Quotes on “Preparing for Marriage”

Quotes on “Preparing for Marriage”

Often the female is infatuated with a “wedding” more than a marriage. The wedding is the ultimate showcase and the relationship then quickly subsides afterwards. Beware young men on this one! (Delores Stone)

• Snared by the $40 billion wedding industry machinery, brides and their relatives are mauled and squeezed until they come up with a sum large enough to buy a small car or two. “The belief attached is that if I spend hand over fist —if everything’s perfect —we’ll have a great day and a great marriage,” said Sheryl Paul Nissinen, a bridal counselor in Los Angeles and author of “The Conscious Bride: Women Unveil Their True Feelings about Getting Hitched” (New Harbinger Publications). But future brides certainly know that dress designers, florists, caterers and others in the matrimonial bazaar are playing upon their deepest, most childish fairy-tale dreams. That’s not the problem.

The trouble is that they like the fairy tale.In fact, they adore everything about it, especially the glass slipper that fits their foot and theirs alone. Is it so terrible to want to suspend reality in favor of magic for one day, as long as you promise to don your sensible shoes the next day? I don’t think so. But it’s terribly tricky because a wedding is a fantasy magnet. The fantasy may start with a single desire —to look beautiful or to marry in a spectacular church. Then, before you know it, you’re expecting every element and every person involved to conform to an astonishingly detailed blueprint called “My Wedding Day.” The diagram seems to have been drawn secretly by your brain. (From: Smartmarriages.com Subject: Putting Your Wedding on a Pedestal)

• So many celebrate the wedding by putting forth months and months of work ahead of time into planning for and preparing for this sacred event. And it’s good that couples hold the wedding ceremony as something of honorable esteem to be celebrated. It’s a sacred God-honoring event. And then after the wedding ceremony there’s an immediate wedding reception held in celebration. Also, so much work is put forth ahead of time so the reception is a true celebration, which is also good —it’s a joyous time to enjoy with all those that witnessed the marriage of two individuals who have pledged to now promised to “love, honor, and cherish each other, until death parts them”

But what about the marriage? What work and effort is put forth ahead of time to prepare for the marriage that’s about to begin after the wedding celebration? We contend that the most important aspect of all that the wedding represents is too often neglected ahead of time. The wedding ceremony commemorates the first day of a life-long journey that needs to be diligently prepared for in advance. This is to insure that the love and honor the marrying couple is pledging in covenant with one another and with God, starts off with their best foot forward.

From that day forward for the rest of their lives, a new life together as husband and wife begins —set forth as a team, with God and for God. For the act of marriage is ALL ABOUT GOD. It’s not about us —we get that so twisted around. It’s all about God. We miss the “mission of marriage.” (Cindy Wright)

• FOR THOSE CONSIDERING MARRIAGE: There has to be a theological unity. You and your future husband, you and your future wife, have to be on the same page on who God is, because He is your reference point for how you act, for how you perceive the universe, for how you perceive man, children, everything is your perception of God. They don’t simply have to be a Christian, but they have to line up on the major particulars. If you are an evangelical, and you see it in a certain way, and you marry a charismatic, you’re going to have some struggles, but major league, if you marry a non-believer, you don’t even interpret the universe the same —in marriage or morality.

…There’s not a one of you, under the heat of longing for marriage that can set aside what you know to be true and marry a non-believer. I can give you names, events, and dates where I’ve seen it happen. Being single and being alone is a struggle. …It’s tough to be single, to be lonely. I’ll tell you what’s tougher is to be married and be lonely. To be lonely in a king-size bed with a person there that you cannot relate to is a major issue. When you are single, there is light at the end of your tunnel but it’s the providence and the timing of God. (Tommy Nelson, from Familylife.com broadcast:Essentials -Part 1 of 2)

• FOR THOSE CONSIDERING MARRIAGE: There has to be a moral unity, meaning that they can’t merely both be Christians. They both must be under the auspices of the Lordship of Jesus Christ. If you have a man that takes his dictum’s from his flesh —even though he can recite the Gospel and give the time of his testimony, we’ve got a problem. There has to be a moral unity, a North Star that doesn’t move.