In preparing for my bible study last night, I came across this sermon by Tim Keller. If you have time this week, I highly recommend reading through the whole transcript. This was my favorite part, and my personal takeaway:
Jesus comes into our lives, and he does what the theologians call sanctification—the gradual perfection, more and more getting us to die unto sin and live unto righteousness. Jesus comes into your life, and he has a vision for your future glory and your future beauty. He says, “I know what you could be. I was there at your creation. You are just a shadow of what you should be. It is incredible what you are going to be. And through my blood and through my sacrifice and through my service, I am going to get you there.”
Anybody who is a Christian knows that when Jesus comes into your life, through the Word and the Spirit and through circumstances of life, he is constantly driving you to change—pushing you to repent and to change and to leave those things behind and to move forward and become more and more like him.
What does that have to do with marriage? That is the model.
…..To fall in love with somebody in this Christian understanding of marriage is to imagine yourself on the final day, the day of judgment, in which God destroys all death and all evil and suffering, and there is a new heavens and new earth, and everything wrong with you and everything deformed and distorted about you falls off, and you blossom into what you were created to be, and you become everything you are supposed to be. To fall in love with somebody is to imagine yourself being there on that day, and looking at that person and saying, “I always knew you could be like that. I saw it in you. And through marriage I have been part of what God is doing in you.”
To fall in love with somebody is to see what God is doing in that person and become committed to that person’s future self.
…………………………….
Wow.
I will be the first person to admit that I often take my marriage for granted, and often turn to it to fulfill my personal needs. But this? What a mission. What a calling. What a gift.
God is clear in his design and intention for marriage: it’s my role as Brett’s wife to help him become the person that God intended him to be, and it’s his role as my husband to help me become the person God intended me to be.
We are helpers to one another, and through submission (a word I am learning to love), we become instruments in God’s plan for the ultimate sanctification of each other. How powerful is that?!
Have you learned anything new about marriage recently?
