Musing
My prayer for Luke and Lydia on their wedding day
A prayer for our oldest son and the woman he marries: that the Holy Spirit would work in their hearts to pursue God’s design for marriage rather than the world’s.
Why I wrote it
Luke is our oldest, and a wedding day is the day a father hands his son over to a covenant older than either of them. I wanted something ready to pray over him and over Lydia when it comes: short enough to say aloud, and honest about what I am actually asking for.
What I am asking for is not an easy life for them, though I would be glad of one. It is the thing neither their vows nor our love can produce: that God the Holy Spirit would work in both of their hearts, so that the marriage they build is the one He designed and not the one the world keeps advertising.
A father’s prayer
Father in heaven,
We thank you for Luke, and we thank you for Lydia, and we thank you for bringing them to this day. Marriage is yours before it is ever ours: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” What you have joined together this day, let no one separate.
Bless them, Lord, and let the blessing be yourself. Send your Holy Spirit into their hearts to do what no vow of theirs and no love of ours can do: make them new, keep them tender, and teach them to forgive one another as they have been forgiven in Christ. Give Luke a love for Lydia that spends itself, “as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her,” and give Lydia a glad and steady heart beside him. Let their home be a small and faithful picture of that greater marriage, Christ and his bride.
Guard them from the world’s pattern for marriage: its easy terms, its escape clauses, its small view of a covenant made before you. “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Work in them the will and the strength to pursue your plan and not their own.
We give them back to you today, gladly. Keep them, and keep them yours, until Christ returns.
In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Dad
The Scriptures behind it
Quoted from the ESV. The prayer is ours; these are not, and they are the reason it asks for what it asks for.
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“Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”
Marriage is God’s institution before it is anyone’s arrangement. It is given in the garden, before there is a culture to define it or a fashion to revise it, which is why a wedding is a covenant made in front of God and not a contract drawn up between two people.
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“Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.”
The measure of a husband’s love is not affection but the cross. Paul goes on to call the whole thing a profound mystery that refers to Christ and the church (Ephesians 5:32): a Christian marriage is meant to show the world something true about the gospel.
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“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
The world has a pattern for marriage and it is pressed on the newly married from every side. Paul’s answer is not willpower but a mind renewed by God, which is exactly why this is something to pray for them rather than something to advise them to try.
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