Marriage Class with Gary Ricucci

This week I get the privilege of spending time with Gary Ricucci in our Marriage class. Gary pastored at Covenant Life for over 30 years, before his role shifted to providing pastoral oversight for the Pastor's College students and their families. It has been a joy to be cared for by him, spend evenings with he and his wife Betsy leading our care group. They are amazing examples of Godliness, love and application of the gospel, in their marriage, joy, and humility. They have impacted Hilary and I's life in profound ways. We began to use their book, "Love That Lasts", on marriage for our pre-martial counseling at Oasis Church - and they have much to say about marriage If you have not read this book, I encourage you to get and read it.

Eph. 5:31 "Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh." 32 This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church."

We must realize that marriage is about Christ and the church... in doing this - we have made a doctrinal statement. How valuable and sobering this is. John Stott writes...

“...the standard of the husband’s love is to be the cross of Christ, on which he surrendered himself even to death in his selfless love for his bride. Dr. (Martin) Lloyd-Jones has a striking way of enforcing this truth. ‘How many of us,’ he asks, ‘have realized that we are always to think of the married state in terms of the doctrine of the atonement? Is that our customary way of thinking about marriage? ...Where do we find what the books have to say about marriage? Under which section? Under Ethics. But it does not belong there. We must consider marriage in terms of the doctrine of the atonement.’ ”

It is then within this marriage, that the glory of God is made manifest in and through it. Elisabeth Elliott wrote these powerful words,

"Marriage is death to privacy, independence, childhood’s home and family, death to unilateral decisions and the notion that there is only one way of doing things, death to self. When these little deaths are gladly and wholeheartedly accepted, new life - the glory of sacrificial love which leads to perfect union - is inevitable.