Happily ever after...

This week we had 3 weddings in 5 days. Craaazzzyyy! It was beautiful. All three couples know and serve the Lord. Marriage is beautiful because marriage is of God. Maybe you don't have a good view of marriage due to your experiences. I'm sorry if that is so. When two people get married, two people are responsible to make it work. You can't always control the other person's decisions and actions, but when you are a Bible believing Christian, and you marry another Bible believing Christian, you both submit to God and play by His rules. If there are no rules, anything can happen. It's like a lucky packet. You might not be so lucky.  If there's no accountability to God, you make up the rules as you go, and it might not be to the benefit of your spouse.

In a lawless, godless society, marriage is defined by man, and love is defined by feelings. Feelings are as inconsistent as the weather. "Following your heart" is offered by many life optimisers/personal growth gurus and other 'clever people' as the key to a happy, fulfilled life. Your head or your heart? Neither! Your brain might be fed with the wrong information and your heart can't be trusted (because of sin)! Its best for us to trust God, who understands us more than we understand ourselves, because He designed us and made us. 

Genesis 6:5

The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

Jeremiah 17:7-19

Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord,

     whose trust is the Lord.

  He is like a tree planted by water,

    that sends out its roots by the stream,

and does not fear when heat comes,

    for its leaves remain green,

and is not anxious in the year of drought,

    for it does not cease to bear fruit.”

 The heart is deceitful above all things,
    and desperately sick;
    who can understand it?
  “I the Lord search the heart
     and test the mind,
to give every man according to his ways,
    according to the fruit of his deeds.”

God showed us first hand how to approach marriage. Marriage is a covenant. A covenant by definition is giving what you've got, and sticking to your word despite the other party's failure to do so. Its different to a contract, whereby failure of the one party to do their part frees the other party of their commitment. The pattern for marriage is reflected in the gospel. The Bible starts with the first marriage between Adam and Eve, and ends with the promise that Jesus is coming back for His bride (the church). The church is every person who has received forgiveness for their sins through Jesus' blood sacrifice (God's covenant to Abraham fulfilled), and is therefore adopted into God's Kingdom. Throughout the Old Testament, God pursues His people, but they keep betraying Him. They find themselves other gods and live as though He didn't exist. Despite this, he forgives them time and again. He still honoured His covenant with them by sending His Son, His own flesh, to die for them, so that they can be saved and share in His glory for ever and ever. This is the most beautiful love story of all time. (Its the only one where they REALLY live 'happily ever after'!)

Jesus, an image of the 'husband', loved his bride so much that He was willing to die for her, in order to save her. In the same way husbands must love their wives, by dying to themselves. (See Ephesians 5). Similarly, the church must submit to Jesus (honour Him, respect Him, trust Him, obey Him, be faithful to Him and Him alone) in the same way that a wife must submit to her husband. It might sound abusive/old fashioned to us, but show me a husband who loves his wife as he loves his own body, and I'll show you a wife who happily submits to him. If ever we don't understand this concept, we must look at the example of Jesus, who demonstrated this perfectly by first loving and pursuing us, while we were still sinners.

We are not perfect, however, and when two sinners join in marriage, we can be sure that they'll hurt each other and sin against each other. But when they sin, by God's design they should both be humble enough to repent before each other and before God and turn away from their sins. As a Christian we have the Holy Spirit, who convicts us of our sin and makes us hate sin, so that we don't want to do it again. Selfishness kills marriages, and selfishness is at the root of sin. Considering this, we can can see why a Christian marriage has hope of succeeding. I don't know how any couple can stay together without submission from both parties to follow God's rules. Such a marriage is blessed of God. 

If marriage is so hard, why do we even bother? Do we marry for happiness? What if marriage wasn't designed to make us happy, but to rather make us holy? (Gary Thomas in 'Sacred Marriage'). Look around you and you'll see that marriage is no recipe for a 'happily ever after'. Even if you have a happy marriage, your partner can be killed in a car accident or contract a deadly disease in a second. True happiness is just not possible in this life.  No matter how hard you work at it, no matter how many '10 steps...', '7 keys...' or '3 solutions...' you follow, if you look for happiness and fulfillment in people or things, it will fade. True happiness, I believe, is in eternal security. Eternal security is found in Jesus.  Mark 8:36 Jesus says: 'For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?'

Everything seems to come back to our situation. I have realised that when I keep looking at what we don't have, what we've lost and what we long for, I am very miserable. But when I look at what we have in Jesus – eternal security, the hope of a perfect future in heaven where we'll be reunited with our beautiful baby where everything will be happy to a degree that we can't comprehend on earth, no lack, no pain, no tears and no longings, no imperfection – we have peace. What we had or didn't have on earth won't be a patch, it will be insignificant, ridiculously petty, forgotten. And nobody can take the peace that He gives away from us! Thank God.