LAW HOMILY: My Life For Yours

As the Lord has called us into his presence, we must now recognize that our place here is not one that we've earned by our righteousness, by our goodness, but rather it's been granted to us by the free grace of God in Jesus Christ.

The Seventh Commandment and the Sanctity of Marriage

Let us now consider our shortcoming and confess our sin before our holy God, reading this morning from Exodus 20, verse 14, the seventh commandment. Thou shalt not commit adultery. On its face, what is forbidden in this command is clear.

God designed marriage to be between one man and one woman for life, and no man is to set that union asunder. In that, the idea that the physical expression of marital union could be exercised with anyone outside of the marriage is clearly a destructive agent to the sanctity and peace of the union, and thus must be forbidden and even actively worked against by the promotion of marital intimacy.

And so again, on the surface, this command has clear implications. Be intimate within your own marriage and do not be intimate outside of it. And yet, there are also deeper applications which we do well to consider.

Esther, Ahasuerus, and Marital Honor

One such application is related to our text this morning in Esther, wherein the King Ahasuerus treats his wife like a prop for others to enjoy, bringing great shame upon himself. For Christian husbands and wives, there is great responsibility one to another that requires an honoring of one another uniquely.

What I mean by that is that husbands are called to lead and love their own wives as Christ loved the Church, and wives are called to submit to and respect their own husbands as unto the Lord. In marriage, exclusivity is not merely in the most intimate thing you can do with another person, but is even required in these all-important dynamics of relationships.

This is a challenge in our egalitarian society. Men and women interact in far more settings than they used to, making it almost seem necessary for men to lead and care for women who aren't their own wives, or for women to submit to men who aren't their own husbands.

You may even be thinking that it is necessary for you to have to do that. But I would challenge you to ask yourself whether that's actually the case, and whether it's worth your marriage. Is it helping you to obey the word of God here to submit to your own husband when you must submit to another man?

Is it helping you to obey the word of God to care for and love your own wife when you have to care for other women who maybe work for you, as an example? Our culture is sick, and in its sickness it has numbed us to the dangers of the egalitarian impulse towards individualism and away from a proper familial view of society.

Fighting Egalitarian Individualism for the Sake of Marriage

As Christians, we must be on the front lines to fight against that. Honoring the seventh commandment doesn't just mean not sleeping with people other than your wife or husband. It means organizing your marriage around this principle, my life for yours.

Because your marriage is more important than those other things, and its benefits are worth fighting for. And I know that this can be difficult. For some, marriage has been painful, and there's a history of hurt along the way.

And yet we have to wonder if, by now submitting to the order that God has established, should I expect that pain to continue? Or is God's way better? And should I expect that, in submission to him, I can believe that he will pour out his blessings upon me and my family?

Confession, Prayer, and Strengthening Marriages in the Church

And so, as we confess our sin this morning, let us acknowledge all the ways in which we fail to cherish our marriages properly. I think it's fitting that we had a few requests for such things this morning, in our time.

Of prayer.

And this applies to single people as well. We should be mindful that we all have a duty to play, a role to play, in encouraging the marriages in our midst. Encouraging brothers to a great joy in their wives, and sisters to a great love and respect for their husbands.

So let us bring before the Lord this morning our shortcoming in this area. Let us confess to him personally and as a community, and ask that he'd help us to labor for stronger marriages in this community here, that our homes would be built upon the solid rock of Jesus Christ, our Lord, let us pray.