Editor’s Note: Tim Challies recently wrote a piece on the “The Great Challenge of Every Marriage.” I was struck by his simplicity and the wisdom of what only years can say. I’m five years down the road further than Tim on both marriage and age – plus I am a professor of biblical counseling who counsels, reads, and writes in this genre most days. Below you will find his big idea and my interaction with it. Thanks Tim for your continued good work for the glory of God and good of His children.
The Great Challenge of Every Marriage by Tim Challies
We’ve all heard that marriage was designed to make us holy more than to make us happy. And though it’s a bit of a trite phrase that threatens to force a false dichotomy between holiness and happiness, there is a measure of truth to it. At its best, marriage does, indeed, help us grow in holiness. It helps us in our lifelong quest to put sin to death and come alive to righteousness. Aileen and I knew this was true when we got married all those years ago, but as time has passed we’ve been surprised to learn how it’s true.
It had been our assumption that marriage would make us holy because we would essentially be enlisting another person to our cause—a person who would assist us in identifying sin and in helping us put it to death. “This is the will of God: your sanctification,” says Paul, and each of us would be involving ourselves in embracing God’s will for the other.
Certainly there have been times when each of us has helpfully and even formally pointed out where the other has developed patterns of sin and selfishness. There have been times when we have each helped the other fight a particular sin or a general sinfulness. Yet as we look back on the past twenty-three years, we see that this has been relatively rare. It’s not that we don’t see plenty of sin in one another and not that we are firmly opposed to pointing it out. No, it’s more that there is another way that marriage has helped us grow in sanctification—a way in which our efforts are directed at addressing ourselves more than fixing each other.
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So perhaps the foremost way that marriage has helped make us holy is not so much in calling each of us to serve as the other’s second conscience, a junior assistant to the Holy Spirit in bringing conviction of sin. It is not in calling each of us to be a kind of moral sandpaper to actively scour off each other’s rough edges. Rather, marriage has helped make us holy by calling each of us to extend a kind of divine mercy toward the other—to simply live lovingly with someone who is prone to be sinful and just plain hard to live with.
In marriage, God allows us to see one another as we really are, then to accept one another as we really are—as holistic human beings who are a mixture of holy and depraved, grownup and immature, wonderful and almost unbelievably annoying. Marriage makes us holy not just in compelling us to identify and confront sin in the other, but also in calling us to bear patiently with another person’s sin, preferences, and bad habits. In other words, marriage makes us holy in the way it calls us to be like God in overlooking offenses, in imparting mercy, in extending forgiveness, in displaying compassion, in refusing to be petty. Thus, the great sanctifying challenge of marriage is not so much to fix one another, as to imitate Christ.
Dealing with Sins and Preferences – an Extension of Humility and Gentleness
I appreciate what Tim wrote related to marriage, sanctification, and its look over many years. As he said, I think many people get married without knowing the extent of how true this will be. In both my marital and premarital counseling, I emphasize Ephesians 4:1-6 for this very reason. The challenge for every believer is to walk worthy of the Gospel of Christ (cf., Eph 4:1). Paul explains the attitudes necessary to do this in the following two verses. (You can check out my entire series of articles on these verses here or here.)
Paul lists five key attitudes to becoming like Jesus Christ: humility, gentleness, patience, forbearance, and endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. I have suggested these are essentially stair steps. In order to keep the unity of the Spirit in marriage, you must start with humility and progress through each of the steps in order.
As I read Tim’s take, I would suggest that he matches two of the five on the way to the fifth in his article. He emphasizes patience with sin and forbearance with preferences as a couple strives for keeping the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. I agree.
What he does not stress (outside of his primary purpose in his small piece) is the way to do this very thing. If you are going to be able to live up to the great challenge of marriage, you will need to start with both humility and gentleness.
How do you pull off the patience with each other’s sins and the forbearance with each other’s preferences? You do this with humility and gentleness. All in an effort to walk worthy of our calling in Christ as we seek to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
(Readers, at the end of the year, you may also want to remember the Nick Challies Memorial Scholarship at Boyce College and the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary—a scholarship in Nick’s honor meant to enable others to carry out the ministry that was so important to him—to minister the Word of God in Canada. The scholarship is now receiving funds from donors and distributing them to students. We would be honored if you would consider making a donation.)
About the Author:
Tim is a follower of Jesus Christ, a husband to Aileen and a father to three children. He worships and serves as a pastor at Grace Fellowship Church in Toronto, Ontario, and is a co-founder of Cruciform Press. Learn More about Tim here.
Tim’s original post appeared under the same title at Challies.com here.
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