When talking about marriage we tend to try to be funny or profound – and end up being neither. Love and human relationships resist our attempts to fit things into a neat little package, and the longer we live the more we recognize this. Yet at some level we want to understand what makes marriage work.
For Christians, we may begin with some basics: make certain of your conversion, read the Bible and pray, trust God, and so on. But then we look around and realize that being a Christian and pursuing Christian disciplines is no guarantee of a good marriage. In the quiet places of our mind, when we’re honest, we admit that some who are not believers have healthier marriages than some who are.
I think we’re too product oriented. We make a list of five or six ideals that characterize a great marriage, and when couples fail to live up to these things, we go back and tweak the formula, thinking that perhaps if we change the list we can make marriages more successful. So let’s start with these disclaimers:
1. God doesn’t owe us or guarantee us a better marriage because we’re Christians.
2. Going to church, reading the Bible and praying don’t guarantee a great marriage either. In fact, some Christians substitute these “spiritual” pursuits for the more difficult and mundane obedience of loving family.
3. Though it’s important to listen to good advice from others, a good marriage is not produced by following someone’s five keys or six steps or seven sure-fire principles.
4. Clear communication is not the answer. If it were, couples who continually communicate anger and contempt would have thriving marriages.
It seems to me that what matters most to a healthy marriage is the individual integrity of each spouse. The common factor in most struggling marriages is a lack of character on the part of one or both. Character is an inner love for good that produces good behavior – but here’s an important part of the definition – no matter what the other person does. It requires a worldview that conforms to Philippians 2:5-7:
“Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant.”
Suppose during a wedding ceremony a pastor asks the couple: “Do you desire to enter into a relationship that will bring you greater fulfillment that you could possibly imagine?” Would it be hard for them to say “We do?” What if instead he asks “Do you desire to enter into a lifelong relationship that will require you to serve the other person for the rest of your life?” If they responded with “We do,” at what level would they comprehend this vow?
Marriage has the potential to be the most rewarding of human relationships. But nowhere does God promise that it will satisfy all your deepest longings. Even God doesn’t do that (here and now). God has designed everything in this life, no matter how great it is, so remind us of a greater truth expressed in the words of C. S. Lewis
“I have found a desire within myself that no experience in this world can satisfy; the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”
