16. Love Like Men!

Welcome to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 16,

Love Like Men. Over the last couple of weeks, we've been talking about the fact that there is a masculinity crisis in this world and nowhere is that felt more profoundly than marriages.

You can think about it this way. If a healthy marriage is the bedrock of a community and healthy communities unite together to form vibrant cultures, then the best way to topple a society is to attack its marriages.

If you break that grand institution down into pieces, if you spoil the marriage, then you will cripple the country and there's no better place for Satan to begin that all -out war on marriage than to focus on the one that God has called to lead in the marriage and that is the man.

And I want you to think about it this way. If manliness, godly masculinity, a man's role in his home is a targeted attack launched consistently by Satan, then what we really need to know and understand is how to fight back.

First of all, we need to understand that the attack is coming. Second, we need to know and understand how to fight back and we don't fight with swords and shields and bravado.

We don't fight with domination and aggression. We fight by orienting our lives around what the

Bible says. By doing what it tells us to do. And by refusing to be moved when the fiery arrows of Satan come.

That is our warfare, brothers. To know and understand what the Bible says and to orient our lives in that Godward direction and then to refuse to be moved off that spot.

The enemy may attack, the enemy may win back ground in our culture and our society, but he will not win on us.

He will not win in the arena of masculinity and marriage. He will not move us from our purpose, from being biblical, masculine men.

That's the way we got to think. And there's no better passage on earth to teach us about this than Ephesians 5, 23 -33.

And we're going to learn five things about what it means to be a man and to love like men in this passage.

The first is that we're going to have a shepherding kind of love. Ephesians 5, 23 -24 says this,

For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is also head of the church, he himself being the Savior of the body.

But as the church is subject to Christ, so also wives ought to be to their husbands in everything.

The first aspect of manly love is godly leadership.

Men have been called to lead in their homes in the same way that Christ provides love and leadership to his church.

And that's not a suggestion. That is a biblical command. Think about it like this.

The church is blessed because of the leadership of Christ. We don't moan and groan under his sovereign rule and care.

We flourish under his leadership. And Christ is not waiting for any of us to lead.

He's the leader. We're the follower. And that's what brings life and health to the church. Well, in that case, because we're no longer wandering around in the spiritual valleys anymore, we've been brought into his strong, life -giving, stabilizing love and leadership, and we're better off for it.

In the same way, we joyfully follow him out of death and enjoy the life -giving benefits of his rule without a whimper of objection.

And in that way, us as men, we don't just enjoy that benefit as followers of Jesus.

We're called to imitate that benefit and diligently lead in our homes.

He's called you and I to bring your family together under your leadership, under your headship.

He's commanded that you bring life into your home through your godly care and your godly rule.

He has called you to provide the same kind of benefits that Christ has brought into his church, albeit in a very temporal way.

Suffice it to say, your family ought to flourish, spiritually speaking, under your consistent, godly,

Christ -honoring, active leadership. Not passive, but active, committed leadership.

If you're leading correctly, then your family will thrive. And if your family is spiritually weak, emotionally sick, relationally at each other's throats, experiencing interpersonal decay, chaos, infighting, rampant immorality, or is declining in any other perceivable metric, then your leadership needs adjusting and repentance because the buck stops with you, sir.

If you've been called to be the leader, then the health of your family is a direct result of your leadership.

If your family is healthy or if your family is growing in the direction of health, then continue doing what you're doing.

Repent when you fall short. Amen. Praise the Lord. But if your family is unhealthy or growing in the direction of unhealth, if chaos has infused itself in your family, then you need to take a really long, hard look and repent.

It's not enough for you to do like Adam and point your finger at your wife and kids and say they're the problem. You're not going to succeed as a husband that way.

You're not called to be a family head in that way. If you adopt Adam's passive leadership style, you're not going to succeed.

You can't. You have to stand up, buck up, grow up, man up, and lead.

You have to take a look at your family and ask yourself some hard questions. I do this all the time when

I think about my family and how they struggle as a result of my pitiful leadership.

Ask yourself things like, are they struggling because of my passive leadership, because of my failed leadership, because of my absent leadership?

Are there things that I need to stop doing that are causing harm to my family, or are there things that I need to start doing that would bring life to my family, but I'm not doing them?

Are there things that I need to do so that I can be more like Jesus, a better head over my family, so that my clan, my people, my tribe can more faithfully honor

God? I know these are hard questions, but again, the buck stops with you. You did not marry into a democracy where everything is decided upon spirited debates on a

Senate floor. You are a God -appointed king. You, sir, have been called to rule with love and affection like Christ for the good and health of your family.

If you fail, the family will suffer. If you repent and if you move in the direction of Christ, your family will flourish.

That's the first aspect of what it means to love like a man. It means to have the guts to lead like Christ.

No excuses. No running away from that. Just simply putting your head down to the pages of Scripture, understanding what

Christ calls you and doing it. To have a shepherding kind of love for your family. That's the first thing.

The second aspect of loving like a man is to have a sacrificial, sacrificing kind of love.

Look at verse 25 of this incredible passage where it lays this out. It says, husbands love your wives just as Christ Jesus also loved the church and he gave himself up for her.

Here the love that Christ has for the church is qualified in his desire and joy to give himself up for her.

His love was demonstrated by his willingness to give his life for her and her life, her health, her vitality would be impossible without him dying to his life.

His life sacrificed for her gave her life. These are wonderful and glorious truths that we celebrate every single week about the gospel.

We say amen to this. We personally, we love this and we, as men, we look to Christ and we praise him for the fact that he died for us as men, but it doesn't stop there if you're a man.

What we often forget is that these things have not only been done for us, they've been required of us as men.

Paul begins with husbands love your wives. And just in case we're not clear what that means, he makes it abundantly clear what he means that we are to love our wives like Jesus loves the church and that we are to give ourselves up for her just like he gave himself up for us.

That means that your leadership cannot be in, cannot be used to advance your own agenda. You wake up for your family.

You go to work for your family. You provide for your family. You serve your family. You go to sleep protecting your family.

You repeat that for a lifetime. You die and honor like a man and you're known as someone who gave it all for his family, just like Jesus gave it all for his.

And not just in those physical ways, although those are important and we'll talk about those in the weeks ahead. Think about what

Jesus has done. Jesus went to the cross. He gave his life for the spiritual well -being of his family, for the spiritual well -being of his bride.

That means that manly love sacrifices everything to make sure the people around us are thriving, not just physically, but more importantly, spiritually.

It means, here's some examples. Praying for your wife. Men, do you pray for your wife? Do you pray with your wife?

That's another question. It means leading family worship with your kids. Men, do you grab a

Bible and grab your family and sit them down together and show them who Christ is and show them what the gospel is?

Do you do that? It means making them go to church even when they don't want to go.

Do you do that? Do you make your family sit with you in church and listen to the gospel every single week? Do you put them in front of faithful teaching?

It means modeling Christ -like leadership. When others want to cut corners in your family, you don't cut corners.

You showcase the character of Christ. It means pointing to Jesus in everything that you do.

It means pointing to Jesus when you discipline your children. You don't discipline them out of anger and out of revenge and out of frustration and out of exasperation.

You discipline them because you want them to know who Christ is and you want them to understand that they've fallen short of the gospel, but that in the gospel there's hope, there's healing, and there's reconciliation.

It means comforting your wife and your children with the gospel in everything. When they are sad, you show them the hope and the joy that there is in Jesus.

When they're angry, you show them that God's anger was poured out on Christ so that our anger could be forgiven so that we could live at peace with one another.

It's showing the implications of the gospel to our family. It means sacrificing ourself, putting ourselves second so that our family can benefit first.

Being a loving leader of your home means being sacrificial to the ones that you love. You sacrifice so that your family can see

Jesus, know Jesus, love Jesus, and follow Jesus. You show your boys how to lead by serving.

You show your daughters the kind of men that they're supposed to marry through serving. Like Jesus, you rely on the strength of your

Father to joyfully care for and lead the ones that He has given you. You don't complain about it.

You don't slack off. You don't take days off. You fight your sinful flesh.

You beat it down. You slay it. You bury it. And you stand up and you serve your family like Christ has served the church and cared for you.

That's the second aspect of what it means to have a manly love, is you lead and you serve.

The third aspect of masculine love is a sanctifying kind of love.

And this builds off what we just learned in verse 25, and it continues on into verse 26 and 27. Notice, in verse 25,

Paul tells us that our sacrificial love comes and is based off of the perfect archetype which is

Jesus. It says, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her, that's verse 25, then the question that we need to ask is why?

Why did He do that? Well, Paul continues in 26, talking about the sanctifying love of Christ, and he says, He did that so that He might sanctify her.

Jesus loved the church and gave Himself up for her so that He would sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of the water of the word, that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot, having no wrinkle or any such thing, but that she would be made holy and blameless under His leadership.

You see, men, we not only love our brides enough or our fiancées in the future that we're going to be married to, we not only love them enough to lead them like Jesus, with sacrificial leadership like Jesus, we also have a

God -defined vision for her life. You don't marry your wife for who she is today.

You married her for the woman that she's going to be in eternity with Jesus. You married her with the goal of helping her get ready to meet her true husband,

Christ, who you are going to worship alongside of her for an eternity when your feet touch that celestial shore.

And one of the greatest privileges—you have to understand this—one of the greatest privileges of your life is not taking from her, but it's giving to her.

It's contributing to her growth in Jesus so that when you hand her over to Christ after a lifetime of faithful leadership, she looks more like Jesus because of your leadership.

Just as Jesus gave up His own life to sanctify His bride, you are called to self -denying leadership that ought to be leading your bride towards greater sanctification in Christ.

And by that, the word simply means set apart. Sanctification means set apart, which tells us that under your leadership, your bride ought to be growing more set apart into God, more holy, more sanctified, and under your care, she ought to be thriving instead of moving in the opposite direction.

Under your royal servant leadership, she is to be growing to be more like Jesus. And this does not, by the way, absolve her of her own responsibility.

She's going to sin, and she's got to stand before the Lord on that. But in the same way, just like your leadership is not going to absolve her of her guiltiness,

Christ's leadership does not absolve us of our sin. When we sin, we have to repent. When we sin, we have to go to the throne of grace.

Well, in the same way, your leadership is not an excuse for your wife. Your leadership is there as a benefit for your wife.

Your goal, brother, is to give her rich gospel soil to grow in, to water her in the word, to pray with her and for her, to study the scriptures diligently, to plow in those scriptures so that you can remove the stony parts of her heart, so that you can help her, assist her, walk with her, lead her, help her grow more in love with Jesus, more set apart to God, more holy, more sanctified.

Those are the things that you are looking to help her accomplish in her life in the time that you've been given with her.

You'll be studying the scriptures diligently so that you can answer any question that she might have to point her in the right direction.

You're going to be developing a robust biblical worldview so that you can make wise choices in tough seasons of your life that you're going to face as a couple, so that she'll have trust that you have her best interest at heart and the family's best interest at heart, and you're not leading in a posture of selfishness.

You're going to take her to church, a faithful church, where she can hear the word preached faithfully and regularly to her so that she can grow up in Christ.

You're going to let her see you meeting God and his word, leading your children, praying often, growing in the wisdom and maturity so that she feels secure under your care.

You're going to help her learn what it means to follow Jesus in every aspect of her life, and you're going to not be a hypocrite because you're going to let her see you doing it as well.

You're going to love her like Christ loves her, and trust me, brother, your bride will flourish under that kind of leadership.

Now, I know that there's women listening to this episode who are listening to this and saying, amen, praise God, Lord, give me that.

Help my husband become that. And the reason is not to shame you, brother. The reason is that her heart was designed by God to be under your leadership in that way.

Her heart sings when you step into this kind of leadership, and when you fail, it actually affects her and it affects the entire family.

That's what I'm trying to say. Again, you need to take an honest look at your wife, your kids as well, but this passage mainly talking about your wife.

You need to take an honest look at her and identify whether or not she is growing.

Is she growing in the right direction because of your leadership or is she growing in the opposite direction because of your leadership?

And before you pass blame on her and you talk about how she's stubborn and she doesn't listen and she doesn't allow you to lead and she's always trying to take over.

Before you do any of that, that's what Adam did. I want you to ask yourself some hard questions.

Am I actually leading her? Am I taking an active role?

That is an important question because Adam modeled for us, all men after him, a passive and weak sort of leadership.

He let his wife go to the tree. He let his wife inspect the fruit. He let his wife eat the fruit and he let his wife give him the fruit and then he acquiesced to her.

Men, that is not what kind of leadership you've been called to. You're the one who leads. You're the one who's out in front.

You're not passive. You're active and you need to ask yourself the question, am I doing that? Am I making excuses for myself?

Am I saying that she's too hard to lead? That's a pretty funny question if you think about it because Jesus never said that about you.

And yet he leads you and he cares for you and he's doing that for you. And you, my friend, are much more difficult to lead than your wife.

You can ask yourself the question, am I making excuses for myself? Yeah, probably

I am. When am I going to stop? Another thing you could do is ask your wife, what areas would she like to grow in this year, next year, and in the next decade?

And then you take that information and you go to your prayer closet and you pray for your wife.

You bring it up in conversations and you ask her how she's doing with that particular area. You encourage her with scriptures.

Maybe you do a Bible study on that topic. You find out the ways that your wife wants to grow and you also, through scripture, identify areas where your wife and you and your family need to grow.

And as the leader of the family, you set the path for the way that your family ought to go. As a leader, you set the pace for your family and the buck stops with you.

And let me just say one more word about this. We live in a society that treat men like imbeciles who can't find themselves out of a wet paper bag.

And if that were true, then you could very easily be a whining loser who shirks responsibility and lets your wife shoulder a burden that she was not designed to carry.

But those things are not true of you. Stop letting society beat you over the head. Stop letting the world tell you that you're a loser and that you have no value because you're a man.

Stop listening to all of the voices and submit to God's vision. He made you for this.

And if he made you for this, then he's going to assist you with this. And he's going to help you with this. You got to trust his plan, brother, because God has called you to this.

He's going to help you with this. And you get the rare opportunity that if you'll just submit to this and do what the

Bible has called you to do, then you will get to see your family flourishing under your leadership. It's that simple.

The question is, will you do it? That's the third aspect of masculine love, that you love her enough to lead her, that you love her enough to sacrifice for her, and you love her enough to participate in her sanctification by encouraging and helping her so that one day you can present her flawless, beautiful to her true husband, which is

Christ. That's the third. You have a shepherding love, sanctifying love, and a sacrificial love for your bride.

The fourth aspect of manly love in this passage is a synthesizing kind of love.

You're the one who's responsible for bringing her together with you, for holding her together with you, and maintaining the unity that God has supernaturally given to both of you.

Look at verses 21 through 38. 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 and cherishes his flesh, just as Christ also does the church, because we are members of his body.

For this reason, a man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

As we've already mentioned, a husband's role is to love his wife selflessly, even as he loves his own body.

And the reason that that is true, first and foremost, is because the miracle of marriage. He really is, when he loves her, he really is loving his own flesh, because in marriage,

God weaves together two dissimilar human bodies into a single unit, united together under his lordship and under his covenantal affections for you, bound to one another for a lifetime, joined together by unbreakable bonds, unless some great damage tears you asunder.

You have been brought into one flesh. In the same way, no one hates his own flesh, but he feeds his flesh, clothes his flesh, bathes his flesh, provides for his flesh.

So too, the husband is called to provide for his bride in the way that he would even care for himself.

That is the first reason that this is true. And I pray that all the men listening to this will let that sink in as consistently, listen, as consistently as you take care of yourself, you must take care of her.

For instance, when you drop everything to use the bathroom, when you prioritize you, when you want to go to sleep, when you drop other things to eat, when you save up your resources to buy that toy or that widget, or whenever you, however you, or whatever you tend to do to provide for yourself and to prioritize yourself, you must be the kind of man that's doing that for her.

In all the ways you care for you, now you've been called to care for her.

Loving her like Jesus loves the church will be the hardest and yet the most rewarding thing that you will ever do in your life.

You will never do it perfectly, but to the degree that you grow in this, the more and more that you grow in this will be to the degree that your family thrives under your care.

Of course, there are no guarantees, but if God commanded you to do it, then

I believe that you can believe and trust that if you do it, it's what he wants you to do, it's what he wants for your wife, it's what he wants for your family, and eventually your family will flourish under that kind of care.

It's the way God designed it. That's the first reason that we have a synthesizing kind of love because you love her like your own body, knowing that she and you have become one flesh under God.

You're to love her like you love yourself. The second reason that you do this gets a little deeper down into the fabric of the gospel, which

Paul takes up in our final section that I'm calling sacred love. This is what Paul says in verses 32 through 33.

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

Nevertheless, each individual among you also is to love his own wife even as himself, and the wife must see to it that she respects her husband.

The second and most important, more important part of this is that you don't just love her because you've been made one flesh with her.

You love her, you lead her, you sacrifice to her, you sanctify her, you bind her together in unity with you because you are acting out a picture of the gospel.

Just like Jesus from heaven, he came and sought her, the church, to be his only bride. And with his own blood, he bought her and for her life, he died.

He sought her, he saved her, he sanctified her, he is sanctifying her and synthesizing her into his own body so that the church has become members of his own flesh, his own body.

Just like the wife has become united with her own husband. When you lead your wife, you reenact the gospel.

When you pursue your wife, you reenact the gospel. When you sacrifice for your wife, you're reenacting the gospel.

When you labor for her sanctification and you put her in front of the gospel and you help her and you pray for her and you study with her and you cherish her, you're reenacting the gospel.

When you provide a loving home where she and you and all of your children can grow up in peace and unity and strength and stability, you are reenacting the gospel.

Your job, brother, is not to love her with a carnal, unbridled, romantic, sensate, emotional, effeminate kind of love.

You are to love her like Jesus. You are to love her enough to give yourself for her, provide for her, and act out the gospel to her.

That is what it means for you to love her like a man. Far too often, society is trying to teach men to love women like women.

We're to love her like men. We're to adopt a biblical vision of how to love her like Christ loves the church.

When we fall short, we repent, but we strive towards that vision. Do not let the enemy win in your marriage, brother.

Don't let society define your marriage, brother. Don't let the enemy tell you how to love your wife.

Don't let movies and culture tell you how to love your wife. Don't accept the vision that just because you're a man that you're less than or you're some sort of toxic patriarchy or masculinity.

Reject all of that and adopt the biblical vision that God has given you here in Ephesians 5 to love your wife like Christ has loved the church.

When you do that, repenting when you fall short, standing up for that vision, trusting in the Lord, obeying his word—when you do that, your family will thrive.

They'll get to see Christ on you, and the world will get to see Christ on them. It's a beautiful thing.

That's all I've got today, gents. Until next time, I want you to go love a woman like Jesus, and together, as we do that, one family at a time, we can change the world.

God bless you, and have a great day.