Matt Chandler - What Is Marriage?

If you want to grab your Bibles, go ahead and do that; we’re going to be in Genesis chapter 2. If you don’t have a Bible with you, there’s a hardback black one somewhere around you; take that. If you don’t own one, that’s our gift to you. I often joke that if you want a nicer one, the lost-and-found is out here by Connection Central. There are some beautiful leather-bound Bibles there that you could grab ahold of if you’d like. Now, we’re going to start today a three-week series on marriage, and I want to give you my outline—not just for today, but for all three weeks—and then we’ll dive into today’s lesson.

Today, I want to accomplish two things. First, I want to show you from the Word of God that humankind has been designed by God for deep companionship with other humans. That’s the first thing. Then I want to move on to present God’s view of marriage. It’s quite simple: I want to show that we have a deep need for companionship, and then I want to define marriage in a way that’s helpful. Next week, we’ll talk about sex. You don’t need to be nervous about that; just shield your children from anything graphic. I’m not showing videos; I just want to discuss God’s purpose and design. Sex was God’s idea—like, He came up with that. It’s a gift from Him to us that is to be enjoyed within the parameters of safety that He created it for. So, we’ll talk about that next week. Then, in week three, we’re going to talk about what I call «the long game.» By the long game, I mean that if we can picture ourselves at 75 or 80 years old, surrounded by grandchildren and great-grandchildren, enjoying being patriarchs and matriarchs, we can see the fruit of decades of faithfulness all around us. I want to start with that imagery and then reverse-engineer it to see what we need to be doing now that will move us in that direction, rather than the opposite.

With that said, I want to acknowledge upfront that I know I’ll be touching on some extremely sensitive areas of our human experience. I understand this, and I will do my best to approach these topics gently, compassionately, and honestly—for our own good. Several years ago, precisely two years ago, I began researching marriage. I went to Amazon.com, opened the search bar, typed in «marriage,» and hit go. When I hit go, I found that there were 151,000 books on marriage two years ago. Add 40,000 to that! There were also 27,000 books on dating and nearly 12,000 books on attraction. What even is a book on attraction? Chapter one: «Is she pretty?» Chapter two: «You’re attracted.» I don’t quite understand, but whatever. Then, there were 190,000 books on sex.

One of the things Amazon does that is a bit different from other sites is that it allows companies and organizations to purchase space based on what you searched. On other sites, ads are thrown up based on your personal profile—the Internet tracks your cookies. For example, if you search for a KRX performance trainer and find one, the next time you visit another website, you’ll see it in the banner, «T-Rex workout, itself!» This is how the Internet keeps tabs on you.

However, what Amazon does is to generate ads based on your search history. So, when I searched for marriage that night two years ago, aggressive divorce ads popped up. One of the links I could click on was «Divorce help for women.» As I started to dig deeper, I noticed that first of all, it’s predatory in nature. If a marriage has entered a difficult space and someone types in «I need help with my marriage,» what comes up? «Aggressive divorce.» To further nuance this, they know it’s usually—though not always—women who are fighting to hold their marriage together. So, there’s a special ad geared towards women: «We specialize in helping women get divorced,» sweet and pretty.

About a thousand of the items lead me to this conclusion: we deeply and desperately desire intimate, deep companionship with others, and we struggle at it. We really do! We aren’t quite sure how to navigate it. With 190,000 books on sex and 151,000 books on marriage, we see that these are relatively modern works—not from the 17th century. So, what in the world has happened to us that we’ve lost sight of what God designed as good and as a gift of grace? As we enter this discussion, let me lay before you some thoughts that I want to explore.