For the love of marriage...
In light of love, Valentine's Day, and all things ooey and gooey, I find a quick survey of our culture deems marriage irrelevant. It seems over and over again that marriage is depicted as a impossible to succeed at and boring and mundane at best. Is it really possible to love one person for the rest of our lives?
But, then this came to mind:
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, 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. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. 1 John 4:7-12
Love is something that cannot be understood apart from Christ and marriage is an institution that only makes sense in light of our relationship to Christ. As it says in Ephesians 5:32-33, “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.”
Our marriages are a daily rehearsal of what we experience in Christ…His love and forgiveness. We can forgive our spouses when they’ve done the same thing for the hundredth time, because we know we’ve sinned against the Lord doing the same thing for the millionth time today. We can forgive our spouses of seemingly little things and the seemingly atrocious things because Christ has forgiven us of everything. We can love our spouses with pure motives because we have been loved perfectly. We can serve and submit to our husbands because we rehearse it daily in our relationship with the Lord.
When we are daily living out our relationship with Christ, the “rehearsing” will be simple. When we forget to take the logs out of our own eyes and forget just how much we are loved…we lose our passion for the role we are playing, “the bride of Christ.” The illustration becomes dimmer and dimmer to those looking on.
This passage from John Piper (as always) states this so well:
There are two levels at which the glory of God may shine forth from a Christian marriage:One is at the structural level when both spouses fulfill the roles God intended for them — the man as leader like Christ, the wife as advocate and follower of that leadership. When those roles are lived out, the glory of God's love and wisdom in Christ is displayed to the world.But there is another deeper, more foundational level where the glory of God must shine if these roles are to be sustained as God designed. The power and impulse to carry through the self-denial and daily, monthly, yearly dying that will be required in loving an imperfect wife and loving an imperfect husband must come from a hope-giving, soul-sustaining, superior satisfaction in God.I don't think that our love for our wives or theirs for us will glorify God until it flows from a heart that delights in God more than marriage. Marriage will be preserved for the glory of God and shaped for the glory of God when the glory of God is more precious to us than marriage.
Excerpted from John Piper, "The Surpassing Goal: Marriage Lived for the Glory of God,"
I imagine there are happy, thriving marriages out there that by some common grace exist apart from Christ as the head; however, I could not be more thankful this Valentine's Day than knowing that the Lord is more precious to my husband than me and that we can love each other because He first loved us.
