Marriage… Commitment is Essential (Part 4)
A marriage covenant is characterized by total, exclusive, continuing and growing commitment. Over the next few newsletters we shall take a brief look at each of these four basic characteristics.
Total Commitment. To accept marriage as a sacred covenant means first of all to be willing to make a total commitment of ourselves to our marriage partners. This is why Paul in Ephesians compares marriage to the relationship of Christ with His church (Eph 5:25-26).
Christ’s commitment to us, the church, is so total that He loved us while we were yet unfaithful (Rom 5:8) and gave up His life that we may live (Eph 5:25). Christ’s total commitment to us, to be with us in life and death, shows us the kind of total commitment upon which Christian marriage is to be founded. It is a commitment based on unrelenting love. It is a love which is “patient and kind; . . . not jealous or boastful; . . . not arrogant or rude; . . . it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. [It is a love that] bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Cor 13: 4-7). It is this loving commitment which makes Christian marriage a sacred and permanent covenant. A Christian married couple is called to enter intimately into the kind of total commitment existing between Christ and His church. Such a commitment makes possible the blending of two lives into an interrelationship where they grow together in loving unity and fidelity.
When Christian couples enter into a marriage covenant, they are committing themselves to maintaining their marital union, no matter what! This total commitment is set forth in the marriage vows: “for better and for worse, for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health.”
By taking the marriage vows, Christian mates promise to each other what is well expressed by Elizabeth Achtemeier: “I will be with you, no matter what happens to us and between us. If you should become blind tomorrow, I will be there. If you achieve no success and attain no status in our society, I will be there. When we argue and are angry, as we inevitably will, I will work to bring us together. When we seem totally at odds and neither of us is having needs fulfilled, I will persist in trying to understand and in trying to restore our relationship. When our marriage seems utterly sterile and going nowhere at all, I will believe that it can work and I will want it to work and I will do my part to make it work. And when all is wonderful and we are happy, I will rejoice over our life together, and continue to strive to keep our relationship growing and strong.”4
Such a total commitment is possible only by divine grace. It is God who gives us power to hold fast to our commitment. This is the unseen factor often ignored in marriage manuals. What is true for salvation is also true for a committed marriage: there is both a divine initiative and a human response. As Paul puts it, “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Phil 2:12-13). We must work to achieve total and permanent commitment in our marriages and yet recognize that it is God who is at work in and through us to make this goal possible.
A wonderful thing about a totally committed marriage is the fact that it is solely a relationship of grace, a relationship in which I do not have to earn my wife’s love constantly because she gives it to me as a gift. Love is seldom deserved because most of the time we are not lovable. Yet it is given to me, and this gives me acceptance, security, and freedom to act. This manifestation of unconditional love challenges us to respond by being more loving and lovable.
Next part….An Exclusive Commitment.
by Don Callander
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