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.

The most surprising men, whether alive today or throughout history, are men of persistent love. Men all over the world accomplish much for any number of reasons — for pride, for money, for fame and honor, for power. We expect men to work hard, take risks, and make sacrifices for self. A few strange men, however, do all that they do for love. They also work hard and take risks and make sacrifices, but they do it for the good of others, especially their eternal good.

When the apostle Paul wrote to a younger man, discipling him in manhood and ministry, he charged him, “Let no one despise you for your youth, but set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity” (1 Timothy 4:12). While the qualities in this verse apply to young men and women alike, I find that they provide a simple yet challenging paradigm for becoming better men of God.

And could we have heard the apostle read this short list to his disciple, I think he may have slowed down over love, letting it land with special force.

Indispensable Ambition

Why would I think that? Because Paul begins the letter, “The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith” (1 Timothy 1:5). My whole reason for writing, Timothy, is that you might be a man of love — and that you might lead others further into that love. Love, as John Piper defines it, “is the overflow and expansion of joy in God, which gladly meets the needs of others” (The Dangerous Duty of Delight, 44). So, Timothy, set the believers an example in your growing, overflowing, need-meeting joy in God. Teach them, with your life, how to love.

“Love is an indispensable ambition for any man pursuing maturity in Christ.”

The apostle Peter charges followers of Jesus, “Above all” — above all — “keep loving one another earnestly” (1 Peter 4:8). And then Jesus himself says, “By this all people will know that you are my disciples . . .” — not by what we can do, or how much we know, or how hard we work, but by our love (John 13:35). Love proves that a man truly belongs to God — that God has chosen him, redeemed him, equipped him, transformed him, and lives in him. We should expect selfishness, sexual immorality, impurity, idolatry, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, and drunkenness from men (Galatians 5:19–21) — but genuine love confronts our (well-informed) assumptions about men.

If love, then, sets us apart as men of God, then love is an indispensable ambition for any man pursuing maturity in Christ.

What Real Love Does

Anyone who has genuinely loved knows just how hard love can be. Paul certainly saw and felt the hurdles himself, as well as how easily love can wither in relationships. His first letter to the church at Corinth addresses a host of serious issues, but perhaps none is weightier than their lack of love for one another. First Corinthians 13 — “the love chapter” — wasn’t written to newlyweds basking in the anticipation of marital intimacy; it was written to a church deeply infected with selfishness and divisiveness — to Christians who thought themselves mature while their love had grown cold.

So, what does real love look like? As men of God, how do we discern if our love is rooted in and empowered by God, or if it is just a self-flattering figment of our imagination? Paul gives us a series of reliable tests, culminating (and to some degree summarized) in 1 Corinthians 13:7:

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Men Who Bear

Men of love do not abdicate responsibility in relationships, or shift blame when things go wrong, or turn a blind eye to the needs of others; they bear, and do so with joy. Men of love are men who gladly bear the burdens of others, and who bear with others when they become a burden — when they disappoint, hurt, or offend us.

The man of God not only bears what might earn him praise or recognition, but he bears what other men will not — what might seem, from an earthly perspective, foolish. What is he getting out of that? And maybe even more surprisingly, he consistently bears the needs and offenses of others with patience, not irritability; with kindness, not harshness or rudeness (1 Corinthians 13:4–5). When a man loves in the strength of God, the burdens he bears are real and yet they are also strangely light (Matthew 11:30). He carries more than most, with more grace than most.

“When a man loves in the strength of God, the burdens he bears are real and yet they are also strangely light.”

So, what burdens might you bear? If you’re married, this begins at home. How sensitive are you to the everyday and ever-changing needs of your wife and children? How ready are you to go above and beyond in shouldering those needs? How well do you bear with the particular weaknesses and sins in your family? And then, having provided well at home, have you thought much about how the joy in you and your home might overflow to meet needs in your church family, your neighborhood, and wherever else God has placed you?

If you are not married, you may assume there are fewer burdens to bear, but remember: the apostle Paul was an unmarried man, and he did not lack burdens to carry. All of us are surrounded by need. Singleness often allows us to shoulder more with greater focus than those who are married (1 Corinthians 7:32–35).

Men Who Believe

Love also believes all things of other people. That sounds awfully naive, maybe even reckless and irresponsible, doesn’t it? Surely men of God know better than that. When the apostle says that love believes all things, he does not mean love believes everything it hears — Jesus certainly did not — but that love believes the best of others. To say it another way, when thoughts, desires, or motives are unclear, love does not assume the worst.

Cynicism, that sin we despise in others and yet often coddle in ourselves, is not the wisdom it pretends to be. It is a profound lack of love masquerading as “discernment.” Love, of course, is discerning. “It is my prayer that your love may abound more and more,” Paul says, “with knowledge and all discernment” (Philippians 1:9). But love is not only discerning. As godly discernment grows and is refined, its love does not shrink and shrivel, but abounds more and more. And while this kind of discernment thinks carefully and deeply, while it feels the seriousness of sin and stands ready to confront it when necessary, it also refuses to assume evil of anyone. Love believes all things.

Whom do you struggle to believe the best of? Whom are you least gracious with — your spouse or roommate, your children or parents, your coworkers, classmates, or neighbors? Men of God rejoice at the truth (1 Corinthians 13:6), and when the truth is unclear, they believe all things. So, when suspicion begins to swell in your heart again, fight to assume the best (it will often be a fight!), and entrust your soul “to a faithful Creator while doing good” (1 Peter 4:19).

Men Who Hope

Men of God believe the best of others, and they hope the best for others, because love hopes all things. This hope is not “our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13), but a relentless horizontal hopefulness rooted in that great and happy hope. Good men don’t rejoice at the failures or misfortunes of others. They’re not consumed with selfish and competitive ambition. They’re not plagued by envy. They rejoice to see others succeed, bear fruit, and thrive — especially their brothers and sisters in Christ.

Paul doesn’t talk about this horizontal hope often, but he does in 2 Corinthians 1:7: “Our hope for you is unshaken, for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort.” Even while he was horribly afflicted, “so utterly burdened beyond [his] strength that [he] despaired of life itself” (2 Corinthians 1:8), Paul still hoped the best for the brothers in Corinth. He took courage and strength in knowing that their future would be better because his present had gotten worse. Men filled with the Spirit of God think and hope that way.

“When thoughts, desires, or motives are unclear, love does not assume the worst.”

So, in each of your relationships, hope for the best. Pray for the best. Ask God to use you to improve someone else’s life and future, even if it costs you along the way. Lay aside the selfishness and competitiveness that groans when others prosper while we struggle, and thank God when you see him using and elevating the gifts of someone else. Men who hope the best for others are unusually joyful men because they have so many more reasons to rejoice. Their joy isn’t limited to their own successes, achievements, and opportunities, but is catalyzed and strengthened by the joy of others.

Men Who Endure

The love of these men not only bears burdens, but keeps bearing burdens. Long after others would have walked away, feeling they had done all they could do, men of love stay and endure.

Fraudulent love always fades and fails, often quickly, like the seed that fell along the rocky ground (Mark 4:17). When real love meets resistance, the resistance doesn’t just reveal endurance, but actually produces endurance (Romans 5:3). These men will set boundaries when necessary in certain relationships, but will also endure more than most would. They love differently, they love durably, because they have been “strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy” (Colossians 1:11).

Of this quality of love, Leon Morris writes,

It is the endurance of the soldier who, in the thick of the battle, is undismayed, but continues to lay about him vigorously. Love is not overwhelmed, but manfully plays its part whatever the difficulties. (1 Corinthians, 182)

Almost any man would like to think himself the soldier who would endure “whatever difficulties,” but like Peter as Jesus was betrayed, we often imagine ourselves dying for love (Matthew 26:35) only to cave before the servant girl in front of us (Matthew 26:69–70). We grumble and give way before the particular difficulties in our path, and make convenient excuses to get out of doing what love requires — we’re tired, we’re busy, we have our own needs, we’ve done so much already.

So, what tempts you to walk away? Anyone who is called to love sinners has plenty of reasons to give up. Love overcomes those reasons, and takes the next brave, costly step, as Jesus did when he bore the cross for us. When I lack the heart to endure, with patience and joy, in marriage, in friendship, in church life, in evangelism, I need to remember just how many reasons Jesus had to abandon me — and yet he has never left me or forsaken me (Hebrews 13:5, 8). So, forbid that, as I follow him, I be found to be a leaving or forsaking man.

Men Who Die

While death to self did not explicitly make the list in 1 Corinthians 13, we catch at least a whiff of this kind of sacrifice in verse 5: “[Love] does not insist on its own way.” Love often dies to its own way — to its own needs, its own desires, sometimes even to its own sense of what would be best or wisest.

“Loving men are always dying men — and happy men.”

And as we look up and widen our gaze beyond the love chapter, we see this thread of loving manhood again and again, most powerfully in the God-man of love: “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). And so, he loved — and in doing so, he left us an example of surprising, masculine, sacrificial love.

For love to bear, it must die to comfort and convenience. For love to believe, it must die to cynicism. For love to hope, it must die to selfish ambition. For love to endure, it must die, again and again, to self. Loving men are always dying men — and happy men. As they die, they follow Jesus, “who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross” (Hebrews 12:2). Like him, men of God love and die for joy.

Audio Transcript

Happy Thanksgiving Day — a national holiday for us in the States. We’re very grateful that you listen to the podcast. And no matter where you live, we are praying that you have a day full of Christ-centered thankfulness for all the blessings we enjoy in this life.

Thanksgiving is an essential daily practice for us all. And it’s evidence of our soul’s well-being. As Spurgeon said, “Thanksgiving is one of the best ways to keep yourselves in spiritual health.” Amen. Thanksgiving is spiritual cardio. To lose gratitude is to lose spiritual vibrance. So, when it comes to this Thanksgiving Day, it’s no small holiday for the Christian. Pastor John, use this day to invest a few minutes to help us refocus on what the Bible says here by leading us in a Thanksgiving Day meditation.

Let’s take a moment and ponder what the experience of thankfulness actually is. I’m going to limit myself to Christian thankfulness, so I’m not talking about Hitler’s thankfulness that his liquidation techniques have become more efficient. That kind of thankfulness is wicked. There is wicked thankfulness. Nor am I talking about a kind of good thankfulness the way most people celebrate Thanksgiving — who don’t have any relationship with God at all but feel that they are the beneficiary of some kind of benevolence and usually attribute it to other people. I’m talking about Christian thankfulness, the kind that God is very pleased with.

Defining Christian Thankfulness

Now, what is it? It’s a feeling, an emotion and affection in the heart, that rises spontaneously in response to receiving something that will increase our enjoyment of Christ. That’s my definition of Christian thankfulness. A couple of comments about that definition.

A spontaneous emotion — so, I’m distinguishing thankfulness from saying the words “thank you.” You can teach a child to say “thank you” to his grandma for a gift he does not want. There’s no spontaneous thankfulness welling up in this child’s heart, because he didn’t want those black socks. So, no spontaneous emotion rose up in the child’s heart when he got this gift that he didn’t want. Saying “thank you” is not the same as being thankful. Being thankful is not a decision. Saying “thank you” is a decision. Being thankful is not a decision. It is a spontaneous heart response to the perception of someone giving you something that’s good for you.

“Christian thankfulness is an emotion that rises in response to receiving something that will increase our enjoyment of Christ.”

What makes the spontaneous response of the heart Christian is that it has the effect of increasing our enjoyment of Jesus. This is partly owing to the fact that we see Jesus as the source ultimately behind the gift, and we fully anticipate that the goodness of the gift will cause us to know him more and love him better. The gift may be an ice-cream cone and the gift may be the salvation of your soul by the power of the Holy Spirit. In either case, what makes the heart response of thankfulness Christian is that it comes from Christ and leads to the enjoyment of Christ. If ice-cream cones don’t make you know and love Christ better, they’re wasted on you.

All things are from him and through him and to him or for him (Romans 11:36; Colossians 1:16). Christians are Christians all the way down, from salvation to Dairy Queen Butterfinger Blizzards and all the blessings above and below, which also implies that thankfulness, while it may have its tears — it regularly has its tears — is a happy emotion. When it comes, we’re glad that it comes. It is a gratifying experience. In fact, the human soul — let this sink in — is deeply made for this experience and, therefore, when it comes, we feel like we have become human as we ought — humbly receptive and sweetly thankful.

Meditating on the Power of Thanksgiving

Now, to help us revel in this happy experience on Thanksgiving, think with me about these few observations.

1. Thankfulness is a sweetly humble experience. It is, in a sense, the very opposite of pride: “What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if [it were not a gift]?” (1 Corinthians 4:7). In other words, thankfulness, by its very nature, pushes boasting out of the human heart. You can’t, at the same time, be a brash, swaggering, boastful, cool, self-sufficient person and a thankful person. You can’t. Not in the same heart.

That’s really important in our day, it seems to me, because in video after video — for all I can tell by the advertisements that slip in while I’m watching some documentary or something else — brash, swaggering, boastful, arrogant, self-sufficient, sassy heroes and heroines are evidently quite popular. Well, they’re not popular with God because God delights in thankfulness. Picture some sassy, swaggering heroine or hero saying with humility to God or to a friend, “I am so thankful for your kindness to me.” No, it won’t work, because thankfulness necessarily implies humility and dependence and the finding of our happiness in receiving some good that another did for us that goes beyond what we deserve. It is the opposite of pride and swagger.

2. Consider that this is why thankfulness is purifying, especially to our mouths: “Let there be no filthiness nor foolish talk nor crude joking, which are out of place, but instead let there be thanksgiving” (Ephesians 5:4). It’s amazing that Paul would contrast crude joking with thankfulness. It’s because emotionally they just don’t go together. I mean, try to imagine it. Why do people with crude, foul mouths lace their talk with four-letter words? Why do they do that? One of Paul’s answers is that their hearts are not brimming with humble, happy thankfulness, especially to God. Nobody uses four-letter words or a crude phrase to express heartfelt, humble thankfulness.

3. Consider how everything that we have is a gift. If we know that we are sinners, then everything we have is an undeserved gift. Not just a few things here and there — everything. “[God] gives . . . life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:25). “What do you have,” Paul asks, “that you did not receive?” (1 Corinthians 4:7). And the answer is nothing.

Which means that thankfulness for the Christian who lives in the light of this truth is utterly pervasive in all of life. This is the beat of his emotional heart. This is the air we breathe. This is the flavor of every experience. God is sovereign. God is wise, God is good. God turns everything for the good of his children. Thankfulness, for the Christian, is part of every experience. That’s what 1 Thessalonians 5:18 says: “Give thanks in all circumstances.” Ephesians 5:20 takes it further: “[Give] thanks . . . for everything.” When we are walking in the light of the truth, no emotion is more common in the Christian heart than happy thankfulness.

4. Finally, consider the vastness of the benefits that Christians have. “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32). All things! “My God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ” (Philippians 4:19). “All things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future — all are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s” (1 Corinthians 3:21–23). It is only a matter of time, Christian, until you inherit the earth (Matthew 5:5). Be patient, be faithful, and be thankful in everything all the time. We were made for this happy emotion.