Double Your Serve

Double Your Serve

Let us think of ways to motivate one another to acts of love and good works.

Hebrews 10:24

German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a wonderful wedding sermon while he was in prison for his involvement with the anti-Hitler resistance, but he never had a chance to deliver it in person. Here is part of what he wrote:

Marriage is more than your love for each other. It has a higher dignity and power, for it is God’s holy ordinance. . . . In your love you see only the heaven of your own happiness, but in marriage you are placed at a post of responsibility toward the world and mankind. Your love is your own private possession, but marriage is something more than personal—it is a status, an office. . . . It is marriage . . . that joins you together in the sight of God.^a

Have you thought about the “higher dignity and power” of your marriage? Have you thought recently about your marital “post of responsibility” to reach out to the world with your mate, doing good together as two married people transcending yourselves to become part of something larger?

One of the ways we have learned to reach out as a couple is by doing something anonymously, even something small. We call it a mission of service in secret. It is an act of kindness that is concealed from everyone but the two of us, and it helps us conform to the image of Christ.

Marriage is a great means to becoming more like Christ. It is a great means to “motivate one another to acts of love and good works” (Hebrews 10:24). Two people joined in marriage, as Bonhoeffer said, are ordained to serve others as a team. As a partnership, two people can serve other people better than they could as separate individuals. So don’t neglect the practice of shared service. And know that when you join your efforts together, you are almost always doubly blessed.

Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy, you must have somebody to divide it with.

—Mark Twain

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