The key question when our marriage has hit a rough spot is, “Now what? What are we going to do about it?” The man’s and woman’s commitment to work through and resolve the issues creating the disillusionment is vitally important. It can lead to the kind of reconciliation and acceptance that makes marriage worth it for life.
Some of us have known what it is like to feel the frustration and fear. The marriage is stuck. It isn’t growing. Yet we also see that running into the bedroom, slamming the door, and staying there for hours is not working.
At this point, we need to realize that all is not lost. There still is hope. In fact, our disillusionment has actually brought us to the threshold of the very love and security we’ve been looking for. To cross over this threshold of fulfillment, however, we must . . .
Let Our Marital Disappointment Help Us To Face Our Disappointment With God.
This step won’t be easy. After all, God is the One before whom we took our vows. He is the One we asked to bless our marriage. Yet, once again, He is the One who seems to have let us down. We may ask, “Should I be surprised? Isn’t He the One who let me have an alcoholic father or a suicidal mother? Should I now be surprised that He didn’t reach in and stop me when I drifted into a difficult marital relationship? He’s the One who hasn’t answered my prayers. He hasn’t changed my mate or taken away the gnawing emptiness inside me.”
In his book Bold Love, Christian counselor Dan Allender wrote, “A sexually abused person once told me, ‘When God did not intervene to stop the abuser, He lost any right to require me to do anything. He owes me; I owe Him nothing.’ Her words are stark and brutal, but I believe she represents the core posture of the heart that struggles with God. She simply had the angry courage to put words to the battle to understand God’s goodness, His response to injustice, and the burden of fulfilling the royal law of love” (p.70). We may be angry with God because our marriage is not going as we expected.
We may be holding Him accountable or accusing Him of breaking His promise of happiness to us. But as we struggle, we are at least taking Him seriously. And in our struggle we can compare our experience with the stories of other people who have been disappointed with God before finding fulfillment in Him.
The Bible tells about a man named Job who felt that God had been unfair to him. It tells us about a man named Joseph who was hated by his brothers, sold into slavery, and then falsely accused of trying to rape his employer’s wife. The Bible tells us about a whole nation of people who, after being delivered from the slave-yards of Egypt, concluded that God had led them out into a barren wilderness to destroy them. The Bible tells us about Jesus, the Son of God, who on the night before His betrayal and death pled with the Father to deliver Him from the suffering He was about to face. Over and over, the Bible introduces us to people whose disappointment with God bleeds through the pages of their lives.
Yet again and again the Bible shows that disillusionment can become the doorway to fulfillment. Job lived long enough to see his confidence in God restored and deepened (42:1-6). Joseph lived long enough to say to those family members who had harmed him, “You meant evil against me; but God meant it for good” (gen. 50:20). Time after time the children of Israel saw bitter and frightening experiences turn into opportunities to witness the power and goodness of God. Jesus endured to the point of saying in Gethsemane, “Nevertheless not My will, but Yours, be done” (luke 22:42).
No one has ever suffered the betrayal, aloneness, abandonment, and abuse that Christ did in the course of His life and death. No one ever experienced the kind of unfair treatment that He endured when He paid the price for our sins. Yet He lived and died and rose from the dead to declare along with Job and Joseph and other godly men and women of Israel, that, in time, God always shows Himself good and powerful and faithful to those who are willing to trust Him to the end. He can do the same for us in our marriage.
Christ showed us by His own example that we were not made to find complete fulfillment or security in any human relationship. He showed us that we are made to find our protection and contentment in God, and that only in this realization can we be free to love and submit to one another.
By His own example Christ also helps us . . .
Let Our Relationship With God Become Our Source Of Marital Fulfillment.
Followers of Christ are in a great position to face the issues that have brought disillusionment to their marriage. Biblical counselor Larry Crabb wrote, “The difference between godly and ungodly people is not that one group never hurts and the other group does, or that one reports more happiness than the other. The difference lies in what people do with their hurt. Either they do what comes naturally: use their hurt to justify self-centered efforts to relieve it, caring less about how they affect others and more about whether they are comfortable; or they do what comes unnaturally: use their hurt to better understand and encourage others while they cling desperately to the Lord for promised deliverance, passionately determined to do His will” (Men And Women, p.93).
Once we learn that our ultimate well-being depends on God and not on our spouse, we will begin to experience the strength of the Lord. Once a husband believes that his relationship to God is more important than his relationship to his wife, he will begin to find a personal sense of significance that doesn’t depend on his wife’s responses or affirmation. He will begin to love her out of the love that he has found in Christ (eph. 5:25).
Once a wife believes that her relationship with Christ is more important than her relationship to her husband, she can begin to find a source of security and acceptance that doesn’t depend on her husband’s ability to meet her needs. She can begin to accept her role as a wife out of the conviction that rightly motivated submission is actually a way of submitting herself to the lordship and provision of Christ (eph. 5:22-24).
This is not to say, however, that godly husbands and wives become independent of one another. It is important that we also . . .
Let Our Dependence On God Become A Basis For Loving Interdependence.
A husband and wife who depend on God—who find their strength and sufficiency in Him—will not be overly dependent on each other. Nor will they demand an unhealthy independence or domination.
God made man and woman as unique, specially gifted beings in His image. Neither of them is to rob the other of that God-given uniqueness. But when they say, “I do,” they are choosing to give themselves to each other in a lifelong relationship.
The Bible helps us to understand how a husband and wife can be one, yet also be true to the unique person God made each to be. God made woman to be a companion and helper her husband can depend on. Genesis tells us, “The Lord God said, ‘It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him’” (2:18). Proverbs 31 describes an initiative-taking, God-gifted woman who did just that. She entered into an enterprise that her husband fully supported.
There was an interdependent relationship between this couple in Proverbs 31. God gave the wife multiple gifts, including good business sense. Her husband apparently was not jealous of her gifts, nor did he deny her their use. He did not try to remake her into something she was not. We can assume that he loved her for the woman God made her to be. She, in turn, used her gifts in a way that produced harmony and marital success, as well as business success. Scripture encourages respect of each other, and an acceptance of the other’s gifts as the person God made him or her to be.
The interdependence of husbands and wives also has implications for their sexual relationship. The Scriptures make it clear that husbands and wives are to protect, enjoy, and share mutual expectations in the intimacy of the marital bed. The sexual dimension of marriage is designed by the Lord to bring continuing pleasure and exhilarating renewal to the relationship. The wise author of Proverbs wrote these words to husbands:
Drink water from your own cistern, and running water from your own well. Should your fountains be dispersed abroad, streams of water in the streets? Let them be only your own, and not for strangers with you. Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice with the wife of your youth. As a loving deer and a graceful doe, let her breasts satisfy you at all times; and always be enraptured with her love (Prov. 5:15-19).
When a man and woman marry, they have the right to expect sexual fulfillment from each other:
Let the husband render to his wife the affection due her, and likewise also the wife to her husband. The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. And likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does (1 Cor. 7:3-4).
If one partner decides to abstain for a time, they must mutually agree and keep the time brief:
Do not deprive one another except with consent for a time, that you may give yourselves to fasting and prayer; and come together again so that Satan does not tempt you because of your lack of self-control (1 Cor. 7:5).
For such mutual pleasure, husbands and wives are to depend on one another. When we offer ourselves to one another in love, God Himself is pleased. When we fail, the pleasure goes to Satan.
The Actions Of Love.
This brings us to 1 Corinthians 13. This chapter about love has no greater application than within the context of marriage. “Love suffers long and is kind; loves does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails” (vv.4-8).
You might want to read this passage again. Where the word love appears, put in your name. Now ask yourself if this is how you treat your husband or your wife. This is what it means to love. Love takes action and trusts God to give the promise of marriage to couples who are willing to trust Him.
