Husbands and Wives Reflecting Christ and His Bride

Introduction

Good morning for the third time. I like the idea that we had on Friday evening of moving the podium up. I’m actually more comfortable on the floor. And I hope I’ll not be shouting all the way to the back, but uh we’ll do the best that we can. I’m grateful for this opportunity. We’ve announced the topic for this morning as a continuation of this series that we’ve been engaged in on marriage, and emphasizing that in a biblical sense, uh what we understand is that the marriage relationship between a husband and wife really mirrors the relationship between Christ and the church. In Ephesians chapter 5, just after the text that we had read for us, and we emphasize this as a general principle, but also as something that specifically applies to marriage, to let bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander, all of these negative things, put that away.

But on the other hand, we’re also told to substitute to play in their place, replace that with kindness and tender-heartedness and the forgiving spirit that Jesus Himself manifested. He is our model in all of these relationships, just as God in Christ has also forgiven you. Now, this morning we’re going to concentrate on several of these ideas that have to do, we’re going to talk a little bit later about threats to marriage, and I don’t like to end on that kind of a note. I don’t like to begin with it either. So our third lesson today, after we deal with some of the threats and the idea of forgiveness, and as we’ve just sung, the idea of fidelity as well, we’re going to talk about some good news about marriage, about how we can be worthy women, as the proverb has it, or worthy men, as the description is given in another context in the book of Job, also chapter 31.

And I want to talk about the fact that some of the public uh information that is disseminated about marriage, that uh marriages are almost doomed. More than 50% of marriages end in divorce. That’s simply not true. It’s not true in our common experience. If you look around any congregation you know or your neighborhood, 50% of the people divorced. So I want to unpack a little bit of that kind of an idea and send us out the door with the sense that yes, marriage is difficult. It’s work, it’s not something that just happens. It takes constant care and attention, but it does work. It’s designed by God, and God designed it in order that we might enjoy the benefits and the fruits of our human behaviors and endeavors.

1. Husbands, Love Your Wives as Christ Loved the Church

As people who are created in his image, we can do it. And particularly for young people who are maybe contemplating marriage, that’s good news. It’s not that your marriage is doomed to fail, or that it’s so difficult that nobody can do it, or it’s a rarity. But in fact, if we will follow the divine instructions, if we will do what God tells us to do, then we can be successful in our marriages. We can have fulfilling lives. Now, if you come over into the fifth chapter, into the very next after these verses that we had read for us, and then I’ve just recited again, in Ephesians chapter five, of course, we encounter instructions to husbands and wives. Husbands are to love your wives. And there are two standards given in this text in some ways.

The first one is as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. Now, in one way you might look at that and say, well, that’s an impossible standard. I’m not Jesus Christ. I’m not divine. So how in the world could I live up to that kind of a standard in terms of what’s expected of me? And there’s an answer to that. Of course, all of us face that dilemma and that problem in any aspect of our Christian lives when we’re trying to follow the teaching of the Lord. We’re never going to be up to that standard. We are never going to be perfect. But there’s another part of the standard. He says, nevertheless, each individual among you is to love his own wife even as himself.

Now, there are some men for whom that might be an impossible standard. You may have heard the story about a woman who was married to a rather, shall we say, obstreperous man who was known for being cantankerous and a few other things. And somebody asked her, how could you be in love? And she said, It’s easy. We’re in love with the same man. And sometimes there are individuals who think so highly of themselves that to think about treating their wife in that way might also be an impossible standard. But the idea here is that I’m to hold myself, I’m not to do anything that I that I would for myself, I’m to do that for my wife. I’m to treat her as an equal in the Lord and in the relationship.

2. How Do You Treat Your Bride?

Let each one of you in particular love his wife as himself. He says it again, underscore. In case we missed it the first time, he repeats it. Love his wife as himself, and let the wife see to it that she respect her husband. It’s a mutual relationship. And he talks about the fact that he is speaking with reference to Christ and the church. But he also says that the marriage relationship is one in which we are to model to mimic that kind of a loving relationship. So, questions. How do you treat, let’s just start with the church? How do you treat the bride of Christ? Do we treat the Lord’s body, our fellow Christians, in terms of our assemblies, or how we interact with each other outside the assemblies with love and with respect?

Or might our, and I know I’m preaching to the choir at a nine o’clock service, but do we treat the body of Christ with indifference or neglect? We don’t see the importance of assembling with the saints or studying the scripture or of teaching others the love of Jesus Christ or anything else that it’s our obligation to do as Christians because we serve the Lord, he’s not only our Savior, but He’s Lord. A lot of people want Jesus Christ as their Savior, but to acknowledge him as Lord, as the one who has control and command over our lives and who we must obey, whether it’s convenient or not, do we have that attitude toward the body of Christ? Or maybe do we treat it with disdain or contempt?

Somebody takes the Lord’s name in vain or says something about uh Campbellites or the Church of Christ or something, and we we don’t care much now, say something about your mother or something else that you hold dear to your favorite athletic team, and some people are ready to duke it out. But do we have that attitude toward the body of Christ? And then shift the focus for a moment to what we’re talking about this morning. How do you treat your bride? The person that you selected to spend the rest of your days on earth with. The person who was, after all, intelligent enough and wise enough to marry you. How do you, especially to the man, how do you treat your wife? Well, of course, there are commands.

3. More to Faithfulness Than Not Committing Adultery

We’re going to talk about faithful marriage and the idea of faithfulness and fidelity for a moment. And that, of course, includes the law that goes all the way back to the Ten Commandments.

Not under any circumstance. You shall not do that. It’s one of the primary basic commands of human relationships. But I want to suggest to you this morning that there’s more to faithfulness, there’s more to fidelity, as we’ve just sung, than simply not committing adultery. Faithfulness has to do, and there, of course, as we study faith and we talk about faith, we’ve used text like James 2 and verse 24. We’re not saved by faith only. And we try to emphasize that that’s more than just intellectual faith. I like the way that Paul puts it both at the beginning and the end of the book of Romans, in Romans chapter 1 and verse 5 and Romans 16, 25. It’s an inclusio, if you use the literary term. It’s a bookend, if you will, where he talks about the obedience of faith.

Biblical faith is not mere intellectual assent. That’s a part of it. It’s a beginning step. But biblical faith is a faith that obeys. It is an active working faith. It is not dead faith, as James describes it. And it’s faith that works. Yesterday we looked at a number of these passages throughout 1 John. Somebody who says, I’m a follower of Christ, somebody who says, I love God. Oh, let’s sing another verse of oh, how I love Jesus, and then does not do anything to demonstrate that. One who says I’m doing this and does not do it. There are all these passages from the apostle of love, John himself, that says you’re a liar if you do that. Or you are a hypocrite. You are behaving one way while claiming to act another way.

And there are texts all over the scripture that teaches that in the book of Revelation. You have tested those who say they are apostles, they make the claim, they talk the talk, but they are not. And the same apostle who wrote those texts in 1 John again calls these individuals liars. I know the blasphemy of those who say they are Jews, who say, in a spiritual sense they have a relationship with God, but they are not. They say one thing, they do another. They are a synagogue of Satan. We call that hypocrisy. And in our modern culture, hypocrisy may be about the only sin left standing. I’ve actually heard people articulate it this way. Oh, I’ll tell you what, preacher, I’m not a very good person.

I drink like a fish, and I cuss just about whenever I open my mouth, and I run around with women’s other. But one thing I’m not, I’m not a hypocrite. Well, pin a rows on you. I mean, it’s almost like that’s the chief sin that’s about the only kind of sin that you can commit. Everything else is just sort of, you know, as one person put it, oh, that I just stubbed my toe, just made a slight error. Well, I want us to think a little bit about a broader concept of faith and fidelity. We’ve just sung about it, actually, in verse 3 of the last hymn, to Christ, be loyal and be true. There’s an aspect of fidelity that’s not just the negative in a sense of a marriage relationship, don’t commit adultery.

It’s that I want to be faithful and loyal. Ennoble service prove. The hymn, of course, is talking about our relationship as part of the body of Christ to our head, but prove your faith, not only what you believe, but your fidelity. It’s not a word that we use very often. You used to see it in the titles of banks and savings and loans, at least back when I was a kid, but it’s a word that in some ways has fallen into disuse, if not disfavor. And there’s another aspect of that that’s also mentioned, the fervor of your love. Being faithful, whether as Christians to the Lord or as husbands and wives, involves not just the intellectual aspect of it, but the loyalty aspect and the fervor of love.

That’s what’s involved here. So let’s talk a little bit about what fidelity is. We sing about faithful and true as a wedding song. And we stand it on its head. We sometimes use it more in the negative sense. Infidelity, unfaithfulness, which we often mean some kind of sexual affair, but I’m trying to make the point that it’s broader than that. Let me suggest that infidelity, unfaithfulness, disloyalty might also include lying and secretive behaviors, something that doesn’t necessarily manifest itself in a sexual affair, selfish or reckless habits, for instance, withholding love and affection or praise and gratitude. If you’ve been here for the remainder of the service, you know we’ve tried to unpack those kinds of ideas as negatives, but sometimes that’s the way people go about trying to build a relationship is by punishing the other partner when they don’t get the behavior that they want, which makes absolutely no sense, entirely illogical.

But there’s this lack of nurturing that sometimes occurs, and that falls into this category of infidelity, of withholding the kind of loving loyalty that Christ expects of us. To say negative or uncomplimentary or destructive words about our spouse or to our wives or our husbands, as the case may be. This is the exact opposite of what fidelity is, of what loyalty to the relationship and the person is, and especially undermining your wife or your husband in front of the children. Again, there are all kinds of texts that apply more broadly than this, but certainly apply in the marriage relationship. If you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another. But I say walk by the Spirit, and you will not carry out the desires of the flesh.

The Bible gives us practical objectives in order to be able to do this. For the flesh sets the desire against the spirit, the spirit against the flesh. For these are in opposition to each other, so that you may not do the things that you please. Now, when we began this series, we said we had three objectives. We want to be biblical, and we’ve looked at a number of different passages, but we also want to be practical. And we’ve tried to import uh into the outlines and in other ways in our presentations. Some research that’s been done by people who have spent careers and lifetimes even looking at uh some of the ideas that we’re going to talk about. So we want to be practical and we want to make this practical as well.

One of the things that’s in the bibliography at the back that we recommend. It’s not only there, but it’s got some asterisks behind asterisks next to it that indicate we think it might be something that you would want to explore a little bit later. And several of you asked about it. It’s a book on fidelity called For Fidelity. This woman is not a Christian. I believe she may be a Roman Catholic at one or may have been at one time. But she’s a secular author who, as far as we can tell, is stating a lot of biblical ideas. And sometimes people who maybe don’t pretend to be particularly religious or don’t state it in religious terms stumble upon a biblical truth. Here’s one passage that illustrates what I’m talking about.

It’s the question of sexual infidelity in this case, or in this case, she’s saying, What would be wrong with just a casual sexual affair? Even if one’s not married. She says here’s the possibility of a free, independent sexual exchange between mature adults who are equal to one another in age and status and so forth. So there’s no power differential going on here.

No strings, no phone calls, no promises, no regrets. If you remember the Sternberg triangles that we talked about, this would be something that’s passion and nothing else. Good contraception, let us suppose. No risk of pregnancy. Safe sex, if you will, privacy assured. Nobody else is going to know anything about this except the two people involved. And God, of course, as we would say it. But suppose both are single. Neither is willing to consider a permanent relationship. Or suppose they are both of them looking for life partners, or suppose one is, but they’re single and unattached, in other words. What would be wrong with this kind of a casual sexual encounter? Suppose one or both are married. Under any of these circumstances, is casual sex okay? And her answer is no.

Casual sexual encounters are morally wrong, not just because the Bible says don’t do that, but there’s a moral and ethical principle involved in this because the exchange is partial even when it is entirely equal or open or honest. In such an exchange, each regards his or her own sexual desire as primarily physiological needs, essentially separable from the deeper psychological and emotional union that is physically enacted in sexual intercourse. Now I want to suggest that what this woman is saying is basically 1 Corinthians chapter 7 and other texts as well that are biblically elaborate on this kind of an idea. So what the what she’s driving at is that fidelity, faithfulness in a committed relationship, is not merely an agreement about sexual exclusivity. Now it includes that, of course, and we sometimes speak about sexual infidelity or unfaithfulness, but fidelity can’t be reduced to a contract clause that governs the reproductive organs.

4. What Fidelity Demands

It’s much broader than that kind of an idea. Fidelity goes way beyond simply not having an affair. It asks us to consider how committed am I to other aspects of the relationship that are spiritual and psychological and inner and not just those that have to do with the reproductive organs. So think with me a little bit more about this idea of fidelity and intimacy as we’ve tried to define it. Fidelity demands maturity in expressing our own needs in a relationship where we’re growing together, trying to understand each other, trying to treat each other with respect and from a husband’s perspective as Christ would treat the church. I’ve got to learn to be mature in expressing my need. And it demands that I take my wife’s needs seriously.

I’ve said several times to the men, you have to become a student of your wife. Sometimes the questions in the session would get a response that says, How might that work in your relationship? Or what works for me might not work for you. That’s the personal aspect of the tripartite or the three goals that we’ve announced. Fidelity demands taking our mate seriously. If she says, I need this, then I need for her to have that if I’m going to be attuned and treating her as I would treat myself. Fidelity demands now also that I have to be responsible in expressing my needs. And there’s an illustration of this that I want to get to in just a moment. Fidelity now is not just frivolity in expressing a lot of wants.

I want this, I want that, I want something else, and so the other party in the relationship is supposed to be scrambling around trying to do that. That’s not what we’re talking about. Fidelity demands honesty and caution in expressing my needs. It has to be something that actually is a deep seated desire that I have. So I’ve got to avoid self-indulgence and things that would damage my spouse. But if I’m tuned into what my wife needs, if you’re tuned in to what your wife needs or your husband, then fidelity, faithfulness to the relationship, makes us open and vulnerable to each other. It’s that lowest, the deepest level of transparency that we’ve talked about and tried to diagram with triangles and so forth and so on. Now, realism dictates that not all legitimate needs can be met.

And fidelity means living with and supporting our loved one even when there are some unmeetable needs. So here’s an example of what fidelity might look like and how it works out practically speaking. She says, I know a marriage in which she, the wife, is deathly afraid of heights, probably a true acrophobic. On the other hand, his ideal idea of a perfect vacation is climbing up a sheer rock face even since adolescence. He has spent weeks every summer climbing with a fellow who’s been that sort of friend for decades. They literally put each other’s lives in one another’s hands. She does not go along to watch because she really could not bear, could not endure to do that. But she does not begrud him the time or the expense or the danger.

He needs his rock climbing.

She cannot fathom why. But she accepts that he does because he’s been clear about that. And she makes no complaint about it. Thereby she shares in the spiritual and emotional renewal that he achieves. Or to put it this way, she shares the high, if not the height. Now imagine a situation like that in which now the woman comes and says, Here’s something that I need. What would you expect the reaction to be from someone who has expressed his need and had that granted without any kind of recrimination or anything like that? My guess is that he’s going to move heaven and earth to see that she gets what she needs. Because that’s the kind of relationship that this sort of trust builds. Now, when does the trapdoor stop or drop?

5. Let’s Talk About Forgiveness

Is it uh 9 50? Do I have five more minutes? Okay, very good. Um let’s talk a little bit about what happens when a relationship does not work out that way. When maybe bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor, or maybe a sexual affair, or whatever. Let’s talk for just a moment about forgiveness. I’m going to quickly work through this. It’s in the workbook if you want to have a look at it. I think maybe Betty has already been over this with the women. But forgiveness, biblically speaking, let me get back to the beginning here. Uh, this is actually again from a secular author who stumbled upon some biblical truths. An example of human wisdom, sometimes corresponding with divine wisdom, has done all kinds of studies about forgiveness.

And forgiveness, in some ways, I mean, there are biblical texts that tell us that it’s yes we we have to do that because God requires it. But there are some benefits to the person who does the forgiving. Uh, as the song says, if you carry that around with you, it’ll eat you up inside. If you cannot learn to forgive even the most grievous kind of a sin. Forgiveness is the peace that you learn to feel when you allow yourself to let go of anger and hurt. Let all anger and wrath and clamor and bitterness put that away. Well, that’s what this research supports. Move forward with your life. It’s really about you, not about the offender. It’s about not letting the offender, the person who has done some grievous wrong against you, maybe your husband or wife, but whoever it might be, this applies in broader context as well.

Don’t give them emotional control of your life. Don’t put them in your emotional driver’s seat, if you will. Put that anger away. Learn to take back your power and your life to live as God intends you to live and to take responsibility for what you feel, to be in control of that, to make peace with the truth. That’s what forgiveness does and is, if you look at it in terms of this model. Forgiveness is really about, in some sense, your healing. It’s also about what other people have done, but it’s not about necessarily who hurt you. Luskin talks about becoming a hero rather than a victim or a survivor. I don’t necessarily like that language, but what his point is is this is a trainable, learnable skill, kind of like throwing a baseball or shooting on a hoop.

Everybody can learn to do this. And there’s hope in that when people are so consumed with anger and grief and so forth that they say, I just can’t get rid of that. I can’t, I can’t control this. What he’s saying is, yes, you can. And you can do it for your own good. It’s about improving your mental and physical health, and it’s a choice. Now, if you spit flip the coin and look at it another way, what this is saying is forgiveness is not about condoning unkindness. It’s not saying we’re going to excuse poor behavior and just forget about it. Or no. The thing about forgiveness is it acknowledges that somebody did something wrong. But I am going to choose to forgive that wrong and not carry that anger around as a ball and chain.

It’s not about forgetting that something, yes, something painful happened. That’s what makes forgiveness in some way so revolutionary because you don’t excuse the behavior or forget about it. You don’t deny or minimize your hurt. You don’t give up your feelings. And it’s not always about reconciling with the offender. I know that’s controversial with some Christians. You know, sometimes you can’t find the offender. We’ve known of cases where uh one in particular where Christians were killed in a drunk driving accident, and both the occupants of the other car got off scot-free because it couldn’t be proven who was actually driving. They survived. So how do you how do you forgive in a case like that? Well, it’s not always about reconciling with the offender. And particularly in cases, and I’m I’m almost out of time, let me close with this.

Conclusion

It might even be cases of egregious sexual abuse, where it may not be possible, it just may not be possible for the for the individuals to to reconcile. I’m trying to delink the idea of forgiveness from reconciliation. Forgiveness can occur even sometimes when reconciliation uh cannot. Well, there’s more in the in the workbook, and I’m gonna leave it with you because my time has expired. I appreciate very much the time and attention that you have paid to this series where we’re trying to share some practical ideas and suggestions about how do we accomplish what the Bible tells us we must do, and what are some practical benefits of that? So we’ll take a break and then begin our uh class service. Do we close with a prayer?

Is that all right? Why don’t we bow together as we’re Ken, would you lead us? Would you mind to leave us, please? Let us pray. My dear God and Father in heaven, we’re so thankful that you’ve loved us enough to allow us to be the bride to your son. That you’ve showed us that love and that faith and that fidelity. We pray, Father, that we will in our own feeble ways reciprocate. We’re so thankful that you modeled in that relationship the relationship that we should have with one another as husband and wives. Bless us in this endeavor. Bless us in our studies this weekend, and bless us in the hard part in putting it into practice in our individual lives and marriages. Continue to love us, continue to forgive us and bless us as you see fit.

In Christ’s name we pray. Amen.