Hey everyone, this is Tony, and before we dive into today's episode, I want to ask you a favor. We love to serve you, and we want to serve you better in 2020 and beyond, and to do this means we need to know you better, and we need to hear from you.

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Tell us. Go online to DesiringGod.org/survey. That's DesiringGod.org/survey. And I'll mention this address again at the end of today's episode, which starts right now. Will God give my future spouse a similar calling to the calling he has given me? Should we expect marriage to be a harmonizing of vocational passions?

The question is from a listener named Arielle. Hello, Pastor John. As I look forward to marriage, Lord willing, I wonder if the partner God has for me, my future husband, will have a similar calling for God's specific purposes. For example, will he give my husband the same level of desire I have for missions?

Is that what God designed for marriage to be, a union of purpose? Or is this naive? Are marriages more likely comprised of a husband and wife who are on their own individual trajectories with unique and different callings? In your pastoral experience, how does this normally work? Perhaps I should start with this sentence.

Marriage is not fundamentally the linking of arms in the pursuit of an agreed-upon vocation. Now, here's one of the ways to see why that is true. When you get married, you have no certainty whatsoever that the person you marry will not undergo profound changes. Your spouse may become an unbeliever in 10 years.

He or she may totally change his or her mind about what vocation they want to go after. They may experience deep depression. They may be in an accident and become disabled and never be able to work a day in their life. They may turn to drink or drugs or sit in front of TV every night or just become a total lazy couch potato doing nothing.

When you get married, you take a huge risk and don't have any way of predicting for sure how this will turn out. So, Jesus, unlike our culture, even our church culture, I am sad to say, said divorce is not the Christian response to these unforeseen changes. Matthew 19, 9, "Whoever divorces his wife except for sexual immorality and marries another commits adultery." Now, the disciples respond to that statement with typical man-centered skepticism.

They say, this is Matthew 19, 10, "Well, if such is the case of a man with his wife, it's better not to marry." In other words, if there's no back door to the marriage leading to a better marriage, second marriage, third, then this unexpected disappointment I might walk into is not worth walking into.

I'm not walking into the front door if there's no back door for a second marriage. Now, Jesus' answer to that response, that skeptical man-centered, I could never do that response, in Matthew 19, 11 says, "Well, celibacy is a worthy option. Not everyone can receive my standards of marriage, but if you can trust me for it, then I will be sufficient to help you keep your covenant no matter what changes come." So my point is, marriage is most fundamentally a covenant commitment to live as husband and wife till death do us part, even if there are totally unexpected changes in vocational preference or disability or capacities for work or changing preferences on a hundred things that might alter your life.

Marriage is not most fundamentally about linking arms in an agreed-upon vocational track. It's about covenant keeping to the glory of Christ till death do us part no matter what. Now, to answer Ariel's question, I need to draw out some biblical realities about the roles, the glorious realities, of how husband and wives in marriage are to relate to each other.

For example, God created man first and then woman in Genesis 2, which Paul says that order is of significance for the cause of leadership in the home, and then God said in Genesis 2.18, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper fit for him." And then in the New Testament, God says, "Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church," Ephesians 5.22.

So these two texts, Genesis 2.18, Ephesians 2.22, these two, not to mention several others, point—and I think the combination of the two makes the point especially strong—point to the protection and the provision and the leadership of a husband toward his wife. In other words, the man bears a unique responsibility for the direction and biblical functioning of the family, not the only responsibility, a unique one as the head.

The reality of woman as helper in Genesis 2.18 and the reality of headship and submission in Ephesians 5 point to a relationship in marriage where the wife is following the lead of her husband's sense of calling and finding her own ministry in that helping, supportive framework. So my counsel to unmarried people would be to the man, seek God's vision for your life, and don't be a jellyfish just coasting or floating along.

See a goal, pursue it for the glory of God. And when a woman comes into your life and it looks like God may be knitting your hearts together toward marriage, be sure that her commitment is to you, not your vocation and not her vocation. Ask her, "Will you follow me wherever God leads me, provided we do not sin?

I do not lead you into any sin." I wouldn't have married Noelle. I wouldn't have married a woman who said, "Well, I don't think your sense of calling should guide us, but my calling should guide us," or "We should split the difference and always find a way so that I can do my vocation and you can do yours." I don't think that way of relating as husband and wife fits the biblical teaching about how we should relate to each other.

And to the unmarried woman, I would say, "Look to God in this second most significant decision of your life—marriage, Christian commitment is the first—look to God in this second most significant decision of your life and discern if this is the kind of man you want in the headship of your life and marriage." Now, with that biblical framework in place, I should say this.

God does not teach that any of His children, male or female, should be without a fruitful, meaningful ministry, whether vocational or non-vocational. Nobody, nobody in Christ should be coasting. Nobody in the kingdom coasts. Nobody is wasting his or her life watching TV or merely playing with hobbies. Home and children are among the highest callings, and there will almost certainly be lengthy seasons of life when the children are not home, they're out, they're gone, that don't require the total focus.

God has always put His daughters to work in a thousand ways that bless the church and the world, and what I'm arguing for is that God loves to do this within the framework of a marriage where the wife delights to stand by her man, support him, help him, follow him, and find in that drama of Christ in the church a ministry, vocational or non-vocational, that blesses the world and glorifies God.

Thank you, Pastor John and Ariel. Thank you for the very good question. Appreciate it. And the weekend hits again, and we return on Monday, the third Monday of January, which marks our celebration of Martin Luther King Jr., a day fitting to step back and assess the current state of race relations in the church in America, which we will do on Monday.

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