How to resurrect a marriage

Do you know what a marriage in need of resurrection looks like? Sometimes husbands and wives live lifeless marriages, longing for is someone to breathe new life into their relationships, but resurrection never happens unless someone dies first. Desperate couples may dress up their marriage and sit it up in a coffee shop and talk to it like it’s living … but it’s still dead.

Counterfeit resurrection doesn’t work.
Real rebirth only happens when real death comes first.

Most of us just celebrated Easter Sunday,  my favorite celebration.  After all, it’s about Jesus using his authority and power over everything to trample on Satan’s plan to snuff him out. We can be kind of hard on Jesus’ followers who cowered in desperate fear and grief on Saturday, but we can deal with Jesus’ death since we know how the weekend ended! Ultimately, we get to live! But what does that have to do with marriage?

Marriages rarely survive and definitely don’t thrive unless there’s death, a lot of death, daily death.

LIFE doesn’t just mean eternal life, though that’s AWESOME, but it means life NOW.  Jesus came so his followers could have life abundantly (John 10:10).   That’s day to day, in our marriages “life.” His followers are his disciples, maybe married disciples, and that’s where the death comes in. If we follow him, we have to die to ourselves daily … even in marriage.

And he said to all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. (Luke 9:23) For a wife to experience abundant “wife life,” she has to deny herself daily and have the kind of Christ-obedience that took him to the cross.

When Jesus died, imperfect couples like us got the opportunity to resurrect our fleshly, disappointing marriages and experience awesome, exciting, fulfilling, satisfying, life-filled marriages. Hard to understand? Even a religious leader who heard Jesus speak once sought him out in the dark (worried about his reputation) to clear it up. Nicodemus (John 3:1-9) had a hard time grasping how a single man could be reborn.

Resurrection of a dead body or a dead heart or a dead marriage has always been a miracle only made possible by the divine.

Is your marriage in need of resurrection? Resist the urge to dress it up and sit it up in a coffee shop and talk to it like it’s living. Jesus died so you can have eternal life in the future, abundant life now, and a marriage that’s reborn. He has authority over EVERYTHING, even what’s killing your marriage.

If you’re wondering why your marriage is lifeless, maybe you need to die first.  Let’s begin by reading this verse out loud together and then praying it with our own marriages in mind.

I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2:20)

Dear Lord,
I believe that I have been crucified with Christ and that I no longer live, but You live in me. The life I now live in my body, I live by faith in your Son, who denied himself, loving me, and gave himself for me. Because of this, Father, I pray You would help me die to myself daily as a wife, crucifying those sinful attitudes and actions that keep my marriage from really living, and resurrect my marriage to abundance!
Amen

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