"Marriage: Love & Respect, Part 1" Ephesians 5:22-33
- Senior Pastor, Robert Dennison, preached this message on April 23, 2023.
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Audio Transcript
There might be some more cake afterward, but there’s just a little blurb in there about Hunter. We’re proud of him for doing this. It was a lot of work. A paper reading, meeting with people, and then having to appear before, like, 10 pastors and have to answer any questions they had for two hours. So it’s a really big thing.
And then I had to speak up for him about his character.
That was the easiest part of the whole process, though. We love Hunter and he’s wonderful. Congratulations, Hunter. We appreciate you doing that. Let’s take our Bibles.
Today we’re looking at marriage, love and respect. We’re in Ephesians 5, 21, 33 and the first service. They didn’t listen very fast, and I did not get through with the sermon, but I did let them out on time. Okay, so you’re going to have to come back later to get all the blanks filled in if you want that love and respect. Ephesians 5, beginning in verse 21.
Submitting to one another in the fear of Christ. 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. And 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. And 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. May we pray? Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word, that it shows us how we can have true righteousness by placing our faith in Christ alone, his death, his burial and resurrection. And Father, we also thank you that it shows us how to live our life according to your plan, that we might be blessed, but more importantly, that you would be glorified through the way we live, through the things we do, the things that we say, and in particular today, Father, as we begin looking at marriages and families, how our families can either glorify you by following your plan, Father, or we can be less than what you desire of us in reflecting your son to the world.
In Jesus name we pray. Amen.
Before we get to husbands and before we get to wives, before we get to children, before we get to slavery, slaves and employees. We look at verse 21 in chapter 5, and it says, submitting to one another in the fear of Christ. Make sure you get that. This is before he’s talking to wives. It’s before he’s talking to husbands or children.
Submission is something that is part of God’s plan so that things work for his glory and also for our best. Now, submission is not a popular word in our modern culture. People don’t want to be submissive. They see submissive as being something that’s awful. They see it as being slavery.
But we need to understand scripturally what submission is in God’s word, because it’s different than that.
Submission has three parts. I’m going to try to explain to you what all the Greek language would say here by giving you three things. The first thing is that biblical submission is one that’s voluntary. It’s one’s choice to be submissive in their life. It’s not something that we force upon other people.
It’s not something that we’re to punish people if they’re not submissive. And we’re certainly not supposed to beat them physically or mentally or emotionally into submission. Biblical submission is submission where God asks us to be that way and we voluntarily, of our own choice, just be that way. But secondly, if we looked at the way the verbs are structured here, this type of submission is one that is continuous. You have to choose continually to be submissive because our sin nature is always pushing us away from that, making us not want it.
Our human nature constantly bucks submission to God. Our human nature constantly bucks submission to parents. If you’ve had children, it doesn’t take you very long to know that they don’t always want to submit to their parents. Now, maybe you had a child that wasn’t that way, but we had four that were always, well, I should say sometimes bucking submission and authority. It’s voluntary, it’s continuous.
We have to work at it, because otherwise we’ll just slide back into our sinful nature’s control. And the last thing is that we don’t submit as if we’re submitting to authorities here on earth. But ultimately, by Submitting to all the authorities that God has given us. We’re doing it in the fear of Christ. In other words, by submitting to those that are placed in authority over us, we’re also showing our respect to the Lord.
We’re submitting as unto the Lord. And we know that everything we eat, everything we drink, everything we do, everything we say is supposed to glorify God the Father and the difficult things in life. When we have that attitude that we’re doing it because it glorifies God, it gives us purpose, it gives us strength in the difficult things of life. And so it is in our submission to one another. And so it is here in 5 21.
Before we talk about any marriages at all. All of us in the body of Christ are supposed to be submissive to the authorities that God has placed over us. And we’re also supposed to submit to one another. God has ordained that there be submission in the world for the world to function appropriately. And God sets that example himself.
Because in the Godhead, in the Trinity, we have God the Father, we have God the Son, and we have God the Spirit. All of them are completely equal. All of them have the same power, all of them have the same knowledge, all of them have the same authority. But within the Godhead, God demonstrates submission. The Son came to the world because the Father sent him.
The Son was submissive to the Father, and the Spirit came into the world because the Son sent him into the world. That doesn’t mean that the Spirit is any less than the Son, and it doesn’t mean that the Son is any greater or any less than the Father or any more than the Spirit. They are all completely equal. And so it is when we have biblical submission, we are following what God established. And we’re going to look more at it here.
It’s the fact that we are all equal in our value, but we’re different in our responsibilities. Let’s go back to verse 32. Paul says this mystery is profound meaning it’s not an easy thing to understand. And there’s more to this than just submission in the Church because he says the mystery is profound, because the mystery is talking about Christ and the Church. In other words, our submissiveness to one another has.
Has something to do with reflecting how Christ and the Church are to relate. And then we come to the summary of the passage. Instead of starting at the beginning, I’m starting at the end. Paul says to sum it up, each one of you is to love his wife as himself, and the wife is to respect her Husband. So what we’re looking at today in the weeks ahead is God’s design for marriage.
And we all have a choice to follow God’s design in everything. But there are plenty other designs out there. You can find any number of books that give a different design for what marriage is supposed to be. And our culture as it is is probably very far off from God’s design. We have to choose whether we want to obey the Lord or not.
Paul addresses the wives first in the text, but when he comes to the summation, who does he address first? He addresses the husband. And if we were to look at the 12 verses here, only three of them are addressed to wives. The bulk of the instruction is in seven verses that are addressed to husbands. And then these last two are addressed to both in summation.
What this shows and what we’re going to see in Genesis is that leadership in a proper marital relationship is the responsibility of the man. Let me say that again. Leadership in a proper marital relationship is the responsibility of the man. Now, that doesn’t mean that men always do this out of our sinfulness and laziness. A lot of times men step aside from being spiritual leaders in the home and they leave that up to the wives, or a husband has left and a wife has to step in and fulfill that role.
But what we’re looking at here is the best way what God’s plan is. I don’t know why it is that Paul starts off with the women. I just have a guess that probably in his day it is now. Often it was the women that come to spiritual enlightenment first. Often it’s women that come come to an understanding of salvation and they start to train their children and the husband drags along behind.
That’s just my thought, but that may be why. But ultimately the proper marital relationship, when things come in line with God’s word, at that point, the responsibility rests upon the shoulders of the husbands. You know, we can look at prison statistics to understand how important it is for there to be a husband in the home. Michael Youssef gave these statistics. He said, if we look in prisons, 70% of long term inmates, 70% of long term inmates,72% of adolescent murderers, meaning adolescents that are committing murder, and 60% of convicted rapists come from homes that are missing something.
You know, you know what that is? It’s a father. Because it shows us in society that the role of the father in his presence is important in the home. We’re going to be looking at three aspects of God’s design for marriage. They’re summed up by these three words, responsibility, reflection, and rules.
And today we’re going to get partially through responsibility, responsibility and. And then into reflection. I’d like you to take your Bibles and turn back to the book of Genesis at the very beginning, because we’re going to see that the responsibility for leadership in marriage wasn’t something new that Paul was proposing. It didn’t just start in the New Testament, it goes all the way back to the beginning. And we find in Genesis that it’s the foundation for the Bible.
But Genesis is also the foundation for belief. And if you try to discredit Genesis, if you try to say that it’s not true or it’s not real, or it’s just all a fable, it undermines so much of what we believe. Examples of that are in Genesis 1, we learn that God is. And if we discredit Genesis and we don’t have that beginning statement that God is. That he is eternal, and it changes the way we look at all of the world.
Genesis also teaches us that God created the world in six days. And if we say that God did not create the world in six days, it wipes out so much of what we believe and teach. We also find there that God ordained one day of rest for every week of seven days. And if you don’t believe that, if you don’t accept that God set that up, it will change your whole world. But the next thing that we find here in Genesis is that God did something very special in his creation with man after he had created all of the planets and the stars and the earth and the vegetation and the animals.
It says that he created man in a special way. He made man in his image. And he’s very clear that both man and woman together reflect God’s image. Men and women are both completely equal in value in God’s eyes. But as we go through these early chapters here, we want to see that the leadership role of the husband begins here in Genesis.
And we start in chapter two, verse seven. It says, then the Lord God formed the man out of the dust from the ground, and he breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being. So the first clue here that man has a leadership role in marriage is that the man was created first, the man was created first. And then we read in Genesis 2:15 that the Lord took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden to work it and to watch over it. So the second clue here is that the man was placed in the garden to work it and to watch over it.
Before the woman was created, man was given this responsibility to take care of the place where he was to live, to take care of his work, to watch over it and to work it. Then we find in Genesis 2, verses 16 through 17 that God gives man the first responsibility to be obedient to God the Father. And here we read that in verse 16, the Lord God commanded the man Eve had not been created yet. He said, you are free to eat from any tree of the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for on the day you eat from it, you will certainly die. We’re going to look at this a little bit later and see how Adam failed in his responsibility.
But we find in these verses that God gave man the responsibility to be obedient to God because this is the first command that we find in Scripture. And he left it up to Adam then to share that knowledge and understanding with Eve. It was man’s responsibility to share with his wife what she needed to do to obey the Lord. Let’s go to Genesis 2:19. Now it says the Lord God formed out of the ground every wild animal and every bird of the sky, and he brought each to the man to see what the man would call it.
And whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name. So what we find here, that man’s leadership role is shown in that he’s given authority over all living creatures because he gave them names. And you have to understand, throughout the Old Testament, when someone gives you a name, the name giver is the authority we find it with Abram, God eventually gave him a new name. And that new name was what? Abraham.
We see it in the secular world. When Daniel and his friends were taken into captivity into Babylon, what was the first thing that Nebuchadnezzar did? He gave them new names to show that he now had authority over them. So man’s authority over all living creatures was displayed by God, letting him name the animals. But then he also names someone else.
Who does he name? He names the woman. The man said, this one at Last, in verse 23, is bone of my bones and flesh. In my flesh. This one will be called woman, for she was taken from man.
And then in verse 20 of chapter three, the man named his wife Eve because she was the mother of all the living. Now, we’re not saying that men are any better than women. We’re not saying that they have any greater value. Both were created in the image of God, but they have different Responsibilities. And it is the husband’s responsibility to be the leader in marriage.
But sad to say, man’s failure to be the leader in the home didn’t just start in the 19th or the 20th or the 21st century. It began here in the Garden of Eden. Because if we go over to Genesis chapter three, we find some interesting things there. Genesis three. Three, the serpent approaches Eve and.
And says that we’re not supposed to eat it. But she also adds this phrase, we’re not even supposed to touch it. Now, where did she get that from? She didn’t get it from her neighbor across the street. The only other person that could have shared this information with her was Adam.
And it was his responsibility to share exactly what God had said. And God had said, they’re not supposed to eat from the tree. But somehow he translated to her, you’re not even supposed to touch it. So I believe that Adam failed in not teaching God’s word to Eve the way that he was supposed to. But he also failed in the fact that he was right there when she was talking to the serpent.
Scripture says that the man was with her and that she gave him the fruit, and then he ate from it. Now, if my wife were approaching a snake as a husband, what should I do? I should come between her and the snake. Adam was reneging on his responsibility. He was being lazy or whatever.
Or I imagine that maybe he was standing back because he was curious, but he was going to see if Eve got in trouble and if she died, if she ate okay. Because he wasn’t taking the responsibility that he was supposed to, but he. He took from the fruit that she gave to him. Now, we would ascertain from that that we would say, sin entered the world through who?
From the narrative, we’d say, sin entered the world through woman because she was the first one to take from the fruit. But that’s not what Scripture teaches. In Genesis 3, 9, 11, we see that God holds Adam accountable because he doesn’t address Eve first. He knew that Eve had eaten from the fruit. If I had been God, I’d say, eve, why did you eat from the fruit?
That’s not what God did. He went to the spiritual head of the family, and he talked to Adam first. So the Lord called out to the man and said to him, where are you?
And then in verse 10, he said, well, I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked. So I hid. And then God asked, who told you that you were naked? Did you eat from the tree that I commanded? You not to eat from.
And instead of saying, yes, what did Adam do? He immediately blamed it on Eve. Again, he’s reneging on the responsibility that God had given him to be the spiritual leader in the home. God holds Adam accountable by addressing Adam first.
But if we go To Romans chapter 5, we read this and we see that God held Adam accountable for the sin entering the world. He didn’t hold Eve accountable. In Romans 5:12, we read, Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man and death through sin, in this way, death spread to all people because all sinned. If you’re struggling with sin in your life, don’t blame Eve, who you’re supposed to blame. You’re supposed to blame Adam because he did not take on his responsibility.
Genesis 2:18.
Then the Lord God said, it is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper corresponding to him. Again, we see here that Adam and is the spiritual authority because he wasn’t made to be Eve’s helper. Eve was made to be his helper. But we need to begin to understand.
What does this word helper mean? It’s not a slave. It’s not someone that we take advantage of. The word here in the Hebrew is ezer E Z E r is the way we translate it. What is.
What does that word mean? And is there? Means that the woman was not created to serve the man, but the woman was created to serve with the man. Let me say that again. The woman was not created to serve the man.
She was created to serve. What did I say with the man? God created the woman and called her an Isair. This word appears 21 times in the Old Testament. Two of those times it refers to the woman Eve.
Here in Genesis 2 and 3 times it refers to more powerful nations that Israel called upon to help them when they were besieged. And 16 times it refers to God always talking about him and as being our help. And so it is that when we talk about wives being helpers serving with their husbands, it doesn’t mean that they’re inferior. This word always refers to someone who is either equal with you or someone that’s even more superior to you. If Israel needed help, they called out a more superior nation to be their is heir.
And whenever we call out to God for help as our is heir, we’re calling to someone who is far superior to us.
So far, women and men are equal in value. Neither is inferior to the other in value. But in function they do show superiority over one another. There are some things that my wife Is much better at than I am. Give you a test.
How many of you think my wife’s beauty is superior to mine?
You know, I appreciate that. I love that. You know, my wife has a phenomenal knowledge of scripture. She knows where the verses are. She.
She’s superior to me. Maybe one or two things. I’m better than her. You’ll have to ask her. I don’t know.
But I’m saying we’re both equal in God’s sight. But in what we do and our skills and our values and what we add to our marriage, that value goes up and down, is there. Is always equal to or superior, but never inferior. So the woman is created to be a helper, to serve with the man, but also she’s created, corresponding to him. What does that mean?
It literally means opposite to him. Here’s another test. Men. How many of you have figured out that women are different?
You know, there’s so many things that they’re opposite in. I think the hardest thing we’ve ever done in our marriage is to try to put up wallpaper and talk about being. I’m serious. Being often Mary, push it that way. And that way always means this way to her.
Okay, so putting up wallpaper, push it that way. No, not that way. You know, that way. But that way is this way. You get the picture.
We just think differently because we’re opposites corresponding to. As opposite to him. Adam and Eve were opposites, but that oppositeness complemented one another. How many of you like to put puzzles together? I mean, thousand piece puzzles are extremely frustrating.
500 pieces are a little better. Well, we bought a box of puzzles for Wyatt and Silas. And each puzzle has two pieces. No frustration at all.
But only those two pieces will fit together. Okay. And so it is with men and women. God created us to be opposites, but because we fit together to make a complete picture. God even said that it wasn’t good for man to be alone.
It doesn’t mean that it’s a bad thing if men don’t get married. But what it means is to be complete, to have to do everything that God wanted to do through Adam. He needed Eve there to accomplish that. And God didn’t make another man. He made woman to be opposite.
And so it is that God ordained then that marriage is between opposites, who are a biological man and a biological woman. The oppositeness would provide what each needed to fulfill God’s plan for them. Doesn’t mean that husbands are superior. It doesn’t mean that they’re smarter. It doesn’t mean that they are more valuable than their wives.
And if husbands have that wrong opinion, it leads them to being things that they shouldn’t be. Things like domineering and selfish and abusive or even cruel. That is not God’s intention. Women are equal to us because Genesis 1:26 says that both men and women are created in the image of who? God.
Therefore, the attitude of a husband toward his wife should be always one of very high regard. He should value her above everyone and everything and only second to his value of God. Therefore, Proverbs 18:22 says that he who finds a wife finds a you fill it in a good thing. Wives are awesome. Proverbs 12:4.
An excellent wife is the crown of her you know what the word is her husband. She’s the most precious thing that he has. Proverbs 31:10 says that her worth is far above rubies or jewels, depending on your translation. Therefore, Malachi 2:15 says, Let none of you be faithless to his wife, because she has been given to you as a precious gift from from God. The wife is a helper to work with her husband, and she’s not exactly like him.
She’s there to correspond to him.
We come now to reflection. This is all extremely important because marriage was designed from the beginning to reflect spiritual truths. In the Old Testament, God the Father is pictured as being married to Israel. In the Old Testament, whenever Israel goes and follows false gods, God says that that was adultery, and it tells us how much it hurt God for His wife to do that. And we come to the New Testament and Jesus Christ is is the groom, and we, his church, are the bride.
So from the very beginning, marriages were designed so that we would have this ongoing object lesson of many spiritual truths. And when marriages function according to God’s plan, they help our children and they help others to understand God. And if marriages are not what they’re supposed to be, just like if fathers are not what they’re supposed to be, people, especially children, get the wrong idea of what God is. If you had a father that was not fulfilling his godly responsibility, and he wasn’t the father he was supposed to be as a child, you could start to think, well, if God is the father and he’s like the Father that I have, I don’t want to have anything to do with him. And it’s the same way with marriage.
When our children look at marriages and they see them functioning imperfect properly, it gives them a false understanding of what does it mean for Christ to be the husband of the church. Therefore, if nothing else, we should strive to have right marriages because we’re concerned about our children learning the proper spiritual truths that we want to pass on to them. Genesis 1:26 28. Then God said, let us make man in our image according to our likeness. They will rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the livestock, the whole earth, and the creatures that crawl on the earth.
The first thing that marriages do in both the man and the woman is that we by ourselves, alone, outside of marriage, are supposed to reflect the image of God. And it makes it clear. Here it says, let us make man in our image. And there man is talking about mankind the way the Word is written, according to our likeness. So God emphasizes a second time.
Men and women are made in God’s image equally, and men and women are made in his likeness equally. And in case you didn’t understand the Hebrew, then we have a very important pronoun. It doesn’t say, he will rule. What’s the pronoun there? They, the man and the woman, are both created in the image of God.
They’re both created in his likeness. And they are both to be in the position of ruling over what we find here. All of creation, male and female, were both created in the image of God. Our first reflection is the that of God himself. And when we live in a growing, healthy relationship with the Lord, then the fruit of the Spirit just pours out of us.
And that fruit of the Spirit reflects God to the world. We also reflect God in many other ways. We’re creative.
Other creatures are not creative. A bird can make a beautiful bird nest. But when it comes back next year, it’s going to do what? Make that same beautiful bird nest. And the year after that, it’s going to make another beautiful bird nest.
Whereas people, they build a house, and five years later, they build what? A bigger and better house. And then 10 years from now, they build an even bigger and better house that they can. Because there’s this creativity that we reflect that shows that God is a creative being. The fact that we can think on our own, that we can reason, that we have understanding, all show that our God is a personal God that understands and thinks and relates with us.
And the fact that we have relationships with one another and we enjoy those relationships and we benefit from them, it shows us that God is a personal being that wants to have a relationship with us. No other animals reflect the image of God. Men and women are equal in their reflection of God because both were created in the image of God. Men and Women are equal in their reflection of God because they were both created in the likeness of God. And men and women are equal in God’s sight because both are created to rule together.
Going back now to verse 27. So God created man in his own image. He created him in the image of God. He created them male and female. And then it tells us in verse 28 that God blessed.
Does it say he blessed the man? He blessed who? Them. Adam and Eve, male and female, were equally blessed by the Lord. And then God said to not the man, but he said to both of them, this is your first responsibility to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it.
And then secondly, rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on the earth.
Men and women are equal in the reflection of God. Both are given the same responsibilities. And the responsibilities here are the first one is to be fruitful. The second one is to multiply, and the third one is to fill the earth. So what we find here is God’s first important thing for marriage is that they were supposed to have what they were supposed to have children.
Now we live in a world today where sin has corrupted people’s genes and there are physical problems. Everyone cannot have children. But Adam and Eve were created perfectly. There were no problems there that would keep them from bearing children. But we.
We need to keep in mind that whether we have children or not, marriage isn’t just about being happy and getting our fulfillment. Marriage is about having families that will pass on the godly teaching from generation to generation. And it’s threefold here because he said that they were supposed to be fruitful.
It’s a good thing that he gave Eve to Adam because good luck with Adam trying to have a baby by himself, right? It just wasn’t going to happen. It’s for the reason that the two have to be opposite to come together to fulfill the responsibility of having a godly family. But not only were they supposed to be fruitful and add children, but they were supposed to multiply children. They were supposed to be very fruitful.
And how fruitful were they supposed to be? They were supposed to fill their house. No. What does it say? Fill the earth.
They were supposed to be very, very fruitful. So you see it here. Be fruitful. Be very fruitful. Be very, very fruitful.
And we’re talking about reflection here. What does this mean for the church? If we are the bride of Christ, by Him empowering us, what are we supposed to do? We’re supposed to Be fruitful. And yes, that does mean that we have the fruit of the Spirit, but it means that we’re supposed to have spiritual children.
We’re supposed to be sharing the gospel and bringing more people into the faith. But it doesn’t mean to just be fruitful and have one or two spiritual children. We’re supposed to multiply that. We’re not supposed to just add to the church by our witnessing. We’re supposed to multiply that.
And we’re not supposed to be just about. Concerning, about filling this church building. What are we supposed to be concerned about? Filling. Filling the whole earth.
And so it is as the bride of Christ, we picture, or I should say that marriage pictures, what we’re supposed to be doing, that we share the gospel to be fruitful, to be very fruitful, and we’re interested and we work at carrying the gospel to all of the earth. The second thing that God tells them to do is they’re supposed to subdue it, subdue the earth, rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on the earth. What does it mean to rule creation? It means not to take advantage of it, not to misuse it, but to look at all the resources that God has given us and to use them in a faithful way so that it’s not just for our enjoyment, but it’s for God’s. What?
It’s for God’s glory in all of this. Men and women are created equal in their reflection of God, but they’re both given different responsibilities. But they’re also given the same responsibilities. Men and women in marriage specifically reflect the relationship of Christ to the church. Once again, I say we are to be fruitful in producing spiritual offspring.
We are to be very fruitful, multiplying, not just adding disciples to the body of Christ. And we are to be very, very fruitful, seeking to fill the earth with believers. Lastly, we are to be wise in how we use whatever resources or talents or gifts that God has given us so that the ultimate goal is that we’re always producing a spiritual family that’s going to grow and honor the Lord and pass that on to generations ahead. Like I said, we’re not finishing today because you’re listening so slow, you know, we will pick up from this point. Some of you are Bible scholars and you can probably fill in the rest on your own.
If you’re able to do that, let me know. All right, let’s have a word of prayer. Heavenly Father, we thank you for the time that we have together today. And you give us the instruction of how we are to live. Father, give us a desire in our heart to want to live according to your plan so that you, our most glorified Father, and in your being, glorified Father, you turn around and you give us the blessings that we don’t deserve ourselves.
In Jesus name we pray. Amen.