Intimacy in the Bed Room

We ended last time talking about 1st Peter 3:7, which says, “Husbands, likewise, dwell with them with understanding.” It is our wives we are to dwell with. And we talked about making a study of our wives.

But the King James Version brings out another connotation. The King James translates this as dwell with them “according to knowledge.” This makes us think sexual. Genesis 4:1 stated, “Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived.” When this verse says “Adam knew Eve,” it didn’t mean he knew her name or her shoe size. That’s not the way babies are conceived. Intimacy in marriage also involves sexual intimacy.

Aha, some of you are getting ideas. Victoria Secrets lingerie, soft music, candlelight and roses. Get the manuals that instruct you the various positions that take an acrobat or yoga instructor to get into. Well, that isn’t the way it works in most homes.

Most married couples, after a few years, have acquired a kid or two. They have put on the pounds, and suffer from varicose veins. By the time the kids are in bed, both are too tired to perform at the pinnacle of excitement. Romance maybe happens on Valentine’s Day or your anniversary, but it’s not part of the regular routine. Yet, normal married couples actually have a more satisfying sex life than those trying to emulate the movies. Why? It is because intimacy comes from knowledge, not mystery.

Proverbs 5, set in the midst of many warnings not to play with fire by dabbling in sex outside of marriage, tells us to be satisfied with our wives. Writing of the wife, Proverbs 5:18-19 say:

“Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice with the wife of your youth. As a loving deer and a graceful doe, let her breast satisfy you at all times; and always be enraptured with her love.”

Even an older woman (still the “wife of your youth”), can compete quite successfully on those terms. As the New International Version says, he is “captivated by her love.” Wives don’t need to dress like prostitutes or act like actresses in X-rated movies. They only need to respond to one another in love, freely giving themselves to one another.

Only within the bounds of true marital love can two people relax and be comfortable with one another, to be un-inhibited in their love-making as Adam and Eve were in Genesis 2:25, which says, “And they were both naked. . . and were not ashamed.” That kind of total intimacy is possible, proper, and God’s intention within a marriage; but it can only grow out of love.

But it takes love PLUS time. Are you taking the time to understand your wife?

Time and Consideration - Key Ingredients to Intimacy

Do you know what the key ingredient is to an intimate marriage? That key ingredient is time. Unfortunately, that is the one thing we are least willing to invest. A recent survey revealed that the average husband and wife spend an average of thirty seven minutes per week in actual communication, meaning real conversation. That wouldn’t sound like much for a single day, let alone a week. For a man, a grunt from behind a newspaper takes less than a second. That doesn’t add up very fast, nor does it do much to increase intimacy. Nor does time spent in front of the TV mesmerized by the flashing lights count as quality time.

Is it any wonder so many marriages fall apart when the kids leave home? The couple find themselves married to a total stranger. They wake up alone one morning in a quiet and an empty house as a couple of old people, and they look across the bed at the other, and they want to ask, “Who are you? I don’t know you.” It is amazing that two people can live together for years, decades even, without ever really knowing each other. Yet it is probably the most common scenario – two people sharing a name and a home, but little else. What a shame.

Warren Wiersbe says,

“In my marital counselling, I often gave the couple a pad of paper and asked them to write down the three things each one thinks the other enjoys doing the most. Usually the wife made her list immediately. The man would sit and ponder. And usually the wife was right, and the husband was wrong.”

Those husbands totally missed the idea of 1st Peter 3:7, “Husbands, likewise, dwell with them with understanding.”

Quoting Chuck Swindall:

“Many a wife is lonely for her husband to sense and minister to her inner spirit. To give her his attention and personal presence. She waits to be noticed, to be appreciated, to be given time to share, and in return hear her husband respond with the newspaper laid aside, with the television off, with the whole evening available. Men, maybe it will help to motivate you if you face the fact that a continually absent husband is a major cause for illicit affairs among wives. And often with men who will simply give them time and attention. Wake up, husbands!”

Let me repeat his last words, WAKE UP, HUSBANDS! Your wives need you. Give them the time.

James Henry Jowett, in defining the phrase, “dwell according to knowledge,” writes this:

“We may grasp its content by proclaiming its opposite. ‘Dwell with your wives according to ignorance. Just walk in blindness. Don’t look beyond your own desires. Let your vision be entirely introspective and microscopic. Never exercise your eyes in clear and comprehensive outlook. Dwell in ignorance.’”

Does that describe your marriage? How sad. That attitude has killed too many marriages.

Another slant to that phrase is given by the New International Version. It translates the phrase, “Be considerate as you live with your wives.” In other words, be sensitive to her deepest physical and emotional needs. Isn’t that good advice? Consideration, courtesy – these are the oils to lubricate a relationship. But why is it so hard to do at home?

In an old “Life Magazine” article, it reported:

“The business man gives service with a smile: he is deferential to his boss, his customers and usually even to his underlings. Women are polite to their neighbors and to door-to-door salesmen. Hardly a voice is raised in anger except behind the closed doors of the home. As the outside world becomes more and more constrained, more and more people seem to feel the home is the last remaining place where they can quit kidding and be their own ornery selves. The bride and the groom who have been standing so patiently in the reception line, smiling sweetly at people they hardly know (and some people they know and don’t like), can seem ornery indeed to each other when they get home and let their hair down.”

This is backwards. Of course we need to be kind and considerate out in the workforce and marketplaces of life. Consideration is necessary in every social encounter. But isn’t the home the most important place to exercise consideration? We must learn to be considerate at home if we want to develop intimacy within our homes.

Intimacy in Marriage - Dwelling Together With Understanding

If we are expected to have an intimate relationship with our spouse, does Scripture give us help? Of course! And to answer that, I want to look at just one verse – 1st Peter 3:7 – which states:

“Husbands, likewise, dwell with them (our wives) with understanding, giving honor to the wife, as to the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life, that your prayers may not be hindered.”

Wait a minute! Why is this addressed to just husbands? Isn’t marriage a joint venture? Yes! Is it solely the husband’s responsibility? No! But wives just seem to do this intimacy stuff more naturally than us guys. God wired them that way, while something must have short-circuited in us guys. But more than that, it is primarily the husband’s responsibility since God left us on charge.

As in so many areas in the home, the husband must be the thermostat setting the emotional and spiritual temperature. The wife is the thermometer letting the husbands know what the temperature is. Men, have you ever noticed things getting a little chilly in your relationship with your wife? That’s your wife acting as the thermometer letting you know the intimacy has cooled down. It’s time to turn up the heat. So both the thermostat and thermometer are necessary.

What are the husbands to do? From 1st Peter 3:7, they are to “dwell with them with understanding.” Dwell with them? Doesn’t that mean” Live with them? That’s easy. We already do. We get our mail in the same mail box, and we eat at the same table. We even share the same bedroom. How’s that for intimacy?

Ah, but the term means more – oh, so much more. In its Greek usage, it means to be completely at home. In other words, home is priority number one.

What is most important to you, husbands? Is it your career? Is it your bank account? Some of you who are Christians will say that God is your highest priority, but then what? If it is not your wife and your family, you have the wrong priority.

How many Christians are there, Mission Boards even, that get it wrong. They so often think families are expendable. Send the kids away to boarding school so they don’t interfere with your work. That’s wrong!

Howard Hendricks used to do something in his classes at Dallas Seminary. He would say, “Gentlemen, your family is not vital to your ministry.” Then he would pause for a few moments before he ended, “Your family is your ministry.”

That is illustrated in the qualifications for elders/pastors in 1st Timothy 3:4-5, when it declares an elder is:

“one who rules his own house well, having his children in submission with all reverence (for if a man does not know how to rule his own house, how will he take care of the church of God?).”

Rule? I like the New International Version translation better, which substitutes the word “manage.” To “rule” the home in Scripture means to lead it. Men are to lead their homes, not to Lord it over their families. We are not to be despots. But it does show where the responsibility lies – it lies with the husband.

But this is intimately related to the next phrase from 1st Peter 3:7, “Husbands, likewise, dwell with them (our wives) with understanding.” Or, as the King James Version puts it, “according to knowledge.” Men, this is the truth – the success of your dwelling with your wife will be in direct proportion to your knowledge (your understanding) of your wife. And I don’t mean to be insulting, but let’s face it, most of us men are blockheads when it comes to understanding our wives.

Do you know your wife? Do you know her fears, cares, dreams, and expectations? Can you read her moods? Do you know her inside and out? Are you a student of your wife? Do you study her to know her better? That’s what we men must do, we must make a study of our wives in order to live with them with understanding.

Men, marriage is too rewarding to let it be static. You will eventually fail if you simply float down stream. Marriages must grow. And yours can, yours will, if you do the hard work. The first years might seem wonderful, but as a decade goes by, love only grows, until as elderly people married for fifty years, it only keeps getting better. You can be closer, more intimate, and more in love on your fiftieth anniversary than you were on your first. That is, if you continually work at it.

Cleaving Soul to Soul and Spirit to Spirit

In Genesis 2:24, God states,

“Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”

“Be joined together” is translated as “cleave” in the King James. The most obvious cleaving is body to body in sexual union. We’ve spent quite a bit of time covering that. But cleaving in marriage also must be soul to soul and spirit to spirit. These are even more important than body to body. Better than cleaving body to body is cleaving soul to soul, and better still is cleaving spirit to spirit.

Let’s look at cleaving soul to soul. For purposes of discussion, we will refer to the soul as the intellectual and emotional side of us. Cleaving soul to soul is sharing the same interests, enjoying each other’s company, finding conversation together fascinating – it’s the stuff of daily life that we share together. They need to help bond us together.

That takes work, and it takes time because our interests and our intellects keep changing and growing. I’ve been married for 39 years, but I’m not married to the same woman. Oh, she has the same name and the same fingerprints, but she is totally different from the young woman I married. She has changed over time. And I have had to learn to change with her.

Most young couples realize soon after they are married that they really didn’t know the one they said “I do” to. Our spouse isn’t who we first thought she was. We realize soon that our vision was clouded by our emotions. Infatuation has a way of shutting off the brain, you know. So it takes work. Keith Miller said that he envisioned his bride as a combination of St. Theresa, Elizabeth Taylor, and Betty Crocker. Boy was he off base – his words.

So, when reality hits us in the face we can do one of two things: We can try to make our spouse like our image, which is bound to create conflict and hurt feelings. Or, we can accept her for who she really is and work to develop our relationship.

But finally, a true union must also be a cleaving of spirit with spirit. A believer indwelt with the Spirit of God must only marry another believer. That was the point of God’s command in 2nd Corinthians 6:14 -

“Do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers. For what fellowship has righteousness with lawlessness? And what communion has light with darkness?”

Think about it: What kind of relationship can there be when you can’t share the most important part of your life (your faith, your Lord) with your spouse? Besides, if you marry a child of the devil, you are guaranteed to have trouble with your father-in-law. GUARANTEED! So teens, don’t even think about dating an unsaved person. DON’T DO IT!

Intimacy is Tough

Chuck Swindall wrote this:

“There were two porcupines living in Alaska. It was very cold. To keep warm, they decided to draw close together. But when they did that, they needled one another. So they pulled apart. But again they got cold. And so they moved close again, and they got needled. Poor porcupines! They were continuously either cold, or else needling one another.”

So much for intimacy between porcupines. But isn’t that the way it is with people too? Alone, we are miserable, lonely, empty; so we get married. But together, we needle one another, aggravate and hurt one another. Like one guy said, “Women! You can’t live with them, and you can’t live without them.”

The result is that half of all marriages fail and end up in the divorce courts. Most of the rest experience disillusionment, sadness, and hurt; yet they endure despite all that. They endure, not because they experience a good marriage, but because they tough it out and won’t give up.

But is that the way God intended marriage to be? No! Not at all! Doesn’t God want us to be able to draw close and be warm and comfortable? Yes! Absolutely!

That is exactly God’s purpose in writing Genesis 2:24-35:

“Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.”

Yes, we are to live together in perfect peace and unity – and with intimacy. That is God’s plan and His will.

Let’s look at what happens in a typical home: The husband comes from a big family that is easy going and rambunctious. He always thought the bedpost was a convenient place to hang his underwear. She comes from a quiet, orderly home. She just assumed that everyone picked up their own underwear. You have guaranteed conflict in this match-up, and these are just over petty differences.

We haven’t even mentioned finances, sexual frequency or responsiveness, distribution of household chores, spiritual issues like where we go to church, and child discipline issues. Or, what about the big one – Where do we spend Christmas? Do we spend it at your Mother’s house or at mine?

It’s funny – when you get married, you only have to satisfy one person. Why isn’t it easier? We stand in bliss at the altar promising to love and cherish till death do us part, and within months we are singing the words to that old country song:

“Why don’t we get along? Everything I do is wrong; Tell me, what’s the reason I’m not pleasing you?”

How sad, but how often true. And it isn’t surprising. We come together with built in, ready-made incompatibility. We have different backgrounds, different ideas on how things should be done, and we are by design created differently. Our bodies are built differently for different functions, and we even think differently. Yet we are expected to join together in marriage and live intimately till death do us part.

It takes a lifetime of work adjusting to one another, but the blessing of an intimate marriage is worth the effort. What is necessary is summed up in Genesis 2:24, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” We will be talking about how this is done in the next few blogs.