Week 4--Doctrine of Eternal Marriage

I have often heard the adage, “Divorce is 50/50, marriage should be 100/100.” Elder Bruce C. Hafen said something very similar. In his talk Covenant Marriage, he said,

“When troubles come, the parties to a contractual marriage seek happiness by walking away. They marry to obtain benefits and will stay only as long as they’re receiving what they bargained for. But when troubles come to a covenant marriage, the husband and wife work them through. They marry to give and to grow, bound by covenants to each other, to the community, and to God. Contract companions each give 50 percent; covenant companions each give 100 percent.”

We each need to decide if we are going to look at our marriage as a contractual agreement, or as a covenant that we’ve made with each other and with our Heavenly Father. I loved the image Elder Bednar showed of a couple at two corners of a triangle with our Savior at the top. As we grow closer to the Savior, we grow closer to one another.

(image source)

When we see our marriage as a covenant between 3 people instead of a contract between 2, it’s easier to let the love we have for our Savior and of our Heavenly Father to be manifest in how we treat each other in our relationship. 

We also need to remember to teach our children the importance of the temple in our lives, and especially in our marriages. President Benson gave a talk in 1984 entitled, What I hope you would teach your children about the Temple. In reading that, I was reminded of how important it is to let our children know why we attend the temple. Yes, there are things that we should not discuss because of the sacredness of those things, but our children need to know about the priesthood and the sealing power that we can partake of in that holy house.

The summer I got married I was teaching a primary class in my home ward. Now, I had always been taught about the temple and its importance, but teaching this class showed me that not everyone places the same emphasis on the temple. I asked the kids, “Where do you want to be married?” and one little girl piped up, “In the big building with the lions out front”. At the time it was pretty funny. Only a 4-year-old would want to get married at the library, but it told me that some of these kids weren’t getting the message about the importance of the temple at home. I think that sometimes we think our kids will just know how important these things are, but if we don’t take the time to talk about them, are they really going to get it? We need to make sure we are talking about the important things in our families. The temple, the priesthood, the importance of marriage. Talk about it!

Here's a post I made on a different blog for a different class (that's not confusing at all, is it?). It covers some of this topic as well. 

References
Ezra Taft Benson (1984) "What I hope you would teach your children about the temple." 
Bruce C. Hafen (1996) "Covenant Marriage."