A Sacred Vow

A Sacred Vow Dr. Lis
Helping couples get on the same page, hash out what really matters, and build a marriage that lasts a lifetime.

When people hear the word lust, they usually think about po*******hy, s*xual fantasies, or s*xual addiction. Those are c...
09/04/2026

When people hear the word lust, they usually think about po*******hy, s*xual fantasies, or s*xual addiction. Those are certainly serious manifestations of lust, but lust is bigger than any one behavior.

Lust is a disordered desire for s*xual pleasure. The problem isn't that s*xual desire exists. God created s*xuality as a good and powerful gift, and within marriage, s*xual intimacy can be a beautiful expression of love, unity, and self-gift. Lust takes something good and pulls it out of its proper order.

Instead of asking, "How can I love this person?" it begins asking, "How can this person satisfy me?" That distinction matters enormously in marriage.

A spouse can be physically present while emotionally absent. They can be treated as a body rather than a person, as a source of pleasure rather than someone whose dignity, desires, needs, and wellbeing matter. The other person's experience becomes secondary to getting what we want.

That can happen through po*******hy or s*xual addiction. It can also happen much more quietly. It can look like expecting s*x whenever we want it. It can look like becoming resentful when our spouse isn't interested. It can look like pressuring them, manipulating them, withdrawing affection to get what we want, or treating their reluctance as a personal rejection rather than listening to what they are communicating. It can even look like being concerned with our spouse's physical satisfaction only because it ultimately serves our own.

Lust asks, "Did I get what I wanted?"
Love asks, "Did I love you well?"

Those are very different questions.

Po*******hy makes this distortion particularly obvious. It trains the mind to separate s*xual pleasure from relationship, commitment, responsibility, and the dignity of a real human person. Over time, the person can become secondary to the stimulation. Novelty becomes more important than fidelity. Fantasy becomes easier than intimacy. Consumption becomes easier than self-gift.

Sexual addiction can create the same devastating reversal. What began as a desire for pleasure can become something that governs the person. The spouse may begin to feel betrayed, rejected, compared, or used. Trust erodes because the s*xual relationship is no longer ordered toward communion between husband and wife.

Lust can also change what we expect our spouse to look like. We begin comparing the person we married to other people. We notice someone who is younger, thinner, more attractive, more s*xually confident, or simply different from our spouse, and suddenly the person standing beside us feels inadequate.

Po*******hy and s*xually saturated culture can make this even worse. We can become accustomed to images that have been carefully selected, staged, edited, filtered, and designed to provoke desire. Eventually, a real human body—with age, imperfections, pregnancy, illness, scars, weight changes, and all the ordinary realities of being human—can begin to seem like it doesn't measure up.

That is a profound injustice to the person we promised to love. Your spouse was never meant to compete with an imaginary standard. They were never meant to spend their marriage wondering whether they are attractive enough to hold your attention. They were never meant to feel that their body is being evaluated against everyone else's.

Lust can create an impossible standard and then punish our spouse for being human. Yet lust doesn't require an addiction. That is important to remember. A person can struggle with lust without po*******hy. A person can struggle with lust within a marriage. The sin is present whenever s*xual desire becomes so self-focused that the other person is reduced to what they can provide. Marriage does not make every s*xual desire automatically loving simply because it occurs within marriage.
Marriage gives s*xuality a proper home, but we still have to learn how to love within it. That means learning that your spouse's body does not belong to your appetite. Your spouse is not an entitlement. They are not a service provided to meet your needs. They are a person entrusted to your love.

This also means that your spouse's "no" matters.

A healthy marriage does not treat s*xual intimacy as something one spouse is owed regardless of the other person's willingness. Love cannot be coerced. Pressure is not intimacy. Manipulation is not affection. Consent matters, but Christian marriage asks for something even deeper than merely obtaining permission. It asks us to become people who genuinely care about the good of the other.

There will be times when one spouse wants intimacy and the other does not. There will be illness, exhaustion, pregnancy, postpartum seasons, stress, pain, emotional wounds, and countless other circumstances that affect s*xual desire. Those moments can become opportunities to practice patience, communication, tenderness, and self-control rather than entitlement.

This doesn't mean that s*xual intimacy isn't important in marriage. It is. It means that its importance cannot be separated from love. Your spouse's satisfaction matters. Their comfort matters. Their dignity matters. Their emotional experience matters. Their ability to freely give themselves matters. The goal of marital intimacy is not simply that both people receive pleasure. It is that husband and wife can give themselves to one another in a way that respects the meaning and dignity of the marital act.

Lust takes. Love gives.

Lust asks, "What can you give me?" Love asks, "What can I give you?"

That doesn't mean love never receives. Marriage is not meant to be a relationship where one person continually gives while the other continually takes. Mutual desire, pleasure, affection, and enjoyment are good. The problem comes when receiving becomes the purpose and giving becomes merely the means of getting what we want. This is why chastity matters even within marriage.

Chastity is not the rejection of s*xuality. It is the virtue that teaches us how to order our s*xuality toward authentic love. It helps us see our spouse as a whole person rather than an object of desire.

Lust says, "I want you."
Love says, "I want your good."

Those words can sound similar, but they reveal completely different hearts. Marriage gives us the opportunity to learn that s*xuality is not primarily about consumption. It is about communion. It is not about possessing another person. It is about giving oneself to them. It’s not simply whether you desire your spouse. The question is what your desire is asking you to do with the person you desire.

Will you use them?
Or will you love them?

That is where lust and love part ways.

Envy is easy to recognize when we imagine someone wanting what another person has. It becomes much harder to recognize w...
09/02/2026

Envy is easy to recognize when we imagine someone wanting what another person has. It becomes much harder to recognize when it enters our marriage.

Often subtle, it can look like comparison, resentment, and fixation.

You see another couple who seems happier, more affectionate, more successful, more financially secure, or more connected. You see their vacations, their home, their children, their date nights, their careers, their friendships, or the way they seem to speak about one another. You see what they allow you to see, and then you compare it to what you know about your own marriage. Suddenly, what you have doesn't feel like enough.

You begin looking at your spouse through the lens of someone else's marriage. Why aren't we like that? Why doesn't he do that? Why don't we have what they have? Why does their marriage seem so much easier than ours?

The problem is that you are comparing your entire marriage—including everything you know about its struggles—to a carefully observed portion of someone else's.

Envy can also show up in response to your spouse's success. Your spouse gets the promotion you wanted. They are recognized for something you worked just as hard to accomplish. They have a talent you wish you possessed. They receive attention, praise, opportunities, or success that you wish were yours. You should be able to celebrate with them, but instead their success stirs something uncomfortable inside you. Their success begins to feel like evidence of your own inadequacy. Instead of "I'm proud of you," something inside you says, "What about me?"

That resentment can be difficult to admit because we don't want to believe that we are unhappy about something good happening to the person we love. So envy often disguises itself. We minimize their accomplishment. We point out its flaws. We remind them of what they haven't done. We become less enthusiastic about their good because, somehow, their good has begun to make us feel like we have less.

Marriage becomes a competition. Your spouse's success feels like your failure. Their joy feels like a reminder of your own dissatisfaction. Add all that together, and you start to become fixated on everything you and your marriage lack. You become so focused on what your marriage doesn't have that you stop noticing what it does have.

You don't have enough money. Your house isn't as nice. You don't travel as much. Your spouse isn't as romantic as someone else's. You don't have the career you wanted. Your children don't behave like those other children. You don't have enough time together. Your life doesn't look the way you thought it would.

Some of those desires may be legitimate. There may be things in your marriage that genuinely need attention or change. Gratitude does not require us to pretend that everything is perfect. The danger comes when what is missing becomes so consuming that we become blind to what is present.

Envy keeps moving the finish line.

It tells us that we will be satisfied when we have what they have, when our spouse becomes more like someone else's spouse, when our marriage looks more like that couple's marriage, when we finally achieve the life we think we are supposed to have. Yet there is always another couple to compare ourselves to. Another house. Another vacation. Another career. Another marriage. Another version of ourselves we think we should have become by now.

This is why envy is so destructive. It doesn't simply make us want something good. It teaches us to look at a blessing and experience it as insufficient because we have found someone who has more. It takes our attention away from the person sitting across from us and directs it toward the life we think we should have.

Gratitude does something very different. Gratitude does not mean refusing to grow. It means learning to recognize what is already good while still working toward what could become better.

You can want a stronger marriage without despising the marriage you have.
You can hope for greater financial stability without believing your current life has no value.
You can encourage your spouse to grow without resenting the person they are today.
You can admire another couple without turning their marriage into a measuring stick for your own.

Your spouse's gifts do not diminish yours. Another couple's happiness does not mean your marriage is failing. Someone else's blessings are not evidence that God has forgotten you. Envy asks, "Why don't I have what they have?" Gratitude asks, "Have I stopped noticing what I do have?"

That question matters in marriage.

Your spouse is not your competitor. Another couple is not your measuring stick. The life you have been given does not become less valuable simply because someone else's life looks different. Sometimes the thing keeping us from enjoying our marriage isn't that we have too little. It's that we have become so focused on what we think we lack that we can no longer see what God has already placed in front of us.

When we hear the word sloth, most of us probably think about laziness. We picture someone who doesn't want to work, does...
08/31/2026

When we hear the word sloth, most of us probably think about laziness. We picture someone who doesn't want to work, doesn't want to get off the couch, or keeps putting off something that needs to be done.

That can certainly be part of it. In marriage, though, sloth can be much harder to recognize. Sloth is not simply refusing to mow the lawn or wash the dishes. It can be a refusal to put forth the effort required to do the work of love in marriage.

Marriage requires work. Not because marriage is supposed to be miserable, but because loving another person well will always require something from us. There will be conversations we would rather avoid, wounds we would rather ignore, habits we would rather not change, and sacrifices that are inconvenient. There will be seasons when loving our spouse requires effort precisely when we don't feel like giving it.

Sloth says, "This relationship is too much work."

It tells us that if something is difficult, maybe we should simply leave it alone. It tells us that if our spouse is upset, perhaps they will get over it. If there is tension between us, perhaps tomorrow will be easier. If communication has become difficult, perhaps it is better not to bring anything up.

Our culture gives us plenty of reasons to believe this. We are constantly told that love should feel easy, that the right relationship shouldn't require this much work, and that we shouldn't have to struggle to be happy. When marriage becomes difficult, there is always another option presented to us: leave, start over, find someone who makes you feel the way you think you should feel.

That is one of the great deceptions surrounding marriage today. We have begun to confuse difficulty with dysfunction and discomfort with incompatibility. Yet difficulty is not necessarily evidence that a marriage is failing. Sometimes it is evidence that two people are being asked to grow.

There is a spiritual battle here that we should not ignore. The enemy does not need us to hate marriage if he can convince us that marriage should always be easy. If we believe that love should never require sacrifice, patience, forgiveness, perseverance, or dying to ourselves, then the moment those things become necessary, we can begin to believe that something must be wrong.

The truth is that love was never promised to be easy.

Christ did not teach us that love means avoiding suffering. He taught us how to love through sacrifice. Marriage is not exempt from that reality. The work of loving our spouse, especially when it is difficult, is part of the very formation marriage is meant to accomplish.

We hide behind "keeping the peace," "giving them space," or "being tired." In reality, we may simply be avoiding the work our sacrament requires of us.

There is nothing wrong with needing rest. There are seasons when one or both spouses are genuinely exhausted, overwhelmed, sick, or carrying more than they can reasonably manage. Rest is not sloth. Taking a break from a difficult conversation so that you can return to it calmly is not sloth.

Sloth enters when rest becomes an excuse to permanently avoid what love requires. You stop asking your spouse how they are really doing because you don't want to open a difficult conversation. You stop pursuing your spouse because rejection feels uncomfortable. You stop working on your own weaknesses because changing is exhausting. You stop dating each other because planning something feels like one more thing on the list. You stop trying to understand each other because you've already decided, "That's just how they are."

Over time, something begins to happen. Nothing is necessarily falling apart—though it can certainly be the beginning of that, too. You are simply no longer building anything. That can be one of the most dangerous forms of sloth in marriage. A marriage doesn't have to be filled with dramatic conflict to become unhealthy. Sometimes two people simply stop putting anything into it. They live alongside each other, manage the children and the house, pay the bills, divide the responsibilities, and gradually become strangers who happen to share a life.

Sloth can also hide behind resentment.
"Why should I be the one to initiate?"
"I've tried before."
"If they cared, they would make the effort."

Sometimes those statements contain legitimate hurt. There may be a real imbalance in a marriage, and one spouse should not be expected to carry the entire relationship alone. Yet there is a difference between recognizing an imbalance and using it as permission to stop doing your own part. Love cannot always wait for the other person to go first. There will be times when you have to decide that the good of your marriage is worth doing something difficult even when your spouse hasn't done it first.

That might mean starting the conversation. It might mean making the appointment with a counselor or coach. It might mean planning the date night. It might mean asking the question you've been avoiding. It might mean finally addressing the habit you know has been hurting your spouse.

It might simply mean turning toward your spouse when your instinct is to turn away. Sloth asks, "Do I really have to do all of this?" Love asks, "What does this marriage need from me right now?"

Those questions reveal two very different orientations of the heart.

Marriage is a vocation, and a vocation requires participation. We are not called merely to remain married. We are called to love the person we married, and love is not passive. There will be days when loving your spouse feels effortless. There will also be days when it feels like work. That does not mean something has gone wrong.

Sometimes the work is the love. The hard conversation is the love. The apology is the love. The decision to try again is the love. The willingness to grow when you would rather stay comfortable is the love. Sloth tells us that comfort is the goal. Marriage reminds us that love sometimes asks us to become uncomfortable for the sake of something greater. The question is not whether marriage will require work.

It will.

The question is whether we will allow the desire for comfort to slowly convince us that the work of loving is no longer worth doing.

When we think about wrath, we often picture someone exploding in anger. We imagine yelling, slamming doors, saying cruel...
08/29/2026

When we think about wrath, we often picture someone exploding in anger. We imagine yelling, slamming doors, saying cruel things, or losing control. Those are certainly components of wrath. However, wrath in marriage can be much quieter than that.

Sometimes it looks like the silent treatment. Sometimes it looks like withholding affection. Sometimes it is sarcasm, contempt, or a cutting remark delivered with just enough calmness to make sure the other person knows exactly what you meant. Sometimes it is keeping a mental record of every wrong your spouse has ever committed so you can bring it back out when you need am******on. Sometimes it looks like using disparaging and hurtful names against your spouse.
Wrath isn't simply anger.

Anger can be a legitimate response to something wrong. When someone hurts us, violates trust, behaves unjustly, or causes harm, anger can tell us that something needs to be addressed. The problem begins when the desire for justice becomes something else.

Wrath wants justice. Then it wants revenge. Then it wants punishment. It doesn't just want the wrong to be made right. It wants the person who hurt us to hurt, too.

The crazy part is that this can feel strangely satisfying.

Often, underneath wrath is a deep sense of injury. You hurt me. You made me feel insignificant. You betrayed my trust. You embarrassed me. You didn't listen. You don't understand what you've done to me. Then comes the temptation: Now you should feel what I feel.

Wrath tells us that making our spouse suffer will somehow balance the scales. If they are hurting as much as we are, perhaps they will finally understand. If they experience rejection, perhaps they will understand what rejection felt like. If we make them feel guilty enough, perhaps they will finally recognize the seriousness of what they did.

The problem is that punishment is not the same thing as justice. Making someone suffer is not the same thing as making them understand.

This is where wrath can become a dance between two spouses. One person is hurt and lashes out. The other feels attacked and becomes defensive. The first person sees that defensiveness as further evidence that their spouse doesn't care, so they become harsher. The other person withdraws or retaliates. Soon neither person is trying to repair the original wound. They are responding to the wound the other person just inflicted.

The original offense may have happened five minutes ago. The war can continue for years.

Marriage is such an intimate thing that couples can become remarkably skilled at this. They know exactly where the other person is vulnerable. They know which words will hurt, which failures to bring up, which affection to withhold, and which memories to resurrect. They may never scream at each other, but they have learned how to punish one another. Since the punishment feels deserved, it can be very difficult to recognize it as sin.

This is one of the great deceptions of wrath: it convinces us that because we were wronged, whatever we do in response is justified.

The hard truth is this: your spouse's sin does not give you permission to sin in return.

That doesn't mean pretending the offense didn't happen. It doesn't mean suppressing anger, avoiding difficult conversations, or allowing serious wrongdoing to continue. Christian forgiveness is not denial. Justice still matters. Boundaries still matter. Repentance still matters. Sometimes consequences are necessary. However, there is a difference between seeking justice and seeking satisfaction through another person's pain.

Justice asks, "What needs to happen for what is wrong to be made right?"
Wrath asks, "How can I make you hurt the way I hurt?"

Those are not the same question.

This is where forgiveness becomes so difficult—and so profoundly Christian. Forgiveness does not mean that what happened didn't matter. It means that I refuse to make my spouse's suffering the price of my healing. I can name the wrong. I can require accountability. I can establish boundaries. I can insist that something change.

I do not have to become the judge, jury, and executioner of the person I promised to love.

Sometimes humility in the face of anger means allowing yourself to be heard without trying to wound in return. It means saying, "What happened hurt me, and we need to address it," instead of, "You hurt me, so now I'm going to hurt you." It means learning to pause before saying the thing you know cannot be unsaid. It means refusing to use your spouse's vulnerabilities as weapons simply because you know where they are. It means remembering that the person standing across from you is not your enemy.

Even when they have hurt you.

Marriage will inevitably give us reasons to be angry. Your spouse will disappoint you. They will misunderstand you. They will fail you. You will fail them. There will be moments when anger is appropriate and something genuinely needs to be confronted.

The question is what happens next.

Will anger become a doorway to truth, repentance, and repair? Or will it become a justification for revenge?

Wrath does not ultimately ask, "How do we heal this?" It asks, "How do I make you pay?"

Love asks a very different question: "What will bring us back to what is good?"

That is what rightly ordered anger seeks.
That is the work of love.

When we think about pride, we often imagine someone who is arrogant, boastful, or convinced they are better than everyon...
08/26/2026

When we think about pride, we often imagine someone who is arrogant, boastful, or convinced they are better than everyone else. But pride in marriage is usually much quieter than that. It doesn't always announce itself. Sometimes it sounds completely reasonable.

"I shouldn't have to apologize first."
"I already know."
"You're overreacting."
"I've done enough."

Pride often disguises itself as being justified. It tells us that our reaction makes sense because of what our spouse did. We focus so completely on the other person's failure that we stop examining our own response. We become less interested in what is true than in proving that we were right.

Underneath that defensiveness is often a very human fear: If I admit I was wrong, what does that say about me? If I apologize first, am I admitting that I was the problem? If I give in here, will I always have to give in? If I acknowledge that you have a point, do I lose something?

Pride tells us that we have to protect ourselves. It tells us that being wrong is humiliating, that apologizing is weakness, that changing our position means losing, and that our spouse needs to understand our perspective before we should have to consider theirs.

However, marriage was never meant to be a courtroom where two people build cases for why they are right.

When pride takes over, the other spouse experiences something very different from what we intended. They may experience dismissal, loneliness, or the feeling that their hurt matters less than our need to defend ourselves. They may stop bringing things to us because they already know how the conversation will end. Eventually, what began as one disagreement becomes a pattern: one spouse pursues understanding while the other protects their position; one becomes increasingly frustrated while the other becomes increasingly defensive.

Then the roles can reverse.

The spouse who has been defending themselves begins to feel attacked. The spouse who has been asking to be heard becomes more demanding. One withdraws, the other pursues. One becomes defensive, the other becomes critical. Each person sees the other's behavior as the problem while failing to notice the dance they are creating together.

That is one of the most destructive things about pride. It doesn't simply affect the person carrying it. It changes the entire relationship around them.

Humility does not mean believing your spouse is always right. It does not mean accepting blame for things you did not do or remaining silent when something genuinely needs to be addressed. Humility is not self-contempt.

Humility is the freedom to stop making your own defense the most important thing in the room.

Sometimes humility means saying, "I was wrong." Sometimes it means apologizing before your spouse does. Sometimes it means listening to something painful without immediately explaining yourself. Sometimes it means being willing to say, "I don't see it the way you do, but I want to understand why this hurt you." And sometimes it means recognizing that you can be right about the original issue and still be wrong in the way you responded to it.

That is where pride becomes so subtle. We can be correct about the facts and still fail to love.

Marriage will give us countless opportunities to choose between protecting our ego and protecting our communion with the person we promised to love. Pride asks, "Why should I have to be the one?"
Humility asks, "What does love require of me right now?"

Those are very different questions.

The humble spouse isn't the one who never makes a mistake. It is the one who doesn't need to be right more than they need to love. That is why marriage can be such a powerful school of humility. Your spouse will eventually see the parts of you that you would rather hide. They will see your defensiveness, your impatience, your need to be right, and your tendency to protect yourself.

The question isn't whether those things will be revealed. The question is what you will do when they are. Pride says, "Protect yourself." Humility says, "Let yourself be transformed." And sometimes the holiest words you can say to your spouse are the simplest ones:

"I was wrong. I'm sorry. Help me understand."

When people hear "the seven deadly sins," they usually think of medieval theology. I think of Tuesday night in a marria...
08/21/2026

When people hear "the seven deadly sins," they usually think of medieval theology. I think of Tuesday night in a marriage.

The seven deadly sins are not relics from a distant Christian past. They are patterns of the human heart that still shape the way we think, speak, react, and love. Because marriage brings two imperfect people into the closest relationship of their lives, it has a way of exposing those patterns very quickly.

The danger of these sins isn't simply that they make us "bad people." Their deeper danger is that they disorder our love. They take something that may be good or legitimate and put it in the wrong place.

The desire to be respected can become pride. The desire to be appreciated can become envy. The desire for rest can become sloth. The desire for justice can become wrath. The desire to provide for ourselves can become greed. The gift of s*xuality can become lust. The desire for comfort can become gluttony.

And marriage gives these disordered desires plenty of opportunities to show themselves.

Pride says, "I shouldn't have to apologize."
Envy says, "Your success makes me feel smaller."
Sloth says, "This relationship is too much work."
Wrath says, "I want you to hurt like I hurt."
Greed says, "What about my needs?"
Lust says, "You're here to satisfy me."
Gluttony says, "Comfort matters more than sacrifice."

Notice that none of these begin with something obviously monstrous. That's part of what makes the deadly sins so dangerous. They often begin with something understandable and then quietly turn our attention inward until our own wants, comfort, recognition, or satisfaction become more important than the good of the person we promised to love.

That's why these sins matter so much in marriage.

Marriage is not simply a relationship between two people who need to learn better communication techniques. It is a relationship in which two human hearts are being formed. Every disagreement, disappointment, temptation, inconvenience, and ordinary frustration gives us another opportunity to choose what will govern us.

Will I protect my pride or seek reconciliation?
Will I compare myself to my spouse or rejoice in their good?
Will I choose comfort or do the work love requires?
Will I seek revenge or forgiveness?
Will I ask only what I am getting from this marriage, or will I ask what I am called to give?

These aren't merely communication problems. They're questions about the heart. That is why I want to spend some time looking at the seven deadly sins through the lens of marriage. Not as an exercise in labeling ourselves or our spouses, but as an invitation to recognize the patterns that keep us from loving well—and to understand the virtues that can put those loves back in their proper order.

Most marriage books teach communication.

I think we first need to understand the heart that's communicating.

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