But here's one that kind of covers both. Hebrews chapter 13 and verse 4. Marriage is precious in all circumstances and sex is a beautiful thing. The prostitutes and adulterers God condemns.

I'd like to give you a breakdown of what we're going to cover in this course so that if you've been wondering whether you should attend or sign up from a distance or not, this will perhaps help you to make up your mind. Who is this course for? It's for single people who want to get married. It's for divorcees and those who've been widowed.

It's for married couples who are happy. I didn't expect that, did you? It's for married couples who are not happy. It's for people who want to do marriage counseling and it's for every normal person.

So if you fit into one of those, this course is for you. God designed marriage. God wants everyone to be married.

Repeat that. God wants everyone to be married. Not only that, he wants everyone to enjoy being married.

God wants your marriage to be a foretaste of heaven. This is why we entitled this the heavenly marriage course. Now I hope over the course of this weekend that we're going to cover this to convince you that these things are true and to help prepare you to overcome every obstacle that stands in your way of enjoying this wonderful privilege that God has designed for all of us.

Why did God make marriage in the first place? I'm going to take you on a little tour of the Garden of Eden. I'm going to tell you a story. Yeah, I know you can go and read it there in Genesis 1, 2 and 3, but it's kind of short and not very clear.

So I'm going to try and tell you a story and show you exactly how marriage came about and why it came about and how God did it. I'd like you to understand what went through the hearts and minds of the man and the woman that God had created so you can understand exactly why God created marriage and why marriage is so important. And I hope that as you look at this story afresh, your heart will be stirred to realize, yes, I've been missing out on something tremendous that God has for me.

I'm going to teach you how God separated the sexes. How that Adam originally was one person made in the image of God having neither gender and yet having both genders in one person. And how God brought a separation and made a male and a female, a man and a woman.

And how God made it in such a way that the two should come together again in perfect harmony and unity to become the perfect human being. We'll go through all of that and you'll understand why God created marriage. We're going to look at the two basic keys to marital success.

The first key to marital success is a loving husband. We're going to look at the roles that a husband has to provide. I'm going to go into a lot of complex detail.

We're going to look essentially what is the role of the husband in the marriage relationship and what causes failure to take place in this area that he fails to be a loving husband. Then we're going to look at the loving wife. But more than the loving wife, we're going to look at the submissive wife.

Because God gave two commandments. Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church. Wives, submit yourself to your husband as unto Christ.

And so we're going to see the roles of the wife in a marriage relationship. We're going to see where failure takes place in this as well. And we're going to look at all of this from God's word.

We're now going to look at the standard that the world is setting today. The trends of the world which are designed to actually pull us apart and to destroy the joy of marriage. Once we've looked at where the problems are, we can look at how to fix them.

We're going to show how developing a relationship with Jesus is the first step towards fixing a marriage. We're going to show you how to change the inner images of your heart that were created in you through various different influences in your life. And we're going to show you how to get healing from those past experiences that left a scar and have stopped you from entering into this wonderful joy and becoming the kind of partner you're supposed to be.

Now the best place to start looking at marriage is to start from the beginning from singlehood. So we're going to spend a bit of time addressing the problems that singles have. So I'm already married.

I'm not single. So that's just going to be a boring part of the seminar for me. Now I don't think so because I think if you're already married, you're going to go back and rethink on how you met your spouse and how marriage came about.

And you're going to see some of the mistakes you made. And you're going to see some of the things that you should have done. And perhaps you'll fall in love all over again.

You'll go back and review that and re-walk that path. So even though you are married, I'd like you to re-walk this path as we look at how it is to find God's perfect match for you. Because God has the perfect person for you who's perfectly matched.

Somebody said, imagine you took an orange and cut it like this and tore it apart. The best way to get it together is to take the right two pieces and put them back and all the cuts match exactly and we have a complete orange. There is a perfect match.

There is somebody who has the same shape as you, who when you come together, you will come together in perfect harmony and together make up one perfect person. That's what the Bible means when it says two shall become one flesh, one person. So we're going to look at God's perfect match and we'll start by looking at the laws of attraction.

Oh, that sounds kind of new agey and the secret. No, no, no, we're not talking about those kind of attraction. We're going to talk about the laws of attraction between a male and a female.

What causes the attraction? How it happens? How God designed it and created it? Perhaps you'll begin to understand why you were attracted to your spouse, why you are attracted to certain members of the opposite sex and why you're not attracted to others. What makes the difference? I'm going to deal in some detail with falling in love. Oh, well, I've fallen in love.

What does that mean? What does it mean to fall in love? Do you understand or you just understand you get all these ooey gooey feelings and you can't eat and can't sleep? What actually happens when a person falls in love and what happens when they fall out of love? I think you need to understand the mechanism of what we call falling in love because if you don't feel that love for your spouse anymore, you're going to have to learn to fall in love again because if you don't, that marriage is not going to be built on a rock. It's not going to be a perfect marriage and it's not going to be a heavenly marriage. So I want you to understand what falling in love really is.

Not the way the world teaches it but scripturally. As a single person you need to learn how to prepare for marriage which means you become the perfect marriage prospect. Got all the single sides and everybody out there is telling you what kind of partner they want.

None of them say, well, this is what I have to offer. I was saying this is the kind of husband, is the kind of wife, is the kind of girls, the kind of man that I want. Well, do they want you? Are you the kind of person that a man with opposite sex would want and desire? What makes you a good prospect for marriage? I'm going to teach you what makes you a good prospect.

I'm going to show you how to become a better prospect than you have been until now. We're going to deal with past hurts and bad experiences that are standing in your way. We're going to show you how to go forward with a positive expectation.

Then you need to learn how to develop a relationship. You know, you have people, you go online and it's placed for them to say whether they're married or single and usually they have this option. I'm in a relationship.

What does that mean? Sometimes it means I'm sleeping with somebody. What is a relationship? When I was younger, they had this term that you ask the person out and now you will consider going out together. I don't know what term they use these days.

I guess we're saying I'm in a relationship. You even understand what a relationship is. And do you know how a relationship should be developed God's way? Most people don't.

That's why they end up with marriages that are not according to God's standard and go on the rocks pretty quickly and don't last. So I'm going to show you how to develop a relationship God's way. I'm going to show you how that two creatures who have a spirit and a soul and a body can learn to interact together in their spirit and their soul and their body to create a bond, a relationship.

It'll make them more capable coming together in marriage, staying together in marriage. And then we're going to look at ministry and marriage. Oh man, this is a tough one.

How do you find a ministry match? Oh I'm not called to the ministry. Are you sure? Everybody has some kind of ministry. God has a ministry and a purpose for your life and if you are going to find a partner that partner must somehow fit in with God's purpose for your life.

And you must fit in with God's purpose for their life. We have a little term that we use based on experience. We see somebody who's really used by the Lord and this is more prominent amongst the prophets.

And they enter into a marriage relationship which has nothing to do with their ministry or their calling which cuts sometimes right against it. And they end up marrying somebody who will stand in the way of God's purpose for their life. We call that a typical prophetic marriage.

And the reason the prophets are more subject to this is because prophets have had a life of rejection and hurt and pain. The preparation of the prophet is a tough one. The prophets are usually loners.

They've been rejected for so many years that when they finally find somebody who shows interest in them they say, whoo at last somebody's not rejecting me. Let's marry them quickly. I need to find out very soon down the line that that marriage now gets in the way of God's purpose.

And it's a matter of time a prophetic marriage ends very quickly. Most prophets have experienced divorce. Stay married with the wrong motives.

You need to take your ministry into account before you find a marriage partner. And you need to know how to identify and find somebody who matches your ministry. Oh she's beautiful.

She's awesome. She's everything I ever wanted in a woman. Pity she's not a Christian.

But you know that one's out already. Oh it's a pity she's not really spiritful. She's a Baptist and she doesn't like the speaking in tongues thing.

But we'll convince her. No you won't. Oh you know he seems a nice guy.

He's just you know he's not really interested in going to church and doing ministry. He's a Christian. He kind of serves the Lord.

He's born again. He knows the Lord. He's just not interested in ministry like I am.

So that's fine. I will just marry him and I'll carry on and do my ministry. No you won't.

No you won't because you've got to be subject to him. He's your husband and you're going to have to put him first in your life. That's why Paul says sometimes it may be necessary if ministry is your passion to not get married at all.

But that's not normal. It's abnormal and you've got to be somebody like Paul who's capable of doing that. Most of us are not.

So if you're going to find a marriage partner make sure that you find one that interfaces with your ministry. One of the biggest mistakes people make in this is they expect their future partner to have the exact same ministry calling as them. We've been learning as we've been looking in the apostolic course that very often our temperament shapes our ministry.

And we know that in marriage opposite temperaments attract and we'll be looking at that too. But if you're attracted to somebody of the opposite temperament the chances are they got an opposite ministry as well. Prophets expect their husband to be excited about the prophetic ministry and they're not at the very opposite of times.

I think I married the wrong man. Not necessarily. As long as you allow him to have the liberty to do the ministry that God's given him.

As long as he allows, the man allows the wife to do the ministry that God's called them. And the two of you can complement together and you can balance. And as you swing temperaments you can also swing ministries and together you can become an apostolic team.

Each one doing a different aspect of the fivefold ministry combining them together to make all of them flow as one. We'll be teaching you some some detail all the things that are involved in how to make this happen. And then finally how do you decide to get married? He asked me to marry him.

That's it. It's decided. I was waiting for that.

She said yes let's do it. Now that's not the reason for making a marriage decision. Is it based on love? Well you know the feelings will develop later.

I don't really I don't really feel the love but everything else is perfect so we won't worry about that. I will learn to love her. I will learn to love him.

Well that is why you need to learn what falling in love is before you get that attitude. Does it line up with the word? Is the person is not a believer? No not even in the hat. When he says he's a Christian is he born again? Is he spirit filled like you are? Oh we can get to that later.

Maybe maybe God will be gracious. Don't count on it. You come to making a marriage decision do not listen to the advice of everybody else out there who suddenly wants to become a counselor and tell you who's good for you and who's bad for you based on their preferences.

Oh it's amazing when you find the right partner that God's chosen for you. How some people will actually feel called to come and tell you that you're marrying the wrong person. Don't ever make your decision based on the advice of others.

If you're going to somebody like a spiritual parent who is a counselor who can advise you by the word that's a different matter. Somebody who knows the Lord and has revelation and can pray with you and say I think you're making a mistake yeah I think you should wait and look to the Lord. Everybody else out there haven't a clue.

And in the end what does God say? What does God say? If you don't know what God said, if you can't hear his voice telling you loud and clear yes marry this person then don't. That's simple. He knows the end from the beginning.

Oh once we've dealt then with how to find a marriage partner we're going to start by looking at what a wife should look like. God's way. Daphne is going to be sharing complete teaching on the attitudes and qualities of a godly wife.

She is a godly wife. She's the best wife that the Lord could ever have given me and I'm quite proud to have her stand up and share. Many women have looked to her and admired her and the image that she gives as a wife.

I'm hoping that in the seminar she'll be able to portray some of that image to you and show you what a godly wife looks like. Then I'm going to put my head on the block and I'm going to teach on the attitudes and qualities of godly husbands. Same kind of thing.

You try and paint a picture of what a husband should look like. God's way. How to be the god kind of wife or the god kind of husband.

The correct attitudes to adopt as a wife or a husband and the qualities that you need to develop in order to become that husband or wife. Okay now we're going to look at marriage and ministry in a lot more detail. I did mention it just now but I want to look especially at a marriage that has already come together and now you need to take your ministries into account.

Earlier I spoke about finding a marriage partner but it could be that you were both unsaved when you got married or neither of you had any real ministry calling and now as time has gone God has begun to place his calling upon your life and that begins to affect your marriage. It can actually tear marriage apart if you're not careful and so I'm going to look at how your ministry calling fits into your marriage. At the ministry activity that you carry out how that will affect your marriage.

We're going to look at the ministering husband and how we should function as a husband and a minister. We're going to look at the ministering wife to see how she should function as both a wife and a minister and we're going to deal with the difficult situation that often exists where one partner is unsaved. Now that should never happen if you got married as a believer because you should never have married an unbeliever so if you married an unbeliever contrary to God's word you actually don't have much right to claim anything because you actually disobeyed God and to ask God to bless that marriage now is a difficult thing but it could be that you got married in an unsafe condition and now you got saved but your spouse is not yet a Christian.

How do we deal with that? What can we do? How do we change the situation? How do we get our spouse to come to the Lord and if they don't how do we continue to work in the work of the ministry especially with a partner that's not a Christian. Then we're going to look at ministry and divorce because that happens. It happens sometimes because of ministry and very often a ministry calling can tear marriage apart and sometimes God actually engineers it for the sake of the call.

There's a big difference between your calling and your ministry and we'll explain that. Your call is given by God and is irrevocable and if your marriage partner stands in the way of that call God could remove them. Your ministry on the other hand is something you like to do.

You know I like going out to church and preaching. Everybody thinks I'm awesome and I stand here and preach. All the women wish I was single and it's so great and this miserable unsaved wife of mine she just has no interest.

She sits at home. Well you know what she can just stay. I will just put her behind me and ignore her and carry on doing the work of the ministry.

Your motive is clearly self-exalting. It has nothing to do with the kingdom of God and so you need to learn when to let your ministry bow to your marriage. You need to know the difference between having a calling that will either fit into your marriage or that marriage may come to an end.

In that case there is a way to go through a divorce process scripturally that will free you to continue to fulfill the calling that God has given you. Now some people believe that Paul was in that circumstance that he was once married and that his wife actually left him once he became a Christian. Evidence is there that somebody held the kind of position that he had was normally a married person.

It is highly unlikely he would have risen up into the position he had as a single person. So the chances are Paul may have been married and that's why Paul often speaks about the unbeliever if they want to leave let them leave and that's why Paul refused to get married again because he put his calling first. We need to look at that in your circumstance and if you are facing that circumstance you need to know how to deal with it scripturally.

You don't just go running off and divorcing your partner because they won't agree with me and my calling. It's not that simple. Now we're going to look at a big subject and that's marriage and sex.

Oh that's a subject that the world wants to talk about all the time but Christians are afraid to talk about and most of our knowledge about sex comes from the world. I always ask people tell me how did you learn about sex? Did your folks call to get you call you into the room the one day and said now we'd like to show you sex and show you how it's done and teach you to do it the right way. See it doesn't happen that way.

Most parents feel embarrassed to discuss it with their children. Nobody actually gives correct sex education God's way to their kids. So where do the kids learn it? They learn it from the world.

They learn it from the internet. They learn it from pornography and everything else. So I'm going to fill that gap and we're going to teach you about sex and the first thing we're going to look at is what I call spiritual sex.

Spiritual sex. How can you have spiritual sex? Sex is quite clearly very physical. Actually it's not.

Sex is more spiritual than you realize. That's why the scripture says that when you get married and you unite together in the sexual relationship you become one person. See marriage isn't what took place when you when you set the marriage vows and the marriage officer said I pronounce you man and wife.

Marriage took place in that intimate unity and you created a spiritual bond with every person you ever slept with. I know that sex is spiritual because sexual desire in humans is very different to what it is in animals. Lust, sexual lust does not occur in animals.

Animals are stirred physically by smell and other hormonal reactions and they go through the mating process for for creating offspring and then it's over. Human beings are very different. Human beings look and lust and desire and think about it.

Why? Because human beings have a spirit. The other thing that confirms it is we know that a demon power, normally we call it a spirit of lust, highly magnifies sexual desire so that when you meet a person and either you or that person have a spirit of lust there's a very very strong sexual attraction to that person. It takes a spirit to create strong sexual desire.

We all know that. What we don't know is that there is a spirit known as the Holy Spirit who's capable of doing the same thing. You need to learn how to invite the Holy Spirit into your sexual experience, your marriage.

You need to let the Holy Spirit create in you a lust for your partner instead of letting Satan create in you a lust for somebody else. You need to make love in the spirit. I'll show you how to do that, teach you some of the principles that are involved.

We're going to look at sexual temperaments. We're going to see how your temperaments often affect your sexual relationship. We're going to look at foreplay the right way, not the world's way.

We're going to look at sex and drugs. What place does medication and drugs hold in the life of believer when it comes to the sexual relationship? Is it wrong for us to use an aphrodisiac to increase sexual desire? And then we're going to look more specifically at other sexual problems. We're going to look at what happens when there is sex before marriage, especially amongst believers.

I'm going to show you how the guilt of having had sex before marriage, if you've grown up in a standard Christian environment, can actually destroy your sexual relationship after you're married. We're going to look at frigidity and impotence. Why is it that women have a problem enjoying sex? What is it that causes a man to not desire and perhaps is unable to perform the sexual act? We're going to include things like erectile dysfunction.

We're going to look at everything associated with that. Then we're going to look at that old taboo subject, masturbation and self-stimulation. Is masturbation a sin? The million-dollar question.

I will be answering that question in the seminar and showing you the role that masturbation could play in your life and in your marriage. We're going to look at pornography and sexual publications. You can understand why pornography is so big, how it works, the power that it has, why it is dangerous and how to overcome it.

Today the internet abounds with pornography. It's available freely. You pay, you get a bit more, but there's so much available freely.

Christians are being snared and drawn into it again and again. Do you know why? Because they haven't built a marriage God's way and they show you that if you build a marriage God's way, pornography becomes unnecessary. Then we're going to look at a subject that is huge in the world today and that's the gay lifestyle, gender confusion, the LGBTXYZ.

There's so many gender orientations these days that you kind of get lost. God only created two genders, male and female. We need to understand how it all goes wrong and not only how it goes wrong and why it goes wrong, but how it can get fixed because it can get fixed.

So we're going to deal with this subject of sexuality in quite a lot of detail and I hope by the end of the seminar you'll be able to deal with all your sexual problems and with the help of the Lord enter into a marriage that has an abundance of good sex because God created sex. That scripture we looked at at the beginning, marriage is precious in all circumstances and sex is a beautiful thing. It is a beautiful thing, it's meant to be a beautiful thing, but Satan has corrupted it and made an ugly thing and some Christians are so religious that they think sex is an ugly thing.

As a result their marriages suffer. Sex is central to a good marriage. A good sexual relationship is essential to a good marriage.

We need to understand the subject properly and then finally we're going to look at solving some other general marital problems. The first major problem, probably the root problem of all marriage difficulties is lack of communication between a husband and a wife. We're going to look at how this comes about, what causes it and how you can go about fixing it because if you don't deal with this everything else will fail.

We're going to look at past hurts and bitternesses, especially if you've been through different relationships prior to your marriage, if you've been in other marriages prior to your marriage. There's a lot of baggage back there that you brought with you and we need to know how to deal with it because if you don't you will never enter into the joy of a heavenly marriage. We're going to look at where finances play a role.

Financial lack can destroy a marriage overnight. The pressures that come on a relationship when there's lack of finances can tear a marriage apart. We need to look at what the Bible teaches about this and how we can deal with financial problems in a marriage situation.

We need to look at how finances are handled in a marriage and especially where both partners are earning their own income, how are the finances handled in the marriage because that again can destroy a marriage. We're going to look at infidelity and third parties. For many people the main problem in their marriage is the fact that their partner is interested in somebody else and you're tempted to think if that person could just drop off the end of the world right now, you know, if I could do like Moses did with Korah and just open the ground and let the ground just swallow them up, my problems will be solved.

It's not true. That person is not the cause of the problems in your marriage. They are a result of the problems in your marriage.

We're going to show you how to avoid it and if it does happen how to deal with it. How do you handle it if your partner's being unfaithful and he's being involved in an extramarital affair. Then we're going to look at another thing that can tear marriages apart and that's in-laws.

You know that old song, my in-laws made an outlaw out of me. In-laws can destroy a marriage, absolutely destroy it. Each partner can be drawn to their family relationships and that draw can be so strong that it breaks the bond that holds a husband and wife together.

Sometimes we feel obligated to relatives and we allow them to control and destroy our marriage. I'm going to show you what the scriptural basis is for that. I'm going to show you how to deal with in-laws according to the word of God and how to handle the situation if your spouse is putting his or her family ahead of you.

And then we're going to deal with one final thing and that's ex-spouses and children. So common today because divorce is rampant and there's not too many marriages, especially amongst older people that are brand new marriages to first-time partners. There is an abundance of remarriage out there and in every case, unless the previous spouse has died and your partner was widowed, there is out there somebody who once stood in your place and that person sometimes may be bent on destroying this marriage.

Sometimes that person may be bent on drawing your marriage partner away from you and what often is right at the center of this is children. Children. I'll show you what the scripture teaches about this and how to deal with it.

But very often stepchildren can destroy a marriage. We need to know how to handle this whole situation because the chances are there's always going to be an ex-spouse and stepchildren if you remarry. All of these things cause major problems in a marriage and prevent you from living that heavenly marriage that God intends.

So in conclusion, if you're a normal being, you don't enjoy being alone. God never created you to be alone. It is natural and normal for you to want to find life partner and God can help you find your perfect match and when he does, your life will take on a whole new meaning.

Now if you're unhappy in your marriage, God can change it. He can bring you back to the condition you were when you first got married. He can take you back to the honeymoon stage.

I'm hoping that the seminar is going to help those married couples who attend to experience that if you've had bad marriage experiences previously, you do not need to be afraid of getting married again in case it happens again. Not if you do it God's way. So one of the main purposes of the seminar is to clear out all the baggage, to deal with your hurts and bad experience of the past and to teach you and show you how you can enter into that new marriage with hope and with confidence and live a joyful happy life the way God intended.

In the end, God wants you to have a life of fulfillment, living a marriage that is a foretaste of what it's going to be like in heaven. Well not quite because heaven is not going to be marriage, but we know heaven is going to be the most wonderful experience ever. So let's start having a bit of heaven on earth while we're down here and let's start experiencing that as a result of being married to the right kind of person, of being the right kind of person to be married to and together living that heavenly marriage experience.

If you desire this, then I urge you to seriously consider either attending the seminar live, perhaps you may be even listening to this message long after the seminar is gone. It will continue to be offered in the future. Every single teaching will be captured on video, will be uploaded in video and in audio and will be transcribed for those who want to read it.

So if you choose at any time to take this course online as a distance learning option, everything will be available to you. You can make that choice right now. I'd encourage you to seriously pray about it and get in there and learn these principles as they could change your life.

Amen.

Post A Review For This Book