In this audio message, Scott Brown discusses the topic of husbands loving their wives. He encourages his listenders husbands to replicate Christ's love for the Church. He explains what true, biblical looks like -- so often, love is misinterpreted and wrongly defined by the world. It's important to correctly understand what Scripture defines it.

This message is entitled: "A Husband's Love" by Scott Brown from the 2021 "Getting the Picture Right - In Your First Ten Years of Marriage" Retreat.

1 Peter 3:7 (NKJV) - "Husbands, likewise, dwell with them with understanding, giving honor to the wife, as to the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life, that your prayers may not be hindered."

Well, open your Bibles to Ephesians Chapter 5. We're going to spend the whole morning in Ephesians Chapter 5. We started last night talking about the fact that in marriage you're painting a picture. You're telling a story that isn't your own story. It's the story of the love of God.

And you know, I wanted to just ask what kind of picture are you painting? And I wanted to identify some of Satan's plots against your marriage, how he sets traps and snares around the marriage bed. We talked about intimacy in marriage and the ways that the devil would like to darken your heart and dampen your love and destroy your joy because the joy of the Lord is your strength and I wanted to say it's a beautiful picture and To say let's replicate it. Let's replicate Christ's love for the church in our marriages You're you're in a time of life that I'm going to call it's the time for embracing Ecclesiastes 3 5 says there's a time to embrace and there's a time to refrain from embracing You're in the time of embracing when you were single you were in the time of refraining from embracing. And so, you know, I'm here to encourage you all to embrace.

You know, Jesus, you know, quoted Genesis when he said, a man shall leave his father and mother and shall embrace his wife, cleave to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. So It's very, it's just so important that you build your building right. You know, I don't know if you noticed when you drove in here, did you see millstones when you drove in here? There are four millstones that you passed on the way into this house, And they were all taken from mills locally, you know, 18th century mills. And they're here for a purpose.

I was looking around for millstones and found some guys that were in locally that were willing to part with them the Lord Jesus Christ Said if you cause even the least of these to stumble it'd be better for millstone were hung around your neck the way you're married can be either a millstone or it can be a sweetness to them and it's you know there are many ways that parents can make children stumble and One of the ways is the way that they conduct themselves in their marriage. And so it's so serious. Jesus says it is so serious that it would be better for a millstone to be hung around your neck. Now I don't know if you can visualize that, but These are big millstones. Imagine one being hung around your neck.

You're going to the bottom real fast. So the Lord Jesus puts the most devastating, terrifying image for us to help us understand how critical it is. Now, in your marriage, you're building a culture, and of course you have a pattern in heaven from which to create that culture. The design for your marriage is in heaven. And it really begins with the love of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, there's a family in heaven.

And that family has particular relational functions. And that family is, that family function, that family atmosphere is meant to be replicated on the earth we we love in the way that the Father and the Son and the Spirit love and you know God has given us this pattern I My daughter bought a book several years ago, Claudia, and she sent me some wonderful quotes from this book. Here's one of the quotes from the book. Between the home set up in Eden and the home before us in eternity stand the homes of earth in long succession. It is therefore important that our homes should be brought up to a standard in harmony with their origin and destiny.

Here are the empire's primal springs. Here Are the church and the state in embryo. Here all the improvements and reforms must arise. Talking about home life, your home. For national and social disasters, for moral and financial evils, The cure begins in the household.

In no case could legislation and commerce lead back to a day of honesty and plenty unless the family were their active coworker. Where souls and bodies are nourished, where fortunes are builded and brains are trained, there must be a focus of all moral and physical interests. What he, What this author is saying is that home life determines everything. The culture that you're creating in your home is so important. You need to define it and to work on it, define it by the word of God.

And that really is simply done by becoming conformed to Christ. Becoming conformed to Christ, understanding what love looks like, being filled with the Holy Spirit is the essence of it. Ephesians five. And you know, if you begin in verse twenty two, he starts talking about husbands and wives. But you have to recognize that there's something that comes before this.

This this section of scripture is called by theologians the family life codes. And of course, he begins with church life and then he begins with husbands and wives, speaks of children and parents and then speaks of workers and those who are in subservient relationships and work And they're called the family life codes by theologians. But how do they begin? They really begin with where it all ought to begin. And that is with the filling of the Holy Spirit.

You can do the things that are commanded here in the family life codes, but it matters how you do them. And why you do them, and that's why in Ephesians 5 18, the apostle says, Do not be drunk with wine, but be filled with the Holy Spirit. And then he begins to itemize what it looks like to be filled with the Holy Spirit. What does it look like when a husband is filled with the Holy Spirit? He loves his wife and he gives himself up for her and he nourishes her and he cherishes her.

And he cleaves her. That's what it looks like when the Holy Spirit is working. So there are things in these family life codes that you're commanded to do. You should do them. But there's a way that you do them and a reason that you do them.

And you're not just going through emotions. You're you're filled with the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit, and the filling of it is the key to family life. If you're going to build a culture in your family, it's really important that you obey God and do what he told you to do. But it really matters how and why you do it. Does it, Is it as a result of the work of God in your heart to love your spouse and to love your children?

And so this, you know, your home is a culture. You're always building a culture in your home. And you have to ask, what kind of culture am I building? Is it the culture of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control? Is it a culture of the Holy Spirit or is it my culture?

My feelings, my moods, my objectives? What's going on here? You're going to build a culture. You can't help it, but what kind of culture are you building? So Ephesians 5 helps us to understand this.

The central word in Ephesians 5 is the word love, and we're going to spend the whole morning talking about various manifestations of love. I want to read this, and then I want to just begin to talk around some of the things that are here in verse 22 The Apostle opens with wives wives submit to your own husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is head of the wife, as also Christ is head of the church, And he is the savior of the body so wives, of course, they order themselves under the authority of their husbands as To the Lord in other words, they obey them in the way that they would obey the Lord If a If a husband is asking his wife to do something not unto the Lord and disobedience to the Lord She should she should disobey her husband in that case But she is submit to her husband as to the Lord. It's a holy thing that she submits to For the husband is head of the wife, as also Christ is head of the church, so a wife has been given a head, someone to lead. And it says here that he is the savior of the body.

That means that his role is to be like the savior. He is to function like Christ. Therefore, just as the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives Be to their own husbands and everything these are all laws of love This is the way that love works in a marriage, and then he turns to husbands, and he says husbands love your wives Just as Christ also loved the church and gave himself for her so he uses this word love now the Bible says that the whole law is summed up in the word love. So that means that a husband's love has a definition. And it's defined by whatever the Bible says about love.

So we know that one way that a husband loves his wife is by obeying all of God's laws. That's love. Love isn't primarily what you feel. Love is what you do. And so he uses this word love.

And it's very important that he that he uses this word love. Now, this passage. Is a wrecking ball for wrong views of love. And. We think of love, we've been trained to think of love as the adrenaline rush of infatuation.

And It's a very distorted view of love. They appear in almost every marriage book that's on the market today. Hollywood has so distorted what love is. You acquire wrong views of love from your friends, from your parents, from songs. And we live in a time where there's such a disfigurement of love.

We don't know what love is anymore. But The Bible tells us what it looks like. That's why the apostles said, see to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deception according to the tradition of men rather than according to Christ. You live in a world where you grew up and you didn't really know that much about what love is from the outside world. They did not teach you what love really looked like.

The only way to get it is really from God. And what happens is that people get married on infatuation and then after a few years they're tempted to throw in the towel, they say, I don't think I love this person anymore. And the reason is they have been held captive to empty philosophies and destructive actual doctrines of demons regarding love and so you find people you know they Somebody described marriages like you know flies you know on a screen door, you know the ones on the inside one out and the ones on the outside want in. And that's because of wrong views of love typically. Now, marriages are destroyed from a number of different fronts.

Lust will destroy your marriage but the kind of lust and the kind of views of love that you see in Hollywood and the romance novels and that is affirmed by all kinds of people are love killers as well. And, You know, almost everybody gets married because of a thrilling attraction they had. Can you agree with that? You know, that's, I did. I certainly had it.

You know, God has built into your system neurochemical reactions of elation. They're called endorphins and they make you happy. And people in our culture have been trained to be endorphin junkies and their whole lives are just moved by endorphin dumps that they create through songs and all kinds of things like that. And people use drugs to do that. But these are hormones that are released and they give you pleasure.

And they, you know, I mean there are lots of ways that endorphins are released. You know, exercise releases them. You know, I remember somebody once said that if exercise were a pill, everybody would take it every day. You know, the results of exercise. Because you just feel better, You know, if you do.

But they relieve depression, they reduce anxiety, they create positive feelings. And they create sort of an intoxication to the level that you're, like you're able to talk on the phone with somebody, you know, when you've sort of fallen in love with them for five or six hours, right? You can't even get off the phone with them because you're on an endorphin dump, you know, and you just can't stand it. And, you know, you can't stand to be separated from them and you want to be on the phone with them all the time. You know, back in the day, it was like really expensive to be on an ender for high, falling in love with somebody because the phone company actually charged you money per minute.

And if that person lived across the country, I mean you could spend thousands of dollars on the phone with that person, you know, that you got infatuated with and it happened all the time. This is Hollywood's doctrine of falling in love. The chick flick, love stories, you know, the romantic, You know how the romantic attraction, you're at the water cooler and oh, I've just fallen in love. And then now the enderfin dump rolls and disaster, and there's nothing but disaster after that. And, but here's the reality, okay.

This is, this should be expected. But the truth is no one can give you this ongoing adrenal rush that you experienced at the beginning. And when you decided to get married you were probably still on that endorphin rush. But it will go away at some point. And by the way, anyone can get infatuated, okay.

Infatuation is actually is not very important because anyone can do it under certain conditions. And I was reading in a business magazine that I read from Time Time, the Business Insider, and I'm just quoting from the article. The honeymoon phase doesn't go on forever. According to a 2005 study by a university in Italy, it lasts about a year. After that, levels of chemical, a chemical called nerve growth factor which is associated with the intense romantic feelings start to fall.

And I just, a couple months ago I read a book by Gary Thomas called The Sacred Search. You know, I did a singles conference. I started reading all these books that people had written about, you know, you know, looking for spouses and the single life and all this kind of stuff. But this is actually a good book called The Sacred Search. He says this in the book, the average lifespan of an infatuation is almost always less than two years.

And he says, this is normal, expected, and a calculable response. It should be anticipated. It should be evaluated. It should not be exalted or overly dignified or magnified as an argument for getting married. Infatuation follows a predictable graph.

Everyone experiences the graph with some minor differences. Now, and we're talking about love. What is love? And it's so critical that you understand what love is and it's not the same thing as infatuation that you had before you got married and maybe even convinced you to get married. And it's, you know, what does it look like?

I'm quoting from Gary Thomas. Not only are you stupid when you're infatuated, you become extremely vulnerable. And he says it might be lofty and sublime and uplifting and exhilarating but it should not be deified and it's not love. And then he says it will end. He says, I'm quoting, falling in love can be a very dangerous game.

Be careful who you play it with. And then he says things, you know, Wisdom waits. He makes some recommendations. And he says that you don't sign a mortgage when you're drunk. And he says you don't make lifelong commitments when you're intoxicated with love.

Okay. Hey, I mean, frankly, I mean, my counsel to people who want to get married is get over that first. Take, just take enough time and get over that if you can. Now, most people can't. They just can't do it.

They have to get married, and they do. But, here's what I'm trying to say. That was not love. That was not love. That was a neurochemical reaction that happens to everybody.

Okay. So you have to get down to love. And what does the Bible say about love? Well, the Bible makes it clear that there are feelings involved with love, but love basically is what you do. It's not how you feel primarily, it's what you do.

It's how you treat someone. That's what love looks like. Now I want you to open to 1 Corinthians 13. It's really important that we get clear on what love is. Because If the Bible says for husbands to love their wives, they need to understand what that looks like.

Now also, it's implied that wives should love their husbands as well. You know, wives don't get off the hook of love here. The Bible has many commands about love. And so those are for both men and women in marriage. So I'm wanting to talk to everybody here.

Even though the command in Ephesians 5 is specifically focused on men, it does apply to women. Now I'm gonna give you an outline here. In the first three verses in 1st Corinthians 13 The Apostle shows us the value of love Though I speak with the tongue of men tongues of men and of angels But have not loved I have become a sounding brass or a clanging symbol. And though I have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and knowledge, and though I have all faith so that I could remove mountains but have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned but have not love, it profits me nothing." So in other words, Without love, you ain't nothing, nothing.

Whatever you do, if it's not motivated by love, it's not very meaningful. And you can have a silver tongue, you can have the gift of prophecy, You can be so smart, understand all mysteries. You can just be such a remarkable person, but if you don't have love, you're nothing. So he speaks of the value of love. It's the most valuable thing.

It's the only thing that lasts. And so he speaks of the value of love and then he speaks of the signs of love in verses four through seven. And there are actually 15 of them. Love suffers long, verse four. Love suffers long and is kind.

Love does not envy, love does not parade itself, is not puffed up. Love does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil, does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures of all things. Those are the signs of love. And by the way, It's not the same thing as infatuation.

It has nothing to do with infatuation. Love is good because it goes far beyond the death of infatuation. And, you know, to say that if infatuation dies, I think should be qualified. That doesn't mean that you don't love each other anymore. You know, I love Deborah more now, I think, than I ever have.

But I'm not as infatuated as I was You know when I first decided I wanted to marry her And then you have the permanence of love in verses eight through 12. Love never fails, but where there are prophecies, they will fail. And then finally, the supremacy of love in verse 13. Now abide faith, hope, love. These three, but the greatest of these is love.

So what do you get from this? The purpose of everything on earth and in heaven is love and Nothing matters without love nothing lasts without love and Nothing is beautiful without love. And so the Apostle says husbands love your wives and There's there's just much to say about this, but I want to just camp for a moment on these 15 marks of love. If you want to love someone, then they this is listed here. These are 15 distinguishing marks of love.

And they all manifest the presence of Jesus. They all manifest the work of the Holy Spirit in your heart and By the way, love is not a decision Love is not a discipline Love is not a work of the flesh Love is a fruit. Love is a fruit of the Holy Spirit. And we have to really understand that love comes from fellowship with God. So if you want if you want to love.

Your spouse more. Then. Sweeten your fellowship with God. Learn from him. Find all of your hope in him.

Worship him. Find the motivation for your love in him. In many ways marriage is really, really simple. Love God with all your heart. And then you won't do the desires of the flesh.

It's really very simple. You know, it's easy to make a list of do this, do this, do this, do this, but at the bottom of it all is something really really simple it's a heart turned toward God and A life that's becoming like Jesus Christ You know hope Personal holiness is the most important thing in your marriage. You know, I want to see holy men and women married. Do you want to be holy? Do you want to eliminate all matter of paganism from your life?

It's very interesting, this morning I woke up. I'm just doing my normal reading, you know, as I normally do. And I ended up in two passages of scripture. The first one was in Nehemiah 13 where Nehemiah says, I got rid of everything pagan. But one of the things that, one of the ways that paganism had worked into the culture is that he, well, he went to Babylon and while he was gone, things deteriorated.

And he comes back and he finds that these people have married pagans and they become pagan. And so, I mean, he has this remarkable reaction. He curses them. He pulls out their beards, okay. It was the most, the paganism of their marriages, he thought, it seemed to him to be the worst thing, and he had this violent reaction to that.

Removing everything pagan from your marriage, please do that. Holiness is the source of all happiness in your home. Do you want to be holy? Do you want to remove everything that is unholy from your life? You know the Jews, they used to symbolize this.

They would spread leaven, you know, it symbolized sin. They would spread leaven all over their house And then they would sweep it up Symbolizing sin and they would take it outside. They'd burn it in order to say we want to remove every manifestation of sin from our households and If you want to have a marriage that is full of love then it would be a holy Marriage and it would And the husband and the wife would have their greatest concentration on Christ becoming like him and being filled with the Holy Spirit and removing all paganism from their lives. And their songs, their reading, everything, Remove the paganism. So anyway, that's why I'm saying love isn't really primarily decision, it's a fruit.

It's not a discipline, it's a manifestation of something from the heart, You love God from the heart. So, by the way, these 15 marks, I'm just going to mention them briefly. You'll notice that every one of these marks of love. Are also illustrations of how Christ loved the church every one of them. This is the way that Christ loves you and I think you know by implication.

This is how we love one another We love because he first loved us. So, so after being taught about the value of love, he now turns to the signs of love. And so in verse four, he says, love suffers long. Now Christ is also patient. How patient Has Christ been with you?

He's long suffering he's been slow to anger Prolonged particular patience with Particular sins how patient has he been and Then secondly love is kind he's kind to the unkind Has your spouse ever been unkind to you Christ loved us and he made us alive while we were dead. He loved us while we were unkind. We were insolent toward him. His love is like that. You know, it was just a few days ago, Deborah and I were with some people And she was telling a story and I corrected her.

And when we got home, you know, it was pretty clear that I never should have done that. You know, I knew it when I did it. And But I never should have done that. It was ridiculous. I was just correcting a silly story, you know.

Totally uncalled for, you know. I didn't need to do it. But it hurt her feelings, you know. Now I was right about the point, okay. But I was totally wrong to do that to her.

And so I was grateful, you know, she came to me and she told me that it, you know, that it hurt her. But love is kind. You know, love, you know, love might let a spouse just tell a story wrong and not have to correct them about it. Number three, love does not envy when someone else prospers. You know, spouses can envy one another in the life that they have.

Fourth, love does not parade itself for self-exaltation. Number five, love is not puffed up over his own opinions. You know, Christ is gentle and humble at heart and you'll find rest for your souls with him. Number six, love does not behave rudely. Have you ever done that?

Number seven, love does not seek its own. Christ laid down his heavenly glory and he became a man, came to be served not to serve, came to serve not to be served. Number eight, love is not provoked when challenged. You know, Christ was silent before his accusers. Number nine, love thinks no evil.

In other words, or love does not keep a record of wrongs. That is so important, not keeping a record of wrongs. You need to keep really short accounts with one another and clear out any problems right away. Don't let them build up. Deal with them right away.

The problem with not dealing with them is that they will blow up. Deal with it before they blow up. You know, I heard an illustration one time, somebody was talking about two different homes, very similar kind of homes, you know, five children, you know, the mothers are homeschooling, they go to the same places, they do pretty much the same things. But one home is really cluttered all the time and the other one is not. Now, and the difference between the two homes isn't that one is a messy home and the other is not a messy home.

The difference is in the messy home, they just don't clean up that much. They create the same amount of mess, but in the other home, they just clean up the mess, they clean the mess up quickly. And a marriage is a little bit like that. You want to clean up the mess quickly. And, you know, there are homes that just let things go on.

But you need to clean your mess up quickly and be reconciled to one another. You know, in that instance where I'd hurt Deborah's feelings, you know, she went to me right away, right away. And we resolved it. And but love does not keep a record of wrongs. Number 10, love does not rejoice in iniquity.

In other words, love doesn't rejoice and doesn't celebrate worldliness. I hope you're not celebrating these celebrities that are around. But love doesn't rejoice in iniquity. Number 11, love rejoices in the truth. Number 12, love bears all things.

Number 13, love believes all things when you're tempted to doubt. Number 14, love hopes all things when things seem hopeless. Number 15, love endures all things when life is really hard and life, you'll find will have hard seasons. Some of them harder than you ever dreamed. Things will happen that you can't even imagine will happen to you.

Number 15, love endures all things And then it's all of this just points to the purpose of everything in heaven and earth is to love. And so when the apostle says, husbands love your wives, there's content in what that means. And it's not the indifferent rush that you had when you got engaged. It's deeper and it's more beautiful. And it has so many contours to it.

And it applies in every part of your life. So nothing matters without love. Nothing lasts without love. And it's the purpose of everything on earth and in heaven. So that's why the apostle says that.

Now then, if you get to Galatians 5, 22 and 23, the fruit of the spirit, you should make your children memorize this, they need to understand what it means to be spiritual. And love is, or the fruit of the spirit is, it's the same thing, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, Goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And that is not the enderfin rush that you had when you got engaged. So when you find the enderfin rush drop off, you know, this one author that I quoted said, you know, that it lasts about two years. Some of you haven't been married two years.

But expect it. It's normal. Don't worry about it. You know, love hasn't died. Now you have a chance to actually love, Right?

And that's the blessing of marriage. Then you have this opportunity to actually do the things that manifest the love of God. So, husbands Love your wives. Wives love your husbands. Without it, you ain't nothing.

It's the whole thing. And the whole law is summed up in that one word, love.