When it comes to resisting temptations to sin, there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy. Temptations arrive in many ways at many times, and the Bible gives many different strategies to defeat them.

But we can notice one fundamental similarity in all the temptations we face, a dimension that’s always present in satanic deception. Remembering this similarity will help us in the fight, whatever resistance strategy we implement.

To help us see this unifying theme in temptation, let’s examine history’s most remarkable example — the devil’s temptation of Jesus. This scene illustrates Satan’s core strategy, how Jesus kept his head clear, and how we can imitate Jesus’s example.

Anatomy of Temptation

Matthew, Mark, and Luke all record Jesus being tempted by the devil at the beginning of his ministry, but Matthew’s account provides the most details. He describes three specific temptations and Jesus’s response to each (Matthew 4:1–11).

Theologians down through history have pointed out that there’s a lot going in this particular temptation from historical and theological standpoints, but I’m not going to address those topics here. Instead, my goal is simply to identify a specific dimension common in all of Satan’s temptations.

Dialogue with the Devil

To begin, after Jesus fasts for forty days, the devil seeks to take advantage of his physical weakness and severe hunger.

Devil: “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” (verse 3)

Jesus: “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” (verse 4, quoting Deuteronomy 8:3)

Then, from the pinnacle of the temple, the devil seeks to take advantage of Jesus’s faith in a scriptural promise.

Devil: “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.’” (verse 6, quoting Psalm 91:11–12)

Jesus: “Again it is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’” (verse 7, quoting Deuteronomy 6:16)

Finally, after showing Jesus “all the kingdoms of the world and their glory” (verse 8), the devil seeks to take advantage of Jesus’s promised exaltation.

Devil: “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” (verse 9)

Jesus: “Be gone, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.’” (verse 10, quoting from Deuteronomy 6:16)

Three Essential Elements

Notice that the three temptations have three elements in common.

First, the devil sought to narrow Jesus’s focus specifically on each tempting proposition, so that Jesus would view each in a distorted context and therefore experience them as disproportionately compelling. More on this in a moment.

Second, each temptation promises both explicit and implicit rewards. I will paraphrase some that I discern, as if spoken by the tempter:

Bread: Jesus, if you miraculously create bread, it will relieve your starving agony and, more importantly, validate your claim to divinity.
Jump: If you demonstrate the truth of this audacious promise in the sight of all those witnesses down there, you will glorify both the trustworthiness of God’s word and the trustworthiness of your claim as God’s Son.
Worship: Since it is in my power, if you will bow to me, I will make sure that every knee will bow and every tongue will confess your lordship.

Third, each tempting proposition makes implicit threats. Again, I’ll paraphrase some that I discern:

Bread: If you’re unwilling to miraculously create bread, doesn’t it indicate your inability to do so? You’re no Moses, much less the Prophet, much less the Son of God. You’re just another self-deluded “messiah” — and you know what happens to frauds.
Jump: If you’re unwilling to demonstrate the truth of these promises, doesn’t it indicate that you don’t really believe them? You’re no Son of God. You’re just like every other hypocritical rabbi: teach, teach, teach, but you won’t risk your life to prove God’s word is true — and you know what happens to hypocrites.
Worship: The road you’re on is more than risky; it’s doomed. If you don’t bow to me, you will die. And I will make sure it is unspeakably horrible.

Satan’s Core Strategy

This dissection of Jesus’s temptation experience helps us examine not only the devil’s specific strategy with Jesus, but the core strategy he employs in every temptation.

“Jesus was not ignorant of the universal diabolical dimension of temptation: to disorient, distort, and deceive.”

What was the devil trying to do? Essentially, he was seeking to do with Jesus what he did with Adam and Eve and what he does with each of us: disorient Jesus’s perception of reality, so he could distort Jesus’s perception of reality and deceive Jesus into believing a false story about reality.

See if this doesn’t sound familiar. Satan comes when Jesus is in a weakened state — we humans are more easily disoriented when we’re physically, emotionally, psychologically weak. Think about how differently you’re prone to respond to various pressures when you’re weak, rather than when you’re strong and refreshed.

Then he poses to Jesus propositions that put a distorted twist on truth. The devil wove plenty of truth into his presentation of a false reality. Was it inherently sinful for Jesus to desire to satisfy his hunger? No. Was it inherently sinful for Jesus to demonstrate his sonship through miraculously making bread? No — he did this very thing later when he fed the five thousand (Matthew 14:13–21). Was it inherently sinful for Jesus to put his faith in a specific promise of Scripture? No. Was it inherently sinful for Jesus (in particular) to long to be highly exalted and for every knee to bow and tongue to confess his lordship? No (see Philippians 2:9–11).

All of these, given the right context, were good and righteous. What made the devil’s propositions evil was their distorted context. And I think it required more resolve from Jesus’s human nature to resist than we might at first assume.

Jesus Resists

But resist he did. How? One way to describe it is that he skillfully used the armor of God against the schemes of the devil (Ephesians 6:11). In Jesus’s responses, we see him lifting the “shield of faith” and wielding the “sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God” (Ephesians 6:16–17).

Another way to describe it is that Jesus was “not ignorant of [Satan’s] designs” and therefore refused to be “outwitted” by him (2 Corinthians 2:11). Jesus was not ignorant of the universal diabolical dimension of temptation: to disorient, distort, and deceive. So he had his antennae up; he was anticipating it. And when it came, he expected it to sound appealing and appear life-giving, when in reality “its end is the way the death” (Proverbs 14:12).

“The devil tempted Jesus to see himself in a different story.”

The devil tempted Jesus to see himself in a different story, one he implied would be better if Jesus took matters into his own hands. Jesus discerned the insidious temptations by remembering the Real Story he was in, which is what his Scripture quotes reveal. He had come to undo the curse of the fall — the catastrophic result of the first Adam believing a perverted story — by doing only what he saw his Father doing (John 5:19).

Remember the Story You’re In

That is the crucial application point I want to draw from Jesus’s temptation: remember the story you’re in. All of us tend to respond to tempting desires or fears based on the narrative of reality we believe (or want to believe) at the moment. What will lead to more joy or less misery, according to the story we’re believing? If we allow ourselves to be disoriented and sold a distorted bill of goods, and if we then take the bait of a deceptively appealing false story, we will be “lured and enticed by [our] own desire,” which when “conceived gives birth to sin, and sin . . . [eventually] brings forth death” (James 1:14–15).

Many different strategies for fighting different kinds of temptations exist. But all of them require that we not be outwitted by Satan due to ignorance of his designs to disorient, distort, and deceive. God calls us, like Jesus, to “be sober-minded [and] watchful,” since our “adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8). So, like Jesus, we anticipate what temptation will be like, and when it arrives we resist the devil by first remembering the story we’re in.

Some have their fifteen minutes of fame. Henry Tanner had his forty days.

In the summer of 1880, the Minneapolis homeopath shocked the medical establishment by fasting on stage in Manhattan, under round-the-clock supervision. Tanner had something to prove, as journalist Steve Hendricks tells the story in his recent book The Oldest Cure in the World. Tanner believed in the “restorative biochemistry” of fasting — that going without food for extended periods could be “regenerative” or even “curative.” By depriving the system of food, and relieving the burden of digestion, the human body could turn its energy elsewhere. Give the gut a break for days, even weeks, and the body could “cure itself” from a number of conditions.

For Tanner, this was no mere theory. He claimed to have fasted for forty-two days in 1879 and been healed of several ailments. When his report was doubted, he offered to go forty days again, the following year, this time under full surveillance.

So, for forty days, Tanner ate no food and drank only water. Doctors claimed he would die in ten or twelve days. From Day 6 to 40, the New York Times and other major outlets reported on Tanner’s progress. In the end, Tanner succeeded both in accomplishing the feat and playing well to the crowds who came daily to the theater.

Thanks to a Little Fast

Fasting as a cure for disease has a long and varied history, though often at the civilizational margins. Hendricks writes,

Skip dinner tonight, and by the time you rise tomorrow, your body will have spent a few hours making the most intricate fixes to cellular components that were damaged during the day, and it will have recycled other parts too far gone to be fixed. Defects that might have turned into cancer or a stroke will have now, thanks to a little deprivation, been refashioned to yield a healthier cell. These processes occur in us every day when our only fast is from the midnight snack to breakfast at dawn, but they’re accelerated enormously when we extend the nightly fast, and fasting for multiple days supercharges them. (30)

“Who knew that giving our stomachs a break might actually do us some good?”

Who knew that giving our stomachs a break might actually do our bodies some good?

Yet in our age of abundance, even decadence, such claims can be unnerving to consider. Very likely, this was not your mother’s counsel. Have we long assumed not eating to be the path to sickness and disease, while slowly eating ourselves to death?

Eat God’s World

God made us to eat. And he created a wonderfully edible world.

The opening chapters of Genesis tell us that God made trees “pleasant to the sight and good for food” (Genesis 2:9), and he designed us to eat his world, both plants and animals (Genesis 1:29; 9:3). For millennia, humans did just that, until God led a special people out from Egyptian slavery and assigned them various dietary restrictions. From Moses until Jesus, under the terms of the old covenant, God taught his people — and the nations, through them — of their sin and need for him, and anticipated the coming of his Son.

With the coming of Christ came the fulfilling of the old covenant, bringing it to its appointed consummation. Jesus inaugurated a new covenant, for people from every nation. In the course of his ministry, Jesus “declared all foods clean” (Mark 7:19; also Romans 14:20), and yet his own approach to food was not simplistic, but varied and flexible — marked by the kind of resilience we might expect the “fearfully and wonderfully made” human body to be capable of (Psalm 139:14).

When You Feast

Some of us might be surprised to learn that Jesus feasted. But he was, after all, a first-century Jew. The nation’s collective life turned on annual feasts — and three in particular, which the Gospel of John mentions Jesus participating in (John 2:23; 7:2; 10:22; 13:1). Jesus attended nonnational feasts as well, like Levi’s “great feast” (Luke 5:29) and the famous wedding feast at Cana (John 2:8–9), where he blessed and enhanced the feast by turning water to wine. In his parables, Jesus compared his kingdom to such feasts (Matthew 22:2–9; 25:10; Luke 12:36). Unlike his cousin John, who was known for abstaining, Jesus came “eating and drinking,” and was slandered as “a glutton and a drunkard” (Luke 7:34).

Significantly, in Luke 14:13–14, Jesus assumes his followers will celebrate occasions of feasting: “When you give a feast,” he says — not if, but when — “invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you.” So too Christ’s apostles, without commanding any particular Christian feasts (Romans 14:4–6), assumed that Christians would, at times, feast (2 Peter 2:13; Jude 12). Feasting, in gratitude to our God and with delight in him, honors him as the all-sufficient Giver. We rejoice in him in and through the joy of food and drink, with friends and family.

Yet in all that commendation of feasting, those of us today, living in the breadbasket of modern abundance, will do well to hear the implicit warning our Lord leaves in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. He introduces the rich man, who we learn now to be in torment in Hades, as one “who feasted sumptuously every day” (Luke 16:19). The caution for us, among other aspects of the parable, is feasting every day — a temptation all too real in the modern world.

When You Fast

Of course, Jesus assumes not only that we will feast, but also that we will fast. In Matthew 6:16–17, he says to his disciples, “when you fast,” not if. And without explicitly commanding his followers to fast on specific occasions, he promises, in Matthew 9:15, “they will fast.” (We see the promise play out in Acts 13:2–3 and 14:23, when the early church, with her groom away, takes up the old practice now made new.)

As a Jew, Jesus himself observed the annual fast, that is, the Day of Atonement, with the whole nation. We might assume he also fasted on other spontaneous occasions, as modeled in the Old Testament. Most notably, Jesus fasted forty days in the wilderness, in preparation for his public ministry (Matthew 4:2; Luke 4:2). Significantly, the Gospels only mention his hunger and him not eating. Unlike the miraculous fast of Moses at Sinai (Exodus 34:28), no mention is made of Jesus going without water. Which likely means this was a natural, fully human fast — one like Henry Tanner would demonstrate humanity capable of.

God designed our bodies not only for food — to eat and enjoy his world — but also to be able to go long periods of time, longer than most of us are comfortable thinking about, in fasting. Fasting accompanies heartfelt prayer in expressing special longing for some particular divine provision or help, and going without such a basic comfort of daily life highlights God’s value beyond his blessings and focuses our affections afresh on him.

As with feasting, Jesus both models and commends fasting, and leaves us a caution. In the parable of the Pharisee and publican, he takes aim at “some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt” (Luke 18:9). Among other boasts, the Pharisee declares, “I fast twice a week” (Luke 18:12). The publican, on the other hand, acknowledges himself a sinner and begs God for mercy. Jesus then comments, hauntingly, “I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other” (Luke 18:14).

Jesus’s warning, reminiscent of the condemnations in Isaiah 58, reminds us that the act of fasting can be hollowed of its God-honoring meaning and made into an effort to twist his arm. Similarly, we find in the letters of Paul a handful of warnings against the misuse of fasting (Romans 14:3, 6; 1 Timothy 4:3; Colossians 2:16).

Whether You Eat, Fast, or Feast

While Jesus commends (and cautions) both feasting and fasting — and assumes his followers will do both — his model prayer for his disciples brings everyday moderation to the fore: “Give us this day our daily bread” (Matthew 6:11).

Far and away, most days are daily-bread days. They are occasions neither for feasting nor fasting, given neither to indulgence nor abstaining, but rather devoted to a virtue that can be one of the hardest of all in times of plenty and lack: self-control. The Christian’s day-in, day-out relationship to food is one we navigate in the fuzzy, though real, bounds of moderation, in between the punctuations of fasting and feasting. That is, we receive God’s regular provision of food with enjoyment, marked by thanksgiving and self-control (1 Timothy 4:4–5).

“Many of us today neither feast well, nor fast at all.”

Many of us today neither feast well, nor fast at all. Oh, we feast. We live with such abundance, much of it edible, that we can hardly keep from daily overindulgence, without pushing against the grain of our society. We feast often, and without even recognizing it. What used to be feasting is now just the “standard American diet” (SAD). Without some countercultural moxie, many find themselves drifting toward obesity unawares.

But if our assumptions and habits have conditioned us one way, then we do have hope for training our stomachs differently.

Here we again accent the amazing biology of the human body. Our bodies can be far more resilient than we’ve learned to expect, and with some thoughtful conditioning they can become even more so, ready to flex for both fasting and feasting, to both enjoy occasions of abundance and endure times of famine. We can train ourselves to go longer without food than we’re prone to think. As Jay Richards writes in Eat, Fast, Feast, “God fitted the human form to thrive in a host of different ecosystems and diets, as we would expect of a Creator who called us to multiply and fill the whole earth” (11).

Richards advocates what he calls a “fasting lifestyle” in which we condition ourselves, over time, to be “metabolically flexible.” With less thoughtless everyday feasting, and more regular fasts (beginning with a meal, then two, then working up to a few days), many of us (some medical conditions notwithstanding) can train our stomachs, and souls, to be like the apostle who testified,

I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me. (Philippians 4:11–13)

Christians in general, and perhaps Protestants in particular, haven’t always excelled at such learning — which is not simply a learning of the mind but of the body. In our good and right emphasis on God’s astounding grace in Christ, have we undersold the astounding abilities of the God-designed human body? And have we failed to put our metabolic flexibility to spiritual use, through Christian fasting, not just intermittent fasting for bodily health?

Every Meal Holy

How fitting that Paul’s penetrating charge to consecrate our every action to God’s glory mentions such trivial (and massive) realities as eating and drinking: “Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). And not just to the God of monotheism, but the Christ of Christianity: “Whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Colossians 3:17).

In the end, we may discover all sorts of human wisdom in countercultural daily moderation, flanked by a learned metabolic flexibility primed for occasional feasts and fasts. Such seems far more enduringly human than our modern context of excess and overreaction. But as Christians, our goal isn’t merely to be more human looking backward (to Eden). We long to be more human looking upward, to the God-man, now risen and glorified, seated at his Father’s right hand. And we look forward, beyond the final conquest of sin and the curse, to the city that is to come, where we will, at last, fully enjoy God in the unencumbered humanity we were destined for. “The Lord Jesus Christ . . . will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself” (Philippians 3:20–21).

We pray, with Jesus, for the daily bread of moderation. We hear his commendation, and see his example, of occasional feasting and fasting, and consider their God-glorifying potential. We hear his cautions about everyday feasting and about pharisaical fasting. And we again consecrate ourselves, and our stomachs, to him, “in the name of the Lord Jesus,” the one who strengthens us.

Several months ago, as my wife’s birthday approached, I was thrilled to discover that a band she likes had plans to play next year in a nearby city. I booked good seats, spending a bit more than I normally would on birthdays, and began anticipating her reaction.

On the morning of her birthday, she opened my gift, saw the concert tickets, and immediately began (to my surprise and consternation) to laugh. Hard. When she could draw a breath again, she reminded me that we had already booked tickets for this exact concert: same night, same venue. At which point I remembered that, oh yes, we had indeed done so months earlier. A long COVID postponement had pushed the concert entirely out of my mind. Now we had four expensive tickets. And — to add insult to injury — the birthday seats I had booked weren’t quite as good as the ones we had already booked together.

Thankfully, my wife was able to laugh at my mistake. But of course, it was also a bit hurtful, given that I had entirely forgotten a special plan we had made together.

Resilient Intimacy

As my wife and I reflected later, we realized that we know married couples for whom my gaffe would have resulted not in laughter but in a blow-out argument — for whom it would have become not an amusing story but a major incident. For the wives, it would have constituted Exhibit A of her husband’s callous disregard, and the story would have been repeated (often) with bitterness, anger, and disgust. For their part, the husbands likely would have doubled down, not apologizing or daring to admit fault.

We wondered what makes the difference in our case, why our marriage can weather small slights, stupid oversights, inconveniences, poorly chosen words, clashes of opinion, and sins of attitude and action against one another. And I think an important part of the answer is marital intimacy. By marital intimacy, I mean a depth of mutual knowledge and affection between a husband and wife, a marriage in which both spouses enjoy sharing experiences, emotions, ideas, and sexual romance with one another.

Our own marriage is certainly a work in progress, and I’m not half the husband I ought or want to be, but through God’s goodness we have tasted this intimacy and desire more.

Obstacle to Intimacy: Busyness

Despite the beauty and blessedness of true intimacy, I’ve encountered numerous obstacles to it — both in my own marriage, and in years of counseling married couples. One of the most common is busyness.

If intimacy involves shared experiences, emotions, ideas, and sexual romance, it’s going to require significant time together. You can’t fit it into fifteen-minute increments here and there. For many married couples, however, time is in short supply. Work commitments, household chores, church involvement, transporting kids to their activities — all these good responsibilities fill our lives and keep us traveling in different directions. When a husband and wife pass like ships in the night, there’s not sufficient time to go deep beneath the surface.

Obstacle to Intimacy: Lack of Effort

A closely related obstacle is a lack of effort invested in cultivating intimacy. Perhaps this is, in part, a function of our culture’s misguided idealization of relationships, in which the dream scenario is to find our soul mate and experience an instant, magical, effortless depth of relationship. We’re disillusioned when we find it doesn’t work that way.

A more realistic guide for marriage comes from Hebrews 10:24, which speaks generally of relationships within the Christian community. The English Standard Version translates the verse as, “Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works.” But a more literal translation would be, “Let us consider one another, unto the stirring up of love and good works.” Note the subtle but significant difference.

The author of Hebrews urges us to consider not mainly a project (how to stir up others) but people (“one another”). The word consider suggests direct observation of something, together with deliberate thought about it. Since Christian community requires such careful thought toward one another, surely marriage does all the more. We’re to consider our spouse, to observe and ponder this person, to become world experts so that no one knows him or her better. Like any field of research, this long-term course of spousal study requires energy, focus, and attention. Failure to put in the work rules out the reward of intimacy.

Obstacles Under the Obstacles

Although lack of time and lack of effort are both significant obstacles, they’re not the only ones, and certainly not the deepest. In general, barring other factors, we allocate time and effort to the pursuits we really care about. If we’re passionate about the latest Netflix show, the model railroading club, or the soccer league, we make time and engage deeply. So what prevents this same investment in our marriage? I’ve found that there are usually obstacles under the obstacles.

One of the deepest is selfishness. True intimacy with a spouse requires time, work, vulnerability, and sacrifice. It’s a whole lot easier to avoid those costs, particularly if they obstruct our other aims and desires. Sometimes, at the end of a day, when I’m tired of talking and prefer to be silent, the best way to serve my wife is through conversation. At other times, the situation is reversed, and I’m the one who needs a listening ear. Our responses in such moments (and in thousands of other ones) will move us either toward or away from intimacy.

“True intimacy with a spouse requires time, work, vulnerability, and sacrifice.”

Ignorance also cripples intimacy. We may long for emotional, relational, and sexual intimacy in marriage, but we’ve never seen such intimacy modeled or learned about it from others. To many, intimacy is a mystery, a foreign land, and we have no map, no idea of how to get beneath pleasantries or functional conversations in order to explore another person’s heart. When we find time alone with our spouse, we remain in the rut of “calendar and kid” conversations.

Or perhaps the obstacle we face isn’t ignorance but insecurity; we’ve been badly hurt in other relationships and have walled off certain areas of emotional intimacy as no-go zones in order to protect ourselves. We’re not sure how (or if) we could ever open those corners of our lives to another person again.

Finally, one of the most serious obstacles to intimacy is a lack of forgiveness. When one or both spouses have been hurt by the other, and that hurt hasn’t been addressed, repented of, and covered with grace, resentment rankles. Each subsequent interaction is freighted with past pain, interpreted through a lens of suspicion. Bitterness accumulates, undercutting intimacy.

How to Pursue Marital Intimacy

So then, in the face of several significant obstacles, how might we move toward marital intimacy?

Vision for Intimacy

A crucial first step is seeing and celebrating intimacy in marriage as a precious and desired goal. We would do well to remind ourselves that marriage is a picture of the relationship between Christ and the church, and that therefore the emotional, intellectual, experiential, and sexual intimacy of husband and wife reflects and expresses the intimate love between Christ and his people. Ephesians 5:28–31 teaches that Christ “nourishes and cherishes” the church, that husbands are to “love their wives as their own bodies,” and that husbands and wives become “one flesh” with one another. These are attractive and compelling visions of intimacy.

Source of Intimacy

Once we desire this intimacy, how do we attain it? We can start by asking God for help. He is glorified when our marriages express the intimate love between his Son and his people. So, when we ask him for help in this area — sincerely and persistently — he will answer. Sometimes he’ll grow us in pleasant ways, and sometimes in painful ways. Seasons of suffering can deepen and sweeten our relationships.

“God is glorified when our marriages express the intimate love between his Son and his people.”

Early in our marriage, my insecurities and anxieties were exposed to my wife in a particularly painful way over the course of months, and she consistently responded to my vulnerability with tenderness and compassion. Her patient love set a tone for our entire marriage that continues to this day.

God will act on our behalf, but he also calls us to action. It may seem paradoxical, but one of the most important means of pursuing marital intimacy is surrounding our marriages with other people. True marital intimacy requires an inner core of the gospel and an outer context of Christian community; intimacy must be sourced by good news and surrounded by church.

In community, our sins of selfishness and unforgiveness are lovingly identified, prayed for, and challenged. In community, we’re given examples of healthy, intimate marriages from which we can learn, and that we can imitate. Those marriages provide a road map for ours. Marriage counseling with a wise and godly couple is great, but so is simply spending time with them and observing their interactions in everyday life. We can see for ourselves how communication happens, conflicts are resolved, courtesies are extended, and collaboration in ministry is enjoyed. If your marriage is stale and superficial, why not commit to diving deeper into the gospel and into a gospel-saturated community of believers?

What’s Wrong in My Marriage?

If Christian community is the nurturing context for marital intimacy, the gospel is the necessary core. Only the gospel can fully address our in-built selfishness, lack of forgiveness, and insecurity — those obstacles under the other obstacles. The gospel draws our hearts to Christ, who surrendered himself to death for our sake and took our punishment upon himself. As we soak in that good news, we experience the magnificence of God’s love and the magnitude of our own sin.

I once asked a warring couple to identify the main problem in their marriage, and then listened for 45 minutes as each spouse pinpointed the failings of the other. For each, their spouse’s sin was the real problem. The other’s failings were big; theirs were small. The gospel devastates that warped view, because it tells us that the Son of God had to die for our sin. But the gospel also announces that, in Christ, we’re forgiven, cleansed, and treasured by God. God sees, knows, and loves us. So maybe it’s possible for another human being to do the same.

True marital intimacy is a precious jewel to be prayed for, prized, and pursued. It’s worth the work.