For Better or Worse: God’s Gift of Marriage

By Stan Lemon

It’s your sophomore year of high school. You’ve made it through freshman year and managed to stay alive. You weren’t squashed into a locker, and you still have a bit of dignity. Now it’s time to find that special someone, your high school sweetheart with whom you are destined to spend the rest of your life. Combine together three years, two proms, graduation, and a brief stint at college together, and that gives you a relationship that will span seven years! You’re all set. Isn’t that what we all dream of?

Sometimes love and dating just don’t work that way. My high school sweetheart broke up with me before midterms first semester and is now a forest ranger out saving the planet. Fortunately, the Lord has a funny way of giving gifts at the strangest times, often when we are least likely to expect or even want them.

My best friend, on the other hand, was set up by his dad with an exchange student from Korea. That didn’t pan out so well; they were doomed from the word 안녕하세요 (Hello). From his dad’s perspective, this was a match made in heaven—literally—since they met at church. Nine years later, I’m happy to report that my best friend met a very nice young lady from southern Illinois and the only thing wrong with her is that she’s a Cardinals fan.

They say love and marriage go together. But that’s not always true. At least, not the way the world thinks of love and marriage. The world believes that marriage is totally dependent on love. If you’re in love and you can tough it out through a couple of proms, college, and the like then you’re all set. The only thing left is marriage.

Unfortunately, marriage doesn’t pan out like that. After four years of marriage, I’m still no expert, but I can tell you that I don’t wake up every morning and think to myself, “I love my wife.” I wish it were that picturesque, but more often than not, I wake up angry and upset, usually at the alarm clock.

Marriage is about receiving gifts, and I don’t mean diamonds or roses. Marriage begins with receiving a spouse set aside for you by the Lord and Creator of the universe. In marriage, God gives you the gift of a husband or a wife and says, “Rejoice!” When you try and do the marriage thing without God or decide not to let our Lord have His way with marriage, then you steal the gift away. You turn what our good and gracious God has given into something you’ve taken, and there’s nothing to rejoice in there. When I look at my wedding band, I don’t think to myself how great a husband I am. Instead, I think of how gracious my Lord is to have promised to keep my wife and me in this marriage. I think that no matter how much of a filthy sinner I am, in Christ my wife is still married to me.

There will be tough times. There always are. Take confidence in knowing that when the Lord gives you in marriage your love will not keep the whole thing together. It’s going to take someone bigger than you to keep your marriage together. It’s going to take someone incomprehensible and almighty to keep your marriage together. It’s going to take the triune God—the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—to keep your marriage together.

That goes for right now too. Live each day like a lily in the field, trusting that the Lord will work all things out for your good. Trust that you have the greatest matchmaker of all eternity, a heavenly matchmaker who knew you before the foundation of the world, a matchmaker who formed Eve perfectly for Adam out of his own rib, and a matchmaker who will likewise form for you one given in marriage.

The story doesn’t end with “I do.” Marriage is about constantly receiving gifts from God and each other. What will start as the gift of one another will continue, sometimes as smaller gifts (wrapped up as a little bundle of joy, of course!). When all is said and done, it won’t be your love that keeps the whole lot together. It’ll be the love of God in Christ Jesus given and shed for you on the cross.

Stan Lemon is Sara’s husband, Lucy’s dad, and Higher Things’ Webmaster. E-mail him at webmaster@higherthings.org.