As a Boy Scout, I never made it past Tenderfoot. The next rank up was underwhelmingly called Second Class. It just didn’t seem worth the effort to work toward something as humble as Second Class, so I switched my focus to baseball.
One of the things that held me back was that I was so terrible with knots. I momentarily learned one or two in an attempt to get a merit badge, but I forgot how to retie them fifteen seconds later. Nobody in the entire troop trusted me to tie down the tent we’d be sleeping in. While I knew the names—the slip knot, the trucker’s hitch, the bowline, the double fisherman’s knot—all my fellow scouts would have chosen a Brownie over this Tenderfoot in order to secure our shelter.
God, on the other hand, excels at knots. He can take the two most diverse substances on this planet—man and woman—and tie them together in a ceremony so that the two become one: “‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh” (Matt. 19:5–6).
There’s something about such “knot tying” that delights the heart of God. Remember what Jesus did with James and John? A seemingly offhand comment packs a powerful punch when you reflect on what it means. After mentioning James and John, Mark tells us that Jesus “gave [them] the name Boanerges, which means ‘sons of thunder’” (Mark 3:17). Jesus gave two brothers, two different people, one name. They were something together that they weren’t individually.
Such unity is so undervalued in our individualistic times that pursuing true unity as a married couple can be a prophetic act of faith. Psalm 133:1 proclaims “How good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity,” which Jesus emphasized with his famous prayer: “I pray . . . that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you” (John 17:20–21).
More than marriage is about sex and children, it’s about unity. Time-wise, sex takes up less than 1 percent of a married couple’s time, and nobody else witnesses it. Unity covers everything the couple does and says, even when they’re not together, and everyone can see it. And while you can have a marriage without children, you cannot have a marriage without unity. Christian marriage is a humble, ironclad, surrendered commitment to a God-inspired and God-tied unity.
Scott Kedersha has written the “marital scout’s guide” to what knots need to be tied, how to tie them, and, on occasion, when to know that these two strands of rope should actually not be tied together (or at least not yet) in order to achieve such unity. He’s even thrown in the occasional illustration to teach you how to tie the knots of conflict resolution, communication, finances, friendship, extended family dynamics, sexual intimacy, and spiritual intimacy.
Don’t skip a step. I know from past experience that skipping a step can make your knot look like a tangled phone cord by the time you’re through. To get the most out of this manual, pray for God’s enlightenment, surrender to His words, and pursue His agenda and design for marriage (which Scott so ably captures here) and you’ll experience the true blessing and miracle of being tied into an indissoluble knot whose craftsman is none other than God Himself.
Few experiences on earth match the beauty, wonder, and fulfillment of an intimately connected marriage. Ready or Knot? will show you how such a knot is tied.
Gary Thomas,
author of Sacred Marriage and Cherish