June, 2023
I have been blessed to walk alongside these two as they have pursued their degrees at university, pursued each other, and most importantly, as they have pursued a greater love for Jesus Christ.
Over the years I have never tired of watching these two pursue each other, particularly as they allow their relationship to be a means of a greater understanding of the Gospel of God. It is to this most important of subjects, the Gospel, that we now turn.
The Bible is not a manual for life. It is not divided up into sections on money, career, or marriage. But as one author puts it, “the whole Bible is about marriage” (Tripp 2021), because every page of Scripture is about God redeeming broken people from their sins and placing them in right relationship to Himself.
The meaning of marriage is to give us a living picture and experience of how God unites sinners to Himself in love. You see, the traditional language used in weddings like “holy” matrimony, or “Covenant”, were not created by mankind for their own benefit, but are imprinted on mankind by our Creator.
One cannot, and will not, understand the weight, beauty, joy, and ultimate significance of marriage if they have not understood and believed the Gospel of Christ, for, as Paul writes in Ephesians 5-
Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. (Eph. 5:31-32)
It is from the Good News of Jesus that we rightly understand what true love is, what covenant faithfulness looks like, and most importantly, how two beings who seem so different can truly be one. Today we are celebrating true love, a sacred covenant, and the coming together of two as one, and as these two commit to love each other, and as we stand as witnesses to that commitment and covenant, is it not appropriate that we all have a right understanding of what love is? What a covenant is?
What is Love?
Today it seems that love is of the greatest value, the most in demand virtue of human life. And though it is in high demand, it is ill defined, seemingly in constant flux, and thus out of reach for most people. How can you fall in love when the target is constantly changing?
We receive a hundred different and varied messages a day about what love is, what it looks like. We are given endless implications of how love ought to work itself out in our lives. These range from love defined as tolerance (which says that the most loving thing to do is never say “no”), warm feelings (which says that love is experiential, and for love to be love we have to keep stoking the fire to keep things going), a generic positive outlook towards others, or a mechanical give and take, win some lose some, if you don’t hurt me too bad, I’ll try my best to not hurt you.
From pop-songs to podcasts, there seems to be an endless stream of ideas about what love is and advice on how love ought to be practiced.
While the words of modern philosopher Joseph Tribbiani ring partly true that love is about giving, receiving, having, and sharing, this is not the whole story. Love has to be more than give and take, more than compromise, and more than generic common good values within a relationship.
When we think of true love, we all crave to receive something from someone else that is more significant, beautiful, and weighty than mere compromise. We crave more than the equation of your personal qualities + my 401 = a good marriage. Marriage must be more than pooling together our resources so that we can accomplish our goals and achieve comfort in this life.
At our deepest level, we all want more than to be viewed as a cog in the marriage machine. We all want more than functionalism and utility out of our relationships. What we crave is for someone to know us truly, understand us thoroughly, and when they see all the good and the bad to not walk away, but to say “I am staying here, with you, for your good, at my expense, because I value you and want to see you flourish.”
What we desire to experience, what this man and woman are entering into today, does not come naturally to us. Because we are sinful, broken beings, we naturally manipulate and mar what it means to love. We naturally view relationships as exchanges of give and take. As long as the good outweighs the bad, we will stick around in a relationship, but if the equation ever changes, we move on.
If this deeper sense of love is foreign to our natural way of doing relationships, where does it come from? Where can we go to gain a truer understanding of what love is, what it looks like, and how we can practice it?
The Apostle John throughout Scripture draws our attention to this theme. In one letter he writes not that God practices love, or is loving, but that God… is… Love…at the core of who He is. God is love.
While we are naturally self-interested people and must learn to love truly, God is truly love and has nothing to learn, therefore He is the ultimate teacher and only He is able to help us understand and practice real, life-giving love. It is not a feeling that comes and goes for God, but that at the deepest core of who God is there is an outward pulse that radiates throughout all time and space which is love itself. God is love.
Elsewhere John defines love in this way, that no one can have a greater love than to lay down their life for a friend, and we might would agree, that it is truly loving to sacrifice for your friend, child, or spouse.
But what about when the person who needs your love is not very friendly? What if they don’t fully appreciate your sacrifices? To take it even further, what about when the other person stiff arms your love and hurts you deeply? Is our definition of love strong enough to love our enemies? Is our definition of love strong enough to survive when the bad seems to far outweigh the good?
John writes- “In this the love of God was revealed, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” (1 Jn. 4:9-10)
You see, true love is not about playing fair, compromise, tolerance, or equality, but about ultimate sacrifice for the highest good for another. This is love, not that we deserved it, or were owed it, but that God looked on a world full of people who have rejected Him and decided out of His own abundance of goodness to send His Son into this world, to take our place as those deserving God’s just wrath, so that we could enjoy the love of God as our Father.
True love, God-like love, is not give and take, compromise, or tolerance. God-like love does not tolerate sin but conquers it. God-like love does give and take, for He gave the ultimate sacrifice, His Son Jesus, for us to take, receive, the ultimate gift, salvation through His blood. God-like love does not compromise, for on the Cross God was both just and merciful.
“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life.”
Maybe you are here today and you have never put your faith in Jesus, you have never acknowledged that you need to be saved, maybe your definition of love has left you longing for more, you desire something that you have been looking for but can never seem to find… to you I would offer the words of Augustine, that your soul will be restless until you find your rest in God.
The invitation of the love of God has been made known to you, and it is your choice to wrestle with whether or not you will ultimately step into God’s love or continue to resist and stiffarm Him as you look for love, meaning, and purpose somewhere else, in something else, or in someone else.
If you are here today and are a disciple of Christ, let’s not treat the Gospel as something that we needed to reckon with back then when we were first saved. The love of God given to us in the Good News of Jesus is what has given us life in the past, and will sustain our life today, tomorrow, and for eternity. Christian, we never move on from the love of God.
Now would be a great time to reevaluate your relationships, to spouse, child, co-workers, friends, to consider if you love them as you define love, or as God defines love? Has the love of God for you so overflowed in your heart that it has spilled over into every relationship and area of life?
To the bride and groom, we are not here today to celebrate a covenant and union of warm fuzzy feelings or generic benevolence. I am standing here with you today as a witness to your understanding and belief in the Gospel, and that with all your hearts, souls, and minds, you seek to build your life together based on God’s love and for His glory.
My charge to the two of you is that in these moments you do not repeat after me because it is traditional, beautiful, or memorable, but because this is the clearest display you can offer to the world of the truth of the Gospel and its impact in your life.
For the bride, to those who are lost and confused, your acceptance, resting, and rejoicing in your husband's love for you is the greatest way you can show what it is like to be loved by God. For the groom, to those who do not know Christ as Savior, your pursuing, humbling, and sacrificial love for your wife is the greatest way you can show what it is like for God to passionately pursue His people. To both of you, your greatest trials ahead will not be about money, running a home, or raising children. The darkest nights of the soul come when the Gospel is faded, assumed, or forgotten.
Likewise, your greatest victories and joys will not come from financial stability, romance, the number of children you have, or accomplishing personal goals. Your greatest satisfaction and joy will come from an ever-deepening understanding of the love of God and the beauty of Jesus as you live out the Gospel in your day to day lives.
The greatest thing you can do for a lost and dying world is be a living picture of what God’s love looks like. If God blesses you with children, the greatest gift you can give to them is an unforgettable legacy of God’s love. My friends, the ultimate end of your marriage is not pleasure, success, comfort, or personal legacy. The ultimate end of your life together is that those who are witnesses today and those you encounter along the journey would see and savour Jesus Christ.
As we turn now to the covenant ceremony, and the union of two as one, your only hope is in the Gospel. The only hope for your union together is your union with Christ. The only hope for covenant keeping people is a covenant keeping God.
Sources
Tripp, Paul D. 2021. Marriage: 6 Gospel Commitments Every Couple Needs to Make. Crossway.
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