Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith. (Hebrews 13:7)

I grew up in a mixed denomination in Sri Lanka and was often exposed to liberal preaching. But my mother, a convert to Christianity, drilled into her five children the dangers of unorthodox teaching and how important God’s word was to life. All five remain committed evangelical Christians today. And thankfully God has provided a much stronger evangelical witness in the denomination today than when I was a boy.

When I was thirteen, we got a new pastor, the Reverend George Good, a missionary from Northern Ireland. The first Sunday that he preached, we went to church nervously, wondering whether he held evangelical convictions. My mother later said that when we sang a particular hymn early in the service, she knew her prayers were answered. The hymn was Charles Wesley’s “Jesus, the Name High over All.”

My parents were very active in church, and naturally we got to know the Rev. Good, whom we affectionately called “Uncle George.” I received an impression then that remains with me even to this day: this is the most Christlike man I have met. Little by little as I watched him, two convictions grew in me: First, my most important goal in life should be to be like Jesus. And second, the most vicious battle I have in life is with my sinful nature, which hinders my being like Jesus. Despite numerous failings, this remains my desire and battle today.

Favorite Day of the Week

Soon Sunday became my favorite day of the week. I came to see worship as something glorious. Uncle George introduced us to the great hymns of the faith, which celebrated the great doctrines of the faith. Aided by music, the language of the heart, the lyrics triggered joy and praise within me. It was later that I was able to articulate this experience verbally with the expression “the joy of truth,” which gradually became a key theme of my life and theology. Hymns are bearers of truth, and truth is one of the happiest things in life. Even today, I begin my time with God almost daily by singing a hymn.

Sunday was also special because our pastor offered a feast of biblical preaching each week. Rev. Good was a busy man, giving himself to the rigors of pastoral work. But rumor had it that he would be up into the night preparing his sermons. Preaching is such a great work, reflecting the honor of God and his word, that it needed to be done well. And George Good did it well.

Each Sunday, we would come to church eager to hear what gems he had mined from the word. I was exposed to the example of a man who tirelessly worked with people but also conscientiously studied the word and prepared good expository sermons. This is hard and tiring work.

“Hymns are bearers of truth, and truth is one of the happiest things in life.”

Most ministers are called to do a lot of things and strive to do them all well. The result is tiredness. As far as I know, the Bible never calls tiredness a sin. It is wrong not to delegate responsibilities to others. It is wrong not to take a Sabbath rest. It is wrong to be always complaining and unhappy about how hard we have to work. George Good was an example of a happy man who worked very hard with pastoral care and the ministry of the word. I had a model to follow.

My Hunger to Preach

I was about fourteen years old when I committed myself fully to Christ. I suppose seeing the glory of ministry in my church made it attractive to me too. Soon I became convinced that God had called me to the ministry. But there was a problem. I was extremely shy and hardly opened my mouth in public. I dared not tell anyone that I wanted to be a preacher! I also felt that I was the mediocre member of a very capable family. I thought I would amount to nothing significant. How could I ever hope to be a minister of the glorious gospel?

When I was fifteen years old, I followed the confirmation classes at church with the Rev. Good. As part of the course, he had personal appointments alone with each of the youth. I think he wanted to make sure that all those he was going to confirm had been born again. When I met with him, he asked me a question that astounded me: “Ajith, have you considered going into the ministry?” Someone really did think that this mediocre, tongue-tied, shy boy could possibly be a preacher! I don’t remember what answer I gave, but I was encouraged to keep thinking about the call to ministry.

Sunday after Sunday, I heard inspiring, faithful preaching. Over time, this awakened and fostered my own hunger to preach. Thus began an exciting journey into the study and proclamation of the word. Later in my father’s library, I found books of Bible exposition by men like F.B. Meyer, G. Campbell Morgan, and John Stott. I devoured these books. My real introduction to the supernatural power of preaching, though, was still what I heard each Sunday in my local church.

When Youth Become Pastors

After finishing my university studies, I went to the United States to study at Asbury Theological Seminary. I had hoped to return and work with Youth for Christ, the movement I served in before leaving Sri Lanka. While in seminary, however, almost everyone I respected told me that I could be making a big mistake doing parachurch ministry. The church or a seminary was the place for a person with my gifts, they said. I was confused and wrote to my parents for wisdom.

“A pastor’s calling is not to be famous; it is to tend the flock God has entrusted to him.”

George Good had returned to Sri Lanka at that time on an assignment. My parents told him about my struggle. His response was not what one would expect from a churchman. He said, “Let him work for Youth for Christ. God can use him to send many young people into the church.” So, I ended up working for Youth for Christ and have now been on staff for 47 years. I believe what George Good said happened.

Through our ministry, hundreds of unchurched youths have found their permanent home in churches. About a hundred have become pastors. Considering that the Protestant population in Sri Lanka is about 300,000, that is a significant figure.

Faithfulness and Fame

Uncle George taught me through his hard work, his faithful preaching, and his wise counsel. He also taught me through suffering. Shortly before he and his wife Eileen left for Sri Lanka, the educational policies here changed, making it impossible for their teenage daughters, Valerie and Joan, to come with them. Their family sacrificed so much for our people. What a relief to know that, despite the huge price they paid, both daughters are vibrant Christians today.

Here was a man whose Christlike character I could never come close to matching. Here was a man whose all-around capability in ministry I could never imitate. But I am known fairly widely, whereas George Good is known only in Britain and Sri Lanka. From a worldly viewpoint, that seems unfair.

But I do not think that would be a problem for George Good. His values were not derived from this world. A pastor’s calling is not to be famous; it is to tend the flock God has entrusted to him. That he did. In terms of qualification for service, a pastor needed to be Christlike and to perform his duties conscientiously, to the best of his ability. That he did, with distinction, even though it did not make him famous over a wide sphere. He surely heard a resounding “Well done” when he met his Master. That is reward enough!

And here on earth, he demonstrated the beauty of Jesus and the glory of pastoral ministry, qualities that won me as a boy and young man. Today, many features that characterize my ministry, and that of my minister brother Duleep, were first learned by watching George Good.

Encouraging young couples to cultivate trust is a bit like exhorting a teenage boy to develop healthy eating habits: it’s rarely front of mind. However, like health, trust takes time, intentionality, and effort to develop and guard. So whether you’re engaged, or early in your marriage (or years in, for that matter), how are you and your spouse deepening and strengthening your trust in marriage?

Traditional marriage vows include the phrase “forsaking all others” as a promise of exclusivity “for as long as we both shall live.” In his book A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken includes an image that offers both a sober warning and a powerful insight into marriage, one my wife and I have benefitted from personally.

As unbelievers, Sheldon and his wife, Davy, so cherished their relationship that they did not want anyone or anything to come between their love for one another. They therefore committed to maintaining a “Shining Barrier” around their marriage to preserve the exclusivity of their love. They vowed to never have children, lest rambunctious little ones invade their shining barrier. Lest death break that barrier, they even promised to one day sail out to sea to sink their sailboat so they could die together. In retrospect, the converted Sheldon judiciously titles the section on their young, distorted commitment to one another’s vows “Pagan Love.” As Christians, we recognize in their marriage a sober warning: a relationship so devoted to itself excludes and replaces God.

Nevertheless, Sheldon and Davy’s commitment to radical exclusivity in their marriage highlights a powerful insight: marriages thrive on trust. Sheldon and Davy prized their “in-loveness” and feared broken trust would destroy it. They therefore sought to cultivate and encourage trust. My wife and I seek to do so too, while wary not to resort to Sheldon and Davy’s extreme exclusivity. We do so by pursuing one another in three distinct but overlapping modes: face-to-face intimacy, back-to-back partnership, and side-by-side friendship.

Face-to-Face Intimacy

Face-to-face trust grows when spouses seek to know and be known by one another. Such intimacy may happen on weekly date nights, or during prayer before bed, or on morning walks, or with playfulness around each other throughout the day. And, yes, in sexual foreplay and consummation too. We’re naive, though, to reduce intimacy to sex. For, as lovers come to know, sex is merely part of a much greater beauty. “To be in love, as to see beauty, is a kind of adoring that turns the lover away from self,” Sheldon observes (A Severe Mercy, 43). Thus, face-to-face intimacy is a beholding of the beloved — a looking up from self and away from the world to truly see another.

“Face-to-face trust grows when spouses seek to know and be known by one another.”

Beholding our beloved will look different in different seasons of marriage. In every season, though, intimacy is an opening up of yourself to your spouse emotionally, physically, and spiritually. This requires vulnerability from both of you. In fact, trust and vulnerability run parallel in intimacy. Thoughtfully and consistently sharing your joys and burdens, fears and successes, and then seeking to hear the same from your spouse, engenders the kind of trust out of which healthy marriages are made.

For many couples early in their relationship, emotional and physical intimacy may come easily. A gentle touch. A whispered word. A quick glance. Eros makes us eager to give ourselves heart, soul, mind, and body to our beloved. And in most marriages, you will quickly rack up more face time with your spouse than with anyone else. But it takes work to develop deeper and lasting intimacy.

In his song “World Traveler,” Andrew Peterson describes how his small-town younger self dreamed of traveling the world to discover “the great beyond.” He had “hardly seen a thing,” though, when he “gave a golden ring / To the one who gave her heart to me.” And he became a different kind of world traveler as “she opened the gate and took my hand / And led me into the mystic land / Where her galaxies swirl.” For deep and lasting trust to take root, we must travel each other’s souls with a kind of patient, unhurried attention that is willing to wonder and delight.

In beholding our spouse, we’re seeking to give and receive the true reward of face-to-face intimacy: being both genuinely known and truly loved. We will ultimately find this only in communion with God, and yet he ordains marriage as one picture that points to such a future heavenly reward (Ephesians 5:25–33). Such face-to-face trust, though, is fragile and requires a different kind of posture to guard and protect it.

Back-to-Back Partnership

When couples, knowing each other’s strengths and weaknesses, seek to guard and protect each other, they develop a kind of back-to-back trust. We all have blind spots, besetting sins, and frailties that our spouse comes to know through the consistent face time of everyday life. And spouses can use those sight lines and their own unique strengths to protect each other. Sin crouches at the door (Genesis 4:7), Satan roars like a lion (1 Peter 5:8), and both seek to devour your marriage. Like two heroes with circling enemies, couples turn back-to-back, trusting the other to call out threats, shout encouragements, and celebrate even the small victories together.

“Sin crouches at the door, Satan roars like a lion, and both seek to devour your marriage.”

Couples, of course, can partner back-to-back without an obvious enemy like sin or Satan. External pressures from difficult circumstances, a challenging boss, high expectations from extended family or friends can all create a setting where a couple needs to practice back-to-back partnership. The in-laws come into town, and their casual, make-it-up-as-we-go style disorients the wife’s thoughtful, well-planned itineraries. Her gift for planning is unwittingly ignored by the husband’s parents, and after day one with them she feels exposed and frustrated. She’s tempted to unload her frustration on him, and he’s tempted to shrug off her concerns as being oversensitive. Both spouses are tempted to start shooting at each other in the very moment they most need to care for the other, building mutual trust by standing back-to-back. In recognizing the urge to attack him, she can instead generously acknowledge the qualities worth praising in her in-laws — while he can initiate a frank conversation with his parents about following the plan for day two.

As we recognize and protect against threats to each other, we reap the fruit of stability and endurance. Back-to-back trust strengthens marriages to bear the heavy burdens we carry together in a fallen world. Yet the intimacy from face-to-face and the strength from back-to-back can both be undermined if we neglect another posture for cultivating trust.

Side-by-Side Friendship

Couples who seek to behold and pursue something together cultivate side-by-side trust. This side-by-side posture is marriage as friendship.

Friendships form around a mutual beholding of a shared delight. When you discover another who shares your interest in something dear to you, you declare, “You too?! I thought I was the only one!” (C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 248). Your friendship may include many mutual pursuits or only just a few, but any side-by-side time fosters the kind of trust that comes from holding something in common beyond your relationship itself.

Many couples’ relationships initially form around something they pursued together. Perhaps you two met because of a love for music, or a shared academic interest, or a business venture. Often, however, the demands and trials of life act over time like a centrifugal force, pushing those once-shared pursuits to the periphery. I’m suggesting that, as much as you can, pursue interests held in common, whether old or new, in the regular rhythms of your life together.

Perhaps you host the annual fall festival in your backyard, or serve on the worship team together, or play Terraforming Mars with those other board-game fanatics. Whatever the common pursuit, invest in it together. And if you object that you do not share the same interests, then find one of your spouse’s interests that you can learn too. Sheldon loved literature; Davy excelled in music. Out of love for the other, they “became at home in both worlds” (A Severe Mercy, 38).

Finding Intimacy on the Way to God

Investing in side-by-side trust is essential because a “creeping separateness,” Sheldon and Davy rightly warn, is frequently a “killer of love” (37). And as they later discovered in their conversion, the greatest resistance to that centrifugal force is no mere common pursuit but the greatest pursuit: beholding God together. So even if shared hobbies and interests feel sparse, seek always to go in a Godward direction together. For Christian marriages are built not around mere eros or philia, but around a shared receiving and giving of agape love for God and one another. Therefore, together as a couple we must prize worshiping God at home and with God’s people.

The beautiful thing about these three postures for cultivating trust is their mutually reinforcing nature. You can’t grow in intimacy if you are not working to protect each other from temptation and sin, disappointment and burnout — or just simply protecting your own time together. The reverse is true as well. You can’t grow in your ability to help each other see your blind spots if you do not grow in face-to-face fellowship. And both face-to-face and back-to-back trust flourish in the consistency of a side-by-side friendship set on God.

Audio Transcript

Happy Friday, everyone. On the podcast, we’ve looked at grumbling, and we’ve looked at complaining — several times, actually. But what about venting? Or is venting just a nice word for complaining?

This question has been asked by several listeners recently. Here are two examples. One is from Allison: “Pastor John, hello! My friend and I have long discussed if there’s a difference between complaining and venting. Our desire is to be mindful of our heart’s reaction to tough situations. How do we as believers express frustrations to those closest to us, to bear one another’s burdens, without falling into ‘misery loves company’? Is there a difference between complaining and venting? Or are we kidding ourselves?”

And another listener, named Sina, writes this: “Dear Pastor John, thank you, and thank you Tony, for this podcast. It’s an incredible blessing in my life. My question is this. Is venting the same thing as grumbling? Philippians 2:14 commands us to ‘do all things without grumbling or disputing.’ Does this apply to venting as well? I’m in a stressful graduate school environment, and complaining is the norm among students. Over the years, I have distinguished between complaining versus venting. Complaining is sinful. Venting is sinless.

“Here’s the distinction I use, using a hypothetical scenario of a teacher who continually assigns overwhelming amounts of schoolwork. Complaining says, ‘I can’t believe this teacher is doing this to us. Doesn’t he (or she) understand we have lives outside of school? Anyone with a brain would know that.’ Venting, however, says, ‘This class is truly difficult. I knew graduate school would be difficult. But this amount of schoolwork makes it feel like I’m drowning. I don’t know if everyone feels like this, or if it’s just me.’ Can you validate or correct this distinction? I don’t want to encourage venting if it is in fact sinful. Thank you!”

A question like this cannot be answered without definitions. You can’t defend or condemn a word like complaining or venting until you know what the reality is that the word is referring to. When that’s clear, then you’re in a position to say, “That reality is good” or “That reality is bad, sinful.” Usually, what happens when you insist on definitions before you jump into a discussion or debate is that the very effort to define the terms turns out to settle the debate, because the definitions often contain the unspoken differences that were causing the debate in the first place. When you see the different realities clearly that the words were expressing, then you can make judgments about whether those realities are good or bad according to the Bible.

Pointing Fingers

Now, Sina comes close to giving me a definition of complaining and venting. She does it with two illustrations rather than two definitions. But if we work backward from her illustrations, we can arrive at definitions, at least partial definitions. So let’s try that.

What’s clear from her illustration of complaining is that it involves a put-down of someone else. It ends with “anyone with a brain would know that.” Okay. Got that. So complaining, in her definition, involves pointing the finger at a person with intent to blame, and probably in a demeaning way.

Venting, on the other hand, she illustrates with a lament about how hard things feel to her. She’s not sure how they may feel to others, so there’s no finger-pointing in her illustration of venting, no absolutizing of her feelings as though they were representative of everybody’s feelings. Venting, it seems she would say, is expressing your frustrations about a situation without necessarily accusing or blaming anybody else.

Now, she would like me to validate that distinction or not and give my opinion about whether such venting is sinful. My answer is, well, you can define your terms any way you wish as long as you make clear they are your definitions rather than claiming that they are Bible definitions or anybody else’s definitions. So given your definitions, Sina, yes, there is a real distinction: expressing heartfelt dissatisfaction with circumstances with blaming, or expressing heartfelt dissatisfaction with circumstances without blaming.

Holy Complaining, Sinful Venting

Now, is one of those sinful? The answer is that both might be sinful, and both might not be sinful. That’s the answer. It is possible for Christians to feel and express great dissatisfaction with harmful circumstances and, at the same time, draw attention to the guilty person who’s causing them, and not be sinning when they do that.

For example, Paul said to Titus, “There are . . . empty talkers and deceivers. . . . They must be silenced, since they are upsetting whole families by teaching for shameful gain what they ought not to teach. . . . Rebuke them sharply” (Titus 1:10–11, 13). Clearly, Paul is not happy. He is not happy with these circumstances in Crete. He speaks negatively about it (call it what you will), expresses his dissatisfaction, and he identifies the guilty. And he tells Titus what to do about it. “Silence them. Rebuke them.” Now, Paul was not sinning when he spoke like that. He expressed dissatisfaction and he expressed blame, and it wasn’t sin.

On the other hand, it is possible to so-called “vent” and express dissatisfaction with your circumstances without pointing the finger at anybody and yet be sinning, because there are more ways to sin than by blaming other people for your problems. Paul said,

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)

“There are more ways to sin than by blaming other people for your problems.”

It may be sin to simmer with frustration over your circumstances without pointing any finger, because it’s a sign of underlying lack of faith in the goodness and wisdom of God, a sign that we have not yet learned the secret of contentment in the strength and fellowship of Christ, in spite of difficulty.

Deep, Settled Peace

Let me step back and see if I can say something more broadly and biblically that I hope will help us sort out how we should respond to hard circumstances — whatever you call it, complaining or venting. How should we respond to hard circumstances?

I think the most fundamental thing to say is that God is absolutely sovereign over all our circumstances. Ephesians 1:11: “[He] works all things according to the counsel of his will.” Therefore, our deepest response to our circumstances should be, “God, my good and loving and wise and strong Father, has dealt me this hand, this hard hand. These painful, difficult circumstances are ultimately from my Father’s wise, strong, sovereign providence — his hand. He has my best interests at heart. I bow my heart before him and say with Mary, ‘I am your servant. Do with me as you think best’” (see Luke 1:38). In that posture of faith, we should have a deep, settled peace beneath whatever else we may feel.

“These painful, difficult circumstances are ultimately from my Father’s wise, strong, sovereign providence — his hand.”

Now, with that foundation of unwavering faith in God’s sovereign care, so that we enjoy a profound, unshakable contentment of soul in God, we will be in a position to express a kind of holy dissatisfaction with different kinds of circumstances.

Dissatisfied Contentment

Now, I know that may sound paradoxical. “Whoa — you just said ‘deep, unshakable contentment,’ and now you’re saying ‘express dissatisfaction’?” Yes, I am. I would call it something like “dissatisfied contentment.” (I said to Noël last night when I was thinking about this, “That takes me back to 1977, when I was thinking about Christian Hedonism at the horizontal level, and I wrote an article for His magazine called ‘Dissatisfied Contentment.’” Wow. Such memories.)

For example, if we encounter sin, we should feel dissatisfied with it, both in ourselves and in other people. This may involve in others a quiet correction, like it says in Galatians 6:1: “Restore [a brother] in a spirit of gentleness.” Or it may involve a public rebuke, as in 1 Timothy 5:20, where you are to rebuke an elder openly for his continuing in sin.

Or if we encounter grief in ourselves or in others, we should feel sympathy, and our heart should go out of ourselves and weep with those who weep (Romans 12:15). Weeping is a kind of dissatisfaction; weeping is a kind of dissatisfaction with this pain. I defined compassion once as the weeping of joy impeded in the extension of itself to another. Compassion is the weeping of joy — by that, I mean that deep, settled contentment — impeded in the extension of itself to another. I was trying to come to terms with holy contentment in God’s sovereignty and holy dissatisfaction with the world the way it is. It is not inconsistent to have a deep, settled contentment of soul in the sovereign goodness of God, and at the same time be weeping because of circumstances that are painful.

One more illustration. What if we encounter injustice? We are to feel dissatisfaction with injustice, and even indignation, perhaps. We should express our disapproval and our desire to set things right as much as possible. Proverbs 31:9 says, “Open your mouth, judge righteously [that is, justly], defend the rights of the poor and the needy.”

Two Tests

The upshot is this from those illustrations: both complaining and venting, as Sina defined them, may or may not be sinful — both of them. The decisive question is this (maybe two questions): Is there a deep, settled faith in the all-wise, all-good providence of God that gives you an unshakable contentment in him beneath all dissatisfactions? Second, in expressing our dissatisfactions, are we speaking our dissatisfactions because of a hatred of sin (which is good), and a zeal for God’s glory, and a love for people? Or are we just wrapped up in ourselves?