This week comes to an end and it has been a fruitful one with author and speaker Dr. Paul David Tripp filling in for John Piper who returns with us on Monday. Paul is the author of the book "Awe, Why It Matters for Everything We Think, Say and Do" which easily made my top 10 best books of 2015 list.

And this week we talked about awe and how it really does in fact relate to everything we do including spiritual growth and ministry aims and weight loss attempts, parenting methods and now we're going to talk about our expectations when it comes to marriage. Paul in my research into the pastoral letters of 18th century pastor John Newton, I was surprised how often he wrote to newlyweds to warn them about avoiding making their spouse into an idol of security.

Over and over in his letters he does this and I think partly because he experienced it in his own marriage which was an incredible love story in and of itself. But the same concern lives on today through ministries like that of Tim and Kathy Keller who see that there's just this consuming fascination with romantic love in our culture and it shapes much of the popular media that we consume as well.

The lie goes like this, if you find romantic love then your life will be safe and fulfilling. So much so that marriage becomes almost a type of salvation and romantic love takes on an almost redemptive expectation. So what would you say to Christians, either singles or newlyweds who are in danger of losing all in God by becoming preoccupied with romantic love?

Well the first thing I would say to them is that romance is never the cause of a good marriage. Now I am by nature a very romantic man, I like romance. But romance is actually the result of a good marriage. And if you look to romance to form for you a good marriage you're going to be freaked out, discouraged, disappointed, ultimately hopeless human being.

Because here's why, what is a biblical view of marriage? It's a flawed person married to a flawed person in a fallen world, are you encouraged yet? But with a faithful God. And so I'm never going to have paradise in my marriage, paradise is to come. I'm never married to a perfect person, that person will never be my Messiah, the person I'm married to has no capacity whatsoever to change my heart, that person I'm married to has no capacity whatsoever to bring satisfaction and contentment to my heart, they have no ability whatsoever to deliver me from my sin, they just have no ability to do any of that.

And so a good marriage is a good marriage because people in that marriage realize they are not the Messiah to one another. But they don't panic because they've been given an adequate and sufficient Messiah who invades marriage by His grace and gives us everything we need to be where we're supposed to be and to do what we're supposed to do in marriage.

Here's what this means, and sort of a bottom line, you never get your capacity to love from the person you were called to love. You never get your capacity to love from your spouse, you get your capacity to love at the foot of the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ, you have it, it's God's gift of grace to you.

And so you don't need to look to the other person for what you've already been given in Christ. Amen. Specifically, what would you say to a single Christian whose loneliness feels more real to them than God's presence does? Well, my response to someone who is just overwhelmed by any human experience, whether it's singleness or sickness or poverty, is to examine your meditation.

It tends to be that whatever controls my meditation will dominate my thinking and reformulate my desires. And so that's why there's a biblical call to meditate on the things of the Lord, to meditate, actually, on God Himself. What I would say is biblical faith never calls you to deny reality.

If you have to deny reality to get peace, you're not exercising biblical faith. But if you allow yourself to meditate on the troubling realities of the fallen world, you're going down. And so you face those realities, but you meditate on God's glory. And in that way, you can be free from being overwhelmed.

Well, we must end the week there. And I could talk about God's glory forever, which is what we will do forever. But for now, we must end the week. And as we do, I'm reminded of what C.S. Lewis once wrote about joy. Lewis said this, "All joy emphasizes our pilgrim status, always reminds, beckons, awakens, and desires, our best havings," he wrote, "our wantings." In a sense, our deepest joys in this life are a sense of our wantings.

And you close the awe book by talking about awe as a longing. In a real sense, even in our awe, there is something unsatisfied at the end of the day, a sort of longing that remains. Maybe we should close here. Explain this phenomenon. Well, I think we were all hardwired for eternity.

And I think that means that every moment of sadness, disappointment, hurt, or fear is a cry for another better world. Every moment of joy, happiness, and peace is a taste for another world. And that longing for paradise is at the center a longing for God. I love saying this.

Paradise will be paradise because God will be in the middle of it forever unchallenged. That's what we're longing for. And every day, in some way, as I face the brokenness inside of me and the brokenness outside of me, whether I know it or not, I cry out for eternity.

The awes of today are drawing us toward that moment when we will live in unbroken awe of God forever and ever and ever and ever. And 10 million years into eternity, there will be no lessening of that awe. Yes. Amen. This is a great place to end for now, Paul.

Thank you for your time this week. Thanks for having me. Anytime. Paul Tripp, author of "Awe, Why It Matters for Everything We Think, Say, and Do," one of my top 10 books of 2015. Check it out. We return on Monday with Pastor John. Until then, browse all of our episodes at our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.

I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Have a great weekend.