Bible Text: Matthew 19:10 | Speaker: Dr. Harold J. Sala | Series: Guidelines For Living | The disciples said to him, “If this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry.” Matthew 19:10

In the past years a lot of things have changed, and there’s no going back to how things used to be. A few years ago most of you who contacted us at Guidelines wrote a card or a letter. Today you send e-mail. A decade ago we mailed thousands of copies of this commentary in response to your requests for a particular program. Today about 4000 to 5000 times a day, or 150,000 times a month someone goes to our web site at guidelines.org for resource materials or copies of what you hear on Guidelines.

The service which hosts our web site also gives us a printout on how many people responded to a specific commentary or topic. In computer lingo, they are called “hits”! When we were recently looking at some of the graphs showing what themes had particularly spoken to the hearts of those who listen on stations which carry Guidelines, one bar of the graph almost went off the page. “What in the world did I talk about that day?” I asked. We started checking. It was a simple commentary which I called, “A Recipe for Marriage,” focusing on the basic ingredients which make a marriage work.

Since 1963 I’ve been producing Guidelines–during a generation which has seen marriages change radically. The traditional family–a dad who was a provider, a stay-at-home mom with a few kids–is almost non-existent. The white picket fence surrounding the little cottage is history. The occasional rerun in black and white of TV programs such as “I Love Lucy” and “Father Knows Best” are nostalgic reminders of how things used to be.

Marriage has faced the onslaught of change–much of which has had an extremely negative impact on both couples and their kids. While there is no turning back, there are a lot of things which can be done to make marriage work. Dr. Paul Popenoe, an authority on marriage and family, used to say that any two people who want to make a marriage work, can do so. They have just got to want to make it work. Inversely, all that is necessary for a marriage to fail is for just one person to say, “I want out! I want my freedom,” and no matter how the other person wants to make it work, or how dedicated he or she may be to a marriage, that marriage is history.

Most of us enter marriage with a great deal of fear–fear of what may happen, fear that if we really turn loose, we submit, we become vulnerable, we may get hurt. And frankly, there’s no guarantee, but I know one thing. Risk is part of love, and when nothing is risked, nothing is gained.

Fierce independence–the refusal to allow your lives to merge–keeps us at a distance which never allows intimacy to develop and is more like living with a stranger than becoming one as God intends. Five times the Bible says a man is to leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife in such a way that they become one flesh.

One flesh–not two independent individuals who have contracted to live under the same roof and, on occasion, share the same bed, but one in thought, in areas of finance, in spiritual harmony, yet maintaining their uniqueness and their own personal identity.

It is no wonder that Paul used the analogy of the union of a husband and a wife as a picture of the mystical and beautiful relationship of Christ to the Church. While marriage has fallen on hard times, it is still the most satisfying and unique of all the relationships on earth. Don’t give up on it. Anything worthwhile requires a lot of work.

Resource reading: Matthew 19:1-12