The Mystery of Marriage

I am I'm so thankful to be uh kicking off our our our series on marriage from Ephesians chapter five.

We're calling Till Death Do Us Part.

And um it reminds me of something a lady said to me one time, she said, Over 30 years of marriage, she was never once tempted to divorce her husband.

She was tempted to murder a couple times, but never, never divorced.

So try not to read too much into this Till Death Do We Part, and uh as we begin this morning.

Our sermon is going to be titled The Mystery of Marriage, and we're taking our text from Ephesians 5 towards the end of that chapter in verses 31 through 32, The Mystery of Marriage.

Before we read that, I want us to get a mental picture in mind.

Um, marriage counselor John Henderson uh said he asked his readers in his book to imagine that God were to walk up to you and hand you this device, something like you've never seen anything like it.

It was ornate and it was beautiful and it looked like it was full of all kinds of potential.

And he says, This gift is a treasure that you can choose to receive or to reject.

And but if you do choose to receive this strange, curious, beautiful thing that's infinitely valuable, just know that you have to use it properly.

If used properly, it'll be an unbelievable blessing to your life.

If used improperly, it'll immediately explode.

And so you probably have lots of questions in your mind, right?

What does it mean?

Like, what's the purpose of this device?

It sounds like it's something I don't want to miss out on, but what is it for?

Does it fit into something bigger?

Is it an independent independent device?

Um, what's its design?

What's its function?

What exactly role will it play in my life?

And what do I need to do to make sure it doesn't explode?

Well, of course, we're talking about marriage.

We're talking about this beautiful gift that God has given us that is full of so much value, it truly is a treasure, and there's it can provide us the highest of highs, but it can also provide us the lowest of lows.

It can bless us or it can wreck us.

And so the very biggest question we should be asking this morning as we approach the idea of marriage is what does its creator, God, design it for?

How should it function in my life, and how how can I handle it correctly?

With this in mind, let's look at our text in Ephesians chapter 5, verse 31.

Ephesians 5:31

Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

This mystery is profound.

And I'm saying that it refers to Christ and the church.

Paul is simultaneously going to ground the meaning and the function of marriage in two other marriages.

The very first marriage between Adam and Eve, and the very last marriage between Christ and his church.

Verse 31, in fact, is a direct quotation from Genesis 2.24, where the writer of Genesis, Moses, summarizes the significance of God giving Adam his wife Eve, and that she was created out of Adam's own body.

Verse 32, of course, refers to the eternal marriage of Jesus Christ to his bride, the church.

And so to get at what Paul is instructing us towards in these very short two verses, because after this, in the next few weeks, there'll be more sermons on the verses that come before when one is stealing one's thunder.

We're going to look briefly at the very first marriage and the very last marriage and to see how ours fits with those.

So with this in mind, let's turn back to Genesis chapter two and look at what the writer there says in verses, we'll read verses 20 through 24.

Genesis chapter 2.

Genesis 2 · chapter mention

The man named Adam, that God gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens, and to every beast of the field.

But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him.

So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept, God took one of his ribs, and he closed it up, closed up the place with flesh.

And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man, he made into a woman, and brought her to the man.

Then the man said, This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.

She shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man.

And here's the summary statement.

Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

In verse 35, and the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.

So you see, this conclusion to the passage in Genesis is a summary of what God intended to bring about and to create when he created the very first marriage.

We see as the narrative unfolds that Adam had just named, he'd as the first scientist, so to speak, he'd just brought about the first classification of life called taxonomy.

He names the animals, he categorizes them according to their kind.

He sees that there's a male and female of all the animals, from the lizard that crawls on the ground to the to the giraffes and elephants, there's male and female.

And after naming all these animals and classifying them and exercising uh taxonomic uh dominion over all of them, he realizes at the end of the day that he's got nobody.

Nobody to lean on in the words of Queen, right?

Come on, someone knows Queen, right?

Nobody to lean on.

Um, can we get some guitar up here?

Um that's not in my notes.

So Adam names all these animals, and I think God very intentionally did not create Eve alongside Adam at the beginning.

He wanted Adam to come to this moment of discovery that he was alone, and that wasn't a good thing.

There were no other humans on the face of the earth except Adam, and God allows Adam, after naming all these animals, to realize, huh, where's my companion?

Where's my female companion that that corresponds with me?

He's the scripture says there was not found for him a fitting or suitable companion.

And so God mercifully says, All right, Adam, it's time for surgery.

Puts the mask over his face, he goes to sleep, and while he's asleep, God takes a rib from his side.

Very interesting that he takes a rib from his side.

I know a lot of times we think about that story, God creating the first woman out of Adam's rib.

You may think it's sort of fanciful or mythical, but it was very, very intentional for God to create the first woman from Adam, not by speaking her into existence like he had Adam himself from the dust to the ground.

What's the significance?

Matthew Henry speaks about this, and he says, it's very important the fact that God does not take a bone from Adam's body from his foot so that man would trample over her and she would be subservient to him.

It's important that he doesn't take a bone from his skull so that she rules over him and dominates him.

He takes it from his side, underneath his arm, and close to his heart.

Maybe poetic language, but the idea is the fact that from Adam's own body, God fashioned the first woman to make them one flesh.

You couldn't be any more one flesh than to literally have been created from another's body.

And so Mad Adam, he he proclaims when he wakes up from his stupor anesthetic and he sees this beautiful woman in front of him.

And at last, after having seen all the animals and there being no humans and probably nothing he was attracted to, he sees this beautiful woman and he says, At last, I have someone who's bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.

She shall be called, and he exercises authority over her.

He gives her a name, he calls her Esha because she was taken from Esh.

In Hebrew, that's male or that's man and woman.

She was his Esha, and he was Ish.

Sometimes Brandy and I will call each other my Ish or my Esha, just to be funny.

At last he had his fitting, complimentary, corresponding female companion.

It is that moment in human history, that light bulb moment that God had brought together into a covenant relationship, this first man, this first woman, to be one flesh.

That Paul quotes in Ephesians chapter 5 and verse 31.

Ephesians 5 · chapter mention

Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

This, this what?

This union of two becoming one, this is a profound mystery.

And I am saying that it, this idea of humans and marriage becoming one flesh, refers to Christ in the church, or we could even say points to, has as its reference point, is an expression of, a display of, a picture of the greater reality of Christ and his church.

And so we see in verse 31, Paul is alluding to the significance of Adam and Eve becoming one flesh, God taking Eve literally from Adam's body.

And then in verse 32, we see something astounding.

He links that very first marriage of two humans, Adam and Eve, to the ultimate marriage, to the marriage between Jesus Christ and his bride, the church.

Matthew chapter 19, Jesus says something that I find a little bit sad, but when I think about it, but that Brandy and I are not going to be married in heaven.

Matthew 19 · chapter mention

Kind of breaks my heart.

But it's going to be even better for both of us, especially for her.

She'll be married to Jesus and me too.

Jesus says in Matthew 19 that humans in the afterlife are going to be like the angels of God.

They will not be given in marriage anymore, because there'll be one bride and one groom, and that is Jesus Christ in his church.

And if you're a believer in Jesus, you're part of that bride.

Our marriages are temporary pointers to signposts pointing to the great reality to which we are all progressing.

Remember when I was a kid in uh, you know, a teenager in South Georgia, we we would see someone driving down the road in the truck.

And you knew a couple was dating because the girl would be sitting so close to the guy, he'd have his arm around her and he's driving in this tall truck, and uh it had to have some mud on the sides, right?

And we would have this expression we would call, we would say, that's one body and two heads.

Oh, there's one body and two heads.

In other words, they're sitting a little too close, right?

And you knew they were married because uh if they were married, because the wife would be sitting on her side as far close to the door as possible, and he'd be sitting over here.

This one uh one man and his wife, she came to him and she complained.

She said, Husband, honey, don't you remember whenever we were dating?

And we always sat close together.

We were near each other.

You put your arm around me.

She's like, For example, you know, you used to put your arm around me in the truck.

He's like, Honey, I haven't moved an inch.

You're the one that moved over there.

The very first fall of mankind in the garden was Adam blaming things on Eve and her blaming things on someone else, and it still goes on today.

The very first marriage, the very last marriage, and then your marriage is somewhere in between.

And we are intended by God in Ephesians 5, 31 and 32 to take our cues from both.

Paul remarkably declares that God designed human marriages to be a microcosm of a cosmic reality too grand for us to imagine, namely the great marriage between God's Son and his church.

This is the main idea of our text today.

That marriage, your marriage, my marriage, if you're married today, or if you're maybe one day going to be married, it pictures our union with Christ.

Our union in marriage pictures our union with Christ.

That's what God designed it for.

The one flesh reality that God created and that he still creates today, every time a man and a woman enter into covenant marriage, is meant to be a display, albeit in fallen and finite ways, right?

Aren't we all witnesses of that?

That we don't live up to this picture.

But nonetheless, are called to picture the spiritual union believers have with Jesus.

Some of you this morning uh love the doctrine of union with Christ.

Others are like union with what?

The doctrine of union with Christ is one of the most important doctrines in all the New Testament.

It often gets overlooked because it's literally the unifying theme that sort of brings together all the other doctrines.

So it's more tempting to sort of focus on all the doctrines.

Union with Christ, if we were to use our common parlance, union with Christ is like you getting married to Jesus with no prenup.

You become one with Christ in all the important ways, and everything he is and has becomes yours.

You're married to him.

That's union with Christ, and it's it's not that easy.

It started before time began when God chose you according to Ephesians 1 and verse 6.

He chose you in Christ Jesus to be represented in him, to be enveloped by him, to be married and wed to him, so that you'd be with him forever and you'd be without blame before him in love.

It progresses to the time when Jesus Christ comes to earth and he on the cross, he bears the sins of his bride.

And God looks at Jesus and he sees the sins of his bride.

And then having been plunged under the blood of Jesus Christ, God looks at the bride who used to be soullied and dirty and covered in sin, and he sees the perfect righteousness of Jesus.

This is the love story God is telling every time two humans become one in marriage.

Union with Christ is a doctrine that's mentioned by the Apostle Paul himself over 200 times in the New Testament epistles.

The gospel writer John, in his epistles, he mentions it two dozen times.

You'll see it appear in phrases like the fact that believers are in Christ, or in the Lord, or in him.

The fact that we are preserved in Christ, found in Christ, sanctified in Christ, walking in the Spirit of Christ, laboring with Christ, and participating in his work that he calls us to as ambassadors of Christ.

All this different terminology, 200 different ways of saying it.

We are in Christ Jesus.

We are wed to Christ by faith through the Spirit.

It is the Spirit of Jesus Christ that indwells us, that unites us to Jesus by faith.

The Spirit, monergistically, if you want to, one-sidedly, comes into our lives and grabs a hold of us, gives us the gift of faith, and then we see Jesus all of a sudden as this unbelievably stunning, attractive, checks all the boxes, 10 out of 10, and we run after him.

Being wed to Christ by faith through the operation of the Spirit, we call that union with Christ.

Notice that Paul calls in our text human marriages picturing this unspeakable reality.

He calls it a profound mystery.

We often think about mystery in terms of we'll never know who done it, right?

The smoking gun, but you'll never find the weapon.

Or maybe a mystery that, yeah, we can talk about it and just about around the edges, but we'll never understand it.

No, actually, what he means by mystery here is something that we actually do understand, maybe not fully because it's too great for us, but we understand what he's talking about.

It's just been something that had been hidden for generations and ages, and has now been revealed to us in the gospel.

This is how the apostle Paul numerous times refers to this great mystery.

For example, in Ephesians chapter 3, he's talking about his own apostleship that God called him to be an apostle to make known to the world things that had been hidden from generations.

Ephesians 3 · chapter mention

3 verse 6 has this to summarize it.

This mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.

It's a huge in Christ, union with Christ kind of passage.

Notice this.

He's saying that the Gentiles, that God's bride, if you want to borrow the analogy of the bride, is now being brought from all nations, being brought into one collective body of people we call believers in Jesus.

And in so doing, they're becoming heirs, legal heirs with Christ.

They're becoming members of the same body which is the body of Christ.

They are now partakers of the promise that is in Christ Jesus when they believe the gospel.

An unbelievably amazing thing happens when someone trusts the promises of the gospel.

The Spirit uses that to unite someone in Christ Jesus.

It's like a wedding day when someone comes to faith in Jesus.

He says it again in a different way in Colossians chapter 1, verse 26.

Colossians 1:26

He says the mystery, mysterion, that which had been hidden but now revealed, the mystery hidden for ages and generations, but now revealed to his saints, to them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles, that is, non-Jews, are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.

What's the essence of this mystery?

The essence of that which had been hidden?

For generations, they've been told things that really only in retrospect you see, and you're like, oh, that was talking about Christ.

But in in looking towards Christ, they miss the fact that Isaiah chapter 9 says all the nations are gonna flow down to Jerusalem.

Isaiah 9 · chapter mention

They miss the fact that all the nations are gonna rejoice in God in Psalm 95.

They miss the fact that the Messiah was gonna be called the Messiah of the nations, that Israel was gonna be called the light to the nations.

They miss that.

Because they thought only God was gonna be, his presence was gonna be known in their one little bitty nation called Israel.

But then the gospel comes.

And Jesus goes to a Samaritan, non-Jew woman.

Jesus heals the centurion's son.

Jesus on the cross is praying that the Father would forgive not just the Jewish Pharisees, but the Father would forgive the Roman soldiers who are piercing him and flogging him and mocking him.

In the gospel we have the nations being drawn by the Spirit into the bride of Jesus Christ.

And he sums it up with this Christ in you, the hope of glory.

And Paul intends for this understanding of your marriage and of all marriages from Adam to Jesus, all those marriages, to radically transform the way we relate to our spouses.

Our marriage is not primarily to be meant to be a male-female contract that grants us secure relationship and lifelong companionship.

Although it does that.

Marriage's purpose is not primarily even meant to be a sacred and stable context in which we have children and bring them up in the world and raise them up in fulfillment of the creation mandate.

Although it does that too, and that's one of its purposes.

The reason God created marriage in this way, a unique relationship not seen in nature like anything else, is to picture the unique relationship of Jesus Christ and his bride, the church.

It is his ultimate purpose for our stories to proclaim the eternal love story of Jesus' redemption of our sins so that we would become his and he ours.

We see this language in in uh Ephesians chapter 5 earlier in the text, in fact.

Ephesians 5 · chapter mention

Just so we realize we're not just reading into the text all this idea.

This is exactly Paul's idea here in Ephesians chapter 5.

Ephesians 5 · chapter mention

Look in verse 25.

Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.

Stop right there.

Husbands, love your wives as Christ loves the church.

And notice the plurality there.

He's not saying husbands should have multiple wives.

Don't be reading that wrong.

That's we're in the wrong state for that.

Um husbands, plural, love your wives, uh, respectively, plural, right?

Notice that he says, you should love your wife as Christ loved the church.

Why would we be called upon to love our, to love my wife, for example, like Christ loves his bride?

It's because he's gonna say later in verses 31 and 32, this human marriage is a signpost pointing to that marriage.

And so we take our cues from that.

He goes on and describes it even more in verse 28.

He says, In the same way, husbands should love their wives as their own bodies.

Where is he getting that idea?

Verse 31.

Adam and Eve.

He was formed out of Adam's body.

And when they were brought together in covenant marriage, God says, You are one flesh.

You're one body.

You're two persons, you're still people, right?

I mean, the unity candle thing, or you mix the sand or light the thing.

The idea is that you're blending two lives.

Well, you know, marriage is even stronger than mixing pink sand and blue sand or something.

You literally, in the eyes of God, become a spiritual unity.

And of course, this points to another huge uh aspect of God's nature, namely, he's the Trinity.

But that's a different sermon, right?

Marriage also pictures the Trinity.

You have diversity in unity as husband and bride.

These two are now made one, but yet still diverse and complementing each other, just like the Godhead, Father, Son, Holy Spirit are three distinct persons, one in essence, complementing each other.

But that's a different sermon.

Verses 29 and 30 say this for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it.

Get Paul's argument.

He's saying, Husband, you are wed to your wife as if you are one body, because in God's eyes you are, and she to you.

And thus you don't hate your own flesh.

If you're thirsty, man, you're gonna find something to drink.

If you are hungry, you're gonna find something.

If you are sleepy, if you're worn out, you're gonna find the nearest bed you possibly can, and you're gonna crash.

That's the same care and concern we should have towards our spouse.

Because we are members of Christ's body.

That's the same concern we as believers in Jesus should have towards each other, because we're all part of his bride, and his bride is part of him.

Now, the union of marriage is typically spoken of in terms of three aspects.

And so we'll we'll follow that pattern.

Three aspects of one flesh union that scripture speaks about.

The first is spiritual union.

Spiritual union in marriage is the foundation upon which everything else is built.

Spiritual union is when a husband, or let's say a bachelor, and a bachelorette are believers in Jesus, and so they're already united to Jesus through faith.

They're indwelt by the Spirit, they are followers of Christ, they are disciples, and then they get married.

There's a spiritual union that takes place between two believers in the covenant of marriage, which is why the Apostle Paul says, you know, in 2 Corinthians chapter 6, he says, Why would you go see a prostitute and become one flesh with someone who's not a believer?

2 Corinthians 6 · chapter mention

Why would you do that?

That's against everything for which you exist.

In 1 Corinthians chapter 7, he says it's so important that believers, when they marry, that they marry in the Lord.

1 Corinthians 7 · chapter mention

And by this he means, he says you must avoid marrying someone who's not a believer in Jesus.

This isn't saying that we're better than other people and we're not sinners and those kinds of things.

This is saying that there's something fundamentally different between someone who's united to Christ and someone who persists in alienation from Christ.

And he even uses an example in farming, a farming example, to sort of drive this point home.

He says, if you're married to an unbeliever and you're a believer, it's like you're getting in a yoke, like two oxen, but you're unequally yoked.

It's like a baby oxen and a big oxen, or maybe it's like a donkey and an elephant.

That's a bad analogy these days.

You're pulling in different directions.

It's not the right height, one maybe stronger, and it's just not working out.

And he uses that example.

You always put two complementary oxen together and they pull in the right direction.

If you marry without one or the other being wed to Christ, you forfeit the sweetest aspect of marriage.

That is the union you share with Jesus, with one another.

There's another union, an emotional union, that we share and we picture the union we have with Christ.

Emotional union is described, I think, really well in a workbook that we elders use when we do premarital counseling put on by Austin Stone Church in Austin, Texas.

They describe it like this: God created people in his image, giving each person a unique capacity to feel and experience a wide range of emotions.

Since marriage is a union, marriage must become an emotionally safe place for each spouse to open up their hearts to one another.

In the deepest parts of our souls, we long to be accepted and loved.

God created marriage to be a place where we can be naked and unashamed before one another.

Genesis 2.25.

But sin causes us to hide and withhold.

And so part of the work of marriage is to grow in emotional oneness.

We should be so deliberate.

And this is this is remarkable.

I think about this in in my own marriage.

It's so much easier to keep my spouse, Brandy, at arm's length emotionally.

I don't want to make myself emotionally naked because I feel shame.

And honestly, that's what sin brings.

Sin militates against anything that makes for a really sweet Christ-picuring marriage.

Sin militates against it.

We hide.

We don't share our feelings.

We don't talk.

We don't communicate.

Oh, how deliberate we must be as husbands and wives to overcome all obstacles, to just acknowledge, yeah, I don't feel safe.

And maybe that's because your spouse doesn't make you feel safe.

Maybe it's because you've got a lot of shame and you just won't let them in.

That's what sin does.

That's what sin, you know, Satan is his name means the accuser.

He loves to accuse us and heap shame upon shame and keep us at arms length from our spouse.

We we must not do that.

Emotional intimacy and oneness is a grace that not only sweetens marriage, but it also, first and foremost, displays our intimate, emotional bond we have with Jesus.

And then thirdly, the physical union.

When we hear the term one flesh union, we we may even think of this one first.

The one flesh union by which you consummate the wedding.

And for good reason, because God created his sexual beings and with sexual desires, and he intends for those desires to be always and only expressed within the beautiful, sacred covenant of marriage.

And there's something so beautiful about that, and there's something so destructive outside of marriage for sexual activity.

The Apostle Paul would say, Whoever commits fornication, who commits sexual acts outside of marriage, that they sin against their own body.

Proverbs says it's like taking fire to your bones.

You ever been to a burn ward in a hospital?

Maybe not.

I'll spend a little bit of time on that.

And you see people that are burnt, 50, 60, 80% of their bodies.

You can't take sex out of its beautiful, God-ordained fireplace, take it out, light the basement on fire, see the house go up and smoke, and not be burned.

Marriage is beautiful in its place.

Excuse me, sex is beautiful in its place.

I remember meeting with a mentor before marriage years ago, and he said, Tim, I know it's tempting for you to think at this point in life, for you to think that the physical intimacy in marriage is the cake.

It's what you're marrying for, it's what you're looking forward to.

But it's not the cake, it's the cherry on top.

The cake of marriage is the spiritual and emotional relationship.

It's the actual relationship, it's the comradeship, it's the friendship.

It's you showing each other grace on a daily basis, and it's you looking out for each other and trying to meet each other's needs in other ways.

That's the cake.

And when that's healthy, the cherry on top is enjoyable.

But without that intimacy in other ways being fostered, the cake withers over time.

Little cherry falls off, and you begin to look for it elsewhere.

This withering of the cake, this withering of our relationships over time, and the more time you've been married, the more time you've had for that relationship to wither, right?

Is part of our stories today.

Our story is that marriage, our marriages often distort the beauty of our union with Christ.

Our marriages often distort the beauty of our union with Christ.

They say untrue things about Jesus.

They say, demonstrate with our words and actions untrue things, ugly things about Christ's bride.

Here are just a few ways that we could think about in terms of how we distort the union of Christ in the church.

We we do so in marriage with dishonesty.

Whether it's out of fear of being reproved or shamed, or it's because of sin and not wanting accountability, we are dishonest with our spouse.

This is this lies about Jesus because Jesus speaks truth and nothing but the truth with his bride.

It's as if we have the passwords to Jesus' iPhone and computer.

We're not hiding things from, Jesus doesn't hide things from his bride, but he tells her truth.

We can think about neglect.

We often take each other for granted.

The longer the time we have together, the more we see reason to be annoyed at each other.

And we see other, maybe younger, happier couples who haven't had as much time as us to accrue annoyances and pet peeves, and we think, man, she's not the way she used to be.

Or him.

He's not the way he used to be.

And you're probably right.

And we neglect each other.

We prioritize work or the kids above our spouse.

But Jesus never neglects or abandons his bride.

He doesn't neglect our emotional, spiritual, and physical needs, but rather he pursues us for our greatest good.

We'd be remiss to not mention abuse.

Abuse grossly distorts the beauty of Christ's tender union with his bride by physical, emotional, verbal, even financial ways that a husband or a little less often, but certainly the case sometimes, a wife can be abusive towards a husband, where they actually mistreat one or the other, or both they treat each other worse than they treat everyone else.

But Jesus always treats his bride with gentleness and strength.

I know as a man it's tempting.

If another man makes you mad, gets in your face, says some things, it's tempting to use your size.

That's kind of what you do.

Like you see two like peacocks, their fellows ruffle up and they get all angry and they start stalking around.

Guys do the same thing.

We just don't have feathers.

In relationship, it's tempting for guys to use their larger, generally, larger physical presence to intimidate their wife.

Because wives are typically a little more verbal, not always the case, but most of the time on average, a little more verbal.

And wives can slice and dice things a little more than men sometimes.

And when a guy kind of runs out of arguments, he just kind of swells up.

Now I say that kind of tongue in cheek and it's funny, but we've all probably seen that happen.

Maybe we've done that ourselves.

We've seen our dads do that.

Men should never, ever, ever use their physical strength to intimidate their wives.

Your strength ought to be your wife's safest place.

That she knows you will never leverage that strength against her.

You can get in my face, you can bow up, you can even do that to me, but never do that to your wife.

It lies about Jesus because he doesn't do that to us.

Unforgiveness, we too often have desires that turn into demands.

I want this, okay, that's a good desire.

You're only a human, but then it turns into a demand.

And then that demand turns into a judgment when you don't meet that demand, and I start evaluating you, and I start critiquing you, and I start badgering you and beating you down, and then eventually that judgment turns into a punishment.

And now we're in a cold war, keeping score, holding grudges.

This is not how Jesus called marriages to operate.

It distorts the beauty of forgiveness, of showing grace freely to one another, like Jesus shows us.

Manipulation, control.

We often misrepresent our marriage to Jesus by being domineering or critical or manipulative towards our spouse in order to get what we want out of it.

But Jesus doesn't dominate his bride, he cherishes, nurtures, and guides her for her greatest good.

Just as the church is called to follow Jesus' lead and to do so with a supportive, joyful, and affectionate heart.

Adultery.

Emotional and physical adultery.

Notice I said emotional and physical.

So sometimes you may not commit physical adultery, but your heart is with someone else, right?

Even if it's just the latest novel you're reading or the Netflix series.

Adultery breaks trust in this covenant.

And even, according to Matthew 19, breaks covenant when it's physical, and it misrepresents the great covenant marriage Jesus has with his bride, the church.

Jesus would never cheat on his bride.

And the glorified church will never cheat on Jesus.

For forever they will be in union with each other.

Indifference.

We often grow indifferent to our spouses along the twists and turns of life, but Jesus remains passionate about the church and the church passionate about him.

I thought of this the other day.

I was driving down the road and I thought, wow, this is a powerful thought.

I think that a lot.

No, I'm just kidding.

And then I share with Brandy, she's like, eh, four out of ten, I don't know.

Um if you were to treat your wife today, or if you're a woman, if you were to treat your husband today, um, if you were to, I'm trying to think out of word this.

You know how you treat your husband or your wife today?

If you were to treat him that way before marriage, would they have married you?

I mean, I'm sure there's high points and low points, but think about that in general.

The way you treat your wife today, had you treated her that way before marriage, would she say, This guy's a jerk?

He's self-centered, he's so impatient.

I'm not marrying this guy.

And the fact is, it's probably very different than the way you treated her.

And it's probably very different than the way you used to treat him.

You used to adoring and look into his eyes, and you just couldn't wait to be with him, right?

Maybe not so much anymore.

We are called, according to Revelation chapter two, to repent and to pursue our first love.

And if that relates to Christ, because by analogy, in the union with Christ and union with one another, it relates to marriage.

We are called to remember from where we have fallen and to do the first works.

Revelation chapter two.

You've left your first love.

Pursue the things you used to do to foster that relationship.

Remember, I was sitting behind one of my friends, we were good buddies, um, still are, and and uh he was a couple years ahead of me getting married, and and he was sitting a few rows ahead of me as well, and and he and his wife, throughout their whole dating relationship, he had his arm around her, and you couldn't see any light between them.

They were just kind of one body of two heads, right?

And uh, and then they got married.

Maybe six months later, I would just noticed during the sermon, huh?

They were sitting about a foot apart.

I thought maybe they had a tiff or something, you know.

The next Sunday, kind of the same thing.

And I started noticing that, you know, I remember talking to him and being like, you know, what's going on here?

And he's like, Oh, I didn't even notice, sorry.

You know, well, then the other day I this occurred to me when I was sitting with Brandy, and it just popped in my mind this memory, and then I realized I was about a foot away from her.

And I was like, it's happening, right?

We don't naturally draw closer together.

Everything in a fallen world, from our greatest enemy, Satan, to our selfishness in our hearts, to the busyness of life, to all the distractions, everything pulls us away from each other, and we have to move closer together.

And so I felt that conviction, I was like, put my arm back around her.

We need to do that in more ways than that, over and over again, so we are not pulled apart.

We withhold affection sometimes.

Spouses often don't withhold affection either as an act of punishment or just mere selfishness.

But Jesus's love for the church is relentless and her joy in him is lavish and complete.

In his book, Sacred Marriage, Gary Thomas, I think, says one of the most helpful things I've read in a long time on marriage.

He says, couples don't fall so much out of love as they fall out of repentance.

We don't so much fall out of love as we fall out of repentance.

The Hollywood narrative is that, yeah, I mean, hey, if this guy makes you feel like a queen and you're special, then you marry him.

If she makes you feel like you're awesome and competent, then you marry her.

Don't let her get away.

But then in the Hollywood narrative, the happily ever after, of course, the movies, the love stories always end with the wedding, right?

Because life is a little more messy.

It doesn't sell as many views.

But if you continue the movie and you see people start drifting apart and such, the Hollywood narrative is you know what?

Maybe you married the wrong person.

Maybe you missed your soulmate.

In fact, your soulmate's probably out there somewhere looking for you right now.

Somewhere in the ether, your soulmate is out there, a half broken heart and a half broken heart, and you just have to find them.

And then you notice that your coworker, she sure is attractive, and she is just so nice to me.

Man, if only my wife treated me like her, like she gets it.

My co-worker gets it.

I'm pretty awesome.

My wife didn't appreciate me.

And you see these bonds form or reverse the roles, and you see this is how affairs happen, this is how marriages drift apart.

When we have this false mentality that we're falling out of some mystical idea of love, instead of, wow, I'm I'm drifting from my spouse.

I'm not building into my relationship, I'm not investing anymore.

And so Revelation 2 says, hey, remember how things used to be.

Repent and do the first works.

I'm so thankful this morning that our our story, and it's all its brokenness, is not the end of our story.

Our gospel conviction is that our union with Christ reshapes our own marriages.

Our union with Christ reshapes our own marriages.

Isn't it amazing that the very thing we need to recover the way we picture Jesus' union with Christ in the church is to draw on our union with Christ as his church.

Ephesians 5, verses 25 to 27 says this husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church.

Ephesians 5:25–27

And I'm going to make this a little more personal.

How Jesus loved you and gave himself up for you, that he might sanctify you, having cleansed you by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present you to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, so that you might be holy and without blemish.

That's the end of your love story, and it's a love story that doesn't end.

The secret, the foundation of healing our own marriages and restoring grace where there's now grief and mercy where there's now misery, is for us to draw on the ultimate reality for which we were created and for which we were saved.

That is to be unified with Jesus Christ.

Jesus died on the cross to deliver us from the penalty of our sins.

And if your spouse is a believer, he died for their sins too.

His spirit has brought us into new spiritual life.

And guess what?

It's not just dormant within us, but is actively working in your wife, in your spouse, in your own heart to beautify us from the inside out.

And God has promised to perfect us just before the grand wedding day in glory, once we are glorified.

And we as the bride of Jesus Christ are once and for all perfect.

Not a wrinkle on our soul or our face, not a blemish, not a dark side of our hearts, but with open eyes and open hearts and open arms, we as the bride of Jesus Christ, dressed in white, having been cleansed by his blood, are walking with faces beaming like the sun into his arms forever.

That's the end of your love story.

Oh, that that would give us the kind of inspiration in the small echoes of that eternity in our own relationships.

That we don't get so caught up in the difficulties of day, uh, of the day and of the mundane things of life and that she's not meeting my needs, he's not meeting my needs.

We need to work on communication.

Let's let's start with who are you?

What is God doing in you?

What is your destiny?

You know what?

That's my destiny too.

And talk about the power of that kind of grace flowing into your life when you can look at another fallen, fallible human and say, I love you.

I am covenantly partnered with you for a short period of time to just picture that great love story that you and I are caught up in.

It changes everything.

John Kent in the 1800s said this in a hymn.

He said, 'Twas with an everlasting love that God, his own elect, embraced.

Before he made the worlds above her earth on her huge columns placed.

I love this line.

Then in the glass of his decrees, Christ and his bride, before time began, they appeared as one.

Her sin by imputation his, while she in spotless splendor shone.

O love, how high thy glory swell, how great, immutable, and free.

Ten thousand sins as black as hell are swallowed up, O love in thee.

That's your story.

That's my story.

And Jesus Christ is loving us with that everlasting love, immutable and free, drawing us into his arms forever.

The foundation of us showing kindness and grace to each other, investing in our relationships, no matter what comes our way.

The foundation is that we are wed to Christ.

And that we are the troubled person in that relationship.

You may be married to a different spouse, a difficult spouse.

But in relation to Jesus, you are the difficult spouse.

Jesus is perfect.

I'm a difficult spouse to Jesus.

His bride is a difficult spouse.

If ever there was one, the bride of Christ is, but he's not gonna leave her there.

The vision that Paul paints is glorious.

One day all we who belong to Christ will be changed from corruptible to incorruptible, from decaying to decadent, from sullied to stunning, and we will stand before Christ forever redeemed.

Now I want to close with our gospel vision with just two takeaway points.

And they fit really well, I think, with what we're talking about so far.

The gospel vision this morning is that our marriages model the complementarity and the oneness of Christ and the church.

Our marriages model the complementarity and the oneness of Christ and the church.

I kind of apologize for the word complementarity, kind of a big word, not one we use very often, but it's pretty simple in its meaning.

The idea of complementarity is that we elders here at Sacred Mission Church, I'm so thankful for the unity we have in this, and I know many of you we've talked about this with, we hold to a view called complementarianism, which believes that from the very beginning until the very end, there is a complementarity, a difference that fits and corresponds perfectly with the other between men and women.

And you see those differences, those distinctions in roles and relationships in marriage and in the church.

In other words, God calls husbands to unique responsibilities to which he doesn't call wives.

There's a lot of middle ground too, right?

A lot of general exhortations to husbands and wives and believers.

But God calls certain things.

He calls husband to certain things to function in marriage in ways that mirror Jesus' role towards the church, namely in sacrificial, visionary, sanctifying, tender, loving leadership.

We could add a lot more words there.

He calls men to spirits to leave their homes, like Jesus does.

And he also calls wives in distinct and equally beautiful ways to function in marriage the way the church responds to Jesus.

In joyful, strong, supportive, respectful submission to Christ's leadership and lordship.

Now, why do we say this?

Why would we have this view?

Well, number one, because it's biblical.

This is truly how Scripture speaks.

It's from the very beginning, the fact that God created Eve from Adam, that Adam gives her a name, that she, her very name is not something different than Adam, but it's actually means taken out of man, that God tells Adam, he puts him in the garden first by himself, and then then he finds him a fitting helper, from which we get the word complementarity.

All these things point from the Old Testament to the new, and then we get to the new and we see instructions on marriage in Ephesians 5 and other places, and he's saying, husbands, you do this like Christ.

Wives, you do this like the church.

Just because you're in Christ and you're saved doesn't mean there's no distinction between male and female.

In fact, those things are upheld.

And it's beautiful.

We don't look at women and expect them to be like men.

That's atrocious.

It's not who they're created to be.

We don't look at men and say you're supposed to be more like a woman.

That's atrocious.

It's not the way you were created to be.

In fact, just I'll just mention this briefly before we move on to oneness.

When you, according to the view like egalitarianism, that says, nope, in Christ Jesus, there's no more male or female, which Galatians 3 says about justification, about in Christ Jesus, me being a male is not mean I'm more righteous or less righteous than my wife, who's female.

In Christ, we all are male and female, that distinction is removed.

But in terms of relationships in the world, those things are still intact.

If you do try to blend it and come about with something called androgyny, andros and gynos, male, female, androgyny, the sort of male-female kind of life in existence, you lie about Christ in the church.

You say things like, yeah, actually, just as well as the wife should the church should follow Jesus, Jesus should follow the church.

No.

Just as well as the wife, um, uh, Jesus laid down his life for his bride, the church lays down its life for Jesus to redeem him.

Whoa, no.

You can't say that.

It distorts the gospel, it distorts the way we picture Jesus.

And so I call you at the end of this message to make those ideals biblically a reality in your home.

Husbands taking responsive leadership and wives taking responsive followership, each with their own strengths, complementing each other the way Jesus and the church do.

Finally, and lastly, this idea of oneness.

We husbands and wives must foster and strive to foster a oneness with each other, spiritually, emotionally, and physically.

Because the gospel we are preaching with our marriage hangs on that.

When we are short with our wives, when we are angry with our spouse, when we are, we treat them worse than we treat the male person, right?

When we're impatient, when we don't care about their needs, when we put ourselves first, we're saying whys about Jesus and his bride, the church.

Whether we're doing it from relational laziness or spiritual disconnectedness or emotional stonewalling or infidelity.

One final exhortation before we close.

If you're a Christian here and you're married to another Christian, I would bet money that eight out of ten times you've siloed your spiritual walks away from each other.

Husband has his walk with the Lord, reads his Bible, prays.

Wife, she has a walk with the Lord.

She reads her Bible, she prays.

So they don't do it together.

It's super common.

It's probably more common than not, right?

And it's so difficult.

As someone, as a pastor here and as knowing the value that that is, it's it's way easier for me to have some time with the Lord, just me and the Lord, than for me to invite my wife into that.

And so my challenge for all of us is to recognize that it's not just a small thing that we just live in these silos, sequestered from each other.

We can enjoy a lot of things in life, but we don't enjoy Jesus together.

No.

Brothers and sisters, let us all catch a vision for us having spiritual and emotional and physical oneness so that we would picture the intimacy Jesus has with his bride, so that what we share with Jesus, we share with each other.

I call us to that.

So that by grace, based upon Christ's relentless love and redemptive action towards us, we can nurture this morning and grow our marriages to be more fully displaying the great marriage for which we've been created and for which Jesus has redeemed us.

Let's pray.