The sermon titled 'Beautiful Pictures of Marriage' by Scott Brown emphasizes the importance of making Jesus Christ preeminent in marriage. The speaker discusses how marriage is a representative relationship designed to display the love of Christ for the church and the respect and obedience of the church for Christ. He presents eight pictures of marriage, including Christ's love for the church, sacred space, the fragrance of Christ, harmony through authority and submission, oneness, contentment, the fruit of the Spirit, and rejoicing. The sermon emphasizes the need for couples to paint beautiful pictures of the kingdom of God in their marriages.

Please open your Bibles to Ephesians 5, Ephesians 5, fine verse 31. I wanna talk about marriage. You know, to make Jesus Christ preeminent in your marriage is really everything that I want to try to underline here. I wanna talk about painting beautiful pictures of the kingdom of heaven while you're building, while you're dwelling, while you're planting in Babylon. And this keystone passage of scripture in Ephesians five is really the summary statement of, I believe, almost everything that the Bible says about marriage.

I'm just gonna read verse 31 and 32. 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, let's pray. Oh Lord, I pray that you would come and bless this gathering, all the people here, even the little ones, with such a beautiful vision for marriage from your word. Amen.

Amen. So that's what I wanna do. I want us to learn how to paint beautiful pictures of the kingdom of God in our marriages. You know, it occurs to me that some of the most important alterations of my life happened right here in this town, in St. Louis, many years ago.

And it started with a man who for almost two decades was a board member of the National Center for Family-Agred Churches. His name is Jim Zeiss. And in his living room, there were tremendous alterations that took place. He collects Reformation documents, books, by the Puritans and Reformers. And I'll never forget sitting in his living room one time, and he brought over to me a 1704 copy of Matthew Henry's sermon, A Church in the House, and I sat there and read it, And it was as if I had just been lost in space.

I was so taken by the message. And I finished reading it and I thought, where am I? And It led to the publishing of a book that we call now, Building a God-Centered Family, which is that sermon. I've, it's, you know, edited to help with some of the archaic language of the Puritans. But that was birth right here in St.

Louis. And then he also brought me a book by William Gouge called Domestical Duties, a big huge book published in 1627, which was written by William Gooshe, who became for about 200 years the most well-read writer on marriage, And I was so struck by it. I bought one of my own. And then I edited it and produced three volumes in this series that I did with Joe Beeke at Reformation Heritage Books, Building a Godly Home. This one is a holy vision of a happy marriage.

This, Domestical Duties written by William Gudge is a huge work. And so I broke it up into three volumes. One about home life, the other about marriage, and the other about just the nuts and bolts of raising children. I'm going through this book, even right now, with a group of young men in my church, we're just reading it. It's some of the best advice about marriage that you'll ever read.

William Gouge talks about things that no 20th century writer will even touch. I mean, he talks about how to minister to your wife while she's breastfeeding. How to minister to your wife in a few days after she has her baby. But he talks about difficult and embarrassing things that happen in every marriage. And then, you know, And then I published this book called Theology of the Family, Five Centuries of Biblical Wisdom for family life.

This book was really birthed in a man's living room in St. Louis. Praise the Lord. I'm so thankful. I'm so thankful to be here again because some of the tremendous alterations in my life happened right here in this town.

And I praise the Lord for it. Well, I'm here to talk about marriage. Your family needs you to have a happy marriage. Your children need you to have a happy marriage. Your church needs you to have a happy marriage.

Your children need you to have a happy marriage. Your church needs you to have a happy marriage. And God tells you how to do it. And you know, my wife and I have, for many years have had small marriage gatherings in our house and other people's houses all over the country And we kept hearing the same thing over and over again with couples, you know, they'd been married 20 or 25 years and they would always say the same thing. I wish I'd heard this earlier.

And so Deborah and I started doing marriage gatherings for people married under seven years to get them early. It's really important that you start out early in understanding what marriage is really all about because everybody has ideas about getting married and why they want to marry that man or that woman, but what's most important is that you think about what God wants for a marriage. And when you know that and you love that, God will bless you in ways that you can't imagine. But God made marriage to paint pictures of his loving kindness. And that's what the verse that I read speaks of, is that marriage is designed to display the love of Jesus Christ for his church, and the respect and honor and obedience of his church for Jesus Christ.

So marriage is a representative relationship. It's an earthly relationship that pictures something greater. And by the way, almost everything in the world is like that. Lights and doors, they're all representative of something greater. Food is a representation of something greater than just the food that you ate for breakfast.

It points to something greater. That Jesus Christ is the bread of life. So everything points to something, and marriage was made to paint pictures of the beauty of the kingdom of God for those who are living in Babylon, so that they would be on display in Babylon, the beauties of holiness in a marriage. So what kind of pictures are you painting? Because you are painting pictures.

You've been painting pictures all morning. You've been painting pictures from the moment you were married. What kind of picture is it? And so I want to give you eight pictures. You know, if you're going to paint something, It really helps to have something to look at.

If you're going to paint Mount Everest, you probably should be looking at Mount Everest to paint it. And so that's the whole thing that I want to say here is that the pictures should be the kind of pictures that God has designed. They're the most beautiful pictures. They're unmatched in the world. So I'm gonna give you eight pictures.

And the first is a picture of Christ's love for his church and a picture of the church's respect and obedience to her husband. What does your marriage picture? Is that the picture that you're painting when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down and when you rise up. You know, people marry for different reasons. They marry for beauty, they marry for money, they marry for infatuation, they marry for lust, they marry for all kinds of reasons.

But here's what God wants you to do. Marry in order to display the beauty of the kingdom of heaven through Jesus Christ and all of his loving kindnesses. God designed marriage to be this living picture. That's why in Ephesians five you have the words as and just as. Marriage is as this, it's just as that.

In other words, marriage is a representative relationship of something greater. And the wife represents a submissive church. A husband represents Jesus Christ, who gave himself for his church, and who says, I will never leave you or forsake you. And one of the most important things you need to know if you're married is you need to know who you are. You need to know who you're representing.

Because by the way, you're not representing yourself. A wife can't do whatever she wants in her marriage. She's representing a glorious church. She can't make up her own lines. She can't do her own thing.

She's not her own. A husband is not his own. A husband can't represent himself. He's not becoming himself. The worst thing you can do in your marriage is try to find yourself.

You want to find Jesus Christ. So marriage is a picture of Christ's love for the church. You are bound, and this is such a good thing to be bound by such a wonderful thing. You are bound to play a role that God created for you. And that means you don't have to make it up on your own.

So marriage is a picture of Christ's love for the church. Second, marriage is a picture. As you're painting this picture of marriage, you're actually painting a picture of what I'm gonna call sacred space. Marriage is sacred space. When you get married, you enter into an institution.

You enter into God's institution. I think it was Mae West who said, marriage is a great institution, but I'm not ready for an institution yet. Well, it's God's institution. It's the most wonderful institution. Getting married represents a massive change in your life.

It alters every relationship in your life. You're not the same person before your friends. You're not the same person before other men and other women. You've completely altered your relationship with the opposite sex when you get married. Because you've actually entered into a different state of being, and it's called the institution of marriage.

You pass from one realm into another. Malachi, in Malachi 2.11, says that it's God's holy institution which he loves. So getting married is like is a little bit like going into somebody's house. Like think of going into the White House. When you go into the White House, you can't behave any way you want.

If you dine with the Queen of England, they will tell you how to hold your fork and how to touch your napkin and how to sit and what to say because when you are dining with the Queen of England you can't do whatever you want to do because you are in somebody else's house and when you enter into marriage you are entering into God's sacred institution. And when you're married you're actually painting a picture, a picture of a sacred space where God rules. And I think we should think of it even like this. You're a visitor in God's institution. Marriage belongs to him.

Marriage has boundaries. It's his space. And you're not free to tinker around with your marriage, but you know who you are. If you're a husband, you are a representative of Jesus Christ. If you're a wife, you're a representative of a respectful and obedient church.

So you enter into marriage a sacred space. And so when you do that, You have to put away your bad manners. Everybody goes into marriage with bad manners. But you can't just be yourself in all your bad manners in your marriage. And God gives many commands to help you get right, get your manners right, so that when you dine in God's holy institution, you know how to hold your fork.

So it's a picture of sacred space. Thirdly, it's a picture of the fragrance of Jesus Christ. And the question is, you know, what's the aroma of your home? In 2 Corinthians 2.15, The apostle tells that church that we are the fragrance of Christ among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing. Now how do you paint a picture of aroma?

Well, gifted painters can do it. They can paint pictures that you can almost smell the aroma and the beauty of the colors and the things that activate a sense of aroma in garden scenes and things like that. But a marriage is a manifestation of the aroma, an unseen aroma of Jesus Christ. And of course we all know aromas are wonderful gifts of God. They trigger memories, They activate emotions when you smell something.

Every mother knows the pleasant smell of her baby's head, you know. The smell of leather and bubble gum and lavender and crayons and things like that. Aromas are wonderful, but your marriage gives off an aroma. And often you can tell when you walk into somebody's house something smells here. It either smells good or it might smell like spoiled food or rotting meat or urine or the smell of unwashed clothes or it's the wonderful aromas of the kingdom of God.

Are you painting a picture of the aroma of Jesus Christ? And then fourthly, the fourth pictures of harmony. This has to do with authority and submission. You're painting pictures of harmony, of the interplay between a man and a woman. And this is where we come to Ephesians 522.

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 the biblical picture that you're painting, it's a picture of the beautiful interplay of authority and submission. And the Bible tells how it all works out. It tells the man what his authority looks like.

He's nourishing, he's cherishing, He's washing his wife in the water of the word. He's sacrificing his life for her. He's living with her in an understanding way. We know how authority works. We need to bring back biblical patriarchy, frankly.

Patriarchy, it's a biblical word. We shouldn't be afraid of it. How do you define patriarchy? Well, the pagans have tried to define it, but here's how Christians define it. Biblical patriarchy is Jesus Christ.

That's the kind of authority infused with loving kindness and tenderness and everything that is of Jesus Christ. Painting pictures of harmony through authority and submission. A wife submitting to her husband as to the Lord. You know, the happiest and most stately women I have ever known, the most confident women, are women who are submissive. They understand authority.

They know what to do. They know how to integrate themselves into God's order of things. These are the most unflappable, peaceful women I have ever known. They fear no man. They're not frightened by any fear like Sarah was.

They're not even afraid of their husbands. You know, it occurs to me over the years, my wife is not afraid of me. She fears God, and she knows that God has his thumb on me and he will do with me what he wills. She's not afraid. I was struck by something I read in a book that I read recently by the former lesbian activist Rosaria Butterfield.

She just wrote a book, Five Lies, and she talks about being invited into a pastor's home when she was still living a life in an American university in the queer theory department of that university. And she talks about seeing the women, the Christian women. And here's what she wrote. The calmness of the women was serene and strange. No grandstanding, no holding court, no gossip.

These were old friends with deep connections who knew how to belly laugh. Anyway, she's just talking about how unusual it is to find a contented, satisfied woman at peace with God. But she's at peace with God's order of authority and submission and the harmony that God designs for marriage. You know, in contrast, you have fitful, unfulfilled, insecure women. They've not humbled themselves under God's authority, and they tend to be very unhappy.

And they have the medications to prove it. Pictures of harmony. Living in harmony with the interplay of authority and submission is such a beautiful thing when it's working well. And then fifth, pictures of oneness. In 1 Corinthians 7, 3 through 5, we read that a husband should render, do affection.

In other words, he owes his wife affection. He's talking about sexual intimacy. And also the wife render what is due to her husband. And then he says, and do not deprive one another. In your marriage, you're painting pictures of oneness, and that actually is manifested in the sexual union.

And the language in Ephesians five is stunning because he makes it very clear in Ephesians five that the union that we have with Jesus Christ spiritually is pictured physically in the sexual relationship. It's so explicit, it's shocking, that when a husband and wife engage in sexual intimacy, They're picturing the unity. They're picturing the joy. They're picturing the covenant fidelity. They're picturing the love of Jesus Christ when they have sexual intimacy.

They're painting a picture, it's a very graphic picture because the sexual union is a picture, an earthly picture of the closeness of the union between believers and the Lord Jesus Christ. So the marriage bed is even a picture. And the apostle says don't deprive one another. The apostle says a husband doesn't have authority over his own body. And then he says what a wife doesn't have authority over her own body either.

What that means is that they have to together work this out in love. What are the who Who has the final say? Well, of course a husband does, but it's not that simple because he has to live with his wife in an understanding way and neither of them have authority over their own body in the sexual union. What that means is that they have to work it out in love. And it's hard to make rules for that because those are things that are brought out by the work of the Holy Spirit.

And then he says, do not deprive one another. So, marriage pictures oneness. And I think what Paul is trying to say in 1 Corinthians 7 is don't let sexual intimacy die in your marriage. You need it. Maybe some of you need to get back to it because you've neglected it for certain reasons.

So get back to it if that's you. It's the command of God. By the way, remember marriage is not your own. You're in God's holy institution. And you play by his rules.

And then the sixth picture, it's a picture of contentment. 1 Peter 4, eight, above all things, have fervent love for one another, for love will cover a multitude of sins. You know, is your marriage a picture of contentment? You know, you can't fix everything in your marriage. You can try to fix everything in your marriage, but if you're all bent up about trying to fix everything in your marriage, you will fail, because you can't fix everything in your marriage.

And couples need to just recognize that there are, in God's institution, there are imperfections that are patiently endured and you cover over sins. You know, when a couple wants to fix their marriage, they often get so focused on their problems on the marriage, and they wanna solve this problem and that problem, and they get very obsessed with it. They name their problems one by one, and you know, they go on the war path, you know, they're holding one another accountable, you know, to this biblical standard, because they're trying to fix everything. Problem with trying to fix someone is you actually have a log in your own eye when you do that. And that's true of everybody.

But love and joy and peace and patience and kindness goes out the window. And so They try to fix everything. But what God gives us is his Holy Spirit, that we would deal with ourselves, primarily. You know, just the other day, several months ago, I was observing my wife in a moment of weakness, and one of her weaknesses. And you know, it was a manifestation of the fall.

It wasn't some egregious sin but I caught myself, I was looking at her and I was smiling and I was watching her sin you know and I don't want you to take this wrong, but I thought, that's So cute. You know, there she is, my sweet wife, you know. And she's manifesting the effects of the fall. You know, just like. And I'm not saying that sin is cute.

I'm not saying that sin is cute. I'm not saying that sin is cute at all. I'm just saying that when I saw that, it actually made me love her more. It tenderized me. And it made me so thankful for the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

She's justified by faith. All of her sins are forgiven. Her past sins, her current sins, and the sins in the future, they're all forgiven. And so I thought, oh, that is, I know it's the wrong word to use, I know it's not cute, but I just thought, it just made me love her more. You can't fix everything in your marriage.

Don't try to fix everything in your marriage. Be filled with the Holy Spirit. So pictures of contentment, painting pictures of contentment, covering over sin. Seventh, pictures of the fruit of the Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

Here's another way to say it. Hey, don't walk in the deeds of the flesh. You know, it's another way of saying, don't be hard to live with, be easy to live with. Are you hard to live with? You know how this works with your car.

You know, some roads are really hard on cars, and some people are really hard on a marriage, like they cause a lot of road wear. Are you causing a lot of road wear? Or are you easy to live with? I'm here to say be easy to live with. But The fruit of the Spirit makes you easy to live with, frankly.

Pictures of the fruit of the Spirit, eighth. This is the final one, pictures of rejoicing. Did you know that God actually made marriage to be a picture of rejoicing? Are you painting pictures of rejoicing? Now I have tried, I have tried to read everything the Bible says about marriage.

You know, in Deuteronomy 24, verse five, there are instructions to a man who is married for the first year of his marriage, and the text says that he shall be free at home one year to bring happiness to his wife whom he has taken. So a husband is supposed to dedicate the whole first year of his marriage to making his wife happy. But actually the Bible doesn't even stop there because like I'm pretty sure I've read every text about a wedding or a marriage in the Bible. And I was reading them and counting them up and I'm thinking Almost every single time a wedding or a marriage is mentioned, it's always connected to a word, rejoicing. Marriage was made for rejoicing.

That's why God created it. And he gives couples this opportunity to paint pictures of everlasting joy, and they will enter into heaven, and the Lord Jesus will say, enter into the joy of your master, and everlasting joy will be on your heads. But marriage was made for rejoicing. That's why God created marriage. I think that is the irreducible motive of God for creating marriage, so that there would be everlasting joy.

But it starts right here, and you have an opportunity to paint it right here. I know it can be hard, But remember, this isn't your institution. This is God's institution. The worst thing you can do in your marriage is try to be yourself. So, Jesus Christ as preeminent in marriage is really the whole matter.

And frankly, these pictures are all pictures of the transformation of the heart. When Jesus Christ is preeminent, Jesus Christ is the head of the church. Jesus Christ is preeminent in all things, and he wants to be preeminent in your own heart. And so if you want to paint beautiful pictures, the first thing that you must do is believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. And repent of your sins.

And follow him and receive the fruits of justification and sanctification that he has for you. Because a marriage that I've just spoken about in terms of these beautiful pictures, It's really only possible when Jesus Christ is the center of your marriage. Well, I want to review these beautiful pictures. First, a picture of Christ's love for the church. Second, a picture of sacred space.

Third, a picture of the fragrance of Christ. Fourth, pictures of harmony through authority and submission. Fifth, pictures of oneness. Don't let sexual intimacy die in your marriage. Seventh, pictures of contentment.

You don't need to fix everything. You can't fix everything. Seventh, pictures of the fruit of the spirit and eighth, a picture of rejoicing because marriage was made for rejoicing. We spend our lives learning how to paint these beautiful pictures. Keep on painting.

By the way, the great thing about painting is you can paint over some of the ugly images that you once had. Praise the Lord for that. I want to do two things here at the very end. And that is to say, keep your eyes fixed on Jesus Christ. That's the secret of marriage.

But I want to quote from my dear friend who's now deceased, Jonathan Edwards. He talks about manifesting the glory of Jesus Christ in the world. And what he says there sums up what I really wanted to say. Here's what he says, when the creature displays excellent qualities and happiness, It is nothing more than the expressions of God's glory shining in and through them. Thus, in seeking their glory and happiness, God makes himself his own ultimate end.

That is, himself diffused and shining outwardly, which he delights in just as he delights in his innate beauty and fullness. He seeks their glory and their happiness as well. This is the reason God created the world, for everlasting joy. So go paint it, Would you pray with me? Lord, we thank you for your glorious word, for the beauty of holiness, for these marvelous pictures that you've called us to paint in our marriages.

Lord, as all of us are building and dwelling and planting in Babylon in the midst of this wicked and perverse generation. Let there be little pieces of heaven, little shining lights all over the country where the love of Jesus Christ is manifested in a marriage. Amen.