In this life, men and women are married to one another. But when we are gathered together in heaven, there will be no marriage (Mark 12:25). Instead, every member of the church will be wed to Christ. Knowing that marriage is a model of the eternal union of the believer and Christ in heaven gives us a very special reason for improving the quality of our marriages. Everyone agrees that a good marriage is more pleasant than an unhappy one. But equally important, because marriage is designed to be a model of the heavenly union bet...
Some Christian couples sit in the pew on Sunday morning singing that their God is “so high you can’t get over Him, so low you can’t get under Him, so wide you can’t get around Him”…but they don’t believe He can put their marriage back together. Given our weak humanity, it isn’t hard to understand why marriages struggle to survive the pressures of the twenty-first century. But here’s the good news: We don’t have to rely on our own finite power to hold things together. With Christ as our Enabler, we can do all things because He ...
Most people learn about marriage from an illegitimate source. They learn about marriage from the television, their friends, or the home that they grew up in. If you grew up in a functioning home, then that would be fine. But many did not, so the home—along with the media and friends—often merge together to form a distorted perspective on the covenant of marriage.
How did Christ love the church? First, “[He] gave Himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25b). That’s referring to the sacrifice Jesus made on the cross so that sinners like you and me can be saved. So if a husband’s love for his wife is to be like Christ’s love for the church, we could say that his love should be cruciform—in the shape of a cross.
For far too many people, the subject of marriage is like a three-ring circus. First, there is the engagement ring. Next comes the wedding ring. Then, there is suffering.