Wedding Sermon Kurtis and Angel

August 14, 2004

Ohio University Chapel

Athens Campus

Athens, OH

Message for Kurtis & Angel Shafer Wedding

To The Congregation

We have come together today into a community of love, to witness and support the marriage of Kurtis & Angel before God. We celebrate this occasion through God, which is both solemn and joyful. It is solemn because it is established in prayerful obedience to the will of God, which is that man and woman should become a union of two persons. 

This ceremony is also solemn because it involves a presence of God and the gathered community. 

This is a joyful time, however, for now a love will have taken a great step toward fulfillment, and a pattern of life will be developed between these two with their response to God’s love in Christ may be worked out to please him in all the new and creative ways that marriage can bring.

Therefore, this adventure must begin with only the utmost of honesty existing between these two and among you who witness this event.  Be it known to you all that the responsibility for the integrity finally rests upon their own hearts and the members of this community, both friends, and relatives who have know them and have encouraged them in their preparation for this service.

If you desire this new estate to be permanent, then cherish the vision of this love.  Let it not be tarnished by the common events.  Believe in this ideal you all share because it is binding, it is sacred and holy, and it is forever.

To Kurtis & Angel

Faith, Hope and Love

It is a combination of faith, hope, and love that brings you to this significant point on the road of life.

FAITH:          Genuine faith is an absolute essential for the highest happiness in marriage.

Each of you needs a genuine, active faith in God that expresses itself in worship and obedience.

-                  You need to have faith in each other.

-                  You must conduct yourself in a manner so as to encourage an ever-increasing confidence in yourself on the part of your companion.

-                  You need faith in yourself as individuals.

-                  May God help you to believe that you can be a good husband or a good wife and in due time good parents and the builders of a successful home.

At the end of life’s journey you will have traveled many and diverse roads of joy and hurt, delight and pain, bliss & brokenness, satisfaction & sorrow, laughter & loneliness.  But faith will be the strength of your love if you allow it to.

HOPE:           Another essential ingredient for happiness in marriage is hope.  It is because of                                      HOPE for happiness and fulfillment that you meet together now to be united in                                  marriage. When your hope is built on faith in God, faith in your companion, and faith              in yourself, which expresses itself in commitment, then you can be assured that you                 have a real basis for success in marriage.

LOVE:           It is because of love that you stand here to be united in marriage.  Perhaps it was romantic love that first attracted you to one another.  If you are to achieve true success, you need to combine the practice of Christian love with the expression of romantic love.

This love of which I speak is slow to lose patience;

-                  It looks for a way of being constructive

-                  It is not possessive

-                  It is neither anxious to impress

-                  Nor does it cherish inflated ideas of its own importance.

Love has good manners and does not pursue selfish advantage;

-                  It is not touchy. 

-                  It does not keep an account of wrongs or gloat over the others mistakes

-                  On the contrary, it is, in fact, the one thing that still stands when all else has fallen.

Let me close with these points.

-                  Marriage is a promise of each to love for life.

-                  Commitment in that relationship is really tested, not when life is smooth, but when life’s difficulties come. And they will come.

-                  Never forget the adventure of commitment that stimulated your hearts when your eyes first met and your hearts sent the message to your mind that something was happening in your hearts and the excitement that occasion brought into your life.

-                  Cherish the vision of love always.

-                  Marriage is sacred and holy and it is forever.

May your marriage be blessed beyond measure by God our Father in heaven.  Amen!