Tag Archives: Happiness

Commentary

The top 7 things a wife needs to be happy in her marriage

1 Comment
Do women have a plan for marriage?
Do women influenced by feminism understand marriage?

From MercatorNet.

Here’s the list, in order of importance:

  1. A husband’s emotional engagement
  2. Fairness
  3. A breadwinning husband
  4. A commitment to marriage
  5. Staying at home
  6. Shared religious attendance
  7. Traditional gender attitudes

I want to highlight #3, because it’s the one I most frequently find missing in younger, unmarried Christian women.

Here’s number three:

American wives, even wives who hold more feminist views about working women and the division of household tasks, are typically happier when their husband earns 68% or more of the household income. Husbands who are successful breadwinners probably give their wives the opportunity to make choices about work and family—e.g., working part-time, staying home, or pursuing a meaningful but not particularly remunerative job—that allow them to best respond to their own needs, and the needs of their children.

The reason I have found that the young, unmarried Christian women oppose this is because it negates the “follow your heart” Disney princess mentality that they are often raised on. They don’t want to be practical, and some of them even go so far as to shun the good advice of other married women. Women should be able to count the costs of a marriage and understand that handsomeness and confidence does not pay the considerable bills that married couples incur, especially when they have children. I think a good basic education in business, finance and/or economics for this “follow your heart”, “have no fear” women would be beneficial. It’s very important that women learn to value a man’s ability to make decisions that allow him to find work that pays well.

It’s getting common now for men to be in their late 20s and yet never have had a job that earns money. Women should not be relying on penniless students younger than they are – men who have not proved (from their past) that they can fulfill the demands of the provider role. Women should not be resting their hopes on men who have no proven record of work experience. They should not hope that things will get better in the future. Future wishes are not evidence of the ability to provide, only past performance at providing is evidence of the ability to provide. What is needed is a record of earning money, of showing up to work on time, of getting promotions, of steady long-term employment (not jumping around to different jobs), and being good at saving money that is earned.

I also liked #4:

Wives who share a strong commitment to the norm of lifelong marriage with their husband—e.g., who both believe that even unhappily married couples should stay together for the sake of their children—are more likely to have a happy marriage than couples who do not share this commitment to marriage. Shared commitment seems to generate a sense of trust, emotional security, and a willingness to sacrifice for one’s spouse—all of which lead to happier marriages for women. This shared commitment also provides women with a long-term view of their marriage that helps them negotiate the inevitable difficulties that confront any marriage.

I think the commitment ideal is something that is now very much against the grain in our culture. We want to have relationships that make us happy all the time. We don’t want to make commitments that will force us to confront the needs of that other person. We don’t want to have to deal with expectations, responsibilities and obligations, especially when they conflict with our pursuit of self-fulfillment and fun. But commitment is the opposite of pursuing fun. Commitment is about making a promise to another person to care for their needs. If caring for someone else’s needs scares you, then naturally, you’ll want to avoid commitment as much as you can.

Unfortunately, marriage isn’t compatible with obligation avoidance. Commitment is the very center of it, and if you want a good marriage, then you’d better get used to making and keeping commitments. If you are good at sensing and caring for the needs of others, and putting others above yourself, and enduring hardships and difficulties to keep your commitments, then you’re ready for marriage.

News

Can prayer, Bible reading, church-singing and charismatic preaching stop Katy Perry’s apostasy?

10 Comments

I received an e-mail from a woman who was telling me to drop my list of 10 worldview questions and just look for a wife who reads the Bible and has feelings about Jesus.

She wrote:

My suggestion to you is to consider a top-down approach.  Just pray for God to send you your wife and pray that you recognize her immediately.  You don’t seem like you really want to remain single…and your children are missing out on having you as their dad.  Marriage is for children, remember?  I know several young ladies who know their Scripture and who love Jesus but who, I don’t think, would pass your test because, in my perception, they aren’t cerebral enough.

I get this e-mail a lot, especially from women who have married non-Christians or who are divorced. Now the whole point of the list of 10 questions is to detect women who are not going to help me to produce effective, influential Christian children. If I am going to spend north of $100,000 per child + tuition, then I expect to get some sort of return on that investment for God. That money doesn’t earn itself, and it needs to be well-spent serving God.

It’s my wife’s job to help me to do that. My goal in choosing a wife is to find a helper to make the relationship serve God. Otherwise, it’s better for God if I give that money that I worked very hard to earn directly to effective Christian scholars. I don’t have money to burn “playing house” with someone who is guided by her feelings. I can just give the money to Reasonable Faith or Discovery Institute instead.

Let’s take a look at two parents who aimed at nothing and hit it with their daughter. The two parents run a ministry that is based around passionate preaching, prayer and Bible verses.

Excerpt:

The Lord spoke to Arise International Conference host Mary Hudson to encourage women to reach their full destiny in Jesus Christ. He wants women to rise up as trailblazers, to think outside the box and be bold in Him, of course putting God first, your husband second and then your family!

Mary’s ministry of Arise! International holds annual women’s empowerment and leadership conferences in Hawaii, Belgium, Colombia, France, Switzerland, Denmark and the USA. The river of glory is rising and we must flow with it.

2012 promises to be a break-through year to Arise! in who you are in Christ. Lean on Him for direction, don’t look to man. Knowing the signs of the times and hearing the voice of the Holy Spirit will be vital to being at the right place at the right time to reap the harvest of souls coming into the Kingdom.

Pray about being a part of Arise! this coming year. It just may be the meeting that propels you into the next level for your life. Remember, you are equipped with everything you need to fulfill your purpose. God’s assignments reveal your abilities and your capabilities, and He will provide both the potential and the provision to meet every assignment.

We call you blessed and highly favored!

I noticed that their “book store” offers nonsense books like this:

Keith Hudson “Looking and Seeing”:

Like this disciplined athlete, you need to learn how to look beyond your present situation and keep your eye on His Presence. God is ready to display His glory in your life as well in these last days, but it is going to take boldness for you to take the mask off and look at people and situations the way God sees them, not how man looks at them. What may stand in front of you may look too big for you to grasp; that what you see now is the way it’s always going to be. Or you look at the dream God has given you and think, “there is no way I can ever accomplish this with my resources at my age…” That is the moment you have to flip the switch from looking to seeing.

Mary Hudson “Smart Bombs”:

Smart Bombs is a book which will show you practically and with true life examples how to take God’s Word and let it explode strongholds in your life. When you read the Bible, He quickens particular passages or verses to your heart. You know it is God talking to you about your situation. Or when you receive a prophetic word, you sense in your heart this is speaking to you. But what do you do with these words when they bear witness with you? Let them fade away and disappear off of your memory? No, Smart Bombs shows you how to go on the offense with the anointed word of God, how to demolish strongholds and take back everything the enemy has stolen from you.

This easy read is a must for anyone who is looking for clarity on their destiny.

Keith Hudson “The Cry”:

The Cry will reignite you with new fire. Christians lose their passion when they let go of their zeal for God. We come into prayer meetings and we are so polished and perfected. But the Lord wants to hear the cry of your heart. The church has lost its cry: God is about to restore it. Why did the thirty people gathered for the Azusa Street revival have such a move of the spirit of God in their day? Because they had a cry in their hearts and in their prayers. The Cry will release a desperate longing in you for Gods intervention in your life. It goes way beyond your natural thinking into a spiritual hunger from your innermost being. When everything else has failed, a desperate cry touches the heart of God.

Now do you think that someone who reads books like that will produce the same kind of children as parents who read William Lane Craig, Stephen C. Meyer, Jay Richards, and Michael Licona? Of course not. Because the Hudson books are fluff and the books by real Christian scholars are not fluff.

Now let’s read an article from Christian Post about what sort of child the fluff approach produces. (H/T Mysterious Chris S.)

Excerpt:

Katy Perry, the 29-year-old singer and songwriter, is revealing that while she prays she no longer identifies with Christianity.

“I don’t believe in a heaven or a hell, or an old man sitting on a throne. I believe in a higher power bigger than me because that keeps me accountable,” she told Marie Claire magazine recently. “Accountability is rare to find, especially with people like myself, because nobody wants to tell you something you don’t want to hear.”

Perry, who took the Billboard charts by storm with her hit song “I Kissed a Girl” in 2008, told Marie Claire that she no longer considers herself a Christian despite being raised by Christian ministers.

“I’m not Buddhist, I’m not Hindu, I’m not Christian, but I still feel like I have a deep connection with God. I pray all the time – for self-control, for humility,” she told Marie Claire. “There’s a lot of gratitude in it. Just saying ‘thank you’ sometimes is better than asking for things.”

Despite her decision to perform music that may seem controversial to the Christian community, the chart-topping singer has never shied away from crediting the Christian church for giving her a start as a performer.

“The atmosphere I grew up in was 100 percent Christian,” Perry said her “Part of Me: 3D” movie which was released last year. “I started singing in the church, I never really had another plan.”

Their daughter is writing songs to promote homosexuality to young people. That’s their legacy. The legacy of spiritual gifts, God opening doors of mysticism and charismatic anti-intellectualism. That’s what they are going to present to God as their spiritual legacy. I noticed that Mary Hudson is now calling her daughter’s celebrity divorce after one year of marriage a “gift from God”. Her daughter married a heroin-addicted leftist non-Christian – but he was hawt. Tall, dark, handsome and a famous comedian, too.

The list of questions I use when courting helps me to avoid marrying a woman like Katy Perry’s mother. She could not answer any of my questions. None of them. And what’s more, she doesn’t want to answer them. She wants to live her whole life without learning how to answer them. She wants to stick with her Bible, her singing, her feelings, her passionate oratory and her crowds of gullible people. I will not marry a woman like that. It produces disaster and failure. It produces anti-Christian children.

In fact, you can’t succeed at anything worthwhile in life using the Keith and Mary Hudson approach to parenting. You can’t do a thing with that approach. Not writing software, not fixing cars, not making investments, not sending a rocket to the moon, not even evangelizing an apostate daughter. You do not want to be a Christian man who pumps 30 years of hard labor into a family that produces apostate children. If you are going to spend the money, then make sure you get the results.

Polemics

If you accept Jesus and become a Christian, will God make you happy?

7 Comments
Navy SEAL Matthew "Axe" Axelson
Navy SEAL Matthew “Axe” Axelson

This is a wonderful, wonderful post from Amy Hall, who writes for the Stand to Reason blog.

She writes:

I had a brief interaction with an atheist on Twitter a couple of weeks ago that unexpectedly turned to the issue of suffering when she said:

You clearly never had a time you were hurt. I don’t mean sick. I don’t mean heart broken. I mean literally a near death experience or rape or abusive relationship…. You can keep floating on a [expletive] cloud thinking Jesus will do everything for you but it’s a lie. What makes you so special?

That surprised me at first because it didn’t seem to have anything to do with the tweet she was responding to, and I was confused as to why she would assume I’d never been through anything traumatic. But then in subsequent tweets, when she revealed she had been raped, it became clear that her trauma had played a central role in her becoming an outspoken, obviously angry “antitheist.” She’s a self-described antitheist now because she thinks Christianity teaches Jesus “will do everything for you” to give you a perfect life, and now she knows that’s a lie. The rape proved her understanding of Christianity false.

So it made sense for her to reason that since I believe Christianity is true, I must still be under the delusion that Jesus is making my life special, which means I obviously never encountered any evil or suffering to shake that delusion.

All right, readers. I don’t want any of you to be thinking that if you become a Christian that these things should be expected to happen:

  • you will feel happy all the time
  • you will be able to sense God’s secret plan for your life through your feelings
  • God’s secret plan for your life will automatically work, even though it’s crazy
  • God will give you a perfect spouse and lots of money without you having to do any work
  • you get permission to do things that that make you happy, even if they are expressly forbidden by the Bible
  • you don’t have to do anything that makes you feel bad (e.g. – go to work), because God wants you to be happy

No! Where do people get this idea that if they convert to Christianity, then God will become their cosmic butler?

Amy has the answer: (emphasis mine)

Hear me, everyone: This is a failure of the church.

A friend of mine who was deeply suffering once said to me that many Christians are in for “an epic letdown” when they realize their preconceived notions about what God is expected to do for us are false. Pastors who preach a life-improvement Jesus are leading people down this precarious path to disillusionment.

If suffering disproves your Christianity, you’ve missed Christianity. The Bible is filled with the suffering of those whom God loves. The central event of the Bible is one of suffering. Love involves suffering. “We know love by this, that He laid down His life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.” That means suffering.

It’s the church. It’s all the singing about happy things and having of happy feelings and happy preaching designed to make us feel good. I would say the comforting devotional reading doesn’t help to make us any tougher or more practical, either. People seem to use Bible study and devotion as a way to artificially create good feelings of happiness, peace and comfort, instead of just doing hard things to serve God. I don’t think it’s a “spiritual” Christian thing to read A. W. Tozer, etc. just so that you can feel comforted and spiritual. That stuff just gives you a false sense of safety about your precarious situation. God’s job is not to prevent you from suffering. In fact, even if you make really smart, practical decisions, you can expect to get creamed anyway.

Please take 15 minutes and read the book of 1 Peter in the New Testament.

Here’s a summary from GotQuestions.org:

Purpose of Writing: 1 Peter is a letter from Peter to the believers who had been dispersed throughout the ancient world and were under intense persecution. If anyone understood persecution, it was Peter. He was beaten, threatened, punished and jailed for preaching the Word of God. He knew what it took to endure without bitterness, without losing hope and in great faith living an obedient, victorious life. This knowledge of living hope in Jesus was the message and Christ’s example was the one to follow.

Brief Summary: Though this time of persecution was desperate, Peter reveals that it was actually a time to rejoice. He says to count it a privilege to suffer for the sake of Christ, as their Savior suffered for them. This letter makes reference to Peter’s personal experiences with Jesus and his sermons from the book of Acts. Peter confirms Satan as the great enemy of every Christian but the assurance of Christ’s future return gives the incentive of hope.

Practical Application: The assurance of eternal life is given to all Christians. One way to identify with Christ is to share in His suffering. To us that would be to endure insults and slurs from those who call us “goodie two shoes” or “holier than thou.” This is so minor compared to what Christ suffered for us on the Cross. Stand up for what you know and believe is right and rejoice when the world and Satan aim to hurt you.

Recently, I blogged about how suffering is compatible with an all-powerful God, so you might want to read that too if you missed it.