1. "Marriage is first about Him and then about us. That means that true love's counterfeit is not hate. It's something more subtle. It's self."

2. "Could it be that Beth was not attracted to Ben because she loved Ben, but because she loved Beth? What felt like love may actually have been excitement that this man she'd gotten to know seemed to fit so nicely into the dream she'd always had."

3. "You may think you love that person, but in fact, what you love is how that person makes you look. Because of beauty or worldly success or even reputation at church."

4. "When you live together before marriage to try it out, the one thing you're not trying is the one thing that makes marriage what marriage is. The security of unconditional vows."

5. "Love is willing self-sacrifice for the good of another that does not require reciprocation or that the person being loved is deserving."

6. "Get rid of the language of the marketplace. Dating is about finding the one whom you will have the privilege to serve."

7. "To be made in the image of God is dignity unspeakable and yet responsibility unbearable, which is also part of God's design."

8. "If you really understand the gospel, if you really understand how much God has loved you in Christ, then your heart will overflow in gratitude, and you will relish opportunity to love him in return. Which means if you have an attitude problem, the source is your gratitude problem."

9. "It's because God first loved you that you can have the audacity to make the kind of promises you're expected to make on your wedding day. Because the love, the power is yours, is the love of God."

10. "Every marriage is bombarded by sin without and sin within, by weakness, broken dreams, misunderstandings, and no love on a wedding day will last forever. There's no perpetual marriage motion machine."

Observation Questions

1. In Ephesians 5:25, what specific example does Paul give for how husbands should love their wives, and what did Christ do for the church according to this verse?

2. According to Ephesians 5:22-24, to whom are wives instructed to submit, and what comparison does Paul make to explain the nature of this submission?

3. What does Ephesians 5:31 say happens when a man leaves his father and mother and holds fast to his wife, and what Old Testament passage is Paul quoting here?

4. In Ephesians 5:26-27, what is Christ's purpose in giving Himself up for the church? What does He intend to accomplish for her?

5. According to 1 John 4:10, what is the definition of love that John provides, and what specific action did God take to demonstrate this love?

6. What does 1 John 4:19 identify as the reason or source that enables us to love?

Interpretation Questions

1. In Ephesians 5:32, Paul calls the relationship between Christ and the church a "profound mystery" that marriage refers to. Why do you think Paul emphasizes that marriage is ultimately meant to reflect Christ's relationship with the church rather than existing primarily for our personal fulfillment?

2. The sermon distinguishes between valuing marriage for what it "produces" (companionship, children, ministry) versus what it "reflects" (God's love). How does this distinction help us understand why self-love can so easily disguise itself as true love for a spouse?

3. According to the sermon's interpretation of Ephesians 5:28-29, why does Paul say "he who loves his wife loves himself"? What does the "one flesh" reality mean for how married couples should view problems in their relationship?

4. The sermon defines love as "willing self-sacrifice for the good of another that does not require reciprocation or that the person being loved is deserving." How does 1 John 4:10's description of God's love as "propitiation" support this definition?

5. How does the sermon explain the connection between 1 John 4:19 ("we love because he first loved us") and our ability to fulfill the demanding requirements of marital love described in Ephesians 5? What is the "power source" for Christian love?

Application Questions

1. The sermon warns that we can think we love someone when we actually love how they fit into our dreams or make us look. This week, what is one specific way you can examine whether your love for your spouse (or a close relationship) has been more about serving yourself than serving them?

2. The sermon states that "commitment without contingency" is necessary for a thriving marriage, comparing unconditional commitment to glass walls that protect a lush ecosystem. What "if-then" contingencies have you introduced into your marriage or close relationships (e.g., "I'll pursue you warmly if you stop disappointing me"), and what would it look like to abandon one of them this week?

3. If an "attitude problem is a gratitude problem," as the sermon suggests, what specific practice could you adopt this week to reconnect with what God has done for you in Christ so that gratitude can fuel your love for others?

4. The sermon challenges the sin of passivity, noting that "the opposite of biblical love isn't hate, it's apathy." In what relationship—marriage, family, church, or workplace—have you been passive rather than proactively loving, and what is one concrete step you could take to move from apathy to active care?

5. For those who are unmarried, the sermon warns that believing marriage will "only complete your dreams and never reconstruct them" makes it a "sticky idol." How can you practically redirect your desires about marriage (or singleness) toward worship of God this week, rather than treating a future relationship as the source of your ultimate fulfillment?

Additional Bible Reading

1. Genesis 2:18-25 — This passage provides the foundational account of the first marriage, which Paul quotes in Ephesians 5:31, showing God's original design for the one-flesh union.

2. Hosea 1:1–3:5 — This passage illustrates God's faithful, covenant love for His unfaithful people through the prophet's marriage, demonstrating love that is graciously given rather than earned.

3. 1 Corinthians 13:1-13 — Paul's famous description of love provides a fuller picture of the patient, kind, and enduring qualities that characterize the self-sacrificial love commanded in Ephesians 5.

4. Colossians 3:12-19 — This parallel passage to Ephesians 5 places marriage instructions within the broader context of putting on Christlike virtues in all relationships within the Christian community.

5. John 13:1-17 — Jesus' washing of the disciples' feet demonstrates the servant-hearted, self-giving love that husbands are called to imitate in laying down their lives for their wives.

Sermon Main Topics

I. The Question of Perfect Marriage: Sheldon and Davy VanNatten's Story

II. Love's Counterfeit: Self-Love Disguised as True Love

III. Love's Offense: God's Terms and Terminus

IV. Love's Essence: Committed, Gracious, and Differently Shaped

V. Love's Power: We Love Because He First Loved Us

VI. Conclusion: Severe Mercy and Redirecting All Loves Toward God

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Detailed Sermon Outline

What is a perfect marriage? You may have read Shelton VanNatten's account of what he described as his perfect marriage. He and his wife, Davy, met as students. In their early years together, they were almost of mythic intensity. They shared everything together.

Since as Sheldon remembers, total sharing was the ultimate secret of a love that would last forever. So they wrapped themselves in what they called the Shining Barrier, a shared, private, exclusive world of beauty, poetry, art, travel that deliberately shut out the ordinary and the mundane. We raised the Shining Barrier against creeping separateness. Above all, we would be us-centered, not self-centered. We were sufficient to each other, our own world.

We were together, we were close, we were overwhelmed by a great beauty. Their marriage, they thought, wasn't just strong, it was perfect, an almost sacred reality. And like an artist chasing beauty through her brush, Davy and Sheldon pursued beauty in their marriage. But was it perfection? They met C.S.

Lewis while at Oxford and began to exchange letters, and though he praised the beauty of their love, he challenged it. Is your love a God or is it offered to God? Because, as Sheldon remembers, I didn't want God aboard. He was too heavy. I wanted him approving from a considerable distance.

I didn't want to be swallowed up in God.

Yet they were, as David came to faith in Christ and now their perfect marriage was challenged by Christ's claim to supremacy. Sheldon followed in faith, but that conversion was costly because Christ introduced a rival allegiance. As Sheldon noted, It is not possible to be, incidentally, a Christian the fact that Christianity must be overwhelmingly first or nothing.

Yet Lewis reminded them that God does not seek to destroy love but to save it. It must always be received as a gift ultimately from Him and never clutched as a possession. They began to sense that their love precisely because it was so intense was fragile, that it couldn't actually bear all the weight they had put on it.

Did Sheldon and Davy find true love? God is love, so says God. But if love cannot survive its encounter with God, Was it love at all? Is not love that which is most consonant with God? How much of what you and I call love when it finally meets God will be seen as something less than love?

So the question we have today is the question that Sheldon and Davy wrestled with early in their Christian life. What is love? When I asked that question, a few of you are thinking about Mark's recent series on Hosea by the same name. Most of you are trying desperately to suppress the Eurodance hit, Baby, Don't Hurt Me. Right, get that out of your system now.

If God is love, what is love for us? This is our second of five topical series sermons on marriage. Normally at this church, a sermon follows the agenda of one particular text of Scripture. But for these five weeks, we're pausing what is a normal, healthy routine, and we're exploring what Scripture says about this topic. Because marriage is increasingly misunderstood and poorly modeled in our culture and even among Christians.

Because this is a city which is really hard on marriages, which affects all of us. Because biblical instruction on marriage teaches us much about relationships more generally, and because marriage tells us about God. So, if you're married or you're looking to marry, listen to these sermons with yourself in view, not your spouse.

If your marriage falls short of what we see in Scripture, which is inevitable but will be for some a more painful comparison, use these sermons to consider how you can please God even in that struggle. And if you haven't, seek help from someone in this church.

Maybe you have been profoundly hurt by another in marriage.

Use these sermons to begin to heal your view of marriage, which in turn will help recalibrate your view of God.

Let these sermons help all of us steward the marriages that are among us, which Hebrews 13 says are to be held as precious among all.

So what is marital love? Well, to answer that question, we're gonna consider four aspects of biblical love in marriage. First, loves counterfeit. Second, loves offense. Third, loves essence.

And fourth, loves power. Loves counterfeit. Offense, essence, and power. We're going to continue our thoughts from last week in Genesis in our first point, focus in Ephesians 5 for points 2 and 3, and then 1 John 4 is our last point. So first, love's counterfeit.

If you were here last week, you will remember our time in Genesis chapter 1, we saw that the significance of a human being and the significance of marriage is rooted in Genesis 1:27. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them. But marriage is significant because it reflects who God is. Through it we see God more clearly, through it we show off his goodness more clearly. That's Genesis 1:27.

And then there's verse 28. And God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living creature that moves on the earth.

A marriage finds its significance in reflecting who God is, Genesis 1:27, as expressed through the things of Genesis 1:28, our labor and our love, our relationships and our rule. But we so often hold up Genesis 1:28 on its own. We value a marriage for what it produces, things like companionship and sex and children, even ministry, without any connection to the one it portrays. And while the things marriage produces are good, none are ultimate, as Davey and Sheldon discovered. When we do that, we value marriage for what it does, for us, whereas God designed marriage to matter for the one it shows as expressed through what it does.

Marriage is first about Him and then about us. That means that true love's counterfeit is not hate. It's something more subtle. It's self.

Let me tell a cap-bap fairy tale to illustrate. A girl grows up on Capitol Hill at CHBC, a cap-bap kid. We'll give her a name, Beth. She starts in the nursery on the second floor, graduates to praise factory, and by God's grace, she comes to Faith in Christ. She's baptized her senior year of high school, goes off to college, always intending to return, always dreaming of raising a family of her own on Capitol Hill.

Junior year at UVA, she arrives too late to sit with her friends at lunch, and she is uncomfortably squished next to a guy she's never met before. He smiles at her. She notices he is a gorgeous human being.

And then she notices the tattered, dog-eared book he's reading. She can hardly believe her eyes. Nine marks of a healthy church. The man's name is Ben. They start talking excitedly about their shared love of expositional preaching and a culture of discipling and the conversation is effortless.

He asks if they can continue talking over or if they can continue talking over coffee and, and who knew they both like oat milk lattes. She learns he's majored in poli-sci, he dreams of life raising a family in DC as a lobbyist. I mean, who already wants to be a lobbyist in college?

It's love at first sight. They're married the day after graduation. She can't wait for her dreams to unfold.

And yet, as Paul Tripp is so fond of asking, whose dreams? Could it be that Beth was not attracted to Ben because she loved Ben, but because she loved Beth? What felt like love may actually have been excitement that this man she'd gotten to know seemed to fit so nicely into the dream she'd always had.

What happens when his career as a lobbyist is a little more demanding than she would like, when he doesn't get along with her childhood friends, when it turns out they can't have children? That's when the subtle difference between true love and self-love begins to show.

On our anniversary a few months ago, I wrote Joan a letter about how much I love her and then read it over. Chastened at how much I wrote was simply what she does for me or what she means to me. There's nothing wrong with expressing gratitude for how she makes my dreams come true, but even in what I think was a legitimately sweet and encouraging letter, I caught sight of how much self, after 24 years, there still is in my love.

You see, rooting marriage's significance in Genesis 1:28, only in what it produces for me, companionship, sex, kids, ministry, confuses true love with self-love. That's true of any relationship because marriage isn't about me. It's not even about my spouse. It's ultimately, Genesis 1:27, about God, its reflection as expressed through production.

You may think you love that person, but in fact, what you love is how that person makes you look. Because of beauty or worldly success or even reputation at church.

You may think you love that person, but in actual fact, like Beth, what you love is how perfectly they fit into the dreams you've always had. You may think you love, but in fact, what you love is how it feels for her to look up to you as a mature believer. You may think you love, but in fact, what you love is the ease of the relationship since it seems like you agree on everything.

Our culture's slogan, Love is love isn't merely wrong in application, it's wrong to its core. Not all love is love. Love. In fact, true love is surprisingly rare. A turn from Genesis to Ephesians 5 where we're going to spend a good bit of the rest of our time together.

I'm struck by the profound statement Paul makes at the end of verse 28. He who loves his wife loves himself.

Paul is aware of how easy it is for love of self to smuggle its way into love of spouse. That's why he spent several verses instructing husbands about what it really means to love. Yet instead of contrasting self-love with true love, he redefines itself. He who loves his wife loves himself. Because, end of verse 31, the two are now one.

Every marriage begins more like Beth and Ben's than we like to think. So much struggle in marriage early on or even years in is the struggle to transform love from me to we.

We can confuse true love with self-love. It might be good sometime this week to reserve 10 minutes and just ask yourself where you have done that. And I think for those who have never been married, part of what can make marriage such a sticky idol is believing it will only ever complete your dreams and never reconstruct them. So learn to find the significance of marriage not merely in what it produces, but through the things it produces. In the God you long to see and show, retune your idols toward worship.

And yet this is a challenge, because not only is God's conception of love foreign to us, it's offensive, which is our second point, loves offense.

Why did they crucify the King of Love? Why do you and I sin against the King of love? Because Jesus' love comes on his terms and not ours. And that's deeply offensive. I mentioned Ephesians 5 earlier.

Let's read the verses we're focused on starting in verse 22.

Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now, as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ 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, 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. In the same way, husbands should love their wives as their own bodies.

He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. 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. However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.

Christ's love here is the substance. Marriage is the shadow. Marriage is what's fading away. Christ's love is love forever. And yet there's offense in these words, isn't there?

Right, to his original audience, Paul's instructions to wives would not have raised an eyebrow, but words to husbands were deeply offensive. Right, the idea that as head of his family his is not power over but power for. That was offensive. To modern ears, it's the opposite, in part because of how long our culture has soaked in Christian waters. A Christian teaching on gender rescued women from being seen as different in value from men, but our culture has slid along that rail so far, it can no longer understand how any difference is not a difference in value.

It sees problems that, sadly, are so often real, and yet so often its medicine is worse than the malady. In Ephesians 5, marital love is offensive because we don't like its terms. And yet if God designed marriage to reflect His love, then we must love as He says. Right? Just like loving your body means following the rules of diet and exercise, the alternative to the rules of love is enslavement to your temperaments, tastes, feelings, impulses.

Same thing here. This is the rule of marital love. Ray Ortlund writes, headship did not come down to us historically as an artifact of oppressive patriarchy. It began in heaven and comes down into this world, creationally, as a pathway to human flourishing. The evils of domination and slavery we invented, but the head with helper dance of complementarity came from God himself.

We men and women today do not automatically know the steps to this dance. We must learn. But if we will receive it by faith, trusting in the goodness and wisdom of God, we can then explore its potentialities for joyful human magnificence.

So love's terms are offensive to us, but so is love's terminus. True, love isn't ultimately about you or even about your spouse. It's about God. And we see the offense of that in the confusion and bewilderment every married couple feels in those moments where marriage is going great and they're confronted with the fact that marriage will not last.

In the Old Covenant, marriage was the faithful life. In the New Covenant inaugurated by an unmarried Messiah and proclaimed by an unmarried Apostle Paul, faithfulness encompasses both marriage and singleness. Singing on a side by side. Yet Jesus taught in places like Luke 20 that in the new creation marriage will be no more. The sign will be swallowed up in the greater glory of the love it signifies.

That's why Davey and Sheldon preferred keeping God at a safe distance.

Because God, in one sense, cannot be trusted. He cannot be trusted to leave us at the center. Conversion to Christianity is a personal, Copernican revolution where God becomes the center. And the fact is we like being at the center. That's the nature of sin.

You and I, the creatures, we want to call the shots. So we would prefer a Christianity that says nothing more than God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. And yet Jesus said, if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. And we find that offensive. To become a Christian is to put God at the center, repenting of our center loving sin and trusting his death and resurrection on our behalf, repentance and faith.

That's how you can be forgiven by God. That is how you can discover the joy of life with God at the center.

That's one reason the Bible speaks so much to your personal life. I've heard atheists mock the Christian God as the deity who cares more about what consenting adults do in their bedrooms at night. Why is God so intrusive? Because God designed us to find life with him at the center. And so he insists on pushing his lordship into the most personal and private areas of our life precisely because He loves us.

You see like the dog that chased the car and caught it? When you love, when you truly love, you lose control.

Offensive, but true of every love and especially love in marriage because true love is on God's terms, not yours. And true love is about God, not you. So what is true love in marriage? That's our third point, love's essence. In Ephesians 5, we see that love in marriage is essentially three things.

It's committed without contingency, graciously given, differently shaped. Some of you are very careful note takers, so I'll repeat those again. Committed without contingency, graciously given, differently shaped. That's love's essence. We see commitment without contingency in verse 31's quotation from Genesis 2, A man shall hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

Right, the two are now one. He who loves himself, sorry, he who loves his wife loves himself. When your stomach is hungry, Paul says, the mouth doesn't resent the needs of the stomach. No, verse 29, he nourishes and cherishes it just as Christ does the church. And marriage problems don't exist as your problems or my problems.

Even when those problems arise from within one of our hearts, problems are always, always ours, which is why marriage vows are not contingent. There's no if you or so long as. They're just promises. And it's that commitment that makes a marriage. Anything short of that, and you're always on trial in the relationship.

When you live together before marriage to try it out, the one thing you're not trying is the one thing that makes marriage what marriage is. The security of unconditional vows. There is fine print here, which we see in Jesus' teaching on divorce, but what the Bible stresses about marriage is commitment without contingency.

And my friends, that's a really important part of how marriage reflects God's love for us because God is, at His very core, faithful. When marriage becomes only about production, about kids and sex and companionship and ministry without reference to reflection, then you're always going to evaluate whether it's doing what you think it's supposed to do, always viewing it like a consumer does. Which means that even if you are committed to your vows, you're not really committed to the marriage. You may never break your vows and yet have all kinds of contingencies that degrade your commitment in marriage. So, my married brother or sister, where have you introduced contingencies?

I'll give that up for you, but only if I see you giving this up for me.

I'll pursue you with warm affection, but only once you stop being such a disappointment.

No, you commit not because what you think you get in the long run is worth what commitment costs, but because in Christ God has committed himself to you. Where do you need to abandon the if-then commitment of consumerism and embrace the self-giving commitment that's like God's? You could ask the same question about all kinds of relationships. Relationships at church come to mind, guarded by the commitment of membership. If marriage is ultimately about reflection, then you are committed because in Christ, God has committed himself to you.

Full stop. No contingencies, no ifs, no ands, no buts. That's the power of reflection.

What's more, relationship thrives inside these safe walls of commitment. Commitment without contingency is like those glass walls at the National Botanical Garden that protect the lush ecosystem on the inside from the cold world on the outside.

I'm not committed without contingency because I don't have the relationship I want. But part of why you don't is because your commitment is spoiled by contingency, and so it's not safe. We would hardly say that commitment without contingency guarantees a good marriage. It's not sufficient, but it is necessary, which leads to that second aspect of love's essence, like God's commitment to us. Marital love is always graciously given.

Verse 33 does not say, Husbands demand that your wives respect you. No, simply let the wife see that she respects her husband. Love is graciously given, as is the love that marriage reflects. John 3:16, For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son. God's love is so generous, it sometimes doesn't even make sense to our little brains.

It certainly isn't fair, yet because God's love is a gift, It in no way depends on us, and so it is as unshakable as his promises.

So when our love reflects his as a gift, what strength that gives. Right, a marriage that's rooted ultimately in what marriage produces is fragile and brittle because its love is only as strong as the certainty that the goods will continue to flow. But true love can never be demanded. It cannot be earned. It can only be given.

And as those who ourselves have been loved by God, love must be given.

I haven't defined love so far, but this would be a good time to do it. I like Paul Tripp's definition, at least as a good starting point, though it's a little clunky. So here it is. Rooted in this idea that love is a gift. Love, he writes, is willing self-sacrifice for the good of another that does not require reciprocation or that the person being loved is deserving.

Love is willing self-sacrifice for the good of another that does not require reciprocation or that the person being loved is deserving.

Because, again, love is a gift. And that's true well beyond marriage. Right? Is your love in friendship given or earned? Is your love as a parent given or earned?

Is your love for fellow church members given or earned? Or here's a doozy: Is your love for your coworkers given or earned?

Sometimes we talk about dating, use the language of the marketplace. I've got so much capital, I'm looking to buy at my level or higher. So foolish, right? Number one, you overestimate your capital, I promise you. Number two, in the heat of romance, you probably overestimate the other person's as well.

So get rid of the language of the marketplace. Dating is about finding the one whom you will have the privilege to serve.

Okay, so what happens when your spouse doesn't do the things that we see here in Ephesians 5? Are you right to be angry?

Yes, but not for the reason most of us get angry. Because love is a gift you are not owed. When you value marriage for the things it produces, you get angry at your spouse's failures because they've deprived you of what was that's how we normally get angry in marriage, that's how I get angry in marriage.

But if marriage is about reflection, then when your spouse fails you, you get angry because they've wronged God. If your husband has failed to love you, as Ephesians 5 commands him to, whom has he failed? You, or God. Well, to whatever extent he's failed you, he's failed God, because your worth as a person is as one made in His image. That should be humbling for you and daunting for your husband.

God should be first in our affections and so first in our anger. And that's the road that leads from anger to compassion. So then in the third point, we looked at marriage as committed without contingency, graciously given. Let's not turn to a third aspect of marriage's essence. It is differently shaped.

Marriage is sacrifice. I think we all understand that. But to simply call it sacrifice underestimates how a husband's sacrifice for his wife is going to look different than a wife's sacrifice for her husband. For her husband. Ephesians 5 describes how the cost of one-flesh union, when pressed in on a man and a woman who are different by design, results in differences in sacrificial love.

In particular, God has given the husband certain kinds of power. Greater physical strength in most marriages, the role of head that we see in verse 23, For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the church, his body. That's not rooted in any kind of supposed superiority of man over woman, simply the order of creation, man before woman. The fact is that man and woman in marriage are different. When things are going well, we love differently and sacrifice differently and communicate differently.

When things are not going well, we argue differently and become self-protected differently and fear differently. But we are not interchangeable.

When I was engaged to be married, I did not know what to do with these verses. I believed them because they were in the Bible, but not happily. My wife was and is extremely intelligent, competent, fully capable of living well on her own. Why she should submit to me was befuddling. And what Paul describes here was intimidating.

And yet, Joan and I decided, We trust the Bible more than ourselves, so this is how we're gonna build our marriage. What a blessing it has been. In fact, if you ask me today, Jamie, why do you believe the Bible is true? I've gotta imagine among my top five answers is that in my marriage I picked a fight with the Bible. It won, I'm forever blessed.

So what do these roles look like in marriage? Let's begin where Paul does, verse 22, Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord. Not women submit to men, but wives submit to your own husbands. Why? Because he deserves it?

No, like we saw earlier, is a gift offered under God. Look there at the text, As to the Lord. Submission is voluntarily yielding in love. I think it would be helpful to place three words side by side. The word submit, like we see here, respect, we see in verse 32 when Paul restates this, and help her from the passage in Genesis that Paul is quoting.

So, to submit means to follow, to yield, yes, but not grudgingly with respect, and yet not mindlessly either. Right? The greatest asset I have as my wife's head is her as her, my helper, helping me see things I missed, helping me with wisdom I lack, helping me with her strength.

And that word respect is challenging because it's not just an action, it's a belief. What if my husband isn't respectable?

But to some, he said, that's where every new marriage begins. He's an inexperienced leader. She's an inexperienced follower. He's not leading particularly well, and even where he is, she may not be able to see it well. And you could respond by focusing on how unworthy a leader he is, which I promise is not fertile soil for respect.

That's the path to scorn.

Or, since love is a gift, since it's not earned, you can encourage him in areas where it's easy to respect him, trust that there's more you cannot see yet, and hope that God is doing something here.

Then verse 25, Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. And we see two examples. They're both about provision. Christ provides spiritual nourishment for the church, verse 26. A person provides physical nourishment for his body, verse 29.

And so these two examples provide a vision of provision which is very holistic, from spiritual to physical. And yet, Paul doesn't use the verb provide. He says love. Why? I assume because of the effective content of that word.

Or just like Proverbs 5's command that a husband be intoxicated always in her love, the Bible commands our affections. Sometimes we are too broken to meet that standard, but those commands are a reminder that we should never be satisfied with love until love bears that sheen of affection. It's like the bow and a gift, the cherry on top. A husband's provision is not cold and distant. It's warm, love, relational, it's a gift.

So how tragic and twisted that these very words have been used by husbands to bully their wives, to get their own way, to trample on her preferences and needs or worse, wives submit to your own husbands?

The very fact that the husband's life is to reflect the love of Christ should puncture any attempt to hide selfishness behind these verses. How on earth is it that selfish love can attempt to cast itself in the reflection of Jesus, who did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many? Remember, love has no contingencies. And yet, selfishness in marriage can be subtle. And one of the most subtle forms in marriage is a sin of passivity.

Gary Thomas put it well, the opposite, he says, of biblical love isn't hate, it's apathy.

When you're the one entrusted with power in any relationship, it's easy to step back, use that power for your own needs, and feel that, you know, well, you might not be a great husband, you're not doing anything wrong, but the reflective nature of love challenges that posture. What does an emotionally distant husband say about God? What does a father who's annoyed at the demands of his children say about God? How does Jesus use his authority? In compassion, he meets us where we're at.

He knows us inside and out. At great cost to himself, he sacrificed himself for us. Even today at God's right hand, he continues to provide for us, interceding for us, ministering to us by his Spirit in the same way. Verse 28 says, Husbands should love their wives as their own bodies, selfless, yes, and proactive, thoughtful. Anticipating.

And if as a wife, you're shaking your head right now at the failings of your husband, you need to remember your posture as his helper. This is a dance which is done together. This is a dance that needs both of you. I remember an older couple in our church reflecting on a difficult time in their marriage. She had pointed out a failure in his leadership.

He didn't see it. She waited a while, pointed out again. He still didn't see it. A third time, nothing. So she said she committed it to prayer daily for two years, and then he saw it.

That's the help he needed. Again, this is a dance you do together, and it's a dance worth fighting for because in this dance is unparalleled opportunity to see and show the glories of Jesus.

But how? If I've done my job well, then I'm not the only one in this room feeling crushed right now.

You're feeling crushed by the expectations of Ephesians 5, even those who are not married are feeling crushed by what love requires.

To be made in the image of God is dignity, unspeakable and yet responsibility, unbearable, which is also part of God's design. And that leads us to our fourth point, which is indispensable, loves power.

So let's get to that verse on the front of your bulletin, which packs more dynamite per word than perhaps any other verse in Scripture. Go ahead and turn to 1 John 4. Verse 19, we love because he first loved us.

The question in this section of 1 John is how to distinguish between what's really of God and the fakes. No one can see God, so how can we know what is from God? The answer in a word is love. Look at verse 12, no one has ever seen God. If we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

That idea of perfected is the idea of completion. Just like an electric circuit must be completed to turn on, God's love for us is made complete through our love for him, which is expressed in our love for one another. So it's love for one another. Verse 17, When that circuit is completed, that gives the child of God confidence as we look ahead to the day of judgment, because just as Christ was love in this world, so are we. And verse 19 captures in a sentence what all this means.

We love because he first loved us. There's power in that verse.

There's power in that verse for love in marriage, for love in all arenas of life. Where is that power to begin with? There's power because of what God has already done for us in Christ. It says, He first loved us. No matter the failings a sermon like this may expose, if you are in Christ, God loves you.

Election is the other side of grace. Verse 10, In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be a propitiation for our sins, to turn aside God's wrath, because we've all sinned in all kinds of ways. God would rightly banish us to hell, and yet in his mercy, he sent Jesus, God become man, to live the life we should have lived. To die a death we deserved on the cross because we deserve this wrath of 1 John 4:10. Jesus took on himself the wrath of God so that we could be forgiven.

We can be forgiven, as I said earlier, if we repent of our sins and put our trust in Christ. So at the cross, Christ freed us from the power of sin. That doesn't mean we never sin, it just means we never have to. There's power there. But beyond that, there's power in gratitude.

If you really understand the gospel, if you really understand how much God has loved you in Christ, then your heart will overflow in gratitude, and you will relish opportunity to love him in return, which he directs toward those around you. Supernatural love by God results in supernatural love by us. Which means if you have an attitude problem, the source is your gratitude problem. But you have lost sight of all that God has done for you in Christ, which means you have lost connection to His power at work in your life. And the beautiful thing is that means that that every sin, in marriage or otherwise, contains in itself the seeds of its own destruction.

So, I struggle with patience with my wife, for instance.

I should look that sin in the face. It's so easy to excuse it, so easy to ignore it, confess it. James 4 says, Mourn weep, and wail. Think about it. What a great evil that having received divine patience, I cannot be bothered to be patient myself.

Then look to Christ. Consider that he took the penalty of that sin. He even took its shame on himself at the cross. He gives me his perfect record of patience, Consider how undeserving I am of such a mercy and His gratitude for forgiveness by God unfolds into love God, I can now turn that love into power for patience. So there's power in gratitude.

There's also power in imitation. We love because He first loved us, in part because Jesus showed us how to love. He showed us how to love our enemies. He showed us how to love the undeserving like us. He showed us how to love with compassion and truth.

Study the Gospels and learn how to love. And there's power in reflection. Verse 20, if anyone says, I love God and hates his brother, he is a liar. A liar because, as the verse says, love for God and hatred for man cannot coexist. And a liar because your lack of love lies about God's perfect love.

Right? I hate it when I say or do something that puts my wife in a negative light because I so enjoy how wonderful she is. How much more with God? In 1 John, God's love is not an extrapolation from ours, but ours is a reflection of his. Our love for one another is what completes the circuit.

It validates his love in us. It's a reflection of his love.

It's because God first loved you that you can have the audacity to make the kind of promises you're expected to make on your wedding day. Because the love, the power is yours, is the love of God. It's because God first loved you that you can make good on those vows years later because God first loved you. You can love others in this church, even the ones you disagree with and find difficult. Because God first loved you, Jesus said, you can love even your enemies.

500 years ago, inventors from India to Europe were fascinated with the idea of a perpetual motion machine that could continue forever without any external impulse. And yet, as the laws of energy were discovered, scientists realized that was impossible, just like marriage. Every marriage is bombarded by sin without and sin within by weakness, broken dreams, misunderstandings, and no love on a wedding day. Not even love like Sheldon and Davy had will last forever. There's no perpetual marriage motion machine.

Loving because of what I hope to get if I keep on loving isn't sufficient. So our world says, that's right, marriage is fickle. Sometimes you just run out of love and then it's best to put the marriage down.

The Christian we love because he first loved us. Not we love because we discovered it makes sense to love. Not we love because we had enough at the start. No, we love because he first loved us. Right?

The God who loves us is this self-existent God. He is, as the Westminster Confession states, unto himself all sufficient, not standing in need standing in need of any creatures which he has made. He is the alone fountain of all being, of whom, through whom, and to whom are all things. This is the God who revealed himself to Moses in a burning bush, ever on fire, never consumed, a living picture of his self-existence, and who then revealed himself to Moses by a most profound name, Yahweh, I am who I am. The God whose name is a verb, unoriginated, ever giving, ever loving, contingent on nothing, dependent on no one, containing all glory, life, goodness, blessedness in and of himself.

That is the God who has loved us in Christ, the inexhaustible fountain for love's power in you. So how can you speak with patience when you feel so impatient? How can you overlook that same fault for the 5,281st time? How can you die yet again to self for the sake of love? How can you forgive when it appears that this time, the marriage you're rescuing by your forgiveness isn't worth the cost of forgiveness?

You love with the power of the burning bush, the ever giving God you love because he first loved you, knowing that in the unquenchable power of his love, he always gives what he commands. And so we should conclude.

I mentioned last week that if you want to love your spouse well, You've got to love God more than you love your spouse. And after Davy and Sheldon had given themselves over to their God, this is the test God applied to them, because if you have read their story, you know that while she was still in her 30s, Davy was stricken with cancer, fought valiantly, and died.

Her death traumatized Sheldon. He wrestled with despair. He longed not just for her memory, he longed at times for reunion with her in death.

And yet he began to slowly realize that while his love for Davy was real and good, it had been closed in on itself. Even after conversion, their love had in many ways excluded God, and so it could not endure loss.

Sheldon longed for Davy. And knowing he could not have her back, longed for God to bring into his life someone else, but eventually he concluded, God does not give substitutes. David's loss was real and could not be canceled out by some new arrangement. God does not give substitutes. Instead, he gives us himself.

And in that realization, Christianity now appeared not as an enemy of love but as its only possible ground. God had loved Sheldon too much to allow his thirst for love to be satisfied by anything less than himself. And so that death, Sheldon wrote, so full of suffering for us both, suffering that still overwhelmed my life, was yet a severe mercy, a mercy as severe as death, A severity as merciful as love.

What is true love?

The love of God, because God is love. He may not call you like he did Sheldon to give up other loves to know his own, but he does call you to redirect all other loves toward his own so that all love within marriage or elsewhere pushes forward to see and show the love of God.

Do you not want to love like that?

Let's pray.

Our most merciful Father, we thank youk for your love, We confess we have underestimated it. We confess that we are just at the very beginning of seeing it for what it really is.

We pray it would transform us. And Father, as we love in holiness, we would see you better and know your love better and love better ourselves. Father, we pray this in the name of Jesus. Amen.