‘The Importance of vows’
We find the important issue of vows, a theme in Judges 11 this week. Through life, we will make many vows,
* to friends
* to family and
* to God
When the penny drops for us, and we respond to Jesus for salvation, we ‘vow’ to trust in Jesus, and not in ourselves, to be saved. There is no more important vow for a human to make.
An article in a recent Daily Telegraph headed, ‘Couples Ditch; Death Do Us Part’. This article outlined that people are increasingly unwilling to vow a lifelong commitment to each other and including a ‘get out clause’ in their vows. Couples are now pledging, ‘as long as our love lasts’, to each other.
One reason for this influx is that secular marriage celebrants or non-christian ministers who allow this, are simply providing a service and care nothing for what God has ordained a marriage to be.
Another reason is humans are selfish, and wrongly see marriage as a tool to meet their ‘needs’.
Christian marriages must take seriously the vow, ‘for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part’, especially as we see the trivialisation of marriage vows becoming more apparent.
Jim Mobbs,
Assistant Minister