Why A Marriage Fails Before Marriage by Pastor Kingsley Okonkwo: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

Marriages Don't Fail in Marriage

Why do you want to get married? If you can't clean up your motive, if you can't look at the whole picture, you have a problem. Sex is part of the benefits of marriage, but it can't be the major reason or the only reason you're getting married.

No marriage fails in marriage. Marriage fails before marriage. I've been in counseling for over twenty years, and I have never seen a marriage that failed in marriage. It fails long before the wedding, and it only shows itself once the couple is married.

The Race I Never Trained For

Let me start with my own story from secondary school. I wanted to represent my house in the long-distance race, but the boys who normally ran it trained every morning — up at 5 a.m., jogging round the field before class. I woke up around 10 a.m., smoked a cigarette, and went nowhere near training.

My friends and I discussed my "strategy." Since the race was 1,500 metres, we measured the school dormitory to work out how many laps of it would equal that distance, and they timed me running round the hostel while my mates were training on the real track. You cannot successfully fail without useless friends. Some of you are asking advice about your relationship from people who know nothing about relationships, and they only make the problem worse.

Even the goal I set was wrong: my plan was simply to follow whoever came first, so I'd naturally come second. On the day of the race, the gun went off, and I followed the leader — second place for the first lap. I didn't know that in a long-distance race you pace yourself for the final lap. When the front-runners kicked for home, I had nothing left. My heart told me if I pushed I would collapse, so I ran straight into the bush and sat down until everyone had gone home — my "useless friends" who'd helped me calculate my failure still waiting with me.

I didn't fail that day. I failed from the day I refused to train, from the day I refused to learn anything about running, from the day I chose useless friends as my advisers. So ask yourself honestly: how many books on marriage have you read? What teaching on marriage have you sat under? What is your idea of a good marriage — your picture, your perspective? How prepared are you, financially, emotionally, spiritually?

The Wedding Is Not the Marriage

I've watched too many couples pour everything into the dance choreography for their wedding and nothing into the marriage itself. But the wedding is not the marriage.

• The wedding is a few minutes; the marriage is for life.
• The wedding is for other people; the marriage is for the two of you.
• The wedding is a ceremony; the marriage is a covenant.

Supporters and guests don't count for anything once the wedding is over. It doesn't matter how many people attended, how many people danced, how many people clapped for you — if the couple isn't prepared, the marriage will still fail. We haven't yet seen the full impact of this generation growing up on social media, where everything about a wedding has become about the dance and nothing about the journey the couple is preparing for.

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Pastor Kingsley Okonkwo

David's Christian Centre, Lagos (DCC).

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Your Perspective Sets Your Goals

What is normal to you is shaped entirely by what you have seen. If all you have seen is a man beating a woman, or your parents' marriage failing, you will think that is normal — and your normal is not necessarily normal.

I once posted about a woman who was in a relationship where her boyfriend came home unannounced with six friends and told her to have pounded yam ready for all of them. She couldn't manage it alone, and when he found out she hadn't finished, he sent his friends away and beat her with a laptop charger. What troubled me more than the story itself was the response online — a large number of people didn't find it strange that one adult would beat another adult with a charger. If your perspective of what is acceptable in marriage is that low, that is exactly the goal you will unconsciously set for yourself.

She later found, on a surprise visit, another woman sleeping in the same bed as her boyfriend, and was beaten again for confronting it — yet she stayed. What is your perspective of a good marriage? If you think it's normal to be beaten, if you think jealousy has no place, your standard has already been set below where it should be. Whatever you have already been exposed to has coloured what you now call normal, and that is precisely why we keep exposing ourselves to what God thinks rather than what we've merely grown used to seeing.

How God Designed Men and Women

Women are created wonderfully adaptable — it is a gift. In Genesis 2, God said He would make man a helper suitable and adaptable to him. A woman married to a "Yahoo boy" or a gangster can become the best gangster's wife you've ever seen; the same woman married to a man who becomes born again will become the greatest partner in ministry you've ever seen. Men, on the other hand, are far less naturally adaptable and far more rigid in how they see things.

Because of that difference, the responsibility falls on the man to determine the direction of the family — what is your vision for this family? Most men, left to their natural instincts, will chase money and productivity above everything else, because that is where they came from. That is a low, natural level to live at. As a child of God, you must go beyond instinct and be led by the Holy Spirit, because God values family far more than the average man's instincts do.

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Set your standards now, before marriage, and only engage someone who shares the same standards. You cannot change another person into who you need them to become — you are not the Holy Spirit. If someone pressures you to compromise before marriage and shows no conviction about it, that pressure will not disappear on your wedding day. The altar does not change your character. Whatever you are doing now — good or bad — is largely what you will still be doing after "I do," except that from that point on, your actions no longer affect only you.

Marrying Outside the Faith

People ask whether they can marry an unbeliever. If your partner is not born again, they are spiritually dead — not physically, but spiritually. If they are born again, even if they are not yet mature, they are alive and headed in the same direction as you, growing at whatever pace, but growing.

Ephesians 2:1-3 lays this out clearly. Before you were born again, you were dead — spiritually dead. You walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now works in the children of disobedience. Every person who is not born again has a spirit at work in them, and that spirit's fruit — however hidden or however nice the person seems now — will eventually show up, sometimes years into the marriage. Every believer likewise has a spirit at work in them: the Holy Spirit. When you become born again, God does not merely improve your actions; He changes your nature, and it is that changed nature that changes how you see and treat your spouse.

How I Chose My Own Wife

My wife was the first person I ever dated. I didn't go through ten relationships hoping to "find the right one" by trial and error. Once your motives and your perspective are right, you don't have to keep testing people to know who is right for you.

I had already decided, long before I met her, the kind of vision and standards a wife of mine would need to fit into. I met many fine, wonderful women before her, but I never pursued any of them, because in getting to know them I already knew they weren't the one I was building toward. That's not a criticism of them — we simply weren't headed the same way. The best relationships happen when two people's visions and spiritual goals cross, not when one partner is dragging the other toward God.

I wanted a wife who would be my friend — someone I could hang out with, talk to, laugh with — who loved God for herself, not because I pushed her to. Spiritual intimacy in a marriage isn't measured only by praying together; it's measured by what your relationship becomes when you're not in the room to remind them.

What Actually Breaks a Marriage

Marriage doesn't fail over the big, dramatic things as often as people think. It fails over the small, repeated things.

• Your financial habits — not that you need to be wealthy, but your general financial behaviour matters, because money issues are a leading cause of conflict in marriage.
• Your emotional intelligence — how self-aware and other-aware you are. If someone shares a loss and your first instinct is to talk about your own loss instead of comforting them, that is a lack of basic emotional intelligence, and it shows up constantly in marriage.
• Communication — a husband saying "my leg is hurting" and his wife responding with something unrelated to what he said is a communication failure. It is the same principle behind the Tower of Babel: once people are no longer speaking the same language, they cannot build together.
• Tenderness and thoughtfulness — noticing what your spouse needs before they ask. If your wife is coming home exhausted from a trip, are you thinking ahead about what she'll eat, so she doesn't have to cook? These small things build or break a marriage far more than people realise.

Marriages don't fail in marriage. People fail before marriage, and it only becomes visible afterward. The real question is not whether your marriage will fail — it's whether you have prepared, whether your perspective is right, whether your goals were ever set to win in the first place.