Your Home A Safe Place: Daily Sharing Time With You And Your Mate Series

NO PLACE LIKE HOME

Your Home A Safe Place

Daily Sharing Time for You & Your Mate

EPHESIANS 5:21-33

Five Safety Builders

There were two men out on the golf course, at the fifteenth green, when they see a funeral procession drive by. One man pauses, takes off his hat, and places it over his heart, staring at the procession. The other man asks, “Did you know that person?” The first man replies, “She was a good wife!”

We are talking about how there is no place like home. Last week we talked about your relationship with God is the core from which all relationships come. Today I want to talk about our relationship with our spouse.

When relationships are godly, they are a safe place for us. Our homes are to be a safe place.

Three weeks after her wedding day, Joanna called her minister in hysterics. She was crying, “Pastor, John and I had our first fight together! It was awful. What am I going to do?"

The pastor, leaning back in his chair and shaking his head said, "Calm down, Joanna, this isn’t nearly as bad as you think. Every marriage has to have its first fight. It’s natural."

"I know, I know," Joanna said impatiently. "But what am I going to do with the body?"

Last week we saw how working on the core relationship with God moves us outward and has its effects on those closest to us. And who is closer than your spouse?

A husband and wife relationship is unique. Genesis 1:27 states, “So God created man in his own image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” The creation of human beings as male and female was God’s idea. There is nothing like it!

MARRIAGE was God’s idea. There is nothing like it either!

A husband’s and wife’s rel’p within a family unit is the closest thing to the invisible Christ’s rel’p with the visible church.

There is nothing like that! The family finds its identity from the church!

And since there is nothing else like those relationships is the precise reason why we need to invest in it and develop them!

God wants to use you. God wants to use your marriage. It is his design and plan to bring people to himself using your unique relationship with your spouse!

You and your spouse will be able to reach some people no other’s can reach!

Now, when sin entered the world it ruined the harmony of marriage: it twisted man’s love into hostile domination in some and lazy indifference in others. It also twisted woman’s intelligent, willing submission into manipulative flattering in some and brazen insubordination in others. Sin ruined, distorted and made men and women’s relationships ugly and destructive

Paul starts the statements to Ephesians not with verse 21, but with verse 17 and 18 when he says that we are to understand that God’s will for us is to be filled with the Holy Spirit of God. And a life that is filled with God’s Spirit will look like this:

1. Among Holy Spirit-filled people there will be an inner singing in the heart and an outer singing to others. God’s Spirit leads us to sing praises to God and speak encouraging praises with each other!

2. The Holy Spirit filled person will be thanking God all the time

3. The Holy Spirit-filled person will be living a life-style of submission to others. THIS shows up in the family life-style in five specific ways:

a. Husbands

b. Wives

c. Children

d. Parents/Fathers

e. Slaves

f. Masters

The word for submission is [hypotassomai]

1. wives hypotassomai

"as to the Lord"

"as the church ’submits’ to Christ"

A cartoon showed how a preacher had prepared the pulpit area like a fortress. He was peering through the crack of a machine gun nest. The caption read, "Today my text is, ’Wives submit to your husbands.’"

When American adults were asked "A wife should submit graciously to the servant leadership of her husband" 69% disagreed with the statement.

When reminded that the statement is taken from the Bible, the percentage declined to 60%.

SUBMISSION COMBATS ANARCHY AND INDIVIDUALISM

GOD is not an anarchist! he is three in one relational at his core being and he wishes

-to have a relationship with you

-use you in your rel’ps with others

-teach you how to have better rel’ps

-know him better in the process

The greatest things in life come from rel’ps = meaning in life, purpose in life, driving forces, heroicism...

The most devastating things in life can come from rel’ps = mental illness, emotional abuse, dysfunctional, socio and psycho-paths

The woman is not alone in her command to submit, just alone as to whom she is specifically to do so to.