Week 19: IRON SHARPENS IRON

“What was God thinking?” ask John and Stasi Eldredge in their book Love and War: Finding the Marriage You’ve Dreamed of. “Marriage is like taking Cinderella and Huck Finn, tossing them in a submarine, and closing the hatch.”  This makes Nicole and I smile because it’s such a great picture of how difficult marriage can be.

At our recent retreat, we got to share from our own experience on how God uses our marriage as a means of grace to form and shape us more into the man or woman God has called us to be.  Here’s a snippet from that talk:

Proverbs 27:17 says, ‘As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.’ Neither of us, and neither of you, are perfect. God’s grand idea for getting you to look more like his son was to give you a gift.  That gift is your spouse and can often feel more like human sandpaper. Yes! This was God’s idea!!!! Someone once said the way they used to build stone walls was to literally take two stones and rub them against one another, beating and breaking off the sharp edges, until they fit together perfectly. 

You see, it’s not our job to force our spouse to change. Think of it as an invitation from the Holy Spirit: “Will you grow?” There’s a good chance God is using that to mold you. A few weeks ago, Nicole called out truth in a situation.  It made me squirm.  Just being honest- I both hate it and love it.  And in that moment, I had a choice.  Will I lean in to the discomfort and allow the Lord to mold me, or will I resist, fortify, defend, and be bitter?  I chose the discomfort, and felt the joy of “it hurts so good.”

You too have a choice.  My pastor recently encouraged our church to make a similar choice:  "Every day, moment by moment, we choose if we're going to harden our hearts, or keep them soft."  Nicole and I's prayer for you is that you choose the path of submission, molding, soft-heartedness, and yes, sharpening.