Ray's Blog

The wife of your youth

“Be intoxicated always in her love.”  Proverbs 5:19

It’s a good translation.  The verb is used elsewhere for a man staggering in drunkenness (Isaiah 28:7).  The sage’s point is that a man and wife should be crazy-in-love together.  That is not frivolous.  It is not unworthy of Christian consideration.  It is biblical.  Crazy-in-love is the good and wise will of God for a married man.

It’s not hard to start marriage that way.  It can be hard to stay that way.  One thing that helps is the wonderful phrase in the preceding verse: “Rejoice in the wife of your youth” (Proverbs 5:18).  Through the years, we men can savor the thought, “She will always be the wife of my youth.  She will always be that girl I fell in love with, that girl who made me drunk with love, that girl who said ‘I do’ and gave herself completely to me.  I am changing.  She is changing.  But this will never change — deep in my eyes, in my eyes alone, she will always be that girl.”

Go back to where you both started together.  It was good.  It was biblical.  It was of God.  It’s worth recovering and reverently preserving all the way to the end.

This post was originally published on The Gospel Coalition