When does marriage move from being a precious gift from God into a false God of personal security? That's the question today and it's sent in to us from Valerie, a Sharp Podcast listener who lives in France. Hello DesiringGod.org team. Thank you for your ministry and for letting so many people benefit from all of the free resources at the site.

Pastor John, my APJ question for you is this. I deeply love my husband and I am deeply grateful to God for lending him to me as my husband during this earthly life. But I don't want to make him an idol in my life. What are some certain signs that I have made him an idol in my life and in my personal security?

And how can I love more and more my husband without finding my satisfaction in this relationship rather than in my relationship with God? Valerie's own words are pretty amazing in the right direction. Right. I mean, I haven't heard a lot of women use this language when she says, "I deeply, I'm deeply grateful to God for lending him to me as my husband during this earthly life." That's a huge step in answering her own question.

My husband is not mine. He belongs to the Lord. He is on loan to me for this life. And then it's over because in the age to come, Jesus says, there is no marriage or giving in marriage in the resurrection. And so, my goodness, Valerie has her ducks in a row theologically, it seems to me.

But she is very wise, I think, to ask the question and to think in terms of idolatry. We all should. And ask what the symptoms of it might look like. So, let me say a word about idolatry and then just give three simple ways that she and I, we all can be vigilant against idolatry in relation to our spouse or, for that matter, anybody we care about.

The very last words of the letter of 1 John are these, "Little children, keep yourselves from idols." 1 John 5, 21. Now, the reason I mention it is because it is so striking. And the reason it's so striking is that John hasn't said one word about idolatry in this letter.

He's never mentioned the word idol. He's never mentioned the word idolatry. And he, out of the blue, just kind of slaps you in the face like, "What? Why are you talking about idolatry suddenly in your very last sentence?" Well, my conclusion from that shock is, I suppose he has been talking about idolatry without using the words, and we should go back and reread and find out what idolatry looks like in 1 John.

And when I do that, the passage that sounds most like that warning is 2 John 2, 15. It goes like this, "Do not love the world or the things of the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the desire of the flesh, the desires of the eyes, the pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world.

And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever. So, little children, keep yourselves from idols." So, he says not to love the world, but then in the very next verse, he explains that he means not loving the world the way the world loves the world.

"The desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes, the pride of life is not from the Father, but from the world, and the world with its desires is passing away." Don't have those. Don't have a love for the world that is like the world's love for the world, that is like the world's desire for the world.

So, the issue is not simply loving the world, delighting in the world, enjoying the world, being thankful for the world, but rather loving the world the way the world loved the world, which is idolatry. So, when it comes to a husband or a wife, she's asking about a husband, the issue is not merely, "May I love my husband?

May I enjoy my husband? May I cherish my husband?" The issue is, do we love them, enjoy them, cherish them the way the world does or the way a spirit-filled Christian does? So, here are my three suggestions for how Valerie can stay vigilant against idolatry in relation to her husband, how she can know she's not loving the way the world loves.

Number one, does the thought, the real prospect of losing him produce debilitating anxiety? Now, no wife wants to lose her husband. Therefore, the thought of losing him should be a negative thought, a painful thought. But what I mean by debilitating anxiety is the kind of worry or fretfulness or fear that undermines a wife's faith or keeps her from joyfully doing the ministry God has called her to do in the home, in the church, in the world.

If the prospect of losing a husband produces that kind of debilitating, immobilizing anxiety, alarm bells should go off that he may be becoming an idol in the place of the God who is our peace and our security and our hope and our joy. That's number one. Number two, does your affection for and delight in your husband detract from or diminish your delight in the Word of God and the people of God and the service of God?

Or does your affection for him, your enjoyment of him, in fact deepen and intensify your love for Christ, your enjoyment of his Word, your engagement with his people? In other words, the first suggestion asks, what are the effects of losing your husband? And the second suggestion asks, what are the effects of the ongoing presence of and enjoyment of your husband?

Jesus says, "Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me." And I think he would say, "Whoever loves husband or wife more than me is not worthy of me." And we can measure the superiority of our affection for Jesus both by what would happen if we lost our best earthly beloved and what happens while we enjoy our best earthly beloved.

And lastly, number three, is your relationship with your husband regulated by the Word of God? And I'm not so much talking here primarily how well you succeed in regulating your relation on the basis of Scripture, but is it your heart's desire that you bring the entire relationship under the Word of God and measure the beauty of it and the success of it by God's standards in the Bible, not the world standards, not your own independent standards?

And a good sign that we are moving toward idolatry is when we neglect the Word of God and decide that we're going to define the meaning of love, and we're going to define the meaning of faithfulness, and we're going to define the meaning of a good relationship on our own terms, or we're going to get it from books we read or movies we watch, but we're not going to—we're going to pour over the Scriptures pleading with God to shape our relationship by all of His revealed truth.

So, my three suggestions in answer to the question, "What are some signs that I am making him an idol?" would be, number one, does the thought of losing him produce debilitating anxiety? Two, does your affection for him diminish or intensify your affections for Jesus and your engagement with His people?

And three, is your relationship regulated by the Word of God or by your own independent ideas or the ideas of the world? Happy the husband, happy the wife, whose love for each other is secondary to their love for Christ. When we love Him more, we love each other better.

That's a great and profound slogan to end with, true of all of our human relationships. Thank you, Pastor John. And excellent question, Valerie, that was sharply worded, too. So, so precise. We appreciate the thoughtfulness in your question and the fact that you really wrote it with a lot of intentionality.

Thank you, and thanks for joining us. Three times a week we publish and you can subscribe to our audio feeds and search our episode archive, even reach us by email with a question you have about your own marriage, perhaps. You can do all that through our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.

So we're going to break for the weekend now, and although Monday is a holiday in the States, it's a Labor Day for us, we're going to return on the podcast. And when we do, we're going to hear from grieving parents. We hear from grieving parents a lot. And to parent in this world is pretty much a guarantee of parental grieving to some degree for all of us.

So what do we do when our children grow up in the church but then leave the faith and we are left with the lingering question over how we have failed them? It is a heavy topic, but it's an important one that we need to address, and that's on Monday.

I'm your host, Tony Reinke. We'll see you then.