Faith and Love: How a Pastor Can Preserve His Marriage

In this article, I want to briefly consider how a pastor can preserve his marriage and have a God-honoring marriage that is a source of comfort and joy to him and his wife. I don’t need to rehearse the tragedy of a broken marriage. It is tragic in any circumstance, but especially for those in pastoral ministry. Although not true of every denomination, many will not allow a pastor to continue if his marriage has broken down. So, I defer to two very simple principles: be faithful to your wife and love your wife.

Be Faithful to Your Wife

The tragedy of broken marriage is one that will, I assume, haunt all of us in Christian ministry. We will know pastors with faithful, fruitful ministries who wrecked their churches and ministries because of their marital unfaithfulness. It is worth briefly thinking about why people fall into sexual sin. Often, we assume that sexual attraction is at the root. However, in his book The Storm Tossed Family, Russell Moorerecounts that in his many years of counseling pastors who have had affairs, he had never “met one person who cheated because his or her spouse was not sexually attractive enough.” No, the reason for the affair is, as he starkly puts it, “not about orgasm but nostalgia.” The person who engages in an affair, he writes, is “seeking to recapture the feeling of adolescence or young adulthood … The secret lover seems to make the married person feel young or “alive” again—until everything comes crashing down.”

I think this is a very insightful reminder that as important and wise as certain practical steps are, such as not being isolated with a person of the opposite sex, engaging in an affair is a matter of the heart rather than simply not setting appropriate boundaries. To be faithful to your wife is to rejoice in her, to be thankful for her, and to find one’s security in Christ so that one is not nostalgically pining to be the person you once thought you were.

How can we do this? Here are three concrete suggestions to help you rejoice in your wife:

First, pray for and (even more importantly) thank God for your wife every day (or at least aim to). Second, spend time enjoying the company of your wife.

It is important to spend time together in an active setting, i.e., not just in front of the TV. Whether going for a meal or a walk, there is no substitute for this intentional relational time. Thirdly, examine your heart and meditate on your blessings in Christ. That will help you guard your heart against the unhelpful nostalgia that will tempt you to feel “alive” in a “fresh” relationship.

Love Your Wife as Christ Loved the Church

But the pastor must not simply avoid being unfaithful. He must actively love his wife. As Paul writes in Ephesians, “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Eph 5:25). There is to be a sacrificial dimension to the husband’s love for his wife. This is challenging in any marriage, but pastors face the acute challenge that they are also to care for their congregations – and to do so sacrificially. More than one pastor has despaired that the job is never done. How can one break away from the congregation’s needs to care for one’s wife?

There are no easy answers here, but the attitude and conviction that your wife is the primary human relationship in your life must be something you continuously reflect on. You must keep it at the forefront of your mind. It is obvious, but that is even more reason to reflect on it continually.

Yes, there will be pastoral crises that mean you won’t be able to spend the time with your wife that you want. But you fight the real battle at those times when you could do something at church, but that will mean neglecting time with your wife. Often, the pull of the ministry at this point is to avoid criticism from your congregation. But these are the times when remembering that your wife is your priority enables you to say no to a good thing (time at church) for an even better thing (time with your wife).

This is a short post, and I have not given any practical suggestions about date nights or walks or even about praying together—as important as these are. That is because each couple will need to work things out for themselves. More importantly, they must share gospel convictions about the priority of caring for their marriage. As Russell Moore, again, has so helpfully put it:

“… the primary trouble going on in most Christian marriages is not that we don’t grasp how to live together (although that’s certainly part of it). Our primary trouble instead is that we don’t grasp fully enough the gospel by which we’ve been saved, the gospel we’ve been called to carry to the world.”

The gospel of the Lord Jesus must be the foundation of every marriage—including every pastor’s marriage. It calls us to and gives us the resources to be faithful to our wife and to love her as he loved the church.