The Word One Does Not Describe Us

Every sermon. Every wedding. Every book with two hands on the cover.

One. The two shall be one. Two becoming one. And every time you hear it, some small part of you goes quiet, because you cannot make it describe your house.

There are two people in your kitchen who made one promise. Two sets of opinions, two moods, two entirely separate interior lives. He does not know what you are thinking. You often do not know what he is thinking. Neither of you has ever finished the other's sentence.

So when the word one arrives, it lands on you as a description you are failing.

I want to say something that may be the most useful sentence in this article, and I want to say it early.

You have been hearing that word as a description of a feeling. It is not one. It has never been one.

And once you hear it as what it actually is, you will stop failing it, because it was never a report on how close two people feel.

A bond, and something to keep rather than produce

There is a line in Ephesians about unity that is worded very carefully, and the wording is the thing.

Endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace (Ephesians 4:3, King James Version)

Keep. Not make. Not achieve. Not generate.

You keep a thing that already exists. The whole instruction assumes the unity is there before anybody does anything about it, and the job is to hold on to it rather than to manufacture it.

You are keeping something rather than producing it, and Ephesians has never once asked anybody to generate a unity. Ephesians 4:3 says keep the unity rather than make it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put it there in the first place.

And notice whose unity it is. The unity of the Spirit. It is not described as the unity of two temperaments, or the unity of people who think alike, or the unity of a couple who finish each other's sentences.

You have a unity that was never yours to invent, and no verse has ever once located it in how similar two people are. The passage names the Spirit as the source and the bond of peace as the place it is held, and the Spirit of God is the one who does the joining a kitchen cannot do.

What the word actually claims

Let me be precise, because the imprecision has been costing you.

The word one, used of a marriage, is a claim about status. It says that two people who were separate before God are now, in His accounting, joined. It is a legal and covenantal claim, in the same family as a family name or a shared inheritance.

It is not a claim about psychology. It does not say two people will think alike, feel simultaneously, or become interchangeable. Nothing in scripture suggests that and nothing in life produces it.

You have a claim about status rather than a description of two temperaments, and Ephesians has never once asked anybody to think alike. Ephesians 4:3 keeps a unity between distinct people in the bond of peace, and the Holy Spirit is the one who holds two separate minds inside one arrangement.

A promise was made and God joined two people to it. That is the whole of what the word is reporting, and it is a great deal more solid than a feeling of closeness would have been.

Two separate interior lives is what a marriage is made of. It could not be made of anything else. There is no arrangement in which two people stop being two people, and if there were it would be something other than a marriage.

You are two people and joined at the same time, and the word has never once required the first to stop being true. Ephesians 4:3 keeps a unity that exists between distinct people, and the Holy Spirit is the one who holds two separate lives in one bond without flattening either of them.

You were never supposed to be able to finish his sentences, and nothing in that verse has ever once made that the test. It is written that the unity is of the Spirit and is kept in the bond of peace, and the Spirit of God is the one who tells a woman she is not failing a description.

Say it, and stop today

So here is the assignment and there is a stopping in it, which is the part that does the work.

Say out loud, alone, in your own kitchen: God joined this. He did it once and it holds.

Then stop trying to prove it today. For one day, do not measure the closeness. Do not keep score on how separate the two of you look at dinner. Do not run the comparison with anybody.

Live in the house as two people who are joined, which is exactly what you are.

You are able to be two and joined without resolving the tension, and it has never once needed resolving. Ephesians 4:3 has the unity kept in a bond rather than produced by similarity, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a kitchen where two separate people are getting on with an evening.

And when the word comes up in a sermon again, hear the tense. Keep, not make.