Working Toward A Great Marriage, Part 2 - Love And Respect

Working Toward a Great Marriage

Part 2 – Love and Respect

Ephesians 5:22-33

May 30, 2010

THE AUDIO OF THIS SERMON CAN BE FOUND AT WWW.ABERDEENWESLEYAN.ORG

NOTE: THE ME/WE/GOD/YOU/WE FORMAT IS FROM ANDY STANLEY’S BOOK, "COMMUNICATING FOR A CHANGE."

Me/We:

This is the second of a two-part series on marriage.

As I mentioned two weeks ago when we started this, this stuff isn’t very easy for me to talk about.

Not because I don’t know what I’m talking about when discussing this, it’s just that I’m very aware that I’ve got a way to go in all this myself.

I’m still working on being the best husband I can be for Debra.

So I hope that I don’t give the impression that I think I’ve got it all figured because I don’t.

When giving a message like this you run the risk that I saw in a cartoon one time when the pastor and his wife are driving home after the service, and he says, “You know, my sermons would be a lot more effective if you wouldn’t yell, ‘Ha!’ after each point.”

I’m grateful for a wife who would never do that, but some people might be thinking that as I go through this material today.

I think that all of us would agree that marriage is waaaay too complicated and complex to just deal with in two messages about 30 minutes each.

So my intention isn’t to give you all there is to know about how to have a great marriage.

What I really hope is that you’ll find something here that you can improve on, then find resources that might help you, and then go for it as a step to helping you honor God in your marriage and to helping people and especially your kids see the love Jesus has for His bride, the Church.

James Dobson said, “Even if marriages are made in heaven, man has to be responsible for the maintenance.” (1001 Quotations that Connect)

My hope is that you’ll all choose to be proactive in maintaining and improving your marriages.

God: We’re going to look at a passage we looked at briefly two weeks ago but didn’t get into very deeply

Ephesians 5:22-33 (p. 829) –

22 Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her 26 to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, 27 and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. 28 In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church-- 30 for we are members of his body. 31 "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh." 32 This is a profound mystery--but I am talking about Christ and the church. 33 However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.

In the last message I focused on how this passage tells us how Christ’s relationship with the Church is our model for how husbands and wives should relate.

Today we’re going to look a little deeper into that.

We won’t cover everything that could be said in regard to this passage and marriage, but I do think you’ll walk out of here with something tangible that you can put into place right when you leave here today to work toward a great marriage.

Wives, according to this passage, your husband has a couple really huge needs: submission and respect.

We’ll start with the idea of wives submitting to their husbands, because I think that this is one of the most misunderstood aspects of the wife’s role in the home.

Submission –

This is mentioned three times in the first three verses of our passage here.

Submit simply means to do whatever your husband tells you to do – whenever he tells you to do it.

I could just hear the wind getting sucked in by every married couple here. The women just about had a heart attack thinking, “You didn’t really just say that.”

And the guys are having a heart attack thinking, “Did you just really say that? Alright!”