LDS Place

“Marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God,” declared the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in “The Family: A Proclamation to the World.” They went on to say that marriage is “essential to [God’s] eternal plan,” with husbands and wives under “solemn responsibility to love and care for each other.”

Then in 1999 President Gordon B. Hinckley reemphasized the crucial role of marriage with his admonition that “God-sanctioned marriage between a man and a woman has been the basis of civilization for thousands of years. There is no justification to redefine what marriage is.” Yet people keep trying to redefine it to legitimize worldly philosophies or to serve their own agendas. Increasingly, believers in God-ordained marriage are called on to defend the institution from those who say it is irrelevant or passé. Parents often find themselves looking for ways to demonstrate the importance of marriage to their children who are bombarded by pressures from the world and, all too often, from their friends and associates.

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A number of years ago my wife and I went to a garden wedding reception. Earlier that day we had been to the temple, where two young people we knew had been married for time and all eternity. They were much in love. The circumstances of their meeting had been almost miraculous. Many tears of happiness were shed. We stood in the reception line at the end of a perfect day. Ahead of us was a close friend of the family. As he approached the couple, he stopped and in a beautiful, clear tenor voice sang to them the stirring words from the book of Ruth: “Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die” (Ruth 1:16–17).

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