This entire week I’ve slept alone.  Not to worry, it’s not because my wife and I have been fighting, because we hate each other, or in any way because we want to.  I’ve been sick and contagious and she can’t afford to catch it, and then pass it on to our two girls.  So she slept on the couch, while I wrestled with the bed.  Don’t be a hater, I’m 6′4 and she’s only about 5′6 so she fits there fine.  Some people would enjoy this mini-separation.  In fact, a little over 5 years ago before I was married, I would have enjoyed it too.

Before I got married I had a king sized bed all to myself, and I used it, the whole thing.  I slept in the very middle, or on any side I felt like sleeping on.  I got all the covers to myself.  All the pillows to myself.  All 800 square feet of the giant bed I had was mine (technically my parents, but you know what I mean).  So I came into marriage somewhat apprehensive about learning to sleep with someone else in the bed.  Would she sleep on my side?  Would she kick me, punch me, elbow me, knee me?  Would she steal the covers while I sleep?  Would she snore (she doesn’t)?

If you noticed, or if not I’ll tell you, all of those apprehensive questions I had revolved around one thing; ME.  In fact, most of my life revolved around me.  All the questions I had about life centered on, you guessed it, me.  My needs.  My desires.  My well-being.  My perceived happiness.  Even God’s will revolved around me.  My former pastor once told me that the thing he looked forward to the most about marriage was now there were two people to make him happy;  Himself and His wife.  That was for all intents and purposes my view too.  As selfish as it sounds, you probably thought that way to some extent too.

Somewhere in the first few months after our wedding, after I’d kicked her, elbowed her nose, stole the covers off of her, slept all over her side of the bed, and gotten a few sinus infections, I began to learn that marriage reveals something about me that I probably knew but didn’t much want to face.  I was selfish.  Very selfish.  World shatteringly selfish.  And little by little God began to break me of that selfishness (He began it, but it won’t be finished until Christ returns, by the way).  He began to teach me about Himself, myself, and my wife.

I learned that a real man and husband is not first concerned with his own needs, desires, and general well-being.  He is first concerned with (after God) his wife’s.  What does she need?  What does she want?  What will give her a sense of well-being?  As a Christian, I saw that I have the mind of Christ, and that having that means I think Christ-like thoughts.  What is one of the biggest traits that characterized the earthly ministry of Jesus?  Self-lessness and humility (See Philippians 2).  He is my model, as well as my empowerer.

If you will let it, outside of raising children, marriage is one of the greatest God-given means for seeing yourself as you really are, and teaching you that the world does not revolve around you.  So how has all this changed me (knowledge without life change is just trivia)?  Many ways, but let’s get back to one minor one.  I sleep differently now.  Having had a King sized bed (not the same one but incidentally given to us by my parents) all to myself for the entire week, I woke up every morning in the same place;  The side of the bed I fell asleep on.  I don’t enjoy sleeping alone anymore.  I miss my wife, even though we stay on “our sides.”  I just miss her being there.  I’m no perfect husband by any stretch of the imagination.  Just ask my wife.  I simply realize I’m fatally flawed and bent towards myself, and am willing to let God change me through my marriage.  If your marriage hasn’t changed you then what are you refusing to see about yourself?

We just finished an excellent (is that bragging?) series about Marriage and Marital Relationships at our church.  I was honestly a little concerned going into it because we have so many men and women who have been married for at least twice as long as I’ve been alive.  In fact one of my dearest friends at the church lost his wife of 72 years at the very beginning of the series.  SEVENTY TWO YEARS!  What I found was an extremely receptive group of people, many of whom had never learned any of this before.  A few of our women who had lost husbands within the past several years said things like, “I wish I’d have known all this while my husband was still alive!”  THOSE ARE THINGS THAT KEEP YOU GOING!

The challenge I offered at the beginning of the series for any of the skeptical was this:  If you do NOT think you need to learn anything else about marriage, then I will not do this series.  If there is only one of you who thinks he has it all down, then I will not do this series.  YOU WILL DO IT.  No one offered.  What does that tell me?  It doesn’t matter how long you have been married, there is always room to grow.

Of course as a 30 year old pastor who has been married a brief 5 years, I couldn’t exactly approach it as an expert.  Thankfully, God didn’t ask me to be a marriage expert with lots of great ideas flowing out of my own experience.  He just asked me to proclaim the truths that He has revealed aleady.  That’s a blessing and curse at the very same time, but it’s FAR preferable to me having to generate the ideas myself.

I trust that some found in this series things that they disagreed with, that made them very uncomfortable (gender roles, purity and faithfulness), that convicted them, as well as encouraged and built up.  The great thing is that I found all of those myself before it ever got to the church.  Preaching can be a beautiful thing.  My hope is that some husbands decided to grow up, some wives decided to check their egos, but in the end, that everyone was pointed to Jesus.  How to marriage sermons are a very hit and miss thing, and will NOT produce life change.  Jesus does change hearts and lives, and as a result marriages.

After Easter I will be doing a six week series on marriage and family.  At this point the topics for study aren’t set in stone, but I have some preliminary ideas.  This is a much needed topic, but always a difficult one, because God’s ideal and our practical reality don’t always look very tidy and neat.  Jesus said that God allowed divorce b/c of the hardness of the people’s hearts.  It is our hard hearts and hard heads that make marriage and family difficult in a fallen sinful world.  You take two sinners, put them in the same house, sharing all the same “space,” and you have what?  Sin.  There is a lot of sin and hurt in marriage, but God intends it to be more beautiful than that.  It’s a picture of Christ and the Church.  We’ll see the beginning of marriage in Genesis.  We’ll look at the nature of marriage from the Bible.  We’ll see practical commands to husbands and wives, otherwise known as gender roles in marriage.  None of this is popular in today’s society.  Let’s not kid ourselves and think it somehow used to be popular, though.  It’s never been accepted and practiced perfectly.  Non-Christian culture thinks we’re extremely weird.  Do we take their advice or the Bible’s commands?  Christians don’t have a great track record of understanding marriage according to God.  We love to denounce homosexuality yet can’t even explain what God’s definition of marriage is and means.  I have spoken with countless people since becoming a pastor who have said, “Neither I nor my spouse really understand what marriage is.”  Let’s seek to address and correct that together. Marriage and family are the essential units of a Church and should be in a society as well.