Quotes from the book “The Meaning of Marriage” by Timothy Keller
The two most basic teachings by the Bible on marriage: that it has been instituted by God and that marriage was designed to be a reflection of the saving love of God for us in Jesus Christ. That is why the gospel helps us the understand marriage and marriage helps us to understand the gospel.
What marriage is for: It is a way for two spiritual friends to help each other on their journey to become the persons God designed them to be.
Ch1: The Secret of Marriage
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. But ironically, this newer view of marriage actually puts a crushing burden of expectation on marriage and on spouses in a way that traditional understandings never did. And it leaves us desperately trapped between both unrealistic longings for and terrible fears about marriage.
We never know whom we marry; we just think that we do. Or even if we first marry the right person, just give it a while and he or she will change. For marriage, being [the enormous thing it is] means we are not the same person after we have entered it. The primary problem is learning how to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.
It is the illusion that if we find our one true soulmate, everything wrong with us will be healed; but that makes the lover into God, and no human being can live up to that.
What husbands should do for their wives is what Jesus did to bring us into union with himself. Jesus gave himself up for us. Jesus the Son, though equal with the Father, gave up his glory and took on our human nature. But further, he willingly went to the cross and paid the penalty for our sins, removing our guilt and condemnation, so that we could be united with him and take on his nature. He gave up his glory and power and became a servant. He died to his own interests and looked to our needs and interests instead. Jesus’s sacrificial service to us has brought us into a deep union with him and he with us. And that, Paul says, is the key not only to understanding marriage but to living it.
Paul saw that when God designed the original marriage, He already had Christ and the church in mind. This is one of God’s great purposes in marriage: to picture the relationship between Christ and His redeemed people forever!
Marriage only “works” to the degree that approximates the pattern of God’s self-giving love in Christ. Do for your spouse what God did for you in Jesus. The gospel of Jesus and marriage explain one another. That when God invented marriage, he already had the saving work of Jesus in mind.
Mutual fulfilment through mutual sacrifice. Jesus gave himself up; he died to himself to save us and make us his. Now we give ourselves up, we die to ourselves, first when we repent and believe the gospel, and later as we submit to his will day by day. Subordinating ourselves to him, however, is radically safe, because he has already shown that he was willing to go to hell and back for us. This banishes fears that loving surrender means loss of oneself.
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.
God’s saving love in Christ is marked by both radical truthfulness about who we are and yet also radical, unconditional commitment to us. The merciful commitment strengthens us to see the truth about ourselves and repent. The conviction and repentance moves us to cling to and rest in God’s mercy and grace.
The gospel can fill our hearts with God’s love so that you can handle it when your spouse fails to love you as he or she should. That frees us to see our spouse’s sins and flaws to the bottom - and speak of them - and yet still love and accept our spouse fully. And when, by the power of the gospel, our spouse experiences that same kind of truthful yet committed love, it enables our spouses to show us that same kind of transforming love when the time comes for it.
Ch2: The Power for Marriage
The last mark of Spirit fullness is in this last clause: It is a loss of pride and self-will that leads a person to humbly serve others.
Paul assumes that each spouse already has settled the big questions of life - why they were made by God and who they are in Christ. If we look to our spouses to fill up our tanks in a way that only God can do, we are demanding an impossibility.
Wives should submit to their husbands - husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church and “gave himself up for her” (Eph 5:25). Each of these exhortations has a distinct shape - they are not identical tasks. And yet each partner is called to sacrifice for the other in far-reaching ways. Whether we are husband and wife, we are not to live for ourselves but for the other.
Paul is applying to marriage a general principle about the Christian life - namely, that all Christians who really understand the gospel undergo a radical change in the way they relate to people. We should consider and count the interests of others as more important than our own. Because Christ humbled himself and became a servant and met our needs even at the cost of his own life, now we are like servants - but to one another.
A servant puts someone else’s needs ahead of his or her own. This is how all believers should live with each other. And if all believers are to serve each other in this way, how much more intentionally and intensely should husbands and wives have this attitude toward one another?
To have a marriage that sings requires a Spirit-created ability to serve, to take yourself out of the center, to put the needs of others ahead of your own. 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.
Seek to serve one another rather than to be happy, and you will find a new and deeper happiness.
The essence of sin - living for ourselves, rather than for God and the people around us. The entire will of God for our lives in two great commands: to love and live for God rather than ourselves, and to love and put the needs of others ahead of our own (Matthew 22:37-40).
Determine to see your own selfishness as a fundamental problem and to treat it more seriously than you do your spouse’s. Why? Only you have complete access to your own selfishness, and only you have complete responsibility for it. So each spouse should take the Bible seriously, should make a commitment to “give yourself up”.
To fear the Lord is to be overwhelmed with wonder before the greatness of God and his love. It means that, because of his bright holiness and magnificent love, you find him “fearfully beautiful”.
I will rest in the righteousness of Christ and learn to rejoice in it. Then I can look at males or career and say, “What makes me beautiful to God is Jesus, not these things”. “Emotional Wealth” - a sense of being loved so deeply that when someone wrongs us we can afford to be generous, able to forgive.
Out of this “fear”, this fullness of the Spirit, we can turn to our spouses and begin to do what we should do for them. The question is, then, how can we actually be filled with the Spirit? How can we grow in the fear of the Lord, so we are not controlled by other fears?
What, then, would the effect be if we were to dive even more deeply into Jesus’s teaching and life and work? What if we were to be so immersed in his promises and summonses, his counsels and encouragements, that they dominated our inner life, capturing our imagination, and simply bubbled out spontaneously when we faced some challenge? How would we live if we instinctively, almost unconsciously, knew Jesus’s mind and heart regarding things that confronted us? When you received criticism, you would never be crushed, because Jesus’s love and acceptance of you is so deeply “in there”. When you gave criticism, you would be gentle and patient, because your whole inner world would be saturated by a sense of Jesus’s loving patience and gentleness with you.
Fortified with the love of God in your soul, you likewise can now give yourself in loving service to your spouse. “We love - because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).
Ch3: The Essence of Marriage
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? And for that, the marriage vow is not just helpful but it is even a test.
Sex in a marriage, done to give joy rather than to impress, can change your mood on the spot.
The Bible sees God as the supreme good - not the individual or the family - and that gives us a view of marriage that intimately unites feeling and duty, passion and promise. That is because at the heart of the Biblical idea of marriage is the covenant.
Why do we say that marriage is the most deeply covenantal relationship? It is because marriage has both strong horizontal and vertical aspects to it. The covenant made between a husband and a wife is done “before God” and therefore with God as well as the spouse. To break faith with your spouse is to break faith with God at the same time.
A covenant relationship is a relationship that is more intimate because it is legal. Making a binding, public marriage vow to another person is an enormous act of love in and of itself. The legal bond of marriage, however, creates a space of security where we can open up and reveal our true selves. We can be so vulnerable, no longer having to keep up facades.
A wedding should not be primarily a celebration of how loving you feel now. 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.
A public oath, made to the world, keeps you “tied to the mast” until your mind clears and you begin to understand things better. It keeps you in the relationship when your feelings flag, and flags they will. By contrast, consumer relationships cannot possibly endure these inevitable tests of life, because neither party is “tied to the mast”.
“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. Because it is our promises that give us a stable identity, and without a stable identity, it is impossible to have stable relationships. Promising is the means to freedom. In promising, you limit options now, in order to have wonderful, fuller options later. You curb your freedom now, so that you can be free to be there in the future for people who trust you. When you make a promise to someone, both of you know that you are going to be there with and for them. “You have created a small sanctuary of trust within the jungle of unpredictability”.
When over the years someone has seen you at your worst, and knows you with all your strengths and flaws, yet commits him- or herself to you wholly, it is a consummate experience. 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 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.
Passion may lead you to make a wedding promise, but then the promise over the years makes the passion richer and deeper.
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. On the other hand, if you stress the action of love over the feeling, you enhance and establish the feeling.
Whenever we do good to another self, just because it is a self, made like us by God, and desiring its own happiness we desire ours, we shall have learned to love it a little more or, at least, to dislike it less.
Of the two - emotion and action - it is the latter that we have the most control over. It is the action of love that we can promise to maintain every day.
If you love the way the Bible described the love of two people who want to share their lives together, you should have no problem making a legal, permanent, exclusive commitment.
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.
Ch4: The Mission of Marriage
What is the purpose of marriage? The Bible’s answer starts with the principle that marriage is a friendship. Being created in God’s image means that we were designed for relationships. “This is my lover; this is my friend” (Songs of Solomon 5:16)
Prime quality of a friend is constancy. Friends “love at all times” and especially during “adversity” (Proverbs 17:17). Two features of real friendship - constancy and transparency. But there is a third quality of friendship - common passion. This means that friendships are discovered more than they are created at will. A common vision can unite people of very different temperaments. The paradox is that friendship cannot be merely about itself. It must be about something else, something that both friends are committed to and passionate about besides one another.
Spiritual transparency - honestly confess their own sins and lovingly point out their friend’s sins. Spiritual constancy - bear each other’s burdens. 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 as companionship. In his redemptive work, Jesus is both Friend and Lover and this is to be the model for spouses in marriage. Husband and wife are to be both lovers and friends to one another as Jesus is to us.
Common vision - what is your marriage for? Where are you going? 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.
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!”
When looking for a marriage partner, each must be able to look inside the other and see what God is doing and be excited about being part of the process of liberating the emerging “new you”. 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.
Look for someone who understand you better than you do yourself, who makes you a better person just by being around them. 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.
Look carefully to see whether you are insisting that you do things exactly the way your parents did them. If you rigidly impose the patterns that you saw in your own family rather than working together with your spouse to create new ones that fit both of you, you haven’t “left home” yet.
God built marriage to be the primary relationship in your life. If you think that marriage is going to be a sidebar to your great career, that it is going to come second or third in your life and that your spouse had better get used to it, watch out. Marriage isn’t built that way. Once you’re married, your marriage has to take priority. Marriage has the power to set the course of your life as a whole.
So if we want to be happy in marriage, we will accept that marriage is designed to make us holy.
You must speak the truth in love with the power of God’s grace. As a divine institution, marriage has several inherent powers that we must accept and use - the power of truth, the power of love, and the power of grace.
Marriage brings out the worst in you. It doesn’t create your weaknesses - it reveals them.
Marriage by its very nature has the “power of truth” - the power to show you the truth about who you are. Marriage does not so much bring you into confrontation with your spouse as confront you with yourself. Don’t resist this power that marriage has. Give your spouse the right to talk to you about what is wrong with you.
Instead of saying, “that’s just the way he is, and I hate it”, remember that the part of him you hate isn’t the real, permanent him. When you envision the “someone better”, you can think of the future version of the person to whom you are already married. God has indeed given us a desire for the perfect spouse, but you should seek it in the one to whom you’re married.
“Godly tantrum” - the unrelenting insistence on being heard. Give each other the right to hold one another accountable.
“Power of love” - an unmatched power to affirm you and heal you of the deepest wounds and hurts of your life. To be highly esteemed by someone you highly esteem is the greatest thing in the world. The power of healing love in marriage is a miniature version of the same power that Jesus has with us.
Consider whether some of the running conflicts you have with your spouse are not love language conflicts. That can soften your attitude and change your strategy. Instead of thinking about the other person, “He is so selfish”, each should think, “He is feeling particularly unloved”.
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. Meeting that need is definitely a choice. If I learn the emotional love language of my spouse and speak it frequently… when she comes down from the obsession of the in-love experience, she will hardly even miss it because her emotional love tank will continue to be filled. However, if I have not learned her primary love language or have chosen not to speak it, when she descends from the emotional high, she will have the natural yearnings of unmet emotional needs. After some years of living with an empty love tank, she will likely “fall in love” with someone else, and the cycle will begin again.
Showing some supportive loyalty for, as well as interest and pride in the work world of your spouse. If both have careers outside the house, it means each learning about each other’s work and appreciating it.
Love can additionally be expressed by sharing each other’s’ mental world. Reading books together (even aloud), discussing changes in one’s thinking, studying a subject together - all these are included.
Friendship love is expressed and grows through both listening and opening up to the other. Friendship is above all a relationship in which it is safe to share fears, hurts and weaknesses - an emotional refuge. Listening takes concentration. Trust is also built by following through on commitments, being reliable.
One of the greatest expressions of love is the willingness to change, to make a commitment to change attitudes and behaviors in yourself that trouble or hurt your spouse. There must be an ability to take correction and to be accountable for real concrete changes. This kind of change is always hard, and nearly impossible without the grace of God, but it is also one of the most powerful signs of love in a marriage.
There is no greater way for Christian spouses to serve one another than to help each other grow spiritually.
Your spouse’s opinion of you can be a terrible weapon.
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. We need to feel so loved by our partners that when they criticize us, we have the security to admit our faults. Then we can come to know and face who we are and grow.
The experience of Jesus’s grace makes it possible to practice the two most important skills in marriage: forgiveness and repentance. Only if we are very good at forgiving and very good at repenting can truth and love be kept together.
Without the power of grace, truth and love can’t be combined. The Bible says we are supposed to forgive people and then go and confront them.
One of the 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. This does not mean you cannot express anger. But forgiving grace must always be present to keep the anger from going bad. Then truth and love and can live together, because, beneath them both, you have forgiven your spouse as Christ forgave you.
What does it take to know the power of grace? First it takes humility. “Emotional wealth” - a fundamental inner joy and confidence. If you are very down on yourself, if you struggle with self-loathing, then it may be far too important for you to have your spouse always pleased with you.
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. If you see Jesus dying on the cross FOR YOU, forgiving YOU, putting away YOUR sin, that changes everything. 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.
Our sins hurt Jesus infinitely more than your spouse’s sins hurt you.
To “help” someone, then, is to makeup what is lacking in him with your strength.
In Jesus Christ’s person and work we begin to see a restoration of the original unity 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, and he also redeems the roles given to man and woman at the beginning by inhabiting them, both as servant-head and ezer-subordinate.
Jesus’s willing acceptance of this role was wholly voluntary, a gift to his Father. My submission in marriage was a gift I offered, not as duty coerced from me.
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 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 honour are given, accepted and given again. The relationship of the Father and the Son is a pattern for the relationship of husband to wife. The Son submits to the Father’s headship with free, voluntary and joyful eagerness, not out of coercion or inferiority. The father’s headship is acknowledged in reciprocal delight, respect, and love. There is no inequality of ability or dignity. We are differently gendered to reflect this life within the Trinity. Male and female are invited to mirror and reflect this life within the Trinity. Male and female are invited to mirror and reflect the “dance” of the Trinity, loving, self-sacrificing authority and loving, courageous submission. The Son takes a subordinate role, and in that movement he shows not his weakness but his greatness.
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. 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. Jesus washed his disciples’ feet, both showing and teaching them how he was redefining authority and headship.
The master has just made himself into a servant who has washed his disciples’ feet, thus demonstrating in the most dramatic way that authority and leadership mean that you become the servant, you die to self in order to love and serve the Other.
Any exercise of power can only be done in service to the Other, not to please oneself. Jesus is the one who did not come to be served, but to serve, to the point of giving his life.
Both women and men get to “play the Jesus role” in marriage – Jesus in his sacrificial authority, Jesus in his sacrificial submission.
Marriage is a full embrace of the other sex. We accept and yet struggle with the gendered “otherness” of our spouse, and in the process, we grow and flourish in ways otherwise impossible. Because, as Genesis says, male and female are “like-opposite” each other – both radically different and yet incomplete without each other.
Men see women’s need for “interdependence” as sheer dependence, and women see men’s need for independence as pure ego. Husbands and wives grow distant from one another because they allow themselves to engage in a constant, daily drumbeat of thoughts of inner disdain for the gendered difference of their spouse. But Jesus gives both a pattern and power to change all of this.
Christ embraced the ultimate “other” – sinful humanity. He didn’t exclude us by simply consigning us to judgment. He embraced us by dying on the cross for our sins. To love the Other, especially an Other that is hostile, entails sacrifice.
In Christ we have a profound security. We know who we are in him, and that frees us from the natural human impulse to despise anyone who is significantly different from us. This enables us to embrace rather than exclude those who differ from us, and that especially goes for our spouse, with all his or her mysterious and often infuriating differences.
It is our very effort to submit to the roles of servant-leader and strong helper that will help us get in touch with and honour our gender differences.
Wives are more directly and more often exhorted to be gentle supporters, to be encouragers (1 Peter 3:1-2,4), and more directly and more often to be nurturing children and the home life (Titus 2:4-5). Husbands are exhorted more directly and more often to lead, provide for and protect the family, but are not let off the hook for the education and nurture of the children (1 Timothy 3:4, 5:8)
Remember, this person is utterly unlike you. He acts differently, thinks differently, and operates differently, and in some cases, dealing with him is not only frustrating and scary, but it’s downright incomprehensible. But at a deeper level, you’re finding out who you really are. You’re seeing him as your other half. You see how God is completing you in your husband. The result of completion is personal ease.
Ch7: Singleness and Marriage
Single people cannot live their lives well as singles without a balanced, informed view of marriage. If they do not have that, they will either over-desire or under-desire marriage.
Our assurance about God’s future world transforms our attitudes toward all our earthly activities. We should be glad of success, but not overly glad, and saddened by failure, but not too downcast, because our true joy in the future is guaranteed by God. So we are to enjoy but not be “engrossed” in things of this world.
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 not overly disappointed by not being so – because Christ is the only spouse that can truly fulfil us and God’s family the only family that will truly embrace and satisfy us.
Single adults cannot be seen as somehow less fully formed or realised human beings than married persons because Jesus Christ, a single man, was the perfect man.
The Christian gospel and hope of the future kingdom de-idolised marriage. Christians who remains single, then, were making the statement that your future is not guaranteed by the family but by God.
Christian hope not only made it possible for singles to live fulfilled lives without spouse and children, but it also was an impetus for people to marry and have children and not be afraid to bring them into this dark world. Children are a sign of their hope that God has not abandoned this world.
“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.”
Marriage is penultimate. It points us to the Real Marriage that our souls need and the Real family our hearts were made for. Without a deeply fulfilling love relationship with Christ now, and hope in a perfect love relationship with him in the future, married Christians will put too much pressure on their marriage to fulfil them.
Demote marriage and family in your heart, put God first, and begin to enjoy the goodness of single life.
Notice the distinct idols women have and men have in your generation, culture and place. Notice the strengths women have and men have in your generation, culture and place. Notice communication modes, decision-making skills, leadership styles, life priorities and the balance of work and family.
Contemporary societies tend to make an idol of independence (because they make an idol out of individual choice and happiness).
One major fruit of the contemporary culture’s fear of marriage is that singles become perfectionistic and virtually impossible to satisfy as they look at prospective spouses. Males will look for near perfection in physical looks while women will look for partners who are financially well off. As a result, modern dating can become a remarkably crass form of self-merchandising. You must look good and make money if you are to attract dates, a partners or a spouse. And the reason you want a good-looking or affluent partner is for your own self-esteem.
The “single calling” Paul speaks of is neither a condition without any struggle nor on the other hand an experience of misery. It is fruitfulness in life and ministry through the single state. The main thing is that God is helping you to grow spiritually and be fruitful in the lives of others despite struggles.
Idolizing my beloved is all about me, though it pretends to be all about the other, it is all about me because it does not take my beloved seriously as a person created and redeemed by God but rather imagines him to be perfect, heroic, sublime and customised to meet my needs.
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 though 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?
Sex is for whole-life self-giving. The sinful heart wants to use sex for selfish reasons, not self-giving, and therefore the Bible puts many rules around it to direct us to use it in the right way. God not only allows sex within marriage but strongly commands it.
Sex is primarily a way to know God and build community, and, if you use it for those things rather than for your own personal satisfaction, it will lead to greater fulfilment than you can imagine.
To call the marriage “one flesh”, then, means that sex is understood as both a sign of that personal, legal union and a means to accomplish it. The Bible says don’t unite with someone physically unless you are also willing to unite with the person emotionally, personally, socially, economically and legally. Don’t become physically naked and vulnerable to the other person without becoming vulnerable in every other way, because you have given up your freedom and bound yourself in marriage. Then, once you have given yourself in marriage, sex is a way of maintaining and deepening that union as the years go by.
Sex is God’s appointed way for two people to reciprocally say to one another, “I belong completely, permanently and exclusively to you”. You must not use sex to say anything less.
A covenant is necessary for sex. It creates a place of security for vulnerability and intimacy. But though a marriage covenant is necessary for sex, sex is also necessary for the maintenance of the covenant. It is your covenant renewal service.
Keep away from sexual immorality for you do not belong to yourselves. You were bought with a price. Show forth God’s glory, then, in how you live your bodily life. (1 Corinthians 6)
Every sex act is supposed to be a uniting act. It is radically dissonant to give your body to someone to whom you will not also commit your whole life. Sex outside marriage is not just morally wrong but also personally harmful. Sex is an emotional “commitment apparatus”. Sex makes us feel deeply connected to the other person, even when used wrongly.
Sex is for fully committed relationships because it is a foretaste of the joy that comes from being in complete union with God though Christ. The most rapturous love between a man and woman on earth is only a hint of what that is like. Our hearts believe the lie that if we have a great, romantic sexual experience, we will finally feel deeply fulfilled. Sex simply cannot fill the cosmic need for closure that our souls seek in romance. Only meeting Christ face-to-face will fill the emptiness in our hearts that sin created when we lost our unbroken fellowship with him. We can have not just intellectual belief in his love but actual experience of it now, through prayer.
We can’t stop sexual thoughts from occurring to us – they are natural and unavoidable. However, we are responsible for what we do with those thoughts. We must not entertain and dwell on them. Often it is unresolved shame for past offenses that stir up present, obsessive fantasies.
Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot.
She ignores what her heart says and looks to what God says. Obedience means you cede someone an authority over you that is there even when you don’t agree with him. God’s law is for times of temptation.
“The husband’s body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife”. It communicates, negatively, his obligation to refrain from engaging in sexual relations with anyone other than his wife, and positively, his obligation to fulfil his marital duty to provide her with sexual pleasure and satisfaction.
Each partner in marriage is to be most concerned not with getting sexual pleasure but with giving it. The greatest sexual pleasure should be the pleasure of seeing your spouse getting pleasure. When we stopped trying to perform and just started trying to simply love one another in sex, things started to move ahead.
Unless your marital relationship is in a good condition, sex doesn’t work. So be very careful to look beneath the surface. A lack of “sexual compatibility” might not really be a lack of love-making skill at all. It may be a sign of deeper problems in the relationship.
Love (III) by George Herbert
Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack’d anything.
“A guest,” I answer’d, “worthy to be here”;
Love said, “You shall be he.”
“I, the unkind, the ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look o thee.”
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
“Who made the eyes but I?”
“Truth, Lord, but I have marr’d them; let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.”
“An know you now,” says Love, “who bore the blame?”
“My dear, then I will serve.”
“You must sit down,” says Love, “and taste my meat.”
So I did sit and eat.
The heart becomes like ground watered by Christ’s love, which enables all the forms of human love to grow.
Appendix: Decision making and gender roles
1. The husband’s authority (like the Son’s over us) is never used to please himself but only to serve the interests of his wife
2. A wife is never to be merely compliant but is to use her resources to empower – She must bring every gift and resource that she has to the discussion, and he must, as any wise manager, know when to allow her expertise to trump his own, less well-informed opinion.
3. A wife is not to give her husband unconditional obedience – No human being should give any other human being unconditional obedience.
4. Assuming the role of headship is only done for purposes of ministering to your wife and family – The answer is that a head can only overrule his spouse if he is sure that her choice would be destructive to her or to the family. He does not use his headship selfishly.
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. The wife will try to respect the husband’s leadership, and the husband will in turn try to please his wife. If this dynamic is in place, in the course of a healthy Biblical marriage, “overruling” will be rare.
The situation could be chaotic, but here we are called to act out the drama of redemption, where the Son voluntarily gives the headship to the Father, saying, “Not my will, but thine be done”.
“If you think this is the right thing to do, then exercise your leadership and make the choice. It’s (the husband’s) job to break this logjam. It’s my job to wrestle with God until I can joyfully support your call.”
“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”.
Why are women called to this position? The answer to that question is another question, “Why did Christ become the one to give up the authority to the Father?” We don’t know, but it is a mark of his greatness, not his indecisiveness! Women are called to follow him here. But remember, taking authority properly is just as hard as granting it.
