Dennis Tuuri

# Christ the King Sunday: Marriage, Part Twelve

about Christ the King Sunday as we conclude our twelve-part series on marriage. And I want us to remind ourselves throughout today’s sermon that the king is a king who has laws and those laws are really the secret, the great source of blessing in our marriages. So please stand for the reading of both the first and last group of eight verses of Psalm 119, which most of you will know as an acrostic. So this is the alpha and the omega, as it were, of Psalm 119.

Psalm 119 beginning with verse one. “Aleph. Blessed are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the Lord. Blessed are those who keep his testimonies, who seek him with their whole heart. Who also do no wrong but walk in his ways. You have commanded your precepts to be kept diligently. Oh that my ways may be steadfast in keeping your statutes. Then I shall not be put to shame, having my eyes fixed on all your commandments.

I will praise you with an upright heart when I learn your righteous rules. I will keep your statutes. Do not utterly forsake me.” And dropping down to verse 169: “Let my cry come before you, oh Lord. Give me understanding according to your word. Let my plea come before you. Deliver me according to your word. My lips will pour forth praise for you teach me your statutes. My tongue will sing of your word, for all your commandments are right.

Let your hand be ready to help me, for I have chosen your precepts. I long for your salvation, O Lord, and your law is my delight. Let my soul live and praise you, and let your rules help me. I have gone astray like a lost sheep. Seek your servant, for I do not forget your commandments.”

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for our Savior, that this is his heart we’re reading here. And we pray, Lord God, that you would make it our heart as well, to know your scriptures, to know your word, your law, and to see your Bible as a law word to us as well as a grace word. Bless us, Lord God, as we conclude now a series of looking at your word, your law in reference to marriage and singleness. We pray your blessing upon this congregation. Your peace, Lord God, would be the result of us attaining to these statutes, to a knowledge of them, and to diligently keeping them. Bless us toward that end by your Holy Spirit today. In Jesus name, the King, we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

So Christ the King is a fairly modern addition to the liturgical calendar. Most of you will know, hopefully, that there are two halves of the liturgical year. And we’re kind of liturgy-light here, calendar-light, but we do sort of follow it. And that’s why the church has been dressed or adorned for Advent season. The first half of the church year begins really with Advent, Christmas, Epiphany. And so that first half of the church year is about the life of Christ.

And the first half of the first half is the first three months, roughly corresponding to the Advent of Jesus, his birth, and his life—his birth rather—and the presentation into the world at Epiphany. And then the second half of the first half. So we have the first three months, and then the second three months. The second half of the first half focuses on the end of his life. So the Advent, the beginning of his life, and then the end of his life. Being a season starts with Lent and then moving through Good Friday, Resurrection Sunday, and then the Ascension of Jesus, which is the great culmination of the first half of the church year.

And if we talk about Christ the King, well, Ascension Day, which is not a Sunday—it’s a Thursday, right?—but I think we’re going to do something for Ascension Day this year here at RCC. But Ascension Day really is the kingdom aspect. Christ the King is focused on there. And we do that every Ascension time to remind ourselves that the story doesn’t end with death, burial, and resurrection for our sins. It concludes with him at the right hand of the Father, from whence he shall reign until all his enemies be made his footstool through the preaching of his gospel.

And then the second half is the ordinary season. Pentecost is this transition from the life of Jesus to the life of the church. And then for six months we don’t really have any special feast days. It’s the ordinary time. Ordinal, meaning numbered time. First Sunday after Pentecost, second Sunday, third Sunday. And this is about the life of the church. So the life of Jesus, right, becomes then the life of the church because the Spirit comes to bring reigning King Jesus to his people, and we do the deeds as Christians that Jesus did and wants us to do to conquer the world, so to speak, through the preaching of the gospel. Okay, the good news that Jesus is at the right hand of the Father.

So we’re now at the end of so-called ordinary time, the life of the church, the last half of the church year. Life of Jesus, life of the church, his coming and then his leaving, right? And then the life of the church. And next Sunday is the first Sunday in Advent. So we begin the cycle all over again, right? We’re down here at the end of the church year now. It’s the last Sunday.

And maybe in the last fifty, sixty years, some churches have started to celebrate Christ the King Sunday on the last Sunday. And there are different motivations, but we’re not real big on it here. We don’t normally do it, or sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. But the thing it could teach is that Jesus as King is at the end of the church year. But we know Jesus as King, at the right hand of the Father, is what begins the church’s half of the church year. So you know, we don’t want to postpone the idea of Christ’s kingdom till some distant future. He reigns now at the right hand of the Father.

On the other hand, a pastor friend of mine in Illinois said, “Well, I’m doing Christ the King because people can’t hear about that enough.” Now, that’s good. And here, as we conclude our series on marriage, I want us to remember that what we’ve been talking about, based on the scriptures in terms of marriage and singleness, is really the King’s words to us, the King’s law for us.

And so I want us to understand the relationship of Christ the King, reigning forever—right, of course he’s going to return at his Second Coming. But Christ as King now has a rule, has a law, has rules for us, commandments for us, to give us knowledge of what marriage is and can be both to convict us of our own sins, but also then to prepare us to do a better job in our marriages. So that’s what I want to do today.

I want to focus, and it’s a little bit indirect, I suppose, but I want to focus on the importance of Christ the King and his rather radical commandments. Remember, they are radical. Remember that when Paul commends singleness to us in Corinthians, this is a radical alteration. There’s nothing really ultimately conservative about Christianity or traditional. It is radical in that it gets to the root of problems.

And the root of the problem of man in terms of marriage is to think that marriage is the end goal and marriage serves us rather than the kingdom. And that singleness must be inferior. This is what cultures have taught for six thousand years since the fall. And the Bible, Jesus’s law to us, says: If you’re single, do not think of yourself in some sort of inferior way. It’s a calling from God. And not only is it a calling from God, it’s a gift.

It’s not the gift of celibacy I’m talking about, because who knows, you may get married. But if you’re single, you’re a gift to this church. Now, I’m going to talk about spiritual gifts after the first of the year, and we’ll talk about gifts. But that also is found in Corinthians, the same place where he tells us that singleness is this gift. Single people, I think you got a little excited about that idea. Some of you did when I preached on it. Have you done anything about it? Do you have a different attitude relating to different actions? Do you have more of a commitment to use the uniqueness of your singleness as a gift to the church? It’s not a gift to you. You’re a gift to the church, which is also a gift to you, I suppose, but it’s indirect. That’s radical stuff.

That’s the law of God that we just read about from Psalm 119 that changes the face of the Church. Okay? That will change the cultures if we apply it correctly. And the same thing’s true of marriage. We saw how radical the equality of men and women that’s portrayed again in Corinthians. You know, just look at in terms of physical ownership of each other’s bodies. You know, we have an order to the relationship in terms of headship and submission, but we must—let’s never let that cause us to think in terms of some sort of ontological or nature inferiority.

No, Paul makes it out of his way to make clear the absolute equality of men and women, as does his epistle to the Galatians. “No more Jew or Gentile, no more male or female. Wholeness has come to the world.” And when we pit the sexes against one another—either by saying there’s no difference—right, that’s a lie. There are differences down to the genetic structure in every part of your body. You are different. And it’s not just physical. It’s all kinds of other ways. If we say there’s no difference, we’re denying God’s law, which instructs us that there is a difference. Or if we say the difference means that women are inferior, that’s a denial, a hellish denial of the reality of equality.

God’s word is radical. And it challenged the Roman culture. It shook it like this in terms of singleness. And in terms of marriage, marriage was not seen just for legal purposes, progeny, or to maintain property. The physical pleasure of marriage is affirmed by Paul in relationship to both parties, owning each other’s bodies and being encouraged to engage in regular sexuality as a married couple. Radical, radical, radical.

And our culture, you know, is becoming more and more away from the scriptures on these issues. So the King has these laws. These laws really were radical for shaking the Roman culture, and they should be radical for us today to help reestablish Christianity in the midst of a culture that’s leaving Jesus. And we’ve got radical things to say to this culture about marriage and singleness.

All right. Now, what I want to do then is look briefly at these verses from Psalm 119, just to remind ourselves of some uses or some purposes of the law, some elements of the law. Some observations now on law and the Christian life from Psalm 119, from the bookends of it, right? The bookends of this psalm.

And so if you look at Psalm 119, if you have your scriptures open, if you don’t, please open them. We’re going to look at these verses for a little bit and just draw some easy but important lessons for us. Some observations, I guess, is a better way to put it. How does Psalm 119 start? We’re going to read Psalm 128 at the communion table about the blessedness of married life, etc. Well, that’s what it starts here, right? Just like Psalm 1 started with blessings: “Blessed are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the Lord. Blessed are those who keep his testimonies, who seek him with their whole heart.”

The law, rejection of the law of God is rejection of the source of blessing. It is to cut yourself off from the blessings of God. Now, who would want to do that? So this—the law is the source of blessing to us. Number one.

Number two, it’s to be kept, walked in, observed, etc. It’s not just interesting information, right? It tells us stuff that we’re supposed to do. And if you’ve listened to these eleven sermons, or any of them, and you’ve heard the word of God being taught in terms of how marriages are supposed to work, that’s God’s law for you. And it doesn’t help your marriage to hear it and not do it. In fact, Jesus makes it quite clear that not only does it not help your marriage to hear and not do, you’re going to be cursed with knowledge that you haven’t obeyed. Increased knowledge brings increased responsibility to do it.

And listen, you know, this is what as this psalm opens up about the law: blessing. But the blessings are for those who walk in the law of the Lord, not who know it and don’t walk, who seek him with their whole heart, who walk in his ways. These laws are to be kept diligently. Verse four, verse five: “My ways might be steadfast in keeping your statutes.”

All right? So these verses tell us that, you know, law is source of blessing, but over and over again: walk, be diligent, keep them, follow them. It doesn’t do any good to know neat things about marriage that other people don’t know if you’re not going to do it. If you do it, then our marriages and our singleness will be blessed by God. And this congregation will increase in blessedness.

You know, we had you take that inventory online. I think twenty-six couples here got a full deck of fifty-two cards. Twenty-six couples took that online marriage thing, and we’ve got back the report on that. And I was thinking about it—we’re having an elder meeting on Wednesday. I’m going to talk to the guys about maybe we should make copies available for you, because it’s pretty interesting information. I mean, they rate then your compatibility, how satisfied you are, and also how much are in agreement within your couple in a positive way in various areas. And then there’s a personality thing at the end. The personality thing is interesting. I don’t know. Those things tend to be not that accurate. But if it’s accurate, it says we’re kind of reserved. We’re not really—we’re not the party church. It’s sort of too bad. I think I got to work on that. But anyway.

But it’s interesting because in terms of spiritual beliefs, that’s one section of the inventory. Why couldn’t ask for hardly anything better? Well, there was one or two women. But I’m not kidding you: one hundred percent of the men, ninety-eight percent of the women satisfied with their spirituality, basic agreement. I mean, that you’re off the charts in terms of your commitment to this stuff that I teach and preach and what the scriptures say. You’re off the charts. Okay? You are doing wonderful.

Now, as it relates to communication, conflict resolution, sexual satisfaction—well, you’re good. You’re good. You’re good, but you’re not off the charts. Okay? You’re over, you know, you’re kind of up there, but there’s work to be done. There’s work to be done. And that makes sense. You know, you learn stuff and then you try to apply it. You fail and you try to apply it some more. You’re growing, right? But that’s the point here: you learn it, but you learn it to do it. And as you do it, you’ll be more satisfied. That’s one of the main rankings of this inventory.

And in this area, we can maybe give you copies of at least some of it. One of the main rankings is satisfaction. Your satisfaction will go off the charts as you apply what you learn in your core commitment to spiritual values and the word of God. So blessing comes from keeping, walking, and observing, being diligent to do the law of God.

And notice the comprehensiveness of this, right? Both of our seeking him. But then of course in terms of the law of God: “Blessed are those who keep his testimonies, who seek him with their whole heart.” We’ve got to be comprehensive. Our whole heart means all of our being. We want the law of God to address everything that we are. It doesn’t just mean having a lot of energy or desire. I don’t think it means that. I think it means seeking him with your whole heart, that it would be reflected to you the light of God and what I should do in terms of my vocation, my friends, my recreation, my—you know, what I do with my spare time—how, you know, how I enjoy life. What I do comprehensive. The law of God is comprehensive in its scope. And so it should be to us. Every bit of our marriage should be impacted by the law of God as it relates to it. Every bit of our singleness, you see, doesn’t mean you can’t have fun. It means just the reverse.

There are all kinds of verses in the Bible about rejoicing and having fun. The Old Testament, right? A whole bunch of feast days, only one required fast day. You know, God’s into feasting, and so we should be too. So it’s comprehensive.

Fourth, it keeps us from shame. You know, shame is what is talked about in this psalm. Where does it say that? Okay. “Kept diligently. Oh, yeah. Verse six: ‘Then I shall not be put to shame, having my eyes fixed on all your commandments.’ Okay? And that’s preceded by verse five: ‘Oh, that my ways may be steadfast in keeping your statutes. Then I shall not be put to shame, having my eyes fixed on all your commandments.’”

So, you know, if you got shame in your life, the way to take care of shame is not, you know, recovering yourself on your own terms. Recovering, right? Recovering like Adam and Eve did. But the cure to your shame is dealing with your sin, which is disobedience to the commandments. So the commandments and the keeping of them—the word of God, the law word of God to us, which is a grace word—the law, the word of God, is the key to avoiding or resolving shame. Okay? So it keeps us from shame.

It results in praise, right? So the psalmist here is praising God in the midst of all of this, right? So he says in the first two verses: “Blessed are those who do this. Walk in them. Keep them diligently. It’ll keep us from shame.” And then verse seven: “I will praise you with an upright heart when I learn your righteous rules. Keep your statutes. Don’t forsake me.” So the law of God is the basis for our praising him.

And if you don’t have a heart that utters praise of God and formal worship or in your home, well, probably one thing you need to do more is meditate on the word of God and its application to your life, to his law, the law of God. And a knowledge of it and an obedience to it results in praise. And that’s the way the first eight verses work. The first word of each of those eight lines begins with the Hebrew letter Aleph. If they’re a unit, it moves then through knowing, keeping, being kept away from shame, and actually being led into praise. That’s the progression of that.

In the same way, the last eight verses have sort of a progression as well. So verse 169: “Let my cry come before you. Give me understanding according to your word. Let my pleas come before you. Deliver me.” And so it starts with prayer, but then it utters into this praise as well: “My lips shall forth your praise, for you teach me your statutes. My tongue will sing of your word, for all your commandments are right.”

Okay, so the way the last eight verses work is it begins with prayer, in the middle is praise based upon his statutes, and then it ends with prayer again. But again, the law of God is key to our praise and to our worship. You know, I’m saying all this because we live in a culture now, a Christian culture, even when people are trying to write good books about marriage and do good things and all this stuff. Nobody really wants to talk about the law anymore. It’s an incredible thing. I mean, because in the scriptures, one of our things that we believe is this law.

Jesus says, you know, “Keep my commandments if you love me.” It’s not some burdensome thing to us. There were aspects of the law that have been fulfilled in Christ that kept people apart—Jew and Gentile, men and women. They couldn’t come to church sometimes at different times. But those things are all now complete. Jesus has brought us together. But the law of God is the whole word of God. And why we would want to back away from talking about the law is beyond me.

It’s the source of our praise. It corrects our shamefulness. You know, it leads into salvation as we see here. So that’s why we’re doing this. What we’ve taught about marriage and what we teach every Lord’s day from this Sanctuary is law to us, and it’s not law that’s burdensome. It’s law that gives delight. So it’s the source of prayer. I said source of praise. I meant now it leads us to prayer, right? Seeking deliverance.

So that’s what the last things are: “Let my cry come before you. Give me understanding. Let my plea come before you. Deliver me according to your word.” So the law of God, which is what this entire psalm is about, encourages prayerfulness on the part of God’s people. So if your prayer life isn’t what it should be, then maybe it’s because your meditation on, delight in, and understanding of God’s law isn’t what it should be.

We have a culture today that doesn’t want to spend time learning about the scriptures, that doesn’t really care. In fact, we’re negatively disposed toward law and judgment, right? We don’t like that stuff. And then we have a culture, a Christian culture, that doesn’t have much of a prayer life. We don’t know what that is anymore. We sort of act like little six- or seven-year-olds in church. We sing little choruses over and over like little kids do because we don’t know what we’re doing anymore. We can’t sing praise. Our prayer life isn’t very good. Why? Because we’ve rejected the foundation of all these things—the word of God. And the law of God is the foundation that produces prayer and produces praise.

And so this prayer, you know, concludes with prayer as well. So in verse one seventy-three: “Let your hand be ready to help me, for I have chosen your precepts. I long for your salvation, O Lord, and your law is my delight. Comprehensive salvation in its fullest sense—not just, you know, fire insurance—but salvation from all the elements of curse around us. Wholeness, right? That is directly linked here to a diligence of keeping the law of God: ‘Your law is my delight,’ right? And that’s linked to the prayer for salvation: ‘I long for your salvation.’”

“Let my soul live and praise you. Let your rules help me.” Okay. Again, so if we want life, it’s the rules of God that will help us to attain this. And then finally: “I have gone astray like a lost sheep. Seek your servant, for I do not forget your commandments.”

You know, the law is not in opposition to grace. The guy that pens all this stuff about the law, right, he’s penning it as a sinner, one who goes astray. Now, I said it was the heart of Jesus. Our sins, the straying, is imputed to him on the cross. He didn’t go astray. But the original writer of this song, and us who sing it, we do go astray. “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it.” Right? So the very culmination of this great paean, this great ode to God’s law, is an acknowledgment that the law is always granted graciously to us. It’s never a means of salvation. It brings us to an acknowledgment of our shortcomings so that God might give us that law graciously to seek us who are not forgetting his commandments. We don’t have disdain for God and his ways. But it comes to us graciously.

There are many verses that would reflect that. But for instance, in verse twenty-nine of this same psalm: “Put false ways far from me and graciously teach me your law. Graciously teach me your law.” Law is always put in the context of grace. God’s word is always a law word to it, commands us, but it does so graciously. We don’t earn anything. We’re not here first and foremost to serve God. That’s not why you came here today. If you did, you got the liturgy wrong. You don’t start things and then God responds to your service. Uh-uh. The whole thing, every part of the liturgy, starts with the grace of God reaching out to serve you. Okay? And so he serves you with glory. He serves you with a knowledge of things, and he gives you this wonderful gift of rejoicing life together.

When the Germans referred to covenant renewal worship as “the divine service,” they didn’t mean that first and foremost it’s our serving God. They meant first and foremost it is gospel, that God serves you and you respond to that clearly. But that’s the way it works. You know, this reticence about using the law of God, it’s modern.

I want to read a particular prayer from the Book of Common Prayer. Now we don’t do confirmation—they did. And I suppose this prayer that mentions God’s law—confirmation was sort of seen as, you know, having some basis in catechization of youths in the Old Testament and the maybe like the idea of bar mitzvah at twelve—you become a son of the law—or bat mitzvah, daughter of the law. But in any event, they had confirmation, and the confirmation was also seen as a recommittal of baptismal vows, right? So the confirmation liturgy confirmed the young person, made them ready to take their first Lord’s Supper, but it also reconfirmed to them their baptismal vows.

But just listen to what the Book of Common Prayer, one of the three great documents to come out of the Protestant Reformation, says. Listen to this cool prayer. I really like it. It’s simple. But the conclusion of the confirmation service says this:

“And the prayer is: ‘Almighty God and ever Almighty Lord and everlasting God, vouch safe we beseech thee to direct, sanctify, and govern both our hearts and bodies in the ways of thy laws. Isn’t that nice? Their prayer begins with a request that everything that we are would be directed in the ways of thy laws and in the works of thy commandments. That through the most mighty protection both here and ever, we may be preserved in body and soul.’”

Remember I said it’s the way to be preserved and kept safe is through the law of God, and they reflect that in this prayer. “‘Through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.’”

Now that’s Episcopalians, that’s Anglicans—not anymore—but that’s how this is, you know, the way this liturgy was written. You know, there was a connection between Martin Bucer, who really gave Calvin most of his liturgical stuff, and much of our liturgy is influenced by Martin Bucer, a Protestant Reformer. But then he spent the last part of his life in England helping work on the Book of Common Prayer. So we think of them as like this, but no, they had a common heritage originally, which was a strong commitment to the sovereignty of God and his law. So there’s a wonderful little prayer. Keep us in that way.

Now, the bishop then blessed those that were confirmed and said this: “‘Go forth into the world in peace. Be of good courage. Hold fast that which is good. Render to no man evil for evil. Strengthen the faint-hearted. Support the weak. Help the afflicted. Honor all men. Love and serve the Lord. Rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit. And the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost be upon you and remain with you forever. Amen.’”

And that’s a little more normal to us. So the law was seen a confirmation and a commitment to keep the law of God, was seen as the means of preservation and the means of empowerment. So that benediction would empower those sons of the law and daughters of the law, as it were, to go forth then into this wonderful Holy Spirit-filled life. Because the Spirit comes to minister God’s word to us—which is to say, the Spirit comes to minister his law word, his grace word, to us. So the law of God, the law of God, is all we’ve tried to talk about here for the last eleven sermons in reference to marriage. And hopefully that significance will ring true to you.

Now let’s talk a little bit about the purpose. Remember now, marriage is set in the context of the creation account, right? And so I want to talk a little bit about Imago Dei. And not the church up there. But Imago Dei is just Latin for the image of God. And what does it mean that we bear God’s image?

And of course, central to the bearing of God’s image is community, unity and diversity in community, because God is triune. And when we read in Genesis 1:26–27 that God makes man in his own image: “In the image of God created he man, male and female created he them.” The very first thing we’re told about the Imago Dei is that we exist in community and, for most of us, I mean obviously the first reference, that’s a direct reference to marriage, but it has the broader sense of living in community, male and female, unity and diversity, both equal but different roles, same with the Trinity.

So we image God by obeying the laws of distinction between male and female, right? The Trinity obeys God. Each of the persons obeys God. So do we. I mean, I know it’s self-referencing, but because they fulfill the roles that they have had since eternity. We don’t know why the Father is the Father. We don’t know why the Son is the Son. We don’t know why the Spirit is the Spirit, but the Son is always the Son and the Father is always the Father. And they always then have complete conformity to the law. The law is an expression of that. And they fulfill those roles because that’s who they are. They are diverse in persons. They have different roles to play. The Son comes to do the will of the Father. The Father gives the Son blessing and glory and honor because of his work on the cross. The Spirit moves between them and empowers whatever they’re doing. They have different roles to play: unity and diversity.

And in the same way, within marriage and within singles of different sexes, within our own sexuality, the Lord God has made us equal, male and female. And he has made us dependent upon one another, male and female, to properly express the image of God because he is unity and diversity. One God, three persons. And so we are one humanity, but expressed in diversity: male and female.

So, you know, to chafe against roles, you know, it’s just so backwards. Roles are the reflection of the law of God for us. If you’re male, God conceived of you in his mind. You were always male before you were conceived by your parents. And if you’re female, you are female. We could say from eternity, God in his mind knew you before you were conceived as female, in the same way that the Father and Son have eternity in terms of who their particular callings are. Why would you want to try to do anything about that other than praise God for it?

I mean, the Son, he is more than happy to be the Son. And the Father is more than happy to be the Father. And the Spirit, more than happy. In fact, anything other than that for who they are would not be blessing but something short of blessing. So Imago Dei, the image of God, is reflected in the context of marriage. Then it’s also reflected in the context of dominion.

Remember, God gave man a wife as a helper to exercise dominion—a strong, powerful, godlike completer of tasks, okay?—and as a complement to him. The image of God immediately after the statement about the image of God in Genesis 1, male and female, immediately the next verse is that he has given men dominion over the world and over everything in it. The image of God—what does it mean to be made in the image of God? Who are you as an image bearer of God? You’re a dominion person. You’re a dominion man and/or woman. That’s who you are. You are created for the exact purpose of being God’s vice regent, vice king, vice president, whatever you want to call it—his representative, his ordained representative, who empowers you for the task of taking this earth and making it more glorious.

And I think that doesn’t stop at the borders of space. We’re going out. We’ve already started it. We’re to exercise dominion to the glory of God over the entire created order. God didn’t want us as caretakers. Yeah, the garden’s great. Just keep it as it is, boys. Keep it as it is, gals. No. We know that by the end of the Bible, what God wants is a garden city. He wants us to dig up gold and refine it. He wants us to take sand, blast furnace it, or whatever they do with that stuff, to make it into silicon wafers and make little tiny etchings on it so you can have a phone that can do incredible computation. Incredible. God calls us to do that. That’s part of the dominion nature of man.

So marriage is given to us—male and female relationships—as part of the image of God and to affect the further aspect of the image of God, which is dominion. Now he imbues us with knowledge. Ephesians or Colossians says that the new man is created in the renewal of the knowledge. So it explicitly tells us that the new man, dominion man—what does it mean to be made in the image of God? It means to have this kind of knowledge, right? The animals can’t create an iPad. You know, the cockroaches can’t build this stuff. Gazelles can’t make beautiful Christmas adornments. They can’t do it. God gives man knowledge of what to do with this created order.

And your marriage or your singleness in relationship to other members of the opposite sex as well—our community nature—is given to us to affect dominion. It’s not an end in and of itself. That’s why we’ve said God doesn’t give you marriage to make you happy. He gives you marriage to make you holy. Because in that holiness and commitment to God, you’re going to be mutual sanctifiers of each other, speaking the truth in love. Not, you know, I don’t mean by that you go home and think, “What can I tell my husband he’s doing wrong this time?” No. You love him. You provide a very safe, gospel-filled environment for him, right? But you know your partner’s sins better than anybody else. And if you’re close friends, the same thing is true. You are sanctifiers.

God has given you marriage to make you more holy. But even that isn’t the goal. It’s not just that you be holy in eternity. It’s that you might do what he told you to do. It’s so you could take your lives and exercise dominion for the glory of God. He wants this different. He wants it to get more and more beautiful, more and more efficient, more and more better, more culture, more civilization, beauty, life flourishing.

You see, when God walks, the trees boom—grow up. And when men go through the earth, they’re supposed to make this place beautiful. Now, I know that can be done in a twisted way. There are two ditches. Dominion man who doesn’t give a rip about beauty and just cares about efficiency or whatever it is or serving himself—who just wants to eat the whole doggone world. And the other ditch is people that refuse to eat the good gifts that God gives us. And in the middle is dominion man and woman.

And your marriage, the laws of King Jesus for you, Christ the King Sunday, means that what God has taught us about singleness and marriage are laws for you so that you might become more and more sanctified, more and more holy, more and more effective at exercising dominion, but only in relationship to the King. And that means this only happens with an increasing knowledge of his word, which is this law word to us.

Evangelicalism, unless it starts embracing again the law of God and dominion properly understood instead of caretaking the way the environmentalists would have us do it—until they do that, they have no power to do what we’re all called to do together. So God says the law is quite important for us. Law in reference to marriage deals with the very purpose of why the good Lord has put us here.

Weeping guitars. Weeping guitars. For some reason, I’ve been thinking the last week or two a lot about the Beatles song “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” The other reference to image of God—let me give one last reference: Ephesians 4:24: “Put on the new self created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.”

So there are the last two elements. We’ve got community, we’ve got dominion, and we’ve got knowledge. And we’ve got righteousness and holiness explicitly stated to be part of the image-bearing capacity of God. Now, righteousness is the application of God’s standard, God’s law, God’s will on a horizontal relationship. It’s justice. It’s dealing with other people. Holiness is dealing with God. “Be holy for I am holy.”

And we have a relationship to God, a relationship to people. And where they meet, we’ve got all for the law of God. The law of God is what informs us what justice is and what informs us what holiness is. And so the law of God is essential to our dominion task and more than that, to our image-bearing capacity. We have been recreated in righteousness, holiness, knowledge, and dominion, and in community. That’s the image of God. And that’s why God’s law as it relates to our community, as it relates to righteousness and holiness, is absolutely essential to know and to apply.

So God calls us to this task and empowers us to do it. But what we have done is perverted all of that. What fallen man does is to pervert those things and twist them. And so I’ve been thinking a lot about George Harrison singing: “I look at you all, see the love there that’s sleeping while my guitar gently weeps. I look at the floor. I see it needs sweeping. Still my guitar gently weeps. I don’t know why nobody told you how to unfold your love. I don’t know how someone controlled you. They bought and sold you.”

You know, I hope this isn’t embarrassing to you to have me read this old stuff. But let me tell you something. It is as true today as it was then. It is so applicable to our world today and in our marriages. We don’t know how to unfold our love because we’ve rejected the law of God. Marriage itself is kaput. We can’t do the basic thing where a guy’s got to marry a gal, rather than another guy, or a girl with another girl. We can’t even do that part, let alone all the stuff we’ve talked about for the twelve weeks.

How do you unfold your love? Well, it’s the power of the Holy Spirit who brings God’s law to you. That’s how it works. And until—and if you can’t unfold your love in the context of marriage, you think that somehow you’re going to love humanity and make everything cool for everyone. Get it? What a joke. If you can’t do it in the home, you can’t do it anywhere, okay? And that’s what’s happening in our culture as we moved away from Jesus, Christ the King, the King’s Law as the basis for who we are as people, even our very image-bearing capacity.

“I look at the world and I notice it’s turning while my guitar gently weeps. With every mistake, we must surely be learning. Still my guitar gently weeps.” We don’t learn because the mistakes aren’t mistakes. They’re sins. You don’t wake up, “Oh, I guess I was sinning.” No, you come to conviction. You want to—you want to pretend that it was just a mistake. But the problem is sin. We should be learning.

“I don’t know how you were diverted. You were perverted to. I don’t know how you were inverted.” Those are excellent words, folks. Forget it was the Beatles. Pretend it was John Donne or something, right? I mean, how good is that? Diverted away from our calling as image bearers of God and exercise of dominion. Perverted in our relationships, particularly in the—well, perversion is a twist on the original thing. But certainly it applies to marriage life or sexuality specifically. And that perversion has created an inversion. We’re all twisting in on ourselves now.

And instead of giving, we’re taking, right? Instead of putting others first, we want to look out for number one. Instead of being servant leaders in the home—whoever can get the most power, whether it’s the guy or the gal, they want to be served. They don’t want to serve. They want to be served. And so we end up with, as Leonard Cohen said, “the homicidal bitching that goes on in every kitchen to determine who will serve and who will eat.”

Let me show you a different way. Let me show you a different way. The answer to all of this is that love is a reflection of the marriage—the tremendous love that the Lord Jesus had, who didn’t come to be served but came to serve, right? Our marriages are supposed to be a reflection of gospel truth, the grace of God. The law of God is a grace word. The Holy Spirit grants it to us graciously.

I have a poem here I’m going to read in conclusion. This was written—probably some of you know it. I’m sure many of you do. George Herbert, it’s called “Love (III).” He was a Christian poet, rather, seventeenth century. And short poem. But just listen to the beauty of how he expresses this and how love is the expression of God’s law, but how it is portrayed here in this wonderful poem about love.

“Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back, guilty of lust and sin. But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack from my first entrance in, drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning if I lacked anything. Brings him to a knowledge of what he lacks. A guest, I answered, worthy to be here. Love said, ‘You shall be he.’ I, the unkind, the ungrateful, ah, my dear, I cannot look on thee. Love took my hand and smiling did reply, ‘Who made the eyes but I?’ Truth, Lord, but I have marred them. Let my shame go where it doth deserve. And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame? My dear, then I will serve. You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat. So I did sit and eat.”

Wonderful poem, you know, the drawing back in shame, that refusal—you know, why is the gift in marriage refused? Well, it isn’t given sometimes, but frequently it’s because we draw back knowing we’re not worthy. We’re really not worthy. It’s not just a punchline. It’s some stupid Wayne movie. But we are not worthy, and we feel it to the depth of our being that kind of love expressed by our spouses.

But Love says, “Hey—ultimately, Love is God. I made the eye. And when the claim of creation is made, then the man, the guilty man, acknowledges the lordship of the one who’s speaking to him: Yes, okay, this is God. And acknowledges Love as Lord. But still says, ‘I know you made me, but I messed it all up. I know you made me. I know that you made my marriage. I know that, you know, our vows were taken to you and then with each other in your presence, but we messed it up. We know you’re the giver of grace and life, and all this is somehow empowering us for dominion, but we messed it up. I’m not worthy.’”

And then Love says, “But you shall be he.” God doesn’t love us because we’re worthy. God doesn’t love us because we’re lovely. He loves us because he’s going to make us lovely. Your spouse doesn’t love you because you’re so great. But to make you great, God has given you a spouse who loves you that intensely to help cure you, to bring you away from your sins and to the acceptance of the gospel of grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. You shall be he. All right, great. In that case, okay, I understand. Let me serve you now, God.”

God says, “No.” God says, “No, you still don’t quite get it. Grace is how this works. You sit down and you must eat my meat. You must come to this table. Not because you deserve it, not because you’re lovely, but because this is the way I’m showing you what true love is. What the nature of the law word, grace word of God is. How dominion will be accomplished in this earth ultimately is found at this table, the little garden table where the new creation begins afresh every Lord’s day.

And God says, ‘Come. Don’t think you can come because you’re worthy. You’ve got to eat. I’m giving you things now.’ And then our response: okay, we sit down and we eat. It’s that simple. And that’s what God is moving us through in this service. Praise God for Christ the King and his law word that governs our marriage and reempowers us as image bearers of his.”

Let’s pray. “Lord God, we praise your holy name for your grace, for your love, and the incarnate love of the Lord Jesus Christ particularly. Thank you, Father, for his word, his law word to us, which is a grace word as well. Forgive us for messing things up in our marriages. But assure us, Lord God, that we indeed are here because you’re feeding us with grace from on high that will flow into our marriages, our relationships. You’re going to empower our singleness and our marriedness so that we might live the life you’ve given us as image bearers of yours and that we might indeed embrace our true meaning and purpose of life to serve you in the exercise of that image.

Bless us, Lord God, as we respond to your love. May not one soul here think that somehow they’re worthy, but rather respond to your grace to us, Lord God, by offering ourselves to you. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.”