Are We Making Ourselves Ready for the Wedding?

God has called us to be part of the Church—the Bride of Christ! What should we be doing to make ourselves ready for that wonderful wedding?

God didn’t choose any of us to be the mother of His Son, but He did choose each of us to be the bride of His Son! What a blessing and privilege! Are we living up to that calling each and every day and making ourselves ready to be that bride in the most awesome wedding ever?

Are we growing in faith, belief and trust in Him, and are we growing in His grace and in knowledge? Are we growing in love and godliness?

Making ourselves ready is what we have to be doing in order to become that bride. “Let us be glad and rejoice and give Him glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and His wife has made herself ready” (Revelation 19:7).

This wedding will be much more awesome than any royal wedding on earth.

Our wedding and our journey

Your wedding, if you are married, was probably the most wonderful event that you can think of in your book of memories. Ours took place 51½ years ago. It was not an elaborate wedding, as we were poor college students; but God blessed us with a beautiful wedding outside in the Lower Gardens of the Ambassador College campus in Pasadena, California, and it was overflowing with guests and gifts!

And even though we have been blessed with a wonderfully happy marriage, we are still on that journey. It is a new start each day as I wake up and ask God to help me be the wife that my husband needs and to fulfill God’s purpose for me as a part of the chosen bride of His Son.

Each day we also change from what we were the day and week before. We either grow more in love, kindness and understanding; or we let our daily stresses, trials and worries make us negative and bitter. That also means each day is a new day in our marriages. Each morning we wake up, we have a new start. We can choose to either grow closer to our husbands in love, kindness and understanding or live in a way that does nothing to benefit our marriage.

What does God mean by love?

All of God’s Commandments are based on love. The average person usually relates the word love to romance, affection or sensual desire—in other words, something physical. But what does God mean when He says we are to love one another with a pure heart?

“Since you have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit in sincere love of the brethren, love one another fervently with a pure heart” (1 Peter 1:22). That has to do with our very being—how we understand other people, how we react to them, how we relate to them and how we judge them. All of these points really boil down to how we treat them.

Jesus Christ loved this whole world so much that He gave Himself to be tortured and crucified in order to give us the opportunity to be forgiven of our sins and to receive the gift of eternal life in His Kingdom! This is the kind of love that He wants us to display in our everyday life. “This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12).

Working on ourselves

How do we implement these qualities of love to our mates? First, as wives we need to ask ourselves, “Am I responding to my husband as I would to Jesus Christ?” Because this is what we are told in Scripture: “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord” (Ephesians 5:22).

The way we do that is to first of all work on ourselves. We cannot blame our husbands for our actions; we have to take accountability and learn to control our thoughts, emotions and our tongues. Instead of taking offense at what our mate does or says, we should say to ourselves, “What if this were Christ saying this or doing this—how would I react to Him?” If we look at it that way, then we won’t take personally everything our mate says or does. (We are talking about a Christian husband, of course. If a husband is abusive, that is a totally different scenario.)

Before we can work on having a happy marriage, we have to first of all work on ourselves. Just as Christ said in Revelation 19:6-7, the wife has made herself ready. Are we making ourselves ready for the most important, wonderful, fabulous, glorious and awesome wedding ever?

To learn more about the biblical basis for the marriage institution, read our article “What Is Marriage?”

Judy Swanson and her husband, Bill, reside in East Bernstadt, Kentucky, and help serve the Church of God, a Worldwide Association, congregations in London, Kentucky; Knoxville, Tennessee; and Asheville, North Carolina.