A brief reflection on twenty years

When I was young and foolish, I remember thinking that someone who was capable of thinking in terms of decades (“Ten years ago, I….”) must have reached the status of “old.”  Our perception of the relative length of a year varies inversely with the number of years we’ve had on this earth. Truly, the older you get the quicker time flies.

On Wednesday, my husband and I will celebrate twenty years of marriage.  Such a momentous occasion, so intensely personal, has of late increased my daily reflections upon marriage, and particularly, on the God of marriage.  With the recent attacks on this sacred institution by our deepeningly evil society comes a tighter grasp of true Christians onto the foundations we hold so dear and valuable.  Why did God design marriage, anyway? There is obviously more than one correct answer to that question. But my favorite answer is found in Ephesians 5.  Our marriages are to be a display of the type of relationship God seeks with his beloved chosen people. And as Paul describes the results of a Spirit controlled life as seen in the life of a believer, he utters this nearly incomprehensible command, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church…..” As Christ loved the church?

How can one do justice to a discussion of the love of God? How can one even come close in imitating this vast, overflowing, all-consuming love?

One of my favorite words in Scripture is a depictor of God’s love.  The term hesed, often translated lovingkindness, can also be translated as steadfast covenant loyalty.  Just one aspect of the love of God is our understanding that he is always there.  This promise is an unfathomable concept in an ever-changing world.  My soul is wrapped in the ties of his faithfulness, and bound securely as an anchor to the mercy seat. There an immutable God sees his precious Son, then turns his gaze upon me in love.  And He can’t change! He has to love me. And He wants to love me….

When your father and mother forsake you, then the Lord will take you up.

I will never leave you, nor forsake you.

Nothing will separate you from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus your Lord.

These amazing, precious promises, held onto by believers for centuries and millennia, separate Christianity from every man made religion.  I am a child of God, always and only because he loves me.  And that will never, ever change.

For twenty years, my husband has displayed that kind of love to me in our marriage.  Now there’s something worth celebrating.

“Jesus, friend of sinners
Loved me ’ere I knew Him
Drew me with His cords of love
Tightly bound me to Him
’Round my heart still closely twined
The ties that none can sever
For I am His and He is mine
Forever and forever.”

His Forever, Sovereign Grace Music, 2003