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

by Timothy J. Keller

The Christian teaching does not offer a choice between fulfillment and sacrifice but rather mutual fulfillment through mutual sacrifice.

The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.

I didn’t want to be in a position where I had to ask for something and receive it as a gift. Kathy was deeply disappointed and insulted that I had robbed her of the opportunity to do so.

Finally I began to see. I wanted to serve, yes, because that made me feel in control.

Then I would always have the high moral ground. But that kind of “service” isn’t service at all, only manipulation. But by not giving Kathy an opportunity to serve me, I had failed to serve...

It is that you are so lost and flawed, so sinful, that Jesus had to die for you, but you are also so loved and valued that Jesus was glad to die for you.

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.

But each of us comes to marriage with a disordered inner being. Many of us have sought to overcome self-doubts by giving ourselves to our careers.

If I look to my marriage to fill the God-sized spiritual vacuum in my heart, I will not be in position to serve my spouse. Only God can fill a God-sized hole.

This does not mean that every time you are criticized you are consciously, deliberately thinking, “What does Jesus have to say about this?” You won’t have to think it out like that, because if Jesus and his Word are so deeply in there, they will just fortify you, lifting you up. They will be part of you. You look at yourself through his eyes; you look at the world through his eyes. It becomes the cast of your whole mind.

Then the gospel “dwells in your hearts richly” (Colossians 3:16),

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.

If we think of love primarily as emotional desire and not as active, committed service, we end up pitting duty and desire against each other in a way that is unrealistic and destructive.

Many people believe that if you have sex with your spouse just to please him or her though you are not interested in sex yourself, it would be inauthentic or even oppressive. This

If you won’t make love unless you are in a romantic mood at the very same time as your spouse, then sex will not happen that often. This can dampen and quench your partner’s interest in sex, which means there will be even fewer opportunities.

Outside of marriage, sex is accompanied by a desire to impress or entice someone. It is something like the thrill of the hunt. When you are seeking to draw in someone you don’t know, it injects risk, uncertainty, and pressure to the lovemaking that quickens the heartbeat and stirs the emotions.

With sex, we were trying to be vulnerable to each other, to give each other the gift of bare-faced rejoicing in one another, and to know the pleasure of giving one another pleasure.

Sociologists argue that in contemporary Western society the marketplace has become so dominant that the consumer model increasingly characterizes most relationships that historically were covenantal, including marriage.

“commodification,” a process by which social relationships are reduced to economic exchange relationships, and so the very idea of “covenant” is disappearing in our culture.

It is because marriage has both strong horizontal and vertical aspects to it.

A covenant relationship is a stunning blend of law and love.

Biblical perspective

Love needs a framework of binding obligation to make it fully what it should be.

It is a relationship that is more intimate beca...

The legal bond

of marriage, however, creates a space of security where we can open up and reveal our true selves.

Wedding vows are not a declaration of present love but a mutually binding promise of future love.

I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery.”

But he goes on to say that these serious conditions do exist, because of “the hardness of your hearts.” That means that sometimes human hearts become so hard because of sin that it leads a spouse into a severe violation of the covenant, without prospects of repentance and healing, and in such cases divorce is permitted. The only such violation that Jesus names in this passage is adultery. In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul adds another ground—namely, willful desertion. These actions essentially break the covenant vow so thoroughly, that, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7:15, the wronged spouse “is not bound.”

Some people ask who they are and expect their feelings to tell them. But feelings are flickering flames that fade after every fitful stimulus. Some people ask who they are and expect their achievements to tell them. But the things we accomplish always leave a core of character unrevealed. Some people ask who they are and expect visions of their ideal self to tell them. But our visions can only tell us what we want to be, not what we are. Who are we? Smedes answers that we are largely who we become through making wise promises and keeping them.

Since promising is the key to identity, it is the very essence of marital love. Why? Because it is our promises that give us a stable identity, and without a stable identity, it is impossible to have stable relationships.

Only a person can make a promise. And when he does, he is most free.

And, of course, you cannot show your partner those parts of your character that you cannot see yourself and which will only be revealed to you in the course of the marriage.

What you think of as being head over heels in love is in large part a gust of ego gratification, but it’s nothing like the profound satisfaction of being known and loved.

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.

Most of our likes and dislikes are neither sins nor virtues—no more than our tastes in food or music. What matters is what we do with them.

Do not waste time bothering whether you “love” your neighbor; act as if you did.

I had been loving them even when I didn’t like them, and the result was that, slowly but surely, my emotions were catching up with my behavior. If you do not give up, but proceed to love the unlovely in a sustained way, they will eventually become lovely to you.

It is almost impossible not to think in terms of how much I am putting into the marriage and how much my spouse is putting in. And if we are getting out of the relationship as much (or a bit more, we secretly hope) than we put in, then we are happy.

And so if my wife is not being the wife she ought to be, I simply will not put in the effort to be the husband I used to be.

You tell yourself at some semiconscious level that this behavior is only fair and equitable. But it’s really a form of revenge.

You have had to do the actions of love regardless of your feelings and therefore now you have deep feelings of love for your child, however loveable she is or not.

It is not surprising, then, that after children leave home, many marriages fall apart. Why? Because while the parents treated their relationship with their children as a covenant relationship—performing the actions of love until their feelings strengthened—they treated their marriages as a consumer relationship and withdrew their actions of love when they weren’t having the feelings.

“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 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.” Speak to your heart like that, and then fulfill the promises you made on your wedding day.

How could Adam be in a “not good” condition when he was in a perfect world and had, evidently, a perfect relationship with God? The answer may lie in the statement of God in Genesis 1:26: “Let us make man in our own image.”

Christian theologians over the centuries have seen here an allusion to a truth only revealed after the coming of Jesus into the world—namely, that God is triune, that the one God has existed from all eternity as three persons—Father, Son, and Spirit—who know and love one an-other. And therefore, among other things, being created in God’s image means that we were designed for relationships.2

“sympathy”—sym-pathos, common passion.

[A]s Emerson said, Do you love me? means Do you see the same truth?—or at least, Do you care about the same truth? The man who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by others, is of great importance can be our Friend. . . .

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? They do it through spiritual transparency.

The other way is spiritual constancy.