Insights on Marriage and Divorce

Guest (Male): Today on Insight for Living, Chuck Swindoll talks about grace in marriage.

Chuck Swindoll: Grace forgives and goes on. Grace doesn't keep a record of wrongs and then dangle them over the wife's head or the wife over her husband's. Grace gives room to grow and to be, to discover and to create. And when it's all said and done, there is the man who loves his wife as he loves himself, and there is the wife who respects her husband.

Guest (Male): Whether it's the meshing mechanical gears on an old grandfather clock or the pistons in a high-performance car, there's nothing like a splash of oil to make things run smoothly. Today on Insight for Living, you'll hear Chuck Swindoll continue his hallmark series, The Grace Awakening.

During the next half hour, we'll focus our attention not on clocks and cars, but on the home. We're looking at several passages for biblical wisdom and insight on the relationship between husband and wife. Whether you've been married one year or 50 years, all of us benefit from encouraging words and a marriage oiled by grace.

Chuck Swindoll: In 1 Corinthians chapter 7, I found that there's a good deal of information about reality. 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.

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.

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.

Your mate expects you to stay for life. It does something to a marriage when the word divorce is removed from the vocabulary and it isn't used as a threat in arguments. It does something to a marriage when you can count on your partner to hammer out differences. The reality is marriage means a lifelong commitment.

What does it take to stay? It takes grace. There isn't a divorcee listening to me right now who wouldn't agree with that. It takes grace, enormous amounts of grace. Grace to forgive, grace to go on, grace to hang tough, even though the same mistake is made over and over or the same sin committed again and again.

There's a third reality. It's over across the page, verse 27. "Are you bound to a wife?" He says it again, really five times, "Do not seek to be released. Are you released? Don't hustle a wife. Don't traffic in all the singles groups to find another mate. Don't seek a wife. God will bring one to you. You'll know. It'll be right. It'll be in His time. He has ways of doing that."

But if you should marry, look at this. "If you should marry, you have not sinned." Well, that's a relief, isn't it, to know that? And if a virgin should marry, she has not sinned. Yet, I love to read this to young couples getting ready to get married. "Yet, such will have trouble in this life, and I am trying to spare you."

Every couple leaving on a honeymoon ought to have written on the dashboard of the car, "Such will have trouble." Every wife who thinks she's found a knight in shining armor on a white horse who's going to save her from all of her ills needs to remember: Such will have trouble. Every guy who thinks he's found Wonder Woman needs to remember: Such will have trouble. Trouble is part of marriage.

Here's the principle: Marriage includes troublesome times, and it takes grace to get through them. Trouble from calamities, trouble from diseases, trouble from the old nature, trouble from children, trouble from church squabbles, trouble from relationships, trouble from neighbors, trouble from the times in which we live, trouble from the weather, trouble from the car, trouble from the school.

It will include times of trouble. I don't know how many times Cynthia has just taken my hand, looked me right in the eye, and said, "Honey, we'll make it through." That took grace. But on the front end of marriage, remember you're going to have troubles. This is so very hard for perfectionists to accept.

There's just something about perfectionism that just has to have it just right. Believe me, you're part of the problem as a perfectionist. It's just going to have trouble. If our Lord had married, there would have been trouble. Maybe that's why He didn't, I don't know. Not from Him, He was perfect, but His wife wouldn't have been. Can you imagine being married to Him?

Wives, your husband isn't the Lord. Husbands, neither is your wife. I don't care how often you go to Bible classes or how much time you spend in the church. Let's have a little grace. A man may be extremely competent in his work, but he needs a lot of grace in his home. A wife may be a wonderful mother, but she needs a lot of grace to be a wife. She's got to live with you. It works both ways.

Now, this requires some responsibility. I suppose I'd have to say as we turn to Ephesians 5, it just means we have to grow up, doesn't it? It's hard to grow up married, but you have to do it. Some people wait until then to do it. It just requires being really authentic.

I like the way one man puts it. God does not want tame pets to fondle and feed; He wants mature, free people who will respond to Him in authentic individuality. Someone passed along a thought to me as I was talking about suffering recently. He said, "In every marriage, there are three rings: an engagement ring, a wedding ring, and suffer-ring." Isn't that true? You just don't get one for it, you just live with it. It seems as though at times it comes like salt: when it rains, it pours.

Some of you right now need an enormous amount of grace just to survive in your marriage, in your home. Now, in the fifth chapter of Ephesians, there is a wonderful series of thoughts beginning at verse 15. He begins with a concern for how they walk. He says, "Be careful how you walk," not they, but we.

"Be careful how you walk. Don't walk as unwise, but walk as wise people. Make the most of your time because days are really evil. Do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is." So there is the need to walk in wisdom, walk within the parameters of God's will. In doing so, don't get drunk with wine, but instead be drunk with the Spirit. Be intoxicated with His power. Be filled to overflowing. Let Him take control of your life. What a wonderful series of commands.

Careful how you walk. Don't be foolish. On the contrary, be filled with the Spirit. Now, when filled with the Spirit, look at the results. They're right here for us to read. You have a melodious heart. You speak to one another in psalms and hymns, and you make melody with your heart to the Lord. There's a music about your life. There's a harmony. There's a beauty about carrying the melody or singing in harmony through life.

Furthermore, you have a grateful heart, verse 20: "Giving thanks for all things in the name of the Lord Jesus." And then you have a submissive heart, verse 21. You know I'm getting ready to set you up, don't you? You're filled with the Spirit, so you have a melodious, grateful, submissive heart. Wives, let it flow into your marriage.

You would fight to the end for submission to your Lord. Carry it out with your mate. Wives, be subject to your own husbands as to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, He Himself being the savior. As the church is subject to Christ, you didn't misread me, says Paul, as he puts this verse in these other words, as the church is subject to Christ, so ought wives also to be in everything with their husbands.

What is this responsibility I'm talking about? What is the wife's primary responsibility? If I may word it, blending together thoughts from Corinthians and Peter as well as Ephesians, I would say it's this: to know and respect herself so well that she can give herself to her husband without hesitation.

In the sweet, Spirit-filled atmosphere that affects a life, it begins to affect the home and there isn't a struggle for authority and rights. There is a willingness to release. That takes grace, such grace. And some of you say, "If you knew my husband, you would know how much grace it takes." I have no argument. Many a husband I meet would take a lot of grace to live with that man.

But that's the challenge of it all. With the Lord Jesus supremely in charge of your life and with the Spirit of God energizing your actions and attitudes, your words, your responses, it is amazing what that does. It sets that grace free. Just as He loved you in an unlovely state, so you can stoop and love another in an unlovely state.

Now, husbands, you and I are beginning to feel a little smug, but there's a lot more verses written to us than written to our wives here. Husbands, verse 25, look at that very next word: "Love your wives." Love your wives as Christ, look at the analogy again, it's back to the Christ and the church, who gave Himself up for her.

I love the way someone put it: the wife loves her husband so much to live for him, but the husband loves his wife so much he would die for her. The wife isn't given the analogy of the Savior's death; she's given the analogy of the Savior's life. But the husband is told the Savior gave Himself up for her. That's love, men. Enough to die for her.

It just flashes through my mind that I have stood alongside men who have buried their wives prematurely and almost without exception, I've had them fall on my shoulder in tears and say, "Why? Why did it take this to reveal to me what I had in my wife?" Husbands, our primary responsibility, you will see as you read through this, is to love our Lord and ourselves so completely we can give ourselves to our wives without conditions.

That's our job. To love our Lord and equally ourselves so completely that we can give ourselves to our wives without conditions. We take the word "if" out of our vocabulary. "If you will do, if you will say, if you will respond, then I will give myself." It's not the way the Savior loved us or loves the church.

Verse 28, notice husbands ought also to love their own wives as their own bodies. I tell you, it doesn't take long in a fitness place to know how much men love their own bodies. Again, grace is essential, so essential. It doesn't flow easily. And you know, I am just finishing a book called *Pleasers* by Kevin Leman.

*The Pleasers*, subtitled "Women who can't say no and the men who control them." Very insightful. I feel like he's been reading our lives. Listen to some of his comments. The cost of marriage is higher for wives than for husbands. If you were talking about good mental health and psychological well-being, the men have it better every time.

Despite all of their complaints about marriage, more women than men find marriage a source of happiness. They cling to marriage regardless of the cost. Now I want you to hear these words from Dr. Leman as he talks about pleasing at any price, ladies, which you may have called submission, but it's not.

I continue: Down through the centuries, women have been the pleasers, men the controllers. Robert Karen, who conducts workshops for men and women on power and intimacy, refers to the old and new systems of male-female relationships. Our parents and grandparents knew a world that had stabler values and much more clearly defined roles for men and women.

Power and responsibility were clearly assigned and everyone knew where he or she stood. The system was often unfair to women, but it did offer them a certain amount of security. If a woman was willing to accept the ground rules and the limits that marriage imposed on her, she could be quite happy.

A woman's job then was to keep the home, raise the children, and be there for the whole family. The man's job was to go out and earn the living and make contributions to society. Men were in effect put on a pedestal and wives relegated to second-class citizenship. Enter women's liberation in the latter part of the 20th century, and all this inequality is supposed to be dying out. But is it? he asks.

Then he answers: Women are finding that having it all is nothing that special. In fact, they're catching up with the men in having heart diseases, ulcers, and other stress-related illnesses. Now they are allowed to get good jobs and earn excellent incomes, but the emotional balance of power at home is still much the same. Most women still do the giving, most men continue to take.

The woman is the one who is more capable of compassion, support, and being there when needed. Men still aren't in touch with their feelings the way women are. They are less capable of reaching out and making emotional contact. But he concludes they are very capable of reaching out to take whatever the woman has to offer. And in so doing, they often take advantage.

I thought his word picture was great. He calls pleasers the moths and controllers the flame. Men, be awfully careful in quoting thoughts regarding submission unless you've really done your homework. It is a grand power play for the male, especially the male who carries a Bible and loves verses on submission written to the wife.

You know what? The better acquainted I become with the grace of God, the less I care about authority. The less threatened I am. The more I become acquainted with the grace of God, the more I want to affirm and release my wife. The less I want to dominate and control her. Now this is not what my daddy taught me. Of course, my daddy was wrong.

He didn't mean to be, it was just the way he saw it, and it lacked biblical support. Grace forgives and goes on. Grace doesn't keep a record of wrongs and then dangle them over the wife's head or the wife over her husband's. Grace gives room, room to grow and to be, to discover and to create.

And when it's all said and done, when there is this kind of love, look at verse 33. There is a man who loves his wife as he loves himself, and there is the wife who respects her husband. She doesn't need something from somebody else intimately; she has it with her man at home. I don't know how many years I wasted in jealousy.

I married a fellow and his bride a number of years ago, and I warned her about the jealousy I sensed in him. "Oh no," he said, "I've got a handle on that." A few months later, she came in and he came in and she said it's gotten to where now he takes down on the odometer the miles I drive. First thing he does when he comes home, he doesn't come in the house, he goes and checks the dashboard and sees how many miles I've driven.

Have we gotten to that? Is that authority? That's incredible insecurity. Would our Savior do that with His mate? Grace. Grace is full of gratitude. It's full of room. It's full of comfort zones. It has a capacity for compassion. Don't you wish you'd heard all of this before you got married? Don't you wish it could just come as easily as a person can preach it?

Don't you wish your mate wanted it as much as you do? See, that's the game plan. That's why the selection of a mate is so terribly important. And that's why grace, when it finds its way into a home, causes such incredible strength to be passed on to children. A marriage oiled by grace.

Guest (Male): A marriage oiled by grace, that's the title of Chuck Swindoll's message today. You're listening to Insight for Living. 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. Don't miss the conclusion to Chuck Swindoll's message, A Marriage Oiled by Grace, on the next Insight for Living.