At the church where I serve, we are in the
middle of a sermon series entitled Love and Marriage. During this series, we
are going to spend our time together asking and answering four questions. During this series we are going to ask and
answer the questions “What is marriage?” “Does marriage matter to Jesus?” “What
is marriage for?” And “How are we to handle conflict in marriage?” And as we go
through this series, our hope and our prayer is that God would move by the
power of the Holy Spirit to enable us to wrap our heads, hearts, and hands
around the answers to these questions in a way that result in us being able to
experience the love and marriage that we were designed to experience.
This week, I would like for us to ask and
answer the question "Why does Marriage matter so much to Jesus? What is
marriage for?" And to answer that question, I would like for us to spend
our time together looking at a section of a letter that is preserved and
recorded for us in the New Testament of the Bible called the book of Ephesians.
And it is in this section of this letter that we will discover the timeless answer to the question “Why
does marriage matter so much to Jesus? What is marriage for?” So, let’s discover the answer to that question
together, beginning in Ephesians 5:25:
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also
loved the church and gave Himself up for her,
As we enter into this section of this letter that Paul wrote to early
followers of Jesus who were a part of a church that was located in Ephesus, to
fully understand what Paul is going to communicate to us this morning, we first
need to understand the context of these verses in the overall flow of the book
of Ephesians. In this part of the book of Ephesians, Paul is unpacking how the
identity that a follower of Jesus has as a result of their vertical
relationship with Jesus should impact the horizontal relationships around them.
Here we see Paul begin to address how a husband’s identity as a follower of
Jesus should impact their relationship with their wives.
In verse 25, Paul begins this section of this letter by giving a command to
husbands: “Husbands love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and
gave Himself up for her”. Paul makes a
parallel between the relationship between husband and wife and the relationship
between Christ and the church to reveal for us the reality that God commands
husbands to love their wives the same way that Christ loved the church. Paul is
reminding husbands throughout history, that they are to selflessly and
sacrificially love their wives, just as Jesus selflessly and sacrificially
loved humanity all the way to the cross.
Paul points husbands throughout history to Jesus as the example to follow. Jesus
left the glory of Heaven, laid aside His position and His prominence and
entered into humanity in order to live a life as a homeless man and die the
most humiliating and painful death imaginable. Paul is basically saying
"Men that is how you are to love your wives. You are to love our wives as
Jesus loves His church." Paul then continued by unpacking the results that
Jesus love has on His relationship with the church in verses 26-27:
so that He
might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27
that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or
wrinkle or any such thing; but that she would be holy and blameless.
Here we see Paul reveal two specific results that Jesus' selfless and
sacrificial love had when it came to His relationship with the church. First,
Paul states that Jesus loved the church selflessly and sacrificially so that He
might sanctify her. Now this word sanctify is a big fancy church mumbo jumbo
talk word that literally means to include a person in the inner circle of what
is holy. Paul here paints for us an amazing word picture of a person who was
once an outsider now being made a part of a family.
Paul’s point is that Jesus love for His church resulted in those who were
once on the outside when it came to having a relationship with God were now
being able to be an insider and a part of the family of God as a result of
Jesus life, death, and resurrection. When Paul uses the phrase, “having
cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, he is reminding the readers
of this letter of what occurs at baptism. The phrase “with the word” refers to
one’s confession of faith that occurs during a baptism.
At baptism, one publicly identifies themselves as being a follower of
Jesus. And part of that process is sharing one’s testimony of how they became a
follower of Jesus. Paul’s point here is that the church reveals and reflects
the relationship with God that they were created for and were brought into as a
result of Jesus selfless and sacrificial love as people publicly proclaim and
identify themselves with the inward transformation that has changed their lives
through believing, trusting, and following Jesus.
Second, Paul states that Jesus loved the church selflessly and
sacrificially so that “He might present to Himself the church in all her glory,
having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she would be holy and
blameless.” When Paul uses the word present here, this word literally means to
make or render. In other words, Jesus love for the church was so that the
church would be made glorious. Jesus loves His church and desires that the
church possess an inherent quality of splendor and purity that is
extraordinary.
Jesus loves the church so that the church would be without spot or stain or
blemish. Jesus loves the church so that the church would be without any cracks
or flaws. Jesus loves the church so that the church would respond to His
selfless and sacrificial love by being devoted and dedicated to Him. And Jesus
loves the church with the desire that the church would respond to His love with
a life that reflects His character and His conduct; a life that is faultlessly
focused on pleasing Him.
After revealing the results that Jesus selfless and sacrificial love had
when it came to His relationship with the church, Paul transitioned to applying
Jesus’ love for the church to the relationship between a husband and a wife. Tomorrow
we will see how Paul applied his words about Jesus to husbands...
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