The following discussion was generated from 2 questions asked about marriage. It reads like a personal response because it is but has been edited to remove any personal information and I have tried to make it fit both the needs of a husband and a wife.
What are the benefits of marriage? What can a husband and wife expect from each other in marriage?
The first question should be: What is God’s purpose for marriage? The answer is: to meet man’s need for companionship because we are not designed to be alone. “Not good for man to be alone” Gen 2:18. As unbelievers, we marry to meet our own needs for a partner. If it doesn’t work out the way we want, we move on an try again with someone else. This is what we see the world doing and rightly so, they have no divine motives working in them to move them to self sacrifice.
The benefits are related to who you marry and what they have to offer. From the divine view, marriage is about giving more than getting. It is about seeing where we need to change more than the other person changing to meet our expectations. Marriage reveals our old man beliefs through our discontentment even when we are being wronged. Imagine if Jesus had gotten married to someone who gave very little and did many wrong things. Do you think He would have left it, complained about it, tried to change the other person? The answer is no, but he had no earthly, human expectations to fulfill, only pleasing God motivated Him.
When we are discontent with what our mate gives us, it shows where we have formed a human image we want to fulfill that they fail to live up to. The image may even be a right one or contain much good but we have no guarantees that it will be fulfilled. Even in extreme situations, our internal image is our own, not something God promised to give us. Even when your image is simply a normal life with a normal partner and children, the image is still our own and not something God promised to give us.
For Christians, marriage is a picture of Christ and the church and the ultimate completion for us is to give to God what the roles require. Christian marriage is a ministry for God’s sake where both parties fulfill the biblical roles and in doing so, form the image of Christ and the church to teach angels and man, the relationship God desires with all mankind. We get very confused about this and think marriage is about getting something for self instead of giving self to God. For believers contentment in marriage can only be found when we discover this truth and give our self to God for His use. He gives us the inner peace and contentment in spite of what our mates give us and this is the primary way happiness can be found in marriage.
Now, having said this and painted the picture of self sacrifice so that we can selflessly give self to God by being the loving husband or the submissive wife to a man who doesn’t do his part very well, none of us are there and able to give what God needs from us. We are all programmed to want something for self and expect our mate to love us, sacrifice for us and fulfill the image we have for them. How do we ever become the person who can forgo what we want and give our self fully to form this image of Christ and the church? That is where taking off the old man beliefs comes into view and reveals that my unfulfilled desires must be given to God, not to our mate, even when our complaints are legit. You see our mate is also programmed with old man beliefs, different ones too and they drive him/her in a different direction. We can’t sacrifice self to fulfill God’s design of living out the roles and forming the picture of Christ/church because we are driven to fulfill the image we formed in our minds about our life. Very seldom do 2 people’s inner images match up driving them in the same direction. This cause us to be unhappy with what the other gives in marriage.
If we were free of our old man image of marriage, we would be free to give our self fully to God and it wouldn’t matter what our mate did or didn’t do, we would still do our part for God. He would meet the deep needs of our souls and we could wait on our mate to grow and be able to do their part for God and make marriage good. But we are not free, we are enslaved to what we want and so we demand that the other give what we want. We express our unhappiness trying to drive them to be what we want but it never helps, only drives them away. Gaining freedom from our old ideas that create our wants is the only way to find happiness and contentment in this life. God has made a way for us to be free from the old thinking we bring into the Christian life, called Transformation. We exchange our old beliefs for the same beliefs Jesus used in His humanity.
Bottom line, for unbelievers marriage is to meet the need for companionship and if it doesn’t, we move on and try again. For believers, it is to form a picture of Christ and the church as a sacrificial ministry for God. He wants us to give our wants up and replace them with the desire to please Him. If we are to fulfill God’s desire for us will depend on if we are willing to let go of the image we all form of what marriage should give to us, even the legit images that our mate can’t give to us or wont give to us. The only way to make Christian marriage what God wants it to be is to give up the old man image, even the right things in it., This will enable us to embrace His ideas which give us the capacity to give self fully to God for His purposes. If we refuse to let go of our inner image and continue to demand our mate live up to it, it can never be what God wants from it and will never be what we want from it either. If we relinquish our old view of what it should be, we find contentment in pleasing God and fulfilling the ministry of forming our side of the Christ/church picture.
You ask what should both parties expect from the other in marriage? The answer is nothing. We have no real basis to expect that the person we marry will live up to the roles described in the bible. If we are wise in our choice of a mate, then we might get part of what we want and expect but never all of it. The image in our mind of marriage was formed from our parent’s marriage and from other influences along the way, even legit ideas. Often we will hold a biblical view of marriage, learned in church and expect our mate to fulfill this image. The problem is that all of us are damaged inside and driven to please the dictates and principles of our original family. We all try to recreate our family of origin whether it was good or bad. It was where we drew our first images of how marriage should work and to us it is what normal is. We begin marriage expecting our mate to live up to the image in our head but none of us can do that. Even if the image is biblical, and maybe especially if it is biblical. All of us have an old system of beliefs that dominate us in the subconscious and until we disassemble it and lay it aside, we are controlled by it. All of these beliefs are self centered and self serving, formed while spiritually dead and separated from God, under the control of the sin nature. The image we form for marriage is also self centered, self serving, driven by our sin nature and formed apart from God’s input. His image for marriage is self sacrifice for His sake. Our image is self serving for our own sake.
The real answer to the marriage dilemma is to disassemble and lay aside our human agenda and replace it with the eternal, divine agenda. This solves all problems in life and resolves all conflicts. It enable us to forgive all failures by our mate and give compassion for the inner turmoil they faced from trying to please us while driven from within by their false beliefs. Much of what we want is legit, but we expect it and demand it from them and we drive them to give it and in doing so we kill the love that we began with. Our image is selfish even if the image is composed of right things and the mutual selfishness is what drives us apart.
Many of us have been disappointed by what has gone on in our marriage. Yet, from the divine perspective, it is all that was possible from the man or woman you married. It was all he/she had to give and their inner program was put in place for by his parents and family. Unless they are willing to see it and lay it aside, he/she can never be any better, he/she is unable to do better than the program in his old beliefs, nor are you. As long as we come at each other with the old program, even when it is legit, we can never find contentment in marriage. As believers, it is the laying aside of the old way and embracing of God’s way of self sacrifice and giving that makes it good for each other. I hope you both are willing to do the work to lay aside the old self and put on the new self, created in the image of the one creating him.
