Meaning and Power for Marriage

Marriage is the one great commitment almost all of us enter with no real training. We would never let a doctor with six weeks of study perform surgery on us, or a lawyer with six weeks of study defend us in court. Yet many of us marry, promise to spend fifty years with another person, and set out to raise children together, with little more than a short pre-marital course and whatever we picked up from watching our parents. Is it any wonder that so many marriages, even Christian ones, quietly become hard? This is where a series on marriage, sex, and singleness has to begin — not with rules, but with the God who invented the whole thing.

Some of you may wonder why we would talk about this on a Sunday morning, with so many singles and young adults present. But we are not wise enough to decide in advance which parts of the Bible apply to us. Scripture says we live by every word that comes from the mouth of God. My hope is that everyone here — single or married — will come away thinking differently and more clearly about love, sex, and marriage, not just learning the commands but understanding the reasons behind them.

God Invented Marriage and Sex

The biggest reason we hold such confused views about marriage is that we take our cues from everywhere except God — from culture, from television, from romance novels, from friends and relatives, from whatever we absorbed growing up. But there are only a few institutions God Himself set up and Himself regulates: the family, the church, and the state. We invented schools and hospitals and banks, and God leaves us to run them. Marriage He did not leave to us. He invented it.

Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

Genesis 2:24

It was God who made sex and called it good. It was God who conducted the first wedding and gave the first vows. So when the One who invented and manufactured this thing tells us how it is best used, we would do well to listen. You don't tell a car's manufacturer to put water in the fuel tank because that is how your father did it, or because an opinion poll says most people prefer it. You read the manual. In this series we will run headlong into things many of us have felt about marriage for a long time — things drawn from pop culture and even our own traditions. When they clash with what the Maker says, we go with the Maker.

What Marriage Actually Means

Ask yourself a question you may never have asked: what does it actually mean to be married? It cannot simply mean warm feelings — you can have warm feelings about a wristwatch. It cannot mean sharing a home — you can share a home with a roommate or a dog. It cannot mean having a sexual partner — many people have had those without being married. So what is it we are saying when we say, 'I am married to this person'?

To be married means that, having left all others, you have made a public, permanent, unconditional, and legally binding decision to belong to this one person for the rest of your life. It is a covenant — a promise to love someone, to perform acts of patience, kindness, and faithfulness toward them, whether or not they love you back, whether they stay lovely or grow difficult, no matter how the years turn out. The Bible's word is cleave — to be bonded together in a way that will not come apart. It is saying to someone, 'With all your flaws, I have chosen to commit myself to you, always, in all ways.'

This is also why God reserves sex for marriage. Sex is the physical expression of exactly that vow. You should never physically give yourself entirely to someone you have not covenanted yourself to entirely. To do otherwise is to say with your body, 'I am fully committed to you,' while withholding the commitment everywhere else.

A Signpost to Something Deeper

Once you see marriage as this kind of covenant, you begin to sense what God is really doing. Marriage is a type — like the Old Testament shadows that pointed to New Testament realities. God instituted it primarily to show us the depth of His own commitment to us. We can make promises, but no human being has ever kept one perfectly. God has. Only God has promised, and kept the promise completely: that as far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our sins; that though a mother might forget her nursing child, He will never forget us; that though the mountains be shaken and the hills removed, His steadfast love will not depart.

God placed in us a cosmic longing — the ache to find someone and say, 'At last, bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh.' Have you noticed how we reach for enormous, eternal language to describe love? Our songs promise to love someone always, to be there forever, to cross any mountain or valley, to make one person our whole world. The words are not literally true; no husband or wife can carry that weight. Yet the longing behind them is real. Animals do not have it; we do. That longing is evidence that the thing we long for exists — and God gave us marriage to point us toward it, not to be it.

This is why so many marriages become painful. People walk into them looking for something marriage was never meant to supply — God Himself. Marriage is the signpost, not the destination. You do not reach the signpost and unpack your bags there; you press on to the real thing, which is found and enjoyed in Christ, both now and in far greater depth in eternity. Many have tried to make the signpost their final home and met only disappointment. They wake up expecting glory and find, as Jacob did, that it is Leah beside them.

The Secret and Power of Marriage

So how can ordinary, sinful people ever capture even a strand of the glory God holds out in marriage? Paul gives the answer at the start of the passage: 'Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.' He is naming the one thing that quietly destroys marriages, families, workplaces, and churches — the disordered love of self. Self-centeredness is the primary cancer. Until you can put your spouse's needs, interests, and desires ahead of your own, you will not be able to enjoy marriage as God designed it.

There are three things worth noticing about selfishness. It is easy to spot in someone else. We rarely deny that we are selfish too. But we almost always insist that the other person's selfishness is worse. And here is the hard truth: this kind of self-forgetting is impossible on our own. It only becomes possible when we are filled with the Spirit — so gripped by the awe of what Christ has done for us that we can finally hold our own interests loosely. Humility is not thinking less of yourself, which is timidity, nor thinking more of yourself, which is pride. It is thinking of yourself less.

That is why Paul tells husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church. Until a man has personally tasted how Christ loves him, he cannot truly lay down his life for his wife. It is why he calls wives to a wholehearted partnership that a woman can only offer when she has seen the love of Jesus for herself. The deeper you experience how flawed you are and yet how fully loved, how sinful and yet how accepted, the more freely you can serve your spouse. Then you can offer criticism without crushing them, receive criticism without being crushed, and forgive before an apology is ever spoken — because you know how much you have been forgiven.

Imagine going home and deciding that the main problem in your marriage is not your spouse's selfishness but your own, and giving yourself to working on that. The human heart, unless it has been hardened past feeling, cannot forever resist unconditional, selfless love. That is exactly how God got through to us — not by shouting or thunder, but by entering the world, bearing our sins, and laying down His life. We have only begun to scratch the surface of what marriage can be. But this much is already clear: selflessness, fueled by the Spirit and rooted in the gospel, is the power that makes a marriage come alive.