Tuesday, July 17, 2007
"You shall not commit adultery" (Exodus 20:14).
IDEA: Grace leads to service.
PURPOSE: To help listeners see how service coming from grace empowers the other person.
Do you ever struggle with applying the Bible to life?
If so, why?
Unless we can take a biblical concept and ground it in life, it’s like packaging fog.
I. We’ve been talking about covenant marriage and the kind of spiral that leads our original commitment to deeper and deeper love.
How did the spiral develop?
Grace which shows itself in forgiveness leads to serving the other person.
II. When we think about service in marriage, how do we think about it?
It is often how another person should serve me. But that is the opposite of what service growing out of grace should look like.
Service is usually linked with power.
If I think of someone serving me, then I have power over that person.
If I think of my serving them, they have power over me.
Love and grace lead to serving the other person rather than being served. We don’t use power over another person; we use power on behalf of another person.
Mutual submission means that the wife and the husband empower one another to be what God wants each of them to be.
"Submitting to one another in the fear of God. Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is head of the wife, as also Christ is head of the church; and He is the savior of the body. Therefore, just as the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything.
"Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her, that He might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word, that He might present her to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish. So husbands ought to love their own 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 the Lord does the church. For we are members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones.
" 'For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.' This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church. Nevertheless, let each one of you in particular so love his own wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband" (Ephesians 5:21-33).
The wife’s submission to her husband empowers him.
The husband’s love for his wife empowers her.
If anything in this concept seems like weakness, this is precisely what Jesus has done for us. He serves His church by dying for it and living for it.