The modern day fairy-tale 

Pastor Anna Button | 5th of May, 2021

Photo by Brooke Cagle from StockSnap

Marriage was never intended to be a modern day fairy-tale, happy-ever-after life that gives us purpose and meaning, with an out-clause if things do not work out, giving us the freedom to skip out and start again. The problem with this idea is that we begin the cycle again. We find ourselves doing the same thing over and over agin, expecting a different result.    

So, what is marriage for? What was its original intended purpose? God instituted marriage, and He did not intend for it to be a fairy-tale existence. I believe God intended marriage to be the joining of a man and a woman together, where nothing but death could part the two. Not someone outside the marriage, and certainly not someone inside the marriage! When one makes a mistake, the other says, “I know you are not perfect as I am not perfect, therefore I choose to forgive you so that we can move forward together, learning and growing with and from each other.”  

God’s intention from the very beginning was that we, in our marriages, show our children, our family, our friends, our relatives, the wider community and our society in general, what God can do with two people who are willing to forgive each other, love one another, and continue a journey together despite the hardships and failures. As we do this, as we model this type of marriage, we model what God does with humanity to our communities, to our society. As we forgive our spouse when they hurt us, or betray us, or sin against us, as we continue to admit that they are not perfect and neither are we, that no one person could ever be the ‘knight in shining armour,’ (because that is not the reason or the meaning of marriage anyway), we model what God does for us individually. We model what God has done to a lost, hurting, and broken world. In a marriage between a man and a woman, the two can model this life together as no other two people on earth could ever do. This is the meaning of marriage. This is what we should be looking for as we search for a life partner. Someone that God puts in our path, to help us learn from each other, to help us teach each other, and to help us forgive each other, thereby modelling what God has done for us, for humanity.  

For more information, I encourage you to read Timothy Keller’s ‘The Meaning of Marriage.’ 

Be blessed,  

Pastor Anna Xx