Involving another woman in your marriage would make things pretty messy. When Abram went to bed with Hagar, life became very difficult. His wife hated the woman. While many men will not repeat such an awful mistake as this, the principles and the spirit of it are played over and over again in our world.

Romancing the young woman

Many men chase after the hormone-stimulating vision of young women. Pornography is a graphic Hagar who slips into the bedroom and comes between man and wife. He begins to think the sags and wrinkles of age make his wife not as lovely as she once was. He projects normal marital emotions onto photoshopped images. He cannot appreciate his wife like he once did because the wild images keep luring him into the darkness of thinking there is some young woman out there who wants him.

Yes, there is. And her name is Satan (Proverbs 5:5; 7:27).

Agony from chasing ecstasy

Abram’s romantic fling brought contention and fighting into his home. Could fifteen minutes of nirvana be worth fifteen years of turmoil? Men who replace their wives with images bring untold turmoil and angst into the home. Their wives feel cheapened—whether they know what he is up to or not. Tension fills the air as the spirit of discontent and lust pull him out of her arms. Even while in her arms he fantasizes about another woman.

If a marriage is full of strife, a husband needs to look at more than just better finance management and conflict-resolution. If he is being unfaithful and disrespectful of his wife’s devotion, he is the source of the anxiety. Once the inside of the cup has been cleansed, the outside will be, too.

Sometimes we wonder why we experience devastating, ugly things. Abram had to meet with God between the bloody carcasses of animals and a horror fell on him as he fought off vultures. Sometimes you might feel like you are going through something as dark.

God sends you trials and tests as raw materials to build you into what He wants you to be. Our church had to get rid of an old van at the metal scrap yard. Some buyer needs iron to make, say, some sheet metal for a building. When our old, brown van arrives it will have been crushed and look uglier than ever.

God hands you ugly situations that you can do with as you please. You can sit and look at the ugliness, try to bury it and pretend it does not exists (as some farmer did on the back of my property), or dress it up so it looks stylish and acceptable. Unlike the company needing to make sheet metal, we cannot see the value of the ugliness that arrives in our lot in life.

The sheet metal company will take that tonnage of ugliness and shred it into metal shards. Then they melt it down. Then it is poured into molds of some sort to make the finished product.

The output looks nothing like the input

What you receive from life’s scrap heap could become something beautiful and useful if you choose to let the Lord transform your mess into something meaningful.

The cross God gives you comes looking ugly. Your faith in the Lord through your hurts and confusion allows the Lord to shape something wonderful out of what looks horrid. Your digestive system takes meats and breaks them down into basic amino acids and then reconstructs it into muscle, enzymes, or other useful proteins. Similarly, your love for God and trust in Him reprocesses life’s bulk material that would otherwise be useless.

Abram had to go through darkness and terror to get a great promise from the Lord. Abram’s future descendents would go through horror and gloom until the beautiful construction of Christ and redemption would come through them.

Let the Lord transform your cross into a crown.