Gender and Sexuality
Part 2. The Myths and Mysteries of Marriage
The Myths and Mysteries of Marriage
Ephesians 5:15-33
Pastor Charles Price
Let’s turn to Ephesians Chapter 5. And I am going to read from Verse 15 down to Verse 33. Ephesians 5:15. And Paul says,
“Be very careful, then, how you live – not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil.
“Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is.
“Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit.
“Speak to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.
“Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.
“Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord.
“For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior.
“Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
“Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.
“In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.
“After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church – for we are members of his body.
“For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.
“This is a profound mystery – but I am talking about Christ and the church.
“However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.”
Well that’s as far as I am going to read. Today, some of you may know, on the Christian calendar, is the Day of Pentecost. It is as important a day in the calendar as is Christmas and Easter because it is Pentecost that causes the purpose of Christmas (God becoming man) and Easter (Christ offered Himself as a substitute for our sin being buried and then raised again from the dead) so that on Pentecost the whole purpose might come to fruition where the Holy Spirit comes to live the life of Jesus Christ in the experience, in the heart, in the life of the believer.
And here in Ephesians 5 Paul gives that command:
“Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit.”
That is a command. It is not a suggestion and it’s not an option. It is a command for every Christian.
Then he talks about three things that will come out of that, that will be evidence of that.
Verse 19:
“Speak to one another.”
Your relationships will begin to grow and be healed.
“Sing and make melody in your heart to God.”
So you will have a new song that will well up within you.
And Verse 21:
“Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.”
And then he talks about the areas in which that submission will take place within marriage, within family, and within business - he talks about masters and slaves. Now we can transpose that from the context in which Paul was living to employees and employers and vice versa.
So he is saying in your relationships, in your marriage, submit to one another, husband to wife, wife to husband. In your family, parents to children, children to parents. Parents must submit to the needs of their children and meet those needs. Employers to employees. It’s not a one way submission; it is a two-way. Submit to one another. That is the context.
And that brings me to what I want to talk about this morning because I began last time a series on gender and sexuality. And I want to talk today about what I am calling “The Myths and Mysteries of Marriage”. Something for which we need the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit is the context in which Paul talks about this. He calls this a profound mystery there in Verse 32. We’ll come back to that in a moment.
The key in the context of these verses is that for a good marriage the Holy Spirit is the source, (His activity within you) and Jesus Christ and His church is the model.
Because in Verse 25 he says,
“Husbands, love your wives.”
Well what do you mean Paul, and how do I do that?
He tells us:
“…just as Christ loved the church”
And notice this:
“He gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.”
And what he is saying in these verses is that the relationship of Christ to His church illustrates the relationship in marriage of a man to his wife. And he is saying that marriage illustrates the relationship of Christ to the church.
So it’s both ways.
And so he is saying, “Husbands, if you are going to love your wives, you are going to give yourself up for her, whatever that means. That is a pricey task, expensive task.
Give yourself up for her, make her holy, keep her clean, present her as radiant, without wrinkle (some of us have difficulties with that, but that’s not about the aging process – we’re going to get wrinkles, of course we are), but as a person, without blemish, blameless.
This is a beautiful picture of what marriage does to a couple, but which tragically so often it doesn’t.
One of the great facts of life is that relationships are vital to our well-being. We need to feel connected, we need to be known, we need to be loved, we need to love. And our mental health, our emotional health, our self-esteem, our ability to function well in life is dependent on good, wholesome relationships.
As young people we dream of love. Most young people dream of a happy marriage. We may have experienced bad relationships in our own homes. We might have experienced sometimes almost non-existent relationships. But we dream of a beautiful relationship because that is so vital to us and to our well-being.
A study published by Queen’s College in New York last year that had followed people from college years through to mid-life, and this study had taken place over 40 years, following several generations of students who participated and followed them through to their 40’s. So they followed this sort of 20 year pattern over a 40 year period.
And they published it last year. And they concluded, amongst other things that were part of the survey, that throughout our adult years intimacy is the key to our sense of well-being. Not our income. Not our status in our society. Not our work life.
But the key to our sense of well-being was intimacy. And by intimacy, I am not speaking just of sexual intimacy, though that of course may be part of it, but the intimacy of mind, of soul, as well as of body.
Now there is risk in love and friendship. And the risk is, of course, that the closer we come to somebody else, the more we expose ourselves to somebody else, the more the possibility of experiencing pain in that process as well. The more meaningful the friendship, the greater the potential for joy and the greater the potential for hurt.
And whilst there are many levels of friendship and many levels of intimacy between two people, but the deepest relationship is found in marriage. And marriage is a place where you will find both joy and pain.
C.S. Lewis has written this:
“Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken at some stage. If you want to be sure of keeping your heart intact you must give it to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully around with hobbies and little luxuries. Avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the coffin of your selfishness. But in that coffin of your selfishness, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. There is risk in love.”
And I am calling what I want to say this morning “The Myths and the Mysteries of Marriage.”
And I want to talk first about the myths of marriage, taking this from these verses in Ephesians Chapter 5.
The first myth I want to talk about is that marriage is a consumer relationship. That is, it’s about getting what I want or what I need. Remember the model Paul uses is the relationship of Christ to the church. And again I read in Verse 25:
“Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her, presenting her to himself as radiant without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.”
Now that’s about Christ portraying what a husband is in the relationship of Christ to the church and the relationship of a husband to his wife. And there are eight qualities, which we are not going to talk about – you can look at them – but we could spend the whole morning looking at those eight qualities that come when a man gives himself up for his wife as Paul speaks of it there.
But this first myth is that marriage is to meet my needs. On another basis we marry because of the benefit it is going to give to me. We marry because it offers companionship. We marry because it offers sex, because it offers children, because it offers belonging, it offers an identity. We make a check list of the things I want in life and against a whole string of them we put the “to-do” bit: “Get married”. And that is going to provide me with all of those.
Now of course, all of it is true, that these are needs and desires and aspirations in our own lives and they are legitimate. But if our relationship – and especially marriage – is founded on a consumer interest, it will last only as long as my needs are being met.
And when I get tired with the particular way these needs are being met or somebody else comes along who is a little bit more exciting, a little bit different, who offers needs that are not being met, then the marriage is going to flounder and probably break.
Imran Khan is now the leader of the opposition party in Pakistan as of a week ago today and the elections they had there. Imran Khan was a famous cricketer before he became a politician and he married into a well-known wealthy British family. And it was quite a news item in Britain when he married into this family.
And at the wedding the bride’s father made a speech welcoming him into the family and saying, you know, what a competent young man he was. He was very good looking, he was rich, he was a capable sportsman, a brilliant sportsman. And he listed all these qualities.
And the bride’s father said, “I believe he will make a wonderful first husband for ___” and he named the daughter. That’s exactly what he said.
And he was absolutely right because the marriage didn’t last. Because here are two consumers coming together. You have got talent, you have got looks, you have got money, you have got influence; I want you. And you are pretty good looking yourself as well and da-da-da I want you.
And the father, whether he was wise enough or foolish enough, I don’t know if he was speaking out of wisdom or folly, but he did speak the truth.
And this is largely a view of marriage in our culture today. As long as you go on meeting my need, the marriage is good. That’s why, according to Statistics Canada, which I consulted this week, that our divorce rate in this country is 40% for first marriages.
If you add to that second marriages that fail and even third marriages and beyond that, the figure is higher.
And what I found intriguing was it gave these statistics province by province and it gave the average age at which the divorce takes place. And they were all in the early 40’s – 41, one province, 43, 42, 44, whatever.
And I thought to myself, what a tragedy, this is just when the marriage is starting to get difficult. Maybe the kids have become teenagers now and they are not quite sure how to handle them and they have got minds of their own anyway and they are breaking the rules and things are now difficult. And they have been around together for 15 years now anyway and we’re getting a bit tired of each other.
And at the very point where it gets painful, instead of working through the pain and discovering in their 50’s they have got something beautiful that has been built out of pain, they quit.
No marriage arrives at a stable beautiful place without pain and struggle. And at the heart of this there are probably two possible conflicting ideas.
One is that marriage is everything.
You know, it’s possible to be in love with marriage. And if you are, it’s going to disappoint you.
If we are in love with marriage, in love with the status of being married, in love with the idea of having a family, and so what we are looking for is an actor to play the opposite role in my dream, and we are going to live happily ever after and we are going to just float along and life is going to look after itself. We are going to spend most of our time in bed and all the washing and the cooking is just going to happen by itself, don’t have to go to work. And that is a fairy tale; it’s not true.
The idea marriage is everything, that’s going to be the key – you are going to become disillusioned very quickly.
Also the idea that marriage is necessary to a fulfilled life is also a myth. You know Jesus was the most fully man as God intended man to be, most complete in Himself, and that was without marriage, as a single person.
Paul, the author of more books in the Bible than anyone else, was a single man. And he extols the virtues of singleness to the extent that he says in 1 Corinthians 7, it is better not to marry.
On a later occasion I am going to talk about singleness and the value of that and the value of the person who lives a single life, because many of us do. It is not a second best thing. It may not contain everything that you would like in life but I will tell you this: if you single people wish you were married, there are a lot of married people who wish they were single. Don’t worry, it works both ways. They are not as free to say it.
It is of course a very wonderful thing that somebody loves you and wants to spend their life with you, but it’s not everything.
And the other extreme, if there are those who say marriage is everything, the other extreme is those who say marriage is nothing, it’s just a piece of paper.
I have heard it many times, “Well, what’s a piece of paper? Do I need a licence to have sex with my girlfriend? It that what it’s about? I mean how is it going to be different? I mean I get married today, have sex tomorrow and it’s all good and had sex yesterday and it’s all bad – what are you talking about?”
And someone very close to me got married and somebody else equally close to me, who is not married – he lives common law, but he said to the person who got married – he said (it was during the reception afterwards), he said, “Well I hope the piece of paper satisfies you. Don’t lose it.”
Well this is not about a piece of paper. And people say, well you have got to road test the marriage to make sure, you know, you wouldn’t buy a car without driving it; you wouldn’t marry a girl without road testing.
What’s wrong with that? That the sexual relationship cannot be detached (and I am going to say more about this in a moment), cannot be detached from the real relationship, which is the union of heart and soul.
That’s why Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7, a man’s body – let me read to you what he says – 1 Corinthians 7:3:
“A husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife”
He’s talking there about sexual responsibility to each other.
“…likewise the wife to her husband. The wife’s body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband. In the same way, the husband’s body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife.”
So what he is saying there is you do not belong to yourselves; you actually belong to each other. That’s what marriage is. A wedding is a public surrender of yourselves to each other. Outside of marriage you do not actually belong to each other.
And so in the aftermath of a sexual relationship there is an empty hollowness because actually you have stolen something that doesn’t belong and you have had it stolen from you because you don’t belong.
And the beauty of it is that the context is the context where you are not your own, not to be taken advantage of, but to give yourself to each other.
Tim Keller has written an excellent book called “The Meaning of Marriage”. I recommend it to you. But he quotes in that book Stanley Hauerwas who is Ethics Professor at Duke University. He says,
“Destructive to marriage is the self-fulfillment ethic that assumes marriage and the family are primarily institutions of personal fulfillment necessary for us to become whole and happy. The assumption is that there is someone just right for you to marry and if we look closely enough we find that right person. This overlooks a crucial aspect of marriage. It fails to appreciate that we always marry the wrong person.”
(I will read on here.)
“We never really know who we marry. We just think that we do. Even if you do marry the right person, give it a while and he or she will change. For marriage, being the enormous thing that it is, means we are not the same person after we have entered into it. The primary challenge is learning how to love and care for the person whom you find yourself married to.”
I think it’s a very profound insight. The very act of marriage changes a person.
You know it is said that husbands believe their wives won’t change but she does. She gets older you know.
And wives believe their husbands will change, and he doesn’t. He doesn’t grow up.
Having said this – I have said this before – I didn’t know how selfish I was until I got married. And I discovered that Hilary had opinions, for instance, and interests and desires. And the sad thing is that I go on discovering new layers of selfishness in my own life.
But you know, preparing for marriage – and I would say this to any young people here or any single people here – don’t come into marriage to have all your needs met.
I used to tell the students at Capernwray Bible School in England when I was leading that; we often used to talk about these issues and I would say to them that the best preparation for marriage is learning to be complete as a single person.
If you have always got to have a girlfriend, always got to have a guy, when you do marry you will just flop all over them, all your junk and all your weaknesses and all your inabilities to cope. And that’s quite a task to give to somebody.
If we can learn to be complete. I don’t mean that we become so coldly self-sufficient. We will always be vulnerable; we will always have those needs because it is not good for man to be alone. We will always need to be related outside ourselves, but I think a great preparation for marriage is learning to be sufficient in a wholesome way in ourselves. And then we bring to our marriage partner in order to give to them.
You see, don’t think that all our emotional needs are going to be met in marriage. Don’t think all your sexual desires and all your sexual fantasies are suddenly going to come and happen.
We have to learn discipline in these areas of our lives. And they are not all going to be met in marriage. We are going to marry somebody, you know, who has their own baggage as we do, who has their own mood swings as we do, who is not always available as we are not. And we need to be those who know how to be structured and disciplined and not just flop all over each other in need.
You see marriage brings us into a more intense proximity to another human being than any other relationship can. There are layers and layers that make us up, some of which we haven’t understood ourselves and sometimes it is in marriage that those layers become exposed. We have never analyzed them, never even understood them, and they come to light.
And as they do come to light in each other in marriage and go on coming to light, they are not as ammunition against that person but to bring that healing.
As Paul says in that verse about being like Christ to His church, and washing and cleansing and making holy, we bring that to each other.
And if Christ and the church is an example of marriage, it is not a consumer relationship, though our initial interests may be selfish and that’s natural. But you know, when Jesus invited people to follow Him, that was the invitation, “Follow Me and I will make you fishers of men.” So that is in their interest (“Come, I will make you something.”)
But you follow Jesus’ discipling of His twelve disciples and there came a time when He said, “If you want to be My disciple, deny yourself, take up your cross. For whoever wants to save his live will lose it, whoever loses His life for Me will find it.”
If you want to enjoy the depth of this discipleship, if you want to enjoy depth in your marriage, you will have to lose your life to find it. You give yourself away and in giving yourself away, that’s when you find satisfaction.
That’s true in the sexual side of marriage as well. You give yourself, you are seeking the well-being of your spouse, you are pleasing them, you are honoring them, and in the giving is the receiving.
Now this is the myths of marriage, but let me just comment a few moments on the mysteries of marriage, the other side of this, because Paul uses that term, that word here in Ephesians 5:31, 32.
“For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.
“This is a profound mystery…” says Paul.
Now you might say, “Well he’s a single man writing that, doesn’t understand it.”
But it is a mystery.
Marriage is not a consuming relationship; it is a covenant, a covenantal relationship. A consumer attitude says, “You are here for me. You are offering me what I am looking for.”
A covenant attitude says, “I am here for you” because covenant is defined in the dictionary that I consulted as an agreement between two parties in the best interest of the other party.
So we come to an agreement but this is my concern: your best interest. This is your concern: my best interest. And together we enter into a covenant relationship.
You know I discovered too this week in some parts of the United States you can have a legally defined covenant marriage. It’s a legal status for marriage.
And the marrying couple agree to some intensive pre-marital counselling and they limit intentionally the grounds of divorce should that ever face them. And I think they limit it to something like violence. Because they are saying, “I am coming to make your life rich and full and I am here to serve you.” And they say that to each other.
And this involves a very deep area of knowing each other. You know this knowledge of another person is a very beautiful thing, a very deep thing, it takes time.
The Christian life is defined as knowing God. In the New Testament Jesus said,
“Now this is eternal life:” (in John 17:3) “that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”
And this “knowing You” is far deeper than knowing about Him; it’s about experiencing Him. But this same expression is used in marriage.
In Genesis 4:1 the NIV, which I use, says,
“Adam lay with his wife Eve, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Cain.”
Straightforward.
The King James says,
“Adam knew Eve, his wife, and she conceived and bare Cain.”
Now the King James Version is correct, absolutely correct in its translation at this point. The NIV has turned the word ‘knew’ into a commentary to explain exactly what is going on. So it says,
“Adam lay with his wife Eve, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Cain.”
And we understand that perfectly. You know, they went to bed together and Cain was the consequence.
But that is a very superficial reading of what went on. Of course that went on, but Adam knew Eve. And the Hebrew word for ‘knew’ is the word ‘yada’ and according to Strong’s Hebrew definitions, he says,
“This word means to know properly, to experience, to discover, to give, to have, to take, to be privy to, and to be sure of.”
So when it says “Adam knew Eve”, Adam came into this union with Eve whereby they knew each other properly, they experienced each other, they were discovering each other, they gave to each other, they took from each other, they had each other, they were privy to each other (that is, they knew things nobody else knew about each other), they were sure of each other.
And in that context the sexual relationship is not only natural but good and necessary as a physical expression of that beautiful oneness of soul and heart.
That is why sex in the Scriptures only belongs in marriage because physical intimacy can never be satisfying outside of soulish intimacy. And it is the intimacy of marriage where these belong together.
Now there are all kinds of substitutes that tantalize and tease but they do not deliver.
An affair cannot deliver this. It may be very exciting for the moment but it does not and cannot deliver.
Pornography is the most pseudo promisable because whereas it can titillate and give a little bit of sexual excitement to somebody, it is totally devoid of reality. And into that awakened part of a man, it puts poison and it is poison that will spread out into a marriage, into other relationships.
And we may have time to develop some thoughts on that on another occasion.
Sex was not designed as an appetite to be satisfied, but to give expression to the deep intimacy of the soul.
Women usually know that before men do because women look for the real person, the inside vulnerable man, to love and be loved by.
Most men begin on the outside and have to work their way in and have to learn it. And if we men don’t learn it then our marriages will not deepen and the physical intimacy with all the joys of it, its deepest joy is its expression of that soulish intimacy of belonging.
And when the intimacy of soul is broken, the sexual relationship may be functional but it will be broken; it will be purely a mechanical process.
If we don’t understand this is the thrust of what Paul is speaking here in Ephesians 5, that there is this unity of love and commitment and devotion to as Christ gave Himself for the church, so husbands give yourselves to your wife; if we don’t see that as the big picture, we will make some awful mistakes with this passage.
For an example, we will stress the gender roles and we will go to this passage to find a verse that says, “Husbands, you are the head of the wife; wives, submit.”
That would be a mistaken interpretation of this passage. The text is always in the context. You see, in Verse 21 he says,
“Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.”
And then in our Bibles, in Verse 31 it says,
“Wives, submit to your husbands.”
Now actually the word ‘submit’ does not exist in the Greek text there. The translators have always imported it to give meaning because the umbrella verse is “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” That’s the umbrella text.
Then he says, “Wives to your husbands” and then he says, by implication, “husbands to your wives” and then he says, “fathers to your children”, then he says, “children to your parents”, then he says, “employers to your employees” and “employees to your employers”.
That is the context there. The umbrella statement where the word ‘submit’ occurs is only in Verse 21.
Because it is a mutual submission and the evidence of that submission, the mutual submission – husband to wife; wife to husband – is that the husband is giving himself for his wife and he is drawing out of her the best, without wrinkle, without blemish.
But if you take this verse to be, “Husbands, you lord it over your wives”, you will crush her and you will create the blemish and the wrinkles and the despair. I know because I have sat and talked to enough on a misunderstanding of this passage that turns it into hierarchy rather than into source, that the source of our being loved and fulfilled and cherished is my husband submitting to me and my wife submitting to him.
Which again, tied in with 1 Corinthians 7, “Husbands your body does not belong to you; it belongs to your wife, wives…” You see, this is the context; this is a mutual giving ourselves away.
If you don’t want to give yourself away, don’t marry. And if you want someone to submit to you, don’t marry. You will crush her in all likelihood.
Because this is the context, the headship of Christ to His church and the headship of a husband to his wife is the source of life to her. He gives himself up for her and makes her holy and washes her through the Word and presents her radiant and blameless.
The most difficult task any of us will ever have in life is if we become a husband or become a wife, to keep the relationship fresh, to keep it alive, to keep it tender, to keep it satisfying to the other person, to keep pouring love into the other person, to be giving yourself up as a husband for her.
The assumption of these verses, by the way, is the initiative of the husband giving himself up for her etc. creates the context where the responsiveness to that – and I don’t want to generalize; that’s always dangerous – but as a generalization, women are responsive and it creates the environment, husbands create the environment.
Fathers, do your kids know you give yourself up for your wife? Or do they see you as the boss? Do they see you making their mother beautiful, without wrinkle, fulfilled?
I know all the hassles of living life and all the stress of living life and we have to live with that – we don’t live on a cloud 9. But is that what he is doing? Is that what I am doing to my wife?
I haven’t always – I tell you, I haven’t always. I have had to learn the hard way. I have had to learn through tears. “I am not treating this woman well and I need to.”
And out of that we have what Paul says that your marriage is a picture to your family of Christ in the church. Your marriage is a picture to your neighbors of Christ in the church.
Let’s pray together.
Lord Jesus, we deal with very precious things here and not without some anguish and not without some shame, not without some guilt, not without some need of cleansing. But thank You for the grace to which we can come.
Thank You this whole passage here is about what it means when we are filled with the Holy Spirit.
We realize we cannot do this just on our own as some human discipline but only as we allow the Holy Spirit to occupy our lives, to fill our lives as we look to the Lord Jesus as the husband of His bride, the church.
And we have in the Holy Spirit the resources and we have in the Lord Jesus Christ the example. We pray that You will help us to grow.
I pray for marriages here. I pray that we will walk humbly together with all the brokenness of our own lives, with all the histories that don’t just unravel overnight, with all the bad habits that we can’t just break, but we pray, Lord Jesus, that we will have hope that things can be different.
Where we have misconstrued and misunderstood and misapplied things we thought were there in Your Word, we pray that we will humbly come back to Your Word and allow it to be our teacher, our corrector, we find forgiveness and cleansing and a whole vision for what is good.
Part 2. The Myths and Mysteries of Marriage
The Myths and Mysteries of Marriage
Ephesians 5:15-33
Pastor Charles Price
Let’s turn to Ephesians Chapter 5. And I am going to read from Verse 15 down to Verse 33. Ephesians 5:15. And Paul says,
“Be very careful, then, how you live – not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil.
“Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is.
“Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit.
“Speak to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.
“Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.
“Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord.
“For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior.
“Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
“Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.
“In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.
“After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church – for we are members of his body.
“For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.
“This is a profound mystery – but I am talking about Christ and the church.
“However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.”
Well that’s as far as I am going to read. Today, some of you may know, on the Christian calendar, is the Day of Pentecost. It is as important a day in the calendar as is Christmas and Easter because it is Pentecost that causes the purpose of Christmas (God becoming man) and Easter (Christ offered Himself as a substitute for our sin being buried and then raised again from the dead) so that on Pentecost the whole purpose might come to fruition where the Holy Spirit comes to live the life of Jesus Christ in the experience, in the heart, in the life of the believer.
And here in Ephesians 5 Paul gives that command:
“Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit.”
That is a command. It is not a suggestion and it’s not an option. It is a command for every Christian.
Then he talks about three things that will come out of that, that will be evidence of that.
Verse 19:
“Speak to one another.”
Your relationships will begin to grow and be healed.
“Sing and make melody in your heart to God.”
So you will have a new song that will well up within you.
And Verse 21:
“Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.”
And then he talks about the areas in which that submission will take place within marriage, within family, and within business - he talks about masters and slaves. Now we can transpose that from the context in which Paul was living to employees and employers and vice versa.
So he is saying in your relationships, in your marriage, submit to one another, husband to wife, wife to husband. In your family, parents to children, children to parents. Parents must submit to the needs of their children and meet those needs. Employers to employees. It’s not a one way submission; it is a two-way. Submit to one another. That is the context.
And that brings me to what I want to talk about this morning because I began last time a series on gender and sexuality. And I want to talk today about what I am calling “The Myths and Mysteries of Marriage”. Something for which we need the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit is the context in which Paul talks about this. He calls this a profound mystery there in Verse 32. We’ll come back to that in a moment.
The key in the context of these verses is that for a good marriage the Holy Spirit is the source, (His activity within you) and Jesus Christ and His church is the model.
Because in Verse 25 he says,
“Husbands, love your wives.”
Well what do you mean Paul, and how do I do that?
He tells us:
“…just as Christ loved the church”
And notice this:
“He gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.”
And what he is saying in these verses is that the relationship of Christ to His church illustrates the relationship in marriage of a man to his wife. And he is saying that marriage illustrates the relationship of Christ to the church.
So it’s both ways.
And so he is saying, “Husbands, if you are going to love your wives, you are going to give yourself up for her, whatever that means. That is a pricey task, expensive task.
Give yourself up for her, make her holy, keep her clean, present her as radiant, without wrinkle (some of us have difficulties with that, but that’s not about the aging process – we’re going to get wrinkles, of course we are), but as a person, without blemish, blameless.
This is a beautiful picture of what marriage does to a couple, but which tragically so often it doesn’t.
One of the great facts of life is that relationships are vital to our well-being. We need to feel connected, we need to be known, we need to be loved, we need to love. And our mental health, our emotional health, our self-esteem, our ability to function well in life is dependent on good, wholesome relationships.
As young people we dream of love. Most young people dream of a happy marriage. We may have experienced bad relationships in our own homes. We might have experienced sometimes almost non-existent relationships. But we dream of a beautiful relationship because that is so vital to us and to our well-being.
A study published by Queen’s College in New York last year that had followed people from college years through to mid-life, and this study had taken place over 40 years, following several generations of students who participated and followed them through to their 40’s. So they followed this sort of 20 year pattern over a 40 year period.
And they published it last year. And they concluded, amongst other things that were part of the survey, that throughout our adult years intimacy is the key to our sense of well-being. Not our income. Not our status in our society. Not our work life.
But the key to our sense of well-being was intimacy. And by intimacy, I am not speaking just of sexual intimacy, though that of course may be part of it, but the intimacy of mind, of soul, as well as of body.
Now there is risk in love and friendship. And the risk is, of course, that the closer we come to somebody else, the more we expose ourselves to somebody else, the more the possibility of experiencing pain in that process as well. The more meaningful the friendship, the greater the potential for joy and the greater the potential for hurt.
And whilst there are many levels of friendship and many levels of intimacy between two people, but the deepest relationship is found in marriage. And marriage is a place where you will find both joy and pain.
C.S. Lewis has written this:
“Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken at some stage. If you want to be sure of keeping your heart intact you must give it to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully around with hobbies and little luxuries. Avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the coffin of your selfishness. But in that coffin of your selfishness, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. There is risk in love.”
And I am calling what I want to say this morning “The Myths and the Mysteries of Marriage.”
And I want to talk first about the myths of marriage, taking this from these verses in Ephesians Chapter 5.
The first myth I want to talk about is that marriage is a consumer relationship. That is, it’s about getting what I want or what I need. Remember the model Paul uses is the relationship of Christ to the church. And again I read in Verse 25:
“Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her, presenting her to himself as radiant without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.”
Now that’s about Christ portraying what a husband is in the relationship of Christ to the church and the relationship of a husband to his wife. And there are eight qualities, which we are not going to talk about – you can look at them – but we could spend the whole morning looking at those eight qualities that come when a man gives himself up for his wife as Paul speaks of it there.
But this first myth is that marriage is to meet my needs. On another basis we marry because of the benefit it is going to give to me. We marry because it offers companionship. We marry because it offers sex, because it offers children, because it offers belonging, it offers an identity. We make a check list of the things I want in life and against a whole string of them we put the “to-do” bit: “Get married”. And that is going to provide me with all of those.
Now of course, all of it is true, that these are needs and desires and aspirations in our own lives and they are legitimate. But if our relationship – and especially marriage – is founded on a consumer interest, it will last only as long as my needs are being met.
And when I get tired with the particular way these needs are being met or somebody else comes along who is a little bit more exciting, a little bit different, who offers needs that are not being met, then the marriage is going to flounder and probably break.
Imran Khan is now the leader of the opposition party in Pakistan as of a week ago today and the elections they had there. Imran Khan was a famous cricketer before he became a politician and he married into a well-known wealthy British family. And it was quite a news item in Britain when he married into this family.
And at the wedding the bride’s father made a speech welcoming him into the family and saying, you know, what a competent young man he was. He was very good looking, he was rich, he was a capable sportsman, a brilliant sportsman. And he listed all these qualities.
And the bride’s father said, “I believe he will make a wonderful first husband for ___” and he named the daughter. That’s exactly what he said.
And he was absolutely right because the marriage didn’t last. Because here are two consumers coming together. You have got talent, you have got looks, you have got money, you have got influence; I want you. And you are pretty good looking yourself as well and da-da-da I want you.
And the father, whether he was wise enough or foolish enough, I don’t know if he was speaking out of wisdom or folly, but he did speak the truth.
And this is largely a view of marriage in our culture today. As long as you go on meeting my need, the marriage is good. That’s why, according to Statistics Canada, which I consulted this week, that our divorce rate in this country is 40% for first marriages.
If you add to that second marriages that fail and even third marriages and beyond that, the figure is higher.
And what I found intriguing was it gave these statistics province by province and it gave the average age at which the divorce takes place. And they were all in the early 40’s – 41, one province, 43, 42, 44, whatever.
And I thought to myself, what a tragedy, this is just when the marriage is starting to get difficult. Maybe the kids have become teenagers now and they are not quite sure how to handle them and they have got minds of their own anyway and they are breaking the rules and things are now difficult. And they have been around together for 15 years now anyway and we’re getting a bit tired of each other.
And at the very point where it gets painful, instead of working through the pain and discovering in their 50’s they have got something beautiful that has been built out of pain, they quit.
No marriage arrives at a stable beautiful place without pain and struggle. And at the heart of this there are probably two possible conflicting ideas.
One is that marriage is everything.
You know, it’s possible to be in love with marriage. And if you are, it’s going to disappoint you.
If we are in love with marriage, in love with the status of being married, in love with the idea of having a family, and so what we are looking for is an actor to play the opposite role in my dream, and we are going to live happily ever after and we are going to just float along and life is going to look after itself. We are going to spend most of our time in bed and all the washing and the cooking is just going to happen by itself, don’t have to go to work. And that is a fairy tale; it’s not true.
The idea marriage is everything, that’s going to be the key – you are going to become disillusioned very quickly.
Also the idea that marriage is necessary to a fulfilled life is also a myth. You know Jesus was the most fully man as God intended man to be, most complete in Himself, and that was without marriage, as a single person.
Paul, the author of more books in the Bible than anyone else, was a single man. And he extols the virtues of singleness to the extent that he says in 1 Corinthians 7, it is better not to marry.
On a later occasion I am going to talk about singleness and the value of that and the value of the person who lives a single life, because many of us do. It is not a second best thing. It may not contain everything that you would like in life but I will tell you this: if you single people wish you were married, there are a lot of married people who wish they were single. Don’t worry, it works both ways. They are not as free to say it.
It is of course a very wonderful thing that somebody loves you and wants to spend their life with you, but it’s not everything.
And the other extreme, if there are those who say marriage is everything, the other extreme is those who say marriage is nothing, it’s just a piece of paper.
I have heard it many times, “Well, what’s a piece of paper? Do I need a licence to have sex with my girlfriend? It that what it’s about? I mean how is it going to be different? I mean I get married today, have sex tomorrow and it’s all good and had sex yesterday and it’s all bad – what are you talking about?”
And someone very close to me got married and somebody else equally close to me, who is not married – he lives common law, but he said to the person who got married – he said (it was during the reception afterwards), he said, “Well I hope the piece of paper satisfies you. Don’t lose it.”
Well this is not about a piece of paper. And people say, well you have got to road test the marriage to make sure, you know, you wouldn’t buy a car without driving it; you wouldn’t marry a girl without road testing.
What’s wrong with that? That the sexual relationship cannot be detached (and I am going to say more about this in a moment), cannot be detached from the real relationship, which is the union of heart and soul.
That’s why Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7, a man’s body – let me read to you what he says – 1 Corinthians 7:3:
“A husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife”
He’s talking there about sexual responsibility to each other.
“…likewise the wife to her husband. The wife’s body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband. In the same way, the husband’s body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife.”
So what he is saying there is you do not belong to yourselves; you actually belong to each other. That’s what marriage is. A wedding is a public surrender of yourselves to each other. Outside of marriage you do not actually belong to each other.
And so in the aftermath of a sexual relationship there is an empty hollowness because actually you have stolen something that doesn’t belong and you have had it stolen from you because you don’t belong.
And the beauty of it is that the context is the context where you are not your own, not to be taken advantage of, but to give yourself to each other.
Tim Keller has written an excellent book called “The Meaning of Marriage”. I recommend it to you. But he quotes in that book Stanley Hauerwas who is Ethics Professor at Duke University. He says,
“Destructive to marriage is the self-fulfillment ethic that assumes marriage and the family are primarily institutions of personal fulfillment necessary for us to become whole and happy. The assumption is that there is someone just right for you to marry and if we look closely enough we find that right person. This overlooks a crucial aspect of marriage. It fails to appreciate that we always marry the wrong person.”
(I will read on here.)
“We never really know who we marry. We just think that we do. Even if you do marry the right person, give it a while and he or she will change. For marriage, being the enormous thing that it is, means we are not the same person after we have entered into it. The primary challenge is learning how to love and care for the person whom you find yourself married to.”
I think it’s a very profound insight. The very act of marriage changes a person.
You know it is said that husbands believe their wives won’t change but she does. She gets older you know.
And wives believe their husbands will change, and he doesn’t. He doesn’t grow up.
Having said this – I have said this before – I didn’t know how selfish I was until I got married. And I discovered that Hilary had opinions, for instance, and interests and desires. And the sad thing is that I go on discovering new layers of selfishness in my own life.
But you know, preparing for marriage – and I would say this to any young people here or any single people here – don’t come into marriage to have all your needs met.
I used to tell the students at Capernwray Bible School in England when I was leading that; we often used to talk about these issues and I would say to them that the best preparation for marriage is learning to be complete as a single person.
If you have always got to have a girlfriend, always got to have a guy, when you do marry you will just flop all over them, all your junk and all your weaknesses and all your inabilities to cope. And that’s quite a task to give to somebody.
If we can learn to be complete. I don’t mean that we become so coldly self-sufficient. We will always be vulnerable; we will always have those needs because it is not good for man to be alone. We will always need to be related outside ourselves, but I think a great preparation for marriage is learning to be sufficient in a wholesome way in ourselves. And then we bring to our marriage partner in order to give to them.
You see, don’t think that all our emotional needs are going to be met in marriage. Don’t think all your sexual desires and all your sexual fantasies are suddenly going to come and happen.
We have to learn discipline in these areas of our lives. And they are not all going to be met in marriage. We are going to marry somebody, you know, who has their own baggage as we do, who has their own mood swings as we do, who is not always available as we are not. And we need to be those who know how to be structured and disciplined and not just flop all over each other in need.
You see marriage brings us into a more intense proximity to another human being than any other relationship can. There are layers and layers that make us up, some of which we haven’t understood ourselves and sometimes it is in marriage that those layers become exposed. We have never analyzed them, never even understood them, and they come to light.
And as they do come to light in each other in marriage and go on coming to light, they are not as ammunition against that person but to bring that healing.
As Paul says in that verse about being like Christ to His church, and washing and cleansing and making holy, we bring that to each other.
And if Christ and the church is an example of marriage, it is not a consumer relationship, though our initial interests may be selfish and that’s natural. But you know, when Jesus invited people to follow Him, that was the invitation, “Follow Me and I will make you fishers of men.” So that is in their interest (“Come, I will make you something.”)
But you follow Jesus’ discipling of His twelve disciples and there came a time when He said, “If you want to be My disciple, deny yourself, take up your cross. For whoever wants to save his live will lose it, whoever loses His life for Me will find it.”
If you want to enjoy the depth of this discipleship, if you want to enjoy depth in your marriage, you will have to lose your life to find it. You give yourself away and in giving yourself away, that’s when you find satisfaction.
That’s true in the sexual side of marriage as well. You give yourself, you are seeking the well-being of your spouse, you are pleasing them, you are honoring them, and in the giving is the receiving.
Now this is the myths of marriage, but let me just comment a few moments on the mysteries of marriage, the other side of this, because Paul uses that term, that word here in Ephesians 5:31, 32.
“For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.
“This is a profound mystery…” says Paul.
Now you might say, “Well he’s a single man writing that, doesn’t understand it.”
But it is a mystery.
Marriage is not a consuming relationship; it is a covenant, a covenantal relationship. A consumer attitude says, “You are here for me. You are offering me what I am looking for.”
A covenant attitude says, “I am here for you” because covenant is defined in the dictionary that I consulted as an agreement between two parties in the best interest of the other party.
So we come to an agreement but this is my concern: your best interest. This is your concern: my best interest. And together we enter into a covenant relationship.
You know I discovered too this week in some parts of the United States you can have a legally defined covenant marriage. It’s a legal status for marriage.
And the marrying couple agree to some intensive pre-marital counselling and they limit intentionally the grounds of divorce should that ever face them. And I think they limit it to something like violence. Because they are saying, “I am coming to make your life rich and full and I am here to serve you.” And they say that to each other.
And this involves a very deep area of knowing each other. You know this knowledge of another person is a very beautiful thing, a very deep thing, it takes time.
The Christian life is defined as knowing God. In the New Testament Jesus said,
“Now this is eternal life:” (in John 17:3) “that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”
And this “knowing You” is far deeper than knowing about Him; it’s about experiencing Him. But this same expression is used in marriage.
In Genesis 4:1 the NIV, which I use, says,
“Adam lay with his wife Eve, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Cain.”
Straightforward.
The King James says,
“Adam knew Eve, his wife, and she conceived and bare Cain.”
Now the King James Version is correct, absolutely correct in its translation at this point. The NIV has turned the word ‘knew’ into a commentary to explain exactly what is going on. So it says,
“Adam lay with his wife Eve, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Cain.”
And we understand that perfectly. You know, they went to bed together and Cain was the consequence.
But that is a very superficial reading of what went on. Of course that went on, but Adam knew Eve. And the Hebrew word for ‘knew’ is the word ‘yada’ and according to Strong’s Hebrew definitions, he says,
“This word means to know properly, to experience, to discover, to give, to have, to take, to be privy to, and to be sure of.”
So when it says “Adam knew Eve”, Adam came into this union with Eve whereby they knew each other properly, they experienced each other, they were discovering each other, they gave to each other, they took from each other, they had each other, they were privy to each other (that is, they knew things nobody else knew about each other), they were sure of each other.
And in that context the sexual relationship is not only natural but good and necessary as a physical expression of that beautiful oneness of soul and heart.
That is why sex in the Scriptures only belongs in marriage because physical intimacy can never be satisfying outside of soulish intimacy. And it is the intimacy of marriage where these belong together.
Now there are all kinds of substitutes that tantalize and tease but they do not deliver.
An affair cannot deliver this. It may be very exciting for the moment but it does not and cannot deliver.
Pornography is the most pseudo promisable because whereas it can titillate and give a little bit of sexual excitement to somebody, it is totally devoid of reality. And into that awakened part of a man, it puts poison and it is poison that will spread out into a marriage, into other relationships.
And we may have time to develop some thoughts on that on another occasion.
Sex was not designed as an appetite to be satisfied, but to give expression to the deep intimacy of the soul.
Women usually know that before men do because women look for the real person, the inside vulnerable man, to love and be loved by.
Most men begin on the outside and have to work their way in and have to learn it. And if we men don’t learn it then our marriages will not deepen and the physical intimacy with all the joys of it, its deepest joy is its expression of that soulish intimacy of belonging.
And when the intimacy of soul is broken, the sexual relationship may be functional but it will be broken; it will be purely a mechanical process.
If we don’t understand this is the thrust of what Paul is speaking here in Ephesians 5, that there is this unity of love and commitment and devotion to as Christ gave Himself for the church, so husbands give yourselves to your wife; if we don’t see that as the big picture, we will make some awful mistakes with this passage.
For an example, we will stress the gender roles and we will go to this passage to find a verse that says, “Husbands, you are the head of the wife; wives, submit.”
That would be a mistaken interpretation of this passage. The text is always in the context. You see, in Verse 21 he says,
“Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.”
And then in our Bibles, in Verse 31 it says,
“Wives, submit to your husbands.”
Now actually the word ‘submit’ does not exist in the Greek text there. The translators have always imported it to give meaning because the umbrella verse is “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” That’s the umbrella text.
Then he says, “Wives to your husbands” and then he says, by implication, “husbands to your wives” and then he says, “fathers to your children”, then he says, “children to your parents”, then he says, “employers to your employees” and “employees to your employers”.
That is the context there. The umbrella statement where the word ‘submit’ occurs is only in Verse 21.
Because it is a mutual submission and the evidence of that submission, the mutual submission – husband to wife; wife to husband – is that the husband is giving himself for his wife and he is drawing out of her the best, without wrinkle, without blemish.
But if you take this verse to be, “Husbands, you lord it over your wives”, you will crush her and you will create the blemish and the wrinkles and the despair. I know because I have sat and talked to enough on a misunderstanding of this passage that turns it into hierarchy rather than into source, that the source of our being loved and fulfilled and cherished is my husband submitting to me and my wife submitting to him.
Which again, tied in with 1 Corinthians 7, “Husbands your body does not belong to you; it belongs to your wife, wives…” You see, this is the context; this is a mutual giving ourselves away.
If you don’t want to give yourself away, don’t marry. And if you want someone to submit to you, don’t marry. You will crush her in all likelihood.
Because this is the context, the headship of Christ to His church and the headship of a husband to his wife is the source of life to her. He gives himself up for her and makes her holy and washes her through the Word and presents her radiant and blameless.
The most difficult task any of us will ever have in life is if we become a husband or become a wife, to keep the relationship fresh, to keep it alive, to keep it tender, to keep it satisfying to the other person, to keep pouring love into the other person, to be giving yourself up as a husband for her.
The assumption of these verses, by the way, is the initiative of the husband giving himself up for her etc. creates the context where the responsiveness to that – and I don’t want to generalize; that’s always dangerous – but as a generalization, women are responsive and it creates the environment, husbands create the environment.
Fathers, do your kids know you give yourself up for your wife? Or do they see you as the boss? Do they see you making their mother beautiful, without wrinkle, fulfilled?
I know all the hassles of living life and all the stress of living life and we have to live with that – we don’t live on a cloud 9. But is that what he is doing? Is that what I am doing to my wife?
I haven’t always – I tell you, I haven’t always. I have had to learn the hard way. I have had to learn through tears. “I am not treating this woman well and I need to.”
And out of that we have what Paul says that your marriage is a picture to your family of Christ in the church. Your marriage is a picture to your neighbors of Christ in the church.
Let’s pray together.
Lord Jesus, we deal with very precious things here and not without some anguish and not without some shame, not without some guilt, not without some need of cleansing. But thank You for the grace to which we can come.
Thank You this whole passage here is about what it means when we are filled with the Holy Spirit.
We realize we cannot do this just on our own as some human discipline but only as we allow the Holy Spirit to occupy our lives, to fill our lives as we look to the Lord Jesus as the husband of His bride, the church.
And we have in the Holy Spirit the resources and we have in the Lord Jesus Christ the example. We pray that You will help us to grow.
I pray for marriages here. I pray that we will walk humbly together with all the brokenness of our own lives, with all the histories that don’t just unravel overnight, with all the bad habits that we can’t just break, but we pray, Lord Jesus, that we will have hope that things can be different.
Where we have misconstrued and misunderstood and misapplied things we thought were there in Your Word, we pray that we will humbly come back to Your Word and allow it to be our teacher, our corrector, we find forgiveness and cleansing and a whole vision for what is good.