Welcome to Gospel in Life. When it comes to marriage, we often use words like soulmate

or the one. These words can reveal an underlying belief that, to have a good marriage, you just

have to find the perfect person. But the biblical vision for marriage is starkly different.

It's a way for two imperfect people to help each other become who God intended them

to be. Listen as Tim Keller explores the meaning of marriage.

I will start. What we're going to do tonight is we're going to talk and talk and talk and

you're going to sit and sit and sit. But in this way, we're going to be doing it sort

of a tag team. Our goal here is to lift up the historic Christian biblical vision for

marriage. In doing that, of course, we're going to be looking at all sorts of things like

ethics and we're going to look at some biblical passages. But the whole idea is there's a Christian

vision for what marriage is. And we want to show you what that is and then essentially

apply it to several different things. First of all, I'm going to just right now spend

a kind of introductory time applying it to the crises of marriage in our culture. Right

now we're at it and I'm going to show you right in one second that we're at a cultural

moment in which most people recognize that marriage is struggling. And what does the

biblical vision of marriage have to say for that? It's impossible for us to just sit down

and think, what does it mean for me without asking, what does it mean for society? On the

other hand, after that, we're going to actually have a section that Kathy and I are calling

the biblical contours of marriage. And I'll tell you what those are, but Kathy and I will

go back and forth and hit four of what we would call the biblical contours of marriage.

So first, marriage in our culture and then the biblical contours, in which case, those

of you who are single, we believe that the biblical vision for marriage, if you grasp

...