"For your Maker is your husband, the Lord of Hosts is His Name" (Is. 54:5).

When young women make their wedding vows, they are seldom pondering how they will prepare for widowhood. And yet, many women, sooner or later, do become widows. My neighborhood is filled with large, older homes that house lonely little widows.

"Obey them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves” (Hebrews 13:17)

God has given us His inscripturated word, unchanging, written in the Bible; He commissions the preacher to expound and apply that word to the situation facing us, driving it home in our lives as the carpenter drives the nail. The preacher speaks for God, because God has spoken in the Bible; His voice resounds with the familiar “Thus saith the Lord.” The church has the responsibility to listen, and to evaluate everything heard in light of God’s revealed truth.

We will consider the curious modern phenomenon of the unattached believer. This none-too-rare species fancies himself somehow to be a member of the universal church, but not of the local church. Like Joseph of Arimathea, he is “a disciple of Jesus, but secretly for fear of the Jews” (John 19:38).

Laura Ingalls Wilder's Farmer Boy is A wonderful book, but it has one of those tragic Sabbath scenes common to so many historical children's stories:

Tradition is not a dry and dusty and antiquated affair. Tradition is as vital and dramatic as treason, which is the same word. The silent passing of a scrap of history from father to son is as personal and passionate as the silent passing of a scrap of paper from traitor to spy.
G.K. Chesterton

Those who blindly follow traditions and those who blindly throw traditions overboard share at least ignorance in common. One keeps what he does not know, another throws away what he does not know. An area where many traditions have been lost or mindlessly kept has been that of the wedding. So in the sixties, we all began to do our own thing--write our own vows, invent our own little ceremonies, and generally march around in our own little circle. Since then we have settled down somewhat, but we still have the idea that the wedding belongs to the couple, and not to a culture. We have come to believe that each wedding should be shaped by the personality of the couple, and not that our culture should bestow recognition on a couple according to the custom of our people.