I think a far more relevant question would be: How do Christians actually live out their own marriages?
Frankly, I believe the [C]hurch is following the culture. We eat, drink and waste our time and lives much as the culture does. Functioning, loving and successful Christian marriages are something of the exception, not the rule. Same goes for our lives and child rearing.
I have traveled much of the world and consistently found Western Christianity lacking in the primacy of surrender (brokenness, if you will) to the Lordship of Christ. Instead, we seem to pretty much fall into the ‘good enough’ pattern of middle class existence and not think about things too deeply.
One simple book, ‘The Pursuit of God’ by A.W. Tozer switched on the lights for me. Today, I am still a sinful man, but I’m standing at the plate and willing to swing (pretty much). The tenuous grasp I have on the meaning of surrender has blown apart, forever, my religious conceptions of what it means to please God and what He expects of us.
The [c]hurch may howl all it wants about this or that, but the [C]hurch immortal and invisible will not be left alone by our Master. He WILL bring us into his purposes one way or another, Usually, I have found, that is totally contrary to what we suppose his methods and purposes are. In matters of family and marriage, after submission to his revealed will, we are to be spent as sacrifices for our charges. Few of us will ever take that charge seriously. Fewer still will pursue it.
This [ruling] gives Christian churches the opportunity to do what Jesus called us to do with our marriages in the first place: to serve as a light in a dark place. Permanent, stable marriages with families with both a mother and a father may well make us seem freakish in 21st-century culture. But is there anything more "freakish" than a crucified cosmic ruler? Is there anything more "freakish" than a gospel that can forgive rebels like us and make us sons and daughters? Let's embrace the freakishness, and crucify our illusions of a moral majority.
That means that we must repent of our pathetic marriage cultures within the church. For too long, we've refused to discipline a divorce culture that has ravaged our cultures. For too long, we've quieted our voices on the biblical witness of the distinctive missions of fathers and mothers in favor of generic messages on "parenting."
For too long, we've acted as though the officers of Christ's church were Justices of the Peace, marrying people who have no accountability to the church, and in many cases were forbidden by Scripture to marry. Just because we don't have two brides or two grooms in front of us, that doesn't mean we've been holding to biblical marriage.
Sage words. You pen truth, and with eloquence and grace.