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January 17 - June 29, 2023
When God brought the first man his spouse, he brought him not just a lover but the friend his heart had been seeking. Proverbs 2:17 speaks of one’s spouse as your ’allup, a unique word that the lexicons define as your “special confidant” or “best friend.”
This principle—that your spouse should be capable of becoming your best friend—is a game changer when you address the question of compatibility in a prospective spouse. If you think of marriage largely in terms of erotic love, then compatibility means sexual chemistry and appeal. If you think of marriage largely as a way to move into the kind of social status in life you desire, then compatibility means being part of the desired social class, and perhaps common tastes and aspirations for lifestyle. The problem with these factors is that they are not durable.
Within this Christian vision for marriage, here’s what it means to fall in love. It is to look at another person and get a glimpse of the person God is creating, and to say, “I see who God is making you, and it excites me! I want to be part of that. I want to partner with you and God in the journey you are taking to his throne. And when we get there, I will look at your magnificence and say, ‘I always knew you could be like this. I got glimpses of it on earth, but now look at you!’” Each spouse should see the great thing that Jesus is doing in the life of their mate through the Word, the
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This is by no means a naïve, romanticized approach—rather it is brutally realistic. In this view of marriage, each person says to the other, “I see all your flaws, imperfections, weaknesses, dependencies. But underneath them all I see growing the person God wants you to be.” This is radically different from the search for “compatibility.”
only if I love Jesus more than my wife will I be able to serve her needs ahead of my own.
We think of a prospective spouse as primarily a lover (or a provider), and if he or she can be a friend on top of that, well isn’t that nice! 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.
If you see your spouse as mainly a sexual partner or a financial partner, you will find that you will need pursuits outside of marriage to really engage your whole soul.
God says, “I didn’t put a parent and a child in the Garden, I put a husband and a wife. When you marry your spouse, that must supersede all other relationships, even the parental relationship.
If your spouse does not feel that you are putting him or her first, then by definition, you aren’t. And when that happens, your marriage is dying.
Maybe your family’s way of operating was wise in a particular regard, but you should only carry it into your new family if it makes sense to your spouse, too. You shouldn’t do it simply because “my family did it that way.” When you marry, you commit to becoming a new decision-making unit and to developing new patterns and ways of doing things.
A strong marriage between parents makes children grow up feeling the world is a safe place and love is possible.
“The best way for you to be a great mother to your daughter is by being a great wife to your husband.
In Ephesians 5:28, Paul introduces another metaphor. He says that a husband ought to love his wife as he does his own body. Paul is referring to the fact that your health is foundational to everything else you do.
Paul is saying that one of the main purposes of marriage is to make us “holy . . . without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish . . .” (verses 26–27). What does that mean? It means to have Jesus’s character reproduced in us, outlined as the “fruit of the Spirit”—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithful integrity, gentle humility, and self-control—in Galatians 5:22–25.
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 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.
the “power of truth” that comes with marriage is a gift, but it truly is a hard gift to receive.
“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 got to work together against it.”
“How can you tell whether you’ve got a friendship on which you can base a marriage?” The answer that Kathy and I have always given is this. When you see the problems in each other, do you just want to run away, or do you find a desire to work on them together? If the second impulse is yours, then you have the makings of a marriage. Do you obsess over your partner’s external shortcomings, or can you see the beauty within, and do you want to see it increasingly released? Then move forward. The power of truth that marriage has should hold no fear for you.4
To be highly esteemed by someone you highly esteem is the greatest thing in the world.
Your spouse’s love for you and Christ’s love work together in your life with powerful interaction.
Sometimes you spouse’s affirmation imitates Jesus’s love and stimulates us to more fully believe and accept the love we have in Christ.
We had observed these patterns of love currency in our respective families, and they had become part of our unconscious assumptions.
All forms of love are necessary, and none are to be ignored, but all of us find some forms of love to be more emotionally valuable to us. They are a currency that we find particularly precious, a language that delivers the message of love to our hearts with the most power.
Take off your filter and recognize the love your spouse is giving you.
[After the euphoria wears off] if our spouse has learned to speak our primary love language, our need for love will continue to be satisfied. If, on the other hand, he or she does not speak our love language, our tank will slowly drain, and we will no longer feel loved.
Because our culture thinks of love as mainly an involuntary feeling and not a conscious action, this foundational skill is often missed entirely.
learning about each other’s work and appreciating it.
Love can additionally be expressed by sharing each others’ mental world. Reading books together (even aloud), discussing changes in one’s thinking, studying a subject together—all these are included.
Marriage has unique power to show us the truth of who we really are.
Genesis shows us that men and women were created with absolute equality. Both are equally made in the image of God, equally blessed, and equally given “dominion” over the earth.
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.”
In Jesus Christ’s person and work we begin to see a restoration of the original unity and love between the sexes. Jesus both elevates and underlines the equality of women as co-bearers of the image of God and the creation mandate,10 and he also redeems the roles given to man and woman at the beginning by inhabiting them, both as servant-head and ’ezer-subordinate.
If it was not an assault on the dignity and divinity (but rather led to the greater glory) of the Second Person of the Godhead to submit himself, and assume the role of a servant, then how could it possibly injure me to be asked to play out the “Jesus role” in my marriage?
Each wishes to please the other; each wishes to exalt the other. Love and honor are given, accepted, and given again.
Male and female are invited to mirror and reflect the “dance” of the Trinity, loving, self-sacrificing authority and loving, courageous submission.
the greatest is the one who is most self-effacing, most sacrificial, most devoted to the good of the Other. Jesus redefined—or, more truly, defined properly—headship and authority, thus taking the toxicity of it away, at least for those who live by his definition rather than by the world’s understanding.
authority and leadership mean that you become the servant, you die to self in order to love and serve the Other.
It means that rigid cultural gender roles have no Biblical warrant.
We must find ways to honor and express our gender roles, but the Bible allows for freedom in the particulars, while still upholding the obligatory nature of the principle.29
What does this mean for our attitude toward marriage and family? Paul says it means that both being married and not being married are good conditions to be in. We should be neither overly elated by getting married nor overly disappointed by not being so—because Christ is the only spouse that can truly fulfill us and God’s family the only family that will truly embrace and satisfy us.
Single adult Christians were bearing testimony that God, not family, was their hope. God would guarantee their future, first by giving them their truest family—the church—so
“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.”
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.
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.
Without the gospel, people often turn temperamental, cultural, and gender differences into moral virtues.
Eventually you can instinctively identify the way your spouse would react to a situation, assess its wisdom in this situation, and adopt it sometimes in a way that you never would have been able to pre-marriage. Let’s call this “cross-gender enrichment.” In this way, male and female “complete” each other and reflect the image of God together (Genesis 1:26–28).
Anyone who always needs to “have somebody” is probably into marriage idolatry.
Paul always uses the word “gift” to mean an ability God gives to build others up. Paul is not speaking, then, of some kind of elusive, stress-free state. The “gift-ness” of being single for Paul lay in the freedom it gave him to concentrate on ministry in ways that a married man could not.
It is fruitfulness in life and ministry through the single state.
