The Great Illustration

Good morning. Good to have you at our second service with this new theme, marriage matters. This summer, we’re going to be going through this theme and this series to really look at what does marriage mean. Obviously, marriage is a huge part of our society. It’s a huge part of the culture we live in. It’s a huge part of many of your lives, whether it’s waiting to be married or actually being married, or some of you who’ve lost this spouse. Marriage has been a huge part of your life. And why is it so important? And how does God view marriage? And why did He create marriage?
So, this is our second week. Last week, Pastor Starmaker kind of gave an overview of what marriage is, and just a general overview of everything about marriage from Scripture. And this morning, I have the opportunity to share with you what God’s view of marriage is, why God has marriage, what did He create it for, and what is its purpose. And so we turn to probably one of the most well-known passages about marriage in the Bible, Ephesians 5:22-33. And we’re going to just go through what marriage means.
And I’m going to start out before I get too much into what marriage is, its purpose, why God created it, and I’m going to tell you about a man whose name is Sergey Krikalev. I don’t really know if I pronounced that right. This is a Russian man. He was an astronaut for the Russian country of Russia. He was most well-known because he was going to go on what’s called the Mir space station. I apologize, you’re supposed to be there for five months. So he trained. This was his second space exploration that he had been on. He was only 30 years old. He was young, but he was obviously a very smart, intelligent engineer, and he was the right man for the job. And so he went up there, supposed to be up there for five months. And some of you may have remembered the story, but he kind of got stuck up there because in the middle of his mission, something very serious started to happen. The political system of Russia started to break down. The Soviets began to lose power, and there were some serious issues. And eventually, he got the news that they ran out of money to get him back home, basically is what it is. And it wasn’t so much that they couldn’t get him back home. The reality was, if they left his mission early, or when he was supposed to, that nobody would be manning this space shuttle, and basically it would fall apart and be ruined because he needed someone up there to man it. And so him being so convinced that this was an important thing, he was willing to stay on for much longer, actually twice as long as he was originally planned.
And I kind of read this story this week, and I kind of thought, you know what? That’s kind of how marriage can get sometimes, right? If we’re honest, have you ever been into a stage of your marriage, right? Like, I kind of view marriages like, you know, the blast-off, you know? And you go up, and the first week, the first two weeks, three weeks, however long it is, it’s great, everything’s good. And then all of a sudden, something happens. We don’t know, maybe it happens quickly, maybe it happens slowly. And it could be so many different things that happen. It could just be you just kind of take it for granted, right? And marriage just kind of gets a little bit routine. And so all of a sudden, you’re kind of like, you know, me and my spouse, we just don’t enjoy each other like we used to. And marriage can get a little bit like that space mission where it’s just kind of like, “Wow, this was fun at the beginning, but it’s starting to just become like work and hard.” And right, why? Because there’s two sinful people living closely together and sharing life together. And it could be for other reasons. It could be your spouse’s sin or your sin or both of you have sin and you haven’t learned how to work together and work it out through forgiveness and confession and those things. But whatever it might be, we all kind of hit errors, those of us who are married. We hit areas in our lives where our marriage feels maybe a little bit dry or a little bit like, “Wow, I just don’t enjoy it like I used to.”
So what keeps us together? And more importantly, what is going to take us to that step where we thrive as a married couple? Because that’s what God’s called us to. He hasn’t called us just to, you know, sometimes we talk about the marriage and divorce rate in our country and people in the past, they stayed married longer. They may have, and I don’t, I can’t judge how everyone’s marriage was, but I wonder how many were unhappy marriages. And that’s not what God’s called us to because as we look through this passage, God calls us to live our marriages in a way that pictures Christ and the church. And that should be a very happy relationship, a joyful relationship. In fact, we just got done working through the Beatitudes, right? And what did it say? “Blessed, happy, joyful are you who are one with Christ.” And so when you’re one with Christ, you have all of these incredible spiritual blessings that not only change you spiritually in your heart and in your actions, but actually change your emotions to be joyful and happy. And if we’re supposed to be living out this picture of what it means to be one with Christ together as humans, we should be joyful and happy. And if we’re not, then something’s wrong, right? And that’s fine. We all need to admit sometimes there are things that are wrong, whether it’s for us personally or in our marriages. But this morning, we’re going to look at the basis of what marriage is. We kind of have to start back at the beginning. And then there will be other people preaching throughout the summer. I’ll be preaching next week as well. But this will be kind of a basis of what marriage is or what its purpose. And then we can get into some of the more specifics of how this aspect of marriage works or how that aspect works. And we’ll get to those throughout the summer.
But really, as we look into marriage, there are so many aspects of marriage that we could talk about. But this is the most foundational passage that we start with. And really, marriage is what I would call… I need to get, I’m sorry, I forgot to have my clicker out of my pocket. Apologize. I gotta turn it on. I’m not doing well this morning. Marriage is what I would call… The great illustration. And we’re going to see that I didn’t just come up with this, that actually in the passage, a lot of that’s in the passage.
The great illustration, and it’s an illustration that we’re going to see a little bit later that even when it was created, man didn’t really necessarily know that. And men and women didn’t know that it was going to be this great illustration. But now, as we’ve seen Christ come and really bring salvation to Earth, we see this illustration becoming more and more vivid in our lives. So it’s the great illustration.
Well, we have to ask the question, what is an illustration? Because this will kind of set up our points of where we’ll go with through the passage this morning. And I’m going to have most of the verses up here because I’m not going to go through the passage like I would normally do, just like straight through chronologically. Okay, we’re going to kind of go throughout because we’re going to kind of break this down as what an illustration is and how important it is and how well God made marriage.
So what is an illustration? Well, first thing you need for an illustration, you need an illustrator, right? If you’re drawing a picture or creating a story, for an illustration to illustrate something, you need somebody who’s going to do that, right? I am not a good artist. So if you said, “I need an illustration for this book I’m writing or the Sunday School lesson I’m doing,” you would not want me to be your illustrator. So we need an illustrator. Don’t ask me if you need that. But there is an illustrator in this great illustration.
Secondly, you need an illustration, right? They need to create something that’s going to help communicate better what they’re trying to communicate. And then, lastly, you need understood truth, because that’s the point of an illustration, correct? The important illustration is to understand and hard truth easier, right? That’s why they always say things like pictures are like a thousand words, why? Because a picture can illustrate or communicate a hard-to-understand truth sometimes much better than trying to explain it in words, or a painting could do the same thing. We have to remember, from the very beginning, an illustration is not a perfect representation, right? There’s a difference. An illustration is not a perfect representation. Our marriages will not exactly be like Christ in the church. It’s not the point. It’s supposed to be a picture or an illustration of that, but it’s not supposed to be the exact same thing. And we’ll see why in just a second. So we’re going to basically use these three points of what illustration is that we’ll find in the text. And this is going to be kind of a little bit more teachy, probably, than preachy this morning. So if you don’t like that, I apologize up front, but that’s how it’s going to be, and that’s, I think, what kind of the passage leans towards.
But the understood truth is what we really want to spend some time with this morning because a lot of times, we’re not going to disagree, any of us in here, I don’t think we’ll disagree on who the illustrator is in this story, and we probably won’t even disagree on the understood truth. Where we’re probably going to find some disagreement within the church is in the illustration side, okay? And normally, we get stuck in the illustration, and we never really get to the point of the illustration and the truth at that point, what it’s trying to create, what’s trying to help us understand. And I want to spend more time understanding the truth than I would do want to get caught up in the illustration side. So I just want to kind of set the stage for that.
So first, God is the illustrator, and you’ll be like, “Oh, I’m so surprised.” Right? No, you’re not surprised. God is the illustrator. In verse 22, what does it say? God designed marriage as service to him first. Ephesians 5:22 says, “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.” That does not mean because we can easily misinterpret this, that does not mean that wives, you’re supposed to look at your husband like he’s deity, okay? That’s not what it’s saying here. When it’s saying “as to the Lord,” it’s saying “as service to the Lord.” So that changes things. And I would say this, yes, this is specifically speaking to wives at this point, but I think this really is a general overview of the heart of what God has for marriage for husbands as well. So he says it right from the beginning. And I would say this would include everything underneath here. So when we say, “Wives are to submit to their husbands, and husbands are to love their wives,” we’re saying we do this, yes, for each other to have a happy marriage, and this works better, whatever we might say are practical things. But ultimately, it’s service to God.
So what does that do? Well, that takes marriage from being very just like a human horizontal relationship, which it is, right? There are human horizontal relationship parts of marriage that are that. But it also makes it a vertical relationship. So when I love my wife, or when my wife respects me, when we do that for each other, yes, that can please each other, but that most importantly pleases God. So what does that do? That takes marriage from being very earthly to now being eternal, has eternal benefits, has eternal and spiritual ramifications to it. And we’re going to see what those are a little bit in the future part of the message here.
So we see that God designed marriage as service to Him. God’s the illustrator, and He designed it in a certain way. So what does that mean? It means that whatever He says about marriage, He’s allowed to say because He made it. It’s His illustration. It’s His picture that He painted, however you want to say it. But next, it was God’s original intent for marriage to communicate. An illustration is by nature meant to communicate something, so we’re going to see what that is a little bit later. But we need to see that was His original intent. We see that more at the end of the passage. “Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.
So God’s original intent, where did you say, Dad? Where do we get original intent from? The word “mystery” means it’s not like it’s a mystery would be a bad illustration if it meant what we normally think of a mystery. A mystery is normally something that we don’t really want people to easily figure out, right? So why would God create an illustration that’s hard to figure out? Well, that’s not really what the Bible means when it uses the word “mystery.” Mystery just means that it was something that was created in the past, and the original intent of it was not understood at that point. It was later understood. So the mystery of marriage and that it’s an illustration of the Gospel or of Christ and the church, in that union, that mystery was not understood when it was originally created. In fact, when marriage was originally created, it was in what? The Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, right? At that time, in a sense, they didn’t need the Gospel yet. So this is really the sovereignty of God that God knew what was going to happen, and He created this seemingly just like this relationship to help His creation out. But this relationship was always supposed to be a picture of what we needed in Christ. And when was that mystery or that hard-to-understand thing? When do we understand it better? When Christ comes to Earth and begins to show what the mystery was all about, what that picture was all about. So it’s called a mystery because it was originally intended for this to picture the Gospel, but it was not originally understood, if that makes sense.
So we have this mystery is profound, and the word “profound” is profound here. It’s saying that it’s a great thing. It wasn’t just saying it’s hard to understand or you have to be so smart to understand it. It means it’s a great illustration. It’s an incredible illustration. So what it’s saying here is that our marriages are the most important way that we can communicate the Gospel to the world around us. Obviously, we need to share with them the truth of God’s Word, but it’s a picture that can make people see the Gospel in a different way than just using words.
And then he says, “And I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.” So it was God’s original intent for the Gospel or for marriages to refer to, picture, point to this union and this relationship that we have to Christ as the church. Well, how do we do that? How does that… What does that look like? Well, first, remember, we’ve got to go back to our points. We have an illustrator, that’s God, and then next, we have an illustration, and we’ll get to that in a second. I forgot I had this in there.
So basically, what that means, and John Piper probably says it better than I could, so I just had him say it. Says, “Marriage exists ultimately to display the covenant-keeping love between Christ and His church.” So, again, what does that do? That does not make marriage less; it makes it makes marriage so much more. So marriage is so much more than just living life together with another person because it works better or because that’s the way we procreate, and so we need to have children to help our economy and our community grow. Those are all great things, and those are all blessings of marriage. But the ultimate purpose is much higher than that. The ultimate purpose is to communicate to the world around us who Christ is and His love for us. And so we have a higher calling in our marriages than maybe we even sometimes think about.
So the next point is marriage, the great illustration. Marriage is the illustration itself. And so what are… There are two roles in marriage, right? There’s the wife, and there’s the husband, in God’s eyes. Those are the two roles in marriage. And what do those roles look like? Well, the first one is simple, and the second one is simple. God doesn’t make it really hard for us. He tells us our roles. They may be very difficult to actually do, but they’re pretty simple. And so the role of a wife is to picture the church. What does that look like? It looks like wives submitting to their husbands as the church submits to Christ, the wife in the same way pictures that leadership, her voluntarily putting herself under the authority of her husband. And again, I want to say that word, “voluntarily,” okay? Often, I think in the past, what’s happened is men have taken this in a sinful way, in a prideful way, and they say, “Oh, my wife needs to listen to everything I say and do everything I say she should do.” No, this is not a time for us to, like, be real manly and take over in a relationship. It’s voluntarily choosing why to picture the church submitting to Christ. So why submit to your own husbands as to the Lord in verse 22? It says it again. Now, as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands, verse 24, and verse 33, “And let the wife see that she respects her husband.”
Okay, this is what God says, and we could talk a lot about what that means or what that doesn’t mean, but this is not really the message for that. We’re going to get into some of those things later on as we kind of flesh those out in more applicable ways. A little bit later in our series, but this is what God says. He says the role for the wife is to voluntarily choose to follow her husband. That’s what it’s saying here. And how does that picture the church? Well, the church is supposed to follow Christ. We’re supposed to put our faith and our trust in Christ. Do we understand exactly what Christ is doing in everything in our lives at all times? No, and yet we trust Him. That’s what God’s called us to.
Husbands, we are not perfect, right? This is not an easy task for our wives to say, “I’m going to trust you. I’m going to respect you.” And this is even a little bit different. This is where the illustration kind of breaks down a little bit because the reality is Christ is perfect. He loves us perfectly. He does everything for us perfectly. And yet, we struggle trusting Him. But now, we’re asking a woman to do that for someone who’s sinful, has his own pride, has his own agendas at times, right? Is imperfect, is sometimes unwise, which makes the picture somewhat more, I guess, more powerful, but it also makes it much harder. And we don’t want to forget that this is a hard thing that God’s called wives to do. This isn’t easy.
And this would have been a very normal thing in the culture, the Greco-Roman culture, at this time when Ephesians was written. This has been a normal part. But the next part, the next role for the husband that we see would have been very counter-cultural because in their relationships back then, their marriages, the husband was kind of like the ruler, and the wife was just there, just to kind of be there, right? She was kind of a pawn to use for whatever purposes he wanted, but he didn’t really have to think about her. It was all about him. But then God says something very different in this role that should change the way we view our marriages.
The role of the husband is to picture Christ’s love. That’s our role as husbands, to picture Christ’s love. What does the Bible say about that? In this passage, husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her. God has called us as husbands to love our wives. He uses the word, as you’ve probably heard before, Agape. There are three words for love in the New Testament, and this is the one that’s the most pure. What it means is really caring about her needs just for her needs, not what you can get from it, not because it’s always easy to do, not just because it’s always fun to do, but just care for her, no matter what it costs to you.
How do we know that? Because it says, “That’s Christ and the church.” And you can show somebody in your neighborhood or in your co-workers, talk about their marriages, and you can share with them how you want to love your wife. And you’re not perfect, obviously. You don’t want to lie to them. But how you want to love your wife because Christ loved me, and people who are loved tend to be more loving than people who are not loved. So if you’ve experienced the love of Christ in your life, you want to reflect that love to your wife.
In the same way, husbands should love their wives as their own body. He who loves his wife loves himself. Now, sometimes we say, “Oh, we need to love ourselves more,” and I think I know what people are saying by that. This passage would tell you that we naturally love ourselves. Okay, I’ve had some physical issues. I’m almost 40. I’m 39, I’m almost 40, and I feel like I don’t know if it’s a midlife thing or what, but I feel like I’ve just had some issues. And I’m not the best person when it comes to having physical problems or tests and going to the doctor and all that. I tend to worry. I tend to talk about it a lot. You can ask my wife if you want to know. And I just tend to be in my brain a lot with those things. I don’t know if you’re like that or not. You know why? You know why I worry about those things? Because I love myself, right? I don’t want this body to cause pain, to break down, whatever. Why? Because I love myself. And nobody has to tell me, “Hey, Dan, you know you really shouldn’t want your body to break down.” You shouldn’t want pain. No one has to tell me that. Why? Because it’s just natural. Like, I don’t like pain. I don’t like worrying about if my body’s not functioning the way it should function. I don’t have to be told that. Why? Because I love myself naturally.
And what it’s saying here is that husbands, we should love our wives as our own bodies. Why? We’re going to see a little bit later as well, but the reason why is because if we believe that marriage is what it is as a picture, that we become one with our wives, and so if I hurt my wife, I’m hurting myself. Why? Because we are one together. We are so closely aligned that hurting her is hurting me, and I should look at her just like I would never, on purpose, hurt myself. I should never, on purpose, hurt her and I should do everything I can to protect her and to make sure that I’m changing and I’m doing things that help her and don’t hurt her. I would never want to tear myself down, so why would I ever want to tear my wife down? Verse 33, however, let each one of you love his wife as himself. And it goes back to that same truth, that if we really believe that marriage is a union and a picture of Christ and the church, that Christ and when we come together with Christ, we become one within that unity, that we are so closely aligned that we are His body on this world. Right? That you can’t take the body from the head. Right? You can’t separate those two and have good things. We should never see it as me and her. It should be us, right? We’re together. We’re aligned closely. So everything I do should always be thinking about how that affects her because that’s just as much affecting me as it is her, and as we work together in that unity.
So those are the two roles, the role of the wife and the role of the husband. And then, lastly, what is the understood truth? And this is really where I wanted to spend most of our time. The gospel is the understood truth. The whole reason for this illustration is the good news of Jesus Christ that people would understand it better and that we could understand it better, those who are already saved, that we could understand the gospel better. And I probably could go if we had the time and I could have you raise your hand as a married couple, and I could say, “How has being married helped you understand the gospel?” And I could see men and women across the whole auditorium saying, “Yes, there’s things that I understand about God’s love better because of my spouse. I understand how much harder it was for Christ to love me because of my own selfishness and all of these things.” We could go through and see how the gospel is better illustrated or better understood because of marriage.
So how do we see it worked out here? How do we see Christ better? Well, we understand the church’s response to Christ’s love better when wives picture the respect of Christ to their husbands. That’s what it’s saying. Now, as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. So what does that look like? How do we know what it means for us to submit to Christ? Well, one, we can look at wives and say, “Wow, how they follow their husband helps me understand how I should follow Christ.” The interesting thing about the Bible is how our culture and other cultures in the past have taken things, it tends to always go to the extremes. It’s easy to be extreme, right? On one hand, do we follow Christ with complete faith? Yes, but God has never asked us that we couldn’t ask questions. You see throughout the Old Testament, you see all these people when hard things happen in the Psalms, in David’s life, he asked questions. He was honest with God. He was raw with God. Right? God didn’t think that was terrible. God liked that. He said, “David is a man after My own heart.” So being a wife and following your husband has nothing to do with the fact that you are some kind of weak person who just goes and whatever he says, you just do. Right? That’s not what it’s talking about here. It’s saying that just as we can go to God and ask Him questions and say, “What are You thinking? What’s going on here, God? I don’t understand,” and we look at the perfect example in Proverbs 31 of the most godly woman that really could be created in this world. Was she weak? If you think a woman has to be weak to follow her husband, then you need to go read Proverbs 31. That was not a weak woman.
In our culture, it’s so hard for us to separate between, if you’re under someone’s authority, you’re lesser. In the corporate world, that’s how it works. If I’m the CEO, I’m better than everybody else. I mean, no CEO says that. Not a good one, right? No one says that. But that is kind of the thing we think, right? If you’re the CEO, you’re better, and everyone else serves me. But what does God’s kingdom say? God’s kingdom flips it all around. The greatest in God’s kingdom is Christ, and what does He do? He serves everybody. Yes, we are called to serve Him, but He served the entire world. God’s kingdom is different. And wives, when this is a struggle, remember, you’re in good company that Jesus submitted to His Father. There was an authority structure within the Trinity. Why? Because that’s how God wants it. It pictures what He wants it to picture better. So even Jesus throughout the Gospels, how many times does He say, “Hey, this may not be what I want to do, but I’ll do the will of My Father”? Right? And He reaches out to His Father when He’s in the garden, and He’s about to be crucified, and He has this horrible struggle emotionally and spiritually in His life. And He’s just struggling through that with whatever that’s going to bring. And what does He say? He says, “Is there any other way, Father?” He questions His Father not in a sinful way, but in a reality way of, “I don’t want to go through this if I don’t have to. But if You want me to, I’m willing.” So we see the picture of the church submitting to Christ better when wives are willing to submit to their husbands voluntarily.
Next, we understand Christ’s love for us better when husbands picture the love of Christ to their wives. It’s not normal to want what’s best for somebody else more important than what’s best for me. That’s not normal. Okay? It’s not. And in our culture, it’s becoming less and less normal. We see husbands and wives who are living for two separate things and wondering why it’s not working, right? But if we’re living not for ourselves but for the other person, if we’re living for Christ ultimately, we will see this picture of Christ’s love for us better. Verse 25 says, “Husbands, love your wives.” Why? Not so that life will be better at home, not so that she’ll make better meals or do things that you enjoy together or whatever. He says, “Husbands, love your wives for a spiritual, eternal reason because it pictures that Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her.”
For what purpose? “That He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word.” This is talking about the gospel. This is talking about what God has done for us, what Christ has done for us. He sanctified us as believers. When can He do that? After He’s cleansed us by the washing of the water with the word, He’s talking about salvation. When He’s talking about cleansing her, about the washing of water by the word, He’s saying, “You’ve been saved. You’ve been made new in Me, and now I’m going to continue to help you.” 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.
You know what it’s saying there in a nutshell? That Christ came to help us fulfill the purpose we were created for originally. That’s what it’s really saying. That’s what we were originally created for. And what happened? Sin happened. And because sin happened, our original intent of us being created got all messed up. And the only way to fix it, the only way to bring it back to that original intent and for it to work is for Christ to come as our Savior. So what does that mean for husbands? How do we picture that better? With husbands, it’s not about what I want for the family or what I can do and what I want in my marriage, what I want in our relationship. It’s about how can I best help my wife be everything that God wants her to be. That’s what it’s saying. That’s what Jesus did for us. Jesus didn’t need us. We need Him. And yet Jesus was willing to bring Himself low and say, “I’m willing to serve My creation, the ones that put Me to death. I’m willing to serve them.” So as husbands, we need to sacrifice. We need to be there. If our wife wants to do something to take a step in her life in some way, we should naturally want to encourage that, to build that up. If God’s calling her to do something, we should encourage that, not be like, “Well, how’s that going to affect me?” We should encourage them to do those things. That’s what Christ did for us. He helped us to fulfill, not only helped this, He gave us the ability to fulfill what His Father has called us to do, and that’s to worship Him and to be holy for Him.
And then lastly, we kind of added one that we see in this passage. We understand the union we have in Christ better when husbands and wives live as one. Verse 28: “In the same way, husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.” We kind of touched on that before. Why does that work? Because when we believe in this incredible union—it’s hard to even explain the union—we see it in Romans 6, where it says that we are baptized together with Christ. That means we’ve become one with Him. When we have someone baptized, what happens? We have this person, and they get immersed in water. They get put under the water. And when you’re underwater, can you just separate yourself from being wet easily? No, right? When you’re in the water, you’re so close with that water; you’re immersed. It’s you and the water have almost become like one, right? That’s what it’s talking about here when we put our faith in Christ in salvation. We become one with Him. So, what do we want with Him? We are one with Him in His death, meaning that we’ve died to sin. We’re one with Him in His resurrection, meaning that through Him, we are alive to Christ and we gain all of the spiritual blessings of being perfect when we were never perfect, but Christ was for us. In the same way, that’s how our relationship in our marriages should be. We should understand and have faith that even when we feel distant, we are not distant in God’s eyes because He’s made us to be one together. So, I would never hurt myself on purpose. Why would I ever hurt that other person on purpose?
We see the union of Christ better when we begin to grow with our spouse and we begin to have those sweet times together and we begin to fulfill our roles in the way that God’s called us to fulfill them. And sometimes that starts not in the best of circumstances. In fact, many times that journey starts when things are the worst. If we went back to our illustration with Sergey, he was up in this space shuttle for years, for months, much longer than he should have been, much longer than he planned on. And he knew that he was up there, things were going to happen to him physically. It’s pretty well known when you’re in space without gravity, your bones begin to get weaker. And so he knew he’d have to work on those. His muscles started to atrophy because when you don’t use your muscles as much, they go away. So he knew all these things. But what kept him up there, in fact, there’s a story told that him and this other guy who could have come down, they do have emergency space shuttles for them to enter Earth, but they didn’t want to. And the reason why is because they believed in the mission. So this morning, do you believe in the mission that God’s called you to be a picture of the gospel in your marriage? If you do, then we will take these things much more seriously than we would if we don’t believe in the mission. Has your boss ever asked you to do things that you really didn’t believe in? So, if you had normally, if you don’t really believe in something, it doesn’t take a whole lot to get you off, right? If your boss said, “Hey, I want you to do this,” and you’re like, “Okay,” and you’re not really excited about it, and as soon as he’s like, “Hey, you know, if you don’t really want to do it,” you’re like, “Okay, I’m out.” You don’t need much convincing if you don’t believe in the mission.
But if you believe in the mission that God has called us to in this passage, then it will change the way that we interact with our spouses. It will change the way that we view our marriages. And most importantly, it will communicate better the gospel to the world around us. And if we could communicate who Christ is, what does that do? It fulfills our purpose for being here. We call it the Great Commission. God has called us to share Him with the world around us who doesn’t know Him yet. One of the ways we do that is through our marriages. So, the rest of our messages are going to kind of all come back to this. Whether they’ve said or not directly said or indirectly said, they all will come back to this point of what marriage is, what’s its purpose, why did God create it, and what is it for? And so really, I’m not going to go into a deep questioning of how this applies to you, but I’ll ask you one question. And that question simply is this: Is your marriage picturing the gospel? That’s really what this passage is asking us, that our marriages should picture the gospel. If it’s not, it’s time to evaluate. And I’ll be honest, none of our marriages are perfectly picturing the gospel. We all need to have room for growth. We all have room that God can change us and work in us, and that we can be better illustrations of Christ in the church.