In the sermon 'Scriptural Mutual Duties,' Dr. Joel Beeke discusses the importance of mutual duties in marriage as seen by the Puritans, focusing on four key aspects: love, chastity, helpfulness, and peacefulness. Love is identified as the undergirding duty, and the sermon suggests ways to maintain and grow love in marriage, such as considering the command of God, praying for growth, and spending quality time together. Chastity and benevolence are also emphasized, with the importance of remaining sexually pure within marriage and expressing love through intimate actions. Helpfulness and peacefulness are discussed as essential duties, involving working together to build a strong marriage and avoiding quarrels through forgiveness and understanding. The sermon encourages couples to view their marriage as a joyful duty performed for the Lord, ultimately aiming to glorify Him through their relationship.

All right, we're going to read from Colossians, just a few verses. 18, 19, 23, 24. Here you have a condensed version of Ephesians 5. And Paul really puts it in two verses. Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, this is verse 18, as it is fit in the Lord.

Fit in the Lord, interesting expression. Husbands, love your wives and be not bitter against them. And then 23 and 24, and whatsoever you do, do it heartily as to the Lord and not unto men, knowing that of the Lord you shall receive the reward of the inheritance, for you serve the Lord Christ. So the key takeaway here is you want to understand that the way you treat each other as husband and wife, ultimately You're doing it for the Lord. You're doing it in the Lord.

You're doing it to the Lord. My employees, for example, at Purity Reform Seminary and also at the church and at Reformation Heritage Books, I'm saying to all three groups constantly, Work as unto the Lord. Do this as unto the Lord. What Paul is saying here is you do your marriage as unto the Lord. So that's why it's so critical to say I'm going to do my marriage as a joyful duty, out of gratitude to God for all the blessings He's poured upon me in Christ, I want to live every area of my life back unto the Lord.

So it's not just about you and your wife. It's about your obedience to the Lord. It's about your glorifying the Lord. It's all about the Lord ultimately, okay? So let's pray.

Gracious God, as we look now at duties today in marriage, Help us not to see this as a legalistic look, but help us to see this as a lifestyle that we owe unto thee, Lord, and that it is a joyful lifestyle as we've been hearing from Scott Brown and we'll hear again from Jason Dohme this afternoon. And so help me in expounding these Puritan concepts of taking the duties of scripture and applying them to practical, marital life. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. All right, so mutual duties is this talk. Later this afternoon, duties of the wife, and then this evening, duties of the husband.

Those are the three main categories of division that the Puritans used in their 29 books. And they're almost all the same this way. Mutual duties, wife's duties, husband's duties. Now, I want to just look with you then at mutual duties right now and we're going to look at four of them. First one is love.

Second one is chastity slash benevolence. The third one is helpfulness. And the fourth one is peacefulness. We owe to each other love, chastity, helpfulness, and peace. So love is the undergirding duty.

Husbands, love your wives. Why does the Bible never say wives love your husbands? Is it not their duty as well? Of course it is. But in Ephesians five, the Puritans say, What Paul is doing, he's picking up on the main weaknesses post-fall of the male and the female.

And therefore he's stressing those. Husbands, Love your wives. We men, by nature, are not very loving, and so we need that admonition constantly. Don't get wrapped up in ourselves, but really love our wives. Don't be narcissistic, as we heard.

For the woman, the greatest weakness is not submitting to God's order of design in the way in which God made her. And so the call is be submissive or be respectful or be reverential, whichever term you use. But mutually, mutually, love is the crowning element in a marriage, the Puritans would say. And I'm going to give you a bunch of points here that the Puritans are teaching us. I just teased Scott Brown that he had 54 wonderful points.

It was a great talk last hour, but he had 54 points in that sermon, I think it was. So I'm only going to give you 45 in this. Number one, consider first, the Puritans say, the necessity, the necessity of this mutual love. William Waitley, who wrote two books on marriage, love is the life and soul of marriage without which It differs as much from itself as a rotten apple from a sound one and as a carcass from a living body. Yea, verily it is a most miserable and uncomfortable society we call marriage and no better than a very living death without love.

I mean, you've got to love one another in marriage or marriage will be just miserable. That's what he's saying. Henry Scudder in his book on marriage. Love each other as your own soul with a Christian, pure, tender, abundant, natural and matrimonial love. So that's number one, it's absolutely necessary.

Number two, consider the peculiar strength of this marital love. There's no other love like it in the world. This is a unique love with which you're to love each other as husband and wife. It's as singular, said one Puritan, as the spouse to whom it is given. Number three, consider the nature of this mutual love.

It is to be strong and fervent and steady. Richard Baxter said, if this mutual love is eclipsed for one hour of one day, the husband and wife both should feel like they have a bone out of joint in their body. And there is no ease, there is no order, there is no satisfaction in life, and no work well done until their relationship is restored and the joints are set right again. In other words, even when there is some honest disagreement, a viewpoint on something, if it becomes problematic and that love wanes, there should be a very, very uncomfortable feeling in the husband, in the wife, and you should feel like it's like, man, I just broke a bone, or a bone is out of joint. I've got to get this right.

We always say, well the Bible says, don't let the sun go down upon your wrath. That's a good principle in marriage. But Baxter's saying, don't let an hour go by during the day, don't wait till nighttime. I mean, you've got to be one with your spouse. These two shall be one.

And so it's critical, you see, that you have consistent love in your marriage. Four, consider, this is what the Puritans called it, the universal benefit, the universal benefit of this love. And what they meant by that was, When you love each other as husband and wife, and it's felt throughout the day, throughout seven days a week, 365, your whole lifetime, when you feel that love, that makes not just your marriage easier and you easier to live with, but it makes your whole life easier and more joyful. In fact, it's a universal benefit. You know, we often say the expression in our culture today, ain't mommy happy, ain't nobody happy, right?

No, you haven't heard that? Oh wow, that's in our culture maybe. Ain't mommy happy, ain't nobody happy. But really we should say, if husband and wife are not happy and close together, The whole home is disjointed, your work life is disjointed, you don't feel at ease in your work, your whole life is out of joint. So everything in a marriage relates to everything in the totality of my life, my spiritual life with God, my work life, every area of our lives.

And so life is hard when we're not close to each other in marriage, but life is so much easier, so much more pleasant, so much more honoring to God when we have this mutual love. William Gooch says, Love is therefore the sum of all the duties that a husband and a wife owe to each other. This, I say, is true wedlock. You're locked together, wedlock. He's making a pun on the word there.

It's the idea of the marriage. Number five, consider further the mutual contentment that results from mutual love. When you have mutual love, Goudge says, it will cause the husband to so settle his affections on his wife that he sees her as the fittest woman that the world could have ever afforded him, and the wife, to so rest her heart upon her husband, that she esteems him to be the most fit man for her of any man under the sun. This is beautiful. This is amazing.

You look at your wife and you say, you are the number one woman in the world. If all the women in the world were out there, four billion women, and I could pick one out of them all without a moment's hesitation. I'm gonna take you right away, again. My only problem is I wish I did it earlier. You see, that's the way you should feel, because you love this woman.

You love her just as she is. So be motivated by this grace of love, you see. That enables you then to overlook your wife's defects and do this vice versa too, to cover her infirmities. Love covers a multitude of these little defects, you see. And it supplements for her weaknesses.

And you see her as your queen or as your king, and you just love the person. Sometimes I even say to my wife, and maybe sometimes she thinks it's a bit of a stretch, but I say, you know, I love you so much, I love even your faults, because that's who you are, and so These faults even are dear to me because I love you just the way you are. Now, that's different of course, if you got major faults that are sins. Of course, then you've got to deal with them, and we'll get to that. Either Scott or I will get to that later today.

But you as a wife too, you overlook your husband's failures, don't you? You don't make a big deal of molehills. You don't make a mountain out of a molehill. You cover his imperfections. And you see him as your prince.

That's what the Puritans are saying. Now what are the means, what are the means, this is my second major thought, the means of preserving this love. How can you maintain this kind of love and grow it in marriage? Well the Puritans give you five or six reasons here. Number one, you should regularly, in your mind, consider the command of God that husbands are to love their wives, Colossians 3.19, And that wives are to love their husbands.

There actually is a biblical text for that, by the way. Titus 2, verse 4. So it's God's command. End of story. End of story.

If God commands something, that's what we do. That's a puritan idea. You don't have to pray over something Is this right for me to love my wife or to my husband if God has a command? Sometimes people say well, I've got to pray about this when actually they know the will of God. It's in the Bible There's enough things to pray for you don't to pray about what you already know.

This is God's command. You love your spouse. Number two, as God is the maker of souls, of marriages, and of affections, We should be in constant prayer, this is a Puritan speaking here, that he would grow our love for our spouse that he first placed within our hearts and that he would enable us to express that love in our speech and actions. That's the idea of being easy to live with. You express that love in your speech, but also in your actions.

So, you want to grow this love. And when couples come to you and they have marital difficulties, one of the first things I say to them, on a scale of one to 10, what was the highest point in your marriage? And most couples will say nine. Low side would be eight. And many will say 10.

And then I'll say to them, well if we could work through the problems that you're encountering now, and we could resolve them biblically, then we can get you back to the highest point where you ever were. So let's say it was nine. We can get you back from the two that you're at right now, back to nine if you just listen and follow the biblical instructions we're about to give you and you practice them. And then once you get back to nine where you were, we're gonna keep growing you by showing you more of what the Bible has to say and you can get up to a ten. So I always give them hope in the first lesson that if they are really willing to listen to God and they're both willing to do the main duty of loving one another, we can get that marriage back to the highest point it ever was and then grow it even further.

Number three, we should Consider the loving words and the compassion with which Christ and his church speak to each other in the Song of Solomon. You know, sometimes people say when you really love your spouse, you know, and you express it in words all the time, you're overdoing it. Or I've had people say, actually quite a few people say to me when I express something wonderful about my wife, oh they say, what's he angling for? I go, what? What do you mean what am I angling for?

I'm not doing this politically. I love this woman. I had a guy call me about a year ago. I feel called to write, so I've been writing my whole life. It's a vocatio for me, not a job.

And I feel closest to God when I write. So I write a lot of books, and in my forewords, I always put some warm words to my wife, because there's no way I could write these books without her, because she gives me space and time and is involved in my ministry and so on. I had this Dutchman call me from Ontario, and you know the Dutch, the old conservative Dutch from the continent, they're very, very careful about not expressing too much affection to their spouse in public. I think they do okay in private, but they're very careful. So he calls me up and in his Dutch accent, he talks to me and he goes, yeah, Dominique Baker, I have a problem here.

The books you write, yeah, I like the content of the books, but in the preface, you speak to your wife. You say things you should only keep in private, me thinks. So Dominique Baker, Please be more careful with what you say about your wife in the books. And I'm just like, oh, you've got to be kidding me. I mean, I think I'm holding back in the preface.

This guy's accusing me of going too far. But you see, everyone in your life, everyone you're connected with should feel and know that you just love your spouse. And Don't be ashamed to say it to other people with your speech and your actions. Now, I know sometimes I overdo it a little bit. My wife tells me, You shouldn't praise me so much.

I said, okay, I'll try to cut back a little, but it's gonna be very, very hard. And then she says something like this. One way or another she'll say to me, well, you know what, come to think of it, Maybe it's not so bad. We just had another grandchild a couple weeks ago and so she left me for 10 days. I was doing two conferences without her, which is the first time in five years.

And oh man, I was a basket case. I missed her so badly. So when we got back together again finally after she came back from our daughter's place in Alberta helping our daughter with the baby, I warned her when she came back home. I said, yeah I've got all these compliments for you that have been building up for 10 days. I mean, you're just gonna have to get used to it.

The next few days, you're gonna hear a lot from me about how wonderful you are. But that kind of pouring of love, the world laughs about it, people get embarrassed about it, But it's right there in the Song of Solomon. That's what the Puritans are saying. And so William Goodge says, Christ addresses his church in such terms as, oh, thou fairest among women. My love, thou art all fair, my love.

There's no spot in thee. Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse, how much better is thy love than wine, my garden, my sister, my spouse, thine eyes have overcome you, my dove, my undefiled is but what, O love for delights." And then he says, and the church responds to Christ in like manner. Thy love is better than wine, thou whom I so loveth, wide well beloved, thou art fair, my beloved, yea pleasant, I am sick with love, my beloved, the chiefest among 10, 000, he is altogether lovely. So what the Puritans are saying is It's not just in your actions you show love But you verbalize it and you verbalize it especially when you're in private with your spouse you verbalize it intimately You verbalize it with variety One man is going to be more gifted or one woman is going to be more gifted than that than the other. But do it.

Do it. This is your duty. This is the means of magnifying this love. And fourth, the Puritans are saying you should treat this love as your superlative love in life. That is to say, You love your spouse as you love none other.

Trusting, I trust you're married in the Lord here. This is critical. And so you love your wife, which means that you spend time with her. Superlative love, the Puritans called it. And what they meant by that was also something that was actually organized.

They saw time as precious. They worked 10 to 13 hour days out in the fields and so on, if they were farmers and they had jobs, they worked a lot. So what they would do is they would say, okay, my wife, husband-wife relationship, that gets the most time in my life, quality time. Then the children, notice children in second place, then my parents, then brothers and sisters, and family and extended relations, and then friends, which means you don't have a lot of time left when you have a big family for men going out with men going bowling or golfing or whatever today. You just don't have a lot of time left.

So what you careful not to do is as a man you don't say well I'm gonna go out with my buddies two nights a week, and you go out with your wife one night a week. You don't do that. This is your superlative relationship. So, love flourishes when the two who love each other spend quality time together. Let them talk often together.

Let them be sorry together. Let them be happy together as they share feelings with each other for this will knit them more tightly together, writes William Secker, another Puritan who wrote a book on marriage. He said, a husband and wife should be like two candles burning together which make the house more full of light or like two fragrant flowers bound up in one bouquet, we would say today, they use an old-fashioned word, that augments its sweetness, or like two well-tuned instruments which sounding together make the more melodious noise. Husband and wife, what are they but as two springs meeting together and so joining their streams that they may make but one current. It is an unpleasing spectacle to view any contention in this close conjunction.

So you need quality time together. And fifth, mutual love is preserved and increased, and this is a very important point for the Puritans, by spiritual love. By spiritual love. And by that they meant by religious exercises together. Not just time spent together, but worshipping God together in public, worshipping God together in the family, family worship, worshipping God together just with the two of them.

I don't know what your marriage is like in terms of, I'm sure you do, I hope you do, family worship as a family. But do you have time with just the two of you? For example, do you get down on your knees together when you go to bed at night, and your wife prays one night, you pray the other night, try that. You'll find it extremely bonding in your marriage. We men, we need to hear the feminine side of prayer from our wives, it's very precious.

So in our marriage, because I'm exhausted on Sunday night, my wife always prays on Sunday evening. We're on our knees, and she'll go through the sermons of the day as she prays. I just love that. It just bonds me to her. And then we'll go every other night.

So I end up praying four nights a week and she ends up praying three. And we have a system. But it's precious to pray together, just the two of you. That's the kind of thing the Puritans are talking about. He says, let husband and wife pray together, said William Waitley.

Let them confer with each other about the heavenly country to which they both hope to go. Let them sing psalms together. Let them join in religious exercises together, so shall their hearts be knit together faster and firmer to God first of all and then to each other. So much of life is mechanical, Especially when you have a quiver full of children, right? There's so many little duties, so many things to care for.

You're overwhelmed. You can easily become like two ships passing in the night. So take that little bit of time, not just to have private devotions, but devotions together, husband, wife, pray together, nourish each other's soul. This will bind you together. So critical is religious observance together that no matter how fervent or strong a couple's love is for each other, if they fail to honor and obey God together, they will soon feel a great distance between themselves, " writes another Puritan.

And then number six. We cultivate this mutual love when we strive to provoke the good rather than the evil in our spouses. Hebrews 10, 24. If we stir up the good in each other, The good will be more obvious than the evil and this will endear our spouses to us. So one Puritan puts it this way, Richard Baxter.

Draw out the fragrance that is within thy spouse, all those things that are good and delectable in them, and then you shall find that even your faulty spouse will appear more amiable to you." Isn't that interesting? Basically saying, look at the positive side. Look at all the good qualities your spouse has, affirm them in your spouse, compliment your spouse for them. That will make your spouse respond more positively to you also as a side effect. You don't do it for that purpose, But you develop a positive attitude to your spouse and then it works the other way around as well.

And so you end up complementing each other, even over small things, and you overlook small things that are weaknesses. So this mutual love is nourished by these six means, the Puritans are saying, and such mutual love is a precious pearl that must be prized and protected in marriage, a flame in the bosoms of both spouses that must be tended and fueled lest it ever go out, as well as a charge from God that they must fulfill. That's duty number one. Duty Number two, chastity and benevolence. Now the Puritans often put these two things together.

They said chastity, which means keeping yourself sexually pure within marriage, is related to what they called due benevolence, that is the sexual relationship in marriage. It is due, it is due because the covenant of marriage obligates you not to deprive one another of this conjugal right of sexual intimacy, 1 Corinthians 7, and it is benevolent because it's an intimate expression of the love you have promised to show each other. So let me look first at chastity and then connect it with benevolence. Chastity means purity, not just of actions, but even purity of mind. You can not commit physical adultery even as you go on committing mental adultery.

And the Puritans say, in marriage you must aim with all that is within you for total chastity. This duty flows, number one, out of the marriage covenant itself. Number two, this duty flows out of the sacred union of a man and woman who are to belong to each other exclusively. 1 Corinthians 7, 2, let every man have his own wife, let every woman have her own husband. We heard last night about the idea that your body really belongs to your spouse in one sense of the word.

And that's part of this, this union. Three, this duty flows out of the original institution of marriage. God appointed one man for one woman. God intended, says one Puritan, a man to have more than one wife. He would have given Adam more than one wife.

So you have no business in mind, emotion, in experience, having any flirtatiousness, any interest in someone outside of your own spouse. Four, faithfulness in this duty can cover many other defects. A man may find weaknesses, for example, in his wife, but if she is faithful to him then he is able to overlook her defects. Chastity, therefore, is to be prized and maintained for its ability to blind a person to whatever imperfections and infirmities may be found in a spouse. Here's what they're saying.

If you look at your spouse and you know that your spouse is a one-woman man or a one-man woman, you can overlook a lot of other things. My spouse is totally dedicated to me only. She has eyes for me only. And so that is worth tons. And I can handle some weaknesses when you have that kind of dedication.

That's what the Puritans are saying. Five, remember that unfaithfulness in this duty of chastity is deadly. It's deadly. It's better, said John Cotton, to have no wife or no husband at all than to have an adulteress one. A man might have a beautiful and amiable wife, but how can he treasure her if she gives herself to another?

Six, a Chase marriage enjoys the blessing of God everywhere. You're totally dedicated to each other. You worship God together in the sanctuary as one. It's beautiful. You worship God in the home as one.

You have sex in the bedroom as one. You rejoice in the fruit of the womb having children and You do it together as one. Your whole life you see, you enjoy the blessing that flows out of this chastity. And seventh, chastity is a cornerstone of marriage itself. A chaste spouse has eyes open, ears watching, and heart attending to the welfare of the family and home.

Both husband and wife are ever mindful of family needs, home fellowship, family love, home obligations, and the need to be together. An anche spouse is absent from home, at least in his or her mind, and from the bedroom in spirit and always wanting to escape the relationship in body. That's a quaint way of saying it. But you understand the idea. When there's chastity, you can focus on the family, and by extension on the church, but there's a unity.

You're in everything together because you're pure-minded toward each other. And finally, chastity preserves the marriage from adultery. Unfaithfulness tears the very fabric of marriage, said the Puritans. Other failings disturb the marriage's comfort, but unfaithfulness dissolves the covenant. Adultery is so contrary, said George Swinock, to the marriage bond that though de facto, that is as a matter of fact, it does not actually dissolve the bond and nullify the marriage in itself, at least not initially, it will if there's no repentance, yet it so far disabliges the wronged and innocent party that it is of right, that is de jure, there is a right to have a sufficient ground to warrant a divorce.

So what they're saying is, just as Jesus said, and they get it from Jesus of course, that Adultery is so serious a sin, it stands apart from all other sins as the one thing that can utterly destroy the marriage and break the covenant. And today, there's a few small denominations around the world that are breaking tradition with the Puritan Westminster statement about divorce and remarriage. They're saying, no, no, with all the divorces today, we need this more conservative view that there's no such thing as divorce. And they think that's more conservative. That's not more conservative.

That's more liberal. Jesus said, adultery, unrepentant adultery, destroys a marriage. And when you minimize sin, you minimize the sin of adultery, that is not being conservative, that's being liberal. So this is paramount in a marriage. And not only in the actual action of committing physical adultery, but you see anything, anything that can generate feelings, mental adultery should be avoided like the plague.

And that's why it's so important that, you know, we don't watch movies where illicit sexual relationships are promoted and appearing as glamorous and all that kind of stuff. And we don't let our eyes linger on anything we see out there in the world. We just turn away from it. I'm devoted, I'm a one-woman man, I'm totally dedicated to my spouse. And we aim for this purity, this chastity.

Oh God, help me to be totally, radically, intentionally chased toward my spouse. It will be a blessing for the whole marriage. So what are the means, that's the next point, what are the means of preserving this chastity? Well, we must guard our hearts against unbridled lust. Many people let their lustful thoughts and desires run loose at a man.

A Christian Man actually said to me one time, you know, as long as I don't touch a woman, I'm not sinning. It's nonsense. Jesus said if you look after a woman and you lust in your heart, you've committed adultery in your heart. Second, we must preserve the inlets of our souls. This is what John Bunyan called, don't let things enter into the gates of man's soul, the eye gate or the ear gate, the eye gate or the ear gate, because by these means, enticements to sin enter into the mind.

So you don't allow yourself to see or to hear things that are contrary to chastity as much as you possibly can. And that's why indulging entertainment is contrary to all these texts and proverbs that talk about not following the adulteress into her home or into the corner or taking fire into your bosom and walking on hot coals. No, you say, God forbid, I want none of these things. Get away from me, Satan. Third, to preserve chastity in our marriages, we must abhor all adultery, all temptations to be unfaithful to our spouses in a day in which we're surrounded, if this was true in Puritan days, how much more so today, by immodesty and suggestiveness and bad examples.

How critical, how critical it is that even as married spouses, we don't dress or act or speak in a way that encourages mental adultery in the minds of others, but also flirtatious words that would generate unhealthy feelings about each other. So we walk with integrity, we walk with chastity before the Lord. And then the Puritans say, out of this chastity you see, you can have this wonderful due benevolence. You give yourself totally to each other in a sexual relationship that is satisfying to both people and romantic and stays romantic within the marriage. And that is something that the Puritans were actually, contrary to their reputation, were actually great at.

They remained very dedicated to their spouses. Very much unlike the Roman Catholic tradition where the priests and everybody knew it, had their mistresses on the side and their illegitimate children. To the Puritan mind, marriage was not something that, well, you get all infatuated about a woman, then you marry her, and then the sexual romantic love wanes away. No, The Puritan mind, it just grows and grows. And that's something that a few of us probably learned when we were really young, people my age anyway, didn't learn while they were very young.

But you thought, well, when you got older, your sexual relationship with your spouse waned away. No, said the Puritans, no. You continue to build on love. The more love you have in your marriage, the more experiences you have in your marriage, the more faithful your track record to each other in marriage is, the more you will love and love and love each other and the more that will come out in your sexual relationship. That's why I always ask couples that I do premarital counseling with, I tell them ahead of time, for the first year or two after you're married, every time I see you, I'm going to ask, do you love her more than yesterday and less than tomorrow?

Every time. And I do it. And if you can't say Yes, you're coming back to me for post-marital counseling. Because why don't we do post-marital counseling? I mean, pre-marital is important, but post-marital, you're in the real situation, and if there's problems, if that love isn't growing, there's problems, and you need post-marital counseling.

So, I want to just give you one example. You women now, just sit back and relax. You are Mrs. Thomas Hooker. Thomas Hooker was a very famous Puritan New England pastor.

He was very conservative, godly, but loved his wife like crazy. And they had a wonderful relationship, sort of like the Edwardses we heard about last hour. So he would go on traveling, he'd go on itinerary tours preaching. And he would often write letters back to his wife, and for some odd reason, I can't explain this, he'd write in the third person. Like, almost like he was someone else, but you're Mrs.

Hooker now, and you just Got up in the morning, you had breakfast, and all of a sudden the mailman brought you a letter, you're having a cup of coffee, you're sitting, ah, I got a letter from my husband, great. And you open the letter, and you read this. This is Thomas Horker speaking about his wife. Remember, he's the one in third person here. He says, the man whose heart is endeared to the woman he loves, he dreams of her in the night when he is away from her, he has her in his eye and apprehension when he awakes in the morning, and he muses on her as he sits at table, as he walks, and he walks with her when he travels and parleys with her.

Interesting old-fashioned word that means flirts with her. Flirts with her in each place where he comes. And then he adds this, and in his mind she is lying with him even in her absence, in his bosom, and his heart is trusting in her, though he is far from her, which forces all within him to confess that the stream of all his affections, like a mighty current, is running with full tide and strength toward her. Wow. I think if you were Mrs.

Hooker, you'd take another sip of your tea and say, wow, I got a great husband. He loves me like crazy. See, this is what you want to cultivate in marriage. You want this romance to continue through due benevolence and due benevolence and chastity. See, by working together, You give yourself completely to one another.

That's the Puritan idea. Alright, mutual duty number three is helpfulness. Helpfulness, I'll be a bit shorter here. The Puritans called this yoke pulling. Because they pictured marriage like a husband and wife who put their shoulders together like two yoke of a haxon and they would work together sharing their burdens, fulfilling their respective callings, but together it would result in a happy Christian home that would run in an orderly, God-glorifying manner.

And so this this fellow yoking pulling together, this helpfulness would make life's problems cut in half and life's joys doubled. And the Puritans taught there are times of special calling for mutual helpful care for each other. And one of those is when one of the two of you is sick. One Puritan kind of jokes like this. Yes, the Puritans did joke, and one of their jokes is this.

As a man, we don't want to admit that we want our wives to treat us like our mothers treated us. But when we're sick, we don't mind. We want our wives to be a little bit motherly. Have this compassion that our mother had us, showed us when we were sick when we were young. But what they're saying here is that We, in times of sickness, you need to be extra kind to each other and thoughtful and ask questions, how you're doing and reach out to each other and be helpful.

We also need, they said, to practice things together that promote good health. They included nutritious diet, necessary medicine, physical exercise, to encourage one another to do these things or to do them together. I think this is great advice, great Puritan advice. My wife and I, we walk every night. I get done, I work late, I'm a late night person.

She is too. So we go for a walk about 1130 every night. And we're the only ones walking up and down the street. If it's the winter, we go to a large store and we walk around inside the store. And everybody knows us in the store, by the way.

We're known as the old couple who walk hand in hand like high school sweethearts through the store. That's what one guy said. You have to get out of the store by 12. So, we try to go by 11.15, we walk for 45 minutes and we just escape one minute before midnight. We walk a mile and a half around the store and we just chatter, holding hands, talking.

It's just so sweet. We can't go to bed without walking together. Now the beauty of a good marriage is that you have these times of intimacy. Maybe it's not walking for you. Maybe it's bicycling intimacy.

Maybe it's gardening intimacy. That's not for me. I have allergies. Whatever kind of intimacy it is, you build intimacies in different areas of your life, you see. And the more intimacies you have like that, it's not just sexual intimacy, it's talking intimacy, walking intimacy.

We have a hot tub, we sit in the hot tub and just chatter. So we have like a hot tub intimacy. It's wonderful. So you develop different areas like this is what the Puritans are saying, and you help each other, you support each other. But also in times of affliction, in days of difficulty, sorrow, adversity, you assuage sorrow, they said.

Ease pain, calm fears, settle hearts, and end misery for your spouse. So Let's say your spouse has a mother who just had a heart attack. Well, they're saying you've got to give a huge amount of dosage of love and comfort and thoughtfulness and kindness to your spouse at such a time, because your spouse has emotional needs at that time. So, this is the idea. Steady helpfulness in all areas of life but special helpfulness in times where special need is present.

Number two, each spouse is to care for each other's name and reputation, both in their hearts as well as by what they say to others. So, the Puritans are really big on this, that you never say anything negative about your spouse to anyone else, so that you can trust each other, you can confide in each other, I can go to my, and my wife is very good at this, I can tell my wife anything, and I know that she will understand what things remain confidential, what things don't remain confidential. That gives me total freedom. I don't have to have one secret from my wife, because I know she's not going to spill the beans to someone else, to some friend, or to her mother, or If she has a complaint about me, I know she's going to come to me. That builds such a feeling of trust, of mutual helpfulness, mutual faithfulness, mutual honesty, mutual purity, All those things that make you easy to live with, that we just heard about, loyalty and love and trustworthiness.

I know that my wife will defend my good name against a bad report from without. And so as much as possible, the Puritans say, a husband and wife must conceal each other's weaknesses from the eyes of others so that the weaknesses of your spouse and of yourself in a good marriage should only be known to God and to each other. Now, if there's a real weakness where you really need help and you need counseling and your spouse wants to go to counseling for it, that's another story, okay? Then you can, But you don't, you don't, then you go together to the counselor and you share that weakness, but the counselor, of course, is also sworn to confidentiality. So there's still this relationship of trust.

And then, of course, there's this whole idea of helpfulness that extends to the family. This is really big in Puritan thinking. You bring your children up in the nurture and ammunition of the Lord together. William Secker wrote, children are in a family as passengers in a boat. In husband and wife, they are like a pair of oars to row the family to their desired haven.

If you row with just one oar, right? This is the tragedy of so many broken families today. The boat will go in circles. I mean, God can give double grace to a single parent. God can, and He will.

He will help a single God-fearing parent who really beseeches Him. But oh my my, how children today need both a father and a mother and how they should work together in rearing their children as a team, like two oars, Just working in tandem, Secker is saying. Now what that means in the Puritan mind is that even though you may be head of the marriage and head of the household, you don't just make unilateral decisions about child rearing, you do them together with your wife so that your kids know that you're consistent. One of the big problems, one of the big problems in many families today, I've seen it so many times in pastoring, is the kids will figure out by the time they're three years old, which parent is more liberal and says yes more easily, and they'll gravitate to that parent, right? By the time they're six or seven, one parent is almost excluded from their life for advice, because they never go to that parent because that parent is stricter.

This is the human depravity of the child coming out. But if the parents talk everything over, the Puritans would say, and agree on everything, you see then there's consistency for the child. It's not one oar going 100 miles an hour and the other oar going 10 miles an hour. It's the oars aren't working in tandem and the boat will go straight. So we got a funny story about that.

One time my son came to me and said, you know, dad, can I do this? And I said, well, why don't you ask your mother? And she went to Mary and said, mom, can I do this? And Mary said, well, why don't you go ask your father? And he looked at her and he said, how come you guys agree on everything always?

He was frustrated with us. But actually, deep down he was happy with it. And so we got, we lived very busy lives. We got very used to saying to our kids when they come to us, and I didn't know how Mary would feel, she didn't know how I would feel, we would say, okay, Mom and I will talk it over tonight, we'll let you know tomorrow morning. And our kids got used to that.

Okay, they file a request, and they'll find out the united view of mom and dad tomorrow morning. And this is the kind of thing that actually the Puritans were promoting. That doesn't have to be the next morning. Could be you go in a separate room and you talk about it, you come back 10 minutes later with a decision. But your kids need the comfort of knowing that there's a unity between the two of you and you're in this as a team You see That's helpfulness helpfulness and then there's a whole section that the Puritans have in their books about this helpfulness, in catechizing your children, in family worship.

You work as a team there too. Yes, as father you lead the family worship, but when you ask questions your wife jumps in and begins to get the ball rolling as you discuss things day by day. So public worship, you train your children together how to get the most out of it. Just in every area of family life You're involved also as a man, but you do delegate certain areas over to your wife, but you're not the outsider looking in. You're aware of what's going on, and you're doing this together in helpfulness, even if you're not around your kids as much as your wife is.

Now, one thing that's really key here for helping your wife is because most men are not around their kids as much as their wives are. The Puritans say something, they really stress this. One of the most important duties of the husband is to make sure that the kids respect the authority of their wife. So you don't, your kids should know that if they become disobedient, they start talking back to your wife, they should know that is no-go ground with dad. You do not do that.

That is a serious moral infraction that will have a serious punishment. And that also binds your wife to you, right? Because she feels that you really respect her and that you're really being helpful to her and upholding her. And most wives will actually be willing to do a lot more work if they know that right behind them is standing, my husband, fully supportive of my implementation of duties with the children. And then they have a whole section about faithfulness and helpfulness in extending to each other's belongings.

Interesting section there, just say one thought about it. They say don't use the terminology of my or mine or his or hers very much. There are certain things maybe that one possesses without the other, but all your belongings are possessed by both. So even with your children, You've heard that, right? People have been married for 20 years, and they say, well, my son, and you look, well, wait a minute, isn't that your husband's son as well?

Oh, yeah, yeah, our son. See, and the Puritans would say, you should be conscientious about that language. You're in this together. You're raising a family together. You say, our son, our daughter, our car, our home, our vacation.

You learn to think in terms of we because these two shall be one. And that's helpful. And then above all, you've got to be helpful in spiritual matters, in spiritual matters. Helping each other, talking to each other about the things of God. I just want to read you one quotation here from Richard Baxter and I think you'll get the feeling.

And the Puritans often did this. They saw everything in the light of eternity, and so everything will come back on the Judgment Day. God will ask you, How did you treat your wife? Did you love her as Christ loved the church? He'll ask you women, how did you treat your husband?

Did you show reverence to your husband the way the church shows to Jesus Christ? And all of this will come back on the Judgment Day. So here's Richard Baxter. This is a husband and wife who have failed and he's picturing them at the judgment bar of God on the day of days. Oh cruel husband, oh merciless deceitful wife, You were commanded by God to warn me and tell me of my sin and misery, to never let me rest in it, but to instruct and treat me until I had come home by Christ, that I might have escaped this place of torment.

But you never spoke to me of God and my salvation unless you did it in jest. If the house had been on fire, you would have been more earnest to have clenched it than you were to save my soul from hell. You never told me of the misery of a natural and non-renewed state, nor did you tell me the great necessity of regeneration and a holy life. Rather morning and night your talk was of nothing but of the world and the things of the world. We did not have one sober word together about our personal salvation.

You never told me of this day of judgment. You never prayed with me or read scripture and good books to me. You never took pains to instruct me or to humble my hardened heart or to save me from it or to draw me to the love of God and the holiness by faith which is in Christ. You did not go before me with a good example. Rather, you led me by an evil example, an ungodly, fleshly, worldly, selfish life.

You neither cared for your own soul nor for mine, nor I for yours or my own. And now we are justly condemned together in this pit of hell because we could not live together in holiness into Christ while in our earthly marriage." Wow. Be helpful to each other spiritually. And then finally, the Puritans also stress that when you are helpful in all kinds of ways like this, complimenting each other, loving each other, helping each other with various duties in every area of life. The natural outflow will be this mutual striving for peace and happiness that we heard about so powerfully last hour.

You will have a mutual goal of just a natural flowing. Your marriage will be like two streams coming together, they set into one river, And when there are rocks of affliction, the river will just bounce over those rocks, and it will actually create beauty. It's because you've learned to live together in peace and harmony, and you've learned to help each other through afflictions and to encourage each other. So when one is down the other lifts the other up and you'll have peace and happiness that will flow out of being a true husband and a true wife to each other. And that will mean the Puritans say sometimes being extra patient with each other in times of affliction, talking through, walking through, repeating comforts to your spouse, reassuring your spouse.

Also the Puritans said, when you strive for peace and happiness in marriage, it's an outgrowth of all these mutual duties. You need to remember never, never, never to be angry both at the same time against each other. So the one person who might be getting angry, the other person should just back off and stay calm. Don't respond to anger with anger, they said, because you're bringing each other down. One of the two has to stand up and walk with integrity.

One of the two has to be following Galatians 5 if the other one isn't, and be patient. And hold back any anger that you feel to keep the peace and then come back lovingly later in a more fit time, talk together, work through the problem, but take all occasions to avoid anger between yourselves. Well there you have it, four mutual duties to each other in marriage that will almost guarantee you a wonderful marriage. Let's pray together. Gracious God, we ask thy blessing upon this talk, and we pray that we may truly have these graces exercised, as we heard last hour, by the Holy Spirit in us, that we may undertake these mutual duties of love, of chastity, and of benevolence, of helpfulness, and of peace to live to the honor and glory of thy name.

We pray in Jesus' name, amen. I wanna just say a quick, real quick word on the books that are out there in the closest table. Scott Brown has his own ministry there too, of course. So the books that are in this table, which are fewer in number, the closer one. Please, please, those go through my wife and me and the others through Scott.

But I've got a package. I just threw some books together in a box of 10 copies of each, but we can take back orders. We'll send it to you post-paid. We're non-profit, so we won't charge you anything for postage. There's actually four books there about marriage and one about my wife's latest book, Teach Them to Work, Building a Positive Work Ethic in our children, which is really helpful.

And then she and I also wrote a little booklet. I call it the Ten Commandments booklet. How can we build a godly marriage? 10 ways, you can read it an hour and a half. And then living in a godly marriage, I'm giving you basically these four addresses, kind of the meat of this book, the Puritans, 29 Puritans on Marriage, and then I wrote a separate book called Friends and Lovers Cultivating Companionship and Sexual Intimacy in Marriage.

So all four of these books, I think it's about 50% discount, you can have for $25 if you want them. And you can take them, if they're gone, we'll give you, you can fill out the sheet and we'll back order them for you. A couple other real quick things. We just came out a week ago, or a couple weeks ago, with this called Revival, the Work of God. If you're really interested in revival, in your own family, but in your church and beyond, it's a $40, two-hour documentary with people like Sinclair Ferguson, Jeff Thomas, people that you will have known.

It walks its way through church history about the great revivals, and the net effect of it is to design you and your family to start really praying earnestly for revival in your family, in the church, and in the nation. And then finally, if you as a father, you wanna lead your family in God's truth, also through family worship. I'm gonna recommend two special deals for you. One is The Christian's Reasonable Service. This is written by a guy named Wohamis Abrokul, and it's four volumes.

The first two volumes are systematic theology, walking through it, but he applies every doctrine. It's written for laymen, and it's really simple, powerful, practical, biblical, and then the last two volumes are Ethics. He'll talk about a chapter on spiritual courage, five chapters on how to obey the 10 Commandments, just how to live the Christian life. If you put me on a desert island and you said I could only have one book beside the Bible, this is what I would take, this four volume set. So I'm offering it to you for $90, the whole set, which is 50, 55% off, and you can sign up for that, and we'll send it to you post-paid.

And then at the same time, another $90 discount, which is 55% off, is my systematic theology, written with Paul Smalley, my TA, who's taken my notes from the last 30 years and wrote them out in full. And the fourth volume is actually coming out in a couple months. This is a walkthrough of every doctrine in the Bible. Every doctrine in the Bible. And we give you what the Bible says, that's number one.

Then we tell you what church history says, number two. And then we tell you how do you experience this doctrine as a Christian? And number four is what are the five to 10 major practical takeaways from this doctrine? And then number five is how do we end with doxology in this doctrine praising God with a poem or a hymn. And so through this five-fold approach, you can read through this as a daily devotional, you can just read it straight through, of course, but you can also use it as a reference tool for any questions your kids have.

There's full indexes in the back that will address every doctrine. So these two sets together are $180, and you'll be well situated with Systematic Theology, I trust, and have good resource tools in your home. Thank you very much, and God bless you.