What is marriage?

Last week, we discovered that the commitments we make are only good as our preparation to keep those commitments. While it is easy to make a commitment, it is much more difficult to keep that commitment. And if we do not take the time to prepare for the commitment to lasting relationships, the harsh reality is that we will not be able to keep our commitment to lasting relationships. 

And the reason why preparation matters is because, at the end of the day, we all want a relationship that lasts. At the end of the day, we all want to experience love and marriage. There is something within the heart of humanity that desires to experience the romance and relationships that are a part of the fairy tales we grew up hearing about as children. Yet, while we all desire to experience the love and marriage that we grew up watching fairy tales about, the reality is that for many people, the idea of love and marriage is more of a fantasy than a reality.

While the hearts of humanity desire and dream about love and marriage, for many of us, the reality of love and marriage is far from the fantasy we dreamed about. For many of us, the idea of love and marriage that we grew up dreaming about ended up being a nightmare that we desperately want out of. So is it possible to experience the love and marriage that grew up dreaming about? Is it possible to experience love and lasting relationships in a marriage?

For the next four weeks at the church where I serve, we are going to spend our time together addressing the issue of marriage in a sermon series entitled love and marriage. During this series, we are going to spend our time together asking and answering four questions.  During this series we are going to ask and answer the questions “What is marriage?” “Does marriage matter to Jesus?” “What is marriage for?” And “How are we to handle conflict in marriage?” And as we go through this series, our hope and our prayer is that God would move by the power of the Holy Spirit to enable us to wrap our heads, hearts, and hands around the answers to these questions in a way that result in us being able to experience the love and marriage that we were designed to experience.

This week I would like for us to spend our time together addressing the first question in this series, which is “What is marriage?”  In our culture today, the prevailing view of marriage is that marriage is a legal contract. Whether they realize it or not, most people believe and behave as though marriage is a contract. 

Now a contract is where two parties agree, by contract, to do certain things for each other, and make promises about how they will conduct their life together. In a contract, at any point in the contract, either party may choose to seek to have that contact dissolved. If either party does not like the terms of the contract, that party can dissolve the contract and look to enter into a contract with someone else.

To use a sports analogy, a person can opt out of their contract and become a free agent so as to see if they can find a better deal with better terms from someone else. This view of marriage as a contract is the dominant view of marriage in our culture today.

For others, when it comes to the question “What is marriage?” they would say that the nature of marriage simply about a sexual relationship between two people. This is an argument that I would often hear when I would talk with college-age students. The conversation would go something like this “Well Dave, we really don’t need to go through the process of getting married, because we are already married in God’s sight.” The view that the nature of marriage simply about a sexual relationship between two people is based on the belief that sexual intercourse is what constitutes marriage in the eyes of God and in some cases, the eyes of the state.

This view of marriage is advocated by those who are for what is referred to as “common law" marriage. Common law marriage, simply put, is the act of a couple representing themselves to others as being married, and organizing their relationship as if they were married, acting as the evidence that they are married.

A somewhat related and similar position is that, when it comes to the question “What is marriage?” the nature of marriage simply about a personal relationship between two people who are in love. For this group of people, being in love is what constitutes marriage. The conversation would go something like this “Well Dave, we really don’t need to go through the process of getting married, because we don’t want to end up like so many others who get married and then up getting divorced. After all, we are in love, so as far as we are concerned, we are married, and we don’t want to complicate and mess up the good thing that we have by actually getting legally married.”

But are these definitions of marriage accurate definitions of marriage? Is marriage simply a legal contract between two parties? Is marriage simply about a sexual relationship between two people? Is marriage simply about a personal relationship between two people who are in love? Or is the nature of marriage something more than these definitions of marriage?

Tomorrow, we will begin to discover the answer to these questions…