Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Good evening, everybody.
How are we doing tonight?
Good. Great.
And everything in between.
So, yeah, this is one of those passages.
Let's just go ahead and read it, and then I'll give you my disclaimer, and we'll jump right in.
All right. Ephesians 5, 22.
Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior.
Now, as the Church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.
Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the Word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.
In the same way, husbands should love their wives as their own bodies.
He who loves his wife, loves himself, for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body.
Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.
This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ in the church.
However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.
All right, so, yeah, I would like to give a little bit of a disclaimer.
I guess the first thing I would say is when you read, anytime you talk about marriage, money, or raising children, people get a little edgy, and I think that's fair.
You know, those are three. Like, can be three really personal things in our lives.
So I would just say I stand before you today not as somebody who feels like I've mastered this or I've arrived in any sort of way whatsoever.
I was kind of stupid and volunteered for this passage. I don't know what I was thinking, honestly, because it's been nothing but a stress in my life since I said I would do it.
But, yeah, I. I haven't arrived.
Blair and I have been married 16 years. It'll be 17 years in this upcoming January.
This passage is just as relevant to us today as it was when we first got married.
So I want to throw that disclaimer in there. Don't have it mastered. At the end of the day, I'm just a sinful guy trying to trust the Lord, trying to trust Jesus, follow Jesus, trust his word, etc. So the other thing is, I am wearing a bulletproof vest, so there will be no John Wilkes Booth nonsense. Although I guess he took a headshot so that. That could still affect me.
But, yeah. So, yeah, if we could cue.
Cue the video.
[00:03:54] Speaker B: I had a very interesting lunch with George Costanza today.
[00:03:58] Speaker A: Really?
[00:03:59] Speaker B: We were talking about our lives, and we both kind of realized we're kids. We're not men. So then you asked yourselves, isn't there something more tonight? Yes, we did. Yeah. Well, let me clue you in on something. There isn't.
There is absolutely not.
[00:04:20] Speaker A: I mean, what are you thinking about, Jerry?
[00:04:22] Speaker B: Marriage? Family?
Well, the prisons.
Man made prisons. You're doing time.
You get up in the morning, she's there. You go to sleep at night, she's there. It's like you got to ask permission to. To. To use the bathroom. Is it all five?
Yeah. And you can forget about watching TV while you're eating.
I can't. Oh, yeah.
You know why? Because it's dinner time.
Do you know what you do at dinner? What? You talk about your day.
How was your day today? Did you have a good day today or a bad day today? Well, what kind of day was it? I don't know. How about you? How was your day?
It's sad, Jim.
It's a sad state of affairs.
We had this talk.
[00:05:11] Speaker A: Not.
All right, that's not an endorsement of that show by any means, but I do think that that is the way that our kind of our secular world, and even if we're honest, some of us, like within the church, view marriage.
You know, I think he said, man made prisons. You're doing time.
So I believe that our marriages are speaking each and every day.
And the question really isn't, are they speaking? The question is, what are they saying?
What is. What is my marriage saying?
What is. If. So if you're married in here tonight, I want you to keep that question in the back of your head. What is my marriage saying? And if you're not married, but maybe you have the idea that you'll get married one day, then the question is, what should my marriage say when. When I meet the right person? When God puts the right person in my life, what should my marriage be saying?
Our marriages are speaking volumes. Each and every day they're speaking to our spouses. What are they saying to our spouses every day when we. When we get up and we're. We just live our lives? What are our marriages communicating to our spouses? What are they communicating to our kids? What Are they saying.
What are they saying to our friends and other people at church?
What are they saying to the random waiter at La Cocina, you know, when he takes our order?
When people look at our marriages, is it the kind of thing where they look at and they say, man, I want that.
Like, look how they interact. You know, look how cute they are together, like a cute old couple. Or look how much they respect each other and they sacrifice for each other. Look how much love there is. You can see it.
Or are they like, Kramer, when they look at their. When they look at us, they're like, man, that man's doing hard time.
Or, man, look, look how little she seems to respect him.
Or, man, look, look how little he seems to care about her feelings.
What are our marriages saying?
So I can tell you from this passage, I think what our marriages should be saying.
I believe that we as Christians are called to much more than just a legal document on some government form.
A change in our marital status.
I believe that our marriages are meant to preach and teach the Gospel. When people look at our marriages, I think they're supposed to see Jesus and his love for the church, and they're supposed to see the church and the church's following of his leadership.
Willful following, joyful following.
You see, when we make a covenant of marriage, it's not just between a man and a woman. It's between a man and a woman in God.
God is a third party in all of those marriages.
So, again, my goal for tonight is really simple. If you walk out with nothing else, this is the number one goal right there. That we would see marriage as an opportunity to respond to the Lord, because that is. It's such a great opportunity.
We have such a great opportunity each and every day, if you're married at such a chance to respond to the Lord each and every single day in worship. It can be in worship.
And a marriage is such a blessing as hopefully you already know.
So. All right, next slide, please.
All right, so let's talk about the context.
So Paul, as we've been over before, he's writing to a Greco Roman audience in Ephesus. Ephesus was a major city under Roman occupation. He. It was a huge city. It was a trade city.
And Paul is going to do this thing that any good teacher does at some point. He's going to take something that everybody's sort of familiar with in culture and he's going to use it as a vehicle to drive a deeper truth.
So in this culture, the audience would have been really familiar with this idea of household rules.
Now, in. In Roman culture and Greek culture, it was all about authority. It was all about Caesar.
And they kind of came to this logical conclusion, right? They said, okay, a city, when you think about it, is just. It's just a collection of different households, right? Like Roxboro. If we all gathered together as the city of Roxboro, it would be nothing but a bunch of households that had gathered together, right?
So the Roman thought was that special attention should be paid to for each household, because if your household was in order, and if you had all of these households that were in order when they came together, it would form a strong state, a strong city, a strong republic, and it would be in order.
And the inverse was true. If there was disharmony, if there's disarray and chaos in individual houses, when they came together, that would bleed over into society.
And frankly, I agree with that. And I think America could probably use a little more of that thinking.
A lot of our problems in society, I think you could trace back to chaos in individual homes that has bled into our society.
But I'm not talking about that tonight. So they had these household rules because of that, and great thinkers like Aristotle, Philo, Josephus, the historian, they contributed to this idea of what an ideal house should look like. And so those household rules would have been common knowledge for anybody in that period. Okay, next slide, please.
So the household rules were pretty straightforward. They went like this.
Husbands rule your wives, fathers rule your children.
Masters rule your slaves.
And the father was seen almost as like a mini Caesar in his home.
So Caesar at the time was a dictator.
So the father's rule was absolute. It was all about authority. It was about hierarchy, and it was about preserving order and structure.
So it's interesting that Paul is going to take this social construct and he's going to inject the Lord.
So he's going to say, if you're familiar with the Beatitudes with Jesus, it's sort of in the same vein as that when Jesus came on the scene and said, you've heard it said, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you, love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you.
And he said, you've heard this about adultery. But I say, anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has committed adultery in his heart.
So it's sort of in that same vein of taking something that was culturally the norm and saying, this is what we all understand now. Let's see what God actually thinks about it. Let's Go deeper.
So immediately, because the father is a mini Caesar. Husbands, future husbands, husbands. I want you to have this idea in your head, because I think it's really helpful.
You can either rule your house like Caesar, or you can rule your household like Jesus.
And which.
Which is it going to look like? Which is it going to be?
So anyway, just keep that in the back of your head.
Immediately we have that juxtaposition of, like, how did Caesar rule as a dictator versus how did Jesus rule as the servant king who was the king of kings?
And he.
He was worthy of all subjugation everywhere in heaven and on earth. And he humbled himself and came down and lived a perfect life and died a humiliating death on the cross for us.
Like, which are we going to look like? You know, are we going to fight and seize for power all the time and execute our enemies and this, that, and the other, like a dictator? Are we going to rule like a servant king, like Jesus?
That's. That, I believe, is what we're called to do.
All right, so that is the context. That's the backdrop. Let's get into it.
All right, big point number one, really simple. Go watch Fireproof.
If you've never seen that movie before, please watch it.
It's such a great movie. It's hokey, it's low budget, but the, you know, the truths that are in it are really profound, and it's really worth the conversation.
It's worth talking about.
Frankly, if. If as my girls get older and they have suitors come along, I'm gonna force them to watch Fireproof and we're gonna talk about. I'm not even joking. Like, this is gonna be, like, on our checklist. Like, we're gonna watch this movie, we're gonna talk about it, and it's gonna be super awkward, but it's just really. It's such a good movie. It's based off of this book called the Love Dare, which is also really good.
And the Love Dare was written to kind of revitalize dying marriages. Marriages where people, one or both people, felt like they wanted out and they were gonna. They were just gonna get a divorce.
And so the Love Dare was. It's like basically 40 days of taking a challenge to decide to love your spouse despite how they treat you or talk to you. So anyway, super worth. Super worthwhile. I don't get any commission off of it. So just put that to rest, if you think that's why I'm saying that. All right, next slide, please.
All right, let's get into it. Call for husbands. I'm going to start with husbands for two reasons. One, so all the women don't just, like, jump me in the parking lot for saying submit without any context.
And two, because honestly, the husband is called to be a spiritual leader in the house.
And when the husband is doing his part, it's when the husband is submitted to God and is really seeking out the heart of the Lord and really trying to apply that in his life.
It becomes really easy for the wife to respect him, to afford him respect. It becomes really easy for the wife to follow his leadership because he's already doing what he's supposed to be doing. He's already leading in those areas.
So there's a call for husbands to put his wife's needs above his own in response to the Lord.
Now, the call for both husbands and wives is the exact same.
It's just the application is a little bit different. Good save.
All right, so. So here. So that's the call for husbands. Can we go next slide? All right.
Husbands, love your wife as Christ loved the church.
That begs the question, how did Christ love the church?
How did he love the church? You ever thought about that?
What does that mean, love your wife as Christ loved the church?
I've been thinking about it a lot the past few months.
You know, one thing, one obvious thing. He did. It says it in earlier, in the chapter, verse 5, Christ gave Himself up for the church.
It doesn't just mean on the cross. It means every day he was. By living a perfect life, by putting aside what he wanted to do and being in submission to God the Father perfectly.
He's giving himself up for the church so he could be a perfect sacrifice.
So, man, give yourself up for the church. Give yourself up for your wife.
What does that even look like?
Pour yourself. Oh, sorry, go back.
Pour yourself out for.
You get this idea of, like, everything that's. Everything that's within you. If you're a vessel, if you're a cup and you're just dumping yourself out, like, giving it everything you've got. It's kind of this image of emptying yourself for your. For your wife.
Love her as you love yourself.
Now, I. I really like that Paul includes these two things. He doesn't just say, as Christ loved the church. Because some. That's kind of mysterious. Some people might be like, I don't know what that means, but it's really clear. Love. Love your wife as you love yourself. That's kind of harder to argue with.
Like, we love ourselves, we take care of ourselves.
His Passage says, we nourish and cherish our own bodies.
So it's pretty simple, a pretty simple concept. If you don't like being lied to, don't lie to your wife.
If you don't like being disrespected, don't disrespect your wife.
Yeah, it's not rocket science, but, you know, it can be hard to do sometimes if you just treat your wife as you'd like to be treated.
It's pretty straightforward.
Next slide, please.
So then he gets into this. This idea of nourish and cherish your wife.
Now, I really like these.
These two words. I've looked them up in the Greek as well. Nourish has more to do with, you know, taking care of someone's physical needs.
But this word cherish is different.
This word cherish is used two times in the New Testament here. And the only other time is when it's talking about a mother, how a mother cherishes her baby, like breastfeeding. But it's kind of this idea of tenderness and gentleness.
So it's not just, I provide for you, this callous, I provide for you attitude. So you should do what I say.
It's much more, man, I love you, I cherish you. I want to take care of you, take care of your needs. And there's this idea of gentleness and kindness and intimacy wrapped up in that word.
And what's most important about this for husbands is the times that you feel like your wife hasn't earned it.
Christ has.
So, like, we're called to respond to Jesus's worthiness, not. Not our spouse. And the reason why is simple. There are going to be days if you've been married, even if you've been married for a year or less, there have been days when, you know, you do not feel like loving your wife, like sacrificing for your wife, like saying, honey, I want to do this, you, you want to do that.
Let's just do what you want to do.
Like, they're going to. There are going to be lots of times when you don't feel like doing that.
So. And there are also going to be times when you're fighting, right? Like, just couples fight.
So when you're fighting, when you're at. When you're at odds with each other, that's why we're called to respond to Christ. And we're called to pour ourselves out as an offering for Christ to our wives.
So even when she hasn't earned it, Christ has earned it, you know?
Amen.
So that's the most important thing about this is, like, respond to Jesus's worthiness, not your wife's worthiness.
Okay, next slide, please.
And again. So we're going to circle back to this idea of like, many Caesar versus Jesus Christ, right? Like, you get the choice of what kind of leader you're going to be in your house and Christian leadership in the home for the husband. It should look a whole lot more like Jesus Christ than it does Caesar.
Like, it shouldn't be marked with this authoritarianism. And this. This is my way or the highway all the time where you don't care what the other person thinks. You don't. You don't have any.
You don't have any tenderness. You don't. You don't have any concern for their well being. It's just, this is what we're doing.
Like, that is not a Christian. That is not a healthy Christian marriage that speaks the gospel to people. When they look at it, they see Caesar, you know? Like, when I see marriages like that, I don't see Jesus Christ. I see Caesar a dictator, like, dictating orders instead of like somebody that you cherish and they're your partner, you know?
So the. The point I'm trying to make is our. Our marriages need to look so much more like Jesus Christ and so much less like Caesar, and we should be pouring ourselves out for our wives, and we should care what our wives think about things.
All right, next slide.
Okay, call for the wife's.
Guys, you can take a breath. Relax. I know that was rough.
It is rough on me. Let me tell you.
I'm not gonna have any friends by the end of the sermon. It's okay. I love you all anyway.
All right, call for wives.
Just like the call for the husband, there's a call for the wife to put her husband's needs above her own response to the Lord.
So we're not just. It's not just. Well, my husband was mean to me today, so I'm going to be a jerk to him.
Like, we're called to respond to each other out of overflow of the Lord, like, in response to Jesus and how Jesus has responded to us.
Next slide, please.
So what does this application look like for wives?
It means you have to willingly follow your husband's lead. If he's not causing you to sin, you should be backing him up. You should be building him up. You should defend him.
So, just a quick anecdote.
I've had multiple people. Actually, this is just occurring to me that a lot of people talk Junk behind my back. But I had multiple people come up to me just as an aside, and be like, john, man, your wife Blair, she really loves you. She like, always defends you. She always has your back when, when people say anything. And it's just occurring to me. Dang, man. Why is everybody talking trash all the time?
I can't believe I didn't put that together until this very moment.
Wow. We're gonna have to have another. We need to get a. A gossip. A gossip sermon on the docket.
I think we're sorely in need of it.
Yeah. But just as a, just as an anecdote and man, that blesses me. That's. That's what wives should be doing, right? Like, wives should be respecting their husbands and trying to build them up. Not like tear them down, not get. Get together with all your friends and, you know, just trash all your husband time, which is just. It's a popular pastime.
We should be like, wife should be building your husbands up and you should treat them with respect.
I think it's really insightful that, that Paul says, treat your husbands with respect. Because men crave respect like we crave it. We want our wives to respect us, we want our friends to respect us, we want our coworkers to respect us. And most of the time, if we're fighting, if guys get bent out of shape and we get mad, a lot of the time it's because we feel disrespected in some way, shape, or form that it kind of like that's almost at all the time. That's at the core of why we get mad at somebody or why we get upset.
So it's really insightful that God says, wives, respect your husband.
Next slide, please.
And here's the thing.
This is the challenging thing for wives.
The times you feel like your husband hasn't earned it. Because there will be lots of times I'm sure if he's anything like me, there will be lots of times when he does not, you know, you feel like he doesn't deserve your respect.
Christ has so respond to Jesus worthiness in those moments and not your husband's shortcomings.
Just as your husband is supposed to respond to Jesus worthiness and not your shortcomings.
I think it's really interesting.
First Peter, chapter three.
Like, even if your husband is a non believer, First Peter, chapter three, verses one and two says this like wives be.
Likewise wives be subject to your own husbands, so that if some of them do not obey the word, they may be one without a word by the conduct of their wives when they see your respectful and pure conduct.
In other words, your marriage is preaching through your actions without having to say a word.
And if you're in that spot today where maybe your husband's a non believer, your actions can preach the gospel to him.
If you are submitted to the Lord, your actions are preaching to them. So be encouraged.
Men crave respect.
Women crave. I have no idea.
Yeah, self sacrifice.
Omelets. Rubbing their hair. In my house, they seem to really like omelets. And they seem to really. I can't watch a TV show without one of them sitting next to me and laying on me and being like, rub my hair.
True story.
I've not watched a show without, like, rubbing their hair for, like, at least a decade.
But no, it's interesting. They did a survey. It was a secular survey done.
And they asked married women, what is the one?
If you could take one quality and you could say, I want my husband to be this way, what would it be?
And by a large number, self sacrifice was the number one answer. Like putting the husband. Putting his wants, his needs, his desires aside, and putting his wife first.
That's funny, because that sounds a lot like scripture, right? That sounds just like this passage.
Secular, Secular. Survey. Who knew?
All right, so we're coming. Coming to an end here.
I want to talk a minute about what this doesn't mean, because I feel like this passage gets taken out of context a lot. I feel like it's gotten weaponized a lot over the years.
I don't think it means that the man makes all the decisions. The wife can't make any decisions. I don't think it means that the wife shouldn't express her opinions or make any decisions on her own, or that she can't have a career, anything like that.
Husbands, your wife should be like your closest confidant. Your wife should be like. Your wife's opinion should matter more to you than anybody else in the whole world.
And vice versa. Wives, you should care so much about what your husband thinks and feels.
Lastly, Paul talks about this profound mystery, and he goes back to Genesis with Adam and Eve.
And, you know, honestly, I'm kind of curious what this passage, what. What this means. I have my thoughts about it. I would encourage you guys to kind of do some research because other people have other thoughts.
My thought for.
For the end of this chapter where he says, therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, the two shall become one flesh. This is a mystery. This is a profound mystery. I'M saying it refers to Christ and the church.
However, let each one of you love his wife as himself and let the wife see that she respects her husband.
Honestly, my interpretation of that is what I said earlier. I think our marriage is the intimacy. The oneness of our marriage is supposed to reflect the oneness of Jesus Christ and the church.
Like we are one body with Christ as the head. I think that is the reflection. I think that's what Paul is getting at here. Again, I'd encourage you. There have been lots of interpretations over the years.
Yeah, I would love to hear what you guys think.
So our marriages are preaching each and every day. What are they saying?
Again, if you take nothing else away from this, I would just, with all that I have, encourage you on those days you don't feel like responding in love on those days you don't feel like sacrificing or respecting.
See your marriage as an opportunity to respond to the Lord and Jesus goodness. Because Jesus is worthy. He is worthy. He's worthy of you taking some abuse from your spouse and being mad. You know, like you and your spouse get into an argument.
And I don't mean, like physical abuse or anything like that, but I mean, Jesus is worthy of you swallowing your pride and losing an argument and saying, you know, baby, I love you anyway. You know, I'm going to respond to you in love no matter how you respond to me.
I really think that when we do that, that is when we start to reflect like what our marriage is supposed to reflect. That's when we start to actually, when people look at our marriage, they don't see a prison like Kramer.
They see, wow, I want that. You know, like, what. What's different about that marriage?
Why is that marriage seems so different than all these other marriages where people are just miserable and hate each other?
Like, I think when we do that, when we. When we decide, I'm going to love you and I'm going to treat you right, despite how you treat me in return. Like, if you don't respect me, I'm still going to do my part.
If you don't listen to me, I'm still going to do my part and respond to the Lord when we do that. I think our marriages reflect Jesus love for the church.
And the reason why is because God is good and he's good to us.
Not when we're not.
He's good to us not only when we're good to him.
You know, Romans 5:8 says, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
So it's this idea that in spite of how we have treated God, even when we were enemies of God, like God still acts in love towards us.
And that's how our marriages should be.
All right, let's pray.
Lord, we just ask that you would speak through your word tonight.
We ask that your spirit would move God. I pray for every marriage in here, Those that are active and those that are upcoming.
I just ask that you would.
That you would rule, that you would win in those marriages.
That those marriages would be a beautiful reflection of you and your love for us, the church.
And please help us to understand your word deeper and to continue to grow and to continue to nourish and cherish and love and sacrifice for each other. In Jesus name, amen.
