I’ve had to remind people severally that I’m not a relationship and marriage minister. But I keep having people invite me to come speak on the subject of marriage. Most of them would say that they listened to the series or teaching I took in our church on the subject, and they were very blessed. My response to them has always been this; “I take time to teach on relationships and marriage because I know it is critical to fulfilling destiny. Our assignment as a church is to empower people to fulfil their God-given destiny.
Friend, marriage is critical to the fulfilment of your destiny. Destiny is not because of marriage but marriage is because of destiny. God gave Adam a work before He gave him a wife (Genesis 2:15-18). It was the work of keeping the garden that necessitated his having to need a wife. Unfortunately, Adam lost the garden when he fumbled maritally. Your marriage will have an effect on your purpose and destiny.
Your marriage will affect your destiny, either for good or bad. Like Adam, a lot of people have lost their place in God’s program because of marriage. Although, some people refuse to marry or have a kind of phobia for marriage because of this. However, you need to understand that if you are meant to marry, refusing to marry or living with the fear of marriage will only compound the problem for you. You need to find out what God has to say concerning your marriage and destiny (Proverbs 4:7).
We must be careful of the subtle strategy of the devil to downplay on marriage and its importance to fulfilling destiny (2 Corinthians 2:11). We now have people who advocate that you don’t have to marry or do well maritally for you to be successful and fulfil your destiny. Unfortunately, we have a lot of role models with bad marriage who are still carrying on with their roles in life.
Truly, you must not allow a bad marriage to stop your destiny (Romans 8:28). But you need to learn how to prevent a bad marriage. There are wise Abigails who have gone ahead to marry Nabal, a fool. There are good-hearted Ahabs who have married wicked Jezebels (1 Samuel 25:23-25, 1 Kings 21:1-16). Singles should stop pointing to those with bad marriages who are billionaires, pastors of mega churches, social media influencers, etc. as examples, else, they end up like them (Proverbs 13:20).
For every bad model out there, there are many good ones. It is who or what you focus on that matters (Isaiah 51:1-2). This is why God admonished us to look unto Abraham and Sarah. God always has His models and patterns in every generation. Your parents might have modelled marriage wrongly for you, but you have enough good examples in the Bible and in our contemporary world. Stop giving excuses for a bad marriage and stop living in fear (Job 3:25). Let God help you today!
‘Demola Awoyele
Lead Pastor,
Destiny Impact Church
Akure, Nigeria