Marriage as Completion: Gender Roles (Part 2)

Welcome to Gospel in Life. You're listening to Cultivating a Healthy Marriage with Tim Keller. This short podcast series features the messages from the most popular sermon series of Dr. Keller's time at Redeemer Presbyterian Church. Preached in 1991, this series was the basis for the best-selling book by Tim and Kathy Keller, the meaning of marriage. With your single, married, widowed or divorced, this series helps you learn how to apply God's wisdom about marriage to your life. We're looking at a subject that's controversial, and yet on the other hand, I find I hate most controversial subjects as a lot of you know. I don't enjoy getting after things that divide people. Yet this is not a controversial issue that's intellectual. This is a very personal one. In most controversial issues, it's very hard for me to preach with a lot of conviction because I say, "Who knows?" A lot of wonderful, godly, intelligent people that believe differently. How do I get off preaching from Mount Olympus and saying, "This is the way it is." In this area, though, I think it's biblically clear, and I also know I'm going to try tonight, especially to speak as personally out of my own experiences I possibly can. Yet it's still an area where I have to tread lightly, I have to think very carefully. So tonight we'll continue for one more week the subject of looking at the passage, "Wives Verse 22, Submit to your husbands, Ask to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church." What does this mean? And the answer is, it means a lot, a whole lot. Let's just read the whole passage as usual because I'd like you to keep on thinking of the whole passage. Ephesians 5, 21 to 32. Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. "Wives submit to your husbands, Ask to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, His body of which He is the Savior." Now as this church submits to Christ, so also, "Wives should submit to their husbands in everything." Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her, to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the Word, and to present her to Himself as a radiant church without staying or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. "Ewho loves His wife loves Himself, after all, no one ever hated His own body but He feeds and cares for it as the Christ does the church, for we are members of His body. For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh." This is a profound mystery, but I am talking about Christ in the church. However, each one of you must also love His wife as He loves Himself and the wife must respect her husband. God's Word. Now, recap, elaborate, work out the implications. What is His teaching? What is Paul teaching? First of all, let's take a look at this word, "Head." For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church. This means two things, and I don't know if you can. Those of you here last week, you might not remember it since I, you know, as usual, was verbose and spent a lot of time developing the things, but let me boil this down to you. First of all, head means that the husband and the wife complete one another. Secondly, head means that there actually is an authority structure inside marriage. Those are the two things. Now, let's look at them again, and let me try to elaborate as well and make it as clear as I can. First of all, when it says the husband is the head of the wife, we said the word "head" means just like the word "authority." I didn't say this last week. The word "authority" has actually two parts to it. Inside the word "authority" is the word "author." And therefore, the word "author" means "source." Something has authority if you're the source, and the illustration I like to use is. And some of you have heard it, of course, is that if you're having a debate in your English class over what this poem means, and everybody's saying, "I think this means this," and somebody else says, "I think it means this." Obviously, no, it means this. In comes the poem of the poet. Now, I know the deconstructions. Don't care what he thinks, but the normal, the normal logical person realized, "In comes the poet," and the poet says, "I wrote this thing. I'll tell you what it means." Everybody shuts up. Why? Because this is the author speaking. Because he's the author, he alone can tell you what it means. Because he is the source. Therefore, he has authority. So, the idea of authority and source go together, even in the English word. Because inside the English word of authority, you have the word "author." And inside this Greek word, for "head," you've got both the idea of source as well as the idea of authority structure. So first, you have the idea of source. And when Paul says, "The wife submits to the husband for the husband and his head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church," he is talking and thinking about the Old Testament. He's talking about Genesis, where we're told that Adam was created out of Eve. And part of me, Eve was created out of Adam. The two actually were part of one another. You don't have two separate creations, X and E, hello. You don't have Adam created out of the ground, and Eve created out of the ground, out of the dust. But you have Adam created out of the ground, and Eve created out of Adam. What is the significance of that? Very, very great. When Genesis 128 were told, in the image of God created He, Him, male and female created He, them. Now when in Hebrew, you put two statements back to back. They're usually parallel. That means one is a restatement of the other. So first of all, it says, "God created man and his own image." In the image of God created He, Him, male and female created He, them. Which is pretty clear. What that means is that when God says, "I'm going to create a human being," that human being is in the image of God means that human being is like a little mirror that reflects to God His own being, His own rationality, His own personality, His own creativity, His holiness, His righteousness. Being in the image of God means that we are persons. And we have the ability to reflect to God is nature in a way that the animals don't, in a way that the rocks don't, and that the trees don't. But then it says, in the image of God created He, Him, male and female created He, them. The clear implication is that when God created human beings to reflect Him, He created human beings in two modalities. But together, the male and female were built to stand there and reflect back to God, His being in a way that the male alone or the female alone can't do. Now maybe an illustration of that. I mean, maybe you're thinking about kind of like two pieces of a mirror and you put them together and then they show forth the image of God. That doesn't quite work because if you have a mirror and you sort of crack it down the center and you have two mirrors, the fact is that both mirrors can completely reflect the totality of your being, isn't that right? You don't need a large mirror or small mirror, the small mirror can do it. I think it's more like this. Here's a piece of aluminum foil. And that aluminum foil reflects you fitfully. And here's a piece of glass. Clear glass. And the clear glass reflects you fitfully too. The human foil, the aluminum foil reflects you in a kind of distorted way. The glass reflects you not in a distorted way but in a shadow way. But if you stick the aluminum foil behind the mirror, if you back, pardon me, if you back the glass with the foil, what have you got? You got a mirror. And the mirror perfectly by putting those two elements together reflects the person who's looking into it. The scripture in so many ways says that male and female together reflect God in a way that male, alone or female alone cannot. This may sound like common sense to you. This may be something you thought you know the Bible's taught for years maybe, but I want to realize it's an amazingly, amazingly controversial topic and our entire society is moving completely away from the idea. Rampifications are huge. I guess we ought to think about some of them tonight. Let's show another place in which that comes up. When in Genesis 2, Adam is naming the animals. We're told at the end of all of his naming of the animals, it says, but a suitable companion was not discovered for him. That tells us that Adam was created with certain design deficits that he needed a companion. He needed something to complete him. It says, you go back into the Old Testament and you'll see in the early stages of the book of Genesis, you have nothing but benediction. The word benediction means a good word, benna, right? Indict, like dictionary, a good word. And so all you see is God created the light and the darkness and he saw the light was good. It's a good word, benediction. And he created the floor and the fauna and it was good. He created the fishes and the animals and it was good. He's creating all these things and it's good. It's good, it's good. Benediction, benediction, benediction. Suddenly, it says it was not good for man to be alone. Malediction, a bad word and yet another is no sin in the world yet. There's been no fall, there's been no, there's no entrance of evil, how could it be bad? Unless God actually went ahead and he created Adam in such a way that he was not able to reflect the image of God in totality. Therefore, literally it says when Eve was created, it says, Eve was created as a helper fit for him. Now, literally the word helper means, I mean, pardon me, the word is, a helper, a companion opposite to him or co-responding to him. She was opposite to him and when he discovers her, I guess we mentioned this a couple of weeks ago, when he first sees Eve, what does he say? He breaks into poetry, the first poetry in the Bible and therefore the first poem in history. Now, when you think of poetry, you think of rhyme, if you're not real sophisticated, you don't know poetry is more than that. In Hebrew, there's a particular poetic form, a poetic couplet that Adam breaks into when he sees Eve and he says, this at last, see at last, there's been a long and there's been a yearning, there's an incompletion. You don't yearn for something unless there's an incompletion. This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. What is he saying? He is saying, this is really weird. You're really different than me. I mean, you're opposite to me. It says he was a helper opposite. You're opposite to me and yet you're me. You're opposed to me. You're against me and yet you're me. Yet I find myself in you. You're the missing part. At last, my bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh, you shall be called woman, for you were taken out of man. How many times does the Bible have to put it to show that there is a fundamental incompletion that each gender has in itself, but that together forms a whole and enables humanity together to reflect the image of God? We're told in verse 25 of Genesis 2 immediately after he meets his wife. It says, and they were naked and unashamed. What happened to him when he was completed? Now, again, this is profound. This is deep. This is the thing I'm going to start to wrestle with a little bit for the next five minutes. I probably won't do justice to it, but we can see the results of completion. Personal ease and at-easiness. They were naked and unashamed. There's no anxiety left. There's no hiding. There's a sense of being, there's a primordial and ancient unity and accord that Adam and Eve had that we've never had since. The sin entered in and disrupted the unity that they were able to have. Nothing to hide. Complete at-easiness with themselves and with each other. So the scripture says, and I don't know how many ways it can say it, literally, that there is a complementary unity between a non-reversible unity between the genders. When I say non-reversible, it means male and female are different. In some sense, they're opposed to each other. They complete each other. They're non-reversible. They're equal but not equivalent. Now what I was trying to say last night, last week, was that this is a very, very difficult thing to articulate. Actually, millions of husbands and wives have experienced this completion, but they can articulate it either. And as soon as you try to sit down and explain what it is and give incidents of it, you'll see that you can always say, "Well, but couldn't someone else besides a spouse do that for you?" And therefore, the actual experience of completion that comes through a decent marriage is always bigger than the sum of its parts. But essentially, the completion goes along this line. I mentioned last week, for example, Carol Gilligan in a different voice is part of a whole new generation and a sense of researchers who are saying, "You know what? When it comes right down to, there's all sorts of, there's a spectrum of differences inside each gender and even though there's all sorts of various permutations and variations, essentially male and female brains and hearts operate in some different ways." And if you remember, the basic summary that she came up with was that men feel they're maturing as they become separated and independent and women feel that they're maturing as they become attached and interdependent. Now, what that boils down to is something pretty interesting. When two people get together and start to complete each other, that means start to live together. That means get convinced that each person, how do we use to put it a couple weeks ago, you get committed to the glory of that person. That means you look into that person's heart and you see the great potential they have. It's the great human being that God wants to make them. And you say, "I'm committed to getting that person there." And so there's love and there's affirmation and there's confrontation and there's service, mutual service and all that great stuff that happens which is hard work. But what you're doing is you're not battling this out with a person of the same gender. The confrontation and the criticism and the affirmation and the building and all this stuff is not happening with somebody of the same gender. It's someone who is opposite to you, someone who is created to both oppose you and complete you. It's a hard thing to describe when you get into it. It doesn't happen with your parents, it doesn't happen with a friend of the same gender and it doesn't happen even with a friend of the opposite gender with whom you don't have this depth of commitment. In marriage you give people the right to come right on inside. We talked about this before to see your dirty parts. See to see the most intimate things and therefore when you get someone of the opposite gender in there, the completion work goes on. It's very hard to describe how something can be opposite to you, the same time enhancing you. Musicians know that if you're, if here's a theme, here's a musical theme. The right kind of counter-theme, which in a sense opposes the theme, just creates incredible beauty. The wrong kind of counter-theme creates incredible ugliness and don't ask me how to describe the difference. I mean everybody knows that that. Everybody knows that all by itself a simple melodic line, all by itself as beautiful as it is can be filled out and furnished and enriched and in some ways the beauty of it brought out because of opposing themes that are being played at the same time. We also know that there's opposing themes can be played in such a way as to create incredible ugliness and just plain noise. And even though lots, I've heard people try to do it. I mean I took a music theory class once. Nobody really knows why. Why ugliness happens and why beauty happens. But we know what happens. So don't try to press me too far on how this completion happens. We just know it does. Now here, basically the completion happens because you're forced for the first time in your life to continually look at the world through the eyes of someone of another gender. What does it do? It creates a wisdom and it fills you out. Just like the opposing theme fills out the melody. So for example, I'm thinking of one kind of example and somebody, hear me out before you jump on me for this. Here's Kathy and myself and we have two different approaches to emotions. Kathy's approach, well in my approach goes like this, Kathy will one day say to me, "You're mad, aren't you? You're really mad." And I'll say, "No, I'm mad, I'm fine. I can tell you I'm just fine." Three days later I'll come back and say, "You're right, I was just really mad." She'll look at me and she'll say, "How can a human being?" There's more than a second grade education. How can a human being really live in this world and not know whether they're mad? How could that be? How could you stuff your feelings out there? How could you be so out of touch with yourself? Now what she's upset about is my non-completed masculinity. I separate. I'm moving out. I'm looking at impact. I don't look inside. I don't look at relationships. I don't care about attachment. She's got to teach me that in a sense. She's got to furnish that. She's got to bring it out. She's upset about, in a sense, at that point, my uncompleted masculinity. But then later on, I may sit down with Kathy and we both agree that there's a person that we need to work with. We need to be civil to. We need to be courteous to because of a number of situations. But that person has been dirty, has been a lous. So she says, "You're going to have to lead on this one." I say, "Why?" She says, "Because you know how to stuff your feelings." By the way, have you ever figured out women who are in the professional world, the definition of professional behavior, is an unrelentingly masculine approach. You see, because men were out in the workplace for so long and women were excluded. Now they get in. All of the standards of professional behavior have all been worked out along with masculine gender types. See, what it means to be professional is to stuff your feelings. Is to be absolutely unwilling to say to a person who you're dealing with how you feel about them. To be completely cool and completely civil and completely courteous. Now the fact is, sometimes that's the right thing to do. Sometimes that's the servant thing to do. Sometimes it's the mature thing to do, but very often it's not. But very often when that has to be done, she looks to me and she says, "You help me." Because you know how to stuff those feelings. You know how to stuff those feelings so deep that you don't even know what to heck your feeling for three months. Now somebody says, "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. This is unfair. These are sexual stereotypes. The insensitive male, the emotional female. I'm sorry. They're not stereotypes. They're us." And what do you think stereotypes are? That's uncompleted masculinity, unredeemed masculinity, and unredeemed femininity. You see, what happens when you get two people together who are completing each other, who are pressing each other, who are confronting each other, who are loving each other into the kingdom of God. What you're continually doing is you are furnishing out and completing to keep the independence from becoming tyranny, to complete the inner, to keep the inner dependence from becoming "be" pendants. See? Together we pull it together. In fact, here's what's interesting. If I am as a man over gender-typed, overly independent, overly autonomous, see, my spouse calls me on it because she sees it, because she's so sensitive to it. But on the other hand, if I'm under gender-type, if I'm not independent enough in a situation that calls for it, she can call me on that and vice versa. We're completing each other. We're pulling each other together. We're bringing it together. It's a mystery that at some deep level, you realize when you're dealing with somebody the other gender, here's a person who's different than me at the same time who is me, who's restoring me, who's healing me, who's turning me more and more and restoring me into the image of God. Male and female created he them. Marriage is one of the most profound human relationships, but it's one that at times can be difficult and painful. We'd like to briefly highlight a resource that provides help for anyone who wants to have more loving and stronger relationships. Tim and Kathy Keller draw from Biblical wisdom and their own experiences to offer a year of daily meditations for couples in their book, The Meaning of Marriage, A Couples Devotional. The book is a 365-day devotional that includes stories, daily scriptures, and prayer prompts that will help couples draw closer to God and to each other throughout the year. If you would like to make a gift to help gospel and life share the love of Christ with more people, we'll send you a copy of The Meaning of Marriage, A Couples Devotional, As Our Thanks. To request your copy, simply visit gospelonlife.com/divo. That's gospelonlife.com/divo. Now here's the conclusion of this episode of Cultivating a Healthy Marriage. It means completion. Secondly, Heshit means authority. Now one thing I did mention this last week, but I think I better be as clear as I possibly can. When this place, the Bible says, "Why submit to your husbands? Husbands love your wives? What is it requiring?" Let me give you a little read out. I mean, a lot of people afterwards, I talked all week to people about this thing. Most everybody says, "I think I got you, and I think I can live with it even if I don't like what you said, at least it's in the ballpark." So let me try to work this out. What does it mean when the Bible says, "Why submit to your husband?" Number one, it does not mean the wives give the husband unconditional obedience. It does not. Now I'll get trouble with somebody here. Here we go. Acts 529, "The civil magistrates tell the disciples to stop preaching Christ." Go to Romans 13 and you will see it says that the Christian must always obey the civil magistrate must always obey the government. That's what it says in Romans 13. And in Acts 529, what does Peter say? It says, "God should judge whether we should obey you rather than him." So the point is that any human authority that you defer to, any support of human authority must never be unconditional. You give Christ unconditional obedience, but your obedience to any human authority is conditioned on this. You are free from human authority. If to support that human authority, you have to forbid what God enjoins or enjoin what God forbids. See, if you're supporting a human authority that is pressing you to sin, that is supporting sin at that point, your obligation that human authority goes. You cannot read Romans 13. It says, "Obey the civil authority." That's something absolute. In light of Acts 529, where the apostles look at the civil magistrates and say, "You're telling us to preach the gospel." God says we have to preach the gospel. At that point, we are no longer under your authority. This would mean, certainly, that for a wife to support the authority of her husband, when that authority is supporting those things which God forbids. If he says, "You're going to help me sell drugs." If he's beating her, you see, in other words, this is support authority that's actually supporting that which God forbids. Of course, that's silly. It's ridiculous. It goes against Acts 529. You must never, ever, ever read this verse. Nobody should read the verse saying where it says, "Obey your wives of submit to your husbands as to the Lord." Does not mean in the same way you obey the Lord. It's saying, "As you obey the Lord, you will obey your husband." You will obey your husband because you will obey the Lord. It doesn't say, "Obey your husband in the same way." It's the same dimensions that you obey the Lord. I know people have taken it that way. I know the church has twisted it that way. I can't help that. I'm not defending the church. I'm defending the Bible here tonight. It doesn't say, when it says, "Submit to your husbands." That means there's some kind of unconditional obedience, some kind of unconditional, servile, total authority that the wife is supposed to give herself to. Secondly, I think it did say this last week to some degree. Secondly, when it says, "Why submit to your husband?" It does not mean why it does not take part in the consensus form of decision-making. The Victorian model of family authority, the little wifey model of authority that says, "You see, why submit to your husband?" That means let your husband make the decisions. You just run errands and you just smile and you just immediately submit to them. Nobody seems to, you know, they never thought about what it means to complete one another. When the Bible says, "Friends are supposed to sharpen each other as iron, sharpened as iron." How much more the ultimate friendship, if submitting to your husband means that your husband makes the decisions that you never argue, you never go at a hammer in tongues, there's no completing going, "How does completion work?" Completion is hard work. Completion is conflict. Completion is going at each other. Completion is arguing. Completion is beating one up. Others up in love and I'm talking, of course, metaphorically. Okay? Completion's got to happen that way and therefore it's really clear from the scripture. Just by all this talk about how you're supposed to sanctify each other and you're supposed to be washing each other and you're supposed to be a dealing with each other's blemishes and confronting each other is extremely clear. That means decision-making is always by consensus. You fight it out, you duke it out. You spend a long time sharpening one another. That's got to happen or there's no completion. All right? Then somebody says, "What does it mean?" And we did say this last week, but I'll show you again why. What does it mean for, say, wife to submit to your husbands? What it means is that when you can't agree, after lots of completion, after lots of consensus, somebody's got to break the tie. Let the husband do it. Why? Because the Bible says, "When that happens, when the husband breaks the tie, when the wife defers, then you're getting in touch with your masculinity and femininity, even though you may not like it, but you will, you'll find it. It's there." A lot of people said, "Look, look, look." I have lots of friends who believe very much in something that is a completely new idea in the whole history of the world, and that is a gallantry marriage. I mean, it may be right, but at least you realize that how incredibly innovative the whole thing is. And in a gallantry marriage, they say that decision-making has to happen and no one breaks the tie. You work it out. And if you cannot, if you can't go to agreement on it, nobody has the right to break the tie and take the authority. And my experience is nobody has been able to show me to, you might say, argue me out of this. My experience is that that's impossible. There are just too many places where you have to make a decision, and they've not to make a decision means you're actually giving one person their way. The perfect example, which I used last week and I didn't use our names, but of course you know what it was all about. And here's Tim Keller who wants to come to New York to start a church and here's Kathy who does it. And at one time during all of this battling, I mentioned this, but I don't think I brought this out so clearly. During the battle, we suddenly realized that there was no such, there's no way that we could decide not to decide. At one point, you see, I said to her, well, if you don't want to come, we're not going to come. And she pointed out to me, that means I get to break the tie. And I recently realized, oh my gosh, there was no way out. No way out. Either I got to break the tie or she got to break the tie. There was no third way. There was no alternative. There's no such thing as an egalitarian approach here. No way. And I can think of dozens and dozens of other situations. You know, like do you put your kids in private school or public school or what school and so forth. You know, not to decide is to decide. Who's going to break the tie? And you see, at that point, my wife says, you break the tie. Now do you see what happened? My wife and I are not from the Midwest, we're not from the South, we're from the Northeast, raised in public schools, went to private schools. We don't have any ideological prejudice toward this approach. Not only that, we don't have neither of us, as most of you know, are very overly gender types. And therefore, why did we do it? Why did we decide in this marriage when we can't come to a consensus when we really are kind of at loggerheads, we've done all the completing we possibly can, we can't bring ourselves around, why let Tim make the decision of it, you know, I want you to realize this has happened less than 10 times in our marriage. In fact, we can only name about six weeks. there must be some other ones. Why? We did it as unto the Lord. We did it simply to obey. We did it simply because first of all somebody's got to do it and if you don't decide who it's going to be on the basis of what the Bible says on the basis of revelation what are you going to do? Whoever has the loudest mouth, whoever's the best of manipulation, what are you going to do? Huh? See the point is and I think that's the only alternative is if somebody has a better alternative show me. As you know I've been as you can tell I've been talking about this for 17 years to people and nobody's even come close yet to show me what that third way is. You have to decide who's going to do it and we have found that even though ideologically and emotionally and every other way it doesn't really make much sense to us. We found out that it did bring out something and as it did yet us in touch with the male and the female form of our humanity it did make us fit. It did complete us in a way we never ever would ever have ever thought of. But here's the other wonderful thing about this teaching that you must never ever miss. It says, "Why is respect your husbands? It does not say husbands get the respect of your wives, take the respect of your wives." The only thing husbands are commanded to do in a biblical marriage is love. Now I want you to think about the implications of this. One of my, one of the guys that I go to all the time because I respect as much as a teacher and as a scholar and as a preacher was an English, well a Welsh pastor, preacher David Martin Lloyd-Jones. I got out his sermon on this text and Lloyd-Jones was a man from the old school. He was raised in Wales in the early part of the 20th century and he was by no means what you might call a modernist and he tended to be very, very old school in many ways. It was amazing what he said. He says, "The clear implications of this text were, 'Why is it told to respect their husbands, but husbands are not told to exert their headship, but only told to love?' He says, "The clear teaching is that husbands have absolutely they are not at all entitled to headship unless they're loving their wives sacrificially." Put it another way, "Headship is never ever something you demand or take. It's only something you can receive." You see if any woman in this audience who feel like, "I hate this idea of headship," you have to see the Christian understanding of headship is incredibly realistic. It says, "A husband never, ever, ever has the right to take it only to receive it. Never has the right to demand it only to earn it. If he's not earning it, if you don't trust him, husbands, if she doesn't trust you, if she doesn't have if you're not living such a sacrificial life for her, putting her needs ahead of yours. So that she trusts you, she's not going to give you headship and you don't deserve it. And you don't even have any right to have it. Nor can you ever demand it. You want headship, you love her until she finds it is something she wants to do. And that's what the scripture says. Clear implications. It never says, "Woe your wife." Never. It says, "Love your wife." And yet on the other hand, it turns around to the wife and says, "Respect and give the headship to your husband." The realism of this thing is overwhelming. Why? Remember we said, Genesis 2 and 3 tells us that sin has changed the headship principle and twisted it so that men will naturally oppress women. It'll always be a tendency. It will always be there. It doesn't eliminate the headship principle. Plenty of people say because of that oppression, we've got to eliminate it totally in marriage. It's just too dangerous. If it was too dangerous, you know, there's wisdom to that, but the Bible doesn't give you that wisdom. And we can't try to be wise with the scripture. What the scripture does though is it hedges it about with all kinds of marvelous and wonderful, uh, a safety catcher. And here's one of them. Husbands, you're never allowed to take the headship. You're only allowed to receive it. You're only allowed to earn it. There's no oppression here. There's no, there's not even a chance of oppression. If two people who sit down, go in and understand what the scripture teaches. People can twist scripture. They can twist anything if they want to. But if you look at the scripture and see what it's saying, it's impossible with a decent understanding of it to use it to kill each other with. And people do it all the time. It's because they don't understand it. Somebody says, well, look, if this is really true, that male and female are that different. And they complimented one another. And if that's, if that's really the basis for this, uh, this unity, why is it that the Bible doesn't command all women to submit to all men? Why is it that there's only a command inside a covenantal relationship? The answer again is the realism of the Bible. The realism of the Bible is that it knows because of the, because of the influence of sin, just what havoc that would wreak. And why the Bible does not say all women are supposed to submit to all men. But simply says in a covenantal relationship, which is hedged about by all these safeguards, there's commitment to absolute love there and only there with all these qualifications. Can you begin to practice the headship principle and get back in touch with the primordial unity that Adam and Eve experienced? We'll never get all the way there. There's only flashes of it. And it's the only safe place to try inside a covenant, inside a commitment, inside a legal bond. But in there, work on it. And what do you see? How wonderful it is occasionally, in flashes to really be at ease. At ease. Now the other part of this verse is actually something that's just too wonderful and it's too, and it's always missed because everybody's so busy arguing over what the heck it means for why it's to submit to their husbands. That they overlook the fact that it says, "For the wife, the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church." And this is actually teaching as something marvelous about your relationship with Christ and it's also saying, "If you don't understand the glory of your relationship with Christ, you will never be decent in your marriage." You know what it teaches you? And this is how we're going to close up. First of all, it teaches you this, about your relationship with Christ. First of all, it teaches you that he is ravished with you. This is so bold. This is so bold. When it says that when you look at how a man falls in love with a woman, okay, and marry her, you begin to get a little bit of an insight into how Jesus Christ relates to you in terms of your salvation. The first thing it proves in our relationship with Christ is that Christ love for us is not indifferent. It's not abstract. He sets his heart on you with probably a considerable more passionate intensity than anybody in this room has ever set their heart on anyone else. He is ravished with you. He is triumphant in you. He glories in his relationship with you. Now, I don't know what is a more daring image than that. I don't know what is a more incredible promise than that. Partly, it's just, it's almost so daring that you really don't let yourself get bare the full breath of it. The man is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church. What an incredible thing. There is a love that goes beyond any kind of passion that you will ever experience and that love for you. He sets his heart on you. He sets his love on you. He delights on you. He sings over you in his love. It says in Zephanie. That's the first thing. That tells you about Jesus' love for you. Secondly, what we're told in this verse about Jesus' love for you is that it's in spite of love. Haven't you ever noticed how people will often say, "Oh, they're in love, they're getting married." I wonder what she sees in him. I wonder what he sees in her. Now, I want you to know that the most immature love and the most mature love look a lot alike. See, there's an immature kind of love that basically gets a crush on somebody. In spite of all those flaws, that person, see, an immature love, you don't see the flaws. Everybody comes up and says, "Honey, you're going to marry him. Do you realize what he does to people? Do you realize these flaws? I mean, you're in trouble." She sees the wonder if she says, "But you don't understand I see his heart." I see who he really is. The problem is with immature love is she sees the heart, but not the blemishes, not the rags. In mature love, you see the heart and you see things that nobody else sees. You see the jewels under the earth. You see the the the or inside all the dirty rock. But you see the blemishes. You see the rags. And this is how Jesus looks at you. He sees all of your blemishes. He sees all of your unworthiness. He sees all of your undeservedness. And he says, "I don't care. I'm going to cover it. I'm going to deal with it because I see the glorious person that you're going to be in me." And that's how he regards you. And that's how he looks at you. You see? It says as the husband looks at the wife and wants to present him to himself, spotless and pure and all that kind of stuff. You know, that's in spite of love. What does he see in you? You know, I tell you something. It's pretty hard. That doesn't happen that much in New York because we are so image conscious that almost none of us will be caught dead with somebody whose glory is not seen by everybody else around. Thank God Jesus is not like us. Thank God Jesus is not at all like us. He sees the jewels under the earth and he says, "I'm committed to that." He loves you in spite of the lack of glory and the lack of beauty and the lack of purity. Thirdly, we said Jesus sets his love on you. It's just as ravished with you as a man loving a woman. Secondly, he sees the beauty in you and he sets his heart on you and he loves you in spite of your blemishes. He sees those blemishes, but that's not important. He's going to cover those things. He sees the glory that he's going to put in you. Thirdly, whenever you fall in love with somebody, you do everything for them. You know, before you used to enjoy going fishing, but now, frankly, you don't enjoy fishing unless he's along or she's along. Before you made money now, you really make money for her, for him. Now you think about what you can do together. What happens is when you're really in love, you can't imagine. You can't enjoy anything without that person. You hear about the artist that was absolutely ruined as an artist. He was a landscape artist and he fell in love. And unfortunately, no matter what he drew, he stuck her. Every single painting he put her couldn't get his mind out. Everything's done for her. Now, look, the Bible says that Jesus Christ did not die for justice. He has not lived for abstract holiness. It's for you. The Bible says he does everything for you. What Romans 8.28 says all things work together for good to the dead of love God and in Ephesians 1 says he's governing all of history, all of circumstances, everything is happening for you. How does Jesus regard us, the church? You know, you send a prayer up there and he gets it and he opens his mail and he says, "Awh, a letter from the church." Let's see, the church, the church. Yeah, a little organization I left down on earth 2,000 years ago, I wonder how they're getting along. No! The scripture says he does everything for the church. He lives for the church. Everything that happens is done for the church, for you and me. He doesn't govern the universe on the basis of abstract principles, of righteousness or justice, it's all for you. Just like a man in love. Can you believe that? Can you understand that? Can you think about that? You won't ever have a good marriage if you can't be ravished with the love with which he's ravished with you. Lastly, Christ's love has authority. The big problem, the reason a lot of you are scared, the death to get married, we're going to talk about that finally last week. Finally we'll say, "Well, what if I'm divorced? What if I'm homosexual and what if I'm single? What has all this got to do with me? It has a lot to do with you. That's next week." But I'll tell you one thing. One of the reasons why somebody says, "I want to hear this." But look, actually I don't know what the heck you've been doing for the last eight weeks. You might as well come next week, but what you were here the last week, the week, I don't know. But you see, one of the reasons a lot of people are so scared about marriage and rightly so, is that when you fall in love, you fall under the authority of that love. We're not talking now about wife or husband. You know darn well how hard it is to actually be in love with somebody because now you're not your own person. You've got to make decisions with them. You can't decide, "Hey, I want to move to LA. You've got to find out whether she wants to move to LA too." There's an authority under which you come. You lose control when you're in love. You have to lose control when you're in love. Otherwise you're using people. If you let a person into your life and that person loves you, then you have, can't treat that person as a thing. You've lost control. To the degree you've got a person in your life who loves you. And when the greatest person in the whole universe and the history of the world comes into your life, you really lose control. But just as you lose control when you enter into a beautiful loving relationship, you also find yourself. You get completed. So there is nothing like the completion that comes from losing total control by giving yourself to the Lord Jesus. He loves you in spite of you. In spite of your flaws. He is absolutely doing everything for you. And lastly, He wants you to come in under His authority. A beep, it's 8 o'clock. Listen. Just remember that Jesus is the helper and He is the head. Those of you who say, "I want that completion." If I had a great marriage, I would be complete. Those of you with great marriages meet me up here and maybe we can talk to these people afterwards and say, "A great marriage is not enough." The best marriage in the world is not enough. It doesn't complete you. It doesn't completely put you into the restaurant or the image of Christ. It's Christ that completes you. He comes in as the ultimate helper. He comes in as the ultimate head. He comes in as the ultimate spouse. This text says, "Whether you are married or not to a human being, you are married to Christ." And He is ravished with you and He loves you. Come in under His authority and let Him complete you. Let's pray. Now Father, we thank You that You have given us the right. You've given us the right to boldly come before You and say, "Because You love us, we know that You will enable us. You will glorify us. You will do all things for us." We thank You that it was so odd. The more we give up our authority, the more we give You control, the more power, the more freedom. The more authority we feel, the more we become ourselves. Help us to take all these words that we have read tonight and we've studied and listened to tonight and apply them to our lives by your spirit's power in Jesus' name we pray. Amen. [Music] Thanks for listening to Cultivating a Healthy Marriage. We trust You were encouraged and that it gives You new insight into how You can apply God's wisdom to Your life. If You'd like to find more Gospel-centered resources from Tim Keller, simply visit gospelonlife.com. There, You'll find articles, sermons, devotional and other helpful resources. You can also stay connected with us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter. [BLANK_AUDIO]