Family and Marriage

There is a saying people sometimes use when they want to be alone together: "Two's company, three's a crowd." So far these lessons have been about twosomes. But marriages are often crowded. In fact they are meant to be, for married couples live in community and usually have family. In this lesson we ask how, by grace, married couples can better serve their families: parents, in-laws, and children.

Leaving parents

Ephesians 5 ends with an afterword that looks forward. Paul reminds us that married people are starting a family. Something new is being made because a husband and wife are now united. It is exciting for the couple and often challenging for their families. This is why preachers tell parents at a wedding that no one is losing anything; one side is gaining a son-in-law, the other a daughter-in-law. But there is also a real sense in which children are separating from father and mother and siblings. Honor, love, and friendship continue, but a new alignment of affection and respect is created.

"Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh."

Ephesians 5:31 (ESV)

When the Bible first summarizes what it means for a man and woman to be together, it mentions two activities: leaving father and mother, and becoming one flesh. In the older King James phrasing, leaving and cleaving. For many couples, the Van Dixhoorns observe, cleaving is the easy part. The leaving is more complicated.

What leaving looks like will depend on your culture. In some places, with extended families living together, leaving may mean getting your own room. We will go out on a limb and say that level of leaving is not optimal in a marriage, even when it is necessary. But whatever the shape leaving takes, it is felt on a personal level. If you were used to spending a lot of time with your parents, not seeing them regularly creates a void. This is especially true where a spouse was particularly close to a parent. Yet if a husband is to be a one-woman man, it is hard to see how he can ordinarily spend an hour a day on the phone with his mother. A parallel point holds for a wife and her parents.

And it is at least as hard for parents, often for longer. Married Christian couples need to care about that, because we want to make the duty of our parents to let go as easy as possible. We will explain that travel and telephone time may need to change. But we may want to say more. We may acknowledge the loss and loneliness a new marriage leaves in other lives. Here Augustine helps: every loss and every loneliness contains its own lesson, that human relations in this life cannot fully satisfy the longing for relationship built into each one of us. Things are left broken in this life to make us long for what is not. Jonathan Edwards makes the same point in his chapter "Heaven, a World of Love": only there is love hindered by nothing.

Loving parents (and in-laws)

We can also talk about parental problems on a relational level. There is a reason there is a whole genre of mother-in-law jokes, going back almost as far as the genre of joke itself. Sometimes we marry into whole families that are complicated. Sarah Edwards, Jonathan's wife, found herself grafted by marriage into a family tree that included an axe murderer. Most of our in-law problems are more pedestrian, and have nothing to do with axes. But they can be just as dangerous because they are less obvious.

Think about the in-law challenges you may have faced. Spending time with your spouse's family, you see not only their strengths but their faults in a larger perspective. There is the moment when you realize your spouse's most irritating sin is typical of the whole family. There is the moment when parents, out of habit, treat your spouse like their child, and you watch in horror as your spouse slips back into the role of a dependent. There are the moments when parents try to shape your decisions by winning their child to their point of view on finances, parenting, or decorating. When manipulation is at work, in-laws feel like outlaws.

Good sense makes one slow to anger, and it is his glory to overlook an offense.

Proverbs 19:11 (ESV)

Proverbs 19:11 reminds us it is a glory to overlook an offense, and we should allow as few things as possible to qualify as offenses. She should not take umbrage when he admires his mother's cooking. He should not be jealous when he does not get her family's jokes. A married couple who wants to help a spouse and parents fulfill their duties will talk these dynamics through together, and then talk to the parents too. Without that, leaving and cleaving will be hindered.

Honoring parents

A second biblical duty helps us balance our child-parent relations. It is the command to honor our parents.

"Honor your father and mother" (this is the first commandment with a promise), "that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land."

Ephesians 6:2–3 (ESV)

Odd as it may sound, married couples must not obey their parents. That would be to fail to leave father and mother. Something new is made in a marriage, including a new head of a new household. But respect must continue. Honoring parents is not just for children; it is for adults too.

Do you remember the respect you showed when you were dating or courting? Those conversations when you wanted your potential in-laws to like you? All that good behavior on display because you wanted your possible spouse to think you respected your parents too? That must not be turned off because the marriage deal is now sealed.

Being parents

Marriage can be crowded by parents. It is also crowded by children. And when we read a command to honor parents, many married couples think first of the honor their children owe them. This is not a parenting book; the Van Dixhoorns are clear about that. But parenting is a task of married people, and it usually accompanies marriage, so we want to think about it in that context.

First, marriage has purposes independent of raising children. Even if there is a sense in which we never stop being parents, we must be clear that our marriage comes before our parenting. It is good for our children to see this in the way we act and speak. It reflects creation priorities: husband and wife existed before father and mother.

Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.

Ephesians 6:4 (ESV)

Thus parents would be wise to spend time alone, or time together, that children may not interrupt. The Van Dixhoorns established a Sunday night date in their home: a square meal for the children after morning worship, a quick "breakfast dinner" after evening worship, then the two of them, perhaps with other adults, eating together after the younger children were in bed. A friend in their congregation once showed up after a service with an open planner and refused to leave until a free evening for babysitting was written down. She did this many times. It does not matter how you carve out your time as a couple. Just find some way to express the priority of the marriage in the family.

More importantly, Christian couples should pray together and have times of worship as a couple, not simply as a family. Their life together as a couple must not get swallowed up by life together as a family. A child-centered marriage is the kind that struggles most with an empty nest, or that fails to let children leave and cleave when their turn comes. In the next lesson we will see that 1 Corinthians 7 teaches we radically belong to one another; the same cannot be said of the parent-child relationship, and we must pass that truth on to our children as they grow.

Imitating a parent

Paul's closing point in Ephesians 4 sets up everything that follows.

Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you. Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children.

Ephesians 4:32 – 5:1 (ESV)

If we can show kindness and tenderheartedness in marriage, and our parents and children see it, we reflect the character of our true Father. And if our marriage is characterized by forgiveness, we leave a legacy worthy of imitation. People sometimes wonder which parent they most resemble. Does she have her mother's chin? Does he have his father's walk? The point of Ephesians 5:1 is that there are traits that ought to characterize the whole family of God, seen preeminently in our elder brother Jesus Christ, in both his love and his self-sacrifice.

To imitate Christ in marriage is to love others by sacrificing. It does not mean always doing what our parents or children most want; even Christian parents and children have wants that must be delayed or denied. It does not even mean always knowing what to say. What it does mean is that, by God's grace, we do all it takes to make leaving and cleaving more manageable for our parents, and honoring and obeying easier for our children.

A question for your mentor. Bring one thing from this lesson that surprised, troubled, or encouraged you to your next meeting. Your mentor can help you trace it further into Scripture and into your own story.