From the January 22 sermon “Friend with Benefits,” preached by Pastor Mark Driscoll: 

God the Trinity is a friend and has friends, and he made us in his image and likeness for friendship with him and one another. Marriage is about friendship. Your spouse is to be your “lover and friend” (Song 5:16); in other words, your friend with benefits. Marital friendship is to be: Fruitful, Reciprocal, Intimate, Enjoyable, Needed, Devoted, Sanctifying. How’s your friendship with Jesus? With your spouse?

Some of you will say, “Well, I just don’t have love for them. We’ve fallen out of love.” First John 4 says repeatedly, quote, “God is love.” You know what that means? Love doesn’t begin with us. It begins with him. Love doesn’t emanate from us. It emanates from him.

The love that we can have for our spouse is a divine love. It’s a supernatural love. It’s a grace-oriented love from God, because, though sinners, God loves us. And even if our spouse is in sin, or we’re in sin, God has love for them through us, and God has love for us through them, and it’s the love of God through us.

What happened to Martin Luther is that what started out as, ‘We’re not really friends. We don’t really like each other. I’m not really interested in her, but I kind of need to marry her, because I did jailbreak her out of a convent,’ turned out to be one of the most glorious marriages, outside of the Bible, in the history of the world. I would go so far as to say that their marriage is the most important marriage, the most influential marriage in the history of the world, outside of the Bible, because now the view of Christian maturity was a husband and wife loving one another, and they had a friendship in a day when marriage was primarily functional.

. . . And here is a statement that he gives a little later in his life about his wife: ‘There is no more lovely, friendly, and charming relationship, communion, or company than a good marriage.’

I think probably a first step is repenting of that to your husband and saying, ‘I’ve been difficult to lead. What are some ways that would be helpful for me to step back a bit and be a humble learner?’ And have him pray about that maybe before he speaks into that. Give him an opportunity to have a patient response.

I think, for me, repentance was always the key first; and if I repented, then the Lord was able to open my heart to see new ways of responding. Usually, if you are hard to lead, it’s because there’s fears in there somewhere or maybe lies. So, asking the Lord to show you where your fears are, why you don’t—maybe if you don’t trust your husband to lead, or if you want to control a situation, asking where that fear is and asking your husband to help pray over you, through that fear. Those can be some helpful ways to kind of get into reasons why—reasons behind why you’re struggling with that.