Who Is Your Enemy?

I stayed up quite late last night and did alot of reading in the new bible that I had purchased earlier that afternoon. There is so much valuable information in it that I had to force myself to put it down and get some sleep! I came upon this one article and wanted to share some of it tonight.
A magazine once made a statement that "Marriage is the only war where you sleep with the enemy."

I would much rather picture the world as the true battlefield and marriage as God's smallest battle formation for winning the war. Every married couple needs to understand a very important and crucial biblical principle: Your mate is NOT your enemy. Paul says in the bible - "For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood" (Eph. 6:12)

Picture marriage as two people joined together in a foxhole, cooperating in a battle against a common enemy. Take a good look at your own foxhole. (as I am doing myself!) Are we fighting the enemy or are we fighting each other? Someone once said, " I was so busy standing up in the foxhole, duking it out with my husband, that I had no time to be involved in fighting against the real enemy." This sounds like my life and definately hit home for me.

We need to keep in mind that whenever we declare war on our mate, ultimately we are opposing God Himself. What a sobering thought this was for me! It means we are rejecting the very person that God has provided to complete us and to meet our needs.

A practical little test I had to stop and do on myself was - do I view my mate as an enemy or a fellow soldier? Do I focus more on the negative in him or do I focus more on the positiive? I definately realized exactly what I was really doing in my personal life.

I realized right then that the real enemy is the devil who loves to decieve us and convince us that our mate is our enemy. His ultimate goal is to divide us, make us oppose each other and set our focus on waging war against each other. We need to stop and say to ourself - my spouse is not my enemy, then focus on the strategies of the one who wants to destroy us, our family and our marriage.