Good afternoon Church family,
I hope and pray that Christ and His Church has been on display in your marriages this past week (Ephesians 5:22-33)! Remember it’s certainly only possible through the Spirit’s empowerment (Eph. 5:18) and your dependence on Him.
The bottom line is that we will all do this imperfectly, women submitting to your husbands and husbands loving your wives. But I hope you understand that these Gospel marriages that we exhibit will only perform to the degree that we personally understand the good theology behind them & that transcends them. In other words, you cannot apply God’s expectations for your marriage unless you heartily understand Christ’s relationship to the Church, just as Ephesians 5 explains.
If you have not been gripped with Christs’ love for you, as a sinner, and the centrality of His Cross in your life, then you will fail to portray your marriage as God intends.
If you have never been gripped with the hope of heaven as that day when “the marriage supper of the lamb” occurs (Rev. 19), then your marriage will fail to live up to the Gospel model that it is meant to portray. This fact highlights how important it is for us as a WOL Chapel family to hold a good understanding of our relationship with Jesus, as His Bride, and Him as the Divine Groom, because all aspects of your married life will spring from that. Your practice and perception of marriage will spring from your meditation on the Gospel.
For instance, when you understood your marriage as a temporary reflection of Jesus and His Church Bride, it will cause you to not idolize your marriage, but also not minimize your marriage. This in turn will create serious responsibility to submit and love with all you’ve got for Christ’s sake, but it will also help eliminate exasperated emotions when your spouse fails you (usually leading to marital conflict) because you know that Jesus will never fail you!
This is such a foreign thought in our world today. But Ephesians 5’s explanation of marriage forges a countercultural understanding of how we as Christians should think through every relationship that we possess and how we practice those relationships. Literally, our understanding of God and His Gospel should reshape the way that we live life.
This means, our aim should be more than just ‘good’ marriages, but gospel marriages. May we live contrary to the grains of culture.
As I thought about the potential difficulties that prevent us from practicing Ephesians 5 marriages well, I thought about the potential threat of a ‘happy marriage.’ This is what I mean:
Typically, I would think that a wife with a difficult husband would find it hard to submit to him in everything ‘as to the Lord’ (Eph. 5:22). And a husband who has a difficult wife may find it harder to love his wife ‘as Christ loved the Church’ (5:25). However, when your wife or husband doesn’t make it easy for you to love and submit to the other, perhaps that nagging difficulty will actually serve you well by forcing you to love and submit for no other reason than for Christ’s sake alone.
But what about the good marriages where the wife submits to her husband because he’s such a wonderful man, and the husband is willing to sacrificially love his wife because she’s such a lovely and sweet gal? I think this could be the most camouflaged danger for the Christian because you end up loving your wife and submitting your husband for his sake and her sake instead of Christ’s sake. And actually, although you have a good marriage, it’s not a gospel marriage.
For those of you with good marriages, praise the Lord, and don’t forget to model the Gospel with your head and your heart.
But for those of you with difficult marriages, take heart and stand encouraged, you can submit and love for Christ’s sake. And God is pleased with this. Don’t give up!
Finally, if anybody needs to talk about their marriage or has more questions about their marriage than answers, please reach out to somebody, myself, an Elder, a friend, etc…
In 1 and 2 Corinthians, we get a neat glimpse into how preaching worked in the Apostle Paul’s ministry to the Church of Corinth. He taught the Church, and his teaching generated questions, the Church created problems, and Paul follows up his teaching by applying God and His truth to new circumstances and problems that arose. I say this to say that it’s good for Biblical sermons to produce more questions, and as real life dilemmas spring up, let them generate an ongoing conversation on how we handle relationships in light of the Gospel.
Please don’t hesitate to keep the marriage conversation rolling. Let God’s Word be at work in your hearts (1 Thess. 2:13).
With love in Christ and for the sake of His reputation,
Aaron
