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How to maintain sanity in your marriage

The Oxford Advanced Learners’ Dictionary defines the word “sanity” as the “the state of having a healthy mind and not being mentally ill” or “showing good judgment and understanding.” Because marital relationship has everything to do with your heart and heart relationship, there can hardly be sanity in your relationship if your heart is not pure.

So, to maintain sanity in your marriage, you need a pure heart. If you approach marital relationship with a pure heart, the blessings of God will not be far from that relationship and there will be sanity because of God’s involvement and presence. “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8).

To be pure means to be of only one form and to be completely undiluted. For sanity to be maintained in your relationship, you need to keep your heart pure against malice, immoral thoughts, evil vices and so on. Having dirty conversations can also make your heart get polluted with dirty images.

If for instance, your spouse offends you and you harbor unforgiveness, it means that you cannot at that point, listen to anything he or she has to say, offer or suggest, irrespective of how good and helpful that idea or suggestion may be. This alone is enough to remove sanity from your marriage because such situation may not produce good judgment and understanding. When you harbor grudges against your spouse, you will not allow him or her to invite your in-laws or host them at that period.

If he or she disregards your feelings and goes ahead to bring them in, it will be very evident when they come that you guys have scores to settle. By the time they observe this, they will naturally out of concern, want to intervene or mediate.

Now, the fruitfulness of such mediation is dependent on how neutral or biased whoever is mediating is. God help you if that in-law of yours is one that already harbours some reservations about you or the marriage. This kind of scenario is an invitation of third party influence over your marriage. If the intervener is someone matured at heart and of good judgment, praise God. If the person is not, he or she might further push your marriage into insanity. Another danger of a biased mediator is that the conflict you have with your spouse could be subjected to diverse wrong interpretations, even after the conflict, especially if the mediator is a spreader of what ought to be a classified information. You need a healthy mind to have a healthy relationship. You need an understanding heart to have sanity in your relationship. To have a healthy mind and understanding heart, you need a pure heart.

Most marital relationships that have lost sanity had one of the parties develop and execute impure thoughts. Now, it is easy for you to say: “well, I have a pure heart but my spouse does not.” You think you have a pure heart just as he or she thinks you are the one that lacks a pure heart. So, what do you do? Use the word of God to measure what you think is the pure heart you have. It is only the word of God that is a mirror we can use to assess our lives and our marriages to achieve sanity in marriage. If you are an impatient person, there can hardly be sanity in your marriage.

In fact, anyone who lacks patience should forget about a sane marriage because it is a major virtue required for marriage. If you are already married and impatient, you can attest to the fact that sanity is a battle in your relationship. What is the solution to your situation? Develop the virtue of patience. It is not even something you can do by your own power. It is a spirit. Surrender your heart and allow the word of God to rule you, your thoughts and actions. Until you do this, sanity in your marriage could remain an illusion.

If you intend to maintain sanity in your marriage, you need a prepared heart, a loving heart, a forgiving heart, a God-inclined heart and an understating heart. If you believe that it is natural to be unfaithful to someone’s spouse, there cannot be sanity in that relationship. God is a faithful God and always rewards faithfulness. If you are married and you are unfaithful to your spouse, trouble looms. I pity your future because there is always a future and punishment for wickedness. You seem to have forgotten this.

“Good understanding gains favour but the way of the UNFAITHFUL is hard” (Proverbs 13:15). Unfaithfulness creates hardship in marriage and accompanying absence of peace and sanity. Because the marital institution is God’s initiative, you need a God-inclined heart to enjoy sanity in marriage. If your heart has been broken severally by members of the opposite sex and you are embarking on marriage with a vengeance mission, your heart is not God-inclined. Therefore, you hardly can find joy in marriage. You also need an understanding heart to sustain sanity in your marriage.

If you do not have an understanding heart, do not bother to marry anybody. Understanding is “the ability to know how someone else is feeling or what the person’s situation is and can forgive the person if the person does something wrong.” There cannot be sanity in any marital relationship without the presence and control of the prince of peace who gives peace “not as the world giveth” (John 14:27). Before Jesus Christ was born, there was prophecy.

Isaiah 9:6 had prophesied that he would be called among other things, the PRINCE OF PEACE. So, there is no peace anywhere outside Jesus Christ. If you desire to have sanity in your marital relationship, you need a pure, patient and forgiving heart. Above all, you need to allow Jesus Christ, the prince of peace to possess your heart, your marriage and rule over them.

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