Care For The Bride

When it comes to marriage and family, I’m a late bloomer. For 18 years of my life, I was married to ministry. The first 11 were in youth ministry, then 7 more in worship ministry. Because of that, I was able to spend a lot of my free time with my students in middle and high school. I was able to build relationships with people within the church body without having to worry about putting my family out and taking time from them. If someone needed me for anything, ministry or not, I could do it on a whim. I had nothing holding me back. During this time, everyone tried to marry me off to their granddaughters, daughters, nieces, and best friends. My students would even put “JK needs to find a wife” on my to-do list in my office. I always told them to be careful what they wished for because if I got married, I’d probably need to find another church.

I had created a ministry model for myself that wasn’t sustainable for a married man. The amount of time that I was spending outside of the house would’ve been deemed “neglective’ and would’ve probably ended in divorce. I knew this because my married youth minister friends weren’t able to do what I was doing. They had a covenant with their wife and God that stated their wife was under their care, and she came second only to God. Because of that, I was always sure to respect their marriages. I knew, no matter how close I was to my friends, I wasn’t more important than their bride. I could be part of their lives, but my role as a friend paled in comparison to their relationships with their wives. So I always treated their wives with the utmost respect and honor. They deserved that.

Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.
Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.
Ephesians 5:22–32

Usually, when we read this passage, our focus is solely on how we should treat our spouse. There’s good reason for that, but there’s also something else in this passage that we shouldn’t gloss over. All of these instructions are followed with a comparison to the relationship that Christ has with the Church. The Church is the bride of Christ. Even the last verse says, “This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.” 

I’ll be honest with you, if you want to be my friend, and you treat my wife horribly, we won’t be friends long. To be in any kind of relationship with me, you have to respect my wife. My wife is an extension of me, my best friend, and my commitment to her is deeper than any commitment to any other person. She comes first, and I won’t stand by and have her treated poorly or have her name run through the mud. 

Today, church hate is a very real thing among believers. People say that can be close to Jesus, but they don’t need to be part of the Church. They run the bride of Christ down and talk poorly of her. I can’t imagine that Christ is good with this. This is His bride, and no one should talk about the bride of Christ in cruel or demeaning ways. Instead, she should be celebrated and cared for.

“Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself ready; it was granted her to clothe herself with fine linen, bright and pure”— for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints. And the angel said to me, “Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.” And he said to me, “These are the true words of God.”
Revelation 19:7–9

One of the biggest reasons why we serve in the Church is because we are to care for Christ’s bride. He’s now preparing a place for her and will return to take her with Him. It’s our responsibility to get her ready.

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
Revelation 21:1–2

I’ve always been a fan of the phrase, “See a need, fill the need.” Unfortunately, we won’t see these needs if we don’t care about the bride. In order to be servants of the Most High God, we need to have a love for the bride and see her care as our ultimate responsibility and desire. Mindset is everything. When we go to work and see it simply as a job, we tend to just do the bare minimum. We don’t go above and beyond, and we surely won’t do anything if it gets in the way of something we’d rather be doing. When we see our work as a representative of who we are and Who we represent, suddenly, our ethic changes. We don’t see the “above and beyond” as a big deal. We actually revel in it. We start to live out what God has desired for us all along.

What gain has the worker from his toil? I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man.
Ecclesiastes 3:9–13

When we find joy in serving the bride, we, in turn, find even more joy in Christ. We need to stop trying to separate our relationship with Christ from our relationship with the Church. That’s not how God has this all set up. Christ will one day come back for His bride, and we are that bride. Let’s make every effort to prepare for His return and prepare the bride for her groom. Our service matters, so let’s care for the bride.