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Marriage:

The Intimate Myste

ry

Congratulations! This is no doubt one of the most exciting moments of your lives and I am honored to be one of the many people who will get to share in it with you. My hope is that over the next several marriage counseling sessions your knowledge and love for each other and God will only grow and increase.

What is marriage counseling like?

Marriage counseling is a lot like videography. Whoever guides you through this process is aware of the limitations of time and must utilize panning effects (taking you as couple through a broad set of issues that effect marriages), camera zooming (narrowing your focus in upon a few key areas of marriage), and wide angle lenses (Looking at the big picture of marriage, ie seeing how it fits into the biblical story).

I enter into this with you through much prayer and will continue to pray with and for you.

- Sincerely Pastor Tony Stiff

Counseling as “Videography”

Week One - Beginnings: Marriage Within the

Biblical Story

Week Two - Story: Understanding the Narrative

of Your Partner

Week Three - Change: Relationships Are a

Mess Worth Making

Week Four - Communication: The War of

Words

Week Five - Finance: Money Can’t Buy Me Love

But It Can Complicate It

Week Six - Sex: The Oasis in the Desert

MARRIAGE COUNSELING101

WEEK ONE BEGINNINGS

Marriage Within The Biblical Story

Marriage, like every other part of human life finds its meaning within the context of a story - the biblical story. It is only until we are able to understand marriage in light of that story that we can understand the things happening inside our own particular marriages.

Throughout our counseling sessions together we will return to what we learn in this section. in our next session we will discuss the importance of understanding your spouses story and how they interpret themselves and life through it. In the last four sessions we’ll look into four areas of drama that affect every marriage: Session 3 - Change; Session 4 - Communication; Session 5 -

“THE BIBLICAL STORY INVITES US IN AS PARTICIPANTS IN SOMETHING LARGER THAN OUR SIN-DEFINED NEEDS, INTO SOMETHING TRUER THAN OUR CULTURE-STUNTED AMBITIONS. WE ENTER THESE STORIES AND RECOGNIZE OURSELVES AS PARTICIPANTS, WHETHER WILLING OR UN-WILLING, IN THE LIFE [AND DRAMA] OF GOD.”

- EUGENE PETERSON, EAT THIS BOOK

spend our time upon. I want you to consider this session as an entrance into a spiritual discipline you as a couple can continue for the rest of your lives. The spiritual discipline of reading scripture with each other to discover how your lives as a couple fit into drama of redemption from Genesis to Revelation.

What part of the biblical story will we focus upon? We will spend time considering the place of marriage in the beginning of the biblical story in Genesis 1-3. Then we will look at the climactic expression of marriage in Jesus marriage to the church in the Gospels and the Apostle Paul’s writings. Finally, we will read about where marriage and the rest of

Finances; and Session 6 - Sex. For now we turn to the biblical story in order to explore the meaning of marriage within it.

Every story has a beginning, characters, conflict, rising and falling action, a climax, and an ending. The biblical story is no different in that respect, but the biblical story is not simply another story. In fact its not merely a single story. Scripture offers its readers a mosaic of stories woven together over thousands of years by different authors living through different life challenges and experiences. In order for us to understand marriage within the biblical story because the story is so rich and complex we must be selective in how we read it and in what we

episode in the biblical story we read the author of Genesis chapters 1-3 saying, “Then God said let us make man in our image, in His image God made man and woman.” (Genesis 1.26) For centuries people have discussed what Genesis 1.26 intended to mean by saying that humanity was formed in the image of God. Many biblical scholars today say that to be made in God’s image is to be made for relationship. In particular for a relationship where love, goodness, and truth flourish. Marriage more than any other human action is able to exhibit this.

Just as God is Triune - three distinct persons, in one essence - so marriage is a joining of two separate individuals. As

the biblical story ends, spending time considering how the culmination of marriage affects our particular experience of it now.

BEGINNINGS - GENESIS 1-3

The biblical story of creation closes on the seventh day when God is said to have rested from all His work and that all His work was very good. But not everything was good, was it? Even in a creation free of sin someone was lonely. We learn early on that it was “not good” for man to be alone (Genesis 2.18) so God made him a helpmate or better translated a co-warrior in life (“Ezer” in Hebrew). It is no mistake that very near this same

desert of human brokenness. Yet the oasis of marriage is filled with challenges. Marriage was created by God to make people whole but now because of Sin every marriage struggles with “Change,” “Communication,” “Finances (ie flourishing),” and “Sex.” BUT there is hope, for the true meaning of marriage isn’t exhausted in the opening chapters of Genesis, but rather in Jesus and his relationship with the Church.

CLIMAX - JESUS & THE CHURCH

It is hard to read Ephesians 5.21-33 in a detached way if you are married or about to enter into marriage. The picture offers both partners great challenge to enter into

authors of the book “The Intimate Mystery” Tremper Longman III and Dan Allender have said regarding this, “Marriage is a union of fundamentally similar beings who couldn’t be more different. In the interplay between like and unlike, something occurs that dispels loneliness. [Love]”

Marriage was at the center point of the creation story in Genesis, and it is within the first human marriage that we see the full expression of what sin does to human relationships. It is very clear in Adam and Eve’s marriage (Genesis 3-4) and in their raising of children that marriage rather being God’s flower in his garden paradise is now an oasis in the

When we enter a marriage we commit ourselves to have our lives, our stories, our preferences and personal freedom re-shaped in the light of the biblical story which came to its climax in Christ’s costly-powerful love upon the cross. God says to wives and husbands in Ephesians 5, “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord... Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27 so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. ”

a lifetime of self-sacrificial love. And even more than this it shows us just how important marriage is for only in marriage do we have an image of what the Son did in leaving his Father to come and save us by taking on human form and marrying himself to us even while we were still sinners (ponder Philippians 2.6-11; Colossians 1.15-20). In our marriages we experience in a small yet significant way the costliness of love because when we say “I do” we are saying it to another sinner; and we experience love’s power to redeem and restore what is broken. As Dave Harvey author of “When Sinners Say I Do” says, “Until sin be bitter, marriage may not be sweet.”

What is the end of marriage? If this question was asked to your average pedestrian on the sidewalk today they would answer in one of two ways: divorce or death. Jesus answers in a different way in Luke 20.27-44. Marriage as an institution and relational covenant ends not in death or in divorce but in the New Creation.

For Israel the biblical story they were such a large part of was thought to be ending soon. God would come back, establish a king who would drive out the foreigners and establish peace in the Land of his promise forever. The signal that he would do this was resurrection. But Israel got a twist in the story they were not expecting, the King returned but

Marriage unites two people inside a relational commitment shaped by the gospel, by the biblical story. Within this union there is a complimentary relationship where the husband and wive don’t share identical roles, but ARE shaped by an identical story - the gospel! As Christ loved the church husbands and wives are to love one another and just as we are to submit to Christ as our King, so in a marriage are husbands and wives to submit out of love and mutuality to one another. Wives lead in submission for their husbands sake and husbands lead in loving self-abandonment for their wives sake.

CONSUMMATION - NEW CREATION

one another as deeply as husbands loved wives. Jesus never addressed what that meant for human sexuality, you get the sense from this discussion in Luke that it was enough that for him to point everyone to the day when the New Creation life he experience in his own resurrection would come to completion in those that followed him even as it was presently at work in their lives changing them (Philippians 3).

The consummation of marriage, the end goal of marriage will only be experienced by us when Christ returns. Until then we live in the midst of the already but not-yet tension of Jesus resurrection. His Kingdom and the New

they did not recognize him, they crucified him. But he did resurrect from the dead and his resurrection was the signal that the end had come but not in its fullness. For Israel expected all those who had been apart of the Israel in the past, the faithful who had died in their struggle with the Gentiles, with Rome, with Babylon and Assyria, and Egypt to resurrect together. Instead Jesus resurrected and promised that one day he would return those who put their faith in him would resurrect with him. And when they resurrected their relationships would be so significant that what marriage did to confront human loneliness and brokenness would no longer be needed for everyone would love

Creation life of it has begun to change us and our marriages but it is not finished!

Our marriages should be lived out in the expectation of what they will be like when Jesus returns. In that regard it is proper to speak about the “missionary character” of marriage. Our marriages express and exhibit to our neighbors what our relationships with God are like and what the character of Jesus love is like.

Where does this leave us?

“Those who follow Jesus can begin to practice, in the present, the habits of the heart and life which correspond to the way things are in God’s Kingdom...” - N.T. Wright, “After You Believe”

From Creation to New Creation,the beginning to the end.

Jesus Res urrection

Jesus Re turn

Your Marriage Is

HERE

WEEK TWOSTORY

Understanding The Narrative of Your Partner

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ETIAM PORTTITOR LECTUS EU ORCI RUTRUM CONSECTETUR. MAECENAS SIT AMET ELIT NON NULLA TRISTIQUE FERMENTUM ET QUIS PURUS.

WEEK THREE CHANGE

Relationships are a Mess Worth Making

WEEK FOURCOMMUNICATION

The War of Words

WEEK FIVEFINANCES

Money Can’t Buy Me Love, But It Can Complicate It

WEEK SIXSEX

The Oasis in the Desert

First Presbyterian Church515 Sunrise Avenue, Roseville, Ca, 95661

Pastor Tony Stiff, (916)782-3186

The Mystery’s Just Begun

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