The Marriage University

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I spoke recently with a husband who was struggling to come to terms with his own responsibility in his home. To help him grasp one of the concepts I came up with a new analogy which I had not used before. I share it here to give you additional focus on the journey couples make in graduating into glory.

Different Roles in the Marriage

Husbands and wives have unique roles in the marriage. There are specific things husbands must do, that their wives are not asked to do. There are specific things wives are asked to do, that their husbands are not asked to do. Both husband and wife must make personal progress in their own assignment, irrespective of how the spouse is getting on with their challenges.

Different Places of Responsibility

According to the Bible, God has established human society by way of a hierarchy of responsibility. That hierarchy starts with God. Almighty God has the ultimate authority and the greatest responsibility, overseeing all else. Directly under God’s authority, and next in the hierarchy of responsibility is Jesus Christ, God’s Son. Then, directly under Jesus Christ is the husband. In the marriage and family, the husband carries the next level of authority and responsibility. The wife, is then under the husband’s authority, just as the husband is under Christ’s authority and Christ is under God.

“But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God.” 1Corinthians 11:3

Different Lessons to Learn

Many specific responsibilities spring from this hierarchical structure. The Husband must shoulder responsibility for the wife, children and home. He is directly answerable to God for his management and handling of the relationships, standards, training and spiritual blessing of the home. This includes morality, godliness, the fear of God, holiness, discipline, direction, spiritual and natural protection, and more.

The Wife must bring herself under the headship of the husband. This will be hard for her if she looks only at her husband. She must recognise and place her trust in God and Christ, as the husband’s heads. If she fails to do that she will end up taking matters into her own hands, making demands of her husband, manipulating, contending and otherwise failing to submit to his headship.

The husband must be able to nurture his wife and children, while being sure that he is answerable to Jesus and God, not others who will seek to direct his life. He must ensure that he does not abdicate to his wife, and allow her to replace Christ as the head of the home. If he allows her to do that he brings spiritual problems into the whole family.

Marriage University

Both husband and wife are attending the same university of life. They attend classes together, but both must learn different lessons from the life situations which they confront. It is as if they are both sitting side by side in the lecture hall, listening to the lessons. Yet the husband is enrolled in a different course to his wife. He will be set different assignments and tested on different questions to his wife, even from the same professor.

The husband is studying headship of his wife and submission to Christ. The wife is studying submission to her husband and faith in Christ and God.

The Curriculum

The Marriage University is an open book, mastery learning, life-experience oriented environment. The curriculum covers the same scope for all who attend, but the individual differences of each student are taken into account by the teachers. Some will study longer and be challenged with more difficult lab tests. Some will find that the open learning environment continues with extension courses for the rest of their lives.

Honours Courses

Each couple should make it their determination to graduate with Honours. High Distinctions are the best objective for each elective and every test. When a person graduates with that standard they are guaranteed many graces and much blessing from their diligent and faithful application.

The fruit of the course begins to be enjoyed long before graduation. Each lesson learned opens the couple to new joys and new privileges in their relationship. In time they will be expected to tutor other students and may well become emeritus professors themselves, as they make the grade and master the curriculum.

Here’s to Your Studies

I wish you every success in your studies. Please don’t drop out of the course. There’s nowhere to go if you can’t stay in the lessons.

And may the Living Lord God bless your relationship as you study and master the material together.

The Economic Man

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A man recently told me how he struggles to take the lead in his home because his wife out-earns him. His situation brought to focus the cherished idea that men have authority only because they are the bread-winner. This is a false notion and needs to be dealt with in order to find blessing in the home.

The problem we have in our society is that there are two prevailing mindsets we can draw from. Well, actually there is only one made accessible to most people, and that’s the wrong one. However, for Bible believing Christians there are certainly two mindsets which pull at our consciousness.

One mindset is the prevailing naturalistic view of the world. People who deny God’s place in the universe see everything as a product of naturalistic processes. They believe the world evolved by natural processes. They believe that societies evolved and that marriage is a product of people’s attempts to survive their circumstances.

From a naturalistic point of view it could be suggested that male leadership in the home evolved due to man’s greater capacity to guarantee the safety of the family, through brute strength and his greater capacity to bring provision to the home. That idea has been sown around western society to the point that many people simply assume it is gospel truth.

The other mindset is given to us in the Bible. It is a mindset based on God as our creator and the architect of our whole life experience.

Naturalistic thinking is mono-dimensional. It can only understand things from the human perspective. It is also without moral protection. Since we live in a moral universe influenced by godly and ungodly forces, those who choose not to seek godly influence will unwittingly come under ungodly influence. Ungodly forces are intent on deception and slavery for mankind, keeping people away from truth that sets them free. The Apostle James identified the way these two forces impact the mind of man when he discussed ‘wisdom’.

“This wisdom does not descend from above, but is earthly, sensual and devilish.” James 3:15

James exposes here that what stacks up as pretty good human, materialistic wisdom will actually have an ungodly source. It will be a limited perspective, from man’s point of view, but with a barb in the tail.

The naturalistic point of view lacks the profound depth and breadth available to us as we listen to what God is saying. The godly, Biblical mindset is rich with grace and positive potential.

Now, back to the Economic Man. The naturalistic, ungodly perspective suggests that a man’s only real value in a home is his economic contribution. His right to lead the home and his value to the other family members is directly linked to his economic worth.

If the wife and children out-earn him, and out-perform him in many ways, then this naturalistic man has to accept his loss of worth. He is demeaned by their success and relegated to some lesser place, unless he can stand tall in their presence and command respect because of his performance.

True manhood has nothing to do with economic contribution. It has nothing to do with physical strength, force of will, ability to protect and defend, or any other masculine quality. True manhood is simply being the man that God created the bloke to be. And the authority which a true man holds comes from God, not from the man himself.

The man is the head of the home, not because of his economic power, but because that is God’s design. God chose the man to carry the responsibility. That is why the universal expression of marriage has the man carrying the responsibility. God created it so and made it natural and logical to be so. Men did not gain headship by a process of evolution, or by swinging a big club. They were given it by God.

A man could be quadriplegic, old, weak, bald, humourless, or any of a myriad un-masculine qualities, and still be the head of his home and the leader of his family.

When men walk away from God they end up reduced to the level of their economic performance. A form of economic rationalism is exerted over their existence. They must perform or be displaced.

When men walk with God they are elevated to the place of leadership and responsibility which God gives them. They don’t have to prove a thing. They can happily have their wife and children out-perform them. They can celebrate the success of their descendents. They can rejoice in their wife’s achievements. They are not threatened by those things nor displaced by them.

It is time to dispense with the economic man. That is an unworthy model of manhood. It is time to embrace true manhood, found in God’s calling, not in human definition.

If you would like to dig into the subject of manhood take a look at my book, Manhood Horizons. Go to: http://familyhorizons.net/html/manhood.html

Marriage in Two Easy Lessons

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I recently noticed a sweet little summary of marriage in the Bible, that I had not noticed before. I like what it says and it gives me a fresh handle on some things I have been teaching and new things I need to bring out in my teaching. So, here’s a look at “Marriage in Two Easy Lessons”.

The passage which caught my attention is in the last book in the Old Testament, the book of Malachi, written by one of the prophets at the close of the Old Testament era. Malachi is a prophet who challenged the backslidden attitudes of the people in his day. Malachi was preoccupied with challenging God’s people, including the religious leaders, about the fact that they were going through the motions but were missing the core essence of many godly things. One of those things Malachi addressed was marriage.

I was struck by the way Malachi summarised marriage in two simple descriptors. Have a look at the verse and see if you can see the two key points that impressed me. Malachi 2:14 “the LORD has been witness between you and the wife of your youth, against whom you have dealt treacherously: yet is she your companion, and the wife of your covenant.” Can you see in that verse that marriage is described as both a ‘companionship’ and a ‘covenant’?

Here we have marriage in two easy lessons. Let me unpack these two lessons for you. I’ll start with the second one, since it is something I have had a beef about more recently on this blog.

Marriage is a ‘covenant’. That means it is something which God created for us. We didn’t invent it and we don’t get to make of it what we want to. It is a divine creation to be operated and explored by God’s rules and for His purposes. I have spoken out already about how people try to make marriage into a product of their liking. They may choose to have consensus instead of headship. They may choose to have shared roles instead of God’s specifications for their roles. They may choose to allow things in their relationship which God does not allow. They may deem for their relationship to be temporary and transient when God declares that it is permanent.

By being a ‘covenant’, marriage is not something we can tamper with. God will judge us, as He did in Malachi’s day, on the basis of how we have treated the special relationship which He created. We cannot get off by saying, “Oh, we decided to make marriage into something more modern and more acceptable to our cultural values.” That just doesn’t wash with God. Marriage is what He made it to be. Your wife is the wife of your covenant, even if you don’t know what a covenant is. Husbands must love their wife. Wives must submit to their husband. The husband must be the head. The husband must perfect his wife and rule over her.

When a man says, “I don’t go in for that headship stuff”, he is defying God and rejecting the gift of marriage which God created for him and his wife. When a man says, “I won’t rule over my wife”, he is denying the wife any opportunity to prove herself as submissive, so he is denying her the chance to be a truly godly wife.

At the same time, given equal weight in Malachi’s summary, is the fact that marriage is a ‘companionship’. Husbands and wives are travelling companions. They are privileged with a close friendship relationship. The formal, by the book, covenant relationship is not the whole story. A couple could have a correct ‘covenant’ relationship and yet not even be good friends. Malachi rescues marriage from that sterility by giving equal weight to the fact that the couple are ‘companions’.

I find that exciting. While I am a strong contender for the covenant roles and model of marriage, I am delighted with having a bride who is my life-long companion. To see that companionship role enshrined so worthily in scripture seems completely fitting to me. Susan is my best friend, my partner, my lover, my travelling companion. She is the one who shares the happy moments with me and who blesses me like no other.

Also, by bringing companionship into focus, we can look at those things which spoil the journey – such as resentment, nagging, contention, unforgiveness, neglect, competition, and the like. When we see those things come between us we know that we have a divine mandate to remove them. Susan is not just my companion because she is my wife, but she is my companion because God declares it so! I have no right to have her as anything other than my companion. When either husband or wife would rather be on their own than with the ‘companion’, there may be something that is spoiling the divine quality which God intends every couple to enjoy.

Now, two cannot walk together except they are agreed (Amos 3:3). So couples may have to work at preserving companionship, just as we may have to work at the covenant aspects of our relationship. We can now do both of those things with a sense of divine injunction and authority, and with the clarity that these are the two broad lessons of marriage.