sermon 3/21

Sermon preached at Andy and Pauline's Wedding

Scripture:

1Corinthians 13:13 “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

Ephesians 5:31-33. 31"For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh."[b] 32This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. 33However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.”

As marriage is a joyful event and therefore, I think it will be all right for me to make a few humorous comments.

First of all, the words of Socrates…he said,

“By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher”. (Socrates).

I hope Andy will not become a philosopher and if he does, that won’t be a bad idea either!

Secondly, Benjamin Franklin said,

“Keep your eyes wide open before the wedding, half shut afterwards”. (Benjamin Franklin). I think it is better to have them fully shut at times after you are married!!

Finally a serious one, and it is from Shakespeare, he said

“They do not love that do not show their love” (William Shakespeare).

That’s a very serious charge to all of us who are married and are planning to marry.

Similarly, in Ephesians Paul tells the husband and wife to demonstrate their love one to another. In the text we read here, he has explicitly used the analogy of the love of Christ to the Church and demonstrated an ideal relationship between a husband and a wife.

Marriage is the place where our ability to love and be loved is demonstrated in the public eyes. And, loving husband and wife is no longer based upon your pre-marriage feeling of falling in love. As Franklin has said, you open your eyes wide before marriage. But at times, as a common saying goes, “love is blind”, so we close our eyes before marriage and choose to be blind. We just brush aside anything that was not normal because our feeling of love controlled our behaviors. But after marriage, after the feeling of being in love or falling in love begins to diminish, we begin to open our eyes, we begin to notice the imperfections, we begin to hear words that sound strange. Then without realizing, our feeling in love vanishes, we don’t feel like loving this person anymore. We start wondering “why and how did I end up marrying this person?” Loving your wife and husband requires more than emotion, it needs will to love.

Therefore, our loving one another is not supposed to be based upon our feeling. It is supposed to be based upon the very words of God. You love your wife and husband because the Bible tells you to love. You decide to love; your love is based upon the command of God and not on your feeling; it’s your choice that you make; you will to love. Once you decide to love based upon the command of God, then you enter into the process of becoming one; you leave your respective families and go on creating a new family by becoming one. It is a deliberate process of making choices based upon the word of God. Love is a combination of will and emotions; and when you will to love, you begin to feel the love.

Becoming one marks a complete new beginning in the lives of two individuals. Your wedding lasts only today, but your marriage is for the rest of your lives. Today you both go back to school again, the school of marriage. Today you begin to learn again, to learn to love each other in a deeper way. You are joining yourselves to each other today to become one, without, of course, losing your individuality. Becoming one doesn’t happen overnight. It is something that you will learn and become better at as you share your married life together. Becoming one means loving each other, sharing your lives with each other, taking each other into consideration always. Becoming one means getting rid of all selfishness out of your lives because there is no room for selfishness in marriage.

In this process of becoming one; love and respect are the two most important factors. When a husband makes his wife the number one object of love and affection in his life; not just in theory but also in practice, with all probability he will have a happy wife and if you have a happy wife, you will become a happy man. If your wife is not a happy woman, it is impossible for you to be a happy man. Similarly, if a wife respects her husband and is proud of her man, not in theory again, but in practice, she will have a happy husband. Only a wife can tell you what you can achieve with a happy husband!

Respecting husband in today’s term is considered old fashioned, but the human need can never be replaced by age or time. If the first woman needed love, women still need love today, and if the first man needed respect, men still need respect today. But this respect is not some kind of slavish submission to the will of the husband, but a respect based on love just like the church respects Jesus Christ. Christ loves the church and church respects (fears) Christ. It is a respect that originates from the command of God and is activated by wife’s own will to respect her husband.

Andy and Pauline; if you can keep love and respect in your home you will have what we call an Ideal marriage because Jesus said, where two people are gathered in one accord, there he will be. Jesus comes in the family that is united in love and respect. When Christ is present in any marriage, that marriage will last for eternity; that marriage will be a happy marriage. May the Lord give you grace to love each other and respect each other so that Christ may find his abode in your home!