Marriage: Roles, Responsibilities, and Reference
Notes
Transcript
Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.
For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior.
Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.
Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her,
that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word,
so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.
In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.
For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church,
because we are members of his body.
“Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”
This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.
However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.
ACTS - God is Love...
Introduction
Introduction
Husbands are not perfect.
Husbands, if your wife thinks long enough and hard enough, she could probably think of a time when you made a mistake.
Wives are not perfect.
Given enough time, wives, your husband could most likely remember a moment when you displayed fallibility.
Husbands and wives tend to think differently about a host of issues. They feel differently. They have experienced life differently. Often times they respond differently when faced with the same situation. And in those moments, the two may be confounded as why the other responded the way he/she did, but at other times, one or both may be thankful for the type of response that was exhibited.
And all those the differences in our thinking, feeling, and responding are usually what make marriage so difficult. Having just read Paul’s instructions for marriage, we need to understand that they are not just advice for when marriage is easy; they’re principles that must be settled in the deepest part of our being for when marriage gets rocky. Paul calls on husbands to love their wives well and for wives to respect their husbands well.
This morning, I have the privilege to preach from a text that most all of us have probably heard before, whether in a wedding, marital counseling, or a sermon. But just because it is familiar, that doesn’t mean that the Spirit can’t still move. In fact, I have found that the Holy Spirit will often change my life with some of the most familiar of texts in the Bible. So I would encourage you not to tune out, but double your efforts to tune in to what the Holy Spirit is going to speak to your heart.
The title has given away the three ways that Paul says makes for a Christ-focused, church-minded marriage. He’s talking about marriage and its roles, responsibilities, and reference.
The Roles in Marriage
The Responsibilities in Marriage
The Reference in Marriage
The Roles in Marriage
The Roles in Marriage
If you and I are wanting a Christ-focused, church-minded marriage, then we must understand our roles within marriage. You’ve probably guessed, but there are two of them: a husband and a wife. Contrary to popular opinion, marriage is not a social construct; it’s a divine institution. The way that we go about it today might be socially constructed—marriage license, tax laws, etc., but marriage itself is an institution that God began, and he did it with one man and one woman for all of life.
At some point, we don’t exactly know when, God revealed to Moses about how he created the first couple. Seeing the beauty and the intimacy between these two, Moses wrote a bit of commentary to explain the roles within the marriage.
Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
This is the very text that Paul quoted that we will look at in a few moments. For now, I just want us to see that from the beginning, there were two roles that were given by God: the husband—the man and the wife—the woman.
That might seem so obvious to most of us, if not all of us, but it’s not obvious to most people throughout history.
A few weeks ago, I was talking about sexual deviance and how it started in Genesis 4, when Lemech married two wives. Suddenly there were three roles in marriage: the husband, the wife, and the other wife. Polygamy—many marriage partners—has been around ever since. If you like history, you might remember that Utah was not allowed to become a state until it outlawed polygamy, setting boundaries on the Mormon Church. Today, there are all types of supposed marriages: from the supposed homosexual marriage to the supposed open and/or polyamorous marriages. These are marriages that the Church of Christ cannot endorse or affirm. The reason why will become clear in a few moments.
But suffice it to say, there are two roles and only two roles: the husband (the man) and the wife (the woman). And if anyone ever tells you—though the argument is not made nearly as much as it was ten years ago—that Jesus never spoke to the issue as to who could marry, he did. It is clear that he based his theology and philosophy of marriage in creation order.
He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female,
and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?
So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”
There’s the line again—a man (the husband) holding fast to his wife (the woman); male and female.
The Responsibilities in Marriage
The Responsibilities in Marriage
Paul brings up more than just the roles in marriage; he also gives each role responsibilities in marriage. If we are wanting a Christ-focus, church-minded marriage, we must understand our responsibilities. This is where we will be spending the bulk of our time this morning because this is where Paul spent the bulk of his time for this passage. And so he starts out by explaining the responsibility of wives by saying,
Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.
Then he says it again, a couple of sentences later:
Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.
Now, pastors, preachers, and counselors will often try to downplay the word submit by saying that it is in reality a mutual submission. Since verse 21 tells the church to submit to one another, so husbands and wives are to do so as well. The problem is that Paul doesn’t liken the home to the innerworkings of the local church’s membership, but rather he likens the home to the Universal Church and Christ. And since the Church is to submit itself to the headship of Christ—Christ being the head and the Church being the body—so then the wife is to submit herself to the head of the household: her husband.
This is certainly countercultural and offensive to the way most people have grown up thinking about the role of wives. It sounds like we’re trying to go back like it’s the 1800s and that I want women to be barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen, bowing before their husbands and fetching his slippers whenever he demands them. But that’s not it at all.
Paul’s call to the wife is to submit “as to the Lord.” The wife displays her love for Christ with her submission to her husband, meaning that her submission is not based on the worthiness of her husband, but on the love and trust she has in Jesus. Pastor Drew will be preaching on the master and slave in a couple of weeks, and in there he says something similar to the slave: “Obey your master...as you would Christ.” Both of these go back to verse 21 when Paul called on the church to submit to one another out of reverence to Christ. That being said, that phrase—as to the Lord—sets up a boundary as to how far the wife can go in her submission. The wife is not to submit to anything that would disobey or dishonor Christ; her loyalty is first and foremost to Jesus.
This really has to do with divine order. Again, if we were to go back to Genesis 2, we find that before woman was ever created, there was an authority that God had given to Adam. He was God’s representative on earth. As Quentin has mentioned multiple times in Sunday School, Adam was a type of priest—a proto-priest. Though God had created everything, dominion and authority was given to Adam. He named the animals and he was the one who was told not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Eve arrived after those responsibilities were given. Thus the headship of the husband came before the creation of the wife.
But God understood that Adam needed Eve. He created Eve, firstly because it was not good for Adam to be alone. I think the same holds true for nearly all men today. Certainly there are some whom God has called to singleness. That is a holy and special calling, but most of us have been called to marriage. But he also created Eve—and this relates to the first reason—to be a help fit for him. Where he is weak, she is strong. Where he is aloof, she is focused.
And so she is the sergeant to her lieutenant. Let me explain why I say it that way.
Lieutenants are the lowest ranking officer in the Army. There is second lieutenant—often derisively called a butter bar because of his brass insignia—who is lower than a first lieutenant. Often they would receive their orders and go to their assignment with this attitude that they know everything. They were in charge. My dad—who had spent 37 years in the military—would always winsomely encourage those lieutenants to find a good sergeant and listen to them closely. The sergeants understood the enlisted soldiers. They had been in the army for years and understood how things got done. It was to the lieutenant’s advantage to heed the advice of a good sergeant. But they were still officers. Technically, they had the power to order Sergeant Majors around—those who were twice their age and had more experience than nearly anyone on base.
Just as it was a good thing for these new officers to find a good sergeant, so Proverbs 18:22 “He who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the Lord.”
A sergeant must submit to any lawful command from the lieutenant even when the he believes lieutenant is wrong, but a good and humble lieutenant will at least listen to the advice of his sergeant even if he does not or believes he cannot heed it. In the same way, the wife is to submit to her husband, but a wise husband will listen to the perspective of his wife.
Which leads us to the responsibility of the husband.
Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her,
That’s your responsibility: to love them well. To love them just like Christ loved the church. If the wife displays her love for the Lord through submission to her husband then the husband displays it by loving his wife righteously. And to help us understand how he loved the church and so understand how we are to love our wives, Paul explained exactly what Christ did to demonstrate his love. There are two ways that Christ did this.
First, Christ gave himself up for the church. Jesus left the splendors of heaven for the hardships of earth. He gave up the accolades of angels for the maltreatment of men. The Author of life died that we could live. This is what it means to love as Christ loved the church. It is to give one’s self wholly over to the woman he loves. That doesn’t mean that we give her whatever she wants; in fact, we can’t even be everything she needs. But we give ourselves to her, even when—especially when—it is hard. Our hopes and dreams are turned toward her.
Notice in the text why Jesus gave himself up for the church—so that he might sanctify her. He gave up heaven in order to bring the church into a state of holiness. How did he do that? By cleansing her.
The wording is a bit strange for us, but the description that Paul is giving here is that the cleansing comes in the form of a bath. That’s what “the washing of water” in verse 26 means. The church is cleansed in a bath of water with the word—the very gospel of Jesus Christ himself. It is as if the gospel is the soap that scrubs away the sin from our souls. Our impurity is made pure by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Jesus gave himself to make the church what she was always meant to be—beautiful, spotless, wrinkle-free, holy, and blemish-free.
Is that how you love your wife—how I love mine? Do we give of ourselves for the good and well-being of our wives?
But there is a second way that Christ loves his church.
Do you remember that comment from Moses that Paul quotes here in verse 31?
“Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”
That’s our responsibility: holding fast to our wives. It means that we adhere to our wives—that we are faithfully devoted to them. Our devotions moves away from father and mother, and turns its attention to the wife. We hold them so close and so tightly that we become one flesh with them. Yes, we are the head and they are our bodies. Because we are one flesh, we act as if we are one flesh. Any sane man seeks to take care of his body. He cherishes his body. No one thinking rightly hurts his own body. We don’t starve it. We don’t punish it. We don’t smack it around. We don’t deride it. We cherish it. We love it. We nourish it. We build it up.
Husbands—to harm her is to harm yourself. To crush her spirit is to crush your own spirit. To cherish her is to cherish yourself. That’s how inseparably one the two of you are! So our responsibility, husbands, is that we must cherish and nourish our wives as if she is our flesh, because she is! We say with Adam, This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh!
That’s how Christ loves his church. We, being his body and he, being our head, are united together, and he loves us as he loves his own flesh.
The Reference in Marriage
The Reference in Marriage
And that leads us to the third way we must live out our marriage if we want them Christ-focused and church-minded. And I keep saying it that way because that’s the idea that Paul keeps alluding to: Christ-focused, church-minded. Christ is at the core of our marriage. The Church is the model by which our marriage is patterned. So we keep our eyes on Jesus in our marriages, and we keep our minds on the Church and how she relates to him. It’s a major point that Paul makes throughout the text.
Verse 23 says that the husband is the head as Christ is the head. Verse 24 tells us that the wife is to submit to her husband as the church submits to Christ. Verse 25 tells husbands that we are to love our wives as Christ loves the church. Verses 28-29 tell us to love our wives as our bodies just as Christ does the church. And in case we didn’t get all the hints, Paul wrote,
This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.
From the first marriage between Adam and Eve in Genesis chapter 2, God has been gearing up to teach the world a beautiful and profound lesson: marriage—the love that the man has for his wife and the respect that the woman has for her husband is like the love that Christ has for his church and the respect the church has for Christ. It wasn’t that God looked around one day and said to himself, “I need a good picture of the relationship for Christ and the Church. Oooh! How about marriage?” No. Marriage has always been a shadow of Christ and the Church. It has always pointed to a greater reality, even though it was a secret (a mystery) until Paul pointed it out. But it goes back all the way to Genesis 2:24. One verse later, we have Satan—unable to stand such a plan, such love, devotion, and respect— entering in to wreck God’s picture of marriage.
Not only did Satan usurp God’s authority by entering into the garden, he usurped Adam’s authority by going after his bride. And in doing so, he pitted humanity against God, and husband and wife against each other. Suddenly the perfect picture of God’s love for his people was marred by sin. It was and is still a picture, but one that has lost much of its color and beauty.
The further marriage gets away from God’s original design, the more the beauty is lost. That’s why we cannot endorse or affirm anything that mars the meaning of marriage further than it already is.
Paul was telling the Church that just as Christ repaired the relationship between God and sinful man and just as Christ repaired the relationship between Jew and Gentiles, so he has also repaired the relationship between husband and wife. So, just as we display a repaired relationship with God among the people who are still far off as individuals, and just as we display a repaired relationship with God and others as a gathering of the church, so we display a repaired relationship with God and spouse as a marriage.
Conclusion
Conclusion
So as we finish out this portion that speaks to husbands and wives, I want to first talk to those who are not yet married. No one knows what the Lord has planned for you. But if he plans for you to one day be married, please look for a man or woman who will fill these roles and responsibilities accordingly. Again, we cannot see the future, so you cannot be certain, but seek out a man or woman as Paul described them here. Do not get so caught up in wanting to be married that suddenly anyone will do. Remember that if your marriage is to reference Christ and the Church, it cannot do that clearly if your spouse is an unbeliever. Hence, Paul’s warning not to be unequally yoked.
To those who are married, I would encourage you to look more to yourself than your spouse. Are you referencing your part well? There is no exception clause that you need only love your wife as Christ does the church unless she doesn’t submit, or that you need only submit if your husband loves you like Christ. Before you focus on pulling that unloving or unsubmissiveness speck out of your spouse’s eye, first pull the log out of your own.
I do want to give one caveat: Paul does allow for separation of husbands and wives; he does not give exact reasons for the separation, but I’m sure abuse would be one of the reasons. His admonition then is to remain unmarried or to be reconciled.
Beloved, we’ve all been given a task that we are not up to completing in our own strength. We cannot divorce these actions from our identity. It is only because we are in Christ having
the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might
that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places,
that we are able to love and submit well. So let us pray for that power to be worked out through that kind of divine might. And let us build our lives upon the love of Christ. It is our firm foundation. Let us remember that our marriages are not about us; they proclaim the gospel of Christ and his church, so let us in his power have marriages that proclaim the gospel with every act of love and respect.
Prayer
Heavenly Father,
It is so easy to be moved by a sermon and your Spirit, but allow the distractions of the world or the lethargy of the flesh overtake our desire to live as your Word calls us to do. May that not happen today. Strengthen our resolve, lengthen our memories, and fill us by your Spirit to be husbands and wives that bring glory to your name by presenting a beautiful, though imperfect, picture of Christ and his Church. In Jesus’s name. Amen.
