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Christ Community Chapel is a church in Hudson, OH, that invites people to reimagine life because of Jesus. Learn more about us at ccchapel.com.
Ephesians 5:22 through 33.
Wives, submit to your own husbands
as to the Lord.
For the husband is the head of the wife,
even as Christ
is the head of the church,
his body and is himself its Savior.
Now as the church submits to Christ,
so also wives should submit in everything
to their husbands.
Husbands,
love your wives,
as Christ loved the church
and gave himself up for her, that he might
sanctify her having cleansed her
by the washing of water with the word
so that he might present the church
to himself in splendor, without spot
or wrinkle, or any such thing,
that she might be holy
and without blemish in the same way.
Husbands should love their wives
as their own bodies.
He who loves his wife loves himself.
For no one ever hated his own flesh,
but nourishes and cherishes
it just as Christ does the church.
Because we are members of his body.
Therefore a man shall leave his father
and mother
and hold fast to his wife,
and the two shall become one flesh.
This mystery is profound, and I am saying
that it refers to Christ and the church.
However, let each one of you
love his wife as himself and as the wife.
See that she respects her husband.
Hey everybody.
Good morning and welcome to Christ
Community Chapel.
So, so glad that you're here.
Thanks for coming.
Before I get into the message,
let me just tell you this.
If you are a member here at CCC
and in just about a month,
you're going to be asked to vote on
the transition of the position of senior
pastor from myself to Pastor Zach.
We've been talking about this for a while,
and if you're a member,
you should have gotten an email
this past week with a video.
It's a short video.
You're going to get an email with a short
video each week for the next four weeks.
And each other
video is designed to tell you something
about how the preparation
was for the transition, the mechanics
of the transition itself, and then what's
going to happen afterwards.
We want to try to communicate as clearly
as we can, what's going on?
For most of you,
it won't seem like much of a change.
Because I'll still be around.
I'll still be preaching the same amount.
But in another way, it is a big change.
It starts a new chapter for our church.
Chapter one for our church was,
Jim Colledge, who is our founding pastor.
He was the senior
pastor during chapter one.
And then it transitioned to me.
And then I have been the senior pastor
for chapter two.
And now it's about to transition,
hopefully to Pastor Zach.
And he will be the senior pastor
for chapter three.
And I know that Pastor Jim,
he prayed that chapter two
would be better
and more exciting than chapter one.
I know I'm praying that chapter three
will be better and more exciting.
The chapter two in chapter
two has been great
I but I really expect it to be even better
and that's the way it's looking.
So I just want to let you know
what was going on.
If you're not a member
and you want to know
kind of what the videos say,
they're on our website.
All right. Okay.
This is the
second message of our four part series.
We are calling Good News for Families.
And today
we're going to talk about marriage.
And if you are married,
of course, this applies to you.
If you're single
and you are hoping one day to get married,
then this should be very helpful
as you start
to think about marriage
or prepare for marriage.
If you're single and for whatever reason
you don't see marriage in your future,
there is still good news for you
this morning, I promise.
Just wait.
The passage
we had read to us, Ephesians chapter
five, is the longest passage on marriage
in the whole Bible,
gives more instructions
than anywhere else.
Those of us who officiate weddings,
we use Ephesians five a lot
because it gives instructions
both to the husband and the wife.
Here are
the three points that I want to use
as an outline,
just to kind of carry our time together.
I want to talk about the simple part
of marriage and of this passage.
I want to talk about the hard part.
And then finally,
I want to talk about the wonderful part,
the simple, the hard,
the wonderful first, the simple part.
We want to say simple.
This is like the foundation of marriage
that you can get out of this passage.
The first is that marriage is God's idea.
There are three aspects
that I put in the simple category.
Marriage is God's idea,
and that means that
he's the one who designed it.
It wasn't some cultural construct
that some primitive culture
came up with a long time ago,
and it's kind of carried through the ages.
God started it way back in Genesis
chapter two with Adam and Eve.
This is before sin ever entered the world.
This is what it says.
This is Adam speaking.
It says the man said, this at last
is bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh.
She shall be called woman,
because she was taken out of man.
Therefore a man shall leave
his father and his mother
and hold fast to his wife,
and they shall become one flesh.
And the man and his wife were both naked,
and were not ashamed.
The reason I say that God designed
marriage is that there are a lot of things
where the Bible doesn't talk much about,
let's say, schools
or community centers or hospitals.
The Bible doesn't regulate those
because God didn't invent those.
He left that up to us.
But marriage is his.
That means that if you decide
to go against God's design
or God's definition of marriage, you do so
at your own peril.
It's like if I buy a car
and I throw away the owner's
manual and I say, I know
it says I should put oil in here,
but I'm going to put peanut butter
because I love peanut butter.
That will not go
well with the way the car is designed.
If you decide to try to do marriage
in a way that God did not design it,
you are heading for trouble.
That's the first aspect
of the simple part.
The second is that marriage
is based on a promise, not a feeling.
It's a promise.
I have officiated a lot of weddings
over the years, and, early on,
I would always start the wedding ceremony
the same way.
I would say, dearly beloved,
we are gathered here in the sight of God,
the presence of these witnesses to unite
these two in the bonds of holy wedlock.
And then my next line
was always our friends,
we have come here to celebrate love.
And then I realized that wasn't true.
So if I did your wedding
and I started out like that, sorry.
Yeah,
that.
Because I realized that no one gathers
at a wedding
to hear a couple
say how much they love each other, right?
Then you gather at a wedding
to witness a promise of how
things are going to be 20, 30,
40 years after that death.
And the reason you make a promise
is that a promise is not fickle,
and feelings are.
I don't care how much you love your fiance
and you think that you will never have
a different feeling, you're going to feel
something different someday.
That's why you make a promise
everyone's well,
somebody will be in my office
and they'll say, you know what I have?
I no longer love my spouse.
And with as much compassion
as I can muster, I say, I don't care.
That's
not what you said when you stood up.
You said, I promise.
And promises aren't fickle.
So feelings go up and down,
but not the promise.
The third thing aspect, it goes in.
The simple part, is that a marriage
relationship is supposed to have priority.
That's what it says in verse 31.
It says, therefore a man shall leave
his father and mother and hold fast.
The old fashioned word was
and shall cleave to his wife,
and the two shall become one flesh.
That word cleave,
is the word for being glued together.
The Bible didn't talk about
any other human relationship like this.
So this is different.
Your relationship with your spouse
is different than
and so nothing should take priority.
No other human relationship.
Not the one with your parents
and sometimes people
I have trouble with that if they come
particularly from a good family.
But then sometimes people are not so not
so bad about separating from their parents
to cleave to each other.
But then they have children, and slowly
the children become the priority
in the family instead of the relationship
between the husband and the wife.
And of course, that's a problem
because the Bible says that one day
those children grow up
and they're supposed to leave
and cleave to somebody else.
But the third thing that can kind of
get involved
in a priority of a marriage
is, of course, work a job.
Scottie Scheffler,
who is the world's number one
golfer and has been for over
100 weeks in a row, is amazing.
Golfer.
He said something that shocked people
about a month ago.
He said,
my marriage and my
family are more important to me than golf.
And the day golf gets between me
and my wife
and my children is the day I quit golf.
And everyone like, what?
Right.
You're the number one golfer in the world.
Tim Keller, the late pastor
from Redeemer
Presbyterian Church in New York City.
He wrote he and his wife, Kathy, wrote
probably the best book on marriage
I've ever read.
It's called The Meaning of Marriage.
And I remember him telling a story about,
when he first went to New York City
to plant the church.
Planting a church
takes an enormous amount of time.
And so he told his wife, Kathy, listen,
for the next three years or so,
you won't see much of me.
I'm just going to be busy
planting this church.
But after three years, things
will settle down and get back to normal.
And he came home, one evening,
around four years later,
and he came home to his apartment and
he heard some crashing out on the balcony,
and he went out on the balcony
and his wife, Kathy,
was sitting on the floor of the balcony
and taking saucers.
Their their wedding China one at a time
and putting him in front of her
and smashing him with a hammer.
And he said, what are you doing?
And she said, I'm getting your attention.
And he said, okay, okay, stop.
You have my attention.
What do you want to tell me?
And she said, you said three years.
It's been four years.
What she was saying is,
if we keep doing it
the way we're doing it, you keep doing it
the way you're doing it.
This marriage will not survive.
It's not the way God designed it.
Just to finish the story that later on
he said to her,
you must have been really upset
to be smashed in our wedding China.
And she said,
I was only smashing the saucers
where the cups had already been broken.
I'm not an idiot.
And I thought that was funny.
So if you're married,
when you get home from church today,
it might be good to sit down
and just say to your spouse,
how are we doing?
Do you feel like our relationship
is more important
than our relationship with our parents?
Do you think our relationship
has priority over our children?
Do you think our relationship has
is more important than our jobs?
All right, that's the simple part.
Now we get to the the hard part.
You know, the Bible or in seminary
they tell you
when you read the Bible,
make sure you read it in context.
It's kind of dangerous to open up
the Bible and just point to some place
and start to read it.
Be like opening up an email and trying
to read right in the middle of the email
and reading something like,
you've always been like this.
You don't know whether that's a compliment
or a criticism.
Not until you read the context.
Same thing with the Bible.
Right before
the Apostle Paul starts
all these instructions about marriage,
the passage before he's
talking about being filled by the spirit.
And when he talks about being filled
by the spirit, that's somebody
who understands the gospel, who Jesus is
and what Jesus has done for them
to such an extent that the gospel has gone
deep enough
where they're opening their lives
more and more
to the to the Spirit of God.
And the last verse right before he starts
the passage on marriage,
it says this submitting to one
another out of reverence for Christ.
What Paul is assuming is that two
Christians who are about to get married
have already gotten the gospel deep
enough into their system that they know
what it feels like to serve someone else,
do not have themselves in the center.
And that's what it means when you submit
one to another, submit to someone else.
The hard part about marriage
is that self-centredness is the number one
problem of every marriage.
Selfishness.
Number one problem in your marriage.
If you're married.
I remember
reading a book on marriage years ago
where the author said that the reason
that selfishness is so easy
to have happen in a marriage
is he said, when when you get engaged, you
when you find the person that you want to
marry you, you usually find them
because they make you feel different
than anyone else has ever made you feel.
They do something for you
that no one has ever been able to do.
And so you say,
that's who I want to marry.
And this author said that can easily shift
into what he called
a tick on a dog syndrome,
where a tick finds a host
and then pulls out what they need
from that host and what this author said.
The problem with most marriages
is that there are two ticks and no dog.
Right? And that's true.
Self-Centredness is the
major problem in any marriage.
Show me two people
who have put the other person
and their needs in front of their own.
I will show you a great marriage.
Show me two people who are married
who put their own
needs in front of the person
they're married to.
I'll show you a terrible marriage.
All right.
I remember
hearing about a guy who had a dream.
And in that dream, he went to hell.
And in hell there was this.
What he saw was this huge banquet table
with all this amazing food.
But everybody was starving, and they were
screaming, and they were in agony.
And he realized the reason was because,
on their hands, they had three foot
long forks and they couldn't
get the food into their mouth.
Right.
And in that same dream,
then the guy went to heaven
and he saw the same banquet table,
same food.
People were laughing and singing
and having just a blast.
And he realized they had the same forks,
three foot long forks on their hands.
But instead of trying to feed themselves,
they were feeding
the person across from them.
And the point of
that story is, in some ways,
there's not a huge difference
between heaven and hell.
In some ways, that's a huge difference.
Same thing with marriage, right?
Show me two people who are saying,
you know what, I'm
going to deal
with my own self-centeredness.
So this is the hard thing
about what I said about self-centeredness
being the problem in marriage.
If, if, when I said that
your immediate thought was of your spouse
and you're thinking, yeah,
they're a problem, you know what?
You're probably the problem.
That's the kicker.
Because if you thought, you know what,
I am self-centered.
You're the problem.
And if you thought they're the ones
that are problem,
you're probably still the problem.
And this is what happens
if with the gospel.
The gospel is supposed to go deep enough
inside of us
that we realize that our deepest needs
are met by Jesus
so we can afford to go ahead
and care about the other person
and see them and serve them.
All right.
The second aspect of the hard part
is that there are different roles
for husband and wife,
and you probably notice that, right?
They're not interchangeable.
God doesn't say, husbands,
love your wives, wives love your husbands.
He says, husbands, love your wives.
Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands.
And that's hard. Listen, wait.
Before I go any further, if you're
a husband and you have used that verse
to serve your own self-centeredness,
shame on you.
Stopping to misuse Scripture
is one of the worst things to do,
and that scripture does not mean
that she becomes your servant.
But there has to be a reason
why God doesn't say, husbands,
love your wives, wives love your husbands.
And this is what I what clicked for me
years ago.
I heard a psychologist, at a lecture,
and he was saying that,
in every human being, there are two basic
needs, every human being.
You have these two basic needs,
the need to be loved
and the need to feel significant,
important.
Right.
And this particular psychologist
said, listen,
every human being has those two needs.
But the average woman,
and this is the difference that he said
was between genders.
If the average woman had to choose between
feeling really loved
or feeling really important
and significant, the average woman
would choose to feel loved.
If the average man had to choose
between feeling really loved
or really significant and important,
the average man would choose
to feel significant and important.
If you've heard me preach,
you know I like to, I think in analogies
and I love props.
And what struck me when I heard this,
this is what's helped me
is I thought, okay, if every time,
I needed to feel
a person needed to feel loved,
instead of having someone tell you that
that they loved you, or show affection
toward you, or write
you a note, you needed a red M&M.
And every time you
needed to feel significant or important,
you didn't need a promotion or somebody
to say you're doing a good job
or somebody say, I'm proud of you,
you needed a green M&M.
That would mean
when you woke up in the morning,
the very first thing you would do before
you got coffee, you would go
and you'd find Your Eminence and you'd get
have some red ones, have some green ones,
because then you would feel great.
You would feel full, right?
Wars would be fought over red and green.
That mean that visibly the most important
commodities in the world.
That's what
this passage says at the very end.
However, let each of you love his wife.
Fill her with red ones
and let the wife
see that she respects her husband.
Fill him with green ones.
And this would help me.
Ever since I had that kind of epiphany
I began,
I would wake up in the morning and
I would think of my wife as an empty jar.
And then my job was to fill her
with red ones
and have a net positive
at the end of the day of red ones,
like so, the first thing I do
in the morning, and if you've heard me
speak about marriage,
you know that I do this as I make coffee
and I bring, a cup of coffee up
and I put it on the nightstand next to
because she loves coffee,
and I want her to know that I thought
of her the first thing in the morning.
And I'm doing that to sort of.
What I'm doing is putting a couple of red
ones in the jar before she even wakes up,
so that when I mess up
later on, I'm just back to zero.
Every time my wife says to me
that she's proud of me
when she says it in front of people,
it's like a bunch of of green ones.
So let me tell you this.
If you're married
and you will go 30 days, 30 days,
I'm saying I'm
going to focus on having a net positive.
And as you go to bed at night, husbands,
you ask your wife,
do you feel more loved now
than you did when we woke up this morning?
And if she says yes, 30 days in a row,
then you have changed her marriage.
If the husband if the wife says,
do you feel like I am more proud of you,
that I'm more excited
about your success
than I was this morning?
And he says, yes,
you will revolutionize your marriage.
This is
if you will say, my selfishness
is the problem.
Not not my wounds, not my past,
not even how I'm being treated.
But I'm going to work on that with Jesus,
and then I'm going
to serve the other person,
and I'm going to fill them
with whatever I can.
So they will feel loved,
so they will feel significant.
There's no there's
no limit to what your marriage can become.
Right now.
We get to the wonderful part.
Paul says something right in the middle
that is great.
He says this husbands, love your wives.
As Christ loved the church,
gave himself up for her that he might
sanctify her, having cleansed her
by the washing of water with the word.
So he might present the church to himself
in splendor, without spot or wrinkle,
or any such thing, that she might be holy
and without blemish.
And then he jumped down.
It says, this mystery is profound,
and I'm saying
that it refers to Christ and the church.
What Paul does in the middle of this
talking about marriage, he likens marriage
to the way Jesus loves the church,
the way Jesus loves us.
The very
central message of the Bible
is called the gospel,
which is what Jesus has done for us.
And the gospel is captured in a bunch
of different places in the Bible.
But I love the way
Romans five eight puts it.
And I'll use this in my wedding ceremony
says,
But God demonstrates his love toward us,
and that while we were still sinners,
Christ died for us.
What that means
is that when you were at your very worst,
God loved you the very most.
When I took my vows before a pastor,
when I got married to my wife Karen,
I said this.
I promise I will love you
for better or for worse,
for richer, for poorer,
in sickness and in health.
And when I said to her,
I will love you for better or for worse.
What I was saying
is, when you were at your worst,
you can count on me
to love you the way Jesus loves me,
because that's the way
God designed marriage.
The wonderful thing about marriage
is that it gives us
the opportunity, gives me the opportunity
to love my wife.
Just a little bit the way Jesus loves her.
And my wife can love me
when I'm at my worst,
and I can feel what it feels like
in a concrete way,
the way Jesus loves me.
And that is astounding.
You know what
marriage is supposed to be, at
its best is a reflection
of the love of Jesus.
It's a pale reflection.
I always think that marriage
is a little bit like,
like a model car,
like a little matchbox Porsche.
And Jesus is the real thing.
He is the portion.
This is the good news for those of you
who are single,
is that you have the real thing,
right?
If you had to
choose between the real thing and the pale
imitation, you would choose the real thing
every day and twice on Sunday.
And you have the real thing every once
while somebody, well,
who has had a great marriage
and their spouse dies,
they'll say, I can't wait to get to heaven
to see my spouse again.
And I get that.
I really do.
But I want you to know
that your love
that you had with your spouse,
your spouse had for you
is just just a tiny taste.
Like you get to heaven,
your spouse will be like a candle,
and Jesus will be like the blazing sun.
And when you get to heaven,
you will run towards the blazing.
You might run with the candle to the
blazing sun, but you are made for that.
You are made for Jesus.
Listen, marriage,
and as much as it is a reflection
of the love of God for you, is great,
but it's not Jesus.
And when my wife, when I.
I want the chance to love her
the way Jesus loves her,
which means I am keeping this
what I'm Susie.
I'm so to keep my eyes peeled for
when she's at her worst.
Because that's my time to shine, right?
And when when I do that,
I want her to feel just a drop
of the love of Jesus, the fountain of love
that Jesus has.
For when I am at my worst
and my wife loves me still,
but I want it to make me love her
more, for sure.
But even more than that, I want it
to remind me of the love of Jesus.
Because what?
When I am at my worst and she loves me,
that love comes right from him,
right from him.
And so that's good news for every family.
It's good news for you, wherever you are.
It's good news for me.
Would you pray with me?
Father in heaven.
Thank you for this thing
that you designed called marriage.
Thanks that you made it
so that it is supposed to be
this reflection of your love.
I pray for all of us.
I pray that you would, help us with the
the simple and the hard
and the wonderful part of marriage.
I pray that those who are single
will realize
the deep love,
the real thing that they already have.
Jesus, thanks and thanks for Jesus.
We pray this in his name. Amen.