Rebuke From The Scripture

rebuke - Rebuke from the Scripture

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, in righteousness. 2 Timothy 3:16, NIV

Mark and Allissa had made great progress in healing the hurts from their marriage. They had eliminated several major conflicts, and they had restored their friendship. Now they desired to tackle their spiritual closeness.

Couples often find spiritual closeness through Scripture memorization, focusing particularly on passages dealing with marriage, family, and communication.

We started Mark and Allissa on a joint memory project of ten passages in Proverbs dealing with communication. We encouraged them to choose a consistent time every day to memorize. They shared in looking up the verse in the Bible and reading the context of the verse so that they could have a clearer understanding of the verse as it relates to the thought of the passage.

Mark and Allissa began by saying the reference and then reading the verse itself. They found that the verses normally break down into logical phrases. So as they tried to memorize each verse, Mark and Allissa took a phrase at a time and committed it to memory until they finally completed the whole verse. They quoted and repeated the verse, checking one another as they said the whole passage out loud.

Mark and Allissa began to use their car-pool time together each morning for their memory work. They quickly learned the ten verses we gave them, plus many more. They saw tremendous growth in their relationship because of the convicting power of the Word of God. Both Mark and Allissa described numerous times when they were about to say or do something that would bring harm to their marriage, but the Spirit brought the Word to their minds.

God’s Word works like that—it serves to bring necessary rebuke so that marital hurt can be prevented.

What will you do today to start making the memorization of the Word of God a bigger part of your marriage?