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August 28 - September 2, 2018
What does this mean? It means that any two Christians, with nothing else but a common faith in Christ, can have a robust friendship, helping each other on their journey toward the new creation, as well as doing ministry together in the world. How can they do that?
The other way is spiritual constancy. Christian friends bear each other’s burdens (Galatians 6:2). They should be there for each other through thick and thin
Paul, however, gives his readers a vision for marriage that must have completely astonished them. The primary goal of Christian marriage is not social status and stability, as it was in ancient cultures, nor is it primarily romantic and emotional happiness, as it is in our culture today. Paul points husbands to Jesus’s sacrificial love toward us, his “bride.” But Paul does not stop there; he goes on to speak of the goal of that sacrificial love for his bride. It is “to sanctify her” (verse 26) to “present her to himself” in radiant beauty and splendor (verse 27a), to bring her to be perfectly
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27c). He wants the new creation for us! He wants to remove all spiritual stains, flaws, sins, and blemishes, to make us “holy,” “glorious,” and “blameless.”
you marry mainly a sexual partner, or mainly a financial partner, you are going nowhere together, really. And those who are going nowhere can have no fellow travelers.
What, then, is marriage for? It is for helping each other to become our future glory-selves, the new creations that God will eventually make us. The common horizon husband and wife look toward is the Throne, and the holy, spotless, and blameless nature we will have. I can think of no more powerful common horizon than that, and that is why putting a Christian friendship at the heart of a marriage relationship can lift it to a level that no other vision for marriage approaches.
That is what it is like to get to know a Christian. You have an old self and a new self (Ephesians 4:24). The old self is crippled with anxieties, the need to prove yourself, bad habits you can’t break, and many besetting sins and en-trenched character flaws. The new self is still you, but you liberated from all your sins and flaws. This new self is always a work in progress, and sometimes the clouds of the old self make it almost completely invisible. But sometimes the clouds really part, and you see the wisdom, courage, and love of which you are capable. It is a glimpse of where you are
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Your marriage will slowly die if your spouse senses that he or she is not the first priority in your life. But only if your spouse is
We never know whom we marry; we just think we do. Or even if we first marry the right person, just give it a while and he or she will change. For marriage, being [the enormous thing it is] means we are not the same person after we have entered it. The primary problem is . . . learning how to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.1
What if, however, you began your marriage understanding its purpose as spiritual friendship for the journey to the new creation? What if you expected marriage to be about helping each other grow out of your sins and flaws into the new self God is creating? Then you will actually be expecting the “stranger” seasons, and when you come to one you will roll up your sleeves and get to work.
But while your character flaws may have created mild problems for other people, they will create major problems for your spouse and your marriage.
When you get married, your spouse is a big truck driving right through your heart. Marriage brings out the worst in you. It doesn’t create your weaknesses (though you may blame your spouse for your blow-ups)—it reveals them. This is not a bad thing, though. How can you change into your “glory-self” if you assume that you’re already pretty close to perfect as it is?
Marriage has the power of truth, the ability to reveal to you who you really are, with all your flaws. How wonderful that it also has the “power of love”—an unmatched power to affirm you and heal you of the deepest wounds and hurts of your life.
“The praise of the praiseworthy is above all rewards.” To be highly esteemed by someone you highly esteem is the greatest thing in the world.
How do you give this life-healing love to your spouse so he or she actually feels loved? That is a very crucial subject and skill. Let me start with an illustration before I begin to lay out the principles.
We had observed these patterns of love currency in our respective families, and they had become part of our unconscious assumptions. And that is why we had an abiding conflict over “Who changes the diapers in this family?” It was perplexing to us at first. It seemed like a pretty simple issue. Why was there so much emotional heat around it?
What happened? We realized what was going on, and in that particular instance it was I who made the change, because I didn’t want to fall into a pattern of pitting my work against involvement with my children. But the lesson was one that we never forgot. It is not enough to simply say, “I love you.” Nor is it enough to give love to your spouse in the way to which you feel most accustomed. If you want to give a person $100, there are many ways to do so. You can give it in cash or by check or in gold or in kind. You can give it in different currencies. So you ask, “In which form do you want the
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we say “I love you” to someone who does not understand a word of English, then the love does not get through. We are sending it, but it is not being received. We must learn to send love in forms that the other person can comprehend.
The Greeks had words to distinguish affection (storge), friendship (philos), erotic love (eros), and service (agape).
Some types of love are more thrilling and fulfilling to us when we receive them.
Learn the primary languages of your spouse and send love over those channels, not over the channels you prefer for yourself. We tend to give love through the channels in which we like to receive it.
Never abuse the primary love language. Never withhold it to hurt the other, for the hurt will go deep. A man who greatly values getting respect from his wife in public will not be able to take it when she mocks him in front of their friends. A woman who needs lots of verbal affirmation will be devastated by the silent treatment.
first love sweeps you up involuntarily, but eventually love is a deliberate choice. It will seem mechanical at first, he reiterated, but if both spouses do it together, eventually the experience of being loved richly and well will sweeten their lives. Brent committed himself to try, and nearly a year later he and Becky had a renewed marriage.
The task before you is difficult but simple. 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.
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.
What we need is the two together, intertwined. We need to feel so loved by our partners that when they criticize us, we have the security to admit our faults. Then we can
The experience of Jesus’s grace makes it possible to practice the two most important skills in marriage: forgiveness and repentance. Only if we are very good at forgiving and very good at repenting can truth and love be kept together.
Here is why you can say to your spouse who has wronged 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.
Spiritually discerning spouses can see a bit of what God sees in their partners, and it excites them. The rest of the world sees us wrinkling up, but using marriage’s powers in the grace of Jesus, we see each other become more and more spiritually gorgeous. We are clothing, washing, adorning each other. And someday the whole universe will see what God sees in us.
What we should say to each other on our wedding day is, “As great as you look today, someday you will stand with me before God in such beauty that it will make these clothes look like rags.”
This is where, surprisingly, some feminist theory echoes Biblical teaching about gender difference. Men and women are not interchangeable, unisex beings, but they have different strengths that result in men and women solving problems, building consensus, and performing leadership functions in distinct ways.
On the cross of Christ, [the love of God] is there for the others, for sinners—the recalcitrant—enemies. The reciprocal self-surrender to one another within the Trinity is manifested in Christ’s self-surrender in a world which is in contradiction to God; and this self-giving draws all those who believe in him into the eternal life of divine love.
Christ embraced the ultimate “Other”—sinful humanity. He didn’t exclude us by simply consigning us to judgment. He embraced us by dying on the cross for our sins. To love the Other, especially an Other that is hostile, entails sacrifice. It means sometimes experiencing betrayal, rejection, and attacks.24 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.
I will never be one to dismiss or make light of the horrible record of abuse suffered by women at the hands of men who wielded twisted and unbiblical definitions of “headship” and “submission” as their primary weapon. The church should not overlook or minimize one iota of that suffering, but I would beg that we not throw the baby out along with the dirty bathwater. Bail bathwater, by all means available, but save the baby, which in this case is the rightful acceptance of gender roles as Jesus has both defined and embodied them.
Why would this be? Well, consider that the Bible was written for all centuries and all cultures. If it had written rules for the roles of wife and husband in ancient agrarian cultures, they would be hard to apply today. But the Scripture doesn’t do that.
Remember, this person is utterly unlike you. He acts differently, thinks differently, and operates differently, and in some cases, dealing with him is not only frustrating and scary, but it’s downright incomprehensible. But at a deeper level, you’re finding out who you really are. You’re seeing him as your other half. You see how God is completing you in your husband. The result of completion is personal ease. Adam and Eve were naked and unashamed with each other before the Fall. There was no anxiety, no hiding. There was a sense of a primordial, ancient unity and accord that Adam and Eve had
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We should be glad of success, but not overly glad, and saddened by failure, but not too downcast, because our true joy in the future is guaranteed by God. So we are to enjoy but not be “engrossed” (I Corinthians 7:31) in things of this world.3
But Christianity’s founder, Jesus Christ, and leading theologian, St. Paul, were both single their entire lives. Single adults cannot be seen as somehow less fully formed or realized human beings than married persons because Jesus Christ, a single man, was the perfect man (Hebrews 4:15; 1 Peter 2:22). Paul’s assessment in 1 Corinthians 7 is that singleness is a good condition blessed by God, and in many circumstances, it is actually better than marriage. As a result of this revolutionary attitude, the early church did not pressure people to marry (as we see in Paul’s letter) and
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“I am not single because I am too spiritually unstable to possibly deserve a husband, nor because I am too spiritually mature to possibly need one. I am single because God is so abundantly good to me, because this is his best for me.”
But singles, too, must see the penultimate status of marriage. If single Christians don’t develop a deeply fulfilling love relationship with Jesus, they will put too much pressure on their dream of marriage, and that will create pathology in their lives as well.
Many singles are looking for a highly compatible, brilliant, and beautiful partner. For others, singleness has become at best a purgatory, where you live waiting for your real life to begin, or at worst a misery. The first kind of single looks right past all sorts of good prospective spouses because of fear and perfectionism. The second kind of single can scare people away because of his or her neediness and sometimes can make terrible choices in marital partners out of desperation. Sometimes the first kind of single dates the second kind of single, and that combination can be deeply painful.
Ultimately, your marriage partner should be part of what could be called your “mythos.” C. S. Lewis spoke of a “secret thread” that unites every person’s favorite books, music, places, or pastimes. Certain things trigger an “inconsolable longing” that gets you in touch with the Joy that is God. Leonard Bernstein said that listening to Beethoven’s Fifth always made him sure (despite his intellectual agnosticism) that there was a God. Beethoven’s Fifth doesn’t do that for me. But everyone has something that moves them so that they long for heaven or the future kingdom of God (though many
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One of the ways you can judge whether you have moved past the infatuation stage is to ask a set of questions. Have you been through and solved a few sharp conflicts? Have you been through a cycle of repenting and forgiving? Have each of you shown the other that you can make changes out of love for the other? Two kinds of couples answer no. The first kind are those who never have any conflicts. It may be they are not past infatuation. 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
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In short, according to Paul, sex with a prostitute is wrong because every sex act is supposed to be a uniting act. Paul insists it is radically dissonant to give your body to someone to whom you will not also commit your whole life. C. S. Lewis likened sex without marriage to tasting food without swallowing and digesting. The analogy is apt.
The Bible does not counsel sexual abstinence before marriage because it has such a low view of sex but because it has such a lofty one. The Biblical view implies that sex outside of marriage is not just morally wrong but also personally harmful. If sex is designed to be part of making a covenant and experiencing that covenant’s renewal, then we should think of sex as an emotional “commitment apparatus.”
This incongruity leads to jealousy and hurt feelings and obsessiveness if two people are having sex but are not married. It makes breaking up vastly harder than it should be. It leads many people to stay trapped in relationships that are not good because of a feeling of having (somehow) connected themselves.
Ironically, then, sex outside of marriage eventually works backwards,
making you less able to commit and trust another person.
Only meeting Christ face-to-face will fill the emptiness in our hearts that sin created when we lost our unbroken fellowship with him.
They should live in community with other singles who are neither too hungry to be married nor too fearful of it. They should be in a community with singles who don’t use the world’s standards—physical beauty and wealth—as a basis for making partner choices. It would additionally be important for singles to live in community with Christian families who do not make family an idol nor make singles feel superfluous.
