“Tell her about it; let her know how much you care.”
Those words are from the song Tell Her about It by Billy Joel. In the song, Billy urges guys to express to their girls the love they have for them.
While I consider Billy Joel a pop music genius – as both a musician and a lyricist – he’s not the one I suggest turning to for marriage advice. But he did get this one right.
The one to go to for wisdom in marriage is God and He’s laid out for us in His Word the wisdom we need for life.
Proverbs 18:21 tells us that death and life are in the power of the tongue.
Three questions:
Is their a person in our lives more suitable for receiving our words of life than our spouse?
Is it life-giving to let someone know how much they’re loved?
Do you want to lift your spouse’s countenance and warm their heart by speaking life to them?
Three answers: Yes. Yes. And yes.
Three more questions:
Have you been an under-speaker of life to your spouse?
Do you want to correct that going forward?
Will you speak life to your spouse today?
Assumes answers: three yeses.
This is something my wife does well. She has the power to lift my spirits or tear me down and she always chooses the former. From the receiving end of words of life I can tell you that it’s a great blessing to have a spouse that isn’t an under-speaker of love and admiration for her spouse. The effect of those words goes far beyond the time they’re spoken. The words are like seeds that grow very good fruit, and that fruit has the taste of confidence; knowing that someone loves and believes in you boosts self confidence like nothing else can.
So let’s take Billy Joel’s advice on this one. And let our spouses know how much we love them.
God’s Word doesn’t intersect all that often with Billy Joel’s lyrics, but it does here. When it comes to marital love, tell them about it.
1st Corintians 13 – the Love Chapter – is the chapter God designated to describe the love He has for us. It’s agape-love, one of four types of love in the language of ancient Greeks, the language in which the Bible was written. Agape-love is essentially what Jesus came to introduce to the world; it’s basically grace, unmerited favor, and the core ingredient of the gospel, the good news that the kingdom of Heaven is here to receive us as citizens through faith in Jesus.
Agape-love is not only the way God loves us, but the love He also calls us to have for each other. Of all human relationships, which one is most important to include agape-love? It has to be the marriage relationship. Husband and wife giving to one another favor without requirement is, perhaps, the most effective illustration for an onlooking world of God loving His people.
If we zoom in on 1st Corinthians 13, into verses 4 through 8, we see something remarkable right there in verse 7. It says there that agape love always trusts
If we take it at face value, which is the right approach for all of God’s Word, we know that God always trusts us.
If you’re like me, you don’t feel right accepting that God (the supremely trustworthy) trusts us (the utterly untrustworthy). Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t we be the ones trusting Him?
Our problem is that we tie trust to expectation. Agape-love doesn’t do that. Agape love trusts without regard to the recipient’s track record of stewardship.
Even though we haven’t managed our money well in the past, God continually provides for our needs.
Almost every resource God has placed into my hands I’ve mismanaged in some way. I’ve squandered, wasted, abused and undervalued God’s blessings in my life, yet He hasn’t stopped pouring them into my life.
Trust means to commit something to; it isn’t a mere attitude or mental stance. It requires action, the action of committing something to a recipient.
What’s preposterous is that God trusts us, knowing our handling of the resource will be flawed. He doesn’t require expectation be met before trusting us with resources.
Imagine a marriage where the spouses give freely to each other, not requiring expectations be met, and they keep on giving to each other without regard to track record. This is trust in marriage.
Trusting the untrustworthy isn’t without problems. There will be pain and loss, just as Jesus endured pain and loss in trusting us with His life, His body. God has ways of helping us deal with the pain and loss, but the solution isn’t to stop trusting. He’ll help us navigate those difficult waters, all while we continue to trust.
Why? Because agape-love always trusts. This is agape-love. And this is trust in marriage.
Believe it or not, there is a way to have an easy marriage.
I admit, easy is a relative word; what one considers easy another may call difficult. So, let’s take Jesus’ perspective. He said that His yoke is easy.
A word that appears often in Scripture is anoint. To anoint something is essentially to apply oil to it, making it work smoothly, making it easy.
Oil is a symbol representing the Holy Spirit. The Spirit’s presence, His involvement, brings an anointing, making easy whatever it is in which He’s involved. The Spirit is given to reside in the heart of every believer in Jesus; that’s what Jesus meant when He said His yoke is easy. Submitting one’s life to Jesus is taking on His yoke, receiving His Spirit. Having the Holy Spirit is the greatest blessing we can receive on this earth. In fact, the Bible says He’s a deposit of our life to come in eternity.
This is yet another principle that can be applied to marriage. God never intended marriage to be carried on without His involvement. Look what happened when Adam and Eve chose their own path instead of His in the garden.
Now that we have, in our present age, the Holy Spirit always with us – more precisely, in us – we never have to be without Him, His presence, His influence, His involvement.
Yet Paul, writing to believers in Galatia who already had the Spirit within them, urged them to walk (or live) according to the Spirit’s guidance, because they still had the option of not being in step with Him.
Every married couple who are in Christ also have the option of being in step or out of step with the Holy Spirit in every part of their relationship.
Dancing can be difficult, two dance partners being in step with each other; if one gets out of step, it messes up the dance. But what if they had an instructor guiding them in every step, making the dance as simple as following his lead. That’s what the Holy Spirit is for us married couples, our divine Instructor in our marriage dance. So, the dance becomes a matter of following His lead. Marriage becomes a matter of walking according to the Spirit, being in step with Him.
The most important relationship in my marriage isn’t the one between my wife and me; it’s the one she and I have with God. When that relationship is strong, when she and I both are in step with Him, our marriage becomes a beautiful dance.
A married couple I know were trying to decide whether to continue attending a certain church they had been attending for a few weeks. Every Sunday at morning worship service a church leader would approach the wife and urge her to help in kids’ church. The wife always said yes because the need was there and her gifts and talents were a perfect fit for it.
The problem was that the church did nothing to staff kids’ church until they saw the wife each Sunday morning. The wife told the church leaders that she couldn’t be in kids’ church every week, that she needed to be in the adult service with her husband at least some of the time for her own discipleship growth.
Nothing changed. Each Sunday, a leader would come to the wife and pressure her into serving in kids’ church.
Meanwhile, the husband otherwise loved the church. The preaching was edifying, the relationships he formed were strengthening and the mission of the church resonated with him.
As the husband and wife discussed the church over the weeks, it became crystal clear to each of them that their respective satisfaction with the church were on opposite ends of the spectrum.
As guests in our home one evening, it came to a head. As they were telling my wife and me about their dilemma, it escalated to a full-scale argument. It was intense and both spouses were obviously intent on winning the argument. It was also inspiring, a truly beautiful thing to witness.
The beautiful thing was that each of them was arguing for what was beneficial for the other, not themselves. The husband insisted they leave the church that had become such a burden to the wife, while the wife argued that she could suck it up and they could continue attending the church her husband loved.
I was impressed that they both fought as hard as they could. Each genuinely wanted the other to be satisfied. They verged on being angry, emotions rising as they argued. Neither backing down, this wasn’t a negotiation; nobody was giving an inch. There would be no compromise.
In fact, they left our home that night with the matter unresolved. The argument would continue on.
It’s so cool when God shows you something. That’s what happened that evening; there was divine revelation. This was love, that spouses lay down their wills for one another.
The lesson from this epic, beautiful marriage fight was this:
If you’re going to fight with your spouse, fight for their benefit. I can testify, it’s a beautiful thing.
The earliest recorded miracle Jesus performed is found in John chapter 2. There was a wedding in the town of Cana and the wedding hosts found themselves in trouble.
There are lessons for marriage found in this wedding story. Here are four of them.
Place Jesus at the top of the invitations list. It turned out that, of all the wedding attendants, Jesus was the most important. It’s the same with our marriages.
The most important relationship in my marriage isn’t the one I have with my wife; it’s the one she and I both have with Jesus. A marriage without Jesus lacks intimacy with His Spirit, and of all the intimate opportunities marriage affords, intimacy with God is the most valuable.
When there’s a need, turn to Jesus. For whatever reason, the wedding hosts ran out of wine, a necessary part of a merry feast.
God is not oblivious to the needs of my marriage; He’s sensitive to even the things important to my wife or me that others wouldn’t see as necessary. To some, wine may not seem necessary for a feast, but Jesus saved anyone and everyone in the wedding party from the embarrassment they might have experienced had there been no more wine.
Obey exactly the instructions God gives. It must’ve sounded senseless the instructions Jesus gave. “Fill these pots with water,” is what He told the servants to do. This step in the process of producing wine only Jesus could yet understand. But obedience brought everyone into understanding.
When we find ourselves in a marriage dilemma and turn to God for help, His instruction may seem counterintuitive, but obedience must often precede understanding. There’s never a time in the history or future of humankind when obedience to God isn’t the best option, never a time in marriage when obedience isn’t the best choice.
Acknowledge the superiority of God’s provision. The master of the wedding feast announced that the miraculously produced wine was better than what had been provided originally by the hard work of professionals and experts.
My marriage will find nothing better than what God offers. He’s the creator of my wife, me and marriage itself. He knows what marital love is and provides exactly the wisdom each spouse needs to navigate the sea of marriage challenges. To have these blessings from God and not give Him credit for them is grossly unfair to Him.
The story is told by Phillip Yancey of a group of Christian theologians in London who were debating among themselves in search of the answer to what sets Christianity apart from every other religion, faith or belief system.
Was it fulfilled prophecy? No, there are other religions claiming prophecies fulfilled.
Was it God incarnate? Nope. Other religious leaders claimed divinity.
How about the founder of the religion dying for their cause? That wasn’t it either; there’ve been other martyred founders of a religion.
Then it must be resurrection. Surprisingly, though, other religions claimed their leader had risen from death.
The theological think tank, having reached the end of their answer rope, with perfect timing, noticed C. S. Lewis, whose office happened to be in the same building, walking past their door.
They got Lewis’ attention and posed the question to him. “That’s easy,” Lewis replied, “it’s grace.”
Every other religion or ethical system has its participants getting what they deserve. Do good, you’re rewarded. Do wrong, suffer the consequences.
Jesus Christ introduced a radically unique concept to the world: grace.
Grace is unmerited favor. To receive God’s favor through Christ, you don’t work to earn it; you’ll never deserve it. Jesus’ favor includes no requisite, other than faith in Him. Believe in Him and you are favored. It’s simple and unique.
The Christian married couple are called to this same uniqueness. As a Christian husband, my calling is to give my wife my favor without requiring her to earn it. You’vereceivedfreely, Jesus taught, nowfreelygive. Christians are in relay position for God’s grace, like a second baseman who catches the centerfielder’s throw and perpetuates it immediately to home plate, and who better for us to relay God’s grace to than our spouse? One of the primary ways God gets His grace to a married person is through their spouse.
Just as the London theologians found the uniqueness of the Christian faith in grace, so will the Christian married couple find their unique marital advantage. In fact, the case could be made that a really good marriage can’t be had without its inclusion of grace. If there were no other reason to be a Christ follower – and there are many, the greatest of which being the promised reality of being with God for eternity – the Christian marriage advantage would be enough.
There is no marriage like the Christian marriage. Let us live out the marital advantage we’ve been given.
James, the half-brother of Jesus, writes to the church in every part of the world in every generation of the age confessyoursinstoeachother (James 5:16).
Confession of sin accomplishes something that cannot be accomplished otherwise. It brings into the light what has been in the dark. It establishes as truth what has been waiting to be known. It brings the one confessing into alignment with reality, with righteousness, with God.
But, perhaps, the greatest achievement of confession is that it renders the confessed sin powerless against the confessor. Confessed sin can never again be effective against the guilty person. As long as we remain in darkness, we’re in danger of condemnation; but once we’re brought into the light by confession, we’re safe.
This blog is, these days, devoted to topics related to marriage. You could ask, doesthisJames5:16Scriptureapplytomarriage? I would ask, to what could it apply more than to marriage?
When a spouse confesses that they’ve sinned against their spouse – and what spouse hasn’t, in some way, sinned against their partner? – a cleansing happens that’s necessary for a marriage.
As hard a decision as it may be to make the confession, the freedom that comes with it makes it worth whatever pain is associated with it.
And there will be pain. Just as there’s scrubbing involved in cleansing something, there will be hurt resulting from the cleansing of the confession. The wronged will be hurt and the wrong-doer will also.
I know all this from experience as well as from God’s Word.
Since there’s sin, confession and pain, there needs to be healing. James, in the same verse, tells us how to get that healing.
And pray for each other, he writes, that you may be healed. That’s the sinner praying for the offended and the offended praying for the one who hurt them by their sin.
So if I sin against my wife, I confess, and then I pray for healing of the pain I caused. And if my wife sins against me and confesses, I pray for healing of the pain her sin and confession caused her.
Then James reveals where the real power is, since confession has rendered powerless the sin committed. Prayer is where the power is, and it is effective (a.k.a. answered).
This is all just another benefit of being in Christ as a married couple. So let us not neglect this valuable truth and principle from God’s Word.
The focus of this blog is to address marriage topics. I’ve learned that we can in some way apply practically every Scripture to marriage. Romans 12:1 is no exception.
I admit that a living sacrifice has always seemed oxymoronic to me, a paradox. The Old Covenant idea of sacrifice involved death. An animal was killed, a plant had died to produce the needed grain. An altar held dead things, even burnt things.
But through Paul God admonishes us to present a different kind of sacrifice, a living one. How is that possible?
Well, it isn’t easy. As someone has said, the problem with the living sacrifice is that it keeps crawling off the altar. I can relate to that.
So, if we don’t present something dead, what kind of sacrifice is it that God wants from us? Here are a few thoughts.
The flesh is the sacrifice God wants. The flesh isn’t literal in this sense; it’s an anti-God mentality known in New Testament writings as the flesh. In Paul’s writings, he contrasts the flesh with the Spirit. Walk in the Spirit and we won’t gratify the desires of the flesh. The Spirit is the Holy Spirit that is given to dwell within believers in Jesus. The flesh is the mentality Satan and his kingdom try to induce us with to draw us away from God and compete with the voice of the Spirit.
We’re warned to not quench the Spirit, which is easily done in the marriage relationship. I’ve certainly been guilty of it and we can quench the Spirit in one area while obeying him in another; the devil is a wily one. But the secret is to bring every desire, every piece of our will to the throne of God and submit it to Him.
Remember the 3 Eds. They help us keep our will and desires under the submission to God’s Spirit.
Yielded. Jesus demonstrated in Gethsemane how to bring a human desire in line with the will of God. He simplified it for us in the words not My will but Yours be done.
Delighted. The psalmist of Psalms 34 revealed the key to having Godly desires and having those desires met. Delight yourself in the Lord, he wrote. When we find our joy in our relationship with Jesus, we also find our desires purified and satisfied. Again, as will always be the case, closeness with the Holy Spirit is most important in the process.
Filled. Paul instructed his readers to be filled with right contents for Godliness. Not with wine, he wrote, but with (that’s right – there He is again) the Spirit. When we’re filled with God’s Spirit, we won’t be filled with ungodly desires, but we’ll have a will that matches up with God’s.
These are some of the tips we glean from Scripture to help us sacrifice what needs sacrificing. As we apply these ideas to marriage, our spouse will be blessed by the benefits of our sacrifice.
May God help us present to Him the sacrifice He wants and our spouse will appreciate.
King Solomon wrote that there is a time for everything. We read this in Ecclesiastes 3 and Solomon included a list of activities for which there is a time. He didn’t include in the list that there’s a time to be selfish, but I believe there is.
You may disagree, off hand, but let me explain.
One of my favorite movies is TheNotebook. In this movie, Noah loves Allie and wants her to marry him. Allie is torn because she has feelings for both Noah and another guy. Noah challenges Allie to consider only what she wants, not what Noah, the other guy, Allie’s parents or anybody else wants. Allie has trouble with this because she doesn’t want to hurt any of the people in her life.
But Noah presses her. “What do YOU want?” To Allie, it isn’t that simple; she can’t just be selfish.
I agree with Noah in this situation. I believe this is the one time in a person’s life when it’s necessary to be selfish.
Before the plane takes off, passengers have to sit through the instructions. Before helping someone else, be sure to secure your own oxygen mask.
There it is, an example of the necessity of a moment of selfishness.
If you’re single and trying to decide whom you’ll be with for life, this is your moment to be selfish.
My advice is to be prayerful about it, being sure to seek God’s direction. And with His direction, decide what it is that you want.
Enjoy this moment, because you can’t carry it into a marriage. In marriage, selfishness is not your friend. So, recognize the time to be selfish, make your decision, and then put your spouse’s needs before your own for the rest of your marriage.
In Solomon’s list we see statements of poetic contrast; for example, there is a time to kill and a time to heal. Likewise, there is a time to be selfish and a time to put others’ needs above our own.
It may help to remember that the time to be selfish is brief, compared to the time to not be.
Of supreme importance is getting the selfish and selfless seasons in their proper places. To choose a marriage partner based on what others want would be as much of a mistake as always putting yourself first in your marriage.
But whether you’re currently in it or not, personally, there is a time to be selfish.
What do these three have in common? Several things. For one thing, me. I’m training for a marathon, writing my first novel and married to my wife, Sharlene, for more than thirty-seven years now.
Another common element is that they all require perseverance. A marathon involves about 70,000 steps; a novel is about 140,000 words; and a thirty-eight-year marriage equals almost 14,000 days. Each step, each word, each day is critical. Each one is a risk, and each one is also an opportunity.
Here are some things I’ve learned in my marathon prep and writing life that also apply to marriage.
Start. Don’t Stop. Finish. One morning I ran a half marathon before work. I started my run at 4:00 a.m., knowing it would take me nearly three hours. (My pace is pretty slow.) The thought came to my mind, it doesn’t matter what happens in the next three hours – blisters, fatigue, pain, road surface, weather, anything – I’m just running. I’m not stopping, no matter what, until I reach the 13.1-mile point. My thoughts had to be consumed with one idea: run; just run.
There’s a scene in one of my very favorite movies, CinderellaMan, in which the comeback fighter’s manager scales everything down to one word. With all the pressures, opportunities and risks, the manager reveals the solution to all fighter Jim Braddock’s problems. The solution is one word: win. In the course of writing my two previous books, Brilliant Faith and Interwoven Love, I’ve often settled my thoughts on one single instructive word for myself: write. You’ll never publish a book without the daily discipline of opening up the computer and writing; it’s just that simple.
In marriage, it’s often helpful to settle on a single word. The word may be a different one from one season to another; it may be love, it could be forgive, listen or simply stay.
It’sHard. I have a friend, Willy Pascua, who recently ran a double marathon; that’s 52.4 miles. Fascinated, I picked Willy’s brain about such a feat. His simple answer to me was, running’shard. He said that, even though he’d run that very long distance, he still found it hard running a 5k. It’s just hard, Willy said, on the human body to run. I found comfort in the words of this retired U.S. Marine Corps Master Gunnery Seargeant, hearing a super hero admit that something I find difficult is also difficult to him.
A conversation writers often have is about the many obstacles to completing a major writing project, like publishing a novel. Author and Director of the annual Blue Ridge Mountains Christian Writer’s Conference, Edie Melson, writes a very helpful daily blog, to which I subscribe, that often targets one of the many common challenges for writers. The common thread running through every solution Edie gives is: don’t be thrown off by the surprise that writing is hard; just stay with it.
Married couples often find themselves in trouble by the element of surprise. They didn’t anticipate the difficulties that awaited them a few weeks, months or years into their marriage.
There’s a saying: you can’t prepare for war. The reason that’s true is that, while you can train for war, you can’t duplicate it; trainees would die if they used real war to train for real war. So, inevitably, warriors will be met by surprise.
Marriage is similar. A couple can do their best to think through, talk through, and pray through every marriage scenario they can fathom, but they can’t imagine all the situations they’ll find themselves facing as a married couple. One of the best things newlyweds can do is expect to be surprised. Fairy tales are not their friend; naiveté is their enemy. If you’re someone in the midst of marriage difficulty, perhaps you can find comfort in knowing that every married couple, at times, finds marriage difficult.
Marriage, like running and writing, has its challenges; but, like those two pursuits, it also has its rewards. May God help us learn these and other lessons and apply them to our all-important marriages.
