In an episode of the uniquely popular TV program The Andy Griffith Show, an episode entitled “The Rivals,” Andy tries to help his son Opie come to terms with the troubling symptoms of being in the throes of first love. As they sit together in the living room, Opie opens the conversation: “Paw, when you like someone a whole lot, that means you love ’em, don’t it?”

“It depends,” says Andy.

“Well, when I’m with Karen, I get a lump in my throat, my ears ring, and my knees get all squiggly. Does that mean I’m in love?’

“Either that or you’ve got a real bad case of the measles.”

“Paw, if I marry Karen someday, her name becomes Taylor, don’t it?”

“That’s right, and all your children become Taylors too.”

“Children? … I don’t think we’d have any children, Paw. We already know enough kids to play with.”

And so – with childhood’s blurry vision of the details of this state called marriage — Opie easily dismisses one of the most important results of engaging in the deepest mysteries of the marriage covenant. Children are a very visible product of those mysteries.

But there are other products as well. Many of them are not so easily seen or identified, but they can be just as important and just as life-changing. There is a sense of fulfillment and a greater sense of wholeness. There’s a sense of security and oneness that melts away all the coldness of being alone. And there’s a new knowledge of self – an understanding of oneself on a new level. The man and woman who have previously been “their own person” have now, for the first time, realized that they are much more complex and much more capable of enjoying that complexity as a result of this new relationship and the new identity that results from it.

But all of this change is not easy. Nor is it simple. In fact, it is so complex that sometimes it’s weeks, or unfortunately even years, before one or both partners actually realize that they have become a part of a brand new whole and are no longer exactly the same persons they were before marriage.

That realization could be frightening if not seen through the plan of God. He, after all, is Love (1 John 4:8). He created this thing called marriage – and the sex that is an integral part of it. And guess what? He knows what He’s talking about. His plan is that each partner in this holy covenant relationship will find in the mate the answer to longings that have never been fulfilled; the key to opening doors in the soul that have never been unlocked; and the love that saturates and nurtures our unique gifts and abilities so that they mature and bring us to the highest and best we can be. In short, it’s this new person, conceived from the two, that is finally complete and whole in a way that nothing but a “covenant” marriage relationship can accomplish.

It is true that our mate cannot fill the place in us that is reserved for God Himself. And we will never be truly whole until He is at home in us, giving us all of Himself. But it is God Himself who has told us clearly, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make him a helper suitable for him. … And the Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man and brought her to the man. And the man said, ‘This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.’ … For this cause a man shall leave his father and his mother and shall cleave to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.” (Gen. 2: 18, 22-24, NAS). God said of his “perfect” man that he needed a woman to be complete. And He created the woman to be so much a part of the man that she would have a need of him to be complete as well. Isn’t it interesting that this “need” of each other was created into us as part of our perfection? And this unique completeness that results is probably the one most powerful and thrilling product of a man and woman entering into and enjoying the blessed mysteries of God’s kind of marriage.

I know in this 21^st century – especially in the hollowed political halls of this world — it is not considered “politically correct” to make such statements. But, thank God, there is still one Document that supersedes all the political attitudes and postures of every society on the face of the earth. It still supersedes every new “law” on the books that would try to make marriage something different from the commitment of one male and one female partner in covenant with each other and with the God who created them. Thank God that Document — The Word of God – The Holy Bible – still gives the human race the blessed, supernatural opportunity to experience total completeness through love – when they enter into it the way God Himself created it to be experienced.

Truly, a Valentine gift to be treasured forever.