“Four-year-old Susie had just heard the story of ‘Snow White’ for the first time. Excited she came home and retold her mother the fairy-tale. After relating how Prince Charming had arrived on his beautiful white horse and kissed Snow White back to life, Susie asked loudly, ‘And do you know what happened then?’ Her mother replied, ‘Yes, they lived happily ever after.’ ‘No,’ Susie said, ‘they got married!’ Susie in her child-like innocence got it right! Getting married is not synonymous with living happily ever after.” (Strike the Original Match, by Chuck Swindoll)
(I am sharing some truthful tidbits on the subject of marriage in this post. Hardly anything here will be original. But this is like some needed, practical “nectar” that I have gained in years of reading, and I hope something of what you read in this and maybe in a follow-up post will be helpful to you. I will cite the source when I can.)
Ed Wheat in Love-Life for Every Married Couple: “These ties are not like the pretty silken ribbons attached to wedding presents. Instead, they must be forged like steel in the heat of daily life and the pressures of crisis in order to form a union that cannot be severed.”
Someone added, “Even if marriages are made in heaven, man is responsible for the maintenance.”
John MacArthur in his sermon “Divine Guidelines for Marriage,” offers ‘How could God command you to marry and not provide the right partner?’ But, listen to me people, if you’re not the right person, you’ll never meet the right partner. That’s the whole key. If you’re not the right person, you’ll never meet the right partner. So instead of looking for the right girl, start being the right man. And girls, instead of looking for the right man, start being the right woman. And then, the right man will start recognizing the right woman.”
Or, as Howard Hendricks, late eminent professor of Bible Exposition at Dallas Theological Seminary for more than fifty years, put it: “Marriage is not finding the person with whom you can live, but finding that person with whom you cannot live without.” (BTW, that was a favorite quote of my dear mother!—and thankfully, I did find that person in Ellen Beshears!)
George Clinebell in Intimate Marriage, says, “Marriage has been described as the relationship of ‘Two reasonable human beings who have agreed to abide by each other’s intolerabilities.”
And, “The wedding ring is that small piece of jewelry placed on the finger that cuts off your circulation.”
W.A. Criswell, who pastored First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas, for forty-eight years, following the fifty-year pastorate of George Truett, said, “Two can live as cheaply as one—if one doesn’t eat and the other goes naked.”
“When Brother Andrew became engaged to his wife, Corrie, he said, ‘Corrie, we don’t know where the road leads us, do we?’ ‘But Andy,’ she said, ‘Let’s go there together.’” (God’s Smuggler) Brother Andrew
Michael McManus in Christian News, (5/26/96) spoke to the subject of cohabitation or “living together” as it has become known as rather than the original euphemism of “shaking up.” He said that it is the “greatest destroyer of marriage in America…a double cancer of marriage. In 1996 he noted that (even then) “the majority of all unions between American men and women begin with cohabitation—not marriage, according to the National Survey of Families and Households—in depth interviews of a large sample of 13,000 people by the University of Wisconsin. This is a shocking finding. Being unmarried is not synonymous with being single, the study asserts. Many who begin cohabitating believe they can screen out a risky marriage. They are wrong. Cohabiting unions are much less stable than unions that begin as marriages…Marriage is one shoe you cannot try on before buying it.”
McManus, cited above, states that 40% of cohabiting couples break up before marriage; marriages that are preceded by cohabitation have a fifty-percent higher divorce rate than those which are not. Of the 60 couples who get married (after cohabiting) 45 of them will divorce. “That means that only 15 couples out of 100 who cohabit before marriage will make it. Cohabitation is almost a guarantee for failure.”
In my home state of Iowa there stood an historic church, the Little Brown Church. Hundreds of weddings took place there every year. It is said that the preacher adopted a special farewell to the couple when, after the ceremony, he took the couple to the entrance of the little chapel and said, “Before you go, the Bride has the honor of ringing the church bell.” He placed the rope in her hands and though she pulled with all her might, the heavy bell would not budge. Then the preacher turned to the groom and asked that he lend a hand to help his bride. Together they pull and the bell rings, sending out over the countryside the news of another wedding. Then the preacher says, “As you go out into life, never forget that as long as you pull together, you can ring the bell.” (Discovery, Little Rock AR)
Again, I turn to Pastor Chuck Swindoll, married more than sixty years, for some distilled wisdom on marriage: On an article entitled “We Rent Wedding Rings,” Chuck commented, “Doesn’t that just sum up the state of our world? Seven days after our first date, I knew that Cynthia was ‘the girl of my dreams’. She was 16 and I was 19 when I proposed. Twenty months later…we said, “I do.” We could never have imagined our life together…but four kids, ten grandchildren, seven great grandchildren and a worldwide ministry later, we still say I do.”
“Cynthia will always be the girl of my dreams. But that doesn’t mean I can sit back and relax! Loving her means being the man of HER dreams. It means practicing patience, kindness, and humility. It means faithfulness and trust…love notes and a few elegant dinners for two…thoughtful words and listening ears. It means making time for prayer, coffee, and especially thunderstorms. Every time a storm rolls in, Cynthia and I press pause on our busy lives. We prefer to go out on our screened-in back porch, where we watch the Creator’s light show, together.
Contrary to popular opinion, our more than six decades together haven’t been pure bliss. Neither of us is ‘easy to live with.’ We’re together for two reasons: God’s unfaltering grace and our uncompromising commitment.”
(So there you have it. Some of the choicest statements, observations and words of wisdom about marriage that I have clipped the past fifty plus years. I hope they will bless you and maybe even help you as you work on fine tuning your marriage (I still am after 58 years!), or as you strive to encourage others who may be struggling in this first and foremost of relational ties established immediately after God created the heavens and the earth.)
YOU and GOD 