Marriage: A Contract To Aid In One Another’s Sanctification

This past Sunday I quoted Dr Richard Lovelace regarding the idea that for Christ-followers, marriage served as an important "school for sanctification."  Here is the longer quotation from his book, Renewal as a Way of Life

Growth in sanctification should be a lifelong series of alterations in our lives through such crises of conviction.  One of the functions of God’s law (biblical moral principles which declare God’s will for our behavior) is to measure our lives and locate places where they need changing.  “The Law” come to us again and again, not only in the pages of Scripture, but also in the warnings or protests of people close to us who can see our failing, however much they may be in the dark about their own.  Parents, teachers, the police and other authorities are all personalized forms of the law.

A husband or wife also functions in this same way, serving God as an agent of our sanctification.  He or she can see the patterns of sin which are hidden from our own vision by spiritual darkness, and from the world because it sees only the surface of our lives.  Most divorces among Christians probably occur because the parties have not realized that marriage is a contract to aid in one another’s sanctification.  Without this realization, we become experts at what is wrong with one another, without recognizing that the information our spouse is giving us about ourselves is an essential aid to our spiritual growth.