Cultivating Your Marriage

Wedding season will soon be upon us, and I’m sure a lot of you will be going to weddings over the next several months. If you’re married, be sure to use this opportunity to think in terms of cultivating and preserving your marriage. If you’re not married, do what you can to support the sanctity of marriage and uphold the importance of this sacred gift and trust God has imparted to humanity.

Nanci and I will be celebrating our 39th anniversary this year. We thank God for His faithfulness and are profoundly grateful that we are each other’s best friend and love and trust each other more than we ever have.

For those with children, let me remind you that the best two gifts you can give them is that you love the Lord with all your heart, and that you love each other unreservedly. They will find security in your love. And as important as raising children is, remember too that it was your wife or husband with whom you exchanged vows. Children are entrusted to us for perhaps twenty years, what may be a third or fourth of our lives. By God’s grace, some of us will be married to our spouses for fifty years or more.

Cultivating your marriage will honor God.

Don’t make your family all about your children’s activities. Love, honor, and serve your husband or wife. Carve out time for them. Go out for dates. Do dinner and a movie. Go out of town together. Put Christ in the center of your life and conversation. Thank Him together for His goodness and kindness, not only for the big things, but also for His small daily provisions of common grace.

In a culture that glorifies selfishness and immorality, cultivate and preserve your marriage. God will be honored, and your children and grandchildren will be grateful. And people will see a signpost that points to Christ’s love for His bride (Ephesians 5).

Randy Alcorn, Eternal Perspective Ministries