"You and your spouse were both planned for God's pleasure. A man once asked Jesus, "What's the most important commandment?" Jesus replied, "I can summarize the entire Bible in two statements: Love God, and love other people!" (Matthew 22:36-39).
Life is about relationships, not achievements. You worship God when you love and sacrifice for your spouse (just read through Romans 12 with a view of what its applications would mean to your marriage). That brings pleasure to God, and any time you give pleasure to God, you're worshiping Him.
-- You and your spouse were formed for God's family. God made an incredible promise about the gathering of even just two believers: "For where two or three have gathered together in My name, I am there in their midst" (Matthew 18:20, NAS). So if both you and your spouse are believers, God is already in your marriage working to transform the two of you into a purpose driven family unit!
Your marriage is a lab for learning how to love like Jesus loves. Within marriage, God has created an opportunity for us to develop a true intimacy and authenticity with another human being.
To go this deep requires genuine, heart-to-heart, gut-level sharing, where you and your spouse get honest about who you are and what's happening in your lives. This happens when you both share your hurts, reveal your feelings, confess your failures, disclose your doubts, admit your fears, acknowledge your weaknesses, and ask each other for help and prayer.
-- You and your spouse were both created to become like Christ. God uses your spouse to build His values, attitudes, morals and character within you.
Once you understand this, a lot of what happens within your marriage will begin to make more sense. When you start to ask, "Why is this happening to me?" The answer is -- to make you more like Jesus!
If God's purpose for each of our lives is to make us look more like Jesus, what better tool could he use than the marriage relationship? Who better for God to use to chisel you than the person you live with seven days a week? God is using each of you to shape the other person more and more into the image of Jesus.
-- You and your spouse were both shaped for serving God. The Bible says, "God has made us what we are. In Christ Jesus, God has made us to do good works, which God planned in advance for us to live our lives doing" (Ephesians 2:10, NCV).
God shapes us for service through a variety of methods, including the difficulties in your marriage to shape you into an effective minister to others. Who could better help somebody recover from the pain of an addiction, a business failure or a prodigal child than a couple who has been through these things and emerged with godly insights?
Could it be that the part of your marriage you regret or resent most -- that which you've wanted to hide or forget -- is the very thing God wants to use as your ministry to help and encourage others sharing the same struggle? God doesn't just use our strengths; He uses our weaknesses, and even our failures!
-- You and your spouse were both made for a mission. Your marriage not only involves ministry, it also involves mission. Your ministry is to believers and your mission is to non-believers -- allowing God to use your marriage as a means for telling others about His love."
There is so much confusion and historical baggage surrounding both the "meaning" and "purpose" of marriage" that it is difficult to know just where to start, but for anyone with the courage to be intellectually honest, it is clear that ever since "Adam and Eve" marriage has been extraordinarily adaptive to the times.
In what I shall describe as the "Christian West", marriage was first shaped by the doctrines and policies of the medieval church before being drastically altered, first by the Protestant Reformation and then the Industrial Revolution. Indeed Martin Luther would have been appalled by Warren's glaring omission:
"The purpose of marriage is not to have pleasure and to be idle but to procreate and bring up children, to support a household. Those who have no love for children are swine, stocks, and logs unworthy of being called men or women;" --Martin Luther
Tracing marriage's roots back several hundred years we see that in Ancient Greece and Rome childless men were likewise treated with scorn. The marriage laws of Rome are not easily summarized as they varied significantly over the years. However, during the imperial times husband and wife were considered equals and as a result many women avoided the mortal perils of childbirth. To the point that the emperor Augustus seeing a plunge in the upper class birthrates drafted laws compelling people to marry and penalizing those who remained childless.
And yet the Romans were also tolerant of prostitution and concubinage, had no qualms about homosexual relationships. Indeed their laws governing rights to property were remarkably fair to women which was what allowed for them to enjoy such a measure of independence.
Interestingly enough, Mao instituted similar equal rights during his "Cultural Revolution" and now that Chinese women are scarce due to the one-child-per-family restriction those in the upper classes, being in demand, are enjoying exceptional autonomy and social freedom. However wherever the terms of marriage have not evolved along with the times women continue to endure their second class status.
The Catholic church restricted their priests from marriage to prevent the bishops from consolidating power through sectional inheritance. That strict prohibition contributed to the Reformation as Protestants rejected the notion of marriage as a sacrament or religious doctrine. As Martin Luther declared, marriage was "a worldly thing . . . that belongs to the realm of government", and a similar opinion was expressed by Calvin. Thus marriage was made secular and ruled to be no longer performed by a minister, but by a justice of the peace. A concept the Puritans themselves brought to America.
(In England they came to be called "common law marriages", and since Henry VIII had broken with Rome, they continued to be permitted until 1753, when the Church of England was put in charge of all marriages (including those of Catholics, but excluding those of Quakers and Jews). This development did not affect the English colonies, however, and thus common law marriages remained possible in America. (As recently as 1970 they were still recognized in several states)
Here at home marital experiments are nothing new. Take for instance the colony founded by John Noyes in 1948 in Oneida, upstate New York. He advocated for a what he called "complex marriage" in which theoretically every woman was married to every man. A safe and loving "village" for raising happy, well-adjusted children.
The Oneida Community
So what can we gather from the historical record? Simply that marriage has served two basic purposes: the sharing and consolidating of property and the protection of child-bearers and their children. In an age of overpopulation, artificial-insemination and sex-change operations if not for providing for a stable home, the right to one's inheritance and a place to raise children-- all aspects of expressing one's "love"-- what the devil does one's "being gay" have to do with it?
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