Stop Getting Married Without Purpose Don't Have Children Without Knowing Why by Rev. Christie Bature: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

Everything begins and ends with purpose. Everyone on this planet was born for a purpose and with a purpose. Without purpose, life is an experiment, a chaotic journey that results in frustration, disappointment, and failure. If you never asked God why He joined your marriage, or why He gave you this specific child, go back and ask Him now. Where there is genuine purpose, divorce stays far away, because there is a word governing that space, and the enemy has to actually contend with that word rather than simply talk you out of the marriage. The same question applies to children: why are you having the children you are having? What is the purpose for these children?

The same promise God gave Abraham, He also gave Hagar: "I will cause his descendants to be as many as the sand." The same promise given to Isaac was given to Ishmael. So why are you marrying this person? Why do you have the children that you do?

A Child Given as a Sign

After six children, one more daughter came at age forty. "I don't need another child. There are so many families looking for one and they don't have. I don't need a seventh child," was the honest prayer at the time. The Lord answered, "I'm giving you the child for a sign." He explained that most of His daughters, once they reach their thirties, become jittery about their "biological clock" and marry anything in the name of a husband, then spend years disappointed because there was no vision attached to the marriage in the first place, only the sense that a husband or wife is the next thing to achieve after a degree, "like you're buying a pair of shoes from the shop." God said, "I'm not only the God of the 20s or the 30s, I'm also the God of the 40s, the 50s. And if they dare believe me, I'm the God of the 60s."

Once that word went out, the enemy came to fight it. A six week bleed followed, with massive clots of blood, and a doctor diagnosed a cancer mimicking pregnancy and recommended a procedure to "flush it out." The Holy Spirit simply said, "No." The pregnancy was carried, and a daughter was born.

Confirming testimonies followed. Preaching in Kafanchan, the Lord instructed that every woman over forty believing for a baby should come forward. A fifty year old woman who had never been pregnant conceived that month and had a son; remembering later that God is also "the God of the 60s," she believed again and had a second son at sixty. A year later, in Enugu, fourteen women over forty stood on the same word, including one woman standing in for her sister, who was not even present. That sister gave birth to twins.

Find out the purpose for each child. Find out the purpose for your marriage.

Purpose Silences the Enemy

When Jesus and the disciples set out to cross to the other side, a calm sea suddenly turned violent, threatening everyone in the boat. On the other side was a demon possessed man living among the tombs. When Jesus delivered him, the man wanted to follow Him, but Jesus told him to stay and tell his own people what had happened, because his work was there, in the region called Decapolis, the Ten Cities. History records that man as the first Christian bishop of Decapolis. Purpose is strong enough to shut down the voice of the enemy when opposition rises, and strong enough to make a person move by faith rather than by what their eyes currently see.

Life Without Purpose Is an Experiment

Someone who leaves their home country to study, to find work, or to improve their life has a purpose. If they arrive and that purpose is suddenly thwarted, disappointment and frustration follow, and some simply pack their bags and go home. Every person is wired with capacities and abilities connected to their purpose. Some excel broadly across the sciences and the arts; others are narrowed to specific capacities. No one is defective, it is simply their design. Someone who paints upside down and only reveals the picture once it is turned the right way has a gift no one else can imitate on command, even if they could never learn to draw with a ruler and graph paper the way someone else can. Find your purpose. Find the purpose for your family.

Five Questions for Finding Purpose

Drawing on the teaching of the late Myles Munroe, there are five basic questions to answer in discovering purpose.

1. Who am I? The question of identity.
2. Where am I from? The question of heritage.
3. Why am I here? The question of purpose.
4. What can I do? The question of potential.
5. Where am I going? The question of destiny.

Every person on earth wants to be seen, to be heard, and to have relevance, and that is the summation of purpose. God is not asking families merely to add to the eight billion people on the earth; He is asking that His kingdom be established through the kind of families we run. Every person causing problems in the world today came from a family; even where a father was absent, someone provided that foundation.

Purpose Can Be Used for Evil

Jezebel was driven by purpose. She was placed in Ahab's life to turn his heart away from the Lord, and she prayed and fasted toward that end and succeeded. She doomed his descendants; after she killed Naboth and took his vineyard, their son died on that same vineyard. To be driven means to be passionate, to see only one thing in front of you, tunnel vision that does not see anything else in the periphery. When you operate in purpose, you are completing a kingdom assignment; refusing purpose is refusing to serve the kingdom, because the kingdom itself is purpose driven.

God Never Acts Without a Reason

God is a purpose driven God who never does anything just for the fun of it. If He gave you a wife, a husband, a child, money, or a house, He had a purpose attached to each one.

Elements of a Purpose Driven Home

1. A Clear Spiritual North Star

   Joshua 24:15

   Deuteronomy 6:4-9

   Proverbs 29:18

   Matthew 6:33

   The family knows who they are in God and why they exist, beyond survival, beyond success, beyond comfort. When a daughter away at university in Leicester avoided a local church because it turned out to be a cult, that discernment was itself evidence of a foundation already laid: "That you could recognize that it is a cult is a blessing. It means you know what a real church should be." Children absorb identity by observation. One daughter said, "Mommy, since I was born, my earliest memories of you is you and your Bible every single day. I think any day you don't read your Bible, you will fall sick, because I think you'll have withdrawal symptoms." A son who, from age two, sat beside his mother every day with his own children's Bible muttering through the story of David and Goliath is now, at twenty five, the most consistent of her children in daily devotion.

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   • What children absorb is not always what parents intend. A boy asked to write a short essay on his family wrote a single sentence: "In my family, my mother beats my father." Out of every good thing happening in that home, that was the one picture that registered, and it was the wrong picture.

2. Home Based Discipleship, Not Outsourced

   Deuteronomy 6:6-7

   Ephesians 6:4

   2 Timothy 1:5

   2 Timothy 3:14-15

   Parents, not the Sunday school teacher, carry primary responsibility for a child's spiritual formation; the church can support it, but the home must lead it. Fathers who leave prayer and spiritual leadership entirely to their wives, calling her "the prayer warrior," are abdicating a role that was never hers alone to carry. A wife is not responsible for the spiritual atmosphere over the home; the husband is, and much of today's chaos traces back to men abdicating that role.

3. Word and Prayer as Rhythm, Not a Random Event

   Psalm 1:1-3

   Colossians 3:16-17

   1 Thessalonians 5:17

   Philippians 4:6-7

   Scripture and prayer are meant to be woven into meals, decisions, conflicts, and transitions, not reserved only for moments of trouble.

4. Purposeful Routines and Family Rituals

   Predictable patterns, a consistent family meal, a consistent character from one day to the next, create stability, identity, and shared meaning. Tension that is never resolved does not stay invisible; children absorb it into their bodies even when they never verbalize what they are feeling, and it can resurface later as drug use, sexual acting out, or generalized anxiety, a coping response to a home that never dealt honestly with its own atmosphere.

5. Love Expressed Through Honor, Safety, and Wise Authority

   Ephesians 4:26

   Do not let the sun go down on your anger. Carrying malice for weeks or months creates a tension in a home that children register even when nothing is ever said aloud.

Principle Based, Not Emotion Based

There are two kinds of emotion based relationships. A benign one is not malicious, but neither side brings any real work to keep the marriage alive; a malignant one is intentionally unkind, withholding affection, praise, finances, or intimacy on purpose. Neither survives long term. What holds is a relationship governed by agreed principle rather than by whichever feeling is loudest that day.

One year into marriage, an agreement that no family member would live in the home for at least three years was broken when a brother needed to be taken in during a crisis. The tension that decision later caused became the marriage's first major test: "This is one of the reasons we said principle based. It is not how you are feeling. We agreed the word of God is the standard, and if I do anything outside of this, I am breaking the principle that governs our marriage."

Every marriage is an invitation to start a new lineage. What was broken in the household a person came from should be honestly examined and deliberately not repeated. A daughter going through a hard season in her own marriage was told, "Being my daughter is not a privilege, it is a responsibility. You have a responsibility to do better than me."

Decide in the home that there will be no malice, no use of the word "divorce," and that the word of God will be the final authority. Where a disagreement cannot be settled immediately, agree on when it will be revisited rather than going to bed keeping malice. Where direct conversation repeatedly breaks down, a written letter, with no accusation, only a clear expression of what is in the heart, can sometimes be heard in a way spoken words in the heat of an argument cannot: "This is the first time I'm understanding what you're trying to say. There was no accusation, just an expression of what was in my heart."