Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: Marriage and Sanctification—Speaking the Truth In Love

**Ephesians 4:15 | September 2, 2012 | Pastor Dennis R. Tuuri**

We’re in the middle of Ephesians 4, which exhorts us to speak the truth in love. But I wanted to put it in context, so I’ll actually be reading Ephesians 4:1-17. Although the sermon will focus on speaking the truth in love and its relationship primarily to marriage. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

*Ephesians 4:1-17*

I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.

There is one body and one spirit, just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call. One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift. Therefore, he says when he ascended on high, he led a host of captives and he gave gifts to men. In saying he ascended, what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower regions, the earth? He who descends is the one who also ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things.

And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, unto Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love. Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for the walk you command us—a walk distinct from the world around us, those that reject the Lord Jesus Christ. And we thank you that this command of yours is preceded by wonderful instruction of your grace and the mechanisms we’re to use. The people were to submit one to another in the context of the body of Jesus Christ. We thank you, Father, for teaching us in this text the essential tool of speaking the truth in love, one to another.

Bless us now as we seek to meditate upon that, to think about it, to the end that we might put it into action in our families and in this church. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated. We’re going to talk very briefly about the text, and then we’ll do most of the sermon applying the text. So you’ll see on your sermon notes there’s a section on speaking the truth, then one on in love, and then finally grace.

Let me say at the beginning that much of the material—the bulk of the material in this sermon—really comes from or is inspired by Tim Keller’s book, *The Meaning of Marriage*, which I’ve mentioned several times in this sermon series on marriage. It’s a wonderful book, and this particular chapter, I think it’s called “Loving the Stranger,” is particularly good and useful, not just in marriage but in the body of Christ as well.

We’ll talk about the text in just a minute and then move to its application in an extended way. But I wanted to clear up a couple of things first. One thing quickly from last week: we had that handout about superiors and inferiors from the Westminster Larger Catechism, and we were dealing with the relationship of men and women and specifically the goal of marriage, which I think the text in Ephesians 5 says is our sanctification.

Well, apparently this caused a little hubbub among some people—several of the young people particularly. Fifteen years ago, these were terms that were used in a functional way that produced no big reaction. That’s no longer the case. Egalitarianism has kind of spread throughout our culture, and these terms now are in the process of being jettisoned because people read ontology—nature, essence—into them.

I had a friend of mine who talked to a Christian marriage counselor recently, and when the friend mentioned what we believe about this kind of language—that Jesus is the second person, the Son, equal in essence to the Father, but subordinate in terms of function—this is what used to be called the ontological Trinity and the economic Trinity. So they’re equal in essence. Jesus is no less God, right? The Son is the second person, but he has a functional inferiority, a functional subordination to the Father. Well, the Christian marriage counselor had never heard this before. So those are the times in which we live now.

Folks my age and older, and you young folks understand that maybe it’d be good to try to come up with some different terms. It is a danger to use terms that have connotations of ontological or nature inferiority tied to them. But that’s not what these terms meant or mean in the Westminster standards. It simply means that whether you’re a guy who has a boss, or a woman who has a boss, whether we’re in a church that has elders, the civil government—there are all these relationships that are superior and inferior. Not in terms of the people involved—they’re equal in essence or abilities. In fact, the inferior may frequently exceed the superior in abilities. But it’s simply an economic term. And by that I don’t mean money, but the idea of function. So please don’t read any kind of implications in the Westminster standards that women were viewed as inferior to men. They weren’t. And these days, we have to explain these terms. And I hope that does. If it doesn’t, please, young people, if you don’t understand some things that are said from the pulpit or in the service, please hang around long enough to get a question in at the end of the service. That’s why we have the question and answer time—so that when confusion comes up about things like that, we can address it.

So I wanted to remind us: we’re here today to talk about tools for the mission, tools for the goal. And the goal of marriage is articulated for us in Ephesians 5:25-27, where we’re told that husbands are to love their wives. That’s the distinctive thing that’s being portrayed for men here. To love your wife. The wife is to respectfully, reverentially submit—to have a submissive attitude, a desire to follow the lead of the husband. Those are the basic roles. But the husband is said to love his wife, commanded to love her the way that Christ loved the church. And then it says, you know, number one, he’s to love his wife. What does it mean? Well, it means he’s supposed to be self-sacrificial, because the text goes on to say that’s what Jesus did. He laid down his life for the church. So what love means is seeking the other’s well-being first. So husbands are to love their wives by being self-sacrificial for them.

But then it tells us that Jesus washed with water. The text goes on to say this: it says that Jesus gave himself up for her, the church, that he might sanctify her. So there it is. The purpose of the love, the goal of the love—the goal of marriage love—in marriage is sanctification. And then he goes on to talk about that, 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. So those are an extended discussion of what the sanctification is producing—the kind of holiness it’s producing. So marriage is to the end of sanctification.

And since this is language that’s really talking about marriage, after we talked about the sort of stuff we read in Ephesians 4 relative to the whole church, we can say then that really the purpose of marriage itself is sanctification, and that sanctification happens as a result of love. Okay. So that’s where we were at, and I wanted to read a couple of quotes from the Keller book to remind us of what this means. Having directly linked then the marriage to its action—love—and its goal, sanctification—Keller talks about this and he says this:

Within the Christian vision for marriage, here’s what it means to fall in love. It’s to look at another person and get a glimpse of the person God is creating, and to say, “I see who God is making you, and it excites me. I want to be part of that. I want to partner with you and God in the journey you are taking to his throne. And when we get there, I will look at your magnificence and say, ‘I always knew you could be like this. I got glimpses of it on earth, but now look at you.’ Each spouse should settle for nothing less than this as the goal and purpose of their marriage.”

This is what we’re doing with each other in marriage. And this is also, by the way, what we’re doing in the church. Remember that this text is placed in the immediate context of discussions about the body and then relationships, and particular aspects are detailed in Ephesians 5 and 6. But essentially, this is what we do with each other.

You all probably have photos of your marriage, of when you got married, and you look at some of those, and you look at the way you were and the way your spouse was, and it looks great. Tim Keller says that when he looks at his marriage photo, ever since he’s been thinking about this—whenever he marries somebody, and he does it a lot—he has an instinct to tell them, “It’s all downhill from here. You know, the body will age, the wrinkles will come, the enchantment with each other will disappear, you know, fights will occur.” But really, what we’re saying here is the best is yet to come. Won’t it be fine? Right, for you older folks—a nice old song: “The best is yet to come.” Because as we said last week, that’s a picture of the purpose of marriage, which is at the end of married life together. And then through God’s transforming work at our death and resurrection, we’ll stand before the Father looking even better than what we did on our wedding days.

And actually, we stand before the Father now. You know, I’ve been married over 30 years, and I love my wife and I think she’s a better person today than she was then. And I think I am too. So actually, it’s the beginning of something, but it can look like it’s all downhill from here. But understood correctly, it’s not.

Keller says we should say this to each other: “I see all your flaws, imperfections, weaknesses, dependencies, but underneath them all, I see growing the person God wants you to be.”

Now, if we have that, then when the disillusionment of marriage comes, that’s okay, because we know what the purpose is and we’ll redouble our effort and work to accomplish that purpose. If you don’t see, as Keller says, your mate’s deepest flaws and weaknesses and dependencies, you’re not even in the game. Let me say that again. If you don’t—and husbands and wives, listen to me—if you don’t see your mate’s deep flaws and weaknesses and dependencies, you’re not even in the game. You’re not looking. You’re not interacting with each other deeply enough, because we’re all sinners, saved by grace, but sinners.

So I think Keller’s right on that. But if you don’t get excited about the person your spouse has already shown and will, and is growing into and will become, then you’re not tapping into the power of marriage to sanctify one another. And that’s what we want to talk about today. What keeps marriages going is a commitment to the spouse’s holiness. A commitment to the spouse’s holiness, which we call the covenant of marriage. And that’s really what it’s all about.

So what we want to talk about today is one of the biggest tools that God gives us so that we can actually do that—so that we can actually sanctify one another. And as I said, the context for this is the marriage cycle. Right? So marriage is about enchantment at first. You know, most couples I’ve known—a few that it’s not about that, but most couples—enchantment happens, right? And then we talk about disillusionment. The illusion has gone away. And then there’s some response to that, right? And without Christ, without an understanding of what we’re to do, the response usually is to use those old terms—fight or flight. Arguments happen more frequently. Breaking up happens. Or flight happens—people just retreat to their corners. The two spouses live a long, cold marriage. And when they have their 50th wedding anniversary, the kiss will be forced.

So that’s what usually happens in the cycle of marriage. And this is because that enchantment really is an enchantment of sorts. Again, I know this quote has probably been put about quite a bit, but Stanley Hauerwas says this: “We never know whom we marry. We just think we do. Or even if we first marry the right person, just give it a while and he or she will change. Marriage, being the enormous thing it is, means we are not the same person after we have entered it. We will change. The primary problem is learning how to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.”

And I think that’s right, you know. So there is this marriage cycle that happens, and it happens because we’re marrying sinners. We’re marrying sinners. So how do we respond to this? If we think that marriage is all about marrying just the right person—our soulmate for life—and nothing, you know, will be wrong with us, we enter into that marriage and when the disillusionment, when the problems surface, we don’t know what to do. We think we married the wrong person. Jackson Browne had an old song. “When you see through love’s illusions, there lies the danger, and your perfect lover just looks like a perfect fool. So you go running off in search of the perfect stranger, and loneliness seeps from your life like a fountain from a pool.”

That’s the way it works. And that’s what we’re trying to avoid. And we avoid it by understanding what marriage is for. It’s for our sanctification. And then looking at the tools that God equips us with.

Marriage reveals us. That’s the point, right? I mean, you’re married to somebody. You know intimate details of their lives. You see them before the makeup gets put on in the morning, right? And you see them at the end of Sunday when they take the nice outer garments off and they relax and become who they really are again—which means they allow themselves to sin sometimes. There’s nobody, you know, you know better. Unless you’re living a strange marriage, there’s no one you know better than your spouse, and them you, so marriage reveals us. It’s an old Ronnie Milsap song: “There’s a stranger in my house,” and that’s what you find out. And it isn’t some third party—it’s that person. And you’re the stranger to the other person after a while. A little bit of an overstatement, but not much.

We’re not quite what we remember. Marriage at first then enchants us in a way. That’s God’s way of getting us married, I think—that grace of enchantment. And then it disillusions us. But then we are supposed to, if we understand the purpose of marriage and the tools of marriage, roll up our sleeves and get to work. We make it better, and we know that’s the purpose of marriage. We didn’t marry the wrong person. There’s not one person out there that we won’t see as quite a sinner after we’ve been married for a little while.

Marriage tempts us to flight or fight. But God gives us the tools to go about it—it is sort of a fight, but it’s a fight properly, right? It’s going about the right kind of work with each other to enhance the marriage by growing each other in sanctification.

Christian marriage has gospel tools to move us from in-love to love. Okay? So from in-love—you’re in love, you’re enchanted with each other, you get married and the enchantment goes away. But God wants us to move to love. Love is the action that goes on. And so we move away from enchantment, through disillusionment, to actual love, which is a far more powerful tool for doing what God wants done in the marriage, which is our sanctification. And so that’s a far more powerful tool. If all you are is in-love and enchanted—and you’re the perfect person—no sanctification’s going to go on, right? Because why should it? You’re both perfect people and you’re the perfect match. So God gives us these tools to move into a deeper marriage relationship of love.

And these tools are in our text today: to speak the truth in love.

Now our text is talking in grander themes than what I’m going to be using it for today, right? So when we read this, and that’s why I wanted to put it in context, this “speaking the truth in love,” in a way there’s a little mini-chiasm here, right? Paul says that there are those who, by craftiness and deceitful schemes, are ruining, trying to ruin you. They use craftiness and deceitful schemes. And we’re supposed to speak the truth, not deceit. And instead of craftiness and manipulation, we speak the truth in love.

So Paul is talking ultimately about the proclamation of the gospel. Okay? So “speaking the truth” is not really, in its first and foremost interpretation here, what I’m going to talk about today. But what I’m talking about today is an aspect of the gospel. That’s why I call it gospel truth. The truth of the gospel is comprehensive, and it includes all that God is doing with that gospel and what he’s doing with that gospel here, as well as in marriage, as well as in Ephesians 5, is maturation.

We speak the truth in love. To what purpose? Well, the text told us: “so that we might grow up in every way into him who is the head of the church”—or rather, the head, Christ. So that’s very similar language, is it not, to the Ephesians 5 stuff about marriage? And we’ve seen this throughout this marriage series so far. In the previous five sermons, we’ve seen that you never want to think of marriage apart from the church—the body of Christ. It’s a subset of it. And our texts have done that, even in Malachi, where we talk about marriage. Remember, it was preceded by a discussion of partiality and disunity that the priests were doing. So marriage is always placed in this greater context.

And the greater context says, “Speak the truth in love so that you’ll mature into the head in everything.” Some people actually think the text means the cosmos will be perfected. That’s probably not right, but it’s not far wrong. We might grow up in everything. The cosmos might grow up. The cosmos might come to maturity. Well, that’s what God has called mankind to do: to bring the cosmos to maturity. And so that happens by us being brought to maturity. And that happens through speaking the truth in love, as opposed to deceitful speech and speech that is attempting to manipulate other people. So both the content and the way it’s delivered are being discussed.

The goal is sanctification, maturation, which leads to dominion—the taking of the entire cosmos and putting it in right order and developing it and beautifying it. Marriage is one of those things that God uses to affect that. But what I’m saying today about speaking the truth in love—it isn’t restricted to marriage. So singles here, young people, older people that are single, you know, this directly relates to you. This relates to your relationships with other people in the body of Christ, and actually outside the body of Christ, right? The things I’m going to say today have immediate reference to marriage, but this text is far broader, and so the application is broader as well.

Speaking the truth in love, as maybe Calvin or somebody said, is the means in Ephesians 4 of the church’s growth. How does the church grow? The church grows, matures, beautifies through speaking the truth in love. So it is this gospel tool that has great power to affect what God wants to affect.

Now in your outlines, I’ve got under “Speaking the Truth” the costume ball and its modern equivalent—avatars—and Cinderella. So you know, Kegel or somebody talked about the costume ball and how this really has a relationship to our relationships one to the other. The old costume balls, you’d dance all night and talk to people, and they’d have masks on. You don’t know who they are. And at midnight the mask would come off and they would reveal themselves—who they are. Okay, so you’re that person.

These days we have avatars, and it’s interesting because avatars originally meant a personification of a deity. Did you know that? That’s what the original meaning of avatar is—according to the dictionary—originally talking about the incarnation of a particular Hindu deity. But nowadays the term has become broader, right? So an avatar is simply a personality, a character you play in a video game, or an online chat or whatever it is. You can present yourselves as an avatar. It could be all kinds of weird things for people. And so that’s what we do. And then, if we’re going to get past that in a relationship with somebody, at some point we take the avatar off, and this is who we really are.

Well, that’s what marriage does. It’s like Cinderella at the ball, and at midnight—the stroke of midnight happens—and all of a sudden you’re revealed for what you really are, you know? And all of a sudden all the beautiful things you’ve put up to display, powerful or whatever it is, all of a sudden it comes off, and there you are—just you, just unattractive in terms of the ultimate designation of beauty. You know, just you. And it’s a little like judgment day, right? That’s what’s going to happen to us on judgment day. We’re going to stand before Christ without all the pretenses we give to one another. It’s like judgment day, but it’s also like marriage. So now you can go and tell friends, “Yeah, Pastor Tuuri says getting married is like being judged for your sins.” It’s a really bad thing. But that’s what happens in marriage, right? You understand what I’m saying? I’ve kind of probably belabored the point a little bit, but that’s what marriage does.

But there’s a tremendous good thing in that. So Keller uses the illustration of a bridge. He saw a bridge from underneath as a little boy. The bridge had cracks in it, but you really couldn’t see them until a heavy truck went over, and then the cracks that were already there would be revealed. And he doesn’t know why he was standing under such a bridge as a kid, but he was. And the point is this: the cracks weren’t caused by the truck. The truck, the stress, revealed the cracks. And so our marriages don’t cause the problems. Getting married is like a Mack truck being driven through your heart. And it reveals what’s already there. Our self-centeredness is the root of all of our sins. And that self-centeredness is revealed through our marriages.

So, you know, marriage is a diagnostic tool. Keller says he went to the doctor. The doctor found a small lump in his neck. Turned out it was cancerous. Had to go through a lot of rigmarole to get the cancer fixed. He came out clean and all that stuff. He’s okay now. But it was a lot of work getting rid of the cancer. He never once thought, “Gee, I wish he hadn’t have found that lump. That was a lot of hard work.” Because if he doesn’t find the lump, he dies.

So the fact that some of the things that we think—the thing that is most distressing about marriage—that it is this Mack truck, that it does have this revelatory nature in terms of our sinfulness—is actually a good thing. We’re to give thanks in everything, and certainly we’re to give thanks for marriage problems. It might sound weird, but marriage problems almost always are about issues relating to sinfulness in one person’s part or the other, or sometimes both. And without marriage revealing those things, those areas of our sinfulness don’t get dealt with.

You know, the only sins you really are not going to get better at getting away from—the only elements of sins that don’t get helped or healed—are the ones we’re blind to, right? If you’re blind to a particular sin, you’re not going to work on trying to get better about it. And so, you know, if you’ve got this sin stuff going on and you don’t know about it, well, then you’re not going to work on it. You want to work on it. You want to get rid of your sin. And so marriage is one of the largest means that God uses for your sanctification, by making it be a Mack truck driving over your already fractured self, revealing your sins so that you can get rid of them. Sin is slavery and chains and death, and you don’t want more of that. Sin is cancerous stuff in your body, and you want to get rid of the cancer.

And so marriage is a bit of a diagnostic tool about our lives. So that’s why we should give thanks, even for the things that seem to be such a big problem for us—in marriage problems.

So I’ve got a line on the outline of the handout: “I’m kissing marriage counseling goodbye.” I take off on Joshua Harris’s book, *I Kissed Dating Goodbye*. As I studied through all of this and came to realize that sanctification is this purpose and what’s going on in marriage, I thought to myself, “Why would I ever want to do marriage counseling?” You know, if marriage counsel—and I’m talking about problem marriage counseling, where people come to me with marriage troubles—it’s not marriage troubles. It’s sin problems. And a marriage doesn’t sin. The individual people involved in the marriage sin. So that’s why I say, kind of tongue-in-cheek, “I kiss marriage counseling goodbye” here.

If we think that marriage is the problem and we need to fix the marriage and so we get counseling so that we can have a better marriage, we’re going about it all wrong. Marriage reveals sin problems. So when people come to me with marriage problems, I don’t want to dissuade you from doing that. But you have to understand that if you’ve got marriage problems, I’m probably mostly going to address sin problems in a particular spouse’s life, or both spouses’ lives. So you get the point.

Marriage is not the problem. Marriage reveals the problem. That’s not a bad thing. That’s a good thing, because as marriage reveals a problem and you can’t work it out and you come and talk to me, then we’re going to deal with it from that perspective. But most problems can be worked out in marriage if we speak the truth. That’s the point of all this. The point is you need to speak the truth in love to your spouse. You need to be able to discern what those areas of sinfulness are and be able to articulate those to your spouse so that your spouse can be freed of that particular besetting sin.

So speaking the truth, in its immediate application here in terms of marriage, means not overlooking problems—sin that your spouse has—but addressing them in a proper way so that they can be freed of them, right? Now, that’s kind of tricky, and that’s why “in love” is an important part of it. But you have to get to the first part.

The hope in the train wreck is that within the ore that you know your marriage is, your spouse is, after a little while, there is gold in there. And you have to be able to see the gold. See what God is doing in your spouse and help him or her to remove, help him or her get rid of all those bits—as we said before in terms of Michelangelo and David—all the bits of the stone that aren’t David.

So marriage is for sanctification. Ephesians 5 tells us that sanctification happens when we speak the truth to one another, and specifically the application of the gospel and the truth of Jesus’s death and resurrection to remove sins from our life. So when we speak the truth in marriage about each other’s sins, now, we know that we’re, when we’re talking about Christian marriage, that, you know, we want to be careful here, because it’s not one of the problems we have—we think that we are those sinners. That’s our ultimate identity. But that’s not true, right?

Second Corinthians 5 says, “For our sake, he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” God. So we really are gold. It’s not some kind of illusion to talk that way about one another—to say, “I know who you are in Christ, and I want to see that develop, and I want to help you move away from the sin that is marring that or preventing that great reflected light of Jesus Christ to shine from your life.” It really is true that we are this brilliant, beautiful reflection of the Lord Jesus Christ, because that’s what he’s made us into as a result of his saving work on the cross.

And so that’s who we are, and that’s what we want to remind our spouses. That’s who we know they are. But then we want to speak the truth in love.

Marriage, after the disillusionment happens, we want to find somebody better, right? I need a better wife. This is not my beautiful wife. This is not my beautiful car, big car, whatever it is. And this is not my beautiful husband, my great guy. That’s right. It isn’t because you’re a little disillusioned. Are you a little enchanted rather? You do need to find somebody better. If you’re having trouble in your marriage today, and I know probably a lot of us are, that’s what happens in marriage because God is sanctifying us. If you’re having trouble in marriage this week, you need to find somebody better.

But the someone better is a sanctified spouse, the sanctified partner you already have. Jesus wants you to find someone better in your spouse, and he actually is going to use you to make your husband and wife better. So the idea that we just simply accept each other as we are is antithetical. I mean, at one level of course we do this. But to think that’s what it’s all about—just learning to live with each other in all of our sinfulness—that is antithetical to what Christian marriage is for, which is sanctification.

So we do look for somebody better. We do want the stranger in our house to get to be a better person. But the somebody better is the spouse themselves. And we try to speak the truth in love into their life in a way that will make them better.

You know, if you don’t do this, if you think that love is the only thing that’s involved in a marriage and acceptance, you know, it may be because you really are more concerned about praise from men than you are praise from God. If you’re not sure of who you are in Jesus Christ and have the proper identification and image of who you are in Christ, if you’re insecure, the last thing you want to do is speak the truth to your spouse, because that’s going to potentially spark a reaction that you’re not going to like at all. And as a Christian, what you might be tempted to do is to paper that over by saying, “I’m just loving them. I’m just accepting them. I’m just affirming them.” You know, “That’s my job as a spouse—simple affirmation of the other person.”

But I don’t believe that is what your job is. There is a lot of that, of course. But half of your job is speaking the truth to your spouse. Not because you dislike them, not because you’re being just and you know, “I’m going to get justice in this whole thing and you’re going to do what’s right”—that’s not the idea. The idea is, if you care two wits for your spouse, that what you want to do is remove chains, remove enslaving elements and sinful tendencies that they have. Don’t you want to do that? Don’t you want to help the other person to become more and more what God has created them to be?

And if you don’t want to do that, you shouldn’t have gotten married, because Paul says, again, in Ephesians 5, that’s what it’s all about. Jesus engages in self-sacrificial love so that he might sanctify his spouse. And we’re told, earlier in Ephesians 4, that sanctification occurs—the primary tool is speaking the truth in love. That’s the means of maturation of the church. That’s the means of the maturation of our spouses. And that’s what we got to commit ourselves to do.

**Action item**: I’m serious about this action item. Okay. What it says in your handout: empower your spouse to speak the truth to you. Okay. Hebrews 3:13 says, “Exhort one another every day as long as it is called today, so that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.” We’re supposed to do this generally with each other, right, Christian people? This is what we’re supposed to do generally. And the person that knows you best, that knows your sins most, that knows what chains enslave you the most, is the very person who has the key to release those chains more often than not. They’re the most powerful releaser of you from sin that you’ve got.

And if you care to bless the Lord Jesus Christ by a life of increasing commitment and service, then you want to be freed from sins and you want to say to your spouse, “I empower you. You may speak to me the truth about sins that you see in my life that need to be dealt with and need to be overcome. Please do that.”

Now, if you don’t care about growing in holiness and service to Christ, well, the door is right there. I mean, there’s no point in being here. There really isn’t. I mean, if you don’t want to grow in holiness, you shouldn’t be here, because this is what we’re doing. This is what Christianity is. Christianity isn’t a little saver for the normal life you have, and this is just a little thing to take care of your conscience or something so you’re okay with Jesus. No, Jesus says if you love me, you know, you’ll follow me. You’ll be my disciples. You’ll obey my laws. You’ll follow me. And if you’re not sold out for Jesus, all this doesn’t make any sense to you. And in fact, it’s going to make your life a lot worse, because your spouse now, if they are sold out to Jesus, is going to bug you about it. And I’m glad, because we need to get serious about being followers of Jesus Christ.

You know, we’re talking about re-envisioning the parish. We’re not just talking about it. We are doing it. Please pray for me. I’m writing up stuff this week that’ll be discussed at our next elder meeting or two. This is the goal. I was talking to Dean Helix, a CRC pastor up in Washington State, and they’ve got community groups. They call them crews. So I’m part of this crew or that crew—cool. And they base them on Ephesians 4, the text I just read—that what we’re trying to accomplish. Whether you call them community groups, parish groups, crews, whatever they are—homeboys, whatever it is, you know—the purpose of that is discipleship, it’s growth, it’s maturation.

And I think we need to kind of build more of that into what we’re trying to do through smaller groups than what happens on the Lord’s day, to take the maturation that’s happening in the service into our neighborhood and community groups, and very importantly, according to Paul, into our marriages.

So I encourage you today: jot a little note right now if you want to. But do it. Because you know, there’s an empowering effect if you tell your spouse, “Look, please do what Pastor Tuuri says. If you know there are problems I need to work on, please speak the truth to me about them, because I want to be a better Christian.”

When we do that with our spouses, you see, we empower them. Now they’re not fearful. Plus, it empowers you not to react in anger or bitterness or pouting or whatever it is you tend to do when your spouse is critical of you. So I think it’s a very important step to say, “You have my permission to speak to me hard truths about my life, about sins that I need to work on.”

So that’s the first action item. Now, the problem with that is that if what we’ve done is we’ve just given our spouses a big hammer, and they can do a lot of damage. You know, because if the spouse, you know, is feeling superior to you, you’re just not as good as them, if they’ve got attitude, you know, an attitude or whatever going on when they speak that truth, and you just told them you can speak truth to my life, now they think—you know, like the 99% speaking truth to power, right? Okay, great. I’m glad you told me that, because you got a lot of stuff in your life that’s really junky.

And so when we do that, think of it: if your spouse is the person who is best able to understand you, your sins and your difficulties, your weaknesses, right? Your spouse is also the person that is most able to absolutely crush you. This is your soulmate. This is the one that God has tied you to. This is the one you are enchanted with and in love with, at least at some point, right? And if that spouse, that spouse, in other words, has tremendous ability to absolutely crush you by not speaking the truth in love.

And so the first gospel truth is Jesus speaks the truth to us. The gospel truth, which includes a message about our sin. But the other gospel power, the gospel truth, or the gospel message, is that Jesus loves us. And so when we do this, when we talk to our spouses and try to develop them, we want to speak the truth in love. And part of what that means is reminding our spouses about who you really are. You’re not this sinful person. The real you is in Jesus Christ. You’re in union with Christ. You’re a brilliant shining saint.

I think it was C.S. Lewis that says, you know, when we go to heaven and when the maturation process is affected, or when Jesus returns, we’re going to look at our spouses and we will be tempted to worship them. I mean, the human being is the reflection of Jesus Christ. We are going to have such glory, holiness, and beauty to us in the eternal state. You know, if we saw such a person here, just like John saw the angel—even more than that—we’re going to be tempted to go down on our knees and worship that person.

Now, that’s who we are. That’s who we are positionally in Jesus Christ in the heavenlies. And that’s what Jesus is doing with us, each one of us, right? And so speaking the truth doesn’t just mean talking about sin. Speaking the truth in love is reminding our spouses that’s who they are. And the only thing you’re trying to do is help them develop that. You’re trying to get rid of the bits that aren’t David, right? You’re trying to heal the stress fractures that were there before the marriage so that you can be a wonderful, powerful bridge. You’re trying to remove the stains, as Jesus says, you know, the blemishes, so that you’ll be presented ultimately to God the Father in brilliant, radiant glory—the glory being that you are fully revealed.

So speaking the truth in love means the truth isn’t limited to diagnosis. As important as that is, the truth is that person is who they are in Jesus Christ. And love means reminding them of the love of Jesus Christ that has created that reality.

Keller again—this is the real you. This is the real me. This is what God wants us to be. This is what has got to go—these sins—and we’ve got to work together against those sins. See, that’s part of speaking the truth in love.

**In Love**

Again, let me read this quote by Keller. It involves this phrase “praise of the praiseworthy” that comes from *The Lord of the Rings*. It might have other origins in literature, I don’t know. But Keller relates it back to Faramir in *Lord of the Rings*. Keller says this:

“If my wife, and so this is now about the power of loving someone and telling someone how good they are—not just their sins and difficulties.”

Okay. You know, your spouse. This is the person you were enchanted with, in love with, still in love with. This is the person who means the most to you in the world. And it’s because of that, truth without love can crush you. But because of that as well, statements of praise and respect and honor have tremendous power to heal you of your own insecurities and lack—you know, it’s who can believe that Jesus died for us and is saving us? Who can believe that? It’s only the spirit of God that tells us that, right? And so we believe that for that reason. But anyway, so Keller says this:

“If my wife, after years of living with me—and that’s the other thing, you know, when the stress fractures are revealed, when the sins are revealed—who do we sin against most? Our wives, our husbands. They’re the ones we can feel at home with. Means more often than not, we can sin with or against. So, you know, marriage has this power. But it’s difficult for the spouse because they’re not just being a diagnostic tool with you. When they find the cancer, usually that cancer is spurting out at them and trying to attach to them and attacking them. So it really takes the grace of God, which we’ll talk about in a minute, to move beyond reaction to sins against us to seeing the need to help our spouses.”

Okay, so anyway, back to the Keller quote:

“If my wife, after years of living with me, says, ‘You are one of the kindest men I know,’ that goes in deep. That affirmation is profoundly comforting. Why? Because she knows me better than anyone else. And if over the years you have grown to love and admire your spouse more and more, then his or her praise will get more and more strengthening and healing to you.”

As Faramir says to Samwise in *The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers*, “The praise of the praiseworthy is above all rewards.” The praise of the praiseworthy is above all. We love our spouses. They’re the praiseworthy ones. And when they praise us, well, this is the highest praise we can receive. To be highly esteemed by someone you highly esteem is the greatest thing in the world.

This principle explains why ultimately, to know that the Lord of the universe loves you is the strongest foundation that any human being can have—because ultimately the praiseworthy one is Jesus Christ. And when Jesus tells us, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant,” through the mouths of others on this earth (not just in eternity), then this is tremendously affirming to us.

So speaking the truth in love—the speaking in love—those things is a tremendous power and tool for our sanctification. Speaking the truth, but speaking the truth in love. More than any other human relationship, marriage has a unique power to heal all hurts and convince us of our own distinctive beauty and worth. Boy, isn’t that true?

How do we do it? Well, you know, here Keller talks about love currencies, love languages. You probably heard about that. Wavelengths, right? If I’m sending out a signal on a particular wavelength and you’ve got a radio, but you’re tuned to a different wavelength, you’re not going to hear me. You’re going to hear something else, right? So we got to be dialed in together.

If I’m, you know, talking to when I go to Poland and I talk to one of these Ukrainians and I say, “Boy, you’re really a great person,” it doesn’t mean anything to them because they don’t understand a word I’m saying. So, you know, in relationships, we can speak things to each other in language that might make sense to us but is not the language of the other person.

So Keller uses the illustration of “Finders Keepers.” Shortly after they were starting to have kids, baby has a dirty diaper. Keller sees the dirty diaper. He says, “Oh, you know, Kathy, the baby needs changing.” And Kathy says, “FindersEpers.” Because in her house, you know, that was the way love is expressed—was either one that found the dirty diaper would change it. And in Keller’s household, the way love is expressed is his dad worked long hours and stuff, and the mom took care of all those domestic duties.

Now, neither way is right or wrong. There are different ways of expressing love, right? So in one household, the husband expresses love for the wife by changing the diapers whenever he finds them. In the other one, the wife is always changing the diaper because that’s how she expresses love to her husband. Neither is right or wrong. And coming from those backgrounds, they have different love languages. They’re sending out different signals and receiving on different wavelengths, right?

And so the problem is that’s what happens in our marriages. Keller says, “Kathy was actually saying, at a semiconscious level, ‘If you love me the way my father loved my mother, you would change the diaper.’ And I was saying in my heart, ‘If you love me the way my mother loved my father, you wouldn’t even be asking me.’ Each of us heard the other one saying, ‘I don’t love you,’ because each of us were failing to get love in the particular way we felt was emotionally valuable to us.

So in order to speak the truth in love, we have to know the language of our partner. How they interpret what—how do you spell love? And hopefully it’s not M-O-N-E-Y. (Fabulous Thunderbirds, anyway.) So how do you spell love, right? How do you, what communicates love to you? And you know, from person to person, that’s quite different based, as Keller was talking about, in terms of backgrounds. It’s also quite different between men and women. They really are different sexes, and they really do differ, right, down to the genetic code and in everything else. And so there are differences—both personal differences and sexual differences, gender differences—as to how love is interpreted and received and expressed.

R.C. Sproul, apparently, on one of his birthdays, he wanted something that he would never buy for himself. He wanted, really what he wanted was a set of golf clubs. And his wife bought him six beautiful new shirts—white shirts. I remember when Joanna and I bought Charity a mattress set—not mattress, sheets and blankets or something like this, some bedding for her—when Charity was a little kid. You know, to Joanna, this is a great gift. And Charity was like, “What?” And I remember getting socks for Christmas when I was a kid.

So R.C. gets these white shirts. Okay. What he really wanted was golf clubs. And then when it comes around to her birthday, today, he wants to lavishly express his love. So he buys her a fur coat. But what she really wanted was a new washer and dryer. Right?

So the question is: how do we express this love? If speaking the truth in love is one of these great tools, how do we express love? And consider, as I say on your handout today, if a lot of your fights or disagreements aren’t about different love languages. Keller shares the story of “Finders Keepers” to show that they had a fight, but the fight wasn’t because they really disagreed about anything. It was they both were hearing the wrong thing from the spouse. It was a love language problem. It was a translation problem.

And so, you know, look at some of your conflicts and think, “Well, maybe a lot of those are that.” On your handouts today, I’ve given some very practical ways to help you with this. I’ve given you two things. One is a two-page form that could serve as a good discussion between you and your spouse about ways that love is expressed. And that comes from the five love languages people. And I’m not endorsing that. I don’t know about any of that. But it’s just a tool to use to start a discussion, right? But I think it’s a useful tool. And then I’ve also given you “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”—no, “50 Ways to Express Love.” I think we—I’m going to maybe write a new song: “50 Ways to Love Your Lover.” That’s a Paul Simon reference.

Well, and here’s, let me read a couple of these really quickly. So from the “50 Ways” list, and this is on your handouts as well. Here are “50 Ideas to Get Your Started Toward Inspiring an Eight-Cow Wife.” And you have to read the thing to get to know what an eight-cow wife is. Anyway, and this first one’s so important:

“Be a student of her. Where do her passions, gifting, and abilities lie? What energizes her? When does she lose track of time because she’s enjoying herself so much? What weights does she bear?” So be a student of your wife. And I would say that goes both ways. Be a student of your spouse. Try to figure out what things they really like, so that you can communicate love. You can get the right sort of gifts. You can say the right sorts of things in a language that they understand. Okay. So to study our spouses is a really good thing. And if you just sort of assumed that “I married the perfect soulmate. We’re not any troubles. There’s really not much reason to study. You’ve already done all that. You got the mate and that’s it.” But if you want to move from in-love to love—long-lasting relationships of sanctification, growth, and development that mirror Jesus and the bride—well, then you’ve got to study each other. You got to realize you don’t really know much.

Two: “Ask God for special wisdom in understanding your wife and in loving her well.”

Three: “Make a list of 30 things that you love and or appreciate about her. Write them on separate sticky notes and have one somewhere in the house every day for an entire month.”

Well, you can read the lists. But these are excellent lists. Not necessarily that you would agree that this is the way to love your wife or this is the way to love your husband, but to get you to think about and to have some discussions with your spouses about how do they indeed spell love? What’s their expression of love—one to the other—or that they would understand from you?

**Grace—The Grinding Compound That Beautifies**

And then finally, gospel truth of grace. How can you possibly give this kind of love and truth without the grace of God being at work in your life? Ultimately, marriage is reflecting the relationship of Christ and the believer, not just Christ and the church. And if you don’t have a reservoir of love currency to give to somebody else, well, then you’re not going to be able to give it. To give love, respect, admiration to your spouse, you have to have someplace that comes from. And the place that comes from is the grace of God in Jesus Christ, who has loved you—not overlooking the truth of your sinfulness, but taking that sinfulness upon himself and dying for you—and so fills your heart with his love, right? The Holy Spirit sheds abroad his love in our hearts by grace. And that grace is the lubricant that, injected into our marriages, creates beautiful gemstones, right?

As I understand it, you have these rock tumblers. You put a couple of rocks in there, and you tumble them. The right kind of rocks. And the idea is to get out beautiful gemstones. That’s marriage. Whether you know it or not, you didn’t marry a gemstone, okay? You might be a pretty good guy, pretty good gal, but they’re not gemstones yet. If they were, they wouldn’t have any need for marriage. God brought you into marriage because you need it for your sanctification. You need to be placed in the tumbler.

But if you don’t put in the grinding compound (as I understand it, again—at least in the illustration), the rocks may bounce off of each other, right? And they don’t really interact. And this is the marriage where flight is the primary mechanism—not physical flight, but emotional flight, right? You just move farther apart. You don’t really ever interact. And at the end of 30 years together, you’re just as ugly as you were at the beginning spiritually.

Or you can get other rocks that bang together, and the problem with them is they bang together without the grinding compound, and they break each other. They shatter each other, right? And so fighting happens all the time. They’re trying—sanctification’s the deal. “We got to get this thing right. We’re not working together very well. You keep working at it and the whole thing breaks.” And after, you know, 15, 20, 30 years, one spouse just leaves. It’s over. And even if they don’t leave, the marriage is dead. You’ve destroyed each other in your marriage by fighting without the grace of God, speaking the truth, trying to do it in love, but without grace.

But when grace is put into that grinder, and those two stones then interact with the lubricant of the grinding compound, then the process produces beautiful gemstones, okay?

So the purpose of marriage is sanctification. And today we’ve talked about one of the great—three great tools—of that sanctification: speaking the truth in love, with grace being the attitude that’s involved in all of those discussions. And God says that’s a great tool.

Next week we’ll talk about another tool that God gives us, and that’s friendship in the context of marriage.

Let me finish with this quote:

“Friendship is a deep oneness which develops as two people speaking the truth in love to each other journey together to the same horizon. Spiritual friendship is the greatest journey of all, because the horizon is so high and far, yet that sure, it’s nothing less than the day of Jesus Christ, and what we will be like when we finally see him face to face, as the Apostle John writes.”

That’ll be what we talk about next week.

Praise God for the wonderful thing he’s doing with us as we point toward that great horizon in our marriages.

Let’s pray.

Lord God, we thank you for today. We thank you for your word. We thank you for admonishing us to speak the truth in love as a tool, as a mechanism to achieve this great goal of joint sanctification in our marriages. Help us, Father, to be rocks mixed together that produce beautiful gemstones by the grace of your Holy Spirit in our conversations with our mates, by speaking the truth, and by committing ourselves to our spouse to only speak the truth in love.

Bless us to this end. May we now, each of us, as we come forward—whether we’re married or not—commit to within the body of Christ, speaking the truth in love, all in the context of grace. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.