Help, I Married the Wrong Person & C.S. LEWIS: “THREE KINDS OF MEN”

Help, I Married the Wrong Person & C.S. LEWIS: “THREE KINDS OF MEN”

Courtney Reissig & Justin Taylor

On a recent business trip my husband was seated next to a man on his way to make a fresh start. The more they talked, the more my husband learned about this man and his plans for the future. After a failed marriage and a series of attempts to make something of his life, he finally reconnected with his high school girlfriend. This flight was his way forward. He was on his way to pick her up so she could live with him—and they could live happily ever after. What failed the first time would not happen again, he was certain. Given a second chance at happiness, he was going to take it.

With the launch of social media and search engines, what was once an impossible feat (finding a long-lost girlfriend) is now possible. Studies have shown that Facebook has led to widespread demise of marriages, discontentment with our current lives, and longing for what might have been. We may have broken up with that person in high school or college (for good reason), but the passage of time and a well-crafted profile makes the grass all the more greener on the other side.

When marriage gets difficult, or our kids ar

e ungrateful, it’s easy to look at the past and think, I made the wrong decision. I married the wrong person. Let me assure you: you didn’t.

God Who Orders It All

I once heard it said that God knew exactly what he was doing when he put a married couple together. In the weeks and months leading up to the wedding day, that can feel like the truest statement ever uttered. You have met your soul mate. Your heart flutters when he holds your hand. You can hardly sleep in anticipation of being married to her. In the words of Jerry Maguire, you really do complete each other.

Fast forward a few months or years and you may feel like you’ve married a monster. Real life sets in, and the true person comes out—and it’s not always pretty or what you expected. But if God knows what he’s doing, then there is something for us to learn in the sometimes muddy waters of marriage.

When Jesus defended marriage in the New Testament, he did so not in the name of love or compatibility, but on the basis of God’s authority over marriage (Matt. 19:6; Mark 10:9). We believe in the earthly permanence of marriage because we know that God has joined this particular man with this woman. From our first parents, Adam and Eve, to our own marriages, God has given us to each other. Our modern culture makes it easy for us to think that we have made a mistake when marriage gets hard, because we do the choosing. There are few arranged marriages in Western culture. Many men and women date, shop for a ring, and pick the date all on their own. I know I did. With the exception of my husband asking my dad for permission to marry me (and the fact that we were set up by friends), we really were “in control” of our relationship. When marriage gets hard, this perceived control makes us think we have a way out—or at least deserve a way out.

But God is no less sovereign over our marriages in a Western context than he was in the Ancient Near East or in a remote village in Africa. Marriage is about God joining two people together for one uniting purpose. He is over all things (Eph. 4:6). Understanding his good purpose gives us hope when we feel the walls of conflict closing in on us.

Purpose of Marriage

Gary Thomas has said that the purpose of marriage is to make you holy, not happy. Of course, a side benefit of marriage is companionship, shared experiences, and—many times—true happiness. But that’s not the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is to make us like Jesus. We don’t get to the final day on our own. Marriage is one of God’s good means to sanctify us and bring us safely home.

The belief that we have married the wrong person is far more sinister than we are led to believe. It feels good to be loved and appreciated. It feels good to know that passion is possible again. But all that love, appreciation, and passion will wither away once we get to the other side of the proverbial greener pastures. People are only people. They cannot meet the deepest needs of our souls, even if their words, actions, and Facebook profiles tell us otherwise.

A long-term view of marriage (and life for that matter), saves us from the propensity to bolt when it gets hard or is less than we expected. God has promised to get us to the final day more like Jesus than when we started (Phil. 1:6).

The man sitting next to my husband failed to understand that the woman he was going to meet on the other end of the flight was not the answer to his deepest longings. He hadn’t missed “the one” all these years. And we haven’t either. Perhaps our spouse may not be everything we hoped he or she would be (or were promised to be on our wedding day), but let’s face it—we aren’t either. But God is faithful. He has joined us together in his sovereign plan for our lives, promising us that we never marry the wrong person.

Courtney Reissig is a writer, wife, and mom to twin boys. She is married to Daniel, and together they live in Little Rock, Arkansas, and serve at Midtown Baptist Church. You can read more of her writing on her blog or follow her on Twitter.

C.S. LEWIS: “THREE KINDS OF MEN”

C.S. Lewis’s short essay, “Three Kinds of Men,” from his collection of essays, Present Concerns (pp. 9-10):

There are three kinds of people in the world.

The first class is of those who live simply for their own sake and pleasure, regarding Man and Nature as so much raw material to be cut up into whatever shape may serve them.

In the second class are those who acknowledge some other claim upon them—the will of God, the categorical imperative, or the good of society—and honestly try to pursue their own interests no further than this claim will allow. They try to surrender to the higher claim as much as it demands, like men paying a tax, but hope, like other taxpayers, that what is left over will be enough for them to live on. Their life is divided, like a soldier’s or a schoolboy’s life, into time “on parade” and “off parade,” “in school” and “out of school.”

But the third class is of those who can say like St Paul that for them “to live is Christ.” These people have got rid of the tiresome business of adjusting the rival claims of Self and God by the simple expedient of rejecting the claims of Self altogether. The old egoistic will has been turned round, reconditioned, and made into a new thing. The will of Christ no longer limits theirs; it is theirs. All their time, in belonging to Him, belongs also to them, for they are His.

And because there are three classes, any merely twofold division of the world into good and bad is disastrous. It overlooks the fact that the members of the second class (to which most of us belong) are always and necessarily unhappy. The tax which moral conscience levies on our desires does not in fact leave us enough to live on. As long as we are in this class we must either feel guilt because we have not paid the tax or penury because we have. The Christian doctrine that there is no “salvation” by works done to the moral law is a fact of daily experience. Back or on we must go. But there is no going on simply by our own efforts. If the new Self, the new Will, does not come at His own good pleasure to be born in us, we cannot produce Him synthetically.

The price of Christ is something, in a way, much easier than moral effort—it is to want Him. It is true that the wanting itself would be beyond our power but for one fact. The world is so built that, to help us desert our own satisfactions, they desert us. War and trouble and finally old age take from us one by one all those things that the natural Self hoped for at its setting out. Begging is our only wisdom, and want in the end makes it easier for us to be beggars. Even on those terms the Mercy will receive us.