Marriage and Family Life

Marriage and family life.  A wonderfully fruitful and deeply blessed union - when all is working well.  Marriage is a union of two people, deeply in love and committed the idea that they will continue in this state of bliss through all the trials and triumphs successes and failure, joys and pain that will come to them in life. So often, too often the Living is replaced by duty, the romance of loving lost in the "contentment of relationship", and the laughing gives way to the hurly-burly of getting through the day. It aught not to be so. We can, we should we must realise the early dreams of "Living, Loving, Laughing".

Our society has attempted to define marriage in ways that can not be defined by biblical record: marriage is an institution ordained by God. Basically, the Christian view of marriage is not that it is primarily or essentially a binding legal and social contract. The Christian understands marriage as a covenant made before God and in the presence of fellow members of the Christian family. Such a pledge endures, not because of the force of law or the fear of its sanctions, but because an unconditional covenant has been made. A covenant more solemn, more binding, more permanent than any legal contract.

Marriage is a relationship between man and woman intended by God to be a monogamous joining, intended to be a permanent bond in which many needs are satisfied - the need to love and be loved, the need for deep friendship, for sharing, for companionship, for sexual satisfaction, for children, the need to escape loneliness. Marriage ought to be a bond of love, reflecting the love Christ has for his people, a bond of sacrificial love where husband and wife have become one.

You may have a slightly different interpretation of what marriage is all about. In reality, most of us come into the marital relationship with certain specific beliefs and expectations in regard to what marriage is. As frightening as this may sound, most of us learn about marriage by living in our own family of origin. It is there that we have observed our own mother’s and father’s marriage relationship. Whether we admit it or not, we carry within our minds a definition of marriage, a belief system of what marriage is about, with subsequent roles and expectations that we think our partner and we ourselves should fulfil. All of these make marriage a potentially exciting and wonderful experience, yet potentially detrimental and destructive.

From these definitions, we develop a philosophy of marriage and family. This foundational belief is rarely challenged prior to saying, “I do”. Thus, most enter marriage with a romanticised view that is all too quickly destroyed by life’s realities. Unless our basic beliefs and philosophy have been successfully modified by God’s word and practical realities, we are destined to repeat certain ingrained patterns that we are convinced are “truth”. In rebuilding (or building) a solid Christian foundation, we must begin by understanding a biblical philosophy of marriage and goals for marriage.

This book is now also available as an  ebook from Smashwords: Marriage and Family Life