Marriage Matters

Grab

Recall and share with your spouse the favorite moment you have during your wedding day.

Grace

“But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female. For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother [and be joined to his wife], and the two shall become one flesh.’ So, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, no human being must separate.” - Mark 10:6-9

God’s plan for a particular family starts when He calls a man and a woman and joins them together in Christian marriage. The man and the woman become one flesh, joined together in an indissoluble union. 

Many marriages break up because one or both spouses have not learned to love their calling according to the ways of the one who called them in this vocation. They choose to live a life of pride, selfishness, and indifference. Due to the challenges faced by couples nowadays they need to look at their marriage in a whole new way and understand what a marriage relationship ought to be.

Let us look at three important truths about Christian Marriage:

1. Commitment not Feelings

Christian marriage ought to be based not on feelings but on a commitment, that transcends feelings. Romantic love is an important element in marriage, but love based simply on feelings will diminish completely as the years go on. Marriage intended by God to last and endure is based on commitment – through thick and thin, for better or worse, in good times and in bad.

2. Selfless Service

We do not enter a marriage simply to gratify ourselves or to have our needs met. The call to the vocation of marriage is a call to love and serve our spouse. Marriage entails humility and dying to oneself. Is it possible to selflessly serve our spouses? Yes absolutely. It is possible when we do it for our perfect and lovable God rather than for our imperfect and sometimes hard-to-love spouse.

3. Love Triangle

Christian marriage is not just a relationship between two persons but three. It is a three-way relationship involving the husband, wife, and God. Without God, a relationship of humility and dying to oneself is now impossible. Christian marriage is God’s invention. It is the Holy Trinity alone who can make marriage works.

Christian marriage is unlike any other relationship. It is a very special relationship established by God himself. As such, there are certain realities that are part and parcel of marriage. It will only work well, according to God’s design.

Today many evil forces are doing everything in destroying marriages. One of which is cohabitation. “Cohabitations are commonly referred to as “living together.” It describes the relationship of a man and woman who are sexually active and share a household, though they are not married.

Every act of sexual intercourse is intended by God to express love, commitment, and openness to life in the total gift of the spouses to each other. Sexual intercourse outside of marriage cannot express what God intended. Rather, it says something false–a total commitment that the couple does not yet have. Our catechism stresses that human love is not compatible with “trial marriages.” Rather, “it demands a total and definitive gift of persons to one another.”

Gather

How can I concretely deepen my marriage commitment to my spouse?  

Go Forth

Make a couple of selfies with your spouse and post them on your Facebook account and make the caption and hashtag like this: 

I Love You so much, ____________! Today I will commit myself to love you for better or worse, in sickness or in health, till death do us part!#MarriageMatters #MissionaryFamiliesofChrist #TruthSeries

Give

God is Generous and in response, let us be good stewards by consistent Spiritual Giving, our tithing. 

For Tithes Remittance of NCR Members: bit.ly/mfctithes