Introduction
Tim Keller was a pastor in New York City, and he wrote this book with his wife, Kathy. Its starting point is simple: marriage is God’s idea. It’s also a human institution, so it always takes on the shape of the culture around it. But the Bible’s most basic teachings about marriage are that God instituted it and that he designed it to reflect his saving love for us in Jesus Christ.
That puts the Bible at odds with a story our culture tells over and over: that individual freedom is the only way to be happy. Unless you look at marriage through the lens of Scripture, instead of through your own fears or romantic hopes, your particular experience, or your culture’s narrow view, you won’t be able to make wise decisions about your own marriage.
The whole book is built on one passage, Paul’s words to husbands and wives in Ephesians 5: “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” In that same passage, Paul calls marriage a great mystery, or a secret. The book sets out to show what that secret is and why it changes everything about how we marry.
Chapter 1 — The Secret of Marriage
Marriage is glorious but hard. It’s a burning joy and strength, and it’s also blood, sweat, and tears, humbling defeats and exhausting victories. In Genesis 2, God himself officiates at the first wedding. When the man sees the woman, he breaks into poetry and says, “At last!” Everything in the text says that marriage, next to our relationship with God, is the most profound relationship there is. That’s why, like knowing God himself, coming to know and love your spouse is hard and painful, yet rewarding and wondrous.
Many young adults today aren’t so sure it’s worth it. The comedian Chris Rock once asked, “Do you want to be single and lonely or married and bored?” A lot of people believe those really are the two options, so they aim for something in the middle and live with a partner without marrying. Much of this comes from fear of divorce. But as one researcher summed it up, if you’re reasonably well educated with a decent income, come from an intact family, are religious, and marry after twenty-five without having a baby first, your chances of divorce are low indeed.
People also assume marriage is a financial drain. The research says the opposite. A 1992 study of retirement data found that people who stayed married had 75 percent more wealth at retirement than those who never married, or who divorced and didn’t remarry. Children who grow up with married parents have two to three times more positive life outcomes than those who don’t. Being married, and growing up with parents who are married, are enormous boosts to our well-being.
So why are so many people afraid of it? Something has shifted in how we think about marriage. It used to be a public institution for the common good. Now it’s a private arrangement for the satisfaction of the two people in it. Marriage used to be about us, but now it’s about me. Ironically, this newer view puts a crushing weight of expectation on marriage and on spouses, in a way older views never did. It leaves us stuck between unrealistic longings for marriage and terrible fears about it.
You can see it in what people look for. When the National Marriage Project surveyed men, looks weren’t the top thing they wanted. They wanted “compatibility,” which above all meant someone willing “to take them as they are and not change them.” Men and women alike want a spouse who’s fun, smart, attractive, shares their interests, and supports their personal goals and the way they’re living now. Never before in history has a society been so idealistic about what it wants in a spouse. The Christian answer to this is blunt: no two people are compatible. The way forward is to look at what the Bible actually says about marriage.
The ethicist Stanley Hauerwas puts the problem well. The idea that there’s someone just right for us, if only we look closely enough, overlooks a crucial fact. We always marry the wrong person. We never know whom we marry; we just think we do. And even if we marry the right person, give it a while and he or she will change. Marriage brings you closer to another person than any other relationship can, so the moment you marry, you both begin to change in ways you can’t predict. The real challenge, Hauerwas says, is learning how to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.
The self-fulfillment view has left us wanting too much out of marriage and not nearly enough at the same time. The writer Ernest Becker saw part of why. We used to expect marriage and family to give us love, support, and security. For meaning, hope, a moral compass, and a sense of who we are, we looked to God. But modern culture has taught us that no one can be sure of those things. Something has to fill the gap, and often that something is romantic love. We look to sex and romance to give us what we used to get from faith in God. And what we want, when we raise a partner to the place of God, is nothing less than redemption. No human being can carry that.
That brings us back to Ephesians 5 and the secret Paul names. As soon as he calls marriage a great mystery, he adds, “I am talking about Christ and the church.” The secret isn’t marriage itself. It’s that what husbands should do for their wives is what Jesus did to bring us into union with himself. He set aside his own interests and looked to our needs instead. If God had the gospel in mind when he created marriage, then marriage only works to the degree it follows the pattern of God’s self-giving love in Christ. Paul says to start here: do for your spouse what God did for you in Jesus, and the rest will follow.
That also settles an old question. Is marriage about denying yourself for the good of the family, or about pursuing your own fulfillment? The Christian answer isn’t a choice between the two. It’s mutual fulfillment through mutual sacrifice. Marriage is so painful and yet so wonderful because it reflects the gospel, which is painful and wonderful at once. The gospel says we’re more sinful and flawed than we ever dared believe, yet more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope. Through the gospel, we get both the power and the pattern for marriage. And the power has to come first.
Chapter 2 — The Power for Marriage
Right before Paul gives his instructions to husbands and wives, he tells his readers to be filled with the Spirit. That order matters. Spiritually, we’re often running on fumes. We need to know where the fuel station is and, even more, that it exists at all. If we look to our spouses to fill our tanks in a way only God can, we’re demanding the impossible.
Paul’s famous description of love makes the stakes plain: “Love is patient and kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking.” Again and again, Paul shows that love is the very opposite of being self-seeking, which means putting your own good ahead of someone else’s.
Think of the problem as “love economics.” You can only afford to be generous if you actually have some money in the bank. In the same way, if your only source of love and meaning is your spouse, then any time he or she fails you, it won’t just cause grief. It will feel like a collapse. But if you know something of the Spirit’s work in your life, you have enough love in the bank to be generous to your spouse even when you aren’t getting much affection or kindness at the moment.
That’s what makes a great marriage possible. If both spouses say, “I’m going to treat my own self-centeredness as the main problem in this marriage,” you have the prospect of something truly great. The Christian principle at work here is selflessness that the Spirit produces: not thinking less of yourself or more of yourself, but thinking of yourself less. If you look to your marriage to fill the God-sized hole in your heart, you won’t be free to serve your spouse. Only God can fill a God-sized hole. Once he does, you’re free to give yourself away, and giving yourself away is exactly what a marriage asks of you.
Chapter 3 — The Essence of Marriage
Marriage asks hard questions. How much of yourself are you willing to give to someone? How much of your freedom, time, and money will you give up for them? Our culture tends to celebrate the thrill of the chase. But the thrill of the hunt isn’t the only kind of passion out there, and it isn’t the best.
There have always been two kinds of relationships. The first is a consumer relationship. It lasts only as long as the seller meets your needs at a price you’re willing to pay. If another seller offers better service, or the same service for less, you have no reason to stay. In a consumer relationship, your needs matter more than the relationship. The second kind is a covenant relationship, and it’s binding. In a covenant, the good of the relationship comes before the immediate needs of the individual. Think of a parent caring for a newborn. The parent may get very little back emotionally. But almost everyone finds the idea of a parent giving up a child because it’s too hard and unrewarding unthinkable. We still see that bond as a covenant, not a transaction.
More and more, though, we treat marriage like a consumer relationship. When it seems to require more love from us than we’re getting back, we cut our losses and move on. But a covenant is a surprising blend of law and love. Love needs a framework of binding obligation to become everything it should be. A marriage covenant isn’t intimate in spite of being legal. It’s more intimate because it’s legal. Being willing to make a binding promise doesn’t smother love. It strengthens it, even supercharges it. And staying has its own reward. Long-term studies show that two-thirds of unhappy marriages become happy within five years if the couple stays married and doesn’t divorce.
What a covenant makes possible is something we all long for. To be loved but not known is comforting but shallow. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is a lot like being loved by God. It’s what we need more than anything. It frees us from pretending, humbles us out of self-righteousness, and strengthens us for anything life can throw at us. Looking back on his own marriage, Keller says the passion he and Kathy share now is different from the thrill they felt at the start, the way a quiet but deep river is different from a noisy but shallow brook.
So what happens when the feelings fade? Nearly everyone agrees that “love your neighbor” is wise and good. But notice that it’s a command, and you can’t command emotions. The Bible doesn’t tell us to like our neighbor or to feel warmly toward them. It tells us to love them, and that mostly means a set of actions. C. S. Lewis argued that you can change your heart over time through what you do: “Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.” Keller found this true in his own life. His emotions caught up with his behavior. If you keep loving someone who’s hard to love, they’ll eventually become lovely to you.
That doesn’t mean feelings don’t count. But whoever you marry, you’ll fall out of like with them at some point. Powerful feelings of delight can’t last forever, because emotions are tied to so many things in our bodies, our minds, and our surroundings. Lewis warned about the idea we get from books that if you marry the right person, you’ll go on being in love forever. When people find they aren’t, they decide they made a mistake and are entitled to a change, not realizing the glamour will go out of the new love just as it went out of the old one.
When that happens, remember what a marriage really is. Its essence is a covenant, a commitment, a promise of future love. In your actions, be tender, understanding, forgiving, and helpful. If you do, you won’t only get through the dry spells. Over time they’ll come less often and go less deep, and your feelings will grow steadier. A promise holds a marriage together. But that raises a bigger question: what is the marriage for?
Chapter 4 — The Mission of Marriage
When God says in Genesis, “Let us make man in our image,” the story suggests that our deep need for relationships wasn’t meant to be met only by our relationship with God. God designed us to need other people, too. And the kind of relationship at the heart of marriage is friendship.
Real friendship has two features: constancy and transparency. Real friends always let you in, and they never let you down. There’s an old line, often credited to the novelist George Eliot, that captures it: “The inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.”
Friendships are discovered more than they’re made on purpose. They grow between people who find they care about and long for the same things. Romantic love can be pictured as two people looking at each other. Friendship is two people standing side by side, looking at the same thing and being moved by it together. Christian friendship goes deeper than enjoying the same concert or game. It’s the oneness that grows as two people travel toward the same destination, helping each other through the dangers along the way.
Different cultures stress different parts of marriage. In tribal societies, social status matters most. In Western societies, romance and great sex matter more than anything else. The Bible doesn’t ignore either one, but it puts great weight on marriage as companionship. If all Christians are called to spur one another on toward love and good deeds, to affirm each other’s gifts and hold each other accountable to grow out of their sins, how much more should a husband and wife do that for each other?
That’s also why friendship is a better foundation than looks or status. Physical attractiveness fades, no matter how hard you work to hold on to it. Money and status can change almost overnight. But spiritual friendship looks ahead. It looks at another person and catches a glimpse of who God is making them, and says, “I see who God is making you, and it excites me! I want to be part of that. I want to partner with you and God on the journey you’re taking to his throne. And when we get there, I’ll look at your magnificence and say, ‘I always knew you could be like this. I got glimpses of it on earth, but now look at you!’”
So if you’re single, screen first for friendship. Look for someone who understands you better than you understand yourself, who makes you a better person just by being around them. Then see whether that friendship could become a romance and a marriage. Once you’re married, keep that friendship first. If your spouse doesn’t feel you’re putting him or her first, then by definition, you aren’t.
In Ephesians 5, Paul says one of the main purposes of marriage is to make us holy, “without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish.” That means having Jesus’s own character formed in us: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. So if we want to be happy in marriage, we’ll accept that marriage is designed to make us holy. And that work doesn’t happen in the abstract. It happens with a real person who keeps turning out to be someone you didn’t expect.
Chapter 5 — Loving the Stranger
Marriage changes us. Having children changes us. A new career changes us. Age changes us. On top of all that, marriage brings out traits that were there all along but hidden from everyone, even you. Now your spouse sees them. Most people enter marriage through the in-love experience, and at its peak it’s euphoric. The counselor and author Gary Chapman says this phase usually lasts from several months to two years, and it includes the illusion that the person you love is perfect in every way that matters.
When that illusion breaks, people respond in different ways. If you married to find a soul mate who wouldn’t change you and would simply support your life goals, it will be deeply disorienting. You’ll wake up to find that your marriage takes a huge investment of time just to work. But what if you went into marriage seeing it as a spiritual friendship on the way to the new creation? What if you expected it to be about helping each other grow out of your sins and flaws into the people God is making you? Then you’d actually expect these “stranger” seasons. And when one came, you’d roll up your sleeves and get to work.
Marriage brings out the worst in you. It doesn’t create your weaknesses, though you may blame your spouse for your blowups. It reveals them. God has given us a desire for the perfect spouse, but we’re meant to look for it in the one we’re married to. Why leave this partner for someone else, only to discover that person’s deep, hidden flaws? Some people go through the same cycle over and over: infatuation, disappointment, rejection, and running to someone new. The only way to begin seeing the glorious person God is making your spouse into is to stay.
When couples ask how to tell whether a friendship is strong enough for marriage, the answer is always the same. When you see the problems in each other, do you want to run away, or do you want to work on them together? If it’s the second, you have the makings of a marriage.
Spouses have a remarkable power over each other. Marriage puts into your spouse’s hands the power to reshape how you see yourself. Their love can overturn what others have said about you and heal some of your deepest wounds. As an old saying puts it, “The praise of the praiseworthy is above all rewards.” To be highly valued by someone you highly value is the greatest thing in the world. That’s why knowing that the Lord of the universe loves you is the strongest thing of all. The world tells us about our faults, but God’s love covers our sins and keeps going in spite of them. In a Christian marriage, you’re living that out in miniature.
For that healing to happen, you have to give love in the way your spouse can actually receive it. Think of it like language. If you say “I love you” to someone who doesn’t speak English, the love doesn’t get through. You’re sending it, but it isn’t being received. And never use your spouse’s primary love language against them. Never hold it back to hurt them, because the hurt will go deep. A husband who values his wife’s respect in public will be crushed when she mocks him in front of friends. A wife who needs words of affirmation will be devastated by the silent treatment.
It helps to look at a list, because a spouse will often point to something and say, “If you did that for me every week, things would be different in our marriage!” The forms of love fall into a few kinds. Affection means eye contact, holding hands, and planning walks and picnics, not just touch when you want sex. Words mean specific, honest praise and thanks, notes and letters, and holding back harsh, critical words. Friendship means real time together, reading books together, and both listening and opening up. Service means doing the menial jobs without being asked, like changing diapers, and standing up for your spouse in front of others. It also means being willing to change the habits in yourself that hurt your spouse, one of the most powerful signs of love there is. Above all, Christian spouses serve each other by helping each other grow spiritually, and especially by praying together every day. Then the task is simple, even if it isn’t easy. Learn your spouse’s love languages. Come up with a handful of concrete ways to give love in those forms. Then do them, every week.
Love also has to be kept together with truth, and that’s very hard. When we’re hurt, we use truth without love. The answer is grace. Experiencing Jesus’s grace makes it possible to practice the two most important skills in marriage: forgiveness and repentance. One of the most basic skills in marriage is being able to tell the plain truth about what your spouse has done, and then forgive fully and joyfully, without a trace of superiority and without making them feel small.
You can’t create that kind of grace. You can only pass it on if you’ve received it. If you see Jesus dying on the cross for others and forgiving the people who killed him, that can feel like a crushing example you’ll never live up to. But if you see Jesus dying on the cross for you, forgiving you, that changes everything. He saw your heart to the bottom but loved you to the skies. The joy and freedom of knowing the Son of God did that for you lets you do the same for your spouse. Nothing is more necessary in marriage than the ability to forgive fully, freely, and from the heart. Then, in God’s eyes, as the years go by, you’re making each other more and more beautiful, like a diamond being cut and polished and set.
Chapter 6 — Embracing the Other
One of the biggest ways a spouse is “other” than us is by being a man or a woman. Ephesians 5 goes on: “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” These verses say that men and women, while equal in dignity and worth, are complementary. They’re made to complete each other.
Genesis 2 points the same way. When God calls the woman a “helper,” the English word isn’t the best translation. “Helper” sounds like someone assisting a person who could almost do the job alone. But the Hebrew word, ezer, is almost always used in the Bible to describe God himself. Other times it describes military reinforcements, the kind without which a battle would be lost. To help someone in this sense is to supply what’s missing in them with your own strength. Woman was made to be a “strong helper.” The word usually translated “suitable” literally means “like opposite him.” The whole story, where a piece of the man is taken to make the woman, suggests that each is incomplete without the other.
Then Genesis 3 tells of the Fall, and the damage to marriage is immediate. The air fills with blame-shifting, finger-pointing, and accusation. Instead of their differences completing each other, they become a reason for one to oppress and use the other.
So what does headship look like when it’s done right? If a wife’s role toward her husband is like the church’s toward Christ, there’s nothing to fear. A husband’s authority, like Christ’s, is never used to please himself. It’s only used to serve his wife’s interests. Headship doesn’t mean a husband makes all the decisions, and it doesn’t mean he wins every disagreement. Jesus never did anything to please himself, so a servant-leader has to set aside his own wants to build up his partner.
A wife, for her part, is never meant to simply go along. She’s to use all she has to strengthen him, and to be his most trusted friend and counselor, as he is hers. Completing each other takes a lot of give and take. Husband and wife need to hear each other out and make their case, with loving back-and-forth, until they sharpen each other. She has to bring every gift she has to the discussion. And he, like any wise manager, has to know when her expertise should win out over his own less-informed opinion. Both men and women get to “play the Jesus role” in marriage: Jesus in his sacrificial authority, and Jesus in his sacrificial submission.
Chapter 7 — Singleness and Marriage
All of this could make marriage sound like the whole point of life. It isn’t. Christianity’s founder, Jesus Christ, and its leading theologian, Paul, were both single their entire lives. Single adults can’t be seen as less complete people than married ones, because Jesus, a single man, was the perfect man.
Paul says that being married and being single are both good ways to live. We shouldn’t be overly thrilled about getting married or overly let down about not being married, because Christ is the only spouse who can truly fulfill us, and God’s family is the only family that will truly embrace and satisfy us. The same idolatry of marriage that distorts a single person’s life will eventually distort their married life if they find a partner. So there’s no reason to wait. Demote marriage and family in your heart, put God first, and start enjoying the good things about single life now.
If you’re single and hope to marry, start by looking past the surface. So many people choose a spouse based on looks and money, instead of character, calling, and who the person is becoming, that they end up married to someone they don’t really respect. You can start to notice a deeper, more complete kind of attraction if you turn off the default screen of money, looks, and polish. You might even find, maybe to your horror at first, that you’re drawn to people who wouldn’t have made the cut before.
And don’t let things get too passionate too quickly. One crucial way to avoid the blindness and mood swings that come from moving too fast is to refuse to have sex before you’re married. That raises the question of what sex is for.
Chapter 8 — Sex and Marriage
Sex is God’s way for two people to say to each other, “I belong completely, permanently, and exclusively to you.” You must not use sex to say anything less. C. S. Lewis compared sex without marriage to tasting food without swallowing and digesting it.
But while a marriage covenant is necessary for sex, sex is also necessary to keep the covenant going. Sex is your covenant renewal service. The Kellers often compare sex in a marriage to oil in an engine. Without it, the friction between all the moving parts will burn out the motor. Without joyful, loving sex, the friction in a marriage will turn into anger, resentment, hardness, and disappointment. And the way to keep it joyful is simple: each partner should care most not about getting sexual pleasure, but about giving it.
Temptation won’t go away, though. Martin Luther is said to have put it this way: “You can’t stop birds from flying over your head, but you can stop them from making nests in your hair.” We can’t stop sexual thoughts from coming. They’re natural and unavoidable. But we’re responsible for what we do with them, and we shouldn’t welcome them in or dwell on them. And when we do something sexually wrong, we should take the gospel of grace to our consciences.
In the end, sex belongs in a fully committed relationship because it points beyond itself. It’s a foretaste of the joy that comes from being in complete union with God through Christ. The most rapturous love between a man and a woman on earth is only a hint of what that will be like.
That leads back to the secret Paul named at the start. Marriage was never meant to be the end of the story. It points past itself to Christ, who gave himself up for us, and whose love is the power and the pattern for every marriage. A husband and wife who give themselves to each other the way Christ gave himself for us get a glimpse, here and now, of the love they were made for.