The One Thing You Need to Sustain an Amazing Marriage

Today on the blog and with the sermons on which this blog is based, I am starting a new series on marriage.  But if you’re not married right now, you may be asking.  What relevance could this blog series have to me at all?  And the answer is.  A lot.

Why?   Every person here has relationships with someone.  And through the particular prism of the intense relationship called marriage, we will look at key factors that every human relationship needs.  Beyond that, God describes the relationship God wants with you as a marriage.  So knowing God’s vision for marriage tells you a lot about God’s vision for his relationship with you.   

And if you are married, whether you are five years into that journey or fifty, exploring God’s vision for marriage will make your marriage stronger wherever you are.    And if you’ve been divorced, it may shift your perspective in important ways.  As lonely as it can be to be single, maybe the loneliest place of all is in a marriage that is simply not working.   And after that marriage fails, the baggage from that loss can stick around.   Seeing God’s vision for marriage can lead you to leave behind that baggage, baggage you may not have even realized you were carrying. 

So wherever you are, this series will speak to you, not only in helping you with the relationships you have with others, but also in seeing more clearly the relationship God wants to have with you. 

And as we begin, I’ve been thinking a lot about a quote from the preacher Andy Stanley.   Stanley said. I have never seen an ugly wedding.  I have seen plenty of ugly marriages.   He’s right.   On that wedding day, it looks so good.  And the happy couple wants it to be good.   They want it to work.  But then it doesn’t.   What happens?  What drains the energy that existed on that day?   What is the source of power that sustains any marriage that makes it great?  In these few simple words, God shows you.  Listen and hear what God has to say.

Ephesians 5:21

In the sentence you just heard lies the answer to what enables any marriage to be all that God created marriage to be.  And let’s be clear, God did create it, marriage that is. 

Think about it.   Why doesn’t the Bible give you thoughts about how schools should be run or what the best economic system is?   Wouldn’t that be helpful?  When you think about it, God hardly gives any comments at all about human institutions.   Yet when it comes to marriage and family, God says a good bit.   Why is that?   It’s because human beings didn’t create marriage.  God did.   That’s why you find it mentioned at the beginning of things in the book of Genesis, right after God creates human beings.   

After all, if God is love, it makes sense that God would give you insights on how to live out loving one another.    And in the bonds between spouses, you have one of the key places where that happens.    And that means, when the Bible talks about what makes marriage work, you better listen. 

After all, you don’t pour maple syrup in your car, and expect it to work.  Why?  You know. The car’s maker didn’t design it to run on that.    And you know if you ignore those manufacturer’s instructions, your car is going to be in trouble fast.    And here in this verse in Ephesians, and the ones that follow, you get God’s instructions for marriage.    Now lots of folks have misunderstood these verses, and over our time together, we’ll clear those up.   But let’s be clear, the insights you’ll find here work.  They work for any marriage, anywhere, anytime.   Why?  You are reading the instructions of the One who created it in the first place. 

And the very first thing God tells you that you must remember about marriage is this.  You must submit.   A lot of folks don’t like to hear that word.  It seems a little harsh.   And that’s for good reason.  The Greek word Paul uses here for submit is one used mainly in the military, which makes sense.      

To be part of an army, you’ve got to learn to submit, to submit even at the risk of your own life for the good of the whole.   Without that willingness to submit, no army can succeed.  Instead, it will be every man and woman for themselves.     So when the fighting starts.  What will you have?  You’ll have a whole bunch of folks running in the opposite direction.  And that won’t work.

But what makes sense in the military, God is saying, makes even more sense in marriage.  Why?   Because nothing will destroy marriage quicker than self-centeredness.  For marriage to work, both parties have to be willing to submit themselves to the other.   And that is incredibly hard.    

Every summer now for 40 plus years, I’ve shared a beach house with other members of my extended family.   And do you know what I’ve learned over those years?  The ability to give yourself to another person, to give up your rights, the ability to serve others’ interests ahead of your own, the ability to submit your own concerns for the good of someone else, the ability to defer your desires to help someone else achieve their desires doesn’t come naturally.  Heck, there’s nothing more unnatural than that.    

Yet if we somehow don’t find a way to do that each year, then those weeks get ugly real fast.   And if two people in a marriage don’t find a way to do that, then their beautiful wedding will grow into an ugly marriage pretty quickly as well.    Nothing destroys a marriage quicker than self-centeredness.  Yet if self-centeredness comes so naturally, how do you break free of it?   How does the selflessness that marriage needs happen?

It happens when you decide that your partner’s wounds matter more than you own.  What do I mean?  

As you go through life, everyone gets wounded.   Parents wound you.  Siblings wound you.  Friends wound you.   You get the idea.   And generally, the more wounded a person is, the more self-absorbed they become.   Their wounds cut so deep that it’s harder for them to get past their own needs to see the needs of others.   And even when they do focus on the needs of others, it’s not really about those needs.   No, they’re simply meeting their own needs for validation or security by being there for others.

Now, many folks think that their self-centeredness comes about because of their wounds.  So, if their wounds get healed, so will their self-centeredness.   But their wounds did not create their selfishness. Their wounds only aggravated it.   The selfishness was there all along, baked into the cake, so to speak.   Now why is this important?

When you get married, three things happen.  First you discover that your spouse is way more self-centered than you ever realized.    And second, your spouse begins to say the very same thing about you.     And the third thing that happens is you don’t see how your selfishness is anywhere as bad as theirs.  Why is that? 

Well, you think, what you’re saying about me is true, but you just don’t understand, what I’ve been though, how I got to be this way.

Now when this pattern happens, you can take it a number of ways.   You can decide your wounds are more fundamental than your self-centeredness.  Therefore, that person’s job is to heal your wounds so that then your self-centered ways go away.   But of course those wounds don’t get healed because the other person is expecting the very same thing from you.  

And so two things happen.  Either the marriage blows up.   Or it stays together, but only because the partners make a deadly bargain.   It’s rarely done overtly, but it’s there.   Basically the bargain goes like this.   You don’t bug me about these things, and I won’t bug you about those things.      

And on the outside, the marriage may even look good.  But when that forty year anniversary comes, and the couple kisses, it looks a bit forced.  

Or you can make a different choice than that.  You can decide.   My self-centeredness has to be more fundamental than my wounds.  My flaws have to matter more than my pain.  So when your partner points out a place where your self-centeredness rises up.   You don’t make excuses.  You take action.  You focus your energy on breaking the pattern.  And you focus your energy there no matter what the other person is doing or not.

And when two people decide that, that their own self-centeredness has to be the focus, and not their wounds, then you have real potential for an amazing marriage.    And even if only one partner does this, and the other doesn’t, something extraordinary often happens.  Not immediately, but over time, the other partner softens, becomes more open to admit his or her own faults. Why?  Because you’ve stopped always talking about them. 

That’s what God is telling you in this sentence.   When each person decides that their own self-centeredness has got to be the issue, not their past, not their wounds, not what the other partner is or isn’t doing, then the possibilities for that marriage become endless. 

Yet as tantalizing as that vision is, how does it actually happen?  And that is where the second part of the sentence comes in, those words, out of reverence for Christ.  This sentence that we are focusing on this morning actually serves as a bridge sentence between two sections of Paul’s letter.   It ends a section focused on the new life followers of Jesus find in Christ, and it starts a section on how that life is lived out with your spouse, your kids, even your boss.   And Paul planned it that way.   Paul is saying, what I am proposing here, it can’t happen on your own.  You need a divine intervention. 

How does that intervention come?  It comes through the God who in Jesus was wounded for you.   On that cross, in Jesus God endured wound after wound.  He suffered abuse and torture not only in the name of the state, but in the name of religion too.  His friends rejected him and ran away.   In those brutal hours, he faced isolation so extreme that not even God could be found.    And why did God in Jesus do it?   God did it for you.   On that cross, God took on all your wounds, both the ones inflicted on you, and the one you’ve inflicted on others.    He was wounded for your transgressions.   And by his wounds, you are healed.   

On that cross, God lost all love, so that you will never lose it.    He lost his life, so that you could regain yours.    So trapped were you in your self-centeredness, that nothing less than the loss of God’s very self could free you.   But God in Jesus so loved you even in your self-involvement and self-absorption, he was glad to lose everything, even his very self to bring you home.   And the more you let that love, Jesus’ love grasp and hold you, the more he will free you to love others even as he loves you.   Then you will not need to look to your spouse or anyone else to heal your wounds.  Why?  You will know Jesus’ love is doing that.  You will know that by his wounds, he is making you whole.