This recording is from Willow Creek Church in Winter Springs, Florida, where Reverend Kevin Labia's our senior pastor, today's message is part 15 in a sermon series on the Book of Ephesians titled Blueprints. This message is taken from Ephesians chapter 5, verses 22 through 33. Listen to God's Word as it's found in Ephesians chapter 5, verses 22 through 33. I submit to your own husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is ahead of the wife, even as Christ is ahead of the church, his body and his, is himself as Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit and 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 and 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 hated, 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. This is the word of the Lord. At this time, children in kindergarten through 3rd grade can go ahead and rise up and meet Mr. Drew in the back of our worship center here, for a time of children's worship if you do their parents would like. If you are our guest this morning, this is the first time you are here, the first time your children will participate, would you take a moment to also rise up, introduce yourself to Drew and his staff so we can ensure a safe and convenient handoff back to you after the conclusion of the worship service. The children are picked up in the gymnasium after this morning's worship service. Let me invite you to open up in your Bibles to Ephesians chapter 5, verses 22 through 33 ourselves this morning as we go there together and as we do so, let's pray. Father, we thank you for your rich love and lavish mercy that you not only rescue us individually but your desire is to rescue and redeem our relationships, those things we share corporately. In every sphere of life, whether it be in the home, in our marriage and family, or in the workplace and our professional relationships, Father, we thank you that the gospel has implications for every sphere of life that we touch, all for your glory. Would you help us by the power of your spirit to understand your truth a little bit more? Although this passage overtly speaks to marriage, it speaks great truths to all of our relationships and I pray this morning that you would speak powerfully by your spirit into each of our hearts. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. First, as we begin, let me wish all of those fathers here a happy Father's Day, donuts with Dad during the Sunday school hour was a rousing success. I got to enjoy that with my two littlest ones. It was a great, great time, a fellowship, hopefully you participated in that, but also know on these kinds of occasions, these observances in our culture, they can also be times of great pain for those who are missing their dads, for those who have never known the joy of having a dad or maybe have a dad, but not the one that we would want for you. If that describes where you are, I find great comfort on days like this and the fact that we have a Heavenly Father and it's Him ultimately that we celebrate every Sunday as we come together and it's His love that forms the foundation of what we'll see this morning and this passage. Let me ask you a few questions as we begin our time together. The first one is for you personally, I would assume that most of you gathered here this morning are Christian believers. You have grown up in the church from one degree or another. You rest upon the teachings of the Scriptures for a foundation, but I hope that some of you have not grown up in the church and I would hope and pray that some of you maybe yet are not even believers in Christ, not that I would deprive you of that joy, but that you might hear it maybe for the first time in turn to the Lord even this morning and find forgiveness and restoration through Him. Let me ask you these questions and not assume that we would all answer them the same way. The first one is, is there a God? Is there a God or is there not? And if that God exists, is He personal and can it be known or is He impersonal and detached? Is He revealed Himself or is He not? Are we creatures or are we products of chance? Are our lives accidental and meaningless or are they purposeful of consequence and everlasting in nature? Is the life that we enjoy here and now something that will continue onward into the future or is the life that we enjoy here and now just in illusion? The process of the world coming together by chance and each of us given and the loseery few moments to live what appears to be a life of existence on this earth only to remove return to dust, or from dust we weren't formed by a personal God but instead by chance and matter just colliding in a certain way so many billion years ago. What's your worldview? How do you answer those questions? How do you see God? How do you see yourself? How do you see the world in which you live? If you're the Apostle Paul living 2,000 years ago you had answered those questions very quickly and very confidently. Your worldview would be the worldview of the Hebrew people, formed over hundreds, thousands of years through prophets who spoke the Word of God. You remember that the Apostle Paul was the Hebrew among Hebrews. He describes his resume in another epistle and says that it was on the eighth day that he was circumcised according to the traditions of his fathers, that he grew up receiving a rabbinic education on rivaled in the Jewish world, that he was a Pharisee of Pharisees, that he looked forward one day to zealously defending the truths of his fathers, even calling those who question them to account and even to more than account, maybe perhaps even to death. Paul formerly Saul was a persecutor of the Christian church because his worldview did not allow at that time for belief that Christ was the promised Messiah, but he did believe a Messiah was coming. He saw humanity as a special creation of God. He saw God as personal involved in the world revealing himself known in the Old Testament scriptures. He saw humanity collectively as created by God in Psalm 139, verse 13, a verse that Paul undoubtedly would have known. He affirmed not only humanity in general being the creation of God, but each individual human being the special creation of God, albeit through secondary means, Paul saw God as transcendent over all things, but also imminent involved in all things. Nothing escaping is notice, nothing escaping is view, nothing in reality unaddressed. In God's word, in one way or another, in Paul's thinking, after conversion, that Hebrew worldview was perfected even more, perfected with the teaching of Christ, and then after Jesus offered his life on the cross and ascended into heaven, perfected further still through the ministry of his apostles, those leaders that Jesus specifically chose and prepared to perpetuate his teachings, and they explained them, inspired by God's Holy Spirit, and what they wrote they understood was no mere human collection of writings. Paul's writings are referred to by Peter himself, a contemporary of Paul's as scripture. Paul says that what he writes are the very words of God, the New Testament, the Old Testament together, perfecting an ancient perspective on the nature of God and of reality. Once we could call the Hebrew worldview, but after the coming and revelation of Christ, many have since called the Judeo-Christian worldview. And why do I mention all of that? Because the first thing that I want you to see this morning is that we're not alone in answering questions concerning marriage, that we as people of faith don't believe that these things are left to chance or to guessing, they are instead revealed. In God's word, and we're revealed in the flesh of Christ in his righteousness. So the first point that I want to make this morning is that Christ rescues us from the tyranny of our own self-righteousness and moves us to enjoy the freedom of his righteousness. Christ freees us from the tyranny of self-righteousness to the freedom of his righteousness. You know, if you affirm the faith of the Apostle Paul, and I know that many of you do this morning, if not all of you here, I hope not all, I hope we are attractive to those still considering these questions, and I hope we will be even more so in the years to come. If you affirm the faith of the Apostle Paul, you affirm that it's teaching and the scriptures is inspired by the Holy Spirit. And inspired by the Holy Spirit, you consequently infer that it is infallible. It's the highest authority because it comes ultimately from God, and that it's inherent true in all that it teaches when it's properly understood with context and questions of genre and all of these things coming together, we can arrive at a right understanding of God and the nature of the world that he created. Now, that doesn't mean you're going to like what God's word says, even though it's inspired. God often times speaks things that are very hard for us to accept. There are things in the Bible that I don't particularly like when I first read them. And many of those things have to do with marriage, and many of those things have to do with the things we're going to consider this morning. If I follow Paul's teaching, inspired by the Holy Spirit concerning marriage, it means that I need to die, and I don't like hearing that. I want to preserve myself. I want to prosper myself. I don't want to surrender myself. And maybe if you're a woman this morning, you don't like what we've already read because you hear the word submit, and that word to you sounds like death. This morning, as I was preaching on the word, actually, the lights went out for a moment. The power shut down, and if I was quicker on my feet, I would've joked about a woman running up into the balcony and pulling the plug just to kill this whole operation. Because let's be honest, these are difficult words. You know what? If you believe that they are of God, and you believe in trust that God's ways are higher than our ways, and that God alone is wise, and His wisdom far exceeds our own, but that He loves us, that He cares for us, that He withholds no good thing from us, even the blood of His own son He would spill to redeem us. And we can trust God not only when verses of Scripture make immediate sense, and seem to comport with what we want to believe about ourselves in the world, but even when it goes against what we want to believe. We can learn to delight in the law of God. Psalm 119, verses 97, 113, 163, 165, the Psalmist over and over and over again saying that He's come to love the law of God, not because it's not challenging, but because it is challenging. Because in the words of the writer of Hebrews, it cuts deep within and it hurts it first, but it humbles and heals those it breaks. When you come to a passage like this concerning marriage, it calls to submission and sacrifice if your trust is in the Lord. You might not like it at first, I believe you can come to embrace it when you understand it within its proper context. Now, if you don't hold the worldview of the apostle Paul, your perspective or standard is going to be different on these questions. You're going to define marriage differently. It will be defined according to the standard of another religion, most likely here in the increasingly relativistic United States, it will be a sort of personal pragmatism where everybody does whatever seems best in their own eyes as they pursue their own definition of happiness. Many, if not most, Americans today, including those in the church view marriage as an institution existing primarily for their own personal happiness, not God's honor, not his glory. Some of you have heard of Tim Keller. He's one of my favorite theologians, he's a pastor up in New York City. I don't agree with him necessarily on everything, but I agree with him on an awful lot. He's written on marriage with his wife Kathy. They have a book, The Meaning of Marriage, Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the wisdom of God. I highly recommend that to you. You might have been a husband and wife, you might even enjoy reading that together. This is what Tim and Kathy say. They say, both men and women today see marriage, not as a way of creating character and community, but as a way to reach personal life goals. They're looking for a marriage partner who will, quote, fulfill their emotional sexual and spiritual desires, end quote. And that creates an extreme idealism that in turn leads to a deep pessimism, that you will ever find the right person to marry. One of my joys as a pastor when I get together with couples where I have the privilege of presiding over their wedding day is one of my personal joys as a pastor is to meet with them in the week leading up to their wedding day and destroy all of their delusions about marriage. It is so fun. I'm just kidding. I love seeing the wide eyed optimism because I remember those days, but I also remember the three weeks after the initial marriage, Molly, can I get a name then? I wanted to kill her and she wanted to kill me. It was bad and I say that only half joking early on our marriage is very difficult and I was not at all prepared for that. I thought when Molly and I got married it would be happily ever after, not at all on earth, but man, it felt more like hell on earth those first few weeks. Molly and I have this legendary argument we had within the first month of our marriage. I got so frustrated and being, you know, I'd like to thank a somewhat good guy. I knew I couldn't do anything drastic so I said I just got to go. So I went for a walk. I don't know why I didn't take my car but I ended walking probably three or four, five miles to the equivalent of a 7-Eleven at like one thirty a.m. and I walked in. I only had a little catch in my pocket. I bought a roast beef sub and some gator egg and I went out to the side of a highway and I just sat there. Lots of the cars go by, wishing one of them would run me over. It was bad, it was so, so bad, unless you think, unless you think I'm saying something native about my wife that she wouldn't feel on her turn, I'm sure she was at home looking for the gun to kill me. It was really, really bad. And one of the reasons it was bad is we had unrealistic expectations. We weren't really thinking of marriage biblically. We were thinking of it idealistically. But a biblical marriage is what Tim and Kathy Keller say here, built on very realistic and let's face it, sobering assumptions about the nature of who we are, our worldview. If we have a pie in the sky worldview about our relationships, we set ourselves up for delusion and all sorts of unnecessary pressure but if we have a very realistic assessment, it actually, ironically, becomes more a pathway to joining the light. Molly and I are thrilled to be married to one another now. At times there are ebbs and flows in every marriage but I think one of the reasons that Molly and I are now so happy in marriage is we're much more realistic about it. They go on to say this, Tim and Kathy Keller, sociologists argue that in contemporary western society the marketplace has become so dominant that the consumer model increasingly characterizes most relationships that historically were covenantal, including marriage. Listen carefully this, today we stay connected to people only as long as they're meeting our particular needs at an acceptable cost to us. When we cease to make a profit, that is when the relationship appears to require more love and affirmation from us than we think we are getting back than we cut our losses and drop the relationship. This has also been called commodification, a process by which social relationships are reduced to economic exchange relationships and so the very idea of covenant is disappearing in our culture. Covenant is therefore a concept increasingly foreign to us and yet the Bible says it's at the essence of marriage. There are really two ways you can view a marriage, oftentimes in our culture, at least these are the prevalent ways. One is to say marriage is a contract and on your wedding day you agree to do X and your spouse agrees to do Y and as long as you do X, they'll continue to do Y and as long as they do Y, you'll continue to do X but what happens when X and Y are unrealistic or unmet? Well, often in our society it means it's over, it's done, default. The ROI, the return on investment isn't as big as it once was and so now we need to trade in on another model, if another model at all. And we have unrealistic expectations of one another. What we oftentimes do is make our relationships into an equation. We live according to law rather than grace, performance, our performance matters more than the performance of God for us and when other people don't seem to be doing what we desire of them in that relationship, whether it's marriage or a work relationship or anywhere we cut them loose. Now that's many things in the Bible and encapsulates many concepts. One of them would be idolatry. We make our relationships into something that we believe will provide what God alone can give a happily ever after, everlasting pleasure, a source of everlasting joy. No human being can carry the weight of those expectations. No fallen, finite, mortal can provide for you, what only God alone can provide for you. If you come into your marriage relationship, your dating relationship, your friendship or any other human relationship with unrealistic self-righteous expectations, you set yourself up for strife, for fragmentation, for brokenness. What we see in our passages morning is a radically different way to view marriage and relationships. One founded not so much on our performance and a contract, but on Christ's performance according to a gracious covenant that God invites us to experience, to enjoy, to reflect, in our own marriage covenants, and I would say even in the lesser covenants of our human relationships and whatever sphere of life we touch. That brings me to the second point. We're not only freed from self-righteousness, but to enjoy the righteousness of Christ. We're freed from the tyranny of our own self-focus, to enjoy the freedom of self-forgetfulness. Vacation Bible school is this past week, and I don't want to sound like a pastor that just brags on his own church. I've got to tell you, this is one of the biggest Bible schools I've ever seen, and I mean that. Did any of you see, by show of hands, the decorations for this vacation Bible school, raise your hands if you saw those. Can you nod and say to everybody else around you who didn't have their hand raised? They were mind-blowingly amazing for vacation Bible school. The snacks we get posted on Facebook, they were themed, they were beautiful, they fit everything wonderfully, the teaching was excellent, kids would come home, excited. I had several parents come up to me and say that they're older children, sometimes you felt like vacation Bible school might be a little bit beneath them, you know, are aching to get involved in junior high-switch, you know, or kind of in that, like no man's land developmentally, and they were saying, I don't want to go to VBS on Monday, they got home and the parent would say, how did it go? It was excellent. And they would say, Tuesday morning, the child would wake up the parent, when are we going to vacation Bible school? It was that good. It was so good. Well, on Friday night, they did this closing, a little celebration, and they brought all the kids up here on these steps by grade level, and next year you need to be here, whether you've got children in vacation Bible school or not, because it was awesome. These little kids get up and they sing and they dance, what they learn, the preceding week, the recited Bible verses and all that. There's a little boy down here, I think it was a little boy who, I obviously over there, I couldn't fully tell, who seemed very, very sheepish about the whole thing, and kept scanning the room, looking for anybody that he knew, you know, like where's my parent kind of thing? Made eye contact. And after eye contact made, it just seemed to me from the side, comfort, peace, knowing that we're not alone, you know? Up here in this uncomfortable foreign environment, but suddenly seeing somebody's with me makes all the difference. And if you go into a marriage relationship or a professional relationship, a personal relationship and you really think you're alone, you're going to behave much differently and prioritize much differently. Then if you go at knowing that God is there with you, that he never leaves you, he never forsakes you, you know, Paul's inspired vision for marriage in these verses is radical and it's built on a foundation that he's laid in the preceding chapters. He's reminded the Ephesian church of several things that God loved them before the foundation of the world, chapter one. From before the foundation of the world, God purposed to not only create them, but to choose them to be his own. And he not only chose them in the appointed time, he called them. He called them to turn away from their rebellion, their sin, their self-reliance, their self-righteousness, and to turn to him and say, enough, I can't do it, I need you. The reason that they would turn, he described was the Holy Spirit's work and their heart and their mind to regenerate, to take what was dead and hardened toward God, to soften it. You know, one time your heart was like a stone toward God, but God in His great love, lavish mercy. Based upon what Christ did for you on the cross, God took your heart of stone and gave you a heart of flesh. He gave you eyes to see and ears to hear. The sin that you used to suppress, you now saw in the light of His truth and love and you felt guilty and condemned in ways that you never felt before and you cried out for relief and you did not hear a condemning word. You heard the words of reassurance that whoever would turn to me, who would ever seek forgiveness would find it. You were justified in that moment. God declared you righteous because Jesus died on the cross to take away your sins, but not only that because He lived a life you could never live in your place, a life of perfect obedience so that He offered His life before the Father and His righteousness in your place that you would not only be declared forgiven, but is righteous as God's own eternal son. So God justified you freely by grace and adopted you into His family. You're now being sanctified. You're now growing to understand all that that means toward one day, a future day when every cure will be wiped from your eyes, every struggle in the rear view mirror, every pain comforted with the balm of God's love, one day, everything will be right. And even though you're not living in that day now, you can live in view of that day in your relationships. How would your relationships change if you understood your position in your place? C.S. Lewis and his great work, Mayor Christianity, some of you might remember this. I know many of you have read it, and if you haven't, you should. It's wonderful. Even you folks in high school, it's a really good book. You should read this. C.S. Lewis said, do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man, he will be what most people call humble nowadays. He will not be a sort of greasy, smart, me person who's always telling you that, of course, he's a nobody. Probably all you'll think of him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him, it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. Listen carefully. He will not be thinking about humility. He will not be thinking about himself at all. There's freedom in Christ to move from self-focus, to self-forgetfulness. You don't need to think about yourself as much in your relationships. Of course, you will. You still have flesh bound to sin and the struggles and temptations, but Christ is freed you to forget yourself a little bit more, to get over yourself, to enjoy and to offer yourself in love and relationship. Now some might object and say, you know what, I want to forget myself in relationships, but real wrong has been done to me. I'm not minimizing that. I'm not saying self-forgetfulness is a form of ascetic self-denial where you just take abuse and don't seek care for that abuse or allow abuse to continue. I'm not saying that at all. What I am saying is that our posture in those situations can and should be radically different as God's beloved children. And difficult decisions can be characterized by love and hope, and a desire for healing, for God's glory and the ultimate good of others. A few years ago, I counseled someone who was in the midst of a marital conflict that was moving toward divorce, and it was very interesting how early on in that marital conflict divorce seemed like the only option and the most advisable option, even for those in the church, the elders and others. And as we counseled the individual who had been wronged in that relationship, specifically wronged, a wrong leading to the possibility of a biblically sanctioned divorce, as we counsel that person, we counseled them that that was certainly on the table and could be chosen. But our concern was that she looked to her motives. What were her motives in that divorce? Were they the motives of vengeance, or were they the motives of concern? And love, would God be most glorified in this or in maintaining the relationship? She did divorce, but without vengeance, as near as we could tell. For her divorce actually became a means by which she desired to reclaim her husband, a loving means by which she desired to show the severity of what had occurred in their relationship. And interestingly, as she pursued divorce, a justifiable divorce, the husband was broken, brought to repentance, and the divorce was averted, though sought. Even in the most difficult of situations, we who are in Christ are never alone. And if we're never alone, we face those situations with a different posture, not one characterized by fear primarily, but instead one characterized by faith, willing to make difficult decisions to be sure, maybe even painful ones that seem to be harmful in a step back, but with hope that God is working to bring about healing even in difficult times. Now that brings us to a third point that we see in our passages morning, and it's much more germane to the immediate text, and that is Christ rescues us from the tyranny of our own self-preservation to the freedom of sacrifice and submission. There's a tendency to read the imperatives in these verses, the commands of the Apostle Paul, especially those perhaps concerning a life submission to her husband in isolation from everything else Paul has said in the book of Ephesians that should never be done. If you take a verse out of context, you impart to it meaning that otherwise would not be there. You read something of your own biases into it rather than what the Apostle Paul, inspired by the Holy Spirit, was actually saying, there's also a tendency to read them through the lens of contemporary debates about gender and gender roles. Some might object to these verses as being so steeped in ancient Near Eastern culture, specifically patriarchal culture and customs as to reflect the cultural bias in the part of the Apostle Paul, an inescapable cultural bias that he had that really shows a low view of the doctorate of inspiration that the Holy Spirit is somehow bound to that cultural notion. I want to show you that on the foundation of Scripture, and perhaps common sense, the Church rejects that, that these commands, given concerning marriage, might find particular and unique expression in various culture, but there are certain principles that transcend culture and in history and are woven into the creation itself. In fact, that's to where I want to draw your attention, is back in Genesis chapter 1 and 2 when God created the world and all that exists, he created a man and then created for him a woman that he might be complete in his humanity that man, capital M, might be both male and female together, that man, capital M is incomplete only with the masculine dimension, but finds completion in the masculine and the feminine coming together by God's design. This order in structure is created before the fall, before sin even enters into human history. It's also created even before culture itself. And so the institution of marriage over which our culture is presently waging a war is for us something rooted in creation, the command of God, it's a structure and institution that's inviolable for for the person of faith. Now there are deviations from it, there are sins in the world, we're not blipely unaware of those, we don't diminish those, we take those very seriously, but those deviations from God's revealed don't justify continued departures from it. In fact, they call us to be more sober to perfect our repentance and to seek these things even more.
It also defies common sense and ignorance displays an ignorance of the culture in which Paul ministered ancient Near Eastern culture was indeed patriarchal, patriarchal, excuse me, in sin found expression within it. Women were viewed oftentimes as property and little more. Children were pushed to the margins of the society, even the disciples themselves pushed the children away as they didn't matter, but consider what Paul is saying to that culture and how subversive it is to the entire structure in which he ministered. Well, he's not undermining the responsibility and authority of Christian husbands and fathers. What's he saying to them? He calls them to redeem their relationships to God's glory through leadership characterized by Christ-like sacrifice, gentleness, patience within cultures that often devalued women and children, pushing them to the margins. Paul's words are revolutionary. Paul says that husbands must so love and cherish their wives that they are willing to sacrifice their blood for them. In other words, withholding nothing of themselves to promote their well-being and growth and grace. You want to be loved like that? I would think so. As Christ died for his bride, the church so husbands must daily die to self and offer their lives for their wives. I'd like to thank you if a gunman came after my wife. I would die in front of that bullet and take it and a grand flourish and I'm very confident I would. But dying for my wife daily is very difficult and you men might know that as well. We have a little joke in our house that when there's one last brownie in the refrigerator, I would sooner die for my wife and forfeit that brownie for her to enjoy. And an older father in the faith come up to me after the first service. He said, Kevin, you're getting this all wrong. Just cut the brownie in half. That's good advice. I didn't think about that or nothing kind of guy.
But notice what Paul says to women too. He commands women to so love and cherish their husbands in responsive love that they respect them. In other words, withholding nothing of themselves to promote their well-being and growth and grace as the church submits to Christ so wives must submit to their husbands. And why does the church love Christ because God first loved us? Husbands are leaders and should lead in selfless love and sacrifice and this should prompt love and respect and return. It's not mindless submission and marriage. There's no subjugation woven into this. This is love-born submission freely chosen, ideally finding expression in response to deep and awe-inspiring love. And wives, if you don't find that from your husband, Paul's counsel in another place is to love them still and respect them still because Christ is for you, which your husband is not. And responding to Christ, you can love your husband that way and then that love might spark within your husband, a shocking love and return. The killers are instructive on that as well. And I know I'm going to second one. Just be with me for a second. When God brought the first man, his spouse, he brought him not just a lover, but the friend his heart had been seeking. Proverbs 2.17 speaks of one spouse as your all up unique word that the lexicans define as your special confidants or your best friend. And an age where women were often seen as the husband's property and marriages were mainly business deals and transactions, seeking to increase the family's social status and security. It was startling for the Bible to describe a spouse in this way. But in today's society, with the emphasis on romance and sex, it's just as radical to insist that your spouse should be your best friend, though for a different reason. In tribal societies, romance doesn't matter as long as social status and in individualistic Western societies, romance and great sex matter, far more than anything else. The Bible, however, without ignoring the importance of romance puts great emphasis on marriage as companionship. Finally, Paul shows us that Christ rescues our relationships from the tyranny of happiness to the freedom of holiness. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with happiness. But happiness goes awry when it's our chief end. And ironically, we never taste it for very long when it is that, when we divorce it from holiness. Happiness for us, creatures in the image of God is found only in fellowship with God, a fellowship that transforms all of our other fellowship. In fact, in our marriage relationships and our work relationships and our parenting relationships, we can enjoy the fellowship of God when they are ordered and patterned in ways that are born of his love and bring glory and honor to him
to our fuller enjoyment of God that our relationships are there in the workplace or in the home, to our fuller enjoyment that Christ calls us and makes possible. Relationships do that by exposing our false trusts. When I'm angry with my spouse or my children, it's oftentimes because I think they can provide for me something that I need and I don't have from God. When in truth, I have everything I need from God. So if they fall short in that moment, I don't need to be angry and impatient. I can return the focus away from myself and the reliance away from myself and put more on God and the things of God. I don't need to look after myself as much because God has looked after me in Christ and I'm free now to look after others and trusted and looking after them, they will respond and looking after me. And even if they don't, that God will raise up another means to care for me as child. They point me to comfort and counsel and Christ these relationships and they show me the power of faith and repentance. When I repent in my relationships, when I respond to my own selfishness with a confession of sin and an appeal for forgiveness and I receive it and the relationship far from being compromised is actually strengthened. I see that it's in my weakness that Christ's power is is perfected in this strength made perfect. So husbands love your wives in sacrifice. Don't love them and sacrifice for them because of their performance. They're going to fail you. Their sinners just like you. Love them and sacrifice for them because Christ loves you and sacrifices for you and wives love your husbands in submission, not because they're worthy of it, they're not, but because of Christ's worthiness and it's Christ who calls you to it, not only for your husband's good, but for yours that through that godly submission you might be built up and fathers this Father's Day don't exasperate your children but persuade and enable them to know God's gracious love for his people by showing them that they're loved even when they stumble and fall again and again and again and finally above all forgive as in Christ God forgive you. Let's pray Father. We thank you. This Father's Day for your great love in our lives. What great love you've shown us that we would be called your children and now in relationship with you our relationships with one another are transformed. We're freed from the neuroses of self-focus and self-reliance. We're now free to give generously knowing that you give us all that we need in abundance and whatever we lose you more than provide in Christ and that as we die in Christ we live in Him. Help us to die to self and to live in Christ more and more. We pray in Jesus name and man. Willow Creek Church is a congregation of the Presbyterian church in America. Our website is www.willowcreekchurch.org and our phone number is 407-699-82-11.