LOVING THE STRANGER
Page 134
We never know whom we marry; we just think we do. Or even if we first
marry the right person, just give it a while, he or she will change. For
marriage, being [the enormous thing it is] means we are not the same person
after we have entered it. The primary problem is…learning how to love and care
for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.
The Power of Truth – Facing the
Worst
Page 138-140
Marriage is different from these others. The
merged life of marriage brings you into the closest, most inescapable contact
with another person possible. And that means not only that you see each other
close up, but that you are forced to deal with the flaws and sins of one another.
But while your character flaws may have created mild problems for other
people, they will create major problems for your spouse and your marriage. For
example, a tendency to hold grudges could be a problem within friendship, but
within marriage it can kill the relationship. No one else is as inconvenienced
and hurt by your flaws as your spouse is. And therefore your spouse becomes
more keenly aware of what is wrong with you than anyone else even has see.
When conducting marriage services, I like to explain this aspect of
marriage using the analogy of a bridge. Think of an old bridge over a stream.
Imagine that there are structural defects in the bridge that are hard to see.
There may be hairline fractures that a very close inspection would reveal, but
to the naked eye there is nothing wrong. But now see a ten-ton Mack truck drive
onto the bridge. What will happen? The pressure from the weight of the truck
will open those hairline fractures so they can be seen. The structural defects
will be exposed for all to see because of the stain the truck put on the
bridge. Suddenly, you can see where all the flaws are. The truck didn’t create
the weaknesses; it revealed them.
When you get married, your spouse is a big truck driving right through
your heart. Marriage brings out the worst in you. It doesn’t create your
weaknesses (through you may blame your spouse for your blow-ups) – it reveals
them. This is not a bad thing, though. How can you change into your
“glory-self” if you assume that you’re already close to perfect as it is?
Marriage shows you a realistic, unflattering picture of who you are and
then takes you by the scruff of the neck and forces you to pay attention to it.
This may sound discouraging, but it is really the road to liberation.
Counselors will tell you that the only flaws that can enslave you are the ones
that you are blind to. If you are in denial about
some feature of your character, that feature will control you. But marriage
blows the lid off, turns the lights on. Now there is hope. Finally you can
begin dealing with the real you. Don’t resist this power that marriage
has. Give your spouse the right to talk to you about what is wrong with you.
Paul talks about how Jesus “washes” and “cleanses” us of stains and blemishes.
Give your spouse the right to do that.
Page 144
Many people have asked me, “How can you tell whether you’ve got a
friendship on which you can base a marriage?” The answer that Kathy and I have
always given is this. When you see the problems in each other, do you must want
to run away, or do you find a desire to work on them together? If the second
impulse is yours, then you have the makings of a marriage.
The Power of Love – Renewing the
Heart
Page 146
Marriage has the power of truth, the ability to reveal you who you
really are, with all your flaws. How wonderful that it also has the “power of
love” – an unmatched power to affirm you and heal
you of the deepest wounds and hurts of your life.
Page 147
But now into your life comes someone who has the power to overturn all
the accumulated verdicts that have ever been passed upon you by others or by
you yourself. Marriage puts into your spouse’s hand a massive power to
reprogram your own self-appreciation. He or she can overturn anything
previously said about you, to a great degree redeeming the past. The love and
affirmation of your spouse has the power to heal you of many of the deepest
wounds. Why? If all the world says you are ugly, but your spouse says you are
beautiful, you feel beautiful. To paraphrase a passage of Scripture, your heart
may condemn you, but your spouse’s opinion is greater than you heart.
Page 152
It is not enough to simply say, “I love you”. Nor it is enough to give
love to your spouse in the way to which you feel most accustomed. If you want
to give a person $100, there are many ways to do so. You can give it in cash or
by check or in gold or in kind. You can give in different currencies. So you
ask, “In which form do you want the hundred dollars?” In the same way you learn
to give your spouse love in the way he or she finds most emotionally valuable
and powerful. That is the only way to bring the remarking and healing power of
love into your spouse’s life.
Page 156
Most marriages start with an in-love “high”
during which time both partners feel profoundly loved by the very presence of
the other. But eventually that high wears off and then love must become a
deliberate choice.
Page 162-163
When we see how devastating truth-telling in marriage can be, it can
push us into the opposite error. We may then decide that our job is to just
affirm. We avoid telling our spouse how disappointed we are. We shut up. We
stuff and hide what we really think and feel. We exercise the power of love,
but not the power of truth.
But then marriage’s enormous potential for spiritual growth is lost. If
I come to realize that my spouse is not really being truthful with me, then her
loving affirmations become less powerful in my life. Only when I know that my
spouse regularly tells me the truth will her loving affirmation really change
me.
The point is that – truth and love need to be kept together, but it is
very hard.
The Power of Grace – Reconciling
Page 163
Truth without love ruins the oneness, and
love without truth gives the illusion of unity but actually stops the journey
and the growth. The solution is grace. The experience of Jesus’s grace makes it
possible to practice two most important skills in marriage: forgiveness and
repentance. Only if we are very good at forgiving and very good at repenting
can truth and love be kept together.
Page 164-165
Jesus gives us the solution. He says that Christians, knowing that they
live only by the forgiving grace of God, must do the work of forgiving
wrongdoers in their hearts and then go to confront them. If you do that, the
confrontation will be so different. In other words, without the “compound” –
the power of forgiving in your life – you will use the truth to hurt. The other
person will either attack you back or withdraw. Your marriage will go either
into a truth-without-love mode, with constant fighting, or a shallow
love-without-truth mode, in which both partners simply avoid the underlying
problems.
One of the most basic skills in marriage is the ability to tell the
straight, unvarnished truth about what your spouse has done – and then,
completely, unself-righteously, and joyously express forgiveness without a
shred of superiority, without making the other person feel small. This does not
mean you cannot express anger. In fact, if you never express anger, your
truth-telling probably won’t sink in. But forgiving grace must always be
present, and if it is, it will, like salt in meat, keep the anger from going bad.
Then truth and love can live together because, beneath them both, you have
forgiven your spouse as Christ forgave you.
Page 166
But the gospel transforms us so our
self-understanding is no longer based on our performance in life. We are so
evil and sinful and flawed that Jesus had to die for us. We were so lost that
nothing less than the death of the divine Son of God could save us. But we are
so loved and valued that he was willing to die for us. The Lord of the universe
loves us enough to do that! So the gospel humbles us into the dust and at the
very same time exalts us to the heavens. We are sinners but completely loved
and accepted in Christ at the same time.
Page 167
Marriage has unique power to show us the truth of who we really are.
Marriage has unique power to redeem our past and heal our self-image through
love. And marriage has unique power to show us the grace of what God did for us
in Christ Jesus. In Ephesians 5, Paul tells us that Jesus laid down his life
for us, forgiving at great cost us to make us something beautiful. And because
he has done it for us, we can do the same for others.
Page 168
Here is why you can say to your spouse who has wronged you, “I see your
sin, but I can cover it with forgiveness, because Jesus saw my sin and covered
it.” It is because the Lord of the universe came into the world in disguise, in
the person of Jesus Christ, and he looked into our hearts and saw the worst.
And it wasn’t an abstract exercise for Jesus – our sins put him to death. When
Jesus was up there, nailed to the cross, he looked down and saw us, some
denying him, some betraying him, and all forsaking him. He saw our sin and
covered it.
I do not know of any more powerful resource for granting forgiveness
than that, and I don’t know of anything more necessary in marriage than the
ability to forgive fully, freely, unpunishingly, from the heart. A deep
experience of the grace of God – a knowledge that you are a sinner saved by
grace – will enable the power of truth and love to work together in your
marriage.
Source: The Meaning of Marriage: facing the complexities of commitment with the wisdom of God, by Timothy Keller with Kathy Keller (2011)
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