Pastor Ryan Biese (now of First PCA in Fort Oglethorpe, GA gave this homily at my wedding in August 2015. It was his first wedding homily, and it is an encouragement to me to this day.

Let us pray as we come to consider what God’s Word teaches us about marriage. Let’s pray.

Almighty God, bless us in these next few moments as we come to consider Your Word, for it is You who created marriage. And so we pray that You, by Your Holy Spirit, will nourish our souls as we come to consider what You say about it. Bless us. Open Your Word to us. Enable us to read it, mark it, and digest it for Jesus’ sake. Amen.

Marriage brings a complete reorientation of life and relationships. Each of you begins something new. You leave the old and you become one flesh as a new family today. And that’s something your extended family needs to remember, that you are now a family.

Now, Jesus, through his apostles, has instructed us how the Christian husband and wife are to build their new family. Marriage, after all, is a picture of the gospel and of the new creation. One day, the Lord Jesus will return and make all things known. He will make his reign to be seen. All things will be in submission to Him. But even now, marriage is a picture and a foretaste displaying the beauty of the eternal marriage between Christ and His church.

And so here are three commands, three charges to the two of you to that end.

1. You must love Christ more than you love each other.
2. You must love each other more than you love yourself.
3. You must live and love the gospel of Jesus together.

You Must Love Jesus More Than You Love Each Other

So first, here from John chapter 15, Jesus says, “I am the true vine. Abide in me and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit. For apart from me, you can do nothing.”

So you must love Jesus more than you love yourself. Now, at first, perhaps that sounds counterintuitive. Aren’t you supposed to love your spouse more than anything? Well, yes, more than any created thing. But many marriages have failed, and even more marriages have encountered trouble because one spouse or the other makes an idol of the other’s spouse. And you know, the trouble with idols is they always disappoint.

Only in Christ, only by finding your chief and highest joy in Jesus, will you be able to find the maximum delight and joy in each other. So, the Lord Jesus Christ must be the source of the love and the delight of everything good in your marriage. Jesus says, “Abide in me.” What does it mean? Abide that conveys permanency, contentment, and residence to remain somewhere. Jesus illustrates what he means when he says abide. He says, as a branch abides in a vine or tree, so you must draw your strength, your power, your vitality, your very life itself from Jesus in this marriage.

Because Jesus says you can bear no fruit unless you abide in him. So if you do not abide in Christ, you will not be able to love each other well enough. You know, it’s not wrong to lust after your wife, after your husband, but you can’t maintain a marriage just based on lust. You’ll get tired of each other, I promise you. If that’s all your marriage is, you will get tired of each other. But if your marriage is built on love that flows from the Lord Jesus Christ, your marriage will endure and last.

So how do you abide in Christ? Well, first of all, Christ abides in you. You throw off everything else, and you cling to the Lord Jesus Christ. You turn from sin and you embrace Jesus as He is offered in the gospel. And He saves you out of His grace, not because you’ve clung to him hard enough or because you’ve done things well enough, but because he is gracious to those who repent.

But you also are not totally passive in abiding in Christ. You look to His Word. You read His Word. You study His Word. You are brought to conviction of sin by reading His Word. You also pray. You implore His favor. You seek His blessing and His sanctifying spirit. Don’t be satisfied in this marriage just with public worship, just with family worship, but don’t neglect private worship yourself. Even as you become one flesh. Because you can’t love Maggie enough, you can’t love Tim enough, if you do not abide in Christ.

You Must Love Each Other More Than You Love Yourself

So you must love Jesus more than you love yourself, but you must also love each other more than you love yourself. Marriage, Christian marriage, is not what American culture conceives of as marriage at all. In this culture, people get married because they find someone who makes them happy, who simply fulfills a need that they have. But Christian marriage is not merely that.

When two Christians come together, it brings a total, profound, fundamental change in every aspect of your lifestyle. Tim, you have been single for a very long time. Maggie, not so long. Now, as a single person, you are accustomed to getting what you want, your own way, but now you must think of and live for, first, before yourself, another mere, flawed, human, mortal sinner.

You must have the other person in your mind before yourself. Even up till now, you’ve had breaks from each other. You’ve been able to function independently. But that independence ends today. And yet today begins a day of freedom to live for each other. And so that living for each other can generally be called love.

But while it’s generally called love, the love of a married couple, of husband and wife for each other, has specific applications for each of you. The Bible tells us that Jesus, in His Word, describes for us what the love of a husband and a wife for each other is to look like. Husbands and wives are different. Husbands and wives have different roles in a marriage.

Maggie, for you, this takes the form of submission, of obedience to your husband. Tim, that love for Maggie takes the form of limitless, prodigal, self-sacrificing love for her. Maggie, Paul writes this in Ephesians 5:

Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now, as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.

Husbands and wives in a Christian marriage express the different aspects of the relationship between Christ and His church, His people, His bride. In your marriage, Maggie, you have the privilege of illustrating for your friends, for your family, for your neighbors, the beautiful way in which the believer responds to the love of the Lord Jesus Christ with deep, joyful submission. The wife’s role is one of submission, because the husband is called by God to be the head of the wife, just as Christ is the head of the church.

God made marriage this way. It’s not because of any inherent inferiority that the wife submits to her husband, but rather that’s the way God designed marriage to work. And remember, there’s nothing ignoble about submission, because after all, it was the submission of the Lord Jesus Christ to the will of the Father that purchased your salvation and mine. So the way in which you submit to Tim, Maggie, Paul describes as like the way the church submits to Jesus in everything. For your good, because he loves you and you love him and he seeks your good. Paul is calling, Jesus is commanding here in marriage, glad, wholehearted submission by the wife to her husband. As for the question every bride must answer, Do I want this man for my husband? Will it be a long-term blessing for the kingdom of God for me to submit to him?

Tim, Paul writes this for you. “Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word so that he might present the church to himself in splendor without spot or wrinkle or any such thing that she might be holy and without blemish.”

Maggie’s role in this marriage is one of loving, wholehearted submission to you as the church to Christ. But Tim, your role in this marriage is much more difficult, much more demanding. Paul says, “Husbands, love your wives.” And if he had just stopped there, it’d be easy. As long as you remembered her birthday and got her flowers on her anniversary and chocolate and all those things, you’d be a good Christian husband. But Paul kept writing. The Spirit of Christ kept speaking. Paul describes, Tim, how you are to love Maggie. You are to love your wife as much as and in the same way as Jesus loves the church.

Sinclair Ferguson says, “The model and measure of the husband’s love is Jesus Christ.” So you see, you can’t begin to love Maggie rightly if you don’t abide in Christ as a branch to a vine. Tim, as a husband, you must commit yourself to blessing Maggie. The love that you show to Maggie must be sacrificial. It doesn’t shrink back from pain and discomfort or even dying for her. The love that Jesus showed for the church is that he put the needs of the church, his bride, above his own needs, even while his people were not submitting to him.

Tim, that is the caliber, the quality, the kind of love that you must have for Maggie. Not just have for her, but lavish upon her. Because that is the kind of love that Jesus has shown to you. Did you ever think the Lord Jesus would provide you with a wife who loves you so deeply? Look at how the Lord Jesus has provided for you your salvation, your joy, your comfort, because He loves you. Well, you were called to love your wife in that way.

You Must Live and Love the Gospel of Jesus Christ Together

So you must love each other more than you love yourself. You must love Jesus more than you love each other. You must live and love the gospel of Jesus Christ together. A Christian marriage is not easy. Paul spends a lot of time describing marriage in Ephesians 5 because marriage has been under attack since the very beginning. You remember in the Garden of Eden, think back to Genesis 2. Adam meets his wife for the first time, and what does he say? He says, “You are bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.” He says, “You complete me.” You’re fit perfectly for me. Do you think later that day in Genesis 3, what does Adam say about his wife then? “The woman whom you gave me.” Total difference.

Marriage is under attack. It’s not easy. Maggie, when you do not submit to your husband as the church submits to Christ, you’re sinning. But, you know, Tim is not Jesus. Tim is not always going to be loving you and serving you and seeing first to your needs. Look at Tim. He’s a big sinner.

Just think, Tim, when you are not loving your wife as Christ loves the church, you are sinning. Tim, you will go to bed every night having failed. You will go to bed every night as a sinner, having sinfully and selfishly not loved your wife as much as she ought to be loved. Tim and Maggie, you can never live up to the command and the design of God for your marriage.

And how you respond to your failures, your sin, gives you the opportunity to display the beauty of the gospel for each other and to each other. Tim, Maggie, every day, your marriage will show you just how much you need Jesus, just how beautiful the gospel is. Maggie, sometimes you are going to struggle to submit to Tim as you should. Tim, all the time, you are going to fall short of the love that you owe to your wife.

But when you realize that and when you come to terms with that in Christ, when you repent to each other, when you forgive each other, and when you seek the mercy of Christ because you failed Him, you will see the beauty of the Savior all the more, because neither of you are perfect, but Jesus still loves you.

And your children, your neighbors, will see what happens when two sinners forgive each other, because they know that the love that is most important to them, the love of Jesus, doesn’t come because they’ve been good enough, or done enough, but comes in spite of what they deserve and because of God’s grace to all who repent.

And if that is fueling your marriage, your marriage will be a light to the world. Your marriage is a witness to the grace of Christ on which it is based. When you, Tim, love your wife on the model of Christ’s love for the church, and when you, Maggie, love and submit to your husband in the joy and the heart that expresses the Christian submission to Christ. One author says that this light shines, fills the home, and spills out into the neighborhood. Your children will see that love. Your family will see that love. Your neighbors will see it. And at the very least, the love that you have for each other will strike them as odd. But by God’s grace, it will dumbfound them. And it will lead them to ask you, “What is the reason for the hope and the love and the joy that is within you?” And they will take hold of you and say, “Let me go with you, for it is clear that God is with you.” And you will lead them to your Savior, who loved you and gave himself for you.