A Woman's Wisdom: How the Book of Proverbs Speaks to Everything (17 page)

Do you struggle with this? Most married people do at one point or another, but God, who loves to bless what he has ordained, will help you renew your marital delight if you are willing to be helped.

Whenever I am struggling with discontentment, I’ve found that the way out of it begins with practicing gratitude. Lately my struggle has involved my living quarters. I live in a multi-family dwelling, and my upstairs neighbor is heavy footed. He is also young, which means he has the energy to stay out until 2 a.m. both weekend nights and once or twice during the week. I, on the other hand, am a light sleeper who, not being young, thinks being awake at 10 p.m. constitutes a late night. The differences in our lifestyles could so easily create neighborly discord, but by God’s grace we get along fine. I express my gratitude to God for that. And I call to mind the time that this neighbor collected my mail when I forgot to have it held at the post office before a trip, and another time when he took my discarded Christmas tree down to the curb after the holiday. And I recall that he did two tours in Iraq as a Marine. I also pray for him, and I’ve found that if I pray when I am most annoyed, the annoyance dissipates. Praying for someone is an act of love, and irritation tends to melt away before love in action.

If all this sounds just a little bit pious, let me be quick to add that recalling positive qualities and even praying for another in the midst of relational difficulty overcomes discontentment only because it is done in the fear of the Lord. In other words, it is an outworking of clinging to Christ in the midst of the difficulty and becoming transformed in the process. Through our union with Christ, we will find we are increasingly enabled to delight in those who irritate us, whether neighbor or friend or spouse, and when it comes to the spouse, there is the added dimension of God’s seal over the relationship. The one who ordained marriage in general ordained yours in particular, and he cares more about your marital health than about any other human relationship you have. He is not blind to the difficulties, big and small. He is not oblivious to your loss of respect for your husband or the hurt you feel because your husband has stopped communicating with you. Whatever the issue may be, you will be enabled to live in peace and value your marriage—even when you see no change—if you cling to Christ rather than clinging to your ideals for your spouse and your marriage. If your marriage is hard, value it anyway, because God
values it.

Married or single, we all are called to value marriage simply because God values it. This can be difficult not only for women in a struggling marriage but also for single women who long to be married. The very idea that they are supposed to value and protect something they cannot have can breed resentment. Nevertheless, wise women, married or single, value marriage.

Another important safeguard for marriage—our own and that of others—is
immersing ourselves in God’
s Word
:

It takes humility to recognize and admit that we can fall in these ways apart from dependence on the Holy Spirit and Scripture. We’re not strong enough to withstand certain temptations on our own, and neither is the best of marriages.

The fourth safeguard is
don’t buy into the lie that no one will
get hurt
.

When adultery occurs, someone always gets hurt. In the short run it is usually just the betrayed spouse and the children of the broken marriage. In the long run it is also the cheating spouse and his or her partner, for not only was their relationship forged on illicit grounds, but also is comprised of two people with blatantly immoral character. The bottom line is this: if a woman abandons her husband because she doesn’t feel in love anymore, that is immoral. If she claims that her actions have God’s approval because God just wants her to be happy, that is blasphemous.

The fifth safeguard is to cultivate within your marriage
a healthy and active
sex life
.

Scripture is not prudish. In fact, in places it is quite graphic about sex, such as in the Song of Solomon. And the apostle Paul candidly instructed husbands and wives not to withhold themselves from one another: “The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband” (1 Cor. 7:3). And he gives the reason why: “Because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband” (v. 2). Proverbs 5:15–19 is providing the same instruction, which is made clear from the very next verse: “Why should you be intoxicated, my son, with a forbidden woman and embrace the bosom of an adulteress?” (v. 20). Derek Kidner writes, “It is highly important to see sexual delight in marriage as God-given; and history confirms that when marriage is viewed chiefly as a business arrangement, not only is God’s bounty misunderstood, but human passion seeks (cf. verse 20) other outlets.”
⁴
The way to avoid temptations to sexual sin is to enjoy sex with your own spouse.

This sort of instruction can be discouraging to those who, for one reason or another, are experiencing a season in which sex is something to be endured rather than delighted in. This is not uncommon for women coping with the exhaustion of caring for an infant or for women going through menopause, and all couples go through seasons where sex is just the same old routine. But that’s life—not just in your marriage but in all of them. Perhaps God didn’t intend for that hot, panting, burning passion that characterized the first year of your marriage to last forever. If it did, you might never have gotten out of bed to take on the responsibilities of daily life. Because we humans are so naturally self-centered, perhaps God designed that initial passion simply to get us into marriage. Apart from that sexual tension, there are many who might never be willing to walk down the aisle and embrace the death to self-interest that marriage necessitates.

So, if that’s the case, isn’t this particular marital safeguard a bit idealistic? It is not, since it is God’s Word that deems it a safeguard. Perhaps we just need to view it a bit differently. We might be picturing the “delight” of Proverbs 5:19 as feelings of intense sexual passion, but why fixate there? Is there not delight simply in the oneness and intimacy and in the fact that, by God’s design, sex promotes love? If what was required for delightful marriage is two people who can’t keep their hands off each other, then neither Proverbs nor Paul would have felt compelled to instruct spouses to continue to come together in a sexual way. We will find delight if we drink water from our own cistern, with or without panting passion.

Sometimes, of course, there are impediments, and some women have no cisterns at all. But none of us is really left with no well, because Jesus is our ultimate and permanent well. To the woman who had gone through five husbands plus a live-in and had never found what she was seeking, he said, “If you knew the gift of God . . . you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water” (John 4:10). He is our living water, and there we can drink deeply, no matter our marital status. We can rest in him where our marriage falls short. We can rest in him if we
have
no marriage. When we drink from this well, we will find all we need to resist looking for love in all the wrong places.

The sixth safeguard is to
cultivate godly jealousy
. In other words, be protective of your marriage. Don’t allow others into the intimate space you share with your spouse. We think of jealousy as sinful, and it is when it springs from a craving to get something that belongs to someone else. It is not sinful when it’s about protecting what God has given to us. Godly jealousy functions like an indicator light on the dashboard that begins to glow red when something is amiss in the engine. Jealousy for our marriage mirrors God’s jealousy for his people. Throughout the Old Testament we see that God is furiously jealous when his people cheat on him with other gods (see, e.g., Deut. 32:16; 1 Kings 14:22; Ps. 78:58; Ezek. 5:13), and his anger at being betrayed is reflected in the anger of the betrayed husband in Proverbs:

A young pastor and his wife invited a struggling young woman to live in their home for an indefinite period of time. But she was an attractive young woman, and while the intentions all the way around were good, the whole set-up was a bad idea. A month into the arrangement, the wife expressed to me her discomfort with it. I suggested she go home and share her discomfort with her husband immediately, which she did, and together they helped the young woman relocate before that week was over. The wife’s jealousy was good and right, and so was the husband’s response. Together they learned a wise and practical lesson: barring any other reasonable option (not ideal necessarily, but reasonable), a young, attractive woman ought not come to live with a married couple.

Another couple I know about is going through a dark time in their marriage. A few months back the wife confessed to her husband her struggle with homosexual feelings, and ever since her confession they have been trying to navigate their way through her troubling admission. Recently, however, she has developed a close friendship with a woman who shares her struggle. The husband is rightly jealous but afraid to say so because his wife’s new friendship has lifted her moodiness. He would be wise to express that jealousy posthaste and without reserve.

Immorality, whether before, during, or after marriage, whether mental, emotional, or physical, is always rebellion against God. Christians can and do fall. And in reality, we are all guilty to varying degrees. Do you think you are not? Just look at Jesus’s words in Matthew: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matt. 5:27–28). Have you never looked at someone with lustful thoughts? Perhaps you are the rare exception who never has. But look at what the Westminster Larger Catechism has to say about it and see if you aren’t more like the immoral woman of Proverbs than perhaps you had realized:

In light of this, what are we to do? We all are or have been the immoral woman in one way or another. If anything in that description fits our present state, we do well to consider what Jesus told the adulterous woman who was dragged before him: “Has no one condemned you? . . . Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more” (John 8:10–11).

Perhaps there is something in the catechism that describes an earlier time in our personal history, a particular sin of which we repented long ago. If so, we can consider the women whom God placed in the lineage of Jesus. There was Tamar, who pretended to be a prostitute and slept with her father-in-law. There was Rahab, who actually was a prostitute. And there was Bathsheba, who had a liaison with the king while her husband was away. All three had a sordid past, but later they were given an honored place in redemptive history.