How to Avoid Marital Failure (Part 1 of 2)

It seems to be an epidemic of lifeless loveless marriages some that end in divorce these days even within the church.

So how can we enjoy our marriage over a lifetime rather than simply enduring it? Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg shares some helpful principles with us in a message titled How to Avoid Marital Failure. I invite you to take your Bibles and we'll turn to the New Testament together and to the book of Hebrews and to the thirteenth chapter. We're going to concentrate this morning on the fourth verse of Hebrews 13. If you like, the platform upon which we're going to build what we discovered this morning is here in this fourteenth verse of Hebrews 13. Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral.

Marriage should be honored by all. It is an immense privilege, a great joy, to be a pastor. To spend one's life in pastoral ministry is to be given the privilege, daunting as it is many times, of sharing with people in experiences that one would ordinarily not have the opportunity of enjoying or enduring. Crucial junctures of life—moments of great joy, sometimes of great sadness. There are days that are disastrous or disappointing. There are days that are delightful.

But really, there are no days in pastoral ministry that are dull. It is an immense thrill to be included in so many different aspects of life at so many key and pivotal turning points. And outside the task of spiritual midwifery—if you like being there at the birthing of spiritual children—there is nothing which I personally enjoy more than the unique and close-up position which is entrusted to me in weddings. I don't know just what it is—I certainly would never have imagined that it would be so—but it is a tremendous, genuine thrill to be that close at a wedding. I mean, I'm closer than the bride's mother, closer than the groom's father.

I am as close as you can get. I am so close that the event is palpable. You can see their eyes, you can hear the little things they say to one another, and you can virtually hear their hearts beat if it's quiet enough. I am sure that I've heard many a fellow's heart beat.

Otherwise, I've got no explanation as to why his tie and his shirt moves in that way. I've seen the sweaty palms. I've had to shake those hands, and I'm talking not about the girl now, but I've seen it all. And I've also sensed the awesomeness in their minds—the wonder, the joy, the privilege, the anticipation of it all—and the awful solemnity of what is taking place, as the minister would say, whom God has joined together. Let not man put asunder. And when, in their making of their vows to one another, they have said, For better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part.

That is an amazing commitment, like no other commitment, that we are ever asked to make in all of our earthly pilgrimage. So it is that apart from spiritual shipwreck, whereby those who have professed faith in Jesus Christ begin to stumble and fall and wander from the path, apart from that kind of sad and sorry failure, nothing pains me more than to learn of the unraveling of these bonds in Christian marriage, to see the crumbling of the foundations that have been laid by a couple full of anticipation in their early days, to watch and see the tearing of the fabric which has been part and parcel of their early lives as they've sought to entwine themselves around God's purposes and around one another. There has been for me no pain in life apart from the loss of a loved one greater than the pain attached to observing the disintegration of marriages, particularly those whom God gave to me the privilege of conducting in the first place.

And yet, how sadly commonplace it is to see such disintegration! With what remarkable ease are couples able to walk away from these solemn vows, and for all who walk away there is another great host, a large company of people who do not walk away but are held together not by self-giving love but are held together more by custom or convention or, if you like, maybe even fear of what the neighbors have to say. Such individuals are enduring what they might in the purposes of God be enjoying. It is not necessarily that they don't know about marriage. They may in fact be very aware of marriage, and all that is involved in it they may have given themselves to the principles of marriage, they may have studied, they may have listened to tapes and gone through seminars, they may have preached a series of sermons on marriage, they may even have been privileged to become the author of a book on the subject of marriage. But all of that, on its own or cumulatively, cannot necessarily be equated with a wonderful discovery, in practical terms, of what the writer to the Hebrews refers to when he says, Let the marriage bonds be held in honor. Sadly, in the case of marriage, many of us have become adept at being hearers of the Word but not doers also. And our marriages are held together by enough veneer to pass inspection, providing the inspection is conducted by blind guides. But anyone with any measure of perception at all will be able to tell whether what we have is the embodiment of what God has designed or a pale imitation of the real thing.

What a tragedy to see couples who have decided that all they can anticipate in marriage is adequacy when, in point of fact, what the Bible calls us to is abundance. Now, a word of explanation as to how I arrive at this this morning. On Friday afternoon, as I was traveling home from Glasgow and coming across the ocean, I was working on my message for this morning, and I had my notes out, and I was working a wave, so there was just Nehemiah and I together in 15 A and B.

But my mind wasn't on Nehemiah. I couldn't get my mind off marriage matters. Because the context out of which I'd come had to do with some of the great sadnesses to which I'm alluding this morning, some of the deep concerns that I had and have for those who are near and dear to me. And so I found myself turning over the pages of my notes, and I decided I would write some notes to myself. So I wrote notes to myself on how to prevent marital failure. And I stopped after I'd written down sixteen principles. Now, you should be glad of that, because I'm gonna tell you them now. There's a lot more than sixteen, but I stopped at sixteen. Somebody brought me a Diet Coke or something, but I stopped at sixteen. A word to young people who are not yet married.

You can never learn these principles too young. Write them down, if you would, and store them away, and one day you'll pull them out again, perhaps. You'll find them, and you'll say, Ah, this is what that fellow meant on that morning.

Now I see what he meant. Singles. Acknowledge the fact that you have a present responsibility, both in praying for and influencing marriages of those around you. Most single people have an impact on families—maybe on one or on two or on more.

They certainly have an impact on their own parental structure, and they may be the kind of praying influence and godly companion and friend that will be the key to developing and sustaining the marriages of those that are under their care and influence. It is also sadly possible that it could be that a single person, because they were naïve to the principles I'm now about to refer you to, could be the catalyst for the disruption of one of these marriage bonds. As with most matters in life, the breakdown in marital affairs comes not as a result, usually, of the extravagant and the bizarre, but on account of a failure to pay attention to the basics consistently. I have to say that in terms of marital failure and breakdown, I could count on my one hand the times when I would have to say that this came, as it were, completely out of the blue in some dramatic, bizarre event.

In ninety-five, ninety-nine percent of the occurrences, it has to do with the fact that the husband and the wife have not been taking care of business. They've just allowed it to slide. They've become experts too soon.

And it has all unraveled for them. Now, some of you are perhaps tempted to press, say, a kind of a mental ejection button at this point, because you know that you've heard all this so many times now that you're experts at it. Well, then, the first thing I wrote down on my notes will be particularly appropriate for the likes of you.

So here it is. Number one, in preventing marital failure, do not be so foolish as to maintain that it could not happen to you. That seems to me to be so straightforward and yet so fundamentally important. It is a statement of unbelievable naivety, a statement of the most foolish bravado—to assume that somehow or another who you are and what you have or what I am and have is somehow immune to all of these external influences, is somehow immune to the forces, the wars, and the temptations that approach us from without and seek to pull us down from within. The principle is found in 1 Corinthians 10 and in verse 11 and following, and eventually where Paul says, the person who thinks that they're standing up should take heed in case they be the very one to fall down. On virtually every occasion that one has had the responsibility of being involved in the demise of a marriage, one hears again and again statements such as this, I never, ever, ever believed that I would be in this situation confronting these circumstances. Or that the couple would say, We regarded ourselves as the last people in the whole of wherever it is ever to face this event. Well, I want to tell you this, that I think that is really deft. And I'm not talking about living with some kind of paralyzing fear in your marriage.

I'm talking about living with a sense of realism in your marriage. You know, when you fly on the plane, they always give you the same spiel before you go, right? They take out the thing, the poor girl has to walk around with a plastic bag on her face, she has to clip the thing on and off, she goes through the whole thing, and it is all couched in phrases like, In the unlikely event of… And it is very unlikely. In the unlikely event of a water landing.

Now, you're flying over two thousand miles of open water between the coast of Scotland and Newfoundland. In the unlikely—you like to hear that. I like that. I like unlikely.

I'd like to say, In the unlikely event of a water landing. Despite the fact that it is unlikely, what do they do? They prepare you for the worst while hoping for the best. Now, folks, in our marriages, we need to be realistic enough to set up the precautionary mechanism to prevent the possibilities that we may so naively believe are going to be the province of someone else rather than us.

Really, it's quite intriguing, in all of that safety instruction, the way they have that little sheet in front of you there that pops out of the seat bag in front of you, and if you notice it, it says something like, If you cannot read this instruction manual, please ask somebody for help. Which is… It seems to me that was written by… I don't know who wrote that, but… Don't be so foolish as to maintain that it could not happen to you. Secondly, Do not assume that a great marriage can be discovered and enjoyed without some solid hard work. In the book of Proverbs, Solomon confronts the sluggard, the lazy individual, and in Proverbs chapter 24, he speaks of the fact that he went past the field of a sluggard. And when he looked at the vineyard of the man who lacks judgment—verse 31 of Proverbs 24—he said, Thorns had come up everywhere, and the ground was covered with weeds, and the stone wall was in ruins.

So the thing was just a shambles. The man's garden was an expression of the man's life. As is so often our marriage. What we have in a marriage, if it becomes overgrown with weeds and thorns and begins to disintegrate, is simply an expression of who we really are.

And, says Solomon, I applied my heart to what I observed, and I learned a lesson from what I saw. A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come on you like a bandit, and scarcity like an armed man. And sadly, loved ones, so many marriages are so unattended.

They are overgrown, they are disintegrating, they are filled with weeds, and a large contributing factor is downright laziness. An unpreparedness to do what it takes, consistently, to make sure that the home fires are tended to. Hebrews 6.12, in relationship to salvation, the writer says, We do not want you to become lazy. Thirdly, Do not allow the busyness of life to disguise neglect.

Do not allow the busyness of life to disguise neglect. I think the song was by Alabama a little while ago. It had a refrain, I recall, I'm in a hurry and I don't know why. All I've got to do is live and die. I'm rushing and rushing, and there's no doubt, and da-da-da-da-da, and I'm in a hurry and I don't know why.

Sold well, I believe, because so many people that listen to it on the radio say, Hey, how did they write a song about me? That's exactly it. I'm in a hurry and I don't know why. You know how many marriages are in a hurry doing everything except looking after each other?

Running here, running there, taking care of this, going to that event, coming back from that event—just absolute craziness. And consequently, what happens is a bit like the picture in Luke chapter 8 in the parable of the sower, that the thorns begin to grow up around the plant and begin to choke its very life out. And Jesus on that occasion says that that which chokes out the life is a preoccupation with worry, with wealth, or with pleasures. And yet so often marriages are held out to us in the magazines on our newspaper stands as a great quest for possessions and pleasure as long as we can distance ourselves from the worry that attaches to such an acquisitive lifestyle. I say to you this morning as what I wrote to myself, I'd better not allow the business of my life to disguise the fact that I'm neglecting my marriage.

Now, let's just get down and talk straight about it in relationship to church. The responsibilities of our lives are to be attached to Jesus Christ, to be attached to our spouse, to be attached to our children. And even good things that are not the best things may find us a busy success in manifold activities and a tragic failure at the point of greatest accountability.

Fourthly—this is a simple one—don't make the mistake of taking each other for granted. 1 Peter 3.7, Peter says to his readers, he says, husbands, be considerate in the way that you live with your wives. I'm gonna be biased to speaking to husbands. It's inevitable, since I wrote the note to myself. You ladies can just apply it the other way around.

But this is what I've found most recently. I've found this strange phenomenon, especially as it relates to the great calling of motherhood. I'm deeply saddened to find how many men, after a period of time, begin to denigrate their wives because they have chosen to make the ultimate sacrifice in the calling of motherhood—that she will be a keeper at home, that she will be a tender of her children, that she will be a provider, that she will give all of that sustenance and security within the family unit. I find many men saying out loud, You know what? All that my wife is is this.

And they somehow find far more attractive at eleven o'clock in the morning, somebody wearing a navy blue suit and high heels, than the thought of what they have left behind within their own home. And they begin to take their wives for granted. In recent days, in talking with a couple, I asked them to write down what had contributed to the demise of their marriage.

On the column of contributing to the demise of the marriage the man had written, My wife appears to be content just to be a mother. And that was, in his perspective, contributing to his response, which was clearly beyond the bounds of anything that the Bible would countenance. I want to take a guy like that and just, in a very loving way, bang his head up against the wall.

I want to just go up to him and shake him warmly by the throat and say to the character, Listen, clothiers, you've got to understand something. Life goes by very quickly, and if you have been given the privilege of having someone in your home who is prepared to be that for you and to you and to your family, you ought to get down on your knees and thank God every day. But instead of that, there are too many people that are reading their Bible too little and reading Cosmopolitan magazine too much. And if you read that godless drivel and allow it to filter through your brain, you will inevitably spit out the world's view, and you will not have sufficient biblical awareness to be able to declare spurious what is clearly spurious. It is indeed a mystery why some couples settle for adequate in marriage when the Bible calls us to abundance.

You're listening to Truth for Life with Alistair Begg. A lasting marriage begins when we understand God's Word and trust in His perfect plan. That's why our mission at Truth for Life is to teach the Bible with clarity and relevance. We do this knowing that God works through the teaching of His Word to convert unbelievers and to bring believers into a closer relationship with Jesus. He also uses His Word to strengthen both members and pastors within a local church so that they are both hearers and doers of the Word. Jesus calls His followers to proclaim the gospel to the world. That's a challenging assignment.

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You've probably heard me talking about today's offer. It's a book titled Gospel Shaped Marriage, Grace for Sinners to Love Like Saints. This book is a great supplement to our current study on Christian marriage. Request your copy of Gospel Shaped Marriage when you sign up to become a Truth Partner or you can request it with a one-time donation to truthforlife.org slash donate. I'm Bob Lapeen. We hope you enjoy the weekend and are able to worship with your local church. Join us Monday for the conclusion of today's message as we'll learn how to pay closer attention to relationship basics. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.