Christ’s Love and Marriage:
Love Is a Choice (part one)
John 16:5-15
© Rev. Dr. Curtis I. Crenshaw
27 April 2008
Introduction
A cake decorator in New Zealand was asked to include the reference to a Bible verse on the couple’s wedding cake. They requested 1 John 4:18 because it states, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear.” Unfortunately, the cake decorator wasn’t familiar with the Bible so the cake ended up with a reference to John’s gospel instead of his epistle. In beautiful print was “John 4:18.” Had the decorator taken time to look up the verse this error would have been detected before the wedding. “You have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband.”
Since Jonathan and Sommer, members of our congregation, have now become engaged, it seemed good to preach on marriage today, especially from the view of Christ’s love for the Church as the basis of the husband’s love for his wife.
And this sermon is not about divorce, which can certainly be legitimate at times, but this is about the positive side of marriage, the choice of a man to love a woman based on Christ’s choice to love His Bride, the Church.
Groucho Marx said to his bother: “She’s a lovely woman, and deserves a good husband. Marry her before she finds one.”
I’ve been saying for several years now, as I sure you’re aware, that the vertical is the basis for the horizontal, by which I mean that our relationship with God determines our relationship with one another. Thus, when a man wants to know how to treat a wife, he does not go to the latest theories in the world, or to some talk show host, but to the word of God. And Paul gives us instructions:
25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her, 26 that He might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word, 27 that He might present her to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish. (Eph 5:25-27)
Clearly, from this passage the standard for loving our wives is Christ’s love for the Church, and I would go so far as to say that we husbands are required to develop our love for Christ so that we can love our wives better. I’ve said in the past that if we do a series on practical matters, we must begin with God then move to ourselves. So how did Christ love the Church?
To preach a series of sermons on marriage without reference to the divine marriage would be humanism, making human love an end in itself. That is what the world does. They seek love in human marriage only, for they—like us—are made in God’s image, and God is Trinity, community. Thus they seek love in others, but can never rise above the human level, and thus their love fails.
The Body of the Sermon: Love Is a Choice
I, James, take you Susan, to be my wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part, according to God’s holy ordinance; and to that end I give thee my covenant promise (if I may finish it out that way).
These words, or something like them, is what we husbands say in our marriage vows. No one forces us to say them, for love is a choice. Some people think of love as an emotion that just takes control over us, that we fall in love and fall out of love as helpless victims. If that were true, how did Christ ever love such sinful people as we are? What caused Him to fall in love with us, and if it is something in us, then He can fall out of love again, sending us to perish. Christ’s love does not change because He does not change, and the reason for His love lies in Himself, not in us; otherwise, He would love us today, not tomorrow, and love us again the next day. Consider this verse from the last book of the Old Testament, Malachi, which is one of the strongest books in the Bible on God’s covenant love:
For I am the LORD, I do not change; therefore you are not consumed, O sons of Jacob (Mal 3:6).
The reason we do not perish is that God’s love for His people is not fickle.
Christ’s love is not dependent on the object of His love but on who He is, and thus we, as those objects, can rest assured that His love will never fail. The source for His love is Himself, and thus it never fails.
But we husbands should have it easier, for our wives are lovely and thus easier to love. We must be feeding our souls on Christ to find His source to change us and we in turn to reflect that back to our wives, to our families, and if we are feeding on Christ, our love for our wives will never fail.
Moreover, it should be the case that the more we men learn to love Christ the more we learn to love our wives. There is a one to one correspondence here. We learn to love Christ, and thus receive from Him, and He gives us grace to love our wives more and more.
But our culture thinks of love as selfish: if it makes me feel good then it is love, but if it makes me feel bad, it is not love, and I have no control. It’s all about me and how I feel.
“Others respond to the command to love with the excuse that they just don’t have anything in common with their spouse anymore, and therefore they are relieved of the responsibility to obey the command” to love (Bp Morse). But this is to view love as feelings, which they can be, but feelings are the caboose and not the engine. The cure to have things in common is for both spouses to grow toward Christ.
Contrast biblical love with the society of today. Think of prenuptial agreements. This is a contract with small print before one takes wedding vows, and essentially says “I love you almost as much as my money.” This is a choice not to love, a commitment to self more than to the other person, essentially legal prostitution for hire. The prenup is a contract conditioned by the performance of the spouse, not a covenant to cherish the other person without conditions. The prenup is a contract to remain together as long as you please me, while a marriage covenant is a commitment to the death. The prenup is taking vows with your fingers crossed.
So a man’s love for his wife is “until death do us part,” it is a leap into love with total commitment, to go for broke, as we say, with this one other person, to make such a commitment by solemn vows that we are willing to die rather than break them.
Love is a choice. Love is willful. Love is commitment. Love is obedience to the commands of God.
Marriage is not the joining of two worlds but the abandoning of two worlds to create one new world.[1] It is the giving up of self and the embracing of another. It consumes, and that is the choice we make. It abandons the ego for another ego. One does not get married to be happy, which is modern notice of selfishness. We often hear “she makes me so happy,” and I hope that is true, but that is not the point. Marriage is not about me. Men, we must marry to make the other person happy, and then to make them holy. If we enter marriage with the sole idea of being happy, then as soon as things make us unhappy, our choice to love falters, and we bail out.
Love is a choice, so we speak of taking vows. Consider the solemnity of these vows. We take them in the presence of the Triune God, who knows what a covenant is all about, for He sent His Son to be our covenant and to die for us. His love was a choice, so He expects us to do the same, to honor our commitment forever, like He did and His Son has. His vow was to the death; it was a choice.
Moreover, we take the vows in the presence of the appropriate human witnesses, stating to all our intention to form this new home, hopefully with the blessing of the prior two homes.
We are saying to our families and to God by solemn covenant, by taking an oath to the death, that we have found and are marrying the right person. Thus from that point on, we can never second guess the person we’ve married and say we messed up. We are not allowed to do that, for we have chosen and taken God’s vows, just like the ones He took for His Church. Can you image Christ saying, “I really messed up. I married the wrong people. I must leave the Church for another people.” No, He placed His love on us by an act of His will, by the vows of the covenant of grace, and then He never looked back, but no matter how sinful we were, He honored His love to death.
Think of God’s love for His people that He illustrated in the life of Hosea. God told Hosea to go marry a former prostitute, which he did. She was cleaned up and repented for a while, but then she returned to her harlotry. Then God said to Hosea to go take her back, and then here is what God said:
How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel? How can I make you like Admah? How can I set you like Zeboiim? My heart churns within Me; My sympathy is stirred (Hosea 11:8).
Think of how selfish it is for a man to say, like one said recently to my son, that his wife just “did not do it for him anymore,” to which my son said, “What about your commitment, your choice to love, your vows before God and witnesses?”
I had a man say to me once that he did not commit himself to such a view of marriage, that his vows did not have such ideas in them, that he could show me his wedding vows in his wedding bulletin. I responded that marriage was not his to play with but that God is the one who joins a man and a woman together, that marriage is His (Matt 19:6), so no matter what he said, his commitment was solemn and to the death in the eyes of God.
You see, in our vows, we promise to love our wives to the death, but come on, how can anyone bring himself seriously to commit to such a fancy? How can we tell what the circumstances will be like twenty years from now, thirty years from now? Seriously, how can anyone do that?
Of course, such love is impossible. I really don’t pretend otherwise. There is not a man in the world who can love a wife in such an unconditional manner, without embracing the love of Christ, without losing himself and his own life in the life of Christ, without dying to himself and being alive to Christ and His will, offering up his life as a burnt sacrifice to do the will of Christ unconditionally. In other words, these are not our vows so much as Christ’s vows, so we must keep them by His grace. We can count on His grace. Moreover, we are saying that love is a choice and that we are making it forever, by the grace of God through Christ’s love for the Church.
You see, if we husbands don’t die to ourselves daily, if we don’t live for Him and His interests, if we don’t honor our marriage to Christ, to obey Him unconditionally, to submit to Him in every way, to say No to self and Yes to that divine marriage, to His love, then we’ll not honor our human marriages to our wives, for there is a one to one correspondence here—one to one, and don’t you ever forget it. The vertical determines the horizontal; our marriage to Christ determines our marriage to our lovely wives. And both are by vows.
Thus, the joining of a man and woman in marriage in the Church is not a natural event to be taken lightly; it is a supernatural event that is to be worshipped, the act of Almighty God whereby He—He, I say—joins a man and woman in marriage. This is just another way to say that love is not an emotion, just feelings, but a resolve, a covenant, an act of the will, though sustained by the divine marriage. Instead of falling into love, we march into it with our eyes open. No one forces us to take solemn vows.
Like coming to Christ in faith, taking marriage vows is an act of faith, an ongoing work of faith, and without works it is dead. We must work at loving our wives. We must learn our wives. We must study our wives.
I saw a statistic this past week that said married couples who attend the same evangelical church regularly and who are seeking to walk with God have a divorce rate of one in 1100. I hope that was correct, though it would be better if there were no divorces.
Conclusion
In the Church, we marry Christ by baptism, which occurs only once, and only then can we partake of the Holy Communion. Likewise in our human marriages we take initial vows only once, and only then can we have Holy Communion of intimacy with one another. Both marriages are sacred. Both marriages are made by God. Let us honor both to the glory of our Groom, the Lord Christ. AMEN.