Your Call to Action

If you lived in Israel in Old Testament times and you were a healthy man, you were expected to show up when the nation went to war. If you didn’t, not only would you be treated as a wimp, you could be severely punished. But there was an exception. There were men who were expected not to go to war because they had something more important to do.

If a man has recently married, he must not be sent to war or have any other duty laid on him. For one year he is to be free to stay at home and bring happiness to the wife he has married. (Deuteronomy 24:5)

Can you believe that? A man is told to stay home from war to bring happiness to his wife. This shows us three important things:
1. God really values happy homes. They must be much more important than we realize.
2. A regular guy can bring happiness to his wife. I don’t know about you, but the year I had the least idea of how to make a wife happy was the first year we were married. But God tells these inexperienced husbands to stay home and make their wives happy. If God thought men couldn’t do this, he would have sent them off to war. If you work at it, you have the ability to make your wife happy.
3. Having a successful marriage requires some focused effort and time. If a man could do it with an occasional letter home or just by depositing his check in the bank, he wouldn’t have needed to stay home from the war.

Get these three points clearly in your mind 1) It is urgently important that you have a successful marriage, 2) You can do it, and 3) It’s going to take time and effort.

I can hear someone whining now. “You don’t know my wife.” You can do this. Do you think you could find a way to make your marriage great if the President called you and told you it was vitally important to our nation that you have a great marriage? I bet you could, and someone much greater than the president is calling. God is. He wants you to be a good husband.