We’re in Ephesians 5:22-6:9. Let’s pray.

Father in heaven, as we open your word this morning, I ask that you open our eyes to the spiritual things that you have for us. As we apply these spiritual lessons in our lives, change our minds and alter our perspectives so that our actions and our intentions reflect your holiness and your purposes. Challenge us to be more like you in works and thoughts. We want to live in accordance with your will for us so that our lives would testify to the world how lovely you are. Lord, as your children, we honor and obey you by submitting ourselves to your sacrifice for us. We want to love the people we’re in relationships with, as you love them, as beloved children of God. Help us glorify you through our expression of your overflowing love in us.

We pray these things in Jesus name. Amen.

Scripture

^5:22 Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. ²³ For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. ²⁴ Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.

²⁵ Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, ²⁶ that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, ²⁷ 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. ²⁸ In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. ²⁹ For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, ³⁰ because we are members of his body. ³¹ “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” ³² This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. ³³ However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.

^6:1 Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. ² “Honor your father and mother” (this is the first commandment with a promise), ³ “that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land.” ⁴ Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.

⁵ Bondservants, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, with a sincere heart, as you would Christ, ⁶ not by the way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but as bondservants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart, ⁷ rendering service with a good will as to the Lord and not to man, ⁸ knowing that whatever good anyone does, this he will receive back from the Lord, whether he is a bondservant or is free. ⁹ Masters, do the same to them, and stop your threatening, knowing that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and that there is no partiality with him.

(Ephesians 5:22-6:9 ESV)

Relationships matter to God.

Our God is a relational God.

For all eternity, God was, is, and will be Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, existing in relationship together, in loving and intimate community. Relationship is why the very core of who God is, is love. God didn’t create the universe to become loving. He created the universe because he was overflowing with love. His love is joyfully, free, and generous. As a result, God pursues relationships with his creation who decided to live without reference to him. God sends, Jesus, His own son into this world, just so we could have a relationship with Him. In fact, Jesus, lays his own life down, by making it a sacrifice worthy of fulfilling the justice necessary so that people who lived without relationship with God could have a relationship with God. The sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross makes all people, of all colors, all ethnicities, all socio-economic statuses children to the most loving father and siblings with each other. That’s why the health and quality of our relationships are so important.

The great challenge for us living in the 21^st century. We live in a culture where transient, unhealthy relationships are the norm. Listen to this sad statistic from an NSF study pre-COVID. 1 in 4 Americans have no one to talk about their personal troubles or their triumphs. When you take out family members, that statistic becomes 1 out of every 2 people had nobody to talk to. There is clearly something broken and entrepreneurs think they found a way to monetize and fix this problem. When you look at the top 10 mobile apps downloaded year over year, 8 out of 10 of those apps purposes is squarely on making relational connections either through messaging or sharing life through social media. Can we say that the richness of our relationships have improved as a result? I can’t say that they have. To make matters worse, these technologies weaponized relationships and gave us “cancel culture.” We were enabled to boycott relationships and burn the bridges around relationships over sins and differences in ideology. Family, this kind of shallowness in relationships cannot be masqueraded around in our lives as the norm for relationships because that’s not how God models it.

Before we dig into this passage I want to provide a lens to understand why Paul highlights these specific relationships.

• First, these three relationships are universal, and basic to all human existence. Universal human relationships are: sexual (between husband and wife), temporal (between parents and children), and material (between masters and slaves). Or clients and those offering services, or bosses and employees in our context.
• Second, from a societal perspective, the purpose of all relationships is to ensure all people acquiesce the status quo to perpetuate society. Meaning, relationships are used to ensure order and hierarchy for a society to operate. But usually where there is hierarchy, there is oppression, alienation, exploitation, and humiliation. Paul is showing us that the gospel reorients Christians to a new way society can operate.
• Third, Paul is articulating a theology of relationships with the main point of relationships not being parties involved, but Jesus Christ, God himself. Simply put, when we practice our relationships with Jesus at the center, and orient our relationship toward the gospel, God is glorified, and we can fully experience relationships as God designed for his beloved children.

Big Idea: Our relationships glorify God by being Christ-centered

Let’s dig into the passage. Verse 22.

^5:22 Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. ²³ For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. ²⁴ Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.

²⁵ Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, ²⁶ that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, ²⁷ 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. ²⁸ In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. ²⁹ For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, ³⁰ because we are members of his body. ³¹ “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” ³² This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. ³³ However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.

When we read this, we see that marriage in the Bible “is a covenant between one man and one woman, ordained and sealed by God, preceded by the leaving of parents, consummated in sexual union, and issuing in a permanent mutually supportive partnership…” bringing glory to God. I know in recent years the definition of civic marriage has changed. I’m not here to get into a cultural debate with you. My intention is presenting God’s idea and plan for marriage as articulated in his word, the Bible.

More than that, my goal is to illustrate the intention of biblical marriage as an imitation of the intimacy and love we will experience in eternity with Christ. If marriage is the epitome of sexual relationships for humans in terms of intimacy then our marriages must be Christ centered.

Point 1. A Christ centered relationship is submissive and sacrificial

That’s how we get a taste of eternity through our marriage relationships. Articulated within these verses are 7 biblical truths regarding marriage relationships:

1. Marriage between a husband and a wife. That’s verse 31.
2. Jesus Christ and his relationship with the church is the model for biblical marriage.
3. Submission and sacrifice are works of love that must be regularly practiced in marriage.
4. Husbands and wives must treat other the same way they would treat their savior, Jesus.
5. Husbands and wives are mutually equal and must be united as one.
6. Husbands and wives have different roles for the same purpose: to submit, sacrifice, respect and love the head of our lives, Jesus Christ.
7. The goal of marriage is the sanctification of both husband and wife to become more like Jesus Christ.

When Christ is at the center of our marriage, loving each other by submission and sacrifice glorifies God because this is exactly how Christ loves his church. Cedarbrook, our marriage relationships must be treated as an offering to God. Sure, we need to work through communication problems, financial issues, personalities, past sins, household chores and responsibilities; but we work through those issues in our marriages by making Jesus Christ the center of our marriages. Our marriages must always be submitted to Christ and daily mirroring his sacrifice.

How do we do this?

Husbands. Your role is to love your wife as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. As a husband, exemplify the life of Jesus in your own. Lay your own life down to your wife in sacrifice, moving her toward sanctification and purity. That means, you are the first to pursue, the first to apologize, the first to forgive, the first to serve. You do this because your wife is one with you and is part of you. Husbands are called sacrifice yourself for the sake of nourishing and cherishing the relationship with your wife like Jesus does for the church. Sacrifice is all encompassing. Husbands, you are called to willingly and actively sacrifice your entire life for your wife, to lead her spiritually and woo her with works of love.

Men, we have lots of work to do in this area. Promotions, jobs, bonuses, hobbies, are a distant second to your highest priority, your wife. The goal of your marriage is to make your wife more like Christ. She exists so you can sacrificially serve her to become Christ-like. There are no excuses for not presenting your wife pure and holy before God.

Wives, you’ve heard the calling on the lives of husbands. When Paul says in verse 22 that the role of the wife is to submit to her husband in marriage. Know that you are not being called to submit to a monster or terrorist. You are being called to submit yourselves to a lover who is ready to die for you.

Submission is a free choice, an act of reciprocating the sacrifice your husband makes for you in love. You, yourselves have heard the gospel, received the gospel, and you chose to submit yourself to Christ and to the will of God because of the gospel. Likewise, choose to submit yourself to your husband because you trust he will care for your soul.

The analogy Paul gives is submission based on the trust that your husband will sacrifice like Christ to lead you toward the Father. Submission is affirming the leadership of your husband and helping him carry it through using your gifting for the purposes of making him more Christlike as he makes you Christlike. The goal is to move your husband toward Christ-likeness.

I want to be very clear:

1. Submission is not forgoing your brain, thoughts, or free will;
2. Submission isn’t agreeing with everything your husband says or does, especially if it’s sinful

If you’re single or unmarried, the application is the same as those who are married:

1. Submit yourself to Christ. Be led by Jesus Christ toward sanctification in your own life. You see there are things you wouldn’t do if you allowed Jesus to lead you.
2. Learn to sacrifice like Christ. Live forgoing your own rights for the will of Christ. There are opportunities and relationships you would pass up, not because they aren’t good, but they aren’t the right ones for you in Jesus.

Now, let’s look at parent-child relationships. Go to verse 1 in chapter 6.

^6:1 Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. ² “Honor your father and mother” (this is the first commandment with a promise), ³ “that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land.” ⁴ Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.

• Children are created in the image of God, for the glory of God.
• Everybody is somebody’s child.
• When we accept Jesus Christ as our savior, we become adopted as a beloved child of God.

Regardless of where you are in your parenting journey, as bio parents, adoptive parents, foster parents, stepparents, non-parents, or hopeful parents, we are children of God first. We must honor and obey our heavenly father.

Point 2. Christ centered relationships honor and obey

The goal of parents in relationship with children according to verse 4, is to discipline and instruct them in the ways of God. What are the ways of God? They are love, grace, mercy, holiness, goodness, wisdom, and righteousness. You may recognize them as the fruits of the Spirit but these are the characteristics of God, our father. God’s intention in his relationship with us, his children is to make you holy like he is holy, to make us more like him. That’s what the journey of faith is, to become more like God.

For the parents: If you want your kids to adopt the characteristics of God, then we need to model it. The only way to model the characteristics of God is by actually obeying and honoring God as he instructs us and disciplines us with his Word, the Bible. As we are instructed by the word of God, the Holy Spirit of God disciplines us, bringing to awareness to areas of our lives that are defiant to his instruction.

I want to define that word, “discipline” because I know some of you immediately start thinking spanking and punishment. Discipline is not that. Discipline is the work and act of restoring relationships. When the holy spirit convicts us of sin, he moves us to repentance so that the relationship we broke through our sins can be restored.

We obey God by walking in his instruction in the Bible because he loves us and wants the best for us. I don’t know if you see that, but the Bible is a love story between a father and his children. We obey and honor our father in heaven because he loves us.

Are you modelling obedience to your children by obeying God’s instruction and discipline? Are you opening up the Bible regularly with them? Are you sharing your faith and your sins and your repentance with them so that they can see it? If you want your kids to live godly, then you have to model it.

Honor, that’s verse 2. Honor your father and mother…. Honor is placing great esteem when you don’t have to. As children get older, they no longer have to obey their parents, but when then honor their parents, they are heeding the instruction and considering their discipline. Hopefully, they’ve seen their parents live in a way honoring their own parents, reflecting the godliness we were instructed and disciplined in.

The reason many of us regularly pray and consistently come to church to worship God on Sundays is because of honor. We honor our heavenly Father by worshipping with his family at church. But also because as a child, we obeyed our parents and came to church when they brought us and we honor our parents by doing the same because we have experienced the love of God ourselves.

Are you honoring God? Your children are being taught through your actions. This is how you do it:

• Read the Bible with them.
• Teach them to worship.
• Talk about what they learned in promiseland.
• Talk about what you learned in church.
• Ask them about the work of God in their relationships.
• Pray with them.
• Do it regularly and do it frequently.  

If you’re a parent, I want you to consider dedicating yourself and your children to raise them in the instruction and discipline of God. There’s a class on 8/27, and the ceremony is on 9/17. You can register online. Parenting is a lot easier when you do it in community.

When Jesus Christ is at the center of our lives, we obey and honor God. As children first, and parents second, our lives should be shaped by disciplining and instructing of God.

Finally, let’s address what Christ-centered material relationships look like. Verse 5.

⁵ Bondservants, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, with a sincere heart, as you would Christ, ⁶ not by the way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but as bondservants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart, ⁷ rendering service with a good will as to the Lord and not to man, ⁸ knowing that whatever good anyone does, this he will receive back from the Lord, whether he is a bondservant or is free. ⁹ Masters, do the same to them, and stop your threatening, knowing that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and that there is no partiality with him.

Some of you, in your translation of the Bible have the word “slave” in the place of “bondservant.” Bondservant are slaves, people who work without wages. If you’re having this bad thought as the Bible affirming slavery because the first part of verse 5 says to slaves to obey their earthly masters with fear and trembling, then rest assured the Bible is opposed to slavery, any and all forms. Especially slavery as we know it in American history.

Paul here is throwing out the traditional master-slave hierarchy of oppressive relationships and subverting those in these types of relationships toward the vision God has for his people. In the 1^st century Roman Empire, it’s estimated that there were about 60 million slaves.

So in a city like Ephesus, about one third of the population belonged to the class of people that were slaves, meaning they had masters and worked without wages. That means 1 in 3 people in the church was a slave. A third of the people in your empire being slaves meant that slaves encompassed all professions and were everywhere, doing all types of work, from farm laborers to bankers and practicing medicine. Very regularly, slaves in the first century would earn enough money to be set free and when they were freed, they would receive Roman citizenship.

I imagine this was the vision Paul had when he was writing this – slaves becoming equal citizens next to their masters. I say that because the Apostle Paul, in particular, was not silent about slavery at all. In 1 Timothy 1, Paul says slavery by means of kidnapping, enslaving, and selling people, we call it human trafficking today, is a vile sin, having no place in the kingdom of heaven. To the Corinthian church, Paul tells the slaves in the church to work to become free people and he tells the free people not to become enslaved. In fact, Paul writes to his friend Philemon regarding restoring slaves to a place of brotherhood. You can read the letter, it’s toward the end of the New Testament. Philemon’s slave, Onesimus, ran away and bumped into Paul. At which point, Onesimus became a Christian. Paul instructs Onesimus to go back to Philemon, but he instructs Philemon to receive Onesimus back, not as a slave but as a freed brother. On his way back to Philemon, Onesimus delivered this message to the Ephesian church.

You see in verse 9, Paul makes it clear that regardless of our economic status as a slave or a master, when we place our faith in Jesus Christ as lord, every single person is received the same in Christ—as God’s beloved child, citizen of the kingdom of heaven. That’s the beautiful truth for us living here and now in this present age.

Culture may tells us that there is a hierarchy of individuals based on gender, credit reports, occupations, and even age, but Jesus crushes that idea by his sacrifice on the cross for us. Jesus was God, but he took on the form of man and he lived blameless and holy so that he could ransom himself for us. To buy our freedom from sin and death. When we were far from God and lived without reference to him, we were slaves, bound to death but through faith we are no longer in enslaved. We are free citizens of heaven, the beloved children of God!

Free from the slavery of sin and death, we make God our master and we:

Point 3. serve each other with godly intentions

I love what Paul says in verse 6 here, if we’re going to be slaves, we need to be slaves to Christ and Christ alone; for the purposes of living out the will of Christ for our lives. Jesus is our only master, our ultimate master. The intentions we have for one another must be lived in reference to the will of Jesus Christ. We must treat all people as Jesus would—with overflowing love and without prejudice. To God, our father, we are all valuable, we are equally all his beloved favorites.

As people loved and favored by God this way, we must interact with every person that way. That’s how we honor our liberator, Jesus Christ. Are your intentions in your relationships godly? Do they aim to liberate people from sin and death through Jesus? Or are they selfishly motivated? To make others bend to your will?  

• We must practice mutuality with others.
• We must avoid hostility toward others.
• We must be wholehearted with people, especially those that do not receive preferential treatment or preference by us, until they are overwhelmingly loved by us.

To those who serve us through work, or business, we must practice respect, we must be accountable, and serve them as Christ would.

Our relationships must glorify God.

• So make Jesus the head of your marriage, and submit to him;
• make God your parent and obey and honor him;
• call Jesus your master, and live doing his will for all people, equally, sacrificially and with God’s love in you.

Let’s pray.

Father in heaven, we want to look carefully as we walk in this world. We want our relationships to be filled with the presence of your Holy Spirit. Lord, we know that this the only we can live in reverence to you is when your grace is greater in our lives. So allow your amazing grace permeate through us. Help us submit to one another with the same love you model for us in your trinity and in your sacrifice on the cross.

Make Jesus the head of our body. Let us submit to your son in everything we do. Allow us to live cleansing each other with the word you provide for us. We desire to be sanctified and holy. We want the people in our lives to be presented blameless before you in eternity.

For those of us who have experienced oppression at the hands of sinful people—in marriages, in childhood, in adulthood, and at work, Lord help us find healing, forgiveness, and reconciliation through the power of your blood. Wash us clean and change our hearts and minds so that we can break the senseless cycle of sin against others in our lives.

Thank you for giving us a framework to live our fullest in our everyday relationships, let your countercultural approach to loving people as brothers and sisters, as part of your own body, change our relationships. Let them glorify you. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.