http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/16097061/will-my-marriage-ever-be-more
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.
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Enthralled by the Beauty of God: Why Jonathan Edwards Still Preaches
What about the theological insights of Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) make them so exhilarating for many who discover them today?
As a Reformed Christian who has long benefited from Edwards’s insights, I have been fascinated by that question. Sixty years ago, when I was a student, Edwards was respected in Reformed circles, but not often celebrated. Within thirty years, however, he had been rediscovered and had become widely revered as the one American theologian who might be mentioned in the same breath with Augustine and Calvin. So, in my studies of Edwards, I have kept asking which of his insights are most valuable for shaping Christian sensibilities today.
How does Edwards speak to us now in the twenty-first century?
Two Worlds Collide
As a historian of American religion and culture, I have been especially interested in how Edwards’s own cultural context helps us understand his continuing relevance. Especially important for that understanding is that Edwards lived at a dramatic turning point in Western culture.
As a precocious teenager, Jonathan struggled passionately with how to reconcile two very attractive worlds. The son of a strict and impressive New England Reformed pastor, he was heir to what had become one of the most formidable intellectual-spiritual traditions of the time. Yet he also was fascinated by the exciting new outlooks arising from the scientific revolution shaped by Isaac Newton, the philosophical insights of John Locke, and what we know as the Enlightenment. We might think of his close New England contemporary Benjamin Franklin, who also was confronted with these two worlds and embraced the Enlightenment.
Edwards recounted that, as a teenager wrestling with these two outlooks, he was full of objections to the “sovereignty of God,” which he thought was a “horrible” doctrine. But then, in a way he could not quite explain, he came to embrace that teaching as “a delightful conviction.” He then goes on to speak of his experiences of an “inward, sweet delight in God and divine things” (Works of Jonathan Edwards, 16:792).
In brief, I think the best explanation for this paradigm shift is that Edwards’s early view of God’s sovereignty was too small. He came to see that if God’s sovereignty is understood properly, it extends to the very essence of all reality. And not only that, but it means that the universe is essentially personal. God’s sovereignty, in biblical terms, is an expression of the language of God. “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1).
God’s language is not identical with God, but it is nonetheless an intimately personal expression. And that language is the language of love. God created the universe and sustains it every microsecond ultimately in order to communicate love to creatures capable of love. And the supreme expression of that love is the sacrificial love of Christ for the undeserving.
Our Impersonal Age
Edwards’s view of the universe as essentially personal offers a view of reality opposite from the direction his enlightened contemporaries — and eventually the whole modern world — were moving.
For Isaac Newton, the physical universe could be understood as interacting impersonal mechanisms. One could add the God of Christianity to this outlook (as Newton himself did), or a vague Providence (as Franklin did), but practically speaking, most things could be understood as the operations of impersonal forces.
During the next generations, the enlightened Deists distanced God further from everyday life. Deists still thought it necessary to posit a Creator of the marvelous mechanisms, but for them, God, like a master watchmaker, had essentially retired, allowing the wonderful machinery to operate on its own.
By the later nineteenth century, with the advent of Darwinism, it became plausible for progressive thinkers to remove God altogether and to view all reality as the product of mindless, chance forces out of which intelligent beings happened to appear.
Today, all of us, even though we might reject a chance universe, are shaped in part by the assumptions on which our civilization has been built: that the universe is most essentially impersonal, run by laws best known by natural science and controlled by instrumental reason. Technology vastly increases the domain of that impersonal universe as its influence shapes our lives, determining how we earn livings, how we organize our everyday lives, how we spend money, how we communicate, how we form our beliefs, how we are entertained, and often how we worship. God is almost inevitably distanced from that impersonal world run by its self-contained sets of laws.
Religious believers typically supplement that world with beliefs in a higher spiritual reality and with some moral principles that may somewhat modify the way they relate to the technological society and the natural world. They typically believe God created the world sometime in the past and may still intervene at any time, particularly with respect to occasional spiritual experiences or regarding personal concerns, especially matters of health. The outlook of religious believers is thus often dualistic. We tend to move back and forth between two types of realities — the “real world,” as we might say in an unguarded moment, and the higher spiritual dimension. These two are seldom well integrated with each other.
God’s Language of Love
Edwards’s starting point in the triune God’s ongoing creative love provides a wonderful basis for cultivating some alternative sensibilities. For Edwards, the most essential dimension of reality is the spiritual and personal that pervades everything. This outlook is not just added on to what we believe about the material world. Rather, it is a reorienting recognition of underlying dimensions of reality that define everything that is.
All creation is part of a language that has its highest expression in the redemptive love of God in Christ. Edwards often speaks of that love as the highest beauty. We all can get glimpses of the wonderful beauty of the natural world around us, as in a sunset or in the flowering trees of springtime. These point to the higher beauties in personal relationships. The highest beauty, after all, is the beauty of true love. And again, the highest love is Christ’s love for us as undeserving sinners.
Edwards accordingly cultivated sensibilities toward what we regard as “the natural world” to see it as a personal expression of a loving God whose love to us should shape our affections. Edwards saw created reality typologically as “Images of Divine Things.” He kept an extensive notebook with that title where he recorded reflections on how the beauties of Christ’s love are revealed in everything around us. Since nature has been corrupted by sin, its revelations are also of Christ’s redemptive love. The beauties of the universe are the harmonies of right relationships that we sometimes get intimations of in the beauty of trees and flowers.
In Edwards’s greatest sermon, “A Divine and Supernatural Light,” he depicts the beauty of the redemptive love of Christ as a light flowing from the center of reality. Since that light reveals the beauty of a loving person, it can be truly known only affectively. Someone might have just a rational knowledge about that love but not truly sense it. Edwards uses the analogy of our human loves. “There is a difference between believing that a person is beautiful, and having a sense of his beauty. The former may be obtained by hearsay, but the latter only by seeing the countenance” (Works, 17:414).
So, if we are given eyes to see the overwhelming beauty of that love, we will freely and enthusiastically embrace it. And if we do truly encounter the love of Christ, it will bring a joy and delight; that is, a new sensibility will begin to reshape our lives and loves.
Transformed by Beauty
Edwards, then, points us toward an overwhelming, wonderful, and life-changing personal beauty. That encounter with the beauty of God’s love at the center of reality offers something much deeper than simply adding new religious convictions and practices to our other activities and loves shaped by the devices and desires of our technological civilization.
Rather, our joy and delight in experiencing Christ’s love will give us new sensibilities about everything around us. It will also reorder our loves. In his great treatise on Religious Affections, Edwards offers us a guide as to what these life-changing loves look like, culminating in Christlike characters and practices of love to neighbors.
None of us may fully live up to these ideals, but in Edwards we find a guide who offers wonderful alternatives to the soul-deadening outlooks of our contemporary world.
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Love, Unity, and Assurance in the Truth: Colossians 2:1–3, Part 2
What is Look at the Book?
You look at a Bible text on the screen. You listen to John Piper. You watch his pen “draw out” meaning. You see for yourself whether the meaning is really there. And (we pray!) all that God is for you in Christ explodes with faith, and joy, and love.
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If Your Brother Sins Against You: How to Forgive and Let Go
Have you also found that it can be much easier to pray for your own sins than to deal with others’ sins against you?
With the first, we can confess to our Lord, take up one of his many promises of pardon, and have our souls restored. With the second, the process can be more inconvenient, messier.
With sinners who betray us, who embarrass us, who hurt us in that place we are most vulnerable, it can feel like climbing a mountain to even tell them we forgive them, let alone to forgive them “from [the] heart” (Matthew 18:35).
The fallen mind has a propensity to involuntarily replay others’ offenses. You see the scene, hear the words, feel the same stab repeatedly. Like a worm, the breach threatens to burrow deeper and deeper within us. The initial shock becomes a growing How could they? And the closer the relationship, the greater the chance of infection, as David knew well:
It is not an enemy who taunts me — then I could bear it;it is not an adversary who deals insolently with me — then I could hide from him.But it is you, a man, my equal, my companion, my familiar friend.
(Psalm 55:12–13)Perhaps you have been well taught on what to do with your sins against God, but is your heart also well instructed in what to do — and not to do — when others, especially fellow Christians, sin against you?
Ancient Help for Lingering Hurt
Love was expected from the start. From the beginning of Israel’s history under the Mosaic covenant, it was enshrined in law, passed down to subsequent generations:
You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor, lest you incur sin because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord. (Leviticus 19:17–18)
I find this text supremely helpful in bearing the affliction of others’ sins against me.
First, it tells me that I shall not hate my brother in my heart. I can think that if I don’t lash out in the moment, if I don’t react unkindly or coldly, that this is the same as doing so in my heart. Self-control is not the same as love. You can practice self-control and harbor a cool contempt. This command forbids me from taking their sins as a squirrel does an acorn, storing them up in my heart and mind.
Second, it tells me I can sin against others in how I respond to their sin. “You shall not hate your brother in your heart . . . lest you incur sin because of him.” God is more concerned here with addressing my present or future sin than the past sin of the person who wronged me. This is challenging. I can be — and many times have been — simultaneously a victim and a culprit in the same situation because of how I responded.
And when I ruminate on sins, inwardly score-keep and note-take their crimes, this practice leads to the two other diseased fruits of hatred described: vengeance and grudges. I feel the need to either settle scores (vengeance) or refuse to move on (hold a grudge). And notice, in passing, the people against whom you and I are tempted to bear a grudge or seek vengeance: the people of your God. His children. His saints. Your own family.
How to Let It Go
What strikes me most in this text, however, are not the sinful ways I can respond to others’ sins — caressing the offense in my heart, holding a grudge, seeking to pay them back. Sadly, I know each too well. What strikes me most are God’s alternatives.
1. Do not hate him — go to him.
You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor, lest you incur sin because of him.
You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but. Here lies the narrow path: you shall speak with the person who sinned against you. (I’m assuming here normal circumstances in which there is no reasonable threat of physical harm that might preclude going alone).
Go to him — not away from him, treasuring his sins in your heart. Go to him, not away from him, to publish it on Twitter or to gossip it to others. Go to him. “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother” (Matthew 18:15).
Do not go to him to injure him, to take vengeance upon him, to accumulate more strength for your grudge. And while it may not be wise to speak with him that same day, do the heart-work necessary on that received sin before the sun falls: “Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil” (Ephesians 4:26–27).
“If you want to let the devil into your life, procrastinate and neglect to resolve your anger toward others.”
If you want to let the devil into your life, procrastinate and neglect to resolve your anger toward others. Don’t ever talk with them. Let the sun sleep before you have quieted and calmed your heart in prayer and confession before Christ.
2. Do not hate him — reason plainly with him.
“You shall reason frankly with your neighbor.” Isn’t it amazing that the alternative to hating your bother in your heart is talking to him? I am not to keep the offense in my mouth and savor it as candy; rather, I am to let it out through speaking the truth in love (Ephesians 4:15).
I have made the mistake of understanding “reason frankly” as “assume you’ve interpreted things rightly and tell that person.” I’ve learned to say instead, “I perceive you have done this,” or, “I believe you to have sinned against me and against God.” These have proved more fruitful beginnings. But be honest, for all of that. Don’t downplay their sin, but speak plainly in love for them.
To some, this will be very difficult. You despise conflict. You despise people disliking you. You would rather your brother or sister remain in patterns of sin against God, you would rather harbor the seeds of resentment inside, you would rather cover their sins in unrighteousness, than have an uncomfortable conversation. Your self-protection, in the end, is hate to your brother.
Half the time, while you might expectantly wait for an apology, your brother has no idea he sinned against you. Your noiseless bitterness robs him of repentance, and robs you of the opportunity to grow in courage, in obedience, in death to self, in self-awareness and repentance if you are wrong. I wager that silent resentment has done even more harm among us than contention following plain speech.
3. Do not hate him — love him as yourself.
You shall not hate your brother in your heart, . . . but you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
Is all of this not how we typically deal with ourselves?
No one has done more ill to you than you. No one has given more offense, no one has caused more problems, no one has made your life harder for yourself than yourself. Our sin — not others’ sins against us — is always our biggest problem. Not “him over here” or “that person there,” but me. Others’ sins can’t damn me. Others’ sins can’t ruin my soul (without my permission).
“Our sin — not others’ sins against us — is always our biggest problem.”
But though our biggest problem is us, we still love ourselves, don’t we? Few go around begrudging themselves, plotting vengeance against themselves, refusing to lend compassion to their own sins against others. Millions have passed without replay.
So how do you love your Christian neighbor? Like that. As Matthew Henry comments, “We often wrong ourselves, but we soon forgive ourselves those wrongs, and they do not at all lessen our love to ourselves; and in like manner we should love our neighbor.”
Don’t Hide Their Sins in Your Heart
Dealing plainly, honestly, speedily with our brothers and sisters in Christ loves them as we love ourselves, and as we have been loved ourselves. And are not even Christian communities that willingly bring faults to one another in love altogether rare? Is it not rather terrible and uncommon to be taken aside by a believer and told of your perceived wrongdoings? And here is the question: Should it be?
This is not a word to embolden faultfinders to voice all sins they see — unleashing Egypt’s plagues of flies, gnats, and frogs upon small groups everywhere. Nor does it remove the very real and beautiful call to silently cover others’ sins in love (Proverbs 10:12; 1 Peter 4:8). It is, rather, a word to encourage speech where there has been bitter silence, courage where there has been cowardice, and love where there has been hate.
