The Fight For Oneness (Becoming One: Part 2)
The Fight For Oneness (Becoming One: Part 2)
By Bradley Bennett
Becoming one with your spouse isn’t a walk in the park. Really, it’s more like a fight.
It’s not a fight against each other, though. Instead, it’s a fight for each other and your union that you both willingly enter into.
This is because becoming one is the result of constant and intentional choices made day after day to grow in your capacity to operate in unity and peace.
Living in oneness with another person is something that does not come naturally to us as humans. It’s like trying to swim against flowing water, it requires going against the natural current.
Our natural inclinations, or our fleshly desires, regularly lead to division rather than unity. It only requires a quick glance at our world to see the reality of this.
Whether politics, race, social status, or religion, we are really good at NOT operating in oneness. And it’s these natural tendencies, the desires of our flesh, that you will constantly fight against as you both daily choose oneness in your marriage.
So like I said, not a walk in the park.
What Are We Fighting For?
The Apostle Paul, when writing to early followers of Jesus, provided counter-cultural ways of living that would empower them to operate in oneness as the body of Christ:
Ephesians 4:1-3 (CSB)
“Therefore I, the prisoner in the Lord, urge you to walk worthy of the calling you have received, 2 with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, 3 making every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.”
Humility, gentleness, patience, bearing in love, and being bound in peace.
These are ways of living that don’t only help followers of Jesus walk as one body, but can also empower you to build oneness in your marriage, too.
These are uphill habits though. Living them out will require an intentional fight against many of our natural tendencies.
So what does this fight look like? What does it look like to operate with these ways of living within a marriage?
Let’s take a look at each one together.
Humility: The Battle Against Pride
Choosing to live with humility begins and ends with one word. Submission.
Not the abusive type of submission that often gets wielded as a weapon to maintain power over someone, but mutual submission. Choosing to serve, lift up, empower, and trust our spouse — even when it’s difficult.
I know from personal experience that this is a hard fight. I’ve lost this daily fight more times than I want to admit. But I’ve also found that it’s as important a fight as there can be.
Because where there is pride, there will be an absence of submission. And where there is an absence of submission, there will be an absence of oneness.
Becoming one with our spouse requires that we each submit out of love to each other, but ultimately both submit to the leading and reign of God in our marriage.
A good marriage is made up of two people who are quicker to operate in submission than they are to demand it. In a marriage like this, oneness finds fertile soil to grow and bloom.
Gentleness: The Battle Against Insensitivity
You’ve probably never noticed, but you and your very different people. Huge revelation, right?
The longer I have been married to Amanda, the more I have come to understand just how different we are in so many ways!
She hates leftovers, I love them. She loves basketball, I can’t stand it. She roots for the Tennessee Titans, I die a little each time because I am a Jaguars fan.
Now please excuse me as I say a quick prayer for Trevor Lawrence…
The reality is that the differences between you and your spouse are often here to stay. And these differences don’t have to be bad, they can be beautiful. They don’t have to be a curse, they can be a blessing.
Which one you experience comes down to how you traverse your differences in order to relate to one another.
The best way to do this is by choosing to operate with gentleness. Choosing to be gentle in the way we communicate and consider one another in all situations.
And OH BOY is this a fight!
I’ve found personally that it’s so much easier to operate with insensitivity — considering only my thoughts, my feelings, and what matters to me. It makes things simpler in the short term because I don’t have to consider the different ways Amanda processes, interprets or feels about various things.
But when we operate like this, we are like a bull in a china shop. Clumsily moving around and shattering our spouse’s feelings, past experiences, and underlying beliefs in a way that causes pain.
And causing reckless pain is not a recipe for oneness.
Patience: The Battle Against Discontent
It’s becoming harder than ever to walk with patience in marriage. We are constantly barraged by images and videos depicting people in perfect little snapshots.
And when we compare those things to our marriage, it just never measures up. We see all our backstage messes that don’t make it on the Gram. The issues, the pieces that aren’t photo-ready, and the progress that needs to be made.
We have to fight that. Because the reality is that your real-life will never measure up to someone’s perfect picture. You can’t compare your behind-the-scenes to someone’s highlight reel. It will just lead to a place of discontent.
Choosing to fight for oneness in your marriage requires us to love the thing God is doing right now. Choosing to love the measure of grace He is showing and the growth that is taking place right now. Whether that growth is an inch or a mile.
Choose patience, choose to love your perfectly imperfect marriage and you choose to fight for one another.
Accepting In Love: The Battle Against Perfectionism
When Amanda and I got married, it took all of 5 seconds for Amanda to realize and remember that she married an imperfect human.
The night of our wedding we were staying in a hotel before leaving the next morning on our honeymoon. Before we left the ceremony, my ‘now-wife’ had given me one mission… To grab some leftover food for the hotel.
It had been a wonderful day, but incredibly busy and we had barely gotten to eat any food!
As you can probably guess, I failed in my simple mission. I forgot the food and we ended up having leftover cake and pop-tarts for dinner!
I am willing to bet a fair bit of money that you’ve learned you married an imperfect human, too. And if you haven’t realized this yet, I’m sorry to burst your bubble!
You see, nobody is perfect. Not even your “snuggle bug”.
And in the process of becoming one, we will constantly have to fight against requiring perfection from our spouse. They have flaws and imperfections, just like we do.
Requiring perfection from each other will just end in pain and disappointment. Perfection is a standard no one can live up to and requiring it will push you further apart, not closer together.
This is why it’s important to fight to accept one another in love. Some translations of this verse actually say, “to bear” with one another in love.
That doesn’t sound nearly as romantic, though!
Fighting perfectionism and choosing to accept one another in love covers over a lot. It fills in a lot of the potholes that can trip us up on the journey to becoming one with our spouse.
Bound In Peace: The Battle Against Worldly Divisions
I had a friend once who said a peaceful marriage is like a unicorn. It sounds cool, but it doesn’t exist.
For many, their experience in marriage is not one of peace, but division and strife.
Thankfully, this doesn’t have to be the story of your marriage. Your marriage can, and was designed to be, a bastion of peace in the midst of a world battered by division.
But how?
By having something in common that is greater than any worldly division. As Paul says in his encouragement in Ephesians, we are to be bound in peace through Christ.
Christ is the greatest unifying force and the peace we have in Him is greater than any division the world may throw at your marriage. All is level at the foot of the cross and a marriage centered around Him and His sacrifice has all that is needed to combat the divisions of the world.
Fighting For Oneness Is A Choice
Building a marriage that experiences oneness is not easy. It is not something that we naturally fall into, it’s something we make a choice to fight for together.
There may be some days you lose the fight and find yourselves operating in pride, or worldly division, or discontent. And that’s okay. It happens because we are humans and are imperfect.
But will you choose to wake up the next day and fight anew?
It’s not easy, but oneness is worth it. The fruit that it can and will produce in your marriage is worth it.
It will lead to a relationship that is far better than any Disney movie fairytale stuff. It’s real. So choose to enter the ring and fight for oneness together.