“I, Barry Robert Leventhal,

take you, Mary Mackey Pollard,

to be my wedded wife;

and I do promise and covenant,

before God and these witnesses,

to be your loving and faithful husband,

in plenty and in want,

in joy and in sorrow,

in sickness and in health,

as long as we both shall live.”

I know I recited these marriage vows at our wedding on June 10, 1967, but, for the life of me, I cannot — under any conditions — actually remember reciting them. Maybe it was the excitement of the moment — my heart was beating so fast, I thought it would jump right out of my chest. Maybe it was the awe of the moment — committing myself to another person for the rest of my life. But I suspect it was really my first glimpse of my soon-to-be-bride as she began her procession down the church aisle — I swear she seemed to actually shimmer in some kind of brightness from another world! The moment I saw her, I went into immediate brain freeze. From that moment on, throughout the remainder of the ceremony, everything was a blur.

So it was good that the minister went over these solemn vows the day before the wedding. Even after all these years, I vaguely remember thinking to myself, “Boy, you are really committing yourself to it now!” And so I did.

But what is the big deal over these kinds of marriage vows anyway? In order to understand why marriage vows are truly sacred we need to see how they fit into the larger picture of marriage as God has designed it. First, marriage is a commitment, actually a fourfold commitment:

For this cause a man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.  And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed (Genesis 2:24-25).