18 November

Today's the day when in 2000 the celebrity wedding of the year took place as Hollywood leading man Michael Douglas married Welsh actress Catherine Zeta Jones. The ceremony took place in New York’s Plaza Hotel at an estimated cost of £1.5 million, but it was shrouded in secrecy due to an exclusive deal with OK! Magazine reputedly worth £1 million. Security was so tight that guests had to show their hologrammed invitations before being allowed in and private photographs were banned.

In a world where the process and cost of holding a wedding often seems to eclipse the importance of marriage itself, it’s good to listen to the Bible setting out a pattern for loving commitment in marriage, as it does in Ephesians 5:

Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Saviour. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.