We have an amazing tendency to sacrifice the eternal for the sake of the perishable. The focus of our lives becomes getting the things we desire in with little regard for what God desires for us. In this process we get more focused on fulfilling our wants and desires that we leave behind that which is best.
In the Gospel of John this is shown by the way the crowd is looking for Jesus to do parlor tricks before they will believe. They wanted their desires to be satisfied before they would believe. Jesus challenges them to believe seek something better, something lasting.
In marriage it becomes easy to sacrifice the fullness of marriage for the desires and wants of the current moment. We want to experience all that marriage has to offer without having to sacrifice any of our desires. This simply will not work. If we are to experience all that marriage has to offer we must be willing to sacrifice the perishable desires for the sake of the eternal.
Some of the struggles we went through early in our marriage often had easy solutions to them. These easy solutions more often than not would have invited us to sacrifice the eternal for the perishable. There would have been jobs taken that were really not what God hoped for us. Purchases made that would have placed us in bondage to something other than Christ. In fact early in our marriage as we began to welcome children into the world we purchased a big SUV to cart our family around. This met a very real desire and a need. The issue was we sacrificed some availability to God because of the unrealistic car payment we found ourselves bound to. For several years after sacrificing the eternal for the perishable, we paid a financial price for the vehicle long after it was gone from our family.
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