Many Marriages are Two Empty People Together

Rev. Ernest O'Neill

And so many marriages are like that, many marriages are really the joining of two empty people together.  Two people who are absolutely empty and are really just living off each other, and so this loved one is trying to pull happiness of some kind, thrills, satisfaction, intimacy of being fully known, eternity of being completely loved, trying to pull that from this poor one here and they’re trying to pull it from the other person.  And so, you get a tremendous sense of there never being enough love to go around, and never being able to get what you wanted from the other person.  They never do it right somehow; they never give you what you need.  And it’s the same of course, with the other things the mind is always trying to get security.

So many of us marry for security so that we won’t be lonely in old age and we carry that on through all of life and we get mad with him when he loses his job, or the wages go down, or he doesn’t seem to be driving the way we think he should.  Many of us marry the other person to get happy, to get feelings of happiness, and we get discontented with them when they don’t give us the emotional satisfaction that we ought to have.  Many of us want recognition, we think if we tie onto somebody else’s coattails we’ll be important in the world and we get mad when the other person doesn’t treat us as important, or appears to treat us as less important than their job, or than somebody else.  And so, in a marriage like that, two empty people living as parasites on one another, you have a desperate constant sense of discontent and is of course because they were never meant to get from each other, they were meant to get from God and to give to each other.

So, the bodies on the whole become a big thing and they try to stimulate each other’s bodies to produce these feelings.  That’s not God’s plan of course at all, his plan is the other way completely, that it would be two full people meeting together.  Two people who would meet because God wanted them to be joined together, who really sensed that God wanted them to be together and therefore that they would receive each other as dear gifts from God and treat each other with great dignity and a desire to protect each other as a son and daughter of God.  That they would see that they were joined together for God’s purpose, that God had a purpose in making them one.  That he could do something in developing their world that he could do through no two other people, and they’d sense that.

That they’d see that the whole purpose of being joined together was so that they would begin to reflect God’s image not just producing a lot of little replicas of their own image, but that they would allow the Holy Spirit in the interaction between this mind and this mind to draw the two minds more into what God wanted them to be.  And so really, for people – you remember, we said last Sunday, who come together because God wants them, first of all their spirits experience a great intercourse and they sense the joy of being in contact with their Father and of their Father choosing them from even before the foundation of the world to be together and that gives them tremendous security and so they really enjoy praying, they really enjoy worshipping, they really enjoy studying his word.  They really enjoy that deep spiritual intercourse with one another that gives a great confidence that they’re never going to part till death parts them.

And then that leads on to the intercourse of two minds, and they begin to enjoy reading books, and sharing ideas, and discussing things together, and their minds grow together the one mind correcting the other at times.  Sometimes, the other mind, by the worse features in it driving the other one to despair and into Jesus’ arms, but both of them interacting on one another and making them more and more like Jesus as they interact mentally and so there’s a great intellectual intercourse.  Then, there’s an emotional intercourse as they begin to enjoy things like beauty, and painting, and music, and the joy of life together and there’s a whole emotional intercourse that takes place.  And then that leads on to an intercourse of the two wills as they begin to sense what God wants them to do together and the wife begins to feed into the husband’s job, insights that he hasn’t himself and the husband begins to share in the wife’s responsibilities and her job and her home, and they begin to experience the joy of two wills coming together in intercourse.

So, when you see them holding hands together, the holding hands is only physical expression of a great spiritual intercourse that’s taking place already, a great intellectual intercourse, a great emotional intercourse, a great volitional intercourse which is there all the time whether they are holding hands or not.  And even when they embrace or kiss, the unity, and the thrill of love, and the intimacy of love is not in the kissing, it’s there all the time in the complete universe of unity that they have already developed within themselves, and that exists whether they kiss or embrace or not.