Isaiah & Hannah Witwam Wedding

Hannah Prissel & Isaiah Whitwam

Seating Guests

Seating Grandparents

Seating Groom’s Parents

Seating Bride’s Mother

Processional

Bride Given Away

Introduction

Wedding Prayer

Scripture Reading

Pastors Message

Closing Prayer

3 Chord Ceremony

Wedding Vows

The Ring Ceremony

The Marriage Declaration

The Marriage Kiss

The Presentation

The Recessional

GIVING OF BRIDE

Who gives this bride to be married? (I do, we do, or her mother and I do)

INTRODUCTION

We are gathered today to celebrate one of the happiest moments in the lives of Hannah and Isaiah; for on this day, they enter into the holy bonds of Christian marriage. It is their desire that God would be honored in their marriage and so would you join me in prayer as we seek God’s blessing upon their relationship

THE WEDDING PRAYER

O God of love, You have established marriage for the welfare and happiness of mankind. Yours was the plan and only with You can it work out with joy. You have said, “It is not good for man to be alone. I will make a helpmeet for him.” Now our joys are multiplied since the happiness of one is the happiness of the other. Our burdens now are reduced since when we share them, we divide the load.

Bless Isaiah. Bless him as provider of nourishment and shelter and sustain him in all the pressures of life. May his strength be her protection, may his character be her boast and may he so live that she will find in him the one for which her heart longs.

Bless Hannah. Give her a tenderness that will make her great, a deep sense of understanding, a great faith in You. Give her that inner beauty of soul that never fades, that eternal youth that is found in holding fast the things that never age.

Teach them that marriage is not living for each other; it is two uniting and joining hands to serve You. Give them a great spiritual purpose in life. May they “seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness”, that the other “things may be added”unto them.

May they not expect that perfection of each other that belongs alone to You. May they minimize each other’s weaknesses, be swift to praise and magnify each other’s strengths, and see each other through a lover’s kind and patient eyes.

Make such assignments to them on the scroll of Your will as will bless them and develop their characters as they walk together. Give them enough tears to keep them tender, enough hurts to keep them humane, enough of failure to keep their hands clenched tightly in Yours, and enough of success to make them sure they walk with God.

May they never take each other’s love for granted, but always experience that breathless wonder that exclaims, “Out of all this world you have chosen me.”

When life is done and the sun is setting, may they be found then as now still hand in hand, still thanking God for each other. May they serve You happily, faithfully, together, until at last one shall lay the other into the arms of God.

This we ask through Jesus Christ, great lover of our souls. Amen.

SCRIPTURE READING

I Corinthians 13:1-13

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned,[a] but have not love, I gain nothing.

4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;[b] 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

8 Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. 12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Colossians 3:12-17

12 Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, 13 bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. 14 And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.

15 And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. 16 Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. 17 And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

MESSAGE / REMARKS

On a day like today, these passages are great reminders that: Marriage was designed by God to “ultimately” bring us great happiness, but it is not “primarily” about our happiness. Let me say that again: Marriage was designed by God to “ultimately” bring us great happiness, but it is not “primarily” about our happiness.

And the words we are most likely to key in on from that statement are “marriage” and “happiness”, but even more important than those two, are the words “ultimately” and “primarily”.

In preparation for their lives together, I had the privilege to sit down with Hannah and Isaiah over the course of several weeks and work through a Bible Study called: You and me forever, Marriage in light of eternity. This study directed us to see the beauty of marriage through the lens of an eternal perspective. That while our marriages hold the capacity for great happiness here and now, they were designed to primarily be about something that transcends the here and now.

We often lose track of this, but God invented marriage. It was His idea. In fact, he officiated over the first marriage. We don’t know how much ceremony was really involved and certainly there wasn’t an audience like this…unless the animals were hanging out with them, I’m not sure.

But when your Father brought you Hannah down the aisle and gave you to Isaiah, it was in echo of that first wedding when the Bible says that God brought Eve to Adam and gave her to him as his wife.

And then it says about you Isaiah, 24Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. (Genesis 2:24)

But in the very next chapter of Genesis, we read how things go terribly wrong. Not just in their marriage, but Adam and Eve disobeyed God’s good word and it tainted everything in God’s good world. This is bad news for every marriage because the very purpose of marriage could no longer be realized.

But the good news, for every marriage and for every person, is that God made a way to fix what we broke in our sin and rebellion against Him and his Word.

Our sin, our rebellion and rejection of God’s good design means that all we deserve is to be separated from Him for all eternity. But up against the darkness and despair of that bad news shines the brilliance and hope found in the “Good News” of God’s love for us.

Romans 5:8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

The Bible says that all of our righteous deeds are like filthy rags. They don’t count for anything, but Jesus counts for everything. His perfect life, death and resurrection paid our penalty so that we can be right with God again.

This not only will restore us individually, it restores the purposes of our marriages as well. Now our marriages mysteriously work to point people to Jesus.

We find the same instructions that are presented in Genesis again in the New Testament. In one of the few direct teachings on marriage in all the Bible, the Apostle Paul teaches that the love and respect found in the mystery of marriage is like the relationship of Jesus with his people, the Church. He says in…

Ephesians 5:22–33(ESV)

22 Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. 24Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.

This will not always be easy Hannah, To be so sold out to the Lord Jesus Christ that you would obey his command to submit to the design that He made this marriage thing for. That is what this submission thing is all about.

Isaiah is a great guy, but he is not perfect. You are not called to submit to him because of him, you are called to submit to his leadership as to the Lord. It is a high calling, and like everything significant and worthwhile it is not the easy road, but it is the road to “ultimately” bring you the happiest marriage.

But this is not just about Hannah, marriage is never just a one-person deal. In the next verses, Isaiah the Bible tells you…

25 Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.

Isaiah there is no higher calling for a husband. We have talked about how God holds you responsible to be the spiritual leader in your marriage. Our wives are a great help, believe me, but still, we hold that responsibility.

And to do this while showing the kind of self-less sacrificial love that Jesus showed for the Church is an overwhelmingly high bar. He didn’t just love with words, …he bought flowers and candy and… those are all fine things, but the true example that he set for us husbands was to do everything we can to lead our wives into a right relationship with God. To invest ourselves in our wifes purity, in their protection and in their holiness before God.

We can’t do this alone, God has given us his Holy Spirit to guide us and the Church to come alongside us but the only way Hannah’s submission to your leadership will be the joyful experience it was meant to be is if you love her like this.

- - -

31 “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” 32This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. 33 However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.

In this way the purpose of marriage has be recovered, we again can glorify God in it, and in this it will “ultimately” bring us great happiness, as long as our happiness is not “primarily” what it is about.

MESSAGE PRAYER

THREE CHORD CEREMONY

Hannah and Isaiah have chosen to symbolize their commitment to place God at the center of their marriage through a three-chord ceremony.

The white strand represents the bride and her life. The purple strand represents the groom and his life.

The gold strand represents God and His majesty.

In braiding these three strands together, Isaiah and Hannah are demonstrating their commitment to make their marriage about more than just the joining of two lives together. They have chosen to trust God to be at the center of their marriage, woven into every aspect of it. Ecclesiastes 4:12 reads, “Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.” Today, Bride and Groom are being woven together by God as ONE in marriage!

THE WEDDING VOWS (to each other)

Now Hannah and Isaiah will make their wedding vows that they have chosen. Will you face each other and join hands.

Isaiah, would you repeat after me:

I, Isaiah, take you, Hannah to be my wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day, to care for and encourage in both good time and bad. I promise to live for Christ and with you in the full awareness of trust and love, and with this commitment, I pledge to you my love.

Hannah, would you repeat after me:

I, Hannah, take you, Isaiah, to be my wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day, to care for and encourage in both good times and bad. I promise to live for Christ and with you in the full awareness of trust and love, and with this commitment, I pledge to you my love.

THE RING CEREMONY

As are symbols of your commitment of love to one another you will exchange rings. They are circles made of precious metals that express the unending dimension of your love and the eternal love of God. Share these rings now in the full awareness of Christ’s love in you and through you.

Isaiah, would you place this ring on Hannah’s third finger and left hand? Would you hold it there and repeat after me: Hannah, I give this ring... as a visible token…of my love, and I give it to you… as my own life.

Hannah, would you place this ring on Isaiah’s third finger and left hand? Would you hold it there and repeat after me: Isaiah, I give this ring... as a visible token…of my love, and I give it to you… as my own life.

THE MARRIAGE DECLARATION

Hannah and Isaiah, because you have exchanged sacred vows, because you have rings as symbols of your commitment to Christian marriage, it is my privilege to pronounce that from this day forward, in the sight of God and man, you are now husband and wife. What God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.

Isaiah you may kiss your bride and your wife.

I am happy to introduce you to Mr. & Mrs. Isaiah & Hannah Witwam