Marriage Myths: Seek Counsel When You Are Unhappy

 

Marriage 29

 

          Throughout Scripture, there is a primacy placed on seeking counsel. Thou shalt guide me with thine counsel, And afterward receive me to glory. (Psalm 73.24) Where no counsel is, the people fall: But in the multitude of counsellors there is safety. (Proverbs 11.14) I could easily cite dozens more.

          Life is a matter of relationships. If you do not believe me, ask the people in Western North Carolina what matters to them now. It is not their career, their stuff, or their reputation. What matters to them is the people they love. It then follows that if life is a matter of relationships, we should certainly be getting counsel about how to better maintain and improve those relationships. Foremost amongst these relationships is marriage. Put plainly, seeking counsel in reference to your marriage is certainly a scriptural and wise thing.

          Why, then, am I criticizing it?

          Look again at the wording of this particular marriage myth: seek counsel when you are unhappy. Assuming this is the approach, this makes your goal in seeking marital counseling one of happiness. However, it should not be the counselor's goal to make you happy, nor should it be your goal.

          Why not? First, because this is a pragmatic approach, and though Scripture does not totally rule out pragmatism, we certainly should not lead with it philosophically. Second, if happiness is my overriding goal in my marriage, I have opened the door to ungodly thoughts and actions. After all, if they make us happy, what right do you have to tell me to avoid them? Third, many divorces happen for precisely this reason – happiness is the goal, and it is slowly determined that it cannot take place within the marriage; ergo, the marriage is dissolved.

          Happiness ought never be a goal; happiness is a byproduct. It is the incidental outcome obtained on the pathway of obedience to the Lord. Of the 137 times the word "counsel" is found in the Word of God, it is never connected, in a good sense, with becoming happy. It is connected with knowing what God wants you to do. It is also connected with learning how to do what you already know God wants you to do. In other words, counsel is connected with obedience.

          Make no mistake, I am for marital counseling. But it is not to make you happy; it is to make you obedient. What does God want you to do in this situation? How exactly do you do that, or how can you do that better? Seek marital counseling for these things, beloved, and happiness will come by inevitable default.   

Marriage Myths: I Can Change Him/She Will Not Change

 

Marriage 28

 

          Single people often make two cardinal mistakes while dating. Each is similarly different than the other. The woman is not blind to the man's weaknesses, but she has a plan for that. She is going to fix him. After they get married, she is going to go to work hammer and tongs and turn him into the man his mother should have. On the other hand, the man contemplates his future bride with unmitigated delight. She is alluringly beautiful and sweetly endearing. The wedding will encapsulate her in a chrysalis of amber. This charming creature of youth and beauty and tenderness will be his to his dying day.

          They are both wrong.

Let us examine each briefly in turn. 

          My dear fellow, I hate to break it to you, but the footsteps of time chase all of us down. Solomon tells us to rejoice with the wife of our youth not with our youthful wife. (Proverbs 5.18) God designed women to be constantly changing, physically and emotionally. I do not mean He designed them to be unstable. I mean, He created them to meet the varied needs of the husband and children around them, needs that shift with the passing of time. As I pen this, I am fifty-one. My children are twenty-two, twenty, and fifteen. If Mandy was the same woman now as the one I married in 1999, my children and I would be in a world of hurt. But she is not. She is the same individual, but the decades of life in between have wrought some changes. If I fight that or resent that, I will have a constant erosion at the center of my marriage.

          My dear lady, I hate to break it to you, but first off, if he will not change for you as he seeks to win you, why would he after he has? Second, as men age, they generally become more resistant to change. That is why old men wear the pants they bought thirty years ago. Their life often resembles a canyon worn deep by the river of time, channels unchanged except for their depth. Third, you cannot change anyone; only the Holy Spirit can. The king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord, as the rivers of water: he turneth it whithersoever he will. (Proverbs 21.1) While you can pray for the Lord to turn your husband, you must also accept it is beyond your power to do so directly. Fourth, and most importantly, failure to understand this produces a profoundly flawed marriage, one in which the wife has either become a battleaxe of a nag that the husband flees from or one in which the wife has so emasculated the husband he could not lead a horse to water.

          What is the moral of the story? Man, choose carefully, then be flexible as the Lord adjusts your wife for what you and your family are going to need next. Do not sigh with regret as she grows with the passing of the years. Woman, choose carefully, and then support your husband as God goes to work, forming him into the image of the Saviour. Do not mother him or nag him. Do not attempt to be his Holy Spirit. There is no vacancy in the Trinity.

          “I can change him.”

          “She won’t ever change.”

          Myths.