The Best of Friends

As I was thinking of topics to write about for today, I began looking up quotes on marriage. I found quite a few. Most of them had to do with shackles and being trapped and that marriage is a bad idea. It breaks my heart to know that that is what the world thinks of marriage. Something that God has created as a blessing, the world decides is a curse. Why, I wonder?

Perhaps it’s seen as a curse for the same reasons that the “rules of Christianity” or Ten Commandments are seen as imprisonment. Perhaps it’s a misunderstanding.

Earlier this week I was listening to a sermon by Pastor Steven Furtick and he spoke about how people view Christianity. They see it as a bunch of rules that will keep them from having fun, from having freedom. But in reality, it is the very thing that gives them freedom. You see, when Moses was given the Ten Commandments, the Israelites had just been freed from many generations of slavery in Egypt. They didn’t know how to be their own nation. They didn’t know how to rule themselves. They didn’t know how to be free. They didn’t have any guidelines. So, God gave them the guidelines of freedom. He said, in essence, “You will all be happier and prosper if you don’t kill each other, sleep with your neighbor’s wife, steal other people’s stuff, etc”. We have been given a framework for freedom. Just like the Israelites were slaves, so were/are we slaves to our sin. The tricky thing about sin is that it doesn’t usually feel like slavery. Most of the time, we don’t even realize we are enslaved to it…at least not until we have been freed from it.

So what exactly am I trying to say?  I don’t know... Maybe that the world has a lot of things backwards? Maybe that the bonds of marriage aren’t made of iron, but of friendship? How many of you got married to your best friend? How many of you are still best friends? How many of you wish you were? One simple truth that I grew up hearing is that, “to have a friend, you have to be a friend.” So what are you waiting for? Go be friends! Prove the world wrong. Marriage is a blessing. And you can have a great one!