Now on to the real importance...as a wife I am called to be my husband's help mate. With that new role in my life has come a new urgency and greater call for purity in my life, because without that I am doing my husband a disservice. I'm not being the help mate I could be and not living up to my calling in our marriage. The only way that will I will ever prevent that and continue on to be what God has called me to be in our marriage that we seek to be a God-honoring union will be my prayerful and purposeful intentional living. We will never do it haphazardly or by coincidence, and we will certainly never do it without the power of God in our lives. So I surrender daily. I seek Him daily.
One of many examples of what happens when we don't surrender and seek Him to transform us daily? Check out Numbers 12:1-15 when Miriam (who's name means rebellion), the sister of Moses and Aaron, starts to seek herself instead of her Creator. While reading the story I felt irked at Miriam. Her brother is Moses for crying out loud, the most humble man than anyone else on the face of the earth (Numbers 12:3), who sees the Lord like nobody else. Miriam should be happy to even be blood-related to this man! But instead she stirs up an argument because she doesn't agree with who he's married to and because the Lord speaks through Moses instead of her. Anybody else thinking-get over yourself Miriam...who do you think you are to say how the Lord chooses to speak. But then my heart started softening. We've all had our "Miriam" moments right?
We've all been there, we all have moment's of "shifty eye syndrome", when we stop seeking God, when we stop seeing what's crucial to our purpose on this Earth, and we all of a sudden shift our view to the non-important, the "fluff". But isn't that how Satan is gaining victory in our lives and our marriages? These times that our eyes shift away from Him may not seem huge, maybe we're still aiming for things that aren't bad. We're not going after an inappropriate relationship, we're just not seeking Him as much we should. We're not hurting anyone, we're just not living as God-honoring as we should. We're not getting sucked into a life of addiction, we're just not maintaining a life of complete purity. But little victory by little victory, Satan is pulling the wool over our eyes by convincing us that these things aren't "big deals". He's winning. And we're letting him.
At the end of the story of Miriam she turns "leprous like snow" (Numbers 12:10). This may seem like something that affected only her, but it didn't. Because of her unclean state she was confined outside the camp for seven days. What's the big deal about that? Because of her impurity, the entire camp that was traveling from Sinai to Kadesh Barnea was stuck. Her sin, that appeared "little" at first, held up everybody until she was considered clean again. All of a sudden I saw myself in Miriam. The areas of imperfections, sins, issues in my life didn't seem so little anymore. They had the potential to hinder my entire family-I had the potential to hinder my family.
If there's ever been a time to seek God with every fiber of my being, it's now.
If there's ever been a time to put aside the sin that so easily entangles (Hebrews 12:1), it's now.
If there's ever been a time to live every day of my life with intention and purpose all the while humbling asking God to further my feeble efforts, it's now.
Before I become a Miriam and prevent not only myself, but my family from being who God has called us to be.
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