Tim Keller writes in The Meaning of Marriage  ,

Christian ethicist Lewis Smedes wrote an article that I read as a young pastor and a still new husband. It helped me enormously as both a counselor and spouse. It is called “Controlling the Unpredictable—The Power of Promising” [Christianity Today 27:2 (January 21, 1983): 16–19]. (p. 90)

Keller then interacts with the article to underscore his point that “marriage is essentially a covenant” (p. 90). Here are some excerpts from Smedes’s article:

Some people ask who they are and expect their feelings to tell them. But feelings are flickering flames that fade after every fitful stimulus. Some people ask who they are and expect their achievements to tell them. But the things we accomplish always leave a core of character unrevealed. Some people ask who they are and expect visions of their ideal self to tell them. But our visions can only tell us what we want to be, not what we are.

Maybe we can best find out who and what we are by asking about the promises we have made to other people and the promises we are trying to keep for their sakes.

__________

When I married my wife, I had hardly a smidgen of sense for what I was getting into with her. [Read more…] about “My wife has lived with at least five different men since we were wed—and each of the five has been me.”

Tim Keller has been pastoring Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City since he planted it in 1989, and the church reflects the city’s demographics: over 80% of the people are single. So Keller has a lot of experience shepherding singles.

His new book The Meaning of Marriage  includes a chapter entitled “Singleness and Marriage.” It concludes with “some practical counsel for marriage seekers,” which unpacks eight guidelines (pp. 207–18):

1. Recognize that there are seasons for not seeking marriage.
2. Understand the “gift of singleness.”
3. Get more serious about seeking marriage as you get older.
4. Do not allow yourself deep emotional involvement with a non-believing person.
5. Feel “attraction” in the most comprehensive sense.
6. Don’t let things get too passionate too quickly.
7. However, also don’t become a faux spouse for someone who won’t commit to you.
8. Get and submit to lots of community input.

Related:

1. “You Take Me the Way I Am”
2. “My wife has lived with at least five different men since we were wed—and each of the five has been me.”

I recently heard Ingrid Michaelson’s catchy pop song “The Way I Am”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xt1Ny_rLp74

It encapsulates the “I love you because you make me feel good about myself” idea that Tim Keller’s The Meaning of Marriage  repeatedly refutes (see especially chapters 1 and 3). Keller rejects the contemporary idea that love means finding your perfectly compatible thrill-inducing soul mate:

[S]exual attractiveness was not the number one factor that men named when surveyed by the National Marriage Project. They said that “compatibility” above all meant someone who showed a “willingness to take them as they are and not change them.” “More than a few of the men expressed resentment at women who try to change them. . . . Some of the men describe marital compatibility as finding a woman who will ‘fit into their life.’ ‘If you are truly compatible, then you don’t have to change,’ one man commented.” (pp. 30–31)

_______

It would be wrong to lay on men the full responsibility for the shift in marriage attitudes. [Read more…] about You Take Me the Way I Am