Wives

Hey, good morning everybody. So glad to see you this morning, even though I'm not really seeing you in full, but glad to be with you this morning. So in 2002, when I bought my house, we were pretty excited because what happened is we bought our house and we had a great backyard. We were really fired up about that because we had two boys and with two boys we wanted to have them be able to just run all over the place and have fun and all that stuff. So we were excited about that when we bought our house. What happened was a couple of years later is that Edie and I got this great idea when we looked in our backyard and they had plenty of room to run around, but we thought, let's build them a playground set in the backyard. So we decided that we were going to purchase a playground set and we were going to build it. This is where the narrator starts in. "This would be a test of their marriage." That's kind of what is about to happen. Or, "This would be a test of the authenticity of their Christian faith." So we decided that that's what we were gonna do. And I promise you this building of this playground set was no joke. This was a playground set that was like, it had swings. It had a slide where I had to dig a hole, pour concrete, erect a pole that was gonna hook up to the slide. There was like a little climbing wall thing. There was a little Ford action up on the top. It was not a joke. We didn't buy all the supplies. I didn't cut all the wood, but we bought it and we had to put it together. And Edie would tell you, and she could tell you, 'cause when I texted with her and asked her about all of this. She said "It was 22 hours of our lives." 22 hours we spent on building this play set. And I remember during the course of building this entire thing, I would, many times, this happened a number of times. I would read directions and I would be frustrated. I would be incensed. Because I'm thinking to myself, I'm reading this direction and I don't really know what the point of this direction is. I don't know why I'm having to do this. I don't want to do this actually. I don't want to do what it's telling me that I'm supposed to do. And I figured out after the fact, and I wish I would've figured it out during this timeframe. But I figured out after the fact that part of the reason that I was frustrated is because I did not have a picture in mind of the overall design of what this was supposed to look like. And so as a result, the instructions were a little bit more difficult for me to grasp and to hold onto because I didn't really understand the design of the whole. Like it would've been great if they would've had the foresight, the people that made this, manufactured this playground set. If they would've had the foresight to with the directions also include a massive poster that I could have just put up. And while I'm getting the directions of figuring all this out, I've got a massive poster of what this is actually supposed to look like so that in my mind I can translate and go, okay, the directions are telling me to do this, but it's moving me toward this particular end. So I was frustrated with the directions a little bit because I didn't understand how they fit in to the overall design. But we got it done. Me and Edie, as a team marriage intact, we finally got it done. In fact, we've got a little picture of a bunch of the kids. There's Trace and there's Tanner, and then some of the other kids. Those are actually Trippy kids and Cockrell kids that are over at our house. And that was the whole thing that we put together. You can actually still see some slats of wood up there. We weren't completely and totally done, but we were most of the way done right there. So anyway, that gives you a picture. Now, the reason that I tell you this to kind of begin what we're gonna talk about today is that when it comes to marriage, there's a lesson here. And here it is. Never build a playground with your spouse. No that's not the lesson. I'm only kidding. That is not the lesson. Here's the lesson. The lesson is this, is that we need to understand the overall design of marriage, if we want to appreciate the instructions that God has given to us in it. If we understand the overall design of marriage, then we can begin to appreciate the actual instructions that God by His spirit, through the Apostle Paul that we'll look at in Ephesians five gave to us. So what is this design? Well, I'm just gonna give this to you and help you maybe frame it in your mind. It's simple. It's this. Marriage is designed to put the good news of Jesus on display. Marriage is designed to put the good news of Jesus on display. Now, stay with me here. I know that there's a bunch of people that are here and you're saying, wait a minute, is this message just for married people? Because I'm not married, and so is this message for me? I want you to just hold tight because this message is actually going to be for everybody. Now we're gonna give a little more focus in this message to wives because this past week, pastor Dan talked to us in this passage in Ephesians chapter five about husbands, and we're gonna give a little more attention to the wives in this particular message, but it's not just a message for wives, even though we're gonna give focus to that. It's also a message for husbands. It's also a message for those who are not yet married who may want to one day be married. It's also a message for those who are maybe widowed or single or whatever that looks like. Because everybody still needs to understand the truth of what Paul is teaching because we have a responsibility in the body of Christ sometimes to be able to share that truth among one another and encourage one another in those truths. Even if it's not your particular situation right now, we still need to be able to understand it and embrace it. And truthfully, because Ephesians five is talking so much about Jesus and about the church, this is relevant for all of us at the exact same time. So I want to turn your attention to where we were last week in Ephesians chapter five. And we're going to give a little more concentration to verses 22 through 24. And I want you to take a look at them with me. "Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife," watch this, "As Christ." I want you to pay attention to that. "Is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the savior. Now as the church submits to Christ," there it is again. "So also wives should submit to their husbands in everything." Now, we're going to give a little more attention to this in just a few moments. And it may be that there are some wives or some future wives that are reading this and you might get hung up on a word or two that is in this passage of scripture, and we'll come back to that in just a moment. There's also a possibility that maybe you're a husband and you heard me reading this passage of scripture and you got pumped and you're like, let's go Pastor Jerry. Tell them about it today. I am here for this. Tell 'em about it today. I wanna pause you right there for just a second, Bucky, and give you just a quick reality check that this was not addressed to you. First word of that passage was wives. This was specifically addressed to wives. It wasn't specifically addressed to you. And you are not supposed to be a person who's in a position of trying to hang this over someone's head. That's not your job at all. In fact, you've been given other responsibilities and other instructions that we covered last week when we talked about husbands. But what I wanted to remind you of in this passage that we'll come back to in just a minute to unpack a little bit more closely is that you saw the relationship that Paul was talking about in this instruction to wives. He's talking about the idea of Christ and the church. You saw it multiple times within those verses that that's what Paul is doing. So what Paul is helping us to see is he's helping to see the design so that we can understand the instructions. He's talking about Christ and the church. Now, he doesn't just do that, by the way, with wives. Those of us that were here last week or that connected or rewatched the message or whatever. You got to see in this message or in this passage of scripture, he actually uses the same phraseology when he is talking about Christ in the church, when he is giving instruction to the husbands, right. So this is a picture of marriage. Remember in verse number 25 it says, "Husbands love your wives, just as," what? "Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her." And then a few verses later in verse number 29, it says, "After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body just as Christ does the church." And so whether it is wives or whether it is husbands, Paul's concern is actually that we are putting Jesus on display through this thing that we call marriage. That's the actual concern that Paul has. Now, if Paul's concern is putting Jesus on display, here's the question that we have to ask. How do we do that? If Paul's concern is putting Jesus on display, how do we do that? Well, first I would say this. "For husbands, it is self-sacrificial love." This is exactly what Pastor Dan was talking about last week. He got it exactly right because this passage of scripture teaches that if wanna put Jesus on display as husbands, then that needs to come through self-sacrificial love in terms of what we are providing in our marriage relationship. Now, Jesus perfectly displayed this, which is why he's referenced. That husbands are to love their wives as Christ love the church. You see, that's the picture that Paul is painting for us and he's keeping it within this great design so that it's kind of like we've got the poster out here that we're looking at so that we understand the instructions that are in inside. And that husbands, when they love their wives with a self-sacrificial love, they're putting Jesus on display because Jesus is who got this exactly right, because in the very beginning, our first husband, Adam got it exactly wrong. You remember the story right? All the way back into Genesis chapter three. Obviously Genesis one and two talks about the creation narrative. And then Genesis three, we've got Adam who had been instructed not to eat from a particular tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And he was instructed not to do that. And then Eve comes along and he tells Eve, "Hey, we're not supposed to do this." And then what happens? Well, Eve is deceived by the serpent and then Eve gets Adam involved. Here, have some of this. So Eve is deceived, but Adam willfully disobeys, and willfully rebels in this particular context. And then notice how the story plays out in Genesis chapter three, beginning in verse eight. It says, "Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, where are you? And he answered, I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked. So I hid. And he said," this is God speaking. "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?" And the man said, watch this. "The woman you put here with me, she gave me some fruit from the tree and I ate it." Isn't that an interesting response that Adam gives in that particular moment? I read that and I realized that instead of Adam demonstrating self-sacrificial love, what Adam was trying to do was demonstrate self-preservation. It's like if here's the bus and I am throwing you under it. This is exactly what he did in this moment. He did not take responsibility for his own sin. Instead, what he did is he blamed his wife. And this happened millennia ago, and it's still happening today. This same particular response continues in fallen and broken husbands over and over and over and over again since the very beginning. It is actually in blaming others. Now, yes, Eve sinned, Eve was deceived, but Adam willfully disobeyed what he knew God had told him to do. And what Adam does is he vacates accountability. He vacates responsibility and instead blames his wife. The truth is though, what's even worse is that Adam was more than blaming his wife. He was blaming God because you heard what he said. God says, "Did you do this?" And he said, "It's that woman that you gave me. You gave her to me." That's why we're in the position we're in. So not only does it go from blaming his wife, but actually it has these echoes of blaming God. And so Adam kind of falls down on the job of self-sacrificial love. And instead, he walks back into self preservation and blaming. But Jesus doesn't do that. Jesus is the poster that we are looking at. Jesus is the one who frames for us these instructions that are given to husbands about self-sacrificial love to love our wives as Christ loved the church and laid his life down for her. You see, what we realize is that every single person has sinned. Every single person has kind of bitten from the, bitten, from the forbidden fruit, so to speak. Every single person is guilty. And instead of Jesus simply just casting blame, even though blame was due us, God demonstrated his own love to us in this, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. He died to rescue us. He died to save us. He died in our place to take upon himself the justice of an almighty God, a holy God who will judge sin. And Jesus took it upon himself so that now by faith in what he's done at the cross and through his resurrection, we can be reconciled to God by faith, through the grace he has shown us in Jesus Christ. This is the beauty of what Jesus has done for us. He gave his life for the undeserving. And instead of saying, it's your problem and I'm just throwing you guys off to the side, or you know, and I'm blaming you rightly so, instead he takes upon himself the self-sacrificial love and gives his life for undeserving people. See friends, listen, when a husband shows self-sacrificial love to his wife, what he's doing is he's putting Jesus on display for the world to see. You see, that's when we start seeing now that the instructions make sense to us because we're seeing the design of what God has actually crafted. So for husbands to put Jesus on display, it looks like self-sacrificial love. But what does that look like for wives? Well, for wives it's submission. This is what Paul actually says. For husbands, it's self-sacrificial love, and for wives it's submission. Now, it's certainly possible that you could hear that word submission and recoil a little bit. And if so, it's probably because of one of two reasons. There may be more, but one of two that kind of came immediately to mind. The first one is that unfortunately you've had really, really, really poor model in a husband. A husband who has been domineering. A husband who's tried to be controlling. A husband who's tried to force you into submission, or God forbid, a husband who's been abusive, maybe even using Christian language to try and do such a thing. This is a terrible occurrence. It should not be and it's the antithesis of what a husband is supposed to be. A husband is supposed to show self-sacrificial love, not make other people their sacrifice. So it may be that when you hear that word submission, you recoil because that's been your experience, or maybe it's been an experience that you've watched play out maybe in your family of origin or something like that. Maybe that's what you've seen. But there's also another possibility as to why we recoil at that particular word of submission. And it may be because we've been drinking from the poisoned well of the world for far too long. That all of a sudden, like in our minds, we've come to this place of thinking that you know what, don't really need a husband. You know what? Don't really care about that. You know what? There's really no difference between husbands and wives anyway. There's no difference between men and women and kind of the distinctions just get rolled away because we've been drinking this poisoned water over and over again. Maybe we could even think to ourselves, you know what, I don't even need a husband because I can do whatever I want in my life, and I could do that with another woman even. Well, the truth is that in doing those things, here's what you may be putting on display, confusion of God's design. You might put on display independence. You might even put on display rebellion. But what you wouldn't be putting on display is Jesus. And that's why we have to be careful because when Paul is writing this to us, we need to understand the instruction within the context of the beauty of the design. See, Paul teaches that wives put Jesus on display when they willingly submit to the loving self-sacrificial leadership of their husbands. Why is that? Well, let's review it again in Ephesians chapter five, beginning in verse 22. It says, "Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. 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." Now, the first question probably that comes to our mind is, okay, Paul's using this phraseology of head and body. He's using this word head. He says, "The husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything." Now, that Greek word for head "Kephale" has been a much researched word with scholars. They've worked very hard in understanding the nature of what this word means. And there's two actual meanings in the Greek language that can be attributed to the word "Kephale." The first has to do with authority. The idea of authority is associated with the word "Kephale" and head. There's also another way that that can be expressed, and that's through the word source or origin. Both of those meanings are true when it comes to the word "Kephale." But for us, we have to actually look at it and understand it in how it's used. It's not used very often. In fact, in the Bible itself, in the New Testament, when we look in the Greek New Testament, we don't really see it used very often. We see it used here. But with extra biblical Greek at that time, you can look in history and be able to see the uses of "Kephale" and how it was used in Greek outside of the biblical text. And with very, very few exceptions, and this has been researched exhaustively by a number of scholars. With very, very few exceptions, it is referring to whenever it's talking about people or a relationship of people, it's talking about some sense of authority in extra biblical Greek. And so that is the likelihood of how Paul is using that terminology here. But what you and I have to make sure is that we not only understand what a word means, that's really important, but understand how a word is used and for what point. You see, sometimes we can get so busy driving down into everything and trying to break apart what the word means that we forget how the word was being employed. And that's what we need to remember when we come to this text. And I'm really actually deeply indebted to Dr. Michelle Lee-Barnewall who, Talbot School of Theology at Biola University who's a really, really first rate scholar. And she did a bunch of work on this idea of "Kephale" and head. And I'm really indebted to her work because I think she sees it clearly. She sees how this word is actually being used because what's happening here is that Paul is actually inverting the metaphor of head and body that is normally used in the ancient world. Paul is inverting it. Now, what I'm not going to do is I'm not going to go into all of the research Dr. Lee-Barnewall went into, but trust me when I say because I've read her work, both articles and a book by her. Trust me when I say that, she did a deep dive into understanding the head and the body metaphor in the ancient world. She was quoting from Aristotle who lived before Paul. She was quoting from Seneca and Plutarch, who lived during the time of Paul. And she was showing us what that head body metaphor means. Now here, you could probably figure it out. It probably makes perfect sense to you. In the ancient world, so take the Roman Empire for instance, and let's take the Roman army. In the Roman army, the general would be referred to as the what? The head. And all the soldiers will be referred to as the body. And in the writing that would be done during this timeframe, there was a huge emphasis on making sure that the body would do anything it had to, to sacrifice for the sake of the head. Because at all costs, the head had to be preserved because it was kind of the centerpiece of everything that was going to happen. The same thing was true when it was talked about the Roman Empire. What do you think that the emperor was called? The head. And what do you think that the people were called? The body. And the goal was, is that body would do anything to sacrifice on behalf of the head. And the head was supposed to be the recipient of all the love, and didn't necessarily have a responsibility to give that love back to the people because that was the head. So this was the understanding in the ancient world. And I'm indebted to her research on that as I began to explore it for myself. This was the understanding in the ancient world. And do you know what Paul does in this passage of scripture? He turns the head and body metaphor on its head. He literally does that. Because now what Paul is saying is, no, no, no. The head is the one who is initiating sacrifice, not the body sacrificing for the head. The head is initiating self-sacrificial love and not just to be a recipient of that. This is what the responsibility looks like. So Paul is saying, we've turned this thing on its head, and as a result of that, how husbands put on display the beauty and the goodness and the good news of Jesus is by demonstrating self-sacrificial love, which was countercultural in this head-body metaphor at that time. And how wives put that on display is by willing submission to that self-sacrificial love. That's how Jesus is actually put on display. 

This is what the responsibility looks like. So Paul is saying, we've turned this thing on its head, and as a result of that, how husbands put on display the beauty and the goodness and the good news of Jesus is by demonstrating self-sacrificial love, which was counter-cultural in this head-body metaphor at that time. And how wives put that on display is by willing submission to that self-sacrificial love. That's how Jesus is actually put on display. Now, Paul actually uses this phraseology of head in a different place when he writes to the church at Corinth. And you may remember that passage. It's in one Corinthians chapter 11, beginning in verse three. It says, "But I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ and the head of the woman is man." That by the way, the head of woman is man that can also be translated, the head of wife is husband. You may remember, I've told you this before, but the word in Greek for man is the same word for husband. And the word in Greek for woman is the same word for wife. And so I actually think that the translation here is probably better to say wife and husband, but nonetheless, "The head of every man is Christ and the head of the wife is the husband or woman is man and the head of Christ is God." Now, without going into great detail here of unpacking this whole passage of scripture, 'cause I don't have time for that, here's what I wanna point out to you. Jesus is God. He is the son of God. He is the second person of the Trinity, Father, son, and Spirit. Jesus himself is God. He is equal to the Father and yet submits. Equal to the Father and yet submits to the Father while on earth. We see it very clearly, right, that he yields himself to the will of the Father. Even by the way, in places of great hardship and great tense decision making, Jesus still yields himself to the Father, he submits. How about in the garden of Gethsemane? You remember when Jesus was praying in the garden? We see it in Luke chapter 22. It says, "Jesus withdrew about a stone's throw beyond the disciples, and he knelt down and he prayed, father, if you are willing, take this cup from me, yet not my will, but yours be done." What a remarkable statement that Jesus makes right here of willing submission to the Father. You see, what we have to remember friends is that just like with husbands, that their self-sacrificial love puts Jesus on display. That for wives, their willing submission to the self-sacrificial love of their husband also puts Jesus on display. See, maybe I could say it this way. Submission is a beautiful word, not a negative word. Submission is a word that we shouldn't recoil from in a Christian context, understood rightly. Submission is not something we should recoil from. It should be something that we embrace as a virtue. And submission in the Christian view, rightly understood, should be celebrated as a virtue like beauty, like strength, like holiness. This should be celebrated because if Jesus embraced it, it's beautiful. If Jesus embraced the act of submission, then it is a beautiful act. Now, I would just pause for a moment here, wives, anybody who's a wife or who's a want to be wife, at some point. If you just gimme your attention for a moment, I would want you to keep something in mind. Submission does not mean that you have no voice. Submission does not mean that you have no opinions. Submission does not mean that you have no skills or gifts to be used. Submission doesn't mean any of those things. Jesus had all of those and was yet submissive to the father. Submission also does not mean acquiescing to the sinful leadership of your husband. Submission doesn't mean that either. Because I need you to understand something. Your first responsibility as a wife is submission to God. Paul says, "Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord." Your first responsibility is submission to Jesus and then submission to the loving, sacrificial leadership of a husband. And that's what puts Jesus on display. But if a husband is leading you down a pathway of sin, you don't have a responsibility to submit to that. Here's why. That man may be your husband, but Christ is your king. Christ is your king, and he is the one that we are all wedded to in higher priority than every other person or thing. Submission also by the way, doesn't mean that you give up trying to win your husband who is not yet a believer. Sometimes women think that. That I'm married and I came to faith in Christ, but my husband has rejected the Lord or has not moved in that direction or whatever. And so my submission, my godly submission is just giving up on that. Not at all. That's not at all what submission means. Submission means that you don't have to give up on praying and working towards seeing your husband come to faith in Jesus Christ. Now, there are ways to do that and maybe ways not to do that. And I would encourage you to go to First Peter chapter three and let Peter give you counsel by his spirit on how a wife can do that with an unbelieving husband. Submission ultimately is to God. And then it's to a husband who is demonstrating this self-sacrificial love in leadership. And the husband, Paul says, has some sense of authority because he has been called the head of his wife. But do you know how Paul defines that authority? As self-sacrificial love. That's the authority that a husband has. Self-sacrificial love. It's not a domineering, it's none of those things. And Pastor Dan talked about that this past week. That's a broken view of what that looks like. But see, here's the thing. When we read these instructions to wives and as we studied last week, we read them to husbands. If we don't keep the design in mind, then we might lose sight of our understanding of the directions. We kind of get, we get stuck in a place and we lose sight of what God is trying to get after. You see, marriages ultimately are to put Jesus on display. That's what marriages are for. And here's why, because of where marriage is actually headed. This is why we're putting Jesus on display because the marriage story is headed somewhere. And I'm not talking about your story in particular, I'm talking about God's marriage story in particular. So where is God's marriage story headed? Where is God's marriage story headed? I'll give you one simple statement, intimate union. This is where God's marriage story is actually headed. Now what do I mean by that? Well, here's what I'll do. The kind of the characteristic nature of intimate union that this marriage story is headed toward, this design that God has given us of marriage. And I can't unpack all of this, and I've preached on this a number of times in my preaching ministry here, but I wanna give you kind of two characteristic words of what this intimate union is. The first one is this, mutuality. Mutuality. You know what mutual means? Mutuality. The reason that I use that phrase is because just prior to the instructions given to wives, in verse 22 of our text, verse 21 tells us something. Here's what it says. "Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ." "Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ." You see, all people that are followers of Jesus are under the command to submit to one another. Why? Because of their reverence for Christ. Now, what marriage is, is marriage is a picture of this. And we have very specific instructions for wives about what their submission looks like. And we've got in specific instructions for husbands about what their submission out of reverence to Christ would look like as it plays out in self-sacrificial love. And it may mean by the way, that the way in which we submit to one another is not reciprocal or identical, but it is still the same heartbeat. Because there's no doubt that there still are roles and there are still distinctions between husbands and wives. Just as a heads up real quickly. Wives are superior to husbands at being wives. Husbands are superior to wives at being husbands. This is the nature of how God has designed this. They're not just amorphous. There's actual distinctions in these things, but there is a mutuality because Paul says, "Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ." And then he gives instructions to wives and then he gives instructions to husbands. Why? Because he's keeping the whole design in place. And by the way, this means that everybody is included in this mutuality, those who are married, those who are single, those who are widowed, every single person is included in this, because ultimately we submit to one another out of reverence for Christ and we can all put Jesus on display. Marriage is a very specific way that that occurs, but it can occur in the body of Christ in a number of different ways. So mutuality gets us toward the idea of intimate union, but so does the idea or the characteristic of oneness. This is where marriage is headed. It's headed towards spiritual union that's defined by mutuality and defined by oneness. What Paul does is he actually reaches all the way back, Paul reaches all the way back to the original design, and he connects to Jesus and the church with the original design. Watch what he says in verses 31 and 32. He says, "For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife and the two will become one flesh." He's quoting Genesis at this point. And then he says, "This is a profound mystery, but I'm talking about Christ and the church." You see when he talks about how the two will become one, and this was the very picture from the very beginning. Man will leave father and mother and be united to his wife and the two will become one. And then Paul says, "This is a great mystery, but I'm talking about Christ and the church." You see there's a oneness coming for the people of God. This is a part of the design of marriage because it's pointing us to that which is coming and there's a oneness coming for the people of God that what marriage does is it gives a glimpse into it. You see, marriage is this union, both a spiritual union and a physical union, that gives a glimpse into kind of an echo or a whisper of what is actually going to come for the people of God when it comes to Christ, the bridegroom and the church, his bride. Marriage is this picture that is given. And this marriage picture is the union of making the two, one. This beautiful oneness. Marriage could better be described not as glue, that's often how people describe it. Is two people who have been glued together. Well, that certainly makes some sense, but when you glue two things together, they are still two independent, completely independent things that can be ripped apart. Yes, part of this might end up on this, and part of this might end up on this, but two independent things that get ripped off. Welding is maybe a better way to think about this. Because what happens is you've got these metals that are actually boiled down, to a place where they are now fused together and that now one is taking on the properties of the other. So they become one new thing. This is the picture actually of marriage that, by the way, can only be an imperfect picture. But it's a picture of what is coming for the people of God in Jesus. In fact, Jesus prayed for this kind of oneness, didn't he? You remember his prayer in the, when he was praying in John chapter 17, he's praying there, he says this. He says, "My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message," 'cause he was praying for his disciples originally. Now he's saying, I don't just pray for them that you'll keep them, but I'm praying for all who are gonna believe through their message. That all of them may be one father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you sent me. You see, the very prayer that Jesus was praying about this oneness of the people of God in which marriage is one picture of that is all about putting Jesus on display. That the world may see that God sent the son, that this is part of the grand design. Let me ask you a question. Do you think that Jesus' prayer is going to be answered in full? Of course it will be. Of course it will be. Is it answered in part right now, in the way that we interact with one another, in the way that we operate in unity, in the way that we preserve the unity of the spirit? Is it in part being answered now? Absolutely. But there is coming a time where it will be answered in the fullness on consummation of its beauty. Revelation chapter 21 actually says it this way, "I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, Look! God's dwelling place is now among the people and he will dwell with them. They will be his people and God himself will be with them and be their God." This is marriage language, the people of God, with God himself. This is what we are after. This is where we are headed, and we've gotta be able to see the design so that we understand the instructions of how we operate within that design. You see, friends, listen, marriage is not about getting our way. So often we come into marriage and we get frustrated in our marriages. Husbands with wives, wives with husbands, and we get frustrated because so often we're trying to get our way in marriage. But marriage is not about getting our way, it's about getting out of the way so that Jesus can be put on display. So that Jesus can be put on display because that's what the point and the design of marriage is. So let me ask us all a couple of questions that are specific. Lemme start with wives. Wives, what may be getting in the way of your submission to the Lord? What may be getting in the way of your submission to the Lord? 'Cause this is where everything starts. Where everything begins with you as a wife to put Jesus on display really means that you are in full submission to the Lord. Is it possible that distraction may be carrying you away from that, 'cause of the world that we live in? Is it possible that envy might be doing that where you're on social media and you're so consumed at times with the way that other people do what they do or how they look or any of those things that it's taking you away from really full submission to the Lord? Or maybe comparison? Maybe you're frustrated with your husband and you see some other husbands and you just, well, I wish I had somebody like that, and maybe that's getting in the way of your full submission to the Lord in the place where the Lord has you right now. I don't know what it may be, but submission to the Lord is where you have to start because it's the only way that you're gonna fulfill his design. Husbands, let me ask you the same question. What might be in the way of your submission to the Lord? If you're like me, I can tell you what gets in my way. Selfishness. That's what gets in my way, and I'm imagining it gets in your way. By the way, I imagine it gets in everybody's way. Self gets in the way. Things that you want, the way that you want them, how you want them done. It's also possible husbands that maybe we have embraced an idea of manhood that the culture wants to give us instead of letting Jesus define that for us. Maybe we think of manhood as telling my wife to do X, Y, or Z, or showing some kind of domineering power over her instead of recognizing that the Jesus the perfect man, the God man demonstrated the full beauty of this through self-sacrificial love. Maybe for those who aren't married, maybe you want to be at some point, maybe you want to be again, maybe you've had a spouse that has passed away or left you or abandoned you or whatever it may look like. I might just suggest something to you. Learn submission to the Lord right now, right now. Because submission to the Lord is the place where you begin. Because submission to the Lord is ultimately how you live into what God actually has designed for you. Submission to the Lord is how you actually find your life. When you lose your life in Jesus, you find who you're really supposed to be. This is what submission to the Lord looks like, because I can tell you this, no matter who you are, husband, wife, single adult, whoever you may be, putting Jesus on display is the goal of our lives. So let's embrace that. Let's take a moment and pray together.

- God, we are so thankful that you have sent your Son in order that we may know you. Jesus, we are so thankful that you have come and you have given yourself a self-sacrificial service, a self-sacrificial love, laying down your life, taking our sin upon your shoulders, taking the penalty for our sin, breaking the power of sin and rising again from the dead in order that we may have new life. Lord, teach us how to submit to you day by day. Show us the things that may be in our hearts that are our idols that we might hold onto, that may be keeping us from submitting to the Lord. Whether it's the the overall submission of our life to the Lord or the moment by moment in our marriages, in our workplaces, at school, wherever it is. Lord, I pray that you would be breaking through in the lives of each and every one of us, breaking through the power of the gospel through to our hearts showing us, Lord, where we need to submit still and empowering us to do so. Lord, I pray that you would do that. We are so thankful that you give us your spirit in order to empower that in us Lord. We love you. It's in Jesus' name that I pray. Amen.