Marriage, Part 3 

Wedding Vows 

"Wedding vows are not a declaration of present love but a mutually binding promise of future love." Tim Keller

"We-just-don't-love-each-other-anymore" is a common excuse for ending a marriage. But is a lack of love the primary  reason for marital breakups? I think not. When God introduced the idea of marriage in Genesis, the word “love” was as scarce as clothes were: “A man will leave his father and his mother, and they will become one flesh.”

Commitment is widely proclaimed in most wedding vows—brides and grooms promise to love each other for a lifetime. Walter Wangerin explains the purpose and power of these vows: “A promise made, a promise witnessed, a promise heard, remembered, and trusted -- this is the groundwork of marriage." These promises are a “special harbor in high seas.”

Even a statistical analysis of marriage supports hanging onto your mate. Over 60% of married people say they are “happy” with their marriage. And 5 years later, nearly 90% of those who aren’t happy today, will be happy if they hold on to their marriage. Most troubled marriages get better with age.

 Some couples will boast: “We don’t need a piece of paper to hold us together.” Sorry—statistics show otherwise. Cohabitation is even more unstable than marriage. Three-fourths of unmarried couples who produce a child will break up before the child’s sixteenth birthday. And it is on to the next partner. Those who reject marriage “never do find any real stability. Instead of growing into maturity with one partner, they go over and over the same basic ground in each new liaison.” Keller

Conventional wisdom might lead a couple to a trial arrangement: "Let’s see if we are compatible before we marry.” But all a trial period does is make it easier to end the relationship. When “they don’t merge their entire lives—socially, economically, legally,” they seldom endure the inevitable hardships of their relationship. Walter Wangerin concludes: [If they choose to live together] before a public wedding, “it’s like starting a job without a contract; there are no secure assurances, and one might be fired on a whim, at a change in the economy, for spite, or for expedience.”

Sittser: Marriage is not an experiment. It is a commitment.

Marriage, Part 2

Friends for Life: Our Need for Companionship

At the end of each day of creation, God wrote an epitaph: “And God saw that it was good.” But even before Adam and Eve’s sinned, God declared that something in Eden was not good: “It is not good for man to be alone.” Though this first couple enjoyed intimate fellowship with their Creator and lived in an unspoiled world, they were still incomplete. God created us to be social beings who need others. Marriage may be our best opportunity to enjoy this companionship.

When Cathy and I were dating we were together constantly -- meeting between classes, sharing meals, attending sporting events, taking long walks, joining a campus Bible study, participating in retreats.

But much of modern life pulls couples apart. A husband works at an insurance agency while his wife teaches in a grade school. He hunts and fishes with his buddies while she participates in a book club with her girlfriends. He serves on the finance committee at church while she teaches a Sunday School class. With such disjointed lives many couples drift apart.

Knowing that relationship building takes time, God gave the following instructions to new husbands: “If a man has married, he must not be sent to war or have any other duty laid on him. For one year he is to be free to stay at home and bring happiness to his wife.” (Deut.24:5) Wow! A yearlong honeymoon! If marriages are going to be strong, then husbands and wives must lavish time on each other in significant ways. Cathy and I have continued to cultivate our bond by sharing housework and yard work, reading books to each other, mentoring other couples, watching a favorite television program, exercising together, entertaining in our home, nurturing grandchildren.

Such extravagance may feel like a “waste” of time. Why would God ask us to pour ourselves out for our mates when there is so much aching human need? Because marriage is the school where we learn how to love another person: “If we cannot love our own favorite person through all of their ups and downs and trials and changes, then how will we ever love the poor and the unlovely and the forgotten of the world?” (Mike Mason)

My marriage “is the place where love must first be practiced before it can truly be practiced anywhere else.”

Marriage: The Basics, Part 1

Introduction

A House Beautiful magazine article offered advice to the wives whose husbands were returning from World War II: “You, to whom the veteran is returning, are entrusted with the biggest morale job in history. Your part in the remaking of this man is to fit his home to him, understanding why he would want it this way, forgetting your own preferences. After all, it is the boss who has come home.” This quaint description of married life from the 1940’s reminds us of one of the greatest truths about the Bible—the Bible never goes out-of-date. It speaks powerfully and purposefully to every culture, to every century, to every marriage. This staying power is one of the reasons why I believe the Bible contains the words of the Living God. What other source can do this?

This post is the beginning of a series I will do on marriage. Though the coming posts will venture into other territory, I will stay on this theme of marriage because marriage plays such a vital role in what God wants to accomplish in people’s lives.

God didn’t waste any time revealing the nature of Christian marriage. In the first three chapters of Genesis, God revealed many of the basic truths that I will return to again and again throughout this series. Marriage is God’s idea. And if “God invented marriage, then those who enter it should make every effort to understand and submit to his purposes for it.” (Tim Keller)

If there is no Creator then it makes sense to fiddle with the definition of marriage. But if marriage and its structure has been given to us by God, then we tread on rough ground if we try to remake it.