On Marriage

Pastor Dave Monreal, Lead Pastor

I received an email from a young pastor friend who has a couple in his church who are 18 and 19, very spiritually and emotionally immature, but want to get married this summer. Both sets of parents are very much against them marrying now because they know the couple is not ready for the challenges of marriage and have no financial stability. When I was a youth pastor and later when I was a middle school Bible teacher, I made it a point to regularly address the topic of marriage. I wanted the reality of this relationship to be deeply imbedded in their thinking from youth on. Here are a few things I repeatedly emphasized:

1.  Marriage is a covenant relationship. Many today, even many in the church, see marriage more as a contract or perhaps some sort of partnership. The Bible’s description of marriage is much richer. A covenant is a binding oath before God to pledge oneself completely to another for life regardless of the circumstances. What is hard for some to realize is that your oath is independent of the response of the other person. Whether you feel the other person is holding up his or her end of the bargain does not absolve you of your responsibility to put everything you have into the marriage to make it succeed. Marriage is not a 50/50 proposition but a 100/100 proposition. So, even if the other person is putting in zero effort at the moment you still meet because you have gone the whole way to meet the other. If you try to meet in the middle, you will not meet if only one is going halfway.

2.  Marriage is a reflection of God’s relationship with his people. Christ is the groom, and we are the bride of Christ. This is the whole point of Ephesians 5:22-32. Paul tells wives to submit to their own husbands as unto the Lord. The idea here is that if after discussing a non-moral issue the couple cannot come to consensus, then the wife is to defer to the husband’s leadership trusting that he is truly seeking the Lord and her best interest in the decision. The husband is told to love his wife just as Christ love the church and sacrificed himself for her. In the same way, the husband’s love is to be selfless and sacrificial for the sake of his wife and family. He is not to look to his interest but to hers to make her spiritually radiant and Christlike. Problems come in when husbands view the servant leadership role as one of domination rather than dying.

3.  Marriage is hard work. I let kids know that marriage is hard work and that couples continually have to work on their marriage in order for it to survive and thrive. Financial problems, emotional struggles, communication breakdown, and problems in the bedroom can all cause marriages to struggle. Often unmarried Christian couples tend to think in terms of their physical relationship and that the “marriage bed is undefiled (pure).” (Hebrews 13:4) I tell young, love-struck couples that if things are not good throughout the day, don’t expect things to be good at night. I share with students that too often couples only go for marriage counseling after things have gotten so bad that they are considering divorce. At the first signs of unresolved trouble the couple needs to go for help informally or formally in marriage counseling. Ideally the young couple should have a mentor couple that they can go to and talk throughout life.

4.  There should be an ease to marriage. Okay, this may seem like a direct contradiction to my previous point, but it really isn’t. My point here is that there should be a natural compatibility that does not have to be continuously forced. When I was in college, I had a friend tell me, “David, the next person you date, MAKE her the right one!” I’ve received a lot of bad advice over the years but that has to be in the top five. If a person has to continually force the relationship that should be a clear signal that they should not get married or at the very least, they need some extensive premarital counseling before they do walk down the aisle.

Much more could be said but this is a newsletter article and not a counseling book. My main point is that we need to be teaching kids the truth about marriage long before they are in college or ready to settle down. If we want to see the statistics change for Christian couples regarding marriages failing, we need to be proactive and do things very differently than we have been doing.