Wedding Sermon Ephesians
Lindert/Foight Wedding, Jeremiah 31:3, June 16, 2007
“An Everlasting Love”
Poet Samuel Daniel, a contemporary of Shakespeare, said, "Love is a sickness full of woes, all remedies refusing." Love is the universal topic of writers, poets and singers. It is the subject of both intellectual literature and the lowly country song. Man acts as if he has a working knowledge of the concept of love. However, true love does not come from man. Love is God's business. He is its author. He is its sustainer.
The truest love is that which is shared between God and His children. In the 31st chapter of Jeremiah, often called God’s “I will” chapter because He pledges His promised love for His people over and over. Jeremiah tells us, "The LORD hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with loving kindness have I drawn thee [to Myself]." God's kind of love is a deep, meaningful, expressive love that is not easily explained. It cannot be imitated or counterfeited. God’s love is an everlasting love.
God has also allowed for a special love between a woman and a man A special love between you Dale, and you Mallory. This love is different from God's love in that it can be expressed physically as well as emotionally and spiritually. God tells us that marital love is a reflection of His love towards us.
Marriage was designed by God Himself. He instituted it and performed the first wedding ceremony in the Garden of Eden. He has continued it down through the ages. It is God's vehicle for the propagation of mankind and our own happiness and fulfillment. The cornerstone of every home is the relationship between the husband and the wife. God takes special care to make sure we understand how this special relationship works. Just as our relationship with God has a proper order so does the marriage relationship, as instituted by God, have a proper order. The husband is the "head of the wife." He is the leader and the authority in the marriage. This does not make the wife any less of a person. Unfortunately some husbands use God’s Word in this way. A husbands leadership and authority is understood in this way. Many people work for bosses other than themselves. Say a person works for a fairly large company. The company manager is the leader and authority figure. He is not better than anyone else. He is often not more intelligent than anyone else. He relies on his workers for most things and trusts them to carry out the work of the company. However, he is ultimately responsible for the running of plant. It is the same situation in the home. There must be someone responsible for leadership. God has placed that responsibility on the husband. It has been said, and rightly so, that marriage is "an ordered equality." As Christian are subject to their leader -Jesus Christ, so is the wife to be subject to her leader -the husband.
What about the wife. Besides following her husband, what is her role? Her role is to be loved and cherished by her husband. That doesn’t sound so bad, does it? Men have gotten this so turned around I don’t know where to begin. The husband is to be like Jesus to his bride and wife, to the woman he pledges his everlasting love. Like our Savior Jesus Christ, the husband should provide, the preserve, and protect his wife. He is responsible for her as Christ is responsible for the Church. The husband serves his wife as Jesus gave his life in service for us all. In fact, God has placed wives and women in an exalted position.
The husband is to give his wife a sacrificial love. The husband's love is to be like Jesus Christ's sacrificial love. This kind of love is not selfish, it is selfless. Christ was the all powerful God in flesh, yet He gave Himself to be crucified because of His love for all people. Self sacrifice finds its fulfillment in forgiveness. Jesus sacrificed Himself on the cross for a reason, so we would know and have God’s love, and the assurance of this is His promise of forgiveness.
In this life, especially in marriage, Your everlasting love, your sacrificial love will find its fulfillment not in roses and love songs, but in forgiveness. It takes a lot of forgiveness to make an everlasting love. Dale and Mallory, you have two wonderful examples of this kind of love as reflected in you parent’s marriages. If you ask them, I bet they would tell you that in all their years of marriage there has been a lot of forgiving. As God loves and forgives you, love and forgive each other.
In marriage God’s will is to give you both, satisfaction, physical satisfaction, emotional satisfaction and spiritual satisfaction. To work, marriage must be carried out God's way. There are few guarantees in today's world. But if both of you, as husband and wife, put God first and keep Him there, God will work to ensure the success of your marriage. Dale, if you show no other leadership than leading your wife and children to church each Sunday, your marriage will have a strong foundation.
In Jeremiah, God said “I Will give my people my everlasting love; and he has. Now it is your turn to say “I will,” before God, and these witness and your families that are being joined together. May God continue to bless you Dale, and you Mallory as you are joined together as one to reflect God’s glory and His everlasting love in your married life. Amen. After Robert L. Cobb