What’s more important--your happiness, or God’s? That may sound like a bizarre question, but it’s a crucial one to ask when your marriage reaches a place where it’s just not...fun, anymore. In the course of a long marriage, there will be many different seasons of cherishing, happiness, struggle, delight, and disappointment. In the best of both worlds, our happiness and God’s happiness will perfectly align. But that’s not always the case, is it?
Our emotions will go up and down, but our resolve, our commitment, should be to keep our focus on what is most pleasing to God. I’ve slightly edited a section from my book, Sacred Marriage, to remind us of our high calling to seek to please God in all things, including in our marriage.
Paul answers a lot of questions for us when he writes, “So we make it our goal to please him” (2 Corinthians 5:9). Ask ten people on the street what their goal in life is, and you’ll get an amazing variety of answers.
For the Christian, Paul couldn’t be clearer: his “consuming ambition, the motive force behind all he does,”[i] is to please God. But Paul doesn’t just say pleasing God is his “consuming ambition”; he assumes it will be ours as well: “We make it our goal to please him.”
When something is the motive force behind all we do, it drives every decision we make. And Paul is crystal clear: The first question we should ask ourselves is, “Will this be pleasing to Jesus Christ?”
The first purpose in marriage — beyond happiness, sexual expression, the bearing of children, companionship, mutual care and provision, or anything else — is to please God. The challenge, of course, is that it is utterly selfless living; rather than asking, “What will make me happy?” we are told that we must ask, “What will make God happy?” And just in case we don’t grasp it immediately, Paul underscores it a few verses later: “Those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again” (2 Corinthians 5:15).
I have no other choice as a Christian. I owe it to Jesus Christ to live for Him, to make Him my consuming passion and the driving force in my life. To do this, I have to die to my own desires daily. I have to crucify the urge that measures every action and decision around what is best for me. Paul is eloquent about this fact: “We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body” (2 Corinthians 4:10).
Just as Jesus went to the cross, so I must go to the cross, always considering myself as carrying around “the death of Jesus” so that His new life — His motivations, His purposes, His favor — might dominate in everything I do.
This reality calls me to look at my spouse through Christian eyes: “From now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view” (2 Corinthians 5:16). The reason is clear: “If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” (verse 17). Part of this new identity is a new ministry, one that is given to every Christian, as it is inherent in the person of Jesus Christ: “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation” (verse 18).
Think about this. The very nature of Christ’s work was a reconciling work, bringing us together again with God. Our response is to become reconcilers ourselves. C. K. Barrett defines reconciliation as “to end a relation of enmity, and to substitute for it one of peace and goodwill.”
Clearly Paul is talking about carrying the message of salvation. But we cannot discuss with any integrity the ending of “a relation of enmity” and the dawning of “peace and good-will” if our marriages are marked by divorce, fighting, and animosity. Everything I am to say and do in my life is to support this gospel ministry of reconciliation, and this commitment begins by displaying reconciliation in my personal relationships, especially in my marriage.
If my marriage contradicts my message, I have sabotaged the goal of my life, which is to be pleasing to Christ and to faithfully fulfill the ministry of reconciliation, proclaiming to the world the good news that we can be reconciled to God through Jesus Christ. If my “driving force” is as Paul says it should be, I will work to construct a marriage that enhances this ministry of reconciliation — a marriage that, in fact, incarnates this truth by putting flesh on it, building a relationship that models forgiveness, selfless love, and sacrifice.
The last picture I want to give the world is that I have decided to stop loving someone and that I refuse to serve this person anymore or that I have failed to fulfill a promise I made many years before. We can’t carry a message well if we don’t live it first.
How can I tell my children that God’s promise of reconciliation is secure when they see that my own promise doesn’t mean a thing? They may get over it, but in that case I will have presented a roadblock rather than a stepping-stone to the gospel.
What happens with most divorces is that at least one party, and possibly both, has ceased to put the gospel first in their lives. They no longer live by Paul’s guiding principle (“I make it my goal to please Him”). The Bible is clear in its teaching. If the goal of a couple is to please God, many will not seek a divorce (but some might still be forced to). I know there are exceptions. Paul allows divorce when the other spouse isn’t a believer and abandons the believer; Jesus considers marital unfaithfulness as grounds for divorce. Certainly, exceptions are to be assumed — at least in the realm of separation — if you or your kids are in danger of violence; but most of the cases of divorce among Christians do not involve such situations. They are far more likely to involve two Christians whose priorities in life have become distorted.
The last thing I want to do is further hurt those faithful believers who feel their lives have been scarred because a former spouse forced them into divorce, even though they fought with all their might to keep their marriage together. I don’t judge you; I grieve for what you’ve gone through. But the first thing I want to do is challenge any believer who approaches divorce with a view of “God will forgive me; it’s best just to start over rather than work through the hurt. After all, doesn’t He want me to be happy?”
One of the reasons I am determined to keep my marriage together is not because doing so will make me happier (although I believe it will); not because I want my kids to have a secure home (although I do desire that); not because it would tear me up to see my wife have to “start over” (although it would). The first reason I keep my marriage together is because it is my Christian duty. If my life is based on proclaiming God’s message to the world, I don’t want to do anything that would challenge that message. And how can I proclaim reconciliation when I seek dissolution?
[i] Philip Hughes, The Second Epistle to the Corinthians.
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