Marriage

A WEDDING SERMON

by GLENN PEASE
01/15/22
Free to Share

  Message Writer
  Hire Writer

Tweet

There is an old story of a land where the birds had only one wing. The males with a wing on one side and the females with a wing on the opposite side. The only way they could fly was to stand side by side and link together the hook and the ring they had on their wingless sides, and then by each flapping their one wing in unison they could rise and soar to any destination of their choice. And so it is with mates. It is only by mutual cooperation that we can ever soar to those lofty heights God has reserved for true lovers. If either fails to do their part their can be a crash landing.

We often read this great love chapter of Paul's in I Cor. 13 and fail to see the obstacles to being great lovers. It all sounds so positive--love is patient, live is kind, etc. We fail to see that the reason why it is loving to be patient is because their are so many things in life that make us impatient and so much that makes us unkind. And their is so much to envy and make us easily angered. Behind every positive is a heap of negatives that make it marvelous to be positive.

You soon learn in marriage what missionaries learn quickly in Africa. It is not the lions and the tigers but the gnats that get you. Most of the things that will be a problem in your marriage will be gnat like. It is the 101 trivial and petty things of life that irritate and aggrevate and make us fall from the sky of our ideal. If you are going to make your marriage fly you need to be ever aware that the little things can bring you down.

Love is far easier to experience than it is to explain. Language limps and words wobble and communication collapses in its attempt to define this elusive thing called love. Someone said love is a feeling you feel when you feel like your going to feel a feelling like you never felt before. There is probably someing to this and to every other of the dozens of definitions of love, but they are all incomplete. The Greeks could get a better handle on love because they had three words to describe it on three different levels. Eros is physical love; Philea is mental love; and agape is spiritual love. These are Biblical concepts of love and God wants us to live on all three levels like a three storied house. To really love someone is to love their body, mind and soul with your body, mind and soul. God is love and therefore love is like God and is a trinity. Lets looke at each of these three levels and see how important they are in marriage.

It is no accident that wedding ceremonies always stress the negative as well as the positive-sickness and health, for better or worse, in adversity as well as in prosperity. The one thing man has learned well is that life is hardly ever all good or all bad. Life is generally a mixture of the two. The realistic and mature couple is a couple who expect a lot of joy in their marriage, but they also do not expect marriage to be an escape from the reality of a fallen world. You will not always look as nice and feel as joyful as you do on your wedding day. There will be days of sickness and days when nothing seems to go right and you will feel miserable.

Suffering in many forms is a part of life and lovers must endure it. That is why Paul in his great love chapter of I Cor. 13 describes love as a tough and rugged virtue. It can handle life's rough roads and endure all things that life brings and still be kind and gentle. He writes, Love is patient and Kind. This is just what is needed in a world where there is constant pressure to be impatient and unkind. Those little remarks of impatience and thoughtless acts of unkindness are all trivial in themselves, like grains of sand. But when you get enough of them together you have a desert. Love provides an oasis in the midst of life's deserts by striving to recognize nothing is so small it doesn't matter. Little things can matter a great deal. Little acts of thoughtfulness and kindness are what make a relationship precious. The thankyou said for what is only expected, and the doing of some little task without being begged, the compliment when it is not even being sought.

Love is not mere feeling. When Jesus died on the cross he did not have warm loving feelings toward those who crucified him, but he did have a will to chose to pay the price of their sin. It is the will that makes love real. It is a matter of choice and not emotion. In marriage we often will not have feelings but still need to make choices that are loving.

The first great act of love that God performed for Adam was the giving to him a wife. Marriage was therefore the first human relationship and God intended it to be the number one human relationship all through history. That is why Jesus performed His first miraculous act of love at a wedding, and that is why God selected the union of husband and wife as a perpetual symbol of the oneness of Christ and the Church. So great is the potential for happiness and marriage that God could think of no better way to begin the joys of eternity than with the marriage supper of the Lamb.

The greatest and most noble example of love in the universe is held up in Scripture as the standard for marriage love. The husband is to love his wife as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself for her. The wife is to love her husband as Christ loved the Father and did not grasp at equality with the Father, but humble Himself and submitted to the death on the cross.

We see that both mates must meet the same requirement for an ideal relationship, and that requirement is sacrificial love. It is certain that you will not be able to achieve this ideal always, for no one can fully match the love of Christ. However, you can, by God's grace approach this ideal frequently enough to make your marriage a fortaste of eternal joy. The degree to which you succeed will depend upon the degree to which you look to Christ to fill you with His redemptive love.

A healthly Christlike love will manifest itself in two ways: It will glow, and it will grow.

I. LOVE GLOWS: That is, it is visible. Christlike love communicates. Jesus did not hide His love for the Church. He entered flesh and blood and demonstrated His love by action. Then he clearly verbalized it and told His disciples of His love, and then told them of how He intended to take them to dwell with Him in His Father's house forever.

Jesus said that those who grasp His love will be the light of the world and will so shine by their loving acts that the world will glorify their Father in heaven. Jesus is saying that true love will glow and manifest itself in action. Romantic love is not differnent from Redemptive love at this point. For the Christian, romantic love is part of redemptive love, for mates should want each other to glorify God and praise Him for the love which they have and show to each other. You must continue to make your love for each other both visible and verbal. The golden rule of married life is, "Do unto each other as you would have done a month before you married."

The most romantic couple soon discovers that they must go from moonlight and roses to daylight and dishes, and, therefor, they must learn to say I love you in the mundane and routine aspects of life. In fact, it is when the circumstances of life are negative that we most need to experience the glow that cames with the asssurance of being loved. It was while we weere yet sinners that Christ died for the ungodly. He knew the need for loves glow in llife's darkest times. We need to learn as mates to keep the channels on communication open at all times so that we might never lose the warmth of love's glow.

II. LOVE GROWS: The love of Christ does not decline but grows brighter as we develop a deeper relationship with him. So it is with romantic love where two people have kept it glowing. A glowing love will be a growing love. The day should come when you look back to this point from which you launched your ship of matrimony and recognize that this is but the bud from which has come an ever expanding flower.

One of the ways you keep your love growing is by refusing to believe you will ever know each other like a book. God has made us a great deal like His Word, The Bible. You can know the Bible ever so well and yet never cease to discover new light and insight that brings joy to your soul. So it is with mates who never stop seeking for fresh glimpses of the commonplace. Each of you must work at helping the other make new discoveries in your relationship. the experience of those who have done this proves their is never an end to new ways of saying I love you.

The love of God will take all eternity to express itself and will never be exhausted. Even human love will take a lifetime to express itself if it is kept growing. Love is the art of constantly striving to meet anothers needs. Since needs are ever changing their is always a need for love to grow and be alert to life's changing situations.

The negative circumstances of life provide love with an opportunity the positive aspects of life cannot provide. That is why marriage is a commitment for better or for worse. Do not waste life's worst times for they can teach you new ways to expand and express your love. The rosy path of marriage will have its thorns, but wise is that couple who knows that the flower of love can be made beautiful by the raindrops of tears as well as by the smile of the sun. Moore wrote,

Their's a bliss beyond all that the minstrel has told,
When two, that are linked in one heavenly tie
With heart never changing, and brow never cold,
Love on through all ills, and love on till they die.