The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

by Timothy J. Keller

They do not see marriage as two flawed people coming together to create a space of stability, love, and consolation—a

Over the years you will go through seasons in which you have to learn to love a person who you didn’t marry, who is something of a stranger. You will have to make changes that you don’t want to make, and so will your spouse. The journey may eventually take you into a strong, tender, joyful marriage. But it is not because you married the perfectly compatible person. That person doesn’t exist.

It is the illusion that if we find our one true soul mate, everything wrong with us will be healed; but that makes the lover into God, and no human being can live up to that.

This is one of God’s great purposes in marriage: to picture the relationship between Christ and His redeemed people forever!”54

Do for your spouse what God did for you in Jesus, and the rest will follow.

Whether we are husband or wife, we are not to live for ourselves but for the other. And that is the hardest yet single most important function of being a husband or a wife in marriage.

Finally I began to see. I wanted to serve, yes, because that made me feel in control. Then I would always have the high moral ground. But that kind of “service” isn’t service at all, only manipulation.

It was because I believed the gospel with my head but it wasn’t operational in my heart.

Self-centeredness by its very character makes you blind to your own while being hypersensitive, offended, and angered by that of others.

The alternative to this truce-marriage is to determine to see your own selfishness as a fundamental problem and to treat it more seriously than you do your spouse’s.

But when the Bible speaks of love, it measures it primarily not by how much you want to receive but by how much you are willing to give of yourself to someone.

But sex in a marriage, done to give joy rather than to impress, can change your mood on the spot. The best sex makes you want to weep tears of joy, not bask in the glow of a good performance.

Wedding vows are not a declaration of present love but a mutually binding promise of future love.

Also, only if you maintain your love for someone when it is not thrilling can you be said to be actually loving a person.

If you do not give up, but proceed to love the unlovely in a sustained way, they will eventually become lovely to you.

You must stick to your commitment to act and serve in love even when—no, especially when—you don’t feel much delight and attraction to your spouse.

This means we must say to ourselves something like this: “Well, when Jesus looked down from the cross, he didn’t think, ‘I am giving myself to you because you are so attractive to me.’ No, he was in agony, and he looked down at us—denying him, abandoning him, and betraying him—and in the greatest act of love in history, he stayed. He said, ‘Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.’ He loved us, not because we were lovely to him, but to make us lovely. That is why I am going to love my spouse.” Speak to your heart like that, and then fulfill the promises you made on your wedding day.

God designed us to need “horizontal” relationships with other human beings.

Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. Therefore we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but what is unseen. (2 Corinthians 4:16–18)

What is your marriage for? Where are you going?

What keeps the marriage going is your commitment to your spouse’s holiness.

Your spouse has got to be your best friend, or be on the way to becoming your best friend, or you won’t have a strong, rich marriage that endures and that makes you both vastly better persons for having been in it.

Look for someone who understands you better than you do yourself, who makes you a better person just by being around them.

Learn your spouse’s love languages. Figure out together what they are, then brainstorm a handful of concrete ways to regularly give love in those forms. Then execute. Concretely give love to each other in deliberate ways every week.

truth and love need to be kept together,

Without the power of grace, truth and love can’t be combined.

One of the most basic skills in marriage is the ability to tell the straight, unvarnished truth about what your spouse has done—and then, completely, unself-righteously, and joyously express forgiveness without a shred of superiority, without making the other person feel small.

What does it take to know the power of grace? First it takes humility. If you have trouble forgiving someone, it is at least partly because deep in your heart you are thinking, “I would never do anything like that!” As long as you feel superior to someone, feel like you are a much better kind of person, you will find it very hard if not impossible to forgive. If you stay superior and disdainful of the person, truth will eat up love. You will only criticize, and not in a way that the person can hear. You will be too scornful and harsh.

I do not know of any more powerful resource for granting forgiveness than that, and I don’t know of anything more necessary in marriage than the ability to forgive fully, freely, unpunishingly, from the heart. A deep experience of the grace of God—a knowledge that you are a sinner saved by grace—will enable the power of truth and love to work together in your marriage.

Do you understand what I have done for you? . . . You call me “Teacher” and “Lord” and rightly so, for that is what I am. Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you. I tell you the truth, no servant is greater than his master.

The second kind of couple has had a stormy relationship and has the same unresolved fights over and over again. They haven’t learned even the rudimentary skills of repentance, forgiveness, and change.

We came to realize that orgasm is great, especially climaxing together. But the awe, the wonder, the safety, and the joy of just being one is stirring and stunning even without that. And when we stopped trying to perform and just started trying to simply love one another in sex, things started to move ahead. We stopped worrying about our performance. And we stopped worrying about what we were getting and started to say, “Well, what can we do just to give something to the other?”