This morning, after our workout, I sat down with Finley and Parlyn and gave them a challenge. Sixty days. Three parts — physical, emotional, spiritual.
The physical part is simple. Pick something — pushups, a run, whatever — and don't just do it. Add to it. A little more every day, so that by day sixty the thing that wrecked you on day one is easy, and the thing that's hard now is something you couldn't have imagined doing on the front end. The point was never the pushups. It's teaching the body to keep going past the place it wants to quit, because almost nothing in life that matters happens before that place.
The emotional part is listening. Go meet with somebody, or read a book — but do it as a listener, not a talker. When you sit with a person, ask questions and actually get to know them. When you read, hear what someone else has to say before you start arguing with it in your head. Every day, put yourself under one more voice that isn't your own.
The spiritual part, honestly, was the one I almost left blank — because if you're already meeting with God, what do you add? So I told them to ask Him. Ask the Lord what He wants you to do on the spiritual side. And then ask Him what He wants you to do on all three sides, because He made all three of them, and He gets a say in the whole thing.
I've been chewing on that conversation all morning. Because I don't think it's a challenge for two of my kids. I think it's the missing piece in most of the marriages I've sat across from as an elder. And I don't think anyone ever said it to those couples out loud.
What Makes Up a Person
Spiritual. Emotional. Physical. That's what makes up a person.
Let me be careful, because I'm not handing you a verse that carves the human soul into three official compartments. The Bible doesn't give us that diagram, and I'm suspicious of anyone who says it does. This isn't exegesis. It's a way of seeing something true about how God made us and how we come apart.
But Scripture does keep treating you as a whole. When a scribe asked Jesus which commandment was the greatest, He didn't reach for one slice of a person. He said, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength" (Mark 12:30). Heart, soul, mind, strength — that's the whole person, every part, leaned in one direction. God never asks for a religious sliver of you while the rest runs on its own. He asks for all of it.
And look at how Jesus Himself grew up. Luke gives us one verse for almost thirty years of His life, and it's striking what he chose to record: "And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man" (Luke 2:52). Wisdom — His mind. Stature — His body. Favor with God — His spirit. Favor with man — His relationships. The sinless Son of God did not grow lopsided. He grew in every direction at once, and the Father was pleased to watch Him do it. If that's how the perfect human matured, I don't know why any of us assumed we were built to grow in one lane and let the others run to weeds.
Here's the picture I keep coming back to. A person is a three-legged stool. One leg is the spiritual life — your walk with God, in step with the Holy Spirit. One leg is the emotional life — how you process, how you listen, how you connect, whether you're growing or going numb. One leg is the physical life — whether you're caring for the body God loaned you or quietly handing it back.
I grew up on a farm in central Illinois, and I know stools like this. The old work stools in a barn had three legs, not four, and there's a reason. Four legs rock. On a floor that's never level — packed dirt, worn board, a low spot worn smooth — a four-legged stool always finds two legs to teeter between. But three legs can't rock. Three points always sit flat, no matter how uneven the ground. That's the whole genius of it: a three-legged stool stays solid on broken ground. And it's also the danger of it. Crack one leg, wear one short, and the thing doesn't get a little less comfortable. It dumps you in the straw. You don't sit on a two-legged stool. You fall off it.
So let me say what those legs are not. Physically strong doesn't mean you belong on a magazine. It means stable. Caring for yourself. Moving, sleeping, eating like a man who knows his body is on loan and was never really his to wreck. You don't have to look impressive. You have to be present in your own body instead of slowly abandoning it.
And the most important leg — the one the other two finally lean toward — is the spiritual one. "In him all things hold together" (Colossians 1:17). Paul wrote that about galaxies, but it is just as true about you. God is the one holding the stool together. Not your discipline. Not your willpower. Him.
So watch what happens when a man starts to let a leg go. It's never dramatic. He doesn't announce it. He just stops caring for the body, or stops doing the slow work of staying connected, or lets the walk with God thin out because life got loud. And because of the way a stool is built, he doesn't end up a third weaker. He ends up unstable. Everything starts to rock — his patience, his presence, his prayers — because the design was never "two will do." The man who was whole could carry weight on uneven ground. The man who dropped a leg can't carry himself.
A whole person — spiritually alive under the Spirit, emotionally engaged, physically stable — is someone who is still growing. Not arrived. Growing. And that growth turns out to be the quiet engine underneath everything else in his life, including the one thing he swears he'd die for and can't figure out why it's dying: his marriage.
What Happens in a Marriage
Think about what two people do when they fall in love and marry.
A lot of the time they slowly hand over their own individuality. They stop being two whole people who chose each other and start being one blended thing that just goes wherever the stronger current pulls. Now, if your spouse is genuinely walking with God — surrendered to Him, serving Him — then getting swept into that current might be the best thing that ever happened to you. A healthy person tends to pull you toward health. But if they're not, that's exactly where it goes sideways, because you didn't marry a direction. You married a person, and you handed them your whole trajectory and called it love.
The quieter version is the one that gets almost everybody, and it has nothing to do with whose current you fell into. Two people get married, they're happy, and somewhere in there they both stop growing.
The physical leg usually goes first, because now you're comfortable. You don't have to win anyone — you already did. So the care slides. The emotional leg goes next, because you stop being curious about the person across the table; you figure you've heard it all, so you quit listening like you used to. And then the spiritual leg starts to thin, and this is the dangerous one, because it happens in a season of joy. Happy people are tempted to need God a little less. The gift of a good marriage can quietly wean you off the very dependence that made you worth marrying. Nobody decides it. It's the slow fade — a leg at a time, none of it on purpose.
And then two stools rock at the same table. Here is the part nobody connects: the marriage didn't weaken because something broke between them. The marriage weakened because each of them, on their own, got weaker. They stopped growing as people, and a marriage is only ever as strong as the two people holding it up. You cannot build something steady out of two stools that both wobble. So a couple wakes up fifteen years in and wonders how they got here — and the honest answer is that nobody chose here. They both quit growing, and the fade did the rest.
I've watched it. I've done it. In our early years I let Jen carry weight I should have carried, and told myself I was busy providing. That's not a confession I enjoy putting in writing. It's just true, and you've probably got your own version of it.
Paul Tripp has spent a career saying marriages aren't made or broken in the big, dramatic moments, because we don't actually live in big moments. We live in the ordinary ones — the ten thousand small choices nobody sees. His line I can't get away from: "This side of heaven, good marriages are good marriages because the people in those marriages are committed to doing daily the things that keep their marriages good." Doing daily. Not deciding once at an altar. The same word I gave my kids over the pushups — add a little every day — turns out to be the word over a marriage. Nobody coasts into health. You grow into it one ordinary day at a time, or you fade out of it the same way.
Which means the ordinary moments aren't filler. They're the diagnosis. Winston Smith, a counselor at CCEF, wrote a whole book on exactly that, and the subtitle is the thesis — Extraordinary Change Through Ordinary Moments. His point goes underneath technique: "Ordinary moments reveal our problems with God. They show that we don't trust him as much as we should, or we don't love him like we think we do." The way I talk to Jen over a sink full of dishes is a readout on the state of my spiritual leg. The marriage didn't create the problem. It exposed the one that was already in me.
That's why the trouble you can name out loud in a marriage is almost never the real trouble. It sits one floor down, in what the heart has quietly started to worship instead of God. David Powlison gave that drift its theological name: "If 'idolatry' is the characteristic and summary Old Testament word for our drift from God, then 'desires' is the characteristic and summary New Testament word for the same drift." Drift. That's the word, and I keep it on purpose, because nobody wakes up and chooses to worship their own comfort. You drift there, one undefended desire at a time, until the thing you reach for in the ordinary moment is no longer the Lord. And the drift that hollows out a person is the same drift that hollows out a marriage, because the marriage was only ever resting on the person.
Kyle Idleman says it at ground level: "Idolatry is the tree from which our sins and struggles grow." The fight you can see is fruit. The idol is the root. And a man can spend twenty years pruning fruit off his marriage — better communication, another conference, one more system — and never once put a shovel near the root. Francis Chan watched the same thing and concluded that most marriage problems aren't really marriage problems at all; they're God problems. Tend the man's walk with God and you've started, finally, on the actual marriage.
There's a line of John Piper's that I've quoted at more than one wedding, because it names where it all goes wrong: "The reason there is so much misery in marriage is not that husbands and wives seek their own pleasure, but that they do not seek it in the pleasure of their spouses." A person who has stopped growing turns inward by gravity. And two people turned inward will starve each other, each one sitting at the table waiting to be fed.
So when a struggling couple comes to me, my first counsel is almost never "work on your marriage." It's a quieter question: are you still growing — as a person, under God? Are all three legs still under you? Because the marriage is not a third thing hovering above the two of you. It is sitting on you. Tim Keller said the heart of marital love is "to look at another person and get a glimpse of what God is creating, and to say, 'I see who God is making you, and it excites me! I want to be part of that.'" You can't say that to someone who stopped becoming anyone. And you can't say it as someone who did.
Spiritual Headship Is Not What Most Men Think
There's a version of this drift that lands hard on men, and it hides inside good theology, which makes it nearly impossible to see.
Ask most men — ask most of the watching world — what spiritual headship means, and you'll get some version of: the husband makes the calls. He's in charge. He leads, meaning he decides, and she goes along. That is about as far from the truth as you can get, and the distance between that idea and the real one is where a lot of marriages quietly die.
Go back to the garden. Eve ate first; Adam was standing right there and ate too (Genesis 3:6). But when God comes walking in the cool of the day, listen to who He calls for: "But the LORD God called to the man and said to him, 'Where are you?'" (Genesis 3:9). Not because the man sinned worse. Because the man was the head, and the head is the one God holds to account first. That is the whole weight of headship in one question. It was never the first slice of privilege. It was the first call to responsibility — where are you, and where is the family I put in your care?
Then watch how Paul fills it in: "Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her" (Ephesians 5:25). The model isn't a CEO. It's a cross. The head of the home is the one who dies first. And Paul says what that death is for: Christ gave Himself up "that he might sanctify her... so that he might present her to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle" (Ephesians 5:26-27). The husband's headship aims at his wife's flourishing. His whole assignment is that she would become more fully herself, more whole, more alive in God — because of how he spent himself on her. A man is meant to leave his wife more whole than he found her. A lot of us have left ours more tired.
Peter says the same thing from another side: husbands, "live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman... since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered" (1 Peter 3:7). Heirs with you — equal standing before God, the same inheritance, no junior partner in the room. And notice the warning Peter tucks on the end: treat her poorly and it jams the line to heaven. God will not rush to listen to a man who is hard on the woman He handed him.
So headship isn't the right to call the shots. It's the weight of going first into the cost. Pastor Josh Howerton reframes it in a way that finally got through to me: a husband doesn't so much lead by serving as serve by leading — the leading is itself the service. And whatever authority a husband carries runs in exactly one direction: he uses it to bless his family, as the loving head of his home, never the selfish head of it.
And here's the turn — the thing the voice in my head fights every time. When a man actually loves like that, when he spends himself on his wife and gives himself up for her and stays gentle under pressure, something happens in her. She starts to want to honor him. You do not have to extract respect from a wife you're laying your life down for. You draw it out of her. Now, the respect Scripture asks of a wife is a real command — Howerton is blunt that it's not contingent on whether he's earned it — she's called to it either way. But a husband who serves like Christ takes that command and turns it from a weight she drags into a response she gives gladly. Both are true. She's called to respect him; and his Christlike love makes it the most natural thing in the world to do. The tragedy is the man who claims the command and skips the cross — who wants the honor without paying for it the way Christ paid for ours.
Bring it back to the stool, because this is where it all ties together. A man cannot pour himself out from an empty tank. A husband who has let his own legs go — gone soft spiritually, numb emotionally, careless with the body — has nothing to lay down. He'll grab for "headship" as a title precisely because he's stopped being a man worth following. Real headship isn't claimed. It overflows from a whole man who is himself held together by Christ. That's a longer conversation than I can have here — why a man has to live as a son before he can ever love as a head, because sacrificial love takes a security only sonship gives — but it lands right here: the stool stands on its spiritual leg, and so does the man.
She Is Not Below Him. She Is Beside Him.
Let me say the other half plainly, because the world has lied about it and too many churches have been too nervous to correct the lie.
A wife is a help meet — and that phrase has been bent into something demeaning, which is a lie. Pastor Josh McPherson says the notion that being a helper is beneath a woman came straight from hell itself, and he's right. The English word "helper" sounds like an assistant, a junior, somebody fetching coffee. The Hebrew doesn't sound like that at all. The word is ezer, and it's the same word the Old Testament uses for God Himself when He comes to rescue His people: "My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth" (Psalm 121:2). You don't call God your sidekick. Ezer is strength that comes alongside. And in Genesis the phrase is ezer kenegdo — a helper "corresponding to" the man, suited to him, standing face-to-face with him as an equal. Not over. Not under. Beside.
And watch how God stages it. Creation rolls out and every line lands the same way — good, good, good, good. Then God looks at the man alone, and for the first time He says: not good. McPherson tells it the way I feel it — God looks at the man by himself and says, in effect, this one is headed for a train wreck without her. The woman is not a footnote to a finished man. She's the answer to a man who was incomplete without her. Go back one chapter and you see it from the top: "God created man in his own image... male and female he created them. And God blessed them" — both of them — and gave them the garden to rule together (Genesis 1:27-28). Two image-bearers. One commission. Shared.
So a wife is not lord over her husband, and a wife is not crushed beneath him. She's an equal ezer beside him — and that is a position of strength, not weakness. The accountability of two equals facing each other is the engine of a strong marriage, not a threat to it. A man who understands this isn't threatened by his wife's strength. He's hunting for it. The strongest thing a husband can have at his side is a wife who is herself a whole, growing person — all three legs under her, held together by God, not dissolved into his orbit but standing on her own ground and choosing, freely, to face him and build.
Which is the stool again, one more time, from her side: whole people make whole marriages. Two complete people, both growing, both held by God, both refusing to let a leg go — facing each other, spending themselves on each other, holding each other to account in love. That isn't two people who lost themselves in a marriage. It's two people who became more themselves inside it.
God Holds the Stool Together
I started with my kids and a sixty-day challenge, and I want to end there, because the challenge was never really about pushups or books.
It was about refusing to let a leg go. About staying a growing person — spiritual, emotional, physical — for a whole life, married or single, comfortable or not. Because those three are what make up a person, and God made all three, and He means to hold all three together. "In him all things hold together," and that includes the parts of you that feel like they're coming apart.
And here's the gospel underneath all of it. You will let a leg go. You'll get comfortable. You'll go numb in a good season and panic in a hard one. You'll coast spiritually right up until the morning you snap at the person you love most and wonder where that came from. The stool will rock, and the marriage built on it will rock with it. That isn't a reason to despair. It's the reason for grace. There has only ever been one truly whole human — one man who grew in wisdom and stature and favor with God and man and never once dropped a leg, who loved His bride all the way to a cross and gave Himself up to make her whole. He holds you together not because you kept all three legs strong, but because He was strong where you weren't. And the same Spirit that raised Him from the dead now lives in you (Romans 8:11), and He is in the business of making whole people out of wobbling ones.
So grow. Add a little every day. Keep all three legs under you — not to earn anything, but because the God who made the whole person is bent on restoring the whole person, and then, out of two restored people, building a marriage that finally has something solid to stand on.
As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. All three legs of us.
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A note on sources: the books underneath this are worth your time — Paul Tripp, What Did You Expect?; Winston Smith, Marriage Matters; David Powlison, "Idols of the Heart and Vanity Fair"; Kyle Idleman, Gods at War; Tim Keller, The Meaning of Marriage; and John Piper, This Momentary Marriage. The pastors I paraphrase — Josh Howerton, Josh McPherson, and Francis Chan — say it better in their own sermons. Go listen.