Three in Oneness in Marriage

Photo by Everton Vila on Unsplash

Bellowing and bawling, slammed doors, revving engines, speeding down the road. It’s not the first time we’ve seen this. Like many couples, we’ve lived it too. Conflict in marriage bears a common denominator: two disconnected entities, both insisting on their individual rightness. Where the glue of marriage has come unstuck.

It is not God’s vision of what He authored
in the institution of marriage.

There is a fundamental three in oneness
in marriage necessary to make it work.

This is not about the Trinity, but it is about the trinitarian nature of marriage, for a cord of three strands is not easily broken (Ecclesiastes 4:12). Those three strands are the (two) dimensions of each partner (one and two) and the oneness (third dimension) that binds their union.

Where the three strands come together is in a oneness that combines them — this is the constituency of two individuals and the dimension that combines them. That dimension that combines them can be thought of as a God dimension of the Holy Spirit, because it is what makes each partner bend toward the other in service — a revenant mutual submission.

We’ve seen it before in our own marriage; two dimensions without the third is ruinous. Two dimensions that pulled us apart without the third dimension that drew us together.

A marriage bears little hope for either partner until
they’ve both learned to love the other sacrificially well.

A marriage encapsulates hope to the measure of love
both individual partners can sacrifice for the other.

And it’s just so common in any couple counselling I’ve done. Partners bring themselves to the table of the marriage without thinking of the sacrifice that so centrally speaks of love, for love is little else than sacrifice in marriage. And sacrifice is raw act of will. Love is a decision, moment by moment, moment after moment, again and again, for the life of the marriage.

When there is no oneness in the marriage, not only is there a lack of thinking for the other partner, there is a comprehensive lack of behavioural regard for them, especially when it comes to pressure times of conflict.

Every couple needs to learn just how to bend toward the other in order to invoke the powerful third dimension that completes the oneness they need to feel their marriage is everything God ordained for them.

The more we lose our lives so our partner might prosper,
the more we will find our lives in a prospering marriage.