The only place a man can grow in his desire and ability to love his wife is under the shadow of the bloody cross and in the doorway of the empty tomb.
Ephesians 5:22 – 33…
22 Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. 25 Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27 so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. 28 In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, 30 because we are members of his body. 31 Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. 32 This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. 33 However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.
Introduction…
The last time we were in this passage we focused on verses 22 – 24 and we honed in on the principles of biblical headship and biblical submission in marriage. Headship and submission are two very serious themes within the biblical teaching regarding marriage. As I said in part one, these two themes have been used and abused both inside the church and outside the church for years. And this abuse has left entire generations of people reeling under the effects of the sinful application of this text.
So my aim today is to try to expose our hearts to what God has to say in regards to marriage in a way that would be faithful and loving and helpful to us as the bride of Christ. And the tension for me in preaching this text is fourfold. #1: I want to handle the Word of God rightly. #2: I am acutely aware of my own failures and weaknesses in my own marriage. #3: I want to see our church family transformed by the power of God’s Word. #4: I want to see the outside culture won to Christ through marriage relationships that adorn the gospel.
This is a tall order. Those four things that I just mentioned create massive amounts of tension for me as I begin to preach this text. God’s Word is precious and it’s powerful and it’s true. And I am just a human. I am a sinfully impure human. And yet I am called to preach the truth of God’s Word into all of the brokenness and weakness and sin that we humans find ourselves tangled up in.
We need to be transformed by the renewing of our minds and our minds can only be transformed through the Spirit empowered preaching of the gospel. And furthermore the message of the gospel as it is applied to practical categories like marriage relationships, family relationships and vocational relationships among many others is powerful to save lost, broken, sinful and weak people. And in this category of lost and broken and sinful and weak people, I feel like the chief among sinners.
I remember the day my marriage fell apart…
Marriage for Christy and I in the early days rough. Like an expensive statue our marriage was beautiful and shiny and delicate and dreamy and fragile at first. But I’ll never forget the day that it all came crashing down. I’ll never forget the pain and the suffering that my sin caused. I imagine some of you can remember a day when it all fell apart for you.
Some of you know Christy and I’s story well. Some of you have maybe never heard it. But in summary, when Christy and I were first married at the ages of 18 and 19, we entered into marriage without the slightest understanding of what God calls husbands and wives to walk like.
We were young and we were in love. And both of us were coming out of homes that were less than ideal when it comes to marriage. Christy’s mom and dad were married but oftentimes they were very distant from each other. My mom and dad divorced when I was really young and from that point forward there was a steady stream of guys in and out of my mom’s bed.
So both of us had deep parental wounds that had never been addressed appropriately and we also had sinful desires that were way out of control. Both of us were looking for love in all the wrong places just like the old country western song. This was an absolute recipe for disaster because when you mix up a crock-pot full of pain and sin and failed expectations you get a kind of soup that is more like cyanide for the soul rather than chicken soup for soul.
And listen, regardless of whether you’ve faced the pain of divorce or not, marriage is still hard. It’s beautiful and dreamy and delicate and fragile but it’s still hard. When two people get together and enter into the marriage relationship the deck is already stacked against them. Divorce stats, sinful desires, failed expectations and the constant moving of the needle in regards to what marriage actually is, creates a culture of dysfunction in our world that is hard to navigate. That brings us to our text for today.
The Text…
Into this croc-pot of overflowing cyanide the apostle Paul stands ready at the gate. You might envision a gate to a massive field. Paul is like the gatekeeper of that field. He’s a gatekeeper of a minefield with a roadmap to help us navigate the journey ahead. And his simple overarching instruction is focused almost exclusively on the husband. And his exclusive instruction to husbands is to love their wives. But what does this look like? What does it mean to love your wife? Now I do want to add a caveat here before we move forward.
Because this text is almost exclusively focused on Paul’s instructions to husbands to love their wives, there may be a temptation for a single guy or a single lady to check out. And there may be a temptation for a married woman to listen with a critical ear so she can beat her husband up for all of his failures later.
And there may even be a temptation for some of you married guys or some of you guys who are seeking marriage to hear this sermon as a checklist of ways you nail this so you can puff up your chest. Or you may hear this with ears of shame and guilt that cause you to hang your head. My prayer is that the Lord would give all of us attentive hearts and open ears to hear his Word so that we might grow in our desire and our ability to love one another well.
So, single folks, you need to wrestle with this text so that you can either prepare for marriage or prepare to come alongside your married friends. Married folks, you need to wrestle with this text so that you can encourage and challenge one another to strive for God honoring marriages. So what kind of love does Paul call husbands to in this text?
#1: Husbands, you are called to love your wives sacrificially… (25)
Paul says it this way in verse 25 “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” The picture we have here is not of a man loving his wife out of his own personal need for legitimacy or out of some misguided desire for security. This is not the picture of a man who complains because he’s too tired to help with the housework or the grocery shopping. This is not the picture of a man who only serves his wife to get something in return. The picture of a man in this passage is the picture of Jesus giving himself up sacrificially.
Jesus loved the church, his bride, to the extent that he gave himself up for her through his sacrifice at the cross. He literally was not only ready to die for his bride and he didn’t just want to die for his bride, he did die for his bride. Marriage is not about finding the person who completes our incompleteness. Marriage is about finding the person whom we can love out of the overflow of our completeness in Christ.
If you and I try to find our completeness in our spouses then we will always be left empty. But if you and I find our completion in the work of Christ at the cross then we will mimic him in our marriages as we die to ourselves by loving our wives sacrificially. So husbands love your wives sacrificially.
Don’t just talk about being ready to do this. Don’t just talk about wanting to do this. Beg God to help you to do what he has done for you and die to yourself for the sake of your wife just like Jesus died for you.
The call of God on a man who is married or on a man who wants to be married is a radical call to come and die so that your wife may have the opportunity to flourish and grow. This leads me to the second way God calls us to love our wives.
#2: Husbands, you are called to love your wives sanctifyingly… (26 – 27)
Paul says that Jesus loved his bride sacrificially so “that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.” If you stop and ponder the weight of what Paul is saying here you might be shocked at the picture you get. The key result of loving our wives is sanctification. What is sanctification? Sanctification is the process of becoming holy or becoming more like Jesus. The goal for a husband is to help his wife become more like Jesus.
The work that Jesus did at the cross for you and for me is what makes us clean and holy or sanctified. Jesus’ broken body and his shed blood is what cleanses his bride from all impurity. His death on the cross is what removes our filthy sin stains. His sacrifice is what irons out the wrinkles of sin that once separated us from our Father in Heaven. When Jesus willingly and joyfully gave himself over to being beaten with a whip and then nailed to a cross to die, our sinful blemishes were tossed as high as the heavens are above the earth and as far as the east is from the west.
This is the kind of sanctifying, stain cleansing, sin removing, wrinkle flattening love that husbands are called to love their wives with. Husbands do not remove their wives’ sins but we are called to help our wives look to the only One who does remove their sins.
We are not called to constantly remind our wives of how dirty they’ve been. We are called to remind them of how clean they are in Christ Jesus. We are not called to hang our wives’ lists of sins over their heads. We are called to remind our wives that they are spotless and perfect because of Christ. We are not called to point out how our wives miss the mark. We are called to remind our wives that Jesus hit the mark for them.
We are not called to use the wrinkles of our wives’ imperfections against them to manipulate them into our own little idols of self-pleasure. We are called to constantly remind our wives that they are daughters of the living God because of Christ’s work at the cross. Husbands, we are called to love our wives sanctifyingly. And the only way to do this is to remove ourselves from the equation which leads me to the third way we are called to love our wives.
#3: Husbands, you are called to love your wives selflessly… (28 – 30)
Paul says, “In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes it and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” Now at first glance it may appear that Paul is arguing for a selfish kind of love rather than a selfless kind of love.
After all, he does say that a man who loves his wife actually loves himself right? So is this is a selfish love or is it a selfless love? Is Paul contradicting himself? Is he calling a man to love his wife with the motivation of making things go well for him self? Is Paul echoing the famous phrase that married men often say “happy wife = happy life”?
I don’t think so. I think to interpret this text that way is a serious misrepresentation of what Paul is saying here. He’s not instructing us to love our wives so that our lives may go well. He’s simply using an illustration to prove that loving and caring for your wife is just like loving and caring for your own body. And then he reminds us that when a man and a woman become married they become one flesh through the bond of sexual intimacy.
A negative way of saying this would be to say that if you treat your wife hatefully then it’s as though you are abusing yourself. Does any man in his right mind love to abuse himself? Of course not! No sane man would enjoy abusing himself therefore no sane man should find pleasure in abusing a woman by using her for his own selfish agenda.
Husbands, we are called to love our wives selflessly. We are called to nurture and care for her. We are called to be sensitive to her emotional needs. We are called to serve her selflessly. We are called to lay down our verbal weapons and pick up washcloths and water basins as we wash our wives’ feet selflessly. Husbands, we are called to love our wives selflessly.
How do we do this?
How do we love our wives sacrificially, sanctifyingly and selflessly? There are a lot of ways to try to come at answering this question that might be helpful. But I think the best way to come at it is to just simply say what Paul says here at the end of the text where he says, “This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. However, let each of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.”
So how do we love our wives? If you want to grow in your desire and your ability to love your wife then you have to embrace the mystery of Christ loving you as a member of his church which is his bride. The only place a man can grow in his desire and ability to love his wife is under the shadow of the bloody cross and in the doorway of the empty tomb. Listen men, I am less concerned with giving you practical how to’s on how to love the woman of your dreams.
I am more concerned with your experience of the mystery of the love of Christ because when you embrace the mystery of the love of Christ for you… when I embrace the mystery of the love of Christ for me (a dirty, empty, rebellious sinner) then from that position as a loved son of God I am motivated and enabled to love my wife. And the reality is that a woman who knows and loves Jesus respects a man who embraces the mystery of the love of Christ. This is the Biblical picture of love and respect in marriage.
Conclusion…
In conclusion I want to share a story that I pray will illustrate some of what I’ve been saying. I have some friends who both went through the pain and the horror of divorce. Her previous marriage was to a highly insecure young man who used her and abused her for his own selfish agenda. And his (my friend) previous marriage ended after years of major conflict and repeated seasons of unfaithfulness from his spouse.
My two friends met and began dating and at some point they began to introduce each other to their parents. And the interesting thing is that when her parents (who were unbelievers) met him, her mom pulled her aside and she asked her daughter “How does it feel?” And the daughter, who was confused at first, asked “How does what feel?” And her mom replied, “How does it feel to be loved?”
In other words, the way this man loves this woman, sacrificially, sanctifyingly and selflessly is so obvious that even her unbelieving mother noticed it and asked her what that was like. Isn’t this really one of the most satisfying results of men who love women like Jesus loves them and then women who respect the men who love them? Think of the impact this could make on an entire family or an entire church family or an entire community.
The message of the gospel is powerful for salvation and transformation. There are many of you in this room who have either long desired to be married or have experienced the pain of a dysfunctional marriage. Can I just challenge you one more time? Can I just invite you to come and embrace the mystery of the cross and the empty tomb where the furious love of Christ was unleashed on your behalf?
Listen, Jesus loves you. He loves you so much that he went to the cross for you. He was beaten to a bloody pulp and he was wrongfully murdered without any hint of complaint for you. Even though you and I are totally rebellious and often make massive messes of our lives Jesus still died so that you and I could become his wife.
Here’s the reality, Jesus has a jacked up marriage to a rebellious and sinful bride. But he loves her. He loves her sacrificially, sanctifyingly and selflessly. He loves you sacrificially, sanctifyingly and selflessly. And this mystery is profound. I pray you will embrace the mystery of the furious love of Christ for you today. Amen?