Fruit of the Spirit: Loving Our Wives

Recently, I was honored to be invited to speak to the "Men of Courage" at Mt. Elam Baptist Church. I shared with them from Ephesians 5:22-27. I thought it would be nice to put my notes together in "blog-form" and post them here. Seeing how I have not posted in a while, I figure it's about time I do something! So here it is...

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²² Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. ²³ For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. ²⁴ Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.

²⁵ Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, ²⁶ that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, ²⁷ so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. [Ephesians 5:22-27 (ESV)]

It is very easy to read Scripture and find examples of people we know that are good examples of "what not to do". We will read about how someone was dishonest, and immediately, someone comes to mind. We have no problem at all applying Scriptures to others. And that's a big problem. When we are focused on others, we are not focused on our own hearts. It's a sneaky way to play the blame game. If we stay focused on how others are messing up, we don't have to look at ourselves.

In reading the words of Paul from Ephesians 5:22-27, I believe it is all-important for us to make it personal. For instance...men, we need to pay much more attention to the "Husbands..." part. Paul did not say, "Husbands, see to it that your wives respect you and submit to you". Nor did he say, "Husbands, make sure you keep your wives happy". 

Instead, Paul focused on personal responsibility for men. He stressed "loving our wives". But we need to really take a look at what he meant by "love your wives, as Christ loved the Church". It's far too easy to gloss over this and not take it the way he meant it. This verse is VERY heavy with responsibility for us. If it doesn't strike us that way, we aren't taking it seriously. "Love", in this passage, is the word "Agape" in the original Greek. This is much different than the "phileo" type of love mentioned in other Scriptures. It's not just a friendly, warm affection.

This "agape-love" is the kind of love Christ has for His bride, the whole body of believers, the Church. Agape-love is unconditional, steadfast, protective, forgiving, patient, gentle at times, aggressive when appropriate, and safe. For guys like me who struggle and have struggled with behaviors such as withdrawing, holding grudges, losing my temper, and dealing out the silent treatment, this type of love sounds impossible, particularly at certain times in my life.

But then comes the most important thing that we need to know about this agape-love (above all the things I listed previously). This kind of love mentioned in Ephesians 5 is also mentioned in Galatians 5:22. There it is described as fruit of the spirit. This is all-important because it is the key to how this kind of love is possible.

Paul ordered his letters in a certain way. He would begin with important doctrine, or truths that we need to believe. He would follow with important notes on the kind of behaviors that we could expect from believing those truths (fruit of the spirit). He really grasped the importance of our relationship with God and how we need to really put our trust in Him and believe that what He says is actually true. When we take these steps of faith (believing the truth), we act on them and then the behaviors flow from Him, through us, to others. As I have stated in this blog many times, our behaviors are motivated by believing or not believing God's Truth. Our relationships with others are directly affected by our relationship with God.

The portion of Scripture we are focusing on here (Ephesians 5:22-27) is actually from the "behavior-section" of Paul's letter. We often jump to this section, attempt to do all these good behaviors, and then wonder why we fail. Loving our wives is actually evidence of our trust in our Heavenly Father. If we don't address this first and foremost, we are lost when it comes to seeing fruit in our lives. This is good and bad news. It's bad because this is hard to hear sometimes. We often want to blame someone else for our bad behavior. This requires us to look at our own hearts. However, it is good news because we cannot possibly overcome the bad behavior and love our wives the way Paul is calling us to...so we need help...and we have it! 

But then we need to take another huge step out of a bad box we get into a lot as Christians. We often make faith this mystical thing that we talk about, but have very little working knowledge of how to apply it in our lives. We must take the mystery out of it and find ways to make it practical for our everyday walk. 

First of all, it is not nearly enough to know truth. Knowledge without acting on that knowledge is worthless. Knowing the truth and not acting on it is an excellent way to define "dead faith", as James puts it in his book. God's Truth has to be so real to us that we act on it. That is when we see the fruit, such as loving our wives.

Experience helps His Truth to become more real to us. We must act on what we know is true, which is taking steps of faith. If we act on ANYTHING other than truth, we subsequently fail to receive and offer His love.

EXAMPLES:

At this point, I want to offer some personal examples of what it might look like to take steps of faith the way I am attempting to describe here.

Years ago, I remember my wife and I were sitting at home. She had something to do outside and went to take care of that. While she was gone, I decided to vacuum the house. Well, when I finished, I realized she had not come back in yet. I really wanted her to notice what I had done, so I contemplated leaving out a piece of the vacuum cleaner in order to make her aware of my "good deed" without having to say a word to her. In a situation like this, a step of faith might look like putting the vacuum away and saying nothing. Instead of looking for my wife's approval or attention (or whatever it is I'm after), I can choose to seek God's approval (which is readily available because He DOES approve of me in Christ). The fact is, when I was thinking through this, my struggle was that I wasn't trusting fully in God's acceptance of me and was seeking it elsewhere (my wife, through my completion of a chore). Steps of faith like this are not easy, but they are necessary in order to truly love my wife instead of looking to her to make me feel better about myself. And she might not even know what happened!

Another quick example is how I used to, regretfully, make my wife the brunt of my jokes. When in the presence of others, I would make jokes pertaining to her and she would laugh along (sometimes not). I realized years into my marriage to her that this was extremely hurtful, although she had said nothing to me about it. How could I be protecting her, being an advocate for her (as Christ has been for me), and valuing her as the precious gift that she is when I am making jokes about her? Often, I found that I was being critical of her actions and the jokes were subliminal messages that I wanted her to change something. How manipulative! And manipulation is not love. Anyway, my step of faith was giving up this terrible habit by giving her the freedom to be her and shedding some light on my despicable behavior despite the fact that no one really knew how bad it truly was. I had to make a choice to trust God's Truth that giving my wife freedom to be herself in our relationship (not manipulating her to be what I wanted her to be) would produce what I was really after. Building her up and protecting her is far more enjoyable than trying to change her.

I know these examples may seem small and inconsequential, but the reality is that they are real examples of everyday struggles I believe many of us share. If we aren't taking the seemingly small steps of faith, then we certainly are not taking the big ones.

Some men struggle with choosing work first over relationship, others with being passive when they need to be more of a leader, and others with being abusive and controlling. Many other examples could be given here, but I will stop there. There are many works of the flesh that show up when we are not walking by faith. As husbands, our relationship with God is central to everything, including being able to love our wives, and the ability to love our wives comes from faith. When we fail to trust God’s Truth (even in the little things), we fail to love. If we catch ourselves without fruit such as "loving our wives as Christ loves the Church", instead of beating ourselves up or trying harder to do what is right, we need to focus on going back to the drawing board: "By Grace Through Faith". The fruit will follow.