Piper’s advice for dealing with the inevitable cow pies in your marriage

I’ve been reading through John Piper’s book This Momentary Marriage on Sunday mornings, and yesterday I encountered this short section (on page 58 of the Kindle edition) on how to deal with “the sins and flaws and idiosyncrasies and weaknesses and annoying habits” that are part of every marriage, because every husband and every wife has and brings each of these “cow pies” into their marriage.

In the larger context of the chapter where this quote is from Piper has been unpacking Colossians 3:12-19, and here he’s really focusing on verse 12 and the truth that believers are “chosen ones, holy and beloved.”

The Compost Pile

So what about the compost pile I mentioned at the end of the last chapter? Picture your marriage as a grassy field. You enter it at the beginning full of hope and joy. You look out into the future, and you see beautiful flowers and trees and rolling hills. And that beauty is what you see in each other. Your relationship is the field and the flowers and the rolling hills. But before long, you begin to step in cow pies. Some seasons of your marriage they may seem to be everywhere. Late at night they are especially prevalent. These are the sins and flaws and idiosyncrasies and weaknesses and annoying habits in you and in your spouse. You try to forgive them and endure them with grace.

Unhappiness is no indication that you are not a Christian

[T]he very existence of the New Testament Epistles shows us that unhappiness is a condition which does afflict Christian people.  There is in this, therefore, a strange kind of comfort which is nevertheless very real.  If anyone reading my words is in trouble, let me say this: The fact that you are unhappy or troubled is no indication that you are not a Christian; indeed, I would go further and say that if you have never had any trouble in your Christian life I should very much doubt whether you are a Christian at all.  There is such a thing as false peace, there is such a thing as believing delusions.  The whole of the New Testament and the history of the Church throughout the centuries bear eloquent testimony to the fact that this is a ‘fight of faith’, and not to have any troubles in your soul is, therefore, far from being a good sign.  It is, indeed, a serious sign that there is something radically wrong, and there is a very good reason for saying that.  For from the moment we become Christians we become the special objects of the attention of the devil.  As he besieged and attacked our Lord, so does he besiege and attack all the Lord’s people, ‘Count it all joy’, says James, ‘when you meet trials of various kinds’.  That is the way your faith is proved, for not only is it a test of your faith, in a sense it is a proof that you have faith.

-Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure, “That One Sin”

Regarding those for whom the gospel “was just an intellectual hobby.”

So I’m still reading Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure by Martyn Lloyd-Jones.  I think that title probably throws some people, and maybe another title would have been better, but it is what it is, and it really is something everybody deals with eventually.  I’ve been reading two or three chapters (sermons) each week, with a day or two in between to chew on what I read, and today’s chapter is called “Mind, Heart, and Will,” and it’s an exposition of Romans 6:17.  The following paragraph is from that chapter and I thought it was worth reproducing here.  He’s speaking of a past time, but folks like he’s describing have been and always will be around.

Knowing how to handle yourself is the key to spiritual living

One week ago I started reading a book I’ve owned for several years now, Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure, and my previous blog post was about that event.  I tend to occasionally start reading a book somewhere in the middle, and then if I feel like the book is worth the time and effort, I go back to the beginning and read the whole thing.  Such is the case with this book.

Spiritual Depression is actually a series of twenty-one sermons that Martyn Lloyd-Jones preached in the early 1960s on the subject, and I’d wager that almost anyone could benefit from reading through these sermons.  Lloyd-Jones was one of the best, and I’ve rarely been unchanged from reading his words or hearing him preach.  Not only for that reason, but this is a topic that any honest person will admit that they wrestle with: after all, life is not a constant bed of roses for anyone.

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones on learning to trust a sovereign God in the darkness of trials

I was reading in the book Spiritual Depression by Martyn Lloyd-Jones this morning and came across several paragraphs in the chapter called “Trials” that I thought would probably be helpful to someone out there.  At least they were to me . . .

The doctrine of the Scriptures is, at the very lowest, that God permits these things to happen to us.  I go further, God at times orders these things to happen to us for our good.  He may do it sometimes in order to chastise [discipline] us . . . We must not be surprised if God begins to chastise us.  The argument in Hebrews 12 is as strong as this: ‘Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth.’  If you have not known chastisement I doubt whether you have ever been a Christian.  If you can say that since you have believed you have never had any trouble at all, your experience is probably psychological and not spirtitual.  There is a realism about Christianity, as I said at the beginning and it goes so far as to teach that God, for our good, will chastise us if we pay no heed to the exhortations and the appeals of Scripture.  God has other methods also.  He does not do these things to those who are outside the family, but if they are His children He will chastise them for their own good.  So we may be experiencing manifold trials as a part of our chastisement.  I am not saying it is inevitable, I say it may be so.