There are many views of marriage, even among Christians.  The world thinks intimate relationships are based on physical relationships.  Less physically minded people think, more wisely they suppose, that marriage is built on love.  Of course there are some who think compatibility, whether financial, social, or in personality is the key.  Compatibility is important, but people are about as compatible as they decide to be.  There are some who are in love with themselves that look for someone just like themselves and call it compatibility.  None of these is a suitable foundation for a Biblical marriage.  The marriage that honors God is based on commitment.

Wedding celebrations are including more and more activities to show how much the couple has in common, how they fell in love and what they did on dates.  Guests love the sweetness of the romance as much as they love the icing on the cake.  But the “meat and potatoes” of the marriage is in the vows.  They don’t say, “I love you,” but “I will love you.”  The shallowness of commitment is often seen when the couple are only able to enjoy the “richer, and healthy, and better” part but not the “poorer, sicker, and worse” part to which they committed themselves.

Marriage is a covenant, “a binding and solemn agreement made… to do or keep from doing a specified thing,” according to Webster.  A popular safeguard these days is the so-called “pre-nuptial agreement”—the contract before the wedding—where the lawyers make the deal and then they meet with the preacher for the pictures.  That characterizes the heart of Christian marriages sometimes.  When people have the attitude, “Here is what you are not going to do to me,” instead of “here is what I’m going to do for you,” the results are what we see.  If you want a Christ-honoring marriage, commitment is the key.