The True Bridegroom
Hosea 3:1-5
And the Lord said to me, go again, love a woman who is loved by another man and is an adulteress, even as the Lord loves the children of Israel, though they turn to other gods and love cakes of raisins. So I bought her for 15 shekels of silver and a Homer and a lethek of barley. And I said to her, you must dwell as mine for many days, you shall not play the whore or belong to another man. So will I also be to you. For the children of Israel shall dwell many days without a king or prince, without sacrifice or pillar, without ephod or household gods. Afterward, the children of Israel shall return and seek the Lord their God and David their king, and they shall come in fear to the Lord and to his goodness in the latter days. This is God’s word.
All the Hebrew prophets, of course, prophesied the coming of the Messiah. The Messiah would someday come. And, of course, Christians believe that the Messiah that they prophesied was born at Christmas. So for the few weeks we have in December, we’re going to take a look. Each week at a different one of the Hebrew prophets, look at what that prophet said about the coming Messiah. So we get prepared for the coming, as it were, of Jesus at Christmas.
And the one we’re looking at tonight is Hosea. And Hosea tells us about the one who is to come. Through the account of his messed up marriage, and especially as we begin to get into it, some of you are going to say, this is bizarre. And I would just like to urge you to be patient. There’s a pastor who was the minister at 10th Presbyterian Church in downtown Philadelphia for many years, James Boyce, once published a series of sermons on Hosea in a book. And in the book, if you go to the sermon on Hosea chapter 3, the text of Hosea 3, the name or the title of the sermon is, The Greatest Chapter in the Bible. That’s the title of the sermon on Hosea 3, The Greatest Chapter in the Bible. And maybe when we’re done, you may not think it’s the greatest chapter in the Bible, but I think you’ll see why some people do think that.
There’s three things that this text teaches us.
- First, that our relationship with God is like a marriage.
- Second, that our relationship with God is like a bad marriage.
- And thirdly, how God healed his marriage and what it cost him.
our relationship with God is like a marriage
First, our relationship with God, this text is telling us, this whole book of Hosea is telling us, is like a marriage. Notice right here at very beginning, verse 1, it says, Go to Hosea, go love a woman as I love the children of Israel. And the point of the book is that just as you, Hosea, are married, God continually says, so am I to my people. Now this is one of the main themes of the Hebrew Scriptures, Hebrew prophets in particular, I mean. So it’s in Jeremiah chapter 2, 3 and 4, it’s in Ezekiel chapter 16, it’s all through Isaiah, it’s here in the book of Hosea. And the theme is this, that you cannot understand our relationship with God strictly under the images of a king relating to subjects, or as a shepherd relating to sheep, or even as a father relating to children.
As important as those images are, and metaphors are, and they all are biblical, and they tell us something about our relationship with God, they don’t exhaust, because anyway they don’t go deep enough to really tell us everything about what God wants in a relationship with us and seeks. Rather, this passage, that theme tells us that God wants a relationship with us so intensely personally intimate, and at the same time so binding and enduring, that he says, you can’t understand me, or my love for you, or our relationship, unless you understand me as your bridegroom. It’s not enough to just understand me as your king, and your shepherd, and your father. You don’t really know what our relationship is about unless you also see me as your husband. So for example, in Isaiah 54, this is God speaking to Israel, his people, and he says this, Do not be afraid, for your maker is your husband.
Oh Israel, the Lord Almighty is his name. I will call you as if you were a wife deserted and distressed in spirit, a wife who married young, only to be rejected, says your God. The Lord will take the light in you. As a young man marries a maiden, as a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so will your God rejoice over you. Now what does that mean? What does it mean to say you don’t understand God or the relationship with God we are supposed to have unless you understand it under this heading of marriage?
Alright, for these three reasons, marriage is a relationship of priority, intimacy, and life -changing potency.
PRIORITY
So first of all, marriage is a relationship of priority. If you are married, then your relationship to your spouse and your spouse has to be the number one priority in your life. Nothing can come before it. And if you do, give it that priority. And only if you do, will the marriage be strong. But if you give it that priority, then if your marriage is strong, and everything else in your life is a mess, it doesn’t matter in a way, you move out into the world in strength. But if your marriage is weak, and everything else in your life is going fine, it doesn’t matter. Because you move out into the world in weakness. Because if you have it, marriage is the human relationship that sets the course of your life as a whole.
And so what God is saying, first of all, when He says, I’m your husband, you have to understand our relationship as a marriage, is He’s trying to say, I’m the ultimate priority. You can’t know me as an add -on. I’m not a booster to get you over the hump when you have troubles. I’m not a vitamin supplement. My relationship with you, your relationship with me, must be the number one priority of your life. Everything else is negotiable. Nothing can come before that. Everything else comes second. Everything else gets ditched for that. So marriage is a relationship of priority.
INTIMACY
Secondly, marriage is a relationship of intimacy. Marriage is the most intimate human relationship in a couple of ways. One is knowledge. It’s the relationship in which knowledge is the most intimate. You can hide stuff from your parents, about who you really are. And you can hide stuff from your children. You can hide stuff from your friends. In fact, you can hide stuff from yourself that your spouse will see. Because the relationship is so intimate. And it’s also intimate in what? In another sense, of course, of all human relationships, the depth and passion of the expressions of love are the most intimate. And so when God says, I want a relationship that is like a marriage, what he is trying to say is, you can’t know me from afar. You cannot know me formally. I have got to be in every nook and cranny of your life, every centimeter, every inch of your life. I must be there. There can’t be any part that you hold back from me. And you can’t just know about me. You have to experience my love. Whatever else our relationship is, and it is many other things, it has to be experiential. There has to be a real sense of my love on your heart. There has to be a real personal and experiential connection because we are married. And so it is a relationship of priority and secondly, it is a relationship of intimacy.
LIFE CHANGING POTENCY
But thirdly, as a result of those two, it is a relationship of life -changing potency. Your spouse, because of the nature of the relationship, because of the intimacy actually and the priority, has massive power to essentially reprogram your self -value and self -worth and self -view and actually heal you of anything. See, and here is why. If somebody in this room comes up to me and says, you are a really kind man, am I going to feel good? Sure. But I am also going to think, fooled you. You have no idea how irritable I am. I have got this kind of patient, nice pastoral demeanor that I have cultivated over the years. You know, it is good and bad. But you see, if my spouse comes up and says, you are about the kindest man I have ever met, if she would do that, if she would do that.
You can’t say, fooled you. You can’t fool your spouse on something like that. In other words, when your spouse has this unbelievable ability to affirm and heal you of anything, if he or she uses it. In other words, if your spouse tells you you are beautiful and everyone else in the world says you are ugly, you feel beautiful. Of course, if your spouse tells you you are ugly and everybody else in the world is telling you you are beautiful, you feel ugly. But your spouse has got that kind of power. Your spouse’s love and positive affirmation has that kind of power to change you and that kind of power to heal you. And if that’s the case, what in the world is God doing when he is saying, I’m not just like a husband, but like a bridegroom? In that place where he says, as a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so I rejoice over you, that’s a moment in your life. You know what he’s talking about? Some of you have been bridegrooms and you know about it. Those of you who haven’t been, you’ve seen it. That’s the moment. God is evoking the moment in which the bridegroom is standing down here and the bride comes around the corner and starts to come on down toward him and he sees her in all of her radiance and beauty, dazzling beauty and radiance. How does he feel at that point? His heart’s pounding through his chest, and he wants to sweep her up in his arms. Now, of course, it’s going to ruin the ceremony, so he doesn’t usually, but he wants to sweep her up in his arms. He wants to promise her the world, and he wants to lay down his life for her. That’s how he feels. And God has the audacity to say, you know how that is? I’m like that. The most incredible moments in the most incredible marriages in the history of the world are just dim hints of my love for you. And if you grasp that, and if you come to understand both of your mind and your heart, mind the light in you, and that kind of love in you, that will be the most life -changing potency in your life. Nothing can be more potent than that. God says, until you understand me, not just as a king, not just as a father, not just as a shepherd, but as a husband, as a bridegroom, you have no idea who I am and what we could be together. So the first thing is our relationship with God is like a marriage.
our relationship with God is like a bad marriage
Number one, number two, though, the second thing we learn in this book of Hosea and in this passage in particular is our relationship with God is like a bad marriage.
Now let’s delve into this. Verse one, Hosea says, and the Lord said to me, go again, love a woman who is loved by another man and is an adulteress. Now, here’s what’s happening. That word again refers to chapter one. It refers to the very, very beginning of the book, which also starts with God saying to Hosea, go. And here’s what happens at the beginning of the book. God does something with Hosea that on the one hand is not very startling. On the other hand is incredibly startling. On the one hand, he says to Hosea, you see this woman and he points out a particular woman, Gomor. And he says to Hosea, you see Gomor, she’s the one for you. This is the woman you were to marry. Now, on the one hand, as I just said, that’s not all that surprising. Why? Because Hosea is a prophet. This is what prophets do. They hear voices. They get revelations. God speaks to them and that’s their job. They get revelations. They hear voices. They hear God speaking and then they preach and then they prophesy and then they tell people. That’s their job. So on the one hand for God to come and say, there’s the woman. He’s a prophet. There’s the woman for you. This is the woman you were to marry. That’s not all that startling. But the next thing that God says is rather startling.
Oh, it’s really rather startling because he says, you see that woman there? This is chapter one, verse two. Go. Take her to yourself. This adulterous wife, because the land is guilty of adultery and departing from the Lord. This adulterous wife. Well, that’s a little bit more prophecy than we’d like, right? Because what God is actually saying is, this is the woman for you and I want you to know she’s going to absolutely break your heart. She’s going to trample on your heart. She’s going to betray you. She’s going to be unfaithful to you and I want you to marry her. Why? And he goes on and says, and this is in chapter one. He goes on and says, because the land is guilty, because the nation, because the people are guilty of the vilest adultery and departing from the Lord. Yet I will show love to the house of Judah and I will save them. Now here’s what’s going on from the perspective of the whole book.
Why would God say to Hosea, go marry this woman who’s going to utterly break your heart and be unfaithful to you? There’s two reasons.
One is so that God could get redemptive energy into Gomer’s life, which he most desperately needed through Hosea. But the other reason is this. God is saying to Hosea, you’re a prophet. It’s your job to understand me and know who I am so you can communicate it to other people and bring the knowledge of God into their lives and change them. This is how you’re going to become a prophet. Because you do not understand me and you don’t understand what I’m going through to love human beings. And you don’t understand sin and you don’t understand grace and you don’t understand my nature and you understand human nature until you have been through the experience of having the person you love most in the world absolutely betray you. We’ll never get to the bottom of this tonight here in this sermon. God is saying this is how you’re going to become the great prophet, a great preacher, a great communicator who’s going to be able to touch other people’s lives. You’re going to have to go through what I’m going through. So we’re told in chapter one, he did marry her. They had three children, by the way, two sons and a daughter. That’s another whole story. Maybe we’ll get back to that sometime. You know what he named the third child? The second son, the third child? Loa me. You know what it means? Not mine. because she immediately began to become unfaithful to him. And then after that, she actually left him and she went to move in with a lover and then she went with other lovers and eventually it got worse and worse and eventually, according to chapter two, she became a street walker. She became a prostitute and you say, oh my goodness, how much further could she fall? How much worse could it get? It gets worse because here in chapter three, we see, she’s for sale. She’s for sale. He said, how did that happen? Well, we’re not told, but there’s a couple of ways that could happen. First of all, it says that she’s still with a lover. See that? She’s with another man who loves, she’s with a lover. And it’s very, very possible that he has put her up for sale. Either she has fallen into debt and that’s one of the reasons why you get sold into slavery or it could be he was a pimp. And she had lost her marketability and he was cutting his losses. But it’s bad. And it’s as far down as a person could fall. And it’s as bad as it can be, it’s as broken as it can be, it’s as miserable as it can be. And so there’s Hosea’s really bad marriage. And God says that is an image of what my relationship with human beings is like. Because he says, love a woman, a woman who is loved by another man and isn’t adulterous, even as the Lord loves the children of Israel, though they turn to other gods and love the cakes of raisin. The cakes of raisins, by the way, were the delicacies that were served at the idol feasts. But when God says, you’re bad marriage, you’re betrayal, when your wife goes and puts herself in the arms of other lovers, that’s exactly what happens when I love my people and I love human beings and they put other things before me and they worship other gods before me. That’s exactly the same thing.
Now when God says that, this is one of the great themes of the Old Testament, he’s telling us two things about him and they’re really important to get.
First of all, he’s telling us, you do not understand the impact of wrongdoing on your God until you understand this image. See, when a king sees a citizen breaking a rule, that makes him angry, right? When a shepherd sees a sheep kind of straying, you know, shepherds say, you know, sheep. When a father sees a child disobeying him, that makes him angry. When the person you love most in your life is putting him or herself in the arms of another lover, that’s different and God says, until you understand that. You know, some of you have been through that. And virtually all of you know somebody pretty well who’s been through that. And there’s almost nothing like it. And yet God says, until you’ve been through that, or you know somebody who’s been through that, you don’t understand the impact of your wrongdoing and your coldness and your waywardness on me. That’s the first thing we’re learning about God.
The second thing we’re learning is you don’t understand yourself and here’s why. When you read about Gomer in chapter two, you can see that she’s out of control. She’s basically a sex addict. She’s out of control, she can’t stop herself. And when God talks about this image, when he calls to his people and say, you’re like a bride who has gone away from me, he uses the same, extremely interesting, the same way of talking. So in Jeremiah two, three and four, he says to, oh Jerusalem, he says, oh it’s so poignant, he says, I remember how as a bride you loved me, but you said, I will not serve you. Does a maiden forget her jewelry and a bride her wedding ornaments? Yet my people have forgotten me days without number. By the roadside you sat waiting for lovers, you ran after other gods until your feet were bare and your throat was dry, but you said, it’s no use, I love foreign gods, I can’t help it, I must go after them. But can the gods you made for yourselves save you when you are in trouble? What are you doing, oh devastated one, says the Lord. Why dress yourself in scarlet and put on jewels of gold? Why shade your eyes with paint? You adorn yourself in vain, for your lovers despise you and they seek your life.
Here’s what God is saying, and again, I can only say this, I can’t plumb the depths of this. What does it mean to follow another god? It means when something is more important than God in your life, if money, making money, if that turns your crank more, if that’s more important to yourself, image, and who you are, if that gives you more joy, then your relationship with God. If having children, if getting married, if being married, if your looks, if your achievements, if some great political causes, there’s anything more important than God in your life. That’s your real God, okay? That’s your real God. And here’s what God is saying. He says, you know how sex addicts are? You know something about sexual addiction? Sexual addiction is you have an inner emptiness. And because of the inner emptiness, you are driven toward the false intimacy of various sorts of sexual practices which don’t satisfy.
God has the audacity here to say that if you make anything more important than me, your career, or a good cause, or your family, or being married, or trying to get married, if you make anything more important than me, you are doing the same thing with your soul that a sex addict does with his or her body. You’re putting yourself in the arms of something. And you’ve got to have it. Because if I don’t have the money, if I don’t have the love, if I don’t have the romance, if I don’t have whatever it is that is so important to me, more important than God, you’re addicted. You’ve given yourself to it. It’s your lovers, but your lover despises you. What is he saying? He says they cannot save you. They’re just idols. They didn’t create you. I did. They can’t save you. Only I can. You’re a slave, says God. How’s your money gonna save you when you lose it, which is constantly happening? It can’t. It can only curse you with a sense of his absence. Only I can save you. If you build your life around an individual, no matter how good he or she is, what happens when they’re dead, which they will be dead?
See, your idols can’t save you. Your lovers, in a sense, seek your life. They can’t help you when your heart is broken. God says until you understand the absolute devastation of having the person you most love betray you, be unfaithful to you. You don’t understand how I feel about your way where it is and about your sin. And you don’t even understand your own heart and how addicted and enslaved you are to other things besides me that can never save you and will only drive you into the ground. So our relationship with God is like a marriage. Our relationship with God is like a bad marriage.
how God healed his marriage and what it cost him
But thirdly, we learn here how God healed his marriage and what it cost him. Let’s first see how he told Jose to do it. Verse one, and the Lord said to me, go again. She’s left him. She’s been a prostitute. She’s up for sale. And God says go again. Now what God is saying here is you have a hundred fold, you have a thousand fold. Reasons for divorce, I want you to go get her anyway. Don’t do that. Let’s go get her. And some people making a mistake right away saying, is this trying to say there’s no such thing as grounds for divorce? That no matter what, you always have to work on your marriage? No. There’s plenty of places in the Bible say there are grounds for divorce. You’re missing the point. The point of this whole thing, the poor point, and Jose are very upset with you by the way, because the only reason he’s going through this is the point to God and his salvation and to show you the nature of God and his salvation. He’s not just an inspiring example, though can you learn about how not to give up too soon? Can you learn something about how to heal a relationship? Yeah. But the whole point of Jose, and he’d be very upset if you looked at him as this inspiring example, how love conquers all. That’s not what it’s saying. It’s saying God conquers all. And God says, let’s show the world what I’m like. Go to her and so he does. And then we see how poignant first two is. And so he says, I bought her. But you know what that must mean? From what we can tell, Israel in the eighth century BC, which is when Hosea and Amos, where it was prophesying, had really decayed spiritually and culturally and was pretty much like the other pagan nations around. Therefore had adopted many, many, many of the customs of the pagan nations around it. And therefore it’s a very, very good chance. It’s most likely that this was a public auction that Hosea was being auctioned and we also know that she was either then stripped virtually naked or naked because the bidders had to see what they were getting. So she’s up for sale and the bidding starts. And it’s not hard to imagine that she probably would have had her eyes closed because it’s not much to do, but it’s about the only thing she had left to shield herself just a little bit from the moment of her greatest degradation. And so she hears the voices and she hears 10, you know, five shekels, eight shekels, and suddenly she begins to realize that one of the voices is her husband. And she’s thinking, what is he doing here? After all that I’ve done, what is he doing here? And then he goes 10, 12, 13, 15, 15 in electae, 15 in a Homer of barley, which by the way is the equivalent of about 30 shekels, which was about the average price for a slave, sold to Hosea. And he would have come up and he would have covered her nakedness with a cloak and led her away. And she must have been saying, why would he still want me? And then probably her first response is, oh, I get it. Revenge. Now you can do what you want with me. But verse three shows no. He speaks tenderly to her. This verse is very difficult to translate. I worked quite very hard on it, by the way, for you all. And every English translation makes no sense if you read it, because it’s very hard to render in a brief amount of English.
But here’s what he’s saying. I’ll just, here’s what he’s saying. Three things.
Number one, I want to dwell with you. I want to dwell with you. He says, no, I don’t want you as a slave. I want you as my wife. I want to build a home again. I want to have a life together with you. That’s the first thing.
But secondly, he says, however, for a set period of time, for many days, for a set period of time, you will have sex with no man, including me. Because the grammar actually says, no man, including me. There’s going to be a period in which we don’t sleep together. And you certainly don’t sleep with anyone else. But then the end of the verse says, but then I will indeed be yours. You know what he’s saying? He says, I want to rebuild our lives together, but there’s going to be a period here in which we don’t get together. But we do all the hard work of going back through everything that’s happened. And then I will indeed be yours. Not just you will be mine. I’m the husband here. I bought you. No, but you, I will be yours.
Derek Kidner in his commentary on Hosea says it like this. What was Hosea doing? Quote, there were the disloyal habits, years in the making that had to be broken. And there were the painful realities in the personal relationship which had to be unhurriedly explored together. You know, oh look, Hosea doesn’t have any of this naive, sentimental, oh God, we’ll just make everything okay. No, he’s paying a price. He’s already paid the financial price. And he’s probably probably paid an enormous social -cultural price when all of his friends, when everyone else in society says, what, her? After she’s been a prostitute, you’re going to take her and for your wife. So he’s paying the price financially. He’s paying the price socially, but most of all he’s paying the price emotionally. He’s basically doing what we would call today, deep emotional work. What he’s saying is, I’ve been hurt, I’ve been hurt. I can’t just climb back into bed with you. We’ve got a lot of work to do. But I’m going to pay the price so that eventually I shall be yours. And even though we don’t know, we’re not told by the text what happens, the fact that this has come down, you know, this relationship between Hosea and Gomer has come down out of that period of time as one of the great parables of God’s relationship with Israel, probably means, I believe, that it means that finally Gomer found rest in her husband’s love.
But this raises a bit of a problem, doesn’t it? The whole idea is that Hosea is an image, an analog of God. Hosea was in love, God’s in love. Hosea has been betrayed, God’s been betrayed. Hosea pays an enormous price to get her back. Where would God, wait a minute, wait a minute, where does that happen to God? Now by the way, right away, I want you to realize something. If you love a person who has no problems, and there are five or six of them in the world, and you should all immediately go after them and try to marry them and be their friend because it doesn’t take anything. To love anyone with a problem involves a substitutionary sacrifice. Oh yeah, just think about this. What if you have a friend and she’s going through a horrible time, and she just desperately needs to have somebody to talk with about her problems, she’s lonely and she’s weeping, and you know, if I go by to see her, there goes my evening, and I’m just going to be involved and it’ll make me feel bad and it’ll make me weep. Look, it’s her or you. You can have your evening, you can keep yourself emotionally, you know, untapped, and she just sinks. Or you can go by and when you’re done with the evening, she feels so much better and you feel so much worse. But that’s the way it is. That’s the way it always is. There’s no way for you to love a weak person without some of that person’s weakness coming to you and some of that your strength going to her or him. That’s just the way it works. All love of anyone with any kind of need is a form of substitutionary sacrifice. Hosea loves and shows at costs, how does God pay a price for us? See, even though this is the Hebrew Scriptures, even though this is the Old Testament, right? The book is just crying out with a question. Where does God come into the marketplace? Where does God pay the price to get his people back? And the answer is, in verses 4 and 5, it’s cryptic because it’s a prophecy, you know? And it says there’s going to be a period of time, verse 4, in which Israel kind of is away and cold and away from everything. But eventually, what does it say? In verse 5, it says, afterward the children of Israel will return and seek the Lord their God. Their relationship is healed. And David their king. David their king. Wait a minute, David’s dead. Oh, this must be a descendant of David, and it is. Because when they asked Jesus Christ in Matthew chapter 9, why don’t your disciples fast? He said, do the friends of the bridegroom fast when they’re with the bridegroom? The bridegroom? Jesus is calling himself the bridegroom. Everybody knew that the bridegroom of Israel was the Lord, the Lord himself, God. And Jesus Christ is saying, I am that bridegroom. But soon I will be taken away, and then they will fast and mourn. I’m the bridegroom, but I’ve come to die, and there’s the answer to all the riddles. In Jesus Christ, God entered the world. He entered the marketplace, and He clothed us covering our nakedness with His righteousness. Because on the cross, Jesus Christ died and paid the price to buy us away from our enslavements.
And so, you know, when God actually has the audacity to say, I’m like that bridegroom, I’m like that bridegroom, seeing the bride coming down the aisle, who wants to say, I sweep you into His arms and wants to say, I want to give you the world, and I want to lay down my life for you. I really like that bridegroom. That’s just not rhetoric, says God. In Jesus Christ, I did. I lay down my life for you. I did the thing, cosmically and visibly, that you have to do every time you try to love somebody with needs. There was a substitutionary sacrifice. Your sin, your evil, your problems came on to me so that my righteousness could be put on you. Do you understand that? Now you understand how much I love you. Now you understand my delight in you. And to the degree you understand that, and you take it into the middle of your life, that has the most life -changing potent power of anything in the world.
May I just suggest three things quick? Number one, are you suffering? Is everything going wrong in your life? Are you in the middle of a cataclysmic meltdown of everything you ever hoped? Maybe God’s making you a prophet. Maybe God’s turning you into somebody who can speak in other people’s lives. That’s how he did it, the Hosea. Number two, are you unmarried and really afraid of it? Or are you unmarried and really incredibly upset because you’re not? In other words, are you underwanting marriage or overwanting marriage? Jesus Christ looks at you and says, until you have my spousal love, until you realize that I’m the only groom, I’m the only spouse that will really satisfy the deepest resets of your heart. And our wedding day, you’re in mine at the end of time, is the only wedding day that will ever really completely fill you down to the corners. And it awaits you. Until you understand that and have my spousal love, you’re going to over want or under want marriage. Not only that, if you’re married and you don’t have Jesus’s spousal love, you’re going to be a lousy spouse. Because you’re either going to look at your spouse and make that and insist a spouse meet all your needs, all your emotional needs. Be perfect. That’s too much freight for any human being to bear. Or else you’ll just get cynical. Jesus Christ says, I’m the spouse you need and until you have me, you’ll be poorly married or poorly unmarried.
And last of all, do you really, really, really have Jesus in your life? As your spouse? Or is he just a kind of boss? If you want the experience of his love on your life for that life changing potency, then what you have to do is make your vow. or remake your vows. That’s what the Lord’s supper is. It’s basically renewal of your marriage vows. Say, I, believer, take you, Lord, to be my savior, my wedded savior. And I do promise and covenant before God and these witnesses to give you my all. He’s already given you His. Let’s pray.
Our Father, thank you for this time to renew our vows and to realize how you poured yourself out for us. And we thank you that you are our beautiful savior. You are our Lord. You are our spouse. You’re the prince of our souls. And unless we have you and have your spouse of love, we will be poorly. We will be unmarried poorly. It would be married poorly. And we ask that you would help us to just rejoice in what you’ve done for us and your love for us tonight as we pray this in Jesus’ name.