Ephesians 5:33
Each one of you also must love his
wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband
Let me start
by stating the obvious, I am fully aware that I am not the most qualified person
to talk about marriage, in fact I am pretty sure that inexperienced in the
marriage department is a fair statement in regards to my qualification on the
subject, but marriages are the prayer focus for today so my thoughts on paper
or screen rather go as follows.
With the
statement that each one of you must love his wife from this verse from Ephesians,
it gets me thinking about love, and the all of the massively different ways
that people in the world choose to define that word, I know there I go again on
the whole definition bunny trail, but that’s not really the point this time, my
point is with such a large verity of ways that we choose to define this one
word, one of the most frequently overlooked definitions is the one that reminds
us that love is a choice. A choice that is most easily made when accompanied with
affection, the appreciation of beauty and a similar direction of life as the
person to whom it is applied to, but it is a choice.
This choice
in regards to marriage is a command from God, you see I believe wholeheartedly that
God knows the man I will marry, not because I think that there is one perfect
guy out there in world for me but because I believe that God knows which out of
the numerous men out in the world that I could be happy with, the one I will
choose to love and commit to loving, commit to choosing regardless of if he
makes me angry, frustrated, annoyed, impatient, worried and stressed or happy,
appreciated, respected, beautiful and understood at the end of the day it’s
still a choice.
And so as I fast
and pray for marriages in the church today, of course I think about my future
and the work that I will face one day when, but more than that I hope and
believe that as the church we will be able to more readily and frequently make
the choice to love in spite of the world saying otherwise, that as a church we
will possess a greater reverence for the commitments that we make to love, that
as a church we will find more grace to stay together, more joy with one another
and more peace in our households, today I’m believing for the marriages of the
church to be more centered around God.