WWUTT 607 A Pastor Loves His Wife as Christ Loved the Church?

Christ Loved the Church as the Pattern for Marriage and Pastoral Care

The Bible says, Husband, love your wife, 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. A pastor should be a model in this for his church, when we understand the text.

This is when we understand the text, studying God's word to reach all the riches of full assurance in Christ. Thank you for subscribing, and if this has ministered to you, please let others know about our program.

Here once again is Pastor Gabe Hughes.

Thank you Becky. We continue discussing the qualifications for overseers that Paul has written to Timothy in 1 Timothy 3 verses 1 -7. The saying is trustworthy. If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task.

Therefore an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not a drunkard, not violent, but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money.

He must manage his own household well, with all dignity, keeping his children submissive. For if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God's church? He must not be a recent convert, or he may become puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil.

Moreover, he must be well thought of by outsiders, so that he may not fall into disgrace, into a snare of the devil. So as we're discussing these qualifications, the one that we were talking about yesterday is there in verse 2, he must be the husband of one wife.

Now of all of these instructions, all of these qualifications, arguably the one that gets debated the most about is this one. What does it mean that he's the husband of one wife? Now it seems to be pretty cut and dry.

This is a man who is married to a woman, and he is devoted faithfully to his wife, and there are no other women, whether you're talking about extramarital affairs or any other wives. He is devoted to his wife in a faithful, monogamous relationship.

The way that God designed marriage to be, he is to be a model of that, and also the way that marriage is supposed to be a picture of the way that Christ loves his church. The man is supposed to be for his wife.

This pastor, this elder should be for his wife what Christ is to the church. Ephesians 5, 25, as I ended yesterday reading, 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.

We came to salvation through the word of Christ, and we are being sanctified by the word of Christ. We are growing in holiness and godliness by that word. So Christ has done that for the church. It's the way that the church grows in sanctification and holiness, preaching the word of God.

And so as Christ has done this for his church, so a husband must also do this for his marriage, that he might sanctify her, cleansing her by the washing of water with the word. He leads in his own household the way that he should be leading in his church, for if he cannot manage his own household, as it goes on to say in 1 Timothy 3, 5, how will he care for God's church?

So I go on here, Ephesians 5, 27, so that he might present the church, Christ might present the church to himself in splendor without spot or wrinkle or any such thing that she might be holy and without blemish.

As the husband is the head of his wife, so he is to his household what Christ is to the church. And what does the head do for the body? The church is the body of Christ. Christ is the head. What does the head do for the body?

The head is the control center for the body, makes decisions for the body, also nourishes the body when it comes to the body, receiving food and everything else, knowledge, hearing, seeing all of these other things.

This all comes through the head. And so the husband should be that for his household as well, protector of his household, caring for his household, leading his household spiritually. And as all husbands should be that for their wife, so must that be the model for a pastor that he's setting for every husband in the congregation and for the congregation itself, since the congregation is the bride of Christ.

I'm sorry. So the pastor is doing this for the body, administering the word of Christ to the bride that she might be washed with the water of the word. Verse 28, Ephesians 5, 28. In the same way, husbands should love their wives as their own bodies, the way that Christ loves his church.

So a husband should love his wife in the same way. Husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. One of the things that I have corrected many marriages on within our church and our church congregation is husbands and wives who tend to make fun of each other and put each other down.

And even if they think they're doing it in jest, they're not. Their spouse, their significant other is perceiving something negative from their spouse, the way that they talk about them. And by the way, so does everybody else.

You are not impressing your friends by making fun of your wife and making them laugh about it. It might be a funny joke to them in the moment, but they do not have a positive view of you in the way that you consider your wife.

Because if you're making fun of your wife, husbands, you're putting yourself down. You are saying just as negative things about yourself. Remember that the description of a marriage that we have from Genesis chapter one and Jesus affirming it in Matthew chapter 19 is that a husband and a wife are one flesh.

So what one does happens to the other. If a husband makes fun of his wife, he's making fun of himself. If a wife puts down her husband, she is putting herself down. It makes no sense for a spouse to put down their spouse for they are degrading themselves.

What does that say about you and your character? If you chose a spouse that you think so negatively of, if you call your spouse an idiot, you call yourself an idiot to put your spouse down is to put yourself down.

Now, I've mentioned before that that I pastor a church that is primarily military. 60 of our congregation is either active duty or retired because of our close proximity to Fort Riley. And a lot of times we'll get some young families that come into our church.

Fort Riley might be their first duty station. They were just married a few weeks ago. And so we're the first church home that they really have as a married couple. And so as the young couples are kind of getting adjusted to marriage for the very first time, sometimes once the honeymoon phase is over, they tend to get a little negative toward each other.

A husband will speak negatively of his wife as he's figuring out, man, men and women are different. And maybe a wife is not speaking so positively of her husband, but it's these young couples, these young men and these young women that get taken in by older members of our church and discipled men being taught to lay themselves down for their wives, that they need to make sacrifices for their wives.

They are giving up their life for their bride and are discipling her in the word, cleansing her by the washing of water with the word in the same way that Christ does this for the church. Husbands should love their wives as their own bodies.

We have the older men that teach the younger men that in the church. And then we have some wonderful older ladies in our church that will help the younger women to understand what it means to be submissive to her husband and to be very encouraging and positive of her husband.

Sometimes we'll even get some military wives into our church whose husbands are deployed and their husbands have not been to the church yet. They're away, deployed overseas. The wife has gotten bored or she's gotten a little restless at home.

And maybe someone's even extended to her the invitation to come to church. And so she's not really a church going type, but it's by that invitation that she's come into church. So she's unregenerate and may not even be a believer.

And so this is a woman who probably speaks very negatively about her husband, really dogging on her husband. Oh, my husband's like this. Oh, like this, you know, and now she feels like she's got a group of ladies that she can now talk about her husband with because she couldn't get that out in any other avenue.

Well, the older, more mature ladies in the church will start to teach her what it means to honor her husband and to be more encouraging of him. Then when that guy gets home and she's been changed by the gospel, we've had this happen a few times in our congregation.

This woman becomes a Christian because of the gospel that she's heard preached and because of the discipleship that she's received from older women. Then when her husband gets home, she invites him to church and she will have told us in advance he's not a believer and she knows that.

And often and in fact, I will say every single time I've had this happen. This woman's eyes fill with tears and will say that her husband's not a believer. And so when he gets back, we as men will kind of gather around him and kind of start to disciple him.

We want we want him to know the gospel of Christ, too. And we know because of the way that his wife spoke about him when she first started attending the church, he probably does have a lot of problems, which was why she spoke so negatively of him and did not have as high an opinion of her husband as she should have had.

So we know he's got some problems and we start to pull him in and start to disciple him. And then he hears the gospel and becomes repentant and he gets baptized. And it's a wonderful, wonderful family moment that I have had the joy of experiencing within our church fills my eyes with tears even right now talking about it.

But but this is some of the things that we encounter even within our church because of the military nature. It's it's like the atmosphere among military wives on post to be negative about their husbands and even some of our mature Christian women in our church have talked about the struggle that it is to develop relationships with these women when they are so negative about their husbands who are either bumming around with the other guys instead of coming home or they're deployed.

And so because they're away and not keeping in touch with the family, the the wife is getting real negative about her husband. It's probably the thing where they got married real quick because I was about to go away to boot camp or I'm about to get deployed.

And so I'm going to get married right now. So they they pretty much have not had the chance to get out of the honeymoon phase and get adjusted to one another, discovering that men and women are different.

They're kind of in that in that conflict phase. And there's not really the chance to to get them counseled together before he's got to go away to serve in another country. The divorce rate is very, very high among military families.

And so this is part of the ministry that our church has serving these military families that come into our community. But anyway, that's just an example to go to say how husbands and wives will often cut one another down.

And doing that is cutting themselves. That does not benefit you at all. Like you might think that you're venting or getting something off your chest by putting your spouse down. I tell you, it brings more strife into your marriage.

You must treat your spouse as you would treat your own body. For as as Paul instructed to the Corinthians, a wife's body is not her own. It belongs to her husband. Ah, but husbands don't think that means you have ownership over your wife's body and over your own.

No, because that instruction goes on to say that a husband's body is not his own. It belongs to his wife. Husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. Verse 29, 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.

And here we are. Verse 31, a verse that I've quoted to you before. 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. So is this is the picture of marriage and that marriage itself is a picture of the way that Christ loves his church.

So an elder, an overseer must be a model husband in the way that he honors his wife, lays his life down for her, washes her with the water of the word, leads his family in in spiritual upbringing and maturity.

He has to do this for his family, for it's going to be his job to do this for the church. A an overseer must display a model of good of a good marriage if he has been called to be the pastor of a church.

And again, I believe that's very cut and dry when we read that he must be the husband of one wife. He is a one woman man. That's the way that literally translates. He is not unfaithful to his spouse. He doesn't have multiple spouses, but rather he is the husband of one wife.

Divorce, Conversion, and Qualification for Overseers

Now, as I said yesterday, now here we are, you know, almost 15 minutes into the program. I said I was going to address this next question. I haven't even gotten to it yet. What about if this man has been divorced?

Because this is what makes this qualification so debated. If a man has been divorced and he marries another woman, does that mean that he's no longer a one woman man, that he now has two wives? Because after all, Matthew 19, Mark chapter 10, Jesus said that if a man gets divorced and marries another woman, that he commits adultery with her.

And if his wife that he divorced marries another man, causes her to commit adultery. And it's only in the Matthew 19 version of that instruction where Jesus says, Matthew 19, nine, I say to you, whoever divorces his wife except for sexual immorality and marries another commits adultery in the Mark 10 version of that.

It doesn't include the caveat of except for sexual immorality. So some have interpreted this to mean if a man at any point in his life has been married and got divorced and it was for any reason other than his wife, his ex-wife now had cheated on him with another man.

If he got divorced for any other reason other than that, he is permanently disqualified from ever becoming a pastor. Even if that happened before he became a Christian, I'm a Southern Baptist minister, and that's a common interpretation in the Southern Baptist denomination.

If he was ever divorced, even before he became a Christian, then he is disqualified from becoming a minister for if he got married again, based on the law of marriage, he's now married to two women. And so therefore he does not meet that qualification in first Timothy three, two, that he must be the husband of one wife for he's been married twice.

So he is married to two wives and the independent fundamentalist church. They they're also very strict on this. And there are even different churches in the Southern Baptist denomination that will interpret this different ways.

Some will say that he can't ever have been divorced and remarried, even in the even in the occasion of sexual immorality. And others will say that it's OK as long as his wife was unfaithful to him, then the marriage is nullified and he can marry again.

And anyway, so what would be my what what would be my interpretation of this? How would I come to understand this instruction that's given in first Timothy three to it does not matter to me what he did prior to becoming a Christian.

I don't think that should have any bearing on whether or not. He is qualified to become a pastor, because as I talked about this past Friday, we should expect that a person who is not saved to act like a person who is not saved.

They are not to be held to any kind of biblical standard of meeting qualifications of becoming an elder. If they were unregenerate, they're evil in their hearts. They are rebellious against God. They have no desire to obey and follow his law, certainly not in a worshipful way.

And so who a person was before they came to Christ is a completely different man or woman than who they are after they came to Christ. That person is dead and gone. The person that they were before Christ Jesus changed their lives before they were saved by the hearing of the gospel of Jesus Christ, who that person was, is dead now.

They have been buried with Christ and they are risen again to new life, as Paul shared with the Corinthians, for I have been crucified with Christ and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives within me.

Ephesians 2, 1 and 3, we were all once dead in our sins and our trespasses in which we once walked following the course of this world, the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived, carrying out the passions of our flesh, the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind.

Before we came to Christ, we were just like them. We did all the things that the world did. We hated marriage. We hated monogamy. We hated moral upstanding character. We wanted to do fulfill all of the passions that were within our own flesh.

We did things for ourselves. We were self-righteous. We had our own sense of morality, and that's what it was that we followed. We followed the prince of the power of the air. We were not following in Christ.

That's everybody. That's who everyone was before Christ. But since the gospel of Jesus Christ was heard and believed upon and the Holy Spirit brought us from death to life, we are now born again. We were dead in spirit, but now we're alive in spirit, brought to life by the power that brought Jesus Christ out of the grave, as talked about in Romans chapter 8.

That same power, the Holy Spirit that brought Christ back to life, lives within us and brought us from death to life. Ever since then, we're a completely different person. So what we did prior to new life in Christ should have no bearing on the judgment of character of who we are in Christ Jesus, because we're two completely different people.

The apostle Paul murdered Christians. Did that disqualify him from being an apostle of Jesus Christ? No. And Paul talked about this at the start of 1 Timothy chapter 1, where he said, I thank him who has given me strength, Christ Jesus our Lord, because he judged me faithful, appointing me to his service, though formerly I was a blasphemer, persecutor, an insolent opponent.

But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom I am the foremost.

But I received mercy for this reason, that in me as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life to the king of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God be honor and glory forever and ever.

Amen. So if you have a man who is a pastor in your church and before he became a Christian, he had gotten divorced for whatever reason, whether his wife was unfaithful to him or he was unfaithful to his wife or he just got bored and didn't want to be married anymore.

But all of this happened before he became a Christian. None of that is going to bring a reproach upon his character in the position that he is in as a pastor and overseer of that church. And I don't think the world is even going to bring that reproach against him.

Somebody might try, but I don't think it's going to stick because it will be recognized even by people in the world that he used to live this way before coming to Christ. He used to be this kind of man.

He was unfaithful to his wife. He was a womanizer, used to carouse around, used to used to pick up all kinds of women. That was who he was before he came to the Lord. But since Christ Jesus has transformed his life, he's very clearly a different man.

He's not like that anymore. He's faithful to his wife and he becomes the model that an overseer of the church should be not just for his congregation, but for the community. Also pointing back to Christ, who is ridiculously faithful to us, his church, when we have not been so ridiculously faithful to Christ.

Amen. And so, again, I do not think that there is a sin in that man's past that would otherwise disqualify him from the position of elder or overseer in the church. Now, if he was a professing Christian and he got a divorce, yeah, then he probably cannot be a pastor or fill that position of overseer because he knows the truth and yet did not hold to it.

And so he goes against that instruction that's been given there, that he is to be a one woman man. And this is the testament that is supposed to be displayed in his own life as an overseer of that church.

But this that I've been talking about here, this goes for every single one of us. For those of us who are in Christ Jesus, you're a new person. You're a new man or a new woman. The dead man is gone. He's been crucified with Christ.

Before you came to Christ Jesus, whoever that man or woman was, they are gone now. In Christ, you are new. And the evidence of this newness that has come about by the power of the Holy Spirit of God will be displayed in your obedience to Christ and doing so with joy.

New Life in Christ, Obedience, and the Believer's Assurance

First John chapter two, verse one, my little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the father, Jesus Christ, the righteous.

He is the propitiation for our sins and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world. And by this, we know that we have come to know him. If we keep his commandments, whoever says, I know him, but does not keep his commandments is a liar and the truth is not in him.

But whoever keeps his word in him, truly the love of God is perfected. By this, we may know that we are in him. Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which Jesus walked. That's an instruction that goes for all of us, but especially modeled by the pastor or the overseer of the church.

Dear God, we thank you for these instructions that you have given to us. What a delight they are that we may know your ways and the things that are pleasing to God. We ask that you would give us faith and that you would give us more faith that we would mature in this faith.

For as we read in Hebrews, if we do not have faith, it's impossible to please God. So as we desire to please you and we desire to know you, show us yourself all the more through these scriptures, you, your son, your Holy spirit alive in our hearts, that we may become more Christ-like with every step that we take in this faith being perfected until that day of Christ Jesus.

When we will be united with him, the bride meets the groom together in glory. Keep us accountable to these things in Jesus' name. Amen.