We are celebrating our seventh wedding anniversary TODAY! What a gift. And around this time of year, I always get nostalgic about our wedding day (and I force Blake to watch our wedding day video with me while I cry).
And when I remember our wedding day and the feeling of being a bride, I am reminded that we as believers are the Bride of Christ. This is what Jesus calls us: His Church, His Bride.
A bride is cherished, loved, honored, redeemed.
She is protected, secure, provided for.
She is beautiful, cherished, celebrated, and beaming.
She has great hope for the future, dreams for the life that lays ahead.
Her eyes are full of light, and she illuminates every room she enters.
She lives loved; she knows her value and worth: the Groom desires her deeply and gives himself for her, to her.
She is not ashamed, she is not condemned, she does not live in fear.
"She is clothed with strength and dignity, she can laugh at the days to come" (Proverbs 31:25).
She is radiant.
We so often forget our identity in Christ; the way He sees us.
We must sit in the presence of Jesus to reclaim our identity as the Bride of Christ.
We must seek Him and listen to Him and ask to be reminded of who we are - for our own sake and the sake of our children.
I know that I would mother differently if I could grasp His love for me more fully. In the past month I've started praying Ephesians 3 over my children nightly: "And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord's holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge - that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God" (Ephesians 6:17-19).
I'm reminded today that I need to pray this for myself too: that I need His power in order to know His love; to understand it and grasp it and experience it and live into it. How we need this love that changes everything to transform our hearts and heal us and bless us so that we may beam like the Bride that we are; so that we may put this Love on display to our children.
This prayer in Ephesians 3 ends this way: "Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen" (Ephesians 3:20-21).
May He revive us today and remind us how it feels to be a Bride. And as we claim our true identity in Him, may He do immeasurably more in and through us than all we could ever ask or imagine.
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