How do I Teach My Kids God’s Ideas on Marriage? Sam Allberry

If marriage points to Christ in the church, then maybe anniversaries are more significant than weddings. Because anyone can make a promise, but not everyone keeps a promise.

And it's the keeping of the promise that really points to the faithfulness of Christ to his people. Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Shelby Abbott, and your hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson.

You can find us at familylifetoday.com or on the Family Life app. This is Family Life Today. All right, so I just had this crazy thought. A Beach Boys song just came to my head. Beach Boys? What are we doing right now?

Yeah, remember this? Wouldn't it be nice if we were older Then we wouldn't have to wait so long It's a song about marriage. It's a song about, wouldn't it be nice if we were married I thought it was about surfing. Well, the Beach Boys have a lot of songs about surfing, but this one's about marriage. Honey, I'm disappointed you don't know the lyrics to Wouldn't It Be Nice? But anyway, the only reason that came to my mind is I was thinking, wouldn't it be nice if there was like a children's book about the purpose of marriage?

Wouldn't it though? I mean, that's a crazy way to introduce this topic, but there is a children's book now. I think it's the only one that's out there about marriage. I feel like this is the first book on this topic for kids, and I think it's really needed. I, as a parent, if my kids were little, I would go out and buy this book, and we already have it. And I'm going to read this to our grandkids.

Yeah, it's called God Sign Post, and we've got the author, Sam Albury, in the studio at Family Life Today. Welcome, Sam. It's good to be with you.

Thanks for having me. What are you thinking of this introduction about the Beach Boys? Yeah, I've heard of them, and I think, is the song about marriage, is it about surfing? I'm not sure there was much of a distinction for the Beach Boys between those two things. Maybe they were married and they were surfing. Hey, you guys just don't know great music.

Anyway, we're not going to talk about the Beach Boys. This is fun to have, Sam, because Sam, you're an author, you're a theologian. Pastor.

Yeah. Preacher. What else are you?

You're everything. Obnoxious Brits. That's why you got the accent. Yeah, where'd you grow up?

I grew up in Kent in England, Southeast England. So, saying that, you must be a Beatles fan. Oh, okay. I'm not not a fan. Not the Beach Boys? Not the Beatles?

They're from England? Come on. The Beatles were who my parents were into. Sam's young, hun.

Well, the music that you enjoy today, trust me, it all goes back to the Beatles. Oh, my. Anyway, we're not talking about that. Well, Sam, did you ever think you'd write a kid's book? No. I never thought I'd write a book.

So how did this one come about? Yeah, so I've done a lot of ministry around the area of sexuality. Had lots of parents saying to me, how do I talk to my children about same-sex relationships and what the Bible teaches? And normally in my head, my answer is there are probably conversations that need to have already happened at a much younger age about what marriage is and what marriage is for. Conversations where you can give a positive vision of marriage. And then that way, when the kids grow up, discover certain prohibitions, they've got a positive framework to put those prohibitions into. So that then made me think, well, we need some kind of resource for young children on what marriage is. So I knocked on the door of a couple of people I know who write kids books and say, hey, I've got an idea.

You should write a kid's book on this. Oh, so you went and said they should do it. Oh, yeah, totally.

Yeah. And they said, no, you should do it. It's your idea. And I said, I don't know how to write for kids. And they said, well, nor did we when we began. So just try it.

So that happened. And then the other thing was I was looking at secular resources for this age group. And there are so many books promoting, I think, really unhealthy views of marriage, of sexuality, of identity. That whole idea is being pushed in a lot of young children's books. Even books on same sex marriage? Yeah, yeah, picture books on all of these things.

I didn't know that. And that just made me think, yeah, we really do need to have as many resources as possible. So I'll do what I can and hope a bunch of other people do what they can too.

The world is very interested in discipling our kids. So we need to be, as Christians, making every effort to help people see the goodness of God at that young age. If you convince God is good, you can cope with the things he says no to.

But if that foundation isn't in place, that's going to be a more precarious process. So how did you come up with the concept, God's signpost, how marriage points us to God's love? Well, I've taught for years about how marriage is meant to point to Christ and the church, as we see in Ephesians 5. And when I was scratching my head trying to figure out how to do a children's book, my dear friends Ray and Jani Auckland had their 50th wedding anniversary. I was in the UK at the time, but I remember messaging them and saying, congratulations, happy anniversary. And I found myself saying in my message, if marriage points to Christ and the church, then maybe anniversaries are more significant than weddings. Because anyone can make a promise, but not everyone keeps a promise. And it's the keeping of the promise that really points to the faithfulness of Christ to his people. So once I'd sent that message, I thought, oh, oh, maybe that's going to be the story then.

It's going to be about a 50th wedding anniversary. I love it. So tell us about their characters. So a bit of it's autobiographical. I used to love when I was a little boy going to visit my nana and pop. I wondered because I told Dave, like, I bet this is Sam's upbringing. Oh, totally. It was. So they lived at the coast as well, which helped. So they had the seaside and everything else.

That's not a bad, you know, attraction for a young kid. But I remember we would go there, we'd be in the car. And I remember me and my brother would, the first time we would pass a sign that had the name of their town, we would get excited and kind of nudge each other and go, we're nearly there, we're nearly there. My nana was always made amazing cakes.

So a lot of this is autobiographical. Yeah. So I was just remembering the excitement of that. And I remember my grandparents having their 50th wedding anniversary. And in their case, we hosted the party at our house and made it a big surprise thing for them and invited all of their old friends and all of that kind of thing.

So, yeah. So it's about these two kids, Ethan and Lila, who are off to visit Nana and Pop. They're used to going there, but this time they go there and there's lots of other people, people are bringing gifts, people are congratulating. But Sam, the biggest thing is the cake isn't there. Yeah, it's not the regular cake. Is it strawberry?

Strawberry tower cake, I think it is in the book. Yes. You think, you wrote it. I know, but I've not done a bad memory.

Anyway, yeah. So it's different. The cake's not there.

There's a different cake. Everyone is congratulating their grandparents and they're thinking, what do you congratulate grandparents on? They've not had another kid.

They haven't started a new job. And so they begin to realize it's their 50th wedding anniversary. And that leads to them having this conversation with their Nana about how marriage points to Jesus. So it's fun. Well, you know, I think a lot of listeners don't even know that signpost. They don't really know that's one of the major purposes of marriage.

So I'll explain the theology behind that. We're like, oh, marriage is going to be awesome. You're going to make me so happy. You didn't have to tell the world our story. We could have kept that part a secret.

But yeah, we didn't know. We thought, what everybody thinks, I'm marrying her because she's going to make me happy. And she's marrying me because I'm going to make her even more happy.

And then that didn't happen. We're like, there's got to be something else marriage is about. So develop that a little bit because that's the foundation of this children's book.

It really is. So we see, I think, three broad purposes for marriage in the Bible. One is procreation, obviously, in Genesis 1. In Genesis 2, the one flesh union is more about the kind of unity and deep fellowship of the husband and wife. It's a form of profound union. Even that phrase, one flesh, speaks of a very deep bond. But we also see as scripture unfolds that this union of a man and a woman that we first encounter in Genesis 2, so it's page two of the Bible this kicks in, that becomes a picture of the union of heaven and earth through Jesus. Because God goes on to reveal himself as a husband.

He makes lavish covenant promises. His people are referred to as his bride, sadly often his unfaithful bride in the Old Testament. When Jesus arrives, among the other things that he calls himself, he refers to himself as the bridegroom.

He says the bridegroom is with you now. And there are passages, many of us will know in the New Testament, that talk about our faith in marital terms. And then Paul famously says in Ephesians 5, he's talking to husbands and wives and he goes, guys, this is actually about Christ and the church. And then obviously the climax of the Bible is the wedding of the lamb and his bride, the church. So marriage has always been in the Bible. It's this whole Bible way of helping us understand and act out something of the love God has shown us in Jesus. So our marriages are meant to be a means of deep companionship and union. By being so, they're also meant to be a pointer to the ultimate marriage, which is between Jesus and his church. So as a pastor, I get to take weddings occasionally.

I love doing that. You get the best view of the whole thing. You get to see the bride coming down.

You get to see the look of kind of shock on the part of the groom that the bride actually did turn up. But one of the things I love saying to the couple on their wedding day is your marriage is going to disappoint you. And it's supposed to. It's not going to be the thing that fulfills you. It's pointing to the thing that can fulfill you. It's a great gift of God. But in and of itself, it's not the ultimate thing.

It's the penultimate thing. And even the best, a very dear friend of mine is in his seventies. I remember him saying of his marriage. He said, my marriage is so much better than I deserved or expected, but it's still not enough. Christ is the bridegroom. He's the one who actually fulfills our deepest longings and desires. He's the one that we are created to be in that covenant love relationship with.

Which is a beautiful truth. It's helped me as a single man to view my singleness in a healthy perspective. Because Jesus says in the age to come, we won't marry. We will have him in his fullness.

We won't need the signpost anymore. And it's helped me to think, okay, well, my singleness is a way of living now as we all shall be then. That actually Jesus is sufficient for that. So marriage is meant to show us the shape of the gospel. That covenant love between the bridegroom and the bride. I like that your pastor said, and marriage is supposed to disappoint you.

That's a wise thing to say. I don't think I've ever heard a pastor say that. Hun, you should have said that when you did marriages. Well, I've stood where you talked about as the officiating pastor, the wedding. And you want to be honest, but you don't want to be so honest it's their wedding day.

You're really going to be disappointed in about six hours or six weeks. Paul David Tripp says if you're disappointed in your marriage, it's not because you have a bad marriage. It's because you're married. And it's so beautiful to hear that, because that's reality.

And to think you're taking that concept and putting it in a children's book. Yeah, and it's reassuring that the marriage doesn't have to be perfect. Because it's not meant to be the marriage that is perfect. We have a perfect marriage in Christ. And it has a bigger purpose than happiness.

I like that you're getting that across to kids. I'm recalling my sister had struggled in her marriage. And I think she'd probably been married 15 years and we'd been married maybe, I don't know, 12.

Actually shorter than that. But I remember her saying, I want a marriage like you and Dave, if I could only have your marriage. And I remember saying- If she only knew.

Yeah, I did tell her, I said, Barb, our marriage struggles. We are struggling. We have to keep our eyes on Jesus constantly. And I said, Jesus is our greater hope. Jesus is the greatest of hopes.

But when you're in a situation that feels painful, we look at so many other people's lives and assume they're so much better off than we are. Did you have a marriage that you saw someone model Christ in the church? Yeah, I can think of several marriages.

Really? Besides ours, of course. Besides yours, of course. Yeah, I've seen some beautiful marriages close up. And I've seen some marriages that have fallen apart as well. And as a pastor, you see a lot of all of that. It is beautiful.

And it's beautiful for the fact that it is imperfect. Because if we only kept the promises because we feel like it 24-7, that would still be great. But the fact that people hang in there, even when it's difficult, that's very- Because you think of the patience Christ has with us day to day with our minds and hearts constantly straying from him. And he's so patient with us.

One of the most important things I put in that book is where the nana says, God is better at this than we are. He's better at keeping promises. He's better at being patient than we are.

So we can trust him fully. That's where our hope is. Is your nana and your pop, are they still living? No, my nana actually died about 30 years ago.

My pop only died a couple of years ago. So he was over 100 when he died. Wow. So he was almost single for as long as he was married. Because they were married for just over 50 years and he died just over 100.

Wow. And what about your mom and dad? Are they still married? They are, yeah. Wonderful marriage. Yeah, they're wonderful.

I remember during the pandemic, you know, with all the lockdowns going on in the UK, I remember being concerned for my parents as I was concerned for anyone to check if everyone was okay. But I never worried about them getting on because they genuinely like each other. They're good friends to each other. So I never worried about the fact that they were stuck with just each other. There were other married couples I was more worried about. I was thinking, how's this going to affect you both being kind of locked into the house together for such a long time? But they are a wonderful example of a healthy marriage.

Well, you know, one of the things as I read your book even last night, Sam, was I was thinking there's so many books about relationships and marriage that kids get. Sort of the, I'm going to marry my prince, my princess, it's going to be happily ever after. I mean, we grew up, and it's said many times, I grew up thinking that's what marriage will be. And then when it wasn't. The hallmark thing, right? Yeah, exactly. It's just like I remember one time, you know, because we go into marriage thinking this person is going to make me happy.

And of course, there should be some happiness there. But I remember years ago, years ago, decades ago, announcing on a Sunday as finishing some sermon, I said, hey, next week, start a marriage series. I called it this.

Now that you married the wrong person, come back next week, bring your friends or whatever. And I remember walking out in the lobby and people were like, oh, man, I can't wait for next week. And I'm like, what? Why? And they're like, because I did.

I'm like, no, no, no. But they resonated with that thought. And we always say you didn't marry the wrong person.

You're looking in the wrong place because you're trying to find life here and you find life here. That's what our whole ministry is vertical marriage. That's what you actually get into already with little toddlers. And I'm like, what a beautiful concept that they're and they're just going to get some of it. But they're starting to grasp at five, six, three, four, ten years old. This isn't what marriage is about.

It's a signpost. I hope so, because that will potentially shield them from all kinds of false ideas, false hopes, lies about where fulfillment is going to be found, what even marriage is. Because in our culture, we have such a different definition of marriage to the one the Bible gives us. What do you think the culture's definition is today? I think marriage effectively is a flexible romantic contract.

Flexible. For as long as I'm feeling romantically fulfilled in you and you're feeling romantically fulfilled in me, we'll stick together. But the moment either of us isn't, we have an out.

So it's a bit like you were articulating earlier. You're there to make me happy. I'm there to make you happy. If that works, great. If it doesn't, no worries.

We'll just abandon it. I married the wrong person because somebody else will make me happy. I just got the wrong one.

Yeah. The wrong car, the wrong house. I am happy, but I think I could be happier with a different person. And it's all about, am I feeling romantically fulfilled? Which is why, you know, weddings so often are a celebration of romantic fulfillment more than they are a kind of declaration of covenant love. So as someone who officiates, one of my conditions now is I say to couples, I'd rather you didn't write your own vows. Because almost always the vows they write are about how they feel right now. We get that. It's your wedding day.

We know you're into each other. We don't need 15 verses of bad poetry to get that. We want to know what you're promising.

Oh, that's so good. Because that's what the marriage vows are for. It's what you're promising rather than how you're feeling right now. Hopefully you're feeling something positive right now.

Don't get me wrong. But we are sitting at a wedding, and even to know what a vow is, when you make a vow or a promise, there was a couple, he was saying, he used the word vow. I vow that every day I walk in the door, I will find you and kiss you. And I'm going through this list of things I vow that no one will ever come before you. And I'm sitting there thinking, nope, nope, you know, nope, that's not going to happen.

And I'm thinking, man, what you're saying today, these are heavy things. There is just not a word like the word covenant. Explain as a pastor, what does that mean that we're making a covenant?

A covenant is such a rich, rich word in the Bible. And it's it's got all the formality of a contract and it's something that is formal and binding. And yet it is so personal. It's far more relational. So I've heard it being described as it's more formal than a contract, but it's far more relational than just, you know, a declaration of love.

It's both of those things all wrapped up together. In the case of the covenants God makes with us, it's a declaration. It's an unconditional declaration of how he's going to love us. And that the marriage vows, the kind of historic marriage service is a wonderful rehearsal of the gospel. There's a reason the groom's already at the church. There's a reason the groom got there first and got everything ready.

Oh, what is that? Because Christ has gone before us and prepared a place for us. There's a reason why that in the choreography of the wedding ceremony that the bride turns up at the door dressed in white and every head swings around and goes, whoa. Because we will be presented as pure and spotless before the bridegroom on that last day. There's a reason we make the vows that we do make in a normal wedding service. You know, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part. We're promising love that isn't going to be affected by circumstances.

It's going to be unconditional. Even the bride taking the name of the groom, again, points to what we have in Jesus. So marriage is a wonderful picture of the gospel. Yeah, we say at the Family Life Weekend to remember. In fact, we went to it as an engaged couple before we knew what family life was and really thought, we don't need this conference. We love each other. And then we're pulling that manual out a month later like, oh, what does it say?

But we taught it now over 30 years. And we say at the conference, the first purpose of marriage is to mirror to the world the love of God. Yeah, that's wonderful. It's your signpost.

It's the same idea. It's like, yeah, a married couple, Ephesians 5, mirrors, reflects in some way to the world the gospel. And in some ways you're like, wow, that's really scary.

As a married couple, you're like, they're watching my marriage. And the other side is like, that is an awesome calling that it isn't just being happy. It is so much grander than that. And we are called into that. And it's amazing to think you've tried to take that concept and put it in a children's book. Yeah.

Way to go. God is a promise-making, promise-keeping God. That's the heart of reality. It's why the right promise from the right person can make life worth living.

And it's why broken promises are so profoundly painful in this world, because we're meant to live by promises, because God himself is a God who makes promises. Sam, I was thinking about that when I read this, of like a blended family. You know, they've been divorced and they're reading this to their kids. Or widowed. Or widowed, yeah. Of, you know, as you read this and your kids are thinking, but mom, you didn't stay.

Or dad, you didn't stay in your marriage. How would you explain that? Yeah. And I try to cover that in the book as well, because I try and sort of give permission for that reality to be the case, because there'll be many homes in which this book is read that have had broken marriages, which is why the key message is less, how are we doing at this? And more, isn't it great that God is the one who does this perfectly?

He's better at this than we are. We don't always manage to keep our promises. And we can say that as parents.

Yeah, but God does. And even a healthy, happy marriage, the message will still be, we're doing this really imperfectly. No marriage is the perfect signpost. None of us is all that we are meant to be. All of us have fallen short of this. Even if we've kept our marriage vows, we won't have been perfect. So I hope it will help cases where there are broken families, single parents, widowed, divorced, whatever it might be, to realize, OK, well, the focus here isn't the signpost.

It's the thing the signpost is pointing to. And we can all get in on that. You know, something you said earlier has stuck with me as weddings are important, anniversaries are even more important. I mean, we celebrate the wedding and we spend tens of thousands, some hundreds of thousands on a day. And that's good for that.

But the promise being kept year after year after year, I was thinking, we should spend money on that. We should celebrate that in a big way. And even I like the idea. I like that your two little characters were there to celebrate as well. And so to bring our kids into that and our grandkids into that is a beautiful idea for them to see a not perfect, but a covenant being lived out before them. And we want to celebrate it.

I mean, that's the other thing in the book. The idea for the party didn't come from Nana and Poppa, it came from the community. They're like, we need to celebrate this. And so wherever we are in our own circumstances, whether we're married or not, whether our marriage is happy or not, if we see a faithful covenant being kept among us, we celebrate it. We honor it. And so when we have a couple that we know who reach the 50-year mark, maybe through gritted teeth, maybe they limp across the line, we want to celebrate that. We want to honor that. That's no small thing. It's a milestone.

Seriously. And we encourage our listeners to make a big deal out of your anniversary. And I would really suggest you pick up this book because our kids need to know God's reason and covenant in marriage. You know, learning through failure is always something that hurts as we travel through it. But that hurt is what's necessary in order to develop maturity in us and cultivate wisdom. You know, the times that I've grown the most is when I've hurt the most, specifically through my chronic back pain. And in times when I've hurt the most, God has used that to shape me into who He wants me to be. It's been hard, but it's been wonderful at the same time. You know, marriage can be that way.

It can hurt a lot, but that's often what God uses in our lives to shape us into who He wants us to be. I'm Shelby Abbott, and you've been listening to David Ann Wilson with Sam Albury on Family Life Today. Sam is the best, isn't he? And he's written a book called God's Signpost, How Marriage Points Us to God's Love. This is Sam's, actually his first children's book, and it shows kids that marriage is a special sign that points to God's unique love for us, the kind of love that keeps on going no matter what. So you can pick up a copy of Sam's book by going to familylifetoday.com and clicking on today's resources.

Or you can give us a call at 800-358-6329. That's 800, F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. You know, obviously you hear us talk often about marriages and how that foundation affects everything else in our lives if you're married. And we've said this before, but great marriages don't just happen.

They're built with intentionality. You know, Family Life's Weekend to Remember Marriage Getaway has events all over the country this fall, and today is the last and final day to register for 50% off. So you can jump on this chance to intentionally pull closer to each other and to God, and get two registrations for the price of one right now at weekendtoremember.com. Now tomorrow on Family Life Today, Dave and Anne Wilson are joined by Ron Deal to talk about how stepdads are often unsung heroes. I know my stepdad was a hero in my life. We hope you'll join us for that show tomorrow. On behalf of Dave and Anne Wilson, I'm Shelby Abbott. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a donor-supported production of Family Life, a crew ministry helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.