Well, given that I’ve posted the previous two parts over the past couple of Fridays, I thought I would complete the set today. We’ve been taking a fresh look at a series on marriage I preached several years ago called Marriage Myths. In each part of the series we unpacked a different myth that our culture often tells us about marriage. Along the way we discovered why the truth is so much better than even the grandest fiction our culture can devise. In this final myth, we’re actually covering ground I covered more recently in the marriage series I preached just a few weeks ago. Marriage isn’t about happiness. Not primarily anyway. Let’s talk about what it’s really about instead, and why that’s better.
Every marriage story our culture tells is always in pursuit of living happily ever after. The trouble is that when you actually get into a marriage, there are seasons when happiness seems pretty fleeting. Complicating this is that we live in a culture that prizes personal happiness above just about everything else. You can perhaps see how this might create some unique challenges for the development of a strong and healthy marriage culture in our nation. The apostle Paul spoke into this challenge almost 2,000 years ago with some counsel that is hard to receive, but if we will receive it with open hands, it has some truly transformational power. As we continue our series, The Journey of a Lifetime, let’s talk about what the real goal of marriage is and why understanding that matters so much.
Happiness Isn’t the Goal
Before 1969 divorce in the United States was hard to come by. That year, the Republican governor of California, Ronald Reagan, signed into a law a bill that allowed for the first time in the nation something called no-fault divorce. Prior to that, if a husband and wife wanted to get out of their marriage, they had to be able to demonstrate enough of some kind of justifiable harm such as abuse, infidelity, abandonment, or something else sufficiently severe along those lines to convince a judge to grant their request. No-fault divorce laws, on the other hand, allowed for couples to simply cite “irreconcilable differences” without having to furnish any kind of proof to back up their claims. In what ought to go down as the least surprising outcome of a public policy ever, within about ten years, the divorce rate in the country more than doubled, bringing with it all of the various social problems associated with divorce.
