Donovan and Gail met when one of her friends dragged her to a conference for singles at her friend’s church eight years ago. Gail’s grandmother had taken her to a Christmas pageant when she was little, but before she met Donovan, that summed up any proximity she’d ever encountered with the name, Jesus Christ. Extremely driven and focused on success, Gail never saw herself as the marrying type. She wanted to enjoy her success, travel, and maybe one day start her own consulting firm. Donovan, on the other hand, wanted to be a husband and a father, and having a family had always been his dream. He was raised in a devout Christian home, and these values were extremely important to him.
They married when they were both 28, and although their chemistry had always been undeniable, Donovan and Gail were both extremely stubborn. When they argued, they went for the jugular. Things could become so ugly that it was nothing for days to go by without either of them speaking to one another. Each dug into their own sides, and often issues were never resolved but buried underneath lots of other stuff.
Gail gave her life to Christ shortly after she’d given birth to their first child, Shebria, but she has not been as serious about her spiritual growth in Christ as Donovan had hoped. When she initially discovered her pregnancy, she and Donovan talked about plans for their expanding family. He assumed she would take some time off from work after the baby was born. He also assumed that her career goals would shift to accommodate the family that they’d agreed they both wanted. Gail was determined to do it all. During her first trimester their arguments about this were so frequent and intense that Gail threatened to have an abortion. They ultimately worked it out, but now, every time they have a heated argument, Donovan brings this up.
Shebria is one of the greatest joys of Gail’s life. She’s gutted that she ever considered aborting her and carries such shame about it. This guilt is a very heavy weight over their marriage. Donovan hasn’t forgiven her, and she feels severely punished when he brings it up. They love each other very much but are emotionally exhausted and although Donovan wants their marriage to work, Gail can’t see a place where he won’t try to hold the leverage of guilt over her. She doesn’t want to go through it anymore.
It doesn’t matter who you are, everyone brings some form of baggage into their significant relationship. Sometimes these issues are incredibly challenging to get over, but in Christ, the reality is that they can be resolved. Recognizing that the love of Jesus Christ is the answer to all our problems is the chief cornerstone of our faith. Believing in the power of his love to heal and restore is necessary to build any long-lasting and quality relationship. The bottom line is that we cannot tear down those we love, and a need to be right must not be greater than our desire to live in the love and light of this truth.
In today’s environment, we hear a lot about strongholds and emotional baggage, because it’s common knowledge that these are cultivated to be tools in the devil’s toolbox. They stem from fear and unbelief and are used by the enemy to destroy any kind of unity. They are designed to break us down piece by piece because we are too blind to see what we’re doing to ourselves and to our relationship with God. Our need to be right and to take the high ground is weaponized in our own homes, and this should never be. Our most basic fear is one of giving up or acquiescing to someone or something that we feel will attack or minimize some aspect of our being. We think that if that thing is proven right and we are proven wrong, then we have lost. The truth is that no matter the circumstance or condition, only love wins.
Strongholds and emotional baggage are internal weights that are not always understood, but they must always be released. The way to release anything that weighs us down internally is to surrender our will for the Will of God. Those we love most will often mirror some of the internal issues we have either refused or neglected to address. The significant person in our lives will show us the very thing that is keeping us connected to pain and keeping us in some way disconnected from the love of God in Christ. Through this person, a choice is presented. We can choose to confront the thing that holds us back and surrender it to Jesus Christ, or we can choose to continue to hold on to it. It’s not about the other person or any shortcoming they may have, it’s about our obedience and humility to God’s Will and Word.
God is Spirit, God is love, and God is perfect! He’s all-knowing, all-powerful, and everywhere present. He is our Creator, and He is the Source of all blessings. Genesis 1:26 tells us that He created us in His image, and we must never mistake the reality that we are spirits as well. We are not souls with spirits. We are spirits with a soul, housed in a body. Our souls and bodies do not and cannot define us, they are the vehicles by which we, as God’s spiritual children, are known.
With every breath, we are commanded by Jesus Christ to express our oneness with God. This is what we were created to do. Galatians 5:6(NLT) tells us, “What is important is faith expressing itself in love.” Whether we are right or wrong in our opinions or assumptions, judging the ones we love, and judging others, is not an expression of faith. And it is not the Will of God. Jesus Christ is the Judge, and judgment belongs to him. Our responsibility as children of light is to pray, to pray for ourselves and to pray for those that have not yet come into the knowledge of Christ that we may have.
The world’s way of handling issues is through excess, condemnation, and narcissism. Couples often go down the route of wanting more, more, and more. They want more of each other, and their expectations of each other become more and more unreasonable. Each will demand from the other a kind of love that they themselves are incapable of giving. When it becomes apparent that the person of their affection can’t fill the voids in their hearts and souls, their love for this person diminishes, and they begin to look for another. This is a very vicious cycle of negativity and immaturity, and it perpetuates division and spiritual neglect.
Most of us refuse to surrender because we are afraid that we will be crushed. We fear our foundations will tumble to the ground, but those foundations were faulty from the beginning. They must come down so that a solid foundation on the goodness of God in Christ can be built. 1John 4:18 tells us that God’s perfect love has no fear, because it expels all fear. God’s love is the greatest power in all of eternity. It far exceeds the bandwidth of choosing sides of right and wrong because God’s love is always right, and it doesn’t need to prove itself. So, to choose love is to choose right.
Confronting and surrendering is a continuous spiritual process of correction for all living beings, and it will never cease. Taking off the thing that holds us down so that we can travel free and lighter signifies spiritual growth in Christ.
Jesus Christ teaches in John 15:13(NLT), “There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” This truth demolishes the world’s agenda of me, me, me. God’s love requires the discipline of sacrifice, because sacrifice restores balance. The disciplines of fasting and prayer, of denying self for the benefit of the ‘we’, this grounds us in the unity of Christ. It reveals that the enduring answer to conflict rests within the unfathomable power of God’s love. When we are truly poised to embrace it, the need to be right and the need to judge will be overcome by a desire to forgive. We will be overcome by God’s love, as the fear we’ve clung to for so long simply melts away. ■
Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.
“Overcome by God’s Love”, written for Springfield Fellowship © 2022. All rights reserved. All praise and honor to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.