Why Marriage Matters — Even If You’re Not Married
The father of the groom stood up in the packed reception hall, 261 family and friends gathered around. He had a microphone in one hand and a champagne glass in the other. The father turned to his son as the emotions started to unexpectedly choke him up, and he said, “Son, I’m so proud to be your father. And I know, I have zero doubts in my heart that you are going to be an amazing husband. Congratulations, and God’s blessings. And to my future daughter-in-law,” he smiled, as everyone smiled with him. “My wife and I, after 31 years of marriage, just want to pass on a simple bit of wisdom, which everyone in this room knows. So would you raise a glass and repeat it with me, ‘Happy man, that’s the plan.'”
Can you imagine? Can you imagine the DJ gets all the married couples on the dance floor, and he kicks off, “If you’ve been married for one day, or one year, or ten years,” until it’s just that old couple that’s gotten 71 years together. This guy can barely stand up as he shuffles, and the DJ gives him a microphone and says, “Sir, tell us the secret of a long marriage.” And he says this, “Satisfied guy, love won’t die.”
Can you imagine that happening? But you can imagine this happening. Family and friends stand up with all seriousness, and they say something very, very similar. They say, “Happy wife, happy life.” You’ve heard it, maybe you’ve said it. I’m curious if you believe it. That’s the prevailing cultural wisdom. If you want a happy marriage, well there’s a simple way to get it, just make your wife happy, and there you go.
I want to talk to you about marriage today, not just because there’s these really interesting sayings in our culture, but because marriage is so deeply important to God and to us. Now, it’s always a little bit tricky as a pastor preaching on marriage, because I know that we all have different relationship statuses. Some of us are married, some of us were married, some of us would like to be married, some of us aren’t at all interested in marriage. But I hope we as a church family, and I hope that all of you watching at home, are convinced that if marriage matters to God, then it must matter to us.
If Jesus, who was single, who was not a husband or a father, talked so much about being a parent and being a spouse, then we absolutely need to talk about such things. So much of society, so much of the health of this community, is based off of the health and stability of the families that comprise it. So, I want to talk about marriage today, not because all of us are married or necessarily will be married, but because I hope that all of us care deeply about marriage as our savior Jesus does.
In fact, if you’re taking notes at home or right here in church, there are two big reasons I want to examine this phrase, “Happy wife, happy life.” Here’s the first one, because marriage matters. If you’re married, I don’t have to tell you this. Your marriage just has a disproportionate impact on your overall health and happiness. If things are bad at work but great at home, it’s way better than the vice versa. You can get through a lot if you come home to a sanctuary, to love and to respect. But man, it’s hard to get through very much if you don’t want to go home because you know tension is awaiting you on the other side of the door.
The reason that the apostles Peter and Paul, one who is married and one who is single, talk so much about marriage is because marriage matters. The joy or dysfunction flows out of the home and affects the people around it for better or worse. And so, if your brother’s marriage is falling apart, it will break your heart. And if he’s walking hand in hand with his bride, it will bring you great joy. If your niece and nephew are celebrating their fifth anniversary, or if they’re googling “best lawyers in my community,” it makes a difference to us what happens in individual homes.
Marriage is so deeply important, as I said, to culture and specifically to our church. Second, and just as importantly, I want to talk about marriage today because the Devil messes with marriages. The Devil hates what God creates, and because one of God’s first creations was the institution of marriage, the Devil, for countless years, has been slithering around trying to tamper with God’s recipe for a really great home life. Now, you don’t have to read that far in the Bible to know that God creates marriage in Genesis 1 and 2, and then the Devil divides the first husband and wife, so by the end of Genesis 3 they’re pointing fingers and blaming each other instead of loving and respecting each other. The Devil loves to mess with what God has made.
And the way that he does it is this classic and really difficult temptation that I call the pendulum effect. Have you noticed this before? Like, if here in the middle is this biblical truth where God wants you and me to be, the Devil has a way of pulling us as a culture too far in this direction. And then once we open our eyes and say, “Wow, wow, wow, okay, this isn’t right, this isn’t biblical,” instead of getting back to where God wants us to be, he swings the pendulum all the way to the other side.
He does this in so many areas of life. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. I think about law enforcement. There’s times in American history where law enforcement was tragically unjust, especially to certain groups of people. We opened our eyes and started to see it, so what happened then? Well, movements like defunding the police, thinking that we didn’t need law enforcement at all. He just swings the pendulum, pulling us to different extremes.
And man, does he do that with marriage. He doesn’t really care what extreme we end up at. If a man is aggressive and abusive and domineering, or if he’s so passive all he does is sit in the corner and say, “Yes dear,” he doesn’t care. As long as he robs us of the beautiful original design of marriage, he’s happy. The Devil knows the power of a great relationship on generation after generation.
And so today what we need to do is to expose the pendulum swings and to get back to what does God say to those of us who are married, our friends and our family who take these sacred vows. What is the God-given institution of marriage, and what’s the secret to true relational happiness? I want to study that with you today, and here’s kind of my roadmap. I just typed in husband and wife into a Bible search engine, and I discovered four of the key spots in the New Testament where God teaches us as followers of Jesus how to be married. Today I want to cover those four sections and just see from a high-level biblical view, what does it look like to have a biblical marriage?
Passage One: Ephesians 5 — Love, Leadership, and the Marriage Triangle
So, let’s dive into this journey. Our first section is probably the most famous. It’s Ephesians 5, where the Apostle Paul says this:
“Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church, for we are members of His body. ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ This is a profound mystery, but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.” — Ephesians 5:22–33
What the Bible does when it speaks about marriage is to speak constantly about Jesus. You catch that? In this section which isn’t that long, we see Christ, we see Lord, we see Savior, we see Christ, Christ, Christ, and Christ. It’s almost like you bring up the topic of marriage and Paul’s mind instantly goes to thinking about Jesus, and the husband and wife become the footnotes of the conversation.
He knows that the best kind of marriages think not one out of seven days or one hour out of every week, but they are saturated with their savior Jesus Christ. They can’t stop thinking about him or talking about him. And when Jesus Christ is not just like the official religion of the husband and wife, but their passion and their greatest joy, that is what makes a Christian marriage truly Christian.
And that’s why my friend Tom made this — did I tell you, by total coincidence, I promise you I didn’t plan this, that today is my anniversary? Yeah, 22 years ago I got married just less than a mile down the street. And when Kim and I took our vows at Saint Matthew Lutheran Church, my pastor talked about the marriage triangle. Have you heard of it? God is here at the top of the triangle, the wife is down here in this corner, and the husband is down here. And what a husband and wife don’t know when their love is, like, new and fresh is just how different and how much distance there is between them.
My pastor said what often happens in relationships is that one of the two people is very passionate about their Christian faith. The wife, for example. And, you know, she goes to church, but her husband really isn’t interested, and she wants to take the kids and teach them to pray, but that’s not really his thing. She is getting closer and closer and closer to God, which is great, but as you can see, it doesn’t solve the distance between the husband and the wife.
And so, my pastor said, “What would happen if you and Kim in your marriage wouldn’t have, like, an imbalance in your spirituality? What would happen if she would go to church and you would go to church with her, and you would go home and say prayers, and she would say prayers with you, and you would read a Christian book, and then you would talk about it with her? What would happen if raising the kids wasn’t like one parent’s job to talk to them about Jesus, but both parents’ job? What would happen if both of us were seeking God and his Kingdom and his name with our whole heart, soul, mind, and strength? Well, the answer,” my pastor said, “is that you wouldn’t just get closer to God individually, you would end up closer to each other.”
Passage Two: 1 Peter 3 — Winning Over Without Words
Which brings us to passage number two. Let’s jump from a single man named Paul to a married Apostle named Peter. This is what Peter says about marriage in chapter 3:
“Wives, in the same way submit yourselves to your own husbands so that, if any of them do not believe the word, they may be won over without words by the behavior of their wives, when they see the purity and reverence of your lives. Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as elaborate hairstyles and the wearing of gold jewelry or fine clothes. Rather, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight. For this is the way the holy women of the past who put their hope in God used to adorn themselves. They submitted themselves to their own husbands, like Sarah, who obeyed Abraham and called him her lord. You are her daughters if you do what is right and do not give way to fear. Husbands, in the same way, be considerate as you live with your wives, and treat them with respect as the weaker partner and as heirs with you of the gracious gift of life, so that nothing will hinder your prayers.” — 1 Peter 3:1–7
When the Bible speaks, instead of the pendulum of assuming the woman’s the problem or the man’s the problem, or she’s the real sinner or he’s the real sinner, the Bible just assumes that God’s sons and daughters will both be gifted, they will both be intelligent, they will both struggle with selfishness, and they will both need about an equal amount of encouragement.
So, the Devil is just grinning as culture swings from form of sexism to form of sexism, and God, in His word of truth, stays right in the middle.
Passage Three: Colossians 3 — Love and Do Not Be Harsh
So, we start with Ephesians 5, we moved to 1 Peter 3. Let’s jump really quickly to the third and shortest section from Colossians 3. The Apostle Paul says this:
“Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them.” — Colossians 3:18–19
What does God say again and again and again and again to husbands? He says love. And what does God say to wives again and again and again and again? He says submit. So, let’s talk about submission for a second. I totally get it, you didn’t have to explain to me that phrases like “the head of the household” or “wives submit to your husband” — I know that they are difficult and confusing and misunderstood by many people.
I want to encourage us today, as a community of faith, if we are biblical people who believe that God is good and his word is good, to not assume that this part of his word is bad, to not water it down, to not edit it, to not take the oomph out of God’s calling for men and women.
Now, I would hope that you or your family or your pastor can explain what this means. Like, to be the head of the household does not mean you get a little bell, and you ring it whenever you want nachos. To be the head of the household means to be like Jesus was the head. He came with authority and He took responsibility. He had the position, and He used it with great patience and selflessness and sacrifice. The cross is the example of what it means to be the head of something.
And to submit does not mean that you’re inferior or unintelligent, or that your voice does not matter. It simply means that if every decision is like an uncontrolled intersection, we’re going to smash into each other. And so, God put up a yield sign for wives to just slow down, express their opinion, but yield to their husbands in everything so there are fewer crashes.
You should explain such things. But even if your friends think, “Wow, wow, you’re that kind of religious, huh?” here’s what I want you to do. I want you to take a vow with biblical language, and then I want you to make them jealous by your marriage. I want you to show them what literally statistics and sociologists would tell us — that Christian people who are passionate about their faith, they’re not doormats and abuse victims, they thrive in marriage because God knows what makes marriage work.
So let them shake their heads, let them say, “Poor girl, submitting to her husband in everything,” and then let them see what happens when a marriage is filled with love and respect, with a man sacrificing constantly and a woman submitting with great humility.
Maybe I’m being biased as a Bible-believing Christian, but I believe deep down God created us with an ache for Eden. We just want to get back there. And the world makes it all fuzzy and messy and confusing, and where we’re triggered and traumatized by even biblical words. But I think there’s something deep in the human soul that just longs for this design that God is giving.
I think a woman, if she had a man who had authority but he used it with Jesus-like responsibility, who didn’t put every decision on her shoulders, but he had an idea after listening to her ideas, and he just led with compassion and patience and strength and courage — I don’t think she would feel like some second-rate Christian woman. I think she would thrive as God intended her to thrive.
Passage Four: 1 Corinthians 7 — The Gift of Sex in Marriage
Which means it’s now time to talk about sex. Last passage for today comes from 1 Corinthians 7. Paul again says, “Now for the matters you wrote about.” The Corinthians had some questions about sex and marriage. Paul says, “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.” If you’re single like Jesus, great, that’s a beautiful way to live.
“But since sexual immorality is occurring, each man should have sexual relations with his own wife, and each woman with her own husband. The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife. Do not deprive each other except perhaps by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.” — 1 Corinthians 7:2–5
Isn’t that a great passage? If you’re new to the Bible, that’s saying have sex a lot, and if you want to take a break to pray, that’s cool with God. Some of you just found a new life verse.
Now this, man, maybe as modern Americans we don’t get this, but this would have been so shocking to the Corinthians. The Corinthians were so used to the pendulum of boys being boys. There’s a Roman poet and statesman, maybe you’ve heard of him, Cicero — he once said that any religion or philosophy that would forbid a man to visit a prostitute was, quote, “extremely severe.”
This was radical. But Christianity — do you see it — called for mutuality within sexuality. Just the language is amazing. The husband should do this; in the same way the wife should do that. The wife should do this, and likewise the husband should do the same thing. There should be mutual consent. There should be an each-otherness. This isn’t his thing, this is not her thing, this is your thing together.
Now this deserves a whole sermon series to unpack, but sex is a great, great gift that God gives to his people. Read Song of Songs, read Adam and Eve, naked and unashamed. Read these verses from 1 Corinthians 7. God loves sex, he made sex, and he wants you to talk about sex. I’m so much in favor of a taboo conversation now that helps us tomorrow. On the other side of that awkwardness, it’s not just having to live with this frustration and tension for the next year or two or ten. So be biblical, talk openly and frequently as God does here, and you will be blessed.
Holy Spouses Make for Happy Houses
Whew. All right, you all did it. Four Bible passages, so much to cover. Here’s my summary. Happy wife, happy life, happy man, that’s the plan. No. Here’s the whole truth from the word of God. Holy spouses make for happy houses. Show me two people who are seeking the Holy God together, and I will show you a couple who’s happy to be married to each other.
Now, really quick, one last question: why would that be? Isn’t that interesting? What is it about coming to church, or praying together, or reading this old book that would make devout Christian couples so much happier than non-Christian couples? Here’s a short answer I want to leave you with. God. The closer you get to this God who is defined by his sacrificial love, the more you learn what real love looks like. Think of Ephesians 5 — as a husband is just learning more and more about Jesus who laid down his life to make us beautiful in the eyes of God.
There is a Jesus who was the head of this relationship, and yet how did he use his headship? He used it to make us holy, blameless, radiant, more beautiful to God. This is stunning to me — then a bride is to her groom on her wedding day. This is what Jesus did for us. That is profound love.
Jesus is so humble that he yielded, and in fact, submitted to his father in heaven. Do you remember the prayer? “Father, not my will but your will be done.” He did that for you, for the forgiveness of your sins. He won us over without words, to quote 1 Peter 3. I mean, Jesus could’ve come down and just lectured us, but instead he did something.
What he did was to die so that all the dumb things I have done as a husband and as a human could be forgiven and sent away. So that all your selfishness and refusal to sacrifice would be nailed and left at the foot of the cross so that you could be a holy child of God. To quote Colossians 3, Jesus is not harsh with us — he’s gentle and humble at heart. He’s patient as we try to do this right one more time.
And to quote 1 Corinthians 7, what Jesus has given us is a place called heaven, which will make the pleasures of sex seem as boring as watching paint dry. I’ll say it. You should know, at the best moment of sex, the most pleasurable, that is .0001% of the happiness that humans feel in the presence of God. God created sex. He created the parts of your body, the nerve endings, so that you could have just a glimpse of the euphoria and peace and relaxation that is ours forever and ever and ever.
These relationships, this institution, the marriage bed itself, was all created so that we could believe, “Wow, I cannot wait to see God.” And at the marriage feast of the Lamb — that’s how the Bible ends — we will celebrate like we have never celebrated here on earth.
What is it about biblical Christianity that makes couples happier? It’s Christ, God, a God of love. Happy wife, happy life? Nah. Holy spouses, happy houses. That’s it. That’s the whole truth. It’s the truth that connects us to God.
Let’s pray.
Oh God, thank you for your word. Wow, I have been so blessed, so comforted, so corrected by your word over the years that it has swung me back to the right spot as a husband that I can love Kim better. And God, by your grace we’re happier than we have ever been.
Man, some of us are in a great spot. We are in amazing relationships, and this was just the nudge we needed to make it better. And some of us wish we could go back to a former marriage or relationship that we did not do biblically. Wherever we’re at, God, help us to remember that you are full of grace and truth and power, that there is forgiveness for all the things we’re thinking about. There is truth to guide us that we can do this right the next time, and there is a power that makes impossible things possible. God, someone who grew up in a home not seeing the best examples, that they can have a great marriage by your Spirit’s power. Those of us who feel stuck and find it so hard to forgive, God, you are more powerful than that bitterness and hurt in our hearts.
And God, for the sake of the children and our children’s children, I pray that this is so much more than a sermon, but this is a seed that grows into something big and beautiful in the years to come. You are the God that loves ten thousand generations of those who trust in you.
And God, I pray as we think about the future that for generations to come, we would seek you and find in you all the love and acceptance that we need. We love you, God, but we believe that you loved us first and that you love us more.
We pray all these things with hope today in the name of Jesus our savior, and all God’s people said, “Amen.”
