Marriage, and the Love That Fulfills the Law

It is a strange thing about marriage: the people who have it can be the slowest to see it. You can live for years beside one of the best gifts God ever handed you and look straight past it, busy, distracted, certain it will keep. And then something shakes it, and you see, almost too late, what was there the whole time. None of what follows is written from a height. The one writing it entered marriage already broken and went on breaking things, and he knows the consequences far better than he ever lived the ideal. So do not read this as a man who has it together handing down advice. Read it as someone still learning to tell the truth about what he did, so that he can honestly long for how it ought to have been, and who would gladly spare you the same long road. What this letter holds up is how marriage is meant to be; the ache underneath it belongs to someone who fell short of it. Lean, then, not on him but on the only authority underneath it all: the shape Scripture gives marriage and the way the church has long held it, a covenant before God, an image of Christ and His church, and a love that turns out to be nothing less than obedience to Him.

A covenant, not a contract

Begin where the Bible begins. Marriage is not an arrangement two people invent and may quietly dissolve; it is a covenant God Himself makes and joins. "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh" (Genesis 2:24). The prophet names God as the witness to it: the LORD "hath been witness between thee and the wife of thy youth… yet is she thy companion, and the wife of thy covenant" (Malachi 2:14). And Jesus seals its permanence: "What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder" (Matthew 19:4-6). A contract is kept while it serves you; a covenant is kept because you gave your word before God. Everything else in this letter rests on that floor.

The picture it was made to be: Christ and the church

Marriage is not only a covenant; it is a portrait. Paul takes the deepest text on it straight to the gospel:

Ephesians 5:25, 33 · KJV

Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it… let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband.

It opens with the posture both are called to first: "submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God" (Ephesians 5:21). The husband's standard is not comfort or authority for its own sake but the cross, sacrificial, self-spending love. The wife's is honor and respect. And Peter ties the whole thing back to the life of prayer: husbands are to "dwell with them according to knowledge, giving honour unto the wife… that your prayers be not hindered" (1 Peter 3:7). How you treat your spouse reaches all the way up to whether your prayers get through. Chrysostom, preaching on this passage, told husbands the measure of their love is Christ's own: be willing, he said, even to give your life for her, as Christ gave Himself for the church. Augustine summed the goods of marriage as three: children, faithfulness, and the unbreakable bond. None of that is sentiment; it is design.

Love is obedience, and obedience is love

Here is the hinge the modern mind misses. We treat love as a feeling that arrives and departs on its own. Scripture treats love as a thing you do, and ties it directly to obeying Christ. "If ye love me, keep my commandments" (John 14:15). "For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments: and his commandments are not grievous" (1 John 5:3). To love is to obey, and to obey is to love. Which means love and sin are pointed in opposite directions: every sin is, at bottom, a refusal to love. Paul makes it explicit, and it lands hard on marriage:

Romans 13:8, 10 · KJV

Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law… Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.

"Love worketh no ill." That is the test. If something I am about to do would work ill to the person I vowed to love, then whatever it feels like, it is not love, and it is not obedience. The whole law, Paul says, is fulfilled in one word: "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" (Galatians 5:14), and your nearest neighbor sleeps beside you. So loving your spouse is not a separate project from following Christ. It is the same obedience, worked out at the closest possible range.

The problem is first your own heart, not your spouse

When a marriage turns cold or loud, the instinct is to diagnose the other person. Scripture turns the lens around. "From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members?" (James 4:1-2). The conflict is exposing something in me, a desire to be right, to be comfortable, to be in control, to be admired, that I have quietly set above God and above my spouse. Jesus says deal with that first: "first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly" (Matthew 7:3-5). Sin is vertical before it is ever horizontal. The marriage will not change until the heart does, and the heart changes before God.

Love is dying to self

If love is action and the cross is its measure, then love costs the self. "Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves. Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others" (Philippians 2:3-4). Paul's portrait of love is not a feeling at all; it is a set of self-denying habits: "Charity suffereth long, and is kind… seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil" (1 Corinthians 13:4-5). A marriage runs on small daily deaths to self, and is starved by the slow insistence on getting your own way.

The daily things: guard your words, and pray together

This is where the love becomes ordinary and practical, and where a marriage is actually kept or lost, in the small hours of a Tuesday. Two habits matter more than people think.

Guard your words. "Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers" (Ephesians 4:29). The old counsel holds: if you have nothing good to say, say nothing at all. "Whoso keepeth his mouth and his tongue keepeth his soul from troubles" (Proverbs 21:23); "let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath" (James 1:19); "a soft answer turneth away wrath" (Proverbs 15:1); and never carry it overnight: "let not the sun go down upon your wrath" (Ephesians 4:26).

Pray. Praying together is a good and powerful thing. Sitting down with each other, even holding hands, and taking turns aloud, honestly, about what you are thankful for, what you need, even what you want, is one of the most knitting things two people can do: "if two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing that they shall ask… there am I in the midst of them" (Matthew 18:19-20). It is also one of the first habits to quietly slip away, and many couples, the one writing this among them, find that somewhere along the way they stopped. If that is you, do not let the guilt of the lost habit talk you out of prayer altogether. Pray for your spouse even when you pray alone, quietly, for them and for the marriage. And when you do not know what to ask, you are in honest company: "we know not what we should pray for as we ought" (Romans 8:26), so pray the words the Lord Himself gave us when His disciples asked Him to teach them, "Our Father which art in heaven…" (Matthew 6:9-13; Luke 11:1). "Pray without ceasing" (1 Thessalonians 5:17). The distance between two people closes not in one dramatic act but in a hundred quiet ones, many of them spoken to God when no one else hears.

And here is a warning worth taking to heart: the quarrels you leave unsettled do not only stand between you and your spouse, they stand between you and God. Peter tells husbands to dwell with their wives considerately and to honor them, "that your prayers be not hindered" (1 Peter 3:7); how you treat the one you married can dam up your own prayers. Jesus says the same of worship: "if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee; Leave there thy gift… first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift" (Matthew 5:23-24). "And when ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have ought against any" (Mark 11:25). Paul would have us pray "lifting up holy hands, without wrath and doubting" (1 Timothy 2:8). Reconciliation is not separate from prayer; it is the doorway into it. Settle the fight, forgive the debt, and the line to heaven opens again.

What quietly corrodes it: hiding and shame

If words and prayer build a marriage, hiding tears it down from the inside. Have you ever felt ashamed of something you have done, or are still doing, and hidden it from your spouse for fear they would not understand? The hiding itself does damage you may not even feel yet. It takes constant work; it makes you defensive when an ordinary question drifts near the thing you are concealing; it makes you irritable, evasive, sometimes dishonest, and finally afraid of being found out. Over time it shuts down the very communication a marriage lives on.

You may need to change course, and "live blamelessly," if there is anything you would be embarrassed, ashamed, or sorry to have your spouse discover, or that you assume they could not bear to know. The way out is old and plain: "Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed" (James 5:16). "He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy" (Proverbs 28:13). David knew the weight of the cover-up in his body: "When I kept silence, my bones waxed old" (Psalm 32:1-3).

But be clear about where blamelessness comes from. It is not that you scrub yourself clean by an apology. "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9), and it is Christ who finally presents us "holy and unblameable and unreproveable in his sight" (Colossians 1:22; Ephesians 1:4). Confession to your spouse is the fruit of that grace, not the source of it. The reward is real: the weight lifts, and a new openness grows where the secret used to sit. The marriage bed itself is meant to be kept honest and undefiled (Hebrews 13:4).

No sin is ever only your own

Here is the lie under most hidden sin: "it only hurts me." It never does. To stray from the truth "affects everyone and not just ourselves," and it "multiplies in ways beyond our understanding." Sin is a departure from the way things ought to be, and like a disease it does not stay politely in one cell. Scripture is blunt about it. When one man, Achan, sinned secretly, the whole nation bore the consequence: "Israel hath sinned" (Joshua 7:1, 11). "For none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself" (Romans 14:7). "A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump" (1 Corinthians 5:6; Galatians 5:9). And a marriage is the lump nearest the leaven: "if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand" (Mark 3:25). The private sin you are sure costs no one but you is already, quietly, being paid for by the person you promised to love. That is exactly why love, which "worketh no ill to his neighbour," cannot make peace with it.

Forgive as you were forgiven

And because two sinners share one roof, a marriage cannot survive without constant forgiveness. The standard is not how much you feel like it, but how much you have been forgiven: "be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you" (Ephesians 4:32; Colossians 3:13). Jesus told of a servant forgiven an unpayable debt who then seized a fellow servant over a trivial one, and warned that the unforgiving will not be forgiven (Matthew 18:21-35). Held against the mountain Christ canceled for you, your spouse's debt to you is small. Forgive it, and keep no ledger; love "thinketh no evil."

Faithfulness, in body and in eye

Faithfulness is more than not leaving. Paul tells husband and wife not to withhold themselves from one another, "that Satan tempt you not" (1 Corinthians 7:3-5); the closeness of marriage is a guard, not an afterthought. The wise man says find your delight at home: "rejoice with the wife of thy youth… be thou ravished always with her love" (Proverbs 5:18-19). And the line is drawn back at the heart and the eyes, long before the body: "whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart" (Matthew 5:28). Guarding a marriage means guarding what you let your gaze and your imagination feed on.

When it is hard: a covenant kept through the storm

Some seasons are simply hard, and the vow was made for those, "for better, for worse." Love "beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things" (1 Corinthians 13:7). The trials are not only damage; God uses them: "tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope" (Romans 5:3-4). A marriage that endures a hard year together is often stronger on the far side than one that never faced anything.

Grace is the power, and marriage is meant to make you holy

One thing must be said plainly, or the rest becomes a crushing to-do list: you cannot do any of this in your own strength. "It is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure" (Philippians 2:13). The love that keeps a marriage is poured in, not worked up. And God's first aim in your marriage may not be your comfort but your character; He uses the daily friction of two lives to sand away your selfishness and make you holy. Read that way, even the hard parts are mercy. A marriage is one of the chief places God grows a Christian up.

There is a strange freedom in writing as exhibit A. Scripture tells the rich man to boast not in his riches but "in that he is made low" (James 1:9-10), and Paul learned to "glory in [his] infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon" him (2 Corinthians 12:9-10; Galatians 6:14). Admitting the failure is not wallowing in it; it is getting out of the way, so that what a reader sees is not the man but the grace that holds a marriage together when the man could not.

Where this lands

Do not wait until you have nearly lost it to see what you were given. A marriage is a covenant before God and a living picture of Christ and His church. The love that keeps it is not a mood but obedience, and obedience that, by working no ill, fulfills the whole law. It guards its words and keeps praying, together where it can and alone where it cannot; it deals with its own heart before its spouse's; it refuses the hidden sin precisely because no sin is ever private; it confesses, forgives as it was forgiven, stays faithful in body and eye, endures the hard seasons, and leans the whole weight of it on grace. Some who write such things are not looking down at you but back at what they failed to guard, longing for how it ought to have been and asking God to redeem even that. Do not wait as long as some of us did. We love because He first loved us, and we keep our covenant because He keeps His.

Study the passages

Read them in context. Links go to BibleHub.

• Genesis 2:24; Malachi 2:14; Matthew 19:4-6 — marriage as covenant, one flesh, joined by God
• Ephesians 5:21-33; 1 Peter 3:7 — Christ and the church; love, honor, and hindered prayers
• John 14:15; 1 John 5:3 — love is keeping His commandments
• Romans 13:8-10; Galatians 5:14 — love works no ill; love fulfills the law
• James 4:1-2; Matthew 7:3-5 — the heart, and the beam before the mote
• Philippians 2:3-4; 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 — love as dying to self
• Ephesians 4:29; Proverbs 15:1; Ephesians 4:26 — guarding the words
• Matthew 18:19-20; 1 Thessalonians 5:17 — praying together
• James 5:16; Proverbs 28:13; Psalm 32:1-5; 1 John 1:9 — hiding, confession, cleansing
• Joshua 7; Romans 14:7; 1 Corinthians 5:6; Mark 3:25 — no sin is private
• Ephesians 4:32; Matthew 18:21-35 — forgive as forgiven
• 1 Corinthians 7:3-5; Proverbs 5:18-19; Matthew 5:28; Hebrews 13:4 — faithfulness, body and eye
• 1 Corinthians 13:7; Romans 5:3-4; Philippians 2:13 — endurance, and grace as the power

Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub. This letter grew out of two newspaper columns by the author, rewritten and expanded, and weighed against the historic Christian and biblical-counseling reading of marriage rather than offered as private opinion. See also "Judge Not"? and the Security of Salvation.