The Meaning of Marriage
by Timothy Keller
Chapter 1: The Secret of Marriage
“Marriage created character by bringing male and female into a binding partnership. In particular, lifelong marriage was seen as creating the only kind of social stability in which children could grow and thrive. The reason that society had a vested interest in the institution of marriage was because children could not flourish as well in any other kind of environment.” (27, 3)
“Instead of finding meaning through self-denial, through giving up one’s freedoms, and binding oneself to the duties of marriage and family, marriage was redefined as finding emotional and sexual fulfillment and self-actualization.” (28, 1)
“A marriage based not on self-denial but on self-fulfillment will require a low- or no-maintenance partner who meets your needs while making almost no claims on you.” (35, 3)
“The Christian teaching does not offer a choice between fulfillment and sacrifice but rather mutual fulfillment through mutual sacrifice.” (47, 3)
“Subordinating ourselves to him, however, is radically safe, because he has already shown that he was willing to go to hell and back for us.” (47, 3)
“The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared to believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ then we ever dared hope. This is the only kind of relationship that will really transform us. Love without truth is sentimentality; it supports and affirms us but keeps us in denial about our flaws. Truth without love is harshness; it gives us information but in such a way that we cannot really hear it. God’s saving love in Christ, however, is marked by both radical truthfulness about who we are and yet also radical, unconditional commitment to us. The merciful commitment strengthens us to see the truth about ourselves and repent. The conviction and repentance moves us to cling to and rest in God’s mercy and grace.” (48, 3)
Chapter 2: The Power for Marriage
“The last mark of Spirit fullness is in this last clause: It is a loss of pride and self-will that leads a person to humbly serve others.” (50, 1)
“Only if you have learned the power to serve others by the power of the Holy Spirit will you have the power to face the challenges of marriage.” (51, 1)
“After trying all kinds of other things, Christians have learned that the worship of God with the whole heart in the assurance of his love through the work of Jesus Christ is the thing their souls were meant to ‘run on.’” (52, 3)
“Whether we are husband or wife, we are not to live for ourselves but for the other. And that is the hardest yet single most important function of being a husband or a wife in marriage.” (53, 1)
“And when it does, there are three possibilities: You can offer to serve the other with joy, you can make the offer with coldness or resentment, or you can selfishly insist on your own way.” (54, 2)
“I didn’t want to be served. I didn’t want to be in a position where I had to ask for something and receive it as a gift.” (55, 3)
“I wanted to serve, yes, because that made me feel in control. Then I would always have the high moral ground. But that kind of “service” isn’t service at all, only manipulation. But by not giving Kathy an opportunity to serve me, I had failed to serve her. And the reason underneath it all was my pride.” (55, 4)
“It is that you are so lost and flawed, so sinful, that Jesus had to die for you, but you are also so loved and valued that Jesus was glad to die for you. Now you are fully accepted and delighted in by the Father, not because you deserve it but only by free grace.” (55, 5)
“The main barrier to the development of a servant heart in marriage is what we touched on in the first chapter—the radical self-centeredness of the sinful human heart.” (56, 4)
“Self-centeredness is easily seen in the signs Paul lists: impatience, irritability, a lack of graciousness and kindness in speech, envious brooding on the better situations of others, and holding past injuries and hurts against others.” (57, 3)
“you only discover your own happiness after each of you has put the happiness of your spouse ahead of your own, in a sustained way, in response to what Jesus has done for you.” (58, 3)
“We were made to serve God and others. That means paradoxically that if we try to put our own happiness ahead of obedience to God, we violate our own nature and become, ultimately, miserable.” (59, 2)
“Therefore, when facing any problem in marriage, the first thing you look for at the base of it is, in some measure, self-centeredness and an unwillingness to serve or minister to the other.” (59, 4)
Chapter 3: The Essence of Marriage
“A covenant relationship is a stunning blend of law and love.” (84, 3)
“When two peope genuinely love each other, and are not simply using one another for sex, status, or self-actualization, they don’t want the situation to ever change. Each wants assurances of enduring commitment, and each delights to give those assurances.” (86, 3)
“Because it is our promises that give us a stable identity, and without a stable identity, it is impossible to have stable relationships.” (91, 3)
“To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us fom pretense, humbles us out of our self-reighteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us.” (95, 3)
“Only if you commit yourself to loving in action, day in and day out, even when feelings and circumstances are in flux, can you truly be a free individual and not a pawn of outside forces.” (97, 4)
“Only with time do we really learn who the other person is and come to love the person for him- or herself and not just for the feelings and experiences they give us. Only with time do we learn the particular needs of our spouse and how to meet them.” (98, 1)
“So if your definition of ‘love’ stresses affectionate feelings more than unselfish actions, you will cripple your ability to maintain and grow strong love relationships. On the other hand, if you stress the action of love over the feeling, you enhance and establish the feeling.” (100, 1)
“Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did.” (100, 3, C.S. Lewis)
“The more cruel you are, the more you will hate; and the more you hate, the more cruel you will become—and so on in a vicious circle forever.” (101, 3, C.S. Lewis)
“I had been loving them even when I didn’t like them, and the result was that, slowly but surely, my emotions were catching up with my behavior. If you do not give up, but proceed to love the unlovely in a sustained way, they will eventually become lovely to you.” (103, 1)
“It is the action of love that we can promise to maintain every day.” (103, 2)
“You do the acts of love, despite your lack of feeling. You may not feel tender, sympathetic, and eager to please, but in your actions you must be tender, understanding, forgiving, and helpful. And, if you do that, as time goes on you will not only get through the dry spells, but they will become less frequent and deep, and you will become more constant in your feelings. This is what can happen if you decide to love.” (104, 3)
“It is not surprising, then, that after children leave home, many marriages fall apart. Why? Because while the parents treated their relationship with their children as a covenant relationship—performing the actions of love until their feelings strengthened—they treated their marriages as a consumer relationship and withdrew their actions of love when they weren’t having the feelings. As a result, after two decades, their marriages were empty while their love for their children remained strong.” (108, 3)
Chapter 4: The Mission of Marriage
“There are two features of real friendship—constancy and transparency.” (112, 3)
“This means that friendships are discovered more than they are created at will. They arise between people who discover that they have common interests in and longings for the same things.” (113, 1)
“Any two Christians, with anything else but a common faith in Christ, can have a robust friendship, helping each other on their journey toward the new creation, as well as doing ministry together in the world.
“They do it through spiritual transparency. Christian friends are not only to honestly confess their own sense to each other (James 5:16), but they are to lovingly point out their friends since if he or she is blind to them (Romans 15:14). You should give your Christian friends “hunting licenses“ to confront you if you are failing to live in line with your commitments (Galatians 6:1). Christian friends are to stir one another up, even provoking one another to get them off dead center (Hebrews 10:24). This isn’t to happen infrequently but should happen at a very concrete level every day (Hebrews 3:13). Christian friends admit wrongs, offer or ask forgiveness (Ephesians 4:32), and take steps to reconcile when one disappoints another (Matthew 5:23ff; 18:15 ff).
“The other way is spiritual constancy. Christian friends bear each other’s burdens (Galatians 6:2). They should be there for each other through thick and thin (1 Thessalonians 5:11, 14–15), sharing their goods and their very lives with each other if there is need (Hebrews 13:16; Philippians 4:14; 2 Corinthians 9:13). Friends must encourage each other through honor and affirmation (Romans 12:3-6,10; Proverbs 27:2). They are to identify and call out one another’s gifts, strengths, and abilities. They are to build up each other‘s faith through study and common worship (Colossians 3:16; Ephesians 5:19).” (115)
“Perhaps the richest and best relationships, however, are those that combine both the natural and the supernatural elements.” (116, 2)
“Friendship is a deep oneness that develops as two people, speaking the truth in love to each other, journey together to the same horizon.” (116, 3)
“In his redemptive work, Jesus is both Friend and Lover, and this is to be the model for spouses in marriage. Husband and wife are to be both lovers and friends to one another as Jesus is to us.” (119, 2)
“Within this Christian vision for marriage, here’s what it means to fall in love. It is to look at another person and get a glimpse of the person God is creating, and to say, “I see who God is making you, and it excites me! I want to be part of that. I want to partner with you and God in the journey you are taking to his throne. And when we get there, I will look at your magnificence and say, ‘I always knew you could be like this. I got glimpses of it on earth, but now look at you!’” Each spouse should see the great thing that Jesus is doing in the life of their mate through the Word, the gospel. Each spouse then should give him- or herself to be a vehicle for that work and envision the day that you will stand together before God, seeing each other presented in spotless beauty and glory.” (121, 3)
“What keeps the marriage going is your committment to your spouse’s holiness.” (123, 3)
“Now we can see how marriage-as-friendship agrees so well with love-as-commitment.” (123, 4)
“Look for someone who understands you better than you do yourself, who makes you a better person just by being around them. And then explore whether that friendship could become a romance and a marriage.” (126, 1)
Chapter 5: Loving the Stranger
“What if you expected marriage to be about helping each toehr grow out of your sins and flaws into the new self God is creating?” (136, 2)
“The merged life of marriage brings you into the closest, most inescapable contact with another person possible. And that means not only that you see each other close up, but that you are forced to deal with the flaws and sins of one another.” (138, 2)
“No one else is as inconvenienced and hurt by your flaws as your spouse is. And therefore your spouse becomes more keenly aware of what is wrong with you than anyone else ever has been.” (139, 2)
“But you must realize that it isn’t ultimately your spouse who is exposing the sinfulness of your heart—it’s marriage itself.” (140, 2)
“the only flaws that can enslave you are the ones that you are blind to.” (140, 3)
“Give your spouse the right to talk to you about what is wrong with you.” (140, 3)
“I’m going to be like Jesus has been with us—accepting us in love but not allowing us to just destroy ourselves with sin.” (142, 2)
“when you envision the ‘someone better’, you can think of the future version of the person to whom you are already married.” (144, 3)
“When you see the problems in each other, do you just want to run away, or do you find a desire to work on them together? If the second impulse is yours, then you have the makings of a marriage.” (144, 4)
“The power of truth that marriage has should hold no fear for you.” (144, 4)
“godly tantrum”: “not an emotional loss of temper but an unrelenting insistence on being heard.” (145, 1)
“Marriage puts into your spouse’s hand a massive power to reprogram your own self-appreciation.” (147, 3)
“Each of us heard the other one saying, ‘I don’t love you,’ because each of us was failing to get love in the particular way we felt was emotionally valuable to us.” (152, 2)
“In the same way you learn to give your spouse love in the way he or she finds most emotionally valuable and powerful. That is the only way to bring the remaking and healing power of love into your spouse’s life.” (152, 3)
“Never abuse the primary love language. Never withhold it to hurt the other, for the hurt will go deep.” (155, 5)
“At first love sweeps you up involuntarily, but eventually love is a deliverate choice. It will seem mechanical at first, he reiterated, but if both spouses do it together, eventually the experience of being loved richly and well will sweeten their lives.” (157, 4)
“The one person in the whole world who holds your heart in her hand, whose approval and affirmation you most long for and need, is the one who is hurt more deeply by your sins than anyone else on the planet” (162, 3)
“when that love is withheld, the statement of the truth doesn’t help—it destroys.” (162, 3)
“Only if we are very good at forgiving and very good at repenting can truth and love be kept together.” (163, 5)
“One of the most basic skills in marriage is the ability to tell the straight, unvarnished truth about what your spouse has done—and then, completely, unself-righteously, and joyously express forgiveness without a shred of superiority, without making the other person feel small.” (165, 2)
Chapter 6: Embracing the Other
“the relationship of the Father and the Son is a pattern for the relationship of husband to wife. The Son submits to the Father’s headship with free, voluntary, and joyful eagerness, not out of coercion or inferiority. The Father’s headship is acknowledged in reciprocal delight, respect, and love. There is no inequality of ability or dignity.” (176, 1)
“The strengths of gender-distinct leadership, creativity, and insight that women bring to the world, to name a few, are lost to the business world, romantic relationships, and even ministry within the church.” (181, 2)
“It is not simply that the other gender is different, it’s that his or her differences make no sense. And once we come up against this wall of incomprehensibility, the sin in our heart tends to respond by assigning moral significance to what is simply a deep temperamental difference.” (182, 3)
“Therefore it is crucial that women who want to accept gender-differentiated roles within marriage find a husband who will truly be a servant-leader to match her as a strong helper.” (184, 4)
“Remember, this person is utterly unlike you. He acts differently, thinks differently, operates differently, and in some cases, dealing with him is not only frustrating and scary, but it’s downright incomprehensible. But at a deeper level, you’re finding out who you really are. You’re seeing him as your other half. You see how God is completing you in your husband. The result of completion is personal ease.” (189, 5)
“Since both the headship role of a husband and the submission role as a wife are servant roles, one can always begin to serve without waiting for permission.” (191, 3)
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