Talk 11 - Ephesians 5:21-33

0:03 Hello everybody. This is a bit strange and unexpected, but it would seem that Storm Eowyn had other plans for us this weekend. And I'm now in the recording studio to do the talk on Ephesians. Do pray for all those involved, the elders, all the team that are involved in helping to sort the issues out contingency plans. This is quite a challenge, of course, but it's an opportunity for us to get together as a church. It's an opportunity even for creativity and new ideas. So let's look forward to all that the Lord will teach us through the inconvenience, the challenge of these coming days. But today, my challenge is to talk to you from Ephesians chapter 5, and in particular to talk about husbands and wives.

1:02 So, without further ado, let's get into the passage. I'm going to read it, Ephesians chapter 5, and we're reading from verse 21. Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body of which he is the saviour. Now, as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.

2:02 After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church. For we are members of his body. For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. This is a profound mystery. I'm talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself and the wife must respect her husband. Now, when we come to something like this, we all have our personal marriage story, either as children or as spouses or parents of married children or just as friends. And all these stories are different.

2:52 Our story, Heather and my story, is, I'm sure, different from yours. We have a 47-year-long story that is still continuing of working out what marriage is. Four kids, nine grandchildren, chickenpox, cancer, transfer tests, transitions, triumphs, tears, joys, disappointments, challenges, choices, all played out against the background of a country and a culture, which have changed and continue to change at a mind-boggling pace. Many have a story similar, many do not. And for some, the experience of marriage has been deeply traumatic. Apparently, I haven't seen it, but there's a Netflix kids cartoon, Spellbound, where a young princess discovers that her parents have turned into monsters. and she has to cope in that context. And the underlying narrative is that the happy ending is found when the parents divorce.

3:54 And that kind of little movie, seemingly perhaps innocent, and many other movies like it and the media and so on are shaping how our culture views marriage. Marriage still survives, but how we address it In a culture where, for example, same-sex marriage is legalized, where the numbers of people choosing to get married have declined, where increasing numbers of children are not being brought up in the context of marriage as envisioned here in Ephesians 5, that is a challenge. Indeed, at first sight, this passage in Ephesians 5 can make matters much worse. There tend to be very different reactions when people read, for example, wives submit to your own husbands. That's deeply problematic in a world where violence towards women and the abuse of women are huge and tragic issues. It is also problematic in the church, in part at least because these lines of Scripture, these verses in Scripture have sometimes been interpreted in a way that justifies poor and damaging treatment of women. Or again, the phrase, the husband is the head of the wife. How do people hear that today if it is heard at all?

5:33 Is this some kind of invitation to the macho male, to subservient wives and so on? As we come to this passage, therefore, we probably have all kinds of questions in our mind, maybe reactions already built up, certainly personal experience. We also come with probably assumptions as to what individual words mean. For example, submit or head. What do these words mean? Submit is often read as obey, but actually Paul doesn't use the verb for obey here. There's a different word which is used in the next chapter, talking about children obeying their parents. But submit is often read as something that is done to wives.

6:30 That is, they are forced into submission. They are subjected to their husbands. But again, that isn't what Paul says. This is something that wives are to do voluntarily, uncoerced. It isn't there for submission to some superior force. Verse 21, which introduces this paragraph, says that we are to submit to one another. And the commentators will talk about something they term mutual submission. So it is in the context.

7:08 Paul is talking about submission in a context of a shared general approach where as a body of people in the Christian church, we listen to one another, we learn from one another, we put one another first. But having said that, husbands aren't asked to submit to their wives. Wives are specifically asked to submit to their husbands in everything just as the church submits to the Lord Jesus. And that's a little clue. It helps us to begin at least to understand what Paul means by the term. It's something to do with how the church relates to the Lord Jesus. And then there's the use of the word head. The husband is the head of his wife.

7:59 Now that obviously is a metaphor using a part of the body in a way that we may say, oh, give me a hand or have a heart or give me a leg up. We use parts of the body. I think probably all cultures do in this metaphorical way. But what does it mean? What does it mean when Paul uses it here? Does it mean dictator, boss, chief, leader? Or does it mean, as some people argue from another application of the Greek language, of what the word might mean in certain contexts. It can mean source.

8:42 Personally, I find that a little bit strained. I'm not quite sure how I would be the source of my wife. And Paul tells us elsewhere that God is the source of Christ. Again, I don't really, as the head of Christ, I don't see how source works there. But once again, if we look at what Paul actually says, he defines his use of the word head with reference to the Lord Jesus. The husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church. So Christ and how he relates to the church is the key reference point for understanding how husbands and wives are to relate to each other. Now, long books have been written on this topic with all kinds of conflicting opinions.

9:39 And the best I can do is to give a little bit of guidance as to how we pick our way through this individually and in our home groups. It is, at least it has become, a theological minefield. I am certain that that was not Paul's intention when he wrote it. so there's a potential that I might make everybody cross by what I say about it that's not deliberate please believe me I'm not trying to do that but it might happen at least perhaps it's better than making nobody cross because I sometimes think that if you don't make somebody react negatively then you haven't done your job because the gospel challenges all cultures and it will challenge every culture in this area as well as every other area. Now, church understanding, the Christian church's understanding and practice, if you look at the history, always tends to reflect, at least to some extent, the culture in which the church lives. That was true when I was growing up in the 50s and 60s. It was true when Heather and I got married in 1977 and we started to work out what it meant to be husband and wife.

11:07 And it is true together. Today, I remember, for example, was it abuse or was it banter from other Christian men when they saw me pushing the pram with Kristen in it? This wasn't really a thing that a lot of men did. That's not what husbands do. Much more seriously, I can remember the disparaging way in which my wife was sometimes treated by Christian men, including Christian leaders. I remember the disrespect for brilliant women who went overseas with the gospel, planted churches, transformed local communities. And yet when they came back home to Northern Ireland, weren't even allowed to speak publicly about it because they were women. The church has not always been kind to women.

12:04 In fact, it has been too often abusive and brutal. And in doing that and behaving in that way, instead of challenging the culture, it has often simply reflected cultural practice and prejudice. Today, of course, generally in Western Europe, a pendulum swing of culture has gone in the opposite direction. And this swing, once again, is mirrored across the church. But I have a question and a concern. Is that the way the church should be? That the church just follows culture? Might it be possible that the current pendulum swing swings too far so that we end up in an equally unbiblical understanding of how we should be together as men and women, as husband and wife in marriage and in the church?

13:07 Might the welcome move away from what is sometimes referred to as toxic masculinity lead to an equally unwelcome toxic femininity? Is such a thing possible? It isn't always easy to discern the instincts that we assimilate from the cultural layer we breathe and then to untangle them from what the Bible actually says. But that's what we are called to. So let's come to this expecting that these words of Paul will be as countercultural in the 21st century as they were in first century Ephesus. Let me now make six general observations very quickly, and then you can take these and develop these in various ways. Number one, look first at the context. Why is Paul teaching here about marriage?

14:08 And as we have looked in the last couple of weeks from chapter 4, verse 17, we have this great section, a final section of Ephesians that's looking at God's purpose and plans for the new self that we now have been created to be in Christ. What does that new self look like? How are we to be as children of light? How do we shine in the world? And in this context, marriage is an obvious scenario because if Christianity doesn't work here, well, you might want to conclude that it doesn't work. This is the fundamental relationship in society. And if this new self, this new life that we have in Christ isn't revealed here in a shining, distinctive way, then where is it going to be revealed? Because this isn't just some spiritual theory.

15:14 This is a reality. Number two, it's clear from what Paul says that men and women are different. As God created us, there are two versions of humanity, male and female. And marriage is designed to be between one male and one female. And any departure from that, as we have ample evidence for, leads to chaos. Point three, Paul addresses husband and wife separately. Now, each is invited to listen in to what he has to say to the other. And this is particularly where I miss actually doing this talk with everybody present in one room, because I was looking forward to seeing people digging each other, you know, and they yell, oh, this is for you, this is for you.

16:13 Oh, he's really got to know, she needs to listen to it. And all the stuff, all the little games we play. But Paul allows them to listen in, but he does address each of them separately. Number four, the key principle of imitation that we have talked about before is worked through by Paul in the context of marriage. We've seen this already, the imitation of God and Christ, for example, in the question of forgiveness, that we are to imitate God In how we forgive people, how he went about forgiving us, that's the way we are to go about forgiving one another. So in this sense, imitation isn't about pretending. It is about learning through imitation, imitating the example of another who does the thing well, or in God's case, perfectly. That's the perfect example.

17:13 We are to learn by imitating that example and grow up in that imitation, a principle of learning. So husbands and wives are both called to imitation and how they relate to one another. The husband to imitate Christ and how he relates to the church. The wife to imitate the church and how it is meant to respond to the Lord Jesus. Number five, Paul doesn't say the same things to each one. For example, he tells husband to love their wives, three times in fact. But he doesn't then tell wives to love their husbands. Of course, they should because we are to love one another.

17:56 But that's not his point here. He has something else to say to wives. He's talking to husbands and wives distinctively. This should alert us at least to the fact that there is something specific and distinctive about each role. Husbands and wives are not the same. Now, having said that, let's remember that this isn't everything that the Bible says about husbands and wives. But Paul's comments here are specific. They mean something.

18:29 To explain them to mean, as some appear to want to, that husbands and wives are basically the same, that there's no difference really in role, that there is no hierarchy. What an awful word. They couldn't possibly be. There's no order. I think that is more to explain them away. I'll come back to that in a moment. Sixth, Paul has much more to say to the husbands than he has to the wives, but he chooses to address the wives first. Now, that itself was probably a bit of a shock, a bit of a reversal in Roman culture where the husband generally would have been regarded as the more important.

19:16 But I think Paul is doing that here because it's just following the flow of his argument, his thinking of the previous few lines about how we are all to learn what it is to live wisely, to make the most of the time, that we're not to live foolishly and give ourselves over to all kinds of negative living, getting drunk and debauchery and all that negative stuff, but rather to live positively, filling our lives and our hearts with spiritual beauty and reality and a truth with a song to God in our hearts and thankfulness to him in our lips and submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ. And in that context then of living like this and this healthy context of mutual respect, of listening to one another and seeking to understand one another, he moves to a particular example where submission is important. Being subject is important because it lies at the heart of the fundamental relationship in human society and that is marriage. So how do these things that he'd be talking about work out specifically in the differing roles of husband and wife? Christian wives are to be characterized by their positive voluntary submission to their husbands. That's not the only thing they're to do, but it's to be a characteristic. Christian husbands are to be characterized in particular by their positive, voluntary, and loving self-giving for their wives.

21:01 It's not the only thing they're called to do, but it's to be characteristic. Because both attitudes lie at the heart of what makes marriage work in the sense of the new self that God has created for us in Christ. despite, of course, the imperfections of both husband and wife. And, of course, this is where comparison, in a sense, with the Lord Jesus in this falls short, because none of us is perfect like him. So let me now take a few moments to expand on all of this. The use of the terms, submits and husband is a head of the wife, often lead to questions regarding authority and leadership and how far it goes. And that in turn leads to all kinds of definition and even division of many Christians into various theological camps. It's often said that there are two basic theological positions that Christians take on the relationship between husband and wife in marriage, complementarian and egalitarian.

22:21 So you're either a complementarian or you're an egalitarian, coming from the word equal. So you can see what that's about. Oh, how we love our labels. Labels can be helpful, of course, but they can also be excuses for laziness and they lead to endless arguments over definitions. What do we mean? Oh, you're a complementarian. What exactly? What precise type of complementarian are you?

22:55 And then we end up in all sorts of arguments about definitions. Labels rarely, if ever, produce the unity that we hope they will bring. But they are certainly handy if we want to put a person in a box and then throw things at them. Because it's a typical thing that we use. Oh, you only say that because you're a woman. Because, of course, all women are the same and think the same and act the same. And we know what a woman is like and so on. Oh, you only say that because you're a Calvinist or you're a charismatic or you're a whatever it happens to be.

23:34 We love our labels. Well, if you want to put me in a box with a label, that's fine. I can't stop you doing that. But that's not the way I think. I don't actually think it's the way. Paul thinks. The New Testament doesn't use these terms. So I think it's much better to forget the labels and look at what Paul actually says and forget about what particular box that puts you sort of three quarters in or 50% in.

24:07 Wiser to submit to their husbands for a reason. The husband is the head of the wife. Now please note there is no full stop here. It doesn't say the husband is the head of the wife full stop. It says the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church, his body. What does that mean? Well, we don't have to wait long to find out. Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.

24:43 These are the actions of Christ as head. This is why the church gladly submits to the Lord Jesus because of his love, his self-giving for them. He is the good shepherd. He values the sheep so much that he led down his life for the sheep. So, a question then. If that is what being head involves, is there strong reason for a wife to struggle to submit herself to a husband who acts like Christ in that way? That is, it seems to me, the goal.

25:34 Of course, none of it is perfect, but that is what Paul is saying. It's his clear emphasis when it comes to how we relate to one another in marriage. You will probably come back to me and say, but doesn't head imply leadership and authority? Well, yes, personally, I think it does. I don't think God is against all authority or all hierarchy. It certainly isn't when it comes to the church or indeed when it comes to the family and certainly not when it comes to the wider society in general. But it begs the question, what do we mean by leadership and authority in Christianity? What baggage are we pulling into those terms?

26:27 Because the way the Lord Jesus talks, for example, about leadership is very different from the way culture tends to talk about it. Jesus made it very clear. Each time he spoke about being leaders, he first emphasized what it isn't. And constantly taught that leadership in his kingdom is not like leadership in the world. It is, in fact, about becoming a servant. Leadership is about considering others more important than yourself. It's not about the baggage that goes with it in culture and in politics and so on. It's not about a claim and status and wielding power and lording it over others.

27:18 Least of all, over your wife. So for me, being head of the home doesn't mean that in the morning I line up Heather, and when the kids were there, they all lined up, you know, on the stairs and said, okay, family, here are the orders for the day. No, that's not what this is about. Being head rather means not some title. It means carrying a responsibility before God to imitate Christ in how I treat my wife with the goal for her in mind that Christ had for the church. Christ is the one who is our role model, the good shepherd giving up his life for the sheep. Christ loved the church, says Paul, and gave himself up for her. This is not an invitation to ego, to status, to power.

28:17 This is an invitation to giving oneself up for my wife, for your wife, husbands, as I speak to you. That is the consistent emphasis throughout the New Testament. It's the emphasis, in fact, of the cross, because it is the self-giving of Jesus that gives Christianity its distinctive character. And therefore, it's the self-giving of Jesus that gives Christian marriage its distinctive character. Now, I'm going to be a bit controversial here if I have not been already. Jesus never said that he and the church are equals. What he did was and said was he loved the church and gave himself up for her. Can we imagine if it was about equality?

29:12 I'll put in 50%, you put in 50%. Salvation would never have happened. Grace would not exist because grace is not transactional in that sense. It is about, in marriage, about being one body, just as it is about in the church. It's not a community of equals. In the church, for example, we are one body, all equally accepted. all equally loved, but it isn't a community of equals. There's no equality of gift.

29:48 For example, Paul makes it clear. Some gifts are more important than others. Some roles carry more authority than others. God exercises his sovereignty here, not to divide the church, but to keep it united. All do not have the same role. There is a certain degree of order and hierarchy, but we are one in Christ, in marriage. It is not some kind of 50-50 division. It is about learning to be one flesh together.

30:23 If I ever find myself thinking that, well, Heather got a night out last week, so I'm entitled to one this week, or I packed the dishwasher yesterday, so it's Heather's turn today. I'm heading down a dangerous and disastrous road where it is about entitlement, about rights, and not about self-giving and submission. This doesn't mean, of course, that we can't have an agreed division of labour and responsibilities, but the basic value is giving ourselves up for the other. The big issue is not equality nor even complementarity. It is self-sacrificial love. If Heather is ill, I don't think, well, I made dinner last night. It's her turn tonight. That would be absurd.

31:25 Discussion of marriage in terms of equality and rights ultimately is doomed to disaster. Jesus warned that if we approach life this way, for example, trying to save our life and make it about us and self, we will lose it. It is only when we lose our lives for his sake and the gospel that we find it. And it's not even a matter of being equally valuable because I regard Heather as far more valuable than myself. I seek to give myself up for her. don't do it perfectly, but I certainly don't force her to give herself up for me. Please don't misunderstand me. It's not that the New Testament doesn't support individual rights in a sense.

32:17 It does, but it's a big and different question. But what the New Testament encourages is the setting aside of those rights for the benefit of others as Jesus did for us, as the apostles often did. So in short, I think when it comes to this passage, we often ask the wrong question and we get lost in arguments about authority, leadership. But let me make it practical as I finish. And of course, you're all dying to hear this. You just love insights into the marriage of Gilbert and Heather. Well, I might disappoint you a wee bit on this. But we've always understood marriage in this way, if you like to use another analogy, as a team.

33:08 And a team needs a captain. That doesn't mean the captain is the best or most valuable. I learned that from being captain of a cricket team. I was far from the best player or the most valuable, but I had a role as a captain. And my role was to set the example and bring out the best in the other players. It doesn't mean making unilateral decisions all the time. Occasionally, if there is division, then there needs to be, if you like, the casting vote. And that is my responsibility as we understand it.

33:43 But most of the time, it is about playing to each other's strength. I can only really remember one occasion in our marriage where I had to play, in a sense, that captain's card, the leadership card, the casting vote, and anything that was significant. I recognize that Heather is far greater expert in certain areas than I am, and she feels the same way about me. I would be a fool not to recognize that, and occasionally I have been a fool by not recognizing it. We seek to do things via consensus, discussion, listening, waiting for one another when there's disagreement, talking through it again and taking our decisions together. And where there's been initial disagreement, I would say maybe by a kind of nine to one, Heather's usually right. That's just the reality. But the key thing I'm trying to get across, whether I got the proportions right in that or not, is working together as one on this.

34:56 Let me take a moment then to talk to myself and other husbands since I'm a man and a husband. In 1896, Sidney Sheldon wrote a book that has sold over 50 million copies. You may have a copy on your shelf. It's called In His Steps, What Would Jesus Do? And that phrase became very popular, especially in the 1990s when Christian youth groups began to wear wristbands with the abbreviation WWJD, what would Jesus do? And for all the positives in that, there is a major negative. It lies in the wood. What would Jesus do if he were here in my situation today?

35:38 And the danger is that that feeds into the common tendency to speculate, to guess, even to reinvent Jesus in accordance with our own culture and our own preferences, our political affiliation, even down to the type of car we drive. I'm not joking. In November 2002 in America, there was an ad campaign. What would Jesus drive? And of course, Jesus would drive the sensible green credentialed car and not the big gas guzzler, etc., etc. I've seen Jesus represented in posters with a machine gun or wrapped in a pride flag. Paul's focus is not on what Jesus would do. It's on what Jesus did.

36:27 Husbands, you and I are not invited to speculate on what Jesus would do if he were alive today in Northern Irish culture. We are asked to look back at what he did and then to imitate that. to be proactive. Certainly for me, it has meant thinking and constantly because this changes as life changes. It's not something you sort in five minutes and then it's done. This is constant. You never really figure this out 100%. So be encouraged by that, not discouraged.

37:00 Taking my role as head seriously to think it through. What does it mean today, this week, this year? What are the goals for this? How can we work this out together? Because I want, for the sake, and it may sound selfish, for the sake of our marriage, our one fleshness together and its success, I want Heather to flourish. That's what I want to see happen. So how does that want to work? In particular, I want what the Lord Jesus wants for his bride, according to this passage, that his bride becomes more and more beautiful, that God deals with through the washing of the water with the word, the work of the Holy Spirit through the word of God and the life of the individual.

37:50 Christ constantly working to transform us so we become more and more beautiful. And that, I'm not the Lord Jesus, I'm not the Holy Spirit, but on a much lower level, I think that's a great goal to have. That as a result of my loving my wife this year, she becomes a more beautiful person, if that's possible. That is the goal. Loving my wife as Christ loved the church is not about demeaning her, abusing her, keeping her in her place, but to make her more beautiful. By giving myself to bring out the best in her, not to keep her down, hidden, deny her abilities and intellect, her gift, and her roles. And notice three times that husbands are instructed to love their wives. As Christ loved the church, number one.

38:42 Love your wife as your own body, verse 28. How important that is in these times where there's so much abuse of women within their own physical abuse and mental abuse of women within their own marriage. Love your wife as your own body, as your own self, down in verse 33. Protect, cherish, look after. No physical, no emotional abuse. Learn how to speak properly, how to act gently and wisely and with deepest love and wives on their part. Learn how to demonstrate and show respect for your husband, not running him down as sadly we have both often experienced in public. Oh, I wish my husband could do the things your husband could do.

39:34 Or men are such da-da-da-da. Notice how many ads there are on TV that show the man up to be stupid and foolish and so on. And of course we can be. But these things can be corrosive in a culture. Learning to show and demonstrate and speak respectfully of your husband is such a critical part in this. Well, I've touched on lots of big issues here and there's so much more to say. Time has really run out. Thank you for your patience.

40:08 I hope it's helpful. Some of the issues are quite personal. They are also may well have provoked difficulties, difficult memories, current problems, please don't bury those. Please seek for appropriate help. And there are wonderful people. There are teams in Glen Abbey, the pastoral care team, the elders. There are others who would just love to help and draw alongside. There's the home group structure, and there are all sorts of other places where you can reach out for help.

40:44 Don't try and deal with these things simply bottled up alone. Do be wise in who you choose to talk to. It's not always a good thing to just be open about all our problems with everybody. That's not wise, I don't think. But seek those wise, godly, confidential people that you can speak to who can help you on your journey. Thank you for being part of this this morning. Again, I'm sorry that I haven't been able to be with you in person and respond to you afterwards. But may God bless his word to all of us.