[Wisdom of Solomon] Keys to a Lasting Loveনমুনা

Happily Ever After

Growing up, you may have read fairy tales or watched animated movies that always had a happy ending. He got the girl, she got her prince charming, the frog was kissed, or two long lost loves found each other again. Regardless of how a story or movie ended, it wasn’t your story or the story told by many other people. Many marriages have ended in divorce. For a lot of people, “happily ever after” is actually a fairy tale. At the same time, though, we do see couples married for seventy-plus years. We see happy marriages with lasting love. How do we get that? How do we build a foundation in our marriages that will lead to lasting love? This doesn’t mean there won’t be trials or hard times, but that in the middle of difficult moments there are biblical keys, founded upon Jesus, that can keep lasting love alive. These keys remind us of all Jesus has done and continues to do for us, giving us the motivation to love others the way we have been loved by Him.

In a world full of the debris of broken homes, crushed spirits, and fractured dreams, God’s people need the message of Song of Solomon as never before. The Song is a righteous antidote to a licentious society that has prostituted the nature of human love. Hope exudes from its pages. If ever a book was written with a message for today’s generation, Solomon’s ode is that book. We need to hear it because there’s so much confusion today about intimacy, marriage, and relationships. Solomon’s account helps us to realize God has given us an entire book of the Bible dedicated to guiding us to understand God’s plan for marriage and intimacy. God wants us to see the beauty of His ways, the beauty of Him ordaining the sanctity of a marriage between a man and wife. This is the template God gives us.

Wherever you are today, I cannot promise that everything in your relationship will be fixed in a moment. However, I can show you, through the Song of Solomon, what God intended for marriage, what sin ruined, and how God is key to reconciling and redeeming all that is lost. Fairy tale endings are simply part of fairy tales, nice ideas, but when we submit to God’s template and His ways, we get God’s ending for our story, an ending filled with the hope and joy of our salvation. Lasting love must be rooted in what Jesus did for us.