Is a happy marriage even possible?

J. Paul Getty, one of the wealthiest men who ever lived, said, "I would give my entire fortune for one happy marriage." One happy marriage. Is that even possible? Can a man and a woman really fall in love and, as the fairy tales say, live happily ever after?

With the divorce rate as it is, you would think the answer is no. The divorce rate today in the United States is roughly 50 percent. One out of every two marriages will end in divorce. However, that statistic rises for second marriages, with a 60 percent chance of divorce. The divorce rate for third marriages rises even higher to 73 percent.

Looking at this divorce rate, some would ask, "Why even get married? Why not just live together? Shack up? Besides, it is a good test run to see if you are compatible." That is a perfect recipe for a failed marriage. Living together actually increases the chance of divorce. More than 8 out of 10 couples who live together will break up either before the wedding or afterward in divorce.

Why should we even give marriage a shot? Because it is God's order. God created marriage. In his book "The Meaning of Marriage," Tim Keller writes, "Marriage did not evolve in the late Bronze Age as a way to determine property rights. ... The Bible begins with a wedding (of Adam and Eve) and it ends in the book of Revelation with a wedding of (Christ and the church). Marriage is God's idea."

The institution of marriage has been tested by millions of people over the centuries and in multiple cultures, and it has not only survived but flourished. If there is a failure in a marriage, then the fault lies not with the institution but with the participants.

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You can be happy after you are married – if you do it God's way. But it means that both people, the husband and the wife, must do their part. If you bring the right ingredients in and place them into expert hands, the result will be good.

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My grandmother, whom we called Mama Stella, was from Arkansas and made everything from scratch. All of her food was fantastic. Her cooking was outstanding. But her crowning achievement was her biscuits. I have traveled the world looking for a biscuit that even comes close. I have not found one. The ingredients she used weren't anything unusual: buttermilk, self-rising flour, oil. But it was the way she combined them. She knew just how to prepare those ingredients in the right way. You can't make a buttermilk biscuit and leave ingredients out. Otherwise, the result will be something altogether different.

In the same way in marriage, there are ingredients that need to be in place for a marriage to survive and thrive. But it is not just the ingredients; it is the ingredients placed into the expert hands of God, and voila! Success! We need to do our part and bring our lives and our marriages to God.

Yet in our culture today, it seems like people will spend more time thinking about their wedding than they do about their marriage. Weddings have become a cottage industry. They are very expensive now. Back when Cathe and I got married, it was like a hippie wedding. There was no budget. It was simply all of our friends getting together, and Cathe and I got married. But I thank God that he blessed it.

Over the years, I have been married to different women, all by the name of Cathe. The Cathe I married at the age of 18 is not the Cathe I was married to at age 30. The Cathe I was married to at age 30 was not the Cathe I was married to at age 40. She has changed, just as I have changed. And I have found that every Cathe gets better than the one I was married to before.

Marriages go through changes. They go through trials. That is why a marriage needs to be built on the right foundation, and that foundation is the Word of God, the Bible. After 40 years of counseling couples, I have found that most marriages have fallen apart because a husband and wife were unwilling to do their part. They were unwilling to follow what the Scriptures taught.

Sometimes people will say the Bible is a book that oppresses women and treats them as objects. But nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, the Bible elevates women to their proper place before God and in culture. In the first century, the Romans treated their wives as mere objects. To a Roman man, a wife was like a slave.

Even among the Jewish people who were liberally interpreting the Scriptures, a man could divorce his wife for pretty much any reason, whether she burned your meal or a more attractive woman came along. In fact, the Pharisees approached Jesus one day and tried to test him with a question on this topic: "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?" (Matthew 13:3 NIV)

Jesus used the opportunity to give them the proper perspective on marriage. He said, "Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning 'made them male and female,' and said, 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'? So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate" (verses 4–6 NKJV).

Jesus evaded their question and went back to God's original plan for marriage. Instead of pointing the Pharisees to the way out of marriage, Jesus directed them to the way to stay married, even how to be happily married as God intended. In Jesus' answer, we find two words that need to be operative if your marriage is going to be successful: "leave" and "joined." Or, as the words appear in the King James Version, "leave" and "cleave." A successful and lasting marriage begins with leaving – all lesser ties must be broken, changed, or left behind.

A successful and lasting marriage also requires cleaving. The word "cleave" means to adhere to, to stick, to be attached. It speaks of a determined action, as if you are holding on to each other. Think about mountain climbing. You are holding on because your life depends on it. In the same way, you hold on to each other because you want to keep your marriage strong. That is the picture given to us in Scripture.

Leaving and cleaving – that is how to have a happy marriage. If only we would come back to doing what God has called us to do.