Marriage: All About Giving

MARRIAGE: All About Giving!

As the Church is subject to Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the Church and gave Himself for it. Ephesians 5:24-25 NKJV

Marriage is so important to God that He instituted it as the primary means of communicating the love relationship the Father and the Son have with those who are the bride of Christ – the Church. The Father gave the Son and the Son gave His life to purchase a bride for Himself. From the very beginning of the Bible (Gen. 2:24) to the end of it (Rev. 21:2) marriage is pictured as the example of this love relationship the Lord has with those who are His. This picture, more fully depicted in Genesis 24 and more fully explained in Ephesians 5:22-33, tells us just how highly God regards marriage.

By contrast, the news media worldwide reports what man thinks of marriage. For example, each week our local newspaper lists the names of couples who have signed marriage licenses, as well as the names of those who have legally dissolved the marriage bond through divorce. Recently I’ve noticed that divorces have been outnumbering marriages – evidence that marriage is an institution falling into ever-increasing disrepair because of growing disregard for the significant part God has in it, and the high regard He has for it.

What can we do about this? If we are married, we can honor God in our relationship by building and maintaining it according to His selfless pattern of agape love and submission, instead of tearing it down with man’s selfishness. If we are unmarried, we can look for mates who share God’s view of love and who desire to live in it, remembering that agape love is giving of self without asking anything in return.

We hope our Feature articles help make your marriage a model of God’s love.

By Larry Ondrejack