At one time, maybe these lovely words from Song of Solomon (at the end of the lat article) described your marriage, but today they seem as
foreign as Greek or Latin. As for the purposes of God in your marriage, perhaps you haven’t even considered them in a while. Maybe you’re experiencing a semblance of peace at home? After all, if the garage is fairly well organized, the bills are getting
paid, and you’re able to play a round of golf from time to time, why question things too much? Well, you should, because a great marriage is more than those kinds of things. Are you bored with your marriage?
Do you have a truce in your marital relationship but no deep oneness? Does male leadership in marriage confuse you and frustrate your wife? Is your wife failing to fulfill
you sexually? Great marriages may seem rare these days, but God
didn’t intend it that way. By God’s way of thinking, a vibrant, cherishing relationship is quite normal and should be quite common because, believe it or not, you already have what it takes to walk faithfully like Uriah:

His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of
him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them
you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires. (2 Peter 1:3-4)

You and your wife already have what it takes to sculpt a glorious image of Christ’s relationship to the church, a
masterpiece so lovely it will draw men and women to Christ simply by their looking at the two of you together. Five hundred years ago, when Michelangelo was lauded
for his famous sculptural masterpiece David, he refused the praise, replying that he had really done nothing at all. He said that the image of David was in that rock from the time of creation—that his hands were merely the tools to chip away the excess stone that revealed the beauty placed there
by God eons ago. Like Michelangelo, you must chip away the stony “flesh”
and attitudes that overlay your marriage and block the beauty God placed there when you were married.
Sadly, too often much of the excess stone overlays the husband’s part of the sculpture, leaving the wife to struggle with less than she’d been promised in both the marriage
bed and her home. Perhaps the husband’s false intimacy found in pornography and masturbation has pushed out the true intimacy that should have been in the marriage from the beginning.

Has your guilt stunted the development of a prayer life
together? Has your guilt kept you from seeking God’s face and searching through the convicting Word of God? Perhaps such guilt has left you grumpy, and your relationship with God has wilted like dry prairie grass
under a broiling late-August sun. If so, your marriage probably hasn’t fared much better. Like many guys, your
marital problems may not stop at your sexual sin.

If sexual sin is not your only issue, you may be hurting your wife in a myriad of ways, from ignoring her pleas to telling her to shut up—and this can hurt your battle for
sexual purity. These sins have consequences, too. For instance, you may get your sexual sin under control and find your sexual desire for your wife increasing, only then to find that her desire for you is DOA because of the many times you’ve trampled her heart over the years.

Relationships can be complicated, and everything is not cut and dried. It doesn’t help that we men are ill-equipped to understand women and relationships— even when we think we understand and we think we are doing well. Having said that, I want you to know that you are a
warrior of the Lord God Almighty. The battle for purity lies before you, and victory is yours for the taking. God is with you, and make no mistake, together you stand as a formidable duo on the battlefield. You can—and will—win this battle. But what happens next? You’ll need a comrade standing at your shoulder as you build true intimacy into your marriage. That person must be your wife, your helpmate. You love her. We know you want to cherish your wife
and want her to feel cherished. You want her to become everything you ever dreamed she could be. We also know that, deep down, you’re suspecting that if you could just lead right and cherish her well, she would
truly blossom in your home and help cement your victory over sexual sin for the rest of your life.