The word I want to emphasize at this wedding is the word heritage. We have the privilege today of witnessing, not only the wedding of two individuals in Christ, but also the wedding of two distinct, but very complementary, heritages. I want to talk about the unique blessings that we are praying that God will bring out of this blessed union.

The two streams that are coming together here are the streams of covenant commitment, centuries of it, and evangelical warmth and application, three and four generations now. They are coming together in a distinct way—not to say the former has no warmth, or that the latter has had no notion of covenant. I am rather speaking here of varying cultural manifestations, which is a matter of emphasis. And in this wedding, I see only the strengthening of both heritages.

The Lord Jesus taught us that foundations are important in the building of houses. If you have no foundation, you cannot withstand the inevitable storms that come (Matt. 7:24). The way we build houses today, that foundation is provided by the footings, and by the concrete walls that we pour to rest on those footings. That is what covenant commitment is like. This is just the way it is. Covenant understanding won’t shift or budge on you. Straight lines, unyielding, cold, gray, covenant concrete. Every house needs that, and needs it underneath absolutely everything. This not unloving—it is the foundation of love. You can always take it as a fixed given that these are my people. The lines of the house are straight because the foundation lines are straight.

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The whole earth is full of God’s glory. The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness of it. Everything that exists was created by Him, and so it is that everything declares the weight of His glory. No matter how small—whether a tiny rock flower, or a sub-atomic particle, or a grain of sand—every discrete and particular thing speaks about God. The supernovas and galaxies do the same. Every finite thing has the privilege of speaking about an infinite noun, maker of Heaven and earth. Each created thing in some sense carries the eternal weight of glory, and of course it can only do this because the source of that glory, God Himself, has willed it.

So every last thing manifests His glory, and this is why we, dulled by sin, can start to take everything for granted. We begin to think that the world is “just the way things are.” When everything is glorious, we think that nothing must be.

This is why God in His mercy will often take special pains to manifest His glory. He goes out of His way. When He does this, we are not moving from no glory to glory, or from dull glory to radiant glory, but rather from constant glory to manifest glory. God does this through the Incarnation of Jesus, through the giving of Scripture, through the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, through the kindness of miracles, and through the revelation brought to us by various poetic and prophetic insights.

What a miracle does is draw our attention to what God does all the time. When Jesus turned water to wine at Cana He was simply doing in fast forward what God has done in every vineyard since the beginning of the world. He enables us to see the whole by showing us a part, sped up a little.

When we pray for a glimpse of glory, we are not asking to be let in on a wonderful secret against the context of the ordinary and mundane. We are not seeing vivid color against the background of a dull sepia tone. No, we are being invited to see the whole world rightly.

And all this relates to our prayer for this new household, just now forming. The prayer is taken from the words of Moses in Psalm 90.

“Let Your work appear to Your servants, And Your glory to their children. And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us, And establish the work of our hands for us; Yes, establish the work of our hands” (Ps. 90:16-17, NKJV).

In the course of His ministry on earth, the Lord Jesus taught us that we were to learn how to accept kingdom disruptions. We are supposed to learn how to rejoice at the arrival of kingdom inversions.

Jesus taught that the way to become great in the kingdom was by becoming least in the kingdom. He taught that the way to the head of the line was to go to the back of the line. Up is down, and down is up. He taught that the way into adult wisdom was to embrace the faith of a child. Out is in, and in is out. In this stipulated theological sense, the hokey-pokey is what it’s all about—but only in this stipulated sense. To take it any further than that would disrupt the solemnity of the occasion.

So in that spirit, I want to begin with something heavy, so that we may, at the invitation of Christ, move to the direct consequence of it, which is the ease of His yoke and the lightness of His burden (Matt. 11:30). If you were to pick up His yoke, heft it in your hands to evaluate whether you wanted to put it on, it would seem intolerably heavy to you. But actually put it on, and you will laugh at the relief.

This is what Christian marriage seems like in the hands: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26).

Whoa. This is not what we usually mean by “focus on the family.” This is a call to discipleship that necessarily relativizes marriage and family. It contextualizes marriage and family, but it does so without annihilating it. It places marriage in the light of eternity. Matthew clarifies for us what was meant in the parallel passage. “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (Matt. 10:37). In other words, we are to love Christ so much that every other love pales in comparison. But something strange then happens. The love that pales in comparison actually become vivid and bright. What do I mean?