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In Jim Collins best selling book about business entitled: “Good to Great,” he says that the biggest enemy of becoming a great company is being a good company. The same is true for marriage. There are few great marriages, because so many of them are good, or good enough. I’ve shown how our culture has a deficient and low view of marriage, and due to that standard, people think they are in a good marriage.

Are our marriages really good or just normal? My premise today is that rather than being transformed by love, we have negotiated for acceptable surrogates.

The Biblical revelation isn’t what we’ve been taught. We’ve all heard pastors recite Paul’s teachings about marriage and religion still imposes a patriarchal hierarchy: God>> Man>> Woman>> Children, even when the model is mutual submission (Ephesians 5:21). Too many people over-identify with the structure, and forsake the foundation of sacrificial love. The structure is not the goal of marriage nor Paul’s teachings. The goal of marriage is transformation through love. If we get love right, the self emptying displaces the requirement for gender based roles. Great marriages are free, not imposed. Can any pastor show me Solomon’s flow chart for marital success?

“Eat, friends, drink, and be drunk with love!” (Song of Solomon 5:2)

I can hear you now, “Keven, clearly Song of Solomon depicts the early phases of love and the infatuation of youth.” I’d like to challenge that assumption. I think we know this intuitively and that is why our culture’s music is drenched in the exuberance of love, or the pain of losing it:

“Day after day, the love turns gray
Like the skin of the dying man
And night after night, we pretend it’s all right
But I have grown older, and you have grown colder
And nothing is very much fun anymore
And I can feel one of my turns coming on
I feel cold as a razor blade, tight as a tourniquet
Dry as a funeral drum” (Pink Floyd, ‘One of my turns‘)

Let the universality of love sink in. Transforming LOVE is the design.

Love is such a vital need for our lives. It lifts us out of the most dire straits. Our greatest pain is the loss of the connection, intimacy and security that love affords. We go through life chasing love in one form or another, yet few ever really grasp it. Some become serial love addicts only sticking around for the thrill of love’s first chapter. The Biblical trajectory is that love is cultivated, explored, and that it evolves and expands over time, yet remains the single driving force for joy, intimacy, connection, satisfaction, and permanent oneness. Human love is the microcosm to experience the Divine macrocosm of love. By contrast, the world that tells us love fades out and never lasts. Consider Jesus’ comment about marriage from this perspective:

“Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.” (Matthew 19:8-9)

The Greek word “sklerokardia” literally means uncircumcised heart. It’s beyond stubborn or hard hearted, it means our epicenter of being hasn’t been sheered, or shaped by love, and our heart has overgrowth which keeps us from experiencing and living from love.

Our confused world has renamed the initial phase of love, infatuation. After buying in, we understand love as the “calmed down” version that emerges when the excitement wears off. However, infatuation is love…at its birth. It is love, not infatuation, which completely takes us over by the experience. Love is disorienting because it finds and accepts the true beloved. Love is the celebration of this discovery. We forgo our sleep, we rearrange our schedules, stay up late, and a million other self denying gestures while other endeavors fade into the background. The giving of oneself in love is the one-flesh impulse and it naturally leads to sexual intimacy. Wisdom admonishes us to not awaken this loving impulse until marriage, but the omnipresent low view of sex betrays the beloved, for their flesh. It’s the foundation of insecurity.

After infatuation, sobriety sets in. The rest of the person eventually emerges. If love has its way, the is intimate context of two selfless givers can now share a life of incremental transformation. Love is the context where each beloved receives one another and everything that comes with them. In the safety of love, we receive healing by one another as our pain is revealed and the hurting place is touched with love. However, love doesn’t usually have its way and we end up in good marriages.

In good marriages…we hide. We pretend. We front. We posture. We stop the healing flow of love’s work. In our fear of abandonment, vulnerability, or weakness we cover up with fig leaves, but eventually the curtain drops and we see the unredeemed parts of the beloved. Then we abandon love either by leaving, or by staying in character, judging or hiding, and never giving up the charade. When two surface level selves negotiate an existence, it’s not the flow of love, it’s the magnetic attraction of mutual dysfunction.

The unredeemed aspects of our self can either repel or attract with the other. Non-judging love finds our pain and heals it, so it can be transformed and no longer transmitted. Psychology says broken people are toxic and we must have boundaries. Love’s design is that brokenness is wrapped securely and cherished in its brokenness. This is what God’s love does for all of us, but in our brokenness we struggle to perceive it. The macrocosm of God’s love finds us infinitely precious even in our inability to love God back.

“…while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son…” (Romans 5:10)

Throughout the Bible, we are given many love stories which reveals this macrocosm of God’s love. That is how we learn how to love others in a million different microcosms.

Good marriages tip-toe around our buried pain. Good knows not to “poke the bear.” Good marriages mostly get along, but cannot suppress the unhealed parts forever. Good marriages function, they cooperate, negotiate, and partially satisfy with punctuated moments of intimacy which quickly vaporize. Good marriages warn everyone.

If you are in a good marriage, I’d like to offer you a final consideration. We are all closer to a great marriage than we realize. We don’t need a therapist to drudge up a lifetime of pain or patterns, nor rename us with a useless diagnostic term. Just like driving at night, we need not see the whole way to journey, but only the next hundred feet. Remember, a true marriage is the divesting of two individuals into a shared identity. Those unredeemed parts we dislike about our spouse are a shared problem. We are offended at ugliness when we stop beholding the beloved within.

A good marriage has something a bad marriage (living divorce) doesn’t, two mostly willing people. If we generally like our spouse as a person…not just what they can do for us, then a great marriage is within reach. The way back to love is on the path we’ve already traveled together. Visit your “relationship lost and found.” The beloved with whom we were once infatuated, is hiding deep within the years of wear and tear, burdens, and pain. Leave the ninety-nine other things and go find what has wandered. Forsake judgment, forsake secrets…knowing they exist, and give yourself (i.e. trust) again. It might go bad, but that’s why psychology can’t get this back.

Love is BIG. Go big or live without love.

Great marriages are made of two givers and two forgivers. In great marriages, love is the guillotine of vulnerability, where each puts their heads in and hands over the rope. Great marriages BECOME safe places to bleed, they are refuges for the weak, the addicted, the failure. None of us are what we’ve done, nor what we do. We are not our accomplishments, nor our failures. Our ontology (true self) is who God says we are, and God has said we are the BELOVED. Great marriages love the beloved despite all the unredeemed parts and sees them as temporary. I promise, if two beloved people, find and are found again, a completely new relationship emerges from where it was originally abandoned…the moment the excitement supposedly wore off.