What's Love Got To Do With It?

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What’s Love Got To Do With It?

Sunday, July 23, 2006

Ephesians 5:21-33

21 And further, you will submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.

22 You wives will submit to your husbands as you do to the Lord.

23 For a husband is the head of his wife as Christ is the head of his body, the church; he gave his life to be her Savior.

24 As the church submits to Christ, so you wives must submit to your husbands in everything.

25 And you husbands must love your wives with the same love Christ showed the church. He gave up his life for her

26 to make her holy and clean, washed by baptism and God’s word.

27 He did this to present her to himself as a glorious church without a spot or wrinkle or any other blemish. Instead, she will be holy and without fault.

28 In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as they love their own bodies. For a man is actually loving himself when he loves his wife.

29 No one hates his own body but lovingly cares for it, just as Christ cares for his body, which is the church.

30 And we are his body.

31 As the Scriptures say, “A man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are united into one.”

32 This is a great mystery, but it is an illustration of the way Christ and the church are one.

33 So again I say, each man must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.

What’s love got to do, got to do with it?

Tina Turner asked that question in her 1983 hit song.

That question could very well have been asked by the husbands in the Ephesian church.

What has love got to do with marriage.

Let’s listen to what Paul was telling everyone.

Love your wife?

Hardly.

You loved your camel, you loved your son, but your wife if she was a good wife she didn’t annoy you, maybe.

If she was a bad wife then you got rid of her.

You can well imagine the shock waves that must have rippled through the congregation when Paul’s letter was read out loud.

"Did I hear right?

Did he really say that we were to love our wives?

Like Christ loved the church?"

I mean these guy’s were riding high, Paul has just told their wives to submit, like that was the type of preaching they wanted to hear.

I can just imagine the applause, foot stamping and whistling that accompanied that one.

But now, he had gone from preaching to meddling.

But Paul was serious.

I’m sure that he had seen the way that Christian husbands were treating their wives.

It was just as if there had never been a change in their lives.

The marriage relationship in the church was the same as it was in the rest of Greek culture.

Granted Christian husbands had given up the courtesans and concubines, but their relationship with their wives hadn’t changed.

And Paul was saying, "hey guys, not good enough, let’s make a change that is noticeable to everyone.

Let’s change our marriages."

Not only does Paul command the husbands to love their wives but listen to some of the ways he tells them to love their wives.

As Christ loved the church, as you love your own bodies, as you loves yourself.