Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Today we're going to talk about a new book we just wrote, Who's We? Me, Jason Dome, Carlton MacLeod, How to Have a Christian Wedding, everything about how to plan one, how to have one, how to look back on one. It's a really neat book focusing on the biblical picture of marriage. I hope you enjoy the discussion.

So we have this book that we wrote on how to have a wedding a christian wedding had a plan one how to have one and jason carlton Scott did this book what this was this was really fun to put together had a friend in africa say I see you finally got your name on the book first maybe last now is a fun project it's a it's a different book in I think it's a different I've read a few books on Christian weddings, but, you know, there's not another book on weddings that I'm aware of that has the word bridezilla. I did make an opinion. Hey, here, I quote, we quote J.R. Miller at the beginning of this book, the wedding day is one that should ever be remembered and held sacred among life's anniversaries. It is the day whose benediction should fall on all other days to the end of life.

It should stand out in the calendar bright with all the brightness of love and gratitude. The memory of the wedding hour in a happy married life should be like a star even to old age Well, that's kind of why we wrote this one. Yeah, so that a what there would be very thoughtful being informed by the Word of God about how to even think about a wedding, every part of it. So, now, and we have this book divided into four parts, your wedding strategy. Secondly, weddings in the Bible.

It's a long section because the Bible actually says a lot about weddings and has several in them. And then the third chapter is the practical, how to plan a Christian wedding and reception. And we're talking about money, we're talking about relationships, we're talking about family blowups and stuff like that, and how to avoid them. And we do talk about Bridezilla and the MOTB, the mother of the bride, how to handle all this kind of stuff. And then finally, where do you go from here?

Okay. So, hey, let's just pound through this book. Now, we start with your wedding strategy. So, let's just talk about that for a couple minutes. What should the strategy be?

So let me back up from that just a bit and read Revelation 19, because it definitely has an impact on how we should think about these things. So this is Revelation 19, 6 through 9a. And I heard as it were the voice of a great multitude as the sound of many waters and as the sound of mighty thundering saying, Alleluia, for the Lord God omnipotent reigns. Let us be glad and rejoice and give Him glory, for the marriage of the lamb has come and His wife has made herself ready. And to her it was granted to be arrayed in fine linen, clean and bright, for the fine linen is the righteous acts of the saints." Then he said to me, Right, blessed are those who are called to the marriage supper of the Lamb." So when we have a wedding, we're actually doing something deeply theological, And I think you always want to have that in the back of your mind as you start to strategize about what kind of wedding.

You never want to have a wedding that is distant from what we see in Revelation 19. R. Yeah, I agree. I agree, definitely. And one of the things that's revelatory to me as I was reading through the manuscript and thinking about the weddings that I've done in the past just as a pastor is how few people actually look at it that way at the outset.

I mean, it's very easy to become consumed in other things, but who plans a wedding for the glory of God? I mean, many good Christians, you know, have that, as you said, back of their mind, but who has it top of mind? And that was one of the things that jumped out at me in that passage and so many others, that this is an opportunity to do these things unto the glory of God. And we wanted to say, hey, the imagery of a wedding is a picture of God's redempted plan. God is rescuing a bride.

A groom is rescuing a bride. And marriage is holy. It's a holy institution. We don't own it. It's God's institution.

We can't mess around with it. And that's why I think we started out the book saying that everything in a wedding, everything from top to bottom, from the thinking of it all the way to the very end of it and the looking back on it, it ought to breathe the gospel of Jesus Christ. A wedding has a purpose. It communicates Christ's love for His church. And so, everything in that wedding ceremony should be holy and point to it.

What does that mean? Dr. John B. Borgman Well, it means that we do everything we can according to Scripture, you know, from the wedding invitations to the way that people are dressed to the elements therein. And here's, you know, a bit of controversy, but even up into and including the reception, all of these things should be done unto the glory of God.

And again, that's just, again, it might be back of mind, but that's not normally top of mind. And that's why I really love this resource, because it forces you, if you're honest with the Scriptures, it forces you to put these things and to put our Lord top of mind. So, I think our counsel to people would be, at the very start, you want to absolutely, every step of the way, be guarding against the creation of two worlds, okay? Religion world, where you have a ceremony that is sacred, and the way we would go about it with the centrality of the gospel as part of this ceremony. We all have family members who don't know the Lord, friends we're inviting who don't know the Lord.

And in some ways, they might be taken aback by the beauty and loveliness, and they might hear things that they need to hear but have never heard before. But it's very possible to create a completely different world, especially when we get to the reception, where the lights come up and the music comes on, and it looks just like every other reception. And you end up leaving the impression, oh, okay, we were just kidding. We had our, Okay, you really, for a minute there, I thought you weren't like us. For a minute there, I thought, this is really different, strangely and yet wonderfully different.

But now we see That was just for that thing, and now we've moved on, and actually you just, you do stuff like we do, and you shake your booty like we shake our booties. You're allowed to say that, is this going to get edited out? But you can have this other word, and they say, oh, the religious part was wink, wink, nudge, nudge, and now we're on to what we all do together. You almost had us going there for a minute. That is the last thing you want to do with your unbelieving family and friends.

Yeah, it's like a freaking frack wedding, right? You know, the first part seems holy and the second part is nothing like it. It's trying to mix light and darkness together, which, you know, light and darkness don't mix. So... And I appreciate the encouragement in the book, too, because sometimes pressure is coming from different places.

And so, you know, you're abroad in the groom trying to plan this thing out, and then there's pressure coming from, you know, your family in Idaho or your family in New York City or something like that. And so you end up yielding to that pressure. So one of the things that's in the book is encouragement for Christian couples to love deeply but stand strong. Yeah, we just want to encourage weddings to be thoroughly Christian, to thoroughly reflect the glory that is a wedding. And God has given us so many examples in His Word.

So let's talk about those. There's this long section, weddings in the Bible, pictures and principles. Let's just talk around the kinds of things that you see in the Bible on weddings. You started with this, Jason, at the end of the Bible, but there's a lot before that. Yeah, I love this passage from Isaiah 61, I will greatly rejoice in the Lord.

My soul shall be joyful in my God, for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation and covered me, has covered me with robes of righteousness as a bridegroom decks himself with ornaments and the bride adorns herself with jewels. I love the discussion in the book about the purity, the beauty, the glory that accompanies the wedding ceremony and what it images and what it pictures in our relationship with Jesus Christ. And I particularly love the aspects of joy to be donned in the robes of righteousness, and the outpouring of joy coming from the bridegroom and the bride. I think it's wonderful. Pete My Bible reading plan has me in Jeremiah right now, and there are so many places that talk about the sound of the bridegroom and the sound of the bridegroom.

Jared Oh, the sound of the bridegroom. That's right. Pete Because of the people's unfaithfulness, God is saying through the prophet, you're not going to hear the sound of the bride and the sound of the bridegroom anymore. And then he talks about the restoration of Israel and says, it'll be back, that you'll have the sound of the bride and the sound of the bridegroom again. And it's the language that's used because we all know what's happier than that?

What day rivals that day? And we really should be creating… What sadness when there's judgment. Right. When the judgment falls on the land, they're no more wedded. Yeah, for sure.

I looked up what I thought was every reference in the Bible to a wedding. And almost every single one of them has the word joy or rejoicing in it. God created weddings and marriages for joy. So when that's not part of our picture, We have a skewed picture of a wedding and our marriages as well. In fact, you know, God tells a husband, you know, the first year of his marriage is to make it make his wife happy.

So joy is central to a marriage. And maybe we could just pause for a second, you know, for couples who are listening to this. Are you doing everything you can to increase joy in your marriage? This is why God made it. And we often drift from that.

But, you know, husbands and wives just need to recognize that God created marriage for a particular beauty of life. It's the thing that we all want. But we often hurt the joy by the things we say, our schedules, and all kinds of things like that. But anyway, God created marriage for joy. That's my conclusion after reading these references in the Bible.

Pete Yeah, Janet's testimony about our wedding day was that by the time we got to the hotel, she was, her face was sort of sore from smiling all day. Absolutely. That was my memory, too. So much smiling. It was such a happy, happy day.

It was, our testimony, it was the happiest day of our lives so far. We've had many, many happy days. So, we want to be understood and not misunderstood. We're not saying strip joy out of the wedding day. We're actually saying the opposite of that, but we need to take care as we do that.

Hey, I was there at your wedding. Yeah, yes. I smiled too. My face was cracking by the end of the day too. What a great thing.

Well, here's this wonderful phrase in the book. The first thing that happened at the first marriage was an outburst of joy. As Adam poetically declared, this is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man. I thought that was poignant.

Yeah. That's a happy guy. That's a happy guy. He's not saying that out of sadness at all. He's pretty excited.

So in the book we say, okay, so you got joy, you got a, you have a man and a woman, a male and a female. Why did we even have to say that? We did say it. And then we talked about it requires a covenant. There's a marriage covenant.

You know, what's really required in a wedding? Well, there's so many pictures, but frankly, the indispensable thing that should happen at a wedding is that there's a covenant. There's a covenant. That's right. And I appreciate the explanation of what a covenant is in the book, that it's this spiritual agreement that involves the man and the woman but also involves god and is the furthest of the first lesson and our premarital counseling here at our church is the explanation of covenant and the fact that it is in fact a covenant much much stronger than a contract that you can break easily, but a lifelong commitment, a lifelong commitment to Jesus Christ and to one another in a holy covenant.

Absolutely essential. I totally agree. You know, there are wedding garments in a wedding. And I, you know, back in the 60s, you know, hey, you had this, you know, thought of, oh, you can just do whatever you want, just do whatever you feel, you know. But actually, in the Bible, there are special, very special wedding garments.

You shouldn't just come to a wedding any way you want. Recognize what those look like, you know, I guess you'll have to figure that out. But in the Bible, there's a thing called wedding garments, and they're described, they're beautiful, Right? I mean, you have brides that are arrayed in purity. Yes.

And the wedding garments are a symbol of Christ's righteousness. That's really clear. So the garments should somehow reflect that. And we have this long list of things you find in the Bible, arrayed in beauty and glory. You have, there are invitations and the Call of the Gospel in Matthew 22, you have their guests who serve as witnesses in Matthew 22, 10.

You have friends of the bridegroom, you have bridesmaids in the Bible, You have a procession of the groom in the Bible, a procession of the bride. There's a wedding veil, there's the giving away of the bride, there's a wedding feast, there's rejoicing, there's the voice of the bridegroom and the bride, there's rejoicing friends, you know. It's all about rejoicing. But these are just elements that you find scattered throughout the Bible. God has dropped them all through His Word from Genesis to Revelation to help us to think rightly, to think biblically about a wedding.

I think you can think biblically about a wedding. Absolutely. And again, one of the things I appreciate is you, you know, you've, you know, we've all kind of collated these bits and pieces in this one resource. It's so handy. It would be so handy for someone who's not really noticed or maybe they've read those passages but didn't see them as practical counsel in pictures of a wedding to have them in one place.

So we move off all this theology, and then we start talking about nuts and boltsy things, you know, about money and receptions and relationships and the wedding of her dreams and stuff like that. How do you navigate the wedding of her dreams, you know, when you've got 10 other people involved in the wedding of the dream, you know? So let's talk about that. That's a chapter. That's kind of a long chapter, actually.

Yeah. Well, I think we want to start with this, you can have a lovely, happy wedding and reception without breaking the bank and without crushing your friends. So, let's just start there. You can have just such a lovely, a wonderful day, a lovely wedding, a happy day and wedding and reception without taking on debt, without crushing all your friends. You know, the element about crushing friends was important, because who really thinks about what their friends can afford or not.

That's normally not high up in the decision. Right. And hey, even not just what they can afford in our circles, we have volunteer workforces. And every complexity that you add adds weight to the workforce. We should just be sensitive to those things.

So we have this section of having the wedding that you can afford. And you know, I've been shocked to see people try to crowd crowdfund their weddings and, and ask, ask the participants to pay for it. Now it comes in different forms. You know, we're going to have our wedding in the Bahamas. You're obligated to come.

You have to buy $350 worth of clothes that you'll never use again. Hey, do you really want to do that with your friends? Yeah, it puts a lot of pressure on friendships sometimes and I think You know our perhaps the dream of the wedding is is way beyond the pocketbook And as Jason said, it's okay to have the wedding that you can honestly fund currently and you know the most important thing is the image of the wedding and the marriage itself. And I've seen couples have very, very simple weddings to go on to have wonderful marriages, and then do a bigger thing later at a renewal ceremony or something like that. But you, you know, there's no correlation between how much money you spend on the wedding and how successful the marriage will be.

Yeah. Hey, also, your friends will also be getting married after your wedding. And you might actually, out of consideration for your friends, have a wedding that's more like what your friends could afford later than the wedding that you could afford. Let's say God has given you a lot of resources. I'm not saying you have to do this, but you should consider this, because we're sort of setting a bar and setting expectations for the future with the wedding that we have.

I'm a pastor, when our daughter got married, we felt that, we felt that we were sort of setting a pace. It was one of the early weddings in our church, and we wanted to have a sane wedding that didn't set a standard of insanity for future weddings. And there was a, hey, we could have afforded some more that we, I think we had the wedding that we could have afforded for our daughter, but it's possible we could have afforded more, but that was part of our thinking. That was a little bit different. You know, earlier in the year, there was this Indian oligarchy.

While he was the richest man in India, he spent almost three quarters of a billion dollars on the wedding. It was some wedding. Nice wedding. Not really nice. Inviting every American entertainer to come over for, you know, this whole thing went through for 30 days or something like that.

But anyway, yeah, the wedding industry has really forced families into a mold that sometimes is actually harmful to the family. And one thing we say is, look, get your mind off the wedding industry. You know, okay, go ahead, look at the wedding books, but they're not going to lead you into a Christian wedding. Look at God, look at the weddings in the Bible, and look at what's reasonable and responsible, because the wedding industry is going to continue to push you to spend more and more money. And the curve, the spending curve on weddings has just continued to go high.

Pete Slauson Right. Pete Slauson So, here's a difficult one. Sometimes, the target isn't the wedding of the bride's dreams, it's the wedding of another parent's dreams, one of the parent's dreams. And they got all, I mean, they got it in their mind exactly how it all needs to go. Brides and grooms need to be careful about this, but they own the wedding.

They own the wedding. Exactly. And they shouldn't be... Allow themselves to be pressured into things that they don't want for their wedding. So, I mean, you're gonna have to be careful as you navigate these things.

I know these are really sensitive areas, but brides and grooms, I think, should start out by sort of psychologically this couple taking ownership of the wedding in their minds so that they make sure that this is... And communicating that, Clary. And communicating that tenderly and carefully. Yeah. Saving no amount of money is worth having a light and darkness kind of wedding because you have pressures from family members I like what you said at the couple should own the wedding this is what we're saying the reception world and the reception is what we talk about that quite a bit so you know you've we deal with all the all kinds of practical areas in the in the reception and the relational matters and we all see in the last chapter so before we get to that let me bring up one thing in this chapter that's important.

Weddings have a lot of stakeholders. Parents on both sides, if there's been divorces, there could be two parents on both sides. And some mixture of people who are paying. And people who are paying always expect to have a say in things. And that's actually not wrong.

When people are paying, there is an expectation that they're at least part of the decision-making process. So you should get all this on the table really early on in the process and have an early period of time where there's expectation settings about how all this is going to work. So that if the bride and groom say, yeah, we can't live with this, they might have to decide, we're going to fund this wedding so that we can have what we think we should have. And that'll change the wedding a lot, right? All these things have implications on what this day is going to look like.

Yeah. Okay, all this to say, Jesus Christ is Lord of the weddings. And every single part of the wedding and the reception, the music, the attire, everything that's said should be some reflection of Christ's love for His Church and to stay on target with that. I want to just end by reading a quote that we have, another J.R. Miller quote in the Bible, one of my favorite things that he wrote on marriage.

He says, what are some of the secrets of happy home life? The answer might be given in one word, Christ. Christ at the marriage altar, Christ on the bridal journey, Christ when the new home is set up, Christ when the baby is born, Christ when a child dies, Christ in the pinching times, Christ in the days of plenty, Christ in the nursery, in the kitchen, in the parlor, Christ in the toil and in the rest, Christ along all the years, Christ when the wedded pair walk toward the sunset gates, Christ in the sad hour when farewells are spoken, and one goes on before and the other stays bearing the unshared grief. Christ is the secret of a happy home life. Hey, that's what we're trying to say in this book.

Go get the book, use it in premarital counseling, have both families, or all four families, however many you've got going, read the book before you hit the road for your wedding. So thanks, guys. Thanks for working on this. I really, really enjoyed it, and I pray it's a blessing. Okay.

And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. Hope you can join us next time. If you found this resource helpful, we encourage you to check out ChurchandFamilyLife.com