It gives a more personal meaning to the scriptures in Isaiah 55 where God declares, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts; neither are my ways your ways.” Sometimes it’s humanly impossible to understand God’s ways concerning certain things He allows or even causes to happen.

God used those that were enemies of His people, to teach them things they wouldn’t listen to or know in other ways. He used people who even mocked Him, to carry out His missions. I’ll NEVER understand that, this side of heaven. And dare I say that He uses even our spouse (and/or others), when they are the least likely ones we would want to learn from? I’ve seen this repeatedly, both in my own life and in the life of others.

Years ago I came across something written by Oswald Chambers in his book My Utmost for His Highest that helped me to open my mind and heart to this when it happens. Yet even after reading this, I still struggle sometimes. But as former missionary Elisabeth Elliot once said, “When I hear someone say they are struggling with something, it is usually found that it is a case of delayed obedience.” And that’s true with me at times.

Oswald Chambers wrote one time on The Commission of the Call upon our lives as followers of Jesus Christ and how He sometimes uses those people and events — that we least expect He would use, to help us to live as Christ. We pray you will read it with an open mind and heart. Mr Chambers wrote:

“We take our own spiritual consecration and try to make it into a call of God, but when we get right with Him He brushes all this aside. Then He gives us a tremendous, riveting pain to fasten our attention on something that we never even dreamed could be His call for us. And for one radiant, flashing moment we see His purpose, and we say, ‘Here am I send me’ (Isaiah 6:8).

“This call has nothing to do with personal sanctification, but with being made into broken bread and poured-out wine. Yet God can never make us into wine if we object to the fingers He chooses to use to crush us. We say, ‘If God would only use His own fingers, and make us broken bread and poured-out wine in a special way, then I wouldn’t object!’ But when He uses someone we dislike, or some set of circumstances to which we said we would never submit, to crush us, then we object.

“Yet we must never try to choose the place of our own martyrdom. If we are ever going to be made into wine (as God calls us to be), we will have to be crushed —you cannot drink grapes. Grapes become wine only when they have been squeezed.

“I wonder what finger and thumb God has been using to squeeze you?

“Have you been as hard as a marble and escaped? If you are not ripe yet, and if God had squeezed you anyway, the wine produced would have been remarkably bitter. To be a holy person means that the elements of our natural life experience the very presence. We have to be placed into God and brought into agreement with Him before we can be broken bread in His hands. Stay right with God and let Him do as He likes, and you will find that He is producing the kind of bread and wine that will benefit His other children as well.”

Oswald Chambers also wrote the following that brings this point home even further. He wrote:

“A saint’s life is in the hands of God like a bow and arrow in the hands of an archer. God is aiming at something the saint cannot see, and He stretches and strains, and every now and again the saint says — ‘I cannot stand any more.’ God does not heed, He goes on stretching till His purpose is in sight, then He lets fly. Trust yourself in God’s hands. Maintain your relationship to Jesus Christ by the patience of faith. ‘Though He slay me, yet will I wait for Him.’

“Faith is not a pathetic sentiment, but robust vigorous confidence built on the fact that God is holy love. You cannot see Him just now, you cannot understand what He is doing, but you know HIM.”

I don’t know what God is doing in your life and in your marriage, but I pray that even though He may be crushing you like grapes, or pouring you out like wine, or stretching you as a bow and arrow, or is taking your through a time when you cannot see and the strain of it is more than you think you can stand at times — I pray you will trust Him because you know His heart.

I pray that if God uses your spouse to say something to you, and even if it is said in a way that repulses or enrages you —even then you will trust yourself in God’s hands and pay attention to the “right” that may be hidden within the wrong way that your spouse is presenting it.

Author Stormie Omartian wrote something in her powerful book, Praying Through the Deeper Issues of Marriage that may help us if we heed what she is saying. She wrote:

“We have to get to the point in our marriage where we live with a repentant heart all the time. A heart that says ‘I am willing to see my errors, and no matter how I have been offended by the things my spouse has done, I will clean house on my own soul. I will pray to have eyes to see the truth about myself before I pray the same for my husband (wife).”

Lord, please open the eyes of our hearts that we may see you. “Search me O God and know my heart, test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me and lead me in the way everlasting” (Psalm 139:23-24).

Blessings in Him,
Cindy and Steve Wright