The Love of Christ for His Church (Ephesians 5:22-32)

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Thank you for subscribing to the Shepherds Church podcast. This is our Lord's Day Sermon. We pray that as we declare the

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Word of God that you would be encouraged, strengthened in your faith, and that you would catch a greater vision of who

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Christ is. May you be blessed in the hearing of God's Word, and may the Lord be with you.

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Isaiah says, Fear not, for you will not be ashamed.

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Be not confounded, for you will not be disgraced. For you will forget the shame of your youth, and the reproach of your widowhood you will remember no more.

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For your maker is your husband. The Lord of hosts is his name, and the

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Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer. The God of the whole earth he is called.

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For the Lord has called you like a wife deserted and grieved in spirit.

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Like a wife of youth, when she is cast off, says your God. For a brief moment

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I deserted you, but with great compassion I will gather you. In overflowing anger for a moment

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I hid my face from you, but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you, says the

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Lord, your Redeemer. This is the Old Covenant reading. For our

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New Covenant reading, if you would turn with me to Ephesians chapter 5. And we will be in verses 22 through 32, a very familiar text.

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The Word of the Lord. Wives submit to your own husbands as to the

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Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church.

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His body and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.

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Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.

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That he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the

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Word. So that he might present the church to himself in splendor. Without spot or wrinkle or any such thing.

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That she may be holy and without blemish. In the same way, husbands should love their wives as their own bodies.

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He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one has ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it just as Christ does the church.

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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.

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This mystery is profound and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.

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This is the reading of God's Word. Now in seminary you will learn fancy words.

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One of them is hermeneutics and it is not your uncle Mr. Newtick. Hermeneutics means the science of interpretation and one of the principal rules of hermeneutics is that every passage has but one meaning.

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It means that if you investigate, if you examine, if you dig down into the meaning of the passage it doesn't have two different meanings.

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It has one meaning. Now while it may have a thousand applications, while it may have multiple different ways that you can illustrate the text, it has one meaning and that meaning is not subjective.

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That meaning is not what I believe that it says or you believe that it says. You ever been to a small group where someone looks at you and says well what do you think it means?

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The meaning of the text is what the text means even if it comes from authoritative sources like when

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David speaks I listen because David knows the principles of good exegesis.

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But as Bereans we must also search the word to understand what it says because it has one meaning and its meaning is not subjective.

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Now when we try we're trying to understand what a text means this is how we get there.

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A text means what the original author was attempting to communicate to his original audience.

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The text means what the original author is attempting to communicate to his original audience and the way that we figure that out is through lots of study.

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We use original languages, grammars, lexicons. We dive into cultural and historical backgrounds.

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We examine syntax and semantic structural analysis, and there's many tools whereby we can study to try to figure out what did the original author mean to say to the original audience.

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That's what the meaning of the text is. A text does not have two meanings.

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But you're maybe wondering why am I going this direction? What happens when a text has such an oversized application that you've only ever heard sermons about the application and not what the text actually means.

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Today we're gonna be looking at a text like that. When a text has that big beautiful relevant application, many times the pastor, the teacher, the

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Sunday school teacher will take that application and they will teach that. And yet in our text today the text actually has a more profound and more beautiful meaning than just what's on the surface that's going on in the application.

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Now, I will say it this way. Many excellent sermons have been given on this passage on the application.

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Many marriage seminars have been given on this passage. Many books have been written on what is a biblical man, what is a biblical woman, what is marriage, all of those things.

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But underneath all of that is something else, something much deeper, something more beautiful that's going on that we have to dig down in order to discover.

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So let's read once more Ephesians 5 22 through 23 and let's attempt to discover what

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Paul is actually getting at. Ephesians 5 22 through 23

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So husbands ought to love their own wives as they love their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself.

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For no one has ever hated his own flesh but nourishes and cherishes it just as Christ also does the church.

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Because we are members of his body. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and shall be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh.

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This is the point. This mystery is great, but I am speaking with reference to Christ and the church.

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Let's pray. Lord, I pray as we dive in to this passage that all of the beautiful things that we've likely learned about this passage, that we would that we would treasure those.

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All of the marriage things that we've seen, sermons on marriage, books on marriage, premarital counseling on marriage, that we would treasure those truths because they are relevant and beautiful applications.

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But Lord, I do pray that we would peel back the layers under all of that and that we would see something deeper and more beautiful that's going on under the surface.

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Lord, would you open our eyes to your word? Would you write your word on our hearts? And Lord, tonight would we bask in the love that you have for your church?

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It's in Christ's name that we pray. Amen. You might have to encourage me a little bit.

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I'm a Baptist. So if I say amen, just help me out a little bit. I'm not a Baptist anymore, but it's deeply ingrained down in my psyche.

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So just love me. Now the majority report on this passage and the vast majority of exposition that's been given is about marriage.

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It's about human marriage. I've looked online. I did a cursory study. I invite you to do the same. Overwhelmingly, the sermons on this topic is about human, creaturely, male -female marriage.

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This is a passage that has spawned different books and different seminars and different premarital counseling.

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I've participated in it. I've preached sermons at weddings on this passage and many fine and excellent sermons, maybe not mine, but many fine and excellent sermons have been given on this passage.

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And let's be honest, in a culture that doesn't even know what a woman is and a culture that doesn't even know what a man is, how needed is a passage like this?

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But today I do want to focus on the original meaning because the original meaning is Christ and his deep abiding love for his church.

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The meaning is right there in verse 32. Paul tells us, I am speaking with reference to Christ in the church.

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And although his illustration is a big illustration and he's weaving in and out of that illustration all throughout the text, it is consistently pointing to the love of Christ for his bride, the church.

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So what I would like for us to do tonight, and perhaps one of the shortest messages that I have ever preached,

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I would like us to see how Christ loves his church. And I would like us to see the great and beautiful things that he has done for us in his love.

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And I would like for us to do that treasuring those details. I'll give you an illustration.

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One of the smartest men that I've ever known was a man named by the name of Garth Rozelle. He's a

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Puritan scholar. He is excellent in everything that he does. The man reads a page every four seconds.

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He's learned how to look at sentences at a time and can scan. He can read books on lunch breaks.

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And this man, when he described to us the gospel in my Jonathan Edwards class, broke down in tears.

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And he wept in front of us and he said, it never grows old and I will never forget when he said that.

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He's a man in his 80s, I believe, and he's weeping over the beauty of what

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Christ has done for us in his gospel. I don't want to offer a single thing new to you tonight.

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I don't want to offer a Greek word that you've never heard of, some syntactical relationship that will that will tickle your brains.

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I want to offer you the beauty of Christ's love and I want us to treasure that in the gospel.

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Amen? Thank you. We're going to begin by looking at how his love leads us.

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It says, wives be subject to your own husbands as to the Lord for the husband is the head of the wife as Christ also is the head of the church.

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Now first we have to understand what headship means and this is something that that has multiple different meanings.

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It symbolizes authority. It symbolizes life. And it symbolizes representation.

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The head is someone who has authority over someone else. It's someone who gives life like a head literally gives life to the body and it's also someone who represents a group of people.

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Well in that sense, Christ is the true head of the church, is he not? He's the one who gives, who has authority over the church.

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He's the one who gives life to the church. He's the true and better Adam who represents the church as our federal head.

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He is not a wicked or despotic leader. He gives his authority in love.

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He gives his authority to us in intimate fellowship. He has a loving and intimate, patient and gentle leadership with us who have fallen short of the glory of God and with us who have fallen short of God's standard again and again and again.

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If you're breathing and your heart is beating, from the time we left here earlier until the time that we arrived here now, you have fallen short of the glory of God and yet Christ has been so rich in his affections to you.

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Christ has a rage that is not applied to you. Like a faithful husband, he protects us.

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He cares for us. His wrath, if you want to read about it in Psalm 110 or Psalm 2, is for those who try to attack his church.

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He's a faithful husband who loves his wife. His most tender affections are for his bride, the church.

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His love for you, and maybe you've never thought about it like this before, is not abusive, it's not cold, it's not indifferent, it's not apathetic, it's not pathetic, and it's not muted.

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His love is joyful for you. Do you remember in the Old Testament where it says that your

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God is singing over you? I think sometimes, especially when we have a very developed sense of our own sinfulness, that we think about God as someone who's disappointed with us yet again.

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Someone who's frustrated that we just don't get it because we're frustrated at ourselves. When you close your eyes at night, what is the picture of Christ that you see?

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Is it the angry and dour Savior who's frustrated that you are still struggling with that same sin, or is the joyful affection of a loving husband who loves to see his wife enter into the room?

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That's how Christ thinks of you. His affections are so tender for you.

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Do not be tempted to doubt his love. My wife sometimes, she's not here so I can talk about her, my wife sometimes will say, do you really love me?

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And I'll say, of course I love you. And I'll remind her of my love.

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Isn't it, isn't it like the bride sometimes to forget how much we're loved, to need to be reminded?

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What a grace it is tonight to have such a passage in front of us to remind us that you are deeply and eternally and never -endingly loved.

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He comforts us in his weakness. His love leads us. Every part about him is love.

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That's the first thing, is his love leads us, guides us, directs us, gives life to us.

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The second thing is that it's his love that actually saves us. For the husband is the head of the wife, also as Christ is the head of the church.

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For he himself being the Savior of the body, but as the church is subject to Christ, so also wives ought to be subject to their husbands and everything.

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Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.

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What we see is that it was love that fueled Christ to leave heaven, to come and be born, to live, to die, to face the cross for the joy that was set before him.

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It was a deep, abounding love for his people that fueled him to come.

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We remember the hymn that we just sang, for from heaven he came and sought her like a husband coming for his bride.

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With his own blood he bought her and for her life he died. Greater love has no man than the one who would give his life for his friends.

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But yet, Christ demonstrated his own love for us and that while we were yet sinners, he died for us.

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His love caused him to seek, to find, to woo, to draw, and to bring into his own his church.

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His love also sanctifies us. Look at what Paul says in verses 25 and 26.

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Husbands, love your wives just as Christ also loved the church and gave himself up for her so that he might sanctify her.

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Having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word. This is grace upon grace.

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Why? Because he doesn't just leave you. He doesn't save you and leave you. I remember at camp when

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I was 12 years old, I raised my hand and I counted as a salvation. I wrote my name down.

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I've decided to follow Jesus. And then what happened? I went home and life hit me and I felt like I had been abandoned, but that's not true of Christ.

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Christ has not left us or abandoned us or forsaken us. He is not the kind of husband who leaves his wife standing at the front of the church.

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He is not the husband who just married her to give her a new status or to put a ring on her finger or to leave her after the honeymoon.

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He married her to transform her. His love does more than just save his church.

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It sanctifies her. It makes her more radiant, more beautiful, more more perfect.

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He's washing away our impurities. He's washing away every spot and wrinkle and stain.

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This means that the church under the love of Christ should be getting better, more holy, more sanctified.

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This means that churches who are drowning in the love of Jesus are becoming softer, more tender, more passionate about the gospel, more in love with God and with Christ.

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These churches are becoming more sanctified over time. It's like a fine wine that gets better as it ages or a nice scotch.

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We're in Presbyterian company now. A nice scotch that gets smoother over time.

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You know what I'm talking about. The church becomes more fragrant, more holy.

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And you know what it occurred to me today? So many people don't get a chance to experience this in today's culture, do they?

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As the church drinks deep of the love of Christ, how many people don't get to experience that?

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And I'm not just talking about people who've never been to church. I'm talking about people who go from church to church to church.

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Because our consumerism as a society has said that, well, if this is not exactly the way that I like it, then

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I need to go find a different church. And on and on and on that pursuit goes every six months to a year.

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And how do you get to experience this if your reality is a new church every year?

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A church that drinks deep of the love of Christ will over time grow more holy.

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But you'll miss out and you won't get to see it if you leave too quickly.

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If you don't sit with a church that's being sanctified for a decade, for 20 years.

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Our culture has made differences the thing that now causes us to leave.

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And those differences become smaller and smaller and smaller. I've heard of situations where churches vote on a particular color of carpet and half the church leaves because it wasn't the right shade.

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I've heard of churches that take doctrines and narrow them down into such minutiae points that we can disagree and we can go our separate ways.

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And this is not just divisive tendencies. We live in a world where jobs actually encourage you to bounce from job to job so that you can increase your career so that you can go and move up the corporate ladder.

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We live in a salient time where planes and trains and automobiles are all moving us all around.

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We live in a time where most of us are actually not from the place that we are currently sitting.

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I'm not. I'm from a very small town, North Carolina, near Mayberry where the

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Andy Griffith show was filmed. I'm completely out of my element, New England. Many of you, maybe not, were even born here.

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All of this works against seeing the church sanctified over decades.

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I was so blessed today when I was in the kitchen and I was talking to two of the sisters who go to this church.

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One of them had been here for 20 years and one had been here for 25 years and I was reminded that I'm gonna be using this as an illustration.

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So maybe it doesn't apply to Merrimack Valley Presbyterian Church. But I was so blessed to hear that they have gotten to see the church grow and be sanctified by Jesus's love for that long.

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What was normal in history where you were born and baptized in your church and you die and you were buried in the backyard of your church?

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What was normal for all of church history has now become an alien concept in the 21st century and we miss something in that.

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We miss seeing the work, the generational, century kind of work that Jesus is doing and loving his church.

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Now I'm not saying that there's not good reasons to leave a church. I'm not saying that you either need to put on your

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Martin Luther hat or just sit down and accept whatever heresy that is being thrown at you. There are good reasons to leave a church.

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But those should be done with sobriety, with prayer, with fasting, with a commitment to have long -standing longevity somewhere else.

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We can't have a posture of bouncing from one church to the next. We rob even our own walk with Christ and what we can see him doing in his church when we adopt that posture.

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The point I'm making, the overarching point, is that Christ has been sanctifying his church for 2 ,000 years.

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He's been making her more radiant, more lovely, and he will continue to do that work until he returns.

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And because we're not infinite, he will continue to do that work forever in eternity.

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He will always be making his wife more lovely. What a beautiful thing, right?

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He's also working to fill his church with glory. It says in verse 27 that he might present to himself the church in all her glory.

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I found that to be a fascinating phrase because I normally associate glory with God. But he's saying that he's going to fill the church in all her glory.

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Now, obviously, we know that there is no glory apart from God. So this is a shared glory.

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This is a borrowed glory. This is a glory that Christ himself has poured out onto the church.

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Yes and amen. But what is this that he's talking about? In both the

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Hebrew and the Greek. I said I wasn't gonna do a word in languages. I'm so sorry. I won't say the words, though.

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But in both the Hebrew and the Greek, glory means weightiness, significance, gravitas, worth, beauty, renown, magnificence.

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Glory in this passage is an adjective. So what Christ is saying is that he is going to fill his church full of glory.

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He has a glorious end in mind for the church. He's not only going to lead us and save us, and he's not only going to sanctify us and wash us, but he is bringing us to the place where we will be filled to the brim with the glory that he has chosen to give us before the foundation of the world.

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He is washing us in the water of his word until we are filled with glory.

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Which means that he has a set time in mind for this work. There's a set time for the washing of the bride to make her ready for the day when her bridegroom calls her home.

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In the same way that you and I don't live in the shower, there will come a day when

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Christ will call his bride home. She will be cleansed of all her spots, all the stains that she has long carried, all the chinks in her armor, all the smudges upon her character, all the blights upon her record will be washed white as snow.

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He's been doing that for centuries. He will continue to do that until it is finished.

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He labors for that, that his bride would be a glory -filled bride.

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And honestly, that should be such an encouragement to you and I. Because God has not left us, he's continuing to refine us.

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I remember hearing a pastor say, if you're not dead, then God's not done. What an encouraging thing to think of.

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Because you and I are not blameless now, are we? You and I are filled with quite a bit of things that we can be blamed for.

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I think if you were to ask many people, there'd be a line wrapping around this building on what they could accuse me of.

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I'm sure you feel the same way. But because Christ has committed himself to this work, he will not neglect this work.

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He will not fail to do this work. He will not stop doing this work until it is finished.

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He won't stop until his church is beautiful. We know that he will not abandon that work because this passage tells us that he won't.

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It says, so husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself, for no one has ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes it and cherishes it just as Christ also does the church.

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Paul, again, through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, is looking past marriage. And he's saying that Christ is committed to nourishing his church.

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And we know that he will continue that work because a head always nourishes its body.

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You have to chop off the head to get it to stop nourishing the body. And who could sever us from Christ?

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He will continue this work. That means that all of this, underneath it, the love, the intimacy, the marital companionship, the sex, the fidelity, the headship, the submission, the children, the family, the home, all of it is underneath of that about Christ's love for you.

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Marriage is the shadow of what Christ is doing. Marriage is the incomplete, two -dimensional, colored drawing that your child brings home from preschool compared to the

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Mona Lisa that Christ is working out for you. He's going to feed us, nourish us, wash us, cleanse us, care for us.

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And he will continue to do that so long as today is called today, so long as the sun continues to rise, so long as the earth continues to be pulled along in orbit with the sun.

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His love will not abandon you. His love will not forsake you. When I was getting out of the

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Army, I was 23 years old. I'd spent four years, five years in the Army. And as a 23 -year -old man,

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I didn't know Christ, but I knew that my dad almost had zero time for me when

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I was a kid. I knew that my dad was so busy working and so busy laboring that he didn't have even a moment to be patient with me.

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The first time my dad told me that he loved me was when I was 18 years old in an

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Army uniform getting ready to ship off to basic training. And at 23 years old,

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I felt abandoned for the first time in my life. It crashed upon me, and I said, maybe

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I'm not worth anything because the people who are supposed to love me have not loved me. It wasn't until that I knew the love of Christ, and I'm sharing this with you with every amount of passion that I have.

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It wasn't until that I knew the love of Christ that I realized finally that I cannot be abandoned, and neither can you.

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If Christ has committed himself to love you, you are loved, dear brother and sister. You will not be forsaken.

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It says that we will even have perfect union with our Savior. It says because we are members of his body.

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It even says that like a marriage, the two shall become one flesh. How many discouragements in our life would be healed if we knew that we were in union with Christ?

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And I mean really know it. I don't mean like a head -level knowledge where you can pass a Sunday school exam.

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I don't know if you guys do that or not. I did that growing up, and I loved it.

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How many disappointments would be cured? How many bouts of depression? How many doubts that we often battle with?

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How many dubious thoughts that we give credence to would die a thousand deaths if we knew the love of Christ, and if we knew how deeply he cares for us?

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You may feel like a second -rate citizen in the kingdom of heaven, but you are not.

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You are his bride. That union that he has with you will change you, will buffet you up in his grace, will build you up, and will bring you out of discouragements.

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I want to just say that you're not what your thoughts tell you they are.

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You're not what your parents spoke over you 30, 40 years ago. You are not the mean things that somebody screamed at you.

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You are not your sins. You are not your failures. You are not your weakness. You are not even your greatest strengths.

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You belong to Jesus Christ, and you are his. My heart for us tonight is that we would live in that identity.

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My heart for us tonight is that we wouldn't be puffed up with all of our knowledge. My heart for us tonight is that we would not think about all of the different ways, as David was saying this morning, how we've advanced somewhat further than someone else beside us, or that we've attained, or that we've done.

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I just want us to think about what Christ has done. What Christ has done for you is that he's loved you and rescued you with no effort from you, no contribution from you.

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In spite of you, he has loved you. As we conclude tonight, this mystery is great, and there's a lot that we could say about that line in and of itself.

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But my heart for you is that we would remember how loved we are in Christ, that we would remember that his love is leading us somewhere, first in our salvation, next in our sanctification, and in that he's nourishing you, and he's got you in union with him so that you may feast upon the love of Christ all your days and for all eternity as well.

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Do you know that you're loved? Do you know that you're loved in Christ? Rest in that.

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Let's pray. Lord God, so many of our sins and our failures and our disappointments and our brokenness, our opinions of ourself, other people's opinions of us, so much of where we fall short is because we believe lies.

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God, I pray that we would understand, rest in, and drink deep of the love of Jesus Christ.

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It says, For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in him will not perish but have eternal life.

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Lord, would we know your love. It's in Christ's name we pray.