Singin' the Marriage Blues: God's Design for Marriage

The sermon opened with a brief audio clip from Keb Mo's song, "I don't know". Lyrics are:
You tell me that you love me
That you really care
We've talked it out and we did our best
and still it ain't going nowhere
It feels like our forever just ended yesterday
And all our tomorrow's were simply tossed away
Should I stay
or should I go?
I . . . don't . . . know

A good blues tune is a gift from God. Yeah, I truly do believe that! A good blues song deals with the problems of living life day-to-day. The shuffling rhythm, the blue notes coming from a guitar, they can take those problems and let them melt away. A good blues song can poke fun at a sad situation or give a voice to an aching inside. Nobody gets through life without singing the blues.
But what happens when you aren’t just singing the blues, but you start living them? When relationships go wrong? What happens when marriage isn’t everything you thought it would be? When, like the singer in the song I just played, you ask, “Should I stay . . . or should I go? . . . I . . . don’t . . . know.” What happens when you’re living the marriage blues?
That’s the question we’re going to try to get after during the next three weeks. Now I realize, of course, that even in a church our size we have a wide variety of marriage needs and experiences. We’ve got some relative newlyweds, some who have a decade or two under their belts. A few of us have the blessing of being married long enough to see grandchildren and great-grandchildren. We’ve got some soon-to-be-weds, some never-have-been-weds, and even maybe a few of “when-are-you-gonna-be?”-weds! But no matter what category you fall into, there is one thing that remains true: Good marriage require constant maintenance. They take work. I want for all of us to be equipped with some good, solid, Biblical tools so that we can have marriages that go from good to great.
Now there are any number of places we can go to get a story-book idea of what marriage is supposed to be like. But I don’t want to give out some Hollywood-inspired notion of “happily ever after.” No, in order to find out what marriage is supposed to be like we’ve got to go to a different story-book; we’ve got to go to the One who designed marriage in the first place and see what God intended marriage to be like. Turn to our Old Testament reading: Genesis, chapter two, verse eighteen.
Genesis 2:18 “18 The LORD God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.’”
The very first thing that God would have us know about marriage is that it is for companionship. Adam needed a companion. He needed someone to walk beside him in life. He needed someone to be with him, someone that would make the good times sweeter and the hard times easier. That’s what marriage is about.
The Hebrew for “helper suitable” is kind of interesting there. It literally translates as “I will make a help for his opposite.” The Hebrew word is neged, and you can almost hear the word “negative”—as in photo-negative—in it. That’s the concept God is suggesting. Not a maid, but an opposite, a complement to Adam. Adam doesn’t need someone just like him. Adam doesn’t need another Adam—he’s already got one! What he needs is someone who’s strong where he’s weak. Someone who’s not the exact same as Adam, but someone that will be a valuable companion along life’s road.
James Sheridan, in his wonderful book A Blessing for the Heart: God’s Beautiful Plan for Marital Intimacy, likens this marriage of opposites to two sides of an arch. Imagine two sides of a tall, graceful arch. Which side is more important? Right; neither. You have to have both sides of an arch—even though they are opposite—to make it complete. Without both sides—both opposites—the whole thing collapses.
Put simply: You are God’s gift to your spouse. For those of you who are married or going to be married, turn to your spouse and say, “I am God’s gift to you.” Now do this, say, “You are God’s gift to me.” We need to recognize that our spouse is a gift from God. He has a purpose for bringing us together. He has a design for our marriage.
That design continues to be laid out in the next few verses. Adam, seeing his wife for the very first time, turns to her and says in Genesis 2:23-25 “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called 'woman, 'for she was taken out of man.” 24 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. 25 The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.
Chuck Swindoll, in his book, Strike the Original Match: Rekindling and Preserving Your Marriage Fire, notes that these verses point to four distinct aspects of God’s design for marriage: severance, permanence, unity, and intimacy. We’ll take them one at a time.
“For this reason a man will leave his father and mother.” That’s severance. To sever something is to cut it off. The first thing we must learn to do in marriage is sever our relationship with our parents. Now, this doesn’t mean to cut all ties completely. After all, God’s word also tells us to honor our father and mother. So God wouldn’t have us get married and then never speak to Mom and Dad again. What it means is that we must remove our parents from the role of being the central emotional and relational fixture in our lives and give that role to our spouses. Think about it . . . no woman wants a man who thinks that he’s married to his Mommy, and no man should have to compete with Daddy for his wife’s attention.
There’s a good story I’ve heard that helps illustrate this point. A mother wanted to make a point at her son’s wedding reception. As the wedding party sat at the head table and they cycled through the speeches, she waited patiently for her turn. When the time came, she didn’t say a word, but simply stood up, opened a gift box and pulled one of her favorite and best aprons out of it. She held it high for all to see . . . and cut the apron strings off of it and gave them to her daughter-in-law. This mother understood that her role as being the primary emotional support was to be severed, and she each handed over that task to her child’s spouse, just the way it should be.
The second item, permanence, comes from God’s design that a husband and wife are to be united. The old King James Version says it eloquently: the husband is to “cleave unto his wife.”
A husband and wife have the task of cleaving, of clinging to one another. Now, you don’t cling to something that isn’t permanent. Permanency gives a sense of security. If you were in an old sailing vessel during a storm and were told to cling to something to avoid being washed out into sea, I would think that you’d choose the solid, central mast rather than choosing to cling to the barrels that were about to be thrown overboard. In the same way you must also cling to your spouse as being a permanent fixture in your life.
“Till death do us part” is a permanent kind of promise! When we enter into marriage, it cannot be with the intent of trying it out for a few years to see if it will really work out. Pastor Rick Warren points wisely points out that good marriages are a result of choice, not chance. Good marriages are a result of commitments, not convenience. There is a commitment that we must make in order to have permanency in marriage.
That commitment is that divorce is not an option. “Divorce” is not a word that belongs in the married couple’s vocabulary. Now of course I understand that some people are divorced. That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re not talking about the past—forget the past! But if you are in a married relationship now or plan to be in the future, make the commitment that you will not divorce.
Now just because you’ve cut yourself off from your parents and decided that you will never divorce from your spouse, does that ensure a great marriage? No, not yet. You also have to become one flesh. You still have to work to develop unity.
As we’ve already discussed, unity does not mean uniformity. You and your spouse will not and should not be identical. Unity in marriage does not mean you will never have a difference of opinion or that you will never argue. Unity speaks of becoming one flesh.
“One flesh” has an obvious physical element to it, but we’re going to cover that in the next point. So for right now let’s stick to the single, yet powerful word become. When we strive to become one flesh in our marriage, we have unity. It is a unity of purpose.
Think about that! “One flesh” means basically “one body,” “one organism.” In a marriage, becoming one flesh means being unified in the purpose of serving the greater cause of the marriage itself. Paul puts it this way in 1 Corinthians 7:3-4, “The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. 4 The wife's body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband. In the same way, the husband's body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife.” In other words, “What I want” takes a back seat to what’s best for the marriage. It implies a total unselfishness, two people setting aside their own wants and desires and instead seeking to make the marriage work. That’s unity of purpose.
The final item on our list comes from the last verse of our reading in Genesis. Genesis 2:25, “25 The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.”
I don’t think I’ve ever said it from a pulpit before, so let me say it now: It’s good to be naked with your spouse! (For that matter, it’s just kind of fun to be able to say “naked” in the pulpit! Naked! Naked! Naked! J)
Intimacy in marriage has a physical component. That’s probably what our minds jump to right away. Physical intimacy in marriage is a wonderful gift from God. As a matter of fact, if you’ve got the mind to, go home and read the Song of Solomon. You’ll find an entire book of God’s Word dedicated to nothing other than the joys of married physical intimacy. Of nakedness. But there’s more to intimacy—to nakedness—than just bedroom time.
True intimacy in marriage also has an emotional component. And just like the physical aspect, the emotional aspect is a secret that just you two share. To be emotionally naked before your spouse is to lay everything on the line. There is nothing you will choose to hide from the other. Your hopes, your dreams . . . your failures . . . your shortcomings. They’re all out there, and you become totally transparent. I accept you for what you are and I trust that you accept me in the same way.
It’s remarkable to me that there are those who would never in a hundred years think of cheating on their spouse physically, but they will gladly rob their spouse of the emotional intimacy that is to be reserved for marriage. I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve heard of a man who’s unwilling to say anything more than “Hrgh” to his wife but who somehow find it acceptable to go out to lunch with the ladies in the office and he’ll talk to them about intensely private matters for hours on end. That’s nothing less than emotional adultery. It’s taking something reserved for your spouse and giving it to someone else. Let me tell you right now: save “being naked”—both physically and emotionally—save “being naked” for your spouse. That’s part of God’s design for your marriage.
We’ve covered a lot of ground today. Obviously, there’s more to talk about in the coming weeks. But I recall saying once that even if I were to get up in the pulpit and talk for an hour, it still wouldn’t be a sermon unless I talked about Christ.
Your marriage—right now—I don’t care if it’s good or bad, on the rocks or on Easy Street . . . Christ is in your marriage because through it He tells us how far He is willing to go to save us. You know how good marriage is supposed to be? How good God designed it to be? Full of self-sacrifice and undeserved, endless love? The kind of love that makes a person say, “I know without a doubt that I am loved!”? That’s the way Christ loved us in His life and on the cross. And because of that He is with you in your marriage, working to help it be the best marriage it can be, even to the point of dying for you, so that in your marriage you can understand how much Christ loves you.
In his letter to the Ephesians, the Apostle Paul speaks of marriage, of the various duties of the husband and wife, and he says, “25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her 26 to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, 27 and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. 28 In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church-- 30 for we are members of his body. 31 "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh." 32 This is a profound mystery-- but I am talking about Christ and the church.”
Christ’s relationship with His Church is so good, so right, so beautiful, that Paul talks about marriage, and then about Christ . . . and he seems to get lost in which one he’s talking about. Paul can’t imagine a marriage without Christ, and he can’t imagine Christ without picturing marriage. That’s how Christ fits into your marriage—He loved it and gave His life for it.



Lord, we thank you for the gift of marriage. But more than that, we thank you for the gift of Jesus Christ. We thank you for His love that is always patient, always kind. We thank you that Christ’s love for us is not self-seeking and keeps no record of wrongs. In Christ, your love for us never fails. Help us to live out our marriage with that same kind of love. In Jesus’ name, amen.