Thinking some more on romantic love and our call to love God.
Church weddings in England tend to follow a very similar pattern for the order of service and the vows that are made. Having been to a few weddings here in the USA I’ve noticed a much greater variations in style and content, with people writing their own vows in a number of cases. Quoting from the Anglican church marriage ceremony,
The minister says to the bridegroom_____, will you take _____ to be your wife?Will you love her, comfort her, honour and protect her,and, forsaking all others,be faithful to her as long as you both shall live?
He answers
I will.The minister says to the bride
_____, will you take _____ to be your husband?Will you love him, comfort him, honour and protect him, and, forsaking all others,be faithful to him as long as you both shall live?
She answers
I will
We are called to “Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” (Deuteronomy 6:5) which means something more solid than mere infatuation, mere fiery passion. The passion of first love ought to never wane but this should be the quality - the adjective - applied to the action - the verb - of loving God. I hear mirrored in the wedding vows the same call - love with all your heart, all your soul and with all your strength. We make vows in the wedding that we will “forsake all others” - in other words, to move from giving away 1% here and 7% there and perhaps 92% to our main relationship to the spot of giving 100% of ourselves to one person, in marriage. When people find themselves subsequently giving less, find themselves splitting themselves (by whatever fraction) between spouse and other people, we call it infidelity.
Spiritually we have a spouse who desires 100% of us. God has made promises - in technical terms, has made a covenant with us - and we now have the choise. Will we be faithful and love, or will we cheat? The bible has numerous examples of the people of God straying - for example in the Old Testament we read
When the LORD began to speak through Hosea, the LORD said to him, “Go, take to yourself an adulterous wife and children of unfaithfulness, because the land is guilty of the vilest adultery in departing from the LORD.”— Hosea 1:2
While we may not be overtly bowing down to idols as they did, we do have to examine ourselves in the light of Jesus’ own challenge:
Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken your first love. Remember the height from which you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first.— Revelation 2:4-5
Are we being faithful to the relationship we have with God? For that matter, have we ever really entered into the relationship in a meaningful way - to borrow the metaphor - are we living together and claiming to be married without ever actually making a formal, lifelong committment? God has called us into a relationship - we can respond to that call by saying an “I will” and God has called us to be faithful to the committment, to stick with the “forsaking all others”.