In this sermon on Ephesians 5, the speaker focuses on marriage and its purpose. According to the sermon, the primary purpose of marriage is to preserve love in the world. The Bible teaches that love is not just a feeling, but rather an action. Husbands and wives have specific roles in marriage, with the wife being called to be a submissive church and the husband called to love and care for his wife like Christ. The filling of the Holy Spirit is vital for a successful marriage, as it provides the power and guidance needed for the couple to navigate their relationship. The sermon also discusses the concepts of submission and headship in relation to Christ and the Church, emphasizing the importance of spouses understanding their roles and being obedient to God's design for marriage.

Well, it really, really is a delight to be here again in this place. It was so nice to be here a few, couple years ago to speak about the things of the Lord. I was so thankful for this song that we just sang following our exalted head, made like him, like him we rise. And I think that capsulizes so much of what I want to try to communicate tonight about marriage in particular. And I pray that the Lord would use our time together to really just do one thing, and that is just to stimulate love toward one another.

I was thinking on the way here about 1st John 4, 7, and 8. Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God, and everyone who loves is born of God. And God has it that he would use marriage to preserve love in the world. And what a marvelous thing he's done to do that. Now I want you to open your Bibles to Ephesians chapter 5, and I want you to put your finger on verse 1.

We'll get to that in a minute. So it's it's especially delightful to be here with my wife Deborah. She's right over here. Deborah and I've been married for almost 40 years And that's nothing. My parents were married 73 years when my dad died last fall.

But when we were married, Deborah was 20, and I was 28. And my first memory of Deborah was when she was about seven years old and I was in her daddy's Sunday school class and the church bell would ring and she would burst through the door and she'd run across the room and jump into her daddy's lap. And I was eight years older than her at that time. And we were actually baptized the same night. She was nine.

And I was 17 by our pastor in California. And so, but she attended the youth camps that I used to put on, and I was one of the leaders. And I remember kind of liking her, but she was only 13 years old. And when you're 21 and the girl you're looking at is 13, you better stop looking. So that's what I did.

But I'm so grateful that we got married. Deborah was born in Lima, Peru. She was a missionary kid. And I was born just up the coast in Sitka, Alaska. But we both grew up in Southern California.

And that's where we first met. And we spent the first five years of our marriage in a little church in California. I was the pastor of this little church. It was kind of an idyllic life then. Those were the days when the phone was bolted to the wall.

To get married and have the phone bolted to the wall is really great. Nobody's bothering you. If somebody wants to come see you, they have to come see you. If you take a walk and you're holding hands with one other, your phone is not, your hand is not going to be reaching to your phone. You're not going to be texting.

This is before the internet. So we had the first five years of our marriage internet free. It would be nice to have that again. And So we have four children, and they're all married now. And we have 23 grandchildren under the age of 14.

And it's just so much fun. It's just such a sweet time. We both had parents who loved one another. We found that to be a great comfort to us in our own lives. Neither of our parents ever argued.

Neither one of us know what it's like to have marital tension in the home. We've never experienced it. And it's such a gift. And I pray that you give that gift to your children and I really do believe if you if you find yourselves obedient to the Lord filled with the Holy Spirit of God, humble, then you can leave that for your children. And I just pray that you do everything you can to remove anything that is getting in the way of providing that kind of thing in your home.

You can do it and God gives us the way to do that. You know, when Deb and I got married, our pastor who's known us for a long time married us and in fact he told me that he thought I should marry her. And I couldn't imagine doing such a thing, but I did it. And I'm so thankful. But at our marriage ceremony, he said something that I'd heard him say dozens of times sitting under his preaching.

He must have said it a thousand times because I keep saying it myself and He would always say that God created marriage. It belongs to him. He designed it. He would say that all the time. And it is true.

And the truth is that ministers don't put people together. God does. And if you're married here, God put you together. It was God who did it. It was a divine order that allowed all the factors that worked in to your getting married.

And the truth is that in our sinful nature, we often think things and do things that lead to us getting married. And somehow we might think, well, it wasn't God that got us married. That's just not true. God arranged all those things. He arranged even the sinful, stupid ideas that you had that got you married, that tricked you into getting married.

It was God that did that. So my assumption tonight is that Almighty God moved. He moved mountains. He did things that no man could do. He got you married, and he did it really to keep love alive in the world through you and through your family.

Now I don't know where you're at today. I don't know if your marriage is crumbling. You know, Deborah and I do lots of marriage conferences and every time there's somebody who's on their last hope and they're sort of doing a last-ditch effort to save their marriage. I don't know if that's true here But maybe you just came here because you just want to keep sweetening your marriage, you want to keep learning. But do you enjoy one another?

Are you friends with one another? Do you like to be with one another? So I don't know if you do like each other. Do like each other, I found that couples fall out of like with each other over time. And I don't know if you've given up.

I don't know if you've slipped into a hole. There are lots of holes that you can slip into in a marriage. You can slip into that hole of pointing fingers. You can slip into that hole of bitterness. You can slip into that hole of silent anger just brewing.

The hole of verbal assault speaking evil to one another, the whole of resignation, and the whole of withdrawal, the whole of withholding kindness, the whole of withholding sexual intimacy, arguing, pride. Well those are the holes, those are the potholes that are out there for everybody to fall into. And I'm really here to encourage you to love one another and to ask you, do you love one another with the love of God? People today don't really understand what love is. They think love is a feeling.

But the Bible actually tells you what love is. It's patient. It's kind. It's lots of things. But love is what you do.

It isn't particularly what you feel. It's what you do. And I know I'm just catching you at a moment in your marriage, and I don't really even know you, but I'll never forget some counsel an older woman gave to Deborah in the first couple years of our marriage. I was a pastor of a little church in California, and this woman's name was Lydia. She was an older woman.

She was taking care of her aging husband in a rest home, and they lived right, she lived right next door to us. And one day she got with Deborah and she said, honey, because she was a pastor's wife, too. And she said, honey, when you leave this place, you're not taking anybody with you except that man that you married. She said, when you leave here, you'll leave with your husband, and no one will go with you. So stay close to your husband.

And she said, make sure that when you leave this place, you're not leaving with a stranger. Leave with a friend. And I thought that was such a wonderful advice. And all of us are in that same place, too, that we have one another. And often, you know, the things in this world encroach upon the friendship and the sweetness that God really ordained.

And these things really really can can can be overcome. Okay, so I want to tell you about the purpose of marriage. I think that can steady us to understand how we ought to go about marriage. If you if you know the purpose of something, then you can know how to go forward with that thing, and marriage is like that. You need to know the purpose of it, and I want to read some scripture to you that helps helps us understand the purpose of it and the duties of it.

And it's so important that you understand this because marriage is dangerous. Getting married is one of the most dangerous things anybody ever does and there are lots of reasons it's dangerous because if you get married just for your own pleasure, for your own glory, then you'll find a lot of danger in your marriage. If you have expectations, everybody gets married with expectations, everybody wanted something when they got married and you know people often find themselves let down by their marriage maybe you're one of those people maybe you feel that down you thought marriage it was going to be one way but it turned out not to be that way. And if you're in that boat, I want to throw out a life preserver in the word of God for you here tonight. But not getting to the point of marriage is really harmful.

Because if you don't understand the purpose of your marriage, you can live for years in disconnection with your spouse, which is just code for lack of love. And you don't want to wake up in 10 or 20 years and say, I don't even know if I love my spouse anymore. You don't want to do that because you get there because there was something you didn't understand about the purpose of marriage. So I want to begin by reading the flagship biblical text on marriage. It explains the most important things about marriage.

And it's in the book of Ephesians. And we're going to begin in Ephesians chapter 5. So when Paul wrote the letter to the Ephesians, It was really a hard place to be married, really hard. It was the place of the Temple of Diana. It was a pornographic city.

If you go through the city, some of the inscriptions you really can't even read in public. It was a place of immorality, all manners, of sexual perversion. Everything was sexualized in that city. And the Apostle Paul is writing to the new Christians in that city to help them know how to be married. It was a hard place to be married.

Our culture is a hard place to be married, too, because we're taught to be narcissists. We're taught to feed our own needs. We're taught perverse ways of sexuality. And so the sexual relationship is all messed up. And our emotions are all messed up, because our expectations are all out of whack.

So the Ephesus was a place like that, too. It was a really hard place to be married. And so I want us to go to Ephesians 5. And I want to begin in verse one, because you find really the heart and soul of a marriage, and that is to be an imitator of God. That's the question I want to ask you.

In your marriage, is it your greatest hope to be an imitator of God? If you want to be an imitator of somebody else or an imitator of your own spirit, you're in big trouble. So Paul says, therefore be imitators of God as dear children and walk in love as Christ also has loved us and given himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet smelling aroma. So if you want to know How to make your way through your marriage or out of the hole maybe you've fallen into. Be an imitator of God.

Know God. Be formed in the likeness of God. And then in verse 17, you see what really is the power of a marriage. It's the thing that really makes a marriage. And it's the power of the Holy Spirit.

That's why Paul says, therefore do not be unwise, but understand what the will of the Lord is, and do not be drunk with wine in which is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit, speaking with one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. Now what the Apostle is saying is that the key to a marriage is the filling of the Holy Spirit. Now, the Apostle Paul, with this phrase, be filled with the Holy Spirit, He's really beginning what theologians call the family life codes in Ephesians. And it begins with the filling of the Holy Spirit. The whole secret to your marriage, the whole secret to the raising of your children, is the filling of the Holy Spirit.

That's what the Apostle Paul is saying. So he's launching this discussion of how you make your way in your family. These are the family life codes. So he's going to speak to the wives, and then he's going to speak to the husbands, and then he's gonna speak to the children, and then he's gonna speak to the fathers, and he's gonna end up saying, don't exasperate your children. So this is these are the family life codes.

And you know The Bible doesn't just tell us what to do. It does. And later on, the apostle tells us what to do in a marriage. But he starts with how you do it. And It's by the power of the Holy Spirit.

The only hope for your marriage is really the power of the Holy Spirit out of the transformation that's come in your heart. If you're not converted, you're not going to have this. And the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. So the whole way of going about a marriage is resting upon whether you're filled with the Holy Spirit. If you're filled with the Spirit, you'll always know what to do.

If you're filled with yourself, you'll always know what wrong thing to do. And so the apostle begins these family life codes with that. But then he jumps into the specifics of what wives do and then what husbands do and that we'll spend our time there. Verse 22, wives submit to your own husbands as to the Lord for the husband is head of the wife as also Christ is the head of the church and he is the savior of the body. Therefore, just as the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything.

So a wife, first of all, she needs to understand that in marriage she's not representing herself. She's not her own. She's not called to make her own way, but she's called to be a glorious church. She's called to be a submissive church. A wife is a picture of the church.

A wife needs to know who she is in the story called marriage. If a wife doesn't know who she is, she will wreck her marriage. She'll tear her house down like Solomon spoke of in Proverbs. But she's not her own. She is.

She represents the church. She represents a submissive church and Her words, her actions, everything is designed to paint a picture of an obedient church, a submissive church. That's her role in life. And a wife has to understand who she is in the story. Our culture is constantly telling women to go find themselves.

It's the most disastrous thing a wife can ever do to go find her truth, to go find whatever. What God is calling wives to be is like a submissive church and to treat her husband as her head in that way. And unfortunately, wives don't have perfect husbands. They just don't exist. But she's been called to paint a picture of a submissive, glorious Church.

That's her role in life, And when a wife loves her husband and respects her husband and she counsels her husband and submits to her husband, she's really telling the story. She's painting the picture of a transformed life. She's not like every other worldly woman in the world. She's transformed. She's different.

She lives life differently and she's not self-driven and She's actually preaching a gospel of an obedient church to the watching world. If she's a rebellious wife, she's just saying that you can rebel against your husband. She's saying that the church can rebel against her husband. So a wife has a tremendous role, and it's not her own. God defines it.

Remember, I began by saying, it was God that invented marriage. God's the designer of it. And a wife has to understand that she's not her own. She belongs to Christ. So that's the wife.

Now there's not too much said in this text about the wife. There's a lot to say to the husband. And so we turn to husbands in verse 25. Husbands love your wives just as Christ also loved the church and gave himself for her. That's what husbands do.

They love and they give. In other words, they lay down their lives for their wives. This is the kind of headship God has. It's the kind of headship that lays down his life. It's the kind of headship that loves.

And we already talked about what love is. You know what love is. I mean, 1 Corinthians 13 tells you what love is. The Bible will tell you all over the place what love looks like. That's what husbands are called to do and to be.

And they're really designed by God to have an effect on their wives, that he might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word. In other words, a husband is an improving influence on his wife. When you marry a woman, She should be more beautiful inside than when you first married her, because you're washing her with the word. You're doing her good. You're caring for her.

And she should be more radiant as a result of being married to you. You know, one of the tragic things that can happen is a man can treat his wife in such a way that She's sorry to be a wife. She wishes she didn't have to be a wife. But that always happens when a husband isn't washing his wife and loving her. But this is something that a man, a husband, is doing before the Lord.

Verse 27, that he, Christ, might present her to himself a glorious church. In other words, a husband kind of stands as a middleman to beautify his wife. So that Christ would present that wife to his father a glorious church, a glorious wife, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish. You know, This whole thing about spots and wrinkles has always struck me, because here, after a long life of sanctifying the church, after a long life of a husband sanctifying his wife, after all that, after all those years, after 40 years, then she doesn't have spots or wrinkles. But it's completely different in nature.

Like you start out in marriage and you don't have spots and wrinkles. But in God's economy, you start out not having spots and wrinkles on the outside, but a lot on the inside. But as time goes on, you have more spots and wrinkles on your body, but less on the inside. That's this internal work of beautification. And God has appointed husbands to beautify their wives.

I want my wife to be more beautiful as the years go on, and that her invisible spots and wrinkles are being smoothed out, so that she's not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish. If you're married for a long time, she's going to have spots and wrinkles and blemishes on the outside. But what's her inside? Well, her inside will be determined about how you treat her as a husband. And then he says, he gives this illustration, you know, Paul's very graphic, and he gives this illustration of a husband's body.

This is how you should love your wife. 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. So the husband has a duty to take care of his wife's body, to pay attention, to know about what's going on in her body, and to care for her, and not ignore what's going on in her body. As it turns out, it seems to me women have a lot more problems with their bodies than men do, on average.

Why? Probably because God wants to demonstrate his glory and his love by giving a husband, a wife, who has pains so that his glory would be magnified in that husband's compassion toward his wife. And then he says, 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.

Now this is very striking because what the Apostle Paul is saying is that Christ's love for the church is pictured in sexual intimacy. He connects Christ's love with how you experience sexual intimacy. And your sexual intimacy is a picture of Christ's love. Sexual intimacy is pleasurable, it's remarkable, but it is actually designed to demonstrate Christ's love. So a couple has to be very disconnected from this pornographic world.

Pornography is really all about getting your own pleasure. But what we are learning here is that the sexual intimacy is about Christ's love for the church and Christ's love gives. In sexual intimacy In the Lord, it's giving, it's not taking. But everything around us teaches us to take. Pornography teaches you to take.

Pornography teaches you to do something for yourself. But Christ teaches you to serve your wife or serve your husband in sexual intimacy. And of course the Apostle Paul explains this in detail in 1st Corinthians 7. We won't go into that. OK, so we talked about the wife.

She's not her own. The husband is not his own either. The husband loves his wife like Christ. In other words, the husband can't do whatever he wants in a marriage. He can only do what pleases Jesus Christ in his marriage.

And he's full of grace and truth. He's like Christ. He treats her tenderly because she's a weaker vessel, as the Apostle Paul said. He lives with her in an understanding way, as Peter teaches us. And he's sensitive to her to her constitution.

In other words, a husband is not his own. He can't play his own role. He has a role to play And he plays the role of Christ in his wife's life. A husband is not his own. And he cares for her.

So a husband can't do whatever he wants to do. He can't say whatever he wants to say. A wife can't do whatever she wants to do. A wife can't say whatever she wants to say. In a Christian marriage, you have two who are under submission to God.

And when they speak to one another, they speak the words of Christ. And so they're linked by a role that is not their own. And so that's the picture of marriage. And I don't know if I don't know of any way for a couple to get through the troubles that can come upon a marriage than to become like Christ or to become like an obedient church. And you have to resolve that in your mind in your marriage.

Are you going to speak the words of Christ? Or are you going to keep speaking your own words for your own glory to get your own way to express your own offenses? Or are you going to say the words of Christ? Now, if you know, if you know who you are in a marriage, you'll always know what to do. You'll always know how to handle anything.

If your wife sins, you know who you are. You're playing the role of Christ. If your husband sins, you know who you are. You don't make up your own lines. You speak the words of a glorious church.

So all this to say, I think the most important thing to understand about a marriage is that you are not your own. And the sweetest things happen when you know that and when you understand that you play the roles of God's design and that actually makes you secondary and Christ primary in everything. So as you go forward, how do you go forward? You go forward by becoming like Christ. You might know what to do in your marriage, and you should do the things that God commands in marriage.

But the truth is the filling of the Holy Spirit is the animating factor in a marriage. And I know that sometimes people, they're married for a long time, and they traffic in Christian culture. But the power of the gospel is not in them. And so they're frustrated. But the problem is that they've actually never been converted.

They've never really submitted their lives to Jesus Christ. And so they really don't have the capacity to love their spouse because they're not filled with the Holy Spirit. So I have just a very simple message tonight and that is be filled with the Holy Spirit. Understand that you're not your own. Obey the commands of God by being filled with the knowledge of his will.

The best thing you can do for your marriage is to be filled up with the knowledge of God and his will. And then you'll know what to do and you'll know what to say and you'll know how to handle the worldliness that each of you are affected by because you have Jesus Christ to lead you. I want to read you in closing something that I love by J.R. Miller. He titled it The Secrets of a Happy Home.

And he writes this, what are some of the secrets of a happy home? The answer might be given in one word, Christ. Christ at the marriage altar, Christ on the bridal journey, Christ when the new home is set up, Christ when the baby is born, Christ when a child dies, Christ in the pinching times, Christ in the days of plenty, Christ in the nursery, Christ in the kitchen, Christ in the parlor, Christ in the toil and in the rest, Christ along all the years, Christ when the wedded pair walk toward the sunset gates. Christ in the sad hour when farewells are spoken. And one goes on before, and the other stays, bearing the unshared grief.

Christ is the secret of happy home life. So all that to say, beloved, let us love one another. For love is of God and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Would you pray with me? Father, you are so kind to show us the ways of life and to explain to us how that we would keep love alive in the world, to teach us how to do the most important thing.

The greatest of these is love. So I pray that you would take the minutes that we've had here tonight and grow our love for one another. I pray for greater tenderness, greater sense of the Holy Spirit in our marriages here tonight. In Jesus' name, Amen.