Marriage as a Spiritual Mirror

“What marriage has done for me is hold up a mirror to my sin. It forces me to face myself honestly and consider my character flaws, selfishness, and anti-Christian attitudes, encouraging me to be sanctified [set apart for God’s use] and cleansed, and to grow in godliness” (Gary Thomas).
Does that statement catch your attention? Read the following written by Gary Thomas on this subject from his great book called, Sacred Marriage: What If God Designed Marriage to Make Us Holy More Than to Make Us Happy (published by Zondervan). It should give us a lot to think and pray about:

Being so close to someone —which marriage necessitates —may be the greatest spiritual challenge in the world. There is no “resting,” because I am under virtual 24-hour surveillance. Not that my wife Lisa makes it seem like that —it’s just that I’m aware of it.
Every movie I rent is rented with the understanding that I will watch it with Lisa next to me. Every hour I take off for recreation is an hour that Lisa will know about. Where I eat lunch—my appetites and lusts and desires are all in full view of Lisa.
This presupposes, of course, that I’m willing to be confronted with my sin —that I’m willing to ask Lisa, “Where do you see unholiness in my life? I want to know about it. I want to change it.”
This takes tremendous courage —courage I am the first to admit I often lack. It means I’m willing to hear what displeases Lisa about me, as well as to refuse to become paralyzed by the fear that she will love me less or leave me because the sin in me is being exposed.
I don’t naturally gravitate toward the honesty and openness that leads to change. My natural sin-bent is to hide and erect a glittering image.
Go back in time for the first sin. And the first obvious result of the Fall was a breakdown in marital intimacy. Neither Adam not Eve welcomed the fact that their weaknesses were now so obvious. All of a sudden they felt kind of funny about being naked. And they started blaming each other.
Howard Hendricks told about a time he had just completed a sermon and a young man came up to him and called him a “great man.” On the drive home, Hendricks turned to his wife and said, “A great man. How many great men do you know?” “One fewer than you think,” she answered.
I have frequently stated that I think God often gives wives to influential men in part to keep their husband’s feet on the ground. When someone receives constant adulation, it’s invaluable to have another person come alongside who will see through to the real you.
Francois Fenelon (an eighteenth-century Christian writer) tells us on the subject of humility that it is, “a certain honesty, and childlike willingness to acknowledge our faults, to recover from them, and to submit to the advice of experienced people.”
I believe it is possible to enter marriage with a view to being cleansed spiritually, if, that is, we do so with a willingness to embrace marriage as a spiritual discipline. To do this, we must not enter marriage predominantly to be filled, emotionally satisfied, or romantically charged, but rather to become more like Jesus Christ. We must embrace the reality of having our flaws exposed to our partner, and thereby having them exposed to us as well.
Sin never seems quite as shocking when it is known only to us; when we see how it looks or sounds to another, it is magnified ten times over. The celibate can “hide” frustration by removing herself from the situation, but the married man or woman has no true refuge. It is hard to hide when you share the same bed.
I have a theory: Behind virtually every case of marital dissatisfaction lays unrepented sin. Couples don’t fall out of love so much as they fall out of repentance.
Sin, wrong attitudes, and personal failures that are not dealt with slowly erode the relationship, assaulting and eventually erasing promises made in the throes of earlier love.
All of us enter marriage with sinful attitudes. When these attitudes surface, the temptation will be to hide them or even run to another relationship where the attitudes won’t be so well known. But Christian marriage presumes a certain degree of self-disclosure. When I married, I committed to allow myself to be known by Lisa —and that means she’ll see me as I am—with my faults, my prejudices, my fears, and my weaknesses.
This reality can be terrifying to think about. Dating is largely a situation in which you always try to put the best face forward —hardly a good preparation for the eventual self-disclosure implied in marriage. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if many marriages end in divorce largely because one or both partners are running from their own revealed weaknesses as much as they are running form something they can’t tolerate in their spouse.
View marriage as a relationship that will reveal your sinful behaviors and attitudes and give you the opportunity to address them before the Lord. But here’s the challenge: Don’t give in to the temptation to resent your partner as your own weaknesses are revealed. Give them the freedom and acceptance they need in order to face their own weaknesses as well. In this way, we can use marriage as a spiritual mirror, designed for our growth in holiness.

As Gary Thomas also said,

“Your marriage is more than a sacred covenant with another person. It is a spiritual discipline designed to help you know God better, trust him more fully, and love him more deeply.”

We pray that we’ll all take some time this week to look into the “spiritual mirror” of our marriages and make sure the reflection that comes back is that of God, without us interfering.