It is far better to assess your marriage at regular intervals. It does not have to be long appointments in front of counselors. In fact, if you just spend regular quality time with your spouse to gauge how he or she is feeling and make small adjustments, your marriage will stay in good shape.

At our most recent workshop, we divided into four groups of couples and practiced assessing the state of our marriage in four particular areas. The results were very enlightening.

The first group assessed how strong is their marriage which is determined by the ability to overcome external or internal conflict. How resilient is your marriage? In other words, how well can you cope by successfully going through trials? If you are confident, then you will not be afraid to bring up sensitive topics to your spouse.

Conflict comes to all relationships with the end result to strengthen or weaken it. Conflict exposes your character, both the good and the bad, which is probably why we try to avoid it. However conflict is God’s method for transforming us.

Scripture tells us in James 4:1-4 that the source of our arguments comes from our own motives and desires which are not of God. We don’t ask God for what we want and instead try to achieve under our own power. When our spouse doesn’t comply, we lash out with anger, frustration or passive aggressiveness.

Some questions that group one discussed were…

• Think about the last crises, external stressor or marital conflict you experienced. Did the final outcome serve to strengthen your marriage or weaken it?
• What can we do as a couple to make sure crises ultimately strengthens our marriage?
• What has your behavior pattern been for dealing with conflict? What would you personally like to do differently in future conflicts?

The second group assessed marriage intimacy in its 3 forms; spiritual, emotional, and physical. When one suffers, the others usually suffer as well because we are triune beings made in the image of our creator. We are spiritually intimate with those who we pray for and pray with. Emotional intimacy depends on our communication at the highest level which is to discuss our ideas, opinions, personal information and feelings. Physical intimacy can only be fulfilling when the other two are nurtured.

Nurturing intimacy requires communicating at the highest level with some regularity in order to really connect with your spouse. Group two was asked to have a 2 minute discussion with just their spouse and converse about something OTHER THAN…

• Work
• Children
• News events
• Ministry / Church
• Television/Entertainment
• Home chores and daily tasks
• People outside of your marriage

Group two did not have time to complete this but we urge you to have this type of discussion with your spouse for at least 4 minutes a day (the average) and build from there. Some of their other assessments were…

• Ways to keep the physical intimacy alive in your marriage
• The effects of pornography, masturbation or having fantasies on marriages
• Ways to give your spouse his/her own space to grow spiritually

Group three assessed commitment, defined as taking steps in a relationship that cannot be undone. Commitment is a three step process. The first step is trust which takes your consistent reliability. The second step is vulnerability which requires courage.  The third step is sacrifice and that requires Jesus.

Counselors, coaches or therapists can impart relationship skill techniques to address certain crises but there can be no lasting change without the third step of sacrifice. We see from scripture that during Jesus ministry on Earth, he made the blind see, the dumb speak, the lame walk…all quick fixes to immediate crises. However, it was His sacrifice that brought about salvation, the permanent solution to what really plagued mankind. In the same way, it takes your sacrifice to bring about healing and real transformation of your marriage into what it is supposed to be.

Group three addressed the following questions…

• What does the act of trust, vulnerability and sacrifice look like in your marriage?
• What have you done to earn your spouse’s trust?
• What are some examples of acts of commitment that you can take in your marriage to move you forward in God’s purpose?

Group four discussed marital happiness. The Institute for American Values and the National Center on African American Marriages and Parenting charts an index of the five leading marriage indicators. Their conclusion was that children are directly affected by a couple’s emotional state. On average, children raised by happily married parents fare better on almost every measure of child well-being compared to children raised by unhappily married parents. A happy marriage is also linked to physical health.  As for the rationale that it is better to get divorced than to subject children to an unhappy marriage, the statistics on how children in single parent households fare compared to both parents tell otherwise.

A University of Texas study concluded that married persons with more favorable attitudes toward divorce actually experience less happy marriages than those who oppose divorce. In other words, if you are miserable, divorce is an option. You just haven’t justified it yet. If divorce truly isn’t an option, you will be happier, what other choice makes sense?

Some of the questions that group four addressed were…

• How realistic is it to say that happiness is a choice we make when confronted with an antagonistic or hurtful spouse?
• Is happiness and vulnerability mutually exclusive in marriage; meaning do we have to choose one over the other?
• How have you dealt with sadness or depression in your relationship? What advice do you have for others?
• Do you consider it phony to come to church and act “happy” when you are experiencing marital difficulty? How should we conduct ourselves in public when going through problems? How should we conduct ourselves in private?

These were just four topics out of many that you can assess. What you give a priority to depends on your marital core values and greatest pain areas. Perhaps these should be the first things that you assess. Start practicing assessment today. Start with just 4 minutes a day and build a habit. A conversation a day keeps the marriage counselor away.

Amid all the pomp and circumstance of the wedding ceremony, we can overlook the fact that a man is immediately given the enormous title of husband. Unfortunately today, too many women are getting married without taking enough time to discover if that man’s character can sustain those responsibilities. The hard truth is that men are not properly trained nor have they experienced many successful models of marriage. The alarming rise in single parent, female head of households means that boys have not had male role models of leadership inside the home. We grow up to excel in all sorts of occupations, but we have not learned to apply these leadership skills in the home. The result is that women have had to step in to fill leadership roles that biblically and traditionally men are supposed to occupy.

These responsibilities come by way of a man’s positional authority as Prophet, Priest and King of the home. Among those responsibilities are to protect, set goals, be a blessing, create opportunities and organize the family unit. What ends up happening because of abuse of authority is that men use their power of influence to control, dominate, create insecurity and stifle their wife’s participation in decision making.

But God is good, merciful, and in his infinite wisdom, works on a husband in the harness of responsibility. Wives participate in transforming their husbands into the leaders they are called to be by giving them personal authority over their lives. Whereas positional authority is inherited, delegated by a higher authority, or taken by force, personal authority is granted to the leader by the people who are called to follow him. Personal authority is earned by the leader through trust. Trust is established through demonstrating relevance, competence, good character and integrity over time.

Unfortunately, many wives no longer want to submit and grant this personal authority because society at large is saying that the husband is increasingly irrelevant in the home. In our post-modern, so called enlightened age, women can now achieve anything a man can and submission is viewed as a weakness.

However, Jesus shows us a different model in His relationship to the Father and to us. Jesus teaches men to lead, develop and care for their spouse as a shepherd does his flock. This is illustrated through various scriptures in the Bible. Jesus modeled this because He did not impose His positional authority as Lord and Savior who created everything, and instead only exercised the personal authority that an individual gave Him over their lives. Once you submit to giving Jesus personal authority over your life, He blesses you in the following ways:

This is just a partial list of the way Jesus loves us. Ephesians 5:25 reads, “Husbands love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her..” This means that everything Jesus does for us, a Husband is to do for their wives! This is certainly a tall order and not achievable apart from the Holy Spirit. It is also not achievable unless the wife grants her husband that personal authority that Jesus asks of us.

This is not easy for wives because it means submitting to their husband in ways that society frowns upon. The worldly concept of submission is that it is subservient, defeatist, and admitting weakness. But the biblical definition is that it takes faith, strength of character and love. Submitting to the husband means granting him the personal authority in her life that will activate the full blessings of God in the marriage. A wife’s husband can be her prophet, priest and king but the process of him becoming that takes time. She must help him through encouragement and applying her skills and abilities in a way that is uplifting to the husband and not denigrating.

A wife is her husband’s help mate. He cannot do it without her but also she cannot hope to live out her call and election in Christ Jesus without him.

The Basic Truth

Marriage was like a coat worn inside out. It fit but it just didn’t feel right. From the beginning, you ordained that I would not be alone but I have come a long way since Eden. The wound of my missing rib had long been covered with a callous scab. I thought you were a cruel trickster to bring me someone I so desired knowing she could never breach my strongholds so long as I held strong to my carnality. My home was a carnival funhouse of distorted images of myself as a man, a husband, and a father.

Ashamed, I lashed out at the mirrors; verbal stones hurling with the power of life and death only to wound the ones I love, perhaps forever.  At last, I came excruciatingly, inexorably, brokenly, to the end of myself. There I fell exhausted into your waiting arms and you wept over your prodigal son.

To you lord, who is always faithful, all goodness, all powerful and merciful, I may submit with time. Don’t ask the same toward my wife, who is fallible, lives life within the boundaries of her fears, judges discriminately, and loves conditionally.  Should I give up the very freedom bequeathed me in Christ Jesus?

Then from my Pastor’s mouth, you spoke these words, “There is no freedom without choice.” My choices were, submit to the covenant I entered with you or go my own way and remain in bondage to sin. Freedom through submission, the very paradox makes my mind spin. Though I will not pretend to understand your grand plan, it is enough that I walk by faith on the road of matrimony.

In the world’s economy the general perception is one of finite resources and abundance of competition. It is scale-based in which people determine their level of contentment by comparing what they have to the next person. If their side of the scale is heavier they are happy. If their side of the scale comes up short then they demand justice. In a world where relationships are identified as have and have not, winner and loser; no one wants to be the loser. It is a system of thought that is simultaneously the greatest motivation for progress and for oppression. Everyone is indoctrinated into this system by experience and it becomes woven in to the fabric of our character, a flaw accepted as normal.

When this flaw is expressed in marriage we have the greatest conflict. Marriage has its own economy created by God. In His economy, the rules are very different. God’s economy is explained succinctly in Matthew 20. In the parable, a landowner hires several workers throughout the day to work his vineyards. The workers who began near the end of the day were paid just as much as the workers who labored most of the day. The parable says that the workers who were hired first began to grumble against the landowner. The land owner responds to the disgruntled workers accordingly. “Friend, I am not being unfair to you. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius?”

What did you agree to when you got married? Generally, one spouse is willing and happy to attend the other’s needs and make sacrifices. Christians at least understand this is what marriage is about. When a spouse becomes unwilling and disgruntled is when they make comparisons. We put our spouse’s level of service on the world’s economic scale to gauge our level of satisfaction. Too often it comes up short. This is usually when we go to God complaining that we should receive more denarius.

Just like the 6 million dollar lottery winner, we have every right to be upset, to demand fairness, that is, in the world’s economy. But in God’s economy there are infinite resources where no one lacks. Would it really matter to you whether you started out with 6 million or 60 if you knew that you could go back to an inexhaustible source whenever you were depleted?

In marriage, it is really not about our level of service to our spouse but how much we are willing to serve God. So long as we do it for Him, we will be blessed with more than we can imagine so that we can serve all the more. God may use us to bring our spouse blessings, grace or even to rebuke not necessarily in words but just by our example. Proverbs 25:21-22 reads, “If your enemy is hungry give him food to eat; if he is thirsty give him water to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals upon his head, and the Lord will reward you.” If we must treat our enemies this way, how should we behave toward our spouse even when they don’t deserve it?

We forget our courting years when it was a contest to see who could out serve the other. In God’s economy, Love is the mode of exchange. The world’s economy runs on the exchange of goods and services and a marriage cannot live on love alone. Are your days of passion long replaced by days of obligation? In whose system of thought are you operating?
Your spouse cannot meet all your needs or bare the strain of making you happy for very long. God himself, with all the promises in the bible, doesn’t promise us happily ever after. He promises happily hereafter but we would rather believe Hollywood before the bible. Marriage is a walk of faith which we exercise in our response to adversity not happiness. Changing our objective from happily married to faithfully married sets the right expectation and could lead to less disappointment.