I have spent a little time thinking through expectations in marriage over the last few months and have been served by a conversation with a wiser friend. The thought that initially challenged me was that biblical expectations are the only ones which will serve the other in marriage. For one to expect something other than what the Bible describes is to be unloving. So to study passages on marriage and husbands and wives is to serve one's husband or wife. Below I seek to build on this simple idea.
Armed with biblical expectations, a spouse is prepared, not to bash the other with them, but to encourage, point, and lead the other toward them. A husband should want to be like Christ, the perfect man. For a wife to expect something which is inconsistent with the ideal (Christ) is to be unloving and unserving of him. What husband wouldn't want to be like Christ, to love his wife like Christ loves the church?
Generally, Christians understand that sanctification (here the husband becoming like Christ) is a process for which "God's method . . . is neither activism (self-reliant activity) nor apathy (God-reliant passivity), but God-dependent effort (2 Cor. 7:1; Phil. 3:10-14; Heb. 12:14)" (Packer, Concise Theology, 170). A loving wife aligns herself under the biblical expectations by understanding the gospel, sanctification, the role of her husband, and then pointing him patiently toward the ideal man--Christ.
[It is worth meditating on the fact that Christ was not a husband, yet his relationship to the church is the reality which the husband is to picture. For husbands are, after all, to love their wives as Christ loved the church.]
Likewise, for a husband to serve his wife by having the most loving expectations possible, he must know the biblical ideal (thinking of Proverbs 31, etc.). For him to expect something which is inconsistent with the ideal is to be unloving and unserving of her. Some might think to expect this ideal of a wife is not helpful and likely only overwhelming for her. To expect this is not unhelpful, but it can be (and sometimes is) done in an unhelpful way, just as expecting one's husband to be like Christ is not unhelpful--but expecting him to be like Christ right now, right away can be unhelpful. Here is my point: No wife would expect her husband to be like Christ immediately after marriage, yet some husbands expect their wives to be like the Proverbs 31 woman immediately after marriage. These clearly sinful (and all too common) expectations flow from a failure to understand sanctification and then apply it in both instances.
Progressive sanctification, the work of God's free but costly grace, requires time. Scripture itself understands this. Note the woman in Proverbs 31 had raised kids. Put simply, she was not a young wife. She was certainly not 24. The grace of God had been at work in her through the experience of mothering for years. In the context of the unique roles of wife and mother and through years of exerting herself in sustained obedience and God-dependent effort within that context, the young, godly wife has become the ideal wife of Proverbs 31. No short cuts on the road of sanctification are allowed.
Christians must understand sanctification is a process and time is required. For it is over time alone that sustained obedience and God-dependent effort can happen. May this understanding of sanctification be lovingly applied to both the husband as he seeks to be like Christ and the wife as she seeks to be like the woman described in Proverbs 31 and elsewhere. More to my point, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way and, if Christ has begun a good work in her, expect great things from Him (I Peter 3:7; Phil. 1:6).
