He who finds a wife finds a good thing, and obtains favor from the Lord – Prov. 18:22
Marriage itself is good for you, just not in the way you often think. Marriage can be both God’s bait and His rod.
Why do most people want to enter into the institution of marriage? They do so as a source of happiness, companionship, and pleasure (the bait) – things that do sometimes come from being married. However, marriage also brings tremendous strife, pain and frustration (the rod).
Having spent twenty eight years in it, and parenting for eighteen years (actually, I am still parenting. . .), marriage is the single greatest force for transformation in a person’s life. Why is this so? In marriage, all the darkest parts of your personality will be exposed in due time and when it is, it will demand correction, if you want to stay happily married. As such, marriage is God’s great crucifer of the flesh – if we let it be.
To put it in another way, I wouldn’t be half the man I am today if I had not been married for so long. It is all too easy to remain who you are when you do not have to constantly adjust and adapt to the needs and interests of another person from whom it is virtually impossible to hide anything.
Those who have never been married I feel sorry for. And it is not because of what they miss in marriage that they think they are missing, but for what they miss in marriage that they don’t even realize they’re missing.
Thus for the single person, it is not necessarily the goal to get married, but that they would learn to derive the same benefits of marriage from Christ Himself.
