How I Got Married At 19 In 200 Level by Apostle Femi Lazarus: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

Happiness is the fulfillment of purpose

What makes you happy is the fulfillment of purpose. Not love

We define love as God. If you say "God is my boo," no, I won't take that

I don't outsource my happiness. Being happy is not a function of what another person gives to me

My joy is derived from what I do in God. My wife is in the same purpose, so there is no turbulence within our ship. We are sailing with the same objective and the same mandate

What regularly rocks other marriages does not necessarily rock ours because of the synergy we have built over the years

Apart from finding my personal purpose, finding someone who complements it and helps me fulfill it is what makes me happy

Keeping the fire

Behind every green garden there is a gardener. Behind every showroom there is a workshop. No one arrives at something beautiful without work behind the scene

It takes intentionality. Both of us understand there is work behind the scene

There is a physical attraction, like Adam when he saw Eve Genesis 2:23

That spontaneity of feeling is still there

Going to her pastor first

Everybody in the church is an uncle and an auntie. She saw me as an uncle. I kept saying, stop calling me uncle, call me by my name. It was a preparation and a marination

You cannot speak to anybody without first speaking to your pastors. So I went to her mom first, who was also my pastor

She asked, is it this person? Is it this person? When I said no to the third, she said, don't do this to me. She suspended the pastors' meeting and went home

Later she called and asked if I had said anything to her daughter. I said no, my principle is to speak to my pastor first.

She said, I am not the one in charge of the heart. I have seen how you do ministry together. Go and talk to her

Purpose precedes marriage

I had two relationships before her. In the first, I told her I would go into ministry and she was fine.

When I said where, she prayed and said that is not where God is calling her. We parted. That is where purpose precedes marriage.

You must have clarity on what it is and where you will do it

In the second, the date was fixed. She met her ex, old feelings came alive, and she told me honestly. Later we agreed to let it go

When I met my wife, her age was not an issue. She was already mature upstairs, and what I found in her I did not find in the others

Do not make one man's story a doctrine

You can copy but you might not be able to paste. The experiences of one man's life should not form doctrine or the pathway for another

Sometimes we get overly fascinated with process and want to copy another man's process and make it ours

Illustration: a childhood with responsibility

Her mother was a pastor, a businesswoman and an itinerant minister. As a secondary school student she ran her mother's accounts and sold her goods. As the first of four, she ran the house

At 10 years old she went to the market with a long list and a lot of money, bought goods from shop to shop and chartered a taxi home. She did not realize her childhood was not normal

By university she was also helping her dad run his accounts and finances. A head start on life, but no real childhood. So marriage did not seem out of place, and she did not feel she missed out

Given how driven she is, if she had not married when she did, to the person she did, she probably would not be married today

Illustration: Mary and Joseph

Mary was the one who got the vision and carried Christ, but Joseph had to know how to midwife her. The covenant was with Joseph, not with the lineage of Mary

I saw the grace God had invested in her at a young age, and I was ready to create the platform to midwife whatever God had put inside her

Age is a number, maturity is content

I was 19 when we got married. It felt like high treason, as if it was unheard of, especially around the kingdom

My mom always said her children would marry early. If they are ready, why should they sit around?

There are young men and old babies. There are old girls and young women

What makes time relevant is the content that goes into the time. If time just passes and the content does not enter, you end up with just numbers

There are 25 year olds I cannot recommend for marriage. They are still wearing emotional and maturity diapers

The exposure to maturity was not made a curriculum within families, and the preparation was not there. I understand why some people were concerned for me

A theory on delayed marriage

Most people give God a timeline. They expect him to show up then. If God comes earlier than that time, they say it is not good, and it takes longer for seasons to recalibrate

Courtship

Courtship time is not intercourse time. It is investigation time and interrogation time

Many people, as soon as courtship starts, are interested only in the wedding and the plan for the day, not for the lifetime

We talked about what God would have us do together. Before talking about how many children or the colors, we talked about each other as persons

Maintenance conversations must happen all the time. How far with you am I? Have I carried you along? Where do you feel left out? We do it weekly.

Every Monday we shut down just for the two of us

A fine "how are you" is not the mundane kind. It is a real check on the other person

Friendship and synergy

We enjoyed each other's company before we started. We understood each other's jokes. Someone whose soul you are in love with is who you will be with when the body gets old

As a pastor's kid, she was on her tippy toes around almost everybody. Here was someone who allowed her to be herself

2 Corinthians 6:14

Believers should not be unequally yoked, so marry someone with shared belief. But having a happy home has nothing to do with religion alone

Many Christians, if they could reverse time, would pay more attention to synergy, not just "I wish" or "I heard" or "God said" or "I had a dream"

We had no dream. We had what we wanted to do

Romance and the soul

Women are very imaginative. A woman can picture in a moment what a future with you looks like. If you cannot romance her soul and her intelligence, you cannot go further

Men, put aside some of the "spiritual" language when relating to a woman

Genesis 2:23

Adam spoke at the soul level when he saw Eve. There was no high level language of God

Opening doors, commending her, complimenting her, using the right words. There is nothing wrong with these gestures. Let us stop making our ladies feel we do not have romance

Messages that threaten or insult a woman are derogatory and demonic. You cannot scare someone into loving you

Religious manipulation in relationships

Someone walked up to my wife while she was single and said, "I'm your God ordained husband. If you miss me, you have missed it for life." That is manipulation

People manipulate prophecy. They bring their own opinion in the name of "thus says the Lord." Those in higher spiritual standing use their office to gain a spouse

I never told my wife "the Lord said" and I never told her I saw a dream. If I had, it would have disqualified me, because she was aware of the manipulation in the relationship space

She viewed life through the lens of trauma and was still hurt, so she knew her marriage had to have the hand of God in it, in different aspects

Prophecy obsession and stalking is obsession, not God. It happens to men and to women, in religious circles

Illustration: the retreat

At a retreat, a brother who liked a sister began to "prophesy" that she was his wife and shared out the sisters to the brothers. One friend replied, "The Lord has kept this one for himself."

If we took video of the foolish things people do in the name of religion, they would almost dig the ground to hide

5 areas of compatibility

Spiritual compatibility alone is not enough. We give couples a compatibility test:

• Spiritual
• Physical
• Intellectual
• Social
• Emotional

Ask: Do you know your spouse's emotional response to a matter? Have you seen them angry? What is their mindset on money, on children, on giving?

Spiritual compatibility cuts across believers. You can be compatible with almost any believer who is led by the Spirit and is allowing the word of God to form them. Being in church is not enough

The foundation is the faith that binds us. As the building goes up, rooms segment. Do we connect emotionally and intellectually? Are our values aligned? We are not speaking in tongues 24/7 in our marriages. We are relating

Compatibility is not sameness. I can like beans and she does not. I want the AC on and she loves warmth. Keys and sockets are different but they fit. Difference does not mean not compatible

Someone who does not love children is a red flag. Some want children but do not want to be involved in raising them

Spouse or partner?

Do you want a spouse, or are you ready to be a partner? Many feel ready because they want help to put their lives together, bear children and keep the house. That is an unpaid assistant for life

Once you think partnership, you think about what you are bringing, not just what you get

How her father got the vision

Her father is a professor who had said none of his children would marry before finishing school. We prayed and did not know how to tell him

In a service he started the benediction, stopped halfway, dropped the mic and went into the church office

He told her he had a vision: "Bamshack is your husband. Go and meet your mother and start to prepare. The marriage will happen soon."

The response was to thank God. If God had done this, it was not something to play with. We had to tread carefully

Honor your parents

Her father broke tradition. He said, "I am the father of this child. I determine who gets married to this child." He collected 10,000 naira

We did not choose our parents. God did. If he chose them for you, we cannot be more intelligent than his will

Firstborns are usually experiment children, because parents are learning on the job. Even if parents did not get everything right, communicate honor, appreciation and gratitude. Do not take it for granted

For my daughters, any man must promise never to maltreat her, to remember why he started, and to bring her back to me if he is tired