This is the message that I (gave) at the wedding ceremony of Colin and Ashlyn Smith, Saturday June 20, 2020:

Ephesians 5:1-2
Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

You came because this a day where we celebrate love, specifically the love God has given to Colin and Ashlyn for each other.

What you see in them (even imperfectly) is a beautifully different kind of love.

Love in Real Life: (Live a life of love)

This passage is what God is saying to Colin and Ashlyn today. This is what God is saying to us today. Live a life of love. Love should be the defining motivation of our lives. That is a beautiful sentiment, but it gets real when laundry has to be done or we are pressured to turn in a project that is over due or that talkative friend of ours wants to come over and unload his day on us.

Jesus’ invitation is to live a lifestyle of love. That includes getting laundry done and being hospitable to chatty friends. Love is only real if it is strong enough to be real in the gritty and mundane.

Did you know the purpose of marriage, the meaning of marriage written into the DNA of the marital relationship is more than companionship, more than spending our lives with our best friend, more than romantic love, and more than creating a new family? All of those are beautiful things that God dreamed up for us, but the main purpose of marriage is to picture love. To describe love with our way of life. The purpose of marriage is a dramatization of love lived out in the real life of laundry and bills and unexpected trips to the grocery store to pick up diapers.

Living a life of love means that love defines everything we do in life. It also means that your marriage and our lives paint a picture of love for the world around us that longs to know what real love is.

How We Talk about Love: “as Christ loved us”

The kind of love described here is beautifully different than we expect. We expect greeting card sentimentality, but we find that what we get strong and enduring love. The “love” described here is “more” than we expect and “deeper” than is comfortable.

Everyone we meet will probably have a different definition of love. Love is the feeling we felt after the latest blockbuster movie we got to watch. We use the word love for our favorite foods and our favorite restaurants, and the newest app. We also use it to describe marriage, but we know they mean different things.

The type of love described here is beautifully different than we expect…and defined by the life of Jesus Christ.

We walk in love AS Christ loved us and gave himself up for us. In the same way. Or better still, we live a life of love with the very same love a Jesus loved us with. To understand his love we must start to understand ourselves as he knows us.

Let’s start with the “us” because we know us better than anyone. He died for us…he gave himself up for us. There is a hard truth in this.

Maybe your first thought is like mine was: the thought of deserving love. We talk about people “deserving” love. Our friend “deserves” a fairy tale romance. She worked hard and sacrificed, she deserves love in her life now. We talk about deserving love, but almost no one feels deserving of love. Love that really loves us as we are, where we are, in our strengths and our failures.

Every person in the world was uniquely made in God’ image and is deserving of the dignity that comes from that, but somehow we all feel like we do not deserve love…especially not this full, deep, pervasive love.

We feel that for a reason…hundreds of reasons in fact. We know our own failures. We feel our own guilt. More than that, we know we are bent toward failure. Though we try to push it down and explain it away, it lingers.

Here is the truth, we don’t deserve love.

The bible says that every person fails people, fails themselves, but most importantly fails God. We reject God with our heart and actions. This is called sin. It is the reality of every heart and it is the reason we feel guilty..because we are guilty.

Because to this, the Bible says we are “dead in our trespasses and sins.” Dead. Not just imperfect, but dead…disconnected from the God we were made to relate to…the one our heart longs for…No matter where we look for it, we don’t have the spiritual life we know we are want because we are not connected to the source of that spiritual life.

We cannot try to deny the truth of who we are and pretend we have it all together. As long as we work to think of ourselves as good enough to deserve love we will miss the love Jesus offers.

The hope is that we can embrace that hard truth.

We can embrace the truth because that isn’t the end of the story.

Love Defined: Jesus Gave Himself Up For Us
Though everyone has their own perspective of what love is. This passage says that Jesus defines it for us. This passage points to Jesus’ love as fully, unquestioningly expressed when he submitted himself to the 1st century roman death penalty: a cross

He doesn’t give us a cold, dictionary definition alone: he demonstrates love. His life and his words painted a picture of what full love really is.

Notice, this says something revolutionary about the deepest form of love: as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

This is MORE love. This is full love.

Jesus died on a Roman cross to reveal the extent of his love. To show that a person who loves joyfully gives of herself or himself even to the point of giving away all they have. This is the heart of love.

It says he gave himself up FOR US. For people who do not deserve love. For people who have earned nothing but rejection. Jesus received the death we deserve in order to give us the life he deserves. Jesus expressed his love through his death by taking our place, taking on our guilt and punishment, and taking it on himself so we don’t have to bear that burden.

Even when we are unlovable…he moves to us to show his love.

This is no merely sentimental love. It is a full love. It is a passionate love. And it is a welcoming love. A “I’m going to stick by you no matter what “ love.

This is not a love that seeks selfish goals, but seeks to do what is best for another.

This is the kind of love that never fails even when someone fails us.

This is a forgiving love. The kind of love that willfully chooses not to hold someone’s sin against them.

This is not a blind love that pretends that the other person is perfect, but longs to see the one they love grow in their faults….and works to support them.

This is the kind of love that is not a duty-filled “I was told to love you” kind of love, but a free, full, “I wouldn’t do anything else but give myself for you” kind of love

This is there kind of love that wants the best for the one they love, at any cost.

This is the kind of love that chases out fear and the selfish desire to always have it our way, which creates trust in the one who is loved.

This is the love that Jesus expressed for us at the cross…and the kind he expresses now.

Jesus love makes those who haven’t earned it, haven’t done it all right, welcomed as if they had. He makes an alienated outsider into a beloved child.

We do not deserve love, but Jesus love is so strong he gives it to those who don’t deserve it and will freely receive it.

In a similar way that you are entrusting your lives to each other today, God is inviting all of us to entrust ourselves to him. To receive a love too big for us…and that is a free gift.

Colin and Ashlyn:
Love is anything but safe. Comforting, yes. But not safe. Giving your heart away to someone is never safe. Entrusting yourself to another always makes us vulnerable.

In his book, the Four Loves C.S. Lewis says:
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”

You two are expressing love today that is willing to trust, willing to be vulnerable, willing to give yourself for the other freely and joyfully.

Your statement of love that you are expressing today is “living a life of love” in a similar way to how Jesus demonstrates his love to us.

Your commitment today and your married relationship that starts today are a living picture, a meaningful message, of the kind of love that Jesus extends to all of us. Your life will demonstrate the heart of Jesus.

Love is different than we expect and more than we are comfortable with.

It is a beautiful and different love because it is Jesus’ love.