When divorce rates are high and the surviving marriages around us seem broken, messy, and unhappy — and there are plenty of other good things to keep us busy — lots of young men and women in their twenties and thirties have basically given up on marriage.
With all the pain, failure, friction and same sex marriages sanctioned, it simply can’t be worth it, can it? Surely I can find other ways to enjoy love, companionship, and even the feeling of a family. That’s what Facebook is, right? There are other ways for me to be known and loved, and marriage really isn’t necessary for my happiness or significance here on earth.
That last sentence is true, but I fear my generation is missing some important things about what marriage really is and why it’s worth all the time, patience, and even heartache.
Lots of single people my age — myself included — need to be reminded that marriage is spectacular and needed, and that’s because it is God’s. The beauty of marriage far surpasses the functional, social, relational, and, yes, even the sexual benefits. For believers in Jesus, the importance and allure of matrimony ought to be deeply spiritual, missional, and eternal.
So twenty-something or thirty-something, don’t let worldly trends convince you marriage is a small and unnecessary accessory to the full and happy life. Before you pour yourself deeper and deeper into your career instead of pursuing a partner, consider your thoughts for your wedding is still something worth wanting.
Perhaps the greatest means God has given us, under the Holy Spirit, for making us more like himself are the people in our lives who love us enough to confront our patterns of selfishness, unhealthiness, and sin.
Marriage places that loving person with us in the same family, the same house, the same budget, and the same covenant promise. If God is unfailingly faithful to his promises, and the Spirit really is more powerful than our weaknesses, and we both truly want more of God, he’ll be using us to eradicate sin and cultivate righteousness in one another.
The husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. (Ephesians 5:23)
When God made the world, marriage was a good and productive part of his perfect creation. (Genesis 1:31) Marriages today, though flawed, are still carrying out, though imperfectly, the glorious purposes God gave them in the Garden.
It’s now more often viewed as simply a convenient social complement to a person’s other dreams and ambitions. And it’s regularly (and sadly) evaluated, and even ended, based on whether it’s serving our other aspirations. People are happy to be married if it’s making them happy and helping them accomplish their goals. If it gets difficult or slow or boring or requires more of us, we just withdraw, punish our spouse and kids directly or indirectly, and eventually get out and cut our losses.
Jesus is the point and power of any marriage. Marriages don’t survive for decades on comfort and self-fulfillment, at least not happily. Marriages endure and thrive on unchanging, selfless mutual commitment to one another.
Children are a miracle worth making, which means they are a miracle worth planning and sacrificing for. Future generations of men and women will run the world, the church, and your local neighborhood. Who will those future men and women be? What kinds of homes will they experience? What lessons will they learn at age four and twelve and fifteen? When will they hear about Jesus? Who will be the Christian examples in their lives? You can teach. You can mentor. You can support other parents too.
“Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.” (Ephesians 5:31–32)
Your Wedding Is Still Something Worth Wanting!
aaron@ugchristiannews.com
