I would have said that I believed in Jesus long before I actually did. I believed in Him like I believed in Napoleon. In other words, I didn’t completely reject His existence. But surely there’s more to it than that.
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Some people feel stifled by a freedomless marriage and other married couples are like single people who happen to share the same address. The way that the members of the Trinity relate model for us a vision of marriage marked by profound unity without the loss of individuality.
This week, I had a strange experience with two books on marriage. I finished reading Darby Strickland’s book, “Is It Abuse?” and started reading Tim and Kathy Keller’s book, “The Meaning of Marriage.” Both of them are excellent. Both of them address the topic of marriage from the Scriptures. But it’s as if they’re addressed to people from two different worlds. The first helps people to identify whether domestic abuse is present in a relationship and gives strategies for addressing it. The second helps people discover how a marriage can become all it was intended to be. Reading one gave me new awareness in reading the second. I realized that in only approaching marriage from the ideal that the Bible presents, there are principles that can be misunderstood and even used by abusers to manipulate their spouses. Consider the following examples.
Last time we considered how the good news about Jesus can change our relationships. Today, I want to look, in particular, at how it can transform a marriage. The Bible’s teaching on marriage today is drowned out by so many other voices. A search for books on marriage at Amazon returns more than 50,000 titles. With all of these books on the subject, you’d think that marriages today must be better than ever. The reality is that the opposite is the case. The Bible holds out hope, but even as Christians turn to its teaching on marriage, they can forget the gospel as they read. They can stumble on God’s commands without leaning on any of His grace. One of the principles of gospel living that we looked at two weeks ago was starting with what God has done before moving on to what we do. Let’s see how that gets played out in the Bible’s teaching on marriage.