Audio Transcript

From dating (last time) to marriage (today). Marriage is a beautiful institution, designed by God to point the world to Christ and to his bride. One wedding at a time, marriage exists for us because God decreed that Christ would purchase his bride, the church. And because of sin, that church, that fallen bride, must be redeemed from her ugly sin and be made beautiful in holiness. It’s an amazing drama played out in history, and in our lives, and it’s a drama played out in harmonious marriages and one played out even in hard marriages too. Painful marriages are no less reflective of God’s plan. And so, we have several episodes now on marriage challenges, which you can see. I gathered up all those APJ episodes and summarized them into one digest in the APJ book, one whole section just on this topic of hard marriages on pages 197–221.

And today, Pastor John joins us over the phone for a question from a perplexed father who wrote us anonymously. “Pastor John, hello. I write to you because my adult son wants to get a divorce from his wife. They have been married for two years and have a one-year-old son and a newborn baby girl of only ten days old. I’m totally perplexed by the timing. I don’t understand why he feels unhappy, but he claims he is ‘no longer in love’ with his wife anymore. What would you say to someone who has ‘fallen out of love’ with their spouse, and why that’s no grounds for divorce?”

Well, what I would say to them face to face would depend partly on their demeanor. But I don’t have him face to face, and so I’m just going to say what I think he probably needs to hear. Whether I would say it exactly like this, I don’t know. But here we go.

Embracing Realism

We would be naive, I think, to suppose that people — young or old, our own children or those of others — will act on the basis of reason and biblical truth when it comes to justifying divorce. I would guess that in 95 cases out of 100 people do what they want to do and then find reasons to do it. Especially those who claim to believe the Bible will find biblical reasons to do it. They just know what they’re going to do. They want to do it. They do it. So, we should be realistic as we talk to people, and we should pray. I think that’s the greatest realism — pray and fast that God would do what our biblical arguments and reasonings by themselves could never do.

But having said that, I totally believe in speaking the truth in love because it’s God’s way, it’s God’s design, that people should know the truth and the truth would set them free (John 8:32). (And that context is free from sin, like leaving your wife.) So, I would hang my thoughts on three words: joy, significance, and ownership. I would try to make those three words as compelling and winsome as I can, but also as forceful as Jesus and the apostles did, for the sake of staying married. So, let me say a word about what I mean by joy, significance, and ownership.

Joy

Joy. I would say to this young man who wants a divorce because he’s not in love, “Oh, what joy lies ahead for those who do not break their covenant even when their hearts are broken.” And here’s what I mean. I believe that most couples who stay married for fifty or sixty years fall in and out of love numerous times. And I say that with not the slightest hint of trying to be funny. It is, in my judgment, almost ludicrous to think that we experience “being in love” for the entire sixty years what we felt at the beginning of that relationship. That’s just utterly crazy. It is naive and immature to think that staying married is mainly about staying in love.

“You are free to break your marriage covenant when Christ breaks his covenant with his bride.”

In a relationship between two sinners, forced to live as close as married couples live, it is naive to think that every season will be one of warmth and sweetness and sexual romance. That’s just contrary to almost the entire history of the world and contrary to every makeup of fallen human nature. Staying married is not first about staying in love; it’s about covenant-keeping, promise-keeping, being a man and woman of your word, a man and woman who keep the vows to be committed for better or for worse, a man and a woman of character. That’s what it’s about.

This covenant-keeping relates to being in love the way gardening in the fall relates to roses in the spring. This is why I said a minute ago, “Oh, what joy lies ahead for those who do not break their covenant even when their hearts are broken.” The modern world of self-centeredness and self-exaltation and self-expression has taken the normal fifty-year process of falling in and out of love and turned it into a fifty-year process of multiple divorces and remarriages. That pattern has not and will not bear the fruit of joy. It leaves a trail of misery in the soul and misery among the generations.

Marriage is the hardest relationship to stay in and the one that promises glorious, unique, durable joys for those who have the character to keep their covenant. So, that’s what I mean by joy.

Significance

Now, here’s what I mean by significance. God offers to husbands and wives the highest possible significance for their marriage relationship by showing them what its greatest and most glorious meaning is — namely, the replication in the world of the covenant relationship between Christ and his bride, the church. That’s what the highest meaning of marriage is. There is no higher, more glorious, more significant conception of marriage than the one that Paul portrays in Ephesians 5, a parable of the greatest, strongest, deepest, sweetest, richest relationship in the universe — the blood-bought union between Christ, the Son of God, and his bride, the church. That’s the meaning; that’s the significance of marriage.

And I would just say to this young man that you are acting, or about to act, on one of the lowest views of marriage — not one of the highest, but one of the lowest, views of marriage. If you divorce because you don’t feel love anymore, there is nothing noble, nothing great, nothing beautiful, nothing high, nothing truly significant about such a motive. What does it say about Christ, the model of a man’s commitment in marriage? What does it say if he forsakes his wife because he doesn’t feel like staying anymore? What does it say about Christ? That’s the issue.

Marriage is an act of worship. It’s a display of the price and the preciousness of the covenant-keeping love between Christ and his church. Covenant-keeping in marriage glorifies Christ and the blood he shed to possess a bride forever. We cannot even conceive of a greater significance of marriage than the one God has given.

Ownership

And lastly, the word ownership. What do I mean by ownership? What I mean by ownership is that the union between a man and a woman isn’t theirs to break. They didn’t create it; they can’t break it. It’s not theirs. Jesus said, “What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate” (Matthew 19:6).

It’s another sign of the man-centeredness and contemporary self-centeredness of Christianity that a young couple would have the mindset that they created the union called marriage, and therefore they can break it. They didn’t create it; they can’t break it. God made it; God breaks it with death. Or as I think Paul would say, “You are free to break your marriage covenant when Christ breaks his covenant with his bride.”

So, for the sake of maximum long-term joy, and for the sake of the deepest and highest significance, and for the sake of the Maker and Owner of your union, keep your covenant. Oh, what joy lies ahead, beyond anything you can presently imagine, for those who keep their covenant even when their hearts are broken.

If we could distill God’s will for his people into a simple prayer, we may do no better than an often-repeated plea from Robert Murray M’Cheyne: “Lord, make me as holy as a pardoned sinner can be made” (Memoir and Remains of Robert Murray M’Cheyne, 159).

How often does such a prayer find its place upon your lips? How deeply does such a desire shape your hopes and plans? If the longings of your heart could speak, would any of them cry out, “Make me as holy as I can be”?

God’s desire for our holiness burns through the Scriptures like a purifying fire. Paul would have us think so: “This is the will of God, your sanctification” (1 Thessalonians 4:3). Peter would have us think so: “As he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct” (1 Peter 1:15–16). Hebrews would have us think so: “Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord” (Hebrews 12:14).

And in a hundred other ways, God would have us think so. Our holiness delights him (Psalm 40:6–8), pleases him (1 Thessalonians 4:1), rises before him like a fragrant offering (Philippians 4:18), elicits his approval and praise (Romans 2:29; 12:1). If you want to please a holy God, be as holy as you can be.

Holiness and Its Hoaxes

Before we consider why holiness makes God happy, ponder for a moment what we even mean by holiness. Like many familiar Bible words, holiness can get lost in a haze of abstraction. And over time, if we’re not careful, we may come to associate the word with images or ideas at odds with the real thing.

Some, for example, may hear holiness and (perhaps subconsciously) think bland or boring. Holiness belongs in a museum or antique shop, hushed and stuffy. True holiness, however, knows nothing of blandness and cannot abide boredom. Scripture speaks of “the splendor of holiness,” of holiness as “glory and beauty” (1 Chronicles 16:29; Exodus 28:2). As Sinclair Ferguson writes, holy people shine with something of God’s own brilliance:

“To sanctify” means that God repossesses persons and things that have been devoted to other uses, and have been possessed for purposes other than his glory, and takes them into his own possession in order that they may reflect his own glory. (The Holy Spirit, 140)

True holiness is breathtakingly beautiful. It participates in God’s own glory — a glory bursting with life and majesty.

Others may hear holiness and think mainly of religious ritual: food laws and temple sacrifices, perhaps, or a devotion to churchly routines. But such was the mistake of many Pharisees — those punctual, precise, “worshiping” bundles of corruption (Matthew 23:25–28). True holiness pierces to the deepest parts of a person; it touches and transforms “spirit and soul and body” (1 Thessalonians 5:23). Holiness is a hand that plucks the heart’s hidden strings, filling all of life with heavenly melody. It is not smoke arising from the altar, but faith and love arising from the soul (Psalm 40:6–8).

Then, finally, some may hear holiness and wonder what relevance it holds to daily life. Maybe holiness seems like a cloud: miles above the ground and impossible to grasp. But true holiness has everything to do with everyday life. When Jesus and his apostles call us to holiness, they address our thinking and speaking, our eating and drinking, our spending and saving, our working and resting. Even on the most ordinary day, there never comes a moment when “be holy” doesn’t mean something practical. Holiness embraces and dignifies our daily doings.

And such holiness — beautiful, deep, broad — makes God happy.

God’s Complex Pleasure

Depending on your personality and theological background, the thought of our holiness pleasing God may raise some questions. Some, especially lovers of the doctrine of justification, may wonder, Doesn’t God already delight in me? And others, especially the sensitive and scrupulous, may ask, How could God ever delight in me?

Doesn’t God already delight in me?

For some, the idea that our holiness delights God seems to undermine (or at least sit in tension with) justification by faith alone. Doesn’t God’s delight rest on Christ’s perfect holiness now reckoned to me through faith? Doesn’t he call me “holy and beloved” before I obey (Colossians 3:12) and even after I sin (1 Corinthians 6:11)?

These questions press us toward a helpful distinction. At one level, God has an unshakeable delight in his people because we are united to “his beloved Son” (Colossians 1:13), our holy Savior who remains the same yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8). We are in Christ — wrapped in his righteousness, sanctified by his purity — and therefore fully approved in God’s sight. And yet, above this foundation of God’s unchanging favor, we really can please him more or less, depending on how we live. We can grieve the Spirit or gladden him (Ephesians 4:30); we can delight God Almighty or displease him (Ephesians 5:9–10).

The image of fatherly discipline in Hebrews 12 brings these two kinds of pleasure together. All discipline implies some degree of displeasure or disapproval. At the same time, all good discipline springs from deep love. “The Lord disciplines the one he loves” (Hebrews 12:6). Beneath the displeasure of God’s discipline is his deep and unchanging fatherly affection.

Because he loves us, he responds to our displeasing sins with discipline — and by discipline, he makes us more pleasing. He gives us the security of his everlasting approval in Christ — and amazingly, he also gives us the dignity of becoming the kind of people who will hear his “well done.”

How could God ever delight in me?

Others ask a different question about God’s delight. They understand why holiness pleases God, and they would love to know themselves pleasing before him. But they can’t seem to imagine their holiness — their small, stumbling holiness — ever being pure enough to please him. Maybe in heaven they’ll delight God, but how could they do so now?

I feel the force of the question. Our sins are still many, our present imperfections run deep, and mixed motives taint even our best deeds. This side of heaven, God can always disapprove of something inside us. So it can feel safer to simply take refuge in the righteousness of Christ and wait till we’re perfect to believe ourselves pleasing. But that would be a great mistake.

“God is happy with our holiness because the heart of true holiness is happiness in God.”

If we, though trusting in Jesus and seeking to follow him, doubt that God could delight in our holiness, we need to reckon with how often God uses the language of pleasure to describe his posture toward his partly sanctified people. He says brotherly love pleases him (Romans 14:18), sharing with others pleases him (Hebrews 13:16), praying for kings pleases him (1 Timothy 2:3–4), a child’s obedience pleases him (Colossians 3:20), even that we can be “fully pleasing” to him (Colossians 1:10). And in each of these examples (and many more), he is not lying. The holy, holy, holy God is astoundingly, wonderfully pleasable.

Roots of His Approval

If we ask why such imperfect holiness pleases God, we might give several answers. We might remember that our present holiness is nothing less than the emerging character of Christ in us (2 Corinthians 3:18), his image rescued and renewed (Romans 8:29) — and God loves the glory of his Son. We might also remember that our holiness is the fruit of the Holy Spirit (Galatians 5:22–23) — and just as in the beginning, God regards the creative work of his Spirit as “good,” indeed “very good” (Genesis 1:31).

Or we might remember, as Richard Sibbes writes, that God is able to take a long view of our holiness, seeing today’s small step as part of a much bigger and more beautiful picture:

Christ values us by what we shall be, and by what we are elected unto. We call a little plant a tree, because it is growing up to be so. “Who has despised the day of small things?” (Zechariah 4:10). Christ would not have us despise little things. (The Bruised Reed, 17)

Today’s edifying speech, purity of thought, self-denying service, prayerful yearning toward heaven — these are acorns becoming oaks, buds about to bloom, mustard seeds destined to outgrow and outlast the thorns and thistles of our sin. And so they please him.

Yet we can dig still deeper.

Happiness at the Heart

At bottom, we might say that God is happy with our holiness because the heart of true holiness is happiness in God. God made the world so that people like us would find our greatest joy in him and so glorify him as the Greatest Joy in the world— the treasure in the field, the pearl of infinite price, the fairest among ten thousand (and far more). And if we could peel back the layers of a truly holy life, we would find a heart that pulses with such pleasure in God.

People growing in holiness have felt, with Paul, something of “the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord,” a worth that makes us more ready to suffer than to sin (Philippians 3:8–10). With Jeremiah, we have left sin’s broken cisterns, drunk deeply from the fountain, and now refuse to leave (Jeremiah 2:13–14). With John, we have taken up the commandments of God and said, with a cry of joy, “Not burdensome!” (1 John 5:3). And with David, we have tasted and seen that God is good (Psalm 34:8) — his presence the height of joy, his right hand the province of pleasures forevermore (Psalm 16:11).

Such holiness is beautiful, a flicker of the love between Father and Son, the aroma of heaven’s atmosphere. Such holiness is heart deep, filling our innermost parts with rivers of living water. Such holiness is broad, spreading over life as comprehensively as the waters cover the sea. And such holiness makes God happy.

So, if we want to distill God’s will for his people into a simple prayer, we may do no better than M’Cheyne’s striking line: “Lord, make me as holy as a pardoned sinner can be made.” And as we pray, we’ll know what we mean deep down: “Lord, make me as happy in you as a pardoned sinner can be made.”

It’s just Jesus. In Christ is all we get from God. Nothing more. Nothing other. He is the answer to our every need.

Does that disappoint you? Were you hoping for something newer? Or easier? Or cooler? Sorry, it’s just Jesus. He is who God is and all God gives us comes in and through him. Maybe that seems like dull news. But as we consider the great Reformation motto “Christ alone,” I hope to thrill you.

This one man who walked the earth long ago still lives. He interacts with us. He lifts away the blanket of guilt and blows the breeze of forgiveness. He fills in the yawning loneliness with a warm presence that will not leave us. He directs our wandering lives to eternally meaningful service. He calls us out of our endless self-loop to an abundant life of love. Just Jesus is a sky full of stars more than we can count. We can never reach the end of the beauty and mystery that awaits exploration. There’s always more.

Recovering Christ

The hallmarks of the Reformation are often expressed in five solas, five “only’s” that needed to be recovered to get Christians reconnected to the Savior. The first sola is Christ alone. All of our salvation, including our justification, comes from Christ Jesus, not from anyone or anything else.

“‘Just Jesus’ is a sky full of stars more than we can count.”

The Reformers labored to express what Christ alone meant in the context of the heavy-handed, burdensome requirements of the medieval church. The church had bottled Christ like a commodity. They had hidden him from the view of ordinary believers. But the recovery of Christ alone as the free gift of God for our justification cracked through those barriers and gave Jesus back to his people.

Of course, the Lord’s own people in every age are always prone to shade the searing light of Christ alone. So let’s consider now three aspects of what Christ alone might mean for the twenty-first century Western situation in which we find ourselves. Christ alone means God gives us Jesus in particular, only Jesus, and all of Jesus.

Jesus in Particular

Good mentors continually pressed this truth into me: There is no god behind the back of Jesus. God is nothing other than who he is toward us in Jesus Christ. Jesus “is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature” (Hebrews 1:3). God is not an angry “Old Testament God” toward us one morning but then a sweetly accepting “New Testament God” toward us the next. When we see Jesus, we have a clear window into the triune God.

Jesus himself said, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). There’s not God the Father over there and then God the Son over here (with the Spirit floating around somewhere). There’s only “I am in the Father and the Father is in me” (John 14:10). In Jesus, “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (Colossians 1:19). As this specific man, who stood so high and talked in this distinct tone of voice, who walked with this unique gait, and with a scent like no one else’s, God incarnated. Indeed, there is a reason only Christians worship the human founder of their faith. Because, wild as it is, we declare that precisely this Jesus, of all the humans who ever lived, is God come to us in flesh and blood.

Some have tried to avoid this scandal and seeming foolishness (1 Corinthians 1:22) by separating Jesus from his beloved title Christ. A liberal theologian once said, “There is more to the Christ than we meet in Jesus.” Another wrote of a “universal Christ.” Christ would thus be a principle or power that Jesus embodied — a principle we also can embody if we live authentically. As if!

Still others ask the question, “Who was Jesus before the church made him out to be God?” Their idea is to find the real Jesus by scrubbing away as inauthentic all his claims to be the Son of God. Couldn’t we just get back to the humble, wise rabbi from Nazareth who lights a path, among many, to the one God? No, Christ alone means this Jesus of the Gospels is uniquely the fully human, fully divine Savior.

Only Jesus

This second aspect reveals a distortion that even good Reformed Christians make. We know that Christ alone means there is no other person or path that can make us right with God. Paul wrote, “There is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all” (1 Timothy 2:5–6). Final salvation relies on the righteousness of Jesus as its sole basis. Only Jesus saves us for eternity.

That’s our deeply held confessional theology. But in our daily working theology, we may well rely more on what kinds of rightness we can generate. We can, often unconsciously, develop some self-salvation systems. No, not for final salvation, but for the immediate sense that we are doing well with God today. These are ways we reassure ourselves that we are okay. We can expose the futility of these soothing strategies by hearing how it sounds to substitute some of them for the riches of Christ alone.

In Ephesians 2, Paul reminds the church how alienated from God they had been. They were strangers to his covenants and promises, children of wrath, stuck dead in their trespasses. Then came an intervention: “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved” (Ephesians 2:4–6).

We were dead, but God made us alive through Christ alone. There’s no more relieving and joyful news. But the truth is, I rely on other stories to comfort me. How silly they sound when inserted into this salvation:

But God, in reviewing your résumé, was so impressed that he raised you with Christ.

But God, when he noticed how great you looked after changing your diet and working out regularly, raised you with Christ.

But God, because you got his attention by your acts of creative compassion, raised you with Christ.

Ridiculous! All my reliance for rightness based on self-generated worthiness gets incinerated in the fire of only Jesus, every moment as well as into eternity.

All of Jesus

Finally, Christ alone means God has nothing else to give us than what he gives us in Jesus. But getting Jesus is getting everything. Joined to him by the Holy Spirit through faith, we receive all that Jesus is for us. So Paul could exclaim that God has relocated us into “Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption” (1 Corinthians 1:30).

This glory overwhelms the eyes; we struggle to take it in directly. We get a glimpse of what it means to have all of Jesus by looking at the benefits that flow from our union with him. We return to the treasury of Ephesians, specifically 1:3–14. Paul writes that in Christ we receive:

every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places
the joy of being chosen before the foundation of the world
the promise of being made holy and blameless
the eternal adoption to himself as sons
redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses
the lavishing upon us of the riches of his grace
the gift of knowing the mystery of God’s will: his purpose to unite all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth
an inheritance in heaven
the blessed Holy Spirit in our hearts as a seal and guarantee

“In giving us all of Jesus, the Father makes us jewels in his crown of glory.”

In giving us all of Jesus, the Father makes us jewels in his crown of glory. We become reasons for the triune God to be praised.

Christ alone means just Jesus. But this particular man Jesus is God incarnate. He only is our righteousness and our salvation, not just in eternity, but now as we live and work, needy for a sense of rightness. He gives us nothing less than himself. Christ alone. Just Jesus. That’s everything we need.