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Everything in the text proclaims that marriage, next to our relationship to God, is the most profound relationship there is.
And yet each partner is called to sacrifice for the other in far-reaching ways. 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.
Rather, we should consider and count the interests of others as more important than our own. Elsewhere he says that we should not “please ourselves” but rather should “please our neighbor, for his own good, to build him up. For even Christ did not please himself” (Romans 15:1–3).
The ability to serve another person requires the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, to drive this very gospel into our hearts until it changes us.
The Spirit’s work of making the gospel real to the heart weakens the self-centeredness in the soul. It is impossible for us to make major headway against self-centeredness and move into a stance of service without some kind of supernatural help.
All people need to be treated gently and respectfully, especially those who have been wounded. They will be unusually sensitive to rough handling. Nevertheless, all people must be challenged to see that their self-centeredness hasn’t been caused by the people who hurt them; it’s only been aggravated by the abuse. And they must do something about it, or they’re going to be miserable forever.
Only you have complete access to your own selfishness, and only you have complete responsibility for it.
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.
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.
when one person says to another, “I love you, but let’s not ruin it by getting married,” that person really means, “I don’t love you enough to close off all my options. I don’t love you enough to give myself to you that thoroughly.”
Wedding vows are not a declaration of present love but a mutually binding promise of future love. A wedding should not be primarily a celebration of how loving you feel now—that can safely be assumed. 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.
Surprisingly, even God claims to have gone through a divorce (Jeremiah 3:8).6 He knows what it is like.
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.
All this means that you can indeed love, and love truly and wisely, when you lack the feelings of love.
So if your definition of “love” stresses affectionate feelings more than unselfish actions, you will cripple your ability to maintain and grow strong love relationships.
The worldly man treats certain people kindly because he “likes” them: 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.
It is the action of love that we can promise to maintain every day.
He loved us, not because we were lovely to him, but to make us lovely.
The Bible’s answer to this question starts with the principle that marriage is a friendship.
This means that friendships are discovered more than they are created at will. They arise between people who discover that they have common interests in and longings for the same things.
Friendship must be about something, even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice.
Friendship is a deep oneness that develops as two people, speaking the truth in love to each other, journey together to the same horizon.
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.
a wonderful block of marble. Not so you can create the kind of person you want, but rather because you see what kind of person Jesus is making.
If you don’t see your mate’s deep flaws and weaknesses and dependencies, you’re not even in the game. 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.
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.
You are in trouble. 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.
We should be going at it the other way around. Screen first for friendship. Look for someone who understands you better than you do yourself, who makes you a better person just by being around them. And then explore whether that friendship could become a romance and a marriage.
Your marriage must be more important to you than anything else. No other human being should get more of your love, energy, industry, and commitment than your spouse.
If your spouse does not feel that you are putting him or her first, then by definition, you aren’t.
When you marry, you commit to becoming a new decision-making unit and to developing new patterns and ways of doing things.
Every page in the Bible cries that the journey to this horizon cannot be accomplished alone. We must face it and share it with brothers and sisters, friends of our heart. And the very best human friendship possible for that adventure is with the lover-friend who is your spouse.
No one else is as inconvenienced and hurt by your flaws as your spouse is. And therefore your spouse becomes more keenly aware of what is wrong with you than anyone else ever has been.
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?
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 love and affirmation of your spouse has the power to heal you of many of the deepest wounds. Why? If all the world says you are ugly, but your spouse says you are beautiful, you feel beautiful. To paraphrase a passage of Scripture, your heart may condemn you, but your spouse’s opinion is greater than your heart.
Also, we can work on our own personal appearance as a gift to our spouse.
And there’s the Great Problem of marriage. 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.
Truth without love ruins the oneness, and love without truth gives the illusion of unity but actually stops the journey and the growth. The solution is grace.
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.
How do you get the power of grace? You can’t create this power; you can only reflect it to others if you have received it.
Spiritually discerning spouses can see a bit of what God sees in their partners, and it excites them.
The English word “helper” is not the best translation for the Hebrew word ’ezer. “Helper” connotes merely assisting someone who could do the task almost as well without help. But ’ezer is almost always used in the Bible to describe God himself. Other times it is used to describe military help, such as reinforcements, without which a battle would be lost. To “help” someone, then, is to make up what is lacking in him with your strength.6 Woman was made to be a “strong helper.”
Those tasked with leadership must be the slaves of all, following their master, who “did not come to be served but to serve. . . .”15
I love my biological siblings, my neighbors, and the other members of my ethnic or racial group, yet we no longer share in common our deepest instincts and beliefs about reality.
Get more serious about seeking marriage as you get older.
Do not allow yourself deep emotional involvement with a nonbelieving person.
Feel “attraction” in the most comprehensive sense.
Let me call it “comprehensive attraction.” What is that? Partly it is being attracted to the person’s “character” or spiritual fruit (Galatians 5:22ff).
“I see what you are becoming and what you will be (even though, frankly, you aren’t there yet). The flashes of your future attract me.”
