The Meaning of Marriage

The Bible’s teaching on marriage does not merely reflect the perspective of any one culture or time. The teachings of Scripture challenge our contemporary Western culture’s narrative of individual freedom as the only way to be happy.

The only way for you to be truly free is to link your feeling to an obligation. Only if you commit yourself to loving in action, day in and day out, even when feelings and circumstances are in flux, can you truly be a free individual and not a pawn of outside forces.

Therefore, if you have sex outside marriage, you will have to steel yourself against sex’s power to soften your heart toward another person and make you more trusting. The problem is that, eventually, sex will lose its covenant-making power for you, even if you one day do get married.

A substantial body of evidence indicates that those who live together before marriage are more likely to break up after marriage.

Individuals who were continuously married had 75 percent more wealth at retirement than those who never married or who divorced and did not remarry.

Married men have been shown to earn 10–40 percent more than do single men with similar education and job histories.

We always marry the wrong person. We never know whom we marry; we just think we do.

Marriage used to be about us, but now it is about me.

The journey may eventually take you into a strong, tender, joyful marriage. But it is not because you married the perfectly compatible person. That person doesn’t exist.

Do for your spouse what God did for you in Jesus, and the rest will follow.

Marriage only 'works' to the degree that it approximates the pattern of God’s self-giving love in Christ.

God’s Spirit doesn’t always work in such a sudden and obvious way, but he always does this same work.

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

We love—because he first loved us.

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. It seems perfectly fair.

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.

Marriage brings out the worst in you. It doesn’t create your weaknesses—it reveals them.

I see who God is making you, and it excites me! I want to be part of that.

Marriage does not so much bring you into confrontation with your spouse as confront you with yourself.

Take off your filter and recognize the love your spouse is giving you.

Love must become a deliberate choice.

Truth and love need to be kept together, but it is very hard.

Sex is God’s appointed way for two people to reciprocally say to one another, 'I belong completely, permanently, and exclusively to you.

Each partner in marriage is to be most concerned not with getting sexual pleasure but with giving it.

Marriage does not consist of just one form of human love. It is not merely romantic passion or friendship, or acts of duty and service. It is all of these things and more.

Christ’s love is the great foundation for building a marriage that sings.

There is not only no evidence that 'open marriages' are better for most people, but there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that the opposite is the case.

If we accept our gender roles as a gift from God, we will try to nourish our weaker abilities rather than deny them.

If God invented marriage, then those who enter it should make every effort to understand and submit to his purposes for it.

Marriage used to be a public institution for the common good, and now it is a private arrangement for the satisfaction of the individuals. Marriage used to be about us, but now it is about me.

The conventional explanation for this is that marriage simply doesn’t fit the male nature. In particular, it is said, the most masculine of men do not do well in marriage.

Never before in history has there been a society filled with people so idealistic in what they are seeking in a spouse.

The new conception of marriage-as-self-realization has put us in a position of wanting too much out of marriage and yet not nearly enough—at the same time.

In short, the “secret” is not simply the fact of marriage per se . It is the message that what husbands should do for their wives is what Jesus did to bring us into union with himself.

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

When Jesus Christ went to the cross, he was simply acting in character. As C. S. Lewis wrote, when Jesus sacrificed himself for us, he did 'in the wild weather of his outlying provinces' that which from all eternity 'he had done at home in glory and gladness.'

If you seek happiness more than you seek me, you will have neither; if you seek to serve me more than serve happiness, you will have both." - Jesus (Matthew 16:25)

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. It means taking your mind off yourself and realizing that in Christ your needs are going to be met and are, in fact, being met so that you don’t look at your spouse as your savior.

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. How much are you willing to lose for the sake of this person? How much of your freedom are you willing to forsake? How much of your precious time, emotion, and resources are you willing to invest in this person?

The Biblical understanding of love does not preclude deep emotion. As we will see, a marriage devoid of passion and emotional desire for one another doesn’t fulfill the Biblical vision. But neither does the Bible pit romantic love against the essence of love, which is sacrificial commitment to the good of the other.

Love needs a framework of binding obligation to make it fully what it should be. A covenant relationship is not just intimate despite being legal. It is a relationship that is more intimate because it is legal.

When you make a promise to anyone, you rise above all the conditioning that limits me. No German shepherd ever promised to be there with me. No home computer ever promised to be a loyal help. . . . Only a person can make a promise. And when he does, he is most free.

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.

Marriage is for both the overly gender-typed and the under gender-typed. It broadens us and deepens us.

God designed us to need “horizontal” relationships with other human beings. That is why even in paradise, loneliness was a terrible thing. We should therefore not be surprised to find that all the money, comforts, and pleasures in the world—our efforts to re-create a paradise for ourselves —are unable to fulfill us like love can.

There are two features of real friendship—constancy and transparency. Real friends always let you in, and they never let you down.

Christian friendship is not simply about going to concerts together or enjoying the same sporting event. It is the deep oneness that develops as two people journey together toward the same destination, helping one another through the dangers and challenges along the way.

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.

Marriage is dif ferent from these others. The mer ged life of marriage brings you into the closest, most inescapable contact with another person possible. And that means not only that you see each other close up, but that you are forced to deal with the flaws and sins of one another.

The love and af firmation 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.

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. Y ou can give it in cash or by check or in gold or in kind. Y ou can give it in dif ferent currencies. So you ask, 'In which form do you want the hundred dollars?' In the same way you learn to give your spouse love in the way he or she finds most emotionally valuable and powerful.

Love should be expressed verbally , not by simply saying, 'Of course I love you.' We must learn to send messages of love in direct, personal, specific, and ever -fresh ways. Discern the strengths and gifts of your partner and communicate honest praise, appreciation, and thankfulness for him or her.

Early in your marriage you will realize what power you have to hurt your spouse. Y ou will know his or her sensitivities like no one else. And cutting remarks from you will go deeper than any knife.

The point is this—truth and love need to be kept together, but it is very hard. When we are hurt, we use the power of truth without love. The fury and pain of such encounters can lead to the mistake of trying to just love without telling the truth, though in the end this does not lead to anyone feeling loved at all.

The Power of Grace—Reconciling 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.

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?

The Son takes a subordinate role, and in that movement he shows not his weakness but his greatness.

In Jesus we see all the authoritarianism of authority laid to rest, and all the humility of submission glorified. Rather than demeaning Christ, his submission leads to his ultimate glorification, where God “exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name.

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.

The Christian perspective on singleness is almost unique. Unlike traditional societies, Christianity sees singleness as good because the kingdom of God provides the most lasting possible legacy and heirs.

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 essence of intimacy in marriage is that finally you have someone who will eventually come to understand you and accept you as you are. Your spouse should be someone you don’t have to hide from or always be “spinning”; it should be someone who “gets” you.

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.

Each partner in marriage is to be most concerned not with getting sexual pleasure but with giving it. In short, the greatest sexual pleasure should be the pleasure of seeing your spouse getting pleasure.

Sex is glorious not only because it reflects the joy of the Trinity but also because it points to the eternal delight of soul that we will have in heaven, in our loving relationships with God and one another.

Assuming the role of headship is only done for purposes of ministering to your wife and family.

In a marriage, where there are only two 'votes,' how can a stalemate be broken without someone having to give way? In the vast majority of cases, the stalemate is broken because each will try to give the other his or her pleasure.

At that point, Tim and I were both submitting to roles that we were not perfectly comfortable with, but it is clear that God worked in us and through us when we accepted our gender roles as a gift from the designer of our hearts.

Marriage reproduces in miniature the beauty shared between the Bridegroom and the Bride. And through it all the mystery of the gospel is unveiled.

Husbands do not submit to their wives in exactly the same way wives submit to their husbands. On the other hand, we must not make the opposite mistake and fail to see the mutuality and reciprocity in the duties of husbands and wives to each other.

The repeated expression 'it was good' in Genesis 1 shows that the material world/physical reality is intrinsically good. The Greeks believed that the creation of the physical world was an accident or even a rebellious action of some lower deities.

Gender relations tell us something of the relationships between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. If God is tripersonal—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—it would take at least two people to capture the full image of God.