Gospel-Shaped Marriage by Chad van Dixhoorn

Author:Chad van Dixhoorn [Dixhoorn, Chad van]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL012050/REL050000/REL012120
ISBN: 9781433580710
Publisher: Crossway
Published: 2022-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

7

Family and Marriage

Recommended Reading

Ephesians 5:31; 6:1–4

There is a saying that people sometimes use when they want to be alone together: “Two’s company, three’s a crowd.” So far in these lessons we’ve been talking about twosomes, but the reality is that marriages are often crowded. In fact, they are meant to be, for married couples live in community and usually have family. We connect to community through Christ (we’ll talk about that in a later chapter). We connect to family by birth or adoption.

In the previous chapter we talked about sin and weakness in husbands and wives, following the focus of 1 Peter 3. There too we saw the usefulness of Ephesians 5:21 and the way of grace and love: if husbands are to understand and honor their wives, wives should endeavor to be understandable and honorable; if wives are to respect their husbands, husbands should seek to be respectable. In this chapter we build on that discussion, asking how, by grace, married couples can better serve their families.

Leaving Parents

There is no question that couples sometimes feel crowded, in the first place, because of their families of origin. You may remember that Ephesians 5 ends with an afterword that is forward looking: Paul reminds us that married people are starting a family. Something new is made because a husband and wife are now united.

This is exciting for the couple but often challenging for families, so preachers tell parents at a wedding that no one is losing anything; one side is gaining a son-in-law and the other a daughter-in-law. Nonetheless there is also a very real sense in which children are separating from father and mother and siblings. Honor and love and friendship continue, but a new alignment of affection and respect is created or affirmed.

In saying these kinds of things Ephesians 5 is clearly echoing Genesis 2, for when the Bible first summarizes what it means for a man and woman to be together, it mentions “leaving father and mother,” and it mentions becoming one flesh. In the old King James Version these two activities are summed up as leaving and cleaving. It is not true of everyone, but many couples find that the cleaving-to-one-another part of marriage is easy, and the leaving-parents-and-family part of marriage is more complicated.

What cleaving looks like will, of course, depend on one’s culture. For some cultures, with extended families living together, leaving means getting your own room. We’ll go out on a limb and say that this level of leaving is not optimal in a marriage, even if it is sometimes necessary. But whatever the shape leaving might take, people experience the difficulty of leaving on a personal level. If you are used to spending a lot of time visiting with parents or were perhaps living with them, then not seeing them on a regular basis can create a void in your life. This is especially true where a spouse has been particularly close to a parent.

Yet if a husband is to be a one-woman man, it is hard to see how he can ordinarily spend an hour a day on the phone with his mother.

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