Insights on Marriage and Divorce

Guest (Male): Today on Insight for Living, Chuck Swindoll describes a marriage oiled by grace.

Chuck Swindoll: Horizontal relationships are marked by nitpicking and petty demands and guilt-giving judgmental statements rather than forgiveness and understanding and encouragement to press on and do better next time. To deliberately let God do the training and the shaping of lives.

Guest (Male): There comes a time in every marriage when the honeymoon begins to fade, life takes over, and tensions rise. At those defining moments, it requires deliberate effort to place your partner’s desires above your own. Today on Insight for Living, you’ll hear Chuck Swindoll present another message in the Hallmark series, The Grace Awakening.

And during the next half hour, we’ll focus our complete attention on husbands and wives, looking for biblical directives on how to nurture our relationships with patience, understanding, and grace. It’s a practical subject for newlyweds and veterans alike. Chuck Swindoll begins with this helpful introduction.

Chuck Swindoll: We live by encouragement and we die without it. Sometimes slowly, sometimes sadly, and sometimes angrily. No matter if we’re the CEO of a Fortune 500 company or the night janitor who empties wastebaskets, we all need affirmation and encouragement. It’s the oil that lubricates our souls, and that oil keeps it from grinding to a rusting halt. The lack of encouragement today is almost epidemic. Have you noticed that? It’s the reason people dread going to work in the morning. It’s why kids often cannot wait to get out of school, and why so many people can’t wait to get out of a marriage. Stop and think about that one.

What is it that enables us to give our mates this crucial encouragement? It is grace. That’s right. It’s grace. We’re back to that word again: grace, the lubricant that lessens the friction in marriage and keeps the gears in our relationships running smoothly. Therefore, no study on this subject of grace would be complete without our addressing its importance in a marriage. Your marriage, and frankly, my marriage as well. In today’s message, we plan to discuss the essential value of grace in any husband-wife relationship. We’re going to be addressing three areas in the process: the realities, the responsibilities, and the roles we fill in marriage.

In preparation for this, let’s open our Bibles together to the first of three passages I want us to consider today. First, I want to read a few verses from 1 Corinthians 7, verses 3 through 5, from the New Living Translation. Then we’ll go to Ephesians 5. But first, hear the word of the Lord, 1 Corinthians 7:3-5. "The husband should fulfill his wife’s sexual needs, and the wife should fulfill her husband’s needs. The wife gives authority over her body to her husband, and the husband gives authority over his body to his wife. Do not deprive each other of sexual relations, unless you both agree to refrain from sexual intimacy for a limited time so you can give yourselves more completely to prayer. Afterward, you should come together again so that Satan won’t be able to tempt you because of your lack of self-control."

And then a passage equally searching is in Ephesians 5, verses 15 through 28. "So be careful how you live. Don’t live like fools, but like those who are wise. Make the most of every opportunity in these evil days. Don’t act thoughtlessly, but understand what the Lord wants you to do. Don’t be drunk with wine because that will ruin your life. Instead, be filled with the Holy Spirit, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves and making music to the Lord in your hearts. And give thanks for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. And further, submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.

"For wives, this means submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For a husband is the head of his wife as Christ is the head of the church. He is the savior of his body, the church. As the church submits to Christ, so you wives should submit to your husbands in everything. For husbands, this means love your wives just as Christ loved the church. He gave up his life for her to make her holy and clean, washed by the cleansing of God’s word. He did this to present her to himself as a glorious church without a spot or wrinkle or any other blemish. Instead, she will be holy and without fault. In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as they love their own bodies. For a man who loves his wife actually shows love for himself."

Guest (Male): You’re listening to Insight for Living and the Hallmark series, The Grace Awakening. You’ll find helpful resources at insight.org. And now, the message from Chuck Swindoll, A Marriage Oiled by Grace.

Chuck Swindoll: Well, I can’t speak for you, but I can speak for myself when I say that perhaps the word obsessed by grace is not too far off the mark. There’s something about growing in an understanding of this great truth that just begins to captivate you and win you, and it begins to flow over like a river that has left its banks into so many areas. I wouldn’t usually wish this on anyone, but I do wish this week you could have read my mail. It was just full of affirming and encouraging words from so many of you who have been gracious and thoughtful enough to say that.

You have talked about how grace has begun to minister to you. I forget the exact wording, but some of you have talked about how it has helped you feel so mature. It has added a sense of dignity to you rather than being treated as children and told every move to make and every assignment of life and precisely where you should go in every detail. Some of you have used words like affirmed and encouraged, freed. One woman was honest enough to say, "Where have I been all my life?" In fact, she closed her letter by asking, "Where have you been all my life? Why am I just now hearing it? Who’s kept this a secret?"

To be honest about it, it hasn’t been a secret. The grace of God has been known through the centuries and has been clearly recorded in his word. Vertical grace that comes from above, where God in his love stoops to the sinner lost without hope, having nothing to give back to a holy God. Sinful, unlovable, disinterested. The sinner can only look up in some sense of longing, and the Father comes and in grace gives and gives and gives in such a way that we can never earn it and certainly could never repay it, nor should we try. It is an insult to grace to try to match God’s gift in return.

Vertical grace has not been a secret. I think, however, dimensions of horizontal grace have been kept a bit of a secret. Churches are full, it seems, and running over with legalism rather than with grace. Horizontal relationships are marked by nitpicking and petty demands and guilt-giving judgmental statements rather than forgiveness and understanding and encouragement to press on and do better next time. We have talked about some of this matter of grace being human and honest enough to let others be. To forgive and to let others disagree. Grace even in ministry to deliberately give people room, to deliberately let God do the training and the shaping of lives.

It doesn’t mean we’re free to run wild and to disobey and call that grace. That’s a perversion, that’s abusing grace. We even looked at that. But free to develop and to cultivate a life free, as I said, to be human. I think the subject would be incomplete if we dealt with it all and left out marriage, however. For I think it is in those secret places of life we reveal ourselves as being or not being people of grace. Or even our relationship with our secretaries, if you happen to have one as I do, or with individuals who work behind the scenes one-on-one with us when no one else is looking.

Eugene Peterson, in a fine book entitled Run with the Horses, writes this: "Only a few people make the historical headlines, but anyone can become human. Is it possible to be great when you are taking out the garbage as well as when you are signing a peace treaty? Is it possible to exhibit grace in your conduct in the kitchen as well as in a nationally televised debate?" He continues, "I once knew a man well who had a commanding public presence and exuded charm to all he met. What he said mattered. He had influence. He was always impeccably dressed and unfailingly courteous.

"But his secretary was frequently in tears as a result of his rudely imperious demands. Behind the scenes, he was tyrannical and insensitive. His public image was flawless; his personal relationships were shabby. He lacked grace. Grace to be what one really is when no one is looking. That kind of grace." Now, I cannot speak as thoroughly on behalf of the wives, though I will attempt to do so as I can regarding husbands. And I think quite honestly, without trying to sound super humble about it, that it’s really our move, men.

In most cases, I have found when the man does his job, he has very little trouble with the wife doing hers, except in cases where there is gross illness and just a case of an emotional invalid on the part of the wife. I don’t believe I’ve found an exception where when the man is doing his part as he should, the wife is beautifully fulfilling her role. That’s all part of the leadership in the home. You wives may have married someone who has become great. He wasn’t when you married him, but he has become that, at least in the eyes of the public. People applaud him and they once didn’t.

They pay great sums of money, perhaps, to accept his services and they listen with rapt attention to his words. He may have that ability to turn little companies into giant companies and to make great waves in the world. But you know differently. You know the man as he really is. Dag Hammarskjöld, in his fine work Markings, writes, "Around a man who has been pushed into the limelight, a legend begins to grow as it does around a dead man. But a dead man is in no danger of yielding to the temptation to nourish his legend or accept its picture as reality. I pity the man who falls in love with his image as it is drawn by the public opinion during the honeymoon of publicity."

You know, ladies, what that man is like because you see him in the kitchen. You see him when you have to put out the garbage. You see him when he takes advantage of you. You know another side of him and you’re not nearly as impressed. And to be fair about it, men, that woman you’ve married may not have fulfilled all the dreams you had for her. She may not be all that you expected her to be. You may have hoped for much more than you now are with. And you listen to the literature of our day and it won’t take you long to figure out how to solve that: just get another partner. Just find someone else. Unfortunately, you have to take you with you when you go.

I was encouraged to find in my study that those people who have made great dents in life have not really been the people who were the shakers and the movers in the eyes of the public. Thinking back in my life, it was the people who exhibited grace. Just stop and think. Can you name the Secretary of State ten years ago? Can you name the Heisman Trophy winner five years ago? Can you name the one who won Best Director and got an Oscar for it four years ago, or the Nobel Prize winner a year ago? But you will never, ever forget in your life the person who stooped and helped you in your wound and with your need.

My plea today, men and women, is that we not limit my thoughts to the home, though I will be speaking of that directly, but that you will understand, whether single or married, that these qualities are needed in your life to become great. The great people are not always the ones who make the headlines. In fact, they seldom are. I’ve found that the talk shows seldom interview people of integrity. I’ve found that those folks who really make a difference in homes and hearts are not even known that well in the community.

I was encouraged to locate in the New Testament three chunks of scripture. I don’t think I’ve ever referred to them in that way, but I think that’s the way I want to look at them today. In 1 Corinthians chapter 7, I found that there’s a good deal of information about reality and the grace it takes to face the realities. I’m going to mention three of them. In Ephesians chapter 5, a familiar passage, at least the last section of it on the home, I found there’s something to be said there about accepting responsibilities, to grow up and to have the grace to carry out our job as wife or as husband in a home.

And then finally, in the third chapter of 1 Peter, I found some things about our roles. What is the role of the wife? What is the role of the husband? And can I really find the grace to fulfill that role? First of all, the realities. And I know when I mention reality, that’s a hard word for some of you to live with because we all tend to be idealistic. We all have these dreams that we wanted for our marriage and we wanted for our partner or wanted for ourselves. And so let’s take off the mask of perfection and let’s live with the reality of our humanity.

As I read in verses 3, 4, and 5, I find a first reality. The subject has to do with intimacy in marriage: sexual intimacy, intimacy in life, intimacy in conversation, intimacy in affection. And I notice right away something said about rights and duties. "Let the husband fulfill the duty or his duty to his wife and likewise also the wife to her husband." Look at the reciprocal part in that. "The wife doesn’t have authority over her own body; the husband does." And before you bruise your elbow, men, "also the husband does not have authority over his own body; the wife does."

It goes both ways, of course. This is a partnership. This is teamwork. This is give and take. This is share and receive time. "Stop depriving one another," he says, "except by agreement for a time that you may devote yourselves to prayer. But don’t get so spiritual about it that you stop being intimate. Come together again lest Satan tempt you because of your lack of self-control." Let me give you the first of three realities that must take place in all of our minds, and it’ll take grace to accept them. First, marriage requires mutual unselfishness. Marriage requires mutual unselfishness.

Notice what it says about duty and authority and depriving. The application is broader than sexual intimacy, though it includes that. What does it take to operate that unselfishly? It takes grace. Grace to accept, grace to forgive, grace to respect, grace to understand, grace to affirm, grace to restrain, grace to give, and grace to take gratefully. Marriage requires mutual unselfishness. Let me assure you of something before I go any further, and I devote these words to you who are yet to be married. If you tend toward being more selfish than not, if you’re the type who clings to your own rights stubbornly, please do the world a favor and don’t marry.

Because marriage is constantly a challenge to selfishness and the grace to release rights and to give, though not given back. There’s a second reality. Drop down to verse 10. To the married, he addresses specifically, "To the married I give instruction, not I, but the Lord, that the wife should not leave her husband." The end of verse 11 concludes that thought, "and that the husband should not send his wife away." Now to the rest, he says, those not yet married, "To the rest I say, not the Lord," meaning the Lord hasn’t spoken on it, it hasn’t been revealed in his word, nor have the disciples taught us what the Lord said in their presence. This is fresh revelation in the progress of time.

"I say this to you as well. If any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever and she consents to live with him, let not that husband send her away." And the same for the wife: "A woman who has an unbelieving husband and he consents to live with her, let her not send that husband away." You may have married outside the Lord and you’ve now come to know Christ, but your husband or your wife has not. Here’s the second reality: marriage means a lifelong commitment. A lifelong commitment. Unless you’re ready to do that, don’t marry. Do your partner a favor. Don’t marry.

Yes, there are exceptions. Yes, they are rare. But I believe in the grace of God that there are exceptions for the fulfillment of this throughout life. This isn’t the time or place to get into that, but the underlying or the basic rule that I would underscore here is that when you marry, you marry for life. He says it not only once but four times. "The wife should not leave her husband," verse 10. "The husband should not send his wife away," verse 11. "Let him not send her away," verse 12. "Let her not send him away," verse 13. Once would be sufficient. Twice would be eloquent. Three times would be a shout. But four times? There’s permanence here. Please do me a favor. Even though you’ve heard me talk about this before, please don’t turn this off. Your mate expects you to stay for life. For life.

Guest (Male): There’s much more from this compelling message on marriage we need to hear. You’re listening to Insight for Living and a message from Chuck Swindoll titled A Marriage Oiled by Grace. Now, if you’d like to hear Chuck’s message in its entirety, remember this study comes in the comprehensive series called The Grace Awakening. There are 15 sermons in the set, and you can purchase the CDs or download the audio files. Go online to insight.org or give us a phone call at 1-800-772-8888.

Again, today’s sermon comes from the series called The Grace Awakening. Thank you for giving faithfully to this listener-supported ministry. We have no other means for covering costs other than the voluntary gifts from loyal friends like you. And when you give, you’re making it possible to share sermons like the one you heard today on marriage to men and women all over the world. You can send your donation to Insight for Living, Box 269000, Plano, Texas 75026.

Or if it’s easier, just give us a phone call right now at 1-800-772-8888. We’ve prepared a number of other resources for you to help you deal with a number of pressing issues related to marriage and family. Just go online to insight.org/marriage. More from Chuck Swindoll about a marriage oiled by grace next time on Insight for Living.