Eyeball to Eyeball on Commitment in Marriage

A Couple in for Counseling—Wanting to Get Married

Woman sitting next to her boyfriend, her live-in: Who wants to marry somebody and commit to a relationship that might not work out? We’ve actually been living as if married, in every sense, and it’s been good to have sort of a test drive about one another.

Pastor: Having that view about marriage worries me, actually.

Woman: (Stunned look) What do you mean?

Pastor: (Going eyeball to eyeball with both of them): You have been living in an experiment, and there is no reason why the formality of marriage would change your habit of treating the relationship as an experiment. Christian marriage is a commitment, not an experiment.

I was taken in with this paraphrased piece from an old edition of Touchstone Magazine.

Tomorrow I am leading off with a talk on sex, sexuality and self-control for men. The test-drive age in which we live has been so formative. Experimental live-in situations assume man’s self-sufficient ways and answers for life. It’s all very person to person focused. It borrows just a teaspoon of Christianity—it’s not good for man to be alone, but then gives shape to life on man’s own standards. What worldly standards? I’ll live with you so long as I am still able to be at the center getting my way, according to my likes. Anything that pushes me too far out of the center no longer serves my purposes.

Rather than acknowledgement about heart issues of man’s sinful state, and his self-serving choices and pleasures, it’s the confession of “I have needs, you know.”

Where’s the binding agreement, a covenant that takes the focus off of each person, and places it on commitment? One of the assumptions above on the part of this couple is that love gives special permission, it places them in an unique spot: they think that experimenting with love is acceptable.

Is one of the attributes of love experimentation? Would it be found in 1 Corinthians 13? Love is patient…does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up… bears all things…experiments with all things….

G. Mark Sumpter