Intro Night

Recite Memory Verse for the Week:

Matthew 6:24 ESV

24 “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.

DAVE: Hello and welcome to class.

My name is Dave Whalen, and as of April 3, I will have been married for 22 years. 18 of those years were not good. Some would have called them a disaster. One day my wife Jocelyn – she’s currently teaching the wives’ class – and I realized that we needed to make some sort of change or our marriage was not going to make it. We had resolved when we got married that divorce was not an option, but we were definitely on track to being in some sort of roommate situation.

 We decided to seek counseling and came across biblical counseling, and decided to give it a try, and it changed our lives. One of the primary ways counseling changed our lives was by teaching us about God’s design for marriage. We successfully completed counseling and decided to start counseling people ourselves and we have seen a lot of fruit from our counseling ministry, having walked many married couples and individuals through what it means to live for the glory of God in their particular situations.

 I am an ACBC certified counselor and I have a specialization in marriage, my wife will be certified early next year, and pastors Dayton and Nathan are currently in the certification process, which can take several years. The principles outlined in this book are principles embraced by ACBC, Stuart Scott is actually the director of member care at ACBC, so I believe if you complain about me, he is the one who deals with the complaint.

There are two primary examples used in the Bible to describe God’s relationship to His people. One of them is a father-child relationship, and the other one is a marriage relationship. The Church is the Bride of Christ. Ephesians 5:22-33 is a passage that describes this relationship. If you have ever been to a wedding, you will likely have heard thispassage. It is very simple, yet it contains so much practical theology. Let’s read.

Ephesians 5:22–33 ESV

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.

I was at a wedding a few months back, it was my wife’s cousin’s daughter. The preacher they had do the ceremony read from this passage, but he put his own twist on it. For the husband, he said, “Husband, love your wife, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her,” and for the wife he said, “Wife, love your husband, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.”

This immediately got my spidey senses going, because the preacher told the man what his duties are, then he told the woman to perform the man’s duties. 

You may notice from our passage that the man and woman have two different sets of responsibilities in the marriage. The man is commanded by Paul to love his wife and give himself up for her, and the woman is commanded to respect her husband. 

Why does Paul command these things of the married couple? There are a couple of reasons.

First, he commands the husband to love his wife because it is in the man’s nature to not want to do that. We can go back to Genesis 3, and Adam did not love his wife enough to lead her well, instruct her, and rebuke her rebellion toward God. Instead, he let her pull him into sin, resulting in the fallen world we live in today.

Paul commands the wife to respect her husband. In Genesis 3:16, God tells Eve that her desire will be for her husband, but that is better translated, “your desire will be to rule over your husband.”

The consequence of sin and fallen human nature is that we as husbands and wives are not predisposed to want to fulfill our marital duties, so God tells us exactly what He expects of us in the marriage relationship. 

Unfortunately, much of these duties are not taught in the church today, and to the extent it is, most preachers assign the duties of the husband to both parties of the marriage like I described at that wedding I attended, then wonder why marriages fall apart.

The second reason Paul commands these things of us is because of verses 29-31, “For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, 30because 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.” 32This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.”

Let me ask you, what is a marriage?

A marriage is not simply a legal agreement between two parties as libertarians would have you believe, a marriage is a covenant between two individuals and God. 1 Corinthians 11:3 says, “But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God.” Marriage is the picture of Christ and His church. As Christ is the head of the church, a husband is the head of his wife, and as the Church submits to Christ, so the wife submits to her husband. 

As we will see as we study these topics, they are not conditional. We are called to do and be all of these things all of the time, because the relationship between Christ and His church is not conditional either. 

Over the next nineteen weeks (we get 2 of those weeks off), Dayton and I will be guiding you through Stuart Scott’s book and study guide, The Exemplary Husband. Throughout this study we will be exploring God’s design for marriage and what our duties are as husbands as we seek to honor Him in leading our households. 

I know there is a lot of material here and life is busy, but I would encourage you to do the reading and the workbook ahead of time and come prepared to have great discussions and be challenged. If you’re more of an audiobook guy, you can get this book on audible as well and listen to it during your commute. If you do that, I encourage you to still do the workbook so we can do the groupwork together. 

This book is a great resource that we use in counseling all the time, and if you not only read the words of this book, but implement them in your lives, the biblical principles you learn here will transform your marriages and, as Dave Ramsey says, will change your family tree.

Dayton:

Adrian and I have a pretty different story than Jocelyn and Dave.

Adrian and I were married around the age of 22 right out of college. We started dating and new pretty quickly that we wanted to commit ourselves to each other.

Adrian came out of a family where her parents had some good and some not so good aspects to their relationship. Her parents were very much often backwards, where her mother has often lead within the home, spiritually and day to day decisions. Her mother dealt much of the load also in discipline. So, she came from a home where it was very much the mother who was leading things in their marriage and family.

I on the other hand come from a family where I have had nothing but pretty bad examples when it comes to husbands.

My mother and father divorced when I was 6 years old from him having multiple affairs on my mother.

My mother then married my step father, (Wayne) who was may step father on and off for 20+ years. He was at times a very good, kind, christian husband, but then would often flip a switch and become very emotionally abusive to my mother. My mother and I lift two or three times as I was a teenager to go and find out own place because of some of the abuse. They finally divorced for good in my early 30’s I believe.

Both of my sisters have been divorced once when I was younger, both brother in laws were just not at all committed to their wives…

So, all in all, I had pretty bad examples growing up of what a husband looks like.

The only solid consistent example I had of a of men acting as healthy husbands/bridegroom were Jesus (THE Bridegroom), and a few men from our church.

And so as Adrian and I had gotten married very early, the Lord had given us a measure of grace in that we were shown wrong ways of doing things and we both knew that that was not what we wanted in a marriage.

That, coupled with with my already established view of marriage and being a husband that I had gotten from scripture in leading/overseeing/Shepherding my wife and family, and giving up myself for my wife as Christ did the church… to sanctify her, to cleanse her with the Word and to present her holy.

We were in an ok position.

We have sense read these books and have both very much been confronted with places in our responsibilities as a husband and wife where we were very much lacking.

I think Adrian has been confronted with at times not submitting to my leadership in certain areas. Again… her mother was the leader. That’s what she knew. And so for her, giving up in all areas of life to allow me to lead wasn’t the most natural thing for her. Up to this point in our marriage she had done an ok job at that, but not to the extent that God’s Word calls her to.

For me… I think I was confronted with having not done the WORK that I should have been doing in ALL AREAS OF HER LIFE to lead, guide and direct her. To take seriously the call to sanctify her and work towards presenting her as holy before the Lord. I thought I had. But i came to a realization that I wasn’t doing it to the level that I should have been.

So… I say all that to let you know that I had been a youth pastor for 12 years… I had somewhat of a pride that I was doing this husband thing a lot better than the dads I grew up with… and so I must be doing something right.

But as I read this book… I was humbled by the Lord that maybe I needed to do a re-evaluation.

Which brings me to two exhortations I have for you all tonight.

I wanted to make sure we come to class with two things in mind…

That we come in humility ready to be confronted with truth that maybe we have never considered and come with the attitude of being willing to change. This is a must. Like Dave said… Stuart Scott, Dave, Myself, we are not God. But, this systematic study of being a husband per scripture, is one of the better ones I have seen. So… come ready and open to be coachable.

I want us to be sure to come with the mindset of being ready to do the work. In speaking about William Tyndale in his book “Filling Up the Afflictions of Christ”, John Piper writes about how Tyndale gave up his life so that we could have for the first time ever, the NT in English other than handwritten manuscripts that were in circulation. For a thousand years, the onlly translation of the Greek and Hebrew was in Latin Vulgate. Few could read it and a few could access it. And before he was martyred in 1536, Tyndale had translated into clear, common English not only the NT, but also the Pentateuch, Joshua, 2 Chronicles, and Jonah. So, in speaking of how Tyndale accomplished all of this… Piper writes this…

We can answer this in Tyndale's case by

remembering two ways that a pastor or any spiritual leader must die in order to bear fruit for God (John 12:24; Romans 7:4). On the one hand, we must die to the notion that we do not have to think hard or work hard to achieve spiritual goals. On the other hand, we must die to the notion that our thinking and our working is decisive in achieving spiritual goals.

Paul said in 2 Timothy 2:7, "Think over what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding in everything." First, think.

Work. Don't bypass the hard work of thinking about apostolic truth. But second, remember this: "The Lord will give you understanding." You work. He gives. If he withholds, all our working is in vain. But he ordains that we use our minds and that we work in achieving spiritual ends. So Paul says in

1 Corinthians 15:10, "I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me." The key to spiritual achievement is to work hard, and to know and believe and be happy that God's sovereign grace is the decisive cause of all the good that comes.

Dave: As we learn the material presented in the book, you are going to be introduced to new ideas and ways of thinking and acting. You will find some of these ideas offensive and challenging. To be frank, there are some ideas presented in this book that I don’t quite agree with, and it is okay that you have questions yourself. After all, Stuart Scott is not God, I am not God, and neither is Dayton. The value of a class like this is that we can discuss these things as men and work through them and come to conclusions about how we are to live our lives. With that being said, this class should be treated as a private, safe space where we can discuss personal matters as we seek to understand how to be better husbands. This is a space where we don’t judge or condemn each other, and it is a space where any personal information shared here stays here. Please don’t discuss personal marriage issues with your wives or with anyone else in the church. I want everyone to be able to share as they feel led, and we should respect the privacy of the class.