The Christian Husband (Ephesians 5:25-33)

Welcome to God's Word for You, a ministry of Sharon R.P. Church in Morning Sun, Iowa. Check us out online at www.sharonrpc.org. We pray that this message will be a blessing to you and that the Lord will use it to transform your faith and your life. Will you turn over in your Bibles with me to Ephesians chapter 5. Ephesians chapter 5, and we'll continue our series through the book of Ephesians. Last week we looked at wives, and this week we look at husbands. Ephesians chapter 5, and we're beginning at verse 25, going through the end of the chapter. Ephesians chapter 5 beginning at verse 25. You can find that on page 1041 if you're using the Pew Bibles. Hear now God's word from the New Testament.

Husbands, Love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave himself for her, that he might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word, that he might present her to himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish.

So husbands ought to love their own 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 the Lord does the church. For we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church. Nevertheless, let each one of you, in particular, so love his own wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband. The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God, brothers and sisters, the word of our God endures forever.

Just in August, there was a man named Mark in Newcastle, Australia, and he and his wife, Chantelle, they went out to go surfing in the ocean. And as they went out to go surfing, all of a sudden his wife was drug under the water off her surfboard by a great white shark. And the man, Mark, immediately jumped off his own diving board, swam over, jumped on top of the shark, and started punching it on its head until it let go of his wife, at which point he paddled her to the shore. And when they asked her why he did this, his comments were, when you see the mother of your child and your support, everything that's who you are, so you just react.

Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church. There is a husband who is married to his wife for over 60 years and every single morning he woke up early in the morning and he got his wife tea and he would make her breakfast and when she woke up they would sit down and they would do family devotions together and every morning he would get up and he would leave to work and he would put in a hard day's work to provide for his wife and his family and he would come home from work. And then he would love his family as he was home. Husbands, love your wives as Christ loves the church. My question to you is, which one loved their wives more? This faithful man of over 60 years or this man who jumped on the head of a great white shark and punched it until he let his wife go? Which one loved his wife more? It's a false dilemma. It's a false dilemma, and we see in Jesus Christ that both there is a sacrificial love, a courageous love, and there is also a faithful, long-suffering love.

And so when we come to this text, let's not just flatten it down to just the cross, but let's look at the fullness of what Christ has done. As we look at husbands loving our wives. Husbands, love your wives. The first thing we need to see here is that there is a command to love. After that, there is a model to love. There is also a type of nourishing love. But then after we get done with the nourishing love, we'll see that there is also a love that demands a type of separation, a leaving and cleaving love. And then finally, another command to love your wife. So first, the command to love. Look with me at verse 25. Husbands, love your wives just as Christ also loved the church and gave himself for her.

This is interesting, and if you were at Chalk and Talk last week, you would have seen that there were many codes during this time for how families should interact. And you would expect, after last week, when we looked at the wife's primary duty towards her husband in submission, you would expect that what would come after that would be God saying, okay, now husbands, rule over your wives. Subject those women. But that's not what the command is here, is it?

Six times in these few verses, six times God says, that's not how a Christian husband acts. Six times he says, love, love, love, love, love. And just in case you didn't get it again, verse 33, love your wife. Love. The command is to love. Not to rule over, but to love. Yes, wives are told to be submissive to their own husbands. We looked at that last week. The men are not to then lord that over their wives, but they're told to love their wives. Christian marriage is marked by that love. This is exactly what Jesus had commanded, isn't it? I mean, you think of the second greatest commandment, what did Jesus say?

To love your neighbor as you love yourself. Or to treat your neighbor as you would want yourself to be treated. Who's your closest neighbor? How much closer can you get to another human being than being in covenant marriage with that person? Husbands, you have a daily example of what it means to love your neighbor. You have a daily example of what it means to live sacrificially. And so the command is to love.

But not everyone was given a good role model on how to do this. And let's face it, we live in a day and age when there's all sorts of distortions on what marriage is supposed to be, both outside the church and inside the church. There's all sorts of ways in which we see that the family unit is not acting the way it should when the divorce rate is higher than it's ever been, especially young boys. There are huge swaths of the American society where there aren't boys with fathers in the home to look up to. So where do you go to get that type of role model? Where do you go? Maybe your dad wasn't the model that you need to look to for how to love your wife.

Well, there's a better model. That model is Jesus Christ. Look with me at verses 25 through 27. Husbands, love your wives just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her, that He might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the Word, that He might present her to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish." The model for the Christian husband It's not your father, it's not your grandfather, it's not your great-grandfather, but it is Jesus Christ himself. This is liberating for the Christian because this means we have a perfect model that we can look at. This means it doesn't matter what type of family you were born into, you can go and you can look at Jesus Christ and you can see what is sacrificial daily love look like. But there's something interesting here.

What is the goal of marriage? What is the goal of the husband loving his wife? What is the goal that Jesus has in loving his church? If you ask most people, well, what do you think marriage is for? And people will tell you, well, it's for companionship. Well, yeah, you get companionship. One of the ones that always cracks me up is when I'll ask people, what do you think marriage was designed for? And they'll say, well, happiness. Well, the honeymoon stage is going to end soon and you're going to find out. If your goal is happiness in marriage, you'll quit pretty fast. But it's not about happiness, is it?

Why does Jesus love His church? That He might present her holy and blameless. That He might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the Word. See, Jesus loves His church because He wants to make His church more holy. Husbands, God has given you your wife that you might love them and see them become more and more holy. God has given you your wife not for your own happiness, but that you might find joy in presenting her to the Lord better than the day you married her.

Now, that's a hard question. This might take some introspection for a second. It might be uncomfortable. Ask yourself honestly, is my wife more holy today than the day she married me? Let me put it another way. Husbands, honestly ask yourself, does my wife look more and more like she's in love with God because of how I've been married to her today than when we were first married?

That's the goal of Christian marriage, is that you are taking her to God, that you are taking her to Christ, that you are loving her with a sacrificial love, that you are making her more and more. Because this is what Jesus is doing. There's a parallel here, right? What Jesus does with the church, husbands do in the home. Now husbands, you're not saving your wives, but you are making them more and more holy. Your job in marriage is to see them conform more and more to the image of Jesus. You do this by loving them. But it's interesting the means by which this happens. Look with me again at verse 26.

That he might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word. How does Jesus make His church more and more like Him? How does God transform you more and more like Jesus Christ? What is the means that He does it? He does it through His Word. He does it through His Word. We go to His Word because in His Word He convicts us of sin. He builds us up in righteousness. He teaches us, hold on, this is the wrong path, and he veers us back to the straight and narrow. He shows us the pitfalls that we're prone to fall into, and he brings us more and more into conformity with himself. He uses his word in the church.

This is why every single week you come here and you hear some whippersnapper tell you about what God has said. We come here and we sit underneath His Word because we want God to change the affections of our heart, to change the patterns of our life. God is working through His Word.

This is why it's so dangerous when people say, well, I can just be by myself and be spiritual and I can just love Jesus by myself. No, hold on. We have to come to His Word. We have to have His Word painfully, uncomfortably, sometimes harshly applied to our lives, where we're like, ooh, I don't like that. But it's what we need, because that's how God is molding and shaping and caring for His church. This is what Jesus does in His church. But it happens also in the home.

Husbands, do you wash your wives in the water of the Word? Is your home a place of holiness? Is your marriage a place where your wife can come to you and know that you are going to be a student of his word? Do you read the scriptures with your wife? Do you tell when you're in an argument with your wife, do you use the scriptures to come to bear to correct your actions and to steer your marriage? Do you use the scriptures to present your wife more and more holy and blameless?

And again, hold on here, this can be a yoke, legalistic heavily. But that's not what this is meant for. What we say is that, hold on, we want the best food. You can go and you can find all sorts of information, all sorts of things to digest, to eat, and to figure out how should I be living my life, and how should I be living in my marriage, to have a good marriage, But if you want to have some real meat that's going to put real nourishment in your marriage, you do it by coming to the Word. You do it by going here. You do it by resting your marriage here.

When we come to the family altar together day in and day out, when we read the Scriptures together day in and day out, it is a way in which God redeems the family. That brokenness that happened in the Garden of Eden, By being in God's word, this is how he's restoring it back to what it's supposed to be.

Remember what happened in the church of Israel. What happened in the church just before Josiah's time? They had forgotten the Word. I mean, so much so that they didn't even know what the Bible said. They were just going through the motions at the temple, because it was just what they got from their parents, and they were just doing stuff. And they were doing stuff all wrong, because their parents had introduced all this outside stuff into the worship of God.

And it wasn't until what happened during Josiah's reign, they found the Book. And they read the book, and the church was purified, and they came back to holiness. They redevoted themselves to the Lord God Himself alone, and the church was made holy once again.

God is doing that in your marriage. How long have you been neglecting the book in your marriage? This doesn't mean you have to sit there, you know, you wake up at 4.30 a.m., and you light the candle, and you sit together with your pioneer clothes, and you just read the Bible for an hour and a half in the morning. But are you opening the book at all with your spouse? Do you devote time, even if it's just a few verses, to say, here's God's word, here's something for us to chew on today, here's something for our souls?

This is what Christ does in the church week in and week out. This is why it's absolutely necessary that the word is the center part of worship. that we worship Him according to His Word, that we come to His Word, that we think about His Word, that we admonish each other with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs as we go through His Word together. We go to His Word.

We look to Jesus Christ as the model for how He loves. It's amazing if you just think about 1 Corinthians chapter 13, the great love passage, 1 Corinthians chapter 13. And you think about Jesus as being the model for love. And you replace love with Jesus.

Jesus suffers long and is kind. Jesus does not envy. Jesus does not parade himself. Jesus is not puffed up. Jesus does not behave rudely. Jesus does not seek his own good. Jesus is not provoked. Jesus thinks no evil. Jesus does not rejoice in iniquity.

Jesus rejoices in the truth. Jesus bears all things, Jesus believes all things, Jesus hopes all things, Jesus endures all things. This is what Jesus does, this is how He pours out His love for the church. Jesus lived out this love, His love incarnate. Jesus shows this love for His church. And we can, I promised you we were gonna get through this in one week. I'm really tempted to go through each one of those and apply them to Jesus and the church. But we're gonna hold off on that. Jesus is our model for love.

But this love, let's face it, love in our society has like, not like it, it just has a lot of bad ideas with it. You open up the Hallmark Channel and you watch these great movies, especially around Christmas time. Oh, people are always falling in love, and it's romance, and people are smiling, and it's always happy, and it has a great ending, and people just feel like they fell in love with someone. Our culture wants to think that love is a feeling.

That love is just romantic butterflies in your stomach. Just, oh, I feel good about this person. Again, if you've been married for more than five minutes, you don't always have butterflies in your stomach when you see your spouse. It's not always about romantic feelings, but it's nourishing, cherishing, being devoted to the other person's good. And this is the nourishing love that we find in verse 28 and 29. Look with me at verse 28 and 29. So husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies. For he who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it just as the Lord does the church.

I'm never amazed when I watch YouTube how many men's health commercials come across my YouTube. I mean, if you want to subscribe to Men's Health Magazine, you can do it. If you want to watch people who are working out and get different workout exercises and stuff, you can do it. I mean, the whole industry of men's health in America is shocking. I didn't look up how big the number is that that sector of the market is, but I'm going to put my guess on it that it's more than a couple million dollars.

And you have to think how much time is devoted. Just think about sports. I mean, many of you men played sports in high school. Many of you men played sports in college. Many of you men know what it's like to devote massive amounts of time to developing your physical skills and of making sure that you are taking the right amount of protein and making sure that you are nourishing your body and taking in the right amount of food. If you don't think you were, I guarantee you talk to your mom and she'll tell you how big the grocery budget is and she knows you were nourishing your body. But we nourish our bodies, we cherish our bodies.

But how does Christ do that? How does Christ, if Jesus is our model for this, how does Jesus nourish and cherish his body, the church? Well, that's what we looked at in the first four chapters of the book of Ephesians. Jesus nourishes and cherishes his church because he redeemed you. Jesus nourishes and cherishes His Church because He sealed you with the Holy Spirit. Jesus nourishes and cherishes His Church because He gives His Church different gifts to care for one another. Jesus nourishes and cherishes His Church because He has empowered us with the Gospel. Jesus nourishes and cherishes His Church by loving us and sanctifying us.

Jesus is making you more holy. Jesus is actively now feeding you. You might feel like, I don't know what he's feeding me. We've been in Ephesians for a long time. But it's in his word. He nourishes us and he feeds us. He cares for us in words, sacrament, and prayer. He builds us up as a church. Likewise, husbands are to love their wives. Husbands, do you provide for your wife physically?

I mean, this is a legitimate question, right? This 80-year-old man who had been married to his wife for 60 years, did you go to work every single day and make sure that your wife had money so she could buy clothes? Did you make sure that you worked hard so she would have a roof over her head? Did you make sure that you had money in the bank account so she could get gas when she needed it and groceries when she went to the store? So you nourished your wife physically, and that's what Paul is saying. Part of it is you nourish and love your wife by providing what she needs. But are you doing it spiritually? Are you committed not just to her physical health, but to her spiritual health as well?

This is the hard part. This is the rub. This is where things get difficult for husbands. Are you giving her costly time to care for her emotional state? Are you giving her costly time? I remember talking to one wife and she was just saying, I just wish that he would pray for me. Like, he just doesn't even pray with me. Husbands, are you taking your wife to the throne of grace? Are you praying for her and with her? Are you nourishing and cherishing your wife, body and soul? Are you committed to her eternal Well, good.

I mean, we take care of our own bodies. When guys are sick, I mean, well, not always. Sometimes we're not very good at this. If you're sick, you go to a doctor. Maybe if you're really sick, you go to a doctor. But at least you still care for your own body. And yet, in our culture and in our society, how acceptable is it when your wife is hurting or when something is wrong in your marriage? It's easier just to say, it's not working out. Hold on, you wouldn't just cut off your arm because something was hurting. Just because your right foot wasn't doing what you wanted it to do, you wouldn't just cut it off, but you would nourish it and cherish it and try to bring it back to health.

This is what God is saying we do in our marriages. We love our wives, we nourish them, we cherish them, we care for them even as we care for our own bodies. So we have a command to love, we have a model to love, we have a loving, nourishing, and cherishing. But there's also a type of love that looks like separating. Look with me at verses 30 and 31. For we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

There's a type of beauty that happens here in Genesis chapter 2. I love a quote by a theologian. I love his quote. I don't love the theologian, but he said, well, the woman was not made out of the man's head that she might rule over him. The woman was not made out of the man's foot that the man might stomp all over him, but she was made out of his side that she might always be at his side.

There's one that we're close with husbands. There's one who should be closer to you than any other. But there's also a separation that needs to happen. And that separation is from mother and father. For this reason, the man shall be joined to his wife And he shall leave his father and mother and the two shall become one flesh. This is in the old King James language, it was leaving and cleaving. The man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife. And I can't tell you how many marital problems there are because one side of the marriage isn't leaving and cleaving. Undue influence of in-laws will ruin a marriage. This is a hard thing, right? This is a difficult thing because we love our parents.

This isn't saying the fifth commandment goes away. This isn't saying that you don't have to honor your mother and your father, but in your home, in your home, it's you and your spouse. In your home, you make the final decisions. In your home, you cling to one another closer than anyone else. Now for some of you, this isn't that big of an issue because, well, your mother and father aren't here.

But are you helping your children's marriage? Are you caring for your grandchildren's marriage? Are you saying, I know I got wisdom to speak into this, but I need to just, if I speak my wisdom, I need to come to them humbly and say, hey, I saw this, this is concerning, but you're your own family unit, I've said it, now I'm gonna back out and walk away and let you deal with it in your own marriage.

This is a difficult thing for, because parents love their kids. But if we're going to respect Christian marriage, it means that we also need to let our children have their own marriages. And boy, is that hard, because you love your children. Do you want their marriage to fail? No. No parent wants their children's marriage to fail, but yet one of the quickest ways to make your children's marriage fail is by meddling in your children's marriage.

That's tough. That's tough, especially when we live in a small, interconnected community. But this is a real, and I know this is more practical, biblical, counseling type stuff than we normally get into here, but this is extremely important. This is the longest passage of all the family code.

When we look at fathers talking to their kids, we only get one verse. But when we deal with husbands loving their wives, what is that? We get eight verses. Eight verses telling us how we're to love our wives. So we love our wives by leaving and cleaving. We love our children's marriage by allowing them to leave and cleave. We look to Jesus as the model for our marriage. We nourish our spouses like Jesus nourishes and cherishes the church. We love our spouses like we ought to. And this is where we end in verse 33. Nevertheless, Let each one of you, in particular, so love his own wife as himself.

I'm going to go back to 1 Corinthians 13 for a second. 1 Corinthians chapter 13, and I want you to Husbands, I want you to input your name here instead of Jesus. Input your name here instead of love and ask yourself, does my life and my relationship to my spouse line up with this? 1 Corinthians chapter 13, verse 4.

Kurt suffers long. Bill is kind. Herschel does not envy. Kim does not parade himself and is not puffed up. Mark does not behave rudely. Buck does not seek his own good. Do we want to keep going? We can keep calling out people. This is really convicting. Brian is not rude, Brian does not seek his own, the husband is not provoked, the husband thinks no evil, the husband doesn't rejoice in iniquity, the husband rejoices in the truth." Oh, this is a hard one. The husband bears all things, the husband believes all things, the husband hopes all things, the husband endures all things. Do you live out love in your life? Do you suffer long? with your wife? Do you endure with your wife? Do you believe all things about your wife? Do you rejoice in truth with your wife? Are you rude with your wife? Do you provoke your wife?

Again, I'm going to encourage you, we're running out of time. Come to Chalk and Talk. Last week we had a real, this is really fun because it's really practical stuff here. Last week we heard great stuff from the women about the things husbands do that make it hard for them to submit. Well, this week we're going to have some fun on what does it look like for husbands to love their wives as Christ loves the Church. But husbands, this is your injunction, this is your command, this is your joy, this is your way that which you get to show the love of God practically to your wife is you get to love your wife as Christ loves the Church.

You're not going to do it perfectly. You're not going to do it wonderfully every morning. Your wife, I guarantee you, every day isn't going to wake up and it's not going to be like the Hallmark Channel every single morning. Oh, I just love you and you love me perfectly every day. That's not how it's going to work. But does your wife know that you love her? Do you present her to the Lord wholly and blameless? Is she more wholly today because of your marriage? Does she look more and more conformed to the image of Christ because of your love for her?

This is what the husband is called to do. And it's in that light of husbands loving their wives that we come to the final point. Wives, respect your husbands. You know, husbands, we can do our wives a great deal of service if we actually love them with this Christ-like way to make it easy for them to live and respect reverence or submission to us. That's what we looked at last week. Wives, your husbands aren't going to do this perfectly. Your husbands are not going to do this perfectly. But will you still respect them?

Last week we read Genesis chapter 18 and it's amazing what 1st or 2nd Peter says about Genesis 18. Sarah shows us a model for respecting her husband. When the angels come and they tell Abraham he's going to have a son and they're going to have a child and Sarah calls Abraham master. And 2 Peter says this is an example of submission. Have you ever read the story of Abraham? That was not a dude that I would want to submit to. The guy told the people in Pharaoh's house that that was his sister. I mean, he straight through her underneath the bus.

And yet she still respects her husband. I remember there was a seminary president, Dr. Joseph Piper, and we went out to, Olivia and I went out to dinner with him and his wife one time at a conference, and we were sitting there, and she was this real proper southern lady, and she kept saying something about Dr. P, Dr. P, Dr. P. And then I realized, oh, she only calls her husband Dr. P. Whenever she's talking to anyone else, she always refers to him, and that was her form of trying to say, I respect my husband. I'm not saying you have to go around and you have to call your husband, you know, Professor John, Professor John, you know, but how do you show that respect to your imperfect husband? And husbands, how do you show that sacrificial love towards your wife?

But indeed, indeed love has no greater than this, that someone would lay down his life for his friend. Jesus Christ loved your wife so much that he was willing to die upon that cross for her. Jesus Christ loved your wife so much that he spilt his blood upon that cross that she might be holy and blameless. Jesus Christ loves your wife so much that he gave up of himself for her.

Will you love her in response to what Jesus has done? Will you show her the love of Jesus Christ every day in your marriage? Will you pour out your life for her? Will you commit yourself to cherishing and nourishing her, washing her in the water of the Word?

Closing Prayer

Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your Word and we thank you for your love for us. We thank you that you showed your love for us and that we were still sinners Christ died for us. Father, I pray that this morning the men of this congregation specifically might not have a heavy yoke laid upon their shoulders, but they might see the perfect model of Jesus Christ and might be spurred on towards righteousness that in some marvelous and mysterious way that they are allowed to enter into the sanctification of their wives. that they are invited by you into loving their wives with a sacrificial Christ-like love. Father, we pray that you would use this type of love to build up marriages, to redeem families, to bring your kingdom here on earth as it is in heaven. We thank you for this passage and for the model of love that you have laid out for us.

In Jesus' name, amen. Thanks for listening to this week's message from God's Word for You, a ministry of Sharon R.P. Church in rural southeast Iowa. We pray that the message would be used by God to transform your faith in your life this week. If you'd like to get more information about us, feel free to go to the website, SharonRPC.org. We'd love to invite you to worship with us. Our worship time is 10 a.m. every Sunday at 25204 160th Avenue, Morning Sun, Iowa, 52640. May God richly bless you this week.