Genesis 2:18-25 | Marriage's Best Kept Secret

Text: Gen 2:18-25

Big Idea: The secret to the strongest marriage possible is one built upon God’s design, nurtured and formed through a foundational commitment to a best friendship.  

1. The need for friendship (v. 18)  

2. The provision of a uniquely fitted friend (vv. 19-23)

3. The priority of best friendship (vv. 24-25) 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Alright, church, let's pray. As we do, we're gonna come out of Psalm 128. Father, as we come before your throne, it is such a privilege to come because of the shed blood of Jesus. We come in Jesus' name and we have every confidence, Lord, that we have your listening ear, that you incline your ear to your people, Lord. That is just the total gift of your grace. And Father, before you even look at this Psalm, I just ask you that what we have not today, you would give us. What we are not, Lord, you would make us. And what we know not, Lord, you would teach us from your word. Psalm 128 says, Blessed is everyone who fears the Lord. Father, make us a God-fearing people. Not because we have it in and of ourselves, but because Jesus was the perfect example of this, and we in him, Lord. Fearing you by the power of the Holy Spirit, turning from evil, walking in your ways. That's the way to blessing, Lord. That's the way to fruitfulness. That's the way to life being well with us. Verse 3 says, Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house, your children will be like olive shoots around your table. Behold, thus shall the men be blessed who fear the Lord. God give us a true view of who you are. Help us to see the goodness, the vast display of your love that you have poured out on us through the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And seeing such holiness and yet such in your son humility to condescend to do for us what we could not do, to die for us, to rise for us, Lord. Help us to have a true glimpse, grasp a greater one today of who you are. Father, as we open your word, we want to see the parallels between what is here and what is coming. The consummate vision of covenant love and its fulfillment between Jesus Christ and his bride. Lord, open our eyes. Bring change, bring conviction. Would the people come under the power of your word today? Only by your spirit we pray. In Jesus' name. And all God's people said. Amen. Well, let me have you stay standing for the reading of God's word as we come to Genesis chapter 2. We're going to be reading Genesis chapter 2, beginning in verse 18, and we're going to be reading down to verse 25. If you don't have a copy of God's word, you can get it on the slides. You can also keep one. There's Bibles on little tables on the sides of the worship center. Would love to have you enjoy that as your own and bring it back with us and we'll study it together. As we do this, we're just reminded this is the word of the living God. Oh, for a word to us, for us, from the Lord Himself. Then the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone. I will make a helper fit for him. Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. Whatever the man called, every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field, but for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. So the Lord God caused the deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept, took one of his ribs, closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, This is at last bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh, she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man. Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. Love ones, this is the word of the Lord for this Lord's Day's Sunday. May the Lord write these eternal truths on your hearts, and with that you can be seated. Church, good morning. If you have a copy of God's word, you're gonna want to go to Genesis chapter 2. My name is Scott, I'm the lead pastor here, and it's great to have you with us. Welcome. You are in the middle of a marriage series that we have now gotten off to on a few weeks called The Grammar of Marriage, and we're talking about the building blocks of a biblical marriage, getting back to kind of ground zero and establishing what the Bible says about what our marriages should look like. And ultimately, our marriages give way to the greater marriage of Jesus Christ and his church. And we've been seeing that every week, and we'll see that again this week. This is week number three. Week one was about the spouses, right? God made them male and female in his image. We talked about that. Those are the partners that partake of this covenant, one man and one woman. And last week we talked about marriage as a covenant, right? A covenant instituted by God, a covenant witnessed by God Himself. Creation ordinance for human flourishing, whereby we serve God in this covenant relationship, in work and worship and marriage and procreation to the glory of God, and ultimately a picture of the final end product, which is the consummate covenant love of Jesus Christ and his church. And so, with that being the previously on the grammar of marriage, the title for this morning is marriage's best kept secret. Isn't that intriguing? Marriage is best kept secret. I'm sure you understand the phrase best kept secret, but if you don't, it's used to describe something awesome that few people actually know about. Or something so great that is surprisingly overlooked. Like I can't believe more people don't know about this place. It is a best kept secret. So some of you have a restaurant that is the best kept secret, right? Some of you, your church, Doxa, is a best kept secret. You don't want to tell anyone else about it, all right? Just kidding, but maybe not. I'm calling this message marriage's best kept secret because here's what I found after all the research coming together, all the books that I looked at to uh consider what should be on our resource page and maybe what I should look at as I study, and you guys fire off emails to tell me what I should. So I've looked at all of it, and here's what I've found is surprisingly absent. This major point I'm gonna talk about today. You would be hard pressed to find a chapter about what I'm gonna talk about in most marriage books today. It's simply, if it's there, is sprinkled throughout a number of different chapters, but it never has a primary focus. It may be present, but it rarely features. You ready for it? A healthy marriage isn't built on shared responsibilities, romance, or reproduction, but friendship. Where's that chapter? That is what I'm saying, is Genesis two tells us friendship isn't an optional benefit that a few marriages ought to shoot for. What I'm telling you is friendship is the foundation. You could argue that friendship is the ultimate end of our existence. It is where everything is going in the new heavens and the new earth with Jesus Christ, the great goal, the consummate expression of love is that we're friends with the Lord Jesus and we enjoy that friendship to its highest degree of glory ever increasing on into eternity. As marriage is meant to be a picture of Christ's love for the church, best friends who delight in a shared life together is precisely the kind of marriage that mirrors Jesus and the church. Best friends that delight in a shared love and life together is precisely the kind of marriage that mirrors the love of Jesus Christ and his church. Now, I'm not original to say this. If you go down through the lane, you stroll down church history lane, you'll find that friendship features all over the place. I'll give you some highlights. Augustine said it like this. Speaking about Genesis, by the way, two things are essential in this world: life, which the Lord gives, and friendship. Both must be prizhly and not undervalued. Not undervalued. Jonathan Edwards, maybe the greatest theological mind that America's ever produced. Friendship is our highest happiness. John Newton said it like this to a feeling mind, by the way, John Newton is the one who wrote Amazing Grace. He said, To a feeling mind there is no temporal pleasure equal to the pleasure of friendship. C.S. Lewis, who you know, wrote The Chronicles of Narnia and many other really good books, Mere Christianity, said it like this: Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods, it is the chief happiness of life. J.C. Ryle, the Anglican preacher, said, I love this line so much. He says, Here's what friendship does: it halves your troubles and it doubles your joys. It's a great way to put that, isn't it? If you don't have it, I would imagine it could be the reverse, right? Especially in a marriage. Lots more sorrow, a lot less joy. So here's what I'm saying, and here's what I believe Genesis 2 is gonna teach us today. It's our big idea for this morning. The secret to the strongest marriage possible. By the way, forgive me for assuming that's what you would want. I'm gonna go ahead and take a stab in the dark. I also recognize the fact that some are gonna be really struggling with this because this is not what they have. However, the Bible's not as concerned about what isn't there necessarily, plenty of grace to get there, but wants to give the ideal, and we all fall short of the ideal. We all need God's grace in the pursuit of this for the record. But the secret to the strongest marriage possible is one built upon God's design. That was kind of last week, but we're kind of playing this out this week. Adding this part in, nurtured and formed through a foundational commitment to a best friendship. The secret of the strongest marriage possible is one built upon God's design. That's nurtured and formed through a foundational commitment to a best friendship. And so we're gonna break it down like this. We'll start broad, the need for friendship. We'll talk about a uniquely fitted friend that God makes for Adam, and then we'll talk about why it's not just any kind of a friendship, but a best friendship that ought to be the pursuit and the priority for every marriage. For those pursuing marriage, this is what you are after. God help us by your grace to cultivate this. So, number one, the need for friendship. And we pick that need up in verse 18. Now, as we're jumping into Genesis chapter 2, I told you this last week. Genesis chapter 1, God created the heavens and the earth in six days, right? In Genesis 2, there's a zoom-in effect, if you will, on the pinnacle of God's creation to give us a breakdown for what that looked like. What we see in Genesis 2 is that everything, the world Adam lived in, the work God had given him, the fellowship with God, everything was good in creation. And then Genesis 2.18 halts us in our tracks when it says this. Then the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone. If you know God's words, you know that is the first time in the scripture that not good is used in all of God's creation. Now, if you were in like a Friday night hangout with some friends and you were doing Bible trivia and someone were to say, the first not good thing, what was it? Many of us would, because you're going fast, because you're super competitive, you would hit the button and you'd be like, sin. The first not good thing in creation was sin. And you would be wrong. The first not good thing in creation was not sin, it was solitude. Isolation. Proverbs 18:1 so clear, he who isolates himself causes huge problems for yourself. Now, why is this? Well, think back. You you and I are made in God's image, the image of the triune God who exists eternally in a communal love relationship among the persons of the Trinity. We exist to reflect God. Here's the thing we could enjoy the fellowship with Him, but we couldn't fully reflect God's relational love in solitude. And so God answers that, and the answer is, and I know this is tough for some of us, and again, we live in a day where the answer wasn't a pet. I'll just say it like that. All right? No, no, let me be fair. Pets are good gifts from God, okay? I think it's great that you have pets. I think some people are too into their pets. Alright? And they become like a person, and it's almost protective in a way, right? The pet can be where I put all my attention, all my affection, all my money, because the pet won't ever hurt my feelings. The pet won't ever hurt me. The pet's always excited to see me. But see, here's the thing: when God saw the problem of man's solitude, he didn't answer with a pet. He answered with a person. Right? Marriage's design expresses that design for friendship that God's built in. When we look last week at Malachi 2.14, there was this language used of a covenant. Marriage is a covenant of companionship. Guys, we were made for this. We were made for this companionship, so much so that the whole creation is not pronounced very good until God addresses Adam's isolation. So maybe the first thing I want to ask you is uh is what's the foundation of your marriage? If you were to get asked this week in your small group, what is the foundation of your marriage? You would say, Jesus. Okay, that one is right. All right. We'll give you that one. What is the horizontal foundation of your relationship? You would say friendship. Friendship. Is it a best friendship you are in pursuit of? I'm not always saying it's perfect because we know it's not. We fall short from the get-go because of our sin nature and our sin choices. I get it. But is your pursuit, the foundation of your marriage, a best friendship? Because here's the thing we see time and time again, and for all kinds of different reasons, and let me be clear on that, but marriages struggle because spouses over time eventually become co-workers, co-parents, and roommates, and they forget the covenant of companionship that should have existed between them. Some of you, you get married so early, you don't know a time uh how to build you didn't have a time to build your relationship with your spouse before you had kids, and then kids turns out they're they they kind of they're dominant. And you're just like, all right, uh, I've got two, you've got two, ready, I'll see you tomorrow, right? And you're just like hanging on for dear life, corralling the kiddos, and so you become this team, and you are absolutely supposed to become a team. However, at the very core of that should be a friendship. The overflow of all that you do, the worship, the work, everything should be a friendship. So listen, one of the things that has to happen, I talked about last week, if your marriage is in a place where it's like it's bad, and and Scott, you're making it worse with every sermon, right? We've talked about that. Like somehow I'm making it worse, and uh and uh it's never gonna come together. And I said one of the things you're gonna have to be willing to do is you're gonna have to look yourself in the mirror and see if you are willing before God to tear your marriage down to the very studs of that relationship. And if you're in need of that, then you need to tear your relationship down to the very studs of that friendship or lack thereof. You are going to need to examine the friendship. Because listen, I'll I'll give it to you in the words of the Puritan William Gooch, he said it like this: a loving mutual affection must pass between husband and wife, or else no duty will be well performed. You go, we got a problem here, we got a problem here, we got a problem here, we got a problem here. Here's what he says: this is the ground of all the rest. Friendship is the foundation. Without that mutual affection passing between husband and wife, which I take to be an expression of friendship, no duty will be well performed. You say, I got this problem, I got that problem. You gotta tear it down to the studs and evaluate the friendship. Another Puritan said it like this: two joined together without love are but two tied together to make one another miserable. It's true, isn't it? You're gonna have to humble yourself like crazy. You're gonna have to rebuild basic social skills. One of the things I've realized as a pastor uh at this particular time is that a lot of counseling doesn't have to do with the Bible stuff. It has to do with common sense that your mom and dad should have taught you when you were growing up. I'm serious. And your mom and dad didn't teach you, and so we're not even like in the ballpark. You're you're in you're in the parking lot of a stadium. You don't even know what you're doing. And it's like we gotta get back to some basic foundations. We gotta learn how to be friends with one another again. And listen, social media is not helping, and I don't care if you have 40,000 friends, you don't have that many friends. The need for friendship, I think, is established. Let's go to number two, the provision of a uniquely fitted friend. What a gift of God. The provision of a uniquely fitted friend. Adam's search reveals his uniqueness in verse 19. He says, Now out of the ground, the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and every beast of the field. Here's the contrastive statement, but you see that? But for Adam, there was not found a helper fit for him. Okay? He had his options, lots of pets, a lot of options. How many of you just want a tiger for a pet? I've thought about it. That would be awesome. Not gonna solve this problem, right? So God creates a helper fit for him, by the way, connecting back to verse 18. A helper fit for him. You know what that literally means? Opposite to him. A helper fit for him is someone, it's as if you're facing in a reflection, one fit for you, but as of inversely corresponding to you. That's what he needed. Inversely corresponding to him, complementing him. And so what do we find? Well, Eve is not created from the dust of the ground like Adam was, but fashioned from Adam's side. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept, he took one of his ribs and closed up its place. With flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, This is that last bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh, she shall be called woman because she was taken out of man. Genesis is clear, guys. Women, the woman given to Adam, was not merely given to assist in Adam's work, but uniquely fitted to share Adam's life. That's gotta be the foundation. Matthew Henry, you probably have this commentary. If you need one commentary on all of the Bible, I would recommend it. Matthew Henry's commentary on the whole Bible. Get it if you need one commentary, do it. Here's what he wrote on Genesis 2.22. He said, The woman was made of a rib out of the side of Adam, not made out of his head to top him, nor out of his feet to be trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected, and near his heart to be loved. That's a good little nugget. So much so that Adam rejoices, he's like, Yeah, baby. Right? That in Genesis 2 language is exactly what happens. I mean, he breaks into song at last, right? And here's the thing do you realize these are the first recorded words of man? First recorded words of man are words of delight. Over what? The relationship is celebrated before the function that Eve brings. The relationship is celebrated first. He sees her as a friend before a helper. He can't believe she's here. He's so beyond excited. One of the things I think we need to do, and I don't think we focus on it enough. I don't think when we think about our marriage, if we're to think about it as a garden, we need to be tending our garden on a regular basis. I don't think friendship comes into that conversation very often. Hey, how's our friendship going? Maybe you know, um, indirectly you do it, but you're not like overtly focusing on it. I think one of the things we need to understand is that we need to value the friendship with our spouse much more highly. This uniquely fitted person given, just made by God, given to you by God. What a gift. We need to be valuing friendship more highly. And you know how you value it is when you share your life together. Friendship comes through shared life. Think about it. Shared everything. Shared time. Right? You and your spouse need shared time. Best friendships need shared time. There's no substitute for that. Would you agree? You need shared time together. You need to be sharing your thoughts with one another, not all your thoughts. Some wisdom in this, all right? It's not an ongoing narrative of your thoughts. But there is some expression of here's my dreams, here's what I'm excited about, here's what I was thinking about, here's kind of why I'm frustrated, or what I'm struggling with today, or here's how God's word is kind of messing with me and flipping me upside down, or man, I got off to a bad foot, I'm so tired, this is, I feel grumpy, like talk with your best friend. Shared time, shared thoughts, shared support. Support each other and work and worship, marriage, in procreation, right? In work. Share in encouraging one another. Like one of the coolest things I can say about my marriage is in 17 years, and I know most people think pastors work two hours a week. I've never worked two hours a week, ever, ever, ever. I mean, I grinded for years to get the church going. And my wife never once complained about what I was giving to you guys. All the nights, all the days. If I didn't discipline myself to stop working, I would always have work. She's never once complained, ever once. And she shapes the culture of our home by celebrating. God, Daddy is serving the Lord. Yeah. And so her bitterness is not getting out to my kids. They love church. Emma thinks she runs the church, all right? Which is a different problem, all right? But one I'm not wanting to correct quite yet. I'm thankful that when she's sitting in a line, she doesn't know why she's not first in every line at Doxa. And that's how I expect it to be ongoing until about 16, and then we'll talk about why that probably doesn't fit a servant leadership mindset. But encouraging one another. What about shared worship? Do you share your doctrine together? Do you share your mission together? Do you live in a shared mission? Here's how we're serving the Lord. Here's what we're doing. Here's what we see the vision of. How do we use ourselves in God's kingdom? Shared communion with the Lord. Here's what God's doing in my time with the Lord. Overflowing. Here's how I'm drawing closer to Christ. Here's how Christ is drawing closer to me. Here's what I'm learning in the middle of this trial. Here's what I'm challenged with. See, one of the things that's like, how do I grow? How do we become a spiritual leader? Listen, if you are serious about Jesus and you are communing with him, you don't need to do anything else. Just live out of the overflow of your robust communion with Jesus Christ. Period. I have never had like, okay, we do this at five and we do this at seven. I mean, we have rhythms, but most of it is just out of the overflow of my communion with Jesus Christ. Shared burdens. Do you share those together? Life's heartbreaks, difficult decisions, hirings, firings, challenging seasons, all of that needs to be shared together. If we're going to value friendship more highly, we got to include all these categories because it's a shared life that we're after. And again, these aren't perfect either, but I'll say it. Shared bed. Shared bedtime. Shared bank account. I don't need an email this week. Well, we can't go to bed at the same time. I got you. I got you. There are circumstances that understand. Understand. But I think that's the focus. I think that would be the driving pursuit. The goal is to enjoy friendship more fully. Think about shared joys, all right? Do you share enjoys together, right? Do you have fun together? Do you date your spouse? Do you study your spouse? Last week I made a comment about I wouldn't give Aaron a sewing machine now, right? As a gift. But 12 years ago, I would have been an awesome husband if I had done that. And by the way, I did. But I know she doesn't want that anymore because I know what she wants now. Shh. When your wife gets pregnant, she changes a little bit. In some wonderful ways. Study her, get to know her. And what the what's so wild about it too is before you got married, you invested so much. Oh man, you put your best foot forward. The stories I hear when people are upset at their spouses, it's like, I had no idea. Were you excited on your wedding day? Oh, I was beaming. When'd you know? The next day, I'm like, come on. Something's off. You remember? You couldn't even wait to be together. When you were, it was gestures and expressions, it was nauseating to everyone else around you. Right? It's like you could not keep your hands off of each other. You're in public, right? You're at a family reunion. Tone it down. Do you remember this? The looks, the actions, the tenderness. Even when you weren't, it was notes and it was gifts and it was emojis before emojis were a thing, and it was compliments, and it was like all this oozing. And then you get married. What happened? You took your foot off the gas. It's always funny too, with like, you know, even physically, like, I look the best I've ever looked on my wedding day, right? And then you just completely take your foot off the gas, right? In all ways, shapes, and forms. Which is wild. Listen, we change. I get that. But I think you want to know that there's a mutual concern on both parts that we're doing our best to, you know, honor the Lord with what he's given us. Don't look perfect. It's looking worse by the day. But I'm gonna give you a concentrated effort, hon. We take things for granted. Toleration at best, resentment at worst. So it somehow fits between that, don't we? We just tolerate. We go on for these long streams. Toleration at best, resentment at worst. Listen, listen, listen. We need to get back to the spirit of Revelation 2.7. Go back and do the things you did at first. It's not rocket science. No one will feel the same way anymore. I'm sorry, did that factor in? Where are you getting that? Repent and go back and do the things you did at first when you were very friendly with each other. Very into each other. You should strive in your marriage to say a Song of Solomon says, This is my beloved and this is my friend. Sometimes I just call Erin best friend. Hey best friend. That's her nickname now. Sometimes it's love. Hey, love. Hey, best friend. Talking in those ways. Deuteronomy 13, she is as my own soul. That's the pursuit. Striving to go back and do the things you did at first. Shared life, shared time, shared thoughts, shared support, shared vision for life, shared joy. So you see what I'm saying? God's given you a uniquely fitted friend to enjoy. The work is worth it. The spirit is powerful enough. The word is clear enough. Let's build these friendships. Now, here's the third thing: the priority of best friendship. So we're not talking about just friendship, we're talking about a kind of friendship. We're talking about a best friendship. Where do we pick that up? Again, we talked about this last week, but we're doubling down again on it this week because I think it very much applies. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother. All right, so the indicator there is you're leaving your most prized lowercase C covenantal relationship, and it's assuming that you're leaving that for your spouse, which is an intentional prioritization. It becomes a superseding number one human relationship. Leaving father and mother, assuming a new number one human relationship. As one commentator said, marriage love admits of no equal. She is my best, or he is my best, and he is my first. Oh, another nickname that comes up. I call her my favorite. You're my favorite. Hey, favorite. I love that. You don't have to have nicknames. You're like, that's cheesy. Well, you probably should get one or two that you use. If marriage admits of no equal and you're to leave and cleave, and this new relationship with your spouse supersedes every other relationship, even father and mother, then you need to protect this, right? It's something that you must protect. Preserve it as your number one relationship. It is your best friendship. So listen, you have to protect it from all kinds of things, like your parents, right? I call them well-meaning meddlers. Isn't it true? Some of you, you're in that place. You are. You are struggling with not being a meddler and your kid's brand new relationship, right? You want to help, you think you're helping, but there's a certain line you need to honor between that new husband and that new wife, whether it's your son or your daughter. We need to protect it. Doesn't mean you don't have a role. It means that your role's not number one. I think that bothers some people that I just said that. Did that bother some of you? I apologize in zero ways for that. I do, I do. And seriously, you, this is the goal as a parent. This is what you're setting yourself up to do, is to be superseded. If you have God's word in your heart, you celebrate this moment. Put your head down and go, oh, I'm disappointed. No! You get excited about that. You play the role you're supposed to play, and you don't meddle as the number one to your daughter anymore or your son. What about careers? They can do that, right? I mean, in my career, I can I'll give you another story in ministry. I remember hearing a horror story in seminary about a true story, about a guy that was just consumed in the books, would not get away from his studies. And eventually the marriage fractured, and over three years, he was just about to graduate. She stacked a huge stack of books on the bed with the letters saying she wanted a divorce. So it happens in ministry, it can happen in other things. You can have work as your wife, you need to protect your relationship from your work. You should work enough to take care of your family, but not enough that you don't have a family. Children. Your relationship needs to rank above your children. Also, don't apologize about that. Here's something that's interesting too when a marriage is bad. When a marriage is bad, you actually keep the best friendship framework, but you put it on your fri your kids, and then you compete with your spouse about who can be the best friend with the kids. It's completely inverted, it's messed up. It happens to, by the way, know the experience. You go, I know there's something in me that says I need to have a best friend, but we are not clicking, so I will invest it in my kids, and I will try to make my spouse understand that my kids feel my best friendship and lean my way versus lean your way. How about friendships, right? You need to protect your best friendship from other friendships. You need to have other friendships for sure. But you ever find that person that's online all the time and it's like, man, they have a ton of people over all the time. How do they do it? And in some cases, praise God for that. But can I just be honest with you, being a pastor for this many years, sometimes, sometimes, sometimes that's a cover for a marriage that's not doing very well? Sometimes that's a cover for something in that friend group going awry with certain couples. Got it? Your love for your spouse must be supreme. You have to protect it. So let me ask, does your spouse receive primary attention from you? Does your spouse receive primary affection from you? Does your spouse receive primary energy from you? Not the weird mystical kind. I mean your focus, your effort, okay, energy. You're like, oh, we got great energy together. No, no, no, no. I mean when you're when you're tired, husband, and you come home, are you praying? In the last little chunk, Lord, give me the strength. Because I my best hours are right now. My best hours are right now. I have just spent myself from the early hours of the morning, nonstop, all day, no breaks. God give me strength. The best time of my day starts right now. Like that. Here's a good test. Do your kids see your spouse as your best friend? If you asked your kids, hey, polling you guys, who's dad's best friend? What would they say? Good, mom. I heard mom, that's huge. Yeah. Winning on the left. Okay? That is absolutely the right answer. That is what should be seen and demonstrated in the home. But like your kids need to see that. They need to see that you're pursuing that best friendship. They need to see the fact that you're set apart with one another. Like Song of Solomon, just go read Song of Solomon. That's how you should interact with your spouse, right? Song of Solomon, the language in chapter two is so great. The woman's talking about man, you are my apple tree among all apple trees, among all trees. You stand apart. You are just a fruit-filled tree. Everything else is just a m tree. The man says, You are my lily among brambles. You stand out, every other woman, thorns. That's the relationship we have. That's the love you want to enjoy. Something that's truly set apart, and you know it. Love must be supreme. Because it's a best friendship. You're leaving your father and your mother. But then it says this: I'm gonna add that love must be steady. It says, and you should hold fast to your wife, which we talked about last week was a covenantal adhesion, right? It's the idea of gluing of souls together. But the hold fast has this keeping element to it, if you can keep it. You have this number one relationship now that supersedes all others. Can you keep it? Can you build upon it? What some of us need to do is we need to get off the roller coaster that so many marriages go through, which is this high highs, low lows, and long lulls. You just get stuck for way too long. Your accounts aren't short enough. You're not just checking in to make sure you're good with the other. You're not bringing counsel in at the appropriate point, you're just waiting and drifting apart and distance. Friendships are not something you fall in and out of. It's not something you just wake up and it's there. It's something you cultivate. Just in the same way that you don't expect to wake up to a field of crops without work. You got to put the work in, period. And I don't even know what you're working with to begin with. But the goal is consistently good and growing. Where's the relationship? It is consistently good and it's growing. Is it perfect? By no means. Is there sin in it? On the regular. But we keep short accounts. We keep a high value on repentance. We make sure the other is cared for in such a degree that if anything is off in the relationship, even at all, you feel it as if it was like a broken bone. One Puritan said it like this: It's as a bone out of joint. There is no ease, no order, no work well done till they're restored and set in joint again. Do you understand what that is? That's the kind of relationship you should have where something is off and man, nothing else makes sense. Like one of the things that I've talked about for a long time is what you see is what you get up here. I don't know how to phone it in, right? If if Aaron and I were off, it would be extremely difficult for me to come up here and pretend and preach. So we have to. God hems us in to make sure our accounts are short, our repentance is serious, our forgiveness is ample, our gospel is big, our God is even bigger all the time. You think about the gluing of souls, what threatens to tear apart your relationship? What are those things that you entertain, whether it's a selfishness, whether it's a bitterness, whether there's an ingratitude, right? And a gratitude can slip in so subtly, especially when you're really busy in the early years, it can just be such a difficult thing. You just become ungrateful. I remember one of the things Aaron and I, we were running so stinking hard, and I and she was raising all three kids, and it was like as soon as one got out of diapers, two more were in them. It was just like that content, and we never got out of a stage. And it was just like we had to look at each other as tough as times were, and we were sometimes frustrated just about circumstances, and just go, listen, I want you to know from the bottom of my heart, I know you're giving everything you have. You're gonna get no peep out of me. I think you're giving your absolute best. And I'm telling you right now, I am giving my absolute best. Let's just trust God for the grace to get us through today, because He will get us through today. We're not gonna comment on each other, we're not gonna critique each other. I just I'm asking for your best, and I promise I'll give you my best today, and I will grind today. Are we good with that? And we literally lived on that for a long time. And then he says this Genesis 2, and they shall become one flesh. One flesh, union of the whole person, the whole life, physical, emotional, spiritual, relational, all of it. This best friendship, physically, you are intoxicated with the love of one another, Proverbs 5. This is, if I can use the words that we used to say in the you why you're more than friends. An intimacy level that is reflective of a best friendship. Emotional level that's reflective of a best friendship. You are mutually open with one another, which I get. That's probably one of the most dangerous things about marriage, is being mutually open with another. Being known as a sinner and yet still being loved is one of the greatest fears that any of us have. And it's expressed on a regular basis. To be a sinner but still loved is one of those things. C.S. Lewis said this: love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to keep your heart intact, you must give your heart to no one. Wrap it carefully with hobbies and little luxuries. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But if you want to get to know someone, you are absolutely taking a risk that in being known you won't be loved. Or that in being loved, you won't receive that love for a long time because the honest truth is you don't love yourself. And I don't mean that in the weird ways. I mean that in the kind of self-pitying ways where pride gets involved and you feel ennobled by your lack of esteem for what the Lord's doing in your life and who you are as a person. But the good news is that God creates this covenant relationship as this beautiful boundary where this best friendship can grow. Like marriage is such a gift because they're not going anywhere. It's the one relationship that can't abandon you. Every other person doesn't have a promise not to abandon you except this one. What an amazing thing that you can have this environment where you can stumble and fall and still be loved and still be sought after and still be pursued. I mean, let's be honest, a friendship hasn't really formed until they've disappointed you, right? Until they've sinned against you. Then you know. That's what I say about church. People get so excited, oh, I love docs at church. I'm like, have we disappointed you yet? I'm serious. Don't say you love our church until we've disappointed you and you figured out a way to stay anyway. If we haven't disappointed you yet, you haven't been here long enough. You go, how many times should I try a church until they disappoint you, and you figure out if you want to stay or not based on their values and what they're pursuing. The one flesh union is a type of the one-body union we have with our Lord Jesus Christ. It was meant to be that way. It was always pointing in that direction. It was pointing beyond to Jesus. What we get to enjoy with our spouses as we pursue this best friendship is ultimately a reflection of the benefit that we get in Jesus Christ. You consider the friendship of Jesus, right? There's this parallel as Adam slept so that God might form his bride. Listen, Christ slept, right? He entered death so that he might redeem his bride, so that he could condescend and do for enemies what they could not do for themselves to make us friends with God. Like the great crowning achievement in John 15 is because of the work of Jesus Christ, he doesn't just call you servants, which is an Old Testament blessing, he calls you friends. That this is the direction that history is going. Jesus is the great peacemaker. His death on the cross, making peace for sinners, restoring a friendship that was broken. There's the picture of a friend who loves to the end, who opens his life, who shares his life with his people, who doesn't air out our dirty laundry but covers it with his own blood as he shed that blood on a cross all the way into death. He lets us in all the way, he bears our burdens. This is the great friend. And he brings us into a covenant friendship. The model we have, and listen, if you're single, if you're widowed, you're like, well, I don't have a best friend, I don't have a marriage, you have a best friend with Jesus Christ. And guess what? Every marriage is gonna give way to that. Tim Keller said that the gospel, the cross in particular, is a cosmic act of friendship. You are not going to know how to be friends and grow in friendship with your spouse until you are befriended by the Lord Jesus Christ. Becoming a better friend is the byproduct of being befriended by the best friend and empowered by the best friend to walk in a newness of life. And listen, if you get a newness of life in Jesus, then you can tear what you have down to the studs and rebuild it. You are no longer who you used to be. You are no longer defined by your sin. You are defined by Jesus Christ. He not only has befriended you, but he has the great best friend, empowered you to walk like he walks. He gives you the strength. You don't muster up this strength. He models what it looks like to be a best friend, and we receive that. The overwhelming gift of being befriended by Jesus. Here's the truth. Best prep for whatever God has for you, growth in covenant friendship with Jesus Christ. You go, well, I want to be married. Great. Prepare and covenant friendship with Jesus Christ. The best hope for friendship in your marriage, enjoying covenant friendship with Jesus Christ. The best part of every friendship, here's the cool thing, will remain beyond this life because again, it's pointing to the greater consummate fulfillment of the great friendship that Jesus Christ purchased with his own blood, a people for himself, to enjoy deep friendship for eternity. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you for its power. Lord, we see and recognize in this that there is much, much, much there and ideal, but not always playing out in our lives the way that it should. God, I just pray that you would, by your Spirit's power and the good news of the gospel, being befriended by Jesus, woo us, change us, and allow us to model our marriages and frankly our relationships after the kind of love we've received from you, God. So empower it in us, we pray. In Jesus' name. Amen.