No. 42
What is my marriage exposing in me?
Why marriage is where God exposes our pride and shapes our humility, and why our aim is to please Him in every season.
Greetings,
Marriage is one of the places God uses most to make me holy, in every season and every circumstance. Our aim is simple to say and hard to live: to please God in our marriage. Paul puts it plainly:
So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him.
That aim doesn’t stop at the church door or the office. It reaches the kitchen table, the car ride, and the bedroom.
Many of us expected marriage to make us happy, and some of that happiness has come. But marriage also shows us what we’re actually like. I can be patient with a coworker and sharp with my wife in the same afternoon, and she is the one who bears the brunt of my selfishness. Nowhere else in my life do my selfishness and my pride come out so quickly. I am grateful for that, even when it stings, because God is using the exposure to make me more like Christ.
My wife is sometimes impatient, anxious, or short with me, and sometimes that’s unjust. She also often shoulders more of our home than I notice, and that weight may be part of why she responds the way she does. That doesn’t excuse her impatience. It helps me understand it. Those moments are real, and they are also where God gives me a chance to love more deeply than my feelings allow.
Familiarity makes it easy to stop noticing what our wives give us: the labour behind ordinary days, the care in their hearts, the burdens they carry. Then we expect them to understand us without any effort on our part. Catherine Porter makes the point that love has to be learned again and again. Marriage is where that learning happens, because it keeps asking us to love a person we know well, weaknesses included. The moments her weaknesses show up are the moments God puts in front of us to show His love.
Consider an ordinary evening. She is anxious about a bill, a child, or a call with her mother, and her mood fills the room. Nothing dramatic has happened, but I feel the pull to withdraw, to correct her tone, or to decide she’s the problem. That pull is where my aim gets tested.
My sin in those moments is rarely one thing. I meet her impatience with my own. I lash out. I seethe in silence and replay her failures until I’ve built a case against her. I go cold, or I go loud, or I simply keep score. Each of these puts my preference above her, and God sees every one.
Peter speaks to husbands directly:
Likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered.
When tension rises, a husband has a choice: meet her with gentleness and patience, or with a sharp word or cold silence. Gentleness doesn’t guarantee calm, and it doesn’t make her responsible for my response. But it gives God room to work in her and in the circumstances, and it puts me where He has called me to lead.
My love for God shows up in how I love my wife. I can’t say I love God while my heart is cold toward the woman He gave me. Marriage stretches my capacity to love, and that capacity flows into everything else.
True humility is what lets me bear with her, respond well, and forgive quickly and freely. I must first see myself in view of God’s holiness, my sinful state, and the grace given at the cross. A man who sees that clearly doesn’t keep score. He repents, and repentance makes him gentle.
Humility starts vertically before it is horizontal.
Humility shows up in small habits. It loves God’s glory more than its own. It is gracious and honest, loving and firm. It is willing to set its preferences aside to serve her, and it is quick to admit, confess, and repent of sin. That kind of humility doesn’t come from trying harder to be patient. It comes from seeing God clearly and seeing myself clearly, and then living in the grace that the cross provides.
None of this means silence. Honest conversation is part of loving well, and some problems need to be named. But I speak as a man who is repenting first, not as a judge.
Gary Thomas makes this case in Sacred Marriage: What If God Designed Marriage to Make Us Holy More Than to Make Us Happy? His argument is that marriage is one of God’s main tools for making us holy, and happiness is something He gives along the way. If you’re looking for a book on why marriage matters so much to God, read it.
What would change in our marriages this week if we brought our aim to please God into the moments where tension arises?
Grace and peace,
Seun
If this one landed, No. 41 goes further — seunadeyemi.ca/reflections/41-what-is-your-marriage-for
Filed under Marriage and fatherhood