Tuesday, July 29, 2008

IDEA: People marry for a lot of wrong reasons.

PURPOSE: To help listeners think about the reasonableness of their reasons for getting married.

Q: Why do people get married?

A: A lot of people get married because "it's the thing to do." As a little girl I dreamed of that long white dress and veil and never imagined that it would not be my experience. I think most people just assume that you grow up and get married – period.

Some people give in to the disastrous impulse to marry just to fill "the hole in the soul." They think it will complete them, that a person cannot be a whole person by him or herself. But marrying to make music together is different from marrying so that someone else will make music for me.

Along with that is the idea that marriage validates me as a worthwhile person. If no one is willing to marry me, then does that mean that I'm a failure? This is a big one. In our culture we have tended to devalue singleness, assuming that there is something defective or lacking in a person who hasn't been chosen for marriage. Of course many single people are single on purpose. The Bible supports that strongly in 1 Corinthians 7. Mary Stewart VanLeeuwen put it this way: "Despite the fact that Christians pay lip service to the equal value of married and single people, their near-idolatry of the family over the past century has made single Christians feel like second-class citizens at best and moral failures at worst."

Along with that, many people also get married because they are afraid of being lonely. At the end of the day they want someone to come home to – or someone to come home to them. God made us for relationship, and this deep need within us is actually a part of being bearers of the divine image. Our Trinitarian God dwells in relationship, and that desire for relationship drives a lot of people to think that marriage is the only game in town, the only way to satisfy that need. We believe that God's purpose for the body of Christ is that it should provide the context for deep and satisfying relationships. Marriage is one context for meeting our needs, but not the only one by God's design.