It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Both of you believe in Jesus as your savior and both of you have committed to counseling at the first sign of trouble. Yet trouble has slowly worked its way into your marriage and no amount of counseling, late night talks, prayer, or repentance has arrested its advance. Apart from God’s miraculous intervention, your marriage will consistently and persistently challenge you. How can you love your broken marriage?
Repent of False Ideals
Few of us think of ourselves as naïve when we enter marriage. Many of us grew up in broken homes and the rest of us witnessed the breakdown of marriages from afar. If anything, we tend to be cynical. But we also have false ideals that create unreasonable expectations for our marriages. We use formulas, like date nights, open communication, and working through fights, that we think will result in a happy marriage. Wash, rinse, repeat. A lot of times these formulas are attempts to replicate the heaven or repudiate the hell that was our childhoods.
We know we have encountered a false ideal when we grow bitter in the face of unexpected or intractable problems. My wife and I had plenty of formulas for a successful marriage, yet we fought for 14 years over who should clean the pots—and behind that fight were deeper feelings of bitterness at unmet expectations. How have you replaced the heaven of God for unearthly expectations for marriage?
Adjust Your Expectations
We should expect good things from our marriage—faithfulness, physical and emotional intimacy, growth, companionship…and hardship. We don’t check our sin at the door of our marriages. Instead, we either hide it or have it exposed by true intimacy with our spouses. The futile attempt to hide sin keeps marriages from forming deep roots and will ultimately result in deep divisions. The exposure of sin will inevitably result in conflict.
This exposure and the collision of two sinners in marriage is not the exception, but the point. Marriage is meant to sanctify us, by God’s grace (1 Cor. 7:12–16). The Lord loves us so much that he does not leave our sin alone. He will uproot it—and he often equips our spouses with a shovel. In the Army, we often think of our physical training as “Oooh, it hurts so good.” We should think of our marriages the same way. Through conviction, repentance, and forgiveness—all secured in God’s love for us in Christ Jesus—we grow in grace and holiness.
Seek Out Beauty
Even in the hardest of seasons, marriage is imbued with beauty. When our hearts become hardened through sin and suffering, we often lose sight of such beauty. But that beauty calls to us! When I have been tempted to bitterness toward my wife, precious memories spring to life—sharing a bottle of wine before an expansive vista just before I deployed, her excitement when our kids accomplish something, laughter so hard it results in tears. Just as the Lord instructs us to remember his works and his ways in Scripture, he enables us to remember his common gifts in our lives.
But it is not just reflections on the past that help us to see beauty. Behind secondary emotions, like anger, there are primary emotions, like loneliness. And in those primary emotions, we see both the gaping brokenness of this world and a hunger for love and beauty. Behind the veil of brokenness, there is beauty. The very things that make our marriages hard can draw our eyes back to the garden we forfeited in our sin, and the eternal garden that awaits us in Christ.
Remember Your First Love
“Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord…Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church…” (Eph. 5:22, 25). Our marriages are reflections of the deepest of loves, that of the triune God for his people. When we consider the love of God for us in Christ Jesus, we see a love that pursues, redeems, and transforms sinners. It is a love that keeps no record of wrongs because those wrongs were nailed to the cross of Christ Jesus.
If the Lord God loves us so, we are given no room to nurse grudges or resent hard providences. We first love our spouses—not for their sake—but because the Lord first loved us. Our love is not conditioned by the quality of our spouses’ love but on the quality of our savior’s love. Even if our spouses rebel and recoil against us, we have an example of cross-borne love before us. Even if our marriages feel irredeemably broken, we can find endless comfort in a God who didn’t feel the same about us.
