What a great title! I can’t wait to read what the secret is to a successful marriage! I always assumed that those who had been married a long time must have some secret to their longevity. So, what is your secret? How have you maintained a strong marriage after 47 years? Well, honestly, friend, I don’t have one. And being even more open, I have never had one. In full disclosure, no one has ever had a secret to longevity in marriage!
I hope you’re not disappointed. Yes, we just celebrated our 47th year together in holy matrimony. It’s hard to believe how long we’ve lived together as husband and wife. To God be the glory, great things He has done! People ask, but we don’t have any secrets to share with you. I don’t want to spoil your eagerness to celebrate many years of happy marriage by promising some kind of inside secret, only for you to find there is none. I especially don’t want to disappoint newlyweds who read a title like The Secret to a Successful Marriage expecting an answer, only to discover there isn’t one. Bummer! Now what will you do?
A day after our anniversary, I spoke with a friend who shared in ministry with me many years ago. He is now 94 years old. We hadn’t spoken in a while, so he naturally asked how we were doing. I told him we’d just celebrated our 47th anniversary and that we were doing fine. He then shared that he and his wife will celebrate 67 years together this August. I was in the middle of writing this paper when he called, so I jumped at the chance to ask him about his 67 years of marriage. I was only one year old when they got married! Incredible! And guess what? He and his wife have no secret either. Their long-enduring marriage is an incredible testimony of their love for God first, and each other second. He told me it was their love for Christ that kept them together. Well, that’s no secret!
Truthfully, nothing about an enduring marriage is a secret when you get down to it. Everything we need to know about life and godliness is written in the Bible. 2 Peter 1:3 His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence.
So, you may be asking yourself, are you saying the Bible has something to do with “all things that pertain to life and godliness,” including marriage? Well, yes! The Bible is not a rule book; it’s a workbook. It’s a life and marriage manual. God’s Word challenges us to work through its truths to live a life of godliness and Christlikeness in every area of our lives. The Bible has had a transformative effect on our lives because it brought the story of redemption and reconciliation to God into our lives. It has transformed how we look at life and how we live it.
This happened when the gospel of Jesus Christ became a true reality in our lives, not just a religious experience. The promise of 2 Corinthians 5:17 is true: “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.” We became new persons in Christ because we believed and obeyed the gospel. We repented of our sin and asked Christ, by faith in His promise of salvation, to save us. (Romans 10:13) It wasn’t denominational, it was decisional, it wasn’t about religion, it was about relationship. We came to Christ by a faith-based decision to repent and turn to God for mercy to save us from our sin. It wasn’t about getting religion; it was about having a true relationship with God on His terms. Our marriage relationship is based upon our relationship with Christ. (christinyoucounseling.com/salvation-3)
A life in Christ is a life that the Bible teaches as being fully surrendered to Christ. Galatians 2:20 I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
Our lives are hidden in Christ. We seek the same things; our thinking about life in Christ, who is our life, is the same. We are putting off the things in our lives and marriage that are harmful, and putting on the things that are helpful to the progression of gospel influence in our lives and marriage. (Colossians 3 and Ephesians 5) Peace, harmony, happiness, and joy come from a life lived “by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
The gospel drew us into a relationship with Christ. (christinyoucounseling.com/category/gospel) That experience drew us into relationship with others in a completely new way. As believers, we have both a mandate and a method for how we live, love, and serve one another. We’ve learned to love one another as believers first, and as a couple second. This kind of love is reflected in our marriage and finds its source in the God who first brought us into a relationship with Him, “so that we might live through him”.
1 John 4:7-11 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
The gospel defines relationships: “if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” What does that mean for marriage? It certainly means that God’s love given and modeled through the gospel can and does give us the blueprint for having oneness and wholeness in our marriage. The gospel has given us the greatest of all relationships: our covenant relationship with God. That relationship brings life and meaning to the covenant relationship of marriage. You and I have the greatest opportunity, and the greatest potential, to be everything God wants us to be in our marriage, our home, and every relationship, because of the gospel. But we must be gospel-centered in our relationships to realize it. (christinyoucounseling.com/the-one-flesh-relationship — see also The Gospel: The Hope for Mankind and Marriage)
Because of the love of God shown to us through the gospel, we are called to love one another as God loved us, in every relationship. God demonstrated His love for us by giving us His Son, Jesus Christ, who died on the cross for our sins. Romans 5:8 says, But God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. And the beloved verse John 3:16 tells us, For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. This verse conveys a great deal, but one thing I’ve always believed is true about it: God loved the world so much that He did something about it. He took action. He gave His only begotten Son.
Love is a verb, an action word. 1 Corinthians 13 lists a series of action words describing how love behaves. Each quality of love listed is an act of love. In His Word, God not only defines love and demonstrates how it acts, He also gives us the perfect model of love in action: the giving of His Son. Jesus then perfectly modeled that love, showing us in His life an intentional way to demonstrate God’s kind of love toward others.
So, there is no secret to a loving, lasting relationship. God has openly displayed in the Bible a loving, lasting relationship through His Son, Jesus. Our marriage has a loving, lasting relationship because we draw from the same model and the same source of truth. The Bible, the source of truth, teaches us about relationships, and that same source holds us accountable to God for how loving or unloving we are toward one another. Our mutual love for God and His Word compels us to hold ourselves to the standard He teaches us there. And we have the perfect model of love in action, lived out in Jesus Christ. The Bible is the source of truth; that is no secret. What it says about relationships is not a secret.
We are both believers who have experienced God’s love through the gospel that saved us from our sins. (John 3:16) “We have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us” (1 John 4:16). We see through the same lens; we are on the same page in our relationship, “because God’s love has been poured into our hearts” (Romans 5:5). Harmony and continuity in our marriage come from the gospel being lived out in our lives before one another. This is where likeness in our relationship overcomes the differences we have as individuals.
We are distinct individuals who are uniquely different, and this manifests itself in a variety of ways. Our upbringing, our family of origin, and the way we think about any number of things have all shaped the kind of person we are. There are so many examples of how our personalities and the simple fact that we are male and female make us different as individuals. All of this has a bearing on how we sometimes look at life. There is only one copy of each of us, and we coexist with conflicts that occasionally stem from our differences. Our unity in the gospel is the only thing that holds our one-flesh relationship together. Our love for God and our life in Christ cause us to focus on sameness rather than difference.
We have learned together, we have grown spiritually together, and held to the same truths about God. We are far more alike than not as time has passed us in our relationship with Him and each other. That is what has held the things together in our one-flesh relationship. Let me borrow from the passage below and insert it as a comment about our relationship as two different, distinct individuals who have a one-flesh relationship: “we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us”, and that deepening knowledge and understanding have helped us to focus on our sameness in Christ, not our differences as individuals. It has deepened our love for God and for each other. It has caused us to appreciate our different makeup as individuals, it has caused us to lose our identity as individuals, and become more in line with the one-flesh relationship that the Bible teaches. We are more at one with each other and less at odds with one another; we are more in alignment with the one-flesh relationship described in the Bible. (Genesis 2:24, Matthew 19:5, 6, Ephesians 5:31–32)
1 John 4:16-21 So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.
God’s love has been perfected in us, and is being perfected in us still, as we grow together in faith. We are growing together as believers, first toward God, then toward one another, then toward our family and others. Horizontal, human love isn’t enough on its own; it must be enhanced by God’s love. Or better said, when we love God first and foremost, we learn to love one another best. Our love is reciprocal: “We love because he first loved us.” (1 John 4:19) God is the initiator; He loved us first, and we were drawn to love Him in return.
So it is in our marriage: we love one another because we see the love of God in each other, and we’re drawn toward one another because we see that love being actively reciprocated and reproduced in our lives. We love each other more as our love for God grows through our relationship with Him. I can’t overstate how much growth in Christ matters to our growth in love for one another. I love my wife more as I see her grow in Christ, as I see her model Him in her life. (2 Peter 3:18) We share a passion to love God first and foremost, and to grow more and more into the likeness of Jesus Christ. Because of that shared passion, we continue drawing closer to each other. That mutual reciprocal love is what keeps marriage lively. Because our relationship with God is not stagnant, our relationship with each other doesn’t become stagnant. When relationships become stagnant, harmony suffers, and couples begin to grow apart.
There is no secret to the harmony in our marriage. We are bound together in Christ, and the gospel and its attributes that first drew us to Christ are being reproduced in our relationship. We show kindness and tenderheartedness toward one another. Not always, we do have our differences, and yes, we occasionally get argumentative (we call this “having a Christian discussion” 😊). But we’ve learned an important biblical principle for those moments: to seek to be kind and tenderhearted, to forgive as Christ forgave us. Ephesians 4:32 Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you. We try to remind ourselves to ask the question. Does this argument please God and bring Him ultimate glory? Are we being Christ-like, or are we being unlike Christ?
Finally, and most importantly, we seek God’s glory in whatever we do — in our lives, our marriage, and our family. 1 Corinthians 10:31 So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.
Pleasing God by bringing Him ultimate glory is the Christian’s highest goal in life. That has been our fixed focus throughout our marriage: to bring God glory through our union. We also share a fixed purpose. The Christian’s ultimate purpose is to be conformed into the image of God’s Son, Jesus Christ, and we share that purpose together as a couple. This kind of focus and purpose is what makes a marriage successful and pleasing to God. (christinyoucounseling.com/understanding-focus-and-purpose-in-life)
We are confident in God’s unchangeable purpose to conform us into the image of His Son within our marriage. (Romans 8:29) We’re confident that if our focus stays on pleasing God by bringing Him ultimate glory, He will bless our efforts to do just that in our relationship with one another. This focus and purpose is the answer to stability, fulfillment, and lasting marriage. It is what it looks like to let the full effects of the gospel take root in a life.
So, there you have it: the bold truth about how we’ve lived in harmony and enjoyed our marriage after so many years. It has been a marriage in pursuit of becoming more like Christ, and bringing God glory by growing into the likeness of His Son within our relationship. Our marriage is far from perfect. I fall so short of being the kind of husband my wife deserves and my Lord desires.
Our life together has had its ups and downs, peaks and valleys, like everyone else’s. But it has been a marriage with ever-growing Focus and Purpose — living to glorify God, (our focus) by becoming like His Son, (our purpose). It has been a marriage of knowing and pursuing God together, in ways that are meaningful and measurable. It has been a life of discovering truth and sharing it with each other. It has been a journey of faith, fascinated by grace, striving to model God’s kind of love. It has been a life of openness and honesty — confession, repentance, trust, belief. It has been a gospel-centered life, reflecting the many facets of the gospel in our everyday choices. It has been a life of loving accountability, holding ourselves to biblical values. It has been a challenging life together to model Jesus Christ, the perfect embodiment of truth. We live for Him; He lives through us. What better way to build and sustain a marriage than to let the ultimate giver of love teach us how to love one another?
I challenge you to live for Christ in your marriage. Live the gospel you claim to believe in and through your marriage. I promise your marriage will grow, and you will change your marriage into a peaceful place of harmony. Speaking of change, the photo attached to this paper was taken at our wedding 47 years ago. Things have changed, gray hair and wrinkles, with a few, ok, more than a few pounds later, we have changed. But most importantly, the inner spiritual change that transpired in our hearts because of Christ is being renewed every day. 2 Corinthians 4:16 So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. That my friend will never grow old!