Love Lab

1 Corinthians 13:^8&13 “Prophecy and speaking in unknown languages and special knowledge will become useless. But love will last forever! …Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.”

Marriage is God’s idea. Marriage Is A Spiritual Model. Marriage Is The Love Lab. Ephesians 5:^21-28 “Submit to each another out of reverence for Christ. Wives submit to your husbands as you do to the Lord. For a husband is the head of his wife as Christ is the head of his body, the church; he gave his life to be her Savior. As the church submits to Christ, so you wives must submit to your husbands. Now you husbands, you must love your wives with the same love Christ sacrificed for his church. He gave up his life for her to make her holy and clean, washed by baptism and God’s word… In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as they love their own bodies. For a man is actually loving himself when he loves his wife.”

The first things that stands out from this reading is that it starts with mutual submission. The second thing that stands out is that the man is not the head of the woman. The husband is the head of his wife. Amen. As Christ is the head of His body. If you do not understand this, you are going to make a lot of errors. You are going to make decisions based on what the government says, or what the world says, or what your friend says. But not what the Word says, not what God says. Remember, marriage is God’s idea. How was Christ the head? “…he gave his life to be her Saviour…”. This is big. The husband should be willing to lay down his life for his wife if that will save his wife. Wow! That is the calling.

The husband must be ready to lay down his life for his wife if that is what is required to save his wife’s life. In other words, if the husband finds himself in a situation where he is asked to choose, between himself and his wife, one person to take the bullet. To be what God wants him to be, he is to step up to the challenge and sacrifice for his wife. That is what it means. And that is why God demands and command submission, because when a man takes that role of providing that covering, the woman by scriptures must submit. Not to submit is clearly disobedience to God. I have heard well-meaning Preachers talking about equality, saying that the man and the woman are equal in a marriage situation.

If, as the head of the church Christ is equal to the church, then the man is equal to the woman. But of course, we know that is not the case. Christ is The Lord, “and as daughters of Sarah who called Abraham, Lord”, Peter says, “whose daughters you are”. “…For a man is actually loving himself when he loves his wife.” Selah! Selah means pause, think, digest, ruminate over that.

Prayer: Father, I pray that my marriage will mirror the model God lays out in Ephesians 5, in the Mighty Name of Jesus. Amen!