to love, honor and obey??? pppfftttt… yeah right…

The original wedding vows, as printed in The Book of Common Prayer, are:

Groom: I,____, take thee,_____, to my lawful wedded Wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part,

Bride: I,_____, take thee,_____, to my lawful wedded Husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love, cherish, and to obey, till death us do part,

to love, honor and obey??? pppfftttt… yeah right… who put THAT in there? I am NOT saying OBEY….. <— this was my reaction to reading the above and what I demanded every time I got married (this isn’t my first rodeo…or his…).

And you know what? Every time, the pastor or person officiating the ceremony took it out for me.

Just like that. As if those words didn’t matter.

and therein lies the beginning of the problem.

The words didn’t matter.

But they do matter… they matter more than you can imagine.

I am going to get into great detail about a lot of this later in the week, but for today, I need you to know my story so you an understand the reason God has called me to write this series at this time. My story will be written out as the month progresses, but this is how it began…

We took ‘obey’ out of our vows as I demanded, and as a result of creating a marriage based outside of the parameters God set in place, is that eventually I stopped listening to him altogether.

Because I didn’t have to obey.

And over time, that morphed to:
I don’t have to listen to you.
You don’t know what you’re talking about.
Why would you even bring that up?
Who do you think you’re talking to?

I lost respect for him, because I never bothered to trust God enough to obey my husband.

And once you lose respect for your husbands, ladies, the downhill spiral happens very, very quickly. They feel the loss of respect and they cannot, and will not function as godly husbands without it. They can’t…it’s how they’re made.

So, it starts, and ends with us, wives.

If we want a godly marriage, we have to begin by actually trusting God with our marriage. He initiated ‘and to obey’ when he told wives to submit to their husbands. We’re going to talk a whole lot about the word submit and what it really really means. But for today, ladies, think about this – why would God ask us to submit to our husbands if it was a terrible thing to do?

LORD, we come before you today, as a group who wants needs a better marriage, a Godly marriage, a marriage dependent and sustained by you alone. Lord, as we go through this series, I pray for open hearts and open minds for the hard hard line that you take on marriage and how, in the end, the entire world depends on the covenant of marriage. Lord, bend us to your will.