Dennis Tuuri

# Ephesians 5:18-21 Marriage and the Holy Spirit
## Sermon by Pastor Dennis R. Tuuri
## July 29, 2012

Please stand for the reading of God’s word. Ephesians 5, beginning at verse 18.

“And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit. Addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another out of the fear of Christ.”

Let us pray. Almighty God, we thank you for your scriptures. We thank you for this wonderful book of Ephesians that begins with our predestination before time and moves through the history of Jew and Gentile, separation and being reconciled together in Jesus Christ, and then moves into this section on the filling of the Spirit preparing us for societal relationships and particularly marriage in the next verse.

And we thank you that this book ends with equipping us for warfare. Bless us, Lord God, in this series. What we’ll be studying primarily from Ephesians is what you have to say about marriage and its relationship to our whole Christian life. We pray for your blessing, Lord God. Give us good gifts of the knowledge of your word that we can take and make direct application in our lives. Give us hope. Give us new challenges.

Give us the strength and comfort of your Holy Spirit that we might indeed believe the promises laid out for us in your scriptures and be empowered to act to fulfill them. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

Well, last week contemporary events were going on that seemed to fit with the topic of the sermon. This week, same thing. There’s this huge topic. I’ve never eaten at Chick-fil-A in my life. And I’d kind of forgotten about it, but there it is. There is this growing—I don’t know if you’ve noticed it or not, but there’s a growing attack on Christianity obviously in our country.

And, you know, it’s not just two mayors who wanted to deny, through zoning laws, the ability of Chick-fil-A to have restaurants in their cities because of the owner’s Christian values and his primarily his Christian statement that marriage is between one man and one woman and that’s what he believes, even though the company doesn’t discriminate against homosexuals. But because of this one statement, you know, it’s not just two mayors who made noises about not letting him build there. But one of those two mayors—do not forget, friends—was the chief of staff for President Obama for a couple of years. It is this an obvious ongoing escalation of an attack against the Christian church, and specifically it’s an attack that’s related to what we’re going to be talking about for the next three months or two or three months or so, and that’s marriage.

And so it’s interesting how these things come together. In Psalm 11, we have this verse: “If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?” Interesting phrase to contemplate. And the foundations of a culture, making application of this text, certainly are their obedience to God and belief in his promises. And then the foundation—another layer of that foundation—is built with marriages, with families, and with the culture that comes forth from them. And it comes forth in ways that maybe you haven’t thought of that we’ll be talking about over the next few weeks and months.

Very significantly, I think, one of the most important things to remember about marriage is that for most people—not everyone—it is the probably primary way that God is sanctifying you. And so the foundation isn’t just you’re going to have kids or not have kids and build wealth and all that stuff. The foundation is holiness, the ability to mature as Christians. And with, as I said, with most of us, and we’ll look at this over the next few weeks and months, marriage is probably the most significant way that God sanctifies us. And of course, God talks about that in the very next section of Ephesians.

Now, this is important to hear. It’s important to know the battle is on. Okay? You need to know that. And you need to know that the battle is very specifically oriented in terms of marriage, and it’s not just the homosexual thing. It’s marriage in general. Of course, for a significant part of the culture, there’s this idea: “Why do we need a piece of paper?” And we’ll be talking about that in the weeks to come and the tremendous significance of a piece of paper. We do need covenant in marriage. So the attack is on, the war is on.

It affects you. This is the air you breathe. This is the culture you live in. And so you need to know that to fight it. But understand this as well. Well, the very next verse says, “The Lord is in his holy temple. The Lord’s throne is in heaven. His eyes see, his eyelids test the children of men. The Lord tests the righteous, but his soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence.”

Chill. Okay? It’s going to be okay. God is in his holy heaven. Now, you may not be okay depending on how you go in terms of some of this stuff, right? I mean, it’s a warning to us that in our fear we can do unsanctified things, and the fear itself of the foundations being destroyed is ultimately probably anxiety over it—is sinful. So we chill, but we apply ourselves to the battle that’s ensuing.

And I want us to apply ourselves very directly. I’m really excited about the next few weeks and months in this series of sermons on marriage. I think it’s quite important for us to consider this. And I want to—one of the first things I want to say is, while we’re going to be talking about marriage, single people, don’t hit the mute button. Don’t tune out. We’re going to zoom out from this little text to the rest of Ephesians. Don’t use zoom out as we’re talking about marriage because what I just read, of course, isn’t given to married couples. It’s given to everybody.

And if we think about this a little bit, you know what I’ll be—what we’ll be talking about is not just marriage. In fact, it’s not even maybe—I guess it’s sort of primarily marriage, but in a way, it’s really stuff that is pertinent to every Christian. Okay. If you look at that next page on the handouts, hopefully you have that. I found this on the internet in my beginning research over the last couple of weeks. It’s a little chiastic structure that somebody did somewhere. The Christian church is onto chiasms now. It’s not something that only a few people knew about. It’s really a huge field of study, but this is an interesting one.

And now, this particular chiastic structure of the text dealing specifically with marriage in Ephesians 5:22 through 31—that we’ll be spending a lot of time with—the reason I want you to look at this, and not tune out if you’re a single person, is that you know, if you can take this, I would encourage you to keep this structure kind of read it, meditate on it. It’s not the end all and be all, but it’s a good way to meditate on the text that we’ll be dealing with over the next few weeks and months.

The important thing here is the way this person has lined out the text. And on first glance, I haven’t done deep study, it looks pretty good. But do you see the X between the F structures there, which would be seven, by the way—which that’s kind of nice when the seven’s at the middle? “That he might present to himself the church in all her glory.” Now, you know, the way these structures work is they draw your attention to kind of the central point.

And so the purpose of this structure is to say, hey, really the central point of this, we might have gotten it a little wrong if we think the whole thing is about marriage. The central point—if this structure is right—drawing our attention to this in the middle—is this statement that really what this is about ultimately is not marriage. It’s sanctifying the bride. And that’s the big thing, which includes singles.

And so that’s kind of the point of this little structure that I’m reason I want you to look at it right now. And then of course we know that there’s some other elements in here that are marked as well in the B prime sections. After the chiasm, the middle point of that is “This mystery is great, but I’m speaking with reference to Christ in the church.” And that’s got two little matching things around it. And so again, it seems like the centrality of this text is really the primary focus—not about marriage and then thrown off a little to the church. It may be about the church, and then in the context of the church, giving us instructions on marriage, which then of course have implication far broader than just marriage.

There’s some other interesting things about this that we’ll be talking about in the weeks to come. For instance, the A and A prime sections—women—and now the reason that’s bracketed “be submissive” is that in some manuscripts this word “be submissive” isn’t actually there. Okay. Now it follows right after the last verse we just read for our sermon text, which is “to submit to one another in the fear of Christ,” and then it says “wives to your husbands.”

So whether or not the word is there is kind of irrelevant, but that’s why the brackets are there from this particular author. But what I wanted you to notice here is this submission—let’s assume that’s at least implied if not there—matches up with the respect, right? The wife to respect her husband. The wife be submissive to your husbands. They match up. They’re bookends. And so part of the sanctification process of the church is that.

Now, what’s interesting to me about that is it leads me to consider and meditate—I haven’t taken a position, but it causes me to think—maybe the respect for your husband doesn’t mean respecting all these things about him. Maybe it’s just like the submission thing. It’s a positional thing that they’re matched up. And so if that’s true, then the respect act is really for the role the husband plays in the imagery of Christ in his church.

Now, it’s good to respect your husband and to give him kudos for great things he does and whatever else. I’m not eliminating that. But you know, I’ve been involved over the last 30 years in marriages where it’s pretty tough for the wife to drop a list of things she respects about her husband. And so, you know, that isn’t the deal. Some women have long lists because their husbands are really tracking with Jesus. Some lists are pretty darn short because they’re not, and they’re in full throat of rebellion.

And how do you obey the command to respect your husband if it means having a long list of things you like about him? But the text, when we look at it that way, it helps us, okay? It’s kind of lined up with submit. And so maybe that’s what’s going on there. There are other things as well that we could talk about here. But for instance, around the center of the X are the F points: “That he might sanctify” and then “having no spot or wrinkle, holy and blameless.”

There’s sacrificial imagery in this text, and it seems to be related—and we’ll talk about this more in future weeks—it seems to be related to the ascension offering that Jesus is preparing his bride as an ascension offering. Okay? And so this is what’s to inform our relationships.

And again, it puts the instruction about Christian marriage directly in the context of sanctification as a general topic. That as I said, I think that means that marriage is this key element to sanctification for those that get married. Remember, the Bible is unlike most other Christianity is unlike most other religions, and it was certainly unlike Rome. Rome thought the family was primo. Man, that was it. You got to be married. If you’re not, you’re really out of it. That’s not what the Bible teaches. That’s what some of our churches teach. That’s what probably this church has not explicitly, but at least implicitly taught. But that’s not what the Bible teaches.

We’ll look at verses in the next few weeks where Paul commends singleness. He says, “Don’t get married under certain conditions and stuff.” He commends it. Now, that we just blow by that because sure, a lot of people are single today. In the history of the world, in the history of cultures, pagan cultures particularly, but the other religions as well, this isn’t the deal. This is very unusual. And it’s very unusual in the context of what’s going on in the Roman Empire at the time.

And unfortunately, I think that we’re in such a big way to battle the culture wars by establishing strong families that singles can feel like somehow they didn’t make the grade. That’s radically untrue. As we’ll look at in the future sermons, singleness is a gift to the church, not to them. It’s a gift to the church, and we’ll talk about that in the weeks to come.

But the point is, this structure, this text, we’ll be spending a lot of time on it. And I’d give this to you to sort of meditate upon it and see some of the connections. And even the head imagery—it’s immediate in the context of body imagery, right? And that has some interesting ways that helps us to think about the text a little differently as well.

So singles, you know, don’t tune out while we go through this series of sermons. And today specifically, you know, there’s a verse in Ephesians that says don’t let the sun go down on your anger. It goes the other way too. Marriage will help us about individual sanctification. Individual sanctification will help us to be married better.

The text earlier in Ephesians tells us not to let the sun go down on our anger and don’t let the devil—don’t give the devil an opportunity. And you’re sort of wondering what is that? Devil come in the middle of the night? What’s going on? Well, no. The word for devil is “diabolos,” slanderer. And if you let your anger stay in place—is the idea—if you don’t get rid of sinful anger, you let anger towards somebody stay in place, the devil has an opportunity because now you’re looking at things through, at the other person, through your angry eyes.

And you know there’s that old expression: to the jaundiced eye, everything is yellow. Your eyes become jaundiced by being angry and not getting, resolving that anger through biblical conflict resolution. And as a result of that, you don’t see the other person right. They may be doing the best they can to follow Jesus and help you and help other people, but you’re going to see it wrong. You know, and when you see it wrong, you’re going to slander that other person in your heart.

The devil has an opportunity. And more often than not, you’re going to slander him to somebody else. Prolonged, unresolved biblical anger is directly related to bad attitudes toward other people, presuppositions that are incorrect, not believing the best, and as a result of that, slander.

Now, that’s a very—you stop right there, and if we just apply that this week, praise the Lord, we’ll mature greatly. But now think about that, not just in terms of individuals and I. You know, this is directly—the Bible’s always a sure word, and it’s a relevant word. I heard a guy tell me recently, “I’ve been angry at you guys for six months.” He didn’t resolve it correctly, and so he’s not looking at us correctly. I mean, that’s just the way it works.

So, but now think about it in marriage. Are there things to get angry at each other about in marriage? Oh my goodness. I was watching a video this week of D.A. Carson and Tim Keller and John Piper talking about marriage. And Carson said that he knew this old guy, great Christian guy. And somebody asked him, “Did you have—have you ever thought about divorcing your wife?” “Divorce? No. Absolutely not. Divorce, no. Murder? Sometimes.” You know, anger happens in marriages because you’re really close with each other. You start to see who they are without the makeup on, right? So to speak, without their church clothes and church attitude on.

Poor Colin and Sarah. The disenchantment will come at some point in time, right? You know that’s true because, and it’s the beauty of marriage. Marriage—you begin to see each other so closely, but that also means you see each other’s flaws and you’ll be the recipient of each other’s sins. So anger is a common occurrence in marriage. And what happens then? You get a presupposition against your mate that’s completely wrong.

And marriages can be there for years and years and years with each other interpreting each other incorrectly because of roots of bitterness, anger that’s unresolved. So the general principles of sanctification in the book of Ephesians and then the specific principles of sanctification in terms of marriage interrelate to each other. There’s cooperation there.

And so young people, please don’t decide to go visit someplace else because the guy’s preaching on marriage and I’m not married. These—I’m excited about this series, and I’m sure like today that there’ll be many things for you to learn here in terms of the general principles of scripture. And that’s because marriage is a reflection of the gospel. And of course, we know that as Christians, we hear that all the time. Marriage is a reflection of the gospel.

I wanted to give my first quote from Tim Keller here. You know, this sermon series really is a gift to you from the church in Oregon City in a way. I went to an event because the church in Oregon City—at their meeting, their pastors’ meeting that afternoon—an event was happening to kick off or to begin preparations for a thing called “Date Night Challenge PDX.” And so I found out about it also—I’d gotten mail, but I found out about it from the church in Oregon City. Went to the event with the two Toms from OCE, and one of them is Tom Dreszel, who’s “Every Marriage Matters,” the other is Tom Hurt, the pastor.

And on the way—so number one, the whole idea of preaching on marriage—I wanted to connect it up with August and September when this “Date Night Challenge” thing is going to happen. And let me ask you right now to please be very attentive to the announcements this afternoon after the meal. Pastor Wilson is kind of our point guy for that marriage effort. This, again, was a gift. We had an initiative coming out of Heathman to do marriage follow-up in a little more intensive way than we’ve ever done it. And then, boom, I get invited by church in Oregon City pastors to “Date Night Challenge,” which is all about really strengthening existing marriages.

And there it is. And this week we got a big box—you know, all kinds of free books, DVDs, study stuff, preparation—you’ll get a phone app card today if you want to get it, a phone app for a “Date Night Challenge.” Big deal. You’re going to start hearing about it in a lot of places. In fact, there’s a flash mob this Thursday. We’ll be sending out an announcement. So if you want to be part of a flash mob in the Pearl District that’s related to “Date Night Challenge,” yet, I know it’s not supposed to be planned, right? But they are. So I’ll send it out.

There’s even a YouTube video where you can see the choreography of how the things work. So anyway, big deal. Chris W. making announcement. Please be attentive to that announcement. I am really praying that the Lord used the next three months in this church to strengthen marriages and not just that, to strengthen the general sanctification of our congregation so that we can be prepared for the tremendous challenges our country is increasingly facing at the foundational level, the blasts we’re receiving.

But my point was that on the way back from—so number one, the sermon series. On the way back from the event, Tom Dreszel, who has read every book on marriage I think that’s ever been printed, said he just read the best book he’d ever read on marriage. And I said, “Oh, who’s that from?” “Tim Keller,” he says. “The Meaning of Marriage.” I didn’t even know about this book. Keller’s, you know, he’s Reformed—he’s one of us, PCA—and we don’t agree with everything he says, but I got the book on Audible, listened to it, great book. Wonderful stuff.

Much of what I’ll be presenting over the next couple of months, a lot of it will come from Keller’s book. And I wanted to just start with this quote and sort of relate this to the gospel. Keller says this: “To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial.” To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. “To be known and not loved is our greatest fear because we know who we are. We know that we don’t deserve it.”

So to be known and not loved—this is our greatest fear, an expectation actually, right? When I got married, I kept expecting my wife to figure out who I was and, you know, shoot me or something. But “to be fully known and fully loved is well a lot like being loved by God. It’s what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for the difficulty life can throw at us.”

So to be known and yet be loved. You see, that’s what marriage is. Marriage is the other is loving the person after the disenchantment, after the fairy tale. God normally enchants us to get us married, and then one day he wakes us up and we’re like, “Oh, okay. So this is the gig.” And this can be tremendously—you know, obviously marriage can be tremendous blessing, but through work and struggle and sacrifice, and what you have to commit to is to know the other person and yet love them.

And that’s gospel stuff, right? That’s Jesus for us. Jesus on the cross—he looks around at a bunch of people who are in ethical rebellion against him, who hate him. He doesn’t die because we’re lovely. He dies to make us lovely, right? That’s what the gospel is. Jesus died for your sins, not that you can get better enough so Jesus can have relationship with you, but Jesus knows you and yet loved you enough to do the great act of love, the greatest act, to die for you and to suffer your punishment for sin on the cross, right?

So this is the gospel. That’s the gospel. Jesus died for your sins. He died to make you lovely, not because you’re lovely. And that’s what marriage is. You, when you get married, you think it’s because of the loveliness of the other person. But after a while, you recognize, okay, so in order for this marriage to succeed, it’s got to be gospel-like. It’s got to be built on the basic premise of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

So this gift we got from our commitment to follow biblical teaching relative to the unity of the churches in a particular city—I wanted to point that out because it’s, you know, it’s a reminder to you that the hard work of folks here to work in cooperation with church in Oregon City. Here’s one of the benefits that has come to us from it. We wouldn’t really be doing this way at all if I hadn’t have gone to the meeting, and we wouldn’t have had the excellent book, The Meaning of Marriage by Keller, to use as part of the basis for what we’re going to say.

I strongly encourage people to read that book, either buy a copy. I’ve got, I think, we’ve got three or four copies now that I’ve ordered for the church library, get it—it’s on Audible. I think it’s a seven-hour listen on Audible. And in that book also, here’s another thing that’s that I wanted to quote before we get into our first outline point. And I guess this is all introduction to the entire series, but I wanted to say this as well.

Here’s Keller’s definition of marriage. Oh, and by the way, there’s a video—about a 50-minute talk by Keller—some place I don’t know where that’s on YouTube that you can watch. It’s also excellent. It’s a very quick—in about 20 minutes summation of the major points of his book. And that would be excellent for you to read. It’s a nice summation of that.

But here’s, in the book, this is how he defines marriage. He says: “Marriage is a lifelong monogamous relationship between a man and a woman.” Ow. Just like that guy from Chick-fil-A. Geez, what a bigot. “According to the Bible, God devised marriage: one, to reflect his saving love for us in Christ, the gospel. Two, to refine our character, right? To make us better Christians, make us better people, to help sanctify us. Three, to create stable human community for the birth and nurture of children. Okay. And again, the foundations—it’s one of the most important foundational levels of a culture. And four, to accomplish all this by bringing the complementary sexes into an enduring whole life union.”

Now, that’s a significant point: to bring complementary sexes into an enduring whole life union. Remember what I said in my prayer—that Ephesians is this: the broad scope of human history is addressed from predestination before the foundation of the world through Jew and Gentile, the union of them, into the getting equipped for the fight and the victory that Jesus gives us. And in there’s the stuff on man and woman stuff—complementary sexes. In the same way that Jew and Gentile are brought together and united in Christ, in the same way there’s a sense in which Christian marriage is now the ultimate means whereby men and women can learn from each other and be one in the body of Christ.

Another thing we’ll talk about in the weeks to come is the way that marriage equips us to deal with the opposite sex in a better way. So you can think of your wife as representative of women and your husband as representative of men. And you learn how to interact with men in a more godly way by having a husband. And you learn to interact with women in a more godly way by having a wife. Now, that’s if you’re applying yourself. It could get worse. But in Christian marriage, where you’re applying yourself and doing what the Bible says you have to do to accomplish all this wonderful, great promises—and the power for those promises is what we’re going to be turning to in Ephesians, beginning with the verses that we read this morning—if you apply yourself, then you see, it’s like the Jew and Gentile thing. You’re learning to bring together men and women that became ripped apart as a result of the Fall.

So it’s a tremendous blessing to the world, Christian marriage, because it equips us for that. Now, single people, there’s ways you can learn too, and we’ll talk about that when we talk about that part of this series, but it’s a very significant element of what marriage is.

So judgment begins at the house of God. You know, I’ve kind of talked about this already, but you know, marriage is typically oversold or undersold, right? It’s either overpromised or underpromised. We get all jazzed. The most joyful thing in the world is two people getting married. Well, yes and no, right?

We tend in Christian circles, I think in our circles, we tend to overcelebrate marriage and kind of sell it that you hit this really neat relationship, but it’s going to be great. And of course, when we give that kind of image to people, it can be not a good thing. And so God wants us to deal realistically with marriage, I think. And yes, it’s joyful, but yes, it’s going to be a lot of work, right?

I mean, the worst thing you can possibly do on earth is have a bad relationship with a spouse. I mean, it’s impossible to describe. If you haven’t been married, you don’t understand it. It’s impossible to describe the amount of torture that brings to your life. So, you know, we kind of oversell it. We sell this enchantment version of it, and we don’t really equip people to love each other and to recognize that when you get married, it’s going to be a different person the next morning because all of a sudden you’re going to start seeing who they are, etc. I’ve talked about that.

Point is that judgment begins at the house of God. The corrective judgment, the salvation of the world comes through the application of God’s word to every bit of our lives. And specifically here, in the context of marriage, the gospel is that marriage is a gift from God. It’s ordained by him. He has a training plan for it. We have texts, a lot of them, that talk about this. And so this will be an important thing for us to do.

And the big thing here, one of the big things, is to avoid the sucker’s choice: fulfillment or sacrifice. Well, the gospel says we’re fulfilled by sacrificing, right? By, if you seek to, you know, keep your life, you’ll lose it. If you lose your life, you’ll gain it. And so fulfillment—we believe in fulfillment, but our culture believes in individual fulfillment in the short term. We believe the Bible teaches that fulfillment is on the far side of sacrifice and service to the other. Whether it’s in relationships, friendships, the church, and primarily in the context now of marriage—fulfillment is on the far side of sacrifice.

And so God is training us as Christians through the application of these truths. And marriage is not the end all and be all. Marriage is sublimated or, rather, subjugated in Ephesians to the general idea of being filled with the Spirit, building the Christian church. And that Christian church, as I said from the structure earlier, is the center of an understanding of what marriage is all about. So for some people, singleness is the way to have that happen, and most people, marriage is not the end all and be all.

So, you know, the church has implied this at least and taught that we can’t be fulfilled without a spouse. It’s simply untrue. It’s a lie. The Bible says otherwise. So we need to be careful about how we talk about marriage while we’re trying to defend it from the culture around us. And hopefully we will understand that if we stay true to God’s word, then we’ll see the value of this.

And again, you know, the point here is that when people wake up over time—over months—they’re going to recognize that the other person sins. And in addition to that, more often than not, the other person sins against you. You know, you’re right there with them all the time now, right? You got a life together. So be, we’re all sinners. And when sin happens in a marriage, it’s usually going to be against you.

Now, you can take that personal if you want. There is a personal aspect to it. Or you can say, okay, so this is an element of my spouse that I want to kind of help him or her grow out of, right? You know, we have this other thing we say: “Don’t marry somebody if you hope to change them.” I guess that’s true. You don’t want to marry vaporware. But on the other hand, I think every marriage should actually have a commitment to change each other.

I mean, unless we think that sanctification isn’t a process. Of course, we want each other to change. And of course, we recognize that because we’re the most intimate relationship with this person, we’ll probably be the most important way that happens, lovingly in a gospel way, of course. But of course, we want each other to change. But of course, we also resist that change. And you know, our sinful predispositions in marriage—we’re the blindest ones to those, right?

We can’t see them. Marriage begins to show us stuff about ourselves we didn’t know because in isolation, it’s easy. Self-deception is easy. So marriage has a lot of problems, going particularly in this culture that says, well, marriage is all about fulfillment, and you know, it’s all about you and looking out for number one and you need to have yourself, you know, grounded as an individual primarily. No, the Bible says the two become one.

And the whole thing about, you know, I’ve got to come to self-realization before I can give myself to my spouse—that’s completely counter to what the scriptures teach. The scriptures say: give yourself to one another, and that fulfillment, that self-realization will come on the far side of sacrificial service to our spouses.

So, you know, judgment begins at the house of God, and we need to be, I think, a little more realistic and a little better in how we train people for marriage, right?

Placosis. So I already talked about this. You zoom out a little bit. Ephesians 5:20—placosis. You know, so Christians, there’s another problem in the church: we take these verses like Ephesians 5:22, about wives submit to your husbands, or even that whole section, and we extract it out and we put it up. And so, you know, Jay Adams says we should have context plaques because we’re always goofed up because we’re just thinking about one little thing and we completely misinterpret it.

It’s why structures are important, folks. That’s why to understand the development of Paul’s argument in Ephesians. If you don’t understand that, how are you going to really figure out what’s happening back here? The immediate predecessor for marriage, which I’ve just described as impossible in the flesh, is a chapter and a half about being filled with the Spirit. Is that related? Duh.

The only way you’re going to do Christian marriage successfully and have its purpose—the sanctification of the people involved and the foundational benefit to the culture—accomplished is through a Spirit-filled life. There’s no way of doing it other than that.

And so, you know, it’s important. And the submission that’s talked about has to be understood in the immediate context of verse 21 about mutual submission to each other. If you don’t have mutual submission to each other in the context of marriage, then whatever submission is called for in terms of the order and structure of the covenant relationship is going to be whacked out of shape. Okay? You’re going to end up with tyranny on the part of the guy or battle of the sexes, whatever it is.

Mutual submission is the key to understanding this. And beyond that, we’re told that mutual submission is part of this being filled with the Spirit. And so the verses I read today, we’re going to back a little even further out next week into Ephesians 4. But the verses for today are the immediate context preparing us for how to do this marriage thing successfully in a way that produces the sanctification that is the significant theme. The sanctification of the church is the most significant theme, I think, in the so-called instruction on Christian marriage in 5:22 to 31.

So to back out will help us. And to remember that the Holy Spirit has a particular purpose. The Holy Spirit is not the Holy Spirit in isolation. Jesus says he’ll send the Spirit who will bring things of Jesus to us. If you want Jesus, you get him through the Spirit. The Spirit’s job is to come to you and to bring to you the meaning of Jesus, the instruction of Jesus, the power of the King Jesus in a way that is transformative for your life, that equips you for that self-sacrificial service to the other that marriage is all about. Okay.

The Spirit is this person of God who comes to bring us Jesus and actually comes because Jesus is a reflection of the Father—to bring us and create in us the character of the Father, so that our marriage can indeed actually be successful. Jesus said, “He’ll teach you all things, bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.” The Spirit’s job is to bring Jesus to us. “He will glorify me,” John 16. “He will take what is mine and declare it to you.”

So that’s the Spirit’s job. You need Jesus. You need the power of the Holy Spirit. You need the gospel. What is the Spirit going to bring to you? What’s one of the most essential teachings of who Jesus is? It’s that he’s that one who understood that fulfillment for him lay on the far side of self-sacrificial service for you. And if the Spirit brings Jesus to you, he brings the gospel to you. And the gospel is: you don’t love someone because they’re lovely. You love them to make them lovely, right?

You look at your spouse as that block of marble and you see the potentials in Christ. And you are part of the chiseling on each other that creates beauty. So Jesus—that’s what the gospel is. That’s what Jesus did for us. And so the Spirit-empowered marriage is a gospel-centered marriage of self-sacrificial service to each other.

You know, when you’re running on fumes, you have to know where the gas station is. The world today points to a gas station of individual fulfillment. The Bible points you to the gas station of the Holy Spirit who’s going to minister Jesus and the Father to you. And that’s where we’re turning for this series.

Three: the unseen cancer that is the greatest threat to marriage and your personal sanctification. Right? Single person, married people—doesn’t make any difference. Curly said there’s just one thing in City Slickers. Just one thing. The secret of life is just one thing. And he never says what it is.

Well, the one thing that is the cancer that eats away at marriage is self-centeredness, and it’s the one thing that eats away at our sanctification as part of the bride of Christ as well. You know, it is that Philippians 2 says this: “Complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit. In humility, count others more significant than yourselves.” And applied to marriage, that’s your spouse. Okay? Count them as more significant.

Romans 15: “We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves. Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, building him up.” Self-sacrifice, elimination of self-centeredness.

Galatians 5:13: “You are called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh. Through love, serve one another.” The one thing: an end of self-centeredness and serving each other. Now, it’s according to how the Bible says to serve. But that’s what it is.

2 Corinthians 5:15: And here it is. The gospel. “And he died for all. Gospel. Why? That those who live might no longer live for themselves, but for him who for their sake died and was raised.” The gospel. And what is the purpose of the gospel? That we wouldn’t live to ourselves. What’s the one thing that keeps us from being able to serve other people? It’s our self-centeredness. It’s our desire to serve ourselves.

And what’s the usual way God drives that out of your life or at least makes it impossible to live with in ignorance or in fooling around? Marriage. Marriage. And so the one thing is self-centeredness, and it can take a lot of manifestations: poor me, inferiority complex, superiority complex. It’s all the same thing. You’re thinking about yourself too much. So, think about the other, serve the other.

The one thing is that Keller says this: “If two spouses each say, ‘I’m going to treat my self-centeredness as the main problem in this marriage,’ you have the prospect of a truly great marriage.” And though I would say the likelihood of a truly great marriage—if just that would happen today, if each spouse here would just say to themselves, “I’m going to treat my self-centeredness as the biggest problem to our marriage,” not my partner’s self-centeredness, right? Not their fault. “I’m going to treat my self-centeredness as the biggest problem to this marriage.”

And if both partners do that—if one partner does it, it’s good. If both partners commit to saying that today, maybe to each other, that’s a good thing to do today. It’s a day of ritual, transforming ritual. Maybe you should do that today when you go home. Spouses say to each other, “I’m going to treat my self-centeredness as the biggest threat to this marriage.” I believe then we will begin to transform marriages, strengthen them, and empower them as well in this church.

In Matthew 16:25, we read, “Whoever would save his life will lose it. Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” If you go out of here and want to serve your spouse, but you do it with a grudging attitude, you’re going to have what some people call a truce marriage that’ll go on a long time, but it doesn’t exhibit the Christian community, the love, the true biblical love. You know, when you kiss on your 40th anniversary, it’ll be a forced kiss.

Or you can go about doing this service with joy, and when you do it with joy, joy is the result. Okay? And so lose your life so that you can indeed save it. We’re to have joy from giving joy.

Another sermon I’ll do in the future is on intimacy, physical relationships within marriage. And that is the key—what I just said: joy through giving joy. Now, the world says just the reverse, but the Bible says that’s the key to physical intimacy and the relational power that physical intimacy gives in a marriage.

So, service. Now, I haven’t really got to the text, but let’s talk briefly here about this, and we’ll come back to this next week. Ephesians 5 gives us: how do you get filled with the Spirit? Okay. “Be filled with the Spirit.” Well, it tells us right here. “Don’t get drunk with wine.”

We have liberty to drink alcohol in this church. Praise God. If you abuse that liberty and get drunk, you’re sinning. It doesn’t mean throwing up drunk. I looked up the word. Some people tell me that. “Oh, no, I’m not really drunk.” No, it means drunk. It means controlled with it. And it’s an opposition to the Spirit, right?

It means getting intoxicated not with the love of the Spirit and the power of the Spirit, but with wine or strong drink. Don’t do it. It’s sin. It’s debauchery. You know, the word debauchery here is actually “no salvation”—would be a literal translation of it. That’s what it means. You’re not living as if you’re saved. And if you keep living in that way, you maybe won’t be saved. I don’t know. But that’s what the word means.

So don’t get drunk with wine. If I know somebody’s drunk, what should I do? Justice through conflict resolution. I should talk to them after they’re sober and say, “Hey, you’re a drunk guy. You need to repent of that.” No, I—who cares? I’m drunk. Okay. Well, I’ll bring back, you know, Joe with me to talk to you about it. Go write down the process. Are we going to love each other enough to keep people from becoming drunkards in this church? Okay. I’ve railed on that enough, but okay.

So don’t get drunk with wine, but be filled with the Spirit. That means the Spirit is intoxicating. Marriage is intoxicating, right? God says in Song of Songs, you know, “Him, kiss me with the kisses of his mouth. Your love is as intoxicating as wine or as good as wine.” The love of our spouses is intoxicating. The people that are married know that, and it’s because it is a flowing of the Spirit between two Spirit-empowered people. So the Spirit is to be a proper intoxication with being filled with the Spirit.

Or how? Addressing one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. Singing your way to a better marriage, right? That’s what it says. If being filled with the Spirit is the key to good marriage, you should sing your way to a better marriage by singing together—psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.

We’ve already been filled with the Spirit. We’re moving ahead in filling of the Spirit because we sang songs together today. Did you notice that we were a community of people? We sang the same words. We submitted to one another and the fear of Christ and the service of Christ, the reverence, the worship of Christ. We attuned our voices to each other. We didn’t go way out of tempo with the other guy next to us or the other woman. No, we attuned ourselves together. We mutually submitted to each other through the singing of songs together. And we got our hearts—our hearts are being tuned together too, right? That’s what it does.

So you can sing your way to a better marriage. The couple that sings together stays together. How’s that? Now, you can also—you’re supposed to sing and make melody to the Lord with your heart. Your own relationship to God is enhanced through humming or whatever, right? Like that trip to Bountiful, you know, the godly old lady hummed around the house, and the girl who was in rebellion to Christ—her daughter-in-law—wanted her to quit that hum and no more singing of those hymns.

We should be singing hymns at least in our hearts and then with each other and to ourselves as well. So the Spirit comes with music. It’s intoxicating to sing music. It changes who we are. The first thing that’s listed here of how to be filled with the Spirit who will make your marriage more joyful is to sing. It’s music. Music.

You know, it’s too bad the pagan culture knows more about the power of music, I think, than the Christian culture. And now the power is usually used in a negative way. But music is where filling with the Spirit starts here. Secondly, giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father. Thanksgiving is a key to the Holy Spirit, right? And then finally, submitting to one another out of the fear of Christ.

And so I’ll close with this. We’re to submit to each other. We’re to give deference to each other. You’re all submitting right now to one another. You’re doing this. We do this in worship. You’re listening to me. We’ve decided I’m the guy that’s going to speak too long, probably. And you’re the one that’s going to try to stay awake and listen. But you’re doing that—submitting to one another, right?

And the point here is it’s telling us here how to be filled with the Spirit. The Spirit is ministered one to the other in relationships of mutual submission. And so that is the need for the Spirit in the context of Christian marriage.

And finally, the fear of Christ. You know, the reverence of Christ, yes, the awesomeness of Christ, yes, the saving work of Jesus, yes, but a healthy respect for his judgments upon us if we don’t do these things, right? An understanding his eyes really do test. His eyelids test the children of men. He knows if you’re not singing to each other, right? He knows if you’re not giving thanks in everything. Everything. That’s a hard verse for me this week, folks. But it’s a verse I’m trying to obey, okay?

The power of the Spirit. Because I don’t want to be without the Spirit to get through what I got to get through in my life. Giving thanks in everything, and then finally submitting to one another. You know, submission is a military term. Hupotasso. And it came from the army. I kept thinking this week of that song: “You’re in the Army Now.” You’re not behind a plow. You’re in the army. Remember Kenny Anderson gave us that great sermon several weeks ago about being drafted into the army of God? And you’re a warrior now.

Well, in the army, you don’t choose your schedule. You don’t figure it out yourself. You don’t decide what you’re going to eat, right? You don’t decide what you’re going to do about much of anything except for maybe an hour or two here or there. And in marriage, in the Christian church, it’s not quite like that, but it is sort of like that, right? You are now not the person who’s going to decide autonomously and individually what you’re going to eat. You’re going to make mutual decisions together about time, food, rituals, what you do. Mutual submission in marriage is what it’s all about.

Yeah, there’s individual stuff, of course. I don’t want to go in a bad ditch here, but submitting to one another is a mechanism that the Spirit uses for his own filling and his empowerment of us in the church for doing what he requires for us in marriage.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for the Holy Spirit that indwells us. We thank you for the ritual filling that we receive here in the context of this service. Singing with each other, making melody in our hearts and with our voices, giving thanks here at this table in a couple of minutes for all things, knowing they’re mediated to us by your great grace and sovereign mercy.

We thank you, Lord God, for calling us to give deference to one another, to submit to each other in the fear of Christ—Christ, Messiah, King, Jesus, Savior—and reminding us of his authority and rule over us. Bless us, Lord God, in this sermon series. May we indeed be empowered as better Christians, better spouses, better singles as well on the basis of the filling of the Spirit that brings us Jesus in your character. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.