The Man's Role in Marriage (07/16/2023)

It is always such a blessing to be able to bring music into the church for the Lord ultimately and just it's been a lot of fun and I think everyone who has stepped up and has helped me Miss Glenda, Brother Bobby, Maddie, Kenner, Betsy, I appreciate y 'all so much and I love all you guys.

Very nice and that was nice guitar work too Mr. Matt, kind of impressed your father who taught you how to play but anyway. But now I need a lesson on the finger picking from you, that's beautiful. Very nice, thank all of you, the harmony was beautiful, sounded great today and thank you for that.

Appreciate the work that you do to make that happen for the rest of us and let's go to the Lord in prayer. Lord, we thank you so much for our service already today and thank you for the beautiful music, for the wonderful Sunday school lesson we heard about King David and his heart for you and your protection and watch care over his life which is such a strong message for us.

We ask you to bless this portion of our service as well and we ask it in Jesus' name, amen. We're going to be mostly in Ephesians chapter 6 this morning. We are talking about marriage and family for a little while until we pick a new book to go through and so we kind of started out talking about the husband in the home, the man in the home and just to review a little bit, the first point was the husband must understand and pursue spiritual warfare.

That comes from Ephesians 6, 10 and 11, finally my brethren be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might put on the whole armor of God and then we talk secondly about the husband must understand his financial responsibilities under God.

There's only one place I can find in the Bible where it calls a man worse than an infidel and says he's denied the faith and that is if he does not take care of his family financially and yet we don't hear a lot about that in churches.

I know we have some TV preachers that misuse it and they teach it like it's an unconditional promise, but it's a conditional promise. Nevertheless, it's a very strong promise of God to take care of us and we talked about the fact that if God holds us responsible in 2 Corinthians 12, 14 and Proverbs 13, 22 to lay aside for our children and our children's children and we have to create a certain amount of wealth.

So why would God command that if he wouldn't show us how to do it in the scripture? So he did and we went through a lot of those kind of passages as well and we also looked up the the word wealth. If you look at the oldest English definition, which is a very good translation from the Greek, it comes from the old English word wheel, which means well-being and yet Hollywood likes to attach a bad meaning to wealth, especially with regard to Christians.

They don't think a Christian should ever have that or even seek it, which is ridiculous because Satan is the author of poverty and God is the author of wealth and blessedness and well-being. And so we talked in pretty much detail about that.

So that brings us to the third point now. And the third point is that the husband must be must realize. The God ordained role of the man in the family, he must understand what his role is as God ordains it in this book right here.

It would be nice if government would study the scripture and see what God ordains government to do and what he doesn't ordain government to do. That would help. But we certainly are not talking about that today.

We're talking about the fathers in the home. And I find that there are about eight points that if gentlemen would follow from scripture, Bible methodology, he could ensure a happy home. Would you like to see that, gentlemen?

All right. Well, the first one is in Ephesians chapter five, verse 18. So we'll be in chapter five, chapter six of Ephesians mostly. And then we'll go out to some parallel passages, too. But Ephesians 5, 18.

Be not drunk with wine wherein is excess, but be filled with the spirit. So my first point is that a man in the home is the spiritual leader of the home. He cannot accomplish that without being spirit filled.

He's, first of all, got to be saved, which means indwelt by the Holy Spirit. But beyond that, he needs to be filled with the Holy Spirit minute by minute throughout each day. And that is something that requires the man's will.

He must choose to do that. It's something we have a choice every minute of every day of every week and every month and year is whether we'll hold Jesus hand and walk with him or whether we just let our old man be God again, which he's not.

He's actually already crucified, isn't he? He has no right to have control over us. But he usurps that authority when we allow it and we shouldn't allow it. We should walk in the spirit. So that's what this says.

Now, I have to mention, I mean, predominantly, that's what point number one is. Be spirit filled. But I have to mention the part about be not drunk with wine, because I take a cursory look at poverty across, especially in America.

But I know there's poverty across the world that's caused by many things. But most of all, it's caused by their leaders in their nation not setting up their economic and political system, according to this book.

And so when they don't use Bible methodology, it's doomed to fail. And that's why so many people are starving. It's not America's fault, by the way. The world wants to blame America. And yet we feed most of the world.

And it's not America's fault. America has the ability to do that still, even in her sin, because she has been set up according to principles of scripture regarding capitalism versus communism and so forth.

And so that has helped America a great deal to get to the place where she is. Now, unfortunately, she's done like the children of Israel did so many times throughout scripture. She's gotten so well off that she now has forgotten God.

And that's going to end up in tribulation and trial and probably war and many discomforts of many kind that will fall upon America because of that, I think. But anyway, I'm just going to look at America because it's a little different than the third world countries that are in poverty because of their lack of proper methodology.

And, you know, they they either are following Buddha or Mohammed or they are steeped in Roman Catholicism, which for many, many centuries hid the Bible from the common man, even burned people at the stake for reading the Bible.

So that's why they're a little bit worse off than the nations of the world that were under Protestantism, which allowed the common man to read this book. That's the main difference. And I can't apologize for it.

I have many Catholic friends, by the way. I don't have very many Islamic friends. I've met a couple. So, you know, I can't apologize for it. It's just a fact of life. If you look where the economies have flourished, it's been where the leaders allowed people to read this book.

So anyway, but let's talk about America because we have poverty here, too. And I would say that this is not data that I have mined from the all knowing, always correct Internet, but I just observed it in my own life and in circles of life.

And I have traveled the world extensively and watched human beings and how they turn out and so forth, as opposed to those who maybe follow scripture and those who don't. But I've noticed this, that when you see a family that is steeped in poverty, I'd be willing to bet you you couldn't go back three generations without finding a man who was an alcoholic in that family line.

So when you find a man, a father who was an alcoholic one or two or three generations back, you normally will see poverty or digging out of poverty in that family. Someone had to start over to undo the damage done by that alcoholic.

So that's mentioned here at the first part. Be not drunk with wine. But the main thing I want to talk about was be filled with the spirit in Galatians chapter five, verse 22. It says, but the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, long suffering, which means patience, gentleness, goodness and faith.

Now, that's that's not all it keeps going. But can you imagine if you were in a home where the father had these attributes, he was full of love for his wife and his children and his grandchildren. He was full of joy in life because he walked with the Lord.

He had peace and sought peace with others, including his family. He was very patient. He was gentle and good and full of faith. And then it goes on and said, meekness and temperance against such there is no law.

So these are fruits of the spirit. And if a man is spirit filled, he will have these. Now, we all have our own personalities, too, and those show through because we are a triune being like God is. And so our fleshly part of us has inherited certain things from our forefathers and our family line.

Some of us are more patient than others by nature. Some of us are more gentle than others by nature, some meeker than others by nature. But all of us are moved more towards these things because these are attributes that Jesus Christ has.

And we're moved more towards those and we more nearly have them, depending on how much we walk in the spirit. Would you agree with that? All right. And they that are Christ's have crucified the flesh.

That's have already crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts of it. So that gives us a head start. When we're walking in the new man, the old man is dead. We cannot sin when we're spirit filled.

It's impossible. We cannot, nor will we, when we're spirit filled. So that gives us a great advantage. Now, all we have to do is choose to be spirit filled, gentlemen, most of the moments of every day.

And we will not bring demise to our families. We will not bring hurt to our marriage or to our children. So that's the starting place. And it's really the answer to everything. We could believe the other seven points out, but we won't because they're in the scripture.

So let's let's look at the second one. Well, let me finish that one. I'm sorry. There's one more verse I left out. Look at verse twenty five of Galatians five. If we live in the spirit, you see why it says if because it's a choice.

Now, being in wealth is not a choice. It's something that was done to us when God called us and saved us. And he did all that work. He inserted himself into our body while we were yet sinners and not desiring it.

Except a moment before he did that, he changed our want to and caused us to desire it. Just a moment. It all happened in a I don't even know if you can put it in sequence because salvation is of God who is outside, not bound by time.

He's now all the time. It's just like, boom, he just did it. It's like a baby is born, boom, and you were just born and you had all these things that came along with it. But the indwelling of the spirit is one of those.

It's not a choice. You have it. You can't change that. And however, verse twenty five starts with the word if which means it's a conditional, which means you can make a choice not to be spirit filled.

Spirit filled is a choice. If we live in the spirit, let us also walk in the spirit. Now, the living in the spirit is kind of like a rhetorical question. That part like, do you live in the spirit? Well, it's rhetorical because you do.

You're indwelt by the spirit. So your life is such that you have the Holy Spirit. But the second part is the choice. And that is let us also walk in the spirit. You must choose to walk in the spirit because you are indwelt by the spirit.

So if we don't walk in the spirit, we're a hypocrite because who we really are is a saved person who's indwelt by God. And when we walk in the flesh, we're being hypocritical. So we need to walk the way we are.

We need to do the way we be, Brother Dave. All right. We need to do what like we be. It's not only good King James is good Texican. Let us not be desirous of vainglory, provoking another, envying one another, which is what happens when we walk in the flesh.

And we've had that in our church from time to time. Not much, especially from the time Brother Otis came. We didn't really have it at all until recent days. We had a little bit of it. But when people desire glory or provoke one another or envy one another, that's not of the Holy Spirit.

That's of the flesh. And it will be revealed if any of us do it. It will be seen by everyone else. And hopefully one of us will tell us and we can repent, kind of like Dave's lesson on King David. Someone needs to let us know that we need to repent sometimes.

Now, that is the first point, being filled with the spirit, a man who is filled with the spirit predominantly will have a happy home. Now, let me just throw this in. There are men who pretend to be godly and filled with the spirit.

And they talk about it a lot. That's how sometimes you can tell those men. They try to have a spiritual aura about how they speak. And ladies, the first thing those kind of men will do is point out to you often that they are the leader of the home.

And when you have a man that has to say that a lot, you've got a problem and you might want to go talk to your pastor about it. Sometimes a pastor can help solve that problem or an elder in the church can deal with that gentleman and help you ladies out.

I've seen that happen. I've been able to help people quite a few times in the last 40 years when they come to me and tell me what their husband is doing. So listen, if the man is always talking about how he's a spiritual leader, he's not a leader.

So there's a clue. All right. Now, at the time, he might remind you. That he is and that's OK. But if it's like a lot going on every week, he mentioned something about it. You might have a man who is pretending to be spirit filled when he's not.

He might not even be saved. But what he likes is the lordship over the home. And as you as we progress through our study on marriage, you're going to find even today, if I get to it in these notes, you're going to find, ladies, that there's some things that are very different to what a lot of churches teach, especially the more legalistic churches, because the more legalistic they are, the more the man gets to wear Bermuda shorts and the woman has to wear long dresses down to the ground and necks up to here and put your hair in a bun and all that.

And so when you start seeing that happen or anything even close to it, well, you got a problem with the men and the legalism will kill. Spirit brings life. So we know all that. Well, it is important that the man be genuinely spirit filled, not someone who just wants to appear to be a spiritual leader.

There's a big difference. And I love the Galatians five, starting with verse twenty two passage, because they can talk. We men can talk all day long, but love shows. Joy shows peace and long suffering and gentleness and goodness and faith and meekness and temperance.

All that shows. And if you don't see that and it doesn't match the talk, you got a problem. You might want to go to your elders or deacons and get some help. There's nothing wrong with that. The Bible says do that.

And I'm preaching to the choir here. I know all you ladies have perfect husbands, so no need to come to me. But I'm just saying we need to teach our families how this works. Our children need to know our grandchildren need to know how this works.

And so do we. All right. So point number two, then. He is to be the supreme lover in the family. I like the way that sounds. The supreme lover in the family. Ephesians 525 says husbands love and my notes have that in all caps.

It's a agape, agape love. Love your wives. Even as Christ also loved the church and gave himself for it. Well, I said we could have left all of them out, except number one, be spirit filled and everything would be fine.

But if you are spirit filled, you have love. And here's point number two. But it's agape love. And there are three different kinds of love mentioned in the Greek. This one is the highest form because this form of love does not stem from the object of the love.

It stems from the heart of the lover. Do you see the difference? So ladies, you can be treating your husband good on one day and he loves you and you can treat him bad on the next. He still loves you the same if he has agape because it comes from God.

No man can do this on his own. This is from the Holy Spirit living in a man. And he's also walking filled with the spirit. And his first thought might be if you treat him bad. His first thought comes from the flesh quite often with me.

I can only speak from experience. The first thought might be not so patient, not so kind and loving and so forth. I'm working at trying to to adjust that before I speak, make sure I do pull back into the spirit before I speak would be helpful in my marriage.

And I'm working on that. But gentlemen, we have to understand that when we are spirit filled, that love is agape. It does not matter how she's treating us. We love her the same. Now, at the deeper level, we're all like that already.

But we need to work it, you know, like think before we talk. Right, gentlemen, think you know what? Because women don't forget your words. They don't forget your words. You can't take them back once you say it.

So in my house, I still wear a mask. Charlotte calls it a muffle. I can have fun today because she's not in here. I'm afraid she's got her phone on, though, back there. Husbands love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church.

How did Christ love the church? He did two things. He lived his life for the church and he gave his life for the church. Right. So there, gentlemen, we come into the be, do, have thing again that Dave and Brother Myron talk about so much.

I say the thought came from Myron and then Dave expanded it. Even Myron would agree with that. But, you know, you are the Supreme Lord because you have Christ. You are that in the home. As far as doing and talking, talking is part of doing right.

What we say is part of what we do. The talking needs to fall in line with that. And that requires thought before we talk, of course. And so the living life for the wife is not just talk. They know that we say we love them and I think they believe that we love them, but they like to see it acted out.

So if you love me, why are you short with me when you talk? You know, if you love me, why don't you ever do romantic things with me? Not just other things, but like like you did when you were dating me.

Why don't you do that anymore? And those kinds of things are the doing part, the be is there, the doing is important, though it needs to match that. And then it ends with he gave himself for the church.

So we would be willing to die for our wives. And sometimes that's easier than living for them. Would you agree, gentlemen? It would be easy to jump in front of a bullet for your wife. I'd do it in a minute.

I would even enjoy doing it because I had my pistol out shooting the other direction, Lord willing. But or this, you know, it's all it's all good. So it's all good. So that's easy. But to not cut her with my words is harder.

You see, man, we need to work at this and we shall, shan't we? It's interesting when you look at this word gave, Jesus gave himself for the church, his bride, it it's a Greek word that means literally you surrender to yield up one's life for another to commit to, to deliver up, you would deliver her up and set her free, uh, instead to suffer hazard for her.

All those things are in the meaning of the root word in Greek. So, um, the first couple of things that I see here is he's the supreme lover in the family. The first thing is little a under that is he must love his wife.

Like Christ loved the church. And, you know, I said, you could get by with just point number one, but you definitely could get by with just point. Number two, probably going to find that's true of all eight points.

The second thing that I see about the man under this idea of the supreme lover is the scripture says the husband should love the wife as his own body. Now let's think about that a minute. Let's read it first.

It's in Ephesians chapter five, verse 28. So all men to love their wives as their own bodies, he that loveth his wife loves himself. Uh, that's quite philosophical, isn't it? We could spend a little time on what does that mean?

Especially if we were at breakfast, just the men talking, right. We could spend a lot of time on what that means. But I remember a story brother Otis told me more than once. And it was always, it was always funny when miss B was standing there too.

And she, she was sort of helped tell the story about their pastor. When brother Otis was a young man, his pastor was named, uh, Dr. Barney Thames. And it was at Pecan Valley Baptist church in Garland, Mesquite or Garland.

I don't, I think Mesquite actually, I believe it was in Mesquite. Is that right? Ben, do you remember it's either Mesquite or Garland? Just take I -20 and go east. You'll find it. Pecan Valley Baptist church is still there, but this was a marvelous pastor.

He taught all, uh, uh, by the way, Otis was a young deacon at the time, but Dr. Barney, brother Barney taught all of them how to preach in case he was ill so they could fill the pulpit. He taught them all how to lead music in case the music director was ill, the deacons could do it.

He was a wonderful pastor in the sense of a good Bible teacher, but also he knew how to duplicate and delegate to, and build a church that way. We're really great man. And, uh, miss B enjoyed telling this story as much as Otis did.

Cause I heard it more than once through the years, 13 years, I was with them before they went to heaven. But, um, uh, brother Barney would, especially he enjoyed doing, he and his wife enjoyed doing things with other couples in the church and, you know, they might be with another couple and in front of the other couple, uh, brother Barney's wife would ask him, Barney, who do you love most in the whole world?

And he'd think for a minute, he'd say, well, honey, you know, who I love most in the whole world, me like that. And he said it that way every time. And Otis and B thought that was hilarious. They laughed every time they told that story and they thought that was so funny.

But, um, the scripture says men should love their wives as their own bodies. Well, we obviously love ourselves. Don't we gentlemen? All humans love themselves. God put that within us, uh, to keep us going, to give us a drive to live and not die and all those things.

We take care of our own body. When we get hungry, we feed it. You know, when we get dirty, we wash it, you know, all these things. We sleep when it needs it. I liked what, uh, Myron said last Sunday, when he's talking about how, uh, the body will feed the brain by putting food in the mouth, wasn't that interesting?

And so we serve the brain, you know, we've got all that going, don't we gentlemen. And it says, just like we love ourselves, we should love our wives at that same level. And then verse 29 says for no man ever yet hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, even as the Lord does the church, isn't that interesting?

So it sort of switched metaphors right there, because first it was talking about Jesus loving the wife, you know, um, or us loving the wife. Like Jesus loved the church. Then it switches and says, we need to love the wife, we love ourselves.

And then it says, Jesus loved the church more than his own body. Well, that's clear, isn't it? Because his body was allowed to be butchered. And killed and nailed to a cross for his bride sake. And so, uh, it, there's a lot in this about loving the wife as our own body.

And then it says, nourish and cherish. The word nourish in the Greek is, um, from two little Greek words. One means to rear up and the other one means maturity. So it means to rear up to maturity. Uh, that is to cherish or even to train.

Uh, I think in the context of this, we're not talking about training, but we're talking about cherishing, um, and making sure that the body remains nourished and growing and healthy. And all of this is all connotated in the meaning of this word nourish.

But mainly the best English word I think to translate this word is to cherish, uh, the wife, uh, like we do our own body and then the word cherish itself in the Greek, where it says nourish and cherish the word cherish in the Greek, uh, means to warm, to keep something warm or to brood over something, uh, to foster or promote something, to advance something, to encourage something, to look after, care for, bring up and nurture.

So all of these things are things that we do for ourselves every day. When we get ready to go out into the world, think how long it takes. It takes a long time to get this body ready to present it to the rest of you.

And the older I get, the longer it takes, or actually it gets easier. There's less comb, uh, hair to comb and things like that. But, uh, ladies, I know that you like to take quite a bit of time to get ready to present yourselves.

And we do all these things for our own bodies. And that is a picture of how we ought to, gentlemen, at that level, we should love them as much as we love ourselves, it says, even as we love ourselves now, that's just that little word, you know, I love studying words in the Bible, that's why it takes me 12, 13 years to teach through a book.

But because I don't teach book, I teach the words in the book. But, um, here where it says, uh, that he loves, we should love the wife, even as we love ourselves. Um, or in verse 29, we should nourish, nourish and cherish it.

Even as the Lord does the church, wow. There's a whole nother picture, isn't it? How does the Lord take care of us through nourishment and cherishing us like that is how we should do it. That little phrase, even as has some added power to it because, um, it is.

This little word of Haas or hosts in, in the Greek, I should say. Um, it is an interesting word. It can be a copulative word, which means it can take this phrase over here and join it to this phrase over here, this right here, even as this right here.

So it's copulative. It joins two ideas in thought, but it's interesting because in Greek, it's not just copulative. It's also cumulative, which means it adds force. When you say this phrase and you got this phrase and you put that word in the middle, it multiplies the power of what we're talking about.

So you could say that this says, um, you know, we should cherish the wife as we do our own bodies. Um, even as the Lord did the church, you could say as Christ does it in Christ or do that with Christ.

Or you could say times Christ multiplied by what we read about what Christ does as far as his love for the church. Now, I don't know that it's humanly possible for us to do more than he did, but we're supposed to try to multiply it because this little word even as adds a little power to it.

So it's like that, but you need to work at it even harder. I would think that would be true that it would take more work on our part to be like that then for Christ, because it's him, but we need to really work or multiply that effort to love our wives as we do ourselves, because then it goes on and says, if he loves his wife, he loves himself, you're doing yourselves a favor gentlemen, when you treat your wife like Jesus would, and that's what it's saying.

So that brings us to the third point here under the supreme lover is that the husband should see himself as being one with his wife. The scripture says in verse 30, Ephesians 5, 34, we are members of his body and of his flesh and of his bones.

Now, the reason that that starts with the word for is because it's looking back at the previous two verses where it's saying we should love our wife as ourselves for, and then it tells us this, which if you didn't have that, you'd think he'd change the subject, but he's not changing the subject.

He's adding more information for we are members of his body, of his flesh and of his bones and life that we should see ourselves with regard to our wives. We should see ourselves as members of her life, her body, her bones, et cetera.

We are one with her. And this little Greek word is the word sarx, S-A-R-X, sarx. I can hardly mispronounce that Greek word. I can butcher some of them, but that one's easy. In like fashion, we are members of our spouse, of their body, of their humanity, their sarx, so this, this word sarx doesn't just mean body.

It means the life of the person, the fact that they are a living person and we are one with that life of our wives and we should contemplate that, so of their body, of their humanity, their sarx, of their bones, we are one, it's a oneness.

We are no more two, but one human being, one sarx, one human. And don't let any man or woman ever split that asunder. Don't ever let anyone say, well, I'm going to share something with you, but don't share it with your wife or your husband.

Now I say, nah, it doesn't work that way. We're one. So don't tell me if you don't think Charlotte should hear it. Now, it also says an elder and a deacon should not have a wife who is a gossip. And I don't, so I've fulfilled that role there.

That's the best role I fulfill as a pastor, is the wife part is exactly scriptural. Okay. So I got that one. I mean, I guess one was enough. The Lord let me preach. So anyway, um, you are in fact, one verse 31 says for this cause, shall a man leave his father and mother and shall be joined to his wife and the two shall be one flesh.

So, uh, the exhortation of scripture is to be the supreme lover of the family. Uh, one of the things you have to keep remembering is you are one with that wife. You are not two individuals. You can't have a fight with yourself, right?

You don't, you don't fight yourself. We'll fight her. Right. So it's very instructive, I think. And I think that the fourth thing under being the supreme lover is a very logical conclusion after we made this third point that we just covered.

And that is that the husband should love his wife even as himself for sure. Um, it's a logical conclusion of that. And that is in Ephesians five 33, nevertheless, let every one of you in particular, so love his wife, even as himself and the wife see that she reverence her husband.

So obviously, um, all those fit together, but let's think about this last little phrase, and we're going to cover this more because when we're done with this, we'll have a whole section on the role of the woman in the family.

And so we'll obviously cover some of this as well, but look what it says here. And the wife, so the man is supposed to love the wife, like Christ loved the church and like he loves himself and realize he is one with his wife.

And so in the light of all that it says, and the wife see that she reverence her husband. So the husband is to love his wife. And what's interesting is when you look at the grammar there in the Greek, the husband loving the wife, like Christ love the church, the husband loving the wife, like he loves himself, the husband loving the wife because he's one with her.

All of these are found in the present active imperative. Now in grammar, in case it's been a while since you were in high school, because a lot of these are the same in English, uh, present tense means you're doing it right now.

It's not like you were a good husband. 10 years ago, you were a good husband when you were dating before you got married. It's like right now, secondly, it's active, which means it's not something greater and bigger than you does to you.

It's something you do. You're the doer of it. And it's imperative, which means it is a command from God. When it says for the husband to love the wife, like Christ loved the church and for the man to love the wife, like his own body and the man to be one with the wife, it is an imperative.

It's a command from God. But ladies, we'll get to this later when we get to your role, but I'll just throw this out because it's right here in front of us. It's interesting when it says, and let the wife reverence her husband.

This is in the present passive subjunctive. Gentlemen, if you don't know what that means, you probably don't want to hear this, but ladies, you will like it. So take your pens out and take note. Present means it's now.

That's the only similarity. Passive means it's something someone else does to you. What that tells me is that your submissiveness, your reverence, and I won't say submissiveness because we're specifically talking about reverence, so I got to be very careful, but specifically with regard to the fact you're supposed to revere your husband.

That's a strong word in today's society. Women, like if I were to preach this on the street corner out there, of course, women today would not like to hear that you reverence the husband. Reverence, that's a strong word, don't you think?