A 50th Wedding Anniversary Celebration

Paul Levy recently posted an article at Reformation21 on the topic of ministers who lose their ministries through sexual sin, but a paragraph caught my eye: “Sex within marriage is God's answer to immorality”:

Love the wife of your youth. Work hard at your marriage. Don’t be dumb enough to neglect this. As men we should be far more brutal in battering one another when we see we’re neglecting our marriages. Spend time together. Don’t just do things like going to the cinema or watching a dvd which means you don’t communicate. My advice to folk in marriage is go to the pub and go there often. The reason being is that there’s nothing you can do in the pub apart from talk, even playing darts or pool you still have to talk. I realise in America you don’t have pubs, you just have bars with 1000’s of TV’s playing basketball and American football and men and women in suits who all look the same discussing trivia. In the US you’ll just need to find somewhere else to go. Sex within marriage is God’s answer to immorality, and so Christians need to work really hard at having good sex lives. In all cases of marital breakdown that I’ve faced this is the area which was cited first.

The flip side of sexual immorality is to be engaged in a life-long marriage. “Love the wife of your youth”, all through a long life, because it is God’s creational plan for a man and a woman.

I was able to see the fruit of that – and its opposite yesterday, as I went to a “50th Wedding Anniversary” party for my aunt and uncle. They invited several hundreds of guests to take part in this tremendous witness of a lifetime, and such an event is a great witness to our world today. Among the guests were those who had an eye on a similar goal, along with a very large number of relatives who would never be able to celebrate such an event, including those who had lost spouses to death, and those who had undergone divorces and remarriage.

God’s plan is a life-long marriage, and it is one of the benefits to observing Gods’ laws.

For my part, I had a tremendous opportunity to enjoy much good conversation, wonderful food and drink, to dance with my wife and daughters, to talk with them about the pure goodness of God’s plans (even when they seem inconvenient), and to come home to an amorous wife who, after 26+ years of marriage and a bout of leukemia, has maybe not much hope of seeing a 50th wedding anniversary, but the understanding that God can and does provide such gifts to people.