I had the privilege this morning of giving some devotional thoughts at the wedding shower of a dear young friend. And I have been requested to post those thoughts here. I have removed the personal references to the couple to protect the innocent)and share the rest below. I stole liberally from Paul Tripp's new book on marriage, What Did You Expect?, which I highly recommend.
Just as I began to think about what I might share about marriage this morning, I received a new book on marriage in the mail. It is a book by Paul Tripp, entitled “What Did You Expect?” And as I scanned through that book, I thought he had a lot of worthwhile material to share, so I have stolen liberally from his book, and if anything I say is edifying for you, it is thanks to him!
Let’s start by reminding ourselves of what God’s word says about love in 1 john, Chapter 4 verses 7-12 and 16-21
7Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. 10In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 11Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us…
God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. 17By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world. 18There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. 19 We love because he first loved us. 20 If anyone says, "I love God," and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. 21And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.
I find it an amazing that love, by God’s definition, requires so much death to self. We live in a culture that hasn’t got a clue about what marriage should be, that seems to define love in terms of self gratification, and propagates unrealistic expectations for meeting all of our needs in marriage. So today, I want to provide a tiny, hopefully godly, reality check about marriage, and our expectations going into marriage.
The first expectation we ought to have is that we are two sinners, marrying in the midst of a broken world. That could be a pretty depressing thought without the equally sure expectation that God is faithful, powerful, and willing to redeem your marriage for His glory and your good. That good news is how the gospel redeems a marriage. It is as we worship God together, that He does transformational work in our hearts. Our marriages, like our lives, have to be built on a solid foundation of worship every day. What does such worship entail?
• First, you must worship with your spouse every day. That worship will take on a character uniquely your own over time. For Dave and I, going on 30 years of marriage, it has looked different during different seasons of our lives, but has consistently included prayer and reading in God’s word and other sources that would lead us to worship God and know him better. God has often used those times of family worship to prepare us for trials coming, or to sow seeds of joy that would come to later fruit.
• Second, your worship together will only be possible if it is built on a firm foundation of individual worship of God in each of you. Encouraging one another to spend time with the Lord each day, and modeling commitment to that will grow your family worship time. As you embrace God’s sovereignty and His grace, you will learn to better embrace each other.
Day by day, living as a sinner with a sinner in a sinful place, can zap your hope. But when your love is rooted in worship, and when you commit to loving one another according to God’s plan, God provides such rich joy, and hope, even in the darkest of hours. But what are those commitments that God calls us to in our marriages? I’m going to steal six commitments from Mr. Tripp, and I’ve found them to be true for Dave and me:
1. Give yourselves to a regular lifestyle of confession and forgiveness. This is a two-fold commitment. First, you have to deal honestly and openly with your own sin, and be willing to encourage your spouse to call you on it, and to believe him when he does. And secondly, you have to be ready to forgive him when he has sinned against you—notice that I didn’t say “IF”, but when. We are sinners. We will break one another’s hearts. When we forgive someone, it’s not that we forget what they have done. Instead, we promise not to remember it. That is a tough order, and means disciplining your thought life not to rehearse the hurtful things, but to commit to forgiveness instead. Early in our marriage, Dave and I committed to never have a fight until we’d prayed. Now, we don’t always manage to stop a fight for a prayer break, but it has become our habit to pause for prayer, and it often short-circuits our anger, and lets us fight productively and deal with our own sin.
2. Make growth and change your daily agenda. If we are worshipping daily, and living a life of confession and forgiveness, we will have to change. Christ will be about the job of killing off the old man in each of you, and renewing you both in His image. As you discover these changes, you need to embrace them in yourself and each other, and follow the lead of the Holy Spirit into unexpected and sometimes frightening new places, well outside of your comfort zone. We are to be reformed by God’s word, and always reforming, so we have to embrace godly change.
3. Work together to build a sturdy bond of trust. This involves never keeping secrets from one another, never hiding our sin from one another, never letting our fear of being really know by our husband keep us from taking the risk of being honest. For Dave and I, this includes me telling my friends when they ask me to keep a confidence that I will be happy to do so, but not confidences from my husband. It means guarding Dave’s dignity by refraining from sharing personal and intimate things about him with my friends, so he knows that things shared between us will stay between us. This kind of trust is like a deposit made in the early years of your marriage, that grows with interest over time, and reaps greater and greater rewards as you mature together.
4. Commit to building a relationship of love. This may seem self-evident, but disunity, spending lots of time apart from each other, and being distracted can make a marriage more of a co-habitation than a relationship. What does God’s word say love looks like? The passage we read from 1st John describes love, and so does 1st Corinthians 13. Love is willing self-sacrifice for the good of another that does not require either reciprocation from that person, or that the other person deserve it. And there will be times when you feel your spouse does not deserve your love. But love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. That kind of love takes a daily commitment!
5. Deal with your differences with appreciation and grace. As a young, newly married woman, I think my unspoken and unexamined expectation was that, given enough time, Dave and I would agree on everything. But if you agreed on everything, then there would be no need for two of you. God built each of u with unique gifts which he intends us to use to further His kingdom. The problem is, those places where we are different can be irritants and rub us raw. It takes a commitment to be thankful for those differences, and treat them with grace.
6. Work to protect your marriage. Watch for ways to safe-guard your precious relationship. Make sure you don’t drift apart by interests that separate, but look for interests to bring you together. Where you have separate interests, learn to enjoy them with each other. My dear husband is an avid runner. And, as is obvious to everyone, I am not. I had a choice early in our marriage whether I would let him go off to running events alone while I did something I enjoyed, or if I would suffer through long, boring events. Well, I no longer consider running events long and boring, and our time spent together at those events was not only a safe-guard in our marriage, but witness to others. People with hurting marriages, or broken relationships, often spoke to us, and opened the way for truth to be shared. Guard your marriage by watching for temptation and dealing with it, whether that temptation comes in the form of a lovely young grad student with whom Quinn works, or too much time on the internet, or too much time commitment to work or a hobby. Pray that God will keep you pure in your relationship, and that you may see the things that threaten it. And guard it as the precious gift it is from our heavenly Father, the source of all good things.
Worship, work, and exercise grace well. Love with your heart, mind and strength. And God will transform you and your spouse, and bless not only the two of you, but those whose lives you touch!
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