The Lord’s Day Morning
Ephesians 5:25-29
God’s New Family: An Exposition of Ephesians (L)
Household Rules: Marriage and Family (5)
"Love Your Wife (2)”
Dr. J. Ligon Duncan III
Amen. If you have your Bibles, I’d invite you to turn with me to Ephesians, chapter five, as we continue our study through this great letter, and specifically this great passage of exhortation to Christian husbands as to their joyful obligation to their wives.
I want to remind you that last week was a one-point sermon: “Husbands, love your wives.” That was the one point, and we’re going to be back to that same one-point sermon this week, but this time we’re going to have eleven specific applications of that one point, to love your wives. The Apostle Paul very clearly in Ephesians 3:25 exhorts Christian husbands to love their wives, and last week we began to ask ‘Well, what does that mean?’ And in light of the fact that Paul himself had said ‘Well, love just like Christ loved the church,’ we looked at some of the ways that Christ loved the church, and we said husbands ought to love in those ways. In fact, two of the seven ways that we looked at how Christ loved the church, the Apostle Paul explicitly brings attention to in this passage. So in light of the example of Christ, we exhorted husbands to love their wives.
Of course, the Apostle Paul himself did not leave the command of love without definition and description. In I Corinthians 13:4-7, he gives us a rather full description of what he believes is entailed in Christian love—that love which is enabled by God’s work of grace in our heart, which is enabled by the work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts—and I’d invite you to turn there as we continue to consider what it is that Paul is asking Christian husbands to do towards their wives.
I would remind you of two or three things before we begin again this week.
First, let me again say to you that our various contexts, the contexts of those who are hearing this message, the circumstances in which we are, impact the way we hear God’s word. If you are a wife who has experienced an overbearing or a passive husband, it may be very difficult to hear this passage. In fact, it may be hard to hear the Apostle Paul’s exhortation at all. It may seem to you that the Apostle Paul is somehow affirming your husband in his neglect, in his overbearing demeanor.
On the other hand, husbands listening to this word, perhaps dealing with a wife who is unrespectful, unresponsive, unloving - maybe even unfaithful - may find it hard to hear these words. And yet the Apostle Paul has spoken these words to all those who are in Christ. God’s word is profitable not for some Christians in some circumstances, but for all Christians in all circumstances. So whether we’re married or single, whether we’re just in the opening stages of courtship or whether we’ve been married for 67 years...whether we’re in a happy marriage or a marriage that is in the process that is falling apart, God’s word has something to say to us. May God grant that out of the fog of your own circumstance, or perhaps the weight, the crushing, the pressure of your own circumstance, that you would be able to hear His word for you.
The second thing I would remind you of is this – and we’ll talk about this more next week. I just don’t have time to touch on it today. The Apostle Paul makes it so clear in this passage that marriage is very much in the context of the gospel, and the context of union with Christ. It needs to be lived in light of Christ’s death on the cross. Calvin has a very poignant comment about that in his sermon on this very passage. I’m going to share it with you next week. But Lloyd-Jones has one of those seraphic side comments of his about living our lives together in marriage in light of the atonement of Christ, in light of the death of Christ on our behalf. That’s a vital thing for us to understand. As long as we’re approaching marriage as something that is going to give us joy, give us happiness, give us security...when we don’t see that God is in this thing and that God is to be glorified in this thing, and that this is something that is about something much bigger than we are...then, we’ll never get our heads or hearts around marriage.
The last thing I would like to remind you again is this. This is a great opportunity as we work through this passage, either for good or for ill; either for growth and gospel change, or for real disaster.
Wives, if your husbands walk out of this place today with your elbow still firmly implanted in their ribs and you’re reminding them on the way home of all the ways that they have failed you, cataloging each of the eleven points which they have not done for you, or with you, then this opportunity will be lost.
Husbands, if all you can think about during the course of this study is the way that your wife has let you down and things that she needs to change, this opportunity will be lost. But if we are each asking of ourselves the question how am I serving the other, so that our attitude is “You first...how can I serve my mate; how can I serve my husband, my wife, my spouse?” then there is a great opportunity for gospel change.
Bear this in mind as we look to God’s word, first in Ephesians 5:25, and then we’re going to go to I Corinthians 13:4-7. Hear God’s word:
“Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her....”
Amen. And thus ends this reading of God’s holy, inspired, and inerrant word. May He write its eternal truth upon our hearts. Let’s pray.
Our Lord, this is Your word. Work its truth deep into our hearts. And as we consider this and other passages, we ask that You would open our eyes to behold wonderful things from Your word. This we ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.
When the Apostle Paul says “Husbands, love your wives,” what does he mean?
Well, last week we turned to the Lord Jesus Christ to get Paul’s answer to that question, and we considered Christ’s unmerited love to us, His intense love for us, His unending love for us, His unselfish love to us, His purposeful love for us, His manifested love for us, and His sacrificial love for us. The Apostle Paul himself has not left us without a practical working description, if not definition, of love, and that’s found in I Corinthians 13:4-7. It’s so important for us to remember as well, as you turn there, that the Apostle Paul is talking in the context of a group of people who are very, very proud of how the Holy Spirit has been manifested in their lives, especially in terms of extraordinary gifts. They see themselves at the very apex of Christian experience, of prophecy, of tongues, of extraordinary gifts and healings. And the Apostle Paul says ‘You know, what would please me most as an evidence of the Holy Spirit’s work in your life would be if you loved one another.’ And in the course of that exhortation to them, he says (if you’ll look at I Corinthians 13:4-7) this:
“Love is patient, love is kind, and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”
And in that passage, the Apostle Paul is giving us an outline of some of the qualities of Christian love expressed in the context of a relationship. And I just want to pause and give you a challenge, husbands: Pick up Jonathan Edwards’ Charity and Its Fruits, and just read through these qualities listed in verses 4-7 with Edwards. Take several months to do it, and then ask yourself how those qualities are being manifested in your life with your wife.
But today what I want to do is to take you back to that exhortation today, and take you back to the very theme or proposition of this whole section, and you’ll find it on your outline. We have said here that the Apostle Paul is calling Christian husbands; that God is calling Christian husbands to a radical, God-originated, gospel-based, grace-empowered, Spirit-wrought, Christ-emulating, self-denying love for our wives. Now, those aren’t just some “John Piper-esque” words that I’m throwing out there. Every single one of those hyphenated terms has a great significance, and I want to consider those with you for just a few moments, and then I want to look at some practical applications of this.
The first thing I want you to see is that what Paul is calling for here is truly radical. Far from Paul saying, ‘You know, this is how things are in our culture, and if we Christians don’t act this way, people are going to think we’re strange,’ the Apostle Paul is actually calling Christian husbands to do something radical. If you study other household codes that existed in the Mediterranean world in the time (and before) of the Apostle Paul, you’ll find that what Paul is asking Christian husbands to do here is truly extraordinary. He is not asking us to conform ourselves to the way Daddy did it, or the way Granddaddy did it. He’s saying ‘I want you to be radically biblical in the way you love your wives. I want you to be radically Christological in the way you love your wives. I want you to love your wife in light of the way Christ has loved His bride.’
In other words, he’s saying to husbands who come back to Paul and say ‘But Paul, I didn’t have a father who showed me how to love a woman, because my father didn’t do a very good job of loving my mother.’ And the Apostle Paul is saying ‘Dear, dear friend, I understand fully the challenge of that, but you understand that I’m not asking you to love your wife the way your father loved your mother. I’m asking you to love your wife the way that Christ loved the church.’ And God in His word has explained what that looks like, and so if you have gone through that tremendously difficulty experience of not seeing how a man ought to love a woman, if you’ve not had that privilege, still yet you have had the privilege of watching your Savior serve His people to the death and love them well. And you have the greatest example that there could be for how to love your wife.
It’s a radical thing that the Apostle Paul is calling us to here, but it’s not just a radical thing, it’s a God-originated thing. You cannot give, we said last week...you cannot give what you do not have. And the kind of love that you are called to give in a Christian marriage is not something that you get, husbands, from your wives. Your wife’s love for you may indeed make it easier for you to love her, but the kind of love that you are called to give to her, you do not get from her, you get it from God. It is the arena of the experience of God’s love to you that is to be determinative in the way that you love your wife. It is a God-originated love that Paul is calling on husbands to give to their wives.
It’s not only a God-originated love, it’s a gospel-based love. Let me say, as I did last week, if you are here today and you don’t know the Lord Jesus Christ, you have not trusted in Him alone for salvation, you are not one of His disciples, one of His followers, you haven’t been regenerated by His Holy Spirit, you haven’t been turned inside out by His saving work, He is not the first and best and greatest in all of life for you, He is not the Lord of life and the Savior of your sins, then you cannot do what I’m about to ask every Christian husband here to do. Because this cannot be done apart from the gospel. It is based upon the gospel. Only the gospel can produce the platform from which this kind of love can be given. And so this is a gospel-based love.
But it’s also a grace-empowered love, because even if we have experienced the gospel, even if we have experienced the saving work of the Lord Jesus Christ, we still need God’s ongoing ministry of grace to us in order to love this way. Our tank runs quickly dry, and one must rely upon the grace of God in order to continue to love in this way. And the Apostle Paul is not calling for a one-time act of love, he’s calling for a lifetime of love, and that will need the empowerment of grace.
And it is a Spirit-wrought love. You remember the whole context of this passage is Paul talking about what it looks like for a person to be filled with the Spirit, or to be going on being filled with the Spirit, and it was in that very context that he talked about our serving one another, our being subject to one another, our having the attitude of “How may I serve you?” And so it is the Spirit that works this ability to love.
And of course, it’s a Christ-emulating love. The Apostle Paul is saying ‘Look, Christ is your example. Emulate Him, Christian husbands.’
And that means, of necessity, that it’s a self-denying love. It’s a love that says ‘You first’ to your wife—‘Your needs before my needs; your concerns before my concerns; you first.’ That’s the kind of love that we are called upon to give as we serve our wives and care for our wives’ best spiritual and temporal interests.
Well, how does this work out practically? Let me give you eleven specific practical manifestations of this kind of Christian love...marital love for Christians, expressed in the context of that committed relationship.
And the first is simply this: The Christian husband who is seeking to love His wife as Christ loves the church will manifest that love with words.
Now, those words will not always be of the tender and romantic sort. They may be words of commitment that are backed up with actions that give your wife confidence in the direction of your family, or that you are going to fulfill something that she has expressed as a deep, deep desire, or something that she believes is very important for the household: ‘Honey, you need to understand that I have heard you say what you think our family needs right now, and I agree with you, and I commit to you now that I will respond to this particular thing that you have said to me.’ Those may be profoundly settling words which show to her your love for her.
But, of course, this also means saying “I love you.” And our God, our Lord Jesus Christ – they give us such a good example of this in the word. They’re constantly telling us—the Father, the Son—how much they love us. Many of the ladies of the congregation commented to me after Derek shared his words that he had written to Rosemary on their thirtieth anniversary. How meaningful they were; and how many of us Christian men fall short in our expression of our love to our wives, verbally.
I want to share with you a quote today, and I want to see if you can guess from whom it comes. It was written a number of years ago, in fact, it was written over 65 years ago, but it’s a letter from a husband to a wife:
“Bethan, you are dearer to me than ever, and I feel prouder of you than ever before. All my love to you and to my three beloved ones, especially the biggest of them. There is no one like you anywhere. The more I see of others, the more obvious does this become, and I would give all the world for you to be here with me. My dear, dear, love – the best wife and girl in all the world – receive every bit of my love.
“Thank you for your letter of this morning, though I’m angry that you should have been up until 11:30 at night writing it. I see that you’re quite incorrigible. The idea that I should become used to being without you is really funny to me. I could speak for a long time on that subject. As I have told you many, many times, the passing of years does nothing but deepen and intensify my love for you. When I think of those days in London in 1925-26, when I thought that no greater love was possible, I could laugh. But honestly, during this last year I had come to believe that it was not possible for a man to love his wife more than I loved you; and yet I see that there is no end to love, and that it is still true that absence makes the heart grow fonder. I am quite certain that there is no lover anywhere writing to his girl who is quite as mad about her as I am about you.”
Now, that word comes from D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, the great Reformed pastor who loved the Puritans, and pastored in London, England, during the middle and end of the twentieth century. You might not have guessed such tender affection and expression of love, but what a good pattern of loving your wife with your words he provides for us. A Christian husband will manifest his love to his wife with words.
He will also provide for her needs. The Apostle Paul in this passage, in verse 28, says husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies, meaning they ought to provide for their wives even as they provide and care for their own bodies. But elsewhere, in I Timothy 5:8, he puts it even more strongly. Do you remember?
“If anyone does not provide for his own, and especially those of his own household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.”
Do you think the Apostle Paul was serious about husbands providing for their wives and for their families? The Christian husband manifests this kind of gospel love by providing for his family.
And the Christian husband manifests his love by protecting his wife. This doesn’t, of course, just mean physical protection, though that is entailed. Perhaps your wife has a tendency to try and do more than is humanly possible. My mother-in-law said to me not long before Ann and I were married (and it has proved to be prophetically true!), “Ligon, your wife is going to try and squeeze into 24 hours more than is humanly possible.” And she does. And so husbands have a responsibility to protect their wives, even from themselves, when they try and do more than is humanly possible.
Perhaps your wife in knuckling under the demands of caring for children. How do you protect her? How do you aid her in that setting? Or perhaps your wife is peculiarly susceptible to the criticisms or expectations of others. How do you provide protection? Perhaps it is by providing her a different perspective on those criticisms and expectations, one which is distinctly friendly to her, one which she knows is on her side, as you patiently hear out her fears and cares about those criticisms and protections and expectations, and you express to her your support for her and provide her shelter from those words that she hears in her head, perhaps long after you have gone to sleep at night.
Fourth, assisting with chores and responsibilities. A Christian husband can manifest his love by showing his helpfulness to his wife in this area.
My mom and dad were of the generation where many, many, many men—and even Christian men—did absolutely nothing with regard to housework, or assisting in the kitchen before or after a meal. In fact, many women of that generation would have been offended if a man had come into their domain in the kitchen before or after the meal and attempted to help.
My father ran into business trouble late in his life, and in the last ten years of his life my mother left her homemaking and her volunteer work and her career in music, and went back to the office to begin helping my father put back together a business that had been broken apart by unfaithful colleagues. When that happened, I saw something that I had never seen my father do. My father began to help in the kitchen. I had never see my father do a dish in my life, but when my mother went back to work to help my father, my father in his own bumbling, halting way began to try and help in the kitchen. It was his way...doing something, of course, that he had never seen his father or grandfather do...of trying to express his appreciation to my mother for bailing him out in his time of need. How do we as Christian husbands show our support to our wives in that area?
Fifth, a Christian husband manifests his love by showing sacrifice for his wife. You come home tired. You want to turn on the tube and veg out. You get home...she needs help. The children are running around like wild banshees...supper is burning...she is on the verge of the dreaded conniption fit, and you don’t want to see a conniption fit! You want to kick off your shoes and watch the news.
You don’t. You take the kids, you herd them to the bathroom, you get them in the tub, you get them ready for supper, you help them with their homework, you offer to help in the kitchen. No, you’re not trying to be Mr. Wonderful. You’re just sending the message that ‘Right now I’m not here to be served; I’m here to serve.’ You may have to stop somewhere along the way home from work and take fifteen minutes to collect yourself to be ready to do that, but you’re thinking about that: When I walk in the door, I am not here to be served, but to serve.
Or maybe you’re tired and she just wants to talk. And you talk. Or maybe you’re tired and she wants to shop...and she wants you to go with her! Not to be served, but to serve.
A Christian husband shows love to his wife by sharing his life with her. Tell her from time to time what it is that you think God has put you here for. You know... ‘I think that God has put me here to do this...I think this because I do have these gifts, I have had these experiences. This is what I think God wants me to do for you, for our children, for our church, for our community. This is what I think I’m here for.’ Don’t close her out.
[If he has the guts to share that with you, sisters in Christ, don’t be quick to offer him suggestions – if you want to hear from him again in that area. It’s like a tortoise coming out of a shell to share our dreams, what we think that God is calling us to do in life. So if you straightway offer your criticisms or insights, you may not hear from him again about his life and his dreams.] But, husbands, share your life with her.
Seventh, a husband who’s loving his wife is going to refuse to compare her unfavorably to others. He’s not going to joke at her expense at any time. He’s not going to denigrate her character. He’s not going to point out to her qualities of other women that he wishes that she had. He’s going to refuse to compare her unfavorably to others. He’s going to demonstrate that she’s first in his life. Oh, yes! He’s God’s man. He belongs to God. He lives to glorify and enjoy God forever. Yes, he’s the children’s father. Yes, he’s a churchman. Yes, he’s got a job and he’s going to do all those things to the best of his ability, but as he does them, he knows that she is first in his life. She knows that even when he’s attending to other things and is necessarily giving time and energy in directions away from her, that still she’s first in his life, and he couldn’t do it without her, and it wouldn’t matter except for her. He wants to be able to come home to her to tell her what he’s done. And that in and of itself will make it all worth it. She’s before business, she’s before hobbies, she’s before children, she’s before parents, she’s before the house. She’s first.
And a Christian husband will manifest his love by expressing that love with tenderness and respect and courtesy. Husbands, have you ever caught yourself, like I have, listening to your message for your wife on the answering machine? And you caught the tone of voice that you used with her and you quickly erased it, and you hoped that neither she nor anyone else had heard that tone of voice. You speak to her so that both the content of your speech and the tone of voice reflects gentleness and respect, and that you treasure her as someone valuable... exceedingly valuable.
A Christian husband expresses his love by giving appreciation and praise in large doses. Do you observe and acknowledge her attempts to please you? Do you stop and say, 'I can’t let this pass – thank you for that’?
It was a great testimony to me just a few weeks ago to talk to a wife who had been married for 60-some-odd years in this congregation, who said to me, “My husband never, ever, ever, forgot to say....he never ever forgot to say ‘Thank you.’ He made a point of expressing to me his thanks for everything that I did for him.” What a tremendous testimony that is, that a wife knows without a shadow of a doubt that she’s appreciated. He honored her in that way.
Let me make a challenge. Make a list of 90-100 things, husbands...90 or 100 things that you appreciate about your wife, and then begin to gradually, slowly, systematically day after day or week after week, bring one of those things up and say ‘Honey, I may not have said this to you before, but I really appreciate this about you.’
And eleventh and finally, a Christian husband leads in love and regard. Do you lead her, brothers in Christ, in such a way that she cannot doubt your love for her? Or that she cannot doubt your respect for her as a peer, as a treasured and best friend, as one for whom you have the profoundest intellectual respect and regard for her character? Does she recognize ‘What I say and think matters to this man, and he relates to me in such a way that I can tell I am a person that he regards highly – the very highest.’
You know, the greatest argument against this biblical model of relating husband to wife is the husband who fails to lead in love and regard. Show me a woman who has experienced an overbearing or a passive husband or father, and I’ll show you a woman who has profound doubts about whether what Paul is saying here will really work. But you see, the problem is not what Paul is saying here. The problem is what we have seen. Husbands, separate those two and go with Paul and live a different way, even if you haven’t seen it from your father. God will bless you and your wife.
Let’s pray.
Lord God, none of this can we do apart from Your help and grace. But, O God, that does not slacken the call that You have given to us as Christian husbands to love our wives with the love that is ready to die daily for them. How life-transforming and marriage-renewing and gospel-witnessing would be such marriages. Grant them to our congregation, I pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
[Congregational Hymn: A Christian Home, stanza 2]
As you find joy in serving each the other, grace, mercy, and peace to you from God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
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