Marriage Is Not the Source of Ultimate Delight

In preparing to preach on singleness, I came across a letter from a 18th century pastor, Henry Venn, to his wife, Eling Venn. I had intended to close the sermon with this but ran out of time, so I'll post it here. The excerpt is a helpful reminder that marriage, while good, is not where we ought to look for ultimate delight.

“You will believe me, when I assure you, it gives me great pleasure to find you love me so tenderly. But you have need to beware lest I should stand in God’s place; for your expressions, ‘that you know not how to be from me an hour without feeling the loss etc.’ seem to imply something of this kind. My dearest E., we must ever remember that word which God hath spoken from heaven, ‘the time is short: let those who have wives be as if they had none; and those who rejoice, as if they rejoice not.’ Both for myself and you, I would always pray that God may be so much dearer to us than we are to each other that our souls in his love ‘delight themselves in fatness,’ and feel he is an all-sufficient God.”

Quoted from Michael Haykin's book The Christian Lover: The Sweetness of Love and Marriage in the Letters of Believers