http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15042930/give-thanks-for-everything-really

We know marriage is hard. We all learn that by the second week. But there are different kinds of hard. There is hard and hopeful, and there is hard and hopeless. The most difficult marriage, of course, is the one that is hard, distant, and with little reason to think it will change. In some of those cases, there might not be overt betrayal or cruel behavior or blatant sins that children would see. Instead, the marriage is . . . disappointing, lifeless, lonely.

To make it more difficult, you witness marriages that seem happy, or at least better than your own. You see spouses who enjoy each other. At those times, jealousy might sneak in for a moment, but you rarely land on coveting. Instead, the reminders just leave you a bit more disconnected from other people.

And to make it more difficult still, your marriage doesn’t receive much attention. Broken ones do. Struggling but growing ones do. But disappointing ones don’t. Consider this as a reminder that you are remembered in some small way.

What Can I Do?

You might feel as though you have tried everything and nothing helps. Yet this remains true: one person can make a difference in a relationship.

Jesus says, “Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water’” (John 7:38). In other words, you are a walking tabernacle, and the Spirit who lives within you will be living water in a desolate place. Very influential indeed. The apostle Paul wrote about wives of unbelievers who were willing to live with them. He said that the wives were holy, and that holiness spreads (1 Corinthians 7:14). God can use your holiness in Christ to promote the work of Christ in others.

“When we have confidence that the Spirit will use us, we become more resilient, creative, and engaged.”

Notice how this resists a drift toward hopelessness. One reason we are hopeless in marriage is because there is nothing else we can do, so we resign ourselves and try to build a more independent life. But when we have confidence that the Spirit will use us, we become more resilient, creative, and engaged.

Avoiding Silence and Frustration

Now reflect on the tendencies that have emerged within you. Do you lean toward silence, words spoken in frustration, or both? Silence is not a biblical strategy. Though there are certainly times when we decide not to speak, that is not a long-term solution in any relationship. Life with God is filled with words, and we imitate God’s ways in our everyday relationships.

Words spoken in frustration are also guaranteed to fail. They are natural but are rarely spiritual or helpful. They separate rather than invite. They look down upon rather than come alongside.

The goal, of course, is wise words, which will make you a learner for life. We never quite arrive at the place where we have finally mastered how to speak them. Instead, wisdom is a search for a treasure that always contains more. The more we search, the more we discover.

Wisdom is founded on the fear of the Lord (Proverbs 9:10), which means that we are astounded by his love for us and we mature to be humble listeners before him (for example, Psalm 5:7). As we listen, we notice his characteristic style with us. He is gentle, patient, and careful in his words. When we read through the book of Proverbs, we also notice that his words are typically adorned as a way to make them meaningful and attractive. His words, in short, are good.

Even his rebukes are good. All his words invite us to come closer as he comes closer to us, and he anticipates our response. He speaks to us, and he wants us to speak to him. The way of wisdom is to enjoy his words to you and delight in listening to him. Then you bring that culture to your relationships. We treat others as we have been treated.

Seeking Wisdom and Creativity

This mission of speaking wise words is decidedly spiritual. You may have many natural abilities that you bring to your relationships, but wisdom is something different. It is a gift of the Spirit. So the work in front of you has two parts. First, you want to hear God’s wise, good, loving words to you and enjoy them. Then you ask him for something you desperately need and only he can give. You ask for skillful, beautified words — “apples of gold in a setting of silver” (Proverbs 25:11).

Then you get creative.

“I have recently been struck by the goodness of God’s words to us and have been praying that I would grow in the way I speak to others . . .”

[Your spouse wants to talk about something “later.”] “Yes, I find these things hard to talk about too. But they seem important. Could we set aside some time on Saturday morning?”

“Both of us probably bring a lot of our parents into our conversations. How have you seen me do that?”

“Today I really struggled with [the kids, complaining, my health . . .]. Could you pray over me?”

“I was thinking about things I would like to know about you. I would love to know one thing that you enjoyed about your day, and one thing that was hard. Could we trade stories on our day?”

When you live in a disappointing relationship, you are not always sure how to talk about it to friends or ask for prayer. Here is a way to ask for prayer: you can ask others to pray that you would be skilled at hearing God’s good words to you so you can pass them on to others.

Learn from Your Differences

Disappointments tend to arise out of differences between you and your spouse. Perhaps you once saw your similarities — or how your differences were complementary. Now you just see differences. For example, you want to talk; he wants to avoid conflict. You want to partner in an activity; he prefers solitary tasks and interests. You hope to know and be known; he seems uninterested in either knowing you or being known by you. As a general rule, differences lead to frustration unless you understand those differences. The more you understand your husband, the more patient you will be.

A discussion about the kind of culture we experience in our early years at home is always a worthwhile way to understand differences. It might be easier than talking about the marital relationship. The primary risk is when we critique the other person’s family.

“Chronic disappointment has a hard time seeing small steps in the right direction.”

A second category to understand would be the ways your two minds are uniquely structured. The purpose here is not to talk about sins but personality styles or mental abilities. You probably already have a preliminary sketch you could offer him. For example, “I have been thinking about us and how, like any couple, we think in our own unique ways. You seem to think like a builder or engineer, who sees a problem and then figures out a way to solve it. That makes me imagine that, when I want to talk, you could easily think that it is always about a problem, and a problem with no apparent solution. Does that seem possible?” The basic idea of this approach is that your spouse has his reasons for his responses that are more than him simply being sinful.

Small Steps

Chronic disappointment has a hard time seeing small steps in the right direction. If those steps ever existed, you quickly backtracked, so you have stopped looking for them. But remember that Christ is at work in you, and his work will affect those around you. Remember, too, that the Spirit’s work is powerful yet oftentimes subtle. We will miss his work when we are not looking for it. With this in mind, keep your eyes open. Look for one way the Spirit is working in you and one way the Spirit is working in your relationship. When you see something, it is worth mentioning.

These thoughts are not new. But they might put a light on truths you know but have faded. In that sense, they are part of that small step of seeing the Spirit at work in the way he gently reminds us of things that are true and good.

We are a generation crying wolf.

Jesus said to beware “ravenous wolves” (Matthew 7:15). Paul warned of “fierce wolves” (Acts 20:29). And for two millennia, one of our enemy’s best schemes has been to quietly infiltrate the flock with predators. There have always been wolves.

Yet our awareness of wolves, and access to their stories, is particularly acute in our times, and with it has come hair-trigger suspicion of even worthy leaders. In an effort to expose wolves in sheep’s clothing, some today imagine real shepherds to be wearing wolves’ underwear. The contagion is tragic. In the end, those who will be hurt most are the genuine victims, whose real cries for help will become harder to hear in the din of over-eager accusations.

In confused days like ours, as in every generation, we’re called afresh to take our cues from Scripture, rather than what’s trending in an unbelieving society. We need God’s word on how to watch for wolves, and we also need a positive vision of what to look for in our leaders. As the list grows longer of what to beware, do we have any corresponding clarity on what to pursue?

Three Big Categories

Into one of the great questions of our time, the risen Christ provides some bracing and clear answers. First comes his own words, while among us, in Mark 10:42–45: his leaders don’t “lord it over,” but serve. Then, we have Paul’s remarkable words to the Ephesian elders captured in Acts 20. Add Peter’s charge to “fellow elders” in 1 Peter 5. Hebrews also sounds a clarion call in its final chapter (Hebrews 13:7–8, 13). And most extensive of all, we have the letters of Paul. Especially the Pastoral Epistles of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus. There, among other passages, we find the “elder qualifications” of 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, where the apostle lays out a bounty of fifteen traits in each list, with the two lists largely overlapping.

We have not been left without direction.

However, sometimes we do get lost in plentiful data. In fact, we have so much guidance available for us on what makes for true, enduring, trustworthy leaders that it might help to have some simple, memorable categories to bring organizing clarity to the many details.

Consider one such effort to slice the pie into three pieces, based on the graces catalogued in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1. The three each start with an H (or H sound). And I’ll show the work on which specific traits go under each heading.

1. Humbled

First and foremost comes the man before his God, that is, “in secret” (Matthew 6:4, 6, 18). The man is his truest self alone before God, with no human eyes watching. This is the man that family, church, and world may not see directly, but they will most definitely see him indirectly by his fruit. Over time, this man, the real man, comes out. And perhaps the chief manifestation will be a genuine, compelling humility that cannot be faked. “He must not be arrogant” (Titus 1:7).

A pastor might pretend to have first steeped his soul in hearing God’s voice in Bible meditation and having God’s ear in prayer, but he can’t pretend it for weeks on end. His spiritual thinness will manifest. The sheep will know in time.

To be clear, the humility we’re looking for here is not a virtue that a man “grows from scratch,” as if he had been born without pride and just needed to develop the opposite. Rather, he was born a sinner, with deep native conceit — and apart from the grace of God, this original pride will deepen and calcify. And God does not typically purge a man of the main roots of his pride through quiet, painless processes alone. He usually roughs him up in painful moments. He humbles him. It can be ugly. And in time, a different kind of man, by grace, emerges on the other side.

Tim Keller tells of Martyn Lloyd-Jones sitting in a gathering of older pastors who were discussing some younger preacher with extraordinary gifts:

This man was being acclaimed, and there was real hope that God could use him to renew and revive his church. The ministers were hopeful. But then one of them said to the others: “Well, all well and good, but you know, I don’t think he’s been humbled yet.” And the other ministers looked very grave.

Lloyd-Jones, says Keller, was hit hard that “unless something comes into your life that breaks you of your self-righteousness and pride, you may say you believe the gospel of grace but . . . the penny hasn’t dropped” (The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World, 119).

Humbled to Lead and Feed

We need humbled pastors. And for most, if not all, God designs the calling process to the pastorate to be part of this humbling. Aspiring to the office is critical, as 1 Timothy 3:1 notes — because in this line of work it is vital to labor “not under compulsion” or “for shameful gain” but willingly and eagerly (1 Peter 5:2). Yet aspiration alone does not make a pastor. He also needs the affirmation over time of fellows in his local church, and then, and often most humbling, the specific real-life appointment of some local church to the office. He may aspire to pastor, but he is not yet called to pastor until some real church appoints him.

“We pray for humbled, whole, and honorable pastors who together will face the challenges that come at each local church.”

So too, under this banner of the humbled man before his Lord, comes the requirement that pastor-elders be (1) “able to teach” and (2) “sober-minded.” Christ calls his undershepherds to lead and feed the flock — that is, to govern and to teach. Which relates to the particular call of church leaders to the word of God and prayer (Acts 6:4). Faithful pastors teach God’s word, not their own preferences, and they lead prayerfully, with God-given sober-mindedness, not natural human wisdom.

Such humbled men “keep their heads” (sober-minded) in conflicted and trying times. They’re calm, settled, secure, and wise — and wise enough not to go off on their own but contribute to and receive wisdom in the context of team leadership, that is, a plurality of local pastors. And such humbled men, when matched with teaching ability (able to teach), are a powerful combination in the leading and feeding of the flock, where genuine skill and ability in teaching is required and where we do not “teach ourselves” as our subject but the stewardship of Scripture we have from Christ.

2. Whole

Second, then, growing out from a man’s devotional life, and life of humility before his God, is the man before those who know him best. We might say “in private.” Does he have integrity? Is he whole, the same in public and private?

One aspect of his wholeness is the broad (and beautiful) banner of self-control (prominent in 1 Timothy 3 and mentioned twice in Titus 1). Has he gained a relative, settled, and holy mastery of his own appetites and bodily passions? Does he seem, by the Spirit, to control his own gut, or is he controlled by it? Related are the two disqualifiers “not a drunkard” and “not a lover of money.”

Intimately connected with “self-control” biblically is sexual holiness and being (literally) a “one-woman man,” which is not simply a box to check (“husband of one wife”) that he’s married and not divorced. Rather, “one-woman man” presses deeper to the fidelity of the man’s soul. Is he faithful to his wife in body, mind, heart, and words? Does he care for her as Christ does for his church? As one of the pastors, he will be part of the team of leaders caring for a particular local church.

Such wholeness, then, also relates to his own household management: “He must manage his own household well, with all dignity keeping his children submissive, for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God’s church?” (1 Timothy 3:4–5). Distraction and abdication at home make him unfit for the leadership the church needs.

3. Honorable

Finally, we have the inevitable public dimension: the man before the watching church and world. At first blush, we might find it strange that spiritual leadership relates so much to public perception and reputation, but we should keep in mind the public nature of church office. It is vital that our pastors be honorable.

The express trait that gets at this most clearly is “respectable,” that is, the man’s life and words make it easier (rather than harder) to respect him, both within the church and in the broader community. So, leading the lists in both 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 is “above reproach.” This likely begins with Christian eyes, though it’s complemented with “outsiders” in 1 Timothy 3:7: “Moreover, he must be well thought of by outsiders, so that he may not fall into disgrace, into a snare of the devil.”

One aspect of this honorable public life is hospitality, which is literally “love of strangers.” Rather than defaulting to fear or dislike of unknown persons, he extends welcome in Christ, whether to the church or into his own home or into conversation.

One final piece of honorable public bearing is how the man carries himself in conflict and when upset. Paul says “not violent but gentle.” Gentleness is not the absence of strength, but the addition of virtue to strength. It applies strength in life-giving, rather than life-harming, ways. One last disqualifier is “not quarrelsome.” Mature Christian leaders aren’t afraid to engage when they must, but they don’t go around picking fights for sport (2 Timothy 2:24–26).

Resilient in Conflict

The nature of the Christian faith is such that good leaders are perennially important. Yet, as many of us have learned in tough times, good leaders prove even more precious in conflict. That’s the setting in both Ephesus and Crete, as Paul writes to Timothy and Titus, and it’s foregrounded in 2 Timothy 2:24–26 and in 1 Peter 5:1–5.

“Good pastors, as a local team of sober-minded teachers, shine all the brighter in tough times.”

Good pastors, as a local team of sober-minded teachers, shine all the brighter in tough times, in the times of difficulty and suffering that already were in the first century, that many face today, and that are coming in the days ahead. And so, we pray for humbled, whole, and honorable pastors who together will meet the challenges that come to each local church.

Even as our generation cries wolf, we pray and look expectantly, knowing that such worthy leaders do not emerge by accident, nor are they as rare as some may suspect. Rather, they are divine gifts, sovereignly appointed and provided, supplied by the risen Christ, for the joy and health of his church.