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Day 8

Pastor Toby Cavanaugh

Topic: Strengthening of Marriages

Scripture Reference: Ephesians 5:31–32

Devotional:

To understand why we should pray for the strengthening of marriages, we first have to understand what God’s purpose was for creating marriage. Do you remember that scene in The Little Mermaid where Ariel comes to the seagull, Scuttle, with a bag of human objects she found in a shipwreck? She pulls out a fork and asks him what it is. “This,” he declares, “is a Dinglehopper! Humans use these to straighten their hair out.” And he teaches Ariel to use it to comb her hair.

If you misunderstand the purpose of a fork and use it to comb your hair, you are going to get subpar results and miss out on its best function. It is the same with marriage. If we misunderstand God’s purpose in why He ordained marriage at the beginning, we will miss out on its greatest benefits.

At creation, where God declares everything good, He sees one thing that is not good—that the man He created is alone. And so God creates a partner for him, a woman. And then God Himself declares over them in Genesis 2:24, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (ESV). And in that declaration at the beginning of human history, God ordains that marriage has a unique purpose of providing a source of love, companionship, and partnership for humans.

But later, the Bible reveals a deeper purpose still. In Ephesians 5:31, Paul quotes that declaration from Genesis 2:24 and then says, “This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:32). And in one sentence, Paul reveals that, when God ordained marriage at the dawn of creation, those words gave reference to something deeper than marriage. As deep as His plans were for the role marriage would play in human history, they were actually a picture of something deeper still.

Embedded into the most fundamental fabric of human experience, entwined with the deepest desires of the human heart, God gave us marriage in its ideal form as a picture of the love relationship He wants with the people He created. The best moments of marriage—that love, that intimacy, that connection, that fire, that longing, that friendship—are only a shadow of how God loves you and wants you to love Him.

So marriage is actually a picture, a piece of art, that God has painted over a thousand generations across every culture to display to billions His love for every person. He painted His masterpiece in the most visible place, within the thing that would inspire the songs and stories of centuries, within the feelings that would make your heart flutter, because He wanted everybody to see and feel it.

That is why marriage is under such attack in our world today. Our enemy would do anything to mar the masterpiece that declares God’s love to billions. That is why we must pray for the strengthening of marriage. We contend for strong marriages, not only for the families that are impacted by them, but that God’s love would be more accurately and more powerfully displayed to a world that desperately needs to know it.

Father, I pray for the strengthening of my marriage and the marriages around me. And I also pray for the strengthening of marriage so that our world will have a clear picture of Your limitless love.