Can This Marriage Stuff Work?

By Bishop Lance L. Davis and Ronnie L. Lee

Can This Marriage Stuff Work? is designed to help couples who are involved in a committed relationship by offering them the necessary tools to build a strong and lasting relationship. It helps enable them to weather the storms that committed relationships can bring. Whether youve been married for many years, are just recently married, or in anticipation of journeying down the road of marriage, this book will offer assistance to you. Pastor Lee provides his readers with both practical and spiritual insight to strengthen them on their relationship journey. He shares some intimate details about his own successes and failures, pulling the mask off those long-held myths concerning marriage and the marriage bed. God never intended for marriage to become stale or boring. Pastor Lee gives helpful tips on how to heal past hurts and put the spice back into your relationship.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Feb 28, 2012
• ISBN: 9781449740610

Bishop Lance L. Davis

Pastor Ronnie L. Lee has a wealth of knowledge on the subject of marriage, as well as his personal experience and pastoral involvement in many marriages as counselor, pastor, and friend, not to mention his longtime love of his beautiful wife, Deidre.    He has had the privilege to aid in the restoration of many marriages, as well as counsel couples contemplating marriage. In this book, Pastor Lee shares his own personal struggles in marriage and how God has helped to equip him with the knowledge on how to build a stronger marriage one day at a time. 

Book preview

Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Opening Meditation

Introduction

Food for Thought

Chapter One The Divorce Epidemic

Food for Thought

Chapter Two The Silent Killer

Food for Thought

Chapter Three It Works If You Work It

Food for Thought

Chapter Four It’s a Heart Condition

Food for Thought

Closing Meditation Don’t believe what you see,

see what you believe.

About the Author

Sources

NCHS Press Room

National Center for Health Statistics

U.S Census Bureau

Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

Acknowledgements

As I complete this work, I would like to take this time to thank God and the guidance of the Holy Spirit for giving me the insight and enduring patience as I traveled this journey of writing. I pray that this material will be a blessing to married couples universally and to anyone who is in a committed relationship and contemplating marriage. As Senior Pastor of Nehemiah Christian Center Ministries, I would like to thank the wonderful members for their love and support.

I would like to give tribute to a great leader and pastor under whose leadership I served as a member, minister and ultimately as youth pastor for six years, the late Bishop William L. Jordan, Pastor of the St. Mark MBCC of Harvey, Illinois. I would like to also extend a special thanks to Bishop Lance Davis, Dr. Michael Reynolds, Mrs. Alzetta Bozeman Henry, Reverend Judge Darron E. Bowden, and Bonita Bennett for their support rendered during this ministry project. I would like to give a special thanks to Mr. and Mrs. Lavandis Brown for their contribution to the cover of this book.

A special thanks to Melvin and Mae Abbott for all of your love and support, and to the greatest mother in the world, Hannah M. Lee, whose corrective hand and undying love from the cradle to manhood made it possible for me to arrive at this place in my life in God. Words are inappropriate to express my gratitude to my lovely wife and beautiful daughters for being by my side, supporting me through love, prayer, and unending encouragement.

Foreword

When God decided to create the heavens and the earth, He chose to design it in such a way that it would prove to be conducive to housing the human race. Everything the Lord God made was not only good and very good, Genesis 1:31 but it was made for the good of mankind. After creating man and woman, the God of heaven and earth informed them of His global and universal will: that they should be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth. Core to His desire to have fellowship with His human creation was to provide them with everything that was needed in order for them to replenish the earth. When we see the words fruitful and multiply, according to the Hebrew language, it should bring to mind the concept of being productive and plentiful. God’s desire was that mankind would subdue or occupy and make productive the land while concurrently populating the earth with people who would be made physically in the image of Adam and Eve and spiritually in the image of God. Hence, it was God’s intention to populate the earth through a human unit called family. This unit would be led by a man and his wife, and the offspring or by-product of this unit would in turn procreate and produce after their own kind.

Then the notorious Enemy of God steps in with a diabolical plan to thwart the will of God by destroying the family. Satan knew very well that in order to destroy the Son who was to be born, he’d have to destroy the concept of family, which hinges on virtues like fidelity, loyalty, love, and trust. The Lord told Satan that there was a Son who would one day come forth whose heel Satan would bruise and who would be strong enough to crush the head of Satan in return. Therefore, from the beginning of the creation of the institution of marriage and the family, Lucifer resolved to destroy it and make himself like the Most High by ruling God’s people through disobedience and sin. Satan must have known that without the God-ordained family structure and without the family unit intact, he would be able to mislead God’s people into worshipping someone or something other than God Himself. The Prince of the air knew that his future would be secure if there was no family for the promised Son to be born into.

In order to destroy the family, the Devil sought to bring enmity between God and His human creation and thereby strip both the man and the woman of their earthly authority. It is from this ancient act of trickery and treachery that the fall occurred with deceit, distrust, disease, and death immediately stepping in. The first victim of this sinister satanic plan was Abel, the brother of Cain. Cain killed Abel not because he feared him or because Abel had violated him in any way but because he envied him. From the time of this senseless murder to today, brother has been found killing brother and father killing mother and daughters killing themselves. Today, disease, ignorance, murder, and poverty are widespread, and the earth is suffering from internal social poisoning. What happened? The fall—that’s what happened. Slowly, the institution of marriage is being discounted, devalued, and daily redefined by mankind.

Divorce has become the answer to all of life’s discomforts that come from living in a fallen world. While it is clear from the Holy Scriptures that God hates divorce, this process of marital cessation has become the option of nearly one-third of all marriages in the United States. This holds true whether the couple is Christian or not. What is the future of the family? you might ask. The outlook is bleak, and pop-culture is dismissing the notion of marriage altogether. Additionally, since a lack of financial resources can put an even greater strain on marriages, the current economic crisis has exacerbated the problem.

Today’s statistics concerning divorce are obviously a part of the Devil’s diabolical plan to destroy God’s version of the family and replace it with a familial unit that vaguely resembles the institution of family without the prerequisite of marriage between a man and a woman. Marriages are under attack. Moving back to a biblically based and God-centered marriage is the only hope for community and the family.

In his book, Can This Marriage Stuff Work?, Pastor Ronnie L. Lee has boldly gone where few have ventured in speaking to the cause and effect of broken relationships. He pursues the subject of marriage with a keen insight that is personal and prophetic. Can This Marriage Stuff Work? is a well-organized and well-thought-out manual on how to get your marriage back on the right track if it is salvageable and help the reader to learn from past mistakes if it is not. Pastor Lee looks intently into the institution of marriage from a biblical and practical perspective in order to draw out those actions and reactions that soon become symptomatic of a broken relationship.

Marriage is the building block of the family, and the family is the building block of community. To paraphrase Matthew 12:33, You either make the family good and it’s community good, or else make the family corrupt and its community corrupt; for the community is known by its families. In order to see a turnaround in our communities, we must see a major turnaround in our families. And in order to see a substantive change in families, we must take a closer look at marriage and why it is failing to uphold the segment of the marital vow that states, till death do us part.

Understandably, many couples who are under the heavy hand of immorality, poverty, and injustice are finding it impossible to move forward together in marriage and forced to move on with their lives through divorce. All too often, couples sink into a dark place; a wilderness, of sorts. They suffer from a constant sense of feeling lonely, isolated, misunderstood, and unwanted. They conclude within themselves that this marriage thing is for the birds . . . it may work for some, but it doesn’t work for me. Pastor Lee puts the breaks on this notion and makes the reader reevaluate his or her situation. Chapter by chapter, he provides anecdotal information that speaks to the core of many marital problems and, in simplistic language, exposes the Enemy at work through our actions and words.

Pastor Lee points out the pitfalls and perils that lurk at every turn of marriage and provides tools to help couples address and redress these relational issues before they develop an irremovable chasm between husband and wife. He draws from a deep well of experience in working with couples to restore their relationships and assist them in confronting the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room.

To any couple who is trying to get their relationship back on track, or to the single person who wants to learn about the potentials of conflict before they enter into a monogamous and permanent relationship, or to the person who has tried marriage over and over again and found nothing more than more of the same, this book is a must-read. It will spell out good habits to take into a marriage and teach the reader how to confront and remove the bad habits. This work is Pastor Lee’s gift to God’s institution of marriage in hopes that he can do his part in making the community better by making marriages stronger.

Careful consideration and contemplation of the gems of information within this work will cause the reader to answer Can This Marriage Stuff Work? with a resounding, Yes! Be assured, this marriage stuff can work if you work this marriage stuff in Jesus’ name.

Bishop Lance L. Davis

New Zion Christian Fellowship

14200 Chicago Road

Dolton, IL 60419

Opening Meditation

Grace under Pressure

—Ernest Hemingway

To the saints and faithful brethren in Christ which are at Colosse: Grace be unto you, and peace, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ (Colossians 1:2 KJV).

Born July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, Ernest Hemingway was an American author turned journalist and novelist who, to his credits, earned a Nobel Prize in literature and a Pulitzer Prize for fiction during this crucial yet troubling time in American history. Hemingway saw something so powerful that he was led to memorialize these ideals in the timeless words he called grace under pressure. On January 15, 2009, pilot Chesley Sullunberger, aka Sully, made a quick decision