BROADCASTS.com

WINNING WITH THE WORD “Winning with the Word” is a weekly blog that will help you to be a winner in life by applying God’s principles for living the abundant life as found in the Bible, God’s manual for life. AN INVITATION TO YOU: To follow this blog, click here.  If this blog has blessed you, please encourage your family and friends to subscribe as well. Thank you! ______________________________________ Do you prefer listening instead of reading? Then click below to listen to today’s blog post:         https://media.blubrry.com/winning_with_the_word/content.blubrry.com/winning_with_the_word/WWW_Podcast_Episode_5_1_2020-02-03_Make_Your_Marriage_Great_Again_.mp3   Hello and Happy Day! This is Dr. MaryAnn Diorio, your Virtual Life Coach, welcoming you to another episode of Winning with the Word. Today is Monday, February 3, 2020. Today's Podcast is Episode #5 in Series 2020 and is titled "Make Your Marriage Great Again!" Recently, my husband and I celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary. While this is quite a milestone to say the least, we didn’t get there by strolling hand in hand down the pathway of life without a few bumps and bruises along the way. Sometimes major ones! We reached that 50-year milestone because of a lot of patience, perseverance, and plain pluck! Because my husband and I are somewhat of a marriage anomaly in this day and age, young people often approach us asking how we stayed married for so long. They also tell us that they are afraid to get married. When they have seen more marriage defeat than success, it's no wonder they are leery of getting married. What young people have seen in the marriages of their elders has only served to discourage, depress, and drive them away from marriage. Instead, many of today's young people have opted for living together, a state called cohabitation. To hear young people say that they are afraid to get married makes me very sad since marriage was instituted by God to bless and to be a blessing. Yet, I understand their reticence. Why risk all the pain and heartache of a divorce when they can simply avoid all that suffering by leaving themselves a way out? In other words, by simply living together without a legal commitment. Before we examine the fallacies and dangers of cohabitation, however, let me be quick to explain that I do not by any means condone living together. Plain and simple, cohabitation is a violation of God's Word, and any violation of God's Word is sin. And, as the Bible warns us in Romans 6: 23, "the wages of sin is death." Sin will always lead to death and destruction on some level.  Yet, today more couples are living together outside of marriage than within marriage. In fact, a 2018 article published by the United States Census Bureau states that "cohabitation is now more prevalent than living with a spouse." The article goes on to state that in 2018, nine percent of the US population lived with an unmarried partner compared to seven percent who lived with a spouse. This is a troubling state of affairs.  While there are many articles out there giving supposedly good reasons for living together before marriage, I'm going to give you good reasons—God's reasons--for NOT living together. And here's a little hint: Choosing any of our own reasons to live together over God's reasons not to live together will ultimately hurt us.  The first thing we need to consider is that marriage was God's idea! And so was sex! Because marriage is so special to God, He set up boundaries for protecting it as an institution and for protecting the husband, wife, and children in a marriage. The chief boundary God placed was that sex—the single act that differentiates marriage from every other human relationship—must be confined to marriage. Why did God set this boundary? Because to have sex outside of marriage is dangerous not only to the psychological and physical well-being of the partners involved but, more importantly, to their spiritual well-being.