Powerful Q And A Session In Maryland, Usa by Rev. Christie Bature: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

Overthinking a partner's flaws, or a genuine red flag?

Change doesn't come easily. How you know you're overdoing it is when you have said something more than once, that's called nagging.

• Illustration: a husband kept shouting each time his wife left her shoes out or forgot to empty the fridge's drip pan. The more he shouted, the more she forgot. One day he simply emptied the pan himself without a word. She never forgot again, and started checking it twice a week. Grace produces more freedom than legalism.
• Say it once, say it twice, then make it a prayer point. Learn to ignore some things, pick your battles.
• If something is the kind of thing you personally notice, handle it yourself rather than demanding the other person change. The things that occur to you are the things God wants you to handle.

When ministry seems to take your time from building a home

Question from a pastor's wife.

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• Ministry is home. God's most important institution is not government or church, it's family.
• Children of pastors have sat across from her counseling chair and said they hate church because ministry neglected them. Every minister has to structure their time so there is time for family.
• When Kenneth Hagin died, ministry continued through his son. When John Osteen died, Joel Osteen continued. No excuse of "I was doing ministry" justifies a husband, wife or children being neglected.
• Pastors' children should not be left roaming the church for hours during long meetings, and should not be held to behavior standards that belong to the pastor. Archbishop Benson Idahosa's daughter did not follow her father into preaching, and said that not following in his footsteps does not mean she failed; she is not an extension of her father.

Family comes first, church second.

Relating to people wounded by their past

• Illustration: if a stray bullet lands on your leg, it isn't your fault, but you still have a responsibility to run to the hospital and pursue healing, not to keep pointing at who shot you.
• Everyone carries wounds, some deep, some superficial, but a wounded person cannot use that as an excuse to keep wounding others. Go deal with your pain, your trauma, your wound, so you can have healthy relationships.
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Rev. Christie Bature
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• Come to people with compassion and understanding, but there's only so far you can go with someone who consistently bleeds on you. Sometimes you need to walk away just to wash the blood off your clothes.
• Love sometimes demands confrontation. Staying quiet and "understanding" indefinitely can become enabling, which reinforces bad behavior rather than helping.
• On mental capacity to seek healing: psychosis is losing control of your mind and needs a doctor. A personality disorder shaped by temperament and experience is not an excuse to keep enabling. Depression is sometimes a chemical imbalance that needs a doctor, not a spiritualized excuse.
• If everyone around you, an entire extended family, avoids you, you are the problem, not everybody else. Illustration: winning over a "tough" mother-in-law by refusing to take her hardness personally, honoring her socially, and showing up for her, including rushing four hours to her side after an armed robbery in her home. She later defended her fiercely in a family meeting.

What headship really means

A ship cannot move with two people at the helm; God is a God of order. But no captain runs a ship alone, he needs his crew.

• Being the head is a responsibility, not a title. When Adam sinned in the garden, God called for Adam, not Eve, even though Eve ate first. If a marriage fails, the head is responsible before God, not "my wife is the reason."
• Men must be intentional before choosing a wife, not focused only on looks. A woman who is only "a casing" with no character will bring struggle into the home.
• Testimony: a young man wrote 20 years after hearing a message on God's design for sexuality that it formed a conviction that ended a relationship involving fornication and reshaped the course of his life and eventual marriage.
• Ephesians 5, husbands are to love their wives as Christ loved the church and gave His life. Christ maintains headship by sacrifice; most men are not willing to bring that to the table.
• Real cases of abuse described: a husband who dismissed his wife's report of him molesting their daughters, and another who beat and locked his wife in a wardrobe and drove off. That is not headship.
• Men have a "secret code" of covering for each other's infidelity that does damage and must be challenged.
• The "handbag test": handing a man your bag in public reveals character. Holding it far from his body, worried about others' opinions, shows he won't defend you publicly. Carrying it naturally under his arm, unconcerned what people think, shows he'll help and defend you when you need it.

Why women sometimes revere pastors more than their husbands

• Giving a pastor your best attention, time and honor while withholding it from your husband at home is idolatry.
• "Let every wife submit to her own husband," not every husband, and a pastor is not your husband. Don't give your pastor honor you can't give your husband.
• Submission is a response to love, not something demanded on its own. When a husband behaves like a tyrant, a wife may misplace the devotion meant for him onto a pastor instead, since it feels safer to give it to a spiritual leader.

Getting a child to open up and trust you

Children don't just close up, there are always reasons.

• Don't mock a child's early affections. A daughter in primary one wrote a love letter to a boy; instead of shaming her, encourage her so she doesn't shut her heart and become a stone. When later asked if she wanted to marry the boy, the child herself said, "I'm just a child, children don't marry, I should love him to express that I like him."
• Keep a friendly, non-alarmed face when a child brings up something sensitive. When a seven-year-old daughter asked what "fornication" meant and described "holding themselves" with her brother, staying calm rather than reacting kept the conversation open; she confided that whenever it happened she "would go blind," which was taken as God's mercy exposing the matter early. It was addressed with both children using Leviticus 18.
• Children who have been molested often still beg not to be told to their parents, fearing they will be blamed or disbelieved rather than protected. That fear is what shuts children down.
• Correcting past parenting mistakes requires admitting them and apologizing to your children. Illustration: growing up, her own parents never apologized even when wrong, which contributed to a sibling becoming the most rebellious child in the house, who died at 44. She vowed to apologize to her own children when wrong; the first attempt was extremely hard, but over time it made "sorry" easy in the home, and her children, now adults, now confide in her freely.

Every child is different; the approach that works for one child may not work for another. Be intentional and re-engage with each one.