Overview
Dr. Jackie Patterson examines “One Flesh: God’s Vision for Marriage” through Genesis 2, 2 Corinthians 3, James 1, Matthew 18, showing how marriage, about, relationship shape a believer’s relationship with God, daily choices, and service to others.
Transcript
Understanding One Flesh: God’s Vision for Marriage
We are in a three-part series on the Christian marriage, and I have been reflecting on my own marriage and the strong Christian marriage that we have built due to three intentional habits. God first, one flesh, and living love. And in the first teaching, we talked about how we put God first by seeking God, not the world, together.
By setting our expectations in God, not our spouse, and by seeing our spouse the way God sees them, not based on their actions. Today, we are going to consider how to achieve God’s vision for marriage of one flesh. And in Genesis chapter 2, God set his vision for marriage when he created the first man and woman.
And we’ll pick up the record in verse 18. I’ll be reading from the English Standard Version. And in Genesis chapter 2 verse 18, it says, Then the Lord God said, it is not good that the man should be alone.
I will make him a helper fit for him. Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.
The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam, there was not found a helper fit for him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man.
And while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man, he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, this at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.
She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man. Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.
You know, I was reflecting on this account of God’s making of Eve and realizing how critical this analogy is to the one flesh relationship. God could have chosen to make Eve out of the dust of the ground the same way that he made Adam. But instead, intentionally, the Lord God took a rib from Adam and from that he made Adam.
Eve was made from Adam, and as the old poem goes, out of his side to be equal in importance, under his arm to be protected, near his heart to be beloved. This beautiful imagery of one flesh in its most basic essence is in reference to physical unity in a sexual relationship, but its meaning is deeper. It is the sharing and joining of a man and a woman’s souls in an intimate, personal relationship.
The one flesh marriage is a man and a woman with different backgrounds, aptitudes, and preferences, weaving their lives together in interdependency to live out God’s calling as a couple. The world has really degraded God’s concept of marriage into all sorts of spinoffs that dilute the blessings that God intended for marriage. If you asked a friend, what does it mean to be married? What is marriage? Someone might say it’s a promise to be faithful to another person for a lifetime.
Well, that’s a start to the Christian concept of marriage to God’s intent. But God’s intent is much bigger than just a promise to stick it out for a lifetime. It’s a promise to weave our lives together as one flesh.
The Biblical Foundation
Throughout history, the idea of marriage and what marriage looks like has evolved. And at one point, it may have looked more like one extreme, which would be one person giving up their own desires and opinions to conform entirely to those of their spouse. At another point in history, it may look like the opposite extreme, a relationship based on equality, where fairness is the guiding principle.
Neither of those are what God intends in the one flesh marriage. Nowadays, a lot of marriage is two people cohabitating in the same dwelling place. They share a home, they share resources, they hang out together when their lives overlap, but they generally live their independent lives.
When you look up marriage in the Webster’s dictionary, it calls it a legal process by which two people make their relationship public, official, and permanent. It is the joining of two people in a bond that putatively lasts until death, but in practice is often cut short by separation or divorce. If this is our society’s view of marriage, we are far from the one flesh relationship that God intended.
We want to get back to God’s intent for marriage, weaving our lives together in interdependency to live out God’s calling as a couple. And as we strive to become one flesh, we do not want to uphold the world standards of marriage. Instead, we want to observe that one flesh relationship in the marriages around us, to take the good from other Christian marriages, learn from those examples, and apply them in our own relationships.
You know, over the years I have observed many couples living out this one flesh relationship to God’s glory, and in my observations, I’ve noted that there are as many ways to enact one flesh as there are couples. It reminds me of 2 Corinthians chapter 3 verse 2 in the King James Version, which says, This verse is true of our marriages as well. Each one flesh marriage is an epistle that can be known and read of all men, helping others envision how they can live the word in this category.
What works well for one couple may not resonate with another. In fact, you may find you identify with some of my illustrations of a one flesh marriage in this teaching and not with others, and that’s the beauty of living epistles. Consider the principle, and then craft a version that works well for your own marriage.
Reflecting on my own marriage, there are 3 principles that have enabled Jason and I to build an intimate relationship. We prioritize time together, we make big decisions as one, and we refuse to live offended. Let’s consider the principle of prioritizing time together.
This comes naturally during the dating phase when you’re getting to know someone and falling in love. But for many, after saying I do, the convenience of living together combined with the busyness of life can really threaten your quality time together. For us, there are 2 essential elements to this principle of prioritizing time together.
It’s having fun together and communicating. There is no one that I know who does having fun with her spouse better than my sister. My sister and her husband were dating before they got married.
They enjoyed going out on adventures together and had really fun date nights. And they continued this fun relationship into their early years of marriage. And then they began to have young children.
Examples and Spiritual Lessons
And 4 young children later, I remember observing their relationship and thinking there is no way that they are going to be able to maintain this social calendar. But they do it. They get out on date nights, on alone time with other couples, they have their adult vacations without their children.
They really prioritize having fun together and building their relationship around having fun. And sometimes Jason and I go along for the ride. We enjoy joining them on some of their excursions and having our alone time as a couple as well.
The second part of prioritizing time together is not just having fun together but communicating. It’s talking to one another. And you know, when Jason and I were dating, we dated for the vast majority of our time long distance.
We met when I was in college and he was living several states away. And so our relationship consisted mostly of phone conversations and occasional in-person visits. We had 6 months where I lived quite far away and we did not visit one another and just had phone calls.
And then we spent a short summer together in the same place before our relationship resumed to being long distance when I started graduate school, really until we got engaged. And so communicating was the basis of our relationship. And that has served us well in our marriage.
We are used to talking to one another. We talk about our day over dinner, on the phone when we’re commuting back and forth, on the couch after the kids are in bed, or whatever overlapping free time that exists when I’m traveling for work and we’re on different time zones. The more you really understand and know your spouse, and the more your spouse really understands and knows you, the more you can act as one flesh.
And in James chapter 1, God gives us some great advice about how to communicate. And specifically, I’m thinking about this in terms of the one-flesh marriage. In James chapter 1 and verse 19 in the English Standard Version, it says, Know this, my beloved brothers, let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger.
What is the old saying that God gave us two ears and one mouth so that we would spend twice as much time listening as we do talking? I think in most relationships, there’s probably one person who tends to be the talker and the other one who tends to be the listener. Perhaps classically, the wife is the talker in the relationship. That’s certainly the case in our relationship.
And, you know, Jason really lives this principle of being quick to hear and slow to speak. When I come home from a long day at work, I like to just talk about my day. And I’ll tell him about the variety of things that happened or that I did over the course of the day.
And he just listens. He may not really care to know all of those nitty-gritty details, but he knows that this is just how I unwind. But I like to get things off my chest, and he will sit and listen.
And I remember early on in our marriage kind of noting that I would share about my day, and he would share a little bit about his. But he generally reserved his sharing to things that were really important, things that might have bugged him during the day or other successes that he might have had during the day. And I began to think, well, if it’s important enough that he’s communicating it to me, I should really listen to try to fix things.
Faith in Action
And so I would listen with the intent of wanting to help him, to help him find a solution to the problem. And over the years, I’ve really matured in my understanding of my purpose in listening to him. You know, sometimes when my husband wants to talk to me about his day, he doesn’t need me to fix something.
He just wants to share his heart, and I’ve learned that I should listen not to respond or to correct, but to understand and to love. And he does that beautifully for me. The amount and quality of time that you need to spend with your spouse to maintain an intimate relationship may differ from couple to couple and from season of life to season of life.
My barometer for whether or not we need to spend more time together is if we’re getting snippy with each other. If we’re easily irritated by one another, then I know that we need to get back on the same page and spend some more time together. So after prioritizing time together, the second principle I wanted to talk about today is making big decisions as one.
And this is something that Jason and I really strive to live in our marriage, that we make decisions about what we’re doing in this life with the mindset of one flesh. You know, one of the biggest decisions that we’ve had to make together in our first decade of marriage was with respect to a job offer for me. I had finished my training and I was looking for a full-time faculty position out of medical school.
And I had one offer on the table up in Boston and the prospect of another offer here in North Carolina. And I was really excited about the possibility of going to Boston. It was a new adventure.
It was a great job offer at a prestigious place. It would have been a great career move. Jason and I went up to the city to explore what life might be like for our family in Boston and thought about this transition long and hard.
And I remember not knowing what the right decision was. There were so many attractive things about the possibility of taking that job offer, but there were also significant concerns, concerns about how we would build Christian community in that area. That we would be moving away from family and support while having a young child and wanting to grow our family, the cost of living, childcare, all of these other things that affect our lives.
And so it was a decision that we took many weeks to think about. And I just was not at peace. I was not certain what the right thing was.
And I remember at one point just feeling that peace that passes all understanding and understanding that the solution and the situation was for Jason to make the decision. And I said to him one evening, I don’t know what job I should take. I don’t even know if I’m going to have an offer here in North Carolina, but we knew the timing, the timeline was going to be tight.
And I said to him, I want you to make the decision for our family. You tell me which job to take and I’ll do it. And he did.
Walking in Love and Confidence
He made the decision for our family and we chose to stay here in North Carolina. And I can’t imagine having done otherwise. It was certainly the best decision for our family and our lives spiritually, but I believe that it also was the best decision for my career.
And you might hear that story and think that’s sort of an odd relinquishing of a decision for your own career that would have been yours to make. And in some ways, sure, since knowledge wise, it was an odd way to make the decision. But a decision about my career is not one that I was going to make in isolation, given how much it would impact our entire family.
And in that particular situation, I just knew that Jason would make the right spiritual decision. And so it’s a wonderful illustration of how God can show you in a one flesh relationship how to make decisions together. Let’s look at Matthew chapter 18 and in verse 19, you know, each situation is different.
That’s not how Jason and I always make decisions. But in that particular decision, that was the way we needed to do it. And we were both at peace with that.
And here in Matthew chapter 18 and in verse 19, it says again, I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. I was really grateful to have a believing partner to make that big life decision with. And you know, while a decision about obligating your own time, for example, job related activities, service, hobbies, social events may feel like your decision, obligating your own time affects your spouse.
And so in our relationship as a rule of thumb, we talk about things that we want to get involved in before deciding. And Jason and I have a beautiful balance of making decisions together. It’s our habit to check with each other on nearly every decision about how we spend our time.
But we also have a mutual habit of letting the person who’s considering an opportunity or an invitation make the decision. For example, if I’m invited out for a girl’s night, that’s usually a decision that I’m in charge of making whether or not I want to go or stay home. But I check with Jason to understand how the opportunity could impact him.
And that understanding impacts my own enthusiasm or lack thereof for the opportunity. And then I make the decision. Look at 1 Corinthians chapter 13.
The third principle that we have strived to build in our Christian marriage to develop a one flesh relationship is that we refuse to live offended. And I’ve put this one last. And in many ways, I think this may be the most important.
You know, a few years into our marriage, I did something terrible that required forgiveness. We were living in a townhome and had a patio and had wanted to start venturing into gardening. And so we had bought a big pot and planted a cherry tomato plant.
And Jason had nurtured this plant with his green thumb and I had enjoyed watching it grow. And it grew to 14 feet tall. It was really flourishing.
Applying the Teaching in Daily Life
But we did not really have a bumper crop of tomatoes on this plant. Despite its stature and the sunshine that had helped it to grow, there really was not quite enough sun to produce tons of cherry tomatoes. And so I remember towards the end of tomato season, us going out on the patio and looking at the plant, we saw 5 to 10 cherry tomatoes that were plump and ready to pick.
And so we picked them off the vine and then we carefully divided them up when we got back in the house because we had a sense that this might be the only cherry tomatoes we’d get for the season at this point. And so we split them up evenly on the counter. I had my pile, he had his pile, and then he went off to go do something else.
And I was sitting there studying for an exam and snacking on cherry tomatoes. And so I’d pop a cherry tomato and do some more practice questions and pop another tomato. And before I knew it, I looked up at one point and realized that all of the cherry tomatoes were gone.
And when I say all, I don’t mean just the ones in my pile. I mean both piles were completely gone. And I remember looking up and gulping because I had no intention of eating his tomatoes.
It just happened inadvertently. And he came down the stairs and I had to confess my sin and ask for forgiveness. And he graciously forgave me.
And that’s maybe a silly illustration, but one that we think about often with love and forgiveness. You know, you will offend your spouse and you will be offended by your spouse. But while being offended is inevitable, living offended is a choice.
And in 1 Corinthians chapter 13 and in verse 5 in the Amplified, it describes the love of God. And it says that the love of God, it is not conceited, arrogant and inflated with pride. It is not rude, unmannerly, and does not act unbecomingly.
Love, God’s love in us, does not insist on its own rights or its own way, for it is not self-seeking. It is not touchy or fretful or resentful. It takes no account of the evil done to it.
It pays no attention to a suffered wrong. The love of God is not touchy or fretful or resentful. It takes no account of the evil done to it.
It pays no attention to a suffered wrong. You know, I put this principle in this teaching about refusing to live offended. And I have to say that early on in our marriage, this is not a principle that I excelled at.
A Life Shaped by God’s Word
In fact, I really struggled with refusing to live offended. When I got married, I was ready to bear my soul with my spouse. And in exchange, I was expecting perfect handling of my feelings.
And I would get offended by small things and then have a hard time letting it go. So much so that it would ruin the night or even the next few days. And my husband would patiently try to help me work through it.
But I ultimately discovered that it was something I had to work through on my own with God. And in my journey to discover how to live unoffended, over the years, I started to notice that when I was on the other side, as the person who had committed the offense, it was never intentional on my part. A statement that I made in passing that I thought nothing of might offend Jason on some days.
And his being offended had more to do with the state he was in than with what I had said. And when I realized that, I had this breakthrough where I recognized that the same was probably true when I was the person who felt offended. It was never intentional on Jason’s part.
And my being offended had more to do with the state I was in than with what had been said. In verse 7 of 1 Corinthians 13 in the Amplified, it says, You know, I used to go up to my room after getting offended about a small thing, go up to our room and close the door and spend some time with God. And I remember reading 1 Corinthians 13 verse 5 and thinking, okay, the love of God is not touchy.
It’s not fretful. It’s not resentful. But why am I so touchy? I knew it was a small thing, and yet I could not seem to get out of that cycle of getting offended over small things.
And it was really 1 Corinthians 13 verse 7 that helped me that the love of God is ever ready to believe the best of every person. I recognized that when I offended Jason, it was not intentional, and therefore learned that when he offended me, the same was likely true. And so I learned that I needed to believe the best of him.
There’s no win in being offended. Your marriage relationship is too important to jeopardize your intimacy with living offended by small stuff. And when I recognized that the offense was not intentional on his part, it helped me release that burden and move on to not get offended by the small stuff.
When I’m now tempted to be offended by something my spouse says, I reflect on his current state or my own. Often one of us is hungry or tired or frustrated by a situation, and usually it’s a frustration coming from something entirely external to our marriage, something at work, something with a friend. And that’s what triggers the offensive statement or the reaction of being offended.
And then it’s easier to believe the best of my spouse that he did not intend to offend me and to overlook the statement. A one-flesh relationship with your spouse will enable you to more readily respond to God’s call for your life. You will be better able to love your children, God’s household, and your fellow man when your marriage is intimate and sweet.
Fiercely protect the intimacy of your marriage and that one-flesh relationship by prioritizing your time together, making big decisions as one, and refusing to live offended.
Key Takeaways
- Fiercely protect the intimacy of your marriage and that one-flesh relationship by prioritizing your time together, making big decisions as one, and refusing to live offended.
- If we’re easily irritated by one another, then I know that we need to get back on the same page and spend some more time together.
- The third principle that we have strived to build in our Christian marriage to develop a one flesh relationship is that we refuse to live offended.
- If this is our society’s view of marriage, we are far from the one flesh relationship that God intended.
- Instead, we want to observe that one flesh relationship in the marriages around us, to take the good from other Christian marriages, learn from those examples, and apply them in our own relationships.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the main message of “One Flesh: God’s Vision for Marriage”?
Dr. Jackie Patterson examines “One Flesh: God’s Vision for Marriage” through Genesis 2, 2 Corinthians 3, James 1, Matthew 18, showing how marriage, about, relationship shape a believer’s relationship with God, daily choices, and service to others.
Which scriptures are central to this teaching?
The teaching draws especially from Genesis 2, 2 Corinthians 3, James 1, Matthew 18, 1 Corinthians 13.
How can believers apply this teaching?
If we’re easily irritated by one another, then I know that we need to get back on the same page and spend some more time together.
Scripture References
Genesis 2; 2 Corinthians 3; James 1; Matthew 18; 1 Corinthians 13
This text was prepared from the teaching audio or source document. Please verify scripture references against your own Bible.
