First Presbyterian Church
Wichita Falls, Texas
February 19, 2012
MARRIAGE: WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT?
Of Horses and Carriages – Part 3
Isaac Butterworth
Ephesians 5:25-33 (NIV)
When Jan and I had been dating for some time, and it was clear to us that we were getting serious about each other, we began to talk about marriage. In time, we made plans to meet with Jan’s parents to ask their permission to get married. I think we surprised them a little, but, surprised or not, they gave their blessing. But, after I left the house that day, Jan’s mother spoke to her in private. She didn’t want her daughter to get married. So, she offered Jan several bribes. I think she agreed to buy Jan a new car, to pay for her college education, I don’t know what all. But Jan held firm, and, finally, in exasperation, her mother asked her, ‘Why do you even want to marry him?’ Jan answered, ‘Because I love him.’ To which her mother said, ‘Well, there’s no accounting for taste!’
When we think of marriage, we naturally think of love. But when we think of love, I’m not sure we have a very clear idea of what it is. Is it a feeling? Is it passion? Is it an overwhelming and compelling abandonment of our better judgment? The title of my sermon is ‘Marriage: What’s Love Got to Do with It?’ Doug and I were talking about it this week, and he asked if I were going to break out in song. I told him, no, my Tina Turner impression is still in the development stage, but I would be glad to call on him. And, the truth is, he could do it!
But what does love have to do with marriage? Here in Ephesians Paul says, ‘Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her….’ And I think that’s the best beginning point for understanding the kind of love that marriage takes.
The fact is, not every kind of love will sustain a marriage. The love we first have for our mates may not really be love at all. The exhilaration may come more from the fact that someone is actually willing to choose me and make me feel important – and there’s nothing wrong with that. We all want to feel validated. But if the love we share is more about meeting my needs and keeping me feeling good, you can see why that kind of love soon evaporates. Especially in a marriage, because there’s lots about a marriage that doesn’t feel all that good.
Paul talks about how Christ loved the church, and then he says, ‘In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives.’ I want us to consider those words carefully, because what Paul is saying is truly astounding. He is saying that the love a husband has for his wife reveals something about the love Christ has for his people. In other words, marriage is to be a window through which the whole world can look and clearly see the nature of Christ’s love. Your relationship with your spouse bears witness to Christ.
How is this so? I see in this passage at least two ways our marriages point to the love of Christ.
I. We Make Promises to One Another
The first way is this: We make promises to each other. Paul says that ‘Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.’ We’re going to look at this matter of giving ourselves up in a moment, but for now, let’s look at the rest of Paul’s statement. He says that ‘Christ…gave himself up’ for the church with a particular outcome in mind. His sacrifice was not a wild abandonment of reason. He gave himself up for the church ‘to make her holy…and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.’
This whole business of making his bride holy is related to what the Bible calls God’s covenant with his people. When God finds us, we are stained and blemished, but God loves us, and he makes promises to us. He binds himself to us. He makes a covenant to redeem us, to wash us ‘with water through the word.’ Christ’s intention ‘to present [us] to himself as a radiant church’ – this is covenant language. Christ redeemed the church by his perfect life and obedient death because, as Paul wrote to Titus, this was something he ‘promised before the beginning of time.’
In other words, Christ made a promise to God for the sake of his people. That promise is what we call a covenant. And when we make a covenant with someone, we bind ourselves to their destiny.
And that’s the first way marriage witnesses to the love of Christ. In marriage, we make promises to one another. We bind ourselves to our mate’s destiny by means of a covenant. We promise to be together ‘for better or for worse,’ come hell or high water. Listen in on a typical wedding service at our church, and you’ll hear the minister address the groom and then the bride with this question: ‘Understanding that God has created, ordered, and blessed the covenant of marriage, do you affirm your desire and intention to enter this covenant?’
Now, to whom does the bride or groom give answer to this question? Technically, to the minister – right? – but the minister is there as a mere functionary. We say at the end of the ceremony that the couple has made their solemn vows ‘before God.’ It is God with whom we’re entering covenant! It is God to whom we’re making this promise! Later in the ceremony the bride and groom will say to each other, ‘I take you to be my husband or wife, and I promise…to be your loving and faithful spouse in plenty and in want, in joy and in sorrow, in sickness and in health as long as we both shall live.’ And there (!) we’re making promises to each other.
So, the covenant is twofold. We promise God and we promise each other. We make what the prophet Malachi calls a ‘marriage covenant’ (2:14). We bind ourselves to each other’s destiny, just as Jesus bound himself to ours.
II. We Make Sacrifices for One Another
And it can be costly. That’s where the sacrifice comes in. Paul says that ‘Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.’ And that’s the second way that marriage serves as a window. People look at your marriage, and they see what Christ’s love for the church is like. It is sacrificial. In marriage, we make sacrifices for each other. We give ourselves up for each other.
When I was pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Levelland, there was a man in our church, the owner of a local business and a highly intentional Christian. The apostle Paul once said of himself that he bore ‘on [his] body the marks of Jesus’ (Gal. 6:17). Well, this man bore the marks of Jesus on his life. His wife was the most annoying woman I have ever known. She was chronically ill, and her sickness had embittered her spirit. She demanded almost all of this man’s time and energy, and she was never grateful for a single thing he did for her. She complained about life, and she complained about him. For his part – I don’t know how he did it – but he remained gentle and serene, and he had the utmost patience with this woman. He never spoke ill of her. He never sighed under the burden of her criticism. He was truly a man of God. He had an intimacy with God that was not showy but nevertheless evident. If life had not rewarded him with outward happiness, he was deeply and inwardly joyful. God was his ‘portion,’ as the Bible says (e.g., Lam. 3:24; Pss. 16:5; 73:26), and he was satisfied.
How could he do this? How could he be so patient and kind and committed to the welfare of his wife despite her ingratitude? I’ll tell you: he was in covenant with his wife, but he was also in covenant with God. And here’s what I learned from him. This man partnered with God in his own process of sanctification. Now, let me tell you what I mean. This man’s highest interest was not in being happy in some conventional way. No. Instead, the longing of his heart was to be the kind of person God wanted him to be. And God has to work on a person to make them like he wants them to be. And what this man did is: he yielded to God’s program of overhaul in his life. God not infrequently uses suffering and adversity. How does the old hymn say it? ‘When through fiery trials thy pathways shall lie, my grace, all sufficient, shall be thy supply; the flame shall not hurt thee; I only design thy dross to consume, and thy gold to refine.’
That’s what this man wanted. He wanted his dross consumed; he wanted his unloving tendencies to be burned in the fire of affliction if need be, and his gold refined, his character refashioned to be like that of his Lord, who ‘loved the church and gave himself up for her.’
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor, sent to prison in Hitler’s Germany and later martyred for his faith. In 1943, while in his cell, we wrote a wedding sermon that he was never permitted to deliver. In that sermon, he said, ‘It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.’
This is a high calling for us, and none of us shall be equal to it if the Holy Spirit does not supply the strength for it. But I’ve seen it demonstrated, and I know God’s grace is sufficient for us.
Paul ends this passage on marriage by quoting Genesis 2:24: ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’ – their destinies bound together forever. And he says, ‘This is a profound mystery.’ And it is, isn’t it? It is a profound mystery. But then look at how Paul concludes. He says: ‘I am talking about Christ and the church.’
Does that mean that he has not been talking about marriage at all? Has he only mentioned marriage as a ruse to talk about Christ? No. What he is saying here is that the vocation of marriage – the high calling of matrimony – is that the relationship between a husband and wife point beyond itself, that in its covenantal aspect it bear witness to Jesus Christ. Your marriage is to be a window through which the world can see the nature of Christ’s love for the people of God. In the marriage covenant, you bind yourselves to one another’s destiny – the way Christ has bound himself to yours – and you find your greatest freedom in making that commitment. To use the words of the children’s song, you ‘let others see Jesus in you.’
