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August 13 - August 18, 2023
And that is why, like knowing God himself, coming to know and love your spouse is difficult and painful yet rewarding and wondrous.
So in our society we are too pessimistic about the possibility of “monogamy” because we are too idealistic about what we want in a marriage partner, and this all comes because we have a flawed understanding of the purpose of marriage itself.
Only if you have learned to serve others by the power of the Holy Spirit will you have the power to face the challenges of marriage.
Jesus, however, spoke of the Holy Spirit primarily as the “Spirit of Truth” who will “remind you of everything I have said to you”
The Holy Spirit’s ministry is to take truths about Jesus and make them clear to our minds and real to our hearts—so real that they console and empower and change us at our very center.
As we shall see, each of these exhortations has a distinct shape—they are not identical tasks. And yet each partner is called to sacrifice for the other in far-reaching ways.
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.
Repeatedly Paul shows that love is the very opposite of “self-seeking,” which is literally pursuing one’s own welfare before those of others. Self-centeredness is easily seen in the signs Paul lists: impatience, irritability, a lack of graciousness and kindness in speech, envious brooding on the better situations of others, and holding past injuries and hurts against others. In Dana Adam Shapiro’s interviews of divorced couples, it is clear that this was the heart of what led to marital disintegration. Each spouse’s self-centeredness asserted itself (as it always will), but in response, the
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The Spirit’s work of making the gospel real to the heart weakens the self-centeredness in the soul.
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.
If two spouses each say, “I’m going to treat my self-centeredness as the main problem in the marriage,” you have the prospect of a truly great marriage.
The Christian principle that needs to be at work is Spirit-generated selflessness—not thinking less of yourself or more of yourself but thinking of yourself less. It means taking your mind off yourself and realizing that in Christ your needs are going to be met and are, in fact, being met so that you don’t look at your spouse as your savior.
Only God can fill a God-sized hole. Until God has the proper place in my life, I will always be complaining that my spouse is not loving me well enough, not respecting me enough, not supporting me enough.
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.
sacrificial commitment to the good of the other.
In sharp contrast with our culture, the Bible teaches that the essence of marriage is a sacrificial commitment to the good of the other.
But the Biblical perspective is radically different. Love needs a framework of binding obligation to make it fully what it should be.
We don’t have to keep selling ourselves. We can lay the last layer of our defenses down and be completely naked, both physically and in every other way.
Rather, in a wedding you stand up before God, your family, and all the main institutions of society, and you promise to be loving, faithful, and true to the other person in the future, regardless of undulating internal feelings or external circumstances.
To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us.
love when we are having strong feelings of love, we often love unwisely.
The Christian, trying to treat everyone kindly, finds himself liking more and more people as he goes on—including people he could not even have imagined himself liking at the beginning.15
But it is truer to say that actions of love can lead consistently to feelings of love.
And when that happens you must remember that the essence of a marriage is that it is a covenant, a commitment, a promise of future love.
You do the acts of love, despite your lack of feeling.
You may not feel tender, sympathetic, and eager to please, but in your actions you must be tender, understanding, forgiving, and helpful. And, if you do that, as time goes on you will not only get through the dry spells, but they will become less frequent and deep, and you will become mo...
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“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
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.”
This is confirmation of our intuition that family and relationships are a greater blessing and provide greater satisfaction than anything money can buy.
Christian friends are not only to honestly confess their own sins to each other (James 5:16), but they are to lovingly point out their friend’s sins if he or she is blind to them (Romans 15:14).
Husband and wife are to be both lovers and friends to one another as Jesus is to us.
If any two unrelated Christians are to provoke each other toward love and goodness (Hebrews 10:24), are to affirm each other’s gifts and hold each other accountable to grow out of their sins (Hebrews 3:13), how much more should a husband and wife do that?8
It is for helping each other to become our future glory-selves, the new creations that God will eventually make us.
want to partner with you and God in the journey you are taking to his throne.
But if you don’t get excited about the person your spouse has already grown into and will become, you aren’t tapping into the power of marriage as spiritual friendship.
The goal is to see something absolutely ravishing that God is making of the beloved. You see even now flashes of glory. You want to help your spouse become the person God wants him or her to be.
Romance, sex, laughter, and plain fun are the by-products of this process of sanctification, refinement, glorification. Those things are important, but they can’t keep the marriage going through years and years of ordinary life. What keeps the marriage going is your commitment to your spouse’s holiness. You’re committed to his or her beauty. You’re committed to his greatness and perfection. You’re committed to her honesty and passion for the things of God. That’s your job as a spouse. Any lesser goal than that, any smaller purpose, and you’re just playing at being married.
Paul is urging spouses to help their mates love Jesus more than them.10
The simple fact is that only if I love Jesus more than my wife will I be able to serve her needs ahead of my own.
If your spouse does not feel that you are putting him or her first, then by definition, you aren’t. And
When you marry, you commit to becoming a new decision-making unit and to developing new patterns and ways of doing things.
Marriage is so much like salvation and our relationship with Christ that Paul says you can’t understand marriage without looking at the gospel. So let’s do that.
If your marriage is strong, even if all the circumstances in your life around you are filled with trouble and weakness, it won’t matter. You will be able to move out into the world in strength.
marriage has several inherent powers that we must accept and use—the power of truth, the power of love, and the power of grace.
These three powers will do their best work in us during times when we find it hard to love the semi-stranger to whom we are married.
However, your confronters didn’t keep up their confrontations, and you haven’t really admitted the severity of the problem. The reason was that the flaw did not pose the same kind of problem for them as it will for your spouse.
they will create major problems for your spouse
No one else is as inconvenienced and hurt by your flaws as your spouse is.
Marriage does not so much bring you into confrontation with your spouse as confront you with yourself.
Marriage shows you a realistic, unflattering picture of who you are and then takes you by the scruff of the neck and forces you to pay attention to it.
