The Family
Notes
Transcript
Good morning Lindsay Lane East! Thank you guys for coming out to worship God with us this weekend! If you are new here, we are glad that you are here! We have a gift for you today at Next Steps on your way out today. Grab that card from the back of the seat in front of you, fill it out with as much info as you feel comfortable with, and drop it by next steps on your way out. They will hook you up with an East tshirt and some info on the church.
Today, we are in week 7 of this message series called Summer School. We have almost covered all the major themes of the book of Ephesians this summer. Today, we are looking at The Family.
Turn with me to Ephesians chapter 5. This morning, I will say some things that will be hard to hear, but know it’s coming from God’s Word. I will say some thing you expect me to say, but don’t tune me out. And I will also say some things you may not expect, but don’t think I’m crazy. Alright?
Let me read verses 22-33 of Ephesians 5, I’ll pray and then we will come back and start working through this...
Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord,
because the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church. He is the Savior of the body.
Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives are to submit to their husbands in everything.
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her
to make her holy, cleansing her with the washing of water by the word.
He did this to present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or anything like that, but holy and blameless.
In the same way, husbands are to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.
For no one ever hates his own flesh but provides and cares for it, just as Christ does for the church,
since we are members of his body.
For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.
This mystery is profound, but I am talking about Christ and the church.
To sum up, each one of you is to love his wife as himself, and the wife is to respect her husband.
PRAY
These verses can stir some intense emotion in people. Men can get prideful and start thinking pretty high of themselves. Some women’s blood will start boiling. And singles may eye roll and think “Great. Another sermon on marriage!” or it may stir a longing or desire for marriage in others.
If you felt any of these emotions when I read this passage just now, hang with me today. I believe God has a word for you, and it may not be what you think, OK?
We can’t just look at what Paul says here, we need to first make sure we understood what Paul understood. In verse 31, Paul uses a hyperlink.
For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.
He is quoting the book of Genesis. He clearly had a good understanding of creation and God creating humans in the first place. So let’s go there to start.
Man and woman were both created in God’s image.
Man and woman were both created in God’s image.
So God created man in his own image; he created him in the image of God; he created them male and female.
It was never to be a patriarchal society.
The Bible actually gives much more right to the woman than any other document of its day. It was no doubt viewed as liberal!
Paul in Ephesians 5 does not say Women submit to men. He says wives submit to YOUR OWN husband. This is not setting up a culture in which women are inferior to men. That already existed during this day! God’s messengers were actually pushing back against the misogyny of the day!
Further evidence can be in that a task was given to the men as well. Paul’s argument wasn’t, Wives, submit to your husbands. Husbands, make sure she does. Paul addresses wives for their part, and then he turns his attention to men and gives them their task. And that task is going to keep them busy enough!
Sin wrecked our relationship with one another.
Sin wrecked our relationship with one another.
The humans God created did not live up to the call and expectation of God. They broke the rules he had set up from the beginning. In that sin, there were eternal repercussions that would affect the relationships of man and woman through the generations.
God had called man and woman to rule together over creation. We do not get a lot of details of what that was to look like before they sinned, but we do see how it was affected after.
He said to the woman: I will intensify your labor pains; you will bear children with painful effort. Your desire will be for your husband, yet he will rule over you.
And he said to the man, “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘Do not eat from it’: The ground is cursed because of you. You will eat from it by means of painful labor all the days of your life.
It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field.
You will eat bread by the sweat of your brow until you return to the ground, since you were taken from it. For you are dust, and you will return to dust.”
Notice, the repercussions for the woman affect her roles as mother and as wife and the husband as breadwinner and provider. Both will experience painful labor: the woman in becoming a mother and the man in becoming a provider.
But in what he said to the woman, we see the relationship killer...
Woman is told that her desire will “be for her husband.” That doesn’t sound bad right? Your desire will be for your husband? How is that bad? That sounds loving if not even sexual. But that is most certainly not what is meant.
The phrase is only used one other time in the Old Testament and it is found in the next chapter.
Adam and Eve’s son Cain gets frustrated with his brother and has the thought of murdering him. And God intervenes....
If you do what is right, won’t you be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it.”
Notice the similarity there! Sin’s desire is for you. You see? It’s the same term from earlier! So, how does sin work? Sin desires to overcome us to control us by ruling over us. When we take that context back to Genesis 3, it appears that God is saying that the woman will desire to be in control the actions of her husband just as sin was at the door desiring to control the actions of Cain.
But instead of this woman winning that fight, God actually says that man will fight back. In fact he says, “he will rule over you.” There will be an endless battle for control in the marriage relationship.
I have seen this in couples that I’ve talked with. Seen it in friend’s marriages at times. And YES. Seen it way too often in my own marriage. Where one party is trying to get control of the other one, then the other one will fight back and it goes in cycles.
Here’s the deal, NEITHER ONE IN CONTROL IS GOOD! That’s the point here! For the man and the woman, this is a sin that abandons the image of God principle we have already seen settled by God! Humanity was made in the image of God and God made them man and woman. And THEREFORE, there is not a right to RULE over the other or gain control. These are not healthy ideas.
You see this battle for power all throughout the Old Testament. And it is obvious not just a battle between husbands and wives. It is between all of humanity. Everyone is looking for the upper hand. A little bit more power than another person.
And we see it in the New Testament with the haughty religious leaders whose desire is to rule and have power.
And we see it in marriages, politics, workplaces, and even churches today. There is always a battle to control others.
So, are we just destined to do this forever? Is there any fix for this?
Enter Ephesians chapter 5...
Paul comes on to the scene and he helps us see how the marriage relationship can work well in light of these sinful desires within us.
Because you see...
Marriage is ONE PART of the fix.
Marriage is ONE PART of the fix.
Paul shows his readers here that married couples can live in such a way that foregoes all the problems that accompany our sinful desires in relationship. There is a way that a husband and wife can live together and honor God while not forsaking the image of God principle.
Neither party in this passage is given control over the other. Both are given specific roles to fulfill so that the tension lurking will stay at bay.
Wives submit to your husbands. Later he will use the word “respect” in the same way. This is going against the very desire that God said would be lurking, right? To submit is to put someone else’s will above your own. Not fighting for control but instead, submitting is the way in which God has called wives to interact. It is a voluntary submission!
If Paul had stopped here, we might begin to think that the role of the man is to make sure that his wife submits. But as we just said, this submission is voluntary, the moment the husband begins to demand respect and submission is the moment he looks more like Genesis 3: forsaking the image of God in his spouse and fighting for control. Instead, Paul says, “Husbands love your wives.” He goes on to describe this love as a sacrificial, life-giving love. (more on that momentarily).
It’s more than a card for your birthday, say I love you every once in a while, but remain lazy and distracted kind of love. Men, the call is TO LOVINGLY SACRIFICE for our wives!
There is also the idea of this love being one that leads. It is a sacrificial, out front love that draws the wife to follow by example. Husbands, our families need us to love like this!
As I said on point three though, Marriage is ONE PART of the fix. When a husband loves and a woman submits like Ephesians 5 lays out, that will be a couple that is honoring God and celebrating the image of God in one another!
But that’s not the only place we see fractured relationships, right? What I had noticed a while back while reading this section of Scripture is that after Paul addresses how a Christian breaks the sin cycle in a marriage, it then talks about how it should look with children...
Children, obey your parents in the Lord, because this is right.
Honor your father and mother, which is the first commandment with a promise,
so that it may go well with you and that you may have a long life in the land.
Fathers, don’t stir up anger in your children, but bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.
Then he goes a step further and explains another type of relationship that is arguably the hardest of all to stay Christlike: the slave and owner relationship.
The earliest followers of Jesus were not powerful people by any means. They were in fact quite the opposite. Jesus’ countercultural message and lifestyle was first accepted by the outcasts, the poor, those with nothing to lose in life. Several of them were slaves. And though they now understood that they were made in the image of God just like their owner and that they were deserving of better treatment, Paul does not call them to leave or to fight back, but to serve to the best of their ability!
Don’t work only while being watched, as people-pleasers, but as slaves of Christ, do God’s will from your heart.
Serve with a good attitude, as to the Lord and not to people,
knowing that whatever good each one does, slave or free, he will receive this back from the Lord.
The slaves of the first century were mostly slaves working off debts. This was not a racially-driven slavery like what we experienced here in the US and other places.
But just as before, Paul also addresses the other side!
And masters, treat your slaves the same way, without threatening them, because you know that both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no favoritism with him.
The common theme that we see is that Paul is explaining how to retain a healthy view of the image of God in all relationships.
i have seen this in the text before.
However, what I had not noticed is that this flow of thought does not begin in verse 22 of chapter 5.
Paul actually addresses the church as a whole right before this in 21...
submitting to one another in the fear of Christ.
Paul says that within the church their must be a mutual submission among members in the church! Then he goes into showing how that best fleshes itself out in several types of common relationships.
But the thought doesn’t even begin there!
Look at verse 15. We read these two weeks ago...
Pay careful attention, then, to how you walk—not as unwise people but as wise—
making the most of the time, because the days are evil.
So don’t be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is.
And don’t get drunk with wine, which leads to reckless living, but be filled by the Spirit:
speaking to one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing and making music with your heart to the Lord,
giving thanks always for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,
submitting to one another in the fear of Christ.
If you follow the flow here, you will notice that Paul challenges his readers to be filled with the spirit, and then he goes on to describe what that looks like...
Singing to one another and to the Lord
Giving thanks for everything
and what? Submitting to one another.
Paul is saying here that one of the outflows of the spirit of God working in us is a submission to others. Yes, I know they are not better than me: we were all created in the image of God. BUT, God is calling believers to make the sacrifice and put that person’s will above your own.
Then Paul goes into all of these specific ways to do this. And it just hit me… When I love my wife well, that is me living filled with the Spirit. When my wife follows my lead respectfully, that is her living filled with the spirit. When my children obey or when I show them the teachings of Jesus through interactions, that is us living filled with the spirit.
Church, we have accepted a lie of the devil. We are living our lives fighting for control in every relationship, all the while not recognizing that to do so is to forsake the image of God principle that God set up from the beginning. And because we live this way, we are totally devoid of an active spirit of God through us.
If you are a Christian in the room, let’s change this! Amen? Let’s look for ways that we can submit to others regularly. Let us not fight to get our way. But surrender our will for the will of others.
But if you are not married in the room, and even if you are, listen to this… Marriage isn’t an original idea of God’s. In fact, it’s just a picture of something much greater that was already in the heart of God long before he created humans!
Paul says that the marriage relationship is supposed to image Christ and the church! The husband who lovingly leads and is willing to sacrifice everything for his submissive bride even his own life!
When a husband and wife do this thing right, the watching world, who may never step into a church get a glimpse of the love of Christ. Your marriage can be that to a lost and dying world!
And not just your marriage! All of your relationships, when lived out properly in voluntary submission will bring glory to God and show his love to the nations.
From the very beginning, God created man and woman, not to live apart, but to live together in community. But not for their own sake! The endgoal has always been and will always be for those called by God to come together so that others may know. God used a couple named Abraham and Sarah to bless the nations. God used Mary and Joseph to bring the Savior into the world. And God has called the church to come together, not for the sake of itself, but for the sake of others! This is the plan of God.
Today, if you have not trusted in this Jesus who gave up his life for you, you can. The Bible has given a clear path for that to happen. God wants to transform your relationships by first letting you experience the perfect example of voluntary submission. Though all of humanity was dead in sin, separated from God forever, Jesus gave up his life to save ours. We have decision counselors at the back today that would love to walk with you into one of the rooms in the hallway and talk through that with you. We want to help you take whatever step you need to today.