If you have the intimacy we’ve talked about thus far, praise the Lord! But if your marriage isn’t all it should be, God is not happy with your marriage. As we saw in Genesis 2, He created us to find fulfillment in marriage, and that is what He wants for you.

    If God doesn’t accept your lack of ONEness in marriage, then neither should you! Demand ONEness. Work for it. Do what it takes to achieve it. (Family Dynamics, the book this article was taken from, and an accompanying workbook all are resources to help you grow in your ONEness with your spouse.)

    Strive for the ONEness God wants you to have with the person to whom you are now married. No matter what you feel about that person at this moment — love, mild affection, hatred, or emptiness — you can and will have the intimacy God intends. All you have to do is follow His direction. We’ve seen it happen time and again.

    The following story of one couple illustrates how pursuing intimacy with God and with your spouse can reap rich rewards. A couple of years ago, I briskly entered an auditorium filled to standing-room-only by thousands of people impatiently waiting for the speaker to arrive. That’s why I moved briskly: I was the tardy speaker. A hurting couple had commandeered me in the parking lot and wouldn’t release me until I heard their hurt and told them where to find the cure. Now, making my way down the overcrowded side aisle, mumbling apologies to the people I was stepping on and tripping over, I found myself suddenly brought up short by a giant of a man standing determinedly in my way.

    “You Joe Beam?” he arched his eyebrow and bored his eyes into me as he asked, making me a little unsure of whether I wanted to identify myself.

    “Ahhh, yeah, ummm, I’m Joe Beam.”

    “My name’s Brad, and this is Thelma,” he said as he magically produced a bashfully smiling, petite lady from behind him. “We were married for twelve years before we split up. When I left, I couldn’t remember ever loving her and just wanted to be free of her, her family, and anything else that had to do with her. You felt the same way about me, didn’t you, honey?”

    She smiled broadly in reply.

“Man, did I ever see the power of God!”

    “Well, anyway, our preacher wouldn’t give up on us. Kept telling us that God could fix this if we’d let Him, but that just sounded like preacher talk to me, you know? Finally, just to get him off my back, I agreed to go through your His Needs, Her Needs course at church. Thelma had already said she’d go.”

    At that point, he got misty-eyed and hugged her tight against him. “Man, did I ever see the power of God! He worked on me for those eight weeks, bringing me closer to Him. And when that happened, something changed in the way I thought about Thelma. I don’t even know that I can explain it except to say that I don’t think I would ever have come to love her if I hadn’t first learned something about loving God.

    “Thelma and I struggled through the tough parts of that course as we did all the things you told us to do on the tapes and in the handbook. We worked hard, not because we wanted to, but because we got to liking the folks in our group and didn’t want to let ‘em down, and because I was beginning to grow in God like never before. I don’t know that I can tell you the exact moment it happened, but one day I realized that I loved this woman. And I found out that she never stopped loving me.

    “I just want to make sure you tell these people that God can do anything with a marriage, no matter how bad it is. If He can turn me around and give me love and a great marriage with my wife, He can do it for anybody. If you just do what God tells you to do, you get what God promises. You tell ‘em that for Brad and Thelma.”

    I did tell them, and now I’m telling you: God can do anything in your marriage — no matter what it’s like right now. If you love each other now, He can show you how to love with deeper levels of intimacy. If you don’t love each other, He can create love in your relationship in ways that defy comprehension. Just as He created our world from absolutely nothing, He can create deep, abiding, intimate love in your heart even if none lives there now.

    He is Creator.

    He can do it.

    Trust Him.

    But remember, if you want deeper, more fulfilling intimacy with your mate, you must first develop deeper, more fulfilling intimacy with God.

1. Remember your dreams. Try to remember the dreams and expectations you had about marriage when you were a child or young teen. Write as many of those dreams and expectations as you can.

2. Review and reflect. Review what you’ve written to find which of your childhood expectations about marriage involved your desire for intimacy. Reflect on what those expectations tell you about how you could be most fulfilled in marriage now.

3. Share together. As a couple, make a time when you will have no distractions and share with each other your reflections from activity 2.

4. Talk openly. Talk openly about what would fulfill each of you and how the two of you together could develop your relationship to that level.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

By Joe Beam, Chairman and Founder, Family Dynamics Institute. From his book, "Becoming One" © 1999, Howard Publishing Company. Used by permission. This article cannot be reprinted in another publication without written permission of the publisher. Click here to buy this title online!

Title: "God Will Give You ONEness"
Author: Joe Beam
Publication Date: February 22, 2002

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Print this Article Send it to a Friend Discuss	Part 1 - The Craving for Intimacy: God Created Us for ONEness Part 2 - Our God-Given Craving for Intimacy Part 3 - The Craving for Intimacy with Another Human Part 4 - The Craving for Intimacy with God Part 5 - What Happens When Intimacy Is Missing?