In this sermon titled 'Getting the Picture Right', Scott Brown emphasizes the holiness of marriage and its purpose to bear witness to God's essence. He discusses the priorities of marriage, the interplay of husbands and wives, and the importance of consecrating one's marriage to God. Brown highlights that marriage is a picture of Christ and the church, and each spouse plays a specific role in this picture. He also emphasizes the significance of sexual intimacy in reflecting Christ's love for the church. Overall, the sermon emphasizes the need for couples to understand and fulfill their God-given roles in marriage for it to be a reflection of Christ's love.

I pray that God would give all of us holy moments where the Lord is impressing something on us for his glory. There's nothing better in the world than to glorify God and to know that you're his child and that you're walking by faith in him. And you know, We have a very wonderfully small group here by design, and I pray that some of you will get to know each other. But mainly that the Lord would really be working. I know this only happens by work of the Holy Spirit.

You know, you have mere men who are going to be speaking who have, who are very aware of our weaknesses, but we, but we don't think the Holy Spirit is weak. And so I'm really thankful that you're here. We're going to cover a lot of things. I'm going to start tonight just some what the most basic thing about marriage. We're going to talk a lot about the essence of marriage because we're by God's design created to bear witness to his essence and the essence of marriages is such a marvelous way to demonstrate the love of God in the world.

We're going to talk about priorities of marriage, purposes of marriage. We're going to talk about the interplay of husbands and wives. Steve tomorrow is going to talk about washing your wife in the water of the word. I can't wait to hear that. How to, how to resolve conflicts, how to have difficult conversations, you know, how not to be hard to live with.

So many things like that. And, so I'm really glad that you're here. The men who are gonna be speaking, our dear brothers, Jason was just up here. Jason and I have been ministering together for over 30 years here in Wake Forest. And it's been a joy.

We raised our kids together. And in fact, I did their wedding 30-something years ago. 30 what? 32 years ago. That was such a fun day.

And one of the funniest parts of that wedding is we had a three-year-old daughter at that time and The church they were getting married in the wedding party just getting ready to go into the into the the me you know to present right the wedding is going to start and My daughter my three-year-old daughter pulled in a fire alarm. The fire alarm was like right at eye level of a three-year-old. What in the world was that? And so Everybody thought they were going to have to evacuate the building. There's a fire, the wedding party's really getting ready to go in.

I went up there and I said, some child pulled the fire alarm. My daughter's never been able to outlive that, you know, she gets reminded of it all too bad. She's not here tonight But and then Steve and Wendy Walker here. I forgot to mention Janet. I met we met Janet first We were planting a church here in Wake Forest and Janet was part of that group.

And this was like a long time, this was 35 years ago, probably 35, 36 years ago. Janet and I used to lead singing when we planted that church. Anyway, that was really, those were really fun days. I had my guitar and then she started playing the piano. Steve and Wendy Walker right back here.

You're going to love these guys. I've watched Steve over the years because the first time we did a conference together, I don't know if it was 10 or 12 or 15 years ago in California, and I was so thankful for this guy. And So it's so good to have you together. We did a marriage conference in Colorado a little while ago too. That was a joy.

So soak these guys for all they're worth while they're here. Deborah and I grew up in California. So We love people from California. One of the few still left. Yeah, it's really amazing.

Well, I want to talk about the holiness of marriage. And then Steve will come up and finish us off. Ephesians 531, 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. I want a thought to settle on us tonight, and that is that marriage is a holy institution.

Marriage is consecrated space. And you know, a marriage begins with a wedding where a couple consecrates themselves to God. Everything changes when two people get married. All their relationships are altered and they are consecrating one another to this institution that God created. They're actually coming under the wing of the care of God the way that he's designed people to function and So, you know you all got married.

I know some of you didn't get married very very long ago You got married two weeks ago three weeks ago something like that. There you have it. Okay, who's been married the least amount? I just identified them. How long ago?

Four weeks. I missed it. Anybody less than four weeks? I don't think so. We had a couple here one time, they'd just been married a few days.

It was so funny to have them here. But when you get married, you are dedicating, You're hallowing the ground that you're going to walk on as husbands and wives. This is what God's people do. They hallow all the ground that they walk upon. But when you, when you get married, you're hallowing this ground from which, if God gives you children, you're, you know, you're raising your children and functioning in the church of Jesus Christ.

But to consecrate Your marriage is to touch no unclean thing. You're dedicating yourself for holy use. God created your union for holy use. It should only be used for holy things, that you're not moved by the world. Somebody once said, the world has yet to see what God will do with a man fully consecrated to God.

And I think that's true in a marriage. You know, the world has yet to see a marriage that is wholly consecrated to God. You know, we all want our marriages to be more dedicated, more set apart, more consecrated to God. And marriage, you know, marriage is a holy institution. That's how the prophet Malachi describes it.

It's God's holy institution, which he loves. You entered into something that God loves. This is what's so heartbreaking about the world we live in where people have redefined marriage. They've redefined marriage into what's not marriage. But marriage is so pivotal to the picture of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

You know, as you think about Consecrating yourself in marriage, you have to understand what you're consecrating yourself to. You're consecrating yourself to something very specific, and that is to Christ's love for the church. And this is really the irreducible principle of marriage, that marriage is a picture of Christ in the church. That's the controlling element of a relationship between a husband and a wife. And a marriage is designed to display publicly what Jesus Christ has done with his church and what his true church has done with him.

Jesus Christ loves his church and gives himself up for her. A glorious church honors and submits and obeys her husband. And so, you know, marriage is a picture. You know, even if you've only been married for four weeks, you've been painting a picture. You're always painting a picture.

And the question is what kind of picture are you painting? Is it a picture of Christ's love for the church? Is it a picture of an adoring wife who follows her husband? Is that the kind of picture that you're painting? Of course the problem is we don't always paint well.

But even if you've not painted well, you can always alter the picture from this day forward. There's always hope in a Christian marriage because God is there and God is a sanctifier. He's a purifier and He actually does forgive sinners and give them a way forward, even though maybe the picture that they painted isn't very beautiful. You know, And in one way, we're here to try to help one another paint a beautiful picture. Maybe paint more beautifully than we have in the past.

But God really has designed your marriage as a picture of something greater than your marriage. And you know a husband or wife have to know who they are in the picture. You have to know what role you're playing in the picture. And a husband's life is not his own. He's a representative of Christ.

In other words, the man who's trying to find himself in marriage has completely missed the point. Because the only hope for your marriage is for a man to become like Christ. So a man knows who he is. And so when his wife, who's a picture of the church, is discouraged, when his wife is hurting, when his wife is disobedient. When a man knows who he is, he can deal with his wife.

He knows exactly how to deal with his wife, the same way that Christ deals with his church because the church is sometimes discouraged, the church is sometimes worldly, the church is sometimes disobedient, the church is sometimes sick. And Jesus Christ gives husbands in marriages so that husbands will know who they are in the picture. You have to know that you are representative of Jesus Christ. And most marriages go off course when a husband or a wife don't understand who God made them to be in that marriage. I mean, and it is the same thing with a wife.

A wife needs to know who she is. One of the most dangerous, damaging, horrific messages that men and women are sold today is that you need to become your own person. That's the most disastrous thing you can do in a marriage. You wives, if you want to find yourself, you are going to find a disaster. But if you know who you are, that you're a representative of a glorious church.

If you are a holy church, if you are an obedient church, a wife will always know what to do even in the most difficult challenges that her husband or life might give her. The Bible tells her wife everything she needs to do, even when her husband is disobedient. The Bible shows you how to go through a moment like that in your life. But a wife needs to know who she is, you know. You are not your own.

You're bought with a price. You are a servant, you are a slave of Jesus Christ. So a wife needs to know who she is and some of the most dramatic problems in marriage has come because somebody forgot who they were and they didn't play the role that they were designed for. It's a role. It's as if you're in a drama.

And you have lines that are given to you. You don't say your own lines. You say the lines that God has ordained. You speak words of life and truth. You don't speak your own truth.

You speak a higher truth from God. And that's so important. Important. So you need to know who you are in the story. You know, many years ago, I did a wedding and I was telling this couple that there are five things they needed to know about a marriage.

And I was just telling, I was just repeating this to them the other day. And I'm just going to give you the list. I really like this list. Because you need to know not only who you are, but you need to know what you're doing in a marriage. And first of all, a marriage is a fountain.

A marriage, a marriage pours forth life into the world in various ways. Maybe one of the most obvious ways is through children. If God gives you children, you're, you know, every, everything, every person in the world, everything that has ever happened in the world has happened because a man and a woman had a relationship. And the marriage is a fountain. So much flows from that fountain.

You know, when Deborah and I got married 42 years ago, all Deborah really wanted to be was a mother and a wife. And I was so thankful for that. But then there was one miscarriage and then there was two and three miscarriages and then there were four, then there were twoable pregnancies and it was just really hard. And then it came about that she couldn't have children. And but Deborah wanted to be a mother.

And so, in God's providence, we knew some pastors who knew girls who didn't want to get abortions, and they wanted to put their children up for adoption. So we adopted four children. And now we have 28 grandchildren. Some of them are up here, right here. But all of that came because Debra, Debra was clearer about a family than I was in those days.

And she understood that God made the family as a fountain. And I'm so glad she did. So many of the blessings in my life today with our grandchildren come because Deborah understood that. But a marriage is a fountain and you know you can't, even today you won't be able to calculate how that fountain will flow. But let it let it flow under the ordinance of God.

Let it flow out of the consecration of the heart before God. A marriage is also a theater. A marriage is a theater to display the joys of the kingdom of heaven. Like I said before, you know, you have to know who you are in the play, because marriage is a theater. And the whole world has an opportunity to see what Christ's love for the church looks like.

What does it mean that Jesus Christ loved the church? Your marriage should display that. The way that you husbands treat your wives, the way that you wives treat your husbands, all of that has to do with a theatrical demonstration. Now, it's not theater in the fake. In the theaters, the people are acting, right?

They're just acting. Now Christians aren't acting in the roles that they play. They're actually getting their material from the Lord, and they're doing it out of sincerity of heart. But marriage is a theater. Marriage is also a purifier.

It's a sanctifier. Marriage changes you. This is one of the great things about marriage. You marry somebody really different compared to you, and you have a whole other dimension of your life that you didn't have before. Things that you didn't like before, you probably need to learn how to like.

And you end up liking more things. And marriage is a purifier and a sanctifier. Somebody said, I think, marriage is like a whetstone that sharpens you. Through the right angle of contact there's a sharpening that goes on but if the if the if the angle is wrong it becomes more like a grinding stone and so The work of the Holy Spirit is pivotal in knowing how to be a whetstone for one another rather than a grinding stone. And then marriage is a weapon.

Marriage is a weapon to crush the serpent's head. You know, the devil is always attacking a marriage. The devil wants to destroy your marriage. The devil wants to destroy your children. He wants to destroy your offspring.

But marriage is a weapon to crush the serpent's head and you do that, you do that first of all by fully consecrating yourself to holy things in your marriage and set no unclean thing before your eyes. And this is the point of the spear of for the crushing of the head of the serpent in your own relationship, in your own life, the life of your children, your life in your local church and in your community. But God created marriage to defeat the devil. And that's why God tells fathers to teach their children when they sit in the house, when they walk by the way, when they lie down and when they rise up. And that's why he says, you shall bind them on your hand and write them on the doorposts of your house because you're creating a little piece of heaven where the devil cannot destroy.

And when families are full of the word of God, they're crushing the head of the serpent. And they're bringing the will of God, the goodness of God into their little kingdom. But a marriage is a weapon to crush the serpent's head but the serpent is always there. You just might ask, you know, in what ways is the serpent after you right now? Right now.

In what ways is the serpent tempting you to compromise, to be consecrated partly rather than wholly in every single part of your life. It's so important that we understand what marriage is all about and the Bible is so clear it gives so many angles so many handles on it and I I'm here to encourage you know what the Bible says about marriage in Genesis chapter 2 21 through 25 we learned that marriage is a demonstration of oneness. The two shall become one flesh. In Genesis three, seven, we learned that Marriage is under attack of the serpent. It shouldn't surprise us that the first attack of the devil was against a husband and a wife.

And how critical it is to recognize that we must resist the devil and flee from him. In Ephesians 5, probably the most important text on marriage, the summary statement of all the other texts in the Bible on marriage, and we're going to spend significant time on that tomorrow. It's the work of the Holy Spirit. You know, the apostle Paul, he tells that the Ephesian Church, He says, you know, be not drunk with wine, but be filled with the Holy Spirit. And then he begins to explain what that looks like.

Like what does it look like in a wife? She submits to her husband. Or does it look like in a husband? He loves his wife. What does it look like in children?

They honor and obey their parents. What does it look like in a worker? He respects his employer. So, I mean, a marriage is designed by God to be a work of the Spirit. Theologians have called Ephesians 5 and 6 the family life codes, because you really get the secret of family life.

And it's probably not what you thought. It's the filling of the Holy Spirit. So to be submitted and filled with the Holy Spirit, fully consecrated to God is so critical. You know, you can you can go to First Peter Chapter five. You can go to so many different places in scripture.

You can go to Hebrews chapter 13 verses 4 through 6 where the marriage bed is to be honored. You can go to 1 Corinthians 7, 3 through 5 where you have a husband who doesn't have authority over his own body in the sexual relationship. You have a wife who doesn't have authority over her own body, but they're able to work it out. They're able to work sexual intimacy out together in a unified way. And you have that wonderful picture that's there you have Malachi chapter 2 marriage is a covenant marriages are held together not by emotions not by compatibilities but by covenants That's the only thing that really holds anybody together in a godly way.

So there are just so many places to go. You need to know everything the Bible says about marriage. And it's so critical that you do that. You know one of the most important things for us to remember is not to let sexual intimacy die. Sexual intimacy is actually dying in our culture today.

Because of pornography and things like that, it's really interesting to look at the people who study these things. But People are having less sexual intimacy today than before. And much of it really has to do with a pornified culture and a selfish kind of a disposition that people have. But the biblical portrait of marriage includes physical intimacy. And you should resist that force in your life to let sexual intimacy die.

Because it's a picture of Christ and the church. Isn't that strange? Sexual intimacy is a picture of Christ and the church. That's what Ephesians five says. It's just flat.

It just says it right out there. The sexual act is a picture of Christ and his church. So you should be faithful to it. You should do the picture. You should keep the covenant.

You know the sexual union is a picture of the intimacy that you have with Christ. It's a picture of the joy. It's a picture of the authenticity that you have with Jesus Christ. He knows everything. He knows everything about you.

Every corner of your mind and your body. The sexual intimacy takes you into a realm of understanding of Christ's love for the church. And even how close the Lord wants us to be to him is mirrored in how we are close to one another. You know, God wants you to be close. God wants you to be skin-close in sexual intimacy.

I'm gonna quote Jonathan Edwards here. He said, as it looks from the eternal point of view which must appear to him as a perfect nearness conformity unity and oneness." So you know marriage is a picture so It's a picture of Christ's love for the church. You know, I was reading a book just this week, actually, by a man, and he wrote the book as if you were walking through the rooms of your home. It's sort of like a picture of Christ in each of the rooms and like there's the porch and there's the kitchen and there's the living room. But he had this chapter on the bedroom.

And I thought it was so interesting the way he talked about it. He was quoting Hebrews 13, four and five that says, let the marriage bed be held in honor, let the marriage bed be held in honor. And he say in the book, he's saying that the marriage, the marriage bed should be an embodiment of honor. He's and what he said, like your bed, your bedroom should be a place where you're honoring the marriage bed. And he said that when you honor something, it's, it's externalized some way.

You know, when you honor someone, you say something honorable about them, or you do something. And he says the marriage bed is the same way. And he said the marriage bed isn't just, your bed isn't just the place that you throw your laundry. And then he said that it should be a protected, sacred place. And he said that because of that, you should make your bed.

You should make your bed every day because you're making the sacred space, this consecrated space. And I'm reading this. I'm thinking of my wife, Deborah, because, you know, all our life, Deborah wanted our, our bedroom to be, to be a love nest. She always called it our love nest. And she wanted it to be one of the most beautiful places in the house.

And so she always protected our bedroom and, you know, didn't want it to become cluttered. And sometimes her husband would have to unclutter his dresser. But she wanted it to be a love nest. And so every morning in our marriage, she would get up and she would make the bed. She would make it beautifully.

She would make it so perfectly. And I thought, Debra, you're just so perfectionistic about making this bed. You know, what's that all about? You know? And then, you know, for years, I would always get up earlier than Deborah, like two to three hours earlier, and she would make the bed by herself.

But now, in recent years, I've decided I'm going to quit cheating my sleep, and I'm going to try to get seven or eight hours of sleep every night. And so now, Deborah and I are getting up together. It's really, like for the first time in our marriage in the last, I don't know how long, maybe a year or two, something like that. We're getting up almost at the same time and I'm on one side of the bed and she's on the other side of the bed and she's making this bed perfect. It just has to be so perfect.

But the reason is that she wants to create, she wants to treat the marriage bed with honor. And I'm so thankful for that. But it's right to keep the bed and the bedroom a place of honor. So consecrate yourself to holy things in your marriage. And set no unclean thing before your eyes.

And make your marriage a little piece of heaven, make your home a little piece of heaven. Because that's really why God designed the family. And that's why God got you married, is to learn how to demonstrate the love of Jesus Christ in the world. So there's the introduction.