[This message was delivered by Pastor Brent at River of Life Church]
“Happy marriages are based on deep friendship…” (John Gottman)
Introduction
Last week we began a new series called Connect. We want to look at building deep relationships in the way that God intended. We started our series by looking at Friendship and this week we are going to move into the area of Marriage. I want to say up front that marriage is always a topic that is difficult to speak on because no one really has a perfect marriage. But that gives me confidence that because we are imperfect, every marriage can thus improve.
If you’re here today and you’re not married, I want to say two things. One day you might be, so you can still learn something. More significantly though, marriage is used by Paul as a symbol of Christ’s relationship with the church and as you know, the ‘church’ is the people — you and me. The more we learn about God’s view of marriage, the more we learn about the kind of relationship he wants to have with us — corporately and individually. So whenever you hear a marriage sermon — look for the nuggets that will help you build your character and look at it as an opportunity to learn more about central image God uses for his relationship with us as a church.
The first thing we need to ask in our particular culture is simply:
Why Marriage?
“A man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are united into one.” (Ephesians 5:31, NLT)
Today more and more people are choosing to not get married. To simply cohabitate and hope it works out. I understand the simplicity of this choice. It avoids all the problems of dealing with family and wedding planning. It saves a lot of money. The average wedding today could be a good down payment on a house. All of these are great supporting arguments but the main reason, the heart of the problem with marriage for many people is that there is no guarantee that the relationship will work. People have been pummelled into a stuper watching marriage after marriage fail all around them. Often it was their parents marriage – either it failed in divorce or just failed while they continued on together. I think we have all see that. For many all of this adds up to just living together to test the waters.
But here is the big problem. It doesn’t really test the waters. It’s like when someone who has a puppy says to a new parent: “having a puppy is the basically the same as having a baby.” Only people who have never had a baby could agree to that comment. There are lot of similarities — but it is really not the same and many levels.
Future Love
…she is your partner, the wife of your marriage covenant. (Malachi 2:14b, NIV)
I want to explain the biggest difference between living together and marriage from a biblical point of view. God created us in a certain way and then gave us some guidelines to live by so that we could live life abundantly — not miserable or unfulfilled. This includes marriage.
The first thing different about cohabitation and marriage is simply this, cohabitation is all about what I know today — I love you right now and I want to be with you right now. Marriage is a certainly based on my love today but it is also a promise about future love. That I will demonstrate love toward my beloved in the yet unknown future.
Tim Keller says it this way in his book, The meaning of Marriage:
In so many cases, when one person says to another, “I love you, but let’s not ruin it by getting married,” that person really means, “I don’t love you enough to close off all my options. I don’t love you enough to give myself to you that thoroughly.” To say, “I don’t need a piece of paper to love you” is basically to say, “My love for you has not reached the marriage level.” (Keller, p. 70)
That sounds a bit harsh, but something true resonates in me when Keller says: “I don’t love you enough not to keep my options open”.
In the Bible, the commitment of marriage is called a covenant. It’s more than a promise, it is promise with consequences. In the ancient times we read Abraham walking into a spot that had a chopped up animal scattered around him and God met him there and “cut a covenant” with Abraham. The scene is one of a self-imprecation. It’s as if the covenant-maker were saying “may I be as this animal if I break my promise”.
Needless to say, we don’t do that kind of thing now, but this is the background for the biblical idea of covenant. It basically is saying “I hope bad things happen to me if I don’t keep my word.” It’s reciprocal, of course. We see that throughout Israel’s history when they break their covenant with God. When that happens they need to be reconciled to God. They need to turn away from the things they were doing and act in a way that showed they loved God before anything else.
This is the kind of promise that creates a strong foundation to build a relationship. It’s not everything. Lots of people have made those promises and not followed through. But it starts with a promise.
I wonder what God would have said if after a few miles on his journey and still with no heir, Abraham said to God: “I wish I never covenanted with you.” The thing is, we don’t have to say it out loud. We just have to live it.
Marriage starts with a promise but it doesn’t end there. Bob Goff likes to say: “Love Does” but it also grows. The Greek had four words to describe different kinds of love ranging from desire, friendship, affection, and sacrificial love. We always have these four loves in us — but we all know in the vast majority of cases, it gets started with desire for each other. But if it just stayed there, the relationship will fail. It was psychologist John Gottman who said: ““Happy marriages are based on deep friendship…” and this is true. Desire is important but the other loves are what keeps things getting better and deeper. After a while, you can’t even imagine life without the other.
The Covenant commitment is the fertile soil that allows trust and friendship to take root and for the sacrificial love — Agape love — to grow and bear fruit in our marriages. It starts with a promise, but it ends with an entanglement of identity and an understanding of the deepest kind of love. When another person knows you completely — warts and all — and loves you still and freely gives themselves to you.
Some people will say that marriage is just a piece of paper — but that is just not accurate. It is a piece of paper that holds a binding promise about an unknown future. A promise of future love. It won’t be the same combination of four Greek loves – ερος, φιλος, στοργη, & αγαπη — and we celebrate that the quality and essence of that love will be matured and even more wonderful — but it is a promise just the same.
One of the things that Paul says about Marriage that I think anyone who is married can readily agree with is that it is a mystery. The reason why it it is compared to God’s relationship to the church, the depth of meaning that brings to our human relationships. The deep-meaning of marriage is indeed a mystery. What is not a mystery is what we must do to create healthy loving marriages. John Gottman wrote a book a few years ago called The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. He took the view that he wanted to study happy marriages to understand what they had in common rather than study bad marriages to see what is wrong. His idea was that it is better to do what is right than to avoid doing what is wrong. You can avoid the worst mistakes of a bad relationship and still have a bad relationship. But if you employ the principles of a happy marriage — you can improve your time together and increase your possibilities for happiness.
You can buy his book to get the full scoop — and I would highly recommend everyone who is married to read it. But I just want to compact them together and give a very brief practical ideas to make marriage stronger and happier.
Puzzle Pieces
This is a huge mystery, and I don’t pretend to understand it all. What is clearest to me is the way Christ treats the church. And this provides a good picture of how each husband is to treat his wife, loving himself in loving her, and how each wife is to honor her husband. (Ephesians 5:32, 33, The Message)
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Kɴᴏᴡ Eᴀᴄʜ Oᴛʜᴇʀ
The first thing is to know each other. What I mean by this is that you need to create mental space for your beloved.
- What is the favourite colour?
- Who is their best friend?
- What is their happiest childhood memory?
- What is their favourite movie?
- What is the favourite song?
- Who at their work is driving them crazy right now?
- What music are they listening to right now?
Gottman has a lot more questions and in the book he has a 20 Questions game to play with your spouse to learn more about them. More importantly, the number one key for making conversation with a stranger, he says is also important for relationship building in marriage. What is that key? Ask open ended questions. Don’t ask questions that have a yes or no answer. Ask questions that allow the other person to talk. Talk and listen. Know each other. Don’t stop learning.
As you learn more about each other, think of the ways you admire and are inspired by your spouse. Everyone who has been married for more than 5 minutes can list the annoying things. But fixating on that is a killer. Instead focus on areas of appreciation and admiration. The other things will come naturally 🙂
When you keep those positives close to your heart, your appreciation comes through in your words and mostly in your tone because your heart is moved and you actually get to a place where you can put your own pride on hold and allow that person to influence your decisions and the way you look at things.
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Dᴇᴀʟ Wɪᴛʜ Iᴛ
If the first thing is to know each other, the second is to deal with problems that can be fixed. There are a lot of things in any relationship that need to be worked on. But you can work on you. If leaving the toilet seat up or leaving the cap off the toothpaste is an annoyance — fix it. If interrupting your spouse bothers them, stop doing that. Learn what the problems are, how you are contributing to them, and work on that. Apologize when you don’t get it right and reaffirm your desire to bring them joy. Also, if those thing bother you, you need to ask yourself why it bothers you so much? What is it about you that makes those things so annoying.
The main thing is to solve the problems that can be solved. For the problems that are deeper, there is a need to allow God’s grace to change us. We need to be forgivers and practice grace in our lives with each other. There will always be things that annoy us about others. I want you to start seeing that as a gift because our ultimate goal in life is to be like Christ and that starts by being gracious to one another.
When we do not live as gracious people — as forgivers — bitterness takes root in us and from that comes contempt. Contempt is a cancer that destroys a marriage. It is bitterness on steroids and sadly it is alive and well in marriages everywhere. It can be fixed if caught early but most of the time it is left to fester and grow and eventually someone quits.
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Wᴇ ɴᴏᴛ Mᴇ
Finally, we need to allow the entanglement that I spoke of earlier to actually have a place in our thinking. The idea of “two becoming one” is something we need to practice in our thinking and planning and doing. Life as a married person is not the same as a single person. You are an individual and you have dreams and hopes, but you are no longer alone in those. You need to share those and allow them to be both cherished and challenged — because there is no “me” just “we” when it comes to marriage.
Each of these practical points are clearly seen in God’s relationship with his church. We are connected to him and we are called to be of one mind in the church. We are give guidelines to live our lives and a helper to empower us but we need to do the work. God isn’t going to do it all himself. We need to practice spiritual disciplines and exercise our faith so we grow in Christ. We need to know God more. We may not be able to ask God open ended questions, but we can hear from him in his word and his Spirit continues to speak to us.
When we take these practical steps in our marriages we grow together in love and unity and ultimately we experience greater fulfillment in our lives.
Ephesians 5 shows us the deep connection of marriage relationship and God’s relationship with his church. Let us listen to the opening verse of Ephesians chapter 5:
Imitate God, therefore, in everything you do, because you are his dear children. Live a life filled with love, following the example of Christ. He loved us and offered himself as a sacrifice for us, a pleasing aroma to God. (Ephesians 5:1–2, NLT)
Husbands and wives – Imitate God in everything you do, because you are his dear children — live a life filled with love.