Sunday quotes -- seventh commandment

The message, "The Honor of Marriage", is here.

“Do you take this woman to be your wife, to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of matrimony? Will you love and cherish her, honor and keep her, in sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer, for better, for worse, in sadness and in joy, and forsaking all others, keep yourself only unto her as long as you both shall live?”

“It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing to a young bride and groom from his prison cell in Nazi Germany in 1943.)

When Billy Graham was asked his secret of love, being married fifty-four years to the same person, he said, "Ruth and I are happily incompatible." His wife, Ruth Bell, said this about marriage: “A good marriage is the union of two good forgivers.”

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The opening of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1877) Sexual freedom is not a new, enlightened idea (see Romans 1) Anna Karenina ends, some 1700 pages later, like Ecclesiastes… ‘Yes, the one unmistakable, incontestable manifestation of the Divinity is the law of right and wrong, which has come into the world by revelation, and which I feel in myself, and in the recognition of which—I don’t make myself, but whether I will or not—I am made one with other men in one body of believers, which is called the church."

Ultimately it's about God himself. He is saying "Be like Me!"...

"Know therefore that the LORD your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love…" (Deuteronomy 7:9)

“'Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.' This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church." (Ephesians 5:31-32)

"I will never leave you or forsake you." (Joshua 1:5; Deut. 31:6; 1 Chron 28:20; Heb 13:5)

"His love endures forever." (Psalm 118 et al)

Finally, two excerpts from Wallerstein's landmark work, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce. ...

“Children in postdivorce families do not, on the whole, look happier, healthier, or more well adjusted even if one or both parents are happier. National studies show that children from divorced and remarried families are more aggressive toward their parents and teachers. They experience more depression, have more learning difficulties, and suffer from more problems with peers than children from intact families. Children from divorced and remarried families are two to three times more likely to be referred for psychological help at school than their peers from intact families. More of them end up in mental health clinics and hospital settings. There is earlier sexual activity, more children born out of wedlock, less marriage, and more divorce. Numerous studies show that adult children of divorce have more psychological problems than those raised in intact marriages.” (page xxix)

“But it’s in adulthood that children of divorce suffer the most. The impact of divorce hits them most cruelly as they go in search of love, sexual intimacy, and commitment. Their lack of inner images of a man and a woman in a stable relationship and their memories of their parents’ failure to sustain the marriage badly hobbles their search, leading them to heartbreak and even despair. They cried, ‘No one taught me.’ They complain bitterly that they fell unprepared for adult relationships and that they have never seen a ‘man and woman on the same beam,’ that they have no good models on which to build their hopes. And indeed they have a very hard time formulating even simple ideas about the kind of person they’re looking for. Many end up with unsuitable or very troubled partners in relationships that were doomed from the start.” (p. 299-300)