My Greatest Treasure

A single minded, devotional, relational pursuit of Jesus is the goal of my marriage because Jesus Christ is my greatest treasure. And this is why…

Lets say that a single man who is single-minded in his devotion to Jesus Christ is moving through life and he meets a girl. And as this guy gets to know this girl he realizes that she is part of God’s plan to push him into the fullness of the knowledge of who Jesus Christ is and so he decides to marry her, because remember this guy is single minded, and this girl helps to lead him into a greater affection for Jesus. So, they get married and life is good, and marriage is good for 6 months, 12 months, 5 years, etc. Life is going really well.

But, one day it starts to go bad, and this does not mean that my spouse just does stuff that gets on my nerves bad, because that is called marriage. I mean really bad. I mean that you prefer to stay at work rather than go home – bad.

In that moment, because we are single minded in our pursuit of Jesus Christ and in our understanding, as we entered into marriage, that God gave us our spouse to loosen up our hands on the things of this world; to reveal in us our pride, to reveal in us our selfishness; to reveal in us how much we think everything is about me; and to reveal in us our absolute refusal to love one another like Christ and other people have loved us.

We realize that as God reveals those things to us, we can begin to press into him and confess those things to him. Like, “I do have a proud heart, I do want this and this and this, and I am more concerned about me than the other person.” And we remember that, Jesus’ teaching about having an abundant life almost always revolve around our death to self. This is why Jesus said, “Unless a seed falls to the ground and dies it can never produce any kind of fruit.” We know that we are never going to really walk in how life was designed to be until we can die to ourselves, submit and follow Christ. And in so doing, we learn to lay ourselves at his feet and we choose to continue to love our spouse like Jesus Christ loved the church despite the fact that it is extremely difficult. And the beauty is that in that moment a greater ethic of love has been created for the entire world to see.

Jesus is not after our begrudging submission. We do this because, Jesus is our treasure, he is our joy, he is our fulfillment, he is our goal, he is what we are after, he is what life is about, he is what happens after life, and so our pursuit is him and in our pursuit of him a greatest ethic is created – which is unconditional love. We do this because our hearts have been transformed by his unconditional love. This is why Jesus is the greatest treasure, and the goal of marriage.