4 Day by Day
I’ll never forget the moment. It was 1974, and Luella and I were on the first mezzanine level of the Forrest Theatre in Philadelphia. It was a packed house at the end of the play Godspell. It was no longer a theater audience. It was a celebration, a party. The reprise was being sung and played over and over. The air was filled with magic. The scene was electric. The doors were open, but no one was interested in leaving. The story of the gospel had, for a moment, transported us to another place. People grabbed the hands of people they didn’t know and would probably never see again. We danced and hugged and laughed. We were all taken beyond our fears and our self-interest. We were celebrating a victory that many of us didn’t really understand. We had seen Wisdom come to earth and transform fools into heroes.
In that once-in-a-lifetime moment we all sang the same song. We sang it over and over. No one in that room wanted that song to stop. The musicians smiled as they cranked it up even more. They knew they may not ever experience that again. It was as though they had a sense that they hadn’t made this happen either. Perhaps for the first time they understood what the production they had been part of for many months was all about.
We thought we had the best seats in the house. We could look down and see exuberance like we hadn’t seen before and probably wouldn’t see again until eternity. As Luella and I glanced at one another, we knew we didn’t need to say what we were thinking. We knew the other knew. Then, suddenly, my mind became freshly aware of the words we were singing, words that all humanity was meant to sing. Tears began to fill my eyes. “This is what we were made for, this is what the gospel is about, and this is what grace alone is able to do,” I thought, as I mouthed the words with the crowd, which had become my for-the-moment family:
Day by day
Day by day
Oh Dear Lord
Three things I pray
To see thee more clearly
Love thee more dearly
Follow thee more nearly
Day by day.
I don’t think it would be possible to have a more appropriate mission statement for a marriage. I am deeply convinced from Scripture, my own experience, and the stories of others that you fix a marriage vertically before you ever fix it horizontally. Before you can really gain significant ground in your relationship with your spouse, ground where real, lasting change takes place, you have to be willing to accept and deal with what God says about you, your spouse, your world, and God himself, his purpose, and his grace. These things aren’t just the focus of super-spiritual people who want marriage plus a whole lot of spirituality. No, dealing with these things in a way that forms a day-by-day lifestyle is the foundation of a marriage that is what God designed it to be and does what God intended it to do. You cannot avoid dealing with these things any more than you can avoid removing trees from the wooded lot where your new home is going to be located.
What we so joyously sang that night was much more than a song, although most of the crowd didn’t know it. It is rather a radical paradigm for a way of living that fills every day with honesty and hope. The things that the lyrics call you to are not one-time decisions; they are meant to be daily commitments that become regular ways of living. When the commitments and actions that follow are applied to marriage, something very simple but quite revolutionary happens, and once it does, you will never want to go back again!
BRICK BY BRICK
I performed the marriage, so I got the call. It is almost always made by the wife, and she is calling because she has actually been forced to face what, somewhere in the recesses of her mind, she knew to be true—she and her husband are sinners. The call is usually made a few days or weeks after the honeymoon. On the honeymoon the self-orientation of sin is overshadowed by exotic cuisine and gorgeous sites, but when the couple returns to real, everyday life, minus these distractions, they are forced to face who they really are and what their marriage is actually about.
I have always thought of this moment of reality recognition as a very positive thing, although the caller rarely does. Usually the wife is in a panic; she thinks she has made a mistake, she thinks their love is over, and she imagines she is going to live a life of loveless torment. But at this moment I think she is about to experience the good stuff that only honest marriage can experience. She is about to be taken beyond herself, and in being taken beyond herself she will abandon her dream, and in abandoning her dream she will pick up a better dream, and in picking up a better dream she will commit herself to a set of daily habits that will not only heal her marriage but make it something better than she ever conceived of. The problem is that none of this is what she expected.
Sara called me at 6:30 AM the day after the ceremony. I picked up the phone to these two words: “It’s over!” I knew it wasn’t over. In fact, I was happy that she was making the call so soon. I thought Sara and Ben were the smart kids in the class. They had gotten to the end of themselves quickly and were doing something very wise—reaching out for help. I was delighted to help, and I knew that the journey we were about to take together would change them and their marriage.
Here is what I have told couples again and again. It is what I have endeavored to live in my own marriage as well. The reconciliation of a marriage must be a lifestyle, not just the response you have when things go bad. Consider why this must be the case. If you are a sinner married to a sinner—and you are—then it is very dangerous and potentially destructive to allow yourself to coast as a couple. You simply will not live a day together where no act of thoughtlessness, self-interest, anger, arrogance, self-righteousness, bitterness, or disloyalty will rear its ugly head. Often it will be benign and low-level, but it will still be there.
Now, I want to introduce you to a theme that will come up again and again in this book: if you are going to have a marriage that lives in unity, understanding, and love, you must have a little-moment approach to your marriage. All this does is recognize the nature of the life God has designed for us. In his wisdom, God has crafted a life for us that does not careen from huge, consequential moment to huge, consequential moment. In fact, if you examine your life, you will see that you have actually had few of those moments. You can probably name only two or three life-changing situations you have lived through. We are all the same; the character and quality of our life is forged in little moments. Every day we lay little bricks on the foundation of what our life will be. The bricks of words said, the bricks of actions taken, the bricks of little decisions, the bricks of little thoughts, and the bricks of small-moment desires all work together to form the functional edifice that is your marriage. So, you have to view yourself as a marital mason. You are daily on the job adding another layer of bricks that will determine the shape of your marriage for days, weeks, and years to come.
Perhaps this is precisely the problem. It is the problem of perception. We just don’t tend to live life this way. We tend to fall into quasi-thoughtless routines and instinctive ways of doing things that are less self-conscious than they need to be. And we tend to back away from the significance of these little moments because they are little moments. You see, the opposite is true: little moments are significant because they are little moments. These are the moments that make up our lives. These are the moments that set up our future. These are the moments that shape our relationships. We must have a “day-by-day” approach to everything in our lives, and if we do, we will choose our bricks carefully and place them strategically.
Things don’t go bad in a marriage in an instant. The character of a marriage is not formed in one grand moment. Things in a marriage go bad progressively. Things become sweet and beautiful progressively. The development and deepening of the love in a marriage happens by things that are done daily; this is also true with the sad deterioration of a marriage. The problem is that we simply don’t pay attention, and because of this we allow ourselves to think, desire, say, and do things that we shouldn’t.
Let me play out this life of little-moment inattention for you. You squeeze and crinkle the toothpaste tube even though you know it bothers your spouse. You complain about the dirty dishes instead of putting them in the dishwasher. You fight for your own way in little things, rather than seeing them as an opportunity to serve. You allow yourself to go to bed irritated after a little disagreement. Day after day you leave for work without a moment of tenderness between you. You fight for your view of beauty rather than making your home a visual expression of the tastes of both of you. You allow yourself to do little rude things you would never have done in courtship. You quit asking for forgiveness in the little moments of wrong. You complain about how the other does little things, when it really doesn’t make any difference. You make little decisions without consultation.
You quit investing in the friendship intimacy of your marriage. You fight for your own way rather than for unity in little moments of disagreement. You complain about the other’s foibles and weaknesses. You fail to seize those openings to encourage. You quit searching for little avenues for expressing love. You begin to keep a record of little wrongs. You allow yourself to be irritated by what you once appreciated. You quit making sure that every day is punctuated with tenderness before sleep takes you away. You quit regularly expressing appreciation and respect. You allow your physical eyes and the eyes of your heart to wander. You swallow little hurts that you would have once discussed. You begin to turn little requests into regular demands. You quit taking care of yourself. You become willing to live with more silence and distance than you would have when you were approaching marriage. You quit working in those little moments to make your marriage better, and you begin to succumb to what is.
Why do we quit paying attention? Because it is hard work to care, it is hard work to discipline ourselves to be careful, and it is hard work to always be thinking of the other person. Now, be prepared to have your feelings hurt: you and I tend to want the other to work hard because that will make our lives easier, but we don’t really want to have to sign in for the hard work ourselves. Oh, I’m not done! I think there is an epidemic of marital laziness among us. We want to be able to coast and have things not only stay the same but get better. And I am absolutely persuaded that laziness is rooted in the self-centeredness of sin. We have already examined the antisocial danger of this thing inside us that the Bible calls sin. We have already considered that it turns us in on our- selves, but it does something else. It reduces us to marital passivity. We want the good things to come to us without the hard work of laying the daily bricks that will result in the good things. And we are often more focused on what the other is failing to do and more focused on waiting for him to get his act together than we are on our own commitment to doing whatever is daily necessary to make our marriages what God intended them to be.
You can have a good marriage, but you must understand that a good marriage is not a mysterious gift. No, it is, rather, a set of commitments that forges itself into a moment-by-moment lifestyle.
RECONCILIATION AS A LIFESTYLE:
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?
There is a very interesting passage in 2 Corinthians that provides a model for what this day-by-day lifestyle looks like.
For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again. So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (5:14–21 NIV)
This passage is a call to a particular way of thinking about and living in our relationship to God. What it calls us to in our relationship with God is a wonderful model for our relationship with one another in marriage. This is always true. The first great commandment always defines the second great commandment.
Paul understands that we have been reconciled to God by an act of his grace. He knew that there is no way for us to earn God’s love or deserve his favor but, having said that, he was also quick to remind us that reconciliation to God is both an event and a process. Notice the words of verse 20: “We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God.” Who is the “you” that Paul is addressing? (The “you” is not in the original, although it is surely implied.) The “you” is the Corinthian church. Now, maybe you’re thinking, “Paul, if these people are believers, haven’t they already been reconciled to God?” The answer is yes and no. Yes, they have been reconciled to God in the advent sense of God’s acceptance of them in Christ. But there is another reconciliation that is still going on. To the degree that we continue to live for ourselves (v. 15), to that degree we still need to be reconciled to God. Since, in some way, we live for ourselves every day, we need to be reconciled daily to God in confession and repentance. What a perfect model this is for our marriages!
Yes, you’ve already made that one-time decision to live in love with one another, but you don’t always live as if you have. To the degree that you daily, in some way, continue to live for yourself, to that degree you daily need to be reconciled to God and to one another. You don’t just coast along, hoping somehow, someway to avoid the bad stuff. No, you live with reconciliation intentionality. You live with humble hearts and eyes wide open. You are ready to listen and willing to hear. You examine and consider. You take on habits of reconciliation that become the daily lifestyle of your marriage. And you make those habits a regular part of your daily routine.
Sadly, I think there are few couples who actually live this way. How many couples do you know who say that their relationship is the best it has ever been and that it is getting better all the time? How many couples say that they are now experiencing a deeper level of unity, understanding, and love than they have ever known? How many couples say that their spouse is their deepest, closest, and most precious friend? These things are not like a romantic cloud that you happen to wander into. No, they are the rich, relational blessing of living the way God, who created marriage, intended us to live. They are not relational luxuries for the romantically inclined. No, they are the essentials of a truly healthy and happy marriage, one that not only makes you smile but makes God smile as well.
MARITAL RECONCILIATION AS A WAY
OF THINKING
I remember that as a young pastor (just a few years ago!) my brother Tedd said that 95 percent of what couples need to know, understand, and do is clearly written in the Bibles that they say they hold dear. When he said it, I thought it was a huge exaggeration by a frustrated pastor who just happened to be my brother, but I have come to see the accuracy and insight in what he said. There is no collection of wisdom principles more stunningly insightful than what can be found in the pages of Scripture. Of course this would be true, since the book was written by the hands of men who were guided to write what they wrote by the one who created everything about which they wrote. It is only the Creator who could have such a powerfully insightful and practically transformational origin-to-destiny perspective as the one found in the Bible. Only he is able to have a perspective not limited by time and space and the bias of sin. Only he is able to speak from the vantage point of creation intention. Who could possibly know more about the world he created and the people he designed?
God’s Word really does open up to us the mysteries of the universe. It really does make us wiser than we could possibly ever be without it. Yet, having said all this, it is important to reflect on how sad it is that we don’t take more advantage of the wisdom God has given us. It is sad that we don’t think his thoughts after him. It is sad that we don’t require ourselves to look at life always through the lens of his wisdom. It is sad that we swindle ourselves into thinking that we are wiser than we are. It is sad that we aren’t more irritated by our foolishness and more motivated to seek his wisdom.
Why have I reminded you of all this? Because the marriage reconciliation lifestyle, which is the focus of this book, is rooted in three essential wisdom perspectives that together must become the mentality of a healthy marriage. Let me lay these out for you.
1) You must live in your marriage with a harvest mentality. Paul captures this mentality with these very familiar words: “Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap” (Gal. 6:7). If you are ever going to live with daily awareness of little-moment needs that propel you to live with habits of reconciliation, you have to carry this mentality around with you. You have to buy into the principle of consequences. Here it is: there is an organic relationship between the seeds you plant and the fruit you harvest. In the physical world you will never plant peach pits and get apples. If you plant peach pits and get apples, run fast and run long, because something has happened to the universe! In the same way, there will be organic consistency between the seeds of words and actions that you plant in your marriage and the harvest of a certain quality of relationship that you will experience as you live with one another. Every day you harvest relational plants that have come from the seeds of words and actions that you previously planted. And every day you plant seeds of words and actions that you will one day harvest. Most of the seeds you plant will be small, but one thousand small seeds that grow up into trees will result in an environment-changing forest.
2) You must live in your marriage with an investment mentality. We are all treasure hunters. We all live to gain, maintain, keep, and enjoy things that are valuable to us. Our behavior in any given situation of life is our attempt to get what is valuable to us out of that situation. There are things in your life that you have assigned importance to, and once you have, you are no longer willing to live without them. (These principles are laid out in Matt. 6:19–33.) Everyone does it. We live to possess and experience the things upon which we have set our hearts. We are always living for some kind of treasure.
Every treasure you set your heart on and actively seek will give you some kind of return. An argumentative moment is an investment in the treasure of being right, and from it you will get some kind of relational return. If you aggressively argue your spouse into a corner, it is not likely that the return on that investment will be her appreciation for you and a desire to have one of those conversations again! If you invest in the treasure of willing service, you will experience the return of appreciation, respect, and a greater friendship intimacy in your marriage. If it is more valuable to have your house immaculately clean than it is for your partner to be comfortable, then you will live with the return of that in the quality of your relationship.
Investment is inescapable; you do it every day, and you are seldom able to escape the return on the investments you have made. Ask yourself, “What are the things that are valuable to me right now, the things I work to experience every day and am unwilling to live without? And how is the return on those investments shaping my marriage?”
3) You must live in your marriage with a grace mentality. When I got married, I didn’t understand grace. I had a principle-istic view of Scripture that caused me to bring a law economy into my marriage. The central focus of the Bible is not a set of practical-life principles. No, the central theme of the Bible is a person, Christ. If all you and I had needed was a knowledge and understanding of a certain set of God-revealed principles for living, Jesus would not have needed to come. I think there are many Christians living in Christless marriages. Without knowing what they have done, they have constructed a law-based rather than a grace-based marriage, and because of this, they are asking the law to do what only grace can accomplish.
The problem with this is that we are not just people in need of wisdom; we are also people in need of rescue, and the thing that we need to be rescued from is us. Our fundamental problem is not ignorance of what is right. Our problem is selfishness of heart that causes us to care more about what we want than about what is right. The laws, principles, and perspectives of Scripture provide the best standard ever for our marriages to quest for. They can reveal our wrongs and failures, but they have no capacity whatsoever to deliver us from them. For that we need the daily grace that only Jesus can give us.
So, we must not simply hold one another to the high relational standards of God’s Word, but we must also daily offer the same grace that we have been given to one another so that we may be tools of grace in the lives of one another. Our confidence is not in the ability we have to keep God’s law but rather in the life-giving and heart-transforming grace of the one who has drawn us to himself and has the power to draw us to one another. When we live with this confidence, we look at the difficulties of marriage not so much as hassles to be endured but as opportunities to enter into an even deeper experience of the rescuing, transforming, forgiving, empowering grace of the one who died for us and is always with us.
Three mentalities—each an essential building block of a reconciliation lifestyle, each requiring the honesty of personal humility, and each encouraging us to be reconciled to one another and to God again and again, and again.
DAILY COMMITMENTS OF A RECONCILIATION LIFESTYLE
You can have a marriage that is mutually satisfying while being honoring to God. You really can! Accepting who you are, resting in who God is, and living as he calls you to live will produce a harvest that is far better than the small-vision dreams that you are able to come up with on your own.
Here are the daily commitments that become the daily habits of the kind of marriage that God’s design intended and his grace can make possible.
1) We will give ourselves to a regular lifestyle of confession and forgiveness. We will come clean and deal honestly with our sin, weakness, and failure. There is only one way that a marriage grows. There is only one way that a marriage changes. There is only one way for your marriage to be what God designed and has enabled it to be. What is this one way? Confession and forgiveness. It is only when we commit ourselves to daily patterns of humble confession, coupled with the willingness to quickly and completely forgive, that a marriage can exceed our limited expectations.
These two things always need to be held together. Regular patterns of forgiveness give us the courage to continue to confess, and regular patterns of confession allow us to experience the joy of the restoration of forgiveness. Why is this so hard for us? Why is this not a regular pattern in every marriage? What will this actually look like in the business of daily living?
2) We will make growth and change our agenda. We will pull weeds. You would tend to think that dissatisfaction is the enemy of marriage, but, in fact, the opposite is true. As sinners, we have the perverse ability to be all too easily satisfied. We tend to be willing to live with a human second-best that falls tragically short of God’s wise and beautiful plan. We tend to settle for marital détente instead of striving for real love. We tend to be satisfied with low-grade bitterness and disappointment rather than working toward a pattern of real confession and forgiveness. We tend to settle for a relationship that is all about negotiating rights instead of one that loves to give and to serve.
What does it look like to commit to daily change? How do you go about identifying weeds of wrong that need to be uprooted? How do you know for sure what needs to be planted in their place? How can you work to make dissatisfaction a good thing, something that actually deepens your love and the functional quality of your marriage? How do you keep from being stuck in patterns that fall way short of God’s plan and fail to rely on the resources of God’s grace?
3) We will work together to build a sturdy bond of trust. Trusting and entrusting, we will build a strong foundation. We simply cannot have a healthy, God-honoring, mutually satisfying marriage without trust. In a fallen world, trust is the fine china of a relationship. It is beautiful when it is there, but it is surely delicate and breakable. When trust is broken, it can be very hard to repair. It is trust that allows a husband and wife to face all the internal and external threats to their unity, love, and understanding. It is trust that allows couples to weather the differences and discouragements that every marriage faces. It is trust that allows couples to talk with honesty and hope about the most personal and difficult things.
There are two sides to trust. First, you must do everything you can to prove yourself trustworthy. Second, you must make the decision to entrust yourself into your spouse’s care. What does it look like to engender a marriage where trust thrives? What does it look like to rebuild trust when it has been shattered? What are the characteristics of a relationship where trust is the glue?
4) We will commit to building a relationship of love. We will incarnate Christ’s love. I sit in the balcony of my church on Sunday mornings and look down on the crowd, and I wonder how many of the couples are living in loveless marriages. You may be shocked at this, but I am convinced there are many marriages devoid of real love. Yes, there may be some respect and appreciation, and, yes, the couples may have learned how to avoid daily battles. They may enjoy doing things with one another every once in awhile, but the practical and personal sacrifices that define love are simply not there.
These couples do not respond with mercy and grace in the face of one another’s weakness and failure. They don’t willingly sacrifice their agenda and their comfort for the good of the other. They don’t look for ways to help and encourage. They don’t jump in and help the other bear the burdens of life in this fallen world. What does real love in marriage look like? What are the daily sacrifices that love makes? What does it mean to respond to your spouse with mercy? What does it mean practically to be willing to lay down your life for another person? What are the characteristics of a loving marriage?
5) We will deal with our differences with appreciation and grace. Celebrating the Creator, we will face our differences with hope. God places lilies next to rocks. He places trees next to streams. He causes bright sun to follow a dark night. He made the muscles of a lion and the delicacy of the wing of a hummingbird. One way God establishes beauty is by putting things that are different next to each other. Isn’t this exactly what God does in marriage? He puts very different people next to each other. This is how he establishes the beauty of a marriage. The moon would not be so striking if it hung in a white sky; in the same way, the striking beauty of a marriage is when two very different people learn to celebrate and benefit from their differences and to be protected from their weaknesses by being sheltered by the other’s strength.
6) We will work to protect our marriage. Watching and praying, we will work to protect our relationship. There are few things more dangerous to a marriage than the feeling of “arrival.” When a couple loses a healthy sense of need, patterns of laziness and inattention grow. No longer does the couple carry around the sense of the enormity of the task they have undertaken. No longer do they live with a shared sense of need for God’s help and protection. No longer are they looking down the road for potential difficulties that may threaten their union. No longer is their marriage protected by humble prayer.
Every marriage requires divine intervention. Every marriage needs divine wisdom. Every couple will be pushed beyond the limits of their character. Every couple will need strength beyond what they have. No husband and wife can do what they were designed to do in marriage without assistance. One of the beautiful things that marriage is meant to do is drive each of us away from habits of self-reliance into patterns of dependency on God. What does it mean to have “watch and pray” patterns in your marriage? How should a couple measure their potential? How do we recognize signs of impending marriage danger? What role does prayer play in a healthy marriage?
These are the six commitments of a healthy marriage, and with practice they become daily habits. These define how you admit your daily need and make reconciliation the moment-by-moment lifestyle of your relationship. There are few things sweeter and more beautiful than a long-term marriage of unity, understanding, and love. There are few things more deeply discouraging and personally hurtful than a marriage of distance, coldness, and conflict. There are few things sadder than couples who settle for survival, or choose to coast, or stay together but have essentially given up on one another.
A BETTER WAY
It doesn’t happen very often, but this was one of those occasions. I cried as I listened to their story. The tension in the room was unbelievable. It was impossible for Chad and Mary to speak to and about one another without anger. Sitting far across the couch from Chad, Mary never did stop crying. She was hurt, but she carried in the file cabinet of her mind a detailed record of wrongs that only deepened her pain. Chad was clearly a man who had had enough. The amazing thing was that there had been no unfaithfulness, there had been no angry violence between them, and there had been no decisive moments of disagreement. Chad and Mary had simply quit working on their marriage. They had quit paying attention. They had none of the habits that this book will consider. This marriage of discouragement and acrimony was formed in a thousand little, mundane, almost unnoticeable moments.
Neither one wanted to be married anymore. They both dreaded getting up in the morning and facing another day. They both pointed their fingers and maintained their self-serving list of offenses. There was a time when they had adored one another, but that time seemed like ancient history. There was no peace now, let alone affection. But I was not without hope, because Chad and Mary had finally made a good choice. They had reached out for help. I knew God cared, and I knew he would never turn a deaf ear to their cries for help. Sure, there was a long way to go, but we would go it together and experience the fresh start that God has made possible in his Son, the Lord Jesus.
What about you? Maybe you haven’t gotten to the place of Mary and Chad, but perhaps in your heart you know that things in your marriage are not what they should be. You know that you have settled for less instead of working for more. You know that in little moments things are said and done that do not draw you together nor deepen your love. You know there are places where you are disappointed. You know there are times when you wish things could be better. You know there are ways in which you feel stuck. You’re not sure how change can take place, but you wish it would.
I invite you to sit down with me, as Chad and Mary did. Let me hold in front of your marriage the most accurate mirror ever made—the Bible. Let me help you see with new eyes and hear with new ears. Let me invite you to open your heart and humbly reach out your hands for help. Let me encourage you not to be satisfied but to be needy and hungry. I don’t know for sure what you expected your marriage to be, but I can tell you for sure that whatever it now is, it can be better. God welcomes us all to a lifestyle of reconciling grace, where problems are faced and change really does take place and where we no longer repeat the same mistakes again and again. Sit down. Take time. God is with you, and he has something better.