Welcome back to a new week on the podcast. Our next question comes from an engaged man, Evan is his name, who writes in to ask this. Pastor John, I'm getting married in exactly 100 days from now. I'm 21 years old, my bride-to-be, Emily, is 18. I'm a student ministries intern at my church.

We met last March and began a long-distance relationship after we met when her college trip and my student ministry retreat overlapped at a camp between our states in Wyoming. We have clearly felt God lead us to be married, and our mentors, church leaders, parents, and close friends have affirmed our decision to be married.

I'm excited to take on the role of loving a woman like Christ did the church, but as the day draws nearer and nearer, I am made more and more aware of my need for wisdom and help to become a husband capable of loving my wife well. I'll be re-listening to all of the episodes on marriage, but with all that being said, what advice do you have for me?

What are the most important questions we need to ask and likely are not asking due to the rushing excitement of the engagement phase? What would you say, Pastor John, to Evan and to his fiance? - Well, the first thing I want to do is send him over to DesiringGod.org to download a document called "Questions to Ask When Preparing for Marriage." The more issues you can talk about now, together, before marriage, the better.

It's far more frustrating and threatening to think of something after you're married that you should have talked about before, which leads me to the second thing I would say, besides go get the document. Don't shy away, Evan, from any issue or conversation with your fiance in these days in order to avoid conflict.

Now is the time to have every conflict you can have that might come up later. If you think that you can dodge conflicts now so that there will be a more opportune time later, you're mistaken. This is what engagement or courtship is designed for, maximum exposure to what each of you thinks, believes, feels, does habitually or occasionally, no secrets, nothing held back.

You don't want marriage to be based on ignorance, but on trust in the face of all truth. The next thing I would say to Evan is that these are golden months in which to set patterns of spiritual leadership in which you take the initiative to read the Bible, pray, think, study, talk together about all kinds of biblical and spiritual realities.

I'm assuming that you agree that you both need to be on the same theological page. That's not an artificial expectation. This means that if you're going to pull together shoulder to shoulder in marriage for some great purpose, which is what marriage is for, you have to be pulling in the same direction.

That is, seeing God in the same way and seeing Christ and seeing the Holy Spirit and seeing faith and seeing love and salvation and heaven and hell and Satan and sin and holiness and obedience, seeing all these things in the same way. Otherwise, pulling together in harness will start to become very painful as you jerk each other around in different directions spiritually.

Or more likely what happens is you just stop talking spiritually, which is worse. So take the initiative and go deep into every dimension of the spiritual life that you can in these days. And the next thing I would say, and this applies to both of you, is that your own personal fellowship of faith and joy and hope and obedience toward Jesus is foundational for the survival and the flourishing of your marriage.

The marriages that I watch unravel, unravel in tandem with the unraveling of spiritual reality. One or both of the couples falls away from Jesus. When that happens, the spiritual resources for handling the normal conflicts vanish. And so the point is, don't just think that what you do together strengthens the marriage.

Far more important, and this may sound like an overstatement, but I thought about it and I'm gonna stick by it. Far more important is what you do apart from each other as each of you meets Jesus and consecrates yourself afresh over and over so that your devotion to Christ is absolutely unshakable personally between you and him, and your experience of him is profoundly satisfying.

When two people operate out of that individual profundity, the marriage will endure and not only endure, flourish with joy and fruitfulness. Now, of all the hundreds of things that need to be said and could be said, here's one last thing to say. Don't assume that your affection for your bride-to-be is known and felt by her.

Instead, put it on your lips over and over again. And over again every day. Find fresh ways to say it. Say it, not just show it. Say it. Lots of guys think, "Why show it? I earn a living. I guard her, I protect her." Look, yes, show it. Yes, show it.

Do the kinds of deeds she loves for you to do, but don't just do things. Say things. This is true for both of you, but I'm talking to you, Evan. Lavish your wife with expressions of delight and appreciation and admiration and affection and enjoyment in your wedding vows. I hope you're going to promise to cherish her above all others and forsake everyone else, cleaving to her alone.

Put that cherishing and that cleaving into words every day. This will pay dividends of great joy and great deep bonding of soul at a very, very wonderfully profound and happy level. It's true that there's a warning in the Book of Solomon, in the Song of Solomon, not to stir up love until it satisfies.

That means, I think, among other things, perhaps you can immerse yourself in this book in a premature and inappropriate way because in the vernacular, it can turn you on in premature ways. But, but, I'm going to risk it anyway and say, go to that book and learn what I'm talking about here.

Learn how to put into words, to her face, the cherishing that you feel for her. May God bless you in these months. - Amen, good word. Thank you, Pastor John. And thank you, Evan, for today's question. We are going to return on Wednesday and we're going to hear from a leader who is wiped out, spiritually and emotionally and mentally drained in his work and he wants to know how to use his downtime to recharge and whether it's possible to recharge his body and recharge his soul at the same time.

It's a really good and important question coming up on Wednesday for anyone who is feeling tired and needs to be refreshed. Well, you've been listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast with longtime author and pastor John Piper. You can find our audio feeds in our archive and you can find your way to our inbox as well with your own questions all through our online home at desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn.

I'm your host Tony Reiki and we will see you on Wednesday. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)