Why did you marry your spouse? Most of us would quickly reply, “Well, I just love him/her!” Really? What does that mean?
I’ve had the privilege of being a pastor for more than forty years. Over the decades, I’ve provided premarital counseling for more than one hundred couples. Often when I’m meeting with a couple for the first time, I’ll ask, “So why do you two want to get married?” I will often ask the man first. He will say, “Well, I just love her!” And I’ll respond with, “That’s great! So, what does that mean, that you love her?” And he’ll smile awkwardly, glance at her, turn back to me and say, “You know, I just love her! She laughs at my jokes, she watches sports with me. When I’m around her, she makes me so happy! I just want to marry her and give her the opportunity to make me happy for the rest of her life!”
Okay. So, I’ll turn to her and ask, “And why do you want to marry this guy?” And she’ll smile coyly, glance at her fiancé, reach for his hand, then look back at me and say, “Well, I just love him so much! He makes me so happy! When I’m around him, he makes me feel so special. I just want to marry him and give him the opportunity to make me happy for the rest of his life!”
Now, you know and I know that no couple actually said these words. But isn’t that really the motivation behind most couples getting married? Isn’t that what led you to marry your spouse—they made you happy? Isn’t that why most of us got married in the first place—to give our sweetheart the opportunity to make us happy for the rest of their life?
And there is happiness—but not all the time. No spouse was ever designed to make their mate happy all the time. So, what could be a better reason to get married—and stay married? The second half of our married years provides a wonderful opportunity for honest reflection on this foundational question and to build a better foundation for our remaining years together as husband and wife.
Even if your wedding day was long ago, let’s rethink this issue now. What might be a better reason to get married? What is the purpose of marriage? Or, to ask the question a different way, “Who is marriage for?”
Marriage is not some mere social construct—the product of the culture we live in. No. Marriage is the invention of the Creator God. It was he who formed the first husband and wife. It was he who designed marriage and performed the first wedding ceremony, as it were. Genesis 2:18, 21–23 records,
“Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.”. . . So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.”
Moses, the human writer of the book of Genesis, adds this important postscript: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed” (vv. 24–25).
So, if God is the Author of marriage, he has authority to delineate the purpose of marriage. And what does the sovereign Marriage Designer say was his purpose? After quoting Genesis 2:24, Paul, moved by the Holy Spirit, wrote these unexpected words in Ephesians 5:32: “This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.”
MARRIAGE IS FOR CHRIST
Have you ever thought of Jesus as a husband? Most people probably haven’t. After all, Jesus was a bachelor, wasn’t he? It’s true that during the thirty-three years Jesus spent physically on this earth, he never married. Yet Ephesians 5:25–33 presents Jesus as a husband and his church as his bride.
Did it arouse your curiosity that Paul calls this a “mystery” in Ephesians 5:32? He says, “This mystery is profound, and I am saying it refers to Christ and the church.” The word mystery in the New Testament does not refer to something that is unknowable, but rather to something that was not known to humans until God revealed it. Mystery refers to something that has been in God’s sovereign playbook all along, but wasn’t understood by humans until God explained it. God instituted marriage all the way back in Genesis. But what was kept hidden earlier and only revealed in the New Testament era is that he designed marriage to reflect the greatest love story ever—the love of Christ for his bride, the church.
Though our marriages bring us great happiness at times, our own happiness is not the ultimate purpose of marriage. Each of our marriages, though imperfect, has the opportunity to be a picture—a living drama—to the watching world of the loving relationship between Christ and his bride, the church. To some degree, what the world thinks of Christ and the church will come from what they see in us. Sobering, isn’t it?
Thinking about our calling as married couples to reflect the greatest love story ever—the love of the Perfect Husband, Jesus Christ, for his redeemed bride, the church—can make us feel inadequate, can’t it? Our reflections of Christ in our marriages seem so muted, so imperfect. We all remember times as husbands and wives when we were not focused on reflecting Christ, maybe as recently as this morning. We were focused on our own frustrated attempts to get our spouse to bring us some measure of happiness—to just make us feel good about ourselves. Many of us can look back over the years humbly admitting that we sought to manipulate and pressure our spouse to make us happy. After all, that’s why we married them in the first place, isn’t it?
MARRIAGE IS FOR OUR SPOUSE
I can still recall the pain and frustration of the lowest point in our marriage. I remember asking myself, how did we get here? We had just had another argument. Try as I might, I could not convince Gladine that she was wrong and I was right. We were about twenty years into our marriage. There had been no adultery, no cataclysmic crisis, no call to the divorce attorney. But marriage wasn’t fun anymore. Neither of us was happy.
I knew I was supposed to be loving my wife. I was familiar with Ephesians 5. In fact, I had taught that passage in various men’s gatherings and even from the pulpit of our church. But I sought to justify my defensiveness and demandingness with the argument, how am I supposed to love my wife when I don’t think she’s doing an adequate job of loving and respecting me? If she’s not pouring adequate measures of love into my “love tank,” where am I supposed to get the resources to love her back?
I had neither the humility nor the courage to tenderly explore her heart at that moment. I was too focused on myself. But if I had, I’m sure she would have said something very similar about me. In the midst of my proud defensiveness, I had been doing a very poor job of loving her in a Christ-reflecting way. Where was she going to find the motivation to love a husband who was not loving her adequately?
We look back now, decades later, and realize that each of us had slowly slid into the selfish supposition that marriage is for me and my spouse is supposed to be making me happy. As in so many other stale or even deteriorating marriages, we were in this downward spiral of constantly measuring what we were “getting” from one another. Whether the issue was time together, expressions of affection, spiritual connection, or satisfying sexual intimacy, it never seemed to be enough.
Yet we knew what God was saying to us in his Word: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25, emphasis added). “Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord”(Ephesians 5:22, emphasis added). Even in the realm of sexual intimacy, we knew intellectually that God’s Word was clear that the focus was not “getting” but “giving.” First Corinthians 7:3–4 reminds us, “The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does.”
So how did the Lord graciously begin to turn our hearts away from pride and selfishness and instead toward a Christ-reflecting commitment to bring each other joy? How did God take us from living as if marriage is for me to marriage is for my spouse?
During this marital low point, we met an older Christian gentleman in our community whose wife of many years was in the latter stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Each day, Bob would visit his wife in the nursing home to spoon-feed her, change her diaper, sponge-bathe her, and sing love songs to her. He did this not in one heroic act, but quietly, faithfully, day after day, week after week, month after month.
As a middle-aged, frustrated husband, I was baffled. How could this man love his wife in such tender, sacrificial ways when she was doing absolutely nothing for him? She was not fixing his meals. She was not giving him great sex. She was not speaking words of appreciation. She couldn’t even remember his name. Yet day after day, he would repeat his tender, loving words and selfless, sacrificial acts. Where did Bob get the motivation to love his unresponsive wife that way? How was his “love tank” getting refilled so that he had enough to give his wife such unrequited love?
As I contemplated our older friend’s amazingly joyful, sacrificial love for his wife, the Holy Spirit began to break my selfish heart. He reminded me of this simple yet profound gospel truth: “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Bob was able to love his wife with glad sacrifice not because of what he was getting from her, but from what the Lord had already given him. He was so focused on God’s immeasurable love for him that he had more than enough love to give to his Alzheimer’s-stricken wife.
The Holy Spirit began to lovingly expose the selfishness and insecurity behind my defensiveness and demandingness as a husband. Simultaneously, he began to warm my cool heart with gospel hope. Loving my wife in a Christ-reflecting way went against my self-centeredness, requiring me to daily turn afresh to the Savior for his freely offered grace. And that’s just where he wanted me—dependent on and fueled by his grace as I lived day by day as a husband. I had been trying to suck “life” from my wife, pressuring her to deliver if she ever expected me to reciprocate. And from my perspective, it was never enough. Like my ultimate ancestor Adam before me, I blamed my wife for my sinful attitudes and actions. My dissatisfaction discouraged her, understandably, leading us into a sad, slow, downward spiral.
The upward change in our marriage didn’t happen overnight, but there was a notable reversal that we thank God for to this day. As the Spirit led me to lean into God’s grace for me as a husband, I began to realize more functionally that I could love my wife—not because she was loving me (and she was, even if I wasn’t admitting it), but because God loved me. I could love Gladine because “he first loved us.”
Maybe as a husband, you are wrestling with some what ifs right now. You are aware of God’s calling on you to love your wife, but What if she just gives me the cold shoulder, or What if she does nothing but disrespect me, or What if she never seems to acknowledge all I’ve done for her? What if . . . ?
The truth of the gospel helps erase the what ifs we face. A husband’s love for his wife is not dependent on her love for him, nor is a wife’s love for a husband dependent on his love for her. Our love for our spouse is not a mere response to our spouse’s love for us. Our love for our spouse stems from the gospel truth that Christ loves us and gave himself up for us (Ephesians 5:25). When did the Lord decide to love us? Was it when he saw us living wonderful lives as faithful followers? No. Thankfully, he did not wait for our loving faithfulness in order to love us back, or we would still be waiting for his love! Did he decide to love us when we placed our faith in him? No. It was long before that. It was before we were born, even before he created the universe. He chose to love us and adopt us as his sons and daughters even before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:2–6)!
The gospel of Jesus Christ is rich in life-giving hope and life-changing help as we face struggles in our marriages. Rather than feeling hopeless and helpless in seeing our spouse’s failures and our own, our eyes are drawn to the limitless, unfailing love that God has for us through Jesus Christ. We are loved by God and therefore empowered to love our spouses through both good times and hard times. “We love because he first loved us.”
Larry McCall, the author of Grandparenting with Grace: Living the Gospel with Next Generation as well as Loving Your Wife as Christ Loves the Church and Walking Like Jesus serves as the director of Walking Like Jesus Ministries. Larry was gripped by God’s saving grace at an early age and had the amazing privilege of being discipled by his parents and by other mentors in his home church. In 1975 Larry married Gladine, his sweetheart since high school days. They have three married children and seven much-loved grandchildren. Larry has had the joy of serving on the pastoral team of Christ’s Covenant Church of Winona Lake, Indiana since 1981. He is a graduate of Grace College, Grace Theological Seminary and has a Doctor of Ministry degree from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He gets his batteries charged in serving Christ’s followers through his speaking and writing ministry, helping them see in clear, practical, gospel-centered ways how to pursue Christ and reflect him in daily life.
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