Trying to make things happen

I sinned against my husband this week.  As I began reflecting on the "why" the Lord began downloading a lot of things into my heart. 

My sin came from trying to make something happen.  The thing I wanted to make happen I felt had God's blessing and favor on it and I didn't feel my husband was seeing "God's perspective" and so I thought I could take matters into my own hands to make it happen.  As you may have already guessed, this didn't work out very well. 

As I was reflecting on this incident, I thought, "the motivation behind my sin was good, I wanted God's will to be done!! So of course that should have justified the means."  But as I reflected more I was reminded of Rebekah's incident (Genesis 27).  Rebekah knew of God's promises concerning Jacob.  God had in fact told her that the older (Easau) would serve the younger (Jacob; Genesis 25:23) and now Isaac was about to bless Esau when it was in fact Jacob's blessing.  She was not about to let that happen.  She took matters into own hand.  Jacob did receive the blessing, "God's will," but her method ended up costing her alot and she had to send her son away for 20 years.

I then was reminded of Sarah.  She too knew that God had promised Abraham a son but it obviously wasn't happening through her.  So she too, took matters into her own hands (Genesis 16), and had her maidservant Hagar sleep with her husband.  The result, Ishmael, ended up being a thorn in Sarah's side for many, many years. 

With both of these ladies, they knew God's will and His promises to their families.  They didn't see their husbands "moving on it" or making it happen, so they decided to take matters into their own hands to make it happen.  A version of "God's will" ended up happening but their forced version also had many negative consequences attached to it and instead of having a beautiful thing, they ended up with some very heavy burdens.

Here is the train of progress:

Desire to see God's will done.
Mistrust of your husband's heart and ability to make it happen.
Taking matters into your own hands: sin.
Ultimately mistrusting God's heart.

Seeing it this way, brought me back to the full truth.  When we as wives, take matters into our own hands, we aren't just mistrusting our husbands, we ultimately are mistrusting God.  We don't think God is able to bring about His will without our help. We've deceived ourselves to think that our husbands are the problem, when in fact the problem remains in our own hearts we ultimately still don't trust God and we think he is holding out on us.  Where did this all come from? Eve.  Eve took matters into her own hand.  She felt that God was holding out on her.  He was keeping her from something good, so she would make the "good" thing happen.  The consequence:
Genesis 3:16
Yet your desire will be for your husband,
And he will rule over you.

Ladies, we have been fighting against this consequence ever since and even as Christians we still try to fight against it, but we disguise our sin in the clothes of making "God's will" happen and thus we justify ourselves when we subvert the authority of our husband.  But even after Christ, God has a design for our own protection and blessing.  Here it is in Ephesians 5:22-24:

Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord.
For the husband is the head of the wife as
Christ is the head of the church,
his body, of which he is the Savior.
Now as the church submits to Christ,
so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

In regards to our marriages, this is the design of God:
Christ is the head
Your husbands are in submission to Him.
We are in submission to our husbands.
This provides a place of protection and blessing.

This sums up what I've learned this week:

God does not need to circumvent His design
to make His will happen.

I definitely haven't figured out how to walk this out perfectly, but it has opened my eyes.  What I am working on is trusting my husband's heart and ultimately trusting God's heart.  The safest way for me to operate in God's actual will is by operating in the position that He has created for me.

In Christ,

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