TWO KINDS OF FREEDOM. The modern understanding of freedom goes something like this. “I should be free to live as I choose as long as I don’t harm or restrict anyone else’s freedom.” In other words, the fewer restrictions on our independence, the freer we are. Let’s call this “negative” freedom—freedom from. But that definition of freedom has a head-on collision with the requirements of any love relationship. The closer the relationship, the more you must make decisions and do things together, not independently. Yet the more you give up your negative freedom the more you can experience a positive freedom, an inner fullness of love and satisfaction that liberates you from fears, self-doubts, and sadness. You give up a lower freedom to gain a higher one.
Reflection: Do an inventory of yourself and your marriage by answering the three questions in the quote above.
Thought for prayer: Meditate on how much Christ was willing to lose in order to gain a relationship with us. Then ask for help in returning that kind of love to your spouse.
May 17
In so many cases, when one person says to another, “I love you, but let’s not ruin it by getting married” that person really means, “I don’t love you enough to close off all my options.” . . . To say, “I don’t need a piece of paper to love you” is basically to say, “My love for you has not reached the marriage level.” (Hardcover, p. 78; paperback, p. 80)
JUST A PIECE OF PAPER? On a podcast a woman who had read The Meaning of Marriage argued that the last line in the quote above was unfair. She and her boyfriend were living together, had no intention of getting married, and wanted their love to be wholly voluntary, not forced by a piece of legal paper. Here again we see that modern people think of love in almost wholly subjective, emotional terms. I only am loving you if I am wanting you and feeling love for you at the present moment. But taking the vows is actually a way to say, “I love you enough to bind myself to you through the ups and downs of feelings and circumstances.” To hear someone make such a promise is to feel grounded and secure in your spouse’s love, and safe from the whims of changing feelings.
Reflection: Do you think the last line in the quote above is unfair? Why or why not?
Thought for prayer: Think of how Jesus “closed off his options” in order to save and love us (Philippians 2:4ff.). Thank him for it.
May 18
The biblical understanding of love does not preclude deep emotion. In fact, any marriage devoid of passion and emotional desire for one another isn’t fulfilling the biblical vision. But neither does the Bible pit romantic love against the essence of love, which is sacrificial commitment to the good of the other. (Hardcover, p. 78; paperback, p. 81)
PLEASURE AND SERVICE. The ancients spoke of two kinds of love. There was the love of benevolence, which was a commitment to actively serve the good of someone regardless of how you felt about them at the moment. Then there was the love of “complacency,” which was to take great joy and pleasure in someone. When we marry it is our pleasure-love that leads us to make a solemn promise of service-love.67 But because our feelings wax and wane, it is our service-love that keeps us close and continually renews our pleasure-love. Since Jesus commands us to love our neighbor (and he can’t mean we must always like our neighbor), the love of benevolence is perhaps more central to the biblical idea of love. But in marriage actions and feelings are mutually interdependent.
Reflection: Have you seen this dynamic between the two aspects of love play out in your own marriage?
Thought for prayer: Thank God that, in Christ, he not only loves us and gives us what we need, but he delights in us (Psalm 149:4). Let that sink in.
May 19
Modern people think of love in such subjective terms, that if there is any duty involved it is considered unhealthy. . . . If you won’t make love unless you are in a romantic mood at the very same time as your spouse, then sex will not happen that often. This can dampen and quench your partner’s interest in sex, which means there will be even fewer opportunities. If you never have sex unless there is great mutual passion, there will be fewer and fewer times of mutual passion. (Hardcover, p. 79; paperback, p. 81)
SEX AS A GIFT. Yesterday we spoke of two aspects of love—service-love and pleasure-love. In both parenting and in marriage it is impossible to sustain a long-term, healthy, loving relationship without both. They are mutually dependent. It is hard for younger adults to see that these two aspects of love are necessary for a long-term sexual relationship as well. It is thought to be almost hypocritical to be sexually intimate if you are not filled with desire, but why? Why can’t you give yourself willingly to your spouse as a genuine gift even when, for myriad possible reasons, you are not emotionally or physically hungry for sex? Sometimes sex can be more of one aspect or the other, but they are both genuine acts of love.
Reflection: If your spouse said, “I don’t particularly feel like sex, but I want to love you—so let’s go to bed,” would you be offended?
Thought for prayer: Ask God to give you a servant-heart in every aspect of your marriage.
May 20
Outside of marriage, sex is accompanied by a desire to impress or entice someone. It is something like the thrill of the hunt. When you are seeking to draw in someone you don’t know, it injects risk, uncertainty, and pressure to the lovemaking that quickens the heartbeat and stirs the emotions. If “great sex” is defined in this way, then marriage . . . will indeed stifle that particular kind of thrill. But this defines sexual sizzle in terms that would be impossible to maintain in any case. (Hardcover, p. 79; paperback, p. 82)
MOTIVES FOR SEX. Sexual activity can often be a mask for other things, such as more fundamental idols. Some people make an idol out of human approval—they feel “if others like me, then I know I’m a worthwhile person.” Being able to draw someone into a sexual liaison convinces such a person that they are approved. Others make an idol out of power—they feel “if I can get control over others then I know I’m a worthwhile person.” For that person, being able to draw someone into sex gives a sense of conquest, of power. But notice how these are both ways of using the sex partner for your own emotional benefit. Here sex is about taking rather than giving.
Reflection: Using a sex partner for this outside of marriage is quite normal, perhaps even inevitable. But can this happen inside marriage?
Thought for prayer: Ask God to help you reflect his own self-giving love in your intimate sex life with your spouse.
May 21
[In sex the goals are] to be vulnerable to each other, to give each other the gift of barefaced rejoicing in one another, and to know the pleasure of giving one another pleasure. . . . Yes, it means often making love when sometimes . . . you are not “in the mood.” But sex in a marriage, done to give joy rather than to impress, can change your mood on the spot. The best sex makes you want to weep tears of joy, not bask in the glow of a good performance. (Hardcover, p. 80; paperback, p. 83)
SEX AND PERFORMANCE. To convey love in any way takes skill. We have all tried to express our love in words and felt that we’ve come up short. Sexual love is no different. In sex we want to give the other person pleasure and that requires a knowledge of both their particular temperament and body. But in our culture sex has moved from being an intimate skill to a performance. Partners don’t expect to start off being rather klutzy, laughing at themselves, but then to grow and learn together. Instead they want to know if they immediately have “sexual chemistry.” Sex has to be great instantly, and that is enormous pressure. Outside of a marriage covenant, sex becomes an anxious encounter rather than a cradle of security in our moment of greatest vulnerability.
Reflection: How does the experience of sex before marriage teach habits that don’t prepare you for the experience within the covenant of marriage?
Thought for prayer: Ask God to protect you from the culture’s emphasis on sex as performance and to be instead grounded in the Bible
’s vision of sex as self-giving.
May 22
It is possible to see marriage as merely a social transaction, a way of doing your duty to family, tribe, and society. Traditional societies make the family the ultimate value in life, and so marriage becomes a transaction that helps your family’s interests. . . . Contemporary Western societies make the individual’s happiness the ultimate value, and so marriage becomes an experience of romantic fulfillment. (Hardcover, pp. 80–81; paperback, p. 83)
LEFT OR RIGHT? Liberals see your money as belonging largely to the state and poverty as due strictly to social structures. Conservatives see your money as belonging wholly to you, and if you are poor it’s your fault and no one else’s problem. The Bible says, instead, that all your money comes from God and belongs to him. This is not some halfway point between the world’s options of left and right. Proverbs tells us that poverty can be caused both by injustice and oppression (13:23) as well as by laziness and irresponsibility (24:33–34). In the same way, traditional societies make an absolute of the family’s interests over individual needs, and modern societies make individual choice the highest value. Both the needs of the family as well as those of the individual are considered significant by the Bible, but neither is ultimate.
Reflection: In what way does the biblical account address the concerns of both cultures, yet critique each culture as fundamentally wrong in its view of marriage?
Thought for prayer: Pray that Christians in your country would be more influenced by the Bible than by secular political options.
May 23
But the Bible sees God as the supreme good—not the individual or the family—and that gives us a view of marriage that intimately unites feeling and duty, passion and promise. That is because at the heart of the Biblical idea of marriage is the covenant. (Hardcover, p. 81; paperback, pp. 83–84)
WHO ARE YOU? Traditional societies see marriage as the fulfillment of a duty that you perform for your tribe and family. Romantic love is secondary and optional. Contemporary society sees marriage instead as a choice you make only if (and as long as) it is fulfilling to you as an individual. The idea of duty is negotiable, while romantic love is primary. Each approach is driven by the conviction that one’s identity and worth is rooted in a particular thing. The traditional view is that you are who your community says you are, while modernity says you are who you say you are. But Christianity says that you are who God says you are, and your self-regard must be rooted in his love.
Reflection: How does the biblical view unite duty and desire?
Thought for prayer: Think of how in Jesus both duty and desire come together. He promises to save us out of love, and never flags in his duty. Ask him to unite those things in your own heart as you love those around you.
May 24
[T]here have always been consumer relationships. Such a relationship lasts only as long as the vendor meets your needs at a cost acceptable to you . . . [because your] individual needs are more important than the relationship. . . . There have also always been covenantal relationships . . . [in which] the good of the relationship takes precedence over the immediate needs of the individual. . . . Society still considers the parent-child relationship to be a covenantal one, not a [transactional] consumer relationship. (Hardcover, p. 81; paperback, p. 84)
PARENTING AS A MODEL. Because you sometimes can look at your child and find your heart bursting with love, you are able to give of yourself to him or her during the far more frequent times in which parenting is a drudge or a bore. For the present, at least, our culture still demands that we love our children like this even as it has redefined marriage to be conditional, to last only as long as it is personally fulfilling. Yet in our still-covenantal parenting we are given an inside look at how that kind of love works. When we “tie ourselves to the mast” (see February 13) to serve the needs of our children, it leads to deeper affection and love. Why can’t we learn to give covenantal love to our spouses as well?
Reflection: Can you think of any other kind of relationship besides parenting that our culture has not turned into a transactional one?
Thought for prayer: Thank God for being a covenant God, who loved us faithfully even when we were not faithful to him.
May 25
[Today] the consumer model increasingly characterizes most relationships that historically were considered covenantal, including marriage. [W]e stay connected to people only as long as they meet particular needs at an acceptable cost to us. . . . [W]hen the relationship appears to require more love and affirmation from us than we are getting back—then we “cut our losses” and drop the relationship. . . . [In] “commodification” . . . social relationships are reduced to economic exchange relationships, and so the very idea of “covenant” is disappearing in our culture. (Hardcover, pp. 81–82; paperback, pp. 84–85)
COSTS AND BENEFITS. The heart of a transactional, consumer relationship is the calculus of cost and benefit. The relationship is completely disposable because it is based solely on profit. It is maintained only so long as the benefits outweigh the costs for each party. The Bible, however, presents marriage as a relationship like our relationship with God (Ephesians 5:22ff.) If God maintained his relationships on a cost-benefit basis, we’d all be lost. If you conduct marriage on a cost-benefit basis you will never succeed. And yet I would argue that taken over a lifetime the benefits of marriage outweigh the costs. Even a difficult marriage may drive you into God’s arms, develop character, and impart other priceless spiritual goods to you.
Reflection: Make a list of the “priceless” goods that your marriage has led you to or has given you.
Thought for prayer: Thank God for the list above that you have made.
May 26
[The] marriage [covenant] has both strong horizontal and vertical aspects to it. In Malachi 2:14, a man is told that his spouse “is your partner, the wife of your marriage covenant” (cf. Ezekiel 16:8). Proverbs 2:17 describes a wayward wife who has “left the partner of her youth, and ignored the covenant she made before God.” The covenant made between a husband and a wife is done “before God” and therefore . . . [t]o break faith with your spouse is to break faith with God at the same time. (Hardcover, p. 83; paperback, p. 86)
PRIMARY WITNESS. In traditional marriage the parents of the spouses, representing the society, are the primary witnesses. The bride is “given away” to the groom by her father. Modern marriage resists such symbolism and sees the two parties giving themselves to each other. But as we have seen (see May 2), it is the Lord who is both the primary witness (Malachi 2:14) as well as the one who gives the spouses to each other (Genesis 2:22). Christian marriage is therefore a deeper and more binding bond that does not let either your society or your spouse have the final word on how you are doing as a husband or a wife. You are accountable to God, and he is far more merciful than society or you yourself.
Reflection: How does it change things for you practically to think of God as the ultimate judge of your marriage?
Thought for prayer: Remember that, while God can see all your sins and flaws, he also loves you perfectly because you are “in Christ” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Thank him for those two truths.
May 27
Imagine a house with an A-frame structure. The two sides of the home meet at the top and hold one another up. But underneath, the foundation holds up both of the sides. So the covenant with and before God strengthens the partners to make a covenant with each other. Marriage is therefore the deepest of human covenants. (Hardcover, p. 84; paperback, p. 87)
TWO-WAY COVENANT. The physics of the A-frame structure serve as an instructional metaphor. No matter how sturdy and strong one side of the house may be, it cannot itself bear any weight if the concrete foundation slab under it does not bear its weight. If it is sinking into the ground, it cannot hold up the other side of the house at all. So in a Christian marriage the parties first make a covenan
t with God in the “I do” questions. That is the foundation. Then, having just heard the other person solemnly swear to God, each person is strengthened in their trust of the other. They can now turn to each other and literally put themselves in each other’s arms. These two aspects of the covenant powerfully infuse and reinforce the marriage relationship.
Reflection: Do you think most people understand that the Christian marriage service has two covenants within it? How conscious are you of the twofold aspect of your marriage covenant?
Thought for prayer: Meditate on God as your “rock” and foundation (Psalm 18:2; Matthew 7:24). Thank God for being there to always support and strengthen you.
May 28
What, then, is a covenant? It creates a particular kind of bond that is disappearing in our society. It is a relationship far more intimate and personal than a merely legal, business relationship. Yet at the same time it is far more durable, binding, and unconditional than one based on mere feeling and affection. A covenant relationship is a stunning blend of law and love. (Hardcover, p. 84; paperback, p. 88)
BLENDING LAW AND LOVE. We have been exploring various ways in which the Christian marriage covenant differs both from a traditional legal contract and from a modern transactional relationship. Here is another. Legal contracts require behavior but they can’t create love. Cohabiting couples try to maintain loving feelings without any binding promises. But just as the original covenant between God and Israel both demanded behavior and offered intimate relationship (“You will be my people, and I will be your God,” Exodus 6:7), so the Christian marriage covenant brings about a wonderful blend of love leading to vow, and then the commitment leading to greater love. Why can it do that? Because it is grounded not primarily in social approval or romantic love but in God’s gracious, perfect love for you.
The Meaning of Marriage: A Couple's Devotional Page 13