by Timothy Keller with Kathy Keller, 2011
Another excellent book by Tim Keller. Kathy, his wife, helped him with this one. Marriage created by God in the Garden of Eden. When God created woman and presented her to Adam, he said, “At last!” Woman completes man. Man completes Woman. Marriage brings us closer to the union God the Father and Jesus the Son have experienced for eternity.
Our culture has perverted marriage and sex. Woman look for men who can take care of them financially. Men look for women who are attractive and also won’t make them change-compatibility. Pressures of life, disappointments, resentments can easily destroy a marriage based on those factors. Instead, look for a mate who is a friend and sees the glorious person you are destined to be in Christ. Look for someone with similar interests, who is a person of faith.
Sex is the way a man and a woman can physically become one flesh and serve one another.
Singleness was validated by Christianity for the first time. To be single is not a curse. You are free to serve God without the constraints a spouse entails.
Ephesians 5 and Genesis 2 are the source texts. Ephesians 5:21-33 says women submit to their husbands and husbands love their wives as Christ loved the church, and gave Himself up for it, washed it and made it holy. To submit to a man who loves you so much he would die for you and do anything to help you become the glorious person you are meant to be is not a burden, it is a delight. Women, look to Jesus to see how submission works. He was God Himself, yet he submitted to God’s will and did the unthinkable–took the crushing burden of all our sins upon Himself, so we would not have to suffer, and then gave us His righteousness. Kathy’s chapter is all about that.
As with all Tim Keller books, I marked every page. Here are some favorite quotes from the book:
“The Bible begins with a wedding (of Adam and Eve) and ends in the book of Revelation with a wedding (of Christ and the church), Marriage is God’s idea.”
He draws from Ephesians 5 and Genesis 2.
“The work of the Spirit makes Christ’s saving work real to our hearts, giving us supernatural help against the main enemy of marriage: sinful self-centeredness.”
“Most striking of all, longitudinal studies demonstrate that two-thirds of those unhappy marriages out there will become happy within five years if people stay married and do not get divorced.”
Regarding living together: “The report [2002 Why Men Won’t Commit] concluded, “Cohabitation gives men regular access to the domestic and sexual ministrations of a girlfriend while allowing them. . . to lead a more independent life and continue to look around for a better partner.”
“Modern people make the painfulness of marriage even greater than it has to be, because they crush it under the weight of their almost cosmically impossible expectations.”
“The problem is not with marriage itself. According to Genesis 1 and 2, we were made for marriage, and marriage was made for us. Genesis 3 tells us that marriage, along with every other aspect of human life, has been broken because of sin.”
“The reason that marriage is so painful and yet wonderful is because it is a reflection of the gospel, which is painful and wonderful at once. The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope…Love without truth is sentimentality; it supports and affirms us but keeps us in denial about our flaws. Truth without love is harshness; it gives us information but in such a way that we cannot really hear it. God’s saving love in Christ, however, is marked by both radical truthfulness about who we are and yet also radical, unconditional commitment to us. The merciful commitment strengthens us to see the truth about ourselves and repent. The conviction and repentance moves us to cling to and rest in God’s mercy and grace.”
“The gospel can fill our hearts with God’s love so that you can handle it when your spouse fails to love you as he or she should.”
“Through the gospel, we get both the power and the pattern for the journey of marriage.”
The Holy Spirit is the power behind marriage. The Holy Spirit makes the truths of God known to our hearts and minds. Ephesians 5:
“First, the picture of marriage given here is not of two needy people, unsure of their own value and purpose, finding their significance and meaning in one another’s arms…No one lives a life of continual joy in God, of course. It is not automatic and constant…We are often running on fumes, spiritually, but we must know where the fuel station is and, even more important, that it exists. After trying all kinds of other things, Christians have learned that the worship of God with the whole heart in the assurance of his love through the work of Jesus Christ is the thing their souls were meant to “run on.”…If we look to our spouses to fill up our tanks in a way that only God can do, we are demanding an impossibility.”
“In verses 22-24, Paul says, controversially, that wives should submit to their husbands. Immediately, however, he tells husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church and “gave himself up for her” (25), which is, if anything, a stronger appeal to abandon self-interest than was given to the woman. As we shall see, each of these exhortations has a distinct shape–they are not identical tasks. And yet each partner is called to sacrifice for the other in far-reaching ways. Whether we are husband or wife, we are not to live for ourselves but for the other. And that is the hardest yet single most important function of being a husband or a wife in marriage.”
Tim tells the story of how he and Kathy and their 3 little boys went to visit friends in the town where they went to seminary. Tim helped Kathy all day with the boys but he really wanted to go to the bookstore. He never said anything, though, and just got increasingly more resentful to Kathy throughout the day. When he finally told her that he’d wished he could have gone to the bookstore, Kathy said ‘Why didn’t you say something! I would have loved to have given you that! I never get to give you anything!’ He realized he didn’t want to be given anything: “I didn’t want to be served. I didn’t want to be in a position where I had to ask for something and receive it as a gift….I wanted to serve, yes, because that made me feel in control. Then I would always have the high moral ground. But that kind of “service” isn’t service at all, only manipulation. But by not giving Kathy an opportunity to serve me, I had failed to serve her. And the reason underneath it all was my pride….My reluctance to let Kathy serve me was, in the end, a refusal to live my life on the basis of grace. I wanted to earn everything. I wanted no one to give me any favors. I wanted to give undeserved gifts to others–so I could have satisfaction of thinking of myself as a magnanimous person–but I did not want to receive someone else’s service myself. My heart still operated like this even though my head had accepted the basic gospel thesis that through faith in Christ we live by God’s grace alone…So why did I fail to allow my relationship with Kathy to be shaped by this gospel? It was because I believed the gospel with my head but it wasn’t operational in my heart. The ability to serve another person requires the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, to drive this very gospel into our hearts until it changes us.”
“Self-centeredness by its very character makes you blind to your own while being hypersensitive, offended, and angered by that of others. The result is always a downward spiral into self-pity, anger, and despair, as the relationship gets eaten away to nothing…Without the help of the Spirit, without a continual refilling of your soul’s tank with the glory and love of the Lord, such submission to the interests of the other is virtually impossible to accomplish for any length of time without becoming resentful…It is impossible for us to make major headway against self-centeredness and move into a stance of service without some kind of supernatural help.”
“That means paradoxically that if we try to put our own happiness ahead of obedience to God, we violate our own nature and become, ultimately, miserable. Jesus restates the principle when he says, “Whoever wants to save his life shall lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:25). He is saying, “If you seek happiness more than you seek me, you will have neither; if you seek to serve me more than serve happiness, you will have both.”
In “Confronting Our Self-Centeredness,” he gives 2 Corinthians 5:15 “And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.” “There is the essence of sin, according to the Bible–living for ourselves, rather than for God and the people around us.”
“All people need to be treated gently and respectfully, especially those who have been wounded. They will be unusually sensitive to rough handling. Nevertheless, all people must be challenged to see that their self-centeredness hasn’t been caused by the people who hurt them; it’s only been aggravated by the abuse. And they must do something about it, or they’re going to be miserable forever.”
“If two spouses each say, “I’m going to treat my self-centeredness as the main problem in the marriage,” you have the prospect of a truly great marriage.”
“If you try to do this without the work of the Spirit, and without belief in all Christ has done for you, then simply giving up your rights and desires will be galling and hardening. But in Christ and with the Spirit, it will be liberating.”
“The Christian principle that needs to be at work is Spirit-generated selflessness–not thinking less of yourself or more of yourself but thinking of yourself less. It means taking your mind off yourself and realizing that in Christ your needs are going to be met and are, in fact, being met so that you don’t look at your spouse as your savior.”
He defines Ephesians 5:21, “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ” as the fear of the Lord:
“To fear the Lord is to be overwhelmed with wonder before the greatness of God and his love.”
“She began to experience what can be called “emotional wealth”–a sense of being loved so deeply that when someone wrongs us we can afford to be generous, able to forgive.”
He gives an example: “Laura Hillenbrand’s bestselling biography of World War II hero Louis Zamperini.”
“Louis Zamperini’s emotional wounds were unusually deep and so the work of the Spirit–making God’s love in Jesus Christ real to the heart–was also very powerful and dramatic. God’s Spirit doesn’t always work in such a sudden and obvious way, but he always does this same work.”
And on and on throughout the book, every page, beautiful words about Christ and His love and glory as the foundation of human love. Here are the last two paragraphs:
“Nevertheless, at the end of the day, Christ’s love is the great foundation for building a marriage that sings. Some who turn to Christ find that his love comes in like a wave that instantly floods the hard ground of their hearts. Others find that his love comes in gently and gradually, like soft rain or even a mist. But in any case, the heart becomes like ground watered by Christ’s love, which enables all the forms of human love to grow.
“Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. . . . Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. . . . This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.” (1 John 4:7, 8, 10-11)
Tim Keller, you are a gift from God. Thank you! Your books and sermons and life show God to our world. You are with Him now and we miss you on Earth but we will see you in heaven! Thank you, Tim and Kathy Keller!