Audio Transcript
There’s a silent ache inside thousands of Christian marriages. And I have come to see the extent of this silent sadness because of how many times over the years I have read your stories. You send them to the APJ inbox. It’s the silent pain of being married to a spouse who does not enjoy God, not to the degree that you experience joy in God. Some of you married spouses who now seem to be completely numb to spiritual joy. It causes a quiet pain that is hard to talk about. It can go unnoticed by everyone else. But you see it. So, how do you endure this quiet pain in your marriage, and how do you love a spiritually affectionless spouse, and love them over the long haul, patiently, without growing resentful to them? Today on Ask Pastor John: the marriage miracle that takes time.
The latest version of the question comes to us from Mike. He’s 38 and married: “Pastor John, after reading your book Brothers, We Are Not Professionals and after finishing a couple of chapters in Desiring God (the book), I find myself with more practical questions than when I started. The books have stirred something very good in my own heart. But it has also led me to discover that my wife, who also professes faith in Christ, does not experience God like I do. She has a faith that seems more driven by duty than by delight and joy. She is not deeply moved by God’s sovereignty in the way I am. As her husband, what am I called to do? How do I love her without judging her and without trying to produce feelings inside of her that only the Holy Spirit could possibly give her?”
Home of Ecstasy and Agony
My marriage of 57 years with Noël is solid and mutually faithful and deeply content and richly rewarding and centered on Christ and his word, which we read every night together.
Now, the reason I mention that is simply because I don’t want Mike or anyone else to consider the sober, modest expectations for marriage that I’m going to talk about to be a lament or a criticism of my own. I wouldn’t trade Noël for the world. I would do it all over again. If I could start back in 1966 and choose another woman, I would choose Noël. But I think it is so crucial that single and married people have a sense that in this fallen, sinful, damaged, disordered, afflicted, beleaguered, partially redeemed world, the expectations for marriage should be modest. As the vows say: “For better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health.”
Marriage is a home of ecstasy and agony: peaceful and embattled; growing in understanding and often utterly baffled; a place of fulfilled dreams and heart-wrenching disappointments, sweetest satisfactions and exasperating frustrations; a bond where you can weep at being apart and dread being together. No one makes you happier; no one makes you more angry. There are wonderful seasons that last for years that make you say, “Piper sure got that wrong,” and then comes a season when you say, “He didn’t know the half of it.”
“Tend your marital devotional life like a garden.”
So, Mike is 38 years old. Maybe he’s been married 15 years, but maybe not; maybe 1 year. I don’t know when he got married, but he’s 38, and he has discovered that he’s married to a woman who doesn’t respond emotionally to Christ and to the glories of Christian reality the way it seems she should.
My guess is that describes 80 percent of the Christian marriages in the world. One spouse responds outwardly with more or less feeling to precious spiritual reality and is emotionally expressive, and the other spouse, man or woman, is not that way, and you wonder what’s going on inside. “Hello, is anybody home?” And you can’t tell. You can’t tell what’s in there.
Ten Ways to Keep Loving
So, what should he do? And a few million others — spouses, men or women like him — what should they do? Here’s my bullet list of suggestions, and let’s tick them off. We can write a book about each one, so just pause and pray and think. Test all things (1 Thessalonians 5:21).
1. FIGHT FOR JOY
Fight for your own joy, Mike, your own joy in Jesus, relentlessly. You want her to join you in your joy, not the other way around. And you dare not say — don’t ever say — “Okay, you want to be glum? I can be glum. See what it feels like.” Don’t do that. It’s totally un-Christlike. It’s deadly. Fight for your joy.
2. BE CHEERFUL
Be as warmly cheerful as you can be, even when there’s no emotional responsiveness from her. You’ll think it’s like playing tennis when the ball never comes back. Never mind. You’re not God. Just keep knocking happy, expressive balls over the net, no matter what. Emotional freedom is caught more than taught.
3. ADJUST EXPECTATIONS
Do not be crushed or ruined by failed expectations. Adjust your expectations. You thought you would be married to one thing; in fact, you’re married to another thing. Adjust your expectations. Otherwise, you will be your own enemy for decades, making you both miserable with endless efforts to fix what you cannot fix but may in fact someday come to cherish.
4. LOOK FOR EVIDENCES OF GRACE
Take note of every evidence of God’s grace in her life. They are there. Take note of them and speak of them admiringly and thankfully and humbly. If you don’t cultivate this in a natural way, in a way that is not manipulative, there will settle over her a sense of hopelessness that she can never please you.
5. KNOW HER
In the warmest and most tender times, ask her about her feelings. “What was it like growing up in your house? How did your parents express their feelings? Were any feelings dominant in your home? How did that make you feel? What are your most common feelings? Which are the easiest to feel? Is there anything I can do to add to your happiness?” And you don’t ask these questions when things are bad, and you don’t ask them like an attorney. You really want to know her, and she wants to be safely known.
6. ACKNOWLEDGE LIMITED UNDERSTANDING
Acknowledge that for all the years you’ve been together, you do not and cannot know the depths of her heart. The human heart is a mystery. It’s a bottomless mystery. You cannot know it. Only God can search the depths. So, have a realistic and limited sense of your knowledge of her spiritual state. She is a wonder: a daughter of the Creator of the universe, unfathomable and flawed, a fellow heir of the grace of eternal life like you (1 Peter 3:7).
7. REMEMBER LIFE’S BREVITY
Keep in mind the brevity of this life and how everything in it is a glorious and pitiful foretaste of the age to come. Here’s Paul’s way of saying this in 1 Corinthians 7:29–30:
The appointed time has grown very short. From now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing.
Which I take to mean: Yes, be faithful to her. Yes, there are things to mourn about. Yes, there are things to rejoice about. But that marriage and that sadness and that joy are all brief and temporary and leading to something immeasurably greater. Be faithful now in these small things, and then you will be ready and inherit great and never-ending things (Matthew 25:21; Luke 16:10).
8. READ AND PRAY TOGETHER
Never stop reading the Bible and praying together. Sometimes feelings will be sweet. Sometimes they will feel very flat. Tend your marital devotional life like a garden. If you keep the weeds pulled and you water faithfully and you plant good seeds, you may be surprised at what God makes grow in due time (1 Corinthians 3:7).
9. BE PATIENT
Be patient and hopeful for 50 years, and you may discover that in your last decade, you enter a season that you never could have dreamed.
So, those are my suggestions for Mike. And of course, there probably should be ten. I suppose I could say nine marks of the good man. No, there should be ten.
10. DON’T GROW WEARY
And so maybe I should close by saying number ten, Mike, is cover them all with prayer and don’t grow weary in it (Galatians 6:9).
