The Magic of Mundane Matrimonial Maintenance

Automated transcript of the sermon audio, generated with OpenAI Whisper (small.en). It has not been checked against the recording and may contain errors, especially in names and Scripture references.

I get the much coveted right after lunch session, where I’m tasked with having a point and keeping you awake. So why don’t we begin with a word of prayer, and we’ll ask God for his help together. Heavenly Father, thank you for your word and how it informs, really should inform all of what we do, but how it informs how we go about marriage. And we pray that even as we do engage in this tune up, Today, it would, no doubt for some land is more of an overhaul, but still that we would be able to keep it in perspective as to what it is.

That is, like so many oil changes and topping off the fluid levels, we are just checking in and making tweaks and adjustments and touching base in such a way as to allow the vehicle, in this case our marriage, our marriage is to operate well. It is clearly your design that we have vibrant, thriving, fruitful marriages because how else could we accurately portray to the cosmos the relationship between Christ and his bride? That is not one that is marked by infighting or strife or selfishness and so we know that you want for us to do well. So we ask for your help. We know we don’t deserve it but we ask for it anyway and we trust that from you, from your gracious character flows all kinds of helps. Those helps come in various forms in people and in your word and please help us to be teachable and to submit accordingly. We pray this now in Christ’s name. Amen. So my talk is entitled, The Magic of Mundane Matrimonial Maintenance and it is not accidentally alliterative and the idea is that maintenance is rarely flashy.

There’s a joke you’ve probably heard about a husband who never tells his wife that he loves her. When asked why this was the case he says, well when we got married I told her I loved her and if something changes I’ll let her know. On his wedding day, this buffoon probably said something like, I, Jonathan, take you, Sonia. And telling his wife that he loves her now and again would serve as a reiteration of that vow. And it is a joke, of course, but it is too near the mark for many in our culture today, and his behavior will have exactly the sort of effect that you’d imagine when he misses that opportunity to reiterate that vow.

Not surprisingly, if that guy treated his car the same way that he treated his wife, he’d be replacing the engine rather than replacing the oil. And conveniently, cars have warning lights. Your job to know what the warning lights mean. A warning light on your dashboard is an indicator that something requires attention. And of course, some are more dire than others. your car’s computer is giving you a heads up that an oil change will be in order soon, or that perhaps you should find a gas station in the next 50 miles if you wish to make it 60. But if, for instance, you wait for the oil light to come on to put oil in your car, you’ve already waited too long.

So sometimes the warning light is an indication that something has really been neglected. Warning lights like these alert us that while we are distracted with other no doubt important things, parts of the car are in neglect. And of course, it’s important to know your spouse well enough to be able to discern the warning lights, one from another. The check engine light could mean 100 different things. So you could take it down to the auto parts store and have them scan the code, right? The gas warning light is a different thing altogether, as is the tire pressure warning light and so on. And while such warning lights are helpful, yes, of course, far better is attentive maintenance as you are going such that the warning lights are rendered unnecessary.

Periodically checking fluid levels, brake life, tire wear, checking air, cabin, oil filters, are all a formula for better longevity. And if it’s done well, nobody even notices. The lion’s share of maintenance that you do is not visible from the exterior. Nobody can tell if you put gas in the car this morning on your way to church just by looking at it, but they can safely assume by virtue of the fact that your car is running, that there is oil, sorry, that there is gas in it. Likewise, what I want to suggest today is really not flashy, but I assure you it is effective. We know it’s effective because the gospel is effectual.

The gospel has its intended effect every time by God’s good grace. God uses death to bring life, not just in our salvation, but also in our sanctification. He does so in our relationships. But it takes faith to walk this out. Just like you trust that changing the, you take it down to the Valvoline place, you don’t know what they did under there. So you know you gave them the money and they might have changed the oil filter, they might not have. They might have replaced it with water rather than motor oil, but you take it on faith that because the car continues to operate well, it is operating well because of that maintenance.

So when we make small investments, when we do small acts of maintenance, they don’t have a a dramatic effect immediately almost ever. But they do have an effect. And it takes faith to walk that out. Sometimes we at least act like we’d prefer to have control over the results. That our spouses were always predictable. A husband empties the dryer and his wife just melts into his embrace. She makes him a sandwich and he responds by rubbing her feet for an hour. This, of course, is silly. A moment’s honesty reminds us that that’s a terrible idea. Because if my wife gave me as much love as I’ve earned or I deserve, we’d have a pathetic marriage and a miserable life.

As it turns out, there are significant moments, of course, along the way, when you’re standing at the altar or when your children are born. There’s these milestones. But the more frequent and the more significant are the mundane marriages, marriage moments. Those are what make us or break us. Marriages then are like cars and lawns and kitchen knives and diapers. They require regular attention as a normal feature of stewardship, let alone of peak performance. If you want the diaper to perform at its peak, don’t wait until you smell something. And so, there are multiple ways to maintain a marriage, but for our purposes I’m going to just focus on two today.

Namely, the pursuit of personal holiness and the rehearsing of marriage vows. So we’ll get right to it. The pursuit of personal holiness. In order to have a vibrant, healthy, thriving marriage, you need to be the right kind of person. And holy people make better spouses. Some of you are like, oh good, because I’m holy. Well holiness doesn’t happen overnight. I mean positionally it means set apart, right? So in one sense, like sanctification does positionally happen overnight when you are redeemed, progressive sanctification, practical sanctification takes a lifetime to work out. Holiness, likewise, takes a lifetime to work out.

It doesn’t happen in a moment, no matter how hard you try. No matter how awesome your quiet time is, you’re not wammo, instantly holy. And to be a good husband, you just can’t be a jerk. Sorry, guys. Unloving or jerk husbands cannot expect their wives to thrive no matter how godly those wives are. Because their wives are being starved. They’re being starved of the food, of the love that their husbands are intended to provide. Holy people make better spouses. To be a good husband you can’t be a jerk. And also to be a good wife you just can’t be a controlling nag. See I told you this wasn’t going to be novel. Nagging or disrespectful wives cannot expect for their husbands to thrive if those men are perpetually needing to triage marital conflict which is going to happen if you’re a controlling nag, no matter how godly the husband is.

It is true that our identity is first in Christ and not in our spouses. But by God’s design, the primary human influence in your sanctification is your spouse. You are supposed to make your spouse stronger and holier in your living together. That is the plan of God. We’ve heard a good deal from Ephesians chapter five today, but bear with me as I read 22 to 28 in its entirety. Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.

Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her that he might sanctify her having cleansed her by the washing of water with the Word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor without spot or wrinkle or any such thing that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way, husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. There is a mutual responsibility and a mutual benefit to the husband-wife relationship. And it is the sanctification. And I’ve always taken great courage in knowing that as part of the church, I comprise part of, however small it may be, the bride of Christ, in which Christ is personally invested in presenting her to himself, pure and spotless.

So Christ is personally invested in my sanctification, and that is a good thing. Likewise, I ought to regard my wife’s sanctification as a personal matter. I should take that personally and take that responsibility to help sanctify her with seriousness. As it turns out, a wife’s godly submission to her husband brings about tremendous influence on her part to help him grow as a leader in godliness. A godly wife who is submissive to her husband has tremendous influence to help him grow in godliness. who submit well to their husbands drive them to lead. But her love must be an outflow of her love for Christ or it won’t be sustainable.

Her own personal holiness affects her godly submission. The wife who pursues her own personal holiness will be better equipped to trust Christ and to submit to her husband. A wife who actually trusts God doesn’t need to take matters into her own hand to try to control her husband. She is not compelled to try to rule over him. But understandably, the greater emphasis in this passage is given to the men. Just as Christ is the sanctifier of his bride, so men are to work to sanctify their wives. must abandon a dammit dereliction and adopt then Christ-like responsibility for their wives. So, don’t be like the first Adam, be like the second Adam in your husbanding.

And a husband who practices service and sacrifice will find for his wife that she is flourishing. That is the deep magic of marriage. The more you give, the more you receive. If you sacrifice, you are blessed. If you insist on being served, you’ll never receive enough. These things have their substance in the Gospel, and we know that the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God. 1 Corinthians 1, 18. Men didn’t come up with this principle that death brings life, and neither can they understand it apart from the Spirit. So just as only the godly wife will be able to rightly submit to her husband, only the godly husband will be able to rightly serve and die for his wife.

There are a host of passages which help us in this. Ephesians 5, 25, husbands, love your wives. We just read this. As Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that is the consummate standard that husbands are to strive for. First Peter 3, 7, here’s another high one. Likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are errors with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered.” Colossians 3, 19, husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them. These are pretty direct words. This is pretty straightforward.

And the man who can apply these verses well must be certain kinds of men. They are holy men. Hebrews 12, 14 says to strive for this.

for peace with everyone and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord. And of course where is that more applicable than in our homes? So peace should be an aim. Like you should be shooting for peace, but you can’t be shooting primarily for peace. You should be looking at that but can’t be the ultimate aim. It must be an ancillary aim. Peace must be a byproduct of the holiness. If you’re looking to keep peace in your household of sinners, that’s going to bite you in the end. If you are looking just to keep the peace in your home, you’re not looking for a home of thriving. As the context suggests, peacemakers must themselves be holy or they have missed the entire point. The thriving marriage presupposes personal holiness. And only the humble person can be holy. And a humble person practices his holiness and service to his spouse. Holiness and humility are inseparable. So a mark of holiness is humility. Washing your spouse’s feet is the sort of spirit of this holiness that we are talking about. So if your marriage is not thriving, start with

repentance for your own personal role in that, your own personal sins, and then men take responsibility for the situation, realize that it won’t be fixed overnight, pray for faith, and get to work being the sort of guy who has an awesome marriage. If you do want to have a good marriage, pursue personal holiness and keep doing it. Keep going day by day, every day in undramatic, non-glamorous fashion. Read your Bible, pray, confess your sins, repent from them. Pray for your spouse and do it every day. This is a necessary kind of marriage maintenance. And largely the point that I’m trying to make is that the magic is in the mundane.

What mundane, a definition for it of, is boring. And there are some ways in which boring is great. The dramatic might be exciting, but the wrong kind of excitement in marriage is bad. So next, I’m suggesting that the rehearsal of marriage vows is a fantastic form of matrimonial maintenance. And by the rehearsal of marriage vows, I’m referring to bringing to your own mind your promises to your spouse through your actions, like on the regular. So that kind of rehearsal, the same kind of rehearsal that the bitter person does, like rehearsing it over and over in his mind. That’s why his memory is so good.

Likewise, you need to keep before your own consciousness the promises that you have made to your spouse and that can be good and orienting and helpful. I, Jonathan, take you, Sonia, to be my wedded wife to have it to hold from this day forward for better for worse for richer for poorer and sickness and in health to love and to cherish till death do us part. Even in my reviewing of my notes for this, I didn’t say that out loud because I wanted to say with a clear conscience that I’m pretty sure that I haven’t said that out loud since July 10th of 1999, which would happen to be the first time I said it. And that was my vow back in the summer of 99 and I meant it then and I mean it now. However, though I haven’t said it, I’ve rehearsed it hundreds and hundreds of times in the context of what I’m calling maintenance, marriage maintenance. Of course it’s work and it takes work but it’s good work. I take you, Sonia, is an act of volition. It is on purpose. It is intentional. It is deliberate. Now it

doesn’t rule out the idea of God being the agent and bringing of the two of you together because, I mean, Jesus assumed that what God has brought together let no man separate, Matthew 19.6. But it does signify the agency of the spouse in marriage. I have responsibility and I choose you. Each chooses the other. To have it to hold is actually, it’s an old legal term that is referring to property ownership. It’s a matter of possession, and not as a master owns a slave, but rather as a steward owns his responsibilities. A husband with affection for his wife knows well this sentiment. He is jealous for her in all the good ways.

Additionally, you get to have and hold your spouse in ways that are unique to you. The sexual relationship is about intimate knowledge, and a vow to have and to hold your wife is a vow to have and hold no others. spirit as well as in letter. For better or worse, anticipates the obstacles to this commitment that will inevitably come. Paul does promise that those who marry are gonna have trouble. They will have worldly troubles according to 1 Corinthians chapter 7 verse 28. It’s not a matter of if, but a matter of when.

One of you has a layoff. One of you gets really sick. One of you has a parent who passes away. So it is wise to expect them and then to enter into your covenant anticipating them and then be resolved beforehand that you won’t quit when things get hard. When you encounter the troubles, the sorts of troubles that the Bible promises are going to happen. How many tragic stories do you hear about families that don’t survive the death of a child? It drives them apart. They’re just not the same afterwards. Or when those that couple are empty nesters, they don’t have the kids around keeping them together anymore. Worldly troubles are certain, but they’re also not unique to married couples. They are a promise to humanity. And for my part, I would much rather endure the worldly troubles of the Bible promises with Sonia’s help than without it. Sadly, not everybody feels this way in doing a little bit of research for this talk. I came across a Pew Research study conducted in 2019 and they would not publish this part but

where I found the study, that author had talked to the authors of the study directly and they said that according to their research in 2019, 58% of evangelicals between the ages of 18 and 44 thought that cohabitation was fine, so long as you intended to get married. Now in the article they were asking the question rhetorically, is cohabiting sin? To their credit they at least said yes, but the fact that a question like that would even be found as novel is telling about where we are today. So again, to review, if this study is remotely accurate, the findings are terrifying, but that 58% of evangelicals from ages 18 to 44 would think that fornication is just fine, as long as you’re going to get married, as long as that is your plan. Well, the reasons are just not surprising. Our culture has an absolute allergy to commitment, an aversion to any sort of binding commitments that are going to cost them anything. The Bible has a lot to say about vows.

Leviticus chapter 27 is all about vows, They are weighty, binding commitments that ought not to be taken lightly. Solomon said in Ecclesiastes chapter 5, “…when you vow a vow to God, do not delay paying, for he has no pleasure in fools. Pay what you vow. It’s better that you should not vow than you vow and not pay.”

And if you’re going to call on God as a witness when you make this vow, that also is something you should not enter into lightly because he’s not going to forget what you committed to do. So the response on the part of many is then why not just enjoy all the privileges of the vow without any of the responsibility associated with it. And of course that’s not just sin, it’s a shame and it doesn’t work. You don’t actually get the benefits without the responsibility. You don’t get the binding nature of a promise without receiving it from the other person as well. And it does have its benefits. Living in covenant promise adds tremendous security and perspective. Unsurprisingly, Sonia and I have had plenty of arguments. And I’ve never once had to question her commitment to me or mine to hers. I’ve never once had to wonder if this is going to be the thing that drove us apart.

Like it’s just never entered my consciousness. And divorce has never been a consideration or a temptation because we love each other, but even more than that, because we made a commitment to each other. And that is the kind of the constant program that is running in the background of every date night of every argument.

And why wouldn’t you want that? So then, if this is also magical and mystical, and if the magic is really in the mundane, what is happening on date night? This is gonna be G-rated just so you know, in case you were concerned. So we’ll consider an on the ground example of matrimonial maintenance, and that is date night. the prioritizing of time together. So what’s really happening on date night? Well, date night presents an opportunity to rehearse the vow to have and to hold. It introduces other opportunities as well, and even other vows, but the thriving marriage is marked by deep association, by co-inherence, togetherness amid distinction.

It is marked by companionship. That is having and holding. When I go on a date with Sonja, I am reminding myself and her of my unique commitment to her. She is mine and she wants to be and I am hers and I want to be. The only other women I go on dates with are my daughters and that’s totally different. My covenant commitment is to my wife and only to my wife. And date night reminds us both of this reality as we rehearse that vow, to have and to hold. When you go on a date, you’re also rehearsing the, for better or worse part, because dates are not always convenient. It is funny how you can tell a couple that’s been married for a while when their dates are things like trips to the grocery store.

And I mean, they’re excited. I get excited to, all right, we have to go to Fred Meyer. But I’m with Sonia. Like, she will walk the aisles with me at Home Depot, not because she’s excited, but because we’re together. Yeah. So for better or worse, as in your time together, you’re reminding one another that you are in it for the long haul. For our part, for years, Sonia and I have alternated family night and date night on Fridays. And there have been plenty of times where we’ve carved out time to connect when the week was crazy, or when we didn’t particularly feel like doing it in the moment, but we had never regretted it because it’s good.

And just as C.S. Lewis has reminded us that favorable conditions never come, convenient times to connect with your spouse rarely drop in your lap. So you need to prioritize and schedule them. With that said, there are lots of in-between opportunities to connect with your spouse. Sure, of course. As you pass in the kitchen, as you drive home at night from church, the kids are in the back seat. You can talk. You can connect. But it’s also worth making sure that it happens enough to schedule it. Talk, ask questions. Listen, lather, rinse, repeat. This serves as a ballast for your marriage. It might be a sail on all sides with the waves of trouble and trial, but that weight at the bottom of the ship keeps it upright in the midst of those waves, in the midst of all the chaos.

It’s that regular personal connection that does this. When we prioritize then our association proactively with our spouses, the blessings flow. Those blessings are by no means guaranteed, but we do know that God does bless and he does so in consistent patterns. Blessings follow faithfulness, and faithfulness is almost never glamorous. There’s more to all of this than is evident on the surface, and that’s why I’m calling it magic, because it’s not naturally explainable. When a couple prays together, their hearts are knit together. Bitterness dies, God hears, and you can’t see that happening. When a couple makes love, they get opportunity to prefer one another ahead of themselves.

They express oneness of flesh. They renew their covenant. And I’ll hit this later, but I could say here, and they speak to the cosmos. You are going to communicate to the watching angels what Christ’s relationship with the church is like. Whether you’re doing it well or you’re doing it badly is the question. But we are saying something to our kids and to the universe about the nature of Christ in his church by our union with one another. When a couple prioritizes time together, they make marriage jealousable before their children. Do you want your kids to want what you have? If you don’t, that’s a problem with you.

You need to have an awesome marriage that you want for your kids to want. So they need to see it being blessed and thriving and flourishing so that it looks good. And not just so you can have grandkids to bounce on your knee, but because you want them to be blessed and happy. They express their importance to one another and they put feet to that good old fashioned have and hold part of the vow. But marriage is itself magical. It’s the context in which the fruit of love is itself further, more image bearers. Of course there are perversions and distortions of this throughout our culture, but marriage is the proper context for the exhibition of this magic.

It is in marriage that we see the chief expression blessing others as a means of receiving blessing. Bless others you will be received. In the marriage bed, the greatest way to receive satisfaction is to serve your spouse. It is the picture to the cosmos of Christ and his bride, the church. Seeing all this, of course, takes eyes of maturity and eyes of faith, which God alone can give, but make a mistake. It’s real. So as you practice this sort of routine, marital maintenance, we renew these practices and remember these realities. So I’ll wrap up here in the interest of time. I’ve tried to argue that the mundane, non-glamorous routine maintenance is critical for a thriving and a fruitful marriage.

And that routine maintenance means frequent connection, communication, association. When it comes to our marriages, three of my very favorite principles have clear application. First, consistency trumps intensity. I love this one. It applies to saving money, working out, eating vegetables, mowing your lawn, raising kids. It also applies to matrimonial maintenance. If a couple’s relationship is on the rocks, it is rarely the case that going on a cruise is going to be some sort of panacea. It is not going to fix everything. I’m not saying don’t go on a cruise, just don’t expect it to fix everything. Connecting with your spouse once a week for three hours is a poor substitute for 10 minutes three times a day.

Is it better than nothing? Of course it is, but communication today is so simple. It is so streamlined. We have little excuse for not making our spouses a part of every aspect of our lives, day by day. Second, maintenance is better than repair. If you spend five minutes a day tidying your bedroom, you will enjoy a regularly tidy bedroom. And you’ll accomplish more in those 35 minutes a week than you will in one 60-minute session every Saturday. And you don’t have to live in filth between Sunday and Saturday. Ironically, we cite time as the reason that we don’t tidy our rooms. If I mow my lawn twice a week, it takes me about 45 minutes a session.

If I mow it once a week, it takes me only a little bit longer except it’s ugly because there’s clusters of grass all over the place and then takes me about another hour to pick up those bundles of grass. So which is better? If I spend $30 every 5,000 miles to change my car’s oil, it ensures that I won’t need to spend $5,000 to replace the engine when it burns out in a year. If I control my portions when eating dinner, that yields a better quality of life. And a longer one than if I indulge to my heart’s content every night. It also saved me a lot of money on medical bills. If I invest in my relationship with Sonya, little by little, every day, regularly, like clockwork, in non-dramatic fashion, if I work hard to maintain it well, I will not need to do as much repair and repentance owing to relational damage that I have inflicted.

Day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year, this is not flashy. But third, have faith. And this is the principle of faithfulness. God uses the acts of obedience of fallen people, messed up people like you and me, to do amazing things.

Many of you have just finished reading Bed and Board by Robert Capon, and in the postscript entitled dinner at our house. There’s a little vignette of mealtime around the Cape and family dinner table. There was nothing romantic about it. While I wish you would have painted a more appetizing picture of the mundane, to do so probably would have weakened his point, namely this, that the mundane is glorious. And that, I suppose, is what prompted me to want to share this with you all today. Yes, the silver bullets are attractive. The panaceas are attractive, but they’re elusive. Really hard to find. Cathedrals, however, are built one brick after the last non-glamorous brick until the whole structure is put together and it is built to last. Children learn more by observation than my hearing. What will they observe. Your marriage did not happen as it is for good or ill simply overnight.

This means that one perfect day is not the silver bullet that’s going to fix everything and no one bad moment need to find your marriage or you for the rest of your life. What we do day in and day out as a matter of faith and habit matters. Being present matters. It’s not glamorous but it is glorious. We live in a spiritual world which means that there is always more than meets the eye to everything. As Christians we know that God is at work and when we see it, great. When we can’t, it’s no less real. For most of us, the way things turn out in our parenting and our marriage is way better than it should be. At least based on our faithfulness or our lack thereof, and what is the reason for that? Because there’s a huge gap between what should be and what actually is, and that gap is covered by God with grace. And we also know that He uses, as we’ve said, the faithful actions of fallen sinners to effect really great things. There’s tremendous value then in just showing up. Show up. Be there for your spouse.

Prioritize meal times around the table. Have couch time after dinner if that’s your thing. Have morning devotions over coffee before the kids are even up. Check in via text messages throughout the day. Talk before bedtime. Make the marriage bed inviting for rest as well as for play for your life companion. And all All these connections, be intentional, do it on purpose. Because you’re putting feet to your vows and God is using them to bring about something glorious. It’s a kind of matrimonial maintenance that is delightful and makes life enjoyable. And may God give us eyes of faith as we practice such maintenance in our own marriages.

Let’s pray. Father, we are grateful that we didn’t write this story, but that you did. And we pray that you would give us faith to walk it out. We’re not done yet. Give us faith to eat and rest and recharge for the next talk. We pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.