God has designed marriage for a specific purpose and with a powerful end in mind. Marriage was created to mimic something—to reflect something. It's not appeasement for your hormones or a means for comfort. Marriage is a covenant.
It is my strong conviction that the main reason why so many marriages end in divorce is a universal misunderstanding of the purpose of marriage. I truly believe that the real purpose of marriage has been largely unknown to the church for millennia. Ask any Christian to describe the purpose of marriage according to the Bible, and most will not know the correct answer. This is a big problem!
Creating men and women of God who will be faithful to their vows is a process grounded in a simple understanding of Why? Why did God create marriage? Why even get married? Is marriage just a social or religious construct? What did God intend to accomplish by instituting marriage? If you can answer these questions and have the answers written on your heart, there will be nothing you want more than to be faithful and true to one person for the rest of your life. The temptations of lust and adultery are obliterated by the simple revelation of what marriage was created for.
The key here is purpose. Understanding the purpose of something is what stops one from abusing its power. Adultery, fornication, lust, pornography, and even homosexuality are all abuses of a power that God gave to humankind—the power to love and be loved. The power of intimacy that can be created between a man and woman is extremely powerful. But misdirect, misunderstand, or abuse that power, and you jeopardize intimacy altogether. Relationships are ultimately destroyed by a simple misunderstanding of the purpose of love, sex, and marriage.
Most couples who enter into an intimate relationship with each other do so for mostly self-centered reasons. Most people love for what they can get out of it—for their own selfish motives and intentions. This isn't love at all. Love is most often reduced to merely a feeling or euphoric experience. This is only self-centeredness disguised as love.
Again, we return to the concept of purpose. Misunderstanding of purpose causes power to be abused. We see this abuse and its ramifications take place in relationships and marriages all over the world. Most people in the world get married because they're in love with the feelings of infatuation they get out of it, not because they truly love the person as Christ does.
People feel validated by the affection they receive and so continue to show affection only until they stop receiving it. And once they stop receiving, what reason do they have to continue giving? After all, they don't get anything out of it anymore. It's an endless cycle of selfishness rooted in a misunderstanding of purpose. Love has nothing to do with what you get. It's about Who you represent when you give. Yes, in giving you receive, but receiving is never to motivate giving.
Giving only to receive something in return is an extremely unstable and harmful way to live. We're called to love because God is love, and we're here to model that love in the same selflessness that Jesus demonstrated. Ultimately, all the love we need should be coming directly from Christ so that His love is the supply and reservoir from which we give. If we give from what we receive from Him, we'll never grow weary, and we'll never feel unloved.
I hope that after you read this book, everything you thought you knew about marriage will be completely overturned. Marriage is a big deal. It's not just another romantic gesture or tradition. It's not a contract that you sign and a ring you put on your finger. It's not just a slightly more formal promise to the person you say you love. Marriage has a purpose. It has a purpose that most people, including Christians, are ignorant of. No wonder why so many marriages end in divorce.
Here's the bottom line: Marriage is about learning how to love. Marriage itself is an expression of love, but marriage alone doesn't teach you how to love. Why? Because love is not a lesson you learn—it's Someone you know. God is love. Jesus is the embodiment of love. And He's the One who created marriage in the first place. Hence, Jesus is the only One who can teach you how to truly love someone. And you don't need to be married to know about love. If you know Jesus intimately, you know love, and therefore, you know more about marriage than most people.
Marriage is not about learning how to get along with your spouse and somehow find a way to stay attracted to them. In a sense, marriage is an outlet for the love you receive and learn from Christ. Marriage is a way to apply and practice a lifestyle of self-sacrifice, ultimately for the purpose of shaping you to become more like Jesus. Marriage tests your character, and so refines you. But it cannot teach you love. You learn love from none other than Jesus Christ.
Marriage is about God giving you the opportunity to mirror His heart to the world around you. God wanted a way to reveal His own love to His creation and make it tangible. So, He created marriage. God took a man and a woman and joined the two together. Thus, He created a model of His own love that we could see and experience. The man and the woman in a marriage both play a role in God's plan to make marriage a picture of His love. Both the man and the woman must know their part and its purpose if their marriage is going to function the way it was designed to.
Purpose must be established. The number of people in the world today who are choosing not to get married is rapidly increasing. Marriage has altogether lost its sacredness in modern society. Due to ignorance of the purpose of marriage, people are simply choosing not to get married. People are beginning to think that marriage is just another tradition—a conservative, social construct with no other purpose than to make a relationship “official.” To the vast majority of people, marriage has become another formality with roots in seemingly meaningless tradition. The world is simply ignorant of why marriage was instituted in the first place.
You may be one of those people who simply don't know why the institution of marriage even exists. You should know that Genesis is the reason why we have such a thing as wedding ceremonies. God instituted marriage in the Garden of Eden about 6000 years ago at the beginning of the creation of humankind. All marriage traditions from around the world stem from the original “ceremony,” so to speak, involving Adam and Eve. Although every culture has varying rituals for marriage ceremonies, all are rooted in the original institution of marriage. For some peculiar reason, cultures universally seem to recognize the importance of a formal, public declaration of the union between a man and woman. It's almost as though marriage comes preprogrammed into our nature.
God made us this way for a reason. He's trying to show us something! There's a great mystery hidden in marriage that God wants to reveal to us (Ephesians 5:32), but we must search it out (Proverbs 25:2). If you want to know about this mystery, read through this book with your full attention. God is about to show you something about marriage that you may have never seen before!
Reflection Questions
- In your own words, how would you define the purpose of marriage?
- Why are healthy marriages so essential to the prosperity of any society?
- Why can't marriage ultimately teach you how to love?