As you come to be joined in marriage today, I want to take a moment to focus on one important dimension of what it means to be married as Christians: that is as those who know Jesus and are being made into His likeness. This is a glorious day, full of joy, beauty, and gratitude for answered prayer, and all because it is centrally a day that reveals the character of the God we serve and His generous love for both of you. If you want to succeed in the journey of married love that you are beginning today, you need to remember and cherish God’s generosity and make it the foundation of your common life together.
1 John tells us that God is love and I Cor. 13, the passage we just read, tells us what that means. In fact, it is helpful to see Paul giving us a description of God Himself: God doesn’t envy or boast, He isn’t arrogant or rude, He isn’t peeved or resentful. Instead God is patient and kind, He doesn’t rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth, God bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. God never fails.
The striking thing about reading I Cor. 13 this way, is the clarity it brings to the direction of God’s character. Because He is love, God isn’t concerned with Himself. He doesn’t suffer from glory-hunger or act out of a desire to protect His self-interests, like a miser his gold. Instead, God loves to give Himself. He is animated by His desire to fill all that He has made with His glory. In other words, to say that God is love means that God loves to share, to give, to glorify. His love is expressed in exuberant generosity.
And this helps us to see the account of creation in Genesis with new eyes. Why did God create heaven and earth? Why did he make things so completely saturated with color and shape? Sights that can bring tears to our eyes, tastes that delight our heart, and sounds that make our hair stand on end? He didn’t do it because he needed something to rule over, or something to give Him glory, or to fulfill some unmet need in Himself.
Rather, the Bible shows us, from Genesis to Revelation, that He made everything because of His overflowing, super-abundant Love. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit labored over creation for six days because God wanted to share His glory with us. And so He fashioned a world to delight us, carefully formed to reveal his pleasure and joy in giving Himself to us. It was a supreme manifestation of His generosity.
Notice that Adam and Eve were created to be like their Father. In the garden, they were designed to represent their Father to the whole of Creation. All of their responsibilities were to mirror and manifest the generosity of their own creation. Adam’s first task is a labor of giving, in which he supplied names to the animals, identifying the shape of their Creator’s good gifts. And when God turns to make woman, a being uniquely designed to complete Adam, He doesn’t take dirt as He did with the man, but Adam himself supplies a rib from his own side, and woman is formed from Adam’s gift. And when Adam wakes he names his wife, Eve, because like him, she was created to generously give life to all the living.
This is why the first sin is so tragic. Rather than submitting to and protecting God’s gifts and their own calling to govern creation with generosity, Adam and Eve reached out, and in one prideful act, turned their world upside down. All of the goodness and giving of their creation was overcome by selfishness and grasping. Before, they were not conscious of lacking anything, now they knew that they were without and were naked. And in the very next chapter, their son Cain, following in the steps of His parents, reached out to take the life of his brother. From that day to this we are all children of our first parents. We’ve exchanged the truth of giving for the lie of grasping. We try to steal, cheat, lie, and destroy our way into a paradise of our own making.
Augustine tells us that this is why God became a man and dwelt among us; in order to cure our pride and selfishness with His humility and generosity. Like a persistent bridegroom, he came for us down the course of our wasted years to find us downing in the cruelty of our profligate and disordered loves. He came healing, forgiving, restoring, and blessing. He came as He did at the beginning, generous and overflowing with love, but this time, he also had to take. Because we grasped, he had to take all of our self-seeking upon Himself so that we could once again become generous like Him. He came, the gospels tell us, not to be served, but to serve and to give His life, as a ransom for many.
Micah, all of this means that as a man who has given his life to Jesus, you have been forgiven and restored to be a husband overflowing with generosity. Just as Jesus gave His life in order to set His bride free, so set yourself to surround Bryony with the joy of your giving. Let generosity be the first thing she thinks about when she contemplates your leadership in your home. To do so you will need to put to death all that remains of your father Adam; killing all temptations to use your strength for self-gratification. You were made to give your life away. Do so generously, be a generous father to her and now your children, be a generous lover, a generous leader, a generous provider, and a generous protector. And give, not begrudgingly, but full of the joy of a man who knows and loves the gifts of God.
Bryony, today God has given you a Boaz, a man who has purposed to give his life for your good. You are taking vows because you are determined to give yourself in return. When a woman gives herself to her husband, it is a terrible and awesome gift. It is the kind of gift that makes a man stand up tall, to pray intently, and to work hard. The bible says that a wife is a crown to her husband. She is his glory, and that glory is a fire that engulfs the entire course of his life. God has uniquely equipped you to adorn his life with the glory of your honor and respect. You are Micah’s glory-fire, and as Eve transformed adamah, the dirt man, into ish, the fire-man, know that as you honor and adorn his achievements and sacrifice, God will transform Micah into a man of even greater sacrifice and generosity than he is today.
And if you both will make God’s generosity the center of your lives together, God will make your home into a place of solace and refuge from the weary world of self-seeking. Your marriage will become an Eden to your children, a place where they can taste and see how good the Lord is. Likewise your home will become a paradise of joy and refreshment to all who rest within its walls.
May God give you both the grace to give generously because you know deep in your bones the truth of St. John’s words: “Beloved see how great a love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called the children of God, and that is what we are! In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Prayer: Let us pray. Almighty God, our Father, You are the Author of all love because You are love. You have commanded us to walk in love even as You first loved us and gave yourself to be the propitiation for our sins. Teach Micah and Bryony to love each other as You have loved them and fill their lives together with the generosity of Your grace, through Jesus Christ Your Son, who lives and reigns with You and with the Holy Spirit, ever one God, unto ages of ages. Amen.
Joshua Appel is a pastor at Trinity Reformed Church, Moscow, Idaho, and a Fellow of Theology at New Saint Andrews College.