And do not get drunk with wine, for that is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord; always giving thanks for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God, even the Father; and be subject to one another in the fear of Christ.
Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, He Himself being the Savior of the body. But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her; that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she should be holy and blameless. So husbands ought also to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself; for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church, because we are members of His body. FOR THIS CAUSE A MAN SHALL LEAVE HIS FATHER AND MOTHER, AND SHALL CLEAVE TO HIS WIFE: AND THE TWO SHALL BECOME ONE FLESH. This mystery is great; but I am speaking with reference to Christ and the church. Nevertheless let each individual among you also love his own wife even as himself; and let the wife see to it that she respect (or reverence; the margin reads fear) her husband. Ephesians 5:18–33.
This passage brings a close parallel between a husband and wife, and Christ and the Church. It paints a picture that is very difficult for modern thinking to grasp because as the centuries pass, the trend is toward individuality instead of the union that can exist. For many centuries a wife was considered chattel property. She had very little to say about her life. If she was not bought or sold, as the dowry system seems to imply, at least she respected and completely obeyed her parents’ arrangement of marriage for her.
The American way of romance and courtship, marriage and divorce, then remarriage and divorce, is probably practiced the most in America. The greater percentage of the world does not practice courtship based upon romantic marriage. There are places in Europe where it is practiced, but in the great areas of Asia, Africa, India and the South Sea Islands, marriages are contracted by anyone but the bride. She has very little to say about it.
However we are not dealing with the American idea of marriage nor with the customs of the rest of the world. We are dealing with the Scriptural ideal of what a marriage should be, and that’s entirely different. Our romantic idea of marriage is wrong. That’s why so many marriages have failed—they have been based upon a courtship which in most countries doesn’t exist and is not even allowed to exist on the level that it does here in the United States. South of the border, when a girl goes out on any kind of a date, a duena, a chaperon, goes along with her. Here in America we follow another course, but the romantic pursuits of Americans do not necessarily prepare them for marriage.
It would be good to introduce new customs that are Scriptural and right. If the young people would invite the intervention of the older generation—the elders and deacons into their courtship—they would have less problems. To a great extent this is already being followed in this walk. The young people won’t even court each other until there has been prayer and a witness by the elders that such a pursuit is of God. This is one of the greatest steps forward that’s ever been taken in any church.
However, we need more than that. It is not enough to have the right choice in the will of God; the relationship must also have the right development in the will of God until it reaches a spiritual maturity and readiness for marriage. You say, “Pastor, you sound like an old man.” A wise man, maybe. I want to see less heartbreak, less of the folly based upon romantic courtships which throws everything else to the winds and ends up disappointed, disillusioned and heartbroken.
Can you point to your friends, to the ones you grew up with, your contemporaries, and realize that over half of them who followed the course of romantic love miserably failed to find any happiness and only managed to secure, year after year, an agonized arrangement together? Don’t you think there could be something better than that?
I’m of the opinion that marriage is made a little bit too easy. It should be more difficult for the young people in this walk to get married, until there is absolutely no question whatsoever in regard to the will of God, and their preparation for it.
We have had some beautiful marriages because we’ve been carefully following the will of the Lord, but the very success of this procedure leads me to want to be even more careful in the future, because the percentage will be greater of the fine homes that can produce prophets and prophetesses, sons and daughters who prophesy, where the whole family can come forth to the glory of God.
It does not seem that marriage just as a human institution and relationship is justified in these end times. In I Corinthians 7:26–27, Paul speaks of the present distress in which those who were married shouldn’t seek to be loosed, and those who weren’t married shouldn’t seek to be married. He said that it is good for a man to remain as he is. He was talking about the fact that it was very perilous to live for God in those days, not knowing when someone might take you away to a martyr’s death, or slaughter your family before your eyes at anytime.
Jesus said concerning the period of time at the destruction of Jerusalem, “Woe to those who are with child and to those who give suck in those days” (Matthew 24:19). That would be an impediment, for when the armies lifted the siege over Jerusalem, there was a brief period of time when Jerusalem went wild with celebration, but the Christians who remembered the words of Christ took off as fast as they could. The last of the trail of fleeing Christians were caught by Titus’ army and, of course, no one in Jerusalem who thought the siege was over for good escaped.
Josephus describes the crucifixion of the Jewish people, and the slavery in the mines of Egypt. Their persecutors lamented that there was no more wood to make crosses, or ground to plant the crosses. Christ had wept over Jerusalem, saying, “Your house has left you desolate” (Matthew 23:38). Judgment suddenly hit upon a Christ-rejecting people. What happened to the Christians? The bulk of them went over the hills, but those who were with child were too slow—they didn’t make it. Those on the housetop could not come down to take anything out; they had to flee. They couldn’t wait a minute extra to escape.
At that time marriage and children were an impediment, and Paul warns us that such a time can come again. We are going to face persecutions and many difficulties in this day, and it is not absolutely essential that people be married. Marriage is not the institution we have been led to believe it is. How many people have thought they’d never be happy until they were married, only to find it was not a cure-all and answer to everything. Happiness depends upon an inner state of spirit. Unhappiness results from factors within you that have not responded to difficulties with an appropriation of the joy and blessing of the Lord.
Let’s be sure that we really want and believe for the will of the Lord. Believe to do the will of God—and if marriage is in the will of God, fine; aim for a marriage as is described in Ephesians 5. If you can’t find that, then walk with God through these days alone. You won’t walk alone, really, but with the Body, a great company of dedicated people.
In the fifth chapter of Ephesians, Paul describes the relationship that should exist between a husband and wife. Unless marriages measure up to that, they and the individuals in them will be shaken through these coming months and years. Paul tells the wives to be obedient to their husbands as the Church is to Christ, and husbands to love their wives just like Christ loved the Church and gave himself for it. He was speaking of a very unselfish relationship. The one complaint women have is that their husbands are basically too selfish. Husbands are to love their wives just like Christ loved the Church, with a sacrificial love. As the Lord gave Himself for the Church, so husbands are to give themselves for their wives and the wives come to reverence their husbands. But in our society, even among Christians, it’s very difficult to even find loyalty in wives, let alone a reverence for their husbands.
You may say, “There is nothing in my husband to reverence.” That’s where faith comes in. You must begin to believe and enter into it. Everything within our thinking should be geared toward the kind of marriage God wants. If that cannot be, if the unbeliever departs or if there is some difficulty which destroys the marriage, then I think there should be a real desire to walk on with the Lord without marriage.
There should be a preparation in the thinking of the Church so that we do not create two different kinds of citizens—the grouping together of husbands and wives and another grouping of widows, widowers, the divorced, and those who are not married. We cannot think that the elite are the married, and the rest are just a little inferior; and yet that attitude does exist more than it should.
The married couples rarely invite those who are single to fellowship with them. Sometimes the single people are like displaced persons. They have gone through too much and others think that they’re not normal, well-adjusted people. They are better adjusted than you realize because of what they have had to go through, and they need love and fellowship. I am not referring to romantic ideas and needs, but to fellowship within the Body, and this should not be denied to those who are single.
Let a woman come into the church who is divorced, or a woman who has children but her husband is dead or divorced—the body does not extend itself toward such an individual. If suspicion is cast, you’ll find that it’s cast in her direction more than toward the people who are married, with apparently happy homes. You say, “Well, the circumstances are different,” but a basic suspicion is one of the reasons why sometimes there are so many problems.
There ought to be an openness, as one great collective Body, toward one goal: that in the will of God, the marriages will be exactly the way God describes in Ephesians 5. In all cases there must be love and understanding and no insistence to only accept people if they are happily married. Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is to visit the fatherless and the widows in their affliction and to keep yourself unspotted from the world (James 1:27).
When Christ loved the Church, He gave Himself for it for one purpose, that He might cleanse it with the washing of water by the Word to present it to Himself a glorious Church without spot or wrinkle or any such thing but holy and without blemish in His sight (Ephesians 5:26–27). This is what marriage is about. Marriage is not for perfect people, but it can be a wonderful process of maturity for people who have a deep love and commitment to each other. Just as Christ redeems the Church to Himself, so marriage becomes a process of maturity, leading us into a sacrificial life.
As an illustration, a young woman may be very virtuous, but her own basic selfishness is an area which has been unexplored until she gets married. She may have worked a little, but favored by her family that has supported and educated her to some extent. She may have educated herself, but still her life has been self-centered. Then when she marries, she wonders at what she has become overnight. Now she has to wait on the man she has married, cook all of his meals, wash his socks; she has to take care of him. Suddenly her life is geared toward unselfish service for another person.
When little Johnny gets married, isn’t the same thing true of him? He hadn’t worried about anything but taking care of himself. If he had any money he spent it on himself, but when he got married things changed completely. Responsibility reared its ugly head and it meant the duty of paying rent and upkeep. Many things are involved, but he had better take the responsibility of them, because the measure of his manhood is not tested by how romantic he was before he married, but by the way he unselfishly gives himself to take care of his family after he is married. In many societies a man is measured by that. That’s what Christ did—He gave Himself unselfishly.
Marriage demands unselfishness above everything else; that people be geared to serve and help each other. Paul warns, “Husbands, love your wives. Be not bitter against them” (Colossians 3:19). Bitterness can come into the lives of individuals because they have gone through difficult experiences. They never thought they would become bitter, but they did. It is very difficult to find couples getting married today who are not already preconditioned by experiences which have left a subconscious restraint on them against the one whom they are going to marry, then they are embittered when they come into marriage. The girls especially are such a target in our society that even when they get married there are reservations in their minds and a restraint upon their emotions to give themselves completely to their marriage because they have been so deeply disillusioned.
There is almost a need to have a school for matrimony. Those shown in the will of God to be married should go through a period in which the subconscious could be purged of hostile selfish attitudes toward marriage, and prepared to go into marriage as dedicated children of God to do His will. It should not become an emotional relationship between two people who fuss at each other.
Marriage must become a relationship between two people linked by God with a dedication to each other because it’s the will of God. It must be from the ranks of romantic love into a divine love to do the will of God unselfishly. As Christ gave Himself for the Church, as the Church gives herself wholly unto the Lord, so that must be the attitude between a husband and wife. The basis of marriage should be shifted from romantic, emotional instability to a divine compassion and dedication to one another.
The reason why many of our young people get married and go into a slump is because they have shifted the basis of their life from a dedication to Christ to romantic love, and it is inferior to their dedication to Christ. Consequently they start losing out in church and must be constantly prodded, “Come on now, get back in church, you better get with it. Let’s get in and walk with the Lord.” Because they are married, something seems to drag them back.
Girls can appear to be such sweet little things; and oh, how they seek God! But let them get their man and then see how spiritual they are. Look at the young men—you may think, “There’s another Apostle Paul. He’s going to be the greatest thing ever.” But after they are married he turns into something else.
That phony way of courtship conducted with deceit should be ended. There should be an honesty and integrity between young men and women when they approach the will of God. To the extent that there is a slump after a marriage in a couple’s spiritual walk with the Lord, to that extent they were phonies before.
From the day we get married, the spiritual level of our life together should increase, not diminish.
Walk with God. If you have a marriage, have a right marriage. If you don’t get married, then walk on with God and do His Will with all of your heart. A great deal of attention needs to be given to the kind of marriage you have or whether or not you should pursue marriage at all, because the greatest hindrance or the greatest help in walking with God comes in marriage. Your marriage will bring either a helpmeet or a hindrance.
Sometimes a young woman takes a husband to be her spiritual head but he’s a spiritual dud and doesn’t head up anything: he won’t lead her in prayer or minister to her and help her. Suddenly she faces the fact that the marriage was supposed to give her a spiritual head, but instead of that, he doesn’t even want to walk with God. Girls, the important thing isn’t how romantically he kisses you. Try to find out how he prays with you: how he can bless you. Measure the man first before you commit yourself to him. Get a man who will walk with God.
A solid foundation must be put under the marriages in the Church. The selfishness has to be gotten rid of and we must come to a dedication to walk with God. We ought to have a class to make good husbands and fathers, good wives and mothers, handmaidens of the Lord.
If your marriage is in trouble, don’t selfishly blame everything in the other person; it’s a give and take situation. Get down and pray together and decide what you’re to do with your relationship. God will help you. It really takes faith.
Who is adequate for the demands that are made upon you in this end time? Men sometimes feel, “How can I be the husband and father I’m supposed to be?” The wives wonder, “Who can ever measure up to be the woman I’m supposed to be in the Lord?” It’s a matter of the grace of God. Let’s be honest and seek it, and God will help us.