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This past weekend I performed my first wedding, and it was for my wonderful sister-in-law and her new husband!

Because I know tiredness and exhaustion is big after a wedding, especially when the ceremony and reception last eight hours plus all of the prep-time before and clean-up after, to save myself some time this week I am posting the message from that wedding!

Now all of you beautiful readers get to feel like you were there! (It really did end up being a wonderful ceremony!)

I hope you enjoy:

JP² – The Wedding

Ephesians 5:21-33 tells every married couple:

²¹ Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.

²² Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. ²³ For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. ²⁴ Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

²⁵ Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her ²⁶ to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, ²⁷ and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. ²⁸ In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. ²⁹ After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church— ³⁰ for we are members of his body. 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.” ³² This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. ³³ However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.

To submit to each other means to live life together.

The greatest examples of living life together can be taken from Jesus and His disciples.

John 2

In John chapter two, we read of Jesus’ first miracle: turning water into wine. This is also the time Jesus first went with His disciples somewhere, and it was a wedding! Working together with each other and those around them made life more enjoyable.

As you start your marriage, learn from Jesus and His disciples: start by having some fun. This is why we are all here! Take this as a reminder to have fun with each other throughout your marriage. It is also a reminder to have fun with your loved ones, your family and friends.

Matthew 14

Speaking of reasons to celebrate, Matthew chapter fourteen shares the story of Jesus and His disciples feeding dinner to about 5,000 men plus women and children with five loaves of bread and two fish. That would be cause for celebration! (Perhaps another reason we are all here: to be fed!)

Instead, as soon as everyone was done eating, Jesus sent His disciples across a choppy lake in the only available boat while he went off to pray. Before the sun came up, Jesus walked out across the surface of the lake – with waves and all – to the boat.

The disciples were scared at first, but Peter yelled out to Jesus. Jesus called Peter out onto the water, and he went and walked on the water with Jesus!

Peter soon remembered the wind and waves, and he began to sink. And Jesus reached out to grab his hand, pulled Peter up, and the two of them walked back to the boat.

As you build your lives together, you will encounter those times when life is hard. Yet, when one of you gets distracted by the troubles you face, the other can be the support. You can take turns lifting each other up as you walk together.

You never face this life alone. The good and the bad will come in varying degrees, but when you face them together you may find the good in the bad. Submitting to each other is listening to and helping each other continually, that you may grow deeper in love and happiness.

Keller

Timothy Keller also compared marriage to a journey, saying that it is:

“. . . a journey that includes shared experience, setbacks, challenges, knowledge, and many many things that make you crazy as well as [the] things that make you happy. If marriage is to endure over time, it has to be because both people within it have tacitly acknowledged something that young lovers might find preposterous: it’s bigger, and more important, than both of us. It’s love, sure, and inside jokes and conversational shorthand. But it’s also families, friends, traditions, landmarks, knowledge, history.”