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

by Timothy J. Keller

Paul talks about how Jesus “washes” and “cleanses” us of stains and blemishes. Give your spouse the right to do that.

It will help a great deal to say, “I hate it when he does that, but that is not truly him.

It will help even more to work together to agree on what is the dross and what is the gold in each other so you can say,

“This is the real you, this is the real me, this is what God wants us to be, and this is what has got to go. And we’ve...

Give each other the right to hold one another accountable. “Exhort one another daily, lest you become hardened by the deceitfulness of sin” (Hebrews 3:13).

But now into your life comes someone who has the power to overturn all the accumulated verdicts that have ever been passed upon you by others or by you yourself.

paraphrase a passage of Scripture, your heart may condemn you, but your spouse’s opinion is greater than your heart.

Your spouse’s love for you and Christ’s love work together in your life with powerful interaction.

Sometimes your spouse points you directly to Jesus’s love. Sometimes you spouse’s affirmation imitates Jesus’s love and stimulates us to more fully believe and accept the love we have in Christ.

Anyone who wants to give you love needs to know what those forms are and to express his or her love in those ways.

So we, too, must clothe our love in the forms to which our spouse can relate.

We must communicate love in the way our spouse needs it.

They were both trying hard to express love to each other, but they were speaking their own languages to a person who needed to hear love in a different dialect.

Learn the primary languages of your spouse and send love over those channels, not over the channels you prefer for yourself.

If the wife is at home engaged in raising children and housekeeping, it is crucial for the husband to be emotionally engaged and deeply interested in helping his wife make the house a home and a haven.

For example, it means happily changing diapers or helping with the house cleaning without being asked.

It means giving your spouse the confidence that you will always speak up and stand up for him, that you will show loyalty and appreciation for her before other family and friends.

This means encouraging each other to participate together actively in church, in Christian community. It means reading and digesting Christian books together as well as studying the Bible together. And it means praying together. For centuries, Christian spouses have observed various forms of daily family prayer.

Praying daily with and for each other is a love language that in many ways brings the other love languages together.

The one person in the whole world who holds your heart in her hand, whose approval and affirmation you most long for and need, is the one who is hurt more deeply by your sins than anyone else on the planet.

When we see how devastating truth-telling in marriage can be, it can push us into the opposite error. We may then decide that our job is to just affirm. We avoid telling our spouses how disappointed we are. We shut up. We stuff and hide what we really think and feel. We exercise the power of love, but not the power of truth. But then marriage’s enormous potential for spiritual growth is lost.

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. This does not mean you cannot express anger. In fact, if you never express anger, your truth-telling probably won’t sink in. But forgiving grace must always be present, and if it is, it will, like salt in meat, keep the anger from going bad. Then truth and love can live together because, beneath them both, you have forgiven your spouse as Christ forgave you.

But if instead you see Jesus dying on the cross for you, forgiving you, putting away your sin, that changes everything. He saw your heart to the bottom but loved you to the skies. And the joy and freedom that comes from knowing that the Son of God did that for you enables you to do the same for your spouse.

Our sins hurt Jesus infinitely more than your spouse’s sins hurt you.

“I see your sin, but I can cover it with forgiveness, because Jesus saw my sin and covered it.” It is because the Lord of the universe came into the world in disguise, in the person of Jesus Christ, and he looked into our hearts and saw the worst. And it wasn’t an abstract exercise for Jesus—our sins put him to death. When Jesus was up there, nailed to the cross, he looked down and saw us, some denying him, some betraying him, and all forsaking him. He saw our sin and covered it.

This means that our maleness or our femaleness is not incidental to our humanness but constitutes its very essence.

I discovered here that my submission in marriage was a gift I offered, not a duty coerced from me.

Understanding that submission to my role was neither demeaning nor dangerous was a big step for me.

To choose willingly to “submit,” or to “be submissive,” didn’t sound like me in the slightest, nor was it a choice that was either understood or encouraged by anyone around me.14 But an even bigger leap was required to understand that it took an equal degree of submission for men to submit to their gender roles. They are called to be “servant-leaders.”

Any exercise of power can only be done in service to the Other, not to please oneself.

We, the church, submit to Christ in everything, and the parallel of a wife submitting “everything” to her husband is no longer daunting, since we know what kind of behavior the husband has been called on to imitate. To what role must he submit? To that of savior, a servant-leader, who uses his authority and power to express a love that doesn’t even stop at dying for the beloved.

By accepting our gender roles, and operating within them, we are able to demonstrate to the world concepts that are so counterintuitive as to be completely unintelligible unless they are lived out by men and women in Christian marriages.

both radically different and yet incomplete without each other.

The easiest thing is to leave. But Jesus did not do that. He embraced and loved us, the Other, and brought us into a new unity with himself.

Since every mention of gender roles in the Bible is tied to the creation story, it is not that easy to just lightly dispense with them. Further, if our assigned roles are rooted in the nature of the relationships within the Trinity, tampering with the revelation of that mystery that God intends within marriage is surely not our prerogative.

So we are to enjoy but not be “engrossed” (I Corinthians 7:31) in things of this world.3

“For Christians do not place their hope in their children, but rather their children are a sign of their hope . . . that God has not abandoned this world. . . .”

Without a deeply fulfilling love relationship with Christ now, and hope in a perfect love relationship with him in the future, married Christians will put too much pressure on their marriage to fulfill them, and that will always create pathology in their lives.

However, if singles learn to rest in and rejoice in their marriage to Christ, that means they will be able to handle single life without a devastating sense of being unfulfilled and unformed. And they might as well tackle this spiritual project right away. Why? Because the same idolatry of marriage that is distorting their single lives will eventually distort their married lives if they find a partner. So there’s no reason to wait. Demote marriage and family in your heart, put God first, and begin to enjoy the goodness of single life.

we were to view marriage as a vehicle for spouses helping each other become their glorious future-selves through sacrificial service and spiritual friendship.

What happens if we see the mission of marriage to teach us about our sins in unique and profound ways and to grow us out of them through providing someone who speaks the truth in love to us?

If you only obey God’s word when it seems reasonable or profitable to you—well, that isn’t really obedience at all.

God’s law is for times of temptation, when “body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour.”

1 Corinthians 7 is an important practical resource. Each partner in marriage is to be most concerned not with getting sexual pleasure but with giving it.

If your main purpose in sex is giving pleasure, not getting pleasure, then a person who doesn’t have as much of a sex drive physically can give to the other person as a gift. This is a legitimate act of love, and it shouldn’t be denigrated by saying, “Oh, no, no. Unless you’re going to be all passionate, don’t do it.” Do it as a gift.

Kathy and I often liken sex in a marriage to oil in an engine—without it, the friction between all the moving parts will burn out the motor. Without joyful, loving sex, the friction in a marriage will bring about anger, resentment, hardness, and disappointment.

“Oh, no, you don’t! You aren’t putting this decision on me. That’s abdication. If you think this is the right thing to do, then exercise your leadership and make the choice. It’s your job to break this logjam. It’s my job to wrestle with God until I can joyfully support your call.”

So why are women called to this position? As I said, the answer to that question is another question: “Why did Christ become the one to give up the authority to the Father?” We don’t know, but it is a mark of his greatness, not his indecisiveness! Women are called to follow him here. But remember, taking authority properly is just as hard as granting it.