Sermon Illustrations
Marriage Protects Love; Love Does Not Protect Marriage
An older married couple offered these words of advice to a young couple during their wedding ceremony:
Your love is priceless and needs to be guarded. Selfishness, pride, lack of forgiveness, and inattentiveness are but some of the many thieves capable of stealing away your love. In a sense your marriage is like a treasure chest forming a protective casing around your love, preventing your love from being stolen. Treasure chests have hard sides. The hardness protects what is on the inside ….
Many people live with the false assumption that love enables a marriage to survive. But that is not the case. Your love will not ensure your marriage will survive; it is your marriage which will ensure your love will survive. This is the very reason God ordained marriage. Marriage keeps love alive, not love keeps marriage alive.