8 Planting Seeds
I don’t know if you have thought about this, but your life is shaped by choice-points. No, I’m not talking about those huge moments of epic decision that we all know change our lives in some way. I’m talking about the thousands of little decisions in mundane moments of daily life that almost go unnoticed but are actually what shape and direct our lives. You see, the quality and character of a marriage isn’t set in two or three grand moments of choice. You make only three or four big decisions in your entire life. No, the character of a marriage is formed in thousands of little moments of saying yes to one thing and no to another. It is the character developed in little moments that you carry into those big moments of decision.
The last chapter was about examining your marriage, searching for those little thoughts, attitudes, and actions that you must say no to, and this chapter is about considering the things that you must say yes to, and in so doing give them room to shape your marriage.
If I could go back to the garden metaphor, cleared ground doesn’t stay clear for very long. If you weed a patch of ground and leave it bare, in a few days you will see the shoots of weeds pushing their way through clods of soil. You will wonder where they came from, and you’ll be irritated that they are already taking over the patch that you so laboriously cleared! What you must quickly do, after you have cleared the ground of weeds, is plant flowers in their place. Weeds don’t just go away, and flowers don’t just grow in their place unless someone is pulling weeds and planting seeds. The application to marriage is obvious. It is not enough to identify the weeds in your relationship that need to go; you must also think about what God is calling you to put in their place. That is what this chapter is about. I want to talk about pulling and planting in a way that may surprise you, but it is just the way the Bible talks about it.
THE WEEDS AND SEEDS
I’m constantly amazed at how helpful the Bible is in diagnosing the human struggle but how little use we actually make of it when we are trying to understand the things all of us go through in marriage. Because our Creator knows and loves us and knows how terribly broken we and our world are, he wants us to know how what is wrong goes wrong and how it can be fixed. Galatians 5 is one of those incredibly helpful biblical passages. Here, the Creator-Savior speaks to us as a loving Father, helping us to understand relational mysteries that we would never understand without him. Even though this passage sets the bar high, it should not leave us burdened or depressed, because Jesus perfectly did all the things that we have failed to do, and he did them for us so that we can stand before God in weakness and failure, confessing our need without fear. Because of Jesus, we know that God will not turn his back on us when we fail. Rather, he willingly gifts us with the grace we need to do, in our marriages, what he has called us to do.
Let’s look at Galatians 5 and see how it gives us a ground-level way of looking at the specific pulling and planting that must be part of every marriage. It amazes me to think about the fact that for years I looked at Galatians 5:13–26 as being about spiritual character growth but failed to see that it is a relationship passage from beginning to end. Look for the relational implications as you read the apostle Paul’s words:
You, my brothers, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather, serve one another in love. The entire law is summed up in a single command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” If you keep on biting and devouring each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.
So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each other, so that you do not do what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under law.
The acts of the sinful nature are obvious: sexual immorality, impu- rity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires. Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying each other. (NIV)
The best place to begin mining the riches of the wisdom of these words is to start with the warning in verse 15. One thing we are all tempted to do is back away from the power and influence of the things we do and say. A husband will yell at his wife, but he will tell himself that it was just a little moment and comfort himself with the thought that despite his anger, she knows that he loves her. A wife will be nasty in the morning, punishing her husband for what he did the night before, but she’ll tell herself that it’s a new morning, and he really does know that she loves him. We all tend to forget that these little moments are important precisely because they are little moments. Since we live in days that are filled with little moments, it is precisely here that the character and quality of a marriage is formed.
Here is the point: you cannot escape the influence of what you do and say on the person you live with and on your relationship to him or her. Paul says, “If you keep on biting and devouring each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other” (v. 15). God has made you a person of influence in the life of your spouse. You will always be influential in some way. You cannot escape the implications of Paul’s words. And notice what he says will be destroyed—you. You can rob your wife of her hope. You can crush your husband’s faith. You can damage one another’s heart. You can cloud your spouse’s view of God’s presence, goodness, and grace. You can tempt the other to believe that he or she is alone and without help. Husbands and wives, you and I must ask, “How do I daily influence the way my spouse thinks about God, him- or herself, and life?” Your response to the rest of this amazing passage will be determined by the degree to which you have embraced the warning of verse 15.
Now, notice the first principle in this highly relational passage: “Do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature” (v. 13). There is no bigger struggle for any of us. There is nothing that complicates our marriages more. A healthy marriage is all about knowing what to say no to. What we are being called to here is both insightful and practical, and it is a protection for your marriage, but I’m convinced that most of us don’t have a clue what it means. Let’s unpack these potentially marriage-changing words.
“Live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature” (v. 16). Because there is sin still inside all of us, there are thoughts, desires, motives, choices, and decisions that we must fight internally. We will never gain ground in our relationships starting by addressing wrong behaviors, because the real battle of relationships lives at a much deeper, more profound level. It is this level that Paul is addressing here. You can only understand this deeper battle when you understand the fundamental nature of sin.
The DNA of sin is selfishness (see 1 Cor. 5:15). Sin turns all of us in on ourselves. It reduces our circle of hopes and concerns to things that touch and involve us. It makes us all focused on and driven by our wants, needs, and feelings. Sin can so fill our eyes with our needs that we become functionally blind to the needs of others. We can be so focused on our interest that we have little interest in the interest of others. Now, think about this: if the DNA of sin is selfishness, then sin in its fundamental form is antisocial. The needs of the individual trump the needs of the other person or the needs of the relationship. Think about when and where you got angry last week. Would it not be safe for me to conclude that little of your anger came from concern for the other person or concerns for your marriage? Most often, we are angry because the other got in the way of something we wanted. You will never understand the struggles of your marriage until you begin to face the reality that something lives inside you that is destructive to relationships. The Bible gives this thing a name: sin.
But there is more to say. Because sin is self-focused and therefore antisocial, it dehumanizes the people in our lives. They cease being the objects of our affection. They get reduced to either vehicles or obstacles. If they are vehicles helping us get the things we want and think we need, we are excited about them and thankful that they are in our life. But if they become obstacles in the way of what we want, we get spontaneously irritated and impatient with them and want somehow to move them out of our way. Although our anger tells us that they are the problem, the problem really has its genesis in the self-orientation and self-obsession of our own sinful hearts.
This is why Paul says, “Don’t go there!” Think about it: what does it mean to indulge something? It means to go where it is drawing you to go. It means to feel its cravings. If I go to the local Chinese buffet and indulge my appetite, I do not have one plate. Thirty-seven plates later I tell myself that there are still edible delights that I need to enjoy! Healthy marriages are healthy because the people in those marriages have learned to recognize and say no to selfish instincts that lurk in their hearts and in the heart of every one of us.
Selfishness is one of the big weeds that choke the life out of a marriage, and we must continually recognize that selfishness is first a condition of the heart before it is ever a set of choices, words, and behaviors. Having said that, it is important to recognize that selfishness expresses itself in a catalog of behaviors. Paul lists these as “acts of the sinful nature” (v. 19). When you think of the trouble that troubles all our marriages, this list is stunningly accurate. Most of the words on the list picture with specificity the things that tend to infect all our marriages, not just in those big moments of difficulty but more regularly in the mundane moments of daily life. Check out these words: hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, and envy. Think about it: has your marriage been free of discord? Have you lived without jealousy? Have you been free of instances of rage? Has selfish ambition ever gotten in the way? Have you ever had dissension in your marriage? Has an otherwise nice day ever been kidnapped by envy? Be humbly honest; in some way all these things have troubled all our marriages.
Consider how selfishness can shape a marriage. If you are not fighting the internal battle, but rather you are permitting your wants, needs, and feelings to be the driving force of your relationship to your spouse, not only will you not say no to things you should say no to, but you will work to get the other to somehow, someway deliver to you the things you have set your heart on. I know this is hard to accept, but you and I must. This means that the basic style of our actions, reactions, and responses to the other is manipulation. I don’t mean a preplanned, intentional swindling of the other person. No, I mean that, in ways in which you will be unaware, you will work to get your spouse to participate in what you want, to deliver what you are convinced you need, and to submit to what you feel.
The three most familiar tools of marriage manipulation are threat, payment, and guilt. A wife will say, “I don’t know what I’m going to do if have to live with this living room any longer!” A husband will say, “Sometimes I wonder if we just made a big mistake!” In each instance, the husband and wife are using the threat of something to rein in their spouse and get him or her to acquiesce to their agenda. We also will use something we know our spouses want, need, or enjoy as an incentive to get them to do what we want them to do. For example, a husband may give his wife a luxurious weekend away, not so much because he wants to be with her but so that when she next complains, he can say, “I do and do for you, and this is the thanks I get?” Or a dissatisfied wife may say to her husband, “I remember when I was a happy woman. It was before I got married. I never thought it would be this way. I never thought we would end up this way.” What is she doing? She is inflicting guilt, hoping that her husband will feel guilty, and because of his guilt he will do what she wants him to do. There is much more manipulation going on in our marriages than we tend to think. The very nature of manipulation is that it is propelled by love of self, not love for the other.
THE COMMON THREAD
What do all these actions that Paul lists have in common? What is the single strand that holds them all together? Selfishness. That one thing that lurks in every heart is the enemy of the unity, love, and understanding that we all say we want in our marriages. Sure, you’ve married a less-than-perfect person. And, yes, your life will be complicated by his or her weaknesses and failures. Your husband or wife will have bad days. He will make regrettable choices. She will not always be as lovable as she was in courtship. It is true—you just don’t get to be married to perfection. But even with all this being true, your biggest problem is not the imperfection of your spouse. No, it is this antisocial thing that lurks in the recesses of your heart. Your biggest struggle is with the selfishness that tempts and seduces us all. We must all pull this weed again and again, along with all the weeds of destructive words and actions that attach themselves to it.
PLANTING SEEDS
Planting seeds is really what Paul is calling us to. We are to commit to intentionally planting the good seeds of a healthy relationship into the soil of our marriages. This will take understanding, commitment, discipline, and perseverance. Paul delineates the contrasting relational lifestyle this way: “Serve one another in love” (v. 13). Then he says something startling: “The entire law is summed up in a single command: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” If you had written the words, “The entire law is summed up in a single command,” what would you have written next? I think I would have written, “Love God above all else.” But, shockingly, that is not what Paul writes. Instead he writes, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” How is it that love of neighbor summarizes all that God calls us to? The answer is both simple and profound. It is that those who love God above all else will love their neighbor as they love themselves. It is hard to hear these things, but there is the hope of lasting change found in these words.
The problem in our marriages is not first that we don’t love one another enough; no, the problem is that we don’t love God enough, and because we don’t love God enough, we don’t love one another as we should. Could it be that we are so busy loving ourselves and making sure that our spouse “loves” us in the way that we want to be loved, that we have little time and energy left to love our spouse as we should? Could it be that we are so busy working to co-opt the other into the service of our wants, needs, and feelings that we are too distracted to notice all the opportunities to love that every day gives us, and too busy making sure that we are loved to do anything about these opportunities even if we noticed them? Why does all this happen? It happens because we have replaced love of God and rest in his care with love of self and the anxiety of “neediness.”
Again, what this means is that you don’t fix a marriage first horizontally; you fix it vertically. It’s only when we have confessed our lack of love for God—his plan, his purpose, and his call—and it is only when we admit that we have replaced his agenda for us with our selfish agenda that we will then be free to begin to love one another in the way that his grace makes possible. It is then that manipulation gets replaced by ministry. Rather than working to co-opt your spouse into your service, you find joy and satisfaction in discovering ways to serve him or her. You want to look ahead for impending needs. You want to do things that bring him joy. You want to share her griefs and carry her burdens. When these desires are mutual, your marriage does not become perfect, but it becomes a place where real unity, understanding, and love have room to live, breathe, and grow.
ATTENTION: HELP NEEDED
We have already said that this kind of service is not natural to us because we all still have the residue of sin in us and because the DNA of sin is selfishness. So, if we are going to live this way, each of us needs the rescue, intervention, and enabling that only God’s grace can give. It is here that we need to hear these words: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9). Be honest: it’s your tendency to argue to yourself that you are the strong one in your marriage and that in some way you are burdened with the weakness of your spouse. But sin leaves pockets of weakness in all of us. No one reading this book is proud of everything he has said in his marriage. No one reading this book is proud of everything she has done in her marriage. No one would defend everything he has thought or desired. So, change is not found in defending our righteousness but in admitting our weakness and crying out for help, and the apostle Paul is reminding us that help is available, and it is up to the task.
Enough of pointing the finger. Enough of listening to your inner lawyer defend your cause. Enough of carrying around a record of your spouse’s wrongs. Enough of judging, criticizing, and blaming. Enough of holding the other to a higher standard than the one you hold for yourself. Enough of complaining, arguing, withdrawing, and manipulating. Enough of the self-righteous standoff that never leads to change. Enough of hurt and acrimony. Enough of painting yourself as the victim and your spouse as the criminal. Enough of demanding and entitlement. Enough of threat and guilt. Enough of telling the other how good you are and how thankful she should be to live with a person like you. Enough of going to bed in angry, self-righteous silence. Enough of hyper-vigilantly watching him to see if he is delivering. Enough of riding the roller coaster of her ups and downs. Enough of looking to him to be your personal messiah, satisfying the longings of your heart. Enough.
It is time to quit pointing the finger and to start confessing how deep and pervasive your weakness is. Change in your marriage begins with confessing your need. It is time to say, “Lord, there are times when I get it right, but so often I get it wrong.” So often I let impatience and irritation get the best of me. So often I am jealous and unforgiving. So often I fail to find joy in serving and satisfaction in giving. So often I would rather win than have unity and peace. I tell myself that I will do better, but I fall into the same old traps. Lord, won’t you strengthen me by your grace so that I can love as you have called me to love?”
What does it look like to live this life of love? What does it mean practically to plant new seeds of love in your marriage? Well, there is another list in Galatians 5 called the “fruit of the Spirit.” There could not be a better catalog of the character qualities of a good marriage than this list. If you want to pull the weeds of manipulation out of your marriage and give yourself to an agenda of love, then this list is for you. Consider these words: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (vv. 22–23).
What does a commitment to serve your spouse in love look like? Well, it looks like getting up in the morning and committing to searching for concrete ways to love your husband or your wife. Where does he tend to be discouraged or overwhelmed? What are the daily tasks in which she could use assistance? In what special way can you communicate your affection? Perhaps an unexpected card in a lunch bag, or a delivery of flowers, or a call in the middle of the day just to say, “I love you.” Maybe you communicate love by not turning on the flat-screen and being willing to talk instead. Maybe love gets communicated by fixing something broken, just because fixing it would make the other’s life easier. Maybe it would be best communicated by your willingness to take over a duty that has usually fallen to the other. There is no want for opportunities to love; the issue is, do we see them and are we committed to respond to them when we do. Would your spouse call you a loving person?
Serving in love means being committed to joy. What is joy about? It means looking for reasons to be thankful. It means being better at counting your blessings than you are at calculating your complaints. It is about communicating appreciation. It is about letting her know how much the things she does for you mean to you. It is about daily thanking God for your marriage, even though it is less than perfect. Joy means looking for the good in the other and encouraging it when you find it. Would your husband or wife characterize you as being thankful?
Serving in love requires being committed to peace. Let’s admit it: there is a shocking amount of conflict in each of our lives. Almost every day we are angry, impatient, irritated, resentful, or disappointed in someone. Sin makes it easier to make war than to make peace, and most of our fights are over issues of little long-term consequence. Sure, there are moments when the stakes are high and we are struggling over something of life-altering significance, but those moments are rare. Sadly, many of us have a short fuse, a quick intolerance for any failure of others and a quick irritation at anyone or anything that gets in our way.
So, if we are really committed to peace, we will gladly overlook minor offenses. We will be quickly willing to forgive. We will work to restore relationship when something has separated us. We will find unity more attractive than winning and peace more compelling than power. We will be willing to listen and committed to think well before we speak. We will not allow ourselves to resurrect offenses that have already been forgiven, and we will be willing to quickly confess when we have been wrong. We will never go to bed while we are still angry, and we will seek to protect our marriage from anything that may interrupt our peace. Would your spouse say that you are a peacemaker?
Serving our spouses in love also means being committed to responding to them in ways that are kind and to do to them only what is good. Think with me for a moment: being kind and doing what is good are the commitments of everyone in courtship. Why? Because each is trying to win the other. But after they are married, both tend to let down their guard. In your case, maybe that means not being as polite and patient as you were when you were dating your spouse. Maybe it means being more critical than you ever would have been when you were trying to win her. Maybe it means failing to put him first the way you did before you got married. Perhaps it means doing things that are rude, things you would never had considered doing when you were still attempting to win your spouse’s affection. Would your husband or wife say that you are a kind person?
Serving in love also means that you are faithful to the vows you made when you got married. Faithfulness is surely one of the essential character qualities of a good marriage. Faithfulness begins with your thoughts and desires. Do you allow yourself to fantasize about leaving your marriage or about being married to another person? Do you ever look at or think about another man or woman in ways that you shouldn’t? Are you still on task, loving your spouse just as you promised you would when you publicly made your vows? Are there other things that have gotten in the way such as work, personal pursuits, children, general busyness, inattention, laziness, forgetfulness, bitterness, or self-interest? Would your spouse say you have been faithful in every way to what you promised?
Serving in love means being committed to gentleness. What is gentleness? It means that something doesn’t get damaged in the process of being handled. A child makes his mommy a card, but he lacks gentleness, so when the card is finally delivered, it is wrinkled, torn, and stained. Often we permit way too much harshness, rudeness, and angry talk in our marriages. In our disappointment and hurt, our responses lack gentleness, deepening the difficulty with which we are already struggling. A quiet heart and a soft answer are very powerful tools in the hands of a God of transforming grace. Gentleness should not be confused with weakness; gentleness is a quiet confidence in the power of God to change what needs to be changed. It is the recognition that if we could change another person by the volume of our voice, the power of our vocabulary, and the force of our personality, Jesus would not have had to come! Would your husband or wife describe you as gentle?
Serving in love means being committed to the daily exercise of self-control. A good marriage is always the result of saying no, not to the other person but to yourself. If you want to damage your marriage, go wherever your desires and emotions lead you. In heated moments of disagreement, in painful moments of disappointment, and in disheartening moments of hurt, you will be tempted to do and say things that are not only wrong but will also add to the trouble you are already experiencing. Disagreement is hard, but it does not have to degenerate into personal war. Disappointment is hard, but it does not have to give way to personal attack. It is painful when you have been hurt, but to lash back is never a step toward reconciliation. There may be no more needed character quality in marriage than self-control. It is the constant willingness to critique your thoughts, edit your words, and restrain your behavior out of love for your spouse and love for what is right. Self-control means you simply won’t give yourself permission to get down and dirty. You will take the time that you need to be in a place where you can speak and act with love, wisdom, grace, and gentleness, and be committed to unity, understanding, and peace.
PLANTING GOOD SEEDS REQUIRES HELP
The memories of our very first garden are still alive and well in my brain. I was a garden novice; naïve in every way. I walked out to the chosen spot: rocky, hard, and untouched soil. All I was carrying were a few hand tools and a dream of vegetables to come. Was I ever in for a shock! My first dig with the shovel wasn’t really a dig at all. The shovel didn’t even penetrate the sod. It just slid across the surface and out of my hands. I moved a few feet and tried again, but that spot was just as hard. I went to look for a pickax. (What was I thinking?) Back at the future garden spot I took a mighty swing with the pickax and made a small hole, a hole not at all commensurate with the force I had exerted! Luella watched. I think she was trying her best not to laugh. My neighbors were probably enjoying the free entertainment while thinking, “He’ll learn.” The next garden tool I used was a phone! I called my brother-in-law to see if I could borrow his gas-powered, earth-eating rototiller. I had been humbled by the soil’s resolve, and I was ready to admit that I needed help.
If you are going to pull out the deeply rooted weeds of a selfish heart and plant new seeds of self-sacrificing love into the soil of your marriage, you need help. Your instincts of self-orientation are as sturdy as the sin that still remains there. When you combine this with the fact that you won’t always see yourself accurately because sin is deceitful, guess who it deceives first? You’ll have no trouble identifying the weaknesses and failures of your spouse, but you won’t see yours with equal clarity. All this is further complicated by artifacts of the self-righteousness that are still inside you. We all tend to be skilled self-swindlers, making ourselves feel good about what God says is not good.
I know you are like me. You want to think that the change that needs to take place in your marriage is being inhibited by your spouse. Yet, the reality is that all of us defend what we do and say, and all of us get in the way of what God is doing. Therefore, we all need more than the “hand tools” of spiritual gardening. The strength and wisdom we have in our hands does not have the power to break through the hard soil of wrong patterns so that new and better seeds can be planted. I don’t know if you face this fact or not, but here it is: if your marriage is ever going to be what it was designed to be, you need divine intervention. Let’s consider for a moment what that looks like.
Have you ever had a moment in your marriage when you didn’t know where to turn? You know that, as a couple, you are not in a good place, and you know you have tried to initiate change, but it either didn’t happen or didn’t last. You seemed to have tried everything; nothing has worked. Well, in Galatians 5 we are told where to look.
Listen to these words: “So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each other” (vv. 16–17 NIV).
I have said this and will continue to return to it throughout this book: the big battles in marriage are not the ones you fight with your spouse. No, the big battles are the ones being fought in your heart. All of the horizontal skirmishes between a husband and wife are the result of this deeper battle. Remember, there is still sin remaining in your heart, and the DNA of sin is selfishness. Since sin in its fundamental form is selfish, then sin is essentially antisocial. This means that you and I must recognize there is something that still lurks inside us that is destructive to marriage. It is important to notice that after Galatians calls us to a lifestyle of loving service, it turns to remind us of this ongoing, daily, moment-by-moment war.
If you are ever going to have a marriage of unity, understanding, and love, you have to be willing to fight daily, but not with your spouse. You need to be committed to fighting with yourself. You need to be committed to fighting against the powerful draw of your self-focus. You need to fight the instinct to indulge those boiling emotions and powerful cravings. You need to exegete your desires, corral your motives, critique your thoughts, and edit your words. You need to battle until your litany of “I wants” becomes a joyful list of “I would be glad to’s.”
Let me say it this way: the spiritual gardening that will make for a beautiful marriage (pulling and planting) must largely be done within your own heart. There are self-centered thoughts, attitudes, desires, motives, choices, and goals that must be uprooted from the soil of your heart, and new seeds of other-focused thoughts, attitudes, desires, motives, choices, and goals must be planted in their place. And you need to remember that this pulling and planting is not a one-time thing, but something that must become the lifestyle of your union.
But there is something even more powerful that the words I quoted above point you to. It is hope for your marriage and mine. The words above give us more than insight into the inner dynamics of the marriage struggle. They give us the best hope ever for our marriage, no matter what condition it is presently in. In fact, I am convinced that it points us to the only place where real hope for lasting transformation can be found. These words remind us of something that many husbands and wives are ignorant of or have forgotten along the way. Here is real hope. As you commit to the daily inner battle of pulling and planting, you are not alone! Right here, right now, wife, say it to yourself: “I am not alone!” Right here, right now, say it to yourself, husband: “I am not alone!”
God knows how big our struggle is. He knows how deep the war inside us runs. He knows how weak and blind we all can be. He knows how fickle our hearts can be. He knows how easily we lose our way. So, to help our marriage he didn’t just give us a set of principles; no, he gave us himself!
Immanuel has invaded your marriage with an initiative of warrior grace. He is not standing outside your marriage, giving you principles to live by and judging you if you don’t. No, he has literally gotten inside your heart, so he can battle for you at the very place where the war for marriage takes place—your heart. He knows that you and your spouse are not perfect. He knows that sin will again and again get in the way of what a marriage can and should be. He knows that rules, principles, and perspectives are not enough. He knows that your marriage needs more than information; it needs transformation, so he has taken residence inside you. This means that he battles with the dark instincts of sin that are still within you, even when you don’t!
If you are God’s children, then your marriage isn’t just a union of two; it is more accurately a union of three. Think about this: the same Spirit that now lives inside you, wife, also now lives inside your husband. His presence provides the best platform for marital unity and love that you could ever wish for. He brings you the wisdom and strength you need to be what you are supposed to be and to do what you have been called to do in your marriage. And his sweetest gift, in an agenda of grace, is that he daily rescues you from you, which is just what you need but are unable to do for yourself.
Hope for your marriage is not to be found in your spouse. No, it is to be found in that third invisible Person, who has made himself part of your union. He has come to you so that you would have everything you will ever need to pull what needs to be pulled and to plant what needs to be planted so that your marriage can be everything that God designed it to be.
ABLE TO GET UNSTUCK
Jodie and Wesley were stuck and very discouraged as a result. Jodie was a reader and made Wes a reader by proxy. She had dragged Wes’s brain through almost every marriage book that hit the shelves. Her bookcase was a museum of marriage hope that had turned yellow on the page. It wasn’t that they had a horrible marriage. There had been no adultery, and they weren’t in the heat of conflict all the time. But their marriage just wasn’t a marriage. They lived and parented together, but that was about the extent of their union. Their sexual relationship was the only barometer necessary to understand the weather of their marriage. Neither Jodie nor Wesley was able to remember for sure when they had last had sex. It wasn’t that they stopped suddenly. It wasn’t that one was refusing the other. It was that sex had long ago quit being tender, exciting, and satisfying. It felt as though they were having sex because they thought they were supposed to. Jodie said it was like being naked in the arms of a stranger, and Wes said that Jodie’s disinterest made it very hard for him to perform. What had become boring was now painful, so painful that they silently made a pact to stop (even though there never was an actual conversation about it).
The sexual relationship is a good barometer for every couple. The character and quality of the marriage relationship will determine the character and quality of their sexual union. You don’t leave disappointment and division at the bedside. You don’t escape misunderstanding and hurt simply because you are in one another’s arms. Because, in this most intimate of human relationships, you are actually physically disrobed and in the arms of another to whom you are offering your physical self, most if not all of the layers of self-protection are gone. You are in a place of exposure and vulnerability. This is what makes the sexual relationship so beautiful. You can be exposed and vulnerable in the arms of your lover and be unafraid, because you know he or she will care for you, and you know that the result will be mutual satisfaction.
But this was not at all the experience of Jodie and Wes. Jodie confidentially shared with one of her friends her dismay at the demise of her sexual life. Her friend suggested she read one of those Christian, “body-part,” sexual manuals, as if Jodie and Wes’s problem was that they didn’t know where stuff was and what it was designed to do. Pay attention to what I am about to say, because I think this applied not only to Jodie and Wes but to thousands of other couples as well. Jodie and Wes did not need a course in physiology; no, they needed a course in theology. They needed to know the truth about the struggle inside their own hearts, and they needed to know that hope was not to be found in principles alone but in the presence of the warrior Spirit living inside them.
Wes and Jodie weren’t stuck. They began to do the daily work of pulling and planting, and they learned to cry out in weakness and receive the strength they needed to go on. This didn’t mean that they instantly had a good marriage; they actually had a long road of change before them. But they were no longer pointing the finger at one another, they were no longer fighting against one another, and they were no longer giving way to discouragement and giving up. They were not only now facing the war within, but they were also helping each other to see where the battle was taking place and encouraging one another as they worked to fight it. And together they celebrated the fact that they were not alone as they began to pull the weeds of an old way and plant a garden of better things in their marriage. God hadn’t left them alone with only the hand tools of their own wisdom and strength; no, he had given the most powerful tool of transformation that they could ever have—himself. And he offers the same help to you!