The King and His Bride
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Read Psalm 45 in full before proceeding, then read Hebrews 1:8–9, where the New Testament addresses its King as God. As you read the psalm, notice where it speaks to the King and where it turns to speak to the bride. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.
Your throne, O God, is permanent … Then the king will be attracted by your beauty.
Psalm 45:6, 11
Of all the psalms in the book, this is the one you would least expect to find there. Psalm 45 is a wedding song, a poem written for the marriage of a king, the only one of its kind in the whole Psalter. Its title calls it a love song, and it opens with a poet whose heart is too full to sit still: My heart is stirred by a beautiful song. I say, “I have composed this special song for the king; my tongue is as skilled as the stylus of an experienced scribe” (v. 1). He has been given a royal wedding to write about, and the words are pouring out faster than he can set them down. What is a love song doing in the prayer book of Christ?
The psalm falls into clear movements, and the read-through will have shown them to you. First the poet turns to the King, the bridegroom, and sings his praises: his beauty, his gracious speech, his sword and splendor, his throne (vv. 2–9). Then he turns to the bride, the queen, and addresses her, calling her to leave her old home and give herself to the King, describing her arrayed in gold and led to the palace in joy (vv. 10–15). And he closes with a word about the King’s sons and the praise of his name in every generation (vv. 16–17). A groom, a bride, a wedding, a procession to the palace. On its face, a court poem for a royal marriage.
But the poet says one thing about the King that no court poet has any business saying about an earthly groom, and it is the thing that pries the whole psalm open. In the middle of his praises he turns and addresses the King directly as God: Your throne, O God, is permanent (v. 6). No king of Judah had a throne that lasted forever, and no honest poet would call a mortal bridegroom God. The language strains past every earthly king it might first have honored, exactly as the royal psalms always do, and the New Testament tells us plainly where it lands. The Letter to the Hebrews takes this very verse and says, without a moment’s hesitation, but of the Son he says, “Your throne, O God, is forever and ever” (Hebrews 1:8). The King of this wedding song is the Son of God. And if the King is Christ, then the bride is not hard to name, for the whole New Testament knows who the bride of Christ is: she is the church, the people He has made His own.
So this love poem turns out to be a gospel hiding in plain sight: the wedding song of the divine Bridegroom and His bride, of Christ and the church. And once we see that, every line begins to glow. The King’s beauty is the loveliness of Christ; his ride for truth and righteousness is the Lord Jesus going out to win His people; the bride summoned from her father’s house is every soul called out of the old life to belong to Him; the gold she is arrayed in is a beauty she did not bring but was given; and the King who desires her beauty is the Lord who loved His church and gave Himself up for her. We are going to find, in a poem about a royal wedding, one of the tenderest portraits of the gospel in all the Old Testament.
We will follow it in its own order, the King first, then the bride, and we will keep two things before us. The King is divine, addressed as God and yet having a God who anoints Him: the two natures again, as in Psalm 110. And the bride is beautiful, but with a borrowed beauty, made lovely by the very King who desires her. That is the heart of the gospel, and the thing Luther would call the joyful exchange. A King who is God, and a bride He makes beautiful and then delights in: that is the whole of Psalm 45, and very nearly the whole of the gospel.
The Most Handsome of the Sons of Men
The poet begins with the King’s beauty. You are the most handsome of all men. You speak in an impressive and fitting manner. For this reason God grants you continual blessings (v. 2). It is worth pausing on, because we are not used to thinking of the Lord Jesus this way. The Gospels tell us nothing of His physical appearance, and Isaiah will say of the Suffering Servant that he had no special appearance to draw us to him. But the beauty the psalm sings is not skin-deep. The line about his speech points to it (older translations render it grace is poured upon your lips): this is the loveliness of a person, the grace of His words and His character, the altogether-desirableness of the One of whom the bride in the Song of Songs says, he is totally desirable. The church has always found Christ the most beautiful of all, not because of how He looked on a Galilean road, but because of who He is and what He has done. Grace was poured on His lips; even His enemies marveled that no one ever spoke as He spoke.
And yet we should hold this beauty next to a hard verse we will meet in the volume to come, because the two together tell the truth about our King. Isaiah will say of the same Lord, in His suffering, that he had no stately form or majesty that might catch our attention, no special appearance that we should want to follow him (Isaiah 53:2). How can the most handsome of all men be the One with nothing in His appearance to catch our attention? Because the King has two appearances, and the world sees only the first. On the cross, to every eye that looked, there was no beauty there at all, only a beaten, bleeding man, marred beyond recognition. But to faith, that very cross is the most beautiful thing that has ever happened, the loveliest act of love in the history of the world. The King is most handsome precisely where the world saw nothing to desire, because His beauty is the beauty of self-giving love, and that beauty shone brightest in the dark. The bride learns to see, by faith, the loveliness the world walked past.
But this beautiful King is no mere ornament. The poet immediately arms him: Strap your sword to your thigh, O warrior. Appear in your majestic splendor (v. 3). In your majesty ride out victoriously for the cause of truth and meekness and righteousness; let your right hand teach you awesome deeds! (v. 4 ESV; the Hebrew names meekness here, which the NET’s rendering does not bring out). The beautiful King is a warrior who rides out to do battle, and notice the cause he fights for: truth and meekness and righteousness. That is a strange banner for a conqueror. Earthly kings ride out for territory and glory and plunder; this King rides for truth, and for meekness, the very meekness we met in Psalm 37, the lowliness of the One who would inherit the earth not by seizing it but by being given it. The conquering King and the meek King are the same King. He rides out mighty, and He rides out lowly, and the deeds His right hand will do will be awesome precisely because they are done in that strange combination of power and humility.
Your arrows are sharp and penetrate the hearts of the king’s enemies. Nations fall at your feet (v. 5). The King conquers; nations fall before Him. But remember how this King’s conquest actually works, the way we learned it in Psalm 110: His scepter goes out from Zion, and He rules in the midst of His enemies by the word, turning enemies into willing subjects. The arrows sharp in the heart are not finally weapons of destruction but of conversion: the word that pierces a heart, convicts it, and brings it to fall, not dead, but in glad surrender at the feet of the King. The nations who fall at this King’s feet rise again as His people. That is the only kind of conquest that ends in a wedding.
Your Throne, O God
And now the poet says the unsayable thing. Your throne, O God, is permanent. The scepter of your kingdom is a scepter of justice (v. 6). He turns to the bridegroom-king and calls him God (Elohim) and credits him with a throne that is permanent, the Hebrew says forever and ever, a throne that lasts not for a dynasty or an age but for all eternity. There are scholars who try to soften this, to read it as your throne is like God’s throne or God is your throne; but we do not have to settle the grammar by ourselves, because the New Testament has settled it for us. The Letter to the Hebrews, proving that the Son is higher than the angels, quotes this verse straight: of the Son he says, “Your throne, O God, is forever and ever” (Hebrews 1:8). The inspired reading is the plain one. The King is addressed as God, and the King is the Son.
And then, in the very next breath, something just as remarkable. You love justice and hate evil. For this reason God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of joy, elevating you above your companions (v. 7). Read it slowly. The King who was just called God now has a God: God, your God, has anointed you. In two verses the King is addressed as God and is said to have a God who anoints Him. To a flat reader that is a contradiction; to the Christian it is the two natures of Christ, exactly as we found them in Psalm 110’s riddle. The Son is true God (your throne, O God), and the Son, in His humanity, is the Anointed One who has a God and Father, anointed with the oil of joy above all His companions. Hebrews keeps both, quoting both verses one after the other and applying both to the Son, because both are true of Him and neither can be spared. The King of the wedding song is true God and true man, and the love song stumbled onto the deepest mystery of the faith without quite knowing it.
And it matters enormously for the bride that her Bridegroom is God, not merely a great man. The human soul was made for God, and there is a place in it that nothing less than God can fill: no spouse, no friend, no king, no creature however good. A merely human bridegroom, even the best, could never finally be the soul’s true rest, because the soul was built to be wedded to its Maker. That is why it is gospel and not blasphemy that the King of this wedding song is God: He alone can be the Husband the soul was made for. When a poor and disgraced people is wedded to this King, they are not merely given a protector or a benefactor; they are given God Himself, the only One who can fill the place in them that has ached, empty, since Eden. The deity of the Bridegroom is not a doctrinal footnote to the romance. It is the reason the romance can satisfy at all.
Notice, too, why this King is anointed above His companions: you love justice and hate evil. The scepter of His kingdom is a scepter of justice; His reign is righteous through and through. This is the King whose whole life loved what God loves and hated what God hates, the only King who ever did so perfectly, and so the oil of joy rests on Him without measure. And the joy matters. This is not a grim and joyless righteousness; the King is anointed with the oil of joy, and the wedding He is riding toward is a feast. The righteous King is the glad King, and His joy will become the joy of the bride He is coming for.
Robes Fragrant with Myrrh
The poet dresses the King for the wedding. All your garments are perfumed with myrrh, aloes, and cassia (v. 8). The King comes to His wedding perfumed, his garments scented with the costliest spices, and on the surface this is simply the lavishness of a royal bridegroom on his great day. But a Christian who reads the Gospels cannot hear myrrh and aloes without a catch in the throat, because those are the very spices that appear at the end of the Lord Jesus’s life: Nicodemus … accompanied Joseph, carrying a mixture of myrrh and aloes weighing about seventy-five pounds, to prepare the body of the Lord for burial (John 19:39). Myrrh and aloes were the spices of a wedding, yes, and they were the spices of a grave.
We should not press the detail into more than it is; myrrh and aloes were used for many festal and costly things, and the psalmist is singing of a wedding, not a funeral. But the resonance is too apt to ignore, and it tells the truth about this Bridegroom. For this is a King who came to His wedding by way of a tomb. The robes He wears to claim His bride are fragrant with the spices of His own burial, because He won her the only way she could be won: by dying for her. Christ loved the church and gave himself for her (Ephesians 5:25). The wedding and the cross are not two stories but one: the Bridegroom went to the grave to make the bride His own, and rose to lead her to the feast. The scent of myrrh on His wedding garment is the scent of the love that died to win her.
But mark this, or the wedding has no groom: the myrrh of His burial is not the end of the story, because no dead bridegroom ever led a bride to a feast. The same spices that perfumed Him for the tomb were left behind in it. We stood at that empty tomb back in Psalm 16 (the Holy One whose flesh did not see corruption, raised on the third day), and it is the risen King, not the buried one, who comes to claim His bride. The Bridegroom went down into death to win her and came up out of it to wed her; the myrrh clung to His grave-clothes and He walked out of them alive. So the scent of myrrh on His wedding robe is not the smell of death’s victory but of death’s defeat, the perfume of a love that went all the way into the grave for the bride and came back out to carry her to the palace. A buried bridegroom would be a tragedy; a risen one is a wedding.
And there, already, is the bride. Princesses are among your honored women. Your bride stands at your right hand, wearing jewelry made with gold from Ophir (v. 9). At the King’s right hand, the place of honor we just learned about in Psalm 110, where the Son sits at the Father’s right hand, stands the bride, arrayed in the finest gold. She is not off in some lesser place; she stands at His right hand, honored, beside the King. The bride of this divine Bridegroom is not a servant kept at a distance but a queen set at His side. Hold that picture, because the poet is about to turn from the King and speak, tenderly, to her.
Forget Your Father’s House
Listen, O princess. Observe and pay attention! Forget your homeland and your family. Then the king will be attracted by your beauty. After all, he is your master. Submit to him (vv. 10–11). The Hebrew says, as older translations have it, forget your people and your father’s house. The poet turns to the bride with the oldest counsel given to anyone marrying: leave the old home, and cleave to your husband. It is the word spoken over the first marriage, a man leaves his father and mother and unites with his wife (Genesis 2:24), now spoken to the bride. She is to forget her people and her father’s house, to let her old allegiance go, and give herself wholly to the King.
And here the wedding song becomes the gospel almost word for word. To belong to Christ the Bridegroom is to leave the old father’s house. Not our literal families, whom we are commanded to honor, but the old household we were all born into: the house of Adam, the old self, the old allegiances of a life lived for ourselves and the world. The believer is called out of that house, called to let it go, to count it loss, to be done with belonging to it, which is what happens in repentance and in baptism, where the old self is drowned and a new one rises belonging to Christ. Forget your father’s house is the call to conversion set to wedding music. The old belonging dies; a new belonging begins; and the bride takes a new name and a new home and a new Lord.
We should not pretend the leaving is easy, because it is not. To forget the old father’s house is to let go of things the heart has clung to all its life: old comforts, old securities, old loves that were never really our friends, the familiar shape of a self lived for itself. It feels, often, like a kind of dying, because it is one; the old self does not go quietly to the water of baptism. But here is what makes the leaving possible and even glad: the bride is not asked to leave her father’s house for nothing, or for a stranger. She is asked to leave it for a King who desires her, a Bridegroom who has already given Himself for her and is waiting to lead her to a feast. No one leaves a poor house grudgingly when a palace and a wedding wait at the end of the road. The call to forget the old belonging is hard; the One who issues it makes it the gladdest exchange a person could ever make.
But hear the promise wrapped around the call, because it is staggering: the king will be attracted by your beauty. The Hebrew word is stronger still; older translations render it the king will desire your beauty. The King desires her. Not tolerates her, not grudgingly accepts her, not puts up with her for form’s sake: desires her, wants her, delights in her beauty. This is a word many a believer desperately needs and can scarcely credit. We are so used to imagining that God, at best, puts up with us (that He forgives us the way one settles a debt, with a sigh) that the thought of Christ actually desiring His church, longing for her, finding her beautiful, sounds almost irreverent. But it is the plain word of the wedding song, and the New Testament only deepens it: Christ gave Himself for the church so that he may present the church to himself as glorious (Ephesians 5:27). The Bridegroom is not enduring a marriage of obligation. He is a King in love with the bride He is coming to claim. He is your master. Submit to him; and what a Master to submit to, who desires the one who submits.
And that submission (he is your master. Submit to him) is not the grim subjugation the word can call to mind. The submission of this bride to this King is the glad self-giving of one who has been sought, desired, and made beautiful by the very One she submits to. When the New Testament speaks of the church’s submission to Christ (as the church submits to Christ, Ephesians 5:24), it sets it carefully inside the Bridegroom’s self-sacrifice: He is a Head who gave Himself for the body, a Lord who loved the bride all the way to death and back. To submit to such a Lord is not to be conquered but to be cherished. The bride does not lose herself in submitting to this King; she finds herself, finally safe, finally home, in glad allegiance to the One who desired her enough to die for her.
All Glorious, Led to the King
Now we have to ask the question the gospel always makes us ask: where did the bride get her beauty? The princess looks absolutely magnificent, decked out in pearls and clothed in a brocade trimmed with gold. In embroidered robes she is escorted to the king (vv. 13–14). She is magnificent, clothed in gold, radiant; but whose gold is it? She did not come to the King wealthy and lovely on her own; no bride of this King ever did. The gold she wears is the gold from Ophir we saw a moment ago, the King’s own treasure; the splendor she is led in is splendor she has been given. The bride is beautiful, but with a borrowed beauty, made glorious by the King who desires her, not glorious in herself.
This is the very heart of the gospel, and it is the thing Luther saw so clearly that he built his account of salvation on this exact picture. He called it the joyful exchange. When a soul is joined to Christ by faith, he said, it is like a marriage between a rich and royal bridegroom and a poor, indebted, disgraced bride. And in that marriage everything is shared: her debts become His, and His riches become hers; her sin becomes His, and His righteousness becomes hers. She brings nothing to the wedding but her poverty and her shame; He brings everything, and makes it all hers by the marriage. So she who came in rags is led to the palace robed in gold: not gold she earned, but gold He clothed her in. The bride of Psalm 45, glorious in borrowed splendor, is the church arrayed in a righteousness that is not her own but Christ’s, given to her in the wedding. She was permitted to be dressed in bright, clean, fine linen (Revelation 19:8). Permitted; dressed; given. The beauty the King desires in His bride is the beauty He Himself gave her.
And so we must read verse 11 carefully, or we will turn the gospel back into law. The king will be attracted by your beauty does not mean make yourself beautiful enough and the King may want you. That would be the old slavery: earn the love, deserve the desire. The wedding song runs the other way entirely. The King makes the bride beautiful, clothes her in His own gold, and then delights in the beauty He has given her. His desire is not a wage she earns by her loveliness; her loveliness is His gift, and His desire is His delight in His own grace adorning her. The believer does not have to become beautiful enough to be wanted by Christ. The believer is made beautiful by Christ, and wanted in the beauty He bestows.
They are bubbling with joy as they walk in procession and enter the royal palace (v. 15). The procession into the palace, joy all around, is the wedding feast the whole Bible is moving toward. For the marriage of this King is not finished yet. The church is betrothed to Christ now (I promised you in marriage to one husband, to present you as a pure virgin to Christ, 2 Corinthians 11:2), but the wedding supper is still ahead, on the last day, when the cry goes up, the wedding celebration of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready (Revelation 19:7), and the holy city comes down made ready like a bride adorned for her husband (Revelation 21:2). Psalm 45’s joyful procession to the palace is the church’s own future: led, robed in given glory, with joy, into the house of the King, to the feast that has no end.
The Bridegroom Who Died to Win Her
Gather the wedding song up. Its King is the Son of God: addressed as God, His throne forever, and yet anointed by His God, the two natures held together in a single pair of verses that the New Testament would one day quote to prove the Son higher than the angels. He is beautiful and mighty, riding out for truth and meekness, conquering by a word that turns enemies into a willing people. He comes to His wedding in robes fragrant with the spices of His own burial, because He won His bride by dying for her. And His bride is the church: set at His right hand as a queen, called out of her old father’s house to belong to Him, desired by Him, and made glorious in a gold that was never hers until He clothed her in it.
And so the gospel is here entire, dressed for a wedding. The Bridegroom is divine, the bride is desired, and the beauty she is desired in is the beauty He gave her: the joyful exchange, her rags for His robes, her shame for His splendor, her sin for His righteousness. This is the truth the believer most needs and least believes: that Christ does not merely forgive the church as a judge dismisses a case, but weds her as a bridegroom claims a bride; that He does not tolerate His people but desires them; that the One seated at the right hand of God is the same One who went down into a grave fragrant with myrrh to make a poor and disgraced people His own forever, and to clothe them in His own glory.
And notice that the bride is one. The wedding song does not sing of a crowd of separate brides each married privately to her own King; it sings of the bride, the princess, the one bride led to the one King. The bride of Christ is the church: His whole people, gathered out of every nation, one body and one bride. This is worth saying plainly in an age that imagines faith to be a solitary affair between an individual and his God. You are not a lone bride; you are part of the one bride, joined to all the others who belong to the King, in the communion of saints. The believer who tries to be wedded to Christ while holding the rest of His people at arm’s length has misunderstood the wedding. We are brought to the King together, robed together, led to the feast together, with the maidens of honor following behind: one glorious bride, made beautiful by one Bridegroom, for one wedding that will gather the whole church into the palace at last.
And if the bride should fear her own faithfulness (and she should, for she knows herself), the Scriptures have a harder and tenderer wedding song still. The prophet Hosea was made to marry an unfaithful wife, to love her, to lose her to her wanderings, and then to buy her back out of the slavery those wanderings had sold her into, all as a living picture of the LORD and His faithless people. That is the marriage the church has actually made with her King: not the romance of a worthy bride, but the rescue of an unfaithful one, pursued and bought back and loved through every wandering by a Husband who will not let her go. So the bride’s security does not rest on her own constancy, which fails, but on the Bridegroom’s vow, which does not. He set His desire on her, paid for her with His blood, and will present her to Himself without stain at the last; and not even her own unfaithfulness will finally undo the wedding, because the keeping of it was never her work but His.
Live, then, as the bride of such a Bridegroom. Forget the old father’s house; let the old belonging go; you have a new Lord and a new name and a place at His right hand. Do not imagine you must make yourself beautiful enough to be wanted. You cannot, and you do not have to; the beauty He desires in you is the beauty He has given you, His own righteousness, and the beauty He is even now working in you by His Spirit and His word, the splendor He will present to Himself without stain or wrinkle on the last day. And lift up your head in the in-between time, betrothed but not yet brought to the feast, because the procession has already begun. The King who loved justice and was anointed with the oil of joy is coming for you with joy, and the wedding song the poet could not write fast enough is, in the end, about you: the bride of the King who is God, led in given glory into a palace whose feast will never end.
Gathering the Threads
We found, where we least expected it, a love song in the prayer book of Christ, and discovered it was the gospel all along. Its King is praised for his beauty and armed for battle, riding out for truth and meekness, conquering by the word that turns enemies into a willing people. And then the poet called him God: your throne, O God, is permanent, the very verse Hebrews would quote of the Son, even as the next verse said God, your God, has anointed you, holding the two natures together in a single breath. The King of the wedding song is true God and true man, beautiful, righteous, and glad.
His robes came scented with myrrh and aloes, the spices of a wedding and of a grave, for this Bridegroom won His bride by dying for her. And the bride is the church: set at His right hand as a queen, called out of her old father’s house to belong wholly to Him, and (wonder of wonders) desired by Him, not tolerated but wanted. We asked where her beauty came from and found the heart of the gospel: a borrowed beauty, a given gold, the joyful exchange in which she brings her sin and shame and He gives His righteousness and splendor, so that she is led to the palace glorious in robes that were always His. The wedding is begun and not yet finished; the church is betrothed now and will be brought to the feast on the last day. Psalm 45 is the wedding song of Christ and His church: a King who is God, and a bride He died to win, desires, and clothes in His own glory.
For Discussion
Psalm 45 is a wedding song for a king, yet verse 6 addresses the King as God, and Hebrews 1:8 applies it to the Son. How does verse 6 (your throne, O God) together with verse 7 (God, your God, has anointed you) hold the two natures of Christ together, as Psalm 110 did?
The New Testament consistently calls Christ the Bridegroom and the church His bride (Ephesians 5:25–32; Revelation 19:7). How does reading Psalm 45 as the wedding song of Christ and His church change what the whole psalm is about?
Verse 11 says, the king will be attracted by your beauty (older translations, will desire your beauty). The session argued the bride’s beauty is not her own achievement but the King’s gift (compare Ephesians 5:26–27; Revelation 19:8). Why does that distinction matter, and how does it keep the verse from becoming a demand rather than good news?
Luther described salvation as a joyful exchange: the believing soul, married to Christ, gives Him her sin and receives His righteousness, so that she becomes beautiful with His beauty. Where in Psalm 45’s King and bride do you see that exchange pictured?
The bride is told to forget your homeland and your family (v. 10; literally, your people and your father’s house). What does it mean for a believer to leave the old father’s house to belong to Christ, and how is that like and unlike leaving a literal home? Compare Genesis 2:24.
The King’s wedding garments are perfumed with myrrh, aloes, and cassia (v. 8), and myrrh and aloes are the same spices brought for the Lord Jesus’s burial (John 19:39). What might it mean that the Bridegroom’s wedding garments carry the scent of His grave? Compare Ephesians 5:25.
Looking Ahead
We have seen the King enthroned (Psalm 110) and the King wed (Psalm 45). The next session closes the royal cluster by showing us what the King’s reign is actually for. Psalm 72 is a prayer for the king, by its title a psalm for Solomon (the Hebrew can also be read of Solomon), asking God to give the king His justice and righteousness. And the reign it prays for is unmistakably a reign of mercy: he will defend the oppressed among the people; he will deliver the children of the poor (Psalm 72:4); he will rescue the needy when they cry out for help, and the oppressed who have no defender (v. 12).
But the psalm prays for more than any son of David ever delivered. It asks that the king rule from sea to sea, and from the Euphrates River to the ends of the earth (v. 8), that all kings will bow down to him; all nations will serve him (v. 11), and, most tellingly, that all nations be blessed in him (v. 17 ESV), which is the ancient promise made to Abraham, that in his offspring all the families of the earth would be blessed. Psalm 72 prays for a King whose righteous, merciful, worldwide reign blesses every nation on earth, and there has only ever been one such King. We will read it as the prayer the whole Old Testament was praying, finally answered in Christ.
Read Psalm 72 in full before the next session. As you read, notice how often the king’s reign is described in terms of justice for the poor and needy, and watch for the moment the psalm’s hopes outrun anything an earthly king could deliver.
Closing Prayer
Lord Jesus Christ, our King and our Bridegroom, true God, whose throne is forever, and true man, anointed with the oil of gladness above all Your companions: we marvel that You should desire a people such as we are. We came to You with nothing but our poverty and our shame, and You have clothed us in Your own righteousness, set us at Your right hand, and called us Your own. We bless You that You won us not from a distance but by going down into the grave for us, Your wedding robes fragrant with the spices of Your burial, and that You rose to lead us to the feast.
Teach us to forget the old father’s house, to let the old self and its allegiances die, and to hold fast to You alone, our Lord. Do not let us imagine that we must make ourselves beautiful enough to be wanted by You; make us beautiful by Your Spirit and Your word, and present us to Yourself at the last without spot or wrinkle. Keep us glad and watchful in the betrothal time, with our heads lifted toward the day the cry goes up that the marriage of the Lamb has come. For You live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.