Linda and I will celebrate fifty-two years of marriage this coming August. Recently we talked together about the abundant life the Lord Jesus has blessed us with.
This includes the.many help-sessions we have had with premarital and marital couples
We talk with them about mutual submission. About serving one another. About putting the other before oneself.
I give the husband or husband-to-be my life marital verse. It is Ephesians 5:25.
Husbands, love your wives,
just as Christ loved the church
and gave himself up for her
I often write this verse on a 3X5 card and carry it with me, pulling it out often to read it again. And again. And... The Holy Spirit has led me to do this. Repetition (meditation) on God's instructions causes them to descend from my mind into my heart.
Ephesians 5:25 is not a suggestion. It's instruction for how to do marriage well. It is, as New Testament scholars agree, a command. An essential. Like all God-given commands, it is life-giving and abundance-producing, when accompanied by the Spirit's power.
The analogy I use is this. I used to teach guitar in a guitar studio. All my students wanted to play better and more beautifully. I taught five-finger fingerstyle picking. I could produce a certain kind of sound. I taught this to my students. Yes, among skilled guitarists, there can be stylistic differences. But there are several basic techniques that all agree are needed. If you want to get this particular and wonderful sound, you must do it this way.
Ephesians chapter five, says New Testament scholar Klyne Snodgrass, gives us a series of Pauline commands about how to live in the Kingdom. (See Snodgrass, Ephesians, pp. 266 ff.) This includes Eph. 5:21-33.
Husbands, do you want abundance and flourishing and beauty in your marriage? If yes, then love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. You'll need the Holy Spirit's empowerment to do this. Ask for it, with all your heart.
EPHESIANS 5:21-33
21 Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.
22 Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do 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 their own body, but they feed and care for their body, 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.”[c] 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.
