In this audio message, Scott Brown discusses God's design of marriage and shares five elements of a godly marriage. He explains that before we discuss anything else, we must first correctly identify God's design for marriage. Whether intentional or not, each marriage is painting a picture -- is your marriage showing a godly or ungodly picture?

Genesis 2:24 (NKJV) - "Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh."

This gathering, small gathering to deal with marriages is really Deborah and my favorite thing to do, especially the small ones, because you can talk to everybody and it's there's just something about meeting in a home and What a great place to meet. You have this big picture window here and I'm just really grateful for this place. My mom and dad have been married 68 years. And Deborah and I just celebrated our 34th wedding anniversary last weekend. And, you know, when I was 32 years old, I had the privilege of doing my grandfather's wedding.

He was 92 when I did his wedding. Isn't that wild? You think you don't have much more time left in your marriage, but you've got a lot of time. Most of you are probably only a third or really halfway through your life being married. Deborah and I met with a group of young people who'd been married just, you know, under seven years, and they were just right at the very beginning of their marriage, but you know, if they stay married, you know, they got married in their 20s, They're probably going to be married 60 years.

You know, you probably will too. You know, when you hear my parents are married for 64, 68 years, you gasp, but it's not out of the question for you that you have a long, a long road ahead being a married couple, and it really, it really is a blessing. Well, I'd like to just pray before we begin and then we'll move move into some of these things. Lord I thank you for ordering all things according to the counsel of your will I thank you for ordering human life so that a man and a woman would be married and that you would use this for such good purposes in the world Lord I pray that you would give us hearts ready to listen to what your spirit would be saying to us through your word that you would help us to understand your will that you would fill us up with the knowledge of your will in all these things and I thank you Lord that we can gather to consider such great things. Amen.

Well I think what what we want to say you know during this entire time is to make it very clear that when you get married you're painting a picture. You're painting a picture of something and the whole design of marriage, the way that God has ordered it is that it is a picture. But it's a picture of something greater. And so we're here to try to describe this design of marriage so that we can understand the design and then create that picture of its design here on earth. And our only hope really is to get the design right, to get the picture right.

And the picture is so clearly described in the Bible. And so we're not left without help in this. There is a heavenly vision that is designed to be seen in the world. And so in one sense, I hope that our time together would result in our just being able to paint well, maybe paint better, Maybe paint differently than we painted in the years past. Because we're all painting a picture right now.

You just might ask, you know, what's on that canvas now? Because you've been painting a picture from the very first moments of your life together. And what is that picture now, but what could it become? And the way that God has designed human life is that human beings can become living pictures of heaven. What a blessing that is.

This is what salvation in Jesus Christ is all about. You turn to Him, you repent of your sins, He fills you with this Holy Spirit and begins to transform you. Into what? After the pattern of heaven. And so we want to try to grasp this heavenly design because that's really the most important thing.

And so we're here to help one another paint well the picture that is in heaven. Now there are a number of elements of this design of marriage and I just want to list five of them. And You'll hear these themes running through our time. The things that I'm going to say here in this first hour, you'll hear these things coming up in the coming hours that we have because I'm going to repeat myself, but I want to try to cast a vision for where we're going and the kinds of things that we're going to be talking about. There are five elements of the design.

The first element of the design of marriage is that marriage's purpose is for the glory of God. God designed marriage in order to display very aspects of His glory. Marriage isn't designed for your glory, it's designed for God's glory, and if you don't get that right, then marriage will never be right, because you'll always be seeking your own glory. The second element of the design is that marriage is designed for a demonstration of the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Marriage is a theater of the illustrations of the power of the gospel.

What does life in Jesus Christ do? How does it make a person think and act and live. And as it turns out, God designed marriage to be, to demonstrate the power of the Gospel on various levels. And so we'll be talking about that throughout this whole time. The third element of marriage is that marriages are designed to be self-consciously and proactively dominion oriented.

God created marriage so that a husband and wife would come together. They would mingle their energies, their strengths, their wisdom, everything about them to take dominion. That they would improve everything in their pathway. And this is one of the glorious things about a marriage, is that you come together with this person that you love and you create a world. You create a life.

And that life is designed for the taking of dominion. And that means that God has husbands and wives come together so that they would improve the area that God places them in. We all live in different communities and neighborhoods and we have people that are part of our lives. We have been created as married couples to take dominion. You have changed your whole identity.

You take a vow and when you walk off that platform and in your wedding you are different. Your relationship with everybody in the world is different. If you're a man, your relationship with every other woman in the world is different. It's fundamentally changed. If you're a woman, the very same thing.

Your relationships with your family and your friends, everything is changed. And one of the manifestations of that change is that when a woman gets married, she no longer is her own. She has now stepped into a different role. She plays the role of the church. So her life is no longer her own.

Her paradigm for living is no longer her own. She must become a glorious church. And that becomes her entire identity and her function in life. And unless a woman understands that, she'll always be confused and she'll always be frustrated. She'll not know who she is.

She'll try to be who she wants to be and it'll be a disaster. And when a husband marries a woman, he does not represent himself any longer. He is no longer his own. He's not his own man. He represents Jesus Christ.

And so he loses his life in marriage. Now that's one of the most critical matters that married couples need to understand. In marriage, you lose your life, but you gain your life as a result of it. You lose your old identity and you become a different person. And so every wife needs to understand here today that her life is not her own.

She becomes a representation of the church and a husband needs to understand when he got married He didn't, he did not do something that would leave him unchanged. It would change absolutely everything about him. And his whole orientation toward his wife is shifted. And he now represents Jesus Christ, not himself. And that's, it's so important to understand that.

And so, marriage is a representative relationship. Further, marriage isn't just representative, it's also a declarative relationship. And this is very important to understand. Marriages were made to say something. Marriages were made to declare a message.

And in the same way that a picture, you know, projects a message to the person who's looking at it, so a marriage is a declarative relationship. And The reality is that marriages are always declaring something. And one of the things that I want us to ask while we're together is what is my marriage declaring? What is the message of our life together as a husband and wife because marriages are always speaking some kind of message and the question is, is the message that our marriage giving, is it a message that's rooted in the categories of the gospel? And, you know, is my marriage declaring a message of love?

Does it declare mercy? Does it declare forgiveness? Does it declare devotion? Does it manifest mercy? Does it speak of the superiority of Jesus Christ?

Because marriage is a declarative relationship. You know, our marriages are always picturing something at any and any given time. You know, you're sitting next to your spouse now, and you're picturing something as you're together in your thoughts, in the way that you feel about each other, the way that you're relating to each other, the way that you look at each other. Your marriage is picturing something even right at this very moment. And we should be very self-conscious about that.

You know, when you get up in the morning and you're with your children as a husband and wife, you are there as a picture. You are painting a picture for them even in the simplest, most routine and mundane aspects of life. You know, when you work together as a family, you're painting a picture. You know, how do you work together? You know, one of the most revealing things in family life happens when families work together because all kinds of things come out, you know.

And in our family, we have all kinds of funny stories of my getting frustrated or something like that. But, you know, but when you work together as a family you're painting a picture. And what kind of picture is it? You know, When you talk on the phone as a husband and wife, you're painting a picture. And when you sit together at dinner, you're always painting a picture.

Marriage is always representing something. And we should be very careful to understand what our marriage is picturing. You know, when a man goes to work and he talks to other women, he's painting a picture of his marriage. When you're together at church, you know, speaking with someone or even across the room, you're declaring something. You're manifesting some element of what your marriage is really all about.

You know, when you crawl into bed at night, and even if you're intimate with one other, you're painting a certain picture. And Here's the secret. The picture that you're painting is dependent on something that is very personal and very internal because you're really painting a picture of something that's in your heart. And this is why it's so critical that we understand the heavenly vision. We get the picture right so that we know how to paint it on earth But that picture, first of all, has to be embraced in the heart.

It has to be loved and enjoyed in the heart first or it cannot be manifested in the earthly picture. And that really is the secret, that there is a love for Jesus Christ and His kingdom, such that the pictures of life are reflective of that kingdom. And that's really the secret of it all. And I know that's very simple. But the most beautiful pictures of marriage are those that are born of God and that come out of love for God.

You know, this is why the Apostle Paul said to the Colossian church, he said, if you've been raised up with Christ, set your mind on the things that are above, not on the things that are on the earth. And that's really the secret of it all. That in our hearts, through our minds, we have the picture right. And You know, unfortunately, we live in a world where the devil is working to mar that picture, to destroy it. He, you know, we were born into this world and we see so many wrong pictures and we adopt them and we end up getting married and we have all kinds of problems as a result of it because the devil is waging an unrelenting attack against marriage.

He always has. He did it from the very beginning in the Garden of Eden. He began to divide a husband and wife. That was the very first work of the devil. And it's obvious that the devil hates marriage.

You know, and you just have to ask why does the devil hate marriage in such a way that he does. It's obvious that he does. Does he just like alienation? Does he appreciate discord and disappointment? Is it just that he likes the worst things of life and he just wants to spread those all around and possibly but I just would submit that the devil hates marriage because the devil hates the gospel And marriage was designed by God to be a picture of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And this is why the devil hates your marriage, is because he hates the gospel of Jesus Christ. And every manifestation of the gospel that he can distort or twist or cover up has been a victory for him and and this this is why the devil hates marriage because he hates the gospel of the grace of Jesus Christ. Because God created marriage to be an earthly illustration of the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. And This union is what he hates the most. And so, that's why it's so critical that as you're painting this picture, you know who you are in the picture.

And that really might be one of the most important questions. Do you know who you are in the picture? Are you still playing yourself in this picture of marriage? Or are you playing the role that is in heaven given to you there. And, you know, every aspect of a husband's role and a wife's role is declaring this matter.

For example, we'll get into more detail of this later, but a wife's submission is so pivotal in the marriage relationship. It really is a declaration. A wife's submission to her husband is evidence that she believes in the gospel. That her life is a picture of Christ, Christ's authority over her life. And that she is designed by God to submit to Jesus Christ.

Her submission to her husband is a picture of her submission to Jesus Christ. And this is one way that submission pictures a fruit of the gospel. One fruit of the gospel is submission. And God commands wives to submit to their husbands to be a demonstration of the submission that God calls for in the lives of a believer. And so her submission preaches a certain kind of gospel.

In the same way, well, and so, you know, her obedience to her husband is an illustration of her obedience to the Lord. And if she's not obedient to her husband, she's become a living illustration that obedience to the Lord is not necessary. And a wife's submission displays that a true church obeys her Lord and when she does not submit to her husband she's declaring a false gospel. She's declaring a gospel that does not require obedience. And that's why God is glorified in a wife's submission.

It's a picture of her trust. It's a picture of her heartfelt desire to submit to her Lord. In the same way, a husband's love is a declaration. A husband who does not love his wife as Christ loved the church declares a false gospel. A husband who doesn't love his wife is declaring that Christ doesn't love his church.

And so These two relationships are so important because they declare a certain kind of gospel. And when you have a husband who doesn't love his wife, you have a marriage that is proclaiming a false gospel. When you have a wife that doesn't submit to her husband, You have a marriage that proclaims a false gospel, that obedience is not necessary in the Christian life, that you can have some kind of formal relationship without honor and love and obedience. So that's the first thing that I want to try to communicate here is that marriage is a picture, and we're here to talk about painting that picture. And I just like to ask all of us just to consider what does the canvas look like now, and what could it look like after we leave here.

Here's another thing that I just want to introduce by way of introduction. All of us know who we are. All of us who've been married for a while understand the difficulties of marriage and there are money problems, there are emotional problems, there are sexual problems, there are physical problems, there are family conflict problems, there are disappointments, there are job challenges, there are offenses, there are all kinds of things that come to the surface in a marriage. You know, you know that about each other and I know that about you and you know we come as broken people. We come as people who need to be mended by the Lord.

And this is the blessing of the kingdom of heaven. It really is the place of healing. And there are all kinds of struggles that we have in marriage because of the way that we grew up and because of the work of the devil in our whole thinking. You know, There are struggles with the whole issue of equality in marriage. You know, how do you grapple with the fact that you know that the Bible teaches that male and female are equal in nature?

But at the same time, there's authority in that equality. And how do you grapple with that? How do you grapple with the fact that even though you're equal by nature, If you're a husband, you're married to someone that the Bible calls a weaker vessel. What's that all about? How do you navigate these problems of authority, Equality on one level, but at the same time, you're very, very different.

And one of the marriage parties is called a weaker vessel. You know, how does a wife grapple with that? How does a husband grapple with that? These things cause problems in our marriages. There are matters of sexuality.

The world has taught us so many wrong things about sexuality. And We're going to talk about this in detail sometime tomorrow, but we have to grapple with what the purpose of our sexuality is. You know, I've had the privilege over the last few years of performing a number of weddings of young people that have grown up in our churches across the United States. And it's really been a blessing. It's been so encouraging.

And I often end up talking to a young man. And one of the things that I'll tell that young man is, look, when you have your first night together, don't do anything that you've, if you've seen pornography, don't do anything that you've seen. Pornography is the polar opposite of the love of Jesus Christ for his church. In pornography you take. In a marriage made in heaven you give.

And so the whole paradigm is wrong. The films, the music we've been listening to has given us completely wrong views of sexuality. And all of us will spend the rest of our lives in recovery from that. And we should recover. We should identify what was wrong and we should recover from it.

There are also matters of conversion that have a dramatic effect on marriage. We've grown up in an era where people believe that if they raise their hand in a meeting or they walked an aisle, they were saved and they declared themselves to be saved, but their lives never changed. And so a lot of times, people got married and they thought they were Christians, they said they were Christians, but they really know their lives have never really changed. And often, you'll have a husband and wife and the real problem in that marriage is one or both of them are not converted. And the reason they can't figure out how to forgive each other is because they've never received mercy.

They don't even know what it looks like and so they can't have mercy on one another. And often in my marriage counseling over the years It's my perspective that most of the time when you have a spouse that cannot have mercy, that cannot forgive, that cannot drop their bitterness, there's one problem. They have never been saved. They have never truly trusted Jesus Christ. They have never said, not my will but thine be done.

And they have no power of the Holy Spirit and so there's no mercy. And that marriage will never be healed ever because the issue is conversion my guess is I'm probably talking to some people here that are not converted it's quite likely I don't know I can't tell from the outside But you probably know whether there is true love for God in your heart and it has changed your life and your life is progressively being changed. That's how you know that you're saved is that the power of sin is broken, not that you're perfect, but it has been broken and you're being sanctified. And I just want to encourage you to ask yourself that question, have I really truly turned to Jesus Christ or am I just part of a religion that helps me a little bit, you know. I know that you have issues in raising your children, dealing with hardships of disappointment and issues with money and all kinds of things like that, expectations.

And so that's who we are. We're a group of people who need healing from the Lord, and He really is our only hope. Getting the picture right is completely hopeless without the power of the Word of God through the Spirit of God working in our lives. That's what we need. Another thing I want to just introduce here is that is that everything testifies to something.

This is the way God created the world. And, you know, you can't look anywhere in the world without seeing something that does not testify to God and the power of the Gospel. You know, wherever you look, God has placed things to remind you of heaven. There's a tree out there. What is a tree?

What does the Bible say a tree represents? There's light. There's a door over here. There's, you know, There's snow. What does snow have to do with your life?

The Bible talks about your sins being whiter than snow. You can't look at a river. You can't look at bread or water or the heavens or mountains or fish or birds or a vineyard. You can't look anywhere in the world without having some manifestation of God's glory to remind you of something greater. What is bread designed to remind you of something greater, the bread of life?

What is a door designed to remind you of that Jesus Christ is the door? What is the light? Why light? It's that God has placed everywhere in creation a manifestation of His glory. Everything testifies to something and marriage is created to testify to something And that's why we read in Ephesians 5, 31, 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. And everything testifies to something, and marriage testifies to Christ and the church. And that's why marriage is really a story within a greater story. And you've got to see your marriage as a story within a larger story. And we want you to think about that story and to take you back to the divine story.

Because every aspect of family life is designed to tell a story. A family is a picture of something greater. A husband is a picture of Christ. A wife is a picture of the church. Children are a picture of honoring and obedient children in the church.

Even singleness is a picture. The Lord Jesus Christ makes this very clear. Singleness really is a picture of single-minded devotion to God. You know, in heaven you're not married or given in marriage. You are single in heaven.

Singleness is a picture of heaven. Singleness is a picture of single-minded devotion to God in heaven. And so everything is a picture. Everything testifies to something greater. And every part of our marriages are testimonies of something.

And we're going to try to unpack that, you know, point by point as we go through this weekend. I'd also like to say that, You know, this story, this picture in heaven, is designed to deliver us. It's designed to deliver us from a self-made marriage. And one of the greatest traps that we have when we get married is to create a marriage in our own image, an inwardly focused marriage for ourselves, for our own glory. This is the pathway to disaster in a marriage.

It's a marriage for its own sake, and you know one of the problems that you have when you go to the Christian bookstores and you look at the books that are there, they really give the idea that your marriage is for your own sake. It's just to kind of fix up your relationships so that you're just happier with each other. It's tweaking your love language. It's doing something to be more pleasing to your spouse. You know, so many of the books about marriage really, really are about that.

They're really just about dealing with this human relationship. But when you focus on one another like that, it never really works out well. You just become a purveyor of an even more self-made marriage because you're making your marriage for yourselves, not for the glory of God, and understanding that is really, really important. Now, When you're in a marriage, there's a lot of talk that goes on. There are many lines that we deliver in marriage.

Now in this heavenly picture of marriage, there are lines given to you. God gives you your lines. He gives you your role and He gives you your lines. And He gives you your lines in His word. And one of the problems with marriage is that all the lines are impromptu.

They happen in the spur of a moment. And so how do you get to the place where you are delivering your lines in a redemptive and a beautiful way. How do you know that your lines are right? It begins with the changing of your mind and saturating your mind with the gospel of Jesus Christ. And if you don't know your lines, if you're just making up your lines on your own your marriage will always be going in the wrong direction and so the Lord gives you lines to speak in your marriage And we want to talk about those lines.

And, you know, the lines in a marriage speak of the purpose of marriage so that you can fulfill it. They speak of your identity in marriage so that you can know what your role is. And it's through the lines that we speak that we build our marriages. But they're all impromptu and they all are required in moments of time but they are all in heaven to pick from they're all there and this is this is the kindness of the Lord and the way you prepare for your lines is by the preparation of a submissive heart before God, the knowledge of the will of God, the knowledge of the love of God, obedience to the commands of God so that your lines are not disobedient, destructive lines in that sense. Now, a picture is designed to be seen.

You don't paint pictures and put them in a closet. And God did not give a marriage to be put into a closet. And there are so many different kinds of observers of this picture. And the first is the most important, and that is that God observes the picture. You also see the picture yourself.

Your spouse sees the picture. Your children see the picture. Your church sees the picture and everybody in the community sees the picture. And so it's so critical that we understand that a marriage is a picture that is seen. Okay So what if you've harmed the story?

What if the picture has some ugly elements to it and you just can't seem to get rid of them? God has sent His Word and His Spirit for this purpose to show you, you know, first of all how to show you how you've messed up the story. And the Holy Spirit convicts of sin and unrighteousness, But the beauty of the kingdom of heaven is that God rewrites stories. He repaints them. He makes all things new.

He may have to tear down in order to build up. Repentance is part of this whole process. And what happens to us when we get married is that some of the ugly parts of our pictures got there because of things that we did not know, things that we did not know were sin at that time. And so I'm assuming that, you know, in many ways because of our backgrounds, because of the world that we grew up in, some of the ugly parts of these pictures we just fell into. But we should recognize what contradicts the glory of heaven and make our way back.

And that's how God rebuilds marriages through repentance and through confession that's how he rebuilds anything and God can rebuild any marriage I have seen some of the most messed up impossible marriages be healed God can do that I know I you know somebody sent me a note just yesterday saying, you know, I wish I could go to this conference but there's this this this this this this this happening in my wife's life and he he had lost hope but you know what I've seen that before and there is hope there is hope Because where the Spirit of the Lord is, there's victory, there's healing, there's love. And so there is hope. Now I also want to give a little warning here. The impact of this weekend could be negative short term. Things might get worse.

Like, you know, there might be some issues brought up that will cause friction between the two of you. And you might feel worse, but often in order to get better things have to get worse. The beginning of all healing is the recognition of sin and the confession of sin and that hurts. So I'm hoping that there'll be some hurt because the hurt is the doorway to the healing. And when you realize what you've done, what you've said, you've realized your sin and you confess it, then you can move forward.

But it's possible that even tonight you're going to go back, you know, into your rooms and it's not going to be better because some things have been said and been brought up. And you know you have to deal with them and it's going to be hard. Here's my advice. Run the course. Take the pain, confess and repent.

That's really the key to it all. And sometimes the best way to heal something is to hurt it. And I'm not opposed to any hurt that might be the gateway to the healing that's here. Some of you might have some pretty rough things to deal with as a result of being here and I would just encourage you to believe that God is good, that all his ways are pleasant ways, all his paths are peace, and when he calls husbands and wives to confess and repent, he's leading them in the paths of peace. You can trust Him for that.

So this whole gathering really is dedicated to the proposition that our marriages are less about pleasing ourselves and they're more about pointing to Him. And I pray that we can somehow, you know, paint the pictures to bring the biblical language out to help us to understand where we are and where we need to go because we're all painting a picture and and even if you've been married 20 years you might only be a third of the way through your marriage there's a lot there's a lot of time ahead And that should give you a lot of hope because God is the God of hope. And so there it is. We want you to just kind of slow down and consider the whole narrative of your life together. We want you to look at the picture you've been painting.

We want you to see if there are elements of that picture that can change, that should change as a result of the instruction of the Word of God. And so there are several passages of Scripture that we're going to engage to do that. So there it is. There's kind of an introduction. I'd like to just pray and we'll have a short break and we'll continue on.

Lord, Lord we thank you for your mercy in giving us such a beautiful picture in heaven so that we might know how to live, so that we might know how to paint, so that we might know how to talk, so that we might know how to heal. And Lord, I thank you for this gift of marriage, how you have used it in our lives in so many ways. And so Father I pray that you would pour out your spirit upon us here, that we would learn from you, that we would seek not our own ways but yours, and that we would find all of our pleasures in the pleasures of heaven. Amen. 1