What’s more important–your happiness, or God’s? That may sound like a bizarre question, but it’s a crucial one to ask when your marriage reaches a place where it’s just not…fun, anymore. In the course of a long marriage, there will be many different seasons of cherishing, happiness, struggle, delight, and disappointment. In the best of both worlds, our happiness and God’s happiness will perfectly align. But that’s not always the case, is it?
Our emotions will go up and down, but our resolve, our commitment, should be to keep our focus on what is most pleasing to God. I’ve slightly edited a section from my book, Sacred Marriage,to remind us of our high calling to seek to please God in all things, including in our marriage.
Paul answers a lot of questions for us when he writes, “So we make it our goal to please him” (2 Corinthians 5:9). Ask ten people on the street what their goal in life is, and you’ll get an amazing variety of answers.
For the Christian, Paul couldn’t be clearer: his “consuming ambition, the motive force behind all he does,”[i] is to please God. But Paul doesn’t just say pleasing God is his “consuming ambition”; he assumes it will be ours as well: “We make it our goal to please him.”
When something is the motive force behind all we do, it drives every decision we make. And Paul is crystal clear: The first question we should ask ourselves is, “Will this be pleasing to Jesus Christ?”
The first purpose in marriage — beyond happiness, sexual expression, the bearing of children, companionship, mutual care and provision, or anything else — is to please God. The challenge, of course, is that it is utterly selfless living; rather than asking, “What will make me happy?” we are told that we must ask, “What will make God happy?” And just in case we don’t grasp it immediately, Paul underscores it a few verses later: “Those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again” (2 Corinthians 5:15).
I have no other choice as a Christian. I owe it to Jesus Christ to live for Him, to make Him my consuming passion and the driving force in my life. To do this, I have to die to my own desires daily. I have to crucify the urge that measures every action and decision around what is best for me. Paul is eloquent about this fact: “We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body” (2 Corinthians 4:10).
Just as Jesus went to the cross, so I must go to the cross, always considering myself as carrying around “the death of Jesus” so that His new life — His motivations, His purposes, His favor — might dominate in everything I do.
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