Marriage is made to kill you

Having spent 8 years as a youth minister I often spoke with students who were either worried about their relationships because they didn’t know if the person they were interested in was “the one” OR (probably more often) that the person they were SURE God had picked for them hadn’t gotten memo and was refusing to date them. Over and over I had to tell them:

“I’m sorry, but you don’t have a soul-mate. God hasn’t picked out one special person for you that you need to find. IF (and it’s a big if) you discern marriage is a vocation that you can handle, be aware you are NOT going into it because you have found the perfect spouse, you are entering into a cross. You are being called to lay down your life for another person and die to your own comforts not only daily but hourly. You are CHOOSING to fall in love with a person day in and day out and FEELINGS are something you are going to be forced to control in ways you can’t even imagine. There are no “soul-mates” picked out in heaven, they are only forged in the fires of commitment and self-sacrifice.”

Needless to say this message was not particularly popular among teenagers, but it’s true, and if you don’t go into marriage with your eyes open to the hard work necessary to build a healthy loving family you will quickly find yourself wondering if you made a mistake and missed the real soul-mate. Perhaps this is one of the contributing factors to the high divorce rate among Christians.

This week I encountered a good article on this very subject as the author reflected back on her own journey from a soul-mate seeker to a spouse-server. Here is a highlight.

My theologian biblical scholar father shattered my dreams by informing me that God doesn’t have a husband for me, doesn’t have a plan for who I marry. NOT TRUE I scolded him, attacking him with the full force of Jeremiah 29:11 that God “knows the plans he has for me, plans to prosper me and not to harm me, plans to give me a hope and a future,” and obviously that means a hott Christian husband because God “delights in giving me the desires of my heart.” He slammed through my horrible (yet popular) biblical abuse by reminding me that the first verse applied to the people of Israel in regards to a specific time and just didn’t even dignify my horrible abuse of the second verse with a rebuttal. Nope, he said, a husband is not only not a biblical promise, it is also not a specific element of God’s “plan for my life.” God’s plan is for us to be made more holy, more like Christ… not marry a certain person

(You can read the rest here)

The hard fact of the matter is that marriage is made to kill you.

To kill your selfishness
To kill your laziness
To kill your egotism
To kill your dishonesty
To kill your lust
To kill your greed
To kill every part of you that doesn’t look like Jesus

YES, Marriage is made to kill you, which is why it’s so important to see marriage as a sacrament. Sacraments are the places we encounter Christ. They are the places where we are joined with Jesus in his own death and are united to Christ in His Resurrection.

When our own bodies become broken, our energy becomes sapped, our strength has run out, and we are at our wits end. There Jesus is. In Christ there is a special grace which I run to in my own marriage. It has revived me over and over and over.

Marriage is made to kill you, but Christ is there to resurrect you.