The Importance Of Creating A Relationship On God’s Foundation: How You Can Maintain This Relationship -

Without a healthy relationship with God, it is impossible to grow, mature, and sustain a healthy relationship with your significant other. When God created Adam, he showed us firsthand what a relationship looks like. A relationship is full of trust, providence, and love that only God could establish first so that Adam could replicate that love back to God and later Eve. But as you can see, Adam had a whole relationship with God first before Eve came into the picture. When God saw the animals with mates, He said for the first time in the Bible that it was not good for man to be alone and created Eve from Adam. Through this beginning stage of their relationship, we all see how the relationship changed between all three, Adam, Eve, and God, when Eve took her focus off God. God knew what had happened but questioned Adam and Eve together so that they could see and confess what they did and, as a result, faced the consequences. From their example alone, creating a God-fearing foundation in your life before or in the process of being with your significant other is essential because, in the foundation, He makes a character that mirrors His image and can display the Love of the Father through you for His child and children to come through you both. His Character through you can speak life and establish healthy lifestyles that a relationship needs.

When you form a foundation in your personal life outside of a relationship with your significant other, you can be transformed and mature enough to handle any relationship you face because you have your roots in God’s Word and Truth. Walking out the life He created for you. When you form a relationship or in marriage and walk life with your companion and choose to establish God as the foundation, you know that your relationship is rooted in His will for you both, His protection, His victory, and more. What God forms cannot be broken, and to say that you both are solely committed to each other and that you are willing to have God at the center, pruning and maturing you both, not for just each other but for the plans He has through both of you for His Kingdom is beyond yourselves, it’s purely trusting in Him shown through the choice made. It’s saying, “God, I still want you in everything in my life. I want to include you in my joy and can’t see life, even with my significant other, without you alongside me in this journey.” This is why building your relationship on God’s foundation is essential. You realize through humbling yourself that you need God more than ever alone and with your significant other and are willing to trust God with His plans for you both rather than your own.

Here are some ways that you can maintain your relationship on God’s foundation:

1. Make God The Center And Focus.

God should always be the center focus in your life. Nothing in this world is greater than the one who lives in you, let alone created you. When you start to lose focus on God and allow outside distractions to be your focus, God can remove or enable situations to remind you who He is and where you have left Him during your hiatus from distractions. {Please note to self: When you put things above God, He does not have to do much for you to see how desperately you need after facing weakness, confusion, depression, anxiety, temptation, loneliness, and more. Those hardships are caused when you try to live without God or allow certain things/people in the world to be the God of your life.} Although your significant other plays a major role in your life, he should never be the spotlight center of your life. Making Him the center can allow destruction through anger from high expectations that he failed at, pressure, and bitterness.

If you want to learn how to make God the center and focus of your life, try starting by establishing:

Alone time with God
- It Is easy to become caught up in your significant other, but never allow yourself to put him before God with your time. Make sure you give God your first and last moments of the day alone to be with Him and allow Him to speak and move in you during those hours. Encourage your significant other to create a habit of having alone time with God.

Prayer and worship

- In your alone time or just randomly, you can have a prayer and worship session to be freely moved by the Holy Spirit and allow Him to express all of His nature through you. This is your time to release what needs to be released and praise God.

“in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight”

Proverbs 3:6

“But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”

Matthew 6:33

“And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.”

Colossians 3:17

2. Follow In Obedience To The Will Of The Father With The Plans He Has Over Your Life And Honor His Plans With Both Of Your Lives.

In relationships, there are many moments when both partners try to please each other by making each other happy. It is all about making each other happy, whether pleasing to God or not because you become consumed by this extraordinary man who can physically comfort and give you attention. This goes even further when each partner starts to implement each other into their lives, waiving their paths for the sake of the relationship.

For instance, God had you walking your given path with opportunities to travel across the country for a job, yet you met this remarkable man. While in the butterfly stage, you, as the woman, decided to let your job opportunity go for the sake of the potential relationship you had created with the man.

You are a married woman who has been growing your relationship with God and realized that you wanted to implement core values and live a worthy life that God has called you to live. Still, your husband is not in the same spiritual position as you, so when you ask him if he wants to go to church and he tells you no, you end up staying home instead of going by yourself. Or when you want to speak freely in your home about what God is doing in your life and feel led to make changes rather in your career, missions, or family life, you find yourself keeping it all to yourself and not making those changes afraid of what your husband might think, feel, or say.

Women often forget about God’s will and plan for their lives when a relationship is created and established. Do not be one of those women! Remember what God has shown you and all the great works that you have experienced along the way. I am not saying that you can not still have the relationship that was formed in the process or still be happily married, but never get to a point where you are following the lead and dreams of a potential “husband” who Is not your husband yet, or you actual husband, instead of living out the Will of your Father who has already established His plans in you. What is meant to be will be in its time. But God’s plan and Will should always be your focus, and even in your current season, it should be something that you encourage your significant other with for his life’s sake as well.

“I would like you to be free from concern. An unmarried man is concerned about the Lord’s affairs—how he can please the Lord. But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world—how he can please his wife— and his interests are divided. An unmarried woman or virgin is concerned about the Lord’s affairs: Her aim is to be devoted to the Lord in both body and spirit. But a married woman is concerned about the affairs of this world—how she can please her husband. I am saying this for your own good, not to restrict you, but that you may live in a right way in undivided devotion to the Lord.”

1 Corinthians 7:32-35

3. Obtain God’s Characteristics

God made you in His image.

When God lives in you, you transform into the image He created you in before the world brushed you with dirt from sin. He washed and pruned you to Spiritually take on His characteristics displayed in the fruits of the Spirit. {love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.} Such fruits that you obtain can help you love others the way God loves them. *Pray for such fruits and practice living in them if you find them challenging to obtain. *

“So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”

Genesis 1:27

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.”

Galatians 5:22-23

4. Love Your Spouse As God Loves Them (God’s Perspective)

The only way you can love people the way God loves them is to become Christ-minded and spiritually transformed so that your perspective and heart gesture can fully be cultivated for the people for whom He died. Seeing your significant other how God sees him will make your heart grow fonder when the enemy tries to deceive you of who he is in Christ and, better yet, when the enemy uses you to speak death (anything opposite of God’s truth) over your man. Maintaining those characteristics can be challenging but worth persevering and spiritually lifesaving. Try implementing these actions in your relationship from the beginning and nourish those characteristics so your relationship can remain strong in trials and tribulations.

Selfless
Faithfulness
Forgiveness
Serve
Respect
Unconditional Love
Speaking Life over each other

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

1 Corinthians 13:4-13

God’s Love and Ours

^“Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

This is how we know that we live in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God. And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.

God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.

We love because he first loved us. Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.”

1 John 4:7-21

5. Marriage Reflects The Godhead

God created men and women in His image. When He created Adam alone, He knew it was not good for Him to be alone, so He created Eve from a piece of Adam’s body. Their union with the Creator of their physical and spiritual bodies shows the first union of marriage in the body. Before the fall, they had a BEAUTIFUL, close relationship with God, which included marriage. The same marriage between the three (Adam, Eve, and God) is the same relationship we see through the Trinity (Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.) The Bible mentions many times how God is the Groom coming back for his bride and His children. So, remember that even in your relationship with your significant other, when it is time to take that vow, you ultimately vow to God’s promises about your husband and have an oath with God first on how you will love His child. This union formed now between you and your husband is not just about you two but the central focus that brought you together: God. The same God who will nourish you both and provide every need that the relationship needs to stand to the end.

“So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”

Genesis 1:27

“Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for herto make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church— for we are members of his body. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.”

Ephesians 5:21-33

“neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Romans 8:39

“being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”

Philippians 1:6

6. Avoid Premarital Sex

Sex is a sacred action done between two individuals unified in a holy bond in the body of Christ. When you have sex with your husband, you are not just fulfilling physical needs for one another, but you are in an act of worship to God.

It is tempting to want to endure premarital sex when your hormones are urging you to make a moment happen with your significant other, but know that other factors can lead you to try to make this action happen. Such factors include demonic spirits that can lead to spiritual warfare. If you find yourself tempted by sexual immorality, know that God always gives you a way out and can help you.

How To Maintain Purity From Sexual Immorality:

Do not position yourself (set yourself up) to be tempted and cave.
- Do not be alone where it can lead to sex.
Ask God in prayer for help. Seek Him and acknowledge His presence in the room.
Make your encounters with your man Spirit-filled.

- Be mindful of what you watch, read, and listen to. (together and alone)

Create boundaries.
Get out of the house and do outside activities.
Communicate your values and heart regarding maintaining purity.
Get accountability buddies.

- You can even have double dates. (Have a double date with the same activity and have both couples at a reasonable distance from each other so that both parties have privacy to talk but have an eye range on each other for safety!)

{For more information on that, please feel free to read & watch: The Dangers of Sexual Immorality: {Lust, Porn, Masturbation} –}

“Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral.”

Hebrews 13:4

“No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it.”

1 Corinthians 10:13

7. Find An Older Christian Couple To Mentor You.

Relationships can be highly challenging. Finding a Christian mentor to help you navigate your relationship and form healthy habits can establish a healthy, long-lasting relationship. Even if you seek to speak to coupled Christian mentors, they can give you insight into hardships that relationships face in different seasons and advise you on how to get through. Not every relationship that you see glammed on the internet Is perfect. They may be able to photoshop an image for others to desire, but you cannot photoshop real life that every relationship endures, and you cannot photoshop a fake solution. You need to ask God to create encounters with Christian couples who will genuinely speak the realities of a relationship and help and encourage yours!

Never hesitate or feel timid or ashamed to ask for counsel. Christian mentors are here to help.

8. Ask More Of God And Less Of Your Spouse.

When you are going through life trials and tribulations, it is easy to want to vent to your spouse. It starts with just airing out some big emotions for relief to your spouse, to you always searching for your spouse when you are faced with another trial, yearning for their assistance in comfort and guidance or maybe even a solution to your problem. Yet, what happens when you have an emotional issue, and your spouse is not there to help you? What happens when you bring all your burdens to your spouse, and they become irritated and moody, creating distance and shrugging your issues away?

Allowing all your weight from life’s ups and downs to fall on your husband without seeking God first can strain your marriage. Your husband is created to be a helper to you, not made to be the God that you go to when life is hard. You must develop a habit of running to God before running to anyone else with your problems. Only God can fully provide what you need in every situation.

9. Surround Yourself With Other Believers In Christ.

Surrounding yourself with fellow believers who are dear friends Is beneficial before, during, and after establishing a relationship with your significant other. Your friends know the Word of God, can speak life into you, and pray over you when facing thoughts regarding your significant other and temptation. Your friends can also encourage you to continue when trials appear in your relationship and help you to continue being you by making you aware of the importance of fellowship and remaining the same as you were before your special friend came into your life. {I know that we grow as life continues, but when you meet a potential mate and are in the butterfly stage, it is easy to be caught up in the guy and blow off your friends as you prioritize him in your everyday schedule. That can be unhealthy if you find yourself slowly but surely changing habits that are drastically not like you, and you start to see your friends genuinely seeking fellowship that you find yourself not being a part of.}

As for married life, You might want to hang out with your friends more, which is also okay! Just remember to establish boundaries of specific conversation topics (Don’t vent about your husband to them or talk mess about your husband trying to compare or see who has it worse), and make sure they are friends who support marriage and want to see your marriage last.

“And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.”

Hebrews 10:24–25

“Two are better than one,

because they have a good return for their labor: If either of them falls down one can help the other up. But pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up. Also, if two lie down together, they will keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.”

Ecclesiastes 4:9–12

10. Reflect On How God Works Together In Your Relationship And Life.

Gratitude: Never forget to give God thanks. If you are in a relationship with ups and downs and are both still dedicated to making it work, you and he need to remind yourselves how far God has brought you both in transformation and give thanks.

Or maybe you have always prayed for the right man to come along, and God sent him, whom you can confidently say, “He is it.” PRAISE God! When you feel upset with him at any moment, remind yourself that he is a walking answered prayer that you prayed for.

Relationships can seem long or difficult during tender loving years, but God is so good through it all that He needs a huge thank you for the seasons of hardships and overcoming. You and your significant other can reflect weekly, monthly, or yearly and show gratitude towards one another, but gratitude to God for even the joyous highlights that both of you experienced together and apart.

“Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.”

1 Thessalonians 5:16-18

Spiritual Fullness in Christ

“So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness.”

Colossians 2:6-7

11. Prayer & Worship

Just as prayer and worship are essential when you are alone, they are also crucial when forming and maintaining a relationship with anyone! Creating a relationship where God is the center is vital for a relationship to stand firm and forever. While holding your man’s hand and praying, you allow the Holy Spirit to move in and around you for any Spiritual messages, presence establishing the setting tone, and for whatever spiritual warfare to cease while you are together. Even knowing your spouse’s battles and vice versa, praying over each other through the Holy Spirit allows God to be in the midst and bring deliverance and blessings to each other.

When you include worship, you both state that the focus is not on one another but God. Nothing is sweeter than making God the center of your encounters. {Honestly, being in a place where God is constantly praised and entirely centered allows peace to come into your home and His Spirit to rest on you fully.

Establishing a firm foundation for your relationship with God is vital if you want it to stand. This is your season to be in a place to fully surrender your life to God, placing Him as a center focus before you can expect to have your companion fully commit to maintaining the relationship’s foundation on God. You get into a genuine place of alone time, prayer, worship, gratitude, friendships who are believers, and transformation first. Through your Christ-like characteristics and drastic changes, the Holy Spirit can and will work on your loved one. Do not give up on this process, either! It can be difficult to mature in areas spiritually and in the waiting season for your loved one to join you, but this season is bigger than you. God is doing a number on him, which is a part of his story and testimony. It is possible to have that relationship founded on God, even if it starts with you first. KEEP GOING! Remember the importance of His foundation, and let that motivate you.

Father,

I know that today, life can seem unbearable alone yet fulfilling with the significant other you have placed in our lives, but please, Lord, let us not make them the God of our lives. Please allow us to seek and draw near you as you come into our hearts with everlasting peace and joy. Come over, my sister, who is currently in a season of trying to make you the foundation of her relationship with her significant other. Let her not grow weary if he is not spiritually in the same place she is, but let her steadfast in prayer and submission to your will over her life. Allow her to be hopeful in the works that you are doing to transform her into your image and let her confidently and faithfully wake up, continuing to be the person you created her to be even if she is timid of her relationship and fearful of what may come in her choice of putting you Lord at the center of it all. Please touch her significant other to have the desire to seek you and live such a beautiful life with her in the ways you call them to live. Open his heart to see and know you fully. Align his desires with yours and let him fully see what having a healthy relationship with you can bring so that He can freely live and be loved, and that is to which he can then love on your daughter as you love her. Please, Lord, protect any marriage going through these changes of finding you and spiritually growing. Protect the women striving to honor you, Lord, in their waiting season for their husbands. In the end, Father, please be the headship and foundation in your daughters as they need you more than ever.

In Jesus name,

Amen