I want to begin this wedding homily in an unusual way, by telling a story about my father. I can assure you beforehand that it will all tie in. In just a moment, it will all tie together.
My father, Jim Wilson, graduated from the Naval Academy in 1950, and was sent to a destroyer in the Far East, just as the Korean War had started. On the way there, he stopped at his hometown in Nebraska, where the Lord used him in something of a mini-revival. Over twenty people were converted to Christ in the space of a few days, including some of my uncles. My father continued on his way to Korea, stopping at a Navigators conference in California. The founder of the Navigators, Dawson Trotman, hated the idea of these new converts being left alone, without any follow-up in discipleship, and so he asked for a volunteer there at that conference to go back to Nebraska to follow up on them, and someone who was there actually volunteered to go.
Many years later, when my parents were making the decision about whether to move to Idaho, my father was being shown around and was introduced to a man in the fellowship who was working at WSU in Pullman, and it turned out to be the same man who had volunteered to go back to Nebraska twenty years before. This odd connection was one of the things that confirmed to my parents that they were supposed to move out west to Idaho. That man was Jim Hardie, Garrison’s grandfather. So not only was Jim Hardie responsible in an upstream kind of way for Garrison being here, his act of faithfulness back in 1950 is one of the reasons that I am here.
And so my subject is that of providential weaving. God governs the world, and all that it contains. In Him we live and move and have our being. God has brought us all to this place today and has done so by means of trillions of events, and decisions, and encounters. Not only does He weave all things together, but it is a very tight weave. He has every detail well in hand. Moreover His providential governance of the world and everything in it is not even difficult for Him. He just does it. The hairs of our head are all number. Not one sparrow can fall to the ground apart from the will of the Father.
Not only does He do this, but He governs the world for His glory and for our good. Indeed, our good is one of the central ways that He glorifies His name. “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end” (Jer. 29:11). He makes this possible through the gospel, that is, through the message of the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
But think for a moment about all the variegated ways that this message of the gospel will get to us. “How will they hear without a preacher?” Paul asks, but think about all the decisions that a preacher makes on his way to a particular event—turning left, and not right, arriving five minutes late, ending five minutes early, talking to one person afterwards and not another . . . all of this is in the palm of God’s hand.
What we do is to trust His governance of all things and rejoice in the fact that He has brought us all here today. Trusting Him, because of the gospel, enables us to trust Him in all the details of our lives, great and small. This wedding here today is one of the great ones, as we all recognize. But there will be countless other great decisions that all of us will make, and we will not know at the time that they are in fact momentous. But here is the thing . . . God knows.
If God blesses this union with children, and they walk with the Lord, and they have children, and as this keeps going for ten generations, we will eventually get to the place where there are hundreds of thousands of people alive who will be woven into countless stories, and all because God is upstream today weaving a particular part of their story here, now, in this moment. God’s ways are beyond us. The best we can do is just adore.
But the only way we can adore properly is through the gospel. We must repent of our sins and turn to Christ as the only hope of our salvation and ongoing deliverance and protection.
Garrison, my charge to you is this. Be a man of God, a man of the Word. Give yourself over to the reading of Scripture, and make sure the Scriptures are the constitutional center of your home. As you do this, the God of the Bible will be active in your life and will equip you to be the best kind of husband, the kind who is a vertebrate. A husband with a backbone. You are by nature affable and accommodating, which is all to the good, but you must also be a man who is capable of hard things. But by this I mean that you must be hard for your family—which is quite a different thing than being hard on your family.
Kendra, your task is one of glorification. The Scriptures teach us that the woman is the glory of man, and this is an ongoing reality. It is not just something you see in the wedding pictures . . . where the groom is respectable and the bride is glorious. Wedding pictures are a ritual type of what is to be going on in various ways throughout your whole life together. He gives you a house, and you return to him a home. He brings home the bacon, and you give him . . . well, you give him bacon. Bacon is already glorified. He gives you grain, and you return to him hot bread, right out of the oven. He gives you seed, and you return to him a child.
And all of this is how God weaves our lives together. He brings us together providentially. He brings the gospel to us providentially. He has brought this couple together providentially. He blesses us in and through His sovereign weaving.
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, amen.