Marriage: Under Attack

God said he who finds a wife finds a good thing, but it seems that American Christian married couples have lost sight of God’s purpose and plan for marriage. Instead of Christian marriages being the standard, they often end no differently than fifty percent of all marriages in America " in divorce court.

As a fairly recently married man, I have spent countless hours seeking God’s word to be a better husband as my wife has done the same in taking her role as wife very seriously. If you’re married as well, I’m sure you’re doing the same. Yet, statistically speaking half of you that are reading this will not part from your spouse at death but at a courthouse in the next fifteen years or so. Why do our marriages fail so often when God has given us clear directives leading to a blissful union? I believe the answer lies with selfishness of one or both spouses.

Let me illustrate. When we enter marriage, we enter as two distinct people who’ve not had to learn how to ‘become one’ with anyone other than ourselves. Our culture places inordinate amounts of praise towards the individual and despite our and God’s best efforts if we’re not careful we’ll be sucked into that mentality. For instance, during my first year of marriage, all I wanted to do every evening was watch ESPN and/or play on our computer. I thought it was my right to do whatever I wanted after a hard days work and watching a romance movie with my wife just wasn’t my idea of ‘fun’.

On the surface, nothing is wrong with ESPN or computer gaming, but I was sowing a seed of selfishness in my marriage as so many often do. I was telling my wife this; “I will seek to please myself before you. Your emotional needs are not as important to my own." She felt unloved, second-best, and ultimately sought to please herself if I was not going to pay attention to her. If not for God sounding the alarm bells, we could have ended our marriage before it really began due to my simple act of selfishness. Countless other marriages have their own ESPN-moments where we make conscious decisions to do our own thing rather than seek the well-being of our spouses. And you can quote the Bible backwards, forwards, or hanging upside down, but if you so the seeds of selfishness in your marriage you will become just another statistic. Don’t let the epitaph of your marriage be written thusly. Instead let us learn the true meaning of becoming one, and again raise the standard of marriage in our homes, communities, and throughout the nation.

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