Artist Andrew Peterson’s newest album Counting Stars is releasing soon on July 27th. Here is the official music video of the single, Dancing in the Minefields. It’s a great song about the joys and trials of marriage.
Archive for the ‘Marriage’ Category
Andrew Peterson’s Dancing in the Minefields
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010How Can I Desire Heaven Knowing I Wont Be Married Anymore?
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010Piper answers a question all Christian couples should carefully work through: How can I desire heaven when I know I wont be married to my husband/wife there?
HT: Ask Pastor John
From the Hotseat: disagreement in a complementarian marraige
Monday, March 2nd, 2009If the husband has the primary responsibility to lead, does that mean every time a couple cannot come to agreement, the wife must eventually yield?
The implied assumption behind this question is that a husband’s authority as leader in the family is a unilateral authority. But this is not what the Bible teaches and it is not what the complementarian vision for manhood and womanhood promotes.
Question 46 (from Fifty Crucial Questions) addresses this question in reference to 1 Cor 7:3-5. Paul is talking specifically about conjugal rights, but it sheds light on our question because we’re given at least one example in a marriage where unilateral decision-making is prohibited.
3 The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. 4 For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. 5 Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time…
Note that Paul says such decisions must be made “by agreement”. That is always the ideal and the goal within a complementarian marriage. Question 46 applies the text this way:
“What are the implications of this text for the leadership of the husband? Do the call for mutual yielding to sexual need and the renunciation of unilateral planning nullify the husband’s responsibility for general leadership in the marriage? We don’t think so. But this text definitely shapes that leadership and gives added Biblical guidance for how to work it out. It makes clear that his leadership will not involve selfish, unilateral choices. He will always strive for the ideal of agreement. He will take into account the truth that her sexual needs and desires carry the same weight as his own in developing the pattern of their intimacy.”
So when a married couple is in disagreement and at an impasse, a husband’s leadership is not to be misused as a means to get “his way”. In fact, good leadership means sometimes admitting when others are in position to make a better decision. So a godly husband will always seek the advice of his wife, strive for agreement, and be open to the option of yielding to “her way”.
But isn’t that how an egalitarian would also answer? How then is the complementarian vision distinct?
The distinction is this: the husband bears primary accountability before God for all decisions made in the family. Suppose a husband yields and his wife’s decision is revealed to be a bad one. A godly husband who accepts his responsibility to lead will not excuse himself from blame and leave his wife to face God alone. Rather, he will accept the role of leader and be willing to stand before God to answer for his family’s decisions.
Resources on Manhood and Womanhood
Sunday, March 1st, 2009Today’s sermon called “Men and Women: Equal Yet Different” (1 Tim 2:11-15) was the first in a two-part sermon on this passage. In our bulletin we included a number of resources on manhood and womanhood. Here they are again:
Carolyn McCulley
Radical Womanhood: Feminine Faith in a Feminist World (199 pgs) [read chpt 1]
John Piper
What’s the Difference? (82 pgs) [download pdf]
John Piper and Wayne Grudem
Fifty Crucial Questions (67 pgs) [read it online]
Rebecca Jones
Does Christianity Squash Women? (204 pgs)
Byran Chapell
Each for the Other: Marriage as it’s meant to be (202 pgs)
Online Books from the Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood
A good book on sex and marriage
Friday, October 26th, 2007In C.J. Mahaney’s Sex, Romance, and the Glory of God, he starts off by establishing the true essence and purpose of Christian marriage.
Paul reveals to us in Ephesians 5 the divine intention for marriage. It’s to be an echo or reflection of the relationship that exists between Christ and the Church – always a very imperfect reflection but a reflection nonetheless. Please don’t think of this as merely a helpful illustration or an interesting perspective. It’s much more than that. This is the essence of marriage. This is the divine purpose for your marriage.
So the purpose of marriage is not sexual or personal fulfillment. The purpose is to witness to the world about Christ – which can be accomplished when we experience sexual and personal fulfillment within the covenant of Christian marriage. But we must be careful not to confuse the means from the ends. He then goes on to challenge the reader (Christian husbands in mind) with a number of probing questions.
Has your marriage primarily been centered on you? On your wife? On your children? On your responsibilities? On your goals? On your comforts? On your stuff? If so, you’ve been trying to live in a way you were never intended to. The biblical purpose for marriage, you see, is not man-centered or needs-centered. It’s God-centered. It’s profoundly mysterious and profoundly significant. Your marriage is meant to point to the truth of the crucified and risen Saviour who will return for his Bride.
I recommend this small, very readable book to both Christian husbands and wives (Mahaney’s wife contributes with a chapter written to wives), who seek to glorify God in sex and marriage.
Marriage: more than just sex and companionship
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007Writing about clergy misconduct in their book Betrayal of Trust, Stan Grenz and Roy Bell attribute sexual failure among ministers (and sexual promiscuity in general) to the loss of a biblical vision of sex and marriage. In light of Barton’s new sermon series on sex, let us take a closer look at that vision.
Grenz and Bell decry the truncated vision of marriage found in contemporary culture. Many view marriage as merely the context for sexual expression or merely a means of companionship. But such thinking exposes how “self-centered, individualistic and self-actualizing” our culture has become. Granted, marriage is about sex and companionship but not only about sex and companionship. What happens if the sex is no longer as good as it once was or if the companionship grows wearisome or boring? With such a truncated vision, it is easy to see why so many marital conflicts are quickly resolved by divorce. Grenz and Bell counter with a biblical vision:
Above all, however, the Bible presents marriage as a metaphor of spiritual truth. . . . the fellowship that God intended from the beginning, to which marriage has always borne witness, is ultimately fulfilled in the new society at the end of salvation history. Marriage is a symbol of that future reality. As male and female maintain the marital bond in all fidelity, they provide a picture of the grand future fellowship of the redeemed humanity with the Creator. A good marriage is a foretaste and sign on a small scale of the great community God is bringing to pass. So even in the present, marriage is to be a foreshadowing or precursory experience of the community God intends to create.
So the institution of marriage carries salvific and eschatological significance (Eph 5:31-32; Rev 19:7; 21:2,9). Why get married? To find the love of your life and to have sex, right? Well yes, but only more so! Get married because it is a God-ordained means of participating in his divine program on earth – by being a witness (an foretaste, a small scale example) of heaven. So when the unbelieving world encounters your marriage, they are left dissatisfied with their empty relational pursuits and left longing for only what God can provide.
In addition, Grenz and Bell suggest another biblical function of marriage: Viewed from the NT perspective, marriage also declares the holy nature of God’s love. . . . the exclusive love shared by husband and wife reflects the holiness of the divine love. Marital love is a picture of the exclusive love present within the Trinity. Marriage is likewise an appropriate picture of the exclusive relationship God desires to share with his people.
Therefore, to break the exclusivity of marriage through adultery is to publicly malign the love of God. That is one reason why adultery is sinful – because our action bears false witness to the love of God.
On the Biblical Grounds of Legitimate Divorce
Friday, October 19th, 2007Piper has written a response to a recent Christianity Today article on divorce and remarriage, arguing that it is guilty of tragically widening the grounds of legitimate divorce.
To form his conclusions, the author of the CT article relied heavily on extra-biblical literature to interpret the relevant passages. As a result, Piper ends with a plea to return to the actual biblical text and to beware of “scholarly rank-pulling”. His final words put a finger on a big problem in current biblical scholarship – namely, the use of rabbinic scholarship or 1st-century Jewish literature as interpretive lenses for justifying liberal shifts away from orthodox theological positions. Piper ends with this statement:
My experience with the issue of divorce (and with the New Perspective on Paul) is that people who talk this way do not generally see the meaning of the New Testament as clearly as those who focus their attention not in the extra-biblical literature but in the New Testament texts themselves. For the ordinary layman who wonders what to do when scholars seem to see what you cannot see, I suggest that you stay with what you can see for yourself.
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Andreas Kostenberger contributes to this debate on legitimate divorce:
“Thus I agree with Piper’s criticism of Instone-Brewer’s treatment of Exod 21:10–11 yet disagree with his criticism of Instone-Brewer’s handling of Matt 19:9 and Deut 24:1.”