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Tag Archives: Marriage


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Love As The Fruit Of Marriage, Not The Cause (via Will Willimon)

Will Willimon observes, in Accidental Preacher, that the promises of marriage are future intent, not present activity. They presuppose challenges to faithfulness will come, and that promise will be needed to undergird service when circumstances would otherwise deter us.

There’s no such thing as instant friends, which is why the Service of Marriage is in future tense. It’s not “John, do you (or have you previously found the opportunity to) love Susan?” It’s “Will you love …?” Promises propel into the future, putting one at the mercy of the vicissitudes of another’s life with little backup but a promise. Love as the fruit of marriage rather than (as most couples suppose) the cause is church wonderfully weird.
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The church makes couples promise to stay married “until death do us part.” Strange to bring up death when most couples I marry look like they’re in pretty good shape. Death intrudes into the service of marriage because the promises of marriage are one way of dealing with our temporality, clinch-fistedly saying to the future, “Take form me what you will, by God I’ll still be faithful to this person.” When we promise to love the unfathomable mystery that is another “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health,” we creatively deal with our radical contingency, promising constancy even amid the ravages of time.

Will Willimon, Accidental Preacher, Eerdmans, 2019, pgs 196, 197.


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Love Is Not Something We Fall Into, It Is A Rough And Rocky Hill Two People Commit To Climb Together (via Chad Bird)

Marriage, contrary to popular thought is not a dream within a dream.
It is a mutual commitment by two people to live as one for the the duration of their lives.
And if it was easy, why would we need promises to hold ourselves to it?

From Chad Bird:

That’s why love is not something we fall into; it’s a rough and rocky hill we commit ourselves to climb. Or, to change the metaphor, love is a story we decide to write together with another person. There will be paragraphs penned in the calligraphy of pure ecstasy, but there will also be chapters scribbled in pain. The thing is, we don’t know what form or direction the narrative will take. The final chapter is not written until it’s lived. What we’re devoting ourselves to is not a fairy tale, not a thriller, not a bestseller, but a simple story of sacrifice for someone else. We for them and (hopefully) they for us. But because it is the account of two sinners sharing the same bed, bank account, and bathroom counter, the narrative will become terribly messy and convoluted at times. There will be entire sections we wish we could blot out. Heated and vitriolic dialogues that embarrass us. And, along the way, plenty of happy surprises as well. We’ll discover places in our hearts, and in the hearts of our beloved, that we didn’t even know existed. That’s the way stories unfold. Unpredictable. Boring. Beautiful. Ugly. Riveting. We’ll find all of this and more when we commit to writing a story with another person to whom we say, “I love you.”

Chad Bird, Upside-Down Spirituality: The Nine Essential Failures Of A Faithful Life, Baker, 2019, pgs 128-129.


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Sharing Their First Meal

Craig and Gemma.

The joy and privilege of be among those to share their first meal as husband and wife.

May the joy of this day savour their life together.


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Happiness Is Not A Goal In Itself, It Is The Product Of Seeking The Right Goals (via Sammy Rhodes)

The pursuit of happiness will be futile if it is happiness itself which is being sought. Happiness can only be experienced as a fruit of seeking after that which endures.
Sammy Rhodes writes about modern relationships and the reasons they founder:

Wanting happiness isn’t a bad thing. It’s a human thing. The problem is that happiness is less something we can directly seek than it is a by-product of seeking the right things in the right ways. Happiness is like the endorphins that flow after a good workout. They’re a result of hunting another goal, not something you can get your hands on directly. They only come by working out. Or so I hear. I’m less a work-out guy, more a work—in guy. And by that I mean most days I like to work on getting an entire bag of chips inside me.
Jesus told us to “seek first the kingdom of God and his’ righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” (Matt. 6:33). Blessings, like happiness, come as we focus our eyes on something other than those blessings. Jesus is teaching us here to think less like consumers and more like himself a covenant—making and covenant—keeping God. If Jesus had let happiness determine his choices, the cross would have never happened. Jesus’ choices were driven by his covenant promises, first to God, then to us.

Sammy Rhodes, This Is Awkward, Thomas Nelson, 2016, pgs 93-94.


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The Never-Ending Faithful Love Of The God Who Hates Divorce (via Sammy Rhodes)

Sammy Rhodes is writing about the way in which effects of his parent’s divorce ripple through his life and perceptions. He recounts the combination of cynicism and romanticism about marriage that the children of divorced parents have. One couple for whom he performed a marriage vowed ‘never to divorce’ one another, a promise that Rhodes felt was both arrogant, yet admirable. It causes him to think of the only one who can truly make that promise:

I think the best metaphor we have for the kind of love God has for us is that he is a God who marries us with eyes wide open and promises to never divorce us regardless of how unfaithful we turn out to be.

When God says he hates divorce, he doesn’t mean he hates the divorced. He means that the kind of love he has for his people is best captured by a one-sided marriage that he promises will never end in divorce. That’s the kind of love he’s come to create in his people. For him. For the church. And for husbands and wives.

God’s love is the only love that can sustain a marriage because it is the only love that can promise it’s never going anywhere. Our love is too frail, too fragile, to possibly sustain our marriages. German Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that it is not our love that sustains our marriages; our marriage becomes the place to sustain our love.

The only way to “divorce-proof” your marriage is for God’s love to sustain your marriage so that, in turn, your marriage can sustain your love.

Sammy Rhodes, This Is Awkward, Thomas Nelson, 2016, pg 43.

In this observation I think Rhodes makes a very important point, when God talks about hating divorce, he’s not telling us something directly about our marriages (though there is something there); he is telling us something about himself and his faithfulness.