Marriage as Friendship

[MUSIC] Welcome to Gospel in Life. You're listening to cultivating a healthy marriage with Tim Keller. This short podcast series features the messages from the most popular sermon series of Dr. Keller's time at Redeemer Presbyterian Church. Preached in 1991, this series was the basis for the best-selling book by Tim and Kathy Keller, the meaning of marriage. Whether you're single, married, widowed or divorced, this series helps you learn how to apply God's wisdom about marriage to your life. [MUSIC] Now what we've been looking at in this series on marriage, I'm trying to give you a view of marriage with windows to it. And especially last week and this week, you see it so clearly. And we want to continue. Last week, as we were reading through this passage in Ephesians, I'll read it here in a second. As we were looking through this passage, we've been looking at it for weeks. Last week we began talking about marriage as friendship. Marriage as spiritual friendship, friendship with eternal dimensions. And I'd like to read again to you the passage, and then I'd like to continue and hopefully finish the subject of understanding marriage as friendship. We spent a couple of weeks understanding marriage as commitment and marriage as ministry. And we've got more to go, but right now we're looking at the subject of marriage as friendship. But it's a cosmic friendship, a spiritual friendship, a friendship in a world with windows. Let's read the passage again until you know it very well. And then we will continue to expound the subject of marriage as a cosmic friendship. Look, verse 22, 21, chapter 5 of Ephesians. Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. It's a wife, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ, as head of the church. His body of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so why should submit to their husbands and everything? Husbands love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy. Cleansing her by the washing with water through the Word. And to present her to himself as a radiant church without staying or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church. For we are members of his body. For this reason a man will leave his father and mother in cleave to his wife and the two will become one flesh. This is a profound mystery, but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you must also love his wife as he loves himself and the wife must respect her husband. The basic thesis, started with last week, is that marriage basically is friendship, put another way. Marriage is not basically romance garnished with friendship. It is basically friendship garnished with romance. It's not basically romance and attraction. And friendship is thrown in. It's a wonderful little option, a wonderful little plus if you can get it. But rather marriage, biblically marriages, essentially friendship with romance garnishing and flavoring it. And so the way we put it last week is that if you are going to marry somebody, you should marry someone who is now or has the potential to be your very best friend. Should not marry somebody who you'd realize could just would not be the sort of person that could understand you to the bottom. We talked about that last week. And we also introduced the idea of the structure of friendship. And that's what I want to show you, that's how I want to try to move through the subject. The structure of friendship. Friendship is not just a feeling of affection. We said friendship is a particular form of love. And friendship has this structure. There's three components to it and we see it in this passage. The structure is, friendship is deep oneness that comes from two people journeying toward a common horizon. It's deep oneness that comes from people journeying to a common horizon. See those three things? The oneness, number one, the walking together, the interacting, number two, and the common horizon or goal that you're going to. Now we have a, you have the body illustration that is something I haven't really talked about till tonight and I need to bring it out now. If you look carefully, you will see that this entire passage is based on the idea of the husband and the wife being parts of a single body. It says the husband as they head and the wife as the body. It's the same illustration that Paul uses in describing the body of Christ that we are all members of one another. And he says the way in which a husband and wife ought to deal with each other is the way in which you deal with your body. And so it says the two become one flesh, that's one body. And the goal is to present the body perfect and without spot and blameless, without blemish or stain. And the way you get there is by nourishing and cherishing your body and washing your body. The illustration is a fascinating one. You are not really separate from your body and yet you can think of your body as something distinguishable in a way from you because you can act toward it. You're not separate, you're not distinct. What happens to your body happens to you. And at the same time you can look at your body, you can work on your body. You can say it's got all sorts of flaws and all sorts of blemishes. It's out of shape. It needs to be closed differently. It needs to be washed differently. It needs to be conditioned differently and you work at that body and your goal is to present it in a certain condition. The Bible says marriages like that only. You see how the passage goes back and forth between how Christ relates to his body, which is us. And what's clear here is that it's the job of the husband and the wife to sanctify one another. The common horizon that two people in marriage have. The thing that really is the Axis Mundi, the thing in which everything in the marriage revolves around is the fact that we both have a vision for what we can be in Christ, what the other one can be in Christ and we're on our way to get there. Now the way we put it last week, but I'm going to try now to restate it. That's what we talked about the horizon. This week I want to restate the horizon and talk about what it means to nourish and cherish and wash your body. How do you get to that horizon? And then maybe a couple of comments on the deep oneness that occurs if you are journeying together toward that horizon. To the three. The deep oneness that occurs if you're journeying together toward the horizon. The horizon, the way we put it last week is you get a vision of what the person is becoming. You get a vision of the glory self. You get a vision of a perfect radiant being that God wants this person to be. You get excited about that and you get committed to seeing that person developed. You see that now this is not something of course that's you know particular to just marriage. This is the way all Christian friendships ought to be. This is friendship with windows. See if you get to know any Christian well, getting to know a Christian is a little bit sort of like trying to look for a mountain on a cloudy day. You watch and you watch and you see that the wind swirls and blows things around and at a certain point you can make out the peak and other times it's completely clouded and all of a sudden the wind can just rip right through a cloud and you see the snow on the mountain and you see the sun briefly shining on it and it takes your breath away and next thing you know back has come the fog. Getting to know a Christian is like that. Getting to know you is like that and you're getting to know somebody else is like that. You get a glimpse every so often of the gorgeous radiant perfect, the glory person, the glory self that this person is becoming. You get a vision of what this person would be if this person was not shackled and fettered by his or her sins and false. You get an idea of the beauty of it and the glory of it. You catch a glimpse of certain times and you get committed to it and you say the spirit of God is working to make that person become that and I want to be part of the synergism. I want to be part of the process. What it really means biblically to fall in love and to want to marry somebody is that you get a tremendous sense of that glory self, that real self and you say I'm committed to that. I want to be like a candlestick on which this candle is placed. I want to find through prayer and service and helping. I want the light, the radiant person who's locked inside here, I want the light of that to be evident. I want other people to see the beauty of this person. I want this person to grow and develop in that direction as fast as possible. Now, that we said is the way any Christian friendships should go. Do you do that? Or do you just try to find out whether this person also likes the same kind of music you like? And by the way, on top of that, they believe the Bible. Wow. That's not a world without, that's a world without windows. That's not. That is not a relationship that's constantly looking beyond time. Constantly saying, we want to be friends for a few billion years. I was very hard for you to think about in New York when your friendships last eight months and then somebody moves. But that's the way all friendships should be, and in particular, that's the way marriage has got to be. It's got to be that kind of friendship. Now, what are the implications? That's the horizon. That's the horizon. Now, the implications of this are marvelous. I mentioned some of them before. I didn't mention others. If that's the horizon, if that's the thing that you're after. Number one, first implication, it means that you will constantly find yourself falling in and out of like. Please don't say you're falling out of love. Remember we talked about love is love is commitment to that glory person. Love is a commitment, but like is the feeling. And the fact is that you'll fall in and out of like with somebody that you are in a relationship like this with. Why? Because you've really, in a sense, got the real self, the permanent self, and you've also got attitudes and personalities and traits and things like that. They're going to burn off in the light of God's glory over the year. They're not permanent. They're temporary. And therefore, there are going to be times in which you're looking at draw and you're mad about it. The process of marriage. Marriage is actually a furnace. There's sparks and not the romantic kind. There's heat. Whenever you take a piece of metal ore that's got beautiful, pure metal inside it and also a lot of impurities that have to be burned off, what do you do with it? You put it through a furnace. And in the furnace, the draw goes away and the pure, the real metal stays. In marriage, two people come to understand and agree what that real glory self is and what the draw is. You understand it. You can point to it. And you can say to one another, this is the real you. This is the real me. This is the thing that we know that God wants to be. And this is the draw. This is got to go. This is going to show up. This is going to crop up. We've got to work together against it. Of course, it's going to be times you fall out of like because there's lots and lots of draws there. There's times in which you're trying to say that's a draw, so it's got to go. And the other person's, you know, wrestles and says, right. But the beautiful thing about this is that in a normal marriage, not a Christian marriage, not a marriage, it's got these eternal horizons that are the context and the framework for everything. In a normal marriage, when you come up against the imperfections, which are there in space, in droves, when you come up against the warts, the imperfections. You don't think of it as draw. So you just say, I wish I had somebody better. You come up against the imperfections and you can imagine someone better. But what's interesting is when you're in love, when two Christians are in love and they're thinking along these lines and they're married and they have these kinds of horizons, you also can envision somebody better. But the person you envision better is the person who you're married to. You see, there's a, you want perfection, but you want her or his perfection. The kind of perfection that only that person will ever become because you want them. You want the radiant them. You want the perfect them. You want the holy them. You don't want somebody else. Of course you're mad at them right now. You want the them and you know the only way you're going to get them is to stick with them. Because they're Christians and you're a Christian and the Bible says, Jesus Paul says to Christians and Philippians, he says, hey, in Philippi, he says, I am convinced that the one who began a good work in you will bring it to completion on the day of Christ. How can he say that to an entire church? Does he know them? He's never even met them. He says, if you're a Christian, if you're a real Christian, I know the good work he began on you who will bring to completion on the day of Jesus Christ. So you expect yourself to fall in and out of light. And yet there's a commitment grows even when you hate the imperfection you see because it's draws and you want to get rid of it. And you also want a perfect person but you want this perfect person. Another implication and real brief, we mentioned it last week but there's more of you than last week. So I ought to mention this. You have to be aware of the normal cultural pattern. The way we usually do it, remember I said basically marriage, biblically is friendship spiked with romance, not romance, spiked with friendship. The way we ordinarily choose our spouse is we look for sexual attractiveness first and eliminate anybody that's not polished enough, not my body type, not attractive to me. We eliminate all those people, all the people that might be wonderful friends, all those people that we might have a wonderful marriage with. I mean after all, the Bible says, you know, beauty is vain, charm is fleeting and there's only so many faceless you can have. And in the end, you're going to look alike anyway. So what we tend to do is we say, let's eliminate all the people except the ones that I'm sexually attracted to and who knows maybe I can make some of these different instead of looking the other way around and saying, how can I find somebody who are attracted to their character, to the nobility, to their bearing, to their balance, to their wisdom. And you see frankly, there is a sexual attraction that comes from deep oneness with someone whose character you admire to the sky and who incredibly admires yours to. There is nothing sexier than that. It's a very different kind of sex. It's a very different kind of attractiveness and it's amazing how it is not completely independent but it's semi-independent from the looks of the other person. And as the years go by, it gets deeper even as your own looks fade. And after all, what the heck do you want? So be careful about the order. If it's really true that marriage is friendship spiked with romance, not romance, but with friendship, why start with sexual attractiveness first in doing your elimination process. Thirdly, and this is something that I only touched on last week, but my wife has told me, I need to say it and she's my friend and she knows that I'm a chicken. And that is, there are people, the Bible says, that have a gift of singleness. First Corinthians 7, what that means is, if you go back to the Old Testament, you'll see that when Adam was created, he was lonely because he was male. And God, what God has done when he created human beings, he divided up his attributes and his qualities into men and women. Men are different than women and women are different than men. And therefore, when Adam finds Eve, he feels a completion that can only happen in a friendship across the gender line. He feels a completion that only happens when he has a deep friendship with somebody of the other gender. Now there are people, the Bible says, who have a particular gift that even though there's loneliness, they can make it. They don't need that deep consolation that many of us absolutely have to have if we're going to be happy. So there's some people that have a gift of singleness. They don't need that. They don't have that deep need for completion in the same way. But what about the rest of us? And what about the rest of us who have that deep need, need the compliment of deep friendship across the gender line? But don't have it because A, we just haven't found somebody to marry or B, we're scared to death of marriage. Marriage is one of the most profound human relationships, but it's one that at times can be difficult and painful. We'd like to briefly highlight a resource that provides help for anyone who wants to have more loving and stronger relationships. Tim and Kathy Keller draw from Biblical wisdom and their own experiences to offer a year of daily meditations for couples in their book, The Meaning of Marriage, A Couples Devotional. The book is a 365 day devotional that includes stories, daily scriptures, and prayer prompts that will help couples draw closer to God and to each other throughout the year. If you would like to make a gift to help gospel and life share the love of Christ with more people, we'll send you a copy of The Meaning of Marriage, A Couples Devotional, As Our Thanks. To request your copy, simply visit gospelonlife.com/divo. That's gospelonlife.com/divo. Now here's the conclusion of this episode of Cultivating a Healthy Marriage. There are some dangers and that is the dangers are that you will try to get that kind of cross-gent, you're going to try to get that kind of completion without a marriage covenant. The Bible says the only safe place to have it is an a marriage covenant. We talked about that, a permanent and exclusive commitment of a man and a woman to one another, to share their lives totally. Permanent, exclusive, legal binding. It's the only place that you can have this deep on this. It's still not a fail-safe thing, but the Bible says it's the only safety net that's strong enough in which to do this stripping, there's vulnerability stuff that the marriage is supposed to be. You can still, as you know, many of you know, you can still get ripped apart in a marriage, but you certainly shouldn't try, even try it outside of that safety net of a binding covenant. Yet, there's a danger of us trying to get that intimacy and trying to get that kind of comfort and trying to get that completion without the marriage covenant. Why? Because we either, nobody's willing to give it to us or because we're afraid of it ourselves. What are some of the ways to do it? One is pretty obvious and that is, even though this person is not a friend, I will have sex with him anyway. Because that, you see, superficially, it feels for the moment that you're getting that completion. But that's another subject, another sermon we've talked about that before. The Bible says that's not the way, ultimately, it's not the way to satisfy that at all, but you'll find yourself becoming lonelier when you use sex outside of a covenant. Second way to do it is when a man and a woman, for whatever reason, decide to have that deep oneness that best friendship and yet refuse to try to get romantic. Here's a person who's of the opposite sex who is my very best friend, no one's close, and yet either that person nor I, one of them is a person who is a person who is a person. or the other or both of it refuse to be romantically committed. We're not going to date. We're just going to have this deep friendship. Now, for a while that works and I just suggest to you that eventually somebody gets somebody, somebody gets killed. It could be the man, it could be the woman. That means one person says, "This is great. You're not possessive. We're not romantic. We're not dating. We're just good friends." The other person is dying because that person feels married. Needs the covenant. Needs the exclusive permanent. If you try to get that completion outside of the covenant, somebody gets killed. Sometimes it's the woman, sometimes the man can work either way. And there's another approach and that is that two people, the same sex can try to get that deep kind of completion through a sexual friendship, which is homosexuality. Again, that's another subject, of course. But I can tell you this, the Bible says that you can't get that kind of completion. The completion we're talking about in marriage, from somebody the same sex. A friendship with somebody of the very same sex cannot complete you in the way that Eve was built to complete Adam. Some people can try to, you know, you can deny that and say, "It's not my experience and I'll be very happy to argue with you, but we can't do it here." All I'm suggesting is you must be careful about trying to get the kind of completion that happens through a friendship between the genders, which we need and we want, unless you have the gift of singleness, but we can't try to do an end run around marriage. If we don't have a marriage, if we don't have a marriage covenant, we've got, we've basically got a grin and bear it. How? The real consolation is through good, same sex friendships. Not same sex friendships that try to replace marriage, but good, same sex friendships. Do they do the job? Do they completely console that longing? You know they don't, but they're the consolation. They're the way that you're supposed to be tied it over until you can be married, unless you find that God gives you, which he very, in many cases does, gives you the ability to not need marriage and not even want marriage. And that's fine too. That can happen permanently or can happen for a season. Lastly, the last implication of this idea that marriage is about two people committed to the glory cells marching to the throne of God, wanting to present one another radiant and spotless before the throne. The last implication is here's how you can tell whether you've got a friendship on which you can base a marriage. A lot of people come and say, "Look, you know we're attracted to each other, we've got a good friendship. That's great." But how do I know if this is the kind of relationship you've been talking about? How do I know if this is the kind of relationship that I really, really ought to have? And I'll tell you what it is. You can agree on what the real self is and what the draw is. That means that as you talk to one another and in your relationship, as you spend time together, you find an elastic demand point of view for a minute. You find that as you talk to this woman, not only does she have a terrific insight into who you really ought to be, who you can be, the glory self, the thing God wants you to be, the best about you, not only does she see it, but in some ways she sees it to some degree better than you do. And as you speak to her, you find that you get a better idea about who you should be and you get ignited about it. He gets passionate for it. In other words, the bottom line of knowing whether this woman is a good enough friend to marry is, does she make you want to be holy? Does she give you a vision of what you could be in Christ that excites you so much that you want to get there? And do you find that you know it better and want it more by being with her? And the real test is does it work backwards? In other words, if she's the one that helps you see it and she's the one who knows you, your glory self, but you don't really have a very good, if you don't do a very good job of helping her with hers, then again, that's detrimental. But if it's happening both ways, if the vissa is truly versatile, if you can agree on what that real self is, if you can agree on what is dross and what is what is metal? You got the makings of a friendship on which to base a marriage with windows on eternity. Now, the question is how do you get there? I've had a number of people come after and say, the problem with this is I didn't get married with any of this in mind. And the fact is that we're not friends. I married him or I married her because we look great together, we felt great together, we had a lot of fun. People said we made a great couple. The fact is that I can go talk to my guy friends about things that I could never bring up to her. And so now, people are invicerversy. The woman says I can go to my girlfriends and talk about things that I couldn't imagine him ever understanding. But I guess I always thought that that was just the way it was. That's a non-Christian understanding of marriage. So what do you do? The answer is, right here in the scripture, there's no reason why you have to despair. What you decide is you decide I'm going to make this person my friend. I'm going to work in that direction. And the Bible shows us that there's really two parts to that. It's going back to the body metaphor. You notice it says on the one hand, look, it says no in the same way, husbands are a lot of other wives as their own bodies. No one hated his own body but feeds and cares for it. Nourishes and cherishes it, it says in the authorized version. And up a little further, it says to make her holy cleansing her by the washing with water through the word. To be a friend, to be friends, you've got to be willing to do the negative and the positive. The negative is cleansing your body. The positive is nourishing and cherishing it. Now think for a minute, you're not going to be friends unless you got both. I can only outline this now and I'm going to, so we're ready to come before the Lord's table. These are very important. Some of you, if you've been to any of the marriages I've done lately, you'll recognize that them as seminal parts in any talk I give when I perform a wedding. On the one hand, think of what it means to clean your body. It's a private thing. In other words, you have to work on your teeth. When you excrete, you wipe yourself. You clean your fingernails. You deal with the problems of your skin. You work on your shower and your bed. The fact is, this is the most private thing that you do is to keep your body clean. The Bible says, when you get married, your spouse has that kind of access to you, to the most private part of your life. That means that your spouse will see and take part in cleaning the dirt. To put it in Star Trek terms, your spouse goes where no one, no man has gone before you. Now, if you hate that and if you resent that, you don't understand marriage and this person will never be your friend. One of the ways in which this person cleanses you is simply by him or her being there. Look, in the path, are you a moody person? You prune the mood swings. Are you an indecisive person? Are you a scaredy cat person about certain things? Are you a kind of abrupt and critical person? Are you an impatient person? You could always, in a sense, clean yourself in private. If you're really mad, if you're really scared, if you're really grumpy, if you're really irritable, if you're really moody, you could pretty much hide it from people. But now, you're constantly humiliated. You're humiliated because these things are things that your spouse sees. You're excreting spiritually all over the place. Your spouse sees that. And now your spouse says something about it. In other words, your moods, your indecision, your fears, create problems for your spouse to. Your moody together. You're into together. You're scared together. What this does on the one hand, it's so cleansing just to have somebody there just seeing it. Because the first time in your life, you can't live in denial anymore. And every mental health counselor will tell you that's the worst thing for you. If you live in denial, you can't do a thing about it. And on the other hand, the spouse can say things to you and help you with it. If you're willing to realize that it's the nature of marriage that your spouse has access to cleansing you. But on the other hand, you've got to be so gentle. You all know what it's like to cleanse. You're so gentle with yourself. Can you imagine somebody else flossing your teeth? Well, you know, that would be pretty scary. Can you imagine somebody else cutting your nails? Can you imagine somebody else doing those things? The reason you're scared is because it's very hard for someone else to be sensitive enough. If you're married, it's your job to do those things. It's your job to do those things. You go in where no one has ever gone before. But how do you do it? You do it oh so gently. To deal with one another's sins. To cleanse one another from sin. The point out sins. To admit sins. To be accountable for sins. If that isn't happening, you're not friends. And you certainly don't have the horizon in mind. If you cannot, if you have a relationship in which you just have to stay away from each other because you're too testy, that means you're not committed to this understanding of marriage and you can never be friends. But then it's the positive side. Here's where we have to conclude. But I want to read you something. The positive side is that it says you nourish and cherish your body. You find out what really builds it up and nourishes it and makes it happy and makes it strong. At this point, you really live out with your spouse, the actual salvation of Jesus. Because what Jesus does is he comes to you and he says, "You are my beloved child in whom I'm well pleased." Let me read you something. A lot of you may have heard this because I brought it up in another situation, especially at weddings. This is a paper written by someone who went to seminary with long ago. Let me just read it and then we're done. Marriage is recreational. In the context of marriage, one encounters the possible redemption of the full life, the retrospective healing of your personal history. The thorough conversion of one's biography is a divine work begun in this life, and it would seem that God has invested the marriage relationship with sufficient emotional power to challenge the authority of accumulated biographical verdicts and to thereby redeem the past. Now, you know what he's saying? You may have heard me say this before. When you get married to somebody, yes, the other person has the right to cleanse you and point out your faults, but here's also what happens. When you get married to someone, you know how the place in the Bible it says, "If our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our hearts." You know what it says that? There is a very important analogy. God invented marriage with this power that if your spouse tells you you're gorgeous, you feel gorgeous, no matter what anybody else says, no matter what the culture says. If your spouse tells you, "I don't care what your father and mother said, I don't care what your teacher said, you are great." I don't care what they said, you are someone I admire. That, well this is what the paper says, and I think this is true. What the passage is saying is that you have massive ability to completely reprogram the self-appreciation of your spouse. Your word will completely overturn all the verdicts that have ever been passed on your spouse. Your spouse believes about himself or herself whatever he's been told over the years, hundreds and thousands of people have told him what he's like. And now you have got the power to completely turn that over. If your hearts are condemned, condemn you, your spouse is greater than your heart. And that means if everybody in the world calls you ugly, and your spouse says you're beautiful, you'll feel beautiful. And it also means that if everybody in the whole world calls you beautiful, and your spouse calls you ugly, you'll feel ugly. You've got that ability to redeem. You nourish and cherish one another. You find out what is good in the other and you call it out, you affirm. And the only reason we know how this works is because Jesus Christ Himself has done it for us. Jesus is the friend. Jesus is the one of whom it said, "A bruised reedy will not break, and a smoking flaxy will not quench till he brings forth judgment to victory." What that means is that he is a God who will bring. He's a person who will come into your life and bring you forth to victory. But in the meantime, if you are so bruised, you're like a bruised reedy, he will treat you so gently you won't break off. If you are so dim that you're like a smoking flax, like a candle that has basically gone out, but there's just a glimmer of a flame there, he won't quench you. That's a friend. There's someone who will bring you to victory, who is committed to you, who won't let you go, who will tell you about your faults, but is so completely committed to you, and who continually says to you, "I love you, I care for you." He's greater than your hearts. He overcomes everything that anyone else has ever said of you. And in the marriage relationship, you're living that out. My dear friends, dear friends, have a marriage. Prepare yourself for a marriage if you're not married. Get yourself a marriage if you are married with windows on eternity. Let's pray. Father, as we go to the Lord's table, as we pertake of the bread and the cup, we pray that we'll remember your friendship, Jesus Christ, how you died for us, how you love us, how you are committed to us, how you are consistent with us, how you're vulnerable to us, how you communicate to us, so we might become the kind of friends that can build other people up toward the throne and prepare us to be the kind of husbands and wives. And the promise that will also bring you glory and joy. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Thanks for listening to Cultivating a Healthy Marriage. We trust you were encouraged and that it gives you new insight into how you can apply God's wisdom to your life. If you'd like to find more gospel-centered resources from Tim Keller, simply visit gospelandlife.com. There you'll find articles, sermons, devotional and other helpful resources. You can also stay connected with us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter.