"Marriage: Love & Respect, Part 4" Ephesians 5:21-33
- Senior Pastor, Robert Dennison, preached this message on June 4, 2023.
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Audio Transcript
Foreign.
I didn’t even ask you, Eric. I just rebooted. But I knew you’d tell me that. Thank you. All right, we got a little bit of hum.
Okay. We’re still doing Marriage, Love and Respect In Ephesians, chapter 5, verses 21 through 33. And I just want to say that we’re spending a lot of time here because there are so many things in our society that are trying to erode the foundations of God’s word. We go back to Genesis. That book is the foundation for what we believe and we teach.
And if you want a building to collapse, what’s a good way to make it collapse? Get rid of the foundations. So the world wants to get rid of the fact that God exists. Genesis 1. The world wants to get rid of the fact that God created the world.
The world wants to get rid of the teaching that God created man and woman in his image. And he wants to get rid of the fact that God ordained marriage for a husband and a wife. And once we start erasing those things from our society, then everything else that God’s Word teaches collapses. And I keep reviewing every week just a little bit. It’s like a recipe.
You always have to keep that ingredient list to the side because if you. If you read down the recipe and you forget what the basic ingredients are, you’re not going to end up with the right result. So we’ll spend a little bit of time in review to make sure that we have all the parts to the puzzle today. Let’s begin reading in Ephesians 5:21. 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, 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 now once again that we can come to your word.
Thank you for giving us this letter of your love and your concern for us. That we might know first how to have a relationship with you through the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and then how we might know how to live properly in this world, Father, so that we can be in harmony with you and represent your Son to the world. In his name we pray. Amen. Just in review, what is submission?
Well, biblical submission is voluntary. It’s not something that’s forced on people. It’s continuous. We don’t do it when we feel like it and not do it when we don’t feel like it. And it’s as unto the Lord, not as unto others.
But ultimately, when we submit as God asks us to, we’re submitting to him. Paul sums it up in this way in verse 33 says, to sum up, each one of you is to love his wife as himself, and the wife is to respect her husband. So that’s hence the title. And it’s about love, and it’s about respect. And we’ve talked about this verse that ultimately the proper marital relationship, responsibility rests upon the shoulders of.
You’ve heard it for about four weeks. Who is it? It rests on the husband. Even though Eve took the fruit first, when God came to speak to them, he approached Adam with the question, what have you done? Because he was holding Adam responsible for what his family had done.
The responsibility of the husband, therefore, according to Scripture, is to be the leader. We’ve talked about that. And the responsibility of the wife we looked at last week is to be the helper, meaning that she’s a collaborator with him. She is a co regent. She reigns with him.
Can we have the next slide up there?
One more slide. There you go. Thank you. Help her. She is the collaborator.
She is the co regent with her husband. She’s his counterpart or correspondent, and she is the one that completes him. The rules. Therefore, our husbands are to love their wives as Christ loved the Church. Husbands are to love their wives as much as they love and care for their own bodies.
And they’re supposed to love their wives more than any other relationship in this world, more than mother and father, more than friends, even more than children. So today we’re looking at the rules for wives. The wives are supposed to submit or respect their husbands. The Two terms are put together here in the passage so that you can understand the full meaning. Let’s go Back to verse 33, where it says, to sum up, each one of you is to love his wife as himself, and.
And the wife is to respect her husband. And going back to verse 22. Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. Literally, this means wives to your husband as to the Lord. This is the way you’re supposed to treat them.
Now, the scripture puts these two words together so that we have a better understanding of what this means. The one word means to place under in an orderly fashion. That’s to submit. But the word respect here, literally, if we just take it for what it says, it means to be fearful, to be terrified, or to be frightened. And certainly God does not want wives to be frightened or terrified by their husbands, and husbands shouldn’t do that to their wives.
So Paul puts both of these terms together and is talking about in the same way that we fear fear. We respect and we submit to the Lord. In regard to the Lord, it’s meaning to revere him, to stand in awe of Him. This fear and respect is to be viewed of the husband as it is for God. We’re not afraid of God.
He’s our loving Father. He gives us nothing but good gifts, and he calls us to come boldly before his throne at any time. But there’s still the matter of respect and reverence that we offer to Him. And in Scripture we see this reverence or respect in many ways. If you’re in the presence of a king, you would naturally do what you would bow.
But when you’re an older person enters the room, and we don’t do this much anymore, but out of respect, when an older person enters the room, people used to do what they used. They used to stand up. And even when you go shopping at Costco or in the marketplace, just recognizing another person and saying hi and greeting them, that’s a way to show respect. So respect comes out biblically in many different ways. Wives, submit, respect your husbands.
There are three things here in the text that tells us how the wife is supposed to do this. First, it is as to the Lord. Secondly, it’s as the leader. And thirdly, it’s as the church to Christ. Let’s go back to verse 22.
Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord as to the Lord. What that’s saying is this is the motivation for why wives should submit. Because ultimately, when you submit to your husband, when you respect him, you’re actually doing it as unto the Lord, you’re respecting the Lord, you’re submitting unto Him. It’s like everything else in our life, whatever we do, everything is supposed to be glorifying to God out of respect and submission to Him. Whether it’s eating, whether it’s working, whether it’s spending time with your children.
Our attitude should always be, God, I’m doing this for you. And the wonderful thing for Christians is that when work is tough, when we don’t have a good situation, we have in our mind that I’m doing this because I love the Lord and I want to honor Him. The motivation here for wives to respect and submit to their husbands is as to the Lord, because submission to your husband is ultimately submission to the Lord. And a wife who does not respect her husband is not respecting the Lord. Secondly, we see here the reason for this verse 23, because the husband is the the head of the wife.
And we’ve looked at that back in Genesis, the many reasons why he is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church. So first we have the motivation as to the Lord. Here we have the reason, because he is God’s appointed leader or head in the family. The husband is God’s appointed leader in the home. And again, a wife who rejects her husband’s leadership is basically rejecting the Lord Jesus Christ because He has given wives the reason why they should do this.
Lastly, after the motivation and the reason, we see the extent. Now, as the Church submits to Christ in verse 24. So also wives are to submit to their husbands in everything. The extent is as the Church submits to Christ, so the wife should submit to her husband. How much do we owe to Jesus?
We owe everything to Him. His life, his death, his burial, and his resurrection. He did all of that so that we might have eternal life, so we might have a right relationship with the Lord, so that we might spend eternity in his presence. We owe everything to Christ. The Church therefore respects Christ and submits to Him.
Therefore, the command here is wives are commanded to submit in the same way to their husbands in everything. Is it always easy for a wife to submit to her husband? No, it’s often very difficult. And if we were spending more time in Genesis, we would see that that’s part of the curse. The tension that was created in relationships between husbands and wives began there because of their sin.
But I want to read this quote from Tim Keller, the meaning of marriage. And I’ve got a couple typos in there. I’ll have to correct them as I read them. He says, if you only obey God’s word when it seems reasonable or profitable to you, well, that really isn’t obedience at all. In other words, if you only respect your husband when you want to, when it’s convenient for you, and other times you don’t, then you’re really not being in submission.
Obedience means that you see someone in authority that see their see you see someone as an authority over you that is there even when you don’t agree with him. And then we correct the last to law. For God’s law is there for times or temptations when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigor. It’s the constant effect of sin in our lives. There’s always that temptation to go against God’s word.
And in the same way Satan is always going to tempt wives to go against what their role and their relationship is in the marriage. Submission and respect come down to obedience to God. It may be difficult to respect and submit to a difficult husband who is not fulfilling his God given role. It can be difficult to submit to a husband who is not following the rules of selfless love. But the wife’s respect and submission are not ever contingent on her husband obeying.
Scripture even says that in circumstances like this that sometimes it’s the wife’s submissive spirit that may well be what leads her husband to the Lord. But on the other side, a husband who is fulfilling his role and he’s following the rules about how to love his wife, he’s going to make it a lot easier for his wife to give her respect and her honor. Therefore, husbands need to appreciate their wives. As the Bible demonstrates. If you appreciate your wife and you love her and and you act like the leader you should be, it’s going to be a lot easier for her to respect and submit to you.
Let’s go back to Proverbs 31. Let’s see how the Bible says that we’re supposed to appreciate our wives in a proper way. In Proverbs 31:11 we read this. The heart of her husband trusts in her and he will not lack anything great good. The man who does not seek his wife’s advice and heed it is a foolish husband.
Because women have insight and wisdom in many areas that men sometimes lack. Women. How many of you would agree with that? Husbands? How many of you would agree that sometimes your wife has better information?
Hey, I want to hear some smart husbands saying Amen. All right, all right, speak up there. How is the husband supposed to trust his wife? Here it says he trusts her well in sense of business matters. The Proverbs 31.
Woman. She went out and she evaluated a field. She could tell whether it was worthy of farming as she buys it herself. And she plants a vineyard with her own earnings. Again in verse 24.
That she makes and sells linen garments, and she delivers belts to the merchants. And she sees that her profits are good. You have to Remember the Proverbs 31. Woman. She never sleeps.
So this is. This is an impossible person. But it does show us the many ways that women can be involved and how their husbands should appreciate them. When we go back to thinking biblically about husband husbands that did not listen to their wives, I want to refer to Matthew 27, when Jesus was standing before Pilate and Pilate was judging him. Remember what happened there with Pilate’s wife.
She sent a message to her husband, and she said, have nothing to do with that righteous man, for today I’ve suffered terribly in a dream because of him. Did Pilate listen to his wife? No. Who was right? His wife was.
He should have listened. We have the same situation in the Old Testament where a man did not seek his wife’s advice. And I want you to recall the story about Nabal. Nabal. His name means fool, which he very much is.
And what happened with Nabal was. He was a very rich man. He had all of his flocks that were out with the various shepherds under his that were under his service. And David and his men had taken care of those shepherds to make sure nobody robbed the sheep. And he did that for a whole season.
And he sent a messenger to Nabal, and he said, you know, none of your sheep have died, none of your shepherds have been hurt. We’ve been helping them. We’ve been watching them all this time. Would you be willing to give us a little bit of food, something to eat to show show appreciation to my men? Because we’re hungry.
Nabal did not consult his wife. Instead, he sent back a message and said, no way am I going to do anything for you. Well, you can imagine what that did to David. It made him rather angry. And so he decided he was going to go and kill not only Nabal, but wipe out his entire family, his children, and all his servants.
But Abigail, his wise wife, heard what was going on from one of her servants. And she quickly got together a lot of food and she took it, and she went to David and she tried to appease him by offering him what was good. She even said, my husband is a fool for not doing this. And this was David’s response. Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, who sent you to meet me today.
May your discernment be blessed, and may you be blessed today. You kept me from participating in bloodshed and avenging myself by my own hand. Nabal did not consult his wife. If he had, he might have kept himself out of more trouble. Now, the moral of the story is, once Nabal found out what had happened, what happened to him?
He fell over dead. So husbands, just remember that there might come a day when you don’t take your wife’s advice or seek it, and you might end up falling over dead like Nabal did. The heart of her husband trusts her. He trusts her in sense, in business matters. But verse 20 says he trusts her in making decisions to be generous.
Her hands reach out to the poor and she extends her hands to the needy. She’s giving of what they have in their bank account or in their house to help other people without having to ask her husband because he trusts her to be wise with their money. He appreciates her words and instruction as being wise. Her mouth speaks wisdom, the proverb says, and loving instruction is on her tongue. Remember, this isn’t the wife writing about herself.
This is about her husband writing about her in the proverb tells us in verse 27 that he respects her decisions about running a household. She watches over the activities of her household. And finally, the husband encourages in verse 31 that we are to reward our wives for their labor. He rewards her for her labor. It says, give her therefore, the reward of her her labor.
We’re supposed to respect our wives. We’re supposed to love them. And when we do that, it makes it way easier for them to respect and love us. What does this respect look like? There are four things.
It means having heartfelt admiration for your husband. It’s about showing favoritism, impartiality, it’s about physically demonstrating honor, and it’s about placing great value in a person. These are the things that we see in scripture that are associated with showing proper respect in many different areas. Having Heartfelt Admiration Once again, the word respect in the Greek means to be fearful of a person. But it’s used if our attitude toward God.
Therefore, it means it’s more reverence is to have a deep appreciation for God, for who he is. That we acknowledge and we appreciate that God is God. And I’m not going to try to be God, and I’m not going to let anyone else take his place as God in my life. You know, we are free to run to God at any time, but our reverence for him still needs to be there. We appreciate God’s role as God, and we do this.
We demonstrate this by spending time reading the Bible, by praying, by giving, by gathering for worship, serving, singing, praising. All these things are an acknowledgment and an admiration for God, for who he is. When we compare this to a wife, it means that a wife appreciates her husband’s God given leadership role, and she therefore interacts with her husband in a way that demonstrates her appreciation of that God given leadership role. But respect doesn’t just mean having heartfelt admiration. It also means showing favoritism and partiality.
Now, in James chapter two, it says, we’re not supposed to be respecters of persons. That means in the church, you don’t say, well, I like that person better and that person’s more valuable. In the church, we’re all supposed to be equal. But when it comes to our relationship with our spouses, we are supposed to show favoritism. We are supposed to show partiality.
A wife therefore respects her husband by letting him know and letting others know that he is her favorite and that she is partial to him. That means that her husband is more important to her than anyone else, more important than her parents, even more important than her children. Having heartfelt admiration, showing favoritism or partiality. But also it’s about physically demonstrating honor. We kind of mentioned this earlier.
If you were in the king’s presence in the Bible, you would show respect by bowing to him. If an elderly person walked into the room, you would show respect by standing for them. You might show respect by grasping someone’s feet, just as the woman in the New Testament washed Jesus feet. And Jesus even showed respect to his disciples because he grasped their feet when he washed them at the Lord’s Supper. Scripturally, it also means paying attention physically with both our bodies and eyes when people are listening.
And in Scripture, it means to properly greet people in the marketplace. In the same way, wives respect their husbands by physically demonstrating in public their respect for him. Ways that Mary does it for me, she speaks well of me in public. If we have a disagreement, we’ll kind of give each other a look. And we don’t discuss it there in front of everybody.
We know that we’ll talk about it at home. She says hello and goodbye to me when I come in and out of the house. It’s a lot of little things, but it’s physically demonstrating, even being close to one another when we sit or when we’re in public demonstrates to other people that I’m her husband, having heartfelt admiration, showing favoritism, physically demonstrating honor. And lastly, it means to place great value in a person. Wives need to show that they value their husbands, and it may be difficult, but you need to look for those things that you can value and you can express to him that you respect in him.
And you can also ask that God would help you to see more value in your husband so that you can value him more greatly. You know, wives are commanded to respect and submit, but it’s supposed to be there, even if it’s difficult to do so. But when God commands us to do something, there’s always a reward for obedience, especially in the most difficult circumstances. Let’s go to Psalm 37:3,6 we read this Trust in the Lord and do what is good. It doesn’t say, trust in him, sometimes says, just trust God for what he says and do what you know is right.
And if you trust in the Lord and do what is good, here’s the promise. You will dwell in the land and live securely. Verse 4 says, Take delight in the Lord. Put him first above all things. Do what he wants you to do.
Love him more than anything. And if you’re obedient to him in this, he will give you your heart’s desires. Now I will tell you, your heart’s desires are going to change if you love the Lord into things that are proper and good for you. Verse 5 says, Commit your way to the Lord. Trust in Him.
When we read God’s Word, sometimes it’s like, well, it says, I’m supposed to do this, but it sure would be more comfortable to go this way. Or God’s Word says, do this, but I know if I do that it’s going to hurt somebody’s feelings. Wouldn’t it be better to go this way instead? But if you commit your way to the Lord and you trust in him, then it says that he will act and he will make your righteousness shine like the dawn and your justice like the noonday. Wives are commanded to respect and submit to their husbands, even if it’s difficult.
But God will bless them for doing that. There’s a familiar verse in Proverbs 3, 5, 6 that says the same thing. Trust in the Lord with all your heart. In other words, not in yourself, not in others, not what the news says. Trust in the Lord.
Do not rely on your own understanding. In all your ways, acknowledge him. Always keep him in mind, and then he will make your paths straight. Jesus was the ultimate Example for submission. The Father sent him into the world to endure 33 years of life among us and then to die on the cross and be buried and raised from the dead.
But that submission did not make any less of Jesus Christ because the Father exalted him. I want to read from Tim Keller’s the Meaning of Marriage. I’m reading from from Tim Keller today because there is going to be a small group that’s starting up for anyone. It’s called the Meaning of Marriage. We’re going to be going over that book at six weeks and you can sign up for it in the bulletin outs not the bulletin, but on the board outside there.
But Tim Keller says this about Jesus and his submission. In Jesus we see all the authoritarianism of authority laid to rest and all the humility of submission glorified rather than demeaning Christ. His submission leads to ultimate glorification where God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name above every name. Jesus demonstrated for us. True submission and how that true submission was rewarded by God the Father first.
Peter 3:1:7 this isn’t just Paul’s idea, but Peter was preaching the same message and this is what he writes in verse one. He says, in the same way, wives submit to your own husbands so that even if some disobey the word, the they may be won over without a word by the way their wives live when they observe your pure, reverent. Or here the word is respectful lives, revere, respect, submit. The same terminology Peter’s using here when he is speaking to what a wife is supposed to do. But in this particular passage, Peter is describing probably the most difficult situation situation in which a wife finds herself that she still has to respect and obey the Lord.
Because in this passage he’s talking about a believing wife who has a husband that has not submitted his life to the Lord. She has a husband that’s rejecting her faith. She has a husband that’s possibly ridiculing her faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and making it difficult for her. And even more so, he’s not able to love her in the proper way because he doesn’t have a relationship with the Lord and he may not be the proper leader in the home. But Peter says, even in this most difficult circumstances, submit yourself to your own husband so that even if some disobey the word, they may be won over without a word by the way their wives live.
In other words, that there’s no guarantee your husband will come to faith and become the husband that God wants him to be. But if you live your life this way, in submission and purity, that the chances, the effect that you’re going to have on your husband may definitely lead him to faith in the Lord. He doesn’t promise that spiritual purity and a respectful life will bring your husband to salvation, but he says that it will help. Then again, we have a word to husbands in verse 7. Husbands, in the same way, live with your wives in an understanding way as with a weaker partner, showing them honor as co heirs of the grace of life so that your prayers will not be hindered.
A word to husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way. That means that you have to learn how to understand your wife. To the Jews in the Old Testament, when a young man got married, he didn’t have to go to war for a whole year because according to the passage, it was going to take him a year to learn how to please his wife. Now some of us have been working at it longer than a year and it takes a long time to learn how to please please your wife. But scripture is telling the husbands we have that responsibility to learn about them, to understand.
I mean, I know what makes me feel respectful and hopefully I’m learning what makes Mary feel loved. But what you experience in your relationship may be different. You have to discuss this. Husband needs to be wanting to say, well, help me understand how do I show my love to you in a better way? And that’s what the passage is asking you to do.
It also tells us here that the wife is a weaker partner. I think that that’s a good thing. To me, the difference is between a plastic cup and a crystal glass. Okay, now that’s husband and wife. What am I?
I’m the plastic cup. You can crush me, but you can’t destroy me. But a piece of crystal, what happens to it? If you step on it, it’s going to break. But which is more valuable, the cup, the plastic or the crystal?
So it is we need to honor our wives. That gentleness, that that weakness is also of great value to us and what God gives us. And the reason being is we’re supposed to show them honor. As the word there is co heirs. Again, it goes back to men and women are equally created in the image of God.
Men and women are equally valuable and we need to see each other that way. As God looks at us, how men and women feel respected and love once again is going to vary from person to person. You need to talk to your spouse to understand them better. Likewise, how the roles of leader and helper are Carried out are going to vary with every couple. It doesn’t always have to be the husband that handles the money or keeps the checkbook.
If he can’t add two plus two and get six, then who needs to be taking care of the checkbook? Did I say something wrong there? I mean, the way you work out, your marriage is going to vary, but the basic roles are still supposed to be there. Leader and helper. These basic roles, according to Tim Keller of leader and helper, are binding.
But every couple must work out how that will be expressed within their marriage. I brought some cups out of our cabinet day. I’ll hold them up so you can see them.
This one’s nice. It’s even pretty on the inside. And it’s got a matching plate. Everybody see that? If you can’t, you need to sit closer next week.
Okay, then I. That’s a teacup there, I’d say. And this is a good sized coffee mug. And it has Memphis written on it here, because that’s where we’re from. This is a tea glass from overseas where my daughter lives.
They call it chai.
And then this is another coffee mug without a handle. Mary likes it because it keeps her fingers warm in the winter. Now we’ll just imagine that these flowers, four cups were down here at the thrift store and they were all on the counter. And everything in the thrift store wants to get what it wants to be bought. It wants to be loved, and it wants to appreciate it, be appreciated because somebody else did what?
They got rid of it. So we got all these cups that are down there and they’re on the shelf and they’re wanting to get sold so they can have an identity so that they can be used and appreciated. And they keep looking at each other, and the little cup there says, you know, well, if I was big like that cup over there, I’d hold a lot more. Maybe somebody would want me if I was bigger. And then this teacup over here says, well, maybe if I break off my handle, then I’ll look like one of the other cups and somebody will love me.
They keep looking at each other thinking, well, if I were just different, maybe somebody would love me because nobody’s bought me. So one of them looks at the shelf above and sees a bunch of finger paints. And they decide, what do you think? I’ll just put some finger paint. I’ll change my color on the outside.
Maybe somebody will love me more. Another one of them looks at the shelf below and there’s some duct tape and that cup says, well, if I wrap myself up in duct tape, maybe I’ll be stronger and somebody will love me and I’ll have an identity. One of them even says, maybe I’ll fall off the shelf. They’ll put me back together in a whole new way. And then somebody will finally want to buy me and take me home.
But only one of these cups finally realizes that changing themselves on the outside is not going to make them any more valuable than what they are the way they’re created. So that one cup looks across and sees the glass cabinet that has some jewelry in it. And there’s a 14 karat gold ring in there that so far I’ve been wearing for 37 years. All right? And that cup says, if I could just get that ring and put it inside of me and somebody comes along, they’ll see that I’m what I have.
Value. The value that we have is in a relationship with Jesus Christ. When we accept him as our Lord and savior. It’s not our purpose to change ourselves on the outside. And so it is with husbands and wives.
Be what God has created you to be and concentrate on what you are on the inside with Jesus Christ to come and live inside of you. I can say, when I was a teenager, I wanted to fit in. I wanted to have identity. So there were a couple ways in high school back then you could be an athlete. Okay, how many of you were athletes in high school?
It gives you a certain identity. You know, I’m part of the group. So I was tall, so I tried basketball, but I was tall and skinny and I got beat up every game. My glasses got broken. So sports was not going to be my identity.
So there were a couple cool guys at school and they had nice cars, all right? One had an mgb, the other one had a Spitfire. And I was like, you know, if I can just get a nice car, that my identity will be something. And I ended up with a green Pinto. Does anybody remember a Pinto?
You know, if you don’t know what a Pinto is, go home and look at it. That is not a chick magnet for sure. I would drive it over to Mary’s house to pick her up and her dad would say, would you like to use my car? And her brother said, we could always hear you coming. Because it was a loud mess in junior high, I thought, you know, well, if I could just be part of the rich crowd, which my parents weren’t rich, but not very smart me to say, well, if I could just buy an oz odd button down shirt, they used to have a little lizard on them.
And the rich kids wore ozods all the time. So I saved up my newspaper money and I went out and I bought a kelly green OZ odd shirt. Just one. That’s all I could afford. And so I started wearing that.
And did it impress anybody? No. Did it make me feel any better? No. I was trying to change what was on the outside.
Back to the demonstration. We need to find our identity in Jesus Christ. Accept ourselves the way that God has made us, and then we will become of true value. Let’s pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for the opportunity today to see that you have made us the way that we are and you’ve given us instruction on how we’re supposed to live in a way that honors you.
Give us a desire to do that very thing, Heavenly Father. Empower us to live according to your word. And we ask that we would grow in our understanding and the importance of having a right relationship with you. And if there’s anyone here today, Father, that doesn’t have a relationship with you, that they would come before you today and they would tell you with their mouth, father, I’m a sinner. I believe that Jesus died on the cross for my sins, that he rose from the dead, and I want him to take control of my life and give me the value that you want me to have.
And then that those people would be willing to express that to others vocally, that Jesus is the Lord of their life. It’s in his name that we pray. Amen.