“Tying the Knot”

A brief reflection on officating the wedding of my niece and her fiancée next week.

This time next week, I have the privilege and great honor of officiating the wedding of my niece and her fiancée. I have officiated other weddings in the past few years, and some of the preparations have been the same, but this one is different.

One of the things that are the same as the others is that my wife and I have been able to walk with them through premarital counseling. That process is always a joy for many reasons. I am reminded of all the Lord has brought my wife and me through and the ways we were not nearly as prepared. Revisiting these things several times in a few years has also been a refreshment for us. Besides reflecting on the ways we were not as prepared, we are also reminded of all the Lord has blessed us with and protected us from. He has been so good to me and Carolina in so many ways. He has shown himself faithful when we failed, and we have had many others come alongside us in our struggles as well. Some lessons we learned the hard way, but they are lessons that we have been able to pass on to other younger couples and minister to them as well.

Another similarity is that we have used Rob Green’s “Tying the Knot” for each couple in the premarital counseling process, which presents “a practical vision of Christ-centered marriage that is realistic, hopeful, and actionable.” It is broken into eight chapters, considering everything from the meaning of marriage and its biblical foundations to communication, finances, and intimacy. There is even a chapter on the importance of community in the context of a local church for ensuring faithfulness in this covenant commitment of marriage. Every chapter also has “homework” to be done individually and as a couple, which is discussed in each session.

The constant refrain throughout “Tying the Knot” is the importance of keeping Jesus at the center of all of life as a couple. Indeed, there is no area of your life as a married couple that can be kept out from under the Lordship of Christ. If you have not read or considered it a resource, I commend it to you for consideration.

What Marriage Was Meant to Be

Going through this process is a needful reminder of what is actually going on in a wedding and with a marriage. The covenant commitment made in a wedding is a display of God’s good design in creation.

Marriage is not merely a contract. Marriage is a covenant—a lifelong commitment of faithfulness to one another before God, forsaking all others. Marriage is more than a civil union. Marriage is a spiritual union—two souls bound together in love, following God’s good design in the most intimate human relationship, reflecting the union of Christ and his church. Marriage, as a covenant, is a God-given picture of His own covenant love—the love of Christ for His bride, the church. Marriage is a picture of the gospel.¹

That gospel message begins with God’s good creation. He created man and wife in his own image for love and dominion over creation as co-heirs of vice-regents—happy and holy. Whatever happened to this beautiful reality?

Sin disrupted God’s good design for creation. God’s Word testifies to this truth, but it is evident in all of life. Sin’s curse is not only all around us in creation; it resides in us, affecting every relationship, especially marriage. Marriage is the frontline of the reality of sin. That sin comes with a cost, a price to be paid. Our debt is to our Holy Creator, and the wage of our sin is death.

Set against this backdrop of a sin-marred creation, there is good news that is being proclaimed even in a wedding ceremony. That is what gospel means: “good news.” The very same good news that the bride and groom cling to and the good news that we all need to hear is this:

Despite our sin, Christ came to redeem us, giving his life in place of our own, bearing the full penalty of our sin against a Holy God in his death on the cross so that we might know forgiveness. He provided us with the hope of eternal life and unending enjoyment of God’s goodness through his resurrection and the irrevocable seal of his Spirit that lives in all who trust in him through faith. All of this is a direct result of God’s grace, not of our own goodness, and it is for the purpose of God’s praise and glory. He is the reason we gather to celebrate a wedding.

Even now, Christ is working for the beauty and the purity of his bride, the church, by the Spirit and the truth of his Word, that he might present his bride to himself in the splendor of holiness on the day of his return.

Even now, he is calling others to himself to join in the great song of redemption by repentance and faith in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, that all who turn from sin and call on his name may celebrate and feast at the marriage supper of Christ and the Church.

I look forward to sharing that good news as my niece and her fiancée have chosen this truth as the bedrock of their love for one another. Indeed, they were chosen for this love by God’s own grace, and we will all one day stand to give an account for this testimony. I also look forward to sharing it because there will be many there to witness this moment who have yet to know this good news.

Encouragement for Today

Besides the similarities, this wedding is different because I have known the bride her whole life. My niece and I have not been close over the years with all the distance, but having seen her grow from a little child to watching her grow in her faith and now commit her life to a man who also loves the Lord is truly special to me.

My hope and prayer for my niece and her fiancée are the same as those for the other couples I have counseled: that they would honor the Lord in their life together, that they would keep Christ at the center of it all, and even at the moment that may seem to be all about them on their wedding day—and rightly so, to a degree—that it would be clear that this moment is all about Jesus. This is not only my hope and prayer for them but also for my own marriage.

For those reading this who are yet to be married or engaged, I could not stress enough the need for premarital counseling with a couple who knows and loves the Lord so that you, too, will make your wedding and your marriage all about Jesus. If you are reading this as someone already in this covenant commitment of marriage, that is my hope for you, too.

Coram Deo

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1. See Genesis 1:28–31; Ephesians 5:22-33.