Should I Get Married? Rethinking Marriage for Disciples of Jesus

Where can we find ultimate meaning and happiness? There are things around us that we look to for fulfillment, but the promise and reality don’t always match up. Finding your significant other, falling in love, and then committing to a life together is one area that many in our culture continue to look to as a life goal. “Surely, I’ll be happier when I accomplish that goal than I am now, right? Should I get married?”

It’s always good to pause and reflect on our fundamental assumptions about how life works. When it comes to marriage and the question “Should I get married?”, there are no easy answers, but there are important additional questions that need asking to arrive at an open-eyed realism that helps you navigate life with wisdom.

Should I get married: Marriage can be an idol.

There is no question that marriage is a good thing. After all, God made it. But just as with any other thing that God has made, it can attain ultimate significance and, in that way, become an idol. In his book Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters, Tim Keller wrote:

What is an idol? It is anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give…An idol is whatever you look at and say, in your heart of hearts, “If I have that, then I’ll feel my life has meaning, then I‘ll know I have value, then I’ll feel significant and secure.” There are many ways to describe that kind of relationship to something, but perhaps the best one is worship. – Tim Keller

When a good thing such as marriage, or singleness, becomes an ultimate thing, a thing that we look to for meaning, it has become an idol in our lives because we are looking to that thing and not to God for our ultimate happiness. And it’s a lot of pressure for your future spouse to try and live up to. What human being can bear the weight of being the source of happiness for another person?

God gives us many gifts to enjoy. We mustn’t be killjoys about the wonderful gifts that God has seeded throughout the world for us to enjoy. These things are to be delighted in, and God praised for them. However, those gifts can often loom large in our eyes and become ultimate things, and that’s where the problem lies.

This is the case with marriage and singleness too. The question “Should I get married?” could be answered with, “Yeah, sure. It’s one of God’s gifts that you can enjoy, but don’t allow it to draw your worship or become the center of your identity.”

Marriage changes a lot about how you do life, but it shouldn’t be valued to such an extent that it becomes the center of your existence, essentially displacing God as the source of meaning, value, and significance.

The question “Should I get married?” can be met with another question – what do you think marriage will give you that you don’t have right now? If you respond that being married will make you more valuable, or will bring meaning to your life, that’s a clue that maybe marriage occupies a position in your life that rightly only belongs to God, your creator.

Following Jesus will bring us life.

How exactly do we go about finding meaning and purpose in our lives? Should you get married to find meaning in your life, or is staying single the best way to find joy and significance? Jesus told this parable when He was on His way to Jerusalem, the journey that ended in His crucifixion and resurrection:

Large crowds were traveling with Jesus, and turning to them he said: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters – yes, even their own life – such a person cannot be my disciple. And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.

Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you, saying, ‘This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.’ Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king.

Won’t he first sit down and consider whether he is able with ten thousand men to oppose the one coming against him with twenty thousand? If he is not able, he will send a delegation while the other is still a long way off and will ask for terms of peace.

In the same way, those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples. Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is fit neither for the soil nor for the manure pile; it is thrown out. Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear – Luke 14: 25-35, NIV.

These words of Jesus are quite disruptive and shocking, intentionally so. He pinpoints the two major areas in our lives that tend to draw our highest allegiance, our tribe/family, and ourselves, and He says that if we want to be His disciples or followers, we must surrender these allegiances and elevate our allegiance to Him above all else. Only when we give up everything, we have can we be disciples of Jesus.

This isn’t an easy task, nor one that we can complete by ourselves, because we fall short. No matter how we count the cost, like the king gearing up for war or the person who wanted to build a tower in Jesus’ parable, we will find ourselves falling short and unable to muster what is needed to follow Jesus faithfully.

The point of the parable is to highlight that being a disciple of Jesus requires us to do and be more than just part of a “large crowd” that’s milling around Jesus. It requires us to intentionally surrender our lives and our ideas about what will make us ultimately happy and yield ourselves to Jesus’ direction. We need God’s help to do this.

Should I Get Married? Finding Balance

For followers of Jesus, the choice of whether to get married or remain single is a real one that deserves serious consideration. That’s because unlike the way of thinking that emphasizes tribe and family as the area of life that deserves our highest allegiance and investment, the Biblical understanding says that our ultimate value lies elsewhere, in God.

And unlike our culture which insists that a radical individualism in which you pursue your pleasures and minimize your sacrifices in that pursuit, Jesus reminds us that the way to find life is to lose it, and to surrender ourselves into His hands is how we find the highest good.

Being married or being single is therefore not the point of life as a Christian. You won’t find happiness or life in either state of being, but in God alone. That’s why Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 7: 1-40 that being single or being married doesn’t matter as much as being faithful to God in whatever situation God has called you.

The Christian is free to marry or to stay single, and they can find contentment in both while glorifying God in that life. Meaning and fulfillment come through serving God in marriage or single life.

We often struggle to find balance as the Bible does on this issue. It’s unsurprising for single people in the Church to find themselves under enormous pressure to get married because marriage will supposedly “complete” them and bring true meaning to their lives.

But it’s also not surprising to find people pursuing singleness because they hold their highest allegiance to themselves and what they want from life. Both of these ways of doing things are dead ends that won’t take you where you want to go. They won’t bring you the abundant life Jesus promises (John 10:10).

Life for the believer is found in Jesus, who reorients our lives and identity around the one true source of life – Himself. Paul wrote about this shift in identity when he wrote, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20, ESV).

When we lose ourselves – our ambitions, desires, ways of defining ourselves – and find our identity in Jesus and what He did on the cross out of love for us, that changes everything about how we view ourselves and live our lives.

Should You Get Married? Finding guidance

Your life journey has brought you to the place where the question “Should I get married?” may be a pressing one. Perhaps you’re still single and considering your options. Or you may be engaged, and doubts have arisen about your next steps. If you’re in the latter case, Christian premarital counseling can help you and your significant other to work through these questions.

Your counselor will help you to grasp the Biblical understanding of marriage, as well as help you explore your expectations and outlook on life and relationships. These may need to be challenged where they aren’t realistic or healthy. If you’re single and working through this question, individual counseling can be a healthy space to unpack your thoughts, feelings, and concerns.

Whatever your situation may be, consider reaching out to a counselor for help in working out the significance and place of marriage and singleness in your life.