Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: Marriage and Sanctification
## Ephesians 5:21-33
### August 26, 2012 | Pastor Dennis R. Tuuri

Today’s sermon text is Ephesians 5, and we’re going to focus in on the section relative to marriage. But to put it in context, we’ll begin reading at verse 18. Ephesians 5:18 through verse 33. And our topic today is marriage and sanctification—the mission of marriage. One of the primary purposes of marriage, which I think our text will tell us, is sanctification. All right, please stand for the reading of God’s word.

May he convert our soul. 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 reverence for Christ. Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord.

For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now, as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.

In the same way, husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is profound. And I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.

However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband. Let’s pray.

Lord God, we pray that you would shower blessings upon us by your Holy Spirit. We thank you for your word and the wonderful effects that it has in our lives as we receive it with thanksgiving that we just recited and sang about from Psalm 19. Father, indeed bless us by your word. We know that without your Holy Spirit illumining our understanding of it and transforming our lives, it’s worthless to us. So bless us by your spirit. May we be yielded to your spirit to receive truth from this text and reform our lives by it. In Jesus’s name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

So we continue today in our series on marriage. We’ve established the foundation of this series by talking about marriage first as needing a source of power. We set in context these verses from Ephesians 5 by looking at chapters 4 and 5 in the work of the Holy Spirit and the relationship of that work to the church.

And then before addressing the text before us in terms of husbands and wives, we looked at in a couple of sermons about what husbands and wives are. They’re in a covenant relationship, not a consumer bargaining relationship, but a committed lifelong relationship of mutual love and submission. And so we looked at the marriage as covenant as well. And so the essence of marriage, as Tim Keller would say in his book, is covenant.

The power for marriage is the Holy Spirit. And in the next chapter of Keller’s book, he moves on to the mission of marriage or what we could say is the purpose of marriage. And that is sanctification, and that’s the topic for our sermon today. The next couple of weeks we’ll look at methods for accomplishing this. So if sanctification is at least a primary goal of marriage, how does that work? What can we do to encourage each other to be like that—to be sanctifiers of one another?

And there’s a couple of specific things that we’re going to be talking about next week. We’ll talk about another phrase from Ephesians—speaking the truth in love—and the significance of those two things being bound together as a unit, and how we are sanctified. And then after that we’ll talk about the role of friendship, both generally but then specifically in marriage as well. And both those things will be tremendous benefits to us as we attempt to apply what I think today’s text tells us.

Now, what we’re going to do today is go over the text. I think that if we understand this text—if I understand this text correctly—I think it will mean some pretty significant changes to some of the marriages in this room, to my own marriage, and maybe to others.

This text, if understood correctly—and I think I understand it correctly—has the capability in a significant way of changing your marriage for the better. And this text, also, if we understand it correctly, will really impact singles as they’re preparing for marriage in terms of what sort of spouse they’re seeking. So if this is the mission and purpose of marriage—sanctification—then that sort of changes what the marriage relationship looks like in the homes, and it also changes the way young people prepare to get married and the sorts of spouses they look for.

So it’s a very significant text of scripture to understand. And unfortunately it’s one that we hear so much, and we hear it in a certain context all the time, and we think we know what it means already. And we just sort of assume things about it. And along the way here, as we look at the text specifically, I’m going to maybe not shatter but at least bump up hard against a couple of commonly held positions in evangelicalism today in terms of this text.

So let’s begin by looking at the text. I’ve given you on your first—I know lots of paper today, lots of paper. So on the first page of your handouts there’s a couple of structures for this text. The first one I shared with you early on in this series, and I don’t even remember where on the internet I found it. I’m not saying it’s the best and last word on it. The second one is an attempt by me to sort of show the back and forth of this text, talking of Paul talking about marriage relationships and then Christ and the church as a way to sort of jolt us out of the way we normally think about things.

So it helps to sort of say: What is the structure? What’s Paul doing as he writes these things? And to come at it with new eyes, as it were. And in that first structure that I show you, one of the things that is interesting to me—and the first little mistaken teaching, well the first teaching, general teaching, that I want to put a little bit of a pushback on—is the idea that marriage is about love and respect.

This is a common thing. The book Love and Respect has sold over a million copies. All kinds of people say love and respect is what marriage is. And then the question becomes: What does it mean to respect? And so what’s commonly held is it’s almost as—when I see women discussing this—you know, how are we to respect our husbands? You could almost substitute the word “admire,” okay, as opposed to respect. So you make a list of what you respect about your husband.

Well, he prays with the kids every night, and he does this and he does that, and he’s tall and he makes money and he’s a good provider. So you list all the things that you respect about him. But really those are things you admire about him. Now that’s a perfectly fine thing to do. It’s a great thing that we end up giving more thanks for our marriage spouses, right? I’m not going to speak against that. But I am going to say that I don’t think that’s what this text has anything to do with.

This text concludes with respect, and it begins with the submission of wives. So number one, we sort of see these bookends of the responsibilities of wives and, leading in from that, the responsibility of husbands. By the way, why do we start with wives? Not sure. But in these kinds of texts, that’s the way it always works. The wife is spoken of first. Maybe it’s because we’re all wives. You know, we’re all corporately the wife of Christ. We’re corporately the bride of Christ. And so, you know, we start with wives because that’s really kind of related in some sense to all of us. We’re to relate to Jesus the way our wives relate to their husbands. And so we also are in submission, right, to a head—a covenantal head. So maybe that’s why he starts with wives. I don’t know, but at least he does.

And the thing that is interesting here is that we have these bookends of submission and respect. Okay? And so respect—the particular word here is not the word that’s used to talk about admiring somebody or a well-respected person because of what he does. There are good Greek words that are used in the New Testament that have that connotation to them. This one doesn’t. In fact, in most translations, this particular word is the only text where it’s translated “respect” as opposed to the normal translation, which is “fear” or “reverence.”

The word is like “phobos.” So it’s like a phobia, right? To have a fear of something. That’s what the word means. Now, you could kind of—you know, you can probably find some weird little Greek passages where it might be used sort of like “admire,” but the general sense of the term here is really not admiring. So, number one, I challenge whether you’re really applying verse 33 when you make a list of all the good things about your husband you like.

Make the lists. Pray with thanksgiving to God. But don’t think you’re fulfilling the requirements of verse 33. I don’t think you are. Verse 33 says what you’re to do is to reverence or to fear your husband. Not with slavish fear, of course. Perfect love casts out fear, the Bible says. So there’s different kinds of fears. But it’s the same sort of fear that earlier he said you should fear Christ. You should mutually submit to one another in the fear of Christ.

And in the way this particular text is looked at here, with the bookends of wives’ submission, then, is informed by the complementary word here in verse 33, and that word is to reverence. So submission is put in as a synonym for the word reverence. And so to submit means to be reverential toward and to stay in right relationship with. So certainly there’s stuff going on, but I don’t think it means what it typically means in most marriage counseling books these days—some kind of list of positive traits about your husband.

Now, notice that this structure, as you look at it, matches up pretty well. Like I said, I’m not even sure who did it, but what they do is, if you look at the center of this thing—the F structure and F-prime, and then the X in the middle—I’ll just read that. So the center of the text, as this particular person has lined it out. And let me just say something about that too. Let me say something about chiasms.

They are not some weird Jordan deal or weird Tuuri deal. Chiastic structures and studies is now part of nearly everyone doing serious Bible study. Bible theologians, Bible instructors think now about where their chiasms are in a text or not. It is a common tool now used to study and interpret biblical texts. That’s because people are saying, “Hey, you know, it makes a lot of sense to know how God structures a passage. We’re going to do that in a couple of minutes by zooming out from their text and looking what follows it, looking what goes before it.” So that’s the beginning of thinking of a little structure, an ABA kind of thing. And we’ll do that in a couple of minutes. But in this particular thing, it notes these bookends that march in toward a center. And if you spend time today looking over these bookends, you’ll see some of these connections that seem pretty obvious.

So, for instance, in the E statement and the E-prime statement, it says “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave himself up for her,” and its matching section says, “So husbands ought also to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself.” So two matching statements call for the husband to love his wife. And in the middle of that, then we have kind of the center. If you just take those statements of the love of the husband for his wife—those commands—what’s the middle of that? What’s the reason given for that?

And the middle is “that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that he might present to himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and blameless.”

Now, and they do a nice job here of saying, well, the washing is up in the F, and in the F-prime, you’ve got the effects of the washing—no wrinkle, any such thing. So the central statement of this entire text from this perspective is that Christ might present to himself the church in all her glory. Now that is the meaning of the text. So this author thinks the very center of the text that performs the idea of coordinating everything that’s being said has to do with the presentation of Christ of a church to himself.

Okay, sanctification is the word we could use. Now let me just step on another commonly held position here that is involved in this particular section. This language clearly is sacrificial language, right? It comes from the sacrificial system. You know that she wouldn’t have a blot or a spot or blemish or wrinkle or any such thing, right? He’s going to present this in all her glory. He’s going to sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word.

This is imagery of the sacrificial system of the Old Testament. Okay, this is not Greek intellectual philosophical concept language. This is very literal sacrificial language. Now, what we normally hear about from this verse is the responsibility of husbands to teach their wives the scriptures. “Ah, yeah, husbands are supposed to wash their wives with the word and sanctify them in that way.”

Well, I like what I’m saying—the text doesn’t say that. It’s a good thing for husbands and wives to teach each other the scriptures. Christine and I find one of the most wonderful points of connection in life are when we’re both studying the Bible together and talking about the Bible, and I learn from her and she learns from me. But if you think that husbands are the ones who are supposed to teach their wives and it never goes the other way around, and if you think this verse is the basis for that, you’re just wrong. You got the wrong verse. This verse, I don’t think, has anything to do with that.

This verse has to do with the washings of the Old Testament that would cleanse the sacrificial animal who is going to ascend to heaven. Okay? So it’s preparing a person for entrance into the throne of God ultimately, eternally. Okay? That’s what the sacrificial system was all about—drawing nearer to God.

And this text brings in all that kind of washing—you know, unblemished offering—sort of thing into the text. And so when we read “the washing of the water with the word,” what is it talking about? Well, most Reformed commentators say what this is talking about is baptism. It’s talking about the washing in the New Testament that replaces all the various washings of the Old Testament. Washings are death-to-life things.

And the washing of the New Testament is baptism. And there are a couple of reasons for that. One, this particular word used—washing—it’s only used one other place in scripture, and that’s in Titus, and a controversial phrase that talks about “the washing of regeneration.” And the question there is: What is the effect of baptism or washing in relationship to regeneration? And that’s too big a topic to go into today.

But having said that, the point is that’s the other text you’re going to look at if you’re talking about this washing term being used. And that seems clearly to be somehow related in some way to baptism. Everybody seems to agree with that. And then, secondly here, one of the big points as to why this is talking about baptism is that this washing is connected to the word. Okay? Washing of water—the washing and water, the use of water with the word.

So we’ve got relationship. We have water and word being brought together doing what this text says Jesus has accomplished for us. He’s fitted us and made us ready definitively, once for all, for heavenly citizenship. Okay, this is not progressive terminology. This is once-for-all terminology. And so the husband’s being told not to “keep washing your wife.” You know, we can make some application, right? Just like the apostles had their feet washed. Okay, we can make application. But the sense of the text, as I understand it—and I think I’m on pretty solid footing here—the sense of this text is the once-for-all work of Jesus in dying and being raised up and ascended for his bride. And that union with him in that brings us out of death into life. And that’s pictured as being accomplished through the washing of water with the word—baptism with the word—done in conjunction with the word of God—is what definitively changes us, transforms us.

We stand here in the heavenlies with Christ without spot or wrinkle because of the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ. That’s what’s happening here. So the text is not some call on husbands to teach their wives the Bible. If you want to teach your wife the Bible, good thing to do. You want to make a list of admirable qualities about your husband, fine. That can be helpful in marriage. But this text—and of course this text is important.

It’s the central, longest explanation of what Christian marriage is in the New Testament. This text says something else. This text says something else.

So you can ponder more upon this particular structure later, but I wanted to point those particular things out about it. And now the bottom half of the page I’ve included verse 21. And this is to further reinforce that what we have in the respect—I would say reverence or fear is a better translation—of wives for their husbands has to do with something other than admiration.

This is why verse 21 says we’re to “submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” Now, the ESV, which is the translation that’s used here, usually tries to do a good job of using the same translation for the same Greek word. Here they did not. Here they did not. Verse 33, when we read that “a husband should see to it that she respects her husband,” it’s the same word as “reverence for Christ”—the same word as “reverence for Christ.” And it would be helpful, I think, to people as they read their Bibles if translations, and some do by a footnote, but if translations just kept a commonality of the terminology here, right?

Whether you make them both “fear” or both “reverence,” right? Doesn’t make any difference. But if you show the similarity of them, now what you do is you say, “Oh, so there’s a whole section here that’s marked off by these bookends of fear of Christ, fear of husband.” And now when you look at it that way, as well as the way we just looked at it in terms of submission to her head, if you look at it this way now with these bookends, then it’s quite obvious that fear for one’s husband—reverential fear, not slavish fear—fear for one’s husband is correlative of fear for Christ, a reverence for Christ. And we know that has to do with his office, who he is, right?

The fear of Christ, you know, isn’t based upon listing a bunch of attributes of him. And you can do that. That’s a good thing to do. But it is rather a reverence of his person, of his office specifically, because he’s referred to here not as “Jesus” but as “Christ”—Messiah—his office that he has performed. And so the reverence of wives for their husbands has to do with office.

Now, couple of other things that this second thing helps you to see. Now look at that—look at the bottom half—verse 22: “Wives, submit to your own husbands.” “Own husbands.” This is another problem with patriarchalism gone amuck—is wives are seen as submitting to all men. This makes it clear that the submission that he’s talking about is to your own husbands “as to the Lord.”

“For the husband is the head of the wife.” This headship thing, too. I should probably preach a sermon on headship. I just think we get it so mixed up. I know for me, it’s hard to pull back from some of the presuppositions we bring about headship to this stuff. And our views of headship end up kind of odd. I mean, basically what runs throughout this text is you’ve got a person and he’s got a head and he’s got a body, right?

And you know, so they’re related. They’re united together, and the body, you know, does what the head would like it to do. But it’s a unity that’s being talked about. It’s not really, you know, functional command necessarily. And but we end up kind of treating this. I mean, you could say that the head-body language is a great way to emphasize unity as opposed to hierarchy. Now, hierarchy is there. I don’t want to take that away. But sometimes I think that in our circles particularly, we only read this in terms of hierarchy and we miss other stuff that’s going on. Okay.

So let me continue to read. “Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now, as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.”

So comprehensively, submission is a desire to follow the godly lead of one’s husband. You know, because the difference, of course, is that husbands are going to want to lead the wrong way. Christ never leads the wrong way. So there’s an obvious thing that Paul doesn’t have to state. But when we read the text, we certainly should read it into the text. The husbands being spoken over here are husbands that are modeling Christ to their wives.

Well, in any event, the point here is that again, we have a little structure talking about wives’ submission to their husbands. Wives’ submission to their husbands, and in the middle is this reason for it—the analogy to Christ as the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. So in the first instruction to wives, at the center of that instruction is the reality of unity and oneness—unity, rather, being one together, Christ and his church.

But don’t miss the fact that it says he’s the church’s Savior. He’s saving the church. He has saved us definitively, and he’s progressively saving us. Okay? He’s keeping us. He’s sanctifying us. So again, if we understand salvation and saving comprehensively, sanctification is part of what’s being discussed here as Christ is brought into this discussion of husbands and wives. Okay.

Then the next section, which is much longer than the first section by the way. You know, this is another thing about headship. Headship implies responsibility and culpability, right? I mean, husbands are responsible for the state of their families in an increased way. And so here you see it just at the number of words used. Husbands are given a lot more instruction because they’ve got a lot more to do. One could say, okay, husbands, love your wives.

“Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.”

So the first thing is, husbands, love your wives. And then there’s a description of the kind of love that Christ has for his church. Okay. And then to drop down to verse 28: “In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. Okay. So again it’s like the wife—with something about Jesus in the center. Husbands love your wives. Husbands love your wives. Something in the center. And then after the something in the center, the husbands love your wives—now it’s thrown in a new phrase that otherwise as their own bodies.

Now again, here, this should—it kind of you can see where Paul gets into it—because what he’s talking about in the entire text is that there’s one body, right? The body and the head are one. And so of course you’re going to love your wife as your own body, the same way the wife would love the husband as her own body, right? I mean you’re one. That’s the point here.

And so but this gets off into another explanation of who Jesus is. “He who loves his own life loves himself. No one ever hated his own flesh but nourishes and cherishes it.” So this sanctification that’s being talked about now has some specific things put into it—to guard and to nourish or bring to fruition. You know, you guard your house, your family, your body. You’ve got a house around you to guard you from the elements. And in that house you eat food. You get nurtured. Okay? So that’s what it is to grow, to be sanctified. It can be summed up in that two-phrase: guard and nurture. And that’s what one does for his own body.

And then he goes back to Jesus. “Just as Christ does for the church, because we are members of his body. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and the two shall become one flesh. Mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.”

So marriage doesn’t come first in Paul’s thinking. Christ and the church does. And the marriage relationship in Genesis only finds its meaning in relationship to Christ and the church. Okay, that’s what it’s saying. God had Jesus and the church in mind when he gave Adam and Eve marriage. That’s what he’s saying here. And then finally, the conclusion is summation: “Let one love his wife as himself. Let the wife see to it that she respects her husband.”

Now, so what’s at the center of men’s love for their wives? So we’ve have these three centers in here, right? The center of the wife is that Jesus is Savior of the body. And then the big center in the middle—what’s going on is this sanctifying work. As I just mentioned, that Jesus loved the church. So men are supposed to love their wives like Jesus loves the church, right? And what does that mean? Well, it means that he gave himself up for her.

So men are supposed to love their wives by putting them first. Now, one of the most common ways that we are to become sanctified is to look at others’ interest ahead of our own. I mean it’s not just in marriage, right? But it’s intensified in marriage. The whole relationship of marriage, a husband to marriage, is to focus upon this basic aspect of how you grow in Christ and are sanctified, which is to put the other person first.

Now the wife is not immune from that, right? The wife is called by Philippians just like the husband is called to “look out for the interests of others more than your own.” So she’s also putting her husband’s interests first. Doesn’t say it here because it doesn’t have to. The man is included with the wife. He’s being sanctified as part of the bride of Christ. Okay. So what the husband does, the wife is also doing. Other texts make quite clear.

But my point here is that the way husbands are to love their wives is to see them as more important than themselves, to lay down their life for them. Okay, that’s how it works. That’s what you do. Okay. But the Bible doesn’t stop there. This text doesn’t stop with what you do. It goes on to say the purpose for Christ’s love, right? “Gave himself up for her—that he might sanctify her.” There it is.

We do this love. We act lovingly toward each other. To what end? Sanctification. Now, Christ’s sanctification is perfect and complete. It’s related to the washing of the water of the word, our baptisms, our movement from death into life, from darkness into light, right? That’s what Jesus does for us, right? And he does this so that he can present us without spot or wrinkle. And we are that now. If I have a heart attack right now and die, I go to heaven. I’m without spot or wrinkle. Praise God. I’m a beautiful creature again, no, the first time in my life. That’s who I am. But in the meantime, while I walk this world, my life is being sanctified, right?

The Bible goes over and over again. It talks about how we’re going from glory to glory. God is sanctifying us. He’s taking away our sins. You know, one of the reasons—one of the elements that we want to put back in or kind of stress in this re-visioning of parish groups—is just that sanctification. You know, we should be praying for, seeking each other’s sanctification. You can call it discipleship—following Jesus better—but in terms of these this text, it’s talking about sanctification—becoming more and more holy, right? “Sanctus”—the spirit, and the spirit, of course, is the Holy Spirit. So sanctification is the purpose for which men are to actually engage in this love of their wives, and by application to the rest of the body, it’s the same thing that women—wives—are supposed to do for their men.

So the text, you know, kind of, if we look at it carefully and closely and think about it a little bit, it isn’t quite the way we’ve always thought about it. Perhaps it doesn’t necessarily mean some of the things we thought it meant. But what it does mean is significant, and it can be completely marriage changing if we understand the relationship of marriage and sanctification.

Now I want to make a couple of other brief points before I talk about marriage and sanctification. If we zoom out from the text we’ve just been looking at and down in the text—right, we go down into chapter six—what we see are more instructions about other relationships: fathers and kids, masters and servants. Well, actually it’s children and fathers, servants and masters. Our primary identity are those that submit.

But then we do have hierarchal relationships as well. So one thing this text is also doing is it is the gospel as applied to vertical relationships. It is, as Calvin said, this text in Ephesians 5, going into 6, is the restoration of divine order. With the fall of man, order gets goofed up. You know, you can see it in Lamech, right? So now men are tyrants, multiple wives, killers, angry. And the world works in terms of tyranny under the fallen curse of Adam and fighting—power, domination—instead of loving covenants, you know, contractual obligations that are used to everybody’s individual advantage.

Warfare is kind of the model, and everybody’s always complaining about, you know, their authority, and the authority is always trying to suppress the ones underneath them. This is why we have union-management struggles, right? Big part of our election. Why? Well, you could pick a side if you want to, but if you do much looking in history, you’ll find sin on both sides of that issue. And so you know what Paul is stating here is a tremendous truth. A tremendous blessing of the gospel of Jesus Christ is that human relationships—whether it’s in the workplace, in the parent-child relationship, the husband-wife relationship, everything—gets fixed. The gospel restores divine order and challenges the presupposition certainly of the Roman culture this was being preached at, but also in terms of our culture.

How do we see marriage in America today? It’s mostly about romance, right? Finding the perfect person. But if marriage is about sanctification, which this text says it is, that whole relationship thing looks different than what it does in our culture. It’s a challenge. As Ted Kuyper would say, it’s a howling indictment of our society’s views of marriage relationships and of husband-wife relationships. We either have, you know, chauvinistic, patriarchal guys who want to make their wives submit and be on their knees the whole time, or we have women who in claiming for equality want to rise up and be in control of their husbands.

And it seems like in the middle there’s very little ground. But that’s where Paul puts the flag. There’s a hierarchy, an order that’s established. Reverence for the covenantal head is to be had on the part of the woman. But he reorders the relationship. And so if we zoom out from the particular text, it is very important to see that there is tremendous blessing because all the mixed-up sinful hierarchical relationships of the fallen world are crushed by Jesus Christ affecting what he affected on the cross.

And Paul is proclaiming the good news of the ascension of the Savior King to the throne. And he is saying this is the way the new world—this is the new creation way of relationships in the home and in the workplace. This is blessing. This is gospel.

So if we, if we take—if we step back a couple of minutes as we’ve just done—and we see the little broader context, you know, what we have here is relationships. On your outlines I’ve given you—again, and I know I’ve done this a number of times—but you know, if you want to work on your marriage, remember that your marriage is just a reflection of all the hierarchical relationships we have that are commanded to us by the Fifth Commandment.

And so the Westminster Larger Catechism Q&A stuff on the Fifth Commandment are given to you there to help you to think through: husbands, read what are the sins of superiors. Wives, read what are the sins of inferiors. That’s a good checklist. What’s being talked about is much broader here in Ephesians 5 than just husband-wife relationships. It’s really the recreation of the divine order. And at the beginning of it, mutually submitting to one another in the fear of Christ.

Christ is the head of all men. Now all relationships are ones of mutual submission to each other in the fear of Christ. Mutual submission involves fulfilling the roles and responsibilities you have relative to the person you’re in relationship to. But the whole thing has been restructured because Jesus is the head. Now, if we are to zoom out and up a little bit now, you can look at—I think it’s the third page on your handouts—a complicated looking diagram. And I’m just going to make it pretty easy for you and just make a couple of quick points about it.

And we see that chapter 5 begins with what will become part of Paul’s major theme as he gets to husband-wife relationships: “Be imitators of God as dear children. Walk in love as Christ also has loved us and given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling aroma. But fornication and all uncleanness or covetousness, let it not even be named among you as is befitting to saints.”

So at the very beginning of this text, if we zoom out, we see that this idea of correct relationships being a having a goal of sanctification is given at the very beginning of the chapter as well. So at the very beginning of the chapter and then in the final part of the chapter, we’ve got this stress upon the sacrificial work of Jesus Christ affecting, you know, a transformed person—a beautiful bride—through sanctification, removing uncleanness, right?

“Don’t be fornicators or unclean. But rather”—so we, the sanctification process is taking those things away. Notice in verse 4: “Neither filthiness nor foolish talking nor coarse jesting, which are not fitting.”

In the top half of Ephesians 5, it seems like speech is really what’s stressed in terms of sanctification. And I mentioned coarse jesting here because this is an example wherein some twisted pagan cultures, like ours, coarse jesting is one of the most prevalent ways—one of the most common things—that men do that loses respect for them in the eyes of women or their mates. So you know, if you want—if someone’s commanded to love you, you should try to be lovable. Somebody’s commanded to respect you, to reverence your position, you should try to be worthy of that.

We had that senator this last week who made the stupid comments, uninformed comments, and he lost reverence, right? So when we’re called to love somebody, they’re called to be lovable. And when we’re called to reverence somebody, they’re called to be of a character that can be reverenced. And men, husbands, single men, when your speech reflects coarse jesting, this is exactly the kind of thing that is a sin against what women are to do when they look at you—in terms of your wife, at least—with reverence. The greatest way to lose reverence is through filthy speech and coarse jesting.

And I say that because we live in an age where coarse jesting is, you know, it’s what’s said every day. It’s the common way of speaking. Well, in any event, so I wanted you to see that this text begins in sanctification and then in the last section, of course, as we’ve talked about it, ends with sanctification as well. And it begins by talking about uncleanness relative to our speech. And it ends with the kind of actions and attitudes we have that will produce sanctification in the context of marriage.

And so this is what’s going on. The giving of thanks in verse 4—at the just before verse 5. This is, you know, an essential context of speech. And this is picked up again right in the verses that lead up to the stuff on marriage. It’s one of the ways we’re filled with the Spirit is through the giving of thanks. And so this speech—again—of thanksgiving is described for us in these matching sections.

And then in verse 9 of the opening section, we have the fruit of the Spirit, right? So what’s happening here is sanctification is being accomplished as the fruit of the Spirit is made known in your life. So you’re to strive to see the results of the Spirit. And then of course, that matches up at the bottom again with being filled with the Spirit in the ways that are being talked about there.

One last thing about this I wanted to point out: There are three do nots. Verse 7: “Therefore, do not be partakers with them, for you were once in darkness.” So you know, verse 7 says in this whole chapter on sanctification that you want to be sanctified by not being partakers with those who are opposed to Christ. Okay. So having distance between you and those who are with Christ and those who are apart from Christ—they’re the ones doing that coarse jesting. They’re the ones with that filthiness of speech. Okay. And so the first do not is: don’t be like them. Don’t talk like them.

Now the second do not is in the very middle of the text. The B section is verses 16 and 17: “But as wise, redeeming the time because the days are evil. Therefore, do not be unwise. Understand what the will of the Lord is.” Here’s the second do not. So don’t, you know, be like them—particularly in speech. Don’t be unwise. But be wise, knowing what the will of the Lord is.

And then the third do not should be, uh, we probably already are thinking of it, but of course it’s: “Do not be drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit.” So the Spirit is what empowers us and what God is using for our mutual sanctification. And this text has a kind of cohesiveness to it of the establishment of the good news of sanctification. So we’ve got the good news of sanctification but bleeding into and being melded with the good news of restored relationships. And restored relationships are given to us as part of then under the heading of our growing sanctification.

All right. So there’s the text and the lesson from the text is that marriage—the purpose of marriage—we could say at least one of the purposes, I think the dominant purpose for marriage, the instruction given for marriage in Ephesians 5, the purpose is sanctification. Paul tells men, love your wives. But he doesn’t say that’s the end of the story. Their love is to a particular goal.

That goal is sanctification. His love was given for a particular goal of creating a sanctified holy bride—who are all of us. And our goal is to create holy mates as well. And to that end, we work in our marriage relationships. His goal, in a phrase, in a very simple phrase, he says in this text is “to sanctify her. To sanctify her.”

Jesus wants the new creation you to become more and more evident to the world and to come at last into its full blossom in heaven. That’s the purpose that Jesus gives here for the relationship of marriage itself. We know that this is generally the purpose of sanctification. “He who began a good work in us will complete it in the day of Christ.” So we know this is generally true. But here it’s actually specifically said to be the purpose or the reason for the marriage relationship itself.

Jesus is our Bridegroom. And as Bridegroom, his purpose is our sanctification. Now, if that’s true, then what it means is that’s what we’re supposed to be doing in our marriages. We are supposed to, I think, hold each other accountable to be our best—disciplers of one another. We could say, to hold each other accountable, to encourage each other to growth in Jesus Christ, and to putting off sinful actions.

Now, you know, this is true generally in the body. Remember, that marriage—you’re going to see somebody at their worst, or at their most obvious of who they are, right? And in marriage, you’re going to see each other, you know, warts and all. And so, who is a better person to sanctify your spouse than you who can see all of that stuff when it comes out at home? I really think that this perspective has the capability of transforming at least a part of your marriages and of people in this church completely transforming it.

Because now, when your wife mentions something that’s critical to you, right, you’re not going to receive it as “oh, she’s just trying to not love me.” Hopefully, you’re going to hear it as “oh, I know now why she does that. I know why she talks to me now about some of my faults. And I shouldn’t just tell her to be quiet and to love me. I need a person who will accept me just the way that I am. Don’t tell me about my problems.”

No, I shouldn’t do that, because God’s very purpose in this relationship is our sanctification. And the wife should say, “My husband’s not just picking on me.” Now, sometimes we do pick on each other and that’s sin. But more often than not, in good Christian marriages, spouses are trying to encourage each other toward righteousness, holiness, knowledge, and dominion.

Spouses have gotten married because they see this glimpse of who the other person can be. Like Michelangelo seeing David in the block of marble. When we get married, we sort of see who that person can be in Christ, right? And we focus on that. God makes us almost blind to the other stuff for a season, and we focus on what they can be. And then when we get married, you see, well, we understand there’s other things going on. And our job was like Michelangelo’s job. He said all he did was to take away the bits of the block of marble that wasn’t David.

“Not David. Let’s move that aside. Not Christine. Christine, repent of that. Dennis, this really isn’t who you are. That’s sin. And you need to move that off to the side.” Marriage is about chiseling each other and making beautiful—incredibly dazzling—saints before God. You know, when you get married, I don’t know about you, but my wedding day, I remember Christine coming up the aisle. And I remember it was probably the closest thing I had to being a vision of heaven—kind of like, you know, this a dream reality sort of thing.

Maybe I had low blood sugar. No, didn’t have diabetes yet. But I suppose it’s the same way with you, right? Men, do you remember seeing your wife come up the aisle? You know, you’re in this wonderful tuxedo suit, and you’re looking sharp, and as Chris W. said, even the minister’s looking sharp, right? Everybody’s looking sharp. And the wife looks radiant and beautiful in her gown. And she’s got a—my wife had a radiance to her that morning that was just astonishing as I, as she came up, and the veil was removed from her face.

And they stood here, right, before a minister. We stood there before a minister, a representative of God. Now, that’s the horizon that your marriage is pointed toward. You are headed toward standing before God and not a representative of God. And when you are in heaven after your death and after Jesus’s sanctification work of you here on this life is complete, and then after your death, you are going to be presented to God, and you will be so much more dazzling and beautiful and brilliant than what your spouse looked like on the wedding day.

Your spouse will be, as C.S. Lewis says, we will be tempted to fall down before each other in heaven and worship each other. I will be tempted to worship every one of you in heaven because that’s what Jesus has accomplished. He’s brought you into a beautiful bride without spot or wrinkle or any such thing—dazzling with beauty and brilliance. As I’ve said, Revelation begins with the beauty of Christ, and it ends with the beauty of his bride, the city, right?

And it’s beautiful, bedecked with jewels, wonderful things. That’s who we are. We’re going to be tempted to worship each other in heaven. We are going to be that beautiful and brilliant, reflecting the glory of God himself. Wonderful.

Now, that’s what we’re headed toward. And that’s what marriage is designed—in part and primarily, I think, based on this text. That’s what marriage is given to us for: to help us look like that in eternity, to begin that process now, to love someone in spite of all their flaws, knowing that really in Christ those flaws are not really who they are. They have to be repented of. Jesus has done it definitively and will complete the work at our death. But now in process, Jesus says, “Husbands, love your wives, sanctifying them.” For the purpose of sanctifying them, and by implication, covenantal headship. The wife also is to love her husband in a sanctifying sort of way.

So, you know, that means that when you go home this week and you start thinking, “Well, why are we married? What’s the purpose of this thing?” You know, “Well, just fellowship, you know, whatever.” No, this text, I think, says that the reason you’re married is that God has given you your spouse as the most important tool he’s going to use in your life to make you into a beautiful person that he’s designed you to be.

That’s why you got married. Now, you didn’t know it. I didn’t know it when I got married. In fact, I was looking for exactly the opposite, right? We’re looking for somebody who just loves me the way I am. Don’t change me. We’re told that, right? I can get myself in trouble now, but don’t marry somebody if you want them to change. What I mean, from another perspective. That’s true in one sense. You want to marry who they are. But you want to be committed to their growth in Christ, don’t you?

Aren’t we committed to their growth in Christ? And aren’t we the ones who see each other in the most intimate of moments—when the doors are closed and when we start complaining about this or that person or swearing about this or that event or being boorish or coarsely jesting or, you know, just being—whatever it is, right? Unholy. We see each other that way. And isn’t it our job, no, isn’t it our delightful, joyful duty to assist each other in cleaning up our act and knocking off the non-David bits, right?

You know, I mentioned before we stayed at Denali up in Alaska, and they’ve got, you know, it’s huge mountain. You’re staying there at the foot of this mountain, Mount McKinley. And but you can never see it. It’s raining. It’s cloudy all the time. And then occasionally for an hour or two, the thing will lift. They’ll send phone calls to all the rooms: “You can see the mountain.” You walk outside and “Woo, there’s this beautiful mountain.”

Well, when we get married, we have that glimpse of our spouses that they are these beautiful mountains. We see things that are so admirable and respectable, so wonderful about them. We see these things. But we know, as well—particularly as we get married and go through life together—the clouds come down. And God wants us to be the principal means of the Holy Spirit to blow off the clouds to bring that person to a full revelation of who they’re intended to be in Jesus Christ.

I think that is relationship changing—to have that perspective on what marriage is all about. It is relationship changing. I might get pushback during the Q&A time today. Maybe you think I’m wrong. Maybe you think this is dangerous for marriages. Maybe it is. But I think this text, if we’re honest with it, doesn’t really talk about husbands, you know, teaching their wives, and it doesn’t talk about women making long lists of admiration points to their husbands.

But what it does talk about—the central text in Christian marriage—is that the purpose of all of this is the purposes of Jesus Christ, who came to sanctify his bride and to create her to be without spot or wrinkle—in other words, to sanctify her. And this matches right up with the rest of Ephesians, saying in this particular context the sanctification of who we are through Christ. And then finally, this last point: if this is true, the obvious implications for seeking a mate are there, right?

What do you do? Well, you try to find a pretty girl. Try to find an interesting, exciting guy. Okay. But what should you be looking for is compatibility—not in terms of those things, but someone you can talk to. Someone who you think can—you’ll see a glimmer that they indeed will help you with your sins and difficulties, and they’ll help you, and you’ll be able to help them. Someone that you have a friendship with, not a fatal romantic attraction to.

Someone that you’ll enter into a lifelong relationship with of maturing together in Jesus Christ and of being part of the principal way that God brings about your sanctification. Marriage is a tremendous blessing from God. And it is a blessing primarily not just because of all the benefits it comes with in terms of holding each other up and all that stuff, but because it’s God’s primary means of sanctifying us.

And as we get sanctified, we’re able to exercise dominion in better and better ways.

Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you for marriage. We thank you for the instruction of Ephesians 5. We thank you that marriage’s purpose or mission is indeed to sanctify one another under the control and guidance of your Holy Spirit. We thank you that the end result of this is to exercise dominion in this world—the way that Adam was to do and yet he forsook and lost his ability to do that through sin. Bless us, Lord God, in our marriages this week. May we sanctify each other, and as a result of that, make each other fit—