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January 3 - April 4, 2022
The Bible, however, without ignoring responsibility to the community or the importance of romance, puts great emphasis on marriage as companionship.
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!’”
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.”
What keeps the marriage going is your commitment to your spouse’s holiness.
I’m not saying that you should marry someone when you feel no attraction. The Bible does indicate that your spouse must be more than your dearest friend, but not less.
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.
In Ephesians 5, Paul quotes Genesis 2:24—namely, that when a man marries, he “leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife.”
God asks that a man leave his father and mother, as powerful as that relationship may have been, to forge a new union that must be an even more important and powerful force in his life.
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.
Plenty of people have marital problems because they haven’t “left” to cleave to their spouses.
But if you love your children more than your spouse, the entire family will be pulled out of joint and everyone will suffer.
A strong marriage between parents makes children grow up feeling the world is a safe place and love is possible.
They shouldn’t be expected to give you the friendship and love that a spouse can.
Marriage is so much like salvation and our relationship with Christ that Paul says you can’t understand marriage without looking at the gospel.
Old things have passed away—behold, the new has come. And when through the gospel we enter into a marriage-like relationship with Jesus as our Divine Spouse, that means giving Christ the supremacy in your life (Colossians 1:15ff).
Paul likens marriage to the health of your body.
Marriage has that kind of power—the power to set the course of your whole life. It has that power because it was instituted by God. And because it has that unequalled power, it must have an unequalled, supreme priority.
And the main message of this chapter is that the key to giving marriage that kind of priority is spiritual friendship.
the power of truth, the power of love, and the power of grace.
Paul talks about how Jesus “washes” and “cleanses” us of stains and blemishes. Give your spouse the right to do that.
In Romans 7:14–25, Paul speaks about this dynamic in himself: “I do the very things I hate” (7:15) and therefore “it’s not really me doing it, it’s the sin living within me” (7:20).
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.
To be highly esteemed by someone you highly esteem is the greatest thing in the world. This principle explains why, ultimately, to know that the Lord of the universe loves you is the strongest foundation that any human being can have. A growing awareness of God’s love in Christ is the greatest reward.
Though he had a perfect relationship with God, his humanity’s relational nature was designed also for human love. Your spouse’s love for you and Christ’s love work together in your life with powerful interaction.
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. The experience of Jesus’s grace makes it possible to practice the two most important skills in marriage: forgiveness and repentance.
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.
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. It gives you both the emotional humility and wealth to exercise the power of grace.
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.
To “help” someone, then, is to make up what is lacking in him with your strength.
In this passage we see taught both the essential equality of the First and Second Persons of the Godhead, and yet the voluntary submission of the Son to the Father to secure our salvation. Let me emphasize that Jesus’s willing acceptance of this role was wholly voluntary, a gift to his Father. I discovered here that my submission in marriage was a gift I offered, not a duty coerced from me.
But fortunately I had some gifted teachers who steered me to the Philippians 2 passage. And then I saw it. 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?
This passage is one of the primary places that the “dance of the Trinity” becomes visible. The Son defers to his Father, taking the subordinate role. The Father accepts the gift, but then exalts the Son to the highest place. Each wishes to please the other; each wishes to exalt the other. Love and honor are given, accepted, and given again. In 1 Corinthians 11:3, Paul says directly what is implied in Philippians 2—namely, that the relationship of the Father and the Son is a pattern for the relationship of husband to wife.12 The Son submits to the Father’s headship with free, voluntary, and
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But in the dance of the Trinity, the greatest is the one who is most self-effacing, most sacrificial, most devoted to the good of the Other.
Both women and men get to “play the Jesus role” in marriage—Jesus in his sacrificial authority, Jesus in his sacrificial submission.
But God’s plan for married couples involves embracing the otherness to make us unified, and that can only happen between a man and a woman.22 Even at the atomic level, all the universe is held together by the attraction of positive and negative forces. The embrace of the Other, as it turns out, really is what makes the world go around.
Agreeing on gender roles as a foundational part of your marriage takes two people, but what if your spouse persists in a wrong interpretation of his or her role? Wouldn’t it just be better to assume the egalitarian, unisex roles that we use in the world as a protection against misuse and outright abuse?
Since both the headship role of a husband and the submission role as a wife are servant roles, one can always begin to serve without waiting for permission.
The experience of deep repentance and salvation by grace through the cross of Christ means that my most foundational beliefs about the world and myself now align with those of other Christians.
marriage forces you over the years to learn how a person of the other sex habitually looks at and reacts to people and situations.
In other words, when contemporary people say they want the perfect mate, sexual and financial factors dominate the thinking. As a result, modern dating can become a remarkably crass form of self-merchandising.
How different seeking marriage would be if, as we argued earlier in this book, we were to view marriage as a vehicle for spouses helping each other become their glorious future-selves through sacrificial service and spiritual friendship.
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.
However, if you are single and in your thirties, you should recognize that if you insist on trying to continue the entertainment category of dating with others of your age, you will be often playing with people’s emotions.
Do not allow yourself deep emotional involvement with a nonbelieving person.
Feel “attraction” in the most comprehensive sense.
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.
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?
One crucial way for you to avoid the blindness and mood swings of becoming too passionate too quickly is to refuse to have sex before you are married.
However, also don’t become a faux spouse for someone who won’t commit to you.
