More Than Happiness: Building a Blessed Marriage God’s Way
BY KEVIN AND LAURA PAYNE
Every Christian married couple would say they desire a blessed marriage. The wedding ceremony often includes a moment when the congregation joins in a prayer of blessing for the couple. Well-wishers send cards and offer heartfelt congratulations expressing the desire for life to be beautiful and filled with success. Guests throw rice and blow bubbles in a giddy symbolic gesture of happiness, prosperity, and abundance. Young couples eagerly launch into this new season with visions of a small starter home surrounded by a white picket fence. Isn’t that what it means to be blessed?
Sadly, Western culture sees blessing through this terribly flawed and entitled lens. Young married couples may falsely imagine that material blessings can be accelerated through their own efforts or hard work. All too often, faith is reduced to a formula that entitles us to dividends, bonuses, and financial gain. These so-called “blessings from God” become the false foundation of marital success and contentment.
Blessings are often equated with happiness, and many possess an insatiable appetite for this emotion. “Happy” is a buzzword in a Western worldview. Everybody wants to be happy. I (Kevin) can’t recount the number of times couples have proclaimed quite adamantly in counseling, “I’m not happy in this marriage.” This statement is often followed by the egocentric phrase “And I deserve to be happy.” Some even choose to chase this fickle emotion and pursue a new mate in hopes of finding happiness.
The word “happy” is derived from the word happenstance. Happenstance is closely related to the word circumstance. Circumstances are situations that happen beyond our control. They are event- or environmentally-driven happenings. We typically claim happiness when something good occurs like going on vacation, receiving a raise, the weather cooperating with our outdoor picnic, or receiving lots of gifts at our birthday party. The hard truth is that happiness can be fleeting. Happiness can be random. And happiness is not guaranteed to every Christian marriage.
The US Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” How easily we leave our Creator behind in our race to happiness.
Matthew 5 gives us an account of the moment Jesus introduced His kingdom to a group of fledgling followers in what became known as the Sermon on the Mount. While Jesus didn’t specifically promote His gathering on the hillside as a marriage retreat, the topics He addressed were applicable to the husbands and wives sitting side by side listening to the Master. He didn’t promise His followers happiness, ease, or security. In fact, He knew His followers would face trouble, persecution, and even death. But He dared to assure them that blessings would come if they would follow His principles.
In his article “What Is God’s Blessing?” John Tweeddale explains that the word for “blessing” comes from the Hebrew noun berakah, which is most often used to communicate the conferring of God’s covenant favor and goodness. Similarly, the verb form, “to bless” (barak) means, at root, “to kneel,” but is also frequently used to describe the reverent worship of God’s covenant people both in terms of prayer and praise. Most Hebrew words evoked a mental image. In the case of barak, the mental image accompanying this verb was an image of kneeling. Hebrew children not only imagined themselves kneeling, but this word evoked an image of God kneeling to His children, bowing low to provide for their needs.
Jewish people intrinsically understood two things whenever they heard the word “blessing.” First, the source of blessing is God Himself. No blessing exists without Him.
While the word has been hijacked by non-believers and thrown around loosely in many contexts, there really cannot be a blessing without a God who endows us with His blessing.
Second, when we return blessing to God by expressing our thanks or appreciation, the act is automatically associated with a posture of humility.
For every couple that wants to prove they can be self-sufficient and make their own way in this world, the biblical concept of blessing keeps us tethered to a God who is our source. Although the state of being blessed might cause us to feel enlarged with abundance, the word should elicit a mental picture of bowing low and approaching our Creator with humility. This is why it makes sense that Jesus invited us to be “poor in spirit” (Matthew 5:3). Indeed, humility is a path to blessing.
None of the blessings in Matthew 5 include material gain. Instead, Jesus promised us blessings that meet our deepest emotional needs, speak to the eternal and spiritual gain of Heaven, and are tied to our identity as children of God. Jesus taught His followers that they could inherit the Kingdom, receive mercy, and be named a child of God. Such precious, undeserved gifts are more sustaining to a marriage than fleeting happiness and white picket fences. Kingdom blessing comes when we limit ourselves by being poor in spirit, showing mercy, and prioritizing the skills of a peacemaker.
Marriage is a perfect place to grow in humility, mercy, and the pursuit of peace. We all enter marriage far more flawed than we care to admit. We come into marriage with a strong spirit of self-preservation that hinders our full dependence on the blessing Giver. But God is faithful. He motivates us forward, reminding us that the ultimate blessings we can gain as a couple are found in the kingdom of Heaven, not in the temporal success of this world. Only by embracing the principles Jesus taught long ago on the side of a hill can we build the beautiful life we imagined together.