Question And Answer Session by Apostle Emmanuel Iren: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

Honoring Parents Without Absorbing Their Wounds

Question: My mother has turned me into a dumping bag for everything about my father's shortcomings. It is beginning to make me see all men as evil. How do I manage this while still honoring her?

The first thing to separate is the two responsibilities involved here. There is what God requires — and God's requirement is clear: honor your father and your mother. He did not add a caveat. He did not say honor your father and your mother if they are good to you. The promise attached to it — that it may be well with you — is a promise God will honor when you honor his word. Whether the parent in question gets away with what they are doing is a separate matter. That is a separate judgment.

One of the keys to walking with God is learning to separate the issues. Ask: what is my responsibility here? Honor. How do I do that while protecting my peace?

Some practical steps:

• Find a voice in your mother's life. Everyone has a boss — someone they respect, honor, and are likely to listen to. Find that person. Narrate the situation honestly. Ask them to plead with your mother that you are not your father. You came from him, but you are not him. Ask them to appeal for the right to live without carrying the baggage of sins that are not yours.
• If no such person exists, go to your mother yourself. Not in anger, not in a moment of confrontation — but in a quiet, deliberate moment, prostrate before her, and speak to her from the place of genuine vulnerability. Tell her: I am your child. I came from your womb. I love you. But I am not my father. Unburden the real pain — how her words are affecting you, what they are doing to your sense of yourself and your future. Ask her to let you be. Offer to pray together for the pain she carries from your father to be released.
• Having done everything you can, stand. Ask God to take charge and intervene. Then wait it out — but do not wait passively.

As for the weight that is beginning to make you see all men as evil: that must be addressed directly in prayer. All men are not your father. If you punish all men for what one man did, you are ultimately punishing yourself — because you will bar from your life the very person God intends to send. Begin praying that God will protect your heart from that conclusion, and trust that the right man, when he comes, will be the kind who understands where you have been and can walk with you through it.

In the meantime, lean on the church — counseling, trusted community, accountability. And if there is any opportunity to create physical distance from the environment — boarding school, university away from home — take it. You cannot always control your circumstances, but you can seek legitimate ways to change them.

Feeling More Intellectually or Spiritually Advanced Than a Partner

Question: If someone feels more intellectually or spiritually exposed than their partner and is afraid of future regret, how do they know whether to stay, build, or reconsider?

If you already know there is a reason to fear in this relationship, that fear is already telling you something. You have seen the consequences of a certain kind of mismatch — possibly in your own parents' situation — and your spirit is flagging it. That instinct deserves respect.

Counsel is not instruction. Counsel is information. When you seek the opinion of others about a decision, all you receive is additional data. The responsibility to decide remains with you — because you are the one who knows what you know, spoken and unspoken.

Here is the honest truth: if you marry someone, you cannot hide that you are intelligent. You cannot pretend you are smaller than you are, indefinitely, without cost. And it is more difficult for the man in that dynamic — society puts additional pressure on a man who senses his wife is ahead of him, and that pressure can cause him to behave in ways he did not plan to. Not because he is a bad man, but because the arrangement is working against a deep-seated need.

Amos 3:3 — can two walk together except they agree? The level of comfort you feel with each other must be genuine enough that you can be fully yourself. Find the level of freedom in one another where you can be free to be true.

Not Yet Ready for Marriage — and Not Approached by Men

Question: I want to get married eventually but do not feel financially or personally ready. I am in my 30s and men are not approaching me much. Should I be worried?

If you feel you are not ready, you are not ready. Period. Readiness is not about age — people arrive at different seasons at different times. When your time comes, you will know. And the right person will come in alignment with that time.

What you cannot control, leave. Do not spend your energy managing circumstances that are not in your hands. What do you control? Your life, your career, your relationship with God. Keep walking your journey.

Consider the friend who, single and in her forties, decided she could afford a house and bought one in a prime location — while people said, "You'll never get married if you buy a house that size." She married the man with a bigger house across the road. She sold hers, kept the money, and moved in. Time and seasons belong to God.

Consider the woman who kept accepting foreign postings at work even when others said she should stay home so she could get pregnant. She kept growing her career. The children came when they came — at the same time they would have come regardless — but if she had abandoned her career to wait, she could never have recovered those years.

God has not lost sight of you. He knows your name, your address, your life. He wrote the script. Your neighbor's timing is not your time. Apply yourself to the best of you. When God's time comes, things fall in place. Do not waste your energy worrying about what you cannot control.

How to Communicate with a Husband Who Is Defensive and Cannot Admit Wrongdoing

Question: As a married woman, how do I communicate with a man who is constantly defensive, finds it hard to listen, and cannot see his own wrongdoing?

The first observation is honest: the person asking this question likely noticed these traits before marriage.

This is offered not as condemnation, but as a lesson for those who are single: the biggest and best thing you will ever do for yourself is wait to marry the person who is right for who you are. Marriage is the most consequential decision of a person's life. A spouse becomes a key factor in whether life succeeds or fails. That level of weight demands discernment and patience — not the desire to be Cinderella for one day.

Once married, the configuration changes. The question is not whether you made the best choice — it is how to make this home work. For the person asking: you are going to need to learn the language that opens this particular man up. There are some universal truths about men — they do not change under constant criticism, they give up rather than press harder, they respond to being seen and believed in — and there are specific truths about your husband that only you know through years of life together.

A useful principle: the discounting policy. Look at a person honestly — the good and the bad. Decide whether the good serves the purpose of your life at a percentage that justifies the errors. Once that decision is made and accepted internally, the errors become things to manage rather than constant sources of grief.

You can pray. You can speak to it with wisdom, at the right time, in the right tone. You can hope it changes. But what you cannot do is change another person. Only they can decide to change. Only God can transform from the inside.

Do not marry someone hoping to change them. And if you are already married to someone you hoped to change — shift your energy to working with what is there.

When a Wife Earns More Than Her Husband

Question: How do you balance a situation in marriage where the wife earns more than the husband?

In most cases, this situation was visible before marriage. In some cases, life changes — one person's income grows faster, one loses a job, one steps back for a season. But the principle is the same regardless.

Money is a tool to be used in service of the family's goals. It is not a scorecard.

Your bank balance does not determine the head of the home. What the Scripture says remains: the man should love his wife as Christ loved the church, and the wife should submit to her own husband. Neither command changes because one person earns more.

If the two have truly become one, the money of the two belongs to the household. Planning for how it is used should be a joint decision. The one who has the greater skill for managing resources should be given that responsibility — not based on gender, but on genuine capacity. Wasting family money and letting the household suffer because the man feels he must control the finances as a matter of pride is not leadership.

The particular weight carried by the woman who earns more: the people around her husband are watching. The moment she says something that in another context would be unremarkable, it is heard as arrogance because of the financial disparity. This is an unfair weight — but it is the reality of the social context you are living in now. Consciously and intentionally manage that dynamic. The responsibility falls disproportionately on her not because it is fair, but because it is the terrain.

The man in this situation also carries a weight: social pressure to perform a dominance that the situation makes harder to display. That pressure can cause him to act out in ways he did not intend. Both people must understand this dynamic to navigate it without it becoming a wound.

From personal experience: thirteen years of a marriage where one person was in business and capable of larger financial upswings, and the other was a salaried professional who was the most prudent manager in the home — and what accumulated over those thirteen years in terms of character, unity, and faithfulness eventually produced an outcome that dwarfed anything the financial disparity of those years suggested. The reaper overtook the plower. Amos 9:13.

Before marriage, have the money conversation. Understand where each person is. Understand how you want to work together. If you already know you cannot handle this dynamic, do not marry into it. After marriage, use the money together. Do not make it a weapon or a ledger. In the place of unity, the Lord commands his blessing.

You have not found a team until you find a husband and wife who understand who they are in Christ and work together as one. Nothing can stop them.