Loving Your Wife

That's what Complementarianism is at its fin"est – and if more of us men got this rather than making excuses about our own sinful habits, our wives would benefit all the more and people might start seeing it for the beautiful thing it actually is. It is designed to protect and cause her to flourish richly in God's design for marriage, not for objectifying or denigrating her, or other women. You don't do it for praise from her or anyone else, or merely when she's looking. You suck it up, get tough on yourself, and love her regardless of whether or not you see the benefit. You work your butt off each and every day, come home and help with the kids and household, lead her in a loving manner toward Christ so that in you, she might see Him more clearly. The idea is one of leading through meekness, which to rob my pastor of yet another gem of wisdom, is strength; it is simply strength under control.

God Watches, We Surrender

We lay down at night, trusting our infinite God to keep us in His care. Pastor Adrian Reynolds expresses this idea poignantly: “the willingness to lie down and sleep is itself an expression of trust in the sovereign hand of God. Nothing is going to happen to me that He does not determine.” We are to trust God completely, regardless of our situation.
Rest generally is a form of creaturely surrender to God the Creator. The universal need for regular times of rest testifies to humanity’s great need for God as both Protector and Sustainer. Through soaring mountain ranges, immeasurable ocean depths, and the immensity of cosmic space, God impresses us with a sense of His awesome power. Yet through the frailty of the human condition, God helps us to understand His invisible attributes by way of contrast rather than by direct analogy. Men must rest from their labors while God works out His will unremittingly in Providence. Men are dependent whereas God depends upon nothing. Men must sleep, but God is ever watchful.

The Gift of Rest

http://www.alliancenet.org/christward/the-gift-of-sleep-capturing-the-biblical-vision-of-rest#.V9IYd_krLIU

Saturday, September 3, 2016

Contentment

"Obviously we live in a world that wants to breed discontent. Everything in our society is geared to make you unhappy with your current circumstances: your job, your wardrobe, your car, your house, your wife, place you live, whatever it might be. Everything in the advertising world is designed to breed discontent. To make you unhappy with what you have. Make you miserable with what you have with the current circumstance. And, of course, Satan feeds this because it essentially winds up in the violation and break down of every relationship. And that serves his purpose very well because it's contrary to God's design. So we're living, I think, in a time when we might be able to say that there is a more massive assault on our contentment than in any other time in human history because the sophistication of the attack has never been quite this extreme.".   -  John Macarthur