No Kidding. 40 Years.

So today marks 40 years together with Nancy. It has been entirely a good business, largely owing to her good heart, good work ethic, good humor, good cooking, good sense, and good looks. That’s 14,600 lucky days for me, not factoring in the leap years. That many lucky days in a row.

We had a good marriage from the very start, but looking back, it is hard to imagine being married to anybody knowing as little as we did back then. We had a good marriage from the beginning, but when I consider how rich it is now, it is sometimes tempting to wonder what we were thinking was so hot back then. But it was.

For some reason, I think of that wedding toast that Nancy has suggested that I not actually propose at any of the numerous wedding receptions we have around here. “May the Lord so prosper your union, with each successive day being better than the previous one, such that after many years you can look back on this day as the worst one you ever had together.”

The grace of God pervades everything. God gives what He does, and what He has given us is a grand total of 80 years of reciprocal gladness. But what have you received that is not a gift? And if a gift, why do you boast as though it were not (1 Cor. 4:7)? All you can do is bow your head and be grateful.

But when you have been married this long, I do understand that some young couples might want to ask us, “how did you do it?” As I have indicated, that is not quite the right question. It is not something you go out and do, but rather something you receive. But in order to receive it, you do need to know what it looks like — because so many of our earthly blessings are communicated to us by means of imitation. When we go out to do, we are often spinning ideas out of our own imaginations, many of them bogus de novo. It is the bogusity that makes them so shiny. But when we look at good and godly examples with admiration, we can know that we are consciously imitating certain godly characteristics that we can see. We find out later that we have also been internalizing a number of things that we couldn’t see.

So gather round, children, and I will try hard not to sound like a geezer. With eyes wide open, young couples should meditate on the five following home truths:

1. The path to true marital originality is to watch and copy.

We were created to learn best by imitation (1 Cor. 11:1). Find older couples worthy of imitation, and watch them closely. Look for the center — imitate from the inside out, not from the outside in. Copy the kindness, not the hand gestures. Honor your parents by consciously imitating everything about them that is worthy of imitation.

Those who lose themselves in this way find themselves

2. Marriage is enacted gospel.

This means that there are many words that our unbelieving age finds to be “triggering,” but which those who would be happily married must lean into and embrace. I mean prefixes like hetero, followed by words like headship, submission, sacrifice, authority, obedience, bleeding, love, kindness, beauty, courage, and the kind of resurrection that only death can bring. Marriage is a microcosm of world history which, when all is said and done, will be a microcosm of church history. Kill the dragon, get the girl.

A hot tip for husbands: you can’t fight the dragon effectively if you are the dragon.

3. Fruitfulness is God’s design.

God likes kids. Because He likes kids, He loves it when we have them in accordance with His Word. Fruitfulness therefore goes far beyond mere begetting and bearing. There is also the matter of feeding them, clothing them, paying tuition for them, going to all their ball games, and reading Hop on Pop to them a hundred times. Fruitfulness is a life-long thing. Fruitfulness compounds daily.

Fruitfulness is also messy. Where there are no oxen, the stable stays clean, but much wealth comes from the strength of the ox (Prov. 14:4). But at the same time, always distinguish the mess that attends fruitfulness and the mess that trails after laziness, like ten feet of toilet paper on the shoe.

4. Marriage is all about fellowship.

If marriage is about partaking in fellowship, then one of the most important things you can do is to maintain fellowship. You maintain fellowship by humbly confessing sin when you have sinned. You don’t let a backlog of unaddressed sin accumulate. You don’t allow grievances to pile up. You keep short accounts.

But though sin disrupts fellowship, fellowship should also be maintained as a positive thing, and not the mere absence of a negative thing like sin. Fellowship is the result of being in the presence of a companion, and being present for that companion. You are with somebody.

5. True marriage is hard-headed.

Despite your best screening efforts, you have nevertheless married a sinner. Despite your spouse’s best efforts, so did she. This means that you must deal with sin as a matter of course. But there is a difference between being wronged by sin, and graciously forgiving that sin, and being personally offended by the mere fact of the temptations. The former is what holiness looks like. The latter is sentimentalism — where sin is not opposed and fought, but rather just resented.

When a wife is tempted to worry about the future, the husband can be personally offended that she is not trusting him to provide and protect. When a husband is distracted by some tight jeans on the wrong person, the wife can be personally aggrieved that it takes grace for him to look at the ceiling. If she trusted me, she wouldn’t worry. If he loved me, he wouldn’t notice. We never think other people’s temptations require grace.

But being hard-headed about the reality of our temptations is not the same thing as being hard-hearted. The point is to deal with sin — not to surrender to it, not to resent it, not to pretend that it ought not even be around.

So there you have it. Forty years of that kind of thing, and you’ll be leaning into the next forty.