The Secret of Marriage

 

• Nothing can mature character like marriage.  

• The purpose of marriage was to create a framework for lifelong devotion and love between a husband and a wife. It was a solemn bond, designed to help each party subordinate individual impulses and interests in favour of the relationship, to be a sacrament of God's love and serve the common good. 

• They want a spouse who is fun, intellectually stimulating, sexually attractive, with many common interests, and who, on top of it all is supportive of their personal goals and of the way they are living now. If your desire is for a spouse who will not demand alot of change from you, then you are also looking for a spouse who is almost completely pulled together, someone very 'low maintenance' without much in the way of personal problems. You are looking for someone who will not require or demand significant change. You are searching, therefore, for an ideal person - happy, healthy, interesting, content with life. Never before in history has there been a society filled with people so idealistic in what they are seeking in a spouse. 

• The extreme idealism in turn leads to deep pessimism that you will ever find the right person to marry. This is the reason so many put off marriage and look right past great prospective spouses that simply are 'not good enough'. 

• A marriage based not on self denial but on self fulfilment will require a low or no maintenance partner who meets your needs while making almost no claims on you. 

• Our culture makes individual freedom, autonomy and fulfilment the very highest value and thoughtful people know deep down that any love relationship means the loss of all three. But if you avoid marriage simply because you don't want to lose your freedom, that is one of the worst things you can do to your heart. 

• We never know whom we marry; we just think we do. Even if we first marry the right person, just give it a while and he or she will change. The primary problem is... learning how to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married. 

• If our views of marriage are too romantic and idealistic, we underestimate the influence of sin on human life. If they are too pessimistic and cynical, we misunderstand marriage's divine origin. 

• Do for your spouse what God did for you in Jesus, and the rest will follow. The gospel of Jesus and marriage explain one another. When God invented marriage, he already had the saving work of Jesus in mind. The reason that marriage is so painful and yet wonderful is because it is a reflection of the gospel, which is painful and wonderful at once. 

• Christian teaching does not offer a choice between fulfilment and sacrifice but rather mutual fulfilment through mutual sacrifice. 

• Love without truth is sentimentality; it supports and affirms us but keeps us in denial about our flaws. Truth without love is harshness; it gives us information but in such a way that we cannot really hear it. 

 

The Power For Marriage

• Only if you have learned to serve others by the power of the Holy Spirit will you have the power to face the challenges of marriage. 

• Picture of marriage is NOT of two needy people, unsure of their own value and purpose, finding their significance and meaning in one another's arms. If you add 2 vacuums to each other, you only get a bigger and stronger vacuum. Rather Paul assume that each spouse already has settled the big questions of life - why they were made by God and who they are in Christ. 

• I begin to see that I wanted to serve because that made me feel in control. Then I would always have the high moral ground. But that kind of 'service' isn't service at all, only manipulation. The reason underneath it all was my pride. 

• In the end, a refusal to live my life on the basis of grace was because I wanted to earn everything. I wanted no one to give me any favors. I wanted to give underserved gifts to others - so I could have satisfaction of thinking of myself as a magnanimous person. 

• Self centeredness: impatience, irritability, lack of graciousness and kindness in speech, envious brooding on the better situations of others, holding past injuries and hurts against others. 

• "Submit" has its origin in the military. To be part of a whole, to become part of a greater unity, you have to surrender your independence. You must give up the right to make decisions unilaterally. 

• Give up yourself, and you will find your real self.  

• "Woundedness" is compounded self doubt, guilt, resentment and disillusionment. Woundedness makes us self-absorbed. We are not sensitive to the needs of others. We 'rescue' people to feel better about ourselves. The woundedness makes us minimise our own selfishness. 

• Both people crippled by inferiority feelings and those who have superiority complexes are centered on themselves, obsessed with how they look and how they are being perceived and treated. 

• See your own selfishness as a fundamental problem and treat it more seriously than you do your spouse's. Because only you have complete access to your own selfishness and only you have complete responsibility for it. 

• 'Fear' in the Bible means to be overwhelmed, to be controlled by something. To fear the Lord is to be overwhelmed with wonder before the greatness of God and his love.  Only out of the fear of the Lord will we serve others unselfishly. 

• We come into marriages driven by all kinds of fears, desires and needs. If I look to my marriage to fill the God-sized spiritual vacuum in my heart, I will not be in position to serve my spouse. 

• What if we dived so deeply into Jesus' teachings and life and work? His promises, counsels, encouragements dominates our inner life, captures our imagination and simply bubbled out spontaneously when we faced challenges? How would we live if we instinctively, almost unconsciously, knew Jesus' mind and heart regarding things that confronted us? 

​

The Essence of Marriage

• ​

 

​