I have made my 55 revolutions around the sun mostly with one person. Brenda Koning caught my eye the summer before my senior year of high school. The rest is history. Later in December we will celebrate 33 years of married life.
Part of my pastoral privilege is performing wedding ceremonies. Without doubt, they are one of the most enjoyable parts of my ministry, and I look back with happy thoughts as the couples come to mind. Still, there are two ceremonies that stand out among the rest – Michael’s and Lauren’s and Jennifer’s and James’. To each of the grooms I charged them with this thought –
Michael, my son – my first born – my name sake, go be Lauren’s husband. In God’s grace and with God’s blessing lead her to places she could never go without you, a place where God is glorified and where happiness is yours and all who know the two of you.
James, my son, go be Jennifer’s husband. For the last 24 years, God gave me the privilege to lead her, but my time is done. I have led her as far as I can. Now the privilege to lead her is yours. In God’s grace and with God’s blessing lead God’s daughter and my daughter to places she could never go without you, a place where God is glorified and where happiness is yours and all who interact with your sweet union.
To receive a wife is one of God’s great gifts to a man (Proverbs 18:22), but with God’s great gifts come great responsibilities. To take a woman as a wife is to take the obligation to lead her toward Christ and never to foster in her a retreat in her spiritual maturity or the penchant to sin where she was not previously tempted. A Christian woman married to a Christian man should be more like Christ for having married him, should be putting off the old and putting on the new for having married him, and she should not fight new battles against the flesh for having married him. That last phrase is where I have failed.
Christian author Jerry Bridges wrote in Respectable Sins about those acts of the flesh that, while common, do not merit the seriousness they require to stamp out and not tolerate. Bridges identified anxiety, frustration, discontent, impatience, irritability, anger, judgmentalism, envy, jealousy, and more. They are not the big sins of immorality, drunkenness, or criminal felonies. They are the “we all are that way” sins that are overlooked and become acceptable.
Please don’t read what I have not written. Brenda is not an angry, frustrated, discontent and impatient woman who is regularly irritable and jealous of others who possess what she does not. There is nothing farther from the truth than that characterization. What I do know and what she readily admits is her need for ongoing sanctification. What troubles me is that those areas of need were introduced to her by me. She didn’t enter our marriage with them. I taught her how to sin in those respectable ways. It is the singular largest regret of my married life. I am working diligently to lead her away from the Slough of Despond where I took her by the hand.
I write not so much to confess my faults nor in any way to disparage my bride whose permission I have to write but to warn younger husbands about something they likely are not aware they are doing. A husband must not lead his wife to new sin patterns she had not known before their marriage. I am convinced that many problems in marriages of a decade or more could have been prevented had the new husband known the potential to lead his new wife to areas of sin she had not faced before her wedding day.
It’s not too late to address the problem, and that’s what I am trying to do, and that’s what I’m calling all husbands to do as well. If you are a new husband or hope to be a husband someday soon, heed the advice of one who has learned from corrected error. When you are anxious, do not lead your wife to anxiety; rather, lead yourself and her to God’s answer for anxiety (Matthew 6:30-33; Philippians 4:4-7). When you are angry, do not lead your wife to anger; rather, lead yourself and her to God’s answer for anger (Proverbs 15:1; James 1:19-20). You get the idea.
I cannot say this enough or with more clarity. A Christian woman should be more like Christ because she married you, her Christian husband. If she is not, you bear some responsibility (Ephesians 5:25-27).
Any who know Brenda and me know I am a better Christian because of her. I want to do what I can to help Brenda be a better Christian because she’s married to me.
May God give us grace.
Mike VerWay
Pastor for Preaching & Vision