Planting Hedges in Marriage (Part 1 of 4)

Music playing... Movies or novels can sometimes paint an idealistic picture of marriage, and that can foster unrealistic expectations. Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg explains why perfection in marriage isn't possible. In fact, we'll hear from Alistair today why a healthy dose of skepticism is essential if we want to remain faithful and avoid marital collapse.

Music playing... I want to address with you the issue of marriage, and I'm not sure all that I'm going to say concerning it—I haven't drafted it out—but I'm going to address it with you now. For those of you who are single and attempted to think that this is something that is irrelevant to you, then I hope you will understand that it isn't. All of us are involved in marriage in some way or another, either through our friends, or because we have been married, or because we are a product of a marriage, or because one day we hope to be married, and tonight I'm going to take a different tack. And before I turn to it, let me just lead us in a word of prayer. Oh God, our Father, we thank you that you order all of our steps, and even today and tonight is known to you. And so we pray that you will take the truths of your Word and write them in our hearts as we see so much around us that is fractured and broken, disintegrating and decaying, the evidence of manifold chaos. We pray that amongst other things you will take couples and families within our church family here and make us as lights in a dark place.

For Jesus' sake we ask it. Amen. I want to begin by reading to you a little scenario. So this is a story.

You can just sit back and relax if you like stories. Jack and Kathy were the ideal couple. At least that is what everyone thought. They had been friends since childhood. Their families vacationed together. They were like brother and sister in high school, and in college they realized that their feelings for each other ran so deep that it was unbearable for either of them to think of spending the rest of their life absent the companionship of the other. So when they married, no one was surprised, and everyone seemed delighted, not least of all Jack and Kathy. The first twenty years of marriage were standard fare.

Two healthy children, a boy and a girl. They more than coped with the challenges of school and were successful in achieving a place at the college of their choice. Each summer was spent at their cottage on the lake. Kathy and the kids would go up as soon as school was out, and Jack would join them at the weekends and then for three weeks in August. What do you think about offering Carla's room to the college student who will be in charge of the Lifeguard program at the pool? Kathy asked Jack on the phone.

After all, she will be gone most of the summer, and although Danny will be away part of the time at soccer camp, he'll still be around enough to prevent Rick being stuck on his own with me or us in August. Jack was leaving for the office, his mind somewhere else entirely. He answered without really thinking, Sure, let's help the young man out.

There can't be any harm in it. By the time Jack reached the cottage that next weekend, Rick the Lifeguard was already installed. The firmness of his handshake combined with the way he looked Jack in the eye made a good impression immediately.

Jack later recalled how in that first encounter, he'd wondered if this young man would be interested in a job in sales. He seemed to have a winning way and was just the kind of fellow that he was constantly on the lookout for to add to his organization. His son Danny also got on well with Rick, and they'd gone sailing together many evenings when the pool had closed. The speed with which Rick could pool that place together was impressive.

If he had a plan, he went for it. It was actually Danny who was first to get that strange, unsettling feeling in his gut. Having gone to bed around 11.30, he awakened around 1 a.m. As he headed for the bathroom, bemoaning the amount of pizza and Diet Coke he and Rick had put away, he heard voices out on the porch. Pausing, he picked up snippets of conversation through the screen door. I haven't always felt that way.

There used to be a lot more excitement. It was his mother's voice, and the responding, when did things begin to change, came, of course, from Rick. What's this, a midnight feast, Danny asked, trying to disguise his sense of internal quiet with joviality. Oh, no, said Mom. Rick and I just started talking about everything.

We must wrap it up, although I must say I've not had as good a conversation as this for some time. When Danny grabbed his usual combination of frosted mini-wheats and Cheerios the following morning, Rick was already at the pool. Probably it was nothing, he thought to himself, as he looked at his mother, 45 and wearing well. Very well, in fact. His college buddies frequently told him that his mom was hot, and they wondered at how his portly, balding dad had managed it. He didn't always look like that, Danny would tell them. He just kind of let things go.

Kathy, on the other hand, blessed with the genes of her Finnish forebears, seemed to be improving with age. Her daily routine of running with her golden retriever, and her willingness to be disciplined with the abdominizer, made it possible for her to face Shape magazine at the grocery checkout without any feelings of inadequacy. When Jack reached the cottage on the following Friday evening, he was greeted by a sleepy stare from Strachan, their faithful retriever. And he was in the walk-in closet, trying in vain to fasten the button on his favorite pair of denim shorts. That dryer is far too hot. Shrinks everything, he thought.

Five more business lunches could have nothing to do with it, surely. Hello? Kathy's voice was quickly followed by her face around the door and a kiss on the cheek. How was the traffic, she asked?

Would you like some spaghetti? Did your father reach you at the office? As Jack began to answer the questions one by one, he thought there was a kind of flush about Kathy's face and neck. He knew that she hadn't been running because the dog was in his usual spot in front of the wicker rocker. I've just been helping Rick tidy the pool, she volunteered. He works so hard, and those lounge chairs are such a hassle to wipe off and straighten.

Nobody seems to have a care. They just walk away and leave him to it. That's what he's paid for, growled Jack, surprising even himself by the tone of his response. He couldn't put his finger on any one thing, but by the time he left on Sunday evening, he was sure that there was something weird going on with his childhood sweetheart. His car could almost take itself home, and he had plenty of time to think and wonder and even worry.

Was this a physical change in Kathy? He should probably check with her sister. The two of them talked all the time, and Joan would be able to point him in the right direction. As he pulled into the driveway, he was thinking that maybe he should make more use of their health club membership, maybe even buy those Adidas running shoes that Danny had been pushing. Will you take a call from Henry, his secretary inquired, interrupting the sales team meeting at her peril. Jack excused himself, wondering why his longtime friend would be wanting him on a Monday morning, especially since they had spent part of the previous day together. They were usually together as couples on Sunday afternoons.

Their cottages gazed at one another across the half a mile of Mirror Lake. Henry, good morning, Jack enthused. Only four more days, and we'll be back on the boat.

What can I do for you? Are you free for lunch? The cryptic response took Jack off guard. When? Today, Henry said. Say 1130 at Finley's.

I'll see you there. Jack took just a moment before returning to the meeting. I sure hope that everything's okay with Henry's company. There have been rumors of an attempt to move him on and make way for a more aggressive young man.

Something's eating him, though. I haven't heard that tone since his daughter had been forced to drop out of college and stay with an aunt before putting the baby up for adoption. I can't imagine there's a problem between he and Helen, not after 28 years of being an example to Kathy and himself. He was in his usual booth just before 1130 and had already decided on the pita pocket in keeping with the resolve of the previous evening when Henry arrived.

May I have your Reuben, please, and a nice tea? Henry leaned forward in his seat and fixed his gaze on his dear friend and dropped the bomb. Jack, I do not know how else to approach this, so I'll just come straight out and say it. Helen and I have strong reason to believe that Kathy and the summer lifeguard are developing a relationship that is destructive and wrong. He then went into details, which made the pita pocket taste more like an oven glove than usual, and ripped a gaping hole in Jack's emotions, which he could neither cover or control.

His shoulders heaved under the weight of the news, and somewhere in the distance he could hear Henry assuring him that he and Helen would do everything they could. Now, I made that one up. But I've heard the story again and again and again.

I've sat with couples who look at one another, first of lay across the table, and once they make their opening statement, the scenario can be written from that point on without any further elaboration on their part. They often use phraseology like, We never thought it would happen to us. How can God allow such things?

We probably were never right for each other. Why didn't someone say or do something? And the list goes on and on, and sadly, I have to tell you that in the majority of cases, the couples do not make it.

They fail to put in the necessary effort to climb the mountain of forgiveness and restoration, and they choose instead to settle down in the plain along with the rest, and the plain is increasingly full of tents. And so the question is—and it's a pressing question—how, then, are we to avoid becoming simply another statistic in the growing statistical average in relationship to these things? How am I, says the young man, in the full flush of zealous excitement for a young girl of his choice to ensure that I will not be that man, that my wife will not do that, that I will not do that?

What are we supposed to do? When I was in Grand Rapids earlier in the summer, in the Saturday newspaper, which had a flood of notices for the church services, which was the reason for my purchasing it, I found a very interesting thing. There was a complete page of announcements of young couples' engagements, and there was also another page that featured couples who had been most recently married. But then there were two pages which outweighed the previous number of photographs, and these two pages had double photographs on them. It was a photograph of an elderly-looking couple, and then of a younger couple right next to it, and a smaller picture. This was two complete pages of couples in the Grand Rapids area who were celebrating their fiftieth anniversary. And the wee picture beside the big picture was the picture that had been on the previous pages fifty years ago in Grand Rapids or somewhere else on the day when they had been married to one another.

And struck by this, I took it and I laid it out on the kitchen table where I was by myself working on this project, and I just kept it there for the whole day, and I kept going back and looking at it, and picking out names, James and Lillian, Richard and Betty, Dale and Gwen, and saying to myself, how did they do this? What did they do? Did they begin with a myth of perfection, as many do? And how long did it take them to dispense with the mythology? Presumably, fairly quickly. For those who live with a myth of perfection, for any prolonged period of time, will make themselves and their partners increasingly uncomfortable, disgruntled, and unhappy. They surely discovered somewhere along the journey that if they were going to make it through the challenges and privileges of marriage, if they were going to love each other through all of their lives till death they do part, then they were going to have to settle down and pay attention to the basics. Just the basics.

Just the basics. Now, simultaneously, I was reading a golf book. I was reading the latest biography of Hogan, probably the consummate striker of a golf ball. Certainly the man who introduced to the world practice at a degree that no one had ever seen before and possibly has never seen since.

Hogan was committed to trying to hit the ball perfectly on every occasion that he addressed it. And it's a fascinating book. In the course of his pilgrimage, you find this quote. In 1946, says Hogan, my attitude suddenly changed. I would guess what lay behind my new confidence was this. I had stopped trying to do a great many things perfectly. Because it had become clear in my mind that this ambitious overthrowness was neither possible or advisable nor even necessary. All that is really required to play good golf is to execute properly a relatively small number of true fundamental movements.

Oh, I said, I should write that down. Not simply because of the help that it is in relationship to the golf swing, but because it fits perfectly my consideration of this matter of marriage. The quest for perfection is neither possible or advisable or even necessary. But what it is going to take, all that is really required to ensure a good marriage, is to execute properly a relatively small number of true fundamental movements. And yet still men and women chase from pillar to post in search of mythological Hollywood engendered perfectionism. And some marriages have foundered not because people have been unwilling to do the essentials well, but because they have had absolutely no interest in doing the essentials well. When marriage is disintegrated, it is not usually as a result of some bizarre event which appears out of the blue.

But it is a result of a slow leak that has gone on undetected for a period of time. And it is neither some kind of superficial optimism or a debilitating pessimism that ought to permeate our thinking in relationship to this. But if we're going to be realistic, then it includes a healthy dose of skepticism.

And this may seem strange to you, but I've been thinking a lot about this, and I think skepticism is a large part of a good marriage. Skepticism. It doesn't sound right. It's not sort of culturally and politically correct in its sound.

I'll admit that. We're not supposed to be skeptical, we don't think. We're supposed to be loving and trusting and glowing and going and all those positive words.

But no, I think skepticism is a really good word, and I'll tell you why. Because we live in a fallen world. And because we live in the reality of Romans 7, the good we want to do we don't do, and the bad we don't want to do we do. Therefore, skepticism is absolutely essential for spiritual wholeness.

And if it is essential for spiritual wholeness, then it is essential for biblical faithfulness within the realm of marriage. See, skepticism starts with an examination of our own motives. The man might ask himself just why it is that he's so concerned to be calling his secretary at such a late hour on a Friday evening. You ought to be skeptical of that.

You ought to ask yourself the question, am I emotionally attached? The parent might not take at face value the bright-faced assertions of the young man who has taken their daughter on a date. After all, he's a raging sea of hormones, and they need to be skeptical, lest their daughter would be swept away on the tide. In fact, it's the height of naivety and foolishness to assume that we can enter high-risk areas without facing the potential for failure. Gordon McDonald, writing on this in his book Rebuilding Your Broken World, quotes Oswald Chambers, Always beware of a friendship, or of a religion, or of a personal estimate of things that does not reconcile itself to the fact of sin. That is the way all the disasters in human friendships and in human loves begin, and where the compromises start. Jesus never trusted human nature. He was never cynical.

He trusted absolutely what he could do for human nature. But he recognized that with which he was dealing. So if we're going to be realistic in preventing the kind of demise that we're alluding to this evening, then we need to make sure that we put necessary boundaries in place. And I want to give to you one or two hedges, if you like. England is the land of hedges. If you've driven in England at all, you'll know that there are huge, big hedges everywhere.

It's downright scary, especially in the home counties in Buckinghamshire and Surrey and all around there. You meet these cars going at breakneck speeds all around the lanes, and you can't see around the corner because of the hedges. Some of the hedges are beautifully fashioned with care.

Others are wild. They're haphazard, apparently. In each case, they're usually planted as a line of demarcation between farmers' fields, or as a means of protection from the elements for the things that are within their precinct. And the care which the average Englishman takes of his hedgerow is actually an indication of the importance of it for him, not simply as a thing of beauty but also as a boundary. Well, you say, well, what kind of hedges are you thinking of? Well, very simple things.

Let me give you just one or two. Let's call the first hedge the hedge of carefulness. Carefulness. There's nothing dramatic about that, is there?

No, and deliberately so. The principle is that which is found in Paul's writings to the Corinthians, Let the man or the woman who feels sure of his standing to be careful that he doesn't fall tomorrow. That doesn't mean we're supposed to live in paralyzing fear. We wouldn't be well served by living every day imagining all the dreadful things that might happen to us.

The fact of the matter is, if we're going to live in sanity, we have to proceed believing that the best will be the case and yet at the same time making constant provision for possible failure. When you and I tonight think about our children heading down the road of life, when we think of them getting their driver's license and going down the street, and when we try and affirm for them the importance of the stop signs and not becoming an amber gambler and not trying to jump the red and sustain it beyond the green, we teach them all these things because we want them to come home in the evening. And in the same way as we think of them going into marriage, we want to teach them about the green lights, the stop signs, the cautions, and we want to tell them about the importance of hedges. Protective boundaries, or hedges, are essential for every marriage, even after decades of relationship success.

You're listening to Alistair Begg on Truth for Life. We're in a series called We Too Are One, and we're learning that marriage has the greatest chance for success when we adhere to the plan of the designer. Many couples, however, stray from the plan and their relationship becomes strained, even at the risk of failing. And that's one of the topics that's covered in a book we want to recommend to you titled Gospel Shaped Marriage, Grace for Sinners to Love Like Saints. This is a book that explains God's design for marriage. The authors take a candid look at some of the difficulties many couples face. Issues like hostility or aggression or injustice are, unfortunately, a reality for many couples.

This is something the Bible acknowledges, but these challenges can be overcome. As you read the book Gospel Shaped Marriage, you'll learn what the Scriptures say about marital tension and how to resolve conflict. Ask for your copy of the book when you donate to Truth for Life today at truthforlife.org slash donate. And if you'd rather mail your donation along with your request for the book, write to Truth for Life at Post Office Box 398000, Cleveland, Ohio, 44139. Now we want you to know that the books we offer on this program are carefully selected by our team, and the book Gospel Shaped Marriage is no exception. We choose titles that supplement the teaching you hear on Truth for Life so you can learn more about the biblical instruction Alistair addresses in his messages. Our desire is that these books will help you grow deeper in your understanding of God's Word and your relationship with Jesus. I mention this because both of the monthly resources we feature are available to you simply by request when you become a Truth Partner.

It's one of the ways we say thank you for your monthly donation of $20 or more. And when you sign up to become a Truth Partner today, you'll receive Alistair's hardcover devotional called Truth for Life, 365 Daily Devotions. Each daily reading includes a scripture passage followed by a commentary from Alistair that will guide you in your study of God's Word.

If you've heard me invite you to become a Truth Partner before, but you have not yet joined the team, why not make today the day? You can sign up online at truthforlife.org slash truth partner or by giving us a call at 888-588-7884 and don't forget to request your copy of the book Gospel Shaped Marriage. And if you've enjoyed learning about marriage in our series called We Too Are One, you can own the study on a USB. We include it along with the series God's Design for Women and other teaching about Christian relationships from Alistair, including family relationships and parenting priorities. The collection of studies is titled God's Design for Life Together. You'll find it at truthforlife.org slash store for $5. I'm Bob Lapine. The way we demonstrate care in the little things of life can make a huge contribution to the success and enjoyment of our relationships. Join us tomorrow to find out why. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.