Larry Crabb - Men and Women: Enjoying the Difference

L et me begin with the bad news: No marriage is exempt from trouble, the kind of trouble that can destroy intimacy. No relationship, not even a relationship between deeply committed Christians, will always run smoothly.

Here is more bad news: Our most natural response to relational difficulties is to look for a way to fix them. But every effort to fix problems and repair relational damage falls short of producing the kind of marriage we were designed to enjoy.

Now the good news: if there is one enduring truth that this book highlights, it is this: Problems in relationships present opportunities to discover what is most wrong with us that only Jesus knows how to deal with, and to release what is most right within us that Jesus has given us. I love how James, the half-brother of Jesus, describes this truth:

Consider it a sheer gift when tests and challenges come at you from all sides. You know that under pressure, your faith-life is forced into the open and shows its true colors. So dont try to get out of anything prematurely. Let it do its work so you become mature and well-developed, not deficient in any way. (James 1:24 MSG)

In my nearly fifty years of being married to the same woman and of counseling hundreds, maybe thousands, of married couples, Ive encountered many other bad-news-good-news truths. Here are a few examples:

No marriage needs to fail, but some marriages will. A godly person is sometimes married to a husband or wife who simply will not acknowledge and face the obstacles within them that make a good marriage impossible. The spouse willing to face those obstacles will be positioned, as a divorced man or woman, to form God-glorifying, meaningful, and richly satisfying relationships, either as a life-long single or in another marriage.

There is really only one core obstacle to developing good relationships. It goes by several names, including narcissism, self-obsession, self-centeredness. But its best to call it what it is relational sin. It presents itself as a demanding spirit; a proud, fear-driven sense of entitlement to whatever we think we need to get from another in order to experience personal wholeness. No one, not the most sincere Christ-follower, relates without the stain of self-centered motives. But it is possible to relate with enough real love radical other-centeredness to create the opportunity for a genuinely good marriage.

Without the resources available only in Jesus, the best marriages cannot rise higher than well-socialized self-centeredness. Without his life within us, our most sincere commitment to love another is always corrupted by an ultimate concern with our well-being. Only the power of God provided in the gospel of Jesus and energized by Gods Spirit can release us from the stranglehold of stubborn self-interest. With that power, a marriage can meaningfully reveal the radical, other-centered nature of the God who shares his nature with us.

Rules and roles in marriage never work, never over the long haul, and never deeply. The key to enjoying our gender differences in a marriage is to release who we are as God-worshiping, Jesus-following, Spirit-prompted men and women in the way we relate to one another. Men and women, who are masculine and feminine because they seize their uniquely gendered opportunity to reveal how God relates, can face every challenge and weather every storm to develop a really good marriage.

These lessons, and a few others, are spelled out in practical detail in Men and Women: Enjoying the Difference. Dont expect to find a recipe guaranteed to whip up a trouble-free marriage. You wont discover a well-tested formula to smooth out every bump on the road to the intimacy you desire. But you will see a new way to live as a man or woman, a way that continually recognizes and repents of self-centeredness as you relate to another and, in the process, revives and releases what is most alive in you as a Christian. This is the radically other-centered life of Jesus. The result? The relationship you were created to enjoy, first with the Trinity, then with the love of your life.