I Survived My Daughter's Wedding!

Staybrite wrote:

kerrick wrote:

Gotcha.  I'm surprised their pastor married them if he knew they were living together.  The reason I ask is that someone close to me who was living with her fiancee recently got married to him.  The parallels are striking actually...  She considers herself a Christian and he possibly does, but they've both been going to church, etc.  Anyways, I've been processing a lot with regards to their actions/unrepentant sin pattern, what it means to be a follower of Christ, my own sin history, God's grace and mercy but also His righteous judgment, the sheep and the goats, loving admonishment, etc.  With such a similar situation, I was curious if you had been thinking through some of the same things.  Anyways, I'm glad to hear everything went well and I hope their marriage will be used by God for great things in His kingdom!  Coming up on our second anniversary, I am beginning to understand what people mean by marriage being a sanctifying experience. 

I let both my daughter and her boyfriend (at the time...now husband).  That I wasn't at all happy with them living together (and obviously fornicating) prior to being married.  I told them that God didn't condone it either.  I think people need to save themselves for marriage (although I wasn't a Christian as a young man and certainly did not save myself for marriage).

However, lets look at the logic of a pastor/church refusing to marry a couple because they are living together.  What is the pastor/church saying by not marrying people who are very likely living in sin?  "Go ahead and just keep sinning because the church (and by default God) is never going to recognize your union because you didn't save your self for marriage"  This seems a bit preposterous, but that's the message those pastor's (churches) send to many of those people (and we wonder why young people are leaving the church in droves).  Should the couple who wants to get married move away from each other and abstain from fornication for some period of time before they get married so later they can be properly married in the church?  Like somehow their purity will be restored by abstinence?  This smacks of "works over faith" to me.  The only thing that will convict the unmarried who are engaging in fornication to repent is the holy spirit.  I fail to see how not allowing them to get married by a pastor/church is going to punish them into repenting.  Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't see the logic in that at all.  It's like telling someone who isn't a Christian that they can't come to your church and they can never get married unless they become a Christian first.

I made a separate thread so we can keep this one on track.  
https://christianhardmusic.niceboard.com/t8311-living-in-sin-repentance-marriage-etc

kerrick wrote:

I made a separate thread so we can keep this one on track.  
https://christianhardmusic.niceboard.com/t8311-living-in-sin-repentance-marriage-etc

Good idea.  But I don't know that you will get a ton of response to it. 

Eh that's alright.    At least we can keep this thread on topic!

Boston cutting "Gary's cake" is a fantastic picture by the way.  Absolutely adorable.

Staybrite wrote:

Jen5 wrote:

Grooms cake??? Now that's something I've never heard of.

I always thought it was a U.S. tradition.  The wedding cake being expensive, and wedding parties can be quite large...  Many weddings here in the U.S. the couple will keep the top tier of their wedding cake and freeze it, to eat later on their 1st anniversary.  If the guest list is large there might not be enough wedding cake for everyone...so I thought they started adding a "groom's cake" to help feed all the sugar ravenous obese Americans.  Traditionally it would be a simple sheet cake (at least that's what I saw years ago).  
Turns out it started as a British tradition (if you can trust wikipedia).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groom%27s_cake

Seems like in recent years they are an excuse to do some wild or original looking (and often tasting) cakes.  There is a famous scene in the movie Steel Magnolias where they have a grooms cake that is red velvet and shaped like an armadillo.

Ah yes, the bleeding armadillo