Good News for Marriage | Good News for Every Family | Pastor Joe Coffey

Ephesians 5:22 through 33.

Ephesians 5:22–33

Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord.

For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ

is the head of the church, his body and is himself its Savior.

Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything

to their husbands.

Husbands,

love your wives, as Christ loved the church

and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her having cleansed her

by the washing of water with the word so that he might present the church

to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle, or any such thing,

that she might be holy and without blemish in the same way.

Husbands should love their wives as their own bodies.

He who loves his wife loves himself.

For no one ever hated his own flesh,

but nourishes and cherishes it just as Christ does the church.

Because we are members of his body.

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 am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.

However, let each one of you love his wife as himself and as the wife.

See that she respects her husband.

Hey everybody.

Good morning and welcome to Christ Community Chapel.

So, so glad that you're here.

Thanks for coming.

Before I get into the message, let me just tell you this.

If you are a member here at CCC

and in just about a month, you're going to be asked to vote on

the transition of the position of senior pastor from myself to Pastor Zach.

We've been talking about this for a while, and if you're a member,

you should have gotten an email this past week with a video.

It's a short video.

You're going to get an email with a short video each week for the next four weeks.

And each other video is designed to tell you something

about how the preparation was for the transition, the mechanics

of the transition itself, and then what's going to happen afterwards.

We want to try to communicate as clearly as we can, what's going on?

For most of you, it won't seem like much of a change.

Because I'll still be around.

I'll still be preaching the same amount.

But in another way, it is a big change.

It starts a new chapter for our church.

Chapter one for our church was,

Jim Colledge, who is our founding pastor.

He was the senior pastor during chapter one.

And then it transitioned to me.

And then I have been the senior pastor for chapter two.

And now it's about to transition, hopefully to Pastor Zach.

And he will be the senior pastor for chapter three.

And I know that Pastor Jim, he prayed that chapter two

would be better and more exciting than chapter one.

I know I'm praying that chapter three will be better and more exciting.

The chapter two in chapter two has been great

I but I really expect it to be even better and that's the way it's looking.

So I just want to let you know what was going on.

If you're not a member and you want to know

kind of what the videos say, they're on our website.

All right. Okay.

This is the second message of our four part series.

We are calling Good News for Families.

And today we're going to talk about marriage.

And if you are married, of course, this applies to you.

If you're single and you are hoping one day to get married,

then this should be very helpful as you start

to think about marriage or prepare for marriage.

If you're single and for whatever reason you don't see marriage in your future,

there is still good news for you this morning, I promise.

Just wait.

The passage we had read to us, Ephesians chapter

five, is the longest passage on marriage in the whole Bible,

gives more instructions than anywhere else.

Those of us who officiate weddings, we use Ephesians five a lot

because it gives instructions both to the husband and the wife.

Here are the three points that I want to use

as an outline, just to kind of carry our time together.

I want to talk about the simple part of marriage and of this passage.

I want to talk about the hard part.

And then finally, I want to talk about the wonderful part,

the simple, the hard,

the wonderful first, the simple part.

We want to say simple.

This is like the foundation of marriage that you can get out of this passage.

The first is that marriage is God's idea.

There are three aspects that I put in the simple category.

Marriage is God's idea, and that means that

he's the one who designed it.

It wasn't some cultural construct that some primitive culture

came up with a long time ago, and it's kind of carried through the ages.

God started it way back in Genesis chapter two with Adam and Eve.

This is before sin ever entered the world.

This is what it says. This is Adam speaking.

It says the man said, this at last is bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh.

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

Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother

and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.

The reason I say that God designed marriage is that there are a lot of things

where the Bible doesn't talk much about, let's say, schools

or community centers or hospitals.

The Bible doesn't regulate those because God didn't invent those.

He left that up to us.

But marriage is his.

That means that if you decide to go against God's design

or God's definition of marriage, you do so

at your own peril.

It's like if I buy a car and I throw away the owner's

manual and I say, I know it says I should put oil in here,

but I'm going to put peanut butter because I love peanut butter.

That will not go well with the way the car is designed.

If you decide to try to do marriage

in a way that God did not design it, you are heading for trouble.

That's the first aspect of the simple part.

The second is that marriage is based on a promise, not a feeling.

It's a promise.

I have officiated a lot of weddings

over the years, and, early on,

I would always start the wedding ceremony the same way.

I would say, dearly beloved, we are gathered here in the sight of God,

the presence of these witnesses to unite these two in the bonds of holy wedlock.

And then my next line was always our friends,

we have come here to celebrate love.

And then I realized that wasn't true.

So if I did your wedding and I started out like that, sorry.

Yeah,

that.

Because I realized that no one gathers at a wedding

to hear a couple say how much they love each other, right?

Then you gather at a wedding to witness a promise of how

things are going to be 20, 30, 40 years after that death.

And the reason you make a promise is that a promise is not fickle,

and feelings are.

I don't care how much you love your fiance and you think that you will never have

a different feeling, you're going to feel something different someday.

That's why you make a promise everyone's well,

somebody will be in my office and they'll say, you know what I have?

I no longer love my spouse.

And with as much compassion as I can muster, I say, I don't care.

That's not what you said when you stood up.

You said, I promise.

And promises aren't fickle.

So feelings go up and down, but not the promise.

The third thing aspect, it goes in.

The simple part, is that a marriage relationship is supposed to have priority.

That's what it says in verse 31.

It says, therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast.

The old fashioned word was

and shall cleave to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

That word cleave, is the word for being glued together.

The Bible didn't talk about any other human relationship like this.

So this is different.

Your relationship with your spouse is different than

and so nothing should take priority.

No other human relationship.

Not the one with your parents and sometimes people

I have trouble with that if they come particularly from a good family.

But then sometimes people are not so not

so bad about separating from their parents to cleave to each other.

But then they have children, and slowly the children become the priority

in the family instead of the relationship between the husband and the wife.

And of course, that's a problem

because the Bible says that one day those children grow up

and they're supposed to leave and cleave to somebody else.

But the third thing that can kind of get involved

in a priority of a marriage is, of course, work a job.

Scottie Scheffler, who is the world's number one

golfer and has been for over 100 weeks in a row, is amazing.

Golfer.

He said something that shocked people about a month ago.

He said,

my marriage and my

family are more important to me than golf.

And the day golf gets between me and my wife

and my children is the day I quit golf.

And everyone like, what?

Right.

You're the number one golfer in the world.

Tim Keller, the late pastor

from Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City.

He wrote he and his wife, Kathy, wrote probably the best book on marriage

I've ever read.

It's called The Meaning of Marriage.

And I remember him telling a story about,

when he first went to New York City to plant the church.

Planting a church takes an enormous amount of time.

And so he told his wife, Kathy, listen,

for the next three years or so, you won't see much of me.

I'm just going to be busy planting this church.

But after three years, things will settle down and get back to normal.

And he came home, one evening,

around four years later,

and he came home to his apartment and he heard some crashing out on the balcony,

and he went out on the balcony and his wife, Kathy,

was sitting on the floor of the balcony and taking saucers.

Their their wedding China one at a time

and putting him in front of her and smashing him with a hammer.

And he said, what are you doing?

And she said, I'm getting your attention.

And he said, okay, okay, stop.

You have my attention. What do you want to tell me?

And she said, you said three years.

It's been four years.

What she was saying is,

if we keep doing it the way we're doing it, you keep doing it

the way you're doing it.

This marriage will not survive.

It's not the way God designed it.

Just to finish the story that later on he said to her,

you must have been really upset to be smashed in our wedding China.

And she said,

I was only smashing the saucers where the cups had already been broken.

I'm not an idiot.

And I thought that was funny.

So if you're married,

when you get home from church today, it might be good to sit down

and just say to your spouse, how are we doing?

Do you feel like our relationship

is more important than our relationship with our parents?

Do you think our relationship has priority over our children?

Do you think our relationship has is more important than our jobs?

All right, that's the simple part.

Now we get to the the hard part.

You know, the Bible or in seminary they tell you

when you read the Bible, make sure you read it in context.

It's kind of dangerous to open up the Bible and just point to some place

and start to read it.

Be like opening up an email and trying to read right in the middle of the email

and reading something like, you've always been like this.

You don't know whether that's a compliment or a criticism.

Not until you read the context. Same thing with the Bible.

Right before

the Apostle Paul starts all these instructions about marriage,

the passage before he's talking about being filled by the spirit.

And when he talks about being filled by the spirit, that's somebody

who understands the gospel, who Jesus is and what Jesus has done for them

to such an extent that the gospel has gone deep enough

where they're opening their lives more and more

to the to the Spirit of God.

And the last verse right before he starts the passage on marriage,

it says this submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.

What Paul is assuming is that two Christians who are about to get married

have already gotten the gospel deep enough into their system that they know

what it feels like to serve someone else, do not have themselves in the center.

And that's what it means when you submit one to another, submit to someone else.

The hard part about marriage

is that self-centredness is the number one

problem of every marriage.

Selfishness.

Number one problem in your marriage.

If you're married.

I remember reading a book on marriage years ago

where the author said that the reason that selfishness is so easy

to have happen in a marriage is he said, when when you get engaged, you

when you find the person that you want to marry you, you usually find them

because they make you feel different than anyone else has ever made you feel.

They do something for you

that no one has ever been able to do.

And so you say, that's who I want to marry.

And this author said that can easily shift into what he called

a tick on a dog syndrome, where a tick finds a host

and then pulls out what they need from that host and what this author said.

The problem with most marriages is that there are two ticks and no dog.

Right? And that's true.

Self-Centredness is the

major problem in any marriage.

Show me two people

who have put the other person

and their needs in front of their own.

I will show you a great marriage.

Show me two people who are married who put their own

needs in front of the person they're married to.

I'll show you a terrible marriage.

All right.

I remember hearing about a guy who had a dream.

And in that dream, he went to hell.

And in hell there was this.

What he saw was this huge banquet table with all this amazing food.

But everybody was starving, and they were screaming, and they were in agony.

And he realized the reason was because, on their hands, they had three foot

long forks and they couldn't get the food into their mouth.

Right.

And in that same dream, then the guy went to heaven

and he saw the same banquet table, same food.

People were laughing and singing and having just a blast.

And he realized they had the same forks, three foot long forks on their hands.

But instead of trying to feed themselves,

they were feeding the person across from them.

And the point of

that story is, in some ways, there's not a huge difference

between heaven and hell.

In some ways, that's a huge difference.

Same thing with marriage, right?

Show me two people who are saying, you know what, I'm

going to deal with my own self-centeredness.

So this is the hard thing about what I said about self-centeredness

being the problem in marriage.

If, if, when I said that your immediate thought was of your spouse

and you're thinking, yeah, they're a problem, you know what?

You're probably the problem.

That's the kicker.

Because if you thought, you know what, I am self-centered.

You're the problem.

And if you thought they're the ones

that are problem, you're probably still the problem.

And this is what happens if with the gospel.

The gospel is supposed to go deep enough inside of us

that we realize that our deepest needs

are met by Jesus so we can afford to go ahead

and care about the other person

and see them and serve them.

All right.

The second aspect of the hard part is that there are different roles

for husband and wife, and you probably notice that, right?

They're not interchangeable.

God doesn't say, husbands, love your wives, wives love your husbands.

He says, husbands, love your wives.

Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands.

And that's hard. Listen, wait.

Before I go any further, if you're a husband and you have used that verse

to serve your own self-centeredness, shame on you.

Stopping to misuse Scripture is one of the worst things to do,

and that scripture does not mean that she becomes your servant.

But there has to be a reason

why God doesn't say, husbands, love your wives, wives love your husbands.

And this is what I what clicked for me

years ago.

I heard a psychologist, at a lecture, and he was saying that,

in every human being, there are two basic needs, every human being.

You have these two basic needs, the need to be loved

and the need to feel significant, important.

Right.

And this particular psychologist said, listen,

every human being has those two needs.

But the average woman, and this is the difference that he said

was between genders.

If the average woman had to choose between

feeling really loved or feeling really important

and significant, the average woman would choose to feel loved.

If the average man had to choose between feeling really loved

or really significant and important, the average man would choose

to feel significant and important.

If you've heard me preach, you know I like to, I think in analogies

and I love props.

And what struck me when I heard this, this is what's helped me

is I thought, okay, if every time,

I needed to feel a person needed to feel loved,

instead of having someone tell you that that they loved you, or show affection

toward you, or write you a note, you needed a red M&M.

And every time you needed to feel significant or important,

you didn't need a promotion or somebody to say you're doing a good job

or somebody say, I'm proud of you, you needed a green M&M.

That would mean

when you woke up in the morning, the very first thing you would do before

you got coffee, you would go and you'd find Your Eminence and you'd get

have some red ones, have some green ones, because then you would feel great.

You would feel full, right?

Wars would be fought over red and green.

That mean that visibly the most important commodities in the world.

That's what

this passage says at the very end.

However, let each of you love his wife.

Fill her with red ones

and let the wife

see that she respects her husband.

Fill him with green ones.

And this would help me.

Ever since I had that kind of epiphany I began,

I would wake up in the morning and I would think of my wife as an empty jar.

And then my job was to fill her with red ones

and have a net positive at the end of the day of red ones,

like so, the first thing I do in the morning, and if you've heard me

speak about marriage, you know that I do this as I make coffee

and I bring, a cup of coffee up and I put it on the nightstand next to

because she loves coffee,

and I want her to know that I thought of her the first thing in the morning.

And I'm doing that to sort of.

What I'm doing is putting a couple of red ones in the jar before she even wakes up,

so that when I mess up later on, I'm just back to zero.

Every time my wife says to me

that she's proud of me when she says it in front of people,

it's like a bunch of of green ones.

So let me tell you this.

If you're married and you will go 30 days, 30 days,

I'm saying I'm going to focus on having a net positive.

And as you go to bed at night, husbands, you ask your wife,

do you feel more loved now

than you did when we woke up this morning?

And if she says yes, 30 days in a row,

then you have changed her marriage.

If the husband if the wife says,

do you feel like I am more proud of you, that I'm more excited

about your success than I was this morning?

And he says, yes, you will revolutionize your marriage.

This is

if you will say, my selfishness is the problem.

Not not my wounds, not my past, not even how I'm being treated.

But I'm going to work on that with Jesus,

and then I'm going to serve the other person,

and I'm going to fill them with whatever I can.

So they will feel loved, so they will feel significant.

There's no there's no limit to what your marriage can become.

Right now.

We get to the wonderful part.

Paul says something right in the middle that is great.

He says this husbands, love your wives.

As Christ loved the church, gave himself up for her that he might

sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word.

So he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle,

or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.

And then he jumped down.

It says, this mystery is profound, and I'm saying

that it refers to Christ and the church.

What Paul does in the middle of this talking about marriage, he likens marriage

to the way Jesus loves the church, the way Jesus loves us.

The very

central message of the Bible is called the gospel,

which is what Jesus has done for us.

And the gospel is captured in a bunch of different places in the Bible.

But I love the way Romans five eight puts it.

And I'll use this in my wedding ceremony

says, But God demonstrates his love toward us,

and that while we were still sinners,

Christ died for us.

What that means is that when you were at your very worst,

God loved you the very most.

When I took my vows before a pastor,

when I got married to my wife Karen, I said this.

I promise I will love you

for better or for worse,

for richer, for poorer,

in sickness and in health.

And when I said to her, I will love you for better or for worse.

What I was saying is, when you were at your worst,

you can count on me

to love you the way Jesus loves me,

because that's the way God designed marriage.

The wonderful thing about marriage is that it gives us

the opportunity, gives me the opportunity to love my wife.

Just a little bit the way Jesus loves her.

And my wife can love me when I'm at my worst,

and I can feel what it feels like in a concrete way,

the way Jesus loves me.

And that is astounding.

You know what marriage is supposed to be, at

its best is a reflection of the love of Jesus.

It's a pale reflection.

I always think that marriage is a little bit like,

like a model car, like a little matchbox Porsche.

And Jesus is the real thing.

He is the portion.

This is the good news for those of you who are single,

is that you have the real thing,

right?

If you had to choose between the real thing and the pale

imitation, you would choose the real thing

every day and twice on Sunday.

And you have the real thing every once while somebody, well,

who has had a great marriage

and their spouse dies,

they'll say, I can't wait to get to heaven to see my spouse again.

And I get that.

I really do.

But I want you to know

that your love that you had with your spouse,

your spouse had for you is just just a tiny taste.

Like you get to heaven, your spouse will be like a candle,

and Jesus will be like the blazing sun.

And when you get to heaven, you will run towards the blazing.

You might run with the candle to the blazing sun, but you are made for that.

You are made for Jesus.

Listen, marriage, and as much as it is a reflection

of the love of God for you, is great,

but it's not Jesus.

And when my wife, when I.

I want the chance to love her the way Jesus loves her,

which means I am keeping this what I'm Susie.

I'm so to keep my eyes peeled for when she's at her worst.

Because that's my time to shine, right?

And when when I do that, I want her to feel just a drop

of the love of Jesus, the fountain of love that Jesus has.

For when I am at my worst and my wife loves me still,

but I want it to make me love her more, for sure.

But even more than that, I want it to remind me of the love of Jesus.

Because what?

When I am at my worst and she loves me, that love comes right from him,

right from him.

And so that's good news for every family.

It's good news for you, wherever you are.

It's good news for me.

Would you pray with me?

Father in heaven.

Thank you for this thing that you designed called marriage.

Thanks that you made it

so that it is supposed to be

this reflection of your love.

I pray for all of us.

I pray that you would, help us with the the simple and the hard

and the wonderful part of marriage.

I pray that those who are single will realize

the deep love, the real thing that they already have.

Jesus, thanks and thanks for Jesus.

We pray this in his name. Amen.