A Successful Marriage: The Wife's Making

The wife is called upon to be a suitable helper of her husband. She is called upon to help him to accomplish the call of God on his life. The Bible says, “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the Lord God commanded the man, You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die. The Lord God said, It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him. Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field. But for Adam no suitable helper was found. So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and closed up the place with flesh. Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. The man said, This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, for she was taken out of man. For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh” (Genesis 2:15-24).
We can see in this passage, which portrays God’s original thought about marriage, that the following were fundamental for a successful marriage:
Adam created by God and living in fellowship with God.
Adam given a specific task to do by God.
A suitable helper needed to help Adam to be all that Godwanted him to be, (particularly in accomplishing the God-given task of working up the garden and taking care of it).
Eve created to be that suitable helper.
Adam fulfilled in having Eve as his helper.
Because this is the divine model, a marriage will succeed as it labours and becomes what God had in mind from the beginning. A wife will make her marriage succeed as she labours and becomes the helper suitable for her husband.
In this book, we shall study what is involved in becoming and being a suitable helper, for as a wife becomes and continues as a suitable helper for her husband, she would have brought in her full contribution to make their marriage successful.
I very much needed the contribution of someone of the opposite sex to enable this small book to make more sense. I needed a woman to say something to women that would help them to bring in their full contribution to making their marriages successful. It is for this reason that chapters 8 and 9 were written by a godly woman - Esther Kouonang.
Many marriages are failing in our day. Even some marriages of true believers are broken or in bad shape. We know that this must grieve our heavenly Father’s heart. We also know that a successful marriage pleases His heart and bears strong testimony to the power of Christ to save and transform.
Because our burden is that the largest number of lost people all over the world should be radically converted to the Lord Jesus and transformed into His likeness in the shortest possible time, we send out this small book with much prayer that it should be used by the Holy Spirit to transform some broken and breaking marriages into marriages that are successful, and that it should transform all happy marriages into successful marriages for the glory of the Lord and the advance of the Gospel.
The next book in the series is going to be, “A Successful Marriage: The Children’s Responsibility.”