![](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qUfUKF699mo/TmIm1ipuRKI/AAAAAAAAAAU/wWDNtIiRY5Q/s320/marriage-portrait-big.jpg)
Objects: Your or another person’s wedding photos, a
marriage certificate, and a wedding ring.
Put up your hand if you have been to a wedding service before? Ask children where the wedding took place. Sometimes people get married in a church building, in a garden, a beach or even some strange place like parachuting out of a plane (show photos of your own or another person’s wedding). And sometimes pastors conduct the wedding service and at other times people call celebrants marry couples.
Today Pastor is preaching on marriage and what its means for us as Christians. How the bible tells us that marriage is a gift from God. You might know already that sometimes marriages last a long time but sometimes marriages don’t last very long. Sometimes people don’t even get married. Do you know how to tell if someone is officially married? They have a wedding certificate like this and they usually wear wedding rings like this.
Jesus said some important things about marriage? Things that a pastor says in the service every time a man and a woman get married through the church. Jesus said this; Haven’t you read that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female’, and said, ‘for this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh?’ Jesus is repeating here what we read in the book of Genesis. Then he goes on to say; so they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let no-one separate.
Talk about the parts of a wedding service that people love to watch, the bride and groom vowing their love to one another, putting on the weddings rings, the kiss, the pronouncement of them as husband and wife and introducing them as Mr and Mrs after the signing of the register, and the greeting of relatives and friends as they leave the church for photos and confetti or flower petals or rice.
Action: If you have enough kids and time, stage manage a mock wedding service with a boy and girl as the bride and groom standing beside each other at the front of the church, have other kids as the father of the bride walking her down the aisle and other parents standing in the congregation who give their blessing to the marriage. Play the part of the pastor and ask the father of the bride; “Who give this woman away in marriage?”
Jesus reminds us that when a man and a woman come to be married, they leave their old families behind, the close ties they have with their parents and they form a brand new family, a new relationship between a husband and wife. A relationship that’s all about being one, one flesh. When people get married today they spend a lot of money on the service, the pretty aspects of the day but they need to spend more time and energy on the rest of their marriage relationship, their oneness together. That’s why their wear wedding rings, it symbolises that oneness, their never ending love and more importantly God’s never ending love which they need to keep their marriage alive and healthy. Let’s find out if there is anyone out their congregation land who has been married. Put up your hand if you are married or about to get married? Hands up if you have been married ten years, twenty years, thirty years, forty, fifty, sixty or more years? Isn’t that an amazing thing worth celebrating, honouring and giving thanks to God for.
Prayer: Faithful God, since you have established marriage, unite all married couples to love each other, and help them to remain faithful throughout their lives. Amen.
(Based on a marriage collect from the LCA Marriage
Rite)