A Wedding Homily Part 2: The Cure for Fruit-Constipation

[This is part two in a series of posts from a wedding homily I gave over the weekend. If you missed part 1, you missed the set-up! Scroll down a bit and check that out first.]

We’re here to worship Jesus, we’re celebrating the two of you. It’s a subtle but important distinction.

This reality is a great gift to each of you individually and to your marriage. We worship Jesus because your life together and your marriage is too great a thing to be built on the fickleness and arbitrary-ness of human love.

Your marriage is too profound, too wonderful a thing to be left to your own devices to figure out.

And so you’ve chosen a great passage for today’s ceremony—John 15 where Jesus invites us: “abide in me and let me abide in you!” And as we do so, there’s a tremendous promise: if you abide in me, you’ll bear much fruit—fruit that will last.

In the Scriptures, love is not primarily about our emotions and it’s not even primarily about our decisions, even though both emotions and decisions are required as a part of it

In the Scriptures, love is a fruit of the Spirit, it is the work of God. And it happens not as we try harder but as we abide in Christ

Branches do not have to TRY to bear fruit because fruit-bearing is very simple: a branch that stays attached the vine bears fruit. If it doesn’t stay attached to the vine, it withers and dies. If you find in your life that you are fruit-constipated, perhaps it is because you are abiding-deficient.

The good news about marriage is that it is a gift!

And part of that gift is that marriage becomes one of the primary ways that God will shape both of your characters for the rest of your lives—marriage is one venue that the Lord uses to teach us to abide in him and trust in him to shape our souls

Sometimes that will be a welcome shaping, sometimes it will be a little less welcome! And sometimes, honestly, it will feel literally like death—because it is death.

There are things about each of you that needs to die, that need to be pruned as it talks about in John 15—the Father is a good gardener, he prunes us so that we’ll bear more fruit. He often uses people to do that--our spouses most of all.

And putting things to death, while it's a good thing, can be extremely, extremely painful.