Husbands, Love Your Wives; God's Pattern for Husbands Part 1-2

Husbands, Love Your Wives; God's Pattern for Husbands Part 1-2

By John MacArthur

Well last week we started talking a little bit about the family and I began by talking more directly to the single people and I have a few more words for you again tonight. I hope there have been some engagements during the week since I…I don’t know, but it would be nice if there had been some. Part of the problem in the world in which we live is you have too many choices. It was a lot better when you lived in a village and there were eight girls to choose from, and that was the way it was.

You know, the illusion in our culture for those people who are single is that somewhere there’s this perfect person hanging out there and you just have to find that person. Nothing could be further from the truth. All you really want is a godly partner, all you want is somebody who loves the Lord Jesus Christ. And I’ll give you a little bit of a warning. You can find your ideal mate, you can find the one that looks and talks and acts and behaves the way you think the perfect…the perfect spouse or perspective spouse should. They may look like you would want them to look, and they may be interested in the things you would want them to be interested in. They may have a wonderful sense of humor and be intellectually interesting and all of those kinds of things. And you can marry that person and that person may feel the same way about you. And if you don’t walk in the Spirit, that marriage will have massive problems.

Or you can find someone who loves Christ and has a heart to serve the Lord, and walk in the Holy Spirit, and if you’re in that same path and that person is in that same path, you will grow into the kind of union that will fill your life with complete joy and blessing. So stop looking for the perfect person somewhere. Stop scanning all of the unknown and available web sites. Stick with the people that the Lord has brought into your life and the people that you know and the people that are around you and the people that love the Lord and believe the things that you believe and find someone who walks in the Spirit and longs to serve the Lord Jesus Christ and watch the Lord make a wonderful and complete and lasting relationship that will be profoundly, profoundly blessed.

Marriage doesn’t have to be conflict. There will be conflict in marriage because there’s conflict in life. But I do not agree with the great General Montgomery who said, “Gentlemen, don’t even think of marriage until you’ve mastered the art of war.” I wouldn’t agree with that. I think that’s…I think that’s extending this thing beyond a reasonable level.

But I do understand that marriage does pose conflict because when you slam two centers together permanently, they’re going to rub each other the wrong way because that’s what sin does. But the answer to all of that, of course, is to be obedient to Christ, to love Christ, to love each other and to walk in the power of the Spirit and watch the Lord overcome those things and fill your life with profound joy and blessing beyond anything that could be experienced in singleness unless that is what God has particularly designed you for.

If you go back to the book of Genesis, for just a moment, in your thinking, and maybe it would be good to do that for a minute. If you go back in to Genesis chapter 1 and we sort of start where you have to start with this kind of discussion about marriage, we are reminded in Genesis chapter 1 verses 27 and 28, “That God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created them, male and female He created them. God blessed them and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply.’” That’s the basic principle. Men and women come together and have children. They multiply, they fill the earth, they subdue the earth and they rule over the earth.

This is expanded in chapter 2 down in verse 18, “The Lord after making man says it’s not good for the man to be alone. I’ll make him a helper suitable for him. Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, every bird of the sky, brought them to the man to see what he could call them and whatever the man called the living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all the cattle, the birds of the sky, and every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man and he slept, then He, being God, took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place. The Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man and brought her to the man. The man said, ‘This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh, she shall be called woman because she was taken out of man. For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.’”

God chose a bride for Adam and I still think it’s the best way. You know, that would be my way as a father and a grandfather, to make the choice myself for all the kids and grandkids in my family. It doesn’t always work out that way in life. But here was a situation where there was no relationship prior to the fact that Adam woke up in the morning and he was married. And he had no choice because there was only one woman who existed in the entire universe. But walking together with God, a relationship of lasting love was cultivated there and God did through them what He said He was going to do through male and female, He produced children.

This is God’s design. A beautiful union came out of that marriage, a kind of co-regency as they came together. Marriage really is for four things. First of all, it is for children, “Be fruitful and multiply.” And children, as we heard read tonight in the Psalm, are a heritage from the Lord. They are a blessing from heaven.

Secondly, marriage is to eliminate solitude. “It is not good for man to be alone.” It isn’t good for a lot of reasons. It isn’t good because man needs a complement to his life, he needs companionship, he needs friendship, he needs accountability. Marriage is designed then to produce children and to provide friendship to eliminate solitude.

Thirdly, to prevent immorality—to prevent immorality. That’s 1 Corinthians chapter 7 and verse 2 where the Apostle Paul says, “We need to be married to prevent immorality.”

And there’s a fourth reason for marriage and I don’t know how you would refer to it in modern vernacular. But in Genesis 26:6, 7, 8 and 9, it describes Isaac and it says, “He was sporting with his wife.” Now I suppose it could have meant jogging if you want to think that way. But if you actually look at the NAS it says caressing…caressing. This is an element of marriage that you have to recognize, and that is the sheer joy and the sheer exhilaration and the sheer love and affection that comes in that union. Yes it is for children, yes it is to eliminate solitude, yes it is to prevent immorality, but it is also to provide loving, loving affection. And that is the way God designed it. And, of course, then the Fall comes in the third chapter of Genesis and the war begins because Satan now is fixed in opposition against God and against all that God has ordained and all that God has created which makes Satan the enemy of marriage, and Satan works very hard to destroy marriages. We’re even instructed in Scripture not to tear asunder anything that God has brought together with regard to marriage. Satan attacks marriage.

People in marriages attack each other because of their own sinfulness, their own fallenness and because there’s conflict as we read in Genesis between the man and the woman as they vie for power in the union. So immediately upon the Fall, marriage is under assault from the outside by Satan and from the inside by the conflict that rises in the hearts of the two people that make up that union.

And then everything starts to really come apart in the book of Genesis. In chapter 4 you have polygamy. In chapter 9 you have evil, sexual thoughts. In chapter 16 of Genesis you have adultery. In chapter 19 you have gross homosexuality. Chapter 34 you have fornication. You have in chapter 34 again unequal yoking. In Genesis 38 you have incest. In Genesis 38 again you have prostitution. Genesis 39, you have an attempted evil seduction in the case of Joseph. And so the corruption of this wonderful, magnificent union that God has designed comes fast and it comes in all these various forms. And all of a sudden the world is a world of polygamy. And it’s a world of adultery and homosexuality, and fornication, and unequal yoking, and incest, and prostitution, and it expands and expands rapidly to the degree that it is so vile by the time you get to the sixth chapter of Genesis, God saying, “I’m going to kill everybody on the planet except for eight people.” That’s how bad it is, just eight people.

Well after the Flood, sinners were still sinners. Men and women were still sinners, still born alienated from God, born with an operative sin principle in their lives that has dominating power. It’s painful to make a marriage work before the Flood after the Fall. It’s painful to make a marriage work after the Flood but there’s at least something that’s a little better. Before the Flood people lived for 900 years. Now you can be happily married for 10, 20, 30, 40, 50. I’m not sure you could make 850, I’m pretty sure you might not be able to. So there’s some grace and mercy in that. It’s hard to make a marriage work. But can you imagine intimate conflict going on for centuries? That’s hard to grasp. So there is a certain mercy, all you have to do is make it work for less than one century by God’s design.

But I really do believe that marital problems have always been the source of the deepest pain in the human heart because it strikes us at the most intimate level of life and the most intense level of life, and the most personal level of life, and the most constant level of life. The sin that gets into our family and into our marriage is the real culprit in the curse. The curse strikes at the basis of our most necessary relationship. We need to be married for the reasons that I gave you. We need partners in life for fulfillment, for the joys of marriage, for the accountability of marriage, the friendship, all of those things, for the procreation which then produces these greater and multiplied joys, we need to be married. It is the grace of life. And because we are cursed and sinful people, then that brings the curse right into our most necessary relationship. And it makes—it makes marriage a very, very difficult situation and it’s probably more difficult in our culture today because the people who are trying to be married today don’t have a generation behind them that can model what a good marriage looks like. We’ve had enough bad marriage generations now that we have a whole generation of young people growing up who have no model of what a good marriage looks like. They’re victims of the sexual revolution, the homosexual revolution, and the Women’s Liberation Movement. And marriage has been the sacrificial Lamb on the altar of all those aberrations.

And yet, what is the most popular kind of song in our culture? What is the category in which the most popular kind of songs exist? They would be called love songs, wouldn’t they? Romantic songs because they’re still in the heart of every man and every woman a deep profound longing to be truly and genuinely and lastingly loved and cared for by another person, and particularly another person of the opposite sex which is why homosexuality is such a horrendous lie and deception, because there can never be in that kind of deviation and aberration the fulfillment of what the heart really longs for because it has to be complementarian and that’s designed by God to be a man and a woman. But our culture constantly fantasizes about the perfect girl and the perfect man and the perfect relationship and the perfect love, and the beautiful face, and the attractive body in hopes that we can find someone who is this idol, who is this sort of Aristotelian model human being that sets the pattern for all other human beings, and we want to find that person and we watch it happen in Hollywood as people—the beautiful people, the wealthy people, the people who have it all find each other and the relationships last days or weeks before they explode in their faces.

How can we have a kind of relationship that just doesn’t happen, how can we attain to that? The world keeps singing about it, writing songs about it, making movies about it, writing books about it, a marriage union that lasts where there’s no boredom, where there’s no unfaithfulness, where there’s no breakup, where there’s no pain, there’s no leaving, there’s no lovelessness. It’s just bliss till death, a relationship that fills everybody’s needs and gets sweeter and richer as the days go by.

Well, I have to say for the people in the world, it’s not going to happen, it can’t happen, it won’t happen. Oh maybe there’s that occasional union where people get along so very well that they’re friends for life. But for marriage to be everything that it ought to be, it has to be a marriage in Christ. It has to be a marriage in Christ. It has to be a marriage both monitored and empowered by the Holy Spirit. And that’s what we’re learning. Let’s go to Ephesians 5.

For a marriage to work, it has to be a marriage that is monitored by and empowered by the Holy Spirit. Here in Ephesians 5:22 to the end of the chapter, we have the greatest treatise on marriage ever written. This is it. The parallel one in Colossians 3 is equal to this only it’s a little briefer so this is a richer one. That’s why I say it’s the greatest treatise on marriage ever written. And the Apostle Paul starts by talking about a wife and a husband and then goes into chapter 6 talking about parents and children.

But what is behind his conversation with us about marriage is chapter 5 and verse 18. “Be filled with the Spirit.” Everything that He says after that comes out of that reality. If you are filled with the Spirit, you will have joy, you will speak to one another in Psalms, hymns, spiritual songs, singing, making melody with your heart to the Lord. You will have gratitude. You will be always giving thanks for all things in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ to God, even the Father, and you will exhibit the humility of submission. You will be submitting yourself to one another in the fear of Christ. And we said then, a Spirit-filled life is a life of singing with joy, a life of saying thanks, and a life of submitting to one another. Submission is a general principle that is within the experience of all believers in all relationships…in all relationships. And what we mean by submission is simply this, “I humble Myself to serve you. I humble Myself to minister to you. I put Myself in a position to give to you what you need, what you require. I look not on my own things but the things of others.”

Even someone who is an elder in the church, or a pastor, or a leader, is in the position of submitting his life completely to the meeting of the needs of the congregation as submission. You might think that someone who is in a position of leadership is only in a position of dominance and authority. There is that kind of leadership, but that’s not biblical leadership. Whoever would be chief among you, Jesus said, let him be your—what?—your servant, your slave.

We’re not like the Gentiles. We don’t lord it over people. Spiritual leadership is simply submitting oneself to the accomplishment of the needs of those for whom He is responsible. That flows right into marriage. In marriage the husband must submit himself, humble himself, lower himself, condescend, come down as Christ did, have this mind in you which was also in Christ Jesus who thought it not robbery to hang on to His equality with God, but humbled himself, took on the form of a slave, came all the way down to death, even death on the cross.

We like to talk even in the Christian community about how wives are to submit to their husbands, but we aren’t quite as eager to talk about how quickly and how necessarily husbands must submit to their wives. The husband is forever asking one question, “How can I minister to my wife? How can I meet the needs that my wife has? How can I provide all that she needs? How can I make this marriage a haven of security and rest and fulfillment and joy for her?”

The Scripture is placing that burden on the husband, even though he is the head in the sense that he is the one who is to protect and provide and care for her and the children. At the same time, he is to be the one who in his protection and provision and care meets her every need as much as he possibly can. So we all submit.

It even comes that way in dealing with children. As a parent, I have to submit to the needs of my children. I have to look at my children and I have to reorder my life in order to meet their needs. Their physical needs have to be met. I might not want to do with my spare time what my children need me to do, but I do it because I’m devoted to meeting their needs. I might rather be occupied doing something other than caring for all of the spiritual needs of my children, but that’s my responsibility before God, to be the spiritual leader of my children. And so I look at their lives, I look at their needs and I set my life on a course to meet their needs. That’s submission.

So we’re all bound up in this kind of submissive attitude. Now we talked about the wife last time, didn’t we? Wives, be subject, and that isn’t in the text, it’s in italics there, it’s implied from verse 21. It literally says, “Wives, to your own husbands as to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church. He Himself being the Savior of the body, but as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives to their husbands in everything.”

So last week we looked at that, and we talked about the duty of the wife to be submissive to her husband in the same way that Christ is submissive to the Lord of the church…that the church, I should say, is submissive to Christ who is the Lord of the church, so we submit as wives to our husbands as the church submits to Christ, knowing that Christ cares for us, meets our needs, provides for us, protects us, preserves us, supplies all that is necessary. He does that for the church, the husband does that for the wife, the wife who knows that submits, rests in that confidence.

Now for tonight, let’s talk about the husband a little bit. And by the way, there are on the Grace To You website a whole lot of messages on the fulfilled family with much more detail then I’m giving you in this bit of a reprise in kind of a summary look at this. There are also other passages in the New Testament that are considered in the more lengthy treatments. You might want to consider those as well. There is a new book that has come out on divorce called The Divorce Dilemma. That book is available now, if you’re asking questions about divorce. The other day I got an interesting phone call from the people at Focus on the Family who asked me if I’d come and do a couple of radio programs because they want to promote that book which is a biblical view of divorce. That’s very encouraging to me, because a lot of people need help in that, so we’ll be doing that in a few weeks. There is more material, is what I’m saying, available.

Now the duty of the husband, let’s look at the duty of the husband, coming down to verse 25. It actually stretches all the way to the end of this chapter. But we’ll pick it up in verse 25. “Husbands, love your wives just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her so that He might sanctify her having cleansed her by the washing of water with the Word that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing but that she would be holy and blameless. “So husbands ought also to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife, loves himself, for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it just as Christ also does the church because we are members of His body.” A very lengthy and very detailed set of instructions for the husband.

Keep the context in mind. We’re talking about Spirit-filled people who already understand the principle of submission. The husband understands the necessary submission to his wife’s needs and the meeting of those needs to provide for her a haven in which her heart can rest.

The husband’s command is very clear. It’s a single command. Husbands, love your wives. Love your wives. That is the command. There is no command to take authority over your wife. That’s not the command. That is not the command. Is the husband the head? Absolutely he’s the head. We saw that, didn’t we, in 1 Corinthians 11, the husband is the head of the wife, Christ is the head of the man, God is the head of Christ. But the command is not to take authority. It doesn’t say a word about that. It doesn’t say take authority. It doesn’t say rule over your wife. It doesn’t say order her around. It doesn’t say command her. It doesn’t say subjugate her, subject her. It doesn’t say dominate her. It says love your wives…love your wives. And the word for love is from the verb agapao which is the most intense, most divine, most magnanimous, most sacrificial, most humble kind of love. It’s the love of the will. There are other words for love in the Greek language. There’s the word eros from which you get erotic, that’s a sexual kind of love. There’s the word phileo, the verb phileo which is the word that is in the word Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, it means that, that kind of a normal, human affection. There is even a word for family love and that word is used when the Apostle Paul writes to Timothy and says that people in the society, the worldly society have lost their natural affection. That is their family love. So there are words for family love, and erotic love, and brotherly love. But this is the word for the love of the will. This is the word that is the most magnanimous, the most far-reaching, and the most intentional. This is…this is a word for love that is not defined by the solicitation of the one loved. This is the love of the will. This is loving because it is right to love, loving because you will to love. It doesn’t mean the person is not attractive, but this word is defined as a word that expresses one’s intentionality.

This is how we are to love because we determine to love, because we will to love. This is, of course, defined for us as the kind of love the Lord has for His church. He does not love us because we are lovable. He did not save us because we were lovable. He didn’t save you and not somebody else down the street from you because you were more lovable than the person down the street. You might have picked your life partner because that person was more lovable in your judgment than the other people you knew. That is not how God chose you. He predetermined by His own will to set His love on you and to then spend His love relentlessly on you forever and ever and ever. And it is that kind of love that a husband is to set upon the woman that he takes as his wife.

It is the manner of our love. Let’s start with that word “manner,” we’ll break it down into several parts. This love, the manner of this love, “as Christ loved the church” and you can go all the way back and say, Romans 5:8, “He loved us when we were enemies, when we were alienated, when we were unlovable and unlovely and unloving and before we loved Him. We only love Him because He first loved us. That’s what we’re talking about. You set your love by your will because it’s right and it’s noble, and it’s the way Christ set His love on us. That’s the manner of it.

If you were to remind yourself, and I’ll help you with that, of Romans chapter 8 and how that chapter ended, you would have there an illustration of this kind of love. Chapter 8 of Romans, verse 35, “Who will separate us from the love of Christ?” We learn here that this is a love from which one will not be separated. “Will tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, sword?” Is that going to separate us? No. “In all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us.” And Paul goes on to say, “Neither death, life, angels, principalities, things present, things to come, powers, height, depth, any other created thing will be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

So Christ loves us with an inseparable love, with an undying love, with a love that cannot be diminished and it cannot be replaced. You think about loving your wife that way. You love your wife with a love that couldn’t be broken by tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, sword. It couldn’t be broken by death, life, angels, principalities, things present, things to come, powers height depth or any other created thing in the universe. This is how Christ loved His church. This is how a man is to love his wife.

Many years ago, early in church history, a man named John Chrysostom, a great preacher, wrote this, translated into Olde English. “Hast thou seen the measure of obedience? Hear also the measure of love. Wouldst thou that thy wife shouldest obey Thee as the church does Christ? Then have care yourself for her as Christ for the church. And if it be needful that thou shouldest give thy life further, or be cut to pieces, a thousand times, or endure anything whatever, refuse it not. Christ brought His church to His feet by His great care, not by threats, nor any such thing. So do thou conduct thyself toward thy wife.” Chrysostom is saying if you were cut in a thousand pieces, it shouldn’t diminish your love for your wife.

And Roman law was very different from that. Cato, writing about Roman Law, said, “If you catch your wife in an act of infidelity, you can kill her without a trial. But if she were to catch you in an act of infidelity, she wouldn’t venture to touch you with her finger, indeed she has no right.” That’s how it was in the ancient Roman world, when Paul was writing and confronting the church with these things. Very different than the world of that time. Men had wives for social reasons. They had concubines for sexual reasons. And here we find the instruction of the Word of God, “Love your wife, love your wife the way Christ loves His church with this undying, unbreakable love.”

Peter points out three sort of duties that that love takes. Look at 1 Peter chapter 3—1 Peter chapter 3, just the opening verses which we mentioned briefly last time, where it talks about wives being submissive to their husbands. But down in verse 7 he addresses the husbands and he says, “You husbands in the same way live with your wives in an understanding way.”

I can tell you from personal experience this is the one thing that wives say all the time. You don’t listen to me, you don’t understand me, you don’t hear what I’m saying, I wish you knew me better, you don’t know what I’m thinking, and on and on. We work hard on it, we never attain success, I don’t think. But live with your wives in an understanding way. That is understanding, sensitivity to needs and feelings.

And then he goes on to say, “As with someone weaker.” So there’s consideration and then there’s actually chivalry, she is the weaker vessel, the weaker vessel. She needs strength. She needs support. She needs to be held up. She needs to be encouraged. She needs to be safe. Not only physically safe but relationally safe. Since she’s a woman, she needs the strength of a man and show her honor as a fellow heir of the grace of life so that your prayers will not be hindered.

How you love your wife, you love her this way—with consideration, and understanding, and sensitivity, and chivalry, and communing together with her, understanding you’re equal heirs of the grace of life which is, of course, marriage in Christ. Together in deep intimate commitment and communion, your prayers will be heard and answered.

So we are to love as Christ loved the church. Let me break that out for a little bit, okay? It was a sacrificial love. Go back to Ephesians 5 for a minute. It says there, “Love your wives as Christ loved the church,” and here’s the first expression of it, “and gave Himself up for her.” Gave Himself up, the Spirit-filled husband loves his wife not for what she can do for him, but for what he can do for her. And I say this to you, young men, find a woman that you can love, find a woman, determine to love her. Find a woman to whom you can give your life and all your abilities and all your powers and all your energies in the way Christ did for the church, a love that knows no tyranny, it only knows sacrifice.

Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her. Find a woman and give yourself up for her. Work harder to provide her physical needs. Invest in her spiritually. Care for her. Shelter her. Protect her. Provide for her. Preserve her. Give your life for her. Find one who loves Christ, who should be under the care of a man, who should be under the protection of a husband and become that to her that Christ is to His own church. This is the sacrifice that defines what a husband does.

By the way, love is always a verb. Love is always a verb, it is always in action, it is always in motion. And a Spirit-filled love is a love that is always sacrificing on behalf of another person.

I tell this to young people from time to time and it will take us to a second point. If somebody says “I love you,” and then they want you to sin with them, that’s not love, that’s lust, that’s not love. Because the second thing to say about husbands loving their wives the way Christ loved the church is that Christ loved the church sacrificially, and secondly, He loved the church with a purifying love—go down to verse 26—so that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the Word, that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing but that she should be holy and blameless.

When a young man says to you as a young lady, “I love you and I want to take away your purity,” that’s not love, run away, flee from that man. That’s not love. The same would be true on the other side. If a young lady says to a young man, “I love you,” and wants to steal that young man’s purity, that’s not love. Love purifies. This is the beauty of it. That’s the illustration that we have with Christ. He loved His church. He gave Himself up for her that He might sanctify her. And we would say that in the marriage context that the spouse or the would-be spouse would seek the purity of that partner, both that spiritual purity that comes with a true understanding of the Word of God, true salvation, a pursuit of sanctification, and the physical purity that is a partner to that. Christ purifies His church, please notice, and He sanctifies it, cleanses it by the washing of water with the Word…with the Word.

You as a husband have the responsibility to wash your wife with the Word of God, to provide continual washing with the truth of holy Scripture, so that all the stains are taken away. That’s what it says in verse 27, He wants to present to Himself a church in all her glory, with no spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that it should be holy and blameless.

Paul may have been thinking about a custom that was actually popular in ancient Mediterranean world, the custom of bathing the bride in holy water. The Catholics didn’t invent holy water, by the way, there was holy water in ancient pagan religions as well. And one of the ways that it was used, the bath was prepared with supposed holy water that had been sanctified by some ritual, and the bride would be bathed in that holy water before the wedding as a symbol of purification before her husband accepted her. In Athens, the bride was bathed in the waters of the Callirrhoe which was deemed sacred, symbolized cleansing from all previous relationships, any previous defilement before entrance and entre into marital life. Maybe Paul had that in the back of his mind, but whatever he had in his mind, the principle of marriage is simply this, marriage is to be a purifying experience, a purifying experience.

You find a very similar expression from the Apostle Paul toward the end of his second letter to the Corinthians. I know you will remember this. Chapter 11, he says, “I am jealous—verse 2—for you with a godly jealousy. I betrothed you to one husband that is Christ talking to the Corinthian church, so that to Christ I might present you as a pure virgin. I’m afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds would be led astray from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ.” Paul was concerned about the Corinthians’ defecting into heresy and wrong theology and error and it was a kind of spiritual adultery that would defile them. He wanted to present to Christ a pure virgin. And that is the picture that should be followed through in marriage; marriage should be the purifying of every partner, the purifying of every partner. You don’t expose your partner to things that are impure, doctrinally, theologically, spiritually, or morally. You are the protector of your wife’s purity if you’re a husband. That’s the picture here. You keep her away from things that are impure. You never expose her to those things.

True love is concerned always for the purity of its object. And any so-called love that takes liberties with that and pursues sin is a false kind of love. Any love that makes people coarse, crude, hard, any love that exposes them to images pornographic, immoral that create impure thoughts in their minds is not the pure love we’re talking about here. Any love that weakens moral fiber, diminishes character is a false love because true love, the love with which Christ loves the church, seeks the absolute purity of its object, sacrificially so…sacrificially so.

So, men, this is how you have to view your marriage. You sacrifice for your wife. You offer the ultimate sacrifice, whatever that might be, even your life, and you pursue your purity at all costs—at all costs. Just as Christ does His own church and wants to present it to Himself without blame and without spot. So it is a sacrificial love and it is a purifying love.

Thirdly, it is a caring love—it is a caring love. And we see this in verses 28 and following. “Husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife, loves himself. No one ever yet hated his own flesh but nourishes and cherishes it, even as Christ does the church because we are members of His body.” The analogy is very simple. The Lord takes care of His church. That’s the point. Love your wife as your own body.

What does that mean? You care for your body. Whose teeth do you brush in the morning? Whose hair do you comb? Whose body do you clothe? You take care of yourself. That’s a given. That’s a given. He’s not saying learn to take care of yourself, some of you need to learn to do that a little better than you’re doing it, but for the most part…you feed yourself, you wash yourself, you do what you’re supposed to do for yourself.

And what our Lord is saying here through the Holy Spirit and the instruction from the Apostle Paul is give the same attention to your wives that you do to yourself because you’re really one flesh and do it, verse 29 says, because if you don’t, it’s a kind of self-suicide. You’re hating yourself. The idea is to nourish and cherish your own wife—to nourish and cherish your own wife—verse 29. Nourish, that means to provide what will bring life and growth and well-being and cherish, literally to make warm. I guess you could sort of stretch and say to cuddle, to embrace, to provide security. And so there’s this idea of caring, meeting needs, fulfilling desires.

Nobody ever hates his own flesh. But everybody nourishes and cherishes it. But Christ does that for the church and you need to do that for your wife.

The word “nourish” actually comes from ek trepho which means to feed, feed. It’s a word used in the Bible primarily of nurturing children, providing nurture, providing a climate of growth and development. You know, this is kind of the other side of the working wife situation which is a serious problem, very serious problem. Your wife is not supposed to provide for, and nourish, and cherish you. You’re supposed to provide that for her. And 1 Timothy 5:8 says, “If you don’t provide for your own family, you’re worse than an unbeliever because even unbelievers do that.”

Something is seriously wrong when a man sees his wife as the source of provision for himself. Something is equally wrong when a man sees his wife as a cook and a washer woman and a babysitter and the physical partner. Man has to see his wife as a treasure to care for…a treasure to care for, to cherish, nourish in the same way the Lord does His church.

Throughout Scripture the man is the provider, the man is the protector, the man is the preserver, the man is the nourisher, the cherisher as Christ is for His church. The church really provides nothing. We cast all our care on Him, He cares for us.

Even the curse demonstrates that the man is going to be the provider because the man is cursed in his labor, isn’t he? When the curse comes to Adam, “Cursed are you when you go to work,” you’re going to be cursed because by the sweat of your brow you’re going to work and it’s going to be hard to produce food. The curse on the woman, where does that come? In her—what? Childbearing because that’s her domain. That’s the area in which each will function. The man will be the provider; the woman will be the child-bearer.

You are the provider, you are the protector, you are the caretaker of that woman in every sense. This is how a marriage becomes everything that people want a marriage to be. And so much of it lays on the fulfillment, the responsibility of the husband. Wives, they rest in all of this care and provision.

So it’s a sacrificial love, it’s a purifying love, it’s a caring love. And finally, it’s an unbreakable love—it is an unbreakable love. Verse 31, “A man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife,” and this is quoted from Genesis 2:24 as we read earlier, “the two shall become one flesh—one flesh.” Indivisible, the indivisible number, one. Two becoming one flesh, an indivisible, intimate, indesolvable union, two becoming one. “What God has joined together, let not man put asunder.” Individual identity is lost. There is no more individual identity. We are lost in each other, leave and cleave. Oneness of mind, oneness of heart, oneness of purpose, oneness spiritually, oneness sexually that ends in a child that is the one product of that union.

That is why all adultery, all fornication, all unfaithfulness are condemned in Scripture because they violate that oneness, that union. That is why Malachi 2:16 says, “God hates divorce.” God hates divorce. It happens, God orders how the marriage is to be dissolved if it is to be dissolved legitimately. There are grounds for divorce. God understands that because of the hardness of heart, but He hates it because it shatters this magnificent institution that God has made that passes righteousness from one generation to the next.

So, men, love your wives sacrificially, purifyingly, caringly and permanently. Be absolutely unbreakable in your devotion and your commitment to your wives. Make a covenant with your wife that follows the pattern of the covenant Christ made with the church and nothing can separate the church from Him, right? Nothing should ever separate the two of you either. Would Christ ever cast away the church? No. Then nor should a man ever cast away his wife or a wife her husband.

Now there’s a motive behind all this and that’s in verses 32 and 33, the motive in verse 32, the mystery is great but I’m speaking with reference to Christ and the church. What is that telling you? Marriage is very, very sacred—very sacred. What is a mystery? New revelation, something in the past hidden, and now revealed. The mystery is this; this has never been said before in holy Scripture, never in the Old Testament that marriage is to follow the pattern of Christ’s relationship to the church. Marriage is sacred. The church is one with Christ, that’s the mystery. The church is one with Christ, and that’s the picture of marriage. It is sacred by virtue of its association with the relationship between Christ and His church.

And then a summation in verse 33. “Nevertheless, each individual among you also is to love his own wife even as himself.” Just the summation of what we studied. “And the wife must see to it that she respects her husband.”

Pretty simple, isn’t it? All that in just a tiny little portion of Scripture, verses 22 to 33, but it says a world of truth. If we follow the patterns that the Lord has laid down in our marriage, they will be all that we would want them to be and more than we would ever expect from them. But the element that has got to be there is the filling of the Holy Spirit, right? We have to go back to that so that our lives are under the control of the Holy Spirit at all times. The Word of Christ is dwelling richly in us and we’re walking in obedience to Him.

I don’t know what condition your marriage is in, but I know what it can be. People say, “Well, I married the wrong person.” Well that person is the right person now. Get over that idea and approach the marriage the way the Scripture tells us to. Walk in the Spirit and the Lord can bring joy and fulfillment into a relationship that has known conflict and bitterness. That can all change. The most important thing is that you be connected to Christ in a way that honors Him, exalts Him, walk in His Spirit, obey His Word. If two people are doing that, they can walk together, can’t they, and know the fullness of blessing.

People say, “Well, there--I probably missed the person I should have married. No, you got the person you married and that’s the person that God wants you to have for the rest of your life. And you can make of that marriage all that God wants it to be if you set the course the way the Scripture tells you to set the course.

Now next time we’re going to follow up with the parents and children on Sunday night, next week, so be here for that, chapter 6. Let’s pray.

Father, we do thank You for the clarity with which the Word speaks to us again on this subject in which there seems to be so much chaos and confusion. Help us to humble ourselves and follow the pattern of Holy Scripture to be what we ought to be to one another in our marriages. Lord, would You heal marriages even now that are not what they should be because people are not walking in the Spirit, they’re not under the control of Your blessed Holy Spirit, they’re not submitting to one another. They’re not loving each other, respecting each other, humbling themselves. They’re not seeking the purity of each other, not sacrificing for each other. We pray, Lord, that You would do a work in those relationships for their sake and for the sake of the children that will be influenced by that marriage. Bad marriages are generational tragedies; they send children reeling into the next generation and to their own marriages with all kinds of wrong experiences and wrong ideas and bitternesses. Give us good marriages, marriages that honor Christ, marriages that are full of joy and blessing so there could be another generation who will experience those same kinds of things, who will go into marriage hopeful, eager, happy, fulfilled and wanting to be everything that they can be so that that marriage can be all that they saw their own parent’s marriage be.

Save us from the destruction that is going on, particularly in the church and may the church be a place of healthy marriages and a place where the gospel is passed with joy to the next generation. We thank You for the testimonies we heard tonight about that, from young people who have come to know You and now can look at the next generation, the generation that they bring into the world and raise them in the knowledge of Christ and give hope for another generation of what marriage should be. May the testimony of those who know Christ and love Christ be clear in a world where marriage is just completely disintegrating all around us and with it the entire culture. May our marriages be strong and to Your glory. We pray in Christ’s name.

God's Pattern for Husbands, Part 1

On February 14 of this year, the Daily News, our local newspaper, reported an AP story about Rex and Theresa Lagale(?) of Albuquerque, New Mexico. They were married recently. And they had claimed to have built their marriage on a solid foundation, a foundation that guaranteed to them success in marriage. What was that foundation? A sixteen-page pre-nuptial agreement. And in that sixteen-page agreement they had spelled out in clear detail an understanding of everything that can go wrong in a marriage. The rules were all laid out. How often they will make love and which gasoline they will buy. Who does the laundry and who does the yard. Some of the rules...nothing is to be left on the floor overnight. Another one...never allow the fuel gauge in the car to go lower than a half a tank. And on and on it goes. A solid foundation for a marriage. Surely that will guarantee a great marriage.

Typically people believe that a great marriage is really guaranteed by being in love. If people are just in love, no rules are necessary, if they just love each other, if there's just the bliss of romance. But it's so very hard to define that bliss.

Recently there was a survey done among children about love, children looking at the adult world, were asked a series of questions. Let me share some of the answers.

They were asked...how do people in love typically behave? Wendy, age 8, said, "Well, when a person gets kissed for the first time, they fall down and they don't get up for at least an hour."

They were asked another question. Why does love happen between certain people? Andrew, age 6, said, "Well one of the people has freckles, so he finds somebody else who has freckles, too." And May, age 9, said, "No one is really sure why it happens, but I heard it has something to do with how you smell and that's why perfume and deodorant are so popular." And then there was Manuel, age 8, he said, "I think you're supposed to get shot with an arrow or something, but the rest of it isn't to be so painful."

And then they were asked...what do you think falling in love is like? John, age 9, said, "It's like an avalanche and you ought to run for your life." And Glenn, age 7, said, "If falling in love is anything like learning how to spell, I don't want to do it, it takes too long."

On the role of looks in love, the children were asked...how important is your looks when it comes to falling in love? Anita, age 8, said, "If you want to be loved by somebody who isn't already in your family, it doesn't hurt to be beautiful." Brian, age 7, said, "It isn't always just how you look, look at me, I'm handsome like anything and I haven't gotten anybody to marry me yet." Christine said, "While beauty is skin deep, but how rich you are can last a long time."

And then the children were asked...why do lovers hold hands? Gavin, age 8, said, "They want to make sure their rings don't fall off because they paid good money for them." And John, age 9, said, "They're just practicing for when they might have to walk down the aisle some day and do that holy matchamony thing."

And then there were some confidential, sort of general opinions about love that I thought interesting. David, age 8, said, "Love will find you, even if you're trying to hide from it. I've been trying to hide from it since I was five, but the girls keep finding me." And Regina, age 10, said, "I'm not rushing into being in love, I'm finding fourth grade hard enough."

And then they were asked to make suggestions about sure-fire ways to really fall in love. Dell, age 6, said, "Tell her you own a whole bunch of candy stores." And Camille said, "Shake your hips and hope for the best." Bart, age 9, said, "One way to do it, to make a person fall in love, is to take her out to eat and make sure it's something she likes to eat. French fries always works for me."

And then they were asked...how can you tell if two adults eating a restaurant are really in love? Bobby, age 9, said, "See if the man picks up the check." And Bart, age 9, said, "Lovers will just be staring at each other and their food will get cold. Other people will eat." And so it goes.

How to make love endure...they were asked. Dick, age 7, said, "Spend most of your time loving instead of going to work." Aaron, age 8, said, "Don't forget your wife's name, that will mess up the love." And Dave, age 8, said, "Be a good kisser, it might make your wife forget you never take out the trash."

Well, pretty hilarious stuff when you ask children to talk about love and to find some meaningful definition. But in all honesty, I'm not quite sure adults would do any better, are you? Figuring out how to make romance endure permanently is a great challenge.

In spite of the difficulty in doing that, in spite of the difficulty of making a marriage work and trying maybe to figure it out in a sixteen-page pre-nuptial agreement, or whatever else, in spite of all of the divorces, in spite of all the difficulties, we need to be reminded that 96 percent of all men and 94 percent of all women will say "I do." And then most of them, sooner or later in our culture, will say, "I don't," and get divorced. But the fact of the matter is, well over 90 percent of the people still pursue marriage. The sad reality is they can't make it work and the collapse of marriage and family relationships is certainly predictable in our culture.

We shouldn't really be too surprised about that. I'd like you to turn in your Bible to 2 Timothy for just a moment, and we can see there, at least in part, what makes marriage so difficult. In 2 Timothy chapter 3 and verse 1 it says, "But realize this, that in the last days difficult times will come," now the last days began when the Messiah arrived, so we are in the last of the last days. And here is how it describes people in these last days. "Men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant." Now you could stop right there and understand that people who are self-lovers, money lovers, boastful and arrogant are going to have a hard time with any sustained relationship, aren't they?

Not only that, "They are revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable," and by the way, the word "unloving" is astorgoiin the Greek, it means they lack normal family love. One of the features of last-days disintegration is the death of family love. "They are malicious gossips without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God." They are unloving, astorgoi, they lack normal family love they are so involved in their own self-love and self- fulfillment.

And we ask the question, and it's rightly to be asked, "Is there any hope for marriage when marriage is assaulted by this kind of last-days mentality, when it is assaulted on the outside by the godless immoral culture in which we live, when it is assaulted on the inside by the battle of the sexes, a woman trying to gain the ascendancy and dominate a man, and a man trying to suppress and control a woman?" Can marriage be rescued in the midst of all of this? Here we are fighting it on the inside, fighting it on the outside, fighting it in terms of the very time in which we live, when prophecy is coming to pass, is there any hope?

Well, the answer comes to us over in Ephesians 5, so you can turn to that text. That's home base for us as we go through this study of God's plan for marriage and the family. And we are reminding ourselves here in Ephesians chapter 5 that in order for marriage to be what God wants it to be, there are some prerequisites. He starts discussing marriage in verse 22 with the wives, and then down in verse 25 with the husband, and then down in chapter 6 verse 1, the children, and then in verse 2, a little more about the children how they honor their father and mother in verse 3 as well. And then in verse 4 he talks about fathers, no doubt encompassing parents as well. So as he gets into the whole idea of marriage and the family in verse 22 and flows all the way down into chapter 6, we begin to see the details. But before the details come the preliminaries in verses 18 to 21.

And we are reminded that verse 18 says, "We are to be filled with the Spirit," Spirit-filled, to be controlled by the Holy Spirit is the only hope for marriage to be what God wants it to be. God can turn the curse into a blessing, as He said in Nehemiah 13:2, and He does that by the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit in the life of believers. Only believers, really, have the possibility of having this kind of fulfilled relationship in marriage and the family because only believers possess the Holy Spirit and can therefore be filled with the Spirit, dominated by the Spirit, controlled by the Spirit.

Secondly in verse 19, there is to be singing, speaking to one another in psalms, hymns, spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord. This indicates a happy heart, a joyful heart, a rejoicing spirit. Where you have a Spirit-filled person, where you have a heart full of joy, you have hope for a good relationship.

Then verse 20, saying thanks. "Always giving thanks for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God even the Father." No matter what happens, no matter what goes wrong, no matter how you might be misunderstood, treated in a marriage, your heart is filled with nothing but thanks, even for your trials because you know they come from God and have a perfecting work.

To be Spirit-filled, to be singing from the depths of your heart with joy, to be saying thanks for everything, and then in verse 21, "To be subject to one another in the fear of Christ. To have an attitude of mutual submission in which you consider others better than yourselves." Those are the spiritual prerequisites for a successful marriage...Spirit-filled, singing, saying thanks and submitting. And we looked at those in some detail a few weeks ago.

Now after those general spiritual realities are discussed, verse 22, Paul launches right in to the role of wives. "Wives, be subject to your own husbands as to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife as Christ also is the head of the church. He himself being the savior of the body. But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything." And we discussed how God has designed this marvelous role of submission to the woman in marriage. And by His design marriage can be fulfilled when that role is assumed with joy.

Now coming to verse 25 we embark upon the husbands. "Husbands, love your wives just as Christ also 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, that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing but that she should be holy and blameless. So husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself." We'll stop there for the moment.

A clear principle then is given in verse 25, the husbands responsibility is to love his wife. It doesn't say rule her, he already has that tendency, even a tendency to dominate her, to control her, to command her. The curse does that. He is told here he is to love her. She is submitting to him, he is to express love to her. It is the leadership of care. Yes he is the head of the woman as God is the head of Christ and Christ is the head of the man, as 1 Corinthians 11 says. He is over her, she is to call him lord, as we learned in 1 Peter chapter 3. He is the stronger vessel, as Peter says. It is his responsibility to give direction and provision and leadership. But it is in a context of love...always in a context of love.

Colossians chapter 3 and verse 19 says, "Husbands, love your wives and do not be embittered against them." There is always the danger of the loss of love and the husband becomes a petty tyrant. When love is not the context of that relationship, a petty tyranny begins to take shape. And so it is the headship of love, it is the leadership of love, it is the guiding of affection.

Now I want us to look more closely at what God means in this command because it's laid out so magnificently. Let's talk about the manner of this love. Back to verse 25. "Husbands, love your wives." How? "Just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her." That's pretty clear. It is the love of self-sacrifice. It is not the love of domination. You are to love your wives just as Christ also loves the church and gave Himself up for her. That is the manner of love, the same kind of love that Christ extended to His church. In Acts 20 it says He purchased the church with His own blood. In Romans 5:8 it pictures Him pouring out His love in His death for unworthy sinners. In Romans 8 it is an unchanging, undying love. He loves us with a love from which we can never be separated.

John Chrysostom, the great preacher, said, "Hear the measure of love, if it be needful that thou shouldest give thy life for her or be cut to pieces a thousand times, or endure anything whatever, refuse it not. Christ brought His church to His feet by His great care, not by threats or any such thing. So do thou conduct thyself toward thy wife," end quote.

I have often heard people and I suppose they have good intentions when they say it, say about their wife, "I love her too much," to which you can promptly reply, "Do you love her as much as Christ loved the church, if you don't, then you don't love her enough." That's the standard.

This elevation and commitment to a wife was frankly revolutionary in the Roman world, as it is revolutionary in our world today. Kato, a Roman writer, said, "If you are to catch your wife in an act of infidelity, kill her without a trial. But if she catches you, she would not venture to touch you with her finger, she has no right." Serious double standard.

A man had complete control over the female population, both his wife and his daughters, and could take their life at any moment without any legal recourse. When Paul says to husbands, "Love your wives and sacrifice your lives for them as Christ gave Himself up for His church," this is frankly revolutionary stuff. It's revolutionary today where you have an agenda in which a man basically says, "As long as you fulfill what I want out of life you can be my wife. And when you cease to do that, I'll get somebody else," right? That's how it works today. What God said through Paul was shocking then and it is shocking now.

Women were considered in that culture differently than they are today. They were considered less than human. They were considered as slaves, beasts of burden, in many cases. They had no rights at all. And men fulfilled the curse in fully exercising a vicious kind of rule and domination over women in general. And Paul says you have to exchange that in Christ for a love that is the kind of love with which Christ also loved the church and it caused Him to give Himself up for the church. it is a self-sacrificing love. It is humble, unselfish love.

Peter further defines this love without ever using the word. Look at 1 Peter chapter 3. Men, it's important for us to understand this and we want to cover all of the related texts. In 1 Peter chapter 3 and verse 7, we can all rejoice in verse 6 where Sarah obeyed Abraham and called him lord, and women are to do the same. But how about verse 7, "You, husbands, likewise, live with your wives in an understanding way as with a weaker vessel since she is a woman and grant her honor as a fellow heir of the grace of life so that your prayers may not be hindered." What a great statement.

Now there are a number of things here, just to remind you, let me give you three "C"s, men, that you need to remember. One, consideration. Live with your wives in an understanding way. This is opposite the cave men mentality, the macho mentality, the independent mentality, the self-serving mentality. This is understanding, sensitivity, meeting her needs, understanding her feelings, fears, anxieties, concerns, goals, dreams, desires. That's what he means. Live with your wives in an understanding way, sometimes it boils down to listening, doesn't it? Understand her heart because you cannot express your love to her unless it is sacrificing love that meets needs, you have to know what those needs are. Not only consideration, but here's an old word, chivalry. He says in verse 7, live with her not only in an understanding way but as with a weaker vessel since she is a woman. What does that mean? It simply means you are unequal physically. She is weaker. You don't say to her, "After you've changed the tire I'll be glad to take you to the store." You understand that there is a physical weakness in woman. God has so designed her to be under the strength and protection of a man. She needs our strength.

Consideration, live with her according to understanding, chivalry, treat her as a weaker vessel, be her strength on the physical side and then thirdly, communion...communion. Treat her with honor as a fellow heir of the grace of life. Men and women are unequal physically. They are equal spiritually, treat her as a spiritual equal.

I love what it says in Song of Solomon where the man says, "This is my beloved," and the woman says, "This is my beloved, my friend." A deep sense of intimate equal sharing of spiritual things. Peter gives us some straight forward things, gentlemen, if we are to be the husbands God wants us to be. We must understand our wives, understanding their needs, understanding their feelings, understanding what it is that they long for and desire. We must live with them providing our strength, strength physically, strength emotionally, strength of character, all of those things could be added. And we must treat them with communion as equals spiritually. We are to love our wives, that is a command.

You cannot say, "Well I don't love her anymore," without confessing that you've sinned, that you've sinned. You say, "Well wait a minute, you don't know how she's treated me." That's not the issue. Christ loved sinners when they hated Him. Is that not true? And that's the model, that's the standard. It doesn't mean that there's no emotion there. If you truly love, the emotion is rich, the feelings are thrilling, the friendship is wonderful.

The biblical definition really plunges to some immeasurable depths. Let's go back to Ephesians. When we start to talk about how we are to love in this sacrificial way, it really starts to go down deep. In verse 25 it says, "Just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her." Can I say it simply, gentlemen? The Spirit-filled husband loves his wife not for what she can do for him, but what he can do for her. That's how Christ's love worked and works. He loves us not because there's something in us that attracts Him, He loves us because He determined to love us in spite of our unattractiveness. He loves us with a love that seeks not to tyrannize us, a love that seeks rather to meet our needs, to understand us, to provide strength for us.

It's not a question of deserving. We didn't do anything to earn Christ's love. It wasn't because we were more desirable than other people that He set His affection on us. We don't deserve His love. There's nothing attractive in us. God doesn't look over the world and pick out the people who somehow draw out His affection. Not at all. God loves us, Christ loves us like...I suppose like Hosea loved Gomer. He saw her as a prostitute. He watched her carry out her professional prostitution. He watched her go through many lovers. He watched her stripped naked on a block being auctioned off, a prostitute for the highest bidder in the slave market, and he went into the place and bought her, not because there was anything about her that was clean and sweet and gracious and lovely, but because it was in his heart to love her. And so God loved prostituted Israel. And so Christ loves His church, even before they are His church and thus sets His affection upon them. And even after they are His church and they prostitute themselves to iniquities, He still loves them. It is a love that never dies. It is a love that can't be killed. It is a love that is utterly and completely self-sacrificing.

I suppose if there's any one way to characterize this love it would be to say it means to self. Swallow your pride, swallow your personal desires, swallow your personal ambitions, swallow your fantasies and dreams about how life might have been with someone else, or under some other circumstances, put all of that aside, it is all meaningless, it only boils down to temptation. And love your wives with a love that knows nothing of self and only of her and her needs and her concerns and her heart and sacrifice your life on her behalf.

This is the kind of love, of course, that the Spirit of God gives us the capacity to carry and to share, the love of Christ is shed abroad in our hearts. The very love which Christ Himself demonstrated toward us, we partake in that love. The fruit of the Spirit is love. The Spirit produces in us this incredible love. First Peter 1:22 says, "Since you have in obedience to the truth purified your souls, or been converted, you now have a sincere love, you have the capacity to fervently love one another from the heart for you have been born again." This is the kind of love that belongs only to people who have been born again. The world tries to hang on to romantic love as long as it possibly can, and eventually the bells stop ringing and the whistles stop blowing and life gets pretty mundane and pretty routine and you start getting older and something outside your own marriage may look better than what's there at home. And you can't sustain that love and you can't hold on to that love because you don't have a new nature. But we who have been born again have a sincere love, a fervent love because of the imperishable seed of the living and abiding Word of God which has granted us new life.

God so loved us that He gave His Son. Christ so loved us that He gave His life. We love our wives to the point of self- sacrifice.

Turn to 1 Corinthians chapter 13. In 1 Corinthians 13 every characteristic of love listed in that chapter is in a verb form. Love is not static, it is not a substantive in terms of language, it is a verb. Love acts, love does something.

Love, verse 4, is patient, love is kind, is not jealous, does not brag, is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly, it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness but rejoices with the truth, it bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things, love never fails. All of those are verbs, that's how love acts. It is patient, it is kind, it is never jealous, it does not brag, it is not arrogant, it does not act unbecomingly, does not act in a way that cheapens. It never seeks its own, it is not provoked easily, it doesn't remember wrongs against it. It doesn't rejoice in unrighteousness, it rejoices only in the truth. It endures all things, it believes the best, it hopes the best, it endures everything and never fails. That's the character of love and that's how we are to love our wives.

It is always a verb, it is always acting on someone. We have been given the capacity to love like this by the Holy Spirit. Because we have been transformed and born again, the Spirit of God has come into us, we have received the fruit of the Spirit which is love and we can share that love. The one in whom the love of God is perfected, said John in 1 John 2, is the one who has been born of God.

If you are a Christian then, you cannot come along and say, "Well I'm sorry I really tried to love her but I don't have the capability." Yes you do. That supernatural spiritual love is there if you choose to exercise it.

You say, "What about if I'm mistreated and if I'm continually mistreated and if she's unfaithful and she leaves me and she goes out and finds another man," and on and on? In those kinds of circumstances the Bible has plenty to say and we'll discuss that as we go along. If it comes to a divorce and a separation and an abandonment, obviously you can no longer express that love if she chooses not to be there to receive it. But as long as she's there, it's your responsibility to give it.

And it is a love that is not dependent on the object. It's not dependent on the physical appearance. It's not depended on muscle tone. I hear so much about that today or someone's figure or someone's looks...it's not dependent on that. It is dependent on the attribute of the lover, the one who loves. And Paul says, as I read to you, "Love does not seek its own," it never wants revenge, it never wants retaliation. To put it simply, love forgives everything done against it. The loving person doesn't keep a record of wrongs.

And I'll tell you, you know what destroys marriages is unforgiveness...unforgiveness. If you continually forgive one another all the time, there's no record of wrong kept, there's no accumulating of a wall every time someone will not forgive, another brick goes into the wall that begins to wall of the two people. Nothing is more important in your marriage than forgiveness, instant spontaneous complete forgiveness so that it's never brought up again. And you cannot accumulate the devastating attitudes of bitterness and retaliation and revenge that destroy a relationship.

When a man is Spirit-filled, when he is so filled with joy and gratitude to God for all that Christ has done and when he loves his wife as himself, he will sacrifice himself for her and thus his authority will be soft and warm and affirming and secure and she will follow if she is obedient to God's plan for her. I suppose, men, we might even ask the question...when was the last time you made a sacrifice for your wife? I'm not talking about something trivial, something significant. Have you crucified self, set something aside to focus on her? I know many men are anxious to be leaders and spiritual giants and they want to appear as they're in control of everything and they are the pious leader of the family. But true spirituality really...really is death to self. So sometimes it's hard to recognize the real strong spiritual leader in a family because he's humble...he's humble, he's taking up his cross daily, he's denying self, he's dying daily, he's willing to be crucified with Christ, he's looking not on his own things but on the things of others, esteeming others better than himself. He's setting aside his desires for her. And it may well be that he appears weak when in fact he's strong.

I suppose death to self is the real issue. Somewhere along your pilgrimage as a Christian you need to learn to die to yourself regularly. It saves you from being defensive, revengeful, retaliatory, hostile, accumulating the list of things against you.

When you are forgotten or neglected or purposely set aside and you sting and hurt with the insult or the oversight, but your heart is happy and you count it a privilege to suffer for Christ, that is dying to self.

When you're good is evil spoken of, when she misunderstands you, when your desires are not interesting to her, when your advice is disregarded and your opinions are ridiculed and when you are abused, when you are mistreated, or misunderstood and you refuse to let anger rise in your heart or even defend yourself, that is dying to self.

When you lovingly patiently bear any disruption, any irregularity, any annoyance, when you can stand face to face with folly and waste and extravagance and insensitivity and endure it as Jesus endured it, that is dying to self.

When you are content with any food, any clothes, any climate, any society, any interruption or any solitude, that is dying to self.

When you never care to refer to yourself in a conversation, or to record and recite your own good works, or to pursue commendation, when you can truly love, to be unrecognized for something good, that is dying to self.

When you see someone else prosper, someone else reach goals that you desire and you can honestly rejoice with that other person in spirit, feel no envy and not question God while your needs are far greater and in desperate circumstances, that is dying to self.

And, gentlemen, when you can receive correction and reproof from your wife and humbly submit inwardly as well as outwardly, feel no rebellion and feel no resentment rising within your heart, that is dying to self.

And that's what makes you the leader God wants you to be in your home. It's when self dies. The manner with which we are to love our wives is the manner with which Christ loved the church. First of all, that is a sacrificial love that demands death to self. It's not easy, especially if you're a strong person, confident person, capable person, successful person, smart person, wise person, respected person, leader type, to constantly deny yourself is a great spiritual challenge. But that's what God calls for. And when you lead in an environment of love and self-denial, you create the atmosphere that a woman longs for.

Secondly, this love is not only a sacrificial love, but it is a purifying love...it is a purifying love. And this is very important for us to understand. Ephesians chapter 5 verse 26, we are to love as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her, verse 26, "That He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the Word, that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing but that she should be holy and blameless."

Now this is a beautiful picture here. Christ loves His church with a sacrificial love and with a sanctifying love or a purifying love. He loves His church enough to cleanse her. He loves His church enough to present her without spot or wrinkle or any such thing but holy and blameless.

What does it mean? It means He seeks the church's purity. He wants the church...can you see the word there in verse 27...in all her glory, endoxon, that is in all gorgeous splendor. Luke 7:25 translates it "gorgeously apparelled," as if she were a queen. Christlike beauty it's talking about, the beauty of purity, the splendor of holiness and virtue without spot, that means stain, without wrinkle, or flaw, rhutisin the Greek, flaw.

When Christ takes His church to be His bride, gives His life for His church, and then He seeks the purity of His church. Christ is the purifier of the church. And that is the way we are to be toward our wives. We are to do everything we can to lead them to holiness and to purity.

In John 13 Jesus said to Peter, "He who has bathed needs only to wash his feet, but is completely clean, and you are clean but not all of you." The idea of that is simple and beautiful. In the Orient the man would take a bath thoroughly cleansing himself and he had then only to periodically through the day wash off his feet. We learn from that that, of course, as Christians when we came to Christ we took a bath, we were bathed, but as we walk through the world in this day of our life, we collect dust on our feet and we need a continual cleansing. And those of us who are in Christ are being purified all the time, cleaned all the time, cleansed all the time, forgiven all the time.

In John 15 and verse 3, "You are already clean because of the Word which I have spoken to you." There's already been a cleansing, there's already been a time when you've been cleaned through the Word, but He even goes on to say there's a pruning to keep you clean. Here in Ephesians chapter 5 it' the same thing. Verse 26, "That He might sanctify, or having cleansed her, by the washing of water with the Word."

Gentlemen, if you do anything in the life of your wife, expose her to the Word of God. Bring her under the hearing of the Word of God that she might be daily, routinely cleansed. That as John 15:2 puts it, the one right before the verse I read, "He takes every branch that bears fruit and purges it that it might bear more fruit." God wants to purify His own and a husband must desire to purify his wife. How does he do that? By constantly exposing her to the Word of God. You are the prophet in that home, you are the one to bring her under the hearing of the Word of God, to make her clean, to purify her. John 17:17 says, "Sanctify them through Thy truth, Thy Word is truth." It's the Word that cleanses.

First of all, in your own heart and your own mind you want to be certain that you never lead your wife into any sin. You never expose her to any iniquity. Don't draw her in to those things which are going to tempt her. Don't take her to some form of entertainment that's going to expose her to sinful feelings. Don't irritate her, or exacerbate, or embitter her so that she falls to the temptation of anger. And you know where the buttons are, don't you? You can say to her, "Oh you're just like your...fill in the blank...mother," and you know what that does. Or you can drag up that same deal out of the past that always elicits the same hostility when you're ready to really wound. Don't do that. If you seek her purity, if you seek her holiness, if you seek her to be spotless and without stain and without flaw, to be cleansed and holy and blameless, then you would never lead her into anything that would produce iniquity. You would never expose her to anything that would produce strong temptation.

On the other hand, you would constantly bring the Word of God to her. You can do that in a number of ways. Make sure that you're here to hear the Word of God and she's by your side, make sure that you give her opportunity to be involved in a Bible study or whatever it might be, to spend time she needs reading the Word of God and being challenged by books or whatever, tapes, whatever source. Make sure that you encourage those things in her life.

So sad to have men come to me and say, "I don't know what went wrong but all of a sudden my wife is gone and she ran off with...whoever." And I often have to say, "Of course you understand that's not the beginning of something, that's the end of something. And what it is the end of is a long developed pattern of sin before you finally bolt like that."

What have you been doing to disciple your wife so that that doesn't happen? That's spiritual leadership as a joint heir, as one who is equal to you in Christ. What are you doing to strengthen her spiritually? Bring her under the sound preaching and teaching of God's Word, expose her to great truth out of Scripture, call her to purity, never do anything that could lead her to be tempted. Don't put her in a position to be tempted. That's another reason why I'm so concerned about men who send their wives to work in an ungodly world because they are exposed to very strong temptation. They're in that kind of office environment with all those well-dressed, slick, successful men, they're dressed for that environment as well, everything looks pretty good and they come home and it's a little bit different, you know. You're slopping around in your dirty jeans with your old T-shirt on and she's poking around in a ragged bathrobe, and it just isn't the same. Why expose her to the kind of temptation that she will experience in that environment?

You know what the Lord constantly does with His church? He says, "Come out from among them and be ye...what?...separate, don't touch the unclean thing." He's always trying to pull the church out of the world. "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world." I know the damage those things are going to do because friendship with the world is enmity with God, James says, and the Lord is always trying to pull us out and separate us and not allow our thinking to be influenced by the world.

In Romans 12, a very, very straightforward command is given to us with regard to worldliness, "Do not be conformed to this world, be transformed by the renewing of your mind." Get out of that system. Get out of that way of thinking. And, gentlemen, you have the responsibility for the protection of your wife's purity on every front and the negative side of that is to prevent temptation, the positive side of that is to expose her to the teaching and the instruction of the Word of God.

In Athens, for example, when a bride was taken, she was to be bathed in the waters of the Callirrhoë River, the river was sacred to the people and it symbolized a cleansing from all previous defilement and an entrance into a pure marital life. And that's why traditionally there's a white gown worn by a bride the first time she is married, that is to represent purity. Marriage is to be a purifying experience, it takes this woman and separates her from all others unto her husband...a purifying relationship. Her husband then takes on the responsibility or the maintenance of that purity.

The love of Christ for His church causes Him to desire to keep His church clean. And your love for your wife should have the same exact desire.

Let me tell you something. It's pretty challenging to live with a godly woman, pretty challenging. I know how challenging it is. It's pretty challenging to live with a woman who expects you to live everything you preach, pretty ridiculous, isn't it? It's very challenging to live with somebody who has immensely high expectations for your virtue. And you might say to yourself, "You know, I could have a lot more fun if my wife wasn't so picky." But in the end, your heart tells you, "What a privilege, what an honor, what a joy to have someone who has such high standards of spiritual accountability to hold you to, what benediction and blessing that brings on your own life. If a wife can bring that to a husband, surely in the husband's role he has a greater responsibility to bring it to her.

Second Corinthians 11:2, Paul says, "I'm jealous for you with a godly jealousy, I betrothed you to one husband that to Christ I might present you as a pure virgin, but I am afraid lest as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds should be led astray from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ." Paul says I want you pure and devoted to Christ and I fear that you're going to follow off after some other lovers.

True love is always concerned with the purity of its object. Christ with His church, Paul with his congregation, a man with his wife...disciple her, purify her, never expose her to impure influences. Her purity is your responsibility. In fact, it even says in 1 Corinthians chapter 14 verse 35, "If women desire to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home for it's improper for a woman to speak in church." Gentlemen, we are to be the theological teacher, we are to be the spiritual source, we are to be the spiritual repository of truth for a woman can come that in hearing the truth she may be purified.

If you really love your wife you're going to hate anything that defiles her. Anything that steals her purity will become to you a terrifying enemy. Any so-called love which drags a partner down to uncleanness is a false love...a false love.

I remember reading a few years ago a man in the ministry saying, "My wife and I read Playboy magazine together. After 18 years we need something to stimulate our relationship." You expose yourself to that, you expose yourself to gross temptation and sin, and then you expose your wife to that? You have forfeited your responsibility to protect her and to purify her.

Any so-called love that makes someone coarse, someone hard rather than refined and pure is really lust masquerading. Love always seeks the absolute purity of its object and it seeks it sacrificially. Real love is sacrificial and real love is a cleanser...a cleanser. It will use discipline if it needs to. Hebrews chapter 12 verses 5 to 10 tells us how the Lord disciplines whom He loves. And, husband, if you're filled with the Spirit, if your heart is right, your life is right, you're going to purify your wife, it may mean confrontation, it may mean a certain discipline, but it certainly means you protect her from temptation and you expose her to the purifying influence of God's truth.

Well, verse 27 and we'll close. Paul says, "We're to present our wives just as Christ presents to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and blameless." You want to present your wife in all her pure splendor. That's her beauty. It's not her hair and her wardrobe, it's her purity that is her beauty. No place for degrading her, no place for criticizing her, no place for knocking her, you want to lift her up for purity is her glory. Her holiness is her beauty. The loving husband, the loving husband is not ashamed of his wife, he never degrades his wife, he never criticizes his wife, he never speaks unkindly of his wife, he never paints her faults large. The loving husband, like Christ, seeks only to present his bride exalted, pure and glorious. Love seeks to honor.

So, that's how we love...sacrificially, cleansing or sanctifying her as well, purifying her, and the love that honors, that lifts her up and says, "Look what God has given me." That's the love that thrills the heart of a wife.

There's more to come but that will be for next time. Let's pray.

Father, we know that it's certainly within the realm of possibility that this kind of life can be lived. We thank You. We thank You that we can experience it in our own marriages. We also know that it is not easy, it is not simple, it takes real spiritual devotion and dedication and maturity. But it is to this end we pray, God, that You would raise up men who love their wives like Christ loved His church, who have denied themselves and in that self-denial have the capacity to sacrifice themselves for the woman You've given them, who not only love sacrificially but love purifyingly, who love with honor, seeking only to lift up and exalt, never to degrade and bring down. O Lord, what joy, what bliss, what blessing, what fulfillment can be found in such relationship. The curse notwithstanding, the confusion and chaos that the flesh generates inside that the world generates outside. And even these last days notwithstanding when normal natural family love is dying, in some cases dead and gone, and men are lovers only of themselves, still in the power of the regenerated life and the indwelling Spirit, marriage can be the grace of life. And two heirs of that grace can share its riches together because of what You've done in us through Your grace. Work this work in every life, Lord, that our marriages and our homes might bring to us unending joy and fulfillment and that another generation in seeing it might be raised to the same joys by the same path of obedience. We commit ourselves afresh to You as husbands and as wives to be obedient as You enable us, in Christ's name. Amen.

God's Pattern for Husbands, Part 2

Tonight we return to our study of God's pattern for husbands. And we are talking about God's design for marriage and the family and I just want to let you all know that we're not done, we're going to talk about parenting, we're going to talk about the responsibility of children, we're going to have some time even to discuss the subject of singleness and how that works into God's perfect order. We'll discuss the issue of divorce and remarriage. And before we're done we're going to cover some very, very important themes.

But for now, this is the second message in dealing with the Scripture related to husbands. Turn in your Bible to Ephesians chapter 5...Ephesians chapter 5. And starting in verse 25 we have direct instruction to husbands. And we'll be looking at that particular text tonight.

But to begin with, so much has been spoken and so much has been written about the tragic impact of the Feminist Movement. It has negatively impacted marriages, it has devastated families, it has destroyed individual women. It has created chaos on the social level, on the moral level. And it is right that we make sure people understand the tragic impact of feminism. And we have done that in this particular study some weeks back. It is clearly a sinful, satanic assault on God's design for the happiness and prosperity of mankind.

But while we're talking about what has gone wrong on the distaff side, while we're talking about what is wrong in the feminist agenda, what is wrong on the female side, we cannot ignore the failure of men...failure to follow and fulfill their responsibility as God has designed it. They too have perverted their maleness, perverted the role that God intended for them. There's no question about that.

In fact, when things go wrong on an athletic team, the coach gets fired. He's the leader and success is his responsibility. When profits drop seriously in a corporation, the president and the CEO are replaced. When things don't go well in the church, the board seeks a new pastor. That's the nature of leadership. If things aren't going well, you take it right to the leader. The leader bears the responsibility ultimately for success and for failure.

And we see that all throughout our society. And certainly in the home the buck stops with the husband, with the father. And if all is not well, the greatest measure of responsibility for that may well be in the hands of the leader, the father. By God's design and by God's will, clearly expressed in Scripture, the man is the head of the household, he is the leader, he is the one responsible for the success of the marriage, the success of the family, the well-being of everyone involved. So say what we must, and we must say it about the Women's Liberation Movement, say what we must and will say about Feminism and its agenda, say what we will about the satanic assault on the proper role of a woman, we also cannot ignore the issue of male irresponsibility, the issue of male liberation which perhaps in the end is even more devastating. It would seem to me that Feminism would have a much tougher time surviving let alone gaining ground in a world where men understood their responsibility clearly.

And we are asking the question today and it's a question that all of us ponder, where are the strong husbands? Where are the loyal, loving, leading husbands and fathers? Where are those men who are the backbone, the solid framework of structure on which you can build a marriage and build a family and build a society. Men have developed their own agendas, their own goals, pursuing their own achievements, living in worlds, for the most part, isolated completely from the family, out of the house, pursuing personal goals, active in their own world of business and passive largely in the home. They are, in their world, aggressive, doers, problem solvers, coming up with all kinds of innovative and inventive ways to make money, seeking promotion, prestige and respect from the strangers in their other world. They are driven to achieve. And in the home, for the most part, they appear passive, indifferent, and irresponsible.

A look at the historical sociological explanation of this would draw us to a quote from one writer who gives us this insight. "A series of historical events beginning at the Industrial Revolution and traversing the search for American independence and the second great awakening and culminating in Victorianism has had the net result of disestablishing American men from the true role of fatherhood and moral leadership in our land, The American male at one time the ever-present guide of the close-knit colonial family left his family for the factory and the materialistic lure that the Industrial Revolution brought. The most numerous and most active members of the church, the men, who commonly debated theology in the colonial marketplace, were in time to be found arguing business practices in the tavern. The fathers who labored hard to instill the value of corporation in their children in time gave their children the example of unlimited individual competition. Men who once taught their children respect and obedience toward godly authority, came to act as though independence were a national virtue. Men who once had an active hand in the education of their sons relegated this responsibility to a public school system dominated by female teachers and feminine learning patterns. Once the leaders of social progress, American men came to look on social reform and mercy movements as women's work and in time became themselves the objects of that social reform, as in the case of movements such as the Women's Christian Temperance Union."

Over the course of 150 years from the mid eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, American men walked out on their God-given responsibility for moral and spiritual leadership in the homes, schools and Sunday schools of the nation. As sociologist Lawrence Fuchs notes, quote: "The ground work for the twentieth century fatherless home was set. By the end of the nineteenth century, for the first time it was socially and morally acceptable for men not to be involved with their families," end quote.

What you have is a legacy of the Industrial Revolution and what it produced in a materialistic world, what you have is the disappearance of the American husband, the disappearance of the American father. All for initially noble purposes, a better life. But the father left the home and began to cultivate a world completely independent of his own family, a world which his own family knows little of anything about. That has caused subtle and not so subtle, radical and devastating change.

That kind of change is represented in a rather typical letter from a lady. Listen to this letter. "The children are in bed. There's nothing on TV tonight. I asked my husband if he minds if I turn off the tube. He grunts. As I walked to the set, my mind is racing. Maybe just maybe tonight we'll talk, I mean have a conversation that consists of more than my usual question with his mumbled one-word answer, or more accurately, no answer at all. May I interject something, he dare not do at work if he wishes to climb the ladder of success."

She goes on. "Silence, I live in a world with continuous noise, but between him and me, silence. Please, O God, let him open up. I initiate once again for the thousandth time, my heart pounds, oh, how can I word it this time? What can I say that will open the door to just talk? I don't have to have a deep meaningful conversation, just something."

"As I open my mouth," she goes on, "he gets up and goes to the bedroom. The door closes behind him, the light showing under the door gives way to darkness and so does my hope.

"I sit alone on the couch. My heart begins to ache. I'm tired of being alone. Hey, I'm married, I have been for years. Why do I sit alone? The sadness undergoes a change slowly, then with increased fervor, I get mad. I am mad. I'm sick and tired of living with a sissy, a wimp, a coward. You know, he's afraid of me. Hostile you say? You better believe it. I'm sick and tired of living in a world of passive men."

She continues the letter, "My two sons like sports. They're pretty good. They could be a lot better if their dad would take a little of his precious time and play catch with them. I'm sorry, catch once a year at the church picnic doesn't quite make the boys into great ball players. But Dad's too busy, he's at work, he's at the health club, he's riding his four-wheeler, he's working on the car, he's playing golf, he's tired, he's watching a movie. So who plays catch with the boys? Me. My husband says, `You shouldn't be playing men's sports.' So who's going to do it? He says he will, but he doesn't. Remember, he's too busy satisfying himself, doing what he likes. So my poor sons have to be second-rate in sports. They could have been good, really good.

"My daughter's a teenager, she likes boys and they notice her. They pay attention to her. She responds. I know what's coming. I try to talk to her, but it's not me she wants, it's Dad. Yeah, Dad. If he would just hug her, notice her, talk to her just a little, she wouldn't need those boys so much. But no. So she turns elsewhere for attention and love and there's really nothing I can do. A mom isn't enough, kids need a father and not just a body, a passive, silent presence."

And here's the killer. "My husband's father did the same number on him. Didn't hug him, didn't take him to anything, let alone watch his baseball games. And he hates his father. Now my husband's doing the same thing."

And she goes on with a few words and ends the letter. She paints a very individual scene but it's not an uncommon one, is it? It just feels like those are the kind of things that all of us know or experienced by women.

And we can explain the problem with men sociologically, historically and I tried to give you somewhat of an insight into that. We can explain it by virtue of the Industrial Revolution and the fact that we have basically created a world outside the home and we don't have much choice but to go there and live in that world. We can explain those things sociologically, but that's really only a force, that's really only a pressure, that's really only a venue of temptation, that's really not the explanation.

The explanation for the breakdown of male leadership is the fact that men no longer obey the Word of God. In fact, throughout our society most men have no idea what it says and when they find out they're not interested in following it. There are so many passive and indifferent and weak men in the home who out there in the world are strong and aggressive. But when it comes to their families, they have abandoned the responsibility to their wives, they have forfeited their character, they have really forfeited their manhood. And they have abandoned their leadership. Therefore their marriage forfeits the ideal, so does the family. And what do you expect but chaos.

And where can we start? Where can we pick up the pieces of all of this? I think for Christian men we have to start here. The heart of being the man God desires you to be is to get a grip on the responsibility you have for the physical, emotional and spiritual well being of your wife and your family. That's where you begin. Moral and spiritual leadership as well as emotional and physical security, strength and protection, lifelong provision and support, that is what male headship is all about. It's not something mystical, it's something very practical. And if we're ever going to get back men in leadership, it's going to begin in the home. It's going to begin when men take their responsibility given by God, Christian men, for the physical, emotional and spiritual well being of their wives and families. Far more important than that you have some kind of success in your career, even with a view toward having a good testimony, far more important that you express the unique role that you have as a man, first of all, in your own home.

Now that takes us back to our text. When we talk about men who are Spirit-filled, when we talk men who are godly men in a home, we begin in verse 25 with these words, "Husbands, love your wives." That's the beginning. That's the starting point. Verse 28, "So husbands ought also to love their own wives as their own bodies."

Colossians chapter 3 adds in verse 19, "Husbands, love your wives and do not be embittered against them." Love them with no mingling of disappointment frustration or embitterment. The key word here is "love," it is used six times from verse 25 to 33. And with that first statement comes man's responsibility in his world...love your wives.

Now if that's all it said, we might fly off into a thousand directions and try to figure out what that means. I watch our society write endless songs about what love is as they poke around and try to figure it out. It always comes out as a feeling. It usually comes out as a feeling that creates irrational behavior. It comes and goes, rises and falls, ebbs and flows. They struggle with the million lyrics to try to figure out what love is. We don't need to struggle, it's right here. "Husbands, love your wives," and then the apostle Paul makes very clear the manner of that love. Please notice verse 25, "As Christ also loved the church."

It is Christ's love for the church that is the model of the husband's love for his wife. Christ's love for the church sets the model in place.

Over in 1 Peter, if I might remind you, 1 Peter 3:7, look at it for just a moment because I want to incorporate this text because I think it's a rich one. Here you have a command to husbands, verse 7, 1 Peter 3, "You husbands likewise live with your wives in an understanding way as with a weaker vessel, since she is a woman and grant her honor as a fellow heir of the grace of life so that your prayers may not be hindered." This spells out a dimension of that love that's very important. Your love means to live with your wife in an understanding way. Understand her, that is to be considerate, not harsh domination; gracious, respectful understanding. You are to understand God's plan and purpose for marriage. You are to understand your wife's needs, desires, longings and frustrations. You are to understand her strengths and her weaknesses. And you are to understand how to please God by honoring her as a fellow Christian, a fellow heir of the grace of life. And when you do that, there's a great reward, your prayers are not hindered.

So this love involves understanding, understanding everything about her, treating her with consideration, bringing strength to her weakness, providing leadership. But getting more specific about that love, we go back to Ephesians chapter 5. And Paul says, first of all, it is a sacrificial love. Look at it in verse 25. "It is as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her." It is a love that knows no tyranny, only sacrifice. It is a love that does not exalt itself, but humbles itself as evidenced by the great self-giving of Jesus Christ for unworthy sinners who were His chosen bride. The standard is thus set for this love from husbands. Even if it is undeserved, it is given lavishly and sacrificially.

Second, we saw last time it is a purifying love. Verses 26 and 27, "Christ loved the church enough to sanctify her," verse 26, "to cleanse her by the washing of water with the Word that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and blameless." You are to love your wife in such a way that you...you work toward her godliness. It is a love that sacrifices. It is a love that purifies. In other words, it's a spiritually uplifting love, it's a spiritually beneficial love. It has the effect of making her more holy,of leading her to the place where you allow her full beauty to shine. The beauty of a woman is not external, the beauty of a woman is internal. It is her glory that shines through her, the work of God in her heart. Man looks on the outward appearance, God looks on the heart. The Bible says, "Women, don't be concerned about adorning the outside, but adorn your heart. Husband, it is your responsibility to sacrifice yourself to meet her needs. It is your responsibility to lead her to ever- increasing virtue. Your goal is to give your life on her behalf and to lead her to godliness and virtue that she should be holy and blameless, even as Christ endeavors to lead His church.

Thirdly, it is a caring love. It is a caring love. Verse 28, "So husbands ought also to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself."

Now what does it mean to love your wife as your own body? Well it's just a very simple concept. We take care of our own body, we care for it. If it's sick, we put it down in bed so it can get better. If it's hungry, we feed it. If it's thirsty, we give it to drink. If it's disheveled, we clean it. We take care of it...feeding, clothing, comforting, whatever. And that's the essence of this. The issue here is to give attention to meeting needs, to being concerned to fill each requirement with great alacrity, great speed and great devotion. We are called to treat our wives with the same preoccupation we give to ourselves.

Now notice down in verse 31 that you compare this verse, very important. "For this cause," this is quoting obviously from back in Genesis chapter 2, "For this cause a man shall leave his father and mother and shall cleave to his wife and the two shall become one flesh." Now I just bring that in at this point because I want to make a single point out of that.

When you got married you became one...you became one. So in a sense, you are one body. And back then in verse 28 when he says, "You ought to love your wives as your own bodies," you want to remember this, that when you got married you became one body. And if her needs are met, your needs are met. If her needs are not met, believe me, your needs won't be met either. You give her the same care you give yourself. You take care of her as if she were you because you are one in an indivisible oneness. Is that not true? When you were married you became one flesh. If you want real happiness in your marriage, care for your wife and all her needs with the same devotion you give to yourself because you are inseparable.

We have a little sign that hangs in the kitchen. I don't know who gave it to us. It's a good reminder. It says, "If mamma ain't happy, ain't nobody happy." And I'll tell you something right now, that goes for you. If you want to be a happy husband, you have a happy wife, right? If you want to be a fulfilled husband, you have a fulfilled wife. You want real happiness in your marriage, then treat her as you treat yourself. You could even embellish that a little bit and say this, since she is a Christian, remember that she's not just one with you, but she's one with Christ as well. Careful how you treat her.

Remember Matthew 18, one of these little ones who believe in Me, if you lead him into sin, lead her into sin, you'd be better off for a millstone hanged around your neck and you were drowned in the depths of the sea. If cause your spouse to sin, you'd be better off dead. You lead them to holiness.

In that same eighteenth chapter, Jesus says you are to receive these little ones in My name and you're receiving Me. You're not to look down on them, treat them with disrespect, you're to guard them and protect them, that's...that's even a compounding responsibility.

In marriage, she is one with you, men. In salvation, she is one with Christ. Therefore you are bound together with Him. He comes to you through her. How you treat her is how you treat Him. If you don't love your wife in a caring way, you don't know how to take care of yourself appropriately because you're going to be miserable. You're going to be miserable. So in verse 28 we are to love our wives as our own bodies. And that's exactly how Christ loves His church. The end of verse 29, "As Christ also does the church." Verse 29 says, "No one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it and she is your flesh, you are one flesh, and you must take care of her as yourself." That's how Christ cares for His church. He meets the church's needs.

In John 14 verses 13 and 14 we read this, "Whatever you ask in My name...Jesus said...that will I do that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask Me anything in My name, I'll do it." That's the Lord Jesus saying to His people, "I will meet your needs." It's repeated again in different words, Philippians 4:19, "My God shall supply all your needs according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus." God will meet all your needs through Jesus Christ. God says, "Seek first the Kingdom and all these things shall be added." He meets all our needs, not all our wants, but all our needs. Men, we are the providers, we are the protectors, we are the preservers, we are the resources for our wives and our families and that is our responsibility. And when their needs are met, and we care for them as we would care for ourselves, then we have the kind of relationship that God wants us to have.

Back to Ephesians chapter 5 again, verse 29 which we commented briefly on. I just want to be a little more specific. Paul says, "No one ever hated his own flesh," and it is not normal to hate yourself. You take care of yourself, that's normal. You take care of yourself with great concern and great care. And that is precisely the way you are to take care of your spouse. Nobody hates his own flesh, you nourish it, you cherish it, just as Christ also does the church.

So if you want your marriage to be blessed, you take care of your wife. When you know she has a need, you seek to meet it. When you know she has a secret longing in her heart and it's certainly reasonable and will add to her virtue and her well being and her happiness and her ability to fulfill her role, you do everything you can to meet that need. Something is seriously wrong when a man sees his wife as a cook and a clothes washer and a baby sitter and a sex partner and that's it. Something is seriously wrong when he puts her in the place of the bread winner. She is a God-given treasure to be cared for, to be cherished, to be nourished, to be your loving helper, to fulfill your need for companionship for the fulfillment of physical desire, for the fulfillment of love and partnership and friendship and to produce children in a home.

Notice those two terms "nourish and cherish" in verse 29. Nourish means to feed, ektrepho, it's a word used primarily of bringing up children. It's used over in chapter 6 verse 4 where it says, "Bring them up..." We think about bringing up our children, we think about nourishing, feeding, developing, nurturing our children but do we think of that with regard to our wives? I think most men just disregard that responsibility, see the wife as responsible for the kids and go charging out into their own world. We are responsible to nourish her so she in her marvelous role can effectively nourish the children as she has been given opportunity.

Then the word "cherish" literally means, beautiful word, to warm with body heat. It's sometimes translated "to melt." It means to soften. It is used of a mother bird who just pulls in all the little baby birds and keeps them all cozy and warm in her feathers. It means to provide a nest, warmth, security, to soften her to a meek and quiet spirit, to support her, to care for her. I tell you, pretty challenging in the world in which we live today when women are raised to be tough and independent. It takes a great man, it takes a tremendous amount of spiritual leadership to soften a woman, to warm a woman, to melt her down to a meek and quiet spirit, to provide a nest and security and strength and warmth.

She is not the nourisher. She is not the provider. You're to do that. That is the man's responsibility.

And if a man doesn't do that, according to 1 Timothy 5:8, he is denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever. Throughout Scripture the man is always the provider as Christ is the provider for His church. That's key. We provide nothing. The church provides nothing. We just receive Christ's provision, protection, preservation, His care, His nourishing, His cherishing. It comes to us. In a sense, it's very one- sided. Men, we are to provide that in our homes.

You say, "Well, I'd have to sacrifice my career to do that." Then sacrifice it. Maybe you can't climb as fast and as far up the ladder as you would like, but in the end you're going to be so richly rewarded in the bliss of that home that it will be far worth every sacrifice. Christ provides everything for us, to nurture us, to warm us, to provide the security for us.

Thinking back, for a moment, to the curse in Genesis 3. The woman was cursed, pain in childbearing. The man was cursed, remember how he was cursed? He was going to be cursed in making a living. Remember that?

Man sinned and the ground was cursed and he was going to have to provide for his wife and his family by hard labor. That was the curse, that the ground would not bring forth its produce readily, or easily. He was going to have to work very hard to provide. And the woman was going to have pain in her childbearing and she was going to have to battle her desire to lead and to be in charge and submit herself. How fascinating that is to me because the curse was a direct hit on the specific responsibility that God gave men and women. Man's specific responsibility was as a provider and that's right where the curse hit him and that provision is difficult to obtain. And a woman, her responsibility, have children and submit and she was cursed right in that very area through the pain of childbearing and the struggle of submission. It's not easy, and I'm not saying it is easy. In fact, it's so difficult I think it can only be fulfilled in the power of the Spirit of God and a transformed life. So the husband is to care for the wife as Christ cares for the church.

Verse 30, "Because we are members of His body." He does it because we are one with Him. We need to do it with our wives because we are one with them. That's the point. We are His body and she is our body. As Christ who is one body with His church cares for His church, so the husband who is one body with his wife cares for his wife. He that is joined to the Lord is one Spirit, 1 Corinthians 6:17 says. He that is joined to the Lord is one Spirit. And He cares for us because we are one with Him. And that's the picture of how we are to care for our wives because they are one with us.

In fact, people who violate this...men, let me tell you, when you don't do this, you really are committing a kind of suicide because once married to that woman there is a one-flesh relationship. And if that marriage is destroyed, something in you is destroyed. It is forgivable, it is not repairable. The grace of God is amazing. It brings full forgiveness for our failures. But you can't necessarily put the pieces back together. The scars will always be there.

So the model for loving your wives, gentlemen, is this— you're to love them as Christ loved the church. How does He love His church? By giving His life for it, by pursuing its holiness, and by caring for it so that all of its needs are met. It is a sacrificial, a purifying and a caring love.

Fourthly, it is an unbreakable love...it is an unbreakable love. Verse 31, "For this cause," and here is a quote from Genesis 2:24, also quoted by our Lord in Matthew 19:5, here is the quote from Genesis, this was God's original design, before the Fall, "For this cause a man shall leave his father and mother and shall cleave to his wife and the two shall become one flesh." This is a coming together of a man and a woman, leaving their family, creating a new union with a unique identity all its own that is called a one-flesh relationship.

Now what does it mean "one flesh"? The primary reference is to the sexual union because the sexual union is what yields the most obvious evidence that the two have become one, which is the birth of the child that carries the genetics of both parents. That child is the true emblem of the oneness of a physical union.

Back in 1 Corinthians 6:16 Paul says, "Do you not know that the one who joins himself to a harlot is one body with her?" Oh, so that oneness is when you join sexually? That's right. Then it says in that same verse, 1 Corinthians 6:16, "For He says the two will become one flesh." You become one flesh in the physical relationship. That's where you share life. When the life of the man is shared with the life of the woman, in the intimacy of that physical relationship, that is the one flesh. Even a man who is joined to a harlot becomes one flesh with her. It's not some mystical marital union, it's not some spiritual emotional union, it is the union that is on the physical level, first of all. It goes beyond that. It engulfs everything about our life, emotions certainly come into play. It becomes unique and personal But it starts with that physical relationship.

So, in Ephesians again, God's design as indicated back in Genesis, is that a man and a woman leave their respective families and come together, clinging to each other and enter into a physical union. They become one flesh. And they cling to each other. This oneness is intimate, unique and personal. This oneness is special. Individual identity is lost. Did you get that? Individual identity is lost. You become really a new person, co-mingled with your life partner. "And what God has joined together, let not man put asunder." That's why God hates divorce because divorce severs that indissoluble indivisible relationship.

Would you notice the word "leave" in verse 31? It's a very intense word, it's another one of those verbs with a preposition on the front of it, kataleipo, it means "to leave behind," it means "to abandon," literally "leave." And, of course, we have to give advice about that lots of times to young couples who have started to cleave but forgotten to leave, which is very helpful. The word "cleave," proskollao, it means "to be glued to." You come together to stick, oneness of physical union which incorporates oneness of mind, oneness of purpose, oneness of heart, oneness of emotion. And you enter into this most private magnificent intimate personal relationship.

It even appalls me all these books that are written about how to express your physical relationship. Certainly somewhere along the line enough information has circulated, and if it hasn't, you can certainly find out rather quickly what ought to happen in the physical dimension.

And when you sort of blatantly parade all of this stuff, you cheapen it. The magnificent beauty of intimacy belongs in the marriage bed. Hebrews 13:2 is so beautiful...Hebrews 13:4 rather, it says, "Let marriage be held in honor among all and let the marriage bed be undefiled." You can also translate that in an indicative mode, the marriage bed is undefiled, but fornicators and adulterers God will judge. There's something wonderful about that marriage bed, about that union, something personal and intimate and private and magnificent as two people come together in a relationship that in and of itself is God's perfect and private and special union that they share. It is an unbreakable union. That's why the Bible condemns divorce. That's why in Malachi it says, "God spoke and said, `I hate divorce.'" Malachi 2:16, "The Lord the God of Israel says He hates divorce." God hates anything that breaks up this union.

And what is it that assaults this union? Sin. Sure. You say, "Well I want to keep my marriage together but, boy, he's a bear to live with, this guy." Or a man might say, "I'd like to keep this marriage together too but I don't know if I can live with this woman." I've actually had men say to me, and not just...not just a few but quite a number, "What would happen if I divorced my wife without biblical cause?" Well my answer has always been, "I don't know. I know you're in direct violation of Scripture and I know God will not bless that. And there's a reasonable assumption that God will chasten that and you may come under serious chastening from God." And I've had men say to me on not a few occasions, "Okay, I'll take it. I would much rather put myself under the chastening of God than live with this woman." Really say that.

You know what that indicates to me? They have reached a point where they are either so sinful in their own lives that they themselves are at fault and have alienated that woman, or perhaps more likely they have ceased to understand how to forgive. You know what happens? It doesn't take a lot of stuff to get to that point, it just takes a continual pattern of unforgiveness and it just accumulates...it just accumulates.

How many times does the Lord forgive you? All day, every day? And His love never changes and His love never wanes and you're still His chosen bride and He's still going to bring you to glory. How many times are we to forgive each other? Peter asked that, didn't he, in Matthew 18, how many times shall I forgive? Seven times? Jesus said seventy times seven...seventy times seven.

So you love your wife with a sacrificial love. You love your wife with a purifying love. You love your wife with a caring love that nourishes her and cherishes her. You love your wife with an unbreakable love that just keeps forgiving and forgiving and forgiving and forgiving. Can a man cast off his wife? I can answer that question with a question. Can Christ cast off His church?

And at this point it would be appropriate to give a warning to you young people. Pick carefully, it's for life. Pick wisely, it's for life. You say, "Oh boy, it makes me nervous." It ought to make you nervous. You say, "Well what's the key to picking wisely?" Simple, be filled with the Spirit walking in a godly way so that your mind is tuned to the will of God. That's why when young couples in for counseling here the first thing we ask them when they want to get married, they come in for premarital counseling, is...are you involved with each other physically? Because if they are, they're in a sinful condition and people in a sinful condition can't discern the will of God, right? So you have to separate and live a godly life so that you can understand the mind of the Spirit and the will of God can be expressed through your life, then you'll know. I always tell young people, "Don't worry about finding the right person, worry about being the right person." And if you're the right person, then the person God has for you will recognize you.

Now what do you look for? Let me give you some suggestions. This is for those of you who aren't married and you know it's for life. First of all, find out someone's reputation. Proverbs 22:1 says, "A good name is better than riches." Find out someone's reputation, a good name is better than riches. Try to avoid a reclamation project and wait until the Spirit of God has done that. Hey, we're all reclamation projects, aren't we? But let the Spirit of God do that before you jump in at square one. The idea of marriage is not so that you can lead her to Christ. I think that's what I'm saying.

Secondly, "Favor is deceitful, beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord, she shall be praised." Find someone who worships the Lord from the heart. Look for reputation, look for a worshiping heart, listen to what they say because out of the abundance of the heart...what?...the mouth speaks. What's the conversation like?

You can check out companions. What kind of people do they run with? Shallow people, deep people, godly people? First Corinthians 15:33 says, "Evil company corrupts good morals."

And check out their wardrobe. You say, "Really?" Absolutely. Check out their wardrobe because godly women are not so much concerned with the outward adornment of the body as they are the inward adornment. And when they do call attention to themselves, they call attention to their virtue. Well enough said at that point.

The manner of love in our passage here, sacrificial, purifying, caring and unbreakable. Let's talk about the motive. What should motivate us to love like this? Verse 32, "This mystery is great but I'm speaking with reference to Christ and the church."

Why should I love this woman like this? Why should I love her sacrificially, why should I love her to the degree that I lead her to holiness, that I care for her? Why should I commit myself to an unbreakable love which means I relentlessly forgive her and never become embittered?

Motive—because of the sacredness of marriage. That's the issue. Because of the sacredness of marriage. Marriage isn't just marriage, marriage is a mystery. A marriage among Christians is a picture of Christ and His church. This mystery is great. And you need to treat marriage with reverence and awe because marriage is a sacred symbol of Christ's relationship to His church.

And then one final word. Verse 33 just reviews everything. "Nevertheless let each individual among you also love his own wife even as himself and let the wife see to it that she respect her husband."

It isn't that tough to understand this. But you can't fulfill it apart from being Spirit filled and you have to go al the way back, don't you, back all the way in this text to verse 18, filled with the Spirit, a heart filled with song and joy, thankful for everything, an attitude of submission. You see, where the Spirit of God is in control, this can come to pass. The commitment of two people to be controlled by the Holy Spirit, filled with worship and thanks, devoted to submitting to each other in humble love...I'll tell you, that will bring romance, that will put springtime in a marriage and it will keep it there.

A lot of marriages break up after the kids go. Have you noticed? A lot of them. And I suppose I used to wonder what marriage would be like when you weren't chasing them all around, when your whole life wasn't seemingly focused on them. You know, in those early years, control is the issue, just get those kids in control. Obedience, line them up, help them to learn how to think and how to act and how to react and how to submit and how to obey and you work hard on that. Then they go off to school and then it's homework for years and years. And you're focused on the homework, every night papers, papers, and, "Daddy, could you please explain this to me? Could you help me draw this? I don't understand this." Or, "Daddy, I got a bad grade on this, could you talk to the teacher? I don't understand." And your life is just focused all over the place.

And then it's Little League. And then it's soccer games, or whatever. And then it's football games and baseball games and I tell you, and piano lessons and then you have to go to some place to buy clothes for all of these kids. And that goes on and on. You know, your whole life is focused on that.

And then they get to the age where they have friends. And they all come over to your house. And now you've got to sort all those friends out and say, "You know, I don't think this person is a really good influence." The energy expended in just coordinating this, to say nothing of the taxi service that goes with it. Your whole life is just focused on all these kids.

And you...then they get to the age where they start to think about serious relationships. And then it really gets serious. I'll tell you, now I pretty well had my boys wired by the time they got to the place where they were going to choose. And you know how they knew what to choose? Well, they loved their mother and she was kind of the standard. But the girls, I was protective. I confess. You know, that's a...you spend your whole life protecting your daughter. Right? Just protect her, protect her. And then in one day she's going to marry some guy and you just say, "Here." And not only did I have to say that, I had to pronounce them man and wife. I mean, that's a pretty traumatic moment.

And then your life is just focused on this and you want to get them to the right place and get them to the right partner. And you want to help them as they go through that process of sorting all of that out and lead them into the right study and get them through school. And you're...and then all of a sudden they're gone. And I've seen some pretty apparently noble servants of the Lord even in ministry have their whole life collapse in front of them at that point. When the truth of the matter is, you should be on your second honeymoon when they're gone. You should look at each other and say, "Boy, we've waited a long time for this." I have to tell you, you know, it's the best of times at our house. You know what? We would...we was okay when they went, but you know what's happened? They're back. Only they're back with little tiny kids and we're saying, in the famous words of Yogi Berra, "This is de ja vu all over again." You know.

You spend a tremendous amount of time and energy...in our complex world, it's so diverse that there's a certain disconnection in all these activities of our kids. We take them here, we take them there, we take them here, we take them there. It's not all happening in the cohesion of that family, is it? Father's over here, the one kid's over here, another one's over here, another one's over here, and it's all scattered. Do we have breakfast together? Maybe. Do we have dinner together? Hardly. Splattered all over everyplace. All that tremendous diverse energy and when that all is gone, a husband and a wife have to face each other and see if there's anything there. And it can be...it can be the best of times. That's the way God designed it.

If you haven't kept the list of the offenses, if there is no such list, if you are as good at forgetting sins and failures as God is at forgetting yours, if you have cultivated a sacrificial love to that wife, a purifying love, a caring love and an unbreakable love, you will be rewarded, she will be rewarded. It can be and should be the best of times.

It's sad when it kind of declines, isn't it? I read a Saturday Evening Post old article called, "The Seven Stages of the Married Cold."

Stage one, the first year of marriage: "Sugar, I'm so worried about you, you've got a sniffle and there's no telling about such things. I'm going to put you in the hospital today for a general checkup and some rest. I know the food's lousy at the hospital so I'll have your meals catered. And I've already arranged it with the floor superintendent."

Second year: "Listen, darling, I just don't like the sound of that cough and I've called Doc Miller to rush over here. Now you go to bed like a good girl, please?"

Third year: "Now maybe you better lie down, honey. Nothing like a little rest when you don't feel well. Have you got any soup?"

Fourth year: "Look, dear, be sensible. After you feed the kids and get the dishes washed, you better lay down."

Fifth year: "Why don't you get yourself a couple of aspirin."

Sixth year: "For Pete's sake stop sneezing, you're going to give me pneumonia."

Seventh year: "You know, if you'd just gargle you wouldn't be sitting around barking like a seal."

Well, does it have to be that way? Not in God's plan. Billy Sunday said, "Gentlemen, try praising your wife even if it frightens her."

Worthiness is not the issue. It's not the issue with Christ. He's tender, sensitive, forgiving toward us. We're speaking about a divine ideal and it's not too late for us, no matter what may be the condition of our marriages. And, gentlemen, it's going to start with you when you love your wife as Christ loved His church and loves His church. That's where to rebuild the whole thing. And that's going to happen when you begin to come back to where you need to be in your own spiritual life. Get the garbage out of your life, get back into the Word of God, get back into living an obedient life. Get your focus where it belongs on Christ and then on that little family that God has given you as a piece of His kingdom to disciple. And put your whole heart there and watch how God rewards that. Let's pray.

Father, it's so wonderful to be taken back to the Word and have a foundation to build on. And, Lord, I know there are many who may feel a certain sadness because we've been speaking about a divine ideal and many perhaps have already lost that. Some have come from divorces and messed up marriages and some are struggling right now. And, Lord, we know it's not an issue of forgiveness. You forgive, we understand that. You forgive. And sometimes there are men who have tried to do what's right and they thought they married a Christian but they didn't. And it was Christ against Satan in the home. Sometimes it was a wife who just decided to live iniquitous life style, engaged in sin and shattered the best attempts of husbands. Whatever. We know You forgive, that's not the issue. The only issue is, Lord, that wherever we are right now, we get back to being the men You want us to be. Forget the past, begin now. Lord, we ask for Your grace, Your strength, Your wisdom that we might be what You want us to be as husbands and wives. And as husbands we might love our wives and the wives respect their husbands.

O Lord, give us homes filled with joy because we have followed the pattern laid out for us in Your power and by Your grace. For the glory of our Savior. Amen.