Now that we’ve finished fellowshipping on the problem of married people’s distorted understandings and practices, let’s fellowship on the topic of “pursuing marital happiness is not your mission.” People letting go of various fantasies about marriage just means that they come to have some correct understandings and ideas that are comparatively in accordance with the truth in terms of the concept and definition of marriage; it does not mean, however, that they can completely let go of their pursuits, ideals, and desires concerning marriage. As for those who have entered marriage, how do they maintain their marital happiness? It can be said that many people are unable to correctly approach marital happiness, or unable to correctly approach the relationship between marital happiness and man’s mission. Isn’t this a problem too? (It is, yes.) Married people always regard marriage as a major event in life and place great emphasis on marriage. They therefore entrust all their life’s happiness to their married lives and to their partners, believing that the pursuit of marital happiness is the only goal to be pursued in this life. That’s why many people expend great effort, pay a great price, and make great sacrifices for the sake of marital happiness. For example, someone gets married and, to attract their partner and keep their marriage and their love “fresh,” they will do many things. Some woman says, “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,” and so she learns from her mother or elders how to cook, how to make fine cuisine and pastries, making all sorts of things her husband likes to eat and striving to provide delicious and agreeable food for him. When her husband is hungry, he thinks of her fine cuisine, then he thinks of home, then he thinks of her, and then he hurries home. In this way, she’s not often left alone in the house but instead often has her husband beside her, and so she feels that learning to make some delicious dishes to get to her man through his stomach is very important. Because this is one way to maintain marital happiness and because it is the price a woman should pay and responsibility she should fulfill for the sake of her marital happiness, she works hard to sustain her marriage in this way. There are also some women who feel insecure about their marriage, and they often use various ways to please, attract, and prompt their husbands. For example, a woman like this will often ask her husband if he remembers when their first date was, when they first met, when their wedding anniversary is, and other dates. If her husband remembers, then she feels that he loves her, that she’s in his heart. If he doesn’t remember, then she gets upset and complains, “You can’t even remember such an important date as this. Don’t you love me anymore?” You see, in a continuous attempt to attract their partner, draw their attention, and maintain their marital happiness, both men and women use worldly ways to prompt their partner, and they all do meaningless and childish things. There are also some women who will pay any price to do things harmful to their own health. For example, some women over the age of thirty, seeing that their skin is no longer so lovely and fair, and their faces are not so bright and beautiful anymore, go for a facelift or hyaluronic acid injection. There are some women who, in order to look more beautiful, have double eyelid surgery and they have their eyebrows tattooed, often dressing themselves up in especially beautiful and sexy ways to attract their husbands, and they even learn to do the romantic things that others do for the sake of their own marital happiness. For example, on a special day, a woman like this may lay on a sumptuous dinner with candles and red wine. Then she turns out the lights and, when her husband comes home, she makes him close his eyes and asks, “What day is it today?” Her husband tries to guess for a long time but can’t think what day it is. She lights the candles and when her husband opens his eyes and looks, it turns out to be his own birthday and he says, “Oh, how wonderful! I love you so much! I didn’t even remember my own birthday. You remembered my birthday, you’re so adorable!” The woman then feels happy and pleased. With just these few words from her husband, she feels satisfied and at ease. Men and women both rack their brains thinking of ways to maintain their marital happiness. The wife makes great changes and sacrifices, expending much time and effort, and the husband does just the same, strenuously working hard and earning money in the world, filling his wallet, bringing more and more money home, making a better and better life for his wife to enjoy. In order to maintain his marital happiness, he also has to learn from what others do and buys roses, birthday presents, Christmas presents, chocolates on Valentine’s Day, and so on, racking his brains thinking of ways to try to make his wife happy, doing all he can to do these pointless things. And then one day he loses his job and doesn’t dare tell his wife, afraid that she’ll divorce him or that their marriage won’t be as happy as it used to be. So he keeps up the pretense of going to work and finishing work on time every day, while at the same time he goes everywhere applying for jobs, looking for work. What does he do when pay day comes and he doesn’t get any money? He borrows from all and sundry to make his wife happy, and says, “Look, I received a 2,000 yuan bonus this month. Buy yourself something nice.” His wife has no idea what’s really going on, and really goes and buys some luxury items. His mind is fraught with worry and he feels there’s nowhere to turn, and his anxiety grows. Whether man or woman, they all take many actions and spend much time and effort to sustain their marital happiness, even going so far as to do things against their own better judgment. Despite wasting so much time and effort, the people involved still have no idea how to correctly face or handle these things, even racking their brains to learn from, study, and consult others in order to maintain their marital happiness. There are even some people who, after they’ve come to believe in God, accept their duty and the commission given to them by God’s house, but in order to maintain the happiness and satisfaction of their marriage, they fall far short when it comes to performing their duty. They were originally supposed to go to a distant place to preach the gospel, returning home once a week or once in a long while, or they could leave home and perform their duty full time according to their various calibers and conditions, but they’re afraid their partner will be displeased with them, that their marriage won’t be happy, or that they’ll lose their marriage altogether, and for the sake of maintaining their marital happiness they give up a lot of time that should be spent performing their duty. Especially when they hear their partner complain or sound displeased or have a moan, they become even more cautious with maintaining their marriage. They do all they can to satisfy their partner and work hard to make their marriage a happy one so that it doesn’t break apart. Of course, even more serious than this is that some people refuse the call of God’s house and refuse to perform their duty in order to maintain their marital happiness. When they should be leaving home to perform their duty, because they can’t bear to part with their spouse or because their spouse’s parents oppose their belief in God and oppose them abandoning their job and leaving home to perform their duty, they make compromises and abandon their duty, instead choosing to maintain their marital happiness and the integrity of their marriage. In order to maintain their marital happiness and the integrity of their marriage, and to prevent their marriage from breaking up and ending, they choose only to fulfill their responsibilities and obligations in married life and abandon the mission of a created being. You don’t realize that, regardless of your role in the family or in society—whether it be as wife, husband, child, parent, employee, or anything else—and regardless of whether or not your role in married life is an important one, you have only one identity before God and that is as a created being. You have no second identity before God. Therefore, when God’s house calls upon you, that is the time when you should fulfill your mission. That is to say, as a created being, it is not that you should fulfill your mission only when the condition of maintaining your marital happiness and the integrity of your marriage is fulfilled, but rather it is that, as long as you are a created being, then the mission God bestows upon you and entrusts to you should be fulfilled unconditionally; regardless of the circumstances, it is always incumbent upon you to prioritize the mission entrusted to you by God, while the mission and responsibilities bestowed upon you by marriage are secondary. The mission you should fulfill as a created being which God has bestowed upon you should always be your top priority under any conditions and in any circumstances. Therefore, no matter how much you wish to maintain the happiness of your marriage, or what your marital situation is like, or how great a price your partner pays for your marriage, none of these are reasons to refuse the mission God has entrusted to you. That is to say, no matter how happy your marriage is or how strong its integrity, your identity as a created being does not change and, as such, the mission God entrusts to you is what you are duty-bound to fulfill first and foremost, and this is not conditional. So, when God entrusts you with your mission, when you come to have the duty and mission of a created being, you should let go of your pursuit of a happy marriage, abandon your pursuit of sustaining an intact marriage, make God and the mission God’s house entrusts you with your number one priority, and not act foolishly. Maintaining marital happiness is just a responsibility you bear as a husband or wife within the framework of marriage; it is not the responsibility or mission of a created being before the Creator, therefore you should not abandon the mission entrusted to you by the Creator in order to maintain your marital happiness, nor should you do so many foolish, puerile, and childish things that have nothing to do with the responsibilities of being a wife or husband. All you need to do is fulfill your responsibilities and obligations as a wife or husband in accordance with God’s words and God’s requirements—that is, in accordance with God’s earliest instructions. At the very least, you should fulfill the responsibilities of a wife or husband with the conscience and reason of normal humanity, and that is enough. As for that so-called “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,” or romance, or constantly celebrating all manner of anniversaries, or the world of two, or the pursuit of “holding hands and growing old together,” or “I’ll love you forever like I love you today,” and other such meaningless things, these are not the responsibilities of a normal man and woman. Of course, to be more precise, these things are not the responsibilities and obligations within the framework of marriage of someone who pursues the truth. These ways of living and life pursuits are not what someone who pursues the truth should engage in, and so you should first of all let go of these insipid, foolish, childish, superficial, nauseating and disgusting sayings, viewpoints, and practices from the depths of your minds. Don’t let your marriage deteriorate, and don’t let your pursuit of marital happiness bind your hands, feet, thoughts, and steps, making you childish, foolish, vulgar, and even wicked. These worldly pursuits of a happy marriage are not the obligations and responsibilities someone with normal reason should fulfill, but instead they have evolved purely from this wicked world and corrupt mankind and have a corrosive effect on all people’s humanity and thoughts. They will cause your mind to degenerate, they will twist your humanity, and they will cause your thoughts to become wicked, complex, chaotic, and even extreme. For example, some women see other men being romantic, giving roses to their wives on their wedding anniversary, or taking their wives out shopping or embracing them or giving them special gifts when they’re angry or unhappy, or even surprising them to try to make them happy, and so on. Once you accept these sayings and practices within you, you will also want your partner to do those things, you will also want that kind of life and those kinds of treatments, and so your sense of reason will become abnormal and will be disturbed and corroded by such sayings, ideas, and practices. If your partner doesn’t buy you roses, doesn’t try to make you happy, or doesn’t do anything romantic for you, then you feel angry, resentful, and dissatisfied—you feel all kinds of different things. When your life is filled with these things, then the obligations you should fulfill as a woman and the duty and responsibilities you should fulfill in God’s house as a created being are all thrown into disorder. You will live in a state of dissatisfaction, and your normal life and routine will be disrupted by these feelings and thoughts of dissatisfaction. Therefore, your pursuits will influence the logical thinking of your normal humanity, your normal judgment and, of course, the responsibilities and obligations you should fulfill as a normal person. If you pursue worldly things and marital happiness, then you will unavoidably become “secularized.” If you pursue only marital happiness, then you will certainly always be needing your spouse to say such things as “I love you,” and if your spouse has never said “I love you,” you’ll think, “Oh, my marriage is so unhappy. My husband is as numb as a plank, like a moron. At most, he brings a bit of money home, exerts some effort, and does some manual work. At mealtimes he says, ‘Let’s eat,’ and when it’s time for bed he says, ‘Time for bed, sweet dreams, night night,’ and that’s it. Why can’t he ever say, ‘I love you’? Can’t he even say this one romantic thing?” Can you be a normal person when your heart is filled with such things? Aren’t you always in an abnormal and emotional state? (Yes.) Some people have no discernment of these wicked trends of the world; they have no resistance, no immunity. A woman like this regards this matter, this phenomenon of saying romantic things as a sign of marital happiness, and she then wants to pursue it, imitate it, attain it, and when she can’t attain it she gets angry, and will often ask her husband, “Tell me, do you love me or not?” Being asked so many times, her husband then gets angry and, blushing red, he blurts out, “I love you, baby.” And she says, “Oh, say it again.” Her husband restrains himself so much that his face and neck both flush red and, thinking, he says, “Baby, I love you.” See, this decent man says this sickening thing, but it doesn’t come from his heart, and so he feels uncomfortable. When his wife hears him say this, she’s overjoyed, and says, “That’ll have to do!” And what does her husband say? “Now look at you. Are you happy now? You’re just looking for trouble.” Tell Me, when a woman and a man live this kind of married life, is this happiness? (No.) Are you happy when you hear the words “I love you”? Does this explain marital happiness? Is it this simple? (No.) Some woman is always asking her husband, “Hey, do you think I look old?” Her husband is honest, and so he says honestly, “Yes, a little. Who doesn’t after they reach forty?” She replies, “Oh, don’t you love me? Why don’t you say I look young? Do you dislike me getting old? Do you want to find a mistress?” Her husband says, “What a nuisance! I can’t even say anything honestly to you. What’s the matter with you? I was just being honest. Who doesn’t grow old? Do you want to be some kind of monster?” Women like this are irrational. What do we call people who pursue this kind of so-called marital happiness? Speaking in vulgar terms, they’re trash. And what can we call them if we’re not being vulgar? They’re mentally ill. What do I mean by “mentally ill”? I mean that they are without the thinking of normal humanity. At the age of forty or fifty, they’re approaching old age and they still cannot see clearly what life is, what marriage is, and they always love doing pointless and nauseating things. They believe that this is marital happiness, that it is their freedom and their right, and that they are supposed to pursue in this way, live in this way, and approach marriage in this way. Isn’t this them not acting properly? (It is.) Are there many people who don’t act properly? (Yes.) There are many in the world of the unbelievers, but are there any in God’s house? Are there many? Romance, presents, embraces, surprises, and those words “I love you,” and so on are all signs of the marital happiness they pursue and they are the goals of their pursuit of marital happiness. People who don’t believe in God are like this, and there are inevitably many who do believe in God who now engage in such a pursuit and who have such views. So, there are many who have believed in God for ten years or more, who have listened to some sermons and understood some truths, but who, for the sake of maintaining their marital happiness, accompanying their spouse, and keeping the promises made regarding their marriage and the goal of marital happiness they vowed to pursue, have never fulfilled their responsibilities and duties before the Creator. Instead, they won’t set foot outside their home, they won’t leave home no matter how busy the work of God’s house gets, and they won’t relinquish their spouse in order to perform their duty, but rather they regard the pursuit and maintenance of marital happiness as a lifelong goal for which they struggle and exert unremitting efforts. By engaging in such a pursuit, are they in pursuit of the truth? Clearly not. Because in their minds, in their innermost hearts, and even in their actions, they have not let go of the pursuit of marital happiness nor the idea, view, and outlook on life of “the pursuit of marital happiness is one’s mission in life,” they are therefore absolutely unable to gain the truth. You are not married yet and have not yet entered into marriage. If you still retain this view when you do enter into marriage, then you won’t be able to gain the truth, either. Once you’ve gained marital happiness, you then won’t be able to gain the truth. Because you regard the pursuit of marital happiness as your mission in life, you will inevitably relinquish and give up the opportunity to fulfill your mission before the Creator. If you give up the opportunity and right to fulfill the mission of a created being before the Creator, then you give up the pursuit of truth, and of course, you also give up on attaining salvation—this is your choice.

We’re fellowshipping on letting go of the pursuit of marital happiness not so that you give up on marriage as a formality, nor is it to encourage you to get divorced, but rather it is so that you give up on those pursuits regarding marital happiness. First of all, you should let go of those views which dominate you in your pursuit of marital happiness, and then you should let go of the practice of pursuing marital happiness and devote the majority of your time and energy to performing the duty of a created being and pursuing truth. As for marriage, as long as it doesn’t clash or conflict with your pursuit of truth, then the obligations you should fulfill, the mission you should accomplish, and the role you should play within the framework of marriage will not change. Therefore, asking that you let go of the pursuit of marital happiness doesn’t mean asking you to abandon marriage or to divorce as a formality, but rather it means asking you to fulfill your mission as a created being and properly perform the duty you should perform with the premise of fulfilling the responsibilities you should perform in marriage. Of course, if your pursuit of marital happiness impacts, obstructs, or even ruins your performance of the duty of a created being, then you should abandon not only your pursuit of marital happiness, but also your entire marriage. What is the final purpose and meaning of fellowshipping on these issues? It is so that marital happiness doesn’t impede your steps, tie your hands, blind your eyes, distort your vision, disturb and occupy your mind; it is so that the pursuit of marital happiness doesn’t fill your life path and fill your life, and so that you correctly approach the responsibilities and obligations you should fulfill in marriage and make the correct choices concerning the responsibilities and obligations you should fulfill. A better way to practice is to devote more time and energy to your duty, perform the duty you should perform, and accomplish the mission God has entrusted to you. You must never forget that you are a created being, that it is God who has led you through life to this moment, that it is God who has given you marriage, who has given you a family, and that it is God who has bestowed upon you the responsibilities you should fulfill within the framework of marriage, and that it is not you who chose marriage, it is not that you came to be married out of thin air, or that you can maintain your marital happiness by relying on your own abilities and strength. Have I now explained this clearly? (Yes.) Do you understand what you’re supposed to do? Is the path now clear to you? (Yes.) If there is no conflict or contradiction between the responsibilities and obligations you should fulfill in marriage and your duty and mission as a created being, then under such circumstances, you should fulfill your responsibilities within the framework of marriage however they are to be fulfilled, and you should fulfill your responsibilities well, shoulder the responsibilities you should shoulder, and not try to shirk them. You must take responsibility for your partner, and you should take responsibility for your partner’s life, their feelings, and everything about them. However, when there is a clash between the responsibilities and obligations you shoulder within the framework of marriage and your mission and duty as a created being, then what you must let go of is not your duty or mission but are rather your responsibilities within the framework of marriage. This is what God expects of you, it is God’s commission for you and, of course, it is what God requires of any man or woman. Only when you are capable of this will you be pursuing the truth and following God. If you are not capable of this and cannot practice in this way, then you are just a nominal believer, you do not follow God with a true heart, and you are not a pursuer of truth. You now have the opportunity and conditions to leave China to perform your duty, and some people say, “If I leave China to perform my duty, then I’ll have to leave my spouse at home. Are we never to see each other again? Won’t we have to live separately? Won’t we have no marriage anymore?” Some people think, “Oh, how will my partner live without me? Won’t our marriage fall apart if I’m not there? Will our marriage be over? What will I do in the future?” Should you be thinking about the future? What should you be thinking about most? If you want to be someone who pursues the truth, then what you should be thinking about most is how to let go of that which God asks you to let go of and how to accomplish that which God asks you to accomplish. If you are to be without a marriage and without your partner beside you in the future, in the days to come, you can still live until old age and live well just the same. If you abandon this opportunity, however, then that is tantamount to you abandoning your duty and the mission God has entrusted to you. To God, you would then not be someone who pursues the truth, someone who truly wants God, or someone who is in pursuit of salvation. If you actively wish to abandon your opportunity and right to attain salvation and your mission and you instead choose marriage, you choose to stay united as husband and wife, you choose to be with and satisfy your spouse, and you choose to keep your marriage intact, then in the end you will gain some things and lose some things. You understand what it is you will lose, right? Marriage is not your everything, nor is marital happiness—it cannot decide your fate, it cannot decide your future, and even less so can it decide your destination. So, what choices people should make, and whether or not they should let go of the pursuit of marital happiness and perform the duty of a created being is up to them to decide. Have we now fellowshipped clearly on the topic of “pursuing marital happiness is not your mission”? (Yes.) Is there any issue you find difficult and concerning which, after listening to Me fellowship, you don’t know how to practice? (No.) After listening to this fellowship, do you now feel clearer, that you have an accurate path of practice, and that you have a correct goal to practice toward? Do you now know how you should practice from now on? (Yes.) Then let’s end this fellowship here. Goodbye!

January 14, 2023