The early months and years of marriage are a time of significant change. Marriage involves at least one or both people moving to join as husband and wife under one roof. A young wife changes her name to show she now belongs to her husband as the two form a new family. Both the new husband and new wife are stepping into new callings they have never had before! With all the change and transition, it shouldn’t surprise us when conflicts, disagreements, or misunderstandings arise.

If you’re a young woman preparing for marriage, you need not fret that marital conflict will spoil the first years, nor should you assume that you and your husband won’t deal with any bumps or tense times. Rather, you can prepare to be the kind of wife who handles conflicts with maturity, charity, and inner peace. Which is to say, you can prepare to be a Christian wife.

He’s Not You

The profound mystery of marriage is that two become one — a man and a woman, distinct and different, joined together in a one-flesh union. Yet in that bodily joining, the two minds do not meld into one. You will think about things much the way you’ve always thought about them; so will your new husband.

Over lots of time and with lots of effort, you will begin to think together — to think alongside your husband, to let him know how your thoughts are developing, and also to understand and appreciate that he will always think differently than you do, no matter how well you both may communicate. This is one grand blessing of marriage: he’s not you!

Quick to Hear, Slow to Speak

Because of these natural and good differences of frame and mindset, a new wife can prepare for moments of disagreement by cultivating patience when her husband’s opinion or decision doesn’t make immediate sense to her. Remember, he’s not you. He may have many good reasons for how he thinks, talks, acts, and leads. Perhaps he sees an angle you don’t see; perhaps he has a priority you haven’t considered.

James says, “Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God” (James 1:19–20). If I could give you one very important piece of premarital advice, it would be this: slow down and listen before you answer or react.

I would guess that the sin for which I’ve most regularly needed to ask forgiveness in marriage is making a snap judgment over some innocuous (or even good) way that my husband was thinking or leading. I would mistake and challenge his choice or initiative because I thought my way of thinking was right and normal, and his way was abnormal and therefore wrong. I was routinely caught off guard by just how different we are.

Now, after 21 years of God’s helping me to slow down and listen, I can say that I am more thankful than ever that my husband’s frame and mindset are different from mine. It is a gift from God to be married to a godly man, who is not me. Don’t try to make your husband be like you or like your closest girlfriends. Praise God for the differences, and practice patience as you grow in appreciation for him.

Whispers Singe Marriage

Proverbs 26:20 says, “For lack of wood the fire goes out, and where there is no whisperer, quarreling ceases.” This bit of God-breathed wisdom pictures quarrels as a fire. And what is the fuel for the quarrel-fire? A whisperer — that is, one who shares information or secrets or private matters with someone who shouldn’t know them.

A young wife must realize, from the get-go, that her marriage is a sacred trust. The Golden Rule can go a long way in helping us grasp what we ought, and ought not, to share with others: Would I want my husband to share [blank] about me? As Proverbs 31:11–12 tells us, a husband’s heart trusts his godly wife. As he confides in her, she does not harm him but does him good all his days.

In the early years of our marriage, I realized that some women wanted to turn conversations into complaining about their husbands. In the process, they almost relished the misery of others alongside their own. Others simply grasped to know more than they ought to know about the intimate details of another’s married life.

What might not be obvious to you yet is that joining in this sort of indiscrete “whispering” can cause conflict in your marriage. When you complain about your husband to friends or overshare the intimate details of your life together, you can expect that your regard for and treatment of your husband will begin to lack honor and respect. And don’t be surprised when the things you “whispered” about him make their way to his ears.

Decide now not to engage in that sort of talk. Be the kind of wife whom your husband can trust in every way. If there is some private matter with which you and your husband need outside help, go to a trusted pastor or godly couple for guidance. But don’t denigrate the sacred bond of trust that you have with your husband through indiscretion or gossip.

Disagreeing with Submission

Even when we avoid hasty speech and practice discretion, and even when our husband is loving us as Christ loved the church, legitimate disagreements will still, at times, arise. When they do, the overarching posture of the wife will often determine whether her input is a welcome counterpoint for consideration or a difficult hurdle to get past.

When a trustworthy wife pursues godliness, seeks good for her husband, and submits to him, a Christian husband will not balk or be threatened by her sincere (and respectfully offered) disagreement. You may even be surprised at how eager he is to gather your input and how seriously he takes it, even though he isn’t bound by it (nor would you want him to be!). You want him to be a man who fears God and acts as one who will give an account for the way he led his wife and family.

When a young wife looks to “the holy women who hoped in God,” such as Sarah — who submitted to Abraham, even “calling him lord” — she can have inner peace through marital disagreements (1 Peter 3:5–6). Why? Because, as Peter tells us, her hope is in God, not in her desired outcome or in her husband’s ability to make the perfect decision. When a young wife’s hope is in God, she can trust his work in the heart of her husband and in herself.

My father died of COVID on January 4th of last year. My mother died of COVID just 48 hours and 3 minutes later. At the time, losing both parents within two days of each other felt like far more than I could take.

The depth of the grief and shock that my brothers and I felt was compounded because we had to tell Mom of Dad’s death over FaceTime. It was the most difficult conversation I have ever had, and we are fairly certain that the devastating news of her husband’s death contributed significantly to her dying so soon after. Having been separated for a week by two hospital floors, she lost the man who loved her most without getting the opportunity to say goodbye.

I share the circumstances of my parents’ deaths because I believe they highlight the kind of man and husband my father was.

In Health and in Sickness

For nearly 56 years, my father loved my mother with a fierce, self-sacrificing love — in health and in sickness.

“For nearly 56 years, my father loved my mother with a fierce, self-sacrificing love — in health and in sickness.”

My mother was seriously ill for well over half of their marriage. When I was 15, she was days away from dying from ulcerated colitis, which she had battled for several years by that point. If not for God putting her in the hospital that had the only surgeon in the country who was capable of doing this particular life-saving surgery, she would have died.

In those many months of suffering, I witnessed my father lovingly care for her when the pain was so severe that the only relief she could fathom was to die and be with the Lord. He was a full-time music professor during the week and was our church’s music minister on Sundays. And he was always a very present father for his three sons. When I was 15, my father’s care for my mother was daily marked by a love I could observe but not fathom.

In 1999, my mother was diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer. Once again, her suffering was intense, and his care was remarkable. My wife and I were teachers at the time, and we were off for the summer, so we decided to take the nine-hour drive to live with them for a month. Oh, what a month it was. His loving care for my mother in her sickness remained indomitable. He loved; I marveled.

And in Humility

Lest my reflections above tempt you to think that my father didn’t struggle with temptation and sin, he did something that has impacted me even more than his love for my mother. I actually believe it holds the key to understanding how he loved the way he did.

Throughout the entirety of my growing-up years, from elementary through high school, if my father realized he had sinned against me (or my brothers), he would come to me and say something like, “Daniel, I was wrong to do/say that. Would you please forgive me for sinning against you?” My father never merely apologized. If he thought that he had sinned against me, he asked me for forgiveness.

Every time my father did that, my admiration and respect for him grew. Here is a man, I thought, who walks in humility before God and others. Even more than his fierce love for my mother, my father asking his sons for forgiveness has impacted and shaped me, mainly because of what it revealed to me about his God.

Skies of Parchment Made

My father was a consummate musician. I remember him telling us boys of the time when Stan Kenton, the king of big bands in the 1940s and 50s, recruited him to play trumpet for him. For all the love my father had for jazz, though, he loved sacred music all the more.

For decades, my father taught music in Christian colleges, and while he did that, he would also lead worship on Sundays at our church. My mother would play the piano while he would direct the choir and lead corporate worship.

This was back in the days when churches would have “special music” in the worship service. Over the many years I heard my father sing solos, the song that left the deepest impression upon me (and I probably heard him sing it over twenty times) was the song “The Love of God” by Frederick M. Lehman.

The love of God is greater farThan tongue or pen can ever tell.It goes beyond the highest starAnd reaches to the lowest hell.The guilty pair, bowed down with care,God gave his Son to win;His erring child he reconciledAnd pardoned from his sin.

Could we with ink the ocean fill,And were the skies of parchment made;Were every stalk on earth a quill,And every man a scribe by trade;To write the love of God aboveWould drain the ocean dry;Nor could the scroll contain the whole,Though stretched from sky to sky.

Every time he sang it, my heart would burn within me. This is the song that revealed what made my father’s heart tick. He was a man who saw the love of the Father written large, and he couldn’t get over it. Whenever he sung of the Father’s love, you knew he was singing “to the praise of [the Father’s] glorious grace” (Ephesians 1:6).

Fuel of His Love

Often, when I think of my father, my mind goes to Luke 7, where we read of the sinful woman who shed tears on Jesus’s feet. She “wiped them with the hair of her head and kissed his feet and anointed them with the ointment” she brought with her (Luke 7:38).

When confronted by a Pharisee for letting a sinful woman touch him, Jesus says to him, “I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven — for she loved much” (Luke 7:47). Jesus is not saying that the woman was forgiven because she loved much. No, he’s saying that the evidence she was forgiven was that she loved much.

If we say, “Summer has come, for the temperature has reached 100 degrees,” we do not mean that summer has come because of the high temperature. We mean that the evidence of the arrival of summer is the scorching heat. Or, to say it a different way, the effect of summer is 100-degree weather. My father’s love for my mother and the humility needed to ask me for forgiveness was the evidence and effect of the Father’s great love for him, by which he was forgiven of all his sins. He loved much because he had been forgiven much.

What More Could a Son Want?

Over the many decades that I watched my father care for my mother, God the Father had graciously given me a regular glimpse of something of what it meant for Christ to love the church and give himself up for her (Ephesians 5:25). My father loved my mother like he did because he couldn’t get over how Christ had loved him.

“My father loved my mother like he did because he couldn’t get over how Christ had loved him.”

But that kind of love wasn’t limited to my mother; it spilled over into how he loved his sons — into how he loved me. My father was kind to me, tenderhearted, forgiving me, and humbling himself to ask for my forgiveness, because God in Christ had forgiven him (Ephesians 4:32). He was unwaveringly humble because he knew just how much mercy he had received in Christ.

As I look back on my father’s life, it’s clear to me that he was carried by love — not by a love of his own making, but by the love of the Father in Christ Jesus, poured into his heart through the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:5).

Oh, how I miss him. In my eyes, his life was lived to the praise of the Father’s glorious grace. What more could a son want?

Early in my marriage (and midway through an argument), my wife complained to me one day that I talked to her like I would a guy from seminary. By my beard, she was right. I knew exactly what she meant.

Amidst my band of brothers, sword fights were not uncommon. Generals trained us for battle; we could not be afraid to spar. Fights happened, as they must when important things are at stake, but we asked forgiveness if necessary and left the stronger for it. Our spiritual program, a place for serious joy, prepared us to affect untold people and places and eternities. We needed one another for sharper service. To be the men our Lord was calling for, we needed heat and friction and resistance from brothers who were for each other in Christ.

My marriage, however, I confused with this combat training. When we disagreed, I instinctively strategized, mobilizing forces of argumentation and logic here, mounting a brigade of illustration there; war must decide which idea prevailed. When I listened, it was the calculating variety — cold and non-interrupting, as Chesterton once said, “he listens to the enemy’s arguments as a spy would listen to the enemy’s arrangements” (What’s Wrong with the World, 26). A good practice for debate; a poor way to live with my wife in an understanding way.

Though as theologically sharp as many seminary men, she was my wife, not my fencing partner. Though she could hold her own, she did not find the swordplay, even when discussing Scripture, nearly as uplifting as I did. Note to self: I should not duel my wife over doctrine. Good to know.

Of Mice and Men

A man ought not debate his wife as he would a brother. But let’s add another truism: a man need not disagree with brothers in the same way he would with his wife. It is one problem to talk to wives like men; it is another to talk to men like wives. It is one loss to forget how to live with our wives in an understanding way, another to forget how to live with men according to the nature of men. Are we losing the ability to talk to men as men?

The writer of Ecclesiastes writes that for everything (speech included) there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to build up, plant, laugh, heal, embrace, and make peace. But this is not all he says. At other times, you must sit among your brothers to pluck up, to kill, to die, to break down, to refrain from embracing, to weep, to lose, to attack his darling sins or cherished unbelief (Ecclesiastes 3:1–8).

God’s rams still need to butt heads; his lions still need to roar. We can’t always play two-hand touch. Nathans need to tell Davids, “You are the man!” Pauls need to oppose Peters to their face or stand aghast at the Galatians. We need Nathaniels in whom exists no guile or flattery. We need men whose “letters are weighty and strong” (2 Corinthians 10:10), servants not tickled by man-pleasing (Galatians 1:10). We need Judes able to contend for the faith because they’ve learned how to contend with their brothers in seminary classrooms and with men who hold them accountable.

Where are the Luthers, the Spurgeons, the Ryles that roused sleeping generations with masculine boldness? We have few and need more. When masculine directness, Christlike candor, and warlike speech fade from the mouths of good men, the world and church suffer rot.

The Man Christ Jesus

Imagine our Savior’s deliberation the moment Peter, his second-in-command, stands between him and the cross. Heaven’s cheers had not yet died down at Peter’s confession, “You are the Christ,” before Peter tries to confront this Christ (Mark 8:29, 32). Jesus plainly taught that the Son of Man must suffer and be rejected, yet Peter, trusting his assessments too much, “took him aside and began to rebuke him” (Mark 8:32).

Do not miss the phrase preceding Christ’s masculine reply:

But turning and seeing his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.” (Mark 8:33)

Jesus commends Peter, the rock, in one breath (Matthew 16:15–20), and administers the strong rebuke in the next. Notice where he looked before he struck: at his other sheep. He considered them as a good father considers the other children who witness a sibling’s defiance. Peter needed to hear this; the disciples needed to hear this. To withhold it would fail not only Peter, but them. We imagine Peter’s eyes following his Savior’s to the other disciples in that intense moment, only to reengage with the blow: “Get behind me, Satan!”

Modern-day disciples trained in a generation of safe spaces recoil: Jesus, don’t you see he only cares about your welfare? He was only considering group morale. Did you really have to call him Satan and belittle him in front of the others? Jesus, don’t you think that was a little harsh? He did well just a minute ago; I wonder if you missed an opportunity to encourage him.

But Jesus, perfectly concerned with God’s glory and the eternal good of his sheep, struck the rock before the others. He had manly words and a manly tone for his chief man and friend. Seeing his disciples, he rebuked Peter to teach them all. A man bold only toward his enemies is not yet as Christlike as he needs to be.

And take note: nobody ran away crying. No one took to blows. No one challenged another to a duel. The truth was spoken, the rebuke taken, and men moved on, better for it. How can we establish fellowship like this? A couple of starting points.

1. Set terms in peacetime.

Unlearning the coddling of modern speech, especially within male circles, need not be done overnight. We do not put gloves on, sneak up behind a brother, and sucker punch him in the name of courage. In my experience, rules of engagement should be established beforehand. When some men and I formed a group years ago, we drew from an old meeting covenant and agreed in the affirmative:

Are you willing to charitably rebuke, chasten, and instruct each other?
Are you willing to take rebukes, chastening, and instruction from others?

We make it clear at the beginning that we must have priorities higher than comfort. Here we strive for a culture concerned with grace-giving but also sin-slaying so that we might be more God-pleasing. We resolve — God helping us — not to let personal ego or weaker-brother sensitivities stop our ears from hearing (or giving) a discomforting word, a naked question, or a plain rebuke.

Bold speech had been a weakness of some in our brotherhood; now it’s a strength. Caring they remain, but without the coddling that shelters sin and harbors — for the sake of “unity” — God-belittling theology and practice.

2. Consider the goodness of correction.

Yes, confrontation is unpleasant. To some it feels like a slow suffocation. To others, a frozen chill climbing the spine. To others, the kindling of a flame to devour culprits offering this strange fire. To still others, the words replay in the mind as hammer blows, driving them down and down into the floor.

After the initial tremor, a man’s pride usually demands satisfaction. Criticism, disagreement, correction all seem to drag our reputation into the contest. I’ve felt what Richard Baxter describes:

They think it will follow in the eyes of others that weak arguing is the sign of a weak man. . . . If we mix not commendations with our reproofs, and if the applause be not predominant, so as to drown all force of the reproof or confutation, they take it as almost an insufferable injury. (The Reformed Pastor, 129–30)

“A man bold only toward his enemies is not yet as Christlike as he needs to be.”

In the heat of the moment, I’ve found that cool reflection on the goodness of correction helps me summon the cavalry of humility. In my disagreement, am I loving the truth, the church, my brother, my God, or myself? If the former, the jousters may need to take another pass. If the latter, I should be suspicious of my urge to swing back, slow to speak, and willing to disengage for a time to drown my pride in Christ’s blood.

Love Peace, Go to War

Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. (Jude 3)

Jude did not live to fight, but he would fight. He wished to discuss the thing that brought him the most joy: their common salvation in Christ. He wanted to explore the treasury of Christ’s excellencies, the bliss of the new birth, the grandeur of God’s glory, and the wonder of the cross. He wanted to drape these glories over all of life (and he does some), but alas . . .

There is a time to discuss our common salvation and revel in Christ. And there is a time when we must draw a sword and defend the Savior and salvation in which we revel. In our times, the spirit of the age scolds that the masculine tone is toxic, aggressive, and unnecessary. Boys should not be boys — much less, someday, men.

Brethren, we are chiefs of our tribes, leaders of families. If we cannot spar over the greatest, most urgent verities of this world and the next, where can we? If we are to hear “you’re wrong” or undergo cross-examination or hear rebuke, should it not be over these truths and with brothers who love us? “A rebuke goes deeper into a man of understanding than a hundred blows into a fool” (Proverbs 17:10). Let hard words sink in, men of God. Speak them with patience; deliver them for each other’s good; remember to speak to men as men. Learn not only to endure them but to cherish them.