23/08/2026
Whose responsibility is it to ensure your marriage works?
Taking into consideration the latest world-wide divorce statistics which state that approximately 42% of all marriages will end in divorce, and this does not include the unhappy marriages where circumstances make divorce impossible, can Christians get married and hope that God will ensure that theirs will be happy until death do us part? Unfortunately, according to statistics, the divorce rate among Christians falls under the same 42%.
The thing is, to expect God to retro-fix an unhappy marriage is akin to setting out on a journey in your car with an empty fuel tank and expecting God to miraculously make it full. If you don’t have enough fuel for a journey, then don’t go. And the same applies if you are not sure about getting married, don’t do it. God won’t just fix all the things you are unsure or unhappy about. If you struggle to deal with an issue before you get married, you will certainly struggle with it all the more after you are married.
I believe marriage is an adventure designed by God. First and foremost, for the joy and happiness of the couple. If we get married because it’s a convenience, or to further our ministries or our acceptability and usefulness to the Church, we have taken the wrong road.
In these, ‘enlightened,’ times the idea that God could guide us to our perfect partner is viewed with ridicule and written off as archaic nonsense, or simply never considered. As was the case with Carol and I, we consulted no one, least of all God, and our marriage quickly dissolved into a complete disaster of bitterness, deceit and unhappiness. Ours was quite an extreme case, and of course not all poor marriages implode, some just become a coexistence of reluctant tolerance for the sake of convenience.
Recently I had occasion to think of the story of the wedding at Cana where Jesus turned the water into wine. The wedding had been going along alright, not the best, but okay. The wine, which was a very important factor in a wedding at this time, was passable, but again not the best, just alright.
Then Jesus came along and turned water into wine. Now this wine was an altogether different thing, compared to this wine the other was no more than vinegar. Even although everything before had seemed alright, even tolerable, compared to what God can do it was poor, so very poor. Don’t settle for the old wine of ‘it’s good enough’, rather look for that awesome new wine from Jesus which can bring beauty out of ashes.
I do not believe that God expects anyone to live in an unhappy marriage. However, divorce is not the answer. Running away from the issue only exacerbates it and creates more problems to deal with. I understand and accept that I have no idea what your marriage may be like. I do not know how your partner behaves or the levels of stress and unhappiness you may be enduring. But I can tell you this, our marriage was a complete fallacy, the depth of my unhappiness caused me to wish that Carol would disappear out of my life, so that I no longer had to contend with her or consider her in anything. I had gown to hate the decisions she was making and pretty much everything about her. Yet into this tangled web of bitterness and loathing we asked God to bring His new wine, and we listened to what He had to say. It was not complicated or deep, it was simple. To me he said, ‘treat Carol better than you would treat yourself,’ and to Carol he said the same. That was the beginning of what was to become the greatest adventure of our lives, an adventure that continues yet.
‘Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, Philippians 2:3