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Greetings all! By way of introduction, we wanted to introduce this posts guest author. Mark , his wife Betty and their 6 children live in Central NJ and serve as Missional community leaders as well as assist with the pre-marital counseling at Jacobs Well Church. We asked Mark to share on fromitous something that the Lord put on his heart in the specific topic of marriage. He shares from his life and experiences. I’m sure you will be encouraged as I was. Once again, please feel free to leave any comments. Thanks for stopping by!

“Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.’
(Ephesians 5:31-32 ESV)

‘It’s all about Jesus.’

While this can be a trite and somewhat meaningless saying, it has taken on new depth for me in recent months as I reflect on the reality of the Gospel and what it teaches us for all of life, and for marriage in particular.

Growing up it was obvious to me that my parents loved each other deeply. In fact, by the time I was a teenager it was downright embarrassing! Not that my parents’ relationship was conflict-free, but it was obvious to me that they were crazy about each other. My father also made it clear to us that while he loved me and my sisters immensely, he loved mom more, and she came before us.

By the time I hit college and early adulthood I thought – and would often say – that if I had a marriage half as good as my parents, I would be extremely happy. While much of this may have been emotional sentiment on my part, the reality of this would bear itself out in the next few years in ways I could have never expected.

You see, as my marriage was beginning, my parents’ was ending – not by choice, mind you, but because my mom was dying of ovarian cancer. And the things I saw during this time – and have come to understand over time – continue to speak Gospel truth to me about marriage.

When it became clear to Betty and me that God wanted us to be married, I became scared and overwhelmed. Why? I took God’s design for marriage seriously, and the following stopped me in my tracks:

‘Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her,’ (Ephesians 5:25 ESV)

Being somewhat of a perfectionist by nature, I began to try to figure out how, by my own discipline and effort, I could become the kind of husband that could do this. I believe this kind of mindset is common among men today on different levels. We strive to ‘get our act together’ or ‘have our bases covered’ in certain areas before we are ‘ready’ to be married – and this often applies to things like career and finances. In fact, I have cousins who have delayed over 10 years for these kinds of reasons. But for me, it gradually became clear that the kind of ‘getting my act together’ that would enable me to love Betty as Christ loved the Church was a long way off (if not impossible) – and so I delayed – until God made it clear to me that marriage was a step of faith by which Betty and I would trust God to make us into the kind of spouses that Ephesians 5 is talking about. At that point I felt total freedom to proceed with marriage, having transferred my trust from myself to God. He made it clear that the work He had done in us to that point and the desire He was building in us for this kind of marriage was translating into a faith in Him that was the right foundation for marriage.

Little did I know that within a year of that time my Mom would be home with the Lord and my Dad’s heart would have been broken – both before the Lord to enable him to love and serve her better, but later before the Lord to mourn for his deep and profound loss.

That sense of being overwhelmed has in many ways never left me. It is quite clear to me that I do not have what it takes to be a godly spouse. If I could be quite direct, neither do you. But God’s Spirit is the perfectly abundant resource we need. Ephesians 5:21 tells us that we are to submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Pastor Timothy Keller puts it this way:

In the end, being filled with the Spirit and the fear of the Lord are basically the same thing. They both refer to an inner spiritual experience and reality, but each phrase brings out different aspects of it. They both take people “out of themselves.” Paul says this Spirit-created unselfishness is crucial if we are going to have the marriages we should have.
Let the Holy Spirit bring this home to your heart until you love and sing and wonder. Then, out of this “fear,” this fullness of the Spirit, we can turn to our spouses and begin to do what we should do for them.
…then, would the effect be if we were to dive even more deeply into Jesus’s teaching and life and work? What if we were to be so immersed in his promises and summonses, his counsels and encouragements, that they dominated our inner life, capturing our imagination, and simply bubbled out spontaneously when we faced some challenge? How would we live if we instinctively, almost unconsciously, knew Jesus’s mind and heart regarding things that confronted us? When you received criticism, you would never be crushed, because Jesus’s love and acceptance of you is so deeply “in there.” When you gave criticism, you would be gentle and patient, because your whole inner world would be saturated by a sense of Jesus’s loving patience and gentleness with you.
This does not happen overnight, of course. It takes years of reflection. It requires disciplined prayer, Bible study and reading, innumerable conversations with friends, and dynamic congregational worship…. Then the gospel “dwells in your hearts richly” (Colossians 3:16), and we find the power to serve, to give and take criticism well, to not expect our spouse or our marriage to meet all our needs and heal all our hurts.
(Keller, Timothy (2011-11-01). The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God (pp. 65-67). Penguin Group.)

The point of all creation is that God would redeem for Himself, of all the peoples of the earth, a bride, to reflect His character and to magnify His glory.

Marriage is a reflection of this primary purpose of God.

Do I overstate it? I think not. I look forward to learning more by experience – however slowly – what this means. I am seeing that nothing less than a complete takeover by His Spirit in our hearts will do!

In His Grip,

Mark Twombly

You can pick up the book Mark quoted here, “The Meaning of Marriage” by Timothy Keller