Today's Passage: 1 Corinthians 7

Marriage is difficult... but worth every minute if you are in it with the one God chose for you.  This statement comes from my 7 1/2 years of experience. This is common knowledge for anyone that has been married for any amount of time.  The funny thing is that Paul makes this same statement in verse 28 and I had never seen it until today. 

Men and women, we all feel a need for an intimate relationship.  Now when we use the word "intimate" in modern culture it is almost always translated as "sexual", but that is not the type of relationship that God designed us for.  God designed us to have an intimate relationship with Him.  However He granted us the ability to form a very similar relationship with our fellow man.  This is where the idea of marriage gets its basis and this is also why God desires to be at the center of the marriage relationship.  The way that God made the world to work according to what Paul writes in these verses is this: You should focus on your relationship with God first in all things, but if you feel the need either emotionally or physically to have an intimate relationship with another human then get married but remember to keep God first.

I have preformed two weddings and am about to preform my third at the end of this month, and long before I preform any ceremony I walk the couple through about 6 hours of pre-marriage counseling.  Sometimes it is welcomed with open arms by the couple and sometimes it's like asking them to have a voluntary root-canal, but the one thing that I always stress is this: When you stand up in front of all of you family and friends the words that you are agreeing to and saying to each other are a covenant not a contract.  Most of the time I say this I get asked "what's the difference?"  "The difference," I say "is simple but so very important."  With a contract if one of the two parties involved fails to fulfill  their end of the deal then the whole thing is off, but with a covenant it doesn't matter what the other party does you must always keep your end of the deal.  I follow this up by saying If you don't think you can commit to this then maybe you should rethink getting married.  Now in my defense I still haven't caused a groom to be to run screaming from the room but I would like to think that I have started some lengthy conversations.

All of this to say God takes the business of marriage very seriously and even though our world has diluted the meaning of marriage down we as believers must commit to holding to the standards that we have been given from God.  If any positive change is going to happen it is going to take root from our example.  But if we continue to look just like the world in how we handle marriage then the only change we'll see is the standard drifting farther and father away from God's.