Christian Marriage

Today's Scripture

Yesterday Lewis defended chastity. Today he turns to marriage itself — and to the question of what love really is once the music stops.

Genesis 2:24 — "Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh."

Mark 10:9 — "What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate."

1 Corinthians 13:4-7 — "Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."

The Big Idea

Our culture says love is a feeling, so when the feeling fades, the love is over. Lewis says the feeling is only the starter motor. Real love is a promise kept — a deep, quiet unity built by the will, by habit, and by grace. That kind of love is called covenant love, and it is a picture of how God loves us.

Reflection

What the movies get wrong

Think about how almost every love story ends: the wedding, the kiss, the music swelling, the credits. The story stops there because the storytellers quietly believe the interesting part is over. The feeling — that fizzy, can't-stop-thinking-about-them feeling we call "being in love" — is treated as the whole point.

Lewis says that belief sets people up for heartbreak:

"People get from books the idea that if you have married the right person you may expect to go on 'being in love' for ever. As a result, when they find they are not, they think this proves they have made a mistake and are entitled to a change — not realising that, when they have changed, the glamour will presently go out of the new love just as it went out of the old one." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Chasing the feeling from person to person is like chasing the new-car smell. It always fades — not because the car is wrong, but because that is what new-car smell does. Lewis is not mocking the feeling. He thinks being in love is glorious. He is simply telling the truth: no feeling can be permanent, and anyone who builds a lifelong promise on a temporary feeling has built on sand.

Notice what Paul does in 1 Corinthians 13:4-7. In the Bible's most famous passage about love, there is hardly a feeling in sight. "Love is patient and kind... It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful... Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things." Patient. Kind. Bears. Endures. Those are verbs of the will — things you keep doing at 11 p.m. when you are tired and the other person is being difficult. Lewis turns that observation into a definition:

"Love as distinct from 'being in love' is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Read that slowly: a deep unity, maintained by the will, strengthened by habit, reinforced by grace. Will, habit, grace. Not one of those three is a mood.

A promise you can actually keep

Marriage begins with vows. "For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part." Notice what the vows do not say: as long as we both feel like it. A wedding is two people making a promise precisely about the days when the feeling will be missing.

This is where Lewis catches our culture in a contradiction. If love is only a feeling, why promise anything at all?

"The idea that 'being in love' is the only reason for remaining married really leaves no room for marriage as a contract or promise at all. If love is the whole thing, then the promise can add nothing; and if it adds nothing, then it should not be made." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

But people in love want to make promises — it is practically the first thing they do. Deep down, lovers know their love is meant to be permanent, and a promise is how you build something permanent out of changeable people. Lewis is careful, though, about what can honestly be promised:

"A promise must be about things that I can do, about actions: no one can promise to go on feeling in a certain way. He might as well promise never to have a headache or always to feel hungry." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

You cannot promise a feeling. You can promise faithfulness — to stay, to care, to forgive, to keep choosing this person. The Bible's word for that kind of binding promise is covenant: a promise that holds two people together no matter what comes. And covenant is God's own language. Deuteronomy 7:9 — "Know therefore that the LORD your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations." When a bride and groom bind themselves with vows, they are imitating, on a small scale, the way God loves.

That is why Jesus speaks of marriage with such seriousness. Mark 10:6-9 — "But from the beginning of creation, 'God made them male and female.' 'Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.' So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate." Hold fast is grip language — the same stubborn loyalty God shows his people. Marriage, in Jesus's eyes, is not a contract between two customers. It is a joining God himself performs.

The quieter, deeper unity

So what happens when the fizzy feeling fades — as Lewis insists it must? His answer is one of the most useful pictures in the whole book:

"Being in love first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

The explosion that starts the engine is loud and thrilling. The engine itself just runs — mile after mile, year after year, through weather the explosion never saw. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing a wedding sermon from a Nazi prison cell for his niece, put the same truth in one unforgettable line:

"It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

Think about an old couple you know. He pours her coffee first, every morning, without being asked; she still laughs at the story he has told four hundred times. Nobody would call it fireworks. It is something better — two lives so woven together that Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 reads like their biography: "Two are better than one... For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow... A threefold cord is not quickly broken." Notice the third strand in that cord. Ecclesiastes hints at what every lasting marriage discovers: two people alone are not enough; the cord holds because God is braided in. Martin Luther — a former monk who was surprised by the joy of his own marriage — said it plainly:

"There is no more lovely, friendly, and charming relationship, communion, or company than a good marriage." — Martin Luther, Table Talk

And here is the surprise Lewis saves for the people willing to stay: giving up the thrill is not losing it. It is trading it for something that keeps coming back.

"Let the thrill go — let it die away — go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow — and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

People who clutch at the first thrill lose everything. People who walk through its fading find a quieter, deeper happiness on the other side — and then, strangely, new thrills they never expected. That principle runs all through the Christian life, and Colossians 3:14 names the thread that holds it together: "And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony." Put on — like a coat, like a uniform. Daily. Deliberately.

The marriage behind every marriage

Why does the Bible care so much about wedding vows? Because marriage was never only about the couple. From beginning to end, Scripture uses marriage as its favorite picture of something bigger — God's covenant love for his people.

Listen to God proposing to unfaithful Israel: Hosea 2:19-20 — "And I will betroth you to me forever. I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love and in mercy. I will betroth you to me in faithfulness. And you shall know the LORD." Betroth means to pledge yourself in engagement. God says it three times — forever, in steadfast love, in faithfulness — to a people who had repeatedly broken his heart. This is covenant love at full strength: love that keeps the promise to someone who has not kept theirs.

Then the New Testament turns to husbands and raises the bar to the sky. Ephesians 5:25 — "Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her." The measure of a husband's love is not how he feels but what Christ did — and what Christ did was die. John 15:13 — "Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends." At the cross, the divine Bridegroom kept his vows to a faithless bride, for better or worse, at the cost of his life. Tim Keller explains why that love is the one every human heart is actually looking for:

"To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God." — Tim Keller, The Meaning of Marriage

Maybe you are married, and the feeling is thinner than it used to be. This chapter is good news: the quieter love you are living is not the death of romance but the engine the explosion was for — and grace is available for every mile. Maybe you are young, or single, and marriage feels far away. This chapter is still about you, because the deepest marriage in the universe is already yours to enter. The Bible ends with a wedding: Revelation 19:7 — "Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself ready." Every faithful human marriage is a small signpost pointing to that day — when the God who is fully aware of the worst about us welcomes us as a beloved bride, because his love was never a mood. It is a covenant, sealed in the blood of Jesus, and he does not break his promises.

Going Deeper

Find a married couple whose love has lasted — grandparents, mentors, friends at church — and ask them one question: "What kept you together on the days the feeling wasn't there?" Listen for the will, the habits, and the grace hiding inside their answer. Then write down one promise-shaped act of love you can do today — not a feeling to manufacture, but an action to take — for a family member or friend you have been taking for granted.