Happily Ever After: Devotions from Time of GraceSample

When You’re Engaged: From Creation One of the crucially important roles that families are supposed to play is to socialize the next generation, that is, hand down instruction about social behaviors that are appropriate, constructive, polite, and functional. Kids are not born knowing how to finish a job, keep a promise, or hold their tempers. Or build a lasting, happy marriage. Here is where God’s Word really helps. Marriage is not a business contract that two corporate attorneys hammer out. Marriage is not a somewhat outdated social arrangement that an ever-evolving humanity came up with millennia ago and is now moving beyond as it comes up with new arrangements. God made people fully developed. He made marriage, too, also fully developed. He made it immediately after making people. Eve was only minutes old when she was led to God’s “altar.” Jesus did not say a lot about marriage, but when he did, it was intense. In Matthew chapter 19, we hear Jesus explaining God’s beautiful plan and intent. Jesus wants you to know that “happily ever after” begins with recognizing where marriage came from in the first place: “Haven’t you read . . . that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female’?” (verse 4). Are you engaged? Just think--you are privileged to participate in a grand divine drama that goes clear back to the Garden of Eden.