Marriage
“You’re not the person I married!”
How many people must have said that to their partner?
When this gets blurted out in anger, we’ve got at least four problems:
(1) just about everything said in anger should never have been said
(2) everyone changes. When we marry, we commit ourselves to another person – not to the image we have of them at one particular point in time
(3) they might have changed, but so have we. We always want the other person to show some grace with us, even when we’re not showing it to them. So we have to do the same back
(4) God designed marriage on earth to be a copy of the marriage of His Son to His bride, the church
We need to make some distinctions here. There are some things we can change about ourselves; there are some things we can’t change about ourselves, and in-between there are lots of things we can slowly change.
Marriage is a life-long commitment to an imperfect person. They are imperfect and we are imperfect. If marriage is really modelled on Jesus’ relationship with us, we need to show the grace, mercy and unconditional love God has shown us, whether our partner responds or not.
The accusation that we’ve changed hits hard because everyone wants to be accepted just as they are, but when all is said and done, that’s not the main issue.
To listen to this message, download in MP3 here.