Real Marriage_ The Truth About Sex, Friendship, and Life Together - Mark Driscoll [12]
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Since that season, we have been works in progress. We are now closer than ever and have a very healthy sex life. We work together as one. We repent and forgive quickly and well by God’s grace. We are blessed to have been faithful to each other for the entirety of our marriage. Through it all, we’ve learned a lot. On a scale of 1 to 10, we’d say our marriage is somewhere around an 8+ or 9, when in years past it was a 3 or 4. Writing this book has been an absolutely unifying and trust-building project by God’s grace. We have a lot of fun as friends, and we get a lot done in life and ministry. By God’s grace and the Holy Spirit’s power, we got a new marriage with the same spouses and avoided becoming yet another statistic.
It was 2007 when we decided to teach the Song of Songs again, about a decade after I had taught it the first time. We did not tell anyone the intimate details of our story. We did, however, tell folks the principles we have learned using a book of the Bible as a springboard to other books of the Bible, some cultural analysis, a few of our counseling insights, and some interesting sociological data. I preached the sermons, and Grace joined me onstage to answer two hundred questions texted in over the course of the series, which we titled “The Peasant Princess.”1 The series vaulted us to number one on iTunes for Religion and Spirituality, a place the podcast has been at or near every week since 2007. The series landed us on ABC’s Nightline a few times, CNN, Loveline with Dr. Drew, and a bunch of other media coverage. It has also led to conferences around the United States.
I have also preached parts of this book’s content in England, Ireland, Scotland, South Africa, Australia, India, and Turkey. I have stood in line, where Grace has joined me when she was able, around the nation and the world, talking for hours with hundreds of thousands of couples. This, along with the ministry in our church and church-planting network, has led to seemingly every possible kind of conversation related to sex and marriage, which helped us greatly in writing the book.
So, after years of learning, counseling, teaching, repenting, forgiving, and praying, we believe it’s time for us to tell the story of what we’ve learned and what we are learning. The story is honest, helpful, practical, and biblical. We’ll give date night tips, talk about how to set up a marriage, and discuss how to fix a broken marriage. We’ll have pointed words for husbands and wives, answer the most tricky “can we do that?” sex questions, and give hope to people like us who entered into marriage a complete mess. And if you have unconfessed sin and/or a past of sexual sin, including pornography, fornication, sexual abuse, bitterness, and the like, we pray this book leads to the healing of your soul and your marriage.
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a Heb. 12:2.
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FRIEND WITH BENEFITS
This is my beloved,
And this is my friend.
—SONG OF SONGS 5:16
In the early morning hours one Easter, twelve young runaway nuns climbed into empty fish barrels and were smuggled out of their convent. Their unlikely hero was a renegade monk they had written to, imploring him to rescue them so they could marry and one day become mothers. The escape was a daring and successful adventure, and it led to a most unusual friendship and marriage. The hero monk? Martin Luther.
Luther is widely known as one of the leaders of the Protestant Reformation. Among the most important people to walk the earth, he lived from 1483 to 1546 as a contemporary of the printing press, Copernicus, Henry VIII, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Christopher Columbus, and John Calvin. A copper miner’s son,