5 Pillars That Will Keep Your Marriage From Crashing by Pastor Kingsley Okonkwo: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

Marriage Is Not Hard, It Is Undertrained

Is marriage hard? The honest answer is that it depends entirely on your level of fitness for it. The simplest task can feel impossible to someone who is not prepared or fit for it, the same way a marathon feels effortless to a runner who trained for months and brutal to one who did not train at all.

In high school, I once talked my way onto my school's long-distance running team, not because I loved the sport but because I wanted to travel with my friends. The boys who actually made the team woke at five every morning to train on the real track. I trained by pacing a dormitory hallway with friends who could not even measure the distance properly. On race day, I kept pace for the first two laps, then the real runners increased their speed on the final lap and I collapsed into the bushes at the side of the track, unable to finish.

Every time people say a marriage "did not work out," what actually happened is that they did not work it out. It is like blaming a race for a runner's lack of preparation. Nothing is wrong with the race. Whether a marriage is hard or easy depends on how prepared you are for it, the same way an exam is only hard to the student who never studied.

Pillar One: How Prepared Are You

There is nothing wrong with marriage itself. There are dynamics to learn, much like the breathing technique and pacing a long-distance runner must learn before the race, not during it. Most people walk into marriage as if it were simply two people getting along, without realizing there is a whole discipline to it that must be learned in advance.

Pillar Two: How Intentional Are You

• Decide, from the very beginning, the kind of marriage you want to build. A marriage built with no higher purpose than "getting married" becomes the most boring and tiring thing a person can do. Have a shared goal and a shared dream from day one.
• Build a solid partnership, including with money. Couples who will not manage their finances together while trusting each other with their lives and their children have confused their own sense of value, treating money as more precious than the relationship itself.
• Understand that a girlfriend is not automatically a wife. A boyfriend can take you out; a husband takes you up. A boyfriend is more concerned with how much you spend, a wife with how much you save. Different roles require different criteria for who is fit to fill them.
• Build by kingdom design, not culture or feeling. A wife's core calling is to be a helper, the same Hebrew word scripture uses to describe God as our helper. When a marriage is built on scripture rather than culture, submission is not a fight, because a woman chooses her leader from the outset. Submission starts from selection.

Pillar Three: How Knowledgeable Are You

Just as a doctor must know the anatomy of the human body before touching it, you must understand the anatomy of attraction before you decide who is or is not "your type." There are three kinds of attraction, and most people make lifelong decisions based only on the weakest of the three.

1. Physical Attraction

   This is the easiest to notice and the easiest to be wrong about. Physical appearance is like the paint on a house or the exterior of a car: it is what draws you in, but it is not what you will actually live with day to day. A house can look beautiful and still have broken plumbing. A car can look impressive and still break down at the worst possible moment. This kind of attraction can be decided from a distance, without ever speaking to the person, and it is also the one guaranteed to fade with age and time.

2. Spiritual Attraction

   This cannot be discerned from a distance. It requires being in the same space with a person over time to see how they carry the presence of God, how they minister, how they pray, how their faith shows up in ordinary moments.

3. Mental Attraction

   This is how well two people can actually talk to each other and make decisions together, since ninety percent of marriage is conversation and decision-making, not appearance. Two people cannot walk together unless they are agreed. This, too, can only be discovered through real engagement, not a glance across a room.

Beauty fades and charm is deceitful, but a person who fears the Lord is the one you can actually trust and depend on. That is the part of a spouse that stays loyal when the physical has changed and the excitement has worn thin. The counsel for anyone still single is simple: do not decide someone is "not your type" before you have engaged with them. Physical attraction alone eliminates people who might have scored highest on the very things that matter most in marriage.

An Illustration: Engage Before You Decide

I once matched a man in his late forties with a woman he initially dismissed as "too old" and who, in turn, dismissed him as "too old," each unaware that the pool of people actually available to them at their age and stage was smaller and different than the picture in their minds. Later, I introduced him to a woman ministering in worship at a church where I preached. They spoke in November, met in person in December, and were married by January, but only after months of him learning to stop deciding before he engaged. Marriages that succeed do so because of decision, not emotion, the decision that you are going to make it work regardless of what you feel on a given day.

Pillar Four: Commitment

Most marriages that fail do not fail because they had to. They fail because somebody was unwilling to put in the work or to adjust. Commitment is the pillar that carries a marriage through the seasons when preparation, intentionality, and knowledge alone are not enough, though there was no time to unpack it fully in this session.