reading this will be spared unwise marriages, unholy
marriages, that you will become such women of God that you will recognize God’s
will when it comes, and that you will be united with men of like mind. For
those women who have disobeyed and are suffering for it, let me encourage you
to walk closely with the Lord.

“Then those who feared the LORD talked with each other, and
the LORD listened and heard. A scroll of remembrance was written in his
presence concerning those who feared the LORD and honored his name” (Malachi
3:16).

“We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you
also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and
with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete” (1 John
1:3-4).

God listens to us talk about Him and has a special book of
remembrance for us. Our fellowship with each other is also with the Father and
the Son.

Much of Christian “fellowship” is fun and food, and not much
with or about the Father and Son. Our fellowship is with each other and
with the Father and the Son.

This post coordinates with today’s reading in the To
the Word! Bible Reading Challenge. If you are not in a daily reading plan,
please join us at TotheWord.com. We would love to have you reading with us.

by Bessie Wilson

If your husband is not a Christian, ask God to give you the kind of a
Christian life that he won’t be able to resist.

When
I first met the woman in Monterey who had married the officer in India, she had
just gone through a good spiritual experience with the Lord. She was a very
perky English woman, and she told me in her pert way, “Bessie, I gave him tit
for tat for many years! I was always after him for deceiving me that he was a
Christian when he wasn’t.”

She
gave him an awful time. Then God spoke to her about the gentle and quiet spirit
and submission to her husband. It was truly a very hard situation for her to be
quiet in. “Do you know what? The Lord gave me grace to say to my husband, ‘May
I go to church?’ He’d say, ‘No.’ And I could say, ‘Alright dear.’ There was no
venom in what I said. Before I knew it, he was suggesting that I go.”

After
a while, we began to have Bible studies in her home. Her husband wouldn’t come
to the study, but he’d come for refreshments afterwards, and he would mingle
with the Christians. I believe that man trusted the Lord before his death. He
died in Europe on the Volga River, a sudden death as he was traveling. I’ve
often thought of how his wife said, “I was able to be sweet with the Lord’s
sweetness, and his attitude changed.”

Another
officer’s wife asked me one time what to do about her non-Christian husband.
She had been a non-Christian herself when she married him, and now that she had
been saved she found herself unequally yoked, but not through sin. Jim and I
suggested that she do everything in her power to obey his wishes. She did. This
was so new to him! Their relationship got better until he began to give her
privileges rather than denying her privileges. In the end, he came to Christ.

Whatever
your marriage is like, this is not a situation that cannot be redeemed. Ask God
to fill you with hope. “The God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in
believing, that you may abound in hope through the power of the Holy Ghost”
(Rom. 15:13).

Put
your house in order. Start by respecting your husband. I always get a blessing
out of hearing a talk reminding me that I’m to respect Jim. I had some strikes
against me at the beginning: I am older than him by eight and a half years, I
had been a Christian much longer, I had been in Christian work a long time, and
I knew the Bible better than he did. (On this last one, I was forced to come to
the conclusion that where I knew it, he obeyed it!)

My
respect for Jim was immediate. Whenever I met single missionaries in Japan, I
wasn’t above looking at them and thinking, “Is this maybe the one who’s going
to be for me, Lord?” I didn’t find a man I respected among the missionaries.
Then this naval officer came trooping in with a passion for the Lord and for
people to come to Christ, and he was the first Christian man who claimed my
respect.

Respecting
your husband is a vital part of victorious Christian living. It is the most
important thing you do in marriage. It is easy for us to look at our husbands
critically, to put their faults and failings under a microscope. Other people,
other women especially, can meet our husbands and say, “What a neat guy!
I’d like to have a relationship with him.” Do you know what men are subjected
to in the world today? In the business world, and in the university world, too,
there are many women who are out to seduce.

Look
at your husband the way others do. How does another woman see him? How does his
secretary see him? Of course, he might be putting his best foot forward out
there—but he’s probably getting some respect there, too.

Do
some brainstorming about how you can show respect to him. Take a look at how
you treat your husband, how you talk to him, and how you talk about
him. For example, if you have a sense of humor, sometimes you can do and say
things to your husband that aren’t respectful, not deliberately, but out of a
misplaced sense of fun. Your aim should be to respect him from the heart, to be
able to truly say, “I am privileged to be the wife of this man. Sure, he’s got
faults—but so do I. He does things that are stupid, but so do I.” Whether you
are in a happy marriage or an unequally yoked marriage, learn to respect him.
Respecting your husband is essential for victorious Christian living.

What
if he is not respectable? I was very astounded by something Jim showed me on
this some years ago. He asked me, “What does Ephesians say a man is to do to
his wife?”

“He’s
to love her.” I knew that answer! “He is to love me as Christ loved the
Church.”

“Where
does that love come from?” Jim asked.

“Well,
I should be fairly attractive to him. But also he should draw on the Lord’s
love for me.”

Then
Jim pointed out something very important. “The Scripture says a woman is to
respect her husband. A wife immediately objects, ‘What if he isn’t
respectable?!’ Well, what if a woman isn’t lovely? Does that clear her husband
of loving her?”

No,
it doesn’t. He is to love her, unlovely as she might be. And we wives are to
respect our husbands, even if they are not respectable. Treat a man like a dog,
and he’s going to act like a dog. Treat him with courtesy, and you’ll be amazed
at the results.

(To be continued on Wednesday.)

by Bessie Wilson

If you came to Christ after your
marriage, there is hope for your spouse. There is a lot of hope. I have
seen unbelieving spouses come to the Lord time and time again through living
with a believer. When a woman comes to Christ after she is married, and she has
a non-Christian husband, normally it isn’t long before she’s able to win him,
because the change in her is so attractive.

Quite
a few years ago, following the cultural revolution in China, Chinese graduate
students began to come to the U.S. to study. Jim and I got to know quite a few
of them, and we held English classes for them in our home. After a while, they
knew enough English that they didn’t come around anymore.

A
year or so later, one of these young men called Jim. He said, “My wife is just
arrived from Shanghai. I’d like you to teach her English, but I want you to
teach her English from the Bible.” We had not done this with the others.

“Why
from the Bible?” Jim asked him.

“She’s
a Christian,” he said.

Jim
went to their house, and he found out that this wife had become a Christian in
China after her husband came to the States to study. When she arrived here, he
found out that he had a new wife. The woman that he was married to now was
wonderful, and the one he had been married to in Shanghai had been awful!

Jim
taught her English from the Bible, but the husband had to help out with the
interpretation, and so he listened to the gospel and became a Christian. The
main reason for his conversion was that he saw the great change Jesus Christ
had wrought in his wife.

If
one spouse becomes a Christian after marriage, we can expect that the other one
will also. On the other hand, when a Christian in disobedience marries a
non-Christian, it does not work the same way. Either one spouse pushes on the
other, or the Christian decides not to push and just live like a non-Christian.
It does not often turn out well. Even if the woman lives out the 1 Peter 3 life
(winning your spouse without a word), it is a long, hard road, and the
unbelieving spouse may never come to faith in Christ.

Don’t
marry a non-Christian thinking you can convert him or her after you are
married. Sometimes, when a woman is in love with a man she knows is not a
Christian, she thinks she’ll be able to lead him to Christ in the marriage. It
won’t happen. She begins to talk to him about the gospel later on, and he says,
“You loved me the way I was when we got married; don’t try to change me now.”

I
have one friend in this situation who comes to town periodically, and we have
lunch together. I always ask her how the marriage is going. Last time, she told
me, “We think he may have come to Christ, but there still isn’t that
fellowship.” This has been going on for years and years. The same woman told
me, years ago, “Another girl turned my husband down for marriage because she
was a Christian and he wasn’t.” That girl gave him his walking ticket. “He met
me, and I was a Christian, but not close to the Lord, so I married him.”

Single
women, hear this: it isn’t enough to say, “Because I met him at church or in a
Bible study, he’s automatically in.” He isn’t. I have a dear English
friend in Monterey, CA. She was serving in India in the Canadian Air Force, and
she met a man in the Officers’ Christian Fellowship Bible studies there. He was
in the Indian army and later became a Canadian citizen. He was always at the
Bible studies, and he participated in them, so she assumed that he was a
Christian. They were married, and then he said, “Now, this has to stop. I’ve
never been a Christian; I have no intention of becoming one.”

What
was she to do? Did she have a right to say, “Now that we are married, you
should change for me”? No.

But
he deceived her!

Yes,
he did. Did she check it out with the Lord? God is faithful. If she had said,
“Lord, this man is in a Bible study, and he seems to be a Christian. Is
he?” God would have shown her. God will show you, but you have to check. Look
for how much fruit there is in his life. Find out whether he is a true
Christian or not.

Being
unequally yoked is hard to bear when it is done in disobedience, but there is
forgiveness. If you recognize that you married in disobedience, and you are
suffering for it, the first thing to do is confess that marriage as sin.[1]
When you are cleansed of the sin, then you will be able to face “what do I do
now with it.” Confess the disobedience, then trust God to redeem the situation.

So
many women won’t take the step of saying, “I was wrong.” You cannot build a
faithful life on unconfessed sin. If you were wrong to get married, the thing
to do is say, “Lord, forgive me.” Even a marriage to a Christian can be wrong
if you had your priorities screwed up when you married.

 Once
you are free of that sin, then you can approach the Scripture and ask,
“Now how do I win this man to Christ?” 1 Peter 3 says that you can win him
without a word by your meek and quiet spirit.[2]
Before you go on, thank God for the cleansing. We sometimes live in a muddle
because we haven’t confessed sin, and then we haven’t thanked God
for cleansing us from that sin. Thank God, then ask Him to help you put your
spiritual house in order. Ask Him to give you the kind of a Christian life that
your husband won’t be able to resist.

by Bessie Wilson

“Do
not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and
wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?
What harmony is there between Christ and Belial? What does a believer have in
common with an unbeliever? What agreement is there between the temple of God
and idols? For we are the temple of the living God, as God has said, ‘I will
live with them and walk among then, and I will be their God, and they will be
My people. Therefore, come out from them and be separate,’ says the Lord.
‘Touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you. I will be a Father to you, and
you will be My sons and daughters,’ says the Lord Almighty” (2 Cor. 6:14-18).

Although
this text is speaking of uniting with unbelievers in idolatry, it can logically
be applied to the subject of marriage as well. Paul is quoting the Old
Testament which prohibits yoking an ox with a donkey. Being unequally yoked
like this does harm to both animals. Paul gives five reasons for not being “in
harness” together with an unbeliever, formulated as rhetorical questions. “For
what do righteousness and wickedness have in common?” Paul doesn’t wait for an
answer. He knows the Corinthians know the answer is nothing. “Or what
fellowship can light have with darkness?” None. “Or what harmony is there
between Christ and Belial?” Belial is the form of a demon. “What does a
believer have in common with an unbeliever? Or what agreement is there between
the temple of God and idols?” No agreement. It is disobedience to God to marry
an unbeliever.

Not
being united in your orientation to Christ is one of the major causes of
marriage problems for believers. I know many Christians who are married to
nonbelievers. There are two ways that happens. One is that a Christian marries
a non-Christian. The other case is where someone becomes a Christian after they
are married, and their spouse remains a non-Christian. In both cases, the
difference puts a strain on the marriage. It is not fair to either person.
However, 1 Corinthians tells us that if you are married to an unbeliever, you
are not to leave them because of that. If the unbeliever wants to stay
married to you, you are to stay married. The believer must not take the
initiative to get divorced.

“I
didn’t know it was wrong to marry an unbeliever. Nobody told me!” When
Christians tell me this, my question to them is, “How could you miss it?”
Through prayer and through reading the Word of God, how could you miss it? We
cannot blame a sinful relationship on the books we have read or the ministers
we listen to. It is not their fault we don’t know what God has said so clearly
in His Word. From the beginning of the Scriptures to the end, God tells us that
there is no fellowship between light and darkness. It is your responsibility to
be in the Word on a regular basis and to know what God has to say to you there.

When
women say, “Nobody told me it was wrong to marry him,” I feel like asking them,
“Would you have listened?” Those who have said this to me were already so
emotionally involved with the man in question that they almost couldn’t stop.
They have already given their heart to him, and in the euphoria of emotion,
they think that love conquers all, and they will be able to make it.

Whether
you knowingly disobey or unknowingly disobey because you don’t know what
the Scriptures say, it is disobedience to marry an unbeliever, and it puts you
in a very sad situation. At the time of this writing, my daughter has just
become engaged. She loves her fiancé, he loves her, they have God’s blessing on
their union, and they are seeking to serve the Lord together. There is a great
joy in their relationship, as there should be. Marriage should be the happiest
state. There is nothing more grievous than when a strong Christian gets
sucked away into a relationship with a non-Christian.

What
causes that to happen? Here is something for single women to be especially
aware of. The girls at Washington State University used to tell me, “You don’t
know what it’s like to sit night after night in the dorm with no date! The
Christian guys don’t date us because they know they have to be seriously
considering marriage before we’ll think of dating them.” They feel left out,
and it is a great temptation to accept an invite from a kind and attentive
non-Christian man who shows an interest in them.

I
was single until I was thirty-three, so I know the feeling of loneliness and
how left out you can feel when you see other people happily getting married.
But even back in those days, I was objective about it. Many of my friends got
married, and there I was in my late twenties, and then my early thirties, an
unclaimed blessing! Then I would visit those friends, and I would go away from
their homes saying, “I am sure glad that is not my lot.” I saw that even
when they were Christians, if it was not a marriage sanctioned and blessed
by the Lord, it was a heavy scene. So I determined when I was still in my early
twenties that I wanted God’s choice for a spouse. I would never consider
marrying a non-Christian, but I also knew that I wasn’t smart enough to marry
my own choice and have a happy marriage.

After
some years, I thought, “Lord, don’t You have any really godly men left?” I was
getting on in my twenties, and there were no good men in sight. Then came the
time to leave for Japan where I was to be a missionary. On December 6, 1948, a
cold, cold day in Edmonton, Alberta, I left on the long journey to Yokohama.
All my Christian InterVarsity students came down to the train to see me off,
and somebody made the bright remark of, “Now you’ll never get a man.” You’ll
never find a single, godly man in post-war Japan.

I
quipped something along the lines of, “Well, I haven’t done too well here.”
What do you say to something like that? But I added this in faith: “If God has
a man for me, He can bring him to me wherever I am.” That is exactly what
God did—He landed Jim right on my doorstep! As I recall, I wasn’t too happy
about it, because it was my week to do housekeeping, and we didn’t have enough
food for guests, and I had to do some maneuvering. But God brought that man to
me.

I
feel sorry for the women who do not have faith in God to lead them and instead
use their own wisdom to evaluate a man on his aims, his status, his
professional ability, his church attendance, and so on.       

Where
are the godly single men? My daughter had to go to Turkey to find hers. People
told her that she would never get a man. She was holding out for a man like her
father. She wanted nothing less than someone who had a love for the Lord like
Jim and was obedient. That was what attracted her to Ararat.

(To be continued on Wednesday.)

Love
from a husband does not always need to end up in sex. If a wife is not up to it
at a particular time, she may get suspicious any time her husband becomes
affectionate. She may even become cynical about expressions of love. A wise
husband needs to learn many ways to express love to his wife besides sex.

Learn
all kinds of giving ways to show love that go beyond saying, “I love
you,” and giving her flowers and hugs and kisses (although those are very good
ways to start, and you should certainly be doing all these things). Think of
things you don’t do that you should start doing. I have learned over fifty
years of marriage to pick up stuff that I didn’t pick up for years. My socks!
Could be that. There were things around the house that I knew would get put
away or taken care of by my wife, and I could ignore them and go on my merry way.
She was healthy and had nothing else to do at home. She could do it! I don’t
know why I ever even thought this way. Do you want to show love to your
wife? Pick up your socks. Take out the trash. Put the toilet seat down. Wipe
the bathroom counter after you shave. Fix that broken thing you’ve been
ignoring. If you put your mind to it, you can probably think of many practical
ways to show love to your wife.

Look
around. Stop and assess: what are some things you could do at home that would
bless your wife? Bessie had trouble with her back off and on for years. One
time, we went to a doctor in Spokane, and he asked, “What size bed do you
have?”

“Queen
size,” she told him.

“Do
you make the bed?”

“Yes.”

“That’s
your problem. Reaching over the queen-size bed as you’re making it is hurting
your back.”

“Ok,
that’s solved,” I said. “I’ll make the bed.” I have been making the bed every
morning for many years now. Making beds is not high on my own priority list,
but “whatever you do, do it heartily as to the Lord, knowing that of the Lord
you shall receive the reward of your inheritance” (Col 3:23-24). It is an act
of love to Bessie.

There are
many little things like this that you can do for your wife. Give to her for her
sake. Do things out of consideration and thoughtfulness for her that do not
have an immediate payback to you.